..in a circular orbit inclined at 47 degrees to the ecliptic.

A colleague has put me onto this fascinating piece from the New Yorker, a review of Philip Tetlock’s book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?. It is a salutary read for those of us who are paid to be political experts; Tetlock found that experts’ predictions of whether things would improve, deteriortae or stay the same was actually worse than a random selection between the three alternatives would have been. (At least, that’s what the review says; I’d like to check out the maths.)

I try and avoid predictions in my punditry, myself. Predictions are an easy way to get a headline, but really not about serious analysis. I find it much more satisfying, and I think the users of what I write fins it more staisfying, to explain the past than to expect the future. However, I definitely get taken by surprise sometimes. Listing for myself the developments that took me by surprise in the last year, I’m struck that I tend to expect worse things than actually happen. Pessimists, of course, get more pleasant surprises than optimists. But the real answer is display your understanding of the situation at present and how we got here rather than to look silly by predicting the future.

In the partisan environment of US politics (and I do think US politics is particularly bad in this respect at the moment), prediction becomes widely separated from analysis. In the New Yorker article, Louis Menand notes:

most of [these public intellectuals] are dealing in “solidarity” goods, not “credence” goods. Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is bound to go badly; when the argument gets more nuanced, they change the channel. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and advocacy is very blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq were correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that though they may have sounded a false alarm, they erred “in the right direction”—not really a mistake at all.

Foreign policy in European countries is much more consensus-driven, which has its own dangers (see the contributions to the massive new Europe’s World magazine, which I will plough through over the next few days). Myself I always want to test the conventional wisdom. Usually it is correct, but one should be careful about dismissing dissenting voices too rapidly; sure they will almost always be motivated by particular axes that the author wants to grind; but even a stopped clock is right twice a day…

Am pondering the things I have got wrong in the last year at work. It is an odd list:

• January-March: Serbian government hands over a dozen war criminals
• May: Moldovan Christian Democrats unexpectedly support re-election of Communist President Voronin rather than trigger the constitutional crisis they had threatened
• June: Russians agree to withdraw troops from Georgia (apart from South Ossetia and Abkhazia)
• September: Bosnian Serbs agree to police reforms
• October: Croatia starts EU accession negotiations, followed in December by the capture of fugitive general Gotovina
• November: Bosnian political parties commit to constitutional reforms strengthening central state and weakening ethnic structures

In each case I thought the opposite would happen, though fortunately I don’t think I had said so in public (I did predict in a conference speech at the end of September that Croatia would not get the nod from the EU the following week, which they promptly did). In each case I think the world is a better place as a result (though arguably the Russian withdrawal of troops from Georgia into Armenia has increased tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan). Of course, our role as an organisation is to warn of things that don’t happen; but maybe I am too pessimistic in general? Perhaps I should monitor my own personal predictions next year.

Local Elections in Cetinje

At early local elections in Cetinje the absolute majority was won by the coalition of two ruling Montenegrin parties, the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) and the Social-Democratic Party (SDP), and their candidate for mayor won in the first round, Belgrade media report.

Non-Government organisations which monitored the elections, the Centre for Monitoring (CEMI) and the Centre for Democratic Transition (CDT) have announced that 57 percent of the citizens voted for DPS-SDP, and that they won 19 places in the local assembly.

The Lovcen for a Free Cetinje list, which gathers officials of the former Liberal Alliance (a pro-independence party which earlier this year brought a decision on its own termination) and who had up to now been in power in Cetinje, won 11 deputies, after 32 percent of the citizens voted for them.

The Coalition of the Socialist People’s Party (SNP), People’s Party (NS) and the Democratic Serbian Party (DSS), which are all in favour of a joint state with Serbia, won seven percent of the vote, or two mandates, and the Citizens’ Party four percent and one mandate.

The DPS-SDP candidate Milo Jankovic won 59.1 percent, the candidate of the Lovcen list and the up to now mayor Aleksandar Aleksic 38.2 percent, and the candidate of the Citizens Party Bobo Vuckovic 2.7 percent.

CEMI and CDT announced on Sunday evening that there had been violations of the election procedure, but not in a measure that would influence the regularity of the elections.

The opposition, however, disagrees. Aleksic claims that the elections were decided by the “buying and selling of votes”, and similar accusations are also being brought by the coalition of pro-Serb parties.

So, in Montenegro’s ancient capital, 89% of those who voted supported pro-independence parties. (Turnout was 71%, apparently, according to one of my other sources.)

Most recently seen chez :

1. My username is ____ because ____.
2. My journal is titled ____ because ____.
3. My subtitle is ____ because ____.
4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.
5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.

1. My username is because those are my initials. But it also means “they” in Welsh, and is the ISO639-3 code for the Western Huasteca dialect of Nahuatl (thanks, ).
2. My journal is titled “From the Heart of Europe” because it originally was going to include more reflections on the Brussels political world than in fact it does.
3. My subtitle is “ༀ – I for one welcome our new Dalek overlords” because it seemed suitably silly. “ༀ” is the Tibetan for “Om”. I’ve been trying to track down the original version of “I for one welcome our new [ ] overlords”, but am not totally convinced that The Simpsons were first.
4. My friends page is called “Creatures of Light and Darkness” because it’s part of a Roger Zelazny theme I have for my default view page. “This Immortal” takes you to the default view, “Doorways in the Sand” takes you to the friends page (which confusingly is called “Creatures of Light and Darkness”), “Roadmarks” takes you to the archives, “Jack of Shadows” to the info page, “The Chnaging Land” to my website, and “Dilvish the Damned”, “24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai”, “He Who Shapes” and “Unicorn Variations” for bits of the sidebar.
5. My default userpic is because a colleague took it of me while we were at the Golubac fortress on the Danube, on the Serbian side of the river (Romania on the other side), in July 2004.

“Hah! You’ve been Wiki’ed!”

Thanks to the livejournal comment problems, I missed ‘ questions last weekend when I did the last interviews.

1. I tried to describe your job to a day or two ago, and realised I wasn’t entirely clear about what you do. I got the impression that it was to do with NGOs, and getting politicians to explain themselves, but I was fairly short on details. Could you elaborate?

   When asked a similar question by , I answered:

   I’m a political analyst, the head of a team doing research on the Balkans and South Caucasus (and a couple of other places), and also responsible for selling our recommendations to those international officials who have the power to make things happen.

   To elaborate a bit: we publish reports on war zones or potential war zones, with the aim of preventing wars, or resolving conflicts where they have already happened. (You can get notification of them by adding to your friends list, among other methods.) Our methodology is basically a) to have people on the ground full-time doing the research, b) to include not just description but prescription in the reports, ie telling the international community (and often but not always local officials) what they should be doing better, and c) to not just publish reports that sit on the library shelf or on the internet, but proactively go and talk to said government officials and ask them why they are not following our sensible recommendations.

   My personal role is to manage our field offices in my region (Balkans and South Caucasus) and direct our other work related to Europe (Moldova and Cyprus, odd bits relating to the EU), both in terms of overseeing the production of reports and also in terms of the advocacy of our recommendations to international officials. Fun but tiring.

2. If you had the chance to go into book-journalism full time, would you do so? If so, why; if not, why not?

   I think that if I found a potential employer who thought my book reviews were worth the same as the work I currently do, I would jump at it like a shot. It would be strictly a commercial decision; I would love to sit at home and read books all day (and then write about them) but at the moment I probably can’t afford it.

3. You seem to carry your Northern-Irishness with you everywhere. Could you muse a little about whether there’s a national stereotype, and whether you fit it well? There’s a related question about Catholic stereotypes, and another about the intersection of the two.

   I definitely exploit my background for the extra credibility it gives me in my work. And I think it’s fair enough to do so. Many of the countries I deal with have gone through traumatic and horrible experiences, and are also sick of external do-gooders dropping by with well-meaning advice which often completely misses the target. I try not to overplay it, but sometimes it does make sense, as when I tried to put the 2001 Macedonian conflict in perspective here (and here)

   But I don’t think I fit the Irish (or Northern Irish) stereotype particularly well. I am a good public speaker, and I like a drink, so to that extent it’s true, but I am very bookish, my accent doesn’t sound right, and I’m (usually) slow to anger rather than following the fiery Irish stereotype.

   As for the Catholic stereotype, I like to think that my faith has helped ground my intellectual endeavours securely (see entries on religion). But remember that both my grandmothers were converts from Protestantism, and anyway I have only three children! (And see also entries on the Pope.)

4. Do you keep pets, or have you done so in the past? What kind of pets do/would you have?

   We did have a kitten, briefly, about four years ago, until it disappeared. I wouldn’t mind having a cat again some time. But having three small children, especially in our situation, is already quite a big responsibility; I’m not rushing to take on more at this stage.

5. Your user info page describes you as a “lapsed medievalist”. Could you talk a bit about medievalism, and the nature of the lapse?

   I’ve written previously about my medievalism here. The lapse, I’m afraid, was again all about money; I had funding to move back to Belfast and switch to the history of Irish science project that became my PhD. I still kept up an interest in medieval stuff for several years after, but haven’t really done more than look at books or museum exhibits about the subject in the last few years. If I can ever take six months off, I will go back to it.

4) Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, by Ann Wroe

Picked this heavy hardback up for a fiver in Belfast in the summer. So little is known about the historical Pilate that Ann Wroe has bulked out the book considerably with stories told about him (the Copts seem to have had a lot). A couple of points I hadn’t realised – the image of the emperor on Roman coins made them unacceptable for use in Temple rituals, which adds extra point to “Render unto Caesar” and also explains what the money-changers were doing at the Temple. But most of the book reflects on the stories we tell about ethics and political morality. “The intriguing thing about Pilate is the degree to which he tried to do the good thing rather than the bad. He commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man.” (A quote from a 1996 interview with Tony Blair.) All very thought-provoking, though I wish it had been a little shorter.

…I generally like talking to students about my work; graduate, undergraduate, heck I’ve even done the odd high school group in the past. But sometimes I wonder why I bother.

This guy came in this morning to tell me about his thesis work on the South Caucasus. He thinks that the entire politics of the region can be explained as a competition for hegemony between the United States, Russia, Turkey and Iran; except that Turkey and Iran are not powerful enough to be real actors, and Turkey is anyway under the control of the United States.

Well, I said, I think there are three fundamental flaws with that analysis; first, there might just possibly be some part played in the politics of the region by indigenous actors, such as the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani governments, as well as the various other armed factions and quasi-statelets on the ground; secondly, in my personal experience, neither the United States nor Russia are monolithic in their foreign policy and any analysis that starts by assuming that they are is deeply flawed; and thirdly, it’s news to me that Ankara’s policy is weak unless determined by Washington; I don’t recall, for instance, that the Americans told the Turks to close their border with Armenia in 1993, and that’s a policy that clearly does have an effect on the ground.

He replied by restating his position and adding in some half-baked obervations from newspaper articles he had read; he clearly had not absorbed a word I said. We parted as friends but I don’t see a glittering career in international relations ahead for him.

On the way back to the office from our last meeting of the day, our taxi driver (and my colleague and I) were alarmed by the behaviour of a car that, just at the Sablon, suddenly pulled out in front of us in the twilight, with no lights on at all, never mind indicators. The next traffic lights were red, and our driver pulled up alongside the offending car, persuaded its driver to wind down her window, and told her in blunt French what he thought of her driving. She replied, no doubt thinking it would simply end the conversation,

“Я не понимаю.”

She had chosen the wrong car to pull that trick on. My colleague leaned forward to the window and conveyed in fluent and very blunt Russian precisely what our taxi driver had said.

Normally I think road rage is childish at best and dangerous at worst, but this seemed justifiable. The driver of the other car rather weakly said she wouldn’t do it again, and so we proceeded on our respective journeys.

Our taxi driver then starting railing against the bloody Poles and why did we ever let them into the EU anyway. My colleague pointed out forcefully that the driver of the other car was Russian, not Polish. I added that I may not speak either language well but I can tell the difference between “Я не понимаю” and “Nie rozumiem” (especially since the Polish is pretty close to the Serbo-Croat “Ne razumijem”/”Не разумем”. The taxi driver settled into a grumpy silence, and brought us swiftly to the office. We did not give him a tip.

has read George R.R. Martin’s A Feast For Crows. (So have I.)

is getting to grips with Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West.

(But if you’re interested in that kind of lj post, you should just add to your friends list.)

First sentence from the first post of each month this year:

January: In the year 2005 I resolve to: Stop exercising.

February: Leonard Nimoy sings a song about Bilbo Baggins.

March: Children’s author Arthur Ransome was under surveillance by MI5.

April: More rubbish from John Laughland in the Guardian today.

May: Best Novel: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold – Hooray! Good for her.

June: Running from the conference to the Metro on Monday evening, I answered a voicemail from a journalist asking my views on the French referendum; I checked his paper on-line yesterday and didn’t see his article, but good old Google News Alerts has now flagged it up for me.

July: Every so often, it happens; I have to go through the CV’s of various exceptionally motivated and intelligent young people, and then decide which of them gets the privilege of working with me.

August: Neil Gaiman provides sensible commentary.

September: Got up at 0630 to drive to Skopje.

October: A collection of sf stories by French (and one Belgian) writer, collected in the mid-1970s; very much feeling like New Wave, plus an added appreciation of sex which somehow feels different from the way an American or British writer of the time would have tackled the subject.

November: It is dark.

December: Six months ago, I knew David Marusek only as the author of the haunting story, “The Wedding Album”, winner of the Sturgeon Award in 2000, collected in that year’s Dozois collection and also in Dozois’ Best of the Best collection.

Thanks to :

Oh Great Cthulhu!

I have been an extremely assiduous devotee this year.

Last week, I wore an Elder Sign (-10 points). In August, I bombed a cultist gathering (-100 points). When the stars were right, I legally changed my name to Randolph Carter (-40 points). In May, I rammed a ship into you (sorry Cthulhu!) (-1000 points). Yesterday, I fed mind_expander to a Shoggoth (250 points). In February, I visited my relatives in Innsmouth (100 points).

In short, I have been very bad (-800 points) and deserve to be flayed alive.

Your humble and obedient servant,

Submit your own plea to Cthulhu!

Today is St Nicholas’ day, Sinterklaas, in Belgium; F left his own shoe, and a shoe for each of his sisters, by the chimney last night, with a carrot for the saint’s horse in each shoe, and a letter he had written. (He worried a bit about the fact that neither of his sisters had written a letter, but we assured him that the saint would understand.)

And when he got up this morning there were no carrots left, but biscuits and oranges for each child, and a mysterious box – which in F’s case contained a rather nice dragon puppet. He was delighted with it.

Today is also the day on which the Finnish Parliament declared independence from Russia in 1917, and the day on which the Spanish people approved their new constitution in a referendum in 1978, and is celebrated as a national holiday in both countries.

I have always found it odd that another anniversary today is not celebrated. On this day in 1921, the British and Irish negotiators led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins on the Irish side, and Lloyd George and Winston Churchill on the British side, signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Precisely a year later, in 1922, the provisions of the Treaty came into force, and the Irish Free State became independent. Indeed, for a few hours there was in fact a 32-county independent Irish state, until the Northern Ireland Parliament exercised its right to opt out later that afternoon. In the meantime, of course, Griffith had died and Collins had been killed in the Civil War.

It is often forgotten that the immediate consequences for British politics were also pretty serious; during those twelve months a revolt by what is now called (in memory of the event) the 1922 Committee, ie Conservative back-benchers, had ejected Lloyd George and his fellow negotiators from power, in the case of Lloyd George never to return, triggering a general election. There would be two more elections and three more changes of prime minister in the next two years.

However, the politically traumatic circumstances of the Treaty negotiation, and the ambiguous quality of the Irish Free State’s independence, I guess were sufficient to prevent this important anniversary from ever being celebrated. Ireland’s national holiday remains 17 March. Which I supppose is sensible enough; the weather is usually better.

Anyone got any idea how I can watch the Doctor Who Children in Need special from last month?

3) Sevenacide, by Robert Shuster

The author sent me this self-published collection a few years ago; I thought I had read it then, but didn’t remember any of the stories except the second one. A set of stories trying to link horror tropes with rugby, not always with great success. I hadn’t realised that rugby was played in the USA at all. The only one I really liked has an obnoxious American tourist in Ireland getting his come-uppance at the hands of the Wee Folk. Failure to use commas correctly always irritates me.

OK, OK, my excuses about travelling and backlog are wearing thin, so here are two more interviews.

From :

1. Do you like living in Belgium?
   Yes, I do. From the professional point of view, I think the sort of international work I am into can be done only in Brussels, London, Geneva or Paris; my French isn’t up to the latter two locations, and who wants to live in London? Added to that, the health system is excellent, so is the restaurant food, and it’s close to lots of other places as well.
2. What’s your job? Is it what you studied for?
   I’m a political analyst, the head of a team doing research on the Balkans and South Caucasus (and a couple of other places), and also responsible for selling our recommendations to those international officials who have the power to make things happen.
   No, it’s not what I studied for at all; my first degree is in astrophysics, and my postgraduate degrees are in the history of science. See here for how my doctorate failed to intersect much with my career.
3. I used to have this friend who moved to Belgium when she was 6. After 12 years she could speak Dutch because she went to school here but her mother and grandmother couldn’t say one word besides “nee” and “hondje”. Can you speak Dutch? What do you think of people who move here and don’t learn the language?
   As it happens, my family lived in the Netherlands for a year when I was thirteen; I went to a Dutch school and retained enough of the language that I still count myself as fluent in it. But these days I mainly use it to communicate with my children’s schoolteachers.
   Living here for twelve years without learning it is a bit much, but I can see why if someone is working and socialising in a largely international environment (as I am) they might not take the bother. I also have to say that when we lived nearer Brussels, in St-Genesius-Rode, the neighbours did not make much effort to get to know us. That has changed since we moved out to Leuven.
4. What’s your favourite genre of music?
   I waver between classical and ’70s rock.
5. What does your username mean?
   Very boringly – my initials! But it also turns out to mean “they” in Welsh, so blog searches on “nhw” tend to pull up ten times as many references to parties in Aberystwyth as to this journal…

And from :

1. What interests you in my journal? (What made you choose to read it?)
   You kindly introduced yourself to me at WorldCon, saying that you occasionally read my posts via friends’ friends lists. So I added you directly, as I tend to do when lj users introduce themselves to me (witness also , another WorldCon hello-in-the-corridor); I’m very much on the fringes of British fandom, but enjoy reading about it vicariously via various people’s journals including yours, and I like the way you write about day-to-day hassles with banks, eBay, university, etc.
2. What’s your favourite Gilbert and Sullivan song and why?
   Perhaps an unusual choice, it would be “I Have A Song To Sing, Oh!” from The Yeomen of the GuardIolanthe, the whole climax of Act I of The Mikado and the songs surrounding the Emperor’s arrival in Act II, and the Major General’s song (and the policemen’s songs) in The Pirates of Penzance.
3. What is a psephologist?
   According to WikiPedia: “Political journalists ridicule people who try to scientifically predict future elections by calling it psephology, suggesting it is akin to astrology. Thus journalist David Broder has explained, ‘The science of interpreting elections has a fancy name: psephology. A shorter, simpler and more accurate title for much election analysis is: fiction.'”
4. What, if anything, do your favourite authors have in common? (What do you look for in a good book?)
   I like good characterisation, mind-stretching ideas, wit, and sensawunda. Does that explain why I particularly like both Brian Aldiss and Roger Zelazny?
5. What do you feel are the most interesting cultural differences in the countries you’ve lived in?
   Bearing in mind that my experience is almost exclusively of Western and South-Eastern Europe: I think there is a real difference between where the Enlightenment has permeated political culture and where it hasn’t. As I look at places where the forces of nationalism remain dominant and sometimes violent determinants of political discourse, such as certain Balkan and Caucasus countries, and indeed my own native Northern Ireland, I sense that the missing factor is a kind of modernity, of realising that in fact you have to find ways of working along with your neighbours and not plotting to expel them. In press interviews (see previous entry!) I often refer to the difference between 19th-century games of territorial aggrandisement and the 21st century game of European integration. I see the transition to modernity happening in Macedonia, in Croatia, and to an extent in the other countries of the Balkans; the Caucasus still has some way to go.
   That is one very striking difference. Another is whether they believe in good food (Italy, Belgium, France, Georgia) or not (Balkans, UK, Ireland).

As ever, if you want interviewed, comment. (And I owe questions to one person already.)

A general memo circulated to all staff by my boss:

• Be absolutely clear: a media interview is a totally artificial situation and must be treated as such. The nub of it is simple: you are not there simply to answer questions for the general good of humanity, or for the specific benefit of the journalist. You are there to get your message across. As powerfully and convincingly as possible.
• Of course, you cannot do this regardless of the questions. The art of the media interview lies in navigating a path from the interviewer’s question to your answer in the subtlest way possible. There is plenty of scope for doing this effectively. You needn’t sound like a barefaced politician.
• To be successful, you must understand the journalist’s agenda. This will never entirely coincide with yours, but the greater the overlap you can create the greater your chance of success. Equally, no overlap means no quote. Understand the journalist’s agenda and use that to your advantage.
• Be clear about this, too: a journalist’s job is not to report what you say. Nor even necessarily to listen to what you say. At least, not in the way normal human beings do. It is to fill blank page space, or blank airtime, with stories of interest to a specific audience. What you say may or may not help the journalist do that.
• Your task is therefore simply stated: package what you have to say in a way that helps the journalist. Do the journalists’ job for them. Fail in that and don’t complain if you are misquoted. Or not quoted at all.
• In other words, take the initiative. You are within your rights to be seeking to set the agenda. In fact, that is what you should be doing.

The Golden Rules of Media Interviews

1. It is a performance, not a conversation.
2. Successful media interviewing is 95% preparation, 5% improvisation.
3. If you don’t know exactly what your objectives are for the interview, you shouldn’t be doing it at all.
4. It’s up to you to make yourself quotable and quoted.
5. It’s your job to set the limits to the interview, not the reporter’s.
6. Interviews are impressionistic, not exhaustive.
7. Reverse the normal order: give your conclusion up front – then your reasons.
8. Never wait for the right question – which may never come.
9. The art of interviewing lies in getting from reporter’s question to your main message as effectively and subtly as possible. But it is an art.

To which my boss adds, in a covering note:

The only rule omitted is never say anything (even specifying that it is ‘off the record’) which you don’t want to see in print or hear on air: the exception to this, and indeed for most of the other rules mentioned, is if you are talking to someone you know, from long past experience, with many tests to prove it, that you can trust absolutely and for ever both to get it right and not embarrass you. And without being unnecessarily rude about professional journalists, how many people do any of us know in that category?

I have to say that this is pretty much how I personally approach interviews, at least on a good day. Do any journalists reading think this is a fair/unfair approach?

(Edited to add: entry friends-locked, not because it is particularly sensitive, but because I expect the media guidelines are copyright.)

1) ‘with all faults’, by David Low

An unexciting autobiographical account of running a second-hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road in the middle of last century. Lots of anecdotes of people I have never heard of before, or am not awfully interested in, with the one exception of Michael Foot, who I see has written to today’s Guardian to point out that he is not dead yet.

But it does make you think how much the British and Irish books trade seems to have changed in the last fifteen years, since the rise of Waterstone’s/Dillon’s. There were three or four decent independent bookshops, and a vast number of good second-hand ones, in the Belfast of my youth. Now the two branches of Waterstone’s have captured the market for new books, apart from the University Books Shop, whose fiction stock was rather unimpressive last time I looked in. The second-hand shops still seem to be in fine shape though.

David Low writes with affection of Bowes & Bowes at 1 Trinity Street Cambridge, now of course swallowed by Cambridge University Press (I think); and of Deighton, Bell, now (alas) Laura Ashley. And of Dublin’s Hodges Figgis, and Greene’s, back in the old days. I suspect it’s easier to get a decent variety of books on the high street and via the internet than it ever has been, but I regret the loss of individuality. (There is a flip side: he mentions only one bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, and complains about how much effort it is to get there, just for the one shop.)

He tries to explain in the preface why this book was published in Tehran, but doesn’t really succeed.

…could a mild-mannered humanities lecturer turn up for work one mornng to find unexpected activity in his office.

(Hat-tip )

17) Counting Heads, by David Marusek

Six months ago, I knew David Marusek only as the author of the haunting story, “The Wedding Album”, winner of the Sturgeon Award in 2000, collected in that year’s Dozois collection and also in Dozois’ Best of the Best collection. Then we ended up sharing a hotel room in Glasgow at WorldCon in August, so I got to know this laid back, courteous guy rather well.

The reason he’d taken the effort to come all the way from Alaska to Scotland was at least as much to try and do business around his novel, Counting Heads, which was coming out in a few months. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for it in paperback, once the time came. And then I happened to notice – via Library Thing – Cory Doctorow’s review, which pushed all the right buttons for me – comparison (favourable) with Benjamin Rosenbaum and Ted Chiang, and indeed with “The Wedding Album”; and was further prodded by here. A quick check around the blogosphere reveals that the positive reviews considerably outnumber the negative. So I thought I would look out for it in New York on Monday, and indeed found a copy.

And it is excellent. I tend to find myself unexcited by the possibilities of nanotechnology to change society; authors who are excited by it often write only characters who are equally excited, or else appalled, by it. David Marusek here has an entirely believable society, with love, parenthood, age, and death – and loneliness, in a world of material plenty – which happens to also have vast amounts of nanotechnology. (I confess I did find the summary of the setting inside the dust jacket helpful to orient myself, but probably needed it mainly because I started reading the book on my second transtalantic flight of the week.) Sure, there is also a plot – one of the oldest around, in that it’s effectively aboout a political murder and an attempt to prevent another murder. And there’s lots of whizz-bang action in the grand finale. But it’s striking to find a nanotech book that actually has a plot and a real ending, something I’ve complained about of others with that theme.

Two other comparisons that occurred to me: some aspects of the mother/daughter relationship and its impact on the mother’s company reminded me a bit of Cyteen, which I read almost exactly a year agoCoils, surely itself an example of cyberpunk before its time. I was pleased to see an overt reference to “The Wedding Album” making it clear that this is the same future; it seems tidier somehow.

My day today started with a meeting with this man:

He is the leader of the largest opposition party in one of the former Yugoslav republics.

My day ended with a meeting with this man:

He is the leader of the largest opposition party in a different one of the former Yugoslav republics.

There will be a prize for the first person to name the two former Yugoslav republics in question.

(Extra bonus for anyone naming the opposition parties and their leaders.)

Am taking the afternoon off at home, having arrived jetlagged from New York, two hours later than planned, at 3 pm. Quite a good trip, all things considered:

Saturday – conference in Berlin, considerably enlivened when in the first session a friendly but sincere dispute broke out between two different wings of the large organisation sponsoring the conference, which made the rest of us feel much more relaxed about speaking our minds – indeed, I can’t recall a conference I’ve been to in Germany that was quite so good-humoured. (The point at issue was, “Is a new EU constitution necessary before any countries join the EU after Bulgaria and Romania?” Discuss amongst yourselves.)

Sunday – mainly a travelling day, with lots of work when I could get the laptop to cooperate. Arrived in New York at 8 pm local time. Went out for a chicken burrito, went to bed.

Yesterday – woke at 0330 NY time (0930 Brussels time, of course) and put in six hours’ solid work before rewarding myself with a trip to the Barnes and Noble on Union Square (recommended to me some time ago by ). Bought Counting Heads by David Marusek and Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Back uptown in time for:

Big Work Lunch. You can watch the promotional video which has a whole 5 seconds of me in it. The main point of the lunch was to present awards honouring the work of James Wolfensohn of the World Bank, Mark Malloch Brown of the UN, and, most movingly, Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved over a thousand people from the Rwandan genocide in 1994. He got a standing ovation from those present, and I can’t have been the only one whose eyes moistened as this modest but heroic man accepted his award.

There was an unexpected personal spin-off for me. As an inveterate self-googler, I knew of a nineteenth century architect called Nicholas Whyte who designed this New York building at 101 Spring St. As it happened, the couple sitting beside me at lunch were an architect and an engineer; and it turned out, by extraordinary coincidence, that his firm is actually renovating 101 Spring St. He promised to give me a tour next time I am in New York for more than 24 hours.

(The lunch itself? Chicken.)

Then to the United Nations for the meeting which was the actual point of my visit. I had enough time to spare beforehand to buy a couple of books for F in the UN bookshop – the rather lovely For Every Child, A Better World, and a a big colouring book called The United Nations in Our Daily Lives which combines simple illustrations of, say, nuclear weapons experts looking at radioactive barrels of gunk, with simple explanatory text in English and Spanish:

Many countries have agreed not to build nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors travel acroiss the planet to check whether these countries are keeping their promises.
Muchos países han prometido no fabricar más armas nucleares. Los inspectores del Organismo Internacional de Energía Atómica viajan por todo el planeta para controlar que esos países cumplan sus promesas.

Perhaps the text is a little advanced for their ostensible target readership, but F has been giving it a fair go this afternoon.

The UN meeting went well, and then it was straight off to JFK again to catch the plane, which was an hour late, giving me time to get into Counting Heads which I am enjoying so far, and grab a meal (chicken yet again). I managed to get some (but not quite enough) sleep on the plane. The delay meant a bit longer in Heathrow, where I saw a paperback edition of Anansi Boys and snapped it up. Also a discounted set of the Doctor Who DVD’s, which I was going to have as my Christmas present, so I bought them too and must now exercise self-restraint for the next four weeks.

And so home, and in pyjamas, and looking forward to a very early bed. And eating something other than chicken for my dinner.

Hat-tip to :

http://janpeters.net/pics/stuff/alphabet.gif

Much more digestible than the Robert Sacks book!

16) The Darkness That Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker

Had been meaning to get around to this for ages. Hmm. Perhaps it’s the consequence of reading it on a transatlantic flight at the end of my second working weekend in a row, but this didn’t really do it for me. It’s a big fantasy novel, the first (inevitably) of a series called “The Prince of Nothing”, but I found the cultures and characters insufficiently distinguishable or engaging. Apart from the women, that is, though even there I was uncomfortable about their stereotyped roles (one querulous queen; one whore with a heart of gold; one naive concubine kidnapped by barbarian prince). I know other people have raved about this but I won’t be looking out for the sequels.

15) Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002, by David Langford

When I grow up I want to be David Langford. I think his “Critical Mass” column in White Dwarf must have been the first regular sf review column I read, over twenty years ago now; I have fond memories also of his just-about-non-sf novel The Leaky Establishment. This volume brings together his own selection of his favourite reviews from the years in question. Some of them – perhaps even all of them – are archived on his website, but there’s nothing quite like the printed page for riffling back and forth to find favourite bits.

Not all of the reviews are of sf; Dave has a great familiarity with the classic detective novel, and as well as reviewing several examples of that genre, spots homages to Dorothy L. Sayers in Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign that had quite passed me by. Not all the pieces are reviews: there are lovely obituaries of people I had heard of, like Bob Shaw, and people I hadn’t, like George Hay. There are pieces on Terry Pratchett (not on-line) and Tom Holt. There is much about the merits (well-known) of Gene Wolfe and Stephen Baxter, and also (less well-known) Jack Chalker and James White.

And it’s all a joy to read. Dave possibly finds it easier to write at length about books that he didn’t like than ones he did – see for instance his take-downs of Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast and David Wingrove’s The Science Fiction Sourcebook (which I’ve reviewed more positively – having said which, I think Dave’s exposition of the book’s flaws is masterly). There are great one-liners like his adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advance technology is indistinguishable from an ad-hoc plot device”.

I winced a bit at the £12 I had to pay for this at Worldcon, one of the most of expensive of my many purchases in Glasgow. But it is worth every penny.

14) [Doctor Who:] The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin

Encouraged by , I went through a probably unnecessarily convoluted process of transferring this Doctor Who novel from the BBC website to my Palm T|X, and read it in bed over the last week or so. This is a story of the Eighth Doctor, Bernice Summerfield and the Brigadier defending 1997 London from an invasion of Ice Warriors from Mars. There is lots to like here. I especially liked the setting – the casual name-dropping of real celebrities from 1997 (including Lalla Ward twice, once as herself and once as Romana), but in the world of Doctor Who (the Whoniverse?), where the UK has had a massive space programme since the early 1970s – a sort of sfnal Cool Britannia. It was a heck of a lot more convincing than, say Remembrance of the Daleks‘ attempt to reconstruct 1963. The basic plot got a little convoluted – sinister British technocrat is conspiring with the aliens to take power, with lots of little details that didn’t always tie up well – but the characterisation and writing was great. Sure, the final escape from certain death through improvised parachute and airbags is a bit of a stretch of the imagination, but hey, we have a Time Lord battling invaders from a Mars with a breathable atmosphere – you expect gritty realism?

Despite my aggravation with getting hold of the text, the BBC has done a great thing in getting Lance Parkin to revisit the book and tell us the story of the story. This was in fact the very last of the New Adventures published by Virgin under the supervision of Rebecca Levene (who I knew at Cambridge), but also the first novel to feature the Eight Doctor. There is therefore a bit of an elegiac tone, and we cannot be really sure who will live and who will die. I saved reading Parkin’s notes to each chapter until I had finished reading the book, and recommend that you do too – both read the book, and then read his notes. One story he tells is this:

On May 1st 1997, on the night of the General Election, Tim Collins, newly-elected Conservative MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale and Doctor Who fan (he’d had letters published in fanzine DWB) sat in his local town hall, oblivious to the activity around him, frantically reading The Dying Days, ‘because he wanted to have read all the New Adventures under a Tory administration’.

Collins lost his seat earlier this year to another friend of mine from those days, Tim Farron.

Back in August I was on a panel at WorldCon with the title “Dr. [sic] Who Retrospective: The Best Years”; my nominations were Season Ten, Season Twelve and Season Fourteen. But I’m beginning to suspect that the Rebecca Levene Years may also be in contention.

The top 21 as scientifically determined by :

The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula Le Guin
Ash – Mary Gentle
Cyteen – CJ Cherryh
Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling
The Warrior’s Apprentice – Lois McMaster Bujold
Nylon Angel – Marianne de Pierres
The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell
Slow River – Nicola Griffith
1610: A Sundial in the Grave – Mary Gentle
Deep Secret – Diana Wynne Jones
Dark Lord of Derkholm – Diana Wynne Jones
China Mountain Zhiang – Maureen McHugh
Magic for Beginners – Kelly Link
Wildseed – Octavia Butler
Oryx & Crake – Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Doomsday Book – Connie Willis
Dragonflight – Anne McCaffrey
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Tam Lin – Pamela Dean
The Lioness Quartet – Tamora Pierce

She has a long list too.