Current The Best of Ian McDonald The HAVOC Files: The Laughing Gnome, ed ??? ο3 Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, eds. Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, by Aliette de Bodard
Last books finished Management Lessons from Game of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros, by Fiona Moore λ3 Warring States, by Mags Halliday μ3 Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins Wordsworth’s French Daughter, by George McLean Harper The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel ν3 ξ3 (did not finish) Luca, by Or Luca
Next books Kerblam!, by Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L. Rodebaugh The Face of Britain, by Simon Schama Ratlines, by Stuart Neville
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
The high point of the month was getting out of Belgium for the first time since lockdown, a three-country trip to my cousin in Luxembourg, my sister in France and work/tourism in Geneva. While we were there we watched the Disney Hamilton and saw Comet NEOWISE.
We enjoyed watching Picard and Staged, and I delved into the etymology of the Ardennes. More seriously, the Spanish Comisión de Arbitraje, Quejas y Deontología del Periodismo found completely in my favour in a complaint I had raised against a journalist who published a false story about me.
I also paused my ten-day COVID updates, but restarted my Doctor Who anniversary posts, which I had first done in 2010-11. I am still doing them, but on Facebook only.
The Hugo Awards gave us a lot of grief. The preparation of the online voting system on the final ballot was so badly delayed that we were within hours of just using Surveymonkey, before the local software solution finally came through at the last moment. Online commentators were rightly scornful of the fact that we opened voting so late, but they didn’t know the half of it. The final ballot results came through as we were driving home from Geneva, and to my astonishment it turned out that there was a tie for the Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). I checked and rechecked the votes, but there was no error.
The CoNZealand Retro Hugo ceremony passed off OK on 30 July, though my connection was poor and some of the actual winners were a bit embarrassing. At midnight on July 31st, I was at my computer waiting anxiously for the 2020 Hugo ceremony itself. We had heard worrying hints about the presentation, but as administrators we had little to do with it (indeed, the pronunciations we had painstakingly gathered earlier in the year somehow were not communicated to the ceremony team [edit: turns out they were communicated, just not used]); surely the convention leadership would take action to protect their own reputation?
…well, I’ll write more about that when I get to August 2020.
Anyway, in July 2020 I read 21 books:
Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 37) EU Lobbying Handbook, by Andreas Geiger The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner George Eliot, by Tim Dolin Yugoslavia’s Implosion: The Fatal Attraction of Serbian Nationalism, by Sonja Biserko Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary Trump
Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 18) The Overstory, by Richard Powers Guban, by Abdi Latif Ega Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo
sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 76) City of Lies, by Sam Hawke Tooth & Claw, by Jo Walton TOR: Assassin Hunter, by Billy Bob Buttons (did not finish) “Houston, Houston, do you read?” by James Tiptree Jr The Ruin of Kings, by Jenn Lyons “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov
Comics: 6 (YTD 27) The Wicked + The Divine vol 6: Imperial Phase Part 2, by Kieron Gillen etc The Wicked + The Divine vol 7: Mothering Invention, by Kieron Gillen etc Gaze of the Medusa, by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson The Wicked + The Divine vol 8: Old is the New New, by Kieron Gillen etc The Wicked + The Divine vol 9: “Okay”, by Kieron Gillen etc The 1945 Retro Hugo finalists for Best Graphic Story or Comic
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 8) Doctor Who Annual 2020 Doctor Who and the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis
5,700 pages (YTD 44,200) 7/21 (YTD 54/165) by women (Biserko, Trump, Hawke, Walton, Tiptree, Lyons, Beeby) 1/21 (YTD 18/165) by PoC (Ega)
As so often, two non-fiction books stood out for me this month, Andy Priestner’s delightful Complete Secret Army, which you can get here, and Sonja Biserko’s horrifying Yugoslavia’s Implosion, which you can get here. I also enjoyed rereading James Tiptree Jr’s “Houston, Houston, do you read?”, which you can get here.
Some awful books too. The 2020 Doctor Who Annual was a poor effort; you can get it here. Guban, by Abdi Latif Ega, is very badly edited; you can get it here. TOR: Assassin Hunter, by Billy Bob Buttons, is rubbish; you can get it here. And Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” has not aged well, but you can get it here.
How the Nebula finalists have hit the markets. As usual, ranked by the geometric average of the number of Goodreads users who have ranked the book and the number of LibraryThing owners who have logged it; highest numbers in each column are in bold.
Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught up to an immortal role in history by the sudden simplification of human affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of their simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi. And Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entire self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of distrust and intricate disaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest sanities of the situation. His voice, when he spoke, was ‘full of remonstrance.’ He was a little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that intellectual idealism which has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only way to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed aside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went to the president in the White House with this proposal. He made it as if it was a matter of course. He was fortunate to be in Washington and in touch with that gigantic childishness which was the characteristic of the American imagination. For the Americans also were among the simple peoples by whom the world was saved. He won over the American president and the American government to his general ideas; at any rate they supported him sufficiently to give him a standing with the more sceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to work — it seemed the most fantastic of enterprises — to bring together all the rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support he could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinate for his advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars this persistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like a hopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation of disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.
Next in my reading of Wells’ novels, this was written in 1913 and published in 1914. It’s quite a short book, an account of a near future where nuclear weapons are developed, major cities are devastated and the nations of the world come together to decide against future war and create a Utopia. It must have been at least indirectly inspiring for the creation of the United Nations thirty years later, and it’s striking how much closer to the mark he got with the impact of new technology on war than he did in The War in the Air, only six years earlier.
I have to say that as a novel it is not all that great. Good chaps, some of whom are royalty, get together in a remote resort to sort the world out, and there is not a lot of drama other than the big bangs of war. There are two named women characters, who have a dialogue on women’s place in the new order at the end. (And there’s a point-of-view unnamed secretary in Paris who witnesses one of the bombings in an earlier chapter.) It’s part of the chain of thought that ends with The Shape of Things to Come, and I think interesting mainly for that reason. You can get it here.
This was my top unread novel by Wells. The next is Love and Mr Lewisham.
However, the Arrow-Debreu theory does not take into account adaptive interactions typical of a CAS [complex adaptive system]. From the CAS viewpoint, the ‘fully rational’ agent assumption is a very strong assumption. Each agent must act on full knowledge of the future consequences of its actions, including the responses of other agents to those actions. Clearly no realistic agent possesses such omnipotence. Arrow was aware of this difficulty from the start, pointing out that real markets involve diverse traders of bounded rationality, with different agents employing different strategies. Moreover, realistic agents change their strategies as they gain experience with the diverse actions of other traders—they adapt. Markets made up of such agents rarely reach an equilibrium, even temporarily; rather, there are often large fluctuations (‘bubbles’ and ‘crashes’) caused by the traders’ ongoing, diverse adaptations.
On the basis of reading two books from the series, I’m rather impressed with the Very Short Introductions from Oxford University Press (the other one I have read is Modern China, by my old friend Rana Mitter). I complained after reading one of the earlier accounts of complexity that I was still looking for a good introduction to the topic, and I think I have found it. Mathematics is not really my thing these days, but I found this a very helpful overview of the theoretical side of complex adaptive systems, pulling together a lot of topics that I vaguely knew about. I still need to find something on the more organisational management side of it, but this is a good start. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019 which was not written by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is When Christians were Jews, by Paula Fredriksen.
Slightly slow to get to the BSFA shortlists, as I had a busy few days, but here are the Goodreads / LibraryThing stats for the Best YA and Best Novel categories, compared with the long lists; and also links for them and for the nominees in other categories.
As usual, I have ranked the finalists in descending order of the geometrical average of their number of owners on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and also provided the average rating on both systems, bolding the highest in each category. I’ve also given Amazon links where I have them – I know, I know, evil big river, but I get a (pathetically) small commission from it…
The Best Novel list is curious. The top novel on the shortlist was 35th, just over half way down, on the long list ranking by GR/LT ownership, and the second novel was 30th; the other three were all in the bottom half of the long-list ranking and one was in 61st place out of 68. To be specific, more people appear to have nominated The Coral Bones for the BSFA Award than own it on LibraryThing.
The Non-Fiction category includes two books and three online articles. NB that the books have higher ratings on Goodreads and LibraryThing than any of the other finalists in any other category.
Goodreads
LibraryThing
raters
av rating
owners
av rating
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins
Because I am a Clarke Award judge this year, I won’t comment on the Best Novel list and I won’t have time to read the Best YA Book finalists, but I’ll cover the other three in due course, starting with Best Art next Tuesday.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Things began to improve this month. with restrictions gradually easing; I went for a triumphant lunch with a colleague the day that the restaurants opened again.
We were allowed to see B again for the first time in more than three months, on her 23rd birthday.
More locally, I went to church, and made a final local video about an ancient enclave of imperial territory just across the river from us.
I read 20 books that month.
Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 32) The Beiderbecke Affair, by William Gallagher The Queen’s Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England, by John Cooper The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter From A Clear Blue Sky, by Timothy Knatchbull The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton
Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 15) Local Hero, by David Benedictus The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies Laatste schooldag, by Jan Siebelink (did not finish)
sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 70) The Sleeper Awakes, by H.G. Wells Heaven’s War by David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt (did not finish) Dreaming In Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov The Extremes, by Christopher Priest
Comics: 6 (YTD 21) The Wicked + The Divine vol 2: Fandemonium, by Kieron Gillen etc The Wicked + The Divine vol 3: Commercial Suicide, by Kieron Gillen etc The Wicked + The Divine vol 4: Rising Action, by Kieron Gillen etc De dag waarop de bus zonder haar vertrok, by BeKa, Marko and Maëla Cosson The Wicked + The Divine vol 5: Imperial Phase Part 1, by Kieron Gillen etc De dag waarop ze haar vlucht nam, by BeKa, Marko, and Maëla Cosson
5,000 pages (YTD 38,500) 4/20 (YTD 47/144) by women (Davie, Sullivan, 2x Ka of BeKa and Cosson) 1/20 (YTD 17/144) by PoC (Mitter)
The best book of this month, indeed of 2020, was Timothy Knatchbull’s From a Clear Blue Sky, his account of the Mountbatten bomb in 1979 and its aftermath; you can get it here. I also had a car-crash fascination with John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened; you can get it here. Rana Mitter’s Modern China: A Very Short Introduction is not as exciting than either of the above but also very good; you can get it here.
I read some pretty bad books too. I gave up on Goyer and Cassutt’s Heaven’s War after a few pages; you can get it here. The short story collection Laatste Schooldag by Jan Siebelink fell flat for me; you can get it here. So did the second of the bandes dessinées by BeKa, De Dag Waarop Ze Haar Vlucht Nam; you can get it here.
Current The Best of Ian McDonald λ3 Warring States, by Mags Halliday The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel Management Lessons from Game of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros, by Fiona Moore
Last books finished Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke η3 θ3 (did not finish) ι3 (did not finish) κ3 (did not finish) Revolutions of Terror, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande and Arianna Florean Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright
Next books The HAVOC Files: The Laughing Gnome, ed ??? The Face of Britain, by Simon Schama Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, ed. Sheree Renee Thomas
Europe has always been a continent of diverse peoples but diversity has never been an obstacle to political union. To strengthen alliances or gain territory, monarchies arranged dynastic marriages that created the multi-national empires that dominated Europe before 1914. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was an extreme example of diversity, for the majority of peoples living under the Habsburg crown were neither Austrians nor Hungarians. However, nationalist movements led to the break-up of multi-national empires. After the First World War, new nation-states were created that emphasized ethnic exclusivity, even when they had large minority populations and Germany under Adolf Hitler sought continental domination claiming to represent a Herrenvolk (master race). The Second World War discredited claims to national superiority while the Holocaust and the displacement of minorities increased the ethnic homogeneity of European states.
Richard Rose will turn 90 in April this year; his first two books, co-authored in 1960, were an analysis of the 1959 election and an investigation of why the Labour Party kept losing. He also carried out a very important analysis of public sentiment about politics and government in Northern Ireland just before the Troubles broke out, which has become an essential baseline for understanding what happened last century. My father greatly respected him, and when he came to Brussels in between the Brexit referendum and the pandemic, I made contact and we had a couple of very friendly dinners on the Grand’ Place.
He was kind enough to give me a copy of this short book about the political system of the EU, and its democratic deficits. It’s a lucid guide to how the structures actually work – too many such guides are hypnotised by the institutions’ own accounts of themselves – and makes a lot of the points on the dangers of disconnection between the EU decision-making process and the citizens who are affected by it. The book came out before Brexit (and assumes that it won’t happen) and before the pandemic, both of which have changed things a bit but maybe not all that much.
I’m going to disagree, however, with a couple of the points he makes. He spends an entire chapter criticising the allocation of seats between countries in the European Parliament, which (as you know, Bob) varies between Malta’s six (one MEP per 80,000 population) to Germany’s ninety-six (one MEP per 800,000 population). I don’t really think that this is a problem. Divergences from proportionality are tolerated in a lot of democratic electoral systems for different reasons, usually in order to give extra representation to groups who need it. The large member states already have a massive amount of soft power within the EU system, and I don’t find it outrageous that they shave a couple of the MEPs that they would have been entitled to on a strict population ratio, in order that the diversity of voices from smaller states is not completely extinguished. I think Rose’s argument also faces an issue about differential turnout between different countries, which he doesn’t address.
He also has a solution that I disagree with – holding EU-wide referendums on crucial issues. Here I think he unrealistically discounts the practical and political difficulties of doing this; election laws and procedures are very different across the 27 member states, referendum laws even more so; and how do you explain to, say, Slovaks that the democratic choice they make nationally can be over-ridden by French and German voters? My own feeling is that we should not try too hard to erode the extent to which the EU is a union of member states, since that’s an important element of its legitimacy.
Anyway, these are debating points surrounded by thorough and lean analysis. You can get it here.
By the time I was born, she [Sharon’s great-grandmother] was already in her late 70s and devoted to daily Bible reading and listening to religious music on an old record player.
I got this after corresponding with the author about the art of her husband, Charles Pfahl. It’s the story of a grim childhood of neglect and occasional abuse with alcoholic parents in Ohio and Brooklyn, followed by a series of unsuccessful relationships and marriages, at the end of which she reunites with Pfahl two decades after splitting up with him, and they resolve to make a go of it again (and apparently did quite well). The cover illustration was painted by Pfahl for the book, but he died before it was published.
There’s a lot of personal insight here, and the various awful relatives and boyfriends / husbands are all portrayed with humanity – even though they behave terribly, they are not monsters but flawed human beings. There’s also a tremendous sense of place; Akron, Ohio has a completely different feel to Brooklyn, which is again different from Manhattan. And (always a plus) it’s quite short despite the brutal subject matter. You can get it here.
Part of the 2020 Hugo Voter packet submitted by Diana M. Pho, but I’ve only just now got to it. It was very nice of several editors that year to give us more novels to read (in a year when we needed them), but it is of course impossible for the reader to know what contribution the editor made to the final product.
It’s a fantasy novel set in a parallel world’s medieval Middle Eastern city, where the guild of assassins is struggling for legitimacy and against an unknown opponent, who our young protagonist is tasked with tracking down. Excellent world-building, layering various bits of ghost lore onto the secure foundation of the Thousand and One Nights; I groaned at the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal near the end, but actually it was played out better than I had anticipated. It’s the first of a trilogy; while I enjoyed it, I won’t make special efforts to get the other two. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020 (after Penric’s Progress, which I can’t find). Next on that pile is Falling to Earth: An Apollo 15 Astronaut’s Journey to the Moon, by Al Worden.
Second paragraph of third chapter, in original Croatian, and English translation:
– Koje?
‘What?’
This won the Tiptree Award in 2010, but is also of interest to me because I know Croatia a bit – we lived in Zagreb for several months in 1998, and I get back when I can.
It’s a novel in three parts. In the first, the (Croatian) narrator talks about her elderly (Bulgarian) mother in Zagreb, and visits Bulgaria; the second part, which occupies the middle two quarters of the book, is about three old Czech ladies at a spa, and the various people they interact with, including a Bosnian masseur; and a fictional anthropologist’s guide to the lore of Baba Yaga, the mythic Slavic crone who flies in various conveyances (often a mortar bowl) across the land.
The stories are engaging in themselves, and also very layered in folklore, with the last section explaining some of the roots of the first two. It’s very entertaining to see old themes reworked, and it works in part because the old folkoric themes are so powerful and tap us at a deep level, and in part because it is funny. The third section, an academic essay in form, ought not to work – I’ve seen other authors earnestly explaining the symbolism of their stories, usually very badly – but it does, I think because Ugrešić’s humour comes through as well.
I also found it interesting that Ugrešić has pulled together perspectives from several different Slavic traditions – Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech and Bosnian – and found threads unifying them. Certainly I had always thought of Baba Yaga purely in Russian terms, and it’s salient to be reminded that there are a lot of other places that share the old Slavic traditions in different ways.
Of the other works on the Honor List for that year’s Tiptree Award, I think the only one I have read is The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin. There were also four other novels, a non-fiction book, and two short stories (both by the same writer).
I read all five BSFA shortlisted novels that year and recorded my vote, which was for Ken MacLeod’s The Restoration Game; it was won by my second choice, The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. The other three nominees were Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes; The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi; and Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan.
I also read all six novels on the Clarke shortlist that year. I would have voted for The Dervish House by Ian McDonald, but was happy enough that the winner was Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes. The others were Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan, again, joined by Generosity, by Richard Powers; Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness; and Declare, by Tim Powers.
That was the year that both Hugo and Nebula Best Novel voters went for Connie Willis’ massive and awful Blackout/All Clear. For Best Dramatic Presentation, both sets of voters chose Inception, which I think has stood the test of time better.
The following year, again, I have read both the Clarke and BSFA winners, but not the Tiptree winner, Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston, so it’s next on this pile.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 13) The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life, by Marcus Du Sautoy Timelash, by Phil Pascoe Listen, by Dewi Small Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle
Non-genre 1 (YTD 3) Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
SF 19 (YTD 41) ρ2 σ2 (did not finish) τ2 Roadside Picnic, by Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky υ2 φ2 Wild Cards: Deuces Down, ed. John J. Miller χ2 (did not finish) ψ2 (did not finish) ω2 (did not finish) α3 (did not finish) β3 (did not finish) Peculiar Lives, by Philip Purser Hallard γ3 δ3 ε3 (did not finish) ζ3 (did not finish) Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C Clarke η3
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 8) Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light, by Rona Munro Lucy Wilson & the Bledoe Cadets, by Tim Gambrell Doctor Who: Timelash, by Glen McCoy
Comics 1 (YTD 5) Agent Provocateur, by Gary Russell et al
6,100 pages (YTD 16,000) 12/28 (YTD 29/73) by non-male writers (McGowan-Doyle, σ2, τ2, υ2, φ2, χ2, ψ2, α3, β3, ε3, Munro, η3) 9/28 (YTD 14/73) by a non-white writer (ρ2, σ2, τ2, υ2, φ2, χ2, ψ2, α3, McCoy) 385 books currently tagged “unread”, 31 less than last month after some recalibration.
Reading now Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright The Best of Ian McDonald
Coming soon (perhaps) Revolutions of Terror, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande and Arianna Florean Warring States, by Mags Halliday The HAVOC Files: The Laughing Gnome, ed ??? Kerblam!, by Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L. Rodebaugh The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, by James Mortimer The Face of Britain: A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits, by Simon Schama Galactic Girl, by Fiona Richmond The Deep State of Europe: Welcome to Hell, by Basil Coronakis Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, ed. Sheree Renee Thomas Ratlines, by Stuart Neville Redwood and Wildfire, by Andrea Hairston My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard The Cider House Rules, by John Irving “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris Falling to Earth, by Al Worden Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman Winter, by Ali Smith
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
We continued to labour under COVID restrictions in May 2020, but our office had reopened for one day a week by the middle of the month and I certainly took advantage of being able to (cautiously) share physical space with colleagues.
I also indulged in some nostalgia, digging out photographs from my 21st birthday party in 1988. The lady in the red jacket later married the guy who is visible over my shoulder, who was one of my co-hosts. The lady in green married another of the co-hosts. The fourth co-host was the much missed Liz.
We finished the month with a visit to the park at Tervuren on a blisteringly hot day.
Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 26) The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, by Thomas Levenson Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003, by P. E. Winter Roger of Hereford’s Judicial Astrology: England’s First Astrology Book?, by Chris Mitchell A border too far: the Ilemi triangle yesterday and today, by Philip Winter
Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 12) The Godfather, by Mario Puzo The Accident, by Ismail Kadarë
sf (non-Who): 9 (YTD 65) Riverland, by Fran Wilde In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime 1: Breaking Strain, by Paul Preuss Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison
Comics: 2 (YTD 15) Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, ed. Shannon Watters The Wicked + The Divine vol 1: The Faust Act, by Kieron Gillen etc
The best of these was my former colleague Philip Winter’s account of peacemaking in DR Congo, A Sacred Cause, which you can get here. I also enjoyed rereading The Godfather, which you can get here, and reading for the first time Make Room! Make Room!, which you can get here. Nothing too awful this month.
Current Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C Clarke The Best of Ian McDonald η3
Last books finished γ3 Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle δ3 ε3 (did not finish) ζ3 (did not finish)
Next books Revolutions of Terror, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande and Arianna Florean The Face of Britain, by Simon Schama The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
Just a few more photos from last weekend, taken after I wrote my blog post on Monday.
First of all, a nice fannish moment in the hotel lobby with Daniel Anthony, who played Clyde in the Sarah Jane Adventures, and does not appear to have aged in the last ten years.
Also, fashionable slippers that I envied a little.
Then we went up to Hollywood with a bunch of Doctor Who writers, first stop the Mystery Pier Bookshop, owned by former actress Pamela Franklin and her husband. (She was out shopping.)
They specialise in first editions, including signed copies of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, and of Queen Victoria’s Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands.
Then it was on to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which has a tremendous setting.
We were there to pay our respects to Tony Beckley, who played Harrison Chase in The Seeds of Doom (1976) and was one of the first prominent British actors to die of AIDS, in 1980.
We held a little commemoration.
Other interesting graves there include Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, with the epitaph “That’s All, Folks!”
This extraordinary grave belongs to Mike Szymanski, who is still alive:
Another striking monument to Romanian film director Mihai Iacob:
I had no idea that there were so many Armenians in the film industry, or in Hollywood at least:
And the cemetery has peacocks, though we are advised not to feed them.
Finally, H and I had a good long chat with Kenny Smith of Big Finish on our way home as he too was flying to Heathrow. He grumbled that I didn’t mention that in my previous post, but in fairness that was written first thing Monday morning, hours before we flew together!
We may be woefully out of date, but we struggle to improve much on the ancient advice on how to succeed in an Oxbridge interview. Well-trained means you know your stuff. Well-educated means you have some breadth, knowledge of the world, and at least an inkling of the social skills you’ll need to get on over time. We can’t teach you these things here, but any good interviewer will certainly test them.
I picked this up after a positive mention in POLITICO years ago, but have only now got around to it. It’s a book about managing work-life balance, a genre I used to read fairly frequently but haven’t looked at for years (perhaps because I feel my work and life are a bit more balanced than they used to be). The point of local interest is that the authors are based in Brussels, so some of the anecdotes have more resonance for me than might be the case for most readers.
It’s quite a thin book, to be honest, but there are a couple of good points. One nice tip is to have a special email account to which you send the venting emails that you might otherwise foolishly send to colleagues and contacts. I also liked the characterisation of the Scrappy-Doo in the workplace:
They work hard all of the time, battle for everything, and then wag their little tails whenever Uncle, or Auntie, Scooby gives them a cookie. And bosses love them for it. Note also that scrappies may be bright and capable, but this is certainly not a requirement for moderately – in some cases hugely – successful Scrappy-hood, however exhausting it may be.
We’ve all known people like this, and indeed a lot of us have been people like this at some point in our career; and the authors give some useful tips on dealing with Scrappies compassionately but effectively.
This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2016 which was still on the unread shelves. Next on that pile is Peculiar Lives, by Philip Purser-Hallard.
It certainly wasn’t his brain. If he’d thought about it at all, he’d have run away from the flying bullets. Whatever it was that made him accompany Ray was something deeper in his make-up. His heart. Perhaps his gut. His reaction was more instinctive than rational. Jerry would have sighed to himself if he’d had the time. He’d always considered himself a smart guy, and this was just crazy.
A full-length novel in GRRM’s Wild Cards series, which I got in the same Humble Bundle as the Amber prequels. The setting is a roughly contemporary America decades after thousands were infected with a virus that gave them varying superhero powers. A former President and a dissident wing of the Vatican believe that the child of two such “Aces” is the Messiah reborn, or possibly the Antichrist. It’s tricky to handle this topic in pulp format, but Miller makes a good fist of it.
Unfortunately I’m going to complain again about the formatting of the electronic book. Most of the chapter headings have been displaced to the end of the book, as a weird appendix, and that means the text is not broken up helpfully for the reader. The publisher, iBooks, folded before the paper version of the book went on general release, but that’s no excuse. It’s not as bad as the Zelazny collection, but it’s not good.
It’s the end of three years in Paris, of boring courses, unpleasant trainings and being forced to follow military discipline, which I can’t stand.
Second frame of third page of volume 2:
They finally let themselves be convinced, given that our minds were made up. Once the decision was taken, we got on with our preparations and said the difficult goodbyes to our comrades.
As my regular reader knows, I have a long-term fascination with the Aldébaran series of bandes dessinées by Brazilian-French artist Leo. Last year he published a two-episode story, Neptune, which takes us on the next steps of the story of the series’ central character, Kim, and her new young colleague, Manon. Despite their young age, their life experience makes them ideal members of a team sent to explore a mysterious alien structure that appears in Earth’s solar system; it’s a nicely done homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama, and other similar stories. The mysterious object turns out to contain some mysterious humans in a jungle habitat filled with new forms of alien life, so Leo executes his usual flamboyant otherworldly landscapes. It’s a good taster for the rest of his works, so if you want to see if Leo writes the kind of bandes dessinées that you might like, you could do worse than starting with Neptune. You can get volume 1 here and volume 2 here in French; volume 1 comes out in English translation next week, and volume 2 in April.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Not surprisingly, I went no further than Brussels in April 2020, and that was only once to deliver essential supplies to two colleagues who had joined just as lockdown hit. We met in the open air by the monument to the brave carrier pigeons of the first world war.
The last Sunday of the month was my birthday, and I had a virtual party on Zoom to which dozens of friends and relatives came. It was very affirming.
I read 28 books that month.
Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 21) The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, by Mallory O’Meara The European Parliament, by Francis Jacobs, Richard Corbett and Michael Shackleton Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski The French Connection, by Robin Moore
Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 10) A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving Muddy Lane, by Andrew Cheffings The Long Song, by Andrea Levy
sf (non-Who): 14 (YTD 56) The Wind on the Moon, by Eric Linklater Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher Prophet of Bones, by Ted Kosmatka The Wicked King, by Holly Black The Moomins and the Great Flood, by Tove Jansson A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsin Muir A Woman in Space, by Sara Cavanagh Catfishing on Catnet, by Naomi Kritzer The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson – did not finish Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells The Giver, by Lois Lowry
Comics: 7 (YTD 13) Mooncakes, by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker Wiske, by Willy Vandersteen Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda Barabas, by Willy Vandersteen LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford, colours by James Devlin Torchwood: World Without End, by John Barrowman, Carole Barrowman, Antonio Fuso and Pasquale Qualano The Heralds of Destruction, by Paul Cornell and Christopher Jones
Those who don’t know or don’t especially like Doctor Who may well query why a middle-aged Brussels lobbyist should devote any time at all to a family TV show which started the day after the Kennedy assassination. Query all you like; I have never made any excuse for seeking escapism. Brian Aldiss once said that good sf is not about asking “What if…?” but about saying, “My God, what if…!?” and Doctor Who at its best does that – whether it’s about schoolteachers trapped in the Stone Age or youths being kidnapped to be turned into cheetahs or a cosmic villain dancing to Boney M in the Winter Palace in 1916. It unites the consistent formula of the hero who is just a little more than human with the companions who represent the reactions of us, the viewers, to what is going on.
I’ve spent this weekend at Gallifrey One in Los Angeles, the biggest annual Doctor Who convention anywhere in the world. It was my fourth time there, and somehow I enjoyed it even more than the previous three occasions. Part of it was surely the presence of recently departed star of the show Jodie Whittaker, whose charm and enthusiasm captured everyone. I had a brief chat with her where I mentioned her role in the great Belfast film, Good Vibrations. “I love that film!” she exclaimed, and I noted the present tense. “But the accent was a bit hard.”
Let’s be honest, this was the point of the trip.
Having just flown in from Sydney, where she has been filming a new series after a year off, she did two interviews on stage, which were of course packed; and then charmed us at the closing ceremony by showing off her badge ribbons, a strip which must have been 15 metres long. A particular highlight which I missed, though my friend H was there, was her performing the script from her own last episode, taking on different roles.
There were some very good panel discussions and other interviews as well. Sophie Aldred (Ace) and Janet Fielding (Tegan), who both made reappearances last year, decades after they had been written out, did a hilarious double act on stage and then also provided commentary for the latest episode, which they are in, along with Chris Chibnall, the outgoing showrunner who wrote it.
Both are quite short so they insisted that fans getting photographed with them use a chair.
One particularly moving event was the screening of the film Doctor Who Am I by Matthew Jacobs. He wrote the script for the 1996 TV Movie, which turned out to be a false start, but had been into Doctor Who as a child – his actor father played Doc Holliday in The Gunfighters, a 1966 story which climaxes at the OK Corral. The film is about his personal reconciliation with Doctor Who through fandom, and particularly through an earlier Gallifrey One convention; so I had the weird experience of watching it while sitting in the room where several scene were actually filled (see eg 1:44 in the trailer). I had the pleasure of chatting to Jacobs a couple of times in the bar.
The other nice small event I did was a Kaffeeklatsch with Frazer Hines, who played the Second Doctor’s companion Jamie in 1967-69, and Michael Troughton, son of Patrick Troughton who played the Second Doctor. They have known each other since Michael was fifteen (“..and I was seventeen!” Hines quipped) and both in fact have performed as the Second Doctor in audio plays. They talked a lot about acting and a bit about Doctor Who. Hines also did photo shoots with his fellow companion Wendy Padbury, who played Zoe.
My other celebrity photoshoot was with Katy Manning who played Jo Grant in 1971-73, literally fifty years ago. Immediately in front of me in the queue was a small child dressed as the alien Alpha Centauri which appeared in two of her stories. I said to her, ‘That was awfully sweet, wasn’t it?’ Her eyes welled with emotion and she grabbed me for a hug.
Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, was also there, looking better than the last time I saw him in 2020, as was his companion Bonnie Langford – I did not go for a picture as I have one with both of them from a previous convention.
The Old Who team, somewhat blurry: Colin Baker, Bonnie Langford, Katie Manning, Sophie Aldred, Janet Fielding, Wendy Padbury, Frazer Hines.
That’s enough about me. The other big big thing about Gallfrey One is the cosplay. Some of the ones that caught my eye:
Loads of people dressed as the Thirteenth DoctorThere is more than one way to cosplay a Dalek.A Drashig and Vorg, from the 1973 story Carnival of monstersThree Tenth Doctors, or as someone put it on Twitter, the 0.3 DoctorsMartha Jones and the Fugitive DoctorThird Doctor, Seventh Doctor, Fourth Doctor
And finally, H and I, who had travelled over together, were charmed to meet with S, a fellow fan and emigrant who lives in Gent. S and I turned out to have a lot of people in common, and we did a fair bit of hanging out together. It’s not just the old friends you meet, it’s the new friends you make.
An Irishman, an Englishman and a Scotswoman walk into a convention
Listen, from the first series of Doctor Who episodes starring Peter Capaldi, is one of my favourite stories of the era. Not a lot actually happens. We get the opening of the relationship between Clara and Danny Pink; we get an encounter from the far future and a descendant of Danny’s; we get the Doctor investigating a phantom in everyone’s psyche; and we get Clara intervening at a key point in the Doctor’s own childhood. It’s not crammed with action. But perhaps, by not trying too hard, we end up with a better outcome.
One of its successes is the very last scene, which sets up a sort of recursion, with the Doctor’s future personality explained to him by Clara, using words originally crafted by Terrace Dicks. It contrasts with a lot of the other revelations we have had about the Doctor’s origins over the years (most recently the Timeless Child) in its subtlety and ambiguity – almost answering a question with another question. It’s also noteworthy that we don’t actually find an answer to the Doctor’s question, and yet the story is satisfactorily closed.
I also think it’s worth noting that the disastrous date between Clara and Danny riffs off one of Moffat’s most consistent and successful themes, of people miscommunicating. My personal favourite example of this is the Coupling episode, The Girl With Two Breasts, followed by the scene with the twins and the pickpocket in the Tintin movie. But here this situation is played not for laughs but as a deadly serious case of PTSD, and it is done very well.
Dewi Small has written one of the shorter but punchier Black Archives about this story. In a brief introduction, he sets out his stall: this story is based on psychology and he will use a Freudian lens to look at it. It works a lot better than the similarly psychological Black Archive on The Face of Evil.
The first chapter, “What if the Big Bad Time Lord doesn’t want to admit he’s afraid of the dark?”, which takes up more than 40% of the whole text, explains the Freudian concepts of the Uncanny and repression with reference to Who and Henry James, and looks at the significance of the barn.
The second chapter, “I Don’t Take Orders, Clara”, looks at the role of Clara and how it transcends the usual role of the companion in Who.
The third chapter, “A Soldier So Brave He Doesn’t Need a Gun”, unpacks the character and importance of Danny/ Rupert. Its second paragraph is:
The new Doctor sets out the revised terms of his and Clara’s relationship when he addresses his ‘many mistakes’ and tells her that he’s ‘not [her] boyfriend’ at the end of his first episode Deep Breath (2014). However, Clara was almost immediately repositioned into a new romantic coupling, providing another layer of impediment to the continuance of the previous relationship between her and the Time Lord.
The brief fourth chapter, “This is It, The End of Everything, The Last Planet” looks at the end of the world as presented in Listen and Utopia, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Fredric Brown’s “Knock”.
And there is a brief conclusion saying again how good the story is, which I agree with.
This is a brief review of one of the briefer Black archives, but I recommend it. You can get it here (NB the picture on the page is for a different book).
Current Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright γ3 Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle
Last books finished ω2 (did not finish) α3 (did not finish) Doctor Who: Timelash, by Glen McCoy β3 (did not finish) Peculiar Lives, by Philip Purser Hallard Timelash, by Phil Pascoe Listen, by Dewi Small
Next books The Best of Ian McDonald Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C Clarke
Before I start – Colin Baker is here at Gallifrey One this weekend, and looking well – last time I saw him was in Brussels in 2020 and he seemed a bit frail, but it looks like the last few years have been good to him.
I remember catching the second episode of Timelash, but not the first, when it was first broadcast in 1985, the month before my 18th birthday. My main memory is that it was pretty obvious who Herbert was meant to be, and otherwise it did not make a lot of sense.
Timelash comes very close to The Twin Dilemma as being the worst Who story ever. Paul Darrow is just awful. Really awful. The glove-puppet aliens are just awful. Really awful. The pointless continuity with an unbroadcast Third Doctor story is just pointless. The inclusion of HG Wells is just stupid. The climbing wall scene is especially unconvincing. And what happens to all the people exiled to the twelfth century? Are they just left there? The only saving grace is that Colin Baker’s Doctor is a little less annoying here than elsewhere. But that is not saying much.
When I came back to it a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I was more forgiving:
One of the things I didn’t like about Timelash was the same essentialism [as with the aliens in The Two Doctors] – the Borad being evil at least in part because he looks evil. Another is the fact that the time travel part of the plot is rather botched (I am a fan of the twelfth century and would have liked to see some action there). But actually the story as a whole, and Paul Darrow, annoyed me much less on this viewing. Most of the plot makes sense, and is in keeping with the spirit of Who. While the production values are rather poor, everyone does seem to be aware of this and carries on as best they can in the circumstances. And having had almost 19 years with no real historical figures portrayed as a speaking role, now, with H.G. Wells, we have two in the same season. But I think he is the last in Old Who. (The Queen and Courtney Pine in Silver Nemesis don’t count, as neither speaks and the latter is not portrayed by an actor but by himself.)
I have to confess that this time around, I swung back to my earlier opinion. I found the script so annoying, the momsters so amateurish and the treatment of Peri so offensive that I was rather distracted from the actual plot. It is certainly in my bottom ten Old Who stories, maybe in my bottom three. I can only really recommend it to completists and to fans of Paul Darrow.
Pennant Roberts directed some very good Blake’s 7 episodes, and also The Face of Evil and several other Who stories. But somehow the magic did not work here; a number of scenes seem very under-rehearsed, and the lead actors don’t seem to be under control. Clearly a lot of energy and money had been used up in earlier stories in the season, and in the pantomime which JNT was also directing Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant.
Author Glen McCoy, who at the time was working as an ambulance driver, had never written for television before, and has since developed a career as a motivational speaker. Incidentally he was the first person of colour to write a Doctor Who script – he describes himself to me as Anglo-Indian. (The first non-white director was Waris Hussein, way back at the start.)
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
Peri was more than delighted, and left her position by the central console, assuming the problem had been solved. Yet her approach received an unfriendly glare from the Time Lord. Peri stopped in her tracks. ‘It is okay now, isn’t it?’
It’s not a fantastic book, but it is at least at the level of quality of the average Who novelisation, unlike the original series; it makes you realise just how much the TV original suffered from a) Paul Darrow’s overacting as Tekker and b) the pathetic hand-puppet monsters. One of those cases where the reader’s imagination is better at supplying the effects.
As I already said, this time around I was so annoyed by the TV story’s flaws that I rather forgot that there was a plot when watching it, and reading the novelisation was a useful reminder that there was some purpose to all the running around. Some (but not all) of the sillier lines are cut. A surprising amount of the action is reported indirectly rather than in dialogue.
Given that McCoy wrote the book as well as the series, this is the first Doctor Who novel by a non-white writer. You can get it here.
Phil Pascoe reveals at the end of his Black Archive monograph that he actually loves this story, and it is intimately tied to very pleasant very personal childhood memories. It’s not the first Black Archive about a story which the writer loves but fandom generally doesn’t, so it’s always interesting to see what approach is taken. As he explains in the first chapter, “The Waves of Time”, Pascoe has decided to look at the story through the lens of H.G. Wells, and the extent to which he “haunts” the text. As I have myself been working through Wells’ novels (next up: The World Set Free), I found it an interesting approach.
The second chapter, “Working for the Benefit of All Karfelons”, looks at the economic set-up of the planet Karfel and applies a Wellsian critique to it.
The third chapter, “Don’t I Have a Say in All This?”, looks at just how badly Peri is treated in the story nd links that rather weakly to H.G. Wells’ feminism in theory and practice. The second paragraph of this chapter is:
I want to emphasise that I do not believe that anyone involved in making the story deliberately and maliciously set out to make a work which discriminates against women. However, there is much in Timelash that, to 21st-century audiences, would appear sexist. Does our unhaunting of the text require this Black Archive to become an apologia, or are some of the more egregious aspects of the story beyond reasonable defence? We encounter the problem, in reconsidering a piece of popular culture from decades past, of it no longer meeting today’s standards or expectations. Timelash can also be haunted from its future, our present, distorting the picture of how the story did what it did in its historical moment of 1985.
The fourth chapter, “Can’t You Speak, Dumbbell?”, looks at voices: interruptions, Paul Darrow’s performance, the Old Man as ventriloquist’s dummy, and the number of times people speak out of shot (to which I would have added the novelisation’s frequent use of reported speech).
The fifth chapter, “Science… Fiction” looks for Wells’ direct influence on Doctor Who and finds some, though not especially in Timelash.
The sixth chapter, “Food Which is Rightfully Ours”, looks at human meat in Who and Wells, and veganism and vegetarianism in Doctor Who.
The seventh chapter, “I Didn’t Realise Dying Heroically Was Such a Strain on the Nerves”, looks at two scenes near the end (in the Tardis console room) written by Eric Saward because the original script under-ran, suggesting that they subtly critique the entire story.
The eighth chapter, “Strange How You Can Forget What You Used to Look Like”, looks at the furniture, asks what the title actually means, and then leads into the ninth chapter, “Wish I Could Have That on Tape”, which attempts to reconstruct the Third Doctor’s adventure on Karfel.
The tenth chapter, “…Wash Us All Clean”, disarmingly admits the writer’s fond childhood memories of the story, separated from fan criticism.
The whole thing is interesting, though not all of the interesting parts are about Timelash. Perhaps that is just as well. You can get it here.
James shot to his feet. ‘Smugglers? Quick, everyone! Split up! Hide!’
Next in the series of novels exploring the timeline of Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, this one has a solid enough story with our hero incarnated into an ally of his own granddaughter and zooming back in time to investigate alien doings at a stone circle on the moor near the Brig’s childhood home. It’s a decent enough reheat of several well-worn themes. I’m afraid I almost tossed it aside after an excruciating yokel pub conversation in the first chapter, but it was just about worth persisting with. You can get it here.
I see that another version of the story has been published from Lucy’s point of view. Not sure that I will bother.
Rona Munro is the only person to have written stories for both Old Who and New Who, having scripted the very last Seventh Doctor story before the cancellation, and then this story for the last Peter Capaldi season. I also saw one of her other plays at the Web Theatre in Newtownards in 2013, a single-actor piece with the only member of the cast playing three parts. I can’t remember the name of the piece, but research suggests it may have been “Women Behaving Madly”.
The Eaters of Light is a rare Doctor Who story set in Scotland (though filmed of course ni Wales) – especially considering that Capaldi and Moffatt are both Scottish, it’s a little surprising that they did not go there more often. It’s less surprising that they got a Scottish writer of the calibre of Munro to take them there. I rewatched the story before reading the new novelisation, and as I had expected, I enjoyed it a lot. (Here’s the BBC page if you want to refresh yourself quickly.)
The Twelfth Doctor, Bill and Nardole arrive in Scotland and decide to investigate the disappearance of the Ninth Legion. They travel back to the first century AD and get involved in the local conflict between Picts and Romans, but manage to persuade both to unite in the face of a Cthulhoid alien enemy attempting to breach the boundaries of the universe. It’s a very simple plot, but it’s very nicely done, with some nice reveals when, for instance, Bill becomes aware of the TARDIS translation circuits, or the two factions realise just how young each other are. At the end of the episode there’s a coda with Missy being released from imprisonment by the Doctor. Season Thirteen is my favourite of the Capaldi seasons and this story is one of the reasons why.
The novelisation of the story, also by Rona Munro, was one of the few Doctor Who books released last year. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Inside Nardole looked around in appreciation. Every surface was painted and decorated: every bowl, every bit of wall, every stool, every piece of cloth. Everything carried geometric patterns in red and blue, green and brown, yellow and purple, the designs echoing the tattoos and the knitted clothes the fierce little people around them were wearing.
The book, as with the best Who novelisations, brings more joyous detail to the plot and fills out the author’s intentions. (174 pages for 45 minutes is pretty generous by the historical standards of novelisations – compare the 143 pages that Terrance Dicks got for ten 25-minute episodes of The War Games.) It turns very much into a story of Picts and Romans, with the Doctor and friends intervening in a local story. This makes the ending, where they reject the Doctor’s help and take responsibility for guarding the Gate themselves, all the stronger. Some of the nicer one-liners are lost, but this is a differently shaped story and in some ways it is stronger for it. The scene with Missy at the end is omitted. Strongly recommended. You can get it here.
This was the first in the IDW series of Tenth Doctor comics, published in 2008. I realised that I have read most of the others in this sequence – The Forgotten, Through Time and Space, Fugitive, Tesseract, and Final Sacrifice. The others are all by Tony Lee and all, to be honest, better. This has six loosely linked stories which don’t really cohere internally and with art which, while very nicely executed, doesn’t always end up looking much like the Tenth Doctor or Martha Jones as we know them. Though I did appreciate the reappearance ot the Cat People from Russell’s long-ago novel, and smiled at this in-joke in a brief discussion of E.R.:
Doctor Corday is of course played by Alex Kingston, whose run as River Song started while these were being published.
Still, it’s enjoyable enough popcorn for the fannish mind. You can get it here.
Next post in this series will be the Titan Comics album Revolutions of Terror.
Battlefield must have been the killer blow which led to the cancellation. It is simply awful. The story is incomprehensible, the direction (particularly of the all-important action scenes) both uninspiring and incoherent, the supposed killer-end-of-the-universe monster is atrocious, and the background music some of the worst of all time. I haven’t seen much late-eighties Doctor Who, but I shall be very surprised if I find another story as bad as this. I am among that minority (even among the small number who have watched it) who thought Ben Aaronovitch’s other story, Remembrance of the Daleks, was bad too, so it comes as little surprise to me.
Surely the programme’s makers must have realised what a risk they were taking with an uneven writer for the opening story of a season where the entire programme faced cancellation? [In retrospect this was very unfair of me, and I have enjoyed a lot of Aaronovitch’s other work.] Ye who complain about Torchwood, or about how not quite every story of new Who comes up to the standards you have come to expect of Buffy or Battlestar Galactica, some time please sit down and watch Battlefield, and marvel.
Anyway, I should not be wholly negative. [Indeed.] Nicholas Courtney puts in one of his best performances as the Brigadier, and has a great confrontation scene with Jean Marsh playing the chief villain. (The two of them had appeared together in Doctor Who 23 years earlier, playing brother and sister galactic agents in The Daleks’ Master Plan.) But that’s about it; even McCoy and Aldred seem to have little idea of what is going on.
In my last post I recanted my previous disdain for Remembrance of the Daleks, and uneasily anticipated that I might have to do the same for Battlefield. And so it proved to be; I take it all back, or almost all. Even if the precise background to the intrusion into our world of the Arthurian mythos as interplanetary battle is not really spelled out, it is generally pleasing, and especially pleasing to see the Doctor made to play the role of Merlin in someone else’s drama. (He is definitely more of a Merlin than a Prospero.) The many effects all work to enhance the story, and we have the excellent Bambera / Ancelyn subplot (it was nice to be watching this so soon after Bambera’s return in Tony Lee’s play Rat Trap for Big Finish) and the Ace / Shou Yuing spark too.
Most importantly for us longterm fans, we also have the final return (for Old Who) of Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier. It allows him to return to military heroism as he did when we first saw him stalking Yeti in the Underground, rather than the blimpish buffoon of the later Pertwee years; even better, we have Courtney sparking against Jean Marsh as they did, briefly, in 1965 in The Daleks’ Master Plan. The moment when the Brigadier chops the Doctor in order to take the final confrontation himself is fantastic, as is the Doctor’s reaction when he thinks the Brigadier is dead (as had been the original intention of the script). It’s a strong enough start to a strong season.
Rewatching it now, I confess I have swung back again to my first take. It seemed to me incomprehensible and badly made. The direction is dull and the music intrusive and inappropriate. Nicholas Courtney is still very good, but (having been reading some military memoirs recently) I wondered about the nature of UNIT hierarchy, and who precisely was giving him orders to go to Carbury and why these were not communicated to Bambera. The final scene is terrifically stupid, though at least it established that the Seventh Doctor can cook.
The novelisation is a different matter. The second paragraph of the third chapter of Part 1 is:
The roads were slippery with the wet green leaves stripped from the trees by the storm. Zbrigniev’s training took each obstacle of debris in its stride, but although the onslaught had died, the UNIT car never topped fifteen miles an hour.
I’m not the greatest fan of Ben Aaronovitch, who wrote the original script, but Platt has taken the story and makes it work really well on paper. It makes you realise just how much of the TV version’s problems were down to poor direction, bad music and lousy acting. We get some lovely back-story for the Brigadier and Doris; we get just enough explanation for the Doctor being Merlin to leave room for further speculation without just being stupid; we get the Bambera/Ancelyn relationship decently treated as well. Interestingly Platt has broken the story up into four parts which more or less coincide with the episodes as broadcast, the only novelisation where I remember this being done. [Actually not the only one; see also: Galaxy Four]
An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Ace and Shou Youing defending each other against the forces of darkness (in the book, we are not distracted by their awful acting).
I still agree with all of that. The middle and end of the story still don’t make much sense, but the beginning is very well developed and that gives you enough momentum to keep going. Intriguingly, Platt’s future Doctor has red hair. You can get it here.
I was very curious as to how Philip Purser-Hallard would approach this story for the Black Archives. In his earlier monograph on Dark Water / Death in Heaven, he persuaded me of some of the redeeming features of a story that I still don’t like very much. Other Black Archive writers have tried the same – thinking here of L.M. Myles on The Ambassadors of Death. But there are other possibilities – James Cooray Smith, writing on The Ultimate Foe, my least favourite of all the stories so far covered by the Black Archive, analyses in forensic detail just how it came to be such a mess.
Purser-Hallard disarmingly admits in a prologue that many of the criticisms of Battlefield are valid, but “despite the story’s various missteps and mishaps, it succeeds in certain important respects, and it is this tension in which this book is most interested.”
The first chapter, “One Painstaking Layer at a Time”, looks at the first two versions of the storyline, both of which made better sense, and the changes made to the script at the last moment. He makes the point that the armour worn by Morgaine and her knights should have been obviously high-tech, as described in the script, and the decision to just use ordinary armour instead had a serious impact on the quality of the story as broadcast.
The second chapter, “Daleks, Master-Plans”, starts by comparing and contrasting Battlefield with Remembrance of the Daleks, and then looks at the Cartmel Master Plan, and the (slim) possibility that Bambera might have returned in future seasons if Old Who had not been cancelled.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “This Thing About King Arthur”, is:
One method is to construct a science-fiction story with parallels to a myth – more often than not a classical myth – and usually to flag the fact in dialogue. This is the approach taken to, for instance, the myths of Jason and the Golden Fleece in Underworld (1978), the Minotaur in The Horns of Nimon (1979-80) and the Minotaur again in The God Complex (2011). Another is to suggest that elements of various mythologies are real, but explicable through science fiction tropes, generally ancient visitations by aliens – the view taken of the Titan Kronos (and the Minotaur again) in The Time Monster (1972), the Egyptian god Set in Pyramids of Mars (1975), and the apocalypse-heralding Norse monster Fenrir in The Curse of Fenric. (This is also a common approach to invented alien religions, for instance in The Face of Evil (1977) and Planet of Fire (1984).) A third variant consists of stories where, rather than inspiring a myth, the alien takes advantage of an existing one to deceive the superstitious locals. In the earliest example of this, The Myth Makers (1965), the alien masquerading as Zeus is the Doctor himself; a more recent one is the Mire warlord who impersonates Odin in The Girl Who Died (2015).
The chapter looks at sources for Arthuriana: Roger Lancelyn Green, Boorman’s Excalibur, The Mists of Avalon, the comic series Camelot 3000 and the BBC series Knights of God which starred Patrick Troughton but was not shown until after he had died. (I am surprised not to see T.H. White or Monty Python on that list.)
The fourth chapter, “The Legendary Arthur, Yes”, looks in detail at the Arthurian roots of various characters and concepts in Battlefield, running into problems with Bambera who is not a brilliant match for Guinevere. This chapter alone takes up a quarter of the book. I think this is trying a little too hard.
The fifth chapter, “Builder of Worlds”, points out that Battlefield is set not in 1989 when broadcast but in an unspecified near future where the UK has a king and various other things have happened. (God be with the days when you could get a vodka and coke, a lemonade and a glass of water for much less than a fiver.)
The sixth chapter, “Is This War?”, examines the story’s depiction of the military and the Doctor’s relationship with them, and the concepts of “honour” and “shame”, the latter of which is used euphemistically by Bambera as a swear word.
The seventh chapter, “Sufficiently Advanced Magic”, points out that the 1988 and 1989 stories had more overtly magical content, and that Morgaine’s witchcraft is in the end her undoing.
The eighth chapter, “Britishness, and Other Identities”, looks at how the story’s heterogenous concept of Britishness is developed further in Aaronovitch’s (excellent) Rivers of London books, and also looks at just why that last scene is so bad.
The ninth chapter, “It’s Only a Trap”, comes back to the Bambera/Guinevere question, and also looks at how future incarnations of the Doctor might appear in the current Doctor’s story. As noted above, Platt’s future Doctor in the novelisation has red hair.
In the conclusion, Purser-Hallard rather disarmingly confesses that “for many years – 16, to be precise – [Battlefield] was my favourite story.” (Sixteen years from 1989 takes us to the dawn of New Who.) I’m really charmed that he managed to resist the temptation to go full-on apologetic for a youthful enthusiasm, and instead provided a thoughtful analysis.
But I still wonder about a few things, notably, why are the direction and the music so awful? It’s a book that answers a lot of questions, but not all of them are the ones I would have asked.
It’s Gallifrey One this weekend, and I’m travelling to Los Angeles today; the next few reviews here will accordingly be of my recent Doctor Who reading, starting with an old favourite seen through new eyes.
I remember vividly watching Horror of Fang Rock when it was first broadcast, kicking off the 1977-78 season of Doctor Who, keeping us entranced for the four weeks that it was on. I really enjoyed it then. On rewatching in 2008, I wrote:
Horror of Fang Rock is a very bleak and horrific story. Indeed, it made me reflect that for all his cuddly public personality, Terrance Dicks’ actual writing is often rooted in pretty horrific stuff – vampires, Frankenstein, King Kong, and his first ever story, co-written with Malcolm Hulke, was The War Games which surely has the bleakest ending of any classic Who.
This is the one with the Rutan, the electrical alien foe of the Sontarans which can change shape and indeed does so as it picks off the inhabitants of the light-house one by one. There is one actor of dubious talents, but fortunately his character is the first to die and the others all give it their best.
This is the last story in which we just have the Doctor/Leela Tardis crew, and it’s worth pausing to reflect that this was surely one of the greatest ever combinations, with a consistent run of four good stories (Face of Evil, Robots of Death, Talons of Weng-Chiang and this one). Leela could so easily have been a one-joke character, but in Louise Jameson’s portrayal she is completely credible, always earthed in her own identity, able to clash and spark with the Doctor, playing the dramatic role of a companion as the one who gets things explained to her not because she is stupid but because she is different. She is the one companion who we see the Doctor trying to change and educate, and that somehow makes it all work much better. After watching the Troughton stories over the last year or so I decided I was a huge fan of Wendy Padbury’s Zoe; but now I see things in Leela that passed me by as a ten-year-old. (Meaning the integrity of her performance, of course.)
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
Horror of Fang Rock is a strong start to Season 15, with Terrance Dicks proving once again that he can actually write. Sure, it’s a base-under-siege story; but it’s one of the better ones, with everyone being killed off except our crew in the end.
It is a particularly good story for Leela, who is utterly exasperated by the screamy Adelaide (she does a brilliant eye-roll when Adelaide faints) and stuns the other Edwardians with her relaxed attitude to death; it makes her horror when Reuben-the-Rutan is unharmed by her knife all the more striking. It’s a bit un-Doctorish to wipe out the entire Rutan mothership as they land, but gives a satisfying bang at the end of the story.
I stand by all of that. A few more things struck me this time. We never actually find out the details of Palmerdale’s nefarious plan, except that it’s clearly indicated that it is dishonorable, and it’s also clearly indicated that Adelaide is more than a secretary. There’s an interesting untold story there. Also, the music is very good. Also, unfortunately, the Rutan is not all that well realised, a weak point in what is otherwise a strong story. Still, I realliy enjoyed rewatching it.
For those of us in the Worldcon community, one of the Doctor’s lines in particular has a strong resonance:
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
‘That’s what happened, according to the Doctor. Massive electric shock, he said.’
Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock is a case of Terrance Dicks adapting one of his own TV scripts, which gives him even more than his usual degree of confidence with the material, and he uses the opportunity to fill out the Edwardian background of the story rather satisfactorily.
I don’t completely stand by that judgement now. One point where the novelisation is consistently out of step with the TV version is that the Doctor is cheerful, funny and charming, whereas Tom Baker’s portrayal on screen is moody and Olympian. Baker apparently did not like Dicks’ script, and his bad mood carries over into his performance, but it makes it all the more watchable; this is not a funny story and a funny Doctor would have been jarring. Perhaps this is Dicks, again belying his cuddly reputation, getting obscure revenge on Baker. If you want to judge for yourself, you can get it here.
I keep on saying this about the books in this series, but with occasional exceptions it keeps being true: Matthew Guerreri’s Black Archive monograph is really good, taking us deep into the roots of the story. I have two minor complaints, and I’ll mention the first now: I wish it had been longer.
A prologue references the infamous Max Headroom incident of 1987, which Guerreri witnessed at first hand, and reflects on the manifestations of intrusion and discontinuity in the story. Like all of the chapters, it is prefaced with a literary quotation.
The first of four long chapters, dubbed “Part 1”, has the title “Technology and Character”. It starts with Robert Louis Stevenson’s credentials in lighthouse construction, goes on to E.G. Jerrome’s 1966 Lighthouses, Lightships and Buoys, compares the lighthouse crew and the production team to the Three Body Problem, looks at Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday’s contributions to lighthouse lamps, examines diamonds as a focus, explains Marconi, comes back to Robert Louis Stevenson on island life, and finishes on the timing of the Doctor’s presence on Fang Rock.
“Part 2: Time and Class” starts with Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse, quotes John Stuart Mill and Ronald Coase on lighthouse economics, ponders the fate of Palmerdale’s sailors and Skinsale’s ethics, returns to Virginia Woolf and her father Leslie Stephen and the letters Q and R, sticks with Woolf’s take on Einstein and her Orlando, detours a little to Roger Fry and the obscure late nineteenth century writer Grant Allen, and briefly considers the diamond again.
The second paragraph of “Part 3: Time and Terror” is:
In 1847, after taking up residence in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, mansion that had been George Washington’s headquarters during the war’s Boston campaign, Longfellow returned to Portland. He took a holiday at the Verandah, a new hotel that would help create Maine’s reputation as a vacation playground for well-off New Englanders. During that sojourn, the poet did not visit the Portland Head Light, but he did see the ‘Two Lights,’ twin towers at the southern end of Cape Elizabeth. Longfellow climbed to the top of the western tower to take in the views.
It starts with Longfellow’s poem, “The Lighthouse”, looks at the Rutan’s roots in Lovecraft and Verne, goes in detail into Lovecraft’s “The White Ship” and “The Color Out of Space”, considers why green should be so awful anyway, and briefly reflects on the Flannan Isles.
“Part 4: Fact and Fiction” looks in detail at Peter Maxwell Davies’ opera The Lighthouse, considers The War of the Worlds, reminds us about Dudley Simpson’s music, mentions the Tarot, looks at William Wilfred Gibson’s poem “Flannan Isle” which is (mis)quotred by the Doctor at the end, and finishes with a note about narrative.
A brief epilogue considers the story about a lighthouse left unfinished by Edgar Allan Poe at the time of his mysterious death.
There’s a lot here, and it expanded my list of books that I want to read (or re-read) much more than I really need right now. You can get it here.
My only other complaint, and it’s a small one, is that I’d have liked to see a nod to the Andy Frankham-Allen novel in the Lethbridge-Stewart sequence, Beast of Fang Rock, which is well worth a look (and you can get it here).
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
This, as you may remember, was the month that the world ended. When I woke up in Cambridge on the morning of 1 March, I had no idea that it would be my last time outside Belgium until July. I visited B a week later, on Sunday 8 March, which was just as well because we were told on Friday 13 that we could not see the girls again until the pandemic situation allowed. As it became clear how things were going, though not how log it would last, we had a gloomy socially distanced farewell lunch in the office with the last few colleagues before lockdown hit. (Colleagues in the picture are from Cyprus, the USA, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Italy.)
And that was that; we were all working from home, and not allowed to see anyone outside our own households. It also coincided with the close of Hugo nominations, the only time of the five times that I have been involved that we did not use the Kansa system first developed by Eemeli Aro in 2017; it was a complete nightmare, on top of everything else.
I marked the passage of time with two videos about our village:
and with the first of what would become a long series of ten-day updates about life in plague times.
Despite the interruption to my commute, I read 26 books that month.
Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 17) The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of Scandinavia’s Utopia, by Michael Booth 1493, by Charles C. Mann Strategic Europe, ed. Jan Techau Red Notice, by Bill Browder An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith – did not finish
Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 7) Small Island, by Andrea Levy Midnight Cowboy, by James Leo Herlihy
sf (non-Who): 17 (YTD 42) The Golden Fleece, by Robert Graves Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (did not finish) The Green Man’s Foe, by Juliet E. McKenna Fleet of Knives, by Gareth A. Powell Babayaga, by Toby Barlow Atlas Alone, by Emma Newman Ragged Alice, by Gareth A. Powell The Survival of Molly Southbourne, by Tade Thompson Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire The Winged Man, by E. Mayne Hull Excession, by Iain M. Banks A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine Blake’s 7 Annual 1979 Blake’s 7 Annual 1980 The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djélì Clark Blake’s 7 Annual 1981
Doctor Who: 1 (YTD 6) Doctor Who: The Macra Terror, by Ian Stuart Black
Comics: 1 (YTD 6) Die, vol 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles
7,400 pages (YTD 20,700) 9/26 (YTD 23/78) by women (Levy, Hardinge, Hurley, McKenna, Newman, McGuire, Hull, Martine, Hans) 3/26 (YTD 8/78) by PoC (Levy, Thompson, Clark)
