Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins (and John Lydecker / Stephen Gallagher)

Posted on 2 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

I vividly remember watching Warriors’ Gate when it was first broadcast back in the cold January of 1981. I was thirteen, and knew that this was Tom Baker’s last season; but much of the actual story sailed over my head. My family were not the only fans in Northern Ireland. In Newry, a thirteen-year-old girl missed the last episode:

I slept all day. I missed Dr Who but Romana and K9 left. Daddy watched a stupid Finnish film so we played "offices" in the kitchen.
— NornIronGirl1981 (@NrnIrnGirl1981) January 24, 2017

But her younger brother caught it.

I went to confession. And I wrecked my Lego town to build something else. In Dr Who, Romana and K9 left.
— NornIronBoy1981 (@NrnIrnBoy1981) January 24, 2018

That evening I too remember watching the “stupid Finnish film”, The Year of the Hare, and unlike NornIronGirl (but like her father) I loved it. (It must have been that evening, because that seems to be the only time it was shown on British TV when I was a teenager.)

When I rewatched Warriors’ Gate in 2008, I wrote:

I was surprised that I did enjoy Warrior’s Gate. A somewhat surreal plot line, with reflections on colonialism, empire and slavery, and also Romana’s extended farewell to the Tardis (for once, decently signalled in advance, more perhaps than for any companion since Victoria). Even Adric, for once, seemed to fit in reasonably well. Definitely worth watching again.

Coming back to it three years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

Warrior’s Gate is truly weird and wonderful. The slavery of the Tharils is pretty horrifying, but we understand that there’s an element of cosmic karma in that they were once the enslavers (and Rorvik in turn gets his cosmic come-uppance at the end). For a story which is mostly filmed in a blank studio, there is an amazing sense of place about it. I still don’t completely understand the plot but I somehow feel confident that the author did, and wasn’t just making it up as he went along. K9 and Adric get reduced to mere observers here – again, it’s a strong story for Romana, but of course it is her last.

This time around, I came to it having seen the whole of Secret Army and its spinoff Kessler, in which Clifford Rose, who is the chief antagonist Rorvik here, plays the vicious SS officer in charge of Brussels. (Rose died just over a year ago in Denville Hall.) He seemed to me to be turning in a very strong performance: like Kessler, Rorvik is stuck with a mission that many would find ethically unpalatable, in an environment that he doesn’t really understand, and his reaction to new factors tends to be suspicious and violent. But it’s different as well to see him as the head of a team; Kessler tended to have the SS adjutant of the week.

I was also struck by the parallel with the other Doctor Who story mainly filmed in a blank studio, the first episode of The Mind Robber, where the production team successfully made something out of literally nothing. The same trick is pulled off here, with a few more props. You wouldn’t want to do this all the time, but it’s interesting to see it done twice.

Rereading the original novelisation in 2008, I wrote:

This is really good, the best book of this run; Romana II departing in style. Lydecker / Gallagher seems almost to be writing a standard genre sf book that the Doctor, Romana and Adric happen to have wandered into – Romana wanting to wander off on her own, of course. (And K9 gets perhaps his best characterisation in any of the novels, even if he is out of order for much of the story.) Of course, with it being the printed page rather than the screen, the story has to be told in a rather different way; but the author, whatever his name is, really rises to the challenge.

Since then I’ve read Gallagher’s early hit, Valley of Lights, and actually passed him by a couple of times in the corridors at the February 2022 Gallifrey One convention; I wish I had stopped for a chat. The book still holds up, giving a bit more meat to the bones of the show-don’t-tell TV story, especially on the background of the slavers. You can get it here.

But but but… it turns out that in 2019 the BBC released a considerably expanded audiobook of the novelisation, so much altered that it is basically a different book. Read by Jon Culshaw, with John Leeson contributing the voice of K9, it gives us a lot more background and characterisation of the slavers and the Tharils, and mixes up the plot quite substantially. Culshaw is very good at the characterisation of the voices, though I think his Rorvik is actually a bit closer to Kessler than Clifford Rose’s was.

It’s not the only or even the strongest case where the novelisation departs from the TV script, but it’s the most recent, I think, and certainly the one with the biggest broadcast-to-publication gap. It’s well worth getting to shed a new light on the intentions behind the story, and gives new depth to the narrative. You can get it here.

I still don’t completely understand every aspect of the story, but I felt I had a much better grasp of it this time around, especially thanks to the expanded novelisation.

Frank Collins’ monograph on Warriors’ Gate is one of the longer and denser works in the Black Archive series. There are eight chunky chapters, preceded by an introduction that explores the problems of assigning authorship of the story to writer Steve Gallagher, script editor Christopher Bidmead, director Paul Joyce (who becomes a major figure in the narrative) and even John Nathan-Turner and Graeme Harper.

The first chapter, ‘A Medieval Mystery Play’, looks at the appointment of Christopher Bidmead as script editor, touches on the Christopher Priest affair (which I’ve heard from the other side) and then looks at the early career of Steve Gallagher as a radio script writer.

The second chapter, ‘The Dream Time’, looks at the origin and early versions of Gallagher’s scripts, shaped also by the Christopher Priest affair, and its roots in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête and the TV mini-series Roots. It also turns out that Gallagher’s original scripts were funnier.

The second paragraph of the third chapter, ‘Aldo and Waldo’, with the quotation that it introduces, is:

Well known for his documentaries on filmmakers, actors and artists made by his company Lucida Productions, Joyce’s wider career spanned theatre, film, television drama, documentary, photography, painting and writing. In 1965, after two terms at The London School of Film Technique, he had used his final grant cheque to fund his first film The Goad, an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s short mime play Act Without Words II, which he’d seen during an experimental programme of five short plays, Expeditions One, at the Aldwych Theatre in July 1964. He saw the play as a meditation on the relentless rituals of modern life, the empty passage of time ‘from birth to death presented in the simplest of terms. (Two sacks, each containing first, a dozy human, and secondly, a spruce, athletic one, are prodded progressively across the stage by a sharp metal object on wheels, “The Goad”).’² Perhaps he saw that sense of relentlessness when he encountered the world of Rorvik and his crew in Warriors’ Gate. He also fastened onto one of Beckett’s recurring themes: rubbish. ‘Beckett’s identification of miscellaneous rubbish with the world, minds and bodies of his characters indicates its importance in his writing,’ and itwas a signifier of mortality and the modern world in many of his novels, theatre and radio plays. The tramps in his breakthrough play Waiting for Godot (1953) also inhabit a world of ‘hand-me downs, cast-offs and detritus’ where ritual and habit are bound up with change brought about by uncertainty³. Again, the rundown privateer is a tangible evocation of Beckett. Joyce’s work continued to incorporate elements of the absurd and surreal, a sensibility that he would detect in Gallagher’s scripts for Warriors’ Gate. This could perhaps be traced back to a formative moment in his childhood, when he saw a black-and-white film that was:
‘…a bit like that Laurel and Hardy one where they have difficulty getting a piano up the stairs […] only it was the delivery of a stereo or a radiogram, of enormous proportions, which was taken upstairs and delivered to a bachelor in his apartment. It was what he’d always been wanting, he plugs it in, twiddles around with it, listens to the music. Magnificent. Then he thinks it’s time for a bite and he goes to switch it off. Switches it off and the music continues. Hits the thing. And the fucking thing won’t stop. In the end, he smashes it to a pulp. How about that for a surreal situation? That gave me film and a Beckett kind of situation.’⁴
² Joyce, ‘Guinness with Godot’, unpublished essay emailed to author, 20 April 2018.
³ Bates, Julie, Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination, 1932-1987, pp6-9.
⁴ Joyce, interview with author. Our efforts to identify this film have been unsuccessful.

The third chapter looks at the career of director Paul Joyce, his work with the plays of Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett, and his first TV drama, Keep Smiling. It then goes in detail into the changes made by Bidmead and Joyce to Gallagher’s scripts, and explains how we have ended up with two very different novelisations – John Nathan-Turner having forced Gallagher to rewrite the original version (now the audiobook) to be closer to the story as broadcast for publication in 1982.

The fourth chapter, ‘Fade to Grey’, goes into as much detail as is possible given the fading of memories and lack of records about the difficulties faced by Joyce in directing the story. This was his first (and as it turned out only) multi-episode TV assignment (indeed most of his subsequent IMDB credits are documentaries). It’s clear that he was unprepared for the demanding time scales required of Doctor Who story production; it’s less clear to what extent others had to step in to help him out; it’s very clear that John Nathan-Turner never wanted to see him again.

The fifth chapter, ‘Cinematic and Videographic’, looks at the extent to which Joyce brought film productions values to Warriors’ Gate, including the costuming as well as the cinematography, and the extent to which it fitted within the New Romantic Zeitgeist.

The sixth chapter, ‘Going Against the Grain’, looks at the impact of the films Last Year in Marienbad, Dark Star, Orphée and 2001: A Space Odyssey in the cinematography of Warriors’ Gate. An interesting quote from Clifford Rose indicates that he saw Rorvik as much closer to Dad’s Army‘s Captain Mainwaring (Secret Army is not mentioned).

The seventh chapter, ‘The Impeccable Realism of Unreality’, looks more deeply at the two Cocteau films, La Belle et la Bête and Orphée, and at their impact on the plot concepts in Warriors’ Gate. (It is also noted that La Belle et la Bête experienced similar production difficulties in post-war France.)

The eighth chapter, ‘The Individual Confronted by the Desolate Universe’, looks briefly at the design of the story by David H. Smith, especially the eponymous Gate, and what it symbolises and is derived from.

A brief conclusion reflects again on the question of authorship, and applies it to New Who, especially Neil Gaiman’s Nightmare in Silver.

As I said, this is one of the longer, richer books in the Black Archive series, and will certainly help those of us who are still trying to get our heads around Warriors’ gate, forty-two years after it was first broadcast. You can get it here.

What to expect in 2023, according to science fiction

Posted on 1 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

For the last few years I’ve done a post looking at the science fiction set in each year, written twenty years or more in the past. I’m a bit late this time, but it’s still 1 January.

I wasn’t able to find a single film set in 2023 which was more than twenty years old. I did find eight novels, one video game, and two Japanese anime series (and a third set in 2023 but missing my twenty-years-before deadline as it was made in 2004). To start with the anime:

The 1988-89 series Gunbuster, known in Japan as Top o Nerae! (トップをねらえ!, “Shoot for the Top!”), concerns the adventures of young Noriko who is training to be a space pilot in Okinawa, six years after her father went missing in the first battles with the alien invaders. (You remember those battles with the alien invaders back in 2015, yeah?) There are only six episodes and I may give it a try. Here are the opening titles.

Ten years later, in 1998, the TV adaptation of the manga Silent Möbius (サイレントメビウス, Sairento Mebiusu) started with an episode set in 2023, explaining how the central character, Rally Cheyenne, recruits women with paranormal powers to Tokyo’s Attacked Mystification Police (AMP) to fight off the Lucifer Hawks from the world of Nemesis. (The original manga seems to be set in 2024.) 26 episodes altogether, and here are the opening titles.

Made a year too late for my usual count, as mentioned previously, the anime series Burn-Up Scramble is about a police woman in the secretive Warriors unit of the Tokyo police, looking for romance and finding crime action instead.

I’m also not counting the 1986 Twilight Zone episode Quarantine, in which the protagonist enters cryogenic sleep in 2023 but all the action comes after he wakes up in 2347.

The one video game set in 2023 is Perfect Dark, originally released by Nintendo in 2000 but remastered since and still on the market, about special agent Emma Dark heading off an alien-led conspiracy to Take Over The World. The trailer is visually impressive if the script is a bit cringe (“the only person man enough to handle the job … is a woman!”)

Over on Playstation, State of Emergency, released in 2002 (so just before my deadline), has a back-story where The Corporation overthrows the federal US government in 2023 and starts to oppress people; players get to take turns overthrowing it. But the action is set in 2035.

So, that leaves the eight novels. Taking them from most to least obscure, we start with one from almost exactly two hundred years ago, Revelations of the Dead-alive (later republished as London and Its Eccentricities in the Year 2023), by John Banim, published in 1824. The book is actually a satirical comedy targeting the London world of writing and art in the early 1820s, in excessive detail. But some changes have happened over the last 200 years. Kensington has become built up, while Fulham has returned to pastureland. Automatic cutlery feeds people at meals. Automated brooms sweep the pavements. Freight wagons are drawn by camels rather than by horses. And Austria and Russia go to war over the colonisation of the Moon (that is, the bits that the British didn’t get to first). You can get it here or here.

Published in 1890, Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton, is a sequel and riposte to Edward Bellamy’s famously utopian Looking Backward. In fact only the framing narrative is set in 2023, where a Chinese history professor lectures his American students about the events of three years before, when China successfully invaded a weak socialist America in 2020. You can get it here.

The great French graphic artist Enki Bilal first hit the scene in 1980 with La Foire aux immortels (The Bedlam of Immortals), the opener of his Nikopol Trilogy. The other two volumes are set two years later, but the story starts in 2023 when disgraced former astronaut Alcide Nikopol returns to Earth after thirty years in cryogenic sleep, and makes common cause with the Egyptian god Horus both to overthrow the corrupt and near-Fascist government in Paris and to repel the other Egyptian gods who have been hovering around in a pyramidal spaceship. I think that’s a fair summary. You can get it here in English and here in the original French.

The most recent of the novels is The Free Lunch by Spider Robinson, published in 2001, and set in a Disney-like theme park which is troubled by time-travelling dwarfs from the future. Our twelve-year-old hero needs to evade the surveillance systems and thuggish human enforcers of 2023, and gain the confidence of the time travellers to ensure that history goes on the right track. (I think.) You can get it here.

The Turing Option, co-written by sf author Harry Harrrison and artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, and published in 1992, starts on 8 February 2023 with the protagonist getting seriously injured in an assassination attempt. The book itself stretches into 2024 with lots of global action, but the 2023 bits are mostly about the pioneering neurosurgery techniques that get our hero back on his feet again, with lots of discussion of computer theory and rather bogus reminiscences of his Irish childhood. You can get it here.

From a little earlier, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, by Matt Ruff was published in 1997 and is another satire, channeling the sprits of Neal Stephenson’s early work and the Illuminatus! trilogy. It’s set in October and November 2023, focussed on New York. The Empire State Building was destroyed in 2006 when a Boeing 747 accidentally crashed into it, but the Twin Towers are still standing. Donald Trump died in 2013 when the spaceship in which he planned to travel to Mars blew up on the launchpad, but Queen Elizabeth II is still alive and well, and personally directing military strikes against her enemies. There’s a mutant great white shark in the sewers, and Ayn Rand resurrected as an AI personality. It doesn’t really hit the mark for me, but you can get it here.

In Killing Time (2000), mainstream novelist and historian Caleb Carr tries to write science fiction and does not really succeed. There was a global financial crisis in 2007, the USA is at war with Afghanistan because of a terrorist attack, and the whole world is recovering from the effects of a global pandemic. A shadowy group of people are undermining democratic political systems in the West by spreading false information and conspiracy theories on the Internet. Unfortunately they are the heroes, and our protagonist joins their mission, but it does not work out smoothly. You can get it here.

Finally, and on a high note, Bruce Sterling‘s Islands in the Net from 1988 has the USA and Soviet Union maintaining the peace in 2023, but with growing challenges from small states like Grenada and Luxembourg who provide data havens which undermine the position of Big Business. Everyone has wearable computers in their watches. South Africa has achieved majority rule. (In 1987, Nelson Mandela had three more years in prison ahead of him.) It’s all a bit utopian from thirty-some years on, but there’s some interesting discussions to have about why the world worked out as it did and not as Sterling imagined it. You can get it here.

I think this is the fourth or fifth roundup I’ve done of science fiction set in the year to come, and honestly, apart from Islands in the Net, this time it’s a disappointing crop. Don’t worry though; there’s some much more interesting stuff lined up for 2024.

Books set in 2023:
Revelations of the Dead-alive (aka London and Its Eccentricities in the Year 2023), by John Banim (1824)
Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton (1890)
The Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal (1980)
Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling (1988)
The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky (1992)
Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, by Matt Ruff (1997)
Killing Time, by Caleb Carr (2000)
The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson (2001)

My books of 2022, including my book of the year

Posted on 31 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I read 298 books in 2022, two more than in 2021, the fourth highest of the nineteen years that I have been keeping track, and the highest since 2011.

Page count for the year: 76,500, ninth highest of the nineteen years I have recorded, almost in the middle; there are some very short books in there.

Books by non-male writers in 2022: 109 (37%), second highest tally and fourth highest percentage of the years I have been counting.

Books by PoC in 2021: 39 (13%), second highest tally and third highest percentage since I started counting.

Most-read author this year: it’s a tie between two previous winners, Terrance Dicks and Kieron Gillen, with five each. The Dicks novelisations were all re-reads.

(previous winners: Neil Gaiman in 2021, Kieron Gillen in 2020, Brian K. Vaughan in 2019, Tove Jansson and Marcel Proust in 2018, Colin Brake and Leo in 2017, Christopher Marlowe in 2016, Justin Richards in 2015 and 2014, Agatha Christie in 2013, Jonathan Gash in 2012, Arthur Conan Doyle in 2011, Ian Rankin in 2010, William Shakespeare in 2009 and 2008, Terrance Dicks in 2007, Ian Marter in 2006, Charles Stross in 2005, Neil Gaiman and Catherine Asaro in 2004).

1) Science Fiction and Fantasy (excluding Doctor Who)

122 books (41%) – 4th highest total, 8th highest percentage.

Top SF book of the year:

I have to be a little coy here, because there are some very good Clarke nominees coming through the mix that I don’t yet feel free to discuss. Apart from that, I’m going to give a joint award to two books which were in the Hugo packet:

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, a novella that totally charmed me despite having a cute robot; you can get it here
Swordheart by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon), fantasy romance between a young widow and a warrior who is mostly embodied in a sword; you can get it here.

Honourable mentions to:

Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi, Earth abandoned by the white folks, Biblical tropes, sexuality and acceptance, rich prose; you can get it here.
Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard, Vietnamese-flavoured fantasy court politics combined with a g/g love story; you can get it here
Half Life, by Shelley Jackson, a world where there are a lot more conjoined twins; you can get it here

Welcome rereads:

The one you don’t have:

The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s, by Brian Aldiss, a talent coming to maturity; you can get it here

The one to avoid:

Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia: leaden prose, poorly edited, childish premise and plot; but you can get it here

2) Non-fiction

95 books (32%) – highest ever number, third highest percentage. I think this has been driven upwards by the excellent Black Archive series of short books about Doctor Who stories, but that’s not the only factor.

Top non-fiction book of the year:

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, by Bernardine Evaristo, the autobiography of a brilliant writer; get it here

Honourable mentions to:

Why I Write, by George Orwell, a lucid and clear set of essays; get it here
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan, asking all the right questions; get it here
The Caucasus: An Introduction by Thomas De Waal, a comprehensive and clear survey of the region from before the most recent war; get it here

The one you haven’t heard of:

A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation, by Alison Light, lovely and honest story of her relationship with a fellow historian, much older and from a very different background; you can get it here.

The one to avoid:

Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five, by Neil Gaiman, early stuff from a writer who went on to much better things; out of print.

3) Doctor Who

Fiction other than comics: 39 books (13%), 10th highest total (dead in the middle) of the last nineteen years and highest since 2017, 13th highest percentage

Including non-fiction and comics: 72 (24%), 7th highest total and 6th highest percentage, both highest since 2013

Top Doctor Who book of the year:

Marco Polo, by Dene October, my favourite of this year’s Black Archive reading; get it here

Honorable mentions to:

(More Black Archive) Hell Bent, by Alyssa Franke, gave me a new appreciation for a story that hadn’t especially grabbed me; get it here
(BBC spinoff) The Doctor – His Lives and Times, by James Goss and Steve Tribe, one of the 50th anniversary books that I only now got around to reading; get it here
(Short Stories) I Am the Master, by Peter Anghelides et al, lots of good stories about our favourite villain; get it here
(Comics) Doctormania, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson, Matheus Lopes and Marco Lesko, great fun with the Ninth Doctor, Rose and Jack; get it here
(Lethbridge Stewart) The Daughters of Earth, by Sarah Groenewegen, the Brigadier trapped in a snowstorm with aliens and feminists; get it here

The one you haven’t heard of:

Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150AD by “Alan Smithee”, (apparently Iain MacLaughlin), novelisation of the second Peter Cushing movie; get it (with three others) here.

The one to avoid:

The Dreamer’s Lament, by Benjamin Burford-Jones, a disappointing entry in the generally good Lethbridge-Stewart series; get it here

4) Comics

20 (7%), 11th highest total and 12th highest percentage, both lowest since 2015.

Top comic of the year:

Carbone & Silicium, by Mathieu Bablet, the history of the decline of humanity observed by two sympathetic robots; get it here in French and here in English.

Honourable mentions:

Snotgirl Volume 1: Green Hair Don’t Care, by Bryan Lee O’Malley and Lesley Hung, an encouraging start to a new series; get it here
Once and Future vol 3: The Parliament of Magpies and vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain, continues to delightfully and brutally subvert Arthuriana; get them here and here

The one you haven’t heard of:

Scherven, by Erik De Graaf, a story of young people in the occupied Netherlands during the second world war; get it here in Dutch.

The one to avoid:

Voorbij de grenzen van de ernst, by “Kamagurka” (Luc Zeebroek), Belgian visual humour which I mostly just didn’t grok; get it here.

5) Non-genre fiction

18 (6%); second lowest tally and lowest ever percentage of the nineteen years that I have been keeping track. Not quite sure why this is; perhaps as I work through the unread bookshelves more ruthlessly, I am getting through loads of previously unread sf, where I had already got to most of the non-genre fiction I had bought on a whim.

Top non-genre fiction of the year – joint honours to two very different books:

Mr Britling See it Through, by H.G. Wells, a famous writer and public intellectual (a merciless self-portrait) adapts to the first world war; get it here
Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman, a woman deals with her father’s death and the conservative Jewish culture in London which she left years before; get it here

Honourable mention:

The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, first in the Cazalets series, the rest of which I have now bought and must read; get it here

The one you haven’t heard of:

A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison, gripping account of a maritime accident in the North Sea; get it here

Nothing that was so awful that I would recommend avoidance.

6) Others: poetry and scripts

I read two excellent poetry collections by Northern Irish writers, Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney (get it here) and The Sun Is Open by Gail McConnell (get it here). I also read a very odd play, Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar (get it here), which was the basis for the much better film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

My Book of the Year

This year’s winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize was, for the first time, a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.

Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some imaginative playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be.

I thought it was incredible and it’s my book of the year for 2022. You can get it here.

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (get it here). However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time.
– Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)

Saturday reading and December books

Posted on 31 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Metamorphoses, by Ovid
Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
γ2
Fugue for a Darkening Island, by Christopher Priest
All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva

Last books finished
The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson
A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison
What If? by Randall Munroe
On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe
Sewer, Gas and Electric, by Matt Ruff

December 2022 books

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 97)
Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins
Zink, by David Van Reybrouck
The Romans, by Jacob Edwards
The Ahtisaari Legacy, ed. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen
What If? by Randall Munroe

Non-genre 3 (YTD 18)
A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg
A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison
On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe

SF 17 (YTD 122)
φ1
χ1 (did not finish)
Filter House, by Nisi Shawl
ψ1
Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton
ω1
Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen
α2
“Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger
The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky
The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
“The Last of the Winnebagos”, by Connie Willis
Shadows of Amber, by John Betancourt
β2
Killing Time, by Caleb Carr
The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson
Sewer, Gas and Electric, by Matt Ruff

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 34)
Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?)
Doctor Who and Warriors’ Gate, by John Lydecker
Doctor Who: The Romans, by Donald Cotton

Comics 2 (YTD 20)
Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko
The Carnival of Immortals, by Enki Bilal

7,100 pages (YTD 66,500)
9/30 (YTD 109/298) by non-male writers (Suomalainen, Unigwe, φ1, Shawl, ψ1, α2, Willis, β2, Melo)
4/30 (YTD 39/298) by a non-white writer (Unigwe, Shawl,ω1, β2)

384 books currently tagged “unread”, 11 less than last month, with more Clarke Award submissions read than received and some work done on the 2016 backlog.

Annual roundup in the next post.

Coming soon (perhaps)

Sin Eaters, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko
Rise of the Dominator, by Robert Mammone
The Fires of Pompeii, by James Moran
Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock. by Terrance Dicks
Horror of Fang Rock, by Matthew Guerrieri
Doctor Who: Battlefield, by Marc Platt
Battlefield, by Philip Purser-Hallard
God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, by Rupert Shortt
Diary of a Witchcraft Shop 2, by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness
At The Edge Of The World, by Lord Dunsany
Death Draws Five, by John J. Miller
“The Mountains of Mourning” by Lois McMaster Bujold
Alternating Current, by Jody Houser et al
The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo
Neptune – Épisode 1 by Leo
Penric’s Progress, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugrešić
Complexity: A Very Short Introduction, by John H. Holland
The World Set Free: A Fantasia of the Future, by H.G. Wells
Roadside Picnic, by Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright
Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C Clarke
Ratlines, by Stuart Neville
My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving

A final book set in 2023: Sewer, Gas & Electric, by Matt Ruff #BooksSetIn2023

Posted on 30 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

New York finally started importing its water, first by aqueduct from Westchester, and later, when the immigrant population explosion had taxed that supply to its limit, from dams in the faraway Catskill Mountains. Publie Works engineers and laborers (many of them only recently arrived from Italy) dug a tunnel from the Catskills to the Hill View Reservoir in Yonkers, then bored south through the bedrock under the Harlem River to bring the water into the city proper. The last segment of the tunnel was blasted open on January 11, 1914, and an incidental consequence of its completion was that it made possible one of the most peculiar marathons in city history: an underground hike of a hundred and twenty miles, from the Catskill Mountains to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

Originally published in 1997, this is a satire channeling the sprits of Neal Stephenson’s early work and the Illuminatus! trilogy. It’s set in October and November 2023, focussed on New York. The Empire State Building was destroyed in 2006 when a Boeing 747 accidentally crashed into it, but the Twin Towers are still standing. Donald Trump died in 2013 when the spaceship in which he planned to travel to Mars blew up on the launchpad, but Queen Elizabeth II is still alive and well, and personally directing military strikes against her enemies. There’s a mutant great white shark in the sewers, Ayn Rand resurrected as an AI personality, a 181-year-old civil war veteran, Walt Disney’s chief engineer and a billionaire and his ex-wife at the heart of the story.

So far so good. But there is a massive problem with the set-up: a recent pandemic, which turns out to have been bio-engineered, has killed all the African and African-descended people in the world, leaving the rest of us to get on with it. This fails on biology – it would really be much much easier to design a plague that only kills us genetically homogenous white folks, rather than targetting the super-diverse population of Africa and its diaspora – and on good taste – this is really not a sensitive or sensible way to address the future of racism, especially since African-Americans are then economically replaced by robots called “Electric Negroes”. Ruff has paid his dues to an extent with Lovecraft Country, but I can’t quite believe that this was thought acceptable in 1997.

I greatly enjoyed Ruff’s later Set This House in Order, which I actually rated as my top sf book of 2021, but I only finished this so that I could complete my project of reading books set in 2023. Apart from the racist plague, which is a major negative, there is not enough structure or characterisation and there are too many straw man debates with the reincarnation of Ayn Rand. But you can get it here.

July 2019 books

Posted on 29 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

July 2019 started with a personal milestone on the first day of the month, as I reached Level 40 of Pokemon Go. I have not played it since. I visited London briefly with F, my only trip abroad that month.

I foolishly voted for Jo Swinson in the Lib Dem leadership contest, and contributed to the history of Karl Marx in Brussels. The Irish Times published one of the most important things I have written about Northern Ireland:

I also wrote about the family connection with the fall of the Bastille, and was delighted to reconnect with the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra as they toured Belgium.

City of Belfast Youth Orchestra tours Belgium

On the hottest day ever recorded in Belgium, I caught up with an old friend from Ireland who I had not seen in thirty years. (Bright sun in my eyes, I think.)

On the night of the 31st, as the Hugo nominations closed, I went and threw axes with my colleagues from work.

In the real world, Ursula von der Leyen was chosen as President of the European Commission, and Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister of the UK.

I read 25 books that month.

Non-fiction: 10 (YTD 29)
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O’Driscoll
Becoming, by Michelle Obama
First Generation, by Mary Tamm
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson
1913: The World Before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma
The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent, by Tim Crook
Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story, by John Bossy
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 19)
Gigi, by Colette
The Cat, by Colette
A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 56)
The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang
Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull
The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 17)
Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green
Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell
Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale
The Showstoppers, by Jonathan Cooper

Comics 3 (YTD 15)
Plastic Man #1, by Jack Cole
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
The Story of Garth the Strong, by Stephen Dowling

6,900 pages (YTD 38,400)
9/25 (YTD 60/137) by non-male writers (Obama, Tamm, Yellowe Palma, Kingsolver, Colette x2, Kuang, Hull, Chakraborty)
4/25 (YTD 22/137) by PoC (Obama, Yellowe Palma, Kuang, Chakraborty)

Four good books here, and two that were especially disappointing. The good ones first:

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O’Driscoll – tremendously enlightening; you can get it here
A Month In The Country, by J L Carr – I saw the film long ago but loved the book; you can get it here.
The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang – brilliant start to a great series; you can get it here.
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens – great Flemish graphic novel; you can get the Dutch original here and the English translation here.

Less happy with:

For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma – grim stuff, poorly edited, but you can get it here.
The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent: The Mysterious Life and Times of Alexander Wilson, by Tim Crook – historical account of the story behind the TV mini-series Mrs Wilson, but again very poorly edited; you can get it here.

An additional book set in 2023: The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson #BooksSetIn2023

Posted on 29 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second, third and fourth paragraphs of third chapter:

And then, even more quickly, he was awake again. Wide awake, instantly aware of who and where he was, motionless in bed, reaching out with all his senses for whatever it was that had wakened him. He couldn’t identify it. But neither could he escape the conviction that something was…well, not wrong exactly, Annie was sleeping soundly beside him, so probably nothing could be seriously wrong. But something was definitely…
…different…
…happening…

I know that there are a lot of Spider Robinson fans out there, but I’m not hugely convinced on the basis of this, “Stardance” (co-written with his wife) and Variable Star (finishing a discarded Heinlein manuscript). It’s not the worst of the books that I have been reading which are set in 2023, but I’m afraid that is not saying much.

The setting is an American theme park in 2023, where our twelve-year-old protagonist decides to establish himself as a runaway from desperate circumstances. He befriends a woman who has been living undercover in the park since before he was born, and then both need to deal with the ongoing threat posed to them by park security, and also incidentally the time travellers from a doomed future who have started appearing in the park’s midst.

The future technology here is entirely to do with surveillance systems and how to evade them, and the weapons used by the various goons. It’s not very exciting, really, and misses the key point that could have been made about the political dominance of the entertainment induistry. The story offensively romanticises homelessness and disability. Too much of the plot depends on just happening to be in the right place at the right time for it to be believable even on its own terms. It’s difficult also to see who the intended audience are – the protagonist is twelve, as mentioned above, but the violence is pretty squicky for a YA book. But if you want to, you can get it here.

One more book set in 2023: Killing Time, by Caleb Carr

Posted on 28 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

On the screen in front of us was the by then deathly familiar scene of three years earlier: the podium in the hotel ballroom in Chicago; the impressive figure of President Emily Forrester striding up, wiping a few beads of sweat from her forehead and preparing to accept the nomination of her party for a second term; and, in the distance, the face, the assassin’s face that had been enlarged and made familiar to every man, woman, and child in the country since the discovery just a year ago of the private digicam images taken by some still anonymous person in the crowd. It was a face that, after only a two-month search, had been given a name: Tariq Khaldun, minor functionary in the Afghan consulate in Chicago. Justice had been swift: Khaldun, constantly and pathetically shouting his innocence, had been convicted within months and had recently begun serving a life sentence in a maximum-security facility outside Kansas City. As a result, diplomatic relations between the United States and Afghanistan, always fragile, had been strained almost to the breaking point.

Written in 2000, this novel forecasts that the year 2023 will have seen a global financial crisis in 2007, the USA at war with Afghanistan because of a terrorist attack, and the whole world recovering from the effects of a global pandemic. A shadowy group of people are undermining democratic political systems in the West by spreading false information and conspiracy theories on the Internet. Which all sounds pretty impressive in terms of foresight..

Unfortunately it’s just not a very good book. I have not read The Alienist by the same author, but I know it has been widely praised; here, the protagonist, a mild-mannered law professor and behavioral scientist, gets rescued from the Feds by the crew of an invisible airship, led by two siblings, the brother a stereotypical mad-scientist-in-a-wheelchair, the sister becoming our protagonist’s love interest. Infodump follows infodump and our hero eventually evades certain death to wander around central Africa, finishing up in 2024 where in a twist ending it turns out that time travel is possible and history can be altered. From online reviews I can see that most people don’t read that far into it. If you want to try, you can get it here.

Yet another book set in 2023: The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky #BooksSetIn2023

Posted on 27 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Snaresbrook looked relaxed, efficient. Discussing the approaching operation with the anesthesiologist and the nurses, then supervising the careful placement of the projector. “Here is where I am going to work,” she said, tapping the hologram screen. “And this is where you are going to cut.”

Another book set next year, though published in 1992, three decades ago. The first chapter is dated 8 February 2023; the first 18 are set then and later in the year, the next 25 are set in 2024 and the last two in 2026.) I’m going to focus only on the parts set in 2023 here, but I’ll make one general observation: I found the prose to be rather clunky in a number of places, much more so than Harrison at his best, and wondered if Minsky, who was a well known artificial intelligence theoretician rather than a fiction writer, had possibly had more to do with the text than the cover credits suggest.

The narrative thrust of the book is about the development of artificial intelligence in computers, but in fact for most of the first half of it, that theme takes second place to the surgical problems of restoring human brain damage with advanced biological and technological techniques. This is described in immense and frankly excessive detail, though it is interesting that we are now starting to get close to this sort of cybernetic enhancement in real life.

The wounded computer scientist is Irish, which unfortunately allows Harrison to indulge in some stereotyping – Mary Robinson had been elected in 1990 and 1992 saw the X case, so it was clear to anyone who cared to look that the life experience of an Irish person born in 1999 (as his protagonist is) would be pretty different from the de Valera years. And there’s this passage on free movement:

“I have studied the relevant data bases. The European Economic Community forms a customs union. A passport is needed to enter any member country from outside the community. After that there is no need to show it again. However, Switzerland is not a member of this group. I thought that this problem might be postponed until we reached that country’s border.”

I’m cheating a bit because that’s from one of the 2024 chapters. But in fact we’ve had passport-free travel with Switzerland since 2009; and, sadly, we no longer have it with the UK. But this is a book about technological speculation, not future geopolitics. (The word “China” does not appear even once)

I can’t honestly recommend it except as a snapshot of Minsky’s thought at a particular moment, and frankly he said and did more interesting things later in his career. But if you want to, you can get it here.

Another book set in 2023: Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton #BooksSetIn2023

Posted on 26 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“After breakfast,” writes Professor West, “Edith informed me that she had put in a requisition for a young man and a young woman from our ward-house, and that she purposed, with their assistance, to devote the first half of the day to putting my study in order. This I took as a notice to absent myself until dinner time; and accordingly having seen that my more important papers were securely locked up, where they could not be disarranged, I wended my way to the college buildings. I found my lecture-room all newly-swept, and smelling somewhat of fresh paint and varnish, so after chatting a little while with such of the other professors as happened to be in the building, I went to the library and spent the rest of the morning there.[“]

I’m going to round out the year with a series of reviews of books set in 2023, though this only barely qualifies: the framing narrative is of a lecture series given in 2023 by Won Lung Li, a Chinese professor of recent history at an American university, but in fact almost all of the story takes place in 2020. Published in 1890, it is a direct riposte to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Because America (and also incidentally France) have adopted cuddly utopian principles, the Chinese are basically able to walk in and take control with very little resistance. Julian West, the protagonist of Looking Backward, is the only person in America who knows about fighting wars, but he is doomed and his surviving papers supply Won Lung with lecturing material. There are some good bits with West and his family escaping occupied Boston on a railway handcart in the middle of the night, but otherwise it’s not a very good book; the Yellow Peril trope is out in full force, combined with Awful Warnings about the Dangers of Socialism. Mercifully short at least. You can get it here.

My top social media and blog posts of the year

Posted on 26 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Both Twitter and Facebook have made it much more difficult to extract the data about how successful my own posts of my own material have been. A bit of manual number-crunching leads me to the conclusion that my top post on Facebook for the year, with the most likes and the most comments, was my birthday celebration at work (in fact, three days after my actual birthday).

The second highest number of likes was on a photo with my half-first-cousin-twice-removed:

And the third highest number of likes was on a virtue-signalling post about getting vaccinated.

The second highest number of comments was on a post about trans people in sports, which unfortunately turned very nasty; I was disappointed in a number of people who contributed to it, and won’t link from here.

The third highest number of comments was on a post commemorating another calendar milestone, when I turned 20,000 days old.

In previous years I was able to state for certain what Facebook posts of mine had been shared most. This year I note that the following were shared three times, but I am not sure if that was the most. One is about my family connection with the death of Rasputin, one about rescuing your data from Twitter.

And as for Twitter; well. I used to be able to extract all kinds of information about what sort of content had worked well. But they have now restricted that data to posts published in the last ten months, which is not much use if you want to do a twelve month retrospective. At least we can still check engagements and impressions from the Twitter Analytics page, from which it is clear that my top tweets in general were during and after the May 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly elections. The tweet with the most impressions was this:

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1522630242308956161

And the tweet with the most engagements – people disputing whether particular groups or individuals could be counted as Nationalists or Unionists – was this:

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1522654308646412288

I remain an occasional visitor to Instagram. As with Facebook, my top post of the year related to my birthday.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux)

And as with Twitter, my second most successful post was related to the Assembly elections, a week later.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux)

My third best post by likes was the same COVID-related virtue signalling that did well on Facebook:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux)

The Instagram video with most plays was a little bit of art for Ascension Day brought home from school by U, here put into action by her mother:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux)

LinkedIn is getting better at showing how successful your posts are. You can easily see how many impressions and likes you have received. My top post by impressions was a job advertisement (which gives you an idea of how the algorithm works):

My top post (again by impressions) with content by me was a Guardian piece that quoted me:

And my top post by likes was a piece on this month’s elections in Tunisia – in which I totally failed to foresee the main headline, that the turnout was so pathetically low as to cast the credibility of the whole process into question.

One of the many advantages of having moved this blog from Livejournal to WordPress is that I now have much more satisfactory statistics for user engagement. So the three top posts on here since I moved in March are, in third place:

My daughter and the king

In second place (now updated with the actual results):

Northern Ireland Assembly elections 2022: a preview

And in first place, by a long long way:

Irish surname maps

See you next year!

Saturday reading

Posted on 24 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Last regular update of the year – next week will be a bumper review of the books of 2022.

Current
What If? by Randall Munroe
Metamorphoses, by Ovid, tr. Stephanie McCarter
Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
γ2
A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison

Last books finished
Zink, by David Van Reybrouck
The Romans, by Jacob Edwards
“Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger
The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky
The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
“The Last of the Winnebagos”, by Connie Willis
Shadows of Amber, by John Betancourt
β2
The Ahtisaari Legacy, ed. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen
Killing Time, by Caleb Carr
Doctor Who and Warrior’s Gate (expanded audiobook edition) by Steve Gallagher and John Lydecker

Next books
Fugue for a Darkening Island, by Christopher Priest
All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva

June 2019 books

Posted on 24 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I started the month with a historic walk around Leuven, including a visit to the replica Kangxi-Verbiest celestial sphere.

The following weekend I was in Bratislava, and went to see the ballet with H and her friend A.

More travel the following weekend, in Rome with Anne, where a diplomat friend took us to the back garden of the Vatican.

The day after we got back was B’s 22nd birthday.

In the last weekend of the month we visited my cousins in Luxembourg again – left to right, L, my son F, little N, big N (me), S and my first cousin J. Our spouses were also present!

With so much European travel, I managed to read 35 books that month. Some of them were short.

Non-fiction: 1 (YTD 19)
Robert Holmes: a Life in Words, by Richard Molesworth

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 16)
Five Women Who Loved Love, by Ihara Saikaku
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
In Another Light, by Andrew Greig

sf (non-Who): 16 (YTD 51)
Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach, by Kelly Robson
Sovereign by R.M. Meluch
The Belles, by Dhonielle Clayton
Binti: The Night Masquerade, by Nnedi Okorafor
Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis
Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells
Beneath the Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire
The Weapon Makers, by A.E. van Vogt
Earth’s Last Citadel, by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner
The Black God’s Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark
The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, by Mary Norton
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, by H.P. Lovecraft
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 13)
The Secret Lives of Monsters, by Justin Richards
Filthy Lucre, by James Parsons and Andrew Sterling-Brown
Moon Blink, by Sadie Miller

Comics 6 (YTD 12)
Will Supervillains Be On The Final?, by Naomi Novik, art by Yishan Li
Monstress, Volume 3: Haven, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
Black Panther: Long Live the King, written by Nnedi Okorafor and Aaron Covington, art by André Lima Araújo, Mario Del Pennino and Tana Ford
Abbott, written by Saladin Ahmed, art by Sami Kivelä, colours by Jason Wordie, letters by Jim Campbell
Paper Girls, Volume 4, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible, by Stan Lee, Peter David and Colleen Doran

6,300 pages (YTD 31,500)
15/29 (YTD 51/112) by non-male writers (Waters, Robson, Meluch, Clayton, Okorafor x2, Wells, McGuire, Moore, de Bodard, Norton, Miller, Novik/Li, Liu/Takeda, Doran)
10/29 (YTD 18/112) by PoC (Saikaku, Clayton, Okorafor x2, Clark, de Bodard, Novik/Li, Liu/Takeda, Ahmed, Chiang)

A lot of good books this month; along with several welcome re-reads, the two best new ones were The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard, which you can get here, and The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters, which you can get here. I know that (different) people love them, but I bounced hard off both Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells, which you can get here, and The Weapon Makers, by A.E. van Vogt, which you can get here.

Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?)

Posted on 23 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“The Myriapod Mutiny”, by Emma Norry):

When the Great Freeze descended, they buried themselves deeper still and made a pact – to ensure, above all else, their mutual survival. Come what may. Yet neither foresaw the Great Collision which obliterated not only their planet, but their plans for survival too …

An anthology of eleven short stories about Doctor Who characters before their first appearances on TV Doctor Who. No editor’s name is given, but I am assuming it was Dave Rudden because three of the stories are by him (featuring Kate Stewart, Vastra and Jenny, and the Master/Missy); whoever did edit it, it is a shame that they are not given credit.

Two of the other stories are by the actors who actually played the respective companions on screen – Sophie Aldred (Ace) and Katy Manning (Jo Grant), both rather interesting takes on their own characters’ back-stories, Sophie Aldred’s being a good start to the collection as a whole (and available here).

Five of the other six are by women of colour who haven’t previously written for the Whoniverse but have strong writing credentials elsewhere – oh, OK, I’ll name them: Emma Norry (Yaz and Ryan meet the Second Doctor); Temi Oh (Davros); Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé (Martha Jones meets the Ninth Doctor); Nikita Gill (Amy and Rory as kids); and Jasbinder Bilan (Clara pre-meets the Eleventh Doctor). The other is by Mark Griffiths (Sarah Jane Smith meeting the Fourth Doctor as a schoolgirl). One of them is not very good, but the rest are all excellent, and I can recommend this to anyone with a vague awareness of the series. You can get it here.

A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg

Posted on 22 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“Never in Real Life” / “Aldrig i verkligheten”, by Åke Edwardson):

Hon läste kartan. Hon var faktiskt bra på det. De kom längre och längre bort från civilisationen men hon missade inte en avtagsväg.

She read the map. She was actually good at it. They drove farther and farther away from civilization, but she never missed a turn.

I got this in advance of Worldcon 75 because John-Henri Holmberg was one of the guests of honour in Helsinki. I know him vaguely because we have ended up on panels together at all three European Worldcons this century, but this was my chance to get into his work. Which I then failed to do in advance of the convention – who knew that running the Hugo Awards takes up quite a lot of one’s spare time???

It’s an anthology of seventeen short stories by Swedish writers, all of them about crime and detection rather than sf or fantasy. Authors include a couple I had heard of, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and lots more whose names were new to me. Good gender balance. Almost all the stories are set in Sweden, which has been on my mind recently because it is about to assume the EU presidency.

Brief parenthesis: I’ve been to Sweden precisely four times in my life, three of them with my sister. We passed through Stockholm by train in 1990 to and from a visit to Finland, and then I happened to coincide with her when I attended a conference there in April 2006. A year before that, in May 2005, I attended a NATO conference in the skiing resort of Åre, without my sister but with several foreign ministers, and panelled with the stars.

Left to right:
James Elles, MEP
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, foreign minister of Croatia and later President of Croatia
Pierre Lellouche, member of the French National Assembly, later trade minister and EU minister
Dimitrij Rupel, foreign minister of Slovenia
Nicholas Burns, then Under Secretary for Political Affairs in the US State Department, now US ambassador to China
Kastriot Islami, foreign minister of Albania
me

Going back to the anthology, the weakest story is unfortunately the one by Stieg Larsson, later famous for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, but he was only 17 when he wrote it (and would probably have blocked its publication if he had still been alive). But the rest are generally good, some very good. At short length you can’t fit in a lot of detection, so more often than not the stories are from the perpetrator’s point of view, but with some interesting twists. The cold revenge of the protagonist of Inger Frimansson’s “In Our Darkened House” will linger with me. A good read. You can get it here.

Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko

Posted on 21 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame from third issue of title story:

Next in the sequence of Ninth Doctor graphic novels from Titan Books. There are two stories here; the titular “Official Secrets”, which brings Nine, Rose and Jack into the middle of a UNIT investigation led by a curiously un-aged Harry Sullivan with support from Benton, and the more interesting if less fan-servicey “Slaver’s Song” then brings Team TARDIS, augmented by new UNIT character Tara Mishra, to Brazil in 1682 where there are ancient mermaid-like monsters and hints of Jack’s secret past as a Catholic priest. I especially like artist Adriana Melo’s characterisation of Tara, ad wonder who the model was.

You can get it here.

Song of Time, by Iain R. MacLeod

Posted on 20 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Does it represent a failure of will that I’ve brought him here? Certainly, it would be nice, to leave a little mystery, and possibly even a small scandal, behind me. Famous violinist found dead with anonymous male—as if people still cared about such things. I should report him now—alert the waymarks. Perhaps he’s dangerous. He could be a compendium of every worst fear, the bearer of some deadly new virus far worse than the antique plagues which afflicted my childhood, or the human bomb, the patient torturer, the rapist, the robber, the hostage-taker, the madman. But he looks so vulnerable—so deliciously helpless…

This is the next book in my sequence of winners of the Tiptree/Otherwise, BSFA and Clarke Awards; I’m going back to blogging the award winners individually for two reasons – I think the all-in-one posts were too long, and my memory of the books was fading after reading them.

The only other book I’ve read by this author is his best known work, The Light Ages, which I felt ambivalent about. But I really enjoyed this, and it has incentivised me to look out for his other books. It’s a story in two timelines: the very near future collapse of western civilisation due to plague and unrest, and the slightly further future timeline putting it all back together again. The narrator is a world-famous violinist from Birmingham with Irish and Indian heritage; her marriage to a world-famous conductor reflects the integration and disintegration of their world, as she retells the story years later to a mysterious visitor to her Cornwall cottage. Really good, and you can get it here.

Song of Time won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2009, beating Anathem by Neal Stephenson, House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper, Martin Martin’s on the Other Side by Mark Wernham and The Quiet War by Paul McAuley. I’ve only read one of those, and I prefer Song of Time. It also won the “other” Campbell Award, jointly with Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, again beating Anathem.

The Hugo that year went to The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, the Nebula to Powers by Ursula Le Guin, the BSFA Award to The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, and the Tiptree Award went jointly to Filter House by Nisi Shawl and The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. Filter House is up next.

Also set in 2023: The Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal

Posted on 19 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third chapter, in original French and in English translation by Edward Gauvin:

Another of the science fiction books set in 2023, this is the best known work of the French comics writer and artist Enki Bilal, born in Belgrade to Czech and Bosnian parents. It’s the first volume of a trilogy, the other two parts being set in 2025 (so I’ll get to them two years from now).

Published as La Foire aux immortels in 1980, this is set in a near-future Paris which is basically independent, France having collapsed as a state, and run by the fascist mayor Choublanc (Bunglieri in my translation) who is now facing re-election. The suburbs are decaying and run by local gangs. Everyone reads their own preferred news bulletins and information is therefore politically fragmented – an accurate anticipation in some ways.

Less accurately (probably – but who knows?), a giant floating pyramid inhabited by the gods of ancient Egypt has materialised over central Paris, and won’t go away unless supplied with fuel. Meanwhile Alcide Nikopol, a former astronaut who has spent thirty years frozen in suspended animation in orbit, returns to the city. His leg breaks off but is repaired in a rush job by the Horus, who allies with him against his fellow deities to shake up the politics of Paris in 2023.

It’s political and passionate, and fits in with the other lefty French-language 1980s comics which I read a few years back, Les Chroniques du Fin du Siècle by Santi-Bucquoy (Autonomes, Mourir à Creys-Malville, Chooz). It’s less ideological, but similar in the sense of the corruption and decay of the ruling classes, and the need for revolutionary action to bring about a better state of affairs. And the art is riveting.

Though also worth noting that the ice hockey team from Bratislava all speak Russian and their uniforms carry the initials ЧССР – not only did Czechoslovakia stay together in this version of 2023, it was also apparently annexed by the Soviet Union, which is still going strong. Bilal’s mother was Czech, so he knows perfectly well that Russian is not spoken much in Bratislava, nor is the Cyrillic alphabet used much there. (There would have been more of it in 1980 than now, but that’s not saying a lot.)

You can get the English translation of the trilogy by Edward Gauvin here, and the French original here.

May 2019 books

Posted on 18 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I started the month with a visit to Ireland for the Northern Irish local council elections…

…visiting my 102-year-old great-aunt…

…and more planning for the Dublin Worldcon.

To England again for our old friend K’s wedding to another K:

I voted in the European and national elections:

And then it was back to Northern Ireland for coverage of the European election count in Magherafelt. (Here with partner in crime Mark Devenport and former Justice Minister and Alliance leader David Ford, who kindly brought us both tea.)

I was very pleased with this picture of the three newly elected MEPs. I had already taken one with them all looking in different directions, but then Martina Anderson (in the middle) called out my name and Diane Dodds (left) and Naomi Long (right) both turned to look at me – funny thing really as I do not know Martina as well as I know the other two.

Anne and I finished a busy month with an Ascension Thursday trip to Utrecht. Here, Anne is a human sundial.

I read 25 books that month.

Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 18)
Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, by Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon
The TARDIS Handbook, by Steve Tribe
The Big Finish Companion, vol. 2, by Kenny Smith
Bland Ambition, by Steve Tally

Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 13)
A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry
Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy
The Bridge on the River Kwai, by Pierre Boulle

sf (non-Who): 13 (YTD 35)
The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black
Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Infomocracy, by Malka Older
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M Banks
The Invasion, by Peadar O Guilin
Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers
Rosemary and Rue, by Seanan McGuire
Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente
Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, ed. Kevin J. Anderson
Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber, Jr
Gather, Darkness!, by Fritz Leiber, Jr

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 10)
The Good Doctor, by Juno Dawson
The Slender-fingered Cats of Bubastis, by Xanna Eve Chown
Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2019, by Paul Lang

Comics 1 (YTD 6)
Animate Europe Plus, by David Shaw, Marta Okrasko, Juliana Penkova, Bruno Cordoba and Paul Rietzl

7,500 pages (YTD 25,200)
13/25 (YTD 36/83) by non-male writers (Le Guin, Perry, Black, Wynne Jones, Kowal, Older, Chambers, McGuire, Valente, Roanhorse, Dawson, Chown, Okrasko/Penkova)
1/25 (YTD 8/83) by PoC (Roanhorse)

I liked most Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, which you can get here, and Record of a Spaceborn Few, which you can get here. I was hugely disappointed with the 2019 Doctor Who annual, but you can get it here.

Saturday reading

Posted on 17 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness

Last books finished
Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton
Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?)
ω1
Doctor Who and Warriors’ Gate, by John Lydecker
Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins
Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen
α2
Doctor Who: The Romans, by Donald Cotton

Next books
Zink, by David Van Reybrouck
“Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger

The Martian, and more recent Hugo and Bradbury Award winning films, with a full table of winners

Posted on 17 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Martian won both the Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, in 2016, but not the Bradbury Award which went to Mad Max: Fury Road. It was way ahead at the nominations stage, and comfortably ahead on the final ballot, with Mad Max: Fury Road in second place, Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens third, Ex Machina fourth and The Avengers: Age of Ultron fifth in both final ballot order and nominations. This was the last year that there were only five finalists in each Hugo category.

This is one of the most star-heavy Hugo winners that is not based on The Lord of the Rings. All of the returning actors are men. Matt Damon, in the lead, was Colin, the organised crime mole within the police in The Departed, ten years before.

Jeff Daniels, here NASA chief Ted Sanders, was Debra Winger’s husband Flap Horton thirty-two years ago in Terms of Endearment.

Michael Peña, astronaut Rick Martinez here, was in back-to-back Oscar winners a decade before, as Daniel the locksmith in Crash (almost the only interesting character in the film) and was also (with more hair) Omar in Million Dollar Baby.

Sean Bean, Mitch Henderson here, was of course Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Chiwetel Ojiafor, here Vincent Kapoor, was the protagonist in 12 Years a Slave and the antagonist in Serenity.

Farther down the credits, Enzo Cilenti, Mike Watkins here, is barely visible in Guardians of the Galaxy as a guard. Gruffudd Glynn, Jack here, had a small part in the Doctor Who episode The Woman Who Lived. Brian Caspe, the timer controller here, had a small part in Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror. I can’t be bothered to get photographs, I’m afraid.

I went to see this in the cinema with F when it came out, and wrote then:

F and I went to see The Martian last night. I had read the book for the Clarke Award, and enjoyed it very much (though obviously not quite as much as the ones we shortlisted); it was by far the most widely owned of all the books submitted on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. The film did what I hoped it would do, and included almost all of the set piece scenes from the book, making them at least as good as they had been in my head. I’m not going to claim that it’s Great Art, but I do think it’s Hugo-worthy and I expect it will be on my list for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) – the only other film I’ve seen in the cinema this year was The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which came out in 2014 and so would have been eligible for this year’s Hugos (but didn’t even make the top 15).

I enjoyed it on rewatching as well – the effects are fantastic and it is very well paced, but was a struck by a couple of negatives. First off, the acting isn’t all that brilliant actually. Jeff Daniels in particular, as the director of NASA, seems to have only one expression on his face.

Second, it’s another case of ethnic erasure I’m afraid. Chiwetel Ojiafor’s character, Vincent Kapoor, is clearly Asian (Venkat Kapoor) in the book, as is Mackenzie Davis’s character, Mindy Park. Another Asian actor playing one of the NASA controllers had all of her speaking scenes cut out in editing. Ridley Scott is entitled to make his own editing decisions, but the rest of us are also entitled to point out when several of them go in the same direction.

I still enjoyed it enough to put it in the top of half of my table of Hugo, Nebula and Bradbury winners, ahead of Stardust but behind The Truman Show.

As previously mentioned, I’m going to draw a close to this sequence of film reviews now. The subsequent winners are:

2017 Hugo and Bradbury: Arrival. It was convincingly ahead of the field in both Hugo nominations and the final ballot, and I certainly voted for it myself (I was also the Hugo administrator that year). I’m putting it in my top ten, below Terminator 2: Judgement Day but above Galaxy Quest.

2018 Bradbury: Get Out. I wrote of it:

I thought Get Out was brilliant – taking an old sf trope, injecting it with the dynamic of the current debate about race, and Josh Lyman from The West Wing as a genial but completely mad scientist. Daniel Kaluuya is particularly good as the protagonist. Maybe a bit too close to the horror side of the genre for my personal taste.

I still ranked it only half way down my Hugo ballot that year, and I’m doing the same with my overall rankings.

2018 Hugo: Wonder Woman. I saw it in the cinema, and wrote:

I went to see Wonder Woman last weekend in my local cinema. I haven’t been following the DC movies recently — the last I saw was The Dark Knight Rises five years ago — and went into it pretty unspoiled with no expectations. I really enjoyed it, and heartily recommend it to everyone.

Spoiler alert!

I had no idea that the film is largely set during the closing weeks of the first world war, in November 1918, with almost all of the second half set in a fictionalised Belgium. Although we Belgians have contributed greatly to the comics tradition, we’re not used to seeing our country in superhero movies.

The fictional Belgian village of Veld, typically for Flanders of the time, has shop signs in French but the villagers mainly speak Flemish to each other — and a frisson went around the movie hall as Wonder Woman spoke to them in their own language. Later in the film, the audience went very quiet at one point.

The resonances were pretty strong. The cinema I was sitting in (which committed a major faux pas on the film’s opening night) was built on the site of buildings destroyed during the invasion of August 1914, close to the monument to the 272 civilians in our town killed during that terrible month. The movie’s interrogation of the rationale for war hit very close to home.

And although it is (rightly) being noted that the portrayal of chemical weapons in Wonder Woman has an eerie similarity to what is happening in Syria right now, it remains the case that the Belgian military Service for the Removal and Destruction of Explosive material — which is based in the woods in our home village — is still finding 150-200 tons of first world war munitions every year, 5-10% of which is toxic, with no sign of that abating.

I’m glad to say that the century-old chemical weapons don’t come near our local headquarters, but are kept in Poelkapelle, 150 km west of here. They are currently working through a significant backlog with their new disposal chamber, which started working only last April after the previous one got blown up in 2012.

Coming from where I do, I’m used to writers taking my own cultural heritage and mangling it horribly. I think Wonder Woman very successfully avoided this trap as far as Belgium goes (though the castle where the military gala ball takes place appears to be in a very un-Belgian landscape). (And I did wonder about Themiscyra apparently being within a day or so of both Turkey and London.)

It’s fundamentally a funny, witty action film with a light approach to actual history; but it does the serious bits very well. As I said, strongly recommended.

On reflection, I was giving it a lot of bonus points for being set in Belgium, and I think I’d actually rank it below Get Out today, but still near the middle of the table.

2019: Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (both Hugo and Bradbury). I was the Hugo administrator again this year, so did not write this up at the time. I enjoyed it a lot, and it (just) gets into the top half of the table of winners. This was the most recent film to win the Bradbury Award – it went to TV episodes in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

2020: The Hugo went to a TV series and the Bradbury Award to and episode of the same TV series, so no entry in the list. (I was deputy Hugo administrator that year.)

2021: The Old Guard (Hugo). I was involved with the process throughout the nominations stage, but left shortly after votes on the final ballot started coming in, and wrote:

Charlize Theron and her co-stars are very cute immortal fighters in today’s world, and do a lot of biffing, for no reason that I could really detect.

I found this film incomprehensible, and am ranking it right at the end of the table, ahead of only The Sixth Sense and some of the sillier Retro Hugo winners.

2022: Dune (Hugo). I was deputy Hugo administrator again this year, and Dune was an early favourite. I went to see it when it came out, and wrote:

Well, well, well – I had not realised that Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune is not yet out in the UK or America. My British and American (and I guess also Irish) friends, you have a treat in store.

F and I went to see it yesterday in the IMAX near the Heysel stadium. I think in retrospect I’d have gone for the 3-D experience rather than the IMAX; it is such a huge film that one rather gets lost in the perspective.

You have surely read the book, so the only important thing to say about the plot is that we get only halfway – although the film is being advertised as Dune, tout court, it’s actually only the first half, up to the point where Paul and Jessica are adopted by the Fremen. So assuming that the opening night in the US in October is successful (and I think it will be), there’ll be a part 2 next year, or in 2023.

What to say: it looks fantastic. Sets, effects, planets, big buildings, big bangs, ornithopters you can almost believe in, and of course the sandworms. (F wondered if the film-makers had drawn inspiration from SpongeBob’s Alaskan bull worm; it’s pretty clear that SpongeBob in this instance was inspired by Frank Herbert.) Here’s the trailer which gives you some idea (though you really have to see it on the big screen).

So, other things to comment on. The casting is good. I want to particularly note Rebecca Ferguson, who despite her name is Swedish, as Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother. She is less hard-edged than the character in the book, but I think deeper for it. Charlotte Rampling basically just gets one scene as the Reverend Mother, but steals it completely. Javier Bardem is Stilgar, leader of the indigenous Fremen, and is superb – the first scene where he brings the “gift of water” sets the tone. (I helped him with an event in the European Parliament in 2012 – see here at 0:37.) Jason Momoa is great as Duncan Idaho. Slightly less convinced by Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck. The nobles – Oscar Isaac as the Duke, Stellan Skarsgård as the Baron – are fine. Sharon Duncan-Brewster, who I last saw as Daniel’s friend and Edith’s girlfriend Fran in Russsell T. Davies’ Years and Years (which I don’t seem to have written up), plays a genderflipped Liet Kynes. The two young leads, Timothée Chalamet as Paul and Zendaya as Chani, are good to look at and manage to carry off the freighting of youth combined with destiny very well. There is justifiable commentary that although the Fremen are ethnically diverse, none of them are actually played by actors whose ethnicity comes from the desert.

But the casting is secondary just to the staging and cinematography. All the key moments are there; some of them look as good as I had hoped, most of them look far better than I’d hoped. The music is just right too, though I was a little sorry that the Pink Floyd from one of the trailers didn’t make it to the big screen:

So, it will get one of my Hugo nominations for next year. I think I may still vote for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings ahead of it, though.

I still think it’s pretty good, and am putting it also in my top ten, just behind Arrival.

So, here is my definitive list of the films that have won the Hugo, Nebula and Ray Bradbury Awards, in reverse order, starting with the bottom half of the table:

64) The Canterville Ghost (Retro Short, 1945)	48) The Princess Bride (1987)
63) Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Retro Short, 1944)	47) 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
62) Curse of the Cat People (Retro Short, 1945)	46) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1990)
61) The Sixth Sense (Nebula, 1999)	45) Fantasia (Retro Long Form, 1941)
60) Heaven Can Wait (Retro Long, 1944)	44) Return of the Jedi (1982)
59) The Incredible Shrinking Man (Outstanding Movie, 1958)	43) Edward Scissorhands (1990)
58) The Old Guard (2021)	42) Bambi (Retro, 1943)
57) A Boy and His Dog (1976)	41) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
56) Pinocchio (Retro Short Form, 1941)	40) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
55) Destination Moon (Retro, 1951)	39) WALL-E (2009)
54) Slaughterhouse-Five (1973)	38) Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
53) The War of the Worlds (Retro, 1954)	37) Howl’s Moving Castle (Nebula 2006)
52) Sleeper (Hugo/Nebula 1974)	36) Moon (2010)
51) The Incredibles (Hugo 2004)	35) Young Frankenstein (Hugo/Nebula 1975)
50) The Avengers (2013)	34) Soylent Green (Nebula 1973)
49) Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)	33) The Picture of Dorian Gray (Retro, 1946)

And the top half:

32) The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	16) Superman (1978)
31) Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (2018)	15) Inception (2011)
30) District 9 (Bradbury 2010)	14) Contact (1997)
29) Wonder Woman (Hugo 2018)	13) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Hugo/Nebula 2001)
28) Serenity (Hugo/Nebula 2005)	12) Beasts of the Southern Wild (Bradbury 2012)
27) Stardust (2008)	11) Galaxy Quest (Hugo/Nebula 2000)
26) The Martian (2015)	10) Dune (2022)
25) The Truman Show (1998)	9) Arrival (2017)
24) Get Out (Bradbury 2018)	8) Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
23) Gravity (2014)	7) Blade Runner (1983)
22) Aliens (1986)	6) Back to the Future (1985)
21) Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)	5) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
20) Dr Strangelove (1965)	4) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
19) Jurassic Park (1993)	3) Star Wars (Hugo/Nebula 1978/77)
18) Pan’s Labyrinth (2007)	2) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
17) A Clockwork Orange (1972)	1) Alien (1979)

The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell

Posted on 16 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

That day she also took Communion in the Nine Lives old people’s home, and attended the rehearsal for the crib service. This involved the junior school and nursery children, so Lizzie had to put on an especially big smile when she saw Jamie Dunning in the audience. She was even called upon, as she ran the children through their parts, to put a doll in the manger. It turned out to be relatively easy not to think about what would happen the next time Jamie was in this building. There was, since Arthur had said those words to her in a different voice while Autumn was away, now something in her head to let her deal with all that. She wasn’t compelled to hurt her hands, and that was a great relief. She could barely hear that small part of herself that was still free, screaming inside a distant room in her head. The actual crib service, since it was scheduled after the wedding on Christmas Eve, would of course never come to pass. But there was no point in letting the cat out of the bag about that.

I voted for the first of this series for the BSFA Awards, and bought the next three at Gallifrey One in 2020 just before the pandemic. I really enjoyed this as well – the village of Lychford becomes the focus of dark forces seeking to destroy the world through a small local child, and the Witches of the first story need to prevent it. Humanely told, as usual with Cornell. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Penric’s Progress, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Locating the planets, December 2022

Posted on 15 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I hope you can see a small point of light high in the sky here? It is the planet Jupiter, taken from Het Torenvalk, our local nature lookout point, at 5pm this afternoon, half an hour after sunset.

This month is a great opportunity to see all five of the classical planets in the early evening. Jupiter is bright and high a bit east of south; Mars also bright, red and glowering in the east. Saturn is a bit dimmer, but still brighter than most other things in the sky, a bit west of Jupiter.

For Venus and especially Mercury, you’ll have to be lucky with clear horizons and clear skies in the 30-60 minutes after sunset, in the southwest. This evening both had dipped below the treeline at Het Torenvalk by the time it was dark enough for either to be visible. But as the month wears on they will become less difficult to find. On Christmas Eve, 24 December, the crescent moon will be very close to both of them – so if that is a clear evening where you are, pop outside a bit after sunset and have a look.

(Also NB despite summer brightness there will be a better view in the Southern Hemisphere as the planets are at a better angle to the horizon.)

(Also a good astronomy app will help. I’ve been using the free versions of SkyView, Night Sky and Sky Guide, but there may well be better options out there.)

The Road To Kosovo: A Balkan Diary, by Greg Campbell

Posted on 14 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He was right to warn me: beyond Zagreb the autobahn fed right into the type of road I was doomed to travel for the remainder of the journey: a narrow ribbon of crumbling asphalt that was barely wide enough for two cars abreast, much less the dense traffic of cargo trucks that are constructed more of lumber than of steel, buses that look like something that was just pried off the Titanic, and horse-drawn wagons carrying four-story haystacks. Of course, there are other obstacles, such as steep mountains, shoulders seeded with PMA-2 antipersonnel land mines, random police checkpoints that always seem to be located at the end of a patch of road-top gravel on a blind curve, sudden narrow business districts springing from the hillsides as if from a children’s pop-up book, and a motley collection of pedestrians in various stages of fatigue-induced dementia staggering in the roadway … usually leading a herd of goats and hens and carrying a stack of 2-by~4s. All this is navigated at breakneck speeds and a thorough disregard for safety and curves.

Returning to the Balkans, I had a good read of this book by a Colorado journalist, sent to the Balkans by the Boulder Weekly and immediately immersed in a conflict that he struggled to understand. Of course, he is writing for the well-meaning Colorado reader who wants to be thrilled and informed, and not for me; I found the breathlessness a bit exasperating at times. (Though I did cheer on the couple of occasions when people who I know personally appeared on the page.)

I’ve read a lot of Balkan war stories over the years, and this one stands out for two paradoxical reasons. First, Campbell totally absorbs and regurgitates the collective narrative of the Balkan press corps at any given time – so he accurately reflects the media consensus without especially critiquing it. But second, he has a good eye for human detail, even if he doesn’t always put two and two together. His chapters on Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 are particularly good on incidental observation. So I was duly entertained by it, if not always in the way the author had intended.

You can get it here.

The overnights meme, updated

Posted on 14 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Since 2005 I’ve been keeping a tally of the number of different places I have spent a night away from home in the course of the calendar year, and more recently also tallying the number of countries that I set foot in whether or not I stayed overnight. I have no further travel planned for 2022, so it’s going to end with a relatively modest total of 14 places in 10 countries, the second lowest of any non-pandemic year. Places (well, just the one place this year) where I spent multiple non-consecutive nights are marked with an asterisk. Edited to add: and in fact I did have one more trip to Amsterdam, so that’s 15 places.

Los Angeles, CA
Snohomish, WA
*London, UK
Geneva, Switzerland
Podgorica, Montenegro
Berlin, Germany
Sofia, Bulgaria
Otterlo, Netherlands
Loughbrickland, UK
Belgrade, Serbia
Natick, MA
Chicago, IL
Cambridge, UK
Trier, Germany
Edited to add: Amsterdam, Netherlands

I also changed planes in Canada and Austria and visited both France and Luxembourg without staying overnight, so, not counting Belgium, my country tally for the year is also 14, the third lowest of the thirteen years I have been counting. I expect that next year will be a little higher, as travel returns to normal post-COVID and assuming that work keeps me as busy as in previous years.

Year	Overnights	Countries
2022	14 15	14
2021	7	5
2020	8	11
2019	23	14
2018	23	20
2017	20	15
2016	29	23
2015	28	21
2014	15	15
2013	17	11
2012	16	14
2011	11
2010	25
2009	14
2008	17	16
2007	24	17
2006	25
2005	21

The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray

Posted on 13 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story (“A Religious Experience”, by Tim Quinn and John Ridgeway):

I had bought this in hard copy ages ago, and had not appreciated that the title story, a Twelfth Doctor / Bill Potts adventure, is a direct follow-on from the previous Twelfth Doctor volume, The Phantom Piper, which I have not read yet. The arc also depends quite heavily on continuity from earlier stories in Doctor Who magazine, most of which I had read but long ago.

But I got over it and very much enjoyed the title story and the collection as a whole. There is a whole arc about Cybermen, which comes close to making them interesting. There is a First Doctor story, a couple of Fourth Doctor stories, and a Fifth Doctor story by Paul Cornell. There are some interesting endnotes by the writers and artists, reflecting on what worked and what didn’t, and why. I still wish I had got the previous volume but I don’t regret reading this. You can get it here.

This was my top unread English-language comic. Next in that pile is Alternating Current by Jody Houser et al, a Thirteenth Doctor volume, but I may have to reassess my approach.

April 2019 books

Posted on 12 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I started April 2019 in Dublin, finalising the launch of the Hugo final ballot video. A group of us gathered to watch it.

The following weekend, I struggled into Brussels for a tour of the city as Charlotte and Emily Bronte would have known it. Totally fascinating.

And it being Easter, we had Eastercon at Heathrow which once again I thoroughly enjoyed, counting the BSFA votes among other things. I finished the month ready to fly to Ireland once again; but more of that anon.

I read 22 books that month.

Non-fiction: 7 (YTD 14)
Publishing and the Science Fiction Canon: The Case of Scientific Romance, by Adam Roberts
Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History, by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Sam Witwer
On the Waterfront, by Malcolm Johnson
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
Doctor Who Episode Guide, by Mark Campbell
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine
Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage, by Luuk van Middelaar

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 9)
A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara
Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

sf (non-Who): 7 (YTD 22)
Time Was, by Ian McDonald
The Land of Somewhere Safe, by Hal Duncan
Embers of War, by Gareth Powell
Phosphorus, by Liz Williams
Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
Dread Nation, by Justina Ireland

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 7)
Combat Magicks, by Steve Cole
The Day She Saved the Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner, Jenny T. Colgan, Susan Calman and Dorothy Koomson
The Weather on Versimmon, by Matthew Griffiths

Comics 3 (YTD 5)
On A Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
Troll Bridge, by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran
De Terugkeer van de Wespendief, by Aimée de Jongh

6,700 pages (YTD 17,700)
11/22 (YTD 23/58) by non-male writers (McIlwaine, Yanagihara, “Eliot”, Williams, Wells, Novik, Ireland, Rayner et al, Walden, Doran, de Jongh)
3/22 (YTD 7/58) by PoC (Yanagihara, Ireland, Koomson)

A lot of really good books this month. I think I will single out Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, which you can get here; Time Was, by Ian McDonald, which you can get here; and Alarums and Excursions, by Luuk van Middelaar, which you can get here. On the other hand I completely bounced off The Land of Somewhere Safe, by Hal Duncan; you can get it here.

Recent Big Finish: Tenth Doctor, Fourth Doctor, Martha Jones

Posted on 11 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

So, I’m rather far behind with writing up my recent Big Finish listening – last time I mentioned it was in July. Three boxed sets of audio plays to cover quickly in summary here.

My favourite of these is a set of three stories with the Tenth Doctor and Classic Companions. All three bring David Tennant together with John Leeson as K9. The first, Splinters by John Dorney, features Louise Jameson as Leela; the second, The Stuntman by Lizzie Hopley, has Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, and the third, Quantum of Axos by Roy Gill, has Sophie Aldred as Ace. All three stories have fantastic chemistry between Tennant and the others – the arrivals of Leela and K9 are the first changes to the regular cast he remembers as a young fan, and clearly everyone is thrilled to bits to be performing with each other. It was also interesting that all three stories play with themes of identity, memory and nostalgia, which always appeal to me too. Dorney, Hopley and Gill are among Big Finish’s more reliable writers, and they have delivered here. Strongly recommended. Here’s a trailer to whet your appetite.

Another New Who spinoff comes in the form of The Year of Martha Jones, set during the year that Martha travels the world while the aged-up Doctor is the Master’s prisoner. We’ve already had a print anthology set in this period; this however is better, getting off to an excellent start in The Last Diner by the always reliable James Goss, a more Western-y The Silver Medal by Tim Foley, and a well-executed climax in Deceived by Matt Fitton. Martha is joined by Adjoa Andoh playing her mother Francine, who has apparently escaped the Master, and Serin Ibrahim as old friend Holly. (Also Clare Louise Connolly plays the Toclafance in all three stories.) Guest stars include Marina Sirtis, best known as Deanna Troi in Star Trek, in the first episode.

The fifth set of Ninth Doctor adventures, Back to Earth, sees Christopher Ecclestone’s time as the Doctor on audio overtaking his record on TV. To be honest I was less wowed by this trilogy than by some of the others, but these are all decent enough stories. Station to Station by Robert Valentine has the Doctor helping a young woman (Indigo Griffiths) out of a strange predicament in a deserted railway station. The False Dimitry by Sarah Grochala brings a Whovian spin to a corner of Russian history, the title character playedby Alexander Arnold. And Auld Lang Syne, another one by Time Foley, has a spooky New Year’s Eve party where all is not what it seems; veteran Wendy Craig makes an appearance as the great-aunt. I got the sense that Big Finish is trying out younger writers and actors in this range, which is fine. Here, again is a trailer.

I’m also way behind on noting the Fourth Doctor box sets that I have been listening to, but I think I’ll save those for another post – the above three are all worth getting anyway.

Saturday reading

Posted on 10 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?)
Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen
ω1
The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness

Last books finished
A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg
Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko
φ1
The Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal
χ1 (did not finish)
Filter House, by Nisi Shawl
ψ1

Next books
Rise of the Dominator, by Robert Mammone
Zink, by David Van Reybrouck
“Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger

Sandman, Wakanda Forever, Firefly

Posted on 10 December 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

Time to catch up briefly on some other media that I’ve been consuming of late. (Like, over the last few months.)

Literally the first book blog entries that I wrote, back in 2003, were my first reading of the Sandman comics. My wife and son have never read them, but Neil Gaiman’s name carries credibility and we had a good few hours watching this year’s TV series. Some very interesting casting, making the characters much more diverse, which I did not have a problem with at all. The best single episode was “The Sound of Her Wings”, with Kirby Howell-Baptiste excelling as Death; I had completely forgotten that she was also in The Good Place as Chidi’s girlfriend Simone. But most of the others were good too – Tom Sturridge manages to avoid going over the top as the title character, Vivienne Acheampong and Vanesu Samunyai are great as Lucienne and Rose Walker, credible dynamic between Derek Jacobi and Arthur Darville in the Calliope episode, Gwendolyn Christie watchable as ever, nice cameos from Stephen Fry, Charles Dance and Ian McNiece. Not totally convinced by Jenna Coleman, I’m afraid, but otherwise I though it was a good example of taking a story from one medium and adapting it to a new one. I’ll be nominating “The Sound of Her Wings” for the Hugos.

I wasn’t able to tempt either wife or son to Wakanda Forever in the cinema. It was pretty courageous to make a superhero film sequel which starts with the death of the main character from the previous film, but it certainly came out right – no doubt they could have recast T’Challa, and told a completely different story, but fans would have had difficulty with any new male lead and the film ended up as a story led by Black women, which carries its own power; I could watch Letita Wright, Danai Gurira and Angela Bassett all day. I felt a little adrift at a couple of points which I suspect depended on knowledge of the wider MCU mythology – were we supposed to know who Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is? Were we supposed to know why Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) is in Haiti? But apart from that it was really thrilling to see a film subverting a lot of traditional political themes through the action trope, with the Namor / Talokan plot supplying an extra dimension to that.

More traditionally, we went back and rewatched Firefly, which we had first seen in November 2005, three years after it was broadcast. Young F was six years old then, and too young, we felt, to appreciate it; now he is 23 and enjoyed it as much as we did. The setup makes no sense astronomically or economically, Inara’s business model doesn’t hold water, the occasional graphic violence is squicky, and we now know what an asshole Joss Whedon is in real life, but on the other hand the scripts and acting are generally top notch. My favourite episode, I think, is Jaynestown, but there are other strong contenders. Sometimes it’s worth going back to scenes of previous enjoyment.

So, should we watch Andor?

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins (and John Lydecker / Stephen Gallagher)

What to expect in 2023, according to science fiction

My books of 2022, including my book of the year

1) Science Fiction and Fantasy (excluding Doctor Who)

2) Non-fiction

3) Doctor Who

4) Comics

5) Non-genre fiction

6) Others: poetry and scripts

My Book of the Year

Previous Books of the Year:

Saturday reading and December books

December 2022 books

A final book set in 2023: Sewer, Gas & Electric, by Matt Ruff #BooksSetIn2023

July 2019 books

An additional book set in 2023: The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson #BooksSetIn2023

One more book set in 2023: Killing Time, by Caleb Carr

Yet another book set in 2023: The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky #BooksSetIn2023

Another book set in 2023: Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton #BooksSetIn2023

Saturday reading

June 2019 books

Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?)

A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg

Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko

Song of Time, by Iain R. MacLeod

Also set in 2023: The Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal

May 2019 books

Saturday reading

The Martian, and more recent Hugo and Bradbury Award winning films, with a full table of winners

The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell

Locating the planets, December 2022

The Road To Kosovo: A Balkan Diary, by Greg Campbell

The overnights meme, updated

The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray

April 2019 books

Recent Big Finish: Tenth Doctor, Fourth Doctor, Martha Jones

Saturday reading

Sandman, Wakanda Forever, Firefly