As usual, I have crunched the numbers to see the extent to which Goodreads and LibraryThing users have assimilated this year’s Hugo finalists. Each table is ranked by cumulative raters/owners on the two systems, the highest number in each column is bolded. In one category, only four of the six finalists appear on either Goodreads or LibraryThing. Links are to Amazon.co.uk (yes, I know, but commissions from those links are my only reward for writing all this).
St Leger’s occupancy of the lord deputyship was critical in maintaining the fragile peace and stability that resulted in both Irish abstinence from involvement in intrigue with France and consequent minimal demands for financial, military and naval resources from the English privy council to fortify Ireland’s defences. His success, however, proved short-lived. Within months of the arrival in Ireland in May 1548 of St Leger’s successor, Sir Edward Bellingham, his aggressive handling of the midland septs led to insurrection. In the aftermath, the dispossessed O’Connors embarked upon a sustained campaign to elicit military support from Henri II of France in support of their opposition to the English crown in what was the most serious episode in sixteenth-century Franco-Irish intrigue.2 2 See Ch. 4 below.
This is a nice short book adapted from the author’s Ph D thesis on the same topic. French interest in Ireland waxed and waned over the long sixteenth century; the big game was always in the future relationship with England, and Scotland was a far more important factor (and Scottish politics much better known) in Paris. Also, the Irish chieftains were much kore assiduous and successful at building relations in Spain, whose relationship with England was much less complex.
So Franco-Irish relations in the Tudor period are a bit of a sideshow, but there is still quite a lot to tell if you want to look into the official documents and archives in France and England (and Ireland, to the limited extent that it is possible). The most interesting Fact I Had Not Known is that Henri II of France came close to organising an invasion of Ireland via Scotland in 1549-50; but the politics didn’t quite work out, and nor did the weather. It would have been a tough defence for the English, provided that a critical mass of Irish leaders had joined the French; in the end I think they would likely have opted for the devil they knew, but that would not have been clear from the beginning.
It’s also just useful to have a look from a different perspective. I’ve read a lot about Tudor Ireland over the last few years, but it’s almost all been internally focused with occasional references to the court in London. It was good to be reminded that there were other neighbouring countries with skin in the game, even if not very much. I’d love to read something about the Spanish angle, however – and that would include Belgium, then under Spanish rule and a hub for Irish exiles.
Anyway, a good book if you are interested in the subject. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next, if I can find it, is Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, by Bernard Grofman.
Her grandmother had taught her that, when Tesla’s rage turned a room incandescent red, the best thing to do was to stay very, very still. The time her elementary school science teacher had marked her correct answer anout the most recent supernova as wrong “because it wasn’t in the textbook” had impressed in Tesla’s mind how effective that stillness could be. It was also the first time she used any version of “I want to speak to the manager” when she asked to go to the principal’s office in a voice that was, in hindsight, too cold and flat for a ten-year-old.
This was very interesting – a detective novel set on an Earth to Mars space cruise. Intricate plotting, lots of good stuff about gender diversity and invisible disabilities, and a very cute dog. And cocktail recipes. I was not quite sure about the ending, though. You can get it here.
As is often the case with more recent New Who, I don’t seem to have written up the closing episodes of Series 5 previously. In case you have forgotten, it is the climax to the first set of stories featuring Matt Smith as the Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy and Arthur Darville as Rory, first shown in 2010. (And Alex Kingston also turns up as River Song.) It’s a story that merrily zips back and forth from Roman times to the present day, with loads of Doctor Who monsters and also Stonehenge. The universe gets destroyed and then put back together again, and the Doctor and the TARDIS are almost eliminated from it but summoned back by Amy at her wedding to Rory. It’s a lot of fun.
Doctor Who is meant to be entertaining, and I’m with the majority who find that this time it worked – The Pandorica Opens had the highest audience ratings so far of any Series 5 episode, beaten the following week by The Big Bang. It was the fifth of six Doctor Who stories to win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), remarkably rising from second last place in both nominations and first preferences to win the award on transfers. It’s the first of the Hugo winners to be covered by the Black Archive series (and at time of writing, the only one).
I noted briefly before that it “manages to avoid pulling its punches”; I think I’d go further, and say that it’s the best of all of the Moffat era season endings (cf Dark Water / Death in Heaven, and Heaven Sent / Hell Bent).The plot doesn’t honestly make a lot of sense, but this is covered with spectacle, action, wit and knowing references to things that had happened earlier in the season so that you are made to feel that it all hangs together, more perhaps than it really does. Amy’s line “something borrowed, something blue”, tying ancient and incomprehensible wedding traditions to the TARDIS is simply beautiful.
Philip Bates has written a fair bit of commentary, but this appears to be his first book. A short prologue states his case that the story succeeds because it is “an intimate tale on epic proportions”. The rest of the book provides supporting arguments.
The first chapter, “Balancing the Epic and the Intimate”, looks at how Moffat pulls off the feat of intricately linking the story with the preceding episodes of the season, and indeed how they are linked to the rest of Doctor Who.
The second chapter, “Myths and Fairytales”, interrogates the concept of fairytales, stopping off briefly at Pandora’s Box, and the way in which fairytale lore informs both the story in question and the character of the Doctor.
The third chapter’s title is “Anomalies”. Its brief second paragraph is:
And so, we’re teased with timely anomalies that hint at what we’ve lost and what could return.
Here Bates looks at the concept of anomalies and how they contribute to the plot of the episode, going (perhaps a little more than necessary) into the scientific concepts underpinning the term.
The fourth chapter, “When Time Travel Wouldn’t Help”, looks at the “rules” of time travel and how Moffat uses them to support the plot – referring back also to his first Doctor Who work, the short story “Continuity Errors“.
The fifth chapter, “The Trouble with Time”, which is the longest in the book, looks at the arrow of time, time loops, and (again) the current scientific understanding behind them, and the way in which they are used in the story.
The sixth chapter, “Endings and Beginnings”, is mostly about scientific understandings of the end (and beginning ) of the universe.
A brief conclusion meditates on the concept of “favourite stories”.
An appendix, “Good Question for Another Day”, attempts to unpack the question of why the TARDIS explodes and who, if anyone, is responsible.
This book lacks a lot of the things I usually like about the Black Archives – analysis of the development of the script or of details of the production -and includes a fair bit of science, which is not what I get the Black Archives for. But I can forgive a lot of it for Bates’ infectious enthusiasm for a story that I already liked a lot. You can get it here.
Groaning, I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, squeeze my eyes shut, and gently rest my pounding head against the window. Rain patters against the roof. My clothes are wet, and my skin feels oddly sticky. The faint, sharp scent of rubbing alcohol drifts around the interior of the truck. My mouth tastes earthy, fishy, like I’ve guzzled overly chlorinated water.
This is a tale of uploaded intelligence and parallel realities. It started well, but lost me a bit in the middle because all of the characters sounded increasingly like John Scalzi (or like John Scalzi characters, it’s the same thing), and then lost me even more at the end with the revelation of vital plot information that I felt had been unfairly kept from us readers. So I’m not especially recommending it. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
This was another month when I did not leave Belgium, though such months are again becoming increasingly rare. I compensated with a couple more trips to see Hansche stuccos:
I had planned to travel to Belfast to give a lecture at the end of the month, but pressure of work in Brussels compelled me to do it virtually. Here is the preview interview I gave with Alan Meban.
The big excitement at home was the installation of a bee hotel at the end of our drive.
I mourned Erhard Busek, and did the last of my ten-day plague posts as life returned to normal.
And this humble blog moved from Livejournal to WordPress; probably not before time.
We were also busily working on the 2023 Hugo Awards, my sixth time of overseeing the process, so I read only 15 books (and was still getting to grips with WordPress).
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 21) The Twinkling of an Eye, by Brian Aldiss The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe in Contemporary Culture, by Mark Bould Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades, by Anna McFarlane Elles font l’abstraction/Women in Abstraction, by Christine Macel and Laure Chavelot Nine Lives, by Aimen Dean
SF 6 (YTD 21) The Green Man’s Challenge, by Juliet McKenna Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley Light Chaser, by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao Shards of Earth, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 11) The Unofficial Doctor Who Annual 1972, ed. Mark Worgan A Very Private Haunting, by Sharon Bidwell Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Comics 1 (YTD 3) Snotgirl Volume 1: Green Hair Don’t Care, by Brian Lee O’Malley and Leslie Hung
4,300 pages (YTD 16,600) 7/15 (YTD 21/63) not by men (McFarlane, Macel/Chavelot, McKenna, Whiteley, Zhao, Bidwell, Hung) 3/15 (YTD 10/63) by PoC (Dean, Zhao, Lee O’Malley/Hung)
Greatly enjoyed rereading Brian Aldiss’ autobiography The Twinkling of an Eye, which you can get here; greatly enjoyed first acquaintance with The Space Machine, which you can get here, and volume 1 of Snotgirl, which you can get here. I will draw a veil over the ones I didn’t like so much.
I’m in my desk chair, turned to face the bed. Eight is sitting up now, leaning forward with his head in his hands. I know how he feels. Waking up straight out of the tank is like the world’s worst hangover, with little bits of leprosy and the bends mixed in for flavor.
From the front cover, spine and headers, it looks to me like the number in the title is intended to be superscript – Mickey⁷ – though the narrator is always referred to as Mickey7 in the text, with no superscript.
I enjoyed this. If you ever played the RPG Paranoia at any stage you’ll appreciate the premise; the narrator is the latest in a series of clones established to help colonise a hostile planet, and faces lethal challenges from his fellow colonisers. The ending left some things unresolved, but I found it satisfactory all the same. You can get it here.
Nomadland won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Director (Chloé Zhao) and Best Actress (Frances McDormand), more Oscars than any other film that year. The other contenders for Best Picture were The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7; I haven’t seen any of them. The Hugo went to The Old Guard, which I really didn’t grok, and the Bradbury Award to a TV script.
Apart from this and the six films nominated for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), I have also seen Enola Holmes and the film-of-the-stage-show of Hamilton from that year, which was of course the first full year of the pandemic. I’d put Nomadland somewhere in the middle of that pack. IMDB users rank it an OK 13th on one scale, but a lowly 43rd on the other. The top films on the two IMDB rankings are Tenet, which I also couldn’t get on with, and Extraction, which I have not heard of.
Here’s a trailer.
I normally run through the other appearances of the cast in Oscar/Hugo/Nebula-Bradbury winners and in Doctor Who. This time, there are hardly any professional actors in the film – most of the cast play themselves. McDormand has the most exposure, but I had only previously seen her in Raising Arizona and Almost Famous. (This is a serious omission on my part; Nomadland was her third Oscar win for Best Actress after Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, putting her level with Ingrid Bergman and Meryl Streep, and more likely than either of them to catch up with Katharine Hepburn.)
The film is about McDormand’s character, Fern, who is displaced from her home by capitalism and links up with the American subculture of people living in their vehicles, crossing the huge area between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi, working on subsistence jobs. As I said, while not my favourite film of the year, I liked it well enough.
It is one of a number of Oscar winners to be based on a contemporary factual situation with some fictionalised elements – apart from the biopics, I would include On the Waterfront, The French Connection, Argo and Spotlight. But Nomadland is a very different kettle of fish. In The French Connection, two of the real-life protagonists play minor figures in the story, and one minor figure plays himself. Here, almost all of the speaking roles, apart from the lead character and a couple of others, are played by people playing themselves.
It makes me a little uneasy, to be honest. A documentary is a documentary; it’s a work of art, sure, but one that relies on showing an existing truth to us on the screen. But this is a film where an A-list Hollywood actress pretends to be part of the lives of very real people with very real problems. To tell their story, was it necessary to bring in a fictional person to help them tell it? And if so, is it still their story, or a similar yet different story belonging to the film-makers? Are we getting the real Linda May, Gay, Patty, Angela, Carl, Doug, Ryan, Teresa, Karie, Brandy, Makenzie and Bob Wells? Or are we getting Chloé Zhao’s version of them?
Still, it’s unusual to be asking this question about middle-aged and elderly white people. (cf Slumdog Millionaire.) These folks are making the best of the disruption to their lives caused by late stage capitalism in a crumbling state (ie the USA); they narrate their situation to themselves and to us as a positive choice; we get to make up our own minds. Some may wish that the film had taken a more polemical stance against poverty and its causes, and I think I’m probably one of them, but I don’t know if an angrier film would have been a better film in this case.
Apart from that, you have to admit that the film looks really good and sounds really good. Those landscapes from the sparsely populated Mountain Time Zone speak for themselves. The music could have been gruesomely sentimental and manipulative, but opts for quiet and contemplative. McDormand herself is not called on to do all that much, but does it very well, and it is impossible to take your eyes off her. (Somewhat related: not many actors of either gender get nude scenes, however discreet, in their 50s.)
So I’m putting it about three fifths of the way down my list of Oscar winners, just below Marty and above The Life of Emile Zola.
As previously mentioned, it’s based on a book with the same title by journalist Jessica Bruder. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Empire was six miles north of “the gyp,” an open-pit gypsum mine nestled at the foot of the Selenite mountain range. There miners detonated blasts of anfo—an explosive blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—to dislodge white, chalky chunks of ore from five terraced pits, the largest a half-mile across. Haul trucks shuttled sixty-ton batches of gypsum up the highway to a drywall plant on the edge of town. There workers pulverized it, heated it to 500 degrees in massive kettles, and shaped it into the wallboard found in homes across the American West.
I’m a huge sucker for the participant-observer mode of anthropology, and this brand of “immersive journalism” comes very close to it. Good writing like this lets the stories come out in their own way and their own time, and although the book is not long, nobody is rushed into fitting into a film scene. Inevitably the book ends up angrier than the film, even if its subjects in general accept their lot, because the mere facts of what the USA is doing to its own people are so enraging, and decent reportage will bring that out.
It also reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, though Alexievich rarely inserts herself into the narrative as Bruder perforce has to, and her subject matter is much rawer. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the impact on its people was far more gruesome and broad than what has happened in America. So far.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 40) A Brief History of Stonehenge, by Aubrey Burl Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart The Robots of Death, by Fiona Moore City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder
Non-genre 3 (YTD 7) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin The Rebecca Rioter, by Amy Dillwyn Chloe Arguelle, by Amy Dillwyn
SF 10 (YTD 110) The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross χ4 δ3 φ3 β2 π3 World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson The Hemingway Hoax, by Joe Haldeman
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 19) K9 Megabytes, by Bob Baker Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks Corpse Marker, by Chris Boucher
Comics 1 (YTD 10) The Endless Song, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,200 pages (YTD 46,900) 12/26 (YTD 78/191) by non-male writers (Beard, Moore, Fearon, Lyons, Bruder, Zevin, Dillwyn x2, χ4, β2, McIntyre / Anderson, Endless Song illustrators) 2/26 (YTD 28/191) by a non-white writer (Zevin, β2)
Reading now The Cider House Rules, by John Irving The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting
Coming soon (perhaps) Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadis et al The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, by Elizabeth Bear Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, by Bernard Grofman Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris One Bible Many Voices, by S E Gillingham Falling to Earth, by Al Worden The Outcast, by Louise Cooper Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress DALEKS Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
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A sequel, has a lot of invented vocabulary; earnestly arguing a political agenda, with poetry and computer code; the “Ten Principals” are not head-teachers but guiding concepts. You can get it here (I think).
A somewhat unexpected YA novel from Robert Silverberg, who I did not realise had written for that group of readers (but he has written so many books in many genres and sub-genres, and I should not have been surprised). It’s about our young hero who is brought to stay on the largest space station in history as a prize in an essay competition. it’s very reminiscent of Heinlein’s juveniles – there are intelligent but alien Martians, and an expedition to Pluto – but I was interested in the character of Claude Regan, the visionary billionaire who funds the space station and other projects; if the book had been written today, we’d see him as a portrayal of Elon Musk, and I wonder if Musk read this book (he’d have been 11 when it came out in 1982). Not spectacular, but an inter4esting snapshot of the time. You can get it here.
This was both the top unread book on my shelf acquired in 2016, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread. The next books respectively on those piles are Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, by Elizabeth Bear, and Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy.
Untethered, her spirit blasted like a lightning bolt back to her real flesh-and-blood body in the Dynast’s palace on the planet Solthar, the center of Unity. Leta crossed the immensity of galaxies and the laborious curve of time between her Proxy and her real body, the two vessels she could inhabit though only one at a time.
Simply too much invented vocabulary, which I found a real barrier to understanding. Also, second book of a trilogy and I felt the lack of having read the first volume. You can get it here.
When he’d gone to speak to Unfair about his grand plan for selling Ichigo, Dov had one question: “So, Ichigo’s a boy, right?”
This is a lovely Bildungsroman about two people from Cailfornia who end up writing video games together in Massachusetts (and then move back to California). They live and love and learn, awful and glorious things happen to them, and it all works out to a conclusion that isn’t quite what I expected but was very satisfactory anyway. I thought that the description of the process of writing video games, and the price that is paid for the work mentally and physically, was particularly compelling, but I also kept reading just to find out what would happen next in the relationship between the two main characters. It is very good. You can get it here.
Of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award submissions, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow had the most owners on LibraryThing and the most ratings on Goodreads, and pretty solid ratings as well. Unfortunately it’s not in any way science fiction; it’s set in contemporary America, over the last couple of decades, and although the games in the story are fictional, I don’t believe there’s anything there that could not be accomplished with real-life technology. So it was not eligible for the award.
This was the top unread book by a woman on my unread pile. Next on that stack is Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver.
No attempt has been made at decor and little at comfort, but the technology is efficient. Its movement is smooth and the quiet hum of whatever propels it unintrusive. Matilda’s library is an old-world collection, and Genrich craft do not figure anywhere.
Seemed more obsessed with getting references to famous artworks into the book than in having coherent characters or plot. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
With pandemic numbers decreasing, I had my first post-COVID trip to the United States, visiting Gallifrey One again in Los Angeles, as I had done just before the plague struck two years before, and staying with one of my oldest friends in Seattle; also doing tourism and catching up with various cousins, some of whom I had never met before.
In the wider world, Russia brutally invaded Ukraine, and I started the necessary steps to transfer this humble blog from Russian-owned Livejournal to its present home.
I also visited Gent with F to see two more stucco ceilings, though I now think that one of them is not after all by Jan Christiaan Hansche (and I was not allowed to photograph the other):
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 16) Roger Zelazny, by F. Brett Cox Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five by Neil Gaiman The Evil of the Daleks, by Simon Guerrier Pyramids of Mars, by Kate Orman Lost in Translation, by Ella Frances Sanders
Non-genre 1 (YTD 7) The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake
SF 8 (YTD 15) Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells Chaos on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard After Atlas, by Emma Newman 84K, by Claire North
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 8) The [Unofficial] Dr Who Annual [1965], by David May The Flaming Soldier, by Christopher Bryant The Dreamer’s Lament, by Benjamin Burford-Jones Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 1 (YTD 2) Scherven, by Erik de Graaf
5,000 pages (YTD 12,300 pages) 8/20 (YTD 14/48) by women (Orman, Sanders, Blake, Jones, Kritzer, de Bodard, Newman, North) 1/20 (YTD 7/48) by PoC (de Bodard)
To be brief: I loved Aliette de Bodard’s Fireheart Tiger, which you can get here; I found The Dreamer’s Lament the worst so far of the Lethbridge-Stewart books, but you can get it here.
We shake hands and he tells me about his church. It’s the big racing green tent on the way down to the canteen (galley, apparently, because the current brigade is the Navy, even though we aren’t on a ship). The door has always been closed over when I’ve passed, but the entrance is around the other side. Next time I go past I take a look. Yes, it’s got all the church gear all right: simple bench seating that’s bound to be painful to sit on, a central aisle, and, at the top, a table altar and a small lectern. The altar is demurely dressed: white cloth and a gold chalice. It waits, mutely, for souls. Over the next few days I take a look fairly regularly and I never see anyone in there. I have no idea what denomination it is.
I’ve known Kate Fearon for about thirty years. She was president of the Students Union at Queen’s University when I was a postgraduate; it was an incubator of political talent. Like me, she worked as a party aide in the 1996-98 peace talks, in her case for the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition; unlike me, she stuck it out to the end, and was there on Good Friday 1998. Like me, she subsequently went to work for the National Democratic Institute in Bosnia-Herzegovina; unlike me, she has spent most of her subsequent career in various field assignments, in Afghanistan, Kosovo and currently Georgia. Six years ago she kindly took this photograph of me as we were walking together through the Parc Leopold in Brussels one lunchtime:
Here she gives an impressionistic, first-person, present-tense account of the year she spent in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2009-10 as Governance Adviser to the UK-led international presence in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. It’s a story of life in primitive military conditions under the constant threat of death. Among the British soldiers who she works with, several die each week, whether by accident of design. The local leaders, whose efforts to build a new structure of government she is supporting, are also under constant threat, and several of those who she had got to know well were indeed assassinated by the Taliban. It is a beautifully written and intense read; you can practically feel the sand in your eyes and taste the flavour of the lamb stew. You can get it here.
In the light of what happened in 2021, it is a particularly poignant read. The book was published in 2012, and concludes with the observation that the situation was very fragile, and might not survive a drawdown of Western troops (as indeed proved to be the case). I don’t know enough about the country to draw conclusions about the failure of the Western mission there, but I do know enough to be pretty clear that it failed dismally.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610, by Mary Ann Lyons.
It did, and Mariucci spent a moment silently apologising to Forsyth for thinking ill of him: the man’s faults might run deep, but he wasn’t deliberately malicious.
A very Clarkean book, very reminiscent of 2010 in that it’s about astronauts investigating strange stuff in the outer solar system in the middle of a massive crisis on Earth. I thought it was very well executed, with two believably flawed viewpoint characters and an intriguingly grim ending. Apparently it is a loose sequel to a previous book, Gallowglass, which I have not read, but I don’t think I missed much by not having read it. I liked this a lot. You can get it here.
Current The Cider House Rules, by John Irving The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder
Last books finished Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons The Rebecca Rioter, by Amy Dillwyn “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson The Hemingway Hoax, by Joe Haldeman
Next books Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadis et al Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam
I am hugely enjoying the Big Finish audios starring Christopher Eccleston. This is already the fifth three-play collection, released last summer, and it includes one really standout story which I must admit I listened to three times: Salvation Nine by Timothy X Atack.
Salvation Nine is about an abandoned tribe of crashed space travellers who have developed their own culture, and moved far away from their origins to the point of oblivion; they live a happy life but their singing is absolutely terrible. They are Sontarans, and the rest of the galaxy wants to destroy them. It’s really well done by everyone – Dan Starkey in particular, demonstrating that he’s so much more than just a funny voice, and Eccleston switching register from tragic to comic effortlessly. I listen to a lot of Big Finish audios (I have been very slack about recording them here), but this was one of the freshest takes on a well-established feature of the Whoniverse that I can remember for a while. Atack also wrote the earlier Ninth Doctor audio Planet of the End, which I also enjoyed.
The middle story, Last of the Zetacene by James Kettle, was less to my taste and has the same theme of unpleasant people engaged in hunting as his previous Ninth Doctor audio, Hunting Season. But there is a superb bit of stunt casting with Maureen O’Brien, who turns 80 next week, as one of the nastier characters.
The third story, Break the Ice by Tim Foley, is back up to Big Finish’s usual standards with a story of elemental peril from a deity of frost. Again, it’s closely linked to the writer’s previous Ninth Doctor story, Auld Lang Syne, but has some good twists and good performances from the two lead guest stars, Thalissa Teixeira and Amy Manson.
But anyway, the first story almost justifies the three on its own. You can get them here.
This ceaseless mixing of the population makes nonsense of all the familiar assumptions of ‘Gaelic origins’ or ‘the Irish race’. The distinctive nature of Irishness arises specifically from the interaction of newcomers with natives (the perennial cliché of Irish historical writing). Strictly speaking, there are no natives; or, to put it the other way round, all the Irish are natives. ‘Irish’, if it means anything, simply means being born in Ireland, even if, like Swift or the Duke of Wellington, you did not want to be. Many of the characteristics which are regarded as ‘typically Irish’, for instance, are demonstrably the legacy of the Old English, or the Anglo-Irish or the Lowland Scots just as much as they are of the Celts, whom we now call the Gaels. Interest in the Gaels, in their language which Irish people still spoke, in their literature and culture generally, revived in the eighteenth century. More specifically, both Protestants and Catholics, though divided from each other politically by the penal laws and structures based on them, tried to establish a connection with the Gaelic Irish culture, which was still extraordinarily healthy. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was in decline, and speaking Irish was regarded as a mark of social inferiority, something associated only with backward rural communities. Then, by the end of the century, a revival was under way, and Gaelic culture was being presented to the Irish population as the indigenous culture.
A.T.Q. Stewart was a colleague of my father’s in Belfast, and his sons were friends of ours – indeed I shared a house in Cambridge with one of them for a year. His perspective was a bit different, as one of the few prominent Irish historians of our parents’ generation who came from the Unionist tradition. I found a 1977 review in Fortnight of Stewart’s award-winning The Narrow Ground, written by my father, which began:
This is one of the most depressing books yet published on Ulster.
and concluded:
His book is beautifully written, as readers of Dr Stewart’s previous books will expect. Again and again, one pauses with pleasure at some felicitous phrase. ‘Ireland, like Dracula’s Transylvania, is much troubled by the undead’. (p.15) ‘The factor which. distinguishes the siege of Derry from all other historical sieges in the British Isles is that it is still going on’ (p.53) ‘What the Catholics have been saying for fifty years about the Ulster government springs from a well that was made bitter long before Stormont was built’. (p.179) I wish I could write like that. But I wish also that Dr Stewart had used his literary gifts to write a more constructive work.
My father also criticised Stewart in 1977 for not reading in other scholarly disciplines beyond history, including anthropology in particular. It’s interesting that in the opening chapter of The Shape of Irish History, published in 2001, eleven years after my father died (and nine years before Stewart’s own death) he too appeals to historians to read beyond their own discipline, particularly anthropology (E. Estyn Evans was a key figure in the history of the history of Ireland). There is probably not a direct connection with my father’s review.
The Shape of Irish History is a quirky book, probably written knowing that it would be the author’s last substantial work. I find the basic thesis very attractive: that we should not regard Irish history as a train on a direct journey (“The 10.14 from Clontarf”) with an inevitable destination; if we analyse people and events in the context of their own times, rather than trying to fit them into a story of national destiny, we will learn more. Subsequent chapters look at interesting diversions off the course of the train, especially in the eighteenth century, where I recently read a very interesting microstudy of one particularly vicious cultural practice of the time (duelling). I also learned a lot from the very brief dissection of what actually happened in 1798. There are lots of fun facts here, including the ballooning career of Richard Crosbie.
At the same time, my father’s observation from 1977 about style and tone still stands. It’s beautifully written, but the conclusion is thoroughly depressing:
There is no misunderstanding between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, none whatsoever. Nor do they need to get to know each other better. They know each other only too well, having lived alongside each other for four centuries, part of the same society yet divided by politics and history. This is not just a clash of cultures; it is a culture in itself.
This embrace of the inevitability of perpetual conflict is as unjustifiable as the narrative of the inevitable ‘10.14 from Clontarf’ train to Irish national destiny, which Stewart rightly criticises. There’s very little reference to other countries, and none to other conflicts, beyond the British Isles here. Stewart had clearly integrated the findings of other scholarly disciplines about Ireland into his worldview between 1977 and 2002; it’s a shame that he didn’t also look further afield.
Anyway, it’s not a book for beginners in Irish history, but it will be of interest to anyone who is already familiar with the basics. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book acquired in 2016 still on my shelves. Next on that pile is Comparing Electoral Systems, edited by David Farrell.
I enjoyed this a lot. Great sequel to the first volume, which I voted for for the Hugo last year. Fantasy, so not eligible for the Clarke Award. You can get it here.
I watched The Robots of Death when it was first shown in 1977, and hugely enjoyed it as a nine-year-old. I have rewatched it several times since and still feel the same way. When I first blogged about it in 2006, I wrote:
The Robots of Death has worn pretty well. I had seen it twice before – the original showing in 1977 when I was 9, and I think again some evening about ten years ago watching someone’s video when there may have been booze and conversation as distractions. The robots themselves look superb – swisstone has commented on the origins of the design. I had not previously picked up the very interesting tension between Uvanov, the captain of the trawler, and the First Families representatives Zilda and Cass – it is an interesting inversion of racial politics, since Zilda and Cass are clearly of non-European origin, unlike the rest of the crew, but are also deferred to socially.
I had forgotten how good Louise Jameson is as Leela. She doesn’t steal the show – as always, that is centred on Tom Baker’s Doctor – but it’s a very interesting performance, I guess the only seriously physically assertive female companion bar perhaps Ace. My sister-in-law giggled manically at the line, “You talk like a Tesh!” for a reason that is only comprehensible if you know who my in-laws are. Which is why I think we’ll watch The Face of Evil next. (After catching up with Sunday’s Torchwood and re-watching yesterday’s Doctor Who.)
It’s also unusual to see a Doctor Who story which is quite so obvious in its homage to classic sf. As long-time readers of this blog well know, I hate cute anthropomorphic robots. But the Robots of Death, despite being designed to Asimovian specifications (at least as far as the First Law is concerned), are not cute at all, even if they are anthropomorphic. The one person who does think they are cute turns out to be the psychopathic murderer. There’s a moral there; are you listening, Mike Resnick? Also the mining machine on the surface of a desert planet is very reminiscent of Dune(though no sandworms here as far as we know).
The plot, of course, doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny – as ever, the Doctor happens to arrive just at the moment of crisis, and the powers-that-be accept his credentials as a benevolent actor pretty swiftly (though it must be admitted not as swiftly as in some stories); and we find out who the villain of the piece is long before the characters do (though the Doctor seems to have worked it out). But it’s all done with great conviction, and the whole thing just looks fantastic.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2010, I was still convinced, though more briefly:
The Robots of Death is another jewel of a story – Baker and Jameson on top form, a stellar guest cast, a claustrophobic and believable scenario, understated but convincing special effects. Gregory de Polnay’s heroic D84 stands out as a particularly great character – “Please do not throw hands at me!” – but everyone is good; Davids Baillie and Collings as baddie Dask and good guy Poul, and Russell Hunter as the besieged commander Uvanov, Pamela Salem as loosely-dressed Toos. And Louise Jameson, now playing Leela in a high-tech envornment, is just fantastic. I really found it something of a struggle to keep to my one-episode-a-day discipline while watching this.
It’s also interesting that The Robots of Death has a substantial aftertrail. Chris Boucher’s novel Corpse Marker takes up the story of the Doctor and Leela returning to Kaldor City to see what happened to the Sandminer crew, and there are then a series of excellent audios set in Kaldor City by Alan Stevens, Jim Smith, Fiona Moore, Daniel O’Mahony and Chris Boucher, including not only Uvanov but also Paul Darrow playing a sinister character who is obviously Avon under a pseudonym (Boucher was of course script editor for Blake’s 7). Strongly recommended.
Rewatching it again, I still think it is great. Why can’t Doctor Who, or indeed life, be that good all the time? You can get the DVD here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
Doctor Who and the Robots of Death loses in the transition to the written page; the TV version just looks so memorable, and I think hints better at the background setting of Kaldor City.
Again I have little to add; where Dicks sometimes enriched the narrative for the printed page, here he simply transposed from the TV script. Not one of his more memorable efforts, but you can get it here.
On the other hand, I went back to Chris Boucher’s sequel novel Corpse Marker, and found it an excellent expansion of the Robots of Death continuity. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Watching them, the Doctor had begun to think that what one member of any particular group of six learned, the others in that group would also know. How the information was communicated within the group he was not yet sure and he could not tell whether there was the same communication between the different groups. Were they factory-produced clones? He wondered. Was each group of six effectively a multiple of one single individual? And was that the root of their mysterious powers of communication?
Corpse Marker takes us to Kaldor City and the three surviving crew members from The Robots of Death, several years on, in a complex web of political intrigue and threat. Once again Leela gets some good bits, and for once Boucher’s world-building is on form: Kaldor City feels pretty real, and there are a number of very visual moments. One of the characters actually has escaped from Blake’s Seven, but I think I missed that particular episode. My caveats about Boucher’s portrayal of the Doctor still apply, though.
Again, I don’t have much to add: perhaps one point is that we don’t often get to revisit a society after the Doctor has intervened and see what effect he has had. You can get Corpse Marker here.
Unusually for a Black Archive author, Fiona Moore has already contributed fictionally to the Robots of Death universe via the Kaldor City audios, which you can get here. So it’s not very surprising that she comes to the story with an even more positive approach than me, wanting to explain why it works so well, without explaining it away. She succeeds in this.
The first chapter, ‘The Robots of Death in Context’, starts with the big picture of 1970s arty TV, then zooms in on the Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who and then briefly examines some of the aspects of the story that make it work.
The second chapter, ‘Script to Screen’, delightfully finds that some of the best bits were added at the last moment, by the actors including Tom Baker.
The third chapter, ‘The Machine Man’, looks at the very direct impact of Expressionism on the design of the story, specifically through the classic film Metropolis. The second paragraph is:
There are three reasons why the design of The Robots of Death is effective. Firstly, it is of a high aesthetic standard; much of it could work out of context, simply as art. Secondly, it makes use of the common technique of using past design rather than ‘futuristic’ designs, which can wind up dating a story. However, above all of this, the past society being referenced was one whose interests and concerns harmonised with the themes of the story itself.
The fourth chapter, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Stupidity’, points out that contra some descriptions, the robots themselves don’t actually rebel; and finds roots for the story’s take on AI in the back-story of Dune.
The fifth chapter, ‘Class and Power in the Works of Chris Boucher’, looks at how these themes played out in The Robots of Death and in his other TV work, the series Blake’s 7, Gangsters and Star Cops and the two other Doctor Who stories (both of which have been Black Archived), The Face of Evil and Image of the Fendahl.
The sixth chapter, ‘Cast All Ethnicities’, makes the point that the story is ahead of its time in assembling a multi-ethnic cast and treating them equally, though the character of Leela is a little problematic.
The seventh chapter, ‘The Legacy of The Robots of Death’, lists at the various Kaldor-set sequels in print and audio (though curiously does not mention Moore’s own authorship explicitly, except in a footnote), and then also looks at the treatment of similar themes in the Ood stories of New Who, and Voyage of the Damned, Oxygen and Kerblam!.
All in all this is a good roundup of why the story is a good one, and it also spurred me to reread Corpse Marker. You can get it here.
The nearest town was a little tourist place that was just one street of stores. Both ends of the street led to mountains that rose in layers of dark green forest and bleached brown rock, until the farthest peaks were misty blue, as if heaven were visible from this town and its citizens could just walk out their front doors and hike into the afterlife. There was no one out and nothing was open. No cars. I drove through the streets alone.
I remember from Newman’s first book, The Country of Ice Cream Star, that there were some very good ideas let down by the execution. I felt that here too. Strong images and thoughts but badly let down by the ending. And I’m very bothered by the transphobia. But you can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
On 27 January 2002 I turned 20,000 days old (54 years, nine months and a day). We were still in the uneasy post-COVID restrictions, so I had no special commemoration apart from a blog post.
Another month when I did not leave Belgium, but I toured two more of the stucco ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche, a rather modest one near Namur and a much more ornate one in Antwerp.
Non-fiction 11 A Radical Romance, by Alison Light Where Was the Room Where It Happened?: The Unofficial Hamilton – An American Musical Location Guide by BdotBarr [Bryan Barreras] Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell The Doctor – his Life and Times, by James Goss and Steve Tribe Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford The God Complex, by Paul Driscoll Why I Write, by George Orwell Scream of the Shalka, by Jon Arnold The Complete Debarkle, by Camestros Felapton
Non-genre 6 Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng Embers, by Sándor Márai Million Dollar Baby, by F.X. Toole Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby
SF 7 Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Monsters Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Planets The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu “Bloodchild”, by Octavia E. Butler “Press Enter ◼️”, by John Varley The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Doctor Who 3 Of the City of the Saved…, by Philip Purser-Hallard (did not finish) The Daughters of Earth, by Sarah Groenewegen Scream of the Shalka, by Paul Cornell
Comics 1 Carbone & Silicium, by Mathieu Bablet
7,300 pages 6/28 by women (Light, Waddell, Kingsolver, Kawakami, Butler, Groenwegen) 6/28 by PoC (Barreras, Tan, Kawakami, Liu x2, Butler)
A lot of good books this month – I see that I have given five out of five to six of them, only one of which was a reread; the other five were all non-fiction. They were:
I remember learning about people of this type in a class on historical geography; how long ago, when our country India was called South Asia, they lived in a place that was also called Asia, but specifically Far East Asia. These Far Eastern people apparently shared a number of bizarre characteristics. One was an inability to distinguish between the virtual and real world: stories were told of people who, when severely beaten by an Internet gang, would die of their wounds, and of youngsters in love with online stars diving into their computer screens, never to be seen again. There were even tales of laborers who worked eighty-hour shifts without sleeping, which would astound even our most ascetic yogis.
A really interesting read, several characters interlocking their lives in a world where Japan has mysteriously vanished – in fact, never existed, though there are plenty of Japanese people. Lots of challenging stuff about languages and the Japanese experience of Europe. Especially liked that some of the action is set in the German city of Trer, which I visited last October). You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (discussing Memling’s Portrait of a Man with a Roman Coin):
It would be easier to suggest a particular reason if we knew for sure the identity of the portrait’s main subject. Recent views have favoured Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian scholar, collector and politician of the late fifteenth century, who in the 147os spent time in Flanders, where Memling was then working, and whose personal emblem included a palm tree and laurel leaves (unusual elements visible in the landscape background and on the lower edge of the portrait). If so, then the coin might be a flattering reference to the quality of Bembo’s own collection; for some Renaissance experts in ancient coinage insisted that, whatever the emperor’s despicable character, Nero’s coins were particularly fine works of art. But there have been plenty of other identifications and explanations too. One idea is that the coin makes a visual pun on the otherwise anonymous sitter’s name: perhaps this was a hint that he was called ‘Nerione’, a not uncommon Italian name at the time. Or maybe a more subtle moral point was being made. It might have been a reminder, as one art historian has recently put it, ‘that worldly fame and visual commemoration cannot always be associated with virtue’.1 1 The identification of the sitter and interpretation of the Roman coin: Lobelle-Caluwe, ‘Portrait d’un homme’ (the first to propose Bembo); Borchert (ed.), Memling’s Portraits 160; Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces 102-5 (quotation on ‘worldly fame’ p. 105), Lane, Hans Memling, 205-7,213-14, Christiansen and Weppelmann (eds), Renaissance Portrait, 330-32; Nalezyty, Pietro Bembo, 33-37. Vico, Discorsi 1,53 writes of the coins of Nero (along with those of Caligula and Claudius) as ‘surpassing the others in beauty’; see also Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 160.
Beautifully illustrated and very detailed description of the iconography of the Twelve Caesars, as made classic by Suetonius, in sculpture and art, based on (but updated from) a series of lectures given in 2011. There’s a huge amount of detail, including a sarcophagus that Andrew Jackson refused to be buried in, and fascinating stuff about lost art that we still know about. Hamton Court alone merits almost a whole chapter. Not my usual thing, and I’m not close enough to the subject to really learn as much as I would like to from this, but it is entertaining and informative. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next up is Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort.
“Jarvis, give me some music,” I growl. The gym is far too quiet at four in the morning. Unnervingly so. And my nerves have already had their fill of nerves today.
YA, fast paced, apparently doomed protagonist overthrowing the unnatural order of things, doesn’t quite deliver on the premise. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Time Thief”):
The secret of this huge ornate building was a NuSev technical innovation, known as a holo cloak. The entire exterior of the museum, was, in fact, a massive 3D virtual reality illusion, projected across the building by tiny holo emitters, dotted around the building’s base, ensuring that it looked like a solid bygone age structure when seen from afar. The truth of the building was only revealed when visitors entered it, disrupting the light emitters. Walking in, visitors found themselves in a massive hall made of marble and artificial sandstone. Upon entry, visitors were required to wear holo glasses so exhibits could be viewed clearly, even though in reality they were all held in high security light box cages.
A modest volume of four short stories featuring K9 Mark 1, subsequent to his Australian adventures. For two of the stories Baker revives other Whoniverse creations, namely Axos and Drax, and the Axos story in particular is an interesting revisiting of the concept. Bt in the end there’s not so much to see here; K9 can never progress much as a character, so it’s really adventure-of-the-week stuff. Out of print, I’m afraid.
