So, on to the joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards presented in 1987 for works of 1986. This time there are two, a short story and a novel.
“Tangents” by Greg Bear, the short story in question, was originally published in Omni. I found scans of the original publication and thought I should share these two cartoons that were originally published alongside it. Unfortunately I can’t read the credits on the scan of page 12 which would have identified the artist, nor can I identify the signature on the first (the second is unsigned).
This piece by Michel Henricot which illustrated the story itself.
Second paragraph of third section of “Tangents”:
“None of my muscles move that way,” Lauren said. “You’re sure you can’t make him … happy, stop all this trouble?”
When I first read it in 2000, I briefly commented:
A story of the fourth (and higher) dimensions which is good fun but didn’t quite work for me.
I stand by that judgement twenty years on. The story is about the Platonic friendship between an adult gay man and a young boy, and about how we in three-dimensional space might perceive four-dimensional beings, and there is music in there as well, but it just doesn’t hang together for me. You can get it in the collection of stories by Bear with the same name.
Three other stories were on both the Hugo and Nebula final ballots for Best Short Story: “The Boy Who Plaited Manes”, by Nancy Springer; “Rat”, by James Patrick Kelly; and “Robot Dreams”, by Isaac Asimov. The Hugo ballot also included “Still Life”, by David S. Garnett, and the Nebula ballot also included “The Lions Are Asleep This Night”, by Howard Waldrop, and “Pretty Boy Crossover”, by Pat Cadigan. I’m sure I’ve read the Asimov but can’t remember which one it is, and I don’t think I have read the others.
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel, the sequel to Ender’s Game which had won both awards the previous year. A few weeks ago in the middle of the night I came across a fanzine article from 1987 drawing attention to Card’s own role in the Nebula process, but I failed to note it down and now can’t find it again. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
We’ve never seen them eat anything else. Novinha analyzed all three foods – macios, capim blades, and merclona leaves – and the results were surprising. Either the peclueninos don’t need many different proteins, or they’re hungry all the time. Their diet is seriously lacking in many trace elements. And calcium intake is so low, we wonder whether their bones use calcium the same way ours do.
Again, I first read it in 2000 and noted then,
Speaker for the Dead is a better book than Ender’s Game; a grown-up Ender, many centuries on thanks to time dilation, comes to solve the problems of the interaction between humans and the alien Piggies on the latter’s home world, and incidentally resolve several issues of the human society there as well. Tackles family life for adults as the previous book tackled children.
As with Ender’s Game, this time around the things that annoyed me about the book annoyed me more. There are two central tragedies in the narrative: Ender’s own hidden past as a perpetrator of genocide, and the unintentional homicide of the indigenous aliens, and also the well-intentioned destruction inflicted by the aliens on their human friends. But the real story here is about colonialism and colonisation, and there’s not much interrogation of that at all; and the fact that the aliens are given an insulting nickname throughout is frankly disgusting. But you can get it here.
There was one other novel on both Hugo and Nebula ballots, Count Zero by William Gibson, which like every other Gibson novel I have read I cannot remember anything about. The Hugo ballot also included The Ragged Astronauts, by Bob Shaw, which won the BSFA Award that year, and Black Genesis by L. Ron Hubbard and Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge neither of which I have read.
The Nebula ballot also included The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, winner of the Clarke Award and a retrospective Tiptree Award and surely the most important sf novel of the year in retrospect, and Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe, The Journal of Nicholas the American by Leigh Kennedy and This Is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow, none of which I have read. The Handmaid’s Tale is a far better book than Speaker for the Dead, and it’s not to the credit of Hugo or Nebula voters that they chose the latter.
In the other categories, the Hugo for Best Novelette went to “Permafrost” by Roger Zelazny, one of the many by him that I rather like, and the Nebula to “The Girl Who Fell into the Sky”, by Kate Wilhelm. “Permafrost” was on both ballots, as were “Hatrack River” by Orson Scott Card and “The Winter Market” by William Gibson.
The Hugo for Best Novella went to “Gilgamesh in the Outback” by Robert Silverberg, and the Nebula to “R&R” by Lucius Shepard. Both were on both ballots, as was “Escape from Kathmandu” by Kim Stanley Robinson.
That was also the year that the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation went to Aliens, which is better than anything else I have mentioned in this post, apart from The Handmaid’s Tale.
The following year, unusually, there were no joint winners. The Hugo written categories were won by The Uplift War by David Brin, “Eye for Eye” by Orson Scott Card, “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” by Ursula K. Le Guin and “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” by Lawrence Watt-Evans; and the Nebulas were won by The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy, “The Blind Geometer” by Kim Stanley Robinson, “Rachel in Love” again by Pat Murphy and “Forever Yours, Anna” by Kate Wilhelm.
So the next post in this sequence will cover two shorter pieces from 1988 that won in 1989: “Schrödinger’s Kitten” by George Alec Effinger and “The Last of the Winnebagos” by Connie Willis.
The next in the Black Archive sequence of commentary on Doctor Who is on The Dæmons, which rounded off the eighth season of Old Who in 1971. As usual, I went back and rewatched the original story, and then reread the novelisation, published in 1974, before getting to the Black Archive analysis.
The Dæmons, first shown in 1971, is presumably the only Doctor Who story featuring a character in the title outside the standard 26 letters of the alphabet (plus numbers and punctuation). I’m a bit stunned that it is remembered as the peak of the Pertwee era by some. It’s not very good; it’s not very bad either; perhaps that makes it an archetypal Pertwee story, and so those who like that sort of thing will like this sort of thing. Delgado is good; Benton and Yates are good (and this story has clearly provided much inspiration for slash writers); both the Third Doctor and Jo are bad, as usual; and the monster is just awful, as is the final twist (it is destroyed when Jo offers her life instead of the Doctor’s as such self-sacrifice CANNOT COMPUTE).
JO: Don’t kill the Doctor, he’s fantastic! Kill me instead! AZAL: Good point. I was just realizing how stupid it would be to kill the Doctor. (KILLS JO). DOCTOR: Tut tut. AZAL: I’m the last of my kind, you know. DOCTOR: Really?
The Dæmons is surely the greatest of the UNIT stories, and one of the most English stories of this very English show. Evil morris dancers! A white witch! The Master is your local vicar! The first time I watched this I didn’t like it much, but taken in context, and an episode at a time, I can see why this Barry Letts script is seen as a high point of the Barry Letts years; it is the first time, apart from The War Games, that we have had a season finale as such, pulling all the characters together and ending with the Master’s disgrace and capture.
The Brigadier is off the main field of action for most of the story, which actually gives him a chance to shine on his own rather than be snarled at by Pertwee, and generates a nice the-boss-is-away dynamic among the other UNIT folks, augmented by Delgado on top form and by Damaris Hayman’s wonderfully batty performance as Miss Hawthorne (who we assume had a jolly good fertility dance with Benton throughout the following night). Apart from Richard Franklin, who is clearly the weakest of the regulars, everyone is excellent. (I enjoyed also watching the Return to Devil’s End documentary, bringing Pertwee, Courtney, Franklin and Levene back to the village along with director Christopher Barry.)
I commented back in The Abominable Snowmen that Who has four ways of treating religion: squabbling sectarians, deluded cultists, religious buildings used for nefarious purposes, or true believers. The Dæmons includes both the second and third categories. As far as I remember it is also the first time religion has been portrayed on the show since The Abominable Snowmen, and the only time apart from Steven’s profession of faith (or at least denomination) in The Massacre and the unecclesiastical antics of The Smugglers that we have had anything explicit about the Church of England. More on this in the story after next.
Once again, I liked it a bit more on rewatching. Sometimes one enjoys performances that little bit more because the performers are clearly having a good time, and this is one of those. The spooky line between science and magic is nicely explored as well; we’ll get to that later.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation, by Barry Letts, is:
Across the churchyard flitted a shadow a little more dense than the shadows of the gravestones in the moonlight. Seeking the sanctuary of the church wall, it paused momentarily as if to make sure it was unobserved and then vanished through the vestry door.
This was one of those books which, on rereading, very much lived up to my fond childhood memories. It is funny, witty, adds bags of backstory to both minor and major characters (the account of the Doctor and the Master growing up together on Gallifrey ought to be canon for all interested fanfic writers), substitutes far better special effects on the page for the end-of-budget ones we got on-screen, and is generally a good read. My favourite Third Doctor book so far.
Again, I still think this is the best Third Doctor novelisation, with Doctor Who and the Green Death by Malcolm Hulke being its only serious rival; it’s the only classic series novelisation by Barry Letts, the producer throughout the Pertwee years. One aspect that I feel deserves a bit more attention: the dramatic internal illustrations by Alan Willow, this being the first of seven novelisations that he illustrated between 1974 and 1975. (Though his take on Jo isn’t brilliant, and “creature” is misspelt in the second caption – not his fault, I guess.)
Matt Barber’s Black Archive on The Dæmons is of average length for this sequence, but has very long chapters, so this review will probably be unfairly short.
The introduction sets out Barber’s stall: The Dæmons is actually a very atypical and unusual Doctor Who story, “without time travel, with little science fiction and, debatably, an ambiguous approach to the existence of magic; a story in which the TARDIS does not appear and is not even mentioned.” Barber himself has an MA in the History and Literature of Witchcraft, and his PhD focused on the mythologising of American politics in film and television, so he brings an unusual set of analytical filters to the task.
The first chapter, “The Unholy Power of Olive Hawthorne”, looks at witchcraft lore through Margaret Alice Murray, Gerald Gardner, and James Frazer of course, before turning to the role of Miss Hawthorne in the narrative; he makes the interesting point that although she is presented initially as a somewhat batty busybody, in fact she is right about what is really going on and all the men she argues with, including the Doctor, are wrong.
The second chapter, “Satanism, Devilish Pacts and Scientists”, starts with a real-life West Country vicar who was accused of involvement with black magic in 1969; then looks at Faust and the Master (and to an extent the Doctor as well); then at the influence of Aleister Crowley and Dennis Wheatley in general; and finally at the similarities and differences between The Dæmons and The Devil Rides Out.
The third chapter’s title is “A Tour of Devil’s End”. Its second paragraph is:
There is something about the English village that made it an enticing location for particular genres of popular culture in the 1970s. But why should such a parochial and picturesque location become such a standard for horror and dark fantasy? In the previous chapter, I inferred that the writers of Doctor Who were, like fan creators, ‘textual poachers’. In this chapter, I want to press this idea further by looking at how the series adapts the work of genre writers including John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale, MR James and HP Lovecraft to create a new, gestalt narrative. Through this, I want to explore how the English countryside and pastoral mythology has been adopted and reshaped by popular culture before, during and after the production of The Dæmons. In this way I will unpack what the English village brought as a location for this story and others in the 1970s and 1980s, and what Aldbourne in particular contributes to the character and popularity of The Dæmons. This will be a whistle-stop tour through subjects ranging from folk horror and pseudo-archaeology to psychogeography, hauntology and religion.
The opening paragraph of the chapter points out that Aldbourne, the village where The Dæmons was filmed, is very close to Silbury Hill, the ancient artificial mound which was the subject of a televised dig in 1969. (My old friend Jonathan Last has things to say about Silbury Hill.) Barber then looks at the real geography of Aldbourne, the connections between The Dæmons and the Fifth Doctor story The Awakening, the subgenre of Folk Horror, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit, John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, the role of the Church (both institution and building), M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft and the role of the pub.
A brief conclusion reflects on Barber’s personal reaction to visiting Aldbourne over the years, and an appendix gives a plot summary of The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley, which is clearly a taproot text for this story.
In general I prefer the Black Archive books that reflect a bit more than this does on the production, plot and performances in the stories that they are looking at. But this was a very interesting and well-informed exploration of the cultural roots of The Dæmons. Recommended. 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.
The month started with a trip to Sofia, rounding off my work with the Bulgarian EU Presidency; the photographer who was part of our group took a nice set of pictures. I like this one of me.
I got to the Tolkien exhibition in Oxford as well:
And we watched the World Cup Final in France, staying with my sister in Burgundy. France won, with the enthusiastic support of locals. Sometimes you do your best with what you’ve got.
At the start of our summer holiday, F and I went to Comic Con in London where I met with a large number of Doctors.
Resuming regular bookblogging, at least until I work through the backlog.
While I am here, I want to respond to a comment from a friend on Facebook who queried my habit of linking to Amazon here for the books that I review. (Unless they are only available elsewhere.) Yes, I know that Amazon has many problems, and I deleted all my reviews from their site back in 2010. But the fact is that every book bought through one of my links gives me a small Amazon credit – not a lot, a pound every couple of months, but it’s the only physical reward I get for writing my blog. I don’t have a lot of other options for ordering English-language books by mail, especially now that Brexit has made it much more difficult to purchase from UK suppliers who haven’t done the EU paperwork. I’m always on the lookout for alternatives, but haven’t yet found any.
Anyway, this was one of the books I got Brian Aldiss to autograph in Forbidden Planet in 2015, a year before he died, published in 2004. It’s a retelling of the Theban Plays, but told largely from the point of view of Jocasta, Oedipus’s wife and mother, as her family and her world disintegrate. It also includes a short story relating the Antigone narrative to political oppression today.
I really enjoyed both parts. The Jocasta story is particularly strong, the title character dealing with supernatural creatures loose in the palace, her aged grandmother communing with the old powers, her teenage children being brats, appearances from Sophocles and other voices from the future, and the claws of destiny slowly closing around her husband. Long long ago I saw Pasolini’s Edipo Re (a very unsuccessful first date), and I’m sure that Aldiss was familiar with it too, as I am sure I detected echoes of it. The Antigone postscript takes a different approach with mixed timelines, but I enjoyed it too. You can get it here. (And here’s a longer review from the Spectator.)
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile: Aldiss’s Complete Short Stories: The 1950s.
It’s a photograph that I have long been familiar with; legendary Irish economist and public servant T.K. Whitaker on the left, Minister for Finance George Colley on the right, and in the middle my grandfather, Sean F. Murray, previously Whitaker’s deputy at the Department of Finance, inspecting the new decimal Irish currency, switching from the old system of 20 shillings and 240 pennies to the pound, to the new 100 pence which endured until the arrival of the euro. My grandfather chaired the internal government committee that brought in the new system.
The new Irish decimal coins exactly matched the British, as the old coins had done since they were introduced in 1928; there was later some divergence, as the Irish 50p coin did not downsize when the British did, and the Irish 20p coin was larger and rounder than the British one, but for most of the period from 1971 to 2002, most British and Irish coins were physically interchangeable, and certainly in Northern Ireland you would normally find some Irish coinage mixed in with your sterling change. This could occasionally lead to problems after the Irish pound aligned with the European Monetary System in 1979; I remember well Black Wednesday in 1992, when the exchange rate shifted from £1.05 Irish to £1 sterling, to vice versa in the course of a few days.
In hindsight, the decision to continue the alignment of the Irish and British currencies after decimalisation in 1971 looks like a no-brainer, and I must say I had vaguely wondered what my grandfather’s committee actually did other than accept the inevitable. I was completely wrong. A 2020 Ph D thesis by Andrew John Cook at the University of Huddersfield looks in depth at the decimalisation process, not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the Commonwealth (much of which had inherited the pounds, shillings and pence of the colonisers) and Ireland. The story is much more complicated than I had realised, and in fact all three of the men in the photograph – Whitaker, Murray and Colley – had initially opposed the decision that they ended up implementing.
From the early days of independence, occasional voices had floated ideas that Ireland should decimalise its currency – but by adopting the ten-shilling unit and shillings as the core of the new system, abolishing the pound and changing from 12 pennies to 10 cents in each shilling. This was not a fringe idea. The first such proposal was from T.A. Smiddy, Michael Collins’ economic advisor and later the Irish Free State’s first ambassador (to the United States). The surviving memo from him to Collins is dated April 1923 in the archives – which must be incorrect, because Smiddy was already in Washington by then and Collins had been dead for eight months. If he received it during his lifetime, Collins would have had other things on his mind anyway.
A cabinet committee in 1959, and another in 1965, endorsed the ten-shilling scheme, though a sizeable minority in both cases preferred to move in tandem with the UK. Another proposal floated at the time was to move to florins, worth two old shillings, as the base unit; each florin would have 100 cents (so 10 florins and 1000 cents to the old pound). The argument was that for a country much poorer than the UK, the fundamental unit need not be as valuable as the British pound.
But with the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement in 1965, and the 1966 British announcement that they would move to a pound with 100 pence in 1971, the situation became urgent. Cook quotes from several government memos written by my grandfather, from which it becomes clear that he ended up as the key mover, along with Finance Minister and then Taoiseach Jack Lynch and also Charles Haughey, Lynch’s successor in Finance, to ensure that Irish decimalisation would match the British process.
My grandfather was in charge from an early stage. In January 1967, three months before I was born, he wrote a memo to the Cabinet on behalf of the Department of Finance recommending the florin-cent system. This was also supported by his boss, T.K. Whitaker, and by the Ministers for Foreign Affairs, Frank Aiken, and for Industry and Commerce, George Colley. However, the 85-year-old President De Valera supported the ten-shilling scheme (advocated 45 years earlier by Smiddy) in an October 1967 letter to the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, in which he also foresaw the ultimate role of a single European currency:
I would adopt half the pound sterling, that is the ten-shilling note as the Irish fundamental note. It would have to be given a name. For want of a better one I use Réalt here. One tenth of a Réalt would be a scilling and one tenth of a scilling a pingin.
If I were asked, why not keep exactly to the British unit, I would say that the ten shilling one is a better one on its merits. Moreover, it is desirable that Dublin is not considered a mere suburb of London, or Ireland as a piece of West Britain. There are, possibly, amongst us some who desire this but we should not aid them. There is no better way of making visitors feel they have come to a different nation than by having a different currency …
We will never get a chance like this again for a quiet assertion of our nationality. The decision to be made here is, in my opinion not a mere economic one. It is, also, a national one, and were the decision to be mine I would not hesitate a moment. The British might, sometime in the future change the basis again, we would surely look ridiculous if we were always accommodating ourselves to them. The position would be different of course if the nations of Europe were all to go over to a common unit and Britain were to join them. We could then, without any loss of dignity, accept the common unit.
But the Minister of Finance, Jack Lynch, had been in favour of simply following the British lead since at least 1966, and when he became Taoiseach in October of that year, the new Minister of Finance, Charles Haughey, ruthlessly implemented Lynch’s policy. (Which is rather ironic, given later events.) Haughey commissioned a public consultation, and put my grandfather in charge of managing it and ensuring that it came up with the right answer (thus neutralising one of the internal voices in favour of the florin system).
The banks were particularly strong supporters of the Haughey/Lynch plan, and that carried a lot of weight. On 23 April 1968, Haughey, backed by his deputy, Jim Gibbons, and by Lynch as Taoiseach, announced the shift to pounds and new pence with the same value as sterling, to take place on 15 February 1971, the same day as the UK, based on the results of the public consultation and the conclusions of the committee that my grandfather had been running.
By February 1971, Haughey had been dramatically fired by Lynch, and tried and acquitted of shipping arms to the IRA, with Gibbons (who had meanwhile become Minister of Defence) the chief witness against him. His replacement as Minister of Finance was George Colley, meaning that he and my grandfather, who had both been early supporters of the florin scheme, were now in charge of implementing a completely different proposal.
The RTÉ coverage of Decimalisation Day starts with Colley in a Dublin bank, my grandfather beside him looking at the camera to see if it is rolling, and ends with my grandfather in a brief interview saying that it all seems to have gone well. (And it had.) It must have been one of the biggest days of his career, and one can sense his glee. (I wasn’t able to embed the video directly, so this is it captured via my iPad; there are some silent parts, including at the beginning.)
Today is in fact the 113rd anniversary of my grandfather’s birth, on 16 October 1909. (His sister-in-law, now aged 106, is still with us.) He died in 1976 when I was nine, and the last thing I remember talking to him about was Gulliver’s Travels. I am the oldest of his 22 grandchildren; here I am with the first of his great-great-grandchildren, my half-first-cousin-twice-removed, born last year.
Meanwhile Andrew Cook’s thesis looks like a rollicking good read of what might at first sound like a very dry corner of administrative history, and for the time being at least, you can get it here.
Blogging has been a bit light in the last couple of weeks, due to a combination of two weekends away in a row (normally I write a week or two’s worth of entries at the weekend) and the fact that due to award submissions I can’t actually write about some of the books I have been reading. So I thought I would do a soft relaunch by telling you about how I decide which books to read next.
I have developed a Reading Order to guide me up the slopes of Mount Tsundoku. I have two aims here: first, to get through as many unread books as possible, especially those that have been on my shelves for a while; second, to make sure that in that process I don’t end up spending too much time on books by white men (which are inevitably the majority).
I catalogue all of my books on LibraryThing, a superb resource. At the time of writing I have 8095 books catalogued there, of which 382 are currently tagged as unread. I have classified the unread books into a number of lists, as follows (the original neat alphabetical order has been overtaken by events):
a) unread non-fiction books, in order of entry into my catalogue
c) unread non-fiction books, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
d) unread non-sff fiction books, in order of entry into my catalogue
e) unread non-sff fiction books, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
f) unread sf books, in order of entry into my catalogue
h) unread sf books, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
p) unread comics in languages other than English, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
q) unread comics in English, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
s) unread books by writers of colour, roughly in order of popularity on LibraryThing
u♀) unread books by writers who are not men
y) unread books acquired in the year I am currently finishing up (2015 at present), in ascending order of page length
b15) unread books acquired in 2015, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
b16) unread books acquired in 2016, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
b17) unread books acquired in 2017, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
b18) unread books acquired in 2018, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
b19) unread books acquired in 2019, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
b20) unread books acquired in 2020, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
b21) unread books acquired in 2021, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
b22) unread books acquired in 2022, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
hn) joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, in chronological order
k) winners of the Clarke, BSFA Best Novel and Tiptoe/Otherwise awards, in chronological order
wells) books on my shelves by H.G. Wells that I have not yet written up online, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
pterry) books on my shelves by Terry Pratchett that I have not yet written up online, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
v) books on my shelves that I have in fact read but have not written up online, and are not by Terry Pratchett, in descending order of popularity on LibraryThing
At the start of the calendar year, I take the top book on each list and arrange them in a Reading Order by length, shortest first. I then bump up any book not by a white man up the Reading Order by six places. (Or to the top of the list if already in the top six.) And that’s my initial Reading Order for the year. Sometimes the same book appears at the top of more than one list, and that’s fine.
As I start each book, I recheck the list it was on to take account of newly acquired books; when I finish each book, the next book on that list goes either to the end of the Reading Order, if by a white man, or seventh from the end, if not by a white man. If the book I have just finished was at the top of more than one list, the next books in each list are arranged by increasing LibraryThing popularity on the Reading Order (so that I get to the more obscure ones first).
I read three books at a time, usually the three which were top of the Reading Order. I make exceptions – if I am already reading two sf books, I may slide down the Reading Order to take the next non-sf book; if I am starting two or three new books at the same time, I’ll start with the shortest of the top two or three on the Reading Order.
I’ve been publishing the current Reading Order in my end-of-month book roundups since January 2010. I have varied the system over the years. Back when Livejournal was a thing and Mount Tsundoku was much lower, I did annual polls to help me decide which books to read the following year. I’m getting through four years’ worth of Tiptree / BSFA / Clarke winners every year, and am now at 2008, so I will finish the k) list in 2026 at that rate. The H.G. Wells and Terry Pratchett lists are new, basically to stop them dominating the b19) and v) lists respectively.
There are special measures for the year that currently has the earliest unread books – at present 2015. I’m about to change the system here. From now on, one of the three regular reading slots will be reserved for the next book on the Reading Order which was acquired in 2015, ie from lists a), d), f), b15) and y). If the top book on lists a), d) or f) was acquired later than 2015, it will be put on hold until I finish the 2015 books. (This is currently the case for lists d) and f), the two fiction categories.) When I do finish the 2015 books I’ll do the same for those acquired in 2016, and so hope to gradually work my way up the Tsundoku slopes.
There are also special measures for Doctor Who books. Each month, the first open slot among my three regular books will be filled by reading the next unread Doctor Who graphic novel from my (large) stash of digital comics, in series canonical order. Then I will read the top unread Doctor Who prose book, whether fiction or non-fiction, from my shelves. Then I will read the next in the Lethbridge-Stewart sequence. Then I will read the next two Black Archive books, and the novelisation of the relevant stories if they exist.
And finally, I also have a “speed read” option where I alternate 50 pages of the three Reading Order books with 50 pages of a book that I want to finish fast. I am currently implementing this for award submissions, but in the first half of the year I tend to use it a lot for Christmas presents, BSFA shortlisted works and Hugo finalists. I also implement it for books that were the basis for Oscar-, Hugo- and Nebula-winning films as I watch them. They tend to be short. (Not always.)
And of course fairly often I just pick up a book off the shelf at random, and read it. Damn the torpedoes!
Blogging still a bit slow, after a couple of weekends away; look forward to catching up this weekend.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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.
Work trips to Dubrovnik, London, Paris, Berlin and Skopje this month. My Dubrovnik conference was enlivened by a Game of Thrones location walk:
For our wedding anniversary trip this year, Anne and I went to Trier, not the nearest large German city to us (Aachen, Cologne, Bonn and most of the Ruhr are closer) but certainly the most ancient German city within easy striking range. I’ve been a couple of times before, first I think in 1986, and I always love going back to the Porta Nigra, the Roman gate which has mostly remained through the centuries.
The other place I particularly love in Trier is what is now the Protestant Church of the Redeemer, originally built in the early fourth century as the throne room of the Emperor Constantine I, who made Christianity the official religion. It is the largest enclosed space to have survived from the Roman Empire, and thought to be the fifth largest constructed in those times (the other four, now destroyed, were in Italy). It is just amazing to stand there in a room constructed 1700 years ago for imperial audiences.
Trier is commemorating the fall of the Roman Empire this year with a massive set of exhibitions, and we went for the full tourist package, which I would actually recommend; details below. The basics are:
Accommodation: Holiday Inn Express, 15 mins walk from the Porta Nigra, very good breakfast and comfortable basic rooms. Friday dinner: Weinstube Zum Domstein, Hauptmarkt 5; more below. Saturday lunch: er, McDonalds. At least you know what you are getting. Saturday dinner: Restaurant Balkan, close to the hotel, nostalgia for Balkan days. Sunday lunch: Okoki Sushi & Grill, who have an attractive all-you-can-eat offer though in fact we went for the bento boxes before leaving.
The full tourist package comes with a ticket to all three major museums in Trier, also a Roman meal, a guided walking tour and a wine tasting. I should say that it is wise to book at least a week in advance with the Trier tourist office; my own booking got stuck in my Gmail spam filter, and a couple of glitches needed to be sorted out – however the tourist office were very helpful, taking into account that last weekend was a holiday weekend in Germany.
So. We started with the Roman meal, hosted by the Weinstube zum Domstein, a gemütlich enough place. This was a large set of small dishes based on the Apicium, a Roman recipe book attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius. No potatoes or tomatoes of course; for me the standout dish was the ham with myrtle fig sauce, but it was all perfectly yummy. You can have this outside the tourist package as well at the Weinstube zum Domstein as long as you order in advance.
On Saturday morning we went to the big exhibition at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier. They have pulled together a colossal assembly of artifacts from the Roman Empire, starting more or less from the time of Constantine (who reigned from 306 to 337) and ending with the successor states in the region. Two points to flag up: no photography is allowed, and it’s a lot more accessible if you have decent German (there is an audioguide in English but it doesn’t cover everything and is scripted as annoying banter between an uninformed man and an expert woman).
My breath was taken away by the very first exhibit: the scepter and insignia of Maxentius. Maxentius was the rival emperor to Constantine who was killed at the battle of Milvian Bridge outside Rome in 312. His imperial regalia were hidden under a staircase, and found in 2006, almost seventeen centuries later. They are the only surviving regalia of a Roman emperor. Normally they are in Rome but they’re in Trier until the end of the exhibition.
(No photography allowed in Trier – this is the photo from the National Roman Museum in Rome)
The whole thing is great, but three other things particularly caught my attention. The first was a fifth-century silver jug, engraved in beautiful detail with the apostles and the evangelists, found in Trier in 1992. It is believed to have originally been part of a hoard of Roman silverware found in 1628, 49 pieces weighing 74 kilos in total, which were melted down (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) by order of the ecclesiastical authorities. The surviving jug is a thing of wonder.
I was also particularly grabbed by a letter from a Roman official who had inside knowledge of a currency devaluation (“The divine fortune of our masters has decreed that the nummus will be reduced to half its value”), lent by the John Rylands Library in Machester; and also a reconstruction of the grave goods of Childeric, found in Belgium in 1653, but stolen from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and mostly destroyed in 1831.
The walking tour of the city was conducted enthusiastically by one of the city’s accredited guides. She took us over the highlights of the conflicts that have shaped the city (Napoleon – rather good; Prussians – rather bad; Prince-Bishops – a mixed bunch) and bemoaned the fact that the university was suppressed in 1797 and restored only in 1970. She indicated, but did not take us to, the large statue of Karl Marx donated by the Chinese government in 2018 to mark the bicentennial of his birth in Trier. We went back later to look at it.
Presenter: Well now we come on to our special gift section. The contestant is Karl Marx and the prize this week is a beautiful lounge suite. (curtains behind the presenter sweep open to reveal a beautiful lounge suite; terrific audience applause; Karl comes out and stands in front of this display) Now Karl has elected to answer questions on the workers’ control of factories so here we go with question number one. Are you nervous? (Karl nods his head; the presenter reads from a card) The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development? Karl: The development of the industrial bourgeoisie. (applause) Presenter: Yes, yes, it is indeed. You’re on your way to the lounge suite, Karl. Question number two. The struggle of class against class is a what struggle? A what struggle? Karl: A political struggle. (Tumultuous applause.) Presenter: Yes, yes! One final question Karl and the beautiful lounge suite will be yours… Are you going to have a go? (Karl nods) You’re a brave man. Karl Marx, your final question, who won the Cup Final in 1949? Karl: The workers’ control of the means of production? The struggle of the urban proletariat? Presenter: No. It was in fact, Wolverhampton Wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1.
The wine tasting in the Oechsle Wein- & Fischhaus featured white wines from all over the Moselle valley. Well, two from Luxembourg and a fair few from the Saarland. All Moselle wines taste like Moselle wines, though different from each other. I got a couple of bottles of Elbling.
The cathedral retains a small amount of the original Roman fabric, though most of the building has been rebuilt several times since. The façade just right of centre in my picture below, with a triangular pediment surmounting three windows with circular arches (and more with circular arches on the next level down) is more or less original from 1700 years ago. Wow.
Inside it is a lot more baroque. I need to look into the potential linkage between the western dome and my favourite stuccist Jan Christian Hansche. I hope this stereoscopic image works for you.
The Cathedral Museum has some fascinating religious art relating to the fall of Rome and the neighbourhood. There are some fascinating tombstones and grave goods – a third of all burials are of children; their shoes are interred with them; there’s also a grave inscription for the local woman doctor Sarmanna of the fourth century.
Hic iacet Sarman/na medica vixit / pl(us) m(inus) an(nos) LXX Pientius / Pientinus fili(us) et / Honorata norus / titolum posuerunt / in pace “Here lies Sarmanna the doctor. She lived around 70 years. Pientius, her son Pientinus, and daughter-in-law Honorata placed this monument. In peace.”
I’m afraid that I broke the rules and took a photo of the reconstructed fresco ceiling from the house built for the Bishop of Trier by the Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena. This woman’s eyes follow me through the centuries.
There is a lot about the necropolis of St Maximin, a large building which housed a thousand tombs in Roman times. I have not come across any other such arrangement on such a large scale for civil burials in any culture, though there is a First World War necropolis near where our daughters live. There’s also a nice exhibition about local bigwig, St Paulinus, whose skull was proven to have spent time in the Middle East by the presence in his nose of a pupal exoskeleton of an insect found only in those parts.
Finally, the Stadtmuseum Simeonstift has a lot of relevant art on display. I am sure I had seen it before, but in this context the Auzon Casket aka the Franks Casket really grabbed my attention – Anglo-Saxon, carved with runes, but referring to Roman history as well as Germanic legend.
The romantic story of the successors and challengers of the Roman Empire has inspired many artists. Here is Hermann / Arminius being crowned leader of the Germans by his wife Thusnelda, as portrayed by Angelika Kauffmann.
The collection includes a miniature version of Rubin Eynon’s Gallos, whose 8-foot original keeps guard at Tintagel:
But I must say that the other piece that grabbed me, not part of the Roman Empire collection but one of the pieces illustrating the history of Trier, was the bleak portrait of three women who had been transported to Nazi Germany as forced labourers, painted by the artist Mia Münster in 1944. There’s an awful bleakness in their eyes.
Anyway. A good weekend culturally, and on the way home we dropped in on my cousin J in Luxembourg, her children L, S and N, her husband D and my old friend M who I had not seen in 20 years and who now works with J. Small world.
Current Doctor Who: A British Alien?, by Danny Nicol Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi ζ1 La Femme, ed. Ian Whates
Last books finished δ1 Voorbij de Grenzen van de Ernst, by Kamagurka Weapons of Past Destruction, by Cavan Scott, Blair Shedd, Rachel Stott and Anand Setyawan Empire Of Sand, by Tasha Suri Juicy and Delicious, by Lucy Alibar Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, by Brian Aldiss ε1
Next books The End of the Day, by Claire North The Bad Christian’s Manifesto, by Dave Tomlinson
Beasts of the Southern Wild won SFWA’s Ray Bradbury Award for Best Script in 2013, beating The Avengers, The Cabin in the Woods, The Hunger Games, John Carter and Looper. It was also nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, but beaten by Argo. IMDB users rate it 95th on one ranking and 174th on the other, by far the lowest for any of the films I have been watching in this sequence.
It is about a little girl living on an island off the Mississippi delta, whose world is ending. Her mother is absent, her father is dying, the sea levels are rising to swamp her home, and ancient aurochs thawed from the melting glaciers are on their way.
I loved it. The other films that I have seen from that year are Argo and The Avengers, as noted above, and The Hobbit part 1, The Dark Knight Rises, Les Miserables, Brave, Wreck it Ralph and Total Recall. I actually think I liked Beasts of the Southern Wild most of all of them. Well done, SFWA voters.
None of the actors had been in previous Oscar, Hugo or Nebula/Bradbury winners, or Doctor Who for that matter; few have them had acted before. Indeed, the father is played by Dwight Henry who ran the bakery across the road from the studio and was co-opted by the producers. They made a wise choice. They made an even wiser choice with Quvenzhané Wallis, the youngest ever nominee for an acting Oscar, who is totally believable as Hushpuppy. I had seen her later performance as Annie, so was not completely surprised.
It’s a film with a lot to say about poverty, family, community, the environment and the end of the world. It’s beautifully filmed and the cast, few of whom had much experience, are very strong just being themselves. I’m not going to go on at great length – neither does the film, at only 93 minutes. You should just go and watch it if you haven’t already. I’m putting it tenth overall in my list of Hugo/Nebula/Bradbury winners, just below Galaxy Quest and above Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
It’s based loosedly on a play, Juicy and Delicious, by Lucy Alibar who then co-wrote the screenplay with Benh Zeitlin. The third of the many short scenes, in its entirety, is:
IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD, Y’ALL
Hushpuppy at school.
A bunch of scrappy kids who are bottom of the food chain.
MISS BATHSHEBA stands before a picture of an AUROCHS.
We hear the sound of ice cracking—a glacier coming loose and falling into the sea.
MISS BATHSHEBA
Welcome to Miss Bathsheba’s Finishing School!
Welcome to the End of the World.
A lemon hits the window. Then several more.
MISS BATHSHEBA
Don’t pay attention to that. Pay attention to me.
Lesson One: Aurochs. Long, long ago, when we all lived in caves, the world was swarming with aurochs. Aurochs were big and hungry and ate babies.
For an aurochs, the perfect breakfast was a sweet, juicy little cave baby. They would gobble cave babies down right in front of their cave parents. And the cavemen couldn’t do nothing about it, because they were too poor, too stupid, too small. To defy the aurochs would mean a long, painful death.
But even cavemen love their children, in their own, stupid, caveman way; and in their own, stupid, caveman way, they were going to do something about it. The cavemen took whatever weapons they could find—numchucks, or blowtorches, or just their teeth. They fell upon the aurochs, screaming, “Toro! Toro! Toro!”
Blood, and eyeballs, and intestines flew everywhere! And when the war was over, most of the cavemen lay dead. But all of the aurochs lay deader.
And now, two million years later, here y’all are. Proof that someone was taking care of you before they even knew you.
Because they loved you with their whole, huge, breaking, stupid little hearts, even way back then.
(The sound of ice cracking. Outside, grits fall from the sky. It’s kind of scary.)
MISS BATHSHEBA
Don’t pay attention to that. Pay attention to me.
The universe is coming unrendered.
Things are dying ain’t supposed to die.
The fabric of the universe is coming all undone.
Don’t be scairt. Miss Bathsheba’s gonna teach y’all how to live through it.
I think this would be unstageable. Flying lemons aren’t the half of it. Also it’s very different from the film – Hushpuppy is a boy, and he and his father live in Georgia and (I think) are coded as white. It’s been turned into a thing of wonder in the cinematic process – a rare example where the film is infinitely better than the material it is based on (cf. Casablanca, also based on an unperformed stage play). But if you are curious you can get it here.
Next up are 12 Years a Slave, which features some of the same cast, and Gravity.
I missed the broadcast of Doctor Who: The Movie (as we now call it) in 1996, because I was fighting an election campaign at the time. I ought to feel grateful to the 95.9% of voters who supported other candidates in the election and liberated me to follow my subsequent career; but for some reason I hold the 4.1% who did vote for me a little closer to my heart. I did not see it until ten and a half years later, when I wrote:
It really did take me until last night to get around to watching, for the first time, the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie. I think it looks fantastic. The inside of the Tardis, especially, but also the other scenes, hospital, party, city, the policeman riding his motorbike into the Tardis, the lot. The final scenes with the Master, the Doctor and the Eye of Harmony are impossible to look away from. I think it sounds good as well. The arrangement of the theme tune is the only one to take serious liberties with the original and get away with it. (Apart from the original 1963 version, the only good opening music for the TV series is the present one. Though the opening titles for the Tom Baker era are the best of the classic series.)
There is, of course huge violence to continuity which can only really be dealt with by assuming that the post-regeneration Doctor and body-transferring Master were deluded in their statements. There is really no way the Doctor can be half-human. We suspect that Gallifreyans and humans can mate (see Leela’s departure, and the follow-up in Lungbarrow), but the Doctor has made so many remarks over the years about his own separateness and difference from humanity that I must assume he doesn’t mean what his eighth incarnation says. Also the Eye of Harmony was on Gallifrey on the Tardis as far as I remember. (Though Wikipedia has some heroic retconning on this topic.)
But in general I come down in favour. I think McGann, Ashbrook and Roberts are great. I also liked the links to continuity both forward and back – McCoy’s appearance for the first twenty minutes, McGann’s fondling a scarf as he decides what to wear; but also of course (a point that was new to me) the Doctor looking through Grace’s letterbox, a scene repeated by the Ninth Doctor and Rose in the very next episode (nine years later). Sure, the plot was just a bit threadbare, and the revival of the dead companions at the end a bit silly (if repeated for Captain Jack in The Parting of the Ways); and I can see why this did not lead to a revival of the series’ fortunes. But it is far from embarrassing.
When I came to it again at the very end of my 2009-2011 rewatch, I wrote:
And last but not quite least, forward another three years to The TV Movie. It actually has a lot of good points – the repeated motif of eyes, a lot of the business of the Doctor explaining himself to himself as well as to the rest of the world, the comedy moments mixed with SFnal horror. Daphne Ashbrook is channelling all of the female Classic Who companions, with added snogging (and in fairness a much more complicated love life than most companions arrive with); Eric Roberts is I think rather good with the somewhat two-dimensional character he is given, though of course it’s difficult for Old Who fans to accept a Master without either a beard or poached-egg eyes. The script tears big holes in continuity about the Doctor’s genetic heritage and the location of the Eye of Harmony, but I think it does make sense in its own terms (apart from the reset button that allows the dead companions to be resurrected); however, it just doesn’t lead on to great things in the way that An Unearthly Child did thirty-three years before.
Knowing what we do now about Who since 2005, The TV Movie feels like a dead end in continuity, though I was surprised by the number of elements have been first properly seen here and carried through to New Who – including some of the musical themes, which are very close to some of Murray Gold’s work. But of course that is the narrow TV viewer’s perspective; the Eighth Doctor continuity goes on in comics, books and audios, in three separate streams, all rooted in these 85 minutes of movie.
McGann, once he has regained his memory and before he gets tied up, is a rather good Doctor; he combines a wizardly young fogey with a bit of an air of surprise and almost annoyance that the world is not quite as he would wish it to be. He is at his best with Daphne Ashbrook, and fans of McGann’s audio performances will remember that the high points there tend to come with interaction with India Fisher’s Charley Pollard and Sheridan Smith’s Lucie Miller. Whereas the more alien Doctors of Old Who were alien because they were hiding their nature from us, the Eighth Doctor doesn’t even fully know himself. It would have been nice to have had more of him.
Watching it again, it annoyed me a bit more. The pacing is generally off, and it’s difficult to imagine how this could have developed into a successful TV series (as indeed it didn’t). All power to McGann, however, a very nice chap in real life.
The second paragraph of The-Book-Of-The-Movie, by Gary Russell, is:
For Dr Grace Holloway, still dressed in her now crumpled ballgown, it began drearily. She woke up and heaved her face up off her desk and tried to massage some life into her right cheek. It had taken the full weight of her sleeping head all night, and she imagined that someone could jab a needle right through it and she would still not feel a thing.
This was the novel of the TV movie, written by Gary Russell (two of whose other Who novels I have read; I liked one of them). Not really a lot to say about this; he has stuck fairly closely to the script, padding out the introduction a bit more, wisely not expanding on the Doctor’s demi-humanity. I see that I found the visuals and the acting particularly attractive in the broadcast version of the story, and inevitably those get lost in the transfer to the printed page. But it’s basically OK.
Actually I liked it a bit more this time around, perhaps because I re-read it so close to re-watching the original version of the story. A lot of the incidental characters are given significantly more back-story. The Doctor himself comes over as a bit more of an enigma, which was possibly wise. I’ve also read enough Who spinoff fiction now to realise that Russell is among the best of the writers in the stable. You can get it here.
Paul Driscoll’s monograph on The Movie is one of the longest so far in the Black Archive series, featuring an introduction by Matthew Jacobs and a long interview with him as an appendix. Jacobs loves it.
I am compelled and intrigued by patterns Paul can see that were never intended, and delighted by the patterns he has seen that so few people have ever spotted that were absolutely intended. / Intended or not, his observations are always valid and entertaining. This is without doubt the most thorough and complete analysis of the TV movie I have ever read – and there have been quite a few. If I had any idea what I was writing in 1995-6 was going to be analysed this deeply, I might never have started!
The introductory chapter, “Anxious Voices in the Wilderness”, frames the TV movie in the context of the times, not just the hiatus in Doctor Who production but the uncertain international situation.
The second chapter, “He’s Back, But It’s About How”, looks at the extent to which the TV movie does (and doesn’t) rely on Doctor Who continuity,
The third chapter, “Coming to America: Refining the Britishness of Doctor Who”, looks in depth at the extent to which the Doctor’s Britishness, and the show’s British roots, shaped the story. The BBC were much more involved in the scripting process than I had realised. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
As the most extreme example of the two cultures combining in Doctor Who, The Movie sheds much light on how Britishness is defined and mediated through the programme, as well as the effects of globalisation and Americanisation on the character of the show. Yet despite the movie’s explicit privileging of Britishness, Danny Nicol’s 2018 dissertation on Britishness in Doctor Who as a whole lacks any notable references to the production or story2. One possible explanation for this odd omission is that Nicol excludes from his study any elements of British culture that he considers to be non-political, such as the emotional restraint conveyed by the term ‘stiff British upper lip’3. The Movie prioritises the personal over the social. Structural or societal evils such as repressive governments or greedy multinational corporations, so often the focus of the Doctor’s ire, are entirely absent from the story. However, by Nicol’s own admission, ‘Britishness’ as a term is intrinsically political and the lack of political and social engagement in the script of The Movie is in itself a political act. Besides which, as we shall argue, the Britishness of the Doctor in the movie runs far deeper than his English accent and fondness for tea. 2 Nicol, Danny, Doctor Who: A British Alien? (2018). 3 Nicol, A British Alien, p31.
The fourth chapter, “Who Am I? Reimagining the Doctor for a New Audience” looks at the McGann Doctor’s literary roots in Frankenstein, Christ, superheroes including Batman, the Beast of Beauty and the Beast, Byronic heroes, Wild Bill Hickock and the operas Turandot and Madame Butterfly.
The fifth chapter, “The Doctor’s Nemesis”, looks not only at the Roberts Master but at the character before and since in terms of various villainous literary archetypes.
The sixth chapter, “How Well Do These Shoes Really Fit?”, looks at the continuities and discontinuities between The Movie and both old and new televised Who, starting with a strong comparison of the plot with that of The Deadly Assassin.
An appendix looks at audience reception of the movie as revealed from an online survey, and another appendix, as mentioned previously, interviews the writer Matthew Jacobs.
It’s a book that focuses very much on the script rather than on the production (except where the latter affected the former), but I still enjoyed it a lot. You can get it here.
A bit light on blogging in the last couple of days – a weekend on the road, plus reading award submissions has slowed down the number of books I can write up here. But anyway…
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.
A fair bit of travel that month, going straight from Sofia…
…to Bratislava:
…with trips to London later in the month and the Netherlands earlier in the month.
Anne had a significant birthday and we swung from the trees in celebration:
Very sadly, we lost our dear friend Andy Carling, and the European Commission spokesman who is now himself a European Commissioner) paid tribute to him.
We offer our deepest condolences after the passing of journalist Andy Carling. Our thoughts go to his family and friends. His kindness of heart and sharpness of wit will live long in our memories. pic.twitter.com/fNhJ8YaKmq
— European Commission (@EU_Commission) May 7, 2018
It’s actually our wedding anniversary today, but we’re celebrating next weekend and so instead I’m bringing you an update on our daughters.
We sometimes take B on an excursion to the Chapel of the Holy Cross at Neerwinden, the next village to where she lives. It’s a small 18th century building, on the site of the two bloody battles of Neerwinden (in 1693 and 1793), which is open for visitors most of the time.
B generally lives in her own world, and while she doesn’t often refuse to engage with the rest of us, she doesn’t rush for opportunities to do so either. However, I got her to light a candle in the Chapel of the Holy Cross last weekend – it took three goes, but she got there in the end.
Meanwhile U continues to come to us for about a third of the time. She has recently decided that she no longer wishes to attend school; she is 19 so that’s fair enough really. She is always accompanied by a green Google Android and a spoon. Her vocabulary is limited but she knows many parts of the body.
Our family is not very much like other families. But we get by, thanks to support from a decently funded welfare state.
Current Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, by Brian Aldiss Voorbij de Grenzen van de Ernst, by Kamagurka Empire Of Sand, by Tasha Suri δ1 Weapons of Past Destruction, by Cavan Scott, Blair Shedd, Rachel Stott and Anand Setyawan
Last books finished β1 Richard of Cornwall: The English King of Germany, by Darren Baker Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card Argo: How the Cia and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, by Antonio J. Mendez and Matt Baglio γ1
Next books Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi The End of the Day, by Claire North
Argo won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2011 and only two others, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film editing; Life of Pi got four Oscars, the most for that year. There were eight other films in contention for Best Picture; I have seen Les Miserables, but not Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook or Zero Dark Thirty.
The Hugo that year went to The Avengers, and SFWA’s Ray Bradbury Award to Beasts of the Southern Wild. The other films that I have seen from that year are The Hobbit part 1, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Les Miserables, Brave, Wreck it Ralph and Total Recall. Also, I haven’t yet sat down and watched the whole film, but the Bollywood dance scene set in Dublin from Ek Tha Tiger is a classic.
Sorry about that. I’m just obsessed.
Anyway, back to Argo. IMDB users rate it 10th and 20th film of the year on the different rankings, which is not brilliant but not as bad as last year’s The Artist. Ahead of it on both rankings are Django Unchained, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit 1, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Skyfall and The Amazing Spider-Man. I would also have put it middle of the pack, but some serious issues came up that bump it to a much lower position in my ranking.
Here’s a trailer.
Returning from previous Oscar winners (and one Hugo winner): first and foremost, Ben Affleck, the star and director here, was Ned Alleyn in Shakespeare in Love.
John Goodman, who is prosthetics expert John Chambers here (the man who invented Spock’s ears, received a special Oscar for Planet of the Apes, and also did Richard Harris’s chest for that scene in A Man Called Horse), was producer Al Zimmer in The Artist last year.
From a previous Hugo winner, Alan Arkin is Hollywood producer Lester Siegel here, and was paterfamilias Bill in Edward Scissorhands back in 1990. (Like many of us, he had more hair then.)
Finally, the Canadian ambassador is played by Victor Garber, who is genuinely Canadian, but I flagged him up previously for his role as the only identifiably Northern Irish character in an Oscar-winning film – Thomas Andrews, the designer of Titanic.
This is the fairly incredible story, Based On True Facts, of how the CIA with help from Canada exfiltrated six American diplomats from Tehran shortly after the seizure of the US Embassy in 1979, by posing as a Canadian film crew looking for locations to make a film version of Roger Zelazny’s great novel Lord of Light.
There are lots of things to like here. But I was dismayed to discover from the memoir by Tony Mendez, the CIA guy behind it all, that the film is significantly more white and male than the real events on which it is based. One of the trapped diplomats, Cora Lijek (who prefers Cora Amburn-Lijek) is a Japanese-American in real life; here she is with the very non-Japanese Clea DuVall who portrays her in the film. (Not that the role is very demanding; the trapped diplomats are basically peril monkeys.)
The film has only one Canadian diplomat, Ambassador Ken Taylor, and his wife Pat, who is also Asian and at least is portrayed by Chinese-Australian actor Page Leong. But in real life, the chief immigration officer and deputy Canadian ambassador, John Sheardown, played a crucial role, along with his wife Zena who is from Guyana. Here she is hosting the fugitives in her house, including Cora Amburn-Lijek on the left.
Almost everyone involved in the story on the US government side was, of course, a white man. But in the book, Mendez is very clear that one memorable meeting – where he made a remark about abortion that is preserved in the screenplay – was chaired by “an undersecretary of state, a dignified woman who was very much in charge.” It took very little research to work out that this must have been Lucy W. Benson, the first woman appointed as US Undersecretary of State; she had left office before the diplomats were successfully extracted from Iran, but would have necessarily been involved with the initial approval process. In his book, Mendez refers respectfully several times to her interventions in the crucial meeting. But on screen, everyone in the room at that meeting is male.
According to Wikipedia, when asked how he felt about being portrayed by Ben Affleck, who is non-Hispanic, Mendez (who was born in Nevada) noted that losing his father when he was young meant he did not learn Spanish nor much of his father’s culture. He said, “I don’t think of myself as a Hispanic. I think of myself as a person who grew up in the desert.” Which is fine; but Affleck did not grow up in the desert either, and his character in the film tells us that he is from New York (Affleck is from Boston), rather than Nevada. A smaller point, but Mendez in real life has three children, a daughter and two sons. In the film he has only one child. Would you like to guess… Yep.
Tony Mendez (the real one) meets President Carter
So basically, Argo whitewashes the protagonist, whitewashes one of the two significant Asian women in the story, erases the most significant black woman in the story, erases the most politically important woman in the story, and even erases the protagonist’s daughter in favour of her brother. Affleck is entitled to make the film he wants to make, and to make the artistic choices that seem right for the story he wants to tell; I too have the right to point out that a lot of these choices go in one direction and not the other, and that the story he tells is much more about white guys vs brown guys than the True Facts that it is Based On. Whitewashing, and erasing women’s agency, are par for the course in Hollywood adaptations, but I can’t remember anything this extensive since All The King’s Men removed the entire African-American population of Louisiana.
It should also be noted that the Canadians dispute the centrality of the CIA to the story, arguing that a lot more of the heavy lifting was done in Ottawa and especially by their embassy in Tehran. And it’s also clear from Mendez’ published memoir that the last-minute hitches portrayed in the film – mission almost cancelled by cold feet in Washington, Iranian security deducing the plan and storming the air traffic control tower in a futile attempt to prevent the departure – are pretty fictional. I’m more forgiving of these changes; it’s a drama, not a documentary, after all. But the Canadians do have a right to feel miffed. (As do the shades of Roger Zelazny and Jack Kirby.)
Apart from that, I quite enjoyed it. I was particularly impressed that the opening sequence described the historic relationship between Iran and the United States in detail, giving context to the hostility that led to the capture of the embassy and the imprisonment of the hostages. Those who were around at the time will remember the apparent impotence of the Carter administration, and the impact of the crisis on his prospects for re-election; for Middle East experts, of course, the 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA had already set the pattern for US involvement in the region for seventy years. After that opening sequence, the narrative of the film is very one-sided, with frothing Iranians vs innocent Westerners, but credit where it’s due – this political context was crucially missing from the Vietnam films I’ve watched in this sequence, and from The Hurt Locker.
The filmography is particularly good, with hand-held cameras among the crowd storming the embassy bringing it into focus, and the Hollywood, Washington and Tehran locations convincingly depicted. The music is suitable and not oppressive – in the hands of another director we’d have had dramatic chords all the way through to tell us what to feel.
A relatively small element of the film, but I was very struck by the story’s very cynical take on Hollywood, especially after last year’s dewey-eyed The Artist, which also featured John Goodman. The parallel between the make-believe world of Movieland and the deception of espionage is well drawn, and also Arkin and Goodman play the Hollywood scenes for just the right amount of laughs to offset the serious subject matter of the rest of the story.
Chambers: [after hearing plan to exfiltrate the house guests] So you want to come to Hollywood and act like a big shot… Mendez: Yeah. Chambers: …without actually doing anything? Mendez: No. Chambers: You’ll fit right in.
The film was enjoyable, but the erasure is so shocking that I am bumping it way way down my list to eighth last, just above All The King’s Men and below Forrest Gump.
I also read the original Wired article by Joshua Bearman which inspired the film (paywalled) and Mendez’ memoir Argo. The third paragraph of the Wired article is:
At first, the Lijeks hoped the consulate building where they worked would escape notice. Because of recent renovations, the ground floor was mostly empty. Perhaps no one would suspect that 12 Americans and a few dozen Iranian employees and visa applicants were upstairs. The group included consular officer Joseph Stafford, his assistant and wife, Kathleen, and Robert Anders, a senior officer in the visa department.
It tells much the same story as film and book, with maybe a little more emphasis on the experience of the fugitive diplomats.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the grandly titled Argo: How the Cia and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, by Antonio J. Mendez and Matt Baglio is:
From the beginning, the Carter administration faced a number of challenges. When Khomeini and the Revolutionary Council threw their support behind the takeover, there was basically nobody for the U.S. government to negotiate with. Carter tried sending two emissaries, but Khomeini refused to allow them to even enter the country. With overt diplomacy off the table, Carter then turned to his military planners, who gave him a similarly bleak assessment. If the United States were to launch a retaliatory strike, the Iranians might execute the hostages. The chance of rescue also seemed remote. Geographically, Iran was extremely isolated and the U.S. embassy compound was located in the heart of the capital city. It appeared there would be no way to get the rescuers in and back out without the Iranians knowing.
Strictly speaking, the film was based on the relevant parts of Mendez’ earlier memoir, Master of Disguise, which were then extracted, expanded and updated as the book Argo to capitalise on the film. This updating was not complete. John Chambers’ identity is concealed behind a pseudonym in the book, even though the film uses his real name and anyway he had been dead since 2001, so it hardly mattered by 2012.
But it’s a satisfying read, if obviously partisan. The book is clear about the fact that the protagonist (played by a white actor in the film) is from a Hispanic background, even if he doesn’t choose to identify in that way; that one of the fugitive diplomats was Asian-American (also played by a white actor in the film); that one of the key people on the Canadian side was a black woman (erased entirely from the film); that the senior US official who authorised the plan was a woman (erased entirely from the film); that the protagonist had a stable marriage with two sons and a daughter (rather than the broken relationship and one son portrayed in the film) and that the last-minute hitches depicted in the film are entirely fictional.
The book also gives useful context about Mendez’ previous experience of disguise and exfiltration, including various capers in Iran itself, in other Middle Eastern countries and in south-east Asia. He is frank about the shortcomings of the USA’s governmental wiring diagram and comments approvingly that the Canadians with a lighter government structure were able to make things happen much more quickly than the Americans. And even without the fictional last-minute threats to the success of the mission, the truth is quite dramatic enough. You can get it here.
Next up: that year’s SFWA Bradbury winner, Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 76) Political Animals, by Bev Laing Matt Smith: The Biography, by Emily Herbert Doctor Who (1996), by Paul Driscoll The Dæmons, by Matt Barber Richard of Cornwall: The English King of Germany, by Darren Baker Argo: How the Cia and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, by Antonio J. Mendez and Matt Baglio
Non-genre 1 (YTD 14) Mr Britling Sees It Through, by H.G. Wells
SF 8 (YTD 77) The Traders’ War, by Charles Stross Brasyl, by Ian McDonald Jocasta, by Brian Aldiss Black Man, by Richard Morgan α1 β1 Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card γ1
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26) Fear of the Web, by Alyson Leeds Doctor Who – The Movie, by Gary Russell Doctor Who and the Dæmons, by Barry Letts
Comics 1 (YTD 14) A Matter of Life and Death, by George Mann, Emma Vieceli and Hi Fi
5,700 pages (YTD 55,500) 6/19 (YTD 84/211) by non-male writers (Laing, Herbert, β1, γ1, Leeds, Vieceli) 2/19 (YTD 27/211) by a non-white writer (Mendez, α1)
368 books currently tagged “unread”, 8 more than last month, with award submissions coming in
Reading now Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, by Brian Aldiss Voorbij de Grenzen van de Ernst, by Kamagurka Empire Of Sand, by Tasha Suri δ1
Coming soon (perhaps) Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi The End of the Day, by Claire North The Harem of Aman Akbar, by Elizabeth Scarborough Null States, by Malka Older Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney La Femme, by Storm Constantine The Bad Christian’s Manifesto, by Dave Tomlinson The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray Song of Time, by Ian R. MacLeod The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell Schrödinger’s Kitten, by George Alec Effinger Metamorphoses, by Ovid What If? by Randall Munroe Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Thirteen, by Richard Morgan The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells Roadside Picnic, by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky Neptune – Épisode 1, by Leo
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
We had a fantastic family trip to (North) Macedonia over Easter weekend:
It was a busy month. I also saw Gillian Anderson at FACTS in Gent:
I met Senator George Mitchell, the broker of the Nothern Ireland peace process, in Oxford:
Went to Albania again, with my colleague E:
And also went to Dublin for a Worldcon planning weekend, arriving on my birthday (oddly enough, I am doing exactly the same this coming weekend, but not arriving on my birthday which is in April).
She was lying in a hospital bed, which admittedly came as no great surprise. On waking, Anne had thought she’d recognised the particular combination of not-too-comfortable mattress and highly starched linen, which only came with institutional bedding; the old-fashioned brushed nylon nightie she was wearing was something of a giveaway, too. She was not in a ward, however, but a private room – and a quite recently decorated one at that, judging by the faint smell of fresh paint lingering beneath the sharp tang of disinfectant. To her left was a small wooden bedside cabinet, on which was placed a carafe of water, a somewhat ‘retro’ (Anne hated that word!) Sony Digimatic digital clock, displaying the time of 10:23, and a hideously large bouquet of red-orange roses in a vase. To her right there was a solitary modern-style armchair upholstered in cream leather-effect vinyl, and a window gave her a view of what looked like a sort of urban green or common, over the far side of which stood a Victorian gothic church with a square tower. Her immediate surroundings seemed quiet, the muffled sound of human voices and movement coming distantly from elsewhere in the building, while outside she could just about discern the steady rumble of traffic, albeit deadened by the thick glass of the window.
The next in the Lethbridge-Stewart series of spinoff novels, and the second in the Laughing Gnome sub-series. The author wrote a good short story in one of the earlier collections.
I have generally enjoyed this whole sequence, and was a bit dismayed when I rather bounced off the previous installment, Scary Monsters; but I’m glad to say that order has been restored, and I very much enjoyed this rewriting of what is already alternative history, where the Brigadier and Anne Travers find themselves projected back in time to the events of The Web of Fear, with a danger that Doctor Who continuity history could go off the rails. You can get it here.
Next in my sequence of books that have won the Clarke, Tiptree/Otherwise and BSFA Best Novel Awards. I had read two out of these three before.
The second paragraph of the third chapter (“File Three”) of The Carhullan Army is:
I did not know how I had kicked away the iron walls and freed up enough space to straighten my legs and uncurl my back. My thoughts were slow to arrive and difficult to arrange. If the door of the dog box was open I could escape. If the pen was like a puzzle, somehow I had decoded it, made one sprung move, one solving turn, and the sides of the cage had released. I could sleep. The stool was gone and I was lying in the dirt. And yet it was smooth and there was the fragrance of soap.
When I first read The Carhullan Army in 2008, I wrote:
I thought it was a very good book. The setting is a near-future Britain, underpopulated and oppressed due to climate change and war; the narrator, a woman known only as “Sister”, flees her native town to join a community of women in the Lake District, and they spend the rest of the book preparing for their struggle with Authority (ie the government). This is the kind of story that is often done embarrassingly badly (see, for instance, Sherri S Tepper on occasion, or The Rising of the Moon) but Hall does it well; Carhullan is emphatically not a utopia, nor is it destined to be a permanent answer to an unjust society, and the leader Jackie and her colleagues are memorable figures. Some readers will be reminded of The Dispossessed, or The Handmaid’s Tale, and I guess it’s fair to say that if you didn’t like either of those books The Carhullan Army will leave you cold. But actually I felt it was also perhaps a response to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, where the protagonists are engaged in essentially a selfish struggle to get through their post-apocalyptic landscape to (if I remember rightly) the Lake District; the Carhullan Army have a more altruistic and redeeming purpose.
Rereading, I still enjoyed it. The feminist community is not a utopia; it’s a very flawed society, which is still better than the alternative. The theme of eco-catastrophe is all the more relevant in 2022. The characterisation is desperate and convincing. Well worth returning to. You can get it here.
The Carhullan Army won the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award for 2008. The shortlist included six novels, of which I have read two (Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce and Glasshouse by Charles Stross), a short story, an anthology, and a comic series of which I have read the last volume. It was also on the shortlist for the Clarke Award. From what I’ve read, the jurors made the best choice.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Brasyl (“Our Lady of Trash”) is:
“I know a hundred World Cup Stories.” Raimundo Soares watched his weight drop into the glowing water. He claimed to be the last professional carioca; sometime journalist, sometime writer with a good book about the new bossa nova, a better book about Ronaldo Fenômeno, and a so-so guide to how to be a professional carioca on his backlist. A little fishing early with the brothers, a little cafezinho when the heat got up, a few hundred words on the laptop, the rest of the afternoon he’d spend in a cafe, watching ass on its way to the beach, or strolling around his city, remembering it, memorizing it. In the evening, receptions, parties, openings, his many lovers: a late sleep and up again at fish-jump. He claimed to have worn nothing but surf-Ts and Bermuda shorts for twenty years, even to his own mother’s funeral. He was the loafer, the malandro who doesn’t have to try too hard, carioca of cariocas: they should make him a Living Treasure. “This is true. David Beckham comes to Rio; he’s going to play at the Maracanã for a benefit for Pelé. He’s the guest of the CBF, so he’s got the wife, the kids; everything. They put him up at the Copa Palace, nothing’s too much trouble for Senhor Becks; presidential suite, private limo, the lot. Anyway, one evening he goes out for a little kick-about on the beach and these hoods jump him. Guns and everything, one two three, into the car and he’s gone. Lifted. Right under his guards’ noses. So there’s Beckham in the back with these malandros with the gold-plated guns thinking, Oh sweet Jesus, I am dead. Posh is a widow and Brooklyn and Romeo will grow up never knowing their father. Anyway, they take him up into Rocinha, up the Estrada da Gávea, and then from that on to a smaller road, and from that onto an even smaller road until it’s so steep and narrow the car can’t go any farther. So they bundle him out and take him up the ladeira at gunpoint and anytime anyone sticks so much as a nostril out of their house, the hoods pull an Uzi on them; up and up and up, right up to the top of the favela, and they take him into this tiny little concrete room right under the tree line and there’s Bem- Te-Vi, the big drug lord. This was back before they shot him. And he stands there, and he looks at Beckham this way, and he looks at Beckham that way; he looks at Beckham every way, like he’s looking at a car, and then he makes a sign and in comes this guy with a big sack. Beckham thinks, Jesus and Mary, what’s going on here? Then Bem-Te-Vi stands beside him and they pull out the World Cup, the original Jules Rimet, solid gold and everything, right Out of the sack. Bem-Te-Vi takes one side, Beckham takes the other, and this guy gets out a digital camera, says, ‘Smile, Mr. Beckham.’ Click! Flash! And then Bem-Te-Vi tutns to Becks and shakes his hand and says, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Beckham, it’s been a real honor… Oh, by the way… if anyone ever finds out about this…’’’
Ian McDonald’s latest. The setting of Brazil fits his lush, dense writing style so well that it is remarkable that he’s never set a novel in real South America before (his two books set on Mars portray a rather Patagonian version of the planet, but it’s not quite the same). We have three interleaving narratives, from the mid-18th century, the present day, and the near future (2030); we have peculiar variations of reality; and we have the jungle, both urban and literal, with its various hostile inhabitants. In some ways it’s deliberately less ambitious than River of Gods, which juggled ten different viewpoint characters against the background of India forty years hence, but the intermeshing of the different characters from their different time periods in the end comes across rather pleasingly.
I wasn’t quite as blown away on re-reading. The three different timeline settings are superbly realised, but I was not as convinced about the link between them. Still very enjoyable. You can get it here.
Brasyl won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. I’ve read all but one of the other finalists: Alice in Sunderland, Black Man aka Thirteen (see below), The Execution Channel, and Hugo and Nebula winner The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the other being The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds. I didn’t vote that year, but I’d probably have gone along with the majority. Alice in Sunderland is a great book, but it’s only tenuously sf. Brasyl was also on the final ballot for both Hugo and Nebula, unlike The Carhullan Army or Black Man / Thirteen.
I had not previously read Black Man, published as Thirteen in the USA. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The siren hit, upward-winding like the threat of a gigantic dentist’s drill.
I’ve read a couple of other books by Richard Morgan, and this seemed to me in character with them and perhaps a little more under control. The viewpoint character is a genetically engineered “Thirteen” in a near-future (early 22nd century) world where people like him are regarded with suspicion by society and mostly exiled to Mars. There is a murder mystery with explosive political ramifications, some nasty violence (this is the bit of Morgan’s expertise that I don’t especially appreciate), some desperate sex and a very well-written death scene. Like all murder mysteries, the point is to get the reader from A to B while admiring the scenery and wondering how the route will twist next, and it certainly succeeds very well in that. You can get it here.
Black Man won the Arthur C. Clarke Award under that title. The other finalists included two books that I have read and already referred to above, The Carhullan Army and The Execution Channel, and three that I haven’t: The H-Bomb Girl, by Stephen Baxter; The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall; and The Red Men, by Matthew de Abaitua. I think if I had been a Clarke judge that year, I’d probably have argued strongly for The Carhullan Army.
Next up are the 2010 winners for books published in 2009: Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod (Clarke winner), Filter House by Nisi Shawl (joint Tiptree winner), The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod (BSFA winner) and The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (joint Tiptree winner).
But one man didn’t think like this. He believed that Doctor Who had a huge role to play in the twenty-first century, that the franchise was not dead but sleeping, and that, in short, it was high time Doctor Who made a comeback. And this particular man was in a position to do something about it.
A rather fluffy biography which I hope I picked up cheap somewhere, first published in 2010 and hastily updated for the paperback edition in 2012, with at least as much about the history of Doctor Who as about the new star, whose career had lasted less than a decade at the time of writing. (Since then of course, he’s been Prince Philip and is now Daemon Targaryen.)
Emily Herbert specialises in celebrity biographies and this is not one of her top rated works on Goodreads or LibraryThing. (For the record, her top-rated works are her biographies of Robin Williams and Lady Gaga.) She does a decent job of making bricks out of straw here, and explains the history of Doctor Who rather well to a target audience whose interest may be less than obsessive. But the really interesting biography (or autobiography) of Matt Smith will be written a couple of decades from now. Meanwhile you can get this one here.
As mentioned previously, I got elected earlier this month to the World Science Fiction Society’s Mark Protection Committee, which works to preserve the intellectual property of the terms WSFS, Hugo, Lodestar, etc. It’s a three year term, with three people elected every year by those who turn up to the Business Meeting (and a number of other members appointed in various ways).
This was actually my second attempt; I had put my name forward at the previous election in December 2021, when unusually six members were elected due to the peculiar circumstances of 2020. I was not elected, probably due to not being at the meeting itself (which made a number of other bad decisions). I did find this a bit surprising; I’m not exactly invisible in these discussions, and a number of people told me that they had voted for me. But we move on, and I got in this time.
I had not realised that the MPC is elected in the same way as Hugo final ballot places are determined. A separate single-seat STV election is held for each seat, with candidates elected in previous rounds excluded and their votes redistributed to the next preference. This is a pretty crazy way to run a multi-seat election. For the Hugo ballot, we want to ascertain the collective will of the majority at every stage, and don’t particularly care about representing minority views. But applied to a committee election, you are basically allowing a majority of voters to determine every one of the seats, and excluding minority views entirely. The result will represent the strongest faction and nobody else.
All public elections which use the Single Transferable Vote to elect more than one candidate (both parts of Ireland, Malta, most of Australia for Senate and state assembly elections, municipal elections in Scotland, New Zealand and some US cities) instead establish a quota of votes that a candidate must exceed to get elected. If you get more votes than the quota, the surplus is redistributed to the next available preferences. It seems to me to get the best balance possible between voter impact on the result, proportionality of outcome between different political groups, and encouraging accountability from elected representatives.
If the election had been a standard multi-member STV election, my 9 first preferences would have taken me to just below the quota (which would have been 10 or 9.3 or 9.29 or 9.286, depending on the precise system) and I would probably have picked up a transfer from somewhere and got in. It’s not just about me: the candidate with the second highest number of first preferences came fourth, and would not have been elected in a normal three-seat year.
WSFS moves slowly, so I don’t expect that this ridiculous situation will be fixed any time soon. But it has implications if WSFS were ever to move to a more manageable system of electing a standing Council of some kind, with executive powers, rather than the archaic Business Meeting, as has been proposed by Kevin Standlee. There would definitely need to be provisions for such a committee to have broad representation engineered into it, and the current system used for the Hugo final ballot and the MPC will not deliver that.
Current Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, by Brian Aldiss Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card Richard of Cornwall: The English King of Germany, by Darren Baker β1
Last books finished Black Man aka Thirteen, by Richard Morgan Doctor Who and the Dæmons, by Barry Letts The Dæmons, by Matt Barber α1
Next books Empire Of Sand, by Tasha Suri Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi
The Avengers won the 2013 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. It had a pretty thumping victory at both stages.
It beat The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which I have seen, and The Cabin in the Woods, The Hunger Games and Looper, which I haven’t. IMDB users rate it 3rd and 8th film of the year on the two rankings. In both cases it is behind The Dark Knight Rises, which I’m really surprised to see came as low as eleventh in the Hugo nomination rankings. (Beasts of the Southern Wild, which won the Ray Bradbury Award, came twelfth.) From the long list I also saw and enjoyed Brave and Wreck-It Ralph. I didn’t vote in that Hugo category that year.
Despite the star-studded cast, just one actor who’d been in previous Hugo winners and one who had been in an Oscar-winning film. Samuel L. Jackson presides here as Nick Fury; in 1993 he was the scientist Arnold in Jurassic Park, and also the voice of Frozone in The Incredibles in 2004.
And Gwyneth Paltrow gets one scene here as Pepper Potts, having won an Oscar as Viola in Shakespeare in Love a decade ago.
This is a film about a bunch of superheroes, the Avengers, getting together and biffing Loki, the god of Asgard, who wants to take over the world. (Or destroy it, I got a little lost.) I think it looks great but I’m not terribly invested in the Marvel mythology, so I’m putting it quite a long way down my rankings, in 40th place out of 53, below The Princess Bride but above The Incredibles.
I had my fourth COVID jab yesterday morning and am feeling under the weather today, so I’ll be brief. The performances are good, but I actually found the script a bit disappointing. My heart lifted when I saw Joss Whedon’s name on the credits; surely we can expect the same crackling humour that he often delivered for Buffy? But there’s not a lot of it.
Thor: Have a care how you speak! Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard and he is my brother! Natasha Romanoff: He killed eighty people in two days. Thor: He’s adopted.
The fight scenes are well choreographed and the effects are superb.
But basically it’s a film that is intended to set up and develop the Marvel mythos, and I’m just not terribly interested in that even though it does the job well.
Next up will be that year’s Oscar winner, Argo, the closest that the late great Roger Zelazny ever got to a cinematic award. (If you don’t know, I’ll explain…)
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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.
As usual a busy month, with two work trips to London and one to Albania; I finished the month in Skopje, on my first ever non-work trip to North Macedonia, dining with my family and my friend Stevo Pendarovski (who is in a different job now). To my delight, when boarding my plane home from Tirana, I saw the planet Mercury for the first time in my life.
They also have public art in Tirana, as my colleague M and I discovered.
“Have to do my fourteen miles before lunch,” he said. “You haven’t seen Manning about, have you?”
I had no expectations whatsoever of this novel, originally published in 1916, one of the last of the novels in my big H.G. Wells collection. I found it a really impressive work, one of the best non-sf novels by Wells that I have read. Mr Britling is a self-parody of the author, a complacent intellectual writer with a nice place in the country, extended family around him and a lover in London. In 1914 he thinks that war is impossible, and if it comes it will be brief because sensible people of all countries will reject it. It turns out that he is wrong, and his world diminishes through loss and tragedy. I like Wells all the more for putting such a flawed version of himself front and centre; Britling is a very imperfect human being, but his tragedy is discovering that the imperfections of the world he lives in are much worse than he had imagined. There are some nice and respectful bits with Belgian refugees as well. You can get it here.
Continuing my journey through my substantial backlog of Doctor Who comics, I’m now at this Eighth Doctor collection from 2016. I have generally rated George Mann poorly as a writer, and so I am glad to say that I really enjoyed these five linked stories, in which the Eighth Doctor finds a young artist squatting in his country house and takes her on a series of adventures. The third, in which sinister entities emerge from mirrors, is particularly good.
My one complaint is that artist Emma Vieceli’s depiction of the Eighth Doctor doesn’t look a lot like Paul McGann. (The cover is by someone else, I think.)
But otherwise this came as a pleasant surprise and I will give George Mann’s work at least a second glance in future. You can get it here.
Next up: the Ninth Doctor in Weapons of Past Destruction.
Third section (illustrated by a picture of a small boy standing under an elephant’s belly):
No matter how much you feed a wolf, an elephant still has bigger BALLS. Russian popular saying.
One of those New Internationalist books. A series of quotes about how humans, especially politicians, behave like animals, and also how we should treat animals a bit more like we treat humans, illustrated with cute animal photos. I am sympathetic to the sentiments, on the whole, but I found the delivery rather sanctimonious. You can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book I acquired in 2015, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are La Femme, by Storm Constantine, and The Bad Christian’s Manifesto, by Dave Tomlinson.
So. My original plan when I booked today’s visit to London, two weeks ago, was to work from our London office today and tomorrow before getting the last Eurostar on Tuesday. But it turned out that for some reason the office would be closed today. Fine, I said to myself, I’ll work from my hotel room for the day, and fulfill a long-standing Monday evening social commitment.
Then, to my dismay, I found on arrival that the hotel’s rooms are completely unsuitable for work – no desk, no comfortable chair, and worst of all, no coffee. Entirely my own fault for not reading the small print when booking, but my plans of today being a normal remote working day disintegrated. I tossed and turned in bed last night, wondering what to do. My mood shifted from frustration to sorrow with the news that we have lost Maureen Kincaid Speller, just one day after she was given a lifetime achievement award by the British Fantasy Society.
And then it all came together. The first funeral I remember attending was my grandmother’s, in 1979, when I was twelve; she was born in Philadelphia in 1899, died after a period of ill health in a nursing home near Hook in Hampshire, and is buried in Brookwood Cemetery, the largest graveyard in Europe, southwest of London. I have not been there since. Given what else has been happening today, and also given that I tracked down her grandparents last month, it felt appropriate to try and find her.
In parenthesis – some people have been asking me for my take on the transition in the British monarchy, as some are euphemistically putting it. I decided not to renew my British passport in 2017, and in general I think it is better to elect your head of state, preferably by qualified majority in Parliament or a electoral college, though I’ll take a popular vote if that’s what’s on offer. Liz Truss was right in 1994 (I was in the room when this happened).
But of course it is a massive crunch to lose a physical link with the past. Very few people can remember a time before the late Queen’s reign. Without really knowing much about her, everyone felt connected to her. Monarchy is bad for the royals, but she managed to persuade her subjects that it is good for the country, without ever having to say so directly.
I watched the ceremony this morning and then walked from Trafalgar Square over the Golden Jubilee Bridge to Waterloo station. Lots of people were standing silently, staring in the direction of Westminster. You can see the massed crowds in the distance in the photo I took of Parliament with its flag at half mast.
It takes 45 minutes to get to Brookwood from Waterloo by train. Today being (of course) a public holiday, the cemetery offices were closed, but I had done a bit of research. My grandmother rests with two of her aunts, her uncle by marriage, and her maternal grandmother. (Her uncle and aunt had no children of their own, but informally adopted my grandmother after her own mother’s early death.) Her uncle, Sir Robert Hadfield, was rich and famous, so I guessed that he might be in one of the posher parts of the cemetery according to a map I found in an academic paper on the social stratification of burials at Brookwood.
But before I get there, I have to say that I was really impressed by the way that Brookwood was designed as, and has remained, a resting place for those of many faiths from the start – Muslims, Zoroastrians, Ismailis, all have space reserved. (I guess that Jews and Hindus have their own arrangements?) It was a bit of a contrast with the very Christian ceremony that I had watched before catching the train, and seemed to me more reflective of England as it really is.
I wandered around the three poshest sections of the southern (Anglican) part of the cemetery, but found no Hadfields. The weather was pleasant this afternoon, fortunately, and I detoured over to the Orthodox shrine of St Edward the Martyr, King of England, who was murdered in 978, a thousand and one years before my grandmother died. After a series of improbable events, he now rests in Brookwood, the longest dead of anyone known to be there, the earliest ruler of England with an identified resting place.
Father Niphon is camera shy, but gave me a tour of the shrine and then a cup of tea. The monks have a sense of humour.
Father Niphon then unearthed a book by John Clark listing famous graves in Brookwood. (On the wall he has a photograph of John Clark presenting him with the book.) To my delight, Sir Robert Hadfield, my great-great-uncle, is among those listed. So I headed straight off to Plot 34, the D-shaped plot east of the small circular plot that is the focus of the southern part of the cemetery, to look for him, his wife, his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law and his niece. I felt a bit like Tuco at the end of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and I confess that I was whistling “The Ecstasy of Gold”, startling a young deer which was the only other large living animal around.
Plot 34 is quite big, and I was (unwisely, as it transpired) guided by a four-decades-ago memory of a gravesite near the path, with arch-shaped headstones. I toured Plot 34 twice looking for such graves with Wickersham / Hadfield / Whyte inscriptions, and was on the point of giving up when I returned to John Clark’s book, and realised that he had left an important clue in the description.
There are really not a lot of conifer-hedged allotments in Brookwood at all, never mind in Plot 34.
And at the entrance to the enclosure I found her, with the others close by.
My memory was completely wrong; it is about as far from the path as you can get in Plot 34, and there are no headstones at all – the memorials are all at ground level. It’s in pretty good shape, though several hours later I am still brushing conifer twiglets out of my hair and clothes.
I remember my grandmother best when she was already frail, but it has been good to renew my acquaintance with her from her memoirs. Here she tells of how her grandmother died when they were on holiday in Italy together at Lake Como. My grandmother had just turned thirteen, a little older than I was when she in turn died.
Triumphantly I returned to the metropolis. As I crossed back north of the river towards Charing Cross, a busker was playing a tuba which belched flames in tune with an Abba recording. Which Abba song? Which do you think!
I had a very good morning of research in the Massachusetts Historical Society at the end of last month. My grandmother’s cousin Henry Seaver (a noted architect, probably named after my great-grandfather Henry Hibbard, and the father of writer Elizabeth Helfman) had carried out a lot of research of his own, including interviewing several of his surviving relatives; his daughter then lodged his papers with the MHS in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I’m going to salute the approachability of the Massachusetts Historical Society. They were very helpful in how best to deal with archival material (I have handled twelfth-century manuscripts in the past, but they could not have known that), and crucially they allow photography of everything, provided that you do not use a flash. This basically meant that rather than spend hours copying someone else’s unreadable handwriting into my own unreadable handwriting, as I have done in my previous archival work decades ago, I was able to instantly capture everything for later analysis.
The most glorious find was in fact an 1889 letter from Henry Seaver’s uncle, my great-great-uncle Thomas Hibbard, to Henry’s mother, my great-great-aunt Susan Seaver, saying that he had been doing research in the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Genealogical Society on the origins of the Hibbard family. I failed to leave a message at the MHS for my own great-great-nephew or -niece to find in the year 2145.
Last Tuesday I visited the rooms of the Mass[achusetts] Historical Society, and the N[ew] E[ngland] Genealogical Society to try to find out something about this Rob[er]t Hibbard of Salem. I only found that he was a salt maker in S[alem] 1639 and afterwards removed to Windham Conn[ecticut]. Could not find his name in the emigration list to tell what vessel he came in or when. Perhaps the genealogy will tell and I am anxious to see it completed.
There was plenty more. I have writtenbefore about the mysterious origins of my great-great-grandmother. She was Henry Seaver’s grandmother, and he wrote a memo in his notebooks which totally contradicts my speculations about her maternal ancestry:
On Mar 2 1908 my mother [Susan Seaver, my g-g-aunt, who died the following year] wrote me as follows about her mother’s family: “On my mother’s side, her father died when she was 11 yrs. old. He was a sailor and was impressed about 1812, imprisoned at Dartmoor, and there contracted the consumption from which he finally died. His name was John Smith and hailed from Portsmouth, N.H. I think, or Dover, N.H. as my mother was born there. My mother knew very little about her ancestors as no one cared much about such things in her day. I tried once to hunt up Judith Locke my mother’s grandmother. She was born at Barnstead N.H.. I found out by her burial certificate that her father’s name was James and mother’s was Sarah but no last name was given. She died in 1852 at the age of 91 (I think, haven’t time now to look it up in the Bible). She wa a little girl at the time of the Revolution and held me in her arms when I as an infant. She died out here in the old house, then a new one.” (West Roxbury)
Other notes on Smith family written by my mother told her by her mother: “Dr Smith was a Scotch physician who came to this country with his son John Smith, but not liking the country he returned. That is all she knew of her family on her father’s side.:
John Smith b. Scotland Nov 14 1784 died Dec 6 1827 married Jan 23 1812 Sally Lock they had 3rd child Sarah Ann Smith my [Henry Seaver’s] grandmother [my great-great-grandmother]
I am tremendously grateful to Patrick Nielsen Hayden for leading me to the genealogical trail which connects me through the original Cleveland settler, Moses Cleveland, to my sixth cousin three times removed President Grover Cleveland, to my ninth cousin, sf writer Fritz Leiber, to Leiber’s third cousin, also my ninth cousin, Shirley Temple, and to my Worldcon colleague and seventh cousin twice removed Jesi Lipp.
Having sorted out Sarah’s paternity to my own satisfaction, her mother’s lineage is the biggest trailing thread of my American ancestry. Henry Seaver wrote another note summarising what he knew, which was not much.
Judith Lock born Barnstead N.H. Jan 1 1762 d. West Roxbury Mass Nov 30 1852 married (not known) Lock her maiden name not known, her father was James, mother Sarah ? [children] Sally Lock b. July 27 1793 d. Jan 28 1870 Ann Burbank Lock b. May 18 1796 d. Nov 29 1845 m. Jos. Akarman
Sally Lock married John Smith Jan 23 1810 [children] John Smith, Dover family Sarah Ann Smith b Ap 3 1815 d Nov 18 1891 Susan Watkins Smith Heath whose oil portrait we have [what happened to it?] (4 other children) Sarah Ann Smith married William C Hibbard Apr 3 1849 and the descendants are the Seaver ancestors in this book. [later note] and Mary J. who married John Deming of St Louis a Union pilot on the Mississippi River in the War.
I took the opportunity to meet up with the descendants of Sarah Ann Smith and her husband William Charlton Hibbard. The day before I met in Plymouth with W, one of my third cousins through my great-grandfather’s older brother Thomas (who wrote the letter quoted at the top of this post); we had met in February but failed to take photos.
The following day I met for the first time with a bunch of third cousins, and the younger of the two surviving members of the generation above us, and we paid our respects at the graves of our great-great-grandparents in West Roxbury.
Left to right: L1, the younger of the two surviving great-grandchildren of Sarah and William Hibbard J, L’s nephew, my third cousin L2, L1’s niece and J’s brother, also my third cousin P, daughter of the baby in the park, also my third cousin, second cousin of J and L2, first cousin of W Me
This came after a great fish lunch in Dedham – can you call it a family reunion when many of those present had never met before? My brother WW came to the lunch, but was not able to come to the graveyard; the other W, who I had seen two days before, was not able to come at all, but sent his wife and mother-in-law to represent his part of the family.
Left to right: R, W’s mother-in-law WW, my brother J L1 N, W’s wife L2 P Me
This was not the first such family excursion. In 1934, my great-grandfather Henry Hibbard together with his brother Thomas Hibbard, great-grandfather of J, L2, P and W, and grandfather of L1 in the photos above, led a family gathering to New Hampshire to the home of their great-grandfather. There were 23 of them on that occasion, 88 years ago. We only had eight attendees; maybe we’ll have more next time.
