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.
This was the month I started Instagram, which I don’t spend a lot of time on, but I do enjoy it. My first post:
Pleased with this pic of my then colleague C and Captain Europe at an EU Tweetup. Captain Europe has mostly retired from being a superhero now, and C has moved to San Francisco and just had a baby.
~4,700 pages (YTD 37,450)
5/15 by women (YTD 38/144) – Wills x2, Heyer, Jansson, Kress
1/15 by PoC (YTD 11/144) – Luo
The best of these were Rory Rapple’s gripping treatment of sixteenth century Irish political violence, which you can get here, and Tove Jansson’s semi-autobiographical short story collection, which you can get here.
I was unexcited and somewhat bored by The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which you can get here (in what may be a better translation).
Fri, 16:25: RT @BrusselsTimes: Just six weeks after the Consultative Committee launched the coronavirus barometer, Belgium is already moving into ‘code…
Fri, 16:52: RT @AmIRightSir: Paulette Hamilton’s election in Birmingham Erdington means that 12 of the last 13 Commons by-election winners have been wo…
Sat, 01:57: RT @chicagoworldcon: (1/5) Don’t forget that nominations for the 2022 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding…
Sequel to the very entertaining Catfishing on CatNet, which won the 2020 Lodestar Award. Takes the story and most of the same characters in quite a new direction with a second rather less cute AI, a riff on Pokemon Go, and a slightly divergent timeline where Minneapolis and St Paul have successfully reformed their police as demanded by Black Lives Matter. Lots of good stuff, plenty for YA readers, and older readers, to chew on. You can get it here.
Fri, 05:50: RT @coreyspowell: For the first time, astronomers have discovered a quadruple asteroid. Three asteroid moons dance around Elektra, a 200-k…
Fri, 06:53: RT @KyivIndependent: ⚡️Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reports that the fire has been put out at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station i…
The novel-length version of Damnation Alley, which Zelazny expanded from the original novella at the suggestion of his agent, provides more explanation of how its protagonist Hell Tanner became the outlaw he is.2 On the whole, the additional material nonetheless slows the momentum of the original story, particularly when Zelazny allows himself lyrical interludes, typical of his earlier work and often quite striking in themselves, which are significantly different in tone from the rest of the narrative. There is little reason to disagree with Krulik’s conclusion that the additional material does not “really satisfy the simple requirements of an action-adventure tale” or with Zelazny’s stated preference for the novella version.3 The other three novels of the 1969–1970 period are significant achievements that, collectively, mark the conclusion of the first period of Zelazny’s career while also looking ahead to the work that would follow in the 1970s. 2 Zelazny, introduction to “Damnation Alley,” Last Defender of Camelot, 125; Lindskold, Roger Zelazny, 111. 3 Krulik, Roger Zelazny, 61; Zelazny, introduction to “Damnation Alley,” Last Defender of Camelot, 125. Compare “He Who Shapes,” which Zelazny also preferred to its novel version, The Dream Master.
It's great to see more academic attention to one of my favourite authors, with Cox strongly defending Zelazny against the allegation that after his meteoric rise in the mid-1960s, he started pumping out potboilers for money, and going through each of his novels and also his best known short stories. There are some pretty convincing biographical readings of some of Zelazny's earlier works, especially looking at the roots of "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" in his relationship with the singer Hedy West, and some good defences of the later novels (though I think it's a tough case to make for some of them).
But I'm sorry to say that I didn't get as much out of this as I did from the books on Zelazny by Carl Yoke and Jane Lindskold. There are some irritating lapses of detail. Zelazny's first wife's maiden name was Steberl, not Stebrel. The underwater version of Amber is Rebma not Remba. "All Men are Mortal" is by Simone de Beauvoir, not Jean-Paul Sartre (a particularly ironic mistake to make). A lot is made of the literary roots of Zelazny's novel Isle of the Dead, but the actual painting by Böcklin, which is explicitly referred to by the narrator, is not mentioned by Barr.
And the missing bit for me is Zelazny's own attitude to religion. His father was born in Poland; his mother was Irish-American. An only child, was he brought up with pre-Vatican II bells and smells every Sunday? Or did his fascination with mythology arise from high school and home education?
This is the latest in the University of illinois' series on Masters of Modern Science Fiction; I've read three others, of which I likedtwo and wasn't as impressed by the third. You can get this one here. (Amazon lists it as Volume 1, but it's at least the fifteenth in this series.)
Wed, 12:56: Four ways the war in Ukraine might end https://t.co/UAvlQMqL67 None of this is particularly good, but some scenarios are more awful than others.
Wed, 14:49: RT @nwbrux: When you discover that someone you’ve known online for years is standing ten metres away from you…
Wed, 16:05: How Russian Sanctions Work https://t.co/2K66JEmg6W Specifically, how powerful the move against the Central Bank will be.
Thu, 08:31: Waited 30 mins (0730-0800) in the cold at Oud-Heverlee station for the @NMBS vervangbus. It never came and I had to ask someone for a ride in their car. No information about when it would arrive; probably it didn’t.
Thu, 10:45: RT @GregJaffe: This is more than any one person should know about tires. But also interesting. Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk…
To be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand feet — and to that height Bert Smallways presently rose — is like nothing else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to man. No flying machine can ever better it. It is to pass extraordinarily out of human things. It is to be still and alone to an unprecedented degree. It is solitude without the suggestion of intervention; it is calm without a single irrelevant murmur. It is to see the sky. No sound reaches one of all the roar and jar of humanity, the air is clear and sweet beyond the thought of defilement. No bird, no insect comes so high. No wind blows ever in a balloon, no breeze rustles, for it moves with the wind and is itself a part of the atmosphere. Once started, it does not rock nor sway; you cannot feel whether it rises or falls. Bert felt acutely cold, but he wasn’t mountain-sick; he put on the coat and overcoat and gloves Butteridge had discarded — put them over the “Desert Dervish” sheet that covered his cheap best suit — and sat very still for a long, time, overawed by the new-found quiet of the world. Above him was the light, translucent, billowing globe of shining brown oiled silk and the blazing sunlight and the great deep blue dome of the sky.
Next in my sequence of novels by H.G. Wells, this is one I really knew nothing about. It was written in 1907 and set in the very near future, maybe the late 1910s. Global society is suddenly and swiftly transformed by technology: the invention of a super-efficient monorail changes the dynamic of industry and commerce, and advances in aeronautic engineering make old military concepts and procedures irrelevant. Our hero, Bert Smallways, gets comically mistaken for the great British inventor Butteridge by the German war fleet, and accompanies them on their surprise attack on America. As a result of the outbreak of war, civilisation collapses.
To get the bad bits out of the way first: I don't like Wells' consistently patronising attitude to people of the social class of his protagonist. Having now read Claire Tomalin, I realise that it's overcompensation because he came from that background himself. But I still don't like it. Also, while mocking the Western fear of the Yellow Peril, he ends up there himself, including depicting a unified jihad from the Gobi Desert to Morocco. Though perhaps that can be excused as a corrective to imperial determinism, which was certainly the dominant take of his day.
The first use of aeroplanes in combat was not until 1911. (Italian planes versus Turkish troops in Libya, since you ask.) Wells depicts a world of rapidly developing technologies, with fixed-wing tactics vying with dirigible airships for usefulness. Of course in real life the airships turned out to be less useful, and military investment went into planes, but it wasn't a bad guess. He also spots the important point that air domination is not enough without a strong ground follow-up.
I think he was also unusual for his time in describing just how devastating an air-led total war would be on the global economy. His chain reaction didn't quite happen in 1939-45, but since then we've been very alert to the prospects of atomic warfare.
And I must say that a real chill went down my spine as he described a successful assault by air on New York. 2001 is not that long ago…
Still, it's a book of its time, and I couldn't really recommend it to anyone who was not, like I have become, a Wells completist. You can get it here.
My next Wells novel is A Modern Utopia, of which I know nothing.
Tue, 12:56: RT @Justin_Br0nk: The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force. My analysis for RUSI on the surprisingly minimal Russian fast jet s…
Tue, 14:23: RT @JeremyCliffe: Gerhard Schröder’s *entire* office staff has resigned over his refusal to give up his commercial ties to the Kremlin, rep…
Tue, 18:25: RT @nick_kapur: Astonishing. This all seems to have been a misguided attempt at OPSEC – since Putin was claiming he had no plans to invade,…
Tue, 18:30: RT @maxseddon: The Russian campaign to “denazify” Ukraine just hit a Holocaust memorial
Tue, 18:42: RT @TheCriticMag: “It was not the answer she wanted, but it was at least an honest answer. Not many of us can say we’ve had one of those fr…
Tue, 20:48: Future Science Fiction Digest – A List of Ukrainian-born SF/F Authors Whose Fiction is Available in English https://t.co/VaIo5CCDYX good list; omits Mikhail Bulhakov and Carl Sagan.
Wed, 08:50: RT @ShirleyHughes_: It is with deepest sorrow that we announce that Shirley died peacefully in her sleep at home on Friday 25th February.…
Wed, 10:45: RT @maxseddon: Some unbelievable details in this story about Ukrainian officials keeping the state running from bomb shelters and the metro…
This is my blog on Livejournal, which I have been running since the spring of 2003.
With Russia's unprovoked murderous assault on Ukraine, I am actively looking at alternative hosts for this journal, preferably those which will retain as much content as possible. No criticism of the owners of Livejournal, who have provided a space for dissent as well, but I am very uncomfortable with being part of the Russian economic system at present, in however small a way.
Since late 2003, I've been using this blog as a record of (almost) every book that I have read; I read a lot (in non-plague times, I have a long commute) and wanted to keep a good note of what I read. At 200-300 books a year, that's over 4000 books that I have written up here. (These are the most recent.)
Danach wurden der Frau fünf Kinder vorgeführt, unter denen sie tatsächlich eines mit bläulicher Aurafärbung zu erkennen meinte. Da natürlich niemand sonst im Studio diese Farbe sehen konnte, wurde ein zweiter Test gemacht: Der Frau wurden die Augen verbunden und dieselben Kinder noch einmal an ihr vorbeigeführt. Diesmal meinte die Frau, sie habe bei Nr. 3 einen stechenden Kopfschmerz empfunden. Obwohl Kind Nr. 3 nicht mit dem ursprünglich identifizierten identisch war, wurde dieses Experiment als irgendwie gelungen bewertet, zumindest klatschten die Zuschauer lange und begeistert, auch ein paar Zeitschriften brachten Artikel über die seltsame Fledermausfrau.
Then five children were presented to the woman, among whom she actually claimed to pick out one with a bluish tinge to his aura. Since no one else in the studio could see this color, of course, a second test was done: The woman was blindfolded, and the same children were presented to her again. This time the woman said that with no. 3 she felt a stabbing headache. Even though child no. 3 was not the same one she had originally identified, this experiment was somehow judged a success, at least the audience clapped enthusiastically for a long time, and a few magazines published articles on the strange bat woman.
Indigo syndrome is a condition that makes people feel seriously ill if they are near you. Clemens Setz (a fictional character in the novel by the writer of the same name) used to teach at an institute for children with Indigo syndrome, but got fired. Apart from that I found it really difficult to follow what was going on, though it did remind me of The Capital by Robert Menasse, the other Austrian novel I read recently. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and also the top unread book that I acquired in 2015. Next on those oiles are Hive Monkey, by Gareth Powell, and Valley of Lights, by Steve Gallagher.
Mon, 21:52: RT @KofmanMichael: Long thread about how I think the first 96 hours have gone, still very early/incomplete impressions. The initial Russian…
Mon, 22:25: RT @CombatJourno: BREAKING NEWS Finland announces it will send more military aid to Ukraine: — 2500 Assault rifles — 150,000 Cartridg…
Tue, 10:45: RT @MickFoley76: Our eldest lad got a couple of euros from the tooth fairy last night and has decided how he wants to spend it. A small rem…
Hooray! The BSFA shortlists are out, and as usual I've looked at how many people have the novels on Goodreads and LibraryThing. (Only two of the short fiction finalists are standalone publicatioons, and while four of the six non-fiction finalists are monographs, a couple of them barely register on Goodreads of LibraryThing).
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 16) Roger Zelazny, by F. Brett Cox Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five by Neil Gaiman The Evil of the Daleks, by Simon Guerrier Pyramids of Mars, by Kate Orman Lost in Translation, by Ella Frances Sanders
Non-genre 1 (YTD 7) The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake
SF 8 (YTD 15) Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells Chaos on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard After Atlas, by Emma Newman 84K, by Claire North
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 8) The [Unofficial] Dr Who Annual [1965], by David May The Flaming Soldier, by Christopher Bryant The Dreamer’s Lament, by Benjamin Burford-Jones Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 1 (YTD 2) Scherven, by Erik de Graaf
5,000 pages (YTD 12,300 pages), average length 250 pages.
Median LT ownership 106.5 (Evil of the Daleks [Peel]/Indigo)
8/20 (YTD 14/48) by women (Orman, Sanders, Blake, Jones, Kritzer, de Bodard, Newman, North)
1/20 (YTD 7/48) by PoC (de Bodard)
317 books currently tagged "unread", same as last month.
Coming soon (perhaps) Nine Lives, by Aimen Dean Air, by Geoff Ryman Hive Monkey, by Gareth L. Powell Valley of Lights, by Steve Gallagher (2005) Hergé, Son of Tintin, by Benoît Peeters Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, by Mark Blake The Limbless Landlord, by Brian Igoe Tower, by Nigel Jones Flicker, by Theodore Roszak Demons and Dreams: v. 1: Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, ed. Ellen Datlow Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card Mort, by Terry Pratchett A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells Junker: een Pruisische blues, by Simon Spruyt Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon Intimacy, by Jean Paul Sartre Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter Roger Zelazny's Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt Make Your Brain Work: How to Maximize Your Efficiency, Productivity and Effectiveness, by Amy Brann
Sun, 14:48: RT @delfoo: 1/I am going to try to explain the irrational Russian Armed Forces behavior towards strategy, common thought, or even the chanc…
Sun, 16:47: RT @reclamation2022: Cost of membership goes up start of March, from £70 to £80. 2022’s Eastercon runs the 15-18th of April at The Radiss…
Sun, 18:08: RT @PickardJE: huge breaking news at BP: – BP to exit its 20% stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft – BP chief executive Bernard Looney to r…
Sun, 20:22: RT @ZelenskyyUa: It was nice to learn that in addition to yesterday’s agreements, Belgium is sending us another 3,000 machine guns and 200…
So, as reported previously I’ve spent the last few days in Washington State, with one of my oldest friends, A, and his family, M and little E (and older F who I did not manage to catch on camera). It was lovely to see them.
Not quite my first time in the Pacific Northwest – I spent 24 hours in Portland, Oregon in 2016. But four days is a decent length of time, and little E was asking why I had to go home? Who will teach her to play Sudoku now?
My first tourism stop in Seattle was the Space Needle, suitably sfnal.
I was a bit taken aback by the $35 fee to get to the top, but in the end felt it was worth every cent. My selfie game, never strong, was worse than uual, so you will have to settle for landscapes without me in.
In partiular I loved the lower level of the observation deck, with the rotating glass floor. It was tremendously relaxing to sit and watch the city revolve around me. The couple next to me had a very tiny baby, just a week old (I asked, as one does), blissfully relaxed as we adults can never be.
At the foot of the Space Needle is MoPoP, the museum of popular culture, formerly the Museum of Science Fiction, with some fascinating displays – there wasn’t a lot new for me from the sf exhibits, but there was a very interesting room on the local indie gaming scene and others on the history of the electric guitar, the photography of hip-hop and Jimi Hendrix on tour.
I also investigated the Olympic Sculpture Park, but was a bit less impressed; the best is Jaume Plensa’s Echo.
And I was pleased with the framing of the Space Needle under the wing of Alexander Calder’s Eagle.
Off to the North, Lenin has been moved from Poprad, now in Slovakia, to a commercial intersection in the suburb of Fremont.
His hands are bloody.
Back in the centre, I was very charmed by the Pike Park Market, with lots of quirky book, comic and game shops. Two people dressed as cats were playing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at the entrance.
Meanwhile at the entrance to the Pike Place market yesterday, two people dressed as cats were playing Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.
Moving away from the urban, I found another distant cousin, W, a third cousin once removed like L who I had met in Los Angeles (and fourth cousin of L; we are descended from different children of my great-great-grandparents). W is the genealogist on his side of the family and showed me a lot more photographs from the early twentieth century. He has not done a DNA test but on average he and I should probably share 0.4% of our DNA. It may be stronger; I share 0.33% with his cousin’s daughter, which is on the high side of expectations for a generation further away. Facebook commentary suggests that the resemblance is detectable.
A took me on a very pleasant road trip yesterday, along the Chuckanut Drive on an unsuccessful hunt for fossils at the chamingly named Teddy Bear Cove (the tide was in) and up to lunch in Fairhaven.
We ventured over to Deception Point, and then down Whidbey Island; the bend of the road at the end of Penn Cove is the farthest west I have been in my life, marginally beating the Charlie Brown Museum in Santa Rosa.
Back at home, M got us grappling with Game of Thrones Risk.
Little E enjoyed the Georgian salmon dish I cooked one evening.
And R made sure we kept out of trouble, ready to help if necessary.
I’m coming back to a very different Europe than I left. I am writing on my flight which is only about a third full; I have a middle row to myself and am making full use of it. Possibly a number of people decided to defer their planned transatlantic trips this weekend for whatever reason.
This all has implications for this humble blog. LiveJournal has been a Russian owned service for some time; I think I need to find another solution. Suggestions welcome. But I think not Dreamwidth, which does not allow post-dating posts and does not have the flexibility with posting media that I like here.
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.
A lot of travel in May 2015, starting with a day trip to Warsaw, then the announcement of the Clarke Award winner in London, the BBC in Belfast for the election results, a work trip to Sofia, a birthday outing to Antwerp for Anne (art museum ratehr than science fiction convention), an excursion to the public sculptures of Borgloon in eastern Belgium, a family party in Loughbrickland, a work trip to Kyiv and two more work trips to London. I didn't take a lot of pictures, but here's a screenshot from the election broadcast:
Also Ireland had a referendum on equal marriage, which went the right way:
~7,150 pages (YTD 32,650)
2/25 by women (YTD 33/129) – Jones, Addison
2/25 by PoC (YTD 10/129) – Liu, Chu
My favourite of these was The Affirmation, by Christopher Priest, which you can get here, followed by The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which you can get here, and the long-awaited official novelisation of City of Death, which you can get here. I should also shout out to Anna Karenina, which I enjoyed more than on previous reading; you can get it here.
Wisdom from my Internet, by Michael Z. Williamson, was not only the worst book I read that month, but I think the worst I read in 2015, possibly in the 21st century. You can get it here.
Sat, 16:05: RT @leeuwengew: The Netherlands will supply Ukraine 200 anti-aircraft Stinger missiles. Other defence material already on its way. #WeStand…
Sat, 16:24: RT @Ondrejcsak: Slovakia is giving to Ukraine: – 12,000 pieces of artilery amunition (120mm) – 10 million litres of fuel – 2,4 million lit…
Sat, 16:33: RT @herszenhorn: BREAKING: Germany dropping longstanding block against lethal weapons transfers to allow 400 RPGs to be sent to Ukraine fro…
Sat, 17:04: RT @visegrad24: BREAKING: Czechia just decided to send machine guns, sniper rifles,handguns and ammunition worth EUR 7,6 mln to Ukraine.…
Sat, 19:04: RT @Bundeskanzler: Der russische Überfall markiert eine Zeitenwende. Es ist unsere Pflicht, die Ukraine nach Kräften zu unterstützen bei de…
Sat, 19:08: RT @Mij_Europe: It’s a cliche to say it – but this is a significant paradigm shift
Sat, 19:42: RT @KevinRothrock: Aid rolling into Ukraine now ➡️ From Belgium: 2,000 machine guns, 3,800 tons of fuel; from Slovakia: 12,000 rounds of 12…
Sun, 00:49: RT @BrigidLaffan: This is the Irish Republican Socialist Party in full support for a vicious dictator. Putin lackeys.
Sun, 01:54: RT @typesfast: The world’s only An-225 was reportedly destroyed on the ground at Hostomel airport yesterday, a tragedy for aviation enthusi…
Sun, 10:45: RT @Mij_Europe: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is going to tip the French presidential election campaign decisively in Macron’s favour – for…
‘I’m looking for a record for my daughter. For her birthday. “I Just Called To Say I Love you”. Have you got it?’
Rob is thirty-five, about to turn thirty-six, and has just split up with Laura, who has moved in with the bloke who used to live upstairs. His North London record shop is failing, and so frankly is he. He revisits the five worst break-ups he has ever had, has a fling with an American musician, and then renews contact with Laura, and together they find a redemption for him.
It's actually rather sweet and funny in places. I thoroughly enjoyed rereading it, even if it made me squirm occasionally. I think even men whose emotional and professional lives have been more successful than Rob's can empathise with his (largely self-inflicted) situation, and be frustrated on his behalf at the difficulty he has in changing gear.
I believe it was made into a decent film, which I must look out for. You can get it here.
This was the top book on my shelves which I had already read but not reviewed here. Next on that pile is Mort, by Terry Pratchett.
Fri, 12:56: RT @DmitryOpines: 1/ I see the “we poked the bear with a stick” line a lot, including from people far smarter and more moral than this… c…
Fri, 15:36: RT @RealCynicalFox: Day 1 of Combat , Takeaways from available information: 1.Russians broke with their own doctrine of relying on heavy,…
Fri, 15:48: RT @b_judah: Map from @nexta_tv of what is estimated to be the Russian advance. It is not a like for like comparison as the strategy was di…
Sat, 10:45: RT @cactus_woman: So, has Conservative Friends of Russia been disbanded or is it still a thing?
Sat, 11:42: Meanwhile at the entrance to the Pike Place market yesterday, two people dressed as cats were playing Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. Peak Seattle. https://t.co/Z46OXyEQoI
So, I am in the USA, for the first time since the pandemic started, having been to Gallifrey One last weekend and now staying in Seattle with one of my oldest friends after a couple of extra days in DTLA (downtown Los Angeles, as the locals abbreviate it).
Getting into the USA was surprisingly smooth. You need a vaccination certificate, of course, and unless you had a COVID diagnosis in the last 90 days, you need a negative test from the day before or day of travel. (Annoyingly, my COVID diagnosis in November was 91 days before I left, so I had to get the test.) You also have to print out and sign a seven page attestation, which immigration officials will briefly glance at and then discard. KLM allows you to upload your vaccine certificate and test result, but I carried paper copies anyway, and the vaccine cert has come in handy in restaurants or bars.
All that having been done in advance, I must say I thought the immigration process wss the smoothest I have had since 9/11. The queue at LAX seemed shorter than in 2013 or 2020, but maybe I was just in a better mood. The border officials have now been trained to ask questions to see if your story holds together, but it comes across as polite chit-chat even though we all knoww what it’s for.
For the subsequent domestic flight from LA to Seattle, there was no check of vaccination status at all, as far as I remember, though all passengers were required to wear masks.
However, that is not the whole story. Originally I had planned to land in Seattle on Wednesday, rent a car and drive up to Vancouver for 24 hours, to see various old friends and long-lost relatives. As I started making the final preparations at the weekend, I got very strong feedback from my Canadian friends that it was simply not worth the risk.
Canadian entry requirements include the provision that you may get pulled aside for random testing, and then required to isolate until the result comes through, which apparently can take up to 24 hours. I can’t really blame them – if most of my country’s international visitors came from the USA, I think I would want to be very cautious and distrustful of travellers from the south of the border in pandemic times.
I was also a little worried about the truckers’ protests, though they were mainly much further east and anyway that seems to be over now. I was not worried by any increased chance of infection – I am triple-jabbed and have also had the damn bug, so I hope I am unlikely to catch it again. But the thought of my planned 24 hours in Vancouver turning into a bored wait in a border motel was pretty discouraging, so, with considerable disappointment, I cancelled everything except the rental car and had an extra day here in Washington State.
I haven’t done the massive picspam posts from Gallifrey One that I did on the two previous occasions I was there because with people wearing masks, the photos are just not quite as good. It’s a price we have to pay, of course. There was a very strong rule that attendees must wear masks unless eating or drinking or doing convention panels or photos, and I did not witness anyone breaking it. The ethos was very much one of shared responsibility.
At the closing ceremony of the convention, Shaun Lyon spoke emotionally about the torrent of abuse that he and the organisers had faced from COVID-sceptics and vaccine deniers every time they made any announcement about their COVID policies, and thanked attendees for the support we had collectively shown. It’s really awful that the trolls reacted in that way, but I guess it is not surprising. I doubt that any of the trolls ever seriously contemplated coming to the convention in the first place, and I am glad that the convention team stood their ground. I felt safe as a result, and I think most other people did too.
When I get back next week, it will be to a Belgium where the COVID numbers are all now dropping fast and teleworking remains recommended but is no longer required. My employer is allowing staff to choose how much they want to be in the office, and I plan to go as much as I can, so the WFH era is coming to an end. But I’ll do at least one more in this series of posts.
On a different topic entirely, I am watching the news from Ukraine with great anxiety. The unprovoked Russian attack, rooted in a belief that Ukraine should not exist as an independent country, does not seem to have been as successful as intended so far. But Russia has a massive advantage in terms of numbers, and the outlook is bleak.
Thu, 16:51: RT @scalzi: Today is a very good day to critically evaluate and reliably source the information that comes to you online and which is almos…
Thu, 20:54: RT @ObsoleteDogma: Putin has said the country he’s invading doesn’t have the right to exist, and people think the problem is we just didn’t…
Thu, 22:31: RT @jonlis1: Your occasional reminder that in 1994 Ukraine willingly surrendered its nuclear weapons in return for Russian, American and Br…
Fri, 03:24: A Close-run Thing? Voters choose in the Republic of Korea https://t.co/zUl4LOSk7E My analysis of next month’s Korean election, which may not be a top priority with everything else going on, but is still pretty important.
Fri, 10:45: RT @ruth_deyermond: The US right are still claiming that this wouldn’t have happened during under Trump because he was so tough on Russia t…
The clock said four, but the window was a flume of sunshine.
This was one of my impulse purchases in Paris last summer, arising from the realisation that I haven't read a lot of non-genre fiction by Asian women, and seduced by the blurbs on the front cover.
It's a story in two parts, the first being a visit by the narrator's sister from Osaka to Tokyo for a breast reduction operation, the second about the difficulties of the narrator getting access to artificial insemination as a single woman who does not like sex. I understand that we lose a lot of context in the English translation because the narrator and her family speak with pronounced Osaka accents and inevitably stick out in stuck-up Tokyo.
Apart from that I found it a good slice-of-life piece of writing, well two slices I suppose, describing the situation of women in today's Japan, and the second part grabbed me more than the first (most reviews that I have seen found the opposite). You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Nine Lives: My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda, by Aimen Dean.
Wed, 18:19: Aha! I worked out that the languages are in alphabetical order by their English name! So it’s probably: Armenian Chinese Farsi Hindi Japanese Khmer Korean Russian Spanish Tagalog Thai Vietnamese https://t.co/0KdoHN2nl9
Thu, 05:37: RT @tconnellyRTE: Russian president Vladimir Putin has launched military operations in Ukraine. The Ukrainian interior ministry has said t…
Second paragraph of third story (which as it happens is “Million Dollar Baby”, on which the film was based):
The voice of Frankie Dunn pierced. In the same sentence it could climb high and harsh or loop sweet as a peach, like Benny Goodman playing “Body and Soul,” or go on down deep as a grizzly’s grunt. It could move sideways on you and then curl back on itself, but always the voice pierced the mind with images that stuck, because the sound out of the old man painted pictures that became part of you, made you hear his voice when he wasn’t even there. When Frankie Dunn told a fighter how to move and why, the fighter could see it through Frankie’s eyes, and feel it slip on into his own flesh and down into his bones, and he’d flush with magic of understanding and the feeling of power. Some called the old man Doc, some called him Uncle Frank. Old-time black fighters and trainers called him Frankie Dunn Frankie Dunn, repeating his name with a nod or a smile. Frankie loved warriors.
In my sequence of Oscar/Hugo/Nebula film-watching, I generally try and read the books on which films are based in the week and write them up at the same time. This collection of short stories is long out of print, and it took me a lot longer to source than I had expected, so I’m finally getting around to writing it up now, some time after watching the film.
The story of the book is a little sad: the author, whose real name was Jerry Boyd, published the book in 2000 at the age of 70, after many rejections from publishers, and died in 2002, just a few weeks after learning that Clint Eastwood wanted to make a film based on it. The original DVD release included paperback copies of the book in every box (which makes it really weird that it was so difficult to track down a copy). But there you go.
These are six nice short pieces, all of them acutely observed from the perspective of an Irish-American who lived in California. Being stories about boxing, they are mainly about men, with the obvious exception of “Million Dollar Baby”. Most of them have rather downbeat endings; in one memorable case, almost all of the main characters die horribly.
There is a lot of fighting; it’s interesting that the Clint Eastwood film cuts Maggie’s brother from the plot of “Million Dollar Baby”, therefore also losing the crucial physical confrontation in a hospital car park between him and Clint’s character Frankie. But there is a lot of character and human observation as well.
Personally, I’m not at all a fan of fighting, but this did bring me a certain amount of empathy with those who are. If you are lucky, you can get it here.
So, I’m on my flight out of LAX, having spent the weekend at Gallifrey One and then Monday and yesterday exploring Los Angeles.
I arrived on Thursday with H, who I actually knew as a Doctor Who fan before we became work colleagues a year ago. The afternoon was a write-off; we struggled over to the convention opening, grabbed dinner and crashed. I tweeted about jetlag and to my surprise got a reply from my cousin B, who lives in Cardiff but happened to be in town putting the final touches to the new TV adaptation of The Time Traveller’s Wife. He should in fact have gone home on Thursday, but was delayed by a day because of Storm Eunice. So we met for breakfast on the beach at Santa Monica on Friday morning, the first time we had seen each other since his brother’s wedding in 2015.
Gallifrey One! What to say? The previous two times I attended, I took lots of cosplay photographs; this time I took fewer, but I hope these convey some of the atmosphere.
And a shoutout to H who is one of the three Eighth Doctors here (her picture, not mine):
The headliners were Sylvester McCoy, Mandip Gill, Jo Martin and Fraser Hines. McCoy and Hines are old friends of Gallifrey One; Gill and Martin are new, and both did lovely interviews about the impact the show, and its fans, have had on their lives. Jo Martin, a long-term fan herself, had not told her son about that plot twist in Fugitive of the Judoon before it went out; quite right too, but it must have been an interesting evening in the Martin household. I got photos with Mandip Gill, Jo Martin, and Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter Sadie Miller; this is my favourite.
And of course quite apart from the specifics, it was just wonderful to be at an in-person event again, able for instance to meet up with Paul Cornell and the Thomases, to discuss The Evil of the Daleks with John Peel who wrote the noveisation and Rob Ritchie who did the animation, and tp have an impromptu dinner with Matthew Sweet, whose work I really like.
On Sunday evening, the convention having ended, I met up with some long-lost cousins: L, who I met through 23andMe, her father W, my third cousin (we are both descended from William Charlton Hibbard and Sarah Ann Smith) and N, L’s mother and W’s wife. These are people of whose existence I was completely unaware two years ago. I had an instant shock of recognition on seeing W, who is thinner, taller and ten years older than me, but immediately looked like family. We got on like a house on fire. Unfortunately we failed to take photos, but L joined me for the first part of my excursion the next day. She shares 0.41% of my DNA, exactly in the right range to be my third cousin once removed, which is our actual relationship. (I am not slouching here – like her father, she is taller than me.)
As you will have spotted, my Monday morning cultural excursion was to the La Brea Tar Pits museum, which I have known about since I was six (I am now 54). Surprisingly central to LA, this area has preserved the remains of tens of thousands of animals that wandered into a sticky field after the last ice age, got stuck and eventually died. At the entrance there is a moving sculpture of Daddy Mammoth and Baby Mammoth looking on in despair as Mummy Mammoth is swallowed by the pool (which bubble non-stop with newly released petroleum gases).
An educational notice pinned to the fence explains that we now know that mammoths did not live in nuclear families, but in female-led herds, and that most of the mammoths discovered at La Brea were males, presumably solitary. Predators are over-represented among the fossils, possibly because they ran in to eat the mammoths etc and then got stuck themeslves. Here is L again, with C, another local friend of mine, with the sabre-tooth tigers.
After lunch, C and I went up to Griffith Observatory to enjoy the view.
No famous discovery was ever made at Griffith Observatory, but it has an iconic status from its appearance in films. I was very struck by the Astronomers’ Monument in front, featuring Art Deco depictions of Hipparchus, Herschel, Kepler, Newton, Galileo and Copernicus.
We spent the evening playing board games and drinking cocktails at the sf-themed bar in Hollywood, Scum and Villainy, at the invitation of fellow-Whovian LA from LA, who took this picture.
Yesterday morning I decided to investigate the origins of the city. This is the Avila Adobe, the oldest building in Los Angeles, dating from 1818, built by the then alcalde (mayor/governor) and used by the Americans when they came marching in. It was lovingly restored in the 1920s and 1930s by local activists. Entry is free, and amusingly the guard who checked my vaccination certificate turned out to be a Doctor Who fan.
It’s a nice little exhibit giving a picture of Los Angeles when it was a very small settlement indeed. But you need to be careful in the garden.
And my final cultural stop was The Last Bookstore, an amazing warren of shelves.
Finally I joined forces with H once more and we met up with some locally based work colleagues in Santa Monica, ending where I had started on Friday morning. No photographs from our social gathering, but H and I were very intrigued by this ballot box:
The languages appear to be Armenian, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Japanese and Khmer on one side, with Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese on the other, listed in alphabetical order of their English names.
And we resisted the temptation of this exhibition.
Tue, 12:56: RT @KenyaMissionUN: Kenya makes strong statement opposing the undermining of the sovereignty & territorial integrity of #Ukraine during the…
Tue, 18:10: “Bloodchild”, by Octavia E. Butler; “Press Enter ◼️”, by John Varley; Neuromancer, by William Gibson https://t.co/KEvj4syX5j
Tue, 22:01: Me (enters small museum in downtown LA) Guard (spotting my Doctor Who bag): Oh, are you in town for @gallifreyone#gally1 then? Me: Er, yes! Were you there too? Guard: Couldn’t go this year but I went in 2020! Me: Me too! Guard: Wasn’t Christopher Eccleston fantastic? Me: Yes!
These three all won Hugo and Nebula Awards presented in 1985 for work published in 1984. (So the 1985 Hugo, but the 1984 Nebula.)
“Bloodchild” has no chapters or sub-sections. The third paragraph is:
But my mother seemed content to age before she had to. I saw her turn away as several of T’Gatoi’s limbs secured me closer. T’Gatoi liked our body heat and took advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how to behave with T’Gatoi—how to be respectful and always obedient because T’Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying.
The story is set on a world dominated by the insect-like Tlic, whose reproduction system includes laying eggs inside a living host; the larvae then hatch and eat their way out. However the mammal-like animals native to the Tlic world have evolved a natural defence which poisons the eggs before they hatch. Fortunately for the Tlic, humans also live on the planet and are ideal hosts for their eggs. The Tlic have moved from a period of time when humans were basically kept as brood animals for the eggs, to a social system of adopting humans into their family; with any luck, the newly hatched larvae can be removed from their human host before too much damage is caused. The narrator of the story is Gan, a young human whose family has been “adopted” by T’Gatoi, a leading Tlic. He witnesses a hatching event which almost goes horribly wrong, but none the less agrees in the end to bear T’Gatoi’s children.
Gan’s position as the future partner and indeed half-brother of T’Gatoi (“She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age”) is very important. Shocked by the process of the larval hatching (though in fact it’s described in terms which are, excruciatingly, almost familiar to anyone who has witnessed a human birth), he takes the responsibility of suggesting that in future humans be made more aware of the process, pointing out that “no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right”. T’Gatoi balks at the suggestion that a private act become public, but Gan seems confident that he will bring her around in the end, and indeed there is enough of a sense that the relationship between humans and Tlic as a species is still developing that we believe him.
There are already a lot of on-line reviews of “Bloodchild”, either on its own or considering it as a part of Butler’s oeuvre (which includes little short fiction but numerous novels). Many of them see it as a story about slavery or about slavery combined with gender exploitation. Elyce Rae Helford has written the best developed analysis I have yet found of this interpretation of the story in “Would you really rather die than bear my young?”: The Construction of Gender, Race and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”, originally published in African American Review vol 28 (1994) pp. 259-271.
Helford describes the Tlic power structure as “a metaphor for human gender relations under patriarchy”, as illustrated by “men suffering the pains of childbearing (and when ‘birth’ means removing grubs from around your internal organs, the pain can be intense)” and the sexual, almost erotic description of T’Gatoi implanting her eggs in Gan at the end of the story. T’Gatoi combines roles which are (in our own society) masculine (leading politician) and feminine (protecting the humans from over-exploitation by her own kind). She sees pointers to the slave-owning society of the Old South in the implantation scene, the widespread use of narcotics to control the humans, and the unspoken despair of Gan’s mother at “the oppressive system under which she must live”. And she also hints that the treatment of humans as animals by the Tlic goes beyond the usual categories of class and race.
Helford’s analysis is impressive and thought-provoking. However, I find myself agreeing with Octavia Butler herself, who writes in an afterword, “It amazes me that some people have seen “Bloodchild” as a story of slavery. It isn’t. It’s a number of other things, though. On one level, it’s a love story between two very different beings. On another, it’s a coming-of-age story in which a boy must absorb disturbing information and use it to make a decision that will affect the rest of his life. On a third level, “Bloodchild” is my pregnant man story.”
True, Gan has been brought up as the young human who is destined to bear T’Gatoi’s young. But it is quite explicit that Gan has a real choice, because his sister Hoa is available and willing to perform the task in his place. His decision is made not merely to protect his sister from the pain of bearing the larval Tlic, but also because he is jealous of the relationship she would thus develop with T’Gatoi. One can see this relationship as exploitative (indeed Butler writes of “paying the rent”) but one can also see it as a possible outworking of a fair and stable decision between two very different organisms to share a family and social life. (A sf precursor is Brian Aldiss’ early short story “The Game of God” aka “Segregation” – much inferior in every way except the descriptions of the weather.)
The fact that Butler is a Black woman writing in the mainly [I think I would now say “traditionally” rather than “mainly”] white male genre of science fiction makes her perspective particularly challenging for the average [white male] sf reader. Gender and race are more consciously present in her writing than in most literature, but rape and slavery are not the automatic results of her exploration of these issues. “Bloodchild” is no clichéd parable of exploitation. Butler’s agenda is more subtle.
It’s worth noting that even among her human characters, Butler specialises in unusual relationships: witness the fact that there was the same large age gap between Gan’s parents as between the central character and her husband in Parable of the Talents, and the sympathetic treatment of brother/sister incest in one of the other short stories in the Bloodchild collection. “Bloodchild” almost feels like a riposte to feminist suspicions of marriage. Butler’s answer seems to be, look, here when the power relationships are so uneven – and inevitably uneven, given the massive physical size of the Tlic compared with humans – a real, valid, loving relationship across species is still possible.
Twenty years on, I’m not very comfortable with my 2001 conclusion. The massive power imbalance between humans and Tlic makes any concept of consent very dubious indeed. Against that, one has to set Butler’s clearly expressed authorial intent; but do authors always achieve what they think they were trying to achieve?
Both Hugo and Nebula shortlists for Best Novelette also included “The Lucky Strike”, by Kim Stanley Robinson, and “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”, by Lucius Shepard. The other Hugo finalists were “Blued Moon”, by Connie Willis; “Return to the Fold”, by Timothy Zahn; “Silicon Muse”, by Hilbert Schenck; and “The Weigher”, by Eric Vinicoff & Marcia Martin. The other Nebula finalists were “Bad Medicine”, by Jack Dann; “Saint Theresa of the Aliens”, by James Patrick Kelly; and “Trojan Horse”, by Michael Swanwick. I’ve read a couple of these, but “Bloodchild” really stands out.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Press Enter ◼️” is:
I thought about ignoring it. I was still thinking about that when the phone rang again. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes. I lifted the receiver and put it right back down.
This is a much more straightforward story, set in the present day (the 1980s). A murderous AI, developed within the existing computer network, kills the narrator’s neighbour and then the woman he loves when they get wind of its existence, and the narrator ends the story holed up in his own home, hoping that he has successfully cut off all points of connection with the outside world; but we sense that he may be doomed anyway.
There’s obvious wish fulfillment in the middle aged narrator scoring with a beautiful hacker babe half his age, but apart from that it’s well enough executed, especially if you haven’t been spoilered for it by reading this review; the previous year’s “Blood Music” maybe did something similar a little better, and it also shares a theme with Neuromancer.
Apart from “Press Enter ◼️”, there was no overlap between the Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novella that year. The other Hugo finalists were “Cyclops”, by David Brin; “Elemental”, by Geoffrey A. Landis; “Summer Solstice”, by Charles L. Harness; and “Valentina”, by Joseph H. Delaney & Marc Stiegler. The other Nebula finalists were “The Greening of Bed-Stuy”, by Frederik Pohl; “Marrow Death”, by Michael Swanwick; “A Traveler’s Tale”, by Lucius Shepard; “Trinity”, Nancy Kress; and “Young Doctor Eszterhazy”, by Avram Davidson. I don’t recall having read any of them.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Neuromancer is:
Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
I have a confession to make. I just don’t get on with William Gibson’s writing. I find Neuromancer not quite unreadable, but pretty unmemorable. The characters are flat, the settings not very well realised, and the plot really not very original. I am well aware that this is a minority view, and I dutifully reread the book last month to see if my mind has changed over the twenty years since I last gave it a try. But it left me as cold this time as previously. Most people like it more than me. You can get it here.
Two other books that I have read were both on the Hugo and Nebula ballots that year, The Integral Trees by Larry Niven and Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert A. Heinlein. I don’t think either is a high point of either author’s career, to put it politely, and Neuromancer despite its flaws is better than either. I have not read any of the other finalists, Emergence by David R. Palmer and The Peace War by Vernor Vinge for the Hugo, Frontera by Lewis Shiner, The Man Who Melted by Jack Dann and The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson for the Nebula.
There were two stories on both best Short Story ballots, “The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything”, by George Alec Effinger and “Salvador”, by Lucius Shepard. Neither won. The Hugo went to “The Crystal Spheres”, by David Brin, and the Nebula to “Morning Child”, by Gardner Dozois. The other Hugo finalists were “Ridge Running”, by Kim Stanley Robinson; “Rory”, by Steven Gould; and “Symphony for a Lost Traveler”, by Lee Killough. The other Nebula finalists were “A Cabin on the Coast”, by Gene Wolfe; “The Eichmann Variations”, by George Zebrowski; and “Sunken Gardens”, by Bruce Sterling. I have probably read several of these, but none of those titles evokes any particular memory, positive or negative.
The Nebulas did not have a dramatic category that year. The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation went to 2010; bizarrely The Terminator did not make the final ballot.
Mon, 12:56: RT @Emily_Rosina: This made my weekend! It’s been wonderful hearing people talk so fondly about our Doctor Who Lockdown times and lovely to…
Mon, 16:05: RT @BernardineEvari: 1/3. The media’s obsession with so-called ‘cancel culture’ is dangerous. Marginalised communities have always been de…
Mon, 18:37: RT @bbcdoctorwho: We’re sad to hear that Stewart Bevan has passed away, who played Professor Clifford Jones, the husband of Jo Jones (née G…
Tue, 10:45: NFTs aren’t art — they’re just the Cult of Crypto’s latest scam https://t.co/EoXu7JtsfH Tremendous piece. You can’t actually spend crypto on anything real, so NFTs were invented to ensure that the gullible stay hooked.
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.
Quite a lot of travel that month – I went to Eastercon at Heathrow via Belgrade, Serbia, and returned via Sofia, Bulgaria. In Belgrade I had a happy reunion with R, who had worked for me in Bosnia in 1998; I hired her the week before her 20th birthday, and she had barely changed.
On my birthday I went with F, and work colleagues T and A, to an sf convention in Antwerp, which was great fun too.
Of course the big sf news of the month was the success of the Sad and Rabid Puppies in dominating the ballot for the Hugo Awards, something I wrote a lot about and which continues to resonate.
I read 40 books that month, but did not finish most of them.
Non-fiction: 3 (YTD 17) A Slip of the Keyboard, by Terry Pratchett Here's One I Wrote Earlier, by Peter Purves The Start-Up of You, by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 4) Wages of Sin, by Andrew M. Greeley Scales of Gold, by Dorothy Dunnett
SF (non-Who): 28 (YTD 63) Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber Babayaga, by Toby Barlow – did not finish The Supernatural Enhancements, by Edgar Cantero – did not finish Shanghai Sparrow, by Gaie Sebold – did not finish Jani and the Greater Game, by Eric Smith – did not finish Fish Tails, by Sherri S. Tepper – did not finish The Rain-Soaked Bride, by Guy Adams – did not finish Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan – did not finish The Stonehenge Letters, by Harry Karlinsky Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle – did not finish The Monster's Wife, by Kate Horsley – did not finish The Return of the Discontinued Man, by Mark Hodder – did not finish Timebomb, by Scott K. Andrews – did not finish Hurricane Fever, by Tobias Buckell – did not finish Kushiel's Justice, by Jacqueline Carey The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword, by Jack Campbell – did not finish The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier – Steadfast, by Jack Campbell – did not finish Resistance, by Samit Basu – did not finish Glass Shore, by Stefan Jackson – did not finish The Rhymer: An Heredyssy, by Douglas Thompson – did not finish Ex-Purgatory, by Peter Clines – did not finish Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz – did not finish The Happier Dead , by Ivo Stourton – did not finish Hive Monkey, by Gareth L. Powell – did not finish Symbiont, by Mira Grant – did not finish Sky Pirates, by Liesel Schwartz – did not finish After Me Comes the Flood, by Sarah Perry – did not finish
Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 15) Burning Heart, by Dave Stone Timeless by Steve Cole Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone Lethbridge-Stewart: Top Secret Files, by Andy Frankham-Allen, Nick Walters, Graeme Harper and David A. McIntee
Comics : 3 (YTD 9) Ms Marvel vol 1: No Normal, by G.Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona Rat Queens, vol 1: Sass and Sorcery, Kurtis J. Wiebe and Roc Upchurch Sex Criminals, vol. 1, by Matt Fraction
~6,500 pages (YTD 25,500)
11/40 by women (YTD 31/104) – Dunnett, Itäranta, North, Sebold, Tepper, Sullivan, Horsley, Carey, "Grant", Wilson, Perry
4/40 by PoC (YTD 8/104) – Buckell, Basu, Alphona, Upchurch
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