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Since Alison asked: two answers on counting the Hugos – EPH and Best Dramatic Presentation

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The latest installment of the Octothorpe podcast has a couple of points on counting Hugo nominations raised by Alison Scott, which I'd like to address here.

First off, at 18:53, Alison expresses the concern that under the counting system (known as "EPH, short for "E Pluribus Hugo"), "if I nominate anything else, it reduces the chance that the thing I love gets on the ballot. And that seems to me to be the big downside of EPH." The podcast is kind enough to link to the explanation of EPH that I wrote in 2017.

It is of course perfectly true that under the current counting system, if you love one thing, and you nominate other things as well, you reduce the chance that your vote will help the one thing you love getting on the ballot. But this was equally true of the old tallying system. It's the principle of monotonicity, as Kenneth Arrow put it in his famous Theorem. Candidate A getting more votes should not lead to her getting a worse result, and Candidate B getting fewer votes should not lead to his getting a better result. If you give an extra vote to A, you are inevitably hurting B's chances, even if you love B more. So it's not uniquely a problem with EPH, but with any system where your vote can go to several candidates simultaneously. (Preferential voting systems, where a lower preference doesn't affect the chances of your highest-placed choice, are a different matter, and in fact are sometimes criticised by their opponents for allegedly violating monotonicity, though I think this is not a reasonable criticism.)

The second point is a question raised by Liz Batty at 21:42, on which Alison calls me out by name at at 22:23. In a situation where a TV series qualifies for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and one or more episodes of it qualify for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, how do administrators decide which will actually appear on the ballot?

This is of course a recent problem. but my answer is clear: if faced with a choice, administrators should choose whatever alternative gets more voters the thing they want on the vote. To go into the detail:

The Dramatic Presentation categories were only split from 2003. The first series to qualify was season 1 of Heroes, in 2008, and only one of its individual episodes even scraped onto the long list that year. It was in 2012 that the first season of Game of Thrones got 171 votes for the Long Form ballot, and individual episodes got 73 and 60 votes which would have been enough to qualify for the Short Form ballot (and another episode was runner-up with 49 votes); but the administrators decided that the series rather than the individual episodes should qualify. George R.R. Martin had anticipated this outcome several months earlier. I do not know if the showrunners were consulted. The series won the Long Form Hugo.

It's worth noting that the 171 votes for the series in Long Form are more than the sum of the votes for the two episodes that made the top five in Short Form (73+60 = 133), and of course a number of voters will have voted for both of the Short Form episodes, so the total number of voters who wanted to see either of the two on the Short Form ballot would have been much less than 133. The episode which came sixth, with 49 votes, doesn't count here, as it would never have been on the final ballot anyway.

Edited to add: A calculation I made for the other years when I first posted this, but forgot to make for 2012, is the down-ballot impact of the decisions available to the administrators. Excluding the series would have brought a film with 94 votes onto the Long Form ballot. Including the two GoT episodes would have excluded two nominees with 38 and 36 votes which ended up on the Short Form ballot in our timeline. So the administrators' decision was in line with the wishes of up to 171+38+36 = 245 voters, whereas the alternative would have satisfied a maximum of 94+73+60 = 227 voters. There would have been some overlap of supporters in the short form nominations, though more in the latter scenario than the former.

The following year, 2013, the second series of Game of Thrones got 164 votes for Long Form, and an individual episode got 95 votes for Short Form. The showrunners were consulted this time as to which should be on the ballot, and opted for the individual episode, which indeed won the Short Form Hugo. This is the only occasion of the five times the situation has arisen (2012, 2013, twice in 2020 and 2021) where the showrunners were consulted, as far as I am aware. This brought a film with 141 votes onto the Long Form ballot; otherwise an audiobook with 58 votes would have replaced the GoT episode on the Short Form ballot. So arguably more voters were satisfied with the actual ballot (141+95 = 236) than with the alternative (164+58 = 222).

The next TV series to qualify for the Long Form category was the first of Stranger Things, in 2017, my first year as Hugo Administrator. None of the episodes came close to qualifying in Short Form however, so there was no decision to make. NB that from that year on there were six finalists per category, rather than five as previously.

The most complex decision so far was in 2020, when the top six nominees for Long Form included the TV series Good Omens, with 212 votes, and Watchmen, with 81; while the top six nominees  in Short Form included an individual episode of Good Omens with 104 votes, and two episodes of Watchmen with 81 and 59. I was Deputy Administrator that year, and we made our thinking pretty clear: more voters supported Good Omens being in Long Form, and more voters supported at least one of the two Watchmen episodes in Short Form, so that was the decision we made, without consulting the showrunners. (We were also, as you may remember, in the middle of a global pandemic.)

If we had instead kept the Good Omens episode on the Short Form ballot (where it actually came top) we'd have got a film with 74 votes on the Long Form ballot and lost a TV episode with 36 votes on the Short Form ballot, thus satisfying 104+74 = 178 voters rather than 212+36 = 248 voters. On the other hand, if we'd kept Watchmen on Long Form and dropped the two episodes from Short Form, the category ballots would have lost a film with 75 votes and gained two TV episodes with 34 and 35, which also clearly satisfies fewer voters, especially if the two TV episodes had supporters in common.

We followed that precedent again in 2021 (official results sheet, tidier version which I supplied too late to the convention), when I was WSFS Division Head and a member of the Hugo sub-committee at the time nominations closed; the second series of The Mandalorian got 67 votes for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and two individual episodes got 67 and 45 for Short Fom. Clearly more voters supported having at least one of the episodes in Short Form, so again without consulting the showrunners, that was the decision that we made. That brought a film onto the Long Form ballot that had got 63 votes; if we had gone the other way, two TV episodes with 28 and 25 votes would have been on the Short Form ballot. I don't need to work out the arthmetic in detail, but you can if you want; it was pretty clear what outcome better reflected the wishes of the voters.

So, in summary (I bet you're glad there's a summary), the practice of administrators has been that the wishes of voters should be given priority, if they are clear, and whichever alternative gives more voters a thing they want on the ballot is the one that should be followed. 2013 may look like an exception at first glance, but if you look at the down-ballot consequences of the decision, it's also defensible in those terms.

I would resist any move to formally throw the decision to showrunners rather than the Hugo administrators. I'm uneasy with the idea that studio execs rather than WSFS voters should get to decide what is on the Hugo ballot, and it should be added that in practice, many showrunners are not very responsive to communications from Hugo administrators (Game of Thrones was very much an honourable exception there).

I'm also opposed to further codifying existing practice in the rules. Let's concentrate on fixing the things that need fixing, in particular the Best Artist categories, and not waste time on the things that already work.

But thank you for asking, Alison!

Les Mondes d’Aldébaran: L’Encyclopédie Illustrée, by Christophe Quillien

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First page of second chapter, with illustrations:

Kim Keller

Lorsque s'ouvre le premier volume d'Aldébaran, Kim Keller est une jeune fille âgée de 13 ans, écolière à la basic school d'Arena Blanca. Vingt-quatre albums plus tard, à la fin du troisième tome de Retour sur Aldébaran, le temps a passé : Kim a 26 ans. Elle est devenue une femme accomplie, confrontée à un destin hors du commun et dont elle n'aurait jamais osé rêver. Au départ, rien ne laissait supposer qu elle vivrait les folles aventures dans lesquelles Leo l'a précipitée. Ce même Leo était loin de se douter que « sa » Kim serait la première humaine à avoir un enfant avec un être venu d'une autre planète, et qu un peuple extraterrestre la désignerait comme interlocutrice privilégiée. Les auteurs de bande dessinée sont parfois dépassés par leurs personnages, tels de modernes docteurs Frankenstein.

La toute première page d'Aldébaran dessine déjà le portrait de Kim Keller. Celui d'une jeune fille intelligente et curieuse de tout, fascinée par l'histoire de la Terre, rompue à l'argumentation et décidée à exprimer ses idées, même quand elles sont en contradiction avec la doctrine officielle. Dans les pages suivantes, victime d'un enchaînement d'événements dramatiques bouleversant sa vie d'adolescente, Kim fait face à la situation avec un courage et une capacité d'adaptation exemplaires, dont elle fera preuve tout au long de la saga. Ce qui ne l'empêche pas d'être aussi une ado exaspérante…

 Kim Keller

When the first volume of Aldebaran opens, Kim Keller is a 13-year-old girl, a schoolgirl at the Arena Blanca basic school. Twenty-four albums later, at the end of the third volume of Retour sur Aldebaran, time has passed: Kim is 26 years old. She has become an accomplished woman, faced with an extraordinary destiny that she would never have dared to dream of. Initially, nothing suggested that she would live the crazy adventures into which Leo has thrown her. Leo himself was far from suspecting that "his" Kim would be the first human to have a child with a being from another planet, and that an extraterrestrial people would designate her as their privileged interlocutor. Comic book writers are sometimes overwhelmed by their characters, like modern Dr Frankensteins.

The very first page of Aldebaran already portrays Kim Keller as a young girl, intelligent and curious about everything, fascinated by the history of the Earth, experienced in argumentation and determined to express her ideas, even when they contradict official doctrine. In the following pages, as a chain of dramatic events that changed her teenage life, Kim faces the situation with exemplary courage and adaptability, which she will demonstrate throughout the saga. Which does not prevent her from also being an infuriating teenager…

Without Maï Lan and Pad's help, I'd have lost it. I was this close to
throwing myself into the void, me and my little aquatic monster baby!


POW!


It's not easy to love a woman like Kim, Doctor…
I know, Suria, but she's worth the risk!


Am I really sure about it? Time will tell, but I'd prefer not to
have any doubt about it. I'd prefer a less complicated life.

As my regular reader knows, I have been a huge fan of the Aldebaran sequence of graphic novels by Brazilian writer Leo for years and years. (I have to thank Samantha for introducing me to them.) This is a lovely tribute to the sequence, by French comixologist Christophe Quillien, going through the planets, people, aliens and themes of Leo's fictional worlds. (The excerpt above concerns the main character, Kim Keller.)

I was particularly interested to read that Leo explicitly credits Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and Robert Charles Wilson's Spin as inspirations. I love both of those books too, but I found it interesting that Leo acknowledges the Anglo-American sf tradition so firmly. Other influences mentioned are Tarkovsky's Solaris and the great Moebius.

I have only read the books in French, so I have no idea if the Cinebooks translation into English is any good, but you can get it here, here, here and here. I do know that it famously censors the female characters' breasts, giving them bras in some scenes where in the original they are topless. Also, you can get L’Encyclopédie Illustrée here.

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Saturday reading

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Current
Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark
The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng

Last books finished
A Radical Romance, by Alison Light
Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver
Where Was the Room Where It Happened?: The Unofficial Hamilton – An American Musical Location Guide by BdotBarr [Bryan Barreras]
Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon
Of the City of the Saved…, by Philip Purser-Hallard (did not finish)
Carbone & Silicium, by Mathieu Bablet
Peter Davison's Book of Alien Monsters
Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets
The Daughters of Earth, by Sarah Groenewegen

Next books
Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell
Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford

A lot this week! At the end of 2021 I had nearly finished A Radical Romance, Animal Dreams and CalvinWhere Was the Room Where It Happened? and the two Peter Davison anthologies are all very short; and I abandoned Of the City of the Saved… after a hundred pages. So I don't expect to keep up this pace for the rest of 2022.

Million Dollar Baby

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Warning: this review contains massive spoilers for a film that came out in 2004

I mean it. If you have not seen Million Dollar Baby, and think you might watch it some day (and I really recommend it, one of the best Best Picture winners), stop reading now.

Anyway.

Million Dollar Baby won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2004, and three others: Clint Eastwood for Best Director, Hilary Swank for Best Actress and Morgan Freeman for Best Supporting Actor. The Aviator actually won five Oscars on the night, and I might make that my next viewing. The Oscar for Best Picture the following year was won by Crash, which was actually released before Million Dollar Baby. I don’t make the rules, I just report them. The Hugo that year went to The Incredibles, and the Nebula to the previous year’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The other Oscar nominees were The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Ray and Sideways, and I haven’t seen any of them. The only other films from 2004 that I have seen are The Incredibles, as noted last week; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though I fell asleep half way through; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; the brilliant death-of-Hitler film Downfall; Before Sunset, the sort of romance that I love; The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, many many times; and the Steve Coogan / Jackie Chan Around the World in 80 Days, which is truly dismal, including Arnold Schwarzenegger as an oriental prince. IMDB users put Million Dollar Baby 4th on one ranking but only 43rd on the other, one of the weirdest splits I have seen. Personally, I would rank it alongside Downfall as my favourite film of the year, just ahead of Before Sunset. (Crash, by the way, is 16th on one ranking and 40th on the other.) Here’s a trailer, which impressively barely hints at the denouement.

There are a couple of actors from previous Oscar Winners. Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman are the two male leads here, as  and were also the two male leads twelve years ago in Unforgiven, which like Million Dollar Baby was directed by Eastwood.

Freeman of course also drove Miss Daisy three years earlier.

A much more obscure returning face is stuntman Ted Grossman, most famously the first person killed by the shark in Jaws, who is one of the ringside doctors here, was a Peruvian porter in Raiders of the Lost Ark and a deputy sheriff in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. None of the shots I could get of him was much good.

The film is about a woman boxer, Hilary Swank’s Maggie, and her relationship with Eastwood’s Frankie, an embittered Irish-American boxing trainer who has lost all the women in his life, with commentary and sidekickisms from Freeman’s Scrap. Fighting really is not my thing, but I know a little about women fighters in that my old friend Rosi Sexton, who I have known since she was 16, was at one stage Britain’s leading woman Mixed Martial Artist (or cage-fighter if we want to be casual) – this after her first-class degree in maths from Cambridge and her computer science PhD. She retired from fighting in 2014 and was the runner-up in the 2020 leadership election of the Green Party of England and Wales. So any preconceptions I may have once had about professional fighting being an exclusively male preserve were long since knocked out of me by her (though not literally). Rosi was one of two women fighters profiled in a BBC documentary in 2009.

I’ll just also note that Frankie is learning Irish (“Gaelic”), which is one of the relatively few times we hear a language other than English in any Best Picture winner (having said which, we recently had Hungarian in Chicago, and Elvish in The Return of the King) and I suspect the only time we will hear Irish in any Oscar-winning film at all. However, Eastwood’s/Frankie’s pronunciation is really terrible; he seems to be learning exclusively from a book, without any coaching from people who actually speak the language; and his stage name for Maggie, “Mo Cuishle”, is wrong – it should be “Mo Chuisle”, though the “s” is indeed pronounced “sh”.

vlcsnap-2022-01-08-10h04m11s705.png

OK, now we get to the massive spoilers. You have been warned.

The first two thirds of the film are about the gradual maturing of the relationship between Frankie and Maggie as she erodes his reluctance to become her trainer and manager. It’s beautifully done. The chemistry between Eastwood and Swank is among the best depictions of a quasi-parental relationship that we have seen in one of these films. The world of boxing is shown unromantically, including through a number of subplots involving other boxers and managers, and we cheer for Maggie as she overcomes these obstacles and achieves success in various places (which, er, all look rather similar but with different decorations on the walls to try and suggest that they may be in different parts of America or Europe). If the film only consisted of the first hour and a half, it would still be a lovely character study.

But two-thirds of the way through, the story takes a massive swerve. In the most important fight of her career, Maggie’s neck is broken by a foul blow from her opponent, and she is paralysed from the neck down for the rest of her life. Frankie continues to care for her, and eventually, at her request, assists her death. The two threads here are Maggie’s courageous accommodation to her new circumstances (incluing a dramatic showdown with her deadbeat biological family), and Frankie’s internal debate about euthanasia (there’s a tremendous scene with a priest, who Frankie has been baiting throughout the film). Here in Belgium, euthanasia has been legal since 2002, but we are ahead of the game. Legal or not, this is an awful subject, and although of course a film treatment needs to sensationalise it a bit for the drama, I felt that Eastwood carried it off tactfully and well here.

I got a lot more out of Million Dollar Baby than I was expecting to, and I’m putting it in my top ten Oscar winners, just ahead of last year’s Return of the King and behind The Bridge on the River Kwai. Next up is Crash, of which I know nothing except that the screenplay is by the same writer, Paul Haggis.

The film is based on one or possibly several short stories in a book by F.X. Toole, which I have had difficulty in getting hold of – it is long out of print, and new EU import regulations complicate the process of acquiring it from most of the English-speaking world. I have ordered it, and will report back when I do read it.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

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Second paragraph of third story (“A Summer Night”):

Upon one stage a woman sang.

Gosh. I had forgotten quite how good this is. It's not a novel; it's a sequence of linked short stories, with some internal inconsistencies, about the colonisation of Mars in 1999-2005, and then a coda in 2026 after disaster strikes Earth. Of course, the stories are more about Earth (and specifically Midwestern, mid-century America) than about Mars; but they are beautifully formed parables, and often more than that. You must have read it, because it's essential reading for anyone who cares about science fiction, but if you haven't, you can get it here.

And the end of the last story, “The Million Year Picnic”, never fails to bring a lump to my throat:

They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night.
“I’ve always wanted to see a Martian,” said Michael. “Where are they, Dad? You promised.”
“There they are,” said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down.
The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.
The Martians were there–in the canal–reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water….

And let's take a moment (well, two minutes and forty seconds) to appreciate Rachel Bloom's tribute to the writer:

This was the top book in my library that I had previously read but not reviewed online. Next on that pile is High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby.

The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene

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Second paragraph of Law 3:

Over several weeks, Ninon de Lenclos, the most infamous courtesan of seventeenth-century France, listened patiently as the Marquis de Sevigné explained his struggles in pursuing a beautiful but difficult young countess. Ninon was sixty-two at the time, and more than experienced in matters of love; the marquis was a lad of twenty-two, handsome, dashing, but hopelessly inexperienced in romance. At first Ninon was amused to hear the marquis talk about his mistakes, but finally she had had enough. Unable to bear ineptitude in any realm, least of all in seducing a woman, she decided to take the young man under her wing. First, he had to understand that this was war, and that the beautiful countess was a citadel to which he had to lay siege as carefully as any general. Every step had to be planned and executed with the utmost attention to detail and nuance.

A well-wisher gave this to F a couple of months ago, and it bubbled rapidly to the top of my reading list. I read the first three chapters and put it down with no intention of resuming. (Actually, that's not the full story. I couldn't find the paper copy, was sufficiently irritated with myself to buy a Kindle version from Amazon, struggled through the first three chapters, gave up, got a refund from Amazon and then found the paper copy.)

I thought it was a repulsive book. It claims to be a self-help book about how to gain Power and be Powerful, illustrated by case studied of people who Obeyed or Transgressed the Laws of Power in history. Most of the self-help books that I have read at least pay lip service to becoming a better person, wanting to make the world a better place by your existence, finding and fulfilling your personal mission, that kind of thing. Greene is just interested in Power; he does not define it, just assumes that you want it too; there is no ethical framework here. It's rather sickening, and the worrying thing is that a lot of people seem to have bought and liked the book. I suspect that his historical analysis is bunk as well, but cannot be bothered to check any of the examples. If you really want to, you can get it here.

This was my top book acquired this year, and my top unread non-fiction book,. Next on those piles are respectively Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver, and Why I Write, by George Orwell.

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660 days of plague: the boosted notes

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No ill effects yet, though I am braced for an uncomfortable night and morning.

The omicron variant is zooming here, as elsewhere, with a massive 82% increase in infections reported today; I would not be surprised if we burst through the delta variant peak in the next few days. (Today: 11778. Record, reported 2 December: 17917.)

But hospital numbers have not been rising as rapidly as in previous waves. Yes, they are up a bit but really not a lot, all things considered. And ICU numbers are actually sill decreasing. We’ll need another couple of days o be sure, but I think the theoty that omicron may be more infectious but less serious is looking fairly credible.

With all of that, the government solemnly met today and decided not to change anything. There were rumours that they had been advised to shift back to 100% teleworking, but in the end they decided to wait and see. So for now I’ll be going into the office on Wednesdays. (If anyone in Brussels wants to meet for lunch, or a pint after work, on a Wednesday, do give me a shout.)

I’m going to divert a bit and talk about career development in pandemic times. I had lunch yesterday with a friend a couple of years older than me who was recently let go from the non-profit job he had had for two decades. Under Belgian law, he still gets paid a month for every year he worked there, so he’s not under economic pressure until late 2023, but of course he is looking around. I mentioned a few possibilities that seemed obvious to me from his CV, and then at the end of the conversation he started talking about one of his hobbies; and his eyes lit up with an enthusiasm that had been absent when we were talking about political work. For heaven’s sake, I said, build yourself a small business working in that hobby (a niche area with lots of fans and certain high-value items and consequently immense transaction fees). I hope he does that. The current situation makes us all more reliant on existing channels of communication, and deters people (well, deters me at least) from setting up new links in the casual way that was possible in the olden times.

This morning I had two separate conversations with two different 21-year-old women who both graduated with their first degrees last summer, one from Northern Ireland, one from Luxembourg (both daughters of old friends). They have had very different university experiences from anyone older than them. Both were really clear about the policy areas that they were really interested in, which of course is really helpful in terms of thinking about where they could look for future employment, so I think I was able to make some concrete suggestions in both cases. But I thought afterwards, in olden times, I could have recommended conferences for them to attend and meet other people with their specific interests, and so that they could make a good impression as potential future hires. It’s much more difficult now, and it’s going to stay difficult for a while.

Stay well, everyone, and get boosted as soon as you can.

A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff, by Neil Gaiman

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Second paragraph of third piece ("Jerusalem", a short story):

He was glad to be out of it.

A collection of mostly minor stories, essays and speeches by Gaiman, including his first ever fiction publication in Imagine issue 14, which came out in May 1984, so I must have bought it at the time without realising its historical importance. A couple of these were already familiar to me, including the famous George R.R. Martin is not your bitch blogpost which I saw when it was first published. There were a surprising number of typos (especially in that first story). Can be safely skipped; I got it as part of the Humble Bundle, and it seems to be otherwise out of print.

Despite its rarity, this was the most popular book that I had acquired in 2015 but not yet read. Next on that pile is Twice a Stranger, by Bruce Clark.

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August 2014 books

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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.

We started the month in Northern Ireland, where among many pleasant experiences we were visited by H and also my cousin A, and did an enjoyable trip to various ancient places in County Down.

The month was dominated by the 2014 Worldcon, Loncon 3, where I was Division Head for Promotions and had a fantastic time.

At the end of the month we went to Leuven for a cinema screening of the first Peter Capaldi episode, Deep Breath, also fun.

(Which was all just as well, as work continued to be unpleasant.)

Worldcon sucked up a huge amount of my time and energy, and I read only 21 books that month, which is unusually low for a summer holiday.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 38)
F in Exams, by Richard Benson
F in Retakes, by Richard Benson
The Making of Doctor Who, by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke

Fiction (non-sf) 8 (YTD 30)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre
A Winter Book, by Tove Jansson
Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis
Battle for Bittora, by Anuja Chauhan
The Waves, by Virginia Woolf
The Life of John Buncle, Esq: Containing Various Observations and Reflections, Made in Several Parts of the World, and Many Extraordinary Relations, vols 1 and 2, by Thomas Amory

SF (non-Who) 6 (YTD 73)
Brontomek!, by Michael Coney
A Guide to Tolkien, by David Day
The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
No Harm Can Come to a Good Man, by James Smythe
Starry Messenger: The Best of Galileo, ed. Charles Ryan
Peacemaker, by Marianne de Pierres

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 42)
Tomb of Valdemar, by Simon Messingham
Bad Therapy, by Matthew Jones
The Crooked World, by Steve Lyons
Engines of War, by George Mann

Comics 1 (YTD 14)
With The Light… vol 7, by Keiko Tobe

~6,600 pages (YTD ~56,500)
5/22 (YTD 49/197) by women (Jansson, Chauhan, Woolf, ξ1, Tobe)
2/22 (YTD 15/197) by PoC (Chauhan, Tobe)

The best of these was The Waves, by Virginia Woolf; you can get it here. Also really good: Battle for Bittora, by Anuja Chauhan, an Indian election romance novel which you can get hereThe Life of John Buncle, Esq., by Thomas Amory, a fore-runner to Tristram Shandy, which you can get hereA Winter Book, by Tove Jansson, which you can get here. Three books that I found particularly poor: Booker-winning Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre, which you can get hereA Guide to Tolkien, by David Day, which you can get herePeacemaker, by Marianne de Pierres, which you can get here.

The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, by Dean Burnett

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Have you got everything you need for your child's upcoming birthday party? Is the big work project going as well as it could be? Will your gas hill be more than you can afford? When did your mother last call, is she OK? That ache in your hip hasn't gone away; are you sure it's not arthritis? That left-over mince has been in the fridge for a week; what if someone eats it and gets food poisoning? Why is my foot itching? Remember when your pants fell down in school when you were nine; what if people still think about that? Does the car seem a bit sluggish to you? What's that noise? Is it a rat? What if it has the plague? Your boss will never believe you if you call in sick with that. On and on and on and on and on and on.

A good breezy book about the wiring system that makes us all function. Style maybe a little too chatty in places, but I guess it helps us to digest the complex subject matter (or at least it helped me to). Rightly excoriates Myers-Briggs and the like. Accepts the standard narrative on the Stanford Prison experiment, Milgram and Kitty Genovese, unlike Rutger Bregman. A lot of what Burnett says is also aligned with cognitive behavioural therapy, with the difference that he is at least as interested in physiology as psychology – which maybe actually makes it all easier to accept. Not a lot more to say, but you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell.

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  • Tue, 15:52: Belgian health ministers have agreed that starting 10 January people who are fully vaccinated will no longer need to quarantine when they have had a high-risk contact for coronavirus. https://t.co/yDiE2p4qp0
  • Tue, 18:51: Seven Deadly Sins, by various writers and artists https://t.co/tenjy9UxjG
  • Tue, 18:54: An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King https://t.co/Zab2FQDhjR
  • Tue, 20:27: RT @DenisMacShane: My grandson will live in 22nd century. Meanwhile tonight Soho newsagent tells me all deliveries of papers from Europe su…
  • Wed, 10:45: This, for me, is the weirdest lie of all. I occasionally lunch with EU celebrities in the brasseries near PLux or Schuman. Everyone else in the restaurant is going, oh look who it is, and they’re with that weird Irish chap. And nobody noticed a prince in Pizza Express? Nobody? https://t.co/RGj2VUdMyu

An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I’ve been steering BeiBei from one quiet game to another so that he would not overwhelm XX the second he returns. I did not grow up in a nurturing household. Now that Hann has given me a taste of that, I want to create that feeling for my son. For all of us. I crave it like food and water.

One of the Chinese SF books that was recommended to me last spring. In a near future China, polyandrous marriages are the norm thanks to the legacy of the gender imbalance caused by the One Child Policy; homosexuality and divorce are pretty much banned. Our protagonists are a young man and a young woman; he wants to join her marriage, but one of her current husbands is a gaming addict and the other is gay, and everyone is subject to state repression. I confess I was not as blown away by this as by the other Chinese SF novels I read in 2021; in real life, the effects of the One Child Policy are apparently not as severe as first reported, and apart from that, I found it a bit of a soap opera. You can get it here.

This came to the top of my pile of unread books by non-white writers. Next up is Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami.

Seven Deadly Sins, by various writers and artists

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Second frame from third sin ("Sloth", by Neil Gaiman and Bryan Talbot):

One of the Neil Gaiman Humble Bundle books that I have almost finished working through, a 1989 collection of short takes on the Seven Deadly Sins by comics writers and artists. The only woman of the fourteen is Roz Kaveney. The best is Neil Gaiman and Bryan Talbot's take on Sloth. You can get it here.

This was the shortest book acquired in 2015 still on my unread shelves. Next on that pile is Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets.

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Black Orchid, by Ian Millsted (and Terence Dudley)

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This is the eighth of the Black Archive brief monographs on Doctor Who, on a two-part 1982 Fifth Doctor story which I well remember watching at the time (it was the month before my fifteenth birthday). When I returned to it in 2008, I wrote:

I did catch Black Orchid first time round in 1992, and it was and is a rather charming story, the Doctor and friends relaxing in a 1920s country household and uncovering the family secret. Davison, playing cricket, and the two girls, partying and in Sutton’s case playing two roles, are great; Waterhouse as Adric won’t dance but will eat. I am left a bit uncomfortable, however, with the idea that you should hide your disabled relatives upstairs and then let then fall to their death off the roof.

When I went back to it for my complete rewatch in 2011, I wrote:

Having had four entire years without a story set in Earth’s past (other than a few scenes in City of Death), we now have two in a row, with Black Orchid taking us forward to the 1920s. There’s not a lot to comment on here; nice characterisation of the regulars, but regrettably the Tardis becomes a taxi again to transport some policemen, appropriately enough given its external appearance, for a distance of only a few miles. The behaviour of the Cranleighs is actually rather reprehensible, and while I hope that the inquest attributed some blame to them, it probably didn’t, since the dead people were only two servants and a disabled person and they had the Chief Constable’s ear.

This time round, for whatever reason, I left it a few days between watching the two parts (they were shown on successive days in 1982; I watched them on the same day in 2008, and on consecutive days again in 2011), and I found myself liking the second episode much less than the first. I have become increasingly annoyed over the years by police procedural fiction where the police do not actually behave like real police would do, and here, having fixed on the Doctor as the likely suspect, they let him hang around the crime scene and bleat on about his innocence, and then while transporting him to custody, stop off to have a trip in his time machine – the TARDIS as taxi, another thing I hate about this era of the show. And, as noted above, the twist is that Cranleigh’s disability turns out to have been morally corrupting as well.

But I will shout out to Ivor Salter as the police sergeant here; he was also the local policeman in several episodes of Here Come the Double Deckers.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terence Dudley’s novelisation is:

‘It could have been made for me,’ said the Doctor. He dropped the costume onto the bed and picked up the head covering which was all of a piece. The pale green cap that covered the head was fronted by a white face mask. This provided holes for the eyes and nostrils, and two blood-red triangles accentuated the cheeks. The Doctor put the head piece on and his identity promptly disappeared.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

Two-part stories give a lot of space to add more to the narrative when it comes time to write the novelisation, and this has been done well (Ian Marter) and badly (Nigel Robinson). This is definitely more at the Marter end of the spectrum. Dudley adds much detail about the cricket match (as incomprehensible to me as to Adric and Nyssa) and roots the story in the class structure of the Britain of the period, the Dowager Marchioness coming across as a particularly memorable personality. He even succeeds in giving Adric a couple of memorable character moments.

It’s a good book – my favourite Fifth Doctor novel so far – but let down by lousy proofing: repeated references to “Portugese” and “Venezuala” (and by the way, the first is not actually spoken much in the second); also we have someone dressed as “Marie Antionette”. A shame that Target couldn’t take more care.

Still my favourite Fifth Doctor novelisation, though I like the comics of the era and the later Big Finish audios rather more in general. Dudley came very close to making me understand cricket. (But still did not quite succeed.) You can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Ian Millsted’s Black Archive analysis of Black Orchid is:

The identification of the Doctor as part of a race called Time Lords did not happen until nearly six seasons had been broadcast. However, from the outset, the Doctor always seemed happier in the company of whoever made up the ruling class of whatever place the travellers found themselves. In Marco Polo (1964) he befriends Kublai Khan. In The Keys of Marinus (1964) he opts to travel straight on to the advanced civilisation while the others slum it in icy wastelands. (To be fair, that was a plot insert to allow William Hartnell a couple of weeks’ holiday.) Even when aristocrats are out of favour in The Reign of Terror (1964), the Doctor manages to ingratiate himself with, and as one of, the new rulers of France. He talks with Robespierre on more or less equal terms.

I thought this was one of the better Black Archive books, though Millsted misses the point I make above about the unrealistic behaviour of law enforcement. The chapters are as follows:

  • an introduction, in which we learn that writer Terence Dudley actually pitched a story to Doctor Who at the very beginning, under Verity Lambert;
  • the story’s roots in Agatha Christie, Murder Must Advertise and Jane Eyre
  • the roots of the horror elements of the story in Frankenstein, The Elephant Man, and the presentation of mental illness and disability in Jane Eyre (again), The Woman in White, East Lynne, The Secret Garden and also other Doctor Who stories;
  • class, race and (briefly) colonisation in Black Orchid and in Doctor Who as a whole;
  • cricket in Doctor Who as a whole, and how Black Orchid successfully rises to the challenge of making it look interesting in a short TV story, despite awful weather on the day of filming;
  • doubles in Doctor Who, from The Massacre to Osgood, circling back to Black Orchid
  • a brief note on two-part stories in Old Who and 45-minute stories in Who generally;
  • an appendix asking if Black Orchid is a true historical story (answer: more or less);
  • another appendix on the Cranleigh family in spinoff fiction, most notably in Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time (which I loved
  • a final appendix responding to critique of the story by the “Watcher” column in Doctor Who Magazine (but mostly agreeing).

Like I said, one of the better Black Archives, with a lot to think about for a very short story. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)

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The stucco ceilings of Jan-Christian Hansche part 5: the church of Saint Rémi at Franc-Waret

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I ventured into darkest Wallonia yeteday, to find another example of the ceiling work of 17th century stucco artist Jan Christian Hansche. This was in the church of St Remigius, Saint Rémi locally, in the village of Franc-Waret near Namur. It’s the least well-known of Hansche’s work – I found it not on a Belgian site but in the Netherlands Institute for Art History lists. The Wikipedia page for the church goes into great detail about the art and who paid for it, but fails to name any of the artists.

I knew that the church is only open for 5pm Mass on Sundays, so got there at 4.30, to find it locked of course, with dusk falling. The priest arrived just after a quarter to, and made it lear that I was welcome to come in and photograph the ceiling. A slightly older couple appeared and it became obvious that it would be churlish not to stay for Mass, since the three of us were the only congregation, so I stuck around.

As I should have anticipated, they asked me to do the readings – but my French is not really up to public speaking and I stumbled a bit over “se prosterneront” in Psalm 72:11. It was not exactly the Volunteer Organist. I don’t think I have been to any religious service in French in the last twenty years, and it will be a while before I go again.

Anyway. The point of the trip was the stucco work of Jan Christian Hansche, and there is a really fine Holy Family above the choir of the church, dated 1663, with Christ’s parents leaning out of the ceiling into our space.

Above the crossing is a representation of the Holy Trinity, which surely must also be by Hansche – it’s very baroque.

I suspect that the nave may have originally had more Hansche ceilings; unfortunately the church was “improved” in the nineteenth century, and there are three rather flat depictions of St Anne educating her daughter, the Virgin and Child and Christ triumphant which are not a patch on Hansche’s work.

The whole church is pretty ornate.

Hand on heart, I could not recommend the church of Saint Rémi at Franc-Waret to the casual tourist. But if you happen to be in the neighbourhood of Namur early on a Sunday evening, or if you are able to get it thrown in as an extra when visiting the castle next door, it’s definitely worth dropping in.

An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown, ed. Francis J. Moloney

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The very fact that John is classified as a Gospel presupposes that John is based on a tradition similar in character to the traditions behind the Synoptic Gospels. Even those commentators who treat the Fourth Gospel simply as a work of theology devoid of historical value must be impressed by the fact that this theology is written in a career-of-Jesus context (unlike the Johannine Epistles).1 Paul too was a theologian, but he did not write his theology in the framework of Jesus' earthly ministry.
1 Indeed, some would regard the Fourth Gospel as an attempt to prevent the kerygmatic preaching of the church from being mythologized and divorced from the history of Jesus of Nazareth.

Anne has returned to studying theology, and it's a subject that vaguely interests me as well so I was glad when this popped up at the top of one of my reading lists. It's a book with a slightly sad history – Brown, the original author, died in 1998 when it was almost finished, and Moloney stepped in to edit his notes and supply a last chapter. This gives rise to the odd situation on pages 257 and 258 where a short footnote by Brown disagreeing with Moloney has been substantially extended with a long defensive comment from Moloney explaining his own argument in more detail.

That aside, I found this a lot more digestible than the biography of St Paul that I recently tried. I have a particular affection for the Gospel of John anyway – way way back, the great C.-J. Bailey (who is 95, if he's still alive, but I don't see any indication that he isn't) tried to teach me New Testament Greek on the basis of the first chapter, and I can still recite it by heart:

1 Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.
2 οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν.
3 πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν
4 ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων ·
5 καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.		 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God;
3 all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

(It's always puzzled me why, given that the original text for the end of the first verse is, literally, “and God was the Word”, “καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος”, most translations choose to put the two nouns the other way round.)

A lot of the theological discussion here is beyond me, but I found Brown's speculation about the process of composition very interesting: that there may have been an original text, now lost, heavily revised and supplemented a few decades later to produce the Gospel that we have, possibly by the same person. Moloney points out very pleasingly in the last chapter that this is also the story of this book – it is based on Brown's numerous earlier writings, but is itself a revision of them by Brown and then by Moloney.

I was also interested in the question of who John was writing against. There is clear polemic against followers of John the Baptist (though one wonders how many of them were left by the time the Gospel was written); against "the Jews", unhelpfully generalised; and against other followers of Jesus who were in disagreement with the writer. In the end, though, Brown agrees with the Gospel's own statement of its purpose at 20:31: "these [things] are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name" – the key purpose is encouragement for the believer, whatever their previous background may be.

Also pleasingly, Brown refers to John the Baptist throughout as "JBap", as if he were a rapper. You can see why, of course, there are a lot of Johns in this story.

I don't think even my regular reader will be rushing to add this to their library, but I got more from it than I had hoped, and you can get it here.

This was the top unread book added to my catalogue in 2019. Next on that list is Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, by Mark Blake.

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The Incredibles

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The Incredibles won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form made in Glasgow in 2005, the first time that I was there in person for the ceremony and I think the first time I voted as well. I had not seen anything in this category and did not express a preference. Voters liked it; it was well in the lead both for nominations and on the final ballot, beating, in order, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Spider-Man 2, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Since then I have seen the Harry Potter, and started watching Eternal Sunshine… on a plane once but fell asleep. I will give it another go some day; it looked promising and is the only film ahead of The Incredibles on both IMDB ratings (one puts them 1st and 3rd respectively, the other 6th and 16th with Spider-Man 2 top.) It was a Nebula finalist, along with Eternal Sunshine… and The Butterfly Effect, but beaten by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King due to the Nebulas' then wacky eligibility timeframe.

I normally do compare-and-contrast photos of actors who have been in previous Hugo or Oscar or Nebula winning films, but since The Incredibles is an animation there's not a lot of point. I'll note that we saw Samuel L. Jackson (Frozone here) as a doomed technician in Jurassic Park, Wallace Shawn (Gilbert Huph here) as Vizzini in The Princess Bride and John Ratzenberger (Underminer here) in small roles in Superman, The Empire Strikes Back, and Gandhi.

I guess that seen from the vantage point of 2005, this looked fresh and interesting and new, an affectionate riff on super-hero stories. (TV Tropes has done a brilliant deconstruction of the themes, as usual.) Fifteen years on, it didn't seem as special to me, with various newer better animations having come in the meantime. I laughed in the right places, but not a lot. Maybe I'm just tired from the Christmas break, and i guess it's entertaining enough, but it didn't do a lot for me; my willing suspension of disbelief must be a bit jaded. I'm putting it about 70% down my list, lower than I've put any Hugo or Nebula winner since The Sixth Sense, ahead of Sleeper but below The Princess Bride.

Next up is Serenity, but before that Oscar-winners Million Dollar Baby and Crash.

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My 2021 books in review

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I read 296 books in 2021, the fourth highest of the eighteen years that I have been keeping track, and the highest since 2011. I was less distracted by real-life politics and by Hugos this year, and also I admit to reading some very short books which bulked up the numbers

(Full numbers: 266 books in 2020, 234 in 2019, 262 in 2018, 238 in 2017, 212 in 2016, 290 in 2015, 291 in 2014, 237 in 2013, 259 in 2012, 301 in 2011, 278 in 2010, 342 in 2009, 371 in 2008, 236 in 2007, 207 in 2006, 144 in 2005, 149 in 2004)

Page count for the year: 77,200, eighth highest of the eighteen years I have recorded, closer to the middle; as mentioned, there are some very short books in there.

(70,400 pages in 2020, 64,600 in 2019, 71,600 in 2018, 60,500 in 2017; 62,300 in 2016; 80,100 in 2015; 97,100 in 2014; 67,000 in 2013; 77,800 in 2012; 88,200 in 2011; 91,000 in 2010; 100,000 in 2009; 89,400 in 2008; 69,900 in 2007; 61,600 in 2006; 46,400 in 2005; 46,800 in 2004)

Books by non-male writers in 2020: 124/296, 42% – a new record in both absolute numbers and percentages.

(77/266 [29%] in 2020, 88/234 [38%] in 2019, 102/262 [39%] in 2018, 64/238 [27%] in 2017, 65 [31%] in 2016, 86 [30%] in 2015, 81 [28%] in 2014, 71 [30%] in 2013, 65 [25%] in 2012, 65 [22%] in 2011, 65 [23%] in 2010, 68 [20%] in 2009, 49 [13%] in 2008, 53 [22%] in 2007, 34 [16%] in 2006, 30 [21%] in 2005, 33 [22%] in 2004)

Books by PoC in 2020: – 42/296 (14%) – highest absolute number, second highest percentage.

(25/266 [9%] in 2020, 34/234 [15%], in 2019, 26/262 [10%] in 2018, 17/238 [7%] in 2017, 14 [7%] in 2016, 20 [7%] in 2015, 11 [5%] in 2014, 12 [5%] in 2013, 15 [5%] in 2011, 24 [9%] in 2010, 16 [5%] in 2009, 6 [2%] in 2008, 5 [2%] in 2007, 8 [4%] in 2006, 4 [3%] in 2005, 2 [1%] in 2004)

Most-read author this year: Neil Gaiman, as I worked my way through the Humble Bundle of his books acquired in 2015. This is the second time that he's been my most-read author of the year.

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

1) Science Fiction and Fantasy (excluding Doctor Who)

2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
131 114 77 108 68 80 130 124 65 62 78 73 78 54 75 68 79 76
44% 43% 33% 41% 29% 38% 45% 43% 27% 24% 26% 26% 23% 15% 32% 33% 55% 51%

Highest total ever, fourth highest percentage.

Top SF book of the year:

I was really impressed by Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, by Matt Ruff, winner of the James Tiptree Jr Award in 2003, a story of multiple personalities and strange things in Seattle; the author went on to write Lovecraft Country, now a TV series. (reviewget it here)

Honourable mentions to:

My votes for the BSFA Award for Best Novel and the Hugo for Best Novel went to, respectively:
(BSFA) Comet Weather, by Liz Williams, a great English fantasy (reviewget it here)
(Hugo) The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin, a great New York fantasy (reviewget it here)

Welcome rereads:

Favourite classics:
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (old reviewget it here)
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (not yet reviewed; get it here)

BSFA Award winners:
River of Gods, by Ian McDonald (reviewget it here)
The Separation, by Christopher Priest (reviewget it here)

Short fiction which won both Hugo and Nebula:
“Sandkings”, by George R.R. Martin (reviewget it here)
“Stories for Men”, by John Kessel (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:

A collection by new-ish British writer Priya Sharma, All the Fabulous Beasts – not sure why she is not better known, I think her writing is great (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:

The 2002 collection of Roger Zelazny's short stories with the title The Last Defender of Camelot – not because of the content, but because of the lazy and incompetent formatting; the 1980 collection of the same name is much better (reviewget it here)





2) Non-fiction

2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
53 50 49 50 57 37 47 48 46 53 69 66 88 70 78 70 42 42
18% 19% 21% 19% 24% 17% 16% 16% 19% 20% 23% 24% 26% 19% 33% 34% 29% 28%

Joint eighth highest total of eighteen years, so squarely in the middle; only 15th highest percentage, near the bottom.

Top non-fiction book of the year:

Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins; more on that below.

Honourable mentions to:

Goodbye To All That, by Robert Graves, mainly about the First World War but also about his privileged background and family (reviewget it here)
A Woman in Berlin, a first-person account of the collapse of the Third Reich, particularly the attendant sexual violence (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:

I was very sorry that The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, by Paul Kincaid, did not win the BSFA Award for Non-Fiction. I like both author and subject, as writers and also as people, but even without that I think it's a great insight into a great writer. (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:

Exploding School to Pieces: Growing Up With Pop Culture In the 1970s, by Mick Deal – sloppy and contributes very little to our knowledge of a well-researched era. (reviewget it here)




3) Comics (and picture books)

2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
48 45 31 28 29 27 18 19 30 21 27 18 28 6 20 6 8 8
16% 17% 13% 11% 12% 13% 6% 7% 13% 8% 9% 6% 8% 2% 8% 3% 6% 5%

Highest total ever, second highest percentage. I've padded a little (but only a little) by including a photo book and an art book here, but that wouldn't change the rankings.

Top comic of the year:

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall – brilliant and timely historical exploration of slavery in places where we don't often think of it as having happened (reviewget it here)

Honourable mentions:

Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, by Damian Duffy and John Jennings – the only thing I voted for that actually won a Hugo; great treatment of a classic story (reviewget it here)
Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen de Booneval, Hervé Tranquerelle and Frédéric Blanchard – a great start to a counterfactual series; I felt the other two volumes didn't quite live up to the promise of the first, but still worth reading (reviewget it here)
My Father's Things, by Wendy Aldiss – lovely lovely book about dealing with grief (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:

Mijn straat: een wereld van verschil, by Ann De Bode – beautiful portrayal of a diverse Antwerp street (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:

Kaamelott: Het Raadsel Van de Kluis, by Alexandre Astier and Steven Dupre – based on a TV series, does nothing new (reviewhere in Dutch and here in French)


4) Doctor Who

Novels, collections of shorter fiction, etc excluding comics
2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
30 18 32 32 51 39 43 59 72 75 80 71 70 179 27 28 5 1
10% 7% 14% 12% 21% 18% 15% 20% 30% 29% 27% 26% 19% 48% 11% 14% 3% 1%
All Who books including comics and non-fiction
2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
40 25 43 42 55 42 54 68 81 75 87 78 80 180 49 32 5 1
14% 9% 18% 16% 23% 20% 19% 23% 34% 29% 29% 28% 23% 49% 21% 15% 3% 1%

I ended my sabbatical from DW reading late in the year. 13th highest total, 15th highest percentage for DW fiction; 14th highest total and again 15th highest pecentage for all DW books.

Top Doctor Who book of the year:

(Black Archive) The Massacre, by James Cooray Smith – second and best so far of the Black Archive analyses of past Doctor Who stories. I flagged it up to actor Annette Richardson, and was thrilled to get a brief but happy reply from her. (reviewget it here)

Honourable mentions:

(Comics) Old Friends, by Jody Houser et al – the Doctor meets the Corsair (reviewget it here)
(Novelisation) The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss – adds a lot to the TV story (reviewget it here)
(Official BBC spinoff) Adventures in Lockdown – somewhat random collection but it works (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:

(Non-BBC spinoff: Lethbridge-Stewart) Night of the Intelligence, by Andy Frankham-Allen – pulls together a lot of threads in this excellent series (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:

(Non-BBC spinoff: Erimem) Angel of Mercy, by Julianne Todd, Claire Bartlett and Iain McLaughlin – you know what's going to happen really very early in the book (reviewget it here)


5) Non-genre fiction

2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
30 40 45 36 26 28 42 41 44 48 48 50 57 24 33 35 9 19
10% 15% 19% 14% 11% 13% 14% 14% 19% 19% 16% 18% 18% 6% 14% 17% 6% 13%

13th highest total, 16th highest percentage, so pretty far down; not quite sure why that is.

Top non-genre fiction of the year:

Joint honours to two novels which were both the basis for Oscar-winning films:
The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris – chilling story of a mass murderer (reviewget it here) and
Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally – chilling story of mass murder (reviewget it here)

Honourable mention:

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson – another look at the same events she has told us about before, from a new perspective (reviewget it here)

Welcome reread:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot – one of my favourite books ever (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:

The Ice Cream Army, by Jessica Gregson – ethnic tensions in WW1 Australia (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:

Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom – also the basis of an Oscar-winning film; awful film, worse book (reviewget it here)



6) Others: poetry and scripts

I read four works of poetry, of which the best new read was Maria Dahvana Headley's Hugo-winning translation of Beowulf (reviewget it hereWelcome to Night Vale volumes, Mostly Void, Partially Stars (reviewget it here) and Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (reviewget it here)

My Book of the Year

My Top Book of 2021 is Carrying the Fire, by astronaut Michael Collins. Funny, moving, gripping, who would have thought that the best account of the first Moon landing would be written by the guy who wasn't there? (And died aged 90 earlier this year.) Absolutely worth reading, not just for space exploration fans but for anyone interested in the human side of one of the most famous events of the twentieth century. You can get it here.

Previous Books of the Year:

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

Poll

Since nobody much is on LJ these days, I've outsourced my 2021 book poll to Surveymonkey. How many have you read?

Friday and December reading

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Roundup for 2021 coming shortly.

Current
Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver
Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon
A Radical Romance, by Alison Light

Books finished last week
The 48 Laws Of Power, by Robert Greene (Did not finish)
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
Les Mondes d’Aldébaran: L’Encyclopédie Illustrée, by Christophe Quillien
Barbarella vol 1, by Jean-Claude Forest, tr Kelly Sue DeConnick
Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday, by Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward and Peter Shirlow
Jani and the Greater Game, by Eric Brown
Barbarella vol 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater, by Jean-Claude Forest, tr Kelly Sue DeConnick
Once & Future Vol. 1: The King is Undead, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvilain
The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World, by Claire Tomalin
Once & Future Vol. 2: Old English, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvilain

December Books

Non-fiction 9 (2021 total 53)
The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend
The Mind Robber, by Andrew Hickey
An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown
Black Orchid, by Ian Millsted
The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, by Dean Burnett
A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff, by Neil Gaiman (more non-fiction than sf content)
The 48 Laws Of Power, by Robert Greene (Did not finish)
Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday, by Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward and Peter Shirlow
The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World, by Claire Tomalin

Non-genre 3 (2021 total 30)
Staring At The Sun, by Julian Barnes
Ann Veronica, by H. G. Wells
Lying Under the Apple Tree, by Alice Munro

SF 9 (2021 total 131)
A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine
The Secret, by Eva Hoffman
"Blood Music", by Greg Bear
Black Oxen, by Elizabeth Knox
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Startide Rising, by David Brin
An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
Jani and the Greater Game, by Eric Brown

Doctor Who 7 (2021 total 30, 40 inc non-fiction and comics)
Doctor Who Annual 2022, by Paul Lang
This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles
The Life of Evans, by John Peel
Night of the Intelligence, by Andy Frankham-Allan
The Wonderful Doctor of Oz, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who – The Mind Robber, by Peter Ling
Doctor Who – Black Orchid, by Terence Dudley

Comics 6 (2021 total 48)
Seven Deadly Sins, by Roz Kaveney, Graham Higgins, Tym Manley, Hunt Emerson, Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, Dave Gibbons, Lew Stringer, Mark Rodgers, Steve Gibson, Davy Francis, Jeremy Banks, Alan Moore and Mike Matthews
Les Mondes d’Aldébaran: L’Encyclopédie Illustrée, by Christophe Quillien
Barbarella vol 1, by Jean-Claude Forest, tr Kelly Sue DeConnick
Barbarella vol 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater, by Jean-Claude Forest, tr Kelly Sue DeConnick
Once & Future Vol. 1: The King is Undead, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvilain
Once & Future Vol. 2: Old English, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvilain

9,300 pages (2021 total 77,200)
13/34 (2021 total 124/296) by non-male writers (Hayward, Tomalin, Munro, Martine, Hoffman, Knox, King, Rayner, Kaveney, DeConnick x2, Bonvilain x2)
1/34 (2021 total 42/296) by PoC (King)
7/34 rereads (2021 total 38/296) – "Blood Music", The Lord of the Rings, Startide Rising, The Martian Chronicles, Doctor Who – The Mind Robber, Doctor Who – Black Orchid, Once & Future Vol. 1: The King is Undead

Coming soon (perhaps)
Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets
El Libro del Mar / The Book of the Sea, by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bolivia (if I can find it)
Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark
Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell
“Bloodchild”, by Octavia E. Butler
Why I Write, by George Orwell
Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz
High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby
Scherven, by Erik De Graaf
The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells
The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest
Air, by Geoff Ryman
Hergé, Son of Tintin, by Benoît Peeters
Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, by Mark Blake
Tower, by Nigel Jones
Flicker, by Theodore Roszak
The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake
After Atlas, by Emma Newman

My tweets

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The Mind Robber, by Andrew Hickey (and Peter Ling)

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Working through the Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who, I’ve now reached the seventh, on the 1968 story The Mind Robber, which features the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie transported to a Land of Fiction, and includes one episode where Fraser Hines is briefly replaced by another actor as Jamie because he had caught chickenpox. I like it. When I watched it for the first time in 2007, I wrote:

The Mind Robber features… Oh, let’s get it over with. Zoe. Nobody can keep their hands off her. Certainly not the Doctor (see right). Certainly not Jamie. And the first episode ends like this. In the fourth episode she has a catfight with a caped and masked comic book superhero and wins. No wonder today’s Guardian lists her as one of the top five companions ever! I have to say that I can’t think of a more confident and sexy performance from any of the companions in any other old Who story; Leela, I think, comes closest but that is not very close. (Of course, if we count new Who as well, nobody can hold a candle to John Barrowman.)

And the confidence on her part (and indeed that of the rest of the cast) is remarkable because in fact the story very clearly doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The Doctor and companions are trapped in the Land of Fiction by its Master (not that Master but a different cosmic villain of the same name). We have a forest made of words. We have Jamie transformed into a different actor for an episode, to cover up the fact that Frazer Hines contracted chicken pox. We have clockwork soldiers. We have Rapunzel, we have E. Nesbit’s Five Children, and best of all we have Lemuel Gulliver, played superbly by Bernard Horsfall (and more on him later [in The War Games]). We have glorious moments of Jamie and Zoe becoming fictional, becoming hostile to the Doctor, being nostalgic for their lost homelands (to which of course they will be returned by the end of the season).

But we also have Doctor Who coming close to breaking the fourth wall, not in the overt way of the First Doctor in the Daleks’ Master Plan (or the charming Morgus in The Caves of Androzani), but in terms of exploring Story and what it means to be in one. It’s fascinating and bizarre and I’ll have to re-watch it soon, along with all the DVD extras. And not just because I want to ogle Zoe again.

When I did my rewatch of the whole of Old Who in 2010, I wrote:

The Mind Robber is one of the most extraordinary Who stories ever. The first episode, bolted onto Peter Ling’s script at the last minute by Derrick Sherwin, is full of wonderful moments of inspired lunacy; the only single episode that does a better job of dimension-hopping is Part One of The Space Museum, and it of course is let down by the rest of that story. In The Mind Robber we have the paradoxical idea of fictional characters (the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe) trying to avoid becoming fictional characters (like Gulliver, Rapunzel and Cyrano de Bergerac). Jamie’s temporary change of body – made necessary by circumstances totally outside anyone’s control – adds an extra element of surrealism to the mix. My one quibble is that the ending is a bit abrupt, and we never see what happens to the Master of the Land of Fiction.

Bernard Horsfall is particularly memorable here as Gulliver, aggravating the Doctor in a world of the mind as he was to do again under David Moloney’s direction in The Deadly Assassin. And having griped about the costumes for The Dominators, those for The Mind Robber – produced by the same designer – are superb; particularly Zoe’s catsuit. The moment when she is shot from behind clinging to the console of the destroyed Tardis is a moment when Doctor Who starts to grow up. Or at least enter adolescence.

Coming back to it again – with the production subtitles on the DVD – I still really enjoyed it, for all the reasons set out above. It’s worth noting that it was the first story directed by David Moloney, who also oversaw the production of such classics as The War Games, Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Patrick Troughton is very good, using force of personality to overcome the low-budget sets. I also must try and get to High Rocks near Tunbridge Wells some time, used both here and in Castrovalva.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:

‘I can’t – hold on – much longer – ‘ Zoe gasped.

When I read it in 2008, I wrote:

This is much more fun. The original TV version was one of the most surreal stories ever; the novel takes some liberties with the script, but basically improves it further to make it one of the better Second Doctor novels. Even the Karkus somehow makes better sense here. One to look out for.

I endorse this assessment. One point to add is that even though Ling did not actually write the first of the five TV episodes, he gives it more page time (38 out of 144 – 26%) than any of the others in the novelisation. Completists will already have it, but if you don’t, you can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Andrew Hickey’s study of the Mind Robber is:

The grafted-on opening by Sherwin means that the serial effectively has two ‘episode 1’s – the story proper does not really start until the second episode – and one could even argue that the plot doesn’t start until near the end of the story. For much of the adventure, this is a picaresque, with the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe exploring an unfamiliar landscape and the characters within it. We will look later at the similarities between the Doctor and Lemuel Gulliver, but in this story the Doctor has become part of Gulliver’s genre – he, like Gulliver, is our representative in a strange place, discovering the rules along with us, and this is enough to carry the narrative without having to have a plot per se.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of Hickey’s writing online over the years, though he has more recently shifted to podcasting and Patreon, neither of which is really my thing, so I was looking forward to this. My expectations were not completely fulfilled. I felt it leant a bit too heavily on the traditional fannish resources for Doctor Who – articles from DWM, Howe et al, Cornell et al – and not enough on other sources. In particular I missed any reference to Who’s Next, by Derrick Sherwin, the writer of the first episode of The Mind Robber and script editor for the whole; his autobiography was published in time for the 50th anniversary rush in 2013, and Hickey’s Black Archive study almost three years later. So there was a lot more telling me what I already knew than telling me new stuff.

Having said that, for those less familiar with Whovian reference books, it’s a workmanlike summary of the state of play, comprehensibly structured and decently written. The chapters cover:

  • the production of the story, and its roots in Platonic philosophy and Alice in Wonderlandthe questions of authorship and the nature of fiction;
  • a very short chapter on the story’s structure;
  • a defence of Season Six and brief bio notes on the main cast and crew;
  • a much longer survey of the characters in the Land of Fiction, especially Gulliver, the Karkus and the Master himself;
  • another very short chapter on why The Mind Robber is different to the First Doctor story The Celestial Toymakerwhat a shame it is that a subtle story full of nuance is chiefly remembered for one male gaze scene [I plead guilty];
  • why the Doctor is not from the Land of Fiction (only one reference is given for this argument);
  • other appearances of the Land of Fiction in the Whoniverse, unsurprisingly omitting The Wonderful Doctor of Oz, published five years later.

You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)