2021 Hugos in detail

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Final ballot stats here, nominations here.

Headlines:

Four categories saw the total number of votes for finalists other than No Award dip below 30% of the total poll – Best Fan Writer (28.8%), Best Professional Editor (Long Form) (28.2%), Best Fanzine (27.2%), and Best Fancast (26.8%). Best Fancast was within 43 votes of not being awarded at all, due to dropping below the 25% threshold.

Close results on the final ballot:

  • The closest results among winners were Best Short Story and the Astounding Award, both decided by margins of nine votes.
  • The winner of Best Fancast was decided by a margin of twelve votes.
  • Fourth place in Best Fan Artist was decided by a margin of two votes, and second place by a margin of nine.
  • Third place in Best Fancast was decided by a margin of three votes.
  • Second place in Best Professional Editor (Short Form) was decided by a margin of four votes.
  • Fifth place in Best Fanzine was decided by a margin of six votes.

Close results at nominations phase:

  • The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen, and Far Sector, by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, were 0.25 and 0.3 points from qualifying for Best Graphic Story or Comic.
  • Lee Harris would have qualified for Best Professional Editor, Short Form, with 0.67 more points. (He was also the runner-up for Best Professional Editor, Long Form, but was further adrift there.)
  • Meg Frank would have qualified in best Fan Artist with one more vote.

Strongest performances:

  • Murderbot got 44% of first preferences in the final ballot count for Best Series.
  • Hades won 55% of the total vote for Best Video Game with two contenders remaining in play.
  • Hades also got nominating votes from 54% of everyone who nominated in that category.

Disqualifications and withdrawals:

  • The Mandalorian, Season 2, qualified for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, but was removed because two episodes had also qualified in Short Form, thus bringing Soul onto the ballot.
  • Toni Weisskopf declined nomination for Best Professional Editor, Long Form. Her place was taken by Nivia Evans.
  • Tithi Luadthong received enough votes to qualify for Best Fan Artist, but informed the Administrators that he had produced no eligible art in 2020. His place was filled by Cyan Daly.

The top finalist in terms of first preference votes lost in nine out of twenty categories; in eight cases to the finalist with the second highest number of first preferences in that category, in one case – Best Editor (Long Form) – to the third-placed finalist in terms of first preferences.

In thirteen categories, the winner also topped the poll at nominations stage. In three, the winner placed second at nominations stage; in two, the winner was third in nominations, and in two, the winner was fifth in nominations. (No winners had placed either fourth or sixth at the nominations stage.)

Full details:

Best Novel

Network Effect led throughout and won by 1139 to 707 for Piranesi. The City We Became overtook both The Relentless Moon and Piranesi to take second place. Piranesi took third place. Black Sun overtook The Relentless Moon for fourth. The Relentless Moon came fifth and Harrow the Ninth sixth.

Network Effect was also quite a long way ahead at nomination stage. The nearest miss was Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia which needed another 8 votes worth 4.33 points to qualify.

Best Novella

Come Tumbling Down got the most first preferences, but was overtaken by The Empress of Salt and Fortune which won by 838 to 674. Come Tumbling Down was also then overtaken by Ring Shout for second place, but won third place. Upright Women Wanted took fourth place, Finna fifth and Riot Baby sixth.

Come Tumbling Down, The Empress of Salt and Fortune and Ring Shout were all well ahead of the other three at nominations stage. Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho needed another 5.69 points to qualify.

Best Novelette

Helicopter Story had the most first preferences but was beaten by Two Truths and a Lie by 781 to 564. In an extraordinary case of transfer toxicity, Helicopter Story was then overtaken by The Inaccessibility of Heaven for second place, by Monster for third place, and by The Pill for fourth place before taking fifth, despite starting with the most first preferences in each count. I cannot remember any other cases of the finalist with the most first preferences in the first count scraping only fifth place overall. Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super came sixth.

Two Truths and a Lie was well ahead at nomination stage. "Yellow and the Perception of Reality", by Maureen McHugh, would have qualified with another 4.5 points. "On Safari in R’lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera", by Greg Elizabeth Bear, would have qualified with another 5.17 points.

Best Short Story

In the joint closest result of the evening, "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" beat Little Free Library by nine votes, 712 to 703; Little Free Library had overtaken "A Guide for Working Breeds" and "Open House on Haunted Hill". Little Free Library then won second place, overtaking the same two stories which had more first preferences. "A Guide for Working Breeds" overtook "Open House on Haunted Hill" for third place, "Open House on Haunted Hill" came fourth, "The Mermaid Astronaut" fifth and "Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse" sixth.

Little Free Library topped the nominations poll; the winner, "Metal Like Blood in the Dark", was third, also behind "Open House on Haunted Hill". "The Eight-Thousanders" by Jason Sanford would have qualified with another 3.34 points. Also not far off: "The Ransom of Miss Caroline Connolly" by Alex Harrow; "My Country is a Ghost" by Eugenia Triantaphyllou; "50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know", by Ken Liu; "St Valentine, St Abigail, St Bridget", by C.L. Polk; "Cold Crowdfunding Campaign", by Cora Buhlert.

Best Series

Murderbot won one of the more convincing victories of the night, with 977 votes to 447 for October Daye and 381 for The Lady Astronaut Universe. It had 44% of the first preferences, the highest of the evening. The Lady Astronaut Universe came second, October Daye third, The Interdependency fourth, The Poppy War fifth and The Daevabad Trilogy sixth.

Murderbot was also far ahead of the field at nominations. The Peter Grant/Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch would have qualified with 5.73 more points.

Best Related Work

Beowulf: A New Translation led throughout and beat George R. R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun by 766 votes to 478. A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky came second. FIYAHCON overtook George R. R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun for third place. George R. R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun took fourth place. The Last Bronycon came fifth and CONZealand Fringe sixth.

Unusually, Discon 3 published No Award runoff figures for every place in every category (the constitution only specifies that this shoudl be done in determining the winner). The numbers for No Award here were particularly high in the last four places, with 358 preferring No Award to 753 who preferred George R. R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun.

The two convention events FIYAHCon and CoNZealand fringe were both far ahead of the field at nomination stage, with Beowulf third. Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold, eds Regina Yung Lee and Una McCormack, would have qualified with five more votes, or four worth 3.5 points.

Best Graphic Story or Comic

Parable of the Sower overtook Ghost Spider 1 to win by 501 votes to 454. Ghost Spider 1 took second place, Monstress 5 third, The King is Undead 1 fourth, Invisible Kingdom 2 fifth and Die 2 sixth.

Monstress 5 topped the nominations poll, with Invisible Kingdom 2 not far behind and Parable of the Sower, the winner, down in fifth place. It was very tight at the end, though. The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen was the last excluded and would have qualified with 0.26 more points. Far Sector, by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, would have qualified with 0.3 more points. Superman Smashes The Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru probably would have qualified with two more votes, and Fangs by Sarah Anderson was also not far off.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

The Old Guard was ahead throughout and beat Birds of Prey by 715 to 552. Birds of Prey came second, Soul third, Palm Springs overtook Fire Saga for fourth place, Fire Saga came fifth and Tenet sixth.

The Old Guard also topped the poll at nominations convincingly. Series 2 of The Mandalorian had enough votes to qualify, but was removed because two episodes had also qualified in Short Form. This brought Soul on to fill the gap. Next down was Wolfwalkers, which would have needed another five votes. The first season of Lovecraft Country would have needed another eight.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Whenever You're Ready, the final episode of The Good Place, had a crushing victory with 793 voteson the final count to 425 for The Expanse: Gaugamela and 348 for The Mandalorian 16: The Rescue (which overtook She-Ra: Heart). The published results seem to have an error at the bottom of the third pass – presumably Doctor Who: Fugitive of the Judoon was eliminated and the two Mandalorian episodes got some of its votes – but the result is clear.

The Expanse: Gaugamela came second, She-Ra: Heart was again overtaken by The Mandalorian 16: The Rescue for third place, The Mandalorian 13: The Jedi came fourth, She-Ra: Heart fifth and Doctor Who: Fugitive of the Judoon sixth.

Whenever You're Ready was also well in the lead at nominations stage, followed by The Expanse: Gaugamela. The Star Trek: Picard episode Nepenthe would have qualified with another three votes.

Best Editor, Short Form

Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya got the most first preferences but were overtaken by Ellen Datlow who won by 436 to 370. Lafferty and Divya then won second place by just four votes over Neil Clarke, who came third. Sheila Williams came fourth, Jonathan Strahan fifth and C.C. Finlay sixth.

The top three at nominations, Jonathan Strahan, Ellen Datlow and Neil Clarke, were tightly bunched. Lee Harris, a perpetual near-finalist in this category, would have qualified with 0.67 more points. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas also missed very narrowly.

Best Editor, Long Form

Diana M.Pho was third in terms of first preference votes, but overtook Navah Wolfe and beat Sheila E. Gilbert by 311 to 269. On the penultimate count, Gilbert was only three votes ahead of Wolfe. Navah Wolfe took second place, Sheila Gilbert a convincing third, Sarah Guan overtook Brit Hvide for fourth, Brit Hvide came fifth and Nivia Evans sixth. Turnout in this category was low, at 28.2%.

Diana M. Pho was top of the nomination votes. Toni Weisskopf received enough nominations under EPH to qualify for the final ballot, but declined. That brought Nivia Evans on to fill her space. Lee Harris was the runner-up here as well, but would have needed nine more votes to qualify. Miriam Weinberg, eliminated on the penultimate round, would probably have qualified with just two more votes.

Best Professional Artist

Rovina Cai overtook John Picacio to win by 441 to 412. Picacio came second, Galen Dara overtook both Maurizio Manzieri and Tommy Arnold to come third, Arnold came fourth, Manzieri fifth and Alyssa Winans sixth.

Rovina Cai topped the poll at nominations. Will Staehle would have qualified with 1.05 more points, and Iris Compiet was not far off either.

Best Semiprozine

FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction was ahead throughout and beat Uncanny Magazine by 496 to 449. Uncanny Magazine took second place, Strange Horizons third, Escape Pod overtook Beneath Ceaseless Skies for fourth place, Beneath Ceaseless Skies came fifth and Podcastle sixth.

FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction was well ahead at nominations stage. Fireside Magazine was the runner up, but would have needed another twelve votes to qualify.

Best Fanzine

nerds of a feather, flock together overtook Journey Planet to win by 286 to 211. Journey Planet was then overtaken again by Lady Business for second place, before winning third by six votes over the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog. The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog came fourth, and The Full Lid beat Quick Sip Reviews by six votes for fifth place. Quick Sip Reviews then came sixth. Turnout was low in this category at 27.2%.

nerds of a feather, flock together got the most nomination votes and points. Galactic Journey would have needed six more votes to qualify.

Best Fancast

The Coode Street Podcast was ahead throughout and beat Worldbuilding for Masochists by twelve votes, 259 to 247. Worldbuilding for Masochists came second. The Skiffy and Fanty Show beat Be the Serpent by three votes for third place. Be the Serpent beat Claire Rousseau's Yotube Channel by fourteen votes for fourth place. Claire Rousseau's Yotube Channel came fifth and Kalanadi sixth. As previously noted, turnout was particularly low here at 26.8%, and if 43 fewer votes had been cast for nominated finalists there would have been no Best Fancast award.

The Coode Street Podcast was well in front at nominations stage. Octothorpe would have qualified with 1.51 more points. Hugo, Girl! and Our Opinions Are Correct were also not far behind.

Best Fan Writer

Elsa Sjunneson overtook Cora Buhlert to win by 290 to 260. Cora Buhlert came secon, Jason Sandford third, and Paul Weimer beat Alasdair Stewart for fourth place. The published statistics then show Paul Weimer also taking fifth place ahead of Charles Payseur, but presumably this is a mistake. Charles Payseur is recorded as coming sixth. Turnout was again low here at 28.2%,

Cora Buhlert was well ahead at nominations stage, followed by Charles Payseur. The winner, Elsa Sjunneson, came fifth. James Davis Nicoll would have qualified with another 1.5 points. O. Westin and Adri Joy were also not far off.

Best Fan Artist

Sara Felix was ahead throughout for Best Fan Artist, Beating Laya Rose (who had overtaken Grace P. Fong) by 353 to 284. Only two votes separated Fong and Rose on the penultimate count. Rose then beat Fong by nine votes for second place. Fong convincinglty won third place, Iain J Clark overtook Maya Hahto to win fourth place by two votes, Hahto came fifth and Cyan Daly sixth.

Sara Felix also topped the poll at the nominations stage. Tithi Luadthong got enough nominations to qualify for the ballot, but informed the Administrators that he had produced no eligible art in 2020. That brought Cyan Daly onto the ballot, with only ten nominating votes, so basically everyone who got even a single nomination in this category was within ten votes of getting on the ballot. The nearest miss was Meg Frank, who would have qualified with just one more vote.

Best Video Game

Hades had proportionally the most crushing victory of the night, with 478 votes on the final count to 246 for Animal Crossing: New Horizons and 144 for Spiritfarer. Animal Crossing: New Horizons came second, Spiritfarer third, Final Fantasy VII Remake fourth, The Last of Us: Part II fifth and Blaseball sixth.

In the most lopsided nominations ballot this cycle, Hades qualified with literally three times as many votes and four times as many points as the next nominee, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The nearest miss was Ghost of Tsushima, which would have needed another two votes. (Though it's apparently questionable to what extent it has sfnal content.)

Lodestar Award

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking was ahead throughout, beating A Deadly Education by 784 to 412. A Deadly Education came second, Elatsoe third, Legendborn overtook Cemetery Boys for fourth place, Cemetery Boys came fifth and Raybearer sixth.

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking was also way in the lead at nominations. The runner up was When We Were Magic, by Sarah Gailey, but it would have needed another 11.05 points to qualify.

Astounding Award

in the joint closest result of the evening, Emily Tesh overtook Micaiah Johnson to win by nine votes, 364 to 355. Johnson came second, Jenn Lyons third, Lindsay Ellis fourth, Simon Jimenez fifth and A.K. Larkwood sixth.

Micaiah Johnson and Emily Tesh were in the lead at nominations phase. The nearest miss was Caitlyn Starling, who would have needed another 10.35 points or thirteen votes to qualify.

For myself, only one of my first preferences actually won, the same as last year.

The stucco ceilings of Jan-Christian Hansche, part 4: The Church of St Nicholas at Perk

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My little project to see all the remaining work of the 17th-century stucco sculptor Jan-Christian Hansche promises to pose a number of challenges. Very few of the eleven buildings where his magnificent ceilings remain are open to the public on a regular basis. Also, not many of them are all that close to here, as you will see from my map:

One of the exceptions is the church of St Nicholas at Perk, a small village in the municipality of Steenokkerzeel, right beside the runways of Zaventem Airport, 20 km from here. I first tried to visit as an excursion to prove that I was getting well after my bout with COVID, two weeks ago on Sunday 5 December. Unfortunately I arrived at 1030 just as the sacristan was locking up, so I gritted my teeth and tried again last weekend, arriving at 0930 in time for Mass which lasted just over half an hour. After Mass there was no problem for me to photograph Hansche’s work, and indeed another tourist had also come just for a look, but the lesson is that you need to be prompt sometimes.

Just to give you perspective, here are two shots of the ceiling from different directions, first from the door looking towards the altar, second from the altar looking towards the organ over the door.


The six panels show the four Evangelists, the church’s original patron (the Blessed Virgin) and its current patron (my own saint, St Nicholas). The order from door to altar is John, Matthew, Nicholas, Mary, Luke, Mark for some reason. I’ll present them in the more traditional order, starting with St Matthew and the angel:

St Mark and the lion:

St Luke and the ox:

Poor St John and the eagle are hidden by the organ:

The Blessed Virgin and child – not sure what she is holding, but it’s one of the classic Hansch leaning-out-of-the-ceiling pieces:

And St Nicholas with the three children who he resurrected; his mitre and the middle child both leaning into our space.

The stucco is not in the best of shape after 350 years, and apparently major restoration work is planned between now and 2023, so if you can postpone your visit until then you’ll be rewarded. Even so, the middle two panels, of St Nicholas and the Blessed Virgin, are electrifying.

My tweets

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  • Sun, 11:39: RT @haveigotnews: Lord Frost reportedly furious with the terms of his resignation after negotiating them himself.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

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So, my sequence of Oscar-winning, Hugo-winning and Nebula-winning films has intersected, uniquely, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It won eleven Oscars altogether, tying with Titanic and Ben-Hur for the most in history; in fact it did not lose in a single category in which it was nominated, thus also exceeding the nine-strong clean sweeps of Gigi and The Last Emperor. As well as Best Picture, it also won Best Director (Peter Jackson), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Sound Mixing, Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects. It did not get a single nomination in any of the acting categories (the tenth Best Picture winner out of 76 where this was the case).

The other Oscar nominees were Lost in Translation, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Mystic River and Seabiscuit; I haven’t seen any of them. The other contenders for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, were Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which I have seen, and 28 Days Later and X2: X-Men United, which I haven’t. Because of the (then) weird Nebula rules, the other contenders for Best Script were all from the following year, 2004: The Incredibles, The Butterfly Effect and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; I started watching the last of these on a plane once but fell asleep before the halfway point. I think I have seen only three other films from 2003: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Underworld and American Pie: The Wedding. I would very happily put The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at the top of my list for the year, as Hugo voters, Nebula voters and Oscar voters all did.

We have the Hugo figures, and I can tell you that it got nominations from more than 82% of those who nominated in this category, and romped home on the first count of the final ballot with 69% of the first preferences. I don’t know of any other winner in any category that has done quite as well for the regular Hugos (for the Retros there have been some pretty skewed results).

ROTK1.png
ROTK2.png

I’m not going to go through the returnees from previous Hugo, Nebula or Oscar-winning films because it’s the same as last time. (There are a couple of actors in RotK who were not in the previous films, but don’t have a track record with other award winners either.)

I love this film too. It has a lot packed in – as noted last time, the last 20% of Book 3 and the last 30% of Book 4 were not in The Two Towers and were saved for here. The result is that we lose some stuff – Houses of Healing, Scouring of the Shire, various other bits and pieces. To be honest we can live without them. The major innovation in the film is the rift in the relationship between Frodo and Sam. Like a lot of the additions made by Jackson, the fairly blatant goal is to create more dramatic tension. But unlike the temporary mislaying of Aragorn or the flip-flopping of Faramir on whether to bring the Ring to Minas Tirith, this actually works very well; I would even go so far as to say that by making Frodo a somehat more flawed character than he is in the book, the story becomes more interesting. And the fact that it’s done as a result of Gollum’s manipulation makes him more interesting too.

Incidentally this is the only time since the Hugo Dramatic Presentation category was split that both awards went to the same franchise, Gollum winning the Short Form category for his MTV acceptance speech.

I’m really tired today because of weird and disreputable events happening in DC, so I won’t go on at great length about how much I love this film. But I will give you two bits that I particularly love. F, who has not read the book, was completely transfixed by the scene with Shelob. So was I, and I’ve been having nightmares about it roughly since I was nine. It’s a superb bit of animation.

And when I first saw it in 2003, I was overwhelmed by the lighting of the beacons. It’s not quite as good on the small screen as it was in the cinema, but still pretty good.

And the ending gets ever more bittersweet as the years pass.

Also I love the music.

In my running tally of Oscar-winning films, I’m putting this in my top ten, below The Bridge on the River Kwai and above One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’m putting it even higher up my list of Hugo and Nebula winners, in second place, behind Alien and ahead of the original Star Wars. Next up are The Incredibles (Hugo winner – there was no Nebula for any film made in 2004) and Million Dollar Baby (Oscar winner)

Of course I went back and finished rereading the book. The second paragraph of the third cahpter of Book 5 is:

Day was waning. In the last rays of the sun the Riders cast long pointed shadows that went on before them. Darkness had already crept beneath the murmuring fir-woods that clothed the steep mountain-sides. The king rode now slowly at the end of the day. Presently the path turned round a huge bare shoulder of rock and plunged into the gloom of soft-sighing trees. Down, down they went in a long winding file. When at last they came to the bottom of the gorge they found that evening had fallen in the deep places. The sun was gone. Twilight lay upon the waterfalls.

Again, I practically know it by heart, but I had forgotten the funny bit with the senior healer in the Houses of Healing. And again the ending hits me harder each time I read it. A welcome re-engagement with a dear old friend.

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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640 days of plague

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I’ve continued to feel more and more like my normal self. My blood oxidation is back up to a healthy 97%-98%, and I also seem to have lost a couple of kilos (down to 78 from 80, from 176 pounds/12 stone 8, to 172 pounds/12 stone 4). Most excitingly, the booster jabs are being rolled out in our area earlier next year and I immediately signed up for 6 January (which is 20 days from now, so will be in the next-but-one COVID update).

I went into the office both yesterday and a week ago. Last week I was still too tired to stay at the office Christmas dinner to the very end, but yesterday was fine (apart from very heavy traffic caused by the EU summit). I also went in on Wednesday this week, not to the office but to a couple of external meetings, one of them a guided tour of this exhibition, which I recommend.

I am glad to say that the Belgian numbers are all now moving in the right direction. Yesterday was the first day since June that all four metrics that I follow – new cases, hospital occupancy, ICU occupancy and deaths – had posted both day-on-day and week-on-week decreases. (Seven out of eight down today; deaths, which are generally a trailing indicator, blipped slightly upwards from yesterday’s number.)

However disruption still continues. Anne’s parents had planned to visit us in the week after Christmas, but their Eurostar has been cancelled so they will now come later in January. More worryingly, the omicron variant has not yet hit Belgium very hard, and that will probably push the numbers back up again in the next few weeks.

I sometimes use these posts to comment on British politics, and I can’t ignore last night’s spectacular by-election result in North Shropshire; the shape of things to come, hopefully. The only bigger swing from Conservatives to Liberal Democrats in history was the Christchurch by-election of 1993, which is also the only parliamentary election in Great Britain that I’ve ever campaigned in, putting in two days and a night for the Lib Dems. Ironically, in recent years I have become very friendly with the Conservative candidate who lost Christchurch in 1993, bonding over a shared interest in psephology.

Anyway, I’m still working next week until Thursday, and I’ll go straight back in January; plenty to do, and all great fun too.

Friday reading

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Current
An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown
An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King

Last books finished
Night of the Intelligence, by Andy Frankham-Allan
The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend
Black Oxen, by Elizabeth Knox
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Wonderful Doctor of Oz, by Jacqueline Rayner
Startide Rising, by David Brin
Doctor Who – The Mind Robber, by Peter Ling
The Mind Robber, by Andrew Hickey

Next books
The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, by Dean Burnett
Seven Deadly Sins, by Neil Gaiman

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My tweets

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  • Thu, 18:17: RT @Mij_Europe: The speed at which consensus has switched on @BorisJohnson – from Teflon/defies gravity to inevitability of his departure i…
  • Thu, 18:42: The second paragraph of the third chapter: 2021 so far https://t.co/Gx3F2gIUIk
  • Fri, 07:41: Christchurch 1993 was the only GB election I ever campaigned in, helping the Lib Dems get what is still (just!) the biggest Tory-to-Lib swing ever. Ironically I am now quite friendly with Rob Hayward, the losing Tory in that election! https://t.co/LDN5tywggK
  • Fri, 08:12: RT @pmdfoster: As a Shropshire lad, born and bred, the #NorthShropshire result is completely amazing. Really didn’t believe that was possib…
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The second paragraph of the third chapter: 2021 so far

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Since 2014, more or less, I've been including the second paragraph of the third chapter (C3P2's, for short) of books that I have read as part of my reviews here (If there are no chapters, I look for the second paragraph of the third sub-section within the text; if there are no sub-sections, as is sometimes the case for shorter pieces, I just take the third paragraph from the beginning.) I was originally inspired by H, and have carried on; it feels like a differently valid way of engaging with the literature that I am reading. Now that we are eleven and a half months through 2021, I thought I'd look back over the year so far and see which of the C3P2 extracts is most interesting.

Comics

Not all graphic novels or bandes dessinées are divided into chapters, but most of them are, and a lot of those that I read are in fact albums combining half a dozen monthly issues. So it's not too difficult to identify the C3P2 in most cases, and one can make adjustments of course; if there are no internal sub-sections, take the second frame of page 3, or whatever is most convenient. My top three for the year so far are:

3) Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, art by Hugo Martínez, written by Rebecca Hall

As will be discussed later on, non-fiction in general does better than fiction in terms of the C3P2. This isn't necessarily the case in comic form, but I love this streetscape by Hugo Martínez of early 18th-century New York, with the hidden legacy of slavery. You can get it here.

2) Coraline, art by Terry Dodson, written by Denis-Pierre Filippi (biggest frame of page 3)

The plot of this two-album series made no sense at all, but the art is gorgeous and this is a nice reaction frame from the second volume. You can get it here.

1) Old Friends, art by Roberta Ingranata, written by Jody Houser

In general fiction books don't provide good C3P2's, and Doctor Who books are no exception, but again comics are different and I love this character moment between the Thirteenth Doctor and the enigmatic Time Lord known as the Corsair. You can get it here.

Special mention 1: Brian Aldiss's chair

After the great writer Brian Aldiss died in 2017, his daughter Wendy photographed everything in his house as away of dealing with her own grief, and then published them. The third photograph in My Father's Things, very evocatively, is Brian Aldiss's favourite chair, now forever empty.

You can get the book here.

Fiction

I'm lumping all fiction other than comics together, because although this constitutes by far the largest share of my reading, the C3P2's tend not to be as memorable. Though I am just waiting to read a book where we read something like:

Chapter 3

"What are you doing, Jake?" Isabelle asked.
"Oh, I'm trying to come up with a good second paragraph for the third chapter of my book," Jake replied. "There's this guy who has nothing better to do than compare that sort of thing."

The C3P2 test is not passed well by many fiction books. By chapter 3, the plot is already getting under way, and most writers will have established some momentum. Often paragraphs reflect dialogue between characters, or inner musings, and become correspondingly more difficult to separate from the surrounding text. To pick on the worst example of the year so far, in Angel of Mercy, by Julianne Todd, Claire Bartlett and Iain McLaughlin, a spinoff novel featuring the minor Doctor Who character Erimem, the second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Petrol.

You can get it here.

More positively, my top five fictional C3P2's for the year so far are:

5) 4.50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie:

She looked defiantly at Miss Marple and Miss Marple looked back at her.

It's short but it's effective, like the scene between the Doctor and the Corsair. You can get it here.

4) Second paragraph of "A Bit of our Harlem", the third story from A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston:

The boy approached the table where the girl sat with the air of a homeless dog who hopes that he has found a friend.

A simple but vivid simile. You can get the book here.

3) Cloud on Silver aka Sweeny's Island, by John Christopher:

Smells came over the still waters of the harbour, unidentifiable, disturbing in a way that she was not sure if she liked or disliked. And distant cries, in a language she did not know. A large catamaran, with twin red sails, was cutting across the bows of a motor-launch which was chugging out on one revved-down engine. Across the harbour the town glittered white under blue skies lightly strewn with cirrus. She thought suddenly of London, and so of John. He would be leaving the office about this time, joining the crowd that surged towards Holborn Viaduct station. Or perhaps calling in at the Printer's Devil for a drink. She smiled; that was, on the whole, more likely. Standing with one elbow on the bar, a pint of light ale in front of him, talking boisterously, laughing from time to time that deep reverberating laugh which, she so well remembered, drew people's attention to him from the furthest corner of the most crowded bar. He would not think of her until later — in the compartment crowded with strangers, walking alone along the road from the station to the neat detached house with the garden he was so proud of, and the three boys he was so proud of, and the wife with whom he spent his evenings and week-ends bickering.

I didn't much care for the book as a whole (you can get it here), but I think this is an effective bit of characterisation and scene-setting.

2) Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer:

She could see the Little Free Library from her living room window, and watched the first day as some of the neighborhood kids stopped to peer in. When she checked that afternoon, she noticed that Ender’s Game, Dragonsinger, and Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine had all been taken. The next day, someone had left a copy of The Da Vinci Code, which made her grimace, but hey, there were people who adored that book, so why not. She put in her extra copy of Fellowship of the Ring along with two Terry Pratchett books.

I loved this story anyway, and this is a nice bit of scene-setting for the concept that books really are gateways to other worlds. You can get it here.

1) The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris:

Dr. Hannibal Lecter himself reclined on his bunk, perusing the Italian edition of Vogue. He held the loose pages in his right hand and put them beside him one by one with his left. Dr. Lecter has six fingers on his left hand.

Vivid, economical and memorable. You can get the book here.

Special mention 2: Welcome to Night Vale Scripts

It's very difficult to really identify a C3P2 in a script for a play or film. The exception is Welcome to Night Vale, which is (mostly) a monologue by a single narrator in a very weird town. I love the second paragraphs from both episode 3, Station Management, and episode 28, Summer Reading Program. The second paragraph of episode 3, Station Management, is:

The Night Vale Business Association is proud to announce the new Night Vale Stadium, next to the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area. The stadium will be able to seat fifty thousand, but will be closed all nights of the year except November 10, for the annual Parade of the Mysterious Hooded Figures, in which all of our favorite ominous hooded figures — the one that lurks under the slide in the Night Vale Elementary playground, the ones that meet regularly in The Dog Park, and the one that will occasionally openly steal babies, and for a reason no one can understand, we all stand by and let him do it — all of them will be parading proudly through Night Vale Stadium. I tell you, with these new facilities, it promises to be quite a spectacle. And then it promises to be a vast, dark, and echoey space for the other meaningless 364 days of the year.

You can get it here, in Mostly Void, Partially Stars, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor.

The second paragraph of Episode 28, Summer Reading Program, is:

Nevertheless, in a show of civic dedication, or mindless bloodlust – and they really are so similar – Night Vale's librarians have banded together in defiance of authority to reinstate Summer Reading. Colorful posters with appealing statements like, "Get Into A Good Book This Summer!" and "We Are Going To Force You Into A Good Book This Summer!" and "You Are Going To Get Inside This Book, And We Are Going To Close It On You And There Is Nothing You Can Do About It!" have appeared overnight around the library entrance and in local shops and businesses, all sporting the clever tagline, "Catch the flesh-eating reading bacteria!" The Sheriff's Secret Police have responded by interrogating the proprietors of businesses where the posters have appeared, and by removing and confiscating the posters themselves. Although, to be honest, listeners, the graphic design work is really cute. I mean, have you seen them? The little flesh-eating germ, with his sun hat and library book, using a screaming semi-skeletal human victim as a beach chair? Ah! Adorable.

It's collected in Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which you can get here.

Non-fiction

Non-fiction, whether scholarly monographs or anguished autobiography, tends to produce much the best C3P2's. There are so many to choose from; but these are my four favourites of 2021 so far, three of them autobiographical, which I think is perhaps telling.

4) Statement and Correspondence Consequent on the Ill-Treatment of Lady de la Beche by Colonel Henry Wyndham, edited by Anne Auriol (second paragraph of the third letter of the collected correspondence, from Lady de la Beche to her legal adviser):

If General Wyndham would only be good enough to state what I have to hope from him, I should at once be enabled to arrange my plans for the ill-fated and unhappy future! Under existing circumstances, and remembering my unfortunate connexion of near sixteen years with him, which has entailed so much misery upon me and my poor mother and brother, and more especially at my time of life, I consider I am in every way entitled to a definitive settlement, whether it is yielded as a matter of right, or merely that which his own kindness of heart and feelings of honour may dictate to him to do.

An extraordinary cri du cœur from my distant relative Letitia de la Beche, who separated from her geologist husband after a brief marriage and then took up with a war hero, who after sixteen years dumped her for her cousin. Spectacularly, the online text has Letitia's own hand-written annotations. Even without that, this is a great paragraph.

3) The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend:

Martial law was restricted to the south-west to keep Dublin open for those, in Sturgis's jokey phrase, 'as wants to negotiate'. A few on both sides seem to have wanted to. They found a new intermediary in Patrick Joseph Clune, Archbishop of Perth, a man with some experience of the war — he had been visiting his native Clare at the time of the Rineen ambush and the reprisals that followed it, and his nephew had died in Dublin Castle along with McKee and Clancy on Bloody Sunday. Shortly after the Kilmichael ambush he was enlisted by Joe Devlin as a go-between, and spent most of December moving between Dublin and London, talking to Griffith in prison, and twice to the Prime Minister, who certified him as 'thoroughly loyal'.1 He seems to have drafted agreed truce terms that included immunity for Collins and Mulcahy.
1 Lloyd George to Greenwood, 2 Dec. 1920. HLRO F/19/1/28.

One of those books where every paragraph tells its own story, but is also part of the bigger story, and makes you want to read more about how Ireland became independent. You can get it here. (I haven't yet blogged this one, but I finished it at the weekend.)

2) A Woman in Berlin:

Halsbrecherischer Treppenabstieg. Ich blieb einmal mit dem Absatz an einer Stufenkante hängen. Todesschreck, konnte mich eben noch am Geländer fangen. Weiter, mit weichen Knien. Ich suchte und tastete lange und herzklopfend in dem stockfinsteren Gang herum, bis ich die Hebel der Kellertür fand. A breakneck rush down the stairs. I was scared to death when my heel got caught on the edge of a step. I barely managed to grab hold of the railing in time. My knees went weak, but I went on, heart pounding, slowly groping my way through the pitch-dark passage. Finally I found the lever to the basement door.

This is an incredible narrative of life in Berlin as the Third Reich disintegrated, which you can get here. The English translation above doesn't quite get the staccato urgency of the German original – "Halsbrecherischer Treppenabstieg"; "Todesschreck"; "Weiter, mit weichen Knien" (and this is before the Russians have even arrived). It's an intense and evocative short piece which is true to the spirit of the book as a whole.

1) A Buzz in the Meadow, by Dave Goulson:

From a very young age I kept newts and common toads in tanks in my bedroom, and this went atypically well. The toads in particular made great pets, seemingly taking to captivity and providing great entertainment by hoovering up mealworms with their extending, sticky tongues. When I grew bored of them, or ran out of mealworms from the supply that I bred in a box under my bed, I could simply release the toads back into the garden. However, I longed to have some more exotic amphibians, and eventually I badgered my parents into buying me a pair of North American leopard frogs for Christmas: attractive, bright-green frogs with (as you might guess from the name) a profusion of black spots. I filled one of my glass fish tanks with piles of stones, peat, some plants and a small pond, to make an attractive home for them. It looked great and the frogs settled in well, but after just a few weeks their energetic hopping about caused one of the piles of stones to topple; I came home from school one day to find them both squashed.

This is a little short story of its own, my top C3P2 for the year (unless I read something better in the next couple of weeks). Poor frogs! You can get it here.

So I'm going to keep this up; it makes me happy, and does no harm.

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A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

(Three months ago, even if she'd somehow reached this exalted position in the Ministry, complete with her own tiny office with a tiny window only one floor down from the Minister herself, Three Seagrass would have been asleep in her house, and missed the message entirely. There: she'd justified clinical-grade insomnia as a meritorious action, one which would enable her to deal with a problem before anyone else awoke; that was half her work done for the day, surely.)

Sequel to last year's Hugo winner A Memory Called Empire, which I greatly enjoyed, but did not write up at the time due to being involved with Hugo administration myself. I really enjoyed this one too – horribly lethal alien incursions, grand sweeping palace politics, and a smart kid and a fish-out-of-water diplomat who separately try to save the day. Martine's gimmick of giving her main culture's characters names that start with numbers is surprisingly effective at creating the sense of a totally different civilisation. It's quite a long book – 480 pages plus a glossary and pronunciation guide – but it did not drag. Kindly sent to me by work colleagues when I was down with COVID, to accelerate my recovery. It certainly didn't do any harm. You can get it here.

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Le dernier Atlas, tome 3, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval, Hervé Tanquerelle and Fred Blanchard

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Second frame of third chapter:


Captain Cartier: No, I haven’t myself… but scientists have detected
a significant underground mass, exactly where you predicted, yes.

Third and final volume of the award-winning bande dessinée series, of which I very much enjoyed volume 1 and volume 2. We start a year on from previous events, with the reappearance of the mysterious Umo, an enigmatic huge extraterrestrial entity, after it was banished at the end of the last volume, and its incursion into mainland France, throwing the government of President Fillon into disarray and bringing about new and nasty alliances between the forces of state coercion and the underworld, while our protagonist Tayeb mobilises the George Sand, a giant killer robot, to try and save the day. To be honest, I was not convinced that Vehlmann and De Bonneval successfully kept all the plates spinning in their convoluted plot, though they ask a lot of interesting questions. But the art by Tanquerelle and Blanchard is very good, and the first volume of the trilogy set a very high bar which the other two did not quite reach.

You can get the whole third volume in French here.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

At one o’clock she told her colleagues she was going to lunch, and they smiled and waved at her from behind their monitors. Pulling on a jacket, she walked to a café near the office and sat at a table by the window, holding a sandwich in one hand and a copy of The Karamazov Brothers in the other. At twenty to two, she looked up to observe a tall, fair-haired man entering the café. He was wearing a suit and tie, with a plastic lanyard around his neck, and was speaking into his phone. Yeah, he said, I was told Tuesday, but I’ll call back and check that for you. When he saw the woman seated by the window, his face changed, and he quickly lifted his free hand, mouthing the word Hey. Into the phone, he continued, I don’t think you were copied on that, no. Looking at the woman, he pointed to the phone impatiently and made a talking gesture with his hand. She smiled, toying with the corner of a page in her book. Right, right, the man said. Listen, I’m actually out of the office now, but I’ll do that when I get back in. Yeah. Good, good, good to talk to you.

Having hugely enjoyed both Rooney's novel Normal People and the TV series, I had very high hopes for her new much-hyped novel. I am sorry to say that those hopes were not fulfilled. It is a story of two young women friends and the two men they are in love with; none of them is particularly interesting, nobody does anything particularly interesting and they have no particular hurdles to surmount other than admitting their true feelings for each other. The detached third-person narrative voice also really annoyed me. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book, and also my top unread book by a woman. Next on both lists is Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver.

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Shanghai Sparrow, by Gaie Sebold

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The fox, his tail quivering and his eyes brilliant, tilted his head at an angle precisely calculated to charm.

Steampunk is not always my thing, but this is a good mashup of an alternate technological Victorian England, with also uneasy coexistence with the fey and the Otherworld, while also engaged in colonial oppression in China, all told from the point of view of an orphan girl who goes to spy school. Fun stuff. You can get it here.

This was the SF book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next on that pile is Jani and the Greater Game, by Eric Brown.

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Boundary Commission 2021 input

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My first comment on the current Boundary Commission proposals for Northern Ireland (click to embiggen):

My more detailed input to the Boundary Commission:

Dear Commissioners,

1. I am a long-term observer of your work, a Visiting Professor at the Facuty of Social Science in Ulster University, and have been part of the BBC’s telecast commentary team for every Northern Ireland election since 2010.

2. Nonetheless, I am writing to you purely in a personal and private capacity, not on behalf of either Ulster University or the BBC, or of any other body. I have absolutely no objection to my name being associated with my remarks below.

3. Thank you for publishing your recommendations for the current review. It is a thorough and well-explained piece of work and I have in fact only one minor amendment to propose.

4. I will however present some arguments in support of some of your proposals, as I know that this will make a difference in the deliberative process.

5. Your work has been made considerably easier than was the case in the previous aborted reviews by the fact that Northern Ireland will retain its current number of 18 parliamentary seats. This has meant that for a number of constituencies, alignment with the required quota has been achieved by adjusting the parliamentary boundary to coincide with the new ward boundaries, and/or by transferring a ward or two between neighbouring constituencies. The results are not always elegant but they are sufficient.

Rule 7

6. I have consistently argued that the Commission should not be shy about invoking Rule 7. The Court of Appeal unfortunately quashed the most recent review partly because of the use of Rule 7.

7. I would observe that the Court’s judgement calls attention particularly to the Commission’s obligation to explain its reasoning in relying on Rule 7 in detail, and I think that even a sympathetic observer (such as myself) would have to concede that the Commission did not explain its adoption of Rule 7 at length in the last review process.

8. The lesson for me is that the Commission should still be ready to use Rule 7, but if it does so, it must also be ready to explain why at some length, even to the extent of publishing potential alternative arrangements that do not use Rule 7 and analysing why they do not satisfy the other Rules in the way that a Rule 7 map would.

9. Fortunately this time around, this is a largely academic argument, as it seems that satisfactory maps can in fact be generated without resort to Rule 7. But the issue will not go away, especially if, as is likely, Northern Ireland’s number of seats changes for the next review.

Belfast

10. Although the additions to South Belfast, expanding it to South Belfast and Mid Down, look rather drastic on the map, in fact the areas in question are closely linked to Belfast and it makes sense to include them in the constituency.

11. The same argument cannot really be made for Garnerville and North Down. Garnerville looks to East Belfast, not Holywood let alone Bangor. But I accept that moving it to North Down minimises the need for change elsewhere.

Downpatrick / Strangford and Quoile

12. I support the proposed transfer of the Downpatrick wards to Strangford, and the proposed renaming of the constituency to Strangford and Quoile. Both the Strangford and Quoile and South Down constituencies will be more compact. It can be argued that Downpatrick does not particularly look to Newtownards or Comber, but it does not particularly look to Warrenpoint either.

Dungannon / Mid Ulster; North Armagh / Fermanagh and South Tyrone

13. More reluctantly, I support the proposed transfer of the Dungannon wards to Mid Ulster. The result is to leave an awkward salient of Fermanagh and South Tyrone wards extending well into the north of County Armagh. But disruption elsewhere in the West is thereby minimised.

14. In particular, it is must be admitted that Dungannon is no more closely linked to Enniskillen than to Cookstown. It is a 15-minute drive from the Thomas Street roundabout to Chapel Road in Cookstown; to get to Enniskillen takes almost an hour, if traffic and roads are good. For their part, travellers heading east from Fermanagh have been able to avoid Dungannon since the M1 was built in 1967 (and most have done so).

The Loughries / Carrowdore border between North Down and Strangford and Quoile

15. I agree with and support the principle of the Commission’s decision to keep the existing north-south boundary between North Down and Strangford / Strangford and Quoile, between Six Road Ends and Ballyblack. The area to the east of this line has been in the North Down constituency since it was created; the population to the west lives mainly around Newtownards. The local government re-warding process unfortunately and unrealistically put these two different populations together.

16. However, it is quite important in general to minimise the departures of the parliamentary boundaries from the local government ward boundaries. There is no reason not to align the next section of the boundary, essentially transferring the townland of Ballybuttle from Strangford / Strangford and Quoile to North Down. The number of voters cannot be very many.

17. On the other hand, it is sensible to keep the easternmost part of the boundary where it is; the boundary between the Loughries and Carrowdore wards runs right through the middle of Millisle, and it will be disruptive to inhabitants to put them in different constituencies.

Conclusion

18. I live and work in Belgium, so unfortunately it is very unlikely that I will be able to participate in any public hearings in this review.

19. Nonetheless, I wish the Commission well in their work, and hope that they will take seriously the arguments in favour of the minor amendment I suggest to their proposals. I look forward also to reading other submissions.

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April 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.

My conversations with my current employer continued in April 2014, but then petered out for a few months. I did have work trips to both Cyprus and Barcelona; much more enjoyably I also went to Eastercon, Satellite IV in Glasgow, where I had a great time despite forgetting to bring any actual money (thanks, once again, to the friends who helped me out with some instant liquidity) and managed (to some later confected controversy) the transmission of the Hugo final ballot to most of the world's media, and started a fight with Vox Day. I then celebrated my birthday with a visit to a convention in Antwerp, where F met the true Voice of Mario.

Colin Baker was also there.

I read twenty books that month. Unlike in some previous cases, I don't appear to have uploaded covers at the time.

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 19)
Adventures with the Wife in Space, by Neil Perryman
Anglicising the Government of Ireland, by Jon Crawford
Understanding the Lord of the Rings, eds. Rose A. Zimbardo & Neil D. Isaacs
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
Other People's Countries, by Patrick McGuinness
Need for Certainty, by Robert Towler

Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 12)
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Revelation, by C. J. Sansom
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith
Cheese, by Willem Elsschot

SF (non-Who) 5 (YTD 27)
Any Given Doomsday, by Lori Handeland
Inverted World, by Christopher Priest
Deathless, by Cat Valente
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Assassin's Quest, by Robin Hobb

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 26)
Amorality Tale, by David Bishop
Return of the Living Dad, by Kate Orman
Hope, by Mark Clapham
A Handful of Stardust, by Jake Arnott

Comics 1 (YTD 3)
Aldébaran #5: La Créature, by Leo

~6,300 pages (YTD ~26,300)
5/20 (YTD 24/85) by women (Zimbardo, Handeland, Valente, Hobb, Orman)
0/20 (YTD 2/85) by PoC

The best of these was Orwell's classic Homage to Catalonia, which you can get hereThe Ocean at the End of the Lane, which you can get here, and Other People's Countries by Patrick McGuinness, which you can get here. Very underwhelmed by Lori Handeland's urban fantasy, Any Given Doomsday, which you can get hereAmorality Tale, which you can get here.


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My tweets

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  • Sat, 14:48: The Treaty of Westphalia https://t.co/IQfqSQ3Gzs What shall we do about Luxembourg?
  • Sat, 15:50: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers https://t.co/pI6bzBMxiL
  • Sat, 17:01: The stucco ceilings of Jan-Christian Hansch, part 3: the ones I’ll never see https://t.co/lNbPSH9qBs
  • Sat, 18:05: RT @EdMcMillanScott: @MatthewParris3 “Someone decent needs to stand up and rid us of @BorisJohnson but Tories are championing an empty vess…
  • Sun, 00:02: Am puzzled by commentary that North Shropshire has been Tory since the Great Reform Act. Mostly, sure; entirely, no. When the seat was first created in 1832, Rowland Hill (he of the stamps) had to share it with a Whig, John Cotes of Woodcote, who however stood down in 1835. 1/
  • Sun, 09:23: RT @Astrozombies76: Happy birthday to Sarah Sutton who played Nyssa in Doctor Who alongside the 4th and 5th Doctors. She’s 60 today. ⭐ #d…
  • Sun, 10:45: RT @nicktolhurst: The whole fishing conflict has essentially been for nothing as it has only achieved poisoning relations while UK eventual…
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The stucco ceilings of Jan-Christian Hansche, part 3: the ones I’ll never see

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I have recently become fascinated with the work of the 17th-century sculptor Jan-Christian Hansche (name spelt in various ways in different sources), who I found out about visiting the Park Abbey, near us, and then the Château de Modave out in Wallonia. His specialisation was in three-dimensional stucco ceilings of incredible detail. Very little is known about him or his life; all the work that he is known to have done was in Belgium or in the Lower Rhine district of Germany, which was under Dutch rule in his lifetime (though before he worked there). I’ve compiled a Google Map locating all of his work that I could find. (Blue – places I’ve been; Green – places I haven’t been to yet but hope to visit; Red – Germany.)

I will never see the Hansche sculptures in Germany, and here’s why.

Let’s start with Wesel, the farthest east of any of Hansche’s work; Wesel incidentally was the birthplace of Peter Minuit, the founder of Nieuw Amsterdam, now New YorkJoachim von Ribbentrop.

Here are two lovely Christmas scenes, originally commissioned for the ceiling of a patrician house on the Fischmarkt in Wesel, later occupied by the Rigaud family. There must have been more than just the Nativity and the Nunc Dimittis originally, but this is all I could find, from this article. Click to embiggen:

I just love the arm of Anna the prophetess reaching up in adoration of the baby.

After the Nazis took power in 1933, the Hansche ceiling in Wesel was moved from its original home in the Fischmarkt and reinstalled in the former castle of the Dukes of Kleve on the Kornmarkt, as part of the buildup of a new municipal museum. 97% of Wesel was destroyed in Allied bombing raids in February and March 1945, the heaviest being in March shortly before the town was captured by Allied ground forces. It is a cliche to say that a bombed-out city looks like the surface of the moon, but there’s some justification in this case.

The Fischmarkt has disappeared from the map, and the site of the old ducal castle where the Hansche ceilings would have been in 1945 is now the municipal cultural and education centre.

Wesel was part of the territory of the Dukes of Kleve, and we’re going a short hop down the Rhine to Kleve itself next. Kleve is best known in English history in the name of Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves (though in fact she was born in Düsseldorf and grew up in Solingen, both of them 100 km or so to the south). In German culture Kleve is known for its association with the Swan Knight, Lohengrin. (Dah dum-da-dum. Dah dum-da-dum!)

According to a nineteenth-century guide to art in the Kleve district, visitors to the inn “Zum Grossen Kurfürst” could look up and see a large stucco by Hansche. Fortunately the innkeeper was sufficiently aware of the commercial potential that he produced postcards of his own ceiling. The first panel shows Venus feeding a horse and Cupid as a centaur:

We then have Zeus kidnapping Europa:

Seven bacchantes bearing flowers, with Mercury, god of trade, floating over them (not a brilliant photo):

The Fall of Phaethon (I love this one, he’s tumbling directly into our space):

Diana kissing the sleeping Endymion:

And Mars and Venus caught in adultery, which Hansche actually signed.

The inn Zum Grossen Kurfürsten is visible on the right of this postcard of the Kleiner Markt, showing also the Church of the Assumption.

Here’s a more recent picture of the Kleiner Markt, posted by Nikodem Niklewicz to Google Maps. As you can see, no trace of Zum Grossen Kurfürsten remains.

Kleve was heavily bombed on the night of 7 February 1945, a young Richard Dimbleby coming along to report breathlessly. It is claimed that it was the most bombed city of its size in Germany, with the level of destruction greater than in Dresden. (I don’t know how one could really measure this.)

Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, who ordered the bombing, described it as “the most terrible decision I had ever taken in my life” … “I felt a murderer. And after the war I had an awful lot of nightmares, but always Cleves.” The rubble was so extensive that it actually slowed down the Allied ground troops when they arrived a couple of days later. Bombs from the war are still being found in Kleve (2014, 2015, 2019, 2021 and again in 2021).

Fans of sculpture in general will still find a visit to the Kleiner Markt in Kleve worthwhile, even though Zum Grossen Kurfürsten has gone. In the middle of the square you will find the Fountain of Fools, seven water-spouting faces at different heights, commemorating a local carnival tradition.

Up beside the church you will find the “Dead Warrior” by Ewald Mataré. This was originally commissioned as a memorial to Kleve’s fallen soldiers of the First World War. But the Nazi regime condemned it as “degenerate art”, removed it, smashed it and buried it. The fragments were discovered in the 1970s and it was restored by Mataré’s pupil Elmar Hillebrand. A monument to the tragedy of war fitted the Zeitgeist of the later twentieth century rather better than the 1930s.

I have friends in Nijmegen, just across the Dutch border. Maybe some day I’ll visit them and nip over to Kleve. (And maybe even Wesel.)

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers won the first ever Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form in 2003, and the Nebula for Best Script of 2003 (awarded in 2004). It also won two Oscars. IMDB users rank it top film of 2002 on one system but only seventh on the other. For both Hugo and Nebula, it beat Minority Report and Spirited AwayHarry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Spider-Man, and the other Nebula finalists were Finding Nemo and a Futurama episode. As with the previous film, The Two Towers scored a knockout victory with Hugo voters, and I think I'd have voted with the majority again even though it is definitely the weakest of the three LOTR films.

Just before I dive into this film, I want to point readers to this critique of my review of Fellowship of the Ring, with a follow-up post including some very interesting links for the reader/watcher who wants to go farther down the rabbit hole.

Most of the actors in The Two Towers who had been in previous Oscar/Hugo/Nebula-winning films were covered last time. There are however two additional old faces to add to the mix, both from Oscar-winners rather than Hugo- or Nebula-winners. Bernard Hill, Théoden here, was the captain of Titanic five years ago, and also attempted to quell Gandhi twenty years ago.


Going back a lot further, Gríma Wormtongue, Saruman's mole in Théoden's court, is played by Brad Dourif who was Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, twenty-seven years ago.

This is the film that should not in fact have been made. Peter Jackson's original vision for LOTR was to make two films, or a trilogy with The Hobbit as the first installment. With the death of Boromir in the first film, and everything post-Isengard and post-Faramir in the third film, The Two Towers only uses 70% of the material of the original (more or less seven out of ten chapters in both Books) and new material is introduced for the sake of dramatic tension; which means that for the Tolkien fan, it does feel a bit padded. The worst bit of padding is the exciting bit where Aragorn appears to have fallen off a cliff and died. It seems about as dramatic as Father Jack losing his slippers in Father Ted. The shift of Faramir's character to i) wanting to take Frodo and Sam to Minas Tirith and then ii) changing his mind is also not terribly smoothly done. One thing that is in the book but a bit disappointing on film: the Ents, who I'd always envisaged as much more thickset and tree-like. Very difficult to get that designed, I guess, especially given that every frame with Treebeard in took 48 hours to render. I remember Ralph Bakshi having similar problems. I also still wince at the infantilisation of Merry and Pippin, though they are starting to grow up here.

But there are two tremendously good things about the film, at the beginning and the end, quite apart from the fact that New Zealand is also made to look fantastic. To start at the end, the Helm's Deep battle sequence is spectacular and shows the money and time thrown at it, while also giving the protagonists some space for character development. (With the flaw that again the extra Elves seem a bit bolted on, and there is a downhill cavalry charge which doesn't seem all that realistic.) I had forgotten that the explosion bringing down part of the wall was also in the book. It's difficult to convey a sense of topography in a filmed battle (well, I imagine it's also difficult to understand the topography of a battle when you are actually fighting one), but I think the film does it pretty well.

(I see when I first wrote up the film trilogy I was also impressed by the flooding of Orthanc; it made less impression on me this time, watching the three-hour theatrical presentation rather than the four-hour director's cut.)

And the Top Thing I Love about The Two Towers is the establishment of Gollum as a character. I never had a good sense of what he might look like from the books – there's a sense of webbed feet, a slightly amphibian note; an unpleasant narcissist with an over-riding obsession. But Andy Serkis' performance combined with the post-production treatment of Gollum's appearance makes for one of the most spectacular bits of character development I've seen between page and screen. This doesn't feel bolted on at all: it's true to Tolkien's concept of the character and at the same time gives it a little extra.

I'm putting this just under halfway down my list of Hugo- and Nebula-winning films, below Who Framed Roger Rabbit and above Bambi, also both films with a lot of animation in. Next up is the only film to win Hugo, Nebula and Oscar.

I went back and reread the book as well, or rather Books 3 and 4 of The Lord of the Rings. The second paragraph of the third chapter (of Book 3) is:

He [Pippin] woke. Cold air blew on his face. He was lying on his back. Evening was corning and the sky above was growing dim. He turned and found that the dream was little worse than the waking. His wrists, legs, and ankles were tied with cords. Beside him Merry lay, white-faced, with a dirty rag bound across his brows. All about them sat or stood a great company of Orcs.

Obviously I love the whole book with a deep deep love, and it's difficult to write about the middle bit in isolation. But I'll say this – often the second volume of a trilogy, or even the middle third of a long book (which this is) suffers from middle-book syndrome, getting the characters from the beginning to the end. I think Tolkien largely avoids this problem by throwing in surprises throughout – we do not know if Merry and Pippin are still alive until the third chapter, we do not know if Frodo and Sam are still alive until the second Book, Gandalf reappears from the dead, and Frodo briefly seems to have been killed by Shelob at the end. He also plotted out the movements of the characters against the calendar meticulously, and the fact that he has done his homework is modestly obvious. I still love the whole thing, with a deep deep love. Even if there are more named horses than women.

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Friday reading

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Current
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend
Startide Rising, by David Brin
Night of the Intelligence, by Andy Frankham-Allan
Black Oxen, by Elizabeth Knox

Last books finished
Lying Under the Apple Tree, by Alice Munro
"Blood Music", by Greg Bear
Doctor Who Annual 2022, by Paul Lang
This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles
The Life of Evans, by John Peel

Next books
An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown
An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King

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The Last Defender of Camelot, by Roger Zelazny (2002, not 1980)

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The title of the third story in this collection is given as "Engine at Heartspring's Center", and the second paragraph, as presented here, is:

She was regaining her feet, the signs in the sand indicating flight and collapse. She had on the same red dress, torn and stained now. Her black hair—short, with heavy bangs—lay in the only small disarrays of which it was capable. Perhaps thirty feet away was a young man from the Center, advancing toward her. Behind him drifted one of the seldom seen dispatch-machines—about half the size of a man and floating that same distance above the ground, it was shaped like a tenpin, and silver, its bulbous head-end faceted and illuminated, its three ballerina skirts tinfoil-thin and gleaming, rising and falling in rhythms independent of the wind.

That of course is a problem. The title of the story is usually given as "The Engine at Heartspring's Center", and the second paragraph is, memorably:

Choose any of the above and you might be right.

An entire page has been omitted from the ebook. I repeat, the entire first page of the story has been omitted. In fact, the last page of the previous story, "For a Breath I Tarry" is missing as well. Other pages are missing throughout the ebook. I don't think that I have ever seen this before, from any other ebook that I have ever read. It is shockingly contemptuous of the author and of the reader. I acquired this over a decade after publication, so there is no excuse for not fixing the problem.

In addition, the very title of the collection shows disrespect to both reader and writer. In Zelazny's lifetime, a largely different collection of stories was published with the same title, in 1980. Each story had an introduction from Zelazny, shedding light on what he was trying to do (and largely succeeding) in each case. There's none of that here, just an introduction from Robert Silverberg saying that Zelazny was a great guy and a great writer.

I never thought that the day would come when I actively disrecommended a book by Zelazny, one of my favourite authors, but that day has in fact come. All of the stories here are great, but all of them are readily available elsewhere, mostly in collections authorised by Zelazny in his lifetimes, and many of them can be found for free online. Shame on ibooks, Inc. for publishing such a crappy effort, and shame on the Zelazny estate for authorising it. I understand that the print edition of this collection was poorly produced and some buyers found that their copies fell apart.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016 (as part of a Zelazny bundle). Next on that pile is The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest, of which I have somewhat higher hopes.

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The Last Witness, by K. J. Parker

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Second paragraph of third section:

We heard all about you, the old man said, the stuff you can do. Is it true?

I picked this up as a recommendation from one of the lists of novellas that should have been on the 2015 Hugo ballot, though in fact this didn't make the top 15. I don't think I was aware at the time that K.J. Parker is a pseudonym for Tom Holt, best known for his comic fantasy. This is not comic at all. It's a grimly convincing story of a man who is able to extract and delete specific memories from other people, but with the consequence that he himself retains those memories; and he never forgets. He's not a pleasant character, but it's a very well-drawn story, and would probably have got a vote from me if it had been on any list I could have voted for. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2015. Next on that list is A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff, by Neil Gaiman.

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One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright

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Second paragraph of third section:

His voice was like bubbles rising in a swamp. “Kicktoad no more, Little Tommy! I am called Bufotenine the Great now, yes I am. Apprentice no more, but Master! Yes!”

This ended up on my unread list as part of the 2015 Hugo packet. It was a story that was slated onto the Best Novella ballot, which I refrained from reading at the time, as I was always going to vote No Award in a category where all five finalists had been put there through an organised campaign by a racist misogynist whose declared aim was to destroy the Hugos. However, I decided that I'd work round to it eventually in good faith; and here we are.

It's not very good. It's a story about four people who as children had a very Narnia-like adventure and are now dragged as adults into a new encounter with the other world by Tibalt the talking cat, who is killed and resurrected towards the end, in case you hadn't got the point. As my regular reader knows, I am not a huge fan of the comic series DIE, by Kieron Gillen and others, but it takes a similar idea and does it much better.

The dialogue of One Bright Star to Guide Them is florid. Many important points of the action happen off stage. (Our protagonist is a captive at the end of one chapter, and free at the start of the next, a transition that is never explained.) All of England is next door to all the rest of England. Wright had his moments earlier in his career; this is not one of them. His behaviour around the Puppies in 2015-16 would anyway have disinclined me to vote for him (yeah, I know, artist from the art, but the Hugos are community awards and choices have consequences). But this story is in no way Hugo worthy.

You can read it for free online here if you want to cross-check my take. I am sorry to report that I cannot now find the rest of the 2015 Hugo packet in my archives, so unfortunately I have had to remove Big Boys Don't Cry, by Tom Kratman, and Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, a collection of essays by John C. Wright, from my unread list. If you happen to have kept your own copies of those from the 2015 packet, please don't feel under any obligation to send them to me. Doing so would be a violation of the honour code on which the Hugo packet is made available.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2015. Next on that list is Seven Deadly Sins, by Neil Gaiman.

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My tweets

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  • Wed, 12:56: Blood donation – Service du Sang – Belgian Red Cross https://t.co/4opYmkohQF Unfortunately I can’t give blood in most European countries because my blood is too British. But if you can, you should think about it.
  • Wed, 19:01: RT @AyoCaesar: Nowhere in this article does it mention that Allegra Stratton’s husband, James Forsyth, is the political editor of The Spect…
  • Wed, 19:12: Not Before Sundown, Sinisalo; Camouflage, Haldeman; River of Gods, McDonald; Iron Council, Mi�ville https://t.co/Uu6pSsXrlC
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Not Before Sundown, Sinisalo; Camouflage, Haldeman; River of Gods, McDonald; Iron Council, Miéville

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These are the four books that won the Tiptree, BSFA and Clarke Awards in 2004. (The Tiptree Award was shared.) I had already read three of them, and I found I didn’t really want to reread one of those three. Which one? Well, you’ll find out…

The one I had not read was one of the two Tiptree winners, Not Before Sundown, aka Troll, a Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo. I met the author in Helsinki in 2017, when we got her to read the final ballot for Best Novel in that year’s Hugo Awards as part of the superb announcement video (now vanished, alas); we filmed in the mini-shopping mall at Eteläesplanadi 22, Johanna standing beside the mermaid statue by Tove Jansson’s father for which Tove herself modelled, me holding an umbrella just out of camera shot because it was pouring with rain.

Thanks to the wonderful Sanna and Jukka, working in parallel, I managed to track down the Finnish original of the second paragraph of Part 3:

Se ei tunnu sairaalta, ei ollenkaan, vaikka sen turkki pölisee jatkuvasti synkeänä pilvenä Electroluxin letkussa.He doesn’t seem ill at all, though the shreds of his coat are a dismal sight in the Electrolux [vacuum cleaner].

This is a really intense and complex (and short) novel, which it would be slightly unfair to call urban fantasy even though it’s about a troll taking up residence in a contemporary Helsinki apartment block. Mikael, who finds and cares for the troll, is a gay photographer who lives upstairs from a Filipina mail-order bride. The troll’s pheromones cause massive sexual confusion for everyone, sparsely recounted in that very Finnish way. The narrative is bolstered by a history of humanity’s coexistence with trolls over the centuries and millennia. Helsinki is a sober nineteenth century city which has undergone some occasionally brutal twentieth century development; but it’s not difficult to feel older forces tugging at you when you are there, and Johanna Sinisalo has captured that, as well as exploring some important human issues.

I had previously read the other Tiptree winner, Camouflage by Joe Haldeman, because it also won the Nebula the following year. The second sentence of the third chapter is:

Of course Jack Halliburton knew that the sub had ruptured and that there was no chance of survivors. But it made it possible for Russell Stearns to ply down the length of the Tonga and Kermadec trenches. He made routine soundings as he went, and discovered a mysterious wreck not far from the sub.

When I read it in 2006, I wrote:

Well, its high points are less high but its low points not as low as the three other books on the Nebula shortlist which I had read (Air, Going Postal and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell). It bears a very strong resemblance to Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, with the story being the interweaving of two threads about immortals (in this case, probably alien) living in our world, who are drawn together by an alien artifact discovered in the Pacific Ocean in 2019. Indeed, perhaps the award of the Nebula was partly a tribute to Butler’s novel. Haldeman, of course, puts his own riffs on it – basically, he brings in much more science, and much more of the military, and makes it into a love story as well. All adds up to a very enjoyable book, which I would certainly have overlooked if it had not won the award.

Coming back to it after fifteen years, I had forgotten almost everything about it but enjoyed it all the more for that, though I have little to add to the above. Haldeman is not what you would think of as a typical potential Tiptree/Otherwise Award winner, yet he has always had an inclination to explore sexuality, which doesn’t always take him down the right track; but this time it did. You can get Camouflage here.

The Tiptree Award showed an interesting balance of old and new, fantasy and science fiction, in its choice of winner that year. It also had two special mentions of non-fiction books; a short list of two novels, two collections and two short stories, none of which I recall reading; and a long list on nine novels and five shorter pieces, which included Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, on which more in a moment, and Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment.

The BSFA Award went to River of Gods, by Ian McDonald. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

With a manifest of Bengali politicians and their diplomatic guests from neighbour and erstwhile rival Bharat, the States of Bengal tilt-jet lurches in the chill microclimate spiralling up from the ice floe. Shaheen Badoor Khan notices that the surface is grooved and furrowed with crevasses and ravines. Torrent water glitters; ice-melt has gouged sheer canyons in the ice walls, spectacular waterfalls arc from the berg’s cliff edges.

I gave River of Gods my first preference for the Hugos, and would certainly have voted for it in the BSFA Awards if I had had a vote. (My first Eastercon was still seven years away.) In my 2005 Hugo round-up, I wrote:

I realise I’m partly cheering for my home team here. I believe the last Hugo winner from Northern Ireland was Bob Shaw, who was voted Best Fan Writer in 1979 and 1980 (and I think Walt Willis’ “Outstanding Actifan” Hugo in 1958 may complete the list not just of Ulster winners but of Irish winners in toto). However I’d like to think my opinion of this book would be just as high if it had been written by a Californian, or indeed an Indian since that’s where it’s set. In 2047, a hundred years after independence, the sub-continent is embedded in ecological troubles and accelerated technology. The cast of characters includes a comedian who inherits a business empire, a journalist, a policeman hunting rogue AI’s, an American scientist, a politician, a neuter, a small-time crook, a Big Dumb Object, and India itself. McDonald keeps all these balls hurtling through the air, to dazzling effect. A great book in a good year.

I slightly sighed when I considered the 477 pages of the novel, but in fact rereading was a joy, with the complex, vivid society of India in the near future, confronted with internal tensions and, as with Camouflage, an alien intrusion. The one point I picked up on this time around is that I think McDonald’s future India has Bangladesh (re)united with West Bengal, which seems improbable from here. Otherwise I stand by what I said sixteen years ago. You can get it here.

(Particularly thinking of Ian right now; he suffered a bereavement last month.)

The BSFA shortlist also included four other books that I have read – Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson; Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke; Newton’s Wake, by Ken MacLeod; and Stamping Butterflies, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood – and one that I haven’t – Century Rain, by Alastair Reynolds. As will already be clear, I think the BSFA voters got it right.

The Arthur C. Clarke Award went to Iron Council, by my fellow Clare College alumnus China Miéville. (We have never met.) The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

‘We’re taking a diversion,’ Cutter said. ‘It’s going to take you a few extra days to get to Shankell. We’re going southwest first. Along the coast. Up the Dradscale Rover. You’ll make Shankell a few days late, is all. And minus a bit of stock.’

Again in my 2005 Hugo round-up, I wrote:

Back to the fantasy city of New Crobuzon, setting of Mieville’s two earlier books, but this time with revolution, and the legacy of a socialist train from years ago in time bringing the ideology back home, combined with the variegated humans and near-humans and the distorted landscapes of Mieville’s created world. Lots of fascinating stuff here, including desperate if unusual love affairs, extraordinary landscapes, and nods to many historical revolutionary movements (New Crobuzon for once more reminiscent of Paris than of London in places). But I felt it went on a bit too long, and the language, while lyrical and wonderful in many places, was verbose in others, and that the ending didn’t really reward the effort I’d had to put in; actually my least favourite of the three New Crobuzon books. Also the fact that Mieville’s politics are well to the left of the average Hugo voter’s will probably put him out of contention. (Of course, that is less true this year than most years.)

If you’ve been counting, you’ll have worked out that this is the one I couldn’t finish when I tried re-reading it. Seventy pages in, with my brain fogged by COVID, it all seemed like a bit too much effort and I turned to other, less profound reading. Be that as it may, you can get it here.

The Clarke shortlist also included River of Gods, along with three other books that I have read – Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; The Syſtem of the World, by Neal Stephenson; and The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger – and one that I haven’t – Market Forces, by Richard Morgan. To be honest I think I would rate all of the ones I have read ahead of Iron Council, but that’s the breaks. I’d have found it tough to choose between Mitchell and Niffenegger; while I love The Syſtem of the World I wouldn’t put it top of that list.

Interesting to note that three of the four above are about non-human intrusions into our world – extraterrestrial intrusions in Camouflage and River of Gods, an ancient entity in Not Before Sundown – even though two of those three aren’t quite our world – River of Gods is set in 2047, and in Not Before Sundown, humans and trolls have a long history of uneasy coexistence.

For completeness, River of Gods and Iron Council were also losers on the Hugo ballot, along with The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross. This was the year of the most recent Glasgow Worldcon, and I diligently read everything and voted for River of Gods, but it lost fairly narrowly to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The rather crazy Nebula system of the time means that you have to compare with two different years, in one of which Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls beat Cloud Atlas, and in the other, as noted above, Haldeman’s Camouflage repeated its Tiptree success, ahead of Air, by Geoff Ryman; Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett (who had declined a Hugo nomination for it); Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell yet again; Orphans of Chaos, by John C. Wright; and Polaris, by Jack McDevitt.

This has been a long entry for the three awards that I am following in this series of posts. The next will be shorter, as all three were won the following year by Geoff Ryman’s Air, a feat otherwise only achieved by Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow.

Arthur C. Clarke Award winners:
The Handmaid’s Tale | The Sea and Summer | Unquenchable Fire | The Child Garden | Take Back Plenty | Synners | Body of Glass | Vurt | Fools | Fairyland | The Calcutta Chromosome | The Sparrow | Dreaming in Smoke | Distraction | Perdido Street Station | Bold as Love | The Separation | Quicksilver | Iron Council | Air | Nova Swing | Black Man | Song of Time | The City & the City | Zoo City | The Testament of Jessie Lamb | Dark Eden | Ancillary Justice | Station Eleven | Children of Time | The Underground Railroad | Dreams Before the Start of Time | Rosewater | The Old Drift | The Animals in that Country | Deep Wheel Orcadia | Venomous Lumpsucker | In Ascension | Annie Bot