Gladiator (2000), and Those About to Die

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Gladiator won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2000, and four others: Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Costume Design, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. It lost in seven categories, three each to Traffic and to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won both Hugo and Nebula that year.

Of the other four Oscar nominees, I have not seen Traffic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Erin Brockovich, though I have seen Chocolat. 2000 was a difficult year for us, and apart from Chocolat, the only other 2000 films I have seen to the end are Almost Famous, Chicken Run and The Dish, all of which I really like, probably more than I liked Gladiator; I started but could not finish O Brother, Where Art Thou and Bring It On. IMDB users rank Gladiator as the best film of the year on both rankings. Here’s a trailer.

Two actors here have returned from previous Oscar-winners. Most notoriously, Oliver Reed, as gladiator trader Proximo, actually died of alcohol poisoning partway through making the film; way back in 1968 he was bad boy Bill Sykes in Oliver!

More recently, Tommy Flanagan, who is our hero’s loyal servant Cicero here, was also a close ally of the doomed hero of Braveheart in 1995.

There are a fair number of Doctor Who crossovers as well, starting of course with Sir Derek Jacobi, Senator Gracchus here and six years later Professor Yana and briefly the Master in Utopia:

Tony Curran is one of the assassins who fail to kill our hero, and also was Vincent van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor (2012).

David Scholfield is Falco here and went on to be Odin, leader of the Mire, in The Girl Who Died (2015).

I could not find good Gladiator shots of David Bailie, credited as the engineer operating the catapults in the opening battle scene, and also of course Dask in Robots of Death (1978), or of Alun Raglan, here a Praetorian guard, and Mo Northover in the 2010 story The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood.

So. Before I start, the opening titles greatly amused me:

That’s “Northern England”, or, as the locals call it, “Scotland”. (Subsequent social media discussion revealed that the Antonine Wall has a bit of a marketing problem.)

The film is the story of Maximus, chosen successor of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who is displaced by the Emperor’s horrible homicidal son Commodus. Maximus escapes Commodus’ assassination attempt, but is captured by slavers in Spain and sold into slavery in North Africa. He comes to Rome as a gladiator, wins all his battles and challenges Commodus for power in Rome. They both die. It’s great to look at, especially if you are the sort of person who likes to see acres of rippling male flesh (limited appeal for me, I’m afraid). But I think we had a rather similar plot with a happier ending 41 years ago.

The scenes set in Africa, like Casablanca, have a notable lack of actual Africans, apart from Djimon Hounsou as Juba, our hero’s ally and the black guy in the film.

I thought Connie Nielsen was very good as Commodus’ elder sister Lucilla, even though she is given very little to work with and has the only female speaking part to have more than one scene. (Later to appear as Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, in Wonder Woman.)

The core performances of Richard Harris as Marcus Aurelius, Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus and Russell Crowe as Maximus are all solid and carry the story. (And Oliver Reed and Derek Jacobi, already noted, are good too.)

The filmography is good and the music really good.

But at the same time there isn’t really much there there. I’m putting it two thirds of the way down my list of Oscar winners, ahead of My Fair Lady, which may have more parts for women but is much more sexist, and behind How Green Was My Valley, also a spectacular landscape film but with a bit more of a human heart.

Its influence is undeniable, of course, and I can’t resist posting the stunning 2004 Pepsi commercial starring Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Pink and the music of Queen:

The film is supposedly based on Those About to Die, a 1958 book by Daniel P. Mannix IV, which starts off as a historical survey of Roman games and then becomes two short stories, the first longer than the second, about men who worked in and around the arena. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The greatest naumachia of all time was the naval engagement staged by Claudius. As Augustus’ lake was too small, the mad emperor decided to use the Fucine Lake (now called the Lago di Fucino) some sixty miles to the east of Rome. This lake had no natural outlet and in the spring it often flooded many miles of surrounding county. To overcome this trouble, a tunnel three and a half miles long had been cut through solid rock from the lake to the Litis River to carry off the surplus water. This job had taken thirty thousand men eleven years to finish. For the dedication of the opening of this tunnel, Claudius decided to stage a fight between two navies on the lake. The galleys previously used in such engagements had been small craft with only one bank of oars. For this fight, there were to be twenty-four triremes (three banks of oars), all regulation ocean-going warships — and twenty-six biremes (double bank). This armada was divided into two fleets of twenty-five ships each and manned by nineteen hundred criminals under the command of two famous gladiators. One fleet was to represent the Rhodians and the other the Sicilians and both groups wore the appropriate costumes.

In fact the book is much less about gladiators and more about the people who arranged fights with animals in the arena, particularly the arrangements for torture and execution by damnatio ad bestias. Mannix has a bit of a fixation with the unpleasant things a trained animal can do to a woman prisoner. But he also makes interesting comparisons with the showmanship of the twentieth century, and although it’s really not all that interesting a subject he covers it breezily enough.

The next Oscar-winning film is A Beautiful Mind; but before we get there, it’s going to be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Fellowship of the Ring.

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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“Fire Watch”, by Connie Willis

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Second paragraph of third section:

Excitement last night. The sirens went early and some of the chars who clean offices in the City sheltered in the crypt with us. One of them woke me out of a sound sleep, going like an air raid siren. Seems she'd seen a mouse. We had to go whacking at tombs and under the cots with a rubber boot to persuade her it was gone. Obviously what the history department had in mind: murdering mice.

When I last read this in 2002, I wrote:

"Fire Watch" by Connie Willis won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette presented in 1983; it also won the SF Chronicle Award. "Fire Watch" is set in almost the same universe as Willis' later novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog"Fire Watch" is sent to guard St Paul's in 1940 during the Blitz, rather than to accompany St Paul as he had anticipated. This failure to communicate vital information is a recurring theme in Willis' work; think of the incapacitated computer technician in Doomsday Book, the appalling interdepartmental assistant in Bellwether, the messages which may or may not be from the dead in Lincoln's Dreams, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Passage. In this case it seems a little odd that the narrator claims to have spent four years preparing for the wrong mission, and I was thrown by his reference to the time he'd wasted learning Latin – surely Greek would have been more appropriate? – but most readers are prepared to go with the flow.

Another Willis theme that one can track from "Fire Watch" through most of her later work is death; horrible, unfair, untimely death. Death is a major player in all the above-mentioned books except the comedic To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether. Death and the imminent threat of death are ever present in the London of the Blitz; every relationship the narrator forms is coloured by the knowledge that death is quite possibly just around the corner. The narrator knows, as the citizens of London do not, that St Paul's Cathedral will survive the Blitz but be destroyed in a surprise terrorist attack by Communists in 2007. (In 1982, Communist attacks on Western cities were plausible, even if the idea that major buildings could be utterly destroyed in single acts of terrorism still seemed far-fetched.)

For me, however, no matter how convincing Willis' portrayal of the Blitz or how moving her sense of the impermanence of it all, the entire story is completely ruined by the implausibility of 21st century Oxford. The narrator, who is a final year undergraduate, has a room-mate called Kivrin, a woman graduate student. In our world, Oxbridge student accommodation practices are completely different; individual accommodation rather than room sharing is prevalent; it is rare to get an opposite-sex couple sharing accommodation unless they are sexual partners (which does not seem to be the case here); it is almost unheard-of for graduate students to share with undergraduates (because their fees are different, their expected time of residence in the college is different, and they basically don't want to). On top of that, the narrator refers to himself as a "history major"; I don't know any UK or Irish university which uses the term "major" in that sense, and I confidently predict that even if it becomes fashionable in the future Oxford will be among the last to adopt it.

The result was that I spent most of the story picking up on the deliberate hints about the fate of St Paul's and at the same time wondering what the author was trying to hint about the fate of Oxford. This sort of thing happens all the time including in some of my favourite writing – in Mary Gentle's Ash, A Secret History, the historically inappropriate Gregorian calendar is used, for instance; or indeed Shakespeare has striking clocks in Julius Caesar, followed by Cleopatra playing billiards and wearing a corset – but in this case I just couldn't overlook it. By making her 21st Oxford so similar to yer standard 20th century US campus, Willis no doubt intended to propel her readers from a familiar environment into an alien war-torn city, and it probably succeeds for most of them. For this Oxbridge graduate who grew up in Belfast, it just didn't work that way.

This time around, I was even more infuriated by the academic setting. The idea that someone would spend four years preparing for (and being prepared for) the wrong mission is simply ridiculous; the investment of resources for a time trip is surely significant enough to make certain that the person sent back in time is fully prepared for their environment. On top of that, it's not even very clear what the mission is in the first place; can the narrator change the course of time, or not? If not, what's the point? It's a story where Willis has written a heart-wrenchingly sentimental account of a confected history, and it worked for Hugo and Nebula voters, but not for me in 2002 or on rereading in 2021.

"Swarm" by Bruce Sterling was also on both Hugo and Nebula ballots. Also on the Hugo ballot were "Nightlife", by Phyllis Eisenstein; "Pawn's Gambit", by Timothy Zahn; and "Aquila" by Somtow Sucharitkul. Also on the Nebula ballot were "Myths of the Near Future", by J. G. Ballard; "Understanding Human Behavior", by Thomas M. Disch; "Burning Chrome" by William Gibson; and "The Mystery of the Young Gentleman", by Joanna Russ. Both "Swarm" and "Burning Chrome" have a very strong record of republication.

The Best Novel awards that year went to Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov (Hugo) and No Enemy But Time, by Michael Bishop. The Best Novella awards went to "Souls", by Joanna Russ and "Another Orphan", by John Kessel. The Best Short Story awards went to "Melancholy Elephants", by Spider Robinson and "A Letter From the Clearys", by Connie Willis. The Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo went to Blade Runner.

The following year there were two joint Hugo and Nebula winners, "Blood Music" by Greg Bear (the original short rather than the novel) and Startide Rising by David Brin, so I'll get to them next.

You can get "Fire Watch" in various places, including as the title story of a Willis collection available here. It is also online here.

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Friday reading

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Current
Discipline or Corruption, by Konstantin Stanislavsky
Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan
Splinters and the Wolves of Winter, by William Whyte
Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix

Last books finished
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
Free Speeches, by Denis Kitchen, Nadine Strossen, Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
The Ryans of Inch and Their World: A Catholic Gentry Family from Dispossession to Integration, c.1650-1831, by Richard John Fitzpatrick (PhD thesis)
The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson
Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte
Axiom’s End, by Lindsay Ellis

Next books
Day of the Dead, by Neil Gaiman
Paul: A Biography, by Tom Wright

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Time Must Have a Stop, by Aldous Huxley

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Evening clothes were a class symbol, and it was a crime to spend money on useless luxuries when people as good as oneself were starving!’ Sebastian knew in advance what his father’s arguments would be. But behind the arguments was the man—dominating and righteous, hard on others because even harder on himself. If the man were approached in the right way, perhaps the arguments would not be pressed home to their logical conclusion. The great thing, Sebastian had learnt from long and bitter experience, was never to seem too anxious or insistent. He must ask for the dinner jacket—but in such a way that his father wouldn’t think that he really longed for it. That, he knew, would be to invite a refusal—nominally, of course, on the score of economy and socialist ethics, but really, he had come to suspect, because his father took a certain pleasure in thwarting the too explicit manifestations of desire. If he managed to avoid the pitfall of over-eagerness, perhaps he would be able to talk his father out of the other, avowable reasons for refusal. But it would take good acting to bring it off, and a lot of finesse, and above all that presence of mind in which, at moments of crisis, he was always so woefully lacking. But perhaps if he worked out a plan of campaign in advance, a piece of brilliant and inspired strategy …

I had got this last year on the basis that it had been published in 1944 and might therefore feature on that year's Retro Hugo list (I was deputy administrator). In the end it got only four votes (though another 1.5 nominating points would have seen it on the ballot). But in fact it's not very sfnal, the non-realistic bit being a character who dies about half way through and then tries to communicate with the living, to no avail. It's also not terribly interesting, being a story of beautiful and selfish teenager Sebastian who tries to slake his lusts with older women and also get a dinner jacket from his leftie London father and his rich uncle in Italy. Huxley probably thought he was being funny, but the humour has not really lasted. You can get it here.

I had this (incorrectly as it turns out) at the top of my unread sf books pile, but also at the top of my bought-in-2020 pile. Next on those lists respectively are Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve, and Paul: A Biography, by Tom Wright.

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John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, by Fred Kaplan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dashing around London as fast as good horses and a carriage could take them from one famous sight to another, they visited St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy, then Windsor, Bath, Oxford, and Cambridge, where the new astronomical observatory made a great impression on John Quincy. They attended art galleries and theaters. At Westminster Abbey, John Quincy was overwhelmed with “Awe and Veneration” at the monuments to the great poets, especially the inscriptions, the quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the invocation “O rare Ben Jonson.” At Drury Lane and Covent Garden, he reveled in every sort of play, from Shakespeare to Tom Thumb. His theater of the mind became a theater of the stage. The monuments to great warriors struck a different chord, for how much to love and how much to hate England was both a personal and a political negotiation. With his father, he attended the opening of Parliament. The king “made his most gracious speech from the Throne: All the Peers were in their Robes which are scarlet and white: the King’s and the Prince of Wales’s were of purple velvet.” His father years later published an account of their reception on entering the lobby of the House of Lords. The usher appeared “in the room with his long staff, and roared out with a very loud voice, ‘Where is Mr. Adams, Lord Mansfield’s friend!’; I frankly avowed myself Lord Mansfield’s friend, and was politely conducted to my place.” That distinguished jurist had not too long before told “that same house of lords, ‘My Lords, if you do not kill him, he will kill you.’” It was great political theater, and a lesson for John Quincy about the conduct and courtesies of international relations: an enemy today can become a friend tomorrow.

Really interesting book about one of the less successful American presidents, at least considered as a president – only the second (after his own father) to fail to be re-elected. But John Quincy Adams had a long political career both behind him and, uniquely, ahead of him apart from his four not very happy years in the White House; he had been the USA's diplomatic representative to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom, a United States senator, and Secretary of State before becoming president, and then after losing re-election in 1828, went on to serve in the House of Representatives from 1831 until he had a fatal stroke at his desk in the chamber in 1848. (No living US President has ever served in the US House of Representatives; the last were the elder Bush, who served two terms more than fifty years ago, and Gerald Ford, who was a Congressman from 1949 to 1973.)

The climax of his career came in 1841, a decade after he had left the White House, when he defended the captured slaves who had taken control of the Spanish slave ship Amistad and subsequently been captured by the US coastguard; he successfully convinced the Supreme Court that the treaty with Spain which he himself had negotiated did not apply here, and exposed some embarrassing inconsistencies in the paperwork supplied by the Executive branch, as a result of which the Africans were liebrated back to Africa. He had always been viscerally opposed to slavery, though felt he could not say so out loud until near the end of his career.

Adams, like his father, left a lot of writing behind, including a lot of poetry which Kaplan integrates into the narrative. A lot of it is written to his deeply loved wife Louisa, who was born and brought up in London, though by American parents; she was the only First Lady born outside what are now the United States before Melania Trump. He was in St Petersburg during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. He negotiated the Spanish cession of Florida to the United States. He wasn't a good party politician, which is why he barely scraped into office in the Presidency (the only President apart from Jefferson to be elected by the House due to lack of majority in the electoral college). But his intellectual ability was clearly valued even by those who opposed him politically.

A good book from which I learned a lot. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown.

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The Wych Elm, by Tana French

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Are you OK?’ Melissa asked in an undertone, reaching over to squeeze my hand.

A rather good novel about young folks in an extended contemporary Dublin middle-class family, who find a mysterious death from ten years ago coming back to haunt them. The somewhat clueless narrator is very well portrayed; as a straight man, he is oblivious to the challenges faced by his two cousins, one gay and one a mother of two, and only gradually develops a clue. It’s weird to realise that Gen Z have always been deep into social media as part of their world. The end did not quite work for me, but the rest did; and Dublin as a place is very well observed. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a woman and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on the first of those piles is The Empire of Gold, by S. A Chakraborty, and on the second it’s Summer, by Ali Smith.

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580 days of plague

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I have been wondering how much longer I would keep doing these ten-day updates. I had hoped to round them off with the abolition of all restrictions a la Denmark and Sweden, but the Belgian numbers are surging a bit at the moment so it seems unlikely. (And we have lost Colin Powell to COVID now.)

But we’re a lot closer to normal than before. Masks in some circumstances, but shops and bars are all open again, and we have bought a new sofa; I had work lunches every day last week and today (though nothing in the calendar for tomorrow or Wednesday); and the USA is finally opening up to Europeans, so I should be OK for Gallifrey One in February.

Brexit has continued to be a complete shitshow. I did not mention it in my last post, but I was invited earlier that day to a briefing by British officials on the next steps to be taken, in effect soft-sounding me and some more important people from the Brussels bubble four days in advance of Lord Frost’s speech last Tuesday to see how we would react to the likely lines he would take. It’s safe to say that we were none of us convinced by the diplomats’ line that the UK was trying really hard to reach a deal but was being blocked by the pesky Europeans. In the event, the speech was even worse than I had anticipated from the briefings, and I amplified my statements in an interview with Al-Jazeera on Wednesday:

On a more positive note, here in Dutch is a presentation of the place where our daughters live – in fact featuring both of their living units, though neither seems to have been caught by the camera (they can move fast when they want to). It’s actually a recruitment video – I hope it works.

In science fiction news, the faltering bid to host the 2023 Worldcon in Memphis officially folded this morning. This means that it will be either in Canada (Winnipeg) or China (Chengdu). My money is on Winnipeg; I don’t think this is China’s year.

That’s it for now. I think I’ll do two more of these, taking me up to 600 days (though there was a big gap last year), and then call it a day, unless things get bad again.

Doctor Who spinoffs: Prime Imperative, Xmas Files, Mind of Stone

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Three spinoff books this evening, one featuring Erimem and two from the Lethbridge-Stewart sequence.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Prime Imperative, by Julianne Todd:

‘Well?’ Alan demanded. ‘What did they say?’

I think I've reached the end of my patience with the books featuring Erimem, the Fifth Doctor's audio companion; they just aren't really very special. This one is a space adventure in which our heroes end up on an endangered ship; various implausible navigational and management decisions are made and a lot of people get eaten by fungus. It would have been an unoriginal plot in the 1930s (except that some of the astronauts are girls). I think I may turn my attention to the Faction Paradox series which some of you have spoken highly of.

Second paragraph of third story in The Xmas Files ("Home for Christmas", by the collective Lethbridge-Stewart authors):

‘Is that for me?’ his mother called from the hallway.

Three short and punchy short stories, which landed slightly wrong for me because I should have read them after the next novel in the sequence, Mind of Stone, which they are set after rather than before. (I read the anthology first because it was published first. Silly me.)

Second paragraph of third chapter of Mind of Stone, by Iain McLaughlin:

So they would be coming for him. The question was when.

My heart sank a little bit here because McLaughlin has been one of the lead writers of the Erimem series. But in fact it's a well put together story; Lethbridge-Stewart goes undercover in Wormwood Scrubs, posing as a prisoner (with rigged judicial process to put him there), and deals with an alien threat which is turning people to stone (like in the last novel, but different). As usual for this series, a solid piece of work.

Next up: I think I'll take both the third Havoc Files anthology and the next novel, Night of the Intelligence, next month.

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July 2013 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.

The month started on a high note with the accession of Croatia to the EU, something I had helped with a bit (though many others did more).

Otherwise work continued to be pretty wretched. I did not travel outside Belgium, though did have some nice gatherings; here are my two (then) favourite foreign ministers, Natalia Gherman of Moldova and Maia Panjikidze of Georgia, sharing a panel:

I held one of my regular gatherings of current and former interns (Colombian L, Estonian L, Belarusian M, Anglo-American M, and Belarusian N, who I am due to have lunch with on Thursday; picture taken by ):

South Sudan invited me to their independence day party:

Preparations for the 2014 Worldcon continued apace. Albert II, the King of the Belgians, abdicated and was replaced by his son, Philippe. My brake cables were chewed by beech martens.

I read 24 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 22)
A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf
Shakespeare's Handwriting: A Study, by Edward Maunde Thompson
Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress, by Jeannette Lucraft

Fiction (non-sf) 9 (YTD 23)
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston
Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol
Desert, by J.M.G. Le Clézio
Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo
The Last Empress, by Anchee Min
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Spend Game, by Jonathan Gash
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

SF (non-Who) 4 (YTD 39)
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov
Kiss of the Butterfly, by James Lyon
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 37, 45 counting non-fiction and comics)
Harvest of Time, by Alastair Reynolds
The Also People, by Ben Aaronovitch
Vanishing Point, by Steve Cole
Plague of the Cybermen, by Justin Richards
The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman

Comics 3 (YTD 19)
Misschien, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
Nooit, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
Ooit, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre

~6,600 pages (YTD 37,100)
8/24 (YTD 38/141) by women (Woolf, Lucraft, Hurston, Min, Christiex2, Collins, Blackman)
3/24 (YTD 7/141) by PoC (Hurston, Min, Blackman)

The best of these was A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf, which you can get here, closely followed by what were then the Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (since supplemented), which you can get here. Nothing particularly awful.

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Gerard Valentine Ryan, 5 November 1922 – 17 October 1944

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Sometimes in my browsing of family history I hit grimly interesting coincidences or anniversaries, and so it was this morning, when I realised that today is the 77th anniversary of the death of my second cousin once removed Gerard Ryan, aged 21, fighting in the Netherlands during the Second World War. His mother, Aileen Ryan née Grehan, lived to an old age; I don’t know when she died, but she was born in 1890 and I remember her as an occasional presence at family gatherings in the 1970s. Her sister Magda married my great-uncle George (they were distantly related) and her niece Bunty Simonds was one of my father’s closest relatives.

Poor Aileen. Her husband Joss Ryan was killed in a polo accident in India in 1927; their daughter Molly died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm in 1933, a month before her ninth birthday; and Gerard’s death left her on her own. As I said, she remained loved by her extended family, but she had lost those closest to her.

Gerard had been the godfather of his not much younger cousin Peter Ryan, born in 1939, and Aileen took on the role of proxy godmother. Peter died earlier this year; he was a science journalist who wrote Invasion of the Moon, 1969: The Story of Apollo 11.

Gerard was killed during the British advance on the Dutch town of Venray, part of the Battle of Overloon during the Allied advance through Dutch Limburg to Germany in late 1944, a colossal tank engagement in which nearly 2000 Allied soldiers and an unknown number of Germans died. He is buried in Venray Military Cemetery.

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Felaheen; Set This House in Order; Quicksilver

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These are the three books that won the BSFA Award, the James Tiptree Jr (now Otherwise) Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2004 for work published in 2003. I had read Felaheen and Quicksilver before, but Set This House in Order was new to me (though I largely enjoyed the TV series Lovecraft Country, based on another book by the same author). To start with the shortest, also the least popular on Librarything:

Second paragraph of third chapter of Felaheen, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood:

He called again. Just in case either guard was within hearing and then turned his attention back to the snake. Death was always going to come. That it chose to manifest as a slithering viper was unexpected but not impossible. Although, if the elderly Emir had been forced to bet (a vice he deplored), he’d have selected a fat-tailed scorpion as being more likely.

When I first read this in 2004, I wrote:

The third in Grimwood’s Ashraf Bey trilogy, set in an early 21st century North Africa where the Ottoman and German Empires never fell (though Russia is nonetheless soviet) and which is otherwise not very different from our own time-line (to the extent of having the same computer operating systems). Apart from the alternate history aspect, other sf elements include the hero’s electronic alter ego and the fact that Tunis is under international sanctions for unauthorised genetic manipulation experiments. I like this series as much for the sultry, sensual prose as for the intricate plot and striking characterisations. This one didn’t disappoint. However now that Ashraf Bey has reached a certain point in his political career I hope his creator will move on to other things – as long as they are as enjoyable as this.

I’m sorry to say that I found it much more difficult to get into this time round, perhaps because I am more separated from the earlier books in the trilogy, perhaps I was just tired. I guess it’s good that just a couple of years after 9/11, UK fans were ready to celebrate a book that engages positively with the Arab world by giving it the BSFA Award ahead of some other good candidates. You can get it here and the whole trilogy here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, by Matt Ruff:

On the morning I met Penny Driver, I hiked to work across the canal bridge, following the same path I’d first taken with Julie Sivik two years before. The Reality Factory was located on a half-acre lot alongside East Bridge Street’s last stretch of asphalt. My father thought the lot had originally been a truck depot—there was an old fuel island with rusted-out diesel pumps at one end of the property—but for several years before Julie took out her lease it had been a storage facility. The main building, the one that became the Factory, was a long, concrete-walled shed. Shed anyway is what Julie called it, although it was huge, as big as Bit Warehouse inside, with nothing but a double row of support columns to break up the space.

This on the other hand I thought was brilliant; barely SFnal in that the viewpoint characters both have forms of multiple personality disorder, and the extent to which their different personalities have reality can be interpreted to different extents; but I found the Seattle setting thoroughly convincing, the characterisation engaging, and the gradual reveal of the twist ending very satisfying. I did wonder for the first half of the book how precisely it fulfilled the Tiptree Award mandate of exploring gender, but it all became clear on page 237. A worthy winner. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson:

Enoch takes advantage of the lull to make other observations and try to judge empirically whether Daniel’s as unsound as the faculty of Harvard College would have him believe. From the Doctors’ jibes on the ferry-ride, Enoch had expected nothing but cranks and gears. And indeed Waterhouse does have a mechanic’s shop in a corner of the—how will Enoch characterize this structure to the Royal Society? “Log cabin,” while technically correct, calls to mind wild men in skins. “Sturdy, serviceable, and in no way extravagant laboratory making ingenious use of indigenous building materials.” There. But anyway, most of it is given over not to the hard ware of gears, but to softer matters: cards. They are stacked in slender columns that would totter in the breeze from a moth’s wings if the columns had not been jammed together into banks, stairways, and terraces, the whole formation built on a layer of loose tiles on the dirt floor to (Enoch guesses) prevent the card-stacks from wicking up the copious ground-water. Edging farther into the room and peering round a bulwark of card-stacks, Enoch finds a writing-desk stocked with blank cards. Ragged gray quills project from inkpots, bent and broken ones crosshatch the floor, bits of down and fluff and cartilage and other bird-wreckage form a dandruffy layer on everything.

This seems to have been the very last book that I read before I started bookblogging in November 2003. (I was near the end on 29 October.) I must say I was dismayed as I contemplated the 916 pages, but it actually flew past rather well; the narrative, rambling between the late 17th century in Europe and the early 18th century in America, pulls in all kinds of intellectually stimulating thoughts about the geopolitics, economics and scientific theories of the day, with flashes of nerdy humour. Now that I’m a bit more of a Samuel Pepys fan than when I first read it, I wished we’d heard more from him, but you can’t have everything. By glorious coincidence, as I reached the final chapters I was spending a weekend in The Hague, staying a stone’s throw from the Huygens House (now demolished) and the Binnenhof (very much still there) where a substantial part of the story is set. It’s rather a borderline call as to whether it’s really SF (indeed, it may not even be clearly a novel), but the Clarke jury seems to have been satisfied. You can get it here.

One book was on all three shortlists, Maul, by Tricia Sullivan, which I rather bounced off I’m afraid. Midnight Lamp, by Gwyneth Jones, and Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson, were on both Clarke and BSFA shortlists. The Clarke list also included Coalescent by Stephen Baxter and Darwin’s Children by Greg Bear. The BSFA list also included Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds and Natural History by Justina Robson, both of which I thought I had read but I find no record of having done so. The Tiptree list included Maul, three other novels and six short stories, none of which I have read.

Next in this sequence: joint Tiptree winners Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo and Camouflage by Joe Haldeman; Clarke winner Iron Council by China Miéville; and BSFA winner River of Gods by Ian McDonald.

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

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Two Gaiman shorts: Gods and Tulips; and Love, Fishie

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Two more of the collection of short Neil Gaiman books which I picked up years ago in a Humble Bundle. Though in fact one of them is mainly by his daughter.

Second para of third lecture in Gods and Tulips:

And while events unfortunately proved me right, I really didn't think that I'd get away with repeating that speech today.

A collection of three speeches given by Gaiman in the early 1990s, expressing his concern that the then boom in the comics industry (to which of course he had contributed via Sandman) would ultimately prove bad for the genre. I guess the jury is still out. You can get it here.

Third poem in Love, Fishie, plus tree:

There once was a bat who was trapped in a hat,
all on an Xmas Eve.
He pushed and he squirmed,
and he found a cute worm.
The bat said to him,
"Is your name Kim?"
The worm said, "Good guess!
It certainly is, yes!"
Along came the cat,
who sat on the hat
that the bat and the worm were in!
The cat came right over and he said,
"Oh my, somebody in that cat bed,
what are you doing, oh my little friends?
Would you like to come out of there and never end?"
Just then there was a bump and a rumble and what do you know?
Someone was on the roof saying, "Ho, Ho, Ho!"
The bat cried, "Oooooh, there's Santa Claus!"
(The cat said, "Hmm, I bet I have sharper claws than him!")
And they danced and had cookies with the guy who had Claus (named Santa).

This is mostly a collection of poems by Gaiman's daughter Maddy, then aged eight, with some proud parental commentary. They're about as good as you would expect from an eight-year-old in a literary household. It is not easy to get.

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Reflected, ed. Peter de Rijcke

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Second paragraph of third section (a quotation from the artist Winnifred J. Bastian) and one of her paintings (of the New Church in The Hague):

‘One could philosophise about a common cause between these two apparently independent developments, but I prefer to take them at face value and create the provocative pictorials their combination evokes. For me, the subject is a gratuitous one; above all, I am a painter of the sea, but I have always had a thing with buildings. The sea has so many appearances and moods. It never stops changing in colour and mood, that and the way it plays with reflections are a continual source of inspiration. My churches are aesthetically pleasing with ordered detail and shape, yet challenged in these paintings by the uncontrollable will of the sea.’

I bought this nice book at the Gallery of Maritime Art in Colijnsplaat opposite the Zeelandia restaurant. It's a collection of thirty contemporary Dutch artists, fairly gender balanced, and their best paintings on maritime subjects. Only a tenner. You can probably get it on mail order from the gallery.

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Friday reading

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Current
Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte
Blake’s 7 Annual 1982
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh

Last books finished
The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss
Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer
Groetjes uit Vlaanderen, by Mohamed Ouaamari
Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks
The Ambassadors of Death, by L.M. Myles
The Empire of Time, by David Wingrove – did not finish
Crashland, by Sean Williams – did not finish
City of Miracles, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Dark Water / Death in Heaven, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Britain and the Puzzle of European Union, by Andrew Duff

Next books
Discipline or Corruption, by Konstantin Stanislavsky
Free Speeches, by Dave Sim, Denis Kitchen, Frank Miller, Nadine Strossen, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Mike Allred, Roberta Gregory, Bob Fingerman, Jeff Smith, Peter Bagge, Dave Cooper, Troy Nixey, Evan Dorkin, Donna Barr, Bill Sienkiewicz, Judd Winick, Shannon Wheeler, Renée French, Mike Mignola, Matt Wagner, Sergio Aragonés, Matt Madden, Scott Saavedra, Bill Tucci, Paul Guinan, Linda Medley, Jessica Abel, Jaime Hernandez, Arthur Adams, Steven Hughes, Jim Mahfood, and Kevin McCarthy

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2021 Hugo novellas

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Here are my thoughts on this year's Hugo finalists in the Best Novella category. All of them are from Tor.com, a clean sweep previously achieved by Asimov's in 1996 and 1991 – though in those days there were usually only five on the final ballot, not six.

6) The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Five cubed dice. Bone and gold. The figures inscribed in silver on each side include the moon, a woman, a fish, a cat, a ship, and a needle.

One has to start pruning somewhere. This is a sweeping fantasy narrative set in an alternate China. I'm afraid I slightly lost the run of it.

5) Finna, by Nino Cipri. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Ava dropped the box carrying the FINNA on the ground and squatted next to it. Behind them, in the Nihilist Bachelor Cube, the maskhål squirmed in the air. The seam between their world and another universe twitched restlessly. Ava turned her back to it, so she wouldn’t have to look.

I liked all the rest. This has a hapless worker for a multidimensional IKEA-like company pursuing a missing customer and romance across the dimensions. Didn't completely gel for me, but came very close.

4) Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Why is it so important for you to find something that fits her, when she’s still wailing and crying and snotting all over everything?” she asked. “You call me the nonsensical one, but right now it feels like you’re putting the frosting before the fire.”

I don't like most of McGuire's work – there, I've said it! – but I do enjoy the Wayward Children stories, most of which have previously had Hugo nominations. This is a further installment in the narrative of Jack and Jill, twin sisters who featured in two of the earlier stories; now they have swapped bodies and there are dark doings with zombies and Frankensteinish creations. Not quite as good as the first of the series, but still entertaining.

3) Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey. Second paragraph of third chapter:

She watched them across the fire as she helped Cye cut up jerky for stew. Over the fire, a pot of beans and water and dried tomatoes was just starting to bubble, and the steam from the stew combined with the smoke from the fire to haze the evening air. It put the three women into soft focus, reminding Esther of the Why We Fight reels that always played before Approved films—but these three women weren’t young soldiers fighting on foreign soil for the prosperity of the United States.

This is great stuff, a tale of a future authoritarian USA where lesbian travelling librarians are the preservers of all that is good about culture. Young Esther joins them and gradually finds out more about the uncomfortable reality of her society. A great read.

2) Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Frenchy’s Inn not the only colored spot in Macon. But tonight it’s the one to be at. Most here is sharecroppers and laborers. Every table packed. Where there ain’t tables people on their feet, roosted on the stairs—fitting in however. Hardly room to dance or a patch of quiet to think. Whole place is a hot, sweltering, haze-of-July-in-Georgia mess. But long as the liquor pouring and the music going, everybody right as rain.

A very dark spin on Birth of a Nation as a Lovecraftian summoning mechanism, thwarted by African-American sorcerors in an alternative 1922. Well put together and timely.

1) Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi. Second paragraph of third chapter:

She raises her hand, grips a pinch of air between her fingers, then throws her hand down, as though she were pulling a cord under a trapdoor.

I'm being partly sentimental here: Tochi and I have been friends since 2006, when he was an undergraduate at Yale trying to make sense of the Balkans, and I have been thrilled to watch his career develop since then. I entreated the DisCon III WSFS team this year (successfully) to let me be the one to send him the "Congratulations, you're a Hugo finalist" message; one of the high points of a process that, er, also had its lows for me.

But it's not just sentimentality. This is a really good story which, like Ring Shout, addresses the contemporary debate about race in America, but rooted in today and the recent past rather than 1922. The two protagonists are a girl with psychic powers and her brother, who of course gets imprisoned for the crime of being black. We get a raw tour through recent crisis points, and ends on a note of empowered defiance. A real thrill, and it gets my vote.

2021 Hugos: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Series | Best Related Work | Best Graphic Story or Comic | Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form | Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form | Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist | Lodestar | Astounding

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De Walvisbibliotheek, by Judith Vanistendael and Zidrou

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First frame of third page (should be second frame if I followed my usual practice, but I like this more):


Deep on the bottom
of the ocean
lived
a whale.
She was
a hundred thousand
years
old.

This won the Willy Vandersteen Prize last month, for the best comic in Dutch of the last two years. (I raise my eyebrows a little at this, as Zidrou, the writer, is a Francophone, and the book was published in French as La Baleine bibliothèque before the Dutch version came out.) I previously read and enjoyed Judith Vanistendael's De maagd and de negerget the French version here and the Dutch version here.

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June 2013 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 two trips were again both pleasure rather than business – I went to Belfast to launch the new Northern Ireland elections archive, and to London for a 2014 Worldcon meeting. Towards the end of the month my back problems from 2009 returned, and my work environment started a deterioration into toxicity from which it never really recovered. The very sad news came of the death of Iain M. Banks, who had been due to be a Worldcon guest. I had taken this great picture of him in 2007:

Giants walked the streets of Leuven.

And we went to find F's tree.

In popular culture, Game of Thrones reached one of its iconic episodes.

I read 22 books that month.

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 19)
The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn
The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century, by Brendan Bradshaw
PR Urban Elections in Ulster 1920, by Alec Wilson
Miradal: Erfgoed in Heverleebos en Meerdaalwoud, by Hans Baeté, Marc De Bie, Martin Hermy, Paul Van den Bremt and Sara Adriaenssens
TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 3: Jon Pertwee, by Elizabeth Sandifer

Fiction (non-sf) 5 (YTD 14)
The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng
The Gondola Scam, by Jonathan Gash
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco and footnote

SF (non-Who) 3 (YTD 35)
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
Blackbirds, by Chuck Wendig
Starship Fall, by Eric Brown

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 32, 40 counting non-fiction and comics)
Rags, by Mick Lewis
Head Games, by Steve Lyons
EarthWorld, by Jacqueline Rayner
Hunter's Moon, by Paul Finch
Something Borrowed, by Richelle Mead

Comics 3 (YTD 16)
Clockworks (Locke & Key Vol 4), by Joe Hill
Saga, vol. 1, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Afspraak in Nieuwpoort, by Ivan Adriaenssens

~5,700 pages (YTD 30,500)
7/22 (YTD 30/117) by women (Mendlesohn, Sara Adriaenssens, Robinson, Collins, Rayner, Mead, Staples)
2/22 (YTD 4/117) by PoC (Eng, Staples)

Enjoyed rereading Name of the Rose, which you can get here, and Danny the Champion of the World, which you can get here. Enjoyed discovering Tardis Eruditorum 3, which you can get here, and Housekeeping, which you can get here. Not impressed by two of the Doctor Who books, Rags, which you can get here, and Hunter's Moon, which you can get here.


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