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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4.50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

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

Looking back at my old reviews, I spotted this as a gap in my write-ups of Agatha Christies and decided to fill it. I actually think it’s one of the better ones. A friend of Miss Marple’s sees a murder happening on a train running parallel to her own; Miss Marple sets out to find the murderer, with the help of a star Oxford graduate who has decided to devote her life to skilled domestic work (er… it must be admitted. one of Christie’s few solid independent woman characters) and the hindrance of a confused family situation which seems to be at the heart of it all, as the story evolves into a country house mystery. There are throwaway remarks about the evils of socialism, but generally made by the less pleasant characters which makes one wonder where the author’s own sympathies lay. The new National Health Service features as a topic (new-ish in 1957), as does the easy availability of abortion services in France. I had read it as a teenager and remembered only that the actual murderer turned out to be someone rather unlikely, as indeed is the case. The reader is not given quite enough information to make the solution fair, but does get enough to make it interesting, and there are some excellent twists along the way. You can get it here.

I don’t think I will revive my Agatha Christie project, but if I do, the next in sequence will be Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

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Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, by H.G. Wells

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He even made some dim, half-secret experiments towards remedying the deficiencies he suspected. He spent five shillings on five serial numbers of a Home Educator, and bought (and even thought of reading) a Shakespeare and a Bacon’s ‘Advancement of Learning,’ and the poems of Herrick from a chap who was hard up. He battled with Shakespeare all one Sunday afternoon, and found the ‘English Literature,’ with which Mr. Woodrow had equipped him, had vanished down some crack in his mind. He had no doubt it was very splendid stuff, but he couldn’t quite make out what it was all about. There was an occult meaning, he knew, in literature, and he had forgotten it. Moreover, he discovered one day, while taunting the junior apprentice with ignorance, that his ‘rivers of England’ had also slipped his memory, and he laboriously restored that fabric of rote learning: Ty Wear Tees ‘Umber —’

Another of H.G. Wells' famous non-sf novels, this one famously made into a musical and film starring Tommy Steele which I saw on TV a few times.

(NB that the shop owner is played by Hilton Edwards, one of the famous Boys of Dublin.)

I wasn't really satisfied. Arthur Kipps, the protagonist, comes from a humble background, gets a girl, unexpectedly becomes rich, gets a different girl, decides he can't take being middle class, goes back to the first girl, loses his money, gets it back again and ends up happy having found his place. Wells is trying to write about the evils of class distinction and inequality, but comes across as rather patronising of poor Kipps. I think it would have been interesting to speculate a bit about the absence of his father and early death of his mother made it difficult for Kipps to make relationships work; and a bit more editorial comment on the ritual humiliation meted out by the middle classes on a parvenu would have been welcome. (Having said that, I found Helen, the dumped girlfriend, rather sympathetic even though she is one of the main agents of this process.) So in the end I felt that the book rather pulled its punches. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by Wells. Next in that list is Ann Veronica, of which I know nothing.

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  • Sat, 18:19: Retour sur Ald�baran, �pisodes 2 and 3, by Leo https://t.co/H96ANUz7gQ
  • Sat, 20:38: RT @garius: On 8th Oct 1952 the worst civilian rail disaster in UK history happened in London. 112 dead. 340 injured. That accident, and t…
  • Sat, 20:48: RT @TSting18: Happy 85th Birthday to the legendary Brian Blessed. As always, to celebrate this great day, here’s Brian swearing for 2 minut…
  • Sun, 08:36: RT @SamuelMarcLowe: I’m on board with any attempt to reduce/remove friction for goods moving from GB->NI, but it’s difficult to see why ECJ…
  • Sun, 10:45: RT @Mij_Europe: No one in EU is quite sure about HMG intentions – does it want to genuinely fix issues in NI citizens/businesses care about…
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Retour sur Aldébaran, Épisodes 2 and 3, by Leo

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Second frame of third page of Épisode 2:


Claudia: OK, I'll leave you to it. Good night and good luck!

Second frame of third page of Épisode 3:


Sterens: This phenomenon has been described in space
travellers' tales. But it has never been confirmed.

So, I've reached the end for now of Leo's Mondes d'Aldébaran series of graphic novels (though a two-volume story, Neptune, is coming out next year). These two round out the trilogy whose first volume I read when it came out. Kim and friends are exploring the new planet reached through a mysterious cube; their mission, and they themselves, are put at risk by dark political machinations back on Aldebaran, and they must deal with the threats of hostile but insentient life-forms and justly suspicious humanoids on their new planet.

Perhaps a bit more starkly than before, Leo looks at migration, integration and xenophobia in a society which thinks of itself as advanced, and links this inevitably with colonisation and exploration. The art is lush, the plot is standard but fairly rattles along, and the characters are all pretty distinct and believable. Recommended (as are all 24 of the Aldebaran books). You can get vol 2 here (here in English) and vol 3 here (here in English).

Here's a promotional video for all three Retour sur Aldébaran volumes:

This was my top unread comic in a language other than English. I have a lot to choose from but I think I'll go for the new and final volume of Le dernier Atlas next.

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570 days of plague

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So, young F has endured ten days in quarantine since I last wrote, and has displayed no symptoms of COVID whatsoever. So we have had a lucky escape. He is free as of tomorrow and I also get a test tomorrow morning (actually my 7-day test from his positive notification, but three days late because I have been travelling and recovering from travelling), and hopefully that will be the end of the story.

In fact I got pinged as having been close to some confirmed cases of COVID at the weekend, while in The Hague, presumably from others in the testing queue on Tuesday last week, but I’d meanwhile had another test on Friday so I was cleared.

I’d had the Friday test for my trip to the U.K. from Monday to Wednesday, only to discover on Monday morning that the British requirement for a recent negative test has been dropped if you are double-vaxxed (as I have been since June). So there you go.

Meanwhile I had a pleasant time in London, with a couple of days of work and also an afternoon visiting C in Eltham, including the medieval palace hall where Henry VIII was brought up.

Eltham Palace is quite extraordinary – reconstructed as an Art Deco home in the 1930s by Sir Stephen and Lady Virginia Courtauld, who only actually lived there for eight years. It has been well restored.

It’s also close to an anonymously crucial spot in Irish history.

Anyway, back to the usual routine. Belgium’s current rate of positive cases is the lowest in Western Europe, and the U.K.’s is the highest (not counting the Isle of Man or Channel Islands); and our death rate is about half the U.K.’s. So I hope I have not brought any nasty souvenirs back with me, but tomorrow’s test will make that clear.

Edited the following day: As I hoped and expected, my test on Saturday morning was negative.

Friday reading

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Current
The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss
City of Miracles, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Groetjes uit Vlaanderen, by Mohamed Ouaamari

Last books finished
Prime Imperative, by Julianne Todd
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
The Wych Elm, by Tana French
The Xmas Files, ed. Shaun Russell
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, by Fred Kaplan
Mind of Stone, by Iain McLaughlin
Time Must Have a Stop, by Aldous Huxley
"Fire Watch", by Connie Willis

Next books
The Empire of Time, by David Wingrove
Crashland, by Sean Williams

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The Rain-Soaked Bride, by Guy Adams

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Certainly,’ replied the man who was calling himself Mr Fisher. He unbuttoned his jacket, shifted forward in his seat and gave the psychic his undivided attention.

I am familiar with Adams’ Whoniverse writing (includes a particularly good Torchwood novel), but this is a different series, the middle book of a loosely linked trilogy about the Clown Service, a secret British government agency fighting paranormal terrorism. Dark forces are attempting to cause a high-level conference between the UK and South Korea to disintegrate in acrimony and mysterious deaths (always accompanied by hyper-localised rain and a spectral bride). The writing is fun, but I really didn't have much of a clue what was going on. You can get it here.

This was at the top of all three of my (almost exhausted piles) of books acquired in 2014. The more popular of the remaining two is Crashland by Sean Wiliams, the one that has been longer on the shelves is The Empire of Time by David Wingrove, and they are of equal length.

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May 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 this month were both pleasure rather than business: my aunt Nora's 70th birthday at the start of the month, and a Worldcon preparation trip to London at the end. Spoiler: Nora sadly died only a few months later, so it was more special than we realised. Here she is on the right, with another aunt, an uncle and my cousin who is also my older godson, singing away.

As usual my own pictures largely failed to get the birthday girl, apart from one dynamic shot with her two daughters.

In London later that month, I tried a couple of unusual means of transport – a water taxi which gave me a good view of the Tower of London:

And the Emirates Air Line cable car for the last step of the journey, the ExCeL, visible here.

I read 22 books that month.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 13)
The Crocodile by the Door, by Selina Guinness
“I have an Idea for a Book …”: The Bibliography of Martin H. Greenberg
A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor
Miracles of Life, by J.G. Ballard

Fiction (not sf) 2 (YTD 9)
Doors Open, by Ian Rankin
The Judas Pair, by Jonathan Gash

SF (not Who) 6 (YTD 32)
Redshirts, by John Scalzi
The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
The Peoples of Middle-earth, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
Toward the End of Time, by John Updike
Three Parts Dead, by Max Gladstone

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 27, 34 counting non-fiction and comics)
Deadly Reunion, by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts
Toy Soldiers, by Paul Leonard
Escape Velocity, by Colin Brake
Magic of the Angels, by Jacqueline Rayner
Tip of the Tongue, by Patrick Ness

Comics 5 (YTD 13)
Final Sacrifice, by Tony Lee and others
Vincent van Gogh: De Worsteling van een Kunstenaar, by Marc Verhaegen and Jan Kragt
Vincent, by Barbara Stok
Grandville: Bête Noire, by Bryan Talbot
Aldébaran 4: La Groupe, by Leo

~5,800 pages (YTD 24,800)
3/22 (YTD 23/95) by women (Guinness, Rayner, Stok)
2/22 (YTD 2/95) by PoC (Ahmed, de Bodard)

The best of these was Neil McGregor's fantastic History of the World in 100 Objects, accompanying the BBC podcastyou can get it here. I also really liked my old friend Selina Guinness's A Crocodile by the Door, which you can get here, and Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, which you can get here. Non-fiction Hugo finalist I Have an Idea For a Book… was a total waste of time, but you can get it here.


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Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

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Second paragraph of third episode:

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.

The scripts of the second year of Welcome to Night Vale, in which there is a sort of narrative arc of the mayoral election contest between The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home and Hiram McDaniels, the five-headed dragon; also the burgeoning romance between Cecil and Carlos; the conflicts with Desert Bluffs and with Strexcorp; and the heroism of Intern Dana and teenage Tamika Flynn. But of course the overall structure matters less than the individual paragraphs:

The Museum of Forbidden Technologies is proud to announce their new special exhibit: "A Startling and Highly Forbidden Piece of Technology Brought to Us by Time Travelers… or Ancient Long-Dead Aliens… or Russians… or Whatever."

The technology will be kept in a locked vault, which itself will be wrapped in thick black bandages, with a hand-written sign taped to one side saying only:

Nope!

Your ticket includes a free audio guide, which will play a single piercing tone, designed to considerately remove you from the world of thought, and sound, and sentience.

The Museum of Forbidden Technologies. Bring your kids! Otherwise, something even worse might happen to them.

and

Look, I know deer are cute and friendly-looking. We all remember adorable little Bambi, from the classic animated movie, with his sweet voice and white freckled rump. But we also remember the bloody end that he wrought on the humans at the end of the film, the graphic beheadings, and trees streaked with gore during the famous revenge-fueled climax.

The lesson of that movie, as in life itself, is that nature is gorgeous, and it is horrible, and it will kill you.

This has been the Children's Fun Fact Science Corner.

and

Listeners, we here at Night Vale Community Radio need to offer the following correction:

In a previous broadcast, we described the world as "real."

We indicated, using our voice, that it was made up of many real objects and entities, and we gave descriptions of these disparate parts. We even went so far as to ascribe action and agency to some of these entities.

But, as we all know, nothing can be fully understood to be "real." Any description of the world we give is simply the world we experience – which is to say, a narrative we force onto whatever horror or void lies behind the scrim of our perception.

We at the station offer our deepest, most humble apologies for the previous, erroneous, report. We affirm once again that nothing is real – including this correction, and least of all, your experience of hearing it.

This has been Corrections.

Nothing quite beats the original deadpan audio delivery, but it is great to have the script for the bits you might not have heard because you were laughing too hard. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next in that pile is the second Zelazny collection with the title The Last Defender of Camelot.

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Dominion, eds. Zelda Knight and Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald

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Second paragraph of third story (“A Maji Maji Chronicle”, by Eugen Bacon):

The little bird surveyed the silence of twilight within a new smell of burning that explained a curl of black smoke in the horizon. He fluttered lime-mottled wings and landed on a branch tremulous from tepid wind. So this was Ngoni Village, the warm heart of German East Africa. He reined himself with the tips of his claws, leaned his body with a subtle shift of weight on the bough. His face twisted skyward, where an eagle soared in a battle dance overhead.

I got this anthology because two of the stories in it made it to this year's BSFA long list – and indeed both made it to the short list, though neither won. It's billed as an anthology of speculative fiction from Africa and the African diaspora; there are thirteen stories altogether, most of them very good. It's interesting looking through the Goodreads reviews to see that different people have felt attracted to different stories in the anthology; I guess for me the ones that grabbed me most were “A Mastery of German”, by Marian Denise Moore, and “To Say Nothing of Lost Figurines”, by Rafeeat Aliyu. But most of them are pretty good. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a writer or writers of colour. Next on that pile is Groetjes uit Vlaanderen, by Mohamed Ouaamari.

book cover
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