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The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Even before night had ended there had been signs of trouble. At five o’clock a landslide had caved in the stable at Kress’s brewery, and anyone who was awake then could hear the rivers. By six everyone who was up and about knew that Johnstown was in for a bad time. The rivers were rising at better than a foot an hour. They were a threatening yellow-brown color and already full of logs and big pieces of lumber that went bounding along as though competing in some sort of frantic race.

I picked this up out of curiosity, having learned that my great-great-uncle was one of the victims of the worst ever civilian accident to hit the United States, in which 2209 people are said to have died.

A Treacherous Pole.

A horse, supposed to be the one upon which Robert Wickersham was riding when the flood overtook him and he climbed a telegraph pole, was found upon the premises of a farmer back of Woodvale. The horse had apparently been in the woods for several days, and was almost starved. Upon his back was a saddle, which was supposed to be owned by Mr. Wickersham. The farmer will keep the horse until called for. Mr. Wickersham was the chief draughtsman at the Johnson Steel company's works.

    Wickersham was seen to climb up the pole until he reached the cross-arms, where he rested. He apparently thought he was safe, and yelled to a number of people to run up the hill out of the water's reach. In a few minutes the pole "sagged" and tipped over. Wickersham still clung to it and the pole began to drop lower and lower. All of a sudden the pole give a lurch and fell into the water. Wickersham disappeared from view and was seen no more. The people living in the row of frame houses on the hillside opposite saw him as he went down.

Wickersham's name was actually Richard, not Robert. He was one of the 980 victims of the flood whose body was never found. Two years later, in 1891, his sister Rebecca married Henry Deming Hibbard (an iron man, like the Wickershams' father Samuel) and in due course Rebecca and Henry became my great-grandparents. Poor Robert or Richard Wickersham was my grandmother’s uncle, though she was not born until 1899, ten years later, and she would have known of him only as one of various dead members of her parents' generation.

David McCullough is one of the great American historians – I've previously written up his John Adams. This was his first book, published in 1968 when a number of survivors of the 1889 flood were still alive. He constructed a compelling and clear narrative of what happened, first in the years between the completion of the South Fork Dam, 100 km east of Pittsburgh, in 1853 and its catastropic collapse thirty-five years later (think of a structure near you that was built thirty-five years ago, in 1986), then on the day of the disaster itself, and then in the days and weeks and months of clearing up afterwards. I must admit that when it came to the point where the dam broke and a wall of water washed away the inhabitants of the valley below, I really could not put the book down. (Even though my grandmother's uncle is not mentioned.)

Some really interesting points came through. Blame of course can be placed in many quarters, but the critical structural damage to the dam was done by John Reilly, briefly a Pennsylvania Congressman, who bought the dam and lake in 1875 and sold them on in 1879, meanwhile having removed the discharge pipes that controlled the outward flow of water and sold them for scrap. He sold the estate on to a private club, whose members included the fabulously wealthy Andrew Carnegie, banker and future Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and future Attorney-General and Secretary of State Philander Knox, and which did no serious maintenance whatsoever. The club was mysteriously not incorporated in the right county, so the regulatory powers of the local authority, which were minimal in any case, were never properly engaged. The railroad wrote to the owners expressing serious concerns about structural integrity, and were fobbed off.

On 29 and 30 May 1889, that part of Pennsylvania received the highest rainfall ever recorded there, around 200 mm. The club staff spotted that there was a problem on the morning of the 31st, and did their best to shore up the crumbling dam, also telegraphing warnings downstream to Johnstown, where nobody listened because they had had too many false alarms before. The dam broke at lunchtime, and 14.5 million cubic metres of water tipped down the narrow valley, hitting Johnstown with a wall of liquid 18m high in places, travelling at about 60 kph. It had already smashed through the iron works at nearby Woodvale. The valley was devastated.

There are some very evocative eyewitness accounts. Here's Gertrude Quinn, aged six at the time, in her eighties when McCullough talked to her when researching the book:

Gertrude never saw the wave. The sight of the crowds jamming through the street had so terrified her aunt and Libby Hipp that they had pulled back from the window, horrified, dragging her with them into an open cupboard.
    “Libby, this is the end of the world, we will all die together,” Aunt Abbie sobbed, and dropped to her knees and began praying hysterically, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Have mercy on us, oh, God . . .”
    Gertrude started screaming and jumping up and down, calling “Papa, Papa, Papa,” as fast as she could get it out.
    The cupboard was in what was the dining room of an elaborate playhouse built across the entire front end of the third floor. There was nothing like it anywhere else in town, the whole place having been fitted out and furnished by Quinn’s store. There was a long center hall and a beautifully furnished parlor at one end and little bedrooms with doll beds, bureaus, washstands, and ingrain carpets on the floors. The dining room had a painted table, chairs, sideboard with tiny dishes, hand-hemmed tablecloths, napkins, and silverware.
    From where she crouched in the back of the cupboard, Gertrude could see across the dining room into a miniature kitchen with its own table and chairs, handmade iron stove, and, on one wall, a whole set of iron cooking utensils hanging on little hooks. Libby Hipp was holding her close, crying and trembling.
    Then the big house gave a violent shudder. Gertrude saw the tiny pots and pans begin to sway and dance. Suddenly plaster dust came down. The walls began to break up. Then, at her aunt’s feet, she saw the floor boards burst open and up gushed a fountain of yellow water.
    “And these boards were jagged . . . and I looked at my aunt, and they didn’t say a word then. All the praying stopped, and they gasped, and looked down like this, and were gone, immediately gone.”

And then the story of the aftermath is also interesting. The newspapers did their best to get to the scene as quickly as possible, and of course found it good for sales to exaggerate the disaster even beyond the horrific reality. One story that did the rounds involved Hungarian immigrants caught looting and then lynched; there was no truth to this at all. I also found it interesting that the survivors rapidly met and elected one of their number (34-year-old Welsh-born Arthur J. Moxham) as "dictator" until the regular civil powers were able to resume control. Obviously only the men were involved in this process, and perhaps a weakness of the book (not unexpected given who wrote it and when) is a failure to look at the gendered aspects of what was going on.

Still, it's a cracking good read. You can get it here.

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Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich

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Second paragraph of third section:

Мы еще там гибли, а нас уже здесь судили. Раненых привозили в Союз и разгружали на задворках аэропорта, чтобы народ не заметил. Не знал…Никто из вас не задумывался: почему после службы в армии в мирное время молодые парни возвращаются с орденом Красной звезды и медалями “За отвагу” и “За боевые заслуги”. Привозят гробы и калек. Никто не задавал таких вопросов… Я не слышал… Я слышал другое… В восемьдесят шестом приехал в отпуск, и у меня спрашивали: вы там загораете, ловите рыбу, зарабатываете бешеные деньги? Газеты молчали или врали. Телевидение тоже. Мы — оккупанты, — пишут теперь. Если мы были оккупантами, почему мы их кормили, раздавали лекарства? Входим в кишлак — они радуются… Уходим — они тоже радуются… Я так и не понял, почему они всегда радовались?They killed us out there, then they judged us back here. They brought the wounded to the Union and unloaded them at the back of the airport, so people wouldn’t notice. I didn’t know … None of you bothered to think why young men who had served in the army came back into peacetime with an Order of the Red Star and medals ‘For Valour’ and `For Services in Battle’. They brought back the coffins and the cripples. But nobody asked those questions … I didn’t hear them … I heard something different. In ’86, when I came back on leave, they asked me: ‘Do you go sunbathing and fishing out there and earn tons of money?’ The newspapers said nothing or they lied. And the television too. We were invaders, they write now. If we were invaders why did we feed them and hand out medicine? When we entered a kishlak they were delighted … And when we left they were delighted. I never did understand why they were always delighted.

A grim grim read by Belarus’s Nobel prize-winning writer – the only Nobel laureate for literature whose output is primarily non-fictional since, errr, Winston Churchill in 1953. This is generally rated her best book; it’s a gruelling set of first-person accounts from Soviet soldiers and other personnel involved with the 1979-89 war in Afghanistan. The personally brutalising effects of war on the combatants are not especially new; what Alexievich manages to do is to eloquently convey the trauma and confusion, especially of those who realised pretty early on that they were fighting for a lie. The frank accounts of the Russian and Belarussian women who signed up as nurses or admin staff, and were then sexually exploited by the system, is another aspect that is surely also true of more recent conflicts but little discussed. An appendix recounts the dispiriting story of attempts to censor or punish the author for having the audacity to publish a book that challenged the Army. It’s tremendous stuff, appllicable to many wars. I’m very glad that you can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Various Hugo packet books are next in line, so I’m not going to record progress on that list until I have exhausted my voting materials.

February 2012 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.

At work that month I had my first visit to my recently acquired client in Tbilisi, Georgia. His mansion overlooking the city is truly amazing. My own photographs were pretty awful, but as it happens Forbes magazine was there the very same day that I was, and took these magnificent shots. I also had a couple of days in Paris on the Georgian project, co-ordinating the various advisers to the campaign, which was also the first time I had a serious conversation with a senior staffer of my current employers.

In the office, my Belarusian intern M left; she now works for a legal head-hunting company in Brussels, while also doing career counselling, mainly for Russian speakers in the Brussels bubble (a larger market than you might have thought). Her successor was L, a Colombian who had just moved to Brussels as a trailing spouse and wanted to do something more interesting than academic research. We rapidly bonded over Game of Thrones and Doctor Who.

Speaking of sf, this was the month that Alice Lawson fatefully invited me to join the staff of the 2014 Worldcon as DH for Promotions. I was not immediately convinced.

Much more sadly, this was also the month that Prince Johan Friso of the Netherlands, whose wedding I had attended in 2004, had a skiing accident which he never woke up from.

I read 20 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 14)
The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal
The World of Washington Irving, by Van Wyck Brooks
My Traitor's Heart, by Rian Malan

Fiction (other than sf) 2 (YTD 4)
Let The Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

SF (other than Who) 7 (YTD 14)
Cyber Circus, by Kim Lakin-Smith
Osama, by Lavie Tidhar
By Light Alone, by Adam Roberts
Snuff, by Terry Pratchett
The Islanders, by Christopher Priest
Year's Best SF 24, ed. Gardner Dozois
Embassytown, by China Miéville

Doctor Who etc 8 (YTD 16)
[SJA audio] The Time Capsule, by Peter Anghelides
[SJA audio] The Shadow People, by Scott Handcock
[SJA audio] The White Wolf, by Gary Russell
Touched By An Angel, by Jonathan Morris
The Eleventh Tiger, by David A. McIntee
Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks
The Taking of Planet 5, by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham
The Sontaran Games, by Jacqueline Rayner

Running totals
~6,100 pages (YTD ~14,600)
2/20 (YTD 12/50) by women (Lakin-Smith and Rayner)
1/20 (YTD 1/50) by PoC (Alexie)

Much the best of these was The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal. I know his brother Thomas quite well; I've never met Edmund. This is a deeply moving tale of a netsuke collection through the travails of the last century or so. You can get it here.

Second best was My Traitor's Heart, by Rian Malan, a liberal South African's account of his country, written when Mandela was still in jail and it was not at all certain that he would ever emerge. You can get it here.

I'm not usually down on Doctor Who books, but The Taking of Planet 5, by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham was rather poor. You can get it here.

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Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The fleet also served as transportation. As we soon learned, the geographic distribution of the Gemini and Apollo contractors was well balanced. In the Los Angeles area was North American Rockwell, which made the Apollo command module and parts of the giant Saturn V. In northern California, Lockheed built the Agena, the Gemini’s target vehicle and auxiliary propulsion engine. St. Louis was home to McDonnell, which built the Gemini spacecraft, while its Titan II booster was assembled in Baltimore. NASA’s center at Huntsville, Alabama, was responsible for the Apollo boosters, the Saturn IB and the Saturn V. The lunar module came from Grumman’s Bethpage, Long Island, factory, and the Apollo guidance system was worked out at M.I.T. in Boston. We lived in Houston and launched from the Cape. These were just the main places involved, and the list should be supplemented with dozens of major subcontractors sprinkled around in out-of-the-way places like Grand Rapids, Michigan. At any given time, at least half a dozen different places would be actively seeking, or demanding, an astronaut’s participation in some design review, meeting, simulation, or PR visit. Our small fleet of airplanes was, therefore, a tremendous help in allowing us to go places with a flexibility airline schedules do not permit.

A few years back I found a list of the best books about spaceflight by astronauts, and this was firmly at the top of the list. It took me a while to actually get around to reading it, but it really is very very good. Collins, who died aged 90 just a few weeks ago, was of course the Command Module Pilot who remained orbiting the Moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on it, and because he was on the far side at the time he was probably the only person in the space programme who did not hear Armstrong's first steps live, even though he was closer to the scene than anyone else. But in a sense that's not the point; the point of the book is how Collins, a modest chap who seems aware of his own deficiencies, became part of one of the most audacious technological projects in history.

It's really interesting to see learn how deeply the astronauts themselves were involved in crucial design decisions. Every crew was assigned their modules from quite an early stage, so when they took them into space they would not only be familiar with them, they would actually be using equipment that they themselves had helped to build. And Collins was horribly aware of what could go wrong; orbiting the Moon, he is deeply conscious that he might be going home alone, leaving two colleagues dead or dying on an alien surface. But they make it back.

The first one through is Buzz, with a big smile on his face. I grab his head, a hand on each temple, and am about to give him a smooch on the forehead, as a parent might greet an errant child; but then, embarrassed, I think better of it and grab his hand, and then Neil’s.

Collins also had some other interesting contributions apart from the flight itself. It was he who actually designed the mission insignia for Apollo 11, the eagle, the olive branch, and the unusual absence of the names of the astronauts, to emphasise the "for all mankind" aspect. He decided at quite an early stage that the firs moon landing would be his last (and second) space flight, went on to do a not terribly happy term at the State Department, and then had a very large hand in setting up the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The book is also really really funny in places. His description of the Air Force survival manual had me crying with laughter.

The manual opens on a cheery note: “Anything that creeps, crawls, swims, or flies is a possible source of food.” Then it gets a bit too specific for my taste. “People eat grasshoppers, hairless caterpillars, wood-boring beetle larvae and pupae, ant eggs, and termites.” Not me, babe! Oh yeah? Read on. “You have probably eaten insects as contaminants in flour, corn meal, rice, beans, fruits, and greens of your daily food, and in stores in general.” No wonder the supermarket has been less crowded lately.

And on the best fitness regime for an astronaut:

Under these circumstances, how should one prepare his body for space flight? Theories within the astronaut group ran the gamut. Bon vivant Wally Schirra allowed as how the best way to prepare for a restful experience was to rest. Mathematician Neil Armstrong suggested that a person was given only a finite number of heartbeats in this life, and he was not going to hasten his demise by asking his heart to speed up during exercise. In the opposite corner were the jocks, chief among them Ed White, who might begin a typical day by joyfully running three miles and end it with half a dozen games of squash and handball. In between, inconspicuous under the dome of the bell-shaped curve, cowered the majority.

That "cowered" is magnificent, isn't it!

It was true that as July 18 [his first launch in 1966] drew closer, my thoughts were more and more preoccupied with the flight, but naturally my placid, even temper prevailed, and I recall thinking how grand it was to be able to share my upcoming experience with my family with such composure, equanimity, and good humor. Harking back to this same period, Pat [his wife] says I resented interruptions and was preoccupied, distracted, and totally irritable! God bless her, she waited a couple of years to tell me this[.]

His wife and family were clearly a key element of keeping him emotionally and psychologically grounded, and it's maybe worth noting that he was the only one of the Apollo 11 crew whose marriage survived the Moon. (There is another hilarious passage when, visiting France, he and Pat are compelled to re-enact their own wedding ceremony in the village where they had originally got hitched several years before.)

Anyway, this was a great read, even if you don't care about spaceflight as much as I do. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired last year. Next on both lists is Humankind, by Rutger Bregman.

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The Hugo for Best Related Work, including my own votes for this year

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The Best Related Work category has been on the Hugo ballot every year since 1980. In 28 of those 41 years, it went to a published monograph or essay collection about science fiction and/or fantasy or related themes. The exceptions were as follows:

  • Popular science books won twice, in 1981 (Carl Sagan: Cosmos) and 1986 (Tom Weller: Science Made Stupid, which is somewhat satirical rather than factual);
  • Art books won five times, in 1988 (Michael Whelan: Worlds of Wonder), 1992 (The World of Charles Addams), 2001 (Greetings from Earth: The Art of Bob Eggleton), 2002 (The Art of Chesley Bonestell) and 2004 (The Chesley Awards for SF & Fantasy Art: A Retrospective)
  • Websites won in 2012 (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition) and 2019 (Archive of Our Own)
  • A podcast won in 2013 (Writing Excuses, Season 7)
  • A blog post won in 2014 (Kameron Hurley: “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative”)
  • No Award was made in 2015 and 2016 (the Puppy years)
  • Jeannette Ng’s Campbell Award acceptance speech won in 2020.

In the last decade, the finalists in the category have been as follows.

  1. Four books and a podcast. (Winner: Chicks Dig Time Lords, a book.)
  2. One book about SF, one website, one art book, one music album, one podcast. (Winner, as noted above: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition, a website.)
  3. Four books about sf and a podcast. (Winner, as noted above: Writing Excuses, Season 7, a podcast.)
  4. Three books about sf, a podcast and a blog post. (Winner, as noted above: “We Have Always Fought”, a blog post.)
  5. Two books about SF, two essays and a humour book that wasn’t very funny. (No award; all five were Puppy nominees.)
  6. Slightly tricky to classify but probably it’s two books, two online essays/blog posts and one collection of blog posts. (No Award; all five were Puppy nominees.)
  7. (final ballot from here on has six rather than five finalists) Five books about sf and one sequence of blog posts. (Winner: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016.)
  8. Six books about sf. (Winner: Ursula K. Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters.)
  9. Three books about sf, one video documentary, one convention event and a website. (Winner, as noted above: Archive of Our Own, a website)
  10. Four books about sf, one video documentary and a speech. (Winner, as noted above: Jeannette Ng’s speech.)
  11. One book about sf, one translated poem, one blog post, one video documentary and two convention events. (Winner: to be determined.)

Only two of the nine most recent years have seen a book about sf win, and both of them were by Ursula K. Le Guin. (And I suspect that this year will make that two out of ten.)

The category description for Best Related Work is currently as follows:

Any work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year, and which is either non-fiction or, if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and which is not eligible in any other category.

Some of the finalists in the last ten years fit that definition less obviously than others, and there is one that I would have disqualified if I had been the Hugo administrator that year. That one is the music album which was nominated in 2012. As I wrote at the time, it is an album of songs which all describe more or less fictional situations, of which a bit more than half have more or less clear fantasy elements in the narrative. In so far as the songs themselves are noteworthy regarding the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, it is precisely in their fictional content. I suppose an argument could be made that just being songs is noteworthy, but I don’t think it is a good argument.

For the record, there is one other finalist in this category since the turn of the century that I would have disqualified if I had been the Hugo administrator that year. One of the 2004 finalists seems to me to be a collection of short fiction pieces, not noteworthy for any aspects other than the fictional text. In 2002, a nominee in this category was disqualified for exactly this reason.

For completeness, I should add that I was a member of last year’s Hugo team who actually did disqualify a nominee from the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Related Work, as it was clearly not sufficiently related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom to be eligible. (It is a magic handbook, by a writer who thought that magic is real, not fictional.) That’s the only disqualification I can find on the criterion of relevance.

So, what about the marginal cases that were permitted to go forward to the voters? The first thing to say is that the instinct of Hugo administrators is generally to let voters put stuff on the ballot and then let more voters choose between the options (or No Award if that’s what they prefer). The bar for disqualification should be set pretty high. I’ve been involved with six sets of eligibility discussions (Hugos in 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2021, and Retro Hugos in 2019 and 2020) and none of the calls that I have been involved with in this category seemed particularly difficult at the time.

In 2017, the set of blog posts was at that time an unusual nominee, but one or two of the previous year’s nominees were similar in form, so there was a clear precedent.

2018 was the only year of the last five where I was not involved, and (coincidentally, I hope) it was the least controversial Best Related Work ballot of the decade, consisting of six solid books.

In 2019, there was much discussion of the eligibility of Archive of Our Own, but really, it’s difficult to find grounds for excluding it that would not also have applied to the 2012 winner, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition. True, most of the content of Archive of Our Own is fiction; but that is hardly the most noteworthy thing about it. The wishes of the voters in the end were pretty clear and it won a solid victory on the final ballot. AO3 generously donated their trophy to the permanent Hugo archive. I very much deplore some of the subsequent commentary.

There was very little discussion in 2019 of two other eligibility rulings that we made that year, the video essay and the convention event, a first time for each. From the administrators’ point of view, they clearly both had enough votes to qualify, and both obviously were non-fiction related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom; and I don’t recall anyone arguing about it. A convention event is clearly work for those organising it; it’s a bit less clear if it constitutes a work, but the wording of the rule is “any work”, so like it or not, I think it’s covered.

In 2020, again there was a certain amount of discussion of the eligibility of the eventual winner, an acceptance speech from the 2019 Hugo ceremony. Again, as administrators this caused us little hesitation. Some commentators suggested that it “really” belonged in Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, because another Hugo acceptance speech had been categorised thus a few years earlier; the argument then ran that, since acceptance speeches are eligible in another category, they therefore are not eligible in Best Related Work (“…and which is not eligible in any other category”).

However, a rather crucial step in the determination of eligibility is getting nominated for the category in the first place; and literally none of the actual 2020 voters nominated the 2019 speech in Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. The will of the nominating voters was clear, and confirmed by the final ballot voters: the speech should be considered in Best Related Work. (I think any reasonable person comparing the two acceptance speeches would concede that there is a strong case for treating them as very different things – see here and here.)

Now we have reached 2021. I relinquished my WSFS duties this year a bit earlier than planned, and so am in a position to give some commentary on eligibility decisions regarding works that ended up on the 2021 ballot. (Commentary on disqualifications will have to wait until the final results are announced; at this stage I will not even confirm or deny if there were any this year, let alone which categories might have been affected.)

The two convention events which ended up on the ballot did cause us some head-scratching. But the 2019 precedent and wishes of the voters were both clear. Likewise, the video documentary, which is clearly in line with similar finalists in 2019 and 2020.

The translated poem caused a bit more head-scratching. But it is noteworthy for being a new translation, rather than for the fictional content as such; the poem was first published in 1786, first published in English translation in 1837, and first published in the USA in 1882, which means that it’s not eligible in any of the fiction categories, as all of those dates are substantially earlier than 2020. So in fact the case for its eligibility in Best Related Work this year is clear.

It was a bit surprising that the blog post proved the most controversial of the finalists. Of course, this was not because of eligibility – it’s clearly commentary on an issue related to fandom, very precisely the 2020 Hugo ceremony – but because it includes a disparaging reference to a very privileged writer in its title. The subsequent discussion illustrated perfectly well why it’s a bad idea to litigate code of conduct issues in public.

(Some will ask, should the WSFS Business Meeting step in and resolve some of these eligibility questions? To which I reply, Christ, no. It should be clear from what I have written so far that it is not at all difficult to resolve eligibility questions in this category using the current wording, and I cannot imagine the Business Meeting improving the situation.)

So, those are my comments on eligibility from the perspective of an administrator.

On the other hand, my views as a voter are somewhat different.

To start with the two convention events: each has provided a good amount of material for voters to consider, which is very welcome. The third paragraph of the introduction to CoNZealand Fringe’s collection of transcripts from the panels is as follows:

Thus, CoNZealand Fringe was built in the space of 3 weeks, on the foundational principles of broadening access and ensuring inclusion for a broad range of fandom. One of the most important aspects of Fringe was our partnership with BookTube, the community of book reviewers and fans on Youtube, with 11 different channels hosting various Fringe streams and panels dedicated to BookTube itself and to popular BookTube video topics. Our panels were built from the premise that fans of colour, queer fans, fans with disabilities and other marginalised folks have vital things to say about every fandom topic, and that ensuring a diversity of expertise is one of our most important duties as event conveners. We didn’t get everything right (nor did we get much sleep) but the set of panels we delivered, and the group of enthusiastic participants who joined them, speak to what is possible in a short space of time when these principles are baked in from the start.

And the third paragraph from FIYAHCon’s Retrospective is as follows:

And so when the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd happened, when everyone decided to be vocal about their position on the mattering of Black lives, when those messages went from hashtags and t-shirts and profile pictures and turned into street protests and donations to bail funds and offerings of mentorship and opportunity in the creative sphere, FIYAH, the magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, received…attention. With that attention came 8,000 new Twitter followers, and over 1,000 new subscribers, enough to take us from the semi-prozine category and allow us for the first time to pay our writers and poets a professional standard of .08/word.

The two represent a vast amount of work on behalf of those who produced them, and clearly were important events for fandom. I hope it’s clear from what I have said above that I totally accept that voters have a right to put convention events onto the ballot.

However, I am an old fuddy-duddy who likes scholarly or biographical books or works about sf and fantasy to win this category, so I’m not going to vote for either of them. Sorry.

The one blog post nominated this year is Natalie Luhrs’ “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into The Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)”. Its third paragraph is:

That said, I have never in my life seen any awards ceremony that, in its whole, was so blatantly disrespectful of the nominees and winners. And I’m including my high school senior awards ceremony where I learned that half the money my family donated to the music department after my mother’s death had been used not for the purpose for which it had been donated.

The blog post is an angry commentary on how the 2020 Worldcon handled the Hugo ceremony. I share a lot of that anger. I was the Deputy Hugo Administrator last year. Our team worked hard to get the Hugo finalists and winners honoured, and it can fairly be said that that work was among very many things that were not well reflected in the ceremony itself. One point that Luhrs doesn’t make, but that particularly struck me on the night, was that it was over an hour into the ceremony before the first actual Hugo winner was announced. For me, this came at the end of a long series of other frustrations with the convention, so I was saddened, sickened and shocked, but not really very surprised at how it had worked out.

Given that there are very few mechanisms for accountability for what went wrong, it’s entirely legitimate for fandom broadly to express its displeasure with last year’s Worldcon by putting Luhrs’ essay on this year’s Hugo ballot, and indeed this also applies to an extent to FIYAHCon and CoNZealand Fringe, which both state explicitly that part of their motivation for setting up the events in the first place was frustration with CoNZealand.

But.

Getting on the ballot is one thing; getting the actual award is another. I don’t really want a 2021 Hugo winner to commemorate the failures of the 2020 Worldcon, egregious though these were. One year’s award should not really go to the previous year’s fights, even to the people on the right side of the argument. (NB this very much does not apply to Jeannette Ng’s 2019 speech, which was addressed to previous decades rather than to the previous year.)

So I’m not going to vote for Luhrs’ essay either. I would not be at all surprised if it or one of the convention events wins – I have no way of knowing, because I left the process before we had started to look at incoming ballots – but it won’t be with my vote.

That leaves three. And having said that I like to vote for scholarly or biographical books or works about sf and fantasy, unfortunately I’m putting the one actual book about sf third out of the remaining three. Here is the second paragraph of the third chapter of Lynelle George’s A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, with footnote:

A self-penned commitment to herself:
2-11-1970
Goal: To Aquire [sic] Free and clear, a cash holding totally of my own of $100,000.00
Plan: To Write. Confessions, television, movies, novels, Science fiction and otherwise, and nonfiction. And to sell what I write. 2
2. OEB Box 56

It is beautifully produced, and conveys very well the sense of awe and reverence that anyone who has ever done archival research knows from dealing with original first-hand materials. But I learned very little from it about what Butler thought she was doing with her work, what her influences were, what external forces pushed her in one direction or the other. It is more of an extended meditation on how Lynelle George feels about Octavia E. Butler and her personal records, which is all very well, but not as interesting as I had hoped for. In case you are reading this after the 2021 Hugo ballot has closed, you can get it here. Of the Butleriana on the ballot this year, I much prefer the graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower.

My second preference vote goes to Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf. I found myself moved by curiosity from reading it to go back and look at Seamus Heaney’s translation, previously read in 2008. There are no chapters in Beowulf, though there is a well-established tradition of short sections of the poem; here’s Headley’s third of these, with the equivalent passages from Heaney and the original, and Tolkien’s prose translation at the bottom.

HeadleyHeaneyOriginal
Later, God sent Scyld a son, a wolf cub,
further proof of manhood. Being God, He knew
how the Spear-Danes had suffered, the misery
they’d mangled through, leaderless, long years of loss,
so the Life-lord, that Almighty Big Boss, birthed them
an Earth-shaker. Beow’s name kissed legions of lips
by the time he was half-grown, but his own father
was still breathing. We all know a boy can’t daddy
until his daddy’s dead. A smart son gives
gifts to his father’s friends in peacetime.
When war woos him, as war will,
he’ll need those troops to follow the leader.
Privilege is the way men prime power,
the world over.		Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield,
a cub in the yard, a comfort sent
by God to that nation. He knew what they had tholed,
the long times and troubles they’d come through
without a leader; so the Lord of Life,
the glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.
Shield had fathered a famous son:
Beow’s name was known through the north.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that’s admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.		Ðæm eafera wæs    æfter cenned,
geong in geardum,    þone God sende
folce to frofre.    Fyrenðearfe ongeat.
Þæt hie ær drugon    aldorlease
lange hwile.    Him þæs Liffrea,
wuldres wealdend,    woroldare forgeaf.
Beowulf wæs breme,    blæd wide sprang,
Scyldes eafera    Scedelandum in.
Swa sceal geong guma    gode gewyrcean,
fromum feohgiftum    on fæder bearme,
þæt hine on ylde    eft gewunigen
wilgesiþas,    þonne wig cume,
leode gelæsten.    Lofdædum sceal
in mægþa gehwære    man geþeon.
Tolkien: To him was an heir afterwards born, a young child in his courts whom God sent for the comfort of the people: perceiving the dire need which they long while endured aforetime being without a prince. To him therefore the Lord of Life who rules in glory granted honour among men: Beow was renowned – far and wide his glory sprang – the heir of Scyld in Scedeland. Thus doth a young man bring it to pass with good deeds and gallant gifts, while he dwells in his father’s bosom, that after in his age there cleave to him loyal knights of his table, and the people stand by him when war comes. By worthy deeds in every folk is a man ennobled.

This excerpt is actually quite a good illustration of why Headley is different from Heaney, let alone Tolkien. Her take is much more deliberately gender-conscious (Heaney’s and Tolkien’s are of course gendered, but unconsciously so) and adopting very contemporary language (“We all know a boy can’t daddy / until his daddy’s dead”) which doesn’t always relate very closely to the original text.

The last sentence of this extract is especially interesting. Translating “Lofdædum sceal / in mægþa gehwære    man geþeon”, Heaney’s take is basically approving: “Behaviour that’s admired / is the path to power among people everywhere.” So is Tolkien’s, if clunkier: “By worthy deeds in every folk is a man ennobled.” Headley’s take challenges the reader: “Privilege is the way men prime power, / the world over.” She’s also a step farther away from the original; a “lofdæd” is a praiseworthy deed, rather closer to Heaney’s “behaviour that’s admired” or Tolkien’s “worthy deeds” than Headley’s “privilege”. Both Headley and Heaney get “power” and Tolkien gets “ennobled” from “geþeon”, the last word of the original part of this text, which is more “flourish”, “do well”, without the connotation of ruling that all three translators give it; but I suppose context supplies that.

Headley’s translation is a provocative and enjoyable experience, another valid take on a text from a thousand years ago which remains vital, but Heaney’s is basically better than hers (let alone Tolkien’s), closer to the original in meaning, and will not date as quickly, so I can’t quite give Headley my top spot. You can get her translation here, Heaney’s here and Tolkien’s here.

Somewhat to my surprise, my top vote goes instead to Jenny Nicholson’s video documentary, The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy. I am not at all familiar with My Little Pony – the Puppies put two episodes on the Hugo ballot in 2016 and I didn’t last three minutes into the first one. But this successfully persuaded me that there was important stuff going on in MLP fandom all that time, with wider ramifications not only for politics but also how fans operate. Watching it was 71 minutes well spent; I found it completely fascinating, and it gets my top 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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The English Patient

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The English Patient won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1996, and eight others: Best Director (Anthony Minghella), Best Supporting Actress (Juliette Binoche), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Sound. That year’s Hugo went to the Babylon 5 episode Severed Dreams.

I have not seen any of the other Oscar nominees that year; they were Fargo, Jerry Maguire, Secrets & Lies and Shine. I have seen eight other films made in 1996: the three Hugo finalists, Independence Day, Mars Attacks and Star Trek: First Contact, and five others: Trainspotting, Multiplicity, Brassed Off, Michael Collins and My Fellow Americans. They’re all good, apart from Multiplicity, but The English Patient is the only one that has Juliette Binoche.

So, actors in The English Patient who were in previous Oscar or Hugo winners, or in Doctor Who, do not include Juliette Binoche.

The do include Willem Dafoe, who is Carravaggio here and was Sergeant Elias in Platoon ten years before.

Clive Merrrison is Fenelon-Barnes here, but only one of his scenes was not cut from the film and I could find only one half-decent shot of his face. He is not seen on-screen with Juliette Binoche. He was also in two Doctor Who stories, Tomb of the Cybermen (Second Doctor, 1967) as crewman Jim Callum, and Paradise Towers (Seventh Doctor, 1987) as the unnamed Deputy Chief Caretaker.

There’s another Whovian: Lee Ross is Spalding, the soldier at the booby-trapped statue, here, another scene that for some reason does not have Juliette Binoche in it, and went on to be the Boatswain in The Curse of the Black Spot (Twelfth Doctor, 2011).

And although Juliette Binoche won an Oscar for her performance here, she has not been in any other Oscar-winning or Hugo-winning films, or in Doctor Who. (Did I say that already?)

I’m afraid that I didn’t really get The English Patient, even though it has one of my favourite actors in it. (You’ll never guess who that is.) It scores better than some Oscar winners in that one of the lead characters is Indian, Kip the sapper, played by Naveen Andrews, and he actually has an interracial relationship with Juliette Binoche’s character.

The title character is of course male, but the two women who interact with him get a lot of agency, both Katharine, played by Kristin Scott-Thomas, and Hana played by, who is it again, oh yes that’s right, Juliette Binoche.

There are some lovely landscape scenes, particularly in the desert (though these do lose a bit by not having Juliette Binoche in them).

I liked the intercutting timelines, even though only one of them has Juliette Binoche.

And Ralph Fiennes’ make-up as the horribly burned English Patient is very impressive.

But I confess that the film as a whole didn’t grab me by the feelings as I had expected it might. Maybe I was just too tired. Still, because I particularly like one of the actors – you’ll never guess who, I’m keeping that as my special secret – I’m putting it just under a third of the way down my ranking, below The Sting but above Ben-Hur.

Edited to add: Elaine’s take.

I also of course read the original book. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Americans and Indians and Australians and Canadians advanced north, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled at Sansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at night over the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously considered the pouring of hot oil from battlements.

I found it really evocative of the times and places of the settings, and liked the integration of the plotlines as representing the healing of the protagonist. But again I found myself curiously unmoved by it. I am a bit surprised that the book won the Booker and the film the Oscar. But there’s no accounting for taste, and I know mine is sometimes a minority opinion.

Next up: Titanic. I wonder what that’s about?

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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Roger Zelazny’s The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Without hesitation I unbuckled my swordbelt and slid into the seat across from her, balancing my weapon across my knees. My fellow passenger was strikingly beautiful, I found, with long dark hair and a wide, almost familiar face. Thin nose, full lips, strong chin––

The first of the prequels to the late great Roger Zelazny's Amber series, published in 2002 but I only got around to it as part of a Humble Bundle a few years back. I had been warned that the prequels were terrible; actually while the first book is not superb, it's not awful either. Our viewpoint character is Oberon, future father of the Nine Princes of Amber, who is pulled from a career as mercenary (his girlfriend killed off before we even meet her properly) by his mysterious father Dworkin, for magical dynastic plotting with his brothers and sisters. It's a bit flat, compared with the heights of the original, but I'll persevere with the series. You can get it here.

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Friday reading

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Current
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Riding the Unicorn, by Paul Kearney
The Separation, by Christopher Priest
Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko

Last books finished
Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas
The Monster's Wife, by Kate Horsley
Light, by M. John Harrison
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

Next books
Empire Games, by Charles Stross
The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty

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My tweets

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  • Thu, 20:48: Damn. I missed this news last week. A lovely guy and a great man. https://t.co/AXFjg2WuQS
  • Thu, 22:59: Britannia waives the rules. Or tries to. https://t.co/BDymhJiYVK
  • Thu, 23:24: I see some commentators this evening suggesting that with Alex Easton’s resignation from the DUP, SF are now the largest party in the Assembly and that this is the first time Nationalists have been in that position.
  • Fri, 06:21: When I was a teenager, I used to sit up all night watching by-election results. Now I am 54 and live in a different time zone, I can just get up early instead. https://t.co/WWWyRqKHo1
  • Fri, 06:25: RT @lewis_goodall: NEW: LABOUR HOLD BATLEY AND SPEN Results LABOUR: 13296 CONSERVATIVE:12973 GALLOWAY: 8264 LIB DEM: 1254 YORKSHIRE: 816…
  • Fri, 09:28: Today’s important life lesson: don’t pull a funny face just before the interview, it may end up getting broadcast. (Interviewed by Albanian TV about EU policy towards their country.) https://t.co/JgUbuw5CLJ
  • Fri, 10:45: The global normalcy index https://t.co/aiE57ao9E6 How close is your country to getting back to the pre-pandemic normal?

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June 2021 books

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Non-fiction 6 (YTD 22)
China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, by Peter Martin
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, by Lynell George
Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar
Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins
Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich
The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullagh

Non-genre 3 (YTD 13)
Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding
All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

Poetry 3
Blind Harry’s Wallace, translated by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield
Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Beowulf: A New Translation, by Seamus Heaney

SF 9 (YTD 63)
Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey
Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane

Roger Zelazny's The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt

"Stories For Men", by John Kessel
Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire
Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas
The Monster's Wife, by Kate Horsley
Light, by M. John Harrison

Comics 4 (YTD 18)
Monstress, vol. 5: Warchild, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Once & Future vol. 1: The King Is Undead, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain, and Ed Dukeshire
Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston
Parable of the Sower, written by Octavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings

6,800 pages (YTD 32,700)
13/25 (YTD 52/123) by non-male writers (George, Foroohar, Alexievich, Fielding, Harrison,Headley, Gailey, MacFarlane, McGuire, Thomas, Horsley, Liu/Takeda, Butler)
6/25 (YTD 24/123) by PoC (George, Foroohar, Ondaatje, Thomas, Liu/Takeda, Butler)
2/25 rereads (YTD 11/123) – Bridget Jones' Diary, Heaney's Beowulf.

Current
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Riding the Unicorn, by Paul Kearney
The Separation, by Christopher Priest

Coming soon (perhaps)
Empire Games, by Charles Stross
The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty
"Grotto of the Dancing Deer", by Clifford D Simak
Le dernier Atlas, tome 2, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard
Fish Tails, by Sheri S. Tepper
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston
Martin Lukes Who Moved My Blackberry, by Lucy Kellaway
Humankind, by Rutger Bregman
The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams
Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm
The History of Mr Polly, by H.G. Wells
Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh
Cryptozoic, by Brian Aldiss
Fish Tails, by Sheri S. Tepper
Eurofiles: A Cartoonist's View of Europe and the Wider World, by Peter Schrank
The Primal Urge, by Brian Aldiss
A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik
The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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My top tweets H1 2021

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My four top tweets from the first half of 2021:

4) The future Sir Alex Allan lends his skateboard to a family friend.

3) Mourning the loss of a dear friend. (This was also my top LJ entry for the first half of the year.)

2) Philip K. Dick foresees 2021.

1) Next time (if there is ever a next time) I’ll include alt-text for the image.

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My tweets

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  • Wed, 12:34: RT @rafaelbehr: I think the post-Brexit narrative demands a Belgium-England final that includes a couple of really protracted VAR reviews,…
  • Wed, 12:56: Submissions list 2021: The complete list of eligible titles submitted for this year’s @ClarkeAward https://t.co/wvDD2r0i6Y Definitely worth a look!
  • Wed, 16:05: RT @ClarkeAward: The 2021 shortlist has landed: The Infinite  – Patience Agbabi The Vanished Birds – Simon Jimenez Vagabonds – Hao Jing…
  • Wed, 22:23: 470 days of plague https://t.co/Nf8Q5nJSI5
  • Thu, 10:45: RT @emilyvdw: My piece on science-fiction writer Isabel Fall and her story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” is live. What Fa…
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470 days of plague

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First and most crucially, I got my second vaccination last Friday, and am therefore clear to travel in the EU from Friday week.

D11AAD4C-73D7-4DB0-A9DF-2BDE00A98CF5.jpeg

Many people had warned me that the second Pfizer dose can really knock you out the second day after you have had it. I am glad to say that I did not notice anything. I had a big work task over the weekend and was able to complete it comfortably by Sunday afternoon.

I note that in my previous post in this series I referred to “Worldcon hassles”. As those who care about these things will already be aware, the entire 2021 Hugo Awards team, including me, resigned on Tuesday 22nd, rapidly followed by the resignation of the 2021 Worldcon Chair on Friday 25th. I’m not going to say much more about it here, except that I very much appreciated a message from one of the Vice-Presidents of BWAWA, the organisation that “owns” this year’s Worldcon, apologizing for the stress that we had experienced. That does make a difference.

But the big news is that the office is now open all week, and I will be in Brussels on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the time being. Two days ago was the first day of the new regime, and I bought a celebratory Vietnamese lunch for the half dozen colleagues who had showed up.

D11AAD4C-73D7-4DB0-A9DF-2BDE00A98CF5.jpeg

The Belgian numbers keep going in the right direction. I think that in the next week we will have a day with no recorded COVID deaths, for the first time since September. For other countries – notably the UK – it’s not quite as good, and for parts of the developing world it is disastrous. I’ll cling to what I have.

I am pondering how long I’ll keep up these posts. Last year my benchmark was that the numbers should be below those of 15 March 2020, when there were 266 COVID cases in hospital, of which 54 in intensive care, and 6 deaths. The fatality rate is comfortably below 6 per day at the moment, and the hospital numbers, currently 329, should be below 266 by this time next week. The number in ICU is comparatively much higher – 147 – but also falling rapidly. So I reckon I’ll be doing a 480 days of plague entry, but maybe not 490.

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Whoniversaries 30 June; and envoi

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i) births and deaths

30 June 1978: death of David Ellis, who co-wrote The Faceless Ones (1967)

30 June 2015: death of Edward Burnham, who played Professor Watkins in The Invasion (1968) and Professor Kettlewell in Robot (1974-75)

30 June 2019: death of Glyn Houston, who played Professor Watson in The Hand of Fear (Fourth Doctor, 1976) and Colonel Ben Wolsey in The Awakening (Fifth Doctor, 1984).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

30 June 2007: broadcast of Last of the Time Lords, the 200th story and 750th episode (depending how you count) of Doctor Who.

And so I reach the end of this project, again. I am glad that I did it. It was an interesting challenge to hunt down photographs to illustrate each day, particularly when it came to lost episodes.

And as ever, we've lost some people who were involved with Doctor Who during the year. Those who qualified for inclusion here were:

John Rolfe (died 12 August 2020), who played the Captain in The War Machines (First Doctor, 1966), Sam Becket in The Moonbase (Second Doctor, 1967) and Ralph Fell in The Green Death (Third Doctor, 1973).

Frank Windsor (died 30 September 2020), who played Ranulf Fitzwilliam in The King's Demons (Fifth Doctor, 1983) and Inspector Mackenzie, who ends up in the soup in Ghost Light (Seventh Doctor, 1989).

Geoffrey Palmer (died 5 November 2020), who played Masters in Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970), the Administrator in The Mutants (Third Doctor, 1972), and Hardaker in Voyage of the Damned (Tenth Doctor, 2007). His son Charles Palmer directed four episodes of Doctor Who in 2007.

Philip Martin (died 13 December 2020), who wrote Vengeance on Varos (Sixth Doctor, 1985) and Mindwarp (Sixth Doctor, 1986).

Jeremy Bulloch (died 17 December 2020), who played Tor in The Space Museum (1965), Hal in The Time Warrior (1973-74), and is best known as Boba Fett in the first two Star Wars films.

Peter Craze (died 30 December 2020), brother of Michael 'Ben Jackson' Craze, who played Dako in The Space Museum (First Doctor, 1965), Du Pont in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), and Costa in Nightmare of Eden (Fourth Doctor, 1979).

Mark Eden (died 1 January 2021), who played Marco Polo in the story we now call Marco Polo (First Doctor, 1974) and half a century later played BBC One Controller Donald Baverstock in An Adventure in Space and Time.

Arthur Cox (died 9 April 2021, two days after his 87th birthday), who played Cully in The Dominators (Second Doctor, 1968) and Mr Henderson in The Eleventh Hour (Eleventh Doctor, 2010), one of the longest gaps between first and second appearances on the show.

Frank Cox (died 27 April 2021; unrelated to Arthur Cox, as far as I know), who directed part 2 of the story we now call The Edge of Destruction (First Doctor, 1964) and parts 5 and 6 of the story we now call The Sensorites (also First Doctor, 1964).

Christopher Coll (died 29 May 2021), who played lunar technician Phipps in The Seeds of Death (Second Doctor, 1969) and the Marshal's aide Stubbs in The Mutants (Third Doctor, 1972).

And last but very definitely not least, Jackie Lane (died 24 June 2021), who played companion Dodo Chaplet in early 1966.

Of all the former companions who lived into this century, Jackie Lane had by far the lowest profile, but here she is in Paris in 2010:

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January 2012 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 biggest professional development of the month was that I got entangled with the politics of Georgia (the real one, not the U.S. state of the same name) which took me to Strasbourg on my one trip of the month (just a few weeks after my last time there). I also got involved with a couple of online slapfights, one on Liz Bourke's infamous review, the other on replacing a British MEP who had resigned. The former is still a relevant debate, I think.

We also entertained the deputy foreign minister of Moldova for dinner. But dear god, my camera back then was pretty awful.

I read 30 books that month.

Non-fiction 11
The History of Christianity, ed. Tim Dowley
Dealing with a post-BRIC Russia, by Ben Judah, Jana Kobzova and Nicu Popescu
Pawns of Peace: Evaluation of Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka, 1997-2009, by Gunnar Sørbø, Jonathan Goodhand, Bart Klem, Ada Elisabeth Nissen and Hilde Selbervik
One Planet, by Nicholas Hulot
How The States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein
Making Ireland British 1580-1650, by Nicholas Canny
The Treason and Trial of Sir John Perrot, by Roger Turvey
Why Can't Elephants Jump?, ed. Mick O'Hare
Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach
Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf
Indian Summer, by Alex von Tunzelmann

Fiction (non-sf) 2
Scotch on the Rocks, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë

SF (non-Who) 7
The Sharing Knife: Horizon, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Tales from Ancient Egypt, by Joyce Tildesley
Out of Nowhere, by Gerald Whelan
The Other City, by Michal Ajvaz
Only You Can Save Mankind, by Terry Pratchett
Slow River, by Nicola Griffith
Conrad's Fate, by Diana Wynne Jones

Doctor Who etc 8
[1st Doctor] Doctor Who: The Daleks (script), by Terry Nation
[11th Doctor] Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012, ed. Clayton Hickman
[7th Doctor] All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane
[SJA] [audiobook] Children of Steel, by Martin Day
[8th Doctor] The Blue Angel, by Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad
[SJA] [audiobook] Judgement Day, by Scott Gray
[Torchwood] Skypoint, by Phil Ford
[11th Doctor] [audiobook] The Art of Death, by James Goss

Comics 2
At The Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft, adapted by I.N.J. Culbard
The Unwritten vol 3: Dead Man's Knock, by Mike Carey

~8,500 pages
10/30 by women (Kobzova, Nissen/Seibervik, Roach, Wolf, von Tunzelmann, Brontë, Bujold, Tildesley, Griffith, Jones)
0/30 by PoC (as far as I know)

Some very good books this month. The best, rather to my surprise, was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë, which I had not read before. You can get it here. Honorable mentions also to the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation analysis of the failure of the Sri Lanka peacekeeping mission, which you can get here, and on a different note Andy Lane's great Doctor Who novel All-Consuming Fire, which you can get here. Wooden spoon to The Other City, by Michal Ajvaz, which you can get here.


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Whoniversaries 29 June

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births and deaths

29 June 1943: birth of Maureen O'Brien, who played Vicki in 1964-65.

29 June 1980: birth of Katherine Jenkins, who played Abigail Pettigrew in A Christmas Carol (2010).

29 June 1999: death of Declan Mulholland, one of the few Northern Irish actors to appear in Who, as Clark in The Sea Devils (1972) and Till in The Androids of Tara (1978).

29 June 2000: death of John Abineri, who played van Lutyens in Fury from the Deep (Second Doctor, 1967), Carrington in The Ambassadors of Death (Third Doctor, 1970), Railton in Death to the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1974) and Ranquin in The Power of Kroll (Fourth Doctor, 1978-79)

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All Among The Barley, by Melissa Harrison

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Yet even this I found that I failed at; for instead of sparkling aphorisms, fascinating conversation and news of current affairs, all the pages revealed each week was that I saw to the hens twice daily and grudgingly fulfilled my other tasks, was pleased when Mother made jam roly-poly and petulant when it was liver, read greedily, said my prayers dutifully, was chided frequently for mooning about and once a month suffered the Curse.

For some reason I apparently put this on my wishlist, and my kind wife duly got it for my birthday in April. It's a very interesting novel set in the 1930s, in a rural England where there is still a shortage of labour due to the first word war, and 14-year-old Edie is coming to terms with the world outside her farm and her village. Glamorous Constance arrives from London to write sketches of country life; but she brings much more dangerous ideas with her as well, and Edie's life ends up completely disrupted (it's made clear at the start of the first chapter that there has been a major disruption, and we spend the rest of the book finding out what happened). I thought this was a great book, if not necessarily a cheerful one, and I will look out for more by this writer. It won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019. You can get it here.

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Whoniversaries 28 June

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i) births and deaths

28 June 1951: birth of Sarah Ward, better known as Lalla Ward, who played Princess Astra in The Armageddon Factor (1979) and then the second Romana from 1979 to 1981. Happy 70th birthday!

28 June 2020: death of Louis Mahoney who played a newscaster in Frontier in Space (Third Doctor, 1973), Ponti in Planet of Evil (Fourth Doctor, 1975), and the older Billy Shipton in Blink (Ninth Doctor, 2007).


ii) broadcast anniversaries

28 June 2008: broadcast of The Stolen Earth, featuring the Tenth Doctor, Martha, Donna, Jack, Ianto and Gwen from Torchwood and Sarah Jane and her adopted son Luke from the SJA. The Earth is moved to the Medusa Cascade by the Daleks and Davros; the Doctor is caught by a Dalek extermination beam.

28 June 2010: broadcast of Hound of the Korven, twenty-fifth and secon-last of the episodes of the Austarlian K9 series. Thorne entices K9 to hand over his regeneration unit in exchange for his missing memory chip. It is a double cross. The fake chip contains a code turning K9 into a bomb. Starkey is taken by an old enemy who has a few surprises for K9 and his friends too.

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