Her birth had been expensive. Eighteen years ago, in order to wrench a final bud from this terminal axil, her mother and father had slaughtered all the children of their House in order to secure a necromantic heir. Harrow had been created in that hour of pallor mortis, while the souls of her peers were fumbling to escape their bodies, her genesis their ignition of thanergy as they died with a simultaneity her parents had agonised to calculate. None of this had been kept from her. It had been explained to Harrow, year after year, right from the time she knew both when to speak and when to not. This skill came early to Ninth House infants.
Jeepers. I really didn't understand what was going on here. I didn't remember a lot about the first book, which was a finalist last year, but am not sure it would have helped if I had. Clearly appeals to quite a lot of people.
She felt the apprentices’ hands, two girls who strained and heaved as they dragged her from the river. She heard Zataya order them to build up the fire, and then she breathed in the smoke the witch fanned from the flames. She screamed without sound at the hot, thick drip of blood against her naked chest, and then at Zataya’s command to her apprentices to spread the blood evenly over Naranpa’s supine form. And as the witch covered her with a blanket, pausing only to pry her mouth open and place a salt rock under her tongue, Naranpa wept unnoticed tears.
Interesting set-up, four characters on separate journeys to the same date with destiny, across a fantasy world which is largely based on Native American culture. Slightly muffs the denouement, but I kept reading.
It was only four standard Preservation day-cycles back to Preservation via wormhole, and I meant to use the time to finish watching Lineages of the Sun. It was a long-running historical family drama, set in an early colony world, with one hundred and thirty-six characters and almost as many storylines.
I'm one of the three people in fandom who rather bounced off previous Murderbot stories, largely due to my antipathy to cute anthropomorphic robot stories (even if the robot is also a killer robot). But this was OK, as it turns out that Murderbot does actually have a space for friendships and possibly even growth, making it a bit more than a one-joke story. Won the Nebula and Locus (SF).
He shook hands with the president, who was a trim, handsome white man in the Clark Gable mold, with dark hair just going silver at the temples. “Director. Thank you so much for coming out.”
I missed the middle volume of the trilogy, but it's easy enough to pick up on what's happening; the space programme as a liberalising catalyst to 1960s/70s America which is recovering from a devastating meteor strike. The calamities that kept falling on the head of the protagonist did challenge my suspension of disbelief just a bit, as did the postscript after the main action of the book was over. But very readable.
It was not the Other. He was thinner, and not quite so tall.
As I have said before, Clarke's first novel in the fifteen years since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a much much shorter book, in which the eponymous protagonist is one of two living inhabitants of a vast building which seems to be the entire world. Gradually the truth about the narrator's past and about the world they are in becomes clear. Intense and intricate. I nominated it for the BSFA Best Novel award.
The terminal is mostly just a big, brightly lit room where a few hundred people can assemble. There’s nothing that should be scary about it. Its walls are lined with ads for movies Aislyn isn’t planning to see and makeup she probably won’t ever wear. The people standing or sitting around her are hers, her people; she feels this instinctively even though her mind resists when her gaze skates over Asian faces, or her ears pick up a language that probably isn’t Spanish but also definitely isn’t English. (Quechua, her strange newer senses whisper, but she doesn’t want to hear it.) They aren’t bothering her, though, and there are plenty of normal people around, so there’s no good reason for her to be as terrified as she is. Terror doesn’t always happen for a good reason.
I was also one of the three people in fandom who bounced off the Broken Earth trilogy (I also counted the votes that gave the second volume its Hugo). However this worked a lot better for me for some reason – our protagonists discover that they have become the incarnations, the genii loci, of New York's boroughs, and also that they are under magical attack. Somewhat reminiscent of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, except that here it's the human-built settlements that have acquired personalities. Vivid and sharp. Has already won the BSFA Award and Locus (Fantasy).
Tue, 21:05: RT @PippaCrerar: Ex-PM Sir John Major furious about foreign aid cuts – suggesting Govt’s plan is “the stamp of Little England, not Great Br…
Wed, 10:45: RT @TNeenan: I, a white man should be allowed to choose the anti-racism symbol I am most comfortable with. Maybe a tiny car we call the ‘be…
Tue, 09:01: RT @pkincaid_critic: @nwbrux How about: you can’t stoke racism and still hold a responsible position in government. The world can’t work li…
Tue, 09:15: RT @Cygie: Het is precies 1 jaar geleden dat ik mijn eerste tweet heb gepost met de COVID-19 cijfers. Toen nog zeer beperkt. Maar het begin…
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.
Lots of work travel this month. I gave a lecture in Geneva; I spoke at a conference in Skopje; and the Georgians took me to Barcelona to (successfully) lobby Liberal International. My trip to Switzerland was more fortunate than one of our local schools, which lost seven pupils and two staff members in the Sierre coach crash. F’s own school was directly affected, in that several of the victims had relatives who were either fellow-pupils or on the staff. It was pretty grim.
Titanic won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1996, and equalled both the record of fourteen nominations set by All About Eve, and the record of eleven wins set by Ben-Hur. The other ten were: Best Director (James Cameron), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Original Song, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects. Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart were nominated in Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively, but did not win. (At 87, Gloria Stuart remains the oldest ever nominee for Best Supporting Actress.) The Hugo that year went to Contact.
I have not seen any of the other four Oscar nominees, which were As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential. I have seen nine other films made in 1998: Men in Black, Starship Troopers, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Contact, Wag the Dog, The Peacemaker, Spice World, The Man Who Knew Too Little, Mrs Brown and Fools Rush In. These are all enjoyable films, especially Spice World, and to be honest I’d rank Titanic somewhere in the middle. IMDB users are much more wowed than me, and put it top of bothrankings. Here’s a trailer.
Three of the cast of Titanic also appeared in the Whoniverse. First off, David Warner, Spicer Lovejoy here, went on to pay Professor Grisenko in the 2013 episode Cold War. He was also the unpleasant Bilfil in Oscar-winning Tom Jones, way back in 1963.
Martin Jarvis plays Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon here, and has been in Doctor Who three times: as the Menoptra leader Hilio in the 1965 story we now call The Web Planet, the villains’ sidekick Butler in 1974’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and the Governor of Varos in the 1983 Vengeance on Varos.
On rather a different scale, there’s Derek Lea, who is stoker Frederick Barrett here and played an alien posing as a paramedic in the 2008 Torchwood episode Sleeper.
There’s a couple of overlaps with Hugo-winning films also directed by James Cameron. The versatile Jenette Goldstein shows up here as the Irish mommy, having previously been John Connor’s foster mother Janelle Voight in Terminator 2 and tough-as-nails Vasquez in Aliens.
Also in Aliens was Bill Paxton, here treasure hunter Brock Lovett, there Sergeant Hudson.
A couple more Hugo-winner appearances: Elsa Raven is Ida Straus here and was the Clocktower Lady in Back to the Future.
Mark Capri is one of the Stewards here and was imperial comms officer M’Kae in The Empire Strikes Back.
And, getting to the end, there are two more crossovers with previous Oscar-winners apart from David Warner. Frances Fisher is Rose’s mother here, and was Strawberry Alice, the brothel manager, in Unforgiven.
Last but not least, Bernard Hill plays Captain Smith here, having previously been Sergeant Putnam, the soldier on the railway station roof, in Gandhi. We will be seeing him again.
Before we get into the meat of it, there’s an interesting linguistic quirk that caught my attention (and probably won’t catch anyone else’s). Thomas Andrews, the engineer who designed the ship, is played by Canadian actor Victor Garber, who I don’t think I have seen in anything else. He’s the very first character in 70 Oscar-winning films to be explicitly from Northern Ireland. Garber gives him a bit of a lilting brogue, to signal to the audience that he is vaguely Irish.
There are no surviving recordings of Thomas Andrews’ voice, as far as I know. But his brother, John Miller Andrews, was interviewed when he became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1940, and as you can hear he has a much more distinctly Ulster twang in his voice. (He lasted only two and a half years, becoming the first but not the last Unionist leader to be ruthlessly ditched by a rebellion in the ranks.)
Anyway. As if you didn’t know, the film is about the 1912 sinking of Titanic, the largest ship in the world at the time, on its maiden voyage. My great-grandmother, born in 1887, told me when I was a child that she had seen it pass along Belfast Lough as it emerged from the Belfast shipyard where it was made, and it’s not difficult to imagine how this massive man-made object would have briefly dominated the natural landscape as it went by.
Belfast has a slightly ambivalent relationship with the ship and the story; there is a massive and impressive museum dedicated to the disaster on the site of the dock where the ship was built, and a big memorial in the grounds of the City Hall. But for a city which has since acquired a strong relationship with tragedy – twice as many were killed in the Troubles as died on Titanic – it’s not a comfortable bit of heritage. The final exchange with the doomed ship is very poignant.
A friend of mine lost her father on the Estonia in 1994; he was the ship’s chief radio operator. Just leaving that there.
Well, what did I think of the film then? It’s all right, I suppose. It’s interesting to come to it at the far end of the centenary in 2012, and having been to the museum in Belfast twice. I don’t think I saw any black faces, though perhaps this is excusable given the setting. Not noted above, because there is no decent picture of him in the film, is the Chinese survivor played by Van Ling (also briefly in Terminator 2).
The only other film I’ve seen Leonardo di Caprio in is the 1996 Romeo + Juliet. Sorry to be heretical, but I don’t think he’s a particularly good actor. His part in Titanic doesn’t have much to it, but I don’t feel he brings much to it either. I think he particularly fails to connect smirking self-confident Jack to sensitive artistic Jack. It’s just about plausible that Rose falls for him on the ship, especially given the awfulness of the alternative, but I can’t believe she would have stayed with him for long.
Those are the only two negatives, though. The music teeters on the edge of being annoying, but just about manages not to be. Only five Oscar-winning Original Songs were also in the Best Picture or equivalent; before “My Heart Will Go On” we had “Swinging on a Star” in Going My Way, and “Gigi” in, er, Gigi; we’ll get to the two others in due course. Just in case you had forgotten, here’s Celine Dion.
Kate Winslet on the other hand has a great part and does it well. Rose is one of those rare leading women characters with a serious and interesting arc. The sequence of her wielding the axe is tremendous.
And the film does a traditional story-telling job very well – introducing us to a bunch of very human people, some of them more interesting than others, and then hitting them with a disaster that many of them do not survive. The core narrative is not original but very competently executed, and tying it back to the present day with Gloria Stuart’s brief but impressive performance as older Rose gives it a firm sense of grounding and relevance.
And the effects of course are spectacular. Cameron has set a high bar with his previous work, and just about exceeds it. The sense of scale of the sinking ship, and the subsequent horror of the slow deaths of the shipwrecked, are particularly effective.
So, I thought it was good but not superb. I’m putting it just under halfway down my list of Oscar winners, ahead of The Last Emperor which also look good but has no attractive characters, and behind Out of Africa which also looks good but does have interesting men as well as women.
That takes me to 70 Oscar-winning films. The most recent ten have had four really good, four medium (The English Patient is very medium, but I gave it extra marks for having Juliette Binoche) and two awful, which I guess is not too bad. Here’s my full ranking.
Just for fun, I’ve broken down the 70 Oscar-winning films by main date and time of setting. (Obviously some straddle timelines and locations – I’m calling the two Godfather films as set in New York, as that’s where their hearts are, and calling All the King’s Men as set when it was made although it is based on real events that happened between the wars.) Five of the eleven “Other Europe” films are set in France.
Sat, 19:23: RT @law_and_policy: Fundamental constitutional reform? We cannot even sort out the hereditary element of the House of Lords Today’s law an…
I’m a bit less cheerful today than I have been in some of my recent updates. Belgium managed briefly to qualify for the ECDC green zone last week, but infections have started to surge again in the last few days, today’s case rate being a massive 82% ahead of a week ago. Hospitalisations and deaths have not yet started to rise in sympathy, which either means that a lot of people who are getting diagnosed are not in fact all that ill, or that the other numbers are delayed. And it’s currently raining cats and dogs outside, on a Saturday when I have been grumpily stuck doing Day Job stuff since this morning. It’s been great to be back in the office three days a week, less great when it extends to the weekend. And the ongoing tedious wrangling over Brexit, with the UK pretending they did not know what they negotiated or signed last year.
I had one of those bizarre media appearances on Egyptian TV last weekend, with long pauses for simultaneous translation, on the future of NATO. It sounded to me like I made sense, but I have no idea what the translation said.
Also an Albanian TV interview which I did in June was actually broadcast at the start of the month, this time interviewed in English but dubbed into Albanian.
One welcome bit of nostalgia was a friend posting photographs from a couple of student parties in Cambridge days. I had bad luck with the reflection off my glasses in the first one, and am looking the wrong way in the second. Amused that in the second I happened to be sitting in front of my future wife, two years before we started dating. Weird also to think that young F is now older than either of his parents were in these pictures taken in 1988.
Not going to jinx it, but I’m planning to get away from Belgium for a couple of days next weekend. I’ll report on that after the fact.
But for now, I think I’m likely to be keeping up these ten-day updates for a while yet.
Fri, 16:05: RT @pmdfoster: It’s OUT!! My weekly #Brexit Briefing for @ft This week: the transition from “CE” safety marks (u see them on everything) t…
Fri, 20:48: RT @apcoworldwide: The 2020 halt to tourism caused huge losses of jobs and income in communities that are largely reliant on tourism. Now,…
Sat, 02:01: RT @ottocrat: If this is true, and see the discussion in the replies, then the headline in the article is wrong. It should read “Brexit put…
Current Middlemarch, by George Eliot The Separation, by Christopher Priest The Last Pharaoh, by Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Last books finished Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko Riding the Unicorn, by Paul Kearney Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Next books Empire Games, by Charles Stross The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty
If you’re within reach of Leuven, and on the look-out for something a bit different to do this weekend, you could do worse than visiting the Abdij van Park, south of the city. We know it well – Anne actually volunteered in the museum for a few months, a couple of years ago. I started a videoblog entry about it last summer, but never completed it; this was the intro.
The abbey now hosts a religious art museum, Parcum, with a permanent exhibition and a rotating set of temporary displays. This summer – now scheduled to finish on 29 August, though they will surely extend it again – they have opened up some more of the abbey infrastructure for the visiting public. As well as various works of art, this includes the incredible recently restored baroque stucco ceilings of the monks’ refectory and library. Made in 1672 by Jan-Christian Hansche, these are vivid, three-dimensional scenes hanging over your head. Here, for instance, is St Norbert being struck by lightning, an incident that caused the young nobleman to rethink his life and dedicate himself to God.
Here is the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well:
And most striking of all, here is the Last Supper, seen in a mirror on the refectory table, with apostles leaning out of the ceiling into our space:
The rest of the art is interesting enough, but I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like Hansche’s stucco ceilings. Well worth going to see.
Fri, 09:59: RT @MichaelAodhan: Great to see more trade deals but not great to see more hyperbole -Less tariffs does not mean no red tape – this is not…
Fri, 11:04: From @gilliantett: 1) Carbon price and tax 2) Push China on reducing coal use 3) Help poorer nations transition to green energy 4) More research into new energy and mitigation 5) Mobilise consumer opinion! https://t.co/XMovZ96YOF
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.
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.
Tue, 22:24: RT @scalzi: A friendly reminder that six months ago today, at the instigation of the seditious now-former president, a bunch of racist moth…
Wed, 10:45: RT @HuwSayer: This by @anandMenon1 is good on how the UK never really understood the EU. “Member states viewed the prosperity and stabilit…
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.
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.
Mon, 16:05: Frodo and Sam’s gay romance in Lord of the Rings is more than a theory – Polygon https://t.co/6ymoWB8rjl Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents.
Mon, 17:11: Lovecraft Country Season 2 Teased By Creator Misha Green After HBO Cancellation https://t.co/WuA72hUzwO Surprising and disappointing that it was not renewed.
Mon, 17:39: RT @Kattullus: @nwbrux Back in my undergraduate days I wrote an essay in a Tolkien class about their relationship. It seemed to me then, an…
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.
Sun, 13:42: RT @simoncoveney: Without generosity on both sides, EU/UK partnership to find solutions to protocol related issues will be impossible. EU m…
Sun, 14:48: RT @JonTonge: Can Stormont be made more “collapse-proof” by extending the time before it is allowed to, er, collapse? Analysis in this week…
Sun, 16:05: RT @SirJJQC: I’m sorry this is hopeless. No acceptance that UK bears any responsibility for what it agreed. Or that the “reality that now e…
Sun, 19:48: RT @DmitryOpines: Excellent thread. Two points from me: 1️⃣ Chilled meat/sausages isn’t some unexpected issue that now needs a fix. It was…
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.
Four books and a podcast. (Winner: Chicks Dig Time Lords, a book.)
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.)
Four books about sf and a podcast. (Winner, as noted above: Writing Excuses, Season 7, a podcast.)
Three books about sf, a podcast and a blog post. (Winner, as noted above: “We Have Always Fought”, a blog post.)
Two books about SF, two essays and a humour book that wasn’t very funny. (No award; all five were Puppy nominees.)
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.)
(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.)
Six books about sf. (Winner: Ursula K. Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters.)
Three books about sf, one video documentary, one convention event and a website. (Winner, as noted above: Archive of Our Own, a website)
Four books about sf, one video documentary and a speech. (Winner, as noted above: Jeannette Ng’s speech.)
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.
Headley
Heaney
Original
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.
Sat, 14:48: RT @AnnaJerzewska: The issues around the NI Protocol come back to the 80:20 rule: If you don’t do it right and only spend 20% of the time…
Sat, 16:05: Debarkle Chapter 45 – The Reviews (April to July) https://t.co/7bluk2feXD The 2015 Hugo finalists, as they were seen at the time. I am quoted.
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.
Fri, 14:21: Disappointing but not very surprising, given that F was not prosecuted for the deaths and injuries that Saville found he definitely caused, but instead for deaths and injuries for which Saville found much weaker evidence. https://t.co/1UZfmhnJdJ
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Fri, 19:32: RT @GrantSana: Would encourage everyone to read Michael Mansfield’s Autobiography, not least because it details word for word, his cross ex…
Fri, 20:20: RT @davidschneider: Boris Johnson absolutely furious about the disaster that is the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiated, signed and sold a…
Fri, 20:48: RT @joncstone: just came across this quote from JRR Tolkien which I thought was interesting given the recent backlash against @TolkienSocie…
Sat, 10:45: RT @MaxCRoser: Three maps that show how the life expectancy of people around the world has changed over the last two centuries. From my @O…
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.
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
Thu, 12:56: RT @RufusTSuperfly: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory is 50. Gene Wilder’s letter to director Mel Stuart remains a perfect example of wha…
Thu, 16:41: My four top tweets from the first half of 2021: 4) The future Sir Alex Allan lends his skateboard to a family friend. https://t.co/d2fjrXcoOQ
Thu, 17:11: Victoria Newton’s Diary: How the Sun got its Matt Hancock scoop https://t.co/8t9uBNaLCh “It’s rare that a news exposé unites the left and the right in British politics.”
Thu, 18:01: RT @Emmanuel_microb: Long tweet sur le variant Delta (mes excuses pour cela) —- Avec @TWenseleers , nous analysons comment le variant Del…
Thu, 18:51: RT @john_lichfield: How can this be? The Spectator, which is scrupulous about facts, told us that the French economy was in ruins. The offi…
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
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
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
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 
