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  • Sat, 12:56: Mummies on the move: Egypt holds grand parade to transfer antiquities to new museum https://t.co/cenqP36VT3 Wow. This happened last weekend.
  • Sat, 14:48: RT @robfordmancs: Election trivia 2019 continues – in one Welsh seat no fewer than 7 different parties (including an independent) have won…
  • Sat, 14:55: I found this choice quite tough (though apparently other voters did not). Planet of the Spiders is over-rated – six episodes are way too long for the plot. And Keys of Marinus is under-rated – an early, if flawed, implementation of today’s new-situation-each-week format. https://t.co/c1a3F0K04M
  • Sat, 16:05: Brussels-Prague night train looks to ride on green momentum https://t.co/DN2AMIA6K8 Via Antwerp and Amsterdam? A long way around, surely?
  • Sat, 16:11: The Silence of the Lambs https://t.co/Yen56jp1B3
  • Sat, 16:42: RT @Feorag: @nwbrux It’s a night train – long way round is good for sleep!
  • Sat, 20:48: P�rplasjet Kosov�-Serbi p�r regjistrat kadastral� (Kosovo-Serbia clashes over cadastral registers) https://t.co/8FiqJp7qou A good article looking at this important issue. Not one of the cadastral documents held by Serbia has been returned to Kosovo, despite 2011 agreement.
  • Sun, 09:18: Long thread on whether Remainers could have got behind a softer Brexit and made it happen, concluding that they could not. I agree. Neither May nor Johnson was interested in losing control of the process, and other forces did not align to take it from them. https://t.co/CZUxDYe2li
  • Sun, 09:30: Whoniversaries 11 April https://t.co/14rrRvxWfZ
  • Sun, 10:45: RT @JohnRentoul: Brilliant series of reflections on coronavirus from @mrianleslie in his newsletter https://t.co/t6I4vnSrDX https://t.co/sz…
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Whoniversaries 11 April

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i) births and deaths

11 April 1940: birth of Sheila Dunn, who played Blossom Lefavre in The Daleks' Master Plan (First Doctor, 1965), the computer voice of the Electromatic company in The Invasion (Second Doctor, 1968), and Petra Williams in Inferno (Third Doctor, 1970). She was married to Douglas Camfield, who directed all three of those stories.

11 April 2005: death of John Bennett, who played General Finch in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974) and (shamefully in yellowface) Li H'sen Chang in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

11 April 2010: death of Richard Shaw, who played Governor Lobos in The Space Museum (First Doctor, 1965), treacherous prisoner Cross in Frontier in Space (Third Doctor, 1973) and also Lakh, one of the imperviously helmeted Seers in Underworld (Fourth Doctor, 1978).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

11 April 1964: broadcast of "The Sea of Death", first episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Arbitan, Keeper of the Conscience of Marinus, sends the Tardis crew to find the lost keys of the machine.

11 April 1970: broadcast of fourth episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The aliens go on the rampage at the Space Centre.

11 April 2009: broadcast of Planet of the Dead. A London bus is transported to a desert planet via a wormhole, its passengers including the Doctor and high-class thief Christina de Souza.

11 April 2020: release of Rory's Story.

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The Silence of the Lambs

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The Silence of the Lambs won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1991, and four others: Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). It lost Best Film Editing and Best Sound, the latter to Hugo winner Terminator 2: Judgement Day. So far it is the third and last film to win Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay, after It Happened One Night (1934) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

That year’s other Best Picture nominees were Beauty and the Beast, Bugsy, JFK and The Prince of Tides. I have not seen any of them, and had not seen the winner before either, the first year since 1970 for which that is the case. I have seen thirteen other films made that year, listed here roughly in IMDB order: Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Cape Fear, Thelma & Louise, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, The Fisher King (actually only got part way through this one), The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, The Commitments, Highlander II: The Quickening (there should have been only one!), Soapdish, Operation Condor (a Jackie Chan film which I watched because the female co-lead, Eva Cobo, is my twin), Enchanted April and Prospero’s Books. I liked all of these except The Fisher King and Highlander II, but I think The Silence of the Lambs is a worthy Oscar winner in that company.

Unusually, IMDB users rate the film top on both systems. (The last film to top both lists was Alien, from 1979; the other Oscar-winners to top both lists were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, Casablanca back in 1943 and All Quiet on the Western Front way way back in 1929/30.)

Here’s a trailer.

None of the cast had been in Hugo-winning films or in Doctor Who. There is a surprise crossover with a previous Oscar-winner: Roger Corman, much much better known as a director and producer. Here he plays the Director of the FBI; seventeen years ago, in The Godfather, Part II, he was one of the senators ineffectively quizzing the Corleones. He turned 95 last Monday. (Trivia: the office where he is filmed as FBI Director was at the time the real-life office of Elizabeth Dole, the U.S. Secretary of Labor.)

This is a film about the relationship between novice FBI Agent Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, and imprisoned serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins. The actual plot is barely relevant, but it concerns Starling’s pursuit, advised by Lecter, of another serial killer, and Lecter’s concurrent escape from custody. We had four Oscar-winners in a row in the 1970s which were about crime and law enforcement (The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting and The Godfather, Part II), but this is the first one since then.

I really liked it. Thrillers are not my genre in general. I find screen violence very icky. There are some other problems which I will get to below. But its’s well-made, well-paced and looks and sounds utterly convincing. I’m putting it in tenth place in my overall league table of Oscar winners, ahead of Rain Man (which has a less convincing plot) and behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which is a little less icky).

Having said that, there are problems. Trans (and indeed queer) people can justifiably feel aggrieved that the killer who Starling is chasing is depicted as a man trying to become a woman. The script mumbles that real trans people are not like that at all, but I fear that point will be lost on most viewers. (The book is a lot clearer on this.) However, as I said before, the actual hunt for the serial killer is background to the central business of Starling and Lecter.

All the main characters are white, but there are a sprinkling of black actors, most notably Kasi Simmons as Starling’s best friend Ardelia Mapp. Simmons has gone on to a very successful career as a director.

I thought Howard Shore’s music was pretty good. We will be hearing from him again when I get to The Lord of the Rings.

The supporting actors are all good – I’ve called out Kasi Lemmons above, but also worth noting Scott Glenn as Clarice’s boss Jack Crawford, Anthony Heald as Lecter’s banal guardian Chilton, and Brooke Smith as potential victim Catherine Martin.

But the film is utterly made by the dynamic between Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in the four (only four!) scenes that they have together. Hopkins is a convincing monster, always several steps ahead of the game, compellingly horrible. (More trivia: with twenty-four minutes and fifty-two seconds of screen time, Hopkins’ performance in this movie is the second shortest to ever win an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, with David Niven in Separate Tables (1958) beating him, at twenty-three minutes and thirty-nine seconds.)

And Jodie Foster is impossible to take your eyes off as Starling. A neat directorial trick: when characters are talking to her, they often talk directly to the camera, but when she is talking to them, she is always looking slightly off-camera, meaning that we directly experience her point-of-view, but not theirs, hence encouraging us to more readily identify with her. She carries the weight of the narrative; we learn lots about her and perhaps also reflect about how we would react when put into a similarly stressful situation. She is completely fascinating.

The film’s key moments are the four conversations between the two, which are just masterpieces of acting and cinematography. This is the last of them.

I had not seen this film before, but it’s been one of the better discoveries of this project.

As usual, I read the book as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

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

It’s impossible to read the book now without seeing Foster and Hopkins in your mind’s eye, but this is not necessarily a bad thing of course. A couple of plot points which are really important did not make it to the screen – the illness and death of Crawford’s wife, much of Starling’s back story, Lecter’s pun on the colouring agent for feces, and the explanation of the serial killer’s psychology and strategy. Starling is if anything an even more three-dimensional character on the page. It’s just as well paced, and if anything it’s even better than the film. You can get it here.

Next up is that year’s Hugo winner, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

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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Whoniversaries 10 April

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i) births and deaths

10 April 1954: birth of Glen McCoy, writer of Timelash (Sixth Doctor, 1985) and the first writer of colour to write for televised Who (I think also his novelisation is the first Who book by a writer of colour).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

10 April 1965: broadcast of "The Wheel of Fortune", third episode of the story we now call The Crusade. Barbara remains a captive; the Doctor is forced to reveal Vicki's true gender.

10 April 1971: broadcast of first episode of Colony in Space. The Time Lords send the Doctor and Jo to a colony planet where the Doctor is attacked by a robot. As usual with a Malcolm Hulke story, there are green lizard people.

10 April 2010: broadcast of The Beast Below. In the 33rd century, all of the United Kingdom's citizens (apart from the Scots) live onboard Starship UK, searching for a new home amongst the stars as the Earth is being roasted by solar flares. What is going on? What secrets does Starship UK hold at its depths, and who is hiding them? Soon, the Doctor is forced to make an impossible choice.

iii) date specified in-universe

10 April 2013: Clara Oswald receives a letter from Madame Vastra while attempting to bake soufflés. It contains an invitation to an emergency psychic conference call with herself, Jenny Flint, River Song, and Strax.

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Friday reading

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Current
Kathedralen uit de steentijd, by Herman Clerinx
Adventures in Lockdown, ed. Steve Cole

Last books finished
Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
Network Effect, by Martha Wells
Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios

Next books
Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells

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Scottish independence: EU membership and the Anglo–Scottish border

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Second paragraph of third section:

The TCA is a basic trade deal that eliminated tariffs on goods that meet the relevant rules of origin but did little to reduce non-tariff barriers. If Scotland were to join the EU it would trade with England and Wales on the same terms as other EU member states do now, so new checks and processes would be required on trade across the Anglo–Scottish border. It would also mean that border infrastructure would need to be erected on the Anglo–Scottish border, across which there are 21 road and railway crossings.32
32 HM Government, Scotland analysis: Borders and citizenship, Cm 8726, The Stationery Office, 2014

This is a short paper that caught my eye the other day, published by the Institute for Government and available for free here. I’m neutral tending to positive on Scottish independence, and felt that this paper laid out well some of the issues regarding Scottish frontier policy that would arise inevitably from an independence status, especially in the light of Brexit (which was not an issue during the 2014 referendum). Basically, it’s impossible to see how an independent Scotland could avoid frontier controls with England (and therefore Wales), whether or not it joins the EU, because of the particularly hard form of Brexit that Boris Johnson chose, unless it chose to remain essentially a vassal state of London (which would also require London’s collusion). The desired end-state of course is EU membership; the authors are I think a little pessimistic about how long that would take (though they do slay the myth of the Spanish veto), but clear that this would certainly mean that the trade frontier between Scotland and England would end up looking much the same as that between France and England, or Ireland and Wales. Northern Ireland is of course a different matter, but the authors rightly do not devote too much time to that as it’s not a Scottish issue. I think it’s also worth pointing out that the 21 border crossings between Scotland and England would be pretty easy to police, and the landscape is favourable, unlike the situation in Ireland.

The authors also look at other alternatives to EU membership that Scotland could try, but one comes away with the sense that there is no real middle way; Scotland can choose continued Union with England, Wales and (to an extent) Northern Ireland, or independence which inevitably means economic disruption to its relationships with the rest of the UK. A renewed relationship with the EU will partially but not completely substitute for that, and there’s not much point in considering anything other than EU membership as an end point. Scottish Nationalists should not pretend that independence will come without a price; of course, the lesson from other cases (including Brexit) is that voters can be persuaded that it is a price worth paying.

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Whoniversaries 9 April

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i) births and deaths

9 April 1972: birth of Neve McIntosh, who played both Alaya and Restac in The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood (Eleventh Doctor, 2010) and Madame Vastra in later stories


ii) broadcast anniversaries

9 April 1966: broadcast of "The Hall of Dolls", second episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. Steven and Dodo, competing with the King and Queen of Hearts, must find the two safe chairs to sit in.

9 April 2005: broadcast of The Unquiet Dead. The Doctor and Rose, with the help of Charles Dickens, investigate reanimating corpses in Cardiff in 1869.

9 April 2013: Strax reports from Trafalgar Square.

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Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux, by Herman Clerinx

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Een van de eerste maatregelen die gouverneur Agrippa had genomen, was het aanleggen van nieuwe en efficiënte wegen, zoals van de Gallische hoofdstad Lyon naar het militaire knooppunt Keulen. Zijn opvolgers lieten op hun beurt nog meer wegen aanleggen, tot uiteindelijk heel Gallië vlot over land kon worden bereisd. One of the first measures taken by Agrippa as governor was to build new, efficient roads, such as the one from Gaul's capital, Lyon, to the military hub of Cologne. His successors, in their turn, had even more roads built, until eventually smooth land travel was possible over the whole of Gaul.

This is a great book, whose title translates as both "Roman tracks" and "Roman traces", looking at vestiges of the Roman Empire in the Benelux countries (somewhat broadly defined as including Trier in Germany and Bavay in France – today's borders did not apply). There's a sensible structure moving from the historical cycle of events to more thematic issues such as religion, wellness and death. There are lovely illustrations, and GPS co-ordinates given for every monument mentioned.

Some have been lost. One dramatic story is what happened to the relics of the goddess Nehalennia, of whom about 30 inscriptions were found in the Zeeland town of Domburg in the 17th century. They were all stored in the church, which was struck by lightning in 1848 and completely destroyed. Spooky, eh? (Though many more have since been found, and the temple has been reconstructed.)

As someone who grew up in a country that was not conquered by the Romans, I was always a little envious of those who were, with all the extra layers of archaeology that they left. In fact in Flanders there is not all that much. Our part of the world was well known for one thing in Roman times: Menapian ham, a delicacy much enjoyed to the south. (A bit surprising that our local pigs tasted better than the Italian ones, but maybe that's branding.) The road from Bavay to Tongeren was to a certain extent an internal frontier, not too far off today's taalgrens, the Rhine (in its older more northern route) being the official fortified border. In between there wasn't a lot, basically farms feeding the garrisons and buildings which have mostly been disassembled by stone-hungry medievals.

There's more than nothing of course. One of the tumuli near our house is classified as Gallo-Roman, and there are more a bit father south. Near where B and U live are the Three Tumuli of Grimde, from which a cameo brooch of the Emperor Augustus was recovered, later stolen by Hermann Göring. But that's barely scratching the surface. Luxembourg has an underground Roman aqueduct, there's plenty from the forts in the Netherlands, and of course I've been to the museum at Oudenburg recently as well. Reading the book inspired me to go to Het Toreke museum in Tienen again, where there is an impressive tableau of the horse, dogs and woman (slave? lover? both?) found sacrificed in another tumulus near the town, as well as the remnants of a mithræum.

Anyway, I was relieved that my Dutch was good enough to get through the book, and excited to find that Clerinx has also written about Belgium's megalithic remains (so I bought that immediately).

This book was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next is Discipline or Corruption by Konstantin Stanislavsky, but I'm saving that until I've finished my books acquired in 2014.

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  • Wed, 12:56: RT @UrsulaV: I thought there was a thing these guys were supposed to carry that would totally protect them from shooters…hang on, it’ll c…
  • Wed, 16:05: RT @luna_plath: Since learning about Jay Kristoff’s 4 special arcs for his upcoming book, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss a ve…
  • Wed, 17:10: RT @worldcon2021: It’s official – DisCon III is moving For the first time in Worldcon history, Worldcon will happen in December. ❄️☃️…
  • Wed, 19:22: Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake https://t.co/z809KAmKcU
  • Wed, 22:03: RT @AlexTaylorNews: Let’s just remind ourselves of what some UK newspapers said about EU leaders when they had “concerns” about AZ causing…
  • Thu, 08:12: RT @florianeder: I could have sworn there was someone else in attendance at that meeting …. Can’t figure it out… #SofaGate https://t.c…
  • Thu, 09:30: Whoniversaries 8 April https://t.co/lfkodqoJug
  • Thu, 10:45: RT @DaveKeating: So, when EU countries restrict AstraZeneca by age group they are being irresponsible and over cautious, and causing deaths…
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Whoniversaries 8 April

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i) births and deaths

8 April 1942: birth of Lovett Bickford, director of The Leisure Hive (Fourth Doctor, 1980)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

8 April 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Faceless Ones. The Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie land at Gatwick Airport to get mixed up in an affair of vanishing corpses; Polly is apparently brainwashed.

8 April 1972: broadcast of first episode of The Mutants. Geoffrey Palmer is the best thing in this story and he gets killed before the end of this episode; five more to go, folks…

iii) dates specified in-universe

8 April 1809: birth of Joseph Sundvik

8 April 1969: setting of The Impossible Astronaut (Eleventh Doctor, 2011)

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Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Titus rose to his knees, the aftermath of a dream remaining like remorse, though he could remember nothing of it save that it was Gormenghast again. He picked up a stick and began to draw in the dust with the point of it, and the moonlight was so fierce that every line he drew was like a narrow trench filled up with ink.

When I previously reread this in 2011, I wrote:

I'm afraid I was simply not convinced by Titus Alone. In fact, I was bored and confused by it. Titus, having run away from his home, finds himself in the neighbouring industrialised countryside (where people have never actually heard of Gormenghast, despite its absolute domination of its own hinterland). He becomes the object of obsession – in particular of the two women, Juno, with whom he has a love affair, and Cheeta, who rejects him and then develops a bizarrely elaborate plan to humiliate him by throwing a party at which various aspects of Gormenghast are satirically brought to life, but also of the self-appointed guardians from the Under-River. The imagery was intense, and I suppose it is in some way a spiritual and allegorical journey for Titus growing up, but in the end he ends back exactly where he started, and it did not work for me.

Also fails the Bechdel Test. I had hopes that the mysterious Black Rose would have a conversation with Juno, but she died before waking up.

As previously mentioned, I've been part of a group reading the Gormenghast trilogy for the last few months. We did the first two books at a chapter a day; many of the chapters in Titus Alone are very short, so we grouped them together and did 122 chapters in 44 days. I noticed that even so, Titus Alone completely killed the group's momentum, and where previously we had a collective running commentary going, very few people seem now to be up to date with their comments (I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, but I sense that most of the others in the group haven't and perhaps won't). Where the first two books had some pretty improbable events, at least things seemed to happen for a reason. Here it's one bizarre scene after another, with plot developments that are never resolved – who are the two stalkers in helmets, for instance?

I really recommend skipping this and ending your reading of the trilogy with the second book, with Titus' departure from Gormenghast as the ending. Titus Alone is much shorter than either of the other two, but you will wonder why you bothered. If you really want to, you can get it here.

One last thing – Peake's concept of hydrogeology is a bit counterfactual. Gormenghast Castle is almost drowned in a great flood – where did the water come from? Is Gormenghast not on elevated ground anyway? And in Titus Alone, you have the network of caverns under the river. Normally caves are created by rivers which then drop down to lower levels. There is so much else wrong with Titus Alone that I won't dwell on it, but it struck me as a curiously consistent blind spot.

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Whoniversaries 7 April

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i) births and deaths

7 April 1934: birth of Arthur Cox, 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.

7 Apruil 2017: death of Tim Pigott-Smith, who played Captain Harker in The Claws of Axos (Third Doctor, 1971) and Marco in The Masque of Mandragora (Fourth Doctor, 1976).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

7 April 1973: broadcast of first episode of Planet of the Daleks. Jo and the Doctor land on Spiridon and separately encounter a Thal expedition.

7 April 2007: broadcast of The Shakespeare Code. The Doctor and Martha, visiting 1599 London, foil a plot by the Carrionites to invade the Earth via Shakespeare's plays.

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Sandkings, Enemy Mine and The Fountains of Paradise

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Three interesting works won both Hugo and Nebula in 1980 for work published in 1979.

The second paragraph of the third section of “Sandkings”, by George R.R. Martin, the Best Novelette winner, is:

On the fifth day, he saw his first mobile, a lone white.

I have a feeling that I actually read “Sandkings” when it was first published in Omni in 1979, borrowed from a colleague of my parents’ at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. At twelve, I didn’t really know what to make of it. At 53, it’s a brutal story of what it means for a flawed man to become a god. The narcissistic protagonist acquires four colonies of sandkings, creatures which build their own civilisations in his terrarium, worshipping him. He treats them badly, and they change and grow to match his personality. His attempts to liberate himself from the problem that he has created end in disaster. It’s not a nice story but it’s very well crafted; we are fascinated by the awfulness of the central character.

Of course, now we know that George R.R. Martin is fascinated by flawed characters. Looking back on Game of Thrones, it’s remarkable how memorable the out-and-out villains are – Tywin, Cersei and Joffrey; Ramsay Bolton; Daenerys at the end. And his good characters certainly also have flaws, and are tempted to apotheosis (this is Daenerys’ downfall). The world of the sandkings is convincingly like ours, just a little worse, perhaps.

Also on both ballots for Best Novelette that year was “Options”, by John Varley. The other Hugo finalists were “Fireflood”, by Vonda N. McIntyre; “Homecoming”, by Barry B. Longyear; “The Locusts”, by Larry Niven & Steve Barnes; and “Palely Loitering”, by Christopher Priest. The other Nebula finalists were “The Angel of Death”, by Michael Shea; “Camps”, by Jack Dann; “The Pathways of Desire”, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and “The Ways of Love”, by Poul Anderson. I have read the first of these but can’t remember if I have read any of the others. I suspect the voters got it right.

You can get Sandkings in a lot of places, including:

Turning to Best Novella, the second paragraph of the third section of Enemy Mine is:

After we finished, we sat inside and admired our work for about an hour, until it dawned on us that we had just worked ourselves out of jobs.

This is what I wrote about Enemy Mine in 2002:

“Enemy Mine” by Barry B. Longyear won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novella presented in 1980; it also won the Locus Poll for Best Novella and on the strength of this early promise the author also won the John W. Campbell Award that year. … “Enemy Mine” was later filmed by Wolfgang Petersen, starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset Jr; the film is not universally loved (least of all by the author of the original story) but has some vocal defenders. Longyear published a revised and expanded version in The Enemy Papers, 1998.

[Adding: only one other author has since managed Longyear’s feat of winning the Campbell/Astounding award and a Hugo for a written fiction category in the same year. This was Rebecca Roanhorse in 2018.]

Isaac Asimov’s personal marketing of “Enemy Mine” in order to secure the first ever Hugo or Nebulas for a story published in IASFM attracted the scorn of Dave Langford in an early Ansible: “The success of Barry B Longyear with his ‘Enemy Mine’ in Hugo and Nebula is an indication of the new Isaac Astral award-grubbing technique: millions of copies of the story were sent to SFWA members with glowing recommendations from the Doctor.” Whatever one may feel about Asimov’s efforts, I suspect that the voters got it right. The only other novella of the year with a respectable run of reprints in anthologies (four times since original publication, compared to eleven for “Enemy Mine”) is Hugo nominee “The Moon Goddess and the Son”, by Donald Kingsbury; I don’t recall ever reading it. The only other novella to feature on both Hugo and Nebula shortlists for the awards made in 1980 was “The Battle of the Abaco Reefs” by Hilbert Schenk, which I also have not read and which seems not to have been republished since, er, 1980.

[Adding for completeness: as noted, “The Battle of the Abaco Reefs” by Hilbert Schenk was on both ballots; it still has not been republished since 1980. The other Hugo finalists were “Ker-Plop”, by Ted Reynolds; “The Moon Goddess and the Son”, by Donald Kingsbury; and “Songhouse”, by Orson Scott Card. The other Nebula finalists were “Fireship”, by Joan D. Vinge; “Mars Masked”, by Frederik Pohl; “The Story Writer”, by Richard Wilson; and “The Tale of Gorgik”, by Samuel R. Delany.]

“Enemy Mine” is yet another story about a human vs alien war. The aliens this time are not the hive-minds of Ender’s Game, The Forever War or Starship Troopers, but the classic sf reptilian humanoids which I think I first saw in “Frontier in Space”, a Doctor Who story of the Jon Pertwee era, and most recently encountered in Harry Turtledove’s awful Worldwar / Colonization alternate history series. (Actually I read Ken MacLeod’s Cosmonaut Keep even more recently, but his intelligent saurs are from Earth and friendly rather than being hostile alien lizards.) Longyear’s local inspiration here is certainly Gene L. Coon’s 1967 Star Trek episode “Arena”, which was inspired by Frederic Brown’s 1944 short story with the same title, but replaced Brown’s spherical alien with a reptilian Gorn.

Unlike in either version of “Arena”, however, the human and alien are not doomed to fight to the death. Instead, they are forced to combine forces against their harsh environment. Again, this seems likely to have a source from a late 1960s screenplay, this time the 1968 John Boorman film Hell in the Pacific, which starred Lee Marvin and Toshirō Mifune as two WW2 pilots, one American and one Japanese, crashed on a Pacific island, who have to co-operate to survive. (Oddly enough there may be a precedent in another 1940s sf story, A.E. van Vogt’s “Co-operate – or else!”, collected in The War Against The Rull. Information on this point welcomed. [Note added January 2003: I tracked down The War Against The Rull and it seems rather different – the human and his unlikely partner are very different in size and ability, and united in their desire to evade the very present Rull, rather than equally matched and marooned far from anywhere.])

So far, so clichéd. The special twist to “Enemy Mine” is that Jeriba Shigan, the alien Drac, who it turns out is hermaphrodite and pregnant, dies giving birth to a child, who is then brought up by Willis Davidge, the human, until they are both rescued. Meanwhile the interstellar war has ended in an uneasy peace. The two are returned to their respective home civilisations, but Davidge has learnt too much respect for the Drac culture to fit in back home; he journeys to the Drac planet to rescue the child, Zammis, and they settle down together building a community for inter-species understanding on the planet where Davidge first met Jeriga Shigan and where Zammis was born.

I guess that the reason “Enemy Mine” is not generally regarded as a piece of classic sf is simply that the aliens are not alien enough. Even before I had come across Hell in the Pacific as a possible source, it was pretty obvious to me that the situation of the two characters is basically a WW2 setting, and that the Drac culture is based on Western perceptions of contemporary human East Asia (the respect for ancestors, hierachical society, etc). When you set them beside other extraterrestrials of 1979, such as George R.R. Martin’s “Sandkings” or most of all Ridley Scott’s Alien, it becomes clear that the Drac are just Asians in rubber suits.

Ironically I find “Enemy Mine” most successful when it is most human. Davidge’s confusion about how to treat the newborn alien must resonate with any human parent who has looked down at a small pink loud thing in their arms and wondered what on earth to do with it. And the central message of the story, that the other guys are probably not evil, only different, is unfortunately at least as relevant today as it was during the fading years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency when it was first published.

Looking back on it now, I missed the huge other theme of the story: the exploration of gender and gender roles through the Drac and through Davidge’s adaptation to their society. It’s actually quite important to examine the extent to which gender is socially constructed, and Enemy Mine comes at it from an unusually macho angle, with no named or visible human women in the story. (Davidge mentions his mother a couple of times.)

Finally, Best Novel. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Fountains of Paradise is:

Tomorrow had come at last, and now the whole court was gathered in the Pleasure Gardens , beneath awnings of brightly coloured cloth. The King himself was cooled by large fans, waved by supplicants who had bribed the chamberlain for this risky privilege. It was an honour which might lead to riches, or to death.

In 2003, I wrote at length about The Fountains of Paradise:

The Fountains of Paradise won the Hugo and Nebula awards made in 1980, competing in both cases against John Varley’s Titan (which won the Locus poll), Frederik Pohl’s Jem, and Thomas M. Disch’s On Wings of Song, which are all (rather surprisingly) now out of print. [Update: Titan and On Wings of Song are now available electronically; Jem is not.] One of the other Hugo nominees was Patricia McKillip’s Harper in the Wind, of which I know nothing; it seems to get rave reviews but is not standard Hugo winning material.

[For completeness: the other Nebula finalists were Juniper Time, by Kate Wilhelm, and The Road to Corlay, by Richard Cowper.]

The first great achievement of Clarke’s career was the invention of the concept of geostationary satellites, which became reality less than twenty years after his essay on “Extraterrestrial Relays” appeared in Wireless World. Since then, Clarke had achieved a unique worldwide profile as a science fiction writer, thanks to 2001: A Space Odyssey and his participation in the Apollo moon landing broadcasts. In the late 1970s, in this, the third book in a series of three for which he had reputedly received the largest advance ever paid to a science fiction author, he developed a grand scale extension of a mere satellite: the space elevator, skyhook, or beanstalk, a tower thousands of kilometres in height, fixed to the earth’s surface, that can be used to ship freight and people to orbit at a fraction of the cost of a rocket.

Great minds think alike. The book came out within months of a similarly themed book by Charles Sheffield, The Web Between the Worlds. They make an interesting pair. Sheffield’s book has everything – young hero overcoming a disability; attractive girl with drug-addict mother; obsessed millionnaire in orbit with his mad scientist sidekick; oh yes, and the actual construction of the space elevator itself, built in space but attached to the Earth by an implausibly risky manoeuvre. Clarke’s book is much less rushed. He gives us the idea of the orbital elevator and the story of its construction, against a rich background that adds to the main theme rather than distracting.

One aspect of that richness, which I haven’t seen anyone else pick up on, is the very name of the central character, Vannevar Morgan. “Vannevar” is clearly Clarke’s homage to Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), not just a famous inventor in his own right but the man who successfully linked state and science during WW2 under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and who these days is often mentioned as a spiritual godfather of hypertext due to his 1945 essay As We May Think (published the same year as Clarke’s own “Extra-Terrestrial Relays”). I am sure that “Morgan” is also intended as a tribute, but to whom? One attractive possibility is Garrett A. Morgan (1877-1963), African-American inventor of the gas mask and the traffic light. But given the circumstances, it seems more likely that the reference is to a man who, like Vannevar Bush, was appointed by FDR to head a massive project of state investment in applied science (though with more of an engineering bent), Arthur E. Morgan (1878-1975), the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who (like Vannevar Morgan in the novel) was eventually relieved of his responsibilities for largely political reasons.

Clarke’s characterisation is not always his strong point (indeed Vannevar Morgan remains rather a cipher who seems to have regretted losing his childhood kite more than his girlfriend), but this book contains some of the most interesting personalities in his oeuvre. Johan Olivier de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe, the viewpoint character of the first few chapters set in the near-future time of the bridge’s construction, is a former senior UN official retired to the island of Taprobane (the slightly altered Sri Lanka where the book is set). A few months ago I found myself on a boat in Helsinki harbour listening to two retired senior UN officials exchanging notes on islands they were sizing up as retreats for their old age, so I can attest that Rajasinghe is at least partly based on reality. But he also of course represents Clarke’s own aspirations for a peaceful retirement and dignified acceptance of old age on the island he loves. The author had just entered his seventh decade, and had just lost his “only perfect friend of a lifetime” (to whom the book is dedicated) in a motorbike accident, so his reflections on mortality are understandable. It is comforting to reflect that, almost a quarter of a cenury on, he apparently enjoys the same comforts he had imagined for Rajasinghe. [Update: one of the UN officials who I was listening to that evening in Helsinki was Cedric Thornberry, who died in 2014, and whose daughter is a prominent Labour Party politician in the UK. The other is still alive.]

Rather more intriguing, though sketched in less detail, is the brilliant mathematician Choam Goldberg, who when we first encounter him has joined a Buddhist monastery and been renamed the Venerable Parakarma. The epigraph to the book as a whole is a quotation from Sri Jawaharlal Nehru, “Politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality.” Goldberg/Parakarma looks at first like he may turn out to be an embodiment of the author’s often expressed desire to explore both science and spirituality. But in fact it becomes clear that he represents (to use a phrase introduced to science fiction in 1977) “the dark side of the force”. He becomes obsessed with protecting the monastery against Morgan’s plans to build the space elevator on its mountain, even after suffering a spiritual crisis and leaving the order; he then sabotages a weather-generating satellite in order to try and wreck one of Morgan’s publicity stunts, but with the unexpected result that the change in wind direction floods the monastery’s mountain top with the butterflies whose arrival has long been prophesied to inevitably mean the monks’ departure.

Most memorable of all – I think the most intriguing artificial intelligence in Clarke’s fiction, including HAL – is the Starglider. Many of Clarke’s novels have as main or subsidiary theme humanity’s contact with an elder, more spiritually developed race. In The Fountains of Paradise the means of contact is the alien probe Starglider, which decades before the time the main part of the novel is set has swept through the solar system and used the brute force of scientific logic to disprove Thomas Aquinas and thus abolish religion, generating Clarke’s favourite humanist utopia setting before the story even begins. Of course it is absurd to imagine that the world’s religions, Buddhism apart, would ever “vanish in a puff of logic” (as Douglas Adams put it in 1978), but this is a point where we readers have to suspend our disbelief and enjoy Starglider’s dissection of its (voiceless) opponents.

There’s much more to write about here – Mars, the historical tale of Kalidasa, the role of sunspots – but due to work and other commitments it’s taken me six months to get this far and I want to move on. The longest and most interesting review of this book on the Web is by Barrington J. Bayley – I completely disagree with him on the issues of the butterflies and Starglider, but he goes to the nub of the matter – the most important character in this book is the one that doesn’t speak at all, the space elevator itself, and the plot of the book is its struggle with nature, and its eventual consumption of its creator’s life. Certainly the space elevator has been taken up by more than a dozen other authors since Clarke and Sheffield set the pace in 1979.

Returning to the book after almost 18 years, I was struck by how short and readable it actually is. But, as with Enemy Mine, I was also struck by how few women characters there are. There is one notable woman journalist, and an engineer who dies horribly, but apart from that it’s an all-male setup. I also noticed more this time how the arc of the story points towards Morgan’s death in harness from a very early stage.

You can get Enemy Mine here, and The Fountains of Paradise here.

For completeness: the Hugo for Best Short Story that year went to “The Way of Cross and Dragon”, also by George R. R. Martin, and the Nebula to “giANTS”, by Edward Bryant. Both stories were on both ballots, as was “Unaccompanied Sonata”, by Orson Scott Card. The other Hugo finalists were “Can These Bones Live?”, by Ted Reynolds and “Daisy, In the Sun”, by Connie Willis. The other Nebula finalists were “The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand”, by Joanna Russ; “Red as Blood”, by Tanith Lee; and “Vernalfest Morning”, by Michael Bishop. That was also the year of Alien.

Next in this series is the only double-winner of the following year, “Grotto of the Dancing Deer”, by Clifford D. Simak.

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Whoniversaries 6 April

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i) births and deaths

6 April 1959: birth of Mark Strickson, who played the Fifth Doctor companion Turlough in 1983-4.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

6 April 1968: broadcast of fourth episode of Fury from the Deep. Van Lutyens, and then the Doctor and Jamie, descend to the base of the impeller shaft and find the Weed Creature gathering in strength.

6 April 1974: broadcast of third episode of The Monster of Peladon. Sarah raises Queen Thalira's consciousness, and the Ice Warriors arrive.

6 April 2013: broadcast of The Rings of Akhaten. Clara Oswald wants to see something awesome, so the Eleventh Doctor whisks her off to the inhabited rings of the planet Akhaten, where the Festival of Offerings is in full swing. Clara meets the young Queen of Years as the pilgrims and natives ready for the ceremony. But something is stirring in the pyramid, and a sacrifice will be demanded.

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Doctor Who: The Legacy of Time (Big Finish audios from 2019)

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I have been slack about Big Finish recently – over the last few months, I picked up listening to the tremendous backlog of their output that I had not previously got to, but have blogged very little here. (In particular, I recommend Susans War with Carole Ann Ford, and the David Tennant/Tom Baker crossover Out Of Time 1.) Anyway, important to record that I got and thoroughly enjoyed the six Legacy of Time audios, released to celebrate Big Finish's 20th anniversary in 2019. Here's the promotional video:

What the video doesn’t say is that all six stories are about time paradoxes, which is a trope used surprisingly rarely in Doctor Who given that it’s a show about a time traveller. (The first TV story that really used it was The Space Museum in 1965, I think.) I would also say that all six stories are good, taking the theme in a slightly different direction each time. Part of the attraction is always the stunt casting, of course, but even so the actors rise to the occasion as is not always the case. So if you’re not sure about Big Finish but want a smorgasbord of different Doctors, this is probably a good sample to take. €30 for the download is really not all that much for six solid hours of entertainment.

In detail, the stories are:

1. Lies in Ruins by James Goss, one of my favourite Who writers, bringing together two great archæologists, River Song and Bernice Summerfield, with the Eighth Doctor and a mysteriously dim new companion. A good double entendre in the title.

2. The Split Infinitive by John Dorney, a bit more moored in Big Finish continuity than others, with Ace and the Seventh Doctor separately interacting with the Counter-Measures team (from Remembrance of the Daleks) in the 1960s and 1970s respectively.

3. The Sacrifice of Jo Grant by Guy Adams, bringing together Katy Manning and Jemma Redgrave as Jo Jones/Grant and Kate Stewart, and Tim Treloar doing his impressive Third Doctor impression.

4. Relative Time by Matt Fitton, possibly the best of the lot, with Georgia Tennant and Peter Davison as Jenny and the Fifth Doctor, along with the Big Finish criminal Time Lord known here as The Nine. Rather glorious.

5. The Avenues of Possibility by Jonathan Morris, another one rooted in Big Finish continuity with the Sixth Doctor and Charley Pollard (India Fisher) having another adventure with D.I. Patricia Menzies (Anna Hope), this time however involving timeslips to 18th-century London and Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones.

6. Collision Course by Guy Adams again, which is partly an excuse for Louise Jameson and Lalla Ward as Leela and Romana to spark off each others’ reminiscences of their Doctor (who is also my Doctor); ending with a sort of rave-up with David Bradley as the First Doctor, Frazer Hines as the Second, Tim Treloar as the Third, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann and nonchalantly David Tennant.

I thought this was great. Well worth a listen.

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November 2010 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 (though this one is very soon after the previous one, which was late) 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

From here on it gets much easier to track my own movements, as this was the month I signed up for Foursquare (now Swarm) and faithfully recorded places I had been.

So I know that in the course of the month, I went to Berlin (cannot now remember why), Moldova (to meet our client there), London (again, cannot remember why) and Dubrovnik (to speak at a conference). That's quite a lot. I was still using the crappy HTC Desire, the worst gadget I have ever bought, but got one good photo of locals using the free wifi in Pushkin Park in Chișinău.

My favourite blog post of the month was on what happened to the Doctor Who companions?

I read 26 books in November 2010.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 66)
Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale – the Final Chapter, by Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook
The Love Letters of Henry VIII
The Cyprus Question and the EU, by Andreas Theophanous
Shakespeare (the illustrated edition), by Bill Bryson
Elizabeth and Essex, by Lytton Strachey

Fiction (non-sf) 5 (YTD 45)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory
The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

SF (non-Who) 6 (YTD 68)
The Thunderbirds Bumper Story Book, by Dave Morris
Analog 6, edited by John W. Campbell Jr
The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald
The Book of Lost Tales I, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home, by James Tiptree, Jr.
Utopia, by Thomas More

Doctor Who 8 (YTD 64, 71 counting comics and non-fiction)
The Coming of the Terraphiles, by Michael Moorcock
The Doctor Who Annual 1976
Lucifer Rising, by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
System Shock, by Justin Richards
Wolfsbane, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Annual 1977
Placebo Effect, by Gary Russell
White Darkness, by David McIntee

Comics 2 (YTD 17)
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, by Bryan Lee O'Malley
Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, by Bill Willingham

~7,500 pages (YTD ~83,400)
6/26 (YTD 57/264) by women (McCullough, Mantel, Gregory, Desai, 'Tiptree'/Sheldon, Rayner)
2/26 (YTD 20/264) by PoC (Desai, O'Malley)

The best of these were Ian McDonald's The Dervish House, which you can get here; Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter, which you can get hereUtopia by Thomas More, which you can get here. Shout out also to Huck Finn, which you can get here.

The worst was Theophanous' dismally biased The Cyprus Question and the EU, which you can get here, though I was also underwhelmed by the 1976 and 1977 Doctor Who Annuals, which you can get here and here.

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  • Mon, 10:57: RT @ceesa_ma: @nwbrux One of a small handful of Anglophone authors writing about revolutions and utopias who actually did their homework, a…
  • Mon, 10:57: RT @Georgeberger: @nwbrux Amen, it is a great political novel. I recommend it to Americans who think that their two party system is really…

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Whoniversaries 5 April

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i) births and deaths

5 April 1946: birth of Jane Asher, who played Susan Foreman in Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? (1994) and Andrea Yates in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (2007), and has thus played alternative

5 April 1991: death of Gerald Blake, who directed The Abominable Snowmen (Second Doctor, 1967) and The Invasion of Time (Fourth Doctor, 1978).

5 April 1999: death of John Wiles, innovative producer who succeeded Verity Lambert but did not last long in 1965-66.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

5 April 1969: broadcast of fifth episode of The Space Pirates. The Doctor and friends find they have been imprisoned with the terrified Dom Issigri; Clancey and Dom escape, but the Doctor, looking for Jamie and Zoe, is caught in the take-off blast.

5 April 1975: broadcast of fifth episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Doctor almost gets Davros to destroy the Daleks; Gharman leads a revolt against Davros; the Doctor prepares to blow up the incubation tanks.

5 April 2002: webcast of "No Child of Earth", part 2, the sixth episode of Death Comes to Time. (Am not going to bother with screenshots from this in future, they don't really tell us anything.)

5 April 2008: broadcast of Partners in Crime, first episode of Season Four of New Who; first regular appearance of Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. The Doctor and Donna foil a plan to turn large numbers of people into food for the infant Adipose.

5 April 2010: broadcast of Aeolian, thirteenth episode of the Australian K9 series. London is being bombarded by sound-waves that cause mass panic. K9 and Starkey are on the trail of an alien, the last of the Aeolians. Darius tries to rescue Jorjie, trapped by falling debris. Drake believes Gryffen has caused the catastrophe and sets out to destroy the creature.

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Reclamation: on being a guest of honour

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The news is out now. Next year's Eastercon, Reclamation, will have four guests of honour: Zen Cho, Mary Robinette Kowal, Philip Reeve and me. To say that I am pleased and excited would be a huge understatement. I'm at the age and stage where you start to look back and think, well, what have I achieved with my life? My career is not barren of success, of course, but it gives me a very warm fuzzy glow to think that in future years, anyone who looks at the long list of Eastercons will see my name listed there along with many others whom I like, respect and admire. So everyone, please come to Reclamation (wherever it turns out to be), the first in-person Eastercon for three years, and I'll do my best to entertain you.

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Whoniversaries 4 April

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i) births and deaths

4 April 1931: birth of Derek Martinus, who directed the story we now call Galaxy 4 (First Doctor, 1965), Mission to the Unknown (First Doctor, though he's not actually in it, 1965), The Tenth Planet (First Doctor, 1966), The Evil of the Daleks (Second Doctor, 1967), The Ice Warriors (Second Doctor, 1967) and Spearhead from Space (Third Doctor, 1970).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

4 April 1964: broadcast of "Assassin at Peking", seventh episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. The Khan wins the Tardis from the Doctor at backgammon, but releases the Tardis crew and allows Marco Polo to return to Venice when they prevent Tegana's assassination attempt.

4 April 1970: broadcast of third episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor and Liz realise that the astronauts are absorbing so much radiation that they must be aliens; but Carrington's men are in pursuit.

4 April 2008: broadcast of Exit Wounds, last episode of the second season of Torchwood