29 March 1936: birth of Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, who wrote the incidental music for the story we now call The Aztecs (First Doctor, 1964)
29 March 1938: birth of Barry Jackson who played Ascaris in the story we now call The Romans (First Doctor, 1964), Jeff Garvey in Mission to the Unknown (First Doctor era, 1965) and Drax in The Armageddon Factor (Fourth Doctor, 1979).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
29 March 1969: broadcast of fourth episode of The Space Pirates. Clancey and the Doctor try to convince Madeleine that Caven is behind the space pirates, but Caven himself arrives and captures them.
29 March 1975: broadcast of fourth episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Thals destroy the Kaled dome; the Daleks destroy the Thals; and Davros captures the Doctor, Sarah and Harry.
29 March 1982: broadcast of third episode of Time-Flight. The Master is trying to get in with the Xeraphin.
29 March 1984: broadcast of third episode of The Twin Dilemma. Mestor is killing people and there are Jacondans and Gastropods.
29 March 2002: webcast of "No Child of Earth, Part 1", eighth episode of Death Comes to Time.
29 March 2007: Tony Blair regenerates.
29 March 2010: broadcast of Alien Avatar, twelfth episode of the Australian K9 series. The Thames is badly polluted by an alien chemical. K9 discovers that telepathic aliens, the Medes, are imprisoned by Drake, who is trying to duplicate a missing special key to operate their organic starship. K9 rescues the Medes. June discovers Drake's plot and helps release their starship. There's a very amusing scene where Darius and Jorjie have been tied up by the bad guys and he tried to gnaw her bonds off.
Easter is coming, and with it the deadline for BSFA Award voting, assisted by the lovely BSFA Award booklet So I'll be revealing my own votes over the next few days, category by category; not to be understood as recommendations, but as confessing my own quirks. (Except for one category, where I am Right and anyone who votes otherwise is Wrong.)
I'll start with the Best Art category. I nominated four works here, and three of them made it to the final ballot, which I think is a record for me in any BSFA award category in any year. The nomination I made what didn't make it was a concept project about a future city, sponsored by a Quebecois brewery, by Myriam Wares. It caught my eye, but obviously did not do the same for a critical mass of other voters.
Turning to the actual nominees, I'm afraid there is a clear 5th out of 5 in this category for me, and it's not so much because of the art as because of the way we are being asked to vote for it. Nani Sahra Walker produced three-dimensional images of four Black Lives Matter murals painted in the wake of George Floyd's death last year. If we were being asked to vote for the murals, and their creators, that would be one thing. But the nomination is not for the original art; it is for Walker's digitisation and presentation of them (which I guess is what makes this sf-relevant). The associated website does not even name the artists behind one of the four murals. Personally, I grew up in a place where political murals were bloody everywhere, so I don't see the art form in itself as especially exciting (frankly it does not have positive connotations for me), and I really don't understand why turning any mural, of any quality, into three-dimensional images should be considered a big nomination-worthy deal; from the technical point of view, it's a fairly old trick, I think. The murals are good works of art in themselves, and they tell a very important story, but that's not what we are being asked to vote for, so I won't.
The other four, however, are difficult to choose between. With reluctance, you have to start pruning somewhere, and my 4th preference goes to Sinjin Li’s cover of Eli Lee’s A Strange and Brilliant Light. Not that I disliked it at all – it's a great image, but all of the others have more going on.
My third preference goes to Ruby Gloom’s cover of Nikhil Singh’s Club Ded. I thoroughly bounced off the book, as will be discussed in a later post, but this is an interesting piece of art and it was one of my own nominations, as were the other two pieces below.
My top vote goes to Iain Clark's Shipbuilding Over the Clyde, produced for the Glasgow in 2024 WorldCon bid, which (important disclosure) I am involved with. In a year when we have all been spending a lot of time indoors, when the present and immediate future have often seemed rather fraught, this image manages both to evoke a fascinating future moored in the past. I did not grow up in Glasgow, but two of the biggest shipbuilding cranes in the world are very visible in my own home city. (Though I just discovered that both were built after I was born!) Anyway, this is a really inspiring and hopeful work of art and it gets my vote.
Sat, 15:34: I cannot understand how The Angels Take Manhattan can be losing. The Faceless Ones has good cinematography but zero coherent plot; The Angels Take Manhattan is a decent time paradox story in itself and a lovely end to Amy/Rory. https://t.co/j9TwwQo6wn
Sat, 17:42: RT @MrBeamJockey: I have not seen this episode of DOCTOR WHO, but its title led me to imagine this. LIST OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE TAKEN MANHATTA…
28 March 1924: birth of Robert James, who played Lesterson in The Power of the Daleks (1966) and the High Priest in The Masque of Mandragora (1976)
28 March 1983: birth of Gareth David-Lloyd, who played Ianto Jones in the first three series of Torchwood (2006-09).
28 March 1987: death of Patrick Troughton, three days after his 67th birthday, while attending a convention in Columbus, Georgia. He did his last panel the previous day, ending it with the words, "I've got another one tomorrow, haven't I? Good. I like doing this." Sadly, he was dead before breakfast.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
28 March 1964: broadcast of "Mighty Kublai Khan", sixth episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. Ping-Cho flees, but the Doctor and the Khan bond.
28 March 1970: broadcast of second episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The returned Mars probe is captured by Carrington's men, and retrieved by the Doctor. But who or what, if anything, is inside?
iii) dates specified in canon
28 March 1963: murder of Lizzie Lewis by Ed Morgan, as later transpires in the Torchwood story Ghost Machine (2006).
Edward Scissorhands won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1991, thirty years ago. In second place was Total Recall, which I have seen; three films I have not seen came third, fourth and fifth, respectively Ghost, Back to the Future III and The Witches. Edward Scissorhands was nominated for one Oscar, Best Make-up, but beaten by Dick Tracy. IMDB users rank it 3rd on one system and 7th on the other, which is not bad. Goodfellas and Home Alone beat it on both rankings. I've have voted for Total Recall ahead of Edward Scissorhands, but for both ahead of this year's Oscar winner, the worthy but dull Dances with Wolves.
There is precisely one crossover with previous Oscar- and Hugo/Nebula-winning films; the star here, Johnny Depp, was one of the unlovely protagonists of Platoon, a translator most of whose scenes were cut from the final version.
I quite like Edward Scissorhands – it has an utterly implausible premise, of a Gothic castle which happens to be right next to a slice of Fifties suburbia, but once you accept that the humour is precisely in the lack of congruity between the two worlds, you can relax into it. It would be very easy to get this wrong, and Burton and Depp manage to make sure that we never quite lose our suspension of disbelief, as Edward's presence exposes the nastiness within the apparently nice neighbourhood. For me this is embodied by Anthony Michael Hall, the nicest of the kids in The Breakfast Club, playing the abusive boyfriend here, attempting to rob his own father and letting Edward be framed for it.
Having said that, it's more of a story of the women, with Dianne Wiest's Peg making the initial generous offer to integrate Edward into the community and Winona Ryder's Kim initially unhappy but (inevitably) becoming the romantic lead.
Also notable that the one black person in the film is the local police chief, played by Dick Anthony Williams, who is also one of the most sympathetic characters.)
(I did wonder at first how Edward goes to the toilet, but given that he is artificial, perhaps he doesn't need to.)
I think everyone has experienced the feeling that they don't really fit in, even people who grew up in the most blissful suburbs, and the genius of the film is to make us all feel more sympathy for the weird (and not necessarily human) Edward at the expense of the "normal" people who he finds himself amongst. It didn't blow me away, but I did like it more than I had expected to on rewatching.
Next in this sequence is Terminator 2, Judgement Day, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula-equivalent Ray Bradbury Award. But first, The Silence of the Lambs.
Fri, 13:30: RT @EURACTIV: “I want to be crystal clear: fossil fuels have no viable future,” EU climate chief @TimmermansEU told participants at a gas i…
Sat, 03:46: RT @praveenswami: Little startled by the furore over Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying he participated in the Jana Sangh’s Bangladesh Gan…
27 March 1935: birth of Julian Glover, who played King Richard in The Crusade (First Doctor, 1965) and Scaroth in City of Death (Fourth Doctor, 1979). I met him last year at a convention in Brussels.
27 March 2014: death 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
27 March 1965: broadcast of "The Lion", first episode of the story we now call The Crusade. Barbara is captured by Saracens; the Doctor, Ian and Vicki ask King Richard to rescue her.
27 March 1971: broadcast of third episode of The Claws of Axos. The Doctor and Jo are captives of the Axons; the Master offers to blow them all up, and the Brigadier agrees.
Hugo nominations closed last weekend, so it was a slow week for reading.
Current Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux met 309 vindplaatsen om te bezoeken, by Herman Clerinx Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios Water Must Fall, by Nick Wood
Last books finished Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth Powell
Next books Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard
Transportation was — and probably still is — a major problem for new bands. Borrowing a parent's car was an option with limited scope, especially with the almost immediate depreciation caused by cramming it full of drum kits and band members. Acquiring a van represented by far the biggest capital outlay — yet had none of the glamour of spending a student grant on a new guitar or bass drum. But though it was possible to muddle through a show with a mishmash of less than perfect or borrowed equipment, the band — and the ever-increasing pile of equipment — still had to get to the gig, and safely back home afterwards.
It's a pretty comprehensive account by Pink Floyd's drummer, the only member to have stayed with the band in all its iterations, coming across as honest and fair-minded. The saddest story is of course the decline of Syd Barrett, the band's original genius, culminating with him turning up, unrecognised at first, to the recording of Wish You Were Here, a song which was actually about him. But I also had not heard that Stéphane Grappelli also happened to be in the studio at the time, and recorded a violin track, which in the end was not used. You can hear it here from 3:12. I think it would actually have been an improvement, but of course reasonable people can disagree about that. I guess we are so familiar with the released version that the variation sounds innovative, and I can understand that at the time the band wanted it to sound like Pink Floyd rather than Grappelli's backing group.
The well-recorded tensions between Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and the rest, are laid out with sympathy for both sides (though naturally more for the side Mason himself happened to be on). The account of the creative process for the band's best-known music is detailed without being tedious. I see some reviewers complaining that Mason names many members of the support team for the band, and has a bit to say about each of them, but I actually found that a positive – the success of the band is due to more than just the people who write and play the music, and it is nice that Mason acknowledges this.
It would have been interesting to read a bit more about how the band and its members handled the transition from poverty and squabbling over the van, to being suddenly very rich. Mason talks a fair bit about the technicalities of money management, and also reflects several times that Pink Floyd collectively were firmly left of centre politically; but I miss a connecting thread.
However, it's laugh-out-loud funny in quite a number of places, often but not always self-deprecating. One gets the sense that Mason has been telling a lot of these stories for years, and honed them well. Originally published in 2004, it was updated in 2011, including an account of the 2005 Live 8 performance, and again for the 2017 exhibition. I really enjoyed it. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Empire Games by Charles Stross.
Thu, 20:22: RT @KeohaneDan: I wasn’t aware of this book until @SJAMcBride wrote about it recently. The v interesting perspective of an European Parliam…
Thu, 20:48: Europe after the Brits https://t.co/FDUADe2zr0 More thoughts from @AndrewDuffEU – I fear he overestimates the ability of the EU to respond to the medium/long term challenge, in pandemic times.
26 March 1925: birth of Barry Letts, producer of Who from Doctor Who and the Silurians (Third Doctor, 1970) to Robot (Fourth Doctor, 1974-75), director of Enemy of the World (Second Doctor, 1967-68) and The Android Invasion (Fourth Doctor, 1975), writer of The Dæmons (Third Doctor, 1972).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
26 March 1966: broadcast of "The Bomb", fourth episode of the story we now call The Ark. The Monoids fight among each other; the Doctor and friends find the bomb on the Ark; and the Doctor turns invisible…
26 March 1978: broadcast of fifth episode of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Leela and the Doctor go to the laundry and are followed by Jago and Litefoot who are captured. Leela and the Doctor return to Litefoot's house, where she unmasks Weng-Chiang.
26 March 2005: broadcast of Rose, the first episode of New Who. Rose Tyler meets the mysterious Doctor, and together they prevent the Autons / Nestene consciousness from taking over the Earth; and she decides to travel with him.
I jumped, not having heard anyone’s footsteps on the staircase which led up to the observation deck. I’d assumed I was completely alone. All the other passengers had retired to their rooms immediately upon boarding – the journey just long enough to justify unpacking their luggage – but I had gone up onto the observation deck to watch our departure. I had a room, but nothing that I needed to unpack.
When I first read this in 2011, I wrote:
A long time ago I read Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and rather bounced off it; perhaps, in retrospect, it was because I read it towards the end of a long work trip and simply wasn’t in the mood. Since then, the recommendations of friends and also amicable encounters with Reynolds himself at a couple of sf cons persuaded me to give him another try, and I was not disappointed.
Chasm City starts as a space operatic story of the central character pursuing a grudge against an old enemy in the eponymous city, while also suffering flashbacks to the memory of a notorious early colonist. But it develops into a gritty examination of memory, identity and shared pain in a future society. (Fortuitously I was also reading Justin Richards' Doctor Who novel Demontage, which features a differently disturbed and disturbing future urban environment, at the same time.) It kept me reading, and has converted me to Reynolds, whose style is reminiscent of Banks but calmer.
I may even give Revelation Space another try.
I confess that I have not yet given Revelation Space another try, and I also found Chasm City tougher going this time round – partly because I was reading it as the BSFA Best Novel winner in the same year as The Kappa Child and Bold As Love won the Tiptree and Clarke awards, and it's almost as long as the two of them combined. (The longest book I have read so far this year, though I'm now in the middle of Foucault's Pendulum.) There are basically two novels here with the two plot strands more or less connected and some nice working of overlapping identities; there's some good colour to the setting as well. On rereading, I liked it but was not wowed. You can get it here.
The other BSFA contenders that year were three books that I have read – American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones (which won the Clarke Award) and Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood – and two that I haven't, Lust by Geoff Ryman and The Secret of Life by Paul McAuley (also shortlisted for the Clarke Award). I'm glad that BSFA voters were not sucked into the awe for American Gods that afflicted Hugo and Nebula voters that year, but my own vote would certainly have been for Pashazade. Reynolds is hugely nice in person, and I've never heard anyone say a bad word about him, which cannot have harmed his chances with the BSFA voters.
Next in this sequence will be the winners of the Tiptree, Clarke and BSFA Best Novel awards from 2002, for work published in 2001: "Stories for Men", by John Kessel, Light by M. John Harrison and The Separation by Christopher Priest, rereads in all three cases.
Wed, 14:01: RT @BrusselsTimes: Belgium announces the latest changes to coronavirus measures at a consultative committee press conference. https://t.co…
25 March 1920: birth of Patrick Troughton, who played the Second Doctor from 1966 to 1969 and returned on various occasions. He would have been 101 today.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
25 March 1967: broadcast of third episode of The Macra Terror, on the star's 47th birthday. Jamie and Polly are made to work in the pit, while the Doctor tries to analyse the mysterious gas. (This was also the date that the DVD/Blu-Ray of the story was released in 2019.)
25 March 1972: broadcast of fifth episode of The Sea Devils. The British government attempts to organise a nuclear strike on the Sea Devils.
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
Some travel this month, with a trip to Berlin to give a lecture, another to Moldova, and a lovely reunion in Cambridge, which inspired poetry. There was going to be another Cambridge reunion exactly a year ago; but it was cancelled due to the you-know-what. I bought myself a smartphone, a HTC Desire, which I rapidly grew to hate.
My trip to Moldova was truncated by big family drama, as B was hospitalised with food poisoning; I could not get back until very late, so Anne found alternative accommodation for F and U and stayed in hospital with her – B cannot talk, and can be rather difficult if people mess with her (eg, giving her medicine, or more specifically putting a drip in her arm). I had seen her just the weekend before; basically if you have a habit of putting your finger in your mouth without washing your hands first, you run a risk of an upset stomach.
She made a quick and full recovery, and next time I visited her I took time to take some pictures of the chapel Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Steen in the vicinity.
With one thing and another, I read only 17 books that month.
Tue, 18:34: My interview with Radio Free Europe on the challenges faced by the new government in Kosovo. In Albanian, I’m afraid – I did it in English, but they translated it for publication! https://t.co/DMx6wUtu0q
24 March 1935: birth of Rodney Bennett, director of three Fourth Doctor stories – The Ark in Space (1975), The Sontaran Experiment (also 1975) and The Masque of Mandragora (1976).
24 March 1942: birth of Lynda Baron, who performed "The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon" in the story we now call The Gunfighters (First Doctor, 1966) and played Captain Wrack in Enlightenment (Fifth Doctor, 1983) and Val in Closing Time (Eleventh Doctor, 2011)
also 24 March 1942: birth of Stephen Yardley, who played Sevrin in Genesis of the Daleks (Fourth Doctor, 1975) and Arak in Vengeance on Varos (Sixth Doctor, 1985).
24 March 1972: birth of Shaun Dingwall, who played Rose Tyler's father Pete (and his parallel universe equivalent) in 2005 and 2006.
ii) broadcast anniversary
24 March 1973: broadcast of fifth episode of Frontier in Space. The Draconians realise that the Ogrons are behind it all, and join forces with Earth to pursue the Master to the Ogrons' planet.
He hadn’t known how much he’d been looking forward to seeing that girl, until they were suddenly together in the royal coach, and she froze him out. Things had been no better since. He was back where he’d started, with the stone cold eyes, the clipped chill voice, the so, do you want that fuck? In times like these, a lover isn’t for sex. A lover is someone to reach for in the night, someone whose existence in the world you can cling to when you’re hard pressed. He’d been imagining that was what they were for each other, but no way. She’d been living in Pig’s hotel under some kind of house arrest, which couldn’t have been fun. He’d thought she’d relax when he took her back to the Snake Eyes’ place: it hadn’t worked.
I read the first part of this when it first came out in Interzone, way back in the day, and thought I had read the rest since, but this was mostly new to me. I generally enjoyed it, which is a relief because I bounced off a couple of other books by Gwyneth Jones that I tried in the meantime. I also suspect that I would not have enjoyed it as much when it first came out; the disintegration of the United Kingdom’s structure of government doesn’t seem either as improbable or as unwelcome as it did in 2001. The setting is a near-future England where Scotland and Wales have become independent and Ireland has reunited, and the counterculture takes over the government so that senior political figures are also playing in their own bands, and if anything a bit better known for the latter than the former. Our heroine, Fiorinda, undergoes a gruesome sexual initiation in the first section of the book and one of the plot strands is her personal quest to come to terms with it; other strands involve the machinations of various factions, some more believable than others. It’s a really impressive vision of what a future England could look like, even if it’s now twenty years old; slightly dystopian but also with a tinge of optimism. You can get it here.
Bold as Love won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2001. I’ve read three of the other nominees, Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson, Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Passage by Connie Willis, and have yet to get to the other two, Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton and The Secret of Life by Paul McAuley. I really loved Pashazade and I think if I’d been a judge that year I’d have argued strongly for it. But I can see why the judges may have felt that Bold as Love was more directly addressing the Matter of Britain, or more precisely the Future of England, and therefore fits some concepts of what the Clarke Award is sometimes trying to do.
My last review was of that year’s Tiptree winner, The Kappa Child, and next will be the BSFA winner, Chasm City (Bold As Love was also on the BSFA shortlist).
Mon, 12:56: South Sudan: Riek Machar and the prophet’s rod – Martin Plaut https://t.co/9BtH8x8VXc The Return of Ngundeng’s Dang, by Douglas Johnson.
Mon, 16:12: RT @BlogTolkien: And finally, on 22 March 1916, J. R. R. Tolkien married Edith Bratt in the church of St. Mary Immaculate in Warwick. Happy…
Tue, 08:10: RT @EmmaVardyTV: NEW: More than 80 MPs have signed a cross-party letter backing the move to give the Northern Ireland Secretary powers to c…
23 March 1909: birth of Charles Morgan, who played Songsten in The Abominable Snowmen (Second Doctor, 1967) and the Gold Usher in The Invasion of Time (Fourth Doctor, 1978).
23 March 1928: birth of Louis Marks, who wrote Planet of Giants (1964), Day of the Daleks (1972), Planet of Evil (1975) and The Masque of Mandragora (1976).
23 March 2018: death of Rupert Laight, writer of two Sarah Jane Adventures TV stories and of various bits of spinoff fiction, most of them rather good. I had missed the memo about this – he cannot have been old.
23 March 2020: (this one I do remember, sadly) death of David Collings, who played Vorus in Revenge of the Cybermen (Fourth Doctor, 1975), Poul in The Robots of Death (Fourth Doctor, 1978), and Mawdryn in Mawdryn Undead (Fifth Doctor, 1983). He also played an alternate Doctor in the 2003 Big Finish audio Full Fathom Five, by Gary Russell.
ii) births and deaths
23 March 1968: broadcast of second episode of Fury from the Deep. Maggie Harris is overpowered by Oak and Quill, and the mysterious noises intensify.
23 March 1974: broadcast of first episode of The Monster of Peladon. The Doctor and Sarah land on Peladon to find Queen Thalira having problems with the miners.
23 March 1982: broadcast of second episode of Time-Flight. The mysterious Kalid has been kidnapping Concordes. Guess who he really is???
23 March 1984: broadcast of second episode of The Twin Dilemma. The Doctor meets an old friend, but discovers that he is responsible for kidnapping the twins.
23 March 1985: broadcast of first episode of Revelation of the Daleks. At Tranquil Repose, there is a disc jockey who looks just like Alexei Sayle and people being turned into Daleks.
A year and five days since the first lockdown; just under a year since the first of these posts; just over a year since the first of my lockdown videos.
We had no idea then of how long this was going to go on. On 27 March last year, I was already missing the office; I still miss it, even more now perhaps. A new colleague joined us today who is actually an old friend of mine; in normal times I’d have taken her out for lunch, or at least a drink, and it sucks that we cannot have that sort of interaction any more.
Right now we’re looking once again at a surge of COVID numbers in Belgium, for no particular reason except that the weather is getting better, I guess, and perhaps people are mixing more, and perhaps new and more infectious variants are now circulating. The EU and UK are snapping more and more at each other; I’m frankly not interested enough to follow the details, except to form the impression that both sides are now at the behaving badly stage. My good friend Dave Keating did such a deep dive into it on Twitter over the weekend that I will refer any future queries to him. (NB that when other European countries were fretting about the Astrazeneca job, Belgium asked for more if there were any spare!) More locally, B and U had their second vaccinations last week.
Outside work and family, the story of the baby in the park reached a conclusion for now. That still leaves plenty of genealogical rabbit holes to disappear down. In particular, I’ve signed up to yet another site, myheritage.com, only to find that one of my younger cousins is already there. This is actually really helpful, because we have the same grandfather but different grandmothers; any mutual connections must therefore be Murrays or Dineens, rather than Stewarts or McIlroys.
And this year’s Hugo nominations have closed. Unlike last year, we were able to adapt the counting software we’d previously used in 2017 and 2019 to process the votes, and it made the process very swift indeed. For various reasons we won’t be able to announce the final ballot until 13 April; some lucky people will be hearing very soon that they are going to have to keep a big secret until then. So it’s nice to be able to bring people a bit of joy in the dark times.
Edited to add: I can’t believe I forgot to mention that today is the fifth anniversary of the 2016 terrorist attacks in Brussels! Partly it’s because local media started the commemoration at the end of last week, so it felt a bit like yesterday’s story. But it isn’t, and the effects are still with us.
Sun, 14:00: Who is on for an expedition to @Pixel_Museum, the video game museum in Brussels, next weekend? Most likely to go Sunday afternoon, with F and U, but plans are not yet final.
22 March 1950: birth of Mary Tamm, who played the first Romana in 1978-79.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
22 March 1969: broadcast of third episode of The Space Pirates. Clancey and the Tardis crew evade General Hermack and arrive at the pirate base on Madeleine's plant.
22 March 1975: broadcast of third episode of Genesis of the Daleks. Sarah has failed to escape from the Thal dome, but Harry and the Doctor arrive to rescue her – and the Doctor is electrocuted.
22 March 1983: broadcast of first episode of Time-Flight. A Concorde is kidnapped and the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa investigate.
22 March 1985: broadcast of first episode of The Twin Dilemma, first full episode for Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. The new Doctor is behaving strangely; meanwhile the Sylvest twins have been kidnapped.
22 March 2003: webcast of "The Child, Part 3", the seventh episode of Death Comes to Time.
22 March 2010: broadcast of Oroborus, eleventh episode of the Australian K9 series. K9 notices a change in behaviour in his friends and discovers time itself is being disrupted. Small chunks of time are being eaten away. A Time Snake has invaded the mansion and Starkey makes a discovery about his own parents that means he alone can face the Oroborus. He offers himself as a meal to defeat the creature.
iii) date specified in-universe:
22 March 2011: setting of most of the Torchwood: Children of Earth episode Rendition. Jack and Gwen are unwillingly transported to America, and Jack survives poisoning.
My next three reviews will be of the winners of the Tiptree, Clarke and BSFA Best Novel Awards published in 2000 and winning in 2001, starting with Tiptree winner The Kappa Child.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The temperature inside our station wagon was unbearable. We might have cooled our bodies by turning on the heater full blast. Past the point of bickering, my sisters and I stuck helplessly to the vinyl, too hot to bother avoiding the gluey smear of skin on skin.
A complex novel of a Japanese-Canadian girl whose family moves from British Columbia to the harsher landscape of Alberta, trying and failing to farm rice there. The Kappa is a Japanese water creature; the protagonist becomes mysteriously pregnant; she and her sisters are oppressed by their father and by the heat. The plot threads overlap and I found it a little hard to keep track, but I did enjoy the vivid writing. You can get it here (for a price).
The Kappa Child won the James Tiptree Jr award in 2001. As far as I know, Goto was the first writer of colour to win it (I count half a dozen since). The other shortlisted works were all novels, unlike in some years: Dark Light, by Ken MacLeod; The Fresco, by Sheri S. Tepper; Half Known Lives, by Joan Givner and The Song of the Earth, by Hugh Nissenson. I am sure I have read the MacLeod and I have probably read the Tepper, but have not heard of the other two writers let alone their books. For what it's worth, The Kappa Child seems a more obvious Tiptree choice than MacLeod or Tepper. My next two reviews will be of the Clarke and BSFA winners that year, Bold As Love and Chasm City.
Sat, 12:56: RT @DrBenLitherland: Spiked are getting attacked for being woke because they did a reasonably fair summary of Jordan Peterson which upset h…
Sat, 14:48: Houston Dairymaids sends cheese into space for NASA astronauts https://t.co/b7eY8gU7Qc Not just any cheese, but *Belgian* cheese!
Sun, 10:02: 12 years ago: a trip along the Karpass peninsula in Cyprus, taking in the ruins of ancient Salamis and Kantara Castle. With wild donkeys. https://t.co/0NblKKracn
Sun, 10:38: RT @devesian: WANTED Project Manager for Building Development at St Ed’s Mottingham, London SE9 4AQ Contact revdrcath@gmail.com for details…
Sun, 10:45: The clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool https://t.co/h5Pu7JHPvy More reflective than the headline suggests.
Sun, 11:57: This is quite a difficult call – the two stories are trying to do very different things, The Gunfighters a Western setting with music, Frontier in Space a good old space opera plot. But I think in the end the later story does it better. https://t.co/ECDoPjHlIH
21 March 1915: birth of Ian Stuart Black, author of The Savages (First Doctor, 1966), The War Machines (First Doctor, 1966) and The Macra Terror (Second Doctor, 1967).
21 March 1923: birth of Peter Pratt, who played the Master in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976).
21 March 1936: birth of Roger Hammond, who played Francis Bacon in The Chase (First Doctor, 1965) and Dr Runciman in Mawdryn Undead (Fifth Doctor, 1983).
21 March 1944: birth of Hilary Minster, who had two rather minor roles as Thals – Marat in Planet of the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1973) and an unnamed soldier in Genesis of the Daleks (Fourth Doctor, 1975), but is of interest to me as the only person to have been semi-regular character in both Secret Army, where he played Hauptmann Muller, and Allo! Allo!, where he played General von Klinkerhoffen – a high ranking Wehrmacht officer in both cases.
21 March 1946: birth of Timothy Dalton, who played Rassilon in The End of Time (2009-2010).
21 March 1970: birth of Chris Chibnall, currently show-runner for New Who, writer of seven other episodes and head writer of first two seasons of Torchwood, first came to prominence as a Doctor Who Appreciation Society critic of the show in 1986.
21 March 1983: birth of Bruno Langley, who played Adam in Dalek and The Long Game (2005).
21 March 2002: death of Neville Barber, who played Dr Humphrey Cook in The Time Monster (Third Doctor, 1972) and Howard Baker in K9 and Company (1981).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
21 March 1964: broadcast of "Rider from Shang-Tu", fifth episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. The Tardis crew are unable to persuade Marco Polo that Tegana is the source of their problems, and he prevents their escape.
21 March 1970: broadcast of first episode of The Ambassadors of Death. An attempt to rescue a lost Mars probe is frustrated by a signal sent from a vacant warehouse; UNIT investigates and is attacked.
21 March 1981: broadcast of fourth episode of Logopolis, ending Season 18: last appearance of Tom Baker and first of Peter Davison as the Fourth Doctor regenerates into the Fifth, after falling from a radio telescope while preventing the Master from blackmailing the people of the Universe.
21 March 2009: broadcast of Fragments (Torchwood), the one with all the flashbacks.
Dances With Wolves won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1990, and six others: Best Director (Kevin Costner), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Sound Mixing. That year’s Hugo winner, Edward Scissorhands, was nominated in one category, Best Make-up, where it lost to one of the two other contenders.
That year’s other Best Picture nominees were Awakenings, Ghost, The Godfather Part III and Goodfellasthink I’ve seen The Godfather Part III but don’t remember much about it. IMBD users rank Dances With Wolvestop on one system but only 9th on the other, behind Goodfellas, Home Alone, Edward Scissorhands, Back to the Future Part III, The Godfather: Part III, Die Hard 2, Total Recall and Pretty Woman.
I’ve seen twelve films made in 1990, The Godfather: Part III and Dances with Wolves, also (in rough IMDB order) Edward Scissorhands, Pretty Woman, Total Recall, The Hunt for Red October, Wild at Heart, Presumed Innocent, Postcards from the Edge, Cyrano de Bergerac, Truly Madly Deeply and Nuns on the Run, which has a particular place in my heart because it was filmed around where my aunt lived in Chiswick. I also have a deep love for Red October and Total RecallDances With Wolves. Anyway, here’s a trailer.
None of the cast had been in previous Oscar, Hugo or Nebula-winning films, or in Doctor Who.
To cut straight to the point: this is, as Anne succinctly put it, worthy but dull. It maybe didn’t help that I ended up watching the 4-hour extended version (almost as long as Gone With the Wind) rather than the original 3-hour theatrical presentation. But all the white people except our hero are bad, all the Pawnee are bad, and all the Sioux are good and if they do happen to do bad things it’s for very understandable reasons. I mean, it should go without saying that the exploitation, displacement and mass murder of the original inhabitants of the Americas by European-descended settlers is a terrible thing. But I think it might be possible to tell a more interesting story about it, and Costner and Blake have not tried very hard.
It’s a better film than Cimarron, the only other Western (so far) to win the Best Picture Oscar, but that’s not saying a lot. One area where Cimarron does score better is that at least its women characters have some agency (even if most of the feminism of the original book has been surgically removed). Here Mary McDonnell in the lead female role just smoulders a bit. You can tell she is smouldering, because unlike all the other women, she doesn’t do much with her hair.
I should not be too unfair to her, but I will note that the role was surely intended for a younger actor; McDonnell is the same age as the actors playing her adoptive parents. But I guess the same is true of Costner’s own role, and he was hardly going to recast himself.
I am going to grumble about two more things, and then I will say a couple of nice things too. First, Costner’s voice-overs of Dunbar’s diary entries are crashingly monotonous and dull. It’s rather surprising, given how much the film was obviously a labour of love, that he slipped up on this rather crucial element. Maybe delivering those lines so boringly was intended to distract attention from the implausibility of the diary as a plot device, but if so it doesn’t work.
Second, I’m sorry, but as soon as the wolf appears, we know a) that it symbolises Dunbar’s coming into harmony with the pre-European environment and b) that it’s going to be killed by another white man at the end.
OK, to be positive. I often whine about the music for these films but this time it seemed a good fit with the spectacular scenery. (And the scenery really is spectacular.) So, good marks there.
The film is about a white guy getting to grips with a non-white culture, but it’s an honest effort to portray that culture as real and valuable, and perhaps better than what replaced it. And I think it’s really worth acknowledging the fact that a large part of the dialogue is in Lakota. I see a scurrilous story that Lakota is a gendered language and that only the female version was taught to the actors, with the result that grizzled warriors are engaging in girl-talk, to the amusement of real Lakota speakers. TBH that seems a bit too good to be true, and even if it is, I’m giving Costner full marks for trying: it’s important for native English speakers to be reminded that other languages are not necessarily foreign.
So, all in all, I’m putting it just ahead of the halfway mark in my list, above Out of Africa but below Lawrence of Arabia, films with which it shares some common themes.
The film is ostensibly based on a book, which I also read. Here’s the second and third paragraphs of the third chapter:
Had it not been for the lettering, crudely gouged in the beam over Captain Cargill’s late residence, Lieutenant Dunbar could not have believed this was the place. But it was spelled out clearly. “Fort Sedgewick.”
The book was actually written with a view to making a film out of the story, which is why the film cleaves more closely to the original plot than almost any other adaptation. The biggest difference is that the Good Indians are Comanche in the book but Sioux in the film, apparently for production reasons. I found the prose pretty clunky, especially in the early chapters, but it is a mercifully quick read. You can get it here (in omnibus with its sequel).
OK, next up is The Silence of the Lambs, but before that, Edward Scissorhands.
Fri, 12:00: 20 hours left to nominate for this year’s Hugo Awards! If you were a CoNZealand member, and you want to nominate, check now to make sure that you are in the system.
Fri, 12:06: RT @POLITICOEurope: It is with great sadness that POLITICO announces the death of our much-loved editor in chief, Stephen Brown, at the age…
Fri, 12:43: If the Hartlepool by-election is on 6 May, it will be 92 weeks after Brecon & Radnor (1 Aug 2019) – we have already beaten the previous 83-week all-time record. By comparison, the 11-month parliament from January to December 1910 had 21 by-elections. https://t.co/8XcefVvyN2
Fri, 13:28: I found this today’s toughest choice. If no An Unearthly Child, we would not be having this discussion. Both have superb first episodes. But 2-5 of Mind Robber better than 2-4 of Child, so it gets my vote. https://t.co/hACNF2bRqS
Fri, 20:18: #DoctorWhoOnThisDay I’m watching the Doctor Who originally shown on 19 March in previous years. First up, “The Return”, third episode of the story we now call The Ark, recorded on 4 March 1966 and shown two weeks later.
Sat, 10:45: No saint, no spartan, no reformer: the life of Robert Walpole https://t.co/DhYKMpBXPk Food for thought re British prime ministerial history.
20 March 1979: birth of Freema Agyeman, who played Martha Jones in New Who and Torchwood.
ii) broadcast and production anniversaries
20 March 1965: broadcast of "The Centre", sixth episode of the story we now call The Web Planet. The Doctor and Vicki are captured by the Animus; but Ian and the Optera attack from below, and Barbara and the Menoptera from above, and Barbara destroys it.
20 March 1971: broadcast of second episode of The Claws of Axos. The British are determined to control the world's supply of Axonite; the Axons, however, are a parasitic organism intending to suck the planet of all its energy.
Current Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux met 309 vindplaatsen om te bezoeken, by Herman Clerinx Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
Last books finished It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of?, by Adam Roberts Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus Dances With Wolves, by Michael Blake The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake
Next books Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper
So I'll be revealing my own votes over the next few days, category by category; not to be understood as recommendations, but as confessing my own quirks. (Except for one category, where I am Right and anyone who votes otherwise is Wrong.)
