I just realised that this did not go live as I had planned on 31 August, the day I arrived in Chicago, so here it is now.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 70) Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo The Life of Col. Samuel M. Wickersham, ed. Edward Wickersham Hoffman The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack The Time Warrior, by Matthew Kilburn That Damn’d Thing Called “Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860, by James Kelly The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O’Reilly Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich
Non-genre 2 (YTD 13) Alaska Sampler 2014: Ten Authors from the Great Land, eds Deb Vanasse and David Marusek The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
SF 9 (YTD 69) Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher The Initiate, by Louise Cooper Sprawl, ed. Cat Sparks The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers “Tangents”, by Greg Bear The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 23) Dalek Combat Training Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric, by Ian Briggs Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 1 (YTD 13) Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano, by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel
1/25 (YTD 25/192) by a non-white writer (Evaristo)
360 books currently tagged “unread”, after adding lots of Doctor Who comics
Reading now The Traders’ War, by Charles Stross Brasyl, by Ian McDonald Mr Britling Sees It Through, by H.G. Wells
Coming soon (perhaps) Speaker to the Dead, by Orson Scott Card Political Animals, by Bev Laing Empire Of Sand, by Tasha Suri Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi Jocasta, by Brian Aldiss Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, by Brian Aldiss The End of the Day, by Claire North The Harem of Aman Akbar, by Elizabeth Scarborough Null States, by Malka Older Voorbij de grenzen van de ernst, by Kamagurka Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell Metamorphoses, by Ovid What If? by Randall Munroe Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Thirteen, by Richard Morgan The World Set Free, by H.G. Wells
Eric’s suite contained the pampered luxury I expected, with overstuffed furniture and a magnificent view of the Plaza outside. A bottle of champagne stood on a low glass table, uncorked. The air was filled with the tinny tones of a ragtime band, emanating from a wireless set – not the compact government-issue People’s Receivers you would have found in every British home in those days, and known universally as Marvin’s Megaphones, but a big chunk of American hardware in a walnut cabinet.
This is a sequel to The War of the Worlds, authorised as such by the H.G. Wells estate, set in an Earth which overcame the original Martian invasion and where England has become a dystopian dictatorship. The narrator is the suffragette sister-in-law of the narrator of The War of the Worlds, with vignettes from all over the world as the Martians launch another assault, having learned lessons from their first unsuccessful attempt.
It’s an interesting contrast with the two sequels to The Time Machine that I have read in recent years, The Time Ships, also by Stephen Baxter, and The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest, which also has some Martian sequences in it. Unfortunately it’s not quite as good as either; there are some vivid set-pieces, but otherwise the plot rather plods along from place to place and battle to battle. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The End of the Day, by Claire North.
Second paragraph of third story (“How to Select a Durian at Footscray Market”, by Stephanie Campisi – third if you count the opening poem):
There are blobs of fruit flesh on the ground where people have pestled kumquats or grapes beneath their shoes, shoes that are old and friendly sandals or heels thin and high as kebab skewers. Kids, hair carved into waterfalls that trail down their necks or propped up in pineapply plumes with supercute sparkly hair bobbles, stagger about in that toddlerish way, their plump bellies steering them towards tasting plates of chopped up sour mango, glistening papaya, white and virginal dragonfruit and blobs of eyeball-like longan.
An anthology of sff stories by Australian writers, published in 2010 in anticipation of that year’s Worldcon. They’re all pretty good. I particularly liked the opening by Tansy Rayner Roberts, “Relentless Adaptations”, which looks at a dystopian future for literature, and the sinister youth of Angela Slatter’s “Brisneyland by Night”. but I don’t think that there is a dud in the collection. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2015 and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are two books by Brain Aldiss, respectively Complete Short Stories: The 1950s and Jocasta, Wife and Mother.
When I first watched The Curse of Fenric in 2007, I wrote:
The Curse of Fenric had been strongly recommended to me, and I adopted the suggestion that I watch the extended director’s cut version on the DVD rather than the show as originally broadcast (in keeping with the non-sequential traditions of the show, this was actually the last story of the four that I watched, during a three-hour stopover in Ankara airport last Friday).
Well, it is indeed a good story – most memorably, Nicholas Parsons, of all people, playing it straight as the doomed vicar Mr Wainwright; a setting in the second world war that actually looks a bit like it might be the 1940s; vampire villains which now seem an eerie foreshadowing of Buffy; secret codes and ancient evils, and the crucial importance of faith. Indeed, of the four last stories, it is the one which most resembles classic Who at its best.
I was not utterly convinced by the plot; I never like stories which crucially depend on some unbroadcast and untold past adventure of the Doctor’s. And although I did like Tomek Bork’s portrayal of Sorin, I was not totally convinced by the behaviour of the Russian soldiers (and to a lesser extent of the British) – as soldiers, that is. However, in general, this was a good ’un.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
I watched the original version of The Curse of Fenric this time rather than the director’s cut, and noticed only one significant difference – we cannot hear what the Doctor is saying when he makes his profession of faith to ward off the Haemovores, whereas the director’s cut makes it clear that he is reciting the names of all his companions in a litany. It’s another excellent story, with the plot of human conflict being exploited by non-human forces which has a venerable pedigree in Who, and the continuing accumulation of details about what the Doctor may really be up to – and, almost two years after her arrival, more about what Ace is there for – I think only Turlough acquires a comparable amount of back-story in the course of his time in the Tardis, and Ace’s tale works much better. My only quibble about The Curse of Fenric is that I have never been impressed by the Haemovores, whose costumes are a bit cheap-looking to the point that we have to be told to be scared of them by scary music.
Rewatching, I wasn’t quite as impressed as I had been on previous occasions – and I note that both times I had seen it before in the context of the rest of the season; this was the first time I had tried it as effectively a standalone. It feels frankly a bit under-directed; too often the actors are just moving from point A to point B without doing much else, and the cinematography is workmanlike rather than interesting. Also this time around I watched the original TV broadcast, which is not as good as the subsequent edits, and that may have been a mistake. I’m glad that Cartmel was trying to revive the show, but he had not yet got there.
Here’s a weird one for you. Pyramids of Mars, already covered by the Black Archive, and Full Circle, also already covered by the Black Archive, were broadcast on exactly the same calendar dates as The Curse of Fenric: 25 October, 1 November, 8 November and 15 November, in 1975, 1980 and 1989 respectively. The first two were shown on Saturday nights, and The Curse of Fenric on Wednesdays. The day after Episode 3 was shown, the Berlin Wall fell.
When I first read the novelisation in 2008, I wrote:
Ian Briggs, on the other hand, does a masterful job with The Curse of Fenric, perhaps the most adult of any of the Who novelisations (in the sense of talking about sex). The most striking change from the TV original is that the vicar, Mr Wainwright, is explictly young (rather than Nicholas Parsons). Apart from that, the whole narrative feels very soundly rooted both in itself and in Who – particularly with Ace’s introduction in Dragonfire (which of course Briggs also wrote). For once, the Doctor’s-hidden-past motif actually seems to make sense rather than feeling like a bolted-on idea (the only other story that achieves this is The Face of Evil). An excellent read.
Also a comfortable pass for the Bechdel test, what with Phyllis, Jean and their landlady on the one hand, and Katharine, Audrey and the Wrens on the other, with Ace wandering between them.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
A thin trickle of villagers, all dressed in their grey Sunday best, were making their way home down the country lane. Only Miss Hardaker, a sharp-faced spinster in her fifties, and two teenage girls lingered on the church porch where the young vicar listened patiently. Miss Hardaker was determined to make her point.
Rereading the novelisation, the same points struck me again; it’s a surprisingly adult book for the range, with the London girls and Ace bantering about sex. And given the timings, it does make more sense for the vicar to be a young man, rather than 66-year-old Nicholas Parsons. There are a couple of good interludes as well, one of which appears to have a drown-up Ace marrying a Russian aristocrat ancestor of Sorin’s. It’s one of the best of the 160+ novelisations.
Both of my Black Archive reads for this month are by writers who I consider friends. Una McCormack is a sparring partner on Twitter:
In this monograph, she has gone for an approach of developing at length four of the interesting themes of The Curse of Fenric, rather than an all-round justification of the story, and as someone who loves the story less than she does, I found it helpful and redemptive. I love most of all the Black Archive books that explain to me why I like some of my favourite Doctor Who stories; but I probably get more out of the ones like this that challenge me to think again about some that are less high up my personal list.
The short introduction sets out her stall, making the link between the timing of first broadcast and the Fall of the Wall, and asserting boldly that “The Curse of Fenric is the best story in what was, at that point, the best season yet of Doctor Who. In other words, I love it.”
The first chapter convincingly positions the story and the entire era in the context of a decade of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher (who as it turned out would last only another year), and the culture wars waged by government supporters, particularly on and in the BBC. The solution to the chess puzzle of the story is, after all, for the pawns to break ranks and join forces against their common oppressor.
The second chapter points out that this is the first Doctor Who story to explicitly use the Second World War as a setting. (Surprisingly, the Nazis in Silver Nemesis are not named as such.) The war itself is of course a crucial cultural historical experience for the UK, as for other countries. But it’s interesting to look, as McCormack does, at the other later presentations of the war in Who, some of which work and many of which don’t, and to explore the good and bad side of using it as the background for a Who story.
The third chapter looks at Ace as a character, arguing that her arc is the first example of the more modern approach to companions that we have seen in the New Who era, and applying some good feminist analysis to the Doctor and his relations with the women who he tracvels with. The second paragraph of the third chapter, including a quote from Joanna Russ, is:
Russ, in her essay, and in typically acerbic fashion, rapidly sketches and dispenses with the clichés of science fiction: the ‘intergalactic suburbia’ in which the 1950s household remains intact and the woman is wife, mother, and home-maker; the ‘passive and involuntary’ women as prizes or motives for space-faring ‘He-Men’; and the domineering Amazons of matriarchies, waiting to be brought to heel by the arrival of men. Her most illuminating criticism for our purposes, however, is of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This novel, published in 1969, a Nebula Award winner and generally accepted to be ground-breaking in its treatment of gender, concerns the inhabitants of the planet Gethen, who have no sex or gender, except that every four weeks they pass through a cycle in which they become either male or female, and sexually potent. The story is motored by the arrival on Gethen of a male human observer, who becomes immersed in Gethenian culture and politics. Russ skilfully argues this is a book from which women are absent:
‘It is, I must admit, a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called “he” throughout, but “put that together with the native hero’s personal encounters in the book, the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men.’4 4 Russ, ‘Image of Women’, p215.”
The brief short chapter reflects on myth and Doctor Who, and the way in which Cartmel was setting up the Doctor as a mythic figure and using themes from mythology to help tell the story.
I guess my biggest complaint about the book is that it’s a bit short. But you can get it here.
Romantic love. Random sex. Hopeless crushes. Short-lived flings. Proper relationships. All of these experiences contributed to making me the person and writer I became, one for whom the pursuit of freedom was paramount: freedom to move home, freedom from a conventional job, freedom to follow the whims of my sexuality, freedom to jump from one encounter to another, freedom to write experimental fiction. Even when my freedom was seriously curtailed, as it was during one relationship in my twenties, I broke free and carved out the life I wanted for myself again.
This is a tremendously entertaining and thought-provoking short book, the autobiography of the author of Girl, Woman, Other and of The Emperor’s Babe, taking her from childhood in Woolwich to fame and success as a Booker Prize winning author. As with all good autobiographies, there is a fair bit of self-reflection; I found her accounts of her love life (mainly lesbian in her 20s, mainly straight before and since) interesting (other people’s lovel lives are almost always interesting) and I also appreciated her frankness about the shortcomings of some of her earlier books, though I may try and get one or two of them anyway – in particular Blonde Roots, an alternate history which was on the 2008 Artchur C. Clarke Award shortlist. She is also very clear about the impact of racism and sexism on her career, which originally was intended to be on the stage (and she has done a good deal of stage work). Punches well above its weight, as does the writer. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that pile is Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi.
Two more in the Candy Jar series of Lethbridge-Stewart stories, a novella by the “showrunner” and a novel by a veteran Who writer.
The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen. Second paragraph of third chapter:
He eventually found the Docherty house, but Mr Docherty was of no help.
This is really good, one of the best of the series so far. It takes the Brigadier and friends to John O’Groats in the far north of Scotland, where they are investigating something resembling the selkie myth; at the same time they are pursued by journalist Harold Chorley and his associate Larry Greene. It turns out that Chorley is actually from Monaghan and reinvented himself with posh English accent to become a journalist, making him one of very few Irish characters in the Whoniverse. The whole thing is very well done, playing with identity and fate, and I strongly recommend it even for those who are less familiar with this continuity. Spinoff fiction at its best. You can get it here.
The Laughing Gnome: Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Major Grigoriy Bugayev parked the service truck at the base of the steps. In his mirror, the fuel truck veered gently to a stop under the airliner’s wing.
Perhaps my concentration was weak while on holiday, but I found this rather confusing and not all that interesting. The Brigadier and friends jump all along their own timelines, including alternative timelines, and it did not make a lot of sense for me. I may try it again. You can get it here.
Back in 2017 I read a Doctor Who novella by Louise Cooper, who I had not previously heard of, and was really impressed. Her best known work is the Time Master trilogy, which I picked up pretty cheaply at Eastercon, and The Initiate is the first volume. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Taunan pointed towards a familiar dark patch in the sward ahead, and carefully the two riders guided their horses over it, making sure that not one hoof strayed beyond its boundaries. And as they crossed it, the change began.
I enjoyed it. The protagonist undergoes a fairly standard fantasy narrative arc, exiled from his home after an unfortunate magical accident to get trained at wizard school; but he is a deeply flawed individual, and the effect of the dark side of his personality on his colleagues and friends is well depicted. A rounded off novel in itself which still leaves us well set up for the next book. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book; next on that pile is Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri.
This is a lovely lovely book about the Daleks, supposedly by the Time Lords, citing all of the Doctor’s televised adventures with them and constructing as much continuity as is possible. Nothing very new for me, but a joy none the less. Well done Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker for putting it together. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (an extract from Still Points North: An Alaskan Memoir, by Leigh Newman):
Some identifiers: The Great Alaskan Dad flies his plane on floats in the summer and on skis in the winter. He hunts for caribou, moose, wild sheep, wild goats, geese, and ducks, plus fishes for halibut, salmon, and trout. No matter where he goes, his outfit remains the same: falling-down hip boots, patched wool pants, drugstore sunglasses with Polaroid lenses for spotting fish underwater, and a Stearns life jacket with a red plastic tag that reads PULL-IN-THE-CASE-OF-AN-EMERGENCY, which has never been pulled, despite his frequent, always almost fatal emergencies. A buck knife — the blade stained with dried unidentified blood and slime — dangles from a lanyard somewhere on his person.
This is a collection of ten pieces by ten Alaskan writers, which I guess I picked up due to the unlikely happenstance that Alaskan author David Marusek was my roommate at the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. The majority of the pieces are fiction, but I found myself more drawn to the non-fiction pieces – the standout pieces are extracts from A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail, by Dana Stabenow (better known as a mystery writer) and from Cold River Spirits by Jan Harper-Haines. Though it’s all good, and certainly knocks on the head any thought you may have had that Alaska is devoid of culture.
I realised a couple of weeks ago that I had paid for a couple of Humble Bundles of Doctor Who comics published by Titan over the years, and now had dozens of unread books to add to my Librarything catalogue. (Which is going to mean a big jump in the number of unread books that I log at the end of this month.) I’m going to go through them in order of internal chronology, hopefully at a rate of one a month, which will be enough for several years to go…
So that means starting with Operation Volcano, a collection of Seventh Doctor stories first published in 2018 as a three-shot series and then collected as a graphic novel. The majority of pages are taken up with the title story, by no less than Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch, which takes the Doctor and Ace to Australia for an adventure of alien infiltration with Group Captain Gilmore. It’s a well done, densely written adventure, which perhaps shows that the comics medium does not suffer the same limitations as the screen.
Second frame of third part of “Operation Volcano”:
There are also three shorter stories in the volume. “Hill of Beans”, by Richard Dinnick, takes the Psychic Circus from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy to a planet ruled by a president who looks just like Donald Trump. the art is by Jessica Martin who played Mags in the TV story and whose character features here. I’m afraid it did not really work for me.
“The Armageddon Gambit”, by John Freeman and Christopher Jones, is a less ambitious but more successful Doctor-and-Ace-outwit-the-aliens tale. Given that it is the third story in the book, I’ll give you its second frame as well.
(I think we know the answer to the alien commander’s questions)
Finally, an unexpected treat: a six-pager from Paul Cornell and John Stokes, “In-Between Times”, which explores the relationships between Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, the First Doctor and the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan. Rather lovely; and I suspect it may be the most recently published new First Doctor comic as of the time of writing.
You can get Operation Volcano here (if you didn’t get the Humble Bundle like I did). Next up is an Eighth Doctor volume, A Matter of Life and Death.
Hugo voting is over for this year, and the winners will be revealed in three weeks. The Hugo voter packet included several books that were not themselves on the final ballot (though their authors or editors were). I’m therefore giving myself a bit more licence to write up those that I read in the last couple of weeks.
Winter’s Orbit, by Everina Maxwell (who is an Astounding finalist). Second paragraph of third chapter:
Kiem had the photo in his head, but it was still a shock to see that grave stare right in front of him. Jainan’s dark eyes gave a hidden spark of electricity to an expression that was otherwise entirely proper and neutral. His clothes were Thean, a half-sleeved tunic with a blunter, looser cut than Iskat styles, in a muted blue that split the difference between a formal outfit and mourning grays.
A space empire tale with full marriage equality and gender diversity. Yet at the same time there are arranged marriages, and the two chaps at the centre of the story are forced into one at the very beginning (and inevitably discover that they quite like each other by the end). Inventive and entertaining, but I struggled a bit with the empire’s political and diplomatic structures, which are completely inflexible up to the point where the plot needs them to be suddenly flexible. You can get it here.
Soulstar, by C.L. Polk (third in the Kingston Cycle, one of the Best Series finalists). Second paragraph of third chapter:
Marlon handled the Windweaver shifts and sent two of them to board the train’s engine car. It looked strange to see its stack smoking with the leavings of burning coal, but all trains could run on coal if there was an emergency. People gathered on the platform, some gathered in clumps organizing their roles on the trains, others getting in the way with their gawking.
I could not get into this, not having read the first two volumes, and gave up not very far into it. This illustrates one of the real problems of the Best Series category, as I have repeatedly argued; a diligent voter cannot possibly familiarise themselves with all of the relevant material, so most votes are cast from imperfect knowledge of the finalists. Though if I had been the author, I think I would have included the first rather than the third volume of the trilogy in the Hugo voter packet. You can get it here.
Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher (part of the World of the White Rat, also a Best Series finalist). Second paragraph of third chapter:
“A man just came out of the sword. I drew the sword and he appeared.”
This was much easier to grasp. A fantasy world with, again, gender diversity, but where old gender roles remain strong and our protagonist, a young widow, discovers that she has inherited a sword which summons a long-dead warrior when it is drawn. The warrior may be long-dead but he is perfectly vigorous when he needs to be, and they have a very satisfying confrontation with the forces of conformity and greed. I enjoyed this one a lot. You can get it here.
The two next in sequence in the generally wonderful Black Archives series of monographs on particular Doctor Who stories. In general I write one post per Black Archive, but that’s partly because in general I have already written a lot of material on each story; that’s less the case with the more recent stories, and in any case these two stories are quite closely linked, so I’m giving you both of them here.
Heaven Sent is, in my completely objective view, one of the best episodes of New Who and possibly the best of the Capaldi era. It’s the one where the Doctor finds himself imprisoned in a tower, doomed to repeat the same actions over and over again until he achieves freedom; Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor is the only speaking part, though we also see Jenna Coleman as the recently deceased Clara, and the mysteriously threatening Veil (played by Jami Reid-Quarrell). It is directed by Rachel Talalay, who is one of the best directors of Doctor Who ever, and written by Steven Moffat, who sometimes dropped the ball but is fantastic when on form, and this time he is on form. It looks great and was the last Doctor Who episode to do at all well in the Hugos (coming second to Jessica Jones). I mentioned it as my top Twelfth Doctor episode in my list of recommendations for people who want to get into New Who.
Kara Dennison’s excellent monograph starts with an introduction wherein she makes the point that this is a rare, possibly unique, case of a Doctor Who story which is all about the character development of the title character. We have the Doctor grieving and guilty over Clara’s death, imprisoned in a castle which will take billions of years to break out of, learning from repetition. An extraordinary setup.
The first chapter analyses the story in Jungian terms, which after all is a pretty obvious thing to do: the rooms, the dust and skulls, the moat, the ascent and descent. This analysis mainly works because Jung was largely right, and hit on some pretty deep threads of the mind.
The second chapter looks at the only other significant presence in the story the Veil, and how it reflects the Doctor’s own personality and experience. And also Freddy Krueger from Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.
The very short third chapter looks at how the Doctor’s repetition of the path through the castle changes both him and the path, and how the clues are laid out; is he the king or the shepherd boy? Or both? Its second paragraph is:
It is, of course, the way of the Doctor. Despite the Doctor’s constant talk of ‘fixed points,’ with everything from Jack Harkness1 to moon dragons2, he can’t claim that he’s ever left a site untouched. 1 Utopia (2007). 2 Kill the Moon.
The fourth chapter looks at the Doctor’s personality in itself, and how it has been developing since the last season of Old Who (including in Moffat’s The Curse of Fatal Death); and in particular how Heaven Sent exposes some of the flaws in his character.
The fifth chapter looks at time loops, bringing in the fascinating case of the Endless Eight anime which I was previously unaware of. (Also of course Groundhog Day and The Dark Tower.)
A final brief sixth chapter admits that Moffat may not have been thinking about Jung at all. To be honest that misses the point for me; if Jung was right (and I think he was), we are all subconsciously thinking along Jungian lines, whether we like it or not.
Anyway, a book that gave me new things to consider about a favourite story. You can get it here.
The season finale which immediately followed Heaven Sent was Hell Bent, which I do not rate as highly, though rewatching I realised that it does have a number of excellent aspects. The Doctor, having escaped at the end of the last episode, seizes control on Gallifrey, brings Clara back to life but ends up with no memories of her; meanwhile she ends up romping around the universe with Maisie Williams’ character Ashildr/Me.
On first watching, and on rewatching before writing this, I found the story a bit too convoluted to be completely entertaining. However there are some lovely bits. The regeneration of the Gallifreyan general, previously played by Ken Bones, into Tnia Miller is the first clear onscreen change of a Time Lord between apparent races and genders. It was also my first introduction to Miller, who I have since found captivating in Years and Years and Foundation.
And on the one hand, I slightly regret Moffat’s tendency not to let the dead stay dead, but on the other, I actually prefer this closure to Clara’s story than the one we got in Face the Raven; and Maisie Williams is always a fun element to add to the mix.
When I visited the Doctor Who studio in 2015, the Tardis set was still set up from this story. The books on the shelves include a lot of H.E. Bates.
Alyssa Franke (who in real life works on the staff of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand) has provided what I found a rather redemptive reading of Hell Bent, persuading me that there are indeed hidden depths to it; in particular she brings a feminist analysis to the story, which certainly made me reconsider it (in a good way). And also I have to admit that her fannish enthusiasm for Hell Bent is slightly infectious.
A brief introduction sets out her stall, quoting a glorious line from the script:
‘The Doctor is flying around the classic console, like a distinguished Scottish actor who’s slightly too excited for his own good.’
and concludes,
My hope is that you will read this and not see it as a definitive statement on Hell Bent’s feminist values, but rather as an exploration of how it explores themes of power, privilege, patriarchy, and autonomy. It’s the beginning of the conversation, not the end.
The first full chapter examines the Doctor’s patriarchal flaws, particularly of the Tenth and Twelfth Doctors, and looks at how he often erodes, or attempts to erode, the autonomy of the women who he meets and travels with. Clara’s fate is in stark opposition to Donna’s, and must surely be read as a commentary on it.
The second chapter looks at the Western genre in Doctor Who, given that large chunks of Hell Bent are set in the US desert (in a diner which turns out to be Clara and Ashildr’s Tardis) and also given the dynamic between the Doctor and the Gallifreyans. Franke makes some telling comparisons with Shane.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Clara was always a character who was never content to play second fiddle to the Doctor. When Steven Moffat first wrote the character, he imagined her as a young, contemporary, female version of the Doctor, who would be ‘terribly clever’ but also have ‘a wayward ego’, reflecting both the Doctor’s strengths and flaws. And like the Doctor, she isn’t particularly suited to living an everyday, domestic life. Moffat said that Clara ‘doesn’t feel like she particularly fits in the world that she lives in’ and that ‘she’s not really very good at living a normal life.’ 1 1 Anderson, Kyle, ‘Steven Moffat on Clara Becoming the Doctor in Doctor Who Series 8’.
It looks in more detail at Clara and the extent to which she was always set up as a contrast to the Doctor – I had not noticed that Jenna Coleman is credited ahead of Peter Capaldi in Death in Heaven – and compares her arc and departure with the other New Who companions, again notably Donna, but also Rose and Amy. (Martha, who leaves completely of her own volition, is the exception.)
The fourth chapter looks briefly at Clara’s leitmotif – I like that fact that the Black Archives often do include a look at the incidental music for the show. It’s really neat that the Doctor plays it diegetically on his guitar when he meets Clara in the desert without knowing who she is.
The long, final fifth chapter mentions Hell Bent only incidentally as part of a sustained campaign by Moffat to normalise the possibility that the Doctor could be a woman, undoing the harm of his jokey introduction of Joanna Lumley in The Curse of Fatal Death. I mentioned above that my own most vivid memory of the episode is the General’s regeneration into Tnia Miller, and I’m sure that I’m not alone. But Franke goes in depth into public statements and other sources to show how the ground was prepared for Jodie Whittaker by Moffat.
So, this is the Black Archive at its best: I like it when (as with Heaven Sent) they produce good and thought-provoking analysis of a story that I already like; but I love it when they produce good and thought-provoking analysis of a story that I did not particularly care for, and prod me into reassessing the experience. You can get the Hell Bent monograph here.
I finished rereading Midnight’s Children almost two weeks ago, but had not yet got around to blogging it until yesterday’s terrible news pushed me into action. It’s good to hear that Salman Rushdie is likely to survive this dreadful attack, but awful that he has been grievously wounded in the course of what should have been a normal professional engagement.
I fear that there are lessons here for anyone involved with organising cultural events; none of us is safe from a determined malefactor. I know that the internal culture of sf conventions is increasingly conscious of security risks, both internal and external. It sucks but it is necessary.
It should also be noted that the risk comes from all extremes. No ideology or belief system has a monopoly on the use of political violence. Christians, Jews, atheists, leftists and right-wingers all use terrorism. Anyone who says that it is a uniquely Muslim phenomenon can go forth and multiply with themselves.
This particular incident is almost certainly rooted in the fatwa pronounced against Rushdie back in 1989 by Ruhollah Khomeini, shortly before his death. I have always suspected that it was an outworking of Iranian politics at the time; the dying Ayatollah wanting to reinforce the place of his regime as a champion of Islam against the West, as the world in general was undergoing revolutionary changes, and therefore picking on a very prominent Westernised Muslim writer as an easy target of opportunity.
When friends asked what they could do to help, he pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, felt that he needed, a more particular defense, like those made in the case of other assaulted books, such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” or “Lolita”—because this was a violent attack not on the novel in general, or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words, and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together.
I don’t feel well informed enough to comment in much more detail. I read The Satanic Verses fifteen years ago and found the critique of Islam pretty mild stuff, at least to what I am used to reading about Catholicism. I hope that Rushdie survives to write more.
My copy of Midnight’s Children was given to me 35 years ago by a dear friend who I have since fallen out of touch with. Opening it again was a return to the better times of that relationship, and I felt a warm glow of nostalgia just from the title page. I enjoyed it over Christmas in 1987, and I enjoyed it again now. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug – that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. That is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)
This weekend is the 75th anniversary of the Midnight of the title, the moment of India’s independence in 1947. The book is the story of India in the last years of British rule and the first thirty-odd years of independence, and it covers also Pakistan and Bangladesh, because you can’t tell the full story otherwise. We know we are onto a good thing in the second chapter, when hereditary nasal problems prove an unexpected blessing to the narrator’s grandfather during the Amritsar massacre:
As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound and take up positions, twenty-five to Dyer’s right and twenty-five to his left; and Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. ‘Yaaaakh-thoooo!’ he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life.
The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is one of the thousand children born in the first hour of India’s independence, all of whom are endowed with supernatural powers of one kind or another. He is perpetually conflicted about his own identity, unaware that in fact he was swapped at birth with the child of a poorer neighbour. His life loops in and out of Indian (and Pakistani and Bangladeshi) history; his powers prove more a curse than a blessing; the political becomes personal and the personal political. It is tremendously engaging; sometimes funny, sometimes very bleak, sometimes both.
If you don’t know a lot about India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh), as I did not in 1987, you’ll learn a lot from this and enjoy the process. If you do know a bit more, I think you’d still enjoy it. I think the one point that has not aged all that well is that the protagonist is actually not a very pleasant person, especially to the women in his life (who are in general as well drawn as the men), and that gets a bit tiresome. But overall I can see why it was acclaimed at the time and why it remains popular. You can get it here.
This was the top book on my shelves which I had read but not yet written up on line. Next is a much older magical book, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
After a few days off (and very relaxing holiday) I’m back to bookblogging again. I have built up quite a backlog thanks to general downtime an also some shorter books, though this one is not very short.
Second paragraph of third letter (from Yorktown, VA, 7 December 1862):
My regiment is pronounced by the officers as the best that has ever landed at their shores and their arrival is a valuable addition to the strength of this important post. After reporting, leaving one company in barracks in the Fort I marched the other companies to the boat. Deposited guns and knapsacks and they distributed the rations and gave them privilege to go ashore and cook their vitals [sic] and a happy merry time they had. All are now on board, gone to roost, guards are stationed, and I am writing to my dear little wife. Tomorrow morning I go to Gloucester, across the York River, to select the ground for my camp and lay it out for winter quarters where I hope to succeed in training my men rightly. All are in good spirits and anxious to acquire knowledge in their art.
More of the correspondence of my great-great-grandfather, a Pittsburgh iron merchant who married his third wife, my great-great-grandmother, in 1860 as the Civil War loomed. She seems to have been very diligent about keeping his correspondence; none of hers to him or to anyone else survives, but we also have a few letters from the daughters of his earlier marriages, addressed to “Mother” (ie their stepmother).
The first volume in this series dealt with the courtship between Samuel Wickersham and Fanny Belt; they lived most of their subsequent lives together, so the only other substantial amount of correspondence comes from his six months of service in the Civil War (briefly in charge of the Pennsylvania 22nd regiment and then second-in-command of the Pennsylvania 169th), and then settling back into the swing of things immediately after when she was spending a lot of time in Philadelphia – partly due to her father’s illness, but also their relationship seems to have had the occasional rocky patch.
Wickersham did not have a terribly dangerous civil war. The Pennsylvania 169th lost a total of eleven men in the few months of its existence, all through disease and none in combat. The closest they got to serious action was pursuing the defeated Lee southwards after Gettysburg, but at that point the Confederates were too busy running away to shoot back. Most of Wickersham’s letters to his wife complain that he has not been paid yet, that she hasn’t written recently and/or that he has got diarrhoea again. There is also some rather sweet commentary on the children, including my great-grandmother getting her first teeth.
Content warning: racism
The most interesting thing for me is that although he was fighting in a war to end slavery, he was still pretty racist. From the 7 December 1862 letter:
4,000 contraband [freed slaves] are quartered about the town in tents or shanties. General Nagle says the best houses in these parts are occupied by them, and woe betide the officer who would displace them to accommodate the soldiers. I told him that if the needs of comfort of my men come into collision with those of the negroes, I fear I shall be recusant to any such orders.
From 13 February 1863:
I hope to do my whole duty to my country under all circumstances, but the negro I never did and never will acknowledge but as an inferior race. I am not and never was an abolitionist, but now to end this war, I would take from our enemies all that strengthen their arms to strike us and if we could afterwards deport the entire negro race to some other clime a source of the most wicked crimes and demoralising influences on our own race would be removed.
From 21 July 1863, after the post-Gettysburg pursuit:
The backbone of this heinous rebellion is broken and the end of it appears. Let us thank God for this. The reign of the n****r in the South ends with it and white man will take his proper place there and Virginia will yet be what nature has so fitted her to be the great state of the union.
It is quite an extraordinary leap to describe the antebellum South as being under the “reign of the n****r”. And I am left not quite understanding why he was so enthusiastic about the war, if he was so prejudiced against African-Americans and actually opposed to Abolition. I guess that there is context here that I have not seen.
One more point of historical mystery: on 25 October 1866, he writes to Fanny,
I have just been tendered the appointment of Asst. Secretary of War & asked for my acceptance. What say you? Mr. Stanton retires & Gen. Sherman takes the position of Secretary of War & ’tis under the new Secty that the offer is made to me.
President Johnson was in perpetual conflict with Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, and indeed his attempt to fire him in 1868 would eventually lead to his impeachment. In October 1866, Johnson must have been hoping that the November elections would give him more room to manoeuvre. Wickersham was friends with Andrew Curtin, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who presumably would have recommended him in Washington.
In fact, the radical Republicans, who felt (entirely correctly) that Johnson was being too soft on the former rebels, won a crushing victory in the 1866 elections and we hear no more of Wickersham’s ambitions in the Executive Branch. (Forty-odd years later, his son was appointed Attorney-General by President Taft.)
There are some interesting personal glimpses as well. There is a mysterious incident where Wickersham fauxpologises, twice, to Fanny for destroying a photograph of her that he did not like, and then tries to guilt her into coming home from her parents, a pattern that is all too familiar to students of human nature. Wickersham’s oldest daughter, Katie, writes several letters to her stepmother about her courtship with a boy we know only as Will G. She never married and died of tuberculosis in her forties. A number of Wickersham’s sketches have survived, as has a single faded flower plucked from the fields of Virginia in the spring of 1863.
There is no point in sugar-coating the past; our ancestors were people of their time, and it is better to acknowledge the facts of racism and injustice than to pretend that they did not exist. This book is probably of limited interest except to the specialist, or to Wickersham’s (many) descendants, but you can get it here.
For the next three nights, unknown to the five prisoners who could hear no sound through the thick walls, carpenters were hard at work erecting gallows and gibbets in the fortress courtyard. At 3.30 a.m. on 8 May they were woken by prison guards, shackled and chained again, and told that in accordance with the sentences imposed on them at a Special Session of the State Senate held three weeks earlier they were now to be hanged. Their offence: an attempted assassination of the Tsar. Jailers said later that the five young men, all of them students at St Petersburg University, were unusually calm as they dressed and prepared themselves for death.
I got this book a couple of years ago because I was chasing a particular historical fact that had eluded me: precisely where in Brussels was the initial venue of the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903, which saw the original Bolshevik / Menshevik split? The Congress met for a few days in a rat-infested flour warehouse, somewhere fairly central, but had to relocate to London because of oppressive surveillance by the Belgian police. The details that we have are entirely from a single account written years later by Lenin’s wife. As with Karl Marx’s residences, I wanted to tie down the historic specificity.
Incidentally, for some reason the façade of the house in Brussels where Lenin lived some years earlier is blurred out in Google Streetview. I have never seen that before, for any other building.
Anyway, I emailed a couple of Lenin experts to see if anyone knew where the Second Congress was held, and the author of this biography replied recommending that I buy his book. I did, but it was not my top priority, and I have only now got around to reading it.
Lenin’s life is of course interesting because he changed the world. He created a revolutionary movement and took power in an empire. He inspired generations. He was responsible for the deaths of multitudes, in many cases personally. So we are entitled to ask how this came about.
Sebestyen is good on the basics. Russia was seething with revolutionary movements in the late nineteenth century. Lenin’s genius was to bind them together with a shared ideology and a centralised political direction. He was helped by literacy and by the organisation of printed party newspapers. As a succession of weak governments in Russia collapsed, starting with the Tsar, he was in the right place at the right time, because he had planned to be. And he ruled with terror for a couple of years, before he died.
He had also endured years of exile, along with his wife and his other long-term partner (they knew about each other perfectly well). He was already a celebrated figure; when he was shipped from Zürich to Russia in the famous sealed train, the likes of Stefan Zweig and James Joyce passed sardonic comment. By the time he took power, his health was failing, and his early death was accelerated by wounds from an assassination attempt. There is an interesting human story there.
Unfortunately I cannot really recommend this particular biography. For a start, it does not actually answer my question about the venue of the Second Congress, as the author had assured me it would. I caught several misspellings of names of minor figures, which looked orthographically suspect to me and where Google instantly confirmed my suspicions. A couple of memorably gory incidents of state violence were either not confirmed or flatly contradicted when I checked other sources. Many of the good bits are simply copied without comment from Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife (though I suspect that’s true of a lot of Leninology).
I will have to resign myself to the loss from historical memory of the location of the rat-infested flour warehouse where Lenin and the comrades argued in 1903. But this has scratched my itch to know more about the man. You can get it here.
This was the top unread non-fiction book on my shelves. Next on that pile is What If?, by Randall Munroe.
Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao. Second paragraph of third chapter:
I lurch up from my straw bed, where I’ve been festering with a twisted stomach all night, turning my wooden hairpin over and over and over in my hand like a thick chopstick.
The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I know you were,” I said grimly, taking it, but her expression didn’t change; probably my tone didn’t sound very encouraging. So I added, “If you were going to say no, it wouldn’t have jumped us,” a little pointedly, because she should have figured that much out by then. A mal smart enough to have been quietly lurking in her floor pillows—floor pillows she’d probably inherited from a previous New York enclaver—for years and years, conserving its energy and slurping up anyone other than her who was unlucky enough to be left alone in her room—which is the kind of thing enclavers do, invite friends over for a study group after dinner with the understanding that one of them is going to arrive first and make sure the room is all right—hadn’t just leapt at us because it suddenly lost all self-control. It had done it because Chloe was about to get on board with me, meaning that especially delicious me was about to become a much harder target.
Redemptor, by Jordan Ifueko. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I’m not hiding,” I lied, humming with manic cheer as I swept through the gilded Imperial Suite hallways, balancing a sloshing tureen on one hip and a bundle of scrolls on the other. “I’m busy. You haven’t had your coneflower tea yet, have you?”
A Snake Falls to Earth, by Darcie Little Badger. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Surrounded by markers and pieces of construction paper, thirteen year-old Nina sat cross-legged on the living room floor, staring at a scanned copy of Rosita’s portrait. She had to make an ancestral chart for class; it was a social studies project worth 10 percent of the class grade. Due to her tribe’s enrollment requirements, Nina already knew the recent branches on her family tree, so the project should have involved minimal research. And initially, yeah, it had been easy. First, Nina Arroyo had written her name, date of birth, and birth town on the bottom of a bright green piece of poster paper. Two branches extended upward: Richie N. Arroyo (father, bookstore owner) and Alicia T. Arroyo (mother, translator). Next, her parents grew four grandparents (one living, three deceased), who grew eight great-grandparents (three living, five deceased), who grew sixteen great-great-grandparents (all deceased). And that’s when things got tricky, since Nina’s teacher would never accept that Great-Great-Grandma Rosita was born in the 1870s (give or take) and died over 150 years later. But everything Nina knew about her ancestor supported this impossible truth.
Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders. Second paragraph of third chapter:
My phone is jittering with all the gossip from Waymaker fandom and random updates about some Clinton High drama that I barely noticed in the midst of my Marrant obsession … and then there’s a message from Rachael on the Lasagna Hats server.
As he heard Stuart’s voice on the other end of the phone he felt his shoulders relax slightly. Although he wasn’t sure what he would work on with his coach today, he knew that for the three months he’d been working with Stuart, they always made progress and he felt better after the calls. Ben started to recount the day’s events, starting with arriving at work to see that the trainee accountant, Jane, who was doing her placement with him currently, had failed once again to follow his instructions. When Jane got into the office he had practically yelled at her, saying that if she didn’t learn to follow simple instructions she’d never make it at this firm. Although he did apologize later, she was still being slow with everything she had to do.
I like to read self-help books occasionally, and this was an interestingly different read, based on the proposition that a lot of our mental behaviour can be analysed in terms of the parts of the brain stimulated (or not) by various activities and the neurochemistry involved. There is a part of me that dislikes the thought that my perceptions and feelings are anything more (or less) than completely rational reactions to my accurate and perfect understanding of reality. But I found that liked Brann’s approach to taking a closer look at what is going on within the brain, and finding better ways to process the things the outside world flings at us. Understanding a process is usually the first step to influencing its outcome. So I got a bit more out of it than I had hoped. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O’Reilly.
‘Better late than never, Miss Travers,’ he said, glancing at the wall-mounted clock. It was almost 6pm.
Another in the series of Lethbridge-Stewart novels from Candy Jar books, this takes the Brigadier and crew, including Anne Travers, to Australia to investigate mysterious alien eggs which exert a peculiar influence on the minds of those who touch them. There are aliens behind it all of course. As is normally the case for this series, it’s well done and will keep me reading more of them. You can get it here.
I wondered what this slob’s line was. Or, rather, what Hubbard’s line was going to be. It was less than half a century since the Moon had really been opened up, and already we had not only bureaucrats by the score but hired thugs muscling a way in for the Hubbards of the world – the Hubbards who had gutted the world and now wanted … what?
The novelisation is by John Burke, author of over a hundred books (mostly novelisations and tie-ins), of which the best known is his treatment of the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night. I was very pleasantly surprised. Where the film stuttered a bit in terns of style and tone, Burke has gone for a relentless noir vibe in the novelisation, which also enables him to smoothe over some of the awkward bits in the story. I thought it came across much better on the page than on screen. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 62) The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt A Short History of Kosovo, by Noel Malcolm Stability Operations in Kosovo 1999-2000: A Case Study, by Jason Fritz The Smell of War, by Roland Bartetzko Presidential Election, by John Danforth et al Make Your Brain Work, by Amy Brann Heaven Sent, by Kara Dennison Hell Bent, by Alyssa Franke
SF 10 (YTD 60) Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia (did not finish) Victories Greater than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik Moon Zero Two, by John Burke Redemptor, by Jordan Ifueko A Snake Falls to Earth, by Darcie Little Badger Winter’s Orbit, by Everina Maxwell Soulstar, by C.L. Polk (did not finish) Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 18) The Unofficial Master Annual, ed. Mark Worgan The New Unusual, by Adrian Sherlock and Andy Frankham-Allen
5,100 pages (YTD 43,700) 11/20 (YTD 69/167) by non-male writers (Northcutt, Brann, Dennison, Franke, Melia, Anders, Valente, Novil, Ifueko, Little Badger, Maxwell, Polk) 4/20 (YTD 24/167) by non-white writers (Ifueko, Little Badger, Polk, Rushdie)
315 books currently tagged “unread”, 1 less than last month
Reading now Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen The Initiate, by Louise Cooper Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher
Coming soon (perhaps) The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo Alaska Sampler 2014, ed. Deb Vanasse and David Marusek Sprawl, by Cat Sparks Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O’Reilly The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall “Tangents”, by Greg Bear Mr Britling Sees it Through, by H. G. Wells Voorbij de grenzen van de ernst, by Kamagurka Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray Metamorphoses, by Ovid What If?, by Randall Munroe Empire Of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Second paragraph of third story (“Ghost of a Chance):
It sort of got me. Maybe because she was so tiny and her hair was so white. Maybe because, white hair and all, she looked so young and helpless. But mostly, I think, because of what she said. “There’s something following me.” Not “someone.” “Something.” So I just naturally hauled out after her.
I got this in 2020 expecting that the title story would be a finalist and indeed likely winner of the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Novelette, and indeed it won by a long way. But it took me until now to get around to reading the rest of the collection. These are all above average stories for the pulp era, with women characters who show signs of three-dimensionality, and some great ideas. “Killdozer!”, the story of a large machine possessed by alien forces, is still the standout of the lot. You can get it here.
I was struck that in the story “Chromium Helmet”, the villain’s name is Wickersham, which was my great-grandmother’s maiden name. Her nephew, Lieutenant-General Cornelius W. Wickersham, had just been appointed head of the New York National Guard when the story was written in 1946, so it was a name in the news.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next is The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell, though I think I’ll take the chance to read all of my unread Lychford novellas.
A student at the London School of Economics, Delgado did not complete his degree. He only lasted 18 months working in the business sector before pursuing his dream of being air actor at the age of 20. Starting out in repertory, through sheer determination, hard work and natural talent, he became a familiar figure on film, television and radio. The list of names he worked with is a who’s who of film stars, including Alex Guinness, John Mills, Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston, Laurence Olivier, Diana Dors, Rex Harrison, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. The diversity of that list shows that, whilst often typecast as the villain, Delgado was far from being a one-trick pony. He could lend his talents to a variety of genres, from the swashbuckling adventure and Hammer horror, to pantomime and comedy.
Another of the unofficial annuals, following the unofficial Doctor Who annuals for 1965, 1972 and 1987, this takes the Delgado!Master as the central character and has him endure various adventures of his own. One or two of them could have benefitted from a firmer smack of the editor’s hand, but in general it’s an entertaining exploration of one of the most important secondary characters of the show. There’s a particularly good early one with the Monk.
My copy is in the Omnibus edition with the unofficial 1965 and 1972 Doctor Who annuals, and also includes a few Seventh Doctor/Ace stories in case the series had been continued.
These were the four novels that won the BSFA, Clarke and Tiptree Awards in 2007 for work of 2006. I should say also that the Tiptree jury gave a special citation to James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips, which I too found an excellent book. When I read it in 2007, I wrote:
This is surely a model of how to write a biography. Although her subject died in 1987, Julie Phillips has been through all her private papers, done the necessary bureaucratic sleuthing through her career, dug into her parents’ background, interviewed the elderly first husband and many other relatives and friends, reflected on the wider social and literary currents of the time illustrated by the main narrative, and supported it all with extensive notes.
But that’s not enough to make a successful biography. To do that you have to not only know your subject; you have to have chosen someone who is in some way fascinating in their own right, and be able to communicate that fascination to your readers. Phillips has done that admirably. I haven’t read a lot of Tiptree’s work (having said which, there isn’t so very much to read), but I think you could safely give this book to someone who had never heard of her, even someone who never reads science fiction, and sill expect them to enjoy it.
Most readers, however, will have bought this book largely to find out more about Tiptree/Sheldon’s writing; we don’t get anything about that until halfway through, but I don’t think anyone will be bored by the first fifty years of Sheldon’s life – privileged Chicago upbringing, childhood safaris to Africa, a Christmas elopement and disastrous first marriage, World War II and the CIA, psychological research, a better choice of second husband.
And then the decade of fame as SF writer James Tiptree, Jr, producing strange, memorable stories, winning Hugos and Nebulas for them, engaging in intimate correspondence with the luminaries of the genre, but all under a pseudonym which was eventually exposed. I had not realised, however, that the Hugo and nebula for “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” both came after the revelation of her true identity.
The one weak point in Phillips’ analysis has been well illuminated by Farah Mendlesohn: she doesn’t convincingly explain Sheldon’s attitude to sexuality – in fairness, a complex question, and one to which we will probably never know the real answer (although Farah’s answer is more convincing than Phillips’).
I am in a rush this morning in Georgetown, just a few miles from where Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree lived and died, so don’t have time to write more about this brilliant book. But we are promised that the paperback will include more photographs, and more of Sheldon’s own art, so I may find myself buying it all over again. [So far, I haven’t.]
You can get it here. It won the relevant Hugo and Locus Awards as well, and got a citation from the BSFA (who did not make a Non-Fiction award that year).
The four novels were all new to me. I read these in reverse order of popularity on LibraryThing, so the first up is the second of three Tiptree books in this post, Half Life, by Shelley Jackson. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The fact was conceived on the bus from Hollywood, where Mama’s big break had just fallen through. She had fired her agent in a fit of pique and was going back to New York, where they loved her. They being the regulars at a bohemian nightclub where she did a theatrical number that combined song and dance with dramatic monologue. Men wet their hankies when she did the sad song, and ladies in top hats licked their lips and sent her flowers. Mama peevishly plucked greasy bits out of a bag of doughnuts. Across the aisle sat my father, with sandwiches and soda and a dollhouse on his lap.
I really enjoyed this, and am somewhat stunned to find a host of much more negative online reviews. I’m used to not liking things that everyone else likes (for an example, see below), but it’s unusual for me to like something that a lot of people don’t. It’s a story about a conjoined twin in a world which is like ours except that, due to more nuclear testing, there are a lot more conjoined twins, giving rise to a whole subculture and liberation movement, and it gives Jackson the excuse to explore the politics of selfhood and medical intervention in a firm but ludic way. The sort of book that the Tiptree/Otherwise Award should be honouring. You can get it here.
The BSFA Award for Best Novel went to End of the World Blues, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Elegant, middle-aged, and happily naked, the Japanese woman lifted herself onto one elbow, revealing a heavy breast. “He’s busy.”
I enjoyed this one too. There are two intertwined plots: an Englishman in Tokyo trying to find out who killed his wife, and a girl from a far future dying earth who has ended up in our time. I got slightly lost in places but I really enjoyed the ride. Jesse Hudson suggests that Grimwood is the 21st century Zelazny; I take the point. You can get it here.
The Clarke Award went to Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Vic’s home was a coldwater walk-up in South End which he inherited, along with his entree into the business, from a retired entradista and tour guide called Bonaventure. He had two rooms and a shower. He never cooked or ate there, though there was an induction stove and the place always smelled of old food. It smelled of old clothes, too, old tenancies, years of dust; but it was close enough to the event aureole, which was his professional requirement. Vic slept on a bed, he sat in a chair, he shaved in a mirror; like anyone else he bought all those things at a repro franchise at the end of the road, the day he moved in. He kept his zip-up gabardine jackets and Inga Malink artisan shirts in a wardrobe from Earth, rose veneer over boxwood circa 1932AD, that far away, that long ago. Out one window he had a good view of a bridge; out the other it was a segment of the noncorporate spaceport, primarily weeds and chainlink fence.
I disliked Light, the first volume of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, and didn’t much enjoy Empty Space, the third volume. True to form, I found Nova Swing unmemorable and uninteresting. A lot of people rave about Harrison’s work, but I find him pretty unreadable. You can get it here.
End of the World Blues and Nova Swing were both on both the BSFA and Clarke ballots, but the other nominees were all different and I have not read any of them. The BSFA for Short Fiction went to “The Djinn’s Wife”, by Ian McDonald.
Finally, as already discussed, the Tiptree Award went jointly to Half Life and to The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente. The second paragraph of the third chapter of the latter is:
Instead, he glanced awkwardly at the steaming food. On the little square of silk lay a glistening roasted dove, fat peaches and cold pears, a half loaf of buttery bread covered in jam, broiled turnips and potatoes, a lump of hard cheese, and several sugared violets whisked away from the table garnish. He drew from his pocket a flask of pale watered wine, the great prize of his kitchen adventures.
I enjoyed this a lot. It’s a revision of the Arabian Nights, in a fantasy world of many kingdoms and races, with a much more gender-balanced set of narratives than the original (which was itself not all that bad). Lots of nesting of narrative within narrative; lots of old orders ripe for subversion or overthrow; some witty moments as well. Half Life is still my favourite of these four, but In the Night Garden is close. You can get it here.
Apart from two winners and a Special Mention for the Phillips biography, the Tiptree Award had a relatively restrained honor roll of seven novels, none of which I have read; one, The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow, was also on the BSFA ballot. The Hugo and Nebula that year both went to The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. None of the Hugo or Nebula finalists was on the BSFA, Clarke or Tiptree lists.
Next in this sequence: The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall; Brasyl, by Ian McDonald; and Black Man, by Richard Morgan.
I am working on a small project about Kosovo at the moment, and improving my reading around the subject. No detailed write-ups as those are for my project notes.
Kosovo: A Short History, by Noel Malcolm. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Unfortunately there is very little direct evidence about conditions in Kosovo during those earlier centuries of Bulgarian and Byzantine rule. We can assume that the Slav population that had settled in Kosovo was brought within the cultural realm of the Bulgarian empire, which means that it would have been included in the Bulgarian dioceses of the Orthodox church. Thanks to the work of Saints Cyril and Methodius (and their followers) in the ninth century, the Slavs had a liturgy and other texts in their own language, written in either of two newly invented alphabets: Cyrillic and Glagolitic. The western macedonian town of Ohrid developed strongly as a cultural and religious centre in the ninth and tenth centuries, and by the end of Tsar Samuel’s reign the archbishopric of Ohrid included bishoprics in Skopje, Lipljan (Alb.: Lipjan; a town just south of Pristina) and Prizren.1 Although the formal division of the Christian Church into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox did not occur until 1054, it would not be anachronistic to describe this Bulgarian Christianity as Eastern in the ninth and tenth centuries; the roots of the conflict between East and West went back a long way. (The Slav liturgy was at first violently rejected by the Roman Church, on the grounds that God spoke only three languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin). 1 Gelzer, Patriarchat, p. 4; Gjini, Ipeshkivia, pp. 79-80.
Magisterial stuff, which unfortunately takes us only to 1997 and the emergence of the KLA. Unlikely to be bettered as a summary of historical knowledge, especially in the medieval period. You can get it here.
Stability Operations in Kosovo 1999-2000: A Case Study, by Jason Fritz. Second paragraph of third chapter:
The President and NATO members supported an air campaign because it excluded the obligation of ground forces, pressured Milosevic toward compliance, and limited allied exposure to losses. The rejection of a ground option satisfied domestic political interests across the Alliance, but limited the seriousness of the threat posed to Milosevic. NATO publicly ruled out ground forces to assuage citizens concerned about starting a new war, but the announcement also signaled to Serbia the limits of U.S. and NATO commitment.94 The guidance from the NCA, discussed in the following section as the plan developed, provided a limited set of strikes to draw Serbia back to negotiations, going so far as to give a break in hostilities to signal NATO’s preference for a bargain, while allowing for an accelerated series of strikes if that failed. Theoretically it was an ideal strategic approach: a limited use of force to compel the adversary to a negotiated settlement. It limited friendly, enemy, and civilian casualties, did not tie down U.S. forces into an occupation, and while Serbian allies such as Russia would disapprove, it was limited enough to keep Russia on the sidelines. Of importance after the operation began, not only did NATO reject a ground component, it refused to plan for any contingency that included ground forces in Kosovo. 94 Nardulli et al., Disjointed War: Military Operations in Kosovo, 1999, 22–23.
Looks at the NATO intervention, especially the air campaign in 1999, from the perspective of lessons to be learned by the US military, of which the most general conclusion is that it is sensible to think ahead of what the political leaders say they want this week, and plan for what they might want next week. You can get it here.
The Smell of War, by Roland Bartetzko. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Be a little coward! Take it easy in the beginning and don’t volunteer for any dangerous assignments. Wear your body protection, even when the whole squad is laughing at you.
Personal account of a German who fought for the Croats in Bosnia and for the KLA in Kosovo. Author subsequently convicted of murder, attempted murder and terrorism for a post-war bomb attack on a Serbian government office. You can get it here, but I think you can give it a miss.
If humans are no longer evolving, the premise of the Darwin Awards is flawed. And even if the premise of the Darwin Awards is valid, do the particular stories in this book actually represent instances of evolution in action?
I got this as a freebie at Eastercon (I think as a prize in a raffle or something like that). It’s an anthology of accounts of deaths and gruesome injuries caused (supposedly) by the foolishness of the victims, the central concept being that be removing themselves from the human gene pool, the victims deserve awards for implementing natural selection. It was not really to my taste. You can get it here.
This was actually my top unread book by a woman, at the time I acquired it. Next on that list (and acquired subsequently) is Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Aleksievich.
He paused to look up at St Joseph’s Cathedral, said to be the beating heart of the Dome. At the top of the entrance stairs, there was a massive door where a bishop and head teacher waited for him.
Bought this back in 2015 because it was being hyped relentlessly by the author; took until now to read it; bounced off the leaden prose and won’t finish. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2015 and the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both of those piles is Jocasta, by Brian Aldiss.
On the morning of 7th March, 1220, a royal messenger arrived at the gatehouse of Corfe Castle with the command of the Council to Peter de Mauley to convey the Lord Richard to Westminster for the coronation of his brother. The preliminary ceremony at Gloucester had been something of a dress rehearsal, designed to bind the country together. Now that order was restored there was no further obstacle to the fulfilment of the coronation in the traditional place. On his deathbed the Marshal had entrusted the person of Henry to Pandulf, the new Papal Legate,1 who had rather annoyed Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches by adopting a de haut en bas attitude towards them. Behind this ill-assorted triumvirate was Stephen Langton, ‘in the minds of many men as well as in his own the spiritual successor of St. Thomas of Canterbury’;2 and it was he who was chiefly responsible for organizing this second coronation. 1 Powicke, 46 2 ibid., 47
OK, hands up – how many of you knew about the thirteenth-century English prince who captured Jerusalem and got elected Holy Roman Emperor (though he was never crowned), at the same time doing his best to defend the Jews of England from being massacred?
Richard of Cornwall (1209-1272) is a fascinating character who has been almost completely forgotten. He was the younger son of King John, and younger brother of Henry III. As Earl of Cornwall from the age of 16, he became fabulously rich on the profits of the tin mines and took his Cornish responsibilities seriously. In 1230, he married Isabel Marshal, a rich widow and daughter of everyone’s favourite medieval knight, William the Marshal. She died in 1240 and in 1243 he married Sanchia of Provence, whose sister Eleanor was already married to his brother Henry III (their two other sisters were also married to kings); she died in 1261, and in 1269 he married a teenage Dutch noblewoman, Beatrice of Falkenburg, who survived him by only five years.
The politics of Henry III’s reign is very messy, but the dominant narrative is that of struggle between the king and the leader of the nobles, Simon de Montfort, who was incidentally married to Henry and Richard’s sister Eleanor. De Montfort is regarded in English political tradition as one of the founders of parliamentary democracy. In fact he was French, started his career in the brutal Albigensian crusade, and then took advantage of Henry III’s disastrous leadership to mount a coup and hold Henry and Richard prisoner, ruling England for a year, robbing and killing the Jews, before in turn being overthrown, killed and dismembered.
This was the most dramatic case of Richard of Cornwall’s life being disrupted by trying to extract his brother from the latest political mess he had got into. Richard’s diplomatic skills, used frequently to calm the situation in England, were frankly amazing. On crusade in 1240, arriving in Palestine after a series of military reversals, he picked up the situation and negotiated the return of Jerusalem to Christian rule without fighting a single battle. The front cover of Roche’s book shows a contemporary sketch of the negotiation.
He also negotiated the release of French soldiers captured during the unsuccessful military first leg of the crusade. This paid off less than a year later, when he and Henry III, on a speculative military expedition in France, found themselves unexpectedly confronted with a massively larger French force and facing annihilation. Richard stripped off his armour, donned a pilgrim’s smock, walked unarmed into the French camp (to the cheers of the French soldiers who recognised him from Palestine) and negotiated a dignified retreat. Extraordinary.
He had impressed other European leaders, and in 1257 the Archbishop of Cologne decided to support his election as Holy Roman Emperor, persuading three of the other six electors to vote the same way. Richard was never able to get officially crowned by the Pope – the next Holy Roman Emperor as such was not crowned until 1312, forty years after his death – but he did hold the title of King of the Romans, was crowned with that title in Aachen Cathedral, and successfully administered the Rhineland for fifteen years, though often at long distance from England.
The end of Richard’s life was not happy. In 1271 his older surviving son, Henry, was murdered in church in Italy by his own first cousins, the sons of Simon de Montfort, and a few weeks later his great-nephew, Henry III’s grandson John, died at the age of four while staying with Richard. (If he had lived, Edward I’s successor would have been John II rather than Edward II, which would have given Christopher Marlowe one less thing to write about.) Richard had a stroke that winter and died in early April the next year.
His younger son, Edmund, was a successful courtier who served as regent of England in the 1280s, but died without children in 1300. (Edmund’s wife was a granddaughter of Isabel Marshal, his father’s first wife, by her previous marriage. Pay attention, there at the back.) Richard had no other surviving children by any of his three wives, though apparently there were a number of others from less formal liaisons.
The 1966 biography by T.W.E. Roche is infused with a sense of reconnecting England to the positive elements of its continental past, and one can feel the optimism of the new approach to Europe, and Germany in particular, emanating from its pages. How times have changed…
I was left wondering about two aspects of Richard’s life. First off, he was married three times, but we are told that he also had many other relationships and several illegitimate children. Roche is a bit coy about this side of his hero’s personality.
Second, I really wondered what languages Richard would have used and known? The English court language was still Norman French, and he must have had enough Latin to manage administration, but surely neither would have got Richard very far when speaking to people in Germany or Cornwall, let alone negotiating with the Ayyubids in Palestine?
I’m glad to see that there is a new biography coming out in September – the first one in English since this was published in 1966 – and I suspect I’ll just have to get that as well. Richard’s story is crying out for a decent fictional treatment – it would be a great basis for a film or graphic novel. Meantime, you can get The King of Almayne here.
Second paragraph of “Erostratus”/”Erostrate”, third story in my edition (it has been published under two different titles, so I give both above):
On a seventh floor balcony: that’s where I should have spent my whole life. You have to prop up moral superiorities with material symbols or else they’ll tumble. But exactly what is my superiority over men? Superiority of position, nothing more: I have placed myself above the human within me and I study it. That’s why I always liked the towers of Notre-Dame, the platforms of the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, my seventh floor on the Rue Delambre. These are excellent symbols.
Au balcon d’un sixième : c’est là que j’aurais du passer toute ma vie. Il faut étayer les supériorités morales par des symboles matériels, sans quoi elles retombent. Or, précisément, quelle est ma supériorité sur les hommes ? Une supériorité de position, rien d’autre : je me suis placé au-dessus de l’humain qui est en moi et que je contemple. Voilà pourquoi j’aimais les tours de Notre-Dame, les plates-formes de la tour Eiffel, le Sacré-cœur, mon sixième de la rue Delambre. Ce sont d’excellents symboles.
A collection of five short stories by the famous philosopher, two of which, the first and the last, are really good; “The Wall” is the story of a man condemned to death in the Spanish Civil War awaiting his execution, and “Childhood of a Leader” is the story of an authoritarian politician’s rise to power and abandonment of his emotional connections. I was not as overwhelmed by the others; “Intimacy” is a rather dull story about sex, and portrayal of a serial killer in “Erostratus” is not really in tune with today’s Zeitgeist. But the two good ones are very good. You can get it here.
This was my top book acquired last year and my top non-genre fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney, and The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
They arrived at the Hotel de las Cisternas. The Marquis immediately conducted him to his apartment, and began to express his satisfaction at finding him at Madrid. Lorenzo interrupted him.
Another of the books that I was reading with a group of Facebook friends, at the rate of a chapter a week. It’s one of the original Gothic novels, published in 1796, full of English hand-wringing about the evils of Catholicism and the power of the Church in Spain, and the stereotypical corruption of the monastic system. It’s full of glorious nonsense; at one point, a character declares that she can only be saved from poisoning if the Monk of the title will have sex with her, which is a rather romantic view of the interaction between poisoning symptoms and libido. The book slips further and further from the real world into horror and at the end the Monk has a decisive interaction with Lucifer himself. Fun stuff, and you can see its roots in much later horror. You can get it here.
She’s been that way [sick] for as long as I can remember.
Won the Vandersteen prize in 2015, for best Dutch-language comic of the year. It’s a moody Bildungsroman about a young noble in declining Prussia; his father is a war hero but has only one leg, his mother has been ill for years, the servants are leaving, the castle is falling down, and his older brother is just mean. I thought the art was evocative and well executed, and the way in which the faces of everyone other than the protagonists is blurred out is a nice focussing gimmick, but there didn’t really seem to be much happening in terms of plot. You can get it here.
