This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 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.
I had two nights away from Belgium that month, a Clarke meeting in London and a work meeting in The Hague. I also enjoyed a massive St Patrick’s Day whammy of Irish Embassy Reception on the evening of the 16th, Northern Ireland representation breakfast on the 17th and the Irish College in Leuven, where it all started, on the evening of the 17th. A couple of days later I attended the screening of a film about Lyra McKee.
Here are two journalists, both with the same first name, at the Irish embassy reception.
With the Clarke deadline closing in, I read 37 books that month, though again I did not finish those that seemed insufficiently science fictional (or insufficiently good) to have a chance of winning.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 22) Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright Management Lessons fromGame of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros, by Fiona Moore Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins Wordsworth’s French Daughter, by George McLean Harper Kerblam!, by Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L. Rodebaugh William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, by Émile Legouis The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, by James Mortimer The Kosova Liberation Army, by James Pettifer The Face of Britain, by Simon Schama
Non-genre 1 (YTD 4) Ratlines, by Stuart Neville
SF 23 (YTD 64) The Key to Fury, by Kristin Cast (did not finish) Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle (did not finish) The Visitors, by Owen W Knight (did not finish) Thrust, by Lidia Yuknavitch Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel Neom, by Lavie Tidhar The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd (did not finish) Luca, by Or Luca Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, by Aliette de Bodard Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Pod by Laline Paull The Best of Ian McDonald Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, eds. Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier Glitterati, by Oliver K. Langmead The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan Off-Target, by Eve Smith Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman Last Exit, by Max Gladstone (did not finish) Speaking Bones, by Ken Liu (did not finish) Ricky’s Hand, by David Quantick The Moonday Letters, by Emmi Itäranta
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 10) Warring States, by Mags Halliday The HAVOC Files: The Laughing Gnome, ed ???
Comics 2 (YTD 7) Revolutions of Terror, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande and Arianna Florean The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
10,100 pages (YTD 26,200) 17/37 (YTD 46/110) by non-male writers (Albright, Moore, Jacobs, Cast, Yuknavitch, St. John Mandel, Shepherd, Luca, de Bodard, Paull, Thomas/Morigan, Egan, Smith, Itäranta, Halliday, Casagrande/Florean, Bechdel) 7/37 (YTD 21/110) by a non-white writer (Cast, Shepherd, Luca, de Bodard, Paull, Thomas/Wiggins, Liu)
Some really good books this month. From the Clarke submissions, Venomous Lumpsucker (get it here), The Anomaly (get it here), Off Target (get it here) and Children of Memory (get it here) were all excellent. Several good biographies too: Rob Wilkins on Terry Pratchett (get it here), Madeleine Albright on herself (get it here), Alison Bechdel on herself in graphic format (get it here). See also Simon Schama on British portraits (get it here) and the Best of Ian McDonald‘s short fiction (get it here). I don’t need to cover the less good ones, I think.
‘I like to sit with my back to the engine,’ he explained.
I had read this as a teenager, which I went through my Flann O’Brien phase, and approached re-reading it with some trepidation; would the Suck Fairy have visited this collection of excruciating puns based around a totally fictional friendship between John Keats (1795-1821) and George Chapman (1559-1634)?
I’m afraid so. I am sure that over the table in a bar, Flann O’Brien would have told these with gusto, his face barely twitching as he reached the end and his friends collapsed with hilarity. But culture has moved on since his time, especially in Ireland, and a lot of the stories are laboured journeys to an uninspiring punchline. Here is one of the less aged ones:
One winter’s evening Keats looked up to find Chapman regarding him closely. He naturally enquired the reason for this scrutiny.
‘I was thinking about those warts on your face,’ Chapman said. ‘
What about them?’ the poet said testily. ‘
Oh, nothing,’ Chapman said. ‘It just occurred to me that you might like to have them removed.’
‘They are there for years,’ Keats said, ‘and I don’t see any particular reason for getting worried about them now.’
‘But they are rather a blemish,’ Chapman persisted. ‘I wouldn’t mind one – but four fairly close together, that’s rather—’
‘Four?’ Keats cried. ‘There were only three there this morning!’
‘There are four there now,’ Chapman said.
‘That’s a new one on me,’ Keats said.
You see what I mean?
The book also includes the script of Eamon Morrissey’s one-man show based on O’Brien’s work, “The Brother”, where the punchline is that although many claim to have died for Ireland, the barman was born for Ireland (in that his mother distracted a hostile British soldier at just the right moment to save the narrator). It’s a cringeworthy set-up, but it also sparks the interesting thought that there has been very little writing about gender-based violence during the Irish conflicts of the early 1920s. Can there really have been none at all?
This was the non-genre book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (I don’t think the stories are very sfnal, even if Keats and Chapman lived two centuries apart in real life, and most of the stories are set long after Keats’ time, never mind Chapman’s). Next on that pile is a rather different matter, Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.
The 81st World Science Fiction Convention opens in Chengdu a month from tomorrow, and I’ve been looking for books about the city to set the scene. A couple that I saw on Amazon looked cheap and interesting and I bought them without too much investigation. Both are memoirs by Americans about their time teaching in Chengdu. Both are, frankly, terrible.
Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdiel LeRoy, is a consolidation of his emailed newsletters home to friends and family from 2005. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In China, foreign visitors are relentlessly assaulted with bizarre arrangements of English words—symptomatic of a country growing faster than its competence. Among my favorites was a sign above a men’s room saying, ‘Toilet of Man’. More recently, I came across this promotional copy from a bed manufacturer: “Whenever the time that night come, grow to have the Yalisi mattress sweet concomitant, let you fallen asleep safely in the quite night [sic].”
I am afraid this is symptomatic. The author wanders through Chengdu (and in later books, other parts of China) getting fired from teaching jobs because he is basically an asshole with no self-awareness, and zero empathy for the culture in which he has chosen to embed himself. Its only merit is that it is quite short.
Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal, dates from a few years later, 2012-13. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Michael, what will you do tomorrow? We’d like to take you into town!”
This is actually even worse; the books starts by mocking the stewardesses on his flight to China from Seattle for the crime of being over 50, and continues in the nastiest possible tone of snide at the country and the people he meets and teaches. I couldn’t finish it.
Sometimes when people show you who they are, you should believe them, and these two authors show rather more of who they are than I wanted to see. I’m not going to do my usual trick of supplying links to buy these books, because I don’t encourage anyone to buy them.
I do have three other books set in Chengdu on my shelf, all by Chinese writers, which I think will make a difference. Two are the first two books in a promised crime trilogy, Death Notice and Fate by Zhou Haohui; the other is Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, by Murong Xuecun. I’m not sure if I will get to writing them up here before Chengdu Worldcon, but I’m totally sure that they will be a lot better than either of these offensive piles of rubbish.
A Black Archive on the recently concluded 13th Doctor era, like Kerblam! looking at one of the more unsatisfactory Chibnall/Whittaker stories. After it was first broadcast, I wrote:
A very obvious riff on The Green Death, my favourite Third Doctor story, which also had some great return-to-Sheffield characterisation moments, and really impressive special effects, but completely muffed the ending. (What happens to the bad guy? Is it really more compassionate to lock the spiders up until they die?)
Rewatching it this time, all the same points occurred to me; the other thing is that the production was very obviously saving money by not having many extras – I mean, what American billionaire would go anywhere without at least half a dozen aides?
Some Black Archive books on similarly problematic stories try gamely to make us see the best in them. Sam Maleski here is frank about Arachnids‘ shortcomings as well as its thematic beats, and doesn’t go on too long about either, turning in a decent analysis of an inferior script.
The first (and longest) chapter, “Doctor Who and the Spiders from Sheffield”, starts by admitting that the story begins and ends on very different notes, but then goes into an in-depth analysis of giant spiders (and other creepy-crawlies) in science fiction film and in Doctor Who in particular. He omits Adrian Tchaikovsky, but he’s not really looking at print.
The second chapter (almost as long), “Yorkshire Gothis”, looks at the ways in which the story is Gothic – a theme in several of the Black Archives I have read recently – and at the importance fo the setting in Yorkshire, and of the shadow of Donald Trump.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Muddled Politics”, is:
But while the aesthetics of the episode are deeply and incandescently political, it seems rather unclear as to what course the characters, and by extension the viewers, should pursue as a response. It’s an episode marred by contradictions: these sometimes enrich its text, and other times simply prove frustrating. In order to demonstrate this, this chapter focuses on three focal points that the episode uses to signal its political nature: science, minority identities and the influence of political music.
It looks at how the story opens up, and then basically squanders, engagement with the politics of science, race and gender, and music. These points are particularly well made.
The fourth and final chapter, “Absence, or Clearing the Cobwebs”, argues that even though the story fails to answer a lot of the interesting questions it raises (including also what “family” means, for the Doctor and for us), that should not stop us from thinking further about them.
Sam Maleski took on a tricky assignment here, and I think did a good job as far as that can be done. You can get it here.
Hunger snaked him through the maze. He clambered over the tailgate and dropped to the ground. A fire snapped somewhere invisibly, bronzing the side of a neighboring truck, packed likewise with a teetering mass of household goods. Down the flickering alleyway between them—Tom could have stretched out his arms and lay his hands flat against either vehicle—he glimpsed a temporary encampment: two or three wagons and half again as many beat-up trucks and cars, parked nose in among a scattered grove of towering cottonwood and oak. In the rough circle between, a handful of children chased each other in some game impervious to adult logic, their clamor flitting in the dark. Their fathers here and there hunkered in circles, lean and grim, peering out from under their hats as they drew sticks through the dust or smoked hand-rolled cigarettes.chased each other in some game impervious to adult logic, their clamor flitting in the dark. Their fathers here and there hunkered in circles, lean and grim, peering out from under their hats as they drew sticks through the dust or smoked hand-rolled cigarettes.
I am not sure why I got this back in 2017, but I am sure that it’s a shame I left it so long until reading it; a very short novella about a quest for angels during the Dustbowl, a sort of John Steinbeck meets Ray Bradbury, as one reviewer put it. I don’t think I have read much else by this writer but perhaps I need to correct that. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
The highlight of February this year was my visit to Gallifrey One in Los Angeles again:
And visited by my sister and her daughter, we re-enacted the gestures of the statues in the forest.
I read 28 books that month, though a number were Clarke nominees where I read only 50 pages either because I didn’t think they were very good or because I didn’t think they were science fiction, or both.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 13) The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey Through Everyday Life, by Marcus Du Sautoy Timelash, by Phil Pascoe Listen, by Dewi Small Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle
Non-genre 1 (YTD 3) Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
SF 19 (YTD 41) To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings (did not finish) How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu Roadside Picnic, by Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky The Furrows, by Namwali Serpell The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Wild Cards: Deuces Down, ed. John J. Miller Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde (did not finish) Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse (did not finish) Until the Last of Me, by Sylvain Neuvel(did not finish) Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo (did not finish) The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews (did not finish) Peculiar Lives, by Philip Purser Hallard Eyes of the Void, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Metronome, by Tom Watson Leech, by Hiron Ennes (did not finish) Harpan’s Worlds: Worlds Apart, by Terry Jackman (did not finish) Tales from Planet Earth, by Arthur C Clarke Oval, by Elvia Wilk
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 8) Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light, by Rona Munro Lucy Wilson & the Bledoe Cadets, by Tim Gambrell Doctor Who: Timelash, by Glen McCoy
Comics 1 (YTD 5) Agent Provocateur, by Gary Russell et al
The best of these were two of the Clarke submissions, Metronome, by Tom Watson (which we eventually shortlisted; get it here) and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (a Hugo finalist; get it here). I’ll draw a veil over the worst of them.
Perhaps a fire, but where no one gets hurt? Just flames and fire engines. We can all stand around watching, with flasks, and Ron can shout advice to the firefighters. Or an affair, that would be fun. Preferably mine, but I’m not greedy, so long as there’s a bit of scandal, like a big age difference, or someone suddenly needing a replacement hip. Perhaps a gay affair? We haven’t had one of those at Coopers Chase yet, and I think everyone would enjoy it. Maybe someone’s grandson could go to prison? Or a flood that doesn’t affect us? You know the sort of thing I mean.
I know Richard Osman of course as a TV quiz show personality; this is the second in a series of murder mysteries solved by a group of retirees in a coastal town in the south of England. The mystery is unrealistically complex, but the character interactions are great fun, and although the tone in general is comedic, there’s also a serious and realistic emotional freight. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-genre novel, and my top unread book acquired last year. Next on those piles respectively are Winter, by Ali Smith, and A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford.
A variety of brain areas implicated in ASD were considered in Chapters 1 and 2, but no focus in the brain emerged as commonly causing ASD. There is no autism producing lesion. The lesion approach to communication disorders had already been challenged by Geschwind2 who resurrected the connectionist approaches of the nineteenth century. He argued that symptoms occurred not because of an area of brain damage, but because brain areas were disconnected. A connectionist, or network, approach to ASD is now widely accepted, as is the brain’s interaction with the environment. This new network model, and the evidence for it, is considered in the second part of this chapter. 2 Geschwind, 1970
This is a hefty volume on autism spectrum disorders, meant for a more expert and knowledgeable audience than me, but which I’m glad we have as a convenient reference point.
(Incidentally, I was stunned and appalled a couple of years ago when I received an email from a person who had put as part of their signature that they knew the cause of autism: “aged sperm”. My daughters were born when I was 30 and 35; my sperm was not all that aged, I think. This person was just casually putting out offensive misinformation in their email signature, to friends and strangers alike! Mind-blowingly inappropriate!)
The book is pretty comprehensive, looking at the rather slim information we have on physical neurological changes in autistic people – this research is very much a work in progress – and in much more detail at the developmental phenomena and educational and health support that are needed; biased of course towards the US system, but with due note being taken of experiences from elsewhere.
The one topic I would have liked to se a bit more on is autistic regression. Our oldest was developing normally until about 2 years old, then lost much of her ability including her speech. One can speculate that in such a case, the brain is somehow overwhelmed – and permanently damaged – by the need to process all the stimuli that a developing child becomes aware of. But it is mere speculation.
On the other hand, I felt very comfortable with the description of the vast amount of research activity that is going on. As consumers, if I can put it that way, we see only the outputs and the occasional tests that we are invited to participate in ourselves. It’s helpful to know that there is a big academic infrastructure behind it all.
One interesting point that I will have to ponder: do we talk to ourselves mentally when we think? And what does this mean for the cognitive abilities of people who don’t have language?
This was the very last book acquired in 2016 that I got around to reading, and I actually finished it last month, nine months after I finished the last book that I acquired in 2015, so I am speeding up.
The unread pile from 2017 is a lot smaller than the 2016 unread pile was last November, so I’ll hope to be expanding the above list again before too long.
That opens up the 2017 books:
Shortest unread book acquired in 2017: A Rumor of Angels, by Dale Bailey
Non-genre longest on the unread shelf: The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien
Non-fiction longest on the unread shelf: Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?, ed. Mick O’Hare
SF longest on the unread shelf: Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission, by George S. Elrick
Top unread book acquired in 2017: Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Nona didn’t want to be just good-looking and dumb; she wanted to be useful. She was dimly aware that she was not what anyone had wanted. This was why she had gone out and got herself a job, even though it wasn’t a paying one.
I completely bounced off the previous two books in this series, both of which were Hugo finalists. But to my surprise, I started off really enjoying this one, as the title character tries to put together her lost memories in a dangerous and violent society not too far from our own. But it lost me again at the end; once she returns to the world of Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, it became boring and confusing, and also there’s a parallel narrative thread which wasn’t integrated into the plot at all, as far as I could see. You can get it here.
5) The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The offices for KPS the name of the organization on the card Tom gave me were on Thirty-seventh, in the same building as the Costa Rican consulate, on the fifth floor. The office apparently shared a waiting room with a small medical practice. I had been in the waiting room for less than a minute when Avella came to get me to take me to her personal office. There was no one else in the KPS office. I guess they, like most everyone else, were working from home.
Very readable and engaging story which I read to the end, a parallel universe with Godzillas; but as usual with Scalzi, all of the characters sound exactly the same (and indeed exactly like Scalzi himself in real life) and the social commentary is paper thin. You can get it here.
4) Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The hob hauled in his box of tools and placed it inside the big doorway.
By a well-known gaming figure, this is about an Orc warrior who decides that she will set up a coffee shop in a fantasy city. There are hilarious capers as she encounters jealous enemies, magical interference with the brewing process (both positive and negative) and love. I honestly don’t think it’s very deep but it’s good fun. You can get it here.
3) The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Her grandmother had taught her that, when Tesla’s rage turned a room incandescent red, the best thing to do was to stay very, very still. The time her elementary school science teacher had marked her correct answer anout the most recent supernova as wrong “because it wasn’t in the textbook” had impressed in Tesla’s mind how effective that stillness could be. It was also the first time she used any version of “I want to speak to the manager” when she asked to go to the principal’s office in a voice that was, in hindsight, too cold and flat for a ten-year-old.
This was very interesting – a detective novel set on an Earth to Mars space cruise. Intricate plotting, lots of good stuff about gender diversity and invisible disabilities, and a very cute dog. And cocktail recipes. I was not quite sure about the ending, though. You can get it here.
2) Nettle and Bone, T. Kingfisher
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I saw you,” said the voice. She squinted against the light and saw the speaker. A man. Perfectly ordinary looking, in the gray-brown garb that everyone wore, here on the edge of the desert. There was nothing that stood out about him, except that he was shouting at her.
As usual with Ursula Vernon, a cracking good read: it’s about a discarded princess who goes on an epic fantasy quest with a gang of unlikely henchbeings. Lots of funny lines and social commentary. Very enjoyable. You can get it here.
1) The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Melquiades claimed the mere thought such a thing might be possible was sacrilege: holiness could not reside in a flower or a drop of rain. Offerings to spirits were the devil’s work.
I thought this was really interesting, a reframing of H.G. Wells in the context of the historical Maya resistance to Mexican rule in the Yucatan. There was a twist three quarters of the way through that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Not especially excited about any of these, but this one gets my vote. You can get it here.
I remember watching and hugely enjoying The Stones of Blood when it was first broadcast in 1978. I’ve come back to it several times and it retains its charm. When I came back to it in 2008, I wrote:
The Stones of Blood was one that I remembered fondly from first time round, and I liked it again on re-watching three decades later. Perhaps, now that puberty is behind me rather than yet to come, I appreciate Mary Tamm’s costumes as Romana all the more. But of course I also have a fascination with megaliths, and this is the only broadcast story that really uses them (though see also the SJA story The Thirteenth Stone). And of the three stories featuring an ancient cult in England within a few years of 1980, this is the only one that really pulls it off well (the other two being Image of the Fendahl and K9 and Company).
When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
We are back on firmer ground [after The Pirate Planet] with The Stones of Blood. This just shows the difference that a decent plot (as opposed to a decent script, which Adams was capable of doing) and good casting and direction can make, though unfortunately we are now slipping into Romana as screamy girl rather than smart aleck, which is a shame, especially as the story has two excellent female leads in Beatrix Lehmann and Susan Engel. (I must also add that the viewing experience on DVD is greatly enhanced by the extras, which include a documentary with Mary Tamm exploring the Rollright Stones where it was filmed.)
It’s a story of two halves, Satanic cults (as previously seen in Image of the Fendahl and The Masque of Mandragora) and then the abandoned prison spaceship with the ruthlessly homicidal justice machines. The story wobbles a bit at times – Beatrix Lehmann, who died a few months after filming, is notably shaky on some of her lines – but stays just the right side of the quality divide. The location filming around the stones is particularly memorable, (including particularly K9 on one of his few field outings) and well blended in with the studio scenes. I am really looking forward to the new novelisation by David Fisher, the author of the original script; the original Terrance Dicks novelisation is workmanlike but not terribly memorable, but Fisher’s two previous novelisations of his own stories – The Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive – are particularly good, among the best Fourth Doctor books and certainly better than the TV originals.
Rewatching it again, I liked it a bit more if anything; it clearly too Beatrix Lehmann a couple of scenes to get comfortable with the situation but once she gets in the swing, she is great. And the monstrous Ogri are depicted as pretty horrifying even though we see very little of what they actually do to people (apart from the unfortunate lady camper). I also liked the clues that the segment is around somewhere nearby, which I picked up on more than on previous watches.
Unusually, though not uniquely, there are two different Target novelisations of the story, the first being a rather workmanlike effort by Terrance Dicks. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Romana straightened up, releasing her end of the tape. A sudden loud cawing sound made her jump. A big black bird was perched on the stone above her head. Romana jumped back. ‘What’s that?’
A longer novelisation by the story’s original author, David Fisher, was released on audio a few years back and is now available in book form. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
The figures pushed back their hoods, revealing themselves to be Mr de Vries, a plump man sporting a wisp of a beard on his chin, and Martha Vickers, a middle-aged lady with the face of a discontented bulldog. She was a resident of the nearby village of Bodcombe Parva, and a member of the local Women’s Institute. Her fellow members would have been astonished to see her there, because she was known to be non-religious and only sang ‘Jerusalem’ under protest. In fact, ever since meeting Mr de Vries a couple of years ago, she had been a pillar of his Druid circle, gradually initiated into the inner mysteries of the BIDS. She used to hunt in her younger days, and unlike some of the other group members was not disturbed by the sight of blood. Hence her presence at all the sacrifices.
Earlier this year the BBC released a new novelisation of an Old Who story – David Fisher, who wrote the original TV story The Stones of Blood, has now converted it not to a print novel but to audiobook format, read with great gusto by Susan Engel (who played the villain of the piece on screen) with John Leeson doing K9’s lines. I had been looking forward to this with hopeful enthusiasm, as Fisher’s novelisations of his other two stories are among the best of the Target range.
I am very glad to say that I was not disappointed. The audio is about twice as long as the original series (four hour-long CDs), and Fisher has bulked out the material with lots more character background and atmosphere than was possible on screen – the full story of the campers gruesomely slain by the Ogri, for example, and various brazen but humorous infodumps. There are lots of decent sound effects as well. Very highly recommended.
I also went back and reread Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of the story for comparison. It must be a lot shorter than Fisher’s new text. I notedof it three years ago that it is “a standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment, somewhat flattening a rather good story” and I found no reason to change my views. I did think Dicks handled the climax of the story with some finesse, but the rest it pretty thin.
The print version is topped and tailed by some lovely personal reminiscences about Fisher by his son Nick Fisher and by the BBC Audio commissioning editor Michael Stevens. It remains a good read.
As my regular reader knows, I myself am pretty interested in megalithic sites and in their mythology. Katrin Thier, the author of this monograph, apparently shares my interest and has given us a good chunky read with no less than seven chapters, not counting introduction and afterword. There’s plenty to say about this story and where it fits in British popular culture.
An introduction sets out Thier’s stall, reviewing the previous careers of writer, director and guest cast and describing the ‘folk horror’ and Gothic modes, and making a link to Irish independence,
Chapter 1, “The Stones”, starts with the bold proposition that “the main guest stars in The Stones of Blood are the King’s Men at Little Rollright in Oxfordshire, playing the Nine Travellers.” Thier reviews the cult of medievalism, especially around the Rollright Stones themselves, and looks at the origin of the Ogri.
Chapter 2, “The Druids”, reviews what is really known about the Druids and the Gorsedds.
Chapter 3, “Megalithic Afterlives”, looks at the scientific investigation of megalithic monuments and how it has been reflected in popular culture (including The Goodies episode “Wacky Wales”, which features Jon Pertwee as a homicidal cultist). Its second paragraph is:
When the Doctor explains to Romana that the circle is a ‘megalithic temple-cum-observatory’, he expresses an interpretation widespread in the 1970s, suggesting that the prehistoric builders of these monuments were not simple undeveloped countryfolk, but were in fact highly sophisticated, maintaining a class of scientists to rival those of the ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The evidence for this was seen in the way many of these monuments seemed to be laid out to allow astronomical calculations. The study of this idea now called archaeo-astronomy (although ‘astro-archaeology’ is also sometimes found, reflecting the different emphasis assumed by different scholars). The idea arose partly out of the well-established observations that some of the major monuments interact with points on the sun’s annual circuit, especially the solstices, and a simple explanation for this is that the monument points to the event it is used to celebrate.
Chapter 4, “The Women”, explores the fact that the two main guest stars are women and that Romana rather than the Doctor carries a lot of the plot. This ties into Graves and Mallory, of course. A nice note – although on screen, Beatrix Lehmann is older than Susan Engel who in turn is older than Mary Tamm, Professor Rumford is the youngest of the three characters, a mere 70ish, whereas Romana is in the first half of her second century and Cessair of Diplos is thousands of years old. (Cessair is a genuine if obscure Celtic figure, but should of course be pronounced with a hard ‘c’.)
Chapter 5, “‘To Wit, a Celtic Goddess'”, looks more deeply at the goddesses – the Morrigan, Nemetona, the Cailleach, Ceridwen and the origin of the Great Seal.
Chapter 6, “Mere Mortals”, looks at the origins of Vivien Fay / Cessair’s other identities. I love this coincidence: the site of the Nine Travellers was supposedly owned at one time by the Little Sisters of St Gudula. St Gudula of course is the patron saint of Brussels, but is also the name of a key character in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, who in the BBC’s 1966 TV adaptation was played by… Beatrix Lehmann!
Chapter 7, “Leaving Earth”, looks at hyperspace, slightly jarring with the themes of the previous six chapters (as indeed the hyperspace parts of the story jar with the rest).
An afterword, “Reithian Gothic?”, points out that the story is really quite informative about megalithic sites and lore, and would have sent the curious viewer off to find out more. It certainly fed my own interest, both on first watching at eleven and since.
This is a good analysis of a good story, even if it’s light on the production details which I usually enjoy hearing about. You can get it here.
Anders Johannsen, captain of the first human starship, tossed and turned in bed trying to find the sleep he so desperately needed, after days of insomnia and stress. Losing the battle as the shouts of his bridge crew reverberated through his mind.
Third in a self-published series. Badly written and incomprehensible. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 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.
Only one trip outside Belgium at the start of this year, to London where unexpectedly I saw Noises Off. Within Belgium, F and I had a great excursion to the Cubes of Herne:
Non-fiction 9 God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, by Rupert Shortt Diary of a Witchcraft Shop 2, by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Horror of Fang Rock, by Matthew Guerrieri Battlefield, by Philip Purser-Hallard The Karmic Curve, by Mary I. Williams Juggle and Hide, by Sharon van Ivan Representing Europeans, by Richard Rose Complexity: A Very Short Introduction, by John H. Holland
Non-genre 2 The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin (did not finish)
Plays 1 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness
Poetry 2 Metamorphoses, by Ovid tr. Stephanie McCarter Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
SF 22 The Circus Infinite, by Khan Wong Fugue for a Darkening Island, by Christopher Priest All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva “The Mountains of Mourning” by Lois McMaster Bujold Full Immersion, by Gemma Amor The Stars Undying, by Emery Robin (did not finish) The Chosen Twelve, by James Breakwell Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez (did not finish) Mercury Rising, by R.W.W. Greene (did not finish) The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo At The Edge Of The World, by Lord Dunsany The Immortality Thief, by Taran Hunt Wormhole, by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown Death Draws Five, by John J. Miller Appliance, by J.O. Morgan The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi The Transfer Problem, by Adam Saint (did not finish) Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugrešić Upgrade, by Blake Crouch The Perfect Assassin, by K.A. Doore Stray Pilot, by Douglas Thompson (did not finish) The World Set Free: A Fantasia of the Future, by H.G. Wells
Doctor Who 5 Doctor Who: Galaxy Four, by William Emms Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii, by James Moran Rise of the Dominator, by Robert Mammone Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: Battlefield, by Marc Platt
Comics 4 Alternating Current, by Jody Houser et al. Sin Eaters, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko Neptune – Épisode 1 by Leo Neptune – Épisode 2 by Leo
9,900 pages 17/45 by non-male writers (Williams, Cheney/Lofgren/Murphy/Luria, “Williams”, van Ivan, Zevin, McCarter, Sachdeva, Bujold, Amor, Robin, Enriquez, Vo, Hunt, Ugrešić, Doore, Houser et al, Melo) 5/45 by a non-white writer (Thompson/Aguilar/Murphy, Zevin, Wong, Sachdeva, Vo)
Malik watched. “You address me as Ataba and yet you disrespect my rules,” he said.
It just seemed to me a slightly above average YA novel, and we never learn the basis for the colourful rain. You can get it here.
More detail: I’m all for Afrofuturism, but IMHO this just isn’t a very good book. It’s a coming-of-age story where a young black woman overcomes (some of) the sources of her people’s historic oppression and learns many important things about life. Mostly in the last fifty pages.
The worldbuilding is vestigial – I got more info from the back cover about the set-up than I did in the first hundred pages. I can see where the author is going with the notion that this is a culture where the blacker your skin is, the more beautiful you are considered to be, but it seems to me that this misses an important point about not judging people by beauty in the first place; and the protagonist’s struggle to overcome disfiguring scars is rather problematic.
In addition, on page 103, eight high-profile prisoners escape by simply walking out of a room in plain sight of their captors and stealing a nearby spaceship. I’m sorry, this is ridiculous.
In addition, I am bothered by the uses of “Mecca”. The crucial serum is given this name by a character who says (p 101) that “It’s a term I heard in a viewer show about Earth. It means the promise of something good.” Well, it doesn’t really, but I’d have been happy to let that slip if we didn’t have the (white) Toth race presented on p. 163 with the comment “they allowed expatriates and had turned their world into an interplanetary mecca”. This bothered me for a couple of reasons:
1) it’s jarring that the characters in the book have only the haziest idea about the real Mecca, but the omniscient narrator knows all about it as a metaphor.
2) having said that, if you describe a place as a “Mecca”, in general you reference a common activity or interest for the people visiting there (“The Vanilla Bar in Manchester is the Lesbian Mecca of the North”, Ta-Nehisi Coates says “my only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University”). But here we are given no such sense of the Toth world being a centre of anything other than travel.
In addition, the asteroid where much of the second half of the book takes place is equipped with a mild atmosphere and running water, like the asteroids in Le Petit Prince. In reality, asteroids have vestigial or no atmosphere and very low gravity. Again, if it was a better book overall I’d stretch a point here, but I’m not feeling merciful.
In addition,”A plea gushed from her mouth” (p. 201). Oh come on.
I appreciate that it’s the author’s first novel, and having read up on her background I can see where she is coming from and why she made some of the choices that she did. I don’t think it’s taking the piss. But I don’t feel that Where it Rains in Color really is up to the mark.
Second paragraph of third essay (Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from “The Lord of the Rings”: A Textual Excursion into the “History of the “The Lord of the Rings””):
We know about these rejects and false starts because Tolkien was a pack rat. He neither burned his rejects nor threw them in the trash; he saved them. Just about all of the drafts and manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings are preserved at the Archives of Marquette University, and a detailed narrative account of the slow crafting and polishing of the tale was stitched together by Christopher Tolkien in the four volumes of “The History of The Lord of the Rings,” a subseries of the 12–volume History of Middle-earth. The volumes are The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated; the Appendices are treated separately in The Peoples of Middle-earth, and will not be discussed in this paper.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever met David Bratman in the flesh, but he was one of those who kept the faith with Livejournal until quite late in the day, and indeed posted a lengthy and well-argued rebuttal to my foolish assertion that Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring is Any Good At All.
I was tipped off to this book of essays by File 770, and grabbed it immediately. I’m a sucker for any serious Tolkieniana, and what I particularly liked about the essays collected here is their chronological scope, from a time before The Silmarillion had been publish to nearly the present day. The shape of the scholarly field has changed a lot in the meantime a there are several telling anecdotes about the early days. If I had to pick two of the Tolkien pieces that really struck me, I think they would be the Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from The Lord of the Rings, and the exegesis of Smith of Wootton Major.
The other essays include four pieces about the Inklings (two on C.S. Lewis, one on Charles Williams and one on their links with the Pacific), and several on other fantasy topics, including a fascinating piece on Lord Dunsany as a playwright, and a standup encomium of Roger Zelazny. There is also a critique of the Peter Jackson films written presciently before they had actually been released.
Clara was twenty-eight years old and, for the past few years, she’d been mixed up with a suspicious gentleman in a blue box who hopped periodically into her life and caused varying degrees of chaos.
I did not write up the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion at the time of broadcast, though I did note that it was my favourite two-part story of Series 9 (though my favourite Capaldi story remains Heaven Sent, also from Series 9). I enjoyed it – there’s some necessary preachiness about the Other, and immigration and terrorism, some very good skullduggery by villains who can look just like you, and some excellent horror in everyday life. The scene of the plane being brought down by a hand-held missile is a bit too close to the bone for me; several friends of friends died when the Russians destroyed MH-17 in a similar way.
The novelisation is a good competent screen-to-page job, adding a bit more background about the Zygon Bonnie (who used to have a boyfriend called Clyde, who looked like Danny Pink). There are a couple of footnotes citing other DW novelisations, including one quoting a books called The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, for which you will search bookshops in vain. At my reading pace it’s quicker to read the novelisation than rewatch the story, and it’s well enough done. You can get it here.
I was about to get out of the car, but my payment and location would be traceable. I told it to drive on and it took me a couple of miles south. I got out, doubling.
Started it three times and failed to finish the first chapter. Eventually got to page 50 and put it down. You can get it here.
But in the evening, on the way to church, the Frobishers and their guest crossed the market-square as his string of boys marched along the west side. And the guest was arrayed in a gay new dress, as if it was already Easter, and her face set in its dark hair came with a strange effect of mingled freshness and familiarity. She looked at him calmly! He felt very awkward, and was for cutting his new acquaintance. Then hesitated, and raised his hat with a jerk as if to Mrs. Frobisher. Neither lady acknowledged his salute, which may possibly have been a little unexpected. Then young Siddons dropped his hymn-book; stooped to pick it up, and Lewisham almost fell over him… He entered church in a mood of black despair.
Another unexpectedly enjoyable Wells novel, a young man who finds that he has to make a choice between two women having already married one of them (not a situation that Wells himself was unfamiliar with), at the same time as dealing with embourgeoisement and the tension between ideals and reality. Quite short, totally credible, would probably make a terrible film. You can get it here.
This was top of my list of H.G. Wells novels; next on that pile is The New Machiavelli.
Paved alleyway, close on all sides, the Old Quarter. The men at the bia hơi she’d just left watched her go, sullen, red-eyed. The heat beating down, worse than usual, night but still unbearable, air thick. Tempers on edge, the aftermath of a Chinese crackdown the week before. A prism grenade thrown into a high-end restaurant popular with Chinese military; two dead officers, two dead waiters, a dozen injured. Not the most notable of attacks, except one of the dead officers was a general. So there were raids and arrests and bodies turning up, young men and young women, tortured and aired out and worse. Everyone an informant, everyone Việt Minh, no one able to talk or trust.
6) Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski
Second frame of third page:
I could not understand what this was about at all. I could not follow the plot (if there was one) or get the characters sorted out in my head. You can get it here.
5) Monstress vol. 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Second frame of Chapter Thirty-Eight (the third chapter in this volume):
Lots of people love this series, and I’m sorry, but I don’t; the art is gorgeous, but I have lost track of the plot by now, and I find the violence too squicky. You can get it here.
4) DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, and Zid
Second frame of third page:
This is quite nicely done, but lacks both the visual grandeur of the film and the narrative detail of the book (even though of course it has more narrative detail than the film, and more visual grandeur than the book). Dune already has twoHugos anyway. But you can get it here.
3) Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
Second frame of third chapter:
I had actually read this last year, because I have been enjoying this series so much: King Arthur comes back as an undead demon revenant, and our hero, his grandmother and his girlfriend are desperately mobilising a small group of allies across the real and unreal realms. Cracking humour, great characterisation; maybe a bit less tied into the underlying mythos than previous volumes, maybe that’s not a bad thing. You can get it here.
2) Saga, Vol 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Second frame of third part:
After the brutal end to volume 9, and the subsequent three-year pause in publication, I wondered how the authors would manage to pick it up. I need not have worried; time has passed for the main characters as well, and we see a lot of the story from the viewpoint of Hazel, the little girl whose parents have been at the centre of Saga up to now. Lots here about smuggling, blended families, evil galactic plots and so on. Ends yet again on a cliff-hanger. Not sure how this will appeal to those who have not read the previous nine volumes. (Six of which were Hugo finalists, the first winning in 2013.) You can get it here.
1) Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes
Second frame of third chapter:
I came to this without any expectations, and was thoroughly won over. I’m not especially familiar with the mythology of Superman, still less Supergirl, and in any case I suspect that this off-earth adventure of cosmic vengeance may not be a typical Supergirl story. But I thought it was brilliant: a super script and plot, gorgeous art making the most of the potential of the comics format, and a thoroughly satisfactory characterisation of Supergirl and her pal Ruth. I felt that Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (first part; you don’t need it all):
I turned to the chapter on Strathspey flies where I kept my research list. Jumping off points for my nightly dives generally fell under one of the following topics, and quickly devolved from there.
Really awful. Not as funny as he thinks it is, by a long way. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 10 (YTD 58) Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor Falling to Earth, by Al Worden Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan, by Digby Tantam The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan (did not finish) Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?, ed. Mick O’Hare Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir, by Wil Wheaton The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
Non-genre 4 (YTD 18) Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
SF 17 (YTD 139) A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L’Engle Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor The Outcast, by Louise Cooper Bloodmarked, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish) Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, by Charlie Jane Anders Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett Nettle and Bone, by “T. Kingfisher” Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods, by Catherynne M. Valente What Moves the Dead, by “T. Kingfisher” A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow A Rumor of Angels, by Dale Bailey Into the Riverlands, by Nghi Vo Even Though I Knew the End, by C.L. Polk Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 25) The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who – The Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
Comics 7 (YTD 21) Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski Monstress vol. 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission, by George S. Elrick DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, and Zid Daleks, ed. Marcus Hearn
10,000 pages (YTD 64,900) 21/42 (YTD 115/267) by non-male writers (Thier, Kingsolver, L’Engle, Okorafor, Deonn, Anders, Brackett, 2x “Kingfisher”, Valente, Harrow, Vo, Polk, McGuire, Kress, Muir, Tidwell, illustrators of Sins of the Father, Evely, Liu/Takeda, Sturges) 6/42 (YTD 36/267) by a non-white writer (Naipaul, Okorafor, Deonn, Vo, Polk, Liu/Takeda) 6 rereads (The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman, A Wind in the Door, Nemesis from Terra, “Beggars in Spain”, Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, Doctor Who – The Stones of Blood)
359 books currently tagged unread – down 1 from last month, with purchases and other acquisitions balancing books cleared off the piles.
Reading now Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Coming soon (perhaps) War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, by David Fisher The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson A Brief History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford “Even the Queen” by Connie Wilis Winter, by Ali Smith Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al
The first thing Tanta does when she gets outside is check on the rest of her unit. They’re still shaken by Porter’s death, but they’ve recovered well from their initial panic. Wright has assumed command of the team and is doing a decent job of keeping up morale; he has established a security perimeter around the building and has the rest of the guardians super-vising the cleaning crews who have arrived to sweep up the debris.The guardians are also holding back an increasingly vocal throng of onlookers.The crowd is fractious, shouting questions at Wright and the team and trying to push past the perimeter they’ve created. Not an ideal situation, but at least it gives her harried colleagues something to focus on besides the explosion. Once she’s sure that Wright has everything under control, Tanta takes herself across the road from the Needle and waits.
This was an Ace Double from 1961, combining a Robert Silverberg novel (expanded from an earlier version published in 1959) with the Leigh Brackett novel that won the 1945 Retro Hugo. Of the latter, I wrote at the time:
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Mayo McCall watched the men running back and forth below. Quite calmly she reached out and closed the switch that controlled her testing beam — the ray that spanned the head of the drift and checked every carload of dull red rock for Fallonite content, the chemically amorphous substance that was already beginning to revolutionize the Terran plastic industry.
Fairly standard but well executed pulp planetary romance / space opera, with desert Mars, swampy Venus and our hero overcoming evil Earth industrialists and perhaps a bit of commentary on colonialism as well. Brackett is one of two women in this category, and the only one to get a solo listing. You can get the original pulp version here and buy a later book version here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Collision Course is:
Bernard lay sprawled in his vibrochair, cradling a volume of Yeats on his lap while the shoulder-lamp wriggled unhappily in its attempt to keep the beam focussed on the page no matter how Bernard might alter his position. A flask of rare brandy, twenty years old, imported from one of the Procyon worlds, was within easy reach. Bernard had his drink, his music, his poetry, his warmth. What better way, he asked himself, to relax after spending two hours trying to pound the essentials of sociometrics into the heads of an obtuse clump of sophomores?
It’s early but very competent Silverberg, a new wrinkle on the Cosmic Duel theme where humanity and one group of aliens are competing for control of our galaxy and a godlike force intervenes to force a settlement. Particularly entertaining in that the humans in Team Earth don’t get on with each other at all. Needless to say, no women characters appear except in flashbacks.
This was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission by George S. Elrick (if I can find it).
Surprise stopped Anne midway across the living room. Granted the room wasn’t huge, but a pair of two-seater sofas, separate miss-matched chairs, a coffee table, sideboard and bookcase, left plenty of room to walk between the furniture. A sense of Madeleine’s apology extending far beyond the limits of her home unsettled Anne, though she struggled to understand why. Before she could enquire, Madeleine pushed them into a whirlwind tour, cutting their greeting short.
Second in the Bloodlines sub-series of Lethbridge-Stewart books, in which Anne Travers and her husband Bill visit France to investigate sinister gangs-on and body-horror in a laboratory. The story is decently enough told, but the connection with Doctor Who so weak that I think I may clear this sequence from my reading list in future. You can get it here.
We race to the inner fort, Devadarshan and I. We seem safer here from missiles; yet the people are more tense and fearful. Perhaps it is because they are not sepoys, but women, children and old folk. They have not the release of action; they can only wait for their fate to be made known to them.
Pam and I had married so that we could be together during my training. We had already decided to spend our lives together, and we didn’t want that commitment interrupted. Why wait, we reasoned? We’d been dating long enough that marriage seemed like a natural step.
Another of the astronaut autobiographies which I saw recommended in this blog post in 2020 (via File 770). I enjoyed Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire so much that I made it my book of 2021. Like Collins, Worden got to circle the Moon while his colleagues went and landed on it; unlike Collins, his career had a hard crash immediately afterwards, as a result of a scandal involving the sale for profit of commemorative stamps that the astronauts had brought to the lunar surface and back. Worden stayed loyal to his commander, David Scott, when the whole story broke, but nearing the end of his life clearly felt that he needed to tell his side and clarify Scott’s overall responsibility. (He died at 88 in March 2020; Scott, now 91, is the last remaining Apollo commander.)
On the technological side, Worden’s account tallies with Collins, though it’s less funny; it’s rather delightful though to read of him developing a passion for lunar geology, and manically photographing every possible inch of the moon’s surface while in orbit. Worden’s personal life was more complex, as he and his first wife divorced while he was undergoing his astronaut training, and one also senses that he was politically less astute than Collins – he notes of a dinner that the Apollo 15 team had with President Nixon and Vice-President Agnew that all five of them underwent public disgrace soon afterwards, but there is not much introspection as to how this happened.
The part of the story I found most shocking in fact was the serious health issue endured by the third man on the mission, James Irwin, whose heart underwent serious stress in the final stages of the lunar excursion. Irwin had a heart attack less than two years after their mission, aged only 43, and was the first of the twelve who walked on the moon to die, aged 61 in 1991. NASA failed to communicate Irwin’s health situation clearly to the three astronauts, and Scott, decided that they should keep working, an error as it turned out, but based on incomplete information. Both the stamps scandal and Irwin’s overwork were mistaken decisions made by Scott, but in a framework established by NASA that made these mistakes very easy to make.
(Irwin became an evangelical Christian after he returned from the moon and went on expeditions to find Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, asserting that the Book of Genesis was literally true. His grandparents were from Pomeroy, Co Tyrone, and he described himself as the first Irishman on the Moon.)
Space is exciting stuff and although I think Michael Collins’s book is superior, this is still an entertaining read. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next is A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell.
I wake to the familiar sound of the key, turning gently in the lock, a three-phase sound, scrape-scrape-click. It is a brass key tied with a pink silk tassel, carried by a member of our domestic staff. She knocks discreetly at my door and says, ‘Good morning, Arthur,’ without any emotion. She doesn’t enter the room. I know what the key looks like because she wears it at all times on her belt. It hangs there sweetly, next to her electroshock gun.
Very crude feminist satire (or something). Didn’t like it much. You can get it here.
I griped previously about the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category having too many finalists where you needed to know the rest of the series to really understand them, and the same goes for the Lodestar Award; two of the six are sequels, two more are threequels, as it were, and one is the fourth in a sequence. It is great that people enjoy these series so much, and that’s why we have the Best Series category (which has only one overlap here). But it makes it more difficult for voters who may not have read previous instalments to assess the success of the latest volume. I don’t think it is worthwhile to tweak the rules in any way on this, I’m just saying that I wish voters would nominate books that stand better on their own. Having said that, some of these stand better on their own than others.
6) Bloodmarked, by Tracy Deonn
Second paragraph of third chapter:
To my left, William glances at the kneeling sorcerers, then back to me. Right. Now is the time to use the protocol I’ve studied. I clear my throat. “Rise, Mage Seneschal Varelian of the High Council and noble members of the Round Table Mageguard.”
I thought that the notion of the Round Table turning up in Chapel Hill as a phenomenon among university students was a load of rubbish when I read the first volume in 2021, and I think so still. I gave this 50 pages before tossing it aside.
5) The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I expect ordinarily it was a grand, dramatic space. Therewas a tiled mosaic floor beneath our feet, and statues liningup alongside a pool running the length of the room with afountain at one end and a skylight overhead. There shouldhave been an illusion of sky up there, made more believableby looking at it in the rippling water, but instead it was onlythe blank empty void, and the pool was still and pitch-dark,with nothing to reflect. The fountain spout was still letting afew drops fall occasionally like a leaking faucet, every unpredictabledrop too-loudand echoing. This had to be the oldestpart of the enclave, the one that had been built when Londonitself was just lurching its way towards becoming a city, andit was clearly meant to make you think of the glory that wasRome. Instead it felt like Pompeii just before the flames, a thinblanket of ash already laid down and more coming.
I was colossally disappointed with this, the third in the Scholomance series (which is also up in Best Series). I had put the first volume top of my ballot in 2021, and the second volume second last year. But I felt it would have been better left as a two-parter. Our heroine traipses around the world, through different magical enclaves which are completely indistinguishable whether in Portugal or China, and engages in a quest to rescue the man she loves while also dealing with other emotional entanglements. Compared with the previous two books, I felt it completely lost focus.
4) Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Please, please, please,” Sunny had said last week to her frowning parents. They knew about her and Orlu, but that didn’t mean they were open to it. “It’s just dinner. Nowhere else.”
I am sorry to keep sounding grumpy. But this was a case where I had quite enjoyed the second book, when I read it way back in 2018, having missed the first; and this seemed to me a rather unspectacular magical training school story, if set in a slightly different culture.
3) Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, by Charlie Jane Anders
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Her barge descends past a dozen towers, blaring with candy-colored lights. Holographic gameplay swirls around the rooftops and cartoon icons run around under a skyline dominated by the crimson curlicues of the nearby Royal Space Academy. Even with Rachael’s Joiner set to “maximum introvert” mode, the shouts of a half-million players and spectators still ring out, and she can smell the fried Scanthian parsnips and bottles of snah-snah juice that everybody uses to fuel marathon gaming sessions.
Getting less grumpy now, as this sequel seemed to me independently enjoyable even if you haven’t read (or can’t remember) last year’s Victories Greater than Death. Six teens turn out to be vital to the future of humanity, and must confront various potentially fatal challenges for high stakes while dealing with the usual agonies of relationships and (interestingly) creativity.
1) Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods, by Catherynne M. Valente
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Even at an hour before midnight in Littlebridge, even with shadows as thick as coat sleeves hanging all round. You could still see the red leaves fluttering on the trees. And the red glass in the fancy windows and the red sheen on the moon reflected in the deep black water. The riverbanks ran over with red leaves, red rose hips, red zinnias, red squashes growing wild for anyone to take.
Fantasy of a boy called to save his people with a bunch of unlikely allies, which charmed me with Valente’s approach to integrating folklore with her own narrative, with vivid descriptions of people and places, and also just by not being a sequel. Gets my vote this year.
In general I have felt that the Lodestar Award has delivered more quality to the ballot, and on a good year the finalists en bloc are competitive with the Best Novel Hugo. I did not feel that this was an especially good year.
