The shock had caught him off guard, but now he was rallying his composure – although it took considerable effort in the face of what had happened. No human being should be capable of breaking through the barrier which held this Castle frozen in a Timeless limbo. His own power, great as it was, couldn’t penetrate the formless, dimensionless yet appallingly real warp of time and space that had trapped him here in his last, desperate attempt to save his life and his soul; and whatever he psychic talents, Cyllan was no true sorceress. Yet she was here, as real as he was…
Second in Cooper’s Time Master trilogy, almost entirely set in and around the castle where her protagonist is being held captive and from which he is trying to escape. The really subversive bit is that the protagonist is very clearly the Bad Guy, and his freedom could lead to disaster for the rest of the fantasy world; Cooper shows this pretty clearly, but also engages our sympathy very successfully on behalf of the villain. A very strong story. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book. Next on that pile is The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd.
He paid no attention, because he had spent so much time and effort making this place his own, and it was too precious to lose. Yet he had always known that rain would be his downfall.
Interesting and horrifying;I felt that the protagonist’s super powers were magical rather than sfnal. Perhaps it belongs on the same shelf as The Stand. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“MPs and their Constituents in Britain: How Strong are the Links?”, by Ivor Crewe):
This argument has made an impact in recent years. According to a June 1983 Gallup poll, a 62 to 26 per cent majority support proportional representation in principle, but half the sympathisers would become less favourable if the change involved ‘merging several existing constituencies into a much larger constituency which would have more than one MP’.1 Reformers share these misgivings. In 1976 a Hansard Society Commission on the electoral system, chaired by Lord Blake, in deference to strong feeling for the single-member constituency, broke with a long tradition of electoral reform agitation and rejected STV in favour of an AM system.2 Conservative Action for Electoral Reform, a Conservative Party ginger group, takes the same line for the same reasons.3 Even the Liberal Party has been affected, as the emphasis and phrasing of the 1982 Report on Constitutional Reform by the Joint Liberal/SDP Alliance Commission revealed.4 In an attempt to reconcile the Liberal Party’s long established commitment to STV with its latter-day tradition of community politics, it proposed ‘Community Proportional Representation’, which retains STV but in multi-member constituencies whose size varies markedly in order to encompass `natural communities’ such as shire counties and major cities. 1 Gallup survey conducted on behalf of Sunday Telegraph and Channel 4’s A Week in Politics, 18-21 June 1983, Table 6. 2 Hansard Society, Report of Commission on Electoral Reform (chaired by Lord Blake), 1976. 3 See, for example, Anthony Wigram (Chairman of CAER), ‘Electoral Reform: Cure for economic ills and a cause for Conservatives’, The Times, 6 December 1974. 4 Electoral Reform: Fairer Voting in Natural Communities, First Report of the Joint Liberal/SDP Commission on Constitutional Reform (London, Poland Street Publications, 1982).
The last of the books about election systems that I got back in 2016, apart from several which I cannot now find. This list of authors is a who’s who of British political science of the early 1980s, 15 men and one woman, with 13 of the 15 men based in the UK (one in Ireland, one in Austria, and the woman contributor is Australian). The editor, Vernon Bogdanor, used to be generally respected as an authority on the British constitution, such as it is, but has gone very Brexity recently. That was all far in the future in 1985, of course.
The book starts with two chapters on the UK, and then goes in sequence through the USA, Australia, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Ireland, before finishing with a couple of chapters on the theory of representation. I must say I found it a bit frustrating. I would have put the two theoretical chapters up front, to contextualise the specific information about each country; I would have put Ireland, whose political culture is much closer to the UK’s than any of the others, much earlier than last in the sequence.
In general I found the authors far too ready to accept uncritically the British paradigm of MPs as constituency representatives, and inclined to rate other countries positively or negatively depending on how well they approached the ideal. The two exceptions here are the cheaper on Ireland, written by Brian Farrell and quoting the likes of John Bruton, Michael D. Higgins and John Whyte and drawing on deep analysis of theory and practice over sixty years of independence; and a completely bonkers and hilarious chapter on Switzerland by Christopher Hughes, who had already retired as Professor of Politics at Leicester but lived another twenty years.
As usual, Malta, which has had both proportional representation on a similar basis to Ireland since 1921 and a rigid two-party system since 1966, doesn’t exist as far as the writers of this book are concerned.
Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.
It is worth pointing out (as only one of the authors quoting him does) that when Burke made this speech, he had just been safely elected, so it was not an argument that he actually put to floating voters; and when he defended his Bristol seat at the next election, he came dead last with only 18 votes.
I think that the question of relations between members and constituents is one which would be treated very differently today. The representation of women and minorities is barely addressed here; also in 1985 we had no idea of the intense democratisation that was about to hit central and Eastern Europe, or the devolution settlements of the late 1990s in the UK. And there had been only two elections to the European Parliament, which was still a curiosity rather than a feature. So it’s a book of its time, perhaps telling a surprising amount through its omissions as well as its content. You can still get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest book (at 320 pages) that I had acquired in 2016 but not got around to. Next on the first pile is Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span, by Digby Bantam, and next on the second is the Ace Double of Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett, which I found after thinking I had lost it for good.
Within moments I am soaked through again. I keep my hair out of my face with one hand, while the other holds my jacket across my chest. A large piece of board tears across the street, missing me by a couple of feet. People’s bins have been blown over and household waste is strewn all down the road. Empty food packets flip across the pavement. A large, unruffled seagull flays ham from a plastic container.
Working through this year’s Hugo finalists, 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. The two Hugo-shortlisted comics I had already read were both new instalments in favourite series of mine, but I felt that Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is head and shoulders above both. I’ll read the other finalists but I’ll be surprised if I like any of them more than this. You can get it here.
She had been clock-watching for almost the last hour now, not really looking forward to going to work. She was tired having been working hard at home already.
More adventures of the Tenth Doctor with comics-only companions Gabby Gonzalez and Cindy Wu. The first of the three stories here features another sound monster taking advantage of the Jazz era in New Orleans; the second is the opening part of the conclusive adventure in this sequence of comics, bringing back the Osirans and Sutekh; and the third is a neat little multi-Doctor adventure with Ten, Eleven and Twelve. I am consistently impressed by the quality of this series, though it has now reached the stage where you’d need to have been reading it from the beginning. You can get this volume here.
Master Able had first won fame while he had still been a pupil of Master Hopestart, the natural philosopher who advanced the theory of selective change, which explained that the vast variety of plants and animals had developed from simpler organisms by the slow, cumulative acquisition of new characteristics. It had been denounced as heresy by priests and philosophers who claimed that because the form of every species was a perfect realisation of the Mother’s will, no change was possible unless She desired it, and those changes were always accompanied by global catastrophe. The great flood which had destroyed the terror lizards; the cleansing fire which had put an end to the wickedness of ogres and left the narrow line of char found in sites all across the Union and United Territories; the plague which had turned bears into crazed beasts after they strayed from the right path. Master Able had been at the forefront of debates which had overturned those old beliefs, explaining the principles of selective change with devasting [sic] clarity, mocking the chop-logic of its detractors and famously saying that just as natural philosophy should not seek an explanation for the Mother, so religion had no business measuring the world. He had reinforced his status with his work on comparative anatomy, including studies of selective change in bears and the ancestors of people, but by the time Pilgrim became his secretary his reputation was greatly diminished, his health was failing and he had fallen out with many of his colleagues because of his interest in sightings of the visitors.
I liked a lot about this – non-human sentient species on post-apocalypse Earth, frustrations of unfunded academic work in a corrupt society, the massive shift of perspective half way through. Not totally sure I got the ending. You can get it here.
Two factors determined the eventual recognition by different communities of a fixed collection of Old Testament writings. One was the crisis facing the Jewish community from outside their faith, and the other, the sects and factions which developed within it.
One of Anne’s textbooks, but a subject that I am interested in too; what is the Bible for? How did it come to be? How should we read it? There’s a very lucid explanation of what people have found in the Bible and how this particular collection of sacred writings assumed its current form. No special notes, just a general feeling of, well, this seems to make sense. It won’t really engage anyone who is not already interested in the subject, but I think it is useful for those who are. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019 which was not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile: What Not, by Rose Macaulay.
I do not often walk, these days. I do not often leave the house, as I can’t make it too far. My legs ache, my bones ache. Birdie once said, ‘You keep acting like it’s a symbiotic relationship or something. It’s not you and the disease, it’s you, and then the disease has latched onto you. It’s a fucking assault, is what it is. It’s a terrorist, holding you hostage while it tortures you to death.’
I quite liked it, and in particular it’s a rare case of the fourth book in a series where I didn’t feel it mattered too much that I had not read the other three. You can get it here.
I am not sure if I caught The Awakening on first broadcast – I think I did see the second episode but not the first. When I came to it in 2008, I wrote:
Fandom seems to be generally fond of The Awakening; it didn’t really grab me. Tegan’s relatives have worse luck with alien invaders than those of any other companion pre-Rose. I found the Malus utterly unconvincing, and as so often its means and motivation made little sense. I did like Polly James as Jane though.
When I came back to it three years later, for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
Hey, it’s another two-part story with roots in a past period of English history! For the second time in four stories, and the third in three seasons. For once, the fundamentals are fairly sound, but the execution a bit haphazard – most notably, the Malus itself rather fails to be scary despite smoke machines and dramatic music, there is an awful lot of infodumping for little emotional payoff, and we have yet another Tardis invasion of both bystanders and the Malus somehow penetrating it. Polly James does her best but it’s not really convincing.
Tegan’s grandfather is about the same age as her late aunt, but I suppose that’s not out of the question.
Nice for the team to get a break and relax after it’s all over. NB that The Awakening is the first story since Black Orchid, almost two seasons before, not to feature a returning villain or companion.
I particularly endorse the first paragraph here. The means and motivation of the baddies are (as so often) not well explained.
As mentioned, Frederick Hall, who played Tegan’s grandfather, was only five years older then Delore Whiteman, who had played her aunt three years before; and he was only thirty years older than Janet Fielding, his on-screen granddaughter. One can think of plenty of ways to resolve this, of course.
I also reread the novelisation by Eric Pringle, who wrote the TV story. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
She dived around the comer of a barn, and stopped. she was gasping for breath and leaned against the barn wall for support, beside its open doorway. The bricks, warmed by the sun, burned against her back.
Often the novelisations of two-part stories bring new material and imagination to the narrative, and I thought at first that this was going to be one of those, with good introductory description (especially of Jane Hampden, one of the great companions who never was). However, the pace isn’t really sustained, and the plot sinks under its own flaws; notably, Pringle misses the opportunity to make something more of the Malus’s physical appearance on the page, and the whole thing ends up essentially as a cut-down version of The Dæmons.
One extra point is that Jane Hampden, played by Polly James who turned 43 in the year of broadcast, is described as “young” in the book. Pringle was six years older than her; it’s a matter of perspective, I suppose. You can get the book here.
David Evans-Powell has done his best here to find depth in what is honestly not a spectacularly good story. The introduction to his Black Archive monograph sets out his stall: that The Awakening is a mediation between 1970s folk horror, and 1980s heritage drama.
The first chapter, ‘Unexpected Aura for a Quiet English Village’, briefly looks at villages in literature and culture as outposts of traditional values under threat from modernity.
The second chapter, ‘There Will Be No Visitors to the Village”, looks at Little Hodcombe as an uncanny landscape, ending up inevitably with the Wicker Man.
The third and longest chapter, ‘We’re in the Wrong Century!’, looks at The Awakening as a ghost story and a time slip drama, ending up with Sapphire and Steel and Quatermass and the Pit. The second paragraph is:
One of the working titles associated with the serial was ‘Poltergeist’1, and this alleged form of haunting is witnessed by the characters alongside more traditional ghostly manifestations. German for ‘noisy spirit’, poltergeists are a particular form of ghostly phenomena in which objects appear to move, appear and disappear without human intervention and where unexplained sensations (such as sudden cold or heat, smells, sounds and noises, and gusts of wind) are experienced. These phenomena have been attributed to psychic abilities, usually telekinesis (the power to move objects with the mind), manifested by those going through emotional or physiological change, such as during puberty2. This association between apparently ghostly activity and psychic ability is a critical aspect of the serial. 1Doctor Who: The Complete History #38, p63. 2 Dagnall, Neil, and Ken Drinkwater, ‘Eight Things You Need to Know about poltergeists”
The fourth chapter, ‘But That’s a Representation of the Devil!’, looks at the Malus’s roots in the Green Man and M.R. James, and the ancient Greek Gorgons.
The fifth chapter, ‘Think of it as the Resurrection of an Old Tradition’, comes back to the question of folk horror vs heritage drama, and comes down on the heritage side.
The sixth and final chapter, ‘You Must Join in Our Games’, looks at re-enactment in general and at how it is portrayed here in particular.
A coda, ’20th-century Men Playing a Particularly Nasty Game’, looks briefly at how civil wars are remembered, mentioning Northern Ireland and briefly looking at Spain.
I generally prefer the Black Archives where the production itself is described; those that concentrate on trying to find the meaning behind the story sometimes run adrift because there is not much there there, and I’m afraid this is one of them. A good effort, but I was not wholly convinced. You can get it here.
Chen looked out at the unreal light surrounding the ship. “You must love it up here,” she said.
Above average space opera with big sweeping changes to the nature of humanity. Let down by the ending where things work out a bit too easily and quickly. You can get it here.
The hob hauled in his box of tools and placed it inside the big doorway.
First of the Best Novel finalists for this year’s Hugos that I have read since the ballot was announced (three of the six were Clarke submissions which I’ve already written up, rather briefly). 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.
Second paragraph of third section of the French half:
The apartment was on the top floor. Its two thick-walled rooms were like rooms I’d visited in dreams. They contained a few essential things, chairs, a table, a big, high bed that jutted from an alcove in the main room — my search for somewhere to live had taught me that in France ‘furnished’ was only a label used to evict tenants without a fuss. The kitchen had hexagonal tiles on the floor, uneven with use and a soft, blurry red. There was a shower stall there, in a corner, and a round-shouldered fridge. The toilet was a cubicle at the top of steps that corkscrewed up from the landing. It had a small window above head height, a wooden seat, and an enamel W.C. sign on the door. Not so long ago it must have served the whole building, but Monsieur Laval said that it would be for my exclusive use. The other apartments had their own toilets inside.
Second paragraph of third section of the Australian half:
People like us will never be invisible, so we have to make a stupendous effort to fit in. Chanel grasped this much sooner than I did — as I said, I merely follow her lead. Take our names: we haven’t always been Chanel and Lyle. Chanel chose new names for us as soon as our application to immigrate was approved. They’re not so far from our original names, which we can hardly remember now. Chanel explained that the way forward was to forget everything we were leaving. She said, `Don’t look back. That’s not the Australian way. It’s a modern country that looks to the future.’ I didn’t appreciate the force of her advice until my second trip back home.
Interestingly in the old double format; literally a book of two halves. I liked the non-sf bit more than the sf bit; young lust in France in 1980 vs fascist near-future Australia. The Australia bits seemed to me more about the setting than the plot. You can get it here.
Dave Baker. A wee French guy. A bit crazy, But I like him.
You don’t know me at all, never mind my filthy alpha male side.
I picked this up on spec in Filigranes one day, a French bande dessinée about two kids in Belfast twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement. Of course they are from opposite sides of the peace wall, of course it turns out that their fathers were both senior paramilitaries back in the day who took an active role in each others’ destinies. There is attention to local circumstantial detail (eg a scene in Roselawn cemetery) while also missing the bigger picture of how people talk to each other. But it’s well meant, and does its best to show people getting on with new lives despite their history; humanely depicted sex scenes; also lots of French slang which I really had not picked up from colleagues. I’ll get the second part as well. You can get it here.
This was my top unread comic in a language other than English. Next on that pile is Jaren van de oliphant, by Willy Linthout.
Ricky didn’t like doctors, and he didn’t like going to the doctor’s. So today was special because even though he wasn’t coughing up goo, or sweating out vodka, or breathing like a busted whoopee cushion, Ricky was going to the doctor of his own accord, like he enjoyed going to the doctor.
By a well-known TV writer. Funny but ultimately implausible even on its own terms. The future tech works just well enough to drive the plot. You can get it here.
I’m in the last stages of finishing the pile of books that I acquired in 2016 (er, seven years ago) and ran into a couple that I just cannot finish.
Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith
This is a collection of essays about the drawing of election boundaries in Canada, with particular reference to Saskatchewan.
This is one of a number of books that I got in late 2016 in preparation for a presentation on drawing constituency boundaries. To my immense frustration, I can’t find several of them now and am left with this and one other. And unfortunately this is awfully technical about Canadian specificities, which were not sufficiently relevant to my life for me to make it worth persevering with. So I have put it aside. If you want, you can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2016, and the non-fiction book that had been longest on my unread shelf and that I could still find. Next on both of those piles is Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, edited by Vernon Bogdanor.
There Will be War X, edited by Jerry Pournelle
The third chapter is “The 4GW Counterforce”, by William S. Lind and Lt Col Gregory A. Thiele, USMC, and its second paragraph is:
The distinction between regular or line infantry and light infantry goes back to ancient Greece. At that time, the regular infantry was the phalanx, a linear formation that based its power on mass and shock. Their tactics consisted of evolutions performed by the phalanx as a whole, in which each warrior adhered to carefully executed drills.
This was one of the infamous Puppy submissions for the Hugo ballot in 2016, a collection of essays building on a previously successful series from the 1980s. I read the first four pieces and then gave up because there was really too much racism (and also the obsessions of the alt right in 2016 turn out not to be what actually happened in 2022). If you want, you can get it here, but please don’t feel you have to.
This was the most popular unread book that I had acquired in 2016, and the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. But I’ve now found my double copy of Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett which now goes onto both of those piles, probably as the last or second last book in my 2016 pile.
Servants had brought blocks of ice out of the cellar and placed them in cubbies all around the room. A windmill on top of the house drove fans behind the cubbies, filling his room with cool breezes that kept the scorching summer heat at bay.
Fourth book in a fantasy series of which I have not read the first three; over a thousand pages in length; I did not get far. You can get it here.
Started quite well, a novel about people in an extended family living their lives increasingly online, but I did not feel it stuck the landing, and rather lost the run of itself before the end. You can get it here.
I loved The Deadly Assassin when it was first broadcast in 1977, and I love it still. When I rewatched it in 2007, immediately after my first watch of The Mind Robber, I wrote:
As for The Deadly Assassin: I was really a bit worried about watching it this time round; could it possibly be as good as I remembered it being from when I was nine years old, over thirty years ago? But yes, yes it is. Tom Baker is at the top of his form, combining humour, moral outrage, and determination to do the right thing by his home planet and people, even if they seem at times equally determined to do the wrong thing by him. And Robert Holmes’ superb script has so many memorable moments – here’s an early one, spoken by the exasperated official trying to pin the Doctor down who comes closest to filling the companion role. There’s a great Doctor/Tardis love moment as well.
Yet there are a couple of oddities. One, which is nothing to do with the series as originally presented, is that it has been preserved only as a 90-minute movie, which is rather annoying for those of us purists who like the old cliffhangers. [No longer the case, thank heavens.] Another, which is very bizarre indeed, is that there are no women visible anywhere in the Gallifrey of The Deadly Assassin. (Helen Blatch plays the disembodied voice of the Time Lords’ computer system.) This is of course the only story featuring the Doctor with no companion (unless one counts The Runaway Bride), but it really does seem peculiar. One could probably do a short list of stories featuring only male guest stars (?The Moonbase?) but I think this must be the only one with no women on the screen at all.
The interesting linkage with The Mind Robber is that for much of the story the Doctor enters a constructed, invented world, in which he has to battle an artifical reality and try and impose his own will on it. There is an interesting compare-and-contrast between the Second Doctor urging Jamie and Zoe to deny the existence of the unicorn charging at them, and the Fourth Doctor denying the fact that he has been wounded in the leg – same theme but pointing to the very different ways the series as a whole was going in 1968 and 1976. Like the Land of Fiction, the world inside the Matrix of the Time Lords turns out to be under the control of a cosmic villain called the Master – and this time it is that Master, reappearing for the first time since 1973, but horribly altered; with an audacious plan to seize control of the universe by tapping the very power of the Time Lords themselves. (The reality-altering theme is nicely echoed in the final episode by Cardinal Borusa’s attempt to impose his own version of historical reality on recent events.)
As I hinted at above, The Deadly Assassin has Bernard Horsfall returning – this time not as Gulliver (left), but as Chancellor Goth of the Time Lords (right). (I believe he is a Thal officer in Planet of the Daleks too, but haven’t seen that yet.) Horsfall also appeared in the last episode of The War Games in 1969 (middle), pronouncing sentence of exile and regeneration on the Doctor. If we are meant to read the two characters as the same person – though they have very different haircuts – then The Deadly Assassin represents the Fourth Doctor not only overcoming the Third Doctor’s unfinished business with his arch-enemy, but also reversing the Second Doctor’s defeat by the Time Lords in general (and by this one in particular).
I always loved The [companionless] Deadly Assassin, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. It is as if Sarah Jane Smith’s departure liberated Robert Holmes from the constraints of the show’s previous history, to go back to the Doctor’s own origins and rewrite them completely. We’ve been gradually moving towards Gallifrey as not so much a place of magical, ineffable power, as we saw in The War Games, but as the fading bureaucracy glimpsed in Colony in Space and The Three Doctors, subject to the political corruption that could give rise to a Morbius. Now it all comes together. I suspect that my own professional fascination with politics may be partly rooted in watching this at the age of nine; the reality that the most powerful people are none the less fallible individuals, operating to their own private agendas as much as to public perceptions, is well portrayed here.
There are so many delights in this: the nightmarish world of the Matrix, the Engin/Spandrell [Pravda/Chitty] double act, Runcible the Fatuous, the final battle amidst crumbling architecture (so dismally copied by the TV Movie). It seems almost churlish to mention two flaws. First off, the re-introduction of the Master worked much better for me at the age of nine, when I barely remembered his existence in the Pertwee era, than it does in sequence – apart from anything else the Time Lords have forgotten him now, having specifically warned the Doctor about him in Terror of the Autons; and of course nobody, not even Peter Pratt who was a great performer, can match Roger Delgado as the arch-enemy. [Since 2010 we’ve seen strong competition from Michelle Gomez and Sacha Dhawan.] Secondly, as my mother remarked when I was nine, there appear to be no Time Ladies among the Time Lords. Now, there are other Who stories without woman among the guest cast – Warriors’ Gate, The Power of Kroll, The Pyramids of Mars, Planet of Evil, Revenge of the Cybermen, The Mutants, The Abominable Snowmen, The Moonbase, The Smugglers and The Rescue – but this is the only one with no visible speaking female character at all (the voice of the Matrix is played by Helen Blatch. It’s a sad lacuna in what is otherwise one of the greatest stories.
When the whole thing was streamed on Twitch in January 2019, I happened to be stuck at a loose end in London and watched it again, live-tweeting as it rolled.
Needless to say I watched it again for this post, and needless to say I enjoyed it again. You can get it here. Nothing much to add to what I have already extensively written. But I was intrigued to learn that the following slide was dropped from the end titles:
We thank the High Court of Time Lords and the Keeper of the Records, Gallifrey, for their help and co-operation.
Who are “we”?
Diverting to another book entirely, I am intrigued by Richard Molesworth’s suggestion, in his biography of Robert Holmes, that the writer at this point was getting irritated with Doctor Who, and that the tall blond Chancellor Goth stalking the hero through the swamp in hope of wiping him out could be seen as wish fulfillment by the author, who was also tall and blond, and had fought in the swamps of Burma / Myanmar during the second world war.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
Three figures appeared out of the gathering darkness. Castellan Spandrell and Chancellor Goth walked side by side, Hildred following respectfully behind them.
Andrew Orton’s Black Archive on the story is very meaty, with seven chapters and three appendices. Up front: I liked it a lot for shedding new light on a story I already love.
“Chapter 1: The Gothic Assassin” is the longest of the chapters, setting out Orton’s agenda. It leads with a consideration of the Gothic in Doctor Who of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes period in general, and of course in The Deadly Assassin in particular. There’s a whacking great indicator in the name of the main Time Lord villain. Even the opening rollover caption echoes the faux manuscript theme in Gothic literature.
“Chaper 2: The Noir Assassin” looks not only at the visible noir influence in the story but also as American and British political scandals: Watergate, Jeremy Thorpe, Harold Wilson’s resignation honours (announced the day the first episode was shown).
“Chapter 3: The Wartime Assassin” looks at the influence of the Second World War and the Cold War on British TV of the era in general, and on Doctor Who and this story in particular. Orton makes the point that the first twenty years of Doctor Who were dominated by the memory of conflict, Holmes in particular with his Burmese experience (it has been previously noted that he has a fondness for swamp planets with bubbling explosive gas). The second paragraph is:
The Second World War cast a massive pall over the first 20 years of Doctor Who, as it did over most of British culture. The Leisure Hive (1980) and Terminus (1983) were the series’ final real dalliances with War imagery, through their use of background radiation as a threat. Up until this point, the War permeated the series. Almost all of Doctor Who’s writers had lived through it (Douglas Adams was the first writer who hadn’t lived through at least a part of the War, although Chris Boucher was only born in 1943 and Graham Williams was born after VE Day but before VJ Day), and its influence informed and is present throughout the series’ first couple of decades. This tended to be shown in two strands: that of the totalitarian regime against which a resistance is formed, and that of the atomic bomb and the dangers of nuclear fallout.
“Chapter 4: The Symbolic Assassin” looks at the way in which the Time Lords mirror British society, especially parliament, and at the symbolism of the Matrix.
“Chapter 5: The Observant Assassin” reflects on the significance of the Panopticon and the Eye of Harmony; what are the Time Lords actually observing?
“Chapter 6: The Linguistic Assassin” looks at Robert Holmes’ inventive use of language throughout his Doctor Who career.
“Chapter 7: The Dangerous Assassin” points out that the story comes more or less at the half-way point of Old Who, and reflects that Holmes’ attempt to myth-bust the Time Lords resulted in yet more mythology.
“Appendix 1: Engines” reports briefly on the whereabouts of the four railway engines seen in Episode 3, all of which are still intact.
“Appendix 2: How Might the Eye of Harmony Actually Work?” unsuccessfully attempts to bring scientific rigour to a technobabble plot twist.
“Appendix 3: Observer Theory” looks at why it is that the Doctor (generally) has his adventures in order. Of course, we know the real reason, but it’s fun to try and put it in fictionally coherent terms.
In summary, Robert Holmes is the greatest Old Who writer, The Deadly Assassin is his greatest story, and this book is a great book because it provides further evidence for those uncontroversial opinions. You may be able to get it here.
The offices he passed were bursting with poised statues and intricate pieces of useless electronic equipment, and even the stacks of blank paper were of top quality — a creamy white watermarked with this month’s Tremptor logo. Simone kept his chin high, doing his best to pretend he was not in awe of the people he passed.
I thought the protagonist was really unpleasant and selfish, even after his moment of personal transformation, and didn’t feel that the satire quite came off. Lyrical description but rather harping on a single note until very near the end. You can get it here.
Two Hugo finalists in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category.
Second frame of third part of Saga, Vol 10:
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. I’ll give this a high vote, but not sure how it would 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.
Second frame of third chapter of Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK:
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. Will also get a high vote from me. You can get it here.
To make a good trade, a carrier needs not to care about transgress-ing time. A carrier needs to slip her way into the barter. To use objects and signs in unorthodox ways.
Time-travelling meditation on the Statue of Liberty. More fantasy than sf, and more importantly it doesn’t quite stick the landing. You can get it here.
Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to lecture on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He lay down to rest for a moment, and a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the underside of the bar.
Breakfast of Champions is firmly in third place in the ranking of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels on both LibraryThing and Goodreads, and firmly in second place among the books of 1973 on both systems. Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle are his top and second novels, and I think that is fair; both are much better books. (Indeed I find The Sirens of Titan, which is fourth on both lists, more to my taste.)
The book is about a science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, on his way to a literary convention in a town which may or may not be Vonnegut’s original home, Indianapolis, and his violent encounter with a deranged local automobile dealer. The author himself features as an anonymous first-person viewpoint minor character, though one with godlike powers over the other characters.
It’s a frustarting book, because it combines some very incisive social commentary with some very regrettable tics; the body measurements of female characters and penis sizes of male characters are all cited, and the n-word is freely thrown around to an extent that was surely already unacceptable in 1973. Vonnegut illustrates it with hs own drawing, which are frankly childish. There are some serious messages lurking there, and some good questions asked about what it is we really expect from fictional narratives, but the book as a whole is just self-indulgent. You can get it here.
I noted a couple of weeks ago the historical background of Phoebe Hurty, aka Glaadys Sutton, aka Jane Jordan, to whom this book is dedicated. Vonnegut remained true to his Indianapolis roots.
“Do not be afraid,” he repeated. “He won’t hurt you.”
This is the second in the sequence of five novels by Madeleine L’Engle about Meg Murry, of which the first and by far the best known is A Wrinkle in Time. (An odd coincidence: my grandmother’s married name was Margaret Murray.) Here Meg is teamed up with a cherubim and her brother Charles’s struggling head-teacher to learn lessons and fight mystic battles among the mitochondria of Charles’ failing body. To be honest, it’s less humane and less magical than the previous book, and there are several longish chapters of Meg lost in the void, without physical form, communicating through dialogue with unseen allies and enemies, Proust could (just about) get away with taking fifty pages to walk up a flight of stairs, but L’Engle doesn’t quite pull it off. Still, it’s an encouraging, positive, imaginative book, and I think the yung readers of 1973 would have been glad to have a sequel, even if it wasn’t quite up to the mark. You can get it here.
In fact while A Wind in the Door is a strong third-placed of the 1973 books on LibraryThing (well ahead of Gravity’s Rainbow), it’s only fourth on Goodreads, well behind Rendezvous with Rama (which however scores much worse on LT). You can get it here.
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
I was vaguely aware of this as (I thought) woo-woo spirituality. I was pleased to discover that it is better than that; in particular I thought it rather good on love and personal relationships, and I can see why people who are uncomfortable with any specific religious tradition like to use it for rites of passage, especially weddings.
It’s interesting that all three of the top 1923 books address death as a fundamental part of what they are doing, though I’ll admit that The Prophet is some distance from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The second last chapter is explicitly “On Death”, and in the last chapter the Prophet himself bids farewell to the priestess and departs from the city departs in a heavily laden metaphor.
Gibran is not so sound on social and political issues, where the message of the book is to try and find the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, without much thought to finding the courage to change the things you can, or the wisdom to know the difference. You can’t have everything, I suppose.
But it’s short, and digestible, and nicely illustrated by the author, and you can get it here.
Continuing with my analysis of the best-remembered novels of 1923, we get to Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers. NB that this review includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for a detective novel published a hundred years ago.
Whose Body? was Dorothy L. Sayers’ first novel, and therefore also the first of the eleven Lord Peter Wimsey novels published in her lifetime. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
“That’s a wonderful instrument,” said Parker.
Whose Body? is a better book than The Murder on the Links. Christie’s Poirot (and the other French characters) are already slipping into caricature; Sayers is engaging in wicked social observation of her own people. The characters are more memorable; I was smiling in recognition of particular lines that I first read thirty-five years ago. It established Wimsey as a realistic, complicated man, who likes to pretend that he is much stupider than he really is.
A naked body is discovered in the bath of a respectable London architect; meanwhile a well-known Jewish financier has gone missing. (A deleted line would have made it clear that the body int he bath is not Jewish.) The central mystery is very complicated, but not quite as unbelievably so as in Agatha Christie, and the clues are scattered through the text to the point that the careful reader will have an inkling of the answer at the same time as Wimsey works it all out. The common thread turns out to be…
MASSIVE SPOILERS
…a distinguished surgeon who killed the financier after decades of resentment about his marriage, and swapped his body for one from the teaching hospital which he runs. He explains himself in a detailed written confession at the end.
Again, the recent war looms behind everything. Wimsey has an awful attack of shell shock just as he works out the answer to the mystery:
Mr. Bunter, sleeping the sleep of the true and faithful servant, was aroused in the small hours by a hoarse whisper, “Bunter!”
“Yes, my lord,” said Bunter, sitting up and switching on the light.
“Put that light out, damn you!” said the voice. “Listen—over there—listen—can’t you hear it?”
“It’s nothing, my lord,” said Mr. Bunter, hastily getting out of bed and catching hold of his master; “it’s all right, you get to bed quick and I’ll fetch you a drop of bromide. Why, you’re all shivering—you’ve been sitting up too late.”
“Hush! no, no—it’s the water,” said Lord Peter with chattering teeth; “it’s up to their waists down there, poor devils. But listen! can’t you hear it? Tap, tap, tap—they’re mining us—but I don’t know where—I can’t hear—I can’t. Listen, you! There it is again—we must find it—we must stop it…. Listen! Oh, my God! I can’t hear—I can’t hear anything for the noise of the guns. Can’t they stop the guns?”
“Oh, dear!” said Mr. Bunter to himself. “No, no—it’s all right, Major—don’t you worry.”
Sayers’ England is still picking itself up after catastrophe, more tangibly so than Christie’s France. Notable that The Murder on the Links and Whose Body? share a particular plot twist: in both stories, there is an unsuccessful attempt to substitute the body of a vagrant for the actual murder victim. It suggests rather grimly that in 1923, there was no shortage of anonymous vagrants dying in England and northern France who could be called in post-mortem to support the nefarious plans of aspiring criminals.
Sayer also surprised me by introducing a theological discussion between Wimsey and his police detective friend Parker.
Lord Peter spent the afternoon in a vain hunt for Mr. Parker. He ran him down eventually after dinner in Great Ormond Street.
Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. He received Lord Peter with quiet pleasure, though without rapturous enthusiasm, and mixed him a whisky-and-soda. Peter took up the book his friend had laid down and glanced over the pages.
“All these men work with a bias in their minds, one way or other,” he said; “they find what they are looking for.”
“Oh, they do,” agreed the detective; “but one learns to discount that almost automatically, you know. When I was at college, I was all on the other side—Conybeare and Robertson and Drews and those people, you know, till I found they were all so busy looking for a burglar whom nobody had ever seen, that they couldn’t recognise the footprints of the household, so to speak. Then I spent two years learning to be cautious.”
“Hum,” said Lord Peter, “theology must be good exercise for the brain then, for you’re easily the most cautious devil I know. But I say, do go on reading—it’s a shame for me to come and root you up in your off-time like this.”
I have attempted in vain to locate a credible British commentary on Galatians published in the early 1920s, though there are a couple of American candidates. Sayers of course was well known for her theological writing, but it’s startling to see that in the hands of a policeman character. It is a good set-up for the exposure of the amoral character of the villain.
Anyway, it’s a great start to a good run of Wimsey stories. You can get it here.
As reported on Sunday, the three top books published in 1923 as measured by ownership on LibraryThing and Goodreads, a barometer of their staying power (in the English-speaking world in particular), are The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I had not read The Murder on the Links or The Prophet before, and decided to do a triple reading with a welcome return to Whose Body?.
NB that this reviews below includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for a mystery novel published a hundred years ago.
The Murder on the Links was Agatha Christie’s third novel (of 66) and second Poirot novel (of 33). It’s just outside her top ten books on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. The second paragraph of the third chapter, gloriously, is:
“What is that you say? Murdered? When? How?”
Poirot, an elderly retired Belgian detective, and the narrator, the young Captain Hastings, are invited to France by Paul Renauld, a Canadian millionaire who has earned his fortune in Chile and Argentina, and writes that he is in fear of his life. They arrive in France to find that he has just been murdered. The case involves many beautiful women and Renauld’s son. It turns out, after much complex investigation and many false leads, that…
MASSIVE SPOILERS
…Renauld had planned to fake his own murder, but one of the beautiful women decided to kill him anyway. She conveniently dies before being arrested; another of the beautiful women marries Renauld’s son, and another marries Captain Hastings and takes him to Argentina.
The war looms over this book, as over the other two which I will come to. In the very first chapter, Hastings introduces himself to the reader by way of conversation with the girl he has just met (and will marry at the end of the story):
We passed through Amiens. The name awakened many memories. My companion seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of what was in my mind.
“Thinking of the War?”
I nodded.
“You were through it, I suppose?”
“Pretty well. I was wounded once, and after the Somme they invalided me out altogether. I had a half fledged Army job for a bit. I’m a sort of private secretary now to an M. P.”
“My! That’s brainy!”
“No, it isn’t. There’s really awfully little to do. Usually a couple of hours every day sees me through. It’s dull work too.”
All of the dialogue in the book is reported in English, though with a distinctly French idiom to let us know when Christie’s characters are speaking French. It is taken for granted that Hastings, like all properly educated people in 1923, is completely fluent and comfortable in French. No difficulties of linguistic comprehension are reported.
The murder plot is intricate beyond belief, but Christie carries it off by having Poirot show off his talent to the sympathetic Hastings and the unsympathetic official detective from Paris. One feels at the end that the elaborate set-up was just about worth the payoff, and it is a more confident and comfortable book than The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie’s first novel, which also featured Poirot. You can get it here.
After leaving Howard’s, she decided to text instead of call Louis, waiting to have the conversation later when he was his full embodied self. But after she texted him with a short update her phone rang straightaway. She was just getting balanced on her bike and had to put the kickstand down again, then remembered to unplug the headphones when she heard his voice so close in her ears.
Interesting exploration of green lifestyle and consciousness-altering pharmaceuticals. I do love Berlin as a city and it’s nice to see something set there. You can get it here.
