At junctures the quakes seemed to come often, sending the water quivering over her skin again and again in reverberating series. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, the concussions jarring through her bones and sending chills through her teeth. Goosebumps lifted on her skin, so rare an occasion she felts at them in wondering confusion. Any texture at all came as a fascinating alleviation to the endless litany of despair that was her only company.
Catie’s rate of output is very impressive, and I have long given up trying to keep pace with her books; I enjoyed this tale of an immortal from Atlantis getting involved with an archaeological dig into his own past, and finding that past relationships come back to haunt him. Some online reviewers insist that it’s rather closely linked to the Highlander series, but I don’t know that particular show and to me it seemed pretty fresh and interesting; ancient secrets and relationships coming to the surface. Good fun. You can get it here.
This was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile (and last of those acquired in 2016) is There Will Be War Vol X, edited by Jerry Pournelle.
“Nobody.” Jes repeats his answer for who knows how many times. He can’t blame the big guy for being cautious. He hadn’t planned on telling them about his ability or the Institute so soon, if at all, but the equipment failure happened, and people were going to get hurt and he had to show them some reason, some value he could add to their operation. Disclosing his ability just opened the door.
Space opera where our protagonist has psychic powers over the forces of gravity. Some nice ideas and good treatment of gender, but not startling. You can get it here.
Russia’s act of aggression against a neighbour jolted the EU into becoming more of a geopolitical actor, forcing it to demonstrate a degree of unity and purpose, which the fractious 27-nation bloc rarely achieves in quieter times. The EU and member states deployed a broad toolbox of measures to support Kyiv, assist Ukrainians, sanction Russia and reduce supply chain dependencies for food, energy, minerals and microchips. They also, for the first time, used collective funds to supply lethal weapons to a partner country under attack.
I’ve decided to be a bit more assiduous about tracking my work-related reading, some of which qualifies as books to blog here. This is a mercifully brief report – 120 pages, available here – which was presented at a conference that I attended last month – I don’t recall actually speaking but I’m visible in the audience at several points.
For those of us inside the policy bubble, there’s nothing very surprising here, but it’s good to get the orthodox view down on paper (or pixels). Taylor reports that both NATO and the defence aspects of the EU have been strengthened, of necessity, after the Russian attack on Ukraine, and that policy-makers are now grappling with the likelihood that we’ll need to be combat-ready for the next decade at least. Lessons have been and are being learned about what armaments are and aren’t necessary. There remains a spectrum of debate but there’s a consensus among defence experts about the big picture.
Necessarily he concentrates on the countries that really drive this – France, Germany, in NATO but outside the EU the UK and USA, and the central and eastern European frontline states. His recommendations are largely things that the main actors are doing or want to do anyway. But it’s a very handy summary of what’s really going on in the policy world, and I hope a helpful counterbalance to the extremists of left and right who prefer to lie about these important issues.
Second paragraph of third story (“Timebox”, by Janelle Monáe and Eve L. Ewing):
“What are you doing? It’s freezing out.”
Five stories set in the world of Monáe’s Dirty Computer, about women caught up in the near-future totalitarian state of New Dawn, where those who don’t fit in, especially in terms of gender and sexuality, face memory wiping by the powerful state. It’s rooted in her Hugo finalist album and film from a few years back:
All five stories are billed as being co-written by Monáe and a series of other writers. They all take the fictional society in new and slightly different directions; my favourite was the third, “Timebox”, co-written with Chicago activist Eve L. Ewing, in which two women discover a room in their apartment which sits outside time, and react to it very differently. But these are all good and thought-provoking, and recommended. (Eligible surely for the BSFA’s new Best Collection category next year?) You can get it here.
This was top of my pile of unread books by non-white writers. Next is a rather different one: The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul.
This is also the first write-up here of a book that I finished this month.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Mothers, the Mothers, How Eerily It Sounds” by David Skal):
He looked at the stars. More of them, every year more of them, just as the elders had promised. The air had been angered once by the earth man had been the cause of the quarrel, and thus had been denied the light of stars. Digger had heard the tale a hundred times and had no doubt of its truth. The elements must never be angered again, lest man be denied more than starlight.
I had got hold of this 1976 anthology mainly because it is the first publication of the Hugo and Nebula-winning story, “‘Houston! Houston! Do You Read?'”, by James Tiptree Jr. The rubric of the anthology is “Amazing Tales of the Ultimate Sexual Revolution”, the editors sayiong in their preface that they wanted fiction that explored what the world might look like after equality between the sexes had been achieved. They didn’t really get it, but it’s a good anthology anyway.
In fact it incudes two stories by the same author, as the editors were not aware that Tiptree and Racoona Sheldon were the same person. It also includes the first chapter of Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, and Ursula Le Guin’s non-fiction essay “IS Gender Necessary?” A couple of the others are real duds, but the good pieces are very good, and I think it’s a useful representation of both how far sf had come in 1976 and how much farther there still was to go. You can get it here.
Next in my sequence of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, these two shorter pieces were published in 1990 and awarded in 1991. They also mark the beginning and end of my previous project of writing up the joint winners of both awards; back in the early 2000s, I decided to go through them in alphabetical order of title, and although since then American Gods, Among Others, Ancillary Justice and All Systems Red have picked up both awards, back in 2001 that was not yet the case and “Bears Discover Fire” was the first in line. And when I ran out of steam with that project a few years later, I had started but nowhere near finished a write-up of “The Hemingway Hoax”.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Bears Discover Fire” is:
The school bus let Wallace Jr. off at my house on Wednesday, the day they left. The boy doesn’t have to pack much of a bag when he stays with me. He has his own room here. As the eldest of our family, I hung onto the old home place near Smiths Grove. It’s getting run down, but Wallace Jr. and I don’t mind. He has his own room in Bowling Green, too, but since Wallace and Elizabeth move to a different house every year (part of the Plan), he keeps his .22 and his comics, the stuff that’s important to a boy his age, in his room here at the home place. It’s the room his dad and I used to share.
First time around, I was not super enthusiastic about the story, but I was enthusiastic enough about the project to give it a long write-up:
“Bears Discover Fire” is described by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as a story that “elegizes the land, the loss of the dream of America; it is also very funny”. I appreciated the story but didn’t see the joke at all. Obviously others enjoyed it more: apart from the Hugo and Nebula, “Bears Discover Fire” won four other awards and was nominated for another two, probably a record. (Having said that, the competition from other short stories in 1990-91 was not very strong. [I don’t think that was really fair of me.])
Terry Bisson writes very American science fiction, rooted in a strong sense of place (Owensboro, Kentucky) and time (the present day, or something very like it); his best-known books include Talking Man and Fire on the Mountain, set in an alternate history where the US Civil War had a quite different course. His website gives a good feel for the man. I really dislike his story “macs”, even though I completely agree with the political point of the story. Perhaps a non-American inevitably has difficulty in accessing Bisson’s work. I notice that I am not alone here [dead link to Asimov’s readers forum]. It took me a couple of rereadings of “Bears Discover Fire” to realise that the “torches” held by the bears at the end of the first section were not battery operated, and this despite the whacking great clue in the story’s title.
Bisson has described “Bears Discover Fire” as being about exactly what the title says. This is not true. The narrator, his brother and his nephew suffer a flat tyre one night; their flashlight goes out, and the narrator changes the tyre in “a flood of dim orange flickery light… coming from two bears at the edge of the woods, holding torches.” It seems that the bears have given up hibernating and are instead settling in the wooded medians (what I would call the central reservations) of the interstate highways, surviving on a newly evolved fruit called a “newberry”. The narrator’s elderly mother disappears from her nursing home, and he and his nephew find her sitting around a fire with a silent group of bears. They fall asleep together, and wake in the morning to find that the bears have gone and she has died in the night.
The most sensitive element (in what is anyway quite a sensitive story) is the portrayal of the narrator’s relationships with his mother and his nephew. The nephew, Wallace Jr, is “old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I’d married and had kids, he’s the kind I’d have wanted.” Wallace Jr stands up for his uncle against his father; his uncle responds by correcting his grammar, not wanting him to end up talking like “what Mother used to call ‘a helock from the gorges of the mountains.'” It’s beautifully portrayed. The mother, on the other hand, is long prepared for her own death, and the narrator is gradually coming to terms with it. Bisson (introducing the story in Nebula Awards 26) comments that the story was his own way of coming to grips with the deaths of his mother and a favourite uncle.
The tone is elegiac throughout. The narrator’s brother chides him for wasting time on fixing old tyres rather than using the new radials. The brother himself is introduced to us as a preacher, but it turns out he makes two-thirds of his living in real estate. The bears seem to be gaining something that we humans have lost, the art of enjoying company by a warm fire in the woods perhaps. “It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything?” The scientists who try to explain the bears’ new behaviour are at a total loss; it’s a phenomenon which is only really understood by the narrator’s mother. “It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking.”
The bears are individuals: “Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.” That “gathered together” is very Biblical, particularly reminiscent of Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Even the narrator is astonished to find the new natural paradise that is in the median, “all tangled with brush and vines under the maples, oaks and sycamores. Even though we were only a hundred yards from the house, I had never been there, and neither had anyone else that I knew of. It was like a created country.” The bears are truly in Eden.
Meanwhile the average human is just insensitive. The nursing home tell the narrator that he will have to keep paying for his mother’s care for another two days even though she has disappeared. The state troopers who arrive in the morning after the bears have gone “scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do.” Hunters in Virginia (not Kentucky, I notice!) complain that the bears have burnt down their house. The narrator clearly feels that if the bears did it, they had a right to do so: “The state hunting commissioner came on and said the possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back… I’m not a hunter myself.”
John Kessel notes [dead link] in particular an exchange between the narrator and his nephew where the nephew wants to shoot one of the bears (for me, the horror I feel at the idea of a twelve-year-old running around with a rifle illustrates yet another cultural difference with America). “I explained why that would be wrong. ‘Besides,’ I said, “a .22 wouldn’t do much more to a bear than make it mad.'” New paragraph. “‘Besides,’ I added, “it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.'” Kessel says that “This combination of the legal, the practical and the moral sums up something about the voice of Terry Bisson.” I think Kessel has it right, but in the wrong order: it’s significant that the moral reasoning, God’s law, is mentioned first; then the practical, Nature’s law; and the legal issues, Man’s law, are an afterthought.
John Kessel [kindly] sent me an email in response to this paragraph: “I think you have it exactly right, and I was trying to say exactly that – that for Bisson, the issues are moral, practical and legal, in descending order of importance. This reflects a rather Emersonian and typically American faith in the idea of a “natural” virtue that only coincidentally has any connection with the law, and is often in opposition to law.”
One of the roles of speculative fiction is to make us look again at our world and re-evaluate what we are doing to it. “Bears Discover Fire” has been described by Robert Sawyer and Bob Sabella [dead link] as a “tall-tale”. I think it’s actually a fable, in the Aesopian sense of a moral story featuring animals which behave as humans. But whereas we were meant to look at Aesop’s animals and laugh at their failings while realising that we share them, Bisson’s bears are in fact on a spiritual plane which may or may not be higher than ours, but is certainly better.
Michael Swanwick has [also kindly] sent an reaction by email: “I was dumbfounded that you couldn’t see the humor in ‘Bears Discover Fire,’ particularly since the opening is structured as a shaggy-dog joke. Every time I reread it, that last line, ‘”Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said,’ makes me laugh out loud. And those triads of explanations the narrator offers, always ending with the anteclimactic: ‘Besides, it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.’ Or: ‘Also, old people tend to exaggerate.’ (You were spot-on about the hierachy of values, incidentally; one of the things I love about this story is how many virtues Bisson layered atop each other.) I think it’s a profoundly funny story, one whose humor lies in its wisdom and vice versa.
“Oh, and did you notice that the last line of the story is implicitly the last statement of one of his triads with the prior two omitted? Terry’s a sly guy.”
I must say that on rereading it more than twenty years later, I still don’t see it as very funny. I guess that this is an American thing.
“Bears Discover Fire” was the only story to be on both Hugo and Nebula ballots in the Short Story category that year. The other Hugo finalists were “Cibola”, by Connie Willis; “Godspeed”, by Charles Sheffield; “The Utility Man”, by Robert Reed; and “VRM-547”, W. R. Thompson. I don’t think I have read any of these – “Cibola” has not been republished in any of the Connie Willis collections. W[illiam] R[och] Thompson was born in 1955 and has published precisely one story since 1996.
The other Nebula finalists were “Before I Wake”, by Kim Stanley Robinson; “Lieserl”, by Karen Joy Fowler; “Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates”, by Pat Murphy; “The Power and the Passion”, by Pat Cadigan; and “Story Child”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I think I have read “Lieserl”; I note that four of the five losing stories were by women.
There was more overlap in the Best Novelette category that year. The Hugo was won by “The Manamouki”, by Mike Resnick, and the Nebula by “Tower of Babylon”, by Ted Chiang. Both were on both shortlists, as were “Over the Long Haul”, by Martha Soukup, and “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk”, by Dafydd ab Hugh.
The Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella were jointly won by “The Hemingway Hoax”, by Joe Haldeman. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
John left the place soon, walking slowly through the afternoon heat. He was glad he hadn’t brought the bicycle; it was pleasant to walk in the shade of the big aromatic trees, a slight breeze on his face from the Gulf side.
As mentioned above, I hit a permanent block when trying to write about this story fifteen years ago, which I think was much more because of family and work circumstances at the time than due to any difficulty with the story itself. It’s complex, but not overly so; an English literature professor and Vietnam veteran, in a marriage that is less happy than he realises, gets inveigled by his wife and a conman into forging the papers lost by Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, on a train leaving Paris in 1922. (The Hemingways were members of the same library as my grandmother.) This scheme attracts the attention of time-travelling entities, one of whome keeps reappearing in the form of Hemingway, for whom it is crucially important that Hemingway’s early writing history remains unchanged and unchallenged, because of his importance to the development of civilisation. Sex, violence and time paradoxes ensue, as the Hemingway entity kills the protagonist only to find him resurrected in a slightly different universe. I enjoyed it without being entirely clear what had happened at the end.
The one element that really has dated is the notion of Hemingway’s exceptionalism.
“the accelerating revival of interest in Hemingway from the seventies through the nineties is vitally important. In the Soviet Union as well as the United States. For some reason, I can feel your pastiche interfering with it.”
When I first read The Hemingway Hoax I had not read any of Hemingway’s books; in the interim, I have in fact read several, and I’ll agree that they are great literature, but really not as earth-shattering as all that. I think we’re meant to take seriously the notion that Hemingway’s writing is central to the present and future of Western civilisation; and I can’t.
On the plus side, the story is clearly also Haldeman working out his own feelings about Vietnam and literature, and both of those are deep wells to draw from. The women characters (wife and lover) wobble on the edge of stereotype but don’t quite fall over. I felt that while it has dated, it’s still very good. You can get a standalone version, slightly expanded from the original publication, here.
Two other novellas were on both Hugo and Nebula ballots that year; “Bones”, by Pat Murphy, and “Fool to Believe”, by Pat Cadigan. The others on the Hugo ballot were Bully!, by Mike Resnick, and A Short, Sharp Shock, by Kim Stanley Robinson; and the others on the Nebula ballot were “Mr. Boy”, by James Patrick Kelly, and “Weatherman”, by Lois McMaster Bujold, which is the only one of these that I am sure I have read (see next para).
The only novel on both Hugo and Nebula final ballots was The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, which I liked when I first read it but didn’t like so much on rereading, though it won the BSFA Award. The Hugo for Best Novel was won by Bujold’s The Vor Game, which incorporates “Weatherman”, and the Nebula by Le Guin’s Tehanu.
St Leger’s occupancy of the lord deputyship was critical in maintaining the fragile peace and stability that resulted in both Irish abstinence from involvement in intrigue with France and consequent minimal demands for financial, military and naval resources from the English privy council to fortify Ireland’s defences. His success, however, proved short-lived. Within months of the arrival in Ireland in May 1548 of St Leger’s successor, Sir Edward Bellingham, his aggressive handling of the midland septs led to insurrection. In the aftermath, the dispossessed O’Connors embarked upon a sustained campaign to elicit military support from Henri II of France in support of their opposition to the English crown in what was the most serious episode in sixteenth-century Franco-Irish intrigue.2 2 See Ch. 4 below.
This is a nice short book adapted from the author’s Ph D thesis on the same topic. French interest in Ireland waxed and waned over the long sixteenth century; the big game was always in the future relationship with England, and Scotland was a far more important factor (and Scottish politics much better known) in Paris. Also, the Irish chieftains were much kore assiduous and successful at building relations in Spain, whose relationship with England was much less complex.
So Franco-Irish relations in the Tudor period are a bit of a sideshow, but there is still quite a lot to tell if you want to look into the official documents and archives in France and England (and Ireland, to the limited extent that it is possible). The most interesting Fact I Had Not Known is that Henri II of France came close to organising an invasion of Ireland via Scotland in 1549-50; but the politics didn’t quite work out, and nor did the weather. It would have been a tough defence for the English, provided that a critical mass of Irish leaders had joined the French; in the end I think they would likely have opted for the devil they knew, but that would not have been clear from the beginning.
It’s also just useful to have a look from a different perspective. I’ve read a lot about Tudor Ireland over the last few years, but it’s almost all been internally focused with occasional references to the court in London. It was good to be reminded that there were other neighbouring countries with skin in the game, even if not very much. I’d love to read something about the Spanish angle, however – and that would include Belgium, then under Spanish rule and a hub for Irish exiles.
Anyway, a good book if you are interested in the subject. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next, if I can find it, is Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, by Bernard Grofman.
As is often the case with more recent New Who, I don’t seem to have written up the closing episodes of Series 5 previously. In case you have forgotten, it is the climax to the first set of stories featuring Matt Smith as the Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy and Arthur Darville as Rory, first shown in 2010. (And Alex Kingston also turns up as River Song.) It’s a story that merrily zips back and forth from Roman times to the present day, with loads of Doctor Who monsters and also Stonehenge. The universe gets destroyed and then put back together again, and the Doctor and the TARDIS are almost eliminated from it but summoned back by Amy at her wedding to Rory. It’s a lot of fun.
Doctor Who is meant to be entertaining, and I’m with the majority who find that this time it worked – The Pandorica Opens had the highest audience ratings so far of any Series 5 episode, beaten the following week by The Big Bang. It was the fifth of six Doctor Who stories to win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), remarkably rising from second last place in both nominations and first preferences to win the award on transfers. It’s the first of the Hugo winners to be covered by the Black Archive series (and at time of writing, the only one).
I noted briefly before that it “manages to avoid pulling its punches”; I think I’d go further, and say that it’s the best of all of the Moffat era season endings (cf Dark Water / Death in Heaven, and Heaven Sent / Hell Bent).The plot doesn’t honestly make a lot of sense, but this is covered with spectacle, action, wit and knowing references to things that had happened earlier in the season so that you are made to feel that it all hangs together, more perhaps than it really does. Amy’s line “something borrowed, something blue”, tying ancient and incomprehensible wedding traditions to the TARDIS is simply beautiful.
Philip Bates has written a fair bit of commentary, but this appears to be his first book. A short prologue states his case that the story succeeds because it is “an intimate tale on epic proportions”. The rest of the book provides supporting arguments.
The first chapter, “Balancing the Epic and the Intimate”, looks at how Moffat pulls off the feat of intricately linking the story with the preceding episodes of the season, and indeed how they are linked to the rest of Doctor Who.
The second chapter, “Myths and Fairytales”, interrogates the concept of fairytales, stopping off briefly at Pandora’s Box, and the way in which fairytale lore informs both the story in question and the character of the Doctor.
The third chapter’s title is “Anomalies”. Its brief second paragraph is:
And so, we’re teased with timely anomalies that hint at what we’ve lost and what could return.
Here Bates looks at the concept of anomalies and how they contribute to the plot of the episode, going (perhaps a little more than necessary) into the scientific concepts underpinning the term.
The fourth chapter, “When Time Travel Wouldn’t Help”, looks at the “rules” of time travel and how Moffat uses them to support the plot – referring back also to his first Doctor Who work, the short story “Continuity Errors“.
The fifth chapter, “The Trouble with Time”, which is the longest in the book, looks at the arrow of time, time loops, and (again) the current scientific understanding behind them, and the way in which they are used in the story.
The sixth chapter, “Endings and Beginnings”, is mostly about scientific understandings of the end (and beginning ) of the universe.
A brief conclusion meditates on the concept of “favourite stories”.
An appendix, “Good Question for Another Day”, attempts to unpack the question of why the TARDIS explodes and who, if anyone, is responsible.
This book lacks a lot of the things I usually like about the Black Archives – analysis of the development of the script or of details of the production -and includes a fair bit of science, which is not what I get the Black Archives for. But I can forgive a lot of it for Bates’ infectious enthusiasm for a story that I already liked a lot. You can get it here.
Nomadland won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Director (Chloé Zhao) and Best Actress (Frances McDormand), more Oscars than any other film that year. The other contenders for Best Picture were The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7; I haven’t seen any of them. The Hugo went to The Old Guard, which I really didn’t grok, and the Bradbury Award to a TV script.
Apart from this and the six films nominated for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), I have also seen Enola Holmes and the film-of-the-stage-show of Hamilton from that year, which was of course the first full year of the pandemic. I’d put Nomadland somewhere in the middle of that pack. IMDB users rank it an OK 13th on one scale, but a lowly 43rd on the other. The top films on the two IMDB rankings are Tenet, which I also couldn’t get on with, and Extraction, which I have not heard of.
Here’s a trailer.
I normally run through the other appearances of the cast in Oscar/Hugo/Nebula-Bradbury winners and in Doctor Who. This time, there are hardly any professional actors in the film – most of the cast play themselves. McDormand has the most exposure, but I had only previously seen her in Raising Arizona and Almost Famous. (This is a serious omission on my part; Nomadland was her third Oscar win for Best Actress after Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, putting her level with Ingrid Bergman and Meryl Streep, and more likely than either of them to catch up with Katharine Hepburn.)
The film is about McDormand’s character, Fern, who is displaced from her home by capitalism and links up with the American subculture of people living in their vehicles, crossing the huge area between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi, working on subsistence jobs. As I said, while not my favourite film of the year, I liked it well enough.
It is one of a number of Oscar winners to be based on a contemporary factual situation with some fictionalised elements – apart from the biopics, I would include On the Waterfront, The French Connection, Argo and Spotlight. But Nomadland is a very different kettle of fish. In The French Connection, two of the real-life protagonists play minor figures in the story, and one minor figure plays himself. Here, almost all of the speaking roles, apart from the lead character and a couple of others, are played by people playing themselves.
It makes me a little uneasy, to be honest. A documentary is a documentary; it’s a work of art, sure, but one that relies on showing an existing truth to us on the screen. But this is a film where an A-list Hollywood actress pretends to be part of the lives of very real people with very real problems. To tell their story, was it necessary to bring in a fictional person to help them tell it? And if so, is it still their story, or a similar yet different story belonging to the film-makers? Are we getting the real Linda May, Gay, Patty, Angela, Carl, Doug, Ryan, Teresa, Karie, Brandy, Makenzie and Bob Wells? Or are we getting Chloé Zhao’s version of them?
Still, it’s unusual to be asking this question about middle-aged and elderly white people. (cf Slumdog Millionaire.) These folks are making the best of the disruption to their lives caused by late stage capitalism in a crumbling state (ie the USA); they narrate their situation to themselves and to us as a positive choice; we get to make up our own minds. Some may wish that the film had taken a more polemical stance against poverty and its causes, and I think I’m probably one of them, but I don’t know if an angrier film would have been a better film in this case.
Apart from that, you have to admit that the film looks really good and sounds really good. Those landscapes from the sparsely populated Mountain Time Zone speak for themselves. The music could have been gruesomely sentimental and manipulative, but opts for quiet and contemplative. McDormand herself is not called on to do all that much, but does it very well, and it is impossible to take your eyes off her. (Somewhat related: not many actors of either gender get nude scenes, however discreet, in their 50s.)
So I’m putting it about three fifths of the way down my list of Oscar winners, just below Marty and above The Life of Emile Zola.
As previously mentioned, it’s based on a book with the same title by journalist Jessica Bruder. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Empire was six miles north of “the gyp,” an open-pit gypsum mine nestled at the foot of the Selenite mountain range. There miners detonated blasts of anfo—an explosive blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—to dislodge white, chalky chunks of ore from five terraced pits, the largest a half-mile across. Haul trucks shuttled sixty-ton batches of gypsum up the highway to a drywall plant on the edge of town. There workers pulverized it, heated it to 500 degrees in massive kettles, and shaped it into the wallboard found in homes across the American West.
I’m a huge sucker for the participant-observer mode of anthropology, and this brand of “immersive journalism” comes very close to it. Good writing like this lets the stories come out in their own way and their own time, and although the book is not long, nobody is rushed into fitting into a film scene. Inevitably the book ends up angrier than the film, even if its subjects in general accept their lot, because the mere facts of what the USA is doing to its own people are so enraging, and decent reportage will bring that out.
It also reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, though Alexievich rarely inserts herself into the narrative as Bruder perforce has to, and her subject matter is much rawer. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the impact on its people was far more gruesome and broad than what has happened in America. So far.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 40) A Brief History of Stonehenge, by Aubrey Burl Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart The Robots of Death, by Fiona Moore City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder
Non-genre 3 (YTD 7) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin The Rebecca Rioter, by Amy Dillwyn Chloe Arguelle, by Amy Dillwyn
SF 10 (YTD 110) The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross χ4 δ3 φ3 β2 π3 World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson The Hemingway Hoax, by Joe Haldeman
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 19) K9 Megabytes, by Bob Baker Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks Corpse Marker, by Chris Boucher
Comics 1 (YTD 10) The Endless Song, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,200 pages (YTD 46,900) 12/26 (YTD 78/191) by non-male writers (Beard, Moore, Fearon, Lyons, Bruder, Zevin, Dillwyn x2, χ4, β2, McIntyre / Anderson, Endless Song illustrators) 2/26 (YTD 28/191) by a non-white writer (Zevin, β2)
Reading now The Cider House Rules, by John Irving The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting
Coming soon (perhaps) Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadis et al The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, by Elizabeth Bear Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, by Bernard Grofman Political, Electoral and Spatial Systems, by R. J. Johnston There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris One Bible Many Voices, by S E Gillingham Falling to Earth, by Al Worden The Outcast, by Louise Cooper Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress DALEKS Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
A somewhat unexpected YA novel from Robert Silverberg, who I did not realise had written for that group of readers (but he has written so many books in many genres and sub-genres, and I should not have been surprised). It’s about our young hero who is brought to stay on the largest space station in history as a prize in an essay competition. it’s very reminiscent of Heinlein’s juveniles – there are intelligent but alien Martians, and an expedition to Pluto – but I was interested in the character of Claude Regan, the visionary billionaire who funds the space station and other projects; if the book had been written today, we’d see him as a portrayal of Elon Musk, and I wonder if Musk read this book (he’d have been 11 when it came out in 1982). Not spectacular, but an inter4esting snapshot of the time. You can get it here.
This was both the top unread book on my shelf acquired in 2016, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread. The next books respectively on those piles are Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, by Elizabeth Bear, and Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy.
When he’d gone to speak to Unfair about his grand plan for selling Ichigo, Dov had one question: “So, Ichigo’s a boy, right?”
This is a lovely Bildungsroman about two people from Cailfornia who end up writing video games together in Massachusetts (and then move back to California). They live and love and learn, awful and glorious things happen to them, and it all works out to a conclusion that isn’t quite what I expected but was very satisfactory anyway. I thought that the description of the process of writing video games, and the price that is paid for the work mentally and physically, was particularly compelling, but I also kept reading just to find out what would happen next in the relationship between the two main characters. It is very good. You can get it here.
Of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award submissions, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow had the most owners on LibraryThing and the most ratings on Goodreads, and pretty solid ratings as well. Unfortunately it’s not in any way science fiction; it’s set in contemporary America, over the last couple of decades, and although the games in the story are fictional, I don’t believe there’s anything there that could not be accomplished with real-life technology. So it was not eligible for the award.
This was the top unread book by a woman on my unread pile. Next on that stack is Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver.
We shake hands and he tells me about his church. It’s the big racing green tent on the way down to the canteen (galley, apparently, because the current brigade is the Navy, even though we aren’t on a ship). The door has always been closed over when I’ve passed, but the entrance is around the other side. Next time I go past I take a look. Yes, it’s got all the church gear all right: simple bench seating that’s bound to be painful to sit on, a central aisle, and, at the top, a table altar and a small lectern. The altar is demurely dressed: white cloth and a gold chalice. It waits, mutely, for souls. Over the next few days I take a look fairly regularly and I never see anyone in there. I have no idea what denomination it is.
I’ve known Kate Fearon for about thirty years. She was president of the Students Union at Queen’s University when I was a postgraduate; it was an incubator of political talent. Like me, she worked as a party aide in the 1996-98 peace talks, in her case for the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition; unlike me, she stuck it out to the end, and was there on Good Friday 1998. Like me, she subsequently went to work for the National Democratic Institute in Bosnia-Herzegovina; unlike me, she has spent most of her subsequent career in various field assignments, in Afghanistan, Kosovo and currently Georgia. Six years ago she kindly took this photograph of me as we were walking together through the Parc Leopold in Brussels one lunchtime:
Here she gives an impressionistic, first-person, present-tense account of the year she spent in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2009-10 as Governance Adviser to the UK-led international presence in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. It’s a story of life in primitive military conditions under the constant threat of death. Among the British soldiers who she works with, several die each week, whether by accident of design. The local leaders, whose efforts to build a new structure of government she is supporting, are also under constant threat, and several of those who she had got to know well were indeed assassinated by the Taliban. It is a beautifully written and intense read; you can practically feel the sand in your eyes and taste the flavour of the lamb stew. You can get it here.
In the light of what happened in 2021, it is a particularly poignant read. The book was published in 2012, and concludes with the observation that the situation was very fragile, and might not survive a drawdown of Western troops (as indeed proved to be the case). I don’t know enough about the country to draw conclusions about the failure of the Western mission there, but I do know enough to be pretty clear that it failed dismally.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610, by Mary Ann Lyons.
This ceaseless mixing of the population makes nonsense of all the familiar assumptions of ‘Gaelic origins’ or ‘the Irish race’. The distinctive nature of Irishness arises specifically from the interaction of newcomers with natives (the perennial cliché of Irish historical writing). Strictly speaking, there are no natives; or, to put it the other way round, all the Irish are natives. ‘Irish’, if it means anything, simply means being born in Ireland, even if, like Swift or the Duke of Wellington, you did not want to be. Many of the characteristics which are regarded as ‘typically Irish’, for instance, are demonstrably the legacy of the Old English, or the Anglo-Irish or the Lowland Scots just as much as they are of the Celts, whom we now call the Gaels. Interest in the Gaels, in their language which Irish people still spoke, in their literature and culture generally, revived in the eighteenth century. More specifically, both Protestants and Catholics, though divided from each other politically by the penal laws and structures based on them, tried to establish a connection with the Gaelic Irish culture, which was still extraordinarily healthy. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was in decline, and speaking Irish was regarded as a mark of social inferiority, something associated only with backward rural communities. Then, by the end of the century, a revival was under way, and Gaelic culture was being presented to the Irish population as the indigenous culture.
A.T.Q. Stewart was a colleague of my father’s in Belfast, and his sons were friends of ours – indeed I shared a house in Cambridge with one of them for a year. His perspective was a bit different, as one of the few prominent Irish historians of our parents’ generation who came from the Unionist tradition. I found a 1977 review in Fortnight of Stewart’s award-winning The Narrow Ground, written by my father, which began:
This is one of the most depressing books yet published on Ulster.
and concluded:
His book is beautifully written, as readers of Dr Stewart’s previous books will expect. Again and again, one pauses with pleasure at some felicitous phrase. ‘Ireland, like Dracula’s Transylvania, is much troubled by the undead’. (p.15) ‘The factor which. distinguishes the siege of Derry from all other historical sieges in the British Isles is that it is still going on’ (p.53) ‘What the Catholics have been saying for fifty years about the Ulster government springs from a well that was made bitter long before Stormont was built’. (p.179) I wish I could write like that. But I wish also that Dr Stewart had used his literary gifts to write a more constructive work.
My father also criticised Stewart in 1977 for not reading in other scholarly disciplines beyond history, including anthropology in particular. It’s interesting that in the opening chapter of The Shape of Irish History, published in 2001, eleven years after my father died (and nine years before Stewart’s own death) he too appeals to historians to read beyond their own discipline, particularly anthropology (E. Estyn Evans was a key figure in the history of the history of Ireland). There is probably not a direct connection with my father’s review.
The Shape of Irish History is a quirky book, probably written knowing that it would be the author’s last substantial work. I find the basic thesis very attractive: that we should not regard Irish history as a train on a direct journey (“The 10.14 from Clontarf”) with an inevitable destination; if we analyse people and events in the context of their own times, rather than trying to fit them into a story of national destiny, we will learn more. Subsequent chapters look at interesting diversions off the course of the train, especially in the eighteenth century, where I recently read a very interesting microstudy of one particularly vicious cultural practice of the time (duelling). I also learned a lot from the very brief dissection of what actually happened in 1798. There are lots of fun facts here, including the ballooning career of Richard Crosbie.
At the same time, my father’s observation from 1977 about style and tone still stands. It’s beautifully written, but the conclusion is thoroughly depressing:
There is no misunderstanding between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, none whatsoever. Nor do they need to get to know each other better. They know each other only too well, having lived alongside each other for four centuries, part of the same society yet divided by politics and history. This is not just a clash of cultures; it is a culture in itself.
This embrace of the inevitability of perpetual conflict is as unjustifiable as the narrative of the inevitable ‘10.14 from Clontarf’ train to Irish national destiny, which Stewart rightly criticises. There’s very little reference to other countries, and none to other conflicts, beyond the British Isles here. Stewart had clearly integrated the findings of other scholarly disciplines about Ireland into his worldview between 1977 and 2002; it’s a shame that he didn’t also look further afield.
Anyway, it’s not a book for beginners in Irish history, but it will be of interest to anyone who is already familiar with the basics. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book acquired in 2016 still on my shelves. Next on that pile is Comparing Electoral Systems, edited by David Farrell.
I watched The Robots of Death when it was first shown in 1977, and hugely enjoyed it as a nine-year-old. I have rewatched it several times since and still feel the same way. When I first blogged about it in 2006, I wrote:
The Robots of Death has worn pretty well. I had seen it twice before – the original showing in 1977 when I was 9, and I think again some evening about ten years ago watching someone’s video when there may have been booze and conversation as distractions. The robots themselves look superb – swisstone has commented on the origins of the design. I had not previously picked up the very interesting tension between Uvanov, the captain of the trawler, and the First Families representatives Zilda and Cass – it is an interesting inversion of racial politics, since Zilda and Cass are clearly of non-European origin, unlike the rest of the crew, but are also deferred to socially.
I had forgotten how good Louise Jameson is as Leela. She doesn’t steal the show – as always, that is centred on Tom Baker’s Doctor – but it’s a very interesting performance, I guess the only seriously physically assertive female companion bar perhaps Ace. My sister-in-law giggled manically at the line, “You talk like a Tesh!” for a reason that is only comprehensible if you know who my in-laws are. Which is why I think we’ll watch The Face of Evil next. (After catching up with Sunday’s Torchwood and re-watching yesterday’s Doctor Who.)
It’s also unusual to see a Doctor Who story which is quite so obvious in its homage to classic sf. As long-time readers of this blog well know, I hate cute anthropomorphic robots. But the Robots of Death, despite being designed to Asimovian specifications (at least as far as the First Law is concerned), are not cute at all, even if they are anthropomorphic. The one person who does think they are cute turns out to be the psychopathic murderer. There’s a moral there; are you listening, Mike Resnick? Also the mining machine on the surface of a desert planet is very reminiscent of Dune(though no sandworms here as far as we know).
The plot, of course, doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny – as ever, the Doctor happens to arrive just at the moment of crisis, and the powers-that-be accept his credentials as a benevolent actor pretty swiftly (though it must be admitted not as swiftly as in some stories); and we find out who the villain of the piece is long before the characters do (though the Doctor seems to have worked it out). But it’s all done with great conviction, and the whole thing just looks fantastic.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2010, I was still convinced, though more briefly:
The Robots of Death is another jewel of a story – Baker and Jameson on top form, a stellar guest cast, a claustrophobic and believable scenario, understated but convincing special effects. Gregory de Polnay’s heroic D84 stands out as a particularly great character – “Please do not throw hands at me!” – but everyone is good; Davids Baillie and Collings as baddie Dask and good guy Poul, and Russell Hunter as the besieged commander Uvanov, Pamela Salem as loosely-dressed Toos. And Louise Jameson, now playing Leela in a high-tech envornment, is just fantastic. I really found it something of a struggle to keep to my one-episode-a-day discipline while watching this.
It’s also interesting that The Robots of Death has a substantial aftertrail. Chris Boucher’s novel Corpse Marker takes up the story of the Doctor and Leela returning to Kaldor City to see what happened to the Sandminer crew, and there are then a series of excellent audios set in Kaldor City by Alan Stevens, Jim Smith, Fiona Moore, Daniel O’Mahony and Chris Boucher, including not only Uvanov but also Paul Darrow playing a sinister character who is obviously Avon under a pseudonym (Boucher was of course script editor for Blake’s 7). Strongly recommended.
Rewatching it again, I still think it is great. Why can’t Doctor Who, or indeed life, be that good all the time? You can get the DVD here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
Doctor Who and the Robots of Death loses in the transition to the written page; the TV version just looks so memorable, and I think hints better at the background setting of Kaldor City.
Again I have little to add; where Dicks sometimes enriched the narrative for the printed page, here he simply transposed from the TV script. Not one of his more memorable efforts, but you can get it here.
On the other hand, I went back to Chris Boucher’s sequel novel Corpse Marker, and found it an excellent expansion of the Robots of Death continuity. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Watching them, the Doctor had begun to think that what one member of any particular group of six learned, the others in that group would also know. How the information was communicated within the group he was not yet sure and he could not tell whether there was the same communication between the different groups. Were they factory-produced clones? He wondered. Was each group of six effectively a multiple of one single individual? And was that the root of their mysterious powers of communication?
Corpse Marker takes us to Kaldor City and the three surviving crew members from The Robots of Death, several years on, in a complex web of political intrigue and threat. Once again Leela gets some good bits, and for once Boucher’s world-building is on form: Kaldor City feels pretty real, and there are a number of very visual moments. One of the characters actually has escaped from Blake’s Seven, but I think I missed that particular episode. My caveats about Boucher’s portrayal of the Doctor still apply, though.
Again, I don’t have much to add: perhaps one point is that we don’t often get to revisit a society after the Doctor has intervened and see what effect he has had. You can get Corpse Marker here.
Unusually for a Black Archive author, Fiona Moore has already contributed fictionally to the Robots of Death universe via the Kaldor City audios, which you can get here. So it’s not very surprising that she comes to the story with an even more positive approach than me, wanting to explain why it works so well, without explaining it away. She succeeds in this.
The first chapter, ‘The Robots of Death in Context’, starts with the big picture of 1970s arty TV, then zooms in on the Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who and then briefly examines some of the aspects of the story that make it work.
The second chapter, ‘Script to Screen’, delightfully finds that some of the best bits were added at the last moment, by the actors including Tom Baker.
The third chapter, ‘The Machine Man’, looks at the very direct impact of Expressionism on the design of the story, specifically through the classic film Metropolis. The second paragraph is:
There are three reasons why the design of The Robots of Death is effective. Firstly, it is of a high aesthetic standard; much of it could work out of context, simply as art. Secondly, it makes use of the common technique of using past design rather than ‘futuristic’ designs, which can wind up dating a story. However, above all of this, the past society being referenced was one whose interests and concerns harmonised with the themes of the story itself.
The fourth chapter, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Stupidity’, points out that contra some descriptions, the robots themselves don’t actually rebel; and finds roots for the story’s take on AI in the back-story of Dune.
The fifth chapter, ‘Class and Power in the Works of Chris Boucher’, looks at how these themes played out in The Robots of Death and in his other TV work, the series Blake’s 7, Gangsters and Star Cops and the two other Doctor Who stories (both of which have been Black Archived), The Face of Evil and Image of the Fendahl.
The sixth chapter, ‘Cast All Ethnicities’, makes the point that the story is ahead of its time in assembling a multi-ethnic cast and treating them equally, though the character of Leela is a little problematic.
The seventh chapter, ‘The Legacy of The Robots of Death’, lists at the various Kaldor-set sequels in print and audio (though curiously does not mention Moore’s own authorship explicitly, except in a footnote), and then also looks at the treatment of similar themes in the Ood stories of New Who, and Voyage of the Damned, Oxygen and Kerblam!.
All in all this is a good roundup of why the story is a good one, and it also spurred me to reread Corpse Marker. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (discussing Memling’s Portrait of a Man with a Roman Coin):
It would be easier to suggest a particular reason if we knew for sure the identity of the portrait’s main subject. Recent views have favoured Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian scholar, collector and politician of the late fifteenth century, who in the 147os spent time in Flanders, where Memling was then working, and whose personal emblem included a palm tree and laurel leaves (unusual elements visible in the landscape background and on the lower edge of the portrait). If so, then the coin might be a flattering reference to the quality of Bembo’s own collection; for some Renaissance experts in ancient coinage insisted that, whatever the emperor’s despicable character, Nero’s coins were particularly fine works of art. But there have been plenty of other identifications and explanations too. One idea is that the coin makes a visual pun on the otherwise anonymous sitter’s name: perhaps this was a hint that he was called ‘Nerione’, a not uncommon Italian name at the time. Or maybe a more subtle moral point was being made. It might have been a reminder, as one art historian has recently put it, ‘that worldly fame and visual commemoration cannot always be associated with virtue’.1 1 The identification of the sitter and interpretation of the Roman coin: Lobelle-Caluwe, ‘Portrait d’un homme’ (the first to propose Bembo); Borchert (ed.), Memling’s Portraits 160; Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces 102-5 (quotation on ‘worldly fame’ p. 105), Lane, Hans Memling, 205-7,213-14, Christiansen and Weppelmann (eds), Renaissance Portrait, 330-32; Nalezyty, Pietro Bembo, 33-37. Vico, Discorsi 1,53 writes of the coins of Nero (along with those of Caligula and Claudius) as ‘surpassing the others in beauty’; see also Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 160.
Beautifully illustrated and very detailed description of the iconography of the Twelve Caesars, as made classic by Suetonius, in sculpture and art, based on (but updated from) a series of lectures given in 2011. There’s a huge amount of detail, including a sarcophagus that Andrew Jackson refused to be buried in, and fascinating stuff about lost art that we still know about. Hamton Court alone merits almost a whole chapter. Not my usual thing, and I’m not close enough to the subject to really learn as much as I would like to from this, but it is entertaining and informative. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next up is Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Time Thief”):
The secret of this huge ornate building was a NuSev technical innovation, known as a holo cloak. The entire exterior of the museum, was, in fact, a massive 3D virtual reality illusion, projected across the building by tiny holo emitters, dotted around the building’s base, ensuring that it looked like a solid bygone age structure when seen from afar. The truth of the building was only revealed when visitors entered it, disrupting the light emitters. Walking in, visitors found themselves in a massive hall made of marble and artificial sandstone. Upon entry, visitors were required to wear holo glasses so exhibits could be viewed clearly, even though in reality they were all held in high security light box cages.
A modest volume of four short stories featuring K9 Mark 1, subsequent to his Australian adventures. For two of the stories Baker revives other Whoniverse creations, namely Axos and Drax, and the Axos story in particular is an interesting revisiting of the concept. Bt in the end there’s not so much to see here; K9 can never progress much as a character, so it’s really adventure-of-the-week stuff. Out of print, I’m afraid.
Revisionism is never content. Those tangible innovations of pottery, cattle, pigs, wheat and barley seeds and the introduction of well-shaped stone tools have been explained away as ‘essentially it was an idea’.1 Ideas do not communicate by themselves. They need people, not a phantom rope-line of grain-filled pots bobbing like homing-pigeons across the Channel or herds of eagerly emigrating cows and bulls chesting the waves of the North Sea. The ‘essential idea’ came from living people, and during the fifth millennium the people came from the mainland of western Europe to settle in Britain. They were farmers. Some settled on the chalklands of Wiltshire where the ground could easily be tilled and planted. 1 ‘Essentially it was an idea’, Francis Pryor, Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans (HarperCollins, London, 2003): ‘There must however have been a small element of migration’, domestic animals ‘had to be introduced from outside’, pp. 121-22.
I’ve long been fascinated by megalithic monuments in general, and Stonehenge is a very special case, one of the most elaborate stone circles of northwestern Europe. We visited in 2016; it’s pretty crowded these days.
Aubrey Burl was the doyen of British megalithic studies, publishing his first book on stone circles in the 1970s and inspiring many other enthusiasts. This was his last book, published in 2007 when he was already 81 (he died in the early weeks of the 2020 pandemic, aged 93).
It’s a generally lucid explanation of the archaeological sequence of the development of Stonehenge, which (as you possibly know) went through several evolutions over a period of 1500 years from 3100 to 1600 BC, the massive trilithons coming in around 2500 BC, though built on a smaller but much older alignment of stones from maybe 8000 BC. These are barely imaginable timelines on a human scale. There are a couple of churches across the Dijle valley from here which have been in use since the eleventh century, and the oldest church in Belgium claims to have been founded in 823 AD. Across the border, the Protestant church in Trier was built as the emperor’s throne room in 1700, and the Roman gate of the city still stands. But these are individual buildings, rather than an entire sacred landscape. Burl is very good at giving us a sense of how Stonehenge and its setting would have seemed to the people who built it, and rebuilt it.
He also starts well, with a review of how Stonehenge came to popular attention 300 years ago, and often refers back to earlier writers. There’s one chapter, unfortunately, where the prose becomes rambling and disjointed, and it’s the most controversial chapter, in which Burl insists that the older standing stones (the ‘bluestones’) were not transported to Wiltshire from Wales by prehistoric humans, but by Ice Age glaciers long before. This is not well supported by the known evidence of known glaciation, even according to Burl’s own account.
Another curious lapse is his attempt to demonstrate that there is a prehistoric substratum of words in Welsh, Breton and Cornish which are unrelated to other neighbouring languages. He seems to be completely unaware of two centuries of research into Indo-European, which has demonstrated that quite a lot of the Celtic words that he sees as independent are in fact related to similar words in English and Latin: for example Welsh rhew and Cornish rew, meaning ‘ice’, come from the same root as English ‘freeze’ and Latin pruina, meaning ‘frost’; and more crucially for his argument, Welsh haul and Breton heol, meaning ‘sun’, are definitely related to Latin sol. It’s an odd lacuna on Burl’s part.
This was the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2016 (I could not find Can You Solve My Problems? by Alex Bellos, which would have been ahead in the queue). Next on that pile is World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg.
Second frame of third story (actually a full page):
Next in my sequence of Tenth Doctor graphic novels, this pulls together three very different stories, of which the first story is the best: the Doctor and comics-only companion Gabby end up on a world where some of th inhabitants are intelligent forms of music, a concept that is difficult to portray in any medium, but done very well here. There’s also a New York vignette with Jack Harkness, and an interesting aliens-at-the-dawn-of-time story which has a pretty overt anti-colonialist theme. You can get it here.
The woman in the wheelchair hummed towards the receptionist’s station. ‘Iris Beckstein, to see Dr. Darling. He’s expecting me.’ She smiled at the secretary: the self-assured smile of the financially secure.
This is a compilation and revision of what were originally the fifth and sixth volumes of this series, following on from The Bloodline Feud and The Traders’ War, and laying the ground for the first in the next series, Empire Games. It is a very good romp through a slightly alternate early-noughties America, twinned with a couple of parallel universes where history worked out differently; in all three there are rapid and drastic changes of government, with extraordinary violence in our own world and a rapid turnover of US leadership. Stross maintains his fascination with economics and the management of intelligence services, and his central figure remains a largely sympathetic character trying to improve the worlds that she lives in but also getting to grips with her own limits. I may go back to Empire Games now, and look for the rest in the series. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier.
This was also the first book I finished this month, posting this review on the 13th.
I don’t seem to have written anything about The Rings of Akhaten when it was first broadcast in 2013, nor did I pick is as one of my essential Twelfth Doctor watches in my 2017 guide to New Who. Both on first watching and on rewatching ten years later, I enjoyed it without especially loving it. It’s Clara’s first proper adventure as a companion, after several previous appearances, and I like the variety of alien races and the back-story for Clara, while regretting that more wasn’t made of either of these in the continuity. Emilia Jones rather glows as the main guest actor, in a story filmed when she was ten years old. She went on to star in an Oscar-winning film (CODA). I am less wild about planet-sized (let alone star-sized) evil aliens. Like I said, I enjoyed it without especially loving it.
It has not been adapted for print, and no subsequent adventure in TV or other media has returned to Akhaten. Several of the alien species have been seen again, notably as exhibits in Nightmare in Silver, and the story itself is moored into the wider continuity by the Doctor’s remark that he had previously visited Akhaten with his granddaughter. (And one of the alien races is a Hooloovoo, encountered differently in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)
William Shaw’s Black Archive monograph has really opened my eyes to what was actually going on in the story. and succeeded in making me feel that I need to give it another go to catch what I missed first time round. (Though I don’t think of myself as a careless watcher, so perhaps I should not take all the blame for my having missed some of these points.)
A brief introduction defends Shaw’s choice of The Rings of Akhaten to analyse, and introduces the themes of the book.
The first and longest chapter, “The Doctor as New Atheist”, jumps right in by looking at the impact of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists on Doctor Who in the Russell T. Davies years (Dawkins himself actually appears on the show, of course) and examines how the Moffatt years saw a shift to a more measured engagement with gender, race, colonialism and indeed religion. The Rings of Akhaten is in fact a story about a religious ceremony, and the Doctor, coming in with a dismissive attitude to religion, is proved wrong several times. That’s a lot more interesting than I had realised.
The second chapter, “Clara, Merry, and the Most Important Leaf in Human History”, looks at the centrality of Clara and her relationship with Merry in the story, taking some time also for consideration of Murray Gold’s music and Orientalism by Edward Said. Again, I realised that there was more going on than I had noticed, especialiy if you consider the story’s place in Clara’s narrative arc.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “Marks out of Akhaten” is:
This chapter therefore focuses on The Rings of Akhaten’s flaws, in terms of both its storytelling and its wider political context. In particular, it examines the episode’s relationship to some key concepts in postcolonial and feminist theory, and the ways in which it both exceeds, and ways in which it both exceeds, and tragically fulfils, the expectations of these schools of thought. None of this is to denigrate the episode. It is simply to argue that, while The Rings of Akhaten represents a positive step forward for Doctor Who, there are several ways in which it could have gone further.
I like very much that Shaw concedes that the story has flaws; some other Black Archive writers feel the need for total defence of their chosen story even when it’s a much worse story than The Rings of Akhaten. He mentions that its narrative beats are a bit uneven, which I agree with, and that there are not enough non-white actors, which I also agree with. He also looks at the disappointment felt by fans of writer Neil Cross’s previous career who may have expected something closer to the “gritty cop drama” Luther for which he is best known. I was not familiar with any of Cross’s non-Who work so that point passed me by.
The fourth chapter, “Anniversary Anxiety”, looks in a little more detail at the wider arc of story-telling in Moffat-era Who (though that phrase is not used), and how the story is one of the building bricks of the Clara narrative, interrogating and subverting what the show is actually about (ie the nature of the Doctor himself).
A brief conclusion explains Shaw’s own journey from sceptic to fan, having not enjoyed The Rings of Akhaten on first broadcast to realising its deeper significance.
An appendix asks whether Akhaten is a planet or a sun.
A second appendix has a decently long interview with the director, Farren Blackburn, explaining some of the artistic choices made during production.
A third appendix reproduces Blackburn’s “Director’s Statement”, his vision for the episode.
This is one of the longer Black Archives, but it really opened my mind to some of the aspects of the story that I wished I had caught for myself on watching. The last in this series that really excited me in the same way was Alyssa Franke’s monograph on Hell Bent. You may be able to get The Rings of Akhatenhere. (Or here.)
Second paragraph of third story (“The Time-Tombs”, by J.G. Ballard):
Most of the time-tombs on the southern edge of the sand-sea had been stripped centuries earlier. But Shepley liked to saunter through the straggle of half-submerged pavilions, the warm ancient sand playing over his bare feet like wavelets on some endless beach. Alone among the flickering tombs, with the empty husks of the past ten thousand years, he could temporarily forget his nagging sense of failure.
An anthology of ten stories from the sf magazine Worlds of If, all published between 1963 and 1967, all by white men (though two at least were British). Several of these were familiar to me from their appearances in other collections, mostly chosen by their authors; the one exception, published only here and in its original magazine appearance, is a spooky-little-girl story, “Toys for Debbie”, by Dave Kyle, who is better remembered for his activities in fandom but published three authorised Lensman novels in the 1980s, ten short stories between 1941 and 1994, and contributed art including the cover of the first edition of Asimov’s Foundation. Most of these are effective enough, but there are noticeably few women (Brian Aldiss scores here, with his tough warrior girl in “In the Arena”).
My copy, the 1951 Sphere edition, has no table of contents or index, and clearly the publishers struggled to squish the material into 256 pages. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next up is an Ace double, Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett, half of which I have already read.
“J-Just to look,” sheu says, catchan the poynt o the yolewife’s quaistion. Sheu’s been raedan aboot the Wrack-Hofn’s mystery, aboot the yoles landan thair haal o Lights, aboot the stoor i the gowden tide, aboot the paece o distance,
aboot a uncan wey o spaekan, o wirkan, o pittan up wirds, o bidan, belongan, an waantid tae luk. But nou sheu’s askan the first body sheu saa i the dock fer the first directions, an habbers, fer the first time no kennan hoo tae explaen hersel.
The visitor, Darling, looks for a place to stay
“Just to look,” she says, catching the point of the boat worker’s question. She has been reading about the Wreck-Havenharbour’s mystery, about the boats landing their haulcatch of Lights, about the stormstrifestrainspeeddust in the golden seatimetide, about the peace of distance, about an unknownweird way of speaking, of working, of praying, of waitstayliving, belonging, and wanted to look. But now she’s asking the first bodyperson she saw in the dock for the first directions, and stammers, for the first time not knowing how to explain herself.
This won last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, for the best sf novel published in the UK in 2021. Rather unusually, it has the form of an epic poem in Orcadian, the language of the Orkney Islands, with English translation running along the lower half of each page. (Also unusually, it is the first part of the author’s PhD thesis.) It’s a love story between a local and a visitor in a spaceport where there are humans and aliens and general things of wonder. It’s actually quite short, and the plot as such is not original, but the characters and setting are very well drawn, in two languages.
And anyway the point is to shake us out of Anglophone complacency and to consider the value of less-spoken languages, and their potential for added nuance and expression, and giving us readers a broader experience of what the world can contain. It very much ticks the Philip K. Dick box, that good sf shouldn’t just be “What if…?” but “My God! What if…?” – in a very different way. I thought ti was fantastic from that point of view. You can get it here.
The other Clarke finalists that year were Hugo-winning A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine, which I read and hugely enjoyed; BSFA finalist Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley, which I did not enjoy as much; and Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, A River Called Time, by Courttia Newland and Wergen: The Alien Love War, by Mercurio D. Rivera, none of which I have read.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Party Activists, Interest Groups and Polarization ion American Politics”, by David Karol):
In this chapter, I argue that activists and interest groups are key elements of political parties. Activists and party-aligned interest groups work within parties to advance their policy goals via candidate selection and lobbying elected officials. Unlike the formal party structure and some elements closely linked to it, activists and interest groups are a force for polarization. I review delegate and donor surveys as well as trends in interest group campaign contributions revealing evidence of polarization among activists and lobbies. Elected officials’ relationships with party activists and interest groups are not one-sided. Even more than highly informed voters, activists take cues from politicians, and interest group leaders are subject to pressure from elected officials. Still, evidence suggests that activists and party-linked interest groups promote polarization.
This was kindly given to me by co-editor James Thurber a few years ago. (Since you asked, I have worked out that he is the fifth cousin once removed of the humorist James Thurber.) It pulls together papers from a conference in May 2014, looking not only at the polarisation of American politics in Congress, but also at state legislatures, in the Supreme Court, in the media and in party structures. The situation was bad in 2014, and nine years later it looks worse.
The 18 essays come to some stark conclusions. The two parties are more ideologically distinct now than they have ever been, and the Republicans are further to the right than the Democrats are to the left. The political system incentivises pandering to your own hardliners rather than, y’know, actually governing. It is difficult to see any realistic path by which this can be reversed. Thomas Mann, in a foreword, suggests that a few more electoral defeats could be healthy for the Republicans and therefore for politics. I would point out that the Republican candidate for President has got more votes than the Democrat in precisely one of the eight elections since 1988, and it doesn’t seem to have chastened them.
I did wonder why some questions were not asked. From a European perspective, it’s actually not such a bad thing to have political parties that clearly represent different points of view. To me it seems that it’s not so much the ideological polarisation that is screwing American politics, it’s the culture of demonisation of political opponents, which actually goes back a long way but has got worse recently. European parties in general know that they may well have to work with each other in government after the election and so find politer ways of disagreement. (There are exceptions, of course.)
The other glaring omission, though it was not as obvious in 2014, is the surge of political violence in the USA, and its endorsement by leading figures on the right, most notably the 6 January 2021 coup attempt. Genteel analysis and numerical coding by academic observers rather pales into insignificance when you have an entire political party whose leadership has supported overthrowing the constitution by force.
Anyway, this is thought-provoking and depressing stuff, painting a gloomy picture which has turned out not to gloomy enough. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon.
When I can stand without wobbling, I walk. The row behind me a dusty dream. I started out in one of the bigger houses hidden in the dense jungles of the Park, where Angela and Kimberly live now. Sometimes on a really hot or busy day, or if I’ve had one too many, I forget I don’t live there anymore. My feet walk me right up into the Park grounds where I lived with Graham, and Lee when he came home, in a house that looked over the bushy rear of the dingo enclosure. Back then, Graham did the Park’s maintenance and I had a cleaning job doing the toilets, the café, the gift shop, and all the offices. Used to read the manager’s emails for a laugh. I know exactly how much shit the Park was in before our Ange took over. It was a good life after being on the road so long. Me and Graham grew a bit of sneaky marijuana in the roof of the house. He could fix anything that didn’t have a heart, and our Lee dropped out of high school and went up to the city to play bongo drums and pick up backpackers. He’d come down to the Park on the weekends and test his charms out on the rangers — until he got Angela in trouble and it all went balls up. We battled it out until Kimberly was born, then Graham fucked off back down south and Lee followed him. Me back in the workforce as a guide and moved out to the row. Ange, a single parent with a good head on her shoulders. We do alright.
Again, an Arthur C. Clarke Award winner, this time from two years ago. I thought this was very enjoyable indeed, though also rather grim with its theme of eco-catastrophe in Australia. The central character is a middle-aged woman sharing the care of her granddaughter with her estranged son’s ex, who is also her boss. Plague hits the population, thematic for a 2020 novel, though not as inconvenient as COVID with the side benefit of enabling communication with animals. And the animals are not anthropomorphised; they are just about comprehensible in their own way. The human and natural landscapes of Australia are evocatively portrayed, and I can see why it appealed to that year’s judges. Recommended. You can get it here.
The other finalists were Chilling Effect, by Valerie Valdes; Edge of Heaven, by R. B. Kelly; The Infinite, by Patience Agbabi; Vagabonds, by Hao Jingfang and The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez. I have only read the last of these, as the author was up for the Astounding Award that year, but lost to Emily Tesh. (I really liked it.) Apart from that, none of the six was on the final ballot for the Hugo, Nebula, Otherwise or BSFA Awards. The Animals in that Country did win the Aurealis Award, but lost the Ditmar to The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 32) Johnson at 10: the Inside Story, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell The John Nathan-Turner Doctor Who Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth American Gridlock, eds. James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka Vengeance on Varos, by Jonathan Dennis The Rings of Akhaten, by William Shaw
Poetry 1 (YTD 3) Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles
SF 13 (YTD 100) Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister ω4 α5 (did not finish) Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett β5 (did not finish) ψ4 The Race, by Nina Allan A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay θ4 The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 16) Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos, by Philip Martin Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, by Philip Martin
Comics 1 (YTD 9) The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,000 pages (YTD 39,700) 9/23 (YTD 66/165) by non-male writers (Giles, ω4, β5, ψ4, Allan, Marske, Serpell, McKay, Casagrande/Florean) 3/23 (YTD 26/165) by a non-white writer (Yoshinaka, ψ4, Serpell) 380 books currently tagged “unread”, 9 down from last month
Reading now The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross χ4 A Brief History of Stonehenge, by Aubrey Burl
Coming soon (perhaps) The Endless Song, by Nick Abadzis et al K9 Megabytes, by Bob Baker The Shadowman, by Sharon Bidwell Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks The Robots of Death, by Fiona Moore The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard Winter, by Ali Smith The Cider House Rules, by John Irving The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris One Bible Many Voices, by S E Gillingham Falling to Earth, by Al Worden The Outcast, by Louise Cooper Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman DALEKS Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
I watched Vengeance on Varos on first broadcast in 1985, and was frankly bored and appalled by it. (Actually I have only a clear memory of the first episode; I may have missed the second.) The start, with a prisoner being tortured and the Doctor / Peri relationship in a deep trough, was not promising.
I remember catching the first scenes of Vengeance on Varos first time round, where Jason Connery’s Jondar is unpleasantly tortured as an audience looks on, and then the Tardis breaks down and the Doctor decides it can’t be fixed. At that point I gave up and went away to do something else. Well, I misjudged it slightly. The torture scenes are unnecessarily unpleasant, and Colin Baker’s portrayal as annoying as before, but the rest of the story is not bad, Martin Jarvis and Nabil Shaban being especially good. Having said which, the scene with Peri turning into a bird is a bit crap.
There’s a decent story in Vengeance on Varos, and particularly some good guest performances by Martin Jarvis, Nabil Shaban, and Sheila Read who plays Etta, and decent special effects at a period when these were sometimes a bit embarrassing. But it is rather spoiled for me by the violence, which I am now realising is a consistent problem with this season; by the silly subplot of Peri being turned into a bird and then magically cured in about five seconds; and by a number of under-rehearsed scenes where actors stand around with their hands limply at their sides, always a bit of a red flag for me.
However, it’s still a rather stupid story. To add to my complaints above, it’s weird and a bit dehumanising that The Governor and The Chief Officer don’t have names. More trivially, when the Doctor is supposedly dead to all appearances during the cliff-hanger at the end of the first episode and the start of the second, Colin Baker is visibly still breathing.
The novelisation is also by Philip Martin, and the second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“I just won’t look!” Peri said, clenching her eyes shut but feeling the stiff vulpine feathers that had now emerged almost fully all over her arms.
(Philip Martin, Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos)
Vulpine feathers, eh?
With extra irony, the chief villain is given to malapropisms due to a faulty translation unit. The omniscient narrator has no such excuse!
I was interested to note that the cliff-hanger comes relatively early in the book, a good ten pages before the half-way point. Otherwise the book is a safe transformation from screen to print. You can get it here.
Before I get into Jonathan Dennis’s Black Archive, I just want to look at the later career of Sil. I’m actually rather a fan of Mindwarp, the second part of Trial of a Time Lord, with its shock ending for poor Peri (foolishly revoked six episodes later). Mission to Magnus, the unbroadcast story from the cancelled 1986 season, failed to impress me either in print or on audio. I was much more impressed by an original Big Finish audio by Martin, Antidote to Oblivion.
And for this post, I sought out and read Martin’s novel Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, based on a direct-to-video film which I have not seen (though apparently Jeremy Corbyn got a copy from Nabil Shaban). The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The profit chamber on Thoros Beta monitored the progress of its multiple investments throughout the universe. Thoros Betans were hunched over display panels giving the latest profit and loss values, and muttered voices echoed in the corridors as fortunes were made . . . and sometimes lost.
It’s not very good. Sil and Lord Kiv get caught up in a plot to sell dangerously addictive drugs to the people of earth (specifically the “Eurozone”, whose boundaries are not defined). Lots of characterful screeching, but as so often, the plot is just nasty for the sake of being nasty. You can get it here.
Jonathan Dennis, who previously wrote the Black Archive on Ghost Light (incidentally, the first Black Archive that I didn’t really care for), has mounted a detailed but ultimately unconvincing defence of Vengeance on Varos.
The first chapter, “Introduction – In Poor taste”, defends the aesthetic and tonal changes made to Doctor Who for the 1985 season, and asserts that they work. I think a more nuanced view is possible.
The second chapter, “Winston Smith Takes it on the Jaw”, looks at dystopias, especially 1984, and at the uncharacteristic (for Doctor Who) pessimism of the story.
The third chapter, “Capital (It Fails Us Now)”, looks at the critique of capitalism and to a lesser extent colonialism in the story, and in other Who stories (including Kerblam!). The second paragraph is:
Keeping this history in mind, it stands out when looking into the production of Vengeance on Varos that ‘producer John Nathan-Turner was wary, fearing that Philip Martin might inject political comment into the storyline.’4 Martin said, ‘He suspected I had some sort of political aim in mind, and so he insisted I prove myself first by doing a scene breakdown.’5 4 Pixley, ‘The DWM Archive: Vengeance on Varos’, p17. 5 Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Keep Watching!’ In-Vision #80 p4.
The fourth chapter, “‘They Also Affect Dogs’ – Sadism and Video Nasties”, looks at the moral panic around video nasties in the mid-80s, in the context of the horror genre in general and Videodrome in particular. Dennis finds a smidgeon of regret that the music cue in the acid bath scene is handled badly, and that Peri is exploited worse than usual here.
The fifth and final chapter, “Who Speaks for the Audience? – Conclusion” makes the fairly obvious point that Arak and Etta to some extent stand for us the audience.
An appendix, “6 Times 2 Equals 12”, makes some very interesting paralells between the Sixth and Twelfth Doctors:
The obvious similarity is in the Doctor’s character arc. Both eras feature a gruff, arrogant Doctor who gradually smooths out and becomes more (conventionally) likeable. In the sixth Doctor’s case that arc is unfortunately truncated due to real-world circumstances outside the narrative. It was a good concept in the Colin Baker era and Moffatt is able to bring it to its proper conclusion with Peter Capaldi.
Aside from this general similarity of the character arc, many of the details are echoed as well. Baker and Capaldi both appeared on the show prior to being cast as the Doctor…
The Doctor and Clara bicker. It doesn’t come off quite as harshly as comparable scenes between the sixth Doctor and Peri, but that’s down to the dialogue being funnier…
The first full years of both Baker and Capaldi’s tenure end with stories heavy on body horror, set in funeral homes where the Doctor’s old enemies are recreated with human corpses as the raw material. There’s even similar imagery, of the glass Dalek and the transparent Cybermen in tanks. They both have companions who die – Capaldi gets two – and all those companions get those deaths negated in some way…
Capaldi gets the all-black outfit that Colin Baker wanted, and it does serve as a visual reminder of the severity of the character. However, Moffatt starts progressing the character arc immediately.
Dennis is ready to admit that this was much more successful in the 2010s than in the 1980s. He seems curiously shy of drawing the obvious conclusion that it’s simply that Steven Moffatt (plus team) is a much better show-runner than John Nathan-Turner (plus Eric Saward). His argument is that the decision to darken the Sixth Doctor era in terms of aesthetics and tone was not a bad decision, just inadequately executed. I’m sorry, but that makes it a bad decision as far as I am concerned.
And so she spent her days in her castle, dressed in wool trousers and jerseys, eating half a cold dinner in the dining room, walking the corridors, the echoes alone persuading her that the walls still existed, stalking the parapets and slumping up and down stairs, she repeated words from the shiny reviews of old tennis matches, singing a sad song to herself, until finally spring came – the heat in the air, the heady smell of blossoms, birdsong loud enough to wake you.
For fairly obvious reasons, I’m thinking a lot about the Arthur C. Clarke Award at the moment, and realised that I have not read the most recent three winners; time to put that right.
I thought The Old Drift was tremendous. It’s mostly about the interlinking lives of three families in Zambia, mostly in Lusaka but starting at the Victoria Falls, over the decades from the early twentieth century to the very near future, in a timeline that diverges slight from ours in terms of technology. I don’t think I’d ever read anything much about Zambia before, and this really conveyed the spirit of a young and also old country, with European and Asian inputs to an African culture. It’s quite a tech-oriented story as well, but the core is the vividly imagined relationships and environment of the characters, with different points of view sympathetically given. It stretched my mind in an unexpected way. Recommended. You can get it here.
Edited to add: I should have mentioned the other Clarke finalists. There was an unusual degree of overlap with the Hugos, with A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders and The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley on both lists; I read all three but did not blog them, as I was Deputy Hugo Administrator that year. A Memory Called Empire won the Hugo and was also on the Nebula final ballot. The other two shortlisted novels were Cage of Souls, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and The Last Astronaut, by David Wellington. None of the six was on the BSFA or Tiptree lists.
She had never been given orders to socialise by a superior before. But then, she’d never before been given many of the orders she now got in the Fourth. Mrs Roberts had taken the telegram to Hilda from Eileen. In it, Eileen had played the pure innocent. Two long separated friends meeting in the middle of a war, and then she would try and find where the missing Ministry money and resources were going. Because it certainly wasn’t leaving the factory as steel parts for Avro Lancaster and Spitfire crankshafts.
First of another sub-series of the Lethbridge-Stewart books, set during the second world war in Derbyshire, and centring on Edward Travers and Eileen Le Croissette (who was actually a real person). The other Doctor Who reference is that the invading robots are the Quarks. It’s decent enough but not really breaking new ground, and I’m wondering how long I will stick with this series. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“Coming-of-Age Day”, by A.K. Jorgensson):
But you got some funny answers.
A 1978 anthology from Pan, including stories by Robert Silverberg, Thomas M. Disch, A.K. Jorgensson, Anne McCaffrey, Brian Aldiss, Hilary Bailey, John Sladek and Michael Moorcock. I’m afraid that despite the stellar array of authors and the potentially interesting subject matter, this is not a great collection; several of the stories depend on a rather rapey concept of consent, the Aldiss contribution is frankly incomprehensible (I see that this is its only publication apart from its original appearance in F&SF) and the Moorcock is an excerpt from Dancers at the End of Time that I already have in two different editions. Hilary Bailey’s “Sisters” is the best of these, and it’s more about bio weapons than sex. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2016 on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart.
