As soon as it’s light outside, I get up and go to my room to change. I thought I’d feel better if I could be in my own room for a while, but I feel like I’m stuck in a nightmare. Noah should be up, running through the halls, complaining about wanting cereal for breakfast instead of something healthy like my mum would suggest. My mum should be coming in to wake me up and telling me to get ready for school.
Fifth in the set of six Doctor Who YA novellas, and I’m afraid not one of the better ones; young protagonist teams up with the Ninth Doctor and Rose to rescue mum and brother from the monster which, er, lives in the cupboard. A number of implausibilities in the story’s own terms, and I wasn’t very satisfied with the characterisation of the Doctor either. A bit more skippable than the rest. But you can get it here.
Edited to add: I forgot to note that this is a fairly easy Bechdel pass; most of the characters (apart from the Doctor) are women. If you want to be specific, there’s an exchange between Rose and the protagonist at the end of Chapter 8 in which no men are present or mentioned.
‘Well, that’s a comfort,’ the Doctor said acidly, as a pulse round exploded a bloom behind his head, splattering his cheek with thick, sweet-smelling sap. ‘I’ll tell that to our lungs, shall I? I’m sure they’ll understand.’
A story of the Tenth Doctor and Donna, visiting Dublin to witness the first ever gig of (fictional) girl band the Blood Honeys, only to find that the event has been infiltrated by a trio of alien sisters out to exploit the emotional energy generated by the event. The aliens have a number of near relatives in both Doctor Who (the Carrionites) and Irish mythology (many cases of three sisters).
Rudden, who is himself Irish, gets the feeling of Dublin in the early Celtic Tiger days very well (even though he would have been roughly eight years old at the time the story is set), and you can very plausibly see Donna and the Doctor interacting with the changing entertainment scene. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who the five-member girl band making their debut in the mid-1990s are based on, but a pinch of satire can help a story run smoothly.
I am preparing a post grumbling about the failures of Big Finish to get Ireland right in a recent audio play, but I have no such grumbles in this case. I enjoyed this and you can get it here.
Bechdel pass in Chapter Four, where the three alien sisters discuss their plans for Earth.
The Doctor strode briskly from the TARDIS, fedora hat balanced on his thick thatch of curls, long scarf streaming behind him. Romana followed a little warily, still uncertain of her friend’s current mood. She glanced up into the flawless blue sky, shading her eyes with her hand. It was a warm morning, no doubt about to turn into a scorchingly hot summer’s day.
This is the longest of the Six Stories for Six Decades in wordcount (the next one has more pages but fewer words), though the story is straightforward enough. The Doctor and Romana, taking a break between seasons 17 and 18, arrive in a London council estate in 1984 where a local lad is achieving great things with technology. But where is he getting the technology from, and what price are he and his neighbours paying? And can police officer Hazel Harper put a stop to it?
About halfway through, it becomes fairly obvious which classic monsters have turned up and from then on the story runs on fairly predictable if entertaining lines. But I did like the way that the bad guy’s downfall has been triggered by Thatcherite economics, tying the merciless and logical free market to the merciless logic of the SPOILERS. I see a number of other reviewers who didn’t get this; perhaps you had to be there. Anyway, not quite as good as the first two in this sequence, but you can get it here.
Bechdel pass when Romana and Tiger Lily talk about cocktails in Chapter Nine.
I don’t love everyone knowing my business. And I don’t love the way you have to run, sometimes, from people who want to bash your head in.
Where the previous story in this series took a fictional town and a timespan mainly in the 1960s but stretching to the present day, The Cradle is set very firmly in 1978 in Southall, at a time of maximum tension caused by the National Front, with the protagonist a gay Indian teenager who is at the front line of racism. I know Tash Suri a bit from our joint stint as guests of honour at the 2022 Eastercon:
I remember an Eastercon discussion a few years ago about places that Doctor Who cannot go – the Holocaust, for example, or indeed Ireland (other than symbolically). 1970s racist London might at first sight seem to be potentially one of those places, but Tasha Suri has found a way of doing it, taking her protagonist and friends on a personal journey mentored by the Twelfth Doctor. At the end of the story everything is not all right, everyone is not OK, but the Doctor has helped and the future looks just a little better than it did. I liked this one too. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass in the first chapter when Seema and her grandmother talk about cooking and the strange lights in the sky.
We went to Rome, which is from history and sometimes from Sunday School. There was a lion! I think I mite like lions even more than cheetahs. The Emperer chased Barbrar and the Doctor pretended to play a liar and made it sound silent. I wish Anne would play silent when she does piano practice. There was a lady and her job was to poison people! I thought the police would come and arrest her but they did not.
This is the first in a series of six YA Doctor Who novellas published to commemorate the recent anniversary. It’s a very good start. Young Gerry has dreams of the Doctor, his companions and their adventures together, in a world that is just the same as ours, except that there is no TV show called Doctor Who and strange things happen like the unsolved murder of a pesticide researcher, or the odd goings-on at the Post Office Tower…
Really this is lovely. Jacqueline Rayner on form is one of the best current Doctor Who prose writers, and she’s on form here. She brilliantly evokes the decaying industrial atmosphere of the mid 1960s and the need for escapism, and the changing dynamics of family relationships over the last sixty years, and the universal difficulty of growing up. I loved it. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid, with tight third around the boy protagonist.
But tonight they were not those children. Tonight, they were Sam and Miel, and he was pulling her on top of him and then under him. The way she moved against him made him feel the sharp presence of everything he had between his legs and, for just that minute, a forgetting, of everything he didn’t.
The BSFA Award for Best Novel that year went to Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award to Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. The BSFA and Clarke ballots that year shared two novels, Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, but neither list had any crossover with the Tiptree list.
It was my first year as Hugo Administrator, and the Hugo for Best Novel went to The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin, but I myself voted for All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders, which won the Nebula. All the Birds in the Sky and Too Like the Lightning were also on the Hugo ballot, and Borderline and Everfair were also on the Nebula ballot.
I really liked this book, and once again kudos to the Tiptree Award (as it then was) for spotting something that others had passed by. It’s set in a world very close to ours, where the protagonists are a Latina girl and an Italian-Pakistani boy in love, but there’s a lot of magic going on (she grows flowers out of her arms; he has a well-hidden secret) and the four red-haired neighbour girls may be witches. It’s an intense exploration of body dysmorphia and the experience of being trans, in a well-realised small town, where the grownups have back-stories too. One of the best novels I have read so far this year, and strongly recommended. You can get it here.
With so many female characters, an easy Bechdel pass.
Next in my list of Tiptree winners (only two left!) is Who Runs the World? by Virginia Bergin.
Belfast: Approach to Crisis, by Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane
I got hold of these two books in preparation for the lecture I gave in Belfast last month about the electoral history of the city, which you can watch here:
These are two very different books from very different times. The second paragraph of the third chapter of Belfast: Approach to Crisis is:
The cause of this increasing prosperity, the greatest that any Irish city has known, was twofold. First, the expansion of the linen industry which became fully mechanised between 1852 and 1862 with the rapid acceptance of the power loom.3 With the coming of the American Civil War Lancashire mills were starved of raw cotton and the Belfast mills soon found a new market for their high quality finished goods.4 The linen trade continued to expand until the 1870s,5 but while the labour force trebled between 1850 and 1875 (from 16,000 to 50,000), the proportion represented by adult male workers never exceeded one third. 3‘In 1852 there was only one power loom in Belfast. Ten years later there were 6,000.’ (Jones in Belfast, p. 109) 4The number of new buildings constructed annually between 1861 and 1864 ranged from 730 to 1,400 – thereby increasing the total valuation by about 20 per cent. (B.N.L., 2 January 1865.) 5The number of flax spindles in Ireland increased from 300,000 in 1850 to nearly 600,000 in 1860, and nearly one million by the end of the 1870s. This peak figure was never equalled – too much machinery had been installed for normal output, cf W. E. Coe, The Engineering Industry of the North of Ireland, pp. 60-61. In 1870 80 per cent of spindles and 70 per cent of power looms in the whole of Ireland were to be found in Belfast and its environs. D. L. Armstrong, ‘Social and Economic Conditions in the Belfast Linen Industry, 1850-1900’, Irish Historical Studies VII (September 1951), 238.
I don’t know Ian Budge (who is now 87) but I did know Cornelius O’Leary, an eccentric colleague of my father’s at the Queen’s University of Belfast, and this book represents good political analysis combined with very poor timing. It has two parts. The first half, more or less, is a survey of the political history of Belfast, paying special attention to the city council (known as the Corporation for most of the period), from the earliest days to the 1960s, when the book was written. I got a lot out of this (and plundered it extensively for my lecture last month).
Until 1832, Belfast was a pocket borough of the Chichester family, but the Great Reform Act opened up its politics to the mainly Presbyterian merchant classes. The first successful political organiser was a John Bates, who managed to combine the roles of main organiser for the Conservative Party (which won all the elections) with that of Town Clerk once the municipal council was reformed in the 1840s. He fell spectacularly from power in 1855 when he was exposed for diverting public funds by a public inquiry. I’d love to see some more about his story.
The book goes in detail through the next 110 years of political history, including a couple more times when the Corporation was suspended and the city was run by administrators. And the second half of the book gives the outputs of an exhaustive political survey of Belfast, including most of the councillors, and many of their supporters and voters in general, along with some comparative research on the attitudes of councillors in Glasgow. The data set is very rich.
The problem is that the research was largely carried out in 1966, and the city collapsed into chaos over the next couple of years, so that when the book first came out in 1973, it was a deep analysis of a political system that had already ceased to exist. The Belfast of 1973 was very different from the Belfast of 1966. The authors do look in depth into the questions of naming the new bridge and the Sunday swings issue, but compared with what happened over the next few years it all looks rather silly. (In fairness, a lot of people thought the swings issue looked rather silly in 1966.)
Really a book only for the most dedicated of Norn Iron politics nerds (and I am proud to count myself among that number). You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Belfast: The Story of a City and its People is:
Some years ago a friend of the family who stayed with us for a few days proceeded to tell me all about the cranes as soon as they arrived and saw the painting. ‘Hey, nice painting!’ they exclaimed, breezing into the living room. ‘That’s David and Goliath in Belfast, you know.’ ‘No, it’s actually Samson and Goliath,’ I responded – politely but firmly. ‘No, I’m sure it’s David and Goliath,’ they ploughed on. ‘You should check it out.’ I walked out of the room, my face burning with indignation, muttering through clenched teeth not entirely sotto voce: ‘Well I lived under them for nearly two decades so I think I should know what they’re called!’ My partner, her laugh stifled by the fear of a meltdown at the beginning of a social visit, rapidly changed the subject to a less divisive one as I harrumphed upstairs. ‘So let’s talk about Brexit then…’ she said.
This on the other hand is a much more accessible book, rooted in Cochrane’s personal story of having grown up as a Catholic in a mixed but traditionally Protestant area of the city (as I did), reflecting on the early history of the city, where he is keen on the radical political tradition of the McCrackens, the Assembly Rooms (now dilapidated) and the Linen Hall Library (of which I was a Governor back in the mid-1990s), and also looking at culture – music, theatre, poetry, and other parts of the arts. I found the first part more engaging, the second feeling a bit too structured, but the information is all good, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about how it feels to be in or from Belfast. You can get it here.
If I can be excused a second video, this is the percussion section of the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra performing Scheherazade in 1985. I am the third percussionist in view, holding the tambourine. The CBYO is still going strong.
The demands of her parents, both ill in their different ways, were endless. She was physically drained and mentally wound up. From morning to night, she worked and worried, her daily life encompassing the worst of both worlds – she was lonely, isolated in her burden of work and care – but never left alone to recoup her spirits. All her resources – time, energy, money, skills – were pressed into a struggle to keep the feeble Lamb family afloat. No part of her life was truly her own, there was no minute of her day that was not already claimed in the service of someone else. Even at night, there was no privacy; she shared the bed of an elderly invalid. Insomnia is now recognised as a warning signal in manic-depressive illness and it was impossible that Mary could sleep properly in these circumstances. With sleep deprivation, that peculiarly disorienting and distressing mental state, problems are magnified tenfold and rational thought flies out the window. That year, September was as hot as June – 78 degrees Fahrenheit – and working with fabric in that heat would have been miserable and oppressive. And September was traditionally a bad month for dressmakers. So added to the normal family worries over money, there was a seasonal dip in income.
A short but really interesting biography of Mary Lamb (1764-1847), who is well known for two things: the 1807 collection Tales from Shakespeare, in which she and her brother retold a number the great Shakespeare plays in terms deemed suitable for children of the day; and the fact that in 1796 during an attack of mental illness, she stabbed her mother to death in the family kitchen. I had previously listened to a rather good radio play by Carlo Gébler about them.
There’s a lot more than just those two things to Mary’s story. The Lambs were of humble stock – their father was a servant in the Inner Temple, and Mary was trained as a seamstress at a time when the market for sewing was saturated. Charles was a clerk in the East India Company. But he had a scholarship to a boarding school where he befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and that friendship gave him and Mary the contacts in the literary world, in particular with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, which made them able to establish a literary salon and to get a good reception from publishers for their own writings – and they wrote a lot more than Shakespeare. Their network included William Godwin, widower of Mary Wollstonecraft, who actually commissioned Tales from Shakespeare.
This was punctuated by periods of serious illness for Mary, and less frequently for Charles. To be honest, two centuries of advance in medical science would not have helped them very much. In today’s world, they would have benefited from some medicated relief, but not enough to eliminate their problems entirely; and in countries with a decent welfare system, there would have been perhaps more care available and more respite for Charles who ended up carrying most of the burden of Mary’s illness. Even so, Mary lived to her eighties.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger.
In the absence of coffee, I had a shower, and, by the time I was dressed, Dominic had texted me to say that he was on his way. The air was still fresh but the sun was already sucking up the moisture from the fields and you didn’t need to be chewing on a straw to know it was going to be another hot day.
I’ve read the previous installments of the Rivers of London series before and enjoyed them (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In this volume, our protagonist, a London detective who has found himself sucked into magical investigations, is called to Herefordshire with his goddess girlfriend to investigate the disappearance of two girls. There’s lots of rural/urban tension, some glorious but not explicit erotic moments, and a look at how the boundary between our world and Faerie might manifest in the twenty-first century. There’s also a really good sense of place within Herefordshire’s geography. I think you could enjoy this book without having read the previous five books, but you’d enjoy it more if you had. You can get it here.
Not quite sure if this is a Bechdel pass. Plenty of women characters, who talk to each other a lot, but because the narrator is a man he is usually in the conversation too, or else being talked about. There’s a sequence at the top of page 117 where three goddesses are discussing mobile phone technology which possibly passes.
The six-part 2021 season of Doctor Who was produced under pandemic conditions, and by the time it ended, I was myself recovering from my bout with COVID and didn’t feel inspired to write about it. A year later, after the broadcast of The Power of the Doctor, I returned to Flux and wrote:
So. The 2021 six-part story, Flux, was a mess. There’s no kind way of putting it. I actually like John Bishop as new companion Dan Lewis; I love Barbara Flynn, whatever she is in; I was really thrilled by Thaddea Graham as Bel, the first semi-regular Irish character in almost sixty years [of the show’s history]; and there were some good spine-chilling moments, such as the destruction of Dan’s house and the Doctor being transformed into a Weeping Angel.
But unfortunately the plot made very little sense, and the climax took place largely offscreen. Of course it was filmed under serious constraints due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t excuse the writers from sitting back and thinking about what they were really trying to convey. For all their faults, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffatt generally remembered that they needed to please their audience as well as indulging their own inner impulses. I felt that Chibnall had lost the run of himself.
I rewatched it again for this blog post, and felt very much the same. This time around I had various plot summaries to hand, which helped me make a little more sense of it; but TV science fiction at its best, unlike say opera, is not normally one of those art forms which requires the consumer to follow along with notes. I love Whittaker as the Doctor, but there are far too many moments where she is attempting to carry the full burden of audience interest through facial expressions and body language, and not helped by the dim studio lighting, the lack of other actors to interact with, or (crucially) the script.
Once again, I did like the fourth instalment, Village of the Angels, much more than the rest – a coherent plot which is more than adequately explained, higher production values, and interestingly the only episode of the six for which a co-writer (Maxine Alderton) is credited alongside Chibnall; and it ends with one of the best visual cliff-hangers ever, as the Doctor herself becomes a Weeping Angel. Interestingly, when I surveyed the Internet Movie Database for the top-rated episode of each era and spinoff of Who, Village of the Angels was a clear winner for the Thirteenth Doctor.
In his editorial foreword, Paul Driscoll explains that the fact that there are six very tightly linked episodes provided a challenge for the Black Archive series. What they have done is to commission six essays from six different authors, topped and tailed with shorter pieces by Alasdair Stuart.
Stuart’s introduction reflects on the terror of the time, when Doctor Who became to an extent a pandemic coping mechanism.
James Cooray Smith’s essay on The Halloween Apocalypse, ‘Apocalypse? Now!’, starts by reflecting on Chris Chibnall’s previous career and how different his Doctor Who turned out to be from his previous work, looks also at the importance of Liverpool as a setting and 31 October as the date for the episode, and recognises the weaknesses in the characters of Karvanista, Swarm and Azure; as I like to say, their means and motivation are never made entirely clear.
Emma Reed’s ‘A History in Flux’, looking at War of the Sontarans, examines the role of history (and fictionalised history) in Doctor Who, especially the Chibnall era’s emphasis on women in history. It also explained to me what the Temple of Atropos stuff was meant to be about, a point which had escaped me on both viewings of the story.
In ‘The Primordial Division’, Once, Upon Time is examined by Philip Purser-Hallard. I found it a thoroughly confusing episode on both viewings, and rather hoped that everything would come out right with the rest of the show. Purser-Hallard explains to me much better what is going on than the actual script did. He makes a number of interesting observations also about the role of double identities in the story and the Jungian resonances, but basically he enjoyed and was interested in this episode and I didn’t, and he doesn’t sell me on it. The second paragraph of his piece is:
She’s perfectly correct, as ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ has already shown: in the Ravagers’ introductions, Swarm was confined to a cylindrical energy shield, supposedly ‘since the dawn of the universe’, while Azure was reduced to ‘Anna’, a human woman living with her partner Jón in the far north of Iceland, without recollection of her extraterrestrial past.
Village of the Angels was broadcast on the worst day of my bout with COVID in 2021, and I did wonder when re-watching if it would hold up to re-watching. I’m glad to say that it did, and as noted above it’s my favourite episode of the series. I therefore had high hopes of Oliver Tomkins’ analysis, ‘The Angels Have the Goggle Box’, and they were fulfilled – it’s an in-depth look at the Weeping Angels, where the come from in terms of story and what they mean, why they are frightening and what they do, and how they break the fourth wall. Tomkins also looks at how the Bel plotline integrates into the Flux story.
‘Doctor Who’s Mother’, by James Mortimore, looks at Survivors of the Flux, considering the colonial framing of the Time Lords (vis-à-vis the Shobogans, and the rest of the universe), and looking at Tecteun and representations of motherhood in the show.
Finally, we get to The Vanquishers. In ‘The Three Doctors… and a Sontaran Stratagem’, Matt Hills is disarmingly frank about its failure to provide satisfactory narrative resolution, and puts this down to Chibnall’s emphasis on surprise. He then looks at the triple-Jodie Whittaker Doctor in the episode as a tribute to The Three Doctors, and reflects on how a fannish show-runner reacts against fannish expectations. It’s a good explanation of what the episode was trying to do, though again I do not feel that it succeeded.
Alasdair Stuart’s conclusion, ‘You are the Universe, Doctor’, defends the whole sequence of episodes, though as will have become apparent, I am not convinced.
Incidentally there are six ways of arranging three different things, and I have arranged the episode title, essay title and essay author’s name differently in each of the previous six paragraphs.
In sum, I did learn quite a lot from this Black Archive, largely because it explained to me what several of the episodes were supposed to be about. I’m afraid that underlines to me that the entire thing was a failure of art. I prefer to understand my TV at the time that I watch it, rather than waiting until I read serious analysis two and a half years later. But you can get it here.
From here on in, I’m switching to doing just one Black Archive write-up per month, as I am catching up with current releases all too quickly.
I got this coffee-table book as a thank-you for giving a lecture in Istanbul a few years back, and it is really lovely. Although the title is 40 Years of Photographs, they are concentrated in the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, giving a sense of a vibrant and human European city full of change but also of history. Although they are at opposite ends of Europe, a lot of the people in Güler’s photographs look very much like their Irish counterparts. And in any case they are just beautiful compositions. The book has an impassioned foreword by Orhan Pamuk. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Devil Kissed Her: The Story of Mary Lamb, by Kathy Watson.
Non-fiction 10 (YTD 25) All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison Kinda, by Frank Collins How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Flux, ed. Paul Driscoll The Devil Kissed Her, by Kathy Watson Belfast: Approach to Crisis, by Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert Kaplan Chindit Column 76, by W.A. Wilcox The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
Non-genre 3 (YTD 14) The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout DOOM 94, by Jānis Joņevs
SF 11 (YTD 27) The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo Translation State, by Ann Leckie Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch Liberty’s Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera Life Does Not Allow Us To Meet, by He Xi Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 6) Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
Comics and art books 5 (YTD 11) Conversion, by Al Ewing et al Saga, vol 11 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples Ara Güler’s Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs The Witches of World War II, by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha and Nicola Scott
314 books currently tagged unread, down 7 from last month, down 75 from April 2023.
Reading now (as of last night) Starter Villain, by John Scalzi The Then and the Now, by Si Spurrier et al
Coming soon (perhaps) Imaginary Friends, by Jacqueline Rayner The Cradle, by Tasha Suri The Self-Made Man, by Mark Griffiths The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill Wannabes, by Dave Rudden The Monster in the Cupboard, by Kalynn Bayron The Girl Who Died, by Tom Marshall Moroda, by L.L. McNeil Belfast City Hall: One Hundred Years, by Gillian McIntosh Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse The Virgin In The Garden, by A.S. Byatt “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch South, by Ernest Shackleton
Second paragraph of third chapter (English text only):
I did well in school, except for physical education. In short, I was a nerd.
This came up in my previous survey of well-known books set in each European country as the top book on Goodreads set in Latvia by a Latvian writer. It’s about the youth culture of the immediate post-Communist years, with the 14-year-old narrator mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, enduring school, failing to comprehend girls, and diving into the heavy metal music and light crime scenes. An afterword set sixteen years later looks at what happened to everyone. It was one of the 2014 winners of the European Union Prize for Literature.
To be honest, I was not blown away; it’s not as bad as Catcher in the Rye, but there is a limit to my tolerance for grumpy adolescent male narrators. Bechdel fail also, due to tight first-person narrative. You can get it here.
This was the non-genre book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien, but I’m holding it until I have cleared my 2018 and 2019 backlogs.
The British ambassador to Czecho-Slovakia, David Brighty, became the Ambassador to both Republics after the dissolution of the state. From Prague, he also covered Slovakia (as a non-resident ambassador) until a fully-fledged Embassy was built in Bratislava, and in 1994 he handed over the baton to the first head of the British diplomatic mission in Slovakia, Michael Bates. At first he was Chargé d’affaires before becoming Ambassador (1994 — 1995). Bates was suceeded in 1995 by Ambassador Peter Harborne, who served in Slovakia until 1998
I was in Bratislava two weeks ago (as previously noted) and met up with my old friend Pavol Demeš, who among other things was the foreign minister of Slovakia just before its break-up with the Czechs. He has now produced this commemoration of the UK-Slovakia relationship for the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, and you can download it for free here.
A lot of it is simply recapitulation of diplomatic routine – exchanges of ambassadors, state visits – but it’s good to hear the voice of genuine enthusiasm for external engagement that comes through loud and clear. The book is in parallel Slovak and English texts, with photographs in the middle, one of which features Pavol himself in his ministerial years. (He’s on the left in the group photo.)
Pavol is a keen photographer himself, but has included only a couple of his own photos. I particularly like this one, taken on the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 on the royal yacht Britannia, of someone who was normally very much on her guard when in the public eye.
For myself, it was interesting to be reminded of the past roles of a lot of my Slovak political contacts – leaving aside the living, I knew Eduard Kukan as a Member of the European parliament and a Balkanist, but he had a distinguished career in domestic politics and diplomacy as well.
A book for specialists only, I think, but very nicely done.
Ruby and her band were performing their usual Christmas set, full of old classics and crowd-pleasers, with some newer, cooler Christmas anthems snuck in. The rosy-cheeked patrons laughed and chatted, coats unbuttoned, bobble hats hanging off chairs, scarves trailing forgotten on the floor. Behind the bar, a boy Ruby knew from around the area served drinks with a cheerful smile, a tinsel crown in his hair.
Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson is new to the Whoniverse, and charmed everyone at Gallifrey One this year, though unfortunately there were not enough copies of this novelisation around for me to get one. Anyway, it’s a breezy, enjoyable revisiting of the first full Fifteenth Doctor story, with a bit more background for Ruby, and sensibly not trying to reproduce the stunning visuals in printed form. She catches the voice of the new Doctor well, but we don’t find out much more about him, perhaps even less than usual for a Who novelisation; perhaps there are surprises in store. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of “The Fatal Bride”, as presented here:
With these few preliminary remarks, now offered once for all, I shall end the te- dious task of introduction, and plunge at once into the business of my story, mere- ly reiterating, by way of supplemental caution, that names and titles, and a few de- tails of locality, which I fancied might indicate individuals, and lead to detection, have been suppressed and altered; but that in the substance, and, indeed, with those exceptions, in all the minor details of these narratives, I shall observe a strict adherence to the facts, as they were either related to me, or came within my own personal knowledge.
Le Fanu is one of those overlooked nineteenth-century Irish writers of the Weird, and this slim volume presents two of his stories told by a narrator identified only as “a Bachelor”. There are good forewords and afterwords by Matthew Holness, Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers, and the two stories themselves are prefaced by an introduction which is actually lifted from the original publication of the second story, “The Fatal Bride”.
The first story, “The Watcher”, is much weirder and to be honest much more interesting; “The Fatal Bride” resolved in a rather prudish nineteenth-century way, and the dark hints of what is going on in “The Watcher” are better executed. However, both of them give a very strong impression of eighteenth-century Dublin – even though Le Fanu was born i 1814 so would not have known it personally.
A nice little gem, though I hope I did not pay the €25 that I see as a price tag on my copy. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Belfast City Hall: One Hundred Years, by Gillian McIntosh.
Next in the series of Eleventh Doctor comics, and I’ll be honest, I read it a couple of weeks ago and don’t remember much about it. There’s some good stuff with the Cyberman, the Emperor Constantine, and the Battle of Milvian Bridge. You can get it here.
But the primary system had opened up the presidential nomination process more than ever before in American history. And openness is always double-edged. In this new environment, a wider range of politicians, from George McGovern to Barack Obama, could now compete seriously for the presidency. But the window was now also open to true outsiders—individuals who had never held elective office. In the twenty-three years between 1945 and 1968, under the old convention system, only a single outsider (Dwight Eisenhower) publicly sought the nomination of either party. By contrast, during the first two decades of the primary system, 1972 to 1992, eight outsiders ran (five Democrats and three Republicans), an average of 1.25 per election; and between 1996 and 2016, eighteen outsiders competed in one of the two parties’ primaries—an average of three per election. Thirteen of these were Republicans.
A grim warning of the threat of authoritarianism and fascism in the United States, written at the end of the first year of the 2017-21 Trump presidency, and looking at historical precedents for the dismantling of democratic systems of government, notably the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and the more recent case of Chavez in Venezuela. (A cynic would pause here and note that the authors do not pick examples from regimes that the USA had good relations with, though one would be spoiled for choice.) You can get it here.
It’s a somewhat frustrating book because it’s half analysis and half exhortation; the exhortation is to those Republicans who actually care about the US Constitution to unite with Democrats and get rid of Trump before American democracy is destroyed. Seven years on, the danger has certainly increased and the likelihood of a positive resolution decreased.
Personally I tend to feel that the rot set in thirty years ago, when the Republicans won the 1994 mid-terms by effectively declaring war on the legitimacy of the Democrats to govern at all, and they have no incentive to abandon a strategy which has kept them in the White House for half of the twenty-first century despite winning a majority of the vote in only one election since 1996.
(Nobody under the age of 37 has voted in a presidential election where the Republicans got more votes. Nobody under the age of 53 has voted in two presidential elections where the Republicans got more votes.)
I also felt that the authors critique the cultural assumptions of those they disagrees with, but fail to address the problems of American governance. Not all of the popular disaffection with the political establishment is down to Trumpian propaganda. Americans live shorter lives and have a worse health-care system than citizens of any other advanced democracy. Study after study shows that while the rich are getting richer, the middle classes as well as the poor are all getting poorer. As I said above, both parties have been in power for half of the twenty-first century, so both must share the blame. But it’s not a recipe for political stability.
Obviously I hope that Trump loses the election in November, and the polls are really too close to call right now (Wikipedia’s running average has Trump on 51% and Biden on 49%). But even if he is defeated, there is an awful lot else that needs to be fixed.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2022 which is not by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Next on that pile is Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez.
Wat hij leuk vond aan Esmeralda, wist hij niet zo direct te duiden. Het was een vaag gevoel. Misschien de vorm van haar ogen, het timbre van haar stem. Het was een gevoel als van een vingerknip. Als dat ene schitterende, ontluikende moment dat altijd zal aarzelen tussen twee seconden. Maar iets was er zéker.
He couldn’t immediately explain what he liked about Esmeralda. It was a vague feeling. Maybe the shape of her eyes, the timbre of her voice. It was a feeling like a snap of the fingers. Like that one brilliant, unfolding moment that will always waver between two seconds. But one thing was certain.
I’m afraid that this novel about women disappearing in an unnamed city (which might be Belgian or might be Iberian) didn’t really do it for me. It may be that I missed important biots due to my Dutch not being good enough, but I didn’t grasp if there was an explanation for the disappearances, and if not, what the point was. I’m also dubious about settings that are both everywhere and nowhere. And I didn’t really see what the astronaut had to do with it. You can get it here.
I thought that this was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, but in the end I don’t think it had any sfnal elements. Next on the unread sf pile is Moroda, by L.L. MacNeil aka L.L. MacRae.
I hoped he was not going to say “Ha!” but he did. And as I had not yet mastered the vocal cords sufficiently to be able to reply, that concluded the dialogue sequence for the moment. Then, still keeping his eyes glued on me, he shouted: “Sir Watkyn!”
After the tough work of getting the Hugos over the line, I felt like a bit of a rest from my usual reading fare and got hold of this, the top Wodehouse novel by ownership on LibraryThing and third on Goodreads. I had a phase of reading Wodehouse when I was thirteen; I cannot remember if I had read this or not, but they are all very similar so I may well have done.
The plot is simple, and also complicated. Wooster, our somewhat dim aristocratic narrator, is sent to a country house on two simultaneous missions, to rescue the relationship of a friend whose engagement is in trouble, and to steal or otherwise acquire an antique cow-creamer which has been acquired by his host, Sir Watkyn Bassett. Wooster’s valet, Jeeves, comes too and by research and quick thinking saves the day on all counts
But honestly, one reads it not for the plot, and certainly not for the social commentary (for there is none apart from “fascism is silly”), but for the delightful turns of phrase. For instance, here we are introduced to the McGuffin, the antique cow-creamer:
It was a silver cow. But when I say ‘cow’, don’t go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence. It was about four inches high and six long. Its back opened on a hinge. Its tail was arched, so that the tip touched the spine—thus, I suppose, affording a handle for the cream-lover to grasp. The sight of it seemed to take me into a different and dreadful world.
or more simply:
I suppose a man who has been hit over the head with a picture of a girl chirruping to a pigeon and almost immediately afterwards enmeshed in a sheet can never really retain the cool, intelligent outlook.
The book was published in 1938, and one of the comic relief characters is Roderick Spode, a would-be dictator of Britain. Wodehouse later got into serious trouble for making wartime broadcasts after he was captured by the Germans, but he had prepared his defence well in advance:
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”
I have not checked in detail, but I strongly suspect that it is a Bechdel fail. The named female characters are Bertie’s aunt Dahlia, Sir Watkyn’s daughter Madeleine Bassett and her cousin Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng (Bertie narrowly escapes marriage to each of the latter two in quick succession). But I am not sure that any two of them even appear in the same scene, the story being told tightly from Bertie’s point of view. Madeleine and Stiffy do have off-screen confrontations, but they are always about Madeleine’s boyfriend, Gussie Fink-Nottle.
One other point that struck me – Bertie and his boy and girl friends are clearly intended by the author to be quite young, in their mid to late twenties. But I have found only one case of an actor under 35 being cast as Bertie for the screen, David Niven in the 1936 film Thank You, Jeeves, which veers far from Wodehouse’s characterisation. In general much older actors have been cast. Ian Carmichael was in his mid-40s for the 1960s BBC series The World of Wooster, and Hugh Laurie in his early 40s for the 1990s Jeeves and Wooster. An innovative creative team could inject a totally different energy into a TV or film adaptation by choosing a much younger cast.
I vividly remember watching Kinda when it was first shown in 1982, and being a little baffled but also a little reassured; I wanted interesting adventures on distant planets, like we had largely had in the Tom Baker years, and apart from the one production fail of the snake itself, we got it.
I also saw Kinda on first showing in 1982, and in some ways it is even less comprehensible than Logopolis, though in other ways it is fairly clear what is going on – giant pink snake trying to penetrate Tegan’s inner recesses, and all that. It is one of Doctor Who’s most successful takes on colonialism (a theme the Pertwee era consistently tried and failed with) even though that isn’t really the point of the story. Wood and Miles point to the influence of Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, and while I can see that, I think it may be a more general reflection of the ecological concerns of the day. The deep themes are laid on pretty heavily – the apple in paradise, the reflections of the “real” world in Tegan’s dream, and on the whole we are shown rather than told about it. There are some impressive performances – Janet Fielding as Tegan of course, the three colonial officers (though we never find out what happened to their missing colleagues) the two Kinda women and the Trickster, which means you can almost overlook the cheapness of the sets and how wooden Adric is. Rather fascinating.
When I rewatched it in 2011 as part of my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
I had forgotten quite how fantastic Kinda is. Even the snake at the end is not as bad as I remembered. But it’s a brilliant tour de force of explorations of reality, possession by spiritual forces, possession by colonial agents, about speaking and not speaking. Again, Janet Fielding is the best of the regular cast, but everyone is good, especially of course Simon Rouse as the increasingly deranged Hindle, and Mary Morris – only in two of the four episodes, but bloody hell, what a performance – as Panna. But nobody is actually bad; Nerys Hughes and Richard Todd, big name actors hired to perform auxiliary parts, lift it; even Matthew Waterhouse, delivered with yet another Adric-as-potential-traitor script, more or less rises to the occasion; and though I see some fan criticism of Sarah Prince as Karuna I must say I find her performance pretty luminous and interesting.
It does show the value of watching Who in sequence. Taken as an attempt at a serious big-picture SF story, it would probably fail because of the limited means available. But when one bears in mind the production constraints, and considers the story as a televised theatrical piece, it really ought to blow you away. I don’t have time or energy to wax more lyrical on the subject, so just let me refer you to a brilliant write-up of the story here. [link now long dead].
Just before we go any further, here is Mary Morris 42 years earlier at the age of 25, performing the dance of the robotic Silver Maiden in The Thief of Baghdad:
As with Paradise Towers, I enjoyed revisiting Kinda, and it almost reminds me of the early Hartnell stories which were trying to tell big picture space parables in a fairly small production and budget space. Adric is still annoying, and the snake still disappoints, but the rest of it all works very well, and this was a rewatch that was more rewarding than I had hoped.
An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with four women guest characters and at least one regular (Nyssa only in briefly, but two versions of Tegan), all of whom talk to each other about various things other than men.
Terrance Dicks wrote the novelisation, and it’s not one of his more energetic efforts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
She stared challengingly at this new apparition. ‘I suppose you’re also going to tell me I don’t exist?’
Frank Collins’ Black Archive monograph on the story follows his previous writing on Warriors Gate and on the first Matt Smith season. As usual, it is dense but enjoyable, one of the longer Black Archives, with seven chapters. Like the monograph of Paradise Towers, it has clearly benefited from a lot of dialogue with the original writer of the story, in this case Christopher Bailey.
The first chapter, ‘An Eccentric Chain-Smoking Buddhist’, looks at Bailey’s personal biography and other work, and convincingly shows how a mild-mannered but politically radical playwright who had not previously touched science fiction ended up writing Kinda.
The second chapter, ‘Only Ever One Ingredient in the Stew’, looks head-on at the Buddhist themes in the story (and the limited visibility of Buddhism elsewhere in Doctor Who).
The third chapter, ‘The Important Part is the Melody’ looks at the behind-the-scene story of the commissioning and production of Kinda. In particular, Eric Saward as script editor rewrote large parts of the last two episodes, and Christopher Bailey then rewrote them again. Its second paragraph is:
However, changes were made to the scripts of The Kinda under the guidance of three different script editors. After his initial consultation with Bidmead, apart from several phone calls and letters, Bailey doesn’t recall meeting in person with him again. Bidmead later saw that Bailey was exploring a ‘strong Buddhist element’ on his own terms and while Kinda ‘lacked the form and structure and indeed the sort of subject that I thought was essential to Doctor Who […] nevertheless, it had an extraordinarily haunting quality to it’3. 3 Bidmead, ‘Dream Time’.
The fourth and longest chapter, ‘The Power of Life and Death, Over All of You!’, starts by looking at the casting of Richard Todd and Simon Rouse and the postcolonial context (unfortunately he says nothing about Nerys Hughes), and goes on to look at theories of ancient science, and then sources of inspiration such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with a brief coda on cargo cults.
The fifth chapter, ‘Otherwise Out There Gets In. Do You See?’, looks at Hindle’s disintegration, Christianity and imperialism, matriarchy and the Box of Jhana, and the Mara and Janet Fielding’s sensuous performance.
The sixth chapter, ‘The Mara Turns the Wheel of Life. It Ends as it Began’, begins and ends with the Box of Jhana again, and also looks at the unfortunate fact that all the actors are white and how this intersects with the colonial themes, and at the uncomfortable role of prophecy in the story.
The seventh chapter, ‘There is Great Danger in Dreaming Alone’, looks at dark places (Conrad again), the imperfect implementation of Bailey’s vision for gender roles among the Kinda, and the late rewrites of especially the last episode to foreground the Buddhist themes more visibly.
I sometimes complain about the Black Archives on less good Doctor Who stories, that they cannot bear the freights of the interpretation placed on them by the Black Archive authors. This is not one of those cases, and it’s a great rick unpacking of the themes informing the story and how they were realised on the screen. (Though I’d still have liked a bit more about Nerys Hughes.) You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“Invisible Monster”):
‘Look!’ said David.
I had meant to get to this book several years ago, the last surviving unread book on my shelves acquired in 2014, but it slipped into a weird corner of the bookshelves and I couldn’t find it. However it then came to light in a recent tidying-up exercise, so I picked it up again.
These are five stories by Wyndham in the space opera tradition, which is not what he is best known for. They each have a somewhat different twist on the format. I had read the title story back when it was up for the Retro Hugos in 2014, and noted then:
this is actually rather an attractive story, Bradbury before his time, with the central characters being the Russian cosmonauts (though in fact they include a Ukrainian, a Kyrgyz and a politically exiled Scot) and an opening-the-tomb narrative with a surprising and downbeat ending.
I wasn’t so impressed with the second story, “Worlds to Barter”, about a time-traveller attempting to interfere with his own ancestor’s crucial decisions, but I enjoyed the rest. “Invisible Monster” has, er, an invisible monster from Venus landing on Earth with a decently paced bit of horror. “The Man from Earth” is a parable of the fall of humanity as a result of exploring Dangerous Places. The title of the last story is “The Third Vibrator”, which OK is a bit snigger-worthy these days but again has a time paradox at the core.
It is what it is. I think only “Worlds to Barter” even has a female character, so we don’t even get near the first step of the Bechdel test. But you can get it here.
This was my remaining unread book acquired in 2014. Back to usual run after this/i
Paradise Towers was first broadcast at the point that I was an undergraduate and no longer watching Doctor Who regularly, so I did not see it until 2008 when I watched the whole of Season 24. I wrote then:
I actually loved Paradise Towers, apart from the music and one ill-inspired character. The whole concept of the abandoned tower block with its feral inhabitants is done, not fantastically well I admit, but at least with the courage of its convictions. Richard Briers as guest star clicks with the show in a way that Paul Darrow utterly failed to do in Timelash. The Kang chants and warping of familiar phrases are also great, and Mel actually gets something to do. This is more like Doctor Who than anything broadcast since The Caves of Androzani. (The two flies in the ointment are the awful music and the character of Pex – some blame Howard Cooke for his performance, but basically Pex doesn’t fit awfully well with the setting.)
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch three years later, I wrote:
And suddenly we seem to have a complete step change with Paradise Towers, a glorious story which merges comedy and horror – Richard Briers dressed up as a Hitler-like bureaucrat; girl gangs with extraordinary slogans; cannibalistic little old ladies; a hero who isn’t terribly heroic; an evil architect and a swimming pool. I don’t know what it is, but there is a sudden injection of energy and confidence into the show at this point that, in my view, lasts for most of the rest of Old Who’s run. The Doctor may not have much of a clue as to what is going on, but we are urging him to work it out and we get there at much the same time as he does. My daily watching of the old episodes has become a pleasure again, rather than a chore.
I’m interested to see that on both occasions, watching the story in sequence with those before and after, I noticed what a different beast it is to its predecessors. I wrote in 2011 that “I don’t know what it is”, but since then, I have read Andrew Cartmel’s reminiscences so it’s clear that Paradise Towers was his first real commission as script editor, and that he was successfully stamping his mark on the show.
This time round was the first time I had watched the story in isolation – both in 2008 and 2011 I watched it in sequence. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it held up. Yes, the production values are poor, but the story actually lampshades it by referencing the decaying tower block environment. Richard Briers is a delight and so are the two old ladies. Pex annoys me less every time; I find the character easier to accept as a send-up of hero tropes. And I actually found the music easier on the ear, especially the riff on the them tune of the show while the Caretakers are holding the Doctor captive in Episode Two.
The one thing that jumped out at me this time is that all the speaking characters, though not all the people we see on screen, are white. That is an opportunity missed. Several of the non-speaking Kangs (and one of the Janitors) are clearly of African or Asian descent, including Nisha Nayar who got a small speaking role in the Ninth Doctor two-parter Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways and has done a fair amount of Big Finish work.
The other really important thing to note is that Stephen Wyatt is the only graduate of Clare College, Cambridge to have written a Doctor Who story – so far. (The only Clare alum to have directed a Doctor Who story is Dan Zeff, who I served with on the 1988-89 JCR Committee.) Wyatt also wrote the novelisation of the story, and the second paragraph of its third chapter is:
At first Mel thought she was hearing things. She was sitting dejectedly in a grimy ill-lit corridor in Paradise Towers and someone was offering her a cup of tea. It was so unlikely Mel thought her mind must be going.
I read it at the same time as first watching it in 2008, and wrote:
Wyatt has the courage of his convictions here: a reasonably strong story in the first place, and the opportunity to overcome the weaknesses of the production (the Kangs on paper can be teenagers, and we don’t get the awful music, though Pex as a character is still an anomaly). An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with the scene where the old ladies are about to eat Mel a particular delight.
Nothing to add to that; an above-average novelisation, just about. You can get it here.
As noted above, both TV story and novelisation easily pass the Bechdel test.
John Toon’s Black Archive monograph on Paradise Towers won the Sir Julius Vogel Award last year (2023), as his previous volume on the Fourth Doctor story Full Circle had done in 2019. I complained about the Full Circle analysis that I would have liked more on the actual production of the show; and the Paradise Towers volume delivers that, for a very satisfying read. It has been richly informed by extensive correspondence between Toon and Wyatt, so that we hear the original author’s voice more clearly than in most Doctor Who analyses.
The first chapter, ‘Reception’, starts by pointing out something I had not realised – not everyone liked Paradise Towers as much as I did. I often find that alleged classic stories are not to my taste, but it’s much rarer to discover that a story I rather admire is not held in such high esteem by fandom. Toon argues that the story’s reputation has improved dramatically in the last couple of years, basically since the Blu-Ray was released, but he shows convincingly that it went down badly at the time and since – featuring at 193 out of 200 in the DWM poll of 2009, for instance.
Toon then goes on to explain the rushed process of writing and production. It all makes a lot more sense when you realise that Pex actually was supposed to be a muscle man, but they couldn’t find one in time who could actually act and were left with Howard Cooke; and that the Caretakers apart from Richard Briers were supposed to be overweight and middle-aged; and that the music was hastily rewritten because the originally commissioned score didn’t fit the way the story was going.
The second and longest chapter, ‘The Foundations’, looks in detail at the similarities and differences between Paradise Towers and J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise, and a few other sources: 2000 AD for the mega-city, A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies for the youth gangs, Toyah Willcox for the Kangs’ style.
The third chapter, ‘Windows’, makes the cases successively for interpreting Paradise Towers as a queer story, a camp story and a Gothic story. (I vote for all three.) Its second paragraph is:
There’s an anecdote often told by Andrew Cartmel about a script conference between himself, Stephen Wyatt and John Nathan-Turner that took place on 16 March 19871. According to Cartmel’s recollection, Nathan-Turner expressed concern about the cannibalistic habits of Tilda and Tabby, in response to which Wyatt confided, ‘You realise that they’re also lesbians?’ Wyatt corroborates this story, and further recalls that he suggested Nathan-Turner might tempt the tabloid press with the headline ‘Dr Who in Lesbian Cannibal Bondage Horror’2. This suggests a creative team keeping a wry eye on opportunities for sensationalism rather than seeking to give representation, sympathetic or otherwise, to non-heteronormative lifestyles. And yet Paradise Towers does lend itself readily to queer interpretation. In large part, this is likely due to the nature of Doctor Who itself in 1987. 1 See, for example, Cartmel, Script Doctor, p53. 2 Email conversation with author. The ‘bondage’ in this case would be Tilda restraining Mel with her knitting, but more on that anon.
The fourth chapter, ‘The Towers’, begins by pointing out that it’s really rare for Doctor Who to address architecture as a topic, and then goes on to sketch the appalling history of Brutalism and the British high-rise block.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Great Architect’, chases the architecture theme still further, with glances at Le Corbusier, Peter and Alison Smithson, Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher, in a very satisfying hunt for truth.
A brief conclusion pulls it all together.
Driven to produce a set of scripts quickly to break ground on Doctor Who’s 24th season, Wyatt and Cartmel created a story as rough-edged yet multi-faceted as the concrete estates they wanted to comment on. It overlays serious issues of shoddy social housing and uncaring architects with comedy fascist Caretakers, punk gang children in their twenties and cuddly teatime cannibals. But for all that, it has a comfortable charm. Be it ever so humble, some of us call it home.
Recommended for fans of the Seventh Doctor era, and of architecture. You can get it here.
The cost of water has gone up again. And I heard on the news today that more water peddlers are being killed. Peddlers sell water to squatters and the street poor—and to people who’ve managed to hold on to their homes, but not to pay their utility bills. Peddlers are being found with their throats cut and their money and their handtrucks stolen. Dad says water now costs several times as much as gasoline. But, except for arsonists and the rich, most people have given up buying gasoline. No one I know uses a gas-powered car, truck, or cycle. Vehicles like that are rusting in driveways and being cannibalized for metal and plastic.
I discovered to my surprise, after reading the Hugo-winning graphic adaptation of this classic novel in 2021, that I had not read the original version, though I had read the Nebula-winning sequel soon after it came out and again in 2009. It’s of special interest right now because the first part of the story is set this year, starting on 20 July 2024 (the 65th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing), though it runs through to 2027.
On the one hand it’s a grim narrative of the disintegration of society in an all too credible future, where the state no longer protects people against each other, climate change is out of control and the narrator’s safe home enclave becomes steadily less safe. There are some gruesome moments of psychological and physical horror, and the whole situation seems a lot more plausible now than it must have done in 1993 (which was the exact time that the Republican Party declared war on the Constitution).
At the same time the narrator, Lauren Olamina, is a symbol of hope, founding a new belief system that allows her and her found family, her tribe, to start rebuilding society for the future. The book ends on a note of optimism despite the horror. One can question how realistic it is that even the most gifted eighteen-year-old could start a successful religious movement for the long term, even (especially?) under such extreme circumstances, but great stories are often written about unlikely events. You can get it here.
Not surprisingly, an easy Bechdel pass, with the narrator and her stepmother discussing the stars in the first chapter.
This was my top unread sf book, my top unread book by a woman and my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on those piles respectively are Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt; and Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse.
The Enigma machine was revolutionary, but actually, the principle that it worked on was as old as the centuries. Despite the technological sophistication, it was still all about substituting one letter for another. The encryption puzzles in this section are intended to reflect the patient discipline that Bletchley codebreakers had to acquire. Especially when facing the prospect of diving into a vortex of chaos.
(Actually read a few weeks ago but the review lingered in drafts for longer than it should have.)
A breezy collection of puzzles, aimed perhaps at older teenagers, with lots of stories about what life was like for the men and women who worked at Bletchley Park during the second world war. A lot of people are into the Bletchley Park fandom and I guess this will feed those cravings and also provide some intellectual stimulation. You can get it here.
Several friends have parents (or older relatives) who worked at Bletchley Park; I’ve had two very minor and remote personal connections – first, John Herivel went back to Belfast after the war and set up the History of Science programme from which I believe I was the first PhD student several decades later (long after he had retired); second, Mavis Batey herself posted a comment on my Livejournal in 2005 when I reviewed her book about Alice in Wonderland (she would have been 84 then, and died in 2013).
Lewis Carroll So glad you liked the Story Of Alice . There were no reference footnotes because it was all my own research as a local historian and Carroll admirer. Yes Christ Church is a wonderful place. My husband was Treasurer of Christ Church and his rooms looked over Alice’s garden . In many ways the donnish creatures hadn’t changed much since Carroll’s days and I suppose you might say with Humpty Dumpty ‘You’ve been listening at doors- and behind trees- and down chimneys – or otherwise you couldn’t have known it’ Mavis Batey.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is a photograph album, Ara Güler’s Istanbul.
‘What the devil…?’ the Judge demands, springing out of bed like a suddenly switched on fountain. ‘Why is that ruddy Gulgul cavorting about naked in my garden like a sturdy gazelle?’
I hugely enjoyed Anuja Chauhan’s story of an Indian parliamentary by-election, Battle for Bittora, when I read it in 2014. As a respite from Hugos last month, I sought out her top book on Goodreads, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, and devoured it fairly quickly. Romance novels are not my usual fare, but sometimes it’s good to have a change.
To my surprise, though published in 2013, the book is firmly set in a specific few months of 1988, with a major subplot being the male love interest’s attempts to hold a government minister accountable for the deadly pogrom against Delhi’s Sikhs in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination four years before. This is grim stuff for a romantic comedy, and I felt that the author did it justice.
Otherwise, it’s a nicely observed comedy of manners, as the fourth of Judge Thakur’s five beautiful daughters, newly hired as a TV newsreader on India’s main evening bulletin, navigates her romantic destiny, finding her backbone as well as her love. There is a healthy dose of political scepticism too, but the main thrust of the humour is in the character observation.
No actual sex on page (unlike Battle for Bittora) but lots of more than significant glances and fragile egos needing any support they can get. I didn’t like it as much as Battle for Bittora, but then I liked Battle for Bittora a great deal. You can get Those Pricey Thakur Girls here.
Not surprisingly, an easy Bechdel pass, with the two youngest sisters discussing how to get smart for a TV appearance in the middle of the first chapter.
The novel is in English, but the 2015 TV series based on it is in Hindi and you can find every single one of the 150 episodes on Youtube. (Five 25-minute episodes every week for more than six months! Phew!) Here’s the trailer.
‘Mollie, Mollie, Mr McCrimmon has been kidnapped. It means the end of us unless we can find him quickly!’
I wrote at length about the TV story, John Peel’s novelisation and Simon Guerrier’s Black Archive on it just over two years ago; however I’m coming back to it now because Frazer Hines, who starred as Jamie in the original show, has produced an alternative novelisation, assisted by Mike Tucker and Steve Cole. The authors have taken the step of the framing narrative of the second (and last) showing the the TV story in 1968, when newly acquired companion Zoe was invited to watch it as an example of the Doctor’s previous adventures.
Is there a point? Yes, I think so; John Peel in his novelisation was trying to make sense of Dalek mythology in the context of the show as a whole, whereas here we have Hines and co-writers humanising the experiences of both Jamie and Victoria, giving a lot more back-story to the companions and indeedto the other characters.
One of the problems I have with The Evil of the Daleks is that quite a lot of the plot doesn’t really make sense. But the TV story keeps you entertained with the pace of events, and this novelisation does the same, from a slightly different direction to John Peel’s. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, as is the TV story. (Some argue that Ruth Maxtible telling Mollie to get some tea at the end of episode 2 crosses the Bechdel threshold, but this is incorrect, because the tea is for Jamie.)
Justin’s family background was conventional. He had one sister, four years older than him. Her name was Amanda. Her friends called her Mandy, but Justin and his parents invariably called her Amanda. His father’s name was Mortimer, and his mother was Nicole. Their names for each other were Mort and Nicky.
A weird little jewel at the end of Christopher Priest’s writing career, this book’s protagonist, a film student who grows up to be a film critic, becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a Hollywood film star at Heathrow Airport in 1948. There’s a lot of exploration of film history and of airports and the human process of flight, and although I worked out what had happened to the actress some time before the characters did, there was more than enough momentum to keep me going. Like most of Priest’s books, this one will set your mind racing rather than your pulse. A decent note to end on. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, I think. Most of the book is tight-third to the male protagonist. There are a couple of scenes where his girlfriend is talking to an older actress, but he is present and in the conversation too.
He was at a cheap, unstable table barely held together by rusty nails and the efforts of a unskilled carpenter. A half-eaten bowl of pepper soup, a mostly eaten plate of suya, and three tall, brown, empty bottles of Gulder beer were sloppily spread in front of him like reluctant offerings. Everything around him vibrated, including his own head, pulsating with the loud music and the rising rush of alcohol. Up on the makeshift stage, where a yellow-painted board spelled out the words: Fela Kuti and the Africa 70 in dark blue letters, a thin, shirtless man in tight trousers with chalk markings on his face sang into the microphone while simulating sex with a sweaty, skinny woman in a gold miniskirt and bra, cowrie shell bangles shaking around her ankles and wrists. Fela’s voice strained as he sang in pidgin.
There is probably a whole subgenre out there of books about stealing items from the British museum. The only other one I have read is a Lovejoy novel, The Very Last Gambado. Both Lovejoy and the protagonist here, Shigidi, arbitrate between their own homelands and cultures (East Anglia and Nigeria respectively) and the symbolic centre of imperial cultural theft, the British Museum, and obviously we cheer for the insurgents both times.
It’s a richly imagined, sexy contemporary magical world, with the metaphors about colonialism and cultural appropriation text rather than subtext; and the sense of place is very good in both Nigeria and London. Entertaining to see Aleister Crowley still alive and taking an interest in contemporary affairs. I did feel that the system of magic and godhood was rather over-bureaucratised, using frankly Western concepts of management which are good for the 21st century in Nigeria or England but would hardly have been around for the millennia! Still, enjoyable and short, and you can get it here.
Bechdel fail, I think. Shigidi’s main accomplice is a succubus called Nneoma, but I don’t thik she speaks to another woman without him being present and in the conversation.
(Alice, thinking): “The Doctor would smile, that special excited-little-boy grin he got when something wonderful and impossible and brilliant happened. And he’d say something like:” Doctor: “Ha! Yes! Temporal protogenic reversal!“
Second in the sequence of Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, continuing his adventures with recently bereaved London librarian Alice, anonymous musician Jones and chameleon entity ARC. Alice is much more interesting than the other two and gets much more plot, especially when her dead mother appears to come back. The standout however is the first episode where time starts running backwards – this has been done a couple of times before in Who, but it’s difficult to do well and it is carried off with aplomb. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail. When Alice meets her resurrected mother, they talk about the Doctor. There is a flashback scene to Alice’s childhood, but it’s not a dialogue.
