Hugos have been a distraction – I read fewer books this month than in any month since March 2019 and March 2017, the two previous times that I was supervising the close of Hugo nominations as Administrator.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 15) Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, by Isabel Hardman Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, ed. Chinuo Onwualu A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan Paradise Towers, by John Toon
Non-genre 2 (YTD 11) Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Those Pricey Thakur Girls, by Anuja Chauhan
SF 4 (YTD 15) Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi Airside, by Christopher Priest Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 4) Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines Doctor Who – Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Comics 1 (YTD 6) Serve You, by Al Ewing, Rob Williams et al
3,200 pages (YTD 13,700) 6/13 (YTD 22/54) by non-male writers (Hardman, Onwualu, Speller/Allan, Howard, Chauhan, Butler) 3/13 (YTD 6/41) by a non-white writer (Onwualu, Chauhan, Talabi) 1/13 rereads (Doctor Who – Paradise Towers)
321 books currently tagged unread, up 12 from last month (thanks to shortlists and Eastercon purchases), down 74 from March 2023.
Reading now De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison, by Niall Harrison
Coming soon (perhaps) Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks Kinda, by Frank Collins Return, by Simon Fraser et al Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu DOOM 94, by Janis Jonevs Ara Guler’s Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert Kaplan Moroda, by L.L. McNeil How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore 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 The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Hard to be a God, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
It was being a thoroughly grown-up evening, and she [Clary] didn’t want him [Archie}to think that she didn’t know about conversation – particularly as Polly wasn’t helping at all: she simply smiles and chose things to eat and ate them. She looked awfully pretty in a pale yellow dress with a lace collar and a little black taffeta bow with streamers.
Third in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brilliant family saga of the Cazalets, set during the Second World War, with the young and middle-aged women who are the central characters falling in love and having plenty of (off-stage) sex, not always with the right people or the same people. I almost feel that we had 900 pages of set-up in the first two volumes, which then explodes into lots and lots of plot here, which is maybe a little unfair as the first two were hardly without incident. Howard’s own gruesome first marriage (to Peter Scott) is unsparingly mined for material, with two particularly memorable passages involving very small babies.
Along with the turbulent love lives of the various viewpoint figures, there are some gems of observation about women’s roles in the society of 1940s England, and a quietly devastating subplot about the Holocaust and the uncovering of the concentration camps. Howard is tremendous at showing a society on the verge of tremendous change – mostly of course from the viewpoint of the privileged, but you write about what you know. And again there is an unlooked-for twist at the end which has my appetite whetted for the fourth volume.
Easy Bechdel pass – in the first chapter Polly and Clary talk about the afterlife and Polly’s dead mother.
I also listened to the middle part of the excellent BBC radio adaptation, which went out as a series of fifteen-minute episodes in 2013 (ten for each of the five books). The BBC moved around some of the internal narrative – the lesbian subplot is much earlier, and the twist at the end signalled much more in advance – but it’s faithful to the spirit of the original. Everyone is good but I was particularly impressed with Alix Wilton Regan, playing Louise, the character closest to Elizabeth Jane Howard herself. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Oja Oyingbo: Centering the Fringes”, by Ayọ̀délé Ọlọ́fintúádé)
My grandfather was the best of them, a wonderful storyteller who wove tales from Ifa with the contemporary. Not only was he a storyteller, he read widely and had a library full of rare books and literature from the Far East. It was in his library that I read my first works of speculative fiction in Yoruba. They were a series of textbooks titled Aláwìíyé (1-6), written by J.F. Odunjo, and the novels of D.O. Fágúnwà, which he made me read aloud because he was visually impaired. It wasn’t until I turned thirteen and gained access to my brother’s library of erotica that I encountered speculative fiction from the Global North.
Back at the start of this month, I foolishly thought that I might be able to get through all of the BSFA finalists for Best Novel and Best Non-Fiction (Long) before voting closes on Saturday. Well, I forgot just how much time the Hugos absorb at close of nominations – and this year was special for several reasons – so I didn’t get very far down either list. However I had a strong start with this collection of essays about SF seen from the perspective of the formerly colonised.
The 21 essays here are all very short, but I learned a lot from them. About half of them are about Nigeria, which is fair enough considering its regional and linguistic dominance. But the standout for me was “Writing Outside the Frame: A Homeland Called Palestine”, by Ibtisam Azem, which briefly but very eloquently puts the case for a society under threat of literal erasure. Much to think about. You can get it here.
Once upon a time, your constituency was just the seat whose name you bore when you spoke in the Chamber. MPs could get away with barely visiting the seat they represented in Westminster. Duncan Sandys, MP for Streatham and Norwood on and off between 1935 and 1974, boasted of his annual trips over the river to visit it. Winston Churchill rarely visited his constituencies either.
An interesting and gloomy reflection on the deficiencies of the British political system by a close observer.
I knew a fair amount of this, having hung around with politicians for most of my career, but there were some things I had not really thought of before – the sheer economic cost of running for parliament, putting your life on hold for a desperate contest that you may not win, and the toll that serving as an MP puts on your family life and mental and physical health, are really extreme. The path to Westnminster is a grim and terrible winnowing process which rules out many people who are not young-to-middle-aged men with a particular set of personality neuroses.
The interlinkage of executive and legislature then works to actively discourage good policy-making. Opposition MPs have no power at all, obviously; but most government MPs are struggling to get on the greasy pole of preferment, and therefore have no incentive to criticise, even constructively. There are a few exceptions – well known mavericks, and the chairs of Select Committees – but essentially, to make your mark in the House of Commons you need to abandon your political ambitions.
Hardman has some modest thoughts on how to improve things. She (rightly) discounts electoral reform, which was lost for at least a generation by the botched 2011 referendum. But reduction of the government payroll, and enhancement of the scrutiny powers of the Commons, could both serve to rebalance the system in a healthier way. She also discounts the complete division of the legislature and the executive, pointing at the deficiencies of the U.S. system of government; but the American way is not the only way, and Belgium, for instance, makes ministers leave parliament while remaining accountable to it.
None of this is going to happen, of course. The surgery that is needed requires either a fresh mandate from an energised reforming new government, or a carefully developed cross-party consensus that Something Must Be Done. The incoming Labour government will have many other fish to fry than constitutional tinkering; and MPs and peers at present can’t even agree on the basics of how to fix the crumbling physical infrastructure of the Palace of Westminster, let alone how to improve the way it makes laws. But if you want to get better informed, you can get this book here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next on that pile is The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century, by Robert D. Kaplan. I should add that although I bought the 2016 edition in 2018, my Kindle edition automagically updated with the author’s comments on the May and Johnson administrations, which gave her much extra material to illustrate her arguments.
Lisa: “It’s just my life… a story of how I changed. And… the hardest thing is to start. Where do I even begin?”
First in a series of volumes about the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, and Alison’s friend Alan who builds her equipment. Not especially explicit, but very sexy. You can get it here.
Crouched on the other side of the bars, and still holding my hands, Nicholas Sabine gave a wry grin. ‘I know it’s not usual, Lucy, but there’s no law against it.’
I got this last autumn under the incorrect impression that it was set in Chengdu; in fact only the opening and the climax are set in China, and it’s near the fictional town of Chengfu, not the real city of Chengdu. (There is also a real Chengfu in Anhui Province, but it doesn’t fit the meagre description given.) So I put it aside, yet it bubbled to the top of my reading pile anyway. Destiny, or something.
It’s a romantic adventure story about young Lucy, abandoned in an orphanage in China, who finds herself sucked into a bizarre English feud between two neighbouring families over lost Chinese treasure. There are some vey effective fish-out-of-water moments for Lucy when she first arrives in England. The plot twists are pretty absurd, as hidden relatives turn up everywhere and Lucy returns to China to skip through the Boxer Rebellion, and yet I kept on being sucked back into it to find out what would happen next. I’m sure that the Chinese details are as wobbly as I know the English historical details are; but I admit that I was entertained anyway. You can get it here.
The author, “Madeleine Brent”, is a pseudonym for Peter O’Donnell, best known as the author of the Modesty Blaise series. I don’t think I have ever read any of them, but I might give them a try now.
Passes the Bechdel test easily in the first chapter, where Lucy is looking after the girls in the orphanage.
At the turn of the year this was my top unread non-genre book. Since then it has been way overtaken by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
It is undeniable that it became convulsed with the most violent emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared. It began an absolutely unprecedented Wabble—unprecedented so far as Hoopdriver’s experience went. It “showed off”—the most decadent sinuosity. It left a track like one of Beardsley’s feathers. He suddenly realised, too, that his cap was loose on his head and his breath a mere remnant.
This is one of H.G. Wells’ earliest novels, published in 1896 between The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and I think his first non-genre novel. I thought it was a little gem. The protagonist, Mr Hoopdriver, working unhappily in a draper’s shop, goes on a cycling holiday across southern England, and finds himself acting as saviour to a teenage girl who has run away from home with a much older man. Often I find Wells’ portrayal of the lower middles classes annoying and patronising, but here I felt there was enough characterisation in the portrayal of Hoopdriver and self-deprecation in Wells’ own tone that the brief story hung together perfectly well. It’s not quite up to the level of Love and Mr Lewisham, the next non-genre novel that Wells wrote, but I enjoyed it all the same. You can get it here.
It would make a lovely short film or teleplay, and I’m surprised to find that it has been adapted for the screen only once, a silent film made in 1922.
Bechdel fail. It’s told from the point of view of Mr Hoopdriver, and when the girl finally is reconciled with her stepmother, there are always men present or being talked about.
Next on my Wells list is another early one, The Wonderful Visit.
I remember watching The Sun Makers aged ten when it was first shown in late 1977. It’s not the high point of Season 15 (that would be Horror of Fang Rock) but it’s not the low point either (that would be Underworld). Even at ten, however, I could feel that the show was trying not to lose its way; I did not know of course that new producer Graham Williams was fumbling to set his mark on the show, or that Robert Holmes stepped down as script editor halfway through the story.
I remembered The Sunmakers from its first broadcast in 1977, but had forgotten quite how good it is. In total contrast to The Seeds of Doom, here we have the Doctor fomenting a popular uprising against an oppressive regime. There are numerous classic sf tropes – the rag-tag rebels living in the bowels of the city, the drugs in the air supply – but also a couple of Robert Holmes touches, such as the repeated digs at the British tax system. The bad guys – Gatherer Hade and the Collector – are gratifyingly over the top, but at the same time the implied violence is pretty alarming – the Doctor almost gets his brains burnt out, Leela is almost executed by public steaming, both are threatened with ugly death by the suspicious rebels, and these seem like serious threats. Indeed I seem to remember reading somewhere that at one point there was a plan for Leela to be killed off in this story, which would certainly have been a more in-character departure than what actually happened (but would have deprived us of her in the much later Gallifrey audios). It is also, and this I think is very unusual, a good story for K9: he starts and ends by beating the Doctor at chess, and takes the initiative at several crucial points during proceedings. It seems almost churlish after all that to point out that the actual setting – humanity has been forcibly displaced to Pluto as a result of fiendish capitalist exploitation – is pretty implausible even for Who, and does great violence to any attempts to construct a future history of the Whoniverse.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
I have a feeling that last time I watched The Sun Makers, for some reason it was immediately after watching Underworld so it looked rather good in comparison. However, in sequence after the brilliance of Season 14 and the more modest successes of Horror of Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl, it is pretty awful. I think I can establish several specific reasons for the awfulness, one of which was not really anyone’s fault, but the remainder of which could have been corrected.
The unchangeable factor is that the weather for the location filming was dull, so the story gets off to a tremendously dull start; it’s difficult to make the roof of a cigarette factory in Bristol look much like the top of a kilometer-high apartment block on Pluto, but it helps if the weather cooperates. I wonder if there’s also a bit of an unconscious assumption on my part that cuddly blurry film should represent contemporary Earth settings, and sharp-edged videotape the future; so the setting looks even more like Bristol than Pluto.
But the other factors were simply mistakes made by Holmes in the script and not sufficiently rounded off in the editing process. The story is simply very nasty. The rebels are really very unpleasant people, threatening to kill him and Leela; we don’t really see why the Doctor should choose to help such unlikeable (and otherwise unmemorable) individuals. The Company of course are even worse, which is OK since they are the baddies, but the attempted steaming of Leela is a really horrific prospect, much worse actually than any of the supposedly extreme violence of the previous season.
It does have its good points. The interplay between Gatherer Hade and the Collector is great fun (though again Holmes is usually smarter than to give all the good dialogue to the villains) and K9 gets to be very useful in his first proper story after joining the Tardis. Though even then, the framing narrative of the chess match in the console room doesn’t quite gel. I don’t think I’ll watch this one again, unless the DVD commentary is particularly good.
This time around, I felt myself falling between the two poles: yes, cracking satire by Holmes and good performances from the bad guys; but the rebels are really unpleasant and the violence very squicky.
It also struck me that the future of humanity on Pluto is rather white. There is one exception, an uncredited Work Unit who appears on the roof in episode 4:
Who was she? The surviving paperwork, supplied to me by Paul Scoones, has four extras with women’s names booked for the filming in Bristol on 19 June 1977, six months before the episode was shown.
The four names are Jennie Weston, Elizabeth Havelock, Angela Towner and Marion Venn. Surprisingly, I think I have tracked down three of them.
I find a Jennie Weston who in 2010 was reported to be a Drama and English teacher, who had worked for Radio Bristol in educational broadcasting; the picture supplied doesn’t look like the person I am interested in.
An Elizabeth Havelock does have a credited page on IMDB, including four speaking TV roles from 1977-79, but was born in 1926 so clearly too old (if it’s the same Elizabeth Havelock); and again there’s a photo which is clearly a different person.
A Marion Venn was swimming coach at Dean Close School in Cheltenham from 1977 (the year of filming) to 2000; I’ve found recent photos of her and she’s definitely not the person I am looking for.
So I think my mystery actor, possibly the only actor of colour in the whole of Season 15 of Doctor Who, is Angela Towner (The Complete History thinks it’s “Angela Tower”, but Paul Scoones was able to find legible paperwork in which the name is clear). This could well have been her only professional acting role, asked to stand around with a crowd on top of a factory in Bristol on an overcast and not very warm Thursday, before going on to a life doing something completely different. It’s entirely possible that her surname subsequently changed, which would make it much more difficult to track down her later performances if any.
Oh yeah, I reread the novelisation by Terrance Dicks as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
However, K9’s brand of logic, based on his recollection of past events, and an extrapolation of future probabilities, told him that the Doctor would land in trouble within a very short time of leaving the TARDIS. He would need K9’s remarkable powers to rescue him from the dangers into which his rashness had led him. It was therefore logical that K9 should exercise these powers as soon as possible.
Doctor Who and the Sunmakers is probably the best of these nine books [the Leela novelisations]; Dicks clearly appreciated Robert Holmes’ script and seems to have really got into the spirit of it. There is an interesting scene in the book but not in the TV series where Leela encounters some elderly workers waiting for euthanasia. Various other minor details are tweaked and basically improved in Dicks’ telling of the story.
Watching the series with the production subtitles switched on, I could see that Dicks was working from Holmes’ script as originally envisaged, and making the most of it.
Anyway. After my very grumpy post about the Black Archive on Kill the Moon, I’m very glad to say that Lewis Baston’s monograph on The Sun Makers was much more to my liking.
The first chapter, “‘An Unprofitable Operation, Hade’: The Sun Makers in context”, looks at the social and economic difficulties of the UK in general and of Robert Holmes in particular at the time the story was made.
The second chapter, “‘The Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe'”, convincingly analyses the extent to which The Sun Makers draws not from contemporary Britain but from the history of the East India Company.
The third chapter, “‘Sacrifices to Tribal Gods'”, announces up front that it examines Doctor Who’s treatment of economics in general, but it also veers into the steaming subplot and death as entertainment, re-done (not as well) in Vengeance on Varos a few years later, and the influence of the Aztecs (much less in the finished programme than was planned by Holmes). Its second paragraph is:
The Sun Makers came relatively early in Doctor Who’s late 1970s engagement with economics. Before then, the principal economic concern was energy, hence baleful consequences in Fury from the Deep (1968), Inferno (1970) and The Claws of Axos (1971) and the background to Terror of the Zygons (1975). The Doctor consistently takes a dim view of humanity’s fossil fuel dependence.
The fourth chapter, “Empire of the Iron Sun”, looks at imperialism as protrayed in science fiction, especially Doctor Who, and also considers the influence of The Iron Sun by Adrian Berry (later Lord Camrose), and the anti-Semitism in the portrayal of the Collector.
The fifth chapter, “‘The People Should Rise Up and Slaughter Their Oppressors'”, looks at the frankly revolutionary and Marxist agenda of the story. It doesn’t reflect, as I did, on how remarkable it is that this story should be written by a former policeman who fought in Burma in the second world war and whose other work is usually entertaining but not nearly as subversive.
The sixth chapter, “‘Praise the Company'”, moves on from 1977, reviews what has happened to us politically and economically since then, and comes to the gloomy conclusion that to an extent we all live in the Collector’s world now.
A brief conclusion ends with a pithy summing-up:
The Sun Makers, therefore, is a revolutionary, experimental tract that shows the signs of its origins as a piece of writing by Robert Holmes which was turned into television by the BBC in the late 1970s. It deals with big ideas, and it is full of allusions and tangents. It also fulfilled its role as entertaining Saturday evening television for a family audience as the nights drew in before Christmas 1977. And, perhaps above all, it is very funny.
I’d have liked a bit more on the parts of the story I didn’t like as much – the gratuitous violence and the poor production values – but this is a case where the Black Archive has achieved redemption for me: I think I like The Sun Makers a bit more, now that I have read this analysis of it. You can get it here.
Pershing picked a blood-fattened leech from the back of his hand. His sleeve had torn and thorns had pulled across his forearm until it looked as if it had been whipped; his legs ached from the effort not to loose his footing and all the water in his body was gushing from his open pores. The motion of his shirt had burst a boil between his shoulder blades.
This is the second of a near-future trilogy co-written by a future Foreign Secretary and one of the founders of Private Eye in the late 1960s, of which the third is Scotch on the Rocks. The scenario is simple: in the mid-1970s, China demands the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control twenty years early, and activates agents deep within the British establishment in order to stay on top of the UK’s nuclear bluff. There is a tremendously tense chase through the corridors of power and less salubrious parts of England, as vital communications in the days before mobile phones require in-person meetings. It’s not all that plausible but it’s well drawn.
I first read it in the 1990s, when Douglas Hurd was still in government and Hong Kong still under British rule, and was struck then by the hopelessness with which the British position is portrayed: the Hong Kong garrison might hold out for 48 hours against a Chinese attack if very lucky; popular sentiment in Hong Kong would certainly shift against the British immediately if withdrawal seemed a serious prospect; the nuclear submarine commander in the Pacific knows that he and his vessel will be destroyed in retaliation if they fire on China. The British establishment is generally weak and in disarray.
This time round, having been in China myself only five months ago, I was struck by the stereotyping of the Chinese leadership. Hurd (who turned 94 on 4 March) was posted to China early in his diplomatic career, soon after the Communist take-over at a time when the foreign ministry (as my friend Peter Martin has written) was probably at its least efficient. In real life, China was consumed with the Cultural Revolution in the period between this book being written and the time it is set. I would add though that the portrayal of Hong Kong is warm and surely based on personal knowledge.
An interesting speculation on a historical might-have-been. You can get it here.
Scrapes a Bechdel pass on page 90 when two (named) Chinese women discuss ways of getting into Hong Kong.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Doom 94, by Janis Jonevs.
Second paragraph of third story (“Eachta an Fhir Ólta: CEOL!,” translated by Jack Fennell as “The Tale of the Drunkard: MUSIC!”; sadly the original Irish-language text is not available):
“What is the meaning of this? What’s wrong with you!” I said. “It’d be more in your line to be in bed, instead of staggering around drunk all over the city like this. You’d be better off if you turned your back on the drink, and your face to the fireplace—an intelligent, mild-mannered man such as yourself—and took up another hobby, like fretwork, or listening to the gramophone. . . .”
I got this in preparation for the Flann O’Brien panel at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon, but I confess that I only skimmed it then. It’s a short collection of short pieces by the great man. The most interesting stuff is at the beginning, where he pokes fun at Irish language enthusiasts in a couple of pieces originally written in Irish (and heavily footnoted to explain the humour). Most of the middle section is material being tried out for deployment elsewhere (the story about the young man who was born for Ireland gets used twice).
At the end, Jack Fennell presents a story which he is certain is by a 21-year-old Flann O’Brien, and published in 1932 in, of all places, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories – “Naval Control”, as by “John Shamus O’Donnell”. He has argued the case further in a recent Journey Planet, and I for one am convinced. How glorious, that Gernsback may have published the future author of The Third Policeman!
To be honest, I think this is really a book for Flann O’Brien completists, but there are a lot of us about, and it comes with a good foreword and scholarly apparatus. I don’t think any of the stories even clears the first step of the Bechdel test. But you can get it here.
This was my top book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.
I’m going to be blunt: Kill the Moon is not just my least favourite Peter Capaldi episode, it’s my least favourite episode of New Who since 2004. In case you have forgotten, the central plot point is that the Moon is not actually a ball of rock but a gigantic dragon’s egg, which hatches, and then the dragon flies off, first laying a new egg that has exactly the same size and appearance as the former Moon. This utter violation of basic astronomy threw me out of the story when I first watched it and threw me out again when I rewatched it for this post.
On top of that, the Doctor abandons Clara on the surface of the Moon to decide whether or not to blow it all up with nukes, in a move that is frankly both cruel and cowardly, and therefore goes against the fundamentals of the character. There are people out there who love this episode, but I find it an embarrassment close to Timelash levels. (Not quite Twin Dilemma levels, though, nothing can ever be that bad again.)
Darren Mooney has a different view, and in his Black Archive earnestly looks for the virtues of the story and claims to find them.
The first chapter, “‘Now We Can Do Something Interesting’: Kill the Moon as Self-Aware Television” argues that the story’s initial reception was very positive from critics (well, it wasn’t from me!) and that it is consciously re-shaping the show’s narrative as part of a master plan for the whole eighth series.
The second chapter, “The Moon’s an Egg’: Kill the Moon and the Tension between Science Fiction and Fantasy in Doctor Who”, argues that expectations of scientific rigour are misplaced as Doctor Who has never been a hard sf show, and references the Sad Puppies who emerged the following year as champions of hard sf. I think my record on the Puppies is reasonably clear, and I don’t think you have to be a raving traditionalist to find Kill the Moon‘s treatment of science offensively stupid..
The third chapter, “‘Second-hand Space Shuttle, Third-hand Astronauts’: The Curdling and Reignition of 60s Utopianism” looks at the cultural significance and interpretation of the historical Moon landings, especially in the Troughton era. Its second paragraph is:
Implicit in this observation is the idea that any expansion of humanity beyond the surface of the Earth will most likely treat the Moon as a stepping-stone. For much of its history, humanity was fascinated by the prospect of visiting the Moon. Stories about imagined lunar expeditions became tremendously popular during the 17th century, prompted by the research and theories of Galileo Galilei1. This fantasy of Moon exploration is inexorably tied into the history of SF as a genre. Released in 1902, Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is frequently identified as the first SF film2. 1 Seed, David, ‘Moon on the Mind: Two Millennia of Lunar Literature’, Nature, 9 July 2019. 2 See, for example, Luokkala, Barry B, Exploring Science Through Science Fiction, p2.
The fourth chapter, “‘We Have to Decide Together’: Scepticism of Simple Majoritarianism in the Work of Peter Harness”, points out that all three of Harness’s Who stories undermine the concept of a democratic vote, and links this to other New Who themes.
The fifth chapter, “‘…First Woman on the Moon’: Gender in Kill the Moon“, briefly looks at the story’s reference to abortion (in my view a clumsily handled and poorly executed minor theme) and then at the way in which the story subverts the gender roles of Doctor and Clara (which I don’t think it really does).
The sixth and final chapter, “‘That’s What We Call a New Moon’: Kill the Moon as an Argument for Optimism”, cheers the themes of death and rebirth in the story, which as noted above I find crass and unconvincing.
I am sure that Darren Mooney is a perfectly reasonable person, and reading the book it’s clear that we are coming from similar directions in a lot of ways. I opened his book wondering if he could persuade me out of my view that this is the worst Doctor Who story of the last forty years; and he did not. But you can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“Ivory Tower” by Amanda Kear):
He was idly watching the drones – several in the colours of local TV channels – gathering pictures of the traffic, when his phone morphed to the colour and ring-tone which indicated an urgent work-related call.
I got this because one of the six short stories in it was shortlisted for the BSFA Award in 2018, and back in those blessed days one could reasonably hope to read all of the BSFA nominees before voting. It didn’t win, but the anthology has been sitting on my electronic bookshelf for the last six years and I have finally read it.
It turns out that these are outputs from a writing workshop held at a small UK convention in 2015, so they’re a little raw. The best is not the BSFA-nominated “Angular Size”, by Geoff Nelder (though it is the only one that passes the Bechdel test), but “Ivory Tower” by Amanda Kear, telling a story of future ivory smuggling in Kenya. None of them is actively bad, though, and it didn’t cost me much. You can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2018, and the sf book that had lasted longest unread on my shelves. Next on those lists respectively are Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu, and De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhaut.
That same year, Helen and Richard [David Whitaker’s parents] moved into a flat in Tulse Hill, south London, on a much more modest scale than they’d been living in Knebworth. Robert [David Whitaker’s brother] said that shortly after this, still in 1930, ‘Richard’s leg caused a great deal of trouble and he went back to Roehampton where the limb was amputated/’ That use of ‘back’ suggests an ongoing problem with repeated visits to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, south-west London. Established in 1915, this ‘quickly became known as one of the world’s leading limb-fitting and amputee rehabilitation centres’. Richard was likely in serious pain and unable to walk let alone work. Physical symptoms may also have been accompanied by mental distress, still barely understood by doctors – let alone wider society. Perhaps this was the cause of Richard and Helen’s earlier separation.
We got a lot fewer books last year to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who than we did for the fiftieth in 2013. But this really makes up for it. David Whitaker was one of the crucial figures in early Doctor Who – script editor at the very beginning of the show, author of the first Doctor Who books, writer of eight Old Who stories; but dead at 51 in 1980, and so missing the extra lease of life given to many former Who creators by the explosion in fan activity later that decade.
Simon Guerrier has done a great job of telling the story of those 51 years in 413 pages. He complains near the beginning that most previous published accounts supposedly (and even actually) by Whitaker about his own life have turned out on investigation to be substantially untrue; details are wrong, achievements exaggerated, essentially the fiction-writer’s skill deployed to his own autobiography.
But Guerrier has mined the archives, talked to relatives (though again, a lot of them died young too), and dug through the assembled Who lore of the past six decades to paint a sober and intriguing picture of a man who knew he wanted to write but didn’t quite know how to do that for a living. He also brings in some vivid social research about Whitaker’s family background and his first marriage, and looks at how the BBC in the 1960s struggled to set up a career structure that adequately rewarded creativity. (I suspect it hasn’t quite got there even today.)
The documentary and memory trail goes a bit thin at the moment when Whitaker and his first wife went to Australia, and he came back a couple of years later with his second wife. It’s also a bit scanty at the very end, when his health broke down (probably from too much smoking) and he was unable to get work. But this is understandable, and doesn’t detract from the attractiveness of the book.
Myself, I was struck on reading it by how little people actually recall about Whitaker. Accounts of meetings and conversations where we know he must have been present just don’t mention him, and the drama doc An Adventure in Space and Time wrote him out of history completely. It reminded me of the protagonist of Bob Shaw’s A Wreath of Stars, who considered himself the human equivalent of a neutrino, a particle able to travel through the Earth without disturbing any other particle. When he went fully freelance at what turned out to be the end of his life, I got the sense that he couldn’t get work because very few people remembered who he was. Awfully sad.
Anyway, this is strongly recommended just as a good read about a creator who had a big success in his mid-thirties and was never quite able to find the magic ingredients again. You can get it here if you are lucky – the first two print runs appear to have sold out.
Water evaporates, the heat pushing it higher and higher until suddenly it is too high, condensing around particles of soot and ash billowed into the heavens by the blaze.
Occasionally I hit a book by a favourite author that doesn’t quite work for me, and I’m afraid this is one of those times. I’m generally a big fan of North’s writing, and I’m also a big fan of A Canticle for Leibowitz, to which this is in part a response. It’s the story of a future scholar dedicated to retrieving past knowledge in a post-apocalypse society, where rival power structures have mutually entangled espionage networks and cosmic principles are embodied.
I didn’t especially like any of the characters, but what put me off more was that although the story is mainly set in the cities and countryside of a devastated Central Europe, there is very little sense of place; the cities are interchangeable and everyone seems to speak the same language. This detachment from geography threw me right out of the narrative. Most people seem to like it much more than me. You can get it here.
A Bechdel fail, I think; mostly first-person narrative and a male protagonist. But I may have missed an exception.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant, which I picked up at Novacon (where I also acquired COVID).
Marjorie rose with a most winning smile to greet—Mrs. Brown!
I dug this 1892 book out of the internets after getting the impression from Simon Guerrier’s biography of David Whitaker that it was the inspiration for the 1969-1971 BBC series Take Three Girls. In fact I was completely wrong, the book that I am writing up here is set in Chicago, while the TV show, set in London, was really inspired by another book of the same title by Ethel F. Heddle, also set in London and published three years after the Chicago one, in 1896. But I have my own interests in fin-de-siecle America and in modern sculpture, so I don’t regret reading this one.
It’s the story of three young women architects involved with preparing the World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893 – and specifically with preparing the Woman’s Building, a really interesting project designed, managed and implemented entirely by women, showcasing women’s achievements in the arts in a way that seems strangely twenty-first century, at a time when only two states in the USA allowed women to vote. (New Zealand and Colorado both extended the vote to women in 1893.)
The book is probably mostly by Laura Hayes, who as well as being a trainee architect was the secretary of Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite who was the prime mover behind the initiative to have a Woman’s Building in the first place (at least her name is given as the copyright holder). Enid Yandell, who gets top billing on the title page, became a very well-known sculptor whose career started with the Chicago Exposition. The third credited author, Jean Loughborough, was another architect who designed the Arkansas building for the Fair.
The book is a brief and warm account of apartment life for young professional women in a city which was just getting used to that concept. It is beautifully illustrated – eight illustrators are credited and I suspect that the authors contributed some pictures as well; there’s something to look at on every page. What got me was the tremendous sense of optimism; America and the world as a whole were opening up, and the three young women are convinced that the future will be better than the past. You can get it for free off the internet here and here.
(And I think every one of the short chapters passes the Bechdel test.)
Second paragraph of third story (“No Stronger Than a Flower”):
Nesta had always been given to believe that, whatever they might say to one, it was a woman’s appearance that men really cared about; and indeed she thought that she well understood their point of view. So understanding had she been in fact, that she had long regarded herself as truly resigned to the wintry consequences in her own case. She would not, therefore, ever have accepted Curtis’s proposal of marriage, had she not greatly, though as yet briefly, loved him. She had a temperamental distaste for extreme measures.
This is a collection of eight spooky stories, with a foreword and afterword expanding on Aickman’s life and career. He has a particular gift for atmosphere, of making places that were slightly odd in the first place become more sinister and threatening. Two of the eight stories, to my surprise, are actually set in Belgium, one in the catehdral in Gent and the other in Brussels in the Wiertz Museum and surroundings (now the EU Quarter). I must go to the Wiertz Museum some time, it’s less than ten minutes’ walk from my office.
Peter McClean, to whom I am very grateful, sent me this book ages ago, with a strong recommendation which I can now endorse. I admit I had not heard of Aickman previously, but his modest output is clearly of very high quality. You can get this collection here.
I had to look quite thoroughly for a story that passes the Bechdel test, but Clarissa, the protagonist of “Bind Your Hair”, has a couple of conversations with the mysterious Mrs Pagani and also with a spooky little girl (who is however not named).
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Why We Get the Wrong Poltiicians, by Isabel Hardman.
It takes a moment or two to appreciate how bad – and yet how good – British food used to be.
Autobiography of the UK journalist and quizmaster, with whom I had two close encounters in 1994 as captain of the unsuccessful Queen’s University of Belfast quiz team:
Yes, that is future Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng on the other team, and future minister and MP Stephen Farry on my team.
It’s an entertaining book, as you would expect from his public persona. Paxman was from gently decaying middle-class roots, but he got to Cambridge and, equipped with his M.A. Cantab, became the face of both Newsnight and University Challenge. He cut his journalistic teeth in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s, and paints a striking picture of the awfulness of official government policy, and the BBC’s difficulties in reporting on the situation properly – there were two striking incidents where he himself was centrally involved in clashes between the broadcaster and the government, but it doesn’t seem to have done his career much harm in the end.
Paxman doesn’t have a lot of self-doubt; this gives us an entertaining take on war reporting, writing books that nobody ever buys or reads, politicians in general and running a quiz show, but the deep reflection is more on the cogs and gears of politics, and why it is important to hold the ruling class to account, than on any deeper sense of society or indeed personal purpose. I enjoyed it a lot but slightly struggle to remember particular incidents, now that I’m writing it up a couple of weeks later. You can get it here.
It’s a man’s autobiography, so if the Bechdel Test were applicable to non-fiction it would not pass.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my pile. Next up there is Bletchley Park Brainteasers, by Sinclair McKay.
Commercial aeroplanes leaving and landing at the City Airport continue to pass overhead. They’re unaware of Sammy and the shape he’s spelling out as he walks. He’s too small to be seen from the sky. He’s a grain of sand, a dot, a pin, a misplaced punctuation mark. Even God would have to squint. However, if he could be seen from such a height, if, for example, you were peering through binoculars or some other magnifying lens, your eye would be drawn to him, dragging his heels from one street to the next, kicking an empty Coke bottle as he goes. You would know that Sammy did not belong on these streets, drifting.
East Belfast, marching season, the present day (2019); two fathers concerned about their children. Ex-Loyalist Sammy suspects that his son is the masked social media influencer behind a wave of arson attacks. Trouble GP Jonathan’s daughter was begotten of a Siren who came and stayed in his bath and then disappeared back into the waves.
Most of the novel is gritty reality, so that you can almost smell the tarmac bubbling in the summer sunlight; but the parts with Jonathan and his daughter edge into magical realism with a particular Belfast idiom, where parents of strangely gifted children navigate both intrusive supernatural forces and the banal bureaucracy of health care and social security.
Often this sort of trope can feel bolted onto a conventional narrative, but Carson makes you feel that Belfast (East Belfast, very specifically) is the sort of traumatised place where reality starts to erode at the edges. It’s well-balanced, in the sense that a cyclist going at top speed over uneven terrain remains well balanced. Anyone expecting a standard urban grim novel will be surprised. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail. The book is either first-person from Jonathans point of view, or tight-third from Sammy’s, and they talk to very few women who in turn don’t talk much to each other, and if they do it’s about Jonathan or Sammy.
The second section of Book 3 of The Odyssey, as generally agreed, has the goddess Athena addressing Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. Here it is in the original, in Emily Wilson’s new-ish translation, in the T.E. Lawrence prose which I read in 2009, and in the classic first English translation by George Chapman (he of Flann O’Brien’s “Keats and Chapman” stories).
(Emily Wilson, 2018) “Do not be shy, Telemachus. You sailed over the sea to ask about your father, where the earth hides him, what his fate might be. So hurry now to Nestor, lord of horses. Learn what advice he has in mind for you. Supplicate him yourself, and he will tell you the truth; he is not one to tell a lie.”
(T.E. Lawrence, 1932 – prose) ‘Telemachus, here is no room for false modesty: no room at all. Have you not come oversea in quest of your father, expressly to learn where the earth is hiding him or what doom he has drawn upon himself? So you must go up straight, now, to this horse-proud Nestor, and make him yield to you the inmost secrets of his heart. Implore him, yourself, to speak perfect truth: and then he will not deceive us: for his mind is compact with wisdom.’
(George Chapman, 1616) “Now No more befits thee the least bashful brow; T’ embolden which this act is put on thee, To seek thy father both at shore and sea, And learn in what clime he abides so close, Or in the pow’r of what Fate doth repose. Come then, go right to Nestor; let us see, If in his bosom any counsel be, That may inform us. Pray him not to trace The common courtship, and to speak in grace Of the demander, but to tell the truth; Which will delight him, and commend thy youth For such prevention; for he loves no lies, Nor will report them, being truly wise.”
I got myself this as a late Christmas present, having read positive reviews and also having slogged through a couple of other translations. I was familiar with the high points of The Odyssey, which is fairly approachable, if oddly structured. But this is definitely worth getting. I really appreciated Wilson’s paring down of the language to take only as much space as the original words – most other English translators seem to have been rather verbose (cf Lawrence and Chapman above, three centuries apart).
As you would expect, given where Wilson is coming from, she boosts the voices of the women characters more than other translators do – and let’s bear in mind that Odysseus has love affairs with Calypso and Circe, and less explicitly with Nausicaa, while poor old Penelope has to stay faithful to him despite his years of absence. I also felt I got a much better sense of Telemachus here.
The book comes with an 80-page introduction and another 12 pages of preliminary notes, and it’s really worth it – a very good survey of both the society which the poem depicts, and the efforts that others have made to interpret the text for later times and places. And crucially the language is crystal clear. I have been told that this is now the standard translation used to teach The Odyssey, and I can see why. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail at the third step. There are plenty of named women, and they sometimes even talk to each other, but it’s always about a man (or men).
This was my top book acquired last year. Next on that pile is The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 11) A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier The Sunmakers, by Lewis Baston Bletchley Park Brainteasers, by Sinclair McKay
Non-genre 5 (YTD 9) Three Girls in a Flat, by Enid Yandell and Laura Hayes Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond The Wheels of Chance, by H.G. Wells Moonraker’s Bride, by Madeleine Brent
Poetry 1 The Odyssey, by Homer, tr Emily Wilson
SF 6 (YTD 11) The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach The Fire Starters, by Jan Carson Lizard Radio, by Pat Schmatz The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2) Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 3 (YTD 5) Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé After Life, by Al Ewing et al Sunstone, vol. 1, by Stjepan Sejić
4,900 pages (YTD 10,500) 7/20 (YTD 16/41) by non-male writers (Yandell/Hayes, Wilson, Stronach, Carson, Schmatz, North, Clarke; “Madeleine Brent” is a pseudonym for Peter O’Donnell) 0/20 (YTD 3/41) by a non-white writer (must do better) 3/20 rereads (The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir)
309 books currently tagged unread, up 4 from last month, down 76 from 28 Feb 2023
Reading now Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, by Isabel Hartman
Coming soon (perhaps) Serve You, by Al Ewing et al Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines Doctor Who: Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt Paradise Towers, by John Toon Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks Kinda, by Frank Collins De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhaut Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu DOOM 94, by Janis Jonevs Ara Guler’s Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert Kaplan Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
These were the joint winners of what was then the Tiptree Award in 2015, a novella and a YA novel.
Second paragraph of third section of “The New Mother”:
All of these names are attempts to capture precisely how it is that babies are being made now in a way they have never been made before. Recall the old, familiar recipe: two cells, a sperm from a man and an egg from a woman, fuse into a single cell which grows into a baby. The sperm and the egg can fuse this way because they are, at a genetic level, different from all the other cells in the body. Every cell contains our complete genetic code, split up into 23 chromosomes. Most cells have two copies of each chromosome (one from mom, the other from dad) for a total of 46. This property of having two copies of every chromosome is called “diploidy.” Almost every cell in the human body is diploid. The lone exception are the gametes, the sperm and the egg. Gametes are “haploid”–they only have one copy of each chromosome. Being haploid is what allows two gametes to fuse into a single diploid cell with a new mix of chromosomes that will develop into a genetically distinct person. This is sexual reproduction, the way human beings have made more human beings from the beginning of the species until sometime in the last six years.
A near-future story in which parthenogenesis becomes possible. I read it when preparing Hugo nominations in 2016 and really liked it, and nominated it. It made the long list in the Best Novella category that year, in 12th place, but would have needed almost three times as many votes as it actually got to qualify.
Rereading it again eight years later, it remains a classic for me – the clash between state-imposed ideological control of fertility, and the demands of humanity and of human nature, are well delineated without thumping the reader over the head with the point. The fact that the story is set in near-contemporary Texas, where some of the worst bits of this dynamic have been playing out in real time since 2016, makes it even more effective now. You can read it here.
Easy Bechdel pass: the protagonist is in a lesbian relationship and she and her partner talk about everything, sometimes but rarely including men.
Lizard Radio is a YA novel by Pat Schmatz, an author I was otherwise unfamiliar with, and jointly won the Tiptree Award with “The New Mother”. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
My fingertips hit the reassuring shape.
There are a lot of dystopian YA novels around, and frankly I’m beginning to find them a bit formulaic, but this is a different matter with a sparkling and nervous energy about it. Kivali, the genderqueer protagonist, is sent to a re-education camp in a dystopian near future, and must negotiate quasi-parental relationships, friends and potential lovers, and the ever-present threat of “vaping”, which in this case means physically spontaneously evaporating, rather than any recreational vapour consumption. The protagonist’s vocabulary is just abit off-kilter and that keeps you as a reader on your toes. I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of this before, and well done to the Tiptree / Otherwise judges for picking it out of the field. You can get it here.
As well as these too, the Tiptree Honor List included four novels, two comic books, a TV series and four short stories. The only one of these that I remember having watched / read is “The Shape of my Name” by Nino Cipri, which I also nominated for the Hugos, though it did not even make the long list.
`Because the journey happens in stages,’ Professor Lovell explained when Robin gave up. ‘Horses don’t want to run all the way from London to Oxford, and usually neither do we. But I detest travellers’ inns, so we’re doing the single-day run; it’s about ten hours with no stops, so use that toilet before we go.’
This won the Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel last year, but infamously not the Hugo. It’s an alternative history story where Britannia rules the waves (and much of the land) through the magical use of linguistics and etymology, which has been developed in depth at an institute known as Babel in Oxford University. Our protagonist, Robin Swift, adopted from the streets of Canton (now Guangzhou) by the unpleasant Professor Lovell, is educated to become one of the instruments of British domination, alongside three close friends, a chap from India and two young women from England and Haiti.
After lengthy academic reflections on the nature of language, illuminated by footnotes (not endnotes, thank heavens, and mostly brief and succinct), it becomes apparent to Robin that violent resistance against the British Empire is the only available course of action. (This isn’t really a spoiler as it’s pretty clearly signalled in the novel’s subtitle.) His group of friends fractures and there is a grand tragic apocalyptic climax.
A couple of friends of mine told me (separately) that they really didn’t like the book. They found it too info-dumpy and thought the magical parts were ripped off from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I respectfully disagree. I’ve been fascinated by linguistics since before I was a teenager, and loved the info-dump bits. I’m a Cambridge graduate, so I really don’t mind Oxford being represented as the centre of all that is evil in the world. I found the dynamics between the protagonist, his friends and the rest of society fully convincing. And the idea that words carry power goes a lot further back than Susanna Clarke; only a month ago I was in Prague, where the legend of the Golem lurks around many of the corners. I really enjoyed it, and you can get it here.
Although there are several strong women characters, including two of the protagonist’s three close friends, I had to hunt a bit for a Bechdel pass because the story is largely told from Robin’s point of view. But I found one at least, in Chapter Six, where Letty (Robin’s fellow student from England) tries to discuss the situation of women at Babel with Professor Craft, and Professor Craft tries to deflect her.
As luck would have it, I finished reading Babel on the morning of 20 January, the day that the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo nominations statistics were released and it became clear that it had been disqualified in the Best Novel category. Despite my previous and subsequent involvement with Hugo Award administration, I have no more information than is in the public domain about why this happened. I think it’s a shame. Babel is selling very well in China (translated by Chen Yang). I would have voted for it if it had been on the Hugo ballot, and I suspect that I am not alone.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour, my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread sf book. Next on all three piles is Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler.
I got this collection of 1930s plays five years ago, in the early stages of my Oscar-watching project, because the middle one of the three was the basis of a very successful film starring Lionel Barrymore. In fact all three of these plays were successfully adapted for the screen.
The scripts are prefaced by a short piece from each of the two authors, gently poking fun at each other and giving a sense of the relationship between two Broadway creators. They certainly seem to have got on with each other better than Gilbert and Sullivan.
The first play, Once in a Lifetime, is about a vaudeville trio, down on their luck because of the invention of talking movies which sucks the audience out of theatre, who go to Hollywood and try to make it big there. The dumb guy of the three ascends to huge cinematic power, and the punchline of the play is that the bad decisions he makes turn out to be very successful.
I thought it was really funny. I don’t always find it easy to read scripts, but here I had no difficulty differentiating the characters with their different voices. I noted that George Kaufman, one of the authors, also played the frustrated playwright Laurence Vail in the first Broadway cast.
The key character is Mary Daniels, the woman in the vaudeville trio, who gets the best lines and serves as the audience viewpoint character on what is happening in Hollywood. In the original Broadway production she was played by Jean Dixon.
The opening directions for the third scene are:
(The gold room of the Hotel Stilton, in Los Angeles. Early de Mille. Gold-encrusted walls, heavy diamond-cut chandelier, gold brocade hangings and simply impossible settees and chairs. There is an air of such complete phoneyness about the room that an innocent observer, unused to the ways of Hollywood, rather expects a director suddenly to appear from behind a door and yell: “All right, boys! Take it away!” This particular room, for all its gaudiness, is little more than a passage to the room where Hollywood really congregates—so you can imagine what THAT is like. The evening’s function is approaching its height, and through the room, as the curtain rises, there pass various gorgeous couples—one woman more magnificently dressed than another, all swathed in ermine and so hung with orchids that it’s sometimes a little difficult to see the girl. The women, of course, are all stunningly beautiful. They are babbling of this and that phase of Hollywood life as they cross the room—”This new thing, dialogue”—”Why didn’t you introduce me to him—I just stood there like a fool”—”It wasn’t the right time—I’ll take you to him when they’re ready to cast the picture.” Through it all an unseen orchestra is grinding out “Sonny Boy,” and it keeps right on playing “Sonny Boy” all evening. Because it seems there was a man named Jolson. Weaving through the guests is a CIGARETTE GIRL but not just an ordinary cigarette girl. Like every other girl in Hollywood, she is beautiful enough to take your breath away. Moreover, she looks like Greta Garbo, and knows it. Hers is not a mere invitation to buy her wares: on the contrary, her “Cigars! Cigarettes!” is charged with emotion. You never can tell, of course, when a director is going to conic along. The COAT CHECK GIRL, certainly the most beautiful girl in the world, buttonholes the CIGARETTE GIRL as the crowd thins out)
This scene got cut from the movie.
The 1933 film of the play is available on Youtube at time of writing:
The two major stars here are the dumb-as-rocks George, played by Jack Oakie, and his love interest Susan Walker, played by Sidney Fox. The script clearly intends Aline MacMahon to be the main character as May (renamed from Mary) and the editing and direction of the movie end up a bit unbalanced. It’s hilariious though.
I wrote up the middle play, You Can’t Take it With You, at length in 2018 so you can read that here:
The stage version, even more than the film, concentrates on Grandpa Vanderhof as the central character. In the film he is portrayed electrifyingly by Lionel Barrymore; in the first stage production, he was played by Henry Travers, most famous as Clarence the guardian angel in It’s a Wonderful Life; he also got an Oscar nomination for the station-master in Mrs Miniver. I think he would have been a bit less vicious.
The third play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, is even more overtly a character study than the other two. A famous New York theatre critic slips on an icy patch while visiting Ohio and is immobilised in the home of his reluctant hosts for several weeks. There’s a bit of a comedy of middle-class manners here, but mainly it’s about the monstrous protagonist who is unaware of his own monstrosity.
The opening of the third scene (Act Two) is:
A week later, late afternoon. The room is now dominated by a large Christmas tree, set in the curve of the staircase, and hung with the customary Christmas ornaments. SARAH and JOHN are passing in and out of the library, bringing forth huge packages which they are placing under the tree. MAGGIE sits at a little table at one side, going through a pile of correspondence.
JOHN. Well, I guess that’s all there are, Miss Cutler. They’re all under the tree. MAGGIE. Thank you, John.
I Imagine that this is simple to stage, in that the entire play takes place in the Ohio front room. It’s more of a one-joke story than the other two. The play was written for actor and critic Alexander Woolcott, who had behaved with abominable rudeness while visiting Hart’s family home; for some strange reason he bowed out of actually performing as the character based on himself, and it fell to Monty Woolley to do it on both stage and screen, giving his career an immense boost. The film stars him and Bette Davis. Here’s a trailer:
Once in a Lifetime gets a Bechdel pass. There is plenty of banter between the named woman characters. The opening lines of Act 1 Scene 3 are a conversation between the Cigarette Girl and the Coat Check Girl, who I admit are not named characters, but it’s funny enough to put here (and was censored from the film with the rest of the scene):
COAT CHECK GIRL. Say, I got a tip for you, Kate. CIGARETTE GIRL. Yah? COAT CHECK GIRL. I was out to Universal today—I heard they was going to do a shipwreck picture. CIGARETTE GIRL. Not enough sound. They’re making it a college picture—glee clubs. COAT CHECK GIRL. That was this morning. It’s French Revolution now. CIGARETTE GIRL. Yah? There ought to be something in that for me. COAT CHECK GIRL. Sure! There’s a call out for prostitutes for Wednesday. CIGARETTE GIRL. Say, I’m going out there! Remember that prostitute I did for Paramount? COAT CHECK GIRL. Yah, but that was silent. This is for talking prostitutes.
You Can’t Take It With You also passes easily, with the opening lines featuring two women characters talking.
ESSIE. (fanning herself). My, that kitchen’s hot. PENNY. (finishing a bit of typing). What, Essie? ESSIE. I say the kitchen’s awful hot. That new candy I’m making—it just won’t ever get cool. PENNY. Do you have to make candy today, Essie? It’s such a hot day. ESSIE. Well, I got all those new orders. Ed went out and got a bunch of new orders. PENNY. My, if it keeps on I suppose you’ll be opening up a store. ESSIE. That’s what Ed was saying last night, but I said no, I want to be a dancer. (Bracing herself against the table, she manipulates her legs, ballet fashion) PENNY. The only trouble with dancing is, it takes so long. You’ve been studying such a long time. ESSIE (slowly drawing a leg up behind her as she talks). Only—eight—years. After all, Mother, you’ve been writing plays for eight years. We started about the same time, didn’t we? PENNY. Yes, but you shouldn’t count my first two years, because I was learning to type.
The Man Who Came to Dinner was a bit more of a challenge, given that it is about a monstrous male egotist who dominates all around him. But just over half way through I found an exchange that definitely passes.
MAGGIE. That’s quite a gown, Lorraine. Going anywhere? LORRAINE. This? Oh, I just threw on anything at all. Aren’t you dressing for dinner? MAGGIE. No, just what meets the eye. (She has occasion to carry a few papers across room at this point. LORRAINE‘s eye watches her narrowly) LORRAINE. Who does your hair, Maggie? MAGGIE. A little Frenchwoman named Maggie Cutler comes in every morning. LORRAINE. You know, every time I see you I keep thinking your hair could be so lovely. I always wanted to get my hands on it. MAGGIE. (quietly.) I’ve always wanted to get mine on yours, Lorraine. LORRAINE. (absently.) What, dear?
The other two Bechdel-passing scenes were cut or trimmed for the screen, but I’m glad to give you this one in full with Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (there is fantasy here, but not of the genre kind). Next in that sequence is The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond.
Second and third frames of third page, in original and English:
At the turn of the year F and I went to a Tintin interactive exhibition in Brussels, where we sat and watched montages from the comics set to various trippy music tracks.
I picked up a couple of the albums that I had not read for a long time, to practice my French.
Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, known in English as Land of Black Gold, has an extraordinary publication history. The first half of it came out in 1939-40, but since the villain of the story is a sinister German, the story abruptly stopped when the Nazis invaded Belgium, leaving Tintin stranded in a sandstorm in the Palestinian desert.
Eight years later with the war safely over, Hergé started publishing it again from the beginning in Tintin magazine. He then took three months off in the middle of the process, without telling anyone in advance; he found the forced pace of creativity stressful, but his unplanned absences infuriated colleagues. The full 62-page album was published in 1949.
But it doesn’t end there. More than two decades later, in 1971, the English-language rights had been acquired by Methuen, who gently suggested to Hergé that it might be a good idea to change the setting from British-mandate Palestine and maybe take out the bit where Irgun mistake Tintin for one of their own agents and kidnap him (and also perhaps remove the British army officers). So Hergé shifted the Arabian settings to the fictional county of Khemed, working in some Belgian humour (more on that below), and the Khemed version rather than the Palestine version is now the standard text in all languages.
Despite its pervasive very dubious Orientalism, the story has some great parts. The opening pages in Belgium see an epidemic of explosions in cars and cigarette lighters due to contaminated petrol. But war clouds are gathering and Captain Haddock gets mobilised into the navy. Tintin learns that the problem with the petrol is happening at its source in Khemed, and undertakes a perilous journey to investigate. Having arrived, he gets entangled in a power struggle between the emir and a rebel leader, with the evil Dr Müller behind the sabotage. Despite the antics of detectives Thomson and Thompson, and with the aid of Captain Haddock, Tintin defeats Müller, rescues the emir’s obnoxious son Abdallah, and returns in triumph.
There’s some very good visual stuff here, especially the scenes on the boat across the Mediterranean, in the desert, and in the underground dungeon where Abdallah is imprisoned. Thomson and Thompson mistakenly consume Dr Müller’s chemicals and start sprouting blue hair and frothing at the mouth. The obnoxious Abdallah is well depicted with few words. But the end is a bit rushed and infodumpy, with text occupying almost 50% of the final page. And the plot does not cohere as well as in some of the other albums, no doubt due to the peculiar process of composition. This is oddly reflected in a recurrent Captain Haddock gag – several times he starts to explain how he has happened to arrive on the scene in the nick of time, but keeps getting interrupted and we never find out.
It is well worth reading in French, if you are so inclined. There’s an amusing and untranslatable riff on Charles Trenet’s classic song “Boum!” on the first page. Some of the Khemed names are taken from the Brussels dialect of Flemish – most obviously the capital Wadesdah is a riff on “wat is dat”, “what’s that”, and the oil wells are located in Bir El Ambik, referring to the Brussels lambiek beer. In a nod to French, the emir’s military adviser is Moulfrid, ie “moules-frites”, “mussels with chips”. And you can’t beat the original version of Captain Haddock swearing. “Anacoluthe! Ectoplasme! Oryctérope!” (That last is the standard French word for “aardvark”.)
Total Bechdel fail. Apart from Bianca Castafiore singing on the radio, the only women who we see are the Simoun switchboard operators and a nurse; they are not named, they talk only about men, and they do not talk to each other. The population of Khemed appears to be entirely male.
Here’s an old joke: fisherman sits in his boat, hooks a fish. As he reels it up and up, his friends sit in the boat with him and laugh. “Water’s fine today,” he says.
An urban fantasy with a difference; the fantasy city is a port threatened by pirates from without and religious fanatics from within. Our protagonist is a gay policewoman who survives murder and gets caught up in a plot to destroy the city. I seem to have read a lot of books like this lately, but this held my attention for the duration. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass: the protagonist is rescued by two women smugglers. (Not counting her earlier flirtation with a singer, because the singer is not named.)
This won the Sir Julius Vogel Prize presented at the fateful plague-struck New Zealand WorldCon in 2020. It was my top unread book acquired in that year (as part of the Julius Vogel packet, I think). Next on that pile is The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz.
Second frame of third part (“What He Wants”, by Rob Williams):
First of the 2014 line of Eleventh Doctor comics by Titan, this introduces a new companion, Alice Obiefune from Hackney, as a regular Tardis traveller along with invisible musician John Jones and an alien entity called ARC. I like the new dynamic between the primaries, but the other two companions seem a bit superfluous, and the historical story set in the segregated Deep South pulls its punches. Pleasing enough, good art, and you can get it here.
I remember watching The Talons of Weng-Chiang when it was first broadcast in 1977, and loving it; the years since then have sensitised me to the racism in the story, but it retains a problematic attraction. I saw it again on videotape twice in the 1990s, and next time I saw it in 2007 I wrote:
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, from 1977, is the climax of the great Holmes/Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who (also the last directed by the superb David Maloney), and is as good now as I remember it being when I was nine. (I admit I have also seen it a couple of times since, once in the company of a girl from Manila who giggled pleasingly at the line about the Filipino army advancing on Reykjavik.) Thanks to my background reading I was now alert to look out for a particular shot at the start of episode 4 which had escaped my notice previously (on the DVD commentary track, Louise Jameson laughs loudly). There is so much great stuff here: Leela and the Doctor are both alien to Victorian London, so Jago and Litefoot are effectively the viewpoint characters; Deep Roy, later to play hundreds of Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, turns in a great Mr Sin. Yes, the ethnic stereotypes are rather regrettable (and quite apart from the Chinese, I would draw the attention of Irish viewers to Chris Gannon’s Casey), but the setting and drama are just fantastic.
When I came to it in my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
I always loved The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. (I know, I said this about The Deadly Assassin too, but it’s true in both cases.) There are two big problems with the story: the fairly useless and unterrifying giant rat, and the racism including having the lead Chinese role played by a non-Chinese actor. However, the settings are beautifully done, the plotting is tight enough, Magnus Greel’s distorted face is truly horrible, and everyone takes it seriously and does it well. The script has some particular delights: “I can play the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ in a bowl of live goldfish”; “sleep is for tortoises”; etc.
I know it by heart, so this time I watched it with the cast commentary and the production subtitles. Still enjoyable, except that the racism really does make you cringe. It’s also a total Bechdel fail. Apart from Leela, there are hardly any women characters, and they do not talk to each other.
As it happens, I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel at exactly the same time as rewatching the show and reading the books, and if you don’t mind connecting the sublime and the ridiculous, that’s a really interesting pairing. You can get the DVD here.
Since I have it, I also went back and reread the Robert Holmes script, edited by John McElroy. The opening of the second scene of the third episode is:
2. PROFESSOR LITEFOOT’S DINING ROOM.
(LEELA peers out of the window. She hears the front door shut, then turns around.) LITEFOOT: Nobody out there now! Fellow must have got wind of .. . (He breaks off mid-sentence with a groan. There is a rustling sound in the hall.) LEELA: Professor? (She goes towards the door.) Are you there, Professor? (She is almost at the door when it swings open. MR. SIN is standing there, a knife glinting evilly in his hand. He moves purposefully towards LEELA. For a moment she is frozen with fear, then she grabs a carving knife from the side-table. As MR. SIN moves stiffly towards her, she hurls the knife at him, with expert precision. It thuds into MR. SIN‘s throat but, to LEELA‘s amazement, it seems to have little effect. The weird little mannequin continues to shuffle towards her.)
The script, published in 1989, is really for completists only, but I would say two things: first, two of the most problematic elements of the TV series – the use of a white actor to play Li H’sen Chang, and the rather poor implementation of the giant rat – are of course invisible in the script (the racism, alas, survives); but second, so is the gorgeous staging which made it such a vivid experience when I was nine. A nice bit of nostalgia which you can get here.
Not much to add to that.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the Terrance Dicks novelisation is:
Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang also loses out in the visual stakes, but gains a bit with occasional tight-third narrative from Leela’s point of view, which accentuates one of the successful aspects of the story, the confrontation between her primitive experience and the Victorian era.
The one difference I picked up on this time is that Teresa, one of Greel’s victims, is clearly coded as a sex worker in the TV story but is a gambling hostess in the adaptation. You can get it here.
With the publication of Dale Smith’s monograph on The Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Black Archive covers six consecutive Tom Baker stories and 26 consecutive episodes, which is their longest run of any era. I think that underlines the consensus that the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era, which ended with Talons, was a true high point of the show.
Smith’s monograph is actually quite short by Black Archive standards, at 137 pages. It has just five chapters.
The first, “Foe from the Future”, looks at the story’s roots in the Jack the Ripper murders, Fu Manchu and The Phantom of the Opera, and also reviews the production process which was deeply exhausting for Holmes.
The second chapter, “The Talons of Victoria”, looks at the affinity that Doctor Who has with the Victorian era, and explores the role of science and the narrative of colonialism (also very much applicable to Leela).
The third chapter, “The Time-Traveller and his Savage Companion”, looks at the many double-acts in the story – not just Jago/Litefoot but also Doctor/Leela and Greel/Chang and even Greel/Mr Sin – and also at the extent to which it really does draw on Fu Manchu, The Phantom of the Opera and indeed The Island of Doctor Moreau. Its second paragraph is:
Holmes was undoubtedly a master of dialogue, creating characters painted with broad enough strokes to be immediately recognisable, but giving each of them the ability to say just the right things to give us a clear picture of who they are. Jago’s couplet of ‘You’ve been drinking’ / ‘Well, it’s time you started’ isn’t just a funny joke3: it gives us a clear picture of what is going through his mind, what he wants and how he intends to get it. But dialogue isn’t the only thing that Holmes uses to give his characters life and depth, and his ability with double acts shouldn’t be reduced to just having a way with words. Holmes had a way with every tool in the writer’s toolkit, and the best way to demonstrate that would be to look at one of the other double acts that Holmes peppered Talonswith. 3 Episode 1.
The fourth chapter, “‘Die, Bent Face!'”, looks at Greel’s disfigurement and at disability in fiction in general and Doctor Who in particular, a theme that suddenly caught fire for about 48 hours last year.
The fifth and longest chapter, “Of Its Time, and Ours” addresses the crucial issue of race and racism. I think this is one of the best such analyses I’ve read by a white guy, addressing a largely white audience. We can love things that are problematic, but it’s really important to understand why and how they are problematic. Smith very briefly reviews the history of British engagement with China in the nineteenth century (it was, again, refreshing that I had just read Kuang’s Babel) and also the history of discrimination against London’s Chinese population, led by the trade unions. (He doesn’t mention the issue of Chinese slave labour in South Africa which became one of the themes of the 1906 general election, but there is plenty else to choose from.) He makes it clear that the question of whether Talons of Weng-Chiang is a racist story isn’t a matter of debate; what is up for debate is our response.
We know this is a bigger issue than just whether one story broadcast in 1977 contains racism. Talons isn’t just a product of the 70s – that young proto-fan can find it just as easily as they would find any of Christopher Eccleston’s stories. It is impossible for anyone to watch anything in the context it was made: everything is watched within an elastic context of ‘now’, and Talons is quite literally a product of now. It is easy for someone to get down their Blu-ray and settle down to watch it, to buy books about how it was made or listen to sequels that ape its atmosphere. The same can’t be said for The Black and White Minstrel Show. That’s why we feel uncomfortable when it is raised, why the urge to minimise and argue is so strong: we have watched this story and enjoyed it, and we are not racists so something else must be wrong.
But it isn’t. We are.
If we were educated through the British school system; if we have engaged with British culture; if we have lived in this country for any length of time. If we are white. It would be impossible for us to eliminate every unconscious racist assumption we have been taught to make. That is why the onus is on those of us who are white Doctor Who fans, to listen when people raise the issue of the racism in Talons. We have to educate ourselves about what that racism is and how it displays itself, and ultimately we have to decide how we as people are going to respond to it. Because it is too easy for us to push back, to force the people that racism targets to carry out the emotional and physical labour involved in educating white people. Because racism is a white problem. We benefit from it every day. It is up to us to solve it.
As this story demonstrates, Doctor Who has not always been good to China, but I’m glad to say that China has a thriving Doctor Who fanbase, as I discovered in October. After a couple of weeks when the Chengdu Worldcon has been excoriated in public and in private (including by me) I’ll take a moment to remember the positive.
This is one of my favourite New Who stories. I wrote of my 2011 Hugo votes:
1) Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor. Yes, I do plan to give my first preference to the writer of The Tall Guy, Blackadder, Mr. Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and The Vicar of Dibley. (Not forgetting his first great work with The Heebeegeebees.) I thought this was the outstanding Who episode of last year, the best since Blink, and my biggest difficulty in deciding which others to nominate for the Hugos was a fear that if I nominated any of them, Vincent might be crowded out. But luckily we got through that stage OK; hopefully the Alternative Vote will see the award go where it ought.
Rewatching it again for this exercise, I still loved it a lot. It looks gorgeous, it sounds gorgeous, the acting is spot-on and the script sparkles. I have two reservations: the actual monster bit is slightly surplus to requirements, and at the end, the exhibition of van Gogh’s work would certainly have displayed his dates of birth and death rather prominently. I’ms also still irritated that a teaching moment in Dutch phonology was missed. As I wrote at the time, in the name “van Gogh”:
1) the ‘a’ is very short and low, heading towards a short ‘o’ in English. 2) both the ‘g’ and the ‘gh’ are pronounced as a softer version of ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’. 3) ‘Vahn Goff’ is completely and utterly wrong. (And if you thought it was ‘Van Go’, I don’t ever want to talk to you again.)
I like his art, and we saw some at the Kröller-Müller Museum a year and a half ago. I’ve also read two biographies in graphic novel format. He’s a fascinating character who left us an evocative legacy, and Richard Curtis pushes it just far enough in Vincent and the Doctor.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two title characters are both men, and apart from Amy there is no named female speaking part. (We are told Giselle’s name after she is dead.)
Paul Driscoll’s Black Archive monograph is one of the longer and more substantial ones. Like the last one I read, on The Haunting of Villa Diodati, it links a historical story about real-life historical creators to the actual biographies and works of those creators. I found it much more successful, I think partly because I like the story much more but mainly because Driscoll has written a better book.
The first chapter, “The Voice of the Writer”, looks at the career of Richard Curtis and how Vincent and the Doctor flows from a lot of his previous themes, and also the very personal one of his sister who he lost to depression a year before the episode was written. I’ve seen less than half of the films and stories referenced, but I am convinced of a linear narrative thread connecting Vincent with About Time and Blackadder: Back and Forth. It’s detailed and well argued.
The second and longest chapter, “The Voice of the Artist”, starts by looking at other screen treatments of van Gogh’s life and death, then looks at how the episode treats him as tortured genius vs visionary artist, and finished by looking at van Gogh’s own letters for indications of how he himself saw his art.
The third chapter, “The Voice of the Monster”, looks at the monster as a metaphor for mental illness and considers how Doctor Who portrays trauma more generally. Its second paragraph is:
In a lengthy scene cut during post-production, the Doctor tells Amy that artists often see real things that nobody else notices. As they prepare to head off in the TARDIS to meet Vincent for the first time, he shows her various examples from Fuseli, Bosch, Munch and De Goya3. The Doctor’s point is that nightmares and monsters cannot always be dismissed as flights of fantasy on the part of the artist. The monster in The Church at Auvers (1890) painting reminds him of a fairy tale he’d read as a child. He cannot be sure, but he sets off on the presumption that the creature is real and not a product of Vincent’s imagination. 3TCH [The Complete History] #65, p94f.
The fourth chapter, “The Voice of the Paintings”, looks first at how little the visual arts feature in Doctor Who outside the Moffat era and then at how much Moffat emphasised them, and then looks at several specific van Gogh paintings and the way in which they are used in the episode.
A brief conclusion considers the story as a fairy tale.
An appendix lists 46 (!) different van Gogh paintings that appear in or are referred to in the episode.
As I said, this was a long but meaty Black Archive, and I recommend it. You can get it here.
It didn’t work out that way. For one thing, I overslept and felt terrible when I got up. I had forgotten what a long, sleepless journey can do to your system. For the past five years I had done less and less traveling, and I was getting soft. For another thing, the rain had changed to sleet during the night and was driving down in freezing gusts. The wind was blowing briskly from the east, in off the sea. Bill and I sat at the battered wooden table in the farm kitchen, while Mrs. Trevelyan pushed bacon, eggs, homemade sausage, bread and hot sweet tea into me until I showed signs of life. She was a spry, red-cheeked lady in her middle sixties, and if she was surprised that Bill had finally brought someone else with him to explore Little House, she hid it well.
When I was doing my first run through stories that won both the Hugo and Nebula in 2004, I wrote:
Back in the summer of 1991 I was finishing up my M Phil in Cambridge, and dropped in one day on my supervisor, who at the time was the curator of the history of science museum. He welcomed me into his office, shuffled through some papers with strange cylindrical diagrams on them, and flourished them at me: “These,” he said, “are Charles Babbage’s original blueprints for the Difference Engine.” He had a tendency to do that. I remember one seminar on Newton where he brought in an authentic 17th-century widget, “just like Newton would have had”, and showed the original owner’s notes of how it had been used, almost casually indicating at the end that the original owner in this case had in fact been Isaac Newton. We would occasionally see the current Lucasian Professor, a post previously held by Babbage and Newton, trundling through the cobbled streets in his battery-driven wheelchair.
Babbage was all the rage in those days, it being the bicentenary of his birth, and with no less than three sf novels published the previous year in which Babbage’s difference engine was actually built (Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, S.M. Stirling’s The Stone Dogs, and William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine), and thus the computer was brought into being a century and a half before Bill Gates. Apart from those three novels and Sheffield’s novelette, which is dated as having been finished on December 31, 1991, there aren’t many stories with that theme, though steampunk as a genre keeps on going. In all three of those novels, the difference engine is at least partly responsible for revolutionising society.
Sheffield, however, takes it in a different direction: what if it were simply built in 1850 as a project of an eccentric couple in the farther flung reaches of the British Empire, and then forgotten? His unnamed narrator and his old New Zealander friend Bill Rigley team up to find out the truth behind the manuscripts located on a farm at the back end of nowhere. In fact, the largest surviving fragment of Babbage’s analytical engine was indeed discovered, along with various papers now in the Wanganui Museum, on a farm in New Zealand in the late 1970s by Garry Tee, to whom “Georgia On My Mind” is dedicated and who “is no more Bill Rigley than I [Charles Sheffield] am the narrator of this story.” However, in our timeline the Babbage material reached New Zealand via Australia in the hands of Babbage’s son and grandson when they emigrated, rather than being constructed from scratch.
Tee made his real-life discovery about the time that Charles Sheffield’s first wife died, in 1977, and the narrator of “Georgia on My Mind” has had a similar recent loss. The theme of nostalgia and loss runs strongly and powerfully through the story, permeating the excitement of the two friends as they look through the papers of Luke and Louisa Derwent from over a century before. Anyone who has ever been bereaved will sympathise with the narrator’s sharp intake of breath as a picture of Louisa reminds him of his dead wife. The setting of New Zealand is also richly portrayed, in the days before Peter Jackson made it as iconic as it now has become. And so we are not really prepared for what happens next.
It seems that the Derwents – a married couple, exiled from England because they were also, scandalously, half-brother and half-sister – had made contact with aliens – or at least intelligent non-humans – on Macquarie Island. One last letter written in 1855 reveals that Luke and the dying Louisa set off to the permanent base of the “heteromorphs”; there is just about enough information in the manuscripts to enable the identification of the site of that permanent base as being South Georgia, in the Atlantic Ocean. (The story’s title has nothing to do with the U.S. state of Georgia, let alone the former Soviet Republic of the same name, where I will be this time next week as I write these words.)
And so, just as the Derwents’ story finishes with preparation for a long and dangerous journey, “Georgia On My Mind” ends with our narrator and Bill Rigley preparing to follow the Derwents to South Georgia. But they will not be alone; word has leaked out, and a host of people from MIT, Livermore and the hard science fiction community are rumoured to also be converging on the island. For some readers, this somewhat recursive twist at the end spoils the story. Not for me. I read it as a tribute, 14 years on, to the support Sheffield drew from his professional and literary colleagues at the time of his bereavement, and a good end to a story whose plot was never intended to be fully resolved.
I should say that Garry Tee of the University of Auckland, on whom the character of Bill Rigley is based, found this review soon after I had posted it in 2004 and we maintained a friendly correspondence until he retired in 2018. If he is still around, he will turn 92 next month, so I do not feel offended that I have not heard from him in a while.
Edited to add, June 2024: Nigel Rowe emailed me to say that in fact Gary Tee died on 18 February 2024, only a few days after I had published this blog post. He was 91. There are two lovely obituaries here and here. Thank you, Gary, for your friendly correspondence with a random chap on the other side of the world.
Coming back to it two decades later, I still loved this story for bringing me back to my history of science days, the most intellectually interesting work I have ever done in my life. I wondered also if E.J. Swift was slightly inspired by it for The Coral Bones. And I think we can all do with a hidden history occasionally.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two women characters are Mrs Trevelyan and Louisa Derwent, who live more than a century apart.
The story has not been reprinted in English since 1998, in The New Hugo Winners, Volume IV where I first encountered it. You can also get it in:
Analog January 1993 (which also included Hugo-wining novella “Death on the Nile” by Connie Willis)
“Georgia on my Mind” won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novelette presented in 1994 for work published in 1993. “The Franchise” by John Kessel was also on both final ballots. The Nebula ballot also included two other Hugo winners due to varying year / word count qualifications.
The other Hugos in the written categories went to Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “Down in the Bottomlands” by Harry Turtledove (Novella) and “Death on the Nile” by Connie Willis (Short Story). The Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo went to Jurassic Park. The other Nebula winners were Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “The Night We Buried Road Dog” by Jack Cady (Novella) and “Graves” by Joe Haldeman (Short Story).
Next up in this sequence: “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” by Mike Resnick.
Second page of third chapter (which is in English in the original – I checked):
Someone commented on social media that this isn’t my usual reading fare, and it’s true. Back in November I was at Brussels Comic Con, and also needed a new phone case; and I spotted a stall selling manga-style artwork including this rather striking young warrior woman. So I bought it.
I thought it must be just something that the stall-holder had invented, but young F was certain that it was a canonical manga, and after a bit of crowdsourcing with his friends, confirmed that it is Rukia Kuchiki from the BLEACH by Tite Kubo. So I invested in the first volume, Strawberry and the Soul Reaper, to become better informed.
It’s a fairly basic story of Ichigo Kurosaki, a kid with red hair (unusual in Japan, to say the least), who finds himself drawn into the grand supernatural battle between the good guy Soul Reapers and the evil spirits called Hollows. Rukia Kuchiki, the character on my phone case, is one of the immortal Soul Reapers (based on the traditional Japanese shinigami, only cuter), but ends up giving her powers to Ichigo and having to become a normal(ish) schoolgirl.
I wasn’t blown away by it, though I can see why the core audience (which I’m not in) would like it. I would have liked to see more sensitive exploration of Ichigo’s abusive family situation, and I was sorry that the promising character of Orihime was introduced and then apparently got dropped. (Though I believe she comes back in later volumes.) Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like. You can get it here.
Even though it’s about a teenage boy with magical powers, I did find a scene where Rukika and Orihime are talking to each other about Orihime’s injured leg. Ichigo is in the vicinity but not in the conversation. (Read right to left.)
The end of story about the phone case is that less than three months after buying it, I found that I needed to upgrade to a new iPhone in order to be able to run my Apple Watch. So if you’d like the Rukika phone case, it’s surplus to my needs right now.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer, and also my top unread comic in English; next on those piles are Babel, by R.F. Kuang, and Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray.
