Occasionally this involves being physically or verbally abused, but mostly it involves paperwork.
I see a mixed reaction to this, the ninth of the Rivers of London series, but I rather enjoyed it. The title and the chapter headings are references to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch, and the plot background for the book includes the historical Spanish Inquisition. There is a mystery involving a strange magical being, and also Peter Grants infamous ex Leslie; there are seven rings that need to be found; there are plenty of cultural references; there is an excursion to Glossop, not far from where I was last month; and there is the imminent birth of Peter and Beverley’s twins. I found it very satisfactory and entertaining. You can get Amongst Our Weapons here.
Thus, the physical brain, though it cannot create such sensory appearances, is a prime factor in their characterization, and, for that reason, an important factor in whatever process it may be that causes them to appear.
This was quite a big hit when originally published (I have the fairly definitive third edition of 1932). Sober-minded aeronautical engineer John William Dunne believed that he had established scientifically that dreams can sometimes be precognitive alerts to things that are going to happen to the dreamer, and he has many Einstein-like diagrams to demonstrate his theory of time travel. Nobody has been able to replicate his experiments independently, and it seems more like a demonstration of the human brain’s ability to find patterns from random stimuli. It’s not very exciting either, but you can get An Experiment with Time here.
This was my top book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Leviathan, by A.G. Riddle, one of the Clarke Award backlog.
Before the rite begins, the tribal elders dunk the ants into an herbal brew. Not to agitate them, but to anesthetize them. The agitating part comes later, after the sleeping ants are handwoven into a pair of gloves made from leaves and palm fronds. When the ants wake up, they’re angry and ready to attack whoever is wearing those gloves—a fact the young boys know all too well. During waumat, each boy must put on these gloves and face the pain as their first step to adulthood.
A straightforward book looking at the psychological benefits of and anthropological rationale for religious rites, particularly rites of passage, and arguing, contra the New Atheists, that people who practice a religious faith often end up mentally healthier for it. This is pretty much where my own prejudices are as well, so I found little to argue with.
DeSteno should for completeness have looked a bit more at how and why religious beliefs go wrong. There are plenty of sectarian conflicts around the world where the protagonists themselves believe that religion is a strong factor, whatever the underlying roots may be. And we see the poisonous effect of extreme religious views in the USA today.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next up on that list is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”):
Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.
I picked this up while at Novacon (in the wonderful Scrivener’s bookshop) and then left it behind in a taxi when I had almost finished it. Luckily the internet is to the rescue, and it wasn’t difficult to fill in the gaps online. I give links below to the online Orwell archive, though I am not sure of the extent to which it has been authorised by the Orwell estate.
It is stunning to be reminded just how good a writer Orwell was. He applies his ethical and moral standards to all sides, and eloquently deconstructs the hypocrisy of the Left as well as the evil of the Right. There are ten essays here and each of them deserves a short note of its own.
“Decline of the English Murder“, the title piece, from 1946, is about the media coverage of real-life murder cases, the public reaction to them, and the extent to which the war had brutalised public discourse.
A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation.
A very vivid, short piece.
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” is an excoriating review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, pointing out Dalí’s many moral failings as described by the artist himself. The takeaway line is,
One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.
“How the Poor Die” is about Orwell’s experiences in a city hospital in Paris, and the uncaring and unsympathetic approach of the staff. He doesn’t blame France as such, but the nineteenth-century traditions of healthcare.
“Rudyard Kipling” examines Kipling’s creative genius and defends him against T.S. Eliot’s charge of Fascism, while deeply regretting his imperialist apologetics.
For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him.
“Raffles and Miss Blandish” contrasts the gentleman thief Raffles in the stories published between 1898 and 1909 by E.W. Horning, with James Hadley Chase’s novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I must say I was astonished to learn that James Hadley Chase’s literary career had begun so early – his last book was published in 1984. I have not read any of his books, and after reading Orwell’s blistering review of his first one, I don’t feel I need to.
“Charles Dickens“, at 62 pages, is the longest piece in the book, taking up almost a third of its length. Orwell clearly loved Dickens’ writing but was also alert to its flaws: “his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development — the characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of eternity.” He criticises Dickens for his portrayal of working-class and poor characters, and for his conservative attitude to social change, but still finds much to praise.
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
“The Art of Donald McGill” looks at the genre of bawdy seaside postcards and finds a lot to like about them. Orwell was a moralist, but he had a sense of humour.
In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.
By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
He applies the same critical apparatus to English and Celtic nationalism as to German and Japanese, and lumps in both Stalinism and Trotskyism as well. I found it a very thought-provoking commentary on bigotry and prejudice, and the mind-set that leads to them.
Finally, “Why I Write” was again a piece that I had read before. It was good to read it after nine other essays, pulling the whole thing together,
An interesting bit of self-reflection, available here, in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
This collection was put together by Penguin in 1965, though the title has also been used for other Penguin collections with different content. You can get this one here.
My usual approach to excerpting fails with this book for reasons that I’ll explain, so I’m taking the attitude that, contra the old saying, more is more.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Mannerheim Symphony”:
Should I go on with it? Would Sinnikka hate me if she knew I was reading something so far below her ideals? Would she not rather that I was undergoing torture?
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Impossible Smile”:
Sweat stood out on his forehead, like grease on a bit of dirty vellum. As he spoke, he held a beaker of bitter-tasting liquid to Wyvern’s lips, letting it slop down his chin while he concentrated on what he was saying. With the sense of urgency harrying him, he had not unlocked the bands around Wyvern’s throat and ankles; but instead of standing over him, he now knelt before him.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “Equator”:
Rain pelted down his neck. His light tropical suit would be soaked in no time. A taxi slowly overtook him, splashing his legs.
I picked this up in excitement at Eastercon in 2022, glad to find a Brian Aldiss book that I had not already read – and then realised that in fact I knew it under its other title, Cracken at Critical, and had read and lost a copy, soon after its original 1987 publication.
It is an intriguing book. The main framing narrative has the title “The Mannerheim Symphony”, and the narrator is a famous Finnish composer, in a Hitler-won-the-war universe, who discovers a dead young woman by the roadside and has to negotiate with his suspicious wife and a police detective who is possessed by a reindeer. So far, so weird.
In the dead woman’s belongings, he finds two short science fiction stories apparently written by her father, Jael Cracken, and reads them. The joke is that the two stories are in fact real Brian Aldiss stories from 1958 and 1965, and one of them was originally published under the pseudonym Jael Cracken.
The first, “The Impossible Smile”, has a telepathic protagonist trying to find allies and avoid enemies in a transitional dictatorial regime between England and the Moon. There’s a flavour of Alfred Bester about it, but it also has some very Aldiss twists.
The second, “Equator” (originally published as “Vanguard from Alpha”) has Earth dealing with immigration from humanoid aliens, mainly in a vividly depicted Sumatra. There are more chase scenes and a beautiful alien babe, and a memorable climax in a vast mechanical setting.
A lot of readers think that the whole thing is rubbish. I don’t; it’s a guilty pleasure for me, Aldiss returning to his early work and repurposing it for the needs of two or three decades later. The haunted police detective is a little jarring, but the composer trying to distract himself from his unfaithfulness to his wife by escaping into science fiction… well, let’s just say that Aldiss knew what he was writing about.
And there are some passages that I find very nicely done.
The solar system progressed toward the unassailable summer star, Vega. The Earth-Moon system danced around the sun, host and parasite eternally hand-in-hand. The planet spun on its unimaginable axis. The oceans swilled forever uneasily in their shallow beds. Tides of multifarious life twitched across the continents. On a small island a man sat and hacked at the casing of a coconut.
It was a step which could only have been taken by a Minister exercising Peel’s authority. With the single exception of Corn Law repeal, his ‘mastery’ over his Cabinet was said to be complete; he had ‘got them as obedient and well trained as the crew of a man of war’.¹ His purchase of Indian corn proved the decisive factor in relieving the distress of 1845-46, but the subsequent value to Ireland of Peel’s boldness, independence and strength of mind was unfortunately outweighed by his belief in an economic theory which almost every politician of the day, Whig or Tory, held with religious fervour. ¹ Peel Memoirs, II, p. 173. Parker, Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, 2nd baronet of Netherby, PC., GCB (1907), Vol. I, p. 26. Treasury Minute, December 9, 1845. Correspondence explanatory of the Measures adopted by H.M. Government for the Relief of Distress arising from the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, H.C., 1846 (735), Vol. XXXVII, p. 2. (Corr. Explan.). Greville, [Memoirs,] Vol. V, p. 16.
Like most schoolchildren in Ireland, I was taught about the famine in history classes as one of the fundamental facts of Irish history. The 1841 census found that the population of Ireland was 8.5 million; today, combining both parts, it is just over seven million. The populations of counties Clare, Fermanagh, Longford, Sligo, Tipperary, Mayo and Cavan today are less than half what they were in 1841. The populations of counties Monaghan and Roscommon are less than a third of their 1841 numbers. Leitrim’s population today is 22% of the 1841 figure. It’s a catastrophe whose impact is still very visible. The immediate impact in the 1840s is vividly shown in this map:
Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1962 book was the first popular history book of the twentieth century to cover the whole period in detail. It came after successful books on the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale, and she later wrote a biography of Queen Victoria. She was from an Irish military family; she claimed to be descended from the Dukes of Leinster, but I have to say that my research does not support this. She was clearly a good story-teller, and Alan Bennet has a couple of funny anecdotes about her.
We were taught at school that the Famine came about as a combination of the natural disaster of a fungal infection, the potato blight, killing the crop on which most Irish people survived, and the unwillingness of the British government to provide relief for the starving population; meanwhile corn which could have fed the hungry was exported and thousands of impoverished tenants were evicted, driving the great wave of Irish emigration to the USA (and to an extent Canada and Australia) which still shapes Irish-American relations today.
A lot of this is rooted in The Great Hunger. But there’s a huge difference between reading the awful, but sanitised, version of history in my schoolbooks forty-five years ago, and reading the primary documentation that Woodham-Smith assembled. The direct accounts of the misery and squalor endured by the population are really tough reading. One cannot defend the authorities in Dublin Castle or in London on the grounds of ignorance. Indeed, the British Prime Minister wrote: “we have made it the most degraded and most miserable country in the world…all the world is crying shame upon us.”
Woodham-Smith is also very enlightening on the second prong of the received historical account, the ideological opposition of the London government to effective aid. Like most governments, of course, Sir Robert Peel and then Lord John Russell were particularly motivated by their need to keep a parliamentary majority, and Russell’s attempts to take a more proactive stance were blocked by others within his coalition. In the end, the buck stops at the top, and also with Charles Trevelyan, who as Assistant Secretary to the Treasury was the single most influential voice on maintaining laissez-faire (what we would today call libertarian) policies, which killed a million people.
I was less familiar with other parts of the story. I had vaguely clocked the fact that more people died of disease than malnutrition; but Woodham-Smith fleshes this out with details of the epidemics that swept through the devastated population, based to a certain extent on the advance of medical knowledge between 1845 and 1962. The worst of all was the effect on emigrants crammed together in unhealthy conditions on the ships going to North America, and then quarantined together when they arrived. On Grosse Isle, just off Quebec, at least 3,000 Irish immigrants are known to have died of various diseases and at least 5,000 are known to be buried. The true figures are obscure, but those numbers are bad enough.
Although the English politicians were more culpable because they were in power, Irish politicians did not cover themselves in glory either, and Woodham-Smith spends a couple of chapters looking at the failure of the Young Ireland movement and the pathetic 1848 rebellion. I admit that it’s difficult to prescribe what politicians could do as society disintegrates around them, but calling on the starving masses to seize arms against the entrenched forces of the largest army in the world probably isn’t it.
Having said all that, the book ends on a weird high note describing the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Ireland in 1849, as a kind of coda to the whole story. The royals had a great time, cruising along the coast from Cork to Dublin and then doing official engagements in Dublin and Belfast. Woodham-Smith presents this as a huge success. I guess it was cathartic, but the direct effects of the famine continued until 1852, so the royal visit wasn’t really the end of the story as it is presented here.
Parenthesis: Victoria’s 1849 visit was the first by a British monarch since her uncle, George IV, had turned up in 1821; and only the second since the War of the Three Kingdoms in 1689-90 had seen James II and William III in direct combat at the Battle of the Boyne. Before that, only three English monarchs had set foot in Ireland during their reigns: Richard II in 1394, King john in 1210 and Henry II in 1171.
In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first writer of colour to get the Nobel Prize for Literature, “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. It’s unusual for the prize to be awarded on the basis of a single work, but the Academy makes it pretty clear that the basis of its decision was this collection, translated into English by Tagore himself and published in November 1912, only twelve months before the Nobel Prize was awarded.
The collection has a rapturous foreword by W.B. Yeats and clearly caught the 1912-1913 Zeitgeist. Its 103 poems include 53 of the 157 in the original Bengali collection of the same name, and another 50 of Tagore’s other poems, freely translated.
Second paragraph of third poem (English version):
The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on.
Second paragraph of third poem (Bengali version):
পুরানো আবাস ছেড়ে যাই যবে, মনে ভেবে মরি কি জানি কি হবে, নূতনের মাঝে তুমি পুরাতন, সে কথা যে ভুলে যাই। দূরকে করিলে নিকট, বন্ধু, পরকে করিলে ভাই।
When I leave my old home, I wonder what will happen if I die, Among the new, you are old, That is a thing I forget. You bring the distant near, friend, And make the stranger a brother.
My translation combining Google and Deepl.
I was not able to identify either the Bengali source verse of the English text above, or the English translation of the Bengali text given immediately after it.
I was somewhat bemused by the prominence that this collection of poems thrust upon Tagore. They are very strong expressions of devotion to the divine, without giving offence by supporting any one religion over another, and I found them a bit repetitive and not really inspiring. Tagore had a Hindu background, was and is very popular among Muslim Bengalis, and was writing here (well, translating here) for disaffected Christians. Perhaps I just was not in the mood.
Amartya Sen, in an essay about Tagore on the Nobel Prize website, argues convincingly that the intense but short-lived popularity of Gitanjali is not a fair reflection of Tagore’s talents. His reputation has endured in both India and Bangladesh, both of whose national anthems were written by him. Certainly I had previously read his The Home and the World, and enjoyed it much more, and I may continue my exploration.
One must also give Tagore credit as the first person on record as renouncing a knighthood awarded by the British state. He was knighted by George V in the 1915 New Year’s Honours (as were Lord Kitchener and General Haig), but after the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, he wrote to the Governor-General:
The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments…
The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.
I wrote of the two TV episodes that this book is based on:
The Legend of Ruby Sunday summoned back lots of old favourites – UNIT, Mel, the recurrent character of Susan Twist, and most of all, Gabriel Woolf – another actor over the age of 90! – as Sutekh. It looked good, sounded good, and had a good twist, but there wasn’t a lot of substance; it was running around for the sake of running around. I hoped this would be put right this weekend.
And I’m afraid it wasn’t. Empire of Death was a real mess. The visuals were superb (as we have come to take for granted, now that we are Disneyfied), and the lead performances were great as usual. I also loved the explicit throwbacks to Pyramids of Mars, one of my favourite Old Who stories.
But the plot was very weak. As soon as people started disintegrating into dust, I knew that they would all be resurrected. Why should Sutekh care about Ruby’s unknown mother? (And indeed why could he not use the available technology to find her?) What was the point of the devastated future world with one inhabitant? And I missed the explanation of the snow, and of various other things.
I do have sympathy for the narrative of finding Ruby’s parents by DNA… one part of my own real life that I have now seen brought into a Doctor Who plot; and it could have been done much worse.
Still, I had been hoping for better.
I ranked them sixth and eighth out of last year’s eight episodes,
As sometimes happens with novelisations, the written word is capable of fixing some of the flaws of the televised story. The sillier special effects are lost, thank heavens, and we do get some more background to Susan Twist and indeed to Ruby. But it remains a fundamentally messy story, privileging spectacle over substance. Not Handcock’s fault, of course: it’s a good novelisation of a disappointing story. You can get Doctor Who: Empire of Death here.
Human formalwear was a deep research hole. Some of this stuff went back four or five hundred years. Avi decided to give Andy a new interest in life and started saving images to his feeds. Could he get a cravat? No. A tie, though? Did he want a tie? Avi stopped and read on some zunimmer hobbyist’s page a brute-force machine translation of what had probably been an article in T-Standard to start with, all about the origin of the necktie. Of fucking course it was a military thing. Station popped up in the corner of his vision with a cheery little message: It looks like you’re researching human history! This is a controversial topic, so would you like to hear from an expert?
This is a short (22 pages) postscript to the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory, written for those of us who attended Novacon last month. Emily Tesh writes, “It follows the thread of the parallel-reality engineer Avicenna, who is both a secondary protagonist and a major antagonist in Some Desperate Glory. I have to confess he was always my favourite character, and it was a pleasure to write about him again.” It is a nice little story of redemption, with some cracking good lines. Hopefully it will get published more widely eventually.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 74) Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Spark that Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno An Experiment with Time, by J.W. Dunne
Non-genre 1 (YTD 38) The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks (did not finish)
Poetry 1 (YTD 4) Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
SF 7 (YTD 111) Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett Salvage, by Emily Tesh The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 28) Time Zero, by Justin Richards Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock
Comics 6 (YTD 35) Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, Volume 3, by Ray Bradbury et al Scotland, Épisode 1, by Rodolphe, Leo and Marchal Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme Spa 1906, by Patrick Weber and Olivier Wozniak
4,700 pages (YTD 72,700) 6/23 (YTD 109/293) by non-male writers (del Ponte, Lewis Williams, Woodham-Smith, Tesh, von Harbou, Roessner) 1/23 (YTD 32/293) by non-white writers (Tagore) 2/23 reread (The Year Before Yesterday, Time Zero) 185 books currently tagged unread, down 4 from last month (some acquisitions at Novacon!), down 75 from November 2024.
Reading now If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun
Coming soon (perhaps) Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by Warren Pleece et al The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Doctor Who: The Adventures After Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison
Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar Lost In Time, by A G Riddle Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe The Dead Take the A Train, by Richard Kadrey Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
Second paragraph of third chapter, though I did not get that far:
I was all alone with my present. With my future.
A retelling of the story of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from her own viewpoint. Historical cliché piled upon historical cliché; antic diction interweaves with the style of a magazine tell-all article. I did not quite make it to the end of the second chapter. You can get The Good Wife of Bath here.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Our Wonderful Selves, a play by Jon Pertwee’s father Roland Pertwee.
Also read, but I’m not going to review it, The Spark That Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:
As their first child, I’ve heard their story so many times I can recite it in my sleep.
This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2022 and not yet read. Next on that pile is Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, edited by Brian Aldiss.
I was gratified to learn that so many African states, including some of the world’s poorest countries, in terms of material wealth but certainly not in terms of human pride and determination, had cooperated with the Rwanda tribunal, arresting and transferring to its custody leaders of the genocide. According to an American nongovernmental organization, the Coalition for International Justice, by the end of 2000, Benin had transferred two accused, Burkina Faso one, Cameroon nine, Ivory Coast two, Mali one, Namibia one, South Africa one, Togo two, Tanzania two, and Zambia three. Kenya had transferred thirteen of the accused; in one arrest operation engineered by Louise Arbour, the Kenyan authorities apprehended seven indicted Rwandan leaders on a single day and subsequently transferred them to the tribunal; the Kenyans knew, however, that they could have arrested and transferred several more; one of the fugitives in Nairobi was Félicien Kabuga, a wealthy businessman who allegedly helped nance Hutu militias and plan the genocide. In contrast, at the close of 2000, NATO, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, had been patrolling Bosnia for five years, and, within its borders, eighteen of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s accused war criminals, including Radovan Karadžić, were still roaming free. As I made my rounds of world capitals seeking assistance to secure the arrest of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s fugitives, I recalled the African states’ cooperation. I brought it up during private meetings with Western leaders. At the time it seemed that, thanks to these African countries, the Rwanda tribunal, much more than the Yugoslavia tribunal, stood to rival Nuremberg in its success at bringing surviving members of the top leadership to the dock.
A memoir by the Chief Prosecutor of the war crimes tribunals for both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, taking the story up to the end of her Yugoslavia work in 2008. It’s quite a personal story, as she takes us through her childhood in Switzerland and her legal career, and admits her fondness for expensive handbags (though these are also a practical tool of the trade). But the nuts and bolts of it are the difficulty of operating the prosecution side of the first big international criminal court since Nuremberg, and the difficulties that del Ponte experienced from all sides.
By her own account, del Ponte must have been a difficult person to work with, though also by her own account and from what I know myself, she was given very difficult working conditions – the promised political and financial support from the Western democracies who had pushed for the war crimes tribunals in the first place turned out to be very inconstant, staffing of the tribunals varied in quality, and co-operation with the post-conflict authorities on the ground began badly and did not always improve. She was the subject of vicious personal abuse in the media of the countries concerned, and although she claims to have a thick skin, it’s difficult to be completely unmoved by that kind of thing.
It is a bit frustrating that the Rwanda narrative ends in 2003 and the ex-Yugoslavia narrative in 2008 when she went to Argentina as the ambassador of Switzerland; it means that while the individual trees of prosecutorial processes are examined at great length, she doesn’t write as much about the forest of international justice and accountability, which would have been interesting.
I myself was engaged with a lot of the policy debates regarding the former Yugoslavia during the noughties, and there are several conversations in the book that I recognise, not because I was present myself, but because I heard about them shortly afterward from people who were. I don’t believe I ever met del Ponte in person, though I became friendly with several of her close colleagues. My then employers, the International Crisis Group, get a couple of mentions, mostly positive; our line then was unqualified support for the war crimes tribunals.
I’m no longer quite as sure. While there were some very important successes, del Ponte herself is upfront about some of the failures: the Rwanda process became victors’ justice, as nobody from President Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front was prosecuted; Slobodan Milošević, conducting his own defence, distracted the court from establishing the facts with his theatrics, and cheated the verdict by refusing to take the medication which would have saved his life.
I would add that the Kosovo prosecutions by the court did not seem as well founded as the others, and more generally del Ponte’s statements about Kosovo sometimes seem to me the wrong side of speculation rather than factual reporting. In fact Kosovo complied much more swiftly with the demands of the tribunal than did any of the other governments involved, but got and gets little credit for that. Former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj has now been acquitted twice, which also surely counts for something. (And never mind the current Thaçi trial, which is under a different structure.)
I also found a couple of puzzling errors. George Robertson, the NATO Secretary-General, is consistently referred to as Lord John Robinson. And when I checked out a reference to one of the Crisis Group reports that I had edited, I found that our report simply referred back to one of the prosecution documents, in other words by citing us, del Ponte was effectively citing herself. Perhaps this just reflects some haste in getting the draft off her desk as she prepared for her next assignment, in Argentina.
In a sense, those were more innocent days, when it was credible to state that those responsible for atrocities during the course of an armed conflict should, could and would be held accountable by the international community. I’ve seen a couple of interesting recent pieces on this. In The Economist, Rosie Blau looks at the difference between today and Nuremberg. On his own blog, my friend and former colleague Andrew Stroehlein looks at the implications for future conflict resolution. He admits that “international justice can seem like a faith-based community. We believe in it, but proof of its existence is rare, and almost miraculous when it happens.” You have to look for that proof pretty carefully these days, especially with the rule of law itself being so visibly demolished in and by the USA.
This was the top unread book in my pile of books about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next up there is Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo Daalder.
Second paragraph of Chapter 51 (which is the third chapter after the prologues; they are numbered going backwards from 53):
The leather cover is scuffed and worn. The binding is slightly loose and several of the pages have pulled almost free. Others are torn or stained or missing entirely.
Going back to the sequence of Doctor Who novels that I read but did not get around to reviewing in 2014-2015, this is the seventieth of the BBC Eighth Doctor series, and also a bit of a turning point in the sequence. The Doctor and faithful companions Fitz and Anji head off in three different directions for what seem at first to be three different adventures, Fitz in 1893 and the others in 2002, but it becomes clear that their stories are intertwined. Some great circumstantial detail, with the image of the TARDIS in a glacier particularly memorable, and we also pick up a good deal about what makes the companions tick. I was a bit confused by the end, though, as it is a while since I read this series and I had forgotten the exact significance of recurring characters Sabbath and Trix. Little mercy is shown to new readers here. But Justin Richards is usually a reliably entertaining writer, and here he was also the overall editor of the series: he gave himself the task of twisting it in a slightly different direction, and succeeded.
The girl, who had been admiring her new hat in the mirror, tweaked the already low neckline of her dress for slightly more exposure, just in case the caller was male, and went and opened the door.
Gradually getting through my stack of Discworld books which I had not written up previously. I think that in fact I had not read this before – although I added it to my LibraryThing catalogue when I set it up in 2005, I also have a record that I got a second-hand copy in 2010, and it did not seem familiar to me.
There are several quite disparate elements to the story. The main narrative concerns one Jeremy Clockson (groan) who is building the perfect clock, which incidentally will bring the world to an end. There’s Susan Sto Helit trying to fix things because her grandfather cannot due to handwavium. There’s a spoof of Chinese kung-fu films with the humble sweeper in the monastery turning out to be the venerable monk with arcane talents. There’s a silly bit with the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. The most successful bit for me was the portrayal of the Auditors of Time, grim inhuman regulators of the type that Pratchett hated, but who are undone by their interaction with humanity (and the other inhabitants of Discworld). All in all, I thought that balancing these various things sucked up some of the energy that might have otherwise gone into plot and humour. So, not my favourite Pratchett, though not awful either. You can get Thief of Time here.
Next up: The Fifth Elephant, of which I have fond memories.
Second frame of third issue of “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”:
The Doctor: Woo-hoo-ha-ha-ha! / “We are the Darkness! You would do well to fear us!” / Well, sorry to burst that delusional bubble, but we don’t. Julie: We don’t?
Two rather well developed Twelfth Doctor stories here. The first, “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”, is a nicely set up adventure mainly in an alternative history 17th century France, with the historical opera singer and adventuress Julie d’Aubigny as a one-off companion. It’s true to the spirit of The Girl in the Fireplace, though obviously with different characters and a completely different alien threat. An affirming read.
The other story, “Invasion of the Mindmorphs”, has the Doctor going to confront the creators of a comic strip called Time Surgeon with an eerie resemblance to his own adventures. A bit more could have been done with this concept, but it’s a funny enough idea and executed very much as a Capaldi era story.
When Seel and Orien arrived they were dressed splendidly for the occasion. They seemed taller than I remembered, proud and graceful, and treated me like a bride, which I supposed, in a sense, I was. Seel put white lilies in my hair, avoiding my eyes, and offered me a goblet of blue glass. The liquid inside it looked murky and tasted foul. I downed it as quickly as I could. They would take no chances with me; I would be drugged almost senseless.
A lot of people really love this book. I didn’t. The protagonist is adopted into the superhuman, supersexy Wraeththu, who are crushing the inferior homo sapiens (that’s people like you and me) and yet spend a lot of time violently arguing internally about power structures and the sexual pecking order, which are basically the same thing. It’s Storm Constantine’s best known single book, but I don’t think the racial and gender politics work for today. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner.
Jim, a pipe in his teeth, leaned back against the oak pew. His eyes shifted from the game and went to Nancy, who, with her chin supported in the crutch of her two hands, was working out her next move.
This was the best selling book of 1925 in the USA, by the largely forgotten Arthur Hamilton Gibbs – it’s his best-known book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but has only 11 raters on Goodreads and only 9 owners on LibraryThing. (The Great Gatsby, also published in 1925, has been rated by getting on for six million Goodreads users, and has almost 80,000 owners on LibraryThing, as of present writing.)
It’s a coming of age story about a young Englishwoman, who goes to Paris, discovers herself, discovers love, discovers that men are both tempting and awful, and finds her destiny back in England looking after her disabled father and developing her own Art; then at the end, one of the men turns out not to have been so awful after all.
There are comic yokels / grovelling working class folk, and although the heroine at one point seems ready to break into full feminist independence, the book doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and goes for a safe ending. It is not as funny as it thinks it is, and, like its heroine, is coy rather than sexy.
It is set immediately before the war and during its first half, and perhaps the readers of 1925 liked the story it told about the time before and during the collective loss of innocence. However I can’t really construct a case for rediscovering it as a lost classic. You can get Soundings here, but NB that the text is riddled with electronic scanning errors.
These both won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for work of 2007, awarded in 2008.
The second paragraph of the third section of The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is:
He was wandering by the Zuweyla Gate, where the sword dancers and snake charmers perform, when an astrologer called to him. “Young man! Do you wish to know the future?”
Back in 2008, I ranked it second on my ballot, behind The Cambist and Lord Iron, by Daniel Abraham, and wrote:
A lovely lovely story of time travel at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, working up all those human themes of loss and love in a richly imagined fantastic environment that Chiang has done so well before. I expect this will win.
I still think that it is really good, and it has certainly proved to have staying power. It’s a story of time travel paradoxes, predestination and acceptance. I love Borges’ short story “The Other”, in which the writer meets his younger self and finds that they do not understand each other. Chiang riffs on this theme as well, with the extra twist that the older self comes to collude in his younger self’s destiny. I also give it good marks for the subtly different portrayals of Baghdad and Cairo, respectful rather than Orientalist (at least that was my take).
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate was the only work on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novelette that year. The other Hugo finalists were “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”, by Daniel Abraham; “Dark Integers”, by Greg Egan; “Finisterra”, by David Moles and “Glory”, by Greg Egan. The other Nebula finalists were “Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone”, by Terry Bramlett; “The Children’s Crusade”, by Robin Wayne Bailey; “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change”, by Kij Johnson; “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche”, by Delia Sherman; “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, by Geoff Ryman; and “Safeguard”, by Nancy Kress.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union starts as follows (explicit surgical details redacted):
Instead, he lights a papiros. After a decade of abstinence, Landsman took up smoking again not quite three years ago. His then-wife was pregnant at the time. It was a much-discussed and in some quarters a long-desired pregnancy—her first but not a planned one. As with many pregnancies that are discussed too long there was a history of ambivalence in the prospective father. At seventeen weeks and a day—the day Landsman bought his first package of Broadways in ten years-they got a bad result. Some but not all of the cells that made up the fetus, code-named Django, had an extra chromosome on the twentieth pair. A mosaicism, it was called. It might cause grave abnormalities. It might have no effect at all. In the available literature, a faithful person could find encouragement, and a faithless one ample reason to despond. Landsman’s view of things-ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything prevailed… Three months later, Landsman and his cigarettes moved out of the house on Tshernovits Island that he and Bina had shared for nearly all the fifteen years of their marriage. It was not that he couldn’t live with the guilt. He just couldn’t live with it and Bina, too.
I ranked it third on my ballot that year, writing:
The setting is an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 – there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again.
Chabon’s viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it’s terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.
However, it’s not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don’t think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I’m not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie’s country houses, or Lindsey Davis’ richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters’ medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn’t make it fantasy).
Don’t get me wrong: I liked the book enormously. The setting seemed to me a very thought-provoking response to the history of Jews, in America in particular, since 1940, far better than the other attempts I’ve read recently. I’ll probably end up ranking it ahead of the other two nominees which I haven’t yet read and of which I don’t have huge expectations. But, while in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I’ve read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from both Halting State and Brasyl, so loses my vote on that account.
Coming back to it seventeen years later, I was not sure that I liked it as much. It’s difficult to believe the political set-up; where are the people who would have been lobbying in Washington to allow Sitka to remain Jewish? Is political extremism really monopolised by religious extremists? There is an intersection, sure, but it’s rarely the perfect overlay depicted here. There’s a bit of an assumption that the experience of urban American Jews applies to Jews everywhere, and I don’t see that that really tracks. And I must also say that I found it rather a long book. Anyway, you can get The Yiddish Policemen’s Union here.
In the Best Novella categories, three stories were nominated for both Hugo and Nebula: the Nebula-winning “The Fountain of Age”, by Nancy Kress; “Memorare”, by Gene Wolfe; and “Stars Seen Through Stone”, by Lucius Shepard. The other two Hugo finalists were “Recovering Apollo 8”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which I voted for, and “All Seated on the Ground”, a particularly silly story by Connie Willis, which won. The other Nebula finalists were “Awakening”, by Judith Berman; “The Helper and His Hero”, by Matt Hughes; and “Kiosk”, by Bruce Sterling.
There was no overlap in the Short Story categories. The Hugo finalists were “Tideline”, by Elizabeth Bear, which won, and also got my own vote; “Distant Replay”, by Mike Resnick; “Last Contact”, by Stephen Baxter; “A Small Room in Koboldtown”, by Michael Swanwick; and “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?”, by Ken MacLeod. The Nebula finalists were “Always”, by Karen Joy Fowler, which won; “Captive Girl”, by Jennifer Pelland; “Pride”, by Mary Turzillo; “The Story of Love”, by Vera Nazarian; “Titanium Mike Saves the Day”, by David D. Levine; and “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse”, by Andy Duncan.
The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form went to Stardust, and for Short Form to Blink. The Nebula for Best Script went to Pan’s Labyrinth.
Next in this sequence is The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Every season of the year wagons came through the streets and picked up bodies of derelicts. Late at night old ladies in babushkas came to the morgue looking for their husbands and sons. The corpses lay on tables of galvanized iron. From the bottom of each table a drainpipe extended to the floor. Around the rim of the table was a culvert. And into the culvert ran the water sprayed constantly over each body from an overhead faucet. The faces of the dead were upturned into the streams of water that poured over them like the irrepressible mechanism in death of their own tears.
This was the best-selling book of 1975 in America, though Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot has proven to have more staying power. It’s set in the period from 1902 to 1915, mostly in New Rochelle, New York, and concerns a white family (referred to as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather, and ‘the little boy’) and their relationship with a young black woman, her pianist boyfriend and their baby, and also a older Jewish man and his young daughter; but also all of these interweave with many famous people of the time, notably Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington and the intriguing socialite Evelyn Nesbit, who I hadn’t previously heard of and who sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to see how much of her story as told here was true (answer: most of it).
I really enjoyed this. I thought that the spirit of the age was convincingly portrayed, and the motivations of the characters always crystal clear and consistent. There is a gripping subplot about a racist fire chief who harasses the pianist, and the pianist’s revenge. The people seem like real people and the places real places. You can get Ragtime here.
I was surprised to see, however, that Ragtime was on the (very long ballot) for that year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel. I wouldn’t classify it as speculative fiction, not even as alternative history – the world is supposed to be our world, and historical events all take place as we know them to have taken place. But there were nineteen books on the ballot that year, so perhaps it was a quirk of the rules combined with some imaginative nominating. The winner of both Hugo and Nebula that year was The Forever War, with the other Nebula nominees including The Female Man, The Computer Connection, Invisible Cities, Dhalgren, (The) Missing Man, The Stochastic Man and my personal favourite Doorways in the Sand.
“But Cudjo know his father takee him to de compound of his father. I didn’t see him after he died. Dey bury him right away so no enemy come look down in his face and do his spirit harm. Dey bury him in de house. Dey dig up de clay floor and bury him. We say in de Affica soil, ‘We live wid you while you alive, how come we cain live wid you after you die?’ So, you know dey bury a man in his house.[”]
I came across this while looking up books which are set in the present-day country of Benin; it was written in 1927 and 1928 by the great Zora Neale Hurston, but published only in 2018, ninety years after it was written and more than half a century after she died. It’s an account of her interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, who was one of the last Africans to be captured, enslaved, and sold into the American South. About a third of the book describes his childhood and life in Africa. As a teenager, he was captured by the ruler of a neighbouring territory in 1860, and sold to an American slaver who brought him along with more than a hundred others to Mobile, Alabama.
Importing slaves had supposedly been illegal since 1808, but one could politely describe the enforcement of the ban as rather patchy. (My distant cousin Joseph Whyte was one of the crew of a Royal Navy ship which intercepted several American slave ships off the African coast in 1857; after being too successful, his ship was sent to Australia, but it disappeared with all hands somewhere along the way.)
Kossola / Lewis’s slavery lasted only five years, as the South lost the Civil War and all slaves were freed. He and some of the other ex-slaves tried to raise enough money to return to Africa, but the odds were stacked against them, and in the end they formed a new community south of Mobile called Africatown (or Plateau). He married and had six children, all of whom he outlived. (He would have been in his late 80s when Hurston interviewed him.) One of his sons was shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy; nothing new there. He himself was severely injured in a railway accident in 1902; he sued the train company and won compensation, but the award was overturned on appeal.
There are questions about how much of the text is Hurston’s and how much by local Mobile writer Emma Langdon Roche, but there are no questions about the effective immediacy of the first-person account of slavery and its aftermath. Apparently one of the reasons that the book was not published in Hurston’s lifetime is that she reports Kossola/Lewis’s words in his own dialect; for me that adds to the impact. I was startled to discover that 40 seconds of footage of him survives at the start of this short film compiling Hurston’s fieldwork:
A really interesting and moving book. You can get Barracoon here. My edition has extensive footnotes, and a foreword and afterword by Alice Walker.
Adam’s father Cyrus was something of a devil—had always been wild—drove a two-wheeled cart too fast, and managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable. He had enjoyed his military career, what there was of it. Being wild by nature, he had liked his brief period of training and the drinking and gambling and whoring that went with it. Then he marched south with a group of replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel girls up into the haystacks. The gray, despairing weariness of protracted maneuvers and combat did not touch him. The first time he saw the enemy was at eight o’clock one spring morning, and at eight-thirty he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that mashed and splintered the bones beyond repair. Even then he was lucky, for the rebels retreated and the field surgeons moved up immediately. Cyrus Trask did have his five minutes of horror while they cut the shreds away and sawed the bone off square and burned the open flesh. The toothmarks in the bullet proved that. And there was considerable pain while the wound healed under the unusually septic conditions in the hospitals of that day. But Cyrus had vitality and swagger. While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents. When he had his new leg, and painfully knew his condition, he hobbled about for days, looking for the girl. He told his bunkmates what he was going to do when he found her. He planned to cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife and get his money back. Carving on his wooden leg, he showed his friends how he would cut her. “When I finish her she’ll be a funny-looking bitch,” he said. “I’ll make her so a drunk Indian won’t take out after her.” His light of love must have sensed his intentions, for he never found her. By the time Cyrus was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.
First of the books that I acquired this summer from the old family home in Dublin, and what a start. It’s a grand generational story of Adam Trask, who moves from Connecticut to the Salinas Valley in California with his pregnant wife Cathy. After she gives birth to twins (it is implied that at least one of them is fathered by Adam’s brother), she shoots Adam in the shoulder and leaves, settling down discreetly to work at and then own the brothel in the next town over. The two boys, Aron and Caleb, grow up, and we move with deliberate and measured pace to a grand conclusion which I won’t spoil. The book was apparently Steinbeck’s favourite of his own writing and must have helped him get the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years after it was published.
There’s also a very interesting character from Northern Ireland in the first part of the book, Sam Hamilton, based on Steinbeck’s own grandfather from Ballykelly, which is about 25 km from the home of my own ancestors in Aghadowey (where my distant cousins still farm the land and live in the house built by my 4x great-grandfather). The Irish Times summarises Steinbeck’s description of his own visit to Ballykelly in 1952 and you can read the original here. That must have been after he wrote the Hamilton parts of East of Eden though, as he says he went to Ireland in the summer and the book was published in September. It’s rare enough to find Northern Ireland intruding in classic literature, and his depiction of Sam Hamilton, his wife Liz and their many children is intense and sympathetic, even though the main thrust of the novel is the story of the Trasks. (Steinbeck even puts himself as a child into the novel, as a casual onlooker.)
There’s also the intriguing character of Lee, who starts as a Chinese servant in the Trasks’ house, but ends up as a family member, shifting from pidgin to standard American English and supplying Biblical exegesis and philosophy when it is needed; there’s a particularly effective moment of Marcus Aurelius at the end. The women fare less well; Cathy / Kate is meant to be the villain, and I found her just a bit too evil at a couple of key moments, and Aron’s girlfriend Abra was just a bit too virtuous to be real. Still, Steinbeck was trying, I think.
This was my top unread top non-genre book, my top unread book acquired this year and the top unreviewed book in my LibraryThing catalogue. Next on all three piles is The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.
War here [Kosovo], of course, did not arrive without warning. It rarely, if ever, does. There were the tell-tale signs. Spikes in nationalistic rhetoric, defiant and threatening in tone, vowing to avenge the humiliation wrought upon their people and prevent further degradation. There was palpable tension and uncertainty, with mounting casualties amongst civilians and police as a game of cat and mouse ensued between the insurgency and security forces; the latter contriving even tougher curtailments of liberty and ultimately life. Regular army exercises meant the call to arms arrived long before the postman delivered the formal conscription notice. Decaying weapons were distributed and fraying uniforms procured. There always seemed to be a deficit of ammunition, at least for those inexperienced in handling weapons. Checkpoints were erected through the usual rudimentary means and identification cards closely scrutinised. There were mass arrests and confessions of terrorist activity forced under duress.
This was sent to me by the author in 2022, but I have only just got around to reading it; and I really regret having left it so long. It’s a well constructed set of anthropological observations about history and society in Northern Kosovo, which remains mainly inhabited by Serbs and under the strong influence of Serbia. But rather than look at the big picture, Bancroft zooms in on particular localities, and particular situations, to colour in the blurry spaces on the map. Kosovo is a complex country, and its history is contested, but in the end its people – including the people of Northern Kosovo – just want to live in peace and prosperity. You can practically smell the macchiato in the cafes.
I was particularly startled to read of the involvement of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty in the exploitation of the Trepča mines from 1927. I associate him mainly with the spectacular manuscript collection which now resides in Dublin Castle; but of course this collection was assembled as the fruits of exploiting mineral resources in many other countries, and Kosovo was not one of his bigger areas of operation. So it was an unexpected connection between Ireland and Mitrovica.
I suspect I’ll be featuring this in my list of Books You Haven’t Heard Of at the end of the year. Meanwhile, you can get Dragon’s Teeth here.
Its lamps lit very little. The colourless sheen of the arching, segmented stems, that looked more like plastic than wood or anything living. The faint flurries of the feeding fans or gills or whatever their function actually was. The limited range of the lamps the drone could mount barely cut through the sheer gloom, the curdled soup of what passed for air on Shroud. All was in shades of brown-grey, light and dark. Nothing had invested the energy into manufacturing pigments, because why put on an art show if nobody can see the pictures? Light and dark, and some yellowish tones, like old bone or diseased teeth or mustard gas. The brown of mud or excrement.
Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps doing it; this is yet another gripping story of the encounter between human explorers and a new form of alien life. The human protagonists trek across the hostile surface of a dangerous moon, and we also get viewpoint snippets from the perspective of the globe-spanning alien entity itself, as the two sides gradually come to understand more of each other, and the humans’ masterplan of converting Shroud into a hob of exploitation becomes less and less realistic. It’s really vivid, and Tchaivkovsky plays fair with the reader, with a coherent and credibly built world. Good stuff. You can get Shroud here.
I participated in a great Brian Aldiss centenary panel at Novacon last weekend, with Caroline Mullan, Mark Plummer and Alan Stroud. There was a fair bit of “what did he do” and “what was he trying to do” but we had a fair bit of “what Aldiss should people read” as well, to which the answer is “Helliconia”. A request for a show of hands from anyone who actually understood Report on Probability A produced a sea of people looking around without putting their hands up.
Here we have one of his less celebrated mid-period novels. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Directly I faced the Master, I felt some of those emotions—call them empathic if you will—which I have referred to as being unsusceptible to scientific method. Directly he spoke, I knew that in him, as in his creatures, aggression and fear were mixed. God gave me understanding.
Not one of the great Aldiss works, I’m afraid. Published in 1981, set during a global war in 1996, the narrator, who is the US Undersecretary of State, crashes on a Pacific island where the sinister Dr Dart, himself an embittered thalidomide victim, has been carrying on the tradition of H.G. Wells’ Dr Moreau by combining animal and humans through experimentation. Various other human exiles also live on the island.
It’s not so much a sequel to the original Wells novel, more an update to the present-ish day. There are a lot of traps about disability, race and gender to fall into here, and I’m sorry to say that Aldiss falls into pretty much all of them. I’m generally a huge Aldiss fan, but I would hesitate to recommend this even to completists.
I got the American edition, whose title is An Island Called Moreau; the original UK title, in homage to George Bernard Shaw, was Moreau’s Other Island. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is another short Aldiss novel, The Year Before Yesterday.
I first watched The Mysterious Planet in 2007. I wrote then:
The Mysterious Planet was Robert Holmes’ swan-song, from 1986. He wrote some of the best stories of the original Doctor Who run; this is not one of them. It’s the first segment of the infamous Trial of a Time Lord season, with the action of the main narrative (the Doctor and Peri land on a mysterious planet and must prevent the local bad guys from taking over the universe; also confusingly it may or may not be a far future Earth) frequently interrupted by flashforwards to a courtroom where the Doctor is on trial, the main story being presented as evidence for the prosecution.
The trial sub-plot simply does not work. There appears to be no due procedure that makes any sense; the evidence presented by the Valeyard (at least as far as this story goes) doesn’t do much to prove the case (as even the Inquisitor admits). If you simply tune out these deeply embarrassing bits, you are left with a fairly standard story: a couple of decent performances from guest actors, and a couple of very cardboard-looking robots.
When I came back to it in 2011, for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
I started watching the Trial of a Time Lord season in a rather foul mood. But in fact, rather to my surprise, I found myself warming to The Mysterious Planet – in relative terms, of course; it’s definitely in the lower third of Robert Holmes’ stories, and has a number of plot elements recycled from his previous scripts when he did them better. But there is a sense that the show might be finding its feet again: back to the 25-minute format, and also embedding the season in a narrative arc (which was successful last time it was tried) in which the Time Lords are up to no good; the basics are actually there, and I think it is the production values that let it down as much as anything. (Though I should admit that the plot is also a bit confusing and over-filled.) The Mysterious Planet is a little dull but it’s not actively bad, unlike most of the previous season.
Rewatching it again, I remain more negative than positive, though I liked some of the Holmesian characterisation. The ridiculous trial set-up remains very poor.
Holmes’ life ended sadly early. He died aged only 60 in 1986, half-way through writing the final story of that year’s Doctor Who season. This was the much contested Trial of a Time Lord arc, for which Holmes had contributed the first four episodes and was due to write the final two (but died before starting the last one). A higher-up at the BBC had sent round a brutal deconstruction of the flaws of the first four episodes (generally now referred to as The Mysterious Planet), which clearly deeply wounded Holmes and possibly even contributed to his illness and death. In a career of a quarter of a century, nobody before had been quite so brutal about his writing. It’s painful reading, and the one positive thing I will say is that the account here raises Eric Saward’s reputation in my view, as he attempted (but failed) to shield Holmes and also keep the show on the road. But between the lines it’s clear that Holmes no longer had what he had once had had. Between 1982 and his death in 1986, literally the only non-Who scripts he sold were three episodes of Bergerac and five for a short-lived drama series set in a Citizens Advice Bureau. Brutal though it is, the BBC higher-up’s criticism of The Mysterious Planet is mostly pretty well-founded.
Molesworth is defensive of The Mysterious Planet‘s virtues, but I’m afraid I am with the BBC hierarchy; it’s a turkey.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
This is, however, not one of Dicks’ greatest efforts. I’ve noted before how the Dicks/Holmes combination is only rarely successful on the printed page, and this, the last of the sequence, is fairly typical, a faithful recounting of what the viewer sees on the screen without much added. There are some mystifying slips, Peri’s full name being given as “Perpegillian”, for instance. It also fails (as did the original TV version) to establish the Time Lord trial setting convincingly (let alone fit it into continuity).
Nothing to add to that, on re-reading.
So I turned with interest to the latest Black Archive, released last month, by Jez Strickley. Sometimes the Black Archives about Doctor Who stories I did not like much achieve a bit of redemption for me by calling attention to aspects that I had not considered before, and sometimes they at least woo me with the author’s enthusiasm. Which would it be?
I’m sorry to say that of the 79 Black Archives that I have read so far, this was the least penetrable. Strickley has written it as an exploration of his pet concepts, topophilia and topophobia, through the lens of the story, but using many other sources as well. I found it dense and uninteresting, and I gave up after the first chapter. The second paragraph of the third chapter will give you some idea, though I did not get that far.
The life of daleswoman Hannah Hauxwell may be a rare example of Heidegger’s concept of dwelling in practice. Born in 1926, Hauxwell lived most of her life at Low Birk Hatt, a farm in Baldersdale in the North Pennines. In the early 1970s, her life became the subject of a television documentary. Until then, and for a time thereafter, Hauxwell lived frugally on the produce of her farming, managing without electricity and running water. Yet, despite these privations, her love of her home and the nearby Hunder Beck, whose ‘waters sing a song to me’, was unwavering. Reflecting on her life in that remote and, in winter at least, unforgiving setting, she once observed that ‘I know this place will always be loyal to me […] It’s mine […] and always will be […] even when I’m no longer here.’⁴ Hauxwell’s turn of phrase, described by one critic as ‘Wordsworthian’, acknowledges a conception of place which goes beyond the purely material and approaches a bond that may be Heideggerian in nature⁵. ⁴ Hauxwell, Hannah, and Cockcroft, Barry, Seasons of My Life: The Story of a Solitary Daleswoman, p10. ⁵ Hauxwell and Cockcroft, Seasons of My Life, p186.
You see what I mean? Heideggerian, eh?
An unprecedented miss for me in this generally hugely enjoyable series. I believe that the next will be on The Enemy of the World, by Robert Fairclough, who has previously written about The Prisoner; I have higher expectations.
I listened and contained myself with difficulty. Most of these women were rich. The whole wide beautiful world was theirs to wander in and they deliberately stayed in dirty dull London and talked about milkmen and servants! I think now, looking back, that I was perhaps a shade intolerant. But they were stupid – stupid even at their chosen job: most of them kept the most extraordinarily inadequate and muddled housekeeping accounts.
I came across this when researching my list of books set in Zimbabwe, and was sufficiently intrigued by an Agatha Christie book with an African setting to search it out. It didn’t make my list in the end, as less than a third of it is set in what was then Southern Rhodesia, the other settings being London, a ship on the Atlantic, and South Africa. And I don’t think it is classic Christie, but I enjoyed the diversion.
The protagonist, Anne Beddingfeld, is the daughter of a famous archaeologist / anthropologist, her father dies in the first chapter, leaving her free to have adventures on a budget. She gets involved with investigating two mysterious deaths in London; the trail takes her to Africa for mortal peril and romance. Agatha Christie had visited South Africa in 1922, during a political crisis, and clearly she observed and noted her surroundings. There’s some great description and characterisation, especially of the heroine – apparently Agatha Christie’s own preferred title for the book was Anna the Adventuress.
Of course, the whole book is permeated with casual racism – it almost goes without saying, but it must still be said. The plot is utterly bonkers, with a sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end and an unreliable secondary narrator. It’s much closer to the thriller genre than to Christie’s home turf of determined detection. But it was only her fourth novel (after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Secret Adversary and The Murder on the Links) and she was entitled to a bit of experimentation. An interesting variation from a familiar writer. You can get The Man in the Brown Suit here.
Even while screaming, part of the Doctor’s mind analysed the problem. They were falling towards something, which most likely meant they were dropping towards a planetary surface. Based on the rate of their descent, he made a guess at the strength of the planet’s mavity. Then he ran that information through a complicated calculation involving the number of seconds they had been in freefall and came up with an estimate that they had so far fallen 30,000 feet.
The Well was my favourite of this year’s Doctor Who stories. I wrote of it:
Midnight is (still) my favourite Russell T. Davis episode, and I must admit I was delighted when The Well turned out to be a sequel, with a real base-under-siege plot and a really scary monster. We had more mind-blowing stuff to come this season, but this was the scariest episode by far.
I was a bit surprised by the news that Gareth Powell had been assigned the job of writing the novelisation – I don’t think he has published any other tie-in literature, instead developing his own complex universes. But it makes perfect sense – Powell’s writing is definitely on the more advanced side of military SF, and The Well is the most military Doctor Who story for years; the Doctor and Belinda even change into military uniform, before the horror part of the story gets going.
And of course it’s a good piece of work. A lot of the appeal of the episode was visual, which can be difficult to translate onto the printed page, but Powell actually uses this for freedom to explore the rather small world of the Well and its visitors a bit more. The story is broken up by brief bios of the military characters, fleshing them out a bit more than we got on screen. The tension of the plot is effectively maintained. I felt pretty satisfied. You can get Doctor Who: The Well here.
Immediately after the war, a commission for transforming the KLA was set up, including representatives of KFOR, UNMIK, the KLA, and the FARK. The commission met approximately 40 times in order to determine the details of transforming the KLA. Three variants were discussed: the transformation of the KLA a) into a National Guard with 14,000 men; b) into a territorial defense with an active reserve, modeled on the old Yugoslavian pattern; and c) a combination of a) and b). KFOR and UNMIK rejected the Kosovar ideas since it was feared they could be a precedent for independence. As a result, the KPC model was actually dictated by the protectorate powers. The ambiguity with regard to the future role of the KPC was accepted by both sides. It is no coincidence that the Albanian name of the organization—Trupat Mbrojtese te Kosoves (TMK)—can also be translated as Kosovo Defense Corps. The question of why KFOR accepted the creation of a thinly veiled KLA successor organization remains open. Some possible answers include the emotional attachment NATO officers felt for the professionalism of their KLA counterparts (German General Reinhardt has, on occasion, noted that KLA commander Hashim Thaci was “like a son” to him). The hope that the KPC might play a useful ‘proxy’ role in combating violent acts by Yugoslav or Kosovo Serb forces may have played a role too. According to a statement repeatedly heard by the authors in Kosovo in early 2001, KFOR was simply interested in retaining some degree of control over the more radical firebrands within the KLA structures—“better in the KPC and under control, than in the hills and on the loose”.
As I work through my books acquired in 2022, there will be quite a few about Kosovo, because I stocked up on the subject in that year for a project that ultimately did not come to pass. This is a very brief start, an analytical paper from the Bonn Institute for Conflict Studies, dating from 2001, so only two years after the end of the conflict and before the debate about Kosovo’s future status shifted decisively in favour of independence.
It does what it says in the title, though the historical part has now been much more comprehensively covered by James Pettifer in The Kosova Liberation Army, and the present to near future part has been completely overtaken by events, starting with the 2001 conflict in North Macedonia which broke out only a few weeks after this paper was published. However it does bust a few myths about the origins and structure of the KLA, which was important to the overall narrative at the time.
In retrospect, the weird thing is that people in the international community were so neuralgic about the future security arrangements of the Kosovo government, independent or not. In my last year at the International Crisis Group (2006), we published a paper advocating a model which was pretty close to the eventual Kosovo Security Force which was founded in 2009. The skies have not fallen.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 68) The New Machiavelli, by Jonathan Powell The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer Wag the Dog: The Mobilization and Demobilization of the Kosovo Liberation Army, by Andreas Heinemann-Grüder and Wolf-Christian Paes The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley (did not finish) Dragon’s Teeth: Tales from North Kosovo, by Ian Bancroft Barracoon: the Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, by Zora Neale Hurston
Non-genre 5 (YTD 37) Our Song, by Anna Carey The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie East of Eden, by John Steinbeck Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs
SF 6 (YTD 104) Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates An Island Called Moreau, by Brian Aldiss “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, by Ted Chiang Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26) Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: The Well, by Gareth L. Powell Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 2 (YTD 29) The Twist, by George Mann et al Paradise Towers: Paradise Found, by Sean Mason and Silvano Beltramo
6,000 pages (YTD 68,000) 4/24 (YTD 103/270) by non-male writers (Hurston, Christie, Carey, Constantine) 2/24 (YTD 31/270) by non-white writers (Hurston, Chiang) 4/24 reread (“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, Mean Streets, Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) 189 books currently tagged unread, down 15 from last month, down 78 from October 2024.
Reading now Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Coming soon (perhaps) Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al Time Zero, by Justin Richards Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks The Spark that Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown Spa 1906, by Drac Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe The Woman in White, by Willie Collins The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Full printed extract from third letter (to his fiancée Edith Bratt, 26 November 2015):
The usual kind of morning standing about and freezing and then trotting to get warmer so as to freeze again. We ended up by an hour’s bomb-throwing with dummies. Lunch and a freezing afternoon. All the hot days of summer we doubled about at full speed and perspiration, and now we stand in icy groups in the open being talked at! Tea and another scramble – I fought for a place at the stove and made a piece of toast on the end of a knife: what days! I have written out a pencil copy of ‘Kortirion’. I hope you won’t mind my sending it to the T.C.B.S. I want to send them something: I owe them all long letters. I will start on a careful ink copy for little you now and send it tomorrow night, as I don’t think I shall get more than one copy typed (it is so long). No on second thoughts I am sending you the pencil copy (which is very neat) and shall keep the T.C.B.S. waiting till I can make another.
I’m a bit of a Tolkien obsessive, as you may perhaps have noticed, and this is the primary source for a lot of the stories about his life that I have known and loved for decades. I read all of the History of Middle Earth volumes a few years ago, but even so, it’s quite a delight to read about his writing in his own words. I knew that the process of writing The Lord of the Rings was painful and difficult; I had not realised that it was literally painful, given the extent of his and Edith’s ill health at the point that he was struggling to complete the book; perhaps there is a selection effect in that people in those days instinctively wrote openly to business partners about their medical problems?
He also complains bitterly about the costs of tax and housing – he and Edith moved several times to smaller and smaller places, and only at the end did Merton College provide him with free lodging and partial board, for which he was duly grateful.
His relationship with children and grandchildren seems to have been genuinely warm and loving. There are no letters to his daughter here, but that is presumably accidental, as she is mentioned in passing in other correspondence. He lived long enough to see his grandchildren starting on their careers, which obviously gave him much pleasure.
There are still some surprises. At the end of May 1945, writing to his sone Christopher about the coming end of WW2 in Asia, he says, “as I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war.” There is also some poorly articulated but deep anger at the racist policies of the government of South Africa, where he was born. One of those cases where an icon slightly exceeds one’s hopes.
And there’s his lovely reminiscence of his first encounter with Finnish, in a 1955 letter to W.H. Auden:
It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.
And I love this namedropping story from a January 1965 letter to his son Michael:
An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before’. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her….
I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who is not a Tolkien completist; but there are a lot of us around. You can get The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien here. (This is an expanded version, published only a few months ago.)
