Tag Archives: bookblog 2025

The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

In 1513, Luther decided that his main lectures in the coming year would deal with the Psalms. There was nothing untoward in this. The book of Psalms was generally considered by Christian theologians the most obviously “Christological” book in the Old Testament, and was therefore a favored subject for commentary throughout the Middle Ages. Notwithstanding Luther’s insinuation that the Bible was unknown to professional theologians, lecturing on a part of the Bible (especially this part) was not at all unusual. The academic pursuit of theology from the thirteenth century onwards had been based on one particular textbook, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, on which dozens, if not hundreds, of medieval commentaries and lecture series survive. But this textbook was the starting point for the study of theology, not its be-all and end-all. Scholars lectured on the Sentences, as Luther had done, by way of apprenticeship, to prove themselves as theologians, and theology students started by attending lectures on the Sentences, but the Bible was by no means ignored.

I got this for Anne a few years back, as it’s closer to her interests than mine; but I also vaguely knew Richard Rex and his wife Bettina from Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy in Cambridge University, at the very start of his career, so I was interested to see what has become of him.

And it’s quite a good book. The intellectual context needs a lot of unpacking for the reader unfamiliar with sixteenth-century Christian theology, but Rex takes us through Luther’s thought processes about what Luther was thinking, saying and teaching, as well as guessing at his (much-explored) psychological impulse to resist authority. I’d have liked maybe a little more on the micropolitics of the German statelets which created a context where (some) governments were more receptive to religious innovation than might have been the case in earlier centuries.

Rex does enlarge at length on the technological revolution of printing, which made the spread of new ideas possible, and which left the ecclesiastical authorities reeling. I must say I found strong similarities to the rise of social media today, and the ability of new political forces to seize the momentum and disrupt existing authority. There is a vivid description of Worms during the Reichstag meeting, festooned with posters of Luther and with the Elector Frederick ready to print off the pro-Luther side of the story for mass consumption as soon as it happened. Meanwhile the Pope had no idea what was happening.

Not a book for beginners, but certainly OK for my level of prior knowledge (better than the bio of Calvin that I read in 2022). You can get The Making of Martin Luther here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson.

The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Many weeks later, after endless fuss and expensive phone calls, they drove to the mortuary chapel at Dublin airport to load up the coffin and follow it down to Tullamore. The hearse went slowly for a while and then, at some secret moment, started belting along the road. It took the bends so fast, Carmel became a little fixated on the square end of the box disappearing up ahead. This chase went on for three hours, then the hearse slammed on the brakes and they were right on top of it again. People turned to stare. A man took off his hat and nodded right at her, through the glass. A woman stood at a garden wall with her children lined up in a row, and they each made the sign of the cross as the cars crawled past. In the centre of Tullamore, shopkeepers stood in front of half-shuttered windows, pedestrians blessed themselves and, when she looked behind, Carmel saw these people step down off the kerb to follow the cortège, like zombies. That is what she said later to Aedemar Grant, it was Night of the Living Dead Culchie. These people, in their anoraks and tweed caps, were the residents of a place that Phil McDaragh had scorned in verse – excoriated – a town he refused to visit after his mother died. And still the local people came, as the priest later intoned, to welcome their poet home.

A really great novel, with the main characters Nell and her mother Carmel; and frequent appearances from Phil, Carmel’s long-dead father, a well-known poet who was horrible to his family, but who still dominates their lives long after his death. There’s a lot of intricate exploration of family, played out against the background of Ireland in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It seems to be my first Anne Enright novel (also her most recent), but it won’t be my last. You can get The Wren, The Wren here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next on that pile is The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings.

The Gallant Edith Bratt: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Inspiration, by Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keats

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Edith was “sent away” in 1903 at the age of fourteen by Mrs. Jane Bratt, her grandmother, to be a boarder at Dresden House in Evesham, Warwickshire (TFA 27). While the Tolkien children do not say why Edith was “sent away” by her grandmother, the most likely reasons were she and the rest of the Bratt family did not want the responsibility of raising Edith (Simpson 148) nor any contact with an illegitimate child, who might raise questions in other people’s minds about the family’s respectability. Edith’s being an heiress did not remove these compelling considerations. By sending Edith to a boarding school, Mrs. Jane Bratt would both further Edith’s education and remove her from the Birmingham area, sparing the family any further shame. The thirty-mile trip from Birmingham to Evesham would have required approximately two hours on an Edwardian train, given train speed and the time needed to stop at other local stations.²

²”At the beginning of the twentieth-century railroads had an average speed of 40 mph.” “The development of the railway network in Britain 1825-1911.” Dan Bogart, Lee Shaw-Taylor and Xuesheng You, last viewed on 6/4/2020. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beca/ ae2e1cf76dca3ecc5a252d529e583806ecec.pdf.

Back in 2020, I read an earlier version of this, and I wrote:

This fascinating 185-page article about Edith Bratt, wife of J.R.R. Tolkien, was published online by the Journal of Tolkien Studies a couple of weeks ago, almost immediately withdrawn, I guess because the presentation was marred by some editing and formatting errors, and then republished with one of the original authors removed. There’s probably a story there, but it’s none of my business. I read it over an insomniac night, and it did not help me to go back to sleep. It’s a scholarly article rather than a monograph, but I am counting it as a book anyway.

Most Tolkien fans will be familiar with the received version of the history of the writer and his wife (as depicted in the recent film starring Lily Collins as Edith, which incidentally I loved). They met as teenage orphaned lodgers in Birmingham; she was a couple of years older, and a Protestant; Tolkien’s guardian, a Catholic priest, forbade him to have any further contact with her until he reached the age of 21 in 1913; when he got back in touch she was engaged to someone else, but broke it off to be with him and they married in 1916, just before he was posted to France for war duty. You may have seen the recent biopic, which I watched on my last transatlantic flight (and enjoyed).

When I reviewed John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War, I commented that “I would like to know more about the effect of Tolkien’s relationship with his wife Edith, who he was courting and marrying at this time [the war years], on his writing. Perhaps there is little to say, or to be discovered.” Well, it turns out that there was plenty to be discovered and to say.

Bunting looks in intense geographical and genealogical detail at Edith’s Midlands background. She was the daughter of a businessman and his wife’s maid; much of her childhood and early adult life revolved around evading the stigma of illegitimacy (she did not even tell Tolkien until after they were married) but she also inherited her father’s fortune and so was able to support Tolkien during their early married life, until his academic career took off.

The authors make a compelling argument that previous writers (notably Carpenter and Garth) have neglected the importance for Tolkien’s life and writing of Edith and their relationship, concentrating instead on his male friends. Indeed, my father, commenting on Carpenter’s biography, wrote in 1980:

…the relationship between Tolkien & his wife begins romantically, in their waiting 3 years for each other. Yet she wasn’t really suited to be a don’s wife. She disliked his friendship w CS Lewis, & he evidently told her to lump it. She was happy only at the v. end, when they lived in Bournemouth. Yet through it all he was fond of her – & presumably she of him, tho’ the author doesn’t offer evidence on this.

Thanks to their research, it becomes clear just how important the early separation from Edith, and their reunion, were for Tolkien’s creativity, and how his emotional state translates into his early work (seeing Warwick – of all places! – as a mythical city). There are some other fascinating insights as well – his mother’s mental lapses in the final stages of her illness perhaps informing some of the depictions of dissociation in Tolkien’s work; also a reference to someone else’s research on the inspiration for the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith. Also this led me to the research of Seamus Hamill-Keays on the Welsh inspiration for Buckland.

The whole thing is forensically researched and illustrated. Utterly absorbing if you are interested in Tolkien, and I think probably even if you are not you’ll find it a nice piece of biographical research on the life of a young woman born at the end of the nineteenth century.

Edited to add: The revised version of the article has also been withdrawn from the Journal of Tolkien Studies website. I hope it will reappear in some form someday.

I’m glad to say that the following year, 2021, it was properly published in the Cormarë series of Tolkieniana, with I think a bit more circumstantial detail and a delightful reconstruction of the episode where Edith danced for her husband in the woods at Dent’s Garth in 1917. It’s well worth getting if you want to see the most important feminine influences on Tolkien, whose story tends to get told in male terms.

It’s not perfect – the writing style is a tad clunky and in places repetitive, and it ends with an odd fixation on Tolkien’s knowledge of Sanskrit – of course he knew some, he was a philologist; but that doesn’t mean it was quite at the forefront of his mind all the time. But for Tolkienists, whether dilettantes like me or more serious folks, it’s a great read. You can get The Gallant Edith Bratt here.

Spent: A Comic Novel, by Alison Bechdel

Posted on by

Second frame of third chapter:

Caption: But Alison’s feeling of doom persists.
Alison (reading Capital, by Karl Marx): Wow. 1,042 pages to go.

This jumped off the shelf at me when I saw it in a London bookshop last month. Alison Bechdel, who we have met in three previous books, is now running a sanctuary for abandoned goats in rural Vermont, while her partner Holly is becoming an internet influencer thanks to her use of power tools for carpentry. Meanwhile Alison’s successful first memoir, Death and Taxidermy, has become a hit TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch as her father, but veering further and further from Alison’s own lived experience. Her old friends live down the road and are going through their own emotional transformations – there’s a fair bit of over-sixties sex in this book – and incidentally the world is going to hell, with Trumpists threatening civil war, climate catastrophe looming, and incidentally Alison’s MAGA sister writing her own autobiography to set the story straight.

I loved this, and laughed out loud several times on the London Underground and the train while reading it, much to the dismay of fellow passengers. The funniest scene perhaps is when the goats… no, I won’t spoil it for you. There are some serious points as well, both about the state of the world and the limited effect that one individual can have (which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try), and also about Life as Art and Art as Life. Recommended. You can get Spent here.

The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I took the M6 north. The satnav reckoned cutting across country to Derby and the M1 would be marginally quicker, or taking the M62 later on, but either way meant navigating a tangle of busy motorways with every chance of traffic jams. I stayed on the motorway until Tebay, where I stopped for a late lunch. The farming business that owns this service station offers freshly sourced local food which you can eat while you enjoy the view of the northern Lakes’ fells. I resisted the temptation to sit down for a meal in the restaurant and got a snack from the quick kitchen counter instead. Still, I’d go home the same way, I decided, and stock up with a few treats from the farm shop.

Sixth in Juliet McKenna’s series of novels about Daniel Mackmain, sent on supernatural missions around contemporary England (and in this case Scotland) by the Green Man and other supernatural entities; his girlfriend is a swan-maiden, and the villain this time is a chap who is a part-time giant cat and is wreaking personal havoc in various places.

As well as the complex politics of mythic figures from British folklore, there’s a very good sense of place here, with a particularly well realised Scottish castle in a vivid landscape. The British weather is also a memorable character. I enjoyed it and you can get The Green Man’s Quarry here.

This won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 2024, beating Airside, by Christopher Priest, and Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi, which I have read, and also Descendant Machine, by Gareth L. Powell, and HIM, by Geoff Ryman, which I haven’t. It’s Juliet McKenna’s first major award win in a 25-year career, and not before time.

Just to remind you of last year’s other winning novels: the Clarke Award went to In Ascension, the Hugo to Some Desperate Glory and the Nebula to The Saint of Bright Doors.

I have only one more BSFA winner to go, Three Eight One by Aliya Whitely; and I’ll wind up this reading project with Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer, which won the Clarke Award last month.

The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past, by Christopher Hadley

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

If the buried won’t help us, perhaps the invisible can prove the way. Where the road has lost all substance we must call upon the boundaries of the land it travels through, because ‘a genuine ancient long-distance road is nearly always a parish boundary at least in places,’ claimed Margary.

Having greatly enjoyed Hadley’s Hollow Places, I was eager to catch up with this story of a single Roman road in Hertfordshire and Essex, running 22 km between the small towns of Braughing and Great Chesterford, and coded RR21b by the great Ivan Margary.

The book has roughly one page for each 70 metres of the actual road (depending whether or not you count the notes). For most of its length, the road has simply disappeared to the unaided eye, though cropmarks do show its presence as a straight line between two points. It appears to have cut directly across hills and valleys.

Hadley meditates on the effect of the road, and on its meaning, and speculates about how long it would have taken to construct – and also to destroy; he reckons that locals simply removed most of the stones from which it was made for building. This is a fairly quiet bit of English countryside, and possibly was at its busiest in Roman times.

The emphasis is on the Roman Empire, and how it affected Britain; and on tracing the records of RR21b in maps and elsewhere; and also on the fauna and flora that currently inhabit the fields through which it runs. It’s a great meditation on history and the countryside. With 340 pages (including notes and acknowledgements) that’s about one page for every 65 metres of the road. The illustrations are lovely, though I wish they had been labelled on each page rather than referenced in the endnotes. You can get The Road here.

The Impossible Contract, by K.A. Doore

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She sat in the window of her room, legs tucked to her chest and hand dangling. Beyond, the sky was a cloudless blue, any mugginess lingering from the storms too thin to be felt, the air quickly returning to its usual stink of hot stones and sand. The gnats had all but disappeared with the rain, but a few still insisted on buzzing by her ear. She swatted at them in vain.

Sequel to The Perfect Assassin, and also acquired as part of the 2020 Hugo packet; I had forgotten reading the first book, but enjoyed this a lot all the same – woman assassin, in love with a healer, both get tangled up in magical skullduggery at the hands of the ruler, vividly realised trek across the desert (the whole thing is set in an Arabian style fantasy world), lots of exciting combat and magical action. These secondary worlds do not always grab me, but this one was fun. You can get The Impossible Contract here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is The Revenant Express, by George Mann.

Panter, by Brecht Evens

Posted on by

Second frame of third chapter:

Kristientje lives with her father and her cat. But her cat gets sick and dies (on page 4, so this is not a spoiler) and Kristientje retreats to her room. The magical Panther appears and starts to cheer her up with tales of Pantherland, where he claims to be the crown prince, and where everything is fun and perfect. Panther alienates Kristientje from her other toys and her father; Kristientje’s stuffed dog Bonzo disappears (we assume, eaten by Panther) and then gets reincarnated in dubious form, along with a bunch of disreputable visitors from Pantherland, including the appalling Mr. Trashcan. It’s quite a dark journey, told as ever in Evens’ super expressive watercolours. I wasn’t quite sure about the last book of his that I read, but this one is impressive stuff. You can get the Dutch original here and the English translation here.

This was my top unread non-English-language comic. Next on that pile is Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier.

The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

De slaapkamer stond vol met flesjes, schalen en kolfjes met planten-aftreksels, azijn, kamferolie en andere middeltjes om de pijn van de aan-staande moeder te verzachten. Hoewel de toortsen, die een parfum van hars verspreidden, de toch al pittige mei-temperaturen helemaal de hoogte in joegen, mocht volgens de traditie geen raam opengezet worden om frisse lucht toe te laten vooraleer de kersverse mama ter kerke was gegaan. De babyuitzet omvatte twee wiegen, eentje op houten wielen voor effectief gebruik en een andere, uiterst luxueus en verfijnd, om mee te pronken. De hertog wilde groots uitpakken met zijn eerstge-borene. Voedster Guyote, die het gewicht van haar kolossale borsten torste, at de klok rond, terwijl Margaretha van Vlaanderen zuchtend het ultieme moment afwachtte.The bedroom was filled with bottles, scales and flasks containing infusions, vinegar, camphor oil and other potions to alleviate the pain of the mother-to-be. Torches had been lit to release a resin perfume, and although this considerably increased the already high May temperatures, custom prevented anyone from opening the windows to let in some fresh air before the new mother had been churched. The layette consisted of two cradles, one on wooden wheels for actual use and the other, extremely luxurious and refined, for showing off. The duke didn’t want to cut any corners with his firstborn. Wet nurse Guyote, who suffered under the burden of her colossal breasts, ate round the clock, while Margaret of Flanders sighed and waited for the ultimate moment.
English translation by Emily Forest-Flier

I read this in the original Dutch in 2019, and wrote then:

This is a big huge book by a Flemish writer about the history of Burgundy in the time when it included the territory from Switzerland to Friesland and everywhere in between, most notably almost all of what is currently in Belgium. The downfall of Burgundy is treated in a couple of fiction books that I have read – Dorothy Dunnett has the Battle of Nancy in one of the later Niccolo books, and it’s a central parallel timeline theme of Mary Gentle’s Ash. But I confess I knew very little about it.

This first few chapters look at the emergence of Burgundy as an entity from the confusion of post-Roman Europe, but the meat of the book is an account of the century or so from 1369, when Philip the Bold married Margaret of Flanders and united the territories from Dijon to the North Sea, to the Battle of Nancy in 1477 in which Charles the Bold (Philip’s great-grandson) was killed and Burgundy’s pretensions came to an end. It’s full of incidental detail, the assassination of John the Fearless, Joan of Arc, the Feast of the Pheasant; Van Loo also takes us through the great art of the day and the politics behind it – the big names here are Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.

If the Burgundians had had better luck, the kingdom might have survived as a single territory to the present day. The presence of so many great cities in the territory meant that there was an early tradition of civic engagement and government. The variety of languages spoken meant that innovative policies about linguistic governance needed to be worked out sooner rather than later. Revolts tended to end with settlements involving greater rights for citizens rather than repression (though not always). The argument is made that some of the foundations of the modern state were laid in medieval Burgundy.

I must say that for me I found the overlapping sovereignties of the period rather reminiscent of today’s situation in Belgium. My home is less than 5km from the linguistic frontier, which was only drawn in 1962 and became a provincial boundary only in 1995 when Brabant was divided. But at the same time we are only 10km from Tourinnes-le-Grosse, which was an exclave of the Prince-bishopric of Liège within the Duchy of Flanders for many years. The attempt to govern Belgium as a unitary state from 1830 to 1962 was the real historical anomaly.

Even after Nancy, it wasn’t all over; Charles the Bold’s daughter Margaret was of age and ruled well for five years until her death after a hunting accident in 1482, aged 25. Perhaps that is the real turning point. (And perhaps it’s telling that historical narrative, including this one, tend to concentrate on the disaster of Nancy without reflecting that Margaret inherited most of her father’s territories intact and the disintegration happened after her death, not his.)

A recently arrived diplomat told me a couple of days ago that he had been recommended this book as a good entry into the history of this part of the world. I think my advice would be to wait until there is an English translation. It’s very good, but at 519 pages of detailed yet also idiomatic Dutch, it’s a tough slog for the non-native speaker. You can get it here.

I was sufficiently interested to get hold of the English translation when it came out, and to reread it for more nuggets. The Burgundians came very close to establishing an independent state as a buffer between France and Germany, and the map we have of Europe today is the result of dynastic accident and battlefield circumstance, with nothing inevitable about it. Van Loo is also very good on the extent to which the art of van Eyck and van der Weyden was exploited by the Burgundian rulers in the process of statecraft.

A point that I had missed was that the independence of the Burgundian and Netherlands courts from the jurisdiction of the Parlement de Paris became a key issue in the evolving constitutional settlement. Judicial competition is nothing new, of course, but I had not realised that it was an issue even in the High Middle Ages.

Anyway, you can get the English translation of The Burgundians here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2021 and my top unread non-fiction book. Next on the first of those piles is A Tall Man in a Low Land, by Harry Pearson; next on the other would have been Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb, but it turned out to be rubbish so instead it’s The Bone Woman, by Clea Koff.

Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The rich scent of hare and juniper stew drew my attention back to the meal itself, reminding me how hungry I was. It was still steaming and the copper jug that held it was almost scalding to touch. A heap of breaded asparagus fenced in lightly charred mushrooms. Half a loaf of crusty bread sat in a basket. I sniffed at a small jug to discover it was full of blood, presumably hare, to go with the stew. Usually, though, it was stirred in before serving rather than after.

We got an extract of this to read in the 2018 Hugo packet, and I was not super impressed:

An interesting parallel history – what if Victorians had discovered a gateway to a fairyland, and sent missionaries? First few chapters are an interesting setup, though it seems a bit narrow in scope – how come only English missionaries are interested in exploring? Loses points for consistently misquoting John 1:1.

But reading the whole book, it makes an awful lot more sense. This is a story about nineteenth century Britain attempting to colonise Arcadia (ie Fairyland) through the Church, and the identity of the colonisers and what is really going on in a culture which the Empire is trying to control; it’s also rooted in British faery lore, and nineteenth century classic fiction. The descriptions of people and places are very arresting, and the message subtle but clear. Recommended, and I regret not getting to it sooner. You can get Under the Pendulum Sun here.

“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link

Posted on by

Third paragraph (it has no sections):

One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where her mother had written it in permanent marker, when Natalie went to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had a job.

This was the subject of the very last of my first set of reviews of joint winners of the Hugos and Nebulas in the written fiction categories, published in January 2008 before I completely ran out of steam for that project. I wrote then:

I didn’t vote for it. Indeed, I put it last of the five nominees in the novelette category for the Hugos, where I had a vote as a Worldcon member; not because I didn’t like it, but because I liked the other stories on the ballot even more. The result was the closest of the four fiction categories, and voters found it difficult to choose for the lower places – second place decided by a single vote, joint win for third place. I don’t begrudge the result; all five nominees were very good, and I see that by the time the Nebulas came around I had changed my views and put it top (though three of the other four stories of course were different). Well, what was it Emerson said about consistency?

In fairness to myself, I think it’s a story that grows on you. On first reading I found it very entertaining but didn’t think it was especially deep; part of my increase in affection for it came about as a result of reading the whole Magic for Beginners collection of Kelly Link’s stories and developing a taste for her particular style of magical realism, urban fantasy, underlaid with darker tones. ‘The Faery Handbag’ is a story told by Genevieve, a young woman living near Boston whose grandmother came with her handbag from far-off Baldeziwurlekistan; the handbag may or may not contain a fierce canine guardian, Grandmother Zofia’s home village, Genevieve’s grandfather Rustam and her boyfriend Jake. But Genevieve has lost the handbag (this is not a spoiler as she tells us so on the second page). And that’s about it.

Part of my initial under-appreciation of the story may be my own background, as a native of Northern Ireland who has worked on the various different countries of Eastern Europe for the last eleven years. Perhaps from an American perspective, Baldeziwurlekistan is an amusing mix of those funny European countries over there, combining Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and classical elements in its mythology. For me, the lack of precision in the geography of Baldeziwurlekistan was a problem; I need to know where things are on the map, and Link’s story is about taking them off the map. I also found myself a bit frustrated by the narrator’s ambiguity about her own reliability, though other reviewers felt this was part of the story’s charm.

Having said that, I agree with everyone who loves Link’s descriptive writing here, from the account of looking through second-hand clothes in the first paragraph to the poignancy of Zofia’s death at the end; and the way we learn about the narrator’s frame of mind from the way she describes the events around her is tremendously subtle and effective. Indeed, as Abigail Nussbaum points out, it’s a bit more approachable than some of Link’s other stories, which may (again) be part of the reason I didn’t quite take to it immediately. But I’ve found it rather a difficult story to grasp sufficiently to write about, which is part of the reason this series of reviews has been on hiatus for seventeen months.

(And of course I never returned to that sequence, instead rebooting the joint Hugo and Nebula winners in chronological order starting in 2017.)

Rereading the story now, I found that it has grown on me again – in particular I loved the resonance between grandmother Zofia and grandfather Rustam, and present-day Genevieve and boyfriend Jake. And perhaps I have got more used to American humour in the last two decades, but I found the story funnier than my recollection. Definitely worth revisiting. “The Faery Handbag” is available on Link’s website for free.

“The Faery Handbag” won the Hugo for Best Novelette in Glasgow in 2005, the first ceremony that I attended. Best Novel went to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke; Best Novella to “The Concrete Jungle”, by Charles Stross; and Best Short Story to “Travels with My Cats”, by Mike Resnick.

These were the days of the crazy Nebula nominations system, so it won the 2005 Nebula for Best Novelette in 2006 (for a 2004 publication). Best Novel went to Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman; Best Novella to “Magic for Beginners”, also by Kelly Link; and Best Short Story to “I Live With You”, by Carol Emshwiller (who turned 85 the month before the ceremony).

Of the other Best Novelette finalists, “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi was on the ballot with “The Faery Handbag” both times, and “The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe was on the same Hugo ballot and the previous year’s Nebula ballot.

Next in this sequence: “Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle.

I don’t know where this illustration comes from, but it’s cute.

The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

After two hundred years of scholarship, the Gaulish language is better known today than it was at the end of the Roman empire. The literal sense of the word ‘Mediolanum’ is now well established. The Gaulish dictionary compiled by Xavier Delamarre defines it as ‘a term of sacred geography: ‘a holy centre… perhaps a central point of reference on the vertical axis of the three worlds – upper, middle and lower’. For students of the Celts, this is familiar ground. In Celtic mythology, ‘middle’ was a three-dimensional term. It referred not only to the earth that lies between the upper and the lower worlds, but also to the intersection of lines based on the cardinal points. According to Celtic legend, Ireland was divided in the first century AD into four kingdoms, each of which gave a part of itself to form a fifth, central kingdom called Mide (or Meath), signifying ‘middle’. This is the cruciform pattern that can be seen on the ceremonial Celtic bronze spoons which began to appear all over Europe in about 800 c. It usually takes the form of two perpendicular lines with a circle at the centre. The so-called Celtic cross of the early Christian Church is probably a direct descendant of those designs.

I was intrigued by this book which offered to unfold the Celtic geographies of Europe, but unfortunately it is all crank stuff, written by someone who spent too long thinking deep thoughts while on long bike trips and then staring into the Internet, and not enough time talking to actual experts or reading up on the scholarship. You can get it here, but I wouldn’t bother.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2022, and would also have been next in line as my top unread non-fiction book if I had finished The Burgundians first, but I didn’t. Next on those piles respectively are The Master, by Louise Cooper, and The Bone Woman, by Clea Koff.

1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illies

Posted on by

Second paragraph of March chapter in original German:

Meier-Graefes Haus in Nikolassee atmete französischen Chic, hatte Eleganz und eine gewisse Behäbigkeit, es war perfekt zugeschnitten auf den gerade 50Jahre alt gewordenen Meier-Graefe und seine Ehefrau (ein paar Jahre später übrigens wurde dann der Architekt Epstein post mortem sein Schwiegervater, weil Meier-Graefe in dritter Ehe dessen Tochter Annemarie heiratete, aber das verwirrt jetzt nur). Hier, im Kirchweg 28. »draußen auf dem Lande«, wie Meier-Graefe in Briefen an den Maler Edvard Munch sein Haus lokalisierte, entstand 1913 ein zentrales Werk der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung: »Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst«, die ab 1914 erscheinen sollte.Meier-Graefe’s house in Nikolassee exuded French chic, had elegance and an air of cosiness, it was perfectly tailored to Meier-Graefe, who had just turned 50, and his wife (a few years later, by the way, the architect Epstein became his father-in-law posthumously, because Meier-Graefe married his daughter Annemarie in his third marriage, but that’s just confusing). Here, at Kirchweg 28, ‘out in the country’, as Meier-Graefe described his house in letters to the painter Edvard Munch, a central work of art historiography was written in 1913: ‘The History of the Development of Modern Art’, which was to be published from 1914.
My translation because this section is missing from the English version that I bought.

I picked this up cheap in a Leuven bookshop a couple of weeks ago, partly out of interest in contrasting it with a similar book by my friend Charles Emmerson. Both of them look at the world in 1913 through contemporary records, with the benefit of hindsight and knowing what was around the corner.

Florian Illies’ book looks mainly at the German and Austrian empires, from Kiel to Trieste, with occasional excursions to Britain, France, Italy and America. It’s a fascinating delineation of the links between politics, science and the arts. Stalin and Hitler are both known to have enjoyed strolling in the gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna that January, and may have tipped their hats to each other as they passed. Franz Kafka had an on-and-off relationship with Felice Bauer. Thomas Mann was coming to terms with his own sexuality. James Joyce was teaching and writing in Trieste. Rilke was loving and writing. Freud and Jung were treating people. The Futurists were starting. Proust self-published Du côté de chez Swann. I had never heard of Der Tunnel, in which a tunnel is built connecting America and Europe. The Mona Lisa, stolen in 1911, was found in Italy in December. There were school shootings in Bremen and Württemberg. Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler launched into their passionate affair, commemorated in Kokoschka’s art.

I found a lot of new names here, particularly literary women who had previously escaped me – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Else Lasker-Schüler, Coco Chanel. There are lots of elements all adding up to a thought-provoking portrait of a time and several places, from an angle I don’t know as well as I thought I did.

I was dismayed to discover that my translation has been cut by around 20% – the German original has 324 pages, my English version only 267. There is no hint of any abridgement anywhere in my copy. That’s frankly deceptive on the part of the English language publisher.

You can get it here.

Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third section:

“Detective Wright, you are cleared to continue your operation. Re-establish contact and proceed as planned,” Palmer said.

A short bleak dystopian satire set in a world where literature is under state control, and the apparatus of government security forces is used to stop people from encountering dangerous ideas, striking through their families. Hits quite hard. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Raven Heart, by “Murphy Lawless”.

Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton (and Christopher H. Bidmead); and some reflections on Escher

Posted on by

I was again glued to the TV in January 1982 as Peter Davison took on the role of the Fifth Doctor in Castrovalva, and I really enjoyed the look and feel of the story, even if the plot was a little confusing. I was fourteen. When I came back to it in 2007, I wrote:

This was the first Peter Davison story and is one of the better ones, but a bit atypical in that the Doctor spends much of the time trying to reconstruct his own personality. Lots of lovely nods to earlier Doctors, most of which were rather lost on me in 1981. The companions are still rather feeling their way, with Nyssa being the clever one who explains everything, coming across as rather cold despite her warm and fuzzy fairy costume, while Tegan gets to be the one who everything has to be explained to. Adric seems to have rather enjoyed being tied up by the Master… The plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but the depictions of two magical places – Castrovalva itself and the Tardis interior – are both rather wonderful, and the music and general sense of goodwill makes it still good viewing.

Continue reading →

The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

<Stop that,> she told the land firmly, pushing its attention away from Wyn. <You’re fond of him, remember? I know his secrecy is trying, sometimes, but this reaction is quite out of proportion to the offense. He’s our friend.> Friend wasn’t quite the right label anymore, but she hadn’t found a new one yet that didn’t sound either silly or premature.

Another from the 2020 Hugo packet, a second installment of a series set in a secondary world which simply failed to draw me in. The fact that I was reading Jeannette Ng’s (much better) Under the Pendulum Sun at the same time didn’t do it any favours. I stopped around page 100. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is The Revenant Express, by George Mann, which I’m approaching with some trepidation as I haven’t always found his writing to my taste.

Fear Death By Water, by Emily Cook

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Thankfully, her bedroom was on the third floor of Longstone Lighthouse. Flooding had been an unfortunately frequent occurrence in her downstairs bedroom at their old lighthouse on Brownsman Island. The windows often failed to withstand storms, meaning large waves would cascade through the broken frames and shattered glass. On one occasion, when she was a young girl, Grace came close to drowning as the room filled with seawater and forced the door shut. The memory of it still sent shivers down her spine with every subsequent storm that passed.

The first original Fifteenth Doctor novel, by Emily Cook, who organised the memorable Twitter watchalongs during lockdown in 2020. Set between the two Fifteenth Doctor seasons, it’s a straightforward aliens-intervene-in-celebrity-history story, the celebrity being lighthouse heroine Grace Darling (apparently a relative of Cook’s; Cook writes herself into the book as well) and the aliens turning out to have some complexity. Gorgeous characterisation of Ncuti’s Doctor, not massively original plot. You can get it here.

Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter (‘The name of the country I have forgotten’ – remembering and dismembering in Sir Henry Sidney’s Irish Memoir (1583), by Willy Maley) – this is a long one!

In recent years, with the advent of the new historicism, local and topographical readings of early modern Ireland have been supplanted by more theoretically sophisticated work on mapping.⁵ This refinement of the relationship between literary culture and geographical understanding has been accompanied br a questioning of the extent to which accurate depiction of place was an essential prerequisite for conquest and colonization.⁶ Maps have gaps, just like texts, and their silences may be as eloquent as their inclusions.⁷ Perhaps the most famous mapping moment, the most remarkable unfolding of a chart in Renaissance literature outside of King Lear, is Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), when Eudoxus interrupts Irenius to say:

I see now all your men bestowed, but what places would you set their garrison that they might rise out most conveniently to service? and though perhaps I am ignorant of the places, yet I will take the mappe of Ireland before me, and lay it before me, and make mine eyes (in the meane time) my schoole-masters, to guide my understanding to judge of your plot.⁸

⁵ R.B. Gottfried’s ‘Irish geography in Spenser’s View‘, English Literary History, 6 (1939), 114-37, is an example of the earlier tradition. The recent criticism includes Bruce Avery, ‘Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A view of the present state of Ireland, English Literary History, 57:2 (1990), 263-79; David Baker’s ‘Off the map: charting uncertainty in Renaissance Ireland’ in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland: literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 76-92; Bernhard Klein’s ‘English cartographers and the mapping of Ireland in the early modern period’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 2:2 (1995), 115-39; Julia Lupton’s ‘Mapping mutability: or, Spenser’s Irish plot’ in Bradshaw et al. (eds), Representing Ireland, 93-115; and Joanne Woolway Grenfell, ‘Significant spaces in Edmund Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland,’ Early Modern Literary Studies, 4:2, Special Issue 3 (September 1998), 6:1-21 URL:http://purl.oclc.org/ emis/04-2/woolsign.htm.
⁶ Peter Barber is among those who have questioned the obsession with cartographic evidence in reading the culture of the early modern period See ‘Was Elizabeth interested in maps – and did it matter?”, TRHS, 14 (2004), 185-98
⁷ J.B. Harley has argued along these lines in ‘Silences and secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe’, Imago Mundi, 40 (1988), 57-76. I am grateful to Thomas Herron for this reference. While I have some sympathy for Harley’s position, and find his use of Foucault persuasive, I am also partial to Foucault’s distinction between the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and an ‘incitement to discourse’. See ‘We “other” Elizabethans’, the introduction to Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: colonialism, culture and identity (Basingstoke, 1997), 1-10. I come closer to Harley in my ‘Forms of discrimination in Spenser’s A view of the state of Ireland (1596; 1633): from dialogue to silence’ in Willy Maley, Nation, state and empire in English Renaissance literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke, 2003), pp 63-91. Cartography in a colonial context carries many dangers. Sir John Davies, writing to the privy council on 28 August 1609, reported the fate of a mapmaker in Ulster, where ‘the enhabitants tooke of his head, by cause they wouid not have their cuntrey discovered’. Cited in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Representing Ireland; literature and the origins of conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge, 1993), 13.
⁸ Andrew Hadfield & Willy Maley (eds), Edmund Spenser, A view of the state of Ireland (1633): from the first printed edition (Oxford & Malden, 1997), p. 96. All subsequent references are to this edition by page number in the text.

I’m still hoping to get around to my project on Irish history in the Tudor period at some point, and I will really not complain if that aspiration sometimes leads me to read brilliant books such as this.

There are sixteen substantial essays here, with an introduction by co-editor Herron, and none of them is a dud, which is really unusual for any book with separately commissioned pieces by that many authors. All of them address the proposition that there are many interesting things to say about Ireland and the Renaissance, two words that are not often used in the same sentence.

Eight of the chapters are about learning and literature (including one about the Counter-Reformation). Topics covered include the teacher Peter White (who I suspect may have been a distant relative of my family), Sir Henry Sidney of course, and the contemporary literary treatment of the glamorous Thomas Stukley.

Six chapters then look at artefacts, mostly architecture – the front cover features Sir Walter Ralegh’s place in County Cork, which still survives as a private residence! – with a bit of art as well, including Bartlett’s maps of the Nine Years War. The standout chapter for me was on the bridge at Athlone constructed by Sir Henry Sidney and demolished in 1844, or rather on the sculptures and inscriptions that adorned it.

Two final chapters examine the personal accounts of two aristocratic women who unsuccessfully defended their castles in 1641, and the celebrations in Dublin of the restoration of Charles II twenty years later. (Your regular reminder that the first recorded Indian immigrant to Ireland was burned out of his home by Irish nationalists.)

One last comment – this is a particularly heavy book, with lovely plates and illustrations, well produced from Four Courts Press. It will last for the ages. A grim comparison with the previous book I finished, Not So Quiet… by Helen Zenna Smith.

You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex.

Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This arrangement, however, was strictly for the hoi polloi. If one were rich enough, one could use the docking facilities at the hub of the Mons Venturi wheel for private shuttle craft. Benny hauled herself through the airlock of one such of these, reflecting that all of this seemed to be a needlessly expensive method of transferring her back to the point from which she’d started, albeit several thousands of kilometres above it.

Next in the sequence of Bernice Summerfield novels, this was an interesting paired reading with Freya Marske’s A Restless Truth because it’s also an sfnal murder/crime mystery on a ship; a spaceship this time, with Bernice Summerfield pitted against the assembled wiles of the galaxy’s best / worst detectives to try and solve the identity of the mysterious thief known as the Cat’s Paw. (Who was prefigured in the previous three novels, though I didn’t notice.)

It’s generally funny and witty, and a good parody of the mystery genre with also some decent characterisation of Benny. As one reviewer puts it, Stone is “operating in a league entirely his own, even if nobody – himself included, one suspects – is quite certain exactly what sport he’s actually supposed to be playing.” Could have done without the digs at autism though, which really bring the book down a couple of points for me.

You can get it here.

Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The stench that comes out as we open the doors each morning nearly knocks us down. Pools of stale vomit from the poor wretches we have carried the night before, corners the sitters have turned into temporary lavatories for all purposes, blood and mud and vermin and the stale stench of stinking trench feet and gangrenous wounds. Poor souls, they cannot help it. No one blames them. Half the time they are unconscious of what they are doing, wracked with pain and jolted about on the rough roads, for, try as we may—and the cases all agree that women drivers are ten times more thoughtful than the men drivers—we cannot altogether evade the snow-covered stones and potholes.

Powerful novel about the experiences of a woman ambulance driver on the front during the First World War, by Evadne Price, Australian-born writer and playwright, who in the last part of her career was a writer of astrology columns for magazines (more fiction, I guess). She had not actually been a V.A.D. driver herself, but drew heavily from a friend’s diary. It was commissioned as a satirical riposte to All Quiet on the Western Front, but ended up as something very different.

The key thing about the book is the visceral description of misery, trauma and death on the battlefield – and I am struggling to remember reading any other portrayal of trench warfare that is quite so explicit about the daily horror of it all. Most accounts dwell on the awfulness of death, without giving much attention to the awfulness of life in that situation.

But tied in with this is a constant reflection on class and gender. The narrator is an upper class woman, and class divisions do not completely dissolve on the battlefield. There is a memorably psychopathic supervisor. The relatives at home have no understanding of what is being done in their name.

And there is plenty of sex as well, though much less explicit than the body horror of the trenches. The narrator has a couple of flings. Her fiancé is grievously injured and cannot have children. There is a particularly memorable passage where the narrator lies to her rich aunt to get money for her sister’s abortion.

My edition has a 50-page afterword by Jane Marcus, who puts the book in context with other writing about the war by both women and men, and mentions a few other figures that I have bumped into in my explorations, notably Mary Borden, who later ran the WW2 hospital founded by my grandmother’s aunt and F.T. Jesse, who my grandmother met in 1926. And the whole story is interesting context for my great-great-aunt’s efforts. But even without that personal element, it is gripping. You can get it here.

My edition has a striking cover, a portrait of a V.A.D. driver by Gilbert Rogers. Unfortunately it does not seem a very robust publication, and after a few days of carrying it around in my bag, the pages and binding began to warp. I see that Virago have also done an edition, which may be longer lasting (but won’t have the Jane Marcus afterword).

June 2025 books

Posted on by

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 38)
Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton
1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illies
The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb (did not finish)
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past, by Christopher Hadley
The Gallant Edith Bratt: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Inspiration, by Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays

Non-genre 2 (YTD 21)
Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright

SF 7 (YTD 64)
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster (did not finish)
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng
The Impossible Contract, by K.A. Doore
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 16)
Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone
Fear Death By Water, by Emily Cook
Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead

Comics 2 (YTD 18)
Panter, by Brecht Evens
Spent, by Alison Bechdel

5,500 pages (YTD 40,800)

12/21 (YTD 64/149) by non-male writers (Bunting, Smith, Enright, Marske, Lancaster, Harding-Shaw, Link, Ng, Doore, McKenna, Cook, Bechdel)
1/21 (YTD 22/149) by non-white writers (Ng)
5/21 rereads (The Burgundians, The Gallant Edith Bratt, “The Faery Handbag”, Ship of Fools, Doctor Who: Castrovalva)
224 books currently tagged unread, down 7 from last month, down 83 from June 2024.

Reading now
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex
F**k Work, Let’s Play: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It, by John Williams

Coming soon (perhaps)
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al
Down, by Lawrence Miles
Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen
Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by by John Higgs
The Revenant Express, by George Mann
Raven Heart, by Murphy Lawless
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson
The Master, by Louise Cooper
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley
The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
Final Cut, by Charles Burns
“Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle
Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire
A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson
The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

2025 Best Poem Hugo; and WSFS Business Meeting Best Poem proposal

Posted on by

2025 Hugos: Goodreads / Librarything stats | Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Graphic Story or Comic | Related Work | Dramatic Presentation, Long and Short | Fancast | Poem | Lodestar | Astounding

So, the last literary category in this year’s Hugos that I’m going to write up is the special category award for Best Poem, a one-off for 2025. I found it pretty easy to rank them.

1) Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead. Second paragraph of third chapter:

I spend a while exploring the tall halls,
Searching the archways for an ideal place.
It should be comfortable and intimate;
I always prefer to be warm at church.

This is a tremendous piece of work, 224 pages in length, a narrative about a generation starship and competing visions of the future, making delightful innovations of form and content. I really hope it wins. You can get Calypso here.

The others are all much shorter.

2) Your Visiting Dragon, by Devan Barlow. Third stanza:

Be prepared for your visiting dragon to steal
your scarves, your spoons, your salt shakers
or anything else that captures their fancy
They will, nearly always,
leave them behind at season’s end

Most of these finalists are telling narrative stories; I liked the way that this one is more of a situation, not particularly trying to have a plot. Poetry can be more than stories in verse. (OK, my top vote is going to a story in verse.)

3) We Drink Lava, by Ai Jiang. Third stanza:

It was clear why humans could not drink
lava like we, so unaccepting of their pasts,
so much fear for their futures, where we find
enjoyment experiencing both in the present.
Because to us, that is all that matters.

An interesting portrayal of human emotions and passions as seen and interpreted by lava-drinking gods.

4) A War of Words, by Marie Brennan. Third stanza:

Today it was the water—
the big water that divides us—
we’re losing more and more,
more battles, more words,
all gone across the water I can’t name anymore
because it belongs to them now,
the—
what are they—
I had a word for them this morning, I know it—

A story about words being stolen, or perhaps rather raided, which works effectively as a poem.

5) Ever Noir, by Mari Ness. Third section (arguably):

Sometimes they spill a golden coin or two,
or seven tarnished silver coins. Or a shirt
woven from nettles. Can turn you from a bird,
they say. Or maybe the other way around. A
golden ring that never fits. Boots with
iron soles. A shard from a shattered slipper.

I was not so sure about this, a merger of three different literary discourses – fairy tales, noir and poetry. It’s ambitious and it didn’t quite work for me.

6) there are no taxis for the dead, by Angela Liu. Third stanza:

At home, you don’t knock, just
ping the paper lanterns, one after the other
            like fireflies seeking patterns in summer heat. You sink

I’m sorry, I really didn’t understand what this was about. Some of the individual pieces, sure, but they did not make a whole picture for me.

Speculative Poetry Award

A team of activists have put a lot of work into putting the case for a permanent Best Poem Hugo. The main difference with this year’s special award is that they propose a minimum of one line rather than three. The brief version of their proposal is in item F12 (pages 40 and 41) of the Business Meeting agenda; they have published longer argumentation at the PoetryHugo.com website.

I admire their commitment, but I am probably voting against, because I feel that there are already too many Hugo categories, and I would like to see the Business Meeting trimming some of the excess before adding yet again to the burdens of Hugo administrators.

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

Posted on by

Second frame of third issue:

“Your kindness touches my heart. Such thoughtfulness is rare these days. What, may I ask, brings such a beautiful couple out on the road? Not running away together, are you?”

Having finished the Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, I’m starting the Twelfth Doctor albums, beginning with this compilation of two two-issue stories, both of which I rather liked.

Terrorformer has the newly regenerated Doctor and Clara visiting a planet which should have been an ice world but seems to have become rather hot; it turns out that there’s an intelligent star behind it all (this made me look up the temperature at the core of the Sun). Clara gets some decent character moments too.

The Swords of Okti is set in both past and future India, and puts Clara aside for most of it to give the Doctor two temporary Indian companions – who I think are the first South Asians to have that role in any medium? The story was originally published as The Swords of Kali, but re-titled after a Hindu group in Nevada protested at the appropriation of the goddess. In any case, it’s a fairly standard aliens-pose-as-gods narrative but with the extra cultural wrinkles.

You can get it here. Next in this sequence: Fractures, also by Robbie Morrison et al.

Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter (“The High Priesthood and the Israelite Samaritan Priests”, by Benyamin Tsedaka):

So, for 112 generations the high priesthood was inherited from father to son in the Phinhas family, heads of the Israelite Samaritan People till 1624 CE. Sometimes the high priesthood was inherited by a brother or uncle in the family if there was not a direct successor to the previous High Priest. Sometimes the High Priest appointed his son as his successor and shared with him the duties during his own time of priesthood.

This was a book of essays on random historical topics that I picked up at Eastercon. Unfortunately the first three that I tried were all too boring to read to the end, so I put it down and won’t pick it up again. If you want to, you can get it here.

A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A few groups of richly dressed people still lingered standing, like clusters of jewels hung from a woman’s throat, but most were seated. The steward who’d opened the door for Maud cleared his throat meaningfully.

Sequel to A Marvellous Light; I acquired them both as part of the 2022 Hugo packet and have the third still to go. It’s a sorcerous murder story set on an Edwardian transatlantic liner, with a lot of lesbian sex. Tremendous fun. Second of the series, and I had forgotten what happened in the first volume but enjoyed this anyway. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. (And we don’t really know what Homer’s gender identity was either.)

Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third section:

She climbed down and followed the tunnel along the outside. After the corkscrew there was another straight horizontal section, longer this time, then more turns, to left and right and up and down, and then something different. A larger chamber, from which the “main” tunnel continued a little offset to the right, but there was also another branch going off sharply left.

A stunning short story about a woman assassin in a Stalin-era prison camp, and the way out offered by the legacy of the Tunguska meteorite. Blew my mind. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2020 (one of many in the Hugo Packet), and also the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my virtual shelves. Next on those lists respectively are Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw, and The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore.

Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

If we look at political Unionism since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, it has been dominated by negativity. There was either defensiveness about the need to sign it, or outright hostility. Never at any point did we see a wholehearted endorsement of it. There has also been a maudlin fascination with death and defeat. To celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Ulster Unionist Council in 190s, the then-leader of the Ulster Unionist Party laid wreaths at the gravestones of each of his predecessors. This form of commemoration does not point to a brighter future, but a trapped mindset focused on the past, with memories of loss. As James Baldwin said, ‘People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them’.⁶⁹
⁶⁹ Baldwin J, ‘Stranger in the Village’, Harpers Magazine, October 1953 Issue, 1953

Interesting polemic by a former Unionist from East Belfast, taking the view that the Union between Great Britain and Northern has passed its sell-by date and that there is therefore a moral imperative on Nationalists to prepare for the coming referendum on a united Ireland, and an equal imperative on Unionists to prepare for that fate. Much description of the advantages of a unitary island state within the European Union (Collins does not think that Stormont should be preserved in a united Ireland). Not quite as much analysis of the errors of Unionism, though there are many. Some parts of the book are a little dated now that the appalling Johnson government is three prime ministers ago, but other parts remain valid.

My own views were expressed in the Irish Times in July 2019, and have not shifted much. I agree that the direction of travel is towards a majority vote for a united Ireland in a referendum, but I think we are further away from it than Nationalists hope and Unionists fear, and I can foresee a nervous equilibrium holding for some time – as Gerry Lynch once put it, “Welcome to the Northern Ireland that won’t vote itself out of the Union but won’t give Unionism majority support.”

I wrote in my 2019 piece that for a unification vote to succeed, three conditions needed to be met:

  1. Brexit works out badly;
  2. Unionists continue to talk only to their own core voters and not to the centre ground;
  3. Nationalists come up with a better offer than the union, especially on health services.

I stand by that analysis; however I think the situation on the ground has changed.

Back in 2019, my first condition, that Brexit works out badly, looked like a slam dunk. But the various deals concluded by prime ministers Sunak and Starmer (but not Liz Truss) with the EU have brought some certainty. The new post-Brexit arrangements are not brilliant for anyone, but they are least worst for Northern Ireland which continues to be able to trade with both Great Britain and the EU. Brexit is still a disaster, but it’s not hitting Northern Ireland as badly as I expected / feared.

The challenge for Nationalists therefore is to explain to Northern Irish voters why their current situation, with trade access to both the EU and the UK, would be improved by erecting barriers with the UK that don’t currently exist, but would be inevitable if Northern Ireland’s status changes. It’s not a fatal problem – in the end this will be decided on sentiment as much as economics – but it’s one that Nationalists need to be able to answer.

Likewise the second condition is a little weaker than it looked in 2019. The DUP have gone back into government with Sinn Fein, accepting the position of Deputy First Minister – and I’ll admit that I wrongly predicted that this could never happen. The DUP’s leader, Gavin Robinson, put out a sympathetic statement on the death of the Pope. Unionism’s instinct is still to reach for the flags and drums, which have less than zero appeal to the crucial centre ground voters, but Unionism’s smarter side has been a little more visible of late.

This could go either way in future. In particular, if hardliners are able to eat further into the DUP vote, the effect paradoxically will be to weaken the Union, as the basis for the DUP’s continued participation in the Stormont executive erodes, and centre voters will become inclined to see Unionism as a blockage to stable government, as it was in the most recent suspension of the Stormont institutions.

On the third point, there has been no progress from Nationalism in spelling out a vision to attract centre ground voters, let alone Unionists. What I see instead is Nationalists blaming each other for the lack of such progress, which is rather a telling sign of blocked thinking. In particular I don’t see any creative ideas around the large share of public sector jobs in Northern Ireland’s economy; will Nationalists propose that the Republic continue subsidising it as the UK does now? Or does a united Ireland mean cutting the public sector too? Some Nationalist commentators think that the UK will provide bridging funding even after the transfer of sovereignty; that seems optimistic to me.

Though curiously enough, as regards healthcare, a doctor friend in County Down tells me that patients are increasingly seeking treatment south of the Border, voting with their feet as it were. But will they vote with actual, er, votes?

Don’t get me wrong – I still think that the direction of travel is clear. But the speed of that travel is another matter, and while it’s probably not irreversible, it could reach an equilibrium point which is short of a majority for a united Ireland, and that could endure for decades. After all, thirty years of violence failed to shift the opinion polls much between Richard Rose’s 1968 survey and the pre-Brexit numbers. Brexit has clearly boosted the case for reunification in a way that the “armed struggle” totally failed to do, but it’s not clear to me that it has reached critical mass.

Anyway, thoughts provoked by the book which you can get here.

A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He commandeered a  horse that had been left in the Lowmarket when its owner had  either died or fled, then rode as fast as traffic would allow to Screaming Hall. Meanwhile, the sky closed in, stealing away any sense of the horizon, and it started to snow.

I happened to be reading this alongside The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang, and they are both fantasy novels with similar themes and about the same length. The Water Outlaws is better, but this is OK – well developed politics of a secondary world with magical elements; I had expected to be put off because it is the second in a series, but in fact it worked perfectly well as a standalone. I wasn’t quite sure that the magic system held together, and the use of French and German to stand for exotic fantasy languages was a little irritating, but if you are in a forgiving mood you’ll probably enjoy it too. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020 (in that year’s Hugo Packet). Next on that pile, from the same source, is The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster.

The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Some of Lin Chong’s techniques would have served her very well in doing so.

I’m only vaguely familiar with the Chinese classic The Water Margin, but S.L. Huang is clearly a fan, and has updated it with the best traditions of wuxia combined with gender-flipping many of the characters and some pretty clear references to Hong Kong kung fu films. There’s some rather gory violence, but also a real affection for the story and a political sensitivity to what is really going on in the magical empire. Slightly to my surprise, I loved it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer (from last year’s Hugo Packet). Next on that pile is The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman.

The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter (“Fortified Settlement in Northern Pictland”, by Gordon Noble):

The 5th and 6th centuries in northern Britain are a key period when historical sources increase in frequency for the societies that had lived north of the Roman frontier (Chapter 2 of this volume; Evans 2008, 2014; Fraser 2009a; Woolf 2007b). The literary sources suggest that this was a transformative period with the emergence of more developed systems of rulership and social structure. Important changes can also be identified in the archaeological record in this same chronological horizon: for example, after more than 1,000 years of very limited burial evidence, the dead become a more prominent part of the archaeological record (Chapter 5 of this volume; Maldonado 2013; Mitchell and Noble 2017). As well as cemeteries, memorials to the dead and traditions of monumental carved stone monuments emerged and played notable roles in creating and maintaining new forms of personal and group affiliation (e.g. Forsyth 1997a, b; Goldberg 2012, 155-9; Henderson and Henderson 2004; Samson 1992).

A short book of essays about the Picts, more specifically the archaeological remains that exist in the land to the south of the Moray Firth as far as Aberdeenshire, the ancient realms of Fortriu and Ce. I must say it is surprising just how little is known about this culture; there’s a little bit of “No one knows who they were or what they were doing“. They seem to have left no written records of their own at all. One of the few contemporaries to write about their attitude to Christianity was very negative:

…ecclesia plorat et plangit filios et filias suas quas adhuc gladius nondum interfecit, sed prolongati et exportati in longa terrarum, ubi peccatum manifeste grauiter impudenter abundat, ibi uenundati ingenui homines, Christiani in seruitute redacti sunt, praesertim indignissimorum pessimorum apostatarumque Pictorum.…the church mourns and weeps for its sons and daughters whom the sword has not yet slain, but who were taken away and exported to far distant lands, where grave sin openly flourishes without shame, where freeborn people have been sold off, Christians reduced to slavery: slaves particularly of the lowest and worst of the apostate Picts.

That’s St Patrick, in his Letter to Coroticus, from the fifth century; though it’s clear that the Picts ended up Christian like everyone else.

The single most fascinating artifact for me is the Rhynie Man, found at what seems to have been a major political/cult centre along with other decorated stones, a life-sized figure carved onto a megalith, now casually sitting in the headquarters of Aberdeen Council. All ancient art is interesting, but human figures are particularly compelling; was the Rhynie Man a portrait? a memorial? a deity? all three? Fourteen centuries on, he is ignoring us and ready to use his axe – on what?

Though the Gaulcross Hoard is fascinating as well, a hundred or so worked silver pieces from the end of the Roman Empire; and the Rhynie Man is but the most striking of many Pictish symbols stones. But it makes you think of the Silurian hypothesis; the Picts had a thriving material culture and presumably everything else that goes with that – yet we do not even know their name for themselves with certainty.

Anyway, well worth a read. You can get it here.