Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi

Posted on 17 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Although both my parents were officially ‘intellectuals’ because they went to university, neither studied what they wanted to study. My father’s story was the more confusing of the two. He was gifted in the sciences and while still in secondary school had won Olympiads in maths, physics, chemistry and biology. He wanted to continue studying maths but was told by the Party that he had to join the real working class because of his ‘biography’. My family often mentioned that word, but I never understood it. It had such wide applications that you could not make out its significance in any particular context. If you asked my parents how they met and why they married, they would answer: ‘Biography.’ If my mother was preparing a file for work, she would be reminded: ‘Don’t forget to add a few lines about your biography.’ If I made a new friend in school, my parents would ask each other: ‘Do we know anything about their biography?’

Autobiography of an Albanian academic, writing about her childhood in totalitarian Albania and the eventual transition to democracy. I have been to Albania a few times, starting in 2004, and the Hoxha regime is now marketed as somewhat kitschy; this first person account reminds us of how all-enveloping the ideologically-driven police state was. I remember some very lefty acquaintances in the 1980s singing the praises of the motivation of the Albanian volunteers building railways for the workers’ paradise; now that we know the truth, it’s all pretty revolting.

Childhood is childhood wherever you are, of course, but the cycle of school and family, indoctrination and mild subversion, was specific to Eastern Europe and particularly odd in Albania. Lea Ypi grew up knowing that her great-grandfather had had the same name as a pre-Communist Prime Minister, but was taught to insist that it was just a coincidence; only after the end of the old regime did she learn that in fact Xhafer Ypi was her great-grandfather, and that this element of ‘biography’ had followed her father throughout his career.

Then change came at breakneck speed, and her parents became political activists, her father even serving a term as a somewhat detached MP for the Democratic Party. Her cosmopolitan grandmother, however, had always encouraged her to keep an eye on the rest of the world, and after the economic collapse of 1997, she left to study philosophy abroad.

This isn’t a travelogue around the physical geography of Albania, but it’s a great guide to the psychology of an entire country forced to survive on lies for forty years, and the aftermath, told through an intensely personal lens. Strongly recommended (and thanks to Michael Clarke for recommending it to me). You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next on that pile is The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright.

Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle

Posted on 16 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Yes,” Cindy agreed as she eyed the milling mob. “But I almost wish they’d let me slip out of here quietly so I wouldn’t be conscious of what I was getting into.” She caught sight of blue uniforms, gold braid, and glistening brass instruments. “Golly, they’ve even got the Aerospace Force Band!”

I picked this up at Eastercon. It’s a curiosity. I have identified the author as Eloise Katherine Engle nee Hopper (1923-1993), who was born in Seattle and died in Alexandria, across the river from DC; in the introduction she identifies her husband as Captain Paul R. Engle (MC) USN. The intro concludes:

I could not have dreamed of writing a space book for girls without the help of Major James F. Sunderman and the Air Force Book program.

She also wrote several books on military history, and a couple of other novels, some of them with her second husband Lauri Paananen, who was Finnish.

Anyway, the story itself was originally published in American Girl, the magazine of the Girl Scouts of the USA, in 1961, and expanded for book publication in 1962. It has a brief but gushing preface from Dolores O’Hara, the Lieutenant Nurse for the Mercury astronauts. It’s set at an unspecified date in the near-ish future, where no women have yet flown into space (though in our own timeline, that particular barrier was broken as early as 1963) and yet there are several dozen male astronauts living on a base on the Moon.

Our protagonist, gallant Cindy McGee, is a nurse for the astronaut corps, and is sent to the Moon to deal with several astronauts injured in an accident because she weighs only 95 pounds, much to the annoyance of her female colleagues who are better pilots. She shows that she is good at nursing in space despite occasional moments of feminine panic. They celebrate Christmas on the Moon, and some of the chaps are mean to her. In the second last chapter there is a bizarre incident where aliens appear on the lunar base, look around and then erase everyone’s memories of their visit before going home. And she realises that she is in love with the astronaut who flew her to the moon and back, manly Turk Hunter [sic].

There are numerous fallacies of detail (mercilessly catalogued by Ian Sales here), but for me the striking thing about the book is its lack of ambition for Cindy and for women. Nursing is the only profession that can get you into space; being a good pilot is not enough. The hierarchy is thoroughly male and likely to stay that way. For a book published in the 1960s, the attitudes are very 1950s. (Cindy’s weight is specified as early as half way down the first page.)

I couldn’t honestly recommend it, but you may be able to get it here.

Astounding Award 2025

Posted on 13 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

As with Best Fancast, I’m going to start at the top.

1) Tia Tashiro

Represented just by five short stories in the Hugo Voter Packet, but I found them all very refreshing and a bit subversive. Second paragraph of third story (“Every Hopeless Thing“):

Elodie carefully tucks the opera glasses into an inside pocket of her scavenging pack. She stands and dusts her gloves off on her thick, shielded pants. The gauge on the inside of her soft plastic helmet is reading at acceptable levels of ambient pollution, nothing that would breach her suit; it would alarm if she hit unsafe levels, and she’d hotfoot it back to Skip and let the medical system give her a once-over if it did.

2) Angela Liu

Also has five short stories in the Hugo Voter Packet, plus two poems. Again I enjoyed them all, I just enjoyed Tashiro’s work more. Second paragraph of third story (“You Will Be You Again“):

‘How do you feel?’ the doctor asks, three assistants hovering behind him like angels of death.

3) Moniquill Blackgoose

Wrote To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which won the Lodestar last year and is represented by an excerpt here. Second paragraph of third chapter:

But then Crow, who came flying to Masquapaug from the lands west of the sunset, taught the first people how to dance. Nampeshiwe’s Mother came to watch their dances. Nampeshiwe’s Mother said to the people, “Your dancing is beautiful. You must teach me your dancing. I would know how it is done.”

4) Jared Pechaček

Represented by a novel, The West Passage, which is a nicely worked out secondary world with some odd dynastic quirks. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Pell had always liked the refectory, with the quiet, half- conscious liking one feels for something one has known since childhood. A clerestory of tiny square windows ran along the eastern wall, letting in morning sunlight and evening breezes. Vast old tapestries covered the stone walls. Their rich colors had dimmed, many were moth- eaten, and some had fallen, but the stories and strange figures they held made her feel as if she were a creature of legend herself. Bats roosted in the south rafters, pigeons flew in and out, and ivy curled in at the windows, but even in its state of decay the refectory held some clear beauty quite separate from the ancient chaos of the rest of the palace.

5) Hannah Kaner

Represented in the Packet by two novels, Godkiller (submitted last year) and its sequel Sunbringer. Second paragraph of third chapter of Sunbringer:

Everything hurt. The cut on her shoulder, the burns on her right leg where her half-melted prosthesis had seared her skin. The nicks, scratches, and aches of long weeks of fitful nights and being hunted through the wild lands. Her body was keeping score of its battles.

Another secondary world, interesting enough but after reading the first hundred pages of Sunbringer I knew where I would rank it.

6) Bethany Jacobs

Represented in the packet by extracts from novels These Burning Stars and On Vicious Worlds. Second paragraphs of third chapters respectively:

Jun takes a grimacing drink of her coffee, cold and sickly sweet with condensed milk. Her appointment with the captain of The Swimming Fox is half an hour away, but she’s been nursing the same cup for two hours, and this is hardly a pleasant place to spend the afternoon. The Grum Bowl’s half-stocked shelves boast evaporated soups, snack packs, and candy bars, none of which are less than a standard year old. The floors are grimy, and the lights are eye-stabbingly fluorescent. Patrons glare at her when they see her gun, flashing their own sidearms like a dare she ignores. On one wall there’s a crude mural of Terotonteris, god of revelry and risks, his round body jutting with arms and legs, his mouth open to swallow from a pitcher while some of his hands play a game of tiles and others clasp at shiny things.

and

It’s tedious. They invited the Kindom here; their docks are open and their weapons are cold. There’s no need for histrionics.

Odd mix of fantasy and sf which didn’t quite draw me in enough to want to track down the full books.

All of these writers are good, I just happened to like some more than others; the future of the genre is safe.

The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

Posted on 12 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut-tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. “She is a little near-sighted; you can’t imagine how sweet it makes her look,” Chris explained. (I did not say that I had seen her, for, indeed, this Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden serene gravity would show that she had seen one, and she would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly, with rather stiff movements of her long arms, to exactly the right place. When she had got the punt up on the gravel her serious brow would relax, and she would smile at one and shake hands and say something friendly, like, “Father thought you’d be over this afternoon, it being so fine; so he’s saved some duck’s eggs for tea.”

I am familiar with Rebecca West’s non-fiction, but this is the first of her novels that I have read, and it was also the first book she had published, in 1918. Shell-shocked Chris returns from the war in 1916, with amnesia wiping out the last fifteen years of his life; he is obsessed with the (now married) working class girl he had a fling with in 1901, and has totally forgotten his own wife and their recently dead young son. The story is narrated by Chris’ cousin who clearly has feelings for him herself. It’s a tightly written, intense story of mental illness and trauma, with a lot more going on under the surface, and I got a lot out of it. You can get it here.

Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco

Posted on 11 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third section:

This is a book that is both weirdly out of date and weirdly timely. It is about an obscure incident of Middle Eastern history: the massacres of civilians in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces on the margins of the 1956 Suez war, 275 killed in Khan Yunus on 3 November and 111 in Rafah on 12 November. In these awful days, it’s probably healthy to cast our minds back almost seventy years to the brief months of the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, when most of its inhabitants had fresh memories of the Nakba and realistic expectations that they might be driven out of their homes again.

The other startling aspect of the book is that the research was carried out in 2002 and 2003, when the second Israeli occupation, started in 1967, was (as it turned out) on the last legs of its direct phase, and Fatah was still in political leadership among the Palestinians, though Hamas and other militants were clearly a rising faction through the Second Intifada, especially within Gaza. The death of Rachel Corrie happens just off screen.

Between the research on the book and its publication in 2009, the Israelis withdrew their military and settlers from Gaza (2004), Hamas won the Palestinian elections (2005) and seized control in Gaza (2006). I hardly need remind you of events since 2009, especially the last twenty months. But I’m writing here about Joe Sacco’s book, not about more recent history.

Sacco portrays the daily grind of life under the occupation vividly, and also the difficulty of getting eyewitness accounts of events from almost half a century before. Even for those who were there, 1956 was comparatively small beer compared with 1948 or 1967, unless you or your family happened to be directly involved with either of the massacres. Accounts differ on the details, but the broad account of brutality is the same, and the graphic medium brings home the human impact as words alone never can.

It’s an account from one side of two particular incidents, because the Israelis largely covered them up (apart from an interesting debate in the Knesset); Sacco interviews a senior Israeli securocrat to get their perspective, and he is also clear about the Fedayeen incursions into Israel in 1956, and indeed the suicide bombings and internal Palestinian violence five decades later.

It’s important that individual incidents in any conflict get the dignity of a permanent record, even if they cannot achieve closure for victims and perpetrators. (Needless to say, I think of an incident in 1972 which was more local to me.) At the time the book was published, these two massacres from fifty-three years before were the largest killings of Palestinians on Palestinian soil, a record that I suspect may no longer stand. I’m glad to say that Ha-Aretz posted a positive review of the book when it came out.

My one complaint, and it is a serious one, is that my copy of the book was wrongly bound, and instead of pages 245-276; there was an extra set of pages 117-148. Fortunately Martin Wisse was able to sort me out with the missing pieces, but it was almost a metaphor for the difficulty that Sacco faced in assembling the truth. If you are lucky, you can get a full copy here.

Truth is really important and also sometimes really difficult to get. As I was writing this, someone in my Facebook feed posted a summary of Palaestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata (1714) by the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland / Hadrianus Relandis, claiming that Reland’s research on the ground in the early eighteenth century “proved” that there were almost no Arabs living in Palestine at that time. This meme is completely false; Reland never visited the Middle East in his life, and there is no attempt to calculate the contemporary population in his book, which is about Biblical and classical references to the place names of the region. As usual, if a propaganda claim from either side looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Footnotes from Gaza was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Final Cut, by Charles Burns.

Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay (and Christopher H. Bidmead)

Posted on 9 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I was glued to the screen for Logopolis‘s first showing in 1981, a month before my fourteenth birthday. The show I loved was being remade, with a total revamp of the TARDIS crew and last of all the leading man – just as Innes Lloyd had done in 1966. And here in 2025, we’ve just been through the same process again…

When I came back to Logopolis in 2008, I wrote at length:

I saw Logopolis (of course) back in 1981 and again when it was repeated later in the year. Its biggest problem is that the pacing doesn’t quite match the amount of Stuff that is Happening; the first episode in particular is alarmingly slow, episode two is incomprehensible in places, and it is not surprising that the ratings for the last two episodes were so low.

But the two million viewers who gave up on it between eps 2 and 3 were mistaken. Things I liked about it: the Watcher works really well, even though we never really find out the details of how he works. It generally looks fascinating – the nested Tardises, the streets of Logopolis. John Fraser as the Monitor is great. Nothing that the Master does actually makes sense, but it’s a great debut story for Ainley who does some high-class evil laughter. Nyssa may pop out of nowhere but it’s good to have her back (and out-acting Adric almost instantly). The music is super – the theme for the Watcher suggesting that he is not the Master (as Adric assumes) but something else, and that final chord sequence as it transforms into the Doctor Who theme.

The biggest problem I have with it now is that the Master’s grand plan simply doesn’t compute. How can he have known that the Doctor was headed for the Barnet by-pass? Or would then head for Logopolis? And how quickly will his message to the peoples of the universe reach them, indeed how will the radio telescope, sending messages at sluggish old light-speed, be able to affect the CVE in time? (And since Logopolis is out of commission, who will do this in future next time there is an entropy crisis?) We’ll leave out the fact that the Third Doctor survived a much longer fall in The Paradise of Death, since that story is of dubious canonicity.

Logopolis is not one of the great regeneration stories – there are four of those, and they are The Tenth Planet, The War Games, The Caves of Androzani and Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways. But it is no way as bad as either Planet of the Spiders or (stretching a point as there is no regeneration) The Ultimate Foe. Good watching, with emphasis on watching rather than trying to understand what is going on.

The DVD is almost worth the cover price alone for the documentary on the transition between Doctors, “A New Body At Last”, featuring interviews with Davison, Baker (as hilarious as ever) and numerous other cast and crew.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:

Taken on its own merits, Logopolis is a bit unsatisfactory. The first couple of episodes have way too much exposition and info-dumping, and the last two episodes are basically about establishing the Master and the new Tardis team, and getting rid of the Fourth Doctor.

But actually, watched in context, I can see why it gripped me at the time; the revival of the Master, the role of the Time Lords, and the CVE’s all link back rather satisfactorily to the earlier stories in the season, and the episode and a half actually set in Logopolis, and then the final battle between the Master and the Doctor, ending in his regeneration, are effective. And it does make sense to have the departing Doctor bid farewell to all of his companions, as the Fifth and Tenth were also able to do; this is a story about goodbyes and it’s appropriate.

And the music is particularly good.

Incidentally, when we reach the police box on Earth in the first episode, this is after a run of 23 episodes set elsewhere – the last time we saw Earth was at the very beginning of The Leisure Hive. It is the longest sequence of non-terrestrial episodes in the show’s history.

Watching again, I want to particularly salute Paddy Kingsland’s music. That sequence at the very end of the story remains spine-chilling, 44 years on.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Christopher H. Bidmead’s novelization of his own story is:

In any case, there was something much more interesting to think about. In the Doctor’s temporary absence, Adric’s curiosity had drawn him towards the police box.

When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:

Bidmead’s write-up of his own story is reassuringly dynamic and exciting, if just a little over-written in places. In particular, Logopolis itself feels more like a real place, and the minor characters more like real people; the whole thing makes slightly better sense than what we saw on screen.

Nothing to add to that; a confident novelisation which does what it needs to do. There is no explanation of the means and motivation of the Master, but there never is. You can get it here.

Jonathan Hay’s Black Archive on Logopolis pays appropriate tribute to a story that marked a turning point in the show. At 119 pages it’s fairly brief. A brief introduction gives the context for the story in terms of the production history.

The first chapter, “Resetting the Scene”, looks at the changes to the show brought in by John Nathan-Turner, the scientific basis for the story, the reintroduction of the Master and the backgrounds of the two new companions.

The second and longest chapter, “Regeneration”, looks at the way regeneration is handled for both the Doctor and the Master, especially in Season 18 but also in later Doctor Who history.

The third chapter, “Entropy” looks at the concept of entropy and the character of the Watcher. Its second paragraph is:

As the laws of physics assert, energy within a closed system can neither increase nor decrease on aggregate; it can only change between forms. Hence, as time passes, more and more energy within a closed system inevitably transforms into the form of heat energy. Heat energy is a disordered form which is essentially unable to then transform back into any other form of energy². This principle is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and applies not only on smaller scales, but also to our universe, the largest closed system we currently know of³. As time passes, the proportion of disordered (heat) energy within the universe increases. This tendency towards gradual disorder, which applies to any given physical system, is known as entropy.
² Maxwell, J Clerk, Theory of Heat, p93.
³ Maxwell, Theory of Heat, p153.

The fourth chapter, “Computers”, looks at the history of computers in reality, including the fact that the word used to mean a woman who does calculations, and the significance of Logopolis; it points out the importance of the computer-generated music. It’s not the longest chapter but I felt was intellectually the most substantial.

The fifth chapter, “The Singularity”, looks at the extent to which Logopolis anticipated Vernor Vinge.

The sixth chapter, “The TARDIS”, looks at the importance of the TARDIS as a plot element in Logopolis (though as I commented a few weeks ago, it’s actually interesting how often it had been a plot element in the show’s early history).

The conclusion, “‘It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for'”, looks at the many ways in which the new Blu-ray edition of Logopolis improves on the original. It’s on my list…

Not the most ground-breaking of Black Archives, but as I said up top, a respectful and detailed analysis of an important story. You can get it here.

Last week, the Black Archives published their 77th and latest volume, on Castrovalva, and once I have read it, this reading project will have caught up to where I wanted it to get to when I started it in September 2021.

The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane

Posted on 7 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Let us set the stage with a brief exploration of perhaps the most famous example of the intersection of honour imperatives and high politics in sixteenth-century Ireland: the fizzled duel of 1571 between James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald and Sir John Perrot. Fitzmaurice was the instigator and initial leader of the so-called Desmond Rebellions that raged in Munster in the 1570s and early 1580s; Perrot was the aging English knight and ex-soldier sent by the Crown to suppress them. Fitzmaurice proposed to settle matters through personal combat, a proposal to which Perrot gladly agreed, even allowing Fitzmaurice to set the conditions of combat. They arranged to meet outside of Killmallock to fight with the sword and target while clad in ‘Irish tresses’. But if Fitzmaurice’s challenge represents the high point of the politics of honour in Anglo-Irish affairs, his failure to show on the day suggests its rapid demise. He justified his absence by saying that were he to kill Perrot, the Queen would simply send a new president to crush him.¹ Whether this was sincere or not, it certainly showed a concern for the limits of honour politics: how could Fitzmaurice be sure that the Queen would abide by the extra-legal agreement made between himself and Perrot, two gentleman commanders? Following a period of self-exile on the continent, the would-be-duellist returned to Munster and with the aid of a small papal force attempted to raise a holy war against the forces of the Crown – marking the first time that a mature ideology of faith and fatherland appeared on the Anglo-Irish landscape, an ideology that would dominate that relationship, arguably, into the present.² In his abandonment of honour principles for the stronger stuff of faith and fatherland as a basis of resistance, Fitzmaurice may not have shown himself the bravest of rebels, but he certainly demonstrated political vision.
¹ For an extended discussion of the honour principles at stake, see Palmer, ‘The insolent liberty’.
² Anthony McCormack’s analysis of the Earls of Desmond’s intrigues with Francis I of France and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, however, demonstrate the longer lineage of ‘faith and fatherland’ ideology in Ireland and in Anglo-Irish relations. Nevertheless, Fitzmaurice’s landing in Munster accompanied by papal troops and carrying a banner bearing the cross marks the first appearance of this ideological position in the field. See McCormack, Earldom of Desmond, p. 68.

I met Brendan Kane back in 2009 when I attended a conference that he organised about Tudor Ireland in Connecticut; it’s still a topic I hope to write about at some future stage, and this book helped to remind me why. It’s a treatment of the concept of honour and how it affected relations between and withing Ireland and England in the century between the start of the process of declaring Henry VIII King of Ireland, and the outbreak of the Confederate Wars (with subsequent spillover into Scotland and England).

I’m instinctively (and anthropologically) attracted to historical explanations that rely on more than economic self-interest, and the concept of honour turns out to be rather a good lens for examining the history of conflict and co-operation between the various strands of Irish and their English overlords. The analysis of Irish language literature is beyond my competence to assess, but I’m glad it’s there. I found the chapters on the Nine Years’ War and on the mutual difficulties of Wentworth/Strafford and his Irish counterpart forty years later particularly interesting.

I was also completely unaware of the liminal figure of Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde (1572-1635), who was also created Earl of St Albans and married Frances, the daughter of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (her first husband, the 2nd Earl of Essex, having come to a sticky end). One of their children married the very Irish Earl of Ormonde, and the other the very English Earl of Winchester. If I count correctly, his younger brother Ulick was my 7x great-grandfather. He was able to move between the two kingdoms and maintain his own set of identities at a troubled time, and I’d like to dig a bit more into his history.

Anyway, a good detailed book on a slightly obscure topic. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. On a related note, the next on that pile is Ireland in the Renaissance, c.1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton.

Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher

Posted on 6 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“The Little Book of Fate”):

When he could get a word in, the Doctor thanked him and set off.

I wrote up the Black Archive on Warriors’ Gate two years ago, including the expanded and revised audio version of Stephen Gallagher’s novelisation which was released in 2019. A few months after my 2023 write-up, the BBC released a print version of the new audiobook, plus two more short stories by Stephen Gallagher set in the same continuity.

As I said before, the revised novelisation gives us a lot more background and characterisation of the slavers and the Tharils than did either the TV series or the 1982 text, and mixes up the plot quite substantially. Gallagher is probably the best known mainstream sf writer to have worked on 1980’s Doctor Who, and he clearly loves the story and can now shape it the way he wants.

The first of the two extra stories is quite a long one, “The Kairos Ring”, featuring Romana and the Tharils and aliens infesting an American Civil War battle. It was also originally released as an audiobook, as the first in a series of five of which the other four were all by Paul Magrs. I had not come across these before, and must look our for them.

The other new story is “The Little Book of Fate”, basically a vignette bringing the Eighth Doctor back into this particular continuity, but nicely done.

Sometimes the BBC tries to make money off us fans by putting old wine in new bottles, but this is very refreshing. You can get it here.

Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe

Posted on 5 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

She didn’t lead with that. First there was some obfuscation.

Story set in a world like today’s America except that there are talking animals. A dog detective teams up with a crow to Solve Crime. Nice idea, though maybe more could have been done with it. You can get it here.

This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2020 (as part of Ellen Datlow’s submission to the Hugo Packet) and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both of those piles is Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix.

Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly

Posted on 4 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

They stood in the courtyard of a family compound in the out-skirts of Dadang. A fat bottle palm squatted by a well, casting cross-hatched shade. Colorful tunics and shawls hung to dry on lines strung between semi separate houses. Aristide wondered who they belonged to. Surely no one lived here. Still, the illusion was admirable. And focusing on the tradecraft kept him from thinking about what he was about to do.

Third in a series (The Amberlough Dossier) of which I had not read the other two. I read the first hundred pages but couldn’t get into it on its own. Not anyone’s fault. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020, in the Hugo Voter Packet as part of Diana Pho’s generous submission. Next on that pile is A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock, from the same folder.

Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Beatriz Blum

Posted on 2 June 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Straightening her eyeglasses, taking in the overall effect, she sighed.

I got this because I had been in contact with the author for a peculiar reason. Back in 2020, when The Canterville Ghost won the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, we had the usual difficulties in tracking down the heirs of the creators to send them the trophy. Eventually I found out that the writer of the script, Edwin Harvey Blum, had a living daughter, and duly got in touch with her and sent her the rocket. (In retrospect, we should have also considered the heirs of director Jules Dassin as potential recipients. I think we did contact MGM, and they were not interested.)

I also discovered that Deborah Blum had written this book, and given my vague general interest in anthropology, I bought it; but it then lingered on my unread shelf for five years, to the point that it was the non-fiction book that had been there longest. (Next on that pile is The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane.)

Anyway, I finally got to it. It’s a reconstruction of the love life of Margaret Mead, between her young marriage to schooldays crush Luther Cressman, her affairs with Andre Sapir and Ruth Benedict, and her meeting with eventual second husband Reo Fortune, basically the first third of her life (she lived from 1901 to 1978).

Other people’s sex lives are always interesting, of course, but I felt this missed several beats. Blum has chosen to write a novelistic reconstruction of conversations and other events, rather than a historical treatment of the surviving correspondence (of which apparently there is a heck of a lot), and I always wonder how much has been made up in cases like this. (See also Persia.)

More importantly, the most interesting thing about Margaret Mead is not who she did or didn’t sleep with in her early twenties, but her contribution to anthropology, and this is only briefly covered in the book, which ends with her return from Samoa in 1926 and lightly skips over her subsequent work and fame. It would be nice to be able to draw a line connecting her emotional and intellectual progress, but that isn’t really attempted here and may not in the end be possible.

Not Blum’s fault at all, but I’d also like to read more some time about Alfred Cort Haddon, one of the founders of anthropology, who popped up in my PhD research thirty years ago as a zoology professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, before he became famous as Haddon the Head-Hunter. He crossed paths with Margaret Mead a couple of times, but was forty-five years older and lived on a different continent, so it is entirely fair that Blum does not write much about him here.

Mead’s feminism is particularly interesting (and insufficiently explored in this book). I would like to know how many young women in early 1920s America, marrying at 21, refused to change their names to their husband’s. It would certainly never have occurred to my grandmother, born two years before Margaret Mead in the same city (Philadelphia). Edited to add: I was completely unfair to my grandmother here. She did tell my grandfather before they married that she would not change her name; he said that would be fine; and then she changed her mind.

I got a much better sense of Mead’s personal mission from her first husband’s moving tribute to her.

All social science, but especially anthropology, owes Margaret Mead a tremendous debt. At twenty-three years of age she did what no woman in anthropology had done. She went on a poverty-level fellowship compared to the generous stipends now given. She violated the canons of the Establishment by writing a report that was interesting, readable, and relevant to the lives of people in our society. She popularized anthropology. The departments in which some of her critics, both friendly and hostile, now teach owe their existence to Margaret’s popularization of the subject matter. If what she wrote in Coming of Age in Samoa tended to produce an outburst of demand for greater sexual freedom among our young people, it did that because it was a lance puncturing the old pustule of hypocrisy. She became a celebrity, and having been made that by the media she cleverly turned it to her own use to support her programs.

Over a half-century ago, this twenty-three-year-old girl who had never before been out of the country, went to an isolated island under financial conditions a contemporary graduate student would probably reject as demeaning, and there made her first field study. She had the firm conviction that she could establish and hold her place in the profession with men. Her record proves she was right and in the doing she became a pioneer in the women’s movement. We all are indebted to her in some degree. Colleagues as scholars will correct her errors, the perspective of time will establish her scientific work, and we, her professional associates, will gain stature both personally and professionally, if we rightly honor the remarkable young girl and the woman Margaret became.

Anyway, you can get Coming of Age here.

May 2025 books

Posted on 31 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Non-fiction 9 (YTD 31)
Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint
Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay
The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce, eds. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans
Irish Unity: Time to Prepare, by Ben Collins
Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson (did not finish)

Non-genre 2 (YTD 19)
thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

SF 13 (YTD 57)
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly (did not finish)
These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe
On Vicious Worlds, by Bethany Jacobs (excerpt only)
The West Passage, by Jared Pechaček
Sunbringer, by Hannah Kaner (did not finish)
Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, by Curtis Craddock
Dislocation Space, by Garth Nix

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13)
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead

Comics 4 (YTD 16)
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris
The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Terrorformer, by Robbie Morrison et al

7,200 pages (YTD 35,300)
13/31 (YTD 52/138) by non-male writers (van der Lint, Blum, Ypi, West, Bradley, Cole, Donnelly, Jacobs x2, Kaner, Engle, Huang, Ferris)
3/31 (YTD 21/138) by non-white writers (Bradley, Cole, Huang)
2/31 rereads (Beyond the Sun, Doctor Who: Logopolis)

231 books currently tagged unread, down 20 from last month, down 78 from May 2024.

Reading now
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske

Coming soon (perhaps)
Ship of Fools, by Dave Stone
Fear Death by Water, by Emily Cook
Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton

Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, ed. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton
The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster
Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw
The Impossible Contract, by K. A. Doore

The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
The Green Man’s Quarry, by Juliet E. McKenna
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
The Wren, The Wren, by Anne Enright
The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Final Cut, by Charles Burns
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

Beyond The Sun, by Matthew Jones

Posted on 29 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I ran a finger down the side of his face and he shuddered and wrinkled his nose as if trying to discourage an insect. And then he turned on to his back and began to snore loudly.

When I first read this in 2009, I wrote:

I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn’t previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny’s ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).

I reread it in 2015, but in the midst of Clarke and other obligations didn’t write it up that time. My original plan was only to revisit the Bernice Summerfield novels that I have never written up at all, but then I thought, I actually enjoyed this and I wonder if a return visit will work? And it did; as well as the nicely judged emotional and physical perils of Benny and her students, there’s a particularly wacky alien reproduction process which often results in hot-looking humanoids, and a deceptive Ancient Weapon. One of the good ones. You can (probably) get it here.

I had written of the audio in 2007:

Beyond the Sun is another archaeological dig-goes-wrong story but introduces the character of Jason, Benny’s ex-husband, and lots of emotional angst as well as the actual plot. I was completely absorbed in it, and yet failed to spot the voices of Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills until I read the sleeve notes afterwards.

I spotted Anneke Wills this time, but failed to spot Sophie Aldred, who is actually a very versatile actor. But the star is Lisa Bowerman, really getting into her stride here as Bernice, with sarcasm and emotion, helping us through what’s actually a rather convoluted plot. The only one of the first season audios not adapted by Jac Rayner but by Matt Jones, the original author. You can get it here.

Hugo Best Related Work 2025

Posted on 28 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

6) The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion, by Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford

What? I hear you exclaim. Given my own record on speaking out against the abuses of the Hugo process carried out by the organisers of Chengdu Worldcon, how can I possibly be ranking the Barkley and Sandford Report, which blew the bloody doors off the whole affair in February 2024, last on my Hugo ballot this year?

There are several reasons, which I will go into at greater length in due course. Most important, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures. But also, this Report misses a couple of vitally important issues revealed in its own detail and compensates with rhetoric. So I’m not voting for it, but it may well win the award anyway.

5) The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel, by Jenny Nicholson.

This is a four hour long video report on a bad investment decision by Disney, to create a Star Wars hotel in Walt Disney World in Florida. It looks nice, but I honestly think that the story is not worth four hours of vidding, let alone watching.

4) r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge

I think it’s brilliant that Reddit users got together to challenge each other to read more broadly, and the enthusiasm for this project is great. I just prefer my Best Related Works to be written commentary.

3) Charting the Cliff: An Investigation into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics, by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones

Now this is more like it, cold hard numbers demonstrating why the published statistics from the 2023 Hugos simply cannot be trusted. I was relieved but not surprised to see that the statistics from the years that I myself was involved generally do pass the mathematical smell test. Lots of beautiful numerical details here, which I’ve been chewing on occasionally ever since it was published.

As noted above, though, I don’t think one year’s awards should commemorate the previous year’s failures, so it’s not in my top two in this category.

2) Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll

Second paragraph of third chapter (actually Chapter 2, “Whitey on the Moon”, counting the introduction as the first chapter):

[Richard B.] Spencer expounded upon this idea at length in an early podcast that explicated Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) with alt-right essayist Roman Bernard. Interstellar caused a big stir among alt-right intellectuals because it expressed the widespread reactionary sentiment that the United States had undergone a serious social and technological decline. The country’s malaise, they suggested, could only be reversed by intrepid white explorers taking up where the Apollo missions left off. In the film, the United States has shifted all resources away from technological innovation and into food production after an environmental catastrophe reduces the planet to a dustbowl. Even as the government denies the possibility of spaceflight—they claim the moon landing was an expensive hoax—a secret NASA program strives to save humanity by sending settlers to colonize another planet.

A short, fascinating analysis of the extent to which the alt-right has drawn inspiration from science fiction, often from authors and works who would have been horrified that they were being used for these purposes. Alas, a very timely book given what has been happening in the USA of late. You can get it here.

1) Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum.

As its title suggests, 2312 is a novel driven less by story or characters, and more by the desire to capture a certain (fictional, futuristic) moment of human history. Robinson accomplishes this by trotting out all the best-known (and often-derided) tools of science-fictional worldbuilding, but also by referencing much of the work that has come before him. So 2312 often seems as much a commentary on visions of the future as one of its own.

Tremendous assembly of a body of work by the excellent Abigail Nussbaum, whose thoughtful dissection of form and substance is always a delight, and she is usually right about the books as well (ie often agrees with me). Gets my vote with enthusiasm. You can get it here.

City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on 27 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Langrice had shrugged. “Magister.” Speaking Pel easily because running the Anchorage meant you needed to be good with languages. “No Ilmari will work for me. It’s bad luck. Only the desperate will even come buy a drink from me. Or those who need to leave Ilmar the least convenient way.” She’d shaken her head ruefully, as though she’d give up the Anchorage and its trade in a moment if only there was someone else. “They won’t even take my money from my hands. I have to send my staff to market, or else pay some middleman. So why, exactly, would I not work with you Palleseen?”

Won the BSFA Award for Best Novel two years ago, against The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift and The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard, both of which we shortlisted for the Clarke Award that year, and Stars and Bones by Gareth L. Powell and The This by Adam Roberts, which we didn’t. City of Last Chances was also submitted for the Clarke, but is pretty clearly fantasy rather than sf, so I put it on one side for later. (To remind you: we gave the Clarke to Venomous Lumpsucker, the Nebula went to Babel and the Hugo, officially at least, to Nettle & Bone.)

I don’t think I voted in this category, and if I had a vote now I’d vote for The Coral Bones and The Red Scholar’s Wake ahead of City of Last Chances, but this is nonetheless a very good book, set in a fantasy city which has recently been occupied by invaders, where the various ancient civic institutions, including the magical ones, continue to function despite the change of rules, and further potential social ferment is brewing. There is a particularly effective twist in the middle, and a slightly discarded deity who attaches himself to one of the main protagonists. It is, er, a bit long at 496 pages. You can get it here.

I’ve run out of Tiptree and Clarke winners to read, so there are only two left in this sequence which I started with Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop back in 2012; a twelve and a half year reading project comes to an end. I think I’ll replace it with a project of reading a book by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man; there are 29 of them by my count. It’s good to have a target.

Lodestar Award 2025

Posted on 26 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Moonstorm, by Yoon Ha Lee. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Most of her classmates zeroed their rifles only when Instructor Kim reminded them. Hwa Young took the training more seriously because of her ambitions. The rest of them could coast on their family connections. She didn’t have that option.

Withdrawn by the author after it became known that this year’s Worldcon had been using ChatGPT to vet programme participants, a revelation that had certain other consequences too. It’s a shame because I rather enjoyed it, a narrative of a young soldier with decidedly mixed loyalties in an interplanetary conflict. You can get it here.

5) The Feast Makers by H.A. Clarke. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dead ahead the Delacroix House exploded upwards and outwards in intricate gingerbread frills. Old snow clung to it, and icicles long as my femurs. Colored lights bled through the windows. Irises clawed through grey slush on the lawn below. It was ostensibly closed for business today, but the look of it said otherwise—people teemed on the long porch in long fur coats and cowboy boots, smoking and bickering and embracing one another. It felt like a music festival or an artist’s funeral. Even from this distance I could hear acrid laughter, drunken singing, weeping, and blunt edged threats. Jing pulled into the lot, cut the music, and eased into one of the last available spots in a sea of variously glossy dark or rust-fucked cars.

A sequel to a book I have not read, and I could not understand what was going on. You can get it here.

4) Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When I land, the impact shatters me to pieces. I am a wreckage of garbled limbs and protruding bones. My heart and lungs struggle behind fractured, exposed ribs.

I am one of the three people in fandom for whom this series hasn’t really gelled, which is a shame as the author comes across as a committed and engaging personality both online and in person. You can get it here.

3) So Let Them Burn, by Kamilah Cole. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dinner had been served. Usually, her parents would wait for the whole family to be home before even setting the table, but not when she was here. When Aveline Renard Castell, the gods-blessed ruler of San Irie, arrived in Deadegg to visit the Vincent family, they brought out the good plates and their best manners. Which was annoying, because she was, well, the absolute worst.

Story of magically gifted teenage girl military leaders, which interestingly is a sequel to an unpublished adventure but works regardless. Lots of high politics and dragons. You can get it here.

2) Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Then, one chilly winter morning, Grandpa Louis wasn’t present anymore.

Prequel to the author’s Elatsoe, which most people loved, but I had reservations. Sheine Lende however is a different matter, nicely and tenderly done story of a girl and a ghost dog, and the forces of evil (both human and supernatural) in 1970s America. You can get it here.

1) The Maid and the Crocodile, by Jordan Ifueko. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Cold leeched from their windowless plaster walls, even in the blazing Oluwan heat. On each front door hung a single adornment: the head of a crocodile, glossily preserved in resin.

Set in the same world as Raybearer, but I felt that the world-building kinks that bothered me about the previous book had been ironed out here; a great tale of gods and (human) monsters, bad parenting and disability, and political liberation – a story for our times, perhaps. You can get it here.

This collage of covers was constructed by hand using PowerPoint and Paint, without use of AI.

The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James

Posted on 23 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story (Convention Special):

I had planned to read the Eleventh Doctor album Dead Man’s Hand next in my sequence of DW comics, but discovered that as such, it was not in fact in the Humble Bundle that I purchased some years back. However three compilations of compilations were, and the third includes the stories Sky Jacks!, which I read last month, Dead Man’s Hand, two shorts for the 50th anniversary, and also Paul Cornell’s lovely The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who.

Dead Man’s Hand, which is the one I was looking for, is a rather fun Wild West story where the Doctor and Clara team up with Calamity Jane and the visiting Oscar Wilde to fight off alien invaders, with due attention to setting and character. Great fun.

Convention Special is a rather cliched story of aliens invading San Diego Comic Con; it has been done before.

Birthday Boy has a flimsy plot excuse for the Doctor to encounter many of his past companions. Unfortunately they are not drawn very well, which weakens the impact.

But it’s worth it for the three longer pieces. You can get it here.

Hugo Graphic Story or Comic 2025

Posted on 22 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Very clear winner for me.

6) Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed

Second frame of Chapter 51 (the third in this compilation):

I’ve totally lost track of what’s going on with the plot of this series.

You can get it here.

5) My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2

Second frame of what looks like it might be the third section:

Superlative graphic novel, but I am not at all convinced that it is sff.

You can get it here.

4) We Called Them Giants

Only frame of third page:

And then I woke up and found everyone really had [left me].
HELLO?!

Mysterious dark story of the disappearance of most of humanity, and the giants that come instead.

You can get it here.

3) The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol. 1

Second frame of third part:

The poets say, “Call them not dead who lay down their lives for their people.”

Orcs and humans have made peace; but something worse is coming.

You can get it here.

2) The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag

Not sure if there are sections, but this is the second frame of the third page.

Lovely LGBTQ+ coming-of-age story, with a monster in the basement.

You can get it here.

1) Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way

Second frame of third page:

LIGHTS ARE NOW OFF
Mariner: Spock Clock, cancel all alarms for the day.
Clock: Acknowledged. Sleep long and prosper, Lieutenant Junior Grade Mariner.

Just a total joy. Beautifully consistent with the TV series, yet warping the format of a choose-your-own-adventure story to challenge the reader.

You can get it here.

thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold

Posted on 21 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

light squeals in red and white flashes

Intense story of a gay man who serves in Vietnam and becomes a biker. Graphic and lyrical language; mercifully short. Not really sure what more to say. You can get it here.

I thought that this was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves, but it turns out to be non-genre. Next on the unread SF pile is Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe.

Hugo Novels 2025

Posted on 19 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I am just another punter, I can reveal my votes in this (and other) categories. I found this a much easier ranking than in some years.

6) Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Some past interaction had resulted in the inspector’s cheek and the side of his neck being torn open, revealing plastic bones and the ducts of his hydraulics. For a moment Charles’ proprietary centers prompted him to deny access to Master on the basis that the inspector was improperly dressed, and to ask him to return when his face had been repaired. Police authority overrode him, though. Now that the inspector had arrived, Charles could not impede the investigation. Which was only fair, given that he was the murderer.

I’m sorry, I just don’t like the travails of anthropomorphic robots and their makers as a storyline, and that’s what this book is about. Shortlisted for the Clarke Award. Locus Top Ten (SF).

You can get it here.

I like all the rest though.

5) Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What did I do?’ I demand, and by the second time it’s more pleading and begging. There aren’t many good reasons to be hauled off to see the big man. And I can’t see why they’d need to make an example of someone right now, given all the varied examples that our delivery method provided us with, but that’s the only thing I can think of. They’re going to dangle me from the scaffolding just to make sure everyone else is sufficiently educated as to the way things are run around here. A final irony, the career academic ending his life as a lesson.

Well imagined, plot-twisty take on exploration of an alien planet, where the scientists themselves are under the control of a brutal autocratic regime and the planet’s environment is horrifyingly hostile. Shortlisted for the BSFA Award but withdrawn. Locus Top Ten (SF).

You can get it here.

4) Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. Second paragraph of third chapter:

And they never once thanked her for it.

Fantasy novel told from the point of view of the anthropophagous monster, which falls in love with a human girl whose family are horrendously abusive. Lots here about disability. Shortlisted for the Nebula Award. Locus Top Ten (First Novel).

You can get it here.

3) A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:

At first her sleep-fogged brain thought that it might have been a sound. Had there been rain? Had she woken because the drumming on the roof had stopped? No, there wasn’t any rain last night, was there? It was clear as a bell and chilly from it.

Another fantasy story with a protagonist whose best friend betrays her early in the book and whose abusive mother has evil plans which need to be thwarted. Shortlisted for the Nebula Award. Locus Top Ten (Fantasy).

You can get it here.

2) The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. Second paragraph of third chapter:

This meant the Empire always had better soldiers than most other fighting forces, certainly. But the beating heart of the Empire were the Sublimes: the cerebrally suffused and augmented set who planned, managed, and coordinated everything the many Iyalets of the Empire did.

Murder investigation in a richly imagined fantasy empire which is beset by adversaries without and within. Locus Top Ten (Fantasy).

You can get it here.

1) The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Second paragraph of first part of third chapter:

Debility, Stanley had said. Well, they all knew what that meant. Scurvy. Men ruptured by melancholy, bleeding from their hairlines. Teeth loose in the head as a blown rose’s petals. Weeping for home— more so than usual. Aching at the joints. The smell of an orange, it’s said, could drive a debilitated man to derangement. The word “Mother” is like a lance to the ribs. Old wounds reopen.

The narrator is assigned to help a member of the Franklin expedition, rescued from 1847, integrate into contemporary British society (where the government has secretly discovered limited time travel). But the project turns out to be much more than she could have anticipated, in several ways. Ticked a lot of my boxes and gets my vote. Shortlisted for the Clarke Award. Locus Top Ten (First Novel).

You can get it here.

Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)

Posted on 16 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I am getting to the end of the Black Archives! At the time of writing, there is only one more to go after Silver Nemesis, though I expect that there will be another in June.

I missed this story on first broadcast in 1988. When I finally saw it for the first time, twenty years later, I was unimpressed.

People had warned me that Silver Nemesis was pretty rubbish, and I’m afraid it is. One of my frequent complaints about bad Who, and indeed bad sf, is that all too often the means and motivation of the bad guys make no sense. In Silver Nemesis, the means and motivation of the hero make no sense: how and why did the Doctor launch the rocket into space in 1638??? The basic plot of three different sets of baddies (Cybermen, Nazis and Lady Peinforte) trying to get the McGuffin is comprehensible, but little else is. Am I unusual in finding Fiona Walker’s performance as Lady Peinforte rather poor? She was way better in CLAVDIVS. And the bit with the Queen is pretty silly.

I was a bit more positive on my rewatch three years on:

I can’t quite be as positive about Silver Nemesis [as I was about The Happiness Patrol], though again I liked it more than I had expected to. It is the first time we have had a contemporary English setting since, errr, the last Cybermen story three years ago, but it doesn’t really make enough of the normality such a set-up offers, setting us up with real (Courtney Pine) and fake (the Queen) celebrities and then bringing in Lady Peinforte and De Flores through literal and metaphorical timewarps, with added Cybermen. A lot of the bits work well, including the increasing sense of the Doctor as someone with a number of devious plans which we don’t know about (and Fiona Walker’s delightfully psychotic Lady Peinforte) but it doesn’t quite add up together.

Watching it again for this post, I felt a bit more negative. The unrealistic firefights between the Nazis and the Cybermen (often a problem with Who, see also here) are symptomatic of the problems of directing the story, which James Cooray Smith goes into in depth, as discussed below. I did not realise until I read the Black Archive after rewatching it that there are several different versions of the story which have been released on video. Eventually I will shell out for the Blu-Ray and discern between them all.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Kevin Clarke’s novelisation of his own story is:

Such was the visitors’ interest that the materialization of the TARDIS a few yards away passed unnoticed. The Doctor and Ace stepped out. Ace sniffed the damp air as she looked around.

I wrote in 2008 that:

Clarke used the opportunity of adapting the script for novelisation to put back some of the material which apparently ended up on the cutting-room floor, but the result is if anything even more confusing. Where the TV series can just about get away with characters being darkly mysterious, the written word demands a bit more clarity (thinking especially of the portrait of Ace in Windsor Castle, never explained). Fails the Bechdel test, unless the cook who Mrs Hackensack’s ancestor bribed away from Lady Peinforte was a woman. (Hackensack is a much less likely name than the TV series’ Remington for a 17th century English aristocrat; but then, so is Peinforte.)

Not much to add to that. You can get it here.

So, the previous Black Archives that I have read by James Cooray Smith were cases where either I agreed with him that the story is good (The Massacre, The Night of the Doctor) or less good (The Ultimate Foe, The Underwater Menace). In this case, I don’t have a very high opinion of Silver Nemesis, but Cooray Smith mounts a bravura defence of the story as a major classic of the Cartmel / Nathan-Turner era. I’m still not at all convinced, but I admire the passion that he brings to it, as well as the forensic detail in his research.

The first chapter, “‘Meteor Approaches England'”, looks at the context from within DW of Andrew Cartmel’s arrival as script editor in 1987, after the great cancellation crisis of 1986, and his work to assemble a team of writers who could deliver the necessary scripts. He makes the interesting point that in 1987 there were very few experienced Doctor Who writers available; Robert Holmes had recently died, and most of the other veterans were busy with other projects, or had fallen out with John Nathan-Turner, or both.

The second chapter, “The Arrow”, looks at Kevin Clarke’s career – of the newly recruited writers, he was the most experienced on paper, but that is not saying much (and the details say even less). It then looks at how the concepts of Silver Nemesis came together; the Cybermen were there from an early stage, and the weird bit with the Queen was originally intended to be the real Prince Edward, who was active in TV drama at the time; but he said no.

The third chapter, “The Statue”, looks at the difficulties of recording, mainly at the physicakl challenges of getting everything filmed combined with the problem that the two stars, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, were very under-rehearsed due to their busy schedule working on other stories. It starts by noting that most of the guest actors were third or fourth choices for their roles. The second paragraph is:

De Flores was turned down by Charles Gray, while Anna Massey and Sarah Badel declined the opportunity to play Lady Peinforte, as did Penelope Wilton. Even the single-scene role of the mathematician was turned down by Geoffrey Bayldon, Richard Vernon and others before being accepted by Leslie French. It would be tempting to conclude that these refusals reflected Doctor Who’s declining prestige in 1988, but they are in fact common throughout the programme’s history. It’s an example of one of the usual compromises of programme-making.

The fourth chapter, “The Bow”, looks at some of the subtle allusions in the script – the fate of the muggers is a reference to the tarot, Lady Peinforte’s reference to The Winter’s Tale rewards closer analysis, and there’s a lot to say about jazz (I had not realised that Courtney Pine composed new music specially for the story).

The fifth chapter, “Critical Mass”, is the defence that I mentioned previously. Cooray Smith loves this story and is surprised that other people don’t. “Frankly, this writer genuinely struggles to understand what is not ‘explained’ in Silver Nemesis, except that which is left ambiguous for dramatic effect”. As will be apparent, I am not in agreement with Cooray Smith here, but I admire the passion of his argument.

The sixth and final chapter, “‘Re-Form'”, defends the legacy of elements from Silver Nemesis extending into New Who, and also goes into the (fairly substantial) differences between the different commercial releases of the story, including the novelisation.

An appendix lists the known script drafts for each episode, and another the scene breakdown for the first episode.

At 188 pages, this is rather a long Black Archive, but Cooray Smith has a lot to say, and says it well. You can get it here.

Incidentally, as I said last time, the Seventh Doctor has been very well served by the Black Archives; fully two thirds of his stories, and more than 70% of his episodes, are now covered by the series. Leaving aside the special cases of Withnail and I, the closest competitors are the Fourth Doctor, for whom the newly published BA on Logopolis takes his story count to over 30%, and the Thirteenth, 46% of whose episodes have been covered (though only 25% of her stories).

Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint

Posted on 15 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (which is presented bilingually in the original text):

Hoe bijzonder het precies is dat Jardin d’émail als monumentale tuin gerealiseerd is, is moeilijk te bevatten. Natuurlijk, het was Dubuffet die het kunstwerk schiep, eerst als een Édifice van twee bij drie meter met de titel Jardin d’émail. Maar het is museumdirecteur Oxenaar die zorgt voor de ‘vergroting’ van het idee, zoals Dubuffet dat in een brief verwoordt. Binnen het oeuvre van Dubuffet wordt Jardin d’émail gerekend tot de belangrijkste voorbeelden van zijn L’Hourloupe-architectuur samen met Closerie Falbala en de Groupe de quatres arbres, een groep van vier bomen voor een bankgebouw in New York en gemaakt in opdracht van de Amerikaanse bankier Rockefeller. (afb. pp. 38-39)

It is difficult to comprehend how amazing it is that Jardin d’émail has been realized as a monumental garden. Of course, it was Dubuffet who created the artwork, initially as an Édifice measuring two by three metres and with the title Jardin d’émail. But it is the museum director Oxenaar who enables the ‘enlargement’ of the idea, as Dubuffet puts it in a letter. Within Dubuffet’s oeuvre, Jardin d’émail is considered one of the most important examples of his L’Hourloupe architecture, together with Closerie Falbala and the Groupe de quatres arbres, a group of four trees for a bank building in New York, commissioned by the American banker Rockefeller. (image pp. 38-39)

The Jardin d’émail (Enamel Garden) is one of the most striking sculptures in the Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo, in the Netherlands. It’s twenty metres by thirty, a stylised garden made not of enamel but of concrete, epoxy resin, polyurethane and paint. It’s probably the biggest single artwork in the whole museum.

We went to see it in 2005 and again in 2022. Here’s my attempt to recreate the same scene twice.

And here’s me beside the central butterfly:

This short book about it by art historian Roos van der Lint describes it as “deeply embedded” in the Dutch national consciousness, and goes into the story of Jean Dubuffet’s career (originally in the family wine shipping trade, but became an artist during the second world war) and how museum director Rudi Oxenaar was impressed by a smaller version, two metres by three, and commissioned the larger one for the Kröller-Müller Museum, built between 1968 and 1973. It also explains the extensive process of restoration in 2020 – it certainly seemed in much better shape the second time we went.

It’s possibly the single most interesting object in the entire Dutch province of Gelderland, and if you ever have a chance to see it, you should take it. Otherwise you can get this little book here, for only €12,50 plus postage, which I think is a real snip.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple

Posted on 13 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. ‘But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.’

One of William Dalrymple’s lyrical explorations of India, this tells the stories of nine people with roles in Indian religion – mostly Hinduism, though the point is well made both by Dalrymple and by several of his interlocutors that it’s all a bit syncretic, and drawing strict boundaries between different faiths is not a good path to understanding.

People who think that all religion is bollocks won’t find much to like in this book. But if you are interested in the belief and faith systems of the largest country in the world by population, this is a very enlightening guide to what nine of the 1.4 billion think, at least as reported by one observer. (No doubt, like any good writer, he has combined material from a number of sources to create nine good stories.)

There’s the Jain nun. There’s the prison warder who becomes a dancing god for two months a year. There’s the singer of epic poems which take five days to recite. There’s the woman Sufi mystic. There’s the maker of bronze idols. There’s the tantric guardian of the cremation grounds. There’s the blind bard of Bengal. Dalrymple respectfully gives them all their voices

And saddest of all is the Devadasi, the temple prostitute who has been servicing worshippers sexually since she was a young girl. Supposedly this practice was made illegal by both the British and by independent India, but it has simply gone underground, with even less protection for the women and girls who get involved. In general my instincts are for the legalisation of sex work where all involved are consenting adults, but that’s not what is going on here, and the story of Rani Bai is heart-rending.

Anyway, well worth getting, and you can get it here. This was the top unread non-fiction book on my shelves; next is the English translation of The Burgundians, by Bart van Loo.

Hugo Novellas 2025

Posted on 12 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Now that I have been unexpectedly liberated to discuss my Hugo votes, here they are in the first category that I completed. These are all good, by the way, and I found it quite difficult to rank them. (This is not the case for every category.)

6) The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Okay,” said Dr. Marjorie. “That’s it. You’re on your own.”

Generation starship where slaves v masters plays into a brutal take on academia. Get it here.

5) The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“People report different things. Some say they feel nothing at all. Others say the scan brings up memories. That it somehow brushes up against them and brings them back to consciousness. They see their lives. Memory by memory, before them.”

Mammoth researchers upload the mind of a long-dead mammoth expert into the brain of a resurrected mammoth. Get it here.

4) What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:

It occurs to me that you may think that I am making a great deal of nothing about traveling, granted that I had spent much of my youth gallivanting across Europe, sometimes while being shot at. Possibly you’re right. All I can say in my defense is that while I was in the army, no matter where we went, we had a routine. We got up, we ate bad food, we complained, we tended the horses, we were extremely bored, we ate again, we went to sleep. Occasionally we would go somewhere else and be bored there. Once in a very great while, we would spend an absolutely nerve-wracking few hours, and afterward we would be shaky and bored, but in general, the routine reigned supreme.

Haunted holiday cottage in fictional but richly realised European country. Get it here.

3) The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Oh, get up, get up, please,” Nhung begged.

Something sinister is up with the arranged wedding that Cleric Chih gets involved with. Get it here.

2) The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“No,” Veris said, glancing back at the handful of guards waiting silently in the front garden. A few had also crept to the back, she knew, to guard the door in case she still, unthinkably, tried to escape.

Only the heroine can rescue two children who have been kidnapped by a monster. Get it here.

1) Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard. Second paragraph of third chapter:

As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.

A lovely dark story about four young women thrown together to ward off the unspeakable. In space. Get it here.

I intend to do these collages of covers for each of the relevant Hugo categories. I do them by hand using PowerPoint and Paint, without use of AI.

Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan

Posted on 8 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Sam’s eyes snapped open, and half the class burst into laughter. “Very funny,” he said. “But you’ve only got ten minutes left, so you should probably save the jokes until then.”

Another of the short works that I have been saving up from the 2020 Hugo packet, this is about a contemporary world where people start to live on different sleeping schedules from each other, and how we can cope; and whether this is in fact something that needs to be corrected, or whether society needs to make accommodations for those who are different. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe.

Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff

Posted on 6 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the vile weather and the unaccustomed seaways, the White Russian prince mislaid Marseilles altogether, and finally, answering calls for professional help from the bridge, my father brought the Lublyana into harbour himself.

As a child and teenager, I enjoyed a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels – I particularly remember the Eagle of the Ninth trilogy, The Hound of Ulster, and Warrior Scarlet. I picked up this autobiography a few Eastercons ago without really looking at it, and plucked it off the shelves at random the other day, interested to get to know more about a much-loved writer. (She lived from 1920 to 1993.)

My first surprise, once I actually looked at the front cover, was to see that it has an introduction by Tom Shakespeare. I knew Tom vaguely when we were students at Cambridge, and he once managed to get a front page photograph in the Guardian by eating fire on King’s Parade in protest at the government’s student loans proposals. We’ve exchanged the odd note over the last few years. He has achondroplasia, the most visible symptom of which is dwarfism, and is one of the world’s leading experts on the politics of disability.

Why, I wondered, would he write a foreword to Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography? I supposed that he might have shared my youthful enthusiasm for her writing, possibly even more so (he started Cambridge with the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic course, before switching to Social and Political Sciences). My copy of the book, which features a head-and-neck photograph of Sutcliff, failed to give me the vital clue that the two earlier editions would have done as soon as I looked at them.

Rosemary Sutcliff had Still’s Disease, systemic-onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and suffered various medical treatments and operations which were deemed necessary by the doctors advising her parents. (Tom Shakespeare points out that “orthopaedics” literally means “putting children right”.) She spent long periods in hospitals, isolated from her family and her few friends. (She was an only child; a sister had died before she was born.) As an adult, she used a wheelchair (after the death of her mother, who refused to allow her to have one). Writing cannot have been comfortable for her; but at her peak, she wrote 1800 words a day, by hand.

Once you know all this, a lot about her writing makes more sense. Tom Shakespeare lists nineteen of her novels where a major character has either a congenital or an acquired physical disability, and comments, “I cannot think of another writer who has done more or better.” And her disabled characters are not defined by their disabilities. They are simply people getting along as best they can in challenging circumstances. And it makes sense to choose Tom Shakespeare as the writer of the introduction to the book.

Sutcliff’s father was in the Navy, her mother was difficult (possibly bipolar) and her childhood was one of bouncing around between different ports, including Sheerness, Chatham and more exotically Malta. She was very slow to learn to read and write, left school at fourteen and worked as an artist until she rather suddenly became a full-time writer at the age of twenty-nine.

Having said all of that, it’s not a sad book. We live the life we get to live, and Sutcliffe makes the most of it, with occasional shafts of real humour. “I have always been sorry for children born more than two hundred years ago, and therefore denied the pleasure of popping fuchsia buds.” (This got some extraordinary responses when I posted it to Facebook.) She has a great eye for the countryside, and depicts friends and pets with love and candour. It’s a portrait of a particular time from a particular viewpoint, but it’s very nicely done.

In the last couple of chapters, she tells of her romantic relationship with Rupert King, a year younger than her but already separated from his first wife and the father of two sons. Eventually he decided to marry someone else, and she decided that she could not bear to be the third person in that relationship. It’s an intense and ultimately unhappy story, but she clearly feels that this thwarted romance was good for her in the end. I did a bit of my own delving on Rupert, using the online genealogy resources; he was married four times in all, with three more children on top of the two from his first marriage, and ended up in Australia. I don’t think he’d have made Rosemary happy in the medium to long term.

Anyway, brief, punchy, evocative, well worth it; you can get it here.

The All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham

Posted on 5 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There were many models for us to choose from: John Glenn, with his sense of obligation and higher purpose. Tough, intense, cocky Gus Grissom, the kind of guy who didn’t care if the sun came out or not. Scott Carpenter and Gordon Cooper were independent and adventuresome and seemed willing to pay the price. They both did.

This was the third of three astronaut memoirs that I got in 2020 after reading this article, the first two being Michael Collins’ superb Carrying the Fire and Al Worden’s entertaining Falling to Earth. I would rank All American Boys between the other two. There are some very good parts. The books starts with the Apollo 1 fire, in which three of Cunningham’s friends and colleagues died horribly; and then it backtracks to become more of a social history of the US space programme, looking very much at the human side of the astronauts of the time, warts, sex, and all. Cunningham himself flew only one flight, Apollo 7, the first after the Apollo 1 disaster, but shares his pride in everything that the Apollo programme (and before it the Mercury and Gemini programmes) achieved, and reflects a bit on what being an astronaut meant at the peak of his career.

The last section of the book, added in 2003 after the original publication in 1977, is about what has Gone Wrong with NASA since the glory days, and is rather relentlessly Grumpy Old Man, railing against various targets such as political correctness in hiring, and Washington’s obsession with keeping the Russian space programme afloat. Even this has some fascinating moments – I had forgotten about the horrifying near-disaster of Soyuz 5, for instance. But Cunningham slightly loses the run of himself and vents personal grievances without much supporting evidence.

Anyway, most of it is well worth reading. You can get it here.

This was both the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves, and my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on those piles respectively are Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead by Deborah Blum, and Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly.

Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al

Posted on 2 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“Mission to Galacton”, by Justin Richards):

A constant stream of freight ships carried resources plundered from worlds the Daleks had conquered. As the empire continued to expand, so the need for supplies grew ever greater, and Dalek task forces ventured further and further into neutral and hostile space in search of planets to ransack. In the centuries before the Great Time War, nothing could stop the Daleks…

A collection of 26 short stories, 16 of them by Justin Richards, previously published in the Doctor Who annuals and other spinoff material. Eleven Tenth Doctor Stories, six Eleventh Doctor, two Twelfth, one with the War Doctor, and also a half-dozen Doctor-lite stories exploring a bit more of the Whoniverse. A couple of weak ones, but several corkers; having been mean to him in my last review, I particularly liked the pair of stories where Amy and Rory have the same adventure from opposite directions without either realising that the other is involved. Decent internal art. No artist or editor is credited. You can get it here.

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

Posted on 1 May 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As a schoolgirl studying geography in Madras, India, Hema had to mark where coal and wool were produced on a map of the British Isles. Africa figured in the curriculum as a playground for Portugal, Britain, and France, and a place for Livingstone to find the spectacular falls he named after Queen Victoria, and for Stanley to find Livingstone. In future years, as my brother, Shiva, and I made the journey with Hema, she would teach us the practical geography she had taught herself. She’d point down to the Red Sea and say, “Imagine that ribbon of water running up like a slit in a skirt, separating Saudi Arabia from Sudan, then farther up keeping Jordan away from Egypt. I think God meant to snap the Arabian Peninsula free of Africa. And why not? What do the people on this side have in common with the people on the other side?”

Another long book which I was reading alongside Paladin of Souls, this came to my attention as the best-known book set in Ethiopia , a country that I know mainly because I once spent two days in Addis Ababa by accident (my flight to Juba was delayed) in April 2010. It’s a fascinating country, with 135 million inhabitants, more than any other African country except Nigeria and more than any European country except Russia (if that counts). At present it is suffering a lot of internal instability, but when Ethiopia has its act together the rest of us will need to pay attention. Dervla Murphy visited it in more innocent times.

Most of Cutting for Stone is set in Addis, the protagonist being the son of an Indian mother and American father, brought up in a hospital with his twin brother; both of them train to be doctors, like their parents, and live through the tumultuous years of the third quarter of the twentieth century (the protagonist is born in 1954, and flees to the USA in 1979). It’s told from a place of love and sympathy for Ethiopia and its people; I actually felt it went slightly off track when we eventually reach America and the search for the protagonist’s long-lost father, and the climax of the book, involving sexually transmitted hepatitis and a liver transplant, was a bit too neat (and not very empowering for the women in the story). The faint-hearted will also be deterred by surgical details throughout the book, especially the graphic gynæcological descriptions at the beginning.

Still, I very much enjoyed it. The author himself was born and brought up in a medical environment in Addis Ababa, so he clearly knows whereof he writes. He is a year younger than the central character of the book, he left Ethiopia in 1974 rather than 1979, and both his parents are Indian rather than just one, so it’s not completely autobiographical, but must include a lot of life experience (there is nonetheless an impressive bibliography). You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that list is Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch.

Wednesday reading and April 2025 books

Posted on 30 April 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Read in the last week
Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al
Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (did not finish)
What Feasts at Night, by T. Kingfisher
Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (did not finish)
Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis, by Kevin Clarke
All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham
Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff
Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan
The Maid and the Crocodile, by Jordan Ifueko
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple

(ten in total for the week, thanks to some short and unfinished books, and a relaxed birthday weekend)

April 2025 totals

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 22)
A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham
Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple

Non-genre 4 (YTD 17)
The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells
How Many Miles to Babylon, by Jennifer Johnston
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

SF 16 (YTD 44)
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger
The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt
The Birds, and other stories, by Daphne du Maurier
Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold
Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Naylor
The Feast Makers, by H.A. Clarke (did not finish)
Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell
The Brides of High Hill, by Nghi Vo
Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Moonstorm, by Yoon Ha Lee
Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (did not finish)
What Feasts at Night, by T. Kingfisher
Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan
The Maid and the Crocodile, by Jordan Ifueko

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 10)
Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards
Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al
Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis, by Kevin Clarke

Comics 4 (YTD 12 )
It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al
The Hunger and the Dusk vol. 1, by G. Willow Wilson, Chris Wildgoose and Msassyk
The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag
Monstress, Vol. 9: The Possessed, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (did not finish)

8,700 pages (YTD 28,100)
13/31 (YTD 39/107) by non-male writers (Sutcliff, Kang, Johnston, Little Badger, du Maurier, Clarke, Vo, Bujold, “Kingfisher”, Ifueko, Wilson, Ostertag, Liu/Takeda)
7/31 (YTD 18/107) by non-white writers (Kang, Verghese, Little Badger, Vo, Lee, Ifueko, Liu/Takeda)
3/31 rereads (Paladin of Souls, Dragon’s Wrath, Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis)

251 books currently tagged unread, up 19 from last month (thanks to the Hugo packet), down 63 from April 2024

Reading now
Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold

Coming soon (perhaps)

Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al
Beyond the Sun, by Matthew Jones
Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher
Doctor Who: Logopolis, by Christopher H. Bidmead
Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay

Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Blum
Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly
Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe

City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang
A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: bookblog 2025

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi

Countdown for Cindy, by Eloise Engle

Astounding Award 2025

The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West

Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco

Logopolis, by Jonathan Hay (and Christopher H. Bidmead)

The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane

Doctor Who: Warrior’s Gate and beyond, by Stephen Gallagher

Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe

Amnesty, by Lara Elena Donnelly

Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, by Deborah Beatriz Blum

May 2025 books

Beyond The Sun, by Matthew Jones

Hugo Best Related Work 2025

City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lodestar Award 2025

The Eleventh Doctor Archives vol 3, ed. Andrew James

Hugo Graphic Story or Comic 2025

thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, by David Gerrold

Hugo Novels 2025

Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith (and Kevin Clarke)

Jean Dubuffet: Jardin d’Email, by Roos van der Lint

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple

Hugo Novellas 2025

Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan

Blue Remembered Hills, by Rosemary Sutcliff

The All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham

Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

Wednesday reading and April 2025 books

April 2025 totals