To be a writer is in fact a fairly common ambition – in a recent survey by YouGov, sixty per cent of British adults said that they wanted to become an author, and not as a casual dream but as a wish for a career. An equivalent survey in the United States revealed an even higher rating: eighty-one per cent of adults questioned felt they had a book in them, and that they should or would write it. In the USA there are approximately one-and-a-half million people who run or conduct courses in creative writing, providing tuition for more than twenty million students. The success of book groups and writers’ circles also underlines what a persistent aspiration authorship is for many people. Most of them will inevitably not achieve the dream, although in these days of internet publishing and print-on-demand, many more will do so than would have been able to in the past.
This is a book of non-fiction essays by the late great Christopher Priest, mostly (but not only) about the craft of science fiction and writing, with some autobiography thrown in. The publishers kindly sent me an advance copy in the expectation that I would review it here – normally I reject such requests (I get half a dozen or so every year), but in this case I was more than happy to oblige.
There are 16 pieces in 300-plus pages here, but they vary wildly in length. The longest single piece, a reflection on Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of his novel The Prestige, is almost a hundred pages. The shortest, about his life in a flat in Harrow from 1969 to 1985, is only four pages long.
Most readers will hope to get insights about Priest’s own career from this collection, and they will not be disappointed. The early autbiographical pieces are fascinating and add to the work of Paul Kincaid. The very first piece, about an unrequited teenage love, is especially moving; it was apparently the last to be written. He writes a lot about other people’s writing, but he also writes a lot about his own, disarmingly frank about the limitations of his analysis.
I don’t know how to write a book. I don’t even know how to write one of my own books.
The key to his own thinking about sf is probably best expressed in “‘It’ Came From Outer Space: The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976 by Lester Del Rey”, which brutally dissects Del Rey’s choices and commentary in a now forgotten anthology (56 ratings on Goodreads, which is close to nothing for a book almost 50 years old). Priest always wanted science fiction to be ambitious and outward-looking; he writes of Del Rey’s
major fallacy… that the creation of the genre magazines by Hugo Gernsback and his imitators in the 1920s and ’30s was a good thing.
He pushes back against narrow interpretations of the genre in several of the other pieces too (most notably in his 2000 Novacon Guest of honour speech) but this is its crispest expression.
He’s very funny about his own early career, though his remarks about Michael Moorcock are pretty salty, to the extent that Nina Allan notes in the foreword that the two of them reconciled at the end. At his very first science fiction convention, he is upstaged by Terry Pratchett:
To my not entirely impartial eyes, Terry seemed to be getting a disproportionate amount of recognition for a single short story, “The Hades Business”, which had appeared in an anthology, having first been published in his school magazine. Terry was then only fifteen years old; he was short and slight, had a mass of bushy dark hair, and spoke in a rather distinctive treble. I, with my writing light hidden under a bushel, could hardly complain that he was getting more attention as a promising young writer than I was, but even so I felt annoyed with him. I privately resolved to outdo him one day, but never in fact did so …
I wrote last year about Priest’s relationship with Doctor Who. One surprise here was a personal reminiscence of Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan, and was a neighbour in the Harrow years:
Marter, whom I found pleasant but distinctly odd, once advised me to wax my car because he said it would help strengthen it in the event of a head-on collision (or, presumably, a tree branch falling on it).
The long piece about the filming of The Prestige is interesting even for those (like me) who have not actually seen the film. Although Priest claimed to be fully stiff-upper-lip about it, he was clearly very emotionally invested in his own story and in what was done to it, and the reader will cheer on his behalf when he is generally pleased (to put it mildly) with the result.
It’s (almost) all worth reading. My one reservation is a 2002 piece supporting the conspiracy theory that Rudolf Hess was secretly replaced by a double. Perhaps it’s useful as an illustration of Priest’s interest in doubles and hidden histories, but I think an editorial note should have been added to say that the duplicate Hess theory, improbable in the first place, was conclusively disproved by DNA testing in 2019. Priest also had odd ideas about 9/11, but luckily doesn’t seem to have committed them to writing, or at least not to writing printed here.
But we’re on much more solid ground with the final piece, his Guest of honour speech from the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow, where he again restated his theory of the genre:
Long ago, I realised that whenever someone says “Science fiction IS”, or “Science fiction SHOULD BE”, I immediately start thinking of exceptions to that rule. Those exceptions are almost invariably stuff I like precisely because it can’t be pinned down. What we call science fiction as a kind of unified lump should consist of a literature of unexpected ideas, found in individual works, written by individual writers in individual ways. The rest is hackwork.
Even those who don’t know Priest’s work will probably enjoy the insights into the creative process that he gives here. For those of us who did know the man and his writing, it’s an essential volume. You can get The Recollections here (starting next month).
Though the Foreign Service emerges on the stage every so often— Benghazi, Libya, being one of the most recent examples—it is not well known outside Washington, D.C. Nor does the State Department have much continued resonance anywhere in the United States other than certain offices in Washington. “The state department of what?” is a question I would often get in response to my explaining where I worked.
The autobiography of American diplomat Christopher Hill, published in 2014, so before his most recent post as ambassador to Serbia, but covering all of the other points of his career. I don’t know him personally, though we have shaken hands a couple of times. I did enjoy highlighting the names of people who I do know as I read through my electronic copy – a good dozen or so from the Kosova and (North) Macedonia chapters, and a fair number from elsewhere.
Hill’s key posts were, in order, briefly Ambassador to Albania in 1991; assisting Richard Holbrooke in negotiating the Dayton Accords in 1995; Ambassador to what is now North Macedonia, 1996-99; overlapping with special envoy to Kosovo, 1998-99; Ambassador to Poland, 2000-04; Ambassador to South Korea, 2004-05 and then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, 2005-2009; and Ambassador to Iraq, 2009-10.
I was particularly interested in the Balkan chapters, but to be honest I did not learn much new from these sections, except that Hill’s views of the situation are pretty similar to mine. He moved on from the Balkans in 2000 (eventually returning as ambassador to Serbia in 2022, after this book was published) so the rest of the book is about his more recent career in areas I know much less well, and here I found a lot of fresh material.
His four-year term as Ambassador to Poland occupies only nine pages of the 350 of the main text, but the Korea and Iraq sections are much more substantial. On Korea, he claims credit for rebooting the USA’s image in South Korea and for making glacial but real progress in the denuclearisation talks with North Korea, in both cases by simply applying the classic skills of diplomacy – empathy and tact, with a firm grasp of your own vital interests and of shared goals. At the same time, he was being cut off at the knees by the neocons in Washington, led by Vice-President Cheney, who believed that the negotiations with North Korea were futile and tantamount to surrender, and briefed against him and the process incessantly.
The Iraq chapters are particularly sad. Hill is eloquently silent about the justification for the war in the first place, and does his best to get the USA to accept that the Iraqis should be allowed to get on with determining their own future. Unfortunately the political situation was distorted by factionalised politics in Washington, obsessed with picking favourites and winners, not to mention the unhealthy relationship between the US military and civilian missions on the ground in Baghdad. He preserves particular bile for an unnamed aide to General Ray Odierno; it did not take me long to work out who it was (nobody I knew).
As a whole, the book is defensive of diplomacy as an activity, but not especially of American diplomacy as it has been practiced; there’s a clear line to be drawn between the hard work of doing a job on the ground, and the craziness of the policy formation process in Washington, and Hill clearly has more patience for serious-minded foreigners than for his own country’s crazy politicians. As a serious-minded foreigner myself, I appreciated that.
This was my top unread book about Kosovo (though in fact most of it is about other topics and places). Next on that pile is From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond, by David Chandler.
PS: I wrote this before the attack on Iran, but have not changed any of it.
‘Also in the springtime,’ he said. Then, after a pause, ‘And the autumn, of course.’ Another pause. ‘Once or twice during the summer.’
Latest in the successful Rivers of London sequence, this takes Peter Grant and his cousin Abigail, along with Indigo the talking fox, to Aberdeen rather than their usual haunts, to investigate the disappearance of a human scientist and the discovery of a mysterious dead humanoid with gills. By about half way through, it becomes clear what the story is really about, but the whole thing has very enjoyable attention to detail and some great character moments, and sometimes a bit of entertainment is all that is needed. You can get Stone and Sky here.
This means that I have finished the Rivers of London books, at least as they stand for now. For my next trick, I’m going to work through Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, on which the TV show is based.
I reached deeper then, to the folds of my mind. I had nothing to fill them with but longed for their old familiarity, and hoped they would help me figure out what to do next.
One of the books from last year’s Hugo packet, this turns out to be the second in a fantasy series in which the protagonist is a professional story teller and also under suspicion of political murder. I bounced off both the prose and the structure and put it aside after fifty pages. If you want to, you can get The Doors of Midnight here.
This was my top book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is Rebellion on Treasure Island, a Doctor Who novel by Bali Rai.
At the moment, Magee was on a break from the war and living in Shannon in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, a world away from Belfast, 250 miles to the north. Shannon was a collection of housing estates built on reclaimed marshland next to an airport and factories. It was Ireland’s newest town, but poor design gave it no center, no heart, and exposed residents to wind and rain. Magee had moved here several months earlier under instructions to lie low and take it easy, but that plan, too, had design flaws. He was on edge, restless, and gazing north.
In September 1996, I attended the Liberal Democrats’ party conference in Brighton, wearing several hats – I was the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland’s Party Organiser and an aide to their delegation in the talks which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement, but I was also the Chair of the vestigial group of Liberal Democrat party members in Northern Ireland. An earnest BBC radio reporter sat me down for an interview in the Grand Hotel at breakfast time. “The situation in Northern Ireland is rather a distant concern for us here at this conference, isn’t it?” she asked me.
I looked back at her. “This building, where we are sitting right now, was blown up by the IRA twelve years ago.”
I know Rory Carroll, and have occasionally givenhimquotes. In this book he goes in depth into one of the IRA’s most audacious operations, the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in September 1984. She narrowly escaped; five party activists were killed; others suffered life-changing injuries. I vividly remember the coverage of Thatcher’s lieutenant Norman Tebbit being dug out of the rubble.
The book goes into intense detail of how the Brighton bomb, and the bomber Patrick Magee, fitted into the IRA’s overall strategy. The leadership were not immediately convinced of the return on investment of such a high risk act, in the wake of the Mountbatten murder. But in the end they were persuaded and the plot went ahead, with Magee planting the bomb with a slow but precise timer weeks in advance.
Magee himself was one of the IRA’s top bomb-makers, but had a complex personal life. I was interested that at one point, while on the run, he found accommodation and work at Venray in the Netherlands, which is where my cousin Gerard Ryan died and is buried. Carroll also gives vivid details of the police side of the story; the forensic investigation of the fragments of the bomb, the identification of Magee’s handprint from his hotel registration, the mixture of chance and preparation leading to his finally being arrested in Scotland in June 1985, while planning more action with a team including Martina Anderson, who I got to know decades later when she was a Member of the European Parliament.
Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, are big and important events, and Rory Carroll’s book gives answers to a lot of the questions that I suppose I had been vaguely wondering about since 1984. It has a couple of minor flaws – the opening chapters jump around the timeline in a way that could be confusing to readers less familiar with the history, and there are a couple of weird repetitions of detail between early and later chapters. So I rank it just below From A Clear Blue Sky and Say Nothing. But overall it’s a fascinating read about the biggest political bombing in British history. (The Gunpowder Plot doesn’t count, because it was thwarted.)
Second paragraph of third story (“The Case of the Missing Will”):
She arrived punctually—a tall, handsome young woman, plainly but neatly dressed, with an assured and business-like manner. Clearly a young woman who meant to get on in the world. I am not a great admirer of the so-called New Woman myself, and, in spite of her good looks, I was not particularly prepossessed in her favour.
The subtitle here is “Twelve Devonshire Mysteries”, but in fact several of them are set in Cornwall rather than Devon – just warning anyone who is expecting Dumnonian exactitude. The stories were originally published between 1923 and 1940 – Agatha Christie’s peak – in a variety of different magazines and collections, and they feature individually Poirot, Miss Marple, Parker Pyne and Tommy and Tuppence, so a decent sampling from across the spectrum of her protagonists. The collection was assembled between hard covers only last year.
One story, “The Hound of Death“, is not about crime at all but a horror story involving a Belgian nun in Cornwall. There is a foreword, extracted from her autobiography, about Agatha Christie’s love of Torquay. Some of the short stories depend on an obvious twist, but the point is more about Christie’s convincing portrayal of the West Country’s landscape and society than the actual plot. Worth it for the Christie fan.
I truly do believe no maiden that will live To look upon the brilliance of the sun Ever will be contemplative Like this one.
‘I truly do believe no maiden that will live’ may simply mean: I think no girl will ever be as sophos (clever) as this one.’ However, ‘To look upon the sun’ (a stock epic and tragic phrase meaning simply ‘to live’) raises the register, and the lines may express admiration for a girl who has already come to appreciate all that the sun symbolizes in the preceding poem. The sun here contains, in the abstract, qualities of shiny luxury items – glitter and glamour.
Translated poetry is always a bit problematic; you just can’t get the nuances exactly as intended by the original writer – especially when the original writer wrote in a dead language more than two and a half thousand years ago, and most of her known poetry survives only in fragments. But Poochigan seems to me to have made a good effort here. I’m not familiar enough with other translations to make a firm judgement, but I also appreciate his explanatory notes for each poem.
Most of the fragments are short, and have been preserved because of a single arresting image or turn of phrase. A couple of the longer ones jumped out at me. There’s an intense moment of jealousy (pp 22-23 here) when she sees the girl she likes talking to (?flirting with?) a man, and her heart throbs and her tongue “shatters”. The next poem (pp 24-25) is a break-up story, of the last conversation with your lover when you both realise it is over. The langauge is ancient but the sentiments are eternal.
The (very short) book ends with two poems which were very recently discovered on scraps of papyri, one about Sappho’s brother not yet having returned from a sea voyage, one a brief entreaty to Aphrodite about love. Poochigan does not mention it, because the scandal had not yet broken, but both of these passed through the hands of the notorious Dirk Obbink, so their provenance is very murky indeed; on the other hand, scholars do seem united in believing that these are genuine Sappho texts. It is awful and shameful that Obbink muddied the waters so much, both in this case and in the more notorious cases of the New Testament manuscripts.
Second paragraph of third chapter (director Kevin Davies’ retrospective on the making of 30 Years in the TARDIS):
I had been entranced by Dr. Who and the Daleks since I was very young. I can remember cowering behind my father as a big red Dalek glided through Selfridges when we went to see the movie exhibition in 1965. The opening scene of the documentary shows the young boy looking up at one in awe, just as I did all those years ago. I was a skinny little lad, and as she watched it my mother spotted the reference immediately, assuming that I must have cast Josh Maguire because he looked so much like the younger me. Maybe I did, subconsciously. The whole project had been very dear to my heart right from the start…
I hadn’t been aware of the existence of this annual-sized publication to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Doctor Who (which then came out a bit late). But it’s a nice piece of work, with very short stories featuring all of the first seven Doctors by Mark Gatiss, Justin Richards, Gareth Roberts (yeah, I know, but this was 1994), Daniel Blythe, Steve Lyons, Simon Messingham and Andy Lane, with comic strips by Paul Cornell and Warwick Gray (now Scott Gray), when all of them were at or near the beginning of their Whovian writing careers. There are also personal reflections from Nicholas Courtney, Sophie Aldred and director Kevin Davies. It’s a great little package, and better than some of the more recent annuals. You can get the 1995 Doctor Who Yearbook here.
It was when he shifted his sight into the Dusklands that it became something else. A dolmen mound. A monumental structure, silvery and solid yet alive… set there by the Ancients, a crossing point between this world and the Underworld.
This is a massive book that kept me going all through my trip to Gallifrey (though in fact I had very little time for reading when on the ground there, it was more for the plane flights). It’s a fantasy of a contemporary England where our protagonists are two generations of two families of Aetherials, who come from the otherworld of Faerie, to which however the path is barred. It’s a bit of an Aga saga, but with magic and demons. I got very drawn into the family dynamics, though I groaned at one (early) revelation in particular. Lots of sex and drama, and agonized psychological traumas manifesting as politics in the human world. I wasn’t really expecting to enjoy it, but I did. You can get Elfland here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (another Eastercon purchase). The next on those piles respectively are The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres, and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 12) The Ark, by Philip Purser-Hallard Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, by Rory Carroll Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill The Recollections: Fragments from a Life in Writing, by Christopher Priest Britain’s Other D-Day: The Politics of Decimalisation, by Andy Cook Liberation: The Unoffical and Unauthorised Guide to Blake’s 7, by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore
Non-genre 5 (YTD 11) Cards on the Table, by Agatha Christie Country Christie, by Agatha Christie The Big Wave, by Pearl S. Buck Pavilion of Women, by Pearl S. Buck Appointment With Death, by Agatha Christie
Poetry 1 (YTD 1) Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments, by Sappho, translated and edited by Aaron Poochigan
SF 8 (YTD 15) Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Dead Take the A Train, by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey (did not finish) Elfland, by Freda Warrington The Doors of Midnight, by R.R. Virdi (did not finish) Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Serbian Folk Tales, ed. Jake Jackson
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 15) The Penumbra Affair, by Paul Magrs (audiobook) Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters Whodle: a Whodunit Adventure Through Time and Space, by Tim Dedopulos, Roland Hall and Dave Knowles (did not finish) Doctor Who: The Ark, by Paul Erickson The Doctor Who Yearbook 1995, eds Gary Russell and Peri Goodbold
~6,900 pages (YTD 16,000) (counting 100 for the audiobook) 10/26 (YTD 23/59) by women (Moore, 3x Christie, 2x Buck, Sappho, Khaw, Warrington, Goodbold) 2/26 (YTD 4/59) by writers of colour (Khaw and Virdi) 5/26 reread (The Big Wave, Red Planet, The Fifth Elephant, Reckless Engineering, Doctor Who: The Ark)
195 books currently tagged unread, up 11 from last month (thanks to Gallifrey One), down 38 from February 2025.
Reading now The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
Coming soon (perhaps) Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al Last Resort, by Paul Leonard The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn
De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel
A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu Drome, by Jesse Lonergan Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai Enchanted April, by Elizabeth Von Arnim Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral Sourire 58, by Baudouin Deville et al Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton Slow Horses, by Mick Herron Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Tyler Banks was Thorne & Dirk’s head of Client Excisions, meaning he made problems disappear. Cut them entirely out of existence when necessary. However, he didn’t like getting his hands dirty with the seriously dangerous jobs. That’s what Julie was for— but she was the last thing on his mind as he stepped into the room.
Urban fantasy with our magically empowered heroine dealing with demonic intrusions and her own disastrous love life. I did not get very far because the horror scenes were gruesomely anatomical, and there is only so much of that that I can read. You can get The Dead Take the A Train here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2024. Next on that pile is A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske, of which I have higher hopes.
“Who plays bridge?” asked Mr. Shaitana. “Mrs. Lorrimer, I know. And Doctor Roberts. Do you play, Miss Meredith?”
A mid-period Christie, in which the murder is carried out during a bridge game, in the presence of Hercule Poirot and three of Christie’s other regular characters. Since we know none of them can have done it (spoiler: indeed, none of them is the murderer), suspicion turns to the four bridge players, who are characterised in detail to help us pick and choose the potential baddie. The plot is a little improbable, as each of the suspects has their own history of causing death; did they do it again? And solving the mystery involves several more deaths. But it’s classic Christie, and it’s no harm for Poirot to be forced to share the stage with some of her other characters (including Colonel Race, previously seen in The Man in the Brown Suit). You can get Cards on the Table here.
She pointedly ignored the ungracious hail, sitting out in the slanted morning sun with her folding desk, working on her triple-entry accounting. The first entry to calculate, the second to check the calculations and the third, on a separate piece of paper, to include all the errant entries that she wouldn’t be reporting to anyone but still felt the obscure need to keep track of.
This is the second in the Tyrant Philosophers series which started with City of Last Chances. Our protagonist, a survivor from the previous book, is conscripted into a military field hospital where with the help of his personal god, he is able to heal the wounded – provided that they then refrain from violence, a riff also from Forever Peace. There’s a complex cast of characters and a varied political and geographical landscape of war; there’s plenty of plot to keep you interested, but it’s still a very long book! I hugely admire Tchaikovsky’s industry and talent, but I would love it if he could write at shorter length too…
Second clue from third puzzle (“The War Machines”):
Dodo believes that the attack will come at sunset, while Ben thinks it will be six hours later, give or take.
I didn’t finish reading this yet, but I think it will be a nice distraction in idle hours (such as they are): a set of 61 logic puzzles, of the type that I loved when I was eleven or twelve, each based around a classic or modern Doctor Who story. I did the first two and found that they had pleasing subtleties. Here’s the grid from “The War Machines” to give you an idea of what it’s about:
The temperature was rising and the dawn wind was blowing firmly, but it was still at least thirty below. Strymon canal was a steel-blue, hard sheet of ice and would not melt today in this latitude. Resting on it beside the dock was the mail scooter from Syrtis Minor, its boat body supported by razor-edged runners. The driver was still loading it with cargo dragged from the warehouse on the dock.
Published in 1949, this was a book that I greatly enjoyed as a young reader, one of Heinlein’s successful juvenile series. The protagonist is a lad in the human colony on Mars, attending a military boarding school where he discovers a fiendish plot by the Earth-based rulers to destroy the colonists. Aided by his Martian pet, and by the mysterious giant Martians themselves, he gets home via the canals and other Martian tech, raises the alarm and helps his family and the rest of the colony defeat the evil administrators, who are apparently eaten by the Martians.
It’s a very male book; the protagonist and his buddy, and their fathers and a wise old doctor, carry most of the narrative, with some dialogue from mothers and a bratty sister. It’s a very pro-gun book; the colonists’ equivalent of Second Amendment rights are taken as obvious common sense (and of course crucial in the uprising). The colonists’ mission is explicitly colonial; no questions are asked about the fate of the Martians once humans spread out over the planet.
And yet there’s still a very attractive sensawunda about it, a feeling of estrangement from Earth and awe at the ancient mysteries and dangers of a new world, and arid landscapes not quite like the American West. Some of the magic remains for me, though perhaps not quite enough for me to recommend it to readers of the same age as I was when I first read it. You can get Red Planet here.
This was my top unread sf book (though of course I had read it long ago). Next on that pile is Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham.
Dusk fell when I still had about four miles more to go. needed to borrow some matches so I called in at an antiques shop in Dragonsdale, a giant metropolis of seventeen houses, three shops, two pubs and a twelfth-century church. That’s modern hereabouts. Liz Sandwell was just closing up. She came out to watch me do the twin oil-lamps on the Ruby. Well, you can’t have everything. Liz is basically oil paintings and Georgian incidental household furnishings. She has a lovely set of pole-screens and swing dressing-mirrors.
Having been rereading the Agatha Christie novels, I realised that I still had an unread Lovejoy novel from years ago on my shelves. And actually I realise now that I had read it even more years ago, but it’s short and digestible.
This is the Lovejoy of Gash’s original conception, fanatically obsessed with antiques and fatally attractive to women, who he treats badly. In fact he hits one of his girlfriends on page 2 (though in fairness she hits him first). If you pick this up expecting the gentle humour of Ian Le Frenais’ writing and Ian McShane’s acting, well, you’ll be surprised.
At the same time, I think the writer is fully aware of Lovejoy’s flaws and shows us what a monster he is, through his own lack of self-perception. And the actual plot of the book is a murder mystery, where Lovejoy is motivated by righteous rage when a friend is killed and the police write it off as an accident. I found the actual mystery resolution a bit opaque, but there is a fantastically well written climactic scene in Colchester Castle, where Lovejoy and his charming newly hired apprentice Lydia take on the villain, Lydia making her first of many appearances here.
There’s also a fair bit of lore about the Holy Grail – this book was published in 1979, three years before The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, but after at least two of the three BBC documentaries that it drew on (from 1972, 1974 and 1979). Not to go into details, but it had me checking Wikipedia for the career of Hester Bateman, one woman for whom Lovejoy has the highest respect.
I haul my bag up the hill. I haven’t brought much. All I need are shorts and t-shirts, flip flops, sneakers. Swim shorts. Harper arrives next week. Nat’s coming to the cottage tonight. I wrote to him weeks ago via the Castine post office, the way he told me to, and let him know I was coming. I don’t have his address. When I passed through Castine earlier I found his reply waiting, just as he promised I would, written in careful, childlike cursive: OK. I’ll bring dinner.
I got this as part of Kelly Lonesome’s submission for the 2024 Hugo packet, in the Best Editor Long Form category. I’m not sure if having that category for the Hugos really makes a lot of sense, but I am very appreciative of the reading material that it generates.
At first I wasn’t even sure if this book was sfnal to be appropriate for the Hugo packet. It starts out as an intense account of a teenager’s encounter with a serial killer in a village on the coast of Maine, and then flips a little forward to his retelling the story at university. But as we see layer upon layer of narrative unpeeling, and the true nature of the events becomes clear, I realised that it definitely qualifies as fantasy horror. It’s a complex and overlapping story, but Ward keeps control of it and we always know where we are. An unexpected dark pleasure.
The first of a recent series of six graphic novels by Weber and Deville, set in Belgium in the mid-twentieth century (later years are 1958, 1960, 1961, 1965 and 1968).
The framing narrative has the central character, Kathleen, cleaning up her mother’s house in 1960, and coming across souvenirs of the war years seventeen years earlier – the same distance that separates us from 2009. We are then plunged into an intense narrative of resistance to German occupation, mostly from a schoolgirl’s point of view, with a lot of real life events and people woven into the fiction. The climax is the publication of the “Faux Soir” on 7 November 1943.
Fiction based around historical personalities and events, whether on the screen or on the page, often falls into the trap of doing it by the numbers. I felt that Bruxelles 43 avoided that; we readers of course know that the occupation will not last for much longer, and that Belgium will pick itself up again, but the characters don’t. It’s also very neat that comics themselves as a medium are woven into the story – Hergé is one of the many historical characters to make an appearance, and there’s a sensitive exploration of the role of culture in general in an occupied society.
This is a good start to the series. Next in the sequence is Sourire 58, by the same creative team. You can get Bruxelles 43 here.
And this attitude baffled Poirot. To begin with, his vanity suffered. It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not. Very good for him, I could not but feel-but not precisely helpful to the object in view!
This is the seventh Poirot novel, written and set in 1932, with Poirot and his friend, Hastings the narrator, becoming entangled with a naïve socialite who lives in a decaying seaside mansion. She appears to be the target of a series of assassination attempts, and after someone else is killed apparently in mistake for her, things get very serious. Lots of good plot here, with some red herrings and some totally fair clues, and Christie turns the tables on the reader very neatly at the end. Not especially memorable perhaps, but classic Christie.
There are a couple of less good bits. A random bloke turns up at the end, starts shooting at people, and is bundled away while Poirot explains that he had nothing to do with the actual plot. There’s casual anti-semitism about another minor character. The ending sees natural justice rather than state justice meted out. But again, this is classic Christie, warts and all.
The strange woman watched them, still holding Mrs Skraeveling’s hat. Her antlers were a sort of hat too, Utterly realized. Now that she had got over the first shock of them she could see the wires to which they were attached shining in the woman’s russet hair. It was a peculiar sort of a hat, but then she was a peculiar sort of person altogether. She was one of the troll-people who lived at the north end of Wildsea in the rocky wooded region called the Dizzard. Reverend Dearlove said that it was rude to call them trolls, but Utterly could see why people did, for the woman with the antlers was quite ugly. All the features of her face were too big and too definite, and her thick eyebrows met above her nose. Her eyes were large and deep-set: dark brown eyes with flecks of gold in them.
I got to know Philip Reeve in person at the 2022 Eastercon, Reclamation, where we were both guests of honour. We had a couple of very pleasant dinners together, and ended up sharing a taxi to escape Heathrow. At that point the only one of his books that I had actually read was a Doctor Who short from 2013. He is of course best known for Mortal Engines, of which Minnesota governor Tim Walz is also a fan. I bought this at that Eastercon, but have shamefully only now got around to reading it.
It’s very good. Utterly Dark is a foundling girl brought up on a strange island off the Cornish coast. Her adoptive father, who was the Watcher of the island, keeping an eye out for the Hidden Isles and the creature known as the Gorm, is found drowned, and his brother is summoned from London to take over. Under the new regime, disaster of a YA Lovecraftian type comes ever closer. It’s all very nicely done, and I’ll keep an eye out for the two sequels now. (Oddly enough my reading of this overlapped with Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward, which also features young protagonists and seaside horrors.)
This is the next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was born in Denmark, but her father was Norwegian and they moved back to Norway when she was two. She began writing as a teenager, and won the Nobel Prize in 1928, when she was 46, then the second youngest winner after Rudyard Kipling (since beaten by Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, and Albert Camus).
The Nobel Committee is clear that the award was for Kristin Lavransdatter: the citation was “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”. She had been nominated previously in 1922, 1925 and 1926; in 1928 her nomination came not from a writer but from Norwegian psychologist Helga Eng. In her mercifully short acceptance speech, she restricts herself to celebrating the bonds between Norway and Sweden. I find the Chairman of the Academy’s presentation speech somewhat patronising, but he’s clear that Kristin Lavransdatter is the key to Undset’s succcess.
I must say that I approached it with some trepidation. My project to read non-white-male Nobel Literature laureates has not been super successful so far; I have read two short okayish novels by Selma Lagerlöf, some incomprehensible poetry by Rabindranath Tagore and a dull book by Grazia Deledda. And Kristin Lavransdatter checks in at over 1100 pages, and I could tell that it was another tale up upstanding rural folk, like the Lagerlöf and Deledda books. However, I realised that I could just read the first part, published in 1920, for this project, and come back to the second and third parts in due course of my normal rounds of reading.
So, what did I think of The Wreath, the first part of Kristin Lavransdatter? Here is the second paragraph of the third chapter:
Ogsaa Kristin følte at det var en stor lykke de hadde faat med den lille spæde søsteren. Tænkt over at morens tunge sind gjorde det stilt paa gaarden hadde hun aldrig; hun hadde syntes det var som det skulde være, naar moren optugtet og formanet hende, men faren lekte og skjemtet med hende. Nu var moren meget mildere mot hende og gav hende mere frihet, kjælte ogsaa mere for hende, og da la Kristin litet merke til at hendes mor ogsaa hadde meget mindre tid til at stelle med hende. Hun elsket da Ulvhild, hun som de andre, og var glad naar hun fik bære eller vugge søsteren, og siden blev det endda mere moro med den lille, da hun begyndte at krype og gaa og tale og Kristin kunde leke med hende.
Kristin also felt it was a great joy that they had been given her little infant sister. She had never thought about the fact that her mother’s somber disposition had made life at home so subdued. She thought things were as they should be: her mother disciplined or admonished her, while her father teased and played with her. Now her mother was gentler toward her and gave her more freedom; she caressed her more often too, so Kristin didn’t notice that her mother also had less time to spend with her. She loved Ulvhild, as everyone did, and was pleased when she was allowed to carry her sister or rock her cradle. And later on the little one was even more fun; as she began to crawl and walk and talk, Kristin could play with her.
English translation by Tiina Nunnally.
Actually I rather liked it. It’s set in the 14th century, in a valley in central Norway. Kristin is the daughter of Lavrans (as you might have guess from the title); he is a respectable nobleman who betroths her to the neighbours’ virtuous son. Kristin however falls in love with an more mature chap who has children from a previous relationship (Undset’s own husband was also an older chap with children from a previous relationship) and eventually persuades her family to let her marry him, wearing the virginal wreath of the book’s title, though she alone knows that she is several months pregnant (as Undset was when she married).
I thought Kristin herself was very well realised, as were the men and women in her life, and the Norwegian landscape and climate, both of which are significant factors in the story, are vividly depicted. One of the interesting subplots is that Kristin’s younger sister suffers a spinal injury in an accident and remains bedridden for the rest of her short life. One of Undset’s own children had a learning disability, as did one of her stepchildren; I don’t know any more details than that, but for obvious reasons disabled characters catch my attention.
It’s quite a Catholic book. Kristin is sent off to a convent school in Oslo, and the portrayal of the nuns is pretty realistic; in general the church plays a helpful role. Undset herself converted to Catholicism in 1924, to great public scandal in Lutheran Norway. In general it’s a huge contrast with the likes of The Good Wife of Bath, which I bounced off last year. My Catholic days are behind me, but I appreciate calm description rather than polemic.
So yeah, this was the first discovery of a new and interesting writer for me in this project, and I will get to the second and third volumes in good time. Meanwhile you can get Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath here.
‘Katabasis’ means descent to the underworld, and here Alice Law, a Cambridge postgraduate student of magick, enters Hell with her classmate to try and rescue their tutor, who has died in a magical experiment gone wrong. It began rather well, as a carefully constructed fantasy afterworld leaning on Virgil and especially Dante, with a stark sparsely described landscape inhabited by the souls of the dead. Symbolic logic turns out to be key to dealing with both magick and the afterlife.
But the metaphor of Hell being a graduate studies programme is laid on very thick, and there is a section about two thirds of the way through the (very long) book where I began to feel that I couldn’t take it quite as seriously as may have been intended. Also the plot really narrows down quite quickly to the point where only one ending is possible, and it duly gets there.
So I don’t think I’ll be nominating it for the Hugos, though I’m pretty sure it will get on the ballot anyway and, depending on what else is there, it will have a decent shot at winning, as Babel should have done in 2023. You can get Katabasis here.
And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.
This is a 60,000 word essay, a single web page on Sandifer’s Eruditorum Press website. It hasn’t been published separately (though will apparently become part of Sandifer’s projected second volume of Last War in Albion, her history of the magical rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison); but I am treating it as a book for bookblogging purposes.
This is mainly because there is a strong case for nominating it in the Best Related Work category in this year’s Hugo Awards, for which nominations open this week. In general the Hugos should not celebrate last year’s controversies; but this is an analysis of the Sandman comics, and of Gaiman’s other work, especially in the graphic medium, over several decades, taking into account what we now know about Gaiman’s personal life and appalling behaviour. It’s not so much about the scandal (though it is about that), as about how Gaiman constructed his career and everything else.
It’s not framed as a hatchet job. Sandifer starts by sympathetically analysing Gaiman’s childhood in Scientology, and the abuse that he certainly suffered at the hands of his father, Britain’s leading Scientologist. She then goes on to look at the roots of Sandman, and at the high points of the story (of which there are many) and its occasionally troubled publications history.
But the pattern of exploitation and abuse of young fans, and later of other women, began pretty early on – Dave Sim refers to one of Gaiman’s convention flings in the notorious Cerebus #186, in 1992. And it’s not at all difficult to find reflections of Gaiman’s behaviour in his work. We may contain multitudes, but perhaps not all that many.
I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. My first entry in the original version of this blog was about meeting him at a signing in Brussels. I have more of his books in my LibraryThing catalogue than for any other author bar Justin Richards, Roger Zelazny and Terrance Dicks. I had generally friendly if slightly spiky correspondence with him over Hugo stuff over the years (his last time on the final ballot was my first time administering the awards in 2017, and he wrote in 2024 to ask “why Sandman Episode 6 was ruled ineligible for the Hugos at Chengdu?” – a question to which unfortunately I did not and do not know the answer).
I will find it very difficult to open any of Gaiman’s work ever again, and yet I wanted some sort of closure for myself. This essay provides it, acknowledging the high points of Gaiman’s work but linking it to the low points of his personal life. I’m lucky; I barely knew him apart from through his writing. Other friends are much more personally devastated. Sandifer ends the essay with one of Roz Kaveney’s heartfelt poems about the end of her friendship with Gaiman. Here’s another, published on 7 February 2025:
Heart is a traitor even when it breaks. Love friendship given cannot be returned. All that I once thought my friend was once has burned To trash shame ruin. Even his mistakes His sins his crimes are of a piece with all The things I valued. His embarrassed smile His weighted pauses. I am certain while He fucked those girls they’d see the shutters fall Behind his eyes. Some random witty thought Would take him for a moment quite elsewhere. Sometimes I want to slap him maybe swear. He was extraordinary until caught. All the good times, the brilliance flawed. Hearts crack. Yet friendship given can’t be taken back.
To a greater or lesser extent, all of us who liked the man and/or his work will have felt that betrayal, and Sandifer’s essay is an important part of moving on. I’m nominating it for this year’s Hugos, and I hope that you do too.
In 1960 Haughey’s constituency colleague, Oscar Traynor, the oldest minister in Lemass’s cabinet, was struggling with the workload in the Department of Justice. Seán Lemass decided that he would need some help to ease the burden and after some debate offered Haughey the job of parliamentary secretary to the minister, today a minister of state.⁶ Haughey said Lemass told him, ‘As Taoiseach I am offering you this appointment on behalf of the government, but as your father-in-law I am advising you not to take it,’ though Lemass would have known there was no chance that his advice, if serious, would be heeded.⁷ Haughey took the job, and immediately showed the flair, attention to detail and administrative skills that would characterise him throughout his career. He tended to identify discrete reforms that he could deliver, and which would be associated with him. Haughey engaged in a programme of law reform Lemass had requested. ⁶ ‘The Peter Berry diaries’ Magill, June 1980; Brian Farrell, Seán Lemass, Gill & Macmillan, 1991, p. 103. ⁷ Deaglán de Breadún ‘C. J. Haughey’s golden days’, Irish Times, 28 March 1984.
This book is by the son of the founder of the Progressive Democrats, Ireland’s liberal party from the 1980s to the 2000s; I knew him (the son, not the father) when we were both young political activists in the 1990s. Eoin is now a lecturer in political science, and not affiliated to any party. He was also involved with an epic trolling exchange with Ryanair a few years ago, back when Twitter was Twitter:
For those of you who don’t remember or weren’t born at the time, the rivalry between Fine Gael leader Garret Fitzgerald and Fianna Fail leader Charles J. Haughey defined Irish politics in the 1980s. My family were definitely Team Garret without apology; my parents knew him as a colleague at University College Dublin in the early 1960s, and were actually introduced to each other by Gemma Hussey, who ended up as a minister in the 1982-87 government which Garret led. There was also the rather important point of him not being a crook.
Today is the 100th anniversary of Garret’s birth. I met him a few times myself. He wrote the foreword to the book that my father had finished writing the week before his death in 1990, and gave the first of a series of annual John Whyte lectures – the title was “What Makes Politics Tick? Interests, Ideals or Emotions?” and it was a typically quirky reflection on his own time at the top. By a coincidence of timing, the day he delivered it in Belfast was the day that Margaret Thatcher resigned, and he leavened his text with some personal anecdotes (I remember one about them both being soaked to the skin while on a boat ride at the European summit in Corfu). Someone asked him how he thought Haughey, his enemy and successor, would deal with the recent election of Mary Robinson as president of Ireland. He gave his characteristic chortle. “The Taoiseach,” he declared, “is a pragmatist.” And so it proved.
A few years later, I met him at an Anglo-Irish political seminar for young activists (and older guests), and I told him about my past medieval history research. He pondered for a moment, and then asked me a rather unexpected question: “Do you know what the main means of goods transport over land was in France in the eighth century?” I shook my head in bafflement. Garret chortled, as ever. “The camel!” he declared. (I have no idea if this is true, and suspect that it may not be.)
When the much-missed Noel Whelan and I launched a hastily written book about the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Garret came to the Dublin launch, and immediately spotted that we had left one of the tables of election results blank. He sat down, got out a pencil, and filled in the missing numbers on his own copy.
The last time I met him was in 2006, when I was speaking about Eastern European conflict zones at Dublin City University; he turned up and asked me good and pertinent questions from the audience.
I had no personal links at all with Charles Haughey, but I recently read Frank Dunlop’s Yes Taoiseach, of which the best bit is the 1979-82 section covering Haughey’s first two terms in office. Like everyone else I read the newspapers, and deplored Haughey’s opportunism, though was impressed by the redemption that he achieved later in his career. I admit I was also annoyed on his behalf every time a British politician or newsreader pronounced his name “Haw-hee”.
We suspected it at the time, but it is now well documented that he was a crook. O’Malley doesn’t go into this, but the evidence is clear. The most sickening example was his outright theft of around Ir£200,000 from funds raised for his colleague and friend Brian Lenihan, who needed a liver transplant in 1989. Over the course of Haughey’s career, he was paid many millions of pounds by private business, mostly but not always Irish, and while it’s difficult to make a direct case that these payments led to specific acts of corruption, none of the money was properly accounted for – and Haughey was a qualified accountant and a qualified lawyer, so he knew exactly what he was doing.
Eoin O’Malley’s book takes the two leaders in parallel – born within five months of each other, Haughey 100 years ago last September, Fitzgerald 100 years ago this very day, studying at University College Dublin at the same time, both with family links to an older political generation (Fitzgerald’s father was a minister in the 1922-1932 government, Haughey’s father-in-law was Sean Lemass, the Taoiseach from 1959 to 1966), both also with family links to Northern Ireland (Fitzgerald’s Ulster Protestant mother, Haughey’s uncle and cousins in Swatragh).
Fitzgerald became leader of Fine Gael in 1977, and Haughey became leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach in 1979; their rivalry lasted until Fitzgerald resigned after losing the 1987 election. Just reading the facts of what happened during those crazy years is fascinating enough, even though I lived through them at the time. The most extraordinary incident was when the perpetrator of a couple of notorious murders in Haughey’s second term was arrested while staying in a flat belonging to his friend who happened to be Haughey’s Attorney-General. That was hardly Haughey’s fault, but it seemed symbolic.
But on the other hand, even we who liked Garret have to admit that he was pretty disastrous in government. He was a catastrophically bad people manager. His ‘constitutional crusade’ to make the Republic more Protestant-friendly by liberalising legislation on social issues crashed and burned. The country’s financial situation got worse and worse. The successful campaign to add a ban on abortion to the constitution saddled the country with a legal and ethical mess that took decades to sort out. (A mutual friend who saw Garret a few weeks before he died reported to me that going along with this was his biggest political regret.)
The one big success was the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, which Margaret Thatcher was somehow charmed into signing. I would love to know the full story behind how this happened. I have seen one account which gives John Hume most of the credit; he is barely mentioned by O’Malley, who puts the UK cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong in the central role. In any case, it regularised the Republic’s relationship with the UK with regard to Northern Ireland, and pushed Unionists (after their initial impotent fury) to realise that a stable long-term solution was going to look more like Sunningdale than the old Stormont. Haughey (a pragmatist, as I said earlier) condemned it bitterly in opposition and operated it smoothly in government.
Haughey won the election in 1987 by running against Fine Gael’s drastic plans for economic reform, which Fitzgerald had typically failed to sell to voters, and then astonished everyone by adopting the Fine Gael programme and implementing it, leaving Fine Gael no option but to support his government. Haughey was a good coalition-builder, and succeeded in getting buy-in from both unions and business. Even more astonishingly, it actually worked, and laid the foundations for the years of economic growth that became characterised as the Celtic Tiger. O’Malley makes the point that while Haughey actually did it, it was Fitzgerald’s plan; they both deserve credit, and the difference between them was more style than policy substance.
Haughey was a crook as previously mentioned, but O’Malley makes a strong case that he was effective and impactful once he finally got to a fairly stable position of government in 1987, and that in a weird sense he owed this success to Fitzgerald.
Though I do wish that O’Malley had spent a bit more time looking at the 1971 Arms Trial (also not really addressed by Frank Dunlop). With the passage of time, almost twenty years after his death, is the balance of analysis that Haughey was actually guilty, or not? And what was the real effect on the ground in Northern Ireland, if any?
So, originally I had planned to pump out a bunch of Doctor Who reviews at the start of the month, including writing up several at Gallifrey One. But, you know what? I have been having far too much fun at Gally to do the writing I had planned. Still, catching a few minutes between panels and other social events, I’ve been able to finalise this after reading the books on the flight over. It’s about a story that I feel strangely affectionate towards.
And if you’re encountering this blog for the first time, I write mainly about books here, and often about Doctor Who. For a sample of the more usual content, these were my top blog posts based on last year’s viewership.
To the matter in hand. When I first watched The Ark in 2006, I wrote:
Fan lore generally is pretty negative about this story; perhaps this shows that I wasn’t concentrating sufficiently, but I really rather enjoyed it.
In particular, I very much enjoyed the one thing that those who dislike this story universally single out for criticism, Jackie Lane’s acting as the newly arrived companion Dodo Chaplet (who walked into the TARDIS at the end of the previous story). I thought it was great to have an assertive young companion – the first really since Barbara’s departure (apart from the brief appearance of Sara Kingdom) – and for my money she rose to the challenge. Hartnell is on top form, and even his fluffs seem much more in character with the Doctor than with the actor. Peter Purves as Stephen has some great lines and even a mild love interest.
The other feature of this story universally mocked by the critics, the Monoids, actually seemed not too bad to me, for 1966 anyway. Certainly far far better than the forest creatures at the end of The Chase. They reminded me a bit of the Ood from The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Their transformation from silent servitors to sinister overlords is creepy but compelling. And they supply the great punchline to episode two, when the TARDIS crew discover that the statue the Ark’s human crews were building has been complete, but with a Monoid head.
I even liked the look of it. The gradual revelation that the forest has (as we are warned in the title of the first episode) a steel sky is well done. The Roman-style costumes of the human Guardians deliberately make us think of the Monoids as slaves. The surface of the planet Refusis, and its invisible inhabitants, are well done. The scenes of planets and suns in space are, at least, not too embarrassing.
The Ark is one of those stories which I did not like as much as before, watching in sequence this time. I don’t think it’s just because we can actually see it for a change (of the 21 previous episodes, only three from The Daleks’ Master Plan survive). The fundamental idea is sound and even a bit daring, but the script is very oddly paced and yet also cliched. (A security kitchen?) It is not surprising that neither the writer nor the director did another Who story, and I wonder how much morale was affected by John Wiles’ imminent departure as producer. One thing which always tells me that the director didn’t quite Get It is that the crowd scenes are lacking in dynamism – it’s interesting to see children in Who, but it’s odd to see them and their parents all standing around with their hands by their sides. Imison does better with the Monoids, in the first half at least (and I see that the lore claims they were his idea), but the script doen’t help. Both halves of the story suffer from over-long exposition and rushed climax. Poor Jackie Lane starts quite well but seems to gradually have the enthusiasm sucked out of her.
I realised to my delight that I had not yet opened, let alone watched, a DVD of The Ark bought some time ago, and spent some time over the weekend remedying the situation. As the First Doctor space opera stories go, this is one of the few successful ones without Daleks; and I’ve always appreciated it as Dodo’s first proper appearance. The DVD is solid rather than brilliant, though the story behind the insanely complex camera work is told very well, and I had not appreciated just how short the time between filming and broadcast was; though the claim that Dodo’s miniskirt seen at the end was the first ever shown on the BBC seems rather bold. The extras include a lovely reminiscence of the Riverside studio where the story was made, with Peter Purves and the director Michael Imison (who was told he was to be sacked literally as he went into the gallery to supervise filming of the final episode), and a rather silly piece on why the Monoids never took off (which at least gets Jacqueline Rayner a moment as a talking head).
And there’s also a short documentary on the influence of H.G. Wells on Doctor Who, which seems at first an odd inclusion, though the argument is in the end very convincingly made that The Ark is one of the most Wellsian stories in the Whovian canon. This features a lot of Matthew Sweet, who has written some of the more literary Big Finish audios, and also Kim Newman, Graham Sleight and a mysterious figure credited as Dr A Keen, who looks like someone I vaguely remember from the Belfast arts faculty computer facilities in the early 1990s; I wonder what he is doing now?
(I should clarify that of course I meant academic, fan and friend Tony Keen in that last remark; also, since then I have become friendly with Matthew Sweet through Gallifrey One, which is where I am writing this up.)
Watching it again, I became impressed by the scope and ambition of the story: a generation starship! An artificial forest! And also the daring out-of-sequence filming of the last episode. Today’s viewer has to make allowances for what was possible at the time, but I think it holds up well.
The second paragraph of the third sentence of Paul Erickson’s novelisation is:
‘I’m not sure, my dear boy,’ the Doctor replied. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
Like Lucarotti [in his novelisation of The Massacre], Paul Erickson added some extra chrome into the book version of The Ark which was, I suppose, not realisable on screen, notably the numerous different habitats on the Guardian/Monoid spaceships, and a second invisible Refusian. Also the motivation for the Monoids’ peculiar decision to send the Doctor and Dodo on an exploratory mission is (just about) rationalised. I had forgotten just how bloodthirsty the climax is, as the Monoids wipe each other out in a firefight (and here Erickson gives in to Ian Marter-style temptation to make the fighting even more vicious on the page). I felt, however, that the characterisation of the first Doctor was a bit shaky, with a bit too much use of “old chap” which is not really one of his catchphrases.
Rereading it now, I was again impressed by the ambition and scope of the story – there is a sequence where the Doctor chases all over the varied climatic regions of the Ark to cure the plague, and later on, the Refusians play chess as well as tennis. You can get it here (though at a price).
Before I get to the Black Archive, I am frankly fascinated by Dodo as a companion. Long ago I wrote a piece about her, linking also to the very small amount of fan fiction then available about her.
There’s also a lovely video of Jackie Lane, played Dodo, taking a day-trip to Paris in November 2010:
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive on the story doesn’t disappoint. It’s a good example of unpacking the ideas and context of the story and raising questions about the received wisdom of fandom.
The introduction reflects on how the story has dated, its roots in Wells and Stapledon, and what is known about the process of writing it.
The first chapter, “The Spaceship”, looks at the use of screens in the story, the conception of the ship itself, and the history of the idea of generation starships (including Ken MacLeod’s Learning the World).
The second chapter, “The Guardians”, looks at the concept of the far future, Olaf Stapledon on the future of humanity, the plague, and the connotations of the fact that the Guardians are all white.
The second paragraph of the third chapter, “The Reptiles”, is:
Many of the most enduring and iconic Doctor Who monsters have been similarly reptilian. The decade following The Ark produced the Ice Warriors, the Silurians and their relatives the Sea Devils, and the Draconians, all of whom have proved their lasting appeal⁶. At the time of the story’s broadcast, a few less prominent (and not necessarily hostile) creatures had been portrayed with some reptile characteristics, like the Slyther and the Sand Beast⁷. The Monoids represent the first time in the series that a primary antagonist is identified this way. ⁶ Introduced respectively in The Ice Warriors (1967), The Silurians (1970), The Sea Devils (1972) and Frontier in Space(1973), and in the first three cases appearing in many TV stories thereafter (while the Draconians have often appeared in tie-in and spinoff media). ⁷ In The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue respectively.
The chapter looks at the reptilian nature of the Monoids and their relationship to the Cyclops and to Wells, at the question of what colour they are both literally and in racial terms, and at the colonial implications of the script.
The fourth chapter, “The Landing”, looks at the depiction of Refusis and the invisible Refusians, at the story’s Biblical parallels, and at the dubious nature of the agreement between humans and Monoids brokered by the Doctor and Refusians at the end (“The Covenant of The Ark” is the last of many witty sub-heading titles).
The conclusion looks at the differences between the two halves of the story, and makes the bold proposal that fan lore may be wrong about the authorship; he sets out a good case that the second half was mainly written by the mysterious Lesley Scott.
(However, he repeats the incorrect but widely believed statement the Malorie Blackman, co-author of the 2018 story Rosa, was the first known writer of colour for Doctor Who. In fact it was probably Glen McCoy, who wrote the 1983 story Timelash.)
I think that this Black Archive is particularly accessible for readers who may not be familiar with the original story, and I hope it will encourage people to watch it. You can get Philip Purser-Hallard’s The Ark here.
I’m having a great time at Gallifrey One, and if you are here, I hope you are too.
This is pretty good fun. The Angels of the Heavenly Host come up against the Weeping Angels; the Judoon and Margaret Slitheen get involved; some nice character moments for the Doctor and Missy, and to a lesser extent Bill and Nardole. Does what it needs to do. You can get A Confusion of Angels here.
I arrived just in time to attend a royal wedding. My royal wedding, I was betrothed to the Great A.l. Generator, a giant machine that wanted to unite queen and machine to rule over everyone and stop the war. It had a copy of my certificate, which it called the Binding Contract of the Star, and it ordered the robots to come and get me ‘so metal and skin may weld within Miss Belinda Chandra’,
The Doctor Who annuals of the Chibnall/Whitaker years were notably thin. This is a bit thicker, if not quite at the glory days of the 1960s and 1970s. There’s a lot of recapitulation of the 2025 episodes, including a couple of extracts in photonovel format which I think is a first. There’s a small amount of reflection on previous Doctor Who lore, and a foreword from Varada Sethu. The most original material is a short story by Pete McTighe, “Night of the Shreek”, a prequel to Lucky Day, which is very nice. I’d say it’s worth the cover price. You can get the 2026 Doctor Who Annual here.
‘These trees don’t look all that healthy’, she observed.
A Ninth Doctor and Rose story which exports the Frankenstein narrative to 1880s Wales, throwing in some Unquiet Dead-style aliens as well. I thought it was very confidently written, and in particular captured the Series One Rose very well, with in general a good sense of the human landscape – with exceptions; Heath, an Australian with a solid writing record of his own, doesn’t seem to realise that Wales doesn’t have lochs.
This was the sixth of the eight Puffin Doctor Who Classic Crossover novels, of which I had already read the first two (both by Jac Rayner). I’ll keep an eye out for the other five, four of which are by Paul Magrs.
Anji shuddered. Whatever those buildings had once been, they were now unrecognisable, hulking ghosts being teased apart by ivy It was amazing how quiet everything was. No traffic, no birdsong, none of the hurly-burly of the city as it should be. Only the sound of their own footsteps and conversation, and the wind sighing through the trees.
Next in the sequence of Eighth Doctor novels that I read but did not review a decade ago, this has the Doctor, Fitz and Anji arriving in a parallel universe – Bristol, to be specific – where a chronological disaster has wiped out most animals and devastated humanity. There is some good action between the macro plot of trying to fix things and the micro plot of the local politics of the (doomed) inhabitants of the parallel timestream. Despite the fact that this Bristol is depopulated and desolate, there is a real sense of place and space in this book and good characterisation of the main characters, including more than one parallel version of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I liked it more than some in this sequence. You can get Reckless Engineering here.
The physicians thought it was unlikely she would live much longer.
I’m not wild in general about the sequence of Eighth Doctor books that I am currently reading, but this one hit the spot for me. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji land in Edinburgh in 2003, but in a timeline where computers were never invented and Britain is ruled by a fascist, racist regime. Inevitably they are accused of terrorism, fall in with the real terrorists, and then end up in the Tower of London trying to unravel the sleeve of history without setting off a domino effect of time destruction. There’s some graphic violence, and some very twisty plot twists at the end (and inevitably Sabbath turns up, does nothing very much and then leaves again), but I liked it more than some of these. You can get The Domino Effect here.
Next in this sequence: Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters.
