Second paragraph of third essay (“Command of Kosovo Force 1999” by Mike [sic] Jackson):
In early 1997 I found myself commanding the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps, or ARRC, in Reindahlen, Germany. Its headquarters is under operational command of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), and I therefore reported directly to General Wesley ‘Wes’ Clark. In May 1998, at SACEUR’s annual conference, Clark told his key subordinates: ‘things are beginning to hot up in Kosovo, NATO may have to intervene.’
A provocative title for an interesting book, a series of essays by senior British military officers and historians, partly about recent (in 2013) campaigns, but also reflecting on the place of knowledge and knowledge management in military structures and strategy. I have an odd connection with one of the editors, Sir Hew Strachan, which is that back in 1991, when his wife Pamela was a candidate for Cambridge City Council, I was her election agent. They have since moved to Scotland, and she has got ordained.
There is one frankly terrible essay here, but the other twenty-five are at least interesting and some are fascinating. For me personally the most interesting single piece was the second, by Sir Alistair Irwin, reflecting on the British Army’s role in Northern Ireland: “at no stage from start to finish was there anything that recognisably had the features of a campaign plan. I confess that I went through a stage of believing that this was a fatal and incompetent omission. Now I begin to believe that the circumstances were such that it was never possible to have one.”
All of the essays reflect on the importance of the political dimension of military operations, both in terms of political guidance from Whitehall which is clear without micro-managing, and also in terms of sensitivity to the facts on the ground and managing relations with local populations. I found it a lot more grown-up than some of the American analysis that I have been looking at recently. The military (or at least these military writers) recognise that the deployment of troops is normally only a part of solving a wider political problem, which will need to be solved by political means.
More than a third of the essays are about the Basra campaign in Iraq, where the consensus of the contributors is very defensive of the alleged successes of the Brits on the ground (the Chilcot report was a lot more damning). I must say that after reading a fourth essay how the British were really not humiliated by the locals, I was less rather than more convinced. About a quarter of the essays were similarly about the Helmand campaign in Afghanistan, which was obviously failing by 2013 though had not yet come to its catastrophic conclusion, and there even the most optimistic writers found it difficult to be upbeat. But the point made in both cases is that the problems faced by the military on the ground stemmed from political direction (or lack of it) given from London.
There is also some more cheerful analysis of Kosovo and Sierra Leone – the latter generally forgotten now because it was a short and successful operation. But the end of the book comes back to reflect on the British military’s approach to knowledge and learning, as well as its relationship to politics, in a much more reflective mode than I would have (perhaps unfairly) expected.
One of the more interesting works of military analysis that I have read recently, honest about the fact that there are shortcomings, if not always completely clear about what they are.
As Patrick Troughton bowed out as the Doctor, times were hard for the series.
Another of the Obverse Books Doctor Who non-fiction catalogue, this is a compilation of writer Eddie McGuigan’s interviews over the years with various cast and some crew members of Old Who. McGuigan seems to have disappeared in recent years, but he was at one time one of the prime movers behind the Outpost Skaro fan website / blog / podcast. To be honest, there’s nothing very new here for anyone who has been paying much attention to DVD extras and Doctor Who magazine over the years, but there’s no harm in it either. You can get Face to Face: the Classic Years here.
He whispered to Mitchell and the latter nodded, and – pushing his way through the passengers – he took up his stand in the doorway leading past the wash rooms to the front car.
An Agatha Christie novel that is both fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating because it shows the early days of commercial air flight, something that we take for granted today but that was pretty new in 1935. A flight from Paris to London cost about £8 (£500 in today’s money); you got full steward service during the trip (lucky if you can get a beaker of water on that route today).
Also, coming back to one of my other Christie interests, the heroine is Jane Grey, who we are told grew up in an orphanage near Dublin and was able to afford the trip to France after winning the Irish Sweepstake lottery; but if she sounds Irish, nobody mentions it.
On the other hand, the resolution of this locked-door mystery is particularly unfair by Christie standards. The motivation of the murderer is cloaked in obscurity and involves crucial information that is not revealed to the reader until the dénouement. And the means by which the murder turns out to have been accomplished are particularly convoluted and frankly improbable. It’s one of those cases where Christie’s portrayal of the world of the 1930s is much more interesting than the mystery turns out to be.
1) The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar. Second paragraph of third chapter:
When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.
As I said previously, a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces. Get it here.
2) What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Certainly,” I said. I had made an attempt at folding my clothes back into my trunk, which Angus was in the process of correcting. “What’s on your mind?”
Great Lovecraftian tale of horrors in West Virgian coal mines, in the same sequence as What Moves the Dead (my 2023 vote) and What Feasts at Night (2025 finalist). Get it here.
3) The Summer War, by Naomi Novik. Second paragraph of third chapter:
But now Father was the one who had made the stupid mistake. Celia knew that Father didn’t care that Argent liked boys; nothing like that ever mattered to him. What he did care about was that if people knew that Argent liked boys, it would give the king an excuse to refuse to give him a royal princess for his wife, and maybe even to disinherit him. Father had just been trying to teach Argent not to get caught, and it had never occurred to him that Argent wanted love more than power.
Fantasy story of magic, sibling relationships, chivalry, and queer fairy-like races. A lot going on. Get it here.
4) Cinder House, by Freya Marske. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Ella didn’t have a will. And with two silent corpses it was easy for the living to dictate the timeline. Ella fell down the stairs, yes, such a terrible accident, and died first. And her father’s heart stopped from grief when it happened.
Reworking of Cinderella as a ghost story. Good and creepy. Get it here.
5) Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Vast round windows in both bow and stern, like the domes of some sideways cathedral, now flickering with the green-and-purple auroras of magnetic disturbances. Ramps and lifts up and down between decks, abandoned from the storm and the lateness of the hour. The diamond patterns of the metal railings, turning shadows into stripes. Doors both simple and ornate, flanked by planters and chairs. Flats and home shops and small cafés, vanishing into the distance, an entire small city flowering as it sped through the great dark nothing.
There seems to be a real fashion for murders on spaceships these days, doesn’t there? Some good descriptive writing but I felt the body-swapping plot didn’t quite hang together. Get it here.
6) Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz. Second paragraph of third section:
The octobot may have been designed for search-and-rescue, but their real obsession had always been business. When the Army upgraded them with an olfactory-gustatory sensor array called NosyMouth—good for sniffing out dangerous chemicals!—they realized there was money to be made using the device’s “taster” features. Humans would pay almost anything for a good meal, especially in times of hardship. All the most successful entrepreneurs of the wartime era had been in the food business. Even in a wrecked post-war economy, you could always find a market for things that tasted delicious.
I hate cute robots, and this is a story about cute robots setting up a noodle store in San Francisco in a newly independent California. One of the cute robots is actually called ‘Sweetie’. Get it here.
The top four of these are all great stories, and it may just be my personal prejudices blinding me to the merits of the other two.
We thoroughly binged all of the TV series of Slow Horses at the end of last year, and I managed to score the complete set of books off eBay for a decent price and am now getting into them (having finished Rivers of London, another unusual Thamesbank-set law enforcement sequence).
The first novel is the one about far right goons who threaten to behead an Asian British kid live on the internet; our heroes, the rejects of the British secret service, are at the forefront of the battle to find the kidnappers and recuse the kid before it is all too late.
The TV show was pretty faithful to the book, which is tense and taut, with some fantastic characterisation, particularly of Jackson Lamb, played so memorably by Gary Oldman. Some of the plot twists are slightly different between page and screen, but the story is very recognisable, and some minor points are explained – for instance, why do Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas always meet at that bench by the canal?
Second paragraph of chapter on The Unquiet Dead, the third Ninth Doctor story:
What I particularly appreciated, though, is ‘The Unquiet Dead’’s characters. I remember loonies at the time attacking the new series for being “character-based”, perhaps with a subtext that it was distressing to have new stories that hadn’t simply been regurgitated from old ones. Personally, if anything, I’d make the opposite complaint. 45-minute episodes if handled badly can end up flatter and simpler than an old-school four-parter, especially when the Doctor’s in almost every scene.
Since I’m now up to date with Obverse Books’ Black Archive series, I thought I should start catching up on their other Doctor Who non-fiction, since I have been generally impressed with their output. Though numbered volume 9, this is the first in an envisaged series of volumes looking at Doctor Who and the wider Whoniverse and related shows, restricting itself to TV, books and comics, but not audio plays (understandable on grounds of length, but a bit of a shame).
I have been familiar with Finn Clark’s critical writing since before New Who started, and these essays seem for the most part to have been written at the time without seeing any need to update them. They cover the Ninth Doctor stories, all of Torchwood, and the various iterations of Quatermass (not Whoniverse but a close relation), along with the 1960s sf series A for Andromeda and Russell T. Davies’ other shows Bob & Rose, Casanova, Queer as Folk and The Second Coming.
The most passionate of these pieces are about the Ninth Doctor TV stories and the first two Torchwood seasons. Clark was not impressed by Torchwood and is not afraid to say so. He is pretty merciless and detailed about the faults of all of the TV shows, but Torchwood seems to summon his energy in a way that few others do.
In general I find that my judgement is aligned with his, at least as to which the best and worst episodes and books are, so I shall try and find the time to watch some Quatermass and some of RTD’s other work, which he recommends. (Quatermass has also been thoroughly analysed by Paul Cornell and Liz Myles in their podcast.) Refreshing, but one for completists I think. You can get Time’s Mosaic 9 here.
Here is half of the Hugo ballot for Best Graphic Story or Comic, in my order of preference.
The Space Cat, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford
First page of third chapter (slightly varying from my usual practice):
This is hilarious and fun – writer Nnedi Okorafor and her daughter have a cat which secretly flies into space on secret missions at night, as well as getting up to the usual cat tricks. There are some glorious moments of observation. It’s not getting my top vote in this category (that’s yet to come) but it will get a decent preference from me. You can get The Space Cat here.
Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Last Amazon, by Kelly Thompson et al
Second frame of Part 3:
I’m not especially well versed in the Wonder Woman universe, but it turns out not to matter, because this has a divergent timeline from the usual Wonder Woman narrative, and takes up the question of what it would be like if Wonder Woman was raised in the Underworld rather than by the Amazons. I enjoyed it without being very invested in it. You can get Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Last Amazon here.
The Power Fantasy, Vol 1: The Superpowers, by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard et al
No one else seemed to notice it. No one mentioned it, at any rate. He supposed they wouldn’t dare. And he didn’t like to ask. It would be absurd to draw deliberate attention to such a weakness in his own body. But sometimes he looked at it in the mirror and he’d prod at it with his finger and it felt spongy and weird, and if he clenched his teeth hard he could even make it throb.
This is another novelisation of a classic Big Finish audio by its author. Jubilee dates from 2003, starring Colin Baker as the Doctor, the late Maggie Stables as companion Evelyn Smythe, and husband and wife team Martin Jarvis and Rosalind Ayres as the dictator of England and his wife. I’ve written the original audio up twice here, once in 2007:
Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).
I confess that on this listening I didn’t feel that it worked as well. The two core moments – when first the Doctor and then his companion meet the imprisoned Dalek – are both very good and ended up much less changed for the TV story. The first half is fine, as we get dug into the horror of an parallel timeline where the UK’s dictatorship maintains its position by whipping up fear of the Daleks; but I felt it lost the run of itself at the end, with too many cases of characters revealing that their real motivations are completely different to what we had been told; and I did not feel that all the plot strings were tied up. There is some great humour – especially the opening sequence which parodies the whole concept of Doctor Who – but some dark shifts of tone which seemed to me dissonant rather than masterful. It’s probably fair to say that fannish expectations were different back in 2003, when it looked like the Wilderness Years would last for ever.
I didn’t listen to it again before reading the new novelisation, as it was still pretty fresh in my mind from last time round. And I should say perhaps that although the story is the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek, it is a very different thing, with just a couple of key scenes in common – though even then, the beats of Baker / Stables are very different from Eccleston / Piper.
Jubilee is a good Doctor Who book, firmly recasting the story into novel form rather than just being an adaptation of the script. A lot of the rough edges are smoothed off here, and in particular I felt that the unfolding of narrative revelations was more under control than the original script had been; but also the feeling of the fascist, hi-tech but nostalgic British regime came across even more viscerally on the page. Shearman has always been clear that the story was written in reaction to the rise of the hard right, and unfortunately the last two decades have given him plenty more material to draw from.
Perhaps more so than The Chimes of Midnight, it might be a handy gateway book for Who fans who aren’t yet sure about Big Finish – this is a good book based on one of the best of the plays.
Novels had ruined me by the age of sixteen, when Maman invited me into her salon and told me in a hushed and solemn manner, as if she were imparting to me my catechism, that she was arranging for me a mariage de raison with a wealthy sugar merchant from Tours. Instead of thanking her and being blushingly excited, as was proper, I merely said that I was honored by her consideration, but I would wait. I was waiting for true love, you see, for my novels had told me that it existed, somewhere. They had also given me a suspicion that maman’s arrangement had more to do with money and position and less to do with love—in fact, she hadn’t even used that word when she outlined for me my future happiness. My novels had also told me that true love rarely had an auspicious ending, but that seemed of little importance to me at the time.
For some reason, my post about William Wordsworth, Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline is one of the most popular of this entire blog, regularly picking up more hits than anything of my more recent entries. I assume that it has hit some popular special interest resource and spiralled from there.
The facts about Annette Vallon’s life after she bore Wordsworth’s daughter are patchy, and leave a lot of room for imagination. Tipton has put together an exciting tale where she not only helps her Royalist family escape murderous revolutionaries, but she becomes a chouanne, one of the guerillas waging armed resistance against the Republic in the northwest of France, and has many exciting adventure and narrow escapes.
I am sure that this is wishful thinking. I also suspect that when Wordsworth finally met up with her and their daughter Caroline in 1802, Annette already knew that Wordsworth was planning to marry Mary Hutchinson a few weeks later, but Tipton has used story-teller’s privilege to make it as dramatic as necessary for the narrative he wants to tell.
This was my top book acquired in 2023 and the non-genre novel that had lingered longest on my unread selves. Next in those sequences are Last Exit, by Max Gladstone, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. The latter will have to wait until I have completed my 2023 pile (and I have not yet finished 2022).
If this was the case, then Mr. Redmond was in for a difficult time of it: for the Church was in no mood to smile upon a Catholic leader who put his national above his sectarian interests and who —with Home Rule as his great objective — was obliged to maintain a liaison with the Liberal Party. The Church had a tendency to construe the word “Liberal” in European terms — as implying all sorts of disagreeable qualities such as anticlerical, freethinking and materialist: and it was inclined to shudder at the sort of Home Rule which might emerge from such an alliance.
Dating from 1976, this was the last book of Anglo-American journalist George Dangerfield, celebrated for his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, published forty years earlier. I found it thorough and (mostly) fair, and am a bit surprised that it’s not better known. I guess it was overcome by the substantial academic works of the 1980s, by Roy Foster and Joe Lee, and of course Charles Townshend’s more recent work has retrodden exactly the same ground and got a lot more detail out of it. But I guess there were not many warts-and-all summaries of Ireland from 1880 to 1925 available in the mid-70s. I spotted only a few mistakes, and they were trivial (“Eann Comhairle” for “Ceann Comhairle”, that kind of thing).
Dangerfield ends the book with a brief but very provocative counter-historical speculation: what if the Irish side had rejected the Treaty in December 1921? His view is that Lloyd George’s threats of terrible war were a bluff, and he would have resigned, putting the Conservatives in charge, with no choice but to completely own the inevitability of Irish independence (as Bonar Law actually did when he came to power a year later); and that the British government and an Irish movement which was not split by the Treaty would then have been in a position to force the Ulster Unionists into a united Irish Free State.
I’m really not so sure. I think that the coercive capacity of both Dublin and London was pretty weak by the end of 1921. Unionists still had the strength to resist, and Ulster Catholics would have paid the price for that resistance in the first place. I also think that once a negotiation has broken down, one cannot assume that the next set of negotiators will be able to simply pick up the pieces and resume the process to take it to a better place – Cyprus and Palestine are obvious cases in point. The most likely outcome of a failure in December 1921 would have been a messy, semi-frozen conflict, and a lot more civilian deaths, probably including more senior political leaders than were killed in our timeline.
Thus, if we’re in the middle of the Cold War, and an influential historian publishes a book magnifying old discussions from Max Weber and Sombart arguing that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the rise of banking and the merchant class, triggered by the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, America can grab that book to say: The Renaissance was the birth of capitalism! Clearly the Renaissance’s true successor is modern western capitalist regimes! The fact that it was a golden age proves capitalism will make a golden age as well! And communism is the bad Dark Ages! If, on the other hand, we’re in the nineteenth-century rise-of-nationalism period, and someone argues that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the idea of Italy as a united nation first articulated in the late 1300s, and that the Renaissance golden age ended because Italy was conquered by outside powers, then the Renaissance can be claimed as a predecessor, not only by the Italian unification movement, but by the German unification movement, and any nationalist movement, all claiming a golden Renaissance will come when peoples become nations. Thus, each time someone (usually a historian) proposes a new X-Factor for the Renaissance, it sparks a new wave of opportunities to claim the Renaissance as a source of legitimacy.
I got this because it is on this year’s Hugo ballot for Best Related Work, but to cut to the chase, I’m not voting for it because it is not actually a work that is related to science fiction or fantasy, other than the fact that its writer is well known as a science fiction writer. I have read the author’s spirited defence of its relevance to the genre, and I am not convinced. This is not a book about sf, it is a book that does what it says on the tin and explains about the Renaissance. I will not be giving it a preference on my Hugo ballot.
Not that it’s a bad book – quite the reverse. It’s very readable and breezy, and makes some very good points about how the Renaissance is read, and by whom. There are some great anecdotes and also some quite profound analytical points. We keep coming back to Machiavelli (and to an extent Petrarch) but that’s only reasonable given their later influence. It’s also interesting to have the science of the period situated so firmly in the other cultural endeavours of the day; I have tended to read work that segregated science out, but that of course is utterly anachronistic.
I think it would have been helpful to have a few maps – I am reasonably familiar with its geography, but I can’t always keep in my head the relative locations of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Perugia, let alone remember where the boundaries of the Papal States were. And the internal geography of the major cities, Florence and Rome in particular, becomes important to the narrative.
My only other problem with the book is that it’s really very long, and absorbed a lot of reading time that I’d have preferred to give to Hugo finalists that I am more likely to vote for. But that’s a me problem, not a problem with the book.
All day he stood by the priest while the flames were fed on the altars, in the midst of the respectful army, and Menelaus stood beside him–the two kings without a rival, now that Achilles was gone. At dusk they let the offerings burn down and smoulder, the soldiers kindled supper-fires, and the priest said the omens so far were good.
This was the best-selling book in the USA in 1926, a hundred years ago, so I got hold of it and read it (as previously for the best-selling books of 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1916, 1917, 1921, and 1925). It’s a bit of a gem – almost entirely told in dialogue, with very little description of the scenery, Helen has nonchalantly returned home with Menelaus after the war and is confronted with the emotional resentment of their daughter Hermione, who sees her mother’s scandalous behaviour as the root of all her problems, but incidentally is in love with her cousin Orestes, who starts killing people (notably his mother, Helen’s sister Clytemnestra) in the last part of the book.
Despite the grim storyline, it’s actually rather funny, with Helen bringing 1920s sensibilities to a dark mythic past. It’s anachronistic, but one can totally see her quipping to her relatives and associates over her cigarette-holder. And her message is one of empowerment: she is unashamed of her love affair with Paris; it didn’t work out, so she is back with Menelaus. She is then challenged to apply the same standards to Hermione, and to another young woman in her household who becomes pregnant, but in the end succeeds in doing so, and we cheer for her. Menelaus (and his doorkeeper Eteoneus who provides an alternative old-fashioned viewpoint) are left confused by her confidence. Rather an interesting find.
A 1967 collection of four novelettes by Zelazny, from near the start of his career.
The Furies
Second paragraph of third section:
In his earlier years he had chalked up the most impressive kill-record of any agent ever employed by Interstel Central Intelligence. Forty-eight men and seventeen malicious alien life-forms had the Lynx dispatched during his fifty-year tenure as a field agent. He was one of the three men in the galaxy to have lived through half a century’s employment with ICI. He lived comfortably on his government pension despite three wives and a horde of grandchildren; he was recalled occasionally as a consultant; and he did some part-time missionary work on the side. He believed that all life was one and that all men were brothers, and that love rather than hate or fear should rule the affairs of men. He had even killed with love, he often remarked at Tranquility Session, respecting and revering the person and, the spirit of the man who had been marked for death.
This is the one about three men with unusual superpowers, chasing the villainous Victor Corgo to his death in a space opera universe. I found two things particularly interesting: the first is that Corgo’s motivations are very well explained, to the point that I think we are asking whether his quest for revenge from a grievous wrong really does make him the bad guy, and whether the trio of hunters are any better at all. The second is that in the end he is tracked down due to what we would now call a data hack from his artificial heart, an early case of a breach of electronic privacy of the kind we are now facing daily.
The original title of the story was “Hunt Down the Happy Wallaby“, that being the name of the Corgo’s spaceship. Frederik Pohl rejected this for Galaxy, saying that he found the narrative “multiply confusing”, which I find an extraordinary comment – it’s crystal clear what is happening and why. Apparently Zelazny wrote it “to honor the comic book heroes that he loved”, and one can see that – the characters are pretty much out of that tradition. The superpowered hunters reappear in a different form in Eye of Cat.
The Graveyard Heart
Second paragraph of third section:
He asked himself (from the blister balcony of his suite in the Hundred Towers of the Hilton-Frisco Complex): Is this the girl I want to marry?
This is the one about a near-future group of fabulously rich people who spend most of their time in cryogenic sleep, emerging now and then for wild parties. The protagonist is in love with an unattainable girl who fortunately turns out to be attainable. There’s also a matriarch, and the girl gets pregnant by the protagonist. However their love provokes the deadly jealousy of a failed poet who is also part of the ‘Set’. (The poetry is Zelazny’s own unpublished work.)
In all four of these stories, the gender roles are pretty firmly baked in, and I thought this one has aged even less well than the others; females are threats, whether cunning crones or unwitting maidens. There is some social commentary about celebrity culture, and capital punishment, but it feels a bit painted on. Not a story I’d recommend to someone who didn’t already know Zelazny.
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth
Second paragraph of third section:
I had to shed my jacket as we flashed out over the bay. To our rear, the skyline could have been under water for the way it waved and rippled in the heatfall. A hopper can accommodate four people (five, if you want to bend Regs and underestimate weight), or three passengers with the sort of gear a baitman uses. I was the only fare, though, and the pilot was like his machine. He hummed and made no unnecessary noises. Lifeline turned a somersault and evaporated in the rear mirror at about the same time Tensquare broke the fore-horizon. The pilot stopped humming and shook his head.
This is the one about catching a super-giant fish creature on the seas of Venus (which were rapidly turning out to be completely mythical). Some critics have apparently complained that it is too obviously lifted from Moby-dick, but that’s completely unfair in my view; The Old Man and the Sea is the much more obvious source, and anyway it’s a completely different story. The narrator is the spurned lover of a rich woman who wants to hire him to help her catch the Big Fish, and the fundamental implausibility of the plot is very well covered by the pace and descriptive drama of the writing; it won the first ever Nebula for Best Novelette.
A Rose for Ecclesiastes
Second paragraph of third section:
Ecclesiastes, abandoned and returned to a dozen times, was almost ready to speak in the High Tongue.
This is the one set on old-fashioned Mars, where the newly arrived Earthfolk are delicately engaging with the dying Martian civilisation (where there is another matriarch, and another girl who gets pregnant by the protagonist). The protagonist is a lonely genius (how optimistic to think that a famous poet would ever be chosen for a space mission!) who cheers the Martians up by fertilisation, and by translating the Book of Ecclesiastes into their language and telling them, hey, it could be worse. It’s one of Zelazny’s earliest stories, written several months before his first publication, and retains a raw narrative power, at least for me. Apparently the emotional charge is based on his relationship with the folk singer Hedy West. I don’t know what to read into the fact that it turns out that the narrator’s Martian girlfriend never really liked him that much in the first place, and was only pretending.
All four of these stories show both the good and the bad of Zelazny’s early writing. The descriptions are fantastic and the use of language lyrical, and his protagonists’ motivations are very well conveyed; but he’s not comfortable writing about women, either old or younger, and the plots sometimes don’t really stand up even on their own terms.
“That’s your considered scientific opinion, is it Fitz?’ the Doctor asked.
I had actually read this one twice before, in 2008 and again in 2015, but I came back to it again to round off the ongoing multiple-worlds narrative of the Eighth Doctor Adventures that I have been slogging through. In my first attempt, in 2008, I wrote:
Well, if I’m going to read more of the 8th Doctor novels at all, I’m going to have to start doing it in sequential order. Dipping into the series – in this case because I was interested to see a different treatment of the Princes in the Tower than we got in The Kingmaker – tends to confront me with characters (in this case Miranda and Sabbath) who clearly have deep significance for the author and for followers of the series but who are unknown to me. There are some vivid bits of description, and a twist at the end which I would have appreciated more if the whole book had not felt rather like fan-fiction in a canon I don’t know much about.
This time round, I felt that there was a decent bit of closure for the narrative, but in the end I still don’t have a strong sense of who and why Trix and Sabbath are in the series at all, and the twist at the end is a nice touch but doesn’t actually tie in with the rest of the story. But you can get Sometime Never… here.
Next in this sequence: Halflife, by Mark Michalowski.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 37) Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay Inventing the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield Time’s Mosaic 9 – Eccleston, Torchwood and Quatermass, by Finn Clark Face to Face: The Classic Years, by Eddie McGuigan British Generals in Blair’s Wars, eds Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan Feel Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You, by Ali Abdaal Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, by Susana M. Morris The Initials in the Heart, by Lawrence Whistler
Non-genre 5 (YTD 22) Crooked House, by Agatha Christie The Private Life of Helen of Troy, by John Erskine Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton Slow Horses, by Mick Herron Death in the Clouds, by Agatha Christie
SF 11 (YTD 40) Equinox, by David Towsey The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee Four for Tomorrow, by Roger Zelazny Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite Cinder House, by Freya Marske The Summer War, by Naomi Novik Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, by Zen Cho
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 35) Sometime Never…, by Justin Richards Jubilee, by Robert Shearman Death Among the Stars, by Steve Cole
Comics 6 (YTD 15) The Lost Dimension, Book One, by Nick Abadzis et mult al The Lost Dimension, Book Two, by Gordon Rennie et mult al The Power Fantasy, Vol 1: The Superpowers, by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard et al The Space Cat, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Last Amazon, by Kelly Thompson et al A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel, by Ursula K. Le Guin and Fred Fordham
~9,400 pages (YTD 36,700), counting the audiobook as 100. 16/33 (YTD 61/152) by non-male writers (Palmer, Morris, 2x Christie, Hodgson, Lee, Waite, Marske, Novik, Newitz, “Kingfisher”, Tran, Cho, Okorafor/Ford, Thompson, Le Guin) 5/33 (YTD 15/152) by writers of colour (Abdaal, Morris, Lee, Tran, Cho) 4/33 reread (Crooked House, Death in the Clouds, Four for Tomorrow, Sometime Never…) 221 books currently tagged unread, up 23 from last month (thank you, Hugo packet), down 10 from April 2025. I may be close to achieving a steady state here.
Reading now H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
Coming soon (perhaps) The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow
The Supremacy of the Cybermen, by George Mann, Cavan Scott, Alessandro Vitti et al Halflife, by Mark Michalowski Aliens of London, by Joseph Lidster Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton The Web Planet, by Bridget Cherry
Lessons From Kosovo: The KFOR Experience, ed. Larry Wentz Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, ed. Glyn Morgan (2022) An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent
O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs Ces Lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Last Exit, by Max Gladstone Dead Lions, by Mick Herron Autumn, by Ali Smith Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton
The poor freshman gives me a confused look but tries again, blowing into his clarinet. Thomas makes a spluttering, sad excuse for a sound, then lowers the clarinet and sighs.
Next up in my reading of the Lodestar Award finalists, this is a sweet sapphic love story about two Asian-American girls in Los Angeles, one in our world or somewhere very close to it, one in a parallel world where magic works and tech is less well developed. They meet through a rift between the worlds, struggle to manage teenage problems and also prevent the bad guys from destroying both versions of the city. And there’s also lots of food and coffee. Very breezy and cheerful. You can get Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universehere.
However, shortly afterwards, the situation took a sudden and dramatic new course when, on 30 September, the Serbian Parliament finally agreed the text of a new constitution. This was a long overdue move that had been spurred by Montenegro’s independence earlier in the year. Controversially, the text specifically referred to Kosovo as an integral part of the Republic of Serbia. While few seriously believed that this clause would have any real effect on the eventual outcome of the status talks – least of all Tadić, who had spoken out against the move3 – the announcement would almost certainly have an enormous effect on the timing of the process. For a start, a referendum would have to be held on the new constitution. This was scheduled for 28-29 October. Thereafter, it was almost certain that parliamentary elections would have to be called. These would be unlikely to take place before December. Once this had taken place, a new government would have to be formed. Based on previous efforts, this could also be a long process, taking weeks, if not months. Given Serbian sensitivities over Kosovo, few now believed that any final moves to address the issue of status could be made until most, if not all, of these different phases had been completed. Indeed, just days later, Ahtisaari acknowledged that the unveiling of his proposals would probably have to be postponed until after the elections. ⁴ ⁴ ‘Serbian polls could delay Kosovo plan – Ahtisaari’, Reuters, 3 October 2006.
Actually quite a short book, with the operational section only 126 pages, followed by another 60 pages of primary source documents and almost the same again of GRRRRR endnotes, giving an account of the final status process (which I too was observing very closely at the time) and promising to “[explain] how and why things went so very wrong and [assess] where the responsibility for the failure to reach an agreed settlement really lies”.
I found it rather unsatisfactory. The case that “things went so very wrong” is not really made. Around 110 out of 193 UN member states now recognise Kosova’s independence, which is surely a critical mass; this is going in one direction rather than the other. And the simple fact is that there was never any sincere intention from Serbian leaders to “reach an agreed settlement”; there was no attempt to paint a realistic picture of a Serbian state which included Kosova with its current population, either for Serbian or for Kosovar consumption, let alone to negotiate on that basis. The Serbian leaders had their own good reasons for taking this position, and I don’t think international mediators can be blamed for failing to shift them.
The good part of the book is the blow-by-blow account of dates and participants at each of the various negotiation meetings involving the leaders of Serbia, Kosova and their international interlocutors; I don’t think I have seen the chronology set out so well anywhere else. But I had expected deeper analysis of the substance of the discussions. In particular, the crucial concept of ‘supervised independence’, which was an essential part of the eventual independence declaration of February 2008, isn’t examined at all. Nor is the question of special status for Serbian-majority municipalities within Kosova, which has turned out to be a major continuing pain point.
Instead the book blames Martti Ahtisaari, the UN mediator, for being partisan. This does not square with my own recollections, and interestingly is entirely based on off-hand remarks passed on at second hand from Western officials. But no matter who was in charge of the process, given the twin realities of a population 90% committed to independence, and a Serbian leadership unwilling to concede peacefully what they had lost militarily, the choice was always either an incomplete and grudging recognition of the Kosova state, or a frozen conflict à la Northern Cyprus, Transdnistria, Georgia, Abkhazia etc. (Or complete defeat as with Nagorno-Karabakh.) I tend to think that Kosova has ended up on the better track.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2022 (and indeed it turned out to be shorter than I realised). Next on that pile is The Initials in the Heart, by Lawrence Whistler.
A bit of a romp featuring mainly the first four Doctors of New Who, but also vignettes of Old Who (including a fair crack of Fourth Doctor), with the comics-only companions being given a fresh lease of life as well. Inevitably a bit episodic, but the writers and artists have made very good efforts to portray the characters of the various Doctors as they appeared on screen. Worth hunting down. You can get Book One here and Book Two here.
Today, Bersun was plainly dressed. An iron band for a crown, stamped with an ∞ – sacred symbol of the Eternal Path. His black tunic was slashed with five scarlet claw marks, a reversal of his bodyguards’ uniform. He wore chain mail beneath his tunic, and a longsword at his belt. Orrun was at peace, the rebellion a long-faded scar. But Bersun was a warrior to the bone. Even now, after more than two decades on the throne, he looked more natural dressed as one.
First of the Hugo Best Novel finalists that I acquired and read after the ballot was announced and before the Packet was made available. (These posts are a couple of weeks behind my actual reading at the moment.) Hodgson is apparently already well known as a writer of eighteenth-century crime novels; this is her first fantasy, set in a world (or at least a country) where eight totemic elemental animals (including the titular Raven) dominate human culture, and the new king is determined in a series of Hunger Games-style trials. It’s an intricate and well constructed plot, as leading characters turn out to be completely different to who we thought they were, and indeed the game plan of the bad guys turns out to be completely different to what it looked like. I found the brutal violence a bit ick though. You can get The Raven Scholar here.
That was the way of our relationship. The way of the vast majority of brotherly and sisterly relationships that crossed sunrise and sunset in the Kingdom of Reikova. We had some power to make our night- or day-brothers aware of something specific; a power often exercised through saying a thing repeatedly, perhaps with the aid of a mirror, or the written word – as I had chosen that day. But total certainty was impossible. An obstinate day-brother could do their utmost to ignore the night before, or see a note and choose not to read it. In that sense there was some degree of control – or the illusion of control – in what we remembered of each other. It was possible, for instance, to be the prying sort. I might know much of what my day-brother did with his sunlit hours. Instead, I had long ago decided his doings were tedious at best, distasteful at worst. I preferred to ignore them as best I could. I imagined he felt the same way of my nightly endeavours. But as with all Reikovan citizens who made something of their lives, who avoided the clutches of St Leonars prison and the like, we lived in a peaceful enough accord with each other. An accord that, on occasion, relied on wilful ignorance.
One of the Clarke submissions that I put aside at the time as clearly fantasy and therefore ineligible, but worth coming back to. The setting is a world (or at least a country) where everyone transforms into a different person at sunrise and sunset, meaning a whole different set of relationships, economic activities, habits etc. The protagonist and his shadow become involved in an occult murder mystery up-country (a frequently used trope, where the author explores their secondary world through the medium of a crime narrative). Quite nicely done, with very good plot pacing as we discover more about the world. Though I did find myself wondering about the personal inconveniences of the setup – the author touches on the intricacies of childbirth, but there’s a lot more to intimate personal interaction than that. You can get Equinox here.
This was the sff book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker, but that will have to wait until I have finished my non-fiction acquisitions of 2022.
I had not yet seen the Old Man. He had been out when I arrived, and after a bath, a shave and a change I had gone out to meet Sophia. When I returned to the house, however, Glover told me that he was in his study.
Since I am trawling through the less popular Agatha Christies at present, I am at the point where most of them are not up to her usual standards (the last one I wrote up here was described by the author herself as “rotten”. But sometimes you get a gem that has escaped the acclaim given to her best known work, and Crooked House is one of those. No Poirot, no Marple; the narrator is a junior diplomat whose father is a senior police detective, and whose girlfriend’s grandfather has just been gruesomely murdered. The entire family (apart from the lovely girlfriend) are a horror show of emotional abuse, all of whom had means and motive, and working out which of them did it takes up a very entertaining 200+ pages.
I had read it years back, but could only remember who was responsible for the second murder attempt, so it was good and fresh for me. There is the usual cop-out of not facing human justice at the end, which perhaps requires a bit more ethical examination than Christie usually gives, but otherwise I felt this was a story where Christie plays the game fairly, and the clues are there if you look past the narrator’s biases. You can get Crooked House here.
Four more of the BBC Twelfth Doctor audios, released in 2017. To be honest they are not especially memorable. The four stories feature the Doctor and New Yorker brother-and-sister companions Alex and Brandon Yow investigating Weeping Angels. The first, The Lost Angel, read by Kerry Shale, is set in contemporary New York; the second, The Lost Planet, read very well by Nicola Bryant (who oddly does not get cover billing), has alien plants infesting the TARDIS; the third, The Lost Magic, read exceptionally well by Dan Starkey, has the team visiting the Spanish Main and John Dee (probably the best of the four); and the final story, The Lost Flame, read by Claire Higgins, takes us back to Karn. Completists will probably enjoy these but I can’t really make a stronger recommendation. You can get them here, here, here and here.
‘Miss Brackley,’ he said, ‘I am told that it is a kindly concern of yours to see that Felicia is sustained during her nocturnal activities. If it really is necessary – which I doubt, since she doesn’t seem to have touched your gift, but if it is – would you mind placing your saucer in a less traffic-prone situation in future. This is the third time I have almost fallen over my own feet in avoiding it.’
A really fascinating (and short!) book by Wyndham, published in 1960; a drug to slow the aging process is developed separately by two English scientists, one of whom uses it only for himself and his immediate family, while the other makes it the core of her beauty business, building up a sympathetic constituency of rich women to support her when the shit hits the fan, as it duly does.
Wyndham is being frankly feminist here, imagining a drastic change in society engineered by a woman for the benefit of women, and brutally portraying the forces of the patriarchy who come out against it. He also finds time for satirical swipes against the media (which one feels are founded in personal experience) and the beauty industry (where perhaps he is less sure-footed).
It’s a novel of ideas rather than action, which ends perhaps a bit abruptly, but that’s because it has worked through its central idea as far as can usefully done in the context of England in 1960. It also perhaps reflects the anxieties of that time, with the Swinging Sixties tangibly around the corner.
The Irish government is brought into the story at one remove, as various English people discover to their astonishment that it is an independent country – there is a rumour that the longevity drug originates from a particular type of Galway seaweed.
‘I mean, it would have been nice to hang on a while, and see whether one couldn’t do something about acquiring seaweed rights in Galway Bay. But, obviously it couldn’t wait for that, so I wired a friend in Dublin to get a head start by making inquiries about legal rights over seaweed, in Irish law.’
The editor shook his head.
‘You’d probably have to petition the Pope, or something,’ he said. ‘It’s likely to be a pretty serious matter with the Irish. They eat the stuff.’
‘They what?’
‘Eat it. They call it dulse.’
Gerald shook his head in his turn, though whether in doubt, or out of sympathy for the Irish, was not clear.
I was also interested in the references to China – the troublesome lichen come from Hokiang, now known as Hejiang, the easternmost part of China which is part of the historic region of Manchuria; it is exported through Dairen, now Dalian, previously Port Arthur. It’s actually a very good call to place a mysterious Chinese agricultural product there. I don’t find any record that Wyndham knew much about China, other than the brief references in this book; maybe he asked a friend.
Next in the series by Weber and Deville about Kathleen, a young Belgian woman coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Here she is recruited by the organisers of the famous Brussels Expo of 1958, with the Atomium in pride of place, and rapidly becomes entangled in a Cold War plot – not that dissimilar to Jonathan Coe’s Expo 58, which makes one feel that there must have been a lot of it going on. Lots of attention to historical detail (including the sexism directed at Kathleen), and successfully conveying the sense that this was an event which Belgium hoped would boost the entire country’s confidence after the war years, seen from the perspective of someone who was there. I’m enjoying this run. You can get Sourire 58 here.
This was my top unread comic in a language other than English. Next on that pile is Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari.
One of this year’s Hugo finalists for Best Graphic Story, a straightforward short book, perhaps for younger readers, about coming to terms with grief through celebrating the day of the Dead with otherworldly entities. You can get The Invisible Parade here.
“Who briefed you?” My own voice sounds distant as a stranger’s.
My first Hugo book since the 2026 ballot was announced, this is one of the finalists in the Lodestar category, and turns out to be the third in a fantasy trilogy. I enjoyed it for the frenemy relationship between the two central characters and the convoluted magical fantasy plot; I felt I did not lose out too much by having missed the first two books. The breathless first-person present-tense narration annoyed me, as did the many mistakes in German in what is explicitly a Bavarian-based world; and I wondered how it comes about that teenagers get given senior law enforcement responsibilities in this particular society. So I suspect it won’t get my top vote in the category, but it was a good start. You can get Holy Terrors here.
Meanwhile, advancing internal decay, as well as external pressure, had severely weakened the Porte. Capitalising on this weakness, the Serbian and Montenegrin principalities took advantage of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-8 to invade Kosovo, thus bringing the Serbs and Montenegrins into their first serious conflict with Albanians. Thousands of Kosovo Serbs crossed over into Serbian territory to enlist in the Serbian army; those Serbs and Montenegrins who remained in Kosovo largely managed to avoid conscription into the Ottoman army by bribing military officials. Facing little opposition, the Serbian army advanced steadily, occupying the towns of Nis, Lescovac, Vranje and Prokuplje, before entering Kosovo. During this period thousands of Albanians were forcibly expelled from the region of Toplice in the Sandjak of Nis, and many of the region’s mosques were destroyed, while as many Serbs fled southern Kosovo ahead of unleashed bashibazouks, who began to take vengeance upon the remaining Serbian inhabitants. The operations of the Serbian army in Kosovo provoked a wave of refugees in the opposite direction as an estimated 30,000 Albanians deserted those parts of the region which the Serbian army occupied. Alongside the retreating Ottoman troops were thousands of displaced Albanians who arrived in Kosovo as refugees. Unaware that Russia and the Porte had agreed to a truce, the voluntary Serb regiment of Major Radomir Putnik took Gnjilane, while the advance guard of the Serbian army reached the Gracanica monastery near Pristina towards the end of January 1878. There a solemn liturgy was performed to honour the victory of the Serbian army and Prince Milan, and a commemoration was held for the heroes of 1389. However, the concluded truce was inclusive of the Serbian army whose units were thus compelled to withdraw from Kosovo.² ² Batakovic, The Kosovo Chronicles, p. 108.
I had read this ages ago, soon after it came out in 1998, and like any book about Kosova published before 1999 (well, 2008), it misses the climax of the story through no fault of the author’s. It’s also somewhat in the shadow of Noel Malcolm’s better known Kosovo: A Short History. But it complements Malcolm in concentrating on the twentieth century and the internal dynamics of Kosova’s emerging autonomy and confidence within pre-1988 Yugoslavia, followed by the collapse of communications between the majority population and the structures of the state.
It’s actually rather difficult to see what other paths were possible from the main actors at the end of this period, given the personalities and starting points; Milošević’s destruction of the Yugoslav state was rooted in his destruction of Kosova’s autonomy, while on the other hand Kosovar militants were not in a position to resort to military pressure earlier than they actually did, never mind the fact that the Americans had told them not to.
I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that the political violence spilled from Kosova as far as Brussels. Vickers recounts that in 1981, a Yugoslav diplomat was killed and another injured in a shooting near the Bourse, in what was then the White Horse pub and is now a hotel / shisha bar called La Pièce. The gunman himself was found shot dead in 2004 in the Loi underground car park, quite close to my office. There were other Brussels incidents too, but those were the most notable. (And of course there were plenty of incidents in other parts of Western Europe.)
This was my top unread book about Kosova. Next on that pile is British Generals in Blair’s Wars, edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron, and Hew Strachan (where I suspect the Kosova content may not be huge).
Next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Gabriela Mistral (real name Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, 1889-1957) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945, the first Latin American writer to get the award. Originally trained as a teacher, she had become famous as a writer with her second volume of poetry, Desolación, published in 1922, and had also pursued an international career in education which transitions to being a full-time diplomat from 1932 onwards.
Her Nobel speech is short and modest, and the presentation speech from the Swedish Academy is also short but makes interesting parallels with the career of Selma Lagerlöf, also a schoolteacher who hit the big time with her writing.
It’s actually quite difficult to get hold of Mistral’s writing in English, and I had to be satisfied with a 2002 collection of prose and prose-poems edited and translated by Stephen Tapscott. The second paragraph of the third piece, “The Golden Pheasant”, is:
Gracias al blanco y al negro no hace arder el arrayán sobre el que se coloca.
Thanks to the white part and the dark part, it doesn’t scorch the myrtle tree where it perches.
I found the pieces in general lyrical, but also sad; a lot of them are religious, rooted in the Catholic tradition which looked eternal in the early twentieth century but is now crumbling away; the emotional energy is rich and intense. None of the passages particularly jumped out at me, but I could see that the whole is at least as great as the sum of tis parts. The observations at the end about writing and politics are also interesting, as she tried to carry the perspectives of Chile to the rest of the world and vice versa. You can get it here. I wish I had been able to find a translation of Desolación though, or of Ursula Le Guin’s tranlation of some of her poems.
The circumstances of [David] Hunter Blair’s conversion were spectacular. During the winter term of 1875 he obtained leave to study music in Leipzig and from Leipzig proceeded to Rome in time to attend the ceremony at which [Henry] Manning was created a cardinal, on 15 March 1875. Manning was a special hero because of his stern espousal of the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he had recently defended against Gladstone’s charge that it ‘equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history’. Swept away by enthusiasm, Hunter Blair, ten days after the Manning ceremony, was himself received into the Church. He was a notable convert: Archbishop (later Cardinal) [Edward] Howard confirmed him, Pius IX himself blessed him and conferred on him the honorary post of papal chamberlain.
When I was nine years old, the final edition of Burke’s genealogies of noted Irish families was published. The Whytes qualified for entry not for being famous, as we weren’t (apart from one or two notable ancestors in the 16th and 17th centuries) but because we happen to have a genealogy that goes back to the twelfth century, though I suspect that the earliest parts are fake. I noted with very slight interest that the family listed immediately after us in Burke’s had changed their name at some point, and vaguely wondered why. Eventually I found out.
(And, good heavens, they published people’s private addresses back in those days! Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s only grandchild, is still alive aged 80, but has lived in France for many years now.)
Richard Ellmann’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Wilde is pretty comprehensive. It starts with his parents, noted surgeon Sir William Wilde and the revolutionary poet and writer born Jane Elgee but known as Speranza. (Oscar was born at 1 Merrion Square.) 550 heavily footnoted pages take us through the 46 years of Oscar’s life, though it’s clear that there is a lot more to say about him (and some of it has been said).
It’s a story that combines many elements. While still a student at Oxford, Wilde rapidly became famous for being famous, to the point that D’Oyly Carte sent him on a (very enjoyable) lecture tour of America before launching their opera about him, Patience. But he was a genuinely good writer as well; Ellmann goes into some of his work, but I think more could also be said about the extent to which it echoed his life.
Wilde was a posh boy who made a career out of being a posh boy, but intellectually he was genuinely a supporter of socialism, Irish nationalism and revolution. This is what gives the drawing-room comedies their vicious edge; he is echoing back to his English hosts what he actually heard them saying behind the polite niceties.
He very courageously chose martyrdom because of his sexuality. He could have escaped to France, Italy and/or the USA and avoided prosecution. But he chose to stay and face his fate in the courts, though he knew it would probably kill him.
Nancy Mitford (born four years after he died) has a telling observation on his legacy in The Pursuit of Love, in an exchange that would have fitted well into one of Wilde’s own plays:
Linda and I were very much preoccupied with sin, and our great hero was Oscar Wilde.
‘But what did he do?’
‘I asked Fa once and he roared at me – goodness, it was terrifying. He said: “If you mention that sewer’s name again in this house I’ll thrash you, do you hear, damn you?” So I asked Sadie and she looked awfully vague and said: “Oh, duck, I never really quite knew, but whatever it was was worse than murder, fearfully bad. And, darling, don’t talk about him at meals, will you?”’
‘We must find out.’
‘Bob says he will, when he goes to Eton.’
Wilde was witty but not wise; he spent his way through both money and relationships extravagantly. Even the grand love affair with Bosie Douglas, which brought him down, seems to have brought him as much pain as pleasure. He genuinely loved Constance and his sons, but accepted that the consequences of his own choices had parted him from them.
It’s a really interesting book and I recommend it, though I know that scholarship in the last four decades may have advanced our knowledge of Wilde a bit further. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald.
We watched the National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon, a few weeks back. I didn’t feel that the stage production transferred to the screen all that well – obviously in live theatre, a lot of the experience is bound up in the audience dynamic with the actors. But Ncuti Gatwa is, as ever, completely magnetic, and Sharon Clarke (who was Grace O’Brien, Graham’s wife / Ryan’s grandmother, in Doctor Who) steals the scene as a very West Indian Lady Bracknell.
Note also Richard Cant, Brian Cant’s son, as Canon Chasuble. The staging more than hints at intense relations between Algernon/Jack on the one hand and Gwendolen/Cecily on the other, and livens it up with music long postdating the original 1895 production. I think the only production of the play that I had seen before was a 1988 BBC version with Joan Plowright and Paul McGann. (But can that be right? I feel it was a bit earlier.)
Anyway, the play itself is very entertaining if just a bit implausible, and although the good lines are front-loaded in the first half, the whole thing is fun.
Apologies for length, but this is an important monograph about an important Doctor Who story.
I first watched the original version of The Daleks back in 2007, from the DVD set of the first three Who stories. I wrote then:
Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker’s novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:
1) the settings were very convincing – the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.
2) Barbara’s romance with Ganatus – there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?
3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.
4) The time travellers, despite Barbara’s relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.
5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger – with a brutal resolution
6) Terry Nation’s attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.
7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes – sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.
8) the one bit that really didn’t work – the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.
Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?)
When I came back to it in 2009 early in my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
The Daleks really is where Doctor Who gets going. There is a case to be made that the pepperpots never get so interesting again. Certainly they are incomprehensible, blankly hostile, psychopathically destructive, and strangely watchable. The conversion of the Thals from pacifists to fighters has some moral ambiguity – the Tardis crew are motivated by their own need to get away, and there is a certain air of tragedy even in the final victory. (Shame that the actual final fight scene is a bit crap.) And Barbara gets the first Who romance with Ganatus (comprehensively rewritten to Barbara/Ian by David Whitaker for the book).
Coming back to it again, I felt that it holds up really well, especially if you are sensitive to the cramped sets and other constraints of the production. The four main cast are very good, clearly getting into their stride. And I should have previously mentioned the superb incidental music of Tristram Cary. You can get it in this box set.
The colorised and abbreviated version of the story released a few years back (you can get it here) foolishly dumps Cary’s music, misses some of the plot and loses out a bit on pacing, but ends with this lovely montage of the rest of the Hartnell era.
I know the novelisation well, and re-read it for this post. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I ran towards the sound, the branches of trees cracking and powdering in clouds around me as I forced my way through. I found Barbara with her back pressed up against a tree, the knuckles of one hand pushed hard against her teeth. She was staring away from me into some bushes. I caught the glint of the eyes of some animal or other and stopped dead still.
There was a time when this was literally the only Doctor Who book in existence (under its excellent original 1964 title of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks); indeed it was the only commercially available representation of any Doctor Who story, in those days long before video-recorders (let alone DVDs). So we have Whitaker taking much greater liberty with Terry Nation’s TV script than almost any other novelisation (John Lucarotti’s treatment of The Massacre differs even more from the story as broadcast, but he was reverting back to his own original script).
And the result is quite possibly the best of the novelisations, judged as a novel. The opening of the story is comprehensively rewritten, Ian being an unemployed research scientist who accidentally encounters Barbara, who has been tutoring the mysterious Susan, and gets involved with the Doctor and his Tardis. So much time is invested – wisely – in setting the scene that we are a third of the way through the book before we reach the equivalent point to the end of the TV story’s first episode (out of seven).
The biggest novelty, for those of us who have read almost any of the subsequent hundreds of Who books, is that the whole story is told in the first person, from Ian’s point of view. (It’s not unknown in later Who literature, but it is very unusual.) This does require a certain amount of narrative juggling, but Whitaker gets away with it better than I remembered from when I first read this, three decades ago.
Today’s generation of fans will squee at the pronounced sexual tension in the Ian/Barbara relationship here – the TV story has Barbara close to flirting with Ganatus, one of the Thals, but he barely gets to look at her on the printed page. Poor Susan rather fades into the background as well after she has done her mercy run to the forest. The characterisation of the Doctor is much more harsh and edgy than Hartnell’s depiction; since Whitaker was the story editor, perhaps this was what he had originally in mind? (A possibility supported by the surviving first cut of the first ever episode.)
And the Daleks themselves are pretty memorable here, though Whitaker seems a bit confused about their size – three feet high at one point, four foot six at another, though the illustrations are of our “normal” sized pepperpots. However, this confusion is compensated for by the glorious description of the mutants within the metal casings, and their glass-enclosed leader. The TV show has never managed such memorable presentations of the creatures inside, though it has occasionally tried. (The versions encountered by the Ninth Doctor come closest.)
Anyway, this is an excellent read, well worth hunting down.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, so I went and also rewatched the Peter Cushing film Dr Who and the Daleks. Last time I saw it, in 2010, I wrote:
As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.
The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Sylvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.
When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainier).
The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.
Rewatching it in close proximity to the original TV story brought home to me how much better the latter is. Just compare the almost wordless acting of Hartnell and Russell here:
versus Cushing, Castle and Tovey playing the same scene for weak laughs here:
Obverse Books have published a novelisation of the film, ostensibly by “Alan Smithee” but I believe actually by Iain McLaughlin. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Ian considered himself to be fit and healthy. He had been drilled into good shape during his National Service and he was still active now, playing football twice a week and turning out for the local cricket side during the summer. He also went dancing – hopefully from now on with Barbara – every weekend, but even he was feeling the effects of the journey. He was out of breath and perspiring heavily. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his muscles ached.
It made me realise that the visual comedy of the film is one of its key elements, very difficult to transfer to the printed page! Anyway, you can get it here.
So, on to the latest of the Black Archives, Oliver Wake’s monograph on The Daleks, concentrating on the original TV series but also referring to the Whitaker novelisation and the Cushing film, and to later Dalek and Terry Nation stories. There is a real break of format with previous Black Archives, with no less than eighteen short chapters each addressing a different aspect of the story, and building the overall case (which is surely unassailable anyway) that The Daleks can be seen as the crucial founding text of the show as a whole. A short introduction explains the book’s agenda:
I aim, firstly, to explore the influences and inspirations Nation called upon in devising the story; secondly, to analyse the story’s mixed authorship and the ways in which varied contributors gave it meaning; and thirdly, to examine The Daleks’ world-building as a piece of televisual fantasy fiction.
The first chapter, “Commissioning The Daleks”, recapitulates what we know about how the story came into being – it was written very quickly, which meant that it was ready for production when an early gap needed to be filled.
The second chapter, “The Bomb”, looks at how the story portrays radiation sickness and the neutron bomb.
The third chapter, “A Climate of Fear”, looks at other portrayals of the aftermath of nuclear war in fiction up to the mid-1960s. Its second paragraph is:
Stories of nuclear weapons had been science fiction and consequently were hidden away in niche publications. After the Second World War they began to emerge into the mainstream, in Britain at least; in the more conservative USA they tended to remain hived off in the sci-fi niche¹. Every conceivable scenario of nuclear devastation was played out in literature, much of it ill-informed and scientifically illiterate. ¹ Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, unpaginated online edition, Chapter 1.
The fourth chapter, “The Survivors”, queries the extent to which the story is meant to show the future of Planet Earth humanity.
The fifth chapter, “The Dead Planet”, looks at the Petrified Jungle and also in some detail at the Magnadon (the dead metallic lizard).
The sixth chapter, “Alien Sound”, looks at the brilliant soundscape of the story created by Tristram Cary’s music and Brian Hodgson’s effects. As I noted earlier, this is one point where the Cushing film is seriously deficient.
The seventh chapter, “The Time Machine”, looks at the influence of Wells’ novel and George Pal’s film adaptation on The Daleks.
The eighth chapter, “The Mutants”, looks at what we are told about both Thals and Daleks as mutations, and points out the inconsistencies. (I must say I prefer this approach to desperately trying to retcon everything.)
The ninth chapter, “The Aryan Thals”, points out the problematic of the perfect Thal race being tall and blond, leaning again on The Time Machine.
The tenth chapter, “Pacifism, the Thals and Terry Nation”, goes into Nation’s well-documented political views, which he expressed as pacifist and sometimes socialist. (So Gareth Roberts is completely wrong on this, not surprisingly.) Ian’s argument with the Thals is Nation’s argument with himself.
The eleventh chapter, “Gender and Authority”, looks at the story’s problematic treatment of gender roles among the Thals and the character of Dyoni, and queries how both Thal and Dalek societies are actually governed.
The twelfth chapter, “Martians and Ants”, looks at the influence of The War of the Worlds (both the Wells novel and the 1953 film) and the early John Wyndham story “Wanderers of Time” on The Daleks.
The thirteenth chapter, “The Power (and Irradiation) of the Daleks”, looks at the Daleks’ dependence on static electricity, their life support systems, and their vulnerability to radiation, and then asks, what do they eat?
The fourteenth chapter, “Outer Space Robot People”, makes some interesting points about who the Daleks are shown to be, as opposed to later portrayals.
In their first appearance, the Daleks are scared isolationists. They are survivalists trapped in their fallout shelter, unable to go outside but possessive of the world beyond their city. This jealousy manifests as paranoia and xenophobia when the Doctor’s party and then the Thals come calling.
The sixteenth chapter, “The Direction of the Daleks”, calls attention to the work of Christopher Barry and Richard Martin in bringing the story (and the Daleks) alive.
The seventeenth chapter, “Extermination, Then?” looks at how the Daleks’ catchphrase slipped subtly into the script.
The eighteenth chapter, “Dal to Lek”, looks at the sources for the name Dalek. These include Wyndham’s “Wanderers of Time” and Nation’s general fondness for cycling through similar names. Wake considers and discounts the relevance of the fact that “dalek”/“daleko” means “far away” in the languages once known collectively as Serbo-Croat.
If I may divert for a moment, I am not quite so sure. My relationship with Balkan nationalisms is ambivalent, but there is a haunting Serbian First World War song, “Tamo daleko”, about the exiled remnants of the Serbian army sheltering on Corfu. (As a Serbian military friend once said to me, it’s not so much like Dire Straits’ “So Far Away From Me”, which would be a literal translation of the title, as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, only less jolly.) I do not know if Nation was ever exposed to, say, a Serbian restaurant playing live or recorded folk music, or some other aspect of Serbian culture, but I can imagine him hearing this song somewhere, somehow, and “daleko” sticking in his subconscious memory. It is the heavily emphasised second word of each of the first three verses; even if you don’t speak any Serbian, it is difficult to miss.
A brief conclusion pulls all this together and looks at questions of authorship.
An even briefer note looks at one of the story’s many variant titles, “Beyond the Sun”, and how this might have come to be.
I was a bit worried at first that I wasn’t going to like this Black Archive; Wake’s style starts out a little jerky. But he settles down fairly quickly and delivers a must-read analysis of one of the most important Doctor Who stories. You can get it here.
