In the previous two chapters, we have examined the culprits co-responsible for the strange death of what we used to call the liberal international order.² We have analysed the resentments, aspirations and chicanery of both the Central European populists and Vladimir Putin. But they plainly did not act alone. Indeed, no Poirot-style sleuthing is required to discover that the current President of the United States has been their willing accomplice.³ His motives for turning his back on America’s allies, disavowing multilateral treaties, and trying to wreck the international institutions created by the US after the Second World War are a matter of controversy. But whatever his motives, he has been an eminent confederate in the gang-slaying of the ‘liberal hegemony’ that characterized international politics for three decades after 1989. ² Graham Allison, “The Myth of the Liberal Order, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2018) ³ David Leonhardt, “Trump Tries to Destroy the West”, The New York Times (Io June 2018); Robert Kagan, “Trump Marks the End of America as World’s “Indispensable Nation”, Financial Times (19 November 2016).
I am conscious that my last couple of books reviews here have been less than positive, so I’m very glad to turn that around and give a glowing recommendation to this short explanation of how western liberal democracy got into its current mess. There are three chapters, one on Viktor Orbán and the other Eastern European populists, one on Vladimir Putin and Russia, and one on Donald Trump, with an afterword on China.
The key argument is that “the future was better yesterday”; western liberals failed to grasp the nature of the task of building and preserving democracy and decent societies in the former Socialist world, and indeed at home in the USA, and that populist politicians, by operating smartly within and outside the new rules, were able to capture the imagination of their own publics and gain and consolidate power. Even now that Orbán and PiS are out, and Trump appears to be struggling, the arguments remain valid.
Indeed, I am sure that the authors would agree that the missing part of the book in retrospect is Western Europe, where we actually have a populist (though relatively well behaved) government in Italy, Nigel Farage seems very likely to win the next British election, the Rassemblement National is not quite as close but close enough to worry about in France, and the AfD is on the rise in Germany.
Their conclusion is that in the end, populism does not present long term stable solutions in the way that liberal democracy does; but that liberals remained complacent for too long, and did not pay attention to the internal threats to the democratic system. They speculate – hope, perhaps – that the rise of China, a a more durable alternative system but one which is not very interested in exporting its societal model, may prove a stimulus to liberals to become more creative.
Nine years on, a lot of this remains just as valid, with the second Trump term proving worse than the first. We have a long way to go.
This bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously- the top unread book acquired in 2022, the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest book acquired in 2022 on the unread shelf. Next on the first two of those piles is The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield; next on the third is Kosovo: The Path To Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay.
Yugoslavia’s air defenses were dominated by surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries equipped with thousands of Soviet-made SAMs, including three SA-2 battalions; 16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars. These radar-guided SAMs were supplemented by around 100 vehicle-mounted SA-9 and several SA-13 infrared SAMs, along with a profusion of man-portable infrared SAMs, some 1,850 antiaircraft artillery (AAA) pieces, and numerous stockpiled reserve weapons and buried communications lines. Backing up these defenses, the Yugoslav air force consisted of 238 combat aircraft, including 15 MiG-29 and 64 MiG-21 fighterinterceptors.¹ Although the Yugoslav IADS employed equipment and technologies that dated as far back as the 1960s, albeit presumably with selected upgrades, its operators knew U.S. tactics well and had practiced air defense drills and honed their operational techniques for more than four decades. They also had the benefit of more equipment and better training than did the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. Finally, they enjoyed the advantage of being protected both by mountainous terrain and by the cover of inclement weather when the air war began.
¹ “AWOS [Air War Over Serbia] Fact Sheet,” Hq USAFE/SA, December 17, 1999. See also The Military Balance, 1998/99, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998, p. 100.
A RAND study of the Kosova war from the point of view of the air force. Reading the introduction, I rather got the impression that this was a supposedly independent report, funded by the USAF and coincidentally promoting the idea that it would have been so much better to just let the USAF get on with dropping bombs, without any political interference. The background historical analysis chapter was full of flaws as well. When we got onto the weapons porn (“16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars”) I decided I had had enough. You can download it here.
This was my top unread book about Kosova. Next on that pile is Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers.
Way back in 2007, I was just getting into the Big Finish audios, and it did not take long until I reached the 29th of their monthly releases, The Chimes of Midnight, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and India Fisher as his audio-only companion, Charlotte “Charley” Pollard. I wrote it up as follows:
The Chimes of Midnight is just creepy: the Doctor and Charley trapped in a house where the servants keep on dying horribly – and even more mysteriously coming to life. Clearly some Big Revelation about Charley’s nature is being planned.
With the new novelisation just published, I listened to it again and it deserves its place of one of the consistently top-rated Big Finish audios. The soundscape successfully invokes the cramped servants’ quarters of an Edwardian mansion, with the guest stars utterly convincing in their denial of reality, especially as they start getting bumped off one by one. There is an Irish character, the butler, Shaughnessy, played by Lennox Greaves (who in real life is a Yorkshireman). I ended the story not quite sure what had happened, but certain that I had been entertained.
This story was recorded in January 2001 but released only in February 2002. You can get it here.
It used to be that one could handily check facts about Big Finish audios on Wikipedia, but I was dismayed to discover that Wikipedia has deleted all of its pages covering individual Big Finish plays. I guess that they were judged not to be of general interest in the way that, say, Andorra’s 2007 Eurovision Song Contest entry obviously is. A shame.
Rob Shearman has novelised his two best known Big Finish audios, this and Jubilee, so needless to say I have got hold of them both. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Chimes of Midnight is:
‘And is this exactly the same as your house back home as well?’ asked the Doctor.
This is a very lucid retelling of the story, offering a lot more depth to some of the characters – particularly Charlotte herself, but also Shaughnessy the bultler – and giving a slightly better idea of what the story is actually about. It’s twenty-five years since Shearman first wrote this, and his style has become comfortable and fluid. The house as portrayed on the page is recognisably the same as in the original play.
I think that readers who aren’t already into the Big Finish Eighth Doctor continuity might be sufficiently intrigued by this to try the other plays in the sequence, though they should be warned that this is something of an outlier. However there is plenty to discover about the Eight / Charley relationship.
Currently reading Equinox, by David Towsey The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton
Finished in the last week The Lost Angel, by George Mann and Cavan Scott Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral The Lost Magic, by Cavan Scott Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers The Lost Planet, by George Mann Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville The Lost Flame, by George Mann and Cavan Scott Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham
April 2026 books
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 28) Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, eds Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, by Benjamin S. Lambeth (did not finish) The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes The Daleks, by Oliver Wake Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers
Non-genre 4 (YTD 17) The Big Four, by Agatha Christie The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, by Zen Cho Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim Capital Christie, by Agatha Christie
SF 4 (YTD 29) Among Others, by Jo Walton Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall (did not finish) Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who 12 (YTD 32) The Gods of Winter, by James Goss Timeless, by Steve Cole The House of Winter, by George Mann The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman The Sins of Winter, by James Goss Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker Dr Who and the Daleks, by “Alan Smithee” The Memory of Winter, by George Mann The Lost Angel, by George Mann and Cavan Scott The Lost Magic, by Cavan Scott The Lost Planet, by George Mann The Lost Flame, by George Mann and Cavan Scott
Comics 3 (YTD 9) The Lost Dimension, Book One, by Nick Abadzis, George Mann, Cavan Scott et multi alii The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville
~6,900 pages (YTD 27,300), counting each of the audiobooks as 100. 12/32 (YTD 46/118) by non-male writers (Mantel, Mistral, Vickers, Christie x 2, Cho, von Arnim, Walton, Hall, Owen, Stott/Melo et al, Bardugo) 2/32 (YTD 10/118) by writers of colour (Cho, Picacio) 5/32 reread (The Big Four, Among Others, Trouble with Lichen, Timeless, Doctor Who and the Daleks) 198 books currently tagged unread, up 4 from last month (Eastercon), down 53 from April 2025.
Coming soon (perhaps)
The Lost Dimension Vol. 2, by Cavan Scott et al Sometime Never…, by Justin Richards Jubilee, by Robert Shearman Time’s Mosaic 9 – Eccleston, Torchwood and Quatermass, by Finn Clark
The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield Kosovo: the Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay British Generals in Blair’s Wars, by Jonathan Bailey
Slow Horses, by Mick Herron The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald 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 Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Green Twining, by Andrew Cheffings
Second paragraph of third essay (“First War of the Global Era: Kosovo and U.S. Grand Strategy” by James Kurth)
As we will see, all of these claims about the Kosovo War are true, but they are also incomplete. They could therefore be misleading both about the causes of the war and about its implications for future conflicts. To understand these causes and consequences, we will need to examine the war in the context of the grand, or national, strategy of the United States. For the Kosovo War was, inter alia, an outgrowth of a new grand strategy that the United States has developed in the aftermath of the Cold War. Among the Kosovo War’s distinctions, it was the first American war of the global era.
A collection of essays about the Kosova war, published in January 2002. Most of the essays are critical of the way in which the war was conducted from a military doctrine or strategic thinking viewpoint. Most of them also try to look ahead to see what the implications are for future conflicts where the USA may not need to have a strong ground component, though very few of the observations turn out to have been helpful to understand the Afghanistan war, started just before the book was published, or the Iraq war, which started just after.
Less surprisingly perhaps, none of them foresaw a future where the USA first threatened annexation to its allies and then attacked Iran and lost. One feels for analysts trying to make sense of the world we are in and then discovering that the future has arrived and it’s not as expected. But none of these essays made me feel that the US policy community had any much better idea of what is going on in the world than the rest of us. In particular, none of the writers has much knowledge of Kosova itself, which is what I am most interested in.
You can get War over Kosovo here. This was the shortest book acquired in 2022 which was still on my unread shelf. Next on that pile is The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.
Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins had not thought of references, and they had not dreamed a rent could be so high. In their minds had floated sums like three guineas a week; or less, seeing that the place was small and old.
I’m of the age where I saw and really enjoyed the 1991 film Enchanted April, based on this book and starring inter alia Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Michael Kitchen and Jim Broadbent, and when I spotted the novel second hand a few months back I snapped it up. As I had hoped, it’s a warm story about four women who come together on holiday in Italy in 1922, and gradually become friends with each other, with the two who are married also rekindling their relationships with their husbands. It’s not super radical, more a comedy of manners, but I found it very entertaining, mainly for the emotional disentanglements but also for the lyrical descriptions of Italy. You can get The Enchanted April here.
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next up there is H Is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald.
‘Are you all right?’ Anji felt sick to her stomach. ‘Guy, are you all right?’
Another in the series of Eighth Doctor novels which I read in 2015 and failed to write up at the time. This brings a loose end to the incomprehensible multiple timelines arc that began with Time Zero, and writes Anji, one of my favourite book-only companions, out of the TARDIS, replacing her with the rather two-dimensional Trix. There’s more complex overlapping timeline stuff, and some very un-Doctorly incidents of Eight gratuitously hurting the bad guys. This came out in 2003 a month before BBC Wales announced the coming of New Who, and really shows the dead end into which Who books were being written at the time. (The Big Finish audios and comics were more lively.) Still, you can get Timeless here (at a price).
I was however interested that one of the more significant guest characters is named Guy Adams, also the name of a writer of Who books who started getting published a few years later. Coincidence?
It was a beautiful autumn day–the city glowed in the sunlight and the skies were that truly cloudless blue you never see back home. Sunshine is so precious here, though England is sunnier than I thought it would be, having been told so often about its greyness. I think it is because the greyness is so depressing that it makes the sunshine all the more spectacular.
A nice wee novella from Zen Cho, originally published way back in 2012 and being re-released this summer (I got an ARC from the author). It’s about a young Malaysian Chinese writer who moves to London in 1920 and has an affair with a chap who sounds very like H.G. Wells (indeed it starts with her critically reviewing one of his books, just like Rebecca West did to HGW). But she really has feelings for her Tamil editor; and pretty soon an extra complication looms… Told in diary form by the self-possessed and funny heroine, and well recommended. You can get The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo here, starting in July.
(Note: I will not generally review ARCs, please don’t send them to me if you don’t know me.)
Second paragraph of third essay (on John Osborne’s memoirs):
A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of a lower-middle-class childhood on the fringes of London, and for its vengeful portrait of a mother who had ‘eyes that missed nothing and understood nothing.
This is a collection of twenty essays by Hilary Mantel from the London Review of Books, published between 1988 and 2019, including her piece comparing the popular cult of the bodies of Anne Boleyn and Kate Middleton which got a lot of coverage at the time.
These are all witty and mostly humane, with my favourites being the pieces that concentrate on her areas of historical expertise, the Tudors and the French Revolution. I thought her pieces on some of the minor Tudor figures, Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon and Margaret Pole, were particularly strong.
There are also a couple of reflections on more contemporary culture, including the famous “Royal Bodies” essay, but also a grim reflection on the death of James Bulger and a piece about Madonna which says pretty much what you’d expect.
I confess that I had not realised that Mantel wrote much apart from the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, but her messages to the LRB editor reproduced here are full of references to other novels and books that she was writing, including her French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety. I’ll start looking our for them.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall, and The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.
“Mon ami,” he said, “if you wish you may wait in to put salt on the little bird’s tail, but for me I do not waste my time so.”
Well. I thought this was rubbish when I read it at thirteen, and I still think it’s rubbish now that I am almost 59. Poirot and Hastings become involved in an effort to uncover the “Big Four”, who are secretly running the world, or trying to take it over, or something. They include a stereotypical Chinese oligarch, a stereotypical American squillionaire, a French scientist who is in no way at all based on Marie Curie, and the mysterious fourth man, who is English and a master of disguise. We also have Hercule Poirot’s twin brother Achille, though (SPOILER for a book published 99 years ago) he turns out to be one of Poirot’s disguises.
Apparently this is a fix-up of a dozen individually published stories, and it shows; very episodic, with a corresponding lack of internal continuity. Every adventure sees the Big Four’s implausibly convoluted plans confronting Poirot’s even more implausibly convoluted plans. There is a comedic has-been actress who gets bumped off mercilessly. There is a grand explosion in Switzerland at the end. The basic concept is the same as The Secret Adversary from five years earlier, but not executed as well. Agatha Christie herself called this a “rotten book” and it is difficult to disagree with her. However, you can get The Big Four here.
However bothersome Nanny’s antics were, they were easy to rationalise. Explaining why a blue box had suddenly appeared from the ether was beyond his patience.
Bali Rai is new to the Whoniverse, but an established YA writer from Leicester. This book is one of a sequence bringing the Doctor into classic children’s novels and seeing what heppens, in this case the Eleventh Doctor and Clara dropping into the world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, where they are joined by River Song and the Paternoster Gang. There’s some admirable unpacking of the slave economy behind the Caribbean trade of the eighteenth century, and we get Jim gender-flipped to Janey, and escaped slaves setting up a free community on the island, but the story is a bit lacking in actual plot (and poor Clara is sidelined for much of it). The Paternoster Gang get some good lines though. You can get Rebellion on Treasure Island here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is The Order of the New Moon Reflected in Water, by Zen Cho.
Second paragraph of third chapter (though I did not get that far):
The following section considers several explanations forwarded to explain the shift from pursing narrow national interests in foreign policy to focusing on human rights questions in areas where Western states have little economic or geo-strategic interest. It suggests that while international changes have provided the opportunity to present foreign policy in ethical terms, the main dynamic behind ethical foreign policy lies in the domestic sphere and the search for new forms of political legitimacy. Subsequent sections develop this analysis, considering the low costs involved in ethical foreign policy and the selective nature of its application, further suggesting that the lack of clear policy aims in human rights promotion reflects a desire to use foreign policy for domestic purposes rather than any concern with human rights issues per se.
I reviewed one of Chandler’s earlier books for a defunct website back in 1999, and also wrote up an essay collection that he edited more recently, so I knew in advance that I was unlikely to agree with this book (I have the second edition from 2005). He makes the argument that the human rights justification for international interventions is fundamentally wrong-headed, but I would reflect that criticism back at the writer.
I’m not even sure that it’s correct to say that the Afghanistan war (his main reference point other than Kosovo) was framed to the Western public as a human rights-driven intervention. My memory is that the core argument was about security and removing a government that was supporting Al-Qaeda. Twenty years on, especially after the last few weeks, it’s very difficult anyway to make the case that there is a dominant human-rights culture in international military interventions, so one feels that Chandler was attacking a straw man at a particular moment in history when it maybe looked more substantial than it has turned out to be. But it also seems to me that it is a Bad Thing if the concept of intervention to protect human rights has disintegrated.
I was also startled to read a series of statements about the 1999 Kosova conflict on pages 15-16 which are simply objectively wrong. Cherry-picking is a tactic that we are all sometimes tempted to use, but at least make sure that you are picking real cherries rather than fictional ones. I’m not going to waste time here by dissecting statements in a twenty-year-old book that nobody who reads this is going to go and read, but really, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
This was my top unread book about Kosova of the bundle that I acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is NATO’s Air War for Kosovo, by Benjamin S. Lambeth.
Three works won both Nebula and Hugo Awards for fiction published in 2011 and awarded in 2012, the second most recent year when this has happened, and 27 years after the most recent previous instance. Personally I think that of the “triplet years”, this is the strongest, well ahead of 1979/80 which is its nearest rival. I know that others will disagree with me; judge for yourself:
Taking the 2011/12 group in increasing order of length:
Second paragraph of third section of “The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu (depending exactly how you count the sections):
Sometimes, the animals got into trouble. Once, the water buffalo jumped into a dish of soy sauce on the table at dinner. (He wanted to wallow, like a real water buffalo.) I picked him out quickly but the capillary action had already pulled the dark liquid high up into his legs. The saucesoftened legs would not hold him up, and he collapsed onto the table. I dried him out in the sun, but his legs became crooked after that, and he ran around with a limp. Mom eventually wrapped his legs in saran wrap so that he could wallow to his heart’s content (just not in soy sauce)
Like the Resnick [“The Homecoming”], this is a tale of familial drama, with a marginal (but significant) sfnal element; the narrator explains how he allowed himself to become estranged from his Chinese mother, who had the magical gift of making origami creatures come alive. I thought this was more honest and much less cloying than the Resnick story, daring to actually be sad. The metaphor is fairly heavy (and we never find out the names of the Chinese girls who translate the mother’s words to him and to his father at crucial moments), but it’s very beautifully written and captures the marginalised schoolboy very memorably.
I still liked it very much on re-reading. The narrator’s estrangement from his mother is cultural as well as emotional, and the magical paper animals are a well executed metaphor.
You can find PDF copies of “The Paper Menagerie” in various places around the internets. If you want a hard copy, it is (not surprisingly) included in Ken Liu’s collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, which you can get here.
It won the Hugo pretty convincingly, though had been only in second place at the nominations stage.
Two other short stories were on both ballots, “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”, by E. Lily Yu (who won what was then the Campbell Award), and “Movement”, by Nancy Fulda, which was my personal favourite.
Second paragraph of third section of The Man Who Bridged the Mist, by Kij Johnson:
The clock in the room in which he slept didn’t work, so one day he used his penknife to take it apart. He arranged the wheels and cogs and springs in neat rows on the quilt in his room, by type and then by size; by materials; by weight; by shape. He liked holding the tiny pieces, thinking of how they might have been formed and how they worked together. The patterns they made were interesting but he knew the best pattern would be the working one, when they were all put back into their right places and the clock performed its task again. He had to think that the clock would be happier that way, too.
I thought this was a brilliant story of a world not quite our own, with a hero-engineer dealing with the challenges of a river of deadly mist and of facing up to his own emotional needs – an odd but effective mixture of immersive fantasy and basic technology. Excellent stuff, which I really hope wins the award.
Again, I still like this story. Re-reading it, I was interested that the world where the story is set is equivalent to early modern in technology, but has much better gender equality; the emotional core of the story is the bridge-builder’s love affair with one of the river sailors who will be put out of business by the bridge. You can get The Man Who Bridged the Mist as a standalone volume here.
It won the Hugo narrowly enough as these things go, having been second-placed on the nominations ballot.
Unusually there were four other novellas on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots: “The Ice Owl”, by Carolyn Ives Gilman; “Kiss Me Twice”, by Mary Robinette Kowal; “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, by Ken Liu; and Silently and Very Fast, by Catherynne M. Valente.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Among Others, by Jo Walton:
I managed to say thank you as well as goodbye. The aunts each kissed me on the cheek.
I must admit that at various points in this novel I wondered how Jo Walton had got inside my head. Her narrator is a teenager in 1979-80, growing up reading Vonnegut, Zelazny, Heinlein and all the classics of science fiction, coping with the usual pains of growing up. Of course, Mor has a few extra problems that I didn’t have: no real friends at school, a move to a different country (Shropshire is very different from South Wales), dealing with a new family, and coping with the physical and emotional scars of the car accident which killed her sister and was conjured by her sorcerous mother. Rather like Buffy, Mor finds the terrors of adolescence taking supernatural and physical form; there’s also an interesting dialogue about England and Wales going on in the background (mostly). I was completely captivated by it; I am a couple of years younger than the heroine and her creator, but basically we are the same generation and Among Others hit me squarely in the memories. (I do wonder if it will appeal as much to those who are much older or much younger.)
I finished reading this at Eastercon (that’s how far my bookblogging is lagging my actual reading) and loved it still. My previous summary missed two important points. First, in Among Others, fairies are real and among the problems that Mor is navigating her way through. Second, one of the joyful aspects of the book is Mor’s encounter with sf fandom, through a group in the local library, at a much younger age than I really started to engage – although I was active in CUSFS and Jómsborg as a student, I have only been regularly attending conventions since 2002, when I was in my mid-thirties. I wish that I had started sooner. You can get Among Others here.
It won the Hugo pretty convincingly, and topped the nominations poll as well.
Embassytown, by China Mieville, was also on both ballots.
In the novelette category, the Hugo went to “Six Months, Three Days”, by Charlie Jane Anders, and the Nebula to “What We Found”, by Geoff Ryman. Each was also on the other ballot. Also on both ballots were “Fields of Gold”, by Rachel Swirsky, and “Ray of Light”, by Brad R. Torgersen, which I personally thought was terrible but was runner-up for the Hugo.
The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form and the Ray Bradbury both went to The Doctor’s Wife, arguably making this year a quadruplet rather than a triplet. Captain America: The First Avenger, Hugo and Source Code were all on both ballots.
Next in this sequence: the winner of Hugo, Nebula and lots of other prizes in 2014, Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie.
This case is illustrative of the conditions in Kosovo during the late Ottoman period, when religious divisions were still more important than ethnic ones. Religion was the dominant marker of identity, in this case dividing Albanians into Muslims and Christians, or into those conservative circles who were determined to defend Muslim hegemony against those who were or intended to become Catholics. Yet this case also marks the beginning of a new period of Ottoman reforms, which led to attempts by the Roman Catholic church, notably the Franciscan order, to gain back some of the souls which had been lost to Islam during the long period of Ottoman rule. The development of the Marian devotion in Letnica, as well as the policy of conferring the sacrament on non-Catholics, were the main devices used to accomplish this, i.e. to re-Catholicize part of the population in the Karadag mountains. The concept of crypto-Christianity was instrumental in church policy. Instead of taking crypto-Catholicism simply for granted, I would like to suggest that initially (i.e. in the first decades of the nineteenth century) it was primarily a church category which did not correspond with the ‘lived realities’ of those who received this label.¹ It was designed to redefine the identity of people who had a vague or ambivalent sense of religious belonging, and to explicate and justify a church policy of Catholic recovery and expansion into Ottoman territory. Through the workings of the devotional and missionary regime in the parish of Letnica, however, the category became increasingly real for those involved. ¹ I do not dispute that at an earlier stage, at the time when Albanian Catholics were converting to Islam (during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), crypto-Catholicism was a ‘lived reality’ indeed. There is ample documentary evidence for that (see for instance Malcolm 1998: 173-175). I want to question, however, the common assumption that there was a clear continuity of crypto-Catholicism up to the nineteenth century. I believe that the awareness of belonging to two different and radically opposed religious traditions was gradually lost among ordinary converts (after two or three generations).
Published in 1999, before the dynamics around Kosova changed completely, this is a study of several interesting cases of religious and ethnic identity in the region, making the case that both are much more fluid than you might think from public discourse. I’m always on for some good anthropological field work, and this is good anthropological field work.
In fact for anyone who knows the region, Duijzings’ core theme is not new. Back in 2024, I was talking with two fairly well-known political figures from Serbia and North Macedonia, and we discovered that each of them had a parent who had been expelled from the same part of northern Greece in the 1940s, and also had cousins who had remained and are now ‘Greek’. Identity is what you make it.
Duijzings approaches the topic with empathy and care, and brings to life the cases he looks at. These are:
Christian shrines which are also the subject of Muslim pilgrimages and other religious practices
The ‘crypto-Catholics’ of the Albanian lands
Dervishes and Bektashi, and their clashes with the state-sanctions Muslim authorities
The Egyptian minority in Kosova and Albania
He then looks at the structure and impact of two nationalist cultural projects, contrasting the unsuccessful attempt by Naim Frashëri to promote Bektashism as a core part of Albanian identity with the successful use of Serbian epic poetry, notably “The Battle of Kosovo”, to do the same for Orthodox Christianity and Serbian nationalism.
Another in the series of BBC original audiobooks, this has the original TARDIS crew arriving on a space liner in what we are told are the early days of interstellar space flight, and at the same time there is also an alien presence and an ancient mystery, treacherous crew members and terrified passengers. It’s reminiscent of Terror of the Vervoids, but done much better (and I am one of those who actually rate Terror of the Vervoids higher than the consensus). Paul Hayes is a radio producer who write two non-fiction books about Doctor Who for the 60th anniversary in 2023; this seems to be his first fiction for the Whoniverse, but I think he has an assured touch. You can get Star Flight here.
In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest, and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution.
Published in 2020, and reflecting on decades of climate negotiations (Figueres was one of the key people behind the 2015 Paris Agreement), this is a surprisingly upbeat book, very clear about the scale of the climate crisis and the devastating consequences for humanity if we don’t get a grip on it, but also clear that there are things that can be done at national, local and individual levels which will all make a difference. Not preachy, very digestible. You can get The Future We Choose here.
I wonder how the authors would assess the situation six years on. The book came out just before the pandemic, which of course showed us that massive disruptions to our economic well-being are entirely possible, and natural disasters linked to climate change have been stacking up. The USA has largely turned its back on the fight against climate change. But at the same time, China, Europe and the growing economies of the middle income countries are pushing ahead with a shift to renewable energy and more sustainable economic practices. So I think stubborn optimism is still appropriate.
This was both the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2022, and the shortest unread book acquired that year. Next on those piles respectively are Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel, and Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings.
Lots of people loved this graphic novel published last year. It tells, with very few words, a story of ancient mythic creatures at the dawn of a Sumerian-style mythos, moving from creating to struggles over control of the human city. I was not as convinced; I think words are useful to give a sense of what makes the characters tick, and it’s much more difficult to convey that with pictures alone (or even mostly with pictures). Still, it’s an interesting experiment. You can get Drome here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Tuki: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith.
Fairly high on the list, however, was: Why breakfast?
Third in Marske’s The Last Binding trilogy. I was not totally convinced by the first of this series, but liked the second much more. I’m afraid that the third lost me not quite half way through, with the protagonists of the previous two books bouncing off each other and around various Victorian (or was it Edwardian?) stately homes. I wasn’t interested enough in the characters or convinced enough by the details of the settings. So I put it down. You can get A Power Unbound here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2024 (as part of the Hugo packet). Next on that pile is Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian.
@JUICELINE / Why Gen ((O) Teens think your favorite Transformers film is problematically cyberphobic / TR91 @SKINNYDIP / We got a sneak peek at the new G17 human rights reform bill! SPOILERS AHOY / TR86 @DEADPLANET / What the fuck lives at the heart of Australia, and why? This zoologist has answers that may surprise you / TR77
I’m sorry that my other book reviews this week have been somewhat grumpy, and I hope this one makes up for it. I have listened to a lot of Eddie Robson’s audio work (particularly enjoyed The Five Companions and The Jigsaw War), and read a number of his short stories, but this is the first time I have read one of his novels and also the first time that I have read any of his non-Who writing.
I thought it was excellent. Our protagonist, Lydia, is from Halifax (the Yorkshire one), and lives in New York in the very near future as a translator for a diplomat from the delegation of an enigmatic alien race, the Logi, who communicate telepathically to chosen individuals. Her alien liaison is murdered, and she finds herself navigating diplomacy, non-human mind-sets, and the relationship between Yorkshire and New York, all in a society where everyone is online and watching you all the time (and you can fact-check people in mid-conversation). It adds up to something very refreshing. You can get Drunk On All Your Strange New Words here.
This was the SF book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next there is Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall.
Opening scene of third episode (The Forest of Fear):
1. CAVE OF SKULLS (NIGHT).
THE DOCTOR: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, it’s all my fault. I’m desperately sorry.
SUSAN: Oh, don’t blame yourself, Grandfather.
THE DOCTOR: Look at those. Look at them.
(He is looking at a pile of skulls.)
IAN: Yes. They’re all the same. They’ve been split wide open.
This was the first in a series of ten scripts of Doctor Who TV stories published by Titan Books between 1988 and 1994, and I guess it’s more interesting now as a case of what you could and couldn’t write then about what was already a decades-old Doctor Who story. There are thirteen pages of introduction (in three chunks) about the concept of the script books, the concept of Doctor Who and the writing of the story, all now well-trodden ground, but I guess less available in 1988. To be honest, I think that even completists could skip this in good conscience. But you can get The Tribe of Gum here.
We both bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and undignified manner. My mother sat by the open window laughing and fanning herself. Pesca was one of her especial favourites and his wildest eccentricities were always pardonable in her eyes. Poor dear soul! from the first moment when she found out that the little Professor was deeply and gratefully attached to her son, she opened her heart to him unreservedly, and took all his puzzling foreign peculiarities for granted, without so much as attempting to understand any one of them.
I have to say that I found the 646 pages of this a real slog. There’s some good sæva indignatio at the legal status of women in Victorian society, but the plot is pretty implausible and the investigation process, not much less so; the central mystery is not interesting enough to compensate for the blandness of the characters (or the length of the book). Wildly overrated, I fear, but you can get it here. I very much preferred Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, which is apparently a reflection of The Woman in White for modern times.
This was my top unread book acquired last year, my top book not yet blogged here and my top non-genre book. Next on all three of those lists is Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.
Slogging through the Eighth Doctor Adventures, I am coming to the realisation that some of them are, well, not very good. Here we have what could have been a masterpiece of overlaid narratives, timelines and tension, with some interesting guest characters and some vivid individual scenes. but it all feels too chaotic and disorganised to be interesting. You can get The Last Resort here (for a price).
I did not get very far with the longer categories in the month between the shortlist announcement on 1 March and tonight’s close of voting. I confess that I was guided by the principle of value for money – the better the ratio of pages to dollars (I get my ebooks from Amazon.com), the more likely I was to read it. The consequence was that I did not read anything like the full ballot in any of these categories.
I list them below in the order of the categories on the ballot paper, which is not the order in the voter booklet (for which many thanks).
I covered Best Audio Fiction and Best Artwork yesterday.
Best Collection
My top vote goes to Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha, a great imaginative collection of twelve mostly fantasy stories about uncertainty and weirdness. The title piece, which ends the book, is the most memorable, with the protagonist carrying around his father’s zombified skull in his backpack for occasional strategic consultations. The second paragraph of the third story (“The Mub”) is:
Somewhere between the black slopes and the longest stretch of the cratered plains, I came across a traveler who I thought might be leaving the city and headed for the nested forests. I greeted him from a distance, just as the road curved around a copse of crooked and dry-skinned pines, but he would not look at me. It was only when we came close to one another that he muttered, “Don’t,” as though throwing the word heavily at my feet, then kept on his way without offering anything else. I’d thought it unkind and almost said something in response.
I also really enjoyed Who Will You Save?, the collection of short stories by Gareth Powell. I enjoyed it more than I expected frankly – 400 pages is quite a lot for a short fiction collection, and many of the stories tie into his other writing, not all of which I am familiar with. But there is a pleasing rejection of formula, or at the vey least some new twists on old stories. Some themes come up several times (teenage love; Bristol) but
The second paragraph of the third story (“Waiting for God Knows”) is:
“It’s an outrage,” Fenrir grumbled over our common channel.
Blood in the Bricks, edited by Neil Williamson, is an anthology of short stories with urban settings heading towards the horror end of the spectrum. The second paragraph of the third story (“Hagstone”, by Tracy Fahey) is:
The yelling is louder. I sigh, fold over the page of the sports section, and get to my feet, grunting out a whoosh of air as I do. Outside, the stark new shapes of industrial units tower over me. The digger is in front of the old half-demolished factory; a rotten tooth in the slick industrial estate. A boy jumps off the digger and runs towards me. Even though the sun beats steadily down, I shiver suddenly; a quick spasm. Goose walking over my grave.
Some of these were very good, including “Hagstone”. But some editorial pruning could have made for a leaner healthier collection; there were too many stories where the protagonist ends up as a human sacrifice to the city’s demons, like The Wicker Man except indoors. You can get Blood in the Bricks here.
I’m afraid that I didn’t get around to the other three nominees, so I will look silly if one of them wins. They are:
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. Andre M. Carrington
Black Friday, by Cheryl S. Nutty
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within, ed. Allen Stroud
(Update: the winner was Blood in the Bricks.)
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
To my surprise, I find that I am voting for Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is long, like most of them:
Two decades later English jurist Henry Sumner Maine, deeply influenced by Carlyle’s writing, published Ancient Law; Its Connection to the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861). His thesis is that society had shifted from human identity and being-in-the-world as defined by one’s status – one’s place in the social hierarchy, the great chain of being – to our social being and interactions as governed by contracts. In some ways, since contracts (unlike status) can be engaged voluntarily, Sumner sees this as an improvement. But there are losses too, and those losses are what Past and Present is about. Carlyle argues less like a lawyer and more like an artist, and he is certain that what has been lost is reverence, something no contract can bestow: ‘at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing’. The contrast Carlyle draws between industrialized irreverential contemporaneity and the vivid life of his imagined medieval world establishes precisely the contrast that the Tolkienian and Lewisian mode of fantasy would later valorize:
Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.¹
¹Carlyle, Past and Present, 2:1.
This was a really fun and informative read, taking the history of fantasy writing from the very beginning to almost the present day. I am very familiar with the historical structure of the genre, but it was very helpful to see it laid out in such a structured way. Roberts is effusive but also analytical of the writers he admires; he takes no prisoners with the others – on Robert Jordan, for instance:
Manifestly the stylistic inadequacies of these books, their vastness, derivate repetitiveness, do not discourage millions of fans from imaginatively playing in the imaginative theme parks they represent: a wish-fulfilment world more colourful than our own, furnishing an idealized nostalgic past that does not deprive us of present-day bourgeois creature-comforts, parlayed through honest-to-goodness melodramatic emotional intensity.
Often I found myself starting his coverage of one of the series or authors that I have not read thinking “Oh, must try that sometime” and then at the end of Roberts’ analysis thinking “Mmm, maybe not”. There are some annoying typos, and there is almost no coverage of recent writers in languages other than English, but even so I got much more from Fantasy: A Short History than I expected, and it can have my vote in return. You can get it here.
I also really enjoyed Colourfields by Paul Kincaid. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
It is clear that this volume [The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint] is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
I stand by what I wrote when I read it a few months ago:
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
It’s a classic collection of pieces by one of our great critics, and deserves to be celebrated.
The only other book that I got hold of in this category was That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
During this period, witchcraft in the popular imaginary was a fractured signifier. It suggested both sexual empowerment and sexual enslavement; collectivist naturalism and individualistic consumerism; science and superstition; intellectual control and hedonistic abandon. But how could this character come to be a feminist icon, a misogynist boogeyman, a harbinger of religious decline, a sex symbol, a trend, and a joke all at once? Using a number of films from a wide range of different contexts (from studio blockbusters to auteurist art films to pornography to exploitation movies), Part I will trace the history of the countercultural witch film cycle, looking at this figure across her various contexts to suggest that in a decade haunted by questions of belief—in alternative communities and more equitable futures on the one hand and conservative religious and patriotic ideals on the other—the witchʼs evolution as a symbol of mysterious and arcane power reflects these shifting landscapes, particularly in the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. As Jon Lewis put it in his book, Road Trip to Nowhere,
[t]oday the movies from the counterculture era that continue to matter were in their day aberrations, movies that got made despite industry policy, movies made elsewhere (overseas, in the B-industry, by independent contractors working on some half-baked deal with a studio)—movies nobody with money and clout at the time gave half a chance at success.³
³ Lewis, 2022, 3.
I’m afraid I did not get very far; I am just not personally very interested in witch films, and while the author promises to make the connection with wider issues of society and gender, it depended too much on the bits I didn’t care so much about. I am sure that it is a perfectly fine read for those who care more about witch films than I do. You can get That Very Witch here.
The voter booklet (for which, again, many thanks) includes extracts from the other three finalists, enough to make me feel confident in ranking them as follows:
Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre, ed. Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Writing the Magic, eds. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914, by Kate Holterhoff
In my earlier write-up of the shortlists, I noted that the last of these was owned by precisely zero users of Goodreads, LibraryThing or StoryGraph, and is also by some way the most expensive shortlisted book in any category. The extract provided for BSFA voters shows only the most slender of links to science fiction or fantasy literature, and I really wonder why anyone would have nominated it for a BSFA Award, let alone enough voters to get it on the shortlist.
(Update: the winner was Colourfields.)
Best Novel
My sole vote goes to When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift. the second paragraph of the third chapter (a long ‘un) is:
After the lockdowns, my parents started using my grandparents for free childcare whenever they could get away with it, and I spent a lot more weekends at the house in Herne Hill. This arrangement suited everyone very well with the exception of Gran, who clearly recognized she was being taken for a ride but felt unable to voice her dissent. Grandad and I remained great pals. I could talk to him about anything, and as I got older I talked more and more, and he’d sit and listen. Truly he had the patience of a saint, for he’d smile and ask questions back, and if I finally ran out of things to say, he would think for a while and then dig out some obscure and fascinating fact, like how the sewers worked. As if I were a jay and he were giving me acorns to stash away. My brain has always been a buzzy place, sometimes an overwhelming place. When I was with Grandad, the buzz quietened. He understood that I needed to get things out, or my thoughts might become too much. When I think of Grandad now, I remember his face, and his gentle voice, but mostly it’s the feeling that’s stayed with me. The feeling of being safe.
This is a great novel about the coming ecological catastrophe and the resilience of society in Britain (though we assume that similar stuff is happening elsewhere), told intimately through the story of two women who barely know each other, with the effect of climate change on them and their families delicately portrayed. There is despair, but there is also hope. I feel it really catches the Zeitgeist, and it gets my vote. You can get When There Are Wolves Again here.
(Update: the winner was indeed When There Are Wolves Again.)
The only other book on the shortlist that I have read is A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
I have always found reassurance in repetition, an aid to thought. Old photographs of Aberdeen docks show a diverse, rambunctious ecosystem teeming with life, a maze of lumber yards and cattle sheds, warehouses and sawmills, a complex, symbiotic machinery geared towards the transport of timber and textiles and livestock, including people. The docks are still busy. Ferries leave for Orkney and Shetland throughout the day. Container ships call at Aberdeen regularly to unload their cargoes. Service vessels bound for the rigs are still based here in the harbour. And the old names are everywhere: Hall, Hood, Duthie and Russell, the great shipbuilding dynasties of Aberdeen’s past embedded in its present, in its street names and parks, carved permanently into the granite from which the town was raised.
It’s an fascinating and well-written book, about the murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934; Nina Allan takes us in and out of the investigation and weaves different facets of herself into the story, including several breaking-the-fourth-wall moments. I’m giving it five stars on the various book sites.
But I’m not voting for it here, because I don’t think that it qualifies as science fiction or fantasy, and I think that the BSFA Awards should celebrate works of science fiction and fantasy. I know that yesterday I admitted that I am voting for a short story which is about fans of fantasy literature, rather than actually being fantastical itself; but A Granite Silence isn’t even addressing sf or fantasy, it’s a novel about a real life crime with no sfnal subject matter. Congratulations to the author on writing an excellent book, but it does not belong on this shortlist and isn’t getting my vote. Still, you can get A Granite Silence here, and probably should.
For various different reasons I did not read the other three finalists. They are:
Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
The Salt Oracle, by Lorraine Wilson
Edge of Oblivion, by Kirk Weddell
I covered Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction (Short), Best Shorter Fiction and Best Translated Short Fiction yesterday.
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
Not that anyone cares other than me, but James Goss has consistently been one of the best Doctor Who prose writers for years, and has never won an award as far as I know.
Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.
I did not read any of the other three shortlisted books in this category. They are:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Secrets of the First School, by T. L. Huchu
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel, by Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
I did consider reading Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, which is far ahead of all the other shortlisted books in any category in terms of public recognition, but it’s 400 more pages and I suspected that there was other stuff on the ballot in other categories that I would enjoy more.
(Update: the winner was Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution.)
Just to record my own BSFA votes this year (and must remember to actually cast my vote in time this time, I foolishly missed the deadline last year). I will do the shorter categories here, the ones where I have considered all of the shortlist works, and then will cover the actual books in another post tomorrow.
I’m not voting in the Best Audio Fiction category. I’m not sufficiently in the habit of listening to audiobooks (other than Doctor Who) to get in the zone for this. One of the finalists is over six hours long.
For Best Art, I nominated just one of the finalists, Nick Wells’ magnificent tesselated covers for the twelve-book Fractal series of novels by Allen Stroud, and I am standing by that as my top preference. It doesn’t come across well in the awards booklet, unfortunately, so I hope that voters take the time to look at the original. None of the others is at all bad, I just happen to really like this work by Nick Wells. I rank the others as follows:
(Update: I am glad to say that the Fractal covers won.)
Best Collection, Best Non-Fiction (Long) and Best Novel can wait until tomorrow, though once again I register my confusion at the ordering of the award categories.
Just one of my nominees for Best Short Fiction made it to the ballot, “The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends“, by Eugenia Trantafyllou. I don’t think I had read any of the other four nominees during the long-listing phase, but I still rate this one higher. In tomorrow’s post I am going to be complaining about finalists which are insufficiently sfnal; this story is not perhaps sfnal per se, but it’s about the enjoyment of reading in the genre, and fannishness and friendship. It gets my top vote.
“One Step at a Time“, by Rick Danforth, annoyed me with untidy punctuation and an untidy ending.
(Update: the winner was “Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike”.)
Also, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):
Man, this was a bit of a drag. It feels like very little progress was made. The book starts with a flashback where we left off. Alavira and Melitini find out they are not only sisters but also royals! They have to fight each other to the death for the Kingdom of Serenopol somehow? Their parents, the King and the Queen, follow the VERY ancient tradition of the land which says that the only worthy heir to the throne is the one who survives its siblings. It goes all the way back to the creation of Serenopol by a Dog King who survived his other siblings and ascended to the throne. Overall, pretty awesome world-stuff. (Also Dog King? Like an actual dog? I hope we get the lore eventually!)
The bear eyes me askance with its piece of bottle. I think the bear stands for wisdom. I think that’s why I made it. I imagine it telling me to go back to the water and try again. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)
The smells were rich and full, and her mother took long breaths in through her nose, inhaling it all, then gulping seltzer from a tall glass near the sink. Miriam could barely wait for her birthday meal to be served. She hopped around the kitchen, getting in the way and sneaking bits from this or that whenever her mother took a drink.
Me. It was my idea. I worked on the HR systems as part of my support duties. I’d Slack-messaged Jen, who’d mentioned it to Nestor, who’d told Matt to go get a cake and a card from the supermarket while you were out.
Electric had long ago replaced the diesel behemoths of her childhood, but percussive maintenance had stood the test of time. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)
None of the four works I nominated for Best Non-Fiction (Short) made it to the ballot, but I also mentioned three others that had impressed me and two of them did make it. My only reason then for not nominating Paul March-Russell’s review of E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again was that I had not yet read the book. I have now read the book (more on that tomorrow) and the essay really adds to my enjoyment of one of the classic novels of 2025, so it’s getting my top vote.
“The Legacy of Discworld” by Rick Danforth is enthusiastic but doesn’t say anything especially new.
(Update: the winner was “Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self in Other”.)
Again, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):
One other aspect of the novel [When There Are Wolves Again] also echoes The Citadel, and that is Swift’s cultural context. Of the many dystopias and apocalypses that featured in British writing of the 1930s, Gollancz published its fair share, including Francis Stuart’s Pigeon Irish (1932), Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), Andrew Marvell’s Minimum Man (1938), and R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). In the same year Cronin’s novel appeared alone, Gollancz also published Katherine Burdekin’s fascist dystopia, Swastika Night (Burdekin wrote it under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine), as well as the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Although such novels often presented anti-fascist, pre-apocalyptic warnings, they also amplified the gathering threats of war, genocide, dictatorship, and immiseration. Even the more optimistic works of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), portrayed war, disease, and famine as drivers for the future course of history. Although a convincing case has been made for the speculative fiction of the 1930s as a political mode that, as Terry Castle puts it in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), “dismantles the real … in a search for the not-yet-real,” the slew of such texts also contributed to a structure of melancholic feeling best summed up in Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (1939).
In my article ‘The Rise of Black Speculative Fiction’ published in Aurealis #129, I share how, as an African Australian, I grappled with matters of identity—until I fell into writing black speculative fiction, which brought me out of the closet.
The cornerstone of this annual gathering is the Hugo awards ceremony. During the days leading up to the big event, the convention attendees engage in quiet discussions about the nominees. They wish their favourite authors the best of luck. They recommend the finalist books and art to all their friends.
In 2018, drawing partly on the renewed interest in the Franklin Expedition in the wake of the rediscovery of its vessels and partly on contemporary interest in fiction exploring colonialism and the environment, the television company AMC produced a ten-part series based on the novel and largely following its text as outlined above, but differing from it in certain aspects of interpretation, character, and conclusions, particularly regarding the characterisation and fate of the Tuunbaq, Crozier and Silna.
One well-intended curse that has followed many comedic fantasy authors has been to be christened with the moniker “The Next Terry Pratchett.” While intended to help the new author, I feel like this has been a stone around their neck due to heightened expectations.
As with most of the other categories, I found it pretty easy to choose my top spot for Best Shorter Fiction, though I would add that all of the stories here are good. Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces. It also has more owners on Goodreads, on LibraryThing and on StoryGraph than all of the other shortlisted books in all other categories combined (apart from Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping) – massively more so on GR and SG.
“Descent“, by Wole Talabi, about an expedition that goes wrong in the African-inspired Sauútiverse.
“The Apologists“, by Tade Thompson, a murder investigation that turns into existential horror for the human race.
“The Art of Time Travel“, by Teika Marija Smith, oddly enough about art and time travel (and loss).
(Update: the winner was “The Apologists”.)
Second paragraphs of third sections / chapters:
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.
And I dream of my mother.
She arrives at an office block in Central London with a shiny brass plate announcing the names of the Coroner’s List pathologists, qualified and approved by His Majesty’s Government. She spots a name, DR ROBERT TALBOT, MBBS, FRCPath.
Footsteps behind her break the quiet, and her focus. She glances back. Catherine walks briskly towards her, beaming and waving a piece of paper. Rossana smiles. For the first time in a while, standing on the deck of a ship and attuning herself to a new environment, part of her feels at home; and though Catherine grew up on a different continent, she feels that the two of them share a bond that bypasses cultural distance. Ragazze della città e del mare, as they say back home; min el-bahr wa-l-medina – women of the comms centres, the two of them, grown between the worlds of humans and whales.
Charles had snorted, said it sounded as if her plan had been taken straight from a B-movie.
We ordinary voters don’t get to vote on Best Translated Short Fiction (and I fully support that), but I would still call your attention to “Still Water” (original title 止水, “Zhǐ shuǐ”) by Zhang Ran (张冉), which I thought was excellent. The second paragraph of its third section is:
You gradually stretch your fingers and forearms, like a young stork spreading its wings against the wind.
(I don’t have access to the original Chinese text.)
More tomorrow, including also the final category, Best Fiction for Younger Readers.
This was the official program book of the exhibition of Wright’s work at the National gallery in London that I went to last month and really enjoyed. (File 770 ran a piece on it too.) The book consists of three parts – a short introduction from National Gallery directors Sir Gabriele Finaldi and Tony Butler OBE; an essay, “Between Darkness and Light”, by Christina Riding; and another essay, “A ‘Peculiar’ Painter of Candlelight”, by Jon King. The second paragraph of the last of these is:
It is likely that Wright’s celebrated candlelight scenes owe much to an early fascination with the principles of illumination and spectacle. Though his childhood is sparsely documented, insights can be derived from notes by his elder brother Richard and the unpublished memoirs of his niece, Hannah. According to Hannah, Wright demonstrated a curious and ‘active mind’ from a young age, spending his free time observing craftsmen at work – such as joiners and marble workers – and recreating what he saw.⁵ In addition to noting skilfully made projects such as a chest of drawers, a gun and a clock without a working mechanism, Hannah recounts Wright’s early fascination with raree boxes. These portable exhibitions presented unusual images illuminated by candlelight. As a boy, Wright not only grasped the mechanics but, Hannah records, he also impressed and embarrassed the showman with his ingenuity:
Having seen a raree show, he considered attentively upon what principal it could be formed; having discovered the manner of placing the glasses, he completed a show about three feet high; he then went to the Showman, and told him he had made a show like his; the man would not believe it at first, but upon inquiring how he had made it, he found it was quite right, & begged he would not tell any one by what means he had effected it.⁶
⁵ Wright 1850, p. 2. ⁶ Ibid., pp. 2-3.
I am more pleased with the balance of the essays in the book than I was with the commentary in the exhibition itself; Riding does write about the scientific content of Wright’s work, and King makes the point that this is also linked to changing concepts of education in the 18th century. Art criticism isn’t generally my bag, but this is very helpful, and also lavishly illustrated for quite a modest price. You can get Wright of Derby here; but also if you can, get to the National Gallery before the exhibition closes (currently schedled for 10 May).
Non-fiction 7 (YTD 19) De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, by Alice Loxton Wright of Derby: From the Shadows, by Christine Riding and Jon King That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas (did not finish) The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler (did not finish)
Non-genre 2 (YTD 13) A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
Plays 1 (YTD 1) The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn
SF 10 (YTD 25) Blood in the Bricks, ed. Neil Williamson Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson Who Will You Save?, by Gareth Powell A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske (did not finish) “The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, by Kij Johnson Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen, by Cécile Cristofari The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 20) Firefall, by Beth Axford The Mind Trap, by John Peel The Last Resort, by Paul Leonard Star Flight, by Paul Hayes Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai
Comics 2 (YTD 6) Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al Drome, by Jesse Lonergan
~5,400 pages (YTD 20,400) 11/27 (YTD 34/86) by non-male writers (Loxton, Riding, McCarty-Sinas, Figueres, Allan, Marske, Swift, Johnson, Cristofari, El-Mohtar, Axford) 4/27 (YTD 8/86) by writers of colour (Liu, El-Mohtar, Ha, Rai) 3/27 reread (“The Paper Menagerie”, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, The Last Resort)
194 books currently tagged unread, down 1 from last month, down 38 from March 2025.
Reading now Among Others, by Jo Walton Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Coming soon (perhaps) The Lost Dimensions 1, by George Mann et al Timeless, by Steve Cole The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker Dr Who and the Daleks, by Alan Smithee The Daleks, by Oliver Wake
Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, by Andrew Bacevich Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, by Benjamin S. Lambeth
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 Tiptree Slow Horses, by Mick Herron The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
Two more Doctor Who audiobooks to write up, and they are both good ‘uns.
Firefall is a Fifteenth Doctor / Belinda story set in Canada during and after the great Leonid meteor shower of 1833. Needless to say, one of the things that falls is not yer standard meteor, and the small community where the story is set becomes disrupted by the alien presence and also by the threat of change. The story itself is about as you would expect, but it is lifted by some great technical points – there are some very well-crafted passages, and Michelle Asante as the reader does all the accents well. I’m adding Beth Axford to my list of writers to look out for – she also ghost-wrote Carole Ann Ford’s contribution to The Adventures After. You can get Firefall here.
John Peel was already on my list of Who writers to keep an eye out for, and with The Mind Trap he is back in his comfort zone of the Second Doctor era, with the story read by David Troughton. So we are in good hands. It’s a pretty minimalist story set in a deserted space jail; Jamie is removed from the scene for plot simplicity and we end up with the Doctor and Zoe crossing wits with mysterious prisoner Markan and his robot. Peel uses the short allocated time economically and throws in some interesting twists which are also totally consistent with the feeling of the era. If you like the Second Doctor at all, you’ll enjoy this. You can get The Mind Trap here.
Het Nederlandse West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, tekende voor de voetgangersbrug die een smalle duinenstrook verbindt met de Uitkerkse polders, een eeuwenoud weidelandschap, waar veel vakantiehuisjes en caravans staan. Op het eerste gezicht ziet de brug eruit alsof wind en golftoppen een enorme lading afvalhout langs de vloedlijn hebben gedeponeerd. De omkisting van een overboord geslagen scheepsvracht? De lambrisering van een verwoeste scheepska-juit? Wie zal het zeggen?
The Dutch firm West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, designed the footbridge that connects a narrow strip of dunes with the Uitkerkse polders, a centuries-old meadow landscape dotted with holiday cottages and caravans. At first glance, the bridge looks as though the wind and wave crests have deposited a huge pile of driftwood along the high-water mark. The hull of a ship’s cargo that has washed ashore? The panelling of a wrecked ship’s hull? Who can say?
I got this for F a few Christmases ago, a guide to 111 “crazy places” in Belgium. I was already familiar with a few of them – the Vlooybergtoren, Baarle, the church in Borgloon that isn’t there, the Atomium, Rédu. We’ve been inspired also to try and find a couple more thanks to the book – the cubes of Herne were a success, but the Post-Imdustrial Pagodas had been destroyed in 2021. Reading the whole book has given me a couple more ideas.
Most of the places mentioned are simply large and odd works of public art, with a few cases of usable architecture and one or two bits of natural landscape. Useful for anyone planning occasional excursions around Belgium. The text is in Dutch, but the photographs need little explanation and the locations are clearly given, with a map at the end.
The author has also published lists of 222 equally crazy places in the Netherlands, and a less ambitious but presumably longer list of 1000 things to do in the Netherlands. I’m glad that he also turned his attention southwards. You can get De gekste plek van België here.
Next of my run of Titan Doctor Who comics acquired in 2022 (and I’m actually getting near the end, I expect that I will finish them this year). Ghost Stories is, unusually for this content stream, a direct sequel to a broadcast Doctor Who episode, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, visiting the new family of Grant the ex-superhero, Lucy the journalist and Lucy’s daughter Jennifer several years after the Christmas 2016 episode. This had a promising beginning with the dynamic between superhero and Doctor nicely portrayed, but petered out into a standard quest story with guest characters in the second half; also the art notably fails to make the Doctor look much like Peter Capaldi, never mind the other established characters. For completists. You can get Ghost Stories here.
