Non-fiction 10 (YTD 66) Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister?, by Anthony Seldon and Tom Everton The Owned Continent, by Dave Keating Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) (did not finish) Silent Earth, by Dave Goulson Christopher Priest: The Interaction, ed. Andrew M. Butler An Adventure in Space and Time, by David Robinson Rory O’Kelly – An investigation into the events of 4 March 1977, by the Independent Commission for Reconciliation & Information Recovery Raising Hare, by Chloe Dalton Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion and American Culture, eds. Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren (did not finish)
Non-genre 4 (YTD 37) Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset Marple, by Lucy Foley et al Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz (did not finish) A Nation Once Again, by Paul Howard
SF 5 (YTD 70) Blake’s 7: Aftermath, by Tony Atwood ”Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal el-Mohtar Every Heart A Doorway, by Seanan McGuire Agents, Adepts and Apprentices, by Kathryn Sullivan The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 54) Fear Itself, by Nick Wallace Charles Darwin and the Silurian Survival, by L.D. Lapinski
Comics 4 (YTD 27) Gods and Monsters: Sutekh and Omega, by Ian Winterton, Mark Griffiths et al Léopoldville 60, by Patrick Weber, Baudouin Deville and Bérengère Marquebreucq The Long Journey of Joan Miró, by Gemma Ballard and Marta Altés Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, by Kate Evans
~5,900 pages (YTD 62,600) 10/25 (YTD 94/259) by non-male writers (Dalton, Porter/McLaren, Undset, Foley and others, el-Mohtar, Macguire, Sullivan, Lapinski, Ballard/Altès, Evans) 2/25(YTD 26/259) by writers of colour (Mahfouz, el-Mohtar) 4 out of 25 reread (Blake’s 7: Aftermath, “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, Every Heart a Doorway, Fear Itself) 181 books currently tagged unread, down 6 from last month, down 24 from September 2025.
Reading now Wench, by Erynne Rivers Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder Garden Jungle, by Dave Goulson
Coming soon (perhaps)
Gods and Monsters, Phase Two, ed. Gareth Kavanagh The Cabinet of Light, by Daniel O’Mahony Doctor Who: Death in the Stars: A Melanie Bush Mystery, by Bonnie Langford Doctor Who – Frontios, by Christopher H. Bidmead Frontios, by Paul Driscoll
Lost, Found, Remembered, by Lyra McKee British Summertime, by Paul Cornell Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Fredriksen The Shadow Glass, by Josh Winning
All That We See or Seem, by Ken Liu Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen Jingo, by Terry Pratchett “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™”, by Rebecca Roanhorse Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Agatha Christie, by Lucy Worsley July’s People, by Nadine Gordimer Septology, by Jon Fosse Real Tigers, by Mick Herron Les Reines de sang – Tseu Hi, La Dame dragon, by Philippe Nihoul Palestine, by Joe Sacco The Human Division, by John Scalzi
Second paragraph of third letter (written November 1871):
And what will you say when I tell you that I can hardly pity one who suffers from Gout; though I would undoubtedly prefer that you should be free from that, or any other ailment. But I have always heard that Gout exempts one from many other miseries which Flesh is heir to: at any rate, it almost always leaves the Head clear: and that is so much! My Mother, who suffered a good deal, used often to say how she was kept awake of nights by the Pain in her feet, or hands, but felt so clear aloft that she made Night pass even agreeably away with her reflections and recollections
Fascinated as I am by Fanny Kemble (1809-1893), I picked this up from Project Gutenberg to get a sense of her from her friend, Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), who had had a big publishing hit in the 1860s with The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and was now living in comfort in Suffolk. I got fifty pages into it and have put it aside; I wanted to hear her voice rather than his, and while there’s nothing objectionable about him, there’s nothing terribly interesting either.
Though I did smile at this 1873 account of a letter gone astray:
Some while ago Carlyle sent me a Letter from an American gentleman named Norton (once of the N. American Review, C. says, and a most amiable, intelligent Gentleman)—whose Letter enclosed one from Ruskin, which had been entrusted to another American Gentleman named Burne Jones—who kept it in a Desk ten years, and at last forwarded it as aforesaid—to me! The Note (of Ruskin’s) is about one of the Persian Translations: almost childish, as that Man of Genius is apt to be in his Likes as well as Dislikes. I dare say he has forgotten all about Translator and Original long before this.
“Carlyle” is presumably Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881); “Norton” is definitely Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908); “Ruskin” is of course John Ruskin (1819-1900); and “Burne Jones” must surely be the decidedly non-American Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), though it seems odd that Fitzgerald had not heard of him – he was already pretty well known by 1873.
Case in point: today’s activities. Seven days out from Mars on an Earth Forces’ personnel carrier. As transportation went, the Pegasus was better than most. They had a cabin and hot food. Recreational facilities were minimal – it was a military vessel, after all – but there was an observation lounge where you could quietly stargaze.
A Past Doctor Adventure reviving the great Eighth Doctor partnership with Fitz and Anji, in a near future where the Doctor and Fitz are involved with a grand space disaster and Anji settles down and gets married before being sucked once again into adventure. I confess that I did not follow it perfectly; there are two parallel timelines and it took me a while to work out what was happening when (maybe that’s just me). Still, there are some gutsy revelations at the end and I enjoyed the return to the old days. You may be able to get Fear Itself here.
Vila knew with a distressing certainty that Servalan had started the questioning with him because he was the one most likely to blurt out the truth. She had not threatened him. She had shown no anger, nor had she even suggested she was in a hurry. But then the questioning had only been going on for ten minutes, and after the first fifteen seconds Vila had told most of the truth. At the same time it had not escaped his thoughts that although Orac had given the advice to surrender it had singularly failed to inform Avon how to arrange the escape in two days’ time. The galaxy was, he decided, making less sense every day.
I had read this book years ago – maybe not quite as soon as it came out in 1984, the week after my 17th birthday, but certainly before I had left Cambridge in 1990. Like the other Blake’s 7 books, I picked it up at Gallifrey One, appropriately enough, my previous copy being long lost. Tony Attwood also wrote Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, the first in a forgotten series of three 1980s Doctor Who spinoff novels.
The premise here is that Vila and Avon both survived the massacre on Gauda Prime, Vila by ducking in time and Avon because he was captured and then abandoned. They reunite under the guidance of the glamorous Korell, who may or may not be a double agent for Servalan, and make their way back to both Terminal and Earth to attack the Federation where it hurts. It’s not particularly epic – one other member of the Seven reappears and then gets killed rather abruptly – but it satisfies the itch to know what might have come next if any of them had survived. If you really want more Blake’s 7, I refer you to the Big Finish audios.
Una McCormack asks if I am going to read Paul Darrow’s novel about Avon’s early life next. The answer is yes.
Det var slik at han tok seg mer nær av dette ille varsel enn hustruen kunne vite. Han hadde skrytt så meget av sin festemø, helt siden hans frender hadde hentet ham jaord på Jørundgaard. Det var det siste han hadde villet, at noen skulle tro, han regnet henne eller hennes frender for ringere enn sine egne folk. Nei, alle skulle vite at han holdt det for en heder og en opreisning, da Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn festet ham sin datter. Nå ville folk si han hadde vel ikke regnet møen for stort mer enn et bondebarn, når han hadde turdet krenke hennes far slik at han sov med datteren, før hun var blitt ham gitt til ekte. I sitt bryllup hadde Erlend trengt heftig inn på sin kones foreldre, til sommeren måtte de endelig komme til Husaby og se hvordan han hadde det. Både hadde han gjerne villet vise dem, at det var ikke til små kår han førte deres datter inn. Men han hadde også gledet seg til at fare omkring og syne seg i følge med disse vakre og staselige svigerforeldre; han skjønte at Lavrans og Ragnfrid kunde hevde seg mellom de fremste, hvor de så kom hen. Og han hadde trodd, siden den gangen han var på Jørundgaard, da kirken brente, at Lavrans tross alt ikke likte ham så ilde. Nå var det lite rimelig at gjensynet mellom ham og hans konefrender skulle bli til hygge for noen av parterne.
As it turned out, he took this act of fate more to heart than his wife could know. He had boasted so much of his betrothed, ever since his kinsmen had won Lavrans’s assent at Jørundgaard. This was the last thing Erlend had wanted—for anyone to believe that he considered her or her kinsmen to be lesser than his own people. No, everyone must know that he held it to be an honor and a distinction when Lavrans Bjørgulfsøn betrothed him to his daughter. Now people would say that Erlend had not considered the maiden much more than a peasant child, since he had dared to offend her father in such a manner, by sleeping with the daughter before she had been given to him in marriage. At his wedding, Erlend had urged his wife’s parents to come to Husaby in the summer to see how things were on his estate. He wanted to show them that it was not to paltry circumstances that he had brought their daughter. But he had also looked forward to traveling around and being seen in the company of these gracious and dignified in-laws; he realized that Lavrans and Ragnfrid could hold their own among the most esteemed of people, wherever they might go. And ever since the time when he was at Jørundgaard and the church burned down, Erlend had thought that Lavrans was rather fond of him, in spite of everything. Now it was unlikely that the reunion between Erlend and his wife’s kinsmen would be pleasant for either party.
translated by Tiina Nunnally
Having very much enjoyed the first volume of Kirstin Lavransdatter, and with the sunk cost of having bought all three in one volume anyway, I came to the second volume with reasonable expectations; which were met. Kirstin has married the rather irresponsible Erlend, already pregnant with the first of their seven sons together, and manages the demands of motherhood and dealing with Erlend’s somewhat irresponsible approach to life and to managing the family’s finances and other commitments, all against the backdrop of the chilly Norwegian climate.
The book then takes a sharp twist when Erlend is arrested on (entirely reasonable) suspicion of plotting a coup d’état to overthrow King Magnus. Kirstin is thrown onto her own wits and needs support from both her father Lavrans and her ex-lover Simon to ensure her own safety and try to prevent Erlend’s execution. The vividly described landscape turns into a well-sketched set of characters interacting because their very lives depend on it.
Glad that I persevered with this. One more volume to go.
Hollywood’s hold over Europe was just the beginning. Next, American music started dominating European charts. Then, American TV shows took over European screens. In the early days of the Internet, narratives set by American news media took over Europe’s editorial offices. And over the past decade, social media has spread the American culture wars to the far corners of this continent. With each passing year, the US cultural hold over this continent has grown. Hollywood rolled into Europe in the 1920s like a snowball at the top of a mountain, and now that snowball has become an avalanche.
I’ve known Dave Keating for a long time, and have heard him speak about this book a couple of times. Although originally American, he has become a passionate advocate of the European ideal, and here he not only diagnoses the malign consequences of American domination of Europe, he offers policy solutions to overcome it.
He starts very strongly, by pointing out how American domination of popular culture – film, television and popular music – has crushed the ability of Europeans to compete. Part of this is the natural gravitational effect of art produced by a large, linguistically homogenous market, but he also shows how American policies, both of the government and of the entertainment industry, have contributed to an externally dominated popular culture in Europe. (Oddly enough I felt some resonance with the observations of George Bilainkin about Penang, Malaysia in 1929-30.)
He then goes on to the economic dimension, with subsections on tech and energy policy. He is deeply sceptical of the Turnberry agreement between the EU and US. Looking at the comparative results gained by Canada and China from standing up to the Trump administration’s bullying more firmly than the EU did, it’s not hard to see his point. I have friends who are tech and energy experts who could probably have written books at least as long as this about their respective domains, but Keating sensibly covers them off in a chapter each.
Thirdly, the military / security dimension, where his analysis is that Europe has willingly become a US security protectorate with NATO as the key instrument of it. Here for once I feel that events are moving ahead of Keating’s analysis. A lot of American-based analysts do not comprehend just how seismic Trump’s threats of annexation to Canada and Greenland have been to European perceptions of the USA as a friendly actor. The Ukraine war has also played an important role here. Keating points out that the old European Defence Community treaty, rejected by France in 1954, remains on the table. I would be a bit surprised if future security arrangements go down that particular route, but it’s good to think creatively.
Finally, he has a number of firm policy proposals, most of which are eminently sensible. Picking on the one that doesn’t work for me, I am still not entirely convinced by calls (including his) for a more federal Europe. I want to see a way of convincing the smaller member states, and their people, that pooling sovereignty with their neighbours, especially their larger neighbours, is a win-win situation, and I haven’t seen that argument yet from the federalist side. But the rest is sound enough.
Anyway, this is a good, passionate and largely convincing analysis of what’s up and more importantly what’s down with the EU-US relationship. You can get The Owned Continent here.
The episode [Gavin Williamson’s resignation] revealed from the outset quite how thin the ice was. Over twelve years of government a sizeable arsenal of unexploded bombs had accumulated beneath the surface, each threatening the new government’s shaky footing. Would these explosive scandals provide the finishing blow to Sunak’s nascent rule? Still fresh in everyone’s minds were the scandals that rocked Major’s government, still more Johnson’s. Hence Sunak’s and LBS’s [Liam Booth-Smith’s] ardent wish to bid goodbye to all that. ‘Ending the madness’ was the order of the day.
I enjoyed Seldon’s co-written demolition of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and also his similar hatchet job on Liz Truss (with reservations), so thought that I would give this a try too. Rishi Sunak was dragged rather unwillingly into the role of Prime Minister, not actually confirming to family and supporters that he wanted the job until the morning of 22 October 2022, two days after Truss had resigned and two days before he was elected leader of the Conservatives.
In fairness, he took the job very seriously once he got it, but Seldon and Egerton keep coming back to the rushed startup as a key problem for the Sunak administration. They treat it as a combination of unavoidable circumstance and Truss’ (entirely understandable) desire to get out of the door quickly once she had been shown it. However I think this was Sunak’s first serious mistake (of many); he had the same information as the rest of us, and could see that Truss’s government spent half of its duration on life support, and should have been prepared.
There are over 600 pages in the book, which I think is more than the subject deserves. I got it really to see if Seldon’s Truss book’s weird claims that she had inspired the Windsor Framework (which she actually detests) were given any further support, but apart from an unsupported throwaway remark or two, they are not. The account of the Windsor Framework is forensic but limited; it concentrates almost entirely on the palace politics at the Downing Street and Westminster end, with some small space for the local dynamics in Northern Ireland and even less for the, er, EU, and gives little indication that the authors actually understand the substance of the problem. This is not especially fair on their own sources, Sunak’s advisors, who clearly had a very good understanding of Northern Ireland.
That said, I agree with the authors that the Windsor Framework is one of Sunak’s (few) real achievements as Prime Minister, and more importantly that it’s difficult to see any of the alternative Tory leaders having achieved it. Johnson and Truss were already committed to blowing up the relationship with the EU rather than enforce the Protocol that Johnson himself had negotiated. I cannot really see Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove or Penny Mordaunt (the other alternative Tory leaders in 2022, had Sunak not been available or not lasted) having either the necessary brains or the necessary character for it either. (See here for a sympathetic portrait of Mordaunt by Iain Dale, not that it matters now.)
Seldon and Egerton also see Sunak’s support of Ukraine as one of his key achievements. Myself, I think that any of the alternative leaders – Hunt, Gove, Mordaunt – would have followed exactly the same policy as Sunak on Ukraine, as indeed Johnson, Truss and Starmer actually did, and Burnham is doing, and it’s very difficult to point to one thing Sunak did that they would not have done.
The other big story of the book is the migration issue. One of Sunak’s (many, entirely avoidable) mistakes was to choose “Stop the boats” as one of his five key pledges, as unpacked by Rachel Cunliffe in August 2023. It was unachievable and he must have known that it was unachievable. Admittedly Sunak had a difficult legacy – Johnson had taken a strong line rhetorically against migration but in fact had facilitated it by his actual policies, so Sunak started with a in-built credibility problem.
There was then a tension between the performatively vicious side of the party (Braverman and Jenrick, both of whom have since joined Reform) and those who actually cared about not breaking the law (less vocal but as it turned out more influential). Even Seldon and Egerton, who generally boost Sunak, admit that he failed on this one, though they don’t follow through to speculate on what could have constituted success. There seems to have been no reflection on what a results-based policy would look like (and there still hasn’t been),
Sunak’s decision to go for a July election is excused by most (but not all) of those around him as the least worst of three bad options, the other two being May and November. I tend to agree. The particular consideration I hadn’t realised was that he (or rather his key advisers) hoped to outflank Nigel Farage, who was personally not ready for an election, and whose initial response (before his sponsors thought better of it) was that he would sit this one out. It was a rational choice on Sunak’s part, though it did not really work.
There is some half-hearted analysis of the extent to which Sunak was to blame for the disastrous election result. But really it came down to the destruction of their own party’s credibility in government by Johnson and Truss, which gives rise to the book’s sub-title asking if Sunak will turn out to have been the last prime minister from the Conservative Party; the precedent of the Canadian Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s is mentioned (they were outflanked by a more right-wing party, called Reform, which they later merged with). Sunak bears some but not much blame for Johnson’s failures, and none for Truss’s. (Unless you think that he did not try hard enough to defeat her in the summer leadership election, but it’s clear that he lost because Tory members preferred a white woman to an Asian man.)
For the Conservatives to win in 2024 would have required not only the steady leadership that Sunak was able to provide, but an external shock of the kind that Donald Trump provided to the Canadian Liberals in early 2025, or an implosion of the Labour Party bigger than 1983 or 2019. Whatever the wider impact of Tory policies on biodiversity may have been, Sunak is not really to blame for the shortage of black swans.
Still, looking at the polls I was interested to note that the Conservatives started the campaign at an average of 23.5% and actually got 23.7% in the election, while Labour fell from a 45% average to 33.7%. The big gainers were of course Reform (from 9% to 14.3%) and the Lib Dems (from 10% to 12.2%). Sunak deserves credit for stemming the drain of votes from his own party. Awful as the 2024 result was, it could (and maybe should!) have been even worse.
In general I hesitate to recommend this book. It is too closely concerned with the kitchen politics of 10 Downing Street while being rather hazy on the big policy picture in the most important issues, and a bit too uncritically rooted in its own sources (interviews with Sunak’s team, and the Chief Whip’s published memoirs). But it’s a compelling insider account of the slow-motion car crash that was the Sunak government, and gets you inside the heads of the driver and his crew. You can get Sunak at 10 here.
First in a series from Cutaway Comics, who are looking at extended stories of some of the Doctor Who characters who have been neglected by other writers. This is a combination of two (largely) unconnected stories, setting up for a later encounter: “Sutekh: The Heretic” is the tale of how Sutekh tried to conquer and destroy worlds and was brought to heel by his sister-wife and the other Osirans, and “Omega: Eltralla” has interacting with a human colony ship which has somehow got into his black hole, to the detriment of the later. (NB it’s not totally clear what the titles of the stories are, but I have done my best.) The art is good and the stories competent. You can get it here.
Judean answers, diverse as they were, emphasized the specialness of Jerusalem. Of course, ideas about Jerusalem’s specialness were not new. From the founding of the Davidic monarchy onward, kings had insisted that God dwelled in and would protect the royal city, often termed Zion in hymns still preserved in the Psalter. But this ancient “Zion theology” took a new turn during the reign of King Hezekiah. It became the main way Judeans explained the mysterious fact of their survival.
One of Anne’s theology books, looking at the writing of the Bible through the lens of trauma and suffering. When I was doing my Religious Education O-Level (for which I received the lowest mark of any subject) we had a module on ‘Suffering, Death and the Afterlife’, from a Catholic perspective of course, with almost no overlap with this book apart from the ‘Suffering Servant’ sections of Isaiah, so this was all new to me.
Carr makes a very powerful case for the centrality of the experiences of the exile to Babylon (in 720 BCE) and the destruction of the Temple (in 586 BCE) in the history of gathering together the scriptures that became the Old Testament, or at least the prophets and historical books. I had read some of the historical background in Barton’s A History of the Bible, but this set it out in a broader context, and also looks at the emotional complexity of the writers’ historical situations. It was fascinating stuff, and of course you can read forward from it to the events of today with little difficulty.
I was less convinced by his argument that the New Testament can be seen more clearly through a similar lens. His case is that the brutal execution of Jesus as a criminal was a traumatic historical event that early Christians needed to respond to; but it seems to me that, apart from the small number of survivors in Jerusalem itself, there would not have been many early Christians who had personal knowledge of it, whereas the depredations of the Babylonians and Assyrians between them affected every single Jewish family of the time. His extension of the argument to include Paul, who never met Jesus and did not become a Christian until several years after Jesus died, was even less convincing.
However, even that section has some interesting nuggets, so the whole book is recommended if you are into that sort of thing. You can get Holy Resilience here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next, not unrelatedly, is Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Fredriksen.
It was Jennifer Wexler, the English Heritage historian, who had said so. We were sitting in the café at Stonehenge. Christmas songs were playing: Mariah Carey, The Pogues. I wrote down her words and they came back to me when, a few days later, I visited the hill for myself.
This is a lovely book about exploring ancient monuments – mainly megalithic, but also Roman era – across England, Scotland, Wales and both parts of Ireland. All the favourites are here: Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, the Uffington White Horse, the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Boa Island Janus, Sutton Hoo, the Antonine and Hadrian’s Walls, Claudia Severa, the felled tree of Sycamore Gap. Ross finds archaeologists, druids, enthusiasts, writers, everyone who is moved by the ancient in different ways.
I had not realised that there are people who are building new megalithic-style graves, both for their own families and as a commercial proposition for those who want their cremains to be stored in the old way. (There is a sign up at Sycamore Gap asking people not to scatter human ashes on or around the stump.) One feels that in a society where it has become more difficult to talk about death, the ancient ways may offer a way into that dialogue.
It’s a subject that I love anyway, but I found Ross’s writing lucid and humane, full in on the detail but keeping the connection to the people who are doing today’s research and the long-dead people who they are researching. It has inspired me to make sure that I go to Boa Island next time I am within reach, and to just look around with more open eyes when I am in the relevant parts of the world. Really good book. You can get Upon a White Horse here.
From one end of the country to the other banks were held up with pistols, sawn-off shotguns and submachine guns on an almost daily basis. Smash and grab raids at jewellers’ shops became so common throughout that period that local police forces had hardly finished taking depositions from the shaking and often bleeding jewellers and their assistants than they were called away to another similar case within their own manor.
I was inspired to re-read this by delving into Hurd and Osmond’s Send Him Victorious, published four years earlier but with certain similarities. It remains a classic read. Even though the reader of 1972 knew (the reader of 2026 may have forgotten) that General de Gaulle was not actually assassinated in 1963, it is a tremendous ride as the Jackal prepares and implements his plan, while the French and British authorities are perpetually a step behind. There are some good bits set in a very seedy Brussels as well. (Moved to a more picturesque Genoa for the film, I think.)
Forsyth’s very tight writing, based on the true crime journalism which he had also practiced, keeps the pace going very well up to the explosive finale. Incidental characters are sketched (admittedly sometimes caricatured) economically yet vividly. There is no mystery about what is going on, and no real mystery about what will happen at the end, but we still race through the pages to find out.
There are two significant women in the story, the Baroness and Jacqueline, both of whom are there for sex and playing a small role in the development of the plot. There is reference to the wars of Africa and conflict in the Caribbean, and to the Corsican mafia. The bad guys are the colonial reactionaries, but the good guys are the conservative rulers of France and Britain – de Gaulle and MacMillan (who both make personal appearances).
On re-reading, I did note that the authorities spend quite a long time chasing the wrong trail until they hit the right one, taking a step (checking recent British passport applications) that really should have been taken much earlier; and that the reactionary Algerian OAS have a number of lucky breaks (and one very unlucky one). But you don’t write great stories about normal events, and this is a pretty good story. You can get The Day of the Jackal here.
Fox rings Owl’s doorbell. Owl is Fox and Hare’s neighbour. He lives in a hole in the tree. ‘Hello Fox,’ says Owl. ‘Hell Owl,’ says Fox. ‘Do you have any cake?‘ ‘No, I’m sorry,’ says Owl. ‘I do have sugar. Is that any good?’ Fox shakes his head. He doesn’t want sugar. He wants cake.
I picked this up in the doctor’s waiting room. It did not take me long to read. The title is “Fox and Hare are looking for cake’, but in fact it is poor Fox alone, ignored by Hare who is reading a book, who is obsessed with cake and goes all around the forest looking for it. (In my limited experience, forests are not the best places to find cake.) But all is well – when Fox returns home dejectedly, it turns out – SPOILER – that Hare’s book was actually a cook-book, and he and Owl have been baking while Fox was out. So there is a happy ending.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Blake’s 7: Their First Adventure:
Not a moment too soon, Vila Restal told himself, as the man’s eyelids fluttered and he started to come round. Affecting a look of concern, Vila lightly slapped the man’s face, leaning over him in the manner of an anxious friend.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Blake’s 7: Project Avalon:
Cally’s head was held rigidly in position so that she could only stare straight up into the pitch blackness. She was aware of movement, of murmuring voices. A face loomed over her, garish shadows thrown upwards making a black slash of the mouth, the nostrils broad and flared, and a single slitted eye gazing down. The eye regarded her as it might a specimen in a test-tube, then looked away into the outer darkness.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Blake’s 7: Scorpio Attack:
He didn’t reckon much to the ship. An obsolete class of cargo freighter by the look of it, and judging by the fixtures and fittings long overdue for the breaker’s yard. But if-what was the name he’d seen on the peeling hull? Scorpio? – if Scorpio had brought Dorian to the planet, presumably she could lift them off it. Yesterday wouldn’t be too soon for him.
I picked these up at Gallifrey One, a few years back. There’s no need to write too much about them. The first two are novelisations of four episodes each from the first series of Blake’s 7; the third covers three episodes of the fourth series. (What has happened to Blake, Jenna, Gan and the Liberator in the meantime is not explained.) Hoyle, who wrote some memorable stuff in his own right, hasn’t tried too hard for innovation here, simply turning the TV scripts into fairly vivid – though very male gaze-y – prose. In the days before home video, this was the closest we could get to re-experiencing the stories as broadcast, and I must admit it brought back a smile or two.
Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2023, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Christopher Priest: The Interaction, ed. Andrew M. Butler, and Agents, Adepts and Apprentices, by Kathryn Sullivan.
An assistant professor of philosophy and a professor of history sat drinking in a corner booth. Two groups of executives were at other booths. It was still rather quiet. Most of the hostesses were sitting with one of these three groups. The executives told risqué stories while the professors complained about university life.
(I can’t locate the Japanese original text.)
Recommended to me by a friend with excellent taste, this is a detective story set very firmly in Japan in 1960. A dead man is found beaten to death near a railway station. Tracing his history is almost a map of Japanese society’s evolution over the previous fifteen years, with the contrast between the old ways and new forms of culture and technology, a political and judicial system struggling to make the adaptation, regions of the same country that know little of each other, and a partnership between an old and a young detective to solve what seems an unsolvable crime.
A crucial (and late) plot point depends on the Osaka fire raids of March 1945, in which almost 4,000 people died and nearly 700 were declared missing. The writing skips quickly over the devastation, but the reader of 1960 would not have needed much reminding of it.
The resolution comes quite close to being science fictional, but I think stays just about on the other side of the fence.
Our host turns red at that last part. Looney Tunes smoke whistles out of his head. Then @DashieGames is a normal human male again.
A fixup collection of essays about being black online in the age of Black Lives Matter and COVID, not to mention all the other racist violence taking place in the USA. I have known the author since we were both on Livejournal twenty years ago (I almost get mentioned at one point when he writes about writing about the Balkans) and have enjoyed his fiction a lot; I’m not however much of a gamer, so some of the core elements of his human experience somewhat passed me by. But this is a good, hard, emotional expression of what it means to be visible in cyberspace, in times like these. You can get Racebook here.
Elbowing his way through a crowd of demonstrators outside Number Ten, he walked up Whitehall. That morning’s special briefing at the F.O. had been ludicrously bare of fact. Obviously the Cabinet had not yet decided whether to move against the new white régime in Rhodesia, and we should have to go through the usual humiliating prevarications at the U.N. Still, it was difficult to see what a Tory P.M. like Harvey could do, with four rightwingers in the Cabinet and anything up to a hundred rebels in the party…. Slotting the facts together, he wrote an anodyne column in his head.
Thriller written by the future foreign secretary and one of the founders of Private Eye, first published in early 1968 and set in the dark and distant future of 1975.
This review has major spoilers for a book published 58 years ago.
It is 1975. A British government with a large but fragile majority (does that sound familiar?) is hit by a foreign policy crisis. Back in 1968, Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia made a (counterfactual) deal with the UK to gradually, eventually, some time real soon, make a transition to majority rule. Now, several years on, they have been overthrown by a more extreme white faction, and South Africa is threatening to invade to support the new government.
There is international and domestic pressure on the British government (which under international law was still the colonial power) to intervene and restore the Ian Smith regime along with a clear path to majority rule. But there is discontent within the Conservative Party, with a faction led by an Enoch Powell-type figure urging hands off Rhodesia. On top of that the army seems to be of questionable loyalty, with mutiny threatening in some regiments. There is a riot between pro- and anti-Rhodesian factions in Oxford, and seventeen people are killed.
The King, who has a school-age son (swift work given that the book is set only seven years in the future) happens to be on holiday in Italy, and flies back home early to make a speech supporting the Prime Minister’s intervention. But – surprise! – the King’s plane explodes in mid-air over the Mediterranean, and the speech read out by his rapidly installed young son supports the Rhodesian rebels and sacks the prime minister, appointing a National Government instead.
All appears lost. But a journalist who happens to be staying in the British embassy in Rome becomes suspicious of a British aerospace industrialist who is also staying, breaks into his room and opens a large trunk hoping to find blueprints of a missile bound for illegal export to South Africa. But in fact – surprise! – the trunk contains the King, who is not dead after all but has been kidnapped by pro-South African conspirators including his own private secretary and the industrialist.
The dim but honest peer who had been appointed to lead the National Government immediately hands power back to the real prime minister, the King’s private secretary commits suicide, the industrialist is arrested, the British successfully invade Rhodesia with support from Tanzania and Zambia, and Ian Smith is also restored to power with a minority of black ministers in his government and a timetable to transition. This last bit takes up only the last ten pages of the 250 in the book.
Of the three Hurd and Osborne thrillers (the other two are The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, about Hong Kong, and Scotch on the Rocks, about Scottish independence) this is the one whose politics has aged least well. Hong Kong’s status changed in 1997 but remains a matter of comment, and Scottish independence is still very much with us. But Ian Smith actually did do a deal with the British and his country’s own majority, though in 1979 rather than 1968, and Rhodesia as a concept is now a distant memory – indeed, it is more than thirty years since South Africa dismantled apartheid and rejoined the community of nations.
Enoch Powell self-destructed in 1974 and spent a decade in irrelevant political exile in Northern Ireland before finally losing in 1987. His party was unable even to win one of the five Assembly seats in his old constituency in the last two elections, and lost their deposit in the 2024 Westminster election.
(Trivia question for you – which UK political party had an election for Deputy Leader in 2024, in which the losing candidate was born in Zimbabwe in 1988?)
I was very tempted to think that the plotline of the murky establishment exerting royal pressure to mount a coup against the elected government must have been inspired by the infamous “loose talk” episode of 1968, when the owner of the Daily Mirror tried to persuade Lord Mountbatten to overthrow Harold Wilson and lead an emergency government. Mountbatten declined (though how energetically he did so is not clear) and Wilson survived.
But the thing is that the crucial moment of the real life 1968 crisis-that-wasn’t occurred in May; whereas The Spectator was reviewing Send Him Victorious in February, so Hurd and Osmond cannot have been reflecting it in their story. Does this mean that, turned around, the Daily Mirror‘s attempt to overthrow British democracy was inspired by the novel? Or perhaps 1968 was just a year where there was a fair bit of treason about.
The King in the novel is probably not the man we know as Charles III in our timeline, because he went to Eton (and sends his son there as well), whereas Chuck did not. William and Harry both did attend Eton, but were born in 1982 and 1984, slightly too late to be taking the throne in a 1975 emergency. I tend to think that Hurd and Osmond were avoiding the distracting controversy that might have arisen by placing the real Queen into the narrative by having a clearly fictional king. I note that the president of Italy in the book is Amintore Fanfani, who was a perfectly plausible future candidate for that role in 1968 and actually did serve as acting president for three weeks in 1978.
Several passages are told from the point of view of British diplomats, notably the ambassadors in New York and Geneva. This of course was a world that Hurd knew well. I was struck by the instinctive assumption of the primacy of international law, combined with the unquestioned legitimacy of the British veto at the UN and the unquestioned illegitimacy of the South African government (and by implication the Rhodesians).
There are not many women in the book. The Enoch Powell chap turns out to have been innocent of all but malice; however his (French) wife was in the conspiracy up to her neck. The journalist’s crucial visit to the British Embassy in Rome is enabled by the fact that his girlfriend is the ambassador’s daughter. The (real) prime minster’s wife complains that he works late. Queen Elizabeth II has disappeared without trace or explanation.
Having said that the politics of the book has aged least well of the three, I think it is also the best written of them. The plot twists towards the end mount up impressively, and the rushed resolution of the last ten pages is actually a relief from the hectic pace of the previous chapters. It reminded me very much of The Day of the Jackal, with the difference that while we know that De Gaulle lived, we don’t know the outcome of the novel (well, we do if like me you had read the later two in the series). It’s a fascinating insight into 1960s British political neuroses.
I have been thinking a bit more about the identity of the King in this book.
It is a relatively young King, who attended Eton, and whose son is old enough by 1975 to also be in Eton.
Originally I thought it was entirely fictional. But I did a bit of digging and discovered that both the Duke of Kent, Queen Elizabeth II’s first cousin, born in 1935, and his son the Earl of St Andrews, born in 1962, attended Eton. It’s an almost perfect fit for Hurd and Osmond’s book.
In 1968 (in our timeline) they were twelfth and thirteenth in line to the throne. (They are now 43rd and 44th.)
We are not told by Hurd and Osmond what happened to the other descendants of George V.
Douglas Hurd is five years older than the Duke of Kent, but they overlapped at Eton and Hurd must surely have known of the young minor royal.
So Ho was uninterested in Shirley and Marcus’s chattering, and the office above theirs was empty, because Harper and Guy weren’t yet back. If they had been, it’s likely that one would have knelt with an ear to the floor, and relayed each word to the other. And if River Cartwright had been in there, instead of in the room above Ho’s, he might have done the same: itwould have relieved the boredom. Which he should have been used to but it kept recurring, like a week-old insect bite that wouldn’t quit. Though if that analogy were to ring true, River now thought, he’d have to be wearing boxing gloves too: unable to scratch; just rubbing away without effect.
This is the one which starts with a British secret agent dead on a bus in Oxfordshire and ends with a Russian attack on a London skyscraper. Tremendous thriller style plotting, including killing off one of the main characters half way through. Hilarious relationship between Jackson Lamb and his colleagues, both in Slough House and at spook HQ. Notable that the TV series made a lot more space for River Cartwright’s grandfather, as played by Jonathan Pryce. All very entertaining. You can get Dead Lions here.
I have not been to Penang, but my father was born there in 1928, and lived nearby with his parents until 1930. George Bilainkin, who went on to become a prominent English journalist and controversialist, was also there as editor of the Straits Echo in 1929 and 1930.
This 1932 book, republished in 2010 by a Penang-based publisher, is an informed view of Penang society from an outsider’s perspective, illustrated with copious photographs. It is of course the perspective of a white man who was there for only a short time, and covers Penang itself much more intensely than the mainland (where my grandparents and father were then living), but it helped me to fill out the unspoken gaps in my grandmother’s memoirs and gave me a sense of the part of the world that my father was born into 98 years ago.
Penang was actually the oldest British possession in the region, the local Malay king having been ‘persuaded’ to cede it in perpetuity in 1786. In 1929-30 it was part of the jointly administered Straits Settlements, including also Malacca and Dinding (now Majung) and more famously Singapore. As a free port, it had attracted immigrants from all over the region, and until the early 1920s was the largest Chinese city outside China (Singapore overtook it). It is on the Indian Ocean, which is a corridor not a barrier, and the population included not just Chinese and Malays but Indians, Arabs, white folks and other groups, with the British in political control but the Chinese (from the historic first wave of immigrants) dominating the business sector.
It’s worth reflecting for a moment that two other nearby cities with similar histories, Singapore and Hong Kong, had quite different fates. Singapore was briefly part of independent Malaysia, but became an independent state in 1963. Hong Kong was united with China in 1997, with special provisions for the independence of its legal system, which have been eroded but still exist. Penang, perhaps more dependent on the neighbouring mainland than Singapore, was included in Malaysia from the beginning with special provisions for free trade from its port; those were abolished in the late 1960s, but the provincial government successfully bet on becoming a tech centre – in the 1970s! – and it continues to thrive.
Bilainkin was there at a turning point in the city’s history, as it came to terms with the mainland and with being overshadowed by Singapore, but also remained an important transit point for Europeans exploring the region – there is a lengthy starstruck interview with Noel Coward, for instance. In his own way Bilainkin campaigned against racism; when local dignitaries demanded that they only be interviewed by white reporters from the Straits Echo, he responded that he himself was the only white reporter on the paper, so if they wanted timely news coverage they would need to accept whoever he assigned to the interview.
One cultural point which oddly enough resonates with an argument made by my friend Dave Keating in his book about EU-US relations, The Owned Continent, is that Hollywood’s dominance of the cinema was already a problem. American culture as depicted on the screen was shown as the default behaviour for Westerners, to Asian audiences who might never interact with Europeans in their day-to-day lives, and who had very different cultural expectations. Bilainkin vowed to campaign for better films as editor of the Straits Echo. I do not think that he had much success.
I hoped to find some direct reference to my grandparents, or if not them to their friends, in the book, especially since my grandmother had originally gone to Penang in 1927 to stay with Bilainkin’s predecessor as editor of the Straits Echo – but when she arrived in Penang, it turned out that her friend had been sacked and was leaving within weeks. Left to her own devices, she met a charming Irish army officer, and the rest is history. I had to wait until the second last chapter of Bilainkin’s book to find a link, but it was a good one. Strap yourself in.
The situation was this: George Francis Lenders (possibly Georges François Leenders), a Belgian who was the Far East representative of Carreras Tobacco (a leading cigarette company, now part of Rothmans), was accused of assaulting a Chinese woman, and the case went to court in Penang. The alleged victim was a remarkable character: Oon Beng Hong, the first woman barrister in Penang, later a parliamentarian and politician, and a future president of the International Federation of Women Lawyers. The Chinese population of Penang began a boycott of Carreras Tobacco and its products in protest. (Bilainkin does not give the full details in his book, but I found it easy enough to fill in the blanks.)
George Bilainkin was invited (it’s not clear by whom) to mediate between the parties to reach an out-of-court settlement. His co-mediator was a solicitor, Arthur de Buriatte, who three years earlier had been sharing a house with my grandfather at the time that he met and married my grandmother; I find this a very pleasing connection. In the end, the mediation failed, the case went to court, and the Belgian was fined fifty Straits pounds. The newspaper reporting (from the Pinang Gazette rather than the Straits Echo) is fascinating reading (here, here, here) and mentions Bilainkin’s attempt at mediation as well.
The judge found that Lenders (or Leenders) had not explained in any way how Mrs Oon came to be injured, and further regretted the “contemptuous” attitude of the defendant, and the failure of the attempted mediation. It’s clear that the defendant was a racist asshole, who also did not appreciate where the economic power in Penang really lay, and his lawyer, who was about to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Malaya, was unable to conjure up a coherent defence for a white chap who hit a Chinese woman lawyer and broke her glasses. (Though I wonder if it would have been different if Lenders had been British and not Belgian.)
I don’t find a George Francis Lenders (or Georges François Leenders) in the online Belgian state records, but I don’t think they are complete, and he may have changed his name at some point. The closest I have is a Georges Lenders who was a witness to two Brussels weddings in the 1890s and would have been born around 1852, far too old to have been the chap in Penang who was an active liaison between the Belgian and British armies during the war and punching barristers on the jetty in 1930.
Next in my reading of books by winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men, this is the first of them who is still alive: Wole Soyinka was born in western Nigeria in 1934, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986, at 52 on the younger side of laureates. (The proper Yoruba spelling is Wọlé Sóyinká but he seems to have dropped the diacritics for his publications.) His Nobel lecture is a powerful condemnation of racism and apartheid in particular, with a tribute to Sweden’s recently assassinated prime minister Olof Palme. His short and witty banquet speech makes a connection between the Yoruba god of destruction, Ogun, and the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel.
He is best known for his drama and poetry rather than novels, and his top book on both LibraryThing and Goodreads is this short play, Death and the King’s Horseman, set in colonial Nigeria. The opening of its third scene is:
A swelling, agitated hum of women’s voices rises immediately in the background. The lights come on and we see the frontage of a converted cloth stall in the market. The floor leading up to the entrance is covered in rich velvets and woven cloth. The women come on stage, borne backwards by the determined progress of Sergeant AMUSA and his two constables who already have their batons out and use them as a pressure against the women. At the edge of the cloth-covered floor however the women take a determined stand and block all further progress of the men. They begin to tease them mercilessly.
AMUSA: I am tell you women for last time to commot my road. I am here on official business.
WOMAN: Official business you white man’s eunuch? Official business is taking place where you want to go and it’s a business you wouldn’t understand.
You can watch it here:
It’s a frankly disturbing piece about the white folks’ attempts to interfere with a ritual suicide, full of disruption and questioning of civilisational values. A number of the characters do not have names but are identified by their function (including a visiting British royal). I found it sympathetic but not necessarily sentimental to Nigerian (well, Yoruba) culture, and slyly holding a mirror up to the British (who also indulge in quaint ritual around the royal visit). The ending is powerful.
In general I find it difficult to read play scripts without a sense of how the piece would look on stage, but this is vivid and conveys a lot with text. It would no doubt convey even more on stage.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Compleat Angler (on how to cook the chub):
First scale him, and then wash him clean, and then take out his guts; and to that end make the hole as little and near to his gills as you may conveniently, and especially make clean his throat from the grass and weeds that are usually in it (for if that be not very clean, it will make him to taste very sour); having so done, put some sweet herbs into his belly, and then tye him with two or three splinters to a spit, and rost him, basted often with vinegar, or rather verjuice and butter, with good store of salt mixt with it.
I am not an angler myself, though one of my uncles made a living out of it for many years and has published a book on the subject of trout flies. So I had no particular expectations of the well-known seventeenth-century guide to the craft. As I expected, it is detailed and full of loving advice on how to catch (and cook) many of the fish species that live in England, told through dialogue between three travellers, one of whom knows what he is talking about.
It’s also firmly rooted in the geography of the Lea Valley between Tottenham and Ware in Hertfordshire, though Walton himself grew up in Stafford and there are references also to the River Dove in the Peak District. The other bit of context lurking between the lines is that the book was published in 1653, under Puritan rule, and Walton had been a Royalist in the recently concluded Civil War. Fishing is explicitly a means of escape into nature from the turmoil of the human world.
You can get The Compleat Angler here, including a final chapter by Charles Cotton which is much more technical (and probably of more practical use, if you want to treat the book as a manual).
I also got hold of a lovely graphic novel adaptation by Gareth Brookes. The first two frames of its third chapter (also about catching the chub) are:
For the casual reader, this is much more digestible than the original text – Brookes admits that he has abridged and rearranged the text ruthlessly, but the result is a stunning homage to Walton’s original work, done through linocuts on bamboo paper and bringing the seventeenth century prose alive. It’s a thing of beauty. You can get The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation here.
The Compleat Angler was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is Raising Hare, by Chloe Dalton.
I was originally attracted to this by the fact that part of it is set in 2024, when the central character accidentally takes over the UK, and there is a quirky 1990s radio series attached to it. The book, however, has way too many dick jokes to be readable and I put it down after fifty pages. I will not bother with the sequel, Twenty-second Century Blues, which is also on my shelves.
Twenty-First Century Blues was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next after that is Blake’s 7: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Last Exit is:
She did not want to talk to June.
Crazy kids on a magical quest of some kind through alternate versions of America. I’m afraid that when I picked it up after having laid it aside for a couple of days, I could not remember what exactly was going on or why we were supposed to care about the plot, so I stopped reading at page 500 of 640. You can get Last Exit here.
Last Exit was my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Silent Earth, by Dave Goulson.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“William Mitchell – 2028”, original published as “The Message” in Galaxy Magazine, in the same issue as the last part of Robert Silverberg’s A Time of Changes):
Every seat in the domed stadium was filled, and the aisles were clogged with people sitting and standing. The people were of all kinds: old, middle-aged, young, children, infants; men and women; rich and poor; black, brown, red, yellow, and pink; clothed for work, street, or party. They all waited for the message to begin.
This is James Gunn’s top book on LibraryThing, pipped by Transcendental on Goodreads. (I suppose I have to specify that this is the science fiction writer James E. Gunn, who lived from 1923 to 2020, not the film maker James Francis Gunn, who was born in 1966.) It’s a fix-up of six stories, five previously published elsewhere, about the reception of a message from aliens in the year 2027 and the consequences for human society. Only the second chapter is actually set in 2027, about the moment when the message actually arrives at the Project in Arecibo while a reporter is visiting. The stories in general are about the impact of the message on the director’s marriage, the first black U.S. President, and the leader of a cult; and then there is a big flash forward to decades later where we find out what has become of the planet Earth in the meantime.
I found it a rather gloomy book. A major character attempts suicide at the end of the first chapter, and the Project itself is depressingly subject to external cultural and political currents in the USA of the 2020s. The world of The Listeners is proud to have finally elected a black president, but women’s roles don’t seem to have changed much from the 1950s. (The stories were published between 1968 and 1972.) The other major difference with our timeline, of course, is that the Arecibo telescope is still in use in the 21st and 22nd century; this side of the timewarp, alas, it physically collapsed in 2020 and will not be rebuilt.
Working slowly through the rather small canon of sf stories and shows set in 2027, I reach the 1987 BBC TV series Star Cops. I have absolutely no memory of watching this show, which went out during the July and August summer holidays at 8.30 pm on a weekday, between my first and second years at university. As far as I remember I spent the summer in Ireland, but there was and is perfectly good BBC reception there.
It’s set among police officers in earth orbit and on the moon, in an era where getting into space seems little more difficult than catching a bus. Indeed, one of the problems of the first few episodes is that the space interiors don’t look all that different from an office environment on Earth, so you’re not quite clear what is happening where.
The 2027 of Star Cops is not very different from the 1987 of when the show was originally made. There seem to be more women in professional leadership positions. The central character, Nathan Spring, has an AI called ‘Box’ which speaks with his voice and is capable of carrying out fairly complex data searches, but nobody else has anything like that. The Soviet Union still exists. “International” generally means from the white, English-speaking world. And as noted above, spaceflight is casually easy.
The show clearly had difficulty finding its feet. The two worst episodes are the first two, written by series creator Chris Boucher and directed by Christopher Baker. Baker had had a long career, though he did very little after Star Cops, and doesn’t seem to have done much science fiction previously. The five episodes (of nine) that he directed are noticeably lacking in energy compared to the other four. (We’ll get onto those in a moment.)
Chris Boucher, who wrote three classic Doctor Who stories and was script editor for Blake’s Seven, should have been able to deliver quality writing, and somehow didn’t here, for a show that was his own baby. Insider accounts tell of the friction between him and producer Evgeny Gridneff. For whatever reason, the first two episodes look flat and have confusing plots, and that was probably enough to kill the prospect of the show continuing.
And that’s a bit of a shame, because although Baker directed five episodes rather unexcitingly, the other four are rather good, and they are all directed by none other than Graeme Harper, who is also the only person to have directed both Old Who and New Who, including one of the stories generally rated as the best of all Old Who, The Caves of Androzani. The screen becomes much more edgy and the show more watchable with him in charge.
In addition, though Chris Boucher wrote the first four episodes and the last, he brought in two other writers for the rest. One episode was written by Philip Martin, who also wrote two Sixth Doctor stories; the other three are by John Collee, then a medical doctor at the start of his writing career, but who hit the big time in the Noughties with his scripts for Happy Feet and Master and Commander. Collee’s scripts are head and shoulders above the other six.
The sixth episode, In Cold Blood, has Graeme Harper directing John Collee’s script, and I think it is the one I would show to someone who was wondering if Star Cops was for them, as a fair representation of its merits and its flaws. As of this writing, you can watch all nine episodes on Archive.org.
Other points that must be made: the scripts are pretty racist and sexist, even by the lower standards of 1987, and the theme tune is just dire.
To go through the episodes one by one:
Episode One: An Instinct for Murder (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 6 July 1987): introduces the main cast, Nathan Spring (David Calder) who gets made the head of Star Cops during the story, David Theroux (Erick Ray Evans), an African-American star cop, Pal Kenzy (Linda Newton), an Australian star cop, and Lee Jones (Gennie Nevinson), Spring’s girlfriend. The plot involves a drowning on Earth and spacesuit sabotage in orbit, and the denouement is frankly confusing, though it turns out the Russians are not to blame after all.
Episode Two: Conversations with the Dead (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 13 July 1987): Spring’s girlfriend Lee is gratuitously fridged at the start, and the Earth cop put in charge of the investigation , the rather old-fashioned Colin Devis (Trevor Cooper), is incomprehensibly hired by Spring to join the Star Cops at the end of the episode. Meanwhile there is a parallel plot with a space freighter which has gone off course and where almost everything dramatic happens off screen.
Episode Three: Intelligent Listening for Beginners (script Chris Boucher, director Christopher Baker, first shown 20 July 1987): Spring fires Kenzy and another cop for blatant corruption; meanwhile a terrorist group called the Black Hand Gang (Chicago rather than Serbian) is attacking critical infrastructure with ransomware (quite an advanced topic) led by a tremendously creepy hacker played by David John Pope (the Kandyman in Doctor Who). Kenzy thwarts the hijacking of a space shuttle and is rehired basking in glory, the blatant evidence of corruption swept aside (this seemed very improbable to me).
Episode Four: Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits (script by Chris Boucher, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 27 July 1987): the Moonbase has a new commander, Alexander Krivenko (Jonathan Adams, also Dr Scott in the Rocky Horror Picture Show). Spring wants to extend his jurisdiction to the American Ronald Reagan space station (Reagan was still president when this was made), where also a scientist has mysteriously vanished without any trace that he was ever there. The American commander (played by Daniel Benzali) is egregiously sexist, but the denouement is the first impressive episode ending of the series, thanks presumably to Graeme Harper.
Episode Five: This Case to be Opened in a Million Years (script by Philip Martin, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 3 August 1987, for some reason much later than the other episodes): Spring goes on holiday to Italy and leaves Theroux to deal with a nuclear waste rocket crashing into the moonrise. While he is away he gets framed for drug trafficking. Some great shots which look like Rome (and may even have been filmed there).
Episode Six: In Warm Blood (script by John Collee, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 10 August 1987): Introduces a new Japanese star cop, Anna Shoun (Sayo Inaba), a Japanese doctor who is recruited from a pharma company that is up to no good. Sadly she rarely rises above stereotype (not the actor’s fault). Very tightly done plot exploring why a renowned scientist was moved to suicide, and incidentally what killed the crew of the Pluto 5 spaceship?
Episode Seven: A Double Life (script by John Collee, directed by Christopher Baker, first shown 17 August 1987): Brilliant concept involving the secret clone of a famous pianist, hiding out on the moon and threatening the embryos of a rich young widow (played by Nitza Saul, who was the Israeli agent in Kessler).
Episode Eight: Other People’s Secrets (script by John Collee, directed by Christopher Baker, first shown 24 August 1987): German official Ernest Wolffhart (played by Geoffrey “Catweazle” Bayldon) comes to check the moonbase safety, and Devis’ psychiatrist ex-wife comes to make a mental health assessment of the crew. Played slightly for laughs but at this point I was relaxing into it.
Episode Nine: Little Green Men and Other Martians (script by Chris Boucher, directed by Graeme Harper, first shown 31 August 1987): Massive media interest is generated by rumors of a Martian artefact, particularly from an American reporter played by Lachele Carl (who went on to be an American newscaster in New Who). Potential shock ending as it looks like one of the main characters has been killed off at the end – or have they?
So, basically I don’t think that Star Cops has the necessary coherence of vision or the resources (or the catchy theme tune) to become a success. It’s clearly still got its fans out there, and I can talk about it now from a position of knowledge.
Chris Boucher wrote two books based on his five episodes. The first, An Instinct for Murder, is a massive expansion of the first TV episode to over 60,000 words, and explains what is going on a lot better than he was able to on screen. It feels like a lot of good writing ideas simply got crowded out by the time limits. The key plot line is still not much good, but it is better supported by the narrative. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Nathan glanced out through the booth’s perspex dome towards the distant reservoir. He told himself that tollbooths were more secure, but the truth was that the new generation mobilinks made him uncomfortable, and he avoided carrying one. There were times, though, when his aversion to being constantly available for the ‘unbreakably close person-to-person contact’ promised by the manufacturers was definitely inconvenient. He said, “We had a meeting.”
The second book, Little Green Men and other stories, adapts the other four Boucher scripts for the page. A notable difference is that rather than Jonathan Adams’ Russian Moonbase commander, Boucher has a Chinese boss, Jiang Li Ho, and Japanese Anna Shoun is replaced by an Irish star cop, who is not treated any differently because of her nationality. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits”) is:
Marty still looked unconvinced and unenthusiastic. His round, pale face remained irritatingly expressionless. “I think she was lucky they didn’t deport her,” he said. “I would have done.”
Again, this is a sweatier, sexier reimagining of the TV show, written years later and giving a sense of what Boucher maybe wishes the original had been.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, and I got hold of the first Big Finish box set of plays based on Star Cops, a sequence titled Mother Earth. The promotional video doesn’t say much about the plot but does have a far better theme tune than the TV show did:
Now, as they say, we are cooking on gas. The script editor for the series is Andrew Smith, who is best known in Doctor Who fandom for having written a TV story when he was only 19, but the important point about his career for present purposes is that he grew up to become a senior police officer working on anti-terrorism, which is actually the perfect background to be show-runner for a series about futuristic law enforcement.
There are four stories, the first by Smith, the others by Ian Potter, Christopher Hatherall and Guy Adams (Potter and Adams are well-established Who writers), all about an anti-space-travel activist group causing mayhem and destruction to the Moonbase and other space infrastructure. The third episode, set in Paris but not really sounding much like it, is perhaps the weakest, but they are all good.
Of the original main cast, David Calder and Trevor Cooper reprise Nathan Spring and Colin Devis; Linda Newton appears again as Pal Kenzy only later in the sequence as they had not tracked her down quickly enough in Australia, and Erick Ray Evans sadly died in 1999 so is no longer available to do David Theroux. To them we add two new star cops, played by Philip Olivier (the Sixth Doctor audio companion Hex) and Rakhee Thakrar (who was the English teacher, Emily Sands, in Sex Education), and a Moonbase commander played by Nimmy March (who I think was new to me).
I think that you could enjoy this a lot even if you had no knowledge of the 1987 TV series, and you can get it here. When I do my write-up of SF set in 2027, of course, only the original TV series (and novels) will count, as I keep a twenty-year threshold.
When I first started watching The Invasion in 2006, I wrote of the animations:
Episode 1 is one of those for which the original video footage has been lost, and only the soundtrack survives. The DVD, however, includes an animation of the style used by the BBC for the Scream of the Shalka and Shada for it, and while it is not a patch on watching real actors deliver their lines, it is much more satisfactory than either soundtrack alone, or the animations generated by fans, or following along the BBC photonovels while trying to listen to the words. Well done to the animators.
The Invasion, from later in that season, leading up to The War Games, is quite a different matter. I’ve commented already on the brilliant idea of using animations for the two episodes (of the right in total) which are missing. I can bear to listen to an entire series in audio, but to mix audio and video is a different matter. I’ve tried the fan “reconstructions”, but don’t find them satisfactory; likewise watching the BBC photonovel combined with listening to the audio. But this format works, although of course once you get back to the live action episodes you realise what you are missing.
Kevin Stoney, as Tobias Vaughn, is a fantastic villain, and every scene with him is great to watch. He is a totally convincing invulnerable sinister scientist oligarch conspiring with the enemies of mankind, and yet achieves a certain measure of redemption at the end. He was, of course, also great as the super-villain Mavic Chen in The Dalek Master Plan, though Chen is quite a different character. (And he popped up in I CLAVDIVS as Tiberius’ court astrologer, Thrasyllus – who is indeed a historical character.) The story is really about Vaughn’s journey as much as about anything else.
Poor Jamie doesn’t get to do a lot, apart from canoeing and climbing up the liftshaft, but the other main characters are all great – Troughton as ever brilliant, but also Wendy Padbury as Zoe sparking a very very watchable rapport with Sally Faulkner’s Isobel Watkins – and incidentally saving the day and blowing up the Cybermen’s fleet with her Mental Powers of Calculation. And of course this is the first UNIT story, with the return of Lethbridge-Stewart (now a Brigadier) and the first appearance of Benton. Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier in particular gets some really good material to work with, a far cry from the cartoonish character of the Pertwee years. Again, the DVD reveals just how much fun the cast were having, especially thanks to the hospitality provided by the Guinness brewery where a lot of the action scenes were filmed.
Some reviewers have expressed bitter disappointment with the Cybermen, either that they don’t have enough screen time, or that they don’t look good, or (inconsistently) both. I don’t completely share those feelings. The Cybermen aren’t seen until the end of episode 4, but that’s really because we have not been told who is behind the invasion of the story’s title. It is a bit unfortunate that much of the action of blowing up spaceships, etc, happens off screen – but of course mediated through that new-fangled radar stuff. I also have the controversial view that the Cybermen redesign is better than the original version – I think supporting evidence is that the new version has survived through to this year.
The only other thing that really annoyed me was the cheery music accompanying the arrival of the soldiers for the final battle (apparently real soldiers from the real army). But the rest of the music is very good, and the whole thing is a jolly good package.
For my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
The Cybermen are back (though not reallly for long) in The Invasion, and so are the villain and one of the heroes from The Daleks’ Master Plan, Kevin Stoney appearing as the rich mad industrialist Tobias Vaughn, and Nicholas Courtney making a return as Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, now promoted to Brigadier. (The first surviving shot of the latter is of his backside as he emerges from a piece of equipment).
Given how little we actually see of the Cybermen here, it feels more like The Avengers, with the Brigadier trying to stop Vaughn’s plan, though eventually relying on Zoe to destroy the approaching fleet (seen only on radar) and on the Doctor to talk Vaughn into renouncing his allies. Taking a longer view, it’s the most New Who-ish story so far, with an alien threat to contemporary Earth (which never happened in the Hartnell era, and only three times out of 21 Troughton stories, though it was a staple storyline of both the Pertwee years and of RTD) combined with recurring characters and family dynamics among the Doctor’s allies.
It’s a very slashtastic story as well, with the strongly sapphic dynamic between Zoe and Isobel Watkins matched by the Doctor and Jamie playing around in canals and tunnels (the Brigadier being the gooseberry) and even the weird powerplay between Vaughn and his increasingly panicky security man, Packer. The music is also particularly good, with the notable exception of the jaunty military theme which destroys the tension of crucial scenes in the last couple of episodes.
Rewatching it now, a couple of points occurred to me. The eight episodes are distinctly padded (as with the ten episodes of The War Games) by our regular cast running into trouble, getting captured, escaping and then running back into trouble again. But on the flip side, there is a lot of characterization – Robert Sidaway’s Captain Jimmy Turner is an alternative love interest for Isobel (Zoe looks distinctly put out, but which of them is she jealous of?) and the relationship between Vaughn and his sidekick Packer, played by Peter Halliday, is interesting too. But the fact that all the crucial action happens off screen in the final episode is a real letdown.
The novelization is one of those done by Ian Marter, who also played one of Tom Baker’s companions, Harry Sullivan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
‘I thought we were going in there to find the lassies’, he complained.
Somehow Marter managed to find his creative spark for his last three novelizations, which are all cracking good reads. The Invasion, also from the 1968-69 season, also featured Jamie and Zoe, and concerned Cybermen invading a near-contemporary London; it also brought back the character of Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart as the Brigadier in charge of UNIT. This was an eight-part story when first broadcast, cut down for Marter’s 1985 novel to 160 pages, so a rather extreme compression. But somehow, Marter makes it work as he failed to with his previous Second Doctor stories; he had better material to start with, true, but the plot is somewhat easier to follow in his novel than in Derrick Sherwin and Kit Pedler’s original script. The villainous Tobias Vaughn, briliantly brought to life by Kevin Stoney on screen, is actually better in some ways here, with several hints that he has already become more—or perhaps less—than completely human, and his change of heart at the end of the story, when he turns on his Cyberman former allies, more consistently portrayed as a fanatic changing targets rather than as the human being brought to his senses whom we saw on television. At the same time, no written description can possibly convey Stoney’s sinister drawl, now available to all on a recently released DVD. There is also, unusually, an injection rather than a subtraction of humour by Marter, with a running joke about the awful tea in UNIT headquarters.
Rereading it, I am struck by the efficiency of Marter’s story telling – the eight episodes get 21 pages, then 25, 20, 19, 22, and the last three 17 pages each. Though perhaps this also illustrates that once he had cut out all the padding, there was a fairly lean story left to tell. You can get the novelization here.
Stephen Hatcher’s Black Archive on the story is a solid look at how The Invasion fitted and fits into the history of Doctor Who and pop culture of the day. The first chapter, “The Doctor, the Brigadier and the Swinging Sixties” makes the point that at the time it was written, the decision to exile the Doctor to Earth in Season Seven had been made, but Troughton and Hines had not yet decided to leave, so the story was potentially setting up a Two/Jamie plus UNIT plus Isabel Watkins dynamic for the next set of stories. That didn’t all come off, obviously, but it’s an unusual Who story in that it was written looking ahead to the future of the show; most of them aren’t.
The second chapter, “England Swings Like a Pendulum Do”, looks briefly at the previous Who stories set in the present day, whenever that happened to be, and then at the role of transistor radios and photographers, both crucial story elements of The Invasion, in making the Sixties swing.
The third chapter, “Doctor Who and the Playboys, Spies and Private Eyes”, looks at the crossover between TV spy shows and Doctor Who, notably The Avengers‘ episode “The Cybernauts” which shares significant plot elements with The Invasion. Also Robert Vaughn, lead actor in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., shares a surname with the villainous Tobias. Its second paragraph is:
The 60s was a period when the Cold War between the USA with its allies in NATO² and the Soviet Union and its fellow members of the Warsaw Pact was at its height. This prolonged period of antagonism between the nuclear-armed superpowers lasted from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although for most of that period, hostilities were confined to ‘proxy wars’ like the Korean War (1950-53) and the war in Vietnam (1954-75), the Cold War was prone to heating up, in response to events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and Soviet actions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). Throughout the Cold War, the intelligence services of both sides are known to have been very active in keeping their respective governments aware of what the other side were up to. In Britain in particular, the revelation of the activities of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – between 1951 and 1963, and the escape from Wormwood Scrubs of the double agent George Blake in 1966, heightened interest in espionage. And, in the same way that popular literature and cinema did before both the First and Second World Wars, film and TV responded to a time of international tension with an upsurge in spy fiction. ² North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
The fourth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Invaders from Space”, looks at the influence of Quatermass, the character of the Brigadier, and the odd resonance of the long-forgotten TV show Counterstrike.
The fifth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Captains of Industry”, looks briefly at boardroom dramas such as The Troubleshooters and The Power Game, and their real life counterparts.
The sixth chapter, “Doctor Who and the squaddies”, looks at the impact of National Service on Britain and in particular on director Douglas Camfield. This is perhaps the moment to acknowledge that Gareth Roberts was correct a few weeks ago to assert that Camfield was pretty right-wing, though the other members of the cast and crew say that he never let it affect his work.
The seventh chapter, “Absence of the Cybermen”, points out that although the Cybermen are only in the second half of the story, it nonetheless had a big impact on subsequent Cyberman stories.
A conclusion asserts briefly that
The Invasion is the Doctor Who story that brings together so much of what was good about 1960s film and television drama, and in doing so it may be the story from that era that is able to speak the most to twenty-first century audiences.
I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I will say that Hatcher has given me new appreciation for a story that I already liked anyway. You can get his Black Archive here.
I’ll also observe that this volume lifts the Second Doctor a little from his under-representation in the Black Archives. This is the first Black Archive about a Second Doctor story since 2019; it is the 84th in the series and The Underwater Menace was the 40th. 19.0% of his stories and 19.3% of his episodes have been covered in the series so far; this is the lowest of any of the first eight Doctors, and taking all Doctors into account, it’s more stories proportionally than the Tenth Doctor’s 13.5% and more episodes than the Ninth Doctor’s 15.4%, but less than anyone else except the special cases of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. (If you’re interested, apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors, the Seventh Doctor is way in the lead.) I am not blaming anyone for this; I was looking forward to last year’s planned volume on The Enemy of the World, but it never appeared.
Doctor
Stories
BA’ed
%age
Episodes
BA’ed
%age
Eighth
2
2
100.0%
2
2
100.0%
Shalka
1
1
100.0%
1
1
100.0%
Seventh
12
8
66.7%
42
30
71.4%
Sixth
11
4
36.4%
31
14
45.2%
Fourth
41
13
31.7%
172
54
31.4%
Thirteenth
24
6
25.0%
26
12
46.2%
First
29
10
34.5%
134
48
35.8%
Third
24
6
25.0%
103
33
32.0%
Fifth
21
6
28.6%
68
20
29.4%
Twelfth
35
8
22.9%
36
10
27.8%
Eleventh
39
8
20.5%
39
10
25.6%
Ninth
10
2
20.0%
13
2
15.4%
Second
21
4
19.0%
119
23
19.3%
Tenth
36
5
13.9%
39
8
20.5%
Fifteenth
16
1
6.3%
18
1
5.6%
Fourteenth
3
0
0.0%
3
0
0.0%
As soon as someone does one of the Fourteenth Doctor episodes, he’ll zoom to halfway up the table.
I hugely enjoyed Jeff Smith’s Bone when it first came out, but am sorry to say that I was less impressed with this. It’s the first volume of two about Tuki, an ancient human hunter on the African plains, who is seeking a mythic herd of buffalo and accompanied by three children and by assorted hominids of other species. There is a lot of magic, which makes this a palaeohuman fantasy in a way. I felt that it lacked the humanity and humor that made Bone such a great work, and didn’t really get what the story was supposed to be about. Other people liked it more. You can get Tuki: Fight for Fire here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, by Kate Evans.
Second paragraph of third chapter (about Ian Paisley):
At the same time, Paisley was aggressive, mean, a bully, and gratuitously insulting. He made up mocking names for his opponents, like Donald Trump much later. For example, in one of the early issues of the organs of the DUP, the Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972, Paisley went on about “Hill-Billy” Whitelaw (for Viscount William Whitelaw, the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland after Direct Rule was imposed in 1972), and “Liar Lynch” (for Jack Lynch, the Taoiseach of Ireland).⁴ He “generated fear” in everyone around him, as Eamon Mallie and David McKittrick put it in their BBC TV series on the Troubles.⁵ The journalist Eamonn Holmes has said recently that, “I defy anyone to say that lan Paisley in his prime was not scary.” ⁶ ⁴ The Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972. DS. ⁵ Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001), 275ff. ⁶ Eamonn Holmes, “Clinton’s Men Tried to Arrest Me Under the Christmas Lights,” Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, eds., Reporting the Troubles: Journalists Tell Their Stories of the Northern Ireland Conflict (Newtownards, Northern Ireland: 2018), 158.
This is a sympathetic book by an outsider. Stormier is both a retired professor of history and a qualified psychoanalyst, and his previous books include two studies of Abraham Lincoln, two books on Christian fundamentalism, and an analysis of the psychological reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Here he gives us a historical account, with nuances rooted in psychology, of the personalities behind the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the process that led to it.
My own first thought on reading the book is that asking why the Good Friday Agreement talks succeeded is a very good question. Many, perhaps most, negotiations around deep-rooted conflicts fail. Look at Cyprus; look at the Israel/Palestine situation; look indeed at the current dynamic between the USA and Iran (I am writing this in mid-August but I think it will be the same when this appears in early September). Even South Africa, held up so often as a paragon of how to do it, had a collapse of the process in mid-1992 with awful violence resulting.
There were several junctures where the Northern Ireland process could have gone in a different and less successful direction, and it’s worth remembering that the timescale was quite short – it was only a decade since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, only twenty-five years since Sunningdale; these were closer to 1998 than 1998 is to us now.
Crozier’s main source for his book is John Alderdice, who was the leader of the cross-community Alliance Party from 1987 to 1998. Crozier interviewed Alderdice expensively and has also had a very good browse through his records. I myself worked very closely with Alderdice from 1993 to 1996, and we have stayed in touch since I left Northern Ireland in early 1997, so even where he is not explicitly quoted I recognized some of his thoughts and analysis coming through.
This is not a bad thing at all – if you have one excellent source to hand, you may as well use it, provided (as in this case) that it is tempered with other sources, in particular the first-hand published accounts of a number of the leading players, notably George Mitchell, and key biographical notes, notably Dean Godson’s on David Trimble (in which I believe I get a credit myself). There is still the occasional slip, and I think the book would have benefited from a final read-through by someone familiar enough with Northern Ireland to catch the occasional point of detail that has gone astray (eg Dolours Price becomes “Jean Dolours”).
The book starts with a 50-page profile of John Alderdice including an introduction to the Northern Ireland situation for beginners. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, who became a psychiatrist, married to a pathologist, but also committed to politics. I had not realized that his family and the Paisleys were near neighbors when he grew up in Ballymena, though there is a big generational difference between them (Ian Paisley was 19 years older).
We then get twenty-page pen portraits of the other leading political figures: Paisley, Adams, Hume and Trimble. Paisley’s participation in the Good Friday Agreement itself was marginal, but it cannot be denied that he is the most dominant Unionist figure, possibly the most dominant figure of any variety, during the Troubles and that Northern Ireland’s troubled psyche ran in tracks that he laid down. There is no mystery about Paisley. Adams is more enigmatic.
After a note about the role of women in the peace process, Crozier then looks at the sequence on the American side that brought Washington into the room, and at the confluence of events in 1994-1995 that led to the ceasefires. This was the period when I myself was most closely involved, and there are a couple of incidents where, while I wasn’t in the room where it happened, I heard about it shortly afterwards from one or more of the protagonists.
I sat on the back benches for the first six months of the 1996-98 talks chaired by George Mitchell. It was a morale-sapping experience, though I did have one good moment when John Alderdice presented a paper on decommissioning of arms that Stephen Farry and I had written, and received compliments from several of the other talks participants. (I think we later published it, but cannot remember where).
My most vivid memory is Jeffrey Donaldson vigorously defending the rights of Orangemen to march through Drumcree – this was 1996, the year that the march was first blocked and then forced through by the police). Nobody enjoyed that phase of the talks, with the DUP and Robert McCartney inside and Sinn Fein outside. McCartney in particular was a complete waste of space, droning on about the purity of his cause so monotonously that even his supposed DUP allies looked bored to death. I left in December, never to return.
However, the point made by Crozier (and not only by him) is that the psychological effect of having party leaders sitting and listening quietly (if not necessarily respectfully) to each other meant that everyone’s point of view received exposure, and it also established the place of action as that depressing room in Castle Buildings (where the ground floor was labelled ‘3’, and the talks took place two stories up on floor 5; we never discovered what lay beneath, but it was rumoured to be the government’s nuclear bunker). That in itself reinforced the credibility of the process, and made Paisley and McCartney look irrelevant once they left.
Post-1998 developments are handled rather quickly in Crozier’s book, which is a shame – the dynamics of the St Andrew’s Agreement of 2007 which brought the DUP into government directly with Sinn Féin, Ian Paisley sharing the top spot with Martin McGuinness, are an important part of the later story.
By then, John Alderdice had moved on to other roles (though he retained an important post as a monitor of paramilitary activity including decommissioning, the subject that Stephen and I had written for him about ten years before); and because Crozier’s main source is off the scene he doesn’t go much beyond the headlines. But this is a book about the Good Friday Agreement, not about Northern Ireland in the last forty years, so I accept it for what it is.
When the officer handed me my astrolabe, I resisted the urge to snatch it back. He was an old Khoush man, so old that he was privileged to wear the blackest turban and face veil. His shaky hands were so gnarled and arthritic that he nearly dropped my astrolabe. He was bent like a dying palm tree and when he’d said, “You have never traveled; I must do a full scan. Remain where you are,” his voice was drier than the red desert outside my city. But he read my astrolabe as fast as my father, which both impressed and scared me. He’d coaxed it open by whispering a few choice equations and his suddenly steady hands worked the dials as if they were his own.
I first readBinti on a transatlantic flight while reading up on Hugo-eligible short fiction for 2016. I wasn’t hugely impressed and have never really understood the general enthusiasm for it. When it made the shortlist for the BSFA Award, I wrote:
Some people have been raving about this, but I don’t really see why. The plot (plucky kid survives alien attack, makes peace between aliens and humans) is hardly original, and the fact that the protagonist’s tribal adornments uniquely give her protection against the aliens is pretty cliched. Yes, well written; yes, interesting characters; no, not a masterpiece.
By the time Hugo voting came around, it has already won the Nebula, and I wrote:
I expect that this will win, and indeed it has already won the Nebula. As I said when I read it for the BSFA vote, the plot (plucky kid survives alien attack, makes peace between aliens and humans) is hardly original, and the fact that the protagonist’s tribal adornments uniquely give her protection against the aliens is pretty cliched. But obviously it appealed to a lot of readers.
I re-read it again for this post, and did not like it any better. I would add that the writing style of the first few chapters is rather clunky, and the protagonist forgives the aliens rather rapidly for massacring most of her friends. None of the ideas are original or especially well executed. Obviously a critical mass disagrees with me, but there you go.
When the Hugo results came out, Binti had been only second at the nominations stage, but won a convincing victory on the final ballot.
I see that both Witches of Lychford and “The New Mother” were on the long list; I liked both much more. Emily Tesh keeps telling us to go back and read “Sorcerer of the Wildeeps”, and maybe I will.
Next in my sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners are the two from my own first year as Hugo administrator, “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar and Every Heart a Doorwayby Seanan McGuire.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 56) Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Charles B. Strozier The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher The Compleat Angler, by Isaak Walton Hail, Penang!, by George Bilainkin Racebook, by Tochi Onyebuchi Upon a White Horse, by Peter Ross
Non-genre 6 (YTD 33) Autumn, by Ali Smith Sleeping Murder, by Agatha Christie Dead Lions, by Mick Herron Send Him Victorious, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth
Play 1 (YTD 2) Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka
SF 9 (YTD 65) Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker (did not finish) Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor Little Green Men and other stories, by Chris Boucher The Listeners, by James Gunn Last Exit, by Max Gladstone (did not finish) Blake’s 7: Their First Adventure, by Trevor Hoyle Blake’s 7: Project Avalon, by Trevor Hoyle Blake’s 7: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle
Comics 3 (YTD 23) Tuki: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation, by Gareth Brookes and Izaak Walton Vos en Haas op zoek naar koek, by Sylvia Vanden Heede, ill. Thé Thong-Khing
~6,900 pages (YTD 56,700) 5/30 (YTD 84/234) by non-male writers (Smith, Christie, Okorafor, Colgan, Vanden Heede) 4/30 (YTD 24/234) by writers of colour (Onyebuchi, Matsumoto, Soyinka, Thé) 5 out of 30 reread (Sleeping Murder, The Day of the Jackal, Binti, The Eye of the Tyger) 187 books currently tagged unread, down 16 from last month, down 22 from August 2025.
Reading now Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr The Owned Continent, by Dave Keating Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister?, by Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton
Coming soon (perhaps) Gods and Monsters: Omega and Sutekh, by Ian Winterton and Mark Griffiths Fear Itself, by Nick Wallace Charles Darwin and the Silurian Survival, by L.D. Lapinski
Silent Earth, by Dave Goulson Christopher Priest: The Interaction, ed. Andrew M. Butler Agents, Adepts and Apprentices, by Kathryn Sullivan Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Frederiksen
Léopoldville 60, by Baudouin Deville ”Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal el-Mohtar Patchwork, by Kate Evans Raising Hare, by Chloe Dalton Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi All That We See or Seem, by Ken Liu Jingo, by Terry Pratchett Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Septology, by Jon Fosse Real Tigers, by Mick Herron Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen
Aha, she thought to herself. It’s the one with the knees.
I don’t seem to have written up the original TV story here at the time of broadcast, though I did include it in my list of Doctor Who stories for someone who hasn’t seen it yet. I rewatched it in advance of reading the novelisation. It’s the two-episode story (The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone) where River Song is busted out of jail by the Doctor and Amy, and the three find themselves allied with an army of clerics on a wrecked ship infested with Weeping Angels. It is scary, and well shot, and to be honest the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense when you hold it up the light and look for holes. But the pace is tremendous, particularly the sequence where Amy must find her way to safety while keeping her eyes closed.
It’s also the one with the controversial final scene where Amy tries to seduce the Doctor as a final fling before her wedding. Stephen Moffat has stated in retrospect that he got this scene wrong, and I agree with him. It’s not consistent with Amy’s character, and it makes her and the Doctor look both silly and stupid. Moffat has written some brilliant sex comedy scenes, stories and award-winning TV shows, but this is not one of them.
Jenny Colgan’s novelization sticks to the TV script but adds one very important nuance. This is River Song’s second appearance in the show, after her death in Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead. The following year’s stories had her origin as a major part of the overall series plot arc, as it turns out that she is actually Amy’s daughter with Rory. Colgan’s version of River Song is fully aware of this (as the viewers, and indeed probably the writer, in 2010 were not) and it adds nuance to her reactions and behaviour on being on an adventure with her own unwitting mother. Other than that, it’s a good bit of writing which does its best to cover for the vivid visuals of the original TV story. You can get The Time of Angels here.
As a bit of trivia, this is the first New Who story to have been adapted for print twice. Trevor Baxendale authored a photo-novel version for younger readers back in 2012, along with three other stories from that season – The Eleventh Hour (also by Baxendale), and Victory of the Daleks and The Lodger (by Peter Gutierrez). I have never seen any of these books in the wild – I saw a note somewhere that they were only sold in Australia. Six Twelfth Doctor stories have also had the photo-novel treatment.
“Moses, you reckon that’s where a witch’s heart is?”
I had zero expectations of this book, which I acquired through the Hugo Voter packet two years ago (part of Kelly Lonesome’s submission in the Best Editor Long Form category). I had other things on my mind that year and didn’t get very far into the BELF folder of the packet, but now it’s starting to surface in my overall reading list.
I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a tautly written folk horror story, set mainly in Kansas shortly after the US Civil War, with a group of stragglers on a quest to catch (or alternatively rescue) a witch. There are ghosts, there are cute animals which suffer gruesome fates, there are viewpoint characters who get killed off, there are horrible secrets lurking in plain sight in the towns and farmsteads. Horror is not usually my thing, but this caught my imagination. Not for the faint-hearted, though. You can get Red Rabbit here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2024. Next on that pile is Septology, by Jon Fosse.
