Tag Archives: bookblog 2026

Send Him Victorious, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

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.

You can get Send Him Victorious here.

Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

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.

Hail, Penang! Being the Narrative of Comedies and Tragedies in a Tropical Outpost, Among Europeans, Chinese, Malays and Indians, by George Bilainkin

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“But what kind of Christian?” I asked.

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.

Anyway, this is a fascinating book, from an unusual angle. You can get Hail, Penang! here.

Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka

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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.

You can get Death and the King’s Horseman here.

Next in my list of Nobel Prize winners is Naguib Mahfouz.

The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton, and graphic novel adaptation, by Gareth Brookes

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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.

Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker; Last Exit, by Max Gladstone

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Second paragraph of third chapter of Twenty-first Century Blues:

’Howdeedoodee! Chaffinch Chaffinch. Delegate 426. Chehee!’

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.

Set in 2027 #3: The Listeners, by James Gunn

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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.

You can get The Listenbers here.

Set in 2027 #2: Star Cops: TV series, books and Big Finish audio

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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.

Both books were originally published by the one and only Judith Proctor in fanzine format. Now you can get them here in a single volume, Star Cops.

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.

The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher (and Ian Marter, and Derrick Sherwin)

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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.

Watching the whole thing, I wrote:

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.

I wrote a big piece on Marter’s Who writing for Strange Horizons in 2007, and said of this one:

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.

DoctorStoriesBA’ed%ageEpisodesBA’ed%age
Eighth22100.0%22100.0%
Shalka11100.0%11100.0%
Seventh12866.7%423071.4%
Sixth11436.4%311445.2%
Fourth411331.7%1725431.4%
Thirteenth24625.0%261246.2%
First291034.5%1344835.8%
Third24625.0%1033332.0%
Fifth21628.6%682029.4%
Twelfth35822.9%361027.8%
Eleventh39820.5%391025.6%
Ninth10220.0%13215.4%
Second21419.0%1192319.3%
Tenth36513.9%39820.5%
Fifteenth1616.3%1815.6%
Fourteenth300.0%300.0%
As soon as someone does one of the Fourteenth Doctor episodes, he’ll zoom to halfway up the table.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Web Planet (83) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7) | The Invasion (84)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)

Tuki: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith

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Second frame of third chapter:

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.

Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Charles B. Strozier

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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.

I think even people with little knowledge of Northern Ireland would find this interesting and enlightening, subject to the above caveats. You can get Making Peace in Northern Ireland here.

Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

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 read Binti 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.

You can get the complete Binti trilogy here.

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 Doorway by Seanan McGuire.

August 2026 books

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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

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 52)
The Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley
The Time of Angels, by Jenny Colgan
Doctor Who: The Invasion, by Ian Marter

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

The Time of Angels, by Jenny T. Colgan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

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.

Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“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.

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Sleeping Murder, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘We’ve planned to take you to a show or two,’ said Raymond whilst Gwenda was drinking gin and rather wishing she could have had a cup of tea after her journey.

I had definitely read this as a teenager: the protagonist, coming to England for the first time (as she thinks) from New Zealand, buys a house with her new husband and immediately starts having flashbacks to witnessing a murder there when a small child. It’s really rather good – totally fair misdirection of the reader, Miss Marple doing her enigmatic yet clear thing, a suitably dramatic and entirely believable revelation at the end. I enjoyed it a lot when I was thirteen and I enjoyed it again now. You can get Sleeping Murder here.

This was actually the last Miss Marple book and indeed the last Agatha Christie novel to be published, coming out a few months after her death in 1976. It’s set during the Second World War, though, and was written between 1940 and 1950 (Christie scholars are divided on exactly when, but the start and end dates are agreed).

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Peril at End House | Lord Edgware Dies | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party | Sleeping Murder

Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The narrator of the story is a science fiction writer living in Oxford. The writer is unnamed, but during the course of the story he mentions, familiarly, Jim Ballard, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Mike Moorcock, and the author of a book called War with the Robots, which was a 1962 short story collection by Harry Harrison. This is the circle within which Oxford resident Brian Aldiss was moving at the time, so if not actually autobiographical, it certainly edges close to that territory.

This is quite a short book for such a long and significant career, but it’s a very good analysis of Aldiss’s work for those who already know it – I don’t think it would be, or is intended to be, a guide for the newcomer. Kincaid takes us through Aldiss’s life and writing, making the point that the key experience of his youth was his military service in Burma and what is now Indonesia, experiencing sexual freedom to an extent unthinkable in the 1940s England where he had grown up. He was born in 1925, so he was a very young soldier.

I’m a huge fan anyway – see my write-ups here of Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, Non-stop, The Primal Urge and Cryptozoic!, Greybeard, The Moment of Eclipse, The Comic Inferno, Frankenstein Unbound, Moreau’s Other Island, the Helliconia trilogy, The Year Before Yesterday, The Invention of Happiness, The Twinkling of an Eye, Jocasta and The Finches of Mars. I have basically read all of his novels published to 1990, and most of the short stories published up to that date.

In fact, I think I am a bigger fan than Paul Kincaid. He finds quite a lot to criticise about many of the earlier books, and basically I like them more than he does. I admit that The Malacia Tapestry and The Eighty-minute Hour are not Great Literature, but I find them lots of fun. Having said that, I appreciated the dispassionate analysis of why some work has stood the test of time better than others.

A related point that had not really occurred to me before is that although the Helliconia trilogy was published almost exactly half way through his writing career, very little of his subsequent fiction writing was up to the level of the first few decades. This is excusable. He had achieved a lot of what he wanted, with very early success, and could afford to write what he pleased, even if it didn’t please other people. But reading this made me feel more like revisiting the earlier work which I haven’t read for decades than searching out the later writing which I have not read at all. You can get Brian W. Aldiss here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next, if I could have found it, would have been The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century. But I cannot locate it on the shelves, so instead next will be Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr.

Autumn, by Ali Smith

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Second paragraph of third section:

The last three times Elisabeth’s been, he’s been asleep. He’ll be asleep this time too, when she gets there. She’ll sit on the chair next to the bed and get the book out of her bag.

Another of Ali Smith’s wonderful short novels, addressing post-Brexit Britain (published in October 2016), with the central theme the friendship between an old man and a young girl as she grows up. There’s also a fascinating meditation on the life and work of Pauline Boty, the only woman among the British Pop Artists, and lots of other gritty nuggets that make you stop and think a bit more about what you have just read. Quite a short book too, with a lot packed into it. Strongly recommended. You can get Autumn here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Volume 2 of Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset.

The Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Far too often, I’m afraid.’

One of the Telos novellas, which I had read years ago but not got around to blogging. By a particularly prominent author, with a foreword by Neil Gaiman that got a lot of attention at the time (before we knew, of course). There are a lot of ideas here – a chap from colonial India who is slowly turning into a tiger, a generation starship, a lion-woman princess, uploaded and downloaded intelligences; too much really for the given length, and perhaps not fully under control. You can get The Eye of the Tyger here (at a considerable price).

Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton

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Second paragraph of third chapter (“Théo Van Rysselberghe’s Work: A Study”, by Patricia van der Elst-Alexandre):

His portraits seem singularly real. Spread by a strong light source, shadows cut across the face, darkening the hollows, while the light illuminates the portions that are rounded and in relief. In no way does the artist try to idealize his sitters. Nor does the neutral background contribute to an embellishment of their image or disturb the spectator’s attention to the subject, who himself looks at the spectator intensely (Self-portrait with Pipe [Sketch], Spanish Woman).

I was inspired to get this by my visit to Gent a month ago – it’s the book-of-the-exhibition of a display of Van Rysselberghe’s art in Brussels and The Hague in 2006. I was able to get it very cheap from a German dealer.

Van Rysselberghe was one of the leading Belgian Neo-Impressionist painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the key movers in the group known as Les XX. He was particularly keen on pointillism for the middle part of his career. His work is mainly to be found in Belgium, the Netherlands and France – the National Gallery in London has one painting attributed to him, and Olivier Bertrand thinks it is really by someone else.

These are (mostly) my own photos of Van Rysselberghe’s work.

“Butchery in Tangier” (18821), representing his early visits to Morocco and his fascination with representing the light there. (In Gent.)
“Pool in the Kempen” (wetlands region in Northern Belgium), one of his early landscapes (1882). (In Gent.)
An early portrait (1882) of “Mme Constantin Meunier”, real name the rather lovely Léocadie Gorneaux, which I saw in Antwerp, shows the signs of Impressionism without the pointillism for which he became best known.
Portrait of ten-year-old Marguerite van Mons (1886), just after the death of her mother. (In Gent.) Influenced by Whistler.
Van Rysselberghe’s portrait of Maria Sethe (1891), which I also saw in Antwerp, is one of his key early Pointillist works.
Valley of the Sambre (1890), a pointillist landscape. In Gent.

Titled “A Reading” (1903), this is a gathering of his Belgian and French intellectual friends, listening to Émile Verhaeren (in the red jacket) reading from his latest work. They also include Maurice Maeterlinck (far left, hand on chin), Belgium’s only Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and Andre Gide (sitting down in the middle with a big moustache), on whom more below. I saw it in Gent last month.
His “Standing Nude” (1919), which I saw in Haarlem, marks the point where he started shifting from pointillism to nudes.
1918 portrait of Théo Van Rysselbergh, by Suzanne Weyher. (In Gent.)

Like (almost) all art books, this looks absolutely gorgeous, and traces Van Rysselberghe through his various phases and personal influences. He was particularly good at painting women, either nude or in respectable portraits, but I find his style always arresting and usually sympathetic.

The ten essays in the book are all well illustrated and mostly interesting. But I found some of the editorial choices made rather odd. The first chapter is on Van Rysselberghe’s fascination with Morocco, and the second on his professional relationship with Brussels art critic Octave Maus, the secretary of Les XX; then the third is a broader biographical piece. Why not put that first, to guide the non-expert reader?

Even more puzzling, a later chapter focusses on the correspondence between André Gide on the one hand and Van Rysselberghe and his wife Maria on the other. A cryptic sentence notes that “the warm relationship between Van Rysselberghe and Gide continued until the birth of his granddaughter Catherine in 1923; the pregnancy of his daughter Élisabeth out of wedlock displeased him”. The uninformed reader will wonder why Van Rysselberghe’s daughter’s pregnancy should affect his relationship with Gide; I think it would have been helpful context to note explicitly that Gide was Élisabeth’s lover and Catherine’s father. It was hardly a secret, and Catherine is thanked in the foreword for her help in setting up the exhibition (she would have been 83 in 2006, and lived to the age of 90).

The editorial credit is given to Paul Holberton in the front matter, but art critic Olivier Bertrand was the director of the 2006 exhibition and probably played an important role in putting the book together. He maintains a website devoted to Van Rysselberghe, on which he froths entertainingly about the mistakes made by other critics. You can get Théo Van Rysselberghe here.

Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature In A Pandemic, ed. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

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Second paragraph of third essay (“Voodoonauts & Afrofuturist Dreaming: On Creating a Summer Workshop for Black Writers during a Pandemic”, by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu):

It is this reverence for the dream-scape through which I approach dreaming in all its meanings. I have a dream jar. It’s a tiny little vase in the shape of an elephant, my family’s ancestral totem, in which I place all my dreams written on sticky notes. When I’m goal setting, hoping, or even making a bucket list, I approach it as a spiritual practice. When I met Shingai Njeri Kagunda, a brilliant Afrofuturist writer from Kenya currently doing her MFA at Brown University, we talked a lot about Afrofuturist dreaming. To us, Afrofuturist dreaming is imagining what we want in the world for Black creators that doesn’t yet exist or is undervalued, and then manifesting it into a reality.

This is a collection of 18 short pieces (average seven pages each) by writers in Africa and of African descent, describing their experiences as creators and, most of all, as human beings during the pandemic. There is a strong representation from Nigeria, which is fair enough (one African in six is Nigerian), but there’s also a diversity of voices from around and beyond the continent. Stories of the individual writing process intertwine with personal loss and with political instability. It’s an enlightening and bracing read. You can get Bridging Worlds for free here, though I got it as part of the 2023 Hugo packet.

This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2023 (actually I had a couple of shorter ones in my catalogue, but could not find them). Next on that pile is Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle.

Time out of Mind, by Jody Houser et al

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Second frame of third section:

This was the first of the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan, the rest of which I had read and enjoyed, so coming back to the beginning now. This also exhausts the massive store of Doctor Who comics that I got from a Humble Bundle purchase in 2022, and it was certainly worth the rather minimal amount I paid for the lot.

This was an excellent note to finish on, as well. It’s a Christmas story, so reading it in the sunmmer wasn’t ideal; but Houser, who is one of the great Who comics writers, catches the Thirteenth Doctor’s voice absolutely perfectly. There is a fun plot as well to do with memory loss and a fake Santa Claus, but really you’re enjoying the ride. You can get Time out of Mind here.

This brings to an end my shelf of books that I acquired in 2022.

I have got the gap down from 8 years for the 2010 books to two and a half years now.

My pile of unread books from 2023 is not as big as the 2022 pile was, only 25 of them – 14 non-fiction, 10 sf, and one poetry collection. Starting off the list are:

  • Bridging Worlds, ed. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki – the shortest book of those that I acquired in 2023 and have not yet read
  • Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid – the non-fiction book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
  • Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker – the sf book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
  • Last Exit, by Max Gladstone – the top unread book of those I acquired in 2023.

Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata

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Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese writer to do so. In his acceptance speech he makes the point that it was 55 years since it last went to “an Oriental“, which is rather shocking. His Nobel lecture is about Buddhism, suicide and poetry. Snow Country was his first well-known novel, from thirty years before (published in various formats up to 1937). The Chairman of the Nobel Committee said of it:

we see a brilliant capacity to illuminate the erotic episode, an exquisite keenness of observation, a whole network of small, mysterious values, which often put the European narrative technique in the shade. Kawabata’s writing is reminiscent of Japanese painting; he is a worshipper of the fragile beauty and melancholy picture language of existence in the life of nature and in man’s destiny. If the transience of all outward action can be likened to drifting tufts of grass on the surface of the water, then it is the genuinely Japanese miniature art of haiku poetry which is reflected in Kawabata’s prose style.

It has only two chapters; so here is the second paragraph of the third section of the first chapter:

とうとう芸者に出たのであろうかと、その裾を見てはっとしたけれども、こちらへ歩いて来るでもない、体のどこかを崩して迎えるしなを作るでもない、じっと動かぬその立ち姿から、彼は遠目にも真面目なものを受け取って、急いで行ったが、女の傍に立っても黙っていた。女も濃い白粉の顔で微笑もうとすると、かえって泣き面になったのでなにも言わずに二人は部屋の方へ歩き出した。He started back as he saw the long skirts – had she finally become a geisha? She did not come toward him, she did not bend in the slightest movement of recognition. From the distance he caught something intent and serious in the still form. He hurried up to her, but they said nothing even when he was beside her. She started to smile through the thick, white geisha’s powder. Instead she melted into tears, and the two of them walked off silently toward his room.
translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

Maybe I was just in a bad mood on the two nights I read this (I was reading it alongside Xenophon’s Ephesiaca, which is a lot more fun) but I found that this moved rather slowly for such a short book. The core plot is about a married man and his feelings for a sex worker who he meets in a mountain resort, and the actual places are described very effectively, but I found it difficult to get into the heads of the characters and might not have finished it if it had been longer. I can see also how the writer is co-opting the form of Western novel into a Japanese context (which in fairness is what the Nobel Committee wanted to celebrate). But it’s a rare miss for me in this sequence.

This was also my top unread book by a non-white writer; next on that pile is another Japanese novel, Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto. Next in my list of non-white-male Nobel Literature laureates is Wole Soyinka, and I have his Death and the King’s Horseman ready.

You can get Snow Country here.

Ἐφεσιακά: Xenophon’s Ephesian history: or the love-adventures of Abrocomas and Anthia, in five books, translated from the Greek by Mr. Rooke

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I normally start my reviews by quoting the second paragraph of the third chapter, or equivalent, but I’m going to save the second section of Book 3 of the Ephesian History to the end, because it deserves special treatment.

I was inspired to get hold of this because when I visited Gent last month, I was struck by Joseph Paelink’s The Fair Anthia Leading Her Companions to the Temple of Diana in Ephesus, which represents a scene from the first chapter, and inspired me to seek out the source material.

It’s the story of Anthia and Habrocomes (the ‘H’ tends to get dropped in translation), who fall in love and set off on a largely involuntary saga of travels around the Eastern Mediterranean, where they are shipwrecked, separated, kidnapped, threatened with seduction, encounter sultry pirates, brigands, merchants and merchant’s wives, believe each other to have died and are finally reunited. Sorry to spoil the ending, but this is a book written in about 200AD and anyway it’s about the journey, not the destination. It is a tremendous romp speaking from the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire and looking back to a more adventurous era. I have seen the Ἐφεσιακά described as the earliest known novel; I’d like to know more about the competitors for that title, but I can sense a format pushing at the boundaries and trying to find out what it can do.

You can easily get the 1727 translation by John Rooke on the Internet Archive. John Rooke also translated Arrian’s account of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, but little else is known of him. My eye was caught by a couple of sentences in the preface:

I muſt not however omit acquainting my Readers, that I have given a different Turn to one Paſſage, towards the beginning ot the third Book, becauſe it would not have ſounded well in an Engliſh Ear; and whatever Toleration the ancient Greeks might plead, it is entirely repugnant to the Genius and Cuſtoms of our Country. Whoſoever underſtands the Original may eaſily find out the Deviation, and to thoſe who do not, the Knowledge thereof is no ways material: This I only add, leſt any ſhould pretend to accuſe me for want of Skill in the Language, and take this Paſſage for a Handle.

Believe it or not, the passage in question is the very second chapter of Book III. Bear with me as I present it below in the original Greek and in Rooke’s translation. The context is that Habrocomas has fallen in with a hot bandit chap called Hippothous, who now tells his own origin story. I have added emphasis to a couple of key points.

»Ἐγὼ« ἔφη »εἰμὶ τὸ γένος πόλεως Περίνθου (πλησίον δὲ τῆς Θρᾴκης ἡ πόλις) τῶν τὰ πρῶτα ἐκεῖ δυναμένων· ἀκούεις δὲ καὶ τὴν Πέρινθον ὡς ἔνδοξος, καὶ τοὺς ἄνδρας ὡς εὐδαίμονες ἐνταῦθα. Ἐκεῖ νέος ὢν ἠράσθην μειρακίου καλοῦ· ἦν δὲ τὸ μειράκιον τῶν ἐπιχωρίων· ὄνομα Ὑπεράνθης ἦν αὐτῷ. Ἠράσθην δὲ τὰ πρῶτα ἐν γυμνασίοις διαπαλαίοντα ἰδὼν καὶ οὐκ ἐκαρτέρησα. Ἑορτῆς ἀγομένης ἐπιχωρίου καὶ παννυχίδος ἐπ´ αὐτῆς πρόσειμι τῷ Ὑπεράνθῃ καὶ ἱκετεύω κατοικτεῖραι· ἀκοῦσαν δὲ τὸ μειράκιον πάντα ὑπισχνεῖται κατελεῆσάν με. Καὶ τὰ πρῶτά γε τοῦ ἔρωτος ὁδοιπορεῖ φιλήματα καὶ ψαύσματα καὶ πολλὰ παρ´ ἐμοῦ δάκρυα· τέλος δὲ ἠδυνήθημεν καιροῦ λαβόμενοι γενέσθαι μετ´ ἀλλήλων μόνοι καὶ τὸ τῆς ἡλικίας {ἀλλήλοις} ἀνύποπτον ἦν.“My Birth,” says he, “I owe to Perinthus, a City near the Confines of Thrace, and I am one of her chief Citizens: You must have heard how famous a City Perinthus is, and how rich her Inhabitants. Whilst a Youth, I was struck with the Charms of a fair Virgin there, whose Name was Hyperanthe. When first I saw her lead up the Perinthian Maids in a Dance, I lov’d her, nor could contain my self longer than the Time when the Vigils of her Country’s Festival were solemniz’d. ’Twas then I approach’d her, and entreated her to be favourable to me. She no sooner heard my Moan, than she inclin’d to Pity, and promis’d whatever she might. Our first Loves begun with Kisses, Embraces, and many Tears from my Eyes. Afterwards, we could upon Occasion, retire from the World, and enjoy each other’s Converse, without Suspicion, by Reason of our tender Years.
Καὶ χρόνῳ συνῆμεν πολλῷ, στέργοντες ἀλλήλους διαφερόντως, ἕως δαίμων τις ἡμῖν ἐνεμέσησε. Καὶ ἔρχεταί τις ἀπὸ Βυζαντίου (πλησίον δὲ τὸ Βυζάντιον τῇ Περίνθῳ) ἀνὴρ τῶν τὰ πρῶτα ἐκεῖ δυναμένων, {ὃς} ἐπὶ πλούτῳ καὶ περιουσίᾳ μέγα φρονῶν· Ἀριστόμαχος ἐκαλεῖτο. Οὗτος ἐπιβὰς εὐθὺς τῇ Περίνθῳ, ὡς ὑπό τινος ἀπεσταλμένος κατ´ ἐμοῦ θεοῦ, ὁρᾷ τὸν Ὑπεράνθην σὺν ἐμοὶ καὶ εὐθέως ἁλίσκεται, τοῦ μειρακίου θαυμάσας τὸ κάλλος, πάντα ὁντινοῦν ἐπάγεσθαι δυνάμενον. Ἐρασθεὶς δὲ οὐκέτι μετρίως κατεῖχε τὸν ἔρωτα, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν πρῶτα τῷ μειρακίῳ προσέπεμπεν· ὡς δὲ ἀνήνυτον ἦν αὐτῷ (ὁ γὰρ Ὑπεράνθης διὰ τὴν πρὸς ἐμὲ εὔνοιαν οὐδένα προσίετο), πείθει τὸν πατέρα αὐτοῦ, πονηρὸν ἄνδρα καὶ ἐλάττονα χρημάτων· ὁ δὲ αὐτῷ δίδωσι τὸν Ὑπεράνθην προφάσει διδασκαλίας· ἔλεγε γὰρ εἶναι λόγων τεχνίτης. Long had we indulg’d our selves with this Freedom, and long had we passionately lov’d each other, when some God envy’d our Happiness. For from Byzantium, which is not far distant from Perinthus, arriv’d a certain Man, named Aristomachus, one of the chief of the Place, fam’d for Wealth, and a haughty Carriage. He had scarce enter’d the City, but (as if by the Direction of some God) he fix’d his Eyes on Hyperanthe, then in my Company, and was instantly struck with Surprize at her Beauty, which indeed was most astonishing. He was desperately in Love, and unable to restrain the Violence of his Passion, and therefore declar’d himself first to the Virgin, but finding no Encouragement there, she rejecting his Suit, because of her steady Affection to me, he perswades her Father, a Man cruel and covetous, to commit her to his Care for her Instruction, he presenting to teach her the rules of exact Behaviour.
Παραλαβὼν δὲ αὐτὸν τὰ μὲν πρῶτα κατάκλειστον εἶχε, μετὰ τοῦτο δὲ ἀπῆρεν ἐς Βυζάντιον. Εἱπόμην κἀγώ, πάντων καταφρονήσας τῶν ἐμαυτοῦ, καὶ ὅσα ἐδυνάμην συνήμην τῷ μειρακίῳ· ἐδυνάμην δὲ ὀλίγα, καί μοι φίλημα σπάνιον ἐγίνετο καὶ λαλιὰ δυσχερής· ἐφρουρούμην δὲ ὑπὸ πολλῶν. Τελευταῖον οὐκέτι καρτερῶν, ἐμαυτὸν παροξύνας ἐπάνειμι εἰς Πέρινθον καὶ πάντα ὅσα ἦν μοι κτήματα ἀποδόμενος, συλλέξας ἄργυρον εἰς Βυζάντιον ἔρχομαι καὶ λαβὼν ξιφίδιον (συνδοκοῦν τοῦτο καὶ τῷ Ὑπεράνθῃ) εἴσειμι νύκτωρ εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν τοῦ Ἀριστομάχου καὶ εὑρίσκω συγκατακείμενον τῷ παιδὶ καὶ ὀργῆς πλησθεὶς παίω τὸν Ἀριστόμαχον καιρίαν. Ἡσυχίας δὲ οὔσης καὶ πάντων ἀναπαυομένων ἔξειμι ὡς εἶχον λαθών, ἐπαγόμενος καὶ τὸν Ὑπεράνθην, καὶ δι´ ὅλης νυκτὸς ὁδεύσας εἰς Πέρινθον, εὐθὺς νεὼς ἐπιβὰς οὐδενὸς εἰδότος ἔπλεον εἰς Ἀσίαν. He no sooner gain’d his Wishes, than he first shut her up at Perinthus, and afterwards convey’d her to Byzantium. I follow’d; and leaving all my other Affairs, whenever Occasion offer’d, I never fail’d to visit her. But these Opportunities rarely happening, our Kisses became less frequent, and our Converse more difficult, for we were strictly watch’d. At last, able to endure this no longer, I fix’d my Resolution, went to Perinthus, dispos’d of all my Effects there, took the Money, and return’d to Byzantium, where (by Hyperanthe’s consent) with Sword in hand I enter’d the House of Aristomachus, by Night, burning with Wrath, and gave him his Death’s Wound, as he lay encircled in her Arms. All Things being then hush’d in Silence, I escap’d unperceiv’d, carrying my Hyperanthe with me, and reaching Perinthus that Night, we embark’d directly on board a Ship, which lay ready for us, and every Body being ignorant of what had happen’d, we design’d to pass over into Asia.
Καὶ μέχρι μέν τινος διήνυστο εὐτυχῶς ὁ πλοῦς· τελευταῖον δὲ κατὰ Λέσβον ἡμῖν γενομένοις ἐμπίπτει πνεῦμα σφοδρὸν καὶ ἀνατρέπει τὴν ναῦν. Κἀγὼ μὲν τῷ Ὑπεράνθῃ συνενηχόμην ὑπιὼν αὐτῷ καὶ κουφοτέραν τὴν νῆξιν ἐποιούμην· νυκτὸς δὲ γενομένης οὐκέτι ἐνεγκὸν τὸ μειράκιον παρείθη τῷ κολύμβῳ καὶ ἀποθνῄσκει. Ἐγὼ δὲ τοσοῦτον ἠδυνήθην τὸ σῶμα διασῶσαι ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν καὶ θάψαι· καὶ πολλὰ δακρύσας καὶ στενάξας, ἀφελὼν λείψανα καὶ δυνηθεὶς εὐπορῆσαί που ἑνὸς ἐπιτηδείου λίθου στήλην ἐπέστησα τῷ τάφῳ καὶ ἐπέγραψα εἰς μνήμην τοῦ δυστυχοῦς μειρακίου ἐπίγραμμα παρ´ αὐτὸν ἐκεῖνον τὸν καιρὸν πλασάμενος Ἱππόθοος κλεινῷ τεῦξεν τόδε σῆμ´ The Beginning of our Voyage was pleasant enough, but after we had pass’d by the Island Lesbos, a violent Gust of Wind attack’d us, and overset our Ship. I, with my Hyperanthe, endeavour’d to reach the Shore by Swimming, and whilst I supported her, my own Labour seem’d the less, but Night coming on, and my fair one’s Strength and Spirits failing, she perish’d in the Waves. I, with some Difficulty, drew her Body on Shore, and gave her Burial. I sigh’d deeply, and shed many Tears over her, and not having Time to erect a Monument, happen’d, by Chance, to find a Stone, fit for the Purpose, which I plac’d over her, and whereon I engrav’d this extempore Epigram, to the Memory of her unhappy Fate.”
Ὑπεράνθῃ, οὐ τάφον ἐκ θανάτου ἀγαθὸν ἱεροῖο πολίτου ἐς βάθος ἐκ γαίης, ἄνθος κλυτόν, ὅν ποτε δαίμων ἥρπασεν ἐν πελάγει μεγάλου πνεύσαντος ἀήτου. For ever sacred be this Place
     To Hyperanthe’s Name,
Hippothous no Tomb can raise,
     Thy Beauties to proclaim.
My fairest Flower, alas! is fled,
     By faithless Winds opprest,
Remorseless Waves roll’d o’er thy Head
     And robb’d thy Mate of Rest.
Τοὐντεῦθεν δὲ εἰς μὲν Πέρινθον ἐλθεῖν οὐ διέγνων, ἐτράπην δὲ δι´ Ἀσίας ἐπὶ Φρυγίαν τὴν μεγάλην καὶ Παμφυλίαν· κἀνταῦθα ἀπορίᾳ βίου καὶ ἀθυμίᾳ τῆς συμφορᾶς ἐπέδωκα ἐμαυτὸν λῃστηρίῳ. Καὶ τὰ μὲν πρῶτα ὑπηρέτης λῃστηρίου γενόμενος, τὸ τελευταῖον {δὲ} περὶ Κιλικίαν αὐτὸς συνεστησάμην λῃστήριον, εὐδοκιμῆσαν ἐπὶ πολύ, ἕως ἐλήφθησαν οἱ σὺν ἐμοὶ οὐ πρὸ πολλοῦ τοῦ σε ἰδεῖν. Αὕτη μὲν ἡ τῶν ἐμῶν διηγημάτων τύχη· σὺ δέ, ὦ φίλτατε, εἰπέ μοι τὰ ἑαυτοῦ· δῆλος γὰρ εἶ μεγάλῃ τινὶ ἀνάγκῃ τῇ κατὰ τὴν πλάνην χρώμενος«.“From that Time, I resolv’d not to return to Perinthus any more, and therefore directed my Course into the greater Phrygia and Pamphilia, where, distress’d by Want, and disorder’d in Mind, I betook my self to Robbing. I serv’d, at first, as a Guard to the Party to which I belonged, but having, afterwards, gather’d 62a Band of my own, in Cilicia; I became famous, ’till, at last, all my Companions were surpriz’d and slain, or taken, a little before I saw you. This is a brief Account of my Adventures: Now, my Friend, oblige me with yours, for you seem driven by some strange Necessity to travel.”

From the English translation alone, it’s a fairly standard story of love gone tragically wrong, one of several in the course of the Ἐφεσιακά. But the part that Rooke felt he could not translate directly into English is this: in the original Greek, it’s absolutely clear that Hippothous fell in love, not with a beautiful young girl called Hyperanthe but with a beautiful young boy called Hyperanthes (incidentally otherwise recorded only as a Persian name). He didn’t see a young girl dancing with the other maidens; he saw a beautiful young man (μειράκιον) exercising in the gymnasium (πρῶτα ἐν γυμνασίοις διαπαλαίοντα). This was what Rooke felt “entirely repugnant to the Genius and Cuſtoms of our Country”. It’s not the only case of same-sex romance (let alone lust) in the Ἐφεσιακά, but it’s the one where the reader is most clearly meant to sympathise with the unhappy lover. Incidentally the 1797 translation into French is perfectly clear that Hyperanthes is a boy.

Hyperanthes‘ epitaph in the English translation bears very little resemblance to the Greek original, except that the dead youth is compared to a flower in both, the name being an obvious enough play on ἄνθος meaning ‘flower’.

Anyway, this short romp from an earlier age is well worth seeking out. I have linked to the Rooke translation and the French version above, but there is also an educational edition which you can get here.

The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, by David Goodall

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

As usual when confronted with a range of unwelcome alternatives, Mrs Thatcher tacked and veered from one point to another, interrupting Geoffrey Howe’s attempts at ordered exposition and from time to time bringing things back to square one with an observation of startling primitiveness. Why could we not redraw the border to exclude predominantly Catholic areas and relieve ourselves of the expense of paying social security to people who did not want to belong to the United Kingdom anyway? It was pointed out that this would not solve the problem: Catholic and Protestant communities were too intermingled in border areas; and even if adjustments were made to the border, the main body of Catholics lived in West Belfast and would remain within Northern Ireland. In that case, why not a wall through the centre of Belfast like the Wall through the Centre of Berlin? (No one seemed to want to comment on this). Following this line of thought, the Prime Minister asked why arrangements could not be made to transfer those members of the minority community who did not wish to remain under British rule to the Republic. After all, she said, the Irish were used to large scale movements of population. Only recently there had been a population transfer of some kind. At this point the silence round the fire became transfused with simple bafflement. After a pause, I asked if she could possibly be thinking of Cromwell. ‘Cromwell: of course.’ ‘Well, Prime Minister, Cromwell’s policy was known as “To Hell or Connacht” and it left a scar on Anglo-Irish relations which still hasn’t healed’. The idea of a population transfer was not pursued.

I am going to start by noting that a couple of my recent Facebook posts about Irish politics have attracted some tedious trolling from drive-by commenters. I will wield the block function more readily in future, for trolls of any variety. I will also note that the last couple of offenders were from one side rather than the other.

Several people had recommended this book to me as the authentic insider account of the negotiations behind the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1983-85. They were right; it’s absolutely what I wanted to read.

Goodall was the right hand of Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, who was the brains behind the entire process; the story Goodall tells is one of constant negotiation between the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland office and the prime minister herself, plus occasional appearances from the Irish government, where Garret Fitzgerald as Taoiseach was closely engaged and senior officials very motivated to make things happen.

My basic question was, what was the origin of the Agreement, which gave the Irish state direct input into policy-making in Northern Ireland in the absence of a devolved government? The answer appears to be that Armstrong was the prime mover; after her second election victory, he put it to Margaret Thatcher that the only place in the world where British troops were being killed in anger was inside the United Kingdom, and something had to be done. He was also friendly with Dermot Nally, his equivalent on the Irish side, as both had been closely involved with the Sunningdale negotiations of 1973, only ten years earlier. But it helped that he had Thatcher’s complete confidence, and that she too saw the logic that something had to be done.

One widely circulated theory that I did not find much evidence for from Goodall’s account (though of course his is necessarily a partial view) was that the Americans had pressed the UK into signing the Agreement at the urging of John Hume. I am sure that Hume did his best to mobilise the Americans to that end, but without Armstrong there would have been nothing to mobilise about. There were several points when negotiations reached a low point, and it was Armstrong who decided to invest his personal political capital into saving the process. Hume was not close enough to the negotiations, let alone to Thatcher, to have been able to do that.

Anyone who subscribes to the very silly notion that Garret Fitzgerald and Fine Gael were crypto Brits should read this; it’s absolutely clear that the Irish government which he led pushed the case of Irish nationalism very effectively, and came out with more concrete results than sixty years of whining about Partition had achieved. At the same time there was a learning process for the Irish side, to discover how far the British could go and for how much in return. And I must say it is striking how many rounds of negotiations were concluded over luxuriously catered lunches and dinners, and the beverages consumed afterwards. (Though you still had to report back in the morning.)

It’s also very striking that the only woman with a speaking part in the whole process is Margaret Thatcher. At the time she was the only woman in the British cabinet, and there was also only one woman in the Irish cabinet (Gemma Hussey). Their officials and advisers were all middle-aged white men too, and so were the political party leaders in Northern Ireland (who were barely consulted anyway, including Hume). And this is only forty years ago.

I found a passing reference to an elderly retired British diplomat who I know, who played a minor part in keeping the show on the road at a late stage, and sent him snapshots of the pages where he is mentioned. He was delighted; he had no idea that he was in the book.

I think that the Anglo-Irish Agreement was a success, and that it was critical in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement thirteen years later, now 28 years ago. It was constructed to be almost unwreckable. It showed political Unionism very clearly that a return to majority rule was not on the cards. Unionism was deeply traumatised, but they had it coming to them, having wilfully destroyed the Sunningdale power-sharing arrangement and failed to put forward anything even half as good themselves. It was an important and significant on the way to lasting peace.

One of several essays by other people in the last third of the book also asserts that the Agreement gave a push to the new thinking in the IRA and Sinn Fein that led to the Hume/Adams talks, the secret channel with the British government and the ceasefire. I think the biggest factor there was certainly exhaustion from decades of conflict with no progress, but the fact that there was a political process happening demonstrated that other ways of investing energy could bear fruit.

I still don’t quite understand Thatcher’s own psychology here. I suspect that she thought there would be clear and immediate benefits on security co-operation – I remember a very conservative family friend telling me, the weekend after it was signed, that if there were security benefits, then infuriating the Unionists would have been worth it. Any such benefits were not really obvious; there were 57 deaths in the Troubles in 1985, which was actually the lowest of any year between 1971 and 1994, so the violence actually increased after the Agreement. But it clarified the landing zone for how it could be brought to an end.

Really one for history nerds, or people who love diplomatic insider accounts. But a great bit of storytelling. You can get The Making of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 here.

The Many Lives of Doctor Who, by Richard Dinnick et al

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Second frame of third story:

A nice little collection of 3-4 page stories about each of the Doctors from Hartnell to Capaldi, including also Hurt, structured as the Doctor’s memories flashing through their mind as they change from Capaldi to Whitaker. Not terribly deep, but quite joyous. You can get The Many Lives of Doctor Who here.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I had started the term with my battels paid and over a hundred pounds in hand. All that had gone, and not a penny paid out where I could get credit. There had been no reason for it, no great pleasure unattainable else: it had gone in ducks and drakes. Sebastian used to tease me – ‘You spend money like a bookie’ – but all of it went on and with him. His own finances were perpetually, vaguely distressed. ‘It’s all done by lawyers,’ he said helplessly, ‘and I suppose they embezzle a lot. Anyway, I never seem to get much. Of course, mummy would give me anything I asked for.’

I had read this many years ago, appropriately enough borrowed from the library at Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy at Cambridge University, where I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate. Fisher House in the late 1980s was still shaking off the traumas of twenty years before, when the veteran chaplain Monsignor Gilbey was displaced after three decades.

There were ongoing tensions between the posh and the less posh, and between traditional Latin vs folk Mass worshippers, two cleavages which had substantial but not 100% overlap, and where being Irish I was able to flit around the boundary. Once or twice a year, the octogenarian Monsignor Gilbey would sweep in to visit and celebrate Mass the old way, exciting the acolytes. There was palpable nostalgia for the days that Waugh writes about in Brideshead Revisited and elsewhere.

Indeed, it’s a little shocking to realise that this 1946 novel was only half as old in 1986 as it is now in 2026. I loved it then, and I loved it on rereading. Sure, it’s about a bunch of privileged upper-class kids, and sure, the author is being didactic about Catholicism; but the interpersonal dynamics are fascinating and the dialogue really cracks along. Just to pick one minor character, the narrator’s father, stunningly and apparently unintentionally rude in every conversation:

‘So you’re being divorced,’ said my father. ‘Isn’t that rather unnecessary, after you’ve been happy together all these years?’
‘We weren’t particularly happy, you know.’
‘Weren’t you? Were you not? I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why.’

It’s that ‘wondering why’ that makes it a classic line, and I hope John Gielgud got to say it in the TV version. (I have not checked.)

My only complaint is that we end rather weakly, with Sebastian disappearing off stage and Charles unable to get it together with his sister Julia at the point when it all seemed possible. But sometimes life doesn’t offer completely satisfactory endings, and it’s the author’s choice to tell us rather than show us what happens to Sebastian. A return visit that did not disappoint me. You can get Brideshead Revisited here.

This was my top unread book acquired last year, my top unread non-genre fiction book, and my top book not yet reviewed here. Next on all three piles is Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy.

The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones

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Second paragraph of third section (of the first of two chapters):

‘That’s all the sixes,’ his companion said, joining us.

Another of the recent Who novelisations, by the writer of the original TV story. I don’t seem to have made a note about this story when it was first broadcast. When I first rewatched it in 2013, I wrote:

I fear this is becoming a boring refrain, but I had forgotten how good The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit actually is. I think it is our first proper base-under-siege story in New Who (perhaps arguments can be made for The End of the World or Dalek, but I won’t) and perhaps it’s a return to that comfort zone of Old Who, with the difference of a more diverse base crew than Old Who would have had (the black guy would never have been in command in the old days, and the smart woman would never have been chief scientist). The scarily different bit is not so much the monster – though it is well done, both the descent to the pit and the technical realisation of a superhuman incarnation of evil – but the Ood, who are very creepy indeed. Having a slave race never works out well in Who, but here the message is that by exploiting the Ood, humanity has opened a potential route for its own destruction. Terrific stuff.

In 2022, coming back to it for Simon Bucher Jones’ Black Archive, I wrote:

Rewatching it now, I was again pleasantly surprised. David Tennant is always watchable, but here the chemistry between him and Billie Piper is at its peak. It also struck me that the plot element of the TARDIS being lost on a world where a more cosmic battle is playing out had been done before, and worse, in Frontios.

I didn’t rewatch it again before reading the novelisation, as my memory was still pretty fresh.

This is another one of the good ones. It is presented as a set of testimonials, and other incidents, from the enquiry that the Krop Tor base crew faced when they finally got back. This neatly solves a story-telling problem: you don’t need an omniscient narrator when you have a bunch of different viewpoints, and each admits from the start that each has only a partial view of the events.

Doing the story that way means that you end up with quite a different experience of the plot from watching the original TV version, but a good one. It also centres the guest characters, and the impact that the Doctor and Rose make on the rest of their lives, which doesn’t often feature in what we see once the TARDIS departs. There is one chunk of narrative told from the Doctor’s own point of view about three quarters of the way through, and it’s not clear how that gets into the book, but I think most readers will swallow it anyway. The original story is good, and the novelisation is good too.

I don’t think I had realised that Jones was the author of one of my favourite Bernice Sumnmerfield novels, Beyond the Sun, and of the New Adventures novel Bad Therapy which I also enjoyed. He also wrote the “Dead Man Walking” episode of Torchwood. One to keep an eye on.

You can get The Satan Pit novelisation here.

Understanding the War in Kosovo, eds Florian Bieber and Židas Daskaloski

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Second paragraph of third essay (“Ethnic Prejudices and Discrimination: The Case of Kosovo”, by Lazar Nikolić):

Prejudice, as indeed discrimination itself, produces changes which can be analyzed on several levels. In this work practical consequences of different forms of stereotyping are analyzed: firstly, at the micro level (the level of the individual as actor in everyday life); secondly, at the middle level (the level of social institutions and group memberships) and thirdly, at the macro level (the level of society). All these levels include different examples of relationships, actions and ways of thinking between Albanians and Serbs in individual, group and community settings. Examples that follow specify different strategies of selfperception and its interpretation, perception of the ‘other’ and perception of relationships.

A collection of academic essays on Kosovo published in 2003, so before the final status process had started, though after it was already clear which way such a process would go. To be honest, I was surprised at the poor quality of some of the pieces; presumably (though I don’t think this is made clear) they are submissions to a conference. The last three however, looking at the effects of the Kosovo situation on Albania by Aldo Bumci, (North) Macedonia by Goran Janev and Serbia by Florian Bieber, are very good state-of-the-nations pieces which stand the test of time; Serbia perhaps has changed most since then, but not really because of Kosovo. You can get Understanding the War in Kosovo here (at a price).

This was the second last of the books about Kosovo on my shelves acquired in 2023. However I’m not going to bother writing up the last of them (Blood Libel, by Bardhyl Mahmuti) so my 2023 books list will end with a couple of Doctor Who comics.

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, by Bob Shaw

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Second paragraph of third story (“And isles where good men lie…”):

Still spitting noisily, Fortune pushed himself up and walked heavily to the window. Half a million miles beyond the orbit of the Moon the ship made a minute course correction….

I never met Bob Shaw, who died aged 64 in 1996, but I am aware of him as Northern Ireland’s leading science fiction writer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, along with James White, and he apparently had a great line in humorous convention speeches (for which he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1979 and 1980). I have fond memories of his A Wreath of Stars, but rather bounced off both Orbitsville and The Ragged Astronauts when I tried them a few years ago.

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush is a collection of some of his short stories originally published between 1966 and 1971. The most republished of these is “The Happiest Day of Your Life”, a very short piece about a future where children receive all of their education in a single day. That could have been really poor if played for laughs, but it actually comes out very powerfully, reflecting wistfully on the importance of childhood as a part of the human experience.

Most of the stories are solid engineering sf of the type you would expect from Shaw, who was an aeronautical engineer by profession. A couple feature one of his other trademark tropes, a poisonously bad marriage between the leading characters, presumably based on a situation he had closely observed in person. It’s not ground-breaking, but it’s not bad either.

The reason I got the book, however, was to read “The Cosmic Cocktail Party”, a 1970 story involving the personalities of people who have died being preserved in a computer storage called a matrix, in which one particularly strong individual has created a colonial hunting fantasy which the other minds in the matrix are compelled to acknowledge and participate in; part of the technobabble around this involves artrons.

Doctor Who fans will immediately recognise elements of the bedrock of one of the greatest Who stories, The Deadly Assassin. To put icing on the cake, the concealed villain of the longest of the stories in the book, “The Pilot Plant”, appears to be an AI called Xoanon (though it turns out to be humanoid rather than robotic). This is also the name of the mad computer in The Face of Evil, the story after The Deadly Assassin. Going back to “The Cosmic Cocktail Party”, it also features a very minor character called Uvarov, which is not a million miles from Uvanov, the captain in The Robots of Death (the story after The Face of Evil).

Credit for pointing this out belongs entirely to Shakespeare scholar Martin Wiggins, who included it in the information in the Season 14 Blu-Ray commentary and kindly answered my questions. He has not published the link between Bob Shaw and Doctor Who anywhere else, so let the acknowledgement of his discovery now begin.

You can get Tomorrow Lies in Ambush here.