‘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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
Last book acquired in 2022, read in July 2026 (Time Out of Mind)
Last book acquired in 2021, read in October 2025 (Het lijkt Washington wel)
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.
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:
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
For ever sacred be this Place ToHyperanthe’sName, Hippothousno 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.
“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.
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 lastcouple 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Second paragraph of third chapter (O’Toole’s turn to write in favour), with embedded quotation:
What is striking about this argument from the heart of unionism is that neither [Lord] Brookeborough nor [Brian] Maginess contested the idea that it was logical to think of the island of Ireland as a single country. Brookeborough quoted with approval the words of a fellow unionist, his minister for home affairs, Walter Topping:
In circumstances other than those that exist in Ireland it would be natural to assume that an island the size of this one should be economically and politically a single entity. Much can be said for the practical advantages to be gained by the elimination of the Border; and there is also the sentimental appeal of being Irish throughout (a sentiment which the Scotsman and the Welshman proudly maintain) had the situation been different — had being Irish not been made incompatible with being at the same time British.
This, of course, raises a question that is now much more salient: what if being Irish can be made compatible with being British? What if the divide between competing mentalities and identities has become bridgeable?
This is a very interesting intellectual experiment. Two of the best known journalistic commentators each put the case for and against a United Ireland, taking turns to write from each side. What makes this really attractive is that most writing on the subject is heavily polarised to one side or the other, so to read not just a debate between two thinkers, but a debate where each writer engages with himself as well as with the other, is a refreshing change of format. I don’t know that this will change any minds, but I do know that it has already deepened the discussion.
Unionists continue to talk only to their own core voters and not to the centre ground;
Nationalists come up with a better offer than the union, especially on health services.
I stand by that analysis; in particular, I think that the Brexit situation has been contained for now, which renders the other two points moot for the time being. I agree that the direction of travel is towards a majority vote for a united Ireland in a referendum, but I think we are further away from it than Nationalists hope and Unionists fear, and I can foresee a nervous equilibrium holding for some time – as Gerry Lynch once put it, “Welcome to the Northern Ireland that won’t vote itself out of the Union but won’t give Unionism majority support.”
Two points particularly linger with me. One, which is addressed by both writers and which I have also written about before, is that a United Ireland needs to find a solution to the massive share of the public sector in the Northern economy. Will southern voters continue to effectively subsidise Northern government employee lifestyles? Nationalists need to start coming up with an honest answer to that, and we haven’t seen it yet other than hand-waving.
The other is that advocates of a United Ireland need to be honest about the real threat of Loyalist violence in opposition to it, when the time comes (again we tend to get hand-waving on this). Sam McBride makes this point in the closing pages of the book, to my surprise quoting my father on the subject: “for civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it.” He also points to the normalisation of political violence in Trump’s America as a source of infection. I don’t see this as a fatal flaw ion the Nationalist case, but I do wish I had the sense that Nationalism has thought about it seriously. Generosity on cultural issues would be helpful here.
At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.
Discworld’s take on the cinema industry, with awful forces trying to install film-making into the Discworld. I remembered this one less favourably than some; the satire is thickly laid on and very specific to cinema culture, which I’m not as interested in as some people. But I am pretty sure that I read it before my 2017-2023 project of watching every single Oscar-winning film in order, and now that I have done that, I found myself much more able to relax into enjoying it for what it is, a bit of fun and perhaps a return to the roots of Discworld, where the first two books were more pastiche than plot. Not sure that the wizards really work though. You can get Moving Pictures here.
This is the last in the series of Eighth Doctor Adventures that I didn’t get around to writing up when I first read them in 2014-15. Most of them were in the Sabbath arc which didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but the previous volume, Halflife, and this one both seem a bit more coherent and interesting, as perhaps the impending end of the series of books was concentrating the creativity of the authors (and editors).
The Tomorrow Windows is a picaresque novel which includes an exploding Ken Livingstone, windows which give you visions of potential futures, and lots of Douglas Adams-esque planets with humorously depicted aliens. I felt it worked well; I have complained about previous books in the sequence that the character of new-ish companion Trix is underdeveloped, but here she gets a fair bit of first-person narrative and I felt I knew her much better. None of this series is Great Literature, but this one at least is satisfactory. You can get The Tomorrow Windows here.
That finished the unblogged EDA’s, but I find I still have some Who books on the shelves acquired years ago that I have not yet written up, so I’m going to go through them in more or less continuity order. First up will be Paul McAuley’s Eye of the Tyger.
(Published in the US as Thirteen at Dinner.) Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Well, mon ami,” he said. “What do you think of that?”
One of Christie’s classic mysteries, published and set in London in 1933. Clearly aimed at the American market, as the first victim’s wife is an American actress who has married English aristocracy.
A very well put together mystery, with the murderer turning out to be able to mastermind an impressive, but just about believable, set of deceptions. Poirot is especially well portrayed, though one feels sorry for Hastings who is patronised by him in every chapter.
It is however marred by casual, unpleasant and explicit anti-semitism.
My electronic edition spells ‘Edgware’ correctly in the main text and title page, but with an extra ‘e’ in page headers and chapter titles.
Another of the BBC’s Doctor Who audiobooks, read by Fraser Hines, with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria landing on a strange planet where memories and sensual perceptions are up for barter. It takes Victoria in particular to some surprising places, and the central concept is well developed; also Hines is a very good reader of the three main characters. You can get The Elysian Blade here.
The last time I saw that winter count, a girl and her little brother were holding it above them to try to keep the freezing rain off, and, because I was an enemy to them, the girl was holding her hand tight around a long knife, not because that could have worked against me, but because she was Pikuni, and Pikuni fight even when the fight’s over. That’s why your Great Father still hasn’t been able to stamp us all out like he wants, no matter how many soldiers he sends.
This won the Nebula earlier this year, and no doubt will show up on the Hugo long-list. I think that may make Jones the first Native American writer to win a Nebula. It’s a well assembled novel of a Native American vampire in Montana, as told to a Lutheran pastor in 1912, then unearthed by the pastor’s granddaughter a century later. The descriptions are visceral and convincing. I am still not wild about the horror elements and it is a little too gory for my own delicate tastes. But you can get The Buffalo Hunter Hunter here.
Three stories of the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors separately, laying the way for the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan. To be honest I didn’t find any of them particularly memorable, though the art is pleasing. You can get The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor here.
Voting in this year’s Hugos closes on 8 August! Go do it!
1) My top vote in this category goes to Sophie Burnham, author of the one novel I had not previously read, Sargassa. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
The long stretch of summer was just beginning, and already burdened by an oppressive heat that stuck heavy on his skin and clothes. His stepmother Naevia had taken to winding herself in cool strips of linen soaked in water and aloe before hiding in the tiled bathhouse with his little sister Selah, who was six at the time and still too little to be very interesting. And though she’d expressly forbidden him from going out into the sun, Naevia wasn’t his mima, and Arran had slipped away to join the other boys from his elementary in the shallows that ran along the lush private shores of Luxana’s Arborem district.
I thought this was excellent. We start off in an alternate timeline where an extension of the Roman Empire survives in North America, and we have young people involved with deadly palace politics and incipient revolution. I was really enjoying that, and then the writer puts an extra twist on the situation just after the three-quarter mark which made me enjoy it even more. The sequel was also in the Hugo packet, and I’ll read it in due course, but the first was enough for me to determine my vote for Burnham. You can get Sargassa here.
2) Antonia Hodgson, represented by her novel The Raven Scholar, which I already wrote up. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Today, Bersun was plainly dressed. An iron band for a crown, stamped with an ∞ – sacred symbol of the Eternal Path. His black tunic was slashed with five scarlet claw marks, a reversal of his bodyguards’ uniform. He wore chain mail beneath his tunic, and a longsword at his belt. Orrun was at peace, the rebellion a long-faded scar. But Bersun was a warrior to the bone. Even now, after more than two decades on the throne, he looked more natural dressed as one.
Hodgson is apparently already well known as a writer of eighteenth-century crime novels; this is her first fantasy, set in a world (or at least a country) where eight totemic elemental animals (including the titular Raven) dominate human culture, and the new king is determined in a series of Hunger Games-style trials. It’s an intricate and well constructed plot, as leading characters turn out to be completely different to who we thought they were, and indeed the game plan of the bad guys turns out to be completely different to what it looked like. I found the brutal violence a bit ick though. You can get The Raven Scholar here.
3) Kamilah Cole, represented by her novel So Let Them Burn, which I read last year. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Dinner had been served. Usually, her parents would wait for the whole family to be home before even setting the table, but not when she was here. When Aveline Renard Castell, the gods-blessed ruler of San Irie, arrived in Deadegg to visit the Vincent family, they brought out the good plates and their best manners. Which was annoying, because she was, well, the absolute worst.
Story of magically gifted teenage girl military leaders, which interestingly is a sequel to an unpublished adventure but works regardless. Lots of high politics and dragons. You can get it here.
4) Jared Pechaček, represented by his novel The West Passage, which I read last year. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Pell had always liked the refectory, with the quiet, half- conscious liking one feels for something one has known since childhood. A clerestory of tiny square windows ran along the eastern wall, letting in morning sunlight and evening breezes. Vast old tapestries covered the stone walls. Their rich colors had dimmed, many were moth- eaten, and some had fallen, but the stories and strange figures they held made her feel as if she were a creature of legend herself. Bats roosted in the south rafters, pigeons flew in and out, and ivy curled in at the windows, but even in its state of decay the refectory held some clear beauty quite separate from the ancient chaos of the rest of the palace.
A nicely worked out secondary world with some odd dynastic quirks. You can get it here.
Generation starship with all kinds of issues between bottled brains and AIs. Some cute stuff but felt it wasn’t fully under control.
6) Molly O’Neill, represented by an extract from her novel Greenteeth. Second paragraph of third chapter:
I was stiff from my sleep and wanted to get up. I coughed loudly and rustled the reeds and branches of my nest more than I usually do. I didn’t want to startle her but Temperance stayed still, her chin resting on her knees. Her face was perfectly blank and pale, devoid of any expression, even when I scuttled past her to dangle my feet in the water. I looked back at her and tried to smile without showing any of my teeth. This was difficult to manage and a few of the first row popped out. I gave up and stopped smiling.
Clunky prose, doesn’t get the intersection between modern characterization and ancient lore, too much “look what a cute idea”!
That’s it for my Hugo votes this year, at least the ones I am making public. Happy voting, all!
Non-genre 4 (YTD 27) Lord Edgware Dies, by Agatha Christie Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Xenophon’s Ephesian history: or the love-adventures of Abrocomas and Anthia, in five books, translated from the Greek by Mr. Rooke Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata
Doctor Who 6 (YTD 49) Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton The Elysian Blade, by David Bishop The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones
Comics 3 (YTD 20) Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor, by James Peaty et al The Many Lives of Doctor Who, by Richard Dinnick et al Time out of Mind, by Jody Houser et al
~7,200 pages (YTD 48,700), counting the audiobooks as 100. 9/31 (YTD 79/204) by non-male writers (Copeland, Cherry, Dent, Christie, Collins, O’Neill, Lord, Burnham, Houser) 3/31 (YTD 20/204) by writers of colour (Kawabata, Ekpeki, Lord) 4 out of 31 reread (Brideshead Revisited, Moving Pictures, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, The Tomorrow Windows) 203 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 4 from June 2025.
Reading now Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton Autumn, by Ali Smith Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian
Coming soon (perhaps)
Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley The Time of Angels, by Jenny Colgan Doctor Who: The Invasion, by Ian Marter The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher
Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker Last Exit, by Max Gladstone Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century, ed. Laura Horn
TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor Dead Lions, by Mick Herron The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton Léopoldville 60, by Baudouin Deville Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi Jingo, Terry Pratchett Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset Septology, by Jon Fosse
Second paragraph of third section (which is the third of three introductions, this one by the editor Glyn Morgan):
The book that you hold in your hands was created as a companion project to the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition that opened at the Science Museum in London in October 2022. This book is an extension of the themes and topics covered there, but stands alone as a collection of essays and images across five different topics, each exploring different aspects of the global genre of science fiction and its relationship with scientific enquiry, history and culture.
I got this book at the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition in the Science Museum in London in December 2022. I didn’t bother writing up the exhibition itself at the time – to be honest, I did not find it very exciting at all, but could not work up the energy to be mean about it.
However, this lavishly illustrated book of short essays and interviews is a good souvenir. The interviews are with Stanley Chen / Chen Qiufan, Charlie Jane Anders, Vandana Singh, Tade Thompson and Kim Stanley Robinson. The five individual sections are on machines / robots, space travel, communication and translation, aliens and millennial despair. The essay that I enjoyed most was Rachel Cordasco’s on science fiction in translation, which is not to say that any of the others were bad. The illustrations are relevant and well chosen. I think I got more enjoyment from the content of the book than from the content of the exhibition, and probably spent more time reading it than I did in the Science Museum that day three and a half years ago. Worth looking out for. You can get Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination here.
This was my shortest unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles was An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent, but I didn’t finish that and can’t be bothered to write it up; likewise the very last book I acquired in 2022 other than Doctor Who comics, Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War by Bardhyl Mahmuti.
The department secretary/courier glanced back at the envelope he had tossed onto my desk. ‘How would I know?’
I’ve only read one of Karen Lord’s books before, but was inspired to get this after meeting her at Eastercon (we were part of a big group that went out for dinner one evening, and ended up sharing a massive baked camembert between the two of us).
I really enjoyed this. It’s a very humane story of a nearly-human race whose world has been destroyed, and of the government agent whose job it is to settle refugees from the genocide onto a new planet. We end up touring the new planet which itself turns out to be pretty diverse, with different social structures and beliefs in different regions, while the two protagonists sort out their own relationship while observing the other personal dynamics in their team. The book was published in 2013, so just before the refugee crisis really hit, but was very timely for all that. Lord pulls off the trick of vivid alien planetary settings and vivid yet comprehensible almost-human characterisation.
The book came fifth in the 2014 Locus Awards but rather surprisingly didn’t get any other nominations. It was my top unread science fiction book, before the Hugo packet landed; top of that list now is The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. You can get The Best of All Possible Worlds here.
When I first started to watch The Web Planet in 2007, the DVD was unfortunately still in my laptop when it was stolen by a sneak thief at the Gare du Nord in Brussels. I got another copy eventually and wrote:
I got the DVD of The Web Planet, a First Doctor story from 1965 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, back in January; and then, after I had read Wood and Miles‘ excoriating description of it, the disc was in my laptop when it got stolen. But I caught up with this one over the weekend as well.
Oh dear.
It’s very brave to try and produce an entire six-part story with no humanoid characters other than the regular cast, and the production teeters on the edge of greatness but, ultimately, falls off and hurtles to its doom. I mean, the Zarbi, with their unearthly whistling, are actually pretty good, so good that you can nearly forget that they are blokes in giant ant costumes. And the disembodied Animus is pretty sinister. But the Venom Grubs are, frankly, pathetic. And the Menoptra, with their bizarre dance movements, and their pitiful Optera relatives, are just ludicrous. I can’t quite believe that this is the only story from the original Season Two (apart from the glorious Dalek Invasion of Earth) available on DVD. Almost any other would make more sense and be a better advertisement for Who as a whole. (I have reservations about The Chase, though it does at least have Daleks and a variety of settings, and I’ve only seen the first episode of The Space Museum so can’t speak to the whole of it, though I must say it really grabbed me.)
Maureen O’Brien is good as Vicki though, perhaps the best I remember her in any of her stories. The others are fine too, especially (as ever) Hartnell.
Coming back to it two years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
When I first watchedThe Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.
Coming back to it, I attempted to binge the whole story in an evening, and I think this was a mistake; I found myself confused and actually a little bored. Yes, the makers of the show achieved miracles on a shoestring, but it’s difficult for today’s viewer to grasp. People who saw it the first time around were generally more impressed, most notably Peter Capaldi:
…those old shows were only made to be watched once, on a flickering monochrome telly that smelled of valves and furniture polish. In that context, they succeeded immeasurably. They were triumphs of imagination. It may surprise you now, but something like The Web Planet lived powerfully and expansively in my head for decades… until the DVDs came along and spoiled the party. But I’m glad to say that the Menoptra eventually flitted back into my dreams, where they belong.
The novel, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton, the Australian writer of the original story, was the second Doctor Who novel ever published (after Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Chesterton, get back! Back!”
I (obviously) read it as a child, and was fascinated. Coming back to it in 2008, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.
The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.
To call it “the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era” is a strong statement, and to be honest I think three of the four Hartnell Dalek stories are better contenders. But as a story, it’s at the upper end and the novelisation pulls that out. You can get Doctor Who and the Zarbi here.
The illustrations in the book are really striking.
They are credited to one John Wood, which is also the name of the BBC designer who worked on the TV story. Fannish lore, however, insists that these are two different people, and further that the illustrator John Wood is a mistake for John Woods, one of the illustrators who also worked on the three 1960s Dalek books (The Dalek Book, The Dalek World and The Dalek Outer Space Book). Unfortunately the three or four different artists who worked on the Dalek books are not credited individually, so it is difficult to compare.
I am not convinced by fannish lore. I think Occam’s Razor shaves closer to the possibility that the same artist designed the TV show and illustrated the book. Also, the Vicki in the illustrations is a brunette, whereas Maureen O’Brien at that age was blonde. Surely this indicates that the illustrations could have been based on the original production design, which might have dated from before Maureen O’Brien’s start on the show? The Web Planet was only her third story, and its first episode was her seventh. Also, if John Wood’s name was spelled incorrectly when the book was first published, surely he would have had a chance to correct it before a different publisher brought it out again ten years later?
Anyway. Brigid Cherry, a retired media studies academic who like Peter Capaldi is old enough to have seen the story when it was first broadcast in 1965, has written a redemptive Black Archive monograph on it. I must say that while my favourite Black Archives are those that tell me all the reasons why my favourite stories are so fantastic, I do also like the ones like this where the writer challenges my less positive views and finds reasons that I had not considered to appreciate a story. There are only three chapters, but they are long and it is a chunky read.
A substantial introduction, with the title “So the Legends Say: Receptions of The Web Planet“, looks at views of The Web Planet, contrasting the rather harsh take of modern fans such as me with the much more positive memories of those who saw it at the time, including the author herself, Stephen James Walker and contributors to an online forum. She doesn’t quote Peter Capaldi here, but his comments are fully aligned with her argument.
I’m going to lazily use the author’s summaries of her own chapters. “Chapter one [whose title is “Every Corner of Vortis: Televisuality”] explores the aesthetics of the story in relation to how television was made at the time, and the ways in which the mise-en-scène, art design, camerawork and other stylistic elements were determined by these production processes. In terms of The Web Planet being considered an ambitious, if not over-ambitious, experiment, this chapter also frames early Doctor Who, and this story specifically, as an example of the experimental television being produced at the time.”
“Chapter two [whose title is: “Flying Above thought: Performance”] extends this approach by further considering the performativity of the story, considering it in relation to art or media forms such as puppetry, mime, and avant-garde theatre. These two chapters are necessarily historiography (writing about the past) not in order to definitively answer the question of whether The Web Planet is great children’s TV or a failed experiment – it might be both, of course. Rather, it is an analysis intended to re-examine it from the perspective of TV production history and the history of the wider arts and popular culture of the time. Such historiography… can be both an account of industrial circumstances (in this instance, aspects of production and performance at the BBC in the 1960s) and a social history where the text reflects the national (or global) zeitgeist.”
The second paragraph of the third and final chapter (whose title is: “The Light is Good: Themes”) is:
There are several technological forms contrasted in The Web Planet: the organic technology of the Carsinome; the inorganic crystalline technology used by the Menoptra (the prime example of which is the communication device that Vrestin uses to contact the invasion force in ‘The Zarbi’); the metallic gold collars (again inorganic) used by the Zarbi to ‘morphotise’ victims; and the mysterious energy that powers the TARDIS itself and is shown to repel the Animus and Zarbi (potentially both organic and inorganic since the Doctor’s ship often seems ‘alive’). These various forms of technology are indicative of technological, and thus cultural, development in each of the character groupings in the narrative.
The author’s summary is: “chapter 3 turns to the textual meanings that underpin the story, revealing the ideological meanings and discourses in relation to the 1960s zeitgeist. This also draws on yet another element of historiography discussed by Hilmes, that is consideration of the conditions under which the popular culture text is consumed or experienced.”
The short conclusion, “The Silence of Time: Reappraising The Web Planet”, sums up what has been said, and ends:
Bear in mind that when the Doctor stops Ian from plunging his hand into the acid pool in the opening episode, the lesson to be learnt is to be more cautious before rushing in and take more time to better understand what we are seeing. It is past time to re-appraise The Web Planetin contexts other than an established fan canon born of naiveté or ignorance of television history. It is, then, time to come back to Vortis. As this book has argued, The Web Planet’s innovative approaches demand it is given its deserved status in the canon of British experimental television.
As I hope is clear by now, I found this an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and maybe the next time I pop the DVD in the player I’ll approach the story in a more redemptive frame of mind. You can get the Black Archive here.
Andrew Hilton is more than ninety years old and hasn’t stood at his full height in ten. He was a tower of a man in his prime, two metres tall and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not and tell him ‘No.’ Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, with everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He’s spent his final months crumpled up in bed like a dying spider, changing to a corpse’s colour ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he’d lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be: a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people.
One of the hotly tipped books this year, a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, this is a great story combining the vibes of A Scanner Darkly and H.P. Lovecraft, and perhaps a nod to the Silents of Matt Smith era Doctor Who, and Charlie Stross’s Laundry. The Antimemetics Division deals with entities which are invading us, taking our memories, our consciousness, our loves and emotions. and leaving nothing. People who have worked at the Division for years turn up and think it is their first day. The protagonist loses all knowledge of her husband. The sense of alienation and loss of trust in reality is tremendously conveyed. You do slightly wonder how the Antimemetics Division itself could withstand the tests of time, given the powerful nature of the opposition. But I enjoyed the ride a lot. You can get There is No Antimemetics Division here.
Gerry decided to test at 23andMe, too. She was curious about her own results, and besides, if she matched Alice, that would eliminate some possibilities that Alice needed to consider—that Alice had been adopted or that Jim Collins wasn’t, biologically speaking, Alice’s father. These were contenders for an explanation, even if Gerry told Alice she was insane when Alice suggested their mother could have had an affair.
My attentive reader will have noticed that I have become very fascinated by the addition of DNA analysis to the suite of tools available to the genealogy researcher. I have been fortunate; all of my own direct ancestors appear to be genetically who we thought they were, at least back to the early nineteenth century; and while I have identified a couple of absentee parents for other people, only one of them was still alive (and his daughter decided not to try contacting him).
Libby Copeland takes us to stories of people who found much closer and less pleasant surprises in their DNA, and asks what this means for the American concept of families? And it is a much more American than European thing; I find more relatives on the DNA sites connected to my American grandmother than to my three Irish grandparents combined. There are lines around consent and confidentiality that modern technology is redrawing. The privacy of a brief relationship decades ago is up-ended by the genetic information encoded in the body of the child of that relationship, who has a right to know where they come from too.
If you haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of DNA testing, but are considering it, this is an essential read to think through what you might find out. If you have, you’ll find yourself alternating between nods of recognition and jaw-dropping astonishment. I am lost in admiration of CeCe Moore, who has turned the combination of DNA analysis and genealogical research into a new branch of science. My own dabbling has been fascinating but without any huge shocks. Not everyone is so lucky.
I will never see Lenore Dove again. Never hear her laugh coming from high above me in the branches. Never feel the warmth of her in my arms as we lay on a bed of pine needles, my lips pressed into the hollow of her neck. Never pull a stray goose feather from her hair, or listen to her play her tune box, or press my finger into the crease that forms between her eyebrows when she’s puzzling out a thought. Never see her face brighten at a bag of gumdrops or a full moon or the sound of me whispering, “I love you like all-fire.”
I have been wondering about this book since grinding through the statistics for the YA finalists in the BSFA, Nebula/Andre Norton and now the Hugo/Lodestar, given that it is so far ahead of the field in terms of ownership on all of the platforms. Apparently it was the best-selling book in the USA last year. I wasn’t a massive fan of the Hunger Games trilogy though I could see how it developed a cult following. It took me a while to remember how this story, which is about the past Hunger Games victory of Haymitch Abernathy of District 12, fits into the narrative 24 years before the original novel is set.
Reader, I hugely enjoyed it. Even though we know from the very beginning that everyone else is going to die horribly, the story pushes on with tremendous energy and momentum, and a strong empathy for the children who are being slaughtered by each other in the ritual killing. I guess it’s notable that the technology of Panem doesn’t change much in the 24 years between the two stories, but then again, it’s a repressive place where innovation serves only the interests of state surveillance. I found it an easy, exciting read and I was actually able to remember the plot afterwards. You can get Sunrise on the Reaping here.
With that, it’s time to decide my votes for this year’s Lodestar Award. I think I will go as follows:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Among Ghosts, by Rachel Hartman
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee
Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen
They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran
Oathbound, by Tracy Deonn
I will write up one more category here, the Astounding Award, before the voting deadline.
