pic#ortelius
Like most kids growing up in Catholic Ireland, I "did" some of O'Faolain's short stories at school. I guess I hadn't appreciated how big a figure he was in the (admittedly small) world of the arts in mid-century Ireland, constructing the literary self-image of the new state as it found its way to becoming the Republic. This book was his third history book in five years, coming after his edition of Wolfe Tone's autobiography in 1937 and his biography of Daniel O'Connell in 1938; he claims not to be attempting a serious academic history, but this is disingenuous; he must have realised that a book on such a subject by a writer of his profile would establish received wisdom for decades to come.

I'm more interested in the subject than the writer. O'Neill was the leader of the Irish side in the last struggle between the old Gaelic order and the London government; surrendering after nine years of war in 1603, he slipped away to exile in Rome and died there. For O'Faolain's purposes, he is of course a hero in that he tried but failed to establish an independent Irish state. But there were a couple of interesting slants which prevent it from being a hagiography.

Hiram Morgan has disproved one of the key planks of O'Faolain's narrative, that the young O'Neill was fostered in England, and Morgan is rather better on the overall politics and culture of the era. It's a bit of a shame, actually, because O'Faolain is big on the importance of communication and even compromise with the English, and O'Neill's (fictional) early life in England equips him to be the right man for this job. Where O'Faolain does better than Morgan is on the human level. His sixteenth-century Ireland is a rather sexy place (certainly in comparison to the repressed de Valera / McQuaid state). O'Neill's marital history is explained in great detail, including the elopement with Mabel Bagenal, the daughter of one of his regional English rivals. O'Faolain is fairly neutral rather than scandalised about this; I guess that he hoped his readers would draw their own conclusions.

And his account of the end of the war is rather good, though here he does slip into moral lessons from history a bit. Though a proud Cork man himself, O'Faolain admits that Kinsale was practically the worst place for the Spanish to land; had they come anywhere in the north or northwest coast, O'Faolain reckons they would have won the war fairly quickly. As it was, a less good English leader than Mountjoy could easily have screwed up the siege. But it's impossible to find a positive description of the way the arriving Irish soldiers blundered into a catastrophic and decisive defeat, and O'Faolain goes into splendid descriptive detail about it. O'Neill is in the end the victim of a bad Spanish decision, unusually good English command, and a lack of discipline among his own supporters and allies. My memory is that Cyril Falls, writing only a few years later and as an avowed Unionist, is actually a bit more even-handed in his assessment.

Anyway, not an essential book for historical understanding of the period, but an important book for understanding more recent perceptions of the events. And quite a good read.
tardis
Russell is generally one of the better writers of Who spinoff fiction (the novelisation of the TV movie, the Torchwood novel The Twilight Streets, the Tenth Doctor / Wilf novel Beautiful Chaos) but this early Missing Adventure is not a hit. Aliens who look exactly like cats plan to tear the earth in half, as you do, but are stymied by the fact that continental drift has moved crucial equipment out of alignment over a few dozen millennia (when continents would only have drifted by about a kilometre). Some nice descriptive passages, especially about Cumbria and Polly, admitted by the author to be particular interests in the foreword, but otherwise the narrative is confused and cluttered. You can skip this and I did not really need to reread it.

Links I found interesting for 25-05-2012

summer

New Doctor Who episode

tardis
Only two minutes, but great fun:


And it looks like Rebecca, Emily and Libby join this list.

2012 Hugos: Best Novelette

buzz
Once again, thanks to the Hugo Voters Packet, I have been able to read the five nominees in the Best Novelette category and decide how to rank them.

6) Ray of Light, 5) No Award, 4) Fields of Gold, 3) The Copenhagen Interpretation, 2) What We Found, 1) Six Months, Three Days )

See also: Best Novel | Best Short Story | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Fan Artist

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Simpsons / Game of Thrones mashup

"Ray of Light", by Brad Torgersen

buzz
A couple of extracts from this Hugo-nominated novelette for your enjoyment. At one point our narrator writes of:
...risking my life and the old sub to chase a wild hair through the vast, dark ocean.
This would be a jarring enough metaphor if "hare" had been spelt correctly, as a waterlogged animal would not get very far once submerged in the vast dark ocean. With the incorrect spelling of "hair", the entire sentence is nonsensical.

Later on, when we first encounter the ray of light of the title of the story, it appears thus:
...there was a gloaming light in the very far distance. Only, gloaming wasn't the right word.
Indeed it wasn't; "gloaming" is not an adjective, but a noun which means "twilight", often more specifically "dusk". The narrator / the author may have meant "dim" or "gleaming".

This one will not be at the top of my ballot paper.

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Links I found interesting for 24-05-2012

Worrying statistic: hare vc hair

alphabets
I am alarmed to discover that Google has 51 hits for the phrase "chase a wild hair [sic]" but only 39 for "chase a wild hare", which, it should go without saying, is very obviously the correct spelling. Life is very strange.

Edited to add: Per [info]tortoise in comments I tried again and got 403 hits for "hair" and 59 for "hare". Which is a little more reassuring.

Links I found interesting for 23-05-2012

summer

Links I found interesting for 22-05-2012

summer

Links I found interesting for 21-05-2012

summer

2012 Hugos: Best Fan Artist

buzz
I don't think I have ever voted in this category before, but after last year's debacle when I failed to vote for Randall Munroe of xkcd, and he missed winning the award by a single vote, I have decided to educate myself thanks to the Hugo Voters Package. There are five artists in this category (none of them Randall Munroe, for some reason) and I have heard of only one, so I am judging the others purely on the basis of the four pieces submitted for the Package; if they have done better (or worse) work over the last year I'm not aware of it.

Edited to add: I now realise that Randall Munroe is in fact a nominee but that none of his work has been included in the Hugo Voter Package. He is getting my top vote anyway, and I have revised the others down a place.

Without very much hesitation, I rank them as follows:
6) Steve Stiles. Three of the pieces submitted are weak jokes; the fourth is more interesting, a bloke looking out of the frame with a screaming face reflected in his sunglasses. But not interesting enough to shift him from the bottom spot on my ballot.
5) Brad Foster. This was the one artist whose work I did already know, in that he provides cover cartoons for Ansible. Nothing seriously wrong with any of the pieces but they are pretty basic. The best is the logo for last year's CONDFW, excerpted here.
4) I hesitated a bit about Taral Wayne, because the first two pieces are a gnome joke and a jack o'lantern leering at a furry creature of some kind. But the other two are both rather good, a planetscape crowded with fannish references and a lovely long-focus landscape, nicely realised, with a trademark furry explorer. I like both better than I like any of the Foster or Stiles pieces, so Wayne goes above them.
3) We are in a slight chalk and cheese situation with Spring Schoenhuth, whose medium is metalwork rather than graphic art. The jewellery photographs we have been given to judge her work on are all beautiful pieces which one would like to own; there's a sense of consistent attention to detail. It may be slightly quirky of me, but I put her third.
2) That brings us to Maurine Starkey, three of whose four pieces impressed me as having a story to tell; I was underwhelmed by her Close Encounters fanzine cover, but her Sherlock Holmes homage, her skeleton resting in flowers, and especially the weird children on the cover of Askance #24 would all make me want to pick up whatever they adorned and also look for more from that artist.
1) Randall Munroe. A consistent cause of delight and entertainment, and occasionally education and enlightenment.


So, the Hugo Voter Package has successfully educated me about the Best Fan Artist category, though slightyl misled me by the absence of one of the nominees' work. More to come.

See also: Best Novel, Best Short Story, Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

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Nebula Awards

buzz
Best Novel: Among Others, by Jo Walton - HOORAY!!!!
Best Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” by Kij Johnson
Best Novelette: “What We Found,” by Geoff Ryman
Best Short Story: “The Paper Menagerie,” by Ken Liu
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation: Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife,” written by Neil Gaiman, directed by Richard Clark
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book: The Freedom Maze, by Delia Sherman

Grand Master Award to Connie Willis.
Solstice Awards to John Clute and posthumously to Octavia Butler.
Service to SFWA Award to Bud Webster.

Congratulations to [info]papersky!!! (And to the others of course.

Jo Walton, Ken Liu, and (slightly to my surprise) Geoff Ryman are all first-time Nebula winners. Kij Johnson had won twice before, making this her third. (Years of birth: 1951, 1960, 1964, 1976; but not necessarily in that order.) Neil Gaiman had of course won two Nebula Awards for written fiction, but this is his first Bradbury Award (he had been nominated for Best Script for Princess Mononoke.

Supercalorific banana chocolate cake

khinkali
recipe )

With many thanks to Laura Carre-Diaz.

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My reading speed

books
928 wpm according to this test.

Links I found interesting for 19-05-2012

Links I found interesting for 18-05-2012

summer

Links I found interesting for 16-05-2012

summer
manga-me
A couple of people have been looking back at their blog posts on this day over the last five years, so I thought, why not?

15 May 2011: I commemorated the death of Peter Grimwade (among other Whoniversaries), wrote up a Doctor Who audio starring Mary Tamm and quoted Neil Gaiman on Who.

15 May 2010: I gave a grudging yes to the new British coalition government, reported that Northern Ireland's local government reform was to be delayed yet again (it has just been restarted), and reviewed a Hugo-nominated novel that didn't much impress me.

15 May 2009: I complained about twitterbots from British Columbia, reviewed Shakespeare's The Tempest and The Wizard of Oz, and added a thought about the links between the Tin Woodman and the Cybermen.

15 May 2008: I wished my wife a happy birthday (I was in Albania I think), and mourned the demise of the daily RFE/RL news bulletin.

15 May 2007: I reviewed the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, an Iain Banks novel and an early Doctor Who story.

So, what about you?

JKR v GRRM

earthsea
4koma comic strip - A Clash of Writers
see more Comixed

Links I found interesting for 15-05-2012

summer

Links I found interesting for 14-05-2012

summer
buzz
I decided I really wanted this book after the ever-excellent Bookslut tipped me off to this interview with the author. It mostly succeeds; it is the story of a man going through intense emotional crisis and working it out by writing a book about pencil sharpening, except that almost everything apart from the pencil sharpening has been taken out. Rees is good at capturing the tone of how-to manuals, especially when describing really obvious and easy tasks. There are a couple of points when he wanders far off-topic and the humour did not work for me, even taking it as intentionally ironic. On the other hand, I loved the sequence about how best to help your friend use an electric pencil sharpener (by breaking into their house and smashing it). I suspect that most readers will dip into it rather than go through from start to end, and that may be best.
buzz
It may be ten years or so since I read this, and I had forgotten how good it is. Set at the Versailles court of Louis XIV, it is the story of Marie-Josèphe de la Croix and a captive sea monster, destined for slaughter for royal entertainment, and how her realisation of the captive's personhood revolutionises Marie-Josèphe's world, all in lush yet intense prose. Presumably it was one of the sources at the back of Neal Stephenson's mind for the Baroque series set around the same time.

The Moon and the Sun won the 1998 Nebula for Best Novel, one of those years when the Nebula process came up with an admirable choice from a strong field. I have read three of the other shortlisted books, and two of them - Bujold's Memory and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones - are particular favourites of mine, though perhaps less obvious Nebula winners. I have also read (though was much less impressed by) Connie Willis' Bellwether; the other nominations were King's Dragon by Kate Elliott, Ancient Shores by Jack McDevitt, and City on Fire by Walter Jon Williams. (Blue Mars and Forever Peace won the Hugos around this time.)

Links I found interesting for 11-05-2012

summer

2012 Hugos: Best Novel

buzz
Fortunately none of this year's Hugo nominees is actually a bad book, an improvement on some previous years (no Willis, no Sawyer). Even so, I found it pretty easy to rank the nominees as follows:

6) Deadline, 5) No Award, 4) A Dance With Dragons, 3) Leviathan Wakes, 2) Embassytown, 1) Among Others )

NB that three out of five of these feature dead girls in frequent conversation with central characters. In two cases it is the narrator's sister.
See also: Best Short story, Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

Links I found interesting for 10-05-2012

May Books 6) Deadline, by Mira Grant

buzz
Last of the Hugo nominees for this year for me; a sequel to last year's Feed, taking forward the story of newsbloggers in a near-future USA covering the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. Lots of action and capers, but I did not enjoy it as much: the previous book's narrator is here present only as a voice in her brother's head, there is no presidential campaign subplot, and most of all the story is left unresolved at the end, with a massive plot twist setting us up for the next volume, so it's not a complete work. With some regret, this goes at the bottom of my Hugo ballot.
manga-me
A book by a prominent Buddhist monk outlining key teachings of Buddhism. I started off rather liking it as an approach to mindfulness and how to process suffering and the good things about life. But after he Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, I started to get a bit irritated with the constant discovery of new lists of important spiritual things, from the Two Truths up to the Twelve Links of Interdependent Co-Arising; it seems to me that over-describing the undescribable is fundamentally a mistake. I also started wondering to what extent Thich Nhat Hanh is presenting a mainstream account of Buddhism or his own particular take (or his school's). And I wonder also if there is much sense of the numinous in Buddhism; there didn't seem a lot here. Anyway, it is still the most interesting book by a Buddhist on Buddhism that I have read.

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