From the Heart of Europe

• Drinking: How to lie about wine | The Economist
  Failing to detect the real expert.
  (tags: wine )
• More Product, Less Process for Born-Digital Collections
  Thoughts on digital archiving.
  (tags: )
• HC 643 The foreign policy implications of and for a separate Scotland
  A sane note by the very sane Graham Avery.
  (tags: )
• The Long, Winding, and Shapeshifting Trail to Episodes VII, VIII & IX
  The history of the future of the franchise.
  (tags: sf )
• The Astonishingly Non-Nonsensical Plot of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
  @use_theforce_em finds hidden depths.
  (tags: films sf )
• The EU Budget: The Truth « Jonathan Fryer
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Hurricane recovery map
  Where New York's public transport is (and isn't) running on Thursday.(PDF)
  (tags: maps weather )
• Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, by James Tiptree, Jr.
  Chris Beckett explores Alice Sheldon.
  (tags: sf )

Another delightful look at part of England by the author of Pies and Prejudice, this time looking at southern England as a partial outsider. Though he spends a lot of time on the usual quirks of local populace and history, his most powerful chapters are on great English literature and also humour. Strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in England.

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This is an exceptionally violent Who book, taking the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria and dropping them into a vicious colonial conflict which is pretty clearly based on the Indonesian conquest of West Papua. This amount of sex and gore isn't really my thing (and seems wel out of place for a Who novel of the black and white era), but I found it a compelling read none the less - clearly the author is passionate about the setting (one of the more miserably botched decolonisations of the 1960s) and the story is tightly plotted and well told with compelling guest characters. Not yer typical Who novel, and not necessarily in a bad way.

Apparently this has some continuity with The Dimension Riders by the same author, but I'm afraid I had forgotten the key details. I did enjoy the Doctor and Bernice skipping between time zones (1997 and 2387, and the far future), actually rather reminiscent of the previous novel in this series, Set Piece but perhaps slightly better executed, the 1997 scenes being particularly vivid. However the telepathic gestalt alien is not terribly exciting by Who standards.

Much below usual this month, partly becuase of two very intense business trips which left me little time to think let alone read and tended to feature flights at antisocial hours, and partly also that I'm nearing the end of three very long books which will push up November's page count significantly.

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