I like Simon Guerrier; up to now I have generally liked his writing; I love Peter Purves both as Stephen and playing the Doctor; in the week when we got the sad news of Jean Marsh’s death, it was lovely to hear her resuming the role of Sara Kingdom; and the story of the Doctor’s first encounter with Sontarans – proper bloodthirsty Lynx and Styre type Sontarans – is well structured and well told.
But I am afraid I don’t like torture scenes, and although of course it’s perfectly consistent with Styre in The Sontaran Experiment, I didn’t like that much either. So it’s a rare thumbs down for me for this particular combination of creators.
Soon after reading some of her father’s work, I got hold of his daughter’s best known book. The only work of hers that I previously remember reading is The Captains and the Kings, at least thirty-five years ago.
This is a short, swift, very sad story about a friendship across class and religious lines in pre-first world war rural Ireland, which then plays out grimly in the trenches. There’s a wealth of hidden sexuality and buried family secrets, and the politics of conflict which plays out as much in the internal tensions of the Irish troops as with the Germans. It’s very well done. You can get it here.
Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival
Joe Simpson
62,315
2,763
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Mario Vargas Llosa
22,064
2,788
The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
25,982
1,910
Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time
Mark Adams
20,164
1,172
Conversation in the Cathedral
Mario Vargas Llosa
10,654
1,341
These are pretty solid numbers, after a few countries which scored less well.
Slightly controversially, perhaps, I’m allowing the top spot to Bel Canto. Even though it is not explicitly set in Peru, everyone agrees that it’s based on the 1996-97 hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, so I think it qualifies. I was a bit surprised to find that the book in second spot, The Celestine Prophecy, is also set in Peru – I don’t feel the slightest inclination to read it – but apparently that’s the case. The others are much less surprising, with the recently departed Mario Vargas Llosa filling a lot of the spots as you go down the table.
I disqualified the following:
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder – only two of its five parts is set in Peru
The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in the Dominican Republic
The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in various countries
Inés of My Soul, by Isabel Allende – only one part set in Peru
The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa – set in Brazil
People seem to have a tendency to slap the ‘Peru’ tag onto books by Mario Vargas Llosa, whether or not his country is represented in the actual content.
In the brief downtime between announcing the Hugo final ballot, and getting voting under way (which will be Real Soon Now), I reflected that the two disqualifications and two withdrawals from the ballot this year seemed rather low by recent standards. So I looked into the records, and found indeed that of the seven years that I have been involved with running the Hugos, only one had fewer such cases – two were disqualified, and one declined, in 2021, otherwise a really crazy year for Worldcon.
(For these purposes I’m counting a disqualification as any exclusion of an otherwise valid nominee by the administrators under their interpretation of the rules. This includes the various permutations under the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, and also the bad decisions made and published by the Chengdu Worldcon team in 2023.)
The proliferation of withdrawals and disqualifications is a recent phenomenon. I have access to the nomination statistics for 1980 and 1996, and for every year since 1998. From 1998 to 2002, and again in 2007, there were no disqualifications or withdrawals from the Hugo ballot at all, and in the four intervening years there was only one each time. (Ted Chiang, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman declined fiction nominations in 2003, 2005 and 2006, and there was a disqualification in the Best Semiprozine category in 2004.)
One potential finalist was disqualified in 2008, and two potential finalists declined nomination in 2009, 2010 and 2011; and since then there have been at least three withdrawals and/or disqualifications each year. The high water mark was, infamously, 2023, where (according to the official statistics) twelve potential finalists were disqualified and another three declined nomination, though evidence suggests that votes for many more Chinese nominees were removed from the system at an earlier stage, effectively disqualifying over twenty of them without making it public.
The second highest total for withdrawals and disqualifications was the previous year, 2022, when I was Deputy Administrator. We disqualified seven potential finalists that year, four of them in the Best Editor, Long From category (where another potential finalist withdrew); a unique issue at that time was the blockage to global supply chains caused by the pandemic, as a result of which a lot of 2021 publication schedules slipped, though in my view it also shows the difficulties of voter awareness of the editing process.
The only other ballots that saw as many as seven disqualifications were the 1939 and 1941 Retro Hugos. 1939 (awarded in 2014) saw a lot of eligibility confusion, and in 1941 (awarded in 2016) three of the disqualified potential finalists had had sufficient support to qualify in both Dramatic Presentation categories, and of course they could only be on the ballot in one, and therefore were disqualified from the other.
Among the Hugos, the Best Dramatic Presentation categories have generally had the most disqualifications, largely thanks to the rule (or custom) preventing entire TV series and individual episodes of that series appearing on the same ballot. Thirteen BDP Short Form and five BDP Long Form nominees have been disqualified by administrators in the years that those categories have existed, though in many of these cases at least part of the material disqualified in one category appeared on the ballot in another.
The other category with a lot of disqualifications is the Astounding Award, previously the Campbell Award, where there have been seven disqualifications over the years where I have data (including one each in 1980 and in 1996). Sometimes voters (and indeed writers themselves) are uncertain as to when a writer’s career actually started.
The only disqualification for Best Fan Writer on record was the incomprehensible decision to exclude Paul Weimer in 2023; it’s rather difficult to see how anyone who has published anything fannish in the year of eligibility could be ruled out in that category. Apart from Retro Hugos, nobody has ever been disqualified in Best Fanzine or Best Novella, at least in the years for which I have data; nor for the Lodestar, which is also a recent innovation and whose criteria again are broad. Best Game or Interactive Work is the only category where there has not yet been either a withdrawal or a disqualification, but since it has only been going for two years, there is plenty of time…
The largest number of voluntary withdrawals of finalists who would otherwise have qualified numerically is six, in 2016. There were five withdrawals in 2015 and also last year, 2024. As noted above, the last year in which there were no withdrawals from the regular Hugos was 2013.
Seven finalists for the Best Novel and the Best Editor, Long Form categories have withdrawn from the ballot. Pro Artists have declined nomination five times, and Fan Writers and authors of both Novellas and Novelettes four times each, in the years where I have full data.
We have yet to see a voluntary withdrawal in the Best Graphic Story or Comic, BDP Short Form, Game / Interactive Work, and Editor Short Form Hugo categories, or for the Astounding Award or its predecessor, as far as I know. The first and so far only withdrawal from the Lodestar was this year, the first and only withdrawal from Best Related Work that I know of was last year, and the the first only withdrawal from BDP Long was in 2023.
There are two very striking shifts in the numbers. Up to 2011, there were an average of 0.375 disqualifications each year. Since 2012, counting the regular Hugos only, there has been an average of 4.00 disqualifications each year. It’s an abrupt change.
The shift in the number of withdrawals is a little later. Up to 2014, the average was 0.73 per year. Since 2015, the average number of withdrawals from that year’s Hugos is 3.4.
The five rounds of Retro Hugos run between 2014 and 2020 saw no withdrawals at all, hardly surprising in that few of the nominees were in a position to accept or decline nomination, but there were an average of 4.4 disqualifications each year.
(Not that it is a significant difference, but the average number of withdrawals in 2017, 2019-22 and 2024-25, the years where I was personally involved with administering the nominations, is lower – 2.43 rather than 3.4 – and so is the average number of disqualifications – 3.57 rather than 4.00 – but I think this simply shows that the two big years for withdrawals were just before my time, and also I fortunately was not involved with the massive number of disqualifications in 2023.)
I think we are seeing a couple of different effects here over time. Taking withdrawals first: this had never been a huge factor in the Hugos until the Puppy years, when (as noted earlier) a record number of potential finalists declined nomination in both 2015 and 2016. Perhaps one of the lasting effects has been that nominees now feel more comfortable about saying no in general. Also, the aftermath of Chengdu drove the number of withdrawals up again – two of the five in 2024 were directly related to the previous year’s events.
(Kathryn Duval has pointed out to me in conversation that it’s also possible that Hugo administrators in the olden days did not need to be as diligent in chasing nominees for consent as we have been since she and I first administered the awards in 2017. That perhaps is another effect of the traumas of 2015/2016.)
The massive increase in disqualifications since roughly 2012 has several causes. The biggest chunk of disqualifications has been in the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, starting from the year that the entire first series of Game of Thrones was on the ballot, and usually because of a conflict of nominations between the two categories; I have written before about this. And I noted earlier that the special circumstances of the pandemic hit Best Editor, Long Form in 2022.
The constitutional criteria, which are complex in some cases, must also be a factor. The Astounding/Campbell rules are somewhat arcane. The rules in the Artist categories are frankly obsolete. And have you ever had to explain the concept of a Semiprozine? (In Korean?) It all causes a lot of head-scratching for us administrators – it’s not surprising or blameworthy that voters can get it wrong. And the more categories that are added, the greater the opportunity for everyone to make mistakes.
But the other big change, one that almost exactly matches the explosion in the number of disqualifications, is the impressive and welcome surge in the number of voters. I don’t think it is as widely appreciated as it should be that the numbers participating in Hugo voting shifted abruptly upwards in 2009-2011, and now show no sign of declining to their previous level. Before 2009 there had only once been more than 1500 votes on the final ballot, and never been more than 800 voters at the nominations phase. Since 2011, only one year (2023 / Chengdu) has seen less than 1800 final ballot votes (peaking at 5950 in 2015, the first Puppy year), and the lowest number of nomination votes cast was 1249 in 2021 (peaking at 4032 in 2016, the second Puppy year).
NB that this graph includes the published number of nomination and final ballot votes for Chengdu in 2023, which cannot be considered reliable, and the final ballot votes for Glasgow 2024 after 377 fraudulent ballots were disqualified. Blank columns are where I don’t have the data.
Probably the biggest single factor here is the Hugo Voter Packet, which gives hundreds of dollars / pounds / euros worth of books to voters who buy a WSFS membership. It started in 2009 and was really integrated into Worldcon marketing from 2011, almost exactly matching the expansion in participation.
But I think that there was also an effort – perhaps it is too much to call it a campaign – by many people, perhaps in reaction to the 2007 ballot which included only one work of fiction by a woman, to broaden the appeal of the Hugos and make them more diverse. This is a Good Thing. The Puppy argument that the Hugos were locked in a vicious circle of declining participation and political correctness was precisely backwards: by the early 2010s, Hugo participation was rising, not falling, and this was adding some very welcome and needed diversity to the ecosystem.
The effect has been to bring in a cohort of voters who are less invested in some of the older (indeed, oldest) categories, as fan culture itself is de-emphasising the traditional channels. Twenty years ago, in 2005, 546 nominating votes were cast in the Hugos, and a nominee needed 20 votes to get onto the Best Professional Artist ballot, 36 for Best Semiprozine, 24 for Best Fanzine, 30 for Best Fan Writer and 26 for Best Fan Artist. This year there were 1338 nominating votes, almost 2.5 times more than in 2005, but the effective thresholds to qualify for those five categories are the same or lower: 14 for Best Professional Artist, 38 for Best Semiprozine, 25 for Best Fanzine, 27 for Best Fan Writer and 16 for Best Fan Artist. (Though of course there are now six finalists per category rather than five.)
Analyzing the historical levels of participation in each category in depth is for another blogpost (and maybe someone else will do it before I do, which is fine by me). But I think it’s clear that in a number of categories, the Hugo electorate of today is broadly less invested than the Hugo electorate of twenty years ago, and it is therefore more likely that well-known but unwilling or ineligible nominees will be chosen.
As an administrator, I always feel a bit sad and uncomfortable when removing any nominee from the ballot. Most people’s votes are cast in good faith, and they should in general be respected. At the same time, the nominees themselves have the absolute right to choose whether or not to participate in the Hugos; and the rules are there for many reasons (mostly good reasons) and need to be implemented to maintain the integrity of the process. So when it has to be done, it has to be done.
No internal divisions, so this is the third paragraph.
She meant that people who live in space live differently than people who live on planets. I’m not talking about the micro-gravity and the sense of confinement and the recycling of air and water and protein, the exercise regimen, and all the implants and augments, like bone-sintering and radiation-nanos and white-blood infusions, and all the other stuff that dirtsiders think about. That’s just mechanics. You live with it.
Entertaining short story about teenage Starling who lives with her grandparents on a space station in the asteroid belt. They are vulnerable to capitalism, betrayal and death, and Starling’s Ganny does her best to outwit them. Very cheerful in the end. You may or may not be able to get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, also by David Gerrold.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Apple Tree”):
It was a fine clear morning in early spring, and he was shaving by the open window. As he leant out to sniff the air, the lather on his face, the razor in his hand, his eye fell upon the apple tree. It was a trick of light, perhaps, something to do with the sun coming up over the woods, that happened to catch the tree at this particular moment; but the likeness was unmistakable.
Six very spooky stories by the author of Rebecca, the title story being well known as the basis of another Hitchcock film. Apart from “The Birds”, which gave me sleepless nights when I first read it at the age of 12, the other really effective piece is “The Apple Tree”, where a woman gets posthumous revenge for a bad marriage though manipulation of vegetation. But they are all splendidly creepy. Two out of six are definitely not sff, but at least three of the other four are, so I’m booking this as genre rather than non-genre in my tally. You can get it here.
Unfortunately Virago don’t give a credit for the striking cover. (They have published a more recent hardback edition with a different cover, by Neisha Crosland.)
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske.
Current Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell
Last books finished Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al. The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Naylor The Hunger and the Dusk vol. 1, by G. Willow Wilson, Chris Wildgoose and Msassyk The Feast Makers, by H.A. Clarke (did not finish) A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
Next books Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
A short story from the 2020 Hugo packet, about a Syrian scientist trying to enter the USA with his ideas about the empirically demonstrable connection between the soul and the body. Short but clear. You can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves (virtual and physical) acquired in 2020. Next on that list is Zeitgeber, by Greg Egan.
I flagged this book to myself as the second most popular book published in 1874 on LibraryThing and Goodreads, after Far From the Madding Crowd. It’s a ridiculously long fantasy (750 pages!) about five chaps who, escaping from Richmond in the closing days of the U.S. Civil War, are swept by balloon to a remote Pacific island, where fortunately they find all the animal, vegetable and mineral resources necessary for them to survive and thrive.
Towards the end they encounter a character from a previous Verne novel, and this firmly tips the book into science fiction (it has been teetering on the edge up until then, with a super-intelligent orang-utan). Lots of incident, lots of Great Engineer solutions, lots of unconscious racism (and some totally conscious racism from Caleb Carr in the introduction to my edition). I think if I had not had been reading two other rather long books at the same time, it might have become a bit tedious, but it’s all done at cracking pace.
My edition also features the glorious line-drawing illustrations by Jules-Descartes Ferat, engraved by Charles Barbant, from the original French version.
Homegoing has a commanding lead here, especially on Goodreads, and it’s good to see Ghanaian authors penetrating the two systems.
I disqualified eight books, in some cases because they are mainly about the Ghanaian migrant experience and in others because they are actually about the process of migrating from Ghana. They were Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi; Maame, by Jessica George; Open Water, by Caleb Azumah Nelson; The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński; Pigeon English, by Stephen Kelman; Illegal, by Eoin Colfer; The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, by Arthur Japin; and North to Paradise by Ousman Umar.
Next up: Peru, Saudi Arabia, Madagascar and Côte d’Ivoire.
I can strongly recommend the exhibition of art by Victor Hugo at the Royal Academy in London at the moment. Not much of this was published or exhibited during his lifetime; he clearly felt a compulsion to draw, but much less of a compulsion to show his drawings off to people – with a couple of exceptions, including his homage to John Brown, L’Homme pendu, which I felt was too gruesome to post here.
There are about 70 of Hugo’s drawings in the exhibition, and a lot of information about his life and travels. There are also a few photographs, particularly of Hauteville House, his home on Guernsey for many years. He put a lot of effort into furnishing the house and muttered that he had missed a career as an interior decorator.
Anyway, these were the pieces that particularly jumped out at me. The exhibition is on until 29 June, so you have plenty of time to get to it.
Happy New Year 1856 from Victor Hugo!Furteneck [actually Fürstenberg] castle in Mist, 1840Inkblot retouched with a pen (1850s) – look at the faces he has found in the ink patternsFantasy landscape with a castle on a cliff, 1857Mirror frame with birdsLandscape reflected in waterScary octopus from late novel The Toilers of the SeaFrontispiece for Les MiserablesThe lighthouse at Casquets, GuernseyThe town of Vianden (in Luxembourg) seen through a spider’s web
He lay in hospital for a long spell, painful but self-satisfied. The nature of his injuries was not yet clear to him. Presently he would get all right again. “V.C.,” he whispered. “At twenty. Pretty decent.”
This is the last of the set of novels by H.G. Wells that I bought in 2019 and have been working my way through ever since. I’m glad to say that after a couple of real duds, I have ended on a high note. It’s a very long book, and you know where it is going as soon as you see the title, but I found it very worthwhile and interesting.
Joan and Peter are cousins, and are orphaned quite early in the book and brought up together. Their guardianship passes from a pair of eccentric left-wing aunts (“I suspect them strongly of vegetarianism”), to a monstrous conservative cousin (“In spite of its loyalty, Ulster is damp”), to another cousin, war hero Oswald who has been busy civilising Africa and wants to do the same for England, or at least for the two children who he has ended up with.
Wells’ Big Theme for the book is education, and Oswald’s efforts to secure it for both Peter and Joan (“if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well be let right out”), but if you can ignore the lengthy philosophising about that, and the certainty that the White Man hath his Burden, there’s rather a good human story between Oswald and Peter’s parents at the start, and then between Oswald, Joan and Peter.
The two kids both have plenty of other potential lovers apart from each other, but I am a bit of a romantic at heart and I do like the slow path to the (spoiler) happy ending. Adam Roberts didn’t; he found the pace far too slow. I was reading a couple of other very long books at the time, so it suited me. I will agree with Adam that Wells makes Joan sound unnecessarily childish, even as an adult.
There are some great lines. Here’s one of Joan’s unsuccessful boyfriends:
…when Huntley went on to suggest that the path to freedom lay in the heroic abandonment of the “fetish of chastity,” Joan was sensible of a certain lagging of spirit.
Here are the lefty aunts:
Aunt Phoebe sat near Aunt Phyllis and discoursed on whether she ought to go to prison for the Vote. “I try to assault policemen,” she said. “But they elude me.”
Here’s one of the failed educational theorists who Oswald interviews:
Hinks of Carchester, the distinguished Greek scholar, slipped into his hand at parting a pamphlet asserting that only Greek studies would make a man write English beautifully and precisely. Unhappily for his argument Hinks had written his pamphlet neither beautifully nor precisely.
And here’s just a nice bit of scene-setting:
Slowly, smoothly, unfalteringly, the brush of the twilight had been sweeping its neutral tint across the spectacle, painting out the glittering symbols one by one. A chill from outer space fell down through the thin Russian air, a dark transparent curtain. Oswald shivered in his wadded coat. Abruptly down below, hard by a ghostly white church, one lamp and then another pricked the deepening blue. A little dark tram-car that crept towards them out of the city ways to fetch them back into the city, suddenly became a glow-worm…
As with Mr Polly, there is a crucial plot twist depending on a fake death by drowning.
Also, uniquely in Wells’ work as far as I have read it, there is a significant section set in Ireland. Wells’ characters generally float back and forth on Home Rule (more forth than back); here, Peter and Oswald go on a fact-finding mission to pre-war Dublin and are a bit disappointed with the facts that they find, while the monstrous conservative cousin Lady Charlotte throws her energy into Unionism:
“We’re raising money to get those brave Ulstermen guns. Something has to be done if these Liberals are not to do as they like with us. They and their friends the priests.”
There’s a certain amount of “these tedious people and their comic accents quarreling with each other rather than working for a better world society”, but there’s also some good observation based on personal experience, rather than just reading the newspapers.
This was a positive note to end two of my projects on: working through the H.G. Wells back catalogue, as I mentioned, and also finishing all the unread books that I acquired in 2019. So it’s another to add to this list:
그녀는 아주 젊지 않다. 딱히 미인이라고 부르기도 어렵다. 다만 목선이 고운 편이고 눈매가 서글서글하다. 자연스러워 보이는 옅은 화장을 했으며, 흰 반소매 블라우스는 구김 없이 청결하다. 누구에게든 호감을 줄법한 그 단정한 인상 덕분에, 희미하게 얼굴에 배어 있는 그늘은 그다지눈에 띄지 않는다.
She isn’t really young anymore, and it would be difficult to call her a beauty, exactly. The curve of her neck is quite attractive and the look in her eyes is open and friendly. She wears light, natural-looking makeup, and her white blouse is neat, uncreased. Thanks to that smart impression, which one might reasonably expect to attract curiosity, attention is deflected away from the faint shadows clouding her face.
translated by Deborah Smith
This came top of my survey of books set in South Korea, and contribute to the author winning the Nobel Prize for Literature last year; and it also came strongly recommended by a number of friends in whose judgement I generally have faith. It’s the story of Cheong Yeong-hye, who decides to stop eating meat, to the dismay of her extended family who eventually commit her to a mental hospital. It’s told in three parts, by her husband, her sister’s husband and then her sister, so that we get the events of each part retold and reflected on by the next narrator.
It’s not really about the merits or demerits of meat. It’s much more about shame, choice, illness and desire, and it’s very closely and intensely written. It really does stick in the mind. You can get it here.
Han Yang is the only Nobel Prize winner for Literature who is younger than me (born in 1970). She celebrated her 54th birthday between the announcement last November and receiving the award in December. She was the youngest writer to win it since 1987 when it went to Joseph Brodsky, then 47; Orhan Pamuk was a few months past his 54th birthday when he won in 2006.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer and my top unread book by a woman. Next on those piles respectively are The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier, and The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang.
Current Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al. Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
Last books finished Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold How Many Miles to Babylon, by Jennifer Johnston
Next books Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
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