18) Jhereg, by Steven Brust

Another of my sf reading resolutions for this year. This is the first in a long series of novels featuring assassin Vlad Taltos, in a well-imagined high fantasy setting. The style owes a great deal to Roger Zelazny, but I felt was not quite as even. Complex plot which more or less made sense; I quite enjoyed it, but not really enough to seek out more in this series.

17) Odd Man Out, by F.L. Green

Literally the only film I have seen this year is Carol Reed's adaptation of this novel, published in 1944. So my write-up of it is very much based on the differences with the film, of which three seemed to me pretty significant.

The first, which concerns me most in a way, is that where the setting of Reed's film is somewhat ambiguous, Green's book is absolutely firmly set in Belfast in 1944. The city centre streets are named - Royal Avenue, Dublin Road, Victoria Street; and the tram that in the film is heading up the Falls Road is going up the Shankill in the book. Green therefore also catches the sectarian picture a bit more than the film does (or could); the youths on the tram chant "No Surrender!" at the police, the two ladies who care briefly for the fugitive Johnny are respectable Protestants, which adds an extra poignancy.

Second is the book's structure - whereas the film continually cuts between Johnny and his various pursuers, in the book he is almost absent from the first half after his colleagues abandon him, so that by the time we reach the mid point we are wondering what on earth has happened to him. Since he is then reintroduced to us half-way through the book, Green can be pretty clear about the fact that Johnny is dying as soon as he reappears; in the film there is a bit more suspense on this matter.

Third of course is the nature of the drama, culminating in the ending. It is inevitable, of course, that Johnny will die. But Green has Agnes and Father Tom more complicit in the manner of his death - and redemption, according to the last paragraph - than Reed. Throughout, Green talks about souls, faith, belief, where Reed concentrates more on character and action.

Altogether, it makes for a convincing package. William Hartnell's character, Mr Fancy, is here the sinister Fencie, ten years older: difficult to choose between them or some of the other differences in characterisation. But basically, as so often, the film is very good but the book is even better.

16) Contested Island: Ireland 1460-1630, by S.J. Connolly

I found this a much more interesting and well-structured book than Lennon's Sixteenth Century Ireland. By the end of it I had a much better idea of the two key narratives - the shift of the Old English areas to permanent alliance with Gaelic Ireland, and the growth in power of the state apparatus centred in Dublin. The general failure of the Reformation to take hold in Ireland is a part of this story, but Connolly admits after surveying the various theories that he does not have a good explanation of why it failed. The least satisfactory thing about the book is that the six maps at the end are horrendously mislabelled; only one is published with the correct caption.

An unexpected benefit of reading about this period of Irish history is that it gives me a slightly different insight into international relations today. Reading how various English military expeditions tended to end not with the defeat of the Irish enemies, but with them being bought off with recognition of their authority and (often temporarily) converted to allies, has obvious parallels with today's Iraq and Afghanistan. And the gradual extension of the central govenment's authority across the whole island has many resonances with state-building efforts around the world up to the present.

It is fascinating that the British government in Ireland was utterly unable to cover its costs from locally raised revenue. At the start of the book, roughly 90% of Dublin Castle's budget had to be met from Westminster; by the end of the book it was down to roughly 30% but that is still a heck of a lot - and the cost of this improvement in the finances was the loss of identification with English interests of the vast majority of the previously loyal population. One question that is rarely asked is, given the huge costs of Ireland to England, why bother? I guess there was a certain amount of protecting existing investments of property and prestige, but the question of securing a geographical back door to the English realm must have been even more important - just before the start of the sixteenth century, you have Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, and just after the century ends you have thousands of Spanish troops landing in Kinsale.

Some of you will remember that my interest in this period is driven by family history. My namesake and ancestor Sir Nicholas White gets two mentions, one in passing as a reformist official, the other as the person who suggested that a legal dispute be resolved by the two litigants fighting to the death in the yard of Dublin Castle - which doesn't sound terribly reformist to me...

Anyway, somewhat heavy going in places, but enlightening all the same.

2) Template, by Matt Hughes

I actually read this book a week ago in Burgundy, but am following up on james_nicoll's suggestion that we all blog about it today - Hughes has kindly been distributing it electronically to anyone who promises to review it on-line.

In style, it is a conscious homage to Jack Vance, whose Tales of the Dying Earth I enjoyed a couple of years ago. There are three notable differences. First, Hughes' hero, Conn Labro, is a naïf rather than a man of smug sophistication like Cugel: he comes from a planet where all transactions are based on economics, so that (as another character describes him) he knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The novel therefore becomes a quest on several levels as he explores the universe, discovers the truth about his origins and gets the girl and his inheritance. Second (though this may just me my lack of appreciation), it is much less funny. The worlds and cultures that Conn Labro encounters on his journey to enlightenment tend to be monolithically organised around a single principle, but the effect (for me anyway) was sinister rather than humorous, and presumably intended to be so.

Those two differences with Vance are matters of authorial choice, and I think Hughes deliberately takes his story in a direction Vance didn't go, and on the whole navigates well. The third difference I noted, unfortunately, is not to Hughes' credit. The women of Hughes' universe are much less visible than the men: there is the central character's love interest, a slightly comical police detective, and another character who stands and watches her brother gambling (why does she not gamble herself?) and is then horribly murdered. Vance's women are much more interesting, and on occasion get the better of his hero. If Hughes' hero doesn't always win the argument, he makes up for it by saving his lover's life.

One other small point I regretted in Hughes book - a road not taken, perhaps - is that there is a hint in an early chapter that the somewhat two-dimensional cultures described are each intended to represent one of the Seven Deadly Sins. This is a neat idea, and would have brought an interesting extra set of structures to mesh with what is a fairly standard hero's quest narrative; but Hughes doesn't quite do it. Still, I enjoyed the grand narrative sweep and general sensawunda. Good fun.

15) Kosova Express: A Journey in Wartime, by James Pettifer

I've met James Pettifer half a dozen times on the Balkans conference circuit, and corresponded with him occasionally; he was kind enough to send me a copy of this book shortly after its publication in 2005, since when it has sat accusingly on my bookshelves. But I was planning to go to Kosovo next week (in the event, my plans have changed and I will go only to Montenegro and Albania) and so picked it up a few days ago.

It is an autobiographical account of what it is like to be a reporter of conflict; the physical difficulties of transport and communication in the field, the problems of getting copy into the paper, convincing sceptical editors, and overcoming opposition and interference from the British foreign policy apparatus. It is also the political story of the movement of Kosovo from miserable subjection to the verge of independence, and I don't think I have read a better account of the 1991-99 period; I really regretted that apart from a couple of vignettes from 2001, he does not take the story further.

Pettifer is a romantic. His story is full of geography, both human and physical; his Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia are steeped in history. This is both good and bad. I found myself in roughly equal measure deeply impressed by his insights into the interconnections between key figures and events across the region, and frustrated by his paranoia about continental western Europe (the "Euroids") and the British intelligence services (though if even a quarter of what he alleges is true, there are some very serious questions to answer, for instance about the Macedonian arms plot of 1993). His sympathies, like Rebecca West's, are absolutely clear, but that certainly does not make this a bad book. (I do wish someone had proof-read the Slavic names for him, though.)

Pettifer can be a difficult personality. I have seen him walk out of a conference before it began in protest at the presence of another participant. One wonders to what extent his difficulties with his various editors in London and elsewhere were personality clashes as much as professional issues. Having said that, I am impressed by the nice things he says about many people who I also count as friends, both in the region and among the foreign correspondents.

Anyway, if you want an insight into Kosovo that gives a very different perspective than the usual diplomatic histories, you could do a lot worse than start here.

Five more Who books, of which three are decidedly skippable and two rather good.

( Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons )
( Doctor Who - the Mind of Evil )
( Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos )
( Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon )
( Doctor Who and the Dæmons )

So, on to the Third Doctor books, starting with three Dicks efforts of varying quality, and a good one by Malcolm Hulke; all covering stories first broadcast in 1970.

( 6) Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, by Terrance Dicks )
( 7) Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke )
( 8) Doctor Who - the Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks )
( 9) Doctor Who - Inferno, by Terrance Dicks )

( Northern Ireland and Doctor Who )

I've headlined this post by referring to Liz Shaw, but in fact she doesn't come across particularly well on the printed page and, given my childhood memories of the first two of these books, I was surprised by how much I liked Caroline John in the TV role when I watched. I am beginning to spot a pattern where the brainy companions (Zoe and Liz) don't transfer well to the novelisations, whereas the screamy ones (Victoria, Polly and I expect Jo) actually come over rather better.

5) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1985-1989

This is the last (so far) of the About Time series of guides to Doctor Who, covering not only all the Seventh Doctor series and all but the first of the Sixth Doctor stories, but also the 1999 TV movie, the misconceived 1993 Dimensions in Time piece, The Curse of Fatal Death and the two Peter Cushing movies. Tat Wood is the main credited author (Lawrence Miles being absent this time, but with "additional material" by Lars Pearson and a defence of The Two Doctors by Robert Shearman).

As in previous volumes, Wood's sarcastic yet affectionate humour makes it a good read, even though it's the period of the programme's history I probably know least well. There are some brilliantly sardonic one-liners which I was regrettably unable to refrain from reading aloud to anyone who would listen. The explanatory essays are as good as ever. Slightly disappointed with the editing - there seem to be a lot more typoes than usual, and some other structural glitches as well. But any serious fan needs to get this.

4) Decalog 2: Lost Property, edited by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker

A collection of ten DW short stories (actually one has no Doctor, but does have Sarah Jane, Mike Yates, K9 and the Master). As usual, of varying but mostly good quality; I hope any of the other contributors who read this will forgive me for favouriting the two Fourth Doctor / Leela stories, one by Tim Robins and set on a commercially exploited Mars, the other by Pam Baddeley and setting settlers against indigenous people on a planet with its own bizarre legal culture. Apart from that, I enjoyed all the rest except the one with Zoe and Jamie and the one with Peri and the peculiar timeshare.

3) Second Part of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Well, I finally managed it: the second half of Don Quixote, having read the first part three years ago. It hangs together rather better than the first part - much less episodic, one senses that unlike his characters the author knew which way things were going. There is some nasty business with a Duke and Duchess who set our heroes up for a series of practical jokes; but Sancho Panza acquits himself very well from it all. In the end, Quixote's neighbours get him to just give it a rest, and the world is obviously a poorer place as a result. (Also he then dies, to reinforce the point.)

One recurrent theme of Volume II is that Quixote and Panza keep on bumping into people who know them not only from Volume I (published ten years before) but also from the seventeenth-century equivalent of fan fiction; in an early chapter, Panza is prevailed upon to explain a couple of continuity glitches from the previous volume, and there's a repeated complaint that the fanfic writers have got the leading characters completely wrong. (Tat Wood makes an obvious parallel in About Time Volume 6, which I have also been reading this weekend.)

Anyway, that's another off my list of classic literature and 2008 reading resolutions. It didn't blow me away, to be honest, in the same way that Proust has been doing; but it is one of those books everyone should try and get through.

1) The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy

I must admit I wouldn't normally read a book like this; it came free with the Palm T|X back in November 2005, and I had pretty much laid that gadget aside since I got a Blackberry with my new job last year. Oddly enough, it has been the Hugo nominees that pushed me back to the Palm; the best way that I found of reading the nominated short fiction available was to convert via Mobipocket to Palm format. So I came back to this epic novel as well.

Well. It's a tale of a memorably dysfunctional family - not just the standard horrors of conflicting gender roles and alcoholism, but also dead babies in the freezer and rapists eaten by a convenient tiger. The emotional dynamic between the narrator, his twin sister, his brother and their parents is convincing and compelling, and gripped me through to the end.

Oddly, the least believable element is not so much the grand drama of events in South Carolina but the narrator's conversations (and eventual fling) with his sister's psychiatrist in New York. The other slightly peculiar element, as with The Red Badge of Courage (though not as bad), is that the rednecks (including the narrator) seem suspiciously articulate.

Glad I read it. Mostly.

I'd already read probably the best Jamie / Zoe novel, Doctor Who - The Invasion, by Ian Marter, and also the worst, Doctor Who and the Dominators, also oddly enough by Ian Marter. Four of the other six are fairly standard efforts by Terrance Dicks, but the other two present points of interest.

( 35) Doctor Who - The Wheel in Space, by Terrance Dicks )
( 36) Doctor Who - The Mind Robber, by Peter Ling )
( 37) Doctor Who and the Krotons, by Terrance Dicks )
( 38) Doctor Who - The Seeds of Death, by Terrance Dicks )
( 39) Doctor Who - The Space Pirates, by Terrance Dicks )
( 40) Doctor Who and the War Games, by Malcolm Hulke )

So, that's it for the Second Doctor novelisations. I finished up my read-through of the First Doctor novels by regretting that almost nobody manages to capture Hartnell's performance on the printed page. Troughton (who perhaps put less of his own personality into the part than any other Doctor before Davison) is easier to pin down, the visual aspects of his performance more easily described. Of the other regulars, I felt that Victoria gains most, and Zoe loses most, on the printed page. Perhaps it is easier to inject some gravitas into the rather two-dimensional Victoria than to convey how stunningly cute Wendy Padbury is as Zoe.

The best of the Second Doctor novelisations are John Peel's Doctor Who - The Power of the Daleks, Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, Peter Ling's Doctor Who - The Mind Robber and Ian Marter's Doctor Who - The Invasion, with honourable mentions to Doctor Who - The Evil of the Daleks, the other three early Season 5 books, and Doctor Who and the War Games. None is quite as good as the best of the First Doctor novelisations, though.

Since I am reading these on my commute and am taking a long weekend chez scattyme in France, it'll be a while before I do the next lot.

33) J. R. R. Tolkien: a biography, by Humphrey Carpenter

( My father's thoughts )

34) J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth, by Daniel Grotta

( Don't bother. )

32) The Cornelius Quartet: The Final Programme , A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin, The Condition of Muzak, by Michael Moorcock

Another classic of speculative fiction, which I have now read: the complex tales of Jerry Cornelius, his family, his allies and his enemies. It's difficult to call it a novel, or a collection of novels; the first book perhaps comes closest to having a conventional plot, but the second and third books in particular are rather free of the contraints of linearity. You have to really let the word pictures wash over you without expecting the narrative to behave as we are used to plots behaving. There's a consistent sort of post-Empire awareness behind the scenes, which sometimes bubbles to the top: in one passage in the fourth book, various English groups are presented as if native tribes in some far-off colony. Often such experiments seem just boring and self-indulgent, but this kept my interest.

( a long note about Doctor Who )

These five Who books are all from 1967-68 stories, but from different ends of the chronology of publication. The first of these was in fact the very last of the official novelisations produced by Target/Virgin, in 1993; the other four were among the first five Second Doctor books, published between 1974 and 1978 by Target. Having been underwhelmed by my last clutch of Who books reviewed, I'm happy to report that all of these are good stuff.

( 27) Doctor Who - The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel )
( 28) Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis )
( 29) Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, by Terrance Dicks )
( 30) Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors, by Brian Hayles )
( 31) Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks )

So that's it for the Jamie/Victoria combination. While Victoria, apart from in Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, is the screamiest girl companion since Susan, the affectionate interactions between the Tardis crew are almost (but not quite) as entertaining on the page as on the screen.

All five of these books are medium good, and four of them are important as the perspective through which fans of my age first encountered the Second Doctor. The best of them is certainly Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, which wraps up one line of continuity (the Yeti and Travers) while setting up another (the Brigadier and UNIT). But all are worth adding to the serious Who fan's library. (The same can't be said for the other two novels of this run, alas.)

Five novelisations of Second Doctor stories, all originally broadcast in 1967. None of them specially good, and a couple which are pretty dire, but all very quick reading for my commute.

( 22) Doctor Who - The Highlanders, by Gerry Davis )
( 23) Doctor Who - The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson )
( 24) Doctor Who and the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis )
( 25) Doctor Who - The Macra Terror, by Ian Stuart Black )
( 26) Doctor Who - The Faceless Ones, by Terrance Dicks )

In summary, your life will not be incomplete for lack of having read any of these! These are the five books featuring Ben, Polly and Jamie in the regular cast; it is remarkable how much more interesting Polly is as a character than the other two. Shame she didn't stay longer.

21) Understanding English Place-Names, by (Sir) William Addison

Picked this somewhat randomly off the shelves this morning. It does exactly what it says on the tin, breaking England down into regions and looking at the place names as a whole and particular individual cases of interest. It brought home to me how little of England I know despite my five years in Cambridge. It is interesting that so few English place names are Celtic in origin, apart from the obvious parts of the west and a few pockets farther east; also surprising that the Normans did not leave a heavier footprint on toponymy. I remain puzzled by the way that the Danelaw failed to really translate into later political divisions, but the book assured me that the pattern of Norse settlement based on place names is very visible. Anyway, an absorbing, quick read.

20) Doctor Who - The Power of the Daleks, by John Peel

John Peel continues his run of excellent Who books with this, the first story of Patrick Troughton's incarnation of Doctor Who. It is a favourite of mine anyway - I cannot understand why fannish opinion generally prefers the later Evil of the Daleks - but Peel, equipped with David Whitaker's original scripts (retrieved, apparently, from his ex-wife's attic) and benefiting from some editorial decision to give him 250 rather than 125 pages to tell the story, has done an excellent job.

On reflection, it's also because this is a relatively unusual Dalek story, presenting them not as a rival galactic empire to us humans but as in some way a dark reflection of our own desires about ourselves. The only other televised story that comes close to doing that is Robert Shearman's Ninth Doctor story.

Anyway, Peel turns a good TV story (as far as we can judge, since it is one of the lost ones) into a good novel. An encouraging start to my reading up on the Second Doctor.

19) True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

This was recommended to me by someone about six months ago, I think after I was a bit unimpressed by the same author's Oscar and Lucinda. It really grabbed me; I was only vaguely aware of the story of Ned Kelly, but Carey has given him and his country (the Australian state of Victoria in the 1870s) a resounding voice. The story is dramatic and moving; the underlying theme of the book is the injustice by which Kelly and his family, and their community, were shut out of having their voice heard, and had to submit to the lies and distortions of their more powerful enemies. Kelly becomes a robber and a murderer, but only after the authorities have made him so; he is motivated by love and loyalty for his family, and comes across as flawed but in his own way noble. I believe this won the Booker Prize? A decent choice if so.

And so I reach the end of the first phase of this insane project, the last two novelisations featuring William Hartnell's incarnation of the Doctor.

( 17) Doctor Who - The Smugglers, by Terrance Dicks )
( 18) Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, by Gerry Davis )

So, that's it for the First Doctor novelisations. The best ones are David Whitaker's original Doctor Who and the Daleks, Ian Marter's Doctor Who - The Rescue and Donald Cotton's Doctor Who - The Romans, with honorable mentions to the other four by those three authors, John Lucarotti's Doctor Who - Marco Polo and the three Dalek novelisations by John Peel. None of them is quite the real thing though: Hartnell's performance was so strongly visual that it is impossible to catch on the printed page. The only way to really get a flavour of early Who is to watch it.

On to the Troughton era now...

16) The Great War: Breakthroughs, by Harry Turtledove

I got this somewhat randomly several years back in preparation for the WorldCon panel I chaired with Turtledove as one of the participants. I didn't manage to read it then, though; bounced off the first couple of chapters. I have now struggled through it as part of my ongoing programme of clearing my backlog of unread books.

The book is, it turns out, the third of a trilogy about an alternate history war ending in 1917, where the US and Germany are fighting a bitter trench combat against Britain/Canada, the Confederate States of America fifty years after their victory in the War of Secession, and France. All the action takes place on or near the North American continent, so the fact that I didn't read it before our panel on the future of Europe is no great loss. The major one of the "Breakthroughs" of the title is the penetration of Confederate lines on the Kentucky/Tennessee front by the US army's new battle machines (known as "barrels" rather than "tanks" in this world), under the command of septuagenarian George Armstrong Custer, as a result of which the Confederate front collapses, the US re-occupies Washington, annexes chunks of Canada and declares Quebec independent, and the war and the book both end.

Turtledove has about a dozen viewpoint characters, telling the story from the point of view of the military and civilians affected by the war. US president Teddy Roosevelt pops into the narrative now and then, and the defeated CSA president appears at the end, but on the whole this is the story of the little people. It is detailed and well worked out, but didn't quite grab me as much as I was hoping. I very much enjoyed Turtledove's Hugo-winning novella "Down in the Bottomlands", and wonder if the discipline of the shorter form enables him to concentrate quality rather better than in a trilogy of 650-page books.

Three good ones this time, though whether they represent two or three broadcast stories is a matter of opinion!

( 13) Doctor Who - The Myth Makers, by Donald Cotton )
( 14) Doctor Who - Mission to the Unknown, by John Peel )
( 15) Doctor Who - The Mutation of Time, by John Peel )

I'd recommend all three of these. Next for me, since I've already read the Dodo novelisations, is Doctor Who - The Smugglers.

12) A History of Africa, by J.D. Fage

Since I changed jobs at the start of last year I've been working with two African groups, the Polisario Front of Western Sahara and the government of Somaliland. Part of my motivation for getting this job was that I wanted to do more on Africa; I feel that if you're working in international relations and not working on Africa you need to ask yourself why not. But I confess my overall knowledge was not very extensive, and while I've deepened my understanding of the Western Sahara and Somaliland situations in particular, I wanted some more general information. artw had picked up this book years ago somewhere, and so I worked through it over the last week.

I found it a pretty fascinating guide to the interlocking ebb and flow of kingdoms and empires across the continent up to the colonial period. The particular strength is in West Africa south of the Sahara, which I have been long fascinated by despite knowing very little about it, but he's good on the rest as well. Two things I was particularly interested to read about: i) The first massive external colonialist intervention, based on greed and collapsing in mismanagement and ignominious withdrawal, seems to have been the Moroccan destruction of the Songhai empire based on the Niger river in 1591, which resulted in the impoverishment of the whole of West Africa. ii) The rape of southern central Africa ("Bantuland", as Fage calls it) by slave traders at the start of the nineteenth century, and its subsequent easy penetration by European colonialists, was mainly due to the exploratory, trading and colonising efforts of Sayyid Said, the Sultan of Oman, who got so engaged with his successful African trade that he moved the seat of his Arabian sultanate to Zanzibar.

However, it's probably not the best place to start for today's reader; published in 1978, it therefore misses the crucial transitions in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and covers less than the first half (in many cases not even the first third) of most countries' post-independence history. The unresolved Rhodesia and apartheid questions I think also make it more difficult for the author to assess the colonial and post-colonial eras in the round, and of course the Portuguese and Spanish had only just disengaged. Also, rather surprisingly, the Cold War is not mentioned at all. I've been doing a bit of digging and am interested to see John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the continent coming up in recommendations; has anyone out there read it?

Three more books in my ongoing project, based on the last few stories of the 1964-65 season.

( 9) Doctor Who - The Space Museum, by Glyn Jones: not particularly impressive )
( 10) Doctor Who - The Chase, by John Peel: a good novel based on a less good story )
( 11) Doctor Who - The Time Meddler, by Nigel Robinson: better than I feared )

I've already read Doctor Who - Galaxy Four so next are the intermingled narratives of the Myth Makers and the Daleks' Master Plan.

8) The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

So, I've now finished all the novels on the Hugo shortlist, and can get started on the short fiction. Some of you will remember my exchanges with Scalzi on the first book in this series, Old Man's War, which I took as an endorsement of kick-ass militarism and a mockery of the concept of conflict resolution. (refs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Scalzi explained to me then that his narrator was unaware of the true facts of the situation, and indeed the political message of The Last Colony is one I have much more sympathy with: humanity is dragged into an unwinnable war with the rest of the galaxy by the lies of its own political leadership, and our hero ends up as the one man who can resolve matters. So no complaints on that score.

However, I find Scalzi's narrative style rather wearyingly unvarying; almost all the characters speak with identical voices. And the plot is both complex and reliant on fortunate accidents of timing. There are touches I liked - Charles Stross makes an appearance as a genetically engineered super-soldier, and I appreciated the subtle "Commodore Perry" riff at the end of the book - but this is going fourth on my ballot.

7) Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer

Sawyer's continuing presence on award shortlists is a mystery to me. His Hominids is possibly the worst book ever to win the Hugo (and yes, I have read They'd Rather Be Right); and The Terminal Experiment, while not quite as dire, is certainly one of the least impressive Nebula winners.

So when I say that Rollback is the best book I have read by Sawyer, this should be understood as damning with faint praise. The prose somehow seems a bit less clunky: the tedious undergraduate-level discussions of philosophy and science are wisely constrained to the first half of the book; the two story lines - the central character's unexpected rejuvenation, and the decoding of an alien message - come close to reinforcing each other.

Yet in the end, it doesn't work. The biggest flaw is that while our central character is undergoing the dramatic changes of rejuvenation, and the consequent disruption of his life with his wife and family, we get very little sense of being inside his head. The second huge plot problem is that the alien messages come only once every 18.8 years (well, actually every 37.6 years): surely once contact has been established, one would set up continuous transmission in both directions, even knowing that there would be an 18.8 year lag?

Having said that, it's a mediocre book rather than a bad one. Probably going last on my list (certainly below "No Award"); but I haven't read Scalzi yet!

6) Saturnalia, by Lindsey Davis

Latest in this run of detective novels set during the reign of the emperor Vespasian. After a couple of less impressive efforts in recent years, Davis seems to be firmly back on form: this is an entertaining tale of family dynamics interacting mildly with high politics - Falco is called in to track an escaped German political prisoner, who coincidentally is the former lover of his brother-in-law. Oddly enough the actual murders are the least convincing part of the plot, but the rest is good fun.

5) The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon

Another of this year's Hugo nominees, and another good read. The setting is an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 - there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again.

Chabon's viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it's terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.

However, it's not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don't think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I'm not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie's country houses, or Lindsey Davis' richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters' medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn't make it fantasy).

Don't get me wrong: I liked the book enormously. The setting seemed to me a very thought-provoking response to the history of Jews, in America in particular, since 1940, far better than the other attempts I've read recently. I'll probably end up ranking it ahead of the other two nominees which I haven't yet read and of which I don't have huge expectations. But, while in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I've read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from both Halting State and Brasyl, so loses my vote on that account.

3) Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton
4) Doctor Who and the Crusaders, by David Whitaker

These were the other two Doctor Who books published in the 1960s, after the initial success of Whitaker's Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. Both feature Hartnell's First Doctor with original companions Ian and Barbara, and relatively new girl Vicki.

( Doctor Who and the Zarbi )
( Doctor Who and the Crusaders )

2) Brasyl, by Ian McDonald

My reading of this year's Hugo nominees continues with another good 'un, Ian McDonald's latest. The setting of Brazil fits his lush, dense writing style so well that it is remarkable that he's never set a novel in real South America before (his two books set on Mars portray a rather Patagonian version of the planet, but it's not quite the same). We have three interleaving narratives, from the mid-18th century, the present day, and the near future (2030); we have peculiar variations of reality; and we have the jungle, both urban and literal, with its various hostile inhabitants. In some ways it's deliberately less ambitious than River of Gods, which juggled ten different viewpoint characters against the background of India forty