Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
Is “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman” in there? Yes. “Shatterday”? Yup. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”? Of course. “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”? Certainly. “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin”? Er, no actually; perhaps it didn’t win anything (the Contents page scrupulously lists which awards different stories won in what year – and it is quite a range of years). But most of the big hits are here; even the lightly fictionalised memoir “All The Lies That Are My Life”, if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t particularly. I do like a good sf short story, though, and Harlan Ellison was a great writer of sf short stories – bearing in mind that (a) quite a lot of his greatness was down to uniqueness, so there is an element of winning at a game he’d invented, and (b) in any case, he was nowhere near as great as he thought he was. Or, indeed, as his admirers think he was. This book comes with three separate introductions – by the book’s editor Michael Straczynski, Cassandra Khaw, but Neil Gaiman – and several pages of endorsements; read it all and you’ll see the same stories about Ellison’s feminist and anti-racist credentials three times. But there’s no denying that some of the stories are terrific.

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You
“Academic returns to school where she’d studied to teach a class, and successfully reopens the case of a girl in her class who was murdered, aged 16.” All the reviews I’ve seen seem to be reviewing that book – and it’s an interesting book, with lots to be said about it. (The recurring riff on news stories about women’s rape and murder – it was the one where she…; it was the one where she…; it was the one where she… – is horribly effective.) But Makkai’s actually doing something rather different. It’s not irrelevant that the narrator’s a successful podcaster (!) as well as an academic, that she’s been invited to teach a class in podcasting, and that she puts some of her 16-year-old podcasting students on the case; the wild volatility and voluntarism of social media play into how the story unwinds. In fact it’s more like “podcaster obsessively pursues a former teacher whom she blames for the murder of a classmate, enlisting podcasting students in her support”. While she’s at the school her ex-husband, coincidentally, gets “MeToo’d”; she thinks the charges are ludicrous, but her attempts to point this out to the good folk of Twitter dot com do not go well (an entertaining and horribly believable passage). Repercussions from the ensuing social media firestorm and from her attempts to reopen the case end up costing her her boyfriend, her main source of income and her health; meanwhile, her contract at the school’s coming to an end. End of part 1.

At the beginning of part 2, a few years have passed and all of this has gone away – the pile-on, the obsessive fugue and their real-world consequences. Not only that, the schoolkid podcasters have grown up to be student podcasters and the case has been reopened. Not only that, but it’s been established that the teacher the narrator’s been obsessing over – and intermittently addressing throughout the book, hence the ‘you’ of the title – wasn’t the killer, although he was sleeping with the victim. At the end of the book the narrator’s undaunted in her pursuit of the teacher, who was clearly an abuser – and who she still blames, indirectly, for her classmate’s murder. Her conviction that she needs to track him down and denounce him is unchanged; it’s certainly untouched by any reflection on her earlier conviction that he was the killer. In short, the book begins as a heroic story about using online media to take on male violence, then turns into a horror story about what the consequences of doing so might be – but then turns back into the heroic story. It’s either much more complex and self-ironising than the book I’ve seen reviewed or much less successful – possibly both.

Randall Munroe, What If?
I picked up both What If? books in a local charity shop a while back, and have been reading them last thing at night. If you know What If?, and xkcd more generally, it’ll need no introduction. If you don’t, you probably should. Let’s just say that the “what if”s Randall specialises in aren’t of the “what if inflation went above 5%?” or “what if Netflix bought WB?” variety; a more typical example is “What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East. How steep would the slope have to be to sustain the momentum needed to ride a bicycle the entire distance without pedaling?”.

Jane Gardam, A Long Way From Verona
The story of Jessica Vye, who is in her early teens in the early 40s (Gardam was born in 1928), and in her own words “[is] not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine”. She’s something of an outsider at school; she’s introverted and unconventional, has violent mood swings, and believes herself to be different from most people (able to ‘read’ other people’s emotions, unable to tell a lie). She’s a bright 14-year-old, in other words. Her ‘violent experience’, I should say, was hearing a writer who visited her school; he agreed to read her writing and later wrote back to her, “JESSICA VYE YOU ARE A WRITER BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT!” (“This experience changed me utterly”).

And then, and then… It’s hard to write about this book briefly, or without quoting chunks of it. One key event is Jessica’s chance encounter with an escaped Italian POW (the girls have been warned that there is a ‘maniac’ on the loose). He doesn’t assault her but does give her a look “that I had absolutely never seen before, or not in faces looking at me. It was a liking sort of look but a queer liking-look … sort of excited, as if he had found something.” Later, just after narrowly escaping death in a bombing, she writes a long poem called “The Maniac” and knows at once, and for the first time, that she has written something good. (Gardam, wisely, doesn’t quote from the poem.) Like that “sort of excited” expression, the events of the book combine great intensity with an odd kind of innocence; we feel that much stronger emotions are at work than Jessica realises, but also that they are going to need to stay repressed if Jessica is to get through either adolescence or the war.

I don’t know if I’ve conveyed this, but it’s a lovely book: an easy and charming read, but engagingly real and with a powerful emotional undertow. There’s an obvious parallel with I Capture the Castle, but if I had to choose between them I’d take this one; I felt that Jessica Vye was dealing with bigger stuff than Cassandra Mortmain, and cared more about where she ended up.

Michelle Paver, Rainforest
In which a deeply repressed middle-aged man joins an archaeological expedition into the rainforest, hoping to study nothing more emotionally loaded than insects, and becomes embroiled in local belief systems concerning the life and death of trees, animals, people; especially people. Especially people and especially death. Meanwhile he’s reliving his unsuccessful relationship with the much younger Penny, which began as mildly embarrassing and rapidly turned much worse; he stalked her and may have caused her death. The two plot strands develop side by side but don’t really connect, frustratingly. By the end of the book our man has a very different attitude to the rainforest, its people and their beliefs – and has the scars to prove it – but he still seems to believe that “Penelope” was the love of his life and that he was guilty of nothing more than romantic exuberance.

Magnus Mills, Screwtop Thompson
As well as short and oblique novels, Magnus Mills has written short stories; they’re mostly very short and very oblique, bordering on downright unsatisfactory. (One story here goes one better on Andrew Michael Hurley, as it reads like Robert Aickman’s “The Hostel” with all of the eeriness and grotesquerie left out.) The mood is generally sunny and undramatic; there are some very vividly realised characters and incidents, but they don’t really bear retelling (it would be like retelling amusing incidents that happened at work). Mills does in prose something similar to what Morandi did as a painter, paying minute attention to things we only half-remember or half-notice.

Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman, An Advancement of Learning, Ruling Passion
Christmas presents, all of which I’d read by the end of the year. These are the first three “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels, dating from the early 1970s. The first book, revolving around a rugby club, is rather grim: Hill is at pains to impress on us that we’re mixing with plain, ordinary, working Northerners, and that plain, ordinary, working Northerners are awful people. “Which of us has our desire or, having it, is gratified?” Nobody here; every male character is having an affair with another man’s wife, or wishes he was, or in some cases both. The plot’s not great, either; Hill succumbs to the temptation, which I’ve lamented here in the context of Sophie Hannah, of setting up a bizarre and improbable murder scene and then explaining it with a bizarre and improbable murder. It’s powerful, though; it’s definitely got something. (Something that makes you want to have a wash afterwards, though.) The second book, set at a teacher-training college, lets Hill indulge a vein of sheer fantasy. The (cold case) murder scene, again, is utterly improbable – whose body was under what? – but the villain is so vividly weird that this seems nothing but appropriate. A charismatic youth who reads Crowley and John Allegro, publicly deflowers virgins and calls all his male friends “love”; as ruthlessly self-seeking as Linus Roache’s cult leader in Mandy, as commanding as Yaxley from The Course of the Heart and as beautiful as Ivor Swann from Ruth Rendell’s No More Dying Then (which came out in the same year as AAoL, so presumably neither of them influenced the other). It’s not how I remember the Students’ Union. The best of these three books, encouragingly, is the third, which begins with Pascoe leaving on holiday a day late after Dalziel insisted he take a look at a series of robberies; he drives to the other end of the country to stay with some friends, only to find three of them dead and the fourth missing. Both cases grow more complicated as Pascoe grows more exhausted and confused, strung out by the demands of his dual role – a detective in Yorkshire, a witness down south. He becomes convinced that the two cases are connected somehow; it’s a mark of Hill’s growing skill that he shows this conviction not to be entirely irrational – but mostly. Sometimes a loose end is just a loose end.

They’re quick reads (evidently); not especially demanding, but engaging enough to keep you going. The characterisation – no-nonsense old-school copper Dalziel, ambitious college-educated Pascoe – is fairly broad-strokes: Dalziel in particular is a comically awful unreconstructed Yorkshireman, who seems to get grosser (physically and in his manners) as these three books go on. Pascoe is a graduate, young and single; as such he has two main character traits, namely using long words and being constantly horny. Like some films shown on Talking Pictures, these books contain “1970s social attitudes”, particularly towards women; at one point Hill also makes Dalziel a howlingly obnoxious racist, but thankfully seems to have decided not to pursue that line of character development. Some of the sexism on display is clearly Reginald Hill’s own, though; there is some really woeful stuff in the second book about women with large breasts, a topic on which he does not appear to agree with Ian Watson. Boys, please!

Also in December, I watched these films:

Knives Out (Rian Johnson 2019), Wake Up, Dead Man (Rian Johnson 2025)
Recent TV adaptations of Agatha Christie often seem to start by throwing out the sexism and racism, then casting around for what else they can throw out – we won’t need all these characters, surely, and nobody will miss that sub-plot – before finding some way to make the Radio Times call them ‘edgy’. You can end up with something that looks like an Agatha Christie but without the tone, the mood or the plot. Compare Knives Out: a pure Agatha Christie whodunnit – an impossible murder, a roster of vividly-drawn suspects with different motives for murder, a flamboyant detective and a satisfying resolution – without the inconvenience of having to be based on an actually-existing Agatha Christie. Wake Up, Dead Man is a return to form after the Avengers-esque detour of Glass Onion; it features an impossible murder, a roster of vividly-drawn suspects with different motives for murder, an ever more flamboyant detective and a satisfying resolution. Also a sketchy but compelling essay on the nature of Christianity, but that’s just the cherry on top.

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi 2025)
What’s this about? It’s about someone who was tortured in an Iranian prison, later meets his torturer by chance and decides to kidnap him and take his revenge; it’s about what happens next, a picaresque accumulation of episodes (and people) as the main character drives around town, looking for anyone who may be able to confirm or deny that he’s got the right person; and it’s about how that question’s resolved; and what happens after that; and… Some parts are upbeat, almost comical; some grimly satirical; some heartbreaking or horrific. Each successive tonal shift is justified, but the cumulative effect is dizzying, and I’m not sure how well it all fits together. (But maybe that’s just what you get if you try to write seriously about contemporary Iran.) It’s a powerful piece of work, anyway.

Eternity (David Freyne 2025)
This is another film that’s satisfying while you’re watching it but doesn’t quite gel. The setup is that, on dying, you arrive in Heaven physically restored to the age when you were happiest, then have a week to choose in which themed ‘world’ you’ll spend, well, eternity. Which has definite comic potential, in a Loki-ish style; the film-makers get a lot of mileage out of background shots of trade-fair-style booths advertising the different worlds (“Smokers’ World – Because cancer can only kill you once!”). But the question they layer on top of that – what if you knew, with absolute certainty, that the time you were happiest, and/or the time your partner was happiest, was before the two of you had met? – is deadly serious (cf. 45 Years). It boils down to ‘if you had to choose between seeking your own happiness above all else and building a relationship, what would you do?’. In that perspective, it’s a bit of a design flaw that Heaven is built exclusively to prioritise the former.

No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield 2023)
What if what appeared to be a home invasion was actually an alien invasion? What if you went into town and nobody would help, because they’d all been possessed by aliens? And what if nobody would help because they just didn’t like you? An unusual and promising setup, but the film’s a bit underdeveloped, I think partly because of a distinctive but odd stylistic choice. Nobody ever seems to talk to themselves in films, even alone in their house (“now where did I… of course it’s there, I left it there, get a grip Edwards!” – just me then?). The protagonist of this film is no exception – and she spends a lot of time on her own. This seems to have inspired the director to go the whole hog: there are two (2) lines of dialogue in this film, both of them imagined. All actual communication is handled through “oh”s, “uh”s, waves and curls of the lip. An impressive exercise, but it didn’t have any obvious connection with the plot, which I think would have worked a lot better with a few more words on the soundtrack.

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow 2025)
A nightmare scenario – an ICBM launched at the USA from an unknown source – played out to its nightmarish conclusion, in 19-minute sections covering the same time period in different settings, moving upward from the early-warning radar station to the White House. It’s not clear precisely what’s happened at the end, but it almost certainly isn’t anything good. Idris Elba is the President and plays him as well-intentioned but tired and out of touch – a nod towards Biden, perhaps. So things could be worse – or rather, things are worse.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson 1992)
It was Christmas Eve. We watched The Muppet Christmas Carol; what else were we going to do? It was wonderful; it always is.

The Housemaid (Paul Feig 2025)
A twisty domestic (ho ho) thriller, school of Fatal Attraction or (especially) Single White Female. Can the unknown woman coming into the household be trusted? Is the impossibly glamorous man of the house all that he seems? Is his wife the person she appears to be? Who’s actually in charge here? No, no, no and the answer may surprise you. I’ve got a soft spot for Paul Feig (particularly A Simple Favour, which I genuinely and unironically like a lot). This isn’t one of his best – I mean, it is basically trash – but it is a lot of fun; it hits a distinctive, slightly manic note early on and sticks to it. Don’t be fooled by the BBFC warning of ‘sexualised nudity’, though; this harks back to the 80s & 90s in some ways, but not in treating sex scenes as a way of displaying the lead actress’s body (or, in the case of Working Girl, hoovering scenes). The sex scenes here are frank in what they show but positively demure in how they show it. (It’s almost as if those scenes weren’t being shot as male fantasy any more.)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier 2025)
The main character’s a theatre actor; the other main character’s her estranged father, who’s a film director and has just reappeared in her life. He’s making a film about his mother, who committed suicide when he was young, and wants her to play the lead role. She refuses to take the part; her father casts an American actress… There’s more to the setup than this, and at first it seems that the film’s going to be impossibly complicated; it works, though, because of the simplicity and intensity of its themes. It’s about the relationship between the main character and her sister (who acted in one of their father’s films, once); it’s about the father’s attempts to express his feelings, to make amends, to defy the passage of time – attempts which are shown to be well-intentioned but delusional and self-serving, even self-indulgent (shades of Wallis Island). It’s about the past, about family, about how they made us and scarred us, and how we got through. Stellan Skarsgård is great, but both Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (as the daughters) are amazing; you could be watching two real sisters. A film of the year; strongly recommended – especially for anyone else whose father used to make long, rambling phone calls at inconvenient times. It didn’t get to me like Clare Foy singing “Always on my mind” in All Of Us Strangers – few things have – but the scene in which the father earnestly attempts to make contact with his daughters without actually listening to them (“I know how you feel! You’re creative, like me!”) really reminded me of the old man. (Sorry, Dad. Miss you.)

Terry Carr, Cirque (1977)
A far-future fantasy with barely the tip of a toenail in hard sf. Cirque, a city on a future Earth, sits on the edge of the Abyss (literally). The large cast includes an alien millipede which can ‘remember’ the future as well as the past, and which has come to Earth to see what is about to emerge from the Abyss (as it knows it will, since it remembers seeing it). There are also (among others) a priestess of the Five Elements, a City Guardian and a ‘holopathic’ telepath (who selects and rebroadcasts particularly noteworthy subjective experiences). On the surface it’s picturesque fantasy, but the central device of a creature emerging from an Abyss is decidedly odd (as is what happens when it does emerge). There seems to be a distinct message being conveyed here, even a suggestion of allegory. I couldn’t really make out what the message was, though, unless it was simply that fear of monsters creates monsters (monsters – from the Id!). As I said on reviewing it, “it’s ambitious and substantial … but it’s also very, very odd”.

C. J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith (1978) 
My difficulties with fantasy continue. I didn’t get on with this one either, although it has a fairly substantial hard-sf frame and no hint of a message or theme. (There’s no pleasing some people.) The planet of Kesrith is an inhospitable imperial outpost, about to be handed over to humans by the regul, who have hitherto garrisoned it with mri. The regul are long-lived, leathery-skinned bureaucrats, like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and the Vogons, and have a tendency to kill their young if they don’t measure up; the mri (who seem to be reptilian rather than humanoid) are colony-dwelling warriors, like a cross between Samurai and naked mole rats, and have a tendency to kill everyone, including themselves. We spend time among all three – especially the mri, whose vocabulary tends to the solemn and grandiose and for whom there was in me but little patience. I mean, it’s not stupid by any means; there’s lots of interesting stuff going on, particularly if you like learning alien languages on the fly. I just didn’t feel it had much point.

Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979) 5*
I’d read this once before, and was happy to revisit it. The ‘home’ register of this book – the voice in which it starts and ends – is Keith Waterhouse-ish mock-heroic social realist comedy, but it doesn’t stay put: while there are passages of very English, almost Pythonesque humour, there are also passages of all-too-human grotesquerie and tragedy, reminding me of John Berger’s The Foot of Clive. And there’s outright horror, even gore (one character is murdered and another loses a limb); there’s a chapter consisting of a report written by aliens, in a version of English they’ve pieced together from observation of Blackpool; there’s a brief biography of a poet, showing how his style changed and developed through the years. It all, somehow, fits together. The central conceit – an alien race piloting structured craft of approximately the size and shape of a ladybird – is probably a physical impossibility, but that hardly seems to matter. Quoting my review: “[the] plurality of registers and styles seems to me very much of a piece with the fact that it’s science fiction; it’s as if the essential absurdity of the premise … makes conventional expectations irrelevant, making it possible to head off in all these different directions”.

D. F. Jones, Xeno (1979) 1*
Do you know Xeno? No? Me, I know Xeno.

It begins with a thriller-ish plot involving aeroplanes disappearing and then reappearing after weeks or months, with the crew and passengers unaware of any lost time. People hold urgent meetings and say things like “But surely you don’t mean–”. Then the narrative divides between an international task force working on the lost-time episodes and a group of passengers on one of the vanishing planes, who start to come down with a mysterious illness – or is it? It transpires that it’s actually a parasite, which has transferred to humans from whatever entity has been messing about with planes (the task force concludes, oddly, that this will have been a divine or semi-divine being, albeit not God Himself, who is by definition perfect and therefore does not have parasites). The alien parasite is a physical organism; it’s very keen on reproducing and very hard to kill, and routinely kills its human hosts. So, er, we’re all doomed. Sorry about that. It’s a weird, disjointed, cosmically pessimistic work, which is also characterised (like many works by male authors in this period) by staggeringly awful portrayals of women: for example, the character who spends several minutes every morning standing naked in front of a mirror and admiring her own body. Ben Elton once speculated that the reason why women were under-represented in the professions was all the time they must waste, looking at their breasts in the mirror and going “Phwooah! Wa-hey! Don’t get many of those to the pound!”. This is basically that, but done straight. 1979, ladies and gentlemen.

Xeno? No-no.

Christopher Priest, An infinite summer (1979) 5*
Not all British sf writers from the late 1970s… I’d read this at least twice before, and was more than happy to revisit it. There are five stories here, of which three are set in Priest’s Dream Archipelago and one in Surrey. I’ve always loved Priest’s style, which could be a dictionary definition for ‘deceptively plain’; without fireworks of any kind, he takes you inside a consciousness that isn’t your own and subjects it to strains – things that seem unbearable, or impossible, or unbearably desirable – that it can barely cope with. There’s a lot of loneliness and isolation in the five stories here, a lot of romantic and sexual desire, a lot of lost time; there’s one story that’s basically about the male gaze. Above all, there’s an intense subjective portrayal of how those things feel, and what they do to you. There are elements of hard sf here, but Priest uses them to establish scenarios through which those feelings can be articulated and re-experienced, in all their complexity and strangeness. This is sf at its best.

Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
This book is set in a dystopian future, where a (literally) viral hack to the human sense of smell has made society unliveable and led to a general flight from the cities, as well as a rather drastic reduction in the population (although this isn’t dwelt on). Also, it turns out that there are aliens on Earth – or in the Earth’s atmosphere – only we never knew they were there before because we couldn’t smell them, you see? And, and then it turns out that the aliens are telepathic, only you can’t get make telepathic contact with them unless you really chill out, OK, and also you’ve got to be empathetic. So of course young people are particularly good at that – I mean, the whole empathy / telepathy / alpha wave thing – but especially when they’re stoned, right? (Weed has a very distinctive aroma, or so I’m told, and it would really honk if you had an artificially ultra-sensitive sense of smell; the book doesn’t dwell on how that’s managed, though.) By the end of the book a happy ending is in sight; everything is fixed (or soon will be), by the power of youth, empathy, meditation and marijuana. (While at university, “Spider entertained at campus coffeehouses and gatherings, strumming his guitar and singing in harmony with his female partner”, according to Wikipedia. You don’t say.) All snark aside, I did actually like this a lot. It’s just a big bag of stuff, but it’s held together by sheer authorial biro.

Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
This is a fix-up of five stories, most of them previously published, about Dave Surgenor and his colleagues in the (interplanetary) Cartographical Service. It’s a lot like a reimagining of Poul Anderson’s David Falkayn stories, ten years on and without the mercantilist politics. Like those stories, a lot of these are high-concept exercises: the Cartographical Service specialises in mapping planets that are uninhabited, lifeless and as such safe for visitors, and three of the stories here test those assumptions in different ways. Falkayn was also, not to put too fine a point on it, relentlessly horny, and the other two stories here are mostly about GURLS hem-hem. In one the all-male crew of Surgenor’s ship are supplied with sleep tapes inducing realistic erotic dreams, which has the unfortunate side-effect of increasing testosterone-fuelled behaviour in waking hours – partly because, unlike p0rn, they’re so realistic as to induce emotional attachment. In the other, the ship has been joined by a lone woman, former Crackerjack presenter Christine Holmes (are you sure? Ed.), just before a mission which goes so badly wrong that everyone seems to be doomed within a matter of days; more than one of the crewmen sees her as his last ever chance of a shag and tries to act accordingly. Dave, our point of view character, is sceptical of the tapes in the first story and protective without being creepy in the second, but both stories are basically about The Woman Problem. (Which Dave solves! At least, he asks Christine out when they get back to Earth.) Authorial attitudes here don’t rise to the level of “what were you thinking?” (Anderson, D.F. Jones, Ian Watson, others), but we’re definitely at “well-intentioned but oh, mate”.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977/1972) 5*
An astonishing piece of work. I’m going to cheat and just quote my original review:

This is, most obviously, a gritty thriller about people living on the edge of the law, dealing with interfering bureaucrats, untrustworthy rivals and the dwindling comforts of home life – although it’s also an adventure story, stretching our heroes to the limit as they negotiate the unpredictable perils of a strange landscape. At the same time, it’s a horror story, vividly evoking what it feels like to deal with – and fail to deal with – things that are beyond your capacity to understand, but won’t go away. It’s also a political allegory about colonialism and how it drains the vitality of colonised societies, even while it appears to bring material wealth. And it’s a desperately sad novel about young people growing up, making new commitments and discovering unwelcome truths about one another, and about themselves. It’s all of that, and it is – and could only be – sf.

It’s a literary novel, it’s a thriller, it’s an indictment of colonialism, it’s an Aickmanesque ‘strange story’. It builds and builds, although it’s written (and was published) as four separate stories – builds to an appalling double gut-punch of a conclusion, when we discover something terrible about a central character and he discovers something even worse about himself (but neither of them is a surprise). Frankly, this book justifies the existence of sf.

Incidentally, it’s 143 pages long.

Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
Like Xeno, this novel involves a lot of important men having important meetings – although they’re scientists rather than soldiers and consequently go on at much greater length. Like Xeno, it has two separate plots, one of which has weird theological overtones. On one hand, there’s a whale which has been implanted with a human consciousness, out there somewhere (they did it with computers); unknown to its human handlers, it’s now starting to join in the world-wide network of whale communications, which is a thing. On the other, a scientist has proved scientifically that the Big Bang was immediately followed by an even bigger collapse, that the entire observable universe is only an echo of the expanding universe that might have been, and as such that God doesn’t exist – or rather, that God definitely does exist, but not in our universe. The reaction to this news is a worldwide crisis of faith, riots, collapsing governments etc – and that’s before the whales find out about it.

Like Xeno, in other words, it’s downright weird, but not in a good way. And it’s also like Xeno in relentlessly and degradingly sexualising its female characters; one fantasises about being raped by Hell’s Angels, while another, whose large breasts had made her a popular cheerleader, now “approached cetacean psychology with the same cheerful bounce”. Not all British sf writers from the late 1970s – but definitely some of them.

Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other stories (1978) 5*
This book made a very pleasant change (I didn’t read it straight after The Jonah Kit, but I did read it straight after Xeno…). My only slight negative – well, a query more than a negative – is whether some of these stories are sf at all; Wilhelm goes considerably further out, in genre terms, than (e.g.) Christopher Priest, and many of these stories would look right at home in an anthology of “strange stories”, post-Aickman or post-Highsmith. But I like strange stories – and sf that’s generically in the borderlands – so no harm done. Several stories seem to be in dialogue with earlier works – including a particular story by Patricia Highsmith – which I also liked; Wilhelm takes those earlier models in some interesting directions. But above all, Wilhelm writes about real people, of both sexes. I don’t particularly hanker after stories in which people spend a lot of time thinking about dresses, but by God it makes a pleasant change from having them contemplating their own boobs.

Ten books, including four 5* reviews and two 1*s. Four 5*s seems generous, but there’s only one here that I might consider demoting – and one (Roadside Picnic) which would deserve a 6th star if one were available.

Next: I’ll probably write a blog post about politics or something. But I will go back for one last look at the £10 Box. If you have been, thanks for reading, and watch this space.

In November I read the last two books from the £10 Box:

Christopher Priest, An Infinite Summer

C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith

Reviews on blog.

I also read (or finished)

Nicci French, The Red Room
A quick, enjoyable read, as I’d expected. I was late to Gerrard/French completism, so I missed out some of their earlier novels and didn’t catch up for a while; this one is the fifth of their 27 novels to date, from 2001. NF don’t exactly write to a formula, but there are certainly recurring elements. The central character here is a woman recovering from trauma; she has a hunch about a murder investigation, and makes a nuisance of herself in trying to get the police to take her seriously; she meets a man who she trusts, but maybe shouldn’t… I mean, stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. This (early) iteration works pretty well, though; the character of Michael Doll – the sex-starved obsessive stalker who may (or may not) also be a murderer – is particularly strong.

Lynn Steger Strong, Flight
Having been through the awful process of dividing up a dead parent’s possessions with siblings, I expected that a novel about a family gathering to contemplate just that would resonate. It didn’t, really, and by the end I was disengaged and rather bored. For one thing, this is basically a ‘Christmas family reunion’ story – nobody’s too bothered about the division of assets, apart from a dispute about the house itself which people are mostly too polite to raise. There are far too many characters (everyone involved brings along their partners and kids, each with their own back story), and some of the American cultural reference points were surprisingly alien (yes, even in 2025). Every time they had a meal there was at least one dish that baffled me; there’s a scene in a bar where people order a basket of fried cheese, which sounds impractical on more than one level. Oh, and one of them’s an artist who makes wooden birds, and one of them’s a social worker who has a client who has a kid who seems to have run away, hence ‘flight’, you see.

Andrew Michael Hurley, Saltwash
I enjoyed reading this a lot more than the previous book, but it was a much bigger disappointment; it read as if it had started life as a short story and probably should have stayed that way. It was basically Robert Aickman with some, but not all, of the eeriness and grotesquerie left out – in fact to a large extent it was Aickman’s “The Hostel” with, etc. Hurley’s slightest work by some way.

Holly Seddon, 59 Minutes
This is just silly; maybe not quite as silly as the Janice Hallett (see below), but getting there. I’m going to ‘spoil’ this one, because any spoiler-free description is likely to make it sound interesting; it’s for your own good, basically. So, it’s the end of the world: nukes are going to fall, across the south of England, in 59 minutes’ time – that is, 59 minutes and counting! Three parallel narratives, with countdown time stamps, follow different characters, all of whom are running round (as my mother used to say) like little mad things. The separate narratives of Carrie, Frankie and (oddly) Mrs Dabb converge and intersect, and as their clocks all tick down to zero… never mind, it was a false alarm! The early warning system got hacked! As you were, everybody! It also turns out that Mrs D’s seemingly parallel narrative has been in a different timeframe all along: her story’s taking place ten years after the event, and she’s been running around panicking for a completely different reason. Also, she’s one of the main characters from the other two strands (hence the ‘Mrs’ malarkey). Bah, is what I say. Also, what kind of hackers does this world have, if they can not only get a fake nuclear alert sent out but disable all the systems that would have rapidly shown it was false?

Adam Roberts, Lake of Darkness
I know Adam, slightly, mainly through the World Of Blogs. He’s a really interesting writer and thinker, particularly in the short story form, although I haven’t always got on with his novels. (Or with sf novels generally, to be fair; I’ve always felt that sf has a natural affinity with short stories.)

As with The Thing Itself and Purgatory Mount, I felt that there was a lot going on here; unfortunately, as with Purgatory Mount I wasn’t entirely sure what it all was. I don’t know Gilles Deleuze from a rhizome in the ground (ho ho), so there’s probably a lot in there that I missed. (Many readers didn’t feel they missed so much, or else didn’t worry about what they were missing. I didn’t need to look up any words, I can say that much.) The book’s also narrated (like the ‘frame’ sections of Purgatory Mount) in an oddly arch, “Listen with Mother” voice, supposedly motivated by the sheer alienness of the far-future situation from or in which the story’s being told. It grated on me, as messing with the omniscient narrator tends to do; when I was reading Gravity’s Rainbow I remember at one point flicking ahead to try and establish when the narrative would get back to ‘normal’. I think I just prefer novelistic prose to err on the side of plainness, third-person narration especially. (I’m not – for all Adam’s advocacy – a fan of Anthony Burgess.)

The two central conceits of this novel can (I think) be summed up in two sets of paired assertions:

1. Nothing can possibly continue to exist inside a black hole; certainly not life in any form.
2. Or can it? What does ‘inside’ mean in this context anyway?

and:

1. The people of a post-scarcity utopia would simply play happily forever, like children.
2. Have you spent any time with children? That sounds awful!

To be honest, I don’t have a great deal of time for point 2.; my response to those two rhetorical questions would be “No, it can’t” and “It means ‘beyond the event horizon of the said black hole, as opposed to anywhere else in the rest of the universe’, as you very well know”. So the revelation that something, or someone, could and did exist in there – followed by the revelation that the black hole’s ‘inside’ was in fact always already ‘outside’, because of the effect of Infinite Mass on Space and Time and Topology Itself! – left me a bit on the cold side. I don’t object to people going to place A at time X and encountering an immortal superhuman being which has been confined there since the dawn of time; if it’s good enough for Doctor Who it’s good enough for me (exceptions apply). I do baulk at having them (at time X, at place A) encountering an immortal superhuman being which is immaterial and indifferent to time and space, and which has in fact always been already everywhere – and no amount of Socratic questioning (“ah but when you think about it hasn’t it always already been there, hmm?”) is going to unbaulk me.

I am quite sympathetic towards point b., though – I do think a post-scarcity utopia would, ironically at first sight, leave a lot to be desired. However, the burden of Lake of Darkness seems to be that what a p.-s. u. would lack is hardship and loss, and that this could be remedied by reintroducing conflict (courtesy of the dweller in the black hole). This, as an assertion about post-capitalist society, seems about as wrong as it could be. Conflict per se will never need to be reintroduced, it seems to me: scarcity of some kinds is ineliminable, which in turn means there will always be competition and hence conflict. (Indeed, the narrative includes some interesting speculations about what the denizens of utopia would find to do all day, making it clear that not everything would be possible all the time for everyone: there would be priorities to set, which inevitably means that there would be disagreements over those priorities, hence conflict.) Black Hole Dude, to identify him no more spoilerishly than that, specialises in ego-driven ruptures of communal social accord – and who hasn’t occasionally, self-centredly, found communal accord a bit boring? But there’s nothing stipulating conformity, let alone enforced conformity, in the specs for a post-scarcity utopia: you can always disagree, and disagree again, and at worst you can always walk away. The rupturing moves – selfishness, lies, violence – don’t bring anything to the party; they don’t even make conflict work better. If you could engineer anti-social behaviours out of society – and the wager of utopia is that you could – there’d be no need to reinvent them. What you would need are means and procedures for resolving conflict. What a viable anarchy would (still) need, in other words, is law.

Zooming back out, it is worth lingering for a moment over those two conceits, and just how disparate they are; scratching those two itches in a single narrative is quite something. It’s a really interesting book. Didn’t agree with it, of course, but that in itself is quite an interesting thing to say about a novel.

Janice Hallett, The Examiner
Dreadful. As a recovering academic, I thought a post-graduate course might be an interesting setting for Hallett’s “found documents” approach. It’s not. The course and its students begin by not resembling any I can imagine, and end by revealing themselves to be something else entirely. (No spoilers, it’s really not worth it.) Also, Hallett reuses the “improbable thing hidden improbably inside another improbable thing” plot device from The Christmas Appeal; perhaps she thought nobody would have read it. On the plus side, it only took me an evening to read, and it’s cured me of any wish to read any more of her books. Fool me, er, four and a half times… well, anyway.

Also in November, I watched these films:

Anemone (Ronan Day-Lewis 2025)
A small film, rather stagey in a Sam Shepard style (two men in a room, brooding silences alternating with furious monologues). If this had been directed by Ronan Smith, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been co-written by and starred Daniel Day-Lewis, and it might well not have been made. Which would have been a shame; it works well enough, the acting’s genuinely powerful and there’s some great cinematography. I think the guy’s got a future in the business (as well as a father).

Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay 2025)
Sometimes the opening shots of a film make me think, “It’s OK, we’re in safe hands here”. (Sometimes the feeling’s more intense: the opening shots of Todd Haynes’ Carol made me cry.) I had this feeling – that, whatever else, the film-maker knew what they were doing – watching Sentimental Value, and Conclave, and Anemone, and this film. I’m reluctant to overrule my own gut feeling, but the film actually seemed like a bit of a mess; I wasn’t at all sure what it was doing, or whether it succeeded. Films portraying mental illnesses which seem to be shaped to the demands of the film rub me up the wrong way (Sky Peals, Hard Truths), and this certainly didn’t ring true to me as a portrayal of post-partum depression. It brought out the awful, seductive appeal of dropping out of role and calling out phonies, like a more aggressive Holden Caulfield, and how destructive (and self-destructive) such a move can be. Was that what it was about? Not sure.

And Then There Were None (Peter Collinson 1974)
Rock-solid plot, great cast, beautiful location – what could go wrong? The script (mediocre), the staging (wooden), the editing (alternately under- and overactive) and the acting (woefully under-rehearsed); that’s what. A TV movie, and not one I’ll seek out again.

Ballad of a Small Player (Edward Berger 2025)
What did the director of Conclave do next? He adapted a short novel, by cult author Lawrence Osborne, about “Lord Doyle”, a con man and compulsive gambler who inexorably loses everything in the casinos of Macau; he got Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton on board, and the film was released through Netflix, less than a year after the release of Conclave. It’s a terrific novel – it steeps you in “Doyle”‘s consciousness, to the point where the urge for another bottle of champagne and another round of baccarat seems entirely reasonable, or at least like one that’s not worth resisting. The film opens it up and builds up several smaller parts, not always successfully. But Colin Farrell is magnificent; you’d give him a very wide berth (for multiple reasons), but he’s magnificent.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies 1988)
I’m so glad to have seen this on the big screen, and so sorry not to have seen it before. Astonishing film-making, the kind of thing that lives on in your mind; if Country and Western is “three chords and the truth”, this is the truth on 35mm. People’s lives seen as a passage through spaces articulated over time – it doesn’t sound like much spelt out, but done well it’s amazingly powerful. The long shot of the stairs near the beginning of the first part sums up family life, as parents experience it, better than I’ve ever seen it done.

Keeper (Osgood Perkins 2025)
It’s not on the level of The Monkey – which I described as, among other things, “a treatise on mortality dramatised by Peter Jackson circa Braindead” – but this was a lot of fun. “Hi, I’m your new boyfriend and you can definitely trust me!” is a fine old sub-genre of horror film, as is “Things in the woods? Who told you there were mysterious ancient things in the woods?”. Smoosh them together, add gore and grunge and here we are.

The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović 2025)
The films to which Peter Bradshaw and Isaac Feldberg gave their maximum ratings both sound great; they don’t sound like the same film, though, and neither of them sounds like the film I saw. (Feldberg does describe the film as ‘glacially paced’, among other ice-related epithets; I wouldn’t have said that was a good thing, but there you go.) I can’t help feeling a bit “Emperor’s New Clothes” about this one. You can talk about David Lynch and Black Narcissus and use words like ‘oneiric’, or you can say that ‘teenage runaway becomes film extra, talks to star, dreams of stardom’ is pure 50s Hollywood – and the 50s treatment would have fitted in a bit of establishing exposition and wouldn’t have skated so lightly (see what I did there?) over practical questions (were her family looking for her? where did she live while she was an extra, and how?). Meh; all the ‘meh’. (Tout le ‘bof’.)

The Hitcher (Robert Harmon 1986)
We end the month with another old movie making an appearance on Channel 5 or Great! Movies or somewhere – and, unlike Distant Voices, Still Lives, I did see this in the cinema at the time. In a casting decision that will surprise no one, the role of a nameless, motiveless psychopath quietly enjoying the death and destruction he causes is played, rather brilliantly, by Rutger Hauer. It’s great; basically one long car chase, like a shlockier version of Duel.

The £10 Box was an old fruit box containing 40 hardbacks, all of them Science Fiction Book Club editions, dating from 1968 to 1979, which I bought from my local Oxfam bookshop for a tenner several years ago. This is the last in a series of twenty posts each reviewing two of those books; the first was posted in April 2024. All reviews are linked at the end of this post.

Christopher Priest, An Infinite Summer (1979)

I had already read three of the forty books in the £10 Box; this is the third (these were the other two). It was a joy to revisit; in fact I’m fairly sure this isn’t the first time I’ve re-read this book. It’s a collection of five stories, written separately and over a period of years, as Priest is at pains to point out in his Introduction. He also stresses, however, that they have been revised for this collection and “placed … in a deliberate order, with a purpose that I hope will become clear on reading”. Challenge accepted – at least, this makes me feel a bit better about writing up each story in order.

The title story is the only one set in this world – more specifically, it’s set on the banks of the Thames, between Richmond and Isleworth, in times ranging from 1903 to 1940. The story begins when the main character’s life – and his incipient romance with, as far as his family are concerned, the wrong girl – is interrupted by tourists, taking pictures; tourists from an unknown time and place, whose ‘instruments’ fix their subjects in a three-dimensional tableau, invisible to the wider population and frozen for a period that may be days long or stretch into decades. Sometimes you’re the main character, sometimes you’re local colour.

“Whores”, the shortest story here, is set in the Dream Archipelago. A soldier, invalided out of the front line after prolonged exposure to the enemy’s hallucinogenic chemical weapons and still suffering intense synaesthetic flashbacks, goes in search of R&R. He is warned to steer clear of the local girls, but don’t they always say that? To say the story’s frank about sex would make it sound much more wholesome than it is, but it’s certainly frank about male desire and where it can lead – or rather how it can override any concern for where it’s leading.

“Palely Loitering” has a steampunk alternative-Victorian setting reminiscent of the world of Hello Summer, Goodbye; a faster-than-light starship is a key plot driver, although nobody shows much interest in it (the central character least of all). But: suppose that there was a park with a lake, and one of the bridges over the lake took you forward in time by a day while one took you back a day; suppose that, as a young boy, you discovered that jumping the last few feet to the bank propelled you much further into the future; and suppose that you fell in love with a girl you saw there… We’d probably use words like ‘stalking’ now, admittedly, but here the effect is sweet, often comical and rather charming.

“The Negation” is another Dream Archipelago story; its main character is also a soldier in a war involving the weaponising of hallucinogens. While “Whores” portrays a sullenly defeated population in tropical heat, the setting here is wintry and oppressively authoritarian. Against the brutalities of government repression and endless war, the story floats the possibility that art can conquer all, the possibility that a decisive political action is far more effective and the possibility that both of these are consoling daydreams.

“The Watched” is a third Dream Archipelago story, which shares something different with “Whores”: a male viewpoint character who is, frankly, rather excessively horny. The first time I read this story I didn’t particularly notice this – I was young enough to think that, if one’s girlfriend happened to have a shower, one might well find oneself standing outside and imagining how “twin streams of droplets would fall from her nipples [and] a tiny rivulet would snake through her pubic hair” (to quote the first page of the story). There’s a lot of sex in this story, but it’s mostly “sex” as in “looking and fantasising”, not as in “sexual activity” (let alone “sexual relationships“). Really, it’s about male desire considered as a desire to possess through looking, and where that can lead. Also, and not unrelatedly, colonialism, tech bros, the surveillance state…

If I said that these stories were about the sense that we can only live in time, or the sense that we’re all alone but want to make a connection, or the sense that we don’t know what’s going on, it would sound a bit banal. But they are, and their (and Priest’s) strength is to inhabit those feelings and bring out their complexity and weirdness. On examination, it’s not so much that we don’t know what’s going on (for instance), more that what we do know is fundamentally inadequate to the task of telling us what’s going on; or, more precisely, that any kind of approach to a grasp of what’s going on probably begins with the realisation that nothing we think we know is adequate. Stay with ideas like these long enough and your head starts to spin. Stories like these, similarly.

C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith (1979; first published 1978 (this is described as the ‘First British edition’))

Shame to go out on an off note, but I didn’t get on with this at all. There’s a lot that’s interesting about it, to be fair, starting with the setup. The regul, an alien race with their own interplanetary empire (and their own factions warring for control), have made peace with the advancing human race. They are now on the point of withdrawing from the planet of Kesrith: a planet which they have garrisoned with warriors from the mri, a second alien race whose society is warlike and rigidly organised. We spend time with all three species – humans, regul and mri – and learn a lot about conditions on the inhospitable surface of Kesrith and aboard the (for humans) equally inhospitable regul spaceships.

I’ve got two problems with this. One is that Cherryh is plainly fascinated by the mri, a fascination which I didn’t really share – not for want of trying on her part. Cherryh’s far too good a writer to resort to info-dump exposition, but over the course of the chapters set among the mri we learn a lot about their caste-based society, their living arrangements, even their language.

Moreover, there’s something orientalist, in a vaguely Samurai mode, about the mri: lots of honour, flashing blades, solemn oaths and pronouncements. Solemn pretty much everything, in fact. The English used to translate mri dialogue and thought processes is consistently heightened, which is to say, stilted and archaic; it’s also liberally studded with untranslated terms. Here’s a sample:

He had in him a gathering certainty that, whatever the evidence of his eyes and the testimony of the regul, Medai had not laid down his life willingly. The dus, so close to a kel’en’s mind, was miuk’ko and grown so thin that it could pass shrine doors, and the body of Medai, once solid with muscle, was thin as the mummified dead.

I guess some readers find this style of writing sonorous and impressive. I just found it got in the way. (Even a proud member of an unvanquished warrior caste doesn’t think “I have in me a gathering certainty”, surely.) As for the dus and so on, by this point in the book a reasonably alert reader will know roughly what a dus is, who the kel (grammer) are and even what’s involved in going miuk’ko down in – and I suppose there’s some pleasure in being called upon to be that alert reader. But, again, I find it makes the text a bit of a slog; I think it would have worked better, both for ease of reading and as a defamiliarisation strategy, if Cherryh had stuck with familiar terms and let readers discover that a ‘beast’ (say) wasn’t quite what they’d assumed.

My second problem is that I can’t see what all this is for. It’s a well-written, thoughtful and detailed story about future humanity’s engagement with two vividly-imagined alien races – well, one and a half; the regul are rather like a three-way cross between the Vogons, the Slitheen and Jabba the Hutt (although in fairness they do pre-date all three*). It’s high-grade storytelling. But is that enough? The entire book is also the setup for a larger story to be played out over parts two and three – but if this isn’t enough, would three books of it be any better?

I guess this goes back to my recurrent trouble with space opera. I just think sf can do more – even (or especially) while doing less, at least in the way of world-building. (Imagine what Chip Delany could have done with the interactions of the mri language and caste system, or Kate Wilhelm narrating the ghastly gerontocracy of regul society.) The contrast between this and the previous book is stark. Cherryh’s book gave me something to think about the whole time I was reading it – but Priest’s made me think more deeply about things I was already thinking about.

*Two definitely and one almost certainly; C.J. Cherryh could just about have heard the first episodes of HHGTG before she’d finished this book, if she was still working on it in March 1978 and if she visited the UK in that month.

Full list of reviews (with * rating and SFBC # where present)

Poul Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (1963, 1965, 1966) #141
John Brunner, Timescoop (1969)
Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (1967) #142
Terry Carr, Cirque (1977)
Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth (1967) #133 1*
C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kesrith (1978)
D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1975) 5*
Michael Coney, Winter’s Children (1974)
Michael Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975) 5*
Richard Cowper, Breakthrough (1967) #136 5*
Richard Cowper, Phoenix (1968) #147
Richard Cowper, Worlds Apart (1974)
L.P. Davies, Twilight Journey (1967) #134
Samuel Delany, Babel-17  (1966) #140 5*
Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979) 5*
Harry Harrison, War with the Robots (1962) #138
Philip E. High, Invader on my Back (1968) #148
D.F. Jones, Xeno (1979) 1*
Damon Knight, Three Novels (1951, 1954, 1957) #139
Charles Logan, Shipwreck (1975) 5*
J.T. McIntosh, Six Gates from Limbo (1968) #144 1*
R.W. Mackelworth, Firemantle (1968) #151
Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (1972) 5*
Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction (1966) #131
Larry Niven, Inconstant Moon (1973)
Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, The Dynostar Menace (1975)
Frederik Pohl, The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965, 1966) #166
Frederik Pohl, The Gold at the Starbow’s End (1972)
Christopher Priest, An Infinite Summer (1979) 5*
Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
Robert Sheckley, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (1971)
Curt Siodmak, City in the Sky (1974) 1*
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977) 5*
Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (1968) #135
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other fictions (1978) 5*
‘Patrick Wyatt’, Irish Rose (1975)
Roger Zelazny, The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth and other stories (1971) 5*
Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown, The Cassiopeia Affair (1968) #149

Key to Star Ratings

5*: you should definitely read this; read the review to see why
1*: you should definitely not read this; read the review to see why not
No star rating: read the review and see what you think

Well, perhaps. But what do we mean by a branch?

Most fundamentally, a branch is defined by geography. If Party A has members in a lot of different places, it will make sense for Party A to set up branches in those places. The area covered by a party branch is inversely related to the size of party membership. If more or less everyone’s a member, it will make sense to have a branch for every street; if an organisation’s got members worldwide, but not very many of them in any one country, national branches (or ‘sections’) will be in order. Your Party has members throughout Britain, and has their details on a membership list (or so we’re told). It would be fairly straightforward to sort the membership list by post code, and from there it’s just a matter of grouping post codes together: every YP member in Manchester could be declared a member of the Manchester branch tomorrow. Alternatively, everyone in the Manchester Withington constituency area could be declared a member of the branch for that constituency; we could probably even go down to ward level, as the Labour Party (for one) does.

A branch considered only as a geographical unit wouldn’t really amount to anything – what would all those members do next? We can start fleshing out the definition by thinking of a branch as an interest group. ‘Interest’ here may mean ‘collective self-interest’ or just ‘finding something interesting’; either way, once you’ve identified everyone in a geographical area who considers themselves to share that interest, it’s reasonable to think they might want to meet up. The interest group is then defined by whatever it is they do to pursue their shared interest; crochet lovers get together to do (and talk about) crochet, trade union activists get together to do (and talk about) trade union activism. And when the nature of the shared interest is membership of a party, party members get together to do (and talk about)… party-member stuff.

Does that need to be defined any more precisely? Can we trust in the shared ethos and philosophy of the party, allow each branch party to be shaped by the particular shared interests of its activists, and let the national leadership get on with it unless and until they say something unacceptable? (I suspect this may be the stop where Green Party activists get off.) Or should we begin with a clear idea as to what party members should do – and how they should relate to the party hierarchy and its national representatives?

One option is to see a party branch as an electoral support system. The starting assumption here is that the party has an electoral candidate in a given area; party members in the branch for that area are there to try and make sure they get (re-)elected. And that goal defines what party members do. Campaigning in elections, canvassing voters before elections, canvassing voters in between elections to make the pre-election canvassing run more smoothly: when I was in the Labour Party, that was the bread and butter of branch activity. Indeed, there was very little else that my branch actually did – at least, very little of any political consequence.

This doesn’t sound like a great idea; it isn’t really possible for Your Party, in any case. At present all Your Party’s MPs and councillors are all either former independents or defectors from Labour; I don’t know who any future candidates will be, or how (or by whom) they’ll be selected. If we had a slate of Your Party candidates I’d be happy to canvass for them, once in a while, but that’s a long way off.

Another option is for a party branch to function as – or ideally to grow out of – a community organisation. The idea here is that a locally-based organisation could bring together activists in the area, across or outside party lines (initially at least), and that similar local organisations could federate, regionally and ultimately nationally, to form a new and more representative kind of political organisation. Bottom-up approaches like this seemed to be endorsed at different times by Jamie Driscoll (of Majority and the Green Party) and by Jeremy Corbyn who, after being re-elected as an independent in 2024, promised to build local mechanisms of feedback and accountability in his Islington constituency.

The problem with this model is self-evident: whether the existence of the new party is made to depend on the presence of community organisers or of active independent politicians, the short-term result will be extreme unevenness, leaving much, probably most, of the country untouched. This is not a recipe for building a national party; it’s not really a recipe for building anything, but (at best) for giving something an opportunity to grow – and in all probability to grow “vaster than empires and more slow”. (And, not to get all electoral-support-y, but there is going to be another General Election within the next few years, not to mention council elections next May.)

We could also embrace the “local branch/central hierarchy” structure and think of the party as a transmission belt. In this model (developed originally by Palmiro Togliatti), transmission is two-way. The party transmits the grounded radicalism of workers in struggle upwards to keep the leadership honest, preventing compromises and sellouts; at the same time, the party transmits the more developed programmes and longer perspectives of the leadership downwards, preventing hasty or adventurist action. It’s a two-way transmission of both ideology and discipline. The membership keep the leaders up to date and tell them what not to do (not to settle for less, not to sell out under-represented interest groups); in return, the leadership keeps the members focused on the longer term and tells them what not to do (not to make demands that can’t be met, not to alienate potential allies).

We might ask why having a transmission belt matters: if we’ve got a common philosophy and shared values, why do we also need the leadership’s thinking to be informed by what the members are doing, and vice versa? The answer is class, and the fact that any Left organisation is always at least partially prefigurative. In this model, the members whose radicalism is transmitted up the chain aren’t considered as random individuals who happen to be party members; they’re people active in trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, campaigning charities. In short, they’re people actively building alternatives and challenges to capital and its status quo – and it’s the knowledge and experience built in those struggles that needs to inform the leadership’s decision-making.

I think something like this is in the minds of a lot of the people pushing for the establishment of YP branches. But the devil’s in the detail. The party transmits the leadership’s perspectives downwards, fair enough (although right now we could actually do with a steer on the leadership’s perspectives, beyond the perspective that things are generally going swimmingly). Transmitting the radicalism of workers upwards, though: how? How does the branch constitute itself as having a voice, and how does it make that voice heard?

An answer to that question – although not, I think, a very satisfactory one – is to build a formal apparatus for enabling branches to communicate with the centre, and integrate all branches into it. This leads to one last way of looking at party branches, which is to see them as hierarchical nodes. A vote in the ward party decides (or reaffirms) its position on policy A; delegates from the ward party argue for that policy at the level of the constituency party, where delegates from other wards vote for or against it; constituency parties send delegates to the national conference, where they argue for the policies they’ve adopted at national level. Ultimately, by filtering the most popular options upwards through multiple layers of electoral competition, the base governs the centre, steers party policy and determines who represents the party. The logic is simple, and will be only too familiar to anyone who’s been a member of the Labour Party (although Labour Party democracy hasn’t actually worked like this since the 1990s at the latest).

Two points need to be stressed here. Firstly, the corollary of these bottom-up mechanisms of accountability is a degree of democratic centralism: once a position has been adopted by a party centrally, the leadership has the right to expect that the position will be binding on the party at large (as does everyone who worked to commit them to the policy in question). What this means is that, once a debate or a candidate selection is settled, it stays settled, whatever an individual branch may feel about it (let alone an individual member); at least, it’s settled until the next appointed time for these issues to be debated. As well as governing the centre from below, these mechanisms discipline the membership from above.

Secondly, to say that bottom-up control begins with the branch ‘deciding’ its position is a bit misleading. While the branch is the base layer of the whole hierarchical structure, it’s also a hierarchical structure in itself: majority votes decide what position a branch will back, but those votes are the object of intense factional organising – never more intense than when undertaken by the faction that won last time round. Moreover, given the previous point – that settled issues stay settled – a member is unlikely to see a branch as a hive of debate; it’s more likely to present an image of mute, apolitical unity, with serious debate on policies and personnel seen not as a normal democratic function but as a threat to be fought off. You say “the branch reaffirmed its position”, I say “there were stirrings from the opposition, but the branch’s ruling group won the vote after they’d phoned round and got their friends out”. Potato, potahto.

To recap:

1. The branch is an interest group: party members in particular areas get together and do, collectively, whatever they feel party members in their area ought to be doing.
2. The branch is an electoral support system: party members in particular areas get together and work to get their party’s representatives elected and/or re-elected.
3. The branch is a community organisation: party members are campaigners in particular areas, who get together to form a party out of a national federation of these organisations.
4. The branch is a transmission belt: campaigners in particular areas get together and work to keep the party’s leadership aligned to the priorities of the working class in struggle.
5. The branch is a hierarchical node: party members in particular areas get together and compete among themselves to represent their branch and to commit it to particular policies.

Labour Party branches, in my experience, are mostly amalgams of 1, 2 and 5. By contrast, the ideal image of a Your Party branch, when the party was first proposed, was a combination of 1, 3 and 4: local, grassroots, community-based activists would be in the driving seat, whether they were organised independently of YP or not. We can see traces of this way of thinking in the proposal, approved by YP’s recent founding conference, to give YP members the ability to form a local branch, subject to the real-time agreement of 20% of the branch’s membership in the relevant area. While this provision might seem to have an obvious flaw – how can you mobilise 20%, or any significant %, of the branch’s membership if you haven’t got the membership list? – this can also be seen as a safeguard. If you’ve got a community organisation (model 3) you can contact like-minded people through that; if not, you can reach out to workers in struggle (model 4), who will either join YP on the spot or already be members. If you don’t know where to start with either of those routes, well, maybe your area isn’t ready to form a branch.

Meanwhile back in the outside world, preparations for forming branches are proceeding apace – and not only branches; there are already cross-branch co-ordinating bodies bringing together delegates from individual branches (although I’m not sure what the status of those delegates is when they haven’t been elected, not least because their branches don’t actually exist yet). The thinking seems to be that building a hierarchical node (and occupying positions within it) is a good idea in itself, irrespective of whether YP is or isn’t in touch with what’s going on in the area, and hence irrespective of whether the prospective branch is likely to be able to function as a transmission belt. In some cases, the drive to form these – both the individual proto-branches and the cross-branch networks – has been pushed by members of some of the small non-electoral socialist groups that have committed to working in YP, notably the Socialist Workers Party and their offshoot Counterfire. Which suggests an additional, more cynical definition:

6. The branch (like the party itself) is a position of influence which may be occupied by one of a number of rival groups and factions, amplifying their voice and their ability to intervene in the broader struggle.

I’m not a member of Your Party; the anxiety which the period of rival membership portals caused me, and the relief I felt when I considered the possibility of not joining, made my decision for me. For those who are – and those who, like me, are still on the party’s periphery – I think the branch formation process is going to be critical; I think we should do whatever we can to make our local branch(-to-be) more like a transmission belt to whatever’s going on locally, and less like a hierarchical node in a structure like an organisational chart, all ready for local party veterans to move in once they can swing the necessary votes. I am absolutely not in favour of barring members of revolutionary socialist groups in general from YP, or even the Socialist Workers Party in particular. However, I am also absolutely not in favour of rerunning the Socialist Alliance/Respect/Left List débacle with Zarah Sultana in the role of George Galloway – and I think this is a genuine danger if we give free rein to time-served party activists in search of positions of influence, and let YP branches drift into the hierarchical node form. I hate to say it, but I really think we need to go to the people, or at least think seriously about what that would mean. (It’s not language I like using – I can’t honestly say I’ve never been a Maoist, but it was a very long time ago – but when they’re right, they’re right.)

PS Which also means that I’m not in favour of drumming up enough names to reach the 20% threshold out of our existing WhatsApp lists.

7. A branch is not a WhatsApp list.

Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams

D.F. Jones, Xeno

Reviews on blog.

I also read (or finished)

Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
My favourite Pynchon, of the five I’ve read; I spent much of September re-reading it, in preparation for watching One Battle After Another (see below). I needn’t have bothered from that point of view, but I’m still glad I did. On re-reading I found the mood of the book quite different from what I remembered, though. Curiously, I found that the mood of Anderson’s film chimed, not with the book I’d just read, but with my earlier vague memory of it – by which I mean, a mood of laid-back, good-humoured but rock-solid radicalism, Costa-Gavras filtered through The Big Lebowski and The Blues Brothers. By contrast, on re-reading it I felt that Vineland‘s not about battles but defeats – at best, the lulls between defeats. Its ending is upbeat, but I closed the book feeling that all its most sympathetic characters and situations, from the saddest and most chaotic or compromised to the glimpses of possible hippie Arcadias, existed at the pleasure of forces far more powerful than they, in the crevices and interstices of a repression so vast and so successful as to have become invisible. Pynchon loves his characters as well as the (genuine) radical history on which he’s grafted them, but he loves them fondly, indulgently, like children. The writing’s amazing, though. There’s a wonderful passage midway through a dramatic confrontation within a chapter-long flashback, when the narrator suddenly throws forward to show the two characters confronting each other in the book’s narrative present, just two middle-aged guys at a barbecue, one cautiously broaching the topic of what had gone on in the old days – It got pretty wild back then, didn’t it? I think you even thought I was a police informer! Yeah… crazy times… All this, before we abruptly spool back to the time of the flashback and realise that that barbecue is never going to happen. There’s also a striking example of a plot-resolving deus in machinam. (No, I don’t mean in machina.) Nobody else writes like this.

Sophie Hannah, The Telling Error
As the next few titles demonstrate, after finishing Vineland I was in the mood for a quicker read. I like a bit of cosy crime, and I keep getting suckered in by Sophie Hannah’s mysteries, mainly because of their intricate and outlandish setups. I should know by now that what you get is 300 pages of people running around like headless chickens, followed by an equally intricate and outlandish solution. There’s a mnemonic for the compass points in order which goes Never Eat Shredded Wheat; I feel as if I ought to be able to do something similar with Never Read Sophie Hannah, but NRSH isn’t really anything.

Henning Mankell, An Event in Autumn
A ‘cold case’ novella and my first exposure to Wallander. Quite Sjöwall/Wahlöö-esque, both in the grim and mildly political resolution to the case and in the rather dogged “The middle-aged man sat down at the table. He felt overwhelmingly tired and he realised that his shoes were leaking.” narration. Good, but not much fun.

Nicci French, The Unheard
Unlike Sophie Hannah, Sean French and Nicci Gerrard are quite good at setting up situations that don’t make sense, but then giving them explanations that do. This wasn’t their best; it was written during lockdown, and I think you can see both stress and haste in the generically ‘Nicci French’ cast of characters (the charming boyfriend, the sceptical police officer…) as well as the details that are left hanging at the end. A good read, though.

Karen B. Golightly, There are things I know
A novella narrated by Pepper, an eight-year-old boy who is very good with some things (especially numbers) and very bad with others (crowds, loud noises); he tells us how a strange man had picked him up from a school outing, claiming to be his uncle. As adult readers we know that things could go very bad at this point, but the abductor seems only to want to replace his own son, who died at a similar age. I was reminded of Walker Hamilton’s All the little animals, a favourite book of mine when I was a few years older than Pepper. It’s an episode rather than a story in its own right, but really well told; if Golightly were to incorporate it into a novel three or four times its length, I wouldn’t complain.

Malcolm Devlin, Engines Beneath Us
A short story and a very powerful one, in a mode that can best be described as working-class Aickman (see also Ray Newman, below). It only rarely crosses the line between terror and horror – which is to say, between ‘creeping dread’ and ‘grue and squick’; it might have been stronger if it hadn’t done so at all. Definitely an author to watch out for, though.

Mick Herron, Clown Town
Some of Herron’s later Slough House books – including the generally wonderful The Secret Hours – have shown signs of narratorial cynicism, self-consciousness, fourth-wall breaking and suchlike symptoms of fatigue. This latest is lively enough, thankfully (although Jackson Lamb does at one point say the words “here we go again”). There’s a bit of London Rules in there, a bit of Real Tigers, even a bit of The Secret Hours, but it’s coherent enough to work in its own right. I was a bit disappointed to be left with a cliffhanger, though – and not just a cliffhanger, but a cliffhanger that could have been designed to be resolved by Goodreads feedback (how many “OMG I can’t believe that X” threads and how many “OMG I can’t believe that Y“?).

Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin
Freelance journalists like to see their work in print, so the life of the freelance obituarist is particularly unsatisfactory – although, this book suggests, that may be better than the alternative. A black comedy from Ukraine (post-independence, pre-invasion). I’m still not convinced about the penguin – although, if the truth be told, I probably wouldn’t have picked the book up without it.

Ray Newman, Intervals of Darkness
Journalist, IT guy and beer authority Ray Newman has been writing horror fiction for a while now, working (like Malcolm Devlin) in a “working-class Aickman” mode; in Newman’s case there’s also an sf-like element of formal experimentalism and more than a touch of the Online Weird (creepypasta, Scarfolk etc). Did I not mention folk horror? Bit of that too. The stories here are powerful and eerie, and I look forward to seeing what Newman does next; I don’t think he’s quite settled on a style yet, but his voice is distinctive. The story that’s sunk the deepest hook into me is one that I’ve read twice – which, when you think about it, is a very good sign.

Also in October, I watched these films:

Dead of Winter (Brian Kirk 2025)
Minnesota. Snow. Shots fired. A frozen lake. A desperate woman. An old woman goes ice-fishing. A girl runs through the snow, screams, is pulled to the ground. Emma Thompson, playing her age, with what sounded like a pretty good Minnesota accent. A decent thriller, elevated by its unusual setting – the cold is practically a character – and its majority-female featured cast. (And that accent.)

The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal 2021)
In which a young female academic (Jessie Buckley) goes to a conference in the entourage of a much older male professor; meets another male professor who she hears lecturing (he opens his paper with a bilingual pun about Bourdieu, which has them in stitches); goes to bed with him after insisting that he first recites Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”, from memory, in Italian; and leaves her husband and two pre-school kids for him, before leaving him to live alone for three years. That’s one narrative strand; the other is the same woman twenty years later (Olivia Colman), now a successful academic and on good terms with her adult daughters, but apparently still a bit traumatised by all the above. (I imagine the husband was fairly miffed as well.) As much as I like both the lead actors, I found the main character hard to sympathise with (the kids do seem truly unbearable, to be fair). It didn’t help that the academic stuff might as well have been taking place on the moon; it made more sense when I realised that the film was based on a book by Elena Ferrante. (Italian academia is weird.)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson 2025)
Just to reiterate, Pynchon’s Vineland isn’t about the Weather Underground – let alone a Bizarro World Weather Underground that somehow maintained a huge network of sleepers and sympathisers for decades after it stopped operating – and I’m really not sure why this film is. (Or, while I’m being picky, why the nuns aren’t Buddhist.) I liked it as a film, but I wasn’t blown away; I think I didn’t like it nearly as much as I would have if it had seemed like an approximation either to Vineland or to the reality of American radicalism (which, come to think of it, Vineland is a lot closer to). It’s significant that Perfidia Beverley Hills’ mother is a cipher called Gramma Minnie; the book’s equivalent, Frenesi Gates’s mother Sasha Traverse, is a key link between Frenesi and a whole history of Pacific Northwestern labour radicalism. But I do love the fact that Perfidia’s daughter Willa was played by an actor called Chase Infiniti: none more Pynchon.

Urchin (Harris Dickinson 2025)
A young man begging on the streets is offered food, but beats his benefactor up. We understand that he wants money for drugs, but the brutality of the attack (which we only see later) poses its own questions. He gets clean in prison; when he gets out he’s set up in a halfway house and started in a job. However, this all comes crashing down when a restorative justice session with the man he’d beaten up evokes feelings that he has no way of dealing with. A sweet-natured but hardheaded film about what it means to fall through the cracks – although I think it would have been stronger if the main character (played by Frank Dillane) hadn’t been so polite and well-spoken.

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro 2025)
Rather long, and very unevenly paced. My daughter informs me that in the book the monster’s story is three times the length of Victor’s story, whereas in the film they’re both long, but pretty much equally long; this may account for the odd sense I sometimes had that the film was both dragging and rushing through the material. (How one goes about learning to read when one knows nothing about alphabetic writing and one’s only companion is blind remains a mystery.) As ever with del Toro, it looks great: there are some heartbreakingly beautiful scenes, and some set-piece sequences that aren’t so much stunning as staggering. I don’t think that’s enough to make it a great film, though.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg 1977)
This isn’t the version I saw when it came out; we spend more time with Richard Dreyfus’s irritating family (boo) and less with the pile of mashed potatoes (also boo). I liked it a bit better than I did then, but still wished that it didn’t so often look like a TV movie. Having spent long enough reading about ufology to recognise several of the early scenes from actual reports, I also feel that the question of whether Flying Saucers Are Real is at the very least interesting, and shouldn’t be answered in the affirmative for the hell of it. I felt, as I often do with Stephen King, that the proposition “there’s something out there” is far more effective if you can add “or is there?”.

Good Boy (Ben Leonberg 2025)
A horror film made over several years on “very minute lolly” (Mark E. Smith), and shot as if from the perspective of a dog – not literally from the point of view of a dog, but showing the world as a dog sees it, perhaps. That the dog sees its owner encountering strange and formless threats wasn’t much of a surprise, nor (mild spoiler) that the owner ends up dead. That the character had begun the film seriously, perhaps terminally, ill was more unusual, and suggested to me that the film might have been aiming for something which would have been really impressive if it had brought it off. (There was something out there – or was there?) A near miss, anyway, and definitely a director to watch out for, if he can scare up some funding.

Orlando (Sally Potter 1992)
Spotted on MUBI and re-watched 33 years on. I enjoyed it a lot. Just the sight of Heathcote Williams – let alone the sight of Heathcote Williams in two different parts – took me back to a vanished world; a world where it seemed perfectly natural for political, formal and cultural radicalism to go hand in hand, and to strike sparks of vivid beauty along the way. Or perhaps it wasn’t a world so much as a scene, even a coterie; perhaps the reason Potter’s film-making often struck me as “school of Jarman” isn’t a matter of artistic affinities or bare-bones budgets, but simply that her film was rooted in the same scene as his, literally among the same group of people. Perhaps that’s also why there never really was a school of Jarman (more’s the pity). Terrific film, though.

Good Fortune (Aziz Ansari 2025)
Aziz Ansari is a working shlub struggling to survive in the gig economy; Seth Rogen is a millionaire tech bro with some personal responsibility for the gig economy; Keanu Reeves is a well-intentioned but not very bright angel. What follows is an odd sort of amalgam of It’s a Wonderful Life, Trading Places, Sorry To Bother You and Bill and Ted. It’s not original, but it is engaging, sharply written and a lot of fun; Keanu as angel is terrific, and even Seth Rogen is less irritating than usual.

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt 2025)
In interviews, Kelly Reichardt has reacted very badly to questions about specific elements of this film, preferring audiences to go in as unprepared as possible. In one interview she was asked, delicately, why the scene with the ladder was as long as it is, and seemed to take exception to even being asked to confirm that there was a ladder in the film. Which is a shame, as I would love to know why the scene with the ladder went on so long – particularly when this doggedly vérité approach to (some) individual scenes goes along with editing of the overall narrative that’s tight to the point of being elliptical, leaving key information withheld and significant characters unintroduced. I didn’t think the film being set in the 1970s justified shooting it in misty shades of autumnal brown and prussian blue, either. Josh O’Connor was good, though.

The Last Sacrifice (Rupert Russell 2025)
“I didn’t realise that you wrote poetry. I didn’t realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry.”
Substitute ‘documentaries’ and you’re there. We attended a special screening of The Last Sacrifice, followed by a Q&A with the director. His aim was to make a documentary about Satanism, witchcraft and black magic in the British cinema in the 1970s, and the two-way relationship which these films purportedly had with real practices of Satanism (etc), being influenced by that reality and influencing it in turn. He wrote the film in a credulous, Channel 5 “but was there a more sinister explanation?” style, and had it edited like a trailer (on his own admission). 94 minutes is a long time to be watching montages and jump cuts; the opening ten minutes, introducing the film and edited like a trailer on speed, nearly made me walk out. During the Q&A the director also revealed, artlessly, that he’d only seen The Wicker Man a few years ago and had started getting into folk horror after that, and that he didn’t for a moment think that any of the various wouldbe sorcerers in the film could actually do anything supernatural. Which made me feel that the film, on top of being incoherent, sensationalist, confused and over-excited, was a massive missed opportunity. A film on the same subject made by that person – a newcomer to folk-horror magic and a sceptic about real-world magic – could actually have been interesting. Anyway, I don’t think it’s been released, so you’re unlikely to come into contact with this film; but if you do, avoid.

Point: the racism of current Labour government policy (to which Stephen Bush rightly objects) was facilitated by the labelling of the anti-racist Corbynite Left as racist and the subsequent defeat of an anti-racist Labour Party by Boris Johnson‘s Tories (to which Bush contributed).

Counterpoint: in 2012 Jeremy Corbyn culpably “[couldn’t] see the problem” with Mear One’s Freedom For Humanity mural; this demonstrates that he was (and is) a racist, and hence that the “anti-racist opposition” was no such thing – and demonstrates it so clearly and conclusively that only another racist could object.

Spoiler: I agree with the first poster and strongly disagree with the response. (At least, I strongly disagree with everything after the semi-colon, which I really don’t think is tenable – and let’s not even mention what’s after the en-dash.)

It’s worth pausing to think about what kind of claim is being made here. The response only works if we assume, not only that Corbyn’s response was racist and/or revealed him as a racist, but that one form of racism was just as important as the other. In other words, it only works if Corbyn’s racism was as serious a problem as the unfolding panorama of government-endorsed racism that we’re currently seeing – and, more to the point, as serious as all the predictable negatives of a Boris Johnson-led Tory government (from hard Brexit on). A Labour Party with inadequate policies or a disappointing leader (imagine that) would still be worth supporting as an alternative to that. Really, the argument has to be that the racism some people inferred from Corbyn’s response to that mural was disqualifying: made it impossible to vote for his party.

This isn’t a novel idea; we already know that Corbyn was disqualified – a lot of people who might otherwise vote Labour felt strongly motivated not to vote for him, or for any government he would lead. Having campaigned for Labour in 2019, I clearly don’t agree with this position – I’m not even sure I understand it – but it is where a lot of people are coming from (even now). And, while it’s possible that for some people Corbyn’s comments on that mural were the final, clinching piece of evidence, I don’t think anyone’s mind was made up on the basis of those comments alone – or that anyone’s mind will be changed now by anything I say about them. There are those of us who believe Corbyn and Corbynism to be anti-Zionist but not antisemitic, and then there are those who believe them to be both – or else that the two are in some sense the same thing. Reinterpreting a single piece of evidence is unlikely to move anyone from one camp to the other.

But let’s crack on anyway. What were Corbyn’s comments – and what was he commenting on?

The mural, as you can see in Stephen’s post above, shows six grey-haired and -bearded men apparently playing Monopoly, in front of an image of the eye in the pyramid (as seen on the US dollar bill), on a table formed of the bent backs of naked, faceless people. I say ‘playing’, but five of the six are sitting quietly, staring ahead expressionlessly; the sixth is counting his money. The figures are blobby and caricatured, although they’re not well enough executed to be recognisable (and/or the subjects aren’t well enough known). Three, including the one with the money, have large, bulbous noses.

The mural was painted in 2012, and rapidly came under attack for the perceived antisemitism of the depiction of the six men, seen as caricatures of “Jewish bankers”; the local council duly got it removed. On one level this was unfortunate; it certainly misrepresented what the artist was trying to do. Given that the figures appear to be caricatures, it’s reasonable to take the artist’s word as to who they’re caricatures of; the answer appears to be that they’re meant to represent Walter Rothschild, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Paul Warburg, Andrew Carnegie and Aleister Crowley. (The artist’s own comments refer to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Walter’s eighteenth-century forebear, but the caricature is fairly plainly of Walter (the original addressee of the Balfour Declaration). This – and the fact of there being multiple Rothschilds – will be relevant later.)

So: Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Warburg, Carnegie, Crowley. One of those names is not like the others, and we’ll return to that. More to the point, only two of those individuals – Warburg and Rothschild (the figure with the bundle of money) were Jewish. In the words of the artist (heavily edited for length and clarity),

I chose to depict the likenesses of … robber barons, specifically Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Warburg, as well Aleister Crowley … These wicked banksters have indeed been playing a game of monopoly on the backs of the working class. … [I don’t] believe there is some jewish conspiracy creating and controlling our money … So to conflate my anti-capitalist message with antisemitic rhetoric … is very ill-intended … It was also [my critics’] interpretation, and never mine, to point out ‘hook noses’, ‘crooked noses’ and other vile Nazi, Third Reich antisemitic propaganda

Of course, this only amounts to a very qualified defence of the mural. The then mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, said that “the images of the bankers perpetuate anti-Semitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial institutions” – and those tropes are still evoked if there are only two Jewish financiers in the lineup, or one. Authorial intention is only relevant up to a point. “It’s a banker, they deal in money!” “It’s Walter Rothschild, that is what he looked like!” Valid points, but you still end up with someone who looks stereotypically Jewish clutching a wad of banknotes. When it comes to public art, one hook-nosed banker grinding the faces of the poor is one too many.

Still, that is what the artist thought he was doing – which may explain why, when he posted on Facebook objecting to the plan to remove the mural, he did not mention the antisemitism accusation, or any other reason for the council to want the mural removed. The local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, commented as follows:

“Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller destroyed Diego Viera’s mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”

I think it’s probably fair to say that, if a constituent had written to Corbyn asking his views on the Man at the Crossroads mural project, the reply would have spelled ‘Rockefeller’ correctly and got Diego Rivera’s name right. In other words, this looks like an off-the-cuff response, suggesting that Corbyn had probably not thought very deeply about the mural – or looked at it closely enough to see why anyone might object to it. He may simply have thought he was looking at a variant of the “Pyramid of the Capitalist System“, with the eye in the pyramid representing the almighty dollar.

What happened next? Nothing. The mural was painted over, the artist complained and the world turned; nobody even objected to Corbyn’s comments. At least, nobody objected until nearly three years later, when the Jewish Chronicle – acting either on information that they’d sat on for three years or on a remarkably in-depth search of the new Labour leader’s social media presence – ran a story about the mural and what Corbyn had said, contacting his office for comments “about his support for a clearly antisemitic mural remaining on display”. No comment was forthcoming and the story died again – until late March 2018, with the Salisbury attack in the news and the tide running against Corbyn, when Luciana Berger revived it and demanded a response. On receiving it, she and others (notably those Labour stalwarts Gavin Shuker and Ian Austin) promptly demanded a better one.

Here they both are:

In 2012, Jeremy was responding to concerns about the removal of public art on grounds of freedom of speech. However, the mural was offensive, used antisemitic imagery, which has no place in our society, and it is right that it was removed.

“Jeremy thought that removing the mural raised freedom of speech issues. At the time he hadn’t noticed the antisemitic imagery, which overrides those considerations and means it was right to remove it.”

This was considered grossly inadequate (too brief? too impersonal? no apology?) and Corbyn duly issued a second statement:

In 2012 I made a general comment about the removal of public art on grounds of freedom of speech. My comment referred to the destruction of the mural Man at the Crossroads by Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller Center. That is in no way comparable with the mural in the original post. I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on, the contents of which are deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic. I wholeheartedly support its removal. I am opposed to the production of anti-Semitic material of any kind, and the defence of free speech cannot be used as a justification for the promotion of anti-Semitism in any form. That is a view I’ve always held.

“I got it wrong and I’m sorry; you guys were right, the mural’s really bad; the free speech argument doesn’t come into it; and no, I’m not just saying all this now because I’ve been found out.” That about covers it – at least, if we assume that it’s at least possible that the original comment was made in ignorance, in error or in haste. It’s hard to see what more Corbyn could have said – or why what he said wasn’t enough.

But of course his critics didn’t want more, they wanted something different. They didn’t want him to explain that he’d inadvertently fallen short of a shared standard of behaviour, but to admit that he’d never shared that standard in the first place. What they wanted, in other words, wasn’t an apology but a confession. Thus Stephen Pollard stated (wrongly) that the creator of the mural had confirmed that the six figures were intended as antisemitic caricatures, building to claims that “[t]he Jewish caricatures were the entire point of the mural” and that “[t]he obvious truth of the matter is that [Corbyn] liked the mural”. How then to deal with Corbyn’s apology and disavowal, which Pollard quotes in full? Simple: it’s all lies. “Mr Corbyn protests that he cares about antisemitism ‘and all forms of racism’, in the formulation he insists on using. Mr Corbyn is a liar.”

Now, you don’t talk to, or about, a political opponent in those terms; you couldn’t, you’d have nobody left to talk to before long. (There’s a reason why “Liar!” is the worst possible insult one MP can use against another.) You assume good faith, just as you assume other forms of common decency (including not being racist); you make that assumption irrespective of whether you actually think the other person’s truthful, honest and so on. You make that assumption; if your opponent falls short, you challenge them and demand an explanation; you accept the explanation as itself being made in good faith, and the world continues to turn. To call someone a liar is to say that you aren’t assuming good faith – which means that you can’t work with them, ever. Between political actors, it means that you want the other person gone; you think they shouldn’t be in the political sphere in the first place. In Mouffean terms, it turns agonism into antagonism. (The opposition between political opponents – even opponents committed to one another’s total defeat – is agonistic; the opposition between the political sphere and people excluded from it is antagonistic. Usually the relationship between the Labour Party and even its bitterest opponents remains agonistic.)

But the rejection of Corbyn’s apology made it inevitable that he would be called a liar – in point of fact, to listen to somebody’s explanation for why you might have mistakenly assumed them to be X, and then continue to label them X, is to call them a liar. More broadly, to say that your explanation for your actions doesn’t count is to say that your words and your thinking don’t count: whatever game we’re playing, you’re not a full part of it. It’s antagonistic, and as such it’s a treatment that most people in politics would never dream of giving one another – not least because they’d never want it visited on themselves.

What do I think about Jeremy Corbyn’s views on that mural? Well, I think he’s an elected politician, and as such he deserved the benefit of the doubt when he said that he hadn’t looked at it closely and so forth. Yeah, but what do I think he really thought? I think that you can’t ask that question if you think of Corbyn as a legitimate political actor. I also think that delegitimating him – turning him from an agonist into an antagonist – had, and continues to have, baleful effects on our political discourse, and that it wasn’t justified, by his comments on that mural or anything else.

There is something interesting about that mural, though. A few years ago Bob Pitt got curious about it – why that particular lineup? why Crowley, of all people? – and did some digging. It turns out that the image of Aleister Crowley has a similar source to some of the other odd features of the mural, notably the eye in the pyramid – and, I would argue, the weirdly static, trancelike quality of the central tableau. It seems that Mear One is not a conventional Leftist but a devotee of the work of David Icke. According to Icke, “Rothschild Zionists” run the governments of the US, the UK and Israel, and hence the world; the label does not refer to Jews or even to Zionists, but to a secret society which has worked to further the interests of the Rothschild family over the centuries. All five of the bankers featured in the mural have been nominated by Icke as “Rothschild Zionists”; Icke’s personal mythology also has an important place for Aleister Crowley, “Satanist, Freemason and Illuminati operative”. Consider also the odd passivity of the people on the bottom level, as well as the fact that the six figures in the middle are doing nothing more consequential than playing a game, and that Rothschild himself is the only one of the six to show any movement. All this attests to this belief system’s lack of dynamism: history in this vision is not the history of class struggle but the history of unchanging, unending control, exercised at an almost supernatural level. It’s a highly idiosyncratic, borderline-psychotic belief system, based on a weirdly literal re-reading of old antisemitic tropes but without anything to say about real-world Jews. And no, Corbyn didn’t spot this, but then neither did anyone else before 2022.

Returning to the Bluesky posts that we started with: I think the honour of the “anti-racist left” is largely intact. Off the top of my head I’d define racism as “treating people differently, and/or advocating that people should be treated differently, on the grounds of their supposed race, with one or more out-group of people denied the dignity and respect afforded to members of the in-group”. The OED goes further:

A belief that one’s own racial or ethnic group is superior, or that other such groups represent a threat to one’s cultural identity, racial integrity, or economic well-being; (also) a belief that the members of different racial or ethnic groups possess specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities, which can be compared and evaluated. Hence: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against people of other racial or ethnic groups (or, more widely, of other nationalities), esp. based on such beliefs.

The sense in which the policies and rhetoric of the current government are racist, like the sense in which much of Boris Johnson’s better-known writing is racist, is pretty straightforward. On the other hand, Corbyn and the movement he briefly led were known for their vocal opposition to racism, and for anti-imperialist internationalism more broadly. Can the mural affair outweigh that? Assume (being as charitable as possible to the critics) that the mural made a definite nod to antisemitic iconography and that there’s something suspicious about Corbyn’s failure to notice this; assume that a comment with suspicious omissions, made in 2012, is telling evidence of Corbyn’s trouble with Jews between 2015 and 2020; assume that there’s no other relevant evidence regarding Corbyn, Jews and antisemitism.

When all those assumptions – some of them counterfactual – have been made, what have we got? Certain beliefs about Jewish people’s “specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities” do seem to have fed into the depiction of Walter Rothschild, even if the artist denied it; and Corbyn’s comment in 2012 didn’t call this out. But this doesn’t get us very far; remember the assumption of good faith and common decency under which agonistic political conflict operates. More, surely, is needed in order to overcome the assumption that Corbyn – that any random MP, Left or Right – doesn’t think it’s appropriate to portray a historical Jewish banker as having a large nose, clutching a wad of money and physically oppressing the poor. And even if we assume that the question can legitimately be asked, we can’t overlook the fact that it has been answered, with a resounding No.

So no, the case for Corbyn’s antisemitism isn’t proved by his comments on that mural. In fact those comments can only be considered as possible evidence of antisemitism if you call him a liar – and in that case you can basically call him what you like (you aren’t going to believe his denials); you’ve already excluded him from the respect due to a political opponent. The “Corbyn’s antisemitism unmasked” reading of the mural brouhaha isn’t straightforward or self-evident; it’s tendentious, selective and above all hostile. Relative to Corbyn’s exclusion from political legitimacy, it’s a symptom, not a cause.

Writing as I am in November 2025, the last thing I’m currently inclined to do is defend Jeremy Corbyn. But it really seems to me that his biggest sin – the one thing that made him persona non grata in respectable politics – was his unhesitating and consistent opposition to the imperialism of Britain and its allies. Among other things, this found expression in an opposition to Zionism which guided his approach to Israel/Palestine, although he always fought shy of articulating it – wrongly, I think; equivocating didn’t reduce the hostility his beliefs aroused, and made him seem evasive and untrustworthy. For some people – Pollard included – this could not be forgiven or tolerated; it had to be either elevated to the status of a career-ending defect or assimilated to the racism which was already seen in those terms. Others found his stance on Ireland unacceptable, or the possibility that a Corbyn-led Labour government would seek justice for victims of the British Army in Afghanistan and elsewhere – or simply the fact that he threatened existing centres of power in the Labour movement. (Needless to say, I don’t share these objections or sticking-points; on the specific point of anti-Zionism, I don’t believe a Corbyn-led government would have posed any danger to the security of the Middle East, still less to Jewish people in Britain.) Whatever the issue, Corbyn’s opponents could find common cause in labelling him, and the movement behind him, as utterly beyond the pale; a label that eventually, after much effort and several false starts, stuck.

A successful Corbyn-led Labour government was always a distant prospect; much of the opposition to Corbyn came from within the Parliamentary Labour Party, making it highly unlikely that a Corbyn government elected in mid-2017 would have made it as far as… actually they might have made it to the end of 2019, so never mind. Anyway, there wasn’t a viable, battle-ready alternative government of the anti-racist Left ready to go in 2017, still less 2019. But it would have been good to give it a try; I can’t believe the results would be anywhere near as bad as what we’ve got now.

As (very) long-term readers will know, I joined the Labour Party in 2015, shortly after voting for Jeremy Corbyn in the ‘registered supporters’ section of the leadership election. Like most people, I didn’t expect Corbyn to win. I committed to becoming a full member after the election in any case, in the hope of taking part in the bottom-up revitalisation of the party that his campaign seemed to herald.

He won, of course, which was great, but even after that I couldn’t see much sign of the party being revitalised. Certainly not locally; I went to a party meeting or two and found the vibe rather routine and self-satisfied – very much as if Corbyn’s election hadn’t changed anything. I stopped going and went back to social media. Then, about six months after I’d joined, I got a call from an unknown number. “Is that Phil? I believe you joined the Labour Party recently… Could I just ask, do you support Jeremy Corbyn?” And a big sigh of relief when I said Yes.

The thing is, you can’t revitalise the party from the bottom up as individual members; you need to do it collectively. But you can’t do anything collectively unless you can bring enough people together – and to do that you need to know who those people are. The local party leadership, of course, knew perfectly well who had joined the party recently and how to get in touch with them – but the local party leadership didn’t intend to use that information (other than to invite the newcomers to party meetings and socials), and they certainly weren’t going to share it. So left-wing members wishing to contact similar – and knowing damn well that several hundred similar had recently arrived – were reduced to scrounging contact details from a whole variety of sources (a Momentum appeal on Facebook in my case), and tentatively asking unfamiliar party members whether, no offence intended and don’t take this the wrong way, they might perhaps be a supporter of… the person just elected leader with 59.5% of the vote.

As well as holding the mailing list, the local leadership clique had the incumbency advantage. This is a killer for anyone trying to win the votes of less informed and/or less motivated voters; think of it as the “seems to be doing a reasonably good job, seems nice enough and lots of people seem to support him/her” advantage. In my ward, at least, they also had a strong networking advantage – as I discovered the day a perfect stranger, who I’d seen at the odd meeting, wandered up to me at the bus stop and asked if I was still working at the same place. We had quite a nice chat, but I never found the words to say “who are you and how do you know me?”. (The person in question would later be Chair of the local branch; talking it over with a friend in the Left group, we worked out that our mutual friend was probably the father of a kid who’d been a friend of one of my kids, five or six years earlier (hence “are you still” etc, I guess).) One way and another, anyway, the clique were several steps ahead of us, so – despite theoretically having numbers to spare – we never did manage to revitalise the Labour Party in Chorlton. We got close once, relatively early on, but not close enough (search term: “rinsed”).

2. Where We Got To

I’m not going to say that the real revitalisation of the Labour Party was the friends we made along the way – we were defeated by the Labour Right, repeatedly, and it wasn’t good. But I did make friends along the way, and that’s not nothing. Specifically, I became part of a network of people in the Withington constituency, mainly organised through a range of WhatsApp groups. (The Withington constituency includes Chorlton, Didsbury, and Old Moat as well as Withington itself.) While to begin with we were all members of the Labour Party, under Starmer’s leadership some of us were expelled and most of the rest drifted away. When a few of us met up in person a couple of months ago, it was quite noticeable that almost nobody was still in the party – nobody, that is, apart from the people who’d managed to get elected to the council before the tide went out.

But the network endured – even when it had outlived its original purpose of organising within the Labour Party – and the first meeting of people interested in Your Party in the Withington constituency grew out of this network. The first thing we did was introduce ourselves – yes, the old ‘go round the circle and say something about yourself’ routine – but, rather brilliantly, we were instructed to keep things moving by only giving three pieces of information: our name, our pronouns and our political affiliation. So I can say with some confidence that there were people there from RS21, Counterfire, the Socialist Workers Party and another couple of groups, as well as several like me whose group affiliations are in the past (Socialist Society/Socialist Movement 1987-95, Labour Party 2015-24 and, er, that’s it).

The rest of the meeting was more practical. With a bit of help from facilitators we surfaced several issues and clusters of issues, enabling people to form sub-groups to pursue them – in the meeting and, more importantly, afterwards. I thought I could make the biggest contribution to the group focusing on party structure, which at that point I saw as three inter-related questions: how the new party should be structured (branches etc); how it actually was structured, if only by default (i.e. who was running the show and how); and how members could feed back their ideas on (a) into the apparatus of (b). As we’ll see in the next post, this question isn’t so much difficult to resolve as difficult to define at all, and there’s scope for an awful lot of bootstrapping and recursion – how to set up structures to enable not-yet-branches to hold the not-yet-centre accountable for the mechanisms it establishes for the formation of true branches empowered to hold the centre to account… To take only the most obvious issue, there’s no easy answer to the chicken-and-egg “the centre is accountable to the branches”/”the branches are authorised by the centre” question. But it’s probably not realistic to take the process as slowly and incrementally as it really deserves to be taken, and I suspect the knot is going to get cut one way or another (and probably without any input from me).

We also began planning for a public meeting where Your Party would be launched on the people of Withington: this, rather than the meeting of our (literally) self-selected group, would mark the true foundation of YP in Withington constituency. What follows is almost entirely second-hand, as I wasn’t involved in planning this meeting – in fact I didn’t even go to it. Digressing slightly, I had a strong emotional reaction to the 2017 election – and an equally strong reaction to the 2019 defeat, which hit me like the loss of a friend. (Which, for anyone lucky enough not to have experienced bereavement, doesn’t mean ‘I felt very sad’; I did, obviously, but it was much worse than that.) My response to the launch of the YP mailing list was euphoric – echoes of July 2017 – and I went to the inaugural meeting on a high. After that, though – and particularly after the membership portal débacle – I started getting 2019 flashbacks, and started keeping a bit of a distance from YP for the sake of my own wellbeing.

The meeting was held in a bar’s function room; misgivings about meeting on licensed premises (would we put off observant Muslims? would the meeting be disrupted by drunks?) were addressed by having the towels put on during the meeting. In passing, I think these worries may have been a bit overdone. It seems to me that there aren’t likely to be many people interested in the explicitly non-religious Your Party who are also sufficiently devout not to want to set foot in a pub – and I strongly suspect that there’s a swathe of people on the Left who would actually prefer at least some of their meetings to be held in pubs.

Anyway, the lack of booze didn’t stop the meeting being a success in the obvious ways; it was well-attended and there were plenty of contributions from the floor. What turned out to be more problematic was a decision that had seemed like a no-brainer: both Corbyn and Sultana were going to be in the Northwest around the time we were meeting, why not get one of them along? A date was agreed with Sultana, the meeting was advertised on social media and tickets flew out. Which was great, except that having Sultana’s name on it made the meeting attractive to a slightly different, and much wider, range of people – and we didn’t have any way of limiting attendance to potential members of a Withington constituency YP branch. In retrospect I think we could have thought more about the potential mismatch between online organisation, publicity and ticketing, on one hand, and organising a face-to-face group within the geographical unit of a constituency, on the other – and between a meeting of Withington YP supporters and a YP supporters’ meeting in Withington.

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing! In any case, what took place was by all accounts the second kind of meeting, not the first. People did try to use the Q&A constructively, by getting answers from Sultana to some of the difficult questions – particularly around party structure – but without much success; she’s a politician, after all. At the end of the night it was a successful meeting, but it wasn’t the founding event for a party branch; the branch, at the time of writing, remains un-founded.

But what do we need a branch for? See next post.

Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other fictions (1979; originally published 1978)

The name of this collection initially put me in mind of Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex, and the psychedelic-bucolic strain of British sf more generally. But Kate Wilhelm’s Somerset isn’t an English county; it’s a small town in rural America, possibly in Wyoming (some of the place names, although not others, seem to match). This Somerset is a small and declining town; it used to be on the route between two towns (well, the back route), but since the river flooded and took the bridge out you only go to Somerset if you’re going to Somerset. And, as with Royston Vasey, if you do go to Somerset you may never leave; more to the point, you may never want to leave…

There are seven other stories here (or ‘fictions’ if you like), all between ten and 30 pages. ‘Planet Story’ is set on an alien planet, and suggests that we may not have considered the implications of that word ‘alien’; ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis’ (from 1976) gives us a couple (and a society) hopelessly addicted to a reality TV ‘survival’ game. (Meanwhile back in 2025, a site called DirecTV has a list of the 15 “most popular Outdoor Survival TV Shows available to stream right now”.) ‘Mrs Bagley Goes to Mars’, the only previously unpublished story, has a title that both is and isn’t self-explanatory; I was reminded of authors like Joanna Russ and Josephine Saxton.

So Kate Wilhelm clearly had a way with titles. Otherwise the stories just mentioned are unusual; very little here is unambiguously set in the future, in space, among alien beings or w.h.y. Policing the boundaries of sf is a mug’s game, always liable to fall back on defensive positions like ‘sf of the old school’ – or if all else fails ‘hard sf’ – so I’m not going to say that any of these stories aren’t sf; I will say, though, that many of them border on Robert Aickman territory and would fit well in a collection of psychological horror stories. It seems that what interested Kate Wilhelm was altered states of consciousness and how they could be induced by – or induce – altered states of reality; uncanny edgelands, which you may stray into on an alien planet or in a suburban garden. It’s also worth noting that ‘Mrs Bagley Goes to Mars’ wasn’t the only story that reminded me of another work of fiction; ‘State of Grace’ evoked an equally (and differently) uncanny story, Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Empty Birdhouse’, while the Twilight Zone episode ‘Mirror Image’ seemed to lie in the background of ‘The Encounter’. I should stress that I’m not suggesting plagiarism, but something more like a creative dialogue: all three stories are quite unlike the material they seem to riff on, and take similar setups in very different directions.

The other great strength of these stories is that, however eerie their scenarios are, they are about believable relationships between believable people, male and female. (Believable people in awful situations and believable relationships being stretched to the limit, but still.) Which is rarer than you’d think, at least if you’re reading 1970s sf written by straight male authors (for another example see below). When a female point-of-view character acknowledges a man’s interest in her and treats it as a minor irritation, or simply does something normal like planning meals or talking about clothes – I would say it makes a refreshing change, but more specifically it’s a relief: you feel you can stand up straight. I wouldn’t call Kate Wilhelm a feminist writer on the basis of these stories (hence ‘Mrs Bagley’ drawing my attention), but she did write about real women (and indeed real men), for which much thanks.

D.F. Jones, Xeno (1979)

I wondered briefly whether D.F. Jones had been a woman using initials so as to go undetected in the male-dominated world of sf/f (cf. C.J. Cherryh, J.K. Rowling, U.K. Le Guin), but Xeno quickly dispelled this suspicion. In fact the author’s full name and style was Commander Dennis Feltham Jones OBE, and he wrote eight books, published between 1966 and 1981 (the year of his death, aged 62). SFE notes, in appropriately dismal tones, that his later novels “succumb with excessive ease to a slick gloominess”, dissipating his work’s “initial glum panache”. So don’t get your hopes up for this one – certainly not for a happy ending.

The book starts well enough, with a military plane going missing – just blipping off the radar – and reappearing, to the utter bafflement of the pilot, four months later and five thousand miles away. Then we go behind the scenes of US military intelligence, and the pace immediately flags: we see a lot of square-jawed military men being called to urgent meetings, where they exchange lines of the “Surely you’re not saying…”/”That’s exactly what I’m saying!” variety. Then a Russian plane vanishes and subsequently reappears (“But Colonel, surely you’re not saying…”); then an American passenger plane. The authorities keep an eye on the people who were on that plane, who seem initially to be uncannily healthy – but then they start falling ill, and developing subcutaneous cysts that resemble eggs…

This book has a lot in common with Ian Watson’s The Jonah Kit (an earlier 1* review); in this case I’m not suggesting either plagiarism or creative dialogue, at most a certain shared underlying nihilism. Like The Jonah Kit, this book’s plot has two separate drivers: the lost time episodes and what may have caused them fade from view halfway through, with the rest of the book being about the mysterious infection and its ramifications. Like The Jonah Kit, it indulges in some rather weird theological speculations: people interpret the lost time episodes and the subsequent alien infestation in terms, not of alien contact, but of contact with a semi- or quasi-divine being, which has somehow passed on a parasitical infection while playing its inscrutable games with aeroplanes. This would not be God, you understand – God is by definition perfect and hence could not be carrying parasites – but something intermediate between humanity and God: a cosmic angel, perhaps, or an intergalactic saint. The point of this digression seems to be the problems it causes for the Communists (“‘But God does not exist!’ Tatyana cried desperately.”); it’s still decidedly odd. And, like The Jonah Kit, it’s extremely dark, with a far-future frame story that holds out very little hope for the planet.

Then there’s (sigh) the sexual politics, which are from another era (a final similarity with The Jonah Kit) – although, given that Jones was born 25 years before Watson, you could argue that his attitudes were from another era in another era. Either way… oh dear.

Essentially a simple, cheerful girl, Shane de Byl was bright enough to know that she had no great brain. … She knew she had a fine body, and the instinct to enjoy it and to use it for its proper function, children. But not just yet.

Proper function. Right. Moving along… oh, we aren’t moving along.

Secretly, she delighted in her body, watching its magical progression from puberty, from skinny flatness to ample, gentle curves.

Secretly, you say – as in “we’re not going to hear about it”? Nope. Jones is just getting warmed up, and I do mean ‘warmed up’:

Every morning, flanked by a mirror on one side, an open window on the other, she had her private session of self-admiration, turning this way and that, craning her neck to see her herself from all angles, conscious of the fresh air that added to her awareness by its chill touch.

Yep, that’s definitely something that a real woman who is a real person would really do. Every morning.

Shane de Byl is the closest this book gets to a love interest, although ‘love’ may be pushing it.

One of the most powerful and satisfying experiences known to humans is sex, and Jaimie and Shane had plenty of that. In basic, earthy terms,

Please, D.F. Jones, spare us the basic, earthy terms.

In basic, earthy terms, Jaimie screwed the hell out of Shane on every possible occasion.

How nice for them. Jaimie is a doctor; he had first met Shane when he treated her broken leg. He wasn’t in the habit of picking up his female patients, you understand; the idea wouldn’t even cross his mind, generally speaking.

Generally speaking, doctors regard their female patients’ bodies with a detached eye. Often, a body that looks wildly exciting displayed on a dimly lit bed appears very different on an examination couch under cold light.

Call me politically correct, but I would have thought the difference between a sexual relationship and a doctor-patient relationship was more relevant than the quality of the light. Anyway, to examine Shane’s fractured tibia Jaimie would only need to look at her lower leg, wouldn’t he?

But there can be exceptions. Doctors are trained to observe: Jaimie Scott, 28 and unattached, could not help noticing her sensational figure, or the fact that she was a genuine blonde.

OH D.F. JONES NO. As I said, I wondered briefly if D.F. Jones was a woman using initials so as to go undetected in the male-dominated world of sf/f; only briefly.

Like The Jonah Kit, this is a weird, disjointed disaster novel with cosmically doomy overtones, written by an author who seems half in love with the disaster. Like The Jonah Kit, its sexual politics are truly dreadful. And, like The Jonah Kit, it’s getting one star.

Reviews so far (with * rating and SFBC # where present)

Poul Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (1963, 1965, 1966) #141
John Brunner, Timescoop (1969)
Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (1967) #142
Terry Carr, Cirque (1977)
Louis Charbonneau, Antic Earth (1967) #133 1*
D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1975) 5*
Michael Coney, Winter’s Children (1974)
Michael Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975) 5*
Richard Cowper, Breakthrough (1967) #136 5*
Richard Cowper, Phoenix (1968) #147
Richard Cowper, Worlds Apart (1974)
L.P. Davies, Twilight Journey (1967) #134
Samuel Delany, Babel-17  (1966) #140 5*
Richard H. Francis, Blackpool Vanishes (1979) 5*
Harry Harrison, War with the Robots (1962) #138
Philip E. High, Invader on my Back (1968) #148
D.F. Jones, Xeno (1979) 1*
Damon Knight, Three Novels (1951, 1954, 1957) #139
Charles Logan, Shipwreck (1975) 5*
J.T. McIntosh, Six Gates from Limbo (1968) #144 1*
R.W. Mackelworth, Firemantle (1968) #151
Barry Malzberg, Beyond Apollo (1972) 5*
Judith Merril (ed.), Path Into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction (1966) #131
Larry Niven, Inconstant Moon (1973)
Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, The Dynostar Menace (1975)
Frederik Pohl, The Age of the Pussyfoot (1965, 1966) #166
Frederik Pohl, The Gold at the Starbow’s End (1972)
Spider Robinson, Telempath (1976)
Bob Shaw, Ship of Strangers (1978)
Robert Sheckley, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (1971)
Curt Siodmak, City in the Sky (1974) 1*
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1977) 5*
Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (1968) #135
Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975) 1*
Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and other fictions (1978) 5*
‘Patrick Wyatt’, Irish Rose (1975)
Roger Zelazny, The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth and other stories (1971) 5*
Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown, The Cassiopeia Affair (1968) #149

Key to Star Ratings

5*: you should definitely read this; read the review to see why
1*: you should definitely not read this; read the review to see why not
No star rating: read the review and see what you think

Back in July, Zarah Sultana MP announced – to general surprise – that she was leaving Labour to co-lead the formation of a new party, together with Jeremy Corbyn. There had been rumours that a new Left party might be in the offing, but this was the first official announcement that a party was actually being formed. Expressions of interest in the new party were invited and duly flooded in – I think the counter got up to 800,000 before updates stopped appearing.

Corbyn confirmed the news (albeit not immediately), and for a while everything looked rosy. However, nothing seemed to be happening about turning those expressions of interest into membership – or turning the initial announcement into a party that people could become members of. There was a disquieting silence from the leadership on these issues – and on most others, including who the leadership actually were.

On the 18th of September an email broke the silence: a membership portal was opened and announced to YP supporters. However, three hours later another all-supporters email disowned the portal (call it Portal 1), portraying it as little better than a phishing attack:

This morning, an unauthorised email was sent to all yourparty.uk supporters with details of a supposed membership portal hosted in a new domain name. Legal advice is being taken. That email should be ignored by all supporters. If any direct debits have been set up, they should be immediately cancelled.

Ouch. Sultana – for it was she – responded by acknowledging that she’d acted unilaterally in opening up membership, and said that she’d been frozen out of YP collective decision-making by a “boys’ club” of Corbyn and the other Independent Alliance MPs. In one message Sultana talked about taking legal advice herself, and for a while things were looking extremely rocky; she retracted this threat later, fortunately.

Six days later, a new membership portal (call it Portal 2) was announced in another email, headed pointedly “Official: Your Party Membership Now Open!”. Subsequent communications have made a point of referencing Sultana as well as Corbyn, and we’ve been given to believe that relations between the two are at least civil. However, membership data collected from Portal 1 has still not been merged into what’s now the YP membership database; the money paid by would-be members via Portal 1 (which runs to several million pounds) is also in limbo, being held by MOU Operations, a separate company from YP. On October 27th people who had joined via Portal 1 were invited to contact YP and let them know that they’d already paid a sub. Two days later, in less happy news, a story attributed to anonymous YP sources appeared in the Guardian, claiming that YP intended to take legal action against MOU to recover the missing millions (MOU’s response is here).

I haven’t joined; if Portal 1 had been left open I might have been tempted, but the infighting that immediately erupted made me feel I’d be better off sitting this one out for a while. (The 29th October Guardian story does nothing to change my mind.) Even before Portal 1 had been disavowed, though, I was uncertain about the whole process of joining the new party, given that the new party didn’t yet exist – although, without members, how could it? There’s an awkward chicken-and-egg relationship between founding the party and inviting people to become members. On one hand, there’s not much point joining something unless you know what it is and what it’s for: this would imply that the party should be founded first and then opened to members. On the other hand, any new left party should be – and this party in particular is specifically intended to be – guided and controlled from below, by its members: this would imply that nothing should be done in the way of founding the party until after everyone’s joined. Obviously both of these conclusions are impractical; we need somehow to split the difference. The approach being taken so far is to designate the new party’s first conference as its founding event, and to stress that only paid-up members will be eligible to attend – more precisely, that attendees will be randomly selected from the paid-up membership (the principle of sortition, as seen (on a much smaller scale) in jury selection). The wording of Portal 1, in fact, said very little about becoming a member (and what we would be becoming members of), stressing instead that only by taking out membership would you be eligible to be selected for the founding conference.

The conference, it was announced some time ago, is to be held in November, and that remains the commitment (yes, this November). The timetable seems to have been set by working backwards from May 2026, the imperative being to get something recognisable as a party – and preferably not still called ‘Your Party’ – up and running in time for next year’s council elections. However, a two-day conference can’t be expected to write a party constitution, or even scrutinise a draft constitution. Ahead of the conference, therefore, YP’s founding documents have been published in draft form; regional assemblies are being held at which they can be discussed and amendments proposed, while an online ‘crowd editing’ tool has been launched. But the devil’s in the detail. What were originally described as ‘mass’ assemblies are materialising as meetings of around 200 people, who divide into groups to discuss allocated sections of the founding documents. (The principle on which sections of the documents are allocated seems obscure, to put it kindly; one group in an assembly in the East of England found itself called on to discuss how the new party should operate in Scotland and Wales.) Groups then feed back to the room. Comments and amendments are collected by the facilitators, but there’s no time for plenary discussion; as such there’s no attempt to consolidate the contributions made by different groups or to arrive at any overall positions. It seems that the only people getting any kind of overview, or having any chance of synthesising different positions, are the facilitators – a group whose membership and qualifications for the role remain obscure, but which in any case is evidently not very big. As for the ‘crowd editing’ tool, anyone expecting something like the Google Docs multiple-editor experience will be disappointed: apparently anyone will be able to propose amendments, but nobody will be able to see anyone else’s amendments – except the leadership group, presumably, who will be able to pick and choose which to apply. The size of the YP membership, and the range of skills and experience that members can bring to it, has rightly been seen as its key asset; the assemblies and the ‘crowd editing’ tool could have been designed to neutralise that asset.

The founding conference for its part has been trailed as having a projected attendance of 13,000, made up of two separate groups of 6,500 attending on each of two days – or possibly four groups of 3,250 each attending one session (there’s been no official clarification). These numbers are, frankly, insane. Figures this large aren’t required in order to make the meeting representative; random selection does that for you, above a certain (fairly low) limit. Presumably the idea is to accommodate some (most?) of these people online, although that’s scarcely problem-free (a free Zoom account has a limit of 100 participants in a session). In any case, even if 3,250 people could be beamed down at 9:30 a.m. (and beamed up again at 1:00 to make room for the afternoon shift), the deliberative potential of a meeting of that size would be basically nil – as would the chance of any individual member getting to address the meeting. (Both of which would be pretty minimal in a meeting of 325, to be fair) There’s a strong whiff of the stage army about this proposal – of a conference which functions like a rally, endorsing by acclamation decisions that have been hammered out elsewhere. Which, again, gives the impression of a leadership that’s happy to have a mass membership, but doesn’t want them getting any ideas about running the show.

As for who actually is running the show, this article by Archie Woodrow from September is a good starting-point. It appears that early preparations for building a new party were dominated by Collective, a group associated with Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project in which Karie Murphy, formerly of the Leader of the Opposition’s office team (LOTO), plays a major role. The group was expanded following dissent among participants including Jamie Driscoll (the former North of Tyne metro mayor who now leads the Majority group) and Andrew Feinstein (who stood against Keir Starmer in the 2024 election); the dissenting group circulated a Memorandum of Understanding (unpublished) and established a company, MOU Operations. Following the Portal 1 débacle (in which the directors of MOU Operations have denied any involvement), relations with the MOU group appear now to have broken down; as a result, presumably, the narrower group centred on Corbyn is back in charge.

Officially – according to the email which launched Portal 2 – the leadership group in fact consists of the Independent Alliance. Which is to say, Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the opposition and the second longest-serving MP in the House of Commons; Zarah Sultana, who is 32 (today – happy birthday, Zarah!) and was first elected to anything in 2019; and four MPs elected in 2024 as pro-Gaza independents, defeating Labour incumbents. With the best will in the world, those four – a former Liberal Democrat councillor, a former Labour Party member and two people with no political history at all – aren’t going to have the resources to mount much opposition to someone with Corbyn’s depth of experience. Mind you, six months ago I would have said something similar about Sultana – and she’s effectively bounced Corbyn into first launching the party and then opening party membership, and is now freelancing on party policy. What seems to have happened is that Sultana’s recognised that Corbyn’s key tactic is delaying and refusing to give a definite answer, and decided to neutralise it by simply going round him. It’s working so far, but it’s not a recipe for a productive working relationship longer-term. But then, neither is Corbyn’s heel-digging – which reminds me of a line by Philip Larkin about how people look at him and think he’s got what he wanted, when in fact he’s only succeeded in not getting what he didn’t want.

All in all, things don’t look too hopeful. It’s disappointing, and disillusioning, and perhaps more than anything else it’s frustrating. Even while writing this post I’ve had the urge to write some formulation like “…which raises some interesting issues”, and immediately felt wretched – the whole point of actually launching an actual party was that we were actually going to do something, like we did in the late 2010s, instead of writing blog posts discussing the issues raised by X and the implications of Y, like we’ve been doing ever since. (NB previous sentence may contain rose-tinted view of 2015-19 period.)

Still, the story’s not over yet. And neither is this series of blog posts (plenty of issues still to be raised!). Next: the local news (Your Party in Manchester Withington constituency).