Andrew Preview

Sorry to hear that Andre Previn, the classical musician, has died.
Here he is in one of the greatest moments of Morecambe and Wise:

All the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order....

One of the Champions

I learned today that Richard Barrett was the former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6. He was giving his opinion on the case of Shamima Begum.
So that's what he did when he left Nemesis!

Too Many Targets - Avengers from Big Finish

This is the British, 1960s, Avengers, of course, not the more famous Marvel Avengers. Big Finish don't only do audio adventures for Doctor Who - they've branched out into other cult TV shows as well.
It's a great temptation, because of the Doctor Who link to Big Finish, to think of this story as Steed with all of his Companions. The story is set at the time when Steed is paired with Tara King, played by Emily Woodward, but gradually brings in all the other people he's worked with up to that time.
It took me a while to get used to Julian Wadham as Steed - after all, Patrick Macnee had such a distinctive voice, but as they said in the actor interviews which are also on the CD, the characterisation is all there in the script. They'd got the way Steed talked exactly right. It's also quite nice that Christopher Benjamin, who plays Mother, also appeared in several episodes of the original series.
Cathy Gale gets involved because of a rogue killer gorilla in Surrey, and Beth Chalmers does have a voice very like Honor Blackman's. All the actresses involved said it was great fun doing the period RP accents!
Mrs Peel (Olivia Poulet) is now running Knight Industries, which also seems to be involved in the case, and Dr David Keel (Anthony Howell) gets involved when a colleague of his gets kidnapped.
There's a glorious scene with the constantly frustrated KGB agent who is Steed's Russian counterpart(voiced by Dan Starkey, sounding very much like Warren Mitchell, who originally played the part).
The script is based on a novel that came out in 1990, written as a homage to the series by John Peel and Dave Rogers, and it really captures the witty banter and bizarre situations of the original series.
I loved it!

Visiting The Long Earth

I've just been reading The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, which was very good.
The premise is that there are a multitude of alternate Earths to either side of our Earth, with the important difference that none of these other Earths have any humans in them, and now people have discovered how to visit those other worlds by means of a simple device called a Stepper.
Some people wander the worlds, others head out in groups like the old Wild West wagon trains.
The book mentions a problem also talked about by Charles Stross, in his Merchant Princes series - secure places are no longer secure when you can Step one world over, walk to the middle of the place you want to get into (for instance Fort Knox) and Step back into this world, right into the bank vault. Though in Charles Stross's books only particular families have the ability to step between worlds, and all the worlds are inhabited.
I started thinking about what I would want to see if I could Step to another Earth - and came to the conclusion that there would be nothing much out there that I would want to visit. It would be interesting, of course, to see the Wye Valley in its primal glory, filled with ancient woodland. But when I go out into the wilds, I'm looking for the signs of ancient habitation, the stones and banks that show that people have lived in that landscape before - and in the Long Earth there is no archaeology, because there have never been people.

Rider Haggard's 'She'

I downloaded this classic adventure tale from Project Gutenberg the other day - in the story I'm writing my characters are visiting the lost city of Kor, and I wanted to see how Rider Haggard had originally described it. This was great fun, discovering the ruined city inside the crater of a volcano, with lots of interesting caverns to discover as Ayesha led Leo down to the Flame of Immortality.
And then they came to an abyss, which was crossed by a narrow plank - and I stopped and thought "Where on Earth did the plank come from?"
I'm pretty sure the locals weren't building their homes with planks, though descriptions are somewhat sketchy as Rider Haggard's characters are not much interested in native huts. And it's a Lost City - they weren't trading with anyone anywhere else.
It's just one of those little world-building touches that I think Rider Haggard didn't even consider, so he just put in something familiar to his readers (and himself).

A Room Full of Stars

I'm feeling rather pleased with myself. I've just spent the evening building my own Constellation Projector, including wiring a switch for the first time in my life.
It looks something like this one, from the Science Museum - mine was made for The Works:

When I switched it on for the first time, and turned out the main light, all that time fiddling with tiny screws and double-sided sticky tape was totally worthwhile! I was standing in the middle of a cloud of stars, and it was magical!
Something like this:

I'm heading for bed now with a mug of cocoa, so I can play with the settings - it's supposed to be able to show which constellations are overhead for any month of the year, and by the hour.
My own personal galaxy!

My Mountain of Unread Books

This is getting a bit silly now.
I've come to the end of the year and there are 58 books on my 'pending' shelf that I haven't read yet. 20 of those came from FantasyCon. And there are more on my list of books that I want to buy, just as soon as I've read a few more of these....
At the moment I'm racing through NK Jemison's Obelisk Gate, but I haven't yet allowed myself to buy the third in that trilogy, so I may go on to Miracle Brew by Pete Brown (about beer), or Lionheart by Sharon K Penman (Richard I in the Holy Land)…. Or there's Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths (a forensic archaeologist in Norfolk), or Provenance by Ann Leckie, Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, The Cogwheel Brain by Doron Swade (about Babbage's Difference Engine)….
History, SF, Fantasy, murder mystery with archaeology, real ale - there's a good variety to keep me entertained in the coming months.