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rolanni at 11:50am on 07/07/2025 under life after the apocalypseMonday, sunny and already too warm for my taste. We are once again standing under a Heat Advisory, though I haven't gotten any city notices about cooling centers being open.
Breakfast et, one's duty to the cats dispatched, trash staged, banking done, have appt to see the chiropractor, then plan to stop at grocery before I come home. Station air is ON.
Spent yesterday introverting. Today may be some more of the same, though I will at least be sitting with the manuscript for a bit.
The cats don't appear to like the Sensitive Stomach blend of cat food, though everybody will eat it, grudgingly. Except, of course, the Actual Guy with the Sensitive Stomach, for which said food was purchased.
TOMORROW is Rookie's Gotcha Day. He tells me he wants to do a podcast, but I'm really not sure about that. Maybe he'll be satisfied with a photoshoot.
So! How's everybody doing?
Today's blog title brought to you by Sail North, "Row"
Pictures from the past
2003 Marscon Writer Guests of Honor
Hanging around in Waterville 2016
Steve's High School Reunion July 2023
oursin at 04:24pm on 07/07/2025 under activism, animals, class, dystopia, homosexuality, lesbians, marriage, panic, philanthropy, queer, religion, rituals, science, scientists, sff, social history, technology, women, writersReading this, I'm very much reminded of certain sff stories I read - late 60s/early 70s - that were either directly influenced by this research or via the population panic works that riffed off it: review of Lee Alan Dugatkin. Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity. Does this ping reminiscence in anyone else? (I was reading a lot of v misc anthologies etc in early 70s before I found my real niche tastes).
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What Is a 'Lavender Marriage,' Exactly? Feel that there is a longer and (guess what) Moar Complicated history around using conventional marriage to protect less conventional unions, but maybe it's a start towards interrogating the complexities of 'conventional marriages'.
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Sardonic larffter at this: 'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'
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Not quite what one anticipates from a clergyman's wife? The undercover vagrant who exposed workhouse life - a bit beyond vicarage/manse teaparties, Mothers' Meetings or running the Sunday School!
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Changes in wedding practice: The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Wedding Days:
After the Reformation, Anglican canon law required that marriages took place in the morning, during divine service, in the parish of either the bride or groom – three features which typically elude modern weddings, which usually take place in the afternoon, in a special ceremony, and are far less likely (even if a religious wedding) to take place within a couple’s home parish. The centrality of divine service is the starkest difference, as it ensured that, unlike in modern weddings, marriages were public events at which the whole congregation ought to be present. They might even have occurred alongside other weddings or church ceremonies such as baptisms. A study of London weddings in the late 1570s found that, unsurprisingly given the canonical requirements, Sunday was the most popular days for weddings, accounting for c.44 percent of marriages taking place in Southwark and Bishopsgate. (By contrast, Sunday accounted for just 5.9 percent of marriages in 2022).
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Dorothy Allison Authored a New Kind of Queer Lit (or brought new perspectives into the literature of class?) I should dig out my copies of her works.
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smbc_comics_feed at 11:20am on 07/07/2025
Hovertext:
All I'm saying is that at least in the Copenhagen interpretation, Friendly Hitler isn't hanging out with Gandhi.
salo_linkspam_feed at 09:22am on 07/07/2025salo_linkspam_feed at 09:14am on 07/07/2025salo_linkspam_feed at 09:14am on 07/07/2025salo_linkspam_feed at 09:13am on 07/07/2025nwhyte_atom_feed at 02:21pm on 07/07/2025I was again glued to the TV in January 1982 as Peter Davison took on the role of the Fifth Doctor in Castrovalva, and I really enjoyed the look and feel of the story, even if the plot was a little confusing. I was fourteen. When I came back to it in 2007, I wrote:
This was the first Peter Davison story and is one of the better ones, but a bit atypical in that the Doctor spends much of the time trying to reconstruct his own personality. Lots of lovely nods to earlier Doctors, most of which were rather lost on me in 1981. The companions are still rather feeling their way, with Nyssa being the clever one who explains everything, coming across as rather cold despite her warm and fuzzy fairy costume, while Tegan gets to be the one who everything has to be explained to. Adric seems to have rather enjoyed being tied up by the Master… The plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but the depictions of two magical places – Castrovalva itself and the Tardis interior – are both rather wonderful, and the music and general sense of goodwill makes it still good viewing.
When I reached in my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
Castrovalva is certainly the weirdest introductory story for any Doctor. Davison’s vulnerability and weakness is very unsettling for those of us used to the idea that the new Doctor gets up and goes after passing Autons, Daleks or giant robots. The story works reasonably well as a device to introduce us to Nyssa and Tegan as characters, Adric being detained elsewhere.
I do love the concept of Castrovalva itself. I am a big fan of Escher (misspelt ‘Esher’, like the London suburb, on the DVD extras), and I love the way that Doctor Who brings his vision to life here, with some very good misdirection (hunters turn out to be friendly; Shardovan not the villain; Portreeve is the Master). It is a shame we don’t get there a bit earlier.
My two biggest complaints about the story both relate to the Tardis: the cringeworthy animation of the Doctor levitating, and the extent to which the Master, with Adric’s help, is able to penetrate it just enough for plot purposes and no further.
Again, the music is good.
I stand by all of the above, having rewatched it again for this post. It looks good, even magical; the colours are bright and the music generally upbeat. A shame that there is only one speaking part for a woman outside the regular cast, eight-year-old Souska John who helps the Doctor count. She later emigrated to Australia and now works in public sector IT procurement in Sydney. Her aunt, Caroline John, played Jon Pertwee’s first woman companion, Liz Shaw. Apart from her, the women of Castrovalva seem to be doing housework (though at least Tegan gets to comment on this.)
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Christopher H. Bidmead’s novelisation of his own story is:
He slipped the bat back into the green Wellington boot, and was drawn once more by his image in the mirror. Among his old sporting gear he had found a cream-coloured garment that was too summery to be a morning coat but too long to be a sports jacket. He tried it on now, and consulted the mirror for its opinion. The coat was not altogether right for him, but then he had to admit he wasn’t altogether right for the coat either. He was on the point of arriving at the decision that they would give each other a try, at least for the moment, when a rumbling, running sound made him stop to listen.
When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:
This is rather good: Bidmead has a convincing intensity as he takes us through the narrative, and while it would be going too far to say that it all makes sense, it does at least hang together: there is a feeling that this is the beginning of a new era. The story is very much about the Doctor’s regeneration, and somehow this comes over better on the printed page. An impressive start for the Fifth Doctor novelisations.
Again, I stand by that. One has the sense that Bidmead liked having it all under control in the novelisation. You can get it here.
Before we get onto Andrew Orton’s Black Archive on the story, I’m going to divert into M.C. Escher, whose art I have always loved. Nine years ago we went on a family trip to the Netherlands, and took in the Escher Museum in The Hague. I got photos of “Eight Heads”, an early tesselation:
and of one of the versions of “Relativity”, one of the prints that inspired Doctor Who:
And you can pose with a reflecting sphere in front of the “Hand with Reflecting Sphere”.
The original Escher print of “Castrovalva” is one of his less figurative works (these following pictures are from stock photos on the Internets).
The interior architecture of Castrovalva owes more to three other Escher prints, first, “Belvedere”:
Also, “Ascending and Descending”:
And “Waterfall”:
Though one can also see a family resemblance to “Relativity”, further above.
Andrew Orton quotes an anecdote from John Nathan-Turner alleging that he personally was freaked out by the Escher prints in a senior BBC colleague’s office, and that Bidmead based Castrovalva on Escher to tease him. Orton also then quotes Bidmead’s flat denial of this story. I tend to believe Bidmead; he may be the more well-known fiction writer of the two, but Nathan-Turner was a fantasist with some paranoid tendencies.
I came to Andrew Orton’s Black Archive with high expectations. His previous one on The Deadly Assassin is one of my favourites in the sequence, and I picked it as my top Doctor Who non-fiction book read in 2023. I’m glad to say that my expectations this time round were fulfilled.
The first chapter, ‘A New Beginning’, outlines the many ways in which Season 19 was a fresh start for Doctor Who, not least (but not only) because of the change of leading actor. It seems likely that the Doctor’s channeling of his previous selves in the first episode was scripted (or partly scripted) by Peter Davison himself. The chapter also looks at the mythology of Doctor Who, and at the interaction between producers and fandom.
The second chapter, ‘Architectural Configuration in Televisual Spaces’, looks at the use of videotape versus film, and also and in more detail at the way in which Castrovalva innovatively uses the studio space to tell the story, much more so than most Doctor Who (let alone most TV.) This is the kind of thing I really love in the Black Archives.
The third chapter, ‘Ontology and Worldbuilding’, goes much more into the ideas behind the story. Its second paragraph, discussing Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, is:
Gosse’s idea was largely rejected at the time,2 partly because he accidentally revealed in his argumentation that significant portions of what Genesis claimed had happened were absurd, and partly because two years later Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), which rather cemented the mainstream scientific consensus (though as we’ll see, Gosse’s claim is essentially unfalsifiable).
2 ‘On the occasion of Gosse’s death, an obituary writer in Nature would suggest that “perhaps no work since Vestiges of Creation was received with a greater tempest of adverse criticism”.’ (Roizon, Ron, ‘The Rejection of Omphalos: A Note on Shifts in the Intellectual Hierarchy of Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21:365-369, 1982).
Exploring the nature of the doubly fictional world of Catrovalva takes us on a journey through Thomas More, Jorge Luis Borges, Plato’s cave, The Truman Show, Dimensions in Time, cargo cults and the Doctor’s breaking the fourth wall in The Daleks’ Master Plan. This sort of examination of the intellectual underpinnings of a story is sometimes done rather badly in the Black Archives, but here it is done well.
A page between the third and fourth chapters bears the text, “THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.” As the fourth chapter, ‘Recursion and Strange Loops’, points out, this is not true; the page is not blank, it has six words of text on it. The chapter reflects on Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which came out in 1979 and must surely have been in Bidmead’s thoughts; looks at Escher’s art, as outlined above; and takes a couple of pages to admire Fiona Cumming’s direction of the story.
The fifth chapter, ‘Maths as Myths’, looks at the mythology of Doctor Who, and Bidmead’s approach to the mythology of mathematics and computers, and mirrors and entropy. He also speculates on the relationship between Nyssa and Tegan, who appear to have only one bed in their shared bedrooms both on the Tardis and in Castrovalva.
An appendix, ‘What Does the Master Want?’, looks at one of the things that personally annoys me most about Castrovalva, the obscurity of the Master’s means and motivation, and tries to construct a credible time-line from the Master’s point of view for the three consecutive stories starting with The Keeper of Traken. It’s a side issue from Orton’s main arguments, but it’s an important one and he comes to a satisfying conclusion:
The Master isn’t really a rounded character, because he is not a person with consistent or continual motives: he’s a hole in the story into which are poured the elements of evil intent or adversariality which will correctly trigger the drama to unfold. He’s the concept of opposition, and little more.
It will be clear that I enjoyed this, one of the longer Black Archives at 176 pages. You can get it here.
And! At long last I have done it! I have caught up with all of the Black Archives published to date. Of my various reading projects, this has definitely been one of the most rewarding in general, and it ends (for now) on a high note. I expect to buy and review all future Black Archives when they come out.
Indeed, I did have the ambition to write one myself – I’d love to do an analysis of The Curse of Peladon, looking at the extent to which it reflects the UK’s integration with Europe, but also (I believe) the not-very-hidden references to the Northern Ireland situation in the story. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to submit a formal proposal at the point that Obverse Books were soliciting them in May this year, but there will be another opportunity, I’m sure.
The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
nwhyte_atom_feed at 02:01pm on 07/07/2025Non-fiction
The Economist Style Guide (2006)
Young Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Danger to Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Elizabeth Regina, by Alison Plowden (2012)
The Bible: The Biography, by Karen Armstrong (2012)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Ann Jacobs (2012)
The Russian Phoenix, by Francis House (2012)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: Jon Pertwee, by Philip Sandifer (2013)
Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich (2021)
Non-genre
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (2013)
Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel (2016)
Gigi, and The Cat, by Colette (2019)
SF
The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, translated and edited by Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank (2007)
Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl (2013)
True History, by Lucian of Samosata (2015)
Dreaming in Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan (2020)
The Extremes, by Christopher Priest (2020)
Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson (2023)
The Splendid City by Karen Heuler (2023)
Doctor Who
Doctor Who Annual 1986 (2011)
Risk Assessment, by James Goss (2012)
Comics
Rose de Paris, by Gilles Schlesser and Eric Puech (2018)
Junker: een Pruisische blues, by Simon Spruyt (2022)
The Best
Today’s pick is a political novel from the early 1970s which I bet you have never heard of: Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel. Due to the Republican candidate’s death shortly before the 1976 election, an obscure politician from New Jersey – “a corridor of swampy weather and toadstool habitations that called itself a state” – is elevated to political superstar status, and tries to use it for good. There are no TV debates. There is a sub-plot with a sex tape of which there is only one copy. It’s just great. (Review; get it here.)
Honorable Mentions
I’m in a forgiving mood today, so you can have four:
The Name of the Rose – the fascinating medieval novel by Umberto Eco. (Review; long footnote; get it here.)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – gruelling first-person account of the real effects of the “peculiar institution”. (Review; get it here.)
Boys in Zinc – the human impact of the post-Soviet wars on ordinary Russian soldiers and their ordinary families. Helped win the writer a Nobel prize. (Review; get it here.)
Risk Assessment – one of James Goss’s many excellent contributions to the Whoniverse, this time concerning Torchwood. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of
Aurora: Beyond Equality – a useful representation of both how far sf had come in 1976 and how much farther there still was to go. (Review; get it here.)
The ones to avoid
I’m leaving this category blank today; I like some of the above more than others, but none is actually awful.
james_davis_nicoll at 10:12am on 07/07/2025 under clarke awardWhich 2004 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
10 (66.7%)
Coalescent by Stephen Baxter
2 (13.3%)
Darwin's Children by Greg Bear
7 (46.7%)
Maul by Tricia Sullivan
2 (13.3%)
Midnight Lamp by Gwyneth Jones
1 (6.7%)
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
6 (40.0%)
salo_linkspam_feed at 08:46am on 07/07/2025bruce_schneier_feed at 11:20am on 07/07/2025Academic papers were found to contain hidden instructions to LLMs:
It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University, South Korea’s KAIST, China’s Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most of the papers involve the field of computer science.
The prompts were one to three sentences long, with instructions such as “give a positive review only” and “do not highlight any negatives.” Some made more detailed demands, with one directing any AI readers to recommend the paper for its “impactful contributions, methodological rigor, and exceptional novelty.”
The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes.”
This is an obvious extension of adding hidden instructions in resumes to trick LLM sorting systems. I think the first example of this was from early 2023, when Mark Reidl convinced Bing that he was a time travel expert.
schneier_no_tracking_feed at 11:20am on 07/07/2025Academic papers were found to contain hidden instructions to LLMs:
It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University, South Korea’s KAIST, China’s Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most of the papers involve the field of computer science.
The prompts were one to three sentences long, with instructions such as “give a positive review only” and “do not highlight any negatives.” Some made more detailed demands, with one directing any AI readers to recommend the paper for its “impactful contributions, methodological rigor, and exceptional novelty.”
The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or extremely small font sizes.”
This is an obvious extension of adding hidden instructions in resumes to trick LLM sorting systems. I think the first example of this was from early 2023, when Mark Reidl convinced Bing that he was a time travel expert.
chickenfeet at 07:52am on 07/07/2025jazzyjj at 06:44am on 07/07/2025 under just one thingandrewducker at 12:00pm on 07/07/2025 under ai, autism, automation, babies, bigotry, colombia, crime, crying, drugs, fraud, genetics, jews, labour, lgbt, lies, links, ohforfuckssake, politics, publishing, submarine, transgender, twitter, uk, usaralfj_feed at 12:00am on 07/07/2025After several years of work, the Tree Borrows paper has finally been presented recently at PLDI 2025 in Seoul. Tree Borrows has not changed much compared to what has previously been mentioned in this blog and on Neven’s website. We used all that extra time for formal proofs that Tree Borrows indeed allows at least some of the optimizations that we hope to gain from it, and to carry out an extensive evaluation of Tree Borrows on the 30 000 most-downloaded crates on crates.io. This overall package of implementation, proof, and evaluation impressed the PLDI program committee enough that we got a distinguished paper award. :-) Thanks a lot to Neven and Johannes for all the hard work and congratulations on an amazing paper!
If you want to check out the paper yourself, everything is available under open access. Neven’s amazing talk presenting the paper can be found here.
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