The Last Oprichnik

Review: The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper

2012-02-13T10:26:00.008Z

The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper by James Carnac.
Bantam Press 2012.

This review contains spoilers.

When I'm chatting to religious types, as I'm prone to do, one question which often comes up is why they believe that the Bible (or whatever their tome of choice may be) is the unadulterated word of God. There are many answers, but a lot of them boil down to the simple logic: it is the word of God because it claims to be the word of God. Now while it may be easy to see the circularity of such an argument, it does act as a reminder of just how many books are out there that claim to be something that they are not. My favourite is Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, in the foreword of which the author recounts the story of his discovery of a manuscript by the Benedictine monk, Adso of Melk. Eco, so he claims, is merely the story's translator. (As Paul Begg points out in his notes on The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper, George MacDonald Fraser made a not dissimilar claim when introducing Flashman.)

And so James Carnac's 'autobiography' comes with its own foreword, describing how it fell into the hands of its discoverer, Sydney George Hulme Beaman (famous not least as the creator – I kid you not – of Larry the Lamb).

If the subject were not the Whitechapel Murderer, I doubt whether the question 'is it genuine' would ever come to mind. Had it not been for the emergence, two decades ago, of James Maybrick's supposed diary, would the world of Ripperology spend any of its valuable time considering if James Carnac (of whom no historical trace has been found) were actually the Ripper? To be honest, not too much valuable time has been spent. The noted Ripper expert Paul Begg gives us 30 odd pages of quite reasonable analysis, but leaves many potential lines of enquiry unexplored (or at least his exploration unreported). Even if the name of every character in the book had been changed, it would still not be too hard to find reports of the inquest of a doctor (Carnac's father) in Tottenham who cut his wife's throat and then his own, nor of the road accident in which Carnac lost a leg, nor of his death in a gas explosion near Russell Square. But such enquiries would take time and effort, and although Begg has in the past shown his skill and willingness to put these into an investigation, it must be hard to find inspiration when one knows that all clues will come to nothing. Carnac's work screams from every page that it is a work of fiction.

Which is not to say that it is a fake. People often say that the Turin Shroud is a fake, but what they really mean is that they are now convinced that it is not something that they once suspected it might be. To be a fake, it must be proved not to be what its creator intended people to believe it to be. If the Turin Shroud turns out to have been a cover for the tortured body of Jaques de Molay, or an early experiment in photography by Leonardo da Vinci, then it will genuinely be that thing, and not be a fake anything else. The fakery is only in the minds of those who want to believe.

Thus The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper is no fake. It is merely a work of fiction with a forward that is intended to add verisimilitude, much like The Name of the Rose or Flashman. As a work of fiction, how does it stand up?

To be clichéd, it's something of a curate's egg. The story is divided into three parts – Carnac's early life, the Ripper murders, and the events leading to his death. Of these, the first part is by far the best. Despite the author's repeated (and perhaps telling) insistence that he has no skill in writing, there is good pacing and some nice turns of phrase. The story covers the gruesome death of his parents, his own growing bloodlust, his conversations with the mysterious 'Voice', his discovery of his family's macabre history and his encounter with the embodiment of the evil that has haunted every generation of his ancestors.

Great stuff! And whilst not approaching the quality of H.P. Lovecraft or M.R. James, it's of the same kidney. Part two, covering the Ripper murders themselves, disappoints. Here one might almost suspect that the author genuinely is trying to convince us that he is the Ripper. As a writer of historical fiction, I know that is better to add invented detail to make a scene more convincing and that I will get little comeback for minor inaccuracies. However, the cursory coverage of the murders in Whitechapel suggests an author who fears getting caught out in his mistakes. Even then, as Paul Begg points out, he does make many mistakes – often ones that would have been easy to check.

But the real problem of part two is its failure to deliver on Carnac's motivation. Part one has convincingly told us of his growing desire to see and feel a knife cutting into living human flesh, and told us that this was to be the reason for his becoming the Ripper. But once he does kill, we hear nothing of his reaction to finally committing the act to which he has so long been drawn. Nor is there anything to explain how a desire simply to cut a human throat spirals into the squalid, uncontrolled evisceration to which the Ripper descended at Miller's Court. In his foreword, Hulme Beaman tells us that he has 'removed and destroyed portions of the manuscript which contained details particularly revolting to me.' It should be noted, that there is no trace of any such censorship of the typescript (which, I add in passing, is irritatingly referred to as a manuscript throughout the book). This sounds to me more like an author's pretended excuse for not going into a level of detail that he guesses would be unacceptable to his readership, but in reading part two it almost seems that the author has forgotten the groundwork he laid in part one, or that part two was written first, or perhaps even by a different author.

Part three is different again. It is a short tale of a murderer hoist on his own petard, for which there is no real requirement that the murderer be Jack the Ripper. The events take place forty years after the Ripper murders – close to the time the document seems to have been written. This section begins like the rest as a first person narrative, but the twist in the tail is delivered as a separate coroner's report, thus neatly avoiding the necessity for Carnac, like Moses, to be the narrator his own death. The problem here though is that this seems to defeat the conception of the entire work as being an autobiography. One would at least expect a further note from Hulme Beaman explaining his later discovery of the coroner's report. Perhaps that would be just too pat. What is confusing though is that the coroner's report was written out using the same typewriter as the last part of Carnac's autobiography.

Ultimately my guess would be that the autobiography is in fact an amalgamation of three short stories – or perhaps even two, with the middle Ripper section added rather cursorily to link them and to increase public interest. While this does still leave questions, many of which Begg raises, over numerous inconsistencies even this is taken as a work of fiction, I don't see any of them as particularly serious. We all from time to time (or is it just me?) send half-baked ramblings to our editors in the knowledge that we'll have the chance to iron out the wrinkles later on. Moreover, there's nothing to suggest that this was the final revision of the work. Hulme Beaman died in 1932, only a few years after the document's presumed date, so it may have been a work in progress.

In the end, I think that this is a book that may appeal more to the aficionado of early twentieth century horror than to the Ripperologist. Luckily, those are two groups between which there is a substantial overlap, which includes myself. The biggest question that remains for me is whether Hulme Beaman really is the author of this work of fiction, or whether he added his foreword to the work of another.

Personally, I like to think that Hulme Beaman wrote it himself. It's a heck of a lot better than Larry the Lamb.

Give Me the Blame – Just Give Me the Boy

2012-02-02T10:37:00.002Z

So Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin has been stripped of his knighthood, and we all feel better for it. At least, I'm presuming we all feel better, otherwise the whole debacle would have been a bit of a waste of time and effort, wouldn't it? And the really nice thing is that while we all feel better, the ci-devant himself is probably weeping few tears at once again being plain old Mr Goodwin. He was after all, a banker, and thus his public humiliation might count for little in comparison with pert pieces of copper coinage that he can still thrust without cease into his trouser pockets. Though maybe that's not such a good thing after all. Maybe as we all come to appreciate just how little he has been saddened by these events, we will ourselves realize how little we have been made happier.

Fortunately the former knight is not the only person who is having his life made deliberately worse in these times of trouble. There are calls to reduce the salaries and bonuses of rich bankers and there are plans to cap the maximum benefits that a family can receive. Now there may be good reasons for this, both in the case of bonuses (the money could be better spent on recapitalization; incentives should be restructured to promote long term growth) and benefits (intergenerational unemployment impoverishes both the nation and the individual). There also arguments against them (more money to bankers means more tax the exchequer; cutting benefits may actually cost more if families have to be rehomed). But that's not the main thrust of the debate. In both cases the argument at the forefront is that the people in question do not deserve this money, therefore they should not get it. It is not fair. And for the rest of us the advantage is not that we become richer, but that we feel happier to see others made poorer.

And why not? The government has recently been looking into what makes people happy, and it seems that being happy is not the same as being rich. Perhaps this is the alternative to capitalism that is being suggested – a world where happiness is maximized instead of wealth. And how better to be happy than to watch others made poor? As Gore Vidal put it, it is not enough to succeed – others must fail. In reality, I'm not sure that most people really want an alternative capitalism – we just want a return to that good old fashioned capitalism that used to work, before it stopped laying its golden eggs a few years ago.

Which talk of golden eggs brings us to Jack, and the beanstalk, and the giant. The title of this blog comes from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's magnificent Into the Woods. Towards the end of act 2, our heroes are menaced by the giantess who threatens to destroy their village unless they hand the boy, Jack, over to her, whom she blames for the death of her husband. As is to be expected, there follows a round (and indeed a song) of blame allocation, where the characters attempt not to solve their problem, but to determine whose fault it is. To which the witch counters:

No, of course what really matters
Is the blame,
Somebody to blame.
Fine, if that's the thing you enjoy,
Placing the blame,
If that's the aim,
Give me the blame-
Just give me the boy.

Now I'm not saying that handing over Jack is the right thing to do (I'm reminded of those utilitarian questions about pushing a fat man into the path of a runaway train full of passengers), but at least the witch is addressing ways to solve the problem. And perhaps the government, and the opposition, and the press and all of use might do better look for policies that might improve the lot of us all, rather than make things worse for a few – be they a rich few or a poor few.

So there we are. I've allocated the blame, and that's made me feel a little bit happier. Now I'm off to do some work, and make myself a little bit richer.

The Transworld Book Group Reading Challenge!

2011-07-28T13:00:00.003+01:00

Twelve has been included in Transworld's Book Group Reading Challenge. Choose any four books (that's to sayTwelve plus any other three) from the list of fifteen and be sent copies to review on Amazon or on your own blog.

Full details here.

Full Fathom Forty

2011-07-26T09:54:00.003+01:00

My short story Ben will be featuring in the British Fantasy Society's fortieth anniversary anthology, Full Fathom Forty.

The anthology will be published at the end of September in time for the British Fantasy Convention in Brighton, and a fee copy will be given to all BFS members.

A full list of contributing authors and ordering details for non-members are available. A Brief description of the story Ben can be found here.

New Look Website

2011-07-11T12:30:00.003+01:00

In preparation for the publication of The Third Section, I've done a major overhaul of my website.

Experience the new look at www.jasperkent.com.

The Third Section

2011-07-07T09:30:00.006+01:00

Here's the cover of The Third Section, the next instalment of The Danilov Quintet.

It's published in the UK by Bantam on August 18^th and in the USA by Pyr on October 25^th.

Artwork is again by the wonderful Paul Young.

Nun of Thee Above

2011-04-26T08:56:00.003+01:00

UPDATE: FOR REASONS THAT YOU'LL SEE IF YOU READ THE COMMENTS SECTION, THIS WHOLE IDEA TURNS OUT TO BE A BIG PILE OF DOGGY-DO. MY APOLOGIES. I LEAVE THE POST UP ONLY AS A MEMENTO OF MY STUPIDITY.

The proponents of AV claim (and I hope that if you've been following these pages, you'll accept the claim is false) that AV guarantees that the winner has the support of more than 50% of those who voted. Even in those cases that the claim is true, it's still just a quirk of the fact that if a candidate doesn't get 50%, then they are repeatedly given additional votes until they do.

But if we really wanted all MPs to have more than 50% of the vote, even under First Past the Post, it would be quite simple:

If a constituency gives no candidate 50% support, then that constituency doesn't return an MP.

(Note that this approach wouldn't work under AV, since at least one candidate always gets more than 50%.)

It's a radical approach, but it has its pros and cons. The main pro is that it is something that would really encourage candidates to seek a broad base of support. The con is that it would leave many (perhaps most) constituencies unrepresented.

Under FPTP, and under AV, we do have a mechanism to indicate that we don't want any of the candidates to represent us at Westminster - we don't vote. At the last general election, 35% of the UK took that option, more than the fraction who voted for many of the winning candidates.

The problem is, there's more than one reason for abstention. It may be to wish a plague on all their houses, or it may be because we couldn't be bothered, or were away on business, or whatever. We can demonstrate that we really do care enough to go to the polling station, by turning up and then spoiling our paper, but even then there is no way to distinguish between the conscientious abstainer and those can't tell the sharp end of the pencil from the blunt one.

What we need is a genuine box in which to put our cross, labelled NOTA - None Of The Above.

Would it have much effect? Perhaps not.

Under FPTP, the NOTA votes would be counted and would certainly be of interest if NOTA came in third or second or even (dare we hope?) first place. But it wouldn't actually make any difference.

Under AV, NOTA would have less impact. The winning candidate would still get over 50% (it can't be avoided). If a voter put NOTA as their first choice, and then listed the other candidates, then they would be saying, 'I don't want any of these candidates, but if I have to have one of them, here's my order of preference.' Well, the fact is you do have to have one of them, and so your NOTA vote would instantly be dismissed and the process would carry on as normal with your second-choice vote being counted.

But what if, as suggested above, you could have none of them? What if, under FPTP or AV, NOTA was counted like any other candidate and could win. It would be rare I think, but it's an option that would allow voters to truly express themselves. Under FPTP things would be, inevitably, simple. If NOTA gets more than any other candidate then NOTA wins and the constituency returns no MP.

Under AV things are (inevitably) more interesting. The NOTA selection could go anywhere in the list that the voter chooses - top, bottom, or middle. And suppose you list the candidates in the order A, B, C, NOTA, D, E , F. That would be saying, 'I'm happy to have A or B or C as my MP, and of them, here's my order of preference. I don't want any of D, E, F, but if it comes to it, I do still have a order of dislike.'

That's really quite expressive. Under standard AV, however much you loathe and despise candidate F, you still have to list them to get the most of you vote, you put them last, seemingly suggesting that you would like them to be your MP, just that you'd like others more. By putting that NOTA break in there, you're effectively producing one list of candidates you like and another of candidates you don't, and putting the BNP (sorry, candidate F) at the top of that list. (It has to be said that this is a point of perception, not something that directly effects the result, but perception is important.)

There's still one problem, however. In a constituency where NOTA wins, the people don't get a representative in Parliament. The best I can come up with is that the runner-up gets forced to go to Westminster, but doesn't get a salary. I can see the fairness of it, but I can also see how it might produce an MP who slightly less than enthusiastic about their job - which was really the whole motivation for electoral reform.

But that's a detail. The important thing is to modify AV by adding this NOTA option. So who's with me? Who will make their voice heard? Who will climb up onto the roof tops and shout out the slogan to all who will listen:

'Vote NOTA-AV!'

Why Stop at 50%?

2011-04-25T09:06:00.003+01:00

I've been too negative - pointing out inaccuracies in claims made in favour of AV, when nobody really cares how the system actually works anyway; it's about the spirit of the change.

So for this post and the next, I'm going to be more positive, and suggest some alterations to the electoral system that might in some small way improve things. (And for this first one, I'm indebted to Katie Piatt for setting me along this line of thought.) Let's begin.

A supporter of First Past the Post, a supporter of AV and a third-world dictator (I won't name them) are sitting in a pub (I will name it - the Good Companions, in Brighton).

The FPTP supporter says, 'Under my system, the winning candidate has the highest number of votes.'

The AV supporter says, 'Ah! But under my system I can guarantee that the winning candidate has more than 50% of the votes.'

The dictator says, 'That's nothing. Under my system I can guarantee that the winning candidate gets 100% of the votes.'

As it turns out, both the FPTP and the AV supporter are understating their positions.

In FPTP, we can make guarantees about percentages. If there are four candidates, then it is guaranteed that the winner will get more than 25% of the votes. If there are three candidates, then it's 33%. If two, then 50% (the equivalent of the last round of AV) and if there's only one, then you can guarantee 100% support (the dictator's system).

So if we want, as AV claims, more than 50% support for the winner but still have FPTP, that's easy - we just restrict the number of candidates to two. The problem is obvious - how do we determine those two?

AV is essentially an answer to that question. It manages it all in one election, but effectively takes multiple votes across a series of elections. If there are four candidates in total then we have a vote between those four. The loser drops out and their votes are transferred to the next round of three. At this stage we can only be sure that one candidate gets at least 33%, so again we drop out the loser, transfer the votes and now have an election of two in which someone (it's mathematically guaranteed) gets more than 50% and the result is called.

But why stop there? Why halt this repeated process of dropping out the losing candidate? Now the second place candidate drops out, his votes are transferred to the only remaining candidate, and the winner can be declared as having 100% support.

But that's silly. Clearly no one believes that the winner has 100% support, in just the same way that no one believes it in a dictatorship. The winner may be the most popular candidate, but the 100% support is meaningless - it's just an inevitable consequence of the mathematics.

But in just the same way, under AV as it is proposed, the 50% is meaningless - it's just as much an inevitable consequence of the maths, a statement which though true, cannot be false. I'd like to see a winner under AV who didn't get 50% of the vote.

I say that the percentage is meaningless, but perhaps a better term is 'not interesting'. If I were to tell you that the last five presidents of France all got more than 50% of the vote in the final round, it would not be interesting. And I use the term in a slightly technical sense - by 'not interesting' I mean it provides no information that you couldn't otherwise have inferred. French presidents have to get more than 50%, just as AV candidates do - that's the system.

However, if I told you that in 2007 Sarkozy won with 53%, whereas in 2002 Chirac won with 82%, that would (might) be interesting. Clearly there was something different about Chirac's election compared with Sarkozy's. (There was - Chirac was standing against the fascist Le Pen.)

But under AV, as currently proposed, we don't get that sort of information. If I were to tell you that in one constituency the winner was Smith with 53% and in another the winner was Jones with 58% the actual percentages tell you nothing of interest. Jones my actually be less popular than Smith.

Why? Well in Jones' constituency, voting went to the final round. Jones got 58% and his opponent got 42%.

But Smith reached the 50% finishing post while there were still three candidates left. He got 53% and his opponents got 20% and 27%. If the AV process had continued to the next stage and the third place candidate had dropped out then the redistributed results might have given 63% (or more, or less) to Smith and 37% to his opponent. Now Smith's 63% can be more fairly compared with Jones' 58%.

So why is this not the way AV is proposed to work? Why do we stop counting as soon as one candidate passes 50%? Well, it could be argued (I have done) that the purpose of elections is primarily to choose an MP, not to divine other related information. But I'd also argue that getting other information is useful, if it doesn't affect the actual result, which this doesn't.

It could be argued that counting every constituency through to the final round would be expensive, but we already know that there is no additional cost to AV elections, so even if my proposal proved to be twice as expensive, twice nothing is still nothing (and that's the simplest bit of maths you're likely to see on this blog for a long time).

It could be that proponents of AV realise that if this approach were followed then in some seats (safe seats under FPTP and still safe under AV) this extra transfer of votes might mean the winner getting maybe 80% or occasionally 90%, and that's getting a bit too close to the dictator's 100% and could give away the game that all the percentages are just artefacts of the system. I doubt it, because I doubt many of AV's proponents have thought it through to that extent.

But that's my proposal. If AV succeeds at the referendum, make a slight amendment to it:

In every seat, counting should carry on to the final round of two candidates, even if a winner can be determined earlier, so that comparison of winning percentages across constituencies operates on a level playing field.

Any takers?

I'm Backing AV 110%

2011-04-24T08:36:00.007+01:00

(Sorry to go on about it, but I'm just fascinated by mathematics.)

One of the headline reasons being put forward in favour of AV is that it means that no one can become an MP without winning more than 50% of the vote (assuming every voter uses all of their votes, which is a detail I'm not too fussed about). I'm not sure this is such a great thing, since some of that support might be, to say the least, grudging, coming from voters who could actually think of six or seven candidates that they would rather have had than the winner for whom their vote was finally counted.

However 50% is still 50%. And what's really great about AV is it's not only the winner who gets more than 50% of the vote, so might some of the losers.

Let's return to the constituency I mentioned in my last post, but give it a more definite result. First-choice votes go:

Labour: 15,000

Liberal: 11,000

Tory: 9,000

The Tory drops out and let's suppose 7000 of his second-choice votes were for the Liberal. The Liberal now has 18000, which is more than 50%, and wins. First-choice votes of one candidate plus second choice votes of another gives greater than 50%.

The trouble is, the Labour candidate also got more than 50% if you add the first choice votes of one candidate and the second choice of another. The Labour first-choices plus the Liberal second-choices (assuming a reasonable split) also come to greater than 50% . (It's actually mathematically possible that the Tory could get more than 50% too if the Labour candidate's second choice votes were largely for the Tory - but that's unlikely).

So 50% is a necessary but not sufficient condition to win an AV election. How then is the winner decided? We could go back to a FPTP-style approach, where it's the candidate with the highest number of votes (first and second choice combined), but in this example, that would probably be Labour. Here the Liberal wins with more than 50% of a particular set of first and second choice votes, but still fewer than the combination of votes that Labour got, but didn't get counted.

So the total number of votes cast is more than 100%?

Let's consider the definition of percentage. The percentage of votes for a candidate is:

(n / T) * 100

where n is the number of votes received by the candidate and T is the total number of votes overall.

But that term T could actually have several meanings. It could be the total number of voters, or the total number of votes cast or the total number of votes counted. (It could also be the total number of eligible voters, but turnout is a problem under any system.) Under FPTP those three definitions of T are all the same thing, because FPTP is one person-one vote.

But AV gives several votes to each voter. (You can argue that it's a good thing, but you can't deny it - the voter gets to indicate support for more than one candidate. It may not be that multiple votes are counted, but multiple votes are cast.) If you go with T being the number of voters, then it's clearly true - the winning candidate has more than 50% of the vote. In this case, 51%.

But if T is the total number of votes cast, with three votes per voter (assuming that there were no other candidates and that every voter used all their votes) that gives a total of 105,000 votes - and the winning Liberal candidate gets (18,000 / 105,000) * 100 = 17%.

On the other hand, if T is the number of votes counted, things get more complicated. In the first round, 35,000 votes were counted. The Tory dropped out and so in the second round a further 9000 votes were counted, giving a T of 44,000. So now the winning Liberal candidate's percentage is (18,000 / 44,000) * 100 = 41%. Not a bad result for a winner under FPTP, but this is AV, which supposedly guarantees the winner gets more than 50%. You may think I'm being unfair, counting those second-choice Tory votes into T with the same weight as first-choice votes, but if you do, then you must surely also object to them being counted into n (the votes for the winning candidate) with equal weight - that's one of the main objections that many people have to AV.

So the question that we must all answer, whether we are pro or anti or could not care less, is:

What is your definition of T?

Electile Disfunction

2011-04-20T10:11:00.004+01:00

I won't deny it; I've been mildly opposed to the Alternative Vote ever since Gordon Brown first mooted it as an opening gambit in his attempts to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats back in 2009, over six months before the general election.

But one objection that I'd never really held with was the idea that AV is complicated. All the voter has to do, so they say, is write down the numbers 1 to 9 (or whatever) in order of preference. It's simple - in much the same way that solving a Sudoku is simple (or indeed that playing the flute is simple, according to Monty Python).

But the more I think about it, the more complicated it gets. Problems can occur in many areas, but the one I'd like to focus on is the phenomenon of the second choice marginal.

Let's consider an imaginary constituency with just Tory, Liberal and Labour candidates (or one in which other, less popular candidates have already been knocked out in earlier rounds of AV). I use real party names rather than abstractions such as A, B and C not to express any party bias, but because it's easier to follow and easier to decide whether such a scenario could really happen. Suppose the first choice votes are roughly:

Labour: 15,000

Liberal: 10,000

Tory: 10,000

'Roughly?' I hear you bellow. 'Surely we must be accurate here.' Well, yes and no. If this were a First Past the Post election, then those kind of round numbers are quite clear enough to show that Labour wins. Of course, even under FPTP we have marginals if the two leading candidates are close, and then accuracy matters, but under AV we also have the possibility of this kind of second choice marginal (or, indeed, third, fourth of fifth choice) where precise counting even for second place really matters.

More marginals? Isn't that one of the key aims of AV; to force parties to genuinely campaign in more seats, rather than just focussing on the few marginals that matter so much under FPTP? True enough, but you might find that what they're campaigning for isn't quite what you'd expected.

Under AV the winning candidate needs to get more than half the votes cast, so in this case the winning post is 17,500. (Odd, isn't it, that it's AV that actually has the fixed finishing post, and so-called First Past the Post that doesn't?) No one here has 17,500, so we have to consider those second choice votes.

We can ignore the Labour second choices, because they're never going to be counted, though they'll probably be mostly for the Liberals. The Tory second choices are likely to be mostly Liberal too. Admittedly there may be a lot of support from Tories for, say, UKIP, but we're assuming they've been eliminated by now. At this stage, a Tory's second choice can only be Labour or Liberal (or nothing, but that's another story).

As for the Liberal voters, let's assume they spilt 50-50 amongst Tory and Labour. In reality, there might well be more of a bias towards Labour, but it doesn't much matter. With Labour only needing around 2,500 to win, the Liberal spilt could be up to 75% pro Tory, and the mathematics would still be much the same.

So, we had Liberals and Tories on about 10,000 each. Time to be specific. Let's suppose that the Liberal got 10,005 and the Tory 10,000. The Tory drops out and his second choice votes get allocated. We've assumed they're mostly Liberal and very few Labour, and so it seems reasonable that the Liberals will pick up the extra 7,500 they need and will win. This is exactly the sort of result that AV is supposed to achieve. The Liberals come second in the first round, but win on the second round.

But just suppose it goes the other way. Suppose it's the Tory who gets 10,005 and the Liberal 10,000. Then the Liberal drops out and his second choice votes get reallocated. We've assumed it's a 50-50 spilt, so Labour gets 5,000 more votes and wins. Just read that again:

The Tory is more popular than the Liberal and therefore Labour wins.

And on top of that, the difference is the matter of just a few votes. Under FPTP a few votes will matter in a marginal, but at least there a vote for Labour will help Labour, a vote for the Liberals will help the Liberals. Here it's the swing between Tories and Liberals that determines a result between the Liberals and Labour.

So what's a Tory voter to do? In this particular constituency, they know that their favoured candidate has no chance of winning, so the next best option is for the Liberal to win. But if they vote Tory first and Liberal second, that actually increases the chance of Labour winning, by pushing out the Liberal on the first round and thereby getting his second choices counted. It's a better bet for the Tory to vote Liberal first and Tory second, so that the Tory drops out and his second choice votes go to the Liberal. It's classic tactical voting; if you're a Tory afraid of Labour, vote Liberal.

In fact, it's better than tactical voting under FPTP. Not only does the Tory vote for the Liberal mean one more vote for the Liberals; if it makes the Tory candidate drop to third, it means thousands more votes for the Liberal as all those second choices get counted.

And it's not just Tories who can vote tactically. Remember the set up: Liberal second place is good for the Liberals; a Tory second place is good for Labour. So why don't a few hundred Labour supporters tactically vote Tory? It costs a few hundred votes, but if it pushes the Liberals into third and reaps a few thousand Labour votes it's a worthwhile reward.

In both styles of tactical voting, there is a powerful psephological lever in operation. Switching a small number of votes away from your first choice party can actually liberate a huge number in favour of the result you want. It may take a fair deal of voter management from the political parties, but guess what? - they're good at that.

And what about recounts? Let's go back to that scenario where the Tory gets 10,005 and the Liberal 10,000. That means Labour wins. The Liberal isn't happy and there's only five votes in it, so it's worth asking for a recount. But the thing is, the Tory (with Nick Berry's Every Loser Wins ringing in his ears) isn't happy with it either - because Labour wins. So both the winning and the losing candidate (in the second and third place play-off) will be asking for a recount. At least under FPTP it tends to be the loser who wants a recount and the winner who doesn't. It puts the returning officer in a difficult position of perhaps having to act against the requests of both candidates.

And will those candidates have enough information to decide whether a recount is worthwhile. With different second choice voting patterns, it's quite possible that the Labour candidate would win regardless of who comes second. Would the Tory and Liberal candidates know that before deciding whether it's worth bickering over the few votes that determine second and third place?

Of course, we've been looking at a specific example which won't occur everywhere. But with 650 constituencies, this sort of thing could crop up more than once, along with other permutations that aren't even dreamt of here.

Putting the numbers 1 to 9 nine in order has never been more of a challenge.

As Seen on TV

2011-03-14T14:36:00.001Z

TWELVE got a brief mention on the BBC's Culture Show last week. Here's the excerpt.

The Third Section

2011-03-10T21:09:00.003Z

For those of you who just can't wait, I've posted the prologue to The Third Section, the next installment of The Danilov Quintet, on my website. Read it here.

Will the Real Cliff Townshend Please Stand Up?

2011-01-16T18:57:00.004Z

A fascinating story from the 1950s here on my father's blog concerning his landlord, who claimed to be the saxophonist Cliff Townshend, but in fact wasn't.

The story is made yet more intriguing by virtue of the fact the real Cliff Townshend was Who guitarist's Pete Townshend's father, though at the time he would he would only have been in short trousers.

Ave Versus Christus! Ave Jerry Goldsmith!

2010-12-30T19:58:00.002Z

Another instalment of Borders Babel Clash.

Click here for the full post.

Best Speculative Fiction of 2010

2010-12-27T20:06:00.001Z

Thirteen Years Later is number 10 in Pat's Fantasy Hotlist's top ten of speculative fiction titles of 2010, following on from Twelve's position of 6 in the same list in 2009.

Full details at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist.

Why You Little…!

2010-12-26T11:15:00.003Z

Another episode of Babel Clash:

Click here.

Best Vampire Releases of 2010

2010-12-24T09:31:00.002Z

Twelve is listed in Barnes and Noble's best vampire releases of 2010.

Full details here.

Godless Creatures in a Godless World

2010-12-23T09:08:00.002Z

My second contribution to Borders' Babel Clash here:

Godless Creatures in a Godless World

And the Eyes in his Head See the World Spinning Round

2010-12-21T09:30:00.001Z

From today until 3rd January I'll be participating in Babel Clash on the Borders SFF blog. The idea is a that a pair of authors alternately posts in response to one another, and I'm lucky enough to be corresponding with fellow Pyr authors Clay and Susan Griffith, the minds behind THE GREYFRIAR, first instalment of the VAMPIRE EMPIRE series.

Today I got the ball rolling with the following post:

And the Eyes in his Head See the World Spinning Round

They Can’t Take That Away From Me

2010-11-14T20:43:00.002Z

When first I heard the news the other week that the UK is going to accept the European Court ruling that convicts should be allowed to vote, I received it with the same indecision that I've always regarded the issue.

Ultimately, it will make little difference to the makeup of parliament. The prison population of the UK is roughly equal in size to a single constituency, but (a few large prisons aside) it is thinly enough spread to mean that the votes of convicts would not make much difference to the outcome of elections. Of course, if there were a single constituency for which all inmates were the electorate then the results would be interesting (and I use the adjective entirely without spin).

Another side to the argument is directed at the status of the criminal (rather than the effect on electoral results). Some would say that in committing their crimes, criminals have demonstrated their own desire to be separated from society, and so the withdrawal of the privilege of voting is a reflection of that. Others would argue that convicts need to be drawn back into society, and that allowing them to vote is a harmless way of helping to achieve it.

But the phrase that struck me as I listened to the Today programme on Radio 4 (from the lips of Lord Falconer, if I recall correctly), though it's nothing new, was that voting is a human right. It's an obvious thing to say, but it has inescapable implications.

Now I'm not the sort of person who thinks that something is a human right just because the European Court tells me it is. Even though I'm no reader of the Daily Mail, I still balk at the idea of Europe lecturing Britain on the rights of the individual – though I realize that what really sticks in the craw in that Britain needs to be lectured on the rights of the individual.

However, as someone who is generally distrustful of government, human rights are an issue that does arouse my interest, particularly having seen the ways in recent years there have been concerted attempts in the UK both from authoritarians to weaken them and from liberals (with a larger rather than smaller 'L') to dilute them. The authoritarian diminutions are obvious enough, with extended detention without trial, effective house arrest for suspects and the abolition of the right to trial by jury. The dilution is a more insidious issue. The Liberal Democrats talk of 'the right to breathe clean air', but this turns out (like, it transpires, most Lib Dem policy) to be more of an aspiration than a right.

It seems to me (though I site no authority on this) that human rights are the rules that govern how the individual interacts with the state. They should be simple to enforce, regardless of resources, and it should be easy and obvious to highlight occasions where the government compromises the individual's rights. The right to legal representation fits well into this, as does the right not to be detained for more than a specified period without charge. Those are about interactions with the state, and breaches are easy to identify and correct.

The right to breathe clean air doesn't fit in with this scheme at all. Although excessive pollution may be easy to identify, it is not generally caused by the state – in some situations it may be caused by nature itself and no amount of King Canuting can stop Icelandic volcanoes from erupting. And if there is pollution, God knows it's not an easy thing to rectify. To say that a trial should be halted because the defendant didn't have access to a lawyer is straightforward (if politically courageous), but fixing the environment isn't. It's a laudable aim to ensure that we all have clean air, but it's ridiculous to call it a right, and in doing so the simple and powerful concept of a human right is diminished. If it's okay to shrug our shoulders and say that it's impractical to enforce the right to breathe clean air, then it becomes easier to place people under house arrest without trial, offering up the same casual shrug. Rights and aspirations are very different things. Who wants to be told that they have the aspiration to remain silent?

But I digress. We were talking about voting, and I hope, gentle reader, that you experienced just a little foaming at the mouth some 600 words back when I described voting as a 'privilege'. Voting is not a privilege; it is a right. Some may argue that it's limited as a right by the fact that children can't vote, but children are a special case in so many areas. The important thing is that, without qualification, all children who manage to survive to a certain age then get the right to vote.

And this leads us on to another term that is often applied to human rights: that they are inalienable – they can't be taken away (or indeed given away). In Britain, we reach the age of eighteen and we are given the right to vote, and afterwards there is no way that the state can rescind that right.

Except, of course, that they can send you to prison.

It takes little effort to imagine some seedy foreign dictator making selected mass arrests in the more marginal constituencies in order to ensure that his sham elections come up with the intended result. But we're talking about Britain. It's difficult when living in an established liberal democracy such as the UK to make a case that concerns itself with the possibility of an authoritarian government trying to abuse its own legal system in order to take power away from its citizens. At the moment such considerations are out-loomed by the horrifying prospect of murderers, rapists, paedophiles and convicted News of the World journalists being allowed access to our cherished democracy. But, as Thomas Jefferson probably didn't say, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It is only by enshrining rights as unalienable today, when we are not faced with dictatorship, that we have a hope of ensuring those rights are in place in future, when they may genuinely be needed.

So however little I care about the voting intentions of convicted criminals, I care profoundly that neither I nor anybody else risks being incarcerated in order to prevent me from exercising those intentions. In the words of Tim Rice (put into the mouths of Juan Perón's lackeys) 'we have ways of making you vote for us, or at least of making you abstain'. The ability to stop people voting by sending them to prison seems a good way of ensuring abstention.

And that, of course, leads us to the other disenfranchised group of citizens: the insane. The argument that it should be impossible to remove the right to vote from convicts applies equally to the insane. Otherwise we'd end up in a world where, to paraphrase Euripides, those whom the politicians would destroy, they first declare mad.

Fiends from the Past

2010-09-26T12:31:00.004+01:00

I don't know how things are in the USA, but in the UK the seeds planted in the mind of many a small child on February 26^th 1977 are now bearing fruit in writers of every sort of alternative fiction. That was the day when the first issue (prog, as it was described) of 2000 AD first hit the streets. I was eight years old. Now I'm in my forties and letting the dark things that lurk somewhere in the recesses of my memory seep out into my work. There's nothing as straightforward as the wonderful cameo by Max Normal in Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who episode Gridlock, but there was one 2000 AD story that has to be acknowledged as an inspiration for my first novel Twelve. The connection may be surprising, since 2000 AD was a science fiction comic, and I don't (currently) write science fiction. But this particular comic strip wasn't SF – it was pure horror.

Fiends of the Eastern Front, by Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra, débuted in Prog 158. By then I was twelve. I'd never read it since then, but when the idea for a vampire story set during Napoleon's invasion of Russia came to me I immediately remembered what a powerful combination vampires and war make. Fiends was set on the eastern front in World War Two, with a mysterious squad of Romanian soldiers fighting alongside the Germans. It's the obvious location for such a story – the cold and the long nights providing the perfect environment for vampires to hunt. I quite deliberately didn't go back to look at the comic strip when I was writing Twelve, and it was in fact only last week – now that I'm three books into the quintet – that I got round to it. It's a reflection of modern life (and my indolence) that it was easier to order a bound single volume online than venture into the loft and pick out all the relevant editions from my hoarded comic collection.

I'd been fairly sure that I hadn't been ripping it off wholesale, and I was pleased to find no surprises on that front. The only idea that I knowingly took from Fiends, though it's a widespread piece of folklore, was that a vampire could be killed by decapitation. I could even recall the exact wording of the commentary: 'There are many ways to kill a vampire. Decapitation is one of them.' I think that's echoed in Aleksei's words in Twelve when he first kills one of the voordalaki by that means: 'Ever since Iuda had mentioned it, I had been itching to try decapitation as a method for despatching one of these creatures.'

As it happens, and I'd forgotten, the vampires in Fiends conform to just about every bit of folklore that there is: they don't like garlic or crosses; they can transform into bats and wolves; they can't cross fresh water; they can be killed by silver bullets. None of those characteristics applies to the voordalaki of my novels. One notable difference is that my vampires can be killed by fire, where those in Fiends cannot. Again, that was one of the few things I specifically remembered, and remembered almost exactly Captain Constanta's words when he revealed himself to have survived being incinerated by a flamethrower: 'Cringu told you I can grow from the smallest speck – even from ashes, you fool!' I made a definite decision that that was too unphysical for the world I was creating.

So I was well aware of the general connection between Twelve and Fiends of the Eastern Front – vampires fighting in a human war – and I knew a few specific characteristics that I'd chosen to use or ignore. However, there were two connections between the stories which I noticed on rereading Fiends that I had completely forgotten. Whether they come down to coincidence or subconscious recollection is hard to say.

The first is in the specificity of numbers. As the title suggests, Twelve is about twelve vampires, and much of the story involve the hero, Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, picking them off one by one. In the opening of Fiends its hero, Hans Schmitt, is found dead and entombed and on the walls of the cellar he has drawn the silhouettes of ten vampires. He gets through them rather quicker than Aleksei, managing to kill seven of them in one assault. For me, the number came from the fact that I wanted to name my creatures after the apostles – so I suppose we should blame my childhood reading of the Bible, rather than of 2000AD, for that.

But the most surprising thing was the discovery that, like Twelve, Fiends was written in the first person. I'm often asked why I chose to write in the first person and I can't say anything other than it simply seemed right. The decision has a major impact on plotting, and in subsequent books I've not found it possible to put together an entire story from one viewpoint. You might think it difficult though for a comic strip – a medium in which the fourth wall is so evident – to be written in the first person. Fiends, however, is told mostly through the diary of Hans Schmidt, discovered with his body in the cellar in Berlin in the present day (as 1980 was described at the time). Thus every caption is, unlike most strips, part of a first person narrative. Again it could be coincidence, but I suspect that format may have influenced me.

So what next? Will one of my novels feature a character loosely based on Walter the Wobot, Judge Dredd's irritating sidekick? I doubt it, but it can't be denied that 2000 AD has been an inspiration to me as a writer. And I bet I'm not the only one.

Splundig Vur Thrigg.

Turkish Publicity

2010-07-10T20:21:00.002+01:00

Looks like there's been quite a lot of TV coverage following the release of Twelve (Oniki). Here are three links to clips:

Clip1

Clip2

Clip3

Consensus Politics

2010-05-09T20:07:00.009+01:00

I don't envy Nick Clegg over the next few days. He's been handed (by 23% of the electorate) the awesome task of deciding who it is that should govern us all (100% of the electorate, plus all those who didn't vote). Not an easy thing for one man to do (impossible, it seems, for the almost 30 million who did vote to do).

Rest assured though that Nick is not taking his duties lightly. He has urged '...all political leaders to act in the national interest and not out of narrow, party-political advantage,' and one can only assume that he plans to follow that advice himself. Even if we gloss over the admission that what's good for the country and good for the Liberal Democratic Party might be different things, Nick's good intentions will still require some careful thought from him as to what actually is in the public interest.

His starting point must, surely, be to adhere wherever possible to the the will of the people, as so confusingly expressed by the election result.

Clearly, in order to do a deal with either the Tories or Labour, there will be a degree of give and take on policy, but thankfully, there are some policy issues on which the electorate has expressed itself with a uncharacteristic degree of agreement. Those are the policies over which the two largest parties were, before the election, in broad agreement. If David and Gordon agreed then, as far as we can tell from the votes, so did 65% of us.

It would seem perverse of Nick, in his negotiations with either party, to try and go against any of those policies.

One obvious example is Trident. Now broadly speaking, when it comes to not replacing Trident, I, ahem... ahem..., agree with Nick. It's a solution to a problem that's not the one we currently face. But in democratic terms I have to concede that both Labour and Tories want to replace Trident and that combined, 65% of us voted for them. Now of course that's not to say that everyone who voted Labour or Tory agreed with every one of their policies, but neither is it for me, or Nick Clegg, or anyone to try and second guess exactly what a vote for Labour or Conservative meant on this issue.

Simply enough, if Nick wants to work for the good of the country rather than his party, then on this issue he should go with the people and, in negotiations with either of the other parties, drop any insistence on non-replacement of Trident.

And there's another issue on which 65% of the population were voted for parties which were in broad agreement - proportional representation. The Conservatives have always been implacably against PR, and Labour's suggestion of the Alternative Vote system is (as discussed previously on these pages) regarded by no one as having any resemblance to PR whatsoever (it would have increased Labour's parliamentary majority on the same popular vote in 2005). It may be the case that Labour has now undergone a death-bed conversion to PR, but that was after the people had voted. The 29% who did vote Labour, did so on the basis of a commitment not to introduce PR.

So on the issue of balancing 'the national interest' against 'narrow, party political advantage' is would seem that the Liberal Democrats must drop PR from any list of demands they make in negotiations with either party. In terms of the nation, 65% seem not to want it. In terms of party politics, well, who really benefits?

The Case for DR

2010-04-26T09:34:00.005+01:00

To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and to the Liberal Democrats, every problem looks like one that can be solved by proportional representation.

The problem that's troubling us all at the moment is the prospect that, based on current opinion polls, Labour could come third in the popular vote but still be the largest party in the Commons and thus could form a government with the support of minor parties, most likely the Lib Dems.

Would proportional representation solve this problem? Well, it would mean that if Labour came third in the popular vote, it would come third in the number of MPs, but that would make little difference as to whether Labour and the Lib Dems could ally and form a government. There would be a different balance within that alliance, but it would still be an alliance of parties neither of which had come first in the popular vote - a result in which none of the electorate gets the result they voted for. PR is not a solution to the current problem.

What we need is to introduce disproportional representation - a system where whichever party gets the highest proportion of the popular vote, regardless of how small the margin, gets given enough seats to form a majority government, thus giving the maximum possible number of voters the result they wanted. The problem then is that the result is the same regardless of the size of the majority. One solution would be that the size of the majority determines how long it is to the next general election - say between two and five years.

Now I admit that this isn't a perfect solution, nor indeed a very thoroughly thought through one (you should hear some of my ideas on organizing Formula One Saturday qualifying), but at least it tries to address the problem we have, rather than being a simple knee-jerk shout of 'PR' regardless of the problem that the electoral system actually faces.

Marathon (and Zeno) Debrief

2010-04-25T21:42:00.008+01:00

The news you're all waiting to hear is that I completed the Brighton Marathon in 4 hours 12 minutes 43 seconds.

But I know you're not really interested in how quickly I ran the marathon but, as I asked in an earlier post, what was the distance?

Despite not being able to post diagrams, I suspect Katie had the answer to the question posed (as I guessed she would before I even posted).

The answer is that Mr Tortoise, the slower runner, records the further distance on his GPS.

Suppose the following is the actual route that both runners take on a small fragment of the course. It's a sharp bend, to make things clearer, but the same principals would apply to any bend in the route. (Click the diagrams to enlarge.)

Now Mr Tortoise will complete this section in twice the time of Mr Hare. Given that their GPSs both sample their position once a second, that means Mr Tortoise will have twice as many samples (shown as red crosses) as Mr Hare (green circles).

Given these samples locations, calculation of the actual route taken is done by joining up these locations as shown.

(Note that it's an assumption that the GPS software joins the dot's as straight lines. Conceivably, a much more complex algorithm could be used.)

Clearly the red (Mr Tortoise's) route is going to be longer than Mr Hare's, regardless of the nature of the bend. The only circumstances when this is not the case will be on a straight line, where the intermediate red cross will lie on the green line and the distances will be the same.

So on a perfectly straight route, the total distance will be the same, but if there are any bends at all, the slower runner will always record the further distance.

And of course, both recorded distances will be less than the true route, represented by the black curve.

Which leads me to be puzzled as to why, at the Brighton Marathon, my GPS recorded a distance of 26.41 miles, when an official marathon is only 26.22 miles. Worth further sponsorship, surely?

Zeno’s Paradox Revisited

2010-04-07T14:57:00.003+01:00

Two runners, Mr Hare and Mr Tortoise, run a marathon. Mr Hare is faster and completes the course in, let's say, three hours, whereas Mr Tortoise takes six hours.

Each of them wears an identical GPS running watch, which samples the runner's location once every second and uses the information to calculate speed and distance travelled.

The marathon follows a typical street circuit and each of the two runners follows exactly the same path, without cutting any corners or taking any shortcuts.

The question is, at the end of the race, which of Mr Hare and Mr Tortoise is likely to have travelled the furthest distance according to his GPS watch?

If you have a solution, post it as a comment, showing your working. (Note there are no tricks in this, it's purely an issue of mathematics, or possibly physics.)

I'll be posting my solution after the Brighton Marathon on Sunday April 18^th, for which you can still sponsor me at http://www.runningsponsorme.org/jasperkent. I hope that my time will lie somewhere between those of Messrs Tortoise and Hare.

Ding! Ding! Round Two.

2010-03-22T09:40:00.003Z

Twelve is through to the second round of the BSC Review Tournament, and up against The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V. S. Redick. Vote at BSC Review.

My New Novel’s Out Tomorrow – Don’t Buy It!

2010-03-17T16:32:00.004Z

That’s right. If you only do one thing tomorrow, make sure that thing is NOT the purchase of my latest novel Thirteen Years Later, released in the UK on Thursday March 18^th 2010.

Instead, visit the Fourth Annual BSC Review Book Tournament and vote for my first novel, Twelve.

The tournament works as a knock-out, with the sixty-four initial contenders being whittled down round by round to a single winner. In the first round Twelve is pitted against Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire. The voting period for this round is limited, opening in the morning of March 18^th and closing at 8pm EST (midnight GMT) on the 19^th. Subsequent rounds of voting follow soon after, so I’ll keep you posted.

Of course, if you can manage to do two things on Thursday, then I’d be delighted if the second one is to buy a shiny new copy of Thirteen Years Later. Otherwise, I’m quite happy if you leave that until the weekend. Early Saturday morning is probably a good time.

That link for voting again: http://www.bscreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=93&t=7981

No Seax Please, We’re Canadian

2010-02-28T21:19:00.005Z

As part of a recent redesign of my website I've added a number of Wordles to illustrate the text of the excerpts from my novels. If you want to create your own Wordle, click here, but suffice it to say you can design your Wordle using one of a selection of fonts, that Wordles are very popular with teachers trying to get their students interested in language, and that the site has a comprehensive FAQ section.

Hence the following somewhat entertaining FAQ and answer:

Could you remove or change the name of the "Sexsmith" font? I don't want my students to see it.

Yes, with pleasure. First, please write to the musician Ron Sexsmith, after whom the font is named, and get him to change his name. You may also want to write to Sexsmith, Alberta, Canada, and see if you can get them to change their name before any of your students inadvertently consult a map. Christian rocker Paula Sexsmith ought to be in your sights as well; don't let her feel left out. Take a slapshot at goalie Tyson Sexsmith, while you're at it.

"Sexsmith" is a common surname and placename, especially in Canada. It's analogous to "Shoemaker", "Fletcher", or just plain "Smith"; it's a profession. A "seax smith" was someone who made seaxes.

The place-names Middlesex, Essex, Sussex, etc., all derive their names from the seax.

If the children of Boston and its suburbs can grow up in Middlesex county, perhaps giggling occasionally at the mention of the sheriff or courthouse thereof in local news broadcasts or 5th-grade geography lessons, then I believe that the children of the world can weather the mere sight of those letters, in that context. Good luck!

More 2009 Lists

2010-01-01T09:58:00.002Z

Following on from Pat's Fantasy Hotlist 'Hotties', a few more 2009 round-ups have been posted. Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews puts Twelve at number 4 in its top 10, Liviu at Fantasy Book Critic puts it at 8 in his list of 'mainstream' favourites and Speculative Horizons has it in the Top 5 (in no particular order).

The Hotties

2009-12-30T13:23:00.000Z

The fantasy blog Pat's Fantasy Hotlist has announced its year-end awards for 2009. Twelve comes sixth overall in the top ten speculative fiction titles for 2009, and wins the Rookie of the Year award for best debut. Full details here.

The Libel Reform Campaign

2009-12-10T19:49:00.001Z

I've just signed the petition you'll find at the end of this link, and urge you to do the same.

http://www.libelreform.org/sign

Thirteen Years Later

2009-11-09T11:55:00.002Z

Here's the cover artwork for my next novel Thirteen Years Later.

US Publication Deal

2009-10-29T17:40:00.001Z

Pyr-o-mania: PRESS RELEASE –TWO-BOOK US RIGHTS DEAL FOR BRITISH NOVELIST

The People Have Spoken – Let’s Ask Them Again

2009-09-30T22:46:00.004+01:00

It's a familiar scene from many a childhood. You're on holiday and both you and your sister both want the top bunk. There's no sense to it, but even today, as an adult, you empathise with the desire to sleep five feet above the floor, though you still cannot fathom the reason. The fair way to decide is obvious – the toss of a coin. You call and you lose, but still that top bunk beckons. There's only one hope.

'Best of three?'

Whether your sister agrees to this displacement of the stochastic goalposts depends largely on whether she a big sister or a little sister. I rarely got to throw the coin again; I have heard tell of families that made it to best of five – though never best of seven.

But that's not how they do things in the Republic of Ireland.

On Friday, the Irish will go to the polls for the second time on the Lisbon Treaty, taking an approach to democracy that is not so much 'best of three' as 'last past the post'. Because if the 'yes' camp wins this second vote, having lost the first, there will be no third round decider; no extra time followed by penalties. If the people approve the treaty this time, then that will be an approval, regardless of what they have said before. If they reject it, then who knows? The pundits say that the whole treaty will be thrown into doubt, but I don't see it that way. If the Irish government has the barefaced gall to ask for a second referendum, then they must surely feel a diminishing embarrassment in asking for a third, and then a fourth. It's a close vote, and eventually they must get lucky. And, to quote one famous Irish political force, they only need to get lucky once.

Such electoral tomfoolery would never occur in the UK, of course. Well, it might if Gordon Brown's speech at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton yesterday is anything to go by. For in that speech the Prime Minister put forward a proposal to adopt the Alternative Vote system.

Brown's justification is that 'there is now a stronger case than ever that MPs should be elected with the support of more than half their voters, as they would be under the Alternative Voting system'. Now I'm no fan of proportional representation – you only have to look at the certainty that Angela Merkel would remain German Chancellor last weekend, regardless of the vote – but let no one be fooled into thinking that that's what Brown is proposing. The idea behind proportional representation is to make parliament better reflect the opinions of the people. The idea of the Alternative Vote is to make the number of votes recorded better reflect the makeup of parliament.

Let me explain the basics. The Alternative Vote system retains the constituencies we have now. Within a constituency, however, instead of voting for a single candidate, the voter lists all the candidates in descending order of popularity. If no candidate gets more than 50% of first choice votes then the bottom candidate is struck of the list and his or her second choice votes are allocated to the remaining candidates. The process continues until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote, and they then win.

So Brown is right that no MP will be elected on less than half of the vote, but not because MPs have become innately more popular. It will be just like in Ireland. If the establishment does not get the result it wants on the first round (an MP with more than half the vote) it goes back to the electorate and asks them to vote again, and again and again. Admittedly we don't actually have to traipse out to the polls multiple times, like they do in Zimbabwe, but the principle's the same.

In terms of the makeup of the House of Commons, the differences caused by this change in the voting system are likely to be slight. Even the Electoral Reform Society says that 'the alternative vote is not actually a proportional system'. In most English constituencies, the split of the transferred votes is likely to be broadly the same as the split between the two leading parties. Both will get more votes, but whichever led after the first round is very likely to be the first to pass 50%. Small parties, which do get seats in proportional elections like those for the European Parliament, are guaranteed to have their votes transferred. In their second votes UKIP voters, by and large, will revert to their tribal type and vote Tory. Similarly, BNP voters, will, by and large, vote Labour. Even if the minority party voters vote with bizarre unpredictability on their second choices, it won't be their favoured party that gets the seat. For those of us who despise the BNP even more than we despise proportional representation, it's a good thing – but it requires no change to the voting system.

There will be some changes to actual results. Where Liberal Democrats are second to one of the major parties then the transferred votes may be sufficiently skewed to mean that the Liberal candidate passes the 50% post first. (This may well be part of the reasoning behind Brown's proposal of the system.) There's a chance too that the Greens will do well in their targeted seats. But in general, the distribution of seats in the Commons will be little changed. All that will change will be MPs' ability, in imitation of Alan B'stard, to brag to their constituents about their enormous majorities.

Gordon Brown has offered us a referendum on the reform, but it is unlikely that things will come that. I'm not suggesting that Labour would break a manifesto promise to hold a referendum on any issue – perish the thought – but the likelihood is that Labour will not get an absolute majority at the next election. So far, the Tories are not supporting the Alternative Vote – though I wouldn't be surprised if they did, given that Tory MPs would benefit equally from the illusion that they were more popular amongst their constituents. If there is a hung parliament then the Liberal Democrats will probably form a coalition with Labour (tempted, not least, by Brown's offer of slight reform). But if the Liberals are true to their values (and a whiff of power is surely not enough to distract them) then they'll insist on a referendum on full proportional representation, and Brown's half-hearted proposal will be forgotten.

But if this reform does not go through, what then will the politicians do to persuade themselves that we love them? The obvious solution, which has been mooted, is to introduce compulsory voting. That might not change the proportions, but a 12,000 majority would suddenly a 20,000 majority, on a whopping 100% turnout. It would require no new ideas, no peace treaties, no improvements to the NHS and no tax cuts, and yet suddenly all politicians would see a huge jump in popularity.

Surely there can be cross-party support on that?

Like a Virgin

2009-09-28T19:54:00.002+01:00

The BBC reports today that an Egyptian scholar has called for the death penalty for anyone who imports a device that attempts to fake female virginity.

According to the BBC, "The device is said to release liquid imitating blood, allowing a female to feign virginity on her wedding night."

What confuses me is how anyone in Egypt is going to be able to get hold of a device that releases a liquid imitating blood. Haven't they all been snapped up by professional Rugby Union players?

Sua Culpa

2009-09-06T17:57:00.005+01:00

I am sorry to announce that the 16:32 First Capital Connect service to Brighton has been delayed by 27 minutes.

Whilst other travellers may mutter in annoyance at such announcements, making it clear to all around them, if clarity were needed, that actually they had been hoping the train would arrive on time, my feelings are usually directed more towards a profound sense of puzzlement and unease.

The announcement is, as is usual these days, recorded – or not exactly recorded, but assembled from recorded fragments. I worked on a similar system once myself, for an Air Traffic Control simulator, recording the voices of various of my colleagues as they read from prepared scripts designed to encompass all the possible air-traffic-related sentences that could ever be uttered. Be careful, if you ever do such a thing for yourself, to take note of the difference in intonation of the word 'zero' in the phrases 'Turn left heading three five zero' and 'Turn left heading three zero five'.

But the upshot is, both in Air Traffic Control and on the railways, that though the words are spoken with the voice of a person, the meaning is formulated by the computer that splices the fragments together. It's quite the opposite situation from where a person, such as Professor Stephen Hawking, uses a speech synthesizer. There the voice is a machine, but the thought is human. On the platform, the human voice hides the synthetic concept.

But here's the cause of my unease. When the announcement is made, who is it that is sorry? It can't be the computer, they're not capable of the emotion – believe me, I've worked with them for years and it just doesn't happen. So is it the owner of the voice that feels the sorrow? Is there an actor sitting at home in front of Deal or No Deal who suddenly feels a little pulse of sadness in his heart as his voice, miles away and recorded years before, expresses a sentiment which some supernatural power forces the man himself to feel? Do you perhaps know someone – someone with a clear, resonant voice – who, once in a while, especially during rush hour, gazes wistfully into the distances as if remembering some old love from whom he has long been parted.

It seems unlikely. The fact is that no one is sorry about the delay to the train – it cannot be the computer and it cannot be the actor, and no one else is even attempting to apologize. If the announcement were to be phrased 'We are sorry ...' then things would be different, but that would be to suggest that First Capital Connect actually were sorry, and that would never do.

And so to Alan Turing, and the petition asking the Prime Minister to apologize for Turing's prosecution for homosexuality.

I thought about this long and hard – and, for what little it's worth, I'm not going to put my name to the petition.

Now I don't imagine that there are many people more in awe of Turing than I am, though I won't wax lyrical here on his contributions to mathematics, computing, cryptanalysis and war-winning. He's probably the second greatest mathematician in British history (behind Newton) and posterity may well promote him to the top of the rankings. But when it comes to being apologized to for his treatment as a homosexual, what's so special about Alan Turing?

The freedom to go to bed with any consenting adult (or adults) of either sex and get down to whatever the two (or three) of you fancy is not an indulgence that's handed out as a reward for helping to defeat the Nazi onslaught. It's generally agreed (though a few still argue the point) that it's a fundamental human right. It's not for Gordon Brown to look through the history books and select those homosexuals who made a significant contribution to this country (and God knows, there are enough) and apologize only to them. Any apology should be to all those who were persecuted for their sexuality, even if they never made any significant contribution to the Entscheidungsproblem – even if they never mastered their times tables.

But even then, Gordon Brown should not make the apology, any more than he should apologize for the delays to the 16:32 to Brighton. It really isn't his fault. He can't apologize for what happened in 1952, any more than he can take credit for the 1967 act that legalized homosexuality (though he was part of the government that later equalized the age of consent). If anyone is going to say sorry, it should be those who were actually involved – those of them who are still alive – the policemen, politicians, lawyers, judges and psychiatrists who directly or indirectly persecuted Turing and drove him to suicide. An apology from Gordon Brown for something he didn't do would be meaningless, a computerized statement from a front man who cannot – and should not – feel any shadow of the guilt which his words express. And let's face it, Gordon Brown really does have so much that he should apologize for, from the economy, to the war, to the other war. Or is he hoping that in sixty years time there'll be a petition to his successor that they should apologise for his faults? He should not be let off the hook like that in future, and his predecessors should not be let off the hook by him now.

On the other hand, there is also the suggestion going round that Alan Turing should be given a posthumous knighthood, and when there's a petition for that, I'll gladly sign it.

Het Kwintet

2009-06-30T23:07:00.002+01:00

Five books that have influenced me on the Dutch Website De Volkskrant.

Pavel Chekov, or Elmer Fudd?

2009-05-24T23:02:00.002+01:00

I went to see the new Star Trek movie yesterday, and not for the first time it occurred what a strange thing Ensign Pavel Chekov's accent is. Now Chekov is, so he has led his superiors at Starfleet to believe, an ethnic Russian, but for a Russian speaker, he has a remarkable inability to pronounce the letter 'v'. 'Vessel' becomes 'wessel' and 'victor' becomes 'wictor'.

The thing is, 'v' is a very commonly used letter in Russian. It's the third letter of the Russian alphabet (not that alphabets are listed in order of popularity, I know, but it must count for something). It begins many widely used words, such as voda (water), ve (you) and vodka (er, vodka), place names like Volgograd and Vyazma, not to mention Christian names such as Vadim, Vasiliy and Vladimir. Anyone fancy going up to former KGB officer and sixth dan Judo master Prime Minister Putin and calling him 'Wladimir'?

In fact there's no easy 'w' sound in Russian. The best approximation takes two vowels, such as 'Oo-ee-mbldon' for 'Wimbledon'. Alternatively an English 'w' is often replaced by a 'v'. What's the Russian for Wikipedia? Vikipedia. I'm no expert, but I think this 'w' to 'v' (rather than 'v' to 'w') is far more common in most European languages. The one example I can think of 'v' becoming 'w' is from the grandfather of cod-cockney (no, not Dick van Dyke), Charles Dickens. Dickens' Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations pronounces 'vittles' as 'wittles'. But I don't think Magwich was Russian.

Now Walter Koenig, the first actor to play Chekov (and Davy Jones and Rubens Barrichello lookalike) was born and raised in Iowa so, despite his Russian ancestry, might be forgiven for following his director's instruction with regards to the accent. But in the new movie, the role was played by Anton Viktorovich Yelchin, who was born in Leningrad and so really should know better, even though he left for the USA before the age of one. And look at that patronymic. Anton's father is called Viktor. Or do they call him Wiktor back home?

‘From Today Painting is Dead’

2009-03-20T14:48:00.004Z

So said the artist Paul Delaroche, but don't panic; he was speaking in 1839 after the invention of the Daguerreotype, an early form of photograph. And he probably didn't say it anyway, but it's often attributed to him, and many at the time might have thought it a likely prediction.

Thankfully, Delaroche was wrong and for the next hundred years or so, painting just got better and better, with artists liberated from the ambition to faithfully provide a visual representation of their subject and instead were able to visually provide a faithful representation of it. In the process of forming an impression of the world in the mind of the viewer, that brief period of nanoseconds during which information is represented as a collection of photons was at last seen in its proper proportion.

More recently, over the past century or so, a similar question could have been asked regarding the potential effect of cinema on the theatre. Cinema would seem to beat theatre hands down with the ability to bring to its viewers anything that can be filmed anywhere on Earth, while the theatre's unworthy scaffold can only show what can be fitted into that small space of the stage. And with CGI and other special effects able to present on the screen not only what is, but whatever can be imagined to be, the contest might seem to be over. The benefit of being just yards away from stage populated by real people can hardly make up for the fact that that is all that they are – real people.

Happily, seeing War Horse at the National Theatre at the weekend proved to me, if I didn't already know it, that the theatre can still present us with experiences than the cinema can never achieve. The unarguable stars of War Horse are two puppet horses, Joey and Topthorn. No effort is made to hide the three puppeteers that operate each animal, and there has been little attempt to add any kind of finishing touches to the puppets – they are simple frameworks of wood and metal, resembling what a Victorian inventor might have come up with in his quest to create an equine robot. Only the creature's ears are finished with enough detail to have an appearance similar to the genuine article, but with the ears, as with every other feature of these wonderful illusions, the trick is not in how they look, but how they move.

To be honest, I haven't made any great study of how real horses move. I know (thanks to Eadweard Muybridge's ingenious application of photography) that they take all four hooves of the ground during a gallop, but this didn't actually come up during the play. The point though is not to represent the horses with indisputable accuracy; it's to make me believe I'm seeing them.

There's a certain irony in both of the film productions of Henry V that they include the Prologue, with the lines:

"Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them."

and then go on to actually show us horses, somewhat beating the point. War Horse does a little more than talk of horses, but we most certainly see them. What is more, despite the fact that the horses do nothing even faintly supernatural – they do not talk, nor lead their masters to a little boy trapped down a mine – they are as present as characters as any human on the stage. The original novel (which I haven't read, but will) is written from the horse Joey's point of view and so naturally he will be seen as a character in his own right, but since a play cannot in the same way have a point of view (and War Horse does not even try) it would be easy to lose this vital personality. (In a similar way, Bertie Wooster rarely comes across as well in dramatizations as he does in the books where he is there narrator of his own adventures.) Thus it is a glorious achievement that, without a single word, it is the horses that make the show.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to see another play, again at the National, which relied on puppetry: the two part dramatization of His Dark Materials (which I'll be seeing again in a few weeks at the Birmingham Rep). In this case it's possible to make a direct comparison with the cinematic equivalent in the form of The Golden Compass. While the film may have been able to do better in terms of the spectacle, it is the daemons which make the story, and here, as more recently in War Horse, the theatre excelled. But compared to either, what's going on in my head when I'm reading the novel wins without contest. Again, the Prologue of Henry V explains it all:

"And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginative forces work."

Whether we're talking about painting, theatre, cinema or literature, the purpose of art is to inspire our imaginations, not supplant them.

And I forgot to mention the unsung star of War Horse – a remarkably convincing farmyard goose.

War Horse has moved from the National Theatre to the New London Theatre, where it opens on March 28^th.
His Dark Materials runs at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre until April 18^th.

First as Farce, Second as Tragedy.

2009-03-17T10:39:00.004Z

I can already hear your cries of outrage at my misquoting Marx, so let us move on to a slightly more influential Victorian philosopher.

'When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'

Humpty Dumpty made this announcement, so Lewis Carroll records, in a rather scornful tone, and although I have only seen it print, rather than heard him speak, I would suspect that Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, used a similarly scornful tone when he came up with a phrase that meant just what he chose it to mean when he raised the spectre of 'passive drinking'.

It's a chilling phrase, and we all know enough about passive smoking to realize that the vaporous fumes that invade our nostrils, our lungs, our very beings are just as insidious if they are effervescing their way out of Auntie Edna's milk stout as they ever were wafting across the room from the tip of her Capstan Full Strength.

But, hang on a second – what do these terms really mean?

Passive Smoking (from Wikipedia, pending the Chief Medical Officer's anonymous edit):

'Passive smoking is the involuntary inhalation of smoke, called second-hand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke, from tobacco products. It occurs when tobacco smoke permeates any environment, causing its inhalation by people within that environment. Scientific evidence shows that exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke causes disease, disability, and death.'

Passive Drinking (from Liam Donaldson himself):

'England has a drink problem and the whole of society bears the burden. The quality of life of families and in cities and towns up and down the country is being eroded by the effects of excessive drinking.'

It may well be a problem, but it's not really quite the same as passive smoking, except in terms of the structure of the phrase, which is all that Donaldson is concerned with, being nowadays more of a politician than a doctor. On the upside, it does open a new vista of similar phrases. A pedestrian knocked down by a car becomes a victim of 'passive driving'; when you step in something nasty on the pavement, it turns out that you are actually indulging in 'passive dog-walking'. These are both genuine problems, but they don't need silly new phrases to describe them.

Now I have to declare an interest here, being a member of that sadly neglected subgroup in society, the well-heeled functional alcoholic, and as such I have some sympathy with Liam Donaldson's proposals for a minimum alcohol price of fifty pence per unit. It's unlikely to have an impact on the price of any but the rankest of clarets, and might actually do something to shorten the queue in Threshers at 10.55 of a Friday evening. While the Conservatives may argue that it is unfair for us all to bear the costs of an irresponsible few, the fact is that we do so anyway through the cost to the NHS in dealing with alcohol related diseases. While I can see some value in the Tories implicit case that the NHS should not treat self-inflicted ailments, I suspect I would one day find myself hoist on my own petard if I supported it.

But whatever the merits of the case, it does not deserve this ridiculous abasement of language, particularly from someone whose role is supposed to me as an impartial government advisor. There is no such thing as passive drinking. Standing next to me when I'm supping on a pint does not make you less able to drive, more prone to liver disease, less prone to heart disease or more attractive to women. It may mean that you have to give me a lift home, roll me out of the car and nod indulgently when I tell you I love you, but there still not one drop of alcohol in your body. The tragedy is that Liam Donaldson is so close to the government that he imbibed deeply of their propagandist style of talking – a case of passive spinning if ever there was one.

But enough of tragedy, what of farce, to return to my reversal of Karl Marx's observation.

It must be fifteen years or more since I regularly read Viz comic since it's not, as it admitted itself even back then, as funny as it used to be. And I do remember one strip called Modern Parents and one particular episode in which the eponymous parents, their newborn dangling in a pouch around the father's neck, walk past a pub where a man is sitting outside drinking a pint and smoking a cigarette.

In horror, the modern father stubs out the cigarette, complaining of effects of passive smoking on their child. The man apologizes, but then the father notices the pint, picks it up and tips it in the gutter. As the drinker complains, the father utters the phrase which somehow became lodged in Liam Donaldson's mind, to be regurgitated years later.

'Haven't you ever heard of passive drinking?'

It was funny at the time.

A Pause for Thought

2009-03-10T11:43:00.007Z

Politician 1: First, I would like to express my condolences to the families of the soldiers killed in etc., etc., etc.

Politician 2: I would like to add my voice to the sentiments expressed by the Right Honourable gentleman... and so on.

Sinn Fein: Erm... well... hang on, let me think about this for a few hours.

The weekly roll call of deaths of soldiers, commiserated over at Prime Ministers questions unceasingly for the past few years is a cause of sadness for at least two reasons. By far the greater of these lies in the misery of those deaths itself, but a lesser consideration is the increasing valuelessness of the statements themselves, metamorphosing from genuine expressions of shock to automatic reactions which seem, however unjustly, that they could have been muttered involuntarily by the politician’s lips as he snoozed.

Death has always been surrounded by a certain amount of etiquette – termed mourning when applied at a more personal level – whose purpose is to save us from having to think too much at a difficult time. Doing what tradition dictates should be done, rather than deciding for ourselves what should be done, immunises us from committing gaffs at a time when we are unlikely to be thinking clearly and when any faux pas could be more hurtful than usual. We don’t have to consider which of our neckties will best express are true feelings at the funeral, since we know that the rule is to wear a black tie.

The rules today are far more scant than they were a hundred years ago, but there are still rules, and the fact that they change over time is not a problem as long as they do so slowly enough for everyone to keep abreast of them. The most famous counterexample was twelve years ago, after the death of Princess Diana, when Buckingham Palace followed established etiquette by not flying the Royal Standard when the Queen was not in residence. The fickle crowd, led by the People’s Prime Minister, decided to make up its own rules of mourning – which I suppose is fair enough – and then was enraged that Her Majesty hadn’t somehow managed to guess what the new rules were – which isn’t.

The increasing tendency for politicians commiserate and/or condemn at every death that comes about in war or through terrorism is something different. It’s a form of slow inflation which, whether we like it or loathe it, we are at least all well aware of. Although the sentiments can be taken for granted, it’s still a matter of form that they should be given voice.

Thus if any politician fails to join in the chorus at such a time, it jars. And if with the politician in question those sentiments cannot be taken for granted, eyebrows are raised, and raised high.

So when Sinn Fein this weekend took fourteen hours to make any comment on the murders of two British soldiers at a barracks in Northern Ireland, it was a perfect opportunity for the press to beat the Republicans at their own game, by fighting yesterday’s battles.

I think we can all agree that most of Sinn Fein’s leadership are pretty unsavoury characters. Most were involved to some degree in terrorism, and even when dealing in politics, they have not been averse to, say, persuading their comrades to starve themselves to death to further their own political ends. Circumstances have changed, but the personalities have not. They were not ‘nice people’ then and, to many observers, their failure to step into line with other politicians and quickly condemn the murders demonstrates that they are not ‘nice people’ now. And thank heavens for that.

Only Nixon could go to China, and only Adams could go to Stormont. Well not quite – only Adams could go to Stormont and have the hope of bringing anyone with him. Any more extreme and he wouldn’t have wanted to try to be part of a power-sharing government; any more moderate and he would have been happy to lead a life of obscurity in the SDLP.

That’s not to say that the current Sinn Fein leadership has deliberately placed itself in this ‘balanced’ position, disguising its true beliefs (that may be the case, but if it is, we shouldn’t really care). Clearly there are others out there with more moderate and more extreme views, but for that very reason, they don’t emerge as leaders. The leaders of Sinn Fein, whether by accident or design, are at precisely the point in the political spectrum where they are able to represent Republicanism. That doesn’t mean we have to like them, but it does been they’re our best bet to deliver and maintain peace.

And that, of course, is what the Real IRA (along with the Continuity IRA) is trying to disprove. If Sinn Fein can’t keep violent Republicans in check, then what’s the point of them? The majority of the Northern Ireland Assembly may pretend to listen politely to Sinn Fein’s opinions on Education and Agriculture, but the real reason that they’re allowed in is the fear that if they weren’t a part of the Assembly they’d be trying to blow it up. Innocent soldiers and police officers may be the victims, but the target is the Sinn Fein leadership.

Thus Sinn Fein’s reaction to the murders on Saturday was fourteen hours of circumspection. They know just how dangerous and fickle Republican terrorists can be – they only need to look in a mirror. Whatever discussions and consultations took place during that time, and between whatever unsavoury characters, their goal was to produce a reaction that best allowed them to remain in power. And having them in power is what we should all want, however it may make our flesh creep. An instant condemnation might have made them appear a little more likeable, but they are not there to be liked – they’re there to bring the vast majority Republican extremists with them. If that takes fourteen hours of silence, then it’s a price worth paying. You think you could have done it quicker?

So it may be a bit a fun for journalists to get Sinn Fein representatives to tie themselves in linguistic knots trying to condemn – but not too much – terrorist murders, and I doubt whether it’s got any more chance of doing harm than of doing good. But the day that Gerry Adams or Martin McGuiness does speak out quickly and unequivocally against all political violence is the day he loses his constituency, and it will all be over - one way or another.

Neth Space: Jasper Kent Answers Questions Five

2009-03-09T22:51:00.000Z

Neth Space: Jasper Kent Answers Questions Five

Not That Much of a Challenge

2009-03-04T11:08:00.006Z

I have to start by confessing that I was at university during those dark days of the late 1980s when University Challenge was not on the air. Bambi had left Granada to work on the Babycham commercials and the Disney Nasties, and most people would be more likely to look for Paxo in the body cavity of a chicken than on BBC2, and certainly not on a quiz show.

Thus, with no prospect of ever having been on the show, I can bask in the illusion that if only it had been running then my college would have won the series, probably three years running, with 'Trinity Hall, Kent' captaining his team to victory week after week.

As it is, I was denied the opportunity, and so no one can deny the possibility of my fantasy scenario, even though in reality, I probably would never have made the team, not even as the nerdy bloke who sits to the left of the captain and was only there because the other three contestants (reading classics, history and classics respectively) didn't know the first thing about science.

For a few brief moments this week my hopes of perhaps still representing my alma mater were raised, with the news that one of the members of Corpus Christi's winning team, Sam Kay, was no longer studying at the college when the final was recorded. If he could still represent his college months after leaving it then could not I represent mine, two decades on?

The answer came quickly from the BBC - before I'd even had time to fill in my application form. It was a resounding 'no', as Corpus Christi was disqualified and Manchester became victor by default.

An isolated incident, you might think - a blip. But no! Further news came in today that one of the members of last year's winning team, Christ Church, had also fielded a player, Charles Markland, was no longer a member of that college by the time the final was recorded, having moved to Balliol to study for his PhD. In this case, the victory has been allowed to stand.

Of course, it would be very easy for you just to say, 'Well, that's Oxford for you, isn't it? Typical of the underhand, oar-clashing, wrong-end-of the-punt-standing behaviour you'd expect from the institution that brought us Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.' And for the most part you'd be right. But I can't help feeling that the BBC and Granada, who actually make the programme, are also to blame.

The real problem is that the series begins recording in May and ends in November. Now, it's been a while since I graduated, but I still feel that I may be able to give the BBC some insight into university life. Unless things have changed without my being informed, the academic year runs roughly from October to July. Anyone see what I'm getting at? By having the end of the academic year slap bang in the middle of the recording schedule, the producers are virtually guaranteeing that final year students will have left their institution before the end of the series, or that they will be forced to throw the competition at the second round. I would be surprised if there weren't far more cases than these two out there, waiting to be exposed by the diligent journalists of our laudable Sunday papers.

So come on BBC, solve this problem once and for all. Don't disqualify the teams; change the recording schedule. Simples.

Neth Space: Twelve by Jasper Kent

2009-02-27T23:32:00.000Z

Neth Space: Twelve by Jasper Kent

Death to the eight-legs! ... er ... six-legs!

2009-02-27T09:50:00.007Z

CONTAINS SPOILERS

I've just finished reading Dennis Wheatley's 1948 novel, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, and while I guess it's over half a century too late for me to be offering a full review, there is one very important question that the book raises:

Did Dennis Wheatley genuinely believe that spiders only have six legs?

Our crippled hero, 'Toby', is haunted by a supernatural creature which at first he can only see vaguely, in shadow. His initial suspicion is that it is some kind of octopus, but when he manages to make out that it has only six legs, he realizes that that can't be the case (so clearly Wheatley's malacology is better than his entomology, although there's a clue in the word 'octopus', so maybe it's just a case of etymology).

Later on, it's revealed to him that the creature is a spider, albeit a giant one, summoned from Hell itself. As Toby describes it in his diary:

I now knew what it was that had thrown the Shadow. That round body and the six hairy, tentacle-like legs had been those of a spider without a doubt; but a spider the likes of which has never been recorded in this world.

Now, just because Toby doesn't know how many legs a spider has, doesn't mean Wheatley didn't. Perhaps the spider's missing limbs echo the paralysis of the hero's own two legs; if so, nothing is mentioned. Possibly the explanation was lost in an edit (if so, I'm pleased to say that copy-editing has improved vastly over the years - I'd never get something like that past them).

Or maybe Wheatley had just never bothered to look at a spider.

The cover illustration (Wordsworth Editions) certainly shows a spider with sufficient limbs to play Tarzan four times over, as does as least one other edition. Actually, this is a bit of an irritation. The fact that the creature that haunts Toby is a spider is meant to be something of a surprise when revealed (maybe the leg-count is deliberately intended to deflect our suspicions), and so the cover is a bit of a spoiler. Also, the illustration shows Toby on crutches, rather than in wheelchair, which is his sole transport in the text. But now I'm getting picky.

The biggest shock of the book is that not only is the villain a Satanist, but also a Communist, and that, in fact, the latter ism is and always has been merely a front for the former. Now this is something that I, like any right-thinking Englishman, have long suspected, but while Toby takes the Satanism pretty much in his stride, its the Communism that comes as the real shock. I mean, summoning gargantuan, leg-deprived spiders to scare a paralysed airmen into madness is one thing, but the workers controlling the means of production? Well, really!

Despite all this, it's still a fun read, certainly if your can accept it as an artifact of its time. There are some lovely passages within, such as:

Her blue eyes blazed, and she retorted: 'If you were not, one - a cripple; two - my patient; and three - suffering from erotomania, I would slap your face.'

I must try to slip that into my next novel - no one will notice.

What's YOUR Browser?

2009-02-24T13:05:00.000Z

I’ve spent the weekend trying to do something ostensibly rather simple; to wit, trying to make my website more accessible on mobile phones and similar devices. The actual work is fairly simple - just providing alternative pages which are smaller and generally less flashy, but still contain the same data. The only trick is for the web site to be able to determine whether it actually is being accessed by a mobile device or a full-blown browser, so that it can decide which version of the page to send back.

There’s a standard mechanism for this. When the browser makes its request it sends the web server a string (referred to as a User Agent) which, in simple terms, identifies the browser, but does not explicitly say whether it is a mobile browser, or provide any other detailed information. Back on the web server, there is a list of browser capabilities, and the web server looks through this list until it finds an entry matching the string sent from the browser. From that entry, it can see whether the browser is on a mobile device, what the screen width and height are, and much more besides. If it doesn’t find an exact match, it goes for the closest one it can find.

The problem is that this list of browsers has to be kept up to date - and generally it isn’t. For example, many web sites (I would guess most) incorrectly identify Google’s Chrome browser as Apple’s Safari - Chrome is, after all, relatively new on the scene. In this case, the differences don’t matter much, but more significant is the fact that a plethora of mobile browsers are identified as fully capable desktop browsers, simply because the browser capabilities list is unaware of their existence.

Ultimately, no one has taken responsibility to maintain a distributable, up-to-date list of browsers. Microsoft don’t, and even if they did, it would only work for sites that run ASP.Net - the Microsoft website technology. PHP users would still have to manage their own list (although conversion from one to the other should be petty straightforward). The are some not-for-profit sites that try to maintain lists, such as http://owenbrady.net/browsercaps/, but it’s matter of luck and dedication if these are up-to-date. There are also commercial products that provide the information, but they are too pricey for anything but serious commercial sites.

The people who have the knowledge, the ability and, ultimately, the motivation to make this information widely available are the browser manufacturers themselves. The more website designers can tailor their sites to specific browsers, the better the browsers look.

So come on browser manufacturers, pull your socks up. Send me your User Agent strings and your browsers capabilities, in any or all formats, an I’ll put together a website to make sure all web developers can access them. And then we’ll all be happy.

Send your browser capabilities to software@jasperkent.com.

The First Post

2009-02-24T12:48:00.000Z

Welcome to my Blog. As a horror author, you might be expecting me to be writing a great deal about the genre, but that - to the extent which I have one - is not my intent. Here you will find my musings, rantings, call them what you will, on whatever I may fancy. If you want to read about my novels, visit www.jasperkent.com.