A Doctor Of Many Things (original) (raw)
This is the BSFA Award and World Fantasy Award shortlisted management textbook you never knew you wanted, but now you know you have to have it. The hardback has a scary academic price tag, but the paperback has a nice friendly RRP of £20/$30 or equivalent.
Buy direct from publisher here
If you want to order direct from your local bookshop or other provider, the ISBN is 978 1 83910 528 9.
Not sure if you want to buy it or not? Here’s a sample chapter to whet your appetite and a quiz to show you which Westerosi leader you are.
Want me to come talk to your organisation about management and Game of Thrones? Joining CSU Pueblo, Georgia State University, the US Air Force Academy, Beedie School of Business, and many other satisfied clients? Here’s where you can contact me via email, Twitter, LinkedIn or other media of your choice.
Not that sort of appetite.
Technically, this is an awards eligibility post, a sort of “submitted for your consideration”. But it’s really more by way of a simple collation, in one place, of some of the things I did last year, for people who want to know these things.
Everything below is available to read for free at the link, except for Human Resources and Rabbit in the Moon.
Short story: The Portmeirion Road (Morag and Seamus 3), Clarkesworld 212, May 2024: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore_05_24/ (5,700 words)
The Children of Flame (Morag and Seamus 4), Clarkesworld 217, October 2024 https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore_10_24 (5,060 words)
Novelette: What Happened at the Pony Club, Fusion Fragment 22, August 2024: https://www.fusionfragment.com/issue-22/ (10,282 words)
Non Fiction short/Related Work: Workers’ Playtime: Andor, Nostalgia and Admonitory Retrofuturism, 20 July 2024: https://www.redfuturesmag.com/workers-playtime/
Collection: Human Resources, NewCon Press, April 2024: http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.asp?id=239
Novel: Rabbit in the Moon, Epic Publishing, December 2024: https://books2read.com/u/mVLQgp
Graphic version!
Great title. Magnificent title. Unfortunately the episode it’s attached to doesn’t really deserve it. To be fair to Star Maidens, this is the only really unmitigatedly bad episode in the series; even the less good ones otherwise have got some redeeming features, but this one is a car crash.
This is The Environmental Episode. It’s the 1970s, when SF series started feeling obliged to have at least one, but some handled it better than others. Star Maidens handles it with typical plot-liteness.
Rudi’s facial expression in this image sums up how I feel about this episode.
Banished once again to a prison gang on the surface, Rudi makes a connection between catastrophic weather conditions and the chemical composition of the rainwater. Nobody listens to him, because he’s a man and a known agitator. Back in civilisation, Liz also makes the connection while doing some research, but nobody listens to her either because she’s from Earth (which is an interesting development that adds a bit of extra nuance to the Medusans’ chauvinistic mindset).
Meanwhile the Medusans’ computer is predicting climate catastrophe but not saying why, because the Medusans are not asking the right questions. In the 1970s they might have said “that’s unrealistic,” but we of the 2020s think of attempting to diagnose an error on a MacBook and sigh.
Needless to say, Liz finds a way to team up with Rudi and he solves the mystery while she gasps admiringly: the Medusans’ environmental system, which keeps the underground city clean and safe, is spewing all the toxins on to the surface. Which they’ve been ignoring, but now it’s starting to leak back down into the city. This could be a metaphor for their whole political system, but nobody goes there. And Rudi also figures out a way to solve everything that wraps the story up in a convenient 25 minutes.
Leaving aside the heavy-handed environmentalism and the lite plot, this is the first time the series has actually started to look ropey, with blatant reuse of model effects (the same security robot blowing up in exactly the same way twice) and some obvious Chromakey. Stock footage of floodwater is also reused several times. The story needed an extra draft, with the characters learning information in one scene, then learning the information over again in the next scene and reacting as though it’s the first time. Also, while I get that they’re chauvinists, it is a little credibility-straining that the Medusans sit there saying “there’s catastrophic climate change… and both the Earth people seem to have an idea why… and our computer says so too… nah, the Earth people couldn’t possibly be right, because they’re not Medusans.” Finally, like too many of these worthy environmental stories, there turns out to be an easy solution, which I think is really the wrong message.
On the positive side, I do like the way it’s fairly obvious that Octavia views Liz as a rival and is doing everything she can to undermine her credibility, even if it threatens the lives of everyone on the planet.
Will Octavia manage to turn the Medusans completely against Liz? Is there anyone on Medusa who isn’t aged 18-35 and incredibly fit? How did the President somehow manage to get from the environment computer back to the council chamber without a scene change? Has the series run out of budget? Find out!
We’re back with A Feast of Ice and Fire, the official Game of Thrones cookbook! The cookbook provides a nice quote from A Storm of Swords where Tyrion eats fruited oatbread, so yes, it’s a Game of Thrones thing. I like baking on days when I’ve got the time for it, and I thought fruit bread might be a fun way to expand my repertoire.
Oatbread rising. Doesn’t it look tasty already?
Recipe:
1 1/2 cups warm water
2 1/4 teaspoons dry yeast (1 packet)
2 tablespoons honey
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
2 1/2 to 3 cups all-purpose flour (feel free to use some oat flour here too) plus more as needed
1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/3 cup diced dates
1/3 cup diced candied orange peel
1/3 cup peeled, diced apple
Rolled oats for topping (optional)
In a large mixing bowl, combine the warm water, yeast, and honey. Allow the mixture to sit for around 5 minutes, until it becomes bubbly.
Add the oats, 1 cup of the flour, the salt, and butter to the yeasted water. Stir until completely mixed together, then add the fruits and work the mixture until they are evenly distributed throughout. Gradually add the rest of the flour until you have a cohesive mass of dough. Flour a board or your countertop, and turn the dough out onto it. Adding flour as needed, knead the dough for around 8 minutes. If you poke it and it bounces back, you’re done.
Place the dough in a greased bowl and cover it with a clean dish towel. Put it in a warm place until it has doubled in size. Then punch it down and divide it in half. Form the dough into two round loaves. Wet the top of each loaf with a little water, then sprinkle it with rolled oats. Using a sharp knife, lightly score the top with an X shape.
Place these loaves on a baking sheet and allow them to sit, covered with a clean tea towel, for about 1 hour, or until they have doubled in size again. Preheat the oven to 400° (this is around 200 degrees Celsius, for non-Americans–FM).
Bake the loaves for around 30 minutes, or until they are golden brown. Ideally, you should allow the loaves to cool for at least 10 minutes before cutting into one, but given how good this bread smells, you might have trouble leaving it alone.
Lunch with Daenerys and Vyserion
I halved the portions, was a little more generous with the fruit than the recipe suggests, and had to use mixed peel rather than orange peel, because of supermarket availability. But otherwise I just followed the recipe as written.
And yes, it was indeed delicious! It was less fruity than I had hoped, but still, a decently fluffy loaf of bread with a decent crust. I had it fresh with an assortment of cheeses and the leftover apple, and it made for a nice filling lunch. The little figures are from a Game of Thrones blind-box series– Daenerys was purchased at the 2015 Game of Thrones touring exhibition and Viserion off the Internet, because she seemed a bit lonely with no dragons.
If you’ve tried this recipe, or have another you’d like me to try, let me know in the comments below or flag me down on social media.
As well as reviewing things on this blog, I’m also a regular movie reviewer for Galactic Journey, the magazine that reviews science fiction and fantasy but from 55 years in the past. Last month, for reasons which will become clear subsequently, I accidentally wound up writing a review for a movie that had already been reviewed for GJ, so I had to drop the piece, and I’m bringing you an edited version of the review here. Enjoy the Hallowe’en special!
I wasn’t expecting much from this movie, given the general poor quality of 1969 movies so far, and that the title sounds like the result of a horror-themed game of Mad Libs. Inexplicably, though, it turns out to be attached to a German adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum, originally entitled Die Schlangengrabe und das Pendel (“The Snake Pit and the Pendulum”). No idea why they changed the title for the English language release, since the career of Roger Corman demonstrates clearly that loose adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe have a devoted audience.
And as such, while it’s not a game-changing classic, it was certainly a better made and more interesting movie than many other horror films coming out in the English-speaking world in 1969, and has the advantage of featuring the always-watchable Christopher Lee. Lee plays Count Regula, who is sentenced to death by quartering for killing twelve virgin women. Thirty-five years later, he’s all set to return from the grave to seek revenge on the son of the judge who sentenced him and the daughter of the thirteenth virgin, who got away and revealed his crimes to the authorities. Trapping the pair, along with a maid and a rogue highwayman, in his castle, he puts them through a series of surreal and nightmarish trials, involving snake pits (see what they did there?), spikes, and the abovementioned pendulum scenario.
While it suffered from having more movie than story, the time-filling sequences were generally exciting and well made, and the set design was macabre and surreal, with bodies embedded in trees and a castle full of nightmarish twisting tunnels.
There were still a few problems: some of the actors’ delivery is oddly flat, and some of the characters’ actions are unexplained. After explaining to Lilian, the female lead, that he needs to kill her and drain her blood in order to remain immortal, Regula allows his henchmen to let her run on a perilous journey through the castle, including a sequence where she stands over a snake pit on a plank that is slowly being pulled into the wall, and yet she just screams rather than saying, “okay, if you need to drain my blood you’re obviously not going to kill me, so what’s the point of this?” Meanwhile her maid, Babette, disappears for about a third of the movie and then comes back without explanation. I was also unsure if there was meant to be some kind of metaphor in the name “Regula”, relating as it does to laws, or whether it’s just meant to sound vaguely like “Dracula”.
Nonetheless, it held the viewer’s attention, and the design was stylish and effective. Definitely a movie to rival Hammer’s output. Three and a half stars.
For those of you who missed it, the video of my webinar A Song of GANTT Charts: Teaching Management With Science Fiction and Fantasy is now online!
Watch it here:
Starting a new (sub-) feature on this blog! I was recently given the following volume by the lovely, talented and award-winning author and artist Ida Keogh (buy her book):
Gin of thrones by Maester Jaeger. See what they did there?
Also, most of the other genre cookbooks have got a drinks section somewhere in there (the Babylon 5 one has an entire chapter, supposedly authored by Ivanova), and drinks like Romulan Ale and Jovian Sunspots are often features of the sorts of series that get tie-in cookbooks. Therefore, I’ll be unleashing my inner mixologist on an intermittent basis, and reporting the results here.
Gin of Thrones doesn’t actually cover (many) drinks from the series, but is mostly “inspired by the series” cocktails. Now, since I happen to own bottles of Johnnie Walker’s Game of Thrones tie-in whiskies, I was keen to try a recipe that involves scotch.
Johnnie White Walker. See what they did there?
However, it turns out there’s only one recipe in the book that involves scotch, namely Blood and Sand (Snakes). Actually, given what happened to poor old Oberyn Martel, they could have just carried on calling it Blood and Sand. So anyhow, since I had all the ingredients to hand (albeit I had sour cherry concentrate rather than cherry liqueur, but whatever), I decided to have a go.
INGREDIENTS
3/4oz Scotch
3/4oz Sweet vermouth
3/4oz cherry liqueur
3/4oz freshly squeezed orange juice
Orange peel, to garnish
METHOD
I Mix all of the ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice and shake vigorously.
2 Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
3. Garnish with a twist of orange peel.
Enjoy smugly while you bore your guests with details about all the things the HBO show got wrong about the books.
Mine the fury!
So I mixed it all together using my Game of Thrones official shot glasses as measuring cups.
And put it into a thematically appropriate cup for drinking. I didn’t bother with the orange peel twist because we are warriors.
Warriors, I tell you!
The result was surprisingly tasty. I had low expectations given the combination of liquids, but yeah, it really worked. Even with the sour cherry concentrate rather than cherry liqueur. Actually, maybe especially with the sour cherry concentrate, since it gave it a sharper and less sweet flavour.
If you have a drink you’d like me to try, or have tried this one yourself, let me know in the comments or flag me down on social media!
Interested? Excited? Want to know who this man is and what he’s doing in a postapocalyptic theme park? Visit https://books2read.com/u/mVLQgp to preorder your copy and stay tuned for more announcements!
Or, if you think you might like to review, promote, or otherwise get in on the behind the scenes action, contact me here or on social media!
The blurb:
Ken Usagi, a daring young journalist from the icy wilderness of Nunavut, is thrust into a perilous journey through the war-ravaged remnants of the former United States. Haunted by a chilling encounter with a mysterious biotechnical machine—a relic from his troubled childhood—he becomes convinced it holds the key to ending the devastating conflict tearing the world apart.
Far to the south, Totchli, a brilliant young biotechnician from a Mesoamerican society pummeled by catastrophic climate change, receives a desperate order. He must venture north to uncover the fate of a critical colonial expedition, a mission that once carried the last hopes of his people’s survival. Communication channels with the expedition have fallen eerily silent.
As Ken and Totchli embark on their separate quests, the very fabric of reality begins to unravel. Their paths converge, leading to a fateful encounter where the boundaries of their worlds blur and shatter.
In a race against time, with the fate of two worlds hanging in the balance, Ken and Totchli must navigate a web of secrets, dangers, and cosmic forces that threaten to consume everything they hold dear.
As promised, this time I’m going to tackle The Peanuts Lunch Bag Cookbook, one of the oldest (possibly the oldest) franchise tie-in cookbooks. Published in 1972 and aimed at children, this volume has recipes for easy-to-make sandwich spreads, cheese biscuits, devilled eggs and… uh… bread?
Yes, this is the first recipe in the book.
No, really. I suppose it makes sense to start a book that’s mostly sandwich recipes with a recipe for the thing that makes a sandwich, a sandwich; maybe they also want to encourage in kids an understanding of where food comes from; it’s 1972 so everyone is all about home-made and all-natural; and I don’t know. It just seems a little off-putting for young cooks that the first thing in the book involves dissolving yeast and kneading and rising and proofing and all of that.
Still, I like baking bread when I’ve got the time for it, so I was keen to give this a go. Each of the recipes comes with an appropriately themed cartoon:
A cartoon starring Peppermint Patty, Woodstock and some bread.
Recipe:
1 package dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1 cup milk
1 cup water
3 tablespoons butter
5 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
6½ cups white flour
Mixing the butter, milk and water
Dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup warm water. Warm milk, 1 cup water, and butter together. Pour into large mixing bowl. Add sugar and salt. Mix well. Add yeast (if the milk mixture is hot, allow it to cool before adding yeast). Add flour slowly, stirring ćonstantly. Knead dough for 10 minutes. Set aside in a greased bowl in a warm place. Turn dough so that all sides are greased. Cover bowl with a damp cloth. Let rise about 1½ hours or until double in bulk. Punch down and knead for several minutes. Shape into 3 loaves and place in greased pans. Allow to rise until double in bulk. Bake at 450° for 10 minutes (FM: 240 C). Reduce heat to 350° (FM: 180 C) and continue baking 35-45 minutes.
To be fair, this was a pretty easy recipe, particularly if you’re an experienced breadmaker. The directions are clear and the ingredients are simple. I made a 1/2 recipe and it fit neatly into a single tin– if you get 3 loaves out of the full recipe they’re going to be pretty small ones.
The result was even better than I expected. The loaf was fluffy, light and white, but stayed together solidly without crumbling, making it a really good loaf for, well, sandwiches! The crust was a little thick but that’s probably due to me having to convert the oven temperatures into Celsius and not getting it quite right.
Sliced loaf.
Definitely tasty and easy to make, but I suspect that, for future Peanuts recipes, I’ll take the easy road and just use commercial sandwich loaf.
If you’ve tried this recipe and have opinions, or if you have suggestions for me to try, comment below or flag me down on social media!
Heads-up: we’re heading into pre-publication exciting stuff for Rabbit in the Moon, my forthcoming cli-fi novel about an epic road trip through two universes. Sign up to the Epic Publishing mailing list here for cover reveals, preorder details and other fun things! http://eepurl.com/hOcL-5.
Back on Earth and back into German sex comedy mode, as Adam decides that the best way to stay on Earth is to convince Fulvia he still loves her and that they can have a better time on Earth than on Medusa. So they move into a beautifully 1970s suburban house and proceed to have a gender-flipped suburban existence, with Adam in an apron waving Fulvia off as she drives to the office, sharing his recipes with the other housewives, etc.
Yes, they went there.
Meanwhile the B plot involves a very caricatured feminist organisation who want to stage an armed takeover with Fulvia as their leader, sort of a less competent gender-focused Baader-Meinhof gang. They are played by German actors, and are audibly having some trouble with the English.
I found some parts of this story rather sweet. For instance, when Adam says that the big difference about him and Fulvia having a relationship on Earth is that his submissive role is voluntary: he’s keeping house for her because he wants to, not because he has to. Implying that the problem with their relationship is not that the man is the submissive one, but that there’s a lack of consent. Fulvia seems to be fitting in nicely at the astrophysics lab, so there’s a nice theme about science overcoming gender prejudice. And possibly supporting the idea floated in last episode’s comments that Liz is less oppressed than she is, well, submissive.
Others were more WTF, e.g. Adam storms off after a fight (suitcases in hand, no less) announcing he’s going to marry a widowed neighbour, with me saying “um, Adam, doesn’t this contradict your plan? Are you hoping for a green card marriage or something here?” And the feminist Baader-Meinhof gang… yeah. So much cringe.
Another strange thing is the casual way in which the Earth people are treating first contact. We open with Fulvia giving a lecture at a Women’s Institute-type organisation, with people asking polite but interested questions about life on Medusa. Which seems less like you’d treat the representative of an alien culture and more like you’d treat a visiting lecturer from Johannesburg. And there are definitely times where I wonder if Star Maidens isn’t secretly a satire on apartheid rather than on gender: a society where one group are rigidly forced into a subordinate position by virtue of an arbitrary physical trait, and the group in charge are utterly neurotic about losing their superior position. Even the Earth people’s “we sympathise but we still have to hand you over to the Medusans” attitude to Adam and Shem rings true.
Could Adam and Fulvia ever have a meaningful, mutually respectful relationship? Is an interest in BDSM compulsory for a career in science? Why do feminist terrorists attend lectures at the Women’s Institute? Is it all really about apartheid? Find out!