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Our Friend Jennings
Anthony Buckeridge 1955 (Collins 1961)



"Jennings and Darbishire go for a cross-country run on a bus, spend an afternoon trying the patience of the patrons of the local cinema and manage to flash unintentional SOS signals in the dorms after getting locked in the boiler-room following an abortive attempt to roast chestnuts on the fire down there. Attempts to stage their masterpiece The Miser's Secret (starring Venables as Mr 'Hem Hem' Brown) are doomed to failure, but instead they perform part of Henry V with an unexpected guest." (from wikipedia)

Jennings number seven. Probably not regarded as one of the stronger entries in the canon but I was well happy with it and chuckled on numerous occasions. The situations can be amusing but it's the Jennings/Darbishire friendship of opposites which is the source of most of the humour.

The Stars in Their Courses
Isaac Asimov 1971 (Granada 1975)



"This non-technical, misnamed study is not about the movement and make-up of the stars. It is rather a series of essays that appeared first in consecutive issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and because Mr. Asimov's interests range all over the universe, so does this book. Included are sections and chapters on Newton's laws; "weighing" the earth (read the book to see why the quotation marks are needed); the periodic table; astrology and Velikovsky (which and whom he effectively demolishes); the dangers of overpopulation; a defense of science and the space effort; the need for world cooperation; and much else. Aside from a discussion of tachyons — hypothetical, faster-than-light particles — and perhaps the suggestion that the invention of poison gas started the tarnishing of science's halo, there is little in subject matter that is new here. The style is highly informal: "Does it matter that the close match of weight and mass to which we are accustomed on the surface of the earth fails elsewhere? Sure it does." Does it matter that these essays were written by Isaac Asimov and not someone else? Sure it does." (from Kirkus)

Seventeen essays published in F&SF from May 1969 to September 1970. There's lots of good stuff here alongside the obligatory doommongering about overpopulation which was something of an obsession of Asimov during this period. One favourite is "The Man Who Massed the Earth" about Henry Cavendish who in 1798 used some metal balls hanging from wires to "weigh" the Earth with an error of less than one percent.
There's another fourteen of these collections to go and I've got them all lined up ready on the shelf begging to be read.

The Year's Best Horror Stories VIII
Karl Edward Wagner (editor) 1980 (DAW 1980/1986)



"The Year’s Best Horror was a long-running paperback horror anthology published by DAW. Like Donald Wollheim’s World’s Best SF and Lin Carter and Arthur Saha’s Year’s Best Fantasy, both also from DAW, it was a staple on bookstore shelves through the late 70s and early 80s, and served as a terrific introduction to a wide range of new and established writers every year.
For young readers new to science fiction, fantasy, and horror, DAW’s annual Best collections were a terrific way to explore the field. They were ubiquitous, extremely well edited, and — best of all — marvelously inexpensive.
Wagner edited fifteen installments in the series, until he drank himself to death in 1994. The last one was volume XXII, and the series died with him." (from Black Gate)

Sixteen stories by fifteen writers. Four of the authors (Harlan Ellison, Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell and Charles L. Grant) were familiar but the rest I'd not heard of.
The stories range from not bad to not that good but nothing really from either extreme, which seems to be the pattern for most Year's Best anthologies. It was an ok read but not one I'd ever revisit.

Wagner was a good writer of short fiction himself but unfortunately died from liver failure at the age of 48.

Deep Time
Henry Gee 1999 (Fourth Estate 2001)



"Deep Time, according to John McPhee, who coined the term, refers to the millions of years in the geologic record, as opposed to our everyday sense of time in which centuries and millennia seem endless. In this eloquent treatise, Gee, a senior science writer for Nature, asserts that the dramatically different scales on which deep and ordinary time are measured have significant implications for evolutionary biology and paleontology. He takes the provocative and perhaps extreme view that scientists will never be able to successfully answer evolutionary questions about the origins of species, or about the pressures leading to various adaptations, because events that occurred in deep time are not accessible to experimentation. Indeed, he argues, such questions should be considered outside the realm of science. In the place of traditional biology, Gee offers the field of cladistics, ""a way of looking at the world in terms of the pattern that evolution creates, rather than the process that creates the pattern."" By using statistical techniques to group anatomically similar organisms, both extant and extinct, cladists assert that they are able to demonstrate testable evolutionary relationships. While Gee does a superb job of explaining the basics of cladistics and of revealing its use in the controversies swirling around the origins of birds and of humans, more cautious thinkers may find that he exaggerates both its power as a tool and its acceptance by the scientific community." (from Publishers Weekly)

I was always sceptical about how palaeontologists, particularly those working on human ancestors, could construct family trees based on a ridiculously sparse fossil record and Gee does a convincing job of debunking their work. It would be interesting to find a book that supports the other side of the argument.

Vet In Harness
James herriot 1974 (Pan 1976)



"From the author whose books inspired the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small, Vet in Harness is the fourth volume of James Herriot's classic memoirs; a book for all those who find laughter and joy in animals, and who know and understand the magic and beauty of Britain's wild places.
The Yorkshire dales have never seemed more beautiful for James - now he has a lovely wife by his side, a partner's plate on the gate and the usual menagerie of farm animals, pets and owners demanding his constant attention and teaching him a few lessons along the way.
All of the old Darrowby friends are on top form - Siegfried thrashes round the practice, Tristan occasionally buckles down for finals and James is signed up for a local cricket team." (from Foyles)

I've enjoyed the Herriot books as they make for fun, relaxing reading between the heavier stuff. It's interesting to see how primitive much of the animal treatment was back in the thirties and how veterinary medicine was progressing with the introduction of more scientific methods.

Septimus and the Minster Ghost
Stephen Chance 1972 (Puffin 1974)



"The strange events begin with the breathless tale of a mysterious light shining from inside the Minster. Added to reports of ghostly organ music and a piercing scream heard at the dead of night, and the Dean of the Minster has good reason to contact Reverend Septimus Treloar, once a Chief Inspector in the CID. A bad dream, he decides. But before long the mystery deepens with the rumoured return of the ghost of an eighteenth-century organist. Could he have come back from the dead to haunt the Minster? Or will Septimus be able to use his policeman's nous once more to find the villain at the root of it all?
Septimus and the Minster Ghost is the second of Stephen Chance's hugely popular Septimus detective mysteries. First published in 1972, it again combines echoes of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, with the author's own characteristic wit and eccentricity." (from Blackwell's)

Not as good as the first instalment Septimus and the Danedyke Mystery but still a decent read. A character is seen briefly and named for no apparent reason and then plays no further part in the proceedings so it's immediately obvious that he is one of the culprits. A young lad also has a role in the story, again for no real reason and I wonder if the publisher insisted on the inclusion of a character that the target readership can relate to, unlike in the earlier book.
Two more books in this series to go.

The Left Hand of the Electron
Isaac Asimov 1972 (Panther 1976)



"A wide ranging collection of essays, explaining, among other things: why the 'overthrow' of an established principle is usually one of the best things that can happen to natural science; what 'polarized light' is (not really 'polarized,' for one thing), and how it contributed to our understanding of crystals; what makes water a unique chemical compound -- and uniquely important to us; why Euclid's axioms were regarded as absolute truth for two thousand years -- and why they aren't; who first shouted 'Eureka!' and why most scientists won't admit that they still do; how a knowledge of Greek astronomy can enhance an understanding of Shakespeare, and shed some light on an old argument in the process; and many more facts and phenomena of the world around us." (from Google books)

Seventeen essays from the F&SF issues between October 1970 and February 1972. Two are on overpopulation (again) but the rest are of the usual high standard. One is on the subject of prime numbers. I knew that there are an infinite number of primes but I think this is the first time I have seen Euclid's two thousand year old proof which is so simple that just about anyone, even Jeremy Vine, could probably understand it.

Histry O' the Geordies
Scott Dobson 1970 (Frank Graham 1970)



Scott Dobson was an art teacher from Blyth when he published Larn Yersel Geordie in 1969. Fifty thousand were shifted in the first year and a series of "Geordie Byeuks" were spawned, this being the second. They are a humorous celebration of working class language and culture in Northumberland, Tyneside and County Durham half a century ago and evoke an industrial landscape of pits and shipyards that has largely disappeared.

The Norman Conquest
Marc Morris 2012 (Windmill 2013)



"An upstart French duke who sets out to conquer the most powerful and unified kingdom in Christendom. An invasion force on a scale not seen since the days of the Romans. One of the bloodiest and most decisive battles ever fought. This new history explains why the Norman Conquest was the most significant cultural and military episode in English history. Assessing the original evidence at every turn, Marc Morris goes beyond the familiar outline to explain why England was at once so powerful and yet so vulnerable to William the Conqueror’s attack. Morris writes with passion, verve, and scrupulous concern for historical accuracy. This is the definitive account for our times of an extraordinary story, indeed the pivotal moment in the shaping of the English nation." (from Simon & Schuster)

Morris' William I in the Penguin Monarchs series whetted my appetite for a more in depth treatment and I wasn't disappointed by this much more detailed volume. The conquest happens half way into the book but that's appropriate because we can't understand what it was all about without examining the history of England and Normandy in the decades preceeding the invasion. The book is accessable and readable but I found I had to take it quite slowly because there is quite a lot of info to absorb. It's worth the effort though. Recommended

A Fire Upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge 1992 (Tor 1993)



"Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.

Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle." (from Kobo.com)

This is a very good book, the best SF novel I've read for a long time. I'd previously read Vinge's The Peace War which didn't impress me but this one won the Hugo and was nominated for the Nebula (losing out to Connie Willis' Doomsday Book in a travesty of justice), and it received a lot of love from respected critics so I gave the author a second chance. It took over a hundred pages to get into the story as it's a bit slow at the start but the rest of the six hundred pages just whizz by.
There's two other books in this "zones of thought" series which I'm now looking forward to checking out.

Winner of the 1993 Hugo Award.