Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/apostate-by-forrest-reid/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=62637

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A brother and a sister shared to some extent the day nursery with me, but they were my seniors by several years, and hardly counted in my scheme of things. Of far more immediate interest was the personality of a sagacious old tabby, who would stroll into the nursery and lie on the floor in the sun, and was good-natured enough to purr when I used her as a pillow. I was aware that she timed these visits, and that if she did not find me alone (by which I mean alone with Emma) she would not stay. Not that she was, so far as I recall, a particularly affectionate animal. Cats are never sentimental; they treat you exactly as you treat them; and it was simply that she had marked me down, with unerring instinct, as ” safe “—a person who could be trusted to amuse the kittens while one dozed and dreamed.

I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.

As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.

What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)

Chapter VI is a detailed description of 1880s Belfast which I reproduce here (apart from the references to popular literature of the day):

My waking world, also, was gradually expanding, though it still remained the very small world of a provincial town—a rather hard, unromantic town too—devoted exclusively to money-making; yet a town, for all that, somehow likeable, and surrounded by as beautiful a country as one could desire. The Belfast of my childhood [the 1880s] differed considerably from the Belfast of today [1926]. It was, I think, spiritually closer to that surrounding country. Then, as now, perhaps, it was not particularly well educated, it possessed no cultured and no leisured class (the sons of even the wealthiest families leaving school at fifteen or sixteen to enter their fathers’ offices); but it did not, as I remember it at any rate, bear nearly so marked a resemblance to the larger English manufacturing towns. 

The change I seem to see has, of course, brought it closer to its own ideal. For some not very intelligible reason, a hankering after things English—even what is believed to be an English accent—and a distrust of things Irish, have always characterised the more well-to-do citizens of Belfast. But in the days of my childhood this was not so apparent, while the whole town was more homely, more unpretentious. A breath of rusticity still sweetened its air; the few horse trams, their destinations indicated by the colour of their curtains, did little to disturb the quiet of the streets; the Malone Road was still an almost rural walk; Molly Ward’s cottage, not a vulcanite factory, guarded the approach to the river; and there were no brick works, no mill chimneys, no King’s Bridge to make ugly blots on the green landscape of the Lagan Valley. The town itself, as I have said, was more attractive, with plenty of open spaces, to which the names of certain districts—the Plains, the Bog Meadows—bear witness. Queen’s University was not a mere mass of unrelated, shapeless buildings; the Technical Institute did not sprawl in unsightly fashion across half the grounds of my old school. Gone is the Linen Hall, that was once the very heart of the town in its hours of ease. A brand new City Hall, all marble staircases and inlaid floors, garnished with statues and portraits of Lord Mayors and town councillors, and fronted with wooden benches on which rows of our less successful citizens doze and scratch the languid hours away, flaunts its expensive dullness where that old mellow ivy-creepered building once stood, with its low, arched entrance, its line of trees that shut out the town bustle and dust. The Linen Hall Library, transported to another building, still exists, but, as with the city, expansion has robbed it of its individuality. The old Linen Hall Library, with the sparrows flying in and out of the ivy all day long, fluttering and squabbling, was a charming place. It was very like a club. Its membership was comparatively small; its tone was old-fashioned; it belonged to the era of the two-and three-volume novel; it had about it an atmosphere of quiet and leisure. […]

In the Linen Hall Library, curled up in a low deep window seat, I would sit gazing out between the trees and right up Donegall Place, which on summer afternoons was a fashionable promenade, where one was almost sure to meet everybody one knew. […] And here, one summer afternoon, just outside the tall iron gates, I beheld my first celebrity. Not that I knew him to be celebrated, but I could see for myself his appearance was remarkable. I had been taught that it was rude to stare, but on this occasion, though I was with my mother, I could not help staring, and even feeling I was intended to do so. He was, my mother told me, a Mr. Oscar Wilde; and she added, by way of explanation I suppose, that he was aesthetic, like Bunthorne, in Patience.

Oscar Wilde famously visited Belfast in January 1884. It is interesting that Reid’s mother contextualised him for eight-year-old Forrest by referencing the 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan opera which satirised him.

The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.

I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/apostate-by-forrest-reid/

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Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/28-july-books/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=62540

Non-fiction
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew (2019)

Non-genre
Paid and Loving Eyes, by Jonathan Gash (2012)
Last Term at Malory Towers, by Enid Blyton (2012)
Tales from the Secret Annexe, by Anne Frank (2016)
Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn (2023)

SF
The Lady of the Shroud, by Bram Stoker (2006)
The Lost Road, by J.R.R. Tolkien (2011)
Kushiel’s Mercy, by Jacqueline Carey (2015)
The Secret History of Science Fiction, eds. James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel (2016)
Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (2021)
Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas (2021)
Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko (2021)
Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger (2021)
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by “T. Kingfisher” [Ursula Vernon] (2021)
A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik (2021)
To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara (2023)

Doctor Who
Hidden, by Stephen Savile (2009) [Torchwood, spinoff novel]
Doctor Who Annual 1973 (2010) [Third Doctor, annual]
The Highest Science, by Gareth Roberts (2010) [Seventh Doctor, spinoff novel]
Dead of Winter, by James Goss (2011) [Eleventh Doctor, spinoff novel]

The best
I’m going to give a one-off joint win here, to two 2021 Lodestar finalists (reviewed here), A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (get it here) and A Deadly Education (get it here).

Honorable mentions
I have a lot of four-star ratings for the above. the two I’m going to pick out are:
Kushiel’s Mercy, by Jacqueline Carey, is one of the superb erotic fantasy series, and probably the only one I’ll cover in this series of write-ups. (Review, get it here)
Dead of Winter, by James Goss, is a splendidly creepy Eleventh Doctor / Amy / Rory story. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement is a collection of Paul Bew’s writings on Northern Ireland in the early 2000s. Lucid and informative. (Review; get it here)

The one to avoid
Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn, seemed to me to be trying to say important things about race and class by importing Welsh and British legends to North Carolina, and I could not get over the cognitive dissonance. (Review; get it here.)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/28-july-books/

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Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-taiwan/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=62534

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Taiwan. I did reflect on whether or not Taiwan counts as a country, but I plan to include a few other contested cases as I get down the list, so here we go.

There were a couple of these that I was not certain about, but it’s clear that The Astonishing Color of After is mostly set in Taiwan, and that it’s ahead on Goodreads and way ahead on LibraryThing.

Despite its title, I wasn’t completely sure if more than 50% of Tao Lin’s Taipei is set on the island, and likewise Bestiary which seems to be the reminiscences of Taiwanese-American women, but mainly about Taiwan. I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt.

I did exclude half a dozen. Stay True by Hua Hsu, The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin, Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang and Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho all seem to be entirely about the Taiwanese-American emigrant experience. Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung is mainly set on the mainland. Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu is set both on the mainland and in the USA.

Next up: Malawi, Zambia, Chad and Kazakhstan.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine
Oceania: Australia

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-taiwan/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=62534

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/reforming-the-wsfs-committee-elections/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=62678

I wrote in 2022 that the election system used by WSFS should be changed. At present, the rules for electing the Mark Protection Committee, the body charged with ensuring that the intellectual property of WSFS is protected, are set out in Standing Rule 6.2:

Voting shall be by written preferential ballot with write-in votes allowed. Votes for write-in candidates who do not submit written consent to nomination to the Presiding Officer before the close of balloting shall be ignored. The ballot shall list each nominee’s name. The first seat filled shall be by normal preferential ballot procedures as defined in Section 6.4 of the WSFS Constitution. There shall be no run-off candidate. After a seat is filled, votes for the elected member shall be eliminated before conducting the next ballot. This procedure shall continue until all seats are filled. In the event of a first-place tie for any seat, the tie shall be broken unless all tied candidates can be elected simultaneously. Should there be any partial-term vacancies on the committee, the partial-term seat(s) shall be filled after the full-term seats have been filled.

I warned that this carries the risk that a single faction with roughly half of the total votes could win every single seat and squeeze out other viewpoints.

My warning has come dramatically true. One of the candidates for this year’s MPC elections endorsed two other candidates and asked his supporters to transfer their votes to them. That candidate got almost half of the votes for the first seat and was easily elected; the two candidates who he endorse then took the second and third of the three seats up for grabs, thanks to votes transferred from the first candidate. This vividly demonstrates the potential for the current system to be gamed by slates.

What happened this year

The counts were as follows – with the winning candidate labelled C1 and the two who he supported labelled as C2 and C3; the other candidates are labelled D4 to D9 and DX for the tenth one. I’m removing names here because I don’t want to get into personalities.

As you can see, C1 did very well on first preferences, but picked up only two transfers from the 14 votes that came from eliminated candidates. C2 and C3 were quite a long way behind in fourth and fifth place.

For the second round, C1’s votes were distributed to the next preference, and the results were very different. The first two columns here show the first preference votes from the first count, and then the number of votes gained from C1’s transfers.

Of C1’s 67 original votes, 41 followed C1’s advice to transfer to C2 and C3, putting them now first and second rather than fourth and fifth. Transfers from the other candidates coalesced around D4 – by the second last round, D4 had picked up 21 new votes, C2 had picked up 14 and C3 only 6. But C3’s votes were then transferred and broke to C2 by a ration of 3 to 1, electing C2 easily to the second seat. It should perhaps be added that as well as C1 having endorsed C2 and C3, they happen to live in the same city, so a strong rate of transfers could have been expected anyway.

For the third seat, I have broken out how many votes each candidate got in first preferences, then transfers from C1, then transfers from C2.

You’ll see that C3, who got only 6 votes in the first round, got a total of 48 transfers from C1 and C2 – which was just enough to get C3 elected ahead of D4. In the rounds of transfers up to the second last round, D4 picked up 17, C3 only 4. In the last round, D5 was eliminated and his votes were transferred; D5 and C3 (and C2) happen to live in the same city, so some of D5’s votes went to C3 as well.

But all in all, my 2022 prediction that a large enough minority would be able to take all of the seats in this electoral system has been proved by C1’s success in electing C2 and C3.

I note also that in the other election for a WSFS committee this year, where five seats were up for grabs, the same candidate came out as the loser in the first three rounds, and placed third in the last two rounds, with their support peaking at 49 votes out of 138. It’s quite likely that none of those 49 people voted for any of the five successful candidates. Of course, you can debate whether a particular committee is meant to have members who collectively represent the centre of gravity of the meeting’s views, or who represent the diversity of opinion present; but we should be clear that that choice is being made by the system we choose to use.

How this came about

We now reach the point where I should reveal a relevant point of information.

Candidate C1, who quite possibly brought C2 and C3 in on his coat-tails, was actually me.

I did not consult with Alan Bond (C2) and Chris Rose (C3) before suggesting that voters who supported me should transfer to them. I genuinely felt that their insights would be useful to have or to retain on the committee and, in an election where candidates may not be well known to voters, I thought it would be helpful to indicate who was closest to my own views. Neither Alan nor Chris endorsed me, or each other, and in fact I was the only candidate to express support for any of my competitors in that way. And of course lots of people voted for both of them, or for all three of us, without paying any attention to my recommendation

I think my own vote was helpfully inflated by a couple of factors. I made several successful interventions in the Business Meeting session the previous day. (Video here; I spoke nine times, the first time at 1:04:10 and the last at 3:33:45.) On the day that votes closed in the election, File 770 led its news roundup with a piece about that, and then linked to one of my blog posts a bit further down the same post; again, I did not communicate with Mike Glyer about that in any way. So there were no sneaky tricks here; it was entirely organic.

Obviously I’m very glad that Alan and Chris got elected, and I look forward to working with them and the rest of the committee. But I feel sorry for Bruce Farr (D4), who was only two votes short in the end. And the 58 people who voted for him are 42% of the total number of voters; it rather sucks that such a large chunk of the voter body ends up with zero seats out of three.

The solution

I was astonished when I first discovered how the MPC is elected. The runoff ballot in a succession of single-seat contests is appropriate enough for determine the winners and lower places of the Hugo Awards. It’s utterly inappropriate if you want to elect a diverse spread of people. (Maybe you don’t.)

In the real world, which is to say for all elections in both parts of Ireland and in Malta, and for the Australian Senate, and for municipal elections in Scotland, in New Zealand, in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and in Portland (Oregon), the single transferable vote is used and a candidate is elected if their vote exceeds the electoral quota, which is set to be a smidgeon above the number of valid votes cast, divided by one more than the number of seats.

If a candidate is elected, then their votes are transferred to other candidates at a smaller value, calculated as the ratio of transferable votes to the surplus over the quota, usually rounded to two or three decimal places. In the 2025 MPC election, with 138 votes in total for three seats, the quota would be just over 34.5 – let’s take it to three decimal places and say 34.501. We can actually get a pretty good sense of how such an election would have worked out, using the votes actually cast this year. (The voter experience of the current system would not have changed; you still rank as many candidates, in order, as you want to.)

I got 67 first preferences, which is 32.499 votes over the quota. 64 of my votes had second preferences (see the first column of my breakdown of the second seat count, above). They would all be given a new value of 64 ÷ 32.499 = 0.507. So the first two counts would have looked like this:

The number of non-transferable votes recorded is an accounting artifact – it represents the value that gets lost in rounding to three decimal places. If we had gone for two decimal places, the quota would have been 34.51 and the value of the transferred votes would have been 0.50, which I don’t think would have changed the projected outcome much.

We can actually go a bit further in our alternate timeline. The data is incomplete, and I am assuming that the one vote that transferred to me went on to transfer to Alan Bond, but we can be fairly sure that after the bottom three candidates had been eliminated (which would have been done one by one in real life), the numbers would have looked something like this:

Again we can’t break them down individually, but from the numbers we have, we can be fairly sure that the votes from candidates D6 and D7 would have transferred something like this:

So, in a big turnaround from the real life situation, candidate D4 secures the second of the three seats, just creeping over the quota by 0.062 of a vote, with the last seat to be decided between C2 and D5 by C3’s transfers. In the real life election for the second seat, C3’s transfers broke in favor of C2 by a ratio of three to one; we don’t know how many of those were C3’s 6 first preferences and how many were the 23 transferred votes from C1, but it’s clear that C2, who was already 8 votes ahead of D5, would have been the greater beneficiary and would have won the final seat.

Obviously this outcome would have suited my personal agenda less, but I think it would have been a more representative result than the one we had in real life. It also would take a shorter time, because most of the votes would only be counted once.

How to get there

If we went to a multi-member transferable vote system, there are a few technical decisions we’d need to make. One of them is that we shouldn’t transfer surpluses, the operation that has the most work attached, unless the total of the surplus could potentially affect the outcome. In the worked example above, D4 has a surplus of only 0.062 of a vote, which is not enough to save C3 from elimination. WSFS already differs from standard practice by eliminating losing candidates one at a time, even if the lowest-placed candidate’s votes couldn’t possibly make up the difference between the second and third lowest, but I don’t think we have to do that for surpluses too. (If we had taken the value at two rather than three decimal places, D4 would not have reached the quota before the final round.)

The other technical point is, which surplus votes do you actually transfer in later rounds? In Ireland the practice is to just transfer the last votes that came in, which in the worked example above would mean only looking at the votes that D4 got from D6 (probably 2 full value votes and 2 worth 0.507; in total, D4 has 30 full-value votes and 9 at a value of 0.507). There are two reasons for this: in theory, the people who voted for D4 at an earlier stage have already got full value for their votes, and it’s the ones whose votes arrived last who create the surplus; and in practice, it makes the count much easier and more efficient. I understand, however, that the Australians do it differently and redistribute all of the votes that a winning candidate has ever received.

I have seen it argued that since the election method for the Mark Protection Committee is set out in the Standing Rules, it requires only a majority vote at a single Business Meeting to change it. I suspect that rather than go for a change immediately, a suitable intermediate step would be to create a working group next year to report in 2027, which could look at other alternatives too (though I think they’ll end up here once they have looked at the alternatives). This isn’t something that you should try and suspend standing orders for, in order to sneak it through at the last moment. (Very few things are.)

Also worth noting: less than 10% of the votes were cast for women, and all the candidates (as far as I know) identify as white. (The other committee had less than 16% of first preferences cast for men, though a man won the fifth seat.) I don’t know what we can do about that, but I do identify it as a problem. Probably for another day, though.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/reforming-the-wsfs-committee-elections/

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