Catch-up Reviews: Paladin Of Souls, He Do The Time Police, Xenocide Mission

Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold

(Amazon.com link, as it's not published in the UK yet)
A return to the land of Chalion (and any prospective readers should read the Hugo-nominated Curse of Chalion first - this book contains huge spoilers for that one). The dowager Royina goes on a pilgrimage to get away from it all. Of course, nothing goes quite according to plan. Hostile armies, romance, demonic posession, devine intervention, that sort of thing. Another damn good read, though not quite as good as its predecessor (which is praise by faint condemnation, trust me)

He Do The Time Police In Different Voices - David Langford

I saw this in the dealer's room at Novacon, and decided I had to buy it when I started giggling as I read the contents page. It's a collection of Langford's parodies of famous SF/fantasy/horror writers, expanded from the earlier, wonderfully titled "The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge: Odyssey Two" It's great fun, and should be appreciated by anyone who's read huge piles of genre fiction in their time.

The Xenocide Mission - Ben Jeapes

Another sequel, this time to Jeapes' His Majesty's Starship. It has pretty much the same virtues as that book - a good plot that rattles along, and interesting aliens. Like HMS, this is marketed as a young adult book; I would have lapped it up at that age, and I still enjoyed it a great deal at my more advanced age...

The Public Whip

(stop sniggering)

This is a tremendously useful website. It's a searchable guide of the voting records of British MPs, covering the last two parliaments (though the FAQ points out that there are a few gaps in their record of the 1997-2001 parliament)

There are a few problems - the lack of any indication of free votes, the difficulty for readers who aren't total parliament geeks to understand what some of the votes are actually about. The counting of "rebellions" can get a bit freaky, too (apparently, even Tony Blair himself has managed to rebel against the government on one occasion). Still, pretty good for what appears to be a largely automated service.

It confirms what I already knew about my MP - total Blairite loyalist (two votes against the government in two parliaments)

[via This Political Life]