It is ten years today since Big Finish released the first of its Doctor Who audio plays, The Sirens of Time by Nicholas Briggs, which brought together Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy to defend Gallifrey against the eponymous Sirens. Since then, the main sequence of audio plays featuring the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors has reached a tally of 122 (mostly four episodes of 25-30 minutes in length); there has been a separate sequence of Eighth Doctor plays (three sets of eight two-part episodes); the first four Doctors have been brought back through the Companion Chronicles (20 so far); and there are dozens of other out-of sequence plays featuring the Doctor and spinoffs which don’t. (Big Finish’s own website is sometimes a bit tricky to navigate: the best listing of the complete set of stories in on Wikipedia.) By some counts, Planet of the Dead is the 200th televised Doctor Who story; Big Finish hasn’t quite caught up with that total yet, but will do so in the next year or so.

With all of that material out there, Who fans who have not yet got into it may be intimidated out of making the attempt. I would strongly recommend making the experiment. But before getting into particular recommendations, it is worth considering the environment where you can listen. I happen to have a commute of a bit over an hour from home to work every day, broken into three unequal segments (home -> Leuven, Leuven -> Brussels, Brussels -> office). Having episodes of half an hour or so fits this rather well; I can switch off as the closing title music rolls, and ponder what may happen next. I also find that listening while I am exercising – variously at the gym, cycling, or on the Wii (with the TV’s volume turned down) – works for me. If you don’t have a space in your day of half an hour when you can switch your brain over to largely aural stimuli, however, there may not be much point in trying the Big Finish audios.

The original actors (Davison, C Baker, McCoy, McGann) usually seem to enjoy reprising their roles; likewise Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, Nicola Bryant as Peri (most of her audio plays are actually with Davison rather than Baker), and the less frequently used Bonnie Langford as Mel and Mark Strickson as Turlough. Janet Fielding has returned once as Tegan but apparently will do so again for three plays next year. (I’m afraid I’m not a big fan of Sophie Aldred’s acting as Ace; Adric has returned for one play as well, but not as we knew him.) Big Finish have also brought in completely new actors to play regular roles as companions. The best of these as an actor has been Maggie Stables as Professor Evelyn Smythe, who has been a super foil to Colin Baker’s Doctor. I have also particularly enjoyed Caroline Morris as Egyptian princess Erimem, travelling with Five and Peri, and India Fisher as Edwardian rich girl Charlotte Pollard, travelling first with the Eighth Doctor and now, for reasons which have not been made entirely clear, with the Sixth. One crucial figure in all of this is Lisa Bowerman, who has only done a couple of Doctor Who audios as Bernice Summerfield (originally a Seventh Doctor companion from the Virgin New Adventures) but whose independent series as Benny launched the Big Finish colonisation of the audio corner of the expanded Whoniverse.

My favourites, then, of the Big Finish output are as follows:

Main sequence

#11 The Apocalypse Element, by Stephen Cole (August 2000) – Maggie Stables as Evelyn Smythe had a rather poor debut story (The Marian Conspiracy), but this, her third one, takes her to Gallifrey with Romana II, now president, imprisoned by the Daleks and in need of rescue. This was the point where I started believing the people who say that poor Colin Baker is a good actor who was miserably served by the scripts and production when he was on TV.

#16 Storm Warning, by Alan Barnes (January 2001) – the play that brought back Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and introduced India Fisher as Charley Pollard, stowing away on the R101. Also has Gareth “Blake” Thomas as the British Air Minister. A good play anyway, but also a good starting point to see if you will like McGann’s Doctor.

#20 Loups-Garoux, by Marc Platt (May 2001) – I am slightly surprised to have liked this one as much as I did because it is a Five/Turlough story; I’m not a big fan of Turlough as a character and I find werewolves generally rather uninteresting. But it may be more important that this was Marc Platt’s first audio play, and he somehow gets it right.

#22 Bloodtide, by Jonathan Morris (August 2001) – another Six/Evelyn story, this time meeting Charles Darwin (Miles Richardson) on the Galapagos Islands, with added Silurians. Excellent on the internal politics of the Silurians, and Darwin’s own personal dilemmas.

#26 Primeval, by Lance Parkin (November 2001) – a Five/Nyssa story, which becomes effectively a prequel to The Keeper of Traken, but gives us some gret insights nito where Nyssa came from and where she is going (later picked up in Circular Time)

Excelis #3 Excelis Decays, by Craig Hinton (June 2002) – a story with McCoy’s Seventh Doctor and Anthony Stewart Head as a villain; the third of a short series of shorter plays, and actually rather incomprehensible unless you have heard the previous two with Head and Peter Davison/Colin Baker.

#34 Spare Parts, by Marc Platt (July 2002) – this is my absolute favourite of all the Big Finish plays, taking Five and Nyssa to Mondas where they witness the horror of the creation of the Cybermen. It is very bleak, but utterly gripping. (Also features Sally “Jenna” Knyvette and Derren “Tegana” Nesbitt.) Unless you can’t stand Davison, I would suggest listening to this and The Kingmaker as a decent test of whether you will like Big Finish at all.

#39 Bang-Bang-A-Boom, by Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman (December 2002) – when I summarise this by saying that it features Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford in an sfnal version of the Eurovision Song Contest, it sounds awful, and it really oughtn’t to work, but actually it is hilarious: Big Finish sometimes misses the mark with comedy, but this is one of the times when they hit. Also features ex-Goodie Graeme Garden and Patrica “Magenta” Quinn.

#40 Jubilee, by Robert Shearman (January 2003) – of course, nowadays people refer to it as “the one that the TV episode Dalek was based on; but it is a very good and disturbing Six/Evelyn play in its own right.

#44 Creatures of Beauty, by Nicholas Briggs (May 2003) – another Five/Nyssa story, remarkable really for the way in which the narrative is splintered non-sequentially and still makes sense: a great example of using the audio medium experimentally and successfully.

#46 Flip-Flop, by Jonathan Morris (July 2003) – a Seven/Mel story which again takes an interesting narrative approach: each CD has essentially the same story elements, affected by the arrival of the Tardis to dovetail into the other.

#47 Omega by Nev Fountain (August 2003) – in the run up to the fortieth anniversary of Who, Big Finish brought back three classic series villains (the other two being Terry Molloy’s Davros and Geoffrey Beevers’ Master). I liked this one best of the three: Ian Collier’s Omega and Peter Davison’s Doctor, no companions. It is a direct sequel to Arc of Infinity, but about five times better.

#50 Zagreus, by Gary Russell and Alan Barnes (November 2003) – this was the 40th anniversary play, stretching across three full CDs, starring McGann’s Doctor and Charley with Lalla Ward’s Romana, Louise Jameson’s Leela, John Leeson’s K9, Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier, and other classic series actors (Anneke Wills, Elisabeth Sladen, Mark Strickson, Sarah Sutton, Nicola Bryant, Bonnie Langford, Sophie Aldred) playing otehr roles – along with Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison, and (rather impressively since he had been dead for seven years) Jon Pertwee. It’s one of those plays where you are glad that it was done without needing to ask if it was done well; but in fact it was done very well here also. Incomprehensible, I’m afradi, if you haven’t followed much of the previous Eight/Charley arc.

#51 The Wormery, by Stephen Cole (December 2003) – Katy Manning as Irish Wildthyme, and Colin Baker as Six, stuck in a bar between the worlds; a rather subdued but effective piece.

#58 The Harvest, by Dan Abnett (June 2004) – Seven and Ace in a near-future British hospital where odd things are happening; the introductory story for audio-only companion Hex, played by Philip Olivier. Takes some well-worn Who themes and did something new with them

#81 The Kingmaker, by Nev Fountain (April 2006) – this is my second favourite of the lot after Spare Parts: Five, Peri and Erimem (an audio-only companion, originally an ancient Egyptian princess) go to the opening night of Shakespeare’s Richard III and then go back to find out what happened to the real Richard III – totally hilarious, and includes Jon Culshaw doing his Tom Baker impression.

#104 The Bride of Peladon, by Barnaby Edwards (January 2008) – the farewell story for audio companion Erimem, and you can pretty much guess what happens to her from the title. But there’s an exceptionally strong guest cast – Phyllida Law, Jenny Agutter and Yasmin Bannerman – and a very strong script. Obviously will make more sense if you know a certain pair of Third Doctor stories – and also it turns out to have connections to a well-known Fourth Doctor story as well.

#111 The Doomwood Curse, by Jacqueline Rayner (August 2008) – Charley by now has left the company of the Eighth Doctor and is travelling, rather to her surprise, with the Fifth. Here they end up in the rather surprising setting of 1738 England, but without being terribly clea if they are in the world of fact or fiction. It helps if you know one of the earlier Bernice Summerfield spinoff plays which has certain common features, but I think would not be impenetrable if you don’t.

#114 Brotherhood of the Daleks, by Alan Barnes (October 2008) – Another strong Six/Charley story. They arrive on what appears to be the planet Spiridon and are apprehended by what appear to be Thals. But almost nothing is what it appears to be. The revolutionary Daleks singing “The Red Flag” are a particularly glorious touch.

Comment: There are some gaps there, chronological and in terms of characters. Several of the Eight/Charley C’rizz plays – The Natural History of Fear, Caerdroia, Terror Firma, Time Works, The Twilight Kingdom – almost made the cut, as did The Zygon Who Fell to Earth and The Cannibalists from the new Eight/Lucie series. As with all such continuous series, the product varies a bit from time to time, and the listener’s mileage may vary.

The Companion Chronicles

2.1 Mother Russia, by Marc Platt (October 2007) – narrated by Peter Purves as Steven Taylor, takes him, the First Doctor and Dodo to Ukraine in 1812 and the Napoleonic wars. As with most of the Companion Chronicles, there is one other actor involved (Tony Millan playing the bad guy); as with most Platt stories the plot is complex and mind-stretching. Purves is excellent and does a brilliant Hartnell impression.

3.2 The Great Space Elevator, by Jonathan Morris (August 2008) – narrated by Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield, and Helen Goldwyn as the supporting character; a decent sfnal setting, of an elevator stretching from Sumatra to geostationary orbit, but also lots of glorious references to Season Seven continuity.

3.11 The Mahogany Murderers, by Andy Lane (May 2009) – totally brilliant: the Victorian pastiche which Lane did so well in his novel All-Consuming Fire, combined with the wonderful return of Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter (who apparently hadn’t seen each other since 1977) as Jago and Litefoot delivering a beautiful product. Even if for some peculiar reason you haven’t seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang, you will enjoy this; if you do know the older story, you’ll love the sequel.

Unbound

In 2003 Big Finish produced a half dozen stories with alternate versions of the Doctor, of which my favourite is Sympathy for the Devil, bringing David Warner as a Third Doctor exiled to earth in Hong Kong in 1997 rather than England in the early 1970s. There he meets ex-Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, whose career never recovered from UNIT’s failures to repel the Autons, Axons, etc, and the new UNIT commander, who is played by one David Tennant.

Doctor-less spinoffs

The best of these was the Davros miniseries of plays from 2006, of which the second (Purity) is merely good and the other three (Innocence, Corruption, Guilt) excellent. These take Terry Molloy (supported in the title role by Rory Jennings in the first play) through the history of how he grew up on Skaro and invented the Daleks. Really electrifying. I believe they are supplied on the recent DVD box set of Dalek/Davros stories.

I also enjoyed were the Sarah Jane Smith audios which Big Finish produced two series of, the first in 2002 by five different authors and the second in 2006 consisting of four tightly linked stories by David Bishop, the best of those being 2.2 Snow Blind and 2.3 Fatal Consequences. Now that SJS is back on TV, there will presumably be no more separate audios with her character.

One rather rambling Doctor-less series was the three runs of Gallifrey plays of 2004, 2005 and 2006, starring Lalla Ward as President Romana and Louise Jameson as Leela with John Leeson as K9, and also bringing back Mary Tamm. They rely rather heavily on your knowing the back story from The Apocalypse Element, Zagreus and other Big Finish plays. The best is 2.2 Spirit where the two lead characters get mixed up with each other, and we have Jameson doing Romana to Ward’s Leela.

Finally, there is an ever expanding series of Bernice Summerfield audios, starring Lisa Bowerman and runing from 1998 to the present day. I’m about half way through them; my favourites so far are 1.5 Just War by Lance Parkin (August 1999), 3.1 The Greatest Shop in the Galaxy by Paul Ebbs (February 2002) and 3.3 The Dance of the Dead by Stephen Cole (October 2002). but I’m a bit behind with writing them up.

I hope this rather lengthy but very incomplete survey will encourage a few more people to try the Big Finish experience!

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• Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices – NYTimes.com
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• PUNKADIDDLE: Hugos 2009
  Dear Science Fiction Fandom, I wanted to have a word about the Hugos. these are your awards: the shortlists chosen and voted for by you. And because I too am a fan they are my awards. They reflect upon us all. These lists say something about SF to the world. Science Fiction Fandom: your shortlists aren’t very good.
  (tags: sf)

A Doctor Who Missing Adventure novel, featuring the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara, Vicki and the Gunpowder Plot. I think this is the first Who book I have actually given up on. I found the first hundred pages stylistically dull, historically stupid (James I’s father was not blown up at Bannockburn, the Doctor is rather unlikely to have tried staying at monasteries in England in 1605) and really offensively anti-Catholic. I skimmed a couple of online reviews of the whole thing to see if it might be worth persevering, but I rather got the impression that it just gets stupider and more annoying. I am glad to say that Roberts’ other efforts at this period (DWM comic strip “A Groatsworth of Wit” and TV story “The Shakespeare Code”) are much more successful.

Edited to add, March 2012: I have given this another try, and I withdraw the judgement that the book itself is anti-Catholic, but stand by the rest.

More excellent development in this very enjoyable series. Most of the book concerns the first year in the life of Snow White’s children by Bigby Wolf, also the first year of the rule of Prince Charming after his displacement of Old King Cole. As usual, when I summarise it that way it seems absurd that I actually read it, but Willingham has made the survival of the Fable characters in today’s New York, escaping their Adversary, very readable and grown-up.

This book is a very good set of explanations and ideas for helping one’s child with Asperger’s cope with the school environment: how to work the system as far as it is possible. Much of it seemed to me like plain common sense, but I realise that comes from years of dealing with our own situation, and also must concede that I don’t recall seeing any of it written down anywhere previously. One very important point that Lawrence makes is that experience with and knowledge of Asperger’s will dwindle as you go up the school hierarchy – the part-time teaching assistant assigned to the class may well know more than the class teacher, who in turn will probably know more than the principal. Although she is writing for a British audience I think most of what she says applies here too (though I’m pretty sure our services are better in general). I do regret, however, that she chose to use masculine pronouns for the Asperger’s children and feminine pronouns for the teachers and other educators; it’s a bit odd that a book trying to fight stereotypes in one area reinforces them in another.

It’s ten years this month since Big Finish put the first of their audio Doctor Who plays on sale. I have just about caught up with the complete range (though not quite with all the spinoffs) and am mulling a big Big Finish post to explain it all to those of you (probably at least 90%) who haven’t listened to any BF plays. Meanwhile these are the ten I caught up with most recently, in order of internal continuity rather than of when I listened to them or of release (apart from the new Three Companions episodes which go with the discs they came on).

The Magician’s Oath, by Scott Handcock, is set at about the same period as Paul Magrs’ novel Verdigris which I was reading at about the same time. Mike Yates tells the story of a magician who is sucking up all of London’s energy. The plot is nothing terribly new; Richard Franklin does the voices adequately, as does Michael Chance playing the evil magician. Verdigris is better.

George Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago are not technically companions, and there is almost no trace of the Doctor, but Andy Lane’s The Mahogany Murderers is totally brilliant: the Victorian pastiche which he did so well in All-Consuming Fire, combined with the wonderful return of Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter (who apparently hadn’t seen each other since 1977) delivering a beautiful product. Even if for some peculiar reason you haven’t seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang, you will enjoy this; if you do know the older story, you’ll love the sequel.

The same, alas, cannot be said for Nigel Robinson’s The Stealers from Saiph, in which Mary Tamm going solo does a decently professional job of a rather lousy script involving alien goings-on in Antibes in 1929.

David Bishop’s Enemy of the Daleks came close to being an interesting story of the Seventh Doctor being manipulative with the time stream again (and trying to shield his companions), with some surprisingly good good John-Foxon-tries-to-be-Keff-McCullough music. Unfortunately it is badly let down by two terrible performances from the guest cast – Kate Ashfield and Bindya Solanki, who are both fairly well known actors but utterly fail to convince here as the officer and sergeant in charge of fighting off the Daleks. (Solanki is slightly better in the scenes on her own without Ashfield, but this is not saying much.) BF occasionally gets an under par performance (indeed, more often than not the regulars are the ones to blame) but it’s rare to have two of them in the one play.

Paul Sutton sometimes bites off a bit more than he can chew, and I think this happened in The Angel of Scutari: it’s a nice idea to have a fragmented plot, presented out of order, but Big Finish has done this before and better (most successfully with Creatures of Beauty). It seems also like an attempt to give Hex some character development, presumably in order to get rid of him some time next year, but ends up with Philip Olivier doing a one-note nursing whine while waiting for Florence Nightingale, while the Doctor and Ace shift rather confusingly between British and Russian captivity. The cast admit to their bafflement in the CD extras, and one can sympathise.

Those two CD sets / downloads also feature the second and third episodes of the ongoing arc of The Three Companions, by Marc Platt, concentrating on Polly’s reminiscences of a Two/Ben/Jamie adventure. The second episode was a bit dull in getting them all together on the planet where Something is Going to Happen; but in the third episode the Something actually Happens and it all seems to come together well.

Wirrn Dawn, written as well as directed by Nicholas Briggs, is OK but not spectacular, with the giant insects returning to torment Eight and Lucie, and also a rather colonial relationship between two human cultures. Actually I thought BF missed a trick here: most of the guest cast (Colin Salmon, Daniel Anthony, Liz Sutherland) are PoC, and we could have had a more thoughtful exploration of colonialism than we got.

With The Scapegoat, Pat Mills writes the second WW2 audio this year (the first being Steve Lyons’ Resistance). This is occupied Paris, but not as we know it; I kept on thinking of the line from Douglas Adams about the enormous mutant star goat, whose smaller cousins are running a theatre near the Moulin Rouge where the Doctor and Lucie find themselves performing. I listened to it twice and am not sure I quite understood it but I enjoyed it.

I was very unimpressed with Jonathan Morris’ The Cannibalists at first: as I have repeatedly said, I hate cute anthropomorphic robots and this seemed to be just a story of the Doctor and Lucie saving the nice robots from the nasty ones, enlivened by Phil Jupitus’ performance as the nicest of the nice ones. But there is a brilliant twist at the end which made me very glad I had stuck it out.

The season finale, by Eddie Robson, takes Lucie and the Doctor to near-future London where I have to admit that I was pleased and delighted by the revelation at the end of the first part of who the baddies actually were (though the titles of the plays, The Eight Truths and Worldwide Web contain pretty good clues). That was the best bit of it, unfortunately; yet another religious cult turns out to be brainwashing people for alien invasion, and the Doctor and Lucie spend a lot of time running around being imprisoned and attacked. Poor Stephen Moore, as the displaced cult leader, sounded more and more like Marvin as his lines got less and less interesting. I didn’t hate it quite as much as , but like him I was glad when it was over (finished it this morning while doing my Wii Fit routine so made sense to listen to the end).

So, of all of these, my only really strong recommendation goes to The Mahogany Murderers, which is also rather oddly the only one of the stories without an appearance from the Doctor or any of his companions. Most of the others can be skipped

…trawling eBay for Whovian bargains, my eye was caught by an entry which ran as follows:

Blood and Justice: The 17th Century Parisian Doctor Who

Sounds interesting – another bit of canon that I had been unaware of, I thought. But then I checked out the full listing:

The 17th Century Parisian doctor who made blood transfusion history…

In 1667 a Parisian doctor by the name of Jean-Baptiste Denis performed an operation that had never previously been attempted – he transfused blood into another human being.

Ah well, that explains it. (That phrase “made blood transfusion history” is odd, isn’t it? Makes it sound like he had it abolished!)

I enjoyed tremendously Griffiths’ more recent book, Who Goes There?, so thought I should read his earlier memoir about growing up as a Doctor Who fan. It’s amusing enough. Griffiths had a slightly but not very unusual childhood (much older parents, few close friends), and since then has had his fair share of career setbacks and failed relationships; he writes about it all with self-deprecating humour which could perhaps have been spiced up with a bit more passion. I imagine that people who like me and Griffiths were children in the UK in the mid-70s will enjoy this, but I think his other book has wider appeal.

A novel featuring the Third Doctor, Jo Grant, UNIT and Magrs’ own invention, Iris Wildthyme, a renegade Time Lady whose Tardis is shaped like a double decker bus and who claims to be the Doctor’s on-off girlfriend. Magrs recycled a lot of the jokes and some of the plot from this book for the Big Finish audio Excelis Dawn, with Iris (as per usual) played by Katy Manning. But Verdigris is an amusing sideways look at the Third Doctor era, with the bad guys in one scene trying to convince Jo that it is all a cruel hoax: “Think about every alen artifact or creature you have ever seen. Weren’t they always surrounded by a nimbus of blue light? Didn’t they sometimes look a little … unconvincing?” And Mike Yates gets reduced to a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, so not much change there then. It’s not terribly substantial, with some promising elements (eg Iris’ companion, Tommy) left unexplored, but quite good fun.

(I’ve also been listening to The Magician’s Oath from Big Finish, also set in this period; Verdigris is better.)

Read Catherine Kellogg’s explanation, which includes helpful icons to let you know if the author is a character and if the plot is self-contradicting. Then the usual: bold if you’ve read it, italic if you started it, struck through if you hated it.

Kathy Acker’s "In Memorium to Identity"
Donald Antrim’s "The Hundred Brothers"
Margaret Atwood’s "The Blind Assassin"
Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy
Nicholson Baker’s "The Mezzanine"
J.G. Ballard’s "The Atrocity Exhibition"
John Barth’s "Giles Goat-Boy"
Donald Barthelme’s "60 Stories"
John Berger’s "G"
Thomas Bernhard’s "The Loser"
Roberto Bolaño’s "2666"
Jorge Luis Borges’ "Labyrinths"
William S. Burroughs’ "Naked Lunch"
Robert Burton’s "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino’s "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler"
Julio Cortazar’s "Hopscotch"
Robert Coover’s "The Universal Baseball Association, Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor"
Stanley Crawford’s "Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine"
Mark Danielewski’s "House of Leaves"
Don Delillo’s "Great Jones Street"
Philip K. Dick’s "The Man in the High Castle"
E.L. Doctorow’s "City of God"
Geoff Dyer’s "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D. H. Lawrence"
Umberto Eco’s "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
Dave Eggers’ "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Steve Erickson’s "Tours of the Black Clock"
Percival Everett’s "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"
William Faulkner’s "Absalom! Absalom!"
Jonathan Safran Foer’s "Everything Is Illuminated"
William Gaddis’ "JR"
William Gass’ "The Tunnel"
John Hawkes’ "The Lime Twig"
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter"
Aleksandar Hemon’s "The Lazarus Project"
Michael Herr’s "Dispatches"
Shelley Jackson’s "Skin"
Franz Kafka’s "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera’s "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Jonathan Lethem’s "Motherless Brooklyn"
Ben Marcus’ "Notable American Women"
David Markson’s "Wittgenstein’s Mistress"
Tom McCarthy’s "Remainder"
Joseph McElroy’s "Women and Men"
Steven Millhauser’s "Edwin Mullhouse"
Haruki Murakami’s "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
Vladimir Nabokov’s "Pale Fire"
Flann O’Brien’s "At Swim-Two-Birds"
Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried"
Harvey Pekar’s "American Splendor"
Thomas Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow"
Philip Roth’s "The Counterlife"
W.G. Sebald’s "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare’s "Hamlet"
Gilbert Sorrentino’s "Mulligan Stew"
Christopher Sorrentino’s "Trance"
Art Spiegelman’s Maus I & II
Laurence Stern’s "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"
Scarlett Thomas’ "PopCo"
Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse Five"
David Foster Wallace’s "Infinite Jest"
Colson Whitehead’s "John Henry Days"

• The Hidden Messages In Hillary’s Speech – The Daily Beast
  My former colleague Heather used to write speeches for Hillary Clinton, but not this one.
  (tags: world)

…to yesterday’s question, as

gareth_rees

was first to get: the nth number in the qsequence is the lowest integer with n divisors.

1
1, 2
1, 2, 4
1, 2, 3, 6
1, 2, 4, 8, 16
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 36
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 48

so

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60

etc.

What is the eleventh number in this sequence?

1, 2, 4, 6, 16, 12, 64, 24, 36, 48

From The Onion, of course!

• Love and Liberty: How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal
  Alex updates his classic essay
  (tags: doctorwho libdems)

The family connection to the fall of the Bastille.

This is a travelogue of a journey through the five Central Asian former Soviet republics in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the USSR. It had been lingering on my unread books shelf for a while, but I realised that in fact I had read it shortly after it came out. In those days I was interested then in the legacy of Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg in Samarkand, which Thubron indeed describes in so far as it was there to be found. These days I am more interested in the politics, and things have moved on quite a bit in the region: the Tajik civil war, just starting when Thubron was there, has now been over for more than a decade; meanwhile we have had a revolution in Kyrgyzstan, increasing repression in Uzbekistan, the bizarre rule and death of Turkmenbashi, and most of all the War on Terror in the immediate neighbourhood. So the book now feels very out of date. There are a lot of drunken feasts, departing Russians, sweeping generalisations about the facial appearance of people from particular ethnic groups, which I began to find tiresome very quickly. I believe that Thubron did a follow-up volume to this, retracing his earlier route, quite recently but won’t rush to pick it up (unless anyone strongly recommends it to me in comments).

• YouTube – Ukulele Orchestra of GB – Wuthering Heights
  Heathcliff? Heathcliff!
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• YouTube – 24 hrs of World Air Traffic compressed in 1 minute
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• the pen is mightier than the spork: Stepping back
  Torchwood writer James Moran responds to fannish overreactions re Children of Earth
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I was mildly surprised a few years back to read an essay by Ken MacLeod praising Heinlein as the pre-eminent political writer of science fiction – my memories of Heinlein at that time shaped by his later more degenerate works. But Ken was right, and this I think is the novel where it all comes together, against which other depictions of politics in a future society must be measured.

Heinlein is clear that his Luna isn’t necessarily an ideal society (clearer than in some of his other books) but also clear that he wants us to think about the practical consequences of not having much in the way of government, and also to think beyond the Cold War divide which dominated political discourse at the time he was writing. His occasional use of Russian vocabulary is a) generally idiomatic, though one might quibble about the pronunciation and b) a challenge to readers wallowing in the comfortable dichotomies of their own day.

I loved the bits where the central characters plot the revolution – fairly standard revolutionary practice, of course, but interesting to see it so positively portrayed in a mainstream sf novel. My favourite parts, however, are on Earth, the manipulation of the F.N., Heinlein’s successor to the U.N., by the Lunar delegation which includes the narrator. In the 1960s, after the U.N. intervention in Congo, it was possible to imagine that a future world government would dispose of coercive military power. It seems pretty improbable now, and indeed Heinlein points out some of the reasons why it is improbable. It’s a nice touch to have a small African country be the only one to recognise the Luna government at first, rather as only Nicaragua and Russia now recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The political discussion is supplemented by one of the great artificial intelligence characters of science fiction. Mike / Adam Selene could have been yet another irritating Heinlein know-it-all character, but here that role is split between him and the intellectual Professor Bernardo (himself rather modest as Heinlein intellectuals go) and the book is much the better for it. So we have a self-aware computer trying to get to grips with the weirdness of humanity, and by reflection showing us ourselves, yet at the same time in innocence providing the strategic leadership of the revolution. It stands the tired old Asimov laws of robitics on their head.

Heinlein’s ideas of sex on the moon are, alas, rather less convincing. Sure, gender issues will be rather different with institutionalised polyamory, but he rather over-eggs the benefits of his preferred arrangement, which in his account has no apparent drawbacks (or homosexuals) at all. Stranger in a Strange Land was less pleasant but more realistic on this subject.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress won the Hugo for Best Novel in 1967, the year I was born, beating two exceptionally good books which I have read – Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany and the full-length novel version of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes – and three others which I haven’t heard of – Too Many Magicians by Randall Garrett, The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz and Day of the Minotaur by Thomas Burnett Swann. When I reread Stranger in a Strange Land I said I thought it was the best of Heinlein’s Hugo-winning novels; I have changed my mind.

Who fans who are interested in the Target novelisations might like to note that there is an excellent 20-minute documentary about Malcolm Hulke and his role in starting off the range, plus a look at each of his contributions to it, on the new DVD set of The War Games – if, that is, you need another reason to go and get it.

This makes it two such documentaries in a matter of weeks, since Mark Gatiss’s documentary on the range as a whole, On the Outside it Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box, was broadcast on 23 June. (And if you missed it then and haven’t managed to get hold of it since, let me know and I will see what can be worked out.)

• A Beginner’s Guide To Doctor Who DVDs – Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
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• William Leith discovers the hidden problems with living in a 24-hour world | Life and style | The Observer
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Is the new DVD of the 1969 Doctor Who story, The War Games, eligible for next year’s Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form?

Or can the extras be considered eligible for Best Related Work?

On my first working day in Bosnia in January 1997, orienting myself in the National Democratic Institute’s office in Tuzla, I noticed that there is an area of that city called “Irac” – “Irishman”. I never found out why, and I am still wondering.

My office stationery suppliers often throw in free gifts with the latest order, often tacky kitchenware that falls apart after a few uses; this time it’s something a bit more sophisticated, a little GPS device for navigation while you are driving (specifically, a Connex GPC35Js running a system called PolNav Car Navigator).

My problem: turning the bugger on. The instruction booklet is fairly useless: it says that to get the initial GPS fix you have to have it outside in an area fairly clear of buildings for some time. But what it doesn’t give you is the crucial information of what state the unit should be in when you are getting that initial fix. Do I need to have the navigation software turned on, or does the unit magically know how to find the satellites anyway? And what of the mysterious “GPS test” hidden in the settings, where it seems to look for and find the satellite positions, but then not do anything with the information?

Suggestions gratefully accepted.

Some time ago I watched the Doctor Who spinoff video Downtime, written by Marc Platt and directed by Christopher Barry, which unites the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, Victoria Waterfield and the Yeti. Platt’s extended novelisation, published as one of the Virgin Missing Adventures, is much better, with lots more background of Victoria’s life after leaving the Tardis and of the Brigadier’s later experiences; it also includes K9 and a young Captain Bambera. It even has some photos taken from the video, so you can pretend it was better than it was. And of course, being on paper rather than on screen, the effects can be as good as Marc Platt’s words make them, and Peter Silverleaf’s dismally poor acting is no longer a problem.

It’s still a somewhat confusing story, but it is well enough told, and apart from the many moments of continuity joy it also has interesting seeds of the later Sarah Jane audio and TV stories. So I think I can generally recommend it to Who fans. I was able to get it for £2.70 on eBay, so it’s not as difficult to find as some Who books are.

This anthology, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, pulls together 20 short stories by writers of colour, all exploring different aspects of the colonisation experience through an sfnal lens. They are all very good. I found I had to read most of them very slowly to let the language settle into my brain; I think for that reason my attention lingered a bit more on the stories by Vandana Singh, Maya Khankoje and Tobias Buckell which made slightly fewer demands on me. This is a great anthology.

It was published in 2004. The Hugo Short Story shortlist for 2005, for which most of these would have been eligible, was of particularly poor quality (as I said at the time), and even the least impressive from the Hopkinson/Mehan anthology (I’ll identify it as devorah major’s “Trade Winds”) is a far better story than the Hugo winner (Resnick’s “Travels With My Cats”). None of the stories from So Long Been Dreaming got the 11 votes necessary to be recorded on the long list, let alone the 18 needed for the short list. It surely cannot be true that only ten (or fewer) Worldcon members had read So Long Been Dreaming before the nominations deadline? Something is wrong, or at least was wrong in 2005; this year things seem to have improved.

Alas, I was thoroughly spoiled for this by reading David Starkey and Alison Weir on the same subject last year. Though irritated by the writing style I kept hoping that at least I would learn something new; but when I had finished the first quarter of the book without finding anything that had not been covered better by either Starkey or Weir, I decided not to bother with any more.

I wasn’t hugely grabbed by Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but I quite liked this, Hardy’s first Wessex novel: a decent enough romantic plot, with some very good descriptive passages relating to the countryside. It seemed a much quicker and more enjoyable read than Tess, possibly because Hardy is not trying to be too Deep and Meaningful.

I cannot recall any tv show that I have watched generating as much polarisation as this week’s Torchwood. (Of course, I am slow at these things, and watched the later Buffy and mid-period West Wing only a couple of years after first broadcast.)

To generalise brutally, my impression is that a majority of the fanfic side of fandom was appalled, while the more literary sf side was generally fascinated, with plenty of exceptions on both sides. To summarise reaction from my f-list (a number of these posts are locked, so you’ll have to take my word for it):

Like it: here, here, here, here, here, Fiona Moore, I think here, more or less here, here, here, I think here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Don’t like it: here, here, here, here, (firstly) here, here, here, and here.

Further brief comment without saying if they liked it or not: here and here.

My own take: Count me on the fascinated side. Yes, it was derivative – particularly of the 1979 Quatermass, and the last scene being I admit more Douglas Adams (without the humour) than Acts 1:9 or E.T.. But, you know, that’s genre for you; and Quatermass and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide are firmly established as major moments of British media sf, so it’s entirely understandable to try to moor your show in that tradition. Anyway, much great art is derived from other sources; the question is, does it add anything, and did it work dramatically?

My subjective answers are yes and yes. What was different this time was the radical step of actually developing Jack’s character. Tom Baker (most eloquently among many) has pointed out that the Doctor can never really change; there is always a reset button at the end of each story (and RTD has nibbled away at the first of those but not really the second). Jack, on the other hand, has now lost his lover, and then become a monster who sacrifices his own family, without their consent, to save the world; and now has to live with the knowledge of that action forever.

It worked dramatically for me largely because of the guest cast. Peter Capaldi as Frobisher in particular, but also Paul Copley as Clem, Nicholas Farrell as the PM (great choice of name, almost-but-not-quite Gordon Brown), Cush Jumbo as Lois, Susan Brown as Bridget, Lucy Cohu as Jack’s daughter, Ian Gelder as the sinister Mr Dekker and Katy Wix and Rhodri Lewis as Ianto’s sister and brother-in-law. the regulars all seemed to me at the top of their game as well (and I don’t share the view that Barrowman and Lloyd can’t act; they were certainly doing so on this week’s show). The fact that the actors clearly bought into the world that Davies and his team created made it convincing.

Was it manipulative? Well, of course. But I felt that some of the worst characteristic excesses of New Who were dialled down a bit here so that the acting and the script could do the work – thinking particularly of Murray Gold’s music, which occasionally has had to do the work of telling us how to feel when the rest of the show wasn’t up to it; also Davies has got much better at the pacing of his own scripts. Tony Keen has been cruelly accurate in describing some of RTD’s other work as resorting to Total Bollock Overdrive; I thought there was very little of that here.

It’s a subsidiary issue, but I did like the political parts of the show as well. There was a fascinating contrast between the largely static scenes of Whitehall (be it Downing Street or Thames House) and the dynamic hustle of Cardiff. Of course in Real Life, the government would not choose Frobisher’s children as the public examples, or hand out secret passwords to the new girl on her first day, or surrender quite so abjectly sovereignty to the Americans; but in Real Life they aren’t in touch with green aliens who survive on poison gas either. At least we hope not.

I can’t see there being any more Torchwood after this. The Hub is destroyed, Gwen presumably back with the police once she returns from maternity leave, and Jack off exploring the universe and dealing with his own demons. To reunite even Jack and Gwen (let alone Ianto) would require a reset button which is surely beyond even the powers of Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat combined. But we shouldn’t mourn; it was good this week, and I may be in a minority but I enjoyed the first two series as well. Sometimes it’s good to go out with a bang.

Edited to add: For more reactions see here.