This is a collection of written dialogues between two well-established sf writers, originally published over the last ten years in the SFWA Bulletin. I was surprised by just how interesting I found it to be. I have an inkling of the problems facing the professional sf writer from reading their blogs and talking to them, but Resnick and Malzberg take their readers through the detail of foreign rights, agents, collaboration, publishers, the impending collapse of the print market, how to encourage the next generation of writers, and much more. I’m not a huge fan of the Resnick stories I have read more recently (though I liked his early stuff) and I don’t think I have ever read any fiction by Malzberg (though I’m sure I have an anthology or two with his name on it); but I found this book tremendously insightful.

The relevant passages here are pre-Kindle and therefore already well out of date, but I found it fascinating to read how these two authors, both of whose careers started before I was born, are adapting to the world of the internet; it becomes clear that e-sales are going to reshape the way writing works as a profession, or at least the writing of sf, and while Resnick and Malzberg mourn the changing face of bricks and mortar bookshops and of the short fiction market, they are busily developing adaptive strategies.

I was enjoying this book so much at one point that I was considering ranking it top of my Hugo ballot for Best Related Work. In the end, though, I won’t: while the content is great, there is no explanation of its structure, and we are left to fend for ourselves with the apparently unredacted original articles; while I would recommend it strongly to anyone with an interest in the craft of writing sf, it does require a little more patience from the reader than a properly structured book should. I will still rank it above the Heinlein biography, but my top vote stays with Chicks Dig Time Lords. I doubt that I will vote for either of the other nominees at all, as I don’t quite have the patience to go through the nominated podcasts and the publishr of the other nominated book won’t do business in my currency.

Previous Hugo category write-ups: Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form.

Frontios is fairly standard stuff, with four memorable but mild demerits: 1) Norna’s very Eighties haircut; 2) the apparent destruction of the Tardis at the end of episode 1, which we know can’t be permanent when there are a bunch more stories to go this season; 3) Turlough’s race memories, which are a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to inject background into his character; and 4) the trick played on the Gravis by the Doctor at the end, which was written better by Aesop and the unknown originator of Br’er Rabbit.

As it happens I watched this the same week I was listening to the new Big Finish audio, Kiss of Death, which does a lot of the same things (including Turlough’s background and subterranean monsters) and does them better, also with added Nyssa.

Resurrection of the Daleks is the first time we have seen the malignant pepperpots since Romana regenerated, four and a half years ago. It looks fantastic – tremendous moody shots of Docklands and studio sets, action scenes with much mayhem (the highest on-screen death toll of any Who story, I believe, making Tegan’s desire to get the hell out entirely comprehensible), and decent performances from an extraordinary array of guest stars, Rodney Bewes, Rula Lenska, Chloe Ashcroft, the glowering Leslie Grantham in his first TV role, Terry Molloy doing Davros for the first time.

It’s a shame therefore that the story doesn’t make a lot of sense. Every time I think I understand what the various factions (human and Dalek) are up to, there is another twist and I lose track. Viruses? Assassinating the Time Lords? I give up. There are some good set-pieces – Rodney Bewes’ character’s redemption, the confrontation between two sets of Daleks in the middle of episode 2 – but some weak bits as well, including in particular the Doctor’s rather contrived decision to execute Davros and his failure to then carry through this decision.

So, farewell to Tegan. I am surprised to report that I found her a much more attractive and sexy character than I remembered – obviously most of all when possessed by the Mara in Kinda and Snakedance, but also when dressed up in Black Orchid, Enlightenment and The Awakening. and even a little when trapped in a duct with Turlough in Terminus. It’s a while since the Doctor has had a companion who is so much defined by her emotions – possibly even as far back as Victoria – and Tegan adds to that a willingness to sass the Doctor back that we have not really seen since Jamie, Steven and Barbara. Having said that, she probably stays a season too long, but there’s more to her than I remembered. Very glad to hear Janet Fielding as a current companion along with Mark Strickson and Sarah Sutton in this quarter’s Big Finish mini-series.

And for the second time in two stories, we get some more of Turlough’s background, as he returns to his roots in Planet of Fire. I found that the micro-politics of the story, the interactions between the members of a politically traumatised society, actually worked rather well for me. Had Kamelion actually been a regular Tardis fixture, rather than sitting around in a cupboard for the last year, it could have worked a bit better. Poor Anthony Ainley gets little else to do than cackle maniacally (though the end of episode 3 is a great reveal). But somehow the bits don’t gel together into an actual plot, and the point of the story seems to be to write out two regulars and write in another. (And the Doctor’s euthanasia of Kamelion is utterly out of character.)

The Doctor’s decision to add Turlough to the Tardis crew in the first place, after several attempts by Turlough to bump him off, is baffling, the pinnacle of the Tardis-as-taxi syndrome of the Nathan-Turner era, and particularly of the Fifth Doctor stories. However, the fact that the new guy is given a back-story which runs through his first few adventures, and that we then pick up more bits and pieces of his background, does make him watchable, if not necessarily likeable; he’s not heroic by nature but he sometimes does heroic things due to circumstances. Indeed, he’s the first companion whose full background is only revealed as he leaves (though I still think last month’s Big Finish story was an improvement on that theme); and it’s actually fully in character for him not to have given more away at an earlier stage. As I said above, I don’t like Turlough as a character but I think he is done reasonably well.

As did Harry Sullivan, Turlough featured in one of the earliest spinoff novels, a rather dire effort featuring a villain called Rehctaht. Mark Strickson has done well for himself since, making documentaries on the other side of the planet (where apparently he discovered Steve Irwin). As with Janet Fielding, it’s been good to hear his voice again on recent BFs.

Whenever straw polls on fans’ least favourite companion are done, Kamelion is usually forgotten. Unjustly so: he is by far the worst regular character ever to appear on the show. One story – two episodes which could have been used to better purpose – was devoted to introducing him, and then he is removed in a mercy killing by the Doctor (for which the latter shows roughly three seconds of remorse) after a story which again revolved around the need to get rid of him. Yes, yes, I know about the production problems and the tragic aquatic accident, but even making allowances for those circumstances it is badly handled. Kamelion’s brief career is a classic example of it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time but it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.

What a relief to have one standout excellent story in this run. It was only a few months since I had last watched The Caves of Androzani, but it’s a tremendous bit of storytelling – I love it all, and I get a bit more out of it every time. Morgus and Sharaz Jek, with their utterly different yet intertwined motivations, are two of the greatest supporting characters in the history of the show, and everyone else is good too. Somehow Graeme Harper manages to make you believe that the internal sets are fairly intimately related to the location scenes; the music is good, two of the cliff-hangers out of three are excellent (the first and third) and we see the Fifth Doctor sacrificing himself for his friend as perhaps no other Doctor would do. So often one sees a story crippled by a failure of script, or of performance, or of design, or of camerawork; let’s be glad that this one worked.

(Though let’s just not talk about the magma beast.)

Peter Davison started with a huge disadvantage for me of being Not Tom Baker. Given that this was a time in my life when I was growing up a bit anyway, and the bloke who had been the Doctor for half my life no longer was (and the jarring shift to midweek rather than Saturday broadcasts), it just didn’t feel the same.

I realise now that this was quite unfair. Particularly once you have got to know what’s left of the Troughton stories, it becomes clear that Davison was aiming for a more youthful, energetic and idealistic version of Troughton’s compassionate and sympathetic Doctor. It ended up less funny, but otherwise it is a success. Even faced with poor scripts and anæmic directing, Davison is able to inject credibility to the role.

And of course he is still doing it – he is the only Doctor from Old Who to have appeared in New Who, and he continues to generate the old magic for Big Finish. Most of my favourite BF audios are Fifth Doctor stories (Spare Parts, The Kingmaker, etc) and at first I thought this was just coincidence. But maybe not.

(And his daughter hooked up with David Tennant. But that is irrelevant.)

Not everyone agrees that The Caves of Androzani is the best Who story ever, though respondents to the DWM poll a few years ago voted for it on aggregate. (There are a number of Tom Baker stories that I’d put ahead of it, also Blink and a couple of others from New Who.) There are also some who dispute whether or not The Twin Dilemma deserved its place at the bottom of the same poll. (I am not one of them.) I believe that Eric Saward, or possibly even JNT, defended it as the best Who story made on their watch. Few even of their harshest critics would disagree.

The worst bit, of course, is the introduction of the new Doctor, who assaults and tries to kill Peri – the only continuing character in a show which has yet again been reinvented – without any serious adverse consequences in terms of plot. This is so wrong on so many levels that I find it difficult to engage with the rest of the story. The production team took for granted our willingness to accept the Doctor as hero – three of the four episodes end with close-ups of Colin Baker gripped by emotion – and did not realise that the new Doctor needed to earn our affection as all his predecessors did. It’s actually worse than Kamelion, who was just a wasted narrative gimmick: here, the central character is stripped of virtue for no good reason.

The awfulness of the new Doctor’s introduction distracts from the rest of the story, but it is pretty bad too. Maurice Denham as Azmael, and the titular twins, appear to be acting under anæsthetic. Several other characters are played by future big names but fail to come to life. As Tat Wood and Laurence Miles point out, there isn’t in fact a dilemma. The rearranging planets story is done better in one of the less impressive Ninth Doctor books. The “bird-like Jocondans” don’t look like birds. Mestor The Gastropod’s means and motivation make little sense. The back-story of Azmael and the Doctor is not explained. It is everything that Who can do badly combined in one story.

After the crushing disappointment of The Twin Dilemma, it is a huge relief to see something that looks and sounds a bit like Doctor Who. Attack of the Cybermen features, well, Cybermen, Litton from four stories ago, and even a junkyard in Totter’s Lane owned by I.M. Foreman. There is some annoying playing round with the Tardis’s external appearance, but unlike The Twin Dilemma this at least appears to be a variation of the same show.

It has its problems. The first episode has the bizarre fake policemen, whose behaviour is never explained, and also some scenes where the lighting is so bad that the actors are effectively invisible. The nasty and brutal violence is unpleasant and unfortunately a harbinger of things to come this season. And it is never a wise idea to lock the Doctor in a room full of explosives.

But I actually found the Cryons’ story rather effective – I had forgotten that they don’t even appear until well into the second of the two episodes – and rather wished the story had just been about them and left the Cybermen and 1980s London out of it.

This has been a rather grim run, with only Caves of Androzani really good, though some allowance can be made for Attack of the Cybermen. On the plus side, the stories are now so short that I will zip through them fairly quickly, and will report back on the next six by the end of this month.

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

i) births and deaths

15 June 1990: death of Leonard Sachs, who played Admiral de Coligny The Massacre (1966) and Borusa in Arc of Infinity (1983).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

None. This is the first date in the year on which no episode of Doctor Who or its various spin-offs has been premiered.

Quite a short book, written in 1890 by a young Norwegian writer who went on to won the Nobel Prize (and in his old age became a Fascist). It seemed to me to fit fairly comfortably between Dostoyevsky and Joyce, with the former’s existential angst and the latter’s intimate but also intensely geographical observation of humanity. Hamsun’s hero is prettty deranged but very convincing in his derangement.

My edition also features a 20-page essay by translator Sverre Lyngstad explaining why an earlier translation, by Robert Bly, is terrible.

Interesting character exploration of a woman imprisoned for murder in mid-19th century Canada, and her encounter with an early psychiatrist who tries to get to the truth of the crime; yet in a sense he is also imprisoned, by the sexual mores of free society. Grace knows herself to be an unreliable narrator, and part of the attraction of the book is the way she works through it.

Atwood has gone to a great deal of trouble to reconstruct Canada in 1843, when the murders took place, and 1859, when the doctor tries to treat Grace. I was perhaps unreasonably miffed that she made no serious attempt to give Grace a developed background in Northern Ireland – just a village around a harbour near-ish to Belfast. It totally failed to ring true to me. I would like to think that Northern Irish writers who set parts of their books in Canada generally try a bit harder.

Having polished off the Hugos a couple of months ago, I’m getting started on those Nebula winners I have not previously written up online. Man Plus is mostly a horror story about a man who is turned into a cyborg in order to explore Mars, but Pohl overlays it with a couple of other themes. First, he has a near-future projection of the political paranoia of the 1960s and 70s at both US and international level, a very cynical portrayal of how things work at the top which is I guess reflective of the post-Watergate era. Second, he has the secret manipulators of human politics, who gradually take form as first-person narrators as the story goes on, which runs the risk of being actually a bit twee and clichéd until we get the sting on the last page. So it’s an impressive combination of themes; shame about the women characters, though.

This New Adventure takes the Doctor, Ace and Benny back and forth in time to crucial points like the murder of John Lennon and the sinking of the Titanic, on a trail originating in Mexico in the fifteenth and also twentieth centuries. There are consciousness-altering drugs and prose which reminded me of Ian McDonald, and a satisfying resolution to the pursuit of a mostly non-corporeal baddie. Interesting to read it while in the middle of listening to the latest Big Finish audios with the Seventh Doctor, Ace and their new team-mate.

I think the only other Holdstock novel I had read was the rather odd one about Newgrange spirals turning up on another planet, probably thirty years ago. This is an intense exploration of inner space via an English countryside wedded to past historical periods, and the narrator’s own family history of venturing into, and being transformed by, this particular unknown. I felt reading it that I have read both Aldiss and Priest trying to do something similar but not succeeding as well. Having finished it at the start of a long plane flight, I think I’ll find it haunting my dreams (when I finally get to bed).

i) births and deaths

14 June 1985: death of Graham Leaman who played four roles in five Old Who stories: the captive Controller in The Macra Terror (1967), Price the communications officer in Fury from the Deep (1968), the Grand Marshall of the Ice Warriors in The Seeds of Death (1969), and an un-named Time Lord in Colony in Space (1971) and The Three Doctors (1973).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

14 June 1969: broadcast of ninth episode of The War Games. The Doctor summons the Time Lords to deal with the situation, but is himself captured.

14 June 2008: broadcast of Midnight. The Doctor and fellow passengers on a space bus are trapped with a mysterious alien entity.

• What we can do to bring down dictators | Carne Ross | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
  Good question.
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• Tom Bogdan: 'The sky at night stops me from sleeping' – Profiles, People – The Independent
  Be afraid of the next big solar storm!
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• The Backfire Effect « You Are Not So Smart
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• Pajamas Media » Tips for Not Appearing Crazy on the Internet
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• Billions for Missile Defense, Not a Dime for Common Sense – By Yousaf Butt | Foreign Policy
  More on the colossal expense of a technology that doesn't work defending against a threat that doesn't exist.
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This story by Andrew Cartmel, part of the current Big Finish run of ‘lost’ Seventh Doctor scripts, is basically an introduction story for new companion Raine, whose origins were explained in last month’s instalment in this series, Thin Ice. I’m afraid it didn’t really grab me as firmly as its predecessor did – I think ‘Kaffiristan’ is a somewhat dubious name for a fictional country, even a former Soviet republic, and the alien Metatraxi sound like they have escaped from a lesser work of Douglas Adams; their means and motivation were not well explained. Also Ace has forgiven the Doctor awfully quickly for his attempt to manipulate her fate in the previous story. On its own merits it’s solid enough (speaking as one who has just finished re-watching The Twin Dilemma, after which any other Who looks like a masterpiece) but I was disappointed.

I was wondering this evening about the traditional British joke about the young officer who has sex with a camel and Rūmī’s tale of the maidservant, her mistress and the donkey (which is about a hundred times nastier; you have been warned).

It occurs to me that the two stories may in fact be linked. I can imagine that a hundred years ago, some person attached to a British military camp in the Levant or further east – I suppose more likely a British soldier exploring Sufist philosophy, but one can’t exclude a local trying to communicate the concepts to the occupiers – who knew the Rūmī story reinterpreted it for the British troops, changing the gender of the human protagonists and the species of the animal in question.

In both stories, the point of the joke is that the upper-class human should have had greater respect for the knowledge of their underlings, with the result that their attempt to have sex with an animal ends in disaster (embarrassment for the British officer, painful death for the maidservant’s mistress). Rūmī is telling this as part of a wider parable about being adequately prepared for spiritual exertion, though the point of it kind of gets lost in the detail for some readers (including me).

I also speculated about a link between Rūmī and Apuleius, but I don’t see enough parallels to convince me. I suppose we should not exclude two or more people independently inventing stories about sex with donkeys. Anyway, I don’t propose to do any more research on this.

broadcast anniversaries

13 June 1964: broadcast of “The Day of Darkness”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Aztecs. Cameca helps the Tardis crew escape, and Aztec history continues as it had always done.

13 June 1970: broadcast of sixth episode of Inferno. The Doctor and friends fight through to the Tardis console in the parallel Earth, and the Doctor escapes though the others are doomed.

• Chrononaut » And so the bird of heaven…
  David Moles shares my astonishment, and the astonishment of all right-thinking people, at the award of a Nebula for Best Novelette to Eric James Stone's 'That Leviathan, Which Thou Hast Made', a story which "contained no science worth speaking of. There was very little fiction in it either, if fiction is the narrative of imagination; whatever images might have been in its author’s mind, what made it onto the page was determinedly unimaginative, and less narrated than vaguely gestured at. It put forward no fantasy, unless the fantasy that the world is an uncomplicated place populated chiefly by straw men and contrived examples is a fantasy. What writing was in it was mostly bad."
  (tags: sf thatleviathanwhichthouhastmade)
• Short Story Club: "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" : Uncertain Principles
  Chad Orzel weighs in: "I could rant at some length about all the things that are awful about this story about Mormons proselytizing to aliens who live in the Sun, but life is just too short, you know?"
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• Locus Roundtable » Short Story Club: “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made”
  Locus pulls together comments on the story from elsewhere, and attracts some additional comments from Martin Lewis (whose hilarious dissection of the story is so far only available on Twitter).
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• Asking the Wrong Questions: The 2011 Hugo Awards: The Novelette Shortlist
  Abigail puts her finger on it: "What's wrong with "Leviathan" isn't just that it's badly written and that all its characters seem to have been created either to spout talking points […] or act as straw men […].  Worse than these is the fact that it's not a story so much as a thought experiment that posits a situation in which none of the negative associations of Christian missionary work are applicable… The premise of proselytizing to aliens raises a lot of questions, but Stone is more interested in giving definitive answers, ones that shut down all objections to missionary work, among humans and aliens alike."
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• nwhyte: 2011 Hugos: Best Novelette
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Most kids would have been reading this annual, featuring the Sixth Doctor as played by Colin Baker, after the bizarre and unsettling experience of watching the new bloke in The Twin Dilemma several months before, and in the hope that in the new season due to begin in January the Doctor would start to behave, y’know, nicely. This annual would have reassured those kids; seven fairly unexceptional stories, one featuring the Master and several other Time Lords, one set in the eleventh century with a historical twist (and no sfnal elements other than the presence of the Doctor and Peri). There are two behind-the-scenes features on set design and special effects, no comics, no games, no factual filler items. It is the way the annuals have been going since JNT took over but it does feel like a bit of a reboot, given the new Doctor being featured here. The artwork is solid but not gorgeous.

Only one more of these to go – the 1986 annual was the last.

The second of the final pair of Sarah Jane Adventures audio books, like all of them read by the much-missed Lis Sladen as the title character. It’s a decent tale of monsters from a series of books a la Tolkien / Rowling / Pratchett becoming real through mysterious means, with some cheerful playing with the fourth wall and a few lines about death and moving on which have become rather more poignant in the last couple of months. Sladen captures all the characters well, as she always did.

Like most sf fans, I passed through a phase of total fascination with Robert A. Heinlein as a young reader – possibly even before my teens; and like most sensible people, I was repelled and appalled by the awfulness of his last few novels, to the point of wondering if they had all been like that and I was just too young to notice. (Though when I checked, I found the earlier ones were not as bad as I feared.)

At over 600 pages (including a 28 page index and 100 pages of grrrr endnotes), this book is nothing if not comprehensive; but it covers only the first 41 of Heinlein’s 80 years, ending neatly on the day of his third marriage. We learn of Heinlein’s liberal Missouri family background, his career in the Navy dashed by ill-health, his dabbling in political activism (as a left but libertarian Democrat in the 1930s) and his early writing career, and rapid emergence as a leading light in the world of sf. It’s all told in meticulous detail.

However, the hagiographical tone of Patterson’s introduction is a warning signal that the book may perhaps have too narrow a focus on its subject rather than on his environment. Heinlein’s death is compared to the Kennedy assassinations and 9/11 in its impact on people”s lives; we are told that he “galvanised not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement.” It’s news to me, as one who has been active in both, that policy think tanks are especially closely linked with sf in their historical origin.

As did Jo Walton, I had hoped for a biography that would both get under Heinlein’s skin and contextualise his work in the politics both of the USA and of science fiction of the times. But you will learn more of Heinlein’s politics by reading half of Ken MacLeod’s essay in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. This book is almost entirely surface detail – microscopically mapped and decently structured, but it will be an indispensable secondary source for other, better works in future.

The third and last of the BBC anthologies of stories featuring the pre-New Who Doctors, published in 2000. I choose my words carefully, as the collection includes several side steps into non-standard continuity – a brief sequel to the Sixth Doctor stage play, The Ultimate AdventureTV Action magazine; a rather poor effort with the Seventh Doctor, Ace and K9 (as in Dimensions in Time