Monthly Archives: November 2020

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Whoniversaries 11 November: Ice Warriors #1, Stones of Blood #3, Demons of the Punjab

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i) births and deaths

I considered commemorating the births of Stubby Kaye (1918) and June Whitfield (1925) but since neither appeared in more than one Doctor Who story – respectively Delta and the Bannermen (Seventh Doctor, 1987) and The End of Time I (Tenth Doctor, 2009) – I decided I wouldn't mention them.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

11 November 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Ice Warriors. Britannica base, fighting a new Ice Age enveloping Britain (and the whole planet) finds a frozen humanoid and three people arriving from the Tardis, all of whom are intrigued by future fashion.

11 November 1978: broadcast of third episode of The Stones of Blood. The Doctor finds the hyperspace ship and is confronted by the Megara; Amelia and K9 have to deal with the Ogri.

11 November 2018: broadcast of Demons of the Punjab. The Tardis crew get caught up in Yazmin's family history and the 1947 Partition of India.

iii) date specified in canon

11 November 1913: the Doctor defeats the Family of Blood, as seen in, er, The Family of Blood (2007).

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

John and I have discussed the situation in Breckenridge and decided to keep going until we have to stop.

I'd read this many years ago, of course, and what seemed to me like deep philosophical insights in my early twenties now seem like charmingly enough told philosophy lectures framed as a road trip. (Coincidentally, I've just been on a short road trip with my own son today. Pictures to come.) It's mostly a good read; I think it's still kind of grounding and helpful.

The difference between reading it now and reading it in the 1980s is that there is a whole host of internet fandom around the book that you can browse, including (in several places) photographs from the 1968 trip on which the story is based. Here's a particularly lovely one of the author and Chris on the famous bike (which itself is now in the Smithsonian).

The journey itself was way longer than I had realised, basically two-thirds of the way across the lower 48. (I still find it weird to think that Chicago is only a quarter of the way from East to West coasts.)

Bob and Gennie DeWeese, who the group stayed with in Bozeman, Montana, were very much real people who left a huge impression on the local artistic community. So were Jack and Wylla Barsness, who come to the DeWeese's party. John Sutherland died only recently but kept playing music to the end.

There are some references which are darker than the author first intended. I was struck by the description of the Church of the Minorites:

But the print, Feininger’s “Church of the Minorites,” had an appeal to him that was irrelevant to the art in that its subject, a kind of Gothic cathedral, created from semiabstract lines and planes and colors and shades, seemed to reflect his mind’s vision of the Church of Reason and that was why he’d put it here.

It is indeed quite a striking image:

But the sad fact is that by 1968, it was more than twenty years too late to see it in real life; the Barfüßerkirche in Erfurt was reduced to a shell by Allied bombs in 1944. I think Pirsig would have loved to use that metaphor if he's been aware of it, so I guess he just didn't know.

Pirsig's son Chris, as we are told in a sad afterword, died in 1979 just before his 23rd birthday, stabbed in the street in San Francisco.

Anyway, this was a good return journey. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my shelves that I had previously read but not reviewed online. Next on that pile is Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco.

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Whoniversaries 10 November: Neil Gaiman, Creature from the Pit #3, Mark of the Berserker #2

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i) births and deaths

10 November 1936: birth of Terence Lodge, who played the unfortunate Medok in The Macra Terror (Second Doctor, 1967), reluctant coup-ist Orum in Carnival of Monsters (Third Doctor, 1973) and the hapless Moss in Planet of the Spiders (Third Doctor, 1974),

10 November 1960: birth of Neil Gaiman, who wrote Hugo-winning The Doctor's Wife (Eleventh Doctor, 2011) and also Nightmare in Silver (Eleventh Doctor, 2013); and a few other things, I understand.

10 November 1989: death of Clyde Pollitt, who played a Time Lord (the Chancellor) in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969) and The Three Doctors (Third Doctor, 1973).

10 November 1991: death of Tutte Lemkow, who played Kuiju in Marco Polo (First Doctor, 1964), Ibrahim in The Crusade (First Doctor, 1965), and Cyclops in The Myth Makers (also First Doctor, 1965). The first of these is lost but the other two survive. He also choreographed the dancing scenes in The Celestial Toymaker (1966).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

10 November 1979: broadcast of third episode of The Creature from the Pit. In a memorable scene, the Doctor talks to the Creature, and the egg device comes alive.

10 November 2008: broadcast of second episode of The Mark of the Berserker (SJA). Maria, in a welcome (but, alas, final) cameo, tells Luke, Clyde and Rani the secret of the pendant. Clyde retrieves it and tells his father to catch himself on.

iii) date specified in canon

10 November 1913: the Family of Blood arrives in England, as seen in Human Nature (2007).

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Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The young scullions had heard this roar many times before but had never associated it with anything other than anger. At first, consequently, it had frightened them, but they had soon perceived that there was no irritation in its note today.

When I previously reviewed Titus Groan, in 2011, I wrote:

Titus Groan starts with the birth and ends with the first birthday celebrations of the heir to the grand, tradition-bound castle of Gormenghast; every grand fantasy citadel since owes something to Mervyn Peake (thinking, most recently in my reading, of Isse Tower in Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute, but there are many others). Peake weaves a grand miasma of doom and foreboding over the sterile rituals of the castle, introducing also the villainous Steerpike who seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.

It's not terribly clear what era Peake imagines the novel to be set in. The internal workings feel rather Edwardian in a way, conscious of past glory and ignorant of the future. The description of the mud-huts of the villagers outside the castle sounds medieval at best. It also has to be said that not a lot actually happens; my memory is that this is mostly scene-setting for the second book.

… Titus Groan is a technical [Bechdel] pass. There is more than one woman character; they do talk to each other. Sometimes they talk about Titus, who is a baby not a man, so perhaps such conversations do get through the Bechdel test. The earl's demented twin sisters burble to each other about many things, not all of which are men, but it's not clear that those are really conversations in the full Bechdel sense. Anyway, towards the end, Titus's sister Fuchsia reminisces about her childhood with her nanny, which I guess does qualify in that no men are mentioned.

We've been reading this as a Facebook-led group activity, at the rate of a chapter a day, with a pause between books. That's actually quite a good way to pace oneself (we've previously done it with War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Our Mutual Friend). The 69 chapters took just under ten weeks, and the 80 chapters of the second volume will take a bit longer.

What jumped out at me on this time of reading is that Gormenghast's surrounding countryside seems not to be English at all – the vegetation sounds if anything more Chinese (not that I am an expert on these things); it's certainly warmer and more colonial than Britain. I also find myself asking about the political economy of the castle – if the Earl has power, how is that actually manifested in terms of, well, ruling? And where does the money come from, and where does it go to? I guess it's impressive that it took the third time of reading for me to ask myself these questions.

Anyway, it's fascinating stuff even if the first book is only half the story. You can get it here.

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Whoniversaries 9 November: Invasion #2, Delta & Bannermen #2, Happiness Patrol #2, Lost in Time #2

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broadcast anniversaries

9 November 1968: broadcast of second episode of The Invasion. First appearance of UNIT and Benton, and return of the (newly promoted) Brigadier. The Doctor and Jamie are taken to UNIT, and then go in search of Zoe and Isobel; everyone is captured by IE.

9 November 1987: broadcast of second episode of Delta and the Bannermen. The Bannermen pursue Delta, the Doctor and Mel try to help, and the two Americans wonder what they are doing there.

9 November 1988: broadcast of second episode of The Happiness Patrol. The Doctor and Ace run around separately getting captured and escaping; the Kandy Man really ought to lock up the lemonade.

9 November 2010: broadcast of second episode of Lost in Time (SJA). The Shopkeeper turns out to have been a victim of the mysterious Parrot; our team are reunited, and there is a happy ending for everyone except Lady Jane Grey.

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Doctor Who: 2021 Annual, He Kills Me He Kills me Not, Marco Polo

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Third section of 2021 Doctor Who annual (click to embiggen):

Well, I've complained bitterly about the inadequacy of the first two annuals of the Thirteenth Doctor era; I'm glad to say that this winter's offering is a step up. The bulk of it consists of summaries of this year's episodes from Season 12 (or 38), but they are nicely done in the form of diary entries from the regulars, and there's also some exploration of how the stories link back to the rest of the show's history. There are also seven pages at the end looking forward to the Time Lord Victorious stories, promising us not only Brian the Ood and the Kotturuh, who have already shown up, but also the Eternals, the Racnoss, the Osirans, the Great Vampires, the Dæmons and the Dalek Empire. No original fiction apart from that, which is a bit of a shame, and some fairly pointless games and quizzes, but I would feel less embarrassed giving this to a young Whovian this year than I would have last year or the year before. You can get it here.

And, speaking of Time Lord Victorious, I hugely enjoyed the first Big Finish audio play in this continuity, He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not, set in a desert world that is basically a Western setting; the Eighth Doctor encounters Brian the Ood, who is in fact engaged on an assassination mission; they get tangled up with the local sheriff, played with great energy but uncertain accent by Pauline Eyre; and the end resolved the basic plot, but leaves a number of open questions about the actual setting. More please. You can get it here.

The first in a long series of real historical people to be portrayed on Doctor Who, a sequence which currently ends with the Villa Diodati in 1816, was Marco Polo, the 13th-century Venetian traveller. The video of the story has been lost (the first and longest story to be completely wiped); you can experience it via Loose Cannon's reconstruction, or via the audios with linking narration by William Russell, which you can get here. When I first listened to it in 2007, I wrote:

It's generally pretty good though the fifth episode sound quality is rather lousy. […] Seven episodes is about right for a leisurely plot, with Susan bonding with the maiden Ping-Cho, and the others dealing with the treacherous warlord Tegana and with Marco Polo himself, who decides to seize the Tardis and offer it to the Khan as his ticket home to Venice. (Or, as Croatian lore would have it, Korcula.)

It builds to a satisfying conclusion with the Doctor playing the Great Khan at backgammon, with the Tardis as the stake. Marco Polo himself, weighing in the balance his honour, his liking and respect for Ian and the others, and his desire to get home, is an interesting character study.

A shame, but I guess understandable, that they stopped making stories like this one after a while.

NB that three of the guest cast were reunited for an episode of The Prisoner not long after.

Listening to it again – the 25-minute episodes are just right for timing a lunchtime walk under lockdown – I still found it enjoyable. The dynamic between Polo and the Tardis crew is a little odd – I thought that they gave in to Polo a bit too quickly, and also for someone who has not actually looked inside the Tardis he seems pretty sure that it will transform his relationship with the Khan. But that aside, it's well written and well executed. And as I've said tbefore, the recons make it look gorgeous.

I did wonder, however, if anyone seriously thought that this was educational. The original remit for the show was supposedly that the historical stories would get kids interested in history. Well, I fear you'll scan the history books in vain to find out any more about Ping-Cho, the warlord Tegana, or the very camp innkeeper at Sheng-Ting. But maybe it's better to scan the history books for something that's not there, than not to look into them at all.

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Whoniversaries 8 November

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i) births and deaths

8 November 1927: birth of Lennie Mayne, director of The Curse of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1972), The Three Doctors (Third Doctor, 1972-3), The Monster of Peladon (Third Doctor, 1974) and The Hand of Fear (Fourth Doctor, 1976)

8 November 1941: birth of Nerys Hughes, who played scientist Todd in Kinda (Fifth Doctor, 1982) and Rhys’s mother (therefore Gwen’s mother-in-law) in the exceptionally silly Torchwood episode Something Borrowed (2008)

8 November 1956: birth of Richard Curtis, executive producer of The Curse of Fatal Death (interim, 1999) and writer of Vincent and the Doctor (Eleventh Doctor, 2010)

8 November 2012: death of Roger Hammond, who played Francis Bacon in The Chase (First Doctor, 1965) and Dr Runciman in Mawdryn Undead (Fifth Doctor, 1983).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

8 November 1975: broadcast of third episode of Pyramids of Mars. The Doctor and Sarah fail to blow up the rocket, and the Doctor is transported to Sutekh’s chamber.

8 November 1980: broadcast of third episode of Full Circle. The Doctor and Dexeter analyse their samples, but Romana lets the Marshmen onto the starliner.

8 November 1986: broadcast of second episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #10). One of the Mogarians turns out to be a detective in disguise, and the Isolation Room contains a plant/human hybrid.

8 November 1989: broadcast of third episode of The Curse of Fenric. The Haemovores attack the church and Judson is possessed by Fenric.

8 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of Lost in Time (SJA). Sarah and the gang are separated by the enigmatic Shopkeeper to find themselves in three different time-zones throughout history.

8 November 2014: broadcast of Death in Heaven, final episode of the 8th series of New Who. With Cybermen on the streets of London, old friends unite against old enemies and the Doctor takes to the air in a startling new role.

Blade Runner, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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It's a bit difficult to concentrate this evening! (For people coming across this blog post years from now, we just heard that Joe Biden won th election. Today is Saturday, the election was on Tuesday.)

But to my normal Saturday busioness. Blade Runner won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1983. The other finalists were all cinema films; I have seen two – Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which came second, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which came third – but not the other two – The Dark Crystal, which came fourth and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, which came fifth. I wonder where Airplane II came in the nominations tally? I think of the three I have seen, I would have gone with the majority and voted for Blade Runner.

This was the third Hugo-winning film in a row to star Harrison Ford, leading as Deckard here, having been Indian Jones in last year's Raiders of the Lost Ark and Han Solo two years ago in The Empire Strikes Back. He was also of course Solo in the original Star Wars.


There is just one cast member who had a speaking role in an Oscar-winning film: it's M. Emmet Walsh, who is Deckard's boss, police captain Bryant here, and was the swim coach in Ordinary People two years back.

Kimiko Hiroshige, credited here as "Cambodian Woman", and Howie Lee, who plays the Sushi Master, were both also uncredited extras in Around the World in Eighty Days, 26 years ago.

I remember daringly going to the cinema on my own to see this in London, when I was fifteen, so it has a lot of nostalgia for me, and I still like it a lot, even though the year 2019 has now been and gone without android replicants threatening Los Angeles. To get the obvious out of the way, it's a Bechdel fail. Dave points out on Facebook, in response to this review:

Blade Runner didn’t just fail the Bechdel test, it has the leading male character coerce a woman to sleep with him, and has a female replicant wearing virtually nothing be shot in the back and fall through plates of glass. It’s thoroughly sexist throughout.

There are also no visible African-American characters, though many Asians, in a city which actually has about equal numbers of both groups in its population. More subtly, Sarah Gailey has pointed out what is really going on here:

There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.

Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things. If you do not have enough empathy for the correct things, you will be murdered by a cop who does have empathy for the correct things.

The actual plot is straight out of pulp sf, and has been stripped of much of what made the book special. But it's a chilling story, and Deckard engages our sympathy largely by being good-looking Harrison Ford, conflicted over what he is doing, particularly when he falls in love with one of the replicants.

But. It still looks and sounds fantastic. The cityscapes of LA in 2019, pouring rain, crowded underclass, glitzy commercial offices but abandoned residential buildings, are superbly conveyed. Rutger Hauer's dying words as lead replicant Roy Batty remain one of those moments you'll never forget in cinema, as Deckard begins to realise what his journey has really been about.

And I was thoroughly addicted to Vangelis's music – I had a cassette of the album and played it incessantly as a student. I think it holds up as at least the equal of his work for Chariots of Fire last year.



I'm putting this right at the top of my list, in fourth place behind 2001 but ahead of Superman. A very welcome return journey.

I reread Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? again as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

As he unlocked his office door, his superior, Police Inspector Harry Bryant, jug-eared and redheaded, sloppily dressed but wise-eyed and conscious of nearly everything of any importance, hailed him. “Meet me at nine-thirty in Dave Holden’s office.” Inspector Bryant, as he spoke, flicked briefly through a clipboard of onionskin typed sheets. “Holden,” he continued as he started off, “is in Mount Zion Hospital with a laser track through his spine. He’ll be there for a month at least. Until they can get one of those new organic plastic spinal sections to take hold.”for a month at least. Until they can get one of those new organic plastic spinal sections to take hold.”

It's a short book, but it's amazing how little of it actually made it into the film – sure, the core plot of the replicants is there, but we lose the fact that the factory is in Seattle not LA; we lose the obsession with live animals (there's an awful moment when the chap taking what he thinks is a robot cat to be fixed realises that it was real and it has really died); we lose Deckard's home life, and Mercerism and the empathy boxes; and we lose the single most chilling moment of the book, when the replicants set up a fake police station and Deckard is almost fooled into thinking that he is the android – it's a typical Dick moment of questioning reality.

It's also worth noting that the book is set in 2021 (in more recent editions – when first published in 1968, it was set in 1992.) I'm preparing piece on twentieth-century SF set next year; this is certainly the best known.

Next year's Hugo winner is Return of the Jedi, but before that we have to get through Gandhi.

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Whoniversaries 7 November

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i) births and deaths

7 November 1950: birth of Lindsay Duncan, who played Adelaide Brooke in The Waters of Mars (2009).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

7 November 1964: broadcast of “Dangerous Journey”, second episode of the story we now call Planet of Giants. Ian and Barbara are trapped inside the laboratory; the Doctor and Susan scale a drainpipe to rescue them but are themselves threatened by the water.

7 November 2017: broadcast of The Zygon Inversion. With the splinter group of Zygons now ahead of the Doctor, there is only one thing standing in their way of obliterating the human race and taking the Earth for themselves: a moral dilemma! Is Bonnie willing to compromise the peace already in place, just for the sake of Zygons not needing to hide, even if it means making enemies not only of humanity but of her own race?

7 November 2021: broadcast of War of the Sontarans, Part 2 of Flux. Thrown back into the Crimean War, the Doctor finds the Light Division are about to enter senseless battle with… an army of Sontarans? Yaz and Dan are pulled away from her, and each find their task will be restoring Time. The Sontarans are ready for eternal conquest, and in the Temple of Atropos, the enemy has arrived to take it all.

ii) date specified in canon

7 November 1987: Peter Tyler is killed crossing the road to a friend’s wedding – oh no he isn’t – oh yes he is – as seen in Father’s Day (2005).

October 2008 books

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This is the latest post in a series I started last November, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

I started October 2008 with a day in Paris, and visited The Hague overnight mid-month. For half term we visited my sister in France, to meet very new baby S. F was enchanted; U fascinated, though we had to monitor her interactions quite carefully.

The big political news of the month for me was the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, who I had worked with quite a lot in my time with the International Crisis Group. He is not so healthy these days, but still one of the most impressive people I've ever met.

At work, my super-effective American intern D moved on; she is now a foreign service officer wiith the US State Department. Her replacement was Spanish S.

I read 25 books in October 2008.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 56)
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl
The English: A Portrait of a People, by Jeremy Paxman
Jean Sibelius, by Guy Rickards
Edmund Spenser, by Rosemary Freeman
Waterloo, by Andrew Roberts

Non-genre 3 (YTD 22)
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Duke and I, by Julia Quinn (did not finish)
The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin

Scripts 5 (YTD 16)
Love's Labour's Lost, by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Richard II, by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare
The Life and Death of King John, by William Shakespeare

Poetry 1
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

SF 5 (YTD 40)
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino
The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks (did not finish)
Astra and Flondrix, by Seamus Cullen
Sunrise Alley, by Catherine Asaro

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 165)
The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin
All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane
Doctor Who and the City of Death, by David Lawrence
Winner Takes All, by Jacqueline Rayner
Interference Book One: Shock Tactic, by Lawrence Miles

Comics 1 (YTD 4)
The Cruel Sea, eds Tom Spilsbury, Scott Gray

6,200 pages (YTD 76,100)
5/25 (YTD 39/323) by women
none (YTD 6/323) by PoC

Gonna call out four excellent reads here: Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, which you can get here, and Romeo and Juliet, which you can get hereBeowulf, which you can get here, and Thaceray's magnificent Vanity Fair, which you can get here. Worst of the month was Julia Quinn's The Duke and I, which I cast aside after two chapters; you can get it here.


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Whoniversaries 6 November

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i) births and deaths

6 November 2017: death of Scott Fredericks, who played freedom fighter Boaz in Day of the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1972) and turncoat scientist Maxilian Stael in Image of the Fendahl (Fourth Doctor, 1977).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

6 November 1964: broadcast of "Horse of Destruction", fourth episode of the story we now call The Myth Makers

6 November 1976: broadcast of second episode of The Deadly Assassin. The Doctor is put on trial, realises that the Master is behind the assassination, and enters the dream world of the Matrix.

6 November 2009: broadcast of second episode of The Eternity Trap (SJA). Sarah destroys Erasmus and his machine with the sonic lipstick and rescues Professor Rivers. (But what about Lord Marchmont?)