The Romans, by Jacob Edwards (and Dennis Spooner, and Donald Cotton)

Posted on 5 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched the story we now call The Romans in 2006, I wrote:

The Romans has a considerable, and surprisingly effective, comedy element, carried almost entirely by Hartnell’s Doctor. On a whim, he decides to leave their holiday villa and go to Rome (taking Vicki with him) pretending to be a murdered musician, and succeeds in fending off Nero’s jealous attempots to have him killed. There is a much less funny sub-plot involving Ian and Barbara, kidnapped by slavers, who also end up in Rome – Ian as a gladiator, Barbara as palace slave, pursued by the lustful Emperor – before making their escape. (Somewhere there must be a definitive list of the characters who have lusted after Barbara: Ganatus in a very gentlemanly way in The Daleks, the much nastier Vasor in The Keys of Marinus, the equally nasty El Akir in The Crusade, and now Nero.) The Ian/Barbara chemistry is very sweet – they have a nice joke between them about looking in the fridge. The script rather neatly resists bringing the travellers together, so that neither the Doctor and Vicki nor Ian and Barbara ever discovers what the other pair of characters is up to in Rome. Hartnell is simply superb, utterly watchable, imperious, funny, devious. It’s a shame that Maureen O’Brien can’t quite rise to the challenge of being his straight man, but this was only her second story, so I suppose one must make allowances.

When I came back to it three years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

I’ve watched The Romans a couple of times, which may be once or twice too many. There are a lot of good things about it – the costumes, sets and background sound are totally convincing; the Ian/Barbara relationship is at its sweetest and snuggliest; Maureen O’Brien is carving out a quite different Vicki persona to Carole Ann Ford’s Susan, less frightened and more curious. The plot of course takes in all the cliches – lecherous emperor, slavers, the threat of the arena, and even culminating in the Great Fire. The two interlocking plot strands are deftly contrived. The problem is, unusually, with Hartnell himself who is way over the top, smirking, chortling and giggling manically; it matches quite well with Derek Francis’ portrayal of Nero but is otherwise a bit much.

I gave it another go two years later, and wrote:

Last time I watched The Romans, just over two years ago, it left me rather cold. On F’s suggestion we watched the first two episodes last night and the other two this evening, and I found I loved it (and so did he). Last time round I was watching while waking up early and jetlagged on a particularly arduous field trip; shows how the mood you are in can make a difference to your appreciation of, well, anything.

Watching it again, this time with the DVD info text, I enjoyed it again. Hartnell is still a wee bit over the top, and the plot doesn’t really hold together once you start poking at it, but I particularly appreciated Jacqueline Hill keeping in character.

The second paragraph of the third section of the novelisation is:

I hope you are as well as habitual, and as it leaves me also, I am pleased to say.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

I had been looking forward to this one, famed as one of the best Doctor Who novelisations, and I was not disappointed. Cotton has recast the narrative of Dennis Spooner’s TV script into epistolary/diary form: letters from Ian Chesterton to his headmaster, the Doctor’s own diary, letters from Ascalis the assassin and Locusta the poisoner, and contributions also from Barbara, the Emperor Nero, and Nero’s wife Poppæa (but not Vicki); the whole thing framed in a covering note by Tacitus (obviously written several decades later). Eye of Heaven, the best of the spinoff novels featuring Leela, also featured multiple first-person viewpoints, and I’ve read first-person narratives in other First Doctor stories, but this is the only case of the whole thing being ostensibly done from written records (the Doctor having compiled everything and then left it behind in the villa for the archivists to discover).

Admittedly, as an actual story it’s no great shakes, and purists will be disappointed that we lose a lot of the funny lines from the TV version and one of its major comic elements (the two pairs of time travellers not actually meeting each other in their wanderings). But the whole thing is done for language and laughs; it’s meant to be fun, and it is fun, and that’s all you can really ask.

Now that I’ve read almost all of the Doctor Who novelisations (apart from the very latest ones), I appreciate even more the imaginative flexibility that Cotton was allowed to bring to the story. But it’s interesting that the Ian Chesterton of the novel is clearly a teacher at a minor public school, rather than the secondary modern or comprehensive Coal Hill that we see on screen. It’s also regrettable that the women characters don’t get as much bandwidth on the page as they did on screen. Anyway, you can get it here.

Jacob Edwards has written a substantial monograph on The Romans, not quite as long as Frank Collins on Warriors’ Gate but still, I think, one of the longer Black Archives. It’s good chunky stuff, which I think would be useful for anyone interested in mid-sixties UK television in general as well as us Whovians.

A short introduction points out that at time of broadcast, nobody ever expected to see The Romans again; yet we are still analysing it almost six decades later.

The first chapter, “Why Comedy?”, looks at Dennis Spooner’s conscious decision to make Doctor Who funnier than Sydney Newman had imagined it, and points out that The Romans was the first story which was intended to be humorous.

The second chapter, “Humour in The Romans – Is It Funny?” looks at the roots of the humour in the TV story, admits that audience feedback for the fourth episode was negative but challenges the (mostly long-dead) viewers on their reactions; and then looks at the novelisation (“mostly the same type of funny”) and the reception of the later releases of the TV story, the DVD coming out at roughly the same time as the Tenth Doctor’s The Fires of Pompeii.

The third chapter’s title is “Comedy After The Romans“. The second paragraph (with equally long footnote) is:

After The Romans, season 2 continued with three very serious stories – The Web Planet; then The Crusade and The Space Museum (both 1965) – before lightening up with The Chase (1965), a six-part Terry Nation runaround intended to make the Daleks more fun. The humour here is rather patchy, and none-too-subtle, the nadir coming atop the Empire State Building with Peter Purves’ prolonged and cringeworthy appearance as sent-up hillbilly Morton Dill¹. Purves later proved himself a fine actor, returning in ‘The Planet of Decision’ (episode 6) as new companion Steven Taylor. As Dill, however, he was terribly ill-used.
¹ ‘Flight Through Eternity’ (The Chase episode 3). Dennis Spooner by this time was script-editing Doctor Who, and must bear some responsibility. In the audio commentary to ‘Flight Through Eternity’, director Richard Martin says of Dill’s incredulous, irreverent inspection of a Dalek: ‘That’s a Dennis Spoonerism. Dennis invented this. It wasn’t at all a Terry Nation thing.’ But here we see a key difference between The Romans and The Chase. Spooner may have dictated a more comedic approach, and in the former case, with Christopher Barry’s direction, was able to carry it through successfully; yet, humour was a tricky business, and the ham-fistedness with which Morton Dill was written (and directed; Martin heaps praise upon the performance) in large part bears the hallmarks of Terry Nation.

The chapter looks at the humour of later Who stories, pointing out that while the show became funnier in the rest of the black and white era, neither Letts / Dicks nor Hinchcliffe / Holmes wanted there to be many laughs and it was only for the couple of years of Douglas Adams’ influence that comedy re-emerged – to retreat again under John Nathan Turner, with occasional sorties of varying success.

The fourth chapter, “What Else was New in The Romans?” argues that it was the first real four-part story, earlier four-parters having ended up at that length by accident rather than by design; that Derek Francis was the first big name guest star; and that it marked the end of any pretensions to historicity from the historical stories, with the Doctor actually causing history rather than refusing to intervene. On that last point, I note that two of the three previous Hartnell-era Black Archives also deal with historical stories, and contra Edwards, Dene October argues that the earlier Marco Polo lacks historical detail and James Cooray Smith argues that The Massacre, made after The Romans, has much more historical accuracy than may at first be apparent.

The fifth chapter, “What is History?” attempts to untangle the concept of time in the Whoniverse, but does not get very far.

The sixth chapter, “Where Did The Romans Come From?”, briefly looks at the debt the story owes to Carry On Cleo and more particularly A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

The seventh chapter, “How Historically Accurate Is The Romans?”, details a number of inaccuracies before concluding (correctly, in my view) that it doesn’t matter very much.

The eighth chapter, “The Romans and Counterculture – Rewriting the Margins”, briefly unpacks the approach of the story to class, race, sexuality, gender, religion and disability, in the context of wider societal trends and later Doctor Who.

The ninth and final chapter, “A Viewer’s Response to The Romans”, goes through the story episode by episode, and practically scene by scene, listing the successes of the format (and one or two lapses). It’s difficult not to be charmed by Edwards’ enthusiasm here.

As I said earlier, this is a good contribution to the Black Archives series, combining in-depth analysis with enthusiasm, and I recommend it. You can get it here.

August 2019 books

Posted on 4 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 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.

August 2019 for me personally was dominated by my usual family trip to Northern Ireland, which itself was punctuated by the Dublin Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, which I wrote up here and here.

Back in Belgium, I visited the enigmatic Vlooibergtoren with the family.

I read 20 books that month.

Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 35)
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson
John De Courcy, Prince of Ulster, by Steve Flanders
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, by Deborah M. Withers
Second Generations, by Mary Tamm
The Early Life of Samuel M. Wickersham, based on his writings 1819-1862, edited by Edward Wickersham Hoffman
Bloody Sunday: Truth, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, by Douglas Murray

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 21)
Ben-Hur, by Lee Wallace
Alina, by Jason Johnson

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 61)
Grimm Tales for Young and Old, by Philip Pullman
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Smallworld, by Dominic Green
Cat Country, by Lao She

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 20)
Doctor Who: Scratchman, by Tom Baker with James Goss
True Stories, ed. Xanna Eve Chown
The Grandfather Infestation, by John Peel

Comics 4 (YTD 19)
Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes
Berlin: City of Smoke, by Jason Lutes
Berlin: City of Light, by Jason Lutes
Oyasumi, by Renee Rienties, Coco Ouwerkerk and Kimberley Legito Geelen

5,600 pages (YTD 44,000)
5/20 (YTD 65/157) by non-male writers (Withers, Tamm, Le Guin, Chown, Rienties/Ouwerwek/Geelen)
1/20 (YTD 23/157) by PoC (Lao She)

It was great to return to The Dispossessed, which you can get here, and the first Berlin volume, which you can get here. The third and final Berlin volume did not disappoint; you can get it here. On the other hand, Alina, by Jason Johnson, was simply an unpleasant book. You can get it here if you want.

Filter House, by Nisi Shawl; The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness

Posted on 3 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

It being a new year and time of renewal, I’ve decided that I will (again) change the way I am writing up the previous winners of the Tiptree, Clarke and BSFA Best Novel Awards; if I have already written them up on this blog, I won’t revisit them. I have a couple of other long blog post series of projects that I’d like to think about starting, and a couple that will end naturally this year (Oscars and bookblog nostalgia).

However, I’ll still write up joint winners of the same award together, so for today it’s the winners of the 2009 Tiptree Award (as it was then called). This was the year that Song of Time, by Iain MacLeod, won the Clarke Award and The Night Sessions, by Ken MacLeod, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. The Tiptree jury made a joint award (which has happened eight times in the last twenty years) to Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House, and to Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go. The twelve-strong “Honor List” included one novel that I have read and very much enjoyed, Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, and a set of short novels by a different author of which I have tried one and didn’t like it.

The second paragraph of “The Pragmatical Princess”, the third story in Filter House, is:

Ousmani closed her eyes again. She did not believe in dragons, any more than she believed in the affrits and djinns of her father’s homeland, or the water-demonesses of Mali, where her mother had been born. “It is a horse,” she told herself. “A very large and very ugly horse.” Peering out under her long, dark lashes, she considered the dragon’s glittering snout, its gleaming, golden eyes. Its irises were formed like slits, as were the nostrils inches from her own, from which an occasional wisp of steam escaped.

I think this may be the only collection of stories to have won the Tiptree / Otherwise Award. Perhaps I was just in a tired mood, after an exceptionally busy period at work, but none of these especially grabbed me. I guess the two that lingered most are “The Pragmatical Princess”, whose title character cuts a deal with the monster that was supposed to eat her, and “The Water Museum”, about a society where water is scarce and its guardian is an assassination target. I slightly bounced off Shawl’s Everfair as well, and perhaps this is just one of those authors who is not for me. You can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness, is:

“I was in the swamp getting apples for Ben,” I say.

I enjoyed this more – a big chunky fantasy about a boy growing up in a village where all the women have died, and where dark secrets lurk in the hearts of the surviving men; he runs away and explores his world, discovering the awful truth. There is a cute dog and a smart girl. Slightly surprised by the ending, which is a cliff-hanger for the next volume. I would not have voted for this myself (of the Tiptree works, my choice would have been Lavinia), but I enjoyed it. You can get it here.

For completeness, I’ll note that from that year’s BSFA shortlist, apart from The Night Sessions, which won, I have read Anathem by Neal Stephenson but not Flood by Stephen Baxter or The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. Of the two I have read, I’d have voted for The Night Sessions.

For further completeness, I have previously written up here all three winners of the relevant awards for the following year. The BSFA Best Novel Award went to The City & The City, by China Miéville, though as previously noted I’d have voted for Lavinia; the other two finalists were Ark by Stephen Baxter and Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts.

The City & The City also won the Clarke Award that year, and Yellow Blue Tibia was also on the shortlist, as were Far North by Marcel Theroux, Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones, Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson and Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding. Marcel Theroux was an exact contemporary of mine as an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge, though we did not know each other well; China Miéville also went to Clare, but arrived after both Marcel and I had left. I’d have voted for the winner here.

The Tiptree Award was again a tie, between the first two volumes of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, by Fumi Yoshinaga (volume 1; volume 2) and Cloud and Ashes, by Greer Gilman. I enjoyed the former and bounced off the latter, and haven’t read anything else on the long list.

So next in this sequence of reviews will be the 2011 Tiptoe winner, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugrešić.

Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins (and John Lydecker / Stephen Gallagher)

Posted on 2 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

I vividly remember watching Warriors’ Gate when it was first broadcast back in the cold January of 1981. I was thirteen, and knew that this was Tom Baker’s last season; but much of the actual story sailed over my head. My family were not the only fans in Northern Ireland. In Newry, a thirteen-year-old girl missed the last episode:

I slept all day. I missed Dr Who but Romana and K9 left. Daddy watched a stupid Finnish film so we played "offices" in the kitchen.
— NornIronGirl1981 (@NrnIrnGirl1981) January 24, 2017

But her younger brother caught it.

I went to confession. And I wrecked my Lego town to build something else. In Dr Who, Romana and K9 left.
— NornIronBoy1981 (@NrnIrnBoy1981) January 24, 2018

That evening I too remember watching the “stupid Finnish film”, The Year of the Hare, and unlike NornIronGirl (but like her father) I loved it. (It must have been that evening, because that seems to be the only time it was shown on British TV when I was a teenager.)

When I rewatched Warriors’ Gate in 2008, I wrote:

I was surprised that I did enjoy Warrior’s Gate. A somewhat surreal plot line, with reflections on colonialism, empire and slavery, and also Romana’s extended farewell to the Tardis (for once, decently signalled in advance, more perhaps than for any companion since Victoria). Even Adric, for once, seemed to fit in reasonably well. Definitely worth watching again.

Coming back to it three years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

Warrior’s Gate is truly weird and wonderful. The slavery of the Tharils is pretty horrifying, but we understand that there’s an element of cosmic karma in that they were once the enslavers (and Rorvik in turn gets his cosmic come-uppance at the end). For a story which is mostly filmed in a blank studio, there is an amazing sense of place about it. I still don’t completely understand the plot but I somehow feel confident that the author did, and wasn’t just making it up as he went along. K9 and Adric get reduced to mere observers here – again, it’s a strong story for Romana, but of course it is her last.

This time around, I came to it having seen the whole of Secret Army and its spinoff Kessler, in which Clifford Rose, who is the chief antagonist Rorvik here, plays the vicious SS officer in charge of Brussels. (Rose died just over a year ago in Denville Hall.) He seemed to me to be turning in a very strong performance: like Kessler, Rorvik is stuck with a mission that many would find ethically unpalatable, in an environment that he doesn’t really understand, and his reaction to new factors tends to be suspicious and violent. But it’s different as well to see him as the head of a team; Kessler tended to have the SS adjutant of the week.

I was also struck by the parallel with the other Doctor Who story mainly filmed in a blank studio, the first episode of The Mind Robber, where the production team successfully made something out of literally nothing. The same trick is pulled off here, with a few more props. You wouldn’t want to do this all the time, but it’s interesting to see it done twice.

Rereading the original novelisation in 2008, I wrote:

This is really good, the best book of this run; Romana II departing in style. Lydecker / Gallagher seems almost to be writing a standard genre sf book that the Doctor, Romana and Adric happen to have wandered into – Romana wanting to wander off on her own, of course. (And K9 gets perhaps his best characterisation in any of the novels, even if he is out of order for much of the story.) Of course, with it being the printed page rather than the screen, the story has to be told in a rather different way; but the author, whatever his name is, really rises to the challenge.

Since then I’ve read Gallagher’s early hit, Valley of Lights, and actually passed him by a couple of times in the corridors at the February 2022 Gallifrey One convention; I wish I had stopped for a chat. The book still holds up, giving a bit more meat to the bones of the show-don’t-tell TV story, especially on the background of the slavers. You can get it here.

But but but… it turns out that in 2019 the BBC released a considerably expanded audiobook of the novelisation, so much altered that it is basically a different book. Read by Jon Culshaw, with John Leeson contributing the voice of K9, it gives us a lot more background and characterisation of the slavers and the Tharils, and mixes up the plot quite substantially. Culshaw is very good at the characterisation of the voices, though I think his Rorvik is actually a bit closer to Kessler than Clifford Rose’s was.

It’s not the only or even the strongest case where the novelisation departs from the TV script, but it’s the most recent, I think, and certainly the one with the biggest broadcast-to-publication gap. It’s well worth getting to shed a new light on the intentions behind the story, and gives new depth to the narrative. You can get it here.

I still don’t completely understand every aspect of the story, but I felt I had a much better grasp of it this time around, especially thanks to the expanded novelisation.

Frank Collins’ monograph on Warriors’ Gate is one of the longer and denser works in the Black Archive series. There are eight chunky chapters, preceded by an introduction that explores the problems of assigning authorship of the story to writer Steve Gallagher, script editor Christopher Bidmead, director Paul Joyce (who becomes a major figure in the narrative) and even John Nathan-Turner and Graeme Harper.

The first chapter, ‘A Medieval Mystery Play’, looks at the appointment of Christopher Bidmead as script editor, touches on the Christopher Priest affair (which I’ve heard from the other side) and then looks at the early career of Steve Gallagher as a radio script writer.

The second chapter, ‘The Dream Time’, looks at the origin and early versions of Gallagher’s scripts, shaped also by the Christopher Priest affair, and its roots in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête and the TV mini-series Roots. It also turns out that Gallagher’s original scripts were funnier.

The second paragraph of the third chapter, ‘Aldo and Waldo’, with the quotation that it introduces, is:

Well known for his documentaries on filmmakers, actors and artists made by his company Lucida Productions, Joyce’s wider career spanned theatre, film, television drama, documentary, photography, painting and writing. In 1965, after two terms at The London School of Film Technique, he had used his final grant cheque to fund his first film The Goad, an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s short mime play Act Without Words II, which he’d seen during an experimental programme of five short plays, Expeditions One, at the Aldwych Theatre in July 1964. He saw the play as a meditation on the relentless rituals of modern life, the empty passage of time ‘from birth to death presented in the simplest of terms. (Two sacks, each containing first, a dozy human, and secondly, a spruce, athletic one, are prodded progressively across the stage by a sharp metal object on wheels, “The Goad”).’² Perhaps he saw that sense of relentlessness when he encountered the world of Rorvik and his crew in Warriors’ Gate. He also fastened onto one of Beckett’s recurring themes: rubbish. ‘Beckett’s identification of miscellaneous rubbish with the world, minds and bodies of his characters indicates its importance in his writing,’ and itwas a signifier of mortality and the modern world in many of his novels, theatre and radio plays. The tramps in his breakthrough play Waiting for Godot (1953) also inhabit a world of ‘hand-me downs, cast-offs and detritus’ where ritual and habit are bound up with change brought about by uncertainty³. Again, the rundown privateer is a tangible evocation of Beckett. Joyce’s work continued to incorporate elements of the absurd and surreal, a sensibility that he would detect in Gallagher’s scripts for Warriors’ Gate. This could perhaps be traced back to a formative moment in his childhood, when he saw a black-and-white film that was:
‘…a bit like that Laurel and Hardy one where they have difficulty getting a piano up the stairs […] only it was the delivery of a stereo or a radiogram, of enormous proportions, which was taken upstairs and delivered to a bachelor in his apartment. It was what he’d always been wanting, he plugs it in, twiddles around with it, listens to the music. Magnificent. Then he thinks it’s time for a bite and he goes to switch it off. Switches it off and the music continues. Hits the thing. And the fucking thing won’t stop. In the end, he smashes it to a pulp. How about that for a surreal situation? That gave me film and a Beckett kind of situation.’⁴
² Joyce, ‘Guinness with Godot’, unpublished essay emailed to author, 20 April 2018.
³ Bates, Julie, Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination, 1932-1987, pp6-9.
⁴ Joyce, interview with author. Our efforts to identify this film have been unsuccessful.

The third chapter looks at the career of director Paul Joyce, his work with the plays of Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett, and his first TV drama, Keep Smiling. It then goes in detail into the changes made by Bidmead and Joyce to Gallagher’s scripts, and explains how we have ended up with two very different novelisations – John Nathan-Turner having forced Gallagher to rewrite the original version (now the audiobook) to be closer to the story as broadcast for publication in 1982.

The fourth chapter, ‘Fade to Grey’, goes into as much detail as is possible given the fading of memories and lack of records about the difficulties faced by Joyce in directing the story. This was his first (and as it turned out only) multi-episode TV assignment (indeed most of his subsequent IMDB credits are documentaries). It’s clear that he was unprepared for the demanding time scales required of Doctor Who story production; it’s less clear to what extent others had to step in to help him out; it’s very clear that John Nathan-Turner never wanted to see him again.

The fifth chapter, ‘Cinematic and Videographic’, looks at the extent to which Joyce brought film productions values to Warriors’ Gate, including the costuming as well as the cinematography, and the extent to which it fitted within the New Romantic Zeitgeist.

The sixth chapter, ‘Going Against the Grain’, looks at the impact of the films Last Year in Marienbad, Dark Star, Orphée and 2001: A Space Odyssey in the cinematography of Warriors’ Gate. An interesting quote from Clifford Rose indicates that he saw Rorvik as much closer to Dad’s Army‘s Captain Mainwaring (Secret Army is not mentioned).

The seventh chapter, ‘The Impeccable Realism of Unreality’, looks more deeply at the two Cocteau films, La Belle et la Bête and Orphée, and at their impact on the plot concepts in Warriors’ Gate. (It is also noted that La Belle et la Bête experienced similar production difficulties in post-war France.)

The eighth chapter, ‘The Individual Confronted by the Desolate Universe’, looks briefly at the design of the story by David H. Smith, especially the eponymous Gate, and what it symbolises and is derived from.

A brief conclusion reflects again on the question of authorship, and applies it to New Who, especially Neil Gaiman’s Nightmare in Silver.

As I said, this is one of the longer, richer books in the Black Archive series, and will certainly help those of us who are still trying to get our heads around Warriors’ gate, forty-two years after it was first broadcast. You can get it here.

What to expect in 2023, according to science fiction

Posted on 1 January 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

For the last few years I’ve done a post looking at the science fiction set in each year, written twenty years or more in the past. I’m a bit late this time, but it’s still 1 January.

I wasn’t able to find a single film set in 2023 which was more than twenty years old. I did find eight novels, one video game, and two Japanese anime series (and a third set in 2023 but missing my twenty-years-before deadline as it was made in 2004). To start with the anime:

The 1988-89 series Gunbuster, known in Japan as Top o Nerae! (トップをねらえ!, “Shoot for the Top!”), concerns the adventures of young Noriko who is training to be a space pilot in Okinawa, six years after her father went missing in the first battles with the alien invaders. (You remember those battles with the alien invaders back in 2015, yeah?) There are only six episodes and I may give it a try. Here are the opening titles.

Ten years later, in 1998, the TV adaptation of the manga Silent Möbius (サイレントメビウス, Sairento Mebiusu) started with an episode set in 2023, explaining how the central character, Rally Cheyenne, recruits women with paranormal powers to Tokyo’s Attacked Mystification Police (AMP) to fight off the Lucifer Hawks from the world of Nemesis. (The original manga seems to be set in 2024.) 26 episodes altogether, and here are the opening titles.

Made a year too late for my usual count, as mentioned previously, the anime series Burn-Up Scramble is about a police woman in the secretive Warriors unit of the Tokyo police, looking for romance and finding crime action instead.

I’m also not counting the 1986 Twilight Zone episode Quarantine, in which the protagonist enters cryogenic sleep in 2023 but all the action comes after he wakes up in 2347.

The one video game set in 2023 is Perfect Dark, originally released by Nintendo in 2000 but remastered since and still on the market, about special agent Emma Dark heading off an alien-led conspiracy to Take Over The World. The trailer is visually impressive if the script is a bit cringe (“the only person man enough to handle the job … is a woman!”)

Over on Playstation, State of Emergency, released in 2002 (so just before my deadline), has a back-story where The Corporation overthrows the federal US government in 2023 and starts to oppress people; players get to take turns overthrowing it. But the action is set in 2035.

So, that leaves the eight novels. Taking them from most to least obscure, we start with one from almost exactly two hundred years ago, Revelations of the Dead-alive (later republished as London and Its Eccentricities in the Year 2023), by John Banim, published in 1824. The book is actually a satirical comedy targeting the London world of writing and art in the early 1820s, in excessive detail. But some changes have happened over the last 200 years. Kensington has become built up, while Fulham has returned to pastureland. Automatic cutlery feeds people at meals. Automated brooms sweep the pavements. Freight wagons are drawn by camels rather than by horses. And Austria and Russia go to war over the colonisation of the Moon (that is, the bits that the British didn’t get to first). You can get it here or here.

Published in 1890, Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton, is a sequel and riposte to Edward Bellamy’s famously utopian Looking Backward. In fact only the framing narrative is set in 2023, where a Chinese history professor lectures his American students about the events of three years before, when China successfully invaded a weak socialist America in 2020. You can get it here.

The great French graphic artist Enki Bilal first hit the scene in 1980 with La Foire aux immortels (The Bedlam of Immortals), the opener of his Nikopol Trilogy. The other two volumes are set two years later, but the story starts in 2023 when disgraced former astronaut Alcide Nikopol returns to Earth after thirty years in cryogenic sleep, and makes common cause with the Egyptian god Horus both to overthrow the corrupt and near-Fascist government in Paris and to repel the other Egyptian gods who have been hovering around in a pyramidal spaceship. I think that’s a fair summary. You can get it here in English and here in the original French.

The most recent of the novels is The Free Lunch by Spider Robinson, published in 2001, and set in a Disney-like theme park which is troubled by time-travelling dwarfs from the future. Our twelve-year-old hero needs to evade the surveillance systems and thuggish human enforcers of 2023, and gain the confidence of the time travellers to ensure that history goes on the right track. (I think.) You can get it here.

The Turing Option, co-written by sf author Harry Harrrison and artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky, and published in 1992, starts on 8 February 2023 with the protagonist getting seriously injured in an assassination attempt. The book itself stretches into 2024 with lots of global action, but the 2023 bits are mostly about the pioneering neurosurgery techniques that get our hero back on his feet again, with lots of discussion of computer theory and rather bogus reminiscences of his Irish childhood. You can get it here.

From a little earlier, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, by Matt Ruff was published in 1997 and is another satire, channeling the sprits of Neal Stephenson’s early work and the Illuminatus! trilogy. It’s set in October and November 2023, focussed on New York. The Empire State Building was destroyed in 2006 when a Boeing 747 accidentally crashed into it, but the Twin Towers are still standing. Donald Trump died in 2013 when the spaceship in which he planned to travel to Mars blew up on the launchpad, but Queen Elizabeth II is still alive and well, and personally directing military strikes against her enemies. There’s a mutant great white shark in the sewers, and Ayn Rand resurrected as an AI personality. It doesn’t really hit the mark for me, but you can get it here.

In Killing Time (2000), mainstream novelist and historian Caleb Carr tries to write science fiction and does not really succeed. There was a global financial crisis in 2007, the USA is at war with Afghanistan because of a terrorist attack, and the whole world is recovering from the effects of a global pandemic. A shadowy group of people are undermining democratic political systems in the West by spreading false information and conspiracy theories on the Internet. Unfortunately they are the heroes, and our protagonist joins their mission, but it does not work out smoothly. You can get it here.

Finally, and on a high note, Bruce Sterling‘s Islands in the Net from 1988 has the USA and Soviet Union maintaining the peace in 2023, but with growing challenges from small states like Grenada and Luxembourg who provide data havens which undermine the position of Big Business. Everyone has wearable computers in their watches. South Africa has achieved majority rule. (In 1987, Nelson Mandela had three more years in prison ahead of him.) It’s all a bit utopian from thirty-some years on, but there’s some interesting discussions to have about why the world worked out as it did and not as Sterling imagined it. You can get it here.

I think this is the fourth or fifth roundup I’ve done of science fiction set in the year to come, and honestly, apart from Islands in the Net, this time it’s a disappointing crop. Don’t worry though; there’s some much more interesting stuff lined up for 2024.

Books set in 2023:
Revelations of the Dead-alive (aka London and Its Eccentricities in the Year 2023), by John Banim (1824)
Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton (1890)
The Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal (1980)
Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling (1988)
The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky (1992)
Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, by Matt Ruff (1997)
Killing Time, by Caleb Carr (2000)
The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson (2001)

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Monthly Archives: January 2023

The Romans, by Jacob Edwards (and Dennis Spooner, and Donald Cotton)

August 2019 books

Filter House, by Nisi Shawl; The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness

Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins (and John Lydecker / Stephen Gallagher)

What to expect in 2023, according to science fiction