Monthly Archives: April 2024

Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines

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Second paragraph of chapter Three:

‘Mollie, Mollie, Mr McCrimmon has been kidnapped. It means the end of us unless we can find him quickly!’

I wrote at length about the TV story, John Peel’s novelisation and Simon Guerrier’s Black Archive on it just over two years ago; however I’m coming back to it now because Frazer Hines, who starred as Jamie in the original show, has produced an alternative novelisation, assisted by Mike Tucker and Steve Cole. The authors have taken the step of the framing narrative of the second (and last) showing the the TV story in 1968, when newly acquired companion Zoe was invited to watch it as an example of the Doctor’s previous adventures.

Is there a point? Yes, I think so; John Peel in his novelisation was trying to make sense of Dalek mythology in the context of the show as a whole, whereas here we have Hines and co-writers humanising the experiences of both Jamie and Victoria, giving a lot more back-story to the companions and indeedto the other characters.

One of the problems I have with The Evil of the Daleks is that quite a lot of the plot doesn’t really make sense. But the TV story keeps you entertained with the pace of events, and this novelisation does the same, from a slightly different direction to John Peel’s. You can get it here.

Bechdel fail, as is the TV story. (Some argue that Ruth Maxtible telling Mollie to get some tea at the end of episode 2 crosses the Bechdel threshold, but this is incorrect, because the tea is for Jamie.)

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel (brief note)

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

After all that wild splendour, it’s an odd jolt to find himself in Victoria in those tamed and pretty streets. There are Englishmen everywhere; he steps out of the train and the accents of his homeland surround him. He could stay here for a while he thinks.

It has time-travelling, and a plot that turns out to make sense. I wasn’t really into it at first, but loved the ending. You can get it here.

Airside, by Christopher Priest

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Justin’s family background was conventional. He had one sister, four years older than him. Her name was Amanda. Her friends called her Mandy, but Justin and his parents invariably called her Amanda. His father’s name was Mortimer, and his mother was Nicole. Their names for each other were Mort and Nicky.

A weird little jewel at the end of Christopher Priest’s writing career, this book’s protagonist, a film student who grows up to be a film critic, becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a Hollywood film star at Heathrow Airport in 1948. There’s a lot of exploration of film history and of airports and the human process of flight, and although I worked out what had happened to the actress some time before the characters did, there was more than enough momentum to keep me going. Like most of Priest’s books, this one will set your mind racing rather than your pulse. A decent note to end on. You can get it here.

Bechdel fail, I think. Most of the book is tight-third to the male protagonist. There are a couple of scenes where his girlfriend is talking to an older actress, but he is present and in the conversation too.

The Moonday Letters, by Emmi Itäranta (brief note)

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Second paragraph of third chapter;

I have never understood why people would rather attempt to open conversations with strangers when they could be quiet instead.

I loved her first book, Memory of Water, and was on the Clarke jury when it was shortlisted in 2015. But I found this less engaging. Single-note emotionally, and the means and motivation of the eco-terrorists not very well explained in the end. (I also noticed repeated mentions of feline ears!) You can get it here.

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He was at a cheap, unstable table barely held together by rusty nails and the efforts of a unskilled carpenter. A half-eaten bowl of pepper soup, a mostly eaten plate of suya, and three tall, brown, empty bottles of Gulder beer were sloppily spread in front of him like reluctant offerings. Everything around him vibrated, including his own head, pulsating with the loud music and the rising rush of alcohol. Up on the makeshift stage, where a yellow-painted board spelled out the words: Fela Kuti and the Africa 70 in dark blue letters, a thin, shirtless man in tight trousers with chalk markings on his face sang into the microphone while simulating sex with a sweaty, skinny woman in a gold miniskirt and bra, cowrie shell bangles shaking around her ankles and wrists. Fela’s voice strained as he sang in pidgin.

There is probably a whole subgenre out there of books about stealing items from the British museum. The only other one I have read is a Lovejoy novel, The Very Last Gambado. Both Lovejoy and the protagonist here, Shigidi, arbitrate between their own homelands and cultures (East Anglia and Nigeria respectively) and the symbolic centre of imperial cultural theft, the British Museum, and obviously we cheer for the insurgents both times.

It’s a richly imagined, sexy contemporary magical world, with the metaphors about colonialism and cultural appropriation text rather than subtext; and the sense of place is very good in both Nigeria and London. Entertaining to see Aleister Crowley still alive and taking an interest in contemporary affairs. I did feel that the system of magic and godhood was rather over-bureaucratised, using frankly Western concepts of management which are good for the 21st century in Nigeria or England but would hardly have been around for the millennia! Still, enjoyable and short, and you can get it here.

Bechdel fail, I think. Shigidi’s main accomplice is a succubus called Nneoma, but I don’t thik she speaks to another woman without him being present and in the conversation.

Off Target, by Eve Smith (brief note)

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

A straggle of year twos darts past like startled fish, first one way, then the other. Did I ever run like that? It’s hard to imagine. My body is calcifying; with every failed conception it grows more inert. Sometimes, it feels as if I’ve been dropped down a very deep well, and I’m lying there, watching the clouds roll past, listening to the far-off lives of others.

I enjoyed this. A really well depicted moral and personal dilemma which is not too far from today’s tech. The threat to the protagonist and her family is as much from the legacy of her own choices as from external bigotry. Raised my eyebrow a bit at a world where laboratories in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia routinely collaborate, but sometimes there are things in novels that are not true. You can get it here.

Tuesday reading

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Current
De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout
The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse
All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison

Last books finished
Paradise Towers, by John Toon
Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks

Next books
Kinda, by Frank Collins
Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Serve You, by Al Ewing, Rob Williams et al

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Second frame of third installment:

(Alice, thinking):
“The Doctor would smile, that special excited-little-boy grin he got when something wonderful and impossible and brilliant happened.
And he’d say something like:”
Doctor:
“Ha! Yes! Temporal protogenic reversal!“

Second in the sequence of Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, continuing his adventures with recently bereaved London librarian Alice, anonymous musician Jones and chameleon entity ARC. Alice is much more interesting than the other two and gets much more plot, especially when her dead mother appears to come back. The standout however is the first episode where time starts running backwards – this has been done a couple of times before in Who, but it’s difficult to do well and it is carried off with aplomb. You can get it here.

Bechdel fail. When Alice meets her resurrected mother, they talk about the Doctor. There is a flashback scene to Alice’s childhood, but it’s not a dialogue.

The Thousand Earths, by Stephen Baxter (brief note)

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

John had no siblings. And he had grown up sterile, thanks to a gene-warfare attack on London when he was a boy. So Sarah was precious to the whole extended family – and had always seemed especially so to John, otherwise introverted, emotionally undeveloped. Or so even his wife, Sarah, found him.

I found a cache of last year’s Clarke submissions which I did read at the time but had’t yet written up here, so here is a sequence of short posts to clear them from my unblogged list.

I thought the slowly disappearing world sequences in The Thousand Earths were really fantastic. Gave me nightmares. The sequences involving the protagonist, however, seemed to me to be a very slow way of getting us to the place where he needed to be. I can forgive it for the other bits though. And I am glad that sex will still be a thing in the far future!

You can get it here.