Usually as soon as the detailed Hugo statistics have been published, I run an analysis looking at the closely results, the lower placings, and the almost-nominated. I have done it again this year – see who won by one vote, who got onto the ballot by one vote, who came sixth despite almost topping the final ballot in their category and who was beaten by No Award – but I also have thoughts about the strengths of the individual categories.
As usual, Best Novel and Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, appear the strongest, with the most nomination votes and the most nominees. The other two categories that look very robust are the two Best Artist categories, which had the lowest number of first preference votes for No Award and both the lowest number and the lowest percentage of No Award votes in the runoff.
But other categories seem a bit more vulnerable. If the old 25% rule had still been in force, two categories would have been No Awarded this year – Best Editor Long Form and Best Fanzine (the latter by a hair’s breadth). Best Editor Long Form also had the lowest number of nominating votes, the lowest number of nominees, the lowest number of final ballot votes and the highest percentage of No Award votes among first preferences. I have long been of the view that it is difficult for Hugo voters to make a fair assessment of the editor’s role in bringing a novel to press.
Best Fanzine has been struggling to attract voters for a while. Fanzines are at the core of the history of science fiction fandom, and it would be a sad day if we had to admit that they are no longer relevant for a critical majority of fans. But sometimes sad days come.
The special Best Poem category performed below my expectations. It had the lowest threshold for getting on the final ballot, and the highest number of No Award first preference votes. I would want to see at least one more trial before I voted to ratify it as a new Hugo category.
More robust than the above, but worth noting that Best Game or Interactive Work had the highest percentage of No Award votes in the runoff.
Second paragraph of third of the sections of “The Dance of the Horned Road”:
Apart from Fairly. Alone, scared.
This won the BSFA Award for Best Novel this year, beating the poem Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead, and the novel Rabbit in the Moon, by Fiona Moore; Adrian Tchaikovsky withdrew Alien Clay from consideration. Apart from Alien Clay, none of them got a lot of Hugo nominations in Best Novel, which is what I was concentrating on at the time (Calypso did make the Hugo ballot for Best Poem, and got my vote), so I was really taken by surprise; I had not heard much buzz about it.
Having bought it and got around to reading it on the 24-hour ferry from Rosslare to Dunkirk, I was really surprised by how inventive a novel it is. In my mind, fairly or unfairly, the BSFA tends to go for safer choices. This is a narrative of blocks of 381 words (I did not count, but I bet there are 381 of them), describing the heroic journey of a young woman called Fairly across a world that is very different from ours (though we’re told it’s 2024). At the same time (so to speak) starting in the year 2314, another young woman, Rowena Savalas, is reading Fairly’s story, “The Dance of the Horned Road” and adding footnotes to it over a period of decades, so that we have not so much a story-in-a-story as a short-story-slightly-outside-a-much-longer-story.
We therefore have an inventive way of exploring two different worlds. Fairly’s quest / odyssey takes her through shattered communities and even into outer space, while steadily being pursued by the Breathing Man and handling the chas, which seem to be intelligent pigs also used as currency. Rowena joins us in observing this from centuries in the future, and explaining the awkward parts of her own world’s approach to history and life.
My one point of dissatisfaction is that the long footnotes are not always rendered correctly on the Kindle reader, which in pop up view will only show the first paragraph of the note without indicating that there is more. I was about half way through before I realised that this was a problem, and had to go back and reread the previous notes. With that in mind, you can get Three Eight One here.
The only remaining novel to have won the Tiptree/Otherwise, BSFA and/or Clarke Awards is Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, this year’s Clarke winner. Once I have read it, I’m going to take up a new project: reading books by all of the Nobel laureates in literature who were not white men.
So Long a Letter is an epistolary novel whose narrator is a recently bereaved widow; it reflects on the situation of women in West African Muslim communities in the wake of colonialism. At 90 pages, it is very short. Like most of the above list, it was first published in French, as Une si longue lettre.
It’s interesting to see the list so dominated by Senegalese writers (with one Barbadian), and also interesting that this week’s winner is so far ahead of the field, with more raters/owners on either system than the next two combined.
The English translation of Pure Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has not yet been published (which perhaps explains its rather low LibraryThing score) but is apparently on the way.
I disqualified a dozen books. Some of these are set in various countries (or mainly in the USA or UK) with Senegal getting a bigger or smaller look-in along the way; this applies to Swing Time, by Zadie Smith; How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith; The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński; The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuściński again; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, by Issa Rae; Sahara, by Michael Palin; and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French.
Others, however, are very directly addressing the Senegalese emigrant experience, and while I made a judgement that less than 50% in each case is set in Senegal, I may be wrong. Those were At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop; The Most Secret Memory of Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr; Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane; and The Belly of the Atlantic, by Fatou Diome.
Away from Africa for the next few weeks, with Romania, Guatemala, the Netherlands and Ecuador.
This is a nice idea from Cutaway Comics: what happened in the parallel universe of Inferno? How did Britain get to a state where it was ruled as a military regime by a dictator who looks just like the founder of the BBC’s Visual Effects Department?
This short comic, which I picked up at Gallifrey One earlier this year, has the answers. It’s a somewhat complex plot – Churchill allies with Oswald Mosley, who betrays and assassinates him, and then rules first in alliance with Germany and then against, before being in turn betrayed by the new leader. Meanwhile over in China, a Professor Keller is doing something odd with a mind-bending machine… It’s a well put together romp, though in our timeline Oswald Mosley would have been addressed as “Sir Oswald”, not “Baronet” (obviously a point of divergence there). But a resource-hungry country needs the potential power unleashed by Professor Stalmann…
Good stuff and you can get Inferno here (along with a DVD of extras which I didn’t get at Gallifrey).
I recently enjoyed reading Michel Barnier’s My Secret Brexit Diary, and will review it here soon. The English translation by Robin Mackay is generally very fluent, but there is a bizarre glitch in one anecdote which is worth exploring in detail. (Apologies in advance – I am not immediately translating all of the original French and German texts below, but I am giving the gist, and the official English translation of Barnier’s book is part of the story.)
Barnier quotes the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s supposed account of his first meeting with French leader General Charles de Gaulle (as relayed by a later French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), with de Gaulle thinking that his German was better than it really was:
De Gaulle croyait qu’il parlait allemand. Je ne le connaissais pas, a raconté Adenauer, et la première fois, de Gaulle m’invite à venir le voir à Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. J’étais inquiet de son accueil et de ce premier contact. Une voiture vint me chercher à l’aéroport militaire le plus proche et nous nous rapprochions de Colombey. À un moment, nous avons aperçu une grande silhouette vêtue d’un grand manteau accompagnée d’un militaire. Le chauffeur me prévint que c’était de Gaulle, venant à notre rencontre sur la route. Et mes premiers mots pour le saluer furent en allemand : “ Wie gehen Sie ? ” Interloqué, il me répondit : “ Zu Fuss ! ” Et après cela, nous avons décidé de faire appel à un interprète.
Now, this anecdote is confused in Barnier’s telling, above, because “il” and “je” swap places at the end – for reasons that I will explain, Adenauer would certainly not have said “Wie gehen Sie?” to de Gaulle. If Adenauer is the narrator, the last three sentences should surely have been,
Et ses premiers mots pour me saluer furent en allemand : “ Wie gehen Sie ? ” Interloqué, je lui répondit : “ Zu Fuss ! ” Et après cela, nous avons décidé de faire appel à un interprète.
Als Konrad Adenauer im Jahre 1958 den französischen Ministerpräsidenten Charles de Gaulle in dessen lothringischem Wohnsitz-Dörfchen Colombey-les-deux-Èglises besuchte — es war die erste Begegnung der beiden -, begrüsste ihn der Gastgeber auf deutsch: »Wie gehen Sie?« Adenauer antwortete: »Zu Fuss.«
I will now explain the actual joke. Supposedly, de Gaulle translated the stock French phrase for “How are you?”, “Comment allez-vous?” directly into German, “Wie gehen Sie?” – literally, “How are you going?” – and Adenauer, having got out of his car, replied in puzzlement “On foot!!”
The correct formal German for “How are you” is “Wie geht es Ihnen?” – literally, “How is it going for you?” Given that this is one of the first phrases that a student learns in German, it’s a bit improbable that anyone would make that mistake, and it’s also improbable that Adenauer would have misunderstood de Gaulle’s meaning even if the mistake was made.
In any case, Adenauer spoke French fluently (there is plenty of video evidence of him and de Gaulle nattering away to each other in 1958 and at later meetings) and from the protocol point of view it’s usual for the visitor to be the one who makes the effort to speak in the host’s language, not the other way around.
Having said all that, the English translation of Barnier’s memoir, by Robin Mackay, preserves Barnier’s mistake about who said what, but alters the German part of the exchange to make even less sense:
‘De Gaulle believed that he could speak German’, Adenauer recounted. ‘I didn’t know him, and for our first meeting de Gaulle invited me to come and see him at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. I was worried about this first encounter with him and what kind of welcome I would get. A car came to pick me up at the nearest military airport and soon we were approaching Colombey. At a certain point we saw a tall figure in a big coat accompanied by a soldier. The driver warned me that it was de Gaulle, coming to meet us on the road. And my first words of greeting to him were in German: “Wie geht es Ihnen?” Somewhat flustered, he replied: “Zu Fuss!” After that, we decided to get an interpreter.’
This version has Adenauer greeting de Gaulle, entirely correctly from the linguistic point of view, with “Wie geht es Ihnen?” – literally “How is it going for you?” – changing the German from the original Barnier text (and from the 1989 account in Der Spiegel). De Gaulle allegedly replies to this entirely correctly framed question, incorrectly, with “Zu Fuss!” – “On foot!” Really, this response does not answer the question as reported here, whereas at least in Barnier’s original version it does.
And really really, if de Gaulle had ever studied any German at all, he would have learned the correct reply, “Sehr gut, danke!”, long before he learned “Zu Fuss!”
And really really really, a German leader would not speak in German to greet the head of the French government, in the latter’s French countryside home, the first time they met each other, so soon after a brutal war and occupation by the Nazis. Anyway etiquette would require de Gaulle, as host, to speak first and greet his visitor.
In fact the official video of the 1958 meeting (here at 42s) shows a perfectly comfortable and relaxed exchange, with de Gaulle, aged 67, striding from his front door to greet Adenauer as soon as the latter gets out of his car. I think you can literally see Adenauer, who was 82, making the mental shift to speak French.
Even the details of the story are fictional; de Gaulle was not wearing a big coat and not accompanied by a soldier, and the conversation took place right outside his house, not on the road. The only correct point, judging from the video of the meeting (which in fairness would not have been readily available to Giscard and his audience in 1979), is that de Gaulle was the first to speak – and Barnier’s version gets that wrong too. I think we can be pretty certain that when de Gaulle spoke to Adenauer, he spoke in French.
So my suspicion, for what it is worth, is that Giscard d’Estaing made the story up out of whole cloth, to impress upon his German hosts in 1979 that he could speak to them (and also, understand them) much better than his predecessor; and Barnier unintentionally garbled the anecdote in his book; and Barnier’s English translator, trying to correct Barnier’s German and not spotting Barnier’s real mistake about the order of the speakers, garbled it further.
In mid-November of 1903, notice came from Warden Addison Johnson, of Sing Sing, that I was to report there for a scheduled execution. I informed my wife that I was going, and she raised no objection. She thought, as I did, that my role as Davis’ assistant would be little more than that of an observer.
The autobiography of the state executioner of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Massachusetts, who killed 387 people by judicially mandated electrocution between 1926 and 1939. Before I get into the substance, a bit of local interest: his father, who emigrated to America in 1844, was a devout Methodist from County Cavan, and unsuccessfully encouraged the young Robert to get ordained to the ministry. He died when his son was seven.
Elliott gives details of how he got involved, what the job practically entailed, and public reaction (which he clearly found incomprehensible). The most famous of Elliott’s cases were the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, and Bruno Hauptmann who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh. Elliott makes it pretty clear that he was personally unconvinced by the evidence in those cases, but “I did not permit my views to have any effect on the performance of my duty.” His house was bombed a few months after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, though he is hesitant to draw a straight line between the two events.
Most notoriously, his execution of a woman in 1928 was surreptitiously photographed by a reporter who had smuggled a hidden camera into the front row. Elliot reflects:
The ethics of taking or printing a photograph of this sort is not for me to discuss. However, I am inclined to believe that if more such pictures were published with the permission of the authorities, the homicide rate might decrease. Public opinion might also be aroused to the extent that capital punishment would be abolished. In either event, I think their publication would be fully justified.
Alas, I think what would happen in today’s media and social media climate would be the growth of execution porn, and indeed even in his own time, Elliott mentions the unhealthy interest of a lot of people in watching or being more closely involved in the process, an “orgy of sensationalism”.
The two strongest chapters are first, a listing of a number of cases where Elliott was very much inclined to think that the person he executed was innocent; and second, the last chapter, in which he sets out his own opposition to the death penalty.
There are several reasons why the ancient law of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” should be wiped from the statute books. First, man should not be permitted to destroy the one thing which cannot be restored–life. Furthermore, I believe that capital punishment serves no useful purpose, and is a form of revenge.
A wrong, no matter how serious, is not righted by ending a life. And if, as has happened, the condemned should not be guilty, then the tragedy is complete. These instances, of course, are very rare; but the judgment of juries is not infallible. There is always the possibility that an innocent person will pay the extreme penalty.
That’s certainly my own feeling on the subject too; and I think any of us would have to admit that Elliott, who died very soon after this book was published in 1939, had thought about it a lot more than most people.
Since the bodies had been buried by people in Kibuye after the genocide, the general location of the main grave was known: a large, somewhat sunken area of dirt and grass below the priests’ rooms and on the cusp of the northern slope down to the lake. With Stefan at the controls of the backhoe over the previous day or two, the surface layers had already been lifted away and four of us began working with picks, shovels, and trowels to expose the human remains closest to the top of the grave. Doug was setting up and running the electronic mapping station that would chart the contours of the site and provide a three-dimensional outline of each body and its location in the grave. The production of highly detailed and trial-friendly maps was Melissa’s specialty. Ralph was running between the grave and the analysis areas by the church, photographing both processes.
A couple of rather gruesome books up for review today and tomorrow, I’m afraid. Clea Koff outlines the experiences of a forensic anthropologist in the mid to late 1990s in Rwanda and the Balkans. This was a side of conflict resolution that I never came very close to, though colleagues certainly did. The description of how an international team of variously motivated and variously qualified specialists comes together and works together in different and difficult sets of circumstances is very interesting reading; but the core is in the detail, if you can take it, of how she was able to bring closure (or often, sadly, not) to people whose relatives had disappeared as their countries collapsed.
It’s easy and lazy for conspiracy theorists (and genocide apologists) to claim that Srebrenica, or the Serbian attack on the people of Kosovo, or the Rwandan massacres, were hoaxes made up by the international conspirators of your choice. It’s vital that we do enable international organisations to follow these stories to their natural conclusion, and although Koff doesn’t dwell on the political underpinning for her work, it’s always there. You can get The Bone Woman here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and my top unread non-fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are Silence, by Diarmaid McCulloch, and The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition.
Current Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones Musings on Mothering, ed. Teika Bellamy ‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
Last books finished Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood Black Mountain and other stories, by Gerry Adams (did not finish) Irish Conflict in Comics, by James Bacon The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson @Wouters Wondere Wereld, by Guy Gilias Thirst, by Amelie Nothomb The School of Death, by Robbie Morrison et al
Next books Omega, by Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer
Second paragraph of third essay (on The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint):
It is clear that this volume is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one, sorry):
According to his own account he was not what we call conscious, and yet at the same time the experience was a very positive one with a quality of its own. On one occasion, someone had been talking about “seeing life” in the popular sense of knocking about the world and getting to know people, and B. who was present (and who is an Anthroposophist) said something I can’t quite remember about “seeing life” in a very different sense. I think he was referring to some system of meditation which claimed to make “the form of Life itself” visible to the inner eye. At any rate Ransom let himself in for a long cross-examination by failing to conceal the fact that he attached some very definite idea to this. He even went so far–under extreme pressure–as to say that life appeared to him, in that condition, as a “coloured shape.” Asked “what colour,” he gave a curious look and could only say “what colours! yes, what colours!” But then he spoiled it all by adding, “of course it wasn’t colour at all really. I mean, not what we’d call colour,” and shutting up completely for the rest of the evening. Another hint came out when a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as “So you think you’re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there’ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye’ll have a grand time of it!” when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, “Oh, don’t you see, you ass, that there’s a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?” That, of course, directed McPhee’s fire to him. What emerged was that in Ransom’s opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said “engulfed.” He used the word “trans-sexual” I remember and began to hunt about for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting “trans-gastronomic”), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels. But I am pretty sure he was thinking of something he had experienced on his voyage to Venus. But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject–which he doesn’t often allow–and had incautiously said, “Of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,” when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.” And that is about all I can tell you of his journey. One thing is certain, that he came back from Venus even more changed than he had come back from Mars. But of course that may have been because of what happened to him after his landing.
This is the second of C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, after Out of the Silent Planet which is set on Mars, and before the eminently skippable That Hideous Strength, set on Earth. It is a re-telling of the Garden of Eden myth, with Weston, the villain of the previous book, turning up as the corrupting Satan for the Venusian Adam and Eve (particularly the latter) and Ransom (the hero) doing his best do counter Weston by means of argument and eventually brute force. It’s a story of not always totally exciting philosophical discussions against a fantastic and well-described landscape, with a sense of the mythic importance of the struggle between Good and Evil. Lewis says in a note at the start that “All the human characters in this book are purely fictitious and none of them is allegorical.” I am not sure that I agree!
The whole thing is told in a framing narrative by Lewis as himself, including this reflection on just how evil Professor Weston is:
He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of “scientifiction,” in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite–the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species–a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary. In Professor Weston the power had at last met the dream.
Obviously a direct attack on science fiction, science fiction fandom, and interplanetary colonisation, an early shot in the dialogue that he later had with Arthur C. Clarke. Given that this was published in 1943, one can forgive a certain scepticism about the unbridled benefits of technology. However, C.S. Lewis was not about to challenge Hugh Carswell for the title of first Belfast science fiction fan.
This was my top book in my LibraryThing catalogue which I had not already written up. That pile has now been somewhat up-ended by receiving two dozen books from my father’s library, so the next will be East of Eden by John Steinbeck.
I rankedThe Devil’s Chord fifth out of the eight stories from last year’s Doctor Who series, writing about it:
The Devil’s Chord has a really sinister plot, with music being removed from the world; Big Finish has sometimes dared to play with the soundscape of the fictional universe, but this is the first time that the TV show has really gone there. This time it was the execution that was a bit silly, with Jinkx Monsoon really chewing the scenery as the Maestro.
The returning figure from the show’s history that really took me by (pleasant) surprise was June Hudson, in her first appearance on screen at the age of ninety-something; she did all the costume design for late 1970s and early 1980s Who, and also for Blake’s 7. She is the only character actually killed in the 1963 part of the episode.
In his typically readable and enjoyable new Black Archive, out this month, Dale Smith goes behind the spectacle which was my abiding impression of the episode and looks at its commentary on pop culture, especially on the Beatles – indeed, the book is almost as much about the Beatles as about Doctor Who, not that this is a bad thing necessarily.
The first chapter, “The Beatles and the 60s”, looks at the social and political context of post-war change, and in particular how this produced the Beatles, James Bond and Doctor Who. He looks at the extent to which different eras of Who lean towards the Beatles or Bond.
The second chapter, “‘You Can’t Use a Single Note'”, looks in detail at the surprisingly interesting question of when and how the music of the real Beatles has been and can be used in Doctor Who, both in broadcast of new stories and in the re-issuing of old ones.
The third chapter, “The Day the Music Died”, starts by examining the extent to which the episode belongs to the character of Maestro, and then takes a deep dive into music as a cultural phenomenon and the ethical questions of creativity. Its second paragraph is:
Whilst we’ve seen that pop music was a part of Doctor Who almost from the very start, it was predominantly used as diegetic background music. That began to change in the dying days of 20th-century Doctor Who, with Delta and the Bannermen (1987) bolstering its 1950s credentials by including ‘live’ cover versions of a number of period hits, rerecorded by Keff McCulloch, his wife, her sister and a number of other singers put together just for this occasion, or Silver Nemesis (1988) featuring a ‘live’ performance from the actual Courtney Pine². But it was Davies who introduced the modern TV trope of large sections of silent action played to loud, emotive non-diegetic music to Doctor Who, perhaps most notably with the Master unleashing the Toclafane to the sounds of ‘Voodoo Child’ (2005) by Rogue Traders³. But still he held back from sending the TARDIS into one of the few genres it has never visited: the full-blown musical. Rumours abounded that The Devil’s Chord would be Doctor Who’s version of the musical episode, something which had become a staple of genre TV since Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) gave us Once More with Feeling (2001). ² Cooray Smith, James, ‘Delta and the Bannerman’. ³ Donnelly, KJ, ‘Tracking British Television: Pop Music as Stock Soundtrack to the Small Screen’, Popular Music vol 21 no 3, Music and Television, October 2002, pp 331-43.
The fourth chapter, “‘I Thought That Was Non-Diegetic'”, looks briefly at the circumstances of the episode’s production, and then at the breaking of the fourth wall in Doctor Who and elsewhere as an element of postmodernism.
The fifth chapter, “Beatles vs Stones”, looks at Russell T. Davies’ intentions for his second go at running the show: change, to adapt to the demands of today’s audience, while also appreciating its ‘cultural heft’. He posts out that while you can have an argument about whether the Beatles or The Rolling Stones were the better band, there is no argument about which was more culturally important. He mounts a strong defense of Davies’ approach to New Who, even in the current uncertainty about the way forward. In a sense, this is the Black Archive we need to read in the current time of confusion.
