14) [Doctor Who] Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks
A sequel to State of Decay, published in 1994, featuring the Seventh Doctor, Ace, Bernice Summerfield, a guest appearance from Romana, a Dashiell Hammett private eye, more vampires, and conspiring Time Lords back on Gallifrey (reference is also made to The Five Doctors). Very interesting to see what Terrance Dicks could do once liberated from the novelisation format. Here we have the Doctor and Ace running a speakeasy in Al Capone’s Chicago, while Bernice and Romana return to the planet of State of Decay (now mysteriously easier to get to – it is only towards the end of the book that someone remembers that it is in E-Space – and with a much larger population) to check on the return of vampirism there. Bernice’s attempts to bring British parliamentary democracy to the peasants and aristos may not bear immediate fruit. It all hangs together remarkably well, though, with only a few lapses of prose that reminded me, ah yes, this is by Terrance Dicks. (The private eye character gets a few first-person sections of narrative, though otherwise we are in standard omniscient narrator territory.) Good fun.
she actually answers a set of questions from a student who is basically trying to use her brains to write her essay for her
A little backstory is warranted here. When I was at Indiana University, I was in an environmental studies class where I had a research paper on a topic that involved the Brazilian tire industry. There was some piece of information I was missing; I’d done a library search and got nowhere. So I sent an email to a Brazilian tire company website basically asking “Do you know of anyone who might be able to provide information about [specialized piece of information]?”
I got a snotty email back: “I’m not here to do your homework for you! Look it up yourself!”
Well, the thing was, I had tried to look it up myself, and I’d made my previous efforts clear in the email, and … really? All I was asking for was if he knew of someone who might have the information I was looking for. Which, last time I checked, is a form of research. I wasn’t asking him to do my goddamned homework.
I then swore if the shoe was on the other foot, I wouldn’t treat someone else that way.