It being the 48th birthday of Doctor Who today, I thought I would start a brief series of posts about my favourite stories in various media for each of the Doctors, which hopefully will encourage fellow fans to explore a few more books or audios (or maybe even check out some TV stories with a fresh eye).

1) TV I have the unfashionable view that The Daleks' Master Plan celebrates a lot of what made Old Who great and also looks forward to later stories where the Doctor becomes a man of action. It has Daleks, pyramids, Mavic Chen, Sara Kingdom and Bret Vyon; and it has tragedy as well as comedy. Unfortunately three quarters of it has been burninated, but the BBC's narration with Peter Purves is well worth getting hold of. (Fan opinion differs from me: the poll I did a couple of years ago picked The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and both the Dynamic Rankings site and the DWM Might 200 picked The Daleks as the best First Doctor story. A common theme there.)
	2) Books No novelisation of a Doctor Who story is ever likely to be as good as the very first, originally published as Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks, by David Whitaker, now reprinted and available in the shops with a foreword by Neil Gaiman. Whitaker has to take the story from the start, from Ian's point of view, and injects darkness and romance into it, and is of course untroubled by dodgy special effects. Many Doctor Who book collections start here and it should certainly be in yours.
2a) Spinoff books For each Doctor I will pick a favourite book and then also pick favourites from the various other categories of book available for that Doctor. Here, I'm going for Kim Newman's novella Time and Relative, published by Telos, set in a cold London winter shortly before An Unearthly Child and told very much from Susan's point of view. I tend to give extra marks to Who books which capture the characters well and which also tie into the mythology of Who (and indeed other mythologies), on top of their literary merits; I think this one scores on all those points.
	3) Audio It's an early one from the Companion Chronicles of Big Finish, But I particularly liked Marc Platt's Mother Russia on first listening, a story where Peter Purves explains what happened when he, Dodo and the Doctor got caught up in Napoleon's invasion of Russia. (Another early Companion Chronicle, also by Platt and set at almost the same time, is Frost Fire, told by Maureen O'Brien, which tells us how Vicki met Jane Austen.)
4) Dishonourable mention To balance the picture I will mention a story from each Doctor which I cannot stand. Byzantium!, by Keith Topping, brings the Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara to the city of Byzantium. The Doctor ends up producing the Gospel of St Mark and Topping's research into names, languages and architecture is embarrassingly poor. He goes on and on about the city's minarets, which were not built anywhere for another 700 years and not in Constantinople until after 1453. So it edges out The Sensorites at the bottom of my list.

More tomorrow, possibly.

Sorry to say that I thought this was a rare misfire from the Big Finish main sequence of stories. I love the chemistry between Paul McGann’s Doctor and Julie Cox’s Mary Shelley, but this story keeps them apart in return for a tale of moral, psychological and time-paradoxical complexity which the script didn’t really do justice to. Some elements of the plot were similar to the Who book I was reading at the same time, Justin Richards’ novel The Death Riders, which confused me a bit, though this is not anyone else’s fault.

I got hold of this some time before I got the first in the trilogy of mildly supernatural Irish romances. In this one, the happily predestined couple fall in love at first sight (on page 24) and spend the book struggling only with each other’s personalities (and their own) and exploring the troubling possibility that the family ghosts are pushing them together before deciding to ignore it. Every other character (ghosts included) wishes them well, so there is no external factor to make things interesting. The anthropologist-turned-barmaid from the first book gives birth at the end of this one, in a graphically described scene which rather gives the impression that she and the baby miraculously managed without a placenta – I know that’s normal for births on film and TV, but hadn’t realised it extended to fluffy romance novels too.

Another of the double Doctor Who books published earlier this year, two 200-page novels bolted together. Baxendale’s Heart of Stone is set in an English farmhouse where things start turning to moon rock, and the Doctor has to put things right – reminded me of that much better YA novel where moon rock starts animating the exhibits in the New York Natural History Museum – can anyone remember its name and author? Death Riders is formula Richards rather than epic Richards, and has a somewhat confused plot of circus folk on an asteroid concealing a deep secret. The two books will be appreciated by younger readers, but otherwise will appeal only to completists like me.

Of course, I saw the film when it first came out, and found myself continually comparing the book to it. But in fact the book holds up well – a lot of the shocking visual moments from the film are reasonably firmly rooted in the book, and sometimes actually come off better on the page. And the book turns out to be not really about the process of reviving dinosaurs, but about the fragility of human endeavour against the chaos of the natural world – the author’s mouthpiece character, who gets to speak long infodumps and whose gnomic statements preface every section of the book, is not a palæontologist but the mathematician played by Jeff Goldblum in the film.

I did notice, however, that very few of the Costa Rican characters and none of the walk-on black characters actually had names.

From the Gulistan, II.31

A man, being tormented by a contrary wind in his belly and not having the power to retain it, unwittingly allowed it to escape. He said: ‘Friends, I had no option in what I did, the fault of it is not to be ascribed to me and peace has resulted to my internal parts. Kindly excuse me.’

The belly is a prison of wind, O wise man.
No sage retains wind in captivity.
If wind twists thy belly let it out
Because wind in the belly is a burden to the heart.

Though the original seems to have an extra couplet at the end, which can be roughly translated as, “if you are visited by a sour-faced, uncongenial friend, don’t try and prevent him from leaving.”

My commuting listening last week was the set of eight audios produced in 2008-09 telling the story of the various characters of the original Blake’s 7 before the start of the story as we know it. I strongly recommend the set as a whole to fans of the series. Some of the characters are taken in a slightly different direction to what we thought we knew of them, but in general I felt it was true to the spirit of the show as I remember it. (Thanks, I think, to for alerting me to these.) All but the last of these is half an hour in length (the last is a full hour).

The first three audios explore the dystopian society from which our heroes escape / are expelled. When Vila Met Gan, told as a flashback from canon time (though I was confused about the references to teleporting not being available), explores future England as a Brave New World society, Gan as an Epsilon being ineligible to court the girl he loves (and the infrastructure meanwhile crumbling round them). I’m coming round to Ben Aaronovitch; the writing and performance really sparkled, and I was really impressed by how well the actor playing Vila had caught Michael Keating’s voice (and then felt a bit silly when I actually looked at the CD cover properly).

Point of No Return, by James Swallow, has the rather icky story of Travis deciding whether or not to torture a detained political suspect who he believes (or claims to believe) is planning a bombing campaign. I was never hugely interested in the Travis stories, so it didn’t scratch my itches particularly, but I felt it did add a layer of conviction to the social background of the future Earth.

Eye of the Machine, by Ben Aaronovitch, is absolutely brilliant, probably my favourite of the bunch. It tells us how Kerr Avon (played by Colin Salmon), a bright lad from a colony planet at the Oxford University of 2230, falls in with Anna Grant (played by Keeley Hawes) and her radical political friends, at the same time trying to satisfy the intellectual demands of his professor (played by Geoffrey Palmer). This is all in the background context of Roj Blake’s Freedom Party contesting the elections; even if the people support them, will they be allowed to win? We know the answer of course but it’s a great ride.

The other five audios switch us away from Earth. The next two, Blood and Earth by Ben Aaronovitch and Flag and Flame by Marc Platt, take us to Auron and the experience of growing up as part of a family of telepathic clone sisters all called Cally. The first has Jan Chappell turning up as a voice from the past helping a younger Cally escape a crashed spaceship; the second has two more Callys navigating physical and political hurdles, manipulated by the men in charge of their world. The Aaronovitch episode is the better of the two, but both do a good job of conveying a non-human culture with general telepathy. It’s a little unsatisfying that we don’t actually find out which of the surviving Callys is ‘our’ Cally as played by Chappell on TV.

We come slightly closer to home ground with two audios about Jenna by Simon Guerrier, The Dust Run and The Trial. Once again, the first of the two is better, taking us through Jenna’s childhood and adolescent rivalry with one Townsend, played very steamily by Benedict Cumberbatch; the second basically fulfills the role of the middle story in a trilogy of getting our main character to where we know she is at the start of the TV series (though again has some colour about the future Earth society). Jenna herself is played by Carrie Dobro from Babylon 5; obviously she was so traumatised by the events of The Trial that she lost her American accent once she was in the London.

Finally, Escape Velocity tells the back story of Zen, or Deep Space Vehicle Nine as he originally was when constructed by The System. The main character is not Zen but the crew member known as healer, played by Zoe Tapper, with no memory of her past life but a strong desire to find out. Zen is played by Alastair Lock and Tracey-Anne Obermann appears as another character. It’s another good portrayal of an utterly alien set-up.

These are mostly satisfying and all worth while for the Blake’s 7 fan. I think the Aaronovitch stories, and The Dust Run and Escape Velocity, would be perfectly accessible for the listener who knew nothing about Blake’s 7, though they might then be a little confused if they started watching the TV show…

A brilliant short book about a junior judge in the Russian countryside who discovers he has cancer and dies. Lots of well observed psychology, packaged very effectively. I have sometimes felt that Tolstoy rambles but not here.

What seemed like a long long book (though in fact only 450 pages) set in the devastated Confederacy of late 1864, with parallel narrative tracks following a wounded soldier returning from Virginia to his home of Cold Mountain in North Carolina, and the woman he loves who has waited for him. Lots of lush and graphic description of the physical and human geography; not a lot (apart from one political discussion) about the, you know, slaves; and I spotted the shock ending from some way off. I’m sure some people love it but I didn’t really.

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[Locked entry]

I got frustrated waiting for the lift to bring me down to the opening session of the conference, and decided to walk downstairs. On the floor below me I found, waiting for the lift with two bodyguards, the Bulgarian foreign minister; and I rapidly persuaded him to walk down with me (we wrote a paper together in 2000, before his political career began).

What I had not realised is that he is also an sf fan – he complimented me on my bookblogging (which I suppose he follows via Twitter) and said that sf is his main leisure reading.

Maybe there’s a potential panel there for an sf convention, pulling together prominent political figures who are also sf readers (though not necessarily active in fandom)?

I got this off Bookmooch several years ago, and have now got around to reading it. I was really a bit disappointed. It was published in 1985, and rather shows its age. While there is a lot of useful detail, the system of two to six page essays with (unnumbered and confusingly referenced) notes placed in the middle gutter is not in fact very clearly structured. To get a sense of the full sequence and significance of crucial political developments, your eye has to dart back and forth across the columns. Norman Davies succeeded with the much bolder step of having what are effectively full-page footnotes.

I also found that the material did not scratch my own itches, and did not really live up to the title. This is a history of England, with a fair bit of Scotland and nods towards England and Wales. History began in 45 AD for those parts of the larger island conquered by Rome; it begins in the twelfth century for the rest. There are some honourable exceptions – Patrick Buckland’s piece on twentieth century Ireland is very good; Patrick Wormald (whose ex-sister-in-law worked for me years ago, in a bizarre bit of small-worldiness) brings the Celts into British history a bit ahead of the rest of the programme.

But my jaw really dropped when reading Keith Robbins’ complacent framing essay for the entire twentieth century. On decolonisation, he writes “The French experienced defeat in Indo-China and Algeria and the Dutch in the East Indies, but the British beat a dignified retreat – if we are prepared to overlook Aden and Cyprus… There was no major upheaval in a colony close at hand comparable to Algeria in the case of France”. I am not sure that Palestine or Rhodesia really qualify as ‘dignified retreat’ (one could also query the dignity of the British handovers in Kenya, Burma, and India/Pakistan). And I think there may also have been a British-ruled territory fairly close at hand whose internal upheavals had a certain impact on British politics. I accept that Algeria is very different from Ireland, but I think Robbins is lazy and dishonest not to even hint that there might be similarities.

The book closes with a historical Who’s Who of (I estimate) about 700 individuals, of whom 50-ish are women and 40-ish are Irish. (And none Irishwomen.) I really think this must have been a bit outdated even in 1985.

Next in line of the series of books exploring the process by which Tolkien created TLotR. The most interesting point for me was that Frodo and Sam’s path to Mordor, and even back to the Shire, emerged in Tolkien’s thinking much earlier than the story of the others after the death of Boromir. He seems to almost make up the tale of Gimli, Legolas and Aragorn as he goes along, and I must admit it’s not the most satisfying part of the book (and was the most messed around with by Peter Jackson for the film). In the middle of this, however, the Treebeard chapter stands out as a coming together of long-simmering ideas for Tolkien, who was fascinated by trees and forests and had been dropping foreshadowing references to Treebeard into his drafts without really thinking them through.

Tolkien took great care over names. It’s a bit jarring to read “Trotter” instead of “Strider”, “Ingolf” instead of “Aragorn” and “Ondor” instead of “Gondor”, but I think it’s not just familiarity with the final product – the eventually chosen names are genuinely better. There are a very few exceptions – Tolkien was not happy with “Osgiliath”, and I think rightly so, but didn’t find a good alternative. Irish readers find it amusing that one of Treebeard’s fellow elder Ents is named Finglas; this name is there in the very first draft.

I noted with interest that all the early examples of runes – basically Gandalf’s messages left at Bree and scrawled at Weathertop – use the good old-fashioned futhark, rather than what we came to know as the Cirth. The switch was made while composing the inscription on Balin’s tomb in Moria, and implemented consistently after that. The development of the runes shows off Tolkien’s deep knowledge of phonetics; you would expect him to have some familiarity with the subject as a philologist, but clearly it was a profound fascination. (Do you pronounce the ‘o’s differently in ‘Lord’ and ‘Moria’? I don’t, but Tolkien evidently did, going by his first drafts.)

Anyway, much enjoying this reconstruction of how the classic came to be.

Edited to add: amusingly, two people have responded to disagree with me on the vowels in ‘Lord’ and ‘Moria’, one saying that the ‘Moria’ vowel is longer, the other that it is shorter!

• Why can I no longer import posts from my website to my Page’s notes? – Facebook Help Centre
  
  – because Facebook is suicidal.
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• nostalgia_lj: Old Who Recs (a meme)
  
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  And another.
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  And another.
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  Zucotti Park under attack by police right now, live on video
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Police moving in on Occupy Wall Street, live.

This is a beautifully produced edition of one of the most notorious lost Doctor Who stories, a Second Doctor adventure scheduled for Season 6, which had reached the point of casting and costume design before the production team pulled the plug on it. There are a number of other known lost stories out there, many produced by Big Finish in the last couple of years, but I think only two other published scripts, both from the very first season – Anthony Coburn’s “The Masters of Luxor” (a rather dull robot tale) and Moris Farhi’s “Farewell, Great Macedon”, about the death of Alexander the Great (accompanied by a single-episode story about an alien dying for love of Barbara, “The Yellow Arc of Fragrance”), which is much better.

Big Finish did an audio version of “The Prison In Space” a year or so ago, and I noted then that it is an absolutely terrible story, and we are very fortunate that it did not survive to blight the history of Who. The Doctor and pals land on a world (which seems to be a future Earth, though I don’t think this is anywhere stipulated) which is ruled by women; the Doctor and Jamie are imprisoned in the eponymous space prison, but manage to lead a successful revolt which overthrows female rule; Zoe meanwhile has been brainwashed into feminism, but is cured by a vigorous spanking from Jamie. Little more need be said.

Despite the awfulness of the story, fans of the Troughton era will be very well rewarded by getting the book. We get both Sharples’ original outline of the story and his near-final script, which shows some interesting aspects of the production process. We also get some in-depth analysis of how such a dreadful project came so close to being executed, and a review of the script by the former ‘Time Team’ of DWM. On top of that, we get two versions of Brian Hayles’ outline of another lost story, Lords Of The Red Planet (an Ice Warrior story which slightly misfired and which Hayles the replaced with The Seeds of Death), and finally a chronology of what was going on story-wise and cast-wise in the Doctor Who production office between January 1968 and mid-1969, which goes some way to explaining the numerous misfires of Season 6, and indeed makes one glad that things were not in fact worse.

(I’m not sure I can bear to go back to the Big Finish audio, but it seemed to me that the script here was slightly funnier than Simon Guerrier’s adaptation. Maybe it’s just that my appalled reaction to the basic concept has slightly worn off and I can see the humour more clearly.)

Anyway, well done to Richard Bignell and Nothing at the End of the Lane for making a surprisingly silken purse of this pig’s ear.

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  Great piece.
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  “He killed himself when an ignorant and uncouth judge gave him the choice of a prison sentence or chemical castration; and I was overwhelmed by fury at the salacious, gloating humiliation imposed on my friend, and by a sense of guilt that I did not, could not, help him”
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  Hugely encouraging experiment, observed by David Farrell.
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  More on the G1000. An excellent idea.
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In this chapter, the carefully negotiated union of the eastern and western churches does not last, but the pressure on Constantinople is relieved for a few years by the Hungarians, to the north, and Scanderbeg and the Albanians, to the west. We end with Constantine Palæologus on the throne; but not for long. See also my notes on Siberian shamanism, life in India, transliteration, and Albanian geography.

I’ve had a run of excellent reading over the last week or so, and thoroughly enjoyed Moll Flanders, or to be more precise The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, etc. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent. Her life is indeed one of “continu’d Variety”, as she lurches from exploitative marriage to disastrous marriage to unwitting incest and back again, before breaking successfully into the business of petty theft, in the end being arrested almost by accident for a crime she had not yet committed. Defoe has her turn moralistic only at the very end, when she and the fourth husband (I think – I lost count) return to England “where we resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived”, and I sort of forgive that because one can read it as partly tongue-in-cheek, and also though a weak-ish ending it is stronger than the ending of Robinson Crusoe so obviously he was learning. I must also admit that she is rather unrealistically sanguine about the fate of her children, of whom we hear very little.

It’s a fascinating pen-picture of England in the early seventeenth century, where urban social networks were small and intimate enough that you could steal from a shop at one end of town and sell your loot to their competitor at the other; where constables were aware enough of the rights of citizens under the law to be easily intimidated by a sharp-witted suspect; where people would invest wealth not only in hard cash (“which every one knows is an unprofitable cargo to be carried to the plantations”) but also in jewels, silver plate, cloth and easily portable luxury goods. One thing that hasn’t changed, which she reflects on bitterly in the gap between husbands two and three (I think – again, I had already lost count) is the differential social power between women and men, even allowing for economic factors; Defoe verges on feminism in a couple of passages.

Anyway, very strongly recommended, if you like “continu’d Variety”; and who doesn’t?

This short book, published by Demos and mostly written by Jamie Bartlett, Jonathan Birdwell and Mark Littler, presents the results of a large and detailed survey of Facebook supporters of populist far-right movements in various western European countries, including the EDL and BNP in the UK and Vlaams Belang here. (Hungary’s Jobbik was included in the original project but dropped for reasons not really explained.) The results are interesting in various ways. Supporters of such groups tend to have much less trust in the judicial system, their own government, the European Union and the mainstream media than most people do. But they also tend to have a belief in the political process (which is I suppose why they are in organised groups in the first place), usually motivated by concerns over immigration and perceptions of Islam. I wish (and I think the researchers wish) that they had also included a question or questions about the use of political violence; Norway was added to the list of countries surveyed after the Breivik attacks in June. There is an interesting discussion in the appendix of the methodology and ethics of conducting research among Facebook users, and also how to spot trolls and remove their answers. Worth a look.

Gillian Cross was a new writer for me; I enjoyed this children’s story of sinister headmaster with supernatural powers planning to Take Over The World, a blended family, commentary on children’s TV game shows, and knowing winks to Nineteen Eighty-four. Will look out for the sequels if F enjoys it too. Thanks to and for recommending it.

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My old friend Gordon Gillespie gave a talk on this subject yesterday, covered by Slugger O’Toole here.

I had tried Ivanhoe several years ago and bounced off it; persuaded me to give it another go, and I must say that with a paper copy (rather than reading off the Blackberry as I had previously tried) it was much easier to speed-read through the cod-medieval prose and get the sense of story. This edition also has a very useful introduction pointing out that the imagined distance from the Norman Conquest to the setting of Scott’s novel is about the same as the real interval between 1688-91 and the writing of the novel. The conflict between Saxons and Normans, which feels rather anachronistic for 1192, then actually stands as a metaphor for national reconciliation between the ex-Jacobites and the Whigs. This helped me get through the book. I found it all pretty heavy-handed, though, including the treatment of the Jews both by the other characters and by the author. Occasionally the cod-medievalisms made me wonder if it was all supposed to be a joke – “It is as true as the Gospel of Saint Nicodemus” struck me as a phrase capable of more than one interpretation – but alas in the end I think the author was taking himself seriously and expected us to take it seriously too, Saxon heirs, Richard the Lion-Heart, Robin of Locksley, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. And I can’t quite manage it.

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In the early morning of 31 July 1943, our village's peaceful slumbers were interrupted by an explosion on the railway line to the south. The Resistance had successfully attacked a German troop transport, causing fairly substantial damage to the train itself and to the railway line.

These pictures were taken by a German soldier and developed by a local chemist who had the foresight to run off some extra prints:

(Pictures copied from this article.)

Although local legend speaks of 250 dead Germans, and reprisals prevented by a local cigar manufacturer who bought off the Nazi commandant with a barrel of cognac, the truth appears to be that five Wehrmacht and two local Belgian railway staffers were killed, a couple of dozen wounded, and twelve carriages and, most dramatically, the locomotive were derailed. The Resistance set off the bomb with electrical cables salvaged from the brief war of 1940, which were of English manufacture and therefore allowed the embarrassed Germans to pretend that British parachutists were responsible.

One sunny morning last weekend I decided to try and locate the bridge where all this happened. It is here, down a very overgrown lane, just about visible on Google Earth. I had difficulty in deciding if the train had fallen off the eastern or western side of the bridge (the line runs more or less north-south here); in the end I think it is the eastern side, partly because I think the sun may be on the left in the comtemporary pictures (though I suspect it was a cloudy day) and partly because the train was coming from Leuven at the time of the attack, and since Belgian trains presumably then as now were on the left track it would have been on the eastern side of the line.The path approaching the eastern side of the bridge is so overgrown that I couldn't take a decent distance shot; this is it from the other side:

Going back to the eastern side, I reckon this is the corner that features particularly in the first, second and fourth photos above (incidentally the fourth picture is clearly taken from an elevated standpoint, perhaps on top of the carriage visible in the second photo and being lifted away in the fifth):

And this is the eastern side from a different angle:

All very quiet and neglected now. But very odd to look at the scene of the attack sixty-eight years later.

A Torchwood novel set towards the end of Season 2, with Owen already dead but still walking and alien creatures intruding on Earth via sets of game cards (so the ‘pack’ of the title has a dual meaning). Another good effort from Anghelides, reinforcing my view that the Torchwood novels are an insufficiently recognised literary achievement of the Whoniverse.