i) births and deaths

29 October 1935: birth of Michael Jayston, who played the Valeyard in 1986.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

29 October 1966: broadcast of fourth episode of The Tenth Planet. The Cybermen are defeated, but when Ben and Polly return to the Tardis, the Doctor collapses and his face shimmers and changes. Will Doctor Who ever be the same again???

29 October 1977: broadcast of first episode of Image of the Fendahl. The Doctor and Leela are drawn to Fetch Priory, where scientists are performing experiments on the skull whose nickname is Eustace.

29 October 2006: broadcast of Ghost Machine (Torchwood), the one with the gizmo that lets you see into the past, and Gareth “Blake” Thomas as an elderly sex criminal.

29 October 2007: broadcast of first episode of Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (SJA). Sarah has been mysteriously replaced by a woman called Andrea Yates, and only Maria remembers her. The answer lies in a 1962 seaside trip via the Graske.

29 October 2009: broadcast of first episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (SJA). Sarah is in love with the handsome Peter: as the wedding ceremony gets underway, the Tardis materialises, the Doctor appears and the Trickster kidnaps the newlyweds.

I just had a friends request on Facebook from someone who rejoices in the name of Anastasia Micklethwaite. That is such a glorious name that I am tempted to friend her back, even though I don’t know her at all.

I fear that she has mistaken me for this bloke who was in my year in my college in Cambridge but Spells his name Wrong.

i) births and deaths

28 October 1944, 28 October 1986: birth and death of Ian Marter, who played companion Harry Sullivan in 1974-5, and also wrote nine Target novelisations.

28 October 1982: birth of Matt Smith, an actor who I am told appeared in some new New Who episodes earlier this year, though I can’t remember offhand what role he played. Oh yeah, he was on the Sarah Jane Adventures earlier this week too.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

28 October 1967: broadcast of fifth episode of The Abominable Snowmen. Victoria is hypnotised by Padmasambhava; the monks evacuate; and the Intelligence grows in physical manifestation. (Yeah, I posted this plot summary last week mistakenly for episode four.)

28 October 1978: broadcast of first episode of The Stones of Blood, the 100th story of Old Who. The Doctor and Romana find archaeologist Amelia Rumford and local druidic cultists all very interested in the Nine Sisters, a stone circle on Dartmoor.

i) births and deaths

27 October 1923: birth of Peter Bryant, producer of Doctor Who from The Web of Fear (1968) to The Wheel in Space (1969)

27 October 1991: death of Paul Erickson, writer of The Ark (1966)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

27 October 1979: broadcast of first episode of The Creature from the Pit. The Doctor is captured by Adrasta; Romana is captured by the bandits and then by Adrasta; the Doctor is thrown down the Pit.

27 October 2009: broadcast of second episode of Secrets of the Stars (SJA). Trueman attempts to summon the Ancient Lights, but is thwarted by Sarah and company.

• Western Sahara: The Forgotten Injustice « Jonathan Fryer
  (tags: westernsahara)

i) births and deaths

None that caught my eye.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

26 October 1987: broadcast of fourth episode of Paradise Towers, In a final confrontation, both Pex and Kroagnon are killed, and the inhabitants of the Towers look forward to a new future.

26 October 1988: broadcast of fourth episode of Remembrance of the Daleks. Grand battle between the Dalek factions; the Doctor destroys Skaro and also forces the Black Dalek to explode.

26 October 2010: broadcast of second episode of Death of the Doctor.

iii) historical event in canon

26 October 1881: The gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as witnessed by the First Doctor, Steven and Dodo in The Gunfighters (1966).

• Asking the Wrong Questions: A Shire of Shopkeepers: Thoughts on The Hobbit
  "Martin Freeman as Bilbo (possibly the most inspired piece of casting of the last few years, if only because it's made me realize just how much Bilbo and Arthur Dent have in common)"
  (tags: sf)

broadcast anniversaries

25 October 1975: broadcast of first episode of The Pyramids of Mars. The Doctor and Sarah land in the future UNIT headquarters, the Scarman brothers’ family home, and encounter robotic mummies and various Egyptian relics.

25 October 1980: broadcast of first episode of Full CircleMindwarp (ToaTL #8). Peri is killed by brain transplant!!! (Or is she?) Her last appearance as a regular character anyway.

25 October 1989: broadcast of first episode of The Curse of Fenric. The doctor and Ace, and also a Soviet military mission, land at maiden’s Point during the second world war, and find themselves decoding ancient messages.

25 October 2010: broadcast of first episode of Death of the Doctor (SJA)

• The Moroccan Army surrounds the Protest Camp – Laayoune | Demotix.com
  Crisis in the desert
  (tags: westernsahara)

Another in the series of graphic novels about Scott Pilgrim’s battles with Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends – though in this case the evil Todd shows up dating Scott’s own evil ex-girlfriend, Natalie aka Envy. As usual, an entertaining combination of youthful angst with the fantasy of computer games; Scott’s extra life, and Todd being robbed of his powers due to being insufficiently vegan, are highlights.

Maybe it’s a mistake to try reading stream-of-consciousness literature while on a transatlantic flight and over the subsequent days of jetlag (which has hit me much worse than usual on this trip), but I almost completely bounced off this book about a decaying family of the Old South (apart from the third of the four sections, the one narrated by the cynical and self-centred Jason).

In particular, the first section, whose narrator is the severely disabled Benjy, failed to ring true for me. It seemed to me to repeat the fatal problem of The Red Badge of Courage, in that the writer’s voice is far more sophisticated than his character’s thinking could possibly be. Very specifically, I observe from my own daughters that they are much more interested in their own emotional state than in observing what other people are saying or doing around them; Benjy, as portrayed by Faulkner, is completely the opposite, and I found that so contrary to my own experience that I could not engage with the story at all.

(I also didn’t really like the racism of his characters being displayed but not really interrogated, but I’m also reading Huckleberry Finn at the moment which is rather worse in that regard.)

24 October 2005: death of Robert Sloman, who co-wrote The Dæmons (1971), and was credited as sole author of The Time Monster (1972), The Green Death (1973), and Planet of the Spiders (1974) – the season finales for all but the first of the Pertwee years.

24 October: This is the last date with no broadcast Whoniversaries until 20 December.

• Judgement on Fermanagh and South Tyrone election
  Michelle Gildernew still wins.
  (tags: northernireland)
• Heather Hurlburt: Wikileaks: War Is (Misbegotten) Hell
  (tags: waronterror)

I was recommended this fantasy novel, the second in a four-part series, some time ago as a fictional treatment of peace processes. Unfortunately it is the kind of immersive fantasy that doesn’t really grab me, so I’ve given up after 130 pages.

broadcast anniversaries

23 October 1965: broadcast of "Small Prophet, Quick Return", the second episode of the story we now call The Myth Makers. Odysseus demands that the Doctor use his abilities to destroy Troy; Vicki is renamed Cressida by Priam; Steven is captured by the Trojans.

23 October 1976: broadcast of fourth episode of The Hand of Fear. Eldrad discovers that the planet Kastria is dead, and the Doctor manages to dispose of him. Then comes the mysterious 'call from Gallifrey', and – sob! – Sarah Jane Smith leaves after almost three years. Will they ever bring her back, do you think?

23 October 2008: answering that question, broadcast of second episode of The Mad Woman in the Attic (SJA). It turns out that the mysterious Eve had allowed Rani to wish Sarah, Luke and Clyde out of existence; Eve's parent Ship undoes the wish.

• The Hobbit Cast Announced, Martin Freeman Is Bilbo
  No word on Gollum or Gandalf yet,
  (tags: sf)

i) births and deaths

22 October 1938: birth of Sir Derek Jacobi, who has played the Master in both the TV story Utopia (2007) and the webcast Scream of the Shalka (2003) as well as the central character in the Big Finish 'Unbound' audio Deadline (also 2003).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

Today is one of ten dates in the year on which seven or more episodes of the extended Whoniverse have been first broadcast.

22 October 1966: broadcast of third episode of The Tenth Planet. The Doctor is taken ill; Cutler decides to launch the Z-Bomb.

22 October 1977: broadcast of fourth episode of The Invisible Enemy. The Doctor manages to kill off the virus with antibodies before it can swarm; and K9 leaves with the Tardis.

22 October 2006: broadcast of Everything Changes and Day One, the first two episodes of the first series of Torchwood. Everything Changes is the one where Gwen joins the team (also therefore first appearance of Rhys, Owen, and Ianto, and return appearances from Jack and Tosh). Day One is the one with the sex-fuelled alien.

22 October 2007: broadcast of second episode of Warriors of Kudlak (SJA. Luke and Clyde rescue the other captured children; Sarah and Maria then rescue Luke and Clyde, and the whole war turns out to be a mistake.

22 October 2009: broadcast of first episode of The Mad Woman in the Attic (SJA). The eponymous woman is Rani, fifty years in the future in a devastated future Earth. She tells the story of how this happened, when she and an old friend investigated a spooky derelict funfair…

• The European Council on Foreign Relations | The spectre of a multipolar Europe
  Recommendations:
  * An informal ‘trialogue’ involving the EU, Turkey and Russia should be established, allowing cooperation over security to build from the ground up.
  * In order to strengthen Turkey’s European identity, Ankara should be given a top-table seat at the trialogue, in parallel with enhanced EU accession negotiations. New chapters should be opened on CSDP and energy.
  * The EU should be represented by the foreign affairs high representative, Catherine Ashton, institutionalising the EU as a security actor.
  * A European security identity should be fostered by encouraging the involvement of Russia in projects like missile defence that focus on external threats to Europe.
  * Russian resolve should be tested by a commitment to dealing with frozen conflicts and instability in the wider European area.
  (tags: eu)
• james_nicoll: A development re: Wiscon
  SF3 has withdrawn the invitation to Elizabeth Moon to attend WisCon 35 as guest of honor.
  (tags: sf)
• The baffling short-sightedness in the EU-Turkey-Cyprus triangle (pdf)
  Natalie Tocci, like me, is pretty dismayed by the most recent developments.
  (tags: cyprus eu)

i) births and deaths

21 October 2000: death of Alan Rowe who played Evans and the voice of Space Control in The Moonbase (1967), Edward of Wessex in The Time Warrior (1973-74), Skinsale in Horror of Fang Rock (1977) and Garif in Full Circle (1980).

21 October 2007: death of Peter Moffatt, who directed State of Decay (1980), The Visitation (1982), Mawdryn Undead (1983), The Five Doctors (1983), The Twin Dilemma (1984) and The Two Doctors (1985).

21 October 2009: death of Chris D’Oyly-John who worked in various production capacities on fifteen Classic Who stories from The Ark (1966) to The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

21 October 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Abominable Snowmen. Victoria is hypnotised by Padmasambhava; the monks evacuate; and the Intelligence grows in physical manifestation.

21 October 1978: broadcast of fourth episode of The Pirate Planet. Xanxia killes the Captain; the Mentiads destroy her and the bridge; and the Doctor and Romana convert the remains of the planet Calufrax into the second segment of the Key to Time.

As with quite a number of the Pertwee stories, I found myself enjoying Planet of the Spiders much more than I had expected. Seen in sequence, it is a decided uptick in quality after the last couple of stories; also one appreciates the homage to the Pertwee years now ending – bringing back Mike Yates for a last UNIT reunion, reference to Jo off-screen (the first time I think that an ex-companion has done anything other than appear in reminiscence), the gadgetty chase sequence of Episode 2, even the human colonists of mixed acting ability. The idea that the Third Doctor’s death is in some way an atonement for his arrogance is almost pleasing, and the death scene with Sarah (and the Brigadier less so) rather moving. After the triumphs of Season 10, it is a rather more subdued end to Season 11 and to the entire Pertwee era, but not actually bad. And Dudley Simpson is on good form with the music.

We also have another variation on the encounter between Doctor Who and religion. Back in The Abominable Snowmen I remarked that there seemed to be four approaches to religion in Who: squabbling sectarians, deluded cultists, religious buildings used for nefarious purposes, and true believers. Like The Dæmons, Planet of the Spiders combines the second and third elements; indeed, like both The Dæmons and The Time Meddler, it turns out that the religious building in question is actually being run by a Time Lord in disguise. And as with The Abominable Snowmen, we are left with the impression that Buddhist meditation actually works in the Whoniverse as a method of travel between the dimensions and across space. Saves on Tardis maintenance I suppose.

So the Third Doctor era ends. I don’t think Pertwee will ever again be my favourite Doctor, as he was until I was seven, but he has grown on me – in particular, he happens to have been the incumbent when Who finally hit its most successful dynamic of Doctor plus viewpoint female companion character combined with a background ensemble. The first of his five seasons stands out in a bad way, a show that is uncertain and a bit rambling, but it finds its feet from Terror of the Autons on, helped in particular by Delgado’s Master.

Pertwee’s Doctor is a return to the acerbic Hartnell performance without the sense of alienness (which is why it doesn’t appeal to me as much). He also snarls at people he likes, especially the Brigadier and Jo, which is a personality trait I recognise as realistic but hate when I see it in real people. More than any other Doctor he is part of a particular setting – UNIT, Jo, Master – and when this starts to dissolve he seems a bit unmoored. But in a sense this is a completely new show in its fifth or sixth year, rather than the original Doctor Who eleven years on.

It’s also farewell here to Mike Yates, the last of the UNIT regulars of the Pertwee era to be introduced and the first to be written out. His best story is probably The DæmonsVerdigris he is cruelly turned to cardboard, a nice touch.

By a fortunate coincidence, I was watching Robot at the same time as reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, where the gifted technical folks, feeling that the world does not value them enough, withdraw from it until everyone else has starved to death. The story clearly has roots in Mrs Thatcher and fascism as well as King Kong and Frankenstein; there is a brilliant scene with Timothy Craven playing a character called Short (his only lines in the entire story) who is a real nerds-will-rule-the-world type.

The main delight of course is watching Tom Baker, fresh and new, but walking into the part as if it was what he was meant to do all his life (which perhaps it was); his line about the Titanic, his experiments with costume, his tricks with the scarf, his combination of gritty moral determination with bonkers humour, all make me wish I had seen all of this first time round rather than just the fourth episode.

I’ve often remarked in the course of this rewatch that I’ve revised my view of a story from mediocre to decent (or more rarely vice versa) when watching it in sequence. For the first time, with The Ark in Space, I’m revising my rating from “excellent” to “really superb”. In particular, the first episode, establishing the new Team Tardis (particularly the Harry-Doctor relationship, Sarah already being a known quantity) with no other characters seen, is a great stroke – I think the last time we had a new companion treated in anything like this much introductory detail was Zoe.

The rest of the story is good too, with a great deal made of very little physical material – green bubble-wrap and about three sets in total. And Kenton Moore’s agonised performance of Noah is excellent. (I had missed on previous watchings, but ‘Noah’ is his nickname, his real name being ‘Lazar’, i.e. Lazarus, so in fact a character with two Biblical references.) Slightly let down by the adult Wirrn but they are far from the worst monsters ever (or even this season).

After that, The Sontaran Experiment is a bit ordinary. It’s refreshing to have more location filming after the claustrophobia of the Ark in Space but I find the plot a bit pointless – why are the Sontarans suddenly interested in torturing? and the battle fleet turns around just because the Doctor tells it to?

Kevin Lindsay is great again – third time in just over a year after The Time Warrior and his unmasked Cho-Je in Planet of the Spiders – and it is sad that he died a month after this story was shown.

However, Genesis of the Daleks will never get old for me. First off, it looks good; an astonishing contrast with the previous year’s Death to the Daleks, which just looked like a few sets draped around a studio, here we really feel that we are on a war-ravaged planet with two different factions at odds. The performances range from solid (eg Harriet Philpin as Bettan) to unforgettable (Michael Wisher as Davros, Peter Miles as Nyder).

But it really works because the basic plot idea is brilliant, to go back to the beginning of the Daleks’ story and try to change it, an idea which turns out to be really a character study of Davros falling in love with his own creations, and then finding that they have outgrown him and will destroy him. Since we lost the Master we haven’t had a decent villain in a Doctor Who story (with the mild exceptions of BOSS and Lynx). It is not surprising that Davros has had such a long afterlife (and I really recommend the Big Finish prequels about his childhood and earlier career).

Finally, Revenge of the Cybermen is decent enough but not at the level of Genesis or Ark. The exploration of the internal politics of Voga, a closed and fearful society wrestling with technical change and contact with the outside world, is the most interesting thing Davis ever wrote, and the lead Vogans (including stalwarts Michael Wisher and Kevin stoney) rise to the challenge. The Cybermen are actually the weakest point of the story; apparently the last of their race, suddenly vulnerable to gold (a new Sekrit Weekniss which we had never heard of before) and reprising the plan which worked so badly for them in The Tenth Planet, The Moonbase and The Wheel in Space.

I see that the Vogans have the Great Seal of Gallifrey on display, so they must have had contact with the Time Lords from way back (he said, desperately retconning). Tom Baker is getting a little out of control here, visibly giggling as he tells Elisabeth Sladen that they are heading for the biggest bang in history and posing with the two astronauts as the Three Royal Monkeys in episode three.

Back when I started this crazy scheme a bit over a year ago I deliberately scheduled my writing up of stories so that from now on, for the next few months, I will be recapitulating the Hinchcliffe / Holmes glory years which had six stories in each season. Of course that fails a bit here because the end of Season 12 was not where originally planned, Terror of the Zygons being held over to next year. But in any case, one can see the new team bedding in, with two palpable hits in Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks, and even the misses being less embarassing than some.

I’m away from my statistics right now, but having passed the halfway point in screen minutes and individual episodes of Old Who in my previous write-up, I am more of less at the half-way point in individual stories roughly here. If you follow the standard count of 155 stories, the 78th is Genesis of the DaleksShada and K9 and Company, but tally Mission to the Unknown as a detached part of The Daleks’ Master Plan, the 80th of 159 stories is Planet of Evil.

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

Cockett is the Economist’s Africa editor, and has produced here a very readable account of the last few decades and years in Sudan, explaining how the Darfur crisis came about and exploring the international reaction to both Darfur and the sputtering implementation of the peace agreement between the government in Khartoum and the southern part of the country.

Among those professionally engaged in Sudanese matters I am a member of the small minority who are not covering Darfur at all, so I found this book very useful in contextualising my own concerns within the international community’s wider agenda. Cockett explores rather viciously (though I have seen even more vicious analysis) the impact of international activism on Sudanese politics and Western policy. He also has a couple of good sections on Asian involvement, particularly but not only China. I missed, however, a decent explanation of the roles of Libya and Chad in Darfur, which borders both. I was also puzzled by his repeated bemoaning of how the politics of building coalition governments doomed Sudan; it’s not clear to me (and it certainly isn’t clear from his account) that the current regime, effectively a one-party state with a few southern trimmings, has delviered better results than its predecessors. And although the chronology of events in Darfur in the recent period is good, and the accounts of the conditions of life and death are pretty horrific and memorable, I wiould have liked to read a judicious summing up of what exactly had happened and who he thinks was really to blame.

Back in my Cambridge undergraduate days, we Natural Scientists had a joke about the guy studying English who did not want to look out of the window in the morning, because then he would have had nothing to do in the afternoon. But as I have got more interested in sf criticism, I have felt that maybe I did miss something by not sampling what was on offer in terms of literature studies in the department which was still resting on its laurels from the glory days of Leavis (or rather the Leavises). So I picked up this volume to get a sense of what, if anything, I have been missing.

Well, it’s as I expected in one way: Leavis is very judgmental and allows little room for argument. The first half-sentence affirms that “[t]he great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad”, and the rest of the book is an elaboration of the greatness of the latter three (Jane Austen having received a separate book of her own). Not having read much of the authors in question, let alone of those who Leavis dismisses as less than great, I can only really react by assessing whether or not Leavis gives me a fresh understanding of those books that I have in fact read, and also by taking his recommendations of books I haven’t read as potential future reading.

Leavis does not really satisfy me on the first count. His concept of “greatness” is nowhere clearly enough defined for me to feel whether or not I agree with it, let alone whether or not it’s a useful criterion for assessing the quality of a novel. We all know that there are good books and bad books, and most of us will agree that, say, Pride and Prejudice is good, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is bad, and American Gods is good but flawed. Not everyone will do so: there are plenty of people who find Austen’s prose impenetrable, Bach deep and meaningful, or Gaiman either indigestible or worthy of uncritical admiration. It is sometimes nice to imagine that there are vaguely objective criteria out there which one can appeal to, and I had sort of hoped that Leavis would fairly clearly signpost what those criteria might be. But he doesn’t.

However, if I take Leavis’ analysis as an expression of taste, his taste is sufficiently close to mine (we diverge on Wuthering Heights, where I know that I am in the minority who find the book pretty unappealing, but are agreed on Middlemarch and Heart of Darkness) that I did find his recommendations of other novels worth reading, including several by writers outside his chosen few, very interesting: the following therefore go on my Bookmooch list and my Amazon (hawk, spit) wishlist:

Benjamin Disraeli: Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred
George Eliot: Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda (though Leavis recommends skipping the bits that are actually about Daniel Deronda and concentrating on the bits about Gwendolen)
Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians
Joseph Conrad: Nostromo and The Secret Agent
Charles Dickens: Hard Times

A final thought: I’m writing this on a train and won’t edit again before I post when I reach my hotel this evening, but I’d be very interested to know if Heart of Darkness might have influenced H.P. Lovecraft. (Or, if I have the chronology wrong, vice versa.) Leavis entirely fairly accuses Conrad of going well over the top, in the style of a ‘magazine writer’ influenced by Kipling and Poe rather than with the subtlety he was capable of. But the passages he chooses to illustrate this point seemed to me very reminiscent of At the Mountains of Madness. I guess that probably (as Leavis sort of implies) the two have common roots in pulp literature.

i) births and deaths

20 October 1941: birth of Anneke Wills, who played Polly Wright, companion of the First and Second Doctors, from 1966 to 1967 and has reprised the role a couple of times for Big Finish in 2009-10.

20 October 2008: death of John Ringham who played Tlotoxl in The Aztecs (1964), Josiah Blake in The Smugglers (1966), and Robert Ashe in Colony in Space (1971).

20 October 2009: death of Hubert Rees who played the Chief Engineer in Fury from the Deep (1968), Captain Ransom in The War Games (1969), and Stevenson in The Seeds of Doom (1976).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

20 October 1979: broadcast of fourth episode of City of Death, the one with John Cleese, Eleanor Bron, and the punch that saves the universe. Really, if you haven’t seen it, you ought to.

20 October 2008: broadcast of first episode of Secrets of the Stars (SJA). A mysterious astrologer is able to tell Sarah Jane’s history with the Doctor; Clyde appears to be under his influence.

iii) date specified in canon

20 October 1901: The cargo ship Lankester is sailing from Madagascar to New Orleans with passengers including the Sixth Doctor, Peri and some even stranger entities – as told in the Big Finish audio Cryptobiosis (2005).

• Ken Loach: Western Sahara and the Tide of History
  …In 1991 a ceasefire was declared, and under the terms of a UN agreement a referendum for self-determination was promised. Nineteen years later, the native Saharawi are still awaiting that referendum.
  (tags: westernsahara)

19 October 1987: broadcast of third episode of Paradise Towers. Mel is rather implausibly rescued by Pex; the Caretaker is munched by Kroagnon; and the Doctor taken by the Cleaners.

19 October 1988: broadcast of third episode of Remembrance of the Daleks. The Hand of Omega is dug up and the rivals Dalek factions start to slug it out in the school.

19 October 2010: broadcast of second episode of The Vault of Secrets (SJA).

Another little reading project of mine: as well as reading the best-selling novels of 100 year ago, as I have done this year and last year, I decided to try the best-selling novel of 50 years ago, a political tale by a long-serving Washington journalist, which soon after (1962) became a film starring Henry Fonda and Charles Laughton (the latter’s last role before he died).

The plot concerns the nomination of a new Secretary of State by an ailing President whose party controls both Senate and House; the nomination runs into difficulties because of the nominee’s alleged Communist past. But the young Senator from Utah who is most responsible for holding up the process is himself concealing a wartime gay love affair. High drama ensues, with a memorable series of denouements of which the least spoilerish that I can reveal is a Soviet moon landing the week before the Americans would have got there.

I thought it was excellent. There are a number of well delineated characters – the Majority Leader, the ancient Senator from South Carolina, the Mormon with a past, the demagogue, the guy who wanted to be President, the President himself. The Senate is a microcosm of 100 people (99 men and one woman at that time), each with roles to play both officially and privately. Advise and Consent is an incisive description of how politics operates at that highest level, when personality as well as facts and ideology come into play. I found it difficult to put down.

It has its weaknesses. The reported vehemently pro-appeasement views of the nominee for Secretary of State – and indeed the public support he gets for them – seemed to me unrealistic, though I wasn’t around in the 1960s so I may not know. It’s possible that Drury was reversing the political reality, as he does with the Joe McCarthy character who is a left-winger rather than a right-winger. There are four ambassadors who are minor characters; it seemed peculiar to me that they get called together twice to give the key Senators their views of what the rest of the world thinks – normal practice, round here at any rate, would be to see them separately, but of course that doesn’t work for a novel like this. Also they seem to be accredited to the UN as well as to Washington but that may have been normal in 1960.

But I was able to roll with the main flow and greatly enjoy the book. Apparently the Pulitzer Prize Committee in 1960 recommended that the award go to Henderson the Rain KingAdvise and Consent instead, and rightly so.

production and broadcast anniversaries

18 October 1963: Studio recording for "An Unearthly Child" (the version that was broadcast).

18 October 1975: broadcast of fourth episode of Planet of Evil. The Doctor clears the antimatter from the ship and restores Sorenson (who doesn’t really deserve it in my view) to his normal self.

18 October 1980: broadcast of fourth episode of Meglos. The Doctor frustrates the evil cactus’s plans, Brotadac accidentally destroys Zolfa-Thura, and the Deons and Savants agree to get along better in future.

18 October 1986: broadcast of third episode of Mindwarp (ToaTL #7). Brain transplants and battles; Peri is captured and prepped for her ‘orrible fate.

18 October 1989: broadcast of third episode of Ghost Light (the last episode made of Old Who). Light is displeased; the women turn to stone; Control turns into a woman; and I’m sure it made sense to me when I watched it.

18 October 2010: broadcast of first episode of The Vault of Secrets (SJA).

It took me several weeks, but I have finished Rand’s magnum opus, about a woman who likes running trains and clever rich people going on strike. I will leave detailed analysis to those who care more about it than me – I refer especially to John Scalzi’s critique, which has links in comments to a couple more posts on it. (Here’s one: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.")

Having not especially enjoyed Rand’s The Fountainhead, I was surprised by how readable Atlas Shrugged actually is. Once you accept the ridiculous premises of the fantasy world Rand has constructed, the plot moves along at a fairly cracking pace as long as you ignore the political speeches (and there aren’t in fact all that many of them, though one of them does go on for fifty pages).The evil guys are evil, the good guys are mysterious and threatened, and Dagny’s moral dilemma is almost realistic.

It is of course an absurdly premised book. The dystopian society that Rand portrays is rather closer to We and Nineteen Eighty-Four than to anything the US is ever likely to develop into. Her heroes’ response, to sabotage the economy and steal from their own companies, is itself pretty immoral. (At one stage she has a whole trainload of lefty do-gooders killed, but we are meant to understand that it’s OK because they had it coming to them.) The fundamental axiom that you should never do anything for anyone else is impossible to comprehend for anyone who has ever contemplated having children (or even pets) and is in fact contradicted when the good guys rescue one of their number near the end. But on its own merits it holds together, and I think it’s possible to admire the structure without sharing the sentiments.

Atlas Shrugged is certainly a work of sf; quite apart from the new metal developed by Hank Rearden, Galt is able to conceal his valley refuge by arcane means and, Vogon-like, to take over every radio in the country to broadcast his message, and there is the catastrophic explosion of Project X. So I think it qualifies as one of the important political sf novels that any fan with an interest in politics should consider reading; but I also hope that not too many people take it seriously.

I had been puzzling over the title of this Fifth Doctor novel since I first heard of it; what gadget could conceivably be made of crystal and also named for Alexander the Great’s horse? As it transpires there is a double explanation: there is a crystal statue of the horse, which turns out to have extra powers, but also the statue is located in a restaurant named after it. Rather oddly the Doctor turns out to be the owner of both statue and restaurant. Lots of similarly wacky (or wackier) nomenclature in the book, not all of which completely gels, though enough does to keep one going; I loved the idea of the Lazarus Intent, a religion combining a garbled Christianity with the monsters of the Whoniverse, and am impressed that Hilton found something useful to do with Kamelion.

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