• Autism is not a dirty word
  Charlotte Moore talks sense.
  (tags: autism)

I’d read the same author’s Crescent City Rhapsody some time back and wasn’t overwhelmed. Same here; some nice descriptive passages, but I never quite grasped what was going on – setting too peculiar and characters not interesting enough to be worth following. I finished it because my plane was stuck with technical problems on an African runway so I had nothing else to do.

An excellent Rebus mystery: raking through the ashes of an Edinburgh hotel brings out all kinds of seamy connections between the business elite and Scotland’s criminal underworld, with Rebus and his colleagues bending rules slightly beyond my suspension of disbelief, but accepting the consequences when things go wrong. Rebus’ brother reappears as well. I worked out the significance of the gas being turned on before Rebus did, but there was a sufficiently satisfying series of twists before we reached the end. One of the better Rebuses I have read (of five so far).

Livejournal’s “detect location” thingy thinks I am at Calle del Caballero de Gracia 21, Madrid, Spain.

In fact I am at 4° 51′ 30.6″ N, 31° 35′ 54.1″ E.

Well, what’s a mere 3300 miles / 5300 km difference???

I found this an unexpectedly brilliant novel. As it starts it seems like simply a fairly plain tale of being black in Michigan. But it opens up into a fascinating voyage for the protagonist, Macon “Milkman” Dead, as he discovers the truth about his own family’s past, criss-crossing America to explore both geography and history in a process of self-emancipation. The title of the book is a beautiful piece of misdirection as well – several of the characters have bizarre biblical names (Milkman has a sister called First Corinthians), so I expected that we would encounter some similar reference to the Song of Solomon, but in fact the explanation is quite different and entirely satisfying. Barack Obama claims this is one of his favourite novels, and I can bring myself to believe it.

This is the first Torchwood book I have read, rather than listened to, and it was a good start. Set before the end of the first season (indeed before Gwen’s affair with Owen), the immediately striking thing is that the team has acquired a sixth member, James, who is rather too good a fit to be true. It’s fairly obvious from the first page what the problem is; Abnett supplies us with a decent chewy and often witty tale of suspense as to how he will get to the inevitable conclusion (and exactly what form that conclusion will take), along with the usual weird alien menaces. I’ve seen some fans complain that apart from Gwen and Jack the team are rather obscured by the rest of the story, but really this points more to a problem of having a large ensemble cast to begin with.

I am not surprised that Herman Van Rompuy, who has been prime minister of Belgium since the turn of the year, is the front-runner for the first EU presidency now that Vaclav Klaus has signed the Lisbon Treaty.

First of all, Tony Blair was never really a candidate. He got backing from people who hadn’t really thought about it much, including I suspect himself, but once it became clear that the centre right wanted one of their own, he was toast. In any case, the small states were always going to be unenthusiastic about a leader from a large state taking on the role. So, of the 27 member states, the heads of government of Austria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the UK are ruled out for being in the wrong political family. That leaves 13 countries. But we can also rule out France, Germany and Italy because the small states are unlikely to agree to an EU President from a large state (and anyway Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi are not interested). That leaves 10. But we can also rule out the newest member states, who are not sufficiently known quantities as yet; there will in due time be a Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish or Romanian candidate, but that time is not now.

That leaves only four countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Sweden. The Swedes’ stock is high, but they have the disadvantage that they hold the EU presidency at the moment and it looks really bad if you are chairing the meeting which selects you for promotion. That leaves the Benelux prime ministers, Balkenende, Juncker and Van Rompuy. Juncker is the longest serving PM in the EU (since 1995), and is personally well regarded, but his country is not; where France, Germany, Italy and the UK are too big, Luxembourg is really too small, at least for the first holder of the post. That leaves Balkenende and Van Rompuy.

Balkenende is the second-longest serving PM in the EU (since 2002), which has given him time to put a lot of people’s backs up; the then Belgian foreign minister, now European Commissioner, Karel De Gucht described him with brutal accuracy as “a mix between Harry Potter and a rigid bourgeois without charisma” (and this is not a linguistic problem as they share the same native language). Van Rompuy on the other hand is rather sweet and writes haikus on his personal website. More to the point, in his ten months as prime minister he has rescued Belgium from the point of institutional collapse which it reached under his disastrous predecessor, and thus has a proven record of getting people with different native languages and very different political perspectives to work together. He won’t be a tremendously high profile EU president, but he will be a consensus-building figure who will make his bits of the institutions work and not interfere with other people’s turf – be that member states or other senior EU officials.

I’m not a fan of his party, but I am rather a fan of Van Rompuy, and although most of the reasons why he will get the job are actually bad reasons – there is really no good justification for excluding non-Christian Democrats, or anyone from big, tiny or new member states – I think he will actually do it rather well, which is the best reason imaginable to give it to him. The downside is, of course, that Belgium will then need another prime minister, which raises the depressing prospect of Leterme coming back to screw things up again.

This also improves the chances of David Milliband getting the foreign policy job, whose fate matters much more to me. Again, most of the reasons why are bad – the Socialists get the foreign policy job if the Christian Democrats get the top spot, and then there is a real shortage of Socialist foreign ministers that a) anyone has heard of and b) would be personally and politically acceptable (Bernard Kouchner being the best example of someone who clears the first hurdle but not the second). However, while Milliband may have pulled his punches a bit in the current vicious Labour internal struggle, he is a credible at European level (and not tainted by Iraq to the extent that Blair would have been). The question really is does he want it?

(See also discussion here. And you’ll note that many of the above links go to the excellent blog of the Economist’s David Rennie, which is syndicated to Livejournal, though with technical difficulties, as .)

In fact The Sensorites isn’t a bad place to start phase 2 of this project – it begins with the Tardis crew reminiscing about the Story So Far (and includes reference to several unseen adventures, one of which inspired my only foray into fanfic to date), and has some promising character development for Susan as she stands up to the Doctor, reveals her telepathic abilities and reminisces about her home planet. Unfortunately, it also features the first spaceship on Doctor Who, which can’t have looked terribly convincing even by the standards of 1964, and, worse still, the first really poor performance from a guest actor, Lorne Cossette as Maitland. The Sensorites themselves have never considered investigating the mysterious noises in their water supply, or the imaginative possibilities of dressing up as each other. By the last episode everyone is fluffing their lines, which is a shame as the denouement is otherwise competently done. There is potentially a good sf story in here, of the Doctor and chums resolving conflict between the clueless earth folks and the paranoid isolated alien society, but it would need a lot of rewriting to bring it out.

But then we are back on track with The Reign of Terror. Actually even knowing the title of the story is a bit of a spoiler; we don’t find out when the story is set until halfway through the first episode, “The Land of Fear”. The incidental music, though it occasionally misfires in terms of mood, is really the best we have had so far (and it’s by that same bloke what wrote Cavatina as in The Deer Hunter). The story is history as entertainment rather than education, with the situation shown rather than told. Poor Carole Ann Ford, having just had some good character development in an otherwise lousy story, is back to screaming and whining here. William Russell’s holiday for eps 2 and 3 is well concealed. Barbara gets another romance, with a treacherous future renegade Time Lord. Hartnell is in his element, and must have particularly enjoyed the fabulous costume he got to wear as a revolutionary official.

Planet of Giants is rather underappreciated, I think. The plot is admittedly basic; although this is the first return to contemporary Earth since the very first episode, it is almost 50s rather than 60s in style. What really makes it is the model work: the sets for the miniaturised Tardis crew are totally convincing. All too often we Old Who fans have to excuse the special effects as being acceptable to the standards of the day, but no such excuse is needed here (though it is fortunate that the plot requires all the on-screen invertebrates to be dead). Barbara fans object to her getting poisoned but actually it’s only in the third and last episode that she is incapacitated. And this is a great Hartnell story – he really seems to be in his element, very much in command of his material and of the team as a whole.

After a couple of frankly ropey sf stories (The Keys of Marinus and The Sensorites) we have a very marked improvement with The Dalek Invasion of Earth. As with Planet of Giants, we are on familiar English territory, but this time warped by the passage of time rather than perspectives of scale. There are lots of brilliant moments here, and the whole is for once equal to the sum of its parts. The impact of the Dalek emerging from the Thames at the end of the first episode is slightly lost if we know what the name of the whole story is, but several people who saw it first time round in 1964 have picked this as the most memorable moment in all of Old Who. Myself, I just love the sequence of Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun dodging Daleks across London to Chagrin’s haunting tortured incidental music in the middle of episode 3; I could watch that again and again. And at long last, as she leaves, Carole Ann Ford is called upon to do some acting, and rises to the challenge. Susan’s departure scene is really rather moving, especially watching it (as I now have done, and as original viewers had to do) as the 51st episode in sequence rather than the last of a vintage 6-part DVD. One point lost on 1964’s viewers that strikes one forcibly today is Peter Fraser’s eerie resemblance, as David Campbell, to David Tennant (who of course was not born until 1971).

I was originally planning this as a set of reviews just of the stories, but it’s impossible to resist the temptation to reassess each of the regular characters as they depart. (Which is going to make the write-up after next rather fun…) Since her ancestry is so integral to the show’s mythology, it’s a shame that Susan on the whole gets rather little of interest during her time on the show. She is the original screamy girl character, getting decent material in less than half of her stories (her friendship with Ping-Cho in Marco Polo, her weird spacegirl vibe in The Sensorites, and her romance in The Dalek Invasion of Earth). Ford’s own favourite memory of the show was running amok with scissors in The Edge of Destruction. Her later TV appearance in The Five Doctors feels curiously unmoored, but she’s done some excellent work for Big Finish – a couple of alternate mythos plays where she is President of Gallifrey and her grandfather is played by Geoffrey “Catweazle” Bayldon. She returns as Susan later this year with her son being played by Jake McGann, whose father is Paul. The best written spinoff book with Susan which I have read is Kim Newman’s Telos novella, Time and Relative.

I had rewatched The Rescue quite recently. There’s not much to it. I think Vicki gets a very good introduction, just as Susan got a very good departure, in both cases because it was the first time this had happened. The two monsters – Koquillion and the Sand Beast – look pretty unconvincing (though in Koquillion’s case he actually does turn out to be a man in a suit), and Maureen O’Brien is clearly not as young as the character she is portraying. But Barbara gets to shoot a monster, and I think the appearance of the sinister surviving Didonians at the end lifts it a bit. One of the few stories where the novelisation (completed shortly before his death by Ian Marter) is far superior to the original.

I’ve watched The Romans a couple of times, which may be once or twice too many. There are a lot of good things about it – the costumes, sets and background sound are totally convincing; the Ian/Barbara relationship is at its sweetest and snuggliest; Maureen O’Brien is carving out a quite different Vicki persona to Carole Ann Ford’s Susan, less frightened and more curious. The plot of course takes in all the cliches – lecherous emperor, slavers, the threat of the arena, and even culminating in the Great Fire. The two interlocking plot strands are deftly contrived. The problem is, unusually, with Hartnell himself who is way over the top, smirking, chortling and giggling manically; it matches quite well with Derek Francis’ portrayal of Nero but is otherwise a bit much.

So, a rather weak start and end to this run (The Sensorites being the worst Hartnell story so far) but a sequence of decent efforts in the middle, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

< 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 >

I developed a mild interest in Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman Emperor, when I discovered that of the various celebrities who share my birthday (26 April), he is by far the most ancient. My interest intensified after reading the very positive account of his career and achievements in Gibbon, and there are a couple of editions of his Meditations available from Project Gutenberg. (Here, here and here.)

It is rather a remarkable book. It’s not totally clear that Marcus Aurelius wanted it to be published, or if this was basically his commonplace book (or books) for Deep Thoughts which his admirers circulated after his death. It’s a bit jumbled thematically, so I’m inclined to the latter – I think he was a good enough stylist that he’d have organised it a bit better if he was interested in publishing it, and also I don’t think he particularly was interested in publishing it. So we basically have the secret thoughts of the ruler of the Roman Empire at its height, which is really quite something. (Gibbon tells us, in footnote 47 to chapter III, that he actually gave public philosophy lectures, as Emperor, in Rome, Greece and Asia; presumably we have here some of the raw materials for those lectures.)

Marcus Aurelius was a believer in the Stoic philosophy: that one should accept one’s lot in life, not worry too much about what other people think or about death, and just get on with doing as much good as you can given your personal circumstances. Of course, if your lot in life happens to make you the Roman Emperor, you possibly have fewer grounds to complain about it, or to worry about issues of personal status, than most people. But we all worry about death, including emperors. And Marcus Aurelius is not obsessed with his own celebrity or achievements; the first section of the book is a series of thank-yous to the influential people in his life for their wisdom and intelligence.

Sufficiently edited and bracketed with explanations, this could make a rather successful if somewhat unusual self-help book. It is not in the usual paradigm: rather than helping the reader look at their insecurities and work through and past them, Marcus Aurelius urges the reader (who in the first instance is himself) to put it all aside, reflect on the immense infinity of space and time, and just get on with it. In some circumstances that actually is the right advice. Though I wonder if even he was really convinced – was his recording of different material covering the same themes a matter of finding several different beautiful thoughts which appealed to him? Or was he trying to persuade himself by repetition?

Marcus Aurelius’ biological legacy to the empire was his appalling son Commodus, whose reign Gibbon marks (in Chapter IV) as very much the crucial starting point of the decline of Rome. His intellectual legacy is rather more impressive, and certainly longer-lasting. I shall look out for a decent dead-trees edition of this; it is very much worth having on the shelves.

I finished this on Saturday, and was hoping to do the same write-up comparing its contents with the 2001 stories on the Hugo and Nebula shortlists, but won’t really have time to do that. Just to note, though, that this was a year when I think the shortlists were at least equal to if not better than Hartwell’s selection – there are only two overlaps, Michael Swanwick’s “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” and James Patrick Kelly’s “Undone”. Other stories I liked from Hartwell’s selection included Richard Chwedyk’s “The Measure of All Things” (to which the Nebula-winning “Bronte’s Egg” is a sequel) and Ursula Le Guin’s “The Building”.

(And of course I mean the father rather than the son, for those of you who have heard of the latter.)

Sit down for breakfast. Notice a badly bruised mango under a nearby chair. Wonder where it came from. Look up at nearby tree. Notice clumps of large fruit dangling from it. Stop wondering.

Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies by Janice Capel Anderson
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
From Genocide to Continental War: The Congolese Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa by Gerard Prunier
Sudan: The Bradt Travel Guide by Paul Clammer
Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse by Brigid Keenan
Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
Between structure and No-thing: An annotated reader in Social and Cultural Anthropology by Patrick J. Devlieger
A History of Anthropology by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Superior Beings by Nick Walters
Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder

Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 80)

Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 52)

SF (non-Who): 7 (YTD 79)

Doctor Who: 4 (YTD 60)

6 (YTD 60/301) by women (Brontë, Gentle, Kingsolver, Hurston, Jenkins, Mosse)
1 (YTD 14/301) by PoC (Hurston)
Total page count ~8,200 (YTD ~88,900)
Owned for more than a year: 7 (Wuthering Heights [reread], The Meaning of Tingo, An Empire of Plants, White Crow, Year’s Best SF 6 [reread], Year’s Best SF 7 [reread], Labyrinth)
Also reread: To Your Scattered Bodies Go (YTD 35 rereads)

I have to say this is one of the more interesting biographies of Elizabeth I that I have read. Jenkins makes a good argument that Elizabeth’s determination to remain unmarried stemmed not just from the abuse she suffered in her teens from her stepmother, Catherine Parr, and Parr’s new husband Seymour, but also from the childhood echoes of her own mother’s execution – an event she could barely remember, but which was echoed in the beheading of another stepmother when she was eight. Apparently she told Leicester at one point that she had been determined never to marry since the age of eight; as Jenkins more or less puts it, join the dots.

Armed with this assumption, Jenkins has Elizabeth enjoying the thrills of the romantic chase but consciously or subconsciously determined never to reach the point that her male suitors desired to reach – she almost got caught out by the Duc d’Alençon, but I think she always knew that Parliament would never approve the marriage. She flaunted her body to her suitors (and indeed to others) but evaded physical contact. I found Jenkins’ analysis very convincing.

Jenkins also offered further insights into a number of other Elizabethan questions. First, she is very good at analysing Mary Queen of Scots – there is an interesting study to be done comparing and contrasting how she and her grandson ended up losing their heads for rather similar reasons. Second, I now understand rather better one of the ways in which the Irish question shifted during Elizabeth’s reign – once her cousin and prisoner Mary had been acknowledged as potentially legitimate by the Pope and the French and Spanish, a wholly new basis emerged for continental intervention in Irish affairs. Third, Jenkins is rather positive on English Catholics, most of whom remained loyal to Elizabeth except in extremis; the students at the English College in Rome cheered when they heard the Armada had failed in 1588.

And fourth, dancing at court masques and balls is frequently mentioned by Jenkins as an essential part of the political equation. There’s lots of exciting interdisciplinary research to be done there. I’ll bluntly assert that it’s difficult to imagine dancing being an important factor while either of Elizabeth’s siblings was on the throne. (NB that Shakespeare’s Henry VIII has her father gatecrashing a dance incognito, in order to seduce her mother.) But again, I don’t recall a single mention of dancing among the distractions available for government officials in Ireland in Elizabeth’s day; it looks like this was an activity driven by the queen’s personal preferences. (And my namesake and ancestor gets two brief mentions in the book, both favourable!)

Anyway, this was well worth searching out. The book is fifty years old, but stands up well in comparison with more recent works on the same subject.

There is a minor character in this novel who is an unsuccessful author:

When Horace’s book was finally published, it was viciously attacked by the critics. This was sad, as no-one had been able to disprove anything he had written. It was even sadder that the critics, blinded by their own prejudice, could not see the energy, grace and skill that had gone into the book’s construction. Even if, as they believed, every word was untrue, they chose to ignore the incredible flights of imagination necessary to argue such a theory. But worse still – as they were supposedly people of education and letters – they could not see or appreciate the pure, good writing which was on the page. Although the book sold well, it was bought for all the wrong reasons. People would memorise passages from it, then regurgitate them at drinks parties, laughing. like blocked drains as they did. It had become chic to mock Horace. Unable to cope with the ridicule, Horace retired into obscurity. Two years later he died of a broken heart.

It’s tempting to interpret this as Eric Saward justifying himself: a misunderstood and underappreciated genius, the quality of whose work will be apparent to the ages though not to the contemporary critic. Given everything else I know about Saward, actually, I am pretty convinced. Doctor Who – Slipback is a desperate attempt to channel Douglas Adams, even more desperate than the radio series on which it was based. Planets and people have comical names and bizarre characteristics; and threats to the universe are both gruesome and bathetic. I think this actually is a worse book than Saward’s novelisation of The Twin Dilemma, though I’m not rereading it in order to form a more precise judgement. Certainly neither is interesting enough in their awfulness to be worth memorising and regurgitating at drinks parties.

Douglas Adams did it much better, not just because his prose style in general was vastly superior to Saward’s but also because he had a coherent sense of world-building, both for his own fiction and for the Who stories he wrote; and his humour was self-deprecating rather than defensive.

I have to say that I don’t quite get Wuthering Heights. Yes, I suppose the destructive psychological relationship between Heathcliff and the elder Cathy is rather grimly fascinating, as is a train crash; but that takes up only the second quarter of the book. There are elements which are difficult to accept for today’s reader – the appearance of Cathy’s ghost at the beginning, the almost nonchalant violence perpetrated by Heathcliff throughout. The descriptive passages, both of the human relationships and of the natural environment, are vivid and memorable, but I find the repeating pattern of destructive and inescapable family relationships rather depressing and, frankly, not terribly interesting.

Back in late 2005, I entered all the books on our shelves into LibraryThing, and tagged 133 of them as “unread”, ie hoping that I would read them some day. Well, that day has arrived; I have read 122 of them, and will not read the other 11. (Why not? Well, three were ebooks on my Palm T|X when it finally gave up the ghost – I think they were all short stories or extracts anyway, so probably shouldn’t have counted. Two of them I just can’t find, but will read if they ever show up. Three are from series of books that I do not feel I need to rea any more of – the Alexander McCall Smith books, and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman books. Two I gave up on before starting, when I realised that they were academic works too specialised for my tastes or interest. And one I realised I had in fact already read.)

Of the 122 which I have in fact read, I got through 41 in 2006, 39 in 2007, 24 in 2008 and the last 18 in 2009. (Those figures include 10 that I started but gave up on.) The full list, with font size adjusted for how much I liked them, is as follows:

A few years ago, shortly before I began bookblogging, I read and totally loved Mary Gentle’s Ash. More recently, I was rather disappointed with her 1610. I’m afraid that White Crow was more towards the 1610 end of the scale. It brings together three short stories about her protagonists Valentine and Casaubon, and three novels, Rats and Gargoyles, Left to his Own Devices and The Architecture of Desire. Most of the stories are set in varyingly 17th or 18th century milieux, with a heavy admixture of Hermetic magic. I am afraid the only one I really liked was the exception to this setting, the near-future cyberpunkish Left to his Own DevicesAsh, but I couldn’t really recommend them.

…to see that the registrar in tomorrow’s SJA episode is played by Zienia Merton, who was Ping-Cho in the 1964 Doctor Who story Marco Polo. I think this must give her the record for greatest elapsed time between her earliest and most recent appearance in Doctor Who and its spinoffs – apparently she is in Friday’s episode as well so that will be 45 years, 8 months and 7 days since 22 February 1964. (Of course, that is counting televised versions only – Carole Anne Ford is in a Big Finish audio release as Susan later this year, 46 years on.)

I don’t read much true crime, though I am as fascinated as anyone by the story of human wickedness. This seemed to me a particularly good (and early) example of the genre, with Capote following events through the stories of the victims, the investigators and the perpetrators, from just before it happened to the day of the executions. The crimes in question took place fifty years ago next month, when the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, were murdered by two men who had recently been paroled from the state prison. Capote devotes a lot of the book to a not unsympathetic psychological portrait of Hickock and Smith, the two killers; though the description of the Kansas environment where the Clutter family lived and died (based partly on notes by Harper Lee, who had just finished writing To Kill A Mockingbird) is also rather memorable. The book was originally published as a series of long articles in The New Yorker, and retains a couple of journalistic touches; the most intrusive of these is that Capote can’t quite decide to keep himself out of the picture he is creating. I see that there have been two recent films about how Capote wrote this book, which is somehow not surprising.

• gareth_rees: Why I hate FaceBook
  Gareth explains (quite rightly) why Facebook "seriously sucks for serious discussion. Seriously."
  (tags: facebook internet)

Time to write up the two October releases from Big Finish – a Companion Chronicle with Lalla Ward reprising Romana II, and a new Five/Nyssa story set in the village of Stockbridge and partly in the twelfth century. I had read reviews of both of these over at Unreality SF (here and here) so this slightly coloured my expectations. I have to say that in both cases I enjoyed them slightly more than the Unreality SF reviewers did.

The Pyralis Effect is a standard Doctor and aliens runabout. My expectations for this were pretty low, based partly on

steve_mollmann

‘s review but largely on the fact that it is by George Mann, whose fiction and non-fiction has failed to impress me. The fact that it more or less held my attention to the end has to be considered a major triumph, and (given the discussion in the extra tracks of the number of rewrites extracted from Mann by Big Finish) a triumph shared by many. Let us consider it equivalent in quality to the average Season 17 story, and leave it there.

On the other hand, I quite liked The Castle of Fear. Partly, it made me nostalgic for The Kingmaker, which is one of my favourite Big Finish audios; it’s not as good, but then few Who stories are. I hate John Sessions, and luckily all the bits I thought weren’t funny enough were the bits with him in, so I was happy enough to enjoy the rest. A clever plot, just about as funny as it could bear (Sessions apart), and good stuff from Davison and Sutton. John Sessions fans (the mad, deluded fools) will like this one.

I have been pondering the amount of material on each Doctor available in the Whoniverse, considering TV, audio and novels/novellas (I’m not quite sure how to tabulate comics and short story collections).

Time on TV

This is uncontroversial. The order is:

1. Four
2. One
3. Three
4. Two
5. Ten
6. Five
7. Seven
8. Six
9. Nine
10. Eight

This is counting screen time as the Doctor. There have been more individual Tenth Doctor televised stories than for any other except Four, but most of them are only a single 50-minute episode, so in screen time he is still behind Two, though I think now comfortably ahead of Five.

Books

1. Eight
2. Seven

It is a tight squeeze at the top, but Eight just beats Seven – there are 73 Eighth Doctor Adventures, and he features as lead or joint lead also in 2 Past Doctor Adventures and 3 Telos novellas. That is a total of 78, just ahead of Seven’s total of 76 (61 Virgin New Adventures, 1 Missing Adventure, 12 Past Doctor Adventures, and 2 Telos novellas).

3. Ten

There are now 30 New Series Adventures, 12 Decide Your Destiny books, 10 Darksmith Legacy books, and 5 Quick Read novellas featuring the Tenth Doctor, which makes a total of 57. I doubt if he will catch the leaders now.

4. Four and Six

For Four I count 8 Virgin Missing Adventures, 12 Past Doctor Adventures, and 1 Telos novella; I am not counting the novelization of Doctor Who and The Pescatons. For Six I count the three 3 Target Missing Episodes, 5 Virgin Missing Adventures, 11 Past Doctor Adventures, 1 Telos novella, and the charity production Time’s ChampionSlipback. In both cases that is 21 books with Four or Six as lead or co-lead.