August Books 25) Fables vol 9: Sons of Empire, by Bill Willingham

This volume really illustrates the problems of passing meaningful judgement on subsets of an ongoing series. It is very bitty; the bits make sense as contributions to the entirety of the narrative, but don’t hang together especially well combined rather arbitrarily here. It doesn’t help that of the numerous artists involved, one or two are distiinctly sub-standard.

August Books 26) Fables vol 10: The Good Prince, by Bill Willingham

Having grumbled about the last few volumes in the series (including vol. 11 which I read a couple of months back) I am relieved to say that I really liked The Good Prince, in which Ambrose, the former Frog Prince, attempts to lead an army of the resurrected to establish his own haven of peace and tranquility on the territory of the Adversary. It’s a good story; I felt it was not totally consistent with the way we’ve been given to understand the magic of the Fables works, but basically I suppose it can be handwaved into compatibility. It is a good, chunky volume of ten issues of the comic, all very nicely done (with the awful exception of one interlude which is separate from the main narrative).

The government of the Turks and Caicos Islands has been suspended and direct rule from London imposed.

I shall keep an eye on this.

After my note on Cullybackey I started to wonder if the Arthur family had left any legacy in Northern Ireland, and indeed a couple of days ago I found myself in Belfast walking from Arthur Square along Arthur Street past Arthur Place to Upper Arthur Street. Could it be, I wondered, that the future President’s family at one point found favour with Belfast’s city fathers and got commemorated?

Checking the records, it seems that Arthur Street doesn’t appear on the 1685 map or the 1737 one, but is there in 1833. (On the map it runs roughly north-south, Upper Arthur Street being the southern end which runs off the bottom edge of the map, just east of the church marked A67 [the Donegall Square East Methodist Church].) The river running through the area in the 1685 map is the Blackstaff, before it was diverted to enter the Lagan a bit further upstream, allowing houses to be built in Arthur Street / Victoria Square.

Well, Google Books gives me partial access to Marcus Patton’s 1993 booklet, Central Belfast: An Historical Gazetteer, enabling me to piece together the following sentence:

Eliza Street was probably named after Lady Elizabeth, daughter of the First Marquis [sic] of Donegall, with Charlotte Street, Amelia Street and Arthur Street being named after her siblings.

Debrett’s, available in full from Google Books, tells me that the first Marquess of Donegall (whose own dates were 1739-1799) had seven children by his first wife (and none by his second or third), listed as George Augustus (1769-1844), Arthur (1771-1788), Spencer Stanley (1775-1819), and the girls whose birthdates are discreetly omitted, Charlotte, Anne Henrietta, Elizabeth Amelia, and Emilia, all of whom apparently died young.

I’m not sure that I buy this story. Eliza Street, Charlotte Street, Amelia Street, and Henrietta Street which would also go with this pattern, are all to the south – in the case of Charlotte Street, some way to the south – of the Howard Street – Donegall Square – May Street axis where Upper Arthur Street ends. It does make sense that the marquess, who basically owned Belfast, would commemorate his dead daughters in the streets built in the later eighteenth century; but looking at the geography, Arthur Street should have been constructed a few decades earlier. I think it’s more likely that it commemorates the first marquess himself, rather than his son, as his name was also Arthur (as were all four of his predecessors as Earl of Donegall).

In any case, it’s pretty clear that there is no connection, or only a distant one, with the Presidential family of the Ballymena area. I remain on the lookout for local connections to the 21st President; next time I’m up in Derry, I shall ask my old friend Paul if he has any ideas.

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I have a notion of making my next big reading project to get through the whole of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a chapter at a time. The whole text is on-line here and elsewhere. I think I would like to pace it at about two chapters a week. I did start making notes on the earlier chapters at the beginning of this year, but paced it wrong and ran into the sand.

My question is, would anyone be interested in making this some kind of group activity? Perhaps set up a separate LJ account or community to cover it. I would commit to posting my own thoughts regularly, or indeed preferably spread that burden around other interested parties, starting in the first week of September.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s entirely adequate to just post here, tagging appropriately, along with a master index of the kind I pasted into my Shakespeare reviews after I had finished them. That is certainly the default option.

Views welcome.

These were three stories originally commissioned for the 23rd season of Doctor Who, which was then cancelled and reconceived as the Trial of a Time Lord season. Target, at the point that they were running out of stories to publish, latched onto them in 1989-90 and got the writers of the unbroadcast scripts to write them up in novel form. Two of them are apparently to be released as audios by Big Finish later this year, kicking off a new sequence of Six/Peri “Lost Stories”.

August Books 22) Doctor Who – The Nightmare Fair, by Graham Williams

This is a comeback story in a couple of ways: Williams had been the producer of Doctor Who in the later Tom Baker era, now returning to try his hand at writing a script for the show; and the villain is the Celestial Toymaker, who had featured in a 1966 story turning William Hartnell’s Doctor invisible and subjecting companions Dodo and Steven to playing a series of deadly games. This time round the Toymaker has set up shop in Blackpool, and the Sixth Doctor and Peri have to pursue him through a deadly amusement arcade to prevent him from Taking Ovar The Wurld, helped by a young man named Kevin Stoney (who must have been named for the actor who had portrayed the two great early Who supervillains, Mavic Chen and Tobias Vaughn).

It’s not hugely inspiring stuff, but no doubt would have been rescuable with decent performances and effects (and coming at the start of the season it would probably have got them). I have heard a fan-produced audio version which is utterly deflated by the poor performance of the person playing Peri, and of course didn’t have the resources that Big Finish will bring to it. Fans of the Toymaker, if there are any, will probably find The Magic Mousetrap, the recent Big Finish play with the Seventh Doctor, more satisfying.

August Books 23) Doctor Who – The Ultimate Evil, by Wally K. Daly

This is an odd case – probably the best of the three Missing Episodes books considered as a story (so it’s unfortunate that Big Finish won’t be doing it), but the worst written by some way; Daly, who is basically a TV and radio scriptwriter, has followed the by-the-numbers novelisation method of the Target books at their least compelling.

The story, as I said, is decent stuff: there is a planet whose two halves are at an uneasy peace with one another; there is a bad guy who is using Evil Tech to make them go to war and has subverted an ambitious aristocrat in one of the planet’s hemispheres; the Doctor is also subjected to mind control, and Peri almost gets some romance from a guy whose girlfriend, presumed dead in the first chapter, she resembles. I thought the Doctor let the bad guy off a bit lightly in the end, but basically enjoyed it apart from the clunky style.

August Books 24) Doctor Who – Mission to Magnus, by Philip Martin

It will be interesting to see what Big Finish manages to make of this story, because on the page it is a confused and confusing mess. We start with the Doctor being uncharacteristically terrified by a fellow Time Lord, who we are told was the class bully in Gallifrey, and who is in any case dispatched before we are a third of the way through. We have a planet populated by women and boys, all the men having died off, but not much is done with this interesting setup. It’s a Philip Martin script, so we also have Sil just being generally villainous. For some reason we also have the Ice Warriors, who appear at the half-way point, keep changing their minds about shooting people, and try and blow the planet into a new orbit for their own inexplicable motivations. The Doctor and Peri get to run around between all these elements. Despite this rather rich menu of happenings, the 120-page novel still feels padded in places. For completists only.

So, in summary, none of these will make my Top Five Doctor Who books list: or even, I am sorry to say, my Top Hundred.

I was surprised that so few of my top five suggestions related to Doctor Who. I admit that I got the meme from Who fandom, and you can see some of the excellent recent Who top fives listed on . Anyway, here are my four.

asks for my top five actors who have never played the Doctor who I would like to see in the role. I’m really bad at that kind of question, I’m afraid; I’m just not sufficiently engaged in stage and screen to have a meaningful opinion. So I shall pass on this one (though I also agree with Alex Wilcock that any of Peter Davison’s AVPP co-stars – Graham Crowden, David Troughton and Barbara Flynn – would have been fantastic).

asks for my top five Doctor Who adventures. I’m taking this to mean televised Who, both Old and New, since I listed my favourite Big Finish audios quite recently and will do novels below.

I tried doing this by taking the whole list and trimming it down, but that was insane. Instead I went through each of the Doctors and chose my favourite, plus one extra for Ten.

5) The War Games

Neil Gaiman has raved about his original memories of this series, shown forty years ago this spring. I can see why it had such an impact on him. There are of course two totally unforgettable moments in the story (two more than in most stories, let’s be honest) – the moment of recognition between the Doctor and the War Chief (played by Edward Brayshaw, later Mr Meeker in Rentaghost) at the end of episode 4, and the Time Lords’ destruction of the Doctor’s body at the end of the story. In between, despite the length, it keeps up a cracking good pace. The DVD released last month is already essential for any Who collection.

4) School Reunion

This story and Dalek both have New Who meeting with Old Who, but this is much the more enjoyable story – Sarah Jane speaks in a way for any of us who feel we have lost touch with our younger selves and with the people of our personal past. K9 will make you cry, a prediction that would have been impossible in the 1970s. It’s also one of the better moments of the Rose/Mickey/Ten dynamic. And, let’s not forget, it has Anthony Stewart Head as the chief baddie.

3) The Daleks’ Master Plan

I have an unfashionable love for the original third season, and especially this massive monster of a story, which seems to me to epitomise the science fantasy elements that Old Who was originally meant to be about. We lose not one but two companions to violent death; we have Nicholas Courtney making his first of many Who appearances; we have Kevin Stoney as the villainous Mavic Chen, not to mention Peter Butterworth as the Monk; and we have the Daleks at their most determined and villainous, and much less pantomimey than they subsequently became. Shame that only three of the twelve episodes survive, but the audio with Peter Purves narrating is great.

2) The Deadly Assassin

Tom Baker was and remains my favourite Doctor, but it’s difficult to pick out an individual story rather than simply rave about the entire era. However, if I must choose, it is probably this superb marriage of the talents of David Maloney as director and Robert Holmes as writer (the same team having done The Krotons rather less successfully), bringing (as with The War Games) new insights into the Doctor’s background and (as with Maloney’s earlier The Mind Robber) wacky psychedelic visions of artificial reality. Supported well by George Pravda and Bernard Horsfall in particular. Unfortunately it scores badly on the gender front (the only credited female actress plays the Voice of the Matrix). This is the beginning of a superb run of stories, Leela having had a particularly good start as a companion.

1) Blink

I felt a little guilty about including two Ten stories, since I actually rate Tennant below Hartnell and Ecclestone as well as T Baker, but really this is 45 minutes of concentrated terror and wonder, which barely qualifies as Doctor Who (having less Doctor in it than any other story bar Turn Left and Mission to the Unknown) except that it has the correct opening and closing titles. This is the episode I would show someone who knew nothing about the show to see if they could be convinced to try more. Though I would have to apologetically admit that it doesn’t get any better.

If I were doing top five Old Who, I would add The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Caves of Androzani to my list; my top five New Who would also include The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Dalek and Midnight.

asks for my top five Doctor Who novels. I take this to include all varieties of printed Who, which means that the novelisations, especially of the First Doctor, come out well.

5) Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell

This is cheating a bit as I haven’t finished it yet (and I’m not even reading it, I’m listening to Bernard Cribbins doing an abridged version), but it’s a brilliant exploration of Donna’s back-story, with plenty of household tension between her, Wilf and Sylvia, and the Doctor rather out of his depth. There isn’t another New Series Adventure as good as this so far; I hope I am not disappointed with the ending!

4) Doctor Who – The Romans, by Donald Cotton

This is a novelisation that completely re-imagines the story and turns it into a set of letters and diary entries following the protagonists around their Italian adventures, beautifully done by Cotton taking some liberties with Spooner’s original script.

3) Doctor Who and the Dæmons, by Barry Letts

An excellent account of what the producer/writer of this story would have preferred to appear on the screen – reasonably faithful to what actually did appear on the screen but without dodgy special effects and with somehow much more tension and excitement.

2) All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane

This is a superb pastiche of Doctor Who (Seven, Ace and Benny in this case) with the Cthulhu Mythos and Sherlock Holmes, from Virgin’s New Adventure range. Along these lines are also two other favourites Evolution by John Peel, which brings together Four, Sarah, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling in person, and also Eye of Heaven, by Jim Mortimore, which takes Four and Leela on a Victorian sailing expedition to the Pacific.

1) Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker

Doctor Who novels have been on a continuous if occasionally interrupted decline since 1964. Actually that’s not true at all, but the very first of them is still the best – a total rewrite of the beginning of the story, much more explicit if understated romance between Ian and Barbara, glorious description of the Daleks themselves as unfamiliar entities, credible tight first-person narration by Ian; this is still the mark which all other Who books should aim at, and not many come close to.

If I were doing top five novelisations only, Ian Marter’s Doctor Who – The Rescue and Ian Briggs’ Doctor Who – The Curse of Fenric would have made the list. For my top five pre-Nine spinoff novels, I’ve mentioned three above; my other favourites are Kim Newman’s novella Time and Relative and Steve Lyons’ Salvation, both featuring the First Doctor with resectively Susan and Dodo/Steven. Of the Ninth and Tenth Doctor novels, my top five would also include Sting of the Zygons by Stephen Cole, The Feast of the Drowned also by Cole, Only Human by Gareth Roberts, and Winner Takes All by Jacqueline Rayner.

asks for my top five Doctor Who villains.

5) The Master

It’s impossible to do a top five Who villains list which doesn’t include the Master. (It’s difficult to do one that doesn’t include Davros or the Black Guardian, but I think I have succeeded.) What’s odd is that the Master’s stories, on the whole, are not actually the best ones. (Probably the best Master story apart from The Deadly Assassin is Utopia, which hardly has him in it.) But he is such a fundamental part of Who that he can’t be ignored. (And I have to admit he pwns the other renegade Time Lords – the Monk, the Rani, the dismal Drax and Azrael.)

4) Sharaz Jek

Let’s hear it for the disfigured sinister guy! (Scaroth, Last of the Jagaroth, and Magnus Greel came close to taking this spot.) Sharaz Jek is not totally villainous, which is what makes him so memorable – one of many good things about The Caves of Androzani.

3) Tobias Vaughn

Vaughn is the best of a super array of villains who confronted the Second Doctor. I love them all – Salamander, the War Chief, the Great Intelligence, the Ice Warrior leaders, Maxtible, the Master of the Land of Fiction, even mad professor Zaroff; the Troughton era is brilliant in its variety of nasties. But Vaughn is way the most interesting, doing deals with the Cybermen to try and Take Over The World in The Invasion.

2) Mr Finch / Brother Lassar

New Who by contrast has been rather weak on villains, tending toward the pantomimey (including, I’m sorry to say, Simm!Master). Outstandingly the best (if we count the Weeping Angels as monsters rather than villains) must be Giles from Buffy playing a giant bat-creature in School Reunion. That scene by the swimming pool still sends shivers down my spine.

1) Mavic Chen

Sorry to go on about it, but Mavic Chen totally pwns Davros in every respect. He has gained elected office by his own skills, and is the first of many Who villains to think he can gain power by doing a deal with the monsters (as his successor and twin Vaughn does with the Cybermen). His story is a fascinating one of a fall from grace. Again, it’s a real shame that only three of his episodes survive.