Monday morning I woke up in excruciating pain at 0400, and phoned the office of the dentist who I had seen last Thursday. I was planning to just leave a “I NEED AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT PLEASE CALL ME BACK” message on his answering machine, but to my surprise a rather sleepy nurse answered and promised to book me in as soon as possible. She called back mid-morning and told me to go to the other partner’s other office at lunchtime, which was quite a long way away, but luckily I had the car. The partner looked at me somewhat askance when I arrived, and asked if I remembered meeting him before, because the nurse thought he had treated me? I confirmed his suspicion that we did not know each other.

Five minutes later, after fiddling around in my mouth for a bit he exclaimed “Ah! I remember now! My colleague brought me in last week to look at you! I didn’t recognise you, Mr Whyte, but I do recognise your tooth!” And he turned to his assistant and repeated in French, “C’est ça, je me souviens de sa dent!”

Rather sorely I returned to the office. I will have to go back for more on Thursday of this week. The words “root canal” have been mentioned. (Discussing this with colleagues today, one of them said that as far as he knew he didn’t have any root canals and hoped he would never find out.)

My mood on Monday was not improved by Belgacom, who cannot install a land-lines for the new office until 31 July. (Those of you – most of you, I think – who are in my address book will have received a note today of my new coordinates including a cryptic statement about this.) Since Belgacom have a monopoly on the crucial local loop part, we are trapped. In order to get internet access for the office at all, I went out and invested in a pair of wireless USB dongles – my assistant’s dongle works fine, but I had to do a lot of fiddling with my own dongle to get it to perform properly.

*snigger*

Meanwhile my nether regions are making a good recovery, thank you. My assistant has been performing miracles of IKEA furniture assembly while I’ve been fiddling with my dongle and taking it fairly easy with the heavy lifting. I probably should have been more careful last week – I suspect I did set myself back a couple of days. But it seems better now.

This made me laugh.

On Sunday morning I emailed 38 MEPs, the 14 who represent me as a resident of Flanders, and another 24 of various nationalities and political inclinations who I happen to know professionally or personally.

48 hours on, I have had replies from precisely three – the sole Flemish Green, and two German Greens. Silence from all the other political groups.

Perhaps the day before and the first day of the week of a plenary sitting in Strasbourg is not a fair test. Be that as it may, Mr Staes now has a pretty good chance of getting my vote next year.

Edited to add: Had a reply also from Chris Davies (Lib Dem, NW England) along the same lines as .

I won’t be doing my mega-meta-review this year – other things have been absorbing my energy. However, various people have been reminding me that it is time to cast my vote, so I can reveal that my preferences are as follows:

Best Novel (links to my earlier livejournal reviews)

5) Rollback, by Robert J Sawyer. While this is the best book I have read by this author, this should be understood as damning with faint praise. The prose somehow seems a bit less clunky: the tedious undergraduate-level discussions of philosophy and science are wisely constrained to the first half of the book; the two story lines – the central character’s unexpected rejuvenation, and the decoding of an alien message – come close to reinforcing each other.

Yet in the end, it doesn’t work. The biggest flaw is that while our central character is undergoing the dramatic changes of rejuvenation, and the consequent disruption of his life with his wife and family, we get very little sense of being inside his head. The second huge plot problem is that the alien messages come only once every 18.8 years (well, actually every 37.6 years): surely once contact has been established, one would set up continuous transmission in both directions, even knowing that there would be an 18.8 year lag?

4) The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. I have much more sympathy with the political message of this book than of the same author’s Old Man’s War: humanity is dragged into an unwinnable war with the rest of the galaxy by the lies of its own political leadership, and our hero ends up as the one man who can resolve matters. So no complaints on that score.

There are touches I liked – Charles Stross makes an appearance as a genetically engineered super-soldier, and I appreciated the subtle “Commodore Perry” riff at the end of the book. But the plot is both complex and reliant on fortunate accidents of timing. And I find Scalzi’s narrative style rather wearyingly unvarying; almost all the characters speak with identical voices.

3) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. A great book, set in an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 – there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again. Chabon’s viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it’s terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.

However, it’s not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don’t think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I’m not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie’s country houses, or Lindsey Davis’ richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters’ medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn’t make it fantasy). While in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I’ve read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from my top two preferences. Still, it won the Nebula and the Locus Awards. (Thanks, .)

2) Halting State, by Charles Stross. A glorious melding of genres, police procedural and cyberpunk, set in the Edinburgh of an independent Scotland in a few years’ time. The narrative voice is striking – three different viewpoint characters, but all told in the second person, as (quite deliberately) in a computer game. There are nods to all kinds of sf taproot texts, and an unnerving background theme of questioning reality. And Charlie’s prose seems somehow more under control than I can remember from any of his other books. Excellent stuff, and only just squeezed out of the top spot in my ballot paper.

1) Brasyl, by Ian McDonald. The setting of Brazil fits McDonald’s lush, dense writing style so well that it is remarkable that he’s never set a novel in real South America before (his two books set on Mars portray a rather Patagonian version of the planet, but it’s not quite the same). We have three interleaving narratives, from the mid-18th century, the present day, and the near future (2030); we have peculiar variations of reality; and we have the jungle, both urban and literal, with its various hostile inhabitants. In some ways it’s deliberately less ambitious than River of Gods, which juggled ten different viewpoint characters against the background of India forty years hence, but the intermeshing of the different characters from their different time periods in the end comes across rather pleasingly. Has already won the BSFA award.

What others say: Karen Burnham agrees with me except that she puts Halting State last. Joe Sherry is with me on the top choice. Alan Heuer reverses my top two and bottom two. This person reverses my third and fourth choices. Susan De Guardiola hasn’t finished them yet but her ballot is very different from mine.

Best Novella (links to stories on-line)

5) All Seated on the Ground, by Connie Willis. I am not a total hater of Willis’ work – I very much enjoyed both Doomsday Book and her short story “Even the Queen” – but I find her appeals to sentimentality a bit wearying, and this story combines that with another wearyingly familiar Willis theme, failure to communicate – both between a newly arrived group of aliens and between the earthwoman trying to communicate with them and her boss. No doubt a lot of people will vote for it because they think it is funny, but I didn’t laugh.

4) The Fountain of Age, by Nancy Kress. Oddly enough this is the nominee that comes closest to my professional interests, in that it is partly set on Cyprus (and then the rest of the story has the protagonist dealing with the consequences of what happened there). But it didn’t really do it for me; reflections on aging, lost loves, and new biotechnology which just didn’t gel satisfactorily for this reader.

3) Memorare by Gene Wolfe. A rather peculiar story of astronautical documentary makers in the moons of Jupiter, lost loves, grave-robbing and unpleasant brain-washing by alien intelligences. The science, such as it was, didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and I didn’t really get what the story was supposed to be about.

2) Stars Seen Through Stone, by Lucius Shepard. Certainly the least traditionally sfnal of these nominees (possibly of all the nominees). Spooky happenings in small-town Pennsylvania in the 1970s, well told and with a set of interesting characters and relationships navigating through the odd happenings. Very enjoyable.

1) Recovering Apollo 8 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Perhaps I am a crazy sentimentalist, but I loved this more than any of the other nominees in any category. The story is an alternate timeline where Apollo 8 was lost at Christmas 1968; and over the next several decades, the capsule and then the bodies of the three astronauts are recovered, one by one. I’m fascinated by this sort of thing, having dabbled in archaeology myself at one time; and Rusch takes an audacious concept and rus well with it. It won the Asimov’s readers’ poll in its category.

What others say: John DeNardo almost agrees with me but reverses the top two; likewise Karen Burnham. Alan Heuer and Abigail Nussbaum also almost agree with me, with the important exception of bumping Rusch down from first to third and fourth place respectively.

Best Novelette (links to stories on-line)

5) Dark Integers, by Greg Egan. Familiar territory for Egan of mathematics changing reality; but I was rather unconvinced by the idea of the three or four human mathematicians who are responsible for relations with the dangerous other universe. Just didn’t work for me. Won the Asimov’s readers’ poll though.

4) Glory, by Greg Egan. Egan has two stories on the ballot, but I didn’t really like either of them. This one is about a mission of enlightened investigators from a more developed situation doing guerilla archaeology on a more primitive world, and paying the price. Again, I wasn’t totally convinced by it.

3) Finisterra, by David Moles. Utterly superb worldbuilding, of a planet with living dirigible beasts, now being exploited by the humans who are colonising the world; the plot is fairly standard but the scenery amazing.

2) The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang. A lovely lovely story of time travel at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, working up all those human themes of loss and love in a richly imagined fantastic environment that Chiang has done so well before. I expect this will win.

1) The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairytale of Economics, by Daniel Abraham. I thought this was superbly original. Like the Chiang story, it adopts a fantasy fairy-tale style of presentation; but I can’t remember any other story I have read about economics that was this much fun and avoided being preachy. Gets my vote.

What others say: Abigail Nussbaum and Joe Sherry put The Cambist… second, and John DeNardo bumps it down to third place but otherwise they agree with me; Karen Burnham and Alan Heuer agree with me apart from putting Finisterra fourth and fifth respectively.

Best Short Story (links to stories on-line)

5) Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?, by Ken MacLeod. Sadly didn’t really do anything for me; a rather dense space opera story whose point sailed over my head.

4) Distant Replay, by Mike Resnick. Another one of those sentimental stories, about one’s dead spouse coming back to life, that will do better than it deserves.

3) A Small Room in Koboldtown, by Michael Swanwick. Rather a fun detective story in an indutrialising fantasy setting. Won the Locus award.

2) Last Contact, by Stephen Baxter. A moving and ingenious story about the end of the world, let down just a little by Baxter’s prose, which has never quite worked for me (but came very close to doing so here).

1) Tideline, by Elizabeth Bear. I really hate stories about anthropomorphic robots which develop deep and meaningful relationships with human beings which we are supposed to find moving. Elizabeth Bear has scored big time by writing such a story about a decidedly non-anthropomorphic robot developing a friendship with a boy as it gradually breaks down on a beach. Really good stuff, which won the Asimov’s readers’ poll.

What others say: Abigail Nussbaum completely disagrees with me, putting Ken MacLeod first and Stephen Baxter fourth. John DeNardo swaps my top two, and also my third and fourth choices; Alan Heuer swaps my top two and my bottom two. Joe Sherry likes the Baxter but not the Bear. Karen Burnham has only read the top two but agrees with me on their ranking.

I should also add that for the relevant category I am voting for Blink, Human Nature/Family of Blood, and Captain Jack Harkness in that order.

In summary: I liked this set of nominations much more than last year’s. In each of the fiction categories, I feel that any of my top three nominations would be a credible winner. (Probably my feeling this won’t be enough to stop Connie Willis though.)

Edited to add: Apologies to John DeNardo for misidentifying him first time round!

On Monday, July 7, 2008 there will be an attempt to sneak through an EU law to clamp down on file-sharing. If it gets passed, you could end up being disconnected from the Net for ever if your ISP decides you’ve been file-sharing.

More information here. Worth bearing in mind that the two principal protagonists of this bad proposal are British Conservatives, Malcolm Harbour and Syed Kamall.

I have a certain amount of contact with MEPs, but perhaps not surprisingly very few of those who I know at all well seem to be directly involved with this.

Edited to add: Bart Staes, the sole MEP of the Flemish party Groen!, tells me that the Green/European Free Alliance group will vote against. Worth writing to them anyway to stiffen their resolve. More updates as I get responses.

ETA 2: Heide Rühle, the Green/EFA rapporteur, gives a somewhat different spin – she tells me that “most of [the rumours] are unjustified see my added explanation [which she attached, and I must say didn’t make a lot of sense to me]. But we’ll meet once more with the legal service on Monday to clarify that no wording can endanger the freedom of Internet.”

Funny how Daleks speak German with an English accent?

And NB “Whatever you say” translates as “Was Sie auch sagen”, not “Was immer Sie sagen”. Edited to add: This is not a fair criticism – see below – though I stand by my comment on the Daleks’ accents!

More later – I will do a second-half-of-season roundup post in due course.

3) Why I am not a Christian, and other essays on religion and related subjects, by Bertrand Russell

Although I knew from the title that I probably wouldn’t agree with a lot of this, I found it a very enjoyable read. It includes essays of varying lengths (the shortest is less than two pages, the longest 27), on the existence of God and ethical questions in general. On the more general questions, Russell is definitely a liberal, opposed to forced conformity and social hypocrisy, and his views are pretty close to mine. I particularly enjoyed a couple of historical pieces – a review of two books on medieval history and a sketch of the life of Thomas Paine.

On the existence of God, the most interesting of several pieces is a transcript of a radio debate between Russell and a Jesuit, where Russell clearly wins the argument about logical proofs, doesn’t make as convincing a case on ethics, and has no answer to the question of religious experience. (The Jesuit misses a chance to push Russell on what I have always seen as the weakest point of his side of the argument, that science and logic are not in fact able to explain the whole of human experience; and the anti-God response tends to be to pretend that things which don’t fall into the domain of science and logic don’t need to be explained, which is then a tautology.)

I still prefer Russell’s approach to that of, say, Richard Dawkins, because Russell seems to me to have a better grip of the problem: he quite rightly attacks dogmatic beliefs, be they Christian or Communist, held tyrannously by anyone, and advocates free thinking and debate; and one of his arguments against religion, in particular Christianity, is that it usually fosters and leads to this sort of tyranny. My own view is that it is a categorical error to blame this pattern of human behaviour, which is found and has been found among rulers of all religious backgrounds and of none, on religion per se. (There are also plenty of examples of states with a strong religious consciousness which none the less practice or practiced pluralism, but Russell discounts them as not being religious enough, which by his lights they aren’t.)

The book finishes with a long (40 pages) description by the editor, Paul Edwards, of an incident where Russell was barred from taking up a professorship at the City College of New York as a result of an outrageous court judgement, combined with political machinations by (ultimately) Mayor LaGuardia. It is a depressing story, and illustrates that the American system is not always all that it is cracked up to be; but this is perhaps less newsworthy in 2008 than it was in 1940.

“Maiden aunts are invariably nice, especially, of course, when they are rich; ministers of religion are nice, except those rare cases in which they elope to South Africa with a member of the choir after pretending to commit suicide.”

(Answer.)

2) Collected Short Stories, by E.M. Forster

I’m ashamed to say that the only one of Forster’s novels I have actually read is The Longest Journey, though I have seen film versions of A Passage to India, A Room With A View and Howard’s End, which all came out at a time in my life when I saw more films than I do now. I knew that one of these stories is “The Machine Stops”, a riposte to H.G. Wells’ visions of a mechanised future, but I expected the rest to be vignettes in Forster’s distinctive but generally naturalistic aesthetic style. I was therefore surprised to find that of the twelve stories, ten can be classified as fantasy (and “The Machine Stops” as science fiction) with only the last one, “The Eternal Moment” having no overtly unrealistic elements. And they are interesting stories, too, sometimes giving a wicked spin to traditional concepts of death and the afterlife, sometimes just being wicked. I hadn’t really considered Forster as a genre writer before, so it was quite a revelation.

One trick he does rather well is the unreliable narrator – a couple of his viewpoint characters are overconfident men who reveal enough of themselves that the reader can be sure that the writer does not sympathise with them. I hope this isn’t flogging a dead horse, but reminded me a couple of days ago of why I have found other uses of the “unreliable narrator” so unsatisfactory, if there is no discernible hint that (to adapt Achebe’s phrase about Conrad) the character enjoys anything less than the author’s complete confidence. Forster can drop those hints entirely discernibly without damaging the integrity (or readability) of his narrative; one of the things that makes him a great writer.

…Who said, “Although pain isn’t real,
If I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel!”

I’m sore.

The dentist had another go at my tooth this afternoon and prescribed me industrial strength Ibuprofen. And since last Friday, my groin has been very sore and sensitive indeed. Today is the first day for almost a week that I have been walking almost normally.

It’s been bad timing, because this was also the week that I moved our office (albeit only two blocks, from here to here, but still taxing) – thank heavens for my heroic assistant, and my family and friends, who helped with humping boxes, IKEA furniture purchases, etc.

But I also feel rather lucky. The last week has been grim for me in terms of physical discomfort – probably the worst I can remember in my life; other periods of ill health I have had have just involved lying in bed feeling crap rather than actually being in pain at both ends. But other people have it worse. My ground down molar will eventually heal; my groin will return to normal (minus one significant potential ability). My wife has been very gallant in not mentioning too loudly her experiences in delivering our three children. And other people – some reading this, I know – live in constant pain, from whatever reason. It’s something I have spent most of my life not having to think about; and the fact that I have spent much of the last week thinking about it has been a revelation of the extent of my own good fortune.

This is what the poll reveals as the Worst Who stories (listed in order of decreasing consensus by Doctor).

Fifth Doctor: (33 respondents, of whom 1 said that they were all fantastic) The run(a)way winner is Time Flight, voted the worst by 15 of you. The novelisation is no better. In second place, though a long way behind, is Black Orchid on four votes, followed by Kinda and Warriors of the Deep on three, Four to Doomsday and Snakedance on two, and Earthshock, Arc of Infinity and The King’s Demons on one each. The only one of these that I would be slightly defensive about is Snakedance.

Second Doctor: (28 respondents, of whom six think they are all fantastic) Far in front of the field here is The Underwater Menace, tagged as worst by 12 of you. The only other story to get more than one vote was The Krotons with four. Scattered votes went to The Highlanders, The Macra Terror, Fury from the Deep, The Dominators, The Space Pirates and The War Games. All of this is understandable enough, and I guess that the reason more people didn’t vote for, in particular, The Dominators and The Space Pirates is that not many have endured them.

Ninth Doctor: (54 votes, of whom 7 said they were all fantastic) Slightly surprised that the winner here by a convincing margin is The Long Game with 16 votes, followed some way behind by Aliens of London / World War Three (my own choice) and Father’s Day both on nine, Boom Town on 8, with The Unquiet Dead on 4 and a solitary (incomprehensible) vote for The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. No votes at all for Rose, The End of the World, Dalek, or Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. I’m more than a little surprised by the hate for The Long Game, which like a number of other Tenth Doctor episodes (Boom Town, Father’s Day) I enjoyed a lot more on re-watching, and which seems to me about as good as The End of the World.

Sixth Doctor: (32 votes, of whom six said they were all terrible and two diehards insist that they are all good) Quite close here, with Timelash beating out The Twin Dilemma (my own choice) by 9 votes to 8. The Mark of the Rani got two votes, with one each for Revelation of the Daleks and for each individual segment of Trial of a Time Lord. No specific votes, perhaps surprisingly, for Attack of the Cybermen, Vengeance on Varos or The Two Doctors, but they are covered by the six who disliked everything.

Seventh Doctor: (36 votes, including two each for “all great!” and “all terrible!”, and another two for the mistakenly included option of the whole of 1989’s Season 26) Three stories at the top here, Time and the Rani winning with nine votes, followed by Delta and the Bannermen with eight and The Happiness Patrol with seven. One each for Paradise Towers, Silver Nemesis, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Battlefield, The Curse of Fenric and SurvivalDragonfire, Remembrance of the Daleks or Ghost Light. I find this completely incomprehensible. I didn’t think much of either Time and the Rani or The Happiness Patrol, but I am obviously alone in finding them way ahead of either Battlefield (my own choice) or Remembrance of the Daleks.

Third Doctor: (33 votes, including a record 7 who liked them all) The clear winner here was my own pick, The Mutants, with eight votes, twice as many as its nearest rival, The Time Monster with four. The Claws of Axos and Carnival of Monsters each got three, Invasion of the Dinosaurs two, and one each for Doctor Who and the Silurians, Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, Colony in Space, Planet of the Daleks, and The Monster of Peladon. While I do agree that The Mutants is unusually awful, I don’t think it is that much worse than most of the other stories listed here, and indeed several which got no votes (The Dæmons, The Three Doctors, Planet of the Spiders).

Tenth Doctor: (58 votes, including one who likes them all and two who want to defer judgement until after next Saturday) A tie! Fourteen votes each went to the late Season Two stories Love & Monsters and Fear Her. This is way ahead of Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks which got six votes (including mine). 42 got four votes, Voyage of the Damned three, with two each for Tooth and Claw, The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, and The Doctor’s DaughterNew Earth, Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel, The Idiot’s Lantern, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, Human Nature / The Family of Blood, Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky, and The Unicorn and the Wasp. Again, I’m surprised by the concentration of votes on two stories which I didn’t especially warm to either but which seem to me equal if not superior in quality to some of the others listed here.

Eighth Doctor: 48 votes, of whom 37 said this was an unfair question and 11 voted for Doctor Who – the TV movie. Which can be read in several different ways.

First Doctor: (28 votes, of whom 2 liked them all) Another tie, but in a much more closely contested field. The Chase and The Gunfighters both got four votes; The Sensorites (my own choice), The Web Planet and The Space Museum got three each; An Unearthly Child and The Smugglers two; and one each for The Daleks, The Edge of Destruction, Marco Polo, Planet of Giants and Galaxy 4. I’m sorry to see The Gunfighters do so badly; I think it is rather special. (Though I’m glad that the other stories from that run in Season 3 got very few votes.)

Fourth Doctor: (37 votes, of whom 4 liked them all) A close race, but The Horns of Nimon with five votes just beats my own choice, Underworld which got four. Two votes each went to Revenge of the Cybermen, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Invisible Enemy, The Sun Makers, The Creature from the Pit, and MeglosThe Sontaran Experiment, Terror of the Zygons, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death, Image of the Fendahl, The Pirate Planet, The Androids of Tara, The Power of Kroll, The Armageddon Factor, Destiny of the Daleks, and State of Decay. I’m surprised some of those didn’t get more, and also surprised by some of the absences (eg The Invasion of Time). However it is difficult to dispute the top two, and while I voted for Underworld rather than The Horns of Nimon, I think this is something about which reasonable people can disagree.

Thus is revealed the accumulated weight of Livejournal. I am in line with the majority on only three of the nine where there is a serious contest; , whose debate with me sparked this, does rather better. So basically, Pete wins the argument.

When I saw Frank at P-Con a few months ago, I complimented him (sincerely) on how well he was looking, and said that I was very glad to see him there. He chuckled in that way he had, and said that he expected to be around for a while yet. Well, he was wrong; but we will remember him for more than just “a while”.

1) Children of the Atom, by Wilmar H. Shiras

On that list of the 100 most influential sf books that was going round a year or so ago, this was the only one whose author I simply had never heard of. It is set twenty years in the future (ie 1973), and revolves around the assembling of a group of children whose parents all died after a nuclear accident in 1959, and who all display exceptional intelligence. At the end of the book, the children decide that they must integrate into the mainstream of society.

It’s obviously at least in part a parable of fandom / geekdom, but a rather effective one. Definitely an under-rated classic.

49) New Tales of Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy

I got this by mistake – thought I was ordering the famous 1946 anthology edited by Healy and J. Francis McComas, but in fact it is a 1951 followup edited by Healy alone. For all that, I was not too disappointed, at least given my expectations of an original sf anthology of the period; there are average quality stories by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, AE van Vogt and a half dozen others who I haven’t heard of, and the first publication of Anthony Boucher’s classic “The Quest for Saint Aquin”. Apart from that, the other one that really grabbed me was “Bettyann”, by someone called Kris Neville whose work I don’t think I otherwise know. It is the longest story in the book, about a Mid-American teenage girl who is forced to confront her own always half-suspected nature as an alien changeling; excellent, I thought. Is Neville’s other stuff worth pursuing?

Sparked by a debate between and myself, I must ask the following questions:

48) The Lost and Left Behind: Stories from the Age of Extinctions, by Terry Glavin

This is a polemical book about diversity – both biodiversity, in terms of species (and even different breeds of cultivated crops and animals), and ethnic diversity, in terms of languages spoken. Glavin argues passionately that we are losing vast amounts of what makes the world special, and points out that the disappearance of human languages is closely linked geographically to the extinction of species. It is a dramatic story, and some chapters – particularly the one describing the Russian Far East – are simply appalling in their description of what we are doing to our world.

Despite the awfulness of the overall story, Glavin tries to be optimistic, and I too would like to be optimistic, but unfortunately I found his optimistic passages far less convincing than his pessimistic passages. (I also didn’t quite manage to summon up enthusiasm to match his for the whalers of the Lofoten Islands or the Angh of Longwa.) I would have appreciated some more practical ideas for what can be done at an individual or political level to ameliorate matters – Glavin debunks romantic environmentalism, quite possibly with good reason, but without offering much in its place. Still, I guess the purpose of such a book is to raise consciousness, and mine is duly raised.

Well, much to be said about yesterday’s episode – though I won’t say it here, except that I agree with those who believe that surely we will be getting a cop-out of some kind at the start of next week’s 65-minute climax, no doubt involving the hand.

Instead I’m writing up the four Sixth Doctor stories from Season 22 I watched on the laptop yesterday, lying in bed. Two of these are rather meh, the other two awful.

I’ve said before that very few Cybermen stories actually make sense. Attack of the Cybermen is not one of the exceptions. The whole idea of basing a story around the continuity of an earlier story is not intrinsically bad, but once we have reached the real 1986, it is better to just imagine that The Tenth Planet never happened, rather than try and protect it. Even in 1986, we knew enough about Tomb of the Cybermen that the differences between its sets and the “Tomb” sets here killed any visual connection. The Telos scenes as a whole make very little sense – Why human slaves? Why allow escapees to wander round? How did the Cryons evolve on a planet which is clearly warmer than freezing? Above all why haven’t the Cybermen worked out that it might be a bad idea to lock their prisoners in a room full of explosives? Colin Baker is particularly annoying here, but he is far from the worst thing about it. I felt a little sorry for the ice-maiden Cryons, but was left confused by their means and motivation.

I remember catching the first scenes of Vengeance on Varos first time round, where Jason Connery’s Jondar is unpleasantly tortured as an audience looks on, and then the Tardis breaks down and the Doctor decides it can’t be fixed. At that point I gave up and went away to do something else. Well, I misjudged it slightly. The torture scenes are unnecessarily unpleasant, and Colin Baker’s portrayal as annoying as before, but the rest of the story is not bad, Martin Jarvis and Nabil Shaban being especially good. Having said which, the scene with Peri turning into a bird is a bit crap.

Mark of the Rani is just rather dull. The Rani comes across as a more interesting character than in her other TV appearance; the Master’s presence appears pretty pointless; the scenery and setting are nice; the rest of it just isn’t very interesting. (We tactfully pass over the infamous tree shot.)

Timelash comes very close to The Twin Dilemma as being the worst Who story ever. Paul Darrow is just awful. Really awful. The glove-puppet aliens are just awful. Really awful. The pointless continuity with an unbroadcast Third Doctor story is just pointless. The inclusion of HG Wells is just stupid. The climbing wall scene is especially unconvincing. And what happens to all the people exiled to the twelfth century? Are they just left there? The only saving grace is that Colin Baker’s Doctor is a little less annoying here than elsewhere. But that is not saying much.

In summary, it is amazing that the 1986 cancellation was not permanent and that we got another four seasons of Old Who after this.

46) Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel
47) Fatal Attraction: Magnetic Mysteries of the Enlightenment, by Patricia Fara

Back to my former intellectual stamping ground, the history of science. Both of these books are for a popular rather than academic audience; Fara’s perhaps more didactic (she is a historian of science), Sobel’s more for entertainment (she is a journalist).

Sobel’s book is the more old-fashioned. It is a simple biography of John Harrison and his efforts to build a practical chronometer for the purpose of calculating longitude. We get a great deal about the bureaucratic politics which Harrison had to deal with, at one point invoking King George III directly on his own behalf. It is an interesting enough tale, told well; Sobel succeeds in making the 18th century personalities appear just like us.

Having said that, I was not completely satisfied. Sobel’s heroic portrait of Harrison makes little reference to religion and almost none to the wider impact of the longitude question on politics and vice versa; it is ‘Whiggish’ in that the “solution of the greatest scientific problem of his time” is presented as both desirable and ultimately inevitable. It is entertaining enough but not especially profound.

I got my historical training in the same place that Fara teaches (she is now the senior tutor of the Cambridge college I attended, and lectures in the department where I got my M Phil). Fara explores the eighteenth century not as a time like ours but as an alien culture which needs to be explained and unpacked, and does this through three key characters in the history of the understanding of magnetism: Edmund Halley (who also plays an important role in the earlier chapters of Sobel’s book), Gowin Knight (who ended up truculently running the British Museum) and Franz Mesmer (as in mesmerism).

I found this much more satisfying, though would have welcomed even more speculation on what Mesmer was Really Up To. Her section on Knight and his ascent to success on the basis of beautifully designed but functionally useless nautical compasses contains far more about the politics of longitude – both the internal British tension between gentlemen and practitioners, and the colonial purpose of the endeavour – than does Sobel’s book. The book does feel somewhat incomplete, but it is apparently purposely designed as one of a set of four – matching a similar volume also by Fara on electricity in the eighteenth century, and also books by Stephen Pumfrey on the seventeenth century and Iwan Morus on the nineteenth. Must look out for those.

Bring down the Cybus Corporation!

45) Masters of the Fist, by Edward P Hughes

A rather dismal Baen collection of short stories about a village in post-Holocaust Ireland where the head honcho is the only fertile man left in the world, and has to grapple with the awful responsibilities of impregnating the local women. Oirish and sexist clichés abound. Amusingly, the head honcho’s unofficial partner’s name is Celia Larkin (and these stories were written in the 1980s, so I suppose it is coincidence).

Two good ones among this lot, and one total dud.

39) Doctor Who – Castrovalva, by Christopher H Bidmead

This is rather good: Bidmead has a convincing intensity as he takes us through the narrative, and while it would be going too far to say that it all makes sense, it does at least hang together: there is a feeling that this is the beginning of a new era. The story is very much about the Doctor’s regeneration, and somehow this comes over better on the printed page. An impressive start for the Fifth Doctor novelisations.

40) Cold Fusion, by Lance Parkin

Just to divert for a bit into the Virgin Missing Adventures, here we have a novel mainly about Five, Adric, Tegan and Nyssa, but also involving Seven and (rather more so) his companions from the Virgin New Adventures, Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester. There are some very nice character moments, especially for the Doctors and the female companions, but the plot was not particularly special, and I don’t think a tetrahedron of the size specified in those planetary conditions is very likely. There are some nice nods to continuity as well, as you would expect.

(And apparently, “Ανδ Ι τυρνεδ αρουνδ ανδ τηεψ ωερε αλλ ωεαρινγ εψε&#960ατχηεσ” is a Gallifreyan greeting of some kind, and definitely not a well known Nicholas Courtney anecdote in a funny font.)

Oddly enough I also just listened to The Veiled Leopard, which rather more successfully unites Fifth and Seventh Doctor companions (Peri and Erimem, Ace and Hex) but I’ll leave that to my imminent giant audio catchup post.

41) Doctor Who – Four to Doomsday, by Terrance Dicks

A standard write-up from Dicks, losing the fairly impressive visuals of the original and thus exposing the weaknesses of the plot more visibly.

42) Doctor Who – Kinda, by Terrance Dicks

Another standard write-up, not doing any favours to a story whose impact was visual and implicit.

43) Doctor Who – Black Orchid, by Terence Dudley

Two-part stories give a lot of space to add more to the narrative when it comes time to write the novelisation, and this has been done well (Ian Marter) and badly (Nigel Robinson). This is definitely more at the Marter end of the spectrum. Dudley adds much detail about the cricket match (as incomprehensible to me as to Adric and Nyssa) and roots the story in the class structure of the Britain of the period, the Dowager Marchioness coming across as a particularly memorable personality. He even succeeds in giving Adric a couple of memorable character moments.

It’s a good book – my favourite Fifth Doctor novel so far – but let down by lousy proofing: repeated references to “Portugese” and “Venezuala” (and by the way, the first is not actually spoken much in the second); also we have someone dressed as “Marie Antionette”. A shame that Target couldn’t take more care.

The next in sequence, Doctor Who – Earthshock, is one of the Ian Marter novels – indeed, the last of them in broadcast order – which leads us then to:

44) Doctor Who – Time Flight, by Peter Grimwade

A terrible adaptation of a bad story. Wood and Miles rightly mock one of the particularly bad lines in About Time 5, but actually get it wrong; the full quote in all its glory is “‘Eevanaraagh’ cried out Kalid, as the Plasmatron cumulation entered his chamber.” Truly dreadful and over-written.

I’ve been in the habit of writing up each companion as they leave the sequence of novels. Adric really makes very little impression. His tendency towards siding with the baddies is almost his only interesting characteristic. Terence Dudley does make him rather more filled out in Doctor Who – Black Orchid but that is about the high point of his printed career. (And of course the Seventh Doctor and companions acknowledge his coming fate in Cold Fusion but apart from that he doesn’t get much to do.)

Edited to add: I see I forgot to include Eric Saward’s Doctor Who and the Visitation in this batch. Nt rushing to it, I must admit.

These were the last two Fifth Doctor gaps in my list. Frontios is not too bad; Enlightenment sheer genius.

I don’t think I had seen a single minute of this story before, and boy had I missed out. It is simply superb, the best story of the Davison era. Perhaps my appreciation was enhanced by watching it immediately after my operation this morning and needing to be cheered up, but I loved every moment: the creepiness of Striker’s crew, the glorious Lynda Baron as Captain Wrack, the Marriner/Tegan flirtation, the conclusion of the Turlough / Black Guardian storyline, the choice of Enlightenment itself at the end. Granted, the premise of the story is very silly indeed, but I felt that everyone involved carried it off very well. I even felt that Leee John’s performance was peculiar rather than poor. Perhaps that says something about my state of mind this morning.

Frontios is fairly standard stuff; I think destroying the Tardis at the end of the first episode is a bit of a mistake because we know that they must get it back in the end; the Doctor’s concern that the Time Lords might spot him interfering seems a bit belated; as usual for this era, the Tardis gets used as an interplanetary taxi; while the speaking parts among the guest cast are generally good, the direction of the crowd scenes is pretty lousy; the blokes dressed up in rubber monster suits look like blokes dressed in rubber monster suits (as in most Davison stories); but there is a decent sf story in there, and if you consider it against some of the competition it isn’t so bad.

In summary, a decent conclusion to my Fifth Doctor viewing. I will reserve my overall judgement of the Davison era until I have got through the novelisations.

38) Abarat, by Clive Barker

A YA novel about a teenager from a boring American town who is sucked into a fantasy parallel world which she must save. I enjoyed a couple of Barker’s fantasy novels for adults many years ago; wasn’t really so grabbed by this one, kindly lent to me by . The illustrations, which I guess are Barker’s own from the lack of any separate credit, are a bit jarring as well.

I broke a tooth on an olive stone on Wednesday night. It had been twinging for a couple of weeks, and no doubt would have gone sooner or later, but it was annoying none the less. Found a dentist round the corner from the office yesterday, and got them to have a look at it. They shook their heads sadly and said it was basically unsalvageable and will need a full crown, as its counterpart on the other side had two years ago. They also said I would need my remaining two wisdom teeth whipped out in due course, which again came as little surprise but was not particularly good news. They ground the fragmented tooth back to the point where I can at least eat without pain, and I go back next week to get the full job done.

And first thing this morning I went into Leuven hospital for the snip. I made this particular decision as soon as we realised that U had a serious disability, like her older sister; there’s obviously something genetic going on, and it therefore seems sensible to call a halt to my begetting. But it took me quite a long time to move from taking the decision in principle to acting on it – it is the most major surgery I have ever had (indeed, barring dental work and an ingrowing toenail, the only surgery I’ve ever had), and one doesn’t really rush to have one’s delicate parts messed around with, especially if there is no pressing medical reason for it. Anyway, three years on, I finally made the arrangements for this week; the hospital, a Catholic institution, amusingly asked for Anne’s signature as well as mine on the consent form. The procedure itself is not especially pleasant, but fairly brief, and I have been lying in bed rather uncomfortably all day, watching old Doctor Who series on the laptop. So, that’s a sore end to the week. But it will get me out of too much heavy lifting when I move offices on Monday.

The latest cool Facebook tool – the Nexus application which shows the interconnections between your facebook friends. I just love this. Not surprisingly, you can actually identify particular constellations.

But you are all stars!

(PS – is there anything like this for Livejournal?)

37) The Penguin Dictionary of Jokes, compiled by Fred Metcalf

Does what it says on the tin; roughly 2000 jokes of varying degree of suitability and good taste (with also a certain amount of repetition).

To start with the politics: makes me very glad that I am not an activist in the UK with her reportage of the last three weeks of Question Time.

To go on to the literature: Several people with good taste have been linking to this Alison Bechdel strip today. It’s good. read it.

Also a lot of people have been doing the literary meme with this list, subject to the usual conditions of:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them 😉

It’s a bit odd because there are some repetitions (Shakespeare and Lewis) but anyway here you go:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (large parts of)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (large parts of)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The Doctor Who meme: When you see this post, quote from Doctor Who on your LJ. (If you like.)
Hepesh: I would rather be a cave-dweller and free!
The Doctor: Free!?! With your people imprisoned by ritual and superstition?

Autobiography meme: Post 3 things you’ve done in your lifetime that you don’t think anybody else on your friends list has done. I did a version of this before, but here goes:

• Been a candidate in an election for public office in Northern Ireland.
• Spent a night in a circus.
• Explored a Macedonian battlefield.

It is the end: but the moment has been prepared for.

35) Doctor Who and the Keeper of Traken, by Terrance Dicks

A pretty standard effort from Dicks, closing out his contribution to the Fourth Doctor era with an account of what was visible on the screen.

36) Doctor Who – Logopolis, by Christopher H Bidmead

Bidmead’s write-up of his own story is reassuringly dynamic and exciting, if just a little over-written in places. In particular, Logopolis itself feels more like a real place, and the minor characters more like real people; the whole thing makes slightly better sense than what we saw on screen.

And that takes me to the end of the Fourth Doctor era. Tom Baker was very much my Doctor, and I still rate him ahead of any of the others. It is not just his longevity in the part; he brings a certain integrity in his alien compassion to it which I think only Hartnell and Ecclestone approach. I was surprised by how much Hartnell went up and Pertwee went down in my estimation after watching/listening to their stories; I have been relieved that my positive opinion of Baker (T) remains unchanged.

This was roughly the point when Who settled into the format it has resumed since 2005, of the protagonist and his one female companion, few other recurring characters (a format that had been tried out in the later Pertwee seasons but with a large ensemble in the background). Baker’s Doctor is simply strange, and after Sarah leaves so are his companions (with perhaps Tegan as the sole exception). This is no longer a programme about people like us, it is a programme about an eternal but very odd hero helping people like us.

It helps that so many of these stories are exceptionally good. My top twelve, in broadcast order, are Robot, The Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons, The Pyramids of Mars, The Brain of Morbius, The Seeds of Doom, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Horror of Fang Rock and City of Death. Most of those would appear in any fan’s top twelve for the whole of Old Who. They are not evenly distributed: ten of those twelve belong to the great days of the Hinchcliffe / Holmes era. Having said that, there are another dozen which were better than I had expected, which balance out the timeline a bit: Revenge of the Cybermen, The Android Invasion, The Hand of Fear, Image of the Fendahl, The Sunmakers, The Invasion of Time, The Stones of Blood, The Armageddon Factor, The Creature from the Pit, The Leisure Hive, Warrior’s Gate and Logopolis. There is of course the occasional misfire, but even the worst story – Underworld – is better than other Doctors’ nadirs (The Sensorites, The Underwater Menace, The Mutants, Time Flight, The Twin Dilemma, Battlefield).

The Fourth Doctor novelisations don’t map their broadcast originals as closely in terms of quality as one might have expected. Of the great Hinchcliffe era stories adapted by Terrance Dicks, only Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster really have it. Yet he sometimes produces good stuff from unpromising material – for instance Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll and Doctor Who and the Nightmare of Eden. Dicks’ version of the Fourth Doctor, like his adaptation of the Third, is more of a cheeky chappie than we saw on screen. Despite his own fascination with classic horror tropes, Dicks is more comfortable with humour than darkness. I believe he is being interviewed at the BSFA in London this evening – look forward to hearing about it.

Of the non-Dicks novels (12 out of 41) there are several very impressive efforts – Ian Marter’s first two, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space and Doctor Who and the Sontaran ExperimentDoctor Who and the Creature from the Pit and Doctor Who and the Leisure HiveDoctor Who and Warrior’s Gate. As noted above, Bidmead’s Doctor Who – Logopolis has its moments as well.

For completeness, I should note that I have enjoyed almost all the Fourth Doctor spinoff novels that I have read, but been much less impressed by the audios – Doctor Who and the Pescatons, Exploration Earth and the two recent Companion Chronicles with Romana and Leela. However, one of the best spinoff audios I have heard is Daragh Carville’s play Regenerations, which brings Tom Baker to a Doctor Who convention in Belfast. Superb.

(Previous summary posts: the first three Doctors on screenFirst Doctor novelisations summarySecond Doctor novelisations summaryThird Doctor novelisations summary.)

Four Fifth Doctor stories of, er, variable quality with one remarkable point in common: the villains are green. (Though in one case for only half the story.)

Fandom is generally rather forgiving of Four to Doomsday, but it didn’t grab me. Adric is at his most annoying, seduced by the Urbankans’ insane plan and pathetically scrapping with Tegan. Davison is uneven, this being the first story he filmed. The villainous amphibian Monarch is far too static – and why does he not supervise his staff properly? I suppose if we have to sit through numerous set-pieces I prefer ethnic dancing to gun battles, but I would prefer, you know, plot. I must admit I did cheer again at the cricket ball in space scene.

This was the first story since Underworld, broadcast four years before, where the Doctor is the only Gallifreyan character. (We’ve had The Invasion of Time, followed by Romana for most of the next three seasons and then three stories with the Master.)

I found myself again at odds with fan consensus in that I rather liked The Visitation. The opening scene of the Terileptils wiping out the local gentry is a gripping start, and Michael Robbins is very watchable as actor / highwayman Richard Mace. The whole thing looks confidently 17th-century and conveys its setting far better than most stories of this era. So what if the villagers blend into the scenery? That is what they are there for. The weakness is actually the overpopulated Tardis crew, who start the story bickering pointlessly about last week’s episode.

I commented after watching The King’s Demons that it was the worst Fifth Doctor story yet. Well, Time Flight is awful. Not quite as bad as The Twin Dilemma but it comes close. How can I count the ways? The woeful special effects – especially the utterly pathetic use of Concorde. The appalling direction – it is always a danger sign when the actors stand around delivering their lines with their hands hanging limply by their sides. (The only exceptions, oddly enough, are the spectral Xeraphins, but this is spoiled by the obvious zips in their body suits.) And the utterly peculiar disguise that the Master adopts has no narrative or aesthetic justification. Dire.

There is lots to hate about Warriors of the Deep: to start with, the Myrka, which is, honestly, not the worst monster of Doctor Who – compare the Fungoids of The Chase – but is certainly among the bottom five. The Silurians are almost passable, but the Sea Devils just look like stuntmen wearing funny hats. Yet, like The Sensorites, I felt that there was a good sf story here trying to get out; and the cast play it more convincingly than in, say, Time Flight. It is still pretty poor though.

So, in summary, The Visitation is not too embarrassing; the other three, however, are – with a particular demerit for Time Flight, the worst story since The Mutants.