Just sent out an email with tracked changes still visible – AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH

and it was the second time in two weeks as well.

2) Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, by Mark Clapham, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith

Published by Virgin in 2005 just before New Who started. Includes very brief summaries and extended critiques of all the classic series, plus the two Pertwee audios, Slipback, the BBC webcasts, and the Children in Need specials. (Why no Pescatons?) Rates Peter Davison much higher than Tom Baker, and fiercely critical of some of the most popular Hinchcliffe/Holmes stories. It’s a while since I last looked at Clapham’s Pocket Essentials: Doctor Who which is much shorter but it seemed to have much the same material. [See ‘s correction.] The authors acknowledge Cornell, Day and Topping’s Discontinuity Guide which seems eminently fair, as it’s much the better book.

Must brush up on my Scottish monarchs!

First of all, I agree with everyone who says these have been excellent. The average quality of each of the five stories has been at least on a par with New Who, taken as a whole. I felt that the weakest story was the first, Revenge of the Slitheen, with the strongest probably the fourth, Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane (both, as it happens, written by Gareth Roberts). But all were well worth watching, especially in the company of an excited eight-year-old who had already seen them and was bursting to tell me what happened next. (“Do you know who he REALLY is, Dad?” “NO, and I DON’T WANT TO!”)

I rate Revenge of the Slitheen as the weakest of the five stories because it had essentially the same plot as School Reunion. Apart from that, I thought it did the job OK, re-introducing the main cast (and introducing Clyde as substitute for Kelsey from Invasion of the Bane, who to be honest was a bit full of herself).

Eye of the Gorgon, on the other hand, was really very good – the presence of Phyllida Law, the sinister nuns, the comedy element of distracting Alan, and yet the very scary bits of Alan being turned to stone and Sarah Jane herself nearly going the same way, as well as the very serious sub-theme of dealing with Alzheimer’s. Only the rather “with a bound, Maria’s mirror set them free” ending keeps this from the top spot in my list.

I saw the second episode of Warriors of Kudlak first, and wasn’t overwhelmed. The first episode is actually much better, with smart nods to Ender’s Game, various other sf classics, and most spectacularly Kate Bush’s “Cloudbursting” (see author’s note). But as with Eye of the Gorgon, I felt the ending was a bit rushed, and I regret that we won’t see more of Nadiyah Davis as Jen.

Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane is, frankly, Hugo-worthy. As their loved ones are torn away from them, Maria and Alan successively have their world fall apart, and Jane Asher (who previously played the Doctor’s grandduaghter in the radio play “Whatever happened to Susan”) is superb as Sarah Jane’s alter ego Andrea. (F asked me, “So does that mean that Andrea had all those adventures with the Doctor instead?” I suppose so – fan-fic writers, get to it!) A really brilliant fifty minutes of television, the only puzzling thing for me being the role of the Graske. Not surprised to see that Graeme Harper directed it.

The Lost Boy was also pretty good, though it critically depended on Thomas Knight as Luke, who is the weakest of the core cast and only just about carries it off (his nemesis, played by Ryan Watson, bears a startling resemblance to my nine-year-old nephew), and is rather similar in some ways to its immediate predecessor (playing with the core characters’ identities, cosmic disaster). Of all of the stories, it was the one which veered closest to the worst excesses of New Who, with the moon crashing into the earth, return of old enemies at the end of part 1 (though I admit I didn’t see it coming) and of an old friend at the end of part 2 (though I admit I didn’t see that coming either).

So, in summary, this was generally excellent television. The fact that the format allowed for cliff-hangers every second week certainly made a difference. Elisabeth Sladen is still brilliant as Sarah, and Yasmin Paige as her main sidekick Maria is also excellent. Of the supporting male cast, Daniel Anthony (Clyde) and Joseph Millson (Alan, Maria’s father) are also well up to it, though as noted above Thomas Knight (Luke) is still maturing. (And I see that Juliet Cowan, who plays Maria’s mother Chrissie, was in This Life playing a character called Nicki – can anyone remind me which one that was?) I hope there will be more.

Now that we are in December, we will all start doing review-of-the-year posts, and as is traditional, I will start with the first post of each month in 2007.

January: Locked post on family situation and my successful job-hunt, followed by unlocked post reviewing a Doctor Who book.
February: Link to my negative review of Robert A Heinlein’s last book.
March: Preview of the Northern Ireland Assembly elections.
April: Links to other people’s thoughts on the previous night’s Doctor Who episode.
May: My son’s drawing of Doctor Who.
June: Where to find me on various social networks.
July: My review of the previous night’s Doctor Who episode.
August: My review of a 1971 Doctor Who story.
September: How nerdy am I?
October: I complain when I appear to have bought the wrong Doctor Who book.
November: Greetings to those I saw at the First Thursday sf meeting in London the previous evening.
December: Reviews of five classic Doctor Who stories.

Hmm, there is a bit of a recurring theme there, isn’t there? Compare with the equivalent post from last year, which cited three book reviews, three posts on international politics, two on my own travels, two on Doctor Who, a meme and a comment on Harlan Ellison’s behaviour at the Worldcon; or the 2005 version, which was also a lot more varied. I calculate that about 20% of this year’s entries have been tagged “doctor who“, so it’s just coincidence that so many of them have been the first ones posted in a particular month!

1) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1980-1984, by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood

This is the fifth and latest so far published in this superb series of reference guides to Doctor Who (see previous reviews of volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4). It’s the only one that doesn’t begin or end with a change of Doctors – it encapsulates the whole Peter Davison era, plus Tom Baker’s last season and Colin Baker’s first story; it also, of course, covers roughly the first half of John Nathan-Turner’s time as producer. It’s an era where my memory is variable – I saw every episode of seasons 18 and 19 when first broadcast, but remember only about half of season 20 and a bit less of season 21. Since I started watching old Who again in 2005, I’ve seen only five stories from this period (out of 29), so on the whole it is less fresh for me.

Still, Miles and Wood deliver the goods, explaining what the intellectual and cultural roots of each story are, usually finding good things to say despite their general anti-John Nathan-Turner snarking as well as blistering specific critiques of each one (eg, under The Twin Dilemma, they point out that there doesn’t actually appear to be a dilemma in the story). Their inserted essays are, I think, more analytical on the whole than in the other volumes, starting and finishing with the cases for the defence and prosecution of JNT, and including also reflections on the effects of Doctor Who Monthly and the 1983 Longleat celebration on Doctor Who fandom.

 thinks they miss the importance of the Renaissance in Season 18. They also mourn the fact that Graeme Harper directed only two stories – fortunately, this turns out not to be true.

I have another three Who books on my reading pile, but this series is the best I have seen so far.

I’ve been less engaged with this year’s Lib Dem leadership contest than last year’s, basically because work and real life have kept me busier; I’ve been enjoying my new job (which has meant I am posting less here generally) and our changed family situation has absorbed most of the rest of my energies.

But the ballot papers have arrived, and it is a straight choice between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. It is a much more difficult choice than last year. We all know that the problem with Lib Dems is that some of them are mad, some of them are boring, and some are both; last year, it was easy enough to rule out voting for Simon Hughes on the first of these grounds and Menȝies Campbell on the second. But neither Clegg nor Huhne is either mad or boring, so that filter is no use to me.

Both, frankly, would be acceptable leaders for me. Clegg was an exact contemporary of mine as an undergraduate at Cambridge, at a college next door to mine; I don’t remember him, though he remembers me due to my visibility in student politics. Both became MEPs the year we moved to Belgium, 1999, and I ran into both of them from time to time at party events; I remember on one such occasion a party aide glancing at Clegg and Huhne chatting on the other side of the room, and muttering to me that between the two of them they had the vast majority of the aggregate political talent of the Lib Dem MEPs, which seems to me monstrously unfair to the others (but I will come back to that point later). Their policy offerings are pretty similar. There is one issue, Trident, where my own feelings lie closer to Huhne’s line than to Clegg’s, but it’s not in itself a decisive issue for me (and as someone pointed out, it is anyway the party conference that decides policy rather than the leader).

In the end, I’m making my decision based on what other people think. Nick Clegg’s support group on Facebook has 845 members, of whom only six are on my friends list; Huhne’s is smaller in total (567) but 13 are on my friends list. Both campaign websites list people whose opinions I respect. Huhne has, for instance, my old Cambridge contacts David Howarth (now MP) and Andrew Duff (now MEP) not to speak of and David Steel. Clegg’s list is also formidable, including Paddy Ashdown, Shirley Williams, , about half of the MPs and more than half of the MEPs.

It’s that very last point that decides it for me. In the end, all we can judge from the campaign is how good the candidates are at running leadership campaigns. The one thing that became clear to me during the collapse of Charles Kennedy’s leadership was that those working most closely with the party leader – those who are, in fact, looking to be led on a daily basis – are the ones best placed to judge whether he or she is doing a good job. They may get it wrong – the parliamentary party backed Beith over Ashdown, if I remember correctly, in 1988. But where the stakes are otherwise equal, I’ll listen to the views of those who are more on the inside than me.

The killer statistic is this: of the ten Lib Dems elected to the European Parliament in 1999, all but Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne are still MEPs. The other eight, who worked alongside them in the parliament for the full five-year term of 1999-2004, have declared their voting intentions as follows:
Backing Huhne: Andrew Duff, Elspeth Attwooll, Liz Lynne
Backing Clegg: Diana Wallis, Graham Watson, Emma Nicholson, Chris Davies, Sarah Ludford. (Plus also Bill Newton-Dunn, elected as a Tory in 1999 but defected to the Lib Dems in 2000.)

Despite my friend’s comment about them, I have considerable respect for the political abilities of the vast majority of the above-named. On aggregate, they are backing Clegg, and therefore so am I.

I think. But it will be a pretty close race.

here. (Hat-tip to .)

See also the same author’s guide to Belgian beers.

finds a solution when her car breaks down.

Not really the ones I would have chosen to watch during the longueurs of this week’s business trip, but they just happened to be the stories I had to hand when doing the last-minute packing.

The Sea Devils was the middle story of the 1972 season. The Third Doctor had encountered their land-based cousins, the Silurians, a couple of years before. This story is particularly memorable for two things: the glorious scene with the Master attempting to communicate with the Clangers, echoed thirty-five years on by his latest incarnation’s encounter with the Teletubbies; and it is the first point where the Third Doctor actually does “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”, which became his catchphrase. Like all of the Pertwee six-parters I have seen, it drags a bit in places, and the two elderly male stooges (the jail governor and the parliamentary private secretary who is given improbably authority to authorise a nuclear strike on the monsters) are too two-dimensional to be credible. It’s also disappointing that after his valiant efforts to make peace with the Silurians the Doctor decides to side with the stupid bureaucrats and destroy their cousins, after yet again the Master’s non-human allies turn on him – will he never learn? The scenes of dead Sea Devils floating on the water are rather sad. But Katy Manning for once is rather good as Jo, with almost sensible clothes and rescuing the Doctor a couple of tines for a change. Also a shout-out to the silently feminist naval officer. No UNIT, slightly surprisingly, but otherwise a standard Third Doctor story.

If it hadn’t been for the aforementioned hastiness of my packing, it would have been a lot longer before I got around to watching this, so bad is the reputation of the 1986 Trial of a Time Lord season among people whose opinions I generally respect (and the first four episodes totally failed to impress me). But actually “Mindwarp” was really rather good, and it’s no wonder that Colin Baker wrote a sort-of sequelRevelation of the Daleks, listened to Slipback and of course now have caught up with the whole Trial of a Time Lord; even so, I doubt if the remaining three stories will surprise me with their brilliance as this did.

Having said that, the next segment of the Trial of a Time Lord season, “Terror of the Vervoids”, is also not as bad as I expected. New companion Mel appears out of nowhere, looking remarkably like Bonnie Langford, and the head biologist on the spaceship looks remarkably like Honor Blackman. The Doctor’s grief for Peri, the style of the Agatha Christie-type murder mystery, and the sense that this is a future environment that the Doctor is familiar with, all add a certain depth to proceedings. One could forgive the fact that the plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense if it were not for the Vervoids themselves which are, alas, terrible rather terrifying; they are very nearly as awful as my personal candidate for worst Who monster of all, the giant mushroom creatures in the jungle seen in latter episodes of The Chase. On top of this the Doctor once again (as with the Sea Devils) simply wipes them all out; the Valeyard is right to ask for some kind of accountability for this act of genocide, though of course the whole courtroom scene as shown here is a pretty stupid forum in which to do so. The serried ranks of Time Lords in full regalia turning to watch the screen are particularly silly.

Sadly, there is nothing to be said in favour of the last segment of the Trial of a Time Lord, two episodes credited to three writers, a botched farrago of half-baked Time Lord lore, where we find out that the Valeyard is a projection of the Doctor’s future self, and he and the Master take it in turns to do the evil cackle. The Time Lords have forgotten who the Master is, despite what happened in The Deadly Assassin and their summoning of his aid in The Five Doctors. The means available to the Master and the Valeyard are conveniently immense and yet just not quite immense enough to destroy the Doctor. I am even a bit dubious about Peri’s survival, which rather critically undermines the drama of her death (and the chemistry between her and King Yrcanos was as absent as that between Leela and Andred – at least Susan, Vicki and Jo got decent parting romances.) It’s a shame that after delivering so many classics Robert Holmes’ final contribution is such a dud, adn the Sixth Doctor, having won his trial, then gets regenerated anyway. The miracle is that the show was allowed another three years after this awful closure to an over-ambitious season.

The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.

So in summary, “Mindwarp” was an unexpected pleasure, The Sea Devils, “Terror of the Vervoids” and The Happiness Patrol all had their strengths and weaknesses, and “The Ultimate Foe” is best forgotten.

If x is an approximation to the square root of n, then (x/2 + n/2x) is a closer approximation.

I’ve driven this route many times, and I’ve always been aware that Macedonia is in general a few degrees warmer than Kosovo – farther south, less elevated, gets the tail end of the warmer Mediterranean breezes before they are deflected by the mountains. But this is the first time I can remember doing the route when the temperature difference straddled freezing point: it was a tremendous contrast to emerge from the Vardar gorge after crossing the border to find the ground covered in snow, and bedraggled bushes covered with frost like last year’s decorations. Macedonia, twenty minutes drive behind me, was a bit chilly, but there was no visible evidence of winter weather having hit. It’s quite rare for international frontiers to actually coincide with such a dramatic change in the micro-climate.

11) The Happy Prince and Other Stories, by Oscar Wilde

Have had this ebook from FictionWise sitting on my Blackberry for ages, but airport / waiting for meetings to happen gave me the incentive to go through it. I was familiar with two of the stories, The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, from children’s anthologies, but the others (The Nightingale And The Rose, The Devoted Friend and The Remarkable Rocket) were all new to me.

I’m not actually certain that I would give these stories to a child to read – they are all so very sad. The one with the happiest ending is The Selfish Giant, and even then he dies, if not quite as tragically as the protagonists of the other stories! Knowing what I do about Wilde’s own life and death, I was on the lookout for reflections in the stories: but in fact what there is is rather surprising – The Selfish Giant is an explicitly Christian allegory, and The Remarkable Rocket, full of his own pretension, arrogance and snobbery, eventually terminally expends his considerable talents and energies in such a way that nobody notices.

These are uncomfortable stories, and should only be read by children (and perhaps even adults) under strict supervision.

There have been times in my life that the Holiday Inn in Skopje has felt like a second home. I’ve been here rather less in the last year or so, since the people I knew well in the previous government carelessly lost the election and since I changed jobs myself. But it’s quite nice to be back, benefiting from wi-fi, essentially doing much the same work as I would be doing in my office in Brussels. The one irritant is that my Belgian mobile phone doesn’t seem to be networked. But as long as the most urgent messages are getting through I can cope. (My long-suffering assistant in Brussels has already backstopped a couple for me.)

This trip has been unusually chaotic to organise. I had originally planned to be in Kosovo today and see government officials here tomorrow afternoon. Then I realised that the people I want to see in Kosovo are all in Austria today, returning only late this evening. So I asked the Macedonian officials to rearrange their meeting for today instead. Most of them can do it, but of course the most important official is in Estonia and gets back too late this evening to meet. So I have lined up a separate meeting with her tomorrow morning, though am still seeing her colleagues this afternoon; and then will try and zoom up to Kosovo, weather and traffic conditions permitting, to pack in a day’s worth of meetings into the afternoon and evening. And will then try and zoom back here late tomorrow evening to sleep, as my plane home to Brussels via Zagreb on Friday morning is at a truly ungodly hour.

Normally I prefer to travel with colleagues, but I think the levels of uncertainty about the timetabling and transport make it just as well that I am alone this time!

Those of you who care have been expressing outrage or satisfaction, depending, about the big news re next year’s Doctor Who.

Come on folks, it’s not a big deal. It’s rather nice that the programme is able to explore both its recent roots (as with this story) and its more distant roots (as with School Reunion and Time Crash). I can’t quite believe that some commentators seem to think this means The End Of Doctor Who As We Know It – that happened in 1966 when William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton!

In other news, I am baffled as to why my attempts to list my newly purchased copy of Spectrum IV, edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, breaks my LibraryThing catalogue. I’m sure there is a good reason.

(By the way, I am in Macedonia for the rest of the week.)

I was in and out of Beneluxcon this weekend, given that it was just up the road in the Novotel in Leuven and featured three particularly interesting authors, Ken MacLeod, Christopher Priest and Alastair Reynolds. There were 100 people signed up (I myself was alphabetically last at #100) but I didn’t see more than 40 there at any given time. I was struck by a couple of features of the event which differed from any other sf con I have attended (not that I have been to all that many).

1) The programming was fairly light: both mornings and afternoons featured an hour-long session with a single GoH (MacLeod in the mornings, Priest in the afternoons) followed by another panel featuring more of the guests (apart from the three already mentioned, these included two Dublin writers, David Murphy and Robert Nielsen, and three Dutch/Flemish writers) to pick up on the themes of the first panel. So that was only four hours of actual discussion on each day, though there were also readings, signings, a workshop, a banquet, and a tour of Leuven, none of which I was able to attend.

I felt that this approach probably did ensure that the discussion panels were of higher quality than I have sometimes experienced elsewhere; there was no sense of “OMG I’m on another panel WTF am I going to say” which I have sometimes seen (indeed, sometimes experienced directly) at other cons. It was, of course, embedded in a wider theme of talking about “Visions of the Future”, which the con chair attempted with varying success to channel discussions into. And it happened to suit my own intermittent attendance rather well.

2) The second point that struck me is rather less to Beneluxcon’s favour. The eight featured guest authors and the four-strong organising committee were all male. Not a single woman appeared on a panel at any time during the weekend. Unless I missed something, the only woman mentioned in the programme booklet was a local fan who had recently died. Very peculiar. There were certainly women in attendance – I had long chats with Agnes (and Graham) Andrews, and more briefly with ex- – but I felt a palpable gap in discussing the future of humanity, as only half of it was represented at the top table.

Anyway, I did generally enjoy it. Ken MacLeod’s talk on the future of ideology was as provocative as I had hoped, and indeed I would have felt the con was worth the attendance for that alone. Christopher Priest on the inside story of The Prestige was also an entertaining insight into the processes of writing and then having one’s work transferred to the big screen. I did very well in the dealer’s room, picking up nine vintage paperbacks for €15, including Mutiny in Space. And I note that the organising committee for next year’s Beneluxcon in Eindhoven includes someone I knew twenty years ago, so I’m open to attending it, if the guests are interesting and the everything is right.

10) Mutiny In Space, by Avram Davidson

I confess that I bought this purely because I overheard people sniggering about how Jack Gaughan, the cover artist, had been told to add a very small amount to the costume of the lady on the front cover compared to the original (which is still visible, if more dimly, on the back cover):

Also the blurb made this look like it was probably entertainingly bad, particularly given its likely take on sexual politics.

Well, it turned out to be a bad book for quite different reasons. The blurb writer obviously felt that a planet controlled by women must be a Bad Thing; but in the novel Davidson portrays it as a pre-industrial feudal Eden, where men happen to be much shorter and women do the chivalry thing. (The scenes described in the blurb have almost no resemblance to anything that happens in the book.) If anything, I was disappointed by how unimaginative the setting actually was, and the plot is just good Earthmen vs bad Earthmen in Eden. On top of that the characterisation is lousy, and the pacing rather peculiar.

A quick read, though not necessarily a particularly edifying one.

Three blogs that you all should be reading:

plasters the ceiling.

Alex Wilcock is torn between the two Lib Dem leadership candidates.

President Ahmedinejad of Iran.

Like many other people, I’m sorry to hear of the death of Verity Lambert yesterday, the day before the 44th anniversary of Doctor Who and the week before her own 72nd birthday. Not many people start a cult TV series before they turn 28. Her professional record was indeed impressive, but I found myself really charmed by her commentaries on the DVDs of early Doctor Who stories, and by a lovely double-headed interview she did with Russell T Davies in one of last year’s Doctor Who magazines. Her legacy, of course, lives on.

Thanks to the long flights to and from Cyprus, I was able to catch up with some more Old Who: Castrovalva, Doctor Who and the Silurians, and The Time Monster.

I re-watched Castrovalva in preparation for Time Crash, and thanks to and who made it available to me. This was the first Peter Davison story and is one of the better ones, but a bit atypical in that the Doctor spends much of the time trying to reconstruct his own personality. Lots of lovely nods to earlier Doctors, most of which were rather lost on me in 1981. The companions are still rather feeling their way, with Nyssa being the clever one who explains everything, coming across as rather cold despite her warm and fuzzy fairy costume, while Tegan gets to be the one who everything has to be explained to. Adric seems to have rather enjoyed being tied up by the Master… The plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but the depictions of two magical places – Castrovalva itself and the Tardis interior – are both rather wonderful, and the music and general sense of goodwill makes it still good viewing.

Doctor Who and the Silurians was the second story of Jon Pertwee’s first season in 1970 (and for some reason the only TV story with “Doctor Who and” in the title). Those who have seen Quatermass are keen to point out the links; for me, it was one of the most X-Files-like of Doctor Who stories, with our team of investigators checking out mysterious happenings which turn out to have an entirely Earthly explanation (rather rare among Who stories). The first three episodes seemed reminiscent of yer standard rural horror story, but the second half, alternating between science labs and the Silurian caves, steps back into familiar territory. Very familiar in fact – there’s Peter Miles, to return playing essentially the same character in Invasion of the Dinosaurs and even nastier in Genesis of the DaleksThe Mutants before dying horribly; and now of course he is due to return as the captain of the Titanic – spot a pattern here?); and, most surprising, there’s Paul Darrow, nine years before Avon became one of Blake’s Seven, being the Brigadier’s second-in-command. The Young Silurian is overacting a bit though. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Spearhead from Space and Inferno, but I can see why some regard this as Pertwee’s best season.

The Time Monster was the last story in the 1972 season, bringing the Master back to battle the Doctor and destroy Atlantis (for the third time). Fandom generally is rather down on this story, and I must say that the Pertwee era has been generally disappointing for me since I started re-watching. Perhaps it is an effect of lowered expectations, but I rather enjoyed it. The plot was certainly rubbish, but Jo was allowed to be a little clever and a little heroic for once, the Third Doctor much less nasty than usual (even pleading for the Master’s life), the UNIT team generally on good form (Benton ending up naked a la Buffy in Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered – are this and Pertwee’s shower scene in Spearhead from Space the only nude scenes in Doctor Who?), and of course Ingrid Pitt and her stunning costume. Also I was intrigued by the two Tardises coming together, a foreshadowing of Logopolis and also of course of Time Crash.

These days, of course, there is a real Newton Institute in CambridgeShada (and the bits from it hacked into The Five Doctors).

Anyway, none of these makes my personal top ten, maybe not even my top twenty, but I quite enjoyed all three.
——————

8) Eurotemps, edited by Alec Stewart, devised by Alec Stewart and Neil Gaiman

A collection of stories setting the UK government’s Department of Paranormal Resources in a European context which I picked up at Octocon, apparently a sequel to an earlier collection; a British, more bureaucratic version of the Wild Cards stories. Interesting to realise that back in 1992 there was far less Europhobia around in British culture – compare the mild mocking of Brussels here with the irresponsible paranoia of Andrew Roberts. Most of the stories are fairly standard stuff given the scenario; it starts with a rather good one by David Langford which I hadn’t previously read, and I really enjoyed the second last, by , whose fiction I don’t think I have otherwise encountered.

We went and saw B today en famille, and spent about an hour with her in the snoezelruimte at the centre where she is living – not quite as elaborate as the one we used to go to at Tielt-Winge, but none the less very acceptable. She was delighted to see us, and F delighted to see her; U took a bit more convincing that this was a good idea, but had mellowed out by the end. It was really good to see all three children being happy in the same room, with F valiantly doing his best to interact with his sisters. We may even try the excursion again.

We’ve done quite well for family expeditions since she moved out. Last week we went to the annual exhibition of small cuddly animals in our village (see also our visit in 2005both U and F enjoyed it, U seeming very much to engage with them whether in or out of her buggy:

The weekend before we went to Technopolis, the educational science centre in Mechelen to the north of Brussels. Lots of exciting wheels to turn and buttons to push; the highlight is the child’s encounter with their own little Van de Graaff generator, a quite literally hair-raising experience:

See also video evidence of how exciting this is!

Well, the children’s uncle has just arrived to celebrate his 30th birthday, so I shall go and be sociable.

We got F out of bed last night to watch Time Crash (we’re an hour ahead of you guys in Ireland and UK-land, so it wasn’t on until twenty past nine, way past his usual bed-time even on a Friday). He loved every minute of it, though some of the jokes were a bit above his head. And this morning we sat down and watched the Doctor Who Confidential (which consists entirely of fannish squeeing from Collinson, Davies, Moffat, Harper, Davison and Tennant). And then we watched The Runaway Bride. And we finished off with a few scenes from episode one of Castrovalva, so that he could see what the Fifth Doctor looked like first time round. And then after a break we watched both episodes of Revenge of the Slitheen.

F has only really got into Whodom in the last few months. He was aware of it as something his parents watched after his Saturday bedtime, but then his cousin J raced through our DVDs of the 2005 and 2006 seasons while we were staying with them in July, and then the Sarah Jane Adventures began and he is now completely hooked. Now it is again past his bedtime, but he is spontaneously redesigning my filing system for my Tenth Doctor episodes. Excellent.

There has been some debate here about whether or not Mel Chisholm is groping Geri Halliwell’s breast at 4:28 into this.

But what do you think?

rereads the Kushiel books by Jacqueline Carey.

and friends have been staging a mega-Buffy readthrough.

has read Robin Lane Fox’s 1986 book Pagans and Christians, about the sudden rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. (Hat-tip to .)

Wasn’t it great???!!!???

I have been celebrating my purchase of the CD version of The Ark by listening to most of the 1965-66 season of Doctor Who on audio, all narrated by Peter Purves. I don’t have audio versions of either the first story, Galaxy 4, or the last, The War Machines, but otherwise it adds up to 37 episodes of seven (or eight) stories. A child conceived just before Mission to the Unknown was broadcast would have been due shortly after the last episode of The Savages.

I think it’s a brilliant run of stories. The First Doctor, having shed the original Tardis crew, settles down to being a strange cosmic wizard, with a slightly contemptuous and hobbyist attitude to technology and science, and a vigorous sense of ethics and morality. Peter Purves as Stephen plays straight man and action man, often tactlessly reminding the Doctor that he has no control over where the Tardis lands. There are no less than four female companions – Vicki (married off), Katarina (sucked into outer space), Sara Kingdom (the best of the four, who gets aged into dust at the end of The Daleks’ Master Plan) and Dodo Chaplet (of whom I have written before). Nicholas Courtney makes his first Doctor Who appearance as Bret Vyon (and also ends up getting shot). And there are three particularly memorable villains: Mavic Chen, the Guardian of the Solar System who betrays humanity to the Daleks; the mysterious Celestial ToymakerThe Ark survive by enslaving the Monoids (who then turn on them) and Jano and his colleagues are supporting their utopia by vampirically leeching off their own kind. Two female companions die horribly. All three historical stories end in mass killings (the sack of Troy, the eponymous St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the shootout at the OK Corral). But The Myth Makers and The Gunfighters, and the Christmas and New Year episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan, are basically comic, and though it’s not to everyone’s tastes I find it works for me. (The twentieth century appears basically as comic relief in The Daleks’ Master Plan, and briefly at the end of The Massacre to introduce Dodo; the first real contemporary story was The War Machines.)

With audio, the listener is left to imagine the visuals, and given the way in which special effects technology has moved on in the last 40 years this is probably just as well (perhaps most true of The Celestial Toymaker, whose one surviving episode is visually rather dull). The various Daleks, other aliens and humans of The Daleks’ Master Plan sound particularly memorable. That is also the story with the best sound effects, with various jungly noises for the planet Kembel, and the sinister throb of the Time Destructor. But the two final stories of the sequence are musically quite remarkable: the narrative of The Gunfighters is framed in a ballad performed by an off-screen narrator (not everyone likes this but it is one of my guilty pleasures), and Raymond Jones’ electronic incidental music for The Savages is innovative and memorable.

Anyway, I’ve written each of these up separately before, but it was interesting to put them all together and listen in the sequence first intended (especially to separate Mission to the Unknown from The Daleks’ Master Plan by the four episodes of The Myth Makers). It is surely the most diverse season the show has ever had, in terms of setting and tone. Perhaps none of the stories is individually as strong as the greatest of the Tom Baker/Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes years, but taken as a whole it’s one of the best sequences of classic Who.

6) Democratisation in Southeast Europe, ed. Dusan Pavlovic, Goran Petrov, Despina Syrri, David A. Stone

Essentially the papers presented at a January 2004 workshop in Belgrade, organised by the SEERC in Thessaloniki and funded by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. Nothing terribly remarkable in the way of policy prescriptions, but a decent tour d’horizon of electoral practices in the region. (Would have liked a bit more on the methodology of electoral fraud!)
——————