Top Books of 1973, #1: The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

The Princess Bride came out as the top book of 1973 among Goodreads and LibraryThing readers, by quite a convincing margin. This is no doubt due not so much to its popularity in 1973 as to the success of the 1987 film. It is only two and a half years since I last read The Princess Bride, whereas it had been decades since I read A Wind in the Door and Breakfast of Champions, so I did not read it again for this exercise.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Queen Bella was shaped like a gumdrop. And colored like a raspberry. She was easily the most beloved person in the kingdom, and had been married to the King long before he began mumbling. Prince Humperdinck was but a child then, and since the only stepmothers he knew were the evil ones from stories, he always called Bella that or “E. S.” for short.

The first time I reviewed it, in 2012, I wrote:

Well, this is very entertaining! While The Princess Brideis at its core a rollicking fairy tale that does nothing at all to challenge racial or sexual stereotypes, what saves it is the witty and occasionally self-mocking tone of the text, the framing narrative of an author reclaiming a story he loved in childhood for his grandson, and also the sub-plot about the process of editing down and publishing a story written by another person in another time for another audience. I’m also impressed by the ambiguity of the ending (I understand that the film doesn’t dare to replicate that). So, despite its flaws, some of which are acknowledged in the text, strongly recommended.

In 2021, comparing it with the 1987 film, I wrote:

[T]his time around I read the 25th anniversary edition, which goes even further into the joke of the film and book being edited versions of an original Florinian novel and the difficulties of adaptation and location filming, and moving about his memories of Andre the Giant, but also frankly doubles down on the sexism of the first edition. Goldman is also disturbingly emotional about the meaning of it all for him. It’s fair to say that it’s quite a step from his other films (the only one I have seen is, again, All the President’s Men). So I’m not sure I can recommend it as whole-heartedly now. Maybe I’m just in a grumpy mood.

I think I was in a grumpy mood. It’s a decent enough skewering of fantasy tropes, if not as adventurous as the author perhaps thought. Anyway, you can get it here.

Looking at it now in the context of Vonnegut and L’Engle, it’s striking that the three books are all somewhere along the speculative fiction spectrum, and that they are all rather nostalgic – The Princess Bride overtly so, Breakfast of Champions and A Wind in the Door both reminiscent of the early 60s or late 50s rather than the mid 70s. I guess that in the aftermath of Vietnam and the oil crisis, people were reaching for old comforts.

I think I will repeat this exercise for future years. Just to note that the top books of 1873 could be Anna Karenina (first part first published that year) or Around the World in Eighty Days (first book publication that year). For 1823, the poem “The Night Before Christmas” is far ahead of the field.

October 2021 books (out of sequence)

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

Checking back, I realised that a few months ago I skipped directly from September 2021 to November 2021 in this sequence, so here’s the post I should have made on 9 June!

It’s an especially silly omission because we had a really fun post-pandemic trip to The Hague for our wedding anniversary, starting with a rijsttafel and doing various cultural things. (While poor F was isolating with our household’s first COVID-19 diagnosis.)

As soon as we got back I had a London trip where I also visited Eltham Palace:

And the site of Parnell’s love affair with Catherine O’Shea:

I was still keeping up my ten-day plague posts.

At the end of the month my sister and her daughter visited, just in time for a significant birthday.

I read 31 books that month.

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 38)
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, by Fred Kaplan
Groetjes uit Vlaanderen, by Mohamed Ouaamari
The Ambassadors of Death, by L.M. Myles
Dark Water / Death in Heaven, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Free Speeches, by Denis Kitchen, Nadine Strossen, Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
The Ryans of Inch and Their World: A Catholic Gentry Family from Dispossession to Integration, c.1650-1831, by Richard John Fitzpatrick (PhD thesis)
Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix
Discipline or Corruption, by Konstantin Stanislavsky

John Quincy Adams cover Groetjes uit Vlaanderen cover Ambassadors of Death cover Dark Water / Death in Heaven cover Free Speeches cover Those About to Die cover Discipline or Corruption cover

Non-genre 2 (YTD 24)
The Wych Elm, by Tana French
Time Must Have a Stop, by Aldous Huxley
Wych Elm cover Time Must Have a Stop cover

Scripts 1 (YTD 4)
Day of the Dead, by Neil Gaiman
Day of the Dead cover

SF 15 (YTD 109)
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
“Fire Watch”, by Connie Willis
Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer
The Empire of Time, by David Wingrove – did not finish
Crashland, by Sean Williams – did not finish
City of Miracles, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson
Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte
Axiom’s End, by Lindsay Ellis
Splinters and the Wolves of Winter, by William Whyte
Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan
The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez
The Unspoken Name, by A.K. Larkwood
Blake’s 7 Annual 1982, eds Grahame Robertson and Carole Ramsay
41wcwtI+eNL[1].jpg Fire Watch cover Little Free Library coverEmpire of Time cover Crashland cover City of Miracles coverSilver in the Wood cover Space Between Worlds cover Splinters and the Impolite President coverAxiom Splinters and the Wolves of Winter cover Shadowboxer coverThe Vanished Birds cover The Unspoken Name cover B7 1982 cover

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 18, 24 inc comics and non-fiction)
Prime Imperative, by Julianne Todd
The Xmas Files, ed. Shaun Russell
Mind of Stone, by Iain McLaughlin
The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss
Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks
Prime Imperative cover Xmas Files cover Mind of Stone coverCrimson Horror cover Ambassadors of Death cover

7,600 pages (YTD 60,600)
13/31 (YTD 99/231) by non-male writers (Myles, Strossen, Darl/Cooper/Harris/Harris, French, Willis, Kritzer, Tesh, Johnson, Ellis, Sullivan, Larkwood, Ramsay, Todd)
3/31 (YTD 37/231) by PoC (Ouaamari, Johnson, Jimenez)

Two particularly good books this month (and several that weren’t, but let’s focus on the positive).

Back to the normal sequence next week.

December 2021 books and 2021 roundup

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

I started the month still recovering from COVID, and did not venture far, except for exploring another of Jan Christiaan Hansche’s ceilings, at Perk, and also an expedition to find the Goddess Nehalennia in Brussels. (This was the famous occasion when the guard asked if little U really needed her spoon in the museum.)

U and Nehalennia

I reviewed sf novels and films set in 2022. The DC Worldcon finally happened, with massive controversy over the site selection process which nonetheless ended with the bid that got the most votes being declared the winner. And I continued my ten-day plague posts.

I read 34 books that month.

Non-fiction 9 (2021 total 53)
The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend
The Mind Robber, by Andrew Hickey
An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown
Black Orchid, by Ian Millsted
The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To, by Dean Burnett
A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff, by Neil Gaiman (more non-fiction than sf content)
The 48 Laws Of Power, by Robert Greene (Did not finish)
Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday, by Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward and Peter Shirlow
The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World, by Claire Tomalin

Non-genre 3 (2021 total 30)
Staring At The Sun, by Julian Barnes
Ann Veronica, by H. G. Wells
Lying Under the Apple Tree, by Alice Munro

SF 9 (2021 total 131)
A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine
The Secret, by Eva Hoffman
“Blood Music”, by Greg Bear
Black Oxen, by Elizabeth Knox
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Startide Rising, by David Brin
An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
Jani and the Greater Game, by Eric Brown

Doctor Who 7 (2021 total 30, 40 inc non-fiction and comics)
Doctor Who Annual 2022, by Paul Lang
This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles
The Life of Evans, by John Peel
Night of the Intelligence, by Andy Frankham-Allan
The Wonderful Doctor of Oz, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who – The Mind Robber, by Peter Ling
Doctor Who – Black Orchid, by Terence Dudley

Comics 6 (2021 total 48)
Seven Deadly Sins, by Roz Kaveney, Graham Higgins, Tym Manley, Hunt Emerson, Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, Dave Gibbons, Lew Stringer, Mark Rodgers, Steve Gibson, Davy Francis, Jeremy Banks, Alan Moore and Mike Matthews
Les Mondes d’Aldébaran: L’Encyclopédie Illustrée, by Christophe Quillien
Barbarella vol 1, by Jean-Claude Forest, tr Kelly Sue DeConnick
Barbarella vol 2: The Wrath of the Minute-Eater, by Jean-Claude Forest, tr Kelly Sue DeConnick
Once & Future Vol. 1: The King is Undead, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvilain
Once & Future Vol. 2: Old English, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvilain

9,300 pages (2021 total 77,200)
13/34 (2021 total 124/296) by non-male writers (Hayward, Tomalin, Munro, Martine, Hoffman, Knox, King, Rayner, Kaveney, DeConnick x2, Bonvilain x2)

Two very good non-fiction books this month, The Republic, by Charles Townshend, which you can get here, and The Young H.G. Wells, by Claire Tomalin, which you can get here. It was also great to return to The Martian Chronicles, which you can get here, and The Lord of the Rings, which you can get here.

On the other hand The 48 Laws of Power is fascist incel rubbish; you can get it here but please don’t.

2021 roundup

I read 296 books in 2021, the fifth highest of the nineteen years that I have been keeping track, and the highest since 2011 (though exceeded again last year).

Page count for the year: 77,200, eighth highest of the nineteen years I have recorded, closer to the middle.

Books by non-male writers in 2020: 124/296, 42% – a new record in both absolute numbers and percentages.

Books by PoC in 2020: – 42/296 (14%) – highest absolute number, second highest percentage.

Most-read author this year: Neil Gaiman.

1) Science Fiction and Fantasy (excluding Doctor Who)

131 (44%): highest total ever, fourth highest percentage.

Top SF book of the year:

I was really impressed by Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, by Matt Ruff, winner of the James Tiptree Jr Award in 2003, a story of multiple personalities and strange things in Seattle; the author went on to write Lovecraft Country, now a TV series. (get it here)

Honourable mentions to:

My votes for the BSFA Award for Best Novel and the Hugo for Best Novel went to, respectively:
(BSFA) Comet Weather, by Liz Williams, a great English fantasy (get it here)
(Hugo) The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin, a great New York fantasy (get it here)

Welcome rereads:

Favourite classics:
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (get it here)
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury (get it here)

BSFA Award winners:
River of Gods, by Ian McDonald (get it here)
The Separation, by Christopher Priest (get it here)

Short fiction which won both Hugo and Nebula:
“Sandkings”, by George R.R. Martin (get it here)
“Stories for Men”, by John Kessel (get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

A collection by new-ish British writer Priya Sharma, All the Fabulous Beasts – not sure why she is not better known, I think her writing is great (get it here)

The one to avoid:

The 2002 collection of Roger Zelazny’s short stories with the title The Last Defender of Camelot – not because of the content, but because of the lazy and incompetent formatting; the 1980 collection of the same name is much better (get it here)

2) Non-fiction

53 (18%): joint ninth highest total of nineteen years, so squarely in the middle; only 16th highest percentage, near the bottom.

Top non-fiction book of the year:

Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins; more on that below.

Honourable mentions to:

Goodbye To All That, by Robert Graves, mainly about the First World War but also about his privileged background and family (get it here)
A Woman in Berlin, a first-person account of the collapse of the Third Reich, particularly the attendant sexual violence (get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

I was very sorry that The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, by Paul Kincaid, did not win the BSFA Award for Non-Fiction. I like both author and subject, as writers and also as people, but even without that I think it’s a great insight into a great writer. (get it here)

The one to avoid:

Exploding School to Pieces: Growing Up With Pop Culture In the 1970s, by Mick Deal – sloppy and contributes very little to our knowledge of a well-researched era. (get it here)

3) Comics (and picture books)

48 (16%): highest total ever, second highest percentage. I’ve padded a little (but only a little) by including a photo book and an art book here, but that wouldn’t change the rankings.

Top comic of the year:

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall – brilliant and timely historical exploration of slavery in places where we don’t often think of it as having happened (get it here)

Honourable mentions:

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, by Damian Duffy and John Jennings – the only thing I voted for that actually won a Hugo; great treatment of a classic story (get it here)
Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen de Booneval, Hervé Tranquerelle and Frédéric Blanchard – a great start to a counterfactual series; I felt the other two volumes didn’t quite live up to the promise of the first, but still worth reading (get it here)
My Father’s Things, by Wendy Aldiss – lovely lovely book about dealing with grief (get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

Mijn straat: een wereld van verschil, by Ann De Bode – beautiful portrayal of a diverse Antwerp street (get it here)

The one to avoid:

Kaamelott: Het Raadsel Van de Kluis, by Alexandre Astier and Steven Dupre – based on a TV series, does nothing new (get it here in Dutch and here in French)

4) Doctor Who

30 (10%), 40 (14%) counting non-fiction and comics. I ended my sabbatical from DW reading late in the year. 14th highest total, 16th highest percentage for DW fiction; 15th highest total and again 16th highest percentage for all DW books.

Top Doctor Who book of the year:

(Black Archive) The Massacre, by James Cooray Smith – second and best so far of the Black Archive analyses of past Doctor Who stories. (get it here)

Honourable mentions:

(Comics) Old Friends, by Jody Houser et al – the Doctor meets the Corsair (get it here)
(Novelisation) The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss – adds a lot to the TV story (get it here)
(Official BBC spinoff) Adventures in Lockdown – somewhat random collection but it works (get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

(Non-BBC spinoff: Lethbridge-Stewart) Night of the Intelligence, by Andy Frankham-Allen – pulls together a lot of threads in this excellent series (get it here)

The one to avoid:

(Non-BBC spinoff: Erimem) Angel of Mercy, by Julianne Todd, Claire Bartlett and Iain McLaughlin – you know what’s going to happen really very early in the book (get it here)

5) Non-genre fiction

30 (10%): 13th highest total, 16th highest percentage, so pretty far down; not quite sure why that is.

Top non-genre fiction of the year:

Joint honours to two novels which were both the basis for Oscar-winning films:
The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris – chilling story of a mass murderer (get it here) and
Schindler’s List, by Thomas Keneally – chilling story of mass murder (get it here)

Honourable mention:

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson – another look at the same events she has told us about before, from a new perspective (get it here)

Welcome reread:

Middlemarch, by George Eliot – one of my favourite books ever (reviewget it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

The Ice Cream Army, by Jessica Gregson – ethnic tensions in WW1 Australia (get it here)

The one to avoid:

Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom – also the basis of an Oscar-winning film; awful film, worse book (get it here)

6) Others: poetry and scripts

I read four works of poetry, of which the best new read was Maria Dahvana Headley’s Hugo-winning translation of Beowulf (get it here); and four script books, of which the best were the first two Welcome to Night Vale volumes, Mostly Void, Partially Stars (get it here) and Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (get it here)

My Book of the Year for 2021

My Top Book of 2021 is Carrying the Fire, by astronaut Michael Collins. Funny, moving, gripping, who would have thought that the best account of the first Moon landing would be written by the guy who wasn’t there? (And died aged 90 earlier this year.) Absolutely worth reading, not just for space exploration fans but for anyone interested in the human side of one of the most famous events of the twentieth century. You can get it here.

Other Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (reviewget it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (reviewget it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (reviewget it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (reviewget it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (reviewget it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (reviewget it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (reviewget it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (reviewget it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (reviewget it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (reviewget it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol Iget it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (reviewget it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (reviewget it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (reviewget it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (reviewget it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (get it here). However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time.
– Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (reviewget it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (reviewget it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (reviewget it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (reviewget it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (reviewget it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (reviewget it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (reviewget it here)
2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (reviewget it here)

November 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

So, the first half of November 2021 wasa pretty good to me. We started with a family expedition to Modave, to see more of the ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche:

On my way to Novacon, I visited the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, and was blown away by the art collection:

And Novacon itself was a lot of fun.

But I paid a price; in the corridors at Novacon, after twenty months of pandemic, I picked up a dose of COVID that put me in bed for sixteen days, as chronicled here. I don’t remember much about the rest of the month.

But I did read 31 books.

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 44)
Paul: A Biography, by Tom Wright
Building Healthy Boundaries: An Over-giver’s Guide to Knowing When to Say ‘Yes’ and How to Say ‘No’ in Relationships, by Helen Snape
Image of the Fendahl, by Simon Bucher-Jones
Ghost Light, by Jonathan Dennis
A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar
Exploding School to Pieces: Growing Up With Pop Culture In the 1970s, by Mick Deal – did not finish

Non-genre 3 (YTD 27)
The Ice Cream Army, by Jessica Gregson
Summer, by Ali Smith
Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney

Poetry 1 (YTD 5)
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J R R Tolkien, ed. Verlyn Flieger

SF 13 (YTD 122)
Not Before Sundown, by Johanna Sinisalo
The Empire of Gold, by S.A. Chakraborty – did not finish
The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
The Burning God, by R.F. Kuang
Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman
Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve
River of Gods, by Ian McDonald
Waste Tide, by Qiufan Chen
Iron Council, by China Miéville – did not finish
One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright
The Last Witness, by K.J. Parker [Tom Holt]
The Last Defender of Camelot, by Roger Zelazny (2002) – did not finish
Shanghai Sparrow, by Gaie Sebold

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 23, 31 inc comics and non-fiction)
The Book of the War, ed. Lawrence Miles
The HAVOC Files 3, ed. Andy Frankham-Allen
The Witchfinders, by Joy Wilkinson
Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who – Ghost Light, by Marc Platt

Comics 3 (YTD 37)
Sweeney Todd & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots, by Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn
Le dernier Atlas, Tome 3, by Fabien Vehlmann and Gwen de Bonneval

7,300 pages (YTD 67,900)
12/31 (YTD 111/262) by non-male writers (Snape, Nasar, Gregson, Smith, Rooney, Flieger, Sinisalo, Chakraborty, Kuang, Sebold, Wilkinson, Coryn; Gwen de Bonneval is male)
4/31 (YTD 41/262) by PoC (Nasar, Chakraborty, Kuang, Chen)

The best of these were two translated sf novels, Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen, which you can get here, and Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo, which you can get here; and Helen Snape’s very brief self-help book with a long title, Building Healthy Boundaries: An Over-giver’s Guide to Knowing When to Say ‘Yes’ and How to Say ‘No’ in Relationships, which you can get for free here.

I’m feeling a bit uncharitable so I’m going to call out three particularly poor books. The iBooks collection of Zelazny stories, The Last Defender of Camelot, insults the writer and the stories with appalling production values, at least for the ebook; you can get it here. Mick Deal’s Exploding School to Pieces, on 1970s TV, is superficial and poorly researched; you can get it here. And John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them is derivative and disjointed, and not exactly subtle in its ideology; you can get it here.

September 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

My two major excitements were the dorpfeest at the start of the month (described in the “540 days of plague” post below), and a Saturday excursion to Roman re-enactment sites in Belgium and the Netherlands.

I started reading the Black Archive books about Doctor Who, and also kept up my ten-day posts:

The month ended with F getting pinged for COVID, but I’m glad to say that he had no symptoms and the rest of us escaped, on that occasion at least.

I read 29 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 30)
Rose, by Jon Arnold
The Massacre, by James Cooray Smith
Gods and Tulips, by Neil Gaiman
book cover

Non-genre 3 (YTD 22)
Jack, by Marilynne Robinson
Kipps, by H. G. Wells
4.50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie
book cover

Scripts 1 (YTD 3)
Great Glowing Coils of the Universe
, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

Poetry (mostly) 1 (YTD 4)
Love, Fishie, by Maddy Gaiman

SF 11 (YTD 94)
Zodiac Station, by Tom Harper
The Return of the Discontinued Man, by Mark Hodder – did not finish
Hurricane Fever, by Tobias S. Buckell
The Man Who Walked Through Walls, by Marcel Aymé
Felaheen, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
The Bloodline Feud, by Charles Stross
“The Saturn Game”, by Poul Anderson
Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Zelda Knight & Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald
Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, by Matt Ruff
The Rain-Soaked Bride, by Guy Adams
Mama Bruise, by Jonathan Carroll
book cover book cover book cover book cover book cover

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 13, 17 inc non-fiction and comics)
Angel of Mercy, by Julianne Todd, Claire Bartlett and Iain McLaughlin
Blood of Atlantis, by Simon Forward
The Ruby’s Curse, by Alex Kingston
Doctor Who: Rose, by Russell T. Davies
Doctor Who: The Massacre, by John Lucarotti
book cover book cover book cover

Comics and art books 5 (YTD 34)
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez
Retour sur Aldébaran, Épisode 2, by Leo
Retour sur Aldébaran, Épisode 3, by Leo
De Walvisbibliotheek, by Judith Vanistendael and Zidrou
Reflected, ed. Peter de Rijcke
book cover

6,600 pages (YTD 53,000)
8/29 (YTD 86/200) by non-male writers (Robinson, Christie, Gaiman, Knight, Todd/Bartlett, Kingston/Rayner, Hall, Vanistendael)
3/29 (YTD 34/200) by PoC (Buckell, Donald, Hall)

The best of these were Tiptree-winning Set This House in Order, which you can get here, graphic historical account Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, which you can get here, and Night Vale scripts Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, which you can get here.

On the other hand, I totally bounced off The Return of the Discontinued Man, which you can get here.

August 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

The big trip for this month was a return to Northern Ireland for the first time in two years, to celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday with a family party, and a specially commissioned birdbath by Eleanor Wheeler.

It was a great break and we were very happy to reconnect with friends and relatives on both sides of the border.

I also kept up my ten-day posts about the pandemic.

I read 28 books that month; though some of them were very short.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 27)
The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh, by Anne Holland (has fictional elements)
A Woman in Berlin
Humankind, by Rutger Bregman

Non-genre 2 (YTD 19)
Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh
The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue

SF 9 (YTD 83)
Contact, by Carl Sagan
Strange Bedfellows: An Anthology of Political Science Fiction, ed. Hayden Trenholm
Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker
Fish Tails, by Sheri S. Tepper
The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams
A Hero Born, by Jin Yong
Cryptozoic!, by Brian Aldiss
The Primal Urge, by Brian Aldiss
The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 8, 11 inc comics)
The Beast of Stalingrad, by Iain McLaughlin
The HAVOC Files 2, ed. Shaun Russell
Dalek, by Robert Shearman

Comics 10 (YTD 29)
In de tuin, by Noëlle Smit
Hr. Alting, by Bente Olesen Nyström
Trocoscópio, by Bernardo P. Carvalho
Meidän piti lähteä, by Sanna Pelliccioni
Mijn straat: een wereld van verschil, by Ann De Bode
Fridolin Franse frisiert, by Michael Roher
Otthon, by Kinga Rofusz
La Ciudad, by Roser Capdevila
Sortie de nuit, by Laurie Agusti
A Tale of Two Time Lords, by Jodie Houser et al

6,300 pages (YTD 46,400)
13/27 (YTD 78/171) by non-male writers (Holland, the woman in Berlin, Donoghue, Pinsker, Tepper, Bradley, Smit, Pelliccioni, De Boda, Rofusz, Capdevilar, Augusti, Houser et al)
1/27 (YTD 31/171) by PoC (Jin Yong)

The best of these were the traumatic A Woman in Berlin, which you can get here, and the charming Mijn straat: een wereld van verschil, which you can get here. I was underwhelmed by The Place of the Lion, which you can get here, The Secret of Kit Cavenaugh, which you can get here, and The Beast of Stalingrad, which you can get here.

July 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

With things opening up again, I had two significant excursions in July 2021. The first was to nearby Park Abbey just south of Leuven, where for the first time I saw the astonishing work of Jean Christiaan Hansche in the ceilings of the library and the refectory. This became a bit of an obsession for me over the next few months.

Later in the month, F and I went to Paris before his 22nd birthday.

And I kept up my ten-day posts about the pandemic.

I read 21 books that month.

Non-fiction 2 (YTD 24)
Too Innocent Abroad: Letters Home from Europe 1949, by Joan Hibbard Fleming
The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, Commonly Called Mother Ross on Campaign with the Duke of Marlborough (incorrectly attributed to Daniel Defoe)

Non-genre 4 (YTD 17)
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston
Martin Lukes: Who Moved My Blackberry, by Lucy Kellaway
The History of Mr Polly, by H.G. Wells

SF 11 (YTD 74)
Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko
Riding the Unicorn, by Paul Kearney
Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse
The Separation, by Christopher Priest
Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard
A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik
Empire Games, by Charles Stross
“Grotto of the Dancing Deer”, by Clifford D Simak
The Kingdom of Copper, by S. A Chakraborty
The Dragon Republic, by R.F. Kuang

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 5, 7 inc comics)
The Last Pharaoh, by Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett
Times Squared, by Rick Cross
Star Tales, ed. Steve Cole

Comics 1 (YTD 19)
Le dernier Atlas, tome 2, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard

7,400 pages (YTD 40,100)
13/21 (YTD 65/144) by non-male writers (Hibbard Fleming, Davies/Ross, Eliot, Hurston, Kellaway, Ifueko, Roanhorse, Muir, de Bodard, Novik, Chakraborty, Kuang, Bartlett)
6/21 (YTD 30/144) by PoC (Hurston, Ifueko, Roanhorse, de Bodard, Chakraborty, Kuang)

Unusually I’m going to call out two excellent rereads -normally in these posts I concentrate on books read for the first time. But Middlemarch, which you can get here, is one of the best books I have ever read, and The Separation, which you can get here, is one of Christopher Priest’s best books.

June 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

Another month when I did not leave Belgium, though I started going to the office regularly again. F, U and I had a particularly interesting excursion to just the other side of the Dijle valley where there are not one but two eleventh-century churches.

I kept up my ten-day updates.

And crucially I got my second vaccination at the end of the month.

My research into family history and genealogy continued: my great-great-uncle who died in the Johnstown Flood, my first cousin three times removed who acrimoniously split up with her boyfriend in 1842, and the baby in the park, my second cousin once removed.

This was also the month that my involvement with the 2021 Worldcon came to an abrupt end, after weeks in which the internal difficulties became ever more apparent. I resigned along with my entire team on 22 June; the Chair of the convention resigned in turn three days later.

I read 25 books that month.

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 22)
China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, by Peter Martin
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, by Lynell George
Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar
Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins
Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich
The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullagh
     

Non-genre 3 (YTD 13)
Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
  

Poetry 3
Blind Harry’s Wallace, translated by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield
Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Beowulf: A New Translation, by Seamus Heaney

SF 9 (YTD 63)
Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey
Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane
Roger Zelazny’s The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt
“Stories For Men”, by John Kessel
Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire
Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas
The Monster’s Wife, by Kate Horsley
Light, by M. John Harrison
       

Comics 4 (YTD 18)
Monstress, vol. 5: Warchild, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Once & Future vol. 1: The King Is Undead, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain, and Ed Dukeshire
Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston
Parable of the Sower, written by Octavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings
   

6,800 pages (YTD 32,700)
13/25 (YTD 52/123) by non-male writers (George, Foroohar, Alexievich, Fielding, Harrison,Headley, Gailey, MacFarlane, McGuire, Thomas, Horsley, Liu/Takeda, Butler)
6/25 (YTD 24/123) by PoC (George, Foroohar, Ondaatje, Thomas, Liu/Takeda, Butler)

Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire was tremendously enjoyable and ended up being my book of the year; you can get it here. Also good were David McCullough on the Johnstown Flood, which you can get here, and Heaney’s Beowulf, which you can get here. I tried Light by M. John Harrison again, and bounced off it again; you can get it here.

May 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

The most important news of the month was getting my first COVID injection. Weird to think that the pandemic had been going on for fourteen months at this stage. I also seemt o have started going back to the office at this stage, and we were holding office parties in the nearby parks.

With the public holidays, I had two excursions southwards: to Mons on my own, and with two colleagues to see Merovingian metalwork at Mariemont near Mons.

I met up with long-lost cousins in Belgium, and helped solve another genealogy case in the USA.

And I kept up my ten-day blogging about the pandemic.

I read 16 books that month.

Non-fiction 2 (YTD 16)
Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor, by Frank Collins
Statement and Correspondence Consequent on the Ill-Treatment of Lady de la Beche by Colonel Henry Wyndham, edited by Ann Auriol

Non-genre 3 (YTD 10)
Schindler’s List, by Thomas Keneally
The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant
Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom
 

SF 7 (YTD 54)
The Evidence, by Christopher Priest
In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells
Cloud on Silver by John Christopher
All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma
Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
Finna, by Nino Cipri
City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett
      

Comics 4 (YTD 14)
DIE, Volume 2: Split the Party, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine
Ghost-Spider vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over, by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa and Rosie Kämpe
Invisible Kingdom, vol 2: Edge of Everything, by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward

4,600 pages (YTD 25,900)
6/16 (YTD 39/98) by non-male writers (de la Beche/Auriol, Sharma, Cipri, Hans, McGuire/Kämpe, Wilson)
3/16 (YTD 18/98) by PoC (Sharma, Tomine, Miyazawa)

All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma, is really fantastic. You can get it here.

Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom, really sucks. You can get it here.

April 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

Another month when I mainly stayed at home, apart from a birthday excursion to the east of Belgium for more megaliths.

And I went to a museum with little U.

We were devastated by the death of our old friend Liz Marley.

I kept up my ten-day posts.

I also wrote about my American ancestors featuring in art.

Worldcon continued to provide drama, with the publication of the final ballot arousing much controversy, and the entire convention being postponed until December (giving rise to further arguments about the rules). More positively, it was announced that I would be a Guest of Honour at the next year’s Eastercon.

Non-fiction 1 (YTD 14)
Kathedralen uit de steentijd, by Herman Clerinx

Non-genre 2 (YTD 7)
The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

SF 12 (YTD 47)
Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper
Network Effect, by Martha Wells
Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo
The Gameshouse, by Claire North
Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish)
The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells
The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker
The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2, 4 inc comics)
Adventures in Lockdown, ed. Steve Cole
Comics 5 (YTD 10)
Muse vol 1: Celia, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi
Muse vol 2: Coraline, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi
Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard
Feeders & Eaters & other stories, by Neil Gaiman, art by Mark Buckingham
Sculpture Stories, by Neil Gaiman with Lisa Snellings

4,800 pages (YTD 21,300)
9/21 (YTD 33/82) by women (Wells x2, Krasnostein/Rios, Vo, North, Deonn, Kowal, Bujold, Pinsker)
3/21 (YTD 15/82) by PoC (Onyebuchi, Vo, Deonn)

There were a couple of these that I did not like, but you know what, let’s celebrate half a dozen that I liked very much.

Kathedralen uit de steentijd: hunebedden, dolmens en menhirs in de Lage Landen, by Herman Clerinx (get it here)
The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris (get it here)
Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios (get it here)
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi (get it here)
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo (get it here)
Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker (get it here)

March 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

Another month when due to COVID restrictions I did not leave Belgium, and indeed I appear to have gone to the office only twice. It was a year since the first lockdown. Apart from diplomatic walks in Brussels parks, my two excursions were to the Dolmen of Duisburg and the video games museum at Tours et Taxis.

I kept up my ten-day posts:

I also researched the parenthood of the baby in the park, but came to the wrong conclusion.

Hugo Award nominations closed, and it became clear that we had some potentially controversial finalists, including a blog post whose title gave a very direct instruction to a well-known author. From the technical point of view it was relatively smooth; we had one nominated editor decline nomination, one artist inform us that they were not eligible and one TV series that we disqualified from the Long Form category because it also had two episodes in Short Form. (Some felt that we should have disqualified others too, but we did not.)

I read 20 books that month.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 13)
The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, by Paul Kincaid
Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, by Nick Mason
It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of?, by Adam Roberts
Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux met 309 vindplaatsen om te bezoeken, by Herman Clerinx
Scottish independence: EU membership and the Anglo–Scottish border, by Akash Paun, Jess Sargeant, James Kane, Maddy Thimont Jack and Kelly Shuttleworth

Non-genre 1 (YTD 5)
Dances With Wolves, by Michael Blake

Scripts 2
Driving Miss Daisy, by Alfred Uhry
Mostly Void, Partially Stars, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

SF 12 (YTD 35)
The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Comet Weather, by Liz Williams
“Sandkings”, by George R.R. Martin
Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds
Enemy Mine, by Barry B. Longyear
The Doors of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus
The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke
Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake
Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth Powell
Water Must Fall, by Nick Wood
The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, by M. John Harrison

5,600 pages (YTD 16,500)
3/20 (YTD 24/61) by women (Williams, Angus, Sargeant/Thimont Jack/Shuttleworth)
1/20 (YTD 12/61) by PoC (Paun)

A lot of these were very good, and I’m going to recommend three by friends which were also shortlisted for the BSFA Award:

The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, by Paul Kincaid (review; get it here)
Comet Weather, by Liz Williams (review; get it here)
Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus (review; get it here)

On the other hand, Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake is a dismally poor ending to the Gormenghast trilogy. Stick to the first two books, folks. You can get it here.

February 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

Still under lockdown, my biggest expedition that month was to visit a bunch of Belgian megaliths with the hardy J.

As well as musing on Northern Irish referendums, I researched the history of Patience Kershaw, heroine of a well-known song.

And I kept up my ten-day postings about the plague, though only two this month.

That month’s Worldcon crisis was the unprecedented revocation of Guest of Honour status for a publisher whose website hosted far right discussions, in the context of the 6 January coup attempt in the USA. More Worldcon drama was to come in future months (this was by far the most dramatic of the seven Worldcons I have been involved with).

Stuck at home, I read 22 books that month.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 8)
The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China
A Buzz in the Meadow, by Dave Goulson
Ties That Bind: Love in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Francesca T. Barbini
Goodbye To All That, by Robert Graves

Non-genre 2 (YTD 4)
Sugar and other stories, by A.S. Byatt
Three Daves, by Nicki Elson

SF 13 (YTD 23)
The Kappa Child, by Hiromi Goto
Koko Takes a Holiday, by Kieran Shea
Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark
The Autumn Land, by Clifford D. Simak
The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin
Bold As Love, by Gwyneth Jones
Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary Wolf
Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, by Martin Noble, based on the screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter Seaman
Club Ded, by Nikhil Singh – did not finish
Ivory’s Story, by Eugen M. Bacon
Science Fiction: The Great Years, eds. Carol and Frederik Pohl

Comics and photo books 3 (YTD 5)
My Father’s Things, by Wendy Aldiss
Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor – Old Friends, by Jody Houser
A.I. Revolution vol. 1, by Yuu Asami

5,400 pages (YTD 10,900)
13/22 (YTD 21/41) by women (Aldiss, Barbini, Byatt, Elson, Goto, Jemisin, Jones, Hereaka, “Kingfisher”, Bacon, C Pohl, Houser, Asami)
8/22 (YTD 11/41) by PoC (Puyi, Goto, Clark, Jemisin, Ihimaera/Hereaka, Singh, Bacon, Asami)

Of these, I particularly loves Wendy Aldiss’ elegiac My Father’s Things, commemorating the possessions of Brian Aldiss after his death. You can get it here. I also really liked Graves’ Goodbye to All That, which you can get here, and N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, which you can get here. On the other hand, I totally bounced off Club Ded, by Nikhil Singh, which you can get here.

January 2021 books

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

The rest of the world will remember January 2021 for the attempted coup by supporters of Donald Trump against the democratic system, a terrible moment of political deterioration.

Over here, we were still under tough COVID restrictions, and I continued my ten-day posts, four of them on the 1st, 11th, 21st and 31st:

The farthest I travelled was with B, to visit a necropolis in Tienen and a new park in Landen.

But the most significant and unexpected development was that in one of several bizarre twists in the story of the 2021 World Science Fiction Convention, the entire Hugo Award administration team resigned, as did one of the co-chairs. I offered to pick up the work of the WSFS Division, as it’s new Division Head, and my offer was accepted. I rapidly put a new team in place, and we managed to get Hugo nominations open before the end of the month (the departing team had left things in good shape).

Tired of lockdown and busy with Worldcon, I read 19 books that month.

Non-fiction 4
Out of Africa, by Karen Blixen
Endgames: Political Cartoons and Other Stuff, 2015-2020, by Martyn Turner
Watling Street, by John Higgs
T.K. Whitaker, by Anne Chambers

Non-genre 2
The Home and the World, by Rabindranath Tagore
Gallimaufry, by Colin Baker (mostly non-sfnal)
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SF 10
A Day in the Life, by Hank Stine
The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern
Into the Ashes, by Lee Murray
Midnight Blue-Light Special, by Seanan McGuire
The Lowest Heaven, eds Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin
The Food of the Gods: And How It Came to Earth, by H. G. Wells
Greybeard, by Brian Aldiss
The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger
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Doctor Who 1, 2 including comics
At Childhood’s End, by Sophie Aldred
51l0BfH4CGL._SX324_BO1,204,203,200_[1].jpg

Comics 2
Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor Volume 2: Hidden Human History, by Jody Houser et al
Kaamelott: Het Raadsel Van de Kluis, by Astier/Dupre
17e7d2887e09bf7596a61757467426541665142_v5[1].jpg 51QSH8ISD3L._SX372_BO1,204,203,200_[1].jpg

5500 pages
8/19 by women (Blixen, Chambers, Murray, Mcguire, Perry, Little Badger, Aldred, houser)
3/19 by PoC (Tagore, Murray, Little Badger)

Best book of the month was Anne Chambers’ biography of T.K. Whitaker, which you can get here, followed by Out of Africa, which you can get here, and Watling Street, which you can get here.

Totally bounced off Midnight Blue-Light Special, which you can get here, and Het Raadsel van de Kluis, which you can get here in the original French (L’enigme du coffre).

The Mind Robber, by Andrew Hickey (and Peter Ling)

Working through the Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who, I’ve now reached the seventh, on the 1968 story The Mind Robber, which features the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie transported to a Land of Fiction, and includes one episode where Fraser Hines is briefly replaced by another actor as Jamie because he had caught chickenpox. I like it. When I watched it for the first time in 2007, I wrote:

The Mind Robber features… Oh, let’s get it over with. Zoe. Nobody can keep their hands off her. Certainly not the Doctor (see right). Certainly not Jamie. And the first episode ends like this. In the fourth episode she has a catfight with a caped and masked comic book superhero and wins. No wonder today’s Guardian lists her as one of the top five companions ever! I have to say that I can’t think of a more confident and sexy performance from any of the companions in any other old Who story; Leela, I think, comes closest but that is not very close. (Of course, if we count new Who as well, nobody can hold a candle to John Barrowman.)

And the confidence on her part (and indeed that of the rest of the cast) is remarkable because in fact the story very clearly doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The Doctor and companions are trapped in the Land of Fiction by its Master (not that Master but a different cosmic villain of the same name). We have a forest made of words. We have Jamie transformed into a different actor for an episode, to cover up the fact that Frazer Hines contracted chicken pox. We have clockwork soldiers. We have Rapunzel, we have E. Nesbit’s Five Children, and best of all we have Lemuel Gulliver, played superbly by Bernard Horsfall (and more on him later [in The War Games]). We have glorious moments of Jamie and Zoe becoming fictional, becoming hostile to the Doctor, being nostalgic for their lost homelands (to which of course they will be returned by the end of the season).

But we also have Doctor Who coming close to breaking the fourth wall, not in the overt way of the First Doctor in the Daleks’ Master Plan (or the charming Morgus in The Caves of Androzani), but in terms of exploring Story and what it means to be in one. It’s fascinating and bizarre and I’ll have to re-watch it soon, along with all the DVD extras. And not just because I want to ogle Zoe again.

When I did my rewatch of the whole of Old Who in 2010, I wrote:

The Mind Robber is one of the most extraordinary Who stories ever. The first episode, bolted onto Peter Ling’s script at the last minute by Derrick Sherwin, is full of wonderful moments of inspired lunacy; the only single episode that does a better job of dimension-hopping is Part One of The Space Museum, and it of course is let down by the rest of that story. In The Mind Robber we have the paradoxical idea of fictional characters (the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe) trying to avoid becoming fictional characters (like Gulliver, Rapunzel and Cyrano de Bergerac). Jamie’s temporary change of body – made necessary by circumstances totally outside anyone’s control – adds an extra element of surrealism to the mix. My one quibble is that the ending is a bit abrupt, and we never see what happens to the Master of the Land of Fiction.

Bernard Horsfall is particularly memorable here as Gulliver, aggravating the Doctor in a world of the mind as he was to do again under David Moloney’s direction in The Deadly Assassin. And having griped about the costumes for The Dominators, those for The Mind Robber – produced by the same designer – are superb; particularly Zoe’s catsuit. The moment when she is shot from behind clinging to the console of the destroyed Tardis is a moment when Doctor Who starts to grow up. Or at least enter adolescence.

Coming back to it again – with the production subtitles on the DVD – I still really enjoyed it, for all the reasons set out above. It’s worth noting that it was the first story directed by David Moloney, who also oversaw the production of such classics as The War Games, Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Patrick Troughton is very good, using force of personality to overcome the low-budget sets. I also must try and get to High Rocks near Tunbridge Wells some time, used both here and in Castrovalva.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:

‘I can’t – hold on – much longer – ‘ Zoe gasped.

When I read it in 2008, I wrote:

This is much more fun. The original TV version was one of the most surreal stories ever; the novel takes some liberties with the script, but basically improves it further to make it one of the better Second Doctor novels. Even the Karkus somehow makes better sense here. One to look out for.

I endorse this assessment. One point to add is that even though Ling did not actually write the first of the five TV episodes, he gives it more page time (38 out of 144 – 26%) than any of the others in the novelisation. Completists will already have it, but if you don’t, you can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Andrew Hickey’s study of the Mind Robber is:

The grafted-on opening by Sherwin means that the serial effectively has two ‘episode 1’s – the story proper does not really start until the second episode – and one could even argue that the plot doesn’t start until near the end of the story. For much of the adventure, this is a picaresque, with the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe exploring an unfamiliar landscape and the characters within it. We will look later at the similarities between the Doctor and Lemuel Gulliver, but in this story the Doctor has become part of Gulliver’s genre – he, like Gulliver, is our representative in a strange place, discovering the rules along with us, and this is enough to carry the narrative without having to have a plot per se.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of Hickey’s writing online over the years, though he has more recently shifted to podcasting and Patreon, neither of which is really my thing, so I was looking forward to this. My expectations were not completely fulfilled. I felt it leant a bit too heavily on the traditional fannish resources for Doctor Who – articles from DWM, Howe et al, Cornell et al – and not enough on other sources. In particular I missed any reference to Who’s Next, by Derrick Sherwin, the writer of the first episode of The Mind Robber and script editor for the whole; his autobiography was published in time for the 50th anniversary rush in 2013, and Hickey’s Black Archive study almost three years later. So there was a lot more telling me what I already knew than telling me new stuff.

Having said that, for those less familiar with Whovian reference books, it’s a workmanlike summary of the state of play, comprehensibly structured and decently written. The chapters cover:

  • the production of the story, and its roots in Platonic philosophy and Alice in Wonderlandthe questions of authorship and the nature of fiction;
  • a very short chapter on the story’s structure;
  • a defence of Season Six and brief bio notes on the main cast and crew;
  • a much longer survey of the characters in the Land of Fiction, especially Gulliver, the Karkus and the Master himself;
  • another very short chapter on why The Mind Robber is different to the First Doctor story The Celestial Toymakerwhat a shame it is that a subtle story full of nuance is chiefly remembered for one male gaze scene [I plead guilty];
  • why the Doctor is not from the Land of Fiction (only one reference is given for this argument);
  • other appearances of the Land of Fiction in the Whoniverse, unsurprisingly omitting The Wonderful Doctor of Oz, published five years later.

You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Ghost Light, by Jonathan Dennis (and Marc Platt)

When I first watched it in 2007, I wrote:

Ghost Light is an entirely different matter [from Battlefield]. I approached it with some suspicion, in that I had found several of Marc Platt’s other offerings (Downtime, Auld Mortality, Lungbarrow) tough going. And indeed, Ghost Light is tough going too, but I very much felt it was worth the effort: intricately constructed, well acted, beautifully shot; certainly the best story I’ve seen that was broadcast between Caves of Androzani and Rose.

One of my big complaints of Who of this era is that so little effort seems to have been put into getting the settings right: Ghost Light does not suffer from this problem – from the beginning, and indeed all the way through, you feel convinced that this is a Victorian mansion, even when it turns out that the butler is a living Neanderthal and there is a spaceship in the basement.

Also the Doctor’s bringing Ace back to the scene of her childhood crimes is, if I’m not mistaken, practically the first attempt ever to link a companion to his or her back story.

It is, however, a story very far removed from the normal territory of Doctor Who – surrealist play meets Agatha Christie, perhaps – and despite the quality of the drama it must have further created doubt about what Doctor Who was actually for. Still, apparently this was the last story of the old series actually filmed (although the third last to be broadcast) and it’s nice to feel that that the cast and team must have felt they were going out on a high.

Returning to it in 2011, on the last leg of my Great Old Who Rewatch, I wrote:

I was amazed, rewatching Ghost Light, by just how good it is. Densely packed with literary and cultural and scientific references, transformations, and bizarre imagery, it is a real feast for the viewer. Even if I am still not totally certain I know what it was all about, I find it utterly fascinating; the cast seem to be reasonably surefooted in the peculiarity of what is going on, and the music and sets all add up as well. Having had my view of the worst Seventh Doctor story confounded on this rewatch, I felt confirmed in my view that Ghost Light is the best; and as it was the last story actually filmed, we can say that Old Who ended on a real high.

In the years since I wrote that, Marc Platt has continued writing Who scripts – I think that of the Old Who writers he is actually the only one still really active (Rona Munro has done one TV episode, but that’s it). You cannot accuse him of not keeping the faith. I recently much enjoyed his Fourth Doctor two-parter, The Skin of the Sleek / The Thief Who Stole Time, though I don’t know if I will ever get around to writing it up.

However, on the third time of viewing, but the first time watching it out of context with the rest of the final season of Old Who, I have to say that Ghost Light did not work for me as well as before. There are massive holes in the plot, which are only just covered by the energy and bombast of the leads, especially McCoy. If you are in the mood, you don’t worry about it not really making sense; this time round, I just wasn’t in the mood.

And there are a couple of scenes where actors are standing around with their hands by their sides, waiting for their next line, which is never a good sign.

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The second paragraph of the third chapter of Marc Platt’s novelisation is:

The ponderous clock reached its third stroke. In the darkened study, white gloved hands touched the shoulder of a girl who sat motionless, staring into the fire.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

After enjoying most of Marc Platt’s other work, including his novelisation of Battlefield, I was looking forward to reading this. I’m afraid I was disappointed. Once again, I realise just how vital the direction and acting of the TV version can be; and the intensely visual and subtle original just loses most of its vitality and mystery on the printed page. In particular, we lose the striking visual appearance of Nimrod the Neanderthal and of Light himself, who comes across as just some random and rather dull megalomaniac with super powers.

Scrapes through the Bechdel test: in most of the Ace/Gwendolen scenes they are talking about Josias and/or the Doctor, and the one exception is when they fight, and are then interrupted by Control. A fight is barely a conversation, but I suppose it will have to do. (Mrs/Lady Pritchard appears to communicate with the maidservants by telepathy.)

I have been very inconsistent in my application of the Bechdel test; maybe I’ll start being systematic in 2022. Anyway, It was originally intended for films, not books. Apart from that, nothing to add to my previous assessment. You can get the book here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Jonathan Dennis’ Black Archive monograph on Ghost Light is:

[Referring to the ghost story] It’s a popular story genre of course. Myths and stories of haunted places date back to tribal times; there’s a haunted house story in the 1,001 Nights53. As I mentioned before, one of the characters in Ghost Light, Mrs Grose, is taken directly from one of the most popular haunted house stories in literature, The Turn of the Screw (1898). Scarcely a year goes by that there isn’t a movie released about a haunted house, usually more than one. Last year (2015) has seen a remake of Poltergeist (1982), and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, which isn’t just a haunted house story, it’s a Gothic haunted house story in the same vein as those Ghost Light was pastiching.
53 ‘Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad’.

As with my rewatch of the story, unfortunately I didn’t get much out of this. It’s a bit of a grab-bag of source material and script analysis, without looking at the actual staging of the TV story as much as the others have done, or indeed at its reception and subsequent reputation. So it’s the first miss of the first six Black Archives for me; which after all is not such a bad strike rate.

(On a positive note, the footnotes work fine, unlike in the Image of the Fendahl volume.)

The chapters are:

  • telling us firmly how unusual Ghost Light is;
  • arguing (unconvincingly) that it uses other literary and film sources more than other stories (though with an amusing coda on similarities with The Rocky Horror Picture Showpointing out that it is a haunted house story, and the Steven Moffat likes these too;
  • a cursory look at hypnosis and mind control;
  • even shorter on “Java” as a euphemism; and
  • a long and confused chapter on evolution and class.

The completist will want this, but I think there’s more interesting commentary to be found elsewhere. Anyway, you can get it here.

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The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Image of the Fendahl, by Simon Bucher-Jones (and Terrance Dicks)

I have vivid memories of watching Image of the Fendahl when it first came out in 1977 – in retrospect, the last really satisfactory story of Season 15 of Doctor Who, though as a ten-year-old I was generally forgiving. When I rewatched it after thirty years in 2008, I wrote:

I remember being a bit underwhelmed by Image of the Fendahl when it was first broadcast [am no longer sure that is true!], but I really liked it this time round. Having mourned the disruption of the Doctor/Leela partnership by K9’s arrival in my write-up of The Invisible Enemy, actually we’re back to business as before here as the tin dog is out of action for plot purposes. Odd to think that this was the first story with a contemporary setting since The Hand of Fear a year previously (they averaged about one a season in those days). Yet again I find reinforcement for my view that the Leela/Four pairing is the Best Evar, with the contrast between the two quirky regulars sharpened by the crazy Earthlings they are dealing with; Louise Jameson is so expressive even without saying anything. Also my memories of first time round are tempered by the attempt to do much the same thing again a few years later but far less successfully in K9 and Company. Having said that, there are some surprising lapses of direction: the prolonged scenes of the Fendahl manifesting in the cellar lack a certain something, and there is a peculiar shot in episode 3 where we are treated to a prolonged close-up of the Tardis console. But in general it was rather good fun.

Watching it in sequence with the whole of Old Who a couple of years later, I wrote:

This is, so far, a season of re-trying tested formats. After the base-under-siege story and the space opera story, we have a new take on the Hinchcliffe-era horror story in Image of the Fendahl. It mostly works, and if it weren’t for the fact that it comes so soon after the even more successful horror stories done in the Hinchcliffe era this would have a better rep among fans. But I think it does a lot of things better than, say, The Masque of Mandragora or the Pertwee stories which used similar themes, and the Fendahleen themselves are memorably icky. The tension between and among the scientists and the Tyler family keeps us guessing as well.

It’s also yet another brilliant story for Leela, by her creator Chris Boucher, who wrote three of the six stories featuring her and the Doctor without K9. She is great at challenging and teasing the Doctor, efficiently violent but also pragmatic, also just a little vain about her new dress. More on this later, but Jameson’s performance is tremendously enjoyable here as elsewhere.

Rewatching it now, I thoroughly enjoyed it, even with its flaws. For all that the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era of Who is generally described as “Gothic”, this is the one story that really does tick all the Gothic boxes, and Hinchcliffe has already left and it’s Holmes’ last story as script editor. I think also the Doctor and Leela as viewpoint yet alien characters work very well to shed some light on our world as others might see it.

The guest cast are all fully integrated. This was Wanda Ventham’s first acting job after returning to work from the birth of her son Benedict:

And Daphne Heard is just fantastic as Granny Tyler; within a year she would go on to be Peter Bowles’ mother in To The Manor Born.

And the script has some great lines.

DOCTOR: Yes, Fendelman. Tell me about him.
MOSS: Well, he’s foreign, isn’t he. Calls hisself a scientist. They do say he’s one of the richest men in the world. You wouldn’t think so to look at him, scruffy devil. They say he made his money out of electronics, but that don’t seem likely ‘cos he ain’t Japanese.
DOCTOR: Japanese?
MOSS: No. His people dig up bodies.
DOCTOR: They do? Splendid.
LEELA: Grave robbers.
DOCTOR: Or archaeologists.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the Terrance Dicks novelisation is:

‘Earth?’ asked Leela cautiously.

When I first reread the book in 2008, I was not forgiving:

Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl is again a stick-closely-to-the-script effort, which makes the holes in the story a bit less easy to ignore.

I should concede that Dicks does (as he often did) give most of the incidental characters an introductory paragraph explaining their background and motivations, which is in fact a nice set of additions to the narrative. You can get it here.

Anyway, the reason I’m revisiting all of this is that the Black Archive series of Doctor Who monographs chose to ask Simon Bucher-Jones to write up Image of the Fendahl as the series’ fifth volume. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Image of the Fendahl begins with a blond young man talking to a skull. But this isn’t Hamlet and the Skull isn’t, at least to begin with, a reminder of all humanity’s mortality. Adam Colby jokes about it and calls it ‘Eustace’, and as an archaeologist he doesn’t find it in any way sinister, merely puzzling. Expository dialogue between Colby and his colleague Thea Ransome explains that the skull is anomalously 12 million years old, although still that of ‘modern’ Homo sapiens.

I generally enjoyed this, but I am going to start with a serious imperfection in the .epub version which I bought: endnotes and references to them are wrongly joined up, with individual endnote references sometimes taking you to the start of that chapter’s notes section, rather than to the specific note, and sometimes instead to the start of the bibliography for the book as a whole; meanwhile if you do find your endnote, read it, and then want to return to the main text, clicking on the reference instead brings you to the start of the chapter you were in, rather than to the place where you left off. Other books in the Black Archive series have got this right, as most ebooks do, and you would have thought it a fairly straightforward technical tweak, even with 180 notes to a text with rather fewer pages. This may seem like petty whining, but in a book like this where there is a lot of good stuff in the endnotes, the publisher’s failure to hyperlink them correctly is a real barrier to reading pleasure.

Which is a shame, because otherwise more than any other book in the series so far, this gave new depths to my enjoyment of something I already really liked. As usual, it is neatly divided into thematic chapters, and as usual, I’ll quickly summarise them in order.

  • Looking at the context framed as “audience expectations”, both from the Hinchcliffe era of Who and from wider concerns about TV horror;
  • a deep dive into the Gothic, especially the 1965 film The Skull
  • the origins of humanity and evolution, as depicted in fiction;
  • H.P. Lovecraft, the missing fifth planet and the devastation of Mars;
  • ten problems with the script (eg who lets the Doctor out of the cupboard?) and six great things about the story;
  • an appendix looking at the novelisation, and at other appearances of the Fendahl;
  • another appendix with a carefully argued continuity theory that the destroyed Fifth Planet is actually Minyos from Underworld, the story after next.

This is meaty stuff, all done in tremendous, affectionate and often convincing detail. Recommended. You can get it here.

A few years ago I read The Taking of Planet Five, co-written by Bucher-Jones, an Eighth Doctor novel which picks up on the Fendahl and a couple of the other things mentioned above, but I did not rate it all that highly. However, I very much enjoyed the Fendahl’s appearance in the Kaldor City audios, set in the same continuity as both Robots of Death and Blake’s 7, and starring, among others, Scott Fredericks in his B7 role as Carnell, though he is also Max Stael in Image of the Fendahl. Kaldor City is also recommended, though more difficult to get these days I think.

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The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Summer, by Ali Smith

Second paragraph of third part:

She’s the filmmaker whose images I described earlier, the image of the men who can’t speak or hear crossing the rubble conversing with each other and the image of the man with the two suitcases at the edge of the high building.

This is the fourth in a quartet of novels by Smith (whose How to be Both I also enjoyed). I haven't read the other three; I don't think it is essential to have done so in order to enjoy Summer, though I am sure it would help. It's a story of a dysfunctional London family in 2020, with pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, comobined with flashbacks to the Second World War and an internment camp on the Isle of Man. It's possibly the first novel set in the pandemic that I have read, and I guess that means quite a lot – a clear reflection of these turbulent times, with also some invocation of the filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti who I should find out more about. In a period where we've perforce had to live very much in the present, I felt the book both supported that feeling and helped give some historical perspective. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was my top book acquired last year, and my top un-read non-genre book. Next on those piles, respectively, are Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon, and Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney.

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Dark Water / Death in Heaven, by Philip Purser-Hallard

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dark Water is a ghost story, a tale of post-mortem communication and animate skeletons with a horrific conceit at its centre, while Death in Heaven is an elegiac story of mourning and self-sacrifice, and of the heroism of the dead. As these are two halves of a single story, however, elements of both celebrations – which in any case overlap in images of graves and in a heightened concentration on the dead – permeate both episodes.

Fourth in the series of Black Archive books about Doctor Who, old and new, this was published within a year of the first broadcast of the 2014 story that it covers. I didn’t write up the Capaldi era in detail here at the time, but I did watch the programme when it was first shown and again before reading this book. I’m afraid I don’t share his enthusiasm for it; I rank it as one of the comparative failures to end a series properly, with some good points but also some glaring flaws. At the same time, as I said in my last write-up in this sequence, it’s also nice to read a positive account even of something I didn’t particularly enjoy myself.

The central problem I have with the story is its treatment of death. As with Kill the Moon, which tells us that the Moon is actually a space dragon’s egg, though we all know perfectly well that it is a large chunk of rock, Dark Water / Death in Heaven tells us that dead people have become Cybermen under the control of a renegade Time Lord. I find both of these concepts almost offensive in the expected suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer, and can imagine uncomfortable family conversations as kids asked their parents if that means that people who they knew and loved who have died have also been turned into Cybermen. The casual disposal of Osgood strikes a sour note as well, and I find the dead Brigadier awkward. That’s not really what Doctor Who should be about. Philip Purser-Hallard doesn’t quite tackle this problem, though he does have a chapter on death as we’ll see below.

So, before we get into the book, here are two clips with geographical relevance for me. Death in Heaven includes one of the Whoniverse’s few references to my adopted country, as Missy suggests killing some Belgians; “they’re not even French.”

Also, with relevance to the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon bid, Clara has done her homework while pretending to be the Doctor:

I should add that I’ve been thrilled to meet all three lead actors in this in various times and places:

So, to the analysis by Philip Purser-Hallard. As usual with this series, the book is broken down into discrete chapters each making a particular argument. The chapters deal with:

  • Dark Water / Death in Heaven seen in the context of season finales – as mentioned, Purser-Hallard gives it higher marks than I do; I do agree that it pulls together the narrative strands of the series better than some other finales;
  • the narrative arcs of the main characters in the story, including the Doctor, Clara, Missy, Danny Pink and also Osgood, Kate Stewart and Santa;
  • the significance of the story being broadcast in the week between Halloween and Remembrance Sunday in 2014, dealing as it does with death and commemoration (NB that last Sunday’s episode explicitly called out Halloween);
  • gender-swapping and the Master – worth noting that Kronos and Eldrad in Old Who also swapped gender, and also explores how gender affects the way we read the Master’s relationship with the Doctor – turns out of course to be prophetic for the central character of the show;
  • death, where Purser-Hallard skips over what for me is the central problem of bad taste in the story, and looks instead at the various and contradictory treatments of death in the Whoniverse (including within this story – what happens to dead Osgood? Let alone the Belgians);
  • whether or not the Cybermen are cyberpunk (on balance, not);
  • an appendix on the similarities between the story and Purser-Hallard’s own Faction Paradox novel Of The City of the Saved, which Purser-Hallard modestly says are probably coincidental or else flattering (having since read the entry on the City of the Saved in The Book of the War, it seems to me that they share only the most basic concept and every other detail differs).

Each of these is thoroughly footnoted and well argued, and the book succeeds in making me think a bit more about something I had not really expected to think much more about, and lifts my overall experience of the story (though I’m afraid still leaving it in the negative for me).

So there you go. Next up are Simon Bucher-Jones on Image of the Fendahl, and Jonathan Dennis on Ghost Light.

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The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

The Ambassadors of Death, by L.M. Myles (and Terrance Dicks)

The third of the Black Archive books is by L.M. Myles, who I last saw at the fantastic Gallifrey One convention last year. Here she is in the bar on the first night, in the thick of things.

When I first watched The Ambassadors of Death in 2007, I wrote:

Jon Pertwee’s first season in 1970 was certainly his best, but also in a lot of ways quite unlike any other season before or since. The Ambassadors of Death is Who as James Bond-ish adventure story with lots and lots of shootouts and fighting, and aliens who can kill at a touch. I thought Caroline John as Liz Shaw was particularly good here, though she does scream once or twice. Not quite sure what the point of the time experimentation at the beginning was. The plot was exceptionally convoluted in order to cover the seven episodes, and I felt the camera lingered on guest star Ronald Allen for longer than the quality of his acting really deserved (some of the other recurring actors, eg John Abineri and Michael Wisher, were rather better I thought), but altogether it is pretty compelling. It’s quite uncomfortable and spiky in places; the congealing of the UNIT “family” in the next season made for a much safer and basically less exciting programme.

When I rewatched it in 2010, I wrote:

was eager to hear my views of The Ambassadors of Death, and I guess the first point is how little of the story is actually about the eponymous aliens. The first five episodes focus on UNIT trying to battle bad guys who have stolen an alien weapon and are using it for crime, and have also infiltrated UNIT’s own chain of command; each episode has a mandatory action sequence pitting good guys vs thugs. Only in ep 6 does the Doctor transmigrate to the alien spaceship where astronauts are in an altered state of consciousness, which could be symbolic of something. We take a long time to get close to the action; it’s actually rather reminiscent of The Invasion, with seedier human opponents and less willing aliens.

John Abineri does put in a good turn as Carrington – even if his means and motivation are not well explained, he is conveys the deceptively psychotic general rather well. I am, however, mystified and distracted by the cameras’ concentration on Ronald Allen as Cornish; perhaps the director was obsessed by Allen’s good looks. Come to that, I am still a little mystified as to what the story was really about. Nice to see Michael Wisher for the first time. Dudley Simpson, always reliable, utterly excels here with a Jethro Tull-like soundtrack which conveys a slightly weird yet rather English atmosphere.

Rewatching it again I appreciated all of these points, especially the Dudley Simpson soundtrack.

I still found myself baffled by the plot, and the means and motivation of the bad guys, but it’s not the only Who story of which that is the case.

I also noticed that there are practically no women in the story apart from Liz; there are two credited actresses, Cheryl Molineaux (for whom this is her final credit on IMDB, after a career that had started with the lead role in a 1961 children’s series call The Skewbald) who plays Ralph Cornish’s assistant Miss Rutherford in the first two episodes, and Joanna Ross, for whom this is the first role of a brief career, who plays an identical but quieter role in the last three episodes. (Maybe Cheryl Molineaux didn’t want to come back?)

Here’s a fan attempt to make a trailer for the story – rather impressive.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:

One, clearly the senior in both age and rank, was a sparely-built middle-aged man with short hair, a neatly trimmed moustache and the kind of expensive Savile Row suit that is almost a uniform in itself. He wore a red carnation in his buttonhole. His name was Carrington.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

This is not particularly good. We lose out on the action scenes which were one of the original story’s strong points (along with generally good direction), and Dicks adds little new to the plot (having said which, see below for a point on a minor character) which basically exposes its weaknesses rather more mercilessly to the reader. Published in 1987, this was the last of the televised Third Doctor stories to reach print (wording chosen carefully to allow for Barry Letts’ novels based on his two audio dramas).

…we are told that Reegan (as played by William Dysart)

had been born in Ireland, though he had spent much of his life in America and other parts of the world, frequently on the run from the law. He had begun his criminal career robbing banks for the IRA, and had left Ireland in danger of his life when it had been discovered that he was keeping more of the proceeds for himself than he was donating to the Cause.

More recent events notwithstanding, Reegan’s history sounds more like Odd Man Out than anything else; Dicks celebrates his 73rd birthday this coming weekend, so would have been twelve when Odd Man Out was first released. England seems an odd choice of refuge for a former IRA bank robber to flee to.

I think I was a little harsh. Squeezing seven episodes into a Target novelisation is a considerable challenge which the late great Terrance Dicks managed effortlessly, and he also gives us brief introductory characterisation paragraphs for all of the significant characters. It’s still not my favourite novelisation, not even of Season 7 (Cave Monsters for the win!) but I should have been fairer. You can get it here (for a price).

And as for the ambiguity of Reegan, who would have predicted that a former IRA hunger striker would declare in court in 2012 that he was a British citizen and therefore should not be subject to Irish jurisdiction?

The second paragraph of the third chapter of L.M. Myles’ monograph on the story is (with footnote):

The dynamic is set up quite succinctly in the first half of episode one, when the Doctor watches the television broadcast of the Recovery 7 mission. ‘And the Brigadier thinks it’s his business,’ he says, waspishly, after spotting the military presence in mission control. ‘I suppose he’s got to do something to occupy his mind now that he’s blown up the Silurians.’ The Doctor’s rudeness might extend to the Brigadier, but the Brigadier, being fully aware of the Doctor’s brilliance and how he’s brought it to bear against alien attacks on the Earth, has considerably more patience for the Doctor’s snark than any other human. And the will to intercede on his behalf, to press him towards politeness, and to ask others for patience with his tetchy colleague. Importantly, the Doctor is prepared to listen to the Brigadier on these points: when he takes the Doctor aside after he barges into Space Centre, and reminds him that there is a hierarchy here, and that Cornish is in charge, the Doctor calms down instantly, and takes the point. This Doctor, more than any other, is aware of human hierarchies, having been forced to live within them for an extended, continuous “amount of time. At the Brigadier’s urging, he attempts politeness and persuasiveness, arguing that the message must be decoded for the safety of the astronauts, who are Cornish’s primary concern. ‘I suppose we must try everything,’ says Cornish, conceding both to practicality – whatever they can do to help the astronauts, they must – and the Doctor’s argument, whilst subtly, and so Britishly, rebuking the Doctor for his rudeness2.
2 Episode one.

Again, it’s not my favourite story, but Myles successfully persuades me that there is quite a lot going on here, with chapters on:

  • the opening titles, which have a unique-for-Old-Who pre-title sequence and a musical sting for the words “OF DEATH”;
  • the triple Doctor/Brigadier/Liz dynamic;
  • the Doctor/Brigadier relationship;
  • the Doctor/Liz relationship;
  • the villainy or not of the three main guest characters, Reegan, Cornish and Carrington;
  • the fact that there are no women apart from Liz;
  • the problem of UNIT;
  • fictional and real British space programmes;
  • class divisions, especially Sir James Quinlan;
  • the problem of the Ambassadors themselves;
  • the problem of the absent TARDIS (though actually this does explain for me the silly time-travel bit in the first episode);
  • the CSO special effects;
  • the genre shading into spy adventure and crime-fighting;
  • a note on Quatermass;
  • a conclusion. “Ambassadors has been my favourite of season seven since I first watched it, and putting it under such close scrutiny has only increased my admiration and love for it. It’s a complicated, nuanced story that explores humanity’s conflicted, messy reactions to the unknown, and comes down firmly on the side of patience, knowledge, curiosity and trust.”

As is probably clear, I don’t go all the way with Myles on this – the internal inconsistencies annoy me too much – but it’s still nice to read someone else’s appreciation, even for something I don’t like as much as she does. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

The Massacre, by James Cooray Smith

The second of the Black Archive books analysing past stories of Doctor Who looks at The Massacre, a 1966 First Doctor story which has been lost from the archives, apart from an off-air audio recording, a few photographs, and the Loose Cannon reconstruction which you can watch here, here, here and here. It’s set immediately before the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572, also the subject of Christopher Marlowe’s last play. Incidentally, it was the first Doctor Who story to be directed by a woman (Paddy Russell).

Second paragraph of third chapter of Cooray Smith’s book:

Steven also lacks a clear understanding that Paris is a city with a strictly patrolled curfew, which prompts him to remain at the tavern until far later than is advisable. The means that he stays at the Admiral’s house overnight, something that happens simply because he sees Nicholas as the curfew approaches. Had Steven understood the curfew, let alone what will transpire in 72 hours, he might have returned to where the TARDIS is, despite not having a key. (The ship is well hidden.) But simply going home with Nicholas leads others to see him as aligned with the Huguenot faction in French religious politics.

When I first watched the recon in 2007, I wrote:

I was intrigued by this story after the positive write-up given it by Cornell, Day and Topping in The Discontinuity Guide. Although the film of this Hartnell story is lost, I managed to get hold of a fan “reproduction”, with black and white pictures of scenes from the programme montaged against the original sound-track. I watched it late last night, and was not wildly impressed. But this may have been due to just being too tired to take it in properly – I went back to a couple of key scenes this morning to check points for this review and suddenly found myself being drawn into it much more.

Is this the only Doctor Who story featuring just the Doctor and a single, male, companion? Indeed the Doctor himself features only in one and a half episodes out of four, with William Hartnell credited as the Abbot of Amboise in the middle two episodes, though of course Steven (and the audience) are unsure about whether he is really the Doctor in disguise. Peter Purves really has to carry the entire story until half way through the last episode, and is just about up to it.

In some ways it’s actually the basic Doctor Who plot – Tardis arrives in the midst of fiendish political plotting, our heroes make friends with one of the locals and have to sort out the goodies from the baddies. The interesting wrinkles are that the setting is not an alien planet but an obscure corner of French history, the 1572 massacre of the Huguenots, and that the baddies win. Looking at its place in the original broadcast sequence, it came immediately after The Dalek Master Plan in which not one but two companions were killed off, so fitted into a bleak rather than comic phase.

But it really does come alive in the fourth and final episode, when the Doctor reappears without deigning to explain where he has been. He and Steven actually leave Paris with ten minutes of story yet to go, leaving time for them to have a row, Steven to walk out of the Tardis in disgust, Dodo Chaplet to walk into it by mistake, and then Steven to return. In his brief moment on his own, the Doctor delivers a soliloquy which sounds much much better than it looks in script:

Steven: I tell you this much, Doctor, wherever this machine of yours lands next I’m getting off. If your researches have so little regard for human life then I want no part.
Doctor: We’ve landed. Your mind is made up?
(The TARDIS doors open.)
Steven: Goodbye.
Doctor: My dear Steven, history sometimes gives us a terrible shock, and that is because we don’t quite fully understand. Why should we? After all, we’re all too small to realise its final pattern. Therefore, don’t try and judge it from where you stand. I was right to do as I did. Yes, that I firmly believe.
(Steven walks out of the Tardis.)
Doctor: Even after all this time, he cannot understand. I dare not change the course of history. Well, at least I taught him to take some precautions. He did remember to look at the scanner before he opened the doors.

Now they’re all gone. All gone.

None of them could understand. Not even my little Susan, or Vicki. Yes. And there’s Barbara and Chatterton… Chesterton! They were all too impatient to get back to their own time. And now Steven.

Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet. But I can’t. I can’t.

Going to the Peter Purves narrated audio, I wrote:

The Massacre (.co.uk, .com) was one of the first stories I watched via fan reconstruction, and I was very unimpressed. However, the audio version, with again Peter Purves narrating, is, I think the single best Doctor Who audio I have heard. I very strongly recommend it. Tat Wood and Laurence Miles comment that since director Paddy Russell’s specialty was people creeping around silently, probably the best bits were the bits we will never see.

It helps, of course, that Steven rather than the Doctor is the central character here, so Purves is telling his own character’s story. Freshly arrived in Paris from the end of the Daleks’ Master Plan, having lost three fellow companions in the recent past (Vicki through romance, Katarina and Sara Kingdom through horrible death), the Doctor now abandons Steven who has to make his way through a hostile and confusing environment. No wonder he walks out at the end, giving the First Doctor, alone at last, a great soliloquy.

As a future Englishman, Steven is C of E without ever having really thought about it, but now finds himself in a setting where “Catholic” and “Protestant” are terms which can cost you your life – a cognitive dissonance I’ve seen often enough, and I suppose experienced myself in reverse. While the program tends to side with the Protestants, who after all were the massacrees rather than the massacrers in this case, they are very definitely not completely innocent in their suffering.

The story is very neatly structured, with each of the first three episodes lasting from dawn to dusk. Tat Wood and Laurence Miles have some intriguing speculation as to what was happening after dusk, but you should buy their book to find out more. Unlike me, they can’t forgive the end for the way in which new companion Dodo is introduced; I think Steven is a bit out of character (despite this being otherwise his best story) but I can roll with it.

In my 2010 rewatch, I wrote:

More heavy drama in The Massacre, another downbeat story in which lots of people are killed. Again, I was familiar with the Peter Purves audio narration and less so with the recon [edited to add: actually this was not true – I’d watched the recon too], which is very impressive given the limited source material, and also gives a sense of what we are missing – director Paddy Russell’s trademark of people creeping around the set hiding from each other. This is also the first “Doctor-lite” story, though of course Hartnell is in it as the Abbot. (Are the two middle episodes the only ones in the whole of Who which have no actual credit for the Doctor? And I don’t think he even speaks in ep 2.) The story keeps us guessing as to whether the Abbot is the Doctor in disguise, as Steven thinks and as is also hinted at by the Abbot’s failure to deliver effectively on his fearsome reputation. Then at the end of episode 3, he is dead in the street – and bearing in mind that we have lost Sara, Bret and Katarina in the last few weeks, it looks very grim for our hero. Yet episode 4 fairly effortlessly shifts focus, and once the political story line has its grim resolution established, it becomes all about the Doctor – will he take Anne with him? (No.) Whose reaction do we focus on after Steven storms out of the Tardis? (The Doctor’s.) Will he take Dodo with him? (Yes.) It’s back to the old mysterious time-traveller, working to his own set of rules which we do not know: “None of them could understand.” And this is entirely under the control of Donald Tosh, who drastically altered Lucarotti’s original script though had by now handed over as story editor to Gerry Davies.

Three years later, in 2013, my brother wrote up the story. I have quoted myself at too much length already, so you should read his full post, but he suggests a radical reading of the script:

Here’s what happened. The Doctor has defeated the Daleks with the Time Destructor. It was at a great cost, but he did it. After running from his past mistakes for so long, he’s beginning to stop thinking of himself as a fugitive and to start thinking of himself as a hero. Maybe he can make things better after all.

The Massacre of St Bartholemew is an appropriate test case: an event terrible enough that he can improve things even if he doesn’t prevent the event altogether, but also one that Steven doesn’t know about, so a change won’t affect him (remember my theory that history doesn’t matter, what matters is history you know). For it to work, Steven must not know what the Doctor’s up to, so he slips away. Frustrating for us who have Steven as our viewpoint character, of course, that the narrative focus has to stay with Steven as he’s the stable point, but there you go.

On his own and unobserved, the Doctor can try to act. The real Abbot is waylaid on his way to Paris. The Doctor gambles everything on the hope that preventing the assassination, one tiny change that a real historical person could have made, will avert the massacre. And he manages to prevent the assassination, but for some reason the force of existing history is too strong. It is strange, Father Abbot, that since you came everything which had been so carefully planned has gone wrong. He is revealed as a traitor. He is killed and his body dumped in the streets. His death, blamed on the Huguenots, replaces the assassination as the catalyst for the killing of the next days. He is blasted back to Preslin’s shop. The timelines judder back together.

My dear Steven, history sometimes gives us a terrible shock, and that is because we don’t quite fully understand. Why should we? After all, we’re all too small to realise its final pattern. Therefore, don’t try and judge it from where you stand. I was right to do as I did. Yes, that I firmly believe… Even after all this time, he cannot understand. I dare not change the course of history… None of them could understand. Not even my little Susan.

If you believe my take above, this otherwise bafflingly opaque monologue (“I was right to do as I did” in a story where we’ve barely seen the Doctor do anything; all the references to the companions not being able to understand history as if that had been an important theme anywhere other than in The Aztecs) makes sense: the Doctor has tried to change history, been rebuffed, and is now on his own and ready to give up.

(We also explain the mystery of the story’s name: yes, Steven doesn’t know about the Massacre, but the subtext of the entire story is the Doctor’s attempt to prevent it. And we get thematic unity: the Doctor’s plotting in private mirrors the plots and counterplots onstage. Clearly, no writer thought that this was what was going on in the story, but from now on this is my canon).

And then history throws him a bone: a girl with the same name, a lifeline of hope that he made a small difference and got away with it. A girl who won’t be missed, who looks just like Susan. Surnames aren’t matrilineal? Doesn’t matter here; if history’s sending you a message, it will use whatever channel it can.

There is hope. You can make a difference. Some things are permitted. Onwards.

My main takeaway from rewatching it this time is that a creative reading is absolutely necessary to disentangle the confusing plot. The overall tone of doom is clear, but the details really aren’t. No wonder Steven struggles to work out what is going on. It’s a good illustration of why the story editor and writer should be different people, to have more than one set of eyes on a story; if Lucarotti’s original script had been more usable, Tosh would not have had to revise it to the extent that he literally lost the plot in places.

I’m going to salute a couple of members of the cast. In particular, Annette Robertson plays servant girl Anne Chaplet, basically the woman companion of the story, and would have been an interesting addition to the regular cast.

scene with Annete Robertson, Peter Purves and two other actors in a tavern another scene with Annete Robertson, Peter Purves and two other actors in a tavern

Her major previous film appearance was in The Young Ones starring Cliff Richard, where her role is basically Second Girlfriend to Melvyn Hayes’ sidekick character, but she has a lot more oomph than the official female lead, Carole Gray. Here’s a scene where she rather oddly believes that she is Cleopatra.

In between The Young Ones in 1961 and The Massacre in 1965, she married and divorced John Hurt. (She is still alive, and occasionally active on Facebook, but has no IMDB acting credit since 1988.)

Among the male guests, André “Quatermass” Morell is a particular catch; he has come up several times in my Oscar watching. Here he is Marshal Tavannes, but he also appeared in two Oscar-winning films – as Colonel Green in Bridge on the River Kwai and Sextus in Ben-Hur.

André Morell as Colonel Green in Bridge on the River Kwai

André Morell as Sextus in Ben-Hur

A lot of the male actors appeared subsequently in other Who stories – Christopher Tranchell in The Faceless Ones and The Invasion of Time, Michael Bilton in Pyramids of Mars and The Deadly Assassin, Reginald Jessup in The Invasion of Time, Erik Chitty also in The Deadly Assassin, David Weston in Warriors’ Gate and Leonard Sachs in Arc of Infinity – a lot of these are set on Gallifrey, for some reason. (One other actor also appeared in an Oscar-winning film, James Cairncross who plays Lemaitre here and was Parson Supple in Tom Jones in 1963; he made a return to Doctor Who in The Krotons.)

On to the novelisation. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The carriage came to a halt and the driver, leaning over, looked down. ‘That’ll be twenty sous,’ he said and the Doctor handed him thirty as he stepped out. The driver tipped his hat, shook the reins and the carriage rumbled away.

When I first read it in 2007, I wrote:

The novelisation of The Massacre strays furthest from the story as broadcast: we experience it as a flashback from the First Doctor’s point of view, at a moment when he has temporarily made his peace with the Time Lords and is relaxing in the garden from which he is wrenched for The Five Doctors. Rather than the Doctor disappearing from the scene as he does in the TV story, here he and Steven get completely sucked into the Protestants’ attempts to discredit the Doctor’s double, the Abbot of Amboise, and to be honest it is all rather confusing; apparently the story had to be rewritten to allow for Hartnell’s health (or the unusability of Lucarotti’s original script, depending what version you believe). We get the impression that because of the Doctor’s interference to save Anne Chaplet, the Time Lords get grumpy with him again. There is also circumstantial evidence to support the Wood/Miles view of what was going on after curfew, though they are wrong about the chariot pulled by greyhounds (they are Alsatians). Dodo does not appear at all except in that her arrival is referred to by the Time Lords in the epilogue.

On rereading, it’s still pretty confusing, but I guess the most striking difference from the TV script (apart from the carriage drawn by Alsatians through the tunnels of Paris) is that Lucarotti constructs a whole bait-and-switch plan by the Doctor to impersonate the Abbot of Amboise and try to avert some of the looming disaster – for which the Time Lords chide him in the epilogue. It’s ambitious, and even if only 70% of it had made it to screen it would have been a really interesting story, though it would have still needed a lot of tidying up.

James Cooray Smith has done a really superb job of digging into The Massacre for the Black Archives. The first chapter looks at the historical basis of the plot, which more than any other historical Who story engages with the actual political drama happening on the ground, rather than just having dramatic events in which our protagonists get enmeshed. “The Massacre has 15 named speaking characters. Of those, seven are demonstrably real people (and mostly people of sufficient note in their own lives as to be conspicuously embedded in the historical record) and two have a basis in history but are not (necessarily) real individuals. Six are clearly fictional. Of those six, three are the Doctor, Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet, the last of whom only appears in the last five minutes of the final episode and not, in any case, in 16th-century France at all.” A glorious footnote to this paragraph begins “To put this into context, only five real people have speaking roles in all of 1980s Doctor Who, and none at all in 1970s Doctor Who.” Cooray Smith questions why a supposedly educational show didn’t make more of the history, and then makes the interesting finding that there really was a fake Abbot of Amboise during the French Wars of Religion.

The second chapter looks at plot and structure, making the point that “no episode of the story, uniquely for episodic 20th-century television Doctor Who, begins with a reprise of the final scene of the previous episode”. In particular, Cooray Smith teases apart the question of why Steven should think that the Abbot is the Doctor in disguise, and why the other characters do not; and tries to find sympathetic readings, or at least excuses, for other plot ambiguities.

The third, and most interesting, chapter, looks at religion. This is a story about Catholics killing Protestants (and to a lesser extent vice versa). The script is on the side of the Protestants, but not uncritically; both sides have their bigotries. Having myself been born in Belfast the year after this story was shown, I find the mid-century take on Christian sectarianism fascinating. It might have been a lot more difficult for the BBC to make a story like this after the Troubles broke out. But Cooray Smith also sees the story investigating the themes of predestination and redemtion. “Resurrection is the central mystery of all variations of Christianity. And The Massacre is a story explicitly concerned with variations in Christianity, which ends with the Doctor’s apparent resurrection three days after the audience last saw him, and which begins with Steven being turned away from an Inn. Just putting that out there.”

In the fourth chapter, Cooray Smith challenges the idea that the end of the story came as a surprise to viewers in 1966. It was not called The Massacre then; each episode had its own title “War of God”, “The Sea Beggar”, “Priest of Death” and “Bell of Doom”, at least three of which rather clearly signal that this is not a comedy. But he further makes the case that actually the 1572 massacre was a relatively well-known historical fact in 1960s Britain, much more so than today.

In the fifth and final chapter, Cooray Smith undertakes the difficult forensic task of working out exactly which bits of the story are Lucarotti and which are Tosh, not least because both writers have given detailed and contradictory accounts of how the story was written (though both are in agreement on the core narrative: that Lucarotti’s work was heavily revised by Tosh). He makes the point that the show was in real trouble at this point. Ratings had collapsed from their 1964-65 peak (which, as Cooray Smith points out, was higher than achieved by any subsequent era of the show, including Baker/Holmes/Hinchcliffe or Tennant/Davies); the new producer John Wiles and script editor Donald Tosh were both already on their way out after only a short time at the helm; there was a merry dance of companions, with Maureen O’Brien fired at three weeks’ notice, Adrienne Hill hired and fired so quickly that her first scene to be filmed was her character’s death, Jean Marsh likewise in and out and Annette Robertson considered but rejected as the new regular. More importantly, management seems to have decided to get rid of William Hartnell at the end of The Celestial Toymaker, two stories after The Massacre, but apparently there was a mistake in the paperwork and instead he was renewed for another six months. Ultimately of course Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis took over, fired all of the leading cast and made the show what it largely is today. But there was no inevitability about that.

An appendix looks at Dodo Chaplet, the new companion who appears out of nowhere at the end of the story. I’ve written about her too:

Although Dodo is in fact the first companion since the very beginning to come from our own time (Vicki, Steven, and Sara Kingdom from the future; Katarina from the past) she is oddly enough the one we know least about, and find out least about. She is the girl next door, but one whose parents never let you talk to her and who isn’t allowed to discuss anything except the scenery.

Other appendices look a the possible relationship between Anne Chaplet and Dodo Chaplet, the fact that the word “massacre” was first used in English to refer to 1572, the question of the story’s title, contemporary ratings and reactions, and the demise of the historical Doctor Who stories.

I really enjoyed this book which packs a lot of good chunky and new analysis into 100 pages, and took the liberty of recommending it to one of the cast.

He has in fact already held a copy, but may not have read it at the time!

You can get it here, and the novelisation here.

Next up: The Ambassadors of Death, and Dark Water / Death in Heaven.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Rose, by Jon Arnold

Given the very encouraging news that Russell T. Davies is returning to Doctor Who, it’s by fortunate coincidence that today I am reviewing a study of his first ever Who episode back in 2005. I actually wrote most of this entry over a week ago, little realising how appropriate the timing would turn out to be.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Rose by Jon Arnold, with footnotes:

This makes them [Ian and Barbara] outliers in terms of Doctor Who companions. Of the companions during the remainder of 20th-century Doctor Who, only Steven truly carries a whole story by himself (The Massacre). With Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis reformatting the series from one about exploration to a more standard 1960s adventure format, the companions become mainly a plot function, asking questions and keeping the plot moving. Verity Lambert’s era is rightly celebrated for establishing Doctor Who, but the changes made by Lloyd and Davis have greater consequences. They move the Doctor to centre stage, allowing him to initiate adventures and become the central character, something that’s made more overt by the introduction of Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. He is better able to carry the role of action-series lead than the older Hartnell. But this also makes the role of the companion far less interesting, and for all the quirks and foibles of various characters their roles are essentially interchangeable. And to maintain their ability to keep the plot moving they’re in stasis character-wise – Jamie and Zoe are left unchanged by their travels thanks to memory wipes, Liz Shaw returns to Cambridge, Sarah Jane apparently returns to journalism.2 Even Leela, expressly written to be developed from an alien savage to something more civilised, is all but indistinguishable in character from first story to last, before she suddenly decides she fancies a random Time Lord. The only character development we tend to see comes in the stories where companions have to be written out. Jo leaves to marry a man she sees as a human version of the Doctor; Romana’s sole development before suddenly being inspired to become an interuniversal refugee coordinator is when she regenerates due to Mary Tamm’s departure; and Tegan is just as suddenly sickened by the violence of the Doctor’s adventures3.

2 The 2006 episode School Reunion imposes a degree of retrospective character development on Sarah Jane to explore its theme of the effect the Doctor has on the lives of the people he travels with, but mainly limits this to a backstory of the time after she left the Doctor. It also ignores the events of The Five Doctors (1983) to present its theme more elegantly.
3 At the end of Resurrection of the Daleks, which has the highest onscreen body count in series history. Why this is more traumatic than the Master killing her aunt then wiping out half the universe, possession by the Mara, the death of Adric or the slaughter on Sea Base Four is never satisfactorily explained.

I’ve been shamefully slow about getting into the Black Archive series, published monthly by Obverse Books since 2016, each time looking at a Doctor Who story and digging into it for 100 pages or so. If I start reading them at the rate of two a month now, I should catch up with their current production in late 2026.

I should also in future months do things the other way round from this month, where I read the first two Black Archive books, hugely enjoyed them, and then went back and re-watched the relevant stories and read the novelisations. I nnow realise that I will get even more out of the experience if I take the Black Archive analysis last, after re-watching the original and re-reading the novelisation (if there is one). So I’m going to pretend that I did that this month, even though I didn’t.

The first Black Archive book is about the first episode of new Who, Rose, broadcast in 2005. After I first watched it, I wrote:

Look folks, let’s be honest.

It was good.

Eccleston is good – seriously alien and believable. Piper is good – not just screaming. Even Clive was good – the comic, self-referential moments didn’t overwhelm it. The settings were good (even if I now know that some of them were in Cardiff not London). The background music was OK, certainly not as bad as Sylvester McCoy warned. The only thing that didn’t quite gel for me was the climax, which I thought was drawn out a bit too long.

When I re-watched in 2012, I wrote:

Rose is a great beginning to New Who. The mistake made by other reboots was to take for granted that viewers would take an interest in the central character. Russell T Davies turns convention on its head by making this a story mainly about the Doctor’s companion – with the partial exception of the first episode ever, Old Who had precisely one story which was companion-centric, The Massacre, though the Doctor-lite episode has now become a feature of New Who. Rose leads a fairly normal life – dead-end job, mum but no dad, boyfriend who is not quite on her wavelength – and the Doctor arrives to explode her workplace, break her mother’s furniture and drag her across London to face militant plastic aliens. Yet we move from Clive’s suspicions to the point where there can be few viewers who do not cheer Rose’s joyful slow-motion run to the Tardis at the end. One can see why the bat-shippers decided that this was a show about Rose rather than the Doctor.

The two principals are great here, and Ecclestone has some brilliant moments as the damaged soldier trying to stop things going wrong again. There are some minor flaws – Jackie’s seductive fumbling, the burping bin, the sequencing of the climax, the precise nature of the Nestene plans – but it is an excellent bit of television, in which almost the only elements of Who continuity are the Tardis and the Autons. In contrast to The Movie, or Scream of the Shalka (or indeed The Twin Dilemma) you end the story wanting to know what happens to these people next.

On (at least) the third time of watching, all of the above points re-occurred to me, and I actually found myself more tolerant of the humour – more on this below. But I also found myself cheering for the relatively few moments of reference to the past – for instance, the shot at 7:49 where we first see the TARDIS lurking in the background as Billie Piper runs past it:

Rose runs past the TARDIS

And thanks to Arnold’s book, I realised that the Nestene Consciousness actually refers to the Doctor as a Time Lord.

The other thing that jumped out at me is that while Eccleston’s Doctor is brave and heroic here, he’s also very scared for a lot of the time, and needs someone to help him out. Eccleston himself of course was fighting his demons, as we now know. Fortunately he seems to have come to terms with them.

me with Christopher Ecclestone

Arnold’s Black Archive book was actually published before the novelisation of Rose, which came out in 2018. When I first read it, I wrote:

Back in the bad old days of 1996, Russell T. Davies wrote a Seventh Doctor book called Damaged Goods (more recently adapted for audio by Jonathan Morris for Big Finish). It included the following interesting points:

* The first character we encounter in the story is the daughter of Mrs Tyler, who is a single mother
* She says to the Doctor at one point, “You think you’re so funny”, a line almost echoed by Rose Tyler a decade later
* The Tylers live on a council estate where strange things are happening
* The strange things include (but are not restricted to) a doppelganger of a black neighbour created by an evil alien intelligence
* The Doctor’s female companion is Roz
* At the very end the Doctor goes back in time to meet the young Tyler girl before the adventure started in her time line
* As the alien invasion fully manifests lots of people die horribly and swiftly

So this novelisation is actually the third time, not the second, that Davies has visited some of these themes.

Of course he needs to use the script of the 2005 story as his basis, and also has to make it accessible for the younger audience whose aunts and uncles may have bought this, but he adds a lot more material here, starting with a great pen-portrait of the office caretaker, Bernie Wilson, who is the first of many characters to die horribly in New Who. Most notably, Mickey gets considerably more depth and characterisation than he was ever granted on screen, and it turns out that he is in a band including a trans woman and two young men who are just on the cusp of realising their true feelings for each other. The treatment of Jackie on the page seems much more sympathetic than she got on the screen, and poor Clive gets an expansion to his background as well:

And now, in sudden coordination, every dummy in every window lifted its arm and swung down. Row upon row of glass shattered, bright chips cascading to the floor. All along the street, people screamed, yelled, some still laughing. Caroline said, `Well that’s not very funny,’ and she grabbed hold of the boys to pull them back.
   But Clive was staring. With horror. And yet, with delight.
   Because he remembered.
   In his files. In those mad old stories of monsters from Loch Ness, and wizards in Cornwall, and robots at the North Pole, there had been tales, from long ago, fables about shop-window dummies coming to life and attacking people, a slaughter, so the secret files said, a massacre on the streets of England, hushed up ever since by the Powers That Be, the population doped and duped into forgetting. And Clive, even Clive, had read those stories and thought, How can that possibly be true?
   But here it is, he thought. It’s happening again.
   Which meant the Doctor was true. Every word of him and her and them. All Clive’s fantasies were now becoming facts, right before his eyes. But if the glories were true then so were the terrors. And Clive felt a chill in his heart as he watched the plastic army step down into the street.
   He turned to his wife and children.
   He said, ‘Run.’
   Caroline stared at him, more scared by the look in his eyes than by the dummies. He said quietly, ‘I’ll try to stop them. Now for the love of God, run.’
   And Caroline, at last, believed. She looked at her husband for one last time and said, ‘I love you.’ Then she took hold of the boys’ hands, and ran.

The one character we don’t learn so much more about is the Doctor himself. We get a bit more circumstantial detail about the Time War, but Davies put more than that in the 2006 Annual. Of course, this is sensible enough; the book is told from Rose’s point of view, and for her the Doctor is a mysterious stranger who disrupts her ordinary life; the cosmic adventures are yet to come. But having seen how some of the other characters are enhanced by Davies from the printed page, the enigma of the show’s central personality is even more palpable than it was on the screen.

On re-reading, I loved the extra characterisation even more – another footnote to the TV script who gets fleshed out here is Jimmy Stone, Rose’s dubious ex-boyfriend. But two passages also struck me in the light of Jon Arnold’s analysis (which I’ll get to real soon, promise):

‘So you’re saying the world actually revolves around you?’
   ‘Sort of, yeah.’ He had a massive grin on his face.
   ‘You’re full of it.’
   ‘I’ve missed this.’
   ‘Missed what?’
   ‘Little human beings trotting along at my side and asking daft questions. Those were the days!’
   And now Rose stopped. Making a stand. ‘Hey. I’m not your secretary. And I’m not your pet. Have you got that?’
   To her surprise, he stopped and looked at her with genuine alarm. ‘Oh no, no, no,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. Those people, asking questions. I loved them. Oh my God, I loved them all.’ It was the strangest thing, he looked as though he could cry. Then he turned and walked away.

and

She said, ‘Why are you such hard work?’
   ‘I had a bad day.’
   ‘No worse than mine!’
   He looked up, eyes blazing. ‘No, I had a very bad day. I had the worst day of all. I lost everything. I lost everyone. I lost myself. In one single moment, gone. And I have survived since then, very nicely, without a little human standing at my side going yap-yap-yap, so if you don’t mind, shut up.’
   She was outraged. ‘You wanted me to ask questions!’
   ‘I did not!’
   ‘You did! You love it!’

Both exchanges are important insights into the Ninth Doctor’s can’t-live-with-’em-can’t-live-without-’em concept of companions. (And neither made it to the screen.)

And here I’m going to finally turn to Jon Arnold’s book, which is not just about Rose the episode but about Rose the companion. Before I get into it, I’ll observe that in the whole of Old Who, there was precisely one episode that name-checked a companion – “The Feast of Steven”, the Christmas episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan. A few other episode titles indirectly referred to companions – the very first episode ever, “An Unearthly Child” (Susan); “The Bride of Sacrifice” (Susan again); “Guests of Madame Guillotine” (Barbara, Ian and Susan); “Prisoners of Conciergerie” (poor Susan again, and others); “Death of a Spy” (Steven); and “Don’t Shoot the Pianist” (Steven again). After Rose there were a few more name-checks in New Who – Martha Jones in Smith and Jones, Amy in Amy’s Choice and River Song in The Wedding of River Song – and some indirect references too – arguably School Reunion (Sarah Jane Smith), certainly The Runaway Bride (Donna), Partners in Crime (Donna again), and The Girl Who Waited (Amy), and arguably The Witch’s Familiar (Clara, probably).

Arnold starts his book with the strong statement that Rose is the most radical episode ever broadcast under the title Doctor Who. In the rest of the book he tries to prove the point, and I think comes quite close. The first chapter looks at Rose as a launch compared with the original 1963 “And Unearthly Child”, and with the unsuccessful 1996 reboot with Paul McGann. He makes the point that unlike, say Batman or Superman, the 1963 Doctor Who successfully avoided an origin story for its hero  for several years, and Rose takes a similar approach by not giving too much away, except through the research of the unfortunate Clive.

In the second chapter Arnold makes the point that the romantic relationship between Rose and the Doctor was core to Russell T Davis’s concept of the show, and also key to its success. I think this is uncontroversial. In Old Who, there was no hanky-panky in the TARDIS; Paul McGann’s snog in 1996 was seen out of order by fans; but Rose adopted romance from the very beginning, starting as RTD meant to go on.

The third chapter makes the point that Rose reimagines the role of Doctor Who companions who in the old era, as Arnold puts it, become a plot function, asking questions and keeping the plots moving, while the show centred on the Doctor. But Billie Piper is given equal billing from the beginning. She was already more famous than any previous companion from Old Who had been, with the exceptions perhaps of William Russell and Bonnie Langford.

The fourth chapter looks at how Davis successfully inserted Doctor Who into the pop culture of the time, and talks about the disconnection between what the fan audience and the mass audience want. The fan audience generally prefer a program with a darker tone that has internal continuity to fascinate us; the mass audience just want an entertaining program for Saturday night. Arnold makes an interesting contrast with Davis’s gritty adult Who novel, Damaged Goods, which as noted above has a number of similarities with Rose, but some big differences too.

Arnold concludes that Rose is one of the most remarkable pieces of television made in the UK this century. It’s a very sympathetic analysis which I largely agree with. I think he misses two important and related points. The first is the very strong and convincing performance of Christopher Eccleston in the lead role – it is crucial to the show’s success as Billy Pipers. The second thing is that it’s actually quite funny in places, and the humour is usually delivered by Ecclestone. I think the charm of the writing and the chemistry of the principals combined are fundamental to the success of the rebooted show. Let’s hope that he is able to deliver that again, seventeen years on. (Imagine if Verity Lambert had been brought back in 1980, instead of John Nathan Turner!)

Apart from that, I found this a very interesting analysis and I learned a lot from it. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)

Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor, by Frank Collins

Second paragraph of third chapter (which is, not surprisingly, about Victory of the Daleks):

During the 1960s and 1970s, in the classic series of Doctor Who, Dalek stories tended to underplay many of these initial ideas and themes and instead the Daleks were positioned as a generic race of evil aliens bent on galactic dominance. Their appearance in the TV Century 21 comic between 1965-7 echoes Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare strips, and this aesthetic and their role as conquerors of time and space are further expressed on television in The Chase and The Daleks’ Master Plan. The two Dalek films made in 1965 and 1966 also take the pulp form of the comic book as the basis for adapting the first two Terry Nation serials and the Technicolor, widescreen clashes between the Doctor and the Daleks position this relationship firmly within a children’s action-adventure story context. As we will see later, the influence of the two Dalek films is integral to how the Daleks appear in Victory of the Daleks in 2010. With The Power of the Daleks and The Evil of the Daleks in the late 1960s it is David Whittaker’s influence that sees the Daleks elevated from their comic book machinations to make a brief return to the themes of their genetic inheritance, presaging much of the Dalek civil war narratives of the mid to late 1980s. Victory of the Daleks quotes extensively from both serials, with the camouflaged, Union Jack Daleks paraphrasing the claim of “I am your servant” from the former as “I am your soldier” in the reveal on the rooftop of the Cabinet War Rooms and masking their crafty behaviour by serving tea and doing the filing whilst prowling round corridors up to no good. The Doctor, as played by Matt Smith, also reiterates “the final end” as uttered by Patrick Troughton’s Doctor from the latter serial as he too prepares to witness the premature destruction of the Daleks. The Dalek stories of the early to mid 1970s such as Day of the Daleks, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks are more a reflection of the complex operations and guerrilla style tactics in the theatre of the Vietnam conflict. Aptly, Planet of the Daleks is set on the jungle planet Spiridon and Death to the Daleks plays out much of its chase narrative within the framework of the planet Exxilon’s ancient culture and temple-like city, evoking the ongoing war in Cambodia. In all three serials humans or humanoids are involved in galactic wars and are pitched against the Daleks in a desire to expunge the influence of their dogma and ideology. It is not until Genesis of the Daleks that Terry Nation’s original themes are more blatantly married to Nazi ideology and iconography, and to the use of science as a tool to prop up a xenophobic, racist and totalitarian rule. The serial also plays out as if we are witnessing both the last days of Hitler struggling to ensure the survival of the Aryan legacy of his party and the bitter end of the Vietnam War. This decades-long war, coincidentally concluding in April 1975 just as the six episodes of the serial were being transmitted, is a subtext in the story “microcosmically reflecting upon tendencies in the viewer’s world,” as Jonathan Bignell and Andrew O’Day observe in their book Terry Nation.

That’s a fair sample of the book’s content. It’s a very dense and scholarly examination of Matt Smith’s first thirteen episodes as the Eleventh Doctor, with a lot of references to studies of pop culture which I haven’t read and to some which I have. I think the balance is about 20% “I already knew that” to 70% “Hmmm, that’s interesting” and 10% “Oh come on, no way”, which is reasonable for a book of this kind.

(I must say I think that Vietnam was not the only war ever fought in a jungle, and Cambodia was not the only war ever fought around ancient places of worship, and some of those other wars actually involved British soldiers, unlike either Vietnam or Cambodia.)

I actually got this last year by mistake – I had intended to order Andy Priestner’s book about Secret Army from the same publisher, and somehow clicked on the wrong button. When it arrived I was a bit dismayed but decided to keep it in the hope that I would enjoy it, and I did. You can get it here.

The Gameshouse, by Claire North

Second paragraph of third chapter:

You will not find it now – no, not even its gate with the lion-headed knocker that roars silently out at the night, nor its open courtyards hung with silk, or hot kitchens bursting with steam, no, none of it, nothing to see – but then it stood in one of those little streets that have no name near San Pantaleone, just north of a short stone bridge guarded over by three brothers, for there are only two things that Venetians value more than family, and those are their bridges and their wells.

I’ve generally loved Claire North’s novels, which all seem to involve different riffs on immortality. This is a set of three novellas, originally separately published, and I’m sorry to say it didn’t work as well for me. The first one, The Serpent, is great: a young woman in Renaissance Venice becomes part of a secret game-playing fraternity, which sucks her into the high politics of the city. The Thief, set in Thailand in the 1930s, is a hunt where the protagonist is the prey. It somewhat stretched my suspension of disbelief. In the final section, The Master, the protagonists of the first two novellas become involved in a game for the future of the world with implausibly high stakes. I think my recent disappointed re-reading of Foucault’s Pendulum put me in a suspicious mood regarding vast secret conspiracies. As I said, the first bit is very good. You can get it here.