Clouds of mosquitoes were tormenting the four passengers already aboard and I hastily applied repellent to my bare parts before passing the bottle around. But it is a fallacy that clothes protect one; soon this swarm was feasting off my thighs and buttocks. Happily Vientiane is not malarial, at least in winter; dengue fever, borne by a soundless daytime mosquito, is more of a hazard. It kills many children and ‘break-bone’ fever debilitates adults for weeks, causing agonising pain; there is neither a prophylactic nor a cure. Perhaps its worst symptom – certainly the most alarming, from the patient’s associates’ point of view – is psychological: dengue violence. A mild-mannered elderly expat told me that while fevered she hit her gardener over the head with a trowel. When she had fully recovered the young man suggested their going to the wat together, to sit in silence in front of the Lord Buddha and be reconciled. In our world, he’d have sued her.
The late great Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy, who I worked with briefly and at long distance back in 1991, travelled around Laos in late 1997 and early 1998, and produced one of her typically empathy-filled accounts of the country and its people, along with the difficulties of getting around on a bicycle. (The title of the book refers to the fact that she injured a foot quite early in the trip, which also hampered her mobility.) It becomes gradually clear that this is a society in deep trauma after the American bombed it to smithereens in an unreported sideshow to the Vietnam War. Murphy generally enjoys and learns from her interactions with the locals; other foreigners are a different matter (to her annoyance, she finds that a fellow passenger on a ferry boat has brought along a copy of one of her earlier books).
Murphy was anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist, and deeply hostile to western interventions in the developing world. That’s not quite where I am coming from, but I really appreciate her candid and unflinching commentary on the consequences, intended or unintended, of economic transition. But I must say that I appreciate even more her description of the glorious landscapes through which she travels, cycling along uncertain roads through the middle of the Laotian mountains. The one thing that the book lacks is a proper map; when I tried to identify some of the spots where she travelled, I was astonished at the distance she covered. I foolishly thought that crossing Bosnia on bombed-out roads in 1997 in our Belfast-bought Skoda was a bit of an adventure, but really there’s no comparison. It’s a fascinating read, and you can get it here.
We got this book because, as a regular Oxfam donor, Anne was invited to Laos in late 2019, twenty-two years on from Dervla Murphy, to see what the NGO money is being spent on. It’s her story to tell, not mine, but they made a promotional video about the trip which features her several times (starting at 0:19, and you can hear her speaking Dutch at 5:06).
This was my top book acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.
By the time Tolkien was at Exeter College, he was a committed smoker, mostly smoking a pipe but sometimes cigarettes. Smoking was socially acceptable back then and a lot cheaper than it is today, and Tolkien was most happy when with his fellow students talking and smoking late into the evening.
One of those books of Tolkieniana that I picked up ages ago for a pound on the remainder shelves. Aspects of Tolkien’s life and writing (but mainly his life) are packaged into short, thematic, well-illustrated chapters, though the presentation confusingly alternates between the roughly chronological and the more broadly cultural. There wasn’t much here that was new to me, but it might do for the sort of reader who doesn’t want to tackle Carpenter or one of the other biographies. You can get it here.
This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Giants at the End of the World, by Johanna Sinisalo.
This was joint winner of the Tiptree Award in 2015, along with My Real Children by Jo Walton. It’s set in near-future Asia and Africa, with two different timelines converging on Djibouti from the east (across the ocean) and the west (across the continent). I really liked the two timelines, and was kept guessing until quite near the end as to how they actually meshed together. I was not sure about the ending, where 1) both time lines end up with fatal love triangles and 2) the resolution of the earlier of the two timelines struck me as medically improbable, even with future technology. But I really loved the central images of the two roads, one across the ocean (though why ending in Djibouti rather than Bossasso?) and the other across the Sahel. You can get it here.
The Tiptree honor list also included three other books that I have read, Kaleidoscope, eds Alisa Krasnostein & Julia Rios, Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor and Memory of Water by Emmi Itärantal; three books that I have not read, Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi, The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley and Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett; and four shorter pieces, “In Her Eyes” by Seth Chambers, “The Lightness of the Movement” by Pat MacEwen, “Neither Witch nor Fairy” by Nghi Vo and “A Woman Out of Time”, Kim Curran.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“The Virgin Mary and Protestant Reformers”):
The scandal of Cranmer on the Lady altar tells us a good deal about the ambiguous feelings of the Reformers for Our Lady. On the one hand they saw it as a major work of piety to demolish and demystify the cultic and devotional world of which she was the centrepiece. On the other, they needed her as a bastion to defend the Catholic faith against the more militant forces which the Reformation had unleashed. They wished her to play her part in the biblical narrative which they were proclaiming to the world, and which they felt was threatened from the two opposed forces of papistry and radicalism. But in the ambiguity of their feelings towards Mary, they were being true to what they found in the biblical text: here was a story of Mary which not only was restricted in scope but also contained elements of both praise and reserve. The Reformers’ task was one of restoration as much as destruction.
I hugely enjoyed MacCulloch’s massive History of Christianitywhen I read it in 2012; this is a shorter collection of essays on different aspects of the Reformation. I found most of it very interesting, though I must admit I had not heard of Richard Hooker and am little the wiser now. But in general, it’s a set of pleas for English Reformation history to be understood as a specifically English historical experience, but also one that was linked to developments on the European continent and which also had reverberations in America. (I wish there had been more on Scotland and Ireland, or indeed Wales, but this is a collection of pieces mainly published elsewhere so it’s unreasonable to expect global coverage.)
MacCulloch comes back to the question of English religious texts several times, and explains why on the one hand the King James Version (and he unpacks that name) is used for most of the Anglican services, but on the other the Psalms are generally Myles Coverdale’s version. There’s also an interesting short piece on the Bay Psalm Book, the first book in English known to have been published in America (in Boston, in 1640). I like that sort of thing myself, though of course we have to be aware that we tend to focus on the artefacts that survive from history which can lead to a lack of perspective on less tangible things.
Anyway, apart from Hooker I enjoyed this and learned from it, and you can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, ed. Joan Russell Noble.
Travel this month: Oslo, Paris, London, and tonight in Natick, MA, via Copenhagen.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 79) Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost The Hand of Fear, by Simon Bucher-Jones Dalek, by Billy Sequire All Things Made New, by Diarmaid MacCulloch The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany, by Robert S. Blackham One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro
Non-genre 2 (YTD 27) The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope Under the Yoke, by Ivan Vazov
SF 5 (YTD 159) The Road to Amber, by Roger Zelazny My Real Children, by Jo Walton The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 32) Doctor Who and the Androids of Tara, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, by David Fisher Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: Dalek, by Rob Shearman
Comics 2 (YTD 26) Facing Fate: Vortex Butterflies, by Nick Abadzis et al Eldrad Must Live! by Bob Baker, Stephen B. Scott, Andrew Orton and Colin Brockhurst
4,400 pages (YTD 82,000) 7/21 (YTD 141/330) by non-male writers (Murphy, Norton, Castro, Walton, Byrne, Leckie, illustrators of Vortex Butterflies) None (YTD 42/330) by a non-white writer 9 rereads (The Prisoner of Zenda, My Real Children, The Girl in the Road, Ancillary Sword, The Metamorphosis, Doctor Who and the Androids of Tara, Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, Doctor Who: Dalek)
338 books currently tagged unread – down 6 from last month.
Reading now None – typing this up just after I finished The Metamorphosis on the plane.
Coming soon (perhaps) Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al Doctor Who: The Star Beast, by Gary Russell Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, by Terrance Dicks Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold The Haunting of the Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard Giants at the End of the World, by Johanna Sinisalo Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, by Joan Russell Noble Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas “Georgia On My Mind”, by Charles Sheffield Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
In due course Oswald left his minor public school at seventeen, and went straight into the RAF, where he ended up in Bomber Command. He was killed in the autumn of 1943 flying a raid over Germany. Patty went home to Twickenham that Christmas, all heartiness and perpetual appetite, in the middle of a late growth spurt. She found her mother trying to be proud of her heroic son but succeeding only in being desolate. Her father looked ten years older. She knew she was no compensation to them for Oswald’s loss, and did not try. Her own loss was constantly with her.
A novel of a woman whose life bifurcates when she accepts – or rejects – her boyfriend’s marriage proposal in the 1940s; we follow her through two different timelines of England (mostly) in the late twentieth century, with neither timeline being the same as ours – one is a little more hopeful, with colonies on the moon; one less so, with war and conflict. I enjoyed it and was moved by it, but not as much as by Walton’s previous Among Others. I found the biographical details of the main character’s parallel lives a bit staccato in places, especially towards the end, and I wasn’t at all convinced that her early decision was a plausible jonbar point for the two histories – though that appears to be the point of the story. However the depiction of how differently family dynamics can play out under varied circumstances is compassionate and convincing.
It was one of the novels submitted for that year’s Clarke Award, when I was one of the judges, but in the end we didn’t even shortlist it. It did, however, jointly win the Tiptree Award (along with The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne), and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and a bunch of others. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story, “Come Back to the Killing Ground, Alice, My Love” (as presented in this collection; in earlier publication this text is merged with the previous and following sentences to form a longer first paragraph)
At first I didn’t recognize her. And when I did I knew it still couldn’t be right, her, there, with her blindfolded companion in the sandals and dark kimono. She was dead, the octad broken. There couldn’t be another. Certain misgivings arose concerning this one. But I had no choice. Does one ever? There are things to do. Soon she will move. I will taste their spirits.
I complained last month that I had already read all of the stories in the fifth volume of the collected Roger Zelazny. More of the material in this final volume seemed new to me; it starts with an adaptation of the Grimm tale Godfather Death, which Zelazny also turned into a musical (never staged); the final Amber stories are here, but so also is some background writing about Amber which was not widely available in his lifetime; and there are some non-fiction pieces about his concept of his own craft, as well as emotional reminiscences about Zelazny the man and mentor, from friends and family. It’s a thoroughly satisfactory capstone to the five volumes that went before.
I am very glad to report that NESFA, the publishers, have just released all six volumes in epub and mobi format. I was happy to spend quite a lot for the hard copies, with the gorgeous Michael Whelan wraparound cover, but for a lot of fans $9.95 for the electronic version makes more sense. But if you want to, you can get the six volumes here, here, here, here, here and here.
The majority of the sort fiction here was previously published in the 2003 collection Manna from Heaven, which I read in 2005 and was underwhelmed by. A commenter on my original Livejournal post had this to say:
Manna from Heavan is a piece of trash…
There are very good reasons why you were *underwhelmed* by the book. One of the big collectors Scott Zrubek, (laughingly misspelled in book) bought the rights to print Roger’s short-stories and had a Pre-determined list for inclusions. Then he asked for suggestions on story inclusions, then ignored them all and did exactly what he wanted to, its what I call *hardheaded*. He also had a pre-determined name for the book, his favorite story Mana from Heaven, but the estate said that name cannot be used for legal reasons, so again with a hardhead, he changed the Mana to Manna simply so he could keep his original title. But the crowning mis-achievement is that despite offers of financial backing (ahem… me!) he proceeded to use a friend of his to actually produce the book, and all the hype about a wonderfully bound, high-quality acid-free paper with smythe-sewn binding, etc, etc, became a total piece of well…. the paper couldnt be any cheaper, the binding couldnt be any cheaper, the boards warp over time, etc. etc. etc. as his *friend* gave the printing to the cheapest bid and the book was printed in TAIWAN. His friend went for the bucks of profit and the book went to the dogs. Just thought you might want to know what happens when *one* man and *his* friend decide to ignore all reason and requests and produce an item on their own as a lasting legacy to someone HA HA HA….
This provoked a response from a Livejournal user using the handle “madmoravian”, who from context must be Scott Zrubek:
Unfortunately, some of what you say is true and some of what you say is completely unknown to me.
My goal with the book was to get stories that had not seen the light of day back before the public’s eye. The stories I could get my hands on (there are some stories of which I have no copies) were not all of the ones I wanted to publish. Also, because of space reasons for a commercially viable book, a number of stories are sitting on the editing floor. Calling me “hardheaded” is, to me, a bit callous, considering the struggle I had deciding which ones went in and which ones were left out and which ones I had access to.
Someone had to make the final call and, since I’d paid for the rights, I figured it should be me. I put 6 years of my life into the book and quite a bit of money. I’m pleased with the way it turned out, but not overjoyed. Could it have been better? Absolutely. There are a number of things that occurred during the process that I would love to be able to change. Alas, ’tis not to be.
My favorite story of the book is not “Mana from Heaven”. Probably “Blue Horse, Dancing Mountain” is. I thought that title to be an appropriate one for the entire book, with either spelling of mana/manna. I don’t know whether I came up with that for the title of the book, or if one of the other two folks involved did.
I’d be interested to know who you are. Granted, this occurred a long time ago, and I could be forgetting facts, but I don’t remember offers of financial backing from anyone. Financial backing was not the only consideration, there had to be a way to get the book out and distributed. The method that actually occurred pretty much fell flat on its face, but it looked good at the beginning.
I personally don’t believe that I ignored all reason and requests. I ignored some reason and was not able to fulfill some requests, but that is life as a human being, is it not?
I know nothing more.
The Road to Amber was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Giants at the End of the World, edited by Johanna Sinisalo, the 2017 WorldCon anthology.
Before all of these looms Adventure, Warren Robinett’s second game for Atari. (His first, Slot Racers, was a combat racing game in which each player navigated a rudimentary slot car through a maze, attempting to fire a bazooka and hit the opposing player’s car.) Robinett was the first Atari employee who had a degree in computer science, which may have had something to do with his visiting the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and encountering another kind of maze there – one that would inspire the cartridge he created. The game he devised was not at all obvious at the time, but it would manage to establish the basic conventions of the graphical adventure.
I know very little about computer games, and still less about the early history of the Atari system; but sometimes it does you good to read about a field of human endeavour with which you are completely unfamiliar. This is a tremendous analysis of how coding is affected by external factors, especially the way in which the business of game development is financed and structured, but also from learning about player preferences and making crazy bets about game features which turn out to pay off (or not).
This slim volume looks in depth at six games, only one of which I had heard of – Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, but also in passing at the other games developed before or at the same time in each case, to paint a picture of the intellectual moment in which the writing of the game took place. There is a modest amount of machine code, but a lot of analysis of how ideas get turned into player experience. I don’t think I have retained very much of the information, but I come away struck by the cultural profundity of the whole enterprise. Recommended even for those like me who are not immersed in the subject. You can get it here.
This was my top book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.
For the 60th anniversary, we have been given a slightly weird thing: a 24-part story featuring a time-travelling assassin called Doom, in which the Doctor figures only occasionally, told across various media with, frankly, varying degrees of success. The two big problems are that murder isn’t actually all that funny a topic, so it’s awkward to find the tone for a set of funny stories about assassination; and that Doom actually isn’t a very good assassin, in that all of her missions seem to end in failure.
Hour One, by James Goss (online story) – third paragraph:
“I’m dying.”
As my regular reader knows, I’m normally a huge fan of James Goss’s writing, but I’m afraid that this first chapter made very little sense to me. You can read it here for free.
Four Hours of Doom’s Day, by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, Mike Summers and Roger Langridge (comic strip supplement to DWM #592) – second frame of third story:
Again, I normally enjoy Jacqueline Rayner’s prose, and again, I felt that this was far too rushed; the four stories have only 16 pages between them, and the first has only two. We get an appearance from the Sixth Doctor, and separately we also get Jo Grant, River Song, Cybermen and Nestenes. But there’s really not much there.
A Doctor in the House? by Jody Houser, art by Roberta Ingranata, Warnia K. Sahadewa, Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt (Titan comics) – second frame of third story:
Given a bit more space to breathe in – 64 pages across the four stories – I enjoyed this much more; also there’s a nice consistency in that Missy appears in each of the four, creating a fun dynamic with our heroine, and the Twelfth Doctor turns up in the last of them. It’s not yet out as a single volume but you can get the two issues here and here.
AI am the Doctor, by Mario M. Mentasti (video game)
I downloaded the Lost in Time videogame purely so that I could get to this installment of the Doom’s Day story. It is an exceptionally dull game, where you don’t have to do much except poke at the screen to score points, interrupted by occasional bits of plot. If you play the game for long enough, you get to the two Doom-related bits. I poked my way through to the first of these, realised that I had not absorbed any of the plot, closed the game down and have not started it up again.
Extraction Point, by M.G. Harris (novel) – second paragraph of third section:
Huh, cave art. Didn’t expect that.
Four more stories in which the Ninth Doctor appears briefly in the first and the Second Doctor plays a larger role in the last. (There is a confusing misprint on page 220: “The Doctor was already lowering herself into the elevator” which from context should clearly be “himself”.) It’s Harris’s first contribution to Who, and as with some of the other Doom’s Day components I found it a bit rushed. Still, interesting use of shape-changing aliens – the Kraals and Slitheen do have that in common. You can get it here.
Wrong Place at the Right Time, by Garner Haines (video game)
As mentioned above, I lost patience with the Lost in Time game, which this is part of, and did not get to this bit.
Four from Doom’s Day, by Darren Jones (audiobooks)
Four more stories, of which my favourite was the first, read by Sooz Kempener (who also reads the last of the four) and involving Ian and Barbara on a Mediterranean cruise. The Twelfth Doctor shows up in the last of them. You can get them here.
Dying Hours, by Jacqueline Rayner, Robert Valentine, Simon Clark and Lizzie Hopley (Big Finish audio plays)
These are the only parts of Doom’s Day that actually feature actor Sooz Kempener in the title role, along with Becky Wright as her controller Terri. Probably each of the audio plays took more combined creative effort from all the the professionals involved than any of the other segments, and it certainly pays off; you can’t rush an hour-long story with real actors into two pages of text. Even so, the four plays have various levels of success; the one that worked best for me was the last, The Crowd by Lizzie Hopley, which brings Doom into contact with the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard (a welcome return from India Fisher) at the scene of the murder of Thomas Becket. You can get it here.
Out of Time, by James Goss (online story – third paragraph:
The Doctor.
Actually this is short, funny and to the point; the First Doctor shows up and sorts everything out, though in such a way that, once you pause for thought, you slightly wonder if it all really mattered that much in the first place. You can read it for free here.
And finally, there’s a game called Doom’s Minute on the BBC website. It took me a while to work out how to play it, and it’s not all that exciting, but you can play it here.
I can see why the BBC decided to try and do a multiplatform story – it’s a good idea to try and draw those who may not have been into all of the available varieties of media together. Sooz Kempener is a great performer and it’s a shame that we only actually get her in the audio plays towards the end. But this honestly felt rather rushed in places; the bits that worked best for me – the Big Finish audios and the Titan comics – were probably the ones that took the most energy and creativity, and it shows.
Happy 60th birthday, Doctor Who! This week, I’ve been blogging Doctor Who books, and here’s another one.
The first New Who episode with a Dalek was shown the Saturday before the 2005 UK election; I was blogging a lot about New Who at the time, and celebrated the Radio Times cover:
That was excellent. An existential Dalek, no less! The back-story of the Time War comes into clearer focus. The mutant inside was, as put it, “suitably squamous and rugose, not to mention dripping with mucus”. The three-way relationship between the Doctor, Rose and the Dalek. (Oh yeah, and Adam. Who is a bit pretty.)
Coming back to it now, I felt that Corey Johnson as Van Statten is perhaps a little underwhelming, but the rest is still great. We know a bit more now about Eccleston’s personal demons, and it deepens my appreciation of his performance.
The second sentence of the third chapter of Robert Shearman’s novelisation of his own story is:
It might be thought that they had been paired deliberately as comic contrast. But they hadn’t. Van Statten didn’t have that sort of sense of humour. And now as he swept into the Cage operations room, they both snapped to attention and saluted. They knew that their boss wouldn’t acknowledge them, that he probably wouldn’t even notice they were there – but it was the correct form of the thing. If they were surprised that he’d brought the intruder with them they didn’t show it. They were paid not to be surprised.
Great novelisation of one of the great New Who episodes. You have seen the show, here’s the writer’s cut, as it were, giving new background to a number of the characters, smoothing out a couple of plot kinks, with combination of tight-third for Rose interspersed with notes from the omniscient narrator explaining what was happening. We lose a couple of the good lines (“He’s a bit pretty” / “I hadn’t noticed”) but we get a lot more in other areas. Well worth adding to the collection. You can get it here.
Coming to it again just after rewatching the TV episode, I noticed several significant points that I should have remarked on first time around. Goddard is actually an FBI plant, and takes over operations from Van Statten a bit earlier (which makes sense). We get a lot more about everyone’s background, including the security guards. Adam’s personal weapons cache has been built up by him in case he might need to shoot his way out. It’s very satisfactory.
I am in a mood of tracing roots of stories at the moment, so I listened again to Shearman’s earlier Big Finish play, Jubilee, which is credited on screen as the basis for Dalek. It was the 40th Big Finish audio, produced in time for the 40th anniversary of the show in 2003. When I first listened to it in 2007, I wrote:
Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).
I confess that on this listening I didn’t feel that it worked as well. The two core moments – when first the Doctor and then his companion meet the imprisoned Dalek – are both very good and ended up much less changed for the TV story. The first half is fine, as we get dug into the horror of an parallel timeline where the UK’s dictatorship maintains its position by whipping up fear of the Daleks; but I felt it lost the run of itself at the end, with too many cases of characters revealing that their real motivations are completely different to what we had been told; and I did not feel that all the plot strings were tied up. There is some great humour – especially the opening sequence which parodies the whole concept of Doctor Who – but some dark shifts of tone which seemed to me dissonant rather than masterful. It’s probably fair to say that fannish expectations were different back in 2003, when it looked like the Wilderness Years would last for ever. You can get it here.
Billy Seguire has delivered an excellent analysis of the story and everything around it in this Black Archive. It has nine chapters and an interview with Robert Shearman, so I’m afraid I will run through them fairly quickly, while still recommending the book to the interested reader.
The first chapter, “‘And Now I Know Your Name’”, looks at the significance of the epsiode’s one-word title and the way in which Daleks can be named; the Dalek of the episode is referred to subsequently as “Metaltron”.
The second chapter, “The Myth of the Great Curator”, looks at museums in Doctor Who; there are plenty of them.
The third chapter, “‘That’s What They Called It the Last Time’”, looks at the evolution of the story from Jubilee to the TV story and then to the novel. Its (long) second paragraph is:
Words like ‘adaptation’, ‘remake’, and ‘reboot’ are all used to describe a work that is drawing on a past version of itself. ‘Drawing’ is a loaded word in this context, one which can apply either to what an adaptation takes, as in drawing water from a well, or what it defaces, such as drawing a shape on a blackboard. Both meanings apply to the concept of adaptation through the way the past and future versions interact. In the case of Jubilee, becoming ‘the story that became Dalek’ breaks it down to those elements which were carried forward and removes contextual factors like the anniversary nature of the story, or public perception of the sixth Doctor, from consideration. In a sense, this applies to any progression of history. Our present circumstances come into play when interpreting the past in a way that wouldn’t have applied to contemporary analysis. History requires perspective. Yet adaptations are unique in that they allow us to bridge, and affect our understanding of, two distinct periods through direct contrast. There’s a continuing presence of the original in an adaptation that links it to the past work. There is also a way in which the original is now affected. When someone says that a revived work ‘ruined their childhood’, what they really mean is that the new work has infiltrated their perception of the original, that the elements that made it work were removed. This is particularly true in ongoing works, such as the Star Wars franchise, where new entries are made to fit into various states of canon or validity. An adaptation is different from a sequel because they tell the same story. Some elements are bound to contradict, meaning whichever version becomes the prime text often directly overwrites the original.
The fourth chapter, “‘And When I Close My Eyes’”, looks at the story as a portrayalof consflict-related trauma in the context of Abu Ghraib and the conflicts of the early 21st century.
The fifth chapter, “‘And You Made Me Better’”, looks at the character of Rose as a transformative agent for the Doctor (and the Dalek).
The sixth chapter, “Who Owns the Internet?”, looks at the portrayal of the online world in the story, which came just before the growth of social media. (Van Statten’s original name was “Will Fences”, but this is obviously too close to Bill Gates.)
The seventh chapter, “The Dalek Surprise Party”, looks at how Joe Ahearne’s direction and Murray Gold’s music maintain our attention.
The eighth and longest chapter, “In the Absence of God”, makes a convincing case that the Daleks tell us something important about religion and belief. A couple of previous Black Archives have made the mistake of banging on about theology too much, and this seems to me much better-judged.
The ninth chapter, “‘Why Don’t You Just Die?’”, looks at the tricky topic of how suicide is (and can be) portrayed in Doctor Who.
An appendix includes an interview with Robert Shearman, with some interesting reflections on the creative process.
The scene which I’m in some ways happiest with, just because I just think it’s got the best bit of writing in it, is the scene where Chris [Eccleston] gets really angry and goes off about van Statten dragging the stars down. That got very nearly cut. After being filmed, Joe Ahearne said to me, ‘You know, I don’t think we need that.’ I said, ‘Could we keep it?’ And he asked why and I said, rather painfully, ‘It’s just the bit I like the most.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, all right.’ I mean, bless his heart because that’s not his job, and you don’t need it. You don’t. But it’s still a scene which, when I watch Dalek, I remember writing that bit and being quite proud of it. I’m really pleased that it survives.
And unusually there is an online supplement, a chapter that didn’t fit into the book, looking at the online extras surrounding the 2005 relaunch in general and Dalek in particular, including a game where you actually play the Dalek trying to escape and finish by exterminating the Doctor!
A solid and interesting piece of analysis which deepened my appreciation for a favourite story. You can get it here.
I think I missed the first three episodes of The Hand of Fear in October 1976 – I don’t know what would have taken nine-year-old me out of the house on those Saturday weekends, though I note that my grandfather died suddenly the night the second episode was shown, which must have led to some family disruption the following week.
However I vividly remember the fourth episode, with the barren, abandoned planetscape of Kastria, Eldrad shockingly crushed and then transformed from woman to man, and then the abrupt departure of Sarah Jane Smith, after three and a half years in the TARDIS. I enjoyed it a lot at the age of nine, even without having seen the story that got us there.
This may not be the greatest of stories – I rather missed UNIT being able to let the Doctor take control of the quarry and the nuclear plant – but it is still rather fun. In particular, it’s unusual for the Doctor to be so thoroughly hoodwinked by the bad guy (or gal in this case), and I rather liked the setting of Kastria. Of course, everyone remembers this for Sarah’s departure, but I could entirely sympathise with her fury at getting hypnotised yet again (I haven’t counted, but it must have been roughly the fourth time in five stories).
The Hand of Fear is two decent but not terribly memorable stories joined together – the first two episodes being the Nunton nuclear plant invaded by an alien, and the second two being the Destiny of Kastria once Eldrad arises. I remember first time around being really shocked by the moment the female Eldrad is apparently crushed to death. Most of the story is however fairly unremarkable; what makes it linger in the memory is of course Sarah Jane’s farewell, scripted on the spot by Baker and Sladen – I found I had something in my eye while watching it.
Maybe I was just in a good mood – if memory serves me right, I watched it on the way home from Oslo – but I enjoyed it a lot this time round. Out of sequence, I did not mind the absence of UNIT so much; I did like the awful horror of the power station, with the director’s tense farewell phone call to his family; and Judith Parris really steals the show as the first version of Eldrad. Having said which, Elisabeth Sladen is on top form here, and Sarah really does get one of the best farewells of any of the classic companions, perhaps only Susan and Jo are in the same league. There’s a nice piece about the story from 2011 in the Guardian.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
Tom Abbott was being surprisingly co-operative. At first the Doctor’s reception had been rather hostile, but his insistence that no one blamed Abbott for the accident and that Sarah was comparatively unhurt, and above all his production of a set of impressive credentials from some secret Government establishment called UNIT, had all combined to put Abbott in a more friendly frame of mind. He had even agreed to move the old blue police box, in which the Doctor stored his equipment, to a safe part of the quarry, and look after it until the Doctor had time to arrange for its removal.
A pretty standard retelling of the TV original, without much added or taken away. The story line seemed slightly clearer on paper, but maybe I just was not concentrating sufficiently when I watched it. On the other hand, Dicks does not quite do justice to Sarah Jane’s farewell scene.
I think that’s not quite fair; as the co-creator of the UNIT years, Dicks does add a bit more material to link The Hand of Fear with continuity. But basically this is a book to reassure you that you can re-experience the TV serial, in an age before video recorders. You can get it here.
It did strike me that the cover, by Roy Knipe, has Sarah not in the Andy Pandy suit that she wears on screen, but in what is frankly a much more sensible blue outfit, though with the same red top and headscarf.
Left: book cover (scanned from my own much-loved copy, hence creases); right: TV series
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought; so I went back and re-listened to the 2013 Big Finish story Eldrad Must Die!, which I consumed shortly after its release but never got around to writing up here. It’s by Marc Platt, featuring the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough, and I’m afraid it’s not all that brilliant; poor old Turlough gets possessed as usual, and Stephen Thorne shows up as the male Eldrad and shouts. There’s a nod also to J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World. You can get it here.
More intriguingly, shortly before his death in 2021, Bob Baker (who with Dave Martin wrote the original story) published a sequel, Eldrad Must Live!, through Cutaway Comics, illustrated by Stephen B. Scott, Andrew Orton and Colin Brockhurst. This is the second frame of the third page:
As you can see they’ve caught Glyn Houston’s portrayal of the director rather well. It seems that Eldrad’s traces were not completely removed from the nuclear reactor, with predictable consequences, and a mysterious woman supposedly from the authorities shows up; however I’m afraid that the comic ends in mid-story, promising that it will be picked up in Cutaway Comics’ main sequence of Gods and Monsters; and this has not yet happened as far as I know. But you can get it here. I got only the PDF rather than the physical version, which comes with extras.
Simon Bucher-Jones has produced a really good Black Archive on this story, considering mainly the horror tropes. It’s quite long but has only four chapters.
The first and longest chapter, “Why Are Hands So Significant?”, looks at the history of the hand in art from the stone age onwards, and at the precedents for detached hands in horror films, looking at the obvious Addams Family, The Beast with Five Fingers and Carry On Screaming, but also a 1963 B-Movie called The Crawling Hand which features a detached body part from a spaceship explosion.
The second chapter, “‘Eldrad Must Live’: Three Types of Fear in The Hand of Fear“, points out that the hand itself doesn’t strangle anyone and isn’t bloodied; so why is it scary? Or even, is it scary? Bucher-Jones diverts via the Flixborough disaster to considering the story’s plot structure and how the narrative beats function. He’s not completely certain that it all works, but I’m more confident that it does.
The third chapter, “The Thing from the Aeons: Fossil Horror and The Shadow Out of Time“, looks at how ancient figures coming back to life are treated in Doctor Who, linking Eldrad with Omega, Davros and Rassilon. Its second paragraph is:
We discussed in Chapter 1 why the hand is a potent image in horror and fear, and in Chapter 2 how the ‘idea’ of Eldrad adds or transcends the physicality of that horror, being presented as a dark religion that afflicts and repurposes the mind, but there is a further aspect of the horror in The Hand of Fear in the first episode, which we have not yet touched on.
The fourth chapter, “Gender (and Other) Issues in The Hand of Fear“, briefly considers a) the fact that Judith Parrish’s female Eldrad is much better than Stephen Thorne’s male version; b) how the Hand could have landed relatively undamaged; c) the morality of the Doctor’s disposal of Eldrad; and d) the perfection of the final scene with Sarah’s departure.
An appendix, “Kastria and the Kastrians”, considers the difficulties of locating Kastria and of the Kastrians’ biology.
It’s a rare case among the Black Archives where I think I like the story more than the writer does, but in any case he does a good job and you can get it here.
David Fisher’s novelisation of his 1978 Doctor Who story, The Androids of Tara, has recently been published in paper form (it had been around as an audiobook for ages). It is a story which draws very strongly on the 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope,so I thought I should go back to the beginning and re-read that as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Prisoner of Zenda is:
I took an early luncheon, and, having bidden my kind entertainers farewell, promising to return to them on my way home, I set out to climb the hill that led to the Castle, and thence to the forest of Zenda. Half an hour’s leisurely walking brought me to the Castle. It had been a fortress in old days, and the ancient keep was still in good preservation and broad moat, which ran all round the old buildings, was a handsome modern chateau, erected by the last king, and now forming the country residence of the Duke of Strelsau. The old and the new portions were connected by a drawbridge, and this indirect mode of access formed the only passage between the old building and the outer world; but leading to the modern chateau there was a broad and handsome avenue. It was an ideal residence: when “Black Michael” desired company, he could dwell in his chateau; if a fit of misanthropy seized him, he had merely to cross the bridge and draw it up after him (it ran on rollers), and nothing short of a regiment and a train of artillery could fetch him out. I went on my way, glad that poor Black Michael, though he could not have the throne or the princess, had, at least, as fine a residence as any prince in Europe.
In case you don’t know, the story concerns one Rudolf Rassendyll, a minor English aristocrat, who visits the central European kingdom of Ruritania only to discover that he is an exact double of the new king. The new king gets drugged and kidnapped by his half-brother, who is scheming to take the throne, and Rudolf is co-opted to pretend to be the monarch, through the coronation, and courting the lovely princess Flavia. There’s lots of exciting sword-fighting and derring-do, especially around the castle of Zenda where the real king is being held, and the half-brother’s henchmen include an evil Belgian. It’s a slightly deeper book than most readers may think, with reflections on dynastic duty and honour, and it’s a cracking good and short read. You can get it here.
I remember hugely enjoying The Androids of Tara when it was first broadcast in later 1978; I would have been eleven. When I came back to it in 2008, having read The Prisoner of Zenda in the meantime, I wrote:
Almost all of The Androids of Tara is basically a lift from The Prisoner of Zenda – Romana actually finds the fourth segment of the Key to Time, the ostensible point of the plot, in the first episode while the Doctor is off fishing. But it is all great fun – Mary Tamm gorgeous as ever in all her parts (ie all her roles), the villainous count yelling “Next time, I shall not be so lenient!”
I noticed that Declan Mulholland, playing the Count’s sidekick Till, did so with a marked Ulster accent. I checked back on his one previous appearance in Doctor Who, in The Sea Devils, but his character is too busy dying in agony to really display much of an accent there.
When I came back to it in 2011 for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
The Androids of Tara is one of the most shamelessly derivative Who stories ever, so obviously ripped off from The Prisoner of Zenda that apparently even some of the lines are the same. But it’s done with great style and affection, with particularly the guest cast enthusiastically in it – most especially Peter Jeffrey’s evil Count Grendel, but the others as well (and a special shout-out for Declan Mulholland’s Ulster/Mummerset accent as Till). In a season where every story is a quest for a segment, it’s refreshing to have the segment found in the first ten minutes and then get on with the planetary intrigue. Mary Tamm doesn’t have to do much as Princess Strella, which again is a sign of the times.
One minor casting point is that this is the last of Cyril Shapps’ four appearances in Doctor Who, playing the Archimandrite this time, and the only occasion on which his character is not killed off.
On reflection, the story’s relationship with The Prisoner of Zenda is a little more complex than I said in either of my previous write-ups. The Doctor and Romana land in the middle of a Zenda-like plot, but take it in some different directions (and some similar). Rather than the central character being the King’s double, it is his sidekick who is the princess’s double; but the doubles double up thanks to the android theme, with Mary Tamm playing four different roles in the end. Several of the set-piece scenes are indeed lifted directly from Anthony Hope, but with variations – the drugged drink combines two slightly different events from the book; K9 intervenes directly to assist both getting into the Pavilion and getting out of the castle. (In fact we see more aggressive action from K9 here than usual.) Contra what is sometimes asserted, I don’t think any of David Fisher’s lines is a direct lift from Anthony Hope. But it is recognisably the same story, rewritten to have the Doctor, Romana, K9 and android duplicates.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation is:
‘Castle Gracht, my dear,’ said Count Grendel proudly. ‘Ancient home of the Grendels of Gracht.’
It is delightful that we now have Fisher’s own version of the story, filled out in a number of directions. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
The reason for this was that Madame Lamia had become interested in the crystal that the stranger had been found with. Lamia had broken two diamond-tipped drills on it and not even scratched the surface. Yet this strange woman, who was the spitting image of Princess Strella, kept insisting it was quartz. But it was like no quartz that Madame Lamia had ever seen. However, her concentration was shattered by the Count’s entrance at full gallop roaring like an angry bull.
As previously mentioned, this is actually the 2022 print version of a 2012 audiobook, slightly adapted for the page (as Steve Cole explains in an endnote). It is thoroughly satisfying. The social structure and recent history of Tara are explained in depth, if still not completely believably, and it’s very clear that the relationship between Count Grendel and his engineer Madame Lamia is sexually as well as economically exploitative. The whole thing feels very much bulked up rather than padded out, and I’m very glad that the BBC asked Fisher to have another go at it before it was too late. You can get it here.
For fun I went and reread Paul Cornell’s sequel, “The Trials of Tara”, which you can find in Decalog 2: Lost Property, a 1995 anthology of short stories which you can get here. I didn’t especially call attention to this story when I first read the book, but it’s an entertaining mashup of the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield returning to Tara to find that things have gone wrong in their absence, with that notorious android, the Candyman, also turning up, and the whole thing told in (more or less) iambic pentameter as a stage script, with elements of pantomime (Benny cross-dresses, the villains are appropriately villainous). The third scene opens as follows:
Scene 3. Another clearing, with TARDIS
Enter the Doctor and Bernice.
Doctor: This is the sweet and charming planet Tara. Home to android smiths. And nobles. On which I own a field or two of land Having earned it. In royal serrvice. My intent is to visit my old friend Prince Reynart, and his princess bride Strella, Who did resemble my friend Romana.
It’s actually really amusing, and I should have paid more attention on first reading it; it was a nice chaser to the three books. I don’t know of any other Taran spinoff fiction.
(This week is going to be all Doctor Who blog posts. You have been warned.)
First and second frames of third part:
I’m getting to the end of the Titan Comics series about the Tenth Doctor, with companions Gabby and Cindy from New York and also Noob, an incarnation of the Osiran deity Anubis; just one more to go after this.
I thought this was rather good; the Doctor leaves his companions in 2009 Willesden, where they befriend Sarah Jane Smith, and they separately explore a kind of meditation on the Doctor / companion relationship, with some lovely art and a couple more cameos from other characters from the TV series. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (English version, haven’t been able to locate the Japanese original):
Yoshiko had just turned seventy-five. She had never had sex and hadn’t kissed anyone either. She had never even once had intercourse with her older husband, who had died five years earlier. Both of their daughters had been conceived by artificial insemination, and she was still a virgin when she became a mother. Both daughters were now married, and she was thoroughly enjoying living alone in the house her husband had left to her.
One of the books submitted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, sadly not eligible as it is not a novel but a baker’s dozen of unconnected short stories, vignettes of life in a series of different worlds which are not quite like ours. The creative use of human body parts, including discreet but socially sanctioned cookery, is a recurrent theme. These are all very weird and disturbing but also memorable, and recommended if you think you can take a bit of body horror. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse.
Kialan, in spite of Clennen’s rebuke, seemed unable to stop making outspoken remarks. “You know, that cart is really horribly garish,” he said, on the second morning. Perhaps he had some excuse. It was standing against the dawn sky, as he saw it, and Moril’s red head was just emerging from it. The effect was undeniably colorful, but Brid was keenly offended.
I had read this ages ago, probably soon after it came out in 1975. It’s the first published of one of Diana Wynne Jones’ cycles of novels for young adult readers, the Dalemark Quartet. Our protagonist, teenage Moril, is the youngest boy in a family of travelling musicians and players in a fantasy world where there is magic, dynastic politics, and feuds between local warlords. His life is disrupted by a brutal murder in an early chapter, but this brings him an ancient cwidder – a musical instrument which seems to be in the lute family – which turns out to have its own special powers. There are some beautifully observed family and social dynamics, and some rather stunning descriptive passages. I’m not sure if this book is as well known as it deserves. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book, and my top unread book by a woman. Next on the first of those piles is Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez; next on the second is Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
The storm was really giving it everything it had. This was its big chance. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates.
Years since I had read this, and it was a happy return. This is the book that brought back Granny Weatherwax from Equal Rites, establishing the Witches as a new centre of activity within the Dicsworld mythology. I had forgotten how theatrical it is – the plot borrows heavily and consciously from Macbeth and Hamlet, and of course has a troop of travelling actors as an integral part of the plot. But Pratchett himself was very consciously theatrical in his public presentations, from what I remember. He clearly knew a fair bit about stagecraft. Some bits of the story are a little silly (time-slipping an entire kingdom by sixteen years?) but this has aged better than most of that year’s Hugo shortlist. You can get it here.
This was the top Terry Pratchett novel that I had not yet written up here. Next is my favourite of his books, Small Gods.
“This is terribly awkward,” he [David Cameron] admitted. “The thing is … George has for so long had his eye on Dorneywood… He’s very close to me… Would you mind if he used Dorneywood instead of you?” He then proposed that I share the foreign secretary’s traditional grace-and-favour countryside retreat, Chevening, rather than Dorneywood, which was ordinarily used by the number two in government.
Published in 2016, just a year after the catastrophic defeat of the Lib Dems under the author’s leadership in the 2015 election, this is both an apologia and a call to consciousness. Clegg is clear about his mistakes, and in general accepts some share of the blame; though at time of writing, he still didn’t quite grasp how bad the debacle on tuition fees was in terms of betraying the trust of a lot of his own party’s core and new voters; he still didn’t realise how bad a mistake the AV referendum was in the first place, rather than going for proportional representation at local government elections in England and Wales which the Conservatives would likely have accepted; and while he accepted that the austerity narrative was fatal for his own re-election chances, he doesn’t appreciate the Lib Dems’ own role in that. Certainly what pushed me (temporarily) out of the party in 2013, despite having voted for Clegg as leader in 2007, was that Lib Dem ministers seemed to be exulting in the welfare “reforms” that purported to help the disadvantaged by giving them less money, and I could not take that. Come 2015 the Lib Dems needed a good and coherent narrative of what they had achieved in government, did not have it, and are still paying the price.
Those blind spots aside, the book is a very interesting reflection on UK politics as seen from the vantage point of the leader of the minority party in the UK’s first coalition government since 1945. I accept some of his points. First, a centre-left coalition in 2010 would not have worked. The numbers just were not there, and there would have been another election in six months which the Conservatives would have won with a large majority after the economy tanked. Second, of course the Lib Dems in government were never going to get everything they wanted. However, they made some bad strategic choices about what to get, and I think failed to respond to the tactical sneakiness of the Conservative establishment – especially Gove and Osborne. Third, it is the norm rather than the exception for junior coalition partners to lose seats, often a lot of seats, at the next election. (Though perhaps the Lib Dems could have prepared better for this both internally and with external messaging.)
The central message of the book is that the liberal centre of politics still matters, and is deserving of support, in an age of increasing populism. 2016 of course was the year of Brexit and Trump, and populism clearly remains very strong. Although I still count myself a liberal, it’s rather difficult to point to liberal successes since 2016. The Belgian prime minster right now is from the Flemish liberal party, who are currently polling at 8%, with the far-right Vlaams Belang in the lead with three times as much support. (And that’s just figures for Flanders, rather than Belgium as a whole.) The ruling Liberal Party in Canada is currently polling fourteen points behind the Conservatives. Whatever you may try to assert about being right in the long term, it looks like today’s voters are looking to the extremes.
One of the points of Clegg’s book that has dated most since 2016 is the assertion that Labour is unelectable. That was perfectly true under Jeremy Corbyn, whose flaws were manifest, but it’s obviously not true now, when the Tories are desperately claiming that an opinion poll result showing them less than twenty points behind is evidence that they can cling on. Keir Starmer will win next year’s election, and win big. The curious thing is that this is probably also good news for the Lib Dems, who have tended to do well when Labour does well. There is clearly a large-ish group of voters who normally vote for the Conservatives, will never vote Labour, but will vote for the Lib Dems, if they can be persuaded that they don’t need to fear a Labour government. If you plug the current poll numbers into Electoral Calculus, the Lib Dems make substantial gains just on a direct swing from Conservatives to Labour, and tactical voting is likely to magnify that. In the 1997 election, when Labour got a huge majority, the Lib Dems went from 18 to 46 seats, an increase of 156%. To equal that scale of gain next year, they’d need to go to 28 or 29 from the 11 of 2019 (now 15, thanks to by-election gains), and that seems very plausible. It won’t get them into government, but it puts them back in play for a future hung parliament.
Anyway, I read less about UK politics than I used to, but I am very glad I read this. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next on that pile is Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro.
This is happening some time in the future,. Art is on a sofa holding a small child in his arms. The child, who has been learning to read, is sitting on Art’s knee flicking through a book pulled out at random from the bookcase next to Art’s head. It’s an old copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
A short but great book, about a mother and son who don’t really like each other; the mother’s sister, who doesn’t get on with her at all; and the young Croatian woman who agrees at the last moment to pretend to be the son’s girlfriend at the family Christmas gathering, the real girlfriend having dumped him and hijacked his social media accounts. There’s a lot here about family dynamics, contemporary politics, environmentalism and the Greenham Common campaigners; there’s also a bit of a riff on A Christmas Carol, not so much a rewriting of it as a reflection. I found it all pretty powerful. Recommended, perhaps especially as a Christmas present (though for people who won’t worry that there is a hidden message in your giving it to them). You can get it here.
This was both my top unread book by a woman and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on the first of those piles is Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones; next on the other is Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard,
Second paragraph of third story (“Blow-Up” / “Las Babas del Diablo”, by Julio Cortázar):
Puestos a contar, si se pudiera ir a beber un bock por ahí y que la máquina siguiera sola (porque escribo a máquina), sería la perfección. Y no es un modo de decir. La perfección, sí, porque aquí el agujero que hay que contar es también una máquina (de otra especie, una Contax 1.1.2) y a lo mejor puede ser que una máquina sepa más de otra máquina que yo, tú, ella – la mujer rubia – y las nubes. Pero de tonto sólo tengo la suerte, y sé que si me voy, esta Remington se quedará petrificada sobre la mesa con ese aire de doblemente quietas que tienen las cosas movibles cuando no se mueven. Entonces tengo que escribir. Uno de todos nosotros tiene que escribir, si es que todo esto va a ser contado. Mejor que sea yo que estoy muerto, que estoy menos comprometido que el resto; yo que no veo más que las nubes y puedo pensar sin distraerme, escribir sin distraerme (ahí pasa otra, con un borde gris) y acordarme sin distraerme, yo que estoy muerto (y vivo, no se trata de engañar a nadie, ya se verá cuando llegue el momento, porque de alguna manera tengo que arrancar y he empezado por esta punta, la de atrás, la del comienzo, que al fin y al cabo es la mejor de las puntas cuando se quiere contar algo).
Seated ready to tell it, if one might go to drink a bock over there, and the typewriter continues by itself (because I use the machine), that would be perfection. And that’s not just a manner of speaking. Perfection, yes, because here is the aperture which must be counted also as a machine (of another sort, a Contax 1.1.2) and it is possible that one machine may know more about another machine than I, you, she – the blond – and the clouds. But I have the dumb luck to know that if I go this Remington will sit turned to stone on top of the table with the air of being twice as quiet that mobile things have when they are not moving. So, I have to write. One of us all has to write, if this is going to get told. Better that it be me who am dead, for I’m less compromised than the rest; I who see only the clouds and can think without being distracted, write without being distracted (there goes another, with a grey edge) and remember without being distracted, I who am dead (and I’m alive, I’m not trying to fool anybody, you’ll see when we get to the moment, because I have to begin some way and I’ve begun with this period, the last one back, the Blow-Up one at the beginning, which in the end is the best of the periods when you want to tell something).
An anthology of 18 short stories which were all adapted into well-known films. I remain fairly illiterate in movie lore, so I’m sorry to say that I have seen very few of the classic movies represented here; the ones I knew were “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr, source for All About Eve; “Night Bus” by Samuel Hopkins Adams, source for It Happened One Night; and “The Sentinel”, by Arthur C. Clarke, source for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I had seen two of the other films, but not previously read the original stories: Guys and Dolls, based on “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” by Damon Runyon, where I think the show is better than the original, and Psycho, which is very different from “The Real Bad Friend” by Robert Bloch to the point that I actually query the strength of the connection between them. Also, which I have not seen Stagecoach, Ernest Haycox’ story “From Stage to Lordsburg” seems to me rather derivative of Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif”.
There were several here that I liked, enough to make stronger efforts to see the films: “The Fly” by George Langelaan, “The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern which was the source for It’s A Wonderful Life, “The Day of Atonement” by Samson Raphaelson which was the source for The Jazz Singer, and “Mr Blandings Builds His Castle” by Eric Hodgins, which became Mr Blandings Builds His Castle. On the other hand I could not make head nor tail of “The Tin Star”, by John M. Cunningham, supposedly the basis for High Noon.
Long out of print but a quirky and interesting collection. You can get it here.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Bulgarian classic Under the Yoke, by Ivan Yazov.
This was the closing story of Jodie Whittaker’s first season as the Doctor. On first watching, I’m afraid that I was unforgiving.
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos: (See also Matt Hills at DWR, Matthew Kilburn at STT) It’s not unusual for Doctor Who to muff the final story of the year, both in Old Who (The Time Monster in 1972, The Armageddon Factor in 1979) and New Who (Last of the Time Lords in 2007, Dark Water/Death in Heaven in 2014; not to mention End of Days, the appalling last episode of the first season of Torchwood, also in 2007). It’s still disappointing when it happens, though, and I felt that the final episode had a particularly complex setup (the Ux requiring considerable suspension of disbelief) which then failed to pay off emotionally or even dramatically – it seemed rather bathetic to lock the villain in a box from which the next space tourist will surely release him. Bradley Walsh’s Graham did get a bit of closure, but at the end of it all I didn’t really feel I understood the point of the whole journey. Maybe things will become clearer on New Year’s Day.
I rewatched it again for this post, and felt even less engaged, taking it on its own rather than as the last in a sequence of ten episodes. I could not really get into the plot; and to take a small but important point, the lighting of the whole story was dim and dull, as if we weren’t really expected to pay much attention.
When Twitter user @Heraldofcreatio ran a poll to rank all 296 Doctor Who episodes to that date, The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos ranked dead last, behind even The Twin Dilemma. I think that is a little unfair – there are several stories that I like less from both Old and New Who. But I rank it pretty low.
It seems the worst crime you can commit in DW fandom is deliver an anti-climax there are many wrong turns here and many story elements felt they had been done better before but is it the worst ever episode? You think so… pic.twitter.com/ZrzrecNNYS
— Herald of Creation (@Heraldofcreatio) July 19, 2021
James F. McGrath is a theologian, and has chosen to take this Black archive as an opportunity to grind some personal axes against the yielding structure of a not very good Doctor Who episode. The result, as sometimes (but rarely) happens, is a book constructed to defend a not terribly good story by linking it to the writer’s personal interests. McGrath argues that The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos is making some terribly important theological points; I would feel more kindly towards the book if he admitted that it does not make them terribly well. (You’ll have deduced that this is not my favourite Black Archive.)
A longer than usual introduction places The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos as the final story in the Thirteenth Doctor’s first season.
The first substantial chapter, “What’s in a Name?”, asks whether it’s “the planet Ranskoor av Kolos” or “the planet of Ranskoor av Kolos”, and wonders how the Ux actually relate to it.
The second chapter, “The Ux’s (Misplaced) Faith”, tries to disentangle what the Ux understand by a Creator and how that relates to Tzim-Sha.
The third chapter, “Tzim-Sha’s (Delusions of) Godhood”, looks at whether or not Tzim-Sha is a god. Its second paragraph is:
By the time Tzim-Sha and the Doctor meet again after a period of thousands of years, Tzim-Sha has had ample opportunity to develop a plan for revenge and to become powerful. He tells the Doctor, ‘You have made me a god’, in a manner that may be intended to taunt, but also seems to reflect a genuine belief. Previously, we considered the basis for the Doctor’s insistence that Tzim-Sha is a false god. Here we can approach the matter from the other side and explore what framework would allow a particular being to think of themself, and be thought of by others, as a ‘god’. The category of ‘god’ has traditionally encompassed entities that are similar to what Doctor Who depicts as powerful alien entities. It is a lack of familiarity with humanity’s many polytheistic traditions that probably accounts for the facile dismissal of the notion that ‘god’ could be an accurate label for such entities. Divinity has historically been defined in terms of power in many cultures, and that attribute is to the fore here2, as evinced in Tzim-Sha’s words:
‘It has taken thousands of years. Every fragment of scientific understanding the Stenza ever possessed, allied to the impossible power of the Ux. You will see, Doctor. I must be a god. I have the powers of one… This shrine is the weapon. The Ux worked so hard to keep me alive. And they’re right to worship me. I am unstoppable…’
2 On power and divinity see Smuts, Aaron, ‘The Little People’; Litwa, M David, Iesus Deus, pp58, 80.
The fourth chapter, “The Doctor’s (Flexible) Creeds”, looks at the Doctor’s own ethical framework when challenged by a Creator figure.
The fifth chapter, “Graham’s Devotion (to Grace)”, looks further at the Doctor’s ethical framework for dealing out judgement (to Tzim-Sha, the Daleks, the Family of Blood, etc).
The brief conclusion, “Travel Hopefully”, is succinct enough and true enough to the rest of the book to be worth quoting in full:
The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos provides wonderful food for thought. The Doctor’s experience as a student and as an educator has sometimes briefly come to the fore in the plot of previous episodes. Here, however, we actually see the Doctor’s core convictions and pedagogical strategies articulated, exposed, and tested in a far more explicit and sustained manner than is typical. The episode thus provides a wonderful starting point either for wrestling with contemporary issues in the real world using Doctor Who as a base, or for exploring faith and morals in this fictional universe, which may or may not be in some sense ‘divine’ in the perception of at least some of those who inhabit it. To end with some sort of definitive summary or answer would be at odds with the ending of the episode. Indeed, it would clash with it in an extremely jarring manner. This study of major themes in the episode – such as faith, godhood, family, ethics, and power – does not grasp everything the episode has to offer for careful viewers. It points to important questions and invites you on a journey.
Keep looking. Travel hopefully. Doctor Who will surprise you… constantly.
Completists will want this, and perhaps those who want to find links between Doctor Who and theology as well, but I felt that it stretched its analysis rather further than the material warranted.
Next in my sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners, this short story and novel by the same writer both won both awards made in 1993 for work in 1992, so the 1993 Hugo but 1992 Nebula in each case. I wrote them both up twenty years ago (Doomsday Book and Even the Queen), and was generally positive about both.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Even the Queen’ is:
‘What?’
For the first time in this sequence of posts, I have revised my views sharply downwards. I actually considered skipping my usual post of my previous opinion and just writing afresh. But I think I ought to be honestly in dialogue with my former self. So here goes. In 2002, I wrote the following (dead links trimmed):
As has not been unknown on other occasions, the voters got it right. “Even the Queen” is a real jewel of a story, combining humour with a glimpse of a future made possible by an advance in technology. In this case, the outrageous technological advance is that menstruation has become an optional extra. The narrator is a woman judge; her mother a doctor; and her mother-in-law a very senior international diplomat. The father of the narrator’s two daughters is not mentioned, and nor is the father of her granddaughter. The only man in the story is the narrator’s clerk. The general sense is that in this very-near-future world, women are free both to pursue careers and to raise children.
And yet this is no feminist utopia. Indeed, the butt of much of the humour is feminism, or rather its loopier extremes:
In the first fine flush of freedom after the Liberation, I had entertained hopes that it would change everything – that it would somehow do away with inequality and matriarchal dominance and those humorless women determined to eliminate the word “manhole” and third-person singular pronouns from the language.
Of course it didn’t. Men still make more money, “herstory” is still a blight on the semantic landscape, and my mother can still say, “Oh, Traci!” in a tone that reduces me to pre-adolescence.
The main joke of the story is that the “Cyclists” of the future – inspired by “a mix of pre-Liberation radical feminism and the environmental primitivism of the eighties” – reject the technological advance offered by the abolition of periods, in the name of “freedom from artificiality, freedom from body-controlling drugs and hormones, freedom from the male patriarchy that attempts to impose them on us” (basically much the same rhetoric used in our world by the more evangelical advocates of natural childbirth). Perdita, the narrator’s younger daughter, is thinking of joining the Cyclists; the narrator herself uncomfortably defends her decision in the name of Personal Sovereignty, “the inherent right of citizens in a free society to make complete jackasses of themselves”.
This should make the alert reader realise that actually the abolition of menstruation is not the only advance that society has made. There are repeated references to the entranchment of the principle of “Personal Sovereignty” and to the “days of dark oppression” which came before. It sounds as if the “Liberation” may have included a libertarian component at least as important as the biological advance at the heart of the story. [Here I think I completely missed the point.]
(Inspired by a post to humanities.philosophy.objectivism, I tried to find political science or literary roots for the phrases “Personal Sovereignty” and “days of dark oppression”. For “Personal Sovereignty” I drew a total blank; though some commentators invoke the concept in discussions of Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, etc, the original writers themselves don’t appear to have used the phrase, though it does crop up fairly consistently in recent libertarian discourse. Wordsworth, writing romantically of the French revolution in his “Descriptive Sketches“, and Wilde, writing ninety years later in similar vein of the Risorgimento in “Ravenna“, both use the phrase “dark oppression” to describe what had gone before, and it also appears in one of the more lurid passages of Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam“, but I am inclined to feel this is coincidence and that I have been Taking It Too Seriously.)
The alert reader will also realise that while the joke of the story is on the Cyclists, the humour of the story depends on the family interactions between the four generations – the narrator, her mother, her mother-in-law, her elder daughter and her granddaughter – who gather at a restaurant in an attempt to brow-beat the recalcitrant Perdita. Anyone who has – or fears they have – relatives like that will appreciate the way Willis characterises them. The story ends with two minor surprises, that the narrator’s clerk gets off with her elder daughter, and her younger daughter gives up being a Cyclist when she discovers that menstruation hurts. [Here I mistook a silly narrative trick for genius.]
Not everyone sees the point of “Even the Queen”. They are supported in their error [sic] by Willis’ own tongue-in-cheek comment that “I was just a tad vexed at radical feminists who were always after me to write a story about women’s issues. So I did.” I know there are many people out there who simply don’t get or don’t like the story; for me personally, considering all six short stories to have won both Hugo and Nebula, it’s a close run between “Even the Queen” and Simak’s “Grotto of the Dancing Deer“ as to which is my favourite (the others being Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “Jeffty is Five”, Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire“ and Bear’s “Tangents”). [There have been several better ones since.]
Right. Re-reading the story twenty years later and twenty years older, it is a mean-spirited skit on feminism. In the world of the story, the abolition of menstruation has immediately resulted in the emancipation of women everywhere (except that “men still make more money”). Considering how embedded the patriarchy is in real life, this is a deeply dishonest and disempowering message. Considering also how technology does or doesn’t spread between and across cultures, it’s a thought experiment that assumes that everyone is a white American, or behaves like them. (The jokes about peace processes and conflict resolution are in particularly poor taste.)
There could be a great story to be written about how improvements in women’s healthcare could be rolled out globally, yet fought by conservative politicians at home and abroad; except that it’s actually happening in real life, in Texas and Alabama, never mind other cultures; it is journalism rather than sf. The story misses the point of what is really going on so badly that it’s offensive. If I had had my eyes open in 2002, I could have seen it even then. I’m dropping it to the bottom of my list of Hugo and Nebula winners in this category, along with “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”.
Other short stories on both final ballots that year: “The Arbitrary Placement of Walls”, by Martha Soukup, and “The Mountain to Mohammed”, by Nancy Kress. Also on the Hugo ballot: “The Lotus and the Spear”, by Mike Resnick, and “The Winterberry”, by Nicholas A. DiChario. Also on the Nebula ballot: “Lennon Spex”, by Paul Di Filippo; “Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats”, by Michael Bishop; “Vinland the Dream”, by Kim Stanley Robinson.
The Hugo for Best Novelette went to “The Nutcracker Coup”, by Janet Kagan, and the Nebula in that category to “Danny Goes to Mars”, by Pamela Sargent. The Hugo for Best Novella went to “Barnacle Bill the Spacer”, by Lucius Shepard, and the Nebula to City of Truth, by James Morrow.
Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis, won both Hugo and Nebula for Best Novel. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Dr. Ahrens had come in first, and then Mr. Dunworthy, and both times Kivrin had been convinced they were there to tell her she wasn’t going after all. Dr. Ahrens had nearly cancelled the drop in hospital, when Kivrin’s antiviral inoculation had swelled up into a giant red welt on the underside of her arm. “You’re not going anywhere until the swelling goes down,” Dr. Ahrens had said, and refused to discharge her from hospital. Kivrin’s arm still itched, but she wasn’t about to tell Dr. Ahrens that because she might tell Mr. Dunworthy, who had been acting horrified ever since he found out she was going.
Back in 2001, I wrote:
Doomsday Book is a story of time travel, in the same series as “Fire Watch” which also won both awards and To Say Nothing of the Dog which won the Hugo. Reading it soon after The Dispossessed, I was struck by a couple of (presumably unintentional) similarities: the narrative structure, of alternating chapters set at different time periods; the fact that in both novels a key plot element is the petty squabbling among academics researching the nature of Time. However Kivrin, who is sent from a near-future Oxford to the fourteenth century as a university project despite the warnings of Dunworthy, the story’s other main character, is not a revolutionary like Shevek, but a historian, doing research on what the fourteenth century was actually like.
Thomas M. Disch, in his incisive but sympathetic survey The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, comments on the propensity of sf writers to try their hand at historical novels, and vice versa. “The reason for the crossover phenomenon lies in the similarity of the task: to create a densely imagined world, with social protocols and physical environments radically unfamiliar to most readers. That skill, learned in one genre, can be readily transferred to the other.” And if there’s one point where Doomsday Book is outstanding, it’s the portrayal of the fourteenth century as an alien environment – smells, bells, and a chill December wind – and the shock and dislocation experienced by the historian who travels there. (Of course her shock and dislocation are enhanced by illness.)
On the other hand, some readers complain that the future Oxford of Doomsday Book is quite improbable. It does indeed feel more like a future projection of the pre-Thatcher Oxbridge whose remnants were still just visible in my time at Clare College in the late 1980s, dominated by a hierarchical male establishment, obsessed with petty rivalries to the extent of overriding sensible safety precautions in order to prove a point, with no telephones anywhere when you really need them. (I once read the biography of an early 20th century Cambridge physiologist who carried out weird blood transfusion and oxygen deprivation experiments on himself and his students, and as a result died of a heart attack one day trying to catch a bus on Silver Street Bridge. I hate to think of what happened to his students.)
Of course any sensible forecast of what Oxford will look like in the middle of this century, with or without the Pandemic, must look very different from the Oxford of Doomsday Book (apart that is from the irritations of dealing with American tourists). There will be more women in senior positions; safety regulations will be stringently applied, and senior academics will be as much subject to them as anyone; time machines, when available, will be on a university-wide basis rather than attached to the individual colleges; and everyone, and I mean everyone, will have a mobile phone. [Two lost reviews] remark that bells ring out a message of redemption in both time periods of the novel, but the real future Oxford will resound to a medley of electronic trills in the quads.
But guess what? It doesn’t matter. The Oxford of Doomsday Book is no more an attempt at predicting the future than Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is an attempt to consider the implications of life on a flat planet. [A lost review] picks it up as a point of contrast with the medieval period; the 21st century can fight disease with technology, but the 14th has to find the spiritual resources to accept its own limitations. Anne points out that there is a strong sense of the spiritual in both parts of the story: religious services are prominent events, and both Kivrin and Dunworthy are confused with divine beings at different stages. Willis uses the two settings of the book as a stage for a wrenching story of love, death and loss, with a hint of redemption at the end.
The key relationships are quasi-parental – [A lost review] notes the way Kivrin takes on parental responsibilities for the children of the household where she ends up, and in the future, Dunworthy’s lover, Mary Ahrens, is caring for her great-nephew Colin, who by the end of the book has himself become attached to Dunworthy as a surrogate son. The parental relationship between Dunworthy and Kivrin, of course, is at the heart of it. These contrast with more destructive relationships: the undergraduate William Gaddson and his mother, in 21st century Oxford; Lady Imeyne and her son’s household in the medieval period. And there is illicit love: Lady Eliwys and her steward; William Gaddson and his many girlfriends; and Dunworthy and Mary Ahrens, this last so understated that one could be forgiven for missing it. As [a lost review] points out, where Albert Camus used a sparse narrative technique to emphasise existential distance, Willis is capable of using the same technique to develop our empathy with the characters (even more true of Le Guin in The Dispossessed).
A couple of technical points on time travel enable the plot: in Willis’ universe, the space-time continuum itself has a built-in inertia that prevents the occurrence of paradoxes. This is much more important in the later To Say Nothing of the Dog, but it’s an imaginative leap by the author which means that many of sf’s hoary clichés of time travel can be sidestepped. At the same time, the extra precise measurements necessary to ensure the time traveller’s safe return are fundamental to the plot. It hangs together a lot more convincingly than, say, Doctor Who. [Fight! Fight! between my 2001 self and my 2023 self.]
Two things have happened since 2001 which have caused me to revise my opinion of Doomsday Book downwards – though not as sharply downwards as with “Even the Queen”.
The first is that Willis’ awful Blackout / All Clear two-part novel won the Hugo and Nebula eighteen years after Doomsday Book, and I realised that her poor research and clichéd portrayal of Oxford academia can’t be excused with ignorance, but is part of the goal of her writing, reconstructing a romantic nostalgic vision of England as seen by dewy eyed Americans. The second is that we have now actually lived through a global pandemic, and Willis’s portrayal of what it might look like is so far out of whack that it hurts.
Two essays written by Gillian Polack and Lydia Laurenson in June 2020, as we began to get to grips with the pandemic, are more sympathetic than me. Even so, Gillian Polack spots the trick Willis is pulling on the reader:
Willis presents an emotional relationship with the past, and convinces readers that this emotional relationship is a true depiction of history. That’s very clever writing and very powerful.
(But not actually true to history.) Laurenson looks more at the religious aspects of the book, and I’m glad that it resonated with her. Both pieces are still worth reading, three years on, for perhaps a more balanced view than mine.
Anyway. Next up in this sequence is “Georgia on my Mind”, by Charles Sheffield.
I vividly remember watching Earthshock on first broadcast in 1982, at the age of fourteen, and, like many viewers, being pleasantly thrilled by the appearance of the Cybermen in the first episode, and then traumatised by the demise of Adric in the last. This was only a few months after Blake’s 7 ended with the entire team being mown down by the bad guys. BBC science fiction was getting brutal. (It always had been, but it was possible to pretend otherwise.)
When I rewatched it for the first time in 25 years in 2007, I wrote:
As it happens I’ve just been reading Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles on the first two Cyberman stories, The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, and it’s interesting that Cyberman stories seem particularly lacking on plot plausibility or scientific credibility (particularly as the scientific credentials of their co-creator Kit Pedler were widely touted by the BBC). I think the Cybermen are particularly naff here (but I haven’t seen Silver Nemesis, so there may be worse in store for me). Their plan makes no sense at all, they are less strong than their android slaves, and their failure to shoot all their enemies when they have the chance is totally illogical. In addition the Cyber-controller comes very close to displaying emotions (“Excellent!”).
Another annoying thing about the story is the way in which the troopers and scientists all merrily crowd into the TARDIS, which has normally been the private space of the Doctor and companions (indeed, we see Adric’s own teenage private space in the first episode – he likes decorating it a lot more than Susan did). Once Cybermen start wandering all round the TARDIS shooting people (like the unfortunate Professor Kyle, played by Clare Clifford who was later to try and seduce Anna/Daniela Nardini in This Life – and wouldn’t you?) it almost feels like just deserts for being over-hospitable to armed earthlings. Earlier Doctors would never have allowed it. (When Salamander violates TARDIS sanctity in The Enemy of the World, he gets sucked into the vortex.)
One good thing about the story, and a striking contrast with The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, is the number of women in leadership roles – Professor Kyle, Beryl Reid as starship captain, plus numerous others. And unlike some commentators I thought both Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton turned in good performances in their roles.
I remember at the time, when the first episode was broadcast, being slightly startled by Adric suddenly developing a personality after a year and a half of appearing without one. Of course this was build-up to him being killed off in the last episode, and that sequence, the credits being rolled in silence over a picture of his gold star for mathematical excellence, is still effective now; shame they didn’t spend more time on building up the character over the previous months.
When I came back to it in 2011 for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
Earthshock is a different matter [to Black Orchid]. It has brilliant bits and terrible bits. The bits I don’t like: the adolescent spat between Adric and the Doctor, a bolted on bit of inconsistent characterisation to make us feel more interested in Adric before he dies; the androids, which make no sense; the Cybermen’s plan, which makes no sense at all (though that at least is traditional for Cyber-stories); the Cyber-Controller’s emotional glee; the Tardis becoming not only a taxi but a battleground, which runs against all the history of pre-JNT Who. (I’m glad that New Who has kept it as a place of refuge on the whole.)
But there are a couple of brilliant bits as well. The Cybermen’s watching of clips from The Tenth Planet, The Wheel in Space and Revenge of the Cybermen is actually rather reassuring that this is still Doctor Who, despite the full turnover of cast in the last year or so and the new style of the JNT era, and equally reassuring that these Cybermen (despite the personal peculiarities of the Cyber-Controller) are the same as the ones we saw before – this is the first returning villain who actually looks the same as last time they appeared since Destiny of the Daleks two years ago (the Master doesn’t count). It may be a new-look show but it is still our show.
The other brilliant bit is the killing off of Adric. Purely in dramatic and strategic terms, it’s a masterstroke; this may still be our show, but we shouldn’t think it is safe any more. One of the weaknesses of the end of the first (but not the second or third) series of Torchwood was that we rather felt that the regular characters who were killed would probably come back, and to be honest I feel that way a bit about the current Who season; but from this day on one could never feel that about Old Who. Yes, of course we’d been there before in The Daleks’ Master Plan; but one can’t really call Sara Kingdom or Katarina (and I’d argue for Bret Vyon to be in the same category) long-established characters, and anyway that story had been broadcast before many first-time watchers of Earthshock (myself included) were even born. One can forgive Earthshock a lot for its dramatic success of killing Adric.
Poor old Adric, anyway. At the time I didn’t deeply dislike him, but there was certainly a feeling that the Tardis was too full – I had never seen the older stories with more than two companions, and the dynamics were unfamiliar to me, and frankly not all that well worked out. It got a bit tedious that in a majority of his stories, Adric appears to defect to the bad guys, particularly since Waterhouse’s acting abilities really weren’t up to it, but with three companions there’s not a lot else for them to do. He does have one or two good moments – his awe of Tom Baker in Logopolis (definitely not reciprocated) and his final words (which only on this time of watching did I realise referred to his inability to return home). But he will be well down most people’s list of memorable companions, apart from the manner of his passing. (I do recommend the Big Finish audio, The Boy That Time Forgot, where Andrew Sachs plays an older insane Adric who is taking over the Earth with mutant scorpions. Peter Davsion comments, “So imagine my surprise when I saw that they had brought Adric back, only this time he is being played by … an actor!”)
Rewatching it this time, I did feel a real thrill when the archive footage of previous Doctors was shown, and the ending retains its tension even if you know what is going to happen. But I was even more annoyed than on three previous viewings by the Tardis’s role as killing ground, and by the narrative disconnection; what the heck are the Cybermen doing in the space freighter in the first place? Still, the two high points do outweigh the negatives. Just.
The 1982 Fifth Doctor story Earthshock famously, shockingly, killed off the Doctor’s companion Adric in battle with the Cybermen. While the descriptions in early chapters of people being melted into puddles of liquid by androids seem like yet another gruesome addition of detail by Marter, in fact for once his novelization, published in 1983, stuck pretty closely to the original broadcast version—indeed more so than for any of his other novelizations. Unfortunately this does also emphasise the numerous flaws in the plot—not, of course, Marter’s fault but among many crimes which must be laid at the door of the television script’s author, Eric Saward. Why are the Cybermen hiding on the spaceship? Why aren’t their weapons as good as their androids’? How did they get the bomb onto Earth in the first place? Faced with this material, Marter did a barely adequate job of the novelization.
Rereading it, I found no reason to vary my opinion. Marter did a couple of very good novelisations, but this was not one of them. The cover is a photo still of the Doctor about to shoot something, which grates for several reasons. You can get it here.
The other important and relevant source that I have read since 2011 is Matthew Waterhouse’s autobiography, Blue Box Boy, where he is frank about the reasons he was written out.
The Black Archive on Earthshock, by Brian J. Robb, has only three chapters, but they are long and it is one of the longer books in the sequence.
The first chapter, “Everyone Loves Adric”, looks at how the character evolved, rose and fell, with brief reflection on other teen genius characters (eg Wesley Crusher), and plenty of detail on the strategic choices made by the production team and the reasons for them, starting from Tom Baker’s last season.
The second chapter, “The Saward Imperative”, looks at the specific roles of writer Eric Saward and director Peter Grimwade in writing the story, and considers Saward’s attempt to be true to previous Cyberman stories and Grimwade’s directing technique (good with lighting, less good with actors). The Christopher Priest affair is touched on, but I have heard all about that from a more reliable source. (This is the chapter that deals most with the actual topic of the book.)
The third and longest chapter, “Nostalgia and Cynicism”, looks at the success of Earthshock at the time, but also at how the wrong lessons were learned from it, empowering Nathan-Turner and Award to delve back into the show’s history as it went forward, which in the end killed a lot of the potential creativity. Its second full paragraph is:
There can be little argument that whatever other failings John Nathan-Turner may have had, he was a showman who understood publicity and the various ways to bring much-needed attention to an almost 20-year-old programme. His instinct for ‘gimmicks’, whether in casting (Beryl Reid) or the individual elements (Cybermen) that could make up a Doctor Who story, was unsurpassed. He was willing to take a chance on talent and to develop the skills of actors, writers, and script editors, although perhaps not always successfully. In Saward, Nathan-Turner found the creative talent that would define much of his period in the job and reshape the programme – for good and bad – for the 1980s.
This is not just a book about Earthshock, but a guide to the trajectory of the whole Nathan-Turner / Saward era, and it works very well. You can get it here.
Along with Alexander and Alfred, Charlemagne is one of a handful of kings who gets awarded the post-nominal accolade “the Great.” His early life remains mysterious and the stories are assembled from various sources, but it seems he was born around 742 CE, just at the time when the Plague of Justinian was dispatching millions at the eastern edge of the moribund Roman Empire. The precise place of his birth is also unknown, but it’s likely to be in a town such as Aachen, now in contemporary Germany, or Liège in Belgium. Even Einhard, his dedicated servant and biographer, wouldn’t get drawn into the specifics of Charlemagne’s early life in his fawning magnum opus, The Life of Charles the Great. The very fact that this account exists—probably the first biography of a European ruler—is testament to how important he was (or at least was seen to be). In many European languages, the word “king” is itself derived from Charlemagne’s name.
A good summary of where we are with the study of human genes, genetics and genomes, a subject that I have thought about at great length during my genealogical investigations and also my previous pieces on Richard III and the most recent common ancestor. (Rutherford covers both of these topics in detail.) He goes into the very slender genetic basis for race, criminal disposition or many other characteristics that have been said to be biologically predetermined, and explains why it is More Complicated Than That.
In other words, my prejudices were reinforced, but authoritatively, and although the style gets a little too jocular in places for my taste, I still recommend it strongly. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired last year, and my top unread non-fiction book. Next respectively on those piles are How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas.
Firsts and Lasts It’s the end of a trilogy of stories set in the same time-period (as per X3.3, “Gridlock” last year), with the forty-second story getting another visit after X2.8, “The Impossible Planet”, and X3.7, “42”. The ood aren’t afflicted by any ultimate-source-of-all-evil this time, so we have our first recurring friendly aliens since the show’s return.
Second paragraph of sidebar essay to third chapter:
For those of us raised on 1970s Doctor Who, where the conditions of a world fed into the story-telling right from the start, obvious mismatches such as this can be distracting. Take a relatively simple tale such as “The Mutants” (9.4) or “The Caves of Androzani” (21.6), where the basic knowledge every child had picked up from the Moon landings or news items about pollution was deployed in a conceptually exciting and intriguing way (regardless of the execution), then compare it to The Mill’s persistent inability to get phases of the Moon right, and you’ll see why experienced viewers get a little peeved.
Latest in the magisterial set of books about Doctor Who (I have previously read volumes 1, 2, 3, 3 (revised), 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8), this covers Series 4 of New Who, the season with the Tenth Doctor and Donna, and also the 2009 special, with a side order of the Proms concert Music of the Spheres, The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith and the animated Dreamland story. This actually came out in 2019, but I only got it in August, and with David Tennant and Donna Noble about to return to our screens, it’s a timely read.
As usual, there is lovely detailed analysis of each story, including all the sections familiar from past volumes plus a new one, “English Lessons”, explaining cultural allusions which may not be as clear to the non-UKanian reader. None of these stories has yet been covered by the Black Archives, so you can’t really compare and contrast, but I feel comfortable that the two series are doing different things and both doing them well. In particular, the chapters on Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, Midnight and The End of Time were very good.
I’m sorry to say that I did not feel the same way about the sidebar essays accompanying the analysis of each story. There are two standout pieces in the middle of the book, one on the history of the online spinoffs of the show, and one asking “Why Can’t Anyone Just Die?” in the Moffat version of the show, a valid question answered in forensic detail. But in general the companion essays seemed to me a notch or two below the very high standards set in previous volumes, most of them dedicated to exploring obscure rabbit-holes of continuity which I find it difficult to care about.
However, it’s comprehensive on the actual episodes, and the Black Archives you would get for the same price would cover a fraction of the material. So I would still recommend it to the analytical fan, just not as highly as some of the earlier volumes. You can get it here.
Fools often think that they can get something for nothing. Unfortunately a large number of our politicians agreed and decided to make their fantasy come true with public money. They thought all that was required was to harness the infinite power of wind, water and plant life. A concept so simple you have to wonder why it had not been done before. But of course it had and many centuries ago at that. The first recognisable windmill was produced two thousand years ago by a Greek known as Heron the Engineer; water power is even more ancient and goes back to the sixth millennium BC and the first patent for wave power was filed by a father-and-son team in Paris in 1799. The history of tidal power goes back as far as 900 AD.
Robert Durward was a Scottish businessman who had made a fortune in pink gravel. He had firm political beliefs, including that the traditional UK political parties are running out of steam and failing to connect with citizens as once they did (incontrovertible) and that he had the answer to reshape society (more questionable). Fate threw us together for a while in 2017, and we met in person once and had a number of conversations by phone and email. Unexpectedly, he died early in 2018 and our association came to a end.
This brief book, published early in 2017 before I got to know him, is a projection of how British and indeed global society will, in the next seven years, inevitably overthrow the current institutions of government, especially the existence of political parties, and create a utopia of a new world order. I have to be honest: it’s not terribly good. Wells did it better in The World Set Free. I’ve argued with idealists on both the left and the right about the role of political parties in any governance system (whether or not they are democratic) and I tend to think of them as a cultural universal.
So I think 2024 in our timeline is unlikely to work out as Robert Durward predicted (and in fairness, he was offering a vision, not a road map). But you can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro.
Second paragraph of third chapter (and the quote it introduces):
There is great significance in having water at the entrance to this cathedral [Salisbury], for in Christian theology the water of baptism serves as the door through which every Christian enters not just the faith but the whole Christian community, past, present and future. For the Bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Holtam, the baptismal waters are the very ‘water of life’ itself:
“They purify us. It’s about the journey to the Promised Land, passing through the waters of the Red Sea. We come out the other side of the font, as it were, and into the nave of the cathedral, where the community gathers to celebrate the Eucharist. We’re called individually, but we gather together. And this is about the whole church, not just this cathedral. Becoming a Christian, you are baptised into the worldwide church so that, belonging here, you belong in all times and all places.”
A lovely book, based on a BBC Radio series of the same name, lavishly illustrated (as the radio cannot be) with photographs of art and architecture, and enriched by quotes from commentators who know what they are talking about. Some people like to simply dismiss religion as at best a distraction and at worst a force for conflict and division; MacGregor doesn’t shy away from that side of things, but he goes deep into what religious people are actually doing – symbolism, practice, history, politics. He draws some very interesting parallels between religions separated by continents and centuries.
I found it a very healthy perspective on what is and isn’t unique to each of the main strands of world belief. It’s also a surprisingly light read, despite its length and weight, perhaps because of its origin as radio scripts. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was top of my pile of books acquired in 2018. Next there is The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton.
This is the 240th month in which I have been keeping records of every book that I have read, and so it brings to an end my series of regular flashbacks to past months. (If you want to know what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks: basically, I went to China for Chengdu WorldCon.) Some analysis of 20 years of bookblogging tomorrow, perhaps, as it’s a day off for me. Meanwhile here are the tallies for the last 31 days:
Non-fiction 7 (YTD 71) Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin About Time 9, by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford Earthshock, by Brian J. Moss The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, by James F. McGrath Politics: Between The Extremes, by Nick Clegg
Non-genre 4 (YTD 25) Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun Fate, by Zhao Haohui No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler Winter, by Ali Smith
SF 8 (YTD 154) Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Locklands, by Robert Jackson Bennett 2024, by Robert Durward “Even the Queen” by Connie Wilis Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 28) Doctor Who: Earthshock, by Ian Marter
Comics 1 (YTD 24) Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,100 pages (YTD 77,600) 8/21 (YTD 134/309) by non-male writers (Tomalin, Ail, Smith, Willis x2, Wynne Jones, Murata, illustrators of Breakfast at Tyranny’s) 3/21 (YTD 42/309) by a non-white writer (Murong, Zhou, Murata) 4 rereads (“Even the Queen”, Wyrd Sisters, Doomsday Book, Doctor Who – Earthshock) 344 books currently tagged unread – down 8 from last month. At this rate I will clear the lot some time in 2027.
Reading now The Road to Amber, by Roger Zelazny
Coming soon (perhaps) Vortex Butterflies, by Nick Abadzis et al Doctor Who – the Androids of Tara, by David Fisher Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, by Terrance Dicks The Hand of Fear, by Simon Bucher-Jones Dalek, by Billy Sequire All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation, by Diarmaid MacCulloch The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany, by Robert S. Blackham Three Plays, by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro Giants at the End of the World, by Johanna Sinisalo Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort My Real Children, by Jo Walton One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas “Georgia On My Mind”, by Charles Sheffield Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
The three of us would live in two rooms, a bigger one in which we slept, and a small kitchen/living room. To me, it all seemed agreeable, and for the next two years we lived above the pianos, with the sound of Beethoven sonatas filling our ears. Dorrie must have sometimes played and taught work by other composers, but Beethoven came before all others, and she gave me an early education in his piano music that has kept me listening to it ever since. Serious as she was about music, she was also high-spirited and sociable. She liked to organize parties and play jokes, and soon after we moved into her house she gave a nightingale party, telling her friends there was a nightingale in her back garden, and my sister and I were given the job of keeping her guests indoors while she slipped out into the garden with a special nightingale whistle to amaze them. She never made us feel unwelcome, although it must have been hard not to have her house to herself. This was the summer of 1943. I was ten.
I have previously hugely enjoyed Tomalin’s biographies of Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and the young H.G. Wells, so I had pretty high hopes for this autobiography, published in 2017 when she was already 84 (she turned 90 in June). And it pretty much fulfilled them.
Tomalin is the daughter of an English musician and a French writer, who married too young and were already on the verge of separation when she was conceived. She too married young, finding a journalist chap while a student at Cambridge, and the relationship deteriorated into on-again-off-again until he was killed covering the Yom Kippur war, exactly fifty years ago last month. But they had five children, two of who died, one as a baby, the other in her early 20s; and their surviving son has a serious disability. She tells us much less about her second husband, Michael Frayn, which is a little disappointing. But there is still plenty of personal material to draw on, with her literary endeavours a secondary theme.
The hilarious contact lens scene from Noises Off was inspired by something that actually happened to Tomalin while on holiday with Frayn.
From the 1993 film. Interestingly the words “contact” and “lens” are not mentioned in the script – the actors show what has happened without actually telling us.
Writing of her time at Cambridge, she says that she gave up writing poetry because she felt she was not good enough at it; but this “left an emptiness in my life which has never quite been filled.” I find that rather sad. Her biographies are superlative, but I guess she feels that there was something more creative that was possible and that she missed out on. There is still time. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that list is All Things Made New, by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Second frame of the third of the four issues collected here:
Two two-part stories here, the first being the titular “Breakfast at Tyranny’s”, where the Doctor with companions Gabby, Cindy and the deity Anubis are held captive with their memories being harvested; and a more exciting second half, “Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”, set in ancient China with Nestenes. The art here is not always up the usual standards, I’m sorry to say. You can get it here.
She cringed as she did so— she hated changing clothes. She stood in the alley and shut her eyes, wincing as the sensations of mud and smoke and soil and dark wool bled out of her thoughts, and bright, crunchy, crispy hemp fabric surged in to replace them. It was like stepping out of a nice warm bath and jumping into an icy lake, and it took some time for her mind to recalibrate.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Shorefall:
“Sign there,” said Moretti. He winced as he touched the side of his face. “And there. And there…”
Second paragraph of third chapter of Locklands:
There was what Berenice and her compatriots thought of as conventional scriving, wherein one convinced everyday objects or materials to disobey reality by writing elaborate arguments upon them, arguments that called upon other arguments and definitions to make their case, all stored nearby in a lexicon. This was the art of scriving that Berenice had grown up with, the industry that had formed the empire of Old Tevanne, ran fortresses like Grattiara, and had once allowed the merchant houses to capture the whole of the world.
This trilogy was on the Hugo ballot for Best Series this year, and I finished two of the three before the deadline and put it third (well, fourth behind No Award at the top). I very much enjoyed Bennett’s previous Divine Cities trilogy; this is a different fantasy world, but one where magic and machinery intersect according to a series of complex rules. So often in books like this, worldbuilding stops at the point where the writer needs it to in order to drive the plot; I really don’t get that sense here, I feel that the writer is playing fair with us all the way through, and the barriers that the characters face because of how the world has been created don’t seem artificial. There’s also a good spectrum of emotional engagement, romance, parent-child dynamics, deep and committed friendships; and Bennett’s not afraid to kill off important characters as he goes. And the sense of place is very well realised, whether it’s a cityscape, a blasted heath or a vast natural fortress.
I felt that the middle book was not quite as strong as the first and last; the baddy seemed a bit too powerful and that constrains the plot a bit. But otherwise this is a good series of novels set in an unusually thoughtfully constructed world. You can get them here, here and here.
