Second paragraph of third section (of the first of two chapters):
‘That’s all the sixes,’ his companion said, joining us.
Another of the recent Who novelisations, by the writer of the original TV story. I don’t seem to have made a note about this story when it was first broadcast. When I first rewatched it in 2013, I wrote:
I fear this is becoming a boring refrain, but I had forgotten how good The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit actually is. I think it is our first proper base-under-siege story in New Who (perhaps arguments can be made for The End of the World or Dalek, but I won’t) and perhaps it’s a return to that comfort zone of Old Who, with the difference of a more diverse base crew than Old Who would have had (the black guy would never have been in command in the old days, and the smart woman would never have been chief scientist). The scarily different bit is not so much the monster – though it is well done, both the descent to the pit and the technical realisation of a superhuman incarnation of evil – but the Ood, who are very creepy indeed. Having a slave race never works out well in Who, but here the message is that by exploiting the Ood, humanity has opened a potential route for its own destruction. Terrific stuff.
In 2022, coming back to it for Simon Bucher Jones’ Black Archive, I wrote:
Rewatching it now, I was again pleasantly surprised. David Tennant is always watchable, but here the chemistry between him and Billie Piper is at its peak. It also struck me that the plot element of the TARDIS being lost on a world where a more cosmic battle is playing out had been done before, and worse, in Frontios.
I didn’t rewatch it again before reading the novelisation, as my memory was still pretty fresh.
This is another one of the good ones. It is presented as a set of testimonials, and other incidents, from the enquiry that the Krop Tor base crew faced when they finally got back. This neatly solves a story-telling problem: you don’t need an omniscient narrator when you have a bunch of different viewpoints, and each admits from the start that each has only a partial view of the events.
Doing the story that way means that you end up with quite a different experience of the plot from watching the original TV version, but a good one. It also centres the guest characters, and the impact that the Doctor and Rose make on the rest of their lives, which doesn’t often feature in what we see once the TARDIS departs. There is one chunk of narrative told from the Doctor’s own point of view about three quarters of the way through, and it’s not clear how that gets into the book, but I think most readers will swallow it anyway. The original story is good, and the novelisation is good too.
I don’t think I had realised that Jones was the author of one of my favourite Bernice Sumnmerfield novels, Beyond the Sun, and of the New Adventures novel Bad Therapy which I also enjoyed. He also wrote the “Dead Man Walking” episode of Torchwood. One to keep an eye on.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Ethnic Prejudices and Discrimination: The Case of Kosovo”, by Lazar Nikolić):
Prejudice, as indeed discrimination itself, produces changes which can be analyzed on several levels. In this work practical consequences of different forms of stereotyping are analyzed: firstly, at the micro level (the level of the individual as actor in everyday life); secondly, at the middle level (the level of social institutions and group memberships) and thirdly, at the macro level (the level of society). All these levels include different examples of relationships, actions and ways of thinking between Albanians and Serbs in individual, group and community settings. Examples that follow specify different strategies of selfperception and its interpretation, perception of the ‘other’ and perception of relationships.
A collection of academic essays on Kosovo published in 2003, so before the final status process had started, though after it was already clear which way such a process would go. To be honest, I was surprised at the poor quality of some of the pieces; presumably (though I don’t think this is made clear) they are submissions to a conference. The last three however, looking at the effects of the Kosovo situation on Albania by Aldo Bumci, (North) Macedonia by Goran Janev and Serbia by Florian Bieber, are very good state-of-the-nations pieces which stand the test of time; Serbia perhaps has changed most since then, but not really because of Kosovo. You can get Understanding the War in Kosovo here (at a price).
This was the second last of the books about Kosovo on my shelves acquired in 2023. However I’m not going to bother writing up the last of them (Blood Libel, by Bardhyl Mahmuti) so my 2023 books list will end with a couple of Doctor Who comics.
Second paragraph of third story (“And isles where good men lie…”):
Still spitting noisily, Fortune pushed himself up and walked heavily to the window. Half a million miles beyond the orbit of the Moon the ship made a minute course correction….
I never met Bob Shaw, who died aged 64 in 1996, but I am aware of him as Northern Ireland’s leading science fiction writer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, along with James White, and he apparently had a great line in humorous convention speeches (for which he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1979 and 1980). I have fond memories of his A Wreath of Stars, but rather bounced off both Orbitsville and The Ragged Astronauts when I tried them a few years ago.
Tomorrow Lies in Ambush is a collection of some of his short stories originally published between 1966 and 1971. The most republished of these is “The Happiest Day of Your Life”, a very short piece about a future where children receive all of their education in a single day. That could have been really poor if played for laughs, but it actually comes out very powerfully, reflecting wistfully on the importance of childhood as a part of the human experience.
Most of the stories are solid engineering sf of the type you would expect from Shaw, who was an aeronautical engineer by profession. A couple feature one of his other trademark tropes, a poisonously bad marriage between the leading characters, presumably based on a situation he had closely observed in person. It’s not ground-breaking, but it’s not bad either.
The reason I got the book, however, was to read “The Cosmic Cocktail Party”, a 1970 story involving the personalities of people who have died being preserved in a computer storage called a matrix, in which one particularly strong individual has created a colonial hunting fantasy which the other minds in the matrix are compelled to acknowledge and participate in; part of the technobabble around this involves artrons.
Doctor Who fans will immediately recognise elements of the bedrock of one of the greatest Who stories, The Deadly Assassin. To put icing on the cake, the concealed villain of the longest of the stories in the book, “The Pilot Plant”, appears to be an AI called Xoanon (though it turns out to be humanoid rather than robotic). This is also the name of the mad computer in The Face of Evil, the story after The Deadly Assassin. Going back to “The Cosmic Cocktail Party”, it also features a very minor character called Uvarov, which is not a million miles from Uvanov, the captain in The Robots of Death (the story after The Face of Evil).
Credit for pointing this out belongs entirely to Shakespeare scholar Martin Wiggins, who included it in the information in the Season 14 Blu-Ray commentary and kindly answered my questions. He has not published the link between Bob Shaw and Doctor Who anywhere else, so let the acknowledgement of his discovery now begin.
Second paragraph of third chapter (O’Toole’s turn to write in favour), with embedded quotation:
What is striking about this argument from the heart of unionism is that neither [Lord] Brookeborough nor [Brian] Maginess contested the idea that it was logical to think of the island of Ireland as a single country. Brookeborough quoted with approval the words of a fellow unionist, his minister for home affairs, Walter Topping:
In circumstances other than those that exist in Ireland it would be natural to assume that an island the size of this one should be economically and politically a single entity. Much can be said for the practical advantages to be gained by the elimination of the Border; and there is also the sentimental appeal of being Irish throughout (a sentiment which the Scotsman and the Welshman proudly maintain) had the situation been different — had being Irish not been made incompatible with being at the same time British.
This, of course, raises a question that is now much more salient: what if being Irish can be made compatible with being British? What if the divide between competing mentalities and identities has become bridgeable?
This is a very interesting intellectual experiment. Two of the best known journalistic commentators each put the case for and against a United Ireland, taking turns to write from each side. What makes this really attractive is that most writing on the subject is heavily polarised to one side or the other, so to read not just a debate between two thinkers, but a debate where each writer engages with himself as well as with the other, is a refreshing change of format. I don’t know that this will change any minds, but I do know that it has already deepened the discussion.
Unionists continue to talk only to their own core voters and not to the centre ground;
Nationalists come up with a better offer than the union, especially on health services.
I stand by that analysis; in particular, I think that the Brexit situation has been contained for now, which renders the other two points moot for the time being. I agree that the direction of travel is towards a majority vote for a united Ireland in a referendum, but I think we are further away from it than Nationalists hope and Unionists fear, and I can foresee a nervous equilibrium holding for some time – as Gerry Lynch once put it, “Welcome to the Northern Ireland that won’t vote itself out of the Union but won’t give Unionism majority support.”
Two points particularly linger with me. One, which is addressed by both writers and which I have also written about before, is that a United Ireland needs to find a solution to the massive share of the public sector in the Northern economy. Will southern voters continue to effectively subsidise Northern government employee lifestyles? Nationalists need to start coming up with an honest answer to that, and we haven’t seen it yet other than hand-waving.
The other is that advocates of a United Ireland need to be honest about the real threat of Loyalist violence in opposition to it, when the time comes (again we tend to get hand-waving on this). Sam McBride makes this point in the closing pages of the book, to my surprise quoting my father on the subject: “for civil war to break out, it is not necessary for a majority of inhabitants to desire it.” He also points to the normalisation of political violence in Trump’s America as a source of infection. I don’t see this as a fatal flaw ion the Nationalist case, but I do wish I had the sense that Nationalism has thought about it seriously. Generosity on cultural issues would be helpful here.
At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.
Discworld’s take on the cinema industry, with awful forces trying to install film-making into the Discworld. I remembered this one less favourably than some; the satire is thickly laid on and very specific to cinema culture, which I’m not as interested in as some people. But I am pretty sure that I read it before my 2017-2023 project of watching every single Oscar-winning film in order, and now that I have done that, I found myself much more able to relax into enjoying it for what it is, a bit of fun and perhaps a return to the roots of Discworld, where the first two books were more pastiche than plot. Not sure that the wizards really work though. You can get Moving Pictures here.
This is the last in the series of Eighth Doctor Adventures that I didn’t get around to writing up when I first read them in 2014-15. Most of them were in the Sabbath arc which didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but the previous volume, Halflife, and this one both seem a bit more coherent and interesting, as perhaps the impending end of the series of books was concentrating the creativity of the authors (and editors).
The Tomorrow Windows is a picaresque novel which includes an exploding Ken Livingstone, windows which give you visions of potential futures, and lots of Douglas Adams-esque planets with humorously depicted aliens. I felt it worked well; I have complained about previous books in the sequence that the character of new-ish companion Trix is underdeveloped, but here she gets a fair bit of first-person narrative and I felt I knew her much better. None of this series is Great Literature, but this one at least is satisfactory. You can get The Tomorrow Windows here.
That finished the unblogged EDA’s, but I find I still have some Who books on the shelves acquired years ago that I have not yet written up, so I’m going to go through them in more or less continuity order. First up will be Paul McAuley’s Eye of the Tyger.
(Published in the US as Thirteen at Dinner.) Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Well, mon ami,” he said. “What do you think of that?”
One of Christie’s classic mysteries, published and set in London in 1933. Clearly aimed at the American market, as the first victim’s wife is an American actress who has married English aristocracy.
A very well put together mystery, with the murderer turning out to be able to mastermind an impressive, but just about believable, set of deceptions. Poirot is especially well portrayed, though one feels sorry for Hastings who is patronised by him in every chapter.
It is however marred by casual, unpleasant and explicit anti-semitism.
My electronic edition spells ‘Edgware’ correctly in the main text and title page, but with an extra ‘e’ in page headers and chapter titles.
Another of the BBC’s Doctor Who audiobooks, read by Fraser Hines, with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria landing on a strange planet where memories and sensual perceptions are up for barter. It takes Victoria in particular to some surprising places, and the central concept is well developed; also Hines is a very good reader of the three main characters. You can get The Elysian Blade here.
The last time I saw that winter count, a girl and her little brother were holding it above them to try to keep the freezing rain off, and, because I was an enemy to them, the girl was holding her hand tight around a long knife, not because that could have worked against me, but because she was Pikuni, and Pikuni fight even when the fight’s over. That’s why your Great Father still hasn’t been able to stamp us all out like he wants, no matter how many soldiers he sends.
This won the Nebula earlier this year, and no doubt will show up on the Hugo long-list. I think that may make Jones the first Native American writer to win a Nebula. It’s a well assembled novel of a Native American vampire in Montana, as told to a Lutheran pastor in 1912, then unearthed by the pastor’s granddaughter a century later. The descriptions are visceral and convincing. I am still not wild about the horror elements and it is a little too gory for my own delicate tastes. But you can get The Buffalo Hunter Hunter here.
Three stories of the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors separately, laying the way for the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan. To be honest I didn’t find any of them particularly memorable, though the art is pleasing. You can get The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor here.
Voting in this year’s Hugos closes on 8 August! Go do it!
1) My top vote in this category goes to Sophie Burnham, author of the one novel I had not previously read, Sargassa. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
The long stretch of summer was just beginning, and already burdened by an oppressive heat that stuck heavy on his skin and clothes. His stepmother Naevia had taken to winding herself in cool strips of linen soaked in water and aloe before hiding in the tiled bathhouse with his little sister Selah, who was six at the time and still too little to be very interesting. And though she’d expressly forbidden him from going out into the sun, Naevia wasn’t his mima, and Arran had slipped away to join the other boys from his elementary in the shallows that ran along the lush private shores of Luxana’s Arborem district.
I thought this was excellent. We start off in an alternate timeline where an extension of the Roman Empire survives in North America, and we have young people involved with deadly palace politics and incipient revolution. I was really enjoying that, and then the writer puts an extra twist on the situation just after the three-quarter mark which made me enjoy it even more. The sequel was also in the Hugo packet, and I’ll read it in due course, but the first was enough for me to determine my vote for Burnham. You can get Sargassa here.
2) Antonia Hodgson, represented by her novel The Raven Scholar, which I already wrote up. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Today, Bersun was plainly dressed. An iron band for a crown, stamped with an ∞ – sacred symbol of the Eternal Path. His black tunic was slashed with five scarlet claw marks, a reversal of his bodyguards’ uniform. He wore chain mail beneath his tunic, and a longsword at his belt. Orrun was at peace, the rebellion a long-faded scar. But Bersun was a warrior to the bone. Even now, after more than two decades on the throne, he looked more natural dressed as one.
Hodgson is apparently already well known as a writer of eighteenth-century crime novels; this is her first fantasy, set in a world (or at least a country) where eight totemic elemental animals (including the titular Raven) dominate human culture, and the new king is determined in a series of Hunger Games-style trials. It’s an intricate and well constructed plot, as leading characters turn out to be completely different to who we thought they were, and indeed the game plan of the bad guys turns out to be completely different to what it looked like. I found the brutal violence a bit ick though. You can get The Raven Scholar here.
3) Kamilah Cole, represented by her novel So Let Them Burn, which I read last year. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Dinner had been served. Usually, her parents would wait for the whole family to be home before even setting the table, but not when she was here. When Aveline Renard Castell, the gods-blessed ruler of San Irie, arrived in Deadegg to visit the Vincent family, they brought out the good plates and their best manners. Which was annoying, because she was, well, the absolute worst.
Story of magically gifted teenage girl military leaders, which interestingly is a sequel to an unpublished adventure but works regardless. Lots of high politics and dragons. You can get it here.
4) Jared Pechaček, represented by his novel The West Passage, which I read last year. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Pell had always liked the refectory, with the quiet, half- conscious liking one feels for something one has known since childhood. A clerestory of tiny square windows ran along the eastern wall, letting in morning sunlight and evening breezes. Vast old tapestries covered the stone walls. Their rich colors had dimmed, many were moth- eaten, and some had fallen, but the stories and strange figures they held made her feel as if she were a creature of legend herself. Bats roosted in the south rafters, pigeons flew in and out, and ivy curled in at the windows, but even in its state of decay the refectory held some clear beauty quite separate from the ancient chaos of the rest of the palace.
A nicely worked out secondary world with some odd dynastic quirks. You can get it here.
Generation starship with all kinds of issues between bottled brains and AIs. Some cute stuff but felt it wasn’t fully under control.
6) Molly O’Neill, represented by an extract from her novel Greenteeth. Second paragraph of third chapter:
I was stiff from my sleep and wanted to get up. I coughed loudly and rustled the reeds and branches of my nest more than I usually do. I didn’t want to startle her but Temperance stayed still, her chin resting on her knees. Her face was perfectly blank and pale, devoid of any expression, even when I scuttled past her to dangle my feet in the water. I looked back at her and tried to smile without showing any of my teeth. This was difficult to manage and a few of the first row popped out. I gave up and stopped smiling.
Clunky prose, doesn’t get the intersection between modern characterization and ancient lore, too much “look what a cute idea”!
That’s it for my Hugo votes this year, at least the ones I am making public. Happy voting, all!
Non-genre 4 (YTD 27) Lord Edgware Dies, by Agatha Christie Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Xenophon’s Ephesian history: or the love-adventures of Abrocomas and Anthia, in five books, translated from the Greek by Mr. Rooke Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata
Doctor Who 6 (YTD 49) Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton The Elysian Blade, by David Bishop The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones
Comics 3 (YTD 20) Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor, by James Peaty et al The Many Lives of Doctor Who, by Richard Dinnick et al Time out of Mind, by Jody Houser et al
~7,200 pages (YTD 48,700), counting the audiobooks as 100. 9/31 (YTD 79/204) by non-male writers (Copeland, Cherry, Dent, Christie, Collins, O’Neill, Lord, Burnham, Houser) 3/31 (YTD 20/204) by writers of colour (Kawabata, Ekpeki, Lord) 4 out of 31 reread (Brideshead Revisited, Moving Pictures, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, The Tomorrow Windows) 203 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 4 from June 2025.
Reading now Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton Autumn, by Ali Smith Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian
Coming soon (perhaps)
Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley The Time of Angels, by Jenny Colgan Doctor Who: The Invasion, by Ian Marter The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher
Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker Last Exit, by Max Gladstone Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century, ed. Laura Horn
TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor Dead Lions, by Mick Herron The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton Léopoldville 60, by Baudouin Deville Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi Jingo, Terry Pratchett Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset Septology, by Jon Fosse
Second paragraph of third section (which is the third of three introductions, this one by the editor Glyn Morgan):
The book that you hold in your hands was created as a companion project to the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition that opened at the Science Museum in London in October 2022. This book is an extension of the themes and topics covered there, but stands alone as a collection of essays and images across five different topics, each exploring different aspects of the global genre of science fiction and its relationship with scientific enquiry, history and culture.
I got this book at the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition in the Science Museum in London in December 2022. I didn’t bother writing up the exhibition itself at the time – to be honest, I did not find it very exciting at all, but could not work up the energy to be mean about it.
However, this lavishly illustrated book of short essays and interviews is a good souvenir. The interviews are with Stanley Chen / Chen Qiufan, Charlie Jane Anders, Vandana Singh, Tade Thompson and Kim Stanley Robinson. The five individual sections are on machines / robots, space travel, communication and translation, aliens and millennial despair. The essay that I enjoyed most was Rachel Cordasco’s on science fiction in translation, which is not to say that any of the others were bad. The illustrations are relevant and well chosen. I think I got more enjoyment from the content of the book than from the content of the exhibition, and probably spent more time reading it than I did in the Science Museum that day three and a half years ago. Worth looking out for. You can get Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination here.
This was my shortest unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles was An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent, but I didn’t finish that and can’t be bothered to write it up; likewise the very last book I acquired in 2022 other than Doctor Who comics, Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War by Bardhyl Mahmuti.
The department secretary/courier glanced back at the envelope he had tossed onto my desk. ‘How would I know?’
I’ve only read one of Karen Lord’s books before, but was inspired to get this after meeting her at Eastercon (we were part of a big group that went out for dinner one evening, and ended up sharing a massive baked camembert between the two of us).
I really enjoyed this. It’s a very humane story of a nearly-human race whose world has been destroyed, and of the government agent whose job it is to settle refugees from the genocide onto a new planet. We end up touring the new planet which itself turns out to be pretty diverse, with different social structures and beliefs in different regions, while the two protagonists sort out their own relationship while observing the other personal dynamics in their team. The book was published in 2013, so just before the refugee crisis really hit, but was very timely for all that. Lord pulls off the trick of vivid alien planetary settings and vivid yet comprehensible almost-human characterisation.
The book came fifth in the 2014 Locus Awards but rather surprisingly didn’t get any other nominations. It was my top unread science fiction book, before the Hugo packet landed; top of that list now is The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. You can get The Best of All Possible Worlds here.
When I first started to watch The Web Planet in 2007, the DVD was unfortunately still in my laptop when it was stolen by a sneak thief at the Gare du Nord in Brussels. I got another copy eventually and wrote:
I got the DVD of The Web Planet, a First Doctor story from 1965 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, back in January; and then, after I had read Wood and Miles‘ excoriating description of it, the disc was in my laptop when it got stolen. But I caught up with this one over the weekend as well.
Oh dear.
It’s very brave to try and produce an entire six-part story with no humanoid characters other than the regular cast, and the production teeters on the edge of greatness but, ultimately, falls off and hurtles to its doom. I mean, the Zarbi, with their unearthly whistling, are actually pretty good, so good that you can nearly forget that they are blokes in giant ant costumes. And the disembodied Animus is pretty sinister. But the Venom Grubs are, frankly, pathetic. And the Menoptra, with their bizarre dance movements, and their pitiful Optera relatives, are just ludicrous. I can’t quite believe that this is the only story from the original Season Two (apart from the glorious Dalek Invasion of Earth) available on DVD. Almost any other would make more sense and be a better advertisement for Who as a whole. (I have reservations about The Chase, though it does at least have Daleks and a variety of settings, and I’ve only seen the first episode of The Space Museum so can’t speak to the whole of it, though I must say it really grabbed me.)
Maureen O’Brien is good as Vicki though, perhaps the best I remember her in any of her stories. The others are fine too, especially (as ever) Hartnell.
Coming back to it two years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
When I first watchedThe Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.
Coming back to it, I attempted to binge the whole story in an evening, and I think this was a mistake; I found myself confused and actually a little bored. Yes, the makers of the show achieved miracles on a shoestring, but it’s difficult for today’s viewer to grasp. People who saw it the first time around were generally more impressed, most notably Peter Capaldi:
…those old shows were only made to be watched once, on a flickering monochrome telly that smelled of valves and furniture polish. In that context, they succeeded immeasurably. They were triumphs of imagination. It may surprise you now, but something like The Web Planet lived powerfully and expansively in my head for decades… until the DVDs came along and spoiled the party. But I’m glad to say that the Menoptra eventually flitted back into my dreams, where they belong.
The novel, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton, the Australian writer of the original story, was the second Doctor Who novel ever published (after Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Chesterton, get back! Back!”
I (obviously) read it as a child, and was fascinated. Coming back to it in 2008, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.
The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.
To call it “the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era” is a strong statement, and to be honest I think three of the four Hartnell Dalek stories are better contenders. But as a story, it’s at the upper end and the novelisation pulls that out. You can get Doctor Who and the Zarbi here.
The illustrations in the book are really striking.
They are credited to one John Wood, which is also the name of the BBC designer who worked on the TV story. Fannish lore, however, insists that these are two different people, and further that the illustrator John Wood is a mistake for John Woods, one of the illustrators who also worked on the three 1960s Dalek books (The Dalek Book, The Dalek World and The Dalek Outer Space Book). Unfortunately the three or four different artists who worked on the Dalek books are not credited individually, so it is difficult to compare.
I am not convinced by fannish lore. I think Occam’s Razor shaves closer to the possibility that the same artist designed the TV show and illustrated the book. Also, the Vicki in the illustrations is a brunette, whereas Maureen O’Brien at that age was blonde. Surely this indicates that the illustrations could have been based on the original production design, which might have dated from before Maureen O’Brien’s start on the show? The Web Planet was only her third story, and its first episode was her seventh. Also, if John Wood’s name was spelled incorrectly when the book was first published, surely he would have had a chance to correct it before a different publisher brought it out again ten years later?
Anyway. Brigid Cherry, a retired media studies academic who like Peter Capaldi is old enough to have seen the story when it was first broadcast in 1965, has written a redemptive Black Archive monograph on it. I must say that while my favourite Black Archives are those that tell me all the reasons why my favourite stories are so fantastic, I do also like the ones like this where the writer challenges my less positive views and finds reasons that I had not considered to appreciate a story. There are only three chapters, but they are long and it is a chunky read.
A substantial introduction, with the title “So the Legends Say: Receptions of The Web Planet“, looks at views of The Web Planet, contrasting the rather harsh take of modern fans such as me with the much more positive memories of those who saw it at the time, including the author herself, Stephen James Walker and contributors to an online forum. She doesn’t quote Peter Capaldi here, but his comments are fully aligned with her argument.
I’m going to lazily use the author’s summaries of her own chapters. “Chapter one [whose title is “Every Corner of Vortis: Televisuality”] explores the aesthetics of the story in relation to how television was made at the time, and the ways in which the mise-en-scène, art design, camerawork and other stylistic elements were determined by these production processes. In terms of The Web Planet being considered an ambitious, if not over-ambitious, experiment, this chapter also frames early Doctor Who, and this story specifically, as an example of the experimental television being produced at the time.”
“Chapter two [whose title is: “Flying Above thought: Performance”] extends this approach by further considering the performativity of the story, considering it in relation to art or media forms such as puppetry, mime, and avant-garde theatre. These two chapters are necessarily historiography (writing about the past) not in order to definitively answer the question of whether The Web Planet is great children’s TV or a failed experiment – it might be both, of course. Rather, it is an analysis intended to re-examine it from the perspective of TV production history and the history of the wider arts and popular culture of the time. Such historiography… can be both an account of industrial circumstances (in this instance, aspects of production and performance at the BBC in the 1960s) and a social history where the text reflects the national (or global) zeitgeist.”
The second paragraph of the third and final chapter (whose title is: “The Light is Good: Themes”) is:
There are several technological forms contrasted in The Web Planet: the organic technology of the Carsinome; the inorganic crystalline technology used by the Menoptra (the prime example of which is the communication device that Vrestin uses to contact the invasion force in ‘The Zarbi’); the metallic gold collars (again inorganic) used by the Zarbi to ‘morphotise’ victims; and the mysterious energy that powers the TARDIS itself and is shown to repel the Animus and Zarbi (potentially both organic and inorganic since the Doctor’s ship often seems ‘alive’). These various forms of technology are indicative of technological, and thus cultural, development in each of the character groupings in the narrative.
The author’s summary is: “chapter 3 turns to the textual meanings that underpin the story, revealing the ideological meanings and discourses in relation to the 1960s zeitgeist. This also draws on yet another element of historiography discussed by Hilmes, that is consideration of the conditions under which the popular culture text is consumed or experienced.”
The short conclusion, “The Silence of Time: Reappraising The Web Planet”, sums up what has been said, and ends:
Bear in mind that when the Doctor stops Ian from plunging his hand into the acid pool in the opening episode, the lesson to be learnt is to be more cautious before rushing in and take more time to better understand what we are seeing. It is past time to re-appraise The Web Planetin contexts other than an established fan canon born of naiveté or ignorance of television history. It is, then, time to come back to Vortis. As this book has argued, The Web Planet’s innovative approaches demand it is given its deserved status in the canon of British experimental television.
As I hope is clear by now, I found this an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and maybe the next time I pop the DVD in the player I’ll approach the story in a more redemptive frame of mind. You can get the Black Archive here.
Andrew Hilton is more than ninety years old and hasn’t stood at his full height in ten. He was a tower of a man in his prime, two metres tall and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not and tell him ‘No.’ Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, with everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He’s spent his final months crumpled up in bed like a dying spider, changing to a corpse’s colour ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he’d lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be: a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people.
One of the hotly tipped books this year, a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, this is a great story combining the vibes of A Scanner Darkly and H.P. Lovecraft, and perhaps a nod to the Silents of Matt Smith era Doctor Who, and Charlie Stross’s Laundry. The Antimemetics Division deals with entities which are invading us, taking our memories, our consciousness, our loves and emotions. and leaving nothing. People who have worked at the Division for years turn up and think it is their first day. The protagonist loses all knowledge of her husband. The sense of alienation and loss of trust in reality is tremendously conveyed. You do slightly wonder how the Antimemetics Division itself could withstand the tests of time, given the powerful nature of the opposition. But I enjoyed the ride a lot. You can get There is No Antimemetics Division here.
Gerry decided to test at 23andMe, too. She was curious about her own results, and besides, if she matched Alice, that would eliminate some possibilities that Alice needed to consider—that Alice had been adopted or that Jim Collins wasn’t, biologically speaking, Alice’s father. These were contenders for an explanation, even if Gerry told Alice she was insane when Alice suggested their mother could have had an affair.
My attentive reader will have noticed that I have become very fascinated by the addition of DNA analysis to the suite of tools available to the genealogy researcher. I have been fortunate; all of my own direct ancestors appear to be genetically who we thought they were, at least back to the early nineteenth century; and while I have identified a couple of absentee parents for other people, only one of them was still alive (and his daughter decided not to try contacting him).
Libby Copeland takes us to stories of people who found much closer and less pleasant surprises in their DNA, and asks what this means for the American concept of families? And it is a much more American than European thing; I find more relatives on the DNA sites connected to my American grandmother than to my three Irish grandparents combined. There are lines around consent and confidentiality that modern technology is redrawing. The privacy of a brief relationship decades ago is up-ended by the genetic information encoded in the body of the child of that relationship, who has a right to know where they come from too.
If you haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of DNA testing, but are considering it, this is an essential read to think through what you might find out. If you have, you’ll find yourself alternating between nods of recognition and jaw-dropping astonishment. I am lost in admiration of CeCe Moore, who has turned the combination of DNA analysis and genealogical research into a new branch of science. My own dabbling has been fascinating but without any huge shocks. Not everyone is so lucky.
I will never see Lenore Dove again. Never hear her laugh coming from high above me in the branches. Never feel the warmth of her in my arms as we lay on a bed of pine needles, my lips pressed into the hollow of her neck. Never pull a stray goose feather from her hair, or listen to her play her tune box, or press my finger into the crease that forms between her eyebrows when she’s puzzling out a thought. Never see her face brighten at a bag of gumdrops or a full moon or the sound of me whispering, “I love you like all-fire.”
I have been wondering about this book since grinding through the statistics for the YA finalists in the BSFA, Nebula/Andre Norton and now the Hugo/Lodestar, given that it is so far ahead of the field in terms of ownership on all of the platforms. Apparently it was the best-selling book in the USA last year. I wasn’t a massive fan of the Hunger Games trilogy though I could see how it developed a cult following. It took me a while to remember how this story, which is about the past Hunger Games victory of Haymitch Abernathy of District 12, fits into the narrative 24 years before the original novel is set.
Reader, I hugely enjoyed it. Even though we know from the very beginning that everyone else is going to die horribly, the story pushes on with tremendous energy and momentum, and a strong empathy for the children who are being slaughtered by each other in the ritual killing. I guess it’s notable that the technology of Panem doesn’t change much in the 24 years between the two stories, but then again, it’s a repressive place where innovation serves only the interests of state surveillance. I found it an easy, exciting read and I was actually able to remember the plot afterwards. You can get Sunrise on the Reaping here.
With that, it’s time to decide my votes for this year’s Lodestar Award. I think I will go as follows:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Among Ghosts, by Rachel Hartman
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee
Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen
They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran
Oathbound, by Tracy Deonn
I will write up one more category here, the Astounding Award, before the voting deadline.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Kosovo and Bosnia: Different Products of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration” by Jusuf Fuduli):
These include the ethnicities of the people involved, their proportion of the total population, the status of these entities as federal units in the former Yugoslavia, and the relations between the inhabitants before open conflict erupted. In terms of political definitions, the most pronounced differences between Bosnia and Kosovo are the political statuses afforded to each. While both Bosnia and Kosovo are subject to international oversight and the presence of an international peacekeeping force, the fact is that Bosnia requires an international mission to preserve its status as an independent state. This political status originates in its current form from the peace agreement known as the Dayton Accords signed in 1995 by the interested parties in the Bosnian conflict. Essentially, the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia will be required until the cement mixed at Dayton dries. Kosovo, unlike Bosnia, is not an example of a military solution being implemented to augment a political one. In Kosovo, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which provides the mandate for the international mission recognizes it as an interim solution until a final political settlement is achieved. This is the fundamental difference—Bosnia has a political solution defining its status and thereby guaranteeing the independence declared in 1992 that led to war, while Kosovo is still waiting for a settlement to answer its people’s own conflict ridden drive toward independence.
This is a massive 700-page book of essays on Kosovo from the American military point of view, pulled together by Wentz on behalf of the Pentagon’s Command and Control Research Program (reading between the lines, a Lessons Learned unit) back in 2002, which is a long time ago in Kosovo politics. It’s a real grab-bag of pieces, some from very senior writers, some from analysts who were clearly a bit shaky on the substance; Wentz himself contributes over a third of the book, in the form of a grunt’s-eye view of managing civil-military relations in an occupied but largely friendly territory, which is actually rather charming.
It could have been edited better – for instance, there are two consecutive chapters about NATO communications during the 1999 conflict, one of which persistently spells Jamie Shea’s name wrong, and the other actually by Shea himself, spelt correctly. I felt that there were possibly two different books in here, one on high strategy and one on the nuts and bolts of a medium-term military presence. But even so, there was the occasional moment when I nodded to myself and though, “Oh, so that’s why…”
In particular, it was pleasing to see the later chapters stressing the importance of relationships with civil society and international NGOs, and the various means by which these can be established, improved and maintained. The provision of maps to other international actors is a real boon, and saves lives. Information also needs to flow smoothly to where it is needed (the account of various secure comms systems and the different people allowed to use each one became almost funny in its complexity). So I hope that military planners, not only in the US, get a chance to read this book and learn from it.
(Title translates to “These lines that trace my body”.)
Third page:
…making up a symphony to whose rhythm the trees’ branches dance to. It’s so calming…
This has been a big hit in Francophone comics land this year, and has so far been translated into Dutch and Portuguese; English must surely follow. It’s the autobiographical story of Mansoureh Kamari, who was born in Iran, moved to France in 2011 and graduated from the Gobelins school of art in 2015, and is one of the up and coming screen animators in the French film scene.
Here she tells the story of her childhood in the brutal misogynist repression of the Islamic Republic, of continual sexual harassment, of relatives who were simply executed for their behaviour, of a society where women are under constant pressure. But she frames this in reminiscences from her sideline as a nude model who has agreed to participate in a video documentary; so we have Mansoureh, naked and comfortable in her body at last, reflecting on her upbringing. The nude scenes are intimate but not heavily erotic; the point isn’t to titillate, it’s to express her freedom.
The book is more polemical than the late great Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (vol 1, vol 2), but I guess the situation for women in Iran has got much worse since Satrapi first wrote about it from exile – Kamari would still have been a child then. But it’s not just about grim oppression; it’s telling a story of personal liberation, and ends with some joy. You can get Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps here.
Adelaide, symmetrical as ever, dressed in her simple, perfect pastels, sat down in the chair opposite Janet, pushed a tin of biscuits across the table and smiled. ‘Would you like a biscuit? I’ve got these delightful, simply delightful ginger creams from a local baker. I do like to support local small businesses, don’t you? And I do so like that blouse you’re wearing. So many colours! So daring! You must tell me where you got it from.’ Adelaide adjusted her Alice band. ‘Oh, and, now before I forget, how long have you been having an affair with my husband?’
Another good novelisation of an early New Who story – I doubt that we will ever get the full sequence in novel form, but I appreciate what we have. Lidster has taken the sequence of events in the script and given us a book whose two halves correspond to the two episodes; but he has added a lot of background on the various characters, including the skeevy Oliver Charles (married to Adelaide and flinging with Janet) and also Toshiko Sato, who appears in the very first scene filmed for New Who, in the lab with the dead alien pig. Solid, enjoyable and convincing. You can get Aliens of London here.
The rambling sprawl mostly fell into three distinct pieces, moving from southeast to northwest along the side of the bay. At the southeast end was New Town, built by and for the many Iyalets of the Empire, for there they refined and shipped out countless priceless precursors and reagents through the canals. Northwest of that was Old Town, the original home of the Yarrow kings and their folk, though they had left that place long ago. And finally there was the High City, built in the ranges far northwest of that, where the current Yarrow king resided with all of his royal retinue, removed from the bustle of industry that now consumed the land of his ancestors.
I greatly enjoyed The Tainted Cup, the first of this fantasy thriller series, and I greatly enjoyed this as well. Our hero Din and his super abrasive boss Ana are sent to a distant fiefdom which is not yet part of the true empire, and find that deceit and treachery, not to mention magical chemistry on an industrial scale, are all around them. There are some brilliant twists, and it’s all done entirely fairly. You can get A Drop of Corruption here.
That all said, the Hugo deadline is coming up and this is my ranking of the books.
Nelly Sachs was the joint winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, along with the Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Born in Berlin in 1891, she had fled to Sweden in 1840, thanks to the intervention of Selma Lagerlöf just before her death. She made a living in Sweden as a translator to and from German, and started publishing poetry only in 1947.
I got hold of the collection, O, the Chimneys, published in 1967, the year after the Nobel Prize, with the German originals and English translations of varying quality – apart from her verse play, Eli, which is presented entirely in English. I have to say that I was blown away. Her poetry is an unrelenting emotional reaction to the Holocaust – the chimneys of the book’s title are the chimneys of the crematoria of genocide. She cycles between grief, despair, bewilderment, survivor’s guilt, but surprisingly little anger (though it is not completely absent). The play Eli ends with divine revenge, but we know that doesn’t happen in real life. It was an extraordinary reading experience.
Second poem of third section (title is the first line):
Einen Akkord spielen Ebbe und Flut, Jäger und Gejagtes. Mit vielen Händen wird Greifen und Befestigung versucht, Blut ist der Faden.
Finger weisen Aufstellungen, Körperteile werden eingesetzt in sterbende Zeichnungen.
Strategie, Geruch des Leidens –
Glieder auf dem Wege zum Staub und die Gischt der Sehnsucht über den Wassern.
My translation:
Ebb and flow play a single chord, hunter and hunted. Many hands fumble to grasp and seize, blood is the thread.
Fingers point to alignments, body parts are positioned in dying drawings.
Strategy, the smell of suffering –
limbs on their way to dust and the froth of desire on the waters.
I’m going to justify some of my choices here. The original doesn’t have the word “single” in the first line, but I think it’s necessary in translation to catch the emphasis on the object of the sentence, “Einen Akkord”. My “fumble” is a little stronger than “wird versucht”, but “try” and “attempt” sounded clumsy. I felt that “Aufstellungen” and “eingesetzt” are linked, so went for “alignments” and “positioned” rather than the more obvious translations. “Geruch” could have been “stench” or “scent”, but I felt “smell” was neutral enough. My “froth of desire” may be a bit spicier than “die Gischt der Sehnsucht” but I wanted to catch the corporeality. All that said, I am not a professional translator and my German is not what it once was.
This was an unexpectedly impressive discovery in my sequence of Nobel winners who were not white men. Next up is Yasunari Kawabata and his novel Snow Country.
Imperatrix Alinti watched critically, as a bevy of butlers and servants swarmed across the Grand Hall, their arms laden with bolts of silver and gold fabric, banners and poles. She’d grown tired of arguing with her husband about the archaic way in which he’d insisted on decorating the Palace for his birthday celebrations, and had grumpily agreed to ‘maintain a sense of tradition’ about the whole affair.
After a run of Eighth Doctor books that left me rather cold, I’m very glad to say that I came across one that I liked. This actually takes the Doctor’s amnesia and does something interesting with it, including a partial mingling of personalities with Fitz which is quite entertaining; it also does something interesting at last with Trix, who I have hitherto felt was a rather undersketched character; and plonks this into the context of a decaying emperor’s last days, and the palace politics around the succession and the divvying up of resources. One of the best Eighth Doctor books I have read in a while. You can get Halflife here (for a price).
Next in this sequence – actually last in my set of unblogged Eighth Doctor Adventures – is The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris.
My eyes bounce around the terrain, seeking a hiding place, while my mind debates whether I can hide at all.
I completely bounced off both the first volume and the second volume of this series, and not surprisingly bounced off the third as well. Arthurian legend in today’s North Caroline, breathless first-person-present narrative. You can get Oathbound here.
As I stood in the crumbling parking lot, the hot concrete warming the metal of my feet, I was sure of it: the Earth had great things ahead of it, even still.
I haven’t always go on with Okorafor’s writing, but I really enjoyed this: disabled Nigerian-American writer Zelu goes through tough times but also writes a science fiction novel which becomes a runaway success, despite her helicoptering family. There’s lots here about clashes of cultures, clashes of values, shifting the narrative arc from our world (in the very near future) to Zelu’s world; and love and sex and death. I felt that it all hung together very neatly. I suspect that I’m still voting for The Incandescent, but this will be high up my list. You can get Death of the Author here.
We’re back at the harbor on Wild Things. Tomorrow, Knife Girl will meet us here to refuel the boat. Mom and I don’t have a plan yet. We haven’t spoken much at all, our energies depleted from the wild-ass turn of events. Mom lights incense for Sông, each smoky tendril a prayer. Cleaning Bà Oanh’s glasses, I remember the smile I thought I saw. Perhaps she’d foreseen what was coming and could not stop herself from mocking us, though she’d never been unkind. It’s a bad habit of mine, finding the worst in every situation, but no one has taught me to hope.
It’s about Nhung / Noon, a young Vietnamese-American in Louisiana, whose father and brother have died in mysterious circumstances, and who is compelled by the local thug to go find the sea monster which may be behind the ‘orrible red algae bloom on the water. Lushly written, but a bit too much body horror for my sensitive soul (and yes, I realise that is part of the point). You can get They Bloom at Night here.
I wrote this piece two weeks ago, on Sunday 28 June, and later learned to my deep sorrow and dismay that Justin Richards, probably the most prolific Doctor Who writer of all time, had died that very day, aged 64. I never met him or corresponded with him, but his writing was usually reliable and sometimes brilliant. I am sure that I still have some of his work to write up here, but, sadly, no more will be produced.
After opening with The Thing from the Sea, the BBC audiobooks range commissioned three stories from Justin Richards to commemorate the end of the First World War. This is a tricky subject for Who, though not as tricky as Irish history or Hitler’s Germany, especially since (SPOILER) the villain is a well-enough intentioned chap who just wants to stop the killing from happening by the means of time travel.
The first story, Men of War, has Peter Purves telling a story of the First Doctor, Steven Taylor and Sara Kingdom materialising in 1916 to find that the Battle of the Somme has not started on schedule and that Time is trying to reclaim those who should have died. It’s bleak and creepy. Purves tells the story not as Steven but as a British officer trying to make sense of the madness around him. You can get Men of War here.
Horrors of War had come to my notice before as one of the couple of dozen Who stories set in Belgium. This time it’s Katy Manning telling the story of the Third Doctor and Jo Grant arriving at a field hospital near Ypres, where they meet Annie Grantham (who is the narrating character, so as with Peter Purves, Katy Manning does her own Who persona in the third person). This was of particular interest to me because they all go back to Sarajevo to observe the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, which has gone askew in this timeline. I twitched a bit at some of the details which don’t match the Bosnian geography, but I can’t blame Richards for doing less research on Sarajevo than I have (see here and here). Apart from that, I appreciated what Richards was doing. You can get Horrors of War here.
Fortunes of War concludes the trilogy by bringing the Sixth Doctor together with the captain from the first story and the nurse from the second, Colin Baker narrating it in character. They end up investigating the origin of the mystery in a remote forest in northwestern Germany (oddly enough, I too was in a remote forest in northwestern Germany shortly after listening to this) and trying to close the wobbling time loops. I found it very satisfactory. You can get Fortunes of War here.
As I said up front, this is a difficult subject for Who to tackle, but I think it was done well by Richards and the performers, with some great soundscaping as well. Recommended, even now that we are some years past the anniversary.
I was a big fan of Hartman’s previous YA books, and I liked this one a lot too, set in the same universe but about a hundred years earlier. The 13-year-old outsider protagonist starts by seeing two of his bullies horribly killed by magical forces, and then finds his village entangled with ghosts, a plague, a dragon and an enigmatic nun. There is a lot here, and Hartman keeps it all under control, while hinting at the broader issues and currents of her world. My favourite so far in this category. You can get Among Ghosts here.
Having discovered the BBC Original Audiobook line, and started in the middle and worked to the end, I’ve gone back to the beginning for this story set in the Nest Cottage continuity, where Susan Jameson plays the Fourth Doctor’s housekeeper, Mrs Wibbsey, some time around the 2010s. This is the story of their whisking off to the Italian coast in the 18th century, where villagers are being mean to the local non-humans, and Count Cagliostro and the local magnate are also entangled. It’s solid enough, and quite fun, though I sometimes feel that Paul Magrs camps it up a bit too much, and his / Jameson’s portrayal of the Fourth Doctor isn’t really the chap we saw on television. You can get The Thing From the Sea here.
