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My BSFA votes, part 2: the longer stuff

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I did not get very far with the longer categories in the month between the shortlist announcement on 1 March and tonight’s close of voting. I confess that I was guided by the principle of value for money – the better the ratio of pages to dollars (I get my ebooks from Amazon.com), the more likely I was to read it. The consequence was that I did not read anything like the full ballot in any of these categories.

I list them below in the order of the categories on the ballot paper, which is not the order in the voter booklet (for which many thanks).

I covered Best Audio Fiction and Best Artwork yesterday.

Best Collection

My top vote goes to Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha, a great imaginative collection of twelve mostly fantasy stories about uncertainty and weirdness. The title piece, which ends the book, is the most memorable, with the protagonist carrying around his father’s zombified skull in his backpack for occasional strategic consultations. The second paragraph of the third story (“The Mub”) is:

Somewhere between the black slopes and the longest stretch of the cratered plains, I came across a traveler who I thought might be leaving the city and headed for the nested forests. I greeted him from a distance, just as the road curved around a copse of crooked and dry-skinned pines, but he would not look at me. It was only when we came close to one another that he muttered, “Don’t,” as though throwing the word heavily at my feet, then kept on his way without offering anything else. I’d thought it unkind and almost said something in response.

You can get Uncertain Sons here.

I also really enjoyed Who Will You Save?, the collection of short stories by Gareth Powell. I enjoyed it more than I expected frankly – 400 pages is quite a lot for a short fiction collection, and many of the stories tie into his other writing, not all of which I am familiar with. But there is a pleasing rejection of formula, or at the vey least some new twists on old stories. Some themes come up several times (teenage love; Bristol) but

The second paragraph of the third story (“Waiting for God Knows”) is:

“It’s an outrage,” Fenrir grumbled over our common channel.

You can get Who Will You Save? here.

Blood in the Bricks, edited by Neil Williamson, is an anthology of short stories with urban settings heading towards the horror end of the spectrum. The second paragraph of the third story (“Hagstone”, by Tracy Fahey) is:

The yelling is louder. I sigh, fold over the page of the sports section, and get to my feet, grunting out a whoosh of air as I do. Outside, the stark new shapes of industrial units tower over me. The digger is in front of the old half-demolished factory; a rotten tooth in the slick industrial estate. A boy jumps off the digger and runs towards me. Even though the sun beats steadily down, I shiver suddenly; a quick spasm. Goose walking over my grave.

Some of these were very good, including “Hagstone”. But some editorial pruning could have made for a leaner healthier collection; there were too many stories where the protagonist ends up as a human sacrifice to the city’s demons, like The Wicker Man except indoors. You can get Blood in the Bricks here.

I’m afraid that I didn’t get around to the other three nominees, so I will look silly if one of them wins. They are:

  • The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. Andre M. Carrington
  • Black Friday, by Cheryl S. Nutty
  • Creative Futures: Beyond and Within, ed. Allen Stroud

(Update: the winner was Blood in the Bricks.)

Best Non-Fiction (Long)

To my surprise, I find that I am voting for Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is long, like most of them:

Two decades later English jurist Henry Sumner Maine, deeply influenced by Carlyle’s writing, published Ancient Law; Its Connection to the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861). His thesis is that society had shifted from human identity and being-in-the-world as defined by one’s status – one’s place in the social hierarchy, the great chain of being – to our social being and interactions as governed by contracts. In some ways, since contracts (unlike status) can be engaged voluntarily, Sumner sees this as an improvement. But there are losses too, and those losses are what Past and Present is about. Carlyle argues less like a lawyer and more like an artist, and he is certain that what has been lost is reverence, something no contract can bestow: ‘at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing’. The contrast Carlyle draws between industrialized irreverential contemporaneity and the vivid life of his imagined medieval world establishes precisely the contrast that the Tolkienian and Lewisian mode of fantasy would later valorize:

Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.¹

¹Carlyle, Past and Present, 2:1.

This was a really fun and informative read, taking the history of fantasy writing from the very beginning to almost the present day. I am very familiar with the historical structure of the genre, but it was very helpful to see it laid out in such a structured way. Roberts is effusive but also analytical of the writers he admires; he takes no prisoners with the others – on Robert Jordan, for instance:

Manifestly the stylistic inadequacies of these books, their vastness, derivate repetitiveness, do not discourage millions of fans from imaginatively playing in the imaginative theme parks they represent: a wish-fulfilment world more colourful than our own, furnishing an idealized nostalgic past that does not deprive us of present-day bourgeois creature-comforts, parlayed through honest-to-goodness melodramatic emotional intensity.

Often I found myself starting his coverage of one of the series or authors that I have not read thinking “Oh, must try that sometime” and then at the end of Roberts’ analysis thinking “Mmm, maybe not”. There are some annoying typos, and there is almost no coverage of recent writers in languages other than English, but even so I got much more from Fantasy: A Short History than I expected, and it can have my vote in return. You can get it here.

I also really enjoyed Colourfields by Paul Kincaid. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

It is clear that this volume [The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint] is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.

I stand by what I wrote when I read it a few months ago:

A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves

While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.

It’s a classic collection of pieces by one of our great critics, and deserves to be celebrated.

The only other book that I got hold of in this category was That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

During this period, witchcraft in the popular imaginary was a fractured signifier. It suggested both sexual empowerment and sexual enslavement; collectivist naturalism and individualistic consumerism; science and superstition; intellectual control and hedonistic abandon. But how could this character come to be a feminist icon, a misogynist boogeyman, a harbinger of religious decline, a sex symbol, a trend, and a joke all at once? Using a number of films from a wide range of different contexts (from studio blockbusters to auteurist art films to pornography to exploitation movies), Part I will trace the history of the countercultural witch film cycle, looking at this figure across her various contexts to suggest that in a decade haunted by questions of belief—in alternative communities and more equitable futures on the one hand and conservative religious and patriotic ideals on the other—the witchʼs evolution as a symbol of mysterious and arcane power reflects these shifting landscapes, particularly in the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. As Jon Lewis put it in his book, Road Trip to Nowhere,

[t]oday the movies from the counterculture era that continue to matter were in their day aberrations, movies that got made despite industry policy, movies made elsewhere (overseas, in the B-industry, by independent contractors working on some half-baked deal with a studio)—movies nobody with money and clout at the time gave half a chance at success.³

³ Lewis, 2022, 3.

I’m afraid I did not get very far; I am just not personally very interested in witch films, and while the author promises to make the connection with wider issues of society and gender, it depended too much on the bits I didn’t care so much about. I am sure that it is a perfectly fine read for those who care more about witch films than I do. You can get That Very Witch here.

The voter booklet (for which, again, many thanks) includes extracts from the other three finalists, enough to make me feel confident in ranking them as follows:

  1. Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
  2. Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
  3. Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre, ed. Joy Sanchez-Taylor
  4. Writing the Magic, eds. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
  5. That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas
  6. Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914, by Kate Holterhoff

In my earlier write-up of the shortlists, I noted that the last of these was owned by precisely zero users of Goodreads, LibraryThing or StoryGraph, and is also by some way the most expensive shortlisted book in any category. The extract provided for BSFA voters shows only the most slender of links to science fiction or fantasy literature, and I really wonder why anyone would have nominated it for a BSFA Award, let alone enough voters to get it on the shortlist.

(Update: the winner was Colourfields.)

Best Novel

My sole vote goes to When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift. the second paragraph of the third chapter (a long ‘un) is:

After the lockdowns, my parents started using my grandparents for free childcare whenever they could get away with it, and I spent a lot more weekends at the house in Herne Hill. This arrangement suited everyone very well with the exception of Gran, who clearly recognized she was being taken for a ride but felt unable to voice her dissent. Grandad and I remained great pals. I could talk to him about anything, and as I got older I talked more and more, and he’d sit and listen. Truly he had the patience of a saint, for he’d smile and ask questions back, and if I finally ran out of things to say, he would think for a while and then dig out some obscure and fascinating fact, like how the sewers worked. As if I were a jay and he were giving me acorns to stash away. My brain has always been a buzzy place, sometimes an overwhelming place. When I was with Grandad, the buzz quietened. He understood that I needed to get things out, or my thoughts might become too much. When I think of Grandad now, I remember his face, and his gentle voice, but mostly it’s the feeling that’s stayed with me. The feeling of being safe.

This is a great novel about the coming ecological catastrophe and the resilience of society in Britain (though we assume that similar stuff is happening elsewhere), told intimately through the story of two women who barely know each other, with the effect of climate change on them and their families delicately portrayed. There is despair, but there is also hope. I feel it really catches the Zeitgeist, and it gets my vote. You can get When There Are Wolves Again here.

(Update: the winner was indeed When There Are Wolves Again.)

The only other book on the shortlist that I have read is A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

I have always found reassurance in repetition, an aid to thought. Old photographs of Aberdeen docks show a diverse, rambunctious ecosystem teeming with life, a maze of lumber yards and cattle sheds, warehouses and sawmills, a complex, symbiotic machinery geared towards the transport of timber and textiles and livestock, including people. The docks are still busy. Ferries leave for Orkney and Shetland throughout the day. Container ships call at Aberdeen regularly to unload their cargoes. Service vessels bound for the rigs are still based here in the harbour. And the old names are everywhere: Hall, Hood, Duthie and Russell, the great shipbuilding dynasties of Aberdeen’s past embedded in its present, in its street names and parks, carved permanently into the granite from which the town was raised.

It’s an fascinating and well-written book, about the murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934; Nina Allan takes us in and out of the investigation and weaves different facets of herself into the story, including several breaking-the-fourth-wall moments. I’m giving it five stars on the various book sites.

But I’m not voting for it here, because I don’t think that it qualifies as science fiction or fantasy, and I think that the BSFA Awards should celebrate works of science fiction and fantasy. I know that yesterday I admitted that I am voting for a short story which is about fans of fantasy literature, rather than actually being fantastical itself; but A Granite Silence isn’t even addressing sf or fantasy, it’s a novel about a real life crime with no sfnal subject matter. Congratulations to the author on writing an excellent book, but it does not belong on this shortlist and isn’t getting my vote. Still, you can get A Granite Silence here, and probably should.

For various different reasons I did not read the other three finalists. They are:

  • Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
  • The Salt Oracle, by Lorraine Wilson
  • Edge of Oblivion, by Kirk Weddell

I covered Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction (Short), Best Shorter Fiction and Best Translated Short Fiction yesterday.

Best Fiction for Younger Readers

This was an easy choice. James Goss’s adaptation of the Lux episode of Doctor Who (which you can get here) was the best of the Who novelisations published last year. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.

Not that anyone cares other than me, but James Goss has consistently been one of the best Doctor Who prose writers for years, and has never won an award as far as I know.

I also liked Una McCormack’s novelisation of The Robot Revolution (which you can get here) much more than the TV story on which it was based, and it gets my second preference out of two. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.

I did not read any of the other three shortlisted books in this category. They are:

  • Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
  • Secrets of the First School, by T. L. Huchu
  • The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel, by Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson

I did consider reading Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, which is far ahead of all the other shortlisted books in any category in terms of public recognition, but it’s 400 more pages and I suspected that there was other stuff on the ballot in other categories that I would enjoy more.

(Update: the winner was Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution.)

Counterstrike, by Una McCormack

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Another of the BBC Original audio Doctor Who stories which I have been getting into, one that I particularly selected because I like Una McCormack, both as a person and as a writer, and Clare Corbett has delivered some of the best audio readings that I have heard.

I wasn’t disappointed. This is set in the middle of the recent Fifteen / Belinda series, with the two landing on a planet where two robot bases appear to be at war with each other; meanwhile the bases’ distant human commanders try to work out what is going on before it is two late. At heart it’s a classic story of computers-don’t-argue, but the Doctor and Belinda are captured very nicely by both author and reader, and it’s good to have a bit more time with this sadly short-lived pairing. You can get Counterstrike here.

Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution, by Una McCormack

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.

When I watched the TV episode earlier this year, I wrote:

Something didn’t quite gel for me with the first episode, The Robot Revolution. Partly that the plotline wasn’t all that original, but somehow it felt like actors on a set in a way that even early 60s Who didn’t. I was watching it on a cramped screen in a B&B with ants in the floorcracks, so it may not have been the best circumstances, but it really felt like spectacle was being prioritised, and it was one of the weirder introductions for a new companion even by New Who standards.

I am glad to report that I liked Una McCormack’s novelization much more than the TV story; we get a lot more of Belinda’s background and a lot more of poor Sasha 55, and a very good sense of the world of Missbelindachandra as a more-or-less functioning society. It really rounds off the corners of what felt like a slightly hasty TV production. Well worth adding to the shelves. You can get Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution here.

The First Doctor Chronicles vol 2

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A mixed bag of Companion Chronicle style stories here, though with a strong finish. Released in 2017.

It may just have been the mood I was in when listening to it (generally out of sorts and distracted) but John Pritchard’s “Fields of Terror” failed to click for me. As drama, it is purely Maureen O’Brien wandering the Vendée in the company of a French revolutionary officer played by Robert Hands. I didn’t get into it and the plot didn’t seem to resolve.

The other three are a different matter. “Across the Darkened City” by David Bartlett is a two-hander between Peter Purves as Steven and Nick Briggs as a renegade Dalek. It’s an Enemy Mine situation, with several wrinkles and an unpleasant but shapeless alien menace. It brought me back into the sequence.

And then the third story, “The Bonfires of the Vanities”, with Anneke Wills as Polly and Elliot Chapman as Ben, made me sit up sharply. The TARDIS lands in Lewes on Bonfire Night some time in the 1950s, but it seems that there are dark human forces afoot in the town and dark alien forces out to disrupt the Doctor’s timeline. This was the best of the four for me. I let out a gasp of surprise in the commentary when I discovered that it is by my good friend Una McCormack.

Finally, the same cast are in “The Plague of Dreams”, by Guy Adams, a pre-regeneration story for the First Doctor which invokes Shakespeare in unexpected ways and also brings in a new and unexpected renegade Time Lord, tying in loosely but effectively with the previous story. I felt the second half of this box set generally worked very nicely as a unit.

You can get it here.

Caged, by Una McCormack

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

She’d been trekking for days across the grassy plains that lay beyond the valley and the river and the settlements, but at last the ground was beginning to climb. She was sure she would find answers here.

A rather lovely Fifteenth Doctor novel, with two different sets of cute aliens in potential conflict with each other, and the Doctor and Ruby sorting out the conflict. You won’t get the same level of characterisation here as in Ruby Red, but it’s a good sfnal concept, executed in a very Whovian way. You can get it here.

The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack (and Ian Briggs)

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When I first watched The Curse of Fenric in 2007, I wrote:

The Curse of Fenric had been strongly recommended to me, and I adopted the suggestion that I watch the extended director’s cut version on the DVD rather than the show as originally broadcast (in keeping with the non-sequential traditions of the show, this was actually the last story of the four that I watched, during a three-hour stopover in Ankara airport last Friday).

Well, it is indeed a good story – most memorably, Nicholas Parsons, of all people, playing it straight as the doomed vicar Mr Wainwright; a setting in the second world war that actually looks a bit like it might be the 1940s; vampire villains which now seem an eerie foreshadowing of Buffy; secret codes and ancient evils, and the crucial importance of faith. Indeed, of the four last stories, it is the one which most resembles classic Who at its best.

I was not utterly convinced by the plot; I never like stories which crucially depend on some unbroadcast and untold past adventure of the Doctor’s. And although I did like Tomek Bork’s portrayal of Sorin, I was not totally convinced by the behaviour of the Russian soldiers (and to a lesser extent of the British) – as soldiers, that is. However, in general, this was a good ’un.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

I watched the original version of The Curse of Fenric this time rather than the director’s cut, and noticed only one significant difference – we cannot hear what the Doctor is saying when he makes his profession of faith to ward off the Haemovores, whereas the director’s cut makes it clear that he is reciting the names of all his companions in a litany. It’s another excellent story, with the plot of human conflict being exploited by non-human forces which has a venerable pedigree in Who, and the continuing accumulation of details about what the Doctor may really be up to – and, almost two years after her arrival, more about what Ace is there for – I think only Turlough acquires a comparable amount of back-story in the course of his time in the Tardis, and Ace’s tale works much better. My only quibble about The Curse of Fenric is that I have never been impressed by the Haemovores, whose costumes are a bit cheap-looking to the point that we have to be told to be scared of them by scary music.

Rewatching, I wasn’t quite as impressed as I had been on previous occasions – and I note that both times I had seen it before in the context of the rest of the season; this was the first time I had tried it as effectively a standalone. It feels frankly a bit under-directed; too often the actors are just moving from point A to point B without doing much else, and the cinematography is workmanlike rather than interesting. Also this time around I watched the original TV broadcast, which is not as good as the subsequent edits, and that may have been a mistake. I’m glad that Cartmel was trying to revive the show, but he had not yet got there.

Here’s a weird one for you. Pyramids of Mars, already covered by the Black Archive, and Full Circle, also already covered by the Black Archive, were broadcast on exactly the same calendar dates as The Curse of Fenric: 25 October, 1 November, 8 November and 15 November, in 1975, 1980 and 1989 respectively. The first two were shown on Saturday nights, and The Curse of Fenric on Wednesdays. The day after Episode 3 was shown, the Berlin Wall fell.

When I first read the novelisation in 2008, I wrote:

Ian Briggs, on the other hand, does a masterful job with The Curse of Fenric, perhaps the most adult of any of the Who novelisations (in the sense of talking about sex). The most striking change from the TV original is that the vicar, Mr Wainwright, is explictly young (rather than Nicholas Parsons). Apart from that, the whole narrative feels very soundly rooted both in itself and in Who – particularly with Ace’s introduction in Dragonfire (which of course Briggs also wrote). For once, the Doctor’s-hidden-past motif actually seems to make sense rather than feeling like a bolted-on idea (the only other story that achieves this is The Face of Evil). An excellent read.

Also a comfortable pass for the Bechdel test, what with Phyllis, Jean and their landlady on the one hand, and Katharine, Audrey and the Wrens on the other, with Ace wandering between them.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

A thin trickle of villagers, all dressed in their grey Sunday best, were making their way home down the country lane. Only Miss Hardaker, a sharp-faced spinster in her fifties, and two teenage girls lingered on the church porch where the young vicar listened patiently. Miss Hardaker was determined to make her point.

Rereading the novelisation, the same points struck me again; it’s a surprisingly adult book for the range, with the London girls and Ace bantering about sex. And given the timings, it does make more sense for the vicar to be a young man, rather than 66-year-old Nicholas Parsons. There are a couple of good interludes as well, one of which appears to have a drown-up Ace marrying a Russian aristocrat ancestor of Sorin’s. It’s one of the best of the 160+ novelisations.

Both of my Black Archive reads for this month are by writers who I consider friends. Una McCormack is a sparring partner on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/unamccormack/status/1473947186853523459

In this monograph, she has gone for an approach of developing at length four of the interesting themes of The Curse of Fenric, rather than an all-round justification of the story, and as someone who loves the story less than she does, I found it helpful and redemptive. I love most of all the Black Archive books that explain to me why I like some of my favourite Doctor Who stories; but I probably get more out of the ones like this that challenge me to think again about some that are less high up my personal list.

The short introduction sets out her stall, making the link between the timing of first broadcast and the Fall of the Wall, and asserting boldly that “The Curse of Fenric is the best story in what was, at that point, the best season yet of Doctor Who. In other words, I love it.”

The first chapter convincingly positions the story and the entire era in the context of a decade of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher (who as it turned out would last only another year), and the culture wars waged by government supporters, particularly on and in the BBC. The solution to the chess puzzle of the story is, after all, for the pawns to break ranks and join forces against their common oppressor.

The second chapter points out that this is the first Doctor Who story to explicitly use the Second World War as a setting. (Surprisingly, the Nazis in Silver Nemesis are not named as such.) The war itself is of course a crucial cultural historical experience for the UK, as for other countries. But it’s interesting to look, as McCormack does, at the other later presentations of the war in Who, some of which work and many of which don’t, and to explore the good and bad side of using it as the background for a Who story.

The third chapter looks at Ace as a character, arguing that her arc is the first example of the more modern approach to companions that we have seen in the New Who era, and applying some good feminist analysis to the Doctor and his relations with the women who he tracvels with. The second paragraph of the third chapter, including a quote from Joanna Russ, is:

Russ, in her essay, and in typically acerbic fashion, rapidly sketches and dispenses with the clichés of science fiction: the ‘intergalactic suburbia’ in which the 1950s household remains intact and the woman is wife, mother, and home-maker; the ‘passive and involuntary’ women as prizes or motives for space-faring ‘He-Men’; and the domineering Amazons of matriarchies, waiting to be brought to heel by the arrival of men. Her most illuminating criticism for our purposes, however, is of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This novel, published in 1969, a Nebula Award winner and generally accepted to be ground-breaking in its treatment of gender, concerns the inhabitants of the planet Gethen, who have no sex or gender, except that every four weeks they pass through a cycle in which they become either male or female, and sexually potent. The story is motored by the arrival on Gethen of a male human observer, who becomes immersed in Gethenian culture and politics. Russ skilfully argues this is a book from which women are absent:

‘It is, I must admit, a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called “he” throughout, but “put that together with the native hero’s personal encounters in the book, the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men.’4

4 Russ, ‘Image of Women’, p215.”

The brief short chapter reflects on myth and Doctor Who, and the way in which Cartmel was setting up the Doctor as a mythic figure and using themes from mythology to help tell the story.

I guess my biggest complaint about the book is that it’s a bit short. But you can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)