End of Days

It's taken me a while to get my thoughts about the announcement of the new Doctor Who showrunner in order. (NB: This is just what I reckon, yeah? If you're an old-school internet pedant, you may want to imagine this prefaced by a gigantic 48-point flashing ‘IMHO’.)

I can quite see why the BBC have appointed Chris Chibnall to take over from Steven Moffat. He’s an experienced showrunner, with a wide-ranging record that includes the widely respected Broadchurch, the less widely-respected Camelot and... well, seasons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, which built up a dedicated international fanbase and climbed the ladder of channel popularity from BBC3 to BBC1. He has history with Doctor Who, having written four stories including a two-parter, and lots of Torchwood episodes set, at least in theory, in the Doctor Who universe.

The fact that the episodes of Doctor Who he’s written took five years to clamber up from profoundly bad (42) to largely-just-about-competent (The Power of Three), and that seasons 1 and 2 of Torchwood were, from an artistic if not a commercial point of view, a horrific mess, is only going to be an issue for a handful of discriminating fans, and is unlikely to affect the vast demographic that is the series’ core audience. From an industry perspective, Chibnall is self-evidently a safe pair of hands to keep the series steady for a few years until the next one comes along.

As a discriminating fan, though, I feel I have legitimate concerns about what the series from 2018 onwards is going to look like. When they took over as showrunners, both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat had considerable credit in the goodwill bank. RTD was a massively respected TV dramatist who wanted to bring back Doctor Who – in itself a remarkable boost for the series’ status – and had two respected children’s fantasy series (Dark Season and Century Falls), a complex and clever adult fantasy (The Second Coming), a series about a Doctor Who fan that was an absolute masterclass in character and plotting (Queer as Folk), and a startlingly bleak Doctor Who novel (Damaged Goods) all under his belt. Moffat also had a successful young adult series (Press Gang) and an adult fantasy series (Jekyll) on his CV, as well as a number of sitcoms including the excellent Coupling, and had written some of the very best episodes of the series since RTD revived it. Both had impressed us all with what they could do before they started in the job, and both excited me hugely with their visionary perspectives on what Doctor Who should be like.

In Chibnall’s case, there are certainly some viewers who appreciate his past work -- fans of Torchwood and Broadchurch in particular. Good luck to them: I genuinely hope they enjoy what’s coming as much as they assume they will. I suspect even they, though, would struggle to find a clear vision for Doctor Who in Chibnall's past episodes, in the way that Davies clearly believes it should be emotionally literate, people-driven melodrama and Moffat cerebral, child-focussed science-fiction horror. 

More than this, though, both RTD's and Moffat's work – and here we’re getting into 72-point ‘IMHO’ territory – suffers a distinct drop in quality once they become regular showrunners, responsible for commissioning, editing and bringing to fruition 14 episodes a year, based in wildly differing settings each requiring its own prop, set and costume design and distinctive location work, with all the necessary liaising with directors, casting consultants and BBC controllers -- quite apart from continuing to write their own scripts, and devise and impose an overall narrative schema across the season and the future direction of the show as a whole. Nobody in the TV industry has experience in doing this except Davies and Moffat themselves, because no other series makes the same demands on its writers and producers as Doctor Who.

This takes an understandable toll on the showrunners' scripts. Davies had had years to think about how he’d bring back Doctor Who, and it worked gloriously in 2005: he had one year to think about how he’d follow it up with a second series, and in 2006 it shows. None of his later series approach the crystalline perfection of the Eccleston series, and by the time he leaves they’re rapidly approaching incoherence.

Moffat's scripts, too – though still having much to commend them – take a minor nosedive once the realities of commissioning and production properly set in. A few stories during his early years as showrunner (The Eleventh Hour, A Christmas Carol) are on a par with his scripts for RTD like The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances or The Girl in the Fireplace, but most suffer by comparison. It’s only with The Day of the Doctor and the 2014 and 2015 Capaldi seasons – when he’s been in the position longer than Davies and got his second wind – that we see a true return to form. 

(I quite understand, of course, why he’d want to leave, but I’d personally like to have seen several years more of his witty, clever and cheerily terrifying version of Doctor Who before that happened. We’re getting one more year, of course -- even if it is, inexplicably, 2017 -- and let’s hope it’s a thoroughly spectacular one.)

Of course, RTD and Moffat are such outstanding writers that a small trailing-off isn’t really an issue: from 2006 to 2013 they still, for the most part, turned out great scripts. With Chibnall, though, a drop in quality from his previous standard is an alarming prospect.

I think we can expect a few good things from the Chibnall showrunnerate, even so – they just won’t have much to do with his own scripts or the series' overall narrative direction. For instance, I don’t need to have actually watched Broadchurch (to be clear I haven’t, and have no interest in doing so) to see that casting is one of its major strengths. Since Chibnall will clearly be casting the 13th, and quite likely the 14th, Doctors, that’s reassuring. I suspect he'll be disinclined to take the more radical kind of casting decision Moffat has been slyly preparing the way for in his Capaldi stories, but we can probably assume that whichever 30-to-50-year-old white men he casts in the part will be pretty good at acting. His seasons of Torchwood also saw some interesting commissioning choices in the script department: PJ Hammond, Noel Clarke and Catherine Tregenna were all names that would have been unlikely to crop up (at that time, and in that capacity) in mainstream Doctor Who, and all created unusual episodes with distinct and interesting features. The best thing Chibnall brings to Doctor Who may well be his address book. 

So -- amused though I was when a well-known author of my acquaintance responded to the news on Facebook with a picture of the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic -- this isn't an unmitigated disaster. Even the worst eras of Doctor Who (NB If in doubt refer back to the opening disclaimer) have produced individual stories of substantial interest – The Androids of Tara, for instance, or Revelation of the Daleks  – and I’m sure that, from 2019 or so, The Black Archive will be covering selected stories of the Chibnall era with keen enthusiasm. It's the overall arc story, and the several scripts a year written by the showrunner to further it, which I worry may be turgid, incoherent and banal, and occasionally startlingly offensive.

I’m prepared to be proved wrong. But then I'm prepared to be proved wrong on all kinds of issues, from the demise of Elvis to the non-existence of fairies.

And as for the Controller of BBC1’s idea that we don’t need any Doctor Who in 2016 because we’ve got some football and the Olympics… well, don’t get me started. It may make perfect sense from an industry perspective, but it’s naive in the extreme to expect viewers to agree.

Which rather brings us back to where we started.

Announcing The Black Archive

Launching in March 2016 from Obverse Books, The Black Archive is a series of book-length looks at single Doctor Who stories from 1963 to the present day.

The series will publish six titles each year, in simultaneous digital and print editions.  Each title is a twenty to forty thousand word study of a single televised Doctor Who story, drawing on all eras of the series’ history.

Authors confirmed for 2016 include Hugo-nominated editor, critic and podcaster L M Myles (Chicks Unravel Time, Companion Piece, the Verity! podcast), biographer and Doctor Who scholar Lance Parkin (Whoniverse, AHistory, Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore), and film critic and occasional scriptwriter James Cooray Smith (Kaldor City, various Virgin Film titles).

The series is overseen by author and editor Philip Purser-Hallard, who explains the premise of the series as follows:

‘Doctor Who is endlessly fascinating, a powerful storytelling engine about which many millions of words have been written over the years. There are certain stories, though, from all eras of the programme’s history, which are exceptionally deep and rewarding – whether because of their unusually powerful writing, rich symbolism or complex themes. Stories like The Massacre, Kinda, Ghost Light, Midnight or Vincent and the Doctor demand to be explored at greater length and in more depth than a website review or entry in an episode guide will allow.

‘With this series of critical monographs, these Doctor Who stories can receive the detailed treatment that they so eminently deserve. Our primary emphasis is on the stories as stories, rather than the behind-the-scenes history which has been covered in admirable depth elsewhere. While we aim to make an authoritative and significant contribution to the overall critical conversation about Doctor Who, we intend each of these books to be entertaining as well as of academic interest.’

The Black Archive will launch with four titles in March 2016, covering Doctor Who stories from William Hartnell’s tenure as the Doctor to that of current incumbent Peter Capaldi:

• The Black Archive #1: Rose by Jon Arnold
• The Black Archive #2: The Massacre by James Cooray Smith
• The Black Archive #3: The Ambassadors of Death by L M Myles
• The Black Archive #4: Dark Water / Death in Heaven by Philip Purser-Hallard

Jon Arnold has edited fanzines including Shooty Dog Thing: 2th and Claw, and is a major contributor to Hating to Love: Re-evaluating the 52 Worst Doctor Who Stories of All Time. James Cooray Smith is the co-author of Who’s Next: A Guide to Broadcast Doctor Who, and has contributed production notes to a number of BBC DVD releases. L M Myles contributed to Chicks Dig Time Lords before co-editing its Hugo-nominated sequel Chicks Unravel Time, and has written Doctor Who prose and audio drama for Big Finish. Philip Purser-Hallard holds a doctorate in English literature, specialising in science fiction, and has written prose fiction for Doctor Who spinoff ranges as well as original novels.

Further titles will follow at two-monthly intervals during 2016:

• The Black Archive #5: Image of the Fendahl by Simon Bucher-Jones (May)
• The Black Archive #6: Ghost Light by Jonathan Dennis (July)
• The Black Archive #7: The Mind Robber by Andrew Hickey (September)
• The Black Archive #8: The Pirate Planet by Lance Parkin (November)

Confirmed contributors for 2017 include Doctor Who novelist Kate Orman and Magic Bullet producer Alan Stevens.

Ebook and paper editions of all titles, along with yearly subscriptions, will be available through the Obverse Books website.

"All this and more, cock."

Pop quiz: what do the following high-profile British writers all have in common?

• Richard Curtis
• Douglas Adams
• Paul McAuley
• Kim Newman
• Stephen Gallagher
• Steven Hall
• Alan Moore
• Grant Morrison
• Neil Gaiman

OK, so virtually everyone who's still reading this blog will know the answer. (Is anyone who isn't a Doctor Who fan still reading this?) Click the links below to find out which Doctor Who story they wrote, and in what medium:

• Richard Curtis
• Douglas Adams
• Paul J. McAuley
• Kim Newman
• Stephen Gallagher
• Steven Hall
• Alan Moore
• Grant Morrison
• Neil Gaiman

It's an impressive roll-call -- all the more so when you add in the writers I left out because it would make the answer altogether too obvious, like Paul Magrs, Paul Cornell, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat.

Of all of those, only Adams and Moore (both of whom did their Who writing at the start of their careers) inspire anything like the same awe in me as the two elder statesmen of British science fiction who've become the latest additions to the above list:

• Brian Aldiss
• Michael Moorcock

Let's just take a minute to absorb that, shall we? Brian freaking Aldiss and Michael motherloving Moorcock, whose writing careers each started the best part of a decade before the first broadcast of An Unearthly Child, have recently published their first Doctor Who stories.

If literary SF is a little too subcultural for you to have a proper grip on it (...well, you should still know of Aldiss and Moorcock via their highly-respected mainstream fiction, but...), the nearest analogy to the statement this makes about the series' current cultural capital would be if, say, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were to write Coronation Street tie-in books.

I'm really not exaggerating.

Aldiss's contribution is, admittedly, a slight thing -- a two-part short story, "Umwelts for Hire", published in what's effectively an annual pitched at roughly Young Adult level and embarrassed with the title Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2011[1]. It's a very Aldissian read, though: concerned with dreams and therapy, meditatively paced, conveying its action allusively through austere but evocative writing.

A churlish critic might argue that it didn't particularly need to be a Doctor Who story, with the Doctor's part being that of any thoughtful protagonist, but its refusal to conform to lazy fan expectations is part of its quality. Evil goes unpunished, enigmas remain unresolved, and the climax -- inasmuch as there is one in such a quiet piece -- is the implicit redemption of a minor villain. It's utterly at odds with the fast, bold, colourful storylines of the current series, and all the more wonderful for it.

Moorcock's The Coming of the Terraphiles -- a full-scale hardback novel visibly marketed with the view that the words "Michael Moorcock" on a book are just as much of a draw as the words "Doctor Who" -- is fast, bold and colourful. Indeed, it reads quite breathlessly at times, as if it were written in a tearing hurry in one draft, but by a genius. Which is quite likely to be true.

Moorcock's career has effortlessly embraced high and low art, and The Coming of the Terraphiles links his Doctor Who source material with all kinds of other British popular culture, from Robin Hood to P.G. Wodehouse, from sea-tale and space-opera to public-school cricketing story. Indeed, the mishmash is part of the point, the "Terraphiles" of the title being sincere but hilariously confused Ancient Earth reconstructionists of the distant future, whose hybrid of cricket, archery and tourneys has become the galaxy's most popular sport.

The novel is unapologetic about its series affiliations, foregrounding the Doctor and Amy Pond throughout, and making conspicuous use of the rhinocerid alien Judoon, with whom Moorcock's obviously rather taken. (There are also some nicely quirky references to the Daleks and the Time Lords.) Equally though, it's a Moorcock book through and through, part of his massive, multi-million-word Multiverse / Eternal Champion saga. (In particular, there's a character called Captain Cornelius, a space-pirate who wears iron commedia dell'arte masks, whose original conception suggests some interesting connections between the vaguely messianic characters in Moorcock's and the Doctor's universes.)

Admittedly everything Moorcock's written has been tied to this gigantic metaseries one way or another, but the connections here are explicit and inextricable, to the extent that Moorcock has actually recommended The Coming of the Terraphiles to a reader as a source for some of the background informing his series work. From the point of view of Doctor Who continuity, this is a sabretooth amongst the pigeons, upsetting huge swathes of the established history, physics and metaphysics of the Doctor's universe, but from the point of view of even a casual Moorcock fan[2] it's a thing of glory, beauty and wonder.

In plot terms, the novel is pretty much bonkers, with entirely new elements, characters and ideas cropping up nearly every chapter, apparently at random. The ideas are huge, intricate and very silly, and their wild profligacy would keep most writers of the standard post-2005 Doctor Who tie-in range in book proposals for a decade. While the plot manages to be recognisably pulpish (which is also to say, given Moorcock's habitual concerns, archetypally mythic) it also mostly eschews Doctor Who cliche in various refreshing ways.

If I had to choose one aspect of this book to improve, it would be allowing Moorcock to work with a Doctor he was already familiar with, rather than having to learn the character of Matt Smith's eleventh Doctor. I love Smith's mercurial portrayal, and Moorcock writes him well, but I can imagine that a version of this book with William Hartnell's Doctor in central position could be utterly majestic.

Rumour has it that The Coming of the Terraphiles is the first in a series of weightier Doctor Who novels written by high-profile authors, marketed at a rather more literary audience (and inspired, rumour suggests, by Sebastian Faulks's James Bond novel). Rumour even goes as far as hinting that the next name to be added to the roll-call might be that of Stephen Baxter.

While I might prefer such known Doctor Who fans as, say, China Miéville or Michael Chabon -- perhaps even Christopher Priest, who made a number of abortive attempts to write scripts for the TV series in the 70s and 80s -- I can only applaud the vision involved, and hope it's given as free a rein as possible for future titles.

[1] By long-standing convention, annuals and their equivalents are named after the year following their release, even when (as in this instance) their content relates almost exclusively to the current year's output from the parent entity. I think it's an effort to make the more gullible buyer feel they're getting in ahead of everyone else.
[2] I've actually read a very small proportion of Moorcock's vast output: two books of the Cornelius Quartet, the wonderful Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (brief review here) and, long ago in my adolescence, the Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy and the Jerry Cornell comedy-spy diptych. I have literally never read an Elric novel.

Internet Users "Capable of Pettiness, Idiocy," Study Claims

T'sk. I don't post anything substantial for ages, and then I pop up to denounce the organisers of an online forum. I can feel the process of accelerating détournement as I morph into an internet caricature of myself.

The executive summary is that, as of today, I'm quitting the primary web forum for Doctor Who fans, imaginatively known as The Doctor Who Forum. It's a wrench, to be honest, as I've been a member since the olden days when it was known as Outpost Gallifrey, but I can't put up with the endemic immaturity, cronyism and self-regard of the moderators and the forum owner any more.

There's a long, long backstory behind this, which most readers of this blog would find insanely dull. It's your standard tale of Doctor Who canon disputes[1], internet acrimony and personal vendettas, relatively few of them actually involving me. Nobody comes out of it looking terribly good, to be honest, but some have ended up significantly more tarnished-looking than others.

The slightly longer abstract is that of late the Doctor Who Forum's officials have:

• Persistently demonstrated arbitrary, petty and partial judgement in moderating posts, to the extent of suspending one user for banter with a friend while allowing another to remain after posting potentially libellous insinuations against the aforementioned poster (now deleted, fortunately, but sufficiently scattershot that at one point I though I might be a target too). [Edit to add: All the links to DWF posts originally included in this post no longer work, so I'm deleting them.]
• Vindictively banned any mention of the suspended user's small press (to the likely detriment of said small business, as its first book is primarily aimed at Doctor Who fans), after he made representations to them about these potentially libellous post.
• Edited contributors' personal signatures, including mine, without notification or permission, in order to remove any mention of said small press.

Now, I'm partial in this myself (although I don't, of course, aspire to the exalted status of a forum moderator), because the poster in question is Stuart Douglas -- a personal friend and the owner of Obverse Books, the publishers of Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus.

For what it's worth, though, I've seen the correspondence between Stuart and the Forum's owner, Shaun Lyon, which appears to have been the immediate catalyst for the ban. Stuart's representation to Shaun (made after several indirect and independent approaches had been ignored) is polite and adult, expressing a hope that his issues can be dealt with without recourse to legal action. Shaun's is hysterical, childish and obnoxious, and employs the words "fuck" and "twat". I know who I think comes out of the exchange looking better.

I can't be doing with a forum where that kind of thing is considered sane or rational behaviour, and am about to tell them so.

[1] This is particularly stupid, as there's no such thing as canon in Doctor Who. Some people don't like you saying that, for some reason.

Half-Price Trips

If the steepish price has so far put you off buying The History of Christmas and Time Signature, the Short Trips volumes containing my two licensed Doctor Who short stories, you may be interested to know that they and the other 26 volumes in the series are currently half price at the Big Finish website. This means each hardback costs £7.50 -- a moderate price for a paperback these days -- or you can have both for the price of one a couple of days ago. Postage and packing are free within the UK, as well.

This is effectively a closing-down sale for the range, and stocks of some titles are supposedly low, though I have no information as to whether these two are among them.

Still -- if you've ever wanted to see the eighth Doctor celebrating midwinter on a brown dwarf planet, or the first Doctor exploring a world from which time is literally running out, this would be the opportunity. Other titles in the range I'd highly recommend would be Transmissions and 2040.

Matt's Myth Is the Doctor

My perhaps overly mystical response to the casting of the eleventh Doctor -- complete with musings on the heroes of British myth-cycles, the writings of Ian Fleming and Joseph Campbell, and world mythology ranging from Egyptian to Native American -- is now available online at Surefish. I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I enjoyed writing of it.

Surefish are having a bit of a reorganisation at present, and it's not perfectly clear what the long-term future of these columns will be. All I can say for now is that if they're discontinued I'll be archiving them at my website to make sure they remain available.

...when the Doctor's younger than you are

Well, there's no getting away from it[1], it's 2009. And I said I'd be making a New Year's resolution to post here more. So let's give it a go.

I spent most of yesterday writing a Surefish column -- due up sometime this week, with any luck -- on the casting of the new Doctor Who. Although in fact it's less about the specific casting of young Matt Smith than about the recasting of the Doctor in general, and how it compares with the periodic renewals of Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and certain pagan fertility gods. Oh, and that Jesus chap. Actually, I don't think I've squeezed quite so many abstruse references into a column before, so that might be worth looking out for. (Or not. Your call.)

The casting itself is something I'm having trouble forming an opinion on. Some of my fellow Book of the War authors have jumped both ways on this, neither of them being directions I'm altogether inclined to leap in myself.

I wasn't previously aware of Smith's work, not having seen any of the items on his disconcertingly brief TV CV. I know Party Animals got a certain amount of praise, but how much of that was due to Smith's performance I have no idea. Even if I had heard of him... well, there were plenty of names being touted around who would have excited me far more.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, for one. Paterson Joseph and Idris Elba, for two other ones. Excellent actors all, each with a degree of maturity and gravitas which it's very difficult to imagine emanating from a 26-year-old.

What I find baffling, really, is this: even if Smith is (as outgoing showrunner Russell T Davies and his successor Steven Moffat both seemed to be asserting on last night's Doctor Who Confidental), a brilliant, innovative actor who's perfect for the part -- why couldn't he have waited another 10 or 20 years before being given it? (It's not as if, with the best will in the world, his looks are going to spoil... although in fact that weird, otherworldly face is one of his best credentials for the role.)

The Smith Doctor may or may not be an outstanding interpretation, but I'd be a hell of a lot more excited to be looking forward to the Joseph, Ejiofor and Elba Doctors -- and then, if he was ready for it, the Smith one -- than the Smith one right now. Are the showrunners really that impatient? (And yes, I know Peter Davison was only 29 when he got the part... but for pity's sake, when William Hartnell was cast he was twice Smith's age. What's wrong with a happy medium?)

I can't entirely work out how to view the Eccleston-Tennant-Smith progression, either[2]. Consider a respected, globally recognised cinema and TV actor with an impeccable artistic pedigree, giving way to a rising star with a solid theatrical background... who's followed in turn by an unknown with a couple of TV credits.

One possible interpretation -- and I've seen it espoused online -- is that the series is doomed, and has been on the way out since Eccleston left. The other is that, as it's got bigger, it's become less reliant on the recognition of its star... and that, in fact, being cast as the new Doctor is now all the credentials an actor needs.

If nothing else, the sequence of Eccleston (40 years old at the time of casting), Tennant (34), Smith (26) rather suggests that the future twelfth Doctor is currently recuperating from a critically-lauded pre-Christmas stint as a Wise Man, or possibly a Sheep.

Anyway. Personally I'd have much preferred to see an older Doctor introduced as a contrast to Tennant's breezy laddishness... but the fact that the new Doctor is even younger doesn't necessarily mean more of the same. Moffat is (as his 2008 Children in Need mini-episode Time Crash amply demonstrated) a big fan of the aforementioned Peter Davison's interpretation of the character, often described as "an old man in a young man's body". Tennant, by contrast, rarely gives us any indication of the Doctor's great and venerable age, choosing instead to give us his best impersonation of a four-year-old on tartrazine.

If Smith's all Moffat cracks him up to be, he may well be capable of pulling off as effective a version of this character as Davison. That would certainly be something to see -- and, of course, it genuinely requires a young man in the part.

It's a hell of a gamble to have taken, though.

[1]Except possibly through extensive calendar reform. According to these chaps it's actually 02009, which I rather like.

Aha...

...my most recent column's up at Surefish now. It's another summery collection of lists, which gives you some indication of how long ago I wrote it.

It's ended up a little less topical than I'd hoped it would be, particularly now the second X-Files movie's sunk without trace. Still, now it's there all I need to do is finish this month's.

"Well, Narnia and barmier don't rhyme, to begin with."

I've only just noticed that my column for this month is now up at Surefish. In retrospect, I may have got a little carried away with the S.F. theology towards the end.

This is slightly unfortunate, as I'm now writing a review for Surefish endorsing this book, which claims to have discovered a "secret imaginative key" to C.S. Lewis's Narnia septet, based around the tenets of medieval astrology.

And yes, I know how that sounds, but in point of fact Michael Ward's argument is so well-informed, persuasive and -- if you actually know anything about Lewis's thought -- downright reasonable, that I can't imagine not endorsing it. And as someone who reads Fortean Times religiously every month, I have some experience of evaluating dodgy arguments. (Actually, "religiously" sounds wrong in that sentence. In fact I probably read Fortean Times secularly every month.)

If you don't believe me, that's probably fair enough, but if you find Lewis's work interesting enough to be open to new perspectives on it, do give the book (or even this summary) a read before dismissing it. Perhaps you'll decide I'm less insane than the readers at Surefish are now likely to believe.

Otherwise, I've been grindly slowly onwards on the reading front. River of Gods is still huge and difficult to fathom -- I'm perhaps two-thirds of the way through now, but it's slow going. I'm finding that McDonald's use of local (Indian) vocabulary goes way beyond scene-setting and into the realms of deliberate obscurity. The book has an "If I know this, why don't you?" air, which might seem reasonable (if smug) if its target readership consisted of Indians and indologists, but is only going to irritate the average western reader. There's a glossary, admittedly, but it's hopelessly sketchy.

In other respects it's a pretty good character-driven S.F. novel, although there are a hell of a lot of characters. Perhaps a cast list would have been more useful than the glossary.

I think the only other things I've read are a couple of Doctor Who books, The Pirate Loop (mindless fluff, nothing like as good as the author's capable of) and The Many Hands (immensely better, but still suffering from its curtailed length).

I'm also halfway through Reginald Hill's A Cure for All Diseases, which as a police procedural set in modern Yorkshire suffers rather from being closely based on an unfinished Jane Austen comedy of manners set in 18th-century Sussex. Crime writers are weird.

If It Wasn't for December, I Wouldn't Have Any Embers

Inevitably, this month has been spent largely in preparing for the forthcoming santaic rituals, and I've had very little time for blogging, or indeed for writing anything other than our Christmas cards. (I have managed another Surefish column, but that won't be up till January.)

I trust that "Sol Invictus" will partially remedy this lack, although a few of you will have seen it already last year. Those of you I send cards to should be receiving this year's story, "Polarity", shortly -- the rest of you will have to wait till December 2008.

Much of today has been spent rushing around manically, distributing presents and buying supplies for the forthcoming jollities. (I've never actually visited the Bristol Beer Factory before, but it turns out to be the only place one can actually buy kegs of their beer. Not that there's a brewery shop or anything -- I wandered in and found a chap in overalls, who was kind enough to stop putting mash into vats with a great big scoop and sell me some.)

In other, unrelated Christmas news... look, Kylie with a Dalek! Her dress may be minimal in scope, but at least she kept it on, unlike certain 1970s Doctor Who companions I could mention (and who'll appear fairly swiftly if you type "katy manning dalek" into Google Images).

Forgetting Christmas for the moment (as if such a thing were possible)... Elizabeth II may now be Britain's oldest monarch, but she won't be our longest-lived head of state for a few years yet. That honour goes to, of all people, Richard Cromwell, who succeeded his father as Lord Protector when he was 31, ruled for a disastrous eight months in 1658-59, then lived on in obscurity until the age of 85. If longevity in our rulers is a thing to be celebrated, than All Hail Tumbledown Dick.

Finally, the new word for worldbuilding an alternative history is whatification. Pass it on, and use it at all available opportunities.

And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home.

Books Update: Gold and Brown (Baxter likes one)

Let me start by apologising for that truly appalling title. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry...

So, what have I been reading in the surprisingly lengthy expanse of time since my last book update? Quite a lot really. Blimey.

Let's get that horrible pun out of the way first:

Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold was nice, but not great. I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd read it before, rather than after, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The authors are friends, and their books are engaged in much the same project of reinventing the American adventure novel, but with a contemporary political outlook and vastly increased literary panache.

Both are set in a major U.S. city during specific decades of the 20th century; both deal with issues of love and rivalry and oppression and belonging. Both feature real historical characters and events, but fictionalise them heavily. Both have a stage magician as the central character, and his younger gay relative as a sidekick.

Carter Beats the Devil does all of these things well, but Kavalier and Clay does them consummately. As I seem to remember saying about following David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas with his earlier Ghostwritten, if I'd gone from the latter to the former it would have felt like I was ascending from the heights of excellence to a zenith of genius, whereas doing it the other way round felt like a bit of a letdown, really. Ah well.

Eric Brown's Approaching Omega's been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now, since I found it hanging around in a secondhand bookshop. Unfortunately it was a letdown after the other Telos publishing originals I've read. In particular, coming right after the literary banquet of Daniel O'Mahony's Force Majeure (see below) it tasted of takeaway pizza, competently constructed but to a terribly familiar template.

Approaching Omega is formulaic hard S.F., where the maintenance team aboard a generation starship start to act (and worse still, talk) like hardened space marines the moment danger threatens, because that's how People In Space behave (and talk). It deals with interesting issues -- if you hybridise human beings with A.I., where does the human end and the machine begin? -- but in a facile way, albeit with one mildly interesting twist. Stephen Baxter's quoted on the back cover as saying "Brown is at the height of his powers", which makes me wonder what his earlier books were like. (Reasonably numerous, apparently.)

I love Samuel R. Delany's work, but a little of his intense and densely-textured prose goes a long way. I've only read a few of his books over the years, and I still haven't had the courage to tackle the gargantuan, Finnegans Wake-ish Dhalgren. Babel-17 is one I missed out when I first discovered Delany and have only recently gone back to.

It's less impressive than some of his later works, but not by much. The characters are vivid and their predicament fiendishly clever, but some of the space-opera background -- well-drawn and detailed as it is -- feels a little formulaic. What's more, unlike some of the other Delany books I've read it's simply using the formula rather than (apparently) deconstructing it.

Groundbreakingly for S.F. at the time, the plot revolves around linguistics, which it treats in much the same way as earlier S.F. treats the hard sciences -- taking the then-popular Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and extrapolating from it an extreme conceptual scenario designed to distort the boundaries of the reader's worldview. Its linguistics feel a little antiquated now, as does its proto-cyberpunk, but that's only because of how things have moved on since then.

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers is a book I first read when it came out, at which time I was twelve or so. I was surprised how much of it I remembered, and by how well it stood up to my memory of it. In retrospect it's obviously a first novel -- it crams in too many disparate clever things, there are some awkward moments in the writing and the American author never seems quite comfortable with his London milieu -- but there remain some excellent ideas, vivid descriptions and compelling adventure narrative, and a surprisingly coherent magical scheme which works itself out mostly in hints and allusions rather than direct exposition.

Reginald Hill's The Death of Dalziel is a well-written police procedural, relying (perhaps slightly too heavily) on the charm of the characters he's created in his 20-odd previous Dalziel and Pascoe novels. This one revolves somewhat fantastically around a British anti-Islamic terrorist organisation known as "the Templars", which I thought at first was a cop-out allowing the liberal Hill to deal with contemporary issues without offending Islamic sensibilities. Actually, though, it works as a rather clever way of engaging the reader's sympathy with the terrorist mindset, suggesting that terrorists are people whose understandable, rather mundane concerns are radicalised by their extreme life-experiences.

I noted approvingly some months ago that the range of Doctor Who tie-in novels was showing some hints of returning to its former impressive heights, with the announcement of works by Paul Magrs and Mark Michalowski, among others. Subsequent commissions have called this trend into some doubt, but it's still splendid that we have Magrs's whimsically Ballardian Sick Building and Michalowski's biological hard-S.F. novel Wetworld in the range.

Sick Building combines some familiar Magrsian tropes -- a wintry landscape full of fantastical beasts, a young man's troubled relationship with his parents, a villain motivated by possessive love who talks like someone's auntie -- with a take on The Tempest which makes Forbidden Planet look conventional. It's at the lightweight end of Magrs's output, which has certainly included more serious and meatier fare. The eructation-driven climax read almost like a self-consciously silly embracing of New Who's occasional CBeebie-ish excesses -- which, being written by Magrs, it very likely was.

Wetworld's a maturer piece, and one which pays some real interest to the science underpinning its SF world. Where Sick Building, by an author who's written children's books as well as (sometimes very) adult ones, could have been accused of talking down to its readers, Wetworld takes it for granted that they'll be interested in adult stuff like xenobiology and the politics of survival. It's still enormous fun, though, with Michalowski's sympathy for his characters and sometimes wicked wit fleshing out the sturdy framework into one of the best new-series novels yet.

Both authors nail the characters of the tenth Doctor and Martha right through the ears, which I appreciated greatly. I'm not a huge fan of David Tennant's portrayal of the Doctor, but divorced from his actual presence, the three-year-old's attention span and manic logorrhoea are rather endearing. And Martha's fab, of course.

The best work of fiction I've read recently, though, was Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahony -- an alumnus of the Doctor Who novel ranges from back when they were good. Despite the terribly generic cover, this short novel (or maybe it's a longish novella) reads like a hybrid of Jorge Luis Borges and Christopher Priest, presenting a beautifully-envisaged, yet clearly unreal, Latin American city apparently founded in prehistory by dragons, intersecting with the forces of 21st-century capitalism.

As with some of O'Mahony's earlier works, it's not entirely clear what happens in the book and what doesn't, but the descriptions of what may or may not have happened are beautiful and disturbing. His knack of making us sympathise with unlikeable characters is also to the fore.

It's not O'Mahony's best work -- that would still be his Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light -- but it's a brilliant excursion, and it makes me positively salivate for his forthcoming Faction Paradox novel, Newtons Sleep.

Finally (for now), Ken MacLeod's The Human Front is a fun alternative-history novella about a post-WWII world where the U.S.A.F.'s experimental flying saucer didn't crash at Roswell in 1947, but gave rise to a whole new generation of anti-gravity bombers with which America attempts, disastrously, to win the Cold War. As usual with MacLeod's books it's full of left-wing political theory, humanised by a questionable yet sympathetic central character, and ends in a firework-burst of S.F. cleverness. It's even published back-to-back with another novella, so (if I was feeling exceptionally optimistic) I could even give Eric Brown another try.

That's the fiction I've read since August. The non-fiction is another story (as it were), but in the interests of keeping the blog up-to-date (and not having this post fester in my blogspot directory for further months) I'll cover those books later. Suffice it to say that I've read three of them recently, one of which was good, one very good and one quite stunningly good. To find out what they were, watch this space.

The Sound of Voodoo Drums

If you've been wondering what I've thought of the latest season of Doctor Who, the term I'd use would be "mixed", or more accurately "very mixed indeed, so much so as to generate whiplash when watched back-to-back". Some of the early episodes were very, very bad; the run of episodes from Human Nature to Utopia was the best New Who has ever been; and then the whole thing fell apart semi-disastrously at the end.

Ah, well. At least they haven't done anything perverse and idiotic like shunting Freema Agyeman's appealing and charismatic Martha off to Torchwood while bringing back bloody Catherine Tate as the full-time companion for Season Four. Oh, wait.

If, as is quite likely, you're more interested in knowing specifically what I thought of Season Three's treatment of religious themes, then by a mind-boggling coincidence my latest column for Surefish dwells extensively on that very topic.

In other news, those of you mourning the premature and sad demise of the Faction Paradox novels may well be interested in seeing this. Daniel O'Mahony is, I think I'm safe in saying, the most talented writer to have worked in the Faction Paradox arena, and to have a full-length novel from him set in the Faction universe will be a rare treat. I only hope that this is the first of many from Random Static.

TV Update: Doctors, Lawyers and Political Candidates

Meanwhile, I seem to have been neglecting the usual reports on my TV-watching habits for, well, it looks like most of this year.

This Life remains excellent drama, although rewatching it after many years I'm a little puzzled as to how intensely I felt it was speaking to me the first time round. Admittedly I had a fair number of unfortunate house-sharing experiences in the 1990s, but I'm sure it can't just have been that which made me feel that This Life represented the authentic voice of my generation.

Oh, well. Whatever it was, it's gone now. Still a damn good series, though.

Not, admittedly, as good as The West Wing, which fluctuating access to TV-on-demand recently allowed B. and me to watch the first half of the seventh season of. I think we're going to have to rent it to watch the rest. (Please, no-one tell me who wins the election -- though frankly Arnold Vinick would be vastly preferable to the Republicans who are currently in charge of the United States and, in an offhand sort of way, the world. Indeed, I almost wonder whether that wouldn't make a better ending to the series, avoiding obvious wish-fulfilment fantasies while showing that Bartlett's true legacy lies in making the far right unelectable. Don't tell me, though.)

And don't tell me what happens at the end of Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, either -- the falling-out between Virgin and Sky has meant that we still haven't managed to watch all of it, which I'm still enormously frustrated by.

Semi-finally, we seem to be watching the first season of 24. Why? I mean, it's absolute rubbish. Utterly implausible, bereft of sympathetic or believable characters, distasteful in its politics and featuring the most repellent hero I've seen since The Talented Mr Ripley. And yet I seem to be hooked. If anyone can explain this to me, I'd be profoundly grateful.

What else? Oh, the first episode of Jekyll was pretty good. And current Doctor Who is, of course, ace beyond my wildest imaginings. The last time there were four episodes this good in a row, the Doctor had a crewcut. And if the final two episodes of the season manage to maintain the same standard... well, I'm not sure there'll have been anything comparable, in T.V. terms, since about 1963.

Another Place on the Web Where You Can Read Me Banging on about Stuff

Just a quick note to say that regular readers of this blog may be interested in the latest issue of Paul "Brax" Castle's Doctor Who webfanzine, Shooty Dog Thing, which has a seven-page interview with me in it.

It also has a lot of interesting and witty things to say about Doctor Who and Doctor Who fandom, which makes it worth reading in its own right. But I'm assuming that readers of this blog are at least vaguely interested in me and/or my writing. (If not, you're very welcome and everything but, er, why are you here?)

Flaming June

I hate hot bloody weather. People moan about the cold, but when it's cold you can just put on a jumper, or the central heating. What can you do when it's too hot and you've already discarded all the clothing decency allows? Lose weight, that's all. Bah.

That aside, it's been a pleasant couple of weeks. B. and I spent last weekend very enjoyably in London and St Albans, celebrating the respective birthdays of two friends, and staying at flat of the little-sister-in-law and her boyfriend.

Friday night in St Albans was a combination celebration for Not Invented Here's birthday and the 30th anniversary of Star Wars -- both of which we commemorated by watching this comedian act out a breakneck précis of the entire original trilogy in the space of fifty minutes.

I was less impressed with it than most of my companions (who were, in fairness, largely wowed). I felt he really needed a) better voice acting, b) more jokes and c) more visual texture, given that the show consisted essentially of a fast-moving man in a black boiler-suit and the occasional mildly clever lighting change. As it was, the experience was midway between being buttonholed in a pub by an entertaining madman whose company begins to pall after barely the first half-hour, and watching a five-year-old on a tartrazine high running around... well, acting out the entire Star Wars trilogy.

Still, it was entertaining enough, and the company (and the split-level meal before and afterwards) were fun.

On Saturday we met up for lunch with my old friend Z. and her husband W., whom we saw married last August, and who seem very happy still. We then had to climb into 1920s costume (which in my case involved shaving off the goatee bit of my beard to give myself a fine set of muttonchop whiskers [1]) and proceeded hither for my godcousin-in-law's 30th birthday bash [2]. There were canapés and beer, and many more old friends, and a lovely view over the Thames, and it was all thoroughly splendid.

Since then I've mostly been working in one manner or another, though with a brief break on Thursday night to visit some of the better class of drinking establishments in the Bristol area. Lunchtime today we spent with some Australian friends who are sadly about to move back to Australia. Tomorrow we're meeting up with my parents somewhere near Romsey, for some reason. It's all a manic social whirl.

Meanwhile, the borderline-insane idea for a Doctor Who reference book which I mentioned way back when has borne slow-growing contractual fruit. I'm not allowed to say very much about it at present, as the publishers don't want to spoil the surprise, but it'll likely take up a substantial chunk of my attention for the next year or so. I've spent most of my writing time in the past fortnight sorting out preliminary research and assembling a team of experts to help out with the fact-checking.

And speaking of Doctor Who -- as I usually don't, or try not to, or at least not very much, or at least not too much, here -- Paul Cornell's Human Nature and The Family of Blood were both stunningly good, to a degree approaching, with disturbing proximity, actual perfection [3].

You may recall that I'm not a big fan of David Tennant's Doctor, and indeed I'm not -- but I do think that Tennant's a fine actor (not as excellent as Christopher Eccleston, but frankly who is?) when he's not playing the Doctor, as he wasn't for most of the two-parter. It's beyond question the best story since Eccleston left, and I'm not sure it wasn't the best thing the new series has done altogether.

And tonight we have another episode from Steven Moffat, the writer of The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace. And supposedly the Doctor barely appears in it. Which, if all goes well, could make Human Nature through to Blink the best three-episode run of Who since Season One's Cornell-Moffat-Moffat hat-trick.

[Edit 8:25pm: ...Yes, wasn't wrong there.]

And now I'm talking about Doctor Who altogether too much, so I'll stop there.


[1] To be precise, according to this handy spotter's guide to facial hairstyles, they were somewhere between "Friendly Mutton Chops" and a "Franz-Josef".

[2] Godcousin-in-law [n.]: Person whose uncle is one's wife's godfather, but whom one's wife (as she then wasn't) got to know well at university without either of them being privy to this information, until it emerged later with consequences altogether too hilarious to recount here.

[3] We long-term fans were expecting this, of course, given that it was an adaptation of Paul's equally exceptional Doctor Who novel from 1996, Human Nature. ( And if for any reason you feel reluctant to take my word for it, you can read it online here...)

Typology

This was inspired by a typo on a mailing list, during a discussion of whether Human Nature and Human Nature could be fitted into Doctor Who continuity together.

SHARD UNIVERSE [Terminology] There are certain patterns of events which, because of their precise formation and structure in time, are capable of "seeding" history, in much the same way as a single shard of crystal can convert a beakerful of solution into crystals of identical shape and construction.

From a time-bound perspective, the phenomenon resembles nothing so much as eerily significant coincidence, as particular situations, and even names and dates, "echo" and recur throughout perceived history. A god becomes mortal; a demon is chained; an island civilisation falls before the wingbeats of angelic or demonic powers. From some perspectives, even the Homeworld itself might appear to have fallen more than once.

Non-time-active civilisations often perceive such events as the action of providence in history, and it is trure that many such "shards" are deliberately seeded by the Wartime powers and other time-active cultures to their own ends.

Others, however, are naturally occurring. It is thought that these apparently random seed events may themselves be echoes from previous or parallel universes where such recurrences have infested the timeline, resulting in a history of endlessly repeated near-identical episodes. These "Shard Universes" would be characterised by formulaic, clicéd scenarios, barely-distinguished individuals and obsessive returns to depressingly familiar tableaux and set-pieces.

[© Philip Purser-Hallard 2007]

I still love The Book of the War.

Books Update: Expectations, Given Form

It's been a while since I last wrote a bit about what I've been reading, with the result that I'm now four books in deficit. All of them I came to with certain expectations, having read books by their respective authors before.

And here they are:

The Steep Approach to Garbadale is, shockingly, the twenty-first novel I've read by Iain Banks (along with a volume of shorts and a book about whisky), and there was much about it that was comfortingly familiar. Rather too much, I found in fact, as the narrative presented me with a hero emotionally crippled by his childhood love (as in The Crow Road and Walking on Glass), avoiding his sprawling, matriarchal family (The Crow Road again, and also Whit) who run a venerable, highly successful business (The Business) making a game which forms a metaphor for politics (The Player of Games) and taking lots of drugs (passim). What's more, this family has been guarding a terrible secret for a generation (The Wasp Factory and -- oh look -- The Crow Road) whose nature (which I won't reveal here) will also be familiar to long-term appreciators of Banks' oeuvre.

Banks' writing is always competent, and Steep Approach is less flabby and in need of editorial trimming than his last S.F. novel, The Algebraist. There are some lovely bits of writing relating to the hero, Alban's, youthful affair with his cousin, and to his long-dead mother's suicide. But overall it says very little of weight, has none of Banks's usual exuberant creativity, and feels much as if he's writing by the numbers. I've never met a Banks novel I've actively disliked (A Song of Stone and Canal Dreams come closest), but this one's something of a disappointment.

The Penelopiad, on the other hand, is classic Margaret Atwood without, as far as I know, being a retread of anything she's written before. Looking at The Odyssey through the eyes of Odysseus' long-suffering wife Penelope follows a standard feminist-revisionist approach (though it's one James Joyce, for instance, had flirted with before), but it's very productive. Penelope lends the novella a lively, sympathetic voice, sidestepping the victim status she might otherwise invite by tempering her complaints with hard-edged ruthlessness. Atwood gives the novella a second thread in the choric voices of the maids unjustly hanged by Ulysses for fraternising with Penelope's suitors, showing how Penelope herself is compromised by her privileged background as an aristocrat. It's a clever, erudite, witty and highly readable book, and reminded me of why I enjoy Atwood's writing so much.

The only previous work I'd read of Stephen Marley's was his 1995 Doctor Who novel, Managra, which was one of the very best published in Virgin's Missing Adventures range, and a major source of inspiration for Of the City of the Saved.... His Spirit Mirror is an earlier and sadly less deft novel.

The first in Marley's notorious (among Missing Adventures readers, anyway) yet little-read (ditto) "Chinese lesbian vampires" trilogy -- his first novel, bizarrely, being a life of the Virgin Mary -- Spirit Mirror has a lot to recommend it, including inventive ideas, strong characters and vivid descriptions both beautiful and horrific. Unfortunately it's all very po-faced, lacking the streak of wicked humour and deliberately outrageous invention which raises Managra to greatness. The second-century Chinese setting lends local colour -- though less than you might expect -- but ultimately the book is rather flat genre fantasy with some interesting moments.

(Oh, and although the novel contains both Chinese lesbians and vampires, there is no overlap between the two.)

Martin Day's one contribution to Virgin's Missing Adventures line was The Menagerie, a sadly lesser work than Managra, but he has since redeemed himself with contributions to the BBC's Doctor Who book ranges, notably Bunker Soldiers and The Sleep of Reason. I had hoped that Wooden Heart, like Gareth Roberts' Only Human, might be an exception to the dismal tendency of Who books since the new series to be shallow, vapid froth.

Sadly, it isn't quite. Day's work has always had a slight tendency to verbosity, which sadly comes out here in a book I can't imagine its target audience of 8-year-olds enjoying very much. There are some interesting themes relating to ethics and the nature of good and evil, which it's certainly surprising to see tackled by David Tennant's Doctor, but they never develop into anything truly worthwhile.

In the early days of the new series, we long-term Who book readers bemoaned the fact that none of the new Ninth Doctor tie-in books could match such TV episodes as Dalek and Father's Day for subtlety and complexity. Day's book isn't actually a great deal deeper or more complex than those, and yet it easily outdoes the current TV series for thematic sophistication. I find this disappointing.

After all that, then, the list of books I've read so far this year runs thusly:

• Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad.
  
• Iain Banks, The Steep Approach to Garbadale.
  
• Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth, The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction.
  
• Frederick Crews, The Pooh Perplex.
  
• Frederick Crews, Postmodern Pooh.
  
• Martin Day, Doctor Who: Wooden Heart.
  
• Roger Fairclough (ed), The Prisoner: the Original Scripts Volume 2.
  
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
  
• Kelly Hale, Faction Paradox: Erasing Sherlock.
  
• Andy Lane, Torchwood: Slow Decay.
  
• Ken Macleod, The Star Fraction.
  
• Stephen Marley, Spirit Mirror.
  
• China Miéville, King Rat.
  
• Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, About Time 2.
  
• Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls.
  
• Kate Orman, Doctor Who: Return of the Living Dad.
  
• J-P Stacey, A Pocketful of Lies.
  
• Charles Stross, Accelerando.

That's eighteen of the buggers. It's also the eighteenth week of the year, and while I started some of the above before the end of 2006, I'm also part of the way into Collapse and Iron Council already, which means I'm very slightly ahead of the game. Assuming that the name of the game is "reading a book a week".

And that's not counting humorous books read on the lavatory.

Still on my to-read list since last time are the following (new arrivals in bold, "less urgent" stuff in square brackets):

Non-Fiction:

• [Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.]
  
• Michael Frayn, The Human Touch.
  
• Tom Holland, Persian Fire.
  
• Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination.
  
• Terry Pratchett, Ian Cohen and Jack Stewart, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch.
  
• David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments.
  

Fiction:

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
  
• Max Barry, Jennifer Government.
  
• Mark Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
  
• [Mark Chadbourn, World's End.]
  
• Samuel Delany, Dhalgren.
  
• [Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.]
  
• Frank Herbert, Dune.
  
• [Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.]
  
• Ian McDonald, River of Gods.
• Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
  
• Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy.
  
• Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
• Justina Robson, Living Next-Door to the God of Love.
  
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.
  
• Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.

From all of the above we can deduce that:

a) I don't read nearly as many non-fiction books as I intend to.
b) An embarrassing amount of my reading is Doctor Who related.
c) Only women writers are fulfilling my expectations at present.

Perhaps I'd better start one of those Justina Robsons.

Pairs of Linked Columns

Recently I experienced what I seem to remember we used to call a "day off". In case you've never had cause to encounter one of these, it seems to involve getting up very late, sitting on a sofa watching old Doctor Who videos with a cat on your lap, and drinking beer occasionally.

That was last... Thursday, I think.

This indicates that things are beginning to get back to normal after the manic rush to finish Nobody's Children, but still very slowly. I keep being terribly busy, both at work and at home. My aspiration is that things will hopefully calm down a bit next week.

I might even be able to start blogging properly again. Let it be noted that I owe the assembled company mini-reviews of The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Margaret Atwood's rather excellent The Penelopiad. I really should read more Atwood. In the meantime I'm so tired I can barely type, so you'll have to bear with me.

That said... this month's column is up at Surefish, and follows on rather nicely from last month's. And I've sent off a revised proposal for the next long-term writing project, which is looking very hopeful now, and which I may say more about shortly.

Meanwhile, I've had a backlog of photos which I've just uploaded to Flickr.

I'm gonna spend my Easter with a Dalek:


Look! There are spiders!


And a couple of weeks ago now B. and I and all the members of B.'s extended family visited a very decent pub in Worcestershire...

...and a ruined abbey in nearby Gloucestershire.

View the whole set here.

Books Update: Eligible Spatula

In the past three weeks, I've finished three books. Reading, unfortunately, not writing. Two of these have been rereads, which is unusual.

Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman is classic prose Doctor Who, from the era when the novels were at their strongest -- far outstripping in sophistication and depth, anything a range marketed under the banner of an ongoing T.V. series could possibly be. Return is character-driven S.F., the story of Bernice Summerfield's search for her lost father, and of the rivalry and reconciliation between him, her new husband Jason and her mentor, the seventh Doctor. It deals with love, loss, friendship, betrayal, humanity, alienation, existential terror and a sentient spatula called Graeme, and presents them all with utter conviction (perhaps slightly less so with Graeme). It's my favourite of Kate's Virgin-era novels, and Kate's one of my favourite authors. Read this book! Read Kate's other books! Pre-order the book Kate, Jon and I are writing together!

Pashazade: The First Arabesk was my first exposure to the much-hyped Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and I'm unconvinced. Given the potential richness and complexity of the setting ("El Iskandryia", the German-Allied Alexandria of an Islamic Ottoman Empire in the post-cyberpunk mid-21st century of a history where the 1914 Balkans conflict never escalated into a World War), Grimwood provides remarkably little by way of detailed worldbuilding. A writer can expect a reader to extrapolate a panorama from a miniature -- building up vast imaginary worlds from throwaway lines -- but not vice versa. Grimwood seems more interested in his protagonist, who has the opposite problem of being given so many personal, psychological and technological quirks that he seems scarcely believable either. The detective plot's reasonably clever, however, and the prose, at least, is very slick and shiny. I'll probably read the sequels at some point.

I've written about The Pooh Perplex (1964) by Frederick C Crews here before... and with good reason, as I tend to reread it every couple of years or so. I doubt I own a book I've read more times, except for the Pooh books themselves, which like the Perplex itself I use for comfort reading whenever I'm feeling ill or unhappy. If you love Milne's work, and hold literary critics in a kind of suspension of affection and contempt, then it's one of the funniest books it's possible to read. I've now moved on to Crews' much savager (but equally funny) late sequel, Postmodern Pooh (2001).

In addition to PoPooh, I'm currently reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks (who Silk and I are going, perhaps ill-advisedly, to hear speak after the Beer Festival on Saturday) and Accelerando by Charles Stross. I haven't yet got far enough into the Banks to form an opinion (though it hasn't grabbed me on the first page the way, say, Complicity or The Crow Road did), but the Stross is remarkable. I thought at first that it was just another trendy information-dense post-cyberpunk screed, and wondered whether mightn't actually be enough of those in the world already. A third of the way through, though, it's shaping up to be something altogether more interesting. More on this later.

Books Update: Shirtopener

During the last week or so I've mostly been reading telefantasy tie-in titles.

The Prisoner: The Original Scripts Volume 2, edited by Roger Fairclough, is just as fascinating as the first volume was. As there, Fairclough's editorial apparatus is a little erratic: it's sometimes difficult to tell where informed speculation ends and fannish wish-fulfilment takes over, for instance. Furthermore, in this volume Fairclough really goes to town with the script annotations, so that while reading Hammer into Anvil we are told among other things that "As filmed, Number 2 doesn't sit in his chair" or "As filmed, the Prisoner doesn't ask for adhesive tape" -- facts which are: a) fantastically trivial and b) easily observed by anybody in possession of the D.V.D.s (or even, like me, the ancient 1993 V.H.S. boxed set).

The scripts themselves, however, are just as absorbing as those in the first volume, with the genuinely substantial scripting changes, both subtle and huge, being fascinating to follow. It's really interesting seeing how It's Your Funeral originally incorporated a Manchurian Candidate brainwashing plot, for instance, or how the flirtation between the Prisoner and Number 86 in A Change of Mind was ruthlessly edited out by Patrick McGoohan. Even The Girl Who Was Death lost what would have been some gloriously funny and surreal sequences (including one where a gardener who has been spraying bushes with a canister marked "Insecticide" suddenly begins pursuing Number 6 with a canister marked "Homicide").

The most astonishing discovery in this volume, though, is that the original script for Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling -- the sorry runt of the seventeen-episode family, full of precisely the kind of melodramatic plot, clichéd sub-S.F. devices and over-reliance on obvious back-projection which were so prevalent in the spy series of the era, and which The Girl Who Was Death would mock so mercilessly just two episodes later -- is actually really good. Somehow this intelligent, subtle script, where a well-paced plot develops gradually through revealed clues and the more extreme elements emerge naturally through the action rather than being baldly stated upfront -- this quintessential Prisoner script, in fact -- was mangled during the production process until it became the drivelly mess that ended up on screen.

(For what it's worth, most of the changes made to the scripts in these volumes were largely McGoohan's responsibility, and are generally improvements, or at least not obviously detrimental. On the other hand, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling was edited and mostly produced in McGoohan's absence. Make of this what you will.)

Like its sister volume, this is well worth the substantial cover price. Highly recommended.

Less weightily, Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane isn't bad by TV tie-in fiction standards, and certainly better than most of the televised Torchwood stories. Lane has a good grasp on the regular characters (better than most of the scriptwriters, or indeed some of the actors) and a way of coming up with clever, intriguing images which illuminate them and their situations. His prose is smoothly functional, and his horror scenes are appropriately unpleasant.

Unfortunately the plot is formulaic and predictable, and based irritatingly on a very obvious and stupid fallacy. (Highlight whitespace to be spoiled: A parasite in the human gut, however alien, will not make the host appear to lose either weight or volume by eating all their food for them. Instead the hosts, containing as they do a massive, bloated parasite, will look like big, heavy starving people. This makes the idea of using said parasites as a diet tool utterly idiotic.)

It's an O.K. tie-in book, but not a patch on the adult Doctor Who novel ranges of the past... speaking of which, I'm currently re-reading for work-related reasons (writing work, obviously, not administration work) Kate Orman's Return of the Living Dad, which I haven't looked at for many years, and which really is fabulous. I'm also in the early stages of John Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade: The First Arabesk, which took a while to get into but which I'm now enjoying.

And that's this week's book news.