E Omnibus Plurum

My revived work of approximately halfway-deranged fan-scholarship is taking up most of my time at present. (Most of the time, at least, when I'm not being a civil servant, learning to drive or changing my entire inventory of possessions in preparation for the increasingly imminent arrival of the fruit of my loins.)

However, I did want to record the fact that I've had time actually to read Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, and to offer a few thoughts on it.

As usual with books I've contributed to, this can't be in any sense considered a review. But I hadn't read any of the other stories before reading the book, so -- aside from knowing several of the authors, and that I share with them a project to demolish and rebuild various important works of fiction using the deconstructive tools of a talking panda and a mad old woman in a double-decker bus and a floppy hat -- I came to them relatively fresh.

In many ways, the first two stories are my favourites, showing as they do the range of genres and tones an anthology like this can cover: Steve Lyons's hilarious "A Gamble with Wildthyme" takes literally the idea of (of all things) dogs playing poker and frames it within a science-fiction setting, unearthing some brilliant jokes including a quite magnificent punchline. My fellow vampirologist Mags L Halliday's "Sovereign", by contrast, is a contemplative, elegiac piece set in a women's commune in a wintry 1960s Cornwall, which foregrounds Iris's romantic side to lovely effect. Between them they set things up wonderfully for the rest of the volume.

I'm not going to go through the stories one by one, mind you, so these are the highlights. The volume's editors each turn in a fab story (snuggled up cosily on either side of my less than timely Battlestar Galactica parody "Battleship Anathema"). Stuart Douglas's "Future Legend" is a funny but rather sad story of vicious sentient cats making the best of things at the end of time, while Paul Magrs's blisteringly funny take on Torchwood, "The Dreadful Flap", throws Iris in with Dracula, Noel Coward and a lost robot from Paul's last Doctor Who novel in a chaotic, sarcastic, carnivalesque medley. In Darlington.

My other favourite in the collection (which isn't to say that the others suck, by any means) was Cody Schell's "Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta", a splendidly demented story where Iris joins forces with a Mexican luchador, the periodically-tabular Señor 105. Cody's story is his much-deserved first publication: it's cheerful, very silly yet oddly disturbing nonetheless.

At least two of the other stories are thoroughly great as well. If I've sold the book to you (and yes, obviously that is what I'm trying to do, rather than dispassionately appraising the volume), then you can buy it here.

Two further pieces of Iris news, and then I promise I'll shut up. Firstly, our first review's appeared online, and it's pleasingly appreciative. [Edit 15-6-9: Oh look, here's another one.] Secondly, Obverse Books have announced that a second anthology, The Panda Book of Horror, will be out later in the year.

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.

Yeah, well,

right. The unexpected resurgence of a previously moribund writing commission FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE means I probably won't have very much time to blog for the next couple of months. Erm, again.

I know I've been saying that sort of thing rather a lot recently. I wish I were able to keep this blog updated as frequently as I used to a couple of years ago, but what with imminent procreation and a paying job, I hardly ever find myself with the time. (It's not just you either, dear reader -- I've also turned down a couple of offers of paid writing work this year. Hey ho.)

I'm still just about managing to keep up with the microfiction on Twitter, although I think my previous daily posting rate is overly ambitious. If you're not able to follow on Twitter or Facebook, the latest (decent) stuff is available, as usual, here. I quite like this six-word one:

Decimate: one tenth of a friend.

Meanwhile... Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus is due out this very Wednesday, and you can still pre-order copies from Obverse Books. My polymathic fellow author Cody Schell is producing promotional artwork for various stories in the book, and he's already released a poster for my short story, "Battleship Anathema", which you can see on my website. Cody's poster for Paul Magrs's "The Dreadful Flap" is up on the Obverse Books site, and I've also seen the one he's done for his own story, "Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta", which is equally fab.

So far my story is the only one I've seen, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the others. I'll be banging on about this more once it's released, I shouldn't wonder.

Argh, I have to go right now. I'll try to update again soon.

Patient Iris

The 21st century isn't getting any less confusing. I'm beginning to lose track of the permutations of feeds between Twitter, Facebook, here and my website. I'm worried I'll start clicking through to check they're all working and get stuck in a never-ending loop. Ah well.

In less baffling news, I'm told that Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus is now at the printers for publication in May, and copies are available to pre-order. Just go to the Obverse Books website and click on the Panda. After all Stuart and Paul's hard work, it's all looking rather marvellous.

Missing [Peculiar] Time[s]

This morning I experienced lost time as a result of a government conspiracy. I'm still optimistic that Gillian Anderson will come into the room at some point and show me her mosquito bites.

It's particularly annoying, though, as I'd been intending to placate you all with a nice long post to make up for my silence during the rest of this month. Now I have to be somewhere else too soon, so sadly it'll have to wait. I'm aware that my pledge to update this blog regularly this year is looking pretty hollow now -- oops.

In the meantime... four teasers for the stuff I should have been blogging about, haven't been and hopefully will be soon.

1. I've read Werewolves in their Youth by Michael Chabon and The Casebook of Carnacki - Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson. They're good. I'm also -- cue angel trumpets and hallelujahs -- within 45 pages of finishing Blue shagging Mars.

2. I've been writing a couple of articles for a book about Doctor Who and getting paid for it. More on this once the book in question's been announced.

3. Riding the trough of the wave as always, I've started using Twitter. It's not the hugest time-waster on the web, but like a number of other bloggers I've been finding that my thoughts tend to be more easily entered there in condensed form, rather than elaborated at length here. (In future I'll try to make sure I do both. I may also put a Twitter feed in here, if I can work out how.)

4. Did I mention B. and I are expecting a baby in August? (Er, I may not have done. We are. An actual baby. You know, a human one. With nappies and stuff.) This has been demanding an unpredictably large proportion of my attention of late.

Finally, Obverse Books have now revealed the final cover for Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, and I've updated my website accordingly. You may notice (especially if you've just read the entry below) that the blurb's rather familiar: this is because the editors decided that I'd put it as well as they could, and asked my permission to swipe it for the cover. This means that now I've put the official blurb up, my Iris Wildthyme page and my Celestial Omnibus page inevitably read almost identically to one another. I may have to write something else to go on the first one.

Note "new stories from Paul Magrs, Philip Purser-Hallard and Steve Cole amongst many others", though. Stuart wrote that bit, not me...

Magnum Omnibus

I've updated my website today with a page about the forthcoming Iris Wildthyme anthology, Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus.

This has meant a certain amount of rearrangement of other material, including a new Iris Wildthyme Short Stories page to go with my Bernice Summerfield and Doctor Who ones. I'm rather pleased with the description of Iris I wrote for it:

What is there left to say about Iris Wildthyme –- transtemporal adventuress (and sometime Time Lady) extraordinaire, metafictional explorer of texts and subtexts, double-decker-dwelling interstellar bag-lady, amnesia-prone political and sexual revolutionary, writer of wrongs, wronger of rights (especially copyrights), all-round champion of freedom, occasional nightclub singer and frequent barroom floozy?

Well, there’s always something.

The site now incorporates a preview of the cover art for The Celestial Omnibus by former B.B.C. costume designer June Hudson, and the new Iris Wildthyme logo by Anthony Dry.

I've also updated the F.A.Q., although it duplicates information available elsewhere on the site and I'm now convinced that nobody except me ever reads it, ever. I'll get round to purging it at some point.

Meanwhile, allow me to recommend the Iris Wildthyme season 2 CD boxed set -- three excellent stories (and one reasonably decent one[1]) featuring Katy Manning as Iris and David Benson as Panda, packaged gorgeously in the artwork of the aforementioned Mr Dry[2].

[1] No, of course I'm not going to say which one.
[2] "Mr Dry lived in Dryland. Everything in Dryland was very, very dry. Dry sand -- dry river beds -- even dry books! One day, Mr Dry bought a novel called Wetlands..." Sorry, I've started free-associating now.

Obverse Gear

You remember -- well, probably you don't, as I was a bit busy to blog much at the time, and only mentioned it once -- that I spent a substantial chunk of December writing a 5,000-word short story for a new anthology? And that I was going to announce it here when the publishers had made their own announcement?

Well...

Obverse Books, a new publishing venture owned by the estimable Stuart Douglas, has just announced the author line-up for its debut anthology Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, featuring -- naturally -- transtemporal heroine and barroom floozy extraordinaire Ms Iris Wildthyme, created by Paul Magrs. The collection includes my short story "Battleship Anathema", along with stories by Faction Paradox authors Mags L Halliday and Jon Dennis, sundry Doctor Who authors and the category-defying Mr Magrs himself.

Iris's history has been a convoluted one, taking in Paul's Phoenix Court series of magic-realist novels, the original Doctor Who novels and short stories which Paul has written, her own series of CD audio drama adventures[1] -- and one previous short story anthology, Wildthyme on Top, published by Big Finish and including my Shakespeare-rewrites-Iain-M-Banks story "Minions of the Moon", of which I'm still absurdly proud.

I'll be creating a Celestial Omnibus web page on my site shortly. For the moment, though, suffice it to say that my story involves Iris trying to revisit the scene of a series of colourful -- indeed, garish -- space-opera adventures she experienced some thirty years ago, but finding that the people and starships she left behind have become strangely drab and gritty during her absence...

[1] As luck would have it, the postman put my copy of the Iris Wildthyme Series 2 CD box set into my hands an hour or so ago. It's a thing of quite remarkable beauty, the intricately detailed Target novel theming of the covers being offset wonderfully by the shocking pink box and vaguely Buffyesque logo. An awful lot of love and care has gone into designing it, and I'm really looking forward to hearing the stories.