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.

Mummers and Poppers: A Devices Story for Christmas

Another imminent Christmas means another Christmas story, and another all-too-rare update to this all-but-abandoned blog. Except that what I sent out with my Christmas cards last year was a tie-in story to my Devices Trilogy novels, and has already been published on the Snowbooks website. Still, I don't have another one for you, sorry.

This story is set between The Pendragon Protocol and The Locksley Exploit.

MUMMERS AND POPPERS
A Devices story for Christmas

If thee will leave thy tanning trade
and bide in greenwood with me,
my name’s Robin Hood, and I swear by the wood
I will give thee both gold and fee.’
The Kempsford Mummers’ Play

         As Christmases go, this is a weird one. Weirder than normal for the Green Chapel, I mean, because I realise sleeping in draughty tents in a forest, wearing several layers of thermal underwear inside your sleeping-bag and having to break the ice on the communal water-butts before you can have a wash in the morning wouldn’t be most people’s preferred way of spending the festive season.
         It’s all down to the allies – the ‘devices’, as our opposite numbers in the Circle insist on calling them. The living mythic archetypes of Britain have been kicking up a fuss, to say the least of it, ever since open warfare was declared among their human representatives, between the modern avatars of the Knights of the Round Table and Robin Hood’s Merry Men.
         That sort of thing puts the collective psyche of the whole nation under strain, and – though they’re nothing compared with what we’ll be facing later in the year – there’ve been some unusual manifestations emerging. Criminals from armed robbers to drug-dealers have been getting ideas that are strangely similar to stuff in myths, and those of us who live routinely with the influence of legendary figures are getting a bunch of very odd ideas turning up in our heads. The allies don’t dictate anyone’s behaviour, but they can introduce impulses which it’s quite difficult to control.
         So, for example, at the Circle’s Fastness – as Merry Wendiman’s learnt through her remaining contacts there – a bunch of the more credulous Knights are expecting a sign at Christmas, like the sword in the stone appearing on that day in the Morte D’Arthur, which will presage the long-awaited return of the ever-absent Pendragon device. The Seneschal’s doing his best to discourage the rumour, but every Knight who hasn’t been detailed to a quest elsewhere is sticking close to London till the New Year, just in case.
         This gives us a slight respite: recently we’ve been having to decamp and move every week or so, as the Knights come sniffing at our metaphorical door. The current thinking among those who do our decision-making is that the Chapel’s going to have to split up and go to ground – some of us camping, but scattered; others in squats in major cities where that kind of thing goes unnoticed; others kipping on friends’ floors across the country. It’s a long-standing contingency plan, but it’ll be the first time it’s happened in our recent history.
         It’ll be a worrying time for us all… but, thanks to the Knights’ temporary bout of greater-than-usual insanity, probably not until New Year or so.
         In our own ranks too – if ‘ranks’ is the word for the members of an anarchist cell – there’ve been some worrying midwinter manifestations. The other day, two young kids who’d been hiking in the forest and got separated from their parents turned up at our camp, all panicked and tearful. A search of the woods was the last thing we needed, so Zara (the Bosnian ally of Robin Hood’s Saracen pal) and Rev Cantrell (Friar Tuck’s ally and the Chapel’s holy man, for a certain very lax definition of ‘holy’) undertook to reunite them with their family.
         Citing a concern, and on the face of it a perfectly reasonable one, that their descriptions might lead the Circle to us, they insisted on going in disguise. Watching them leading the children away into the woods – Rev, bewigged and compulsively adjusting the generous padding needed to fill out a dress a good many sizes too big for his skinny frame, and Zara, in shirt and trousers with a false moustache, slapping her thigh with a nervous and entirely assumed bonhomie – was our first hint that the pressure of the schism between Chapel and Circle might be forcing the allies to manifest in unaccustomed and frankly disturbing ways.
         The absence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can’t be helping, of course. This is the time of year when those two traditionally slug it out with axes, enacting a mythic ritual thingy of decapitation and rebirth that presumably symbolises the death of the old year, vegetation, sunlight and so forth, and the return of all of the above in the forthcoming spring.
         According to Merry at least, that would have provided some much-needed release for all this pent-up devicial energy – but there is, of course, a problem. The ‘Green Knight’ is what the Robin Hood ally used to be called before there was a Robin Hood, and what the Circle still call it. It’s something the Chapel’s been noticeably missing since the death of Shafiq Rashid a month ago at the Circle’s hands.
          Which brings us to our guest, Jory Taylor – or ‘Dan’, as we’re all still calling him. Shaf’s friend, Merry’s boyfriend and the former bondsman of Sir Gawain among the Knights of the Circle, he’s been moody ever since we rescued him from his own people on his way to their private psychiatric prison, and despite the fact that most of us consider him the heir apparent to the Robin Hood ally – Merry being our own Maid Marian, after all, and someone we trust implicitly to choose well – he’s yet to show much sign of leadership.
         Indeed, with the possible exception of Merry herself when they’re in private, he’s not been saying much to anyone at all.
         It won’t be till later that I’ll realise that Jory, who used to bear the device of Sir Gawain and is now being expected to take on the mantle of the Green Knight, might be experiencing quite a bit of inner conflict around this time of year.

* * *

         This year’s Midwinter Day is bright, crisp and clear – the sunshine actually warming at times, though not enough to make you take off any of your extra layers. A white Christmas is clearly out of the question, but the moss in the shadows under the trees surrounding our communal clearing still bears the night’s frost as late as lunchtime.
         Which is when Ahmed becomes the latest of us to start acting strangely. Without any obvious provocation, the young Somali – the ally of the relatively obscure Merry Man Arthur a’Bland, and normally the sweetest guy in the world – starts insulting Jory, calling him among other things an arrogant, muscle-headed English idiot with unadventurous taste in food. You can tell he doesn’t get much practice being abusive, but he seems in a genuinely belligerent mood about it.
         Jory, who’s been quietly reading next to his and Merry’s tent, looks confused and a little hurt. Merry seems more concerned. While some of us try to tell Ahmed not to be such a prat, Merry unships her laptop and fires up the 4G.
         ‘Relax kid, there’s no need for any of this,’ Rev points out reasonably.
         ‘Aye, Dan’s a big guy,’ grunts Scar, Will Scarlet’s ally and Zara’s girlfriend. ‘You take him on, it isn’t gonna end well.’
         ‘I don’t care. That swine has had it coming,’ Ahmed inexplicably insists, and tries to launch himself in Jory’s direction. Scar and Zara grab an arm each.
         ‘I honestly don’t know what your problem is, Ahmed,’ Jory tells him sincerely, ‘but I don’t want to fight you. Let’s drop it, shall we?’
         ‘Ah, so you’re scared of me, you coward?’ Ahmed sneers. Jory starts to look justifiably irritated.
         ‘Hold on, hold on,’ says Merry, standing up. She’s scanning her laptop screen rapidly. ‘It looks like this is another of those seasonal things. Ahmed, calm down, your ally’s riling you up deliberately. It’s trying to act out the plot of a traditional Christmas mummers’ play. Well, one set of variants anyway. You’re going to end up getting knocked unconscious at the very least.’
         Ahmed doesn’t seem in much of a mood to listen, so Little John’s ally Big Jack Bennett steps in. ‘Listen, pal,’ he says, ‘Dan’s our guest here, aye? He doesn’t need you in his face, acting like a pillock.’
         And at this point, his ally obviously too stoked-up to be held back any longer, Ahmed breaks free of the women and hurls himself, not at Jory but at Jack.
         ‘Bugger,’ mutters Merry. ‘That’s in the script too.’
         I try to skim the text of the play over her shoulder. It does indeed look like a free adaptation of the ballad ‘Robin Hood and the Tanner’, where Arthur a’Bland, the Bold Tanner, turns up and needlessly antagonises Robin Hood, but ends up fighting Little John.
         With reality mimicking drama now, there’s only one way that’s likely to go. Jory may be bigger than Ahmed, but Big Jack must be twice the Somali lad’s body-weight, and has probably been brawling longer than he’s been alive. It doesn’t take an especially epic bout of fisticuffs before the big guy punches Ahmed’s lights out.

* * *

         ‘So what do we do now?’ I ask, as we all gaze down at Ahmed lying, nose bloodied but looking kind of peaceful, on the chilly grass.
         Merry’s frowning. ‘I think, now we’re here, we just let the scenario play itself out,’ she says. She flicks through the script. ‘We’ll need a doctor to cure him.’ (I’ve never looked much into mummers’ plays, but I know that bit isn’t in the ballad.) ‘Preferably a drunken, boastful one. My doctorate’s in psychology, so I’m not sure if…’
         ‘Hey, I’ll give the kid first aid.’ Rev shrugs. ‘No doctorate maybe, but I qualify on those other grounds.’ He lopes off to his tent to get his things.
         ‘Well, I don’t recall this happening before,’ I say, as we wait for him to come back. As the bard of the group, Alan a’Dale’s human ally, I’m supposed to be intimately familiar with the Chapel’s oral history. ‘Anyone else?’
         There’s a general shaking of heads. Even old Brian – the sole survivor of the ’60s version of the Chapel, whose Friar Tuck was a failed guru on the run from creditors in Bradford and whose Marian was a drag queen called ‘Marion Repent’ – says he’s never seen the like.
         Rev hurries back. ‘Hold this a minute,’ he says to Jack, handing him a small glass vial. He bends down to hoick Ahmed into the recovery position.
         Big Jack gingerly unstoppers the bottle and sniffs it. He reels back and stumbles over a guy-rope, sprawling backwards into a tent which immediately collapses. A squeal of protest emerges from its compressed occupant.
         ‘Apparently the doctor’s pretty much the only constant in these plays,’ muses Merry, as Zara tuts and retrieves the vial. ‘Apart from the slapstick,’ she adds as Big Jack sits up groggily and finds himself entangled in a cat’s cradle of guy-ropes. ‘The combatants are more usually St George and either the Dragon or a Turkish knight, but someone always ends up getting brought back to life. I’m guessing the tradition originated as a midwinter death-and-resurrection drama, but so watered down now it’s practically homeopathic.’
         ‘You mean like the Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight story?’ I wonder. Then: ‘Oh, I get it. You reckon this was, what, filling in? Little John and Arthur a’Bland as understudies for the big two?’
         ‘I suppose they were the best alternatives available,’ Merry agrees. ‘We’ve got a Saracen, but no St George.’
         ‘I think you loosen his clothing enough now, Rev,’ Zara observes neutrally, passing Cantrell the vial. ‘What happen next, Merry, in this play?’
          Behind her Big Jack uses another guy rope to pull himself upright. A nearby tent falls over under his weight, disgorging an indignant semi-clad couple.
         ‘Well,’ sighs Merry. ‘The best way of bringing the whole thing to a dignified close would probably be to have Old Father Christmas turn up and suggest everyone has a feast instead. Although I’m not sure how much significance Father Christmas would have for Ahmed.’
         Suddenly Ahmed sits up with a gasp. ‘What was that?’ he asks, grasping Cantrell’s wrist. Rev’s been waving his vial underneath the lad’s nose. ‘What’s in that bottle?’
         ‘Ah… just a little something I had about the place,’ says Rev evasively. ‘Let’s just say it acts as a pick-me up.’
         ‘You just gave Ahmed poppers?’ groans Scar. ‘Jesus, Rev.’
         ‘Amyl nitrite,’ I explain helpfully to Jory, seeing his puzzled look. ‘It’s a gay scene drug. Ahmed will be on a short-lived high right now.’
         ‘Hey, you expect me to have smelling salts lying around?’ Cantrell asks defensively. ‘What am I, the vicar in a Jane Austen novel?’
         I realise we haven’t resolved the Father Christmas issue, but Jory steps in at this point. ‘Hey, Ahmed,’ he cries, ‘You’re feeling better! We need to celebrate! What do you say to a good old Green Chapel party, eh?’
         For a moment Ahmed simply looks confused, then a wide smile spreads across his face. ‘My friend, I like your attitude! Yes! Yes, I’m in a party mood!’
         ‘Someone get some music on, for God’s sake,’ snaps Merry, and there’s a general scurrying to set things up for a shindig. Someone produces some finger-food, someone starts dragging out the homebrew, and someone even finds a box of party poppers – the kind that go bang this time.
         A couple of minutes later – which, from what I gather, is about when one might expect Ahmed to start coming down – everyone’s happily grooving away to Claxton and the Ranters.

* * *

         ‘I didn’t like being cast as Robin Hood,’ Jory confides, half an hour later when a few of us get a chance to chat at the makeshift bar. ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable with that, to be honest. I just can’t see myself as a leader. If I have to be Santa Claus to avoid it, then so be it.’ He grabs a beer and wanders over to where Burn, our street-conjurer-in-residence, is doing tricks for the kids. A girl called Finn is claiming stridently that she saw exactly where that coin went.
         ‘Hell, if I’d known the part of Santa was available, I’d have passed up the doctor,’ Rev tells us. ‘Fat, jolly, holy, drinks far too much sherry? Sounds like my kind of guy.’ Collecting a drink of his own, the scrawny man heads back for the impromptu dance floor, where Ahmed’s cheerfully boogying arm-in-arm with Big Jack.
         That leaves just Merry and me. ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’ I ask her. ‘I saw your expression just then, and earlier too. Dan perking up suddenly like that… that means something.’
         The smile that comes over her face doesn’t quite avoid being smug. ‘I think it does,’ she says. ‘You see, Old Father Christmas… he isn’t Santa. The whole gift-giving thing came much later. The traditional British personification of Christmas is older than St Nicholas.’
         ‘Who is it, then?’ I ask.
         She’s definitely smirking now. ‘Well, he wears green. Holly and ivy leaves, too. He turns up at Midwinter, and invites people to a feast where he plays host. He represents the bounty of spring and of the vegetation, the hope of renewal persisting through the winter. He sounds, you know, an awful lot like…’
         ‘Ah,’ I say, looking over to where Jory’s cheerfully handing round the cheese straws. ‘Yeah, I see.’
         It looks like the Green Knight’s paid us a Midwinter visit after all.

‘Here come I, old Father Christmas.
Christmas comes but once a year,
but when it comes it brings good cheer,
roast beef and plum pudding.
A little money in our pockets, ladies and gentlemen?’
The South Cerney Mummers’ Play

A very merry Christmas to anyone who's still reading.

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.

Furthest Tales of the City

You (Yes, you over there! Pay attention!) will be pleased to learn that the fourth anthology of City of the Saved short stories, Furthest Tales of the City, is due for release some time in late 2015.

The blurb goes like this:

Even the secular afterlife created for humanity by the Secret Architects has its limits – and there will always be those Citizens who chafe against those limits.  Environmentally, culturally, biologically, cosmologically, politically, experientially, some will always seek to go further. 

For instance…

A group mind facing the troubling truth of resurrection.  A comatose giant with human inhabitants of its own.  A civilisation re-enacting an impossible apocalypse.  A woman with negligible human ancestry out on the dating scene.  A cult who inhabit the deep infrastructure underlying the City.  A fictional adventurer starved of the risks his narrative craves.

These are their tales.

And here's the lineup of stories:

Salutation – Philip Purser-Hallard
Weighty Questions – Juliet Kemp
Sleeping Giants – Elizabeth Evershed
Driving Home for Atonatiuh – Lawrence Burton
The Smallest Spark – Paul Hiscock
The Places Above, Between and Below – Louise Sellers
We Only Live Twice (But the City Is Not Enough) – Helen Angove
God Encompasses – Philip Purser-Hallard

Juliet, Liz and Helen are all returning contributors to the City of the Saved, having written stories for the first Tales of the City in 2012. (Liz also wrote for Tales of the Great Detectives in 2014, meaning that she's written more City of the Saved fiction than anyone other than me.) Lawrence Burton is new to the City, but will be familiar to regular Obverse readers as the author of the Faction Paradox novel Against Nature and the Señor 105 novella The Grail, or Señor 105 y el Pueblo del Gobernador Demente, as well as being the regular cover artist for the Faction Paradox books. Paul Hiscock was a contributor to The Obverse Book of Detectives, while Louise Sellers's fiction is published here for the first time.

All of their stories are, in their different ways, marvellous -- variously exciting, weird, thought-provoking and hilarious.

Sharp-eyed readers may notice that a short story called 'God Encompasses' has been up on my website for a while now: this is indeed an updated version of that story. 'Salutation' is a new companion piece. Even more insightful readers may realise that both stories are, very approximately, named after pubs.

I'll update this blog, and my website, when further information -- cover, publication date, that sort of thing -- starts to make itself known.

Meet the Martians

In the event, only one reader entered the competition to identify the types of fictional Martian mentioned in my short story "Green Mars Blues", and that was in fact another of the contributors to Iris Wildthyme of Mars.

I said that I thought there were nineteen types of Martian in the story. I have to admit it depends heavily on how you count.

From the beginning...

1. The Green Man (first appearance p227): A Green Martian from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom sequence.
2. Jenah Pharis (p229): A Red Martian from Barsoom.
3. The Tripods (p232): Obviously, the war machines from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
4. The Coy Stripper and Her "Snake" (p234): An adult and juvenile of the species described in Philip José Farmer's short story "My Sister's Brother".
5 & 6. The Fake Charlatan and the Incompetent Ghost  (p234): One of the telepathic Martians, and one of the slightly different shapeshifting telepathic Martians, from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.
7. The Locusts (p236): The evil insectile Martians from Quatermass and the Pit, with accompanying aerial psychic projection.
8. The Angels of Pavonis Mons (p238): The Eldila from C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet.
9, 10 & 11. The Spindly Men, the Otters and the Froggy Things (p238): The Sorns, Hrossa and Pfifltriggi from Out of the Silent Planet.
12. The Blue (or Possibly Green) Giants (p240): Either the Argzoon from Michael Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars sequence, or the Ice Warriors from Doctor Who.
13. Great Octopus Things (p240): From Men, Martians and Machines by Eric Frank Russell (though other answers would probably have been acceptable).
14. Merpeople (p240): From Doctor Omega by Arnould Galopin.
15. The Blue Lightning (p240): A Fire Balloon from The Martian Chronicles.
16. The Christmas Visitor (p240): Either Dropo from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, or the Alien Super-Being from Christmas on Mars.
17. The Flashing Eyes in the Dark (p241): The Man from Mars in the Blondie song "Rapture". (The biggest clue's in what he eats.)
18. The Laughers at Potatoes (p241): The robotic Martians from the 1970s Smash adverts. (I wouldn't have thought of including these Martians in the story without the input of Andrew Hickey, to whom thanks.)
19. The Armoured Reptile (p250): Definitely an Ice Warrior.

For bonus points, the title of Marcie's proposed talk "Grokking Vulthoom: The Role of Indigene Legends in Modern Cult Formation" (p242) references Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and "Vulthoom" by Clark Ashton Smith.

To his credit, our entrant Simon Bucher-Jones identified twelve of those (fourteen including the bonuses). He also pointed out several texts that identify Jesus (mentioned on p226) as a Martian, and made a valiant effort to name eighteen works which include Martian tripods (on the basis that Marcie has encountered eighteen variants of the story). Simon wins the signed copy of The Pendragon Protocol by default, but it's certainly deserved.

Here's the thing

Today I was sent a link to a forum post where someone speaks enthusiastically about how much they've enjoyed some books of mine (among a number of others), and offers to share the ebook versions with other forum users for free.

I don't know how certain people so consistently fail to understand this, but here it is. Books (including ebooks) are as good as they are, and cost the amounts they do, because a lot of people's time -- authors', editors', illustrators', publishers' -- goes into creating them. You're not paying for the paper and ink that make up the book, or the server space the ebook is held on, you're paying for the time -- sometimes months or years -- that people have spent lovingly working on this thing you've enjoyed reading. To then distribute that work for free -- thus ensuring that the publisher's sales and income remain low and that the money they have to compensate their authors, editors and illustrators remains limited -- shows a degree of thoughtlessness and contempt for those people and their work that's simply staggering.

Other people's work is worth your money. If you won't pay, you don't deserve the benefit of the work. It's that simple.

Competition Time

Right. I have a signed copy of my urban fantasy thriller The Pendragon Protocol to give away, to someone who can demonstrate their close reading abilities and knowledge of obscure science fiction.

To win this you'll need to find a copy of the anthology Iris Wildthyme of Mars. This may sound like a large investment, but a) the ebook version is currently only £5.99 in the Obverse sale, b) The Pendragon Protocol paperback costs £7.99 at Amazon, and c) you'll be getting to buy and keep an anthology I'm very proud of with stories by lots of talented authors that you'll really enjoy. And if you're lucky and win, you'll end up with £13.98 worth of book for £5.99.

The prize will go to anyone who can identify all the types of fictional Martian who are referred to in my story 'Green Mars Blues' in Iris Wildthyme of Mars. There are (I believe) nineteen to identify altogether.

Rules:

1. Email entries to me at martians@infinitarian.com. Please don't post identifications as comments here. 
2. If nobody identifies all nineteen types of Martian, whoever makes the most correct identifications wins. 
3. Some references are deliberately ambiguous, so I'll accept more than one answer. (Identifying both my intended answers will count as an extra point for the purposes of rule 2.) 
4. The closing date will be Sunday 15 February.

Feel free to post any queries here or on Twitter.

Tableaux

A Merry Christmas to all those of you reading this.

Every year I send out a story in my Christmas cards, and every year I put the previous year's online. The past ones are all archived on this blog, but 2013's was a touch experimental, being 720 words of prose supplied on seven cards that could be rearranged in different combinations to create 720 different narratives[1].

That isn't something I can really present via Blogger, but the indispensable Dale Smith has kindly translated it into PHP so I can publish it on my website.

I give you my 2013 Christmas 'story', 'Tableaux'. 

2014's story is more linear, and is a direct tie-in with the Devices trilogy, taking place between The Pendragon Protocol and the second book. I'm not sure quite what's going to happen with that one -- it may appear as an extra in the books at some point. (I'll tell you, though, that it's called "Mummers and Poppers: A Devices Story for Christmas".)

A very pleasing festive season to you all.

[1] Note for the mathematically competent: Yes, I know. One of them always comes first.

Encycled

I’m delighted and slightly stunned to discover that, with the publication of The Pendragon Protocol, I now merit my own entry in the science fiction readers’ Bible, John Clute et al’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  I owned the first edition from the age of twelve or thereabouts; I still have the 21-year-old second edition (see right) and its sister volume, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, on my shelves, and I’ve been avidly consulting the third edition since it went online in 2011. It’s difficult to express quite how proud I feel of finally warranting an appearance of my own in this arcane compendium.

Admittedly I don’t entirely agree with the details of my entry. (I’d argue, for instance, that while The Pendragon Protocol does indeed mention Christian values, it’s hardly uncritical of them, and that — while I’m delighted if the novel works for a Young Adult readership — that wasn’t actually the demographic I was primarily aiming for. Also, the Encyclopedia doesn't seem to be aware of Peculiar Lives, which I would have thought was pretty much up its street.)

This is scarcely the point, though. Among other things, John Clute (John Clute! The SF critic's SF critic!) thinks Of the City of the Saved is "ambitious". I'm unbelievably pleased about this.

* * *

...Well, anyway. In other, not-at-all anticlimactic news, Iris Wildthyme of Mars now exists in hard copy, and is available to order from Obverse Books:

• Iris Wilthyme of Mars hardback
• Iris Wildthyme of Mars ebook
• Tales of the Great Detectives paperback
• Tales of the Great Detectives ebook

As well as writing the third Devices book (the second having been submitted to Snowbooks at the end of September), I'm talking to Stuart at Obverse about possible future anthologies. Watch this space.

Iris and Sherlock (at last, but not together)

It's rather later than expected, I know, but it's now possible to pre-order the two anthologies I've edited this year, Iris Wildthyme of Mars and Tales of the Great Detectives, from Obverse Books. If you're not of a mind to wait for another couple of weeks, or would rather not pay for the print versions (hardback and paperback respectively), it's also possible to buy and download the ebooks for consumption this very instant.

I'm very proud of both anthologies: a total of seventeen thoroughly talented people have contributed to them, they deal with two of my favourite genre characters (albeit in unfamiliar contexts in both cases), the covers are excellent, and I think they've turned out as really lovely books through and through.

Here are the links to do that ordering you'll be so keen on:

• Iris Wilthyme of Mars hardback preorder
• Iris Wildthyme of Mars ebook
• Tales of the Great Detectives paperback preorder 
• Tales of the Great Detectives ebook

Enjoy.

* * *

I've no particular reason to suppose that these will be the last anthologies I'll be editing for Obverse Books, but I thought it might be interesting at this point to look at who I've published so far (since with the publication of these two books the number nearly doubles). Excluding myself, the list goes like this:

• Helen Angove (Tales of the City)
• Aditya Bidikar  (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Blair Bidmead (Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars -- also the cover artist for Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Simon Bucher-Jones (More Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Rachel Churcher (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Mark Clapham (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Jay Eales (More Tales of the City)
• Elizabeth Evershed (Tales of the City and Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Jess Faraday (Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Kelly Hale (More Tales of the City and Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Dave Hoskin (Tales of the City)
• Juliet Kemp (Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Selina Lock (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Stephen Marley (Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Chantelle Messier (Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Lance Parkin (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Ian Potter (More Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Dale Smith (Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Daniel Tessier (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Susannah Tiller (More Tales of the City)
• Richard Wright (More Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Andrew Hickey (Tales of the Great Detectives)

So...

1. That's 22 authors, eight of whom I've commissioned twice, two of whom co-wrote a single story, thus contributing a total of 29 stories (mine excluded). 
2. Of these authors, if I'm remembering correctly, nine hadn't previously been published by Obverse Books or their online wing Manleigh Books; six were making their debuts as professionally published writers. 
3. Of those 22 authors, 16 are British (and I believe in fact English), three American, two Australian and one Indian. However, two of the Brits are based in the USA, and one returned to the UK from India between their first and second commission. The book with the highest concentration of non-UK authors is Tales of the Great Detectives, half of whose contributors are American. 
4. Nine of the authors are women, 13 men; of the stories, 12 are by women and 17 by men. (Those aren't great statistics, admittedly, but they're better than many genre anthologies manage.)  Of the individual anthologies, Tales of the Great Detectives has a majority of female authors, and Tales of the City at least achieves parity (although only if you exclude my contributions).
5. To the best of my knowledge without having actually met them all (see 6), all but one of these people are white. 
6. Eight of the authors are people I've met in real life: five of them I'd never interacted with prior to commissioning them. The rest, predictably, I knew online. (Only three of them are people I went out with, went to university with or invited to my wedding.) 
7. Between us to date (counting co-author credits, and including my own titles this time), the contributors to these anthologies are responsible for 15 Doctor Who novels, four Bernice Summerfield novels, four Faction Paradox novels (with more in the works), four Señor 105 novellas, three Time Hunter novellas and something like 65 short stories for Obverse Books.

Those, then, are the facts. Suggestions as to what any of this might mean, or other ways in which I could (feasibly, and within the bounds of decency and good taste) break that list down, will be received with interest.

Duck and Cover

Did I mention that the cover design for Iris Wildthyme of Mars (created by Cody Quijano-Schell around Paul Hanley's outstanding artwork) has now been finalised?

No? Well, it has.

I'm amused that, of the three covers of books which are out this year with my name on them...

...two have union jacks on them, two have city skylines, and the other pair have something more unusual in common, which I'll leave it to you to discover. (One instance of it isn't at all easy to spot on the version above.)

I must say, I'm really very pleased with all of these. I'd say Iris Wildthyme of Mars and The Pendragon Protocol are easily the two best covers for books I've been published in, and Tales of the Great Detectives is great too.

Oh, What a Giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Pendragon Protocol

by Philip Purser-Hallard

Giveaway ends July 01, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Detective Art

The cover has now been finalised for Tales of the Great Detectives, the third City of the Saved collection due out from Obverse Books in the next month or two.

The artwork is by the polytalented Blair Bidmead, with cover design by Cody Quijano-Schell, and it's a bit of a departure from the previous Tales volumes (click for full-sized versions):

I'm really pleased with how this has come out. Blair's captured just the right blend of tradition and weirdness, as well as visualising the headquarters of the Great Detective Agency exactly how I've always pictured them.

We have a new version of the blurb as well:

The Afterlives of Sherlock Holmes

The City of the Saved houses every human being who ever lived... but some of its immortal Citizens need more. For the Remakers, one fiction above all exerts its fascination: a character existing in countless interpretations, many of them now recreated in the flesh and in business together as the Great Detective Agency.

These are their tales.

In the Agency’s annals, the City’s many Sherlock Holmeses solve the Case of the Pipe Dream, experience the Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate and explore the strangely clichéd Mansion of Doom. A Watson falls in love; a Moriarty goes missing; and Holmes comes face-to-face with his arch-nemesis, the sinister Dr Conan Doyle...

Hopefully the book will be appearing for preordering from Obverse soon. I'll let you all know as soon as that transpires.

Sorry, Site

It's been a source of increasing bother to me that my website, conforming as it does to the design I cobbled together in about an hour and a half in 2004, now looks distinctly dated, as if designed by characters from Neuromancer. Given that I have the first volume of a smart professional new trilogy due out soon, this issue needed resolution... but with over 200 pages at www.infinitarian.com, there clearly wasn't any likelihood that I'd manage to redesign them all, or shunt them to a platform where redesign was easier, any time soon.

Today I unveil my solution, proudly cobbled together in an hour and a half yesterday afternoon: the Devices Trilogy microsite at WordPress, dedicated solely to the new novels, with character sketches, some notes on heraldry and two entirely separate bibliographies. There's also a dedicated blog, which does raise the question of whether I continue blogging here. In the short term the answer's yes, at least about non-Devices stuff, but the jury's out on that one in the long term. I may, indeed, migrate all the content from the www.infinitarian.com site to WordPress, bit by bit.

Remember, Tales of the Great Detectives and Iris Wildthyme of Mars are also due out in the coming months. In the meantime, please feel free to read, comment on and share the new site to your hearts' content.

Enter the Pendragon

It's a year to the day since I submitted my urban-fantasy thriller The Pendragon Protocol to Snowbooks. Today we finalised the cover design:

The image was created by the outrageously talented Emma Barnes, and I love it to pieces. The way it balances thriller and fantasy, modernity and antiquity is wonderful, and the endorsement from Simon Morden is the icing on the cake.  

Here's the blurb again:

The Circle are the modern-day successors of the Knights of the Round Table. Armed with the latest military hardware and operating from a hidden fortress on the South Bank of the Thames, they protect 21st-century Britain from certain very specific threats – criminals who, like the Circle’s own Knights, have characters from Arthurian legend living inside their heads.

Jory Taylor, the Knight bearing the device of Sir Gawain, has grappled on the Circle’s behalf with mercenaries, serial killers and far-right terrorist cells. However, when he is captured by Gawain’s traditional enemy the Green Knight, he discovers a new side to the myths he lives by – one which, as he learns more about this clandestine world, becomes both threateningly personal and terrifyingly political.

The legends of King Arthur are not the only stories with influence on the British psyche – and some of the others have their own, very different agendas.

A smart, contemporary political thriller and a new kind of urban fantasy, The Pendragon Protocol is the first volume in The Devices Trilogy.

The Pendragon Protocol is out on 1 July from Snowbooks. I'll post ordering details at some point over the next few weeks.  

Mars (Your Enjoyment)

I imagine you've all been on tenterhooks (which look like this, apparently) for months now, waiting for the announcement of the author and title lineup for the utterly fabulous forthcoming anthology Iris Wildthyme of Mars.

Please now unhook yourselves from whichever tenter you've been occupying, because the time has now arrived when such an announcement can be made, and it looks like this:

Wandering Stars – Ian Potter
Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Bad Weekend – Daniel Tessier
Iris: Chess-Mistress of Mars – Simon Bucher-Jones
Death on the Euphrates – Selina Lock
And a Dog to Walk – Dale Smith
Talking with Spores – Juliet Kemp
Doomed – Richard Wright
The Last Martian – Rachel Churcher
Lilac Mars – Mark Clapham and Lance Parkin
City of Dust – Aditya Bidikar
The Calamari-Men of Mare Cimmerium – Blair Bidmead
Green Mars Blues – Philip Purser-Hallard

Dale, Juliet and Blair will be familiar to readers of the City of the Saved anthologies as the respective authors of 'About a Girl', 'Lost Ships and Lost Lands' and 'Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy' in Tales of the City; as will Ian, Simon and Richard, who wrote 'The Long-Distance Somnambulist', 'Double Trouble at the Parasites on the Proletariat Club' and 'The Mystery of the Rose' for More Tales of the City.

People who like reading the kind of stuff I write (or who just follow Obverse Books' output) may also be aware of Selina through her Señor 105 e-novella Green Eyed and Grim, and of Aditya through his outstanding short story 'Dharmayuddha' in the Faction Paradox anthology Burning with Optimism's Flames. Both have also written and done other things with comics.

Rachel is a brilliant unpublished author who I've been trying to persuade to write for an anthology since I started editing them. Daniel is the winner of the open submissions competition to choose a new contributor for Iris Wildthyme of Mars: his story is a wonderful sequel to Edwin L Arnold's early, out-of-copyright planetary romance Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, also known as Gulliver of Mars.

Finally, Mark and Lance are prolific novelists and authors whose respective most recent works are the zombie novel Dead Stop and the acclaimed biography Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore. Mark has written for Iris before (in The Panda Book of Horror), but this is Lance's first work for Obverse. 'Lilac Mars' is a sequel to their earlier collaboration, Beige Planet Mars, published in 1998 (and therefore now 15% of the age of Gulliver of Mars).

I'm honoured and proud to have accumulated such a portfolio of talent for my first full-length anthology, and I'm terribly pleased with the stories they've all submitted. The book is designed as a tour of Mars as it appears in fiction, from the classical conception of the Ptolemaic heavens, through early scientific romances, the heyday of the pulps and the later vogue for 'hard SF', to the genre-blending of the 21st century. Along the way you'll find nods to a great many familiar names, plus more poetry, illustrations and maps than you might imagine.

We also have an updated blurb:

The Red Planet.

Everyone agrees about the colour, at least. The rest is up for grabs. 

Is Mars a dead and sterile desert, or teeming with life? 

Are Martians red, green or blue? Nubile and lithe, or monstrously tentacular? 
Are they long gone, or waiting still? How do they feel about visitors? 
Will we become the Martians? What kind of a world might we build on Mars? What myths, new or old, might we create there? 
Oh – and how many different colours can you put in front of ‘Mars’ to make a clever title?

These Marses are of course incompatible, contradictory, and in many cases quite impossible. And Iris Wildthyme has visited them all.

Iris Wildthyme of Mars is due out in the summer. I'll keep you posted when it's ready to pre-order.

Four for 2014

Where have we got to, you may well ask, with the various writing and editing projects of mine which are due out this year?

Here's a rundown.

Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, the anthology of new Holmes stories edited by George Mann which opens with my "The Adventure of the Professor's Bequest", is out now from Titan Books, and has received at least one review (although it doesn't mention my story specifically).

Tales of the Great Detectives, the anthology I've edited about the adventures of the Sherlock Holmes remakes in the City of the Saved, featuring stories by Stephen Marley, Jess Faraday, Chantelle Messier, Kelly Hale, Andrew Hickey and Elizabeth Evershed, is finished and sent off to Obverse Books. I can't show you a cover for that one yet, but I've already posted the blurb here. The current plan is for an Easter release.

Iris Wildthyme of Mars, the anthology of stories I'm editing about the adventures of Paul Magrs' character Iris Wildthyme on the red planet, is still in progress, due out from Obverse Books in the summer. It already has some truly excellent cover art, courtesy of Paul Hanley:

Finally, The Pendragon Protocol, my original novel from Snowbooks which is the first in the Devices Trilogy, is finished (indeed, the sequel's half written) and due out in July. The cover for that, by the highly talented Emma Barnes, also looks fantastic, but I can't share a final version of it yet. I'll keep you posted.

Tales of the Great Detectives

Good day to you all.

I'm pleased to say that I'm very close to submitting the manuscript for Tales of the Great Detectives, the third City of the Saved anthology.

Here's the draft blurb:

The Afterlives of Sherlock Holmes

The City of the Saved houses every human being who ever lived. Inevitably, its immortal Citizens entertain themselves by recreating those who never did. One fiction above all has drawn the attentions of the Remakers – a character existing in countless interpretations, many of them now alive and in business together as the Great Detective Agency.

These are their tales.

Read about Holmes and Watson’s sojourn in the strangely clichéd Mansion of Doom, about the Case of the Pipe Dream and the Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate. Learn what happens when a Watson falls in love, when a Moriarty goes missing, and when Sherlock Holmes comes face-to-face with his arch-nemesis, the sinister Dr Conan Doyle...

And here's the lineup of story titles and authors:

Young Sherlock Holmes and the Mansion of Doom – Stephen Marley
Eliminating the Impossible – Jess Faraday
The Case of the Pipe Dream – Chantelle Messier
Art in the Blood – Kelly Hale
The Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate – Andrew Hickey
The Baker Street Dozen – Elizabeth Evershed


I'm absolutely delighted, once again, to have assembled such a talented group of people to write in my shared universe.

Liz Evershed and Kelly Hale will be familiar to readers of Tales of the City and More Tales of the City as the authors of 'The Socratic Problem' and 'The Isis Method' respectively. Kelly in particular has form with the original Great Detective, being the author of the critically acclaimed Erasing Sherlock and a contributor to George Mann's Encounters of Sherlock Holmes.

Stephen Marley's a respected genre novelist, his best-known work being the Chia Black Dragon sequence of novels based on Chinese vampire folklore. His Doctor Who novel Managra was, as I've said elsewhere, a huge inspiration to me in creating the City in the first place, so I'm delighted that he's contributing to its world at last. Like Liz and Kelly, Stephen's written other short stories for Obverse Books in the past.

Jess Faraday is a novelist who's written period detective stories, ghost stories and a steampunk thriller, and is writing for Obverse for the first time. Her Ira Adler sequence juxtaposes Holmesian plotlines with Victorian London's criminalised gay subculture.

Andrew Hickey's a prolific blogger and critic of music, comics and Doctor Who, while Chantelle Messier contributed a brilliantly funny story to The Obverse Book of Detectives. Both also have self-published short fiction to their name, and Andrew at least has another professional commission in the pipeline.

All six have written seriously good stories which transpose Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, their friends, their enemies and their creator, to the City of the Saved.  I'm proud to be publishing them all.

Tales of the Great Detectives will be published in Spring 2014 -- more details will follow when I know them.

* * *

(And in case you can't wait until then for a book with my name on the outside and Sherlock Holmes' on the inside, Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, which includes my story 'The Adventure of the Professor's Bequest', is out imminently from Titan Books.)

Jan

It's that time of the year again, when we hang mince pies on the tree and children gleefully stuff themselves with mistletoe. It's also the time when I send out a Christmas story to family and friends in, or in place of, Christmas cards. 

This year's one is a bit odd and experimental, and I'm honestly not sure how to go about presenting it here. That's all right, though, because I always blog these stories a year in arrears, so I have twelve months to think about it.

In the meantime, here (and also here) is last year's story, "Jan". This one has a New Year theme, so you should feel free to come back to it in twelve days' time if you want to.

Interestingly (perhaps), while a lot of my fiction has dealt with gender fluidity one way or another, this is the first time I've written about an ordinary transsexual character in a (mostly) realistic present-day setting. I hope I haven't made a hideous hash of it. 

JAN

     He was waiting in the doorway as I left the club. Acid-washed jeans, blue converse trainers, spotless white T-shirt outlining his abs. The face I saw was young, white, perhaps my age, with a minimalist goatee I assumed was ironic. He loitered in the doorway, looking as much a fixture as if someone had screwed him there.
     For all I knew, someone might have. It was that sort of club.
     ‘Going home?’ he said, his voice smiling in the semi-darkness. He sounded like someone who was used to getting his questions answered.
     ‘What if I am?’ I snapped. It was none of his business. He wasn’t a bouncer – too slight, too well-spoken, wrong clothes altogether – and anyway their job’s to keep people out, not in.
     ‘The night hasn’t even got going yet,’ he said. ‘You’ll miss the festivities.’
     ‘That’s kind of the idea,’ I agreed, hoping to shut him up. I was in the middle of a major flounce-out after splitting up with a boyfriend, and stopping for an awkward conversation at the door wasn’t part of the plan.
     ‘Nearly midnight,’ he said, ‘on New Year’s Eve. And you’ve decided to split.’
     ‘Split?’ I repeated. ‘What, have we gone back to the ’50s? Crazy, daddy-oh.’ I was itching to leave, dreading the scene if Paul tried to come after me – he hadn’t taken it well.
     I could have just walked away, I realise. Lied perhaps, told him I was going to meet friends at the Square. For some reason I didn’t even think of it.
     ‘Would you prefer cleave?’ he asked. ‘That can mean split.’ It occurred to me then to worry that maybe he was some kind of serial killer. ‘Or it can mean cling. If you told me you were going to cleave fast, I wouldn’t know if you mean split quickly or stay firmly where you are.’
     ‘What are you on about?’ I’d asked, realising I could probably have left off the last word. (Was he high? Or was I, and he was actually talking perfect sense? It’s happened before.)
     ‘They’re called antagonyms,’ he said. ‘Words which can mean one thing or its opposite. Are you bound for home, or has talking to me bound you here? If I relax my oversight and let you go, will that be an oversight?’
     ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve had this chat,’ I said. ‘Call it what you want, I’m going home.’
     ‘Go where you like,’ he said. ‘You’ll still be on the threshold.’
     It was an odd thing, but since we’d been standing in that doorway, almost blocking it between us, not only had Paul not come after me, but nobody else had pushed past to get in or out of the club. I wondered where the actual bouncers had gone.
     ‘I know who you are, Jan,’ he said. And that really bothered me, because that wasn’t the name I used at the club. I hadn’t used it anywhere, except at the support group.
     I’d only recently decided it was going to be my real name.
     ‘Obviously you don’t,’ I said in as alpha-male a voice as I could muster while I tried to remember where in my man-bag I kept my rape alarm. ‘Because my name’s Ian. Jan’s a woman’s name. Or a foreign one.’
     ‘Well, quite,’ he said. ‘Two names, two identities. Two faces.’
     ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ I said, angry at him for making me talk about this at all. ‘There’s just one me. I’m being true to myself, that’s all.’
     ‘Cleaving,’ he said again.
     The clocks chimed then, prompting mad cheering from the Square and all the pubs and bars around.

     * * *

     ‘Do you think you’ll ever replace him?’ he called after me as I left the club. I guessed he was talking about Paul, who still – I noticed – wasn’t following me. It still wasn’t any of his damn business.
     I walked to the nightbus stop and rode home with the rest of the city’s least enthusiastic revellers. At home I stripped off Ian’s paint-the-town-gay party outfit and put on the clothes I’d bought for Janet. I phoned Declan, wished him a happy New Year, and arranged to meet him for a drink that Saturday.
     I called it off when I heard about Paul.
     Poor Paul. I’d been living with the knowledge of my hidden self for ages, but he’d had no idea.
     That night I’d told him I wasn’t who he thought I was, that Ian was just a part I’d been playing since I was born, and that the real me was someone Paul wouldn’t be interested in, what with him only fancying men and all.
     I might have tried to soften the blow, a little. In fact I’d suggested that the last thing Jan needed as she embarked on her new life was a gay boyfriend reminding everyone of where she’d come from, what I’d been before.
     Like I say, he took it badly.
     He’d wanted to follow me out of the club, I heard later, but his mates – my ex-mates now, mostly – held him back. Let him go, they’d said, the silly drama queen. Let him screw up his life his own way. Paul wasn’t convinced, but he’d never been in the running for the Most Assertive Homosexual awards, so he let himself be persuaded.
     He wasn’t happy, though. After the party ended, when the others left the club and headed back to Clive’s for more drinkies, Paul said he’d take a taxi home. Instead he wandered the streets – thinking ahead, looking back. New Year’s a time for reflection, after all, and I’d given him plenty to consider.
     I suppose he was thinking about transitions and transformations, the faces we wear inside and outside. The people we are with other people, the people we are on our own. Whether he’d ever see me again, and if so who I’d be.
     They cornered him behind the railway station – a bunch of drunk straight lads turfed out from one of the clubs, poisoned by lager and machismo. The police said it was a mugging, but the CCTV footage showed them beating and kicking him without any preamble, one of them grabbing his wallet just before they ran.
     By the time I heard about it Paul was in hospital, in a coma. They’d kicked him in the head a lot, and he had bleeding on the brain. I tried to visit, but his parents had already heard I’d dumped him, and had come to their own conclusions. That door was closed to me now.
     The one I opened led somewhere different.
     The support group where I’d met Declan was a mixed one, men who were really women getting together with women who were really men to swap advice and experiences. Declan had been born Deborah, Deb rather than Dec, and he was further along the way than me, three months of testosterone injections under his belt and living as a pretty convincing man despite his woman’s body.
     At first, things with Dec were fine. He knew his own mind, which I liked, especially compared with Paul’s diffidence. I liked the way he took charge and made me feel protected. With Paul it had usually been me in the driver’s seat, and no girl – I’d told myself, not really having a clue what most girls wanted – wants that.
     After we moved in together, things began to go downhill. Dec started wanting to know where I was when I was out, who I’d been seeing, who I’d been talking to, especially about him. When I said I was allowed some privacy he’d get shouty, sometimes aggressive. He’d always apologise afterwards, blaming it on the hormones.
     How much of it was really the testosterone, how much was acting out his newfound manhood, and how much was just Declan being Declan, I don’t know. My own hormone regime was making me weepy and moody, and living as Janet I was getting depressingly familiar with the kinds of perils that wait for a woman out in the world on her own – stuff which had never impacted me when I walked and talked and dressed like a man. All in all, I was inclined to forgive Dec and preserve the status quo.
     That was until I discovered he’d been cheating on me. An impressive feat, you’d think, under the circumstances, but obviously there are methods. We had a stand-up, knock-down row which ended with me telling him I was leaving. That was when he hit me – for the first, and I’m pleased to say the only time. Luckily his body was still mostly a woman’s, and mine still mostly a man’s, so I was able to get away from him with little more than a black eye.
     The local women’s shelter wouldn’t have me – people like me are always a bit of an embarrassment in those sort of places – and I spent a tense few weeks with my brother and his wife, who ‘understand my lifestyle choices’ but won’t trust me near their kids, before I could get a flat of my own.
     By then, Paul was dead, without ever coming out of his coma. They’d caught the bastards who’d done it from the CCTV images, and put them away for a few years – that’s roughly what a gay man’s life’s worth, apparently – but it hadn’t helped him. He’d hovered on the threshold between death and life for six months, before eventually his parents took the plunge and pulled the plug.
     I was devastated. I told myself it was the thugs who’d killed him, not me, but it was still my fault he’d been in their line of sight that night. I wondered how much more could go wrong in one year.
     I was still transitioning, of course – no-one could take that away from me, at least – but I couldn’t go to the support group any more. I’d tried for a while, but it hadn’t worked out, not with Dec there. My one-to-one counsellor worked out that I was depressed – not a very strenuous way to earn her paycheque – and flagged up a concern that the hormone treatment was having an adverse effect on me.
     And so there I was, that next New Year, having lost not one but two boyfriends to horrific male misbehaviour, with no friends, no likelihood of any new boyfriend any time soon, and the threat that the one source of hope in my life might soon be taken away from me.
     A couple of Paul’s friends – my former friends – had kept in touch with me for his sake, though fewer and fewer during the year, and after his death only the ones who’d liked me more than him in the first place. A couple of them – Ryan and Geoff, specifically – invited me along to their New Year’s bash. Come on, they said, everyone’s going to be there. Nobody will think anything of it. There’ll be all sorts.
     It was idiotic of me to take them up on it, really – but honestly, where else was I going to go?

     * * *

     As I passed through the lobby of the intimidatingly expensive apartment block where Geoff and Ryan had their flat, someone was waiting for me. Converse trainers, tight white T-shirt, acid-washed jeans – the styles a year advanced, the goatee even more microscopic and self-aware.
     This wasn’t him, though. This was a black guy, with the same self-assured air. ‘Leaving already, Jan?’ he asked.
     The voice was different too. I mean, obviously – it was a different guy. But he had the same amused drawl.
     ‘Um, yes,’ I said, a bit nonplussed. ‘Do I know you?’ I hadn’t seen him at the party, but I’d been hideously distracted for most of the time.
     ‘You met my other half,’ he said. ‘This time last year.’
     ‘Ah,’ I said, and paused. He didn’t volunteer a name. ‘So is this a hobby, or do you both loiter professionally?’
     I was just passing the time. The evening had gone badly – very badly, excruciatingly badly – and I was off home to watch Jools Holland on the TV and drink about a pint of vodka. Either that or throw myself quietly off a bridge somewhere – not at the stroke of midnight though, because that would have been tacky. I hadn’t quite decided.
     I suppose I was on what you’d call a threshold.
     ‘You could stay too,’ he said, ‘if you want. Of all Ryan and Geoff’s friends, they’ll be saying later, only Jan’s left.’
     I remembered his boyfriend’s obsession with ambiguous words and phrases. At some point in the year, when I’d been bored, I’d looked antagonyms up on Wikipedia. Janus words, they’re called, after some ancient god with two faces. I tried one of my own. ‘So are you going to sanction me for leaving, or are you going to sanction it?’
     He looked at me calmly. ‘You haven’t had a good year, have you?’
     ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You guys are perceptive as well as weird and creepy.’ I never had worked out how his boyfriend had known that I was Jan.
     He smiled. ‘Wait here with me,’ he said. ‘It’s not long till midnight.’ He was right, I hadn’t made it out in time to get home for the chimes. Too many people had wanted to talk to me about Paul.
     ‘With you?’ I said. ‘Why would I want to do that?’
     ‘It may help,’ he said. ‘You ran out on us last year, and that didn’t work out too well, did it?’
     I shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve got much else to look forward to.’ He was the first man who’d seemed interested in my company for quite a while, and it wasn’t long to wait, in any case.
     I stayed with him till midnight sounded and all the roars of welcome for the New Year rose up from half the flats in the building. As the clock tolled on the church down the road, he said, ‘New Year’s a time for reflection, after all.’
     The way he said it, it sounded like the sort of thing people say in church.

     * * *

     We stayed together a little longer, chatting some more before I went back inside.
     I caught up with some old friends, made up with a few I’d fallen out with. By the time I went home to change, a few short hours before the sun returned, I felt – not happy, certainly, but not as bleak, and certainly with no immediate thoughts of suicide.
     Over the following weeks, I learned that my counsellor had cancelled her note of concern, predicting that my spirits would soon be improving. I started going to the support group again, despite Dec’s presence. It helped a little.
     After a while, I sold my place and went to stay with my brother and sister-in-law. When I slowly developed a black eye, I took this as a signal to move in with Dec.
     Our first hours together were stormy, violent even, but when he healed the pain in my eye I forgave him. I even forgot about his infidelities. Over the coming months I watched as he became less domineering and controlling, at times even sweet and affectionate as the testosterone left his body.
     My oestrogen levels were decreasing too, the hormone drawn out steadily into the doctors’ needles and packaged away. I found myself becoming more irritable and angry. It wasn’t something I liked about myself, but it seemed a tiny price to pay for all the other ways in which the world was getting better.
     Halfway through the year, at the flick of a switch, Paul returned, suspended between death and life. His parents waited anxiously at his bedside for the first signs of his consciousness returning.
     By the time Declan and I parted company, we respected each other as equals. We’d go on seeing each other at the support groups, of course, but by then I was too excited about Paul’s imminent recovery to go on worrying about him. In anticipation I stopped wearing women’s clothes, and started dressing myself as Ian again.
     They’d searched the prison system diligently for men who could redeem themselves by curing Paul. They’d brought them together in a courtroom so that they could be given their mission. Eventually, as New Year approached, the hospital put him in an ambulance and shipped him, still unconscious, to the back alley where these good samaritans would do their healing work. A crowd of well-wishers had gathered, and one by one they left him lying there, calmly waiting for these men and their merciful ministrations. One of the ex-convicts had even found his wallet, and was looking after it for him.
     A little later, Paul was restored to full and vibrant life. By the time I reached the club, he was waiting only for me to make him complete.
     ‘Do you think you’ll ever replace him?’ someone asked me as I stepped up to the doorway, and I knew that I never would.
     A great roar went up all around us, as midnight chimed.

     * * *

     ...Thinking ahead, looking back. New Year’s a time for reflection, after all...

     * * *

      ‘Do you think you’ll ever replace him?’ the white guy with the acid-washed jeans and minimalist goatee called after me as I left the club. I guessed he was talking about Paul, who still – I noticed – wasn’t following me.
     I started to walk toward he nightbus stop, planning to ride home with the rest of the city’s least enthusiastic revellers, worrying slightly that the weird word-obsessed stranger would follow me, half-hoping that Paul might.
     Suddenly I stopped, and turned round. I’d realised that those last words were another of the man’s weird equivocations. It might well be true that I’d never find another boyfriend to fit the space that Paul had taken up in my life... but I could easily put him back where he belonged. I’d taken him out, but I could still replace him. It wasn’t too late.
     I stared at the stranger, who was looking after me with a sly smile.
     So what if I was a woman inside? Paul loved me, I knew that. He wasn’t a shallow person – less so than me, in fact, if I really thought his presence would hamper me in my new life as Jan. If I could adjust to being a woman, perhaps Paul could adjust to loving one. It should be his choice, in any case, not mine.
     The alternative... well, I didn’t know what the alternative was. Declan, I supposed. But that was all unknown territory, and I wasn’t looking forward to exploring it.
     I hurried back. Paul couldn’t have left the club yet.
     As I approached, the stranger stepped aside, moving across the doorway in front of me. He slumped there, forehead to the wall, hands folded behind his back. His other face smiled ironically at me: a skinny black guy leaning comfortably back against the doorjamb, the beard this side of his head even tinier and more self-restrained.
     ‘Tell your other half Happy New Year,’ I said.
     His smile didn’t waver – I didn’t even see his lips move – as he replied, ‘You’re welcome.’
     I stepped back across the threshold.

© Philip Purser-Hallard 2012

A merry Christmas -- and, vitally, a happy New Year -- to all.