( Read more... )
I thought I was reasonably well-informed about the history of Doctor Who spinoff fiction, but was rather amazed to discover this 1966 46-page story, in the same format (and by the same publisher) as the Doctor Who annuals, in which the First Doctor prevents an invasion from the Andromeda galaxy with the help of a family who he has rescued (just before the story starts) from the Great Fire of London. Apparently the text is by J.L. Morrissey, who published half a dozen detective novels in the 1930s and 1940s; the artwork is by Walter Howarth, the World Distributors stalwart illustrator. The story itself is standard Who, let down by rather dodgy astrophysics and some awkward phrasing (note extract from first para here). But the characterisation of Hartnell's Doctor is bang-on.
( Read more... )
( Hornets' Nest: Part 4, A Sting in the Tale and Part 5, Hive of Horrors )
( Three Fifth Doctor plays )
( The Nightmare Fair: the Sixth Doctor goes to Blackpool )
( Death in Blackpool: the Eighth Doctor goes there too )
( Dreamland: Tenth Doctor and aliens in Nevada )
( December Books 6: The Day of the Troll )
( transcript )Funny that McGann, though obviously very aware of Hartnell's Doctor, had never before heard the Susan parts of the back story. But I think he and the other guy successfully identify why the Doctor has never since been portrayed as having a family.
( The Crusade: 'How did I get myself involved in this?' )
( The Space Museum: 'If you want to save yourself, you'd better bring him back to life.' )
( The Chase: 'Well, you must admit it was funny.' 'Really? I haven't seen the joke yet, I must say.' )
( Ian and Barbara )
( The Time Meddler: 'That is the dematerializing control. And that, over yonder, is the horizontal hold. Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy!' )
( Galaxy 4: 'We are strange beings to you. You've never met anything like us.' )
But it could never have been made. It's not because of the numerous hostages to continuity offered by Farhi's script - language-teaching machine in the Tardis, the Doctor's belief in God, Susan's statements about their home time - these would have been weeded out in the editorial process. It is not even that the Tardis crew don't really impact events (though that is a weakness of the story). It is simply that it is too sad: Alexander's three closest friends all fall victims to the conspirators, followed by Alexander himself, leaving his realm to be divided between the complicit Seleucus and the loyal Ptolemy. As one of the commentaries in this edition puts it, Barbara and Susan shed more tears in this script than Rose Tyler does in her entire career.
We also have a bonus here, a single episode story (or perhaps the last episode of an unwritten longer story), The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance, in which the Tardis crew visits a planet where one of the locals literally dies of love for Barbara. It is also too sad to ever have been turned into a broadcast story, but I think that today's fanficcers would love it - it's totally in tune with the idea of takiing the show's characters to places that the show's writers never could.
So this is strongly recommended, though for slightly different reasons than I though it might be: good emotional character-driven writing, and a glimpse of how Doctor Who mght have been.
There is no explanation in the article of why she is depicted in this way, so a lot of European Voice readers will be mildly puzzled.
( The ending, and the Doctor )
I got home to find The Circus of Doom, episode three of the new The Hornet's Nest series, with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, waiting for me. A half-day in Paris on Thursday gave me time to listen to it as I walked from the Gare du Nord to my meeting at the Tuileries and back. Unfortunately I wasn't wildly impressed; it seemed to me too similar to the second episode, The Dead Shoes, with the added demerit of a comedy foreign disabled character (played very well by Stephen Thorne, but that doesn't really help). I do hope that the fourth and fifth episodes, due out at the start of next month, are an improvement.
As I drove across Connecticut last weekend, I was listening to The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, one of the Bernice Summerfield plays released just over a year ago. It is a sequel to my favourite New Adventure, All-Consuming Fire, and features two brilliant actors, David Warner playing Mycroft Holmes and Peter "Nyder" Miles as the evil alien, as well as of course Lisa Bowerman herself. It would alas be slightly incomprehensible to those who don't know All-Consuming Fire but was great fun and consoled me for missing the broadcast on the other side of the Atlantic.
( November Books 18) Millennial Rites, by Craig Hinton )
( November Books 19) Spiral Scratch, by Gary Russell )
In summary, both Time Of Your Life and Millennial Rites are rather good, and Spiral Scratch improves after a weak start.
Of course, he has already included the Doctor and a Dalek in one of his earlier works!
( The Reign of Terror: 'I suppose you think you're very clever!' 'Well, without any undue modesty, yes!' )
( Planet of Giants: 'There are no earthworms that size on your planet!' )
( The Dalek Invasion of Earth: 'I've never felt that there was any time or place that I belonged to...' )
I was originally planning this as a set of reviews just of the stories, but it's impossible to resist the temptation to reassess each of the regular characters as they depart. (Which is going to make the write-up after next rather fun...) ( Susan )
( The Rescue: 'My dear, why don't you come with us, hmm?' )
( The Romans: 'My first real sight of history!' )
So, a rather weak start and end to this run (The Sensorites being the worst Hartnell story so far) but a sequence of decent efforts in the middle, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
< An Unearthly Child - The Aztecs | The Sensorites - The Romans |
When Horace's book was finally published, it was viciously attacked by the critics. This was sad, as no-one had been able to disprove anything he had written. It was even sadder that the critics, blinded by their own prejudice, could not see the energy, grace and skill that had gone into the book's construction. Even if, as they believed, every word was untrue, they chose to ignore the incredible flights of imagination necessary to argue such a theory. But worse still - as they were supposedly people of education and letters - they could not see or appreciate the pure, good writing which was on the page. Although the book sold well, it was bought for all the wrong reasons. People would memorise passages from it, then regurgitate them at drinks parties, laughing. like blocked drains as they did. It had become chic to mock Horace. Unable to cope with the ridicule, Horace retired into obscurity. Two years later he died of a broken heart.It's tempting to interpret this as Eric Saward justifying himself: a misunderstood and underappreciated genius, the quality of whose work will be apparent to the ages though not to the contemporary critic. Given everything else I know about Saward, actually, I am pretty convinced. Doctor Who - Slipback is a desperate attempt to channel Douglas Adams, even more desperate than the radio series on which it was based. Planets and people have comical names and bizarre characteristics; and threats to the universe are both gruesome and bathetic. I think this actually is a worse book than Saward's novelisation of The Twin Dilemma, though I'm not rereading it in order to form a more precise judgement. Certainly neither is interesting enough in their awfulness to be worth memorising and regurgitating at drinks parties.
Douglas Adams did it much better, not just because his prose style in general was vastly superior to Saward's but also because he had a coherent sense of world-building, both for his own fiction and for the Who stories he wrote; and his humour was self-deprecating rather than defensive.
The Pyralis Effect is a standard Doctor and aliens runabout. My expectations for this were pretty low, based partly on
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
steve_mollmann's review but largely on the fact that it is by George Mann, whose fiction and non-fiction has failed to impress me. The fact that it more or less held my attention to the end has to be considered a major triumph, and (given the discussion in the extra tracks of the number of rewrites extracted from Mann by Big Finish) a triumph shared by many. Let us consider it equivalent in quality to the average Season 17 story, and leave it there.On the other hand, I quite liked The Castle of Fear. Partly, it made me nostalgic for The Kingmaker, which is one of my favourite Big Finish audios; it's not as good, but then few Who stories are. I hate John Sessions, and luckily all the bits I thought weren't funny enough were the bits with him in, so I was happy enough to enjoy the rest. A clever plot, just about as funny as it could bear (Sessions apart), and good stuff from Davison and Sutton. John Sessions fans (the mad, deluded fools) will like this one.
( Screen time )
( books )
( audios )
Aggregating
For what it's worth, averaging out the rankings you get the following:
- Four - Top on screen time, decent number of books, let down by his audios but is improving there
- Eight - just tops books and audios, but way way behind on screen time.
- Seven - strong competitor on audios and books, let down by screen time
- Six - likewise
- Three - decent mid-list on books and audios, pulled up slightly by screen time
- One - tie with Ten broken by having more screen time though fewer books and same audios
- Ten - now unlikely to rise higher, unless he starts doing audios
- Five - surprised to see him this low, but only scores well on audios
- Two - despite good screen time, has not been the most popular subject of spinoff fiction
- Nine - poor chap, least books, no audios, and second shortest screen time
( October Books 13) Imperial Moon, by Christopher Bulis: Five, Turlough and Kamelion in steampunk lunar explorations )
( October Books 14) Superior Beings, by Nick Walters: Five, Peri and anthropophagous aliens )
I wouldn't really recommend any of these three to someone other than a Doctor Who completist, and would not really recommend King of Terror to anyone at all.
One has to be careful not to just include any story with a 19th-century or early 20th-century setting. There is nothing in the least steampunkish about The Gunfighters or Timelash, for instance, despite the supposed 19th-century setting of thee one and the presence of the young H.G. Wells in the other (and one would have to stretch a long way to include Pyramids of Mars or Black Orchid). But I think it's pretty clear that the following could be considered at least a little steampunk:
Evil of the Daleks - Victorian inventor produces time machine - what more could you want?
Talons of Weng Chiang - granted that the technology itself is not indigenous to the 19th century, but the attitude to Asian people certainly is. (And the recent Big Finish sequel, The Mahogany Murders, is definitely steampunk.)
Enlightenment - the sailing ships may be from all parts of history, and the centre of historical gravity probably nearer the 18th than 19th century, but really, I look at it and I say "steampunk!"
Tooth and Claw - rather than The Unquiet Dead, even though they both have 19th-century settings, because T&C has Queen Victoria and a telescope rather than ghosts and leaking gas.
(Imagine if The Red Fort had ever been made...)
Various thoughts about audios and books, but I'll pause here.
( The Hornets' Nest: The Dead Shoes - Tom Baker and the haunted seaside entertainment )
( Kaldor City: Doctor Who / Blake's 7 spinoff )
( Bernice Summerfield, mid-series Seven )
( The War of the Worlds - 1938 version )
- Sad news.
- The Sensorites / The Web Planet / Tomb of the Cybermen / The Krotons, all available to watch for free worldwide
Striking how often Barbara is the memorable companion in a lot of these. The Doctor is a very odd, weird, alien and compelling figure, with Susan of course in his wake (except where she is allowed character development in Marco Polo); Ian's memorable moments here are really in The Daleks, and to a certain extent The Edge of Destruction. But Barbara literally rules The Aztecs; the only early story I can think of off-hand which puts a companion closer to the spotlight is also by John Lucarotti, The Massacre. (Later examples are few and far between: Turn Left, of course, but that's about it.)
I've decided to do these six at a time, basically because that will synchronise nicely with the Hinchcliffe/Holmes seasons if I keep it up that long (counting Mission to the Unknown as part of The Daleks' Master Plan). In which case I will post the next of these in mid-November, though my travel schedule for the next few weeks may delay it.
< An Unearthly Child - The Aztecs | The Sensorites - The Romans |
( Hornets' Nest 1: The Stuff of Nightmares - The Fourth Doctor returns, with homicidal taxidermy )
( The Prisoner of Peladon - Ice Warrior refugees and the Third Doctor, as told by David Troughton )
( Paper Cuts: Six, Charley and dead Draconians. Or are they? )
( Blue Forgotten Planet: bye bye Charley )
( The Three Companions )
Syndicate
