Artron Energy podcast #18

The latest Artron Energy podcast is an interview with me about my various Doctor Who related scribblings, conducted by Freddie Hull and Brad Mell in August last year. It is available wherever you get your podcasts, but here are some links:

• Simon Guerrier Artron Energy on Apple podcasts
• Simon Guerrier Artron Energy on Spotify
• Simon Guerrier Artron Energy on Buzzsprout

Doctor Who missing episodes found - in the Telegraph

I've written a piece for the Telegraph about the thrilling discovery, announced today, of two episodes of Doctor Who that have been lost for the past 61 years. They are, as I'm sure you're aware, The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet, aka episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan, which will be up on iPlayer for us all to watch from 4 April.

In December, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph on episode 7 of the same story on its 60th anniversary. An age ago, when the last discoveries of lost Doctor Who were made, I wrote a blog post about why finding missing episodes is such a thing.

See the Film is Fabulous website for more details about the new discovery, and to donate to their valiant work. They have also posted an interview with Peter Purves about the find. It is rather moving to see Peter's delight. 

I also enjoyed the special episode of the Doctor Who Missing Episodes Podcast about these finds. See also the special episodes from Dalek 63•88, one on The Nightmare Returns and one on Devil's Planet.

Oh, and these newly discovered episodes include the first appearance of Bret Vyon as played by Nicholas Courtney. Later this year, thanks to Big Finish, Bret Vyon lives.

Writing the Future, eds. Dan Coxon & Richard V Hirst

Subtitled "Essays on Crafting Science Fiction", this is an anthology first published in 2023 comprising, in most cases, authors talking about their own practice, concerns and obsessions. There's a lot on the context in which they've written things, and the sense of genre as community where we're all in conversation. There's stuff about how we make readers engage with climate emergency - and not turn them off - as well as how we conceive of and convey the alien.

In Steering the Craft by Ursula le Guin, which I read recently, these kinds of discussion are a prompt for writing exercises, the reader as active participant and fellow craftsperson. By comparison, Writing the Future is more inward-looking, the authors reflecting on their own working methods but not inviting us to roll up our sleeves. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, just not quite what I'd expected. The call to action, instead, is to look out various the stories and books cited. 

I was particularly drawn to Aliya Whiteley's "A Crash Course in Black Holes", all about researching a story that never quite worked out and how she felt compelled to follow the threads of the idea anyway. Adam Roberts's "Wellsian Futures" has only whetted my appetite for his book, HG Wells: A Literary Life. (See my recent post on Wells's 1936 novella The Croquet Player.)

Nina Allen's "Running Out of Road: The Radical Modernism of JG Ballard" is a similar trawl through the ideas and obsessions of another writer. I also enjoyed Maura McHugh's "The Eternal Apocalypse: How British Comic 2000AD Remain Relevant", not least in its focus on more recent stuff which I've not read (having lost the faith in the mid-1990s). 

And my pal Una McCormack's "'Right now the building is ours': Affinities of Science Fiction and Historical Fiction", has given me lots to think about in the way SF uses or draws from history, and I've added The Dawn of Everything:A New History of Humanity by Davids Graeber and Wengrow (Penguin, 2021) to my reading list - as soon as the Dr is done with it.

“NKATA” in Interzone #304

My unsettling short story “NKATA” is featured in the latest issue of long-running science-fiction magazine Interzone (issue #304, March 2026), which went out to subscribers today and will be available on the Interzone website shortly. 

The beautiful cover artwork by Emma Howitt illustrates another of the stories in this issue: Van Nolan’s novelette “County Colours”. It’s a packed issue, comprising 70,000 words of stories, articles and reviews. Bargain!

You can subscribe to Interzone via Patreon or buy issue #304 of Interzone for €5.00.

I am thrilled to make it into these august pages at long last, having first submitted a story to Interzone in 1998, and to be among such distinguished company. Thanks so much to editor Gareth Jelley. 

The Heartless Sea - out now

My latest Doctor Who audio adventure, The Heartless Sea, is now available to download. It's paired with another story, The Kraken of Hagwell written by Barbara Hambly, as part of a set called The Companion Chronicles: The Legacy of Time.

My story involves Harry Sullivan (Christopher Naylor) and Eleanor Crooks (Naomi Cross) meeting the Second Doctor (Michael Troughton) just in time to take arms against a troublesome sea.

It was lovely to return to the Companion Chronicles range, having written a whole bunch of them back in the day, and to be reunited - though I didn't know until I downloaded the story just now - with sound designer Richard Fox, who has always performed such wonders. As I say in the interview at the end, what a thrill to be support act to the brilliant Barbara Hambly.

The striking cover art, above, is by Oliver Chenery.

Doctor Who Chronicles: 1984

From the makers of Doctor Who Magazine, Doctor Who Chronicles: 1984 is now on sale. My two pieces are:

Frontios Row Seat (pp. 48-49)

Today, Jenny Colgan is a best-selling - but as a child, she won a competition to see Doctor Who being made.

Windy City Showdown (pp. 98-101)

In November 1984, writer Terrance Dicks and producer John Nathan-Turner has a "blazing row" at a Doctor Who convention in Chicago. Why had their relationship soured?

For the latter, I spoke to Stephen Dicks, Gary Russell, Steven Warren Hill, Emma Abraham, John Lavalie, Kathryn Sullivan, Rob Warnock and Richard Marson. The feature boasts some amazing images from the convention taken by Mary Loye.

The Croquet Player, by HG Wells

This short, 82-page novella first published in 1936 was recommended to me after I posted about the 1934 and 1941 editions of A Short History of the World and Wells’s anxieties about where things were headed. I tracked down a first-edition copy, and read it in a single sitting earlier this week. It has haunted my imagination ever since.

The blurb is as follows:

“In a cafe at Les Noupets, as he comfortably sips his vermouth before lunching with his aunt, the narrator is accosted by a voluble stranger who tells him a strange and terrible story of the haunted countryside of Cainsmarsh, and of how he was finally driven to leave it and put himself in the hands of nerve-specialist. The narrator, already disturbed and frightened by the tale, meets the nerve-specialist next day and the mystery, instead of being solved, broadens and deepens until it embraces the whole world.

This is Mr Wells at his very best, and he could have hardly have chosen a more appropriate moment at which to give us this intriguing story.” (Back-cover blurb of first UK edition, Chatto & Windus, 1936)

The story comprises four chapters. In the first, “The Croquet Player”, the unnamed narrator tells us of two strange people he’s encountered, and that he’ll share what they have each told him in an effort to get it straight.

“It was a sort of ghost story they unfolded” (p. 1).

Having promised us something unsettling, he then sets a scene rather out of PG Wodehouse. The narrator and his aunt, Miss Frobisher, are at Les Noupets to play croquet because they don’t care to be seen playing tennis as it is too popular, while golf.

“we find mixes us up with all sorts of people” (p. 7). 

This snob was educated at Harton and Keble, now lives with his aunt at Upper Beamish Street in an unnamed part of Hampshire, and is, he tells us himself,

“just a little inclined to be what the Americans call a sissy [ … with … ] soft hands and an ineffective will” (p. 5).

He is, in short, an unlikely figure to get caught up in a ghost story or strange adventure. He is a comic character, a recognisable type to ground the story in something real before the horror strikes. My first thought was that Wells was doing a kind of fish-out-of-genre story, putting the least likely or least equipped sort of character into an established kind of set-up. That can be very effective, like doing a Chandler-esque thriller but making the protagonist a baffled stoner, as in The Big Lebowski.

In chapter 2, “The Haunting Fear in Cainsmarsh”, the narrator is out on the terrace when he meets nervous young Dr Finchatton, who tells him about his practice in Cainsmarsh where everyone is beset with a strange, low-level sickness that leaves them perturbed, with visions of ghosts from under the ground etc. It is brilliantly unsettling for being so underplayed, reminiscent of MR James, Lovecraft or The Woman in Black.

In chapter 3, “The Skull in the Museum” Finchatton traces the pestilence to the local museum in Cainsmarsh, which holds the newly found skull of some early version of man — I suspect inspired by the contentious real-life “discovery” of Piltdown man. The implication here is that in unearthing the skull they have unleashed an ancient curse, or rather an ancient perspective — a savage, violent, early version of humanity.

Things then step up: heading home, Finchatton finds the body of a dog that has been beaten to death, then learns that the kindly old vicar Rawdon who advised him earlier in the story has attempted to murder his own wife. Finchatton shares with the narrator his theories about the influence of “primordial Adamite” (p. 55) on everyone in the region, including himself.

“And then Finchatton said a queer thing. ‘Little children killed by air-raids in the street.’” (p. 56)

This incongruous reference brings a tale of ancient horror suddenly into the present. Air-raids weren’t a new idea in 1936; London was bombed in the First World War, and Wells had explored the idea in science-fiction novels including The War in the Air (1908), The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the latter made into the influential film Things to Come (1936). 

But the haunting image here of children killed in the street is apparently a response to contemporary events and the civil war in Spain, a year before the bombing of Guernica. The sense is, then, that the curse has already spread far and wide from Cainsmarsh.

I’ve seen this kind of thing done elsewhere, not least in Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59), where the discovery of an ancient skull produces nightmare visions and we learn our deep-seated violence is an ancient inheritance. I’d understood that to be a direct response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, not least given that writer Nigel Kneale was married to Judith Kerr, a Jewish refugee from Berlin, and his mother-in-law was a translator during the Nuremberg trials. So, for me, it’s extraordinary to see the same kind of idea being articulated before the outbreak of war. 

Wells then goes in a different direction. Chapter 4, “The Intolerable Psychiatrist”, flips the whole tale. The narrator meets with Finchatton’s nerve specialist, Norbert, who tells him that Finchatton’s story isn’t true. There is no such place as Cainsmarsh, and the young doctor was practising in Ely.

Yet, says Norbert, the sickness is real: he’s seen loads of people having similar delusions and nightmares, which he thinks is a response to the mounting tensions in the world, implicitly the rise of fascism and the threat of another world war. People are gripped by a nightmare of things to come.

I put this to my friend Niall Boyce, who shared with me an even earlier version of something similar — the vivid, precognitive nightmare experienced by Carl Jung in 1913:

“In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realised that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasised. An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.’ 

That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.” (CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Flamingo, 1961) p. 199.)

Three years after these dreams, with the First World War in progress, Jung first used the term “collective unconsciousness”, in part drawn from Freud’s idea of the “primal horde”, where part of us, deep in the consciousness, will always be archaic, primitive, wild. I think that’s exactly what Wells is drawing on here, initially as a kind of ghost story.

In the story, Norbert argues that the mounting sense of disquiet, the shared nightmares, are a response to looming threat, implicitly of a new war, but originate in the primitive parts of our consciousness. He  appeals to the narrator:

“‘In a little while,’ he said, ‘there will be no ease, no security, no comfort any more.’ (Thank Heaven! he did not say I was ‘living on the brink of a volcano’.) ‘There will be no choice before a human being but to be either a driven animal or a stern devotee to that true civilisation, that disciplined civilisation, that has never yet been achieved. Victim or vigilante. And that, my friend, means you!” (p. 78) 

The narrator has, he admits, been “hypnotised” by all this. Yet when challenged by the psychiatrist, he shakes him off, because he has and appointment to keep with his aunt, playing croquet. He does not succumb to primitive consciousness; he simply ignores the threat.

I said at the outset that the narrator is like something from PG Wodehouse and to a post-war reader the ending reinforces that idea, given Wodehouse’s behaviour in the early part of the war. Of course, Wells could not have known that at the time of writing, but it is another example of his eerie prescience. 

There’s also something more profound in all this: that idea of people unable to face up to challenges and threats, determined to deny them, avoid them or conjure nightmares of something else. That’s coloured my sense of the news this week, with politicians of various hues determined to ignore or underplay climate change. How strange to read a book published 90 years ago and find it is pointedly now. 

The Croquet Player is dedicated “To Moura”, ie Russian translator and double-agent Countess Moura Budberg, with whom Wells had a long-standing on-off relationship. She’s a fascinating character, and given her experience in the Russian revolution, I can well understand why she might sympathise with a story / view of human psychology like this. 

I wonder how much of this strange, haunting story is the ghost of a conversation between Wells and Moura, horrified by a future they could so plainly see coming.