Robert Shearman interviewed by me - podcast

Listen to Robert Shearman read a new short story in a special podcast. Rob was the guest of the British Science Fiction Association in September, where he performed "The Dark Space in the House in the House in the Garden at the Centre of the World" and was then interviewed by me.

Hear the podcast at http://thedoctorwhopodcast.com/upload/RobShearmanBSFA.mp3 WARNING: the podcast includes adult themes and language, and is not suitable for children.

Special thanks to Tony Cullen and Tony Keen at the BSFA, Tony Whitmore for recording the evening and James "Tony" Rockliffe at thedoctorwhopodcast.com.

AAAGH! Davros's milkshake brings all the monsters to the yard!

My 36th and - for the time being - final episode of AAAGH!, as featured in issue #280 of Doctor Who Adventures. As always, it's drawn by Brian Williamson and edited by Natalie Barnes, who gave kind permission to post it here. You can read all my AAAGH!s.

ETA: This Cult Den interview with me includes brief mention of AAAGH! and how it came about.

AAAGH! and the alien delegates

AAAGH! meets the alien delegates from The Daleks' Master Plan - a reference to a Doctor Who story from 1965-6 that's largely missing from the archive, so perfect for our 8-12 year-old readers. It featured in Doctor Who Adventures #263, out last week.

The art is by clever Brian Williamson, the editing by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who also gave kind permission to post it here. You can read all my AAAGH!s.

Next episode: the history of Mr Stinkle.

AAAGH! on the Moon!

The AAAGH! from issue #253 of Doctor Who Adventures will be my last for a few weeks. I'm sure that comes as some relief. But it's thrilling to realise that this silliness has been running now for over a year. One day I might tell the hallowed tale of how AAAGH! came to be. The world is not ready for that yet.

As ever, the script is by me, the art by Brian Williamson and the editing by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who gave kind permission for me to post it. You can read all my AAAGH!s, and see new ones in Doctor Who Adventures every Thursday.

Sci-Fi Ancient Egypt

I wrote this trail for the Petrie Museum of Ancient Egyptology, which has just had a spangly new makeover. Cat and gothic trails are also available (not by me). Download the latest versions from the Petrie's trails and resources page.

(Will add more images and links when I have a chance.)

“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.”

HG Wells (1898), The War of the Worlds, p. 1.

“The man who knows and dwells in history adds a new dimension to his existence; he no longer lives in the one plane of present ways and thoughts, he lives in the whole space of life, past and present, and dimly future. He sees the present narrow line of existence, momentarily fluctuating, as one stage like innumerable other stages that have each been the all-important present to the short-sighted people of their own day”.

WM Flinders Petrie (1904), Methods and Aims in Archaeology, p. 193.

“The point of archaeology is to carefully recover the past, not disintegrate it.”

The Doctor (1989), Doctor Who: Battlefield.

SPHINX
1. UC14769 (IC13, 2nd from top): Part of base of a sandstone sphinx with 2 paws and cartouches each side denoting Seti I.

As Petrie argued, understanding the past helps to place the worries and wants of the present day in context. Archaeology strives to understand the past from the meagre fragments left to us. From the exquisitely crafted jewels and sculptures to the shards of broken pottery, collecting and comparing these fragments slowly brings the long dead back to life.

We know the fragment here shows the paws of a sphinx from comparison with other artefacts and sources. A sphinx is a mythological creature, often (though not always) having the body of a lioness and the head of a woman. Sphinxes are usually found “guarding” royal tombs.

Science fiction can also place the worries and wants of the present day in context by imagining things to come. HG Wells wrote what many consider the first science-fiction novel The Time Machine in 1895 when the British Empire reached across the world.

In the story, a Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701 where he discovers that humans have died out. Instead, creatures called Eloi and Morlocks live in the shadow of an ancient monument, the only visible remaining trace of civilisation. Wells makes this ancient monument a sphinx, likening the fall of civilisation (and the British Empire) to the fall of ancient empires such as Egypt. The story – and these fragments of two paws – remind us that nothing lasts forever.

Several science-fiction stories show us future societies struggling to understand the fragments left of our own civilisation – often for comic effect. In the 2005 Doctor Who story The End of the World, for example, the Lady Cassandra insists that an old Wurlitzer jukebox is an ‘iPod’.

But there's a sadder connection between the fragments of the past and science fiction. The Petrie Museum holds scant fragments of one of the earliest-known copies of The Iliad. Doctor Who visited the events of The Iliad in the 1965 story The Myth Makers, a story that has since been deleted from the BBC archive. Fragments are left: a full soundtrack (released on CD by BBC Audio), some photographs from the set and a few seconds of low-quality footage.

RAT TRAP
2. UC16773 (Object by Site: Lahun, bottom): Pottery rat trap. Handle, one end and trap door missing - one enlarged air slit partly blocked with ancient plaster. (Originally identified as a coop for small chickens or incubator).

Archaeology and science fiction can both show us how similar we are today to the people of the distant past and future, with the same worries and wants. Here is a pottery rat trap from 1985 -1795 BCE. It gives a vivid sense of the kind of everyday problems faced by people 4,000 years ago. Beside the rat trap is a modern version of the type still in use across Africa. The suggestion might be that little has changed in all that time, that people will always be people. This can also be used to dramatic effect.

In the 2008 Doctor Who story The Fires of Pompeii, Caecillius is pretentious about art, worries about his son getting drunk and how his daughter is dressed. Though this is jokey to begin with, when the volcano Vesuvius erupts, the story is all the more effecting because we've seen these people are so like us.

In The Fires of Pompeii, the Doctor mentions meeting the Emperor Nero – as he does in the 1964 story The Romans. 3. Nero is named in the cartouche on the blocks UC14528 and 16516 (case IC16).

MINOTAUR and MEDUSA
4. UC14518 (case IC9): Limestone slab with bull-headed god, between parts of 2 other figures.

We tend to think of ancient civilisations existing in isolation – the ancient Greeks and Romans separate from the ancient Egyptians. But it's evident from finds made by archaeologists that ancient cultures traded with one another, and that ideas and stories spread. Myths were retold and reworked by different people, as they have been ever since.

Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Sidion (2006) is set in Ptolemaic Egypt, the third in a series about a Roman mercenary making his way through the ancient world but one where the ancient gods walk among the ordinary mortals. A rich, clever adventure, it dares suggest itself less “fantasy” as historical novel.

In the examples on display in the museum here, we can see that the ancient Egyptians themselves told stories featuring characters we traditionally think of as “belonging” to other cultures – such as bull-headed people (like the Minotaur from Greek mythology) and gorgons (like Medusa).

Many science fiction stories rework myths or elements of them. They might reveal that the gods and monsters of the ancient world were aliens or robots. They retell the ancient stories in space instead of Egypt or cherry-pick incidents or characters.

5. UC48468 (case PC 35): Terracotta medallion of a gorgon head; there are traces of white paint on the surface. The facial features are sharply moulded and the hair wavy with two entwined snakes at the top.

Medusa appears in the Doctor Who story The Mind Robber (1968), the Minotaur in The Time Monster (1972). The latter was released on DVD in March 2010 as part of the “Myths and Legends” box-set (BBC DVD 2851), along with two other Doctor Who stories that rework ancient stories.

SOUNDS FAMILIAR

Sometimes science fiction doesn't rework the myths so much as just borrow the names. For example, the Doctor and the Daleks briefly visit the pyramids in episodes 9 and 10 of The Daleks' Masterplan (1966).

(Episode 9 no longer exists in the BBC archive but episode 10 is included in the "Lost in Time" box-set, along with the few existing seconds of footage from The Myth Makers).

The three Egyptians who help fight the Daleks are named “Khephren”, “Tuthmos” and “Hyksos”.

Khephren takes his name from Chephren / Khafre (c.2558 - c.2532 BCE), the pharaoh who built the second great pyramid at Giza and whose face was the model for the sphinx that guards it. You can see a cuboid fragment from the second pyramid at 6. UC16043 (entrance case on right).

Tuthmos is derived from “Tuthmosis”, the name of several pharaohs in the 16th and 15th centuries BCE. Most notably, Tuthmosis III (1479 – 1425 BCE) was a military genius who massively expanded the Egyptian empire. A cartouche of his name can be seen at 7. UC14542 (case IC5).

The tomb of Tuthmosis III was excavated in 1898 by Petrie's contemporary, Victor Loret (1859-1946). The tomb (KV34) in the Valley of Kings included the first complete-found “Amduat” - the book of the Underworld. It is also, as Sarah Jane Smith tells the Doctor in the 1975 story The Pyramids of Mars, where an account is given of Sutekh's battle with his brother Horus.

Hyksos is named after the people from Palestine who ruled in Egypt in the 17th century BCE. Examples of pottery from their time and influenced by them include the black duck jug at 8. UC13479 (case PC27), with white incisions on display in the Pottery Gallery.

SEQUENCE DATING
The film and TV series Stargate (1994, 1997- ) explain that the myths and names of ancient Egypt derive from meetings (via gateways across space) with aliens. The hero of the film is an archaeologist and sarcophagi are used to resurrect people. In the film, the planet on the far side of the stargate is called Abydos, which is the name of the place where the tomb of Osiris is located and where this limestone stele 9. UC14488 (case IC2) was found.

The film shows us the “real” Egyptian gods Anubis and Ra. The TV series has also shown Apophis, Anubis, Ba'al, Hathor, Nirrti, Osiris and Seth – among others. It has also freely used names and events from other mythologies.

(By comparing the names and events of other mythologies rather than Egypt specifically, Stargate follows in a tradition of science fiction stories taking their cue from Joseph Campbell's 1949 book on comparative anthropology, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.)

The stargates and other technology in the series are made of an element called “naqahdah”. The name is reminiscent of Naqada, a town on the west bank of the Nile that Petrie excavated in 1894.

Whereas some archaeologists before him had been more interested in finding treasure and texts, Petrie carefully recorded everything he found, including the broken pieces of pottery on display in the Pottery Room. (Start at PC3 and also see www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/pottery/seqdates.html)

By comparing the styles of pottery itself and its decoration, Petrie developed a Sequence Dating system – a timeline of nine developments in Egyptian pottery. This could then be used to give approximate dates to any further finds made which contained fragments of pottery.

According to Petrie's system – and subsequent testing – the town of Naqada is one of the oldest in Egypt, with pottery found from 4000 BCE in the pre-dynastic period. As a result, the name of the town often appears near the top of any timeline. That may well be why the producers of Stargate chose it.

Like Stargate, a 2009 episode of the TV series Primeval suggested that the “gods” from ancient Egypt were real creatures. One of them chased through the Egyptian galleries at the British Museum.

SCARAB BEETLES
10. UC69860 winged scarab beetle (case L)

The way that scarab beetles rolled great balls of dung seemed, to the ancient Egyptians, like the way the Sun rolled across the sky. Perhaps the Sun, too, was pushed by a giant beetle. The beetle was therefore symbolic of time.

The beetles also ate the balls of dung and their young emerged from them – as if, the ancient Egyptians thought, they had been spontaneously created. The beetles were therefore also symbolic of regeneration.

Time and regeneration are, of course, quite important to Doctor Who. But beetles usually play a more sinister role in modern stories that loot the relics of ancient Egypt. In the 1999 film The Mummy, the tomb of Imhotep is guarded by flesh-eating scarabs.

The 1967 Doctor Who story The Tomb of the Cybermen reworks many familiar elements from Mummy stories in a science-fiction context. In the 1959 Hammer film The Mummy, actor George Pastell plays Mehemet Bey, worshipper of Karnak, who pretends to be a friend of the archaeologists then entreats the risen Mummy to kill them. In the Doctor Who story Pastell plays much the same part, but here he's a member of the Brotherhood of Logicians. Instead of scarabs, we are introduced to Cybermats, which poison and kill the archaeologists as the story requires.

ANKH
11. UC43949 (case WEC9) Light green faience ankh inscribed on both sides of shaft with epithets and cartouches of Aspelta.

Egyptian gods are often shown carrying the ankh, also known as the “key of life”, the hieroglyphic symbol for eternal life. There are several different theories about what the ankh derives from. Is it meant to show a man and woman united under the Sun, or does it show the Nile at the centre of Egypt, the loop at the top representing the Nile Delta, or a penis sheath?

In Neil Gaiman's award-winning Sandman comics, the ankh is the symbol of the character Death. In the TV series Lost, several characters are seen wearing ankh pendants, while the giant statue of the hippo-god Taweret holds an ankh in each hand. (Lost is littered with Egyptian symbols and hieroglyphs, see http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Hieroglyphs.)

NEMES HEADRESS
12. UC14363 (case IC17) Head of mottled diroite (about 1/2 size) of King Amenemhat III, wearing Nemes head-dress and uraeus.

The distinctive striped “nemes” head cloth was worn by Egyptian pharaohs. The flaps of the head cloth taper out behind the wearer's ears and hang down below both shoulders. The golden mask of Tutankhamun and the great statues of Ramesses II are famous examples of pharaohs wearing the nemes. It was often worn with a “uraeus” or “cobra” on the forehead, symbol of royalty.

The space helmets worn by Viper pilots in the original Battlestar Galactica TV series (1978-9) were based on the nemes head cloth, subtly suggesting the links between the human refugees seen in the series and the “legendary” planet Earth they were searching for. The helmets featured a viper symbol instead of the uraeus.

The modern version of Battlestar Galactica (2004- ) has not retained the nemes-style helmets, but there are still occasional hints of the links between the refugees and Earth's ancient civilisations. For example, pyramids can be glimpsed on the colony planet Kobol.

Both the original and modern versions of Battlestar Galactica are available to buy on DVD.

MAGIC
13. UC36314 (case J): Hippopotamus ivory clapper, reconstructed from fragments, in form of right hand; incised bracelet band at wrist and ornate net pattern on arm.

There are many theories about the wands found, usually made of hippopotamus ivory. Hippopotamuses and elephants are dangerous creatures, so acquiring the ivory from a living animal may have been part of the ritual. The wands do not use all of the tusk, either, so each tusk may have produced a “family” of linked wands (not dissimilar to the families of wands in Harry Potter). Wands were clearly of great value. Some use ebony and other precious materials.

Little is known of Egyptian magic, which makes it ripe for speculation in horror and science fiction stories. The Book of the Dead is central to many stories dealing with mummies and resurrection. But Egyptian magic is also used to time travel in both Tim Powers' award-winning The Anubis Gates (1983) and Terry Pratchett's less serious Pyramids (1989).

SUTEKH
14. UC45093 (case IC7): Upper part of a green glazed steatite round-topped plaque incised with image of Seth standing, to his right a column of hieroglyphs 'excellent praised one, beloved of Seth lord of Nubt'.

In the 1975 Doctor Who story The Pyramids of Mars, the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith battle the Egyptian god Sutekh – also known as Set or Seth. The inscription says that Seth was “Lord of Nubt”, the ancient name for Naqara (see above).

Though Seth was Lord of Nubt, the opening shot of The Pyramids of Mars uses stock footage of the step pyramid at Saqqara. A block, possibly an altar or the top of a pyramid looks like the Step Pyramid in Stonework: Statuary IC15 15. UC69838.

Sarah knows about Sutekh's battles with his brother Horus: she explains Sutekh was captured by Horus and “the 740 gods named on the tomb of Tuthmosis III”.

The story includes robot mummies, sarcophagi that transport people, a forcefield controlled by canopic jars, and sphinx-like riddles to get into the pyramid on Mars. It draws heavily on the 1959 Hammer film The Mummy, as did The Tomb of the Cybermen (see above).

While Egyptian mythology (and Doctor Who) is full of creatures that are human but for animal heads, unusually, the animal that provides Seth with his head is unknown to science.

HEROES
16. Portrait of Flinders Petrie by Fülöp László (1934). The old man in the picture might not seem a likely inspiration for Indiana Jones. Yet the traveller-archaeologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries told exciting tales of the worlds they'd discovered – and the adventures they had in discovering them.

Indiana Jones, Rick O'Connell in The Mummy, Daniel Jackson in Stargate and the Doctor's future wife, River Song in Doctor Who have followed that lead. The archaeologist battles the odds to uncover strange and surprising artefacts that change how we see our own place and time.

Like detectives, they use the clues left behind (17. UC50615 Roman Terracotta Tower lamp, like the ‘TARDIS’ lamp on the altar to the household gods in The Fires of Pompeii), the battered artefacts and writings. They don't use them just to solve crimes but to build whole cities and empires and worlds. Exploring the real, ancient world turns out to be just as rich, strange and exciting as anything we can imagine in a story.

© Simon Guerrier, 2010

Primary sources
Battlestar Gallactica (1978-9, 2004-)
Doctor Who

• The Romans (1964) – BBC DVD 2698
• The Myth Makers (1965) – soundtrack available from BBC Audio
• The Daleks' Masterplan (1965-66) – episode 10 available on Lost in Time, BBC DVD 1353
• The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) – BBC DVD 1032
• The Mind Robber (1968) – BBC DVD 1358
• The Time Monster (1972), included in Myths and Legends, BBC DVD 2851
• The Pyramids of Mars (1975) – BBC DVD 1350
• Battlefield (1989) – BBC DVD 2440
• The End of the World (2005) – BBC DVD 1755
• The Fires of Pompeii (2008) – BBC DVD 2605

Gaiman, Neil, The Sandman (1989-96)
Lost (2004-10)
The Mummy (1959)
The Mummy (1999)
Rowling, JK, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
Powers, Tim, The Anubis Gates (1983)
Pratchett, Terry, Pyramids (1989)
Primeval (2007-)
Stargate (1994, 1997-)
Wells, HG, The Time Machine (1895)
Wells, HG, The War of the Worlds (1898)
Wolfe, Gene, Soldier of Sidion (2006)

Secondary sources
Burdge, Anthony, Burke, Jessica, and Larsen, Kristine (eds.), The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who (2010)
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949)
Dowden, Ken, The Uses of Greek Mythology (1992)
Petrie, WM Flinders, Methods and Aims in Archaeology, (1904)

Thanks to Scott Andrews, Debbie Challis, John J Johnston and Stephen Quirke.

Daleks vs. Mechons

Grand Tour 2009

Busy, busy, busy. Lots of different bits of work on and about to go on tour…

Tomorrow morning I’m a guest at Faringdon Arts Festival, reading to children at Faringdon Junior School and then trying to answer their questions. Kids tend to ask more challenging, leftfield questions than grown-ups, so I’m more nervous than normal.

My bit is just for the school kids, but on Saturday afternoon proper TV writers of Doctor Who Paul Cornell and Phil Ford will be spilling their secrets to anyone who’ll listen. Miffed I’m going to miss that.

I’ll be at a guest at the Winchester Arts Festival on Saturday, at the library where I used to borrow Doctor Who books. Me, Mark Morris and Nicholas Briggs will be encouraging three sessions of school kids to write their own monstrous stories and explaining what makes a good monster.

At the end of August I’ll be at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich – the centre of time and space itself, and location for Doctor Who and the Dimensions in Time – as part of a weekend of family activities. More details on what that will involve soon.

Over the weekend of 19-20 September, I’ll be at Regenerations in Swansea, flogging copies of the Inside Story. (How splendid that Gary Russell gets top billing above Derek Jacobi and Davros).

In October I’m hoping to do a thing in Manchester and possibly also in Leeds, of which more details soon. And then, at the end of October I’m at HurricaneWho in Orlando.

If you're able to make any or all of these, do come say hello.

"A guilty secret"

The splendid fellows at Doctor Who podcast Radio Free Skaro have posted up an MP3 interview with me, conducted at the Gallifrey convention in LA last month. Hear me stumble my way towards the articulate without ever quite getting there.

The long fingers of Doctor Who

Here's what I wrote for the FantasyCon programme, on the subject of writing for Doctor Who:

“His long fingers flashed over the keyboard with amazing speed.”

That’s how Terrance Dicks describes David Tennant’s Doctor on page 29 of his 2007 Doctor Who novel Made of Steel. The Doctor’s in an internet cafe, looking for evidence that the Cybermen weren’t all swallowed by the void he created at Canary Wharf. Cor, I thought when I read that sentence. And also, I’m having that.

At the time I was writing The Pirate Loop, my own tenth Doctor novel (all canapés and badger-faced space pirates) and was struggling to find simple ways to differentiate this Doctor from his predecessors. I’ve written novels, short stories and audio plays featuring eight of the 10 Doctors and one of the trickiest things is getting each incarnation right. How do you make sure that the tenth Doctor sounds like the tenth?

Terrance Dicks was obviously the person to steal from. Dicks has written more Doctor Who than anybody else – he invented the Time Lords, script-edited all of the third Doctor’s era on telly and has written more than 80 Doctor Who novels and novelisations. Dicks also believes that the Doctor is always the Doctor; the same man despite outward appearance and mannerisms. In effect, you write the same character, it’s the actors who make him different.

A good example of this is the 2003 Big Finish audio play Jubilee by Robert Shearman. At the beginning of episode two, Colin Baker’s sixth Doctor is trapped in a room with a disarmed Dalek, played by Nicholas Briggs. It’s almost the same scene as the one in Dalek, Shearman’s 2005 script for the TV series, only with Christopher Eccleston in the role. While Eccleston’s Doctor shouts and drools flem, Baker’s performance is quieter, warier, more curious.

Before the new series, when only Real Fans were likely to pick up Doctor Who books, you could even keep the reader guessing, letting them suss out which Doctor you’d chosen by which companions or adventures you mentioned. But there are now people who love new Doctor Who, “fans” who can’t rattle off the names of the actors who played the previous incarnations. Who don’t recite them every night as they brush their teeth.

So Big Finish’s Short Trips anthologies now tell you up front which Doctor features, and there’s a handy guide to the first eight on the inside back-flap of each of our anthologies. But even when you tell the reader which Doctor it is explicitly, you still need to get him right. I once edited a story where I had to ask if the Doctor in it was the fifth or the eighth. It only took a tiny bit of tweaking to get it right, adding in a particular, simple line of description – especially early on in the story.

Terrance Dicks mastered these simple descriptions: the third Doctor’s “shock of white hair”, the fifth Doctor’s “pleasant, open face”; the “skinny geek” tenth Doctor with his long fingers.

It’s not just about pinching the descriptions from Terrance Dicks’ books. There’s also the extremely necessary research of watching lots of Doctor Who on DVD. I rewatched all the existing episodes of the first year of Doctor Who to properly depict William Hartnell’s first Doctor and his companions for my novel The Time Travellers. This vital preparation meant I could steal the first Doctor’s way of starting any statement, “I should say...” and the way he stands tall, gripping the lapels of his frock coat, whenever there’s a problem. Time well spent, I think.

It’s not that you’re parodying each performance. The research often helps you spot something to hook a story on, or at least an angle to show some new facet of the characters. Genre writing of any kind is often a sort of parlour game; you have to reshuffle familiar elements so that the result appears the same but new. How do you make the Doctor just like he is on TV yet also something new?

The first Doctor on screen turns out to be not quite the grouch Fan wisdom sometimes thinks. Yet he’s often single-minded, neglecting his granddaughter and other companions when some mystery or spectacle takes his fancy. He’s also a reluctant hero: fighting monsters and injustice only when he’s made to. Only some 50 episodes into the series, as the Daleks invade Earth, does he, unprompted, dare to stop them. (Though initially he gets involved only because he’s locked out of the TARDIS.)

In practical terms, the production team had realised they needed a more active protagonist, that the Doctor couldn’t keep having adventures by accident. But within the fiction itself, what changes in the Doctor? Why does he become the crusader we have come to know? Or rather, what stops him getting involved before this? That’s the sort of thing with which I padded out my book.

It’s Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor who spends his time being rude and insufferable to his friends. (A fanzine article in the 1990s argued this was his frustration at being stranded on Earth, unable to work his TARDIS.) I pinched that for my first professionally published short story: in The Switching, when the suave Master tries to escape from prison by swapping his mind into the Doctor’s body, the Doctor’s friends don’t just fail to notice, they think it’s an improvement.

The same story wouldn’t work with any other incarnation of the Doctor; or rather it wouldn’t play out in the same way. Likewise The Time Travellers only works with the first Doctor, and at that particular moment in his life before the Daleks invade Earth. The Doctors aren’t just different superficially; their different mannerisms spill out and shape the stories.

So that’s how it’s done, or at least how I do it. I said I’ve written for eight of the 10 Doctors. I’ve not written for the ninth Doctor because he was only around for a year and all the spin-off books and annuals are now on to the tenth. And I’ve not written for the second Doctor because I found him too difficult. His character is all in the performance of actor Patrick Troughton – not what he says but the gravelly-voiced, impish, naughty schoolboy way he says it.

But even “impish” I stole from Terrance Dicks.

“The girl watched him leave [the internet cafe]. ‘Pity,’ she thought. ‘Completely bonkers, of course. But he looked rather interesting for a geek.’

Doctor Who: Made of Steel by Terrance Dicks, page 31.

My mates’ scribbling #1

A sizeable chunk of the stalagmite of wanna-read books are those by my colleagues and playmates. The loyal and supportive thing is to buy the things (even more so, in the case of School's Out, after a freebie copy had been swallowed up by the post). But actually, you know, reading them has been on hiatus.

(One chum was telling me just a while ago that he’s given up any pretence of keeping up with his mates’ stuff. It is easier and cheaper and probably less cruel than to keep on saying, “But I mean to.”)

But my current employment means a couple of hours commuting, which means I’m fast catching up. I’ve also just had this two-week stint extended to 21 December, so I’m afraid there’s going to be quite a lot more book posts to come. Sorry.

Robert Shearman’s Tiny Deaths is a collection of 14 short stories all on the subject of death. The final story, “Somewhere in a small room a little boy sat waiting”, is the only one I’d read before, when it appeared in the Benny anthology Life During Wartime, edited by Paul Cornell. (Alongside TWO stories of mine, because clearly I am best.)

In the context of Tiny Deaths, it’s a very different story. No longer is it implicit that the small boy in question is the half-doggy son of a space archaeologist, hidden away while the museum-on-a-planetoid that’s his home is invaded by space-Nazis. Instead, we only get things as he understands them, so there are hints of something happening that means he must be hidden, and that Mummy is somehow involved.

Reading it in this new context, I realised the story had no especially science-fiction elements to it. The events could almost be happening anywhere, any when – and it’s that universality that makes it so affecting. (Interestingly, to me anyway, Cornell gave me notes once that Benny stories should always be noticeably sci-fi.)

It’s tricky to discuss the rest of Tiny Deaths without spoiling it’s many wondrous surprises. Like a lot of Rob’s plays on stage and on Radio 4, there’s a prevailing bitter-sweetness to the stories, with wry comic detail punctuating the sense of loss. On the back cover, Martin Jarvis compares him to Douglas Adams, Alexei Sayle and Philip K Dick. I also thought of Alan Bennett.

The cover – a lovely thing of a Goth girl blowing bubbles that are also holes – is a great summing up of this light-touch melancholia. It occurs to me as I write this that she only needs an ankh and she could be Neil Gaiman’s fun, lively Death.

Often Rob’s characters are rather numb to the things happening to them – people who aren’t in love or aren’t grieving, or don’t quite understand all the fuss. This leads them to attempt to explain themselves, which is a good device for creating a skewed perspective. It also means that many of the stories have a dream-like quality.

Another thing that makes them dream-like is the strict adherence to the rules of fantasy. Like his celebrated Doctor Who work, Rob will start a story from some mad idea – everyone suddenly all being told how and when they’re going to die, or that Hell does not discriminate between its human souls and those of other animals. And having established this “novum” (which is what the clever academic Darko Suvin calls the weirdshit that’s crucial to sci-fi), he then explores its consequences on ordinary people.

As Douglas Adams famously said, the effect of following this weirdshit through is that an idea that’s initially silly and funny becomes something affecting, and moving, and scary. Stranger still, the mad ideas become somehow plausible, even convincing. By changing the rules of sacred stuff we yet take so for granted – how we die, how we grieve, how we are thought of afterward – Rob undermines our sureties. As a result, it’s an unsettling sequence, at once playful and profound.

Again, it’s difficult to describe this without giving anything away, and the stories are full of quite brilliant veerings off. But the titular story is a particular gem. It begins with a description of Jesus not as an ordinary person as such, but at least as one we feel we might almost have known. He’s good on scripture, the story explains, but not brilliant on practicalities.

“As his parents had said, somewhat ruefully, there was a lad who knew the value of everything and the cost of nothing […] He’d listen patiently as his disciples at the Last Supper tried to tot up the bill and work out how much everyone should put in – they should just split it thirteen ways Andrew had suggested, but Simon Peter pointed out that was all very well but he hadn’t had a starter, and Thomas went on to say that he had had a starter but it had only been olives, that was the cheapest thing on the menu, that hardly counted, in some restaurants they’d be thrown in gratis, it was hardly his fault this one didn’t. And Jesus would say nothing, just watch them indulgently, would wait until he was told what his contribution should be, and put in without further comment.”

Robert Shearman, “Tiny Deaths”, in, er, Tiny Deaths, pp. 175-6.

It’s a story that’s at once deliciously blasphemous and yet at the same time dares to give insight on what Jesus’ death means. There’s both something of The Last Temptation about it, yet also of Life of Brian.

And in struggling to explain what the book’s like, I realise I’m just listing other things I’ve loved. Which is about as a good a recommendation as you’re going to get.

Do not fear fluffiness

Our Bumper Book of Daleks is just reaching people, a hair's breadth prior to Christmas. Hooray!

As a special bonus, you can read online for free - yes free! - the story I pinched from based on the Dr's own PhD. Mrs Guerrier, she so proud of me.

To read "The Eighth Wonder of the World", click on the link immediately below the book's cover at the webpage given above.