Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman

Biologist Karin Resaint has just completed a comprehensive study of a strange, rare fish; she thinks the Venomous Lumpsucker might be intelligent enough to hold a grudge. Mark Halyard, meanwhile, is a mining executive trying to profit from extinctions. He's not the only one: extinction is big business in this bleak near future.

"Every year, a certain number of extinction credits were allocated at no charge by the WCSE [World Commission on Species Extinction], while others were auctioned off, and afterwards they could be bought and sold on the open market. The idea was that the supply of credits would be gradually ratcheted down, so the price would creep up until they were pretty much unaffordable, and people would simply have to use their ingenuity to avoid driving species to extinction.

"Unfortunately for the endangered species of the world, on the night of the Mosvatia Bioinformatics dinner the price of an extinction credit stood at just €38,432." - p. 22.

When someone sabotages the system, these two unlikely characters end up on a quest to find the last surviving examples of Resaint's unusual fish...

Smart, funny and brutal as hell, this brilliant book is packed with big ideas. A lot of them follow from the basic wheeze of extinction credits - with attempts to exploit or cheat the system or, for example, the impact of extinctions in making food taste blander. But there are also other big ideas thrown into the mix, such as the fungal infection that changes people's appearance so much that computer systems don't recognise them as human. Again, we see multiple impacts of this and explore ways it can be exploited. Every few pages there's some new, smart idea. It's a rollicking, intelligent read.

I can easily see why this won this year's Clarke Award (for the best science-fiction novel) and is a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Top marks also to John Hastings, reading the audiobook version and making the different characters distinct. I've just bought a copy of the paperback to give as a gift.

Doctor Who Magazine #574

After some time off to make room for the Christmas quiz (and answers), the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine features another Sufficient Data infographic, written by me and illustrated by Ben Morris. 

This one marks 50 years of Day of the Daleks and owes a little to the blog post I wrote a while ago on the economics of the Daleks.

Economics of the Daleks

In the 1964 Doctor Who episode World's End, the TARDIS materialises on the banks of the Thames – but something is very wrong. A sign warns that, under emergency regulations, it is forbidden to dump bodies into the river.

The Doctor's companions also point out what to them is the odd sight of Battersea Power Station without two of its chimneys (as, er, it is today). All the bustle and business of London, that great centre of trade, has been silenced.

As the Doctor and his friend Ian explore, they discover a clue to what's happening in a desk in a warehouse:

DOCTOR: Ah, here, look. At least we know the century, dear boy. Look. 

IAN: 2164. 

Now, this calendar is a simple method of telling the audience that we're some 200 years in the future. But I think it also suggests something about the mechanics of the world we've arrived in, as I'll explain in a moment.

Soon the Doctor and his friends discover that Earth has been conquered by Daleks - this is the first episode of a story better known as The Dalek Invasion of Earth. In the next episode we learn from a man called Craddock how this conquest came about, his speech full of vivid, horrific detail too expensive to realise onscreen:

CRADDOCK: Meteorites came first. The Earth was bombarded with them about 10 years ago. A cosmic storm, the scientists called it. The meteorites stopped, everything settled down - and then people began to die of this new kind of plague ... The Daleks were up in the sky just waiting for Earth to get weaker. Whole continents of people were wiped out. Asia, Africa, South America. They used to say the Earth had a smell of death about it. 

Another man, David Campbell, continues the story:

DAVID: The plague had split the world into tiny little communities, too far apart to combine and fight, and too small individually to stand any chance against invasion ... About six months after the meteorite fall, that's when the saucers landed. Cities were razed to the ground, others were simply occupied. Anyone who resisted was destroyed. Some people were captured and were turned into Robomen, the slaves of the Daleks. They caught other human beings and many of them were shipped to the vast mining areas. No one escapes. The Robomen see to that. 

The Earth and all its surviving people have become resources for some merciless Dalek project. So what about that calendar? Does it seem likely that after the plague, the invasion and the enslavement of the human race, people continued to print and publish calendars? Or does it seem credible that the Daleks produce them for their human slaves, using our Arabic numerals rather than the Dalek lettering seen elsewhere in the story?

If not, then it seems probable that the calendar was produced before the coming of the meteorites in 2163 (to serve the following year). The TARDIS has landed, according to Craddock, "about 10 years" later so The Dalek Invasion of Earth is set c. 2173 (23 years after the movie-version, Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD.)

Except that in the 1965 episode Day of Armageddon, (part of the story known as The Daleks' Master Plan) the Daleks again threaten Earth, this time in the year 4000. The Doctor refers back to the earlier invasion:

DOCTOR: If the Daleks were going to attack Earth, as you seem to fear, then you must tell Earth to look back in the history of the year 2157 ... History will show how to deal with them. 

It's a passing reference. We don't know if 2157 is the date of the meteorites, the plague or the arrival of the Daleks on Earth - or of all three. And perhaps the Doctor has muddled his dates. But if we take him at his word, the invasion of Earth began six years before the production of that calendar.

Now, we could see that as a small continuity error, and conclude that writer Terry Nation or someone on the production team misremembered details of the earlier story. But I prefer to find ways to rationalise such apparent discrepancies - partly )but not only) because I spend a lot of time writing new stories to fit around old episodes of Doctor Who.

(Masters of Earth, the very good new story apparently set a year before the events of The Dalek Invasion of Earth seems to ignore the date given in Day of Armageddon, using the calendar to conclude that the TV story takes place in 2164, and, following Craddock's "about 10 years ago", that the invasion began in 2153.)

As well as establishing a date, I think we can use the calendar to better understand how the Daleks run their occupation of Earth. Despite enslaving Earth and turning various humans into Robomen, the calendar being produced during the conquest suggests that other humans have at least been granted a level of autonomy to carry out specific tasks set by their Dalek masters. My reasoning is that to complete those tasks successfully requires a certain level of administrative infrastructure, and continuing to print and distribute calendars helps the enslaved humans deliver their tasks on schedule.

The only alternative I can think of is that the calendar has been produced by the human resistance - the allies of Craddock and David Campbell. Perhaps it's useful when planning anti-Dalek activities. But then there's the Doctor's response when he first walks into the warehouse:

DOCTOR: A musty smell. This place hasn't been used in years.

That suggests the warehouse is not in active use by either the Daleks or the human resistance - which is why it's a convenient place to hide a murdered Roboman. But that also suggests the calendar found in the drawer there is a few years' old - so the TARDIS has arrived sometime after 2164. If the Doctor is right in Day of Armageddon about the invasion beginning in 2157, then Craddock's "about 10 years ago" suggests this is c. 2167, and the warehouse has been abandoned for about three years. But it was still being used six years into the invasion.

For the sake of argument, let's say the calendar was produced by the Daleks and the warehouse, before it was abandoned, was used by the Daleks, too (I'll come back with some corroborrating evidence for that in a bit). The warehouse doesn't seem directly connected to the Daleks' mining project in Bedford - a key part of the plot of the story - so it seems there were other Dalek initiatives going on, which needed warehouses and schedules. There are plenty of other things the Daleks might find useful to exploit from Earth: minerals, or information, or perhaps human slaves they could ship out to work on other Dalek worlds.

That speculation about this particular story is backed up by what happens in 1972 story Day of the Daleks, when the Daleks have again conquered Earth in the 21st century. Note, it's not the same invasion as last time, for all it might take place in the same period of future history. In episode 4, the Daleks' human Controller explains to the Doctor and his friend Jo what happened:

CONTROLLER: Towards the end of the 20th century, a series of wars broke out. There was a hundred years of nothing but killing, destruction. Seven-eighths of the world's population was wiped out. The rest were living in holes in the ground, starving, reduced to the level of animals. 

JO: So the Daleks saw their opportunity and took over. 

CONTROLLER: There was no power on Earth to stop them. 

DOCTOR: So they've turned the Earth into a giant factory, with all the wealth and minerals looted and taken to [Dalek planet] Skaro. 

CONTROLLER: Exactly. Men who were strong enough, of course, were sent down the mines, the rest work in factories. 

JO: Why? Why are they doing all this? 

CONTROLLER: They need a constant flow of raw materials. Their empire is expanding. 

For all the parallels with the earlier story, we don't see any Robomen in this Dalek-conquered Earth. Instead, the human Controller and his staff of technicians and guards collaborate with the Dalek regime - the Doctor calls the Controller a "Quisling". In fact, we seen this sort of collaboration in The Dalek Invasion of Earth when the Doctor's friend Barbara meets a woman and girl who appear to be free:

WOMAN: We make clothes for the slave workers. We're more use to them [the Daleks] doing that than we would be in the mine.

The woman and girl soon betray Barbara to the Daleks in exchange for a small amount of food. To survive, these humans conspire in their own oppression.

There's another clue to the way the Daleks run the planets they conquer in Death to the Daleks (1974). Here, we learn of a disease wreaking havoc across various worlds. But this is a not a Dalek plot, a prelude to yet more invasion. As the Doctor explains in episode 2:

DOCTOR: Several of the planets the Daleks have colonised are suffering from the same disease. They're dying in millions. Now they need that chemical just as badly as you [humans] do. 

His choice of words is interesting - he refers to planets the Daleks have "colonised" not conquered, which (for all Doctor Who of the period critiques colonies in space) almost sounds like he thinks they're there legitimately. More pertinently, the Daleks have been prompted to act because people are "dying in their millions". Why would the merciless Daleks care about that? I think the only reason can be that the Daleks need these people to make their empire work. They may talk about wanting to exterminate all other life forms, but in the short-term they must be more pragmatic. They need us.

(ETA: Jonathan Morris points out that later in the story the Daleks say that, having gathered up all the supplies of this special chemical, they "can force the space powers to accede to our demands. If they do not, millions of people on the outer planets will perish." But if the Daleks have, as the Doctor says, colonised worlds with millions of people, that potential for blackmail is in addition to that need to cure their own workers.)

(ETA 2: Paul Smith points out that we're given no indication that these "colonised" worlds of the Daleks were populated by anyone other than Daleks, so that it is Daleks "dying in the millions". That's not how I'd interpreted it, but watching again I think Paul is right. Even so, we know from other examples how the Daleks treat native populations as their exploit a planet's resources: see their invasions of Earth (above), Spiridon (in Planet of the Daleks (1973) and Exxilon (in Death to the Daleks (1974).)

The expanding Dalek empire is not only reaching out into space for ever more resources. Day of the Daleks also suggests something new, as the Doctor is told in episode 4:

DALEK: The Daleks have discovered the secret of time travel. We have invaded Earth again. We have changed the pattern of history. 

The Daleks had the ability to travel in time in three of their four previous onscreen adventures, The Chase (1965), The Daleks' Master Plan (1965-6) and The Evil of the Daleks (1967). But note that the Dalek says "again". They're using time travel to rewrite the events of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, coming back to conquer the Earth at the same point in future history, but this time doing it better to more efficiently exploit Earth's resources.

The Doctor defeats this attempt to change future history, and the suggestion at the end of Day of the Daleks is that he has thwarted the Dalek invasion. Yet in part 1 of Remembrance of the Daleks (1988), we're told this:

ACE: And now [the Daleks] want to conquer the Earth [in 1963]. 

DOCTOR: Nothing so mundane. They conquer the Earth in the 22nd century. 

So the Doctor prevented the invasion in Day of the Daleks from ever happening, but not the one from The Dalek Invasion of Earth - which now takes place as before. There's a clue as to why that might be in part 3 of Remembrance of the Daleks, when the Doctor warns Ace about changing history:

DOCTOR: Ace, the Daleks have a mothership up there capable of eradicating this planet from space, but even they, ruthless though they are, would think twice before making such a radical alteration to the time line. 

Note that it's not that they wouldn't do it, just that they'd think twice. Why?


As we've seen, the Dalek empire depends on expansion to gain ever more resources, and the gathering of those resources depends on the work of enslaved people. The most efficient use of these people is not merely to enslave them, robotised or otherwise, but to offer some of them autonomy to run particular tasks themselves, with an infrastructure to support them which includes printing calendars. But all of this takes ever more resources, so the Dalek empire must constantly expand. And that brings them up against a people just as powerful as they are.

TIME LORD: We foresee a time when they will have destroyed all other lifeforms and become the dominant creature in the universe.

In Genesis of the Daleks (1975), the Time Lords send the Doctor back in time to the point where the Daleks were created. He is meant to either destroy the Daleks entirely, or affect their creation so that they will develop to be less aggressive. It's effectively what the Daleks do in Day of the Daleks - using time travel to pre-emptively weaken a rival.


It's been argued that Genesis of the Daleks sees the Time Lords strike the first blow in what will become the devastating Time War between them and the Daleks, which has haunted all of Doctor Who since 2005.

But we don't hear of the Time Lords battling the Daleks again until the events of the Time War. Indeed, Davros - creator and later emperor of the Daleks - tells the Doctor in Resurrection of the Daleks (1984):

DAVROS: You are soft, like all Time Lords. You prefer to stand and watch. Action requires courage, something you lack.

The suggestion is that, despite provocation, the Time Lords are not acting against the Daleks - yet Davros is still plotting to wage war on them. Then, in Remebrance of the Daleks, the Daleks battle for control of a remote stellar manipulator that will give them the same power over time as the Time Lords.

I noted before the Doctor's comments in this story that the Daleks would be wary of making big changes to history. We've seen them change (future) history before, so perhaps the wariness is because they know they lack the same powers over time as the as the Time Lords, who would thwart such interference (just as the Doctor, a Time Lord, does in Day of the Daleks).

So my thesis is that the Daleks cannot expand their empire through history while the Time Lords have superior power over time. But the Daleks must expand their empire through history because of the way that empire operates, guzzling up ever more resources.

And we can trace how it operates - and thus the economic root of the Time War - from that calendar found in World's End.

(I'm thinking through this kind of stuff as I work on my book about The Evil of the Daleks (1967), to be published by the Black Archive next May. So expect more. Sorry.)

"The Bank can never 'go broke'."

Splendid chums Nyssa1968 and Nimbos popped round yesterday for a contest of Doctor Who Monopoly, which I received for Christmas. The Dr won, quite spectacularly, with some loss to her leftie credentials. I'd forgotten quite how aggressive a game it can be, as you struggle to bankrupt your friends.

I was also much taken by two rules, both of such prominence to be included on the "Set it up!" spread. First,

"It is important that the Banker keeps their personal funds and properties separate from the Bank's."

After all my time transcribing debates in the House of Lords, I wanted to point out that something being "important" is not the same as it being a requirement, and that perhaps we should leave out, "It is important that", and change "keeps" to "must keep". (There could then be an hour-long debate on the legal precedent on "must" versus "may", which is always a favourite.)

Secondly,

"The Bank can never 'go broke'. If the Bank runs out of money, the Banker may issue as much as needed by writing on ordinary paper."

A cynic might say that this is exactly what got us into our current economic snafu. But perhaps I'm still reeling from John Lanchester's "Let's call it failure" in the current London Review of Books, which explains in plain and gossipy style just how bad things are:

"In June 2010, in his first budget, Osborne said the structural deficit was 4.8 per cent, and that with three years of reduced spending, the figure would be down to 1.9 per cent. ... If you reverse the creative accounting and add the interest from the quantitative easing back where it used to be, as a Bank of England asset, it adds 0.6 per cent to the structural deficit. That takes it back up to 4.9 per cent – higher than it was when the coalition came to power."

Books finished, June 2010

Got all caught up in work and real life this past month, hence the lack of blogging. But I did get through some books.

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve is superb: a thrilling adventure in a rich and vivid world, packed full of wild ideas, brilliant characters and eye-popping surprises. Just wow.

I'd read a lot of Lance Parkin's fanzine material in the original fanzines, so a lot of this collected edition felt like revisiting my years as a student in Preston. Lance has often been keen and forthright in his views and there are all kinds of nuggets of insight here, along with stuff where perhaps his enthusiasm goes a bit far.

"1974, then, was perhaps the year when the Copernican revolution came for Doctor Who - the year when Doctor Who stopped revolving around the TV series."
Lance Parkin, 'A forty-year adventure in time and space', in Time Unincorporated - The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives Volume 1: Lance Parkin, p. 29.

I wonder what fans who've come to the show since 2005 will make of this insight into those dark days when there was No Doctor Who On Telly, and we clung to books and audios as keepers of the flame. There's some wild-eyed True Belief here, that the show will come back and be brilliant and prove all the Heretics wrong. How brilliant that he's been proven right.

You can still read Lance's blog about the writing of his Doctor Who book "The Eyeless", on which I commented back in November 2008.

The Gift by Lewis Hyde was a present from m'colleague Ben, and I made pages and pages of notes on it while on holiday in Malta. I'll endeavour to write those up some day properly. The book comes in two halves: first we're shown the difference between a market economy for products and a gift economy for ideas. I read-up on gift economies when I wrote The Judgement of Isskar and had the Doctor explain them this way:

DOCTOR:
Oh. Well, you send Christmas cards out to everyone, and then it’s on their honour to send you a Christmas card back.

It doesn't quite work like that: a gift economy isn't about two people sending stuff back and forth between them; you pass the gift onwards. So really the Doctor should have said:

DOCTOR:
Oh. Well, you send Christmas cards out to everyone, and then it’s on their honour to send out Christmas cards themselves.

Ideas and artworks, Hyde argues, have always flourished in gift economies, and he cites all sorts examples. In the second half, he focuses on the lives of two poets - Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound - to explore the problems of being an artist and at the same time getting paid.

I'm not going to attempt a fully fledged reply now, but the book really prickled my brain, challenging me on what I do for a living and how. I squawked with horror at the snobbishness about getting a day job to pay your way, and Hyde's sense that any kind of compromise or patronage is selling out. And Whitman and Pound, whose lives both went so awry, are hardly people we should aspire to emulate. More on this as soon as life allows...

The Three Incestuous Sisters is a picture book by Audrey Niffenegger. I loved The Time Traveller's Wife and have her next one on my pile of imminent reads. This is a twisted, gothy story that reminded me a bit of Tim Burton's melancholy tales and also Edward Gorey. Strange and broken and haunting, it echoes with some of my Real Life. And also, there are goth girls without any clothes on.

Destined for closure

The new issue of The DFC has some very sad news: it's closing in two issue's time. What a shame.

As I blogged last year, it's the first original, non-tie-in comic to launch since the short-lived Wildcat in 1988. For the past 41 weeks it has boasted no tie-ins to TV or movies or computer games, no cover-mounted freebies, no advertising. Just a mad squodge of new comic-strips through your letterbox to look forward to every Friday. Says the announcement:

"We're really sorry that we have to stop so suddenly, and that your stories are going to be interrupted. But we haven't been able to find the funding to cover the cost of creating more comics."

They promise there'll be ways to "find out what happens next in all the stories", but that's not quite the same.

My favourite strip is probably Fish-Head Steve by Jamie Smart, about a village of people who all have strange heads. But the range of styles and stories had been extraordinary: from the dark and scary Mezolith to the kooky Bodkin and the Bear, from the beautifully drawn sci-fi epic The Spider Moon to the strange adventure of Sneaky - cleverest Elephant in the world.

It's a been a fantastic ride for the last 41 weeks. I've had concerns about some of it: a couple of strips that left me cold, and sometimes the structure of strips has been odd, episodes not adding anything to what we've already learnt or finishing on what are hardly cliffhangers. But on the whole it's been a brilliant, fresh and vibrant read.

And, obviously, I learn it's closing the day after I sent them a submission.

An Englishman gone wrong

Alistair Cooke was born in 1908, the same year as Ian Fleming and William Hartnell. These days, all three seem to have been from another world, one all cigarette smoke, bad dentistry and crackling black-and-white. And yet, watching Cooke’s 1972 TV series America: A Personal History of the United States I’m struck by how the past explains the world we live in now, and what hard-learnt lessons we seem to have forgotten. It seems especially pertinent this week, with America bounding bright-eyed into a new era on this coming Tuesday.

The 13-part TV series is from the same stable as landmark BBC series Civilisation and The Ascent of Man. It's an effective use of the small number of colour TV cameras; like the landmarks shows today that show off high definition. Cooke had already spent 40 years explaining the States to the Brits. The BBC radio programme Letter From America (so much good stuff on that site) ran from March 1946 to 20 February, 2004 – there’s a deluxe hardback of the best of his letters, and various other collections, but the whole damn lot is going to be put online by the University of East Anglia. Hooray!

So this is an ex-pat’s view of his adopted home. The first episode covers Cooke’s own passion for the country, the places he visited when he first arrived, the music and vibe that so wowed him. There’s no doubt he’s got it bad… And that flavours a lot of what follows.

The next eleven episodes tell the history of the country. Though Cooke starts with the first people to arrive from the East, things really get going with the arrival of Chris Columbus and then the empires of Spain and France. Episode three is about the British taking charge of their territory, and the first clamour for independence.

Cooke then follows the efforts of these nascent Americans to achieve in practice the promise of their famous declaration: the self-evident equality of all men, the life and liberty and happiness. Note it is “happiness” not “profit”; much of Cooke’s story of America is about inequality, success and enrichment at the expense of others.

Cooke admits his love for the Supreme Court as – more often than not – the defender of the little guy and thus of the American dream, that anyone can make it so long as they’re prepared to work. Cooke’s villains are those who ignore the Supreme Court, his crises when they get a decision wrong. The nation we know today, Cooke argues, is the product of the Supreme Court having to intercede: “No, this is what America is...”

The American system of checks and balances is interesting because, I’d argue, it looks backward. Everything is referred to the original, 18th century constitution and its 27 amendments. (Cooke covers the first 10 tweaks (the “Bill of Rights”) in some detail, but then rather speaks of the constitution as unchangeable monolith.)

For example, Americans today have the right to bear arms because of lines written by James Madison in 1789 and ratified by three quarters of the 14 then-existent States on 15 December 1791. Imagine our own gun laws being based on people’s habits in the year that Mozart died and Charles Babbage born; so many of our assumptions about the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness have completely changed since then.

As Cooke later argues in the penultimate episode of the series, the Second Amendment sought to prevent the US having its own standing army. The newly independent Americans feared creating a tyrant of their own, one with soldiers to back him up. But, at risk from pirates and Indians and each other, early Americans had to be ready to defend their homes at a minute’s notice. Now they have a standing army – and police force and everything else – haven’t they lost that excuse?

There are those who want a Bill of Rights for the UK, who argue we should have a written constitution like the US. But we have a written constitution; it’s just all of it – every act of law, and the precedent of every decision in a court room. (Madison himself was against a Bill of Rights for that reason and some others.) Ours is a constantly developing system of prohibitions: you’re free to do anything that’s not specifically banned or limited.

One of my history teachers argued that ours is, at least in principle, a much freer system. My understanding is that the reason we have so many laws and amendments is because of people (not always intentionally) abusing loopholes in the law – or wanting some prohibition relaxed. The latter is interesting for reasons I’ll come back to. But as Madison observed, if we only behaved better we’d not need a Government watching us.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

James Madison, The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments, The Federalist #51, 6 February 1788.

A few articles on Cooke I've read criticise him for not really proving the darker side of the US, for being such an establishment yes-man. I think that's most telling when he talks about segregation. When Cooke arrived in the US, he says, he found the racial divide very difficult. He argues – I think not very convincingly – that his winces were no different to his American friends wincing at British “norms” such as sending young kids to boarding school.

Yet episode six, “Gone West”, is unflinching in its horror at the treatment of the native Americans, and episode seven, “A Firebell in the Night” concisely explains the issues of slavery, the Civil War and its legacy today.

It's true he doesn't really explore the racial clashes of the post-war period, and he glosses over the assassinations of both Kennedys despite having been in the room in 1968.

“There was a head on the floor, streaming blood and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an ice cake. There were flash lights by now and the button eyes of Ethel Kennedy turned to cinders. She was slapping a young man and he was saying "Listen lady, I'm hurt too" - and down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb.”

Alistair Cooke, Letter from America, 9 June 1968.

But this series isn't about what is wrong with America, but how often it has been right, and how its national character has been hard won. There's the adversity of the early settlements and trails, the need for Nietzschean will against the enormous odds. This creates the myth of the American dream of triumph through effort.

This story is brought alive by footage of the places as they are now, by contemporary paintings, sketches, architecture, graffiti. Yet it's hearing the songs of wagon trains and revolution that really bring the story alive.

Then when nature is conquered, it is man-made adversity that must be battled: the astonishing violence of the Wild West. We lose the folk songs in favour of brutal photographs of doubled-up families, living on next to nothing.

Innovations slowly make life better: a steel plough to get through the unrelenting ground, barbed wire to make the cowboys into rangers, the mail-order catalogue to allow even the furthest flung family to get the latest clothes and haircuts. Cooke doesn't say it explicitly, but I felt he was implying that the American people became just as domesticated as their animals.

I'm also a little hesitant about some of the stories Cooke relates – they might have lost him 20 points on QI. There's Sacajawea, the native guide who Cooke relates throwing herself in front of her brother to save Lewis and Clark. Isn't that the same story as Pocahontas? Cooke tells us the Sacajawea lived to be 90 and to bitterly regret how her people had been forcibly dispossessed. This again seems to be disputed.

That dispossession is one of Cooke's examples of the Supreme Court being over-ruled by a villain. When President Andrew Jackson ignores Worcester vs. Georgia, Cooke calls him “imperious”. In fact, the story of America is one of empire: of conquest by France and Spain and then Britain, of 13 states then conquering the West.

Yet at the same time it's an empire of incredible, radical liberalism and tolerance. In many ways America sees itself less as a imperial conqueror as a haven for the world's bullied and oppressed. (Perhaps there's an argument that the US, and Israel, are victims of a cycle of abuse: the bullied growing up to be bullies...)

Cooke explains the astonishment of Jews in the nineteenth century on being able to practice their religion freely. (Until recently, only one race or religion had a word meaning their persecution specifically – pogrom – a signpost of centuries of oppression. Since the 1980s, but especially since 11 September 2001, there's also been islamophobia.)

It wasn't just pogroms that caused the huge emigration to America in the nineteenth century. There were the failed revolutions of 1848, the potato famine in Ireland, the stories of American streets lined with gold that dated back to the time of Cortez.

Cooke visits Ellis Island, at the time of filming derelict and recently gutted by fire, what Cooke calls,

“A frowsy monument to the American habit when something wears out of junking and forgetting it.”

He retells the experience of the immigrants, a route visitors can walk themselves today as Ellis Island is a museum. The Dr and I visited on our honeymoon in 2004, stunned that two out of every 10 who’d made the vast trek across the planet to get into this place were sent home – for looking sick or old or useless. US immigration still barks harder than any other sentry post I’ve been through.

What the museum doesn't show is the experience of immigrants once they've succeeded in reaching the mainland. Cooke visits the offices of the Jewish Daily Forward, which has run since 1897 and had a peak circulation of 250,000. Its letters pages speak volumes about the migrant experience: the struggles to learn English, to retain their old identities and religions, to fit in with the locals. Cooke marvels at the Daily Forward still being printed in Yiddish; I found it more strange and alien to see it laid out in chunks of movable type.

The different migrant communities shared the same problems if not the same culture and language. Cooke neatly explains how this shared experience led to a uniquely American style of comedy, the burlesque. He waves an actual slap-stick, explaining that the jokes were all corrupt cops and landlords, lascivious judges, the risks and suffering of the young as they try to make good the promise of their parents. From this shared sense of the little man surviving on his wits, Cooke says, come Keaton and Groucho and WC Fields.

The immigrants also meant cheap labour – and produced a few very rich individuals. Cooke ignores the presidents between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt because he doesn't think they actually held any power. Instead it was the business interests that ran the country and dictate policy – an accusation still levelled today.

Roosevelt gunned for the industrialists, but also wanted the immigrants to sign up to a distinct, indivisible American identity, distinct from their mother countries. I'd always been a little spooked by in-your-face American patriotism – the oath of allegiance in schools and public meetings, the heavy presence of the stars and stripes outside people's homes. Who, I thought, are they trying to convince, and of what? But Roosevelt's call for there to be no more “hyphenated Americans” suddenly puts that in context.

And the second generation of immigrants flourished in their new home. Cooke sorts through the index cards, finding the parents of Irving Berlin and Alfonse Capone, sundry judges and political chieftains. He also makes the link between America's toleration and its success over other nations: the German Jewish physicists fleeing Hitler in the 1930s were to ultimately win America the Second World War.

(See also me on what the bloody foreigners have done for us.)

Cooke is fascinating on the Wall Street Crash of 1928, on the frippery and greed immediately before it and the lie it was built on. He describes the problem brilliantly as,

“A mountain of credit on a molehill of actual money”,

and explains that in those primitive days there was none of the regulation and scrutiny that would stop such a thing happening today (!). (It's also eerie seeing footage throughout the series of the New York skyline, with the World Trade Center still being built.)

Those who ignore history are damned to repeat it. It strikes me that those bankers and money men who've fought so hard to de-regulate the markets are little different from teenagers hosting a party while their parents are away. They don't want rules or conditions either. After all, what can possibly go wrong?

But what can history teach us on how to get out of the present financial mess? Well, new president Franklin Roosevelt brought in a strict regime of what Cooke calls “national socialism”, ending speculation with other people's money for a whole two years (until the Supreme Court over-ruled him). There were huge public works like the Hoover Dam – but Cooke acknowledges it wasn't this Stalinist programme that solved the problem, it was the outbreak of world war.

As detailed above, for its first 160 years, the US had a “dogged distrust” of a standing army. The standing army in 1941, says Cooke, was no larger than Sweden’s. There’s comic footage of what look like boy scouts scampering through the woods, which Cooke starkly contrasts with the vicious efficiency of German Blitzkrieg.

The war changed everything. Cooke rather sees it as the apotheosis of American will, American ingenuity, American tolerance for the Jews so badly treated everywhere else. America bails out the UK and liberates France and Germany, turning the tables on its mother countries. The hydrogen bomb secured its position over the whole world.

Between 1945 and 1953 America’s nuclear toys went unrivalled. This unique position maybe explains their incredible paranoia and witch hunts – though as Cooke says they might as well have tried to keep secret the laws of gravity. The American arsenal and war machine is vital to the US economy, Cooke seems to say, and vital to its modern identity.

The penultimate episode of the series, as Cooke visits the men on duty in a nuclear bunker, is utterly chilling. We watch the nerdy young men who can bring about the end of the world going about their routine. Cooke explains they wear pistols to shoot each other should they start to act strange. He hopes the systems will not become too coolly automated, that there might always be some key human component who’ll be able to have second thoughts…

The last episode seems to begin with a prologue from some years later – perhaps after Reagan has been elected. Cooke admits his predictions in 1972 have not all come to pass, and flavours what follows. He ties his history together, comparing the America of the early 1970s to the founding dreams and ideology of the late 18th century.

It’s fascinating; he’s sure the self-sufficient communes will be part of the future, that America will be living the Good Life, that cities will be left far behind. He shows footage of a young Jesse Jackson, and then tells us of his amazement that – so soon after such violence and deep-rooted segregation – there are now black mayors and senators.

I found Cooke discussing the race question while stood in Chicago deeply strange: he'd finished writing his letters in 2004 just too soon to have mentioned Barack Hussein Obama. I wonder what Cooke would have made of him.

It's a love-letter to a nation, and I found it compelling. The English, Cooke says, often think of Americans as “an Englishman gone wrong.” His series shows how wrong we are.

No one wants to buy this dump

The Dr sends this clip from a 1992 episode of Spitting Image whose time has come again:



Speaking of houses, my own Doctor Who & Home Truths has had spankingly good reviews in the geek press:

“A science-fiction ghost story, similar to Nigel Kneale's rationalistic hauntings [...] An effective and disturbingly spooky tale, Home Truths lingers in the mind long after the open-ended conclusion, and is one of the very strongest of this latest series of Companion Chronicles.”

Matt Michael, "The DWM Review", Dr Who's Magazine #403, 7 January 2009, p.56.

And:

“a surprisingly atmospheric and menacing tale. Author Simon Guerrier has sensibly realised that these audiobook-style discs are often best when spooky, and packs plenty of unsettling moments into this MR James-style story of an apparently haunted futuristic house. One of the best releases yet...”

Saxon Bullock, “Rated Misc”, SFX #178, January 2009, p. 130.

(That said, my story in Christmas Round the World doesn't get a mention in Andrew Osmond's review on p. 115 of the same issue. Guess that means he thinks I'm one of the “sprouts or socks”.)

The Big Finish website now boasts a trailer for Doctor Who and the Judgement of Isskar – which is out next month.

I am the law

Typing away to finish Slitheen and listening to lots of radio. The news is full of bail-outs and a bloke called Judd Gregg - and I keep picturing old stony face.

Comforting when worn close to the skin

Nimbos got me two books for my birthday in June, a proper reading book and one for the toilet.

The latter, Nicholas Hobbes's England - 1000 Things You Need To Know is a whole mash up of facts and figures, and quite a lot of lists. The lists - of English Nobel prize-winners or bridges by Brunel - are a bit... lacking in excitement. But there's plenty of top facts and insights along the way, too.

For example, I already knew that wool had been such a major part of the English economy that the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sits on a comfy woolsack. These days the woolsack is stuffed with wool from all across the Commonwealth.

But I didn't know this little gem:

"Under a statute of 1556, anyone caught 'owling' - smuggling wool to France in the night - would have their left hand cut off and nailed up on display in a public place. Under George I, in the eighteenth century, this was changed to seven years' transportation."

Nicholas Hobbes, England - 1000 Things You Need To Know, p. 355.

Annoyingly, sources for this stuff are rarely given, and I'd also have liked some kind of "Further Reading" section, to help follow up on my favourite morsels. But it's a great toilet book, just as Nimbos thought it might be. And full of top facts I can pinch for my own writing.

I've set myself the target of writing a complete first draft of a short story today. It currently consists of several pages of notes in my notebook, so I should probably get on with it now...

Number crunch

Credit crunch has been in the news lately, which has got me thinking. And noticing just how many offers I get, all with the thrilling prospect of being able to owe banks some money.

There are many different strategies, but all are desperately urgent and equally simpering to please. Perhaps this is just what you get with being an adult and having a mortgage (and being good for a loan of some £¼ million). But this is what I've had in the last lunar cycle:

• 1 April
  Barclaycard send two blank cheques with a maximum total value of five grand. "Streamline your finances" says the accompanying letter, by paying off "outstanding credit or store card balances to your Barclaycard."
  
  "It couldn't be easier," they continue, "to take advantage of this great offer", where the solution to not keeping up with your myriad debts is to, er, borrow more money. I am reminded of my post last year on business buzzwords.
  
  Consolidate
  Verb. Have sex with.
  
  
• 3 April
  Black Horse personal finance tells me I have "been specially selected by Black Horse for a limited offer Priority Loan. We've set aside an amount of £7,575 especially for you. This offer is only available for a short time - so don't miss out on this opportunity. To activate your Priority Loan call us today - it's that easy to apply."
  
  It says the magic number £7,575 another couple of times on the letter, and in big letters, too, for the hard of cogitating. What's more, "because our loans are available up to £15,000, you could borrow more if you need it."
  
  So why are they only tantalising me with about half what they could offer? I feel rather slighted.
  
  "Enjoy affordable repayments" it also says in bold letters. Yes, because it's such great fun, being technically able to keep off the bailiffs!
  

• 9 April
  MBNA offers a credit card by which I might "spring clean" my finances. How seasonal! It's like the first chapter of Wind in the Willows! They don't do anything so unromantic as name actual cash figures, but the small print says there's a cash limit of £50,000 - though they'll dictate all the terms. In fact, there's so many conditions they have to provide a separate leaflet. Obviously no catches there!
  

• 11 April
  Barclaycard again! And I could have "Cash in just 4 working days" - well, they admit that it could be in your account in that time - from £1,000 to £25,000.
  

• 12 April
  British Airways have sent me a credit card. A real plastic one, stuck to a letter. Only it says in small print on the side, "This is not a Real Credit Card". But being able to see what the actual card looks like sure helps me decide whether it's a good offer.
  

• 15 April
  Black Horse again, with a loan to help "Put your plans into action - now!" And they feel snubbed I've not been in touch. "We recently wrote to you with a loan offer - if that amount wasn't right for you there are different amounts available ... Only you know what you want a loan for - here are some suggestions, what did you have in mind."
  
  They then suggest a garden makeover (£5,050), a dream kitchen (£7,575) and - the jackpot - a chance to spring clean my finances (£10,050). They're oddly precise figures, aren't they? Especially when I don't have a garden.
  

• 20 April
  Lloyds TSB this time, not Black Horse at all. And apparently "£5,000 is ready and waiting for you...". Note the suggestive glance of that slutty ellipsis. "Approval on a loan is less than 30 minutes" they explain - because of course I'm the one rushing to get this signed. In fact, I'm so in a hurry I might not notice the huge great box-out, that "Typical 17.9% APR".
  

• 1 May
  Barclaycard again. Word for word the same letter as 1 April with those two sultry cheques. Just in case I've changed my mind.
  

So in total, in one calendar month I've been offered somewhere between £23,575 (just short of the UK's average annual wage - £23,700 according to the BBC) and £105,000 (more than four times' that).

What is the solution? Well, first there's the Mailing Preference Service. But it can take months and it doesn't always work (Black Horse uses slight variations of my address which, I think, worm round the system). And anyway, the sharks themselves have provided the means of delivery.

There are prepaid envelopes with most of these letters. Prepaid, because the bank has to pay up to the Post Office if the envelopes are used. So you tear up the terms and conditions on the offer, stick them in the envelope, and post them back to the bank.

Petty? Well, yes and no. Because if enough people do it, the cost of sending this rubbish is too much to make it worthwhile. At least that's what I tell myself as I giggle fiendishly at the post box.