The Disappearing Future, edited by George Hay

“A thirteen-course brain banquet” boasts the back cover of this 160-page anthology from 1970, comprising six short stories and seven essays — four of the latter republished from elsewhere. 

It is, promises the cover, a “symposium of speculation.” That’s in line with editor George Hay’s firmly held view of the valae of science-fiction as a kind of blueprint for tomorrow — or, as the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia puts it, 

“that sf provides an armamentarium of mostly technological tools for coping with the future, and that a – or even the – main role of sf was to educate us for that future”.

This was the basis on which Hay helped to establish the Science Fiction Foundation, originally at North East London Polytechnic, and the journal Foundation. (The Encyclopaedia says that this was in 1972, but on 10 June 1971 Hay sent a letter on SFF-headed paper to Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who…)

A second blurb on the inside first page here suggests that this is exactly what the book will contain: “versions of the future we are now storing up for ourselves” sourced from “practising scientists and well-known sf authors”. Hay — I’m sure he wrote this, for all he refers to himself in the third person — goes on that,

“we have recently begun to to criminally destroy our ancient life-giving relationship with external nature … The Disappearing Future insists that Mother Earth is urgently giving us, her children, the red alert, and that we have very little time left in which to take even evasion action. The decision is ours.” (p. 1)

That sense of urgency, that sense of the whole Earth as environment and as nurturing mother, is surely an example of the impact of the “Earthrise” photograph taken in December 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8, seeing the world as a whole, single organism, as explored in Robert Poole’s book Earthrise. So it’s odd that, having brought up Mother Earth and imminent environmental catastrophe on p. 1 of this anthology, pretty much nothing further is said on the subject.

In his foreword, Hay tells us that the theme on which he submissions was, “the future, as the writer saw it, as derived from present events and trends”. He wanted a mixture of fiction and non-fiction to allow ideas to be explored in detail without holding up the action (or requiring clunky exposition). But he also says that this book is a response to the “paucity” of so many other tired and cliched anthologies of SF, not least in the shadow of the Moon landing,

“Now that space has finally cracked open, now that we know we can make it” (p. 9)

If not the whole-Earth environment, then, the promise is of a practical, useful ideas about what happens next, how we prepare for and embrace the future. Something to build on and with — or, if you will, a foundation…

But what follows is nothing of the sort. 

The anthology opens with “The First Forecast of the Future” by Professor IF Clarke, Head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde — and, er, not a scientist. It’s a short history of predictions, mostly focused on the anonymously written The Reign of George VII, 1900-1925 (1763), with references to Ini by Julian von Voss (1810) and the work of Jane Webb (he doesn’t mention the title but he means The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)).

Well, yes all right, it’s not really about what the future might hold, but gives us some context for how long we’ve been thinking this way. Fine.

Next up is “The Show Must Go On” by David I Masson, in which a character called Piitasan — his name taken, I think, from the marxist Karl Peterson — wanders through urban streets full of squalor and violence. He shares his views on the economics of labour as he steps over a “meths drinker”, ignores a rape in progress, refers to “spastics” and “mongols” and things then don’t end well for him. There’s some sort of analogy in this nasty mess, something a bit Clockwork Orange but not as fedt or insightful. It just left me feeling grubby.

Ophthalmologist and media boffin Kit Pedler’s “Deux Ex Machina?” was apparently first published in the Listener. It’s a bit dry and technical, positing some ideas about the future of robots, or “biological mimics” / “biomims” as he calls them, because why use the perfectly good and understood “android”? He doesn’t use “Cyberman” either; his biography mentions his work on Doomwatch with “Jerry” Davis, but not that they met on Doctor Who. 

Then we get “Political Science — Mark II” by John W Campbell, which Hay’s foreword suggests has been published elsewhere but doesn’t say where. This is more editorial than essay. Campbell starts by laying out his own scientific credentials:

“I have over the east few years brought up the subject of psi, and the facts of dowsing, and protested that scientists refused to apply the scientific method of open-minded experiments — and have been lectured by many kindly people on the subject of how little I understood” (p. 32). 

Yes, the “facts” of dowsing. But this is just the preliminary to his main point, which is to object to the vote taken by members of the National Academy of Sciences, decided 200 to 10, against making “scientific studies of genetic differences of intelligence among racial groups” (p. 33). Campbell thinks people voted out of fear of embarrassing results — which suggests he already felt he knew what those results would be. As with psi and dowsing, he seems to see the value of science as validating what he thinks or would like to be true. And it’s not really about the future at all.

“The Thorns of Barevi” by Anne McCaffrey is the sole contribution from a woman. It is told from the perspective of Cristen Bjornsen, a young woman from Denver who was abducted by alien Catteni and spent some time as a slave on the planet Barevi. In the nine months she has been there, it has been warm like summer on Earth, but the story begins with her worried that this will change as she only has the one outfit.

“Her sleeveless, single piece tunic was made of an indestructible material but it would not be very warm in cold weather. The scooped neckline was indecently low and the skirt ended mid-way on her long thighs.” (p. 35)

She then eats a red-coloured pear, with,

“its succulent juices dribbling down her chin on to her tanned breasts” (p. 36)

This is especially odd as the story is told in the third person from Cristen’s own perspective; this is how she sees herself.

Then she meets an alien Catteni who is humanoid, and “almost good looking” as he has an aristocratic nose and not the “thick, blubbery lips” of others of his kind. “She’d heard rumours…” she begins to tell us while admiring this handsome specimen, but we’re not told what part of his anatomy she has heard rumours about (p. 38). It’s not exactly subtle in the racial coding.

They run away from some other Catteni, taking refuge in a “flitter”. The handsome alien then says he hasn’t had a Terran before and, as if out of curiosity, rapes her — Cristen attempting but failing to resist his advances. 

“Her struggles only seemed to aid his efforts and just as she was certain she would be split apart, a surging emotion far more powerful and overwhelming replaced fear and pain” (p. 43).

Afterwards, they talk a bit and then, on more friendly terms, have sex again. End of story. I’m not really sure what this has to say about the future; I don’t really want to think what it says about the author.

Next up is “Sleep, Dreams and Computers" by Dr Christopher Evans, originally published in the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. He dismisses three theories about why we dream — to rest, to enter some realm of the fantastic, to be free of societal pressures and rules (the reason dreams are of use in psychoanalysis). Then he puts his own theory, based on a computer going offline from the exterior world to back up and sort data. It’s a compelling idea but not really about what the future holds.

Christopher Priest’s short story “Double Consummation” is based on a fun reversal where, in the Britain of the future, the social norm is not to have lasting or monogamous relationships. A man who works in politics is surprised to be dumped by one of his girlfriends, then finds out his other girlfriend has not taken her pills, is now pregnant and wants to get married — which he fears will end his career. It’s neatly set up and the ending works well, but it’s yet another story about sex without consent (in this case, concerning contraception). 

“The Temple Scientists” by Edward J Mishan — LSE staff member and author of The Cost of Economic Growth — muses on the differences between SF and FS, the latter his term for “future society” stories. I didn’t feel there was much of an argument here, really, more technicality than thesis. But it’s the only contribution, apart from George Hay’s foreword, to address other contributions: Pedler’s essay is “stimulating and thoughtful (and occasionally cynical)”, Masson’s short story “barely qualifies as SF” and Chapdelaln’s — which we’ve not got to yet! — is “perhaps too clever”.

“The Sunset Perspective” by Michael Moorcock is another outing for his achingly trendy / sexy time agent Jerry Cornelius, a character introduced in 1965 novel The Final Programme. Here Jerry struts around in “brown velvet bellbottoms” (p. 79) and “black car coat” (p. 80), while tackling an incursion in time that makes people revert to old, superstitious ways. For example, at one point he finds Miss Brunner — also from that first novel — busy burying a goat.

“He watched as she mumbled to herself, hitching her Biba miniskirt up to her thighs and urinating on the new mound of each” (p. 81)

I do not claim to be an expert on the logistics of miniskirts, but wouldn’t it already be around her thighs? Jerry then tries to help this victim of the time incursion in a manner thematically consist with other stories in this collection:

“He flung himself on top of Miss Brunner and began to molest her” (p. 87)

The story, set in the future, is peppered with headlines and fragments of news from the New York Times of 16 October 1969 and the November 1969 edition of Flying Review International, which I think was meant to convey a connection between the then-now and the future. Some 55 years later, it does not have quite the same effect, but gives an indication of exactly when this was written.

“Future Recall” by James Blish is an essay that largely refutes Hay’s whole thesis that science-fiction can and does prepare us for the future. I liked this a lot: it is engagingly argued and full of top facts — that the term “gas giant” is Blish’s own coinage (p. 102). Blish, whose novels I have long enjoyed, is full of shrewd insight. For example, he speaks of a vogue for mysticism in science at the time he was writing.

“When astronomers only a few years ago discovered the strange celestial objects called pulsars, the first explanation they suggested and published was that they might be navigation beacons for an interstellar civilisation. Had pulsars been discovered in 1935, a scientist here and there might have hoped that that was what they’d turn out to be (they didn’t), but he’d never dare to say so aloud.” (p. 103)

This is followed by “Someday You’ll Be Rich!” by Perry A Chapdelaine, about a PhD cyberneurologist who tries various different schemes to make money, and comes up with a means of rapidly churning out long strings of text using up every combination of keys on a typewriter, so that he can claim copyright on all stories as yet to be written. It’s a bit over-cooked and over-long, but striking to read now in the age of interminable techbro lifehacks and AI.

In “About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words” by Samuel R Delaney, originally published in Extrapolation (ed. Thomas D Clareson), the author presents a brilliant, original view of science-fiction based on the way meaning emerges incrementally as we read each word at a time. Every new word conditions what has come before, he says. If we’re introduced to a science-fiction object or idea — a thing that we know is invented — that shapes our sense of everything else in the story, even if it is part of our recognised world. It’s a really compelling idea, engagingly argued and great fun; that perfect mix of clever and funny and boggling. Hay admits in his foreword that it is “somewhat off-course” from the remit of the book; I rather wish more of the book was like this one.

Finally, “Welcome to Wesbloc/Wesbloc” by Anthony Haden-Guest is a report by the teaching machine Merlin:Merlin in the future city of Ecumenopolis, the gag largely being that many things in the future are named after things from the past — one computer called Orwell, another Lenny Bruce. But it ends with the teaching machine looking backward to “now”, so we get more contemporary headlines and fragments of real news, at the time a connection to the present, but in retrospect a weird snapshot of a historical moment. 

All in all, it’s a very odd collection that doesn’t really deliver on what Hay says in his blurb and foreword that he set out to do. It’s too open, too lacking in discipline, and far too often too nasty. Nerds, get over yourselves. 

Yet it has provided a blueprint for the future. Samuel R Delaney’s piece has got me thinking hard about the way meaning is constructed by the precise deployment of words. That has already changed the way I am reading Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. I think it will shape how I read and how I write from now.

Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, by Terrance Dicks

The eagle-eyed reader might spot the odd, occasional typo in this series of long, long posts about the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I blame the growing cyber-menace that is autocorrect and not my own fleshy human weakness. However, there is not a word missing from the title of this post. The absence of “and” is deliberate.

This is, after Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, the second Doctor Who novelisation not to employ an “and the” title. At least, the “and” is missing from the front cover of my first edition of this book. On the spine and title pages, and in most references to this novelisation, it is Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. It is only from the front cover that the word has been deleted.

This was clearly done to make a long title fit the established cover template. On Terrance’s next novelisation, the long title Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was made to fit by reducing the vertical height of the letters, still set in Futura Condensed ExtraBold, from 6mm to 5mm, or from 40pt to 35pt (based on the typeface I have for reference). 

The team at Wyndhams — who published Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 20 May 1976 — initially intended to shorten the title still further, presumably to make it better fit the template. “[Doctor Who and] The Cybermen’s Revenge” is the title given on a list of “Advance information on Doctor Who novelisations in preparation” sourced from Wyndhams, handwritten by Graham Wellfare and reproduced on p. 92 of Keith Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2. 

As I said in my post on that book, this list sadly isn’t dated but the first title given is [Doctor Who and] The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, to be published “Aug 75” at 35p [in paperback]. That implies that this list was written before publication of that book on 21 August 1975 but after publication of the previous Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, on 15 May.

The title was also “Cybermen Revenge” in Terrance’s handwritten notes for Chapter 10 of the in-progress novelisation. The three pages of notes are undated but were written between dated entries on other projects on 6 September and 6 October 1975. 

Therefore, I think Terrance wrote and delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Cybermen’s Revenge in September 1975, under that title. My guess is that the production team then wanted to retain the title used on screen, as would be the case for all Doctor Who books from pretty much this point on (Doctor Who and the Space War, published 23 September 1976, was the last novelisation to rename a story). The awkward step of deleting “and” from the front cover of this book but not from the spine or title pages suggests that the change was made late in the process.

That original title for the book would have made this a closer match to Doctor Who and the Cybermen by Gerry Davis (published 19 February 1975), adapted from the TV story The Moonbase (1967), which Davis co-wrote with Kit Pedler. I think that may be part of a wider, conscious effort to link these two novelisations.

For the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen, Chris Achilleos produced a stippled, black-and-white portrait of the Second Doctor, including his collar and bowtie, framed by an image of the Moon (the setting of the story) with a flaming and dappled black border suggesting outer space. 

A Cyberman in the lower left of the frame stares impassively back at us. It’s the wrong Cyberman for the TV story, based on a photograph of the redesigned Cybermen from 1968 story The Invasion. But perhaps that was on purpose, to align more closely with the versions seen on TV in Revenge of the Cybermen, broadcast just weeks after this book was first published.

When producing cover artwork for Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, Achilleos seems to have had this earlier artwork in mind. Again, there’s a stippled-black-and-white portrait, this time of the Fourth Doctor, including the top-most part of his scarf. He is framed by an image of fiery space bordered by nebulous black. It’s not space station Nerva or the rocky asteroid of Voga that are the settings in the story; I think that makes it closer in style to the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen. Again, there’s a Cyberman in the lower left of frame. This time he faces another alien creature, a Vogan.

The big difference between the two covers, I think, is that the Second Doctor looks serious, suggesting a serious story, while the Fourth Doctor is beaming. The portrait is based on a photograph of Tom Baker on location for The Sontaran Experiment (1975), but in that photograph Baker’s expression is a bit more determined and grim, teeth gritted rather than smiling. Achilleos has also made the Doctor's hair fluffier and more bouffant. It’s a gleeful Doctor, not one fighting for his life.

Tom Baker filming
The Sontaran Experiment
c/o The Black Archive

There's something similar going on in the depiction of the monsters. On TV, the Cybermen tower over their victims — Terrance refers to them more than once in this novelisation as “silver giants”. But the Cyberman and Vogan here are the same height; indeed, the relative positions of eyes, mouth, chin and shoulders suggest that the Vogan is actually taller. 

There’s little sense that these two figures are deadly enemies; they seem to be smiling at each other. It doesn’t help that there’s something about this particular Vogan that’s a bit Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army…

As a whole, the composition lacks the dynamism and excitement of other work by Achilleos, such as Omega’s hands burning into the foreheads of the Three Doctors, or the kklaking pterodactyl of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. By placing the Cyberman on the left, as per Doctor Who and the Cybermen, and the Vogan on the right, the latter’s arm and body obscure much of the two-handed sci-fi raygun he is holding. For ages, I thought he was proffering some kind of ornate gift or bit of technical apparatus: a friendly gesture, not a threat to kill. Again, there’s no sense of him fighting for his life.

All in all, it’s a rather jolly-looking cover, at odds with the grim tone of the novel inside.

Before we get into the contents of the book, there’s one more thing to address about the cover which has a bearing on the words inside. The name given under the title is Terrance Dicks, not Gerry Davis.

Davis seems to have written the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cybermen around the same time as he wrote the scripts for what became Revenge of the Cybermen on TV. The two stories share a number of elements. For example, both feature what was then a new class of Cyberman — a “Cyberleader” (sometimes, in the novel, also a “Cyber-leader”). Both stories involve a “virus” that the Doctor is able to show is not a virus at all, but a toxin spread by the Cybermen as a prelude to taking control of a remote, human-crewed outpost in space. 

In both stories, the human crew are sceptical of the Doctor’s claims, believing that the Cybermen died out long ago. In Doctor Who and the Cybermen, the silver giants exploit human weakness for sugar and are themselves vulnerable to nail-varnish remover; in Revenge of the Cybermen, they exploit human greed and are vulnerable to gold. The implication, surely, is that in revisiting the older TV story for his novelisation, Davis found some of the structure and plot elements for the new TV adventure.

At that stage, it would also have been logical to assume that Davis would novelise his new TV story in due course. For one thing, of the various Doctor Who stories that Davis worked on over the years, this is the only one on which he received sole credit as writer.

Soon after publication of Doctor Who and the Cybermen and broadcast of Revenge of the Cybermen, Davis tackled the very first Cyberman adventure, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, published on 19 February 1976. In previous posts, I’ve estimated a lead-time on these books of 7.5 months; if that applies here, then Davis delivered Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet at the end of July 1975. Just as he finished that book and needed a new assignment, we see that, as per the list of books in preparation cited above, The Cybermen’s Revenge was added to the schedule. 

He retained copyright on the scripts of the TV story, so his permission must have been sought and given for this novelisation. But he didn’t write the book. Instead, he went on to novelise other TV stories he had worked on as co-writer and/or story editor, with his next one, Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, published on 18 May 1978. 

The reason, of course, is that the version of Revenge of the Cybermen that made it to the screen is very different from what Davis wrote — as we can hear in the audio version of the original scripts. The production team felt there were numerous problems with this version and the scripts were extensively rewritten by Robert Holmes in his capacity as script editor, on staff at the BBC. Davis was not happy with the revised version; the upshot was that he retained sole credit and copyright on a story he largely hadn’t written and really didn’t like. Understandably, he didn’t want to novelise this version of “his” story.

That is significant because it means that Terrance Dicks was commissioned on the specific understanding that he would novelise Revenge of the Cybermen as broadcast. This in turn presented him with a challenge I don’t think he’d faced before. 

Up until now, he’d novelised Big Event Doctor Who stories: the Third Doctor’s debut, his first encounter with the Daleks and the Master, and his death; the Fourth Doctor’s debut, the Second Doctor’s first encounter with the Great Intelligence, the Three Doctors all meeting up. Even Doctor Who’s encounter with the Loch Ness Monster is a big, iconic moment. These are all good, strong stories, too.

With Revenge of the Cybermen, Terrance was presented for the first time with a TV story that, for all I enjoy it, is fundamentally flawed. When he had been script editor, it was his job to fix problems in storylines and scripts. Here, the brief was to not fix the story but match what went out on screen. At times, I don’t think he could help himself, whether in trying to correct faults or in offering wry comment on illogical proceedings.

The three pages from his notebook relating to this novelisation give some sense of his approach. They cover events in Chapter 10, which is the end of Part Three and start of Part Four of the TV story, with a line break for the cliffhanger.

“Kellman killed

Harry sees K dead

Doc knocked out —

Harry sees Doc — goes to unstrap b[omb]

Commander — stop! Explain [that undoing the strap will set off the bomb]

Doc survives — Harry idiot

Doc says Commander keep on — rest of u will get grd + attack”

There’s no reference here or in the other pages of notes to what we see on screen, such as what people are wearing or what things looks like. That suggests Terrance worked from the words in the camera script — stage directions and dialogue — rather than from a screening of the episodes, which would have provided visual details. The notes are a summary of plot, Terrance establishing for himself the overall thrust of the action before translating each scene into prose.

(ETA: Nicholas Pegg told me on Bluesky me that “A further indication that Terrance was working from the scripts rather than from the TV broadcast is his retention of ‘cobalt bombs’. On screen they became ‘Cyber-bombs’, which [director] Michael Briant told me was part of a general decision ‘to make everything Cyber’.” Thanks to Nick, who knows a surprising amount about Cybermen given that he is Dalek.) 

But there is more than that going on here, too. This page of notes includes the word “gyroscope”, which isn’t used in the scripts or the story as broadcast. I think the word was prompted by something else in the script at this point: the machine that the Cybermen use to track the progress of the Doctor as he carries their bomb is a “radarscope”. The word is used in dialogue at other points of the story but it’s also in the stage directions of the script just after the Doctor insults Harry. And I think that word prompted Terrance to use “gyroscope” in a completely different moment in the novelisation, as an apposite word for the very opening sentence:

“In the silent blackness of deep space, the gleaming metal shape of Space Beacon Nerva hung like a giant gyroscope” (p. 7).

The model used in the TV story (and in The Ark in Space) looks a little like the kind of gyroscope that children have as toys, but that single word also conveys a spinning, moving, mesmerising instrument. We do more than visualise the shape; we can feel its intricate, automated workings. It is tangible and a wonder — all from a single word.

There are plenty of other well-chosen words: p. 49, for example, boasts “imperious”, “melodious” and “ostentation”.  The explanation of the “transmat beam” vital to one part of the plot is told from Harry’s perspective, so it is at once conversational, easy-going and fun:

“His travels with the Doctor had familiarised him with this latest triumph of man’s technology, an apparatus that could break down a living human body into a stream of molecules, sent it to a predetermined destination by a locked transmitter beam, and reassemble it unharmed at the other end. With transmat you could send a person as easily as a telephone message” (p. 38).

That page of notes above has another well-chosen word, when the Doctor calls “Harry [an] idiot”. He uses a more offensive term on screen and then falls back unconscious. In the book, he follows the rude comment with something kinder:

“Nevertheless I’m very glad to see you again” (p. 102).

The Doctor is nicer than on TV, Harry is not so undermined; both are more heroic.

In opening the novel, Terrance describes Sarah as a “slim, dark pretty girl” (p. 7), by which he means white but brunette. Her “exceptionally good peripheral vision” (p. 17) explains how, on TV, she alone dodges a Cybermat that has killed more than 40 other people. But when she screams, we’re told it’s in “true feminine style”. That’s the view of the omniscient narrator because Harry, from whose perspective this is sometimes told, knows better. For example, he knows that Sarah “always refused to accept the role of the helpless heroine” (p. 90).

Harry is the same “broad-shouldered, square-jawed young man” (p. 7) as in Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. He has the same vocabulary as in the former, referring here to all the “ruddy gold” (p. 47) on Voga. But there’s a steely side to Harry that we don’t really see on screen, such as when the villainous Kellman is killed in a rockfall that’s partly Harry’s fault.

“Harry felt no sympathy. As far as he was concerned, Kellman had been luckier than he deserved.” (p. 100).

The Doctor, meanwhile, is a “very tall, thin man whose motley collection of vaguely bohemian garments included an incredibly long scarf, and a battered soft hat jammed on top of a mop of wildly-curling brown hair” (p. 7). It’s the first time in print, I think, that this incarnation is described as “bohemian” — though note in this case that it is only “vaguely”.

(For all his love of specific, well-chosen words, Terrance can also often be vague. On p. 64, two things in quick succession are described as “some kind of”…)

That opening page of the novel also introduces the lead character as “that mysterious traveller in Time and Space known as ‘the Doctor’”, repeating the phrase from The Doctor Who Monster Book and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster; less description now as slogan. 

There’s also a reference to the Doctor’s “habitual cheery optimism”, which seems more Terrance than the TV story, and at odds with the lofty, “Olympian detachment” Tom Baker was told to convey by producer Philip Hinchcliffe. It is, I think, a sense of the Fourth Doctor had Terrance stayed on as script editor beyond Robot.

Speaking of which, we’re told it’s been a “few weeks” (p. 8) since that adventure. On TV, the first episode of Revenge of the Cybermen aired 13 weeks after the last part of Robot. Working solely from on-screen evidence, has such a lengthy period really elapsed for our heroes? I would have said it was days.

Page 8 has two footnotes, each referring the reader to other novelisations by Terrance: Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. The latter was the next of his Doctor Who books to be written and published, so had clearly been scheduled at the time he wrote this — begging the question: why didn’t he write that one first? It’s as if these books were purposefully published in reverse of the order of broadcast so that readers had to puzzle out the correct sequence, encouraging them to be active collectors.

On TV, Revenge of the Cybermen begins with the Doctor, Harry and Sarah finding themselves back on space station Nerva and referring to the previous time they were there, in The Ark in Space. A novelisation of that story had not yet been scheduled, so Terrance omitted these lines and instead makes reference, in his narration, to the adventure they have just concluded, and their efforts to “prevent the growing menace of the Daleks” (p. 8). The continuity references are to Terrance’s other Doctor Who books.

There are a couple of further examples of that: the Doctor uses an eye glass (p. 40 and p. 59) as per Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, and there is a reference to Harry Houdini (p. 121) as per Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. In Terrance’s most recently completed novelisation, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, there’s reference to the Brigadier’s “recall device”. Here, it’s the “Space-Time telegraph” (p. 127) as per dialogue in the script — where it is “space-time telegraph”, lower case. The book ends with a scene inside the TARDIS, the Doctor tracing the signal to Loch Ness, nicely cueing up the next / previous novelisation.

The continuity of the Cybermen is interesting. Terrance knew the history of the silver giants, having detailed it in The Doctor Who Monster Book, but there’s no reference to their previous encounters with the Doctor here. Humans, on Nerva, have only vague recollections of the Cybermen (p. 30), just one of several species to attack Earth in its early space-faring years. Again, that is as per The Moonbase.

These Cybermen wear “clothes” (p. 64). We’re told several times that they’re emotionless and without feelings, which is a fundamental characteristic, sort of Cybermen 101. But on TV, the Doctor taunts them:

“You've no home planet, no influence, nothing. You’re just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.” (Part Three)

What is that all about?

In the novelisation, we’re told that when the Doctor says this, he “seemed to be determined to be as tactless as possible” (p. 76) and “seemed to be set on provoking their captors”, after which “it seemed almost possible to detect the overtones of hate in the Cyberman’s voice”, as the Doctor continues in the same way, “infuriatingly”. It is not clear if this narration is from the perspective of one of the human observers, but the repeated use of “seemed” is Terrance suggesting an explanation for what happens in the script, without imposing his view.

Responding to the Doctor, the Cyberleader’s voice rises in volume and intensity. The Doctor continues being annoying and,

“For some reason this childish insult finally broke through the Cyberleader’s control” (p. 77).

It lashes out, exactly as the Doctor has planned; he uses rage against the machine.

I don’t think a Cyberman losing its temper is inconsistent with it being emotionless. It’s sometimes said of the Cybermen that they’ve had their emotions deleted or surgically removed — but what bit of the brain would that be, exactly? 

The academic paper that first coined the term “cyborg” and which I think is key to the original conception of the Cybermen, “Cyborgs and Space” by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline (1960), suggests the use of “an emergency osmotic pump containing one of the high-potency phenothiazines together with reserpine” to automatically respond to abnormal “thought processes, emotions, or behaviour” in the human test-subjects surgically altered for work out in space. The idea was to chemically suppress the emotions.

If the same thing is happening with the Cybermen, they can be emotionless and yet capable of emotion. The Doctor just has to find the right means to trigger them. Note to anti-Cybermen forces: being infuriating and childish works, as here; but don’t waste your time wanging on about sunsets and nice meals, as in Earthshock (1982).

Less fathomable is the sequence in which the Cybermen strap bombs to the Doctor and two humans, then insist that they carry these into the depths of the asteroid Voga. The Cybermen say that, once in the right position, the bombs will begin a 14-minute countdown, allowing the Doctor and the others time to escape with their lives. The Doctor thinks but does not say,

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on” (p. 82). 

So why does he then do as instructed? Well, with the Cybermen using a radioscope to monitor the humans’ progress, and able to detonate the bombs remotely if they veer off course, the Doctor feels he has no other option to escape than to do as bidden, then use the 14-minute countdown to defuse the bombs (p. 83). But we are then told that the Cyberman have anticipated exactly this response; in fact, there is no 14-minute countdown and the bombs will simply explode when they reach the right position. The Cybermen have lied to the Doctor so that he unwittingly does what they want (p. 85).

It’s a clever bit of psychology. But then, almost immediately, one of the other humans asks the Doctor if he really thinks there will be a 14-minute countdown. “I doubt it,” says the Doctor (p. 85). He doesn’t believe the Cybermen’s story, and the humans are at least suspicious. The Cybermen’s clever bit of psychology hasn’t fooled anyone.

So, er, why then is the Doctor willing to carry the bombs into the depths of the asteroid? Well, he says Micawberishly, that he is hoping for something to turn up (p. 86). It’s all a bit woolly and confused, the Doctor relying on luck. We can see that Terrance tried to make sense of it as he wrote this section, but not entirely successfully — because, I think, he couldn’t veer too far from what had been broadcast.

As on screen, Voga is both an asteroid (p. 18) and planet (p. 30), the idea being that the new asteroid is the last-surviving fragment of the planet. On screen, it is also described as a satellite  — ie moon  — of Jupiter, to which the Doctor responds:

 “What, do you mean there are now thirteen?” (Part One)

Terrance cut this line, perhaps because he knew that a 13th moon of Jupiter had already been found by the time of publication: Leda, discovered on 14 September 1974. A 14th moon, Themisto, was spotted in 1975 but not confirmed until years later. But Terrance also refers to Voga as a meteorite (p. 43), suggesting his knowledge of space science was on a par with his knowledge of cars. 

The plot hinges on Voga being an asteroid/planet/satellite/meteorite comprised largely of gold, which is immediately lethal to Cybermen. We see the evidence of this on screen: throw a bit of gold in their general direction and they choke and die. Yet Cybermen can also teleport into the caverns of Voga, stomping around and battling Vogans there with no perceived adverse effects. I suppose Terrance could have fixed this by suggesting that the gold must be forced into their breathing systems, and in sufficient quantities, to be deadly. Perhaps that would only have served to highlight this basic flaw in the story.

But I think the fundamental problems of Revenge of the Cybermen are the structure and the tone. Let’s start with the structure.

The blurb lays out the stakes:

“A mysterious plague strikes Space Beacon Nerva, killing its victims within minutes. When DOCTOR WHO lands, only four humans remain alive. One of these seems to be in league with the nearby planet of gold, Voga… Or is he in fact working for the dreaded CYBERMEN, who are now determined to finally destroy their old enemies, the VOGANS? The Doctor, Sarah and Harry find themselves caught in the midst of a terrifyingly struggle to death—between the ruthless, power-hungry Cybermen and the desperate determined Vogans.”

A central part of the story, then, is who Kellman really works for. Yet I think, ironically for a story about Cybermen, that it is difficult for us to care.

The trouble is that Kellman is, when we meet him, a sardonic, mean-spirited character. There is no great mystery about him being involved in the “plague” that has killed more than 40 people. This horrible fact is not mitigated by the discovery that he is really working for the Vogans, not least because it seems he does so because they will pay him in gold.

Villains in other stories, such as Broton or Davros, present articulate reasons for the evil they do, challenging the Doctor. Kellman offers no such challenge. In fact, he speaks in cliches — at one point using what Terrance calls, “one of science fiction’s immortal cliches” (p. 65). There is no redemption: he proves to be a bit cowardly and is then killed in a rockfall. The usually kind-hearted Harry has no sympathy at all. Kellman deserves only scorn.

That is unusual for Terrance, who so often in a conflict endeavours to see the other point of view. And I think that is the fundamental problem here: there is no depth to or interesting aspect of Kellman. I find myself wondering what Terrance would have done had he been allowed to fix this.

My sense, from the notes he gave as script editor to writers on other stories (available in the production paperwork included on the Blu-ray boxsets), is that he would have wanted to simplify unfolding events and concentrate on revelations of character. So, with that in mind…

At the start of the story, Kellman should be the last person we’d suspect of controlling the Cybermats or working with the Cyberman. A kindly, warm-humoured character, to whom our heroes — and we — take a shine. Only later, when he’s exposed, should we see his colder, more ruthless side, as when James Bond shifts from charmer to hitman. That, in turn, would give the actor a bit more to work with.

Then, over time, we come to learn his vital but morally difficult mission: sacrificing the crew of Nerva to gain the trust of the Cybermen so that he can destroy them and in doing so save countless more lives. Just as Harry learns that he’s got Kellman completely wrong, that the man is a hero, they are both caught in a rockfall. Kellman dies. And Harry realises that he will have to complete the mission, no matter the cost…

Something along those lines. But I think if you can fix Kellman, you fix much of what’s wrong in this story.

Then there’s the tone. The story begins with the Doctor and his friends returning to Nerva to find, instead of Vira and their other friends from The Ark in Space, something out of a horror film for grown-ups. Terrance acknowledges the effect:

“For the rest of her life Sarah Jane Smith was to be haunted by the memory of that nightmarish stumble down the long curved corridor filled with corpses” (p. 14).

It is not a moment of peril in a science-fiction adventure, where our heroes are at risk. It is them stalking their way through the carnage of something brutally realistic that has already taken place and so they are powerless to stop. It is horrific because it is hopeless.

Later, Harry witnesses the brutal death of someone at first hand, and we’re told “it remained for ever photographed on his memory” (p. 107). Then, the Cybermen are defeated and Nerva and Voga are saved, but on screen there's barely time to draw breath or acknowledge what our heroes have been through before they head off to their next adventure.

Terrance adds a brief moment of reflection, addressing the oddness of this, with Sarah,

“surprised to find herself as calm as she was. She supposed so much had happened recently that they’d both lost the capacity to be surprised” (p. 127).

It’s a damning diagnosis. The implication is that Sarah and Harry are both suffering from PTSD… Either that, or from bad writing.

*

These great long posts take time to put together and incur expenses. I’ll keep doing them while I can afford to, so do please support the cause if you are able.

Next time: the last of the Mounties books, War Drums of the Blackfoot, which borrows some of the plot of one of the Doctor Who stories on which Terrance was script editor. And then it’s Genesis of the Daleks…

The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2, by Keith Miller

This second volume of correspondence and fanzines covers the period 1974 to 1978, and most but not all of the era of Tom Baker as the Doctor. It also charts the burning out of the author's passion for Doctor Who, increasingly frustrated with the direction of the series, the more strained and/or “business-like” attitude of the production team towards him, and the activities of other fans.

As with the first volume, it is absolutely fascinating, sometimes very funny and sometimes cringe-inducing. The best thing about it is how honest and raw it all is, the source documents reproduced in full.

There are reports from the set of three Doctor Who stories - Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons and The Masque of Mandragora - as well as various bits of interview with cast and crew, alongside letters they sent Keith. We hear what he thinks of episodes and novelisations as they came out, and follow the exhausting business of running an officially sanctioned fan club that the BBC continued to support but at ever more of a remove.

For my purposes in researching the life and work of Terrance Dicks, a number of things are really striking. First, there's Keith's description of the Doctor Who production office in Room 505 of Union House, Shepherd's Bush Green, on 16 February 1975. Keith had been there several times before (as detailed in the first volume, the last occasion in April 1974), when it was the domain of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance. 

The scene he describes here gives a vivid sense of the dramatic change brought in under new producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes:

“The whole place looked totally different. Gone were the piles and piles of paper. Where walls had once been covered in newspaper-clippings, notes, white-boards etc, now there was barely anything covering them. All the props had been removed. The office reflected the new occupant — very business-like. Ordered.” (p. 18)

What paperwork I wonder, what treasure, got chucked in the bin? 

Miller then shares a transcript of the conversation over lunch at the BBC restaurant, where he spoke to Hinchcliffe, his secretary Ann Burnett and actors Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter. In among the gems here, Hinchcliffe claims that Target books were at the time printing, “25,000 [copies of each Doctor Who novelisation], then a reprint of 50,000”, but that the publishing company had not been aware until he told them of the two Doctor Who exhibitions - at Blackpool and Longleat. This was missing a big opportunity to sell books as, according to Hinchcliffe, 

“Something like a quarter of a million boys and girls went through the exhibition [singular] last year!” (p. 22)

Miller responded to this by saying that Jon Pertwee had hired the London Planetarium a couple of years previously, for a well-organised event involving him answering questions posed by attendees. Hinchcliffe thought this was worth putting to Tom Baker (who Keith tells us was absent for this bit of the conversation, having gone to the loo).

But it seems that by this point Miller already had plans for an in-person event at the Planetarium, because he reproduces a letter sent to him that same year from Juliet Simpkins, Press Officer at Madame Tussaud's (of which the Planetarium was part), responding to “your letters [plural] of 12th February”. That is, four days before he raised the matter with Hinchcliffe (p. 45).

Simpkins had spoken to Hinchcliffe, who wrote to Miller on 22 May 1975, saying that both the Doctor Who production team and the Planetarium were too booked up through the summer to organise an event, but that he would consider the idea again either later in the year or perhaps in early 1976. Note the word Hinchcliffe used for any such event:

“I have heard that you have been in touch with the Planetarium about the idea of a Doctor Who Convention as we discussed when you came down earlier this year” (p. 46).

There had been science-fiction conventions for decades. But the idea of a Doctor Who event being called such a thing was surely inspired by the success of the UK's first Star Trek convention, held at Abbey Motor Hotel in Leicester over the weekend of 28-29 September 1974, with guests George Takei and James Doohan (source). 

In fact, that event directly inspired a group of other Doctor Who fans to organise something similar: the Doctor Who Appreciation Society '77 Convention was held on 6 August 1977, with both Pertwee and Baker in attendance (but not at the same time). It's interesting to see the idea for this first ever Doctor Who convention in the ether so early, and being considered by the production team.

I'll note two more things of particular interest to me. On p. 92, Miller reproduces a handwritten list of Doctor Who novelisations in preparation, supplied to him by Graham Wellfare. The first title listed is [Doctor Who and] The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, to be published August 1975 at 35p [in paperback]. That implies that this list was written before publication of that book on 21 August but after publication of the previous Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons by Terrance Dicks, on 15 May.

At this point, 15 books were in preparation, with a schedule of monthly publication up to October 1976. (No book was listed for December 1975 but two were listed for February 1976, and no publication date was given for the last book in the list.) In fact, the books were published at a slightly less rapid rate, and not in the order given here. The suggestion is of issues with particular titles, and perhaps authors. I'll address some of this in my forthcoming post on Doctor Who [and the] Revenge of the Cybermen.

Lastly, thrillingly, Miller shares a letter from Liz Godfray, Children's Editor at Wyndham Publications, with responsibility for the Doctor Who novelisations. On 24 August 1976, she responded to a letter from Miller, answering his questions. That included a query about the author of the very first Doctor Who novelisation. She replied:

“David Whitaker has been in Australia for the last two or three years - in fact he was back on a visit to this country only two months ago, and he called in to the offices here” (p. 91).

Whitaker had been living in Australia for a little longer than that, since early 1971. But the mention of a visit to London matches another source. On 28 July 1976, the Daily Mail reported that Whitaker had been seen dining with his ex-wife, actress June Barry, and asked what his new wife might think. 

June lived in a large house on the Barnes side of Hammersmith Bridge. I'm struck by the thought of David seeing - perhaps even staying with - her, then ambling over the bridge to pop in and see the Target team at 123 King Street, on the off-chance of some work. 

On the way, he'd pass Riverside Studios, where lots of his BBC work had been made, including several Doctor Who stories. Among them were The Dalek Invasion of Earth, David's final production as story editor, and which he helped adapt for the big screen. Indeed, the TARDIS materialised under his feet, in the shadow of the bridge.

According to the “in preparation” list mentioned above, the novelisation of this story was due for publication in July 1976, the month David was in London. In fact, the book wasn't published until March 1977. 

So I like to imagine David turning up at Target, unannounced, and politely asking how the team were getting on. 

“Oh, fine, but we're having a spot of bother with one particular story...”

Backlisted #244: The Ballad of Halo Jones

I'm the guest on the latest episode of books podcast Backlisted. Keen to choose a book that was a formative influence and by an author they'd not previously covered, I chose The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson. Thanks to Dr Una McCormack, Andy Miller and Nicky Birch for inviting me. What fun.

• Backlisted #244: The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore

In our natter, we mention other works by Alan Moore. You might like to read the big essay I wrote for my MA on V for Vendetta. 

The episode also mentions something that was announced on Saturday at the excellent Target Books Day: I am currently at work on a biography of Terrance Dicks, to be published by Ten Acre Films (who published by previous biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television). More of all that anon.

Space Security Service title sequence

The first volume of Space Security Service is out today from Big Finish. This new audio series, which I produced, comprises three adventures of space cops Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and Mark Seven (Joe Sim), who used to travel with Doctors Who and are now on missions of their own.

To accompany the release, Rob Ritchie has produced a title sequence to match Jon Ewen's amazing theme tune for the series:

Full blurb as follows:

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Anya Kingdom (Jane Slavin) and the android Mark Seven (Joe Sims) are the top agents of the Space Security Service, fighting alien threats and sinister villains across the galaxy. 

Last encountered in the Dalek Universe story arc, in which they teamed up with the Tenth Doctor, these popular characters now star in their own spin-off series of full-cast audio dramas, inspired by the 1960s Doctor Who serials of Terry Nation. 

The thrilling retro-styled adventures of the Space Security Service begin today with a box set of three brand-new stories, which take Anya and Mark to London in the 1980s, a Thal planet where a scientist conducts dangerous experiments, and a world on the brink of war. 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to purchase for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. 

The SSS’s three latest missions are: 

The Voord in London by LR Hay 

1980s London. WDC Ann Kelso is assigned to CID, helping to clean up the streets. But “Ann” is really SSS Agent Anya Kingdom from the 41st century, on a top-secret mission to track down aliens hiding in the past. But then she finds a different group of aliens hiding in the Thames – with very deadly intentions… 

The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 

As their investigations continue, SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven journey to a planet colonised by Thals. They’re in pursuit of a Thal scientist who has perfected an experimental new weapon… But soon they are the targets… 

Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

The lush planet Othrys is on the cusp of civil war. SSS agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven are meant to keep a low profile while on a diplomatic mission there… But when a pregnant surrogate for the Othryn royal family desperately asks for their help, they’re unable to refuse…

Joining Jane Slavin and Joe Sims in Space Security Service: The Voord in London are Sean Gilder (Slow Horses), Madeline Appiah (Jungle), and Lara Lemon (Insomnia). The guest cast also includes Rodney Gooden, David Holt, Nicholas Briggs, Camille Burnett, Peter Bankolé, Jez Fielder, and Barnaby Kay. 

Cover art by Grant Kempster. Script editor John Dorney, director Barnaby Kay and executive producers Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs.

The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke

This comprehensive plunge into the sci-fi horror TV serial from 1953 has been a joy to read. I should declare right away that it’s written by my mate, with whom I’ve just made a documentary for the forthcoming deluxe Blu-ray of the film version of the same story, out next month. But then the reason Toby fronts the documentary is that he’s the go-to guy for this stuff.

The book is him sharing what he knows, the facts gleaned from decades of research and some shrewd deductions, plus his analysis based on long years of consideration. I especially like how good he is at probing sources: he says when he thinks an anecdote has been embellished; he also says when he isn’t sure what to conclude.

There’s lots of factual information here that I didn’t know and there are lots of fresh insights that open up this old TV show. It’s also very engaging — for example in Toby’s increasing exasperation with the Daily Mail’s TV journalist of the time, Peter Black. (By chance, I once gave Toby a copy of Black’s book, The Mirror in the Corner; I wonder what he made of it.) 

The serial was broadcast live in six episodes. The first two episodes were recorded and survive; the rest went out once and were then lost to the ether. What hadn’t occurred to me before I read Toby’s book is that at least some of episodes 3 to 6 were recorded — even if those recordings have now been lost. They each featured a small amount of pre-filmed material, detailed by Toby. It also seems that producer Rudolph Cartier filmed a little of each instalment up to episode 5 to act as a “trailer” or story-so-far at the start of the subsequent episode (pp. 168-9). 

The chances of this material having survived are next to zero, but sometimes — just sometimes — this kind of thing turns up. 

Indeed, Toby has turned up a load of archive material never seen before, including a roll of film from studio rehearsals on episodes 1 to 5, the images in very good condition and presented beautifully here. Reader, I have pored over these thrilling, vivid glimpses of what is otherwise lost to us. I should also like an illustrated version of the script - or even a whole comic strip - done by Robert Hack, whose artwork features here.

Toby has also gathered a wealth of sources to tell a detailed story. What we learn is set nicely in context — how this serial compared to other TV productions of the time, how people watched and engaged with it, and where it sits in the history of science-fiction and horror. Much is made of the fact that nothing like this had been seen on television preciously. That meant I was struck by the line at the end of Episode 1, when a reporter responds to the sight of astronaut Victor Caroon emerging from his rocket,

“That suit they wear, it is like the comic magazines after all,” (p. 70).

That is surely a reference to the Eagle and Dan Dare, pilot of the future, who dons a kind of diving gear in space. His comic strip adventures launched in 1950 but he perfectly exemplifies the kind of “New Elizabethan” hero referred to and then undercut in the serial. Quatermass is, I think, a kind of anti-Dan Dare.

Later, Toby notes that in L’esperimento Quatermass (Mondadori, 1978) — an Italian translation of the script book of the serial — a small change was made to the spoof, 3D sci-fi film playing in the cinema visited by Victor. 

“The Space Girl (Ragazza Spaziale) doesn’t call the Lieutenant ‘Chuck’ as in the UK version, but ‘Jim’,” (p. 269).

That’s a random change, I thought. Unless it’s a reference to the well-known Jim Kirk from Star Trek, updating the allusion to (what was seen as) a contemporary example of hokey sci-fi.

Toby is especially good at keeping the focus on the people involved, the contributions made by cast and crew to both the original production and recounting how it was made. A last section, detailing what they all went on to do after Quatermass, is compelling — like the serial itself, Toby gives them a last bow.

But what I was most taken by, I think, was what the leading man — the first Quatermass — brought to the role in particular.

Toby tells us that Reginald Tate made his TV debut in March 1937, which was less than six months after the start of the BBC’s regular TV service. He appeared in an exact from the stage version of Jane Eyre in which he was appearing at the time in London’s West End. Tate played Mr Rochester, a role he’d had since the stage production began in Malvern the previous year. Toby tells us he played Rochester again on stage in Leeds in 1946 (p. 65) and on TV in 1948 (p. 66). He then performed as Rochester once more, for BBC Radio, at the same time as he was in production on The Quatermass Experiment. He told the Evening Standard at the time that, 

“The transition [between the two roles] is not very great. The two seem to have characters in common” (p. 70).

Toby describes Quatermass as a troubled, guilt-ridden figure, trying to put right what he got terribly wrong — in this case, sending three men into space to devastating effect that now imperils the whole Earth. I don’t think writer Nigel Kneale had any thought of Mr Rochester when he wrote it; but that’s what Tate brought to his performance.

It’s another example of how the leading man of this new kind of TV drama — a pilot of the future, in his own way — is anchored in the past. The ideas are new but the emotional heft of the serial is an echo from the past…

• Buy The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke, from Ten Acre Films

Deep Space Nine: Outside In Can Live With It

I am one of the 171 authors in the newly announced Outside In Can Live With It, an anthology of perspectives on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The book is out on 24 July and available to pre-order now, with proceeds going to the charity Against Malaria.

My contribution, “Red Flags”, is focused on episode #168, ’Til Death Do Us Part. By chance, I wrote it while working on the script for our documentary Terror of the Suburbs, which refers to the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (1965-71), and I had to pay close attention to the order of the “us” and the “do” in each case.

Which has got it right? 

Well, in fact, neither. I mean, both appear in the solemnisation of matrimony, depending which editions of The Book of Common Prayer and other prayer books you check. But if you’re an awful nerd and feel compelled to trace the phrase back to earliest historical source, you reach the 1549 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and it says something else.

I N. take thee N. to my wedded wife, to have and to holde from this day forwarde, for better, for wurse, for richer, for poorer, in sickenes, and in health, to love and to cherishe, til death us departe: according to Goddes holy ordeinaunce: And therto I plight thee my trouth.

The suggestion is that it was written as “departe” but heard as “do part”; the sense of being together until death mutating into one of being together until death forcibly separates us from each other. That is subtly different but I think slightly more romantic, which may explain why it caught on.

The “do us part” is surely a latter correction so as not to split the infinitive. 

I decided this wouldn’t do for my entry in the Deep Space Nine book so inflict it on you here.

The Martian Conspiracy, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Hello from the island of Rhodes, where we are having a short break, retreading the footsteps that the Dr and I took 25 years ago on our first ever holiday together, and also tracing the path of Mary and Charles Newton, the artist and archaeologist who were here in 1863, as detailed in the Dr's exhibition.

I shall post a bit more about what we've been up to but the weather has been odd. We left bright, warm sunshine in Macclesfield (!) to find it grey and rainy here. It's raining again as I write this but he sun has been out pretty solidly, if often accompanied by an icy breeze. The guy serving us in the nice restaurant we went to last night pointed out the snow-topped mountains across the water in Turkey. Until a couple of years ago, he said, that would have been unthinkable in April. Now it seems to be normal, and the locals and the tourist trade are adjusting.

That chimes with this 'ere book that I bought specially for the holiday, the fourth instalment in the Lady Astronaut series I have avidly followed from the start (see my posts on The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky and The Relentless Moon). In the first of these, in 1952, a meteor strikes Earth and obliterates Washington DC. In this new book, we've reached 1970 where there is ever more evidence of massive, devastating change to the climate as a direct result of the blast and all the material thrown into the atmosphere. A powerful lobby tries to downplay the evidence and just continue as before.

This is all in the background as the new novel is set on Mars - and in Martian orbit - with the now 48 year-old Dr Elma York and her husband Nathanial part of the crew working to establish the first permanent settlement in time for more arrivals.

A lot of the story here is about the logistics of the operation - the priority list of tasks that need doing, ensuring people get fed when there are limited resources. There are also the interpersonal politics of lots of gifted, ambitious people from different countries and cultures. Elma must navigate one character's odd, awkward sense of humour, another's preferred pronouns and the objections of some fellow crewmembers to being referred to as "colonists" given the precedent set on Earth. There are competing egos, and the issue of how much independence they all have from their supposed line of command back home - if Earth even is home any more.

There's also an ongoing mystery about what exactly happened on the First Expedition to Mars, involving some of the people Elma lives and works with who really don't want to talk about it. As Elma worries at that, there are plenty of new challenges: her period is late, then a change of leadership on Earth wants all  female crewmembers to leave the Martian surface, then there's a serious incident that risks lots of people's lives...

It's largely another engaging, emotional and thrilling read. What a delight to be back in Elma's company again and catch up with her various friends and colleagues. I was fascinated, too, by the notes at the end explaining what the fiction owes to fact, in both real space history and ideas about future missions to Mars.

It's interesting, too, to revisit this alternate history of the space programme in the light of the TV series For All Mankind, which does a number of similar things, such as giving real people from our own timeline more to do in space. I think the big difference is that the Martian residents here comprise a lot of married, heterosexual couples. In all the discussions of birth control and non-penetrative sex due to limited numbers of condoms, there's very little about what crewmembers might get up to if they're not married or don't have their spouse with them in space. What if someone is gay or has an extra-martial hook-up? The crew are diverse but the sex, apparently, isn't. 

Now, Elma - who narrates the story and provides our frame of reference - admits to being a bit naive about some stuff relating to sex. Indeed, her advice to other couples turns out to be medically wrong and causes something of a crisis. So the absence - the blindness - is in character for the narrator. I can also see it being addressed in subsequent instalments, as more and more people reach Mars. 

At least, I hope it is. Because with Earth facing catastrophe, it's not just a question of who is deemed fit - and by who - to go to Mars. It's about who gets to have a future.

In the Wet, by Nevil Shute

This is an odd and very racist novel, first published in 1953 but largely set 30 years later. The reprint I read is from 1982, with cover art by George Sharp that conveys a scene in the opening pages but doesn’t really give a sense of this peculiar book at all.

How racist can it be, you ask, given that I often delve into old books (and films and TV shows) that can contain unwitting and/or witting prejudice. In fact, I came to this by chance having read a bunch of books from the same year: Farewell Crown and Good-bye King by Margot Bennett, Hackenfeller’s Ape, by Brigid Brophy and, less recently, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

Well, In the Wet features a fair amount of casual racism littered through its pages - more, I think, than those other novels. But on top of that, of the novel’s two protagonists, one insists that his friends, employers and love interest address him by a nickname, which is a word beginning with N.

His (white) love interest, Rosemarie Long, is initially wary of using this nickname. “It’s pretty mean to call you that,” she says. “Not many people do that, do they?”

“Everybody,” responds the man born David Anderson, the name that I’ll use here. “I rather like it.” 

David’s grandmother, we learn, was an Australian aborigine from the Kanyu tribe, who “ruled the Cape York Peninsula before Captain Cook was born or thought of.” David is proud of being a “quadroon”, and would rather people called him by the nickname and so acknowledge the colour of his skin, “than that they went creeping round the subject trying to avoid it.” (All quotations from p. 82) Better, it seems, to address the thing head on, in a plain-speaking, no-nonsense way.

Except that one of the first people to refer to David’s skin colour doesn’t realise he is not white. 

“You don’t look coloured. You look a bit tanned, that’s all.” (p. 70) 

That may account for why David has experienced little in the way of racism in is life, saying that just once, aged 18 and in Sydney, he experienced, “waiters being rude in restaurants, people refusing to sit at table … But it could still happen at any time” (ibid).

We don’t witness racism towards David — in fact, many white characters insist to him that his colour and background are not an issue. But he has internalised prejudice, I think. Now aged 30, he remains unmarried because “the colour makes that a bit difficult” (p. 71). He also assumes that it will bar him from working as a pilot for the Queen. David’s boss, Group Captain Frank Cox, counters that,

“As for the colour, you can put that out of your mind [as] we aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family” (ibid).

Which would be, it seems, unthinkable.

The upshot is that the only prejudiced person we meet is the character of mixed heritage, who insists on being addressed by the N-word. That word therefore features frequently, more often than I think I’ve ever seen in one book, in a novel written by a white emigrant to Australia, lecturing us on race and democracy and a whole lot besides. 

Shute does this through parable or satire, in rather the style of News from Nowhere by William Morris (in which a character from 1890 traipses into the 21st century). The mechanism Shute uses to jump 30 years into the future from his own time is quite peculiar.

The novel opens from the perspective of our first protagonist, 63 year-old Father Roger Hargreaves (no, not him from the Mr Men), who was born in Portsmouth in 1890, ordained in 1912 and has been in Australia on and off since just after the First World War. He’s a no-nonsense vicar, living a meagre existence in a town in the midst of nowhere, North Queensland, tending to lost souls. When an old drunk abuses him, Hargreaves offers the man his own modest home for a wash and shave, and then buys him a drink.

This old drunk is “Stevie”, who lives an even more remote existence with a man called Liang Shih, who grows vegetables for the community and shares his opium with Stevie. One day, Liang Shih comes into town to report that Stevie is seriously ill. Hargreaves joins local nurse Sister Finlay in heading out to see the patient. It’s a perilous journey through rain and flood, and Hargreaves is anyway suffering the after-effects of malaria. They find Stevie on death’s door and, unable to do anything themselves for his pain, let Liang Shih feed him a pipe. A feverish, smoke-addled Hargreaves sits with the dying man in the dark and listens to him murmur something about his life…

We segue, seamlessly, from Hargreaves telling this story on page 60 to the third person account of David Anderson, the man who likes to be known as N—. Hargreaves thinks this is Stevie’s real name. But we are gifted clues over the next 15 pages that something else is going on, before on page 75 there’s a reference to a coin dated 1982. This is all a vision of things to come.

It’s an odd future, one in which the Labour government have been in power in the UK continuously since the end of the Second World War. All buildings are government owned and many houses stand empty because there has been so much emigration to Australia, Canada and other parts of the world, much of it after the stock market crash of 1970.

David Anderson is a pilot with the Royal Australian Air Force who, while stopped off in the UK, is asked to take a posting to fly the royal family wherever they might want to go. It turns out that the RAAF and Australian government are picking up the tab for the Queen’s air transport because the UK’s mean-spirited Labour lot won’t pay. We come to realise the nightmare prospect — has there every been anything so horrific in all fiction? — that the Queen and her family might be happier living abroad (following the example of the author, who emigrated to Australia in 1950).

The whole thing is a very strange right-wing fantasy of grievances against the left, blaming Labour for post-war austerity — and not, er, the Nazis. Rationing is still in place in this 1983, so English people are amazed by David’s access to ham or pineapple, which he gets via airline connections. And yet in this bleak dystopia, posh grocer’s Fortnum and Mason is still open (p. 203), which is convenient when David wants to buy his love interest a treat. By which he means South Australian sherry.

This imagined austerity is all the odder because Shute must have known while writing this that rationing would soon end in the UK. In fact, bread came off the ration in 1948, clothes in 1949, sweets and sugar in 1953, the year In the Wet was published. All other rationing was ended on 4 July 1954, but it had been a pledge of the Conservatives in the 1950 and 1951 general elections — the latter returning them to power.

When In the Wet was published, Labour had been out of office for two years. That this novel is railing against a demonstrably unfounded fear is fascinating in the context of having just read How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien, and its account of scaremongering by media and certain politicians in the lead up to the referendum on leaving the EU.

There’s something, too, in the fear of a population of hard-working, aspirational Brits being dogged by the edicts — whims! — of the civil service. I can see echoes of that fear in things being said in the US at the moment as a reason for cutting public services, that idea of government as something that gums up rather than lubricates the workings of the economy. Somehow, despite this, British engineering, radio and TV are still the envy of the world (p. 75), the latter presumably still being made by the bureaucracy of the BBC.

The Labour government seen here, largely in the person of Prime Minister Iorweth Jones, MP for South Cardiff and a former miner, are variously petty, parochial and paranoid. For all they have, for decades, imposed their dreary ideology on the poor people of the UK, they also don’t stand for anything. We’re told that since,

“Communism was no longer politically expedient in England since the Russian war” (p. 93),

the Prime Minister and his party have abandoned it.

His bureaucrats ensure that one flight David pilots — with the Queen on board — is redirected from her usual airport at White Waltham to one in Yorkshire because they don’t have quite the right papers. The monarch suffers the indignity of being sent to the north and then having to catch a train home.

The Queen — newly crowned when the novel came out — is stoical and modest throughout. Among the privations suffered over the years, she has given up Balmoral and Sandringham to the Labour regime (p. 101). This is all in sharp contrast to the accommodating Canadians and Australians who indulge her every need. When her plane stops to refuel on Christmas Island, she admires the single large house there and arrangements are quickly made to build her one of her own. (Christmas Island, we’re told, transferred, along with all Line Islands, to Australia in 1961 (p. 154).)

The “Prince Consort” (p. 113 — and never the “Duke of Edinburgh”, though given that title in 1947) is blond, practical and itching for independent adventure, envious of David’s life and background. When David replies that he was “born in a ditch”, the Prince Consort responds:

“I still say you were born lucky [because] you could choose your life, and make it what you wanted it to be.” (p. 133)

The Prince of Wales — confirmed as “Charles” on p. 115 — is, like his father, a practical sort, an expert on planes and a veteran of the world war against Russia. He’s married with two boys (p. 124), not a bad prediction for 1953. The Princess Royal is married to the “Duke of Havant” and they have a daughter, “little Alexandra” (p. 124).

David and love interest Rosemarie, both working for the royals, repeatedly tell each other that they won’t gossip or talk politics — but do little else. From this, we glean that Australia is thriving thanks to a modified system of voting where citizens can qualify for as many as seven votes.

First there’s the basic vote for everyone at age 21. There’s a second vote for anyone with a university degree, for solicitors, doctors and commissioned officers. A third vote can be claimed by working outside Australia for two years, presumably acquiring a wider outlook in the process. A fourth vote can be won by raising two children to the age 14 without getting divorced. There’s a vote awarded for anyone earning an income above £5,000 a year, and a vote for officials of the recognised Christian church including wardens — we’re not told which denominations, and it doesn’t seem to include leaders from other religions. Lastly, the Queen can grant an extra vote, rather like an honour.

David is a three-vote man when we meet him and earns a fourth while in service (guess which one he gets). He insists that this system is far superior to that in the UK (not that he ever talks politics), ensuring a better class of MP — “real men in charge” (p. 89), with less influence from trades unions. The result is a society in which, “everybody’s got the chance to make a fortune and spend it” (p. 72), but there’s no safety net. David says proudly of enterprising souls that might come from England to Australia, “if he fails he may be much worse off” (p. 100).

Whatever the fate of such failures, this is all presented as a great success story — a utopia. Did that really seem viable in 1953? There’s not much of the usual trappings of science-fiction in this future but technology, briefly, gets a mention to magically solve the issues of overpopulation.

“When I was a boy people were still saying that twenty-five million [people in Australia] was the limit. But in my lifetime the Snowy irrigation scheme has been completed, and the Burdekin, and half a dozen others, and now they’ve got this nuclear distillation of sea water in the North, around Rum Jungle, and that’s getting cheaper and cheaper.” (p. 220)

If only we leave things to the engineers...

At the end of the book, the Queen appoints a governor-general of England, a move that so horrifies the British public — who still love the royal family really — that the long Labour government is at last overthrown. It is, paradoxically, a revolution in which the status quo is confirmed. It looks as if the UK will adopt the Australian system of voting, too. David is delighted:

“This is the end of something that began in 1867, when a lot of generous idealists gave one vote to every man.” (p. 229)

So this awful dystopia is not just the fault of the post-war Labour government but stretches back almost a century further to the Second Reform Act which extended the right to vote from 1 million to 2 million of the estimated 7 million working men in the country. Too much, too soon, and the wrong sort of chap getting a say in things, plainly. (But I'm reminded of similar anti-democratic feeling in Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming (1958), in which we learn that giving women the vote has, er, made them gay.)

Anyway, the result is that Rosemarie is no longer rushed off her feet with official duties so can no longer put off David’s advances… Jut as things get going between them, on p. 261 we segue back to Roger Hargreaves and dying Stevie.

Over the next 20 pages, Hargreaves comes to realise what seems so obvious: that Stevie died and was born again, and had a vision of his next life. Hargreaves is then called out to baptise a baby born in a ditch, one David Anderson… 

We were told that David has been known by his nickname since he was a boy. So I’m left wondering if stoical, practical Father Roger Hargreaves is the one who first furnishes him with it.