Earthrise, by Robert Poole

I read an earlier version of this book more than a decade ago as prep for The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, and it's never really left my imagination. Poole, who is emeritus professor of history at the University of Central Lancashire (where I was an undergraduate, though I don't think we've ever met) recounts how the space programme affected our sense of ourselves by focusing on the famous "Earthrise" photograph, snapped by William Anders on Christmas Eve, 1968 while on Apollo 8 - the first crewed mission to the Moon.

To place this in context, we begin with the history of conceptions of what the Earth would look like seen from space from before we could take pictures from orbit. The same characteristics recur in old pictures and descriptions: the prominence of landmasses, the lack of cloud, the theory that there would be blinding glare from reflected sunlight in the sea. As I said in Scientific Secrets, we're familiar with this kind of vision of the Earth in the logo of Universal Pictures, with rich green and brown land forms dominant over oceans of deep blue. A fixed shape and structures with no sign of change other than the globe slowly turns.

Instead, with Earthrise and subsequent images, we now know a bright, white-blue world with swirling, active clouds. No two pictures of the Earth from space are ever the same because those clouds are constantly moving, and - as Poole delineates - because the planet is in flux. More of that in a moment.

Before getting to Earthrise, Poole details the efforts to get the first cameras into space, and the perhaps greater challenge of doing something counter-intuitive and pointing them back towards the Earth. The politics or scientific merit of that is just one issue. Poole also explains the complex physical and chemical processes involved in ensuring a camera can survive spaceflight, and a picture can be taken and developed - in the days before digital - and then communicated back to Earth's surface. Thanks to him, a blurry, streaked image of cloud becomes an object of wonder when we understand how miraculous it was to capture any image at all.

How fascinating to learn that there is no consensus on the first photograph to show the curvature of the Earth. As Poole says, the round Earth was known to the ancients. It's an observable phenomenon by watching boats on the sea: masts appear first over the horizon, then the hulls, rather than the whole boat appearing at once in the distance as it would if the sea were flat. I remember standing at Logan's Rock in Cornwall as a kid, looking down on the seaward horizon, and holding up a ruler to better see the curve of that line of sea. Are there really no early photographs of such vistas?

According to Poole, though, "the first photograph clearly to show the curvature of the Earth" (p. 34) was taken by the aeronauts on board Explorer II on 11 November 1935, which launched from the "Stratobowl" in the Black Hills of South Dakota and reached an altitude of 13.6 miles (22 km). The photograph they took was published in National Geographic the following year.

Another notable early effort was took place on 24 October 1946, when a V-2 rocket launched from the army's White Sands proving ground in New Mexico was fitted with a 35mm movie camera. The resulting images, from some 65 miles up, made the papers and newsreels. 

I thought this might be the footage used in the opening moments of The Quatermass Experiment (1953), but checking Toby Hadoke's book reveals this was from a later V-2 launched at the same site on 17 February 1950 (see Hadoke, p. 133).

A set of photographs taken by a V-2 camera on 26 July 1948 were stitched together to create two panoramas of the curving Earth, released to the press on 19 October. Poole says that this, "was accepted in the press and the archives as 'man's first view of the curvature of the Earth', an official position it has held ever since" (p. 37). But, as he continues, the fact that there's any doubt at all is evidence that these different images, for all they were published to some acclaim, didn't quite catch on as later images did.

Various factors explain why the Earthrise image had the impact it did. It's a good quality, high resolution image, for one thing, which reproduces well. While there's no "up" or "down" in space, it's usually presented with the lunar landscape in the lower part of the frame, creation a boggling inversion of our usual view of the Moon in the sky above our own horizon. There's also the juxtaposition of the bright, coloured Earth with its whirling, active cloud and the grey, desolate Moon. 

But Apollo 8 as a whole made people sit up and take notice. As James Burke recalled in Our Man on the Moon, suddenly people realised, "Hey, they're really going to land on the Moon!" Burke was swiftly told to swot up on rocket science so that he could present the BBC coverage. So I think Earthrise was also emblematic of the Moon landings becoming, well, real.

Poole then charts the impact that Earthrise had on Earth, galvanising the environmental and ecological movements and having a direct influence on the first Earth Day, held in 1970, and conceptions of Earth as either spaceship or mother-Gaia. This is the stuff I really remember from reading this last time and - as I argued in Scientific Secrets - is all over the Doctor Who of this period. In fact, the first Doctor Who story shown after the Moon landing, and ushering in a new era of the series, begins with a view of the whole Earth from space, the first to appear in the series, and in colour, too. That's made me think about the mechanics of replication: how much the impact of Earthrise owes to good quality colour print in newspaper supplements and magazines, and the spread of colour TV.  

All in all, this book presents a fascinating, wide-reaching history, full of tenacious characters, not all of them heroes. I didn't know, for example, that Fred Hoyle was an anti-environmentalist who even accused Friends of the Earth of operating on behalf of "their Russian paymasters" to deprive the west of energy (p. 4); he had to withdraw the allegation. 

It's a self-published book, and there are typos and artefacts littered through the text. Perhaps a judicious editor might also have questioned the description of those suggesting that the Moon landings might have been faked as "fuckwit denialism" (p. 76) - though I can imagine other science writers putting it in similar terms. Really, all I mean is that this compelling book deserves another, more polished edition, perhaps including colour plates of the images under discussion.

Last time, what hit me about this book was the way leaving Earth - and looking back at what we left - transformed our sense of and relationship to our planet. That's still here, updated to include William Shatner's response to his own real-life trek into orbit in 2021. He was profoundly moved, and saddened, by the fragility of Earth in a universe of cold, dark nothing. What hits me reading this edition is the same profound sense of loss. The images of Earth from space taken since Earthrise show the damage we have inflicted in the intervening years: the melting ice caps, the loss of vegetation on vast scales, the ferocity of the weather we once never even thought of in our conceptualisations of Earth.

"Humankind now appears to be both the product and the custodian of the only island of intelligent life in the universe that we will ever encounter. Whether that vision has been timely enough, and powerful enough, for homo sapiens, the most successful of all invasive species, to reverse its own devouring impact on the Earth, will be known soon. Perhaps we know already." (p. 177)

More space stuff by me:

• Carrying the Fire, the autobiography of astronaut Michael Collins 
• On 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon
• Moondust, by Andrew Smith
• Apollo, by Fitch, Baker and Collins
• Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
• Ad Astra, by Dallas Campbell
• My trip to Kennedy Space Center
• On Yuri Gagarin's autograph in Croydon

Sirens of Audio podcast: Jean Marsh remembered

The Sirens of Audio podcast has put out a special tribute episode to the late Jean Marsh, who died just over a week ago at the age of 80. Hosts Dwayne and Philip speak to Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred about working with Jean on the 1989 Doctor Who story Battlefield, then interrogate me at some length about the trilogy of audio plays I wrote for Jean starting with Home Truths.

The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts, and there's also a video version on YouTube.

In 2023, I was interviewed by Dwayne and Philip about The Anachronauts - another Doctor Who audio story I wrote for Jean. Last week, I also spoke to the Power of 3 podcast about my work with Jean Marsh.

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.

Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

"There's always another way, even for you."

The follow-up to Children of Time, first published in 2019, is another epic, mind-expanding treat. That first book ended with the sentient civilisation of giant spiders and the surviving remnants of humanity forging a last-minute peace after thousands and thousands of years. 

This sequel sees some of their descendants (and one surviving character) voyage to a star system with two roughly Earth-like worlds. Humans already reached this place some millennia before, and the new arrivals are faced with the extraordinary consequence of that early intervention. Whereas, in the first book, one ancient human scientist affected the development of spiders, here another human has a thing for the octopus. By the time the spider-human team turn up, the octopuses have their own spacecraft...

I thought this started a bit slowly, retreading what we'd seen before - and then if completely blindsided me. It really picks up as we come to learn that the octopus people are not the only antagonist in this system. The other, relentlessly predatory species - details of whom I'll not spoil here - is absolutely bloody terrifying and a brilliant threat. We jump back and forth a bit in time to understand how this species developed, which only makes it all the more appalling and implacable. 

We, as readers, come to understand the threat while the spiders and humans are still guessing at what it might be, so they plunge headlong into danger. I don't think I've ever read a book that achieves that thing of horror movies of making you want to shout "No!" about what a character is about to blunder into...

As before, a particular strength of all this is the way Tchaikovsky tells chunks from non-human perspectives, the physiology and biology of the observer defining their worldview. The octopus people are intelligent, curious and mercurial, in part because of the way an octopus's limbs can work independently of its central brain. They act, react and emote in a way that's separate from thinking. That presents challenges in communication: it's less a matter of finding a common language as expressing the right complexity of feels.

From the basis of this biology follows a whole load of logically reasoned but extraordinary stuff. I was wowed by descriptions of the octopus spacecraft that are effectively bubbles of water in space, and the practicalities this involves in such matters as docking and airlocks. There's an amazing, nightmare sequence near the end of the novel that reminded me a bit of Dead of Night, in which one character puts up a series of memory-based defences against an attack, each one at a personal cost. We understand the physics of what's happening in terms of computational power and yet the effect is an effective, unsettling noir.

Mel Hudson is again a brilliant reader for the audiobook version, nimbly personifying a large and diverse cast - humans, spiders, octopuses and the things I won't say more of. We're left at an intriguing point at the end and I'm very much looking forward to the third book, Children of Memory.

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

“Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard. Earth’s fabulous and improbable backyard.” (p. 2)

When this short, 136-page novel won the Booker Prize on 12 November 2024, I saw some commentary that it was clearly a work of science-fiction just not marketed as such — the implication being out of shame. Sci-fi, after all, is genre and lowbrow while this book aspires to art.

Having read it, I don’t think that’s true. Yes, it is set in the future — just — given that it includes the launch of the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. In real life, Artemis III is currently scheduled to land the first woman and next man on the Moon in mid 2027 (I suspect it may be delayed). The typhoon that here devastates Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines is also a thing still-to-come — but given recent news of extreme weather in the UK and abroad doesn’t seem very distant.

More than that, I’d argue that the technology here, the apparatus of the world depicted, is as it currently exists. There is no “novum” or new wossname to differentiate this world from our own, a novelty whose consequence we then explore. Instead, the launch of the Moon mission, the typhoon and other things — such as the death of one astronaut’s mother down on Earth — help to clarify the sense of scale, distance, remoteness and connection of these six people aboard the small, creaky H. It shapes how we observe them and what they, in turn, observe.

The unnamed H space station here is not, explicitly, the International Space Station — which, in real life, has been permanently occupied by humans since 2 November 2000. But the tech and practicalities are the same. The novel details 24 hours on board, in which the H makes 16 orbits of Earth. We cover the crew’s schedule: scientific experiments, exercise regime, sleeping and toilet arrangements, a shared movie. We dig into their thoughts and fears and dreams. There’s a thing about exactly who and what is being observed in Las Meninas, the painting by Velázquez, as seen in a postcard on board the H. We skip occasionally back to Earth to get a contrasting viewpoint: the dying mother thinking of her daughter in space, the people sheltering from the devastating typhoon that, from orbit, looks serene.

In all this, I’m struck more than anything by a profound sense of fragility: the six people in their slowly eroding H; the people on Earth under threat from the elements; our relationships and loved ones and inevitable loss. So much meaning, all gained by taking a vantage point that provides perspective.

My copy of the book, published (very quickly!) after it won the Booker Prize, includes an afterword from the author which is just as insightful as the novel itself. It’s largely on the subject of what words can do and add and illuminate, as the poorer relation of music, but she also addresses the issues of sci-fi:

“Perversely, perhaps, though Orbital is a book about space, its blueprint wasn’t 2001 or Dune, but A Month in the Country. I thought to myself: I want to write A Month in the Country in space.” (p. 143)

This seems to have been inspired by online videos of the Earth seen from the ISS:

“There’s never a bad view. You never think: oh, this is the boring bit, more ocean, more desert, blah blah; never, no — every view begs for your fresh attention.” (p. 141).

How brilliant and how true, putting in words what I realise I’ve long felt but never consciously articulated. In fact, how extraordinary to look from an orbiting space station — at an altitude of between 413 and 422 km above mean Earth sea level — yet gaze right into my head and explain to me what it is I can see.

Some other books I've read recently:

• Truth & Dare, by So Mayer
• Last Chance to See..., by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
• Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Hackenfeller’s Ape, by Brigid Brophy
• Farewell Crown and Good-bye King, by Margot Bennett

Adventures in Type and Space

My clever colleagues Graham and Jack Kibble-White and Stuart Manning have produced a lovely supplement to last year's Adventures in Type and Space. The new addition is The Sid Sutton Collection, devoted to the late graphic designer perhaps best known for the Doctor Who opening titles used between 1980 and 1986.

In February, I posted on Twitter/X some thoughts about Adventures in Type and Space, slightly revised here for clarity:

I’ve been utterly spellbound by this beautiful, brilliant book. It goes in big on a very small subject — the 30 seconds or so of opening titles at the start of each episode of old Doctor Who. But it’s just as thrilling and rich as those sequences, and so much more than simply a history of who made them and how. It’s funny and profound about the process of creating art and what’s going on in the artist’s head. Along the way, we learn the role of God and Fra Angelico in the whizzy opening titles for Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, and what a CGI artist “sees” in their head as they tap out the code. There are connections to Alien, Bladerunner and Points of View, and everything you could want to know about the typeface Futura. Like the titles themselves, this is an extraordinary visual treat, all the more wondrous the closer you look.

My contribution to that original book was to supply a photograph of Sid Sutton from when I interviewed him at home on 2 May 2017 for Doctor Who Magazine's special The Essential Doctor Who: Adventures in Space. Another of my photographs and some previously unpublished bits of the interview feature in this new supplement.

There is also a long interview with Sid culled from multiple sources, plus an interview with his two sons - who both work in design - and with Sid's collaborator Terry Handley. Again, there's a wealth of detail here: how exactly things were done, using what bespoke equipment and in what premises, and what to look for in the familiar titles that reveal this painstaking process. (Clue: keep you eye on the question marks.)

There's also a revealing interview with Colin Baker as he's shown the myriad different elements Sid employed to create his Doctor Who opening titles. A video of this conversation is also available:

There's some revealing stuff here and not just about the way the titles were made. Baker compares his Doctor, and his plan for revealing this incarnation's true persona, to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

"[We] don't want him anywhere near our heroine. But it turns out he's the only truly decent person in the story. Everything he's done, which others have found objectionable, has been for the benefit of third parties, not himself." (p. 37)

There's a sense that these opening titles are invested with great meaning by interviewer Graham Kibble-White, who was 11 when Colin Baker became the Doctor. The conversation is an attempt to explore what meaning they hold for Baker - very different as an actor on the other side of the screen and yet no less significant.

The separate versions of Aventures in Type and Space and The Sid Sutton Collection are now sold out but compendium edition Adventures in Type and Space: The Complete Collection is available to buy from the Ten Acre Films site.

Something Who podcast #102 and #103

The latest episodes of Doctor Who podcast Something Who compare 1975 story The Ark in Space with 2010 episode The Beast Below. I thought I knew both adventures pretty well, but the juxtaposition really helps to open up both. You can probably hear the tired old cogs of my brain clacking away... 

Joining host Richard Smith are astronomy writer Giles Sparrow, Rick aka @brickpandorica and me.

• Something Who #102: 70s Flare (The Ark in Space)
• Something Who #103: A Whale of a Time (The Beast Below)

Giles was an advisor on my recently published book Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac. Also pertinent to the discussion is the audio version of the first-draft scripts for The Ark in Space, which I produced last year.

The Story of the Solar System, by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

Out today, The Story of the Solar System - A Visual Journey, is a sumptuous big book of space infographics written by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock off of The Sky at Night with some help by me and design/illustration by Emma Price. Exactly what you and everyone you know wants for Christmas, if you even dare wait that long.

(Emma and I have another book out next week, too...)

In case of interest, Solar System is the latest of the infographics books I've worked on, following Whographica (2016) written with Steve O'Brien and illustrated by Ben Morris, and Slayer Stats (2018) also written with Steve O'Brien and illustrated by Ilaria Vescovo. I also wrote the regular "Sufficient Data" infographics for Doctor Who Magazine, illustrated by Ben Morris and Roger Langridge.

I've written before about some of what' involved in producing an infographic. They are fiddly. And, if you're writing about space stuff, no sooner have you finished a complicated graphic showing all the moons of Saturns than those bothersome space scientists go and discover a whole load more.

Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac

The official Doctor Who website has announced my new book, The Time-Travelling Almanac, to be published on 3 October. It is illustrated by Emma Price.

Blurb as follows:

Experience a year from the Doctor's perspective with an exciting new release from BBC Books.

“The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it.”

– The Doctor

Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is your essential companion to a Time Lord’s ‘Year’. You’ll learn how to feel the turn of the Earth under your feet (hurtling round the sun at 67,000 miles an hour), the times each day that Sea Devil attacks are most likely (depending on the tides), how to avoid disturbing dangerous faeries (distances measured in yards), and why, despite all the invasions and Goblins, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. 

Releasing later this year, The Time-Travelling Almanac is a must-have guide with useful tips and information provided by the Doctor and friends – and occasionally his enemies.

Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac is out in hardback on October 3rd 2024. You can pre-order here.

The Sky at Night: The Art of Stargazing by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

I've just received my copies of The Sky at Night: The Art of Stargazing, a new guide by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock to the 88 constellations of stars. It's a lovely book, each constellation illustrated by Tom Matuszewski and with diagrams by Greg Stevenson. What a fun and informative thing to work on.

Blurb as follows:

"What is the story behind the stars? Many of us gaze up into space and marvel at the Milky Way, but do you know what you're really looking at?

The Art of Stargazing is the ultimate insider's guide to the night sky in which award-winning space scientist and The Sky at Night presenter Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock shares her expertise and unique insights into the marvellous world of stars. Take a tour of the 88 constellations and explore the science, history, culture and romanticism behind these celestial bodies.

In this must-have handbook for budding stargazers - and anyone looking for a little more wonder in their lives - Maggie will help you to identify stars and teach you the basics of naked-eye observation, offering fascinating facts plus advice on kit, 'dark sky' locations and much more. Also included are beautiful illustrations to accompany each constellation and an easy-to-read sky map. With Maggie by your side, the night sky will truly come alive."

My credit in the indicia

It's the fifth book published in the past few months that I've written or worked on - the last year or so has been extremely busy, jumping from project to project. Bit knackered now.

Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins

I couldn't resist this memoir of the first moon landing by the man who stayed in orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface. For one thing, Adam at the marvellous Withnail Books in Penrith pencilled on the first page,

A BRILLIANT BOOK

- THE BEST BOOK
WRITTEN BY AN ASTRONAUT
BY SEVERAL MILLION MILES!

£2

For another, I've long admired Mike Collins's insightful, wry and funny perspective on that extraordinary mission, having first seen him interviewed in the great Shadow of the Moon, about which I blogged at the time. 

Carrying the Fire really is an extraordinary book, written by a then 43 year-old Collins just four years after the Apollo 11 landing took place. He covers flight school, life as a test pilot, then work as an astronaut leading up to Gemini 10 and Apollo 11, and details those flights in depth. We finish with a chapter ruminating on what it all means and, given the extraordinary achievement that nothing can hope to eclipse, what he might now do with his life. 

The book is packed with compelling bits of information, such as the first alcoholic drink the Apollo 11 crew had on returning to Earth. There's even a recipe for the martini in question:

"A short glass of ice, a guzzle-guzzle of gin, a splash of vermouth. God, it's nice to be back!" (p. 445)

For me, the first big surprise was a personal one. My late grandfather (d. 2007) was born William and known to his mother and siblings as Bill but to everyone else as "Roscoe", a monicker that has been passed on as a middle name to various of his descendants. According to legend, Grandpa got this nickname on the day he arrived as a gunner in India in the mid-1930s, on the same day that headlines in the local paper declared that, "Roscoe Turner flies in!"

My family had always assumed that this Roscoe Turner was some military bigwig of the time. It was a delight to learn the truth from an astronaut, when Collins explains why he doesn't like to give public speeches.

"In truth, the only graduation speaker to make any lasting impression on me was Roscoe Turner, who in 1953 had come to the graduation of our primary pilot school class at Columbus, Mississippi. The most colourful racing pilot from the Golden Age of Aviation between the world wars, Roscoe had had us sitting goggle-eyed as he matter-of-factly described that wild world of aviation which we all knew was gone forever. ... Roscoe had flown with a waxed mustache and a pet lion named Gilmore, we flew with a rule book, a slide rule, and a computer." (p. 16)

The next surprise related to my research into the life of David Whitaker, whose final Doctor Who story The Ambassadors of Death (1970) involves the missing crew of Mars Probe 7. We're told in the story that this is just the latest in a series of missions to Mars - General Carrington, we're told, flew on Mars Probe 6. - just as the Apollo flights were numbered sequentially. But I think the particular digit was chosen by David Whitaker because of an earlier space programme, as described by Collins.

"The Mercury spacecraft had all been given names, followed by the number 7 to indicate they belonged to the Original Seven [astronauts taken on by NASA]: Freedom (Shepard), Liberty Bell (Grissom), Friendship (Glenn), Aurora (Carpenter), Sigma (Schirra), and Faith (Cooper)." (p. 138n)

(The seventh of the Seven, Deke Slayton, was grounded because of having an erratic heart rhythm.) 

That idea of The Ambassadors of Death mashing up elements of Mercury and Apollo has led me to think of some other ways the story mixes up different elements of real spaceflight... which I'll return to somewhere else. On another occasion, Collins uses a phrase that makes me wonder if David Whitaker also drew on technical, NASA-related sources in naming a particular switch in his 1964 story The Edge of Destruction:

"Other situations could develop [in going to the moon] where one had a choice of a fast return at great fuel cost or a slow economical trip home depending on whether one was running short of life-support systems or of propellants." (p. 303 - but my italics)

Collins certainly has a characteristic turn of phrase, such as when he tells us that, "we are busier than two one-legged men in a kicking contest" (p. 219). This makes for engaging, fun commentary yet - ever the test pilot - he's matter of fact about the practicalities of getting bodies to the Moon and back. For example, there's this, at the end of a lengthy description of the interior of the command module Columbia that he took to the moon:

"The right-hand side of the lower equipment bay is where we urinate (we defecate wherever we and our little plastic bags end up), and the left-hand side is where we store our food and prepare it, with either hot or cold water from a little spout." (p. 362)

This kind of stuff is revealing but I knew a lot of it already from my other reading and watching documentaries. What's more of a surprise, coming at this backwards having read later accounts, is the terminology Collins uses. Flights to the moon are "manned" rather than "crewed", and are undertaken with the noblest of intentions for the benefit of all "mankind" - notable now because the language of space travel tends to be much more inclusive. Then there's how he describes one effect of weightlessness: 

"I finally realise why Neil and Buzz have been looking strange to me. It's their eyes! With no gravity pulling down on the loose fatty tissue beneath their eye, they look squinty and decidedly Oriental. It makes Buzz look like a swollen-eyed allergic Oriental, and Neil like a very wily, sly one." (p. 387)

It's a shock to read this - and see it reproduced without comment in this 2009 reprint - not least because Collins is acutely aware of the issue of the Apollo astronauts solely comprising middle-aged white men. Elsewhere, he remarks on his own and the programme's unwitting prejudice in the recruitment of further astronauts. In detailing the rigorous selection criteria, he adds:

"I harked back to my own traumatic days as an applicant, or supplicant, and vowed to do as conscientious a job as possible to screen these men, to cull any phonies, to pick the very best. There were no blacks* and no women in the group." (p. 178)

The asterisk leads to a footnote with something I didn't know:

"The closest this country has come to having a black astronaut was the selection of Major Robert H Lawrence, Jr., on June 30, 1967, as a member of the Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory astronaut group. A PhD chemist in addition to being a qualified test pilot, Lawrence was killed on December 8, 1967, in the crash of an F.104 at Edwards AFB. In mid-1969, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program was cancelled." (p. 178n)

But Collins goes on, in the main text, that the lack of women on the programme was a relief.

"I think our selection board breathed a sigh of relief that there were no women, because women made problems, no doubt about it. It was bad enough to have to unzip your pressure suit, stick a plastic bag on your bottom, and defecate - with ugly old John Young sitting six inches away. How about it was a woman? Besides, penisless, she couldn't even use a CUVMS [chemical urine volume measuring system condom receiver], so that system would have to be completely redesigned. No, it was better to stick to men. The absence of blacks was a different matter. NASA should have had them, our group would have welcomed them, and I don't know why none showed up." (p. 178)

Collins is not alone in this view of women in space: as I wrote in my review, Moondust by Andrew Smith goes into much more detail about the problems of plumbing in weightless environments, and the author concludes:

“Even I find it hard to imagine men and women of his generation sharing these experiences.” (Moondust, p. 247)

But that acknowledges the cultural context of these particular men. The lack of women in the space programme is more than an unfortunate technical necessity; it's part of a broader attitude. Collins enthuses about pin-up pictures of young women in his digs during training and on the Gemini capsule, and tells us bemusedly about a hastily curtailed effort to have the young women in question come in for a photo op. It's all a bit puerile, even naive, of this husband and father. 

On another occasion, a double entendre shared with Buzz Aldrin leads to a flight of fancy:

"Still... the possibilities of weightlessness are there for the ingenious to exploit. No need to carry bras into space, that's for sure. Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with two thousand breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to their every weightless movement..." (Collins, pp. 392-3)

I've seen some of this sort of thing in science-fiction of the period. It's all a bit sniggering schoolboy, and lacks the kind of practical approach to problem-solving that makes up most of the rest of the book. How different the space programme might have been if these dorky men had been told about sports bras.

Later, back on earth, Collins shares his misgivings about taking a job as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs where he was tasked with increasing youth involvement in foreign affairs. He glosses over the conflict here, of talking to "hairies" - as he calls them - on university campuses in the midst of the conflict in Vietnam. One gets the sense that this was a more technically complicated endeavour than his flight to the moon, and less of a success. It's extraordinary to think of this man so linked to such an advanced, technological project and representative of the future put so quickly in a situation where he seems so out of step with the times.

Collins is more insightful as observer of his colleagues' difficulties in returning to earth: Neil Armstrong rather hiding away in a university job, Buzz Aldrin battling demons in LA. In fact, I found this final chapter in many ways the most interesting part of the book, Collins full of disquiet about what the extraordinary venture to the moon might mean, and uncertain of his own future. He died in 2021 aged 90, so lived more than half his life after going to the moon and after writing this book. By the time he wrote it, the Apollo programme had already been cancelled and space travel was being restricted to the relatively parochial orbit of earth.

"As the argument ebbs and flows, I think a couple of points are worth making. First, Apollo 11 was perceived by most Americans as being an end, rather than a beginning, and I think that is a dreadful mistake. Frequently, NASA's PR department is blamed for this, but I don't think NASA could have prevented it." (p. 464)

Collins thinks the American people viewed landing on the moon like any other TV spectacular, akin to the Super Bowl, and so they couldn't then understand the need to repeat it. I'm not sure that's the best analogy given that the Super Bowl is an annual event, but it's intriguing to think of the moon landing as circus. Then again, does that explain the similar loss of interest in the space programme from those outside the US? 

I'm more and more interested in the way Apollo was explained and framed for the public at the time... 

TV Times listings magazine 19-25 July 1969
"Man on the Moon - ITN takes you all the way"

• Me on Apollo by Fitch, Baker and Collins
• Me on Ad Astra, An Illustrated Guide to Leaving the Planet by Dallas Campbell
• Me on Moonglow by Michael Chabon
• Me on #Cosmonauts and #OtherWorlds
• "So What If It's All Green Cheese? The Moon on Screen", my essay in the exhibition catalogue accompanying "The Moon" at Royal Museums Greenwich
• "Man on the Moon", my essay on the psychology involved, in medical journal Lancet Psychiatry

The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal

The third book in the Lady Astronaut series (after The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky) is another triumph, and having struggled to read anything for months, I'm very pleased to complete such a whopper of a novel - it's 687 pages to the end of the epilogue, not including the acknowledgements, notes on real history and bibliography.

The Lady Astronaut series is set in a world where a meteor smashes into the US in the 1950s, with a dramatic effect on the climate which only looks to get worse. This accelerates the space programme, with the active involvement of women. The first two books in the series are led by Dr Elma York, "the" Lady Astronaut as far as the press are concerned. This new book is focused on one of her colleagues, Nicole Wargin - an accomplished astronaut in her own right but also the wife of the governor of Kansas. He's struggling with the fact that a lot of people object to the expense of the space programme, and many want to deny the existence of the global crisis. An "Earth First" movement is flexing its muscles with ever more menace.

It's a thrilling read, full of incident and twists - the end of Part II in particular made me gasp. The nerdy technical stuff is also threaded with raw emotion: Nicole's anorexia is as much of a wrench for those around her as it is to her. There's grief, too, and the PTSD of those surviving the meteor in the first place, and lots on race and sex (both gender politics and nookie). Lots of this is conveyed in telling detail: an argument where we glean that racial epithets have been used without being told exactly what was said; the mouthfeel of apple sauce or cottage cheese when Nicole is under stress; the chilling etiquette in not asking people where they're from in this world, since it may well have been destroyed.

In her "About the History" notes at the end, Kowal says that in her "LAU", the meteor prevented Jonas Salk working on his polio vaccine which is why the disease is such an issue in the novel. 

"The headline about Chicago refusing to vaccinate children? That is real. The vaccination program did work though and brought the polio epidemic to a standstill. The last case of wild polio in the United States was in 1979 ... When I wrote this book, COVID didn't exist. As we go to press ... the choices that I've made to be religious in my social distancing and mask-wearing are directly influenced by the research I did about polio. My father says that he remembers movie theatres being shut down, how no one would get into a public swimming pool, and that 'everyone was afraid of getting it.' Everyone knew someone who had gotten polio." (p. 698)

As well as the disease itself, Kowal deals with denialism, and in Part III there's the horrible, practical issue of a funeral attended over video link. It's a coincidence that it all feels so timely, but it's a testament to Kowal's skill that this stiff feels so credible having now lived such experience.

Other elements of the plot may have been borrowed from fiction. The front cover of my copy includes an endorsement from Andy Weir, author of The Martian, and I think that book might be the inspiration for Nicole making use of stuff left over from previous expeditions. Earlier, the crew of Nicole's moonbase are compromised using the same method deployed by the Cybermen in 1967 Doctor Who story The Moonbase - and I know Kowal has admitted sneaking the Doctor into other books.

But the success of The Relentless Moon is all down to Kowal as expert pilot. For all the thrills and danger, as readers we're in safe hands: the setting and characters grounded in reality, each of the myriad mysteries tied up by the end, the technical stuff balanced with plenty of humour and insight. It's a hugely satisfying read. The epilogue, set two years after the main events, took me completely by surprise but in retrospect seems inevitable, the ground skilfully prepared - so what felt at first like a giant leap is really a small step. And that, I think, is what makes this book so appealing: it's all about small steps forward in dealing with crises. We can work our problems.

• Last year, I took part in an online panel with Mary Robinette Kowal - World-Building: How Science Shapes Science Fiction

How to Build a Universe, by Brian Cox, Robin Ince and Alexandra Feachem

This book accompanying Radio 4's science panel show The Infinite Monkey Cage is largely a collection of debates addressed on that programme, resisted with further detail and insight. I should declare an interest having been a panelist on the 2015 Christmas special - though unlike Robin's I'm a Joke and So Are You, there's no reference to that episode here.

There are six chapters - Introductions & Infinity; Life, Death & Strawberries; Recipe to Build a Universe; Space Exploration; Evidence & Why Ghosts Don't Exist; Apocalypse - but the material is peppered with asides, footnotes, illustrations and pull quotes. The chapter on building a universe is by far the longest and hard-going, Robin advising us to wade into it as far as we can then stop and start again, hoping to progress a bit further on the each subsequent attempt. At the end, we're presented with illustrations of badges as rewards for making it that far. For all the equations and technical language, I don't think it is (only) the degree-level physics that makes the going tough. The book offers less a single thesis as per a bullet shot from a gun, so much as a range of ejecta shot out of a blunderbuss.

If I'm familiar with a lot of the material - even if I don't wholly comprehend it - there was lots that was new, and loads I'm very taken by, such as this:

"This is the beauty of books, they are secondary human fossils. We may leave behind bones, skin preserved in a peat bog, perhaps eventually a fossil, but books are our mind fossils, the fossils of our thoughts that are left after we are gone. We appear to be the only creature that can interrogate minds even after the owner of those thoughts has died." (p. 242)

There's some fun stuff, too, on the credibility of the science in sci-fi - the subject they quizzed me about when I was on the show.

It's interesting to hear that Brian and Robin argue. When they revisit some of those arguments here, there's a sense that the good-natured discussion in print follows a less amiable row. I'm not sure I agree with some of the assumptions made in the book, either. For example, here's Brian citing a case for greater exploitation of space.

"I recently spoke with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, at his Blue Origin rocket factory in Seattle. His vision is to zone Earth as residential and light industrial, in order to protect it. We've visited every planet in the Solar System, he said, and we know with absolute certainty that this is the best one. That's why his company is called Blue Origin, after our precious blue jewel of a world. Spaceflight does not increase pressures on our world by consuming valuable resources; it is a route to protecting our world by enabling us to grow in a richer and more interesting civilisation whilst simultaneously consuming less of Earth." (p. 152)

I think the first part of that paragraph is a sales pitch and the final sentence is wrong. After all, how do we get into space to access this bounty of resources? Rocket launches produce 150 times as much carbon dioxide as a transatlantic flight - when it's argued that rocket launches have low environmental impact it's because they are infrequent. They also seem to damage the ozone layer and leave space junk in Earth orbit. Are we also to assume that the resources mined in space and the people who fly out to mine them will not be returned to Earth?

But then I think that's the point of the book: it's the book of a panel discussion show aimed at provoking further debate. 

ST:TNG 1.13 Datalore

I enjoyed the recent first series of Star Trek: Picard but was very aware of missing the references as I've not seen all of Star Trek: The Next Generation - and most of that when it was first on. Helpfully, @GDgeek and @ScottKAndrews came up with a list of 12 essential episodes:

1.13 Datalore
2.9 The Measure of a Man
3.16 The Offspring
3.26 The Best of Both Worlds
4.1 The Best of Both Worlds part 2
4.2 Family
4.3 Brothers
5.23 I, Borg
6.26 Descent part 1
7.1 Descent part 2
7.25-26 All Good Things…

So, to begin with…

1.13 Datalore

"But... but... but..."

How achingly young everyone is - and how new the whole enterprise. It’s all so new that the Captain’s log at the beginning has to explain to us that Data is an android.

Wesley Crusher, doing work experience on the bridge of the Enterprise while everyone else is in uniform, seems to be dressed as the Thirteenth Doctor Who.

Colds have been eradicated from this utopian future but there’s some silliness about sneezing. The tone is odd; the silliness stilted - less laugh-out-loud as somewhat amusing. I know from other episodes that these actors are good with comedy, so it’s just the material here not being very funny.

I’m horrified to hear the Enterprise whoosh past the screen in the opening titles, despite the silent vacuum of space. This is Star Trek as fantasy, as lacking in scientific credentials as Star Wars. But Star Wars makes no claim to get the science right.

Another shock as our heroes beam down to an alien planet realised entirely in studio, the forced perspective background looking especially cheap. I remember this "new" iteration of Star Trek when it first arrived as sumptuously rich and extravagant. Here it looks like Time-Flight.

On this alien world we learn about Data’s origins: he was discovered here 26 years ago, he says. Geordi is able to see clues no one else has - which is really odd. Given how strange and precious Data is, did no one think to conduct a proper survey?

Having found a secret base, they recognise the name of a famous Earth scientist - Dr Noonien Soong. But they don’t immediately connect him to Data, or the fact they look so alike. Has no one really never noticed?

Soong, they all know, was Earth’s foremost robotic scientist, “Until he tried to make Asimov’s dream of a positronic brain come true.” Isaac Asimov was still alive when this episode was broadcast, but also admitted that the positronic brain he devised in stories written 50 years earlier weren’t exactly a practical idea. So it’s Star Trek linking itself to a lineage of science-fiction rather than of science. (Daleks have positronic brains in The Power of the Daleks (1966) and The Evil of the Daleks (1967), suggesting they and Data are related.)

Then our heroes find the dismembered parts of an android body just like Data, including his bare bum. It’s an incongruous detail, depersonalising him and his dismantled brother. But perhaps that’s the point.

It’s also odd to have Data then observe but not help in the assembly of his brother. Does he not want to be involved? Is he not allowed? It seems to be a question of etiquette. Despite the 26 years since Data was discovered, people are still awkward around him. There’s some fun in the discomfort

But I like the awkwardness of the crew in asking Data questions about all of this - the social niceties, the strangeness, of a friend and colleague you can make. But the scene in which Data confides in Beverely that he has a secret off-switch is really odd. Would the medical officer on the Enterprise not have full access to his schematics? If not, the suggestion is that’s he’s seen as a piece of engineering rather than a person with medical needs.

Data’s brother Lore says that he was made to supersede - to replace - the imperfect Data, and given the etiquette and awkwardness we’ve just witnessed, this seems cruel. We’re immediately put on our guard about Lore because he’s been mean to Data, though no one else has noticed.

There’s more awkwardness from the human crew, but Picard apologises to Data for his misuse of pronouns in referring to androids as “it”. My suspicion is that when they made this episode they weren’t thinking of trans rights, but that’s surely the association we make watching it now.

Now Data is suspicious of Lore, and Lore uses the word “brother” to make a connection. He is, unlike Data, programmed to please humans, he says - but it’s all very manipulative. My thought was of the algorithms of social media that seek to keep us hooked by playing to our (worst) emotions.

But I really like the walk-and-talk scene in the corridor of Data and Lore together. Just like Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, Brent Spiner makes the two characters distinct individuals, so it doesn’t immediately register that this is a trick shot. Again, Lore is manipulative - suggesting that the emotionless Data is envious or jealous. It’s nicely played, and this early into the series we don’t know Data well enough to be sure about him.

Data tells Lore how he got his Star Fleet uniform: “four years at the Academy, another three as ensign, ten or twelve on varied space duty in the lieutenant grades”, taking up at least 17 of the 26 years since he was discovered. What happened in the years before he joined the Academy? And also - as we will see - it is appalling that after 17 years of service in Star Fleet, the organisation still isn’t sure about Data’s status, rights or personhood.

I’m also unconvinced by the sci-fi cliche that Data can’t use contractions or crack jokes. Word processing software and predictive text can deploy contractions - the rules are simple enough. A child can grasp jokes. It plays, I think, into an insidious myth about autistic people that they don’t understand jokes and are taciturn, unfeeling, somehow lesser than neurotypical people. I don’t know if the production team meant to link Data to these supposed traits of autism, but now I’ve made that connection it makes me very uneasy to see how they’re deployed.

After their conversation, Data leaves and Lore is left alone, reading a computer screen. It’s innocuous enough, but sinister music tells us he is up to something - though we’ve not seen him be naughty yet. We are being manipulated.

On the bridge of the Enterprise, security chief Tasha Yar asks Picard how much he really trusts Data. The crew are shocked, and Picard’s response is really interesting:

“I trust him completely. But everyone should also realise that that was a necessary and legitimate security question.”

As when he apologised to Data about a misuse of pronouns, this is Picard’s compassionate management style, in sharp contrast to the ruthless, selfish Gordon Gekko kind of businessman in Wall Street, from the year before this was broadcast. It’s there, too, in the corporate culture of the Enterprise - with a ship’s counsellor so respected she has a seat on the bridge (if not a uniform), and (as well see in later episodes) organised entertainments that mix up different ranks socially.

Lore opens a bottle of Champagne, which begs the question whether androids can get drunk. In fact, it’s been poisoned and Lore finally shows his true colours. Suddenly the episode kicks into gear, and what follows is tense and involving.

Even so, there’s a very odd scene on the bridge, where Lore pretends to be Data and no one notices except Wesley. The telling detail is that Lore doesn’t understand Picard’s order to “Make it so” - a catchphrase already, just a handful of episodes into the series. When Lore has gone, Welsey tries to share his concern but first Picard and then Wesley’s own mother tell him to shut up. Well ha ha, Wesley is a bit precocious and annoying - but this is the captain of the flagship of Star Fleet snapping at a child in front of everyone on the bridge. A child, I might add, whose dad is dead and whose mum seems to have history with the captain. Where is the sensitive management style now? It’s particularly galling because Welsey is right!

Lore then uses Wesley, who still doesn’t fall for the trick. He helps the real Data, and there’s a fight. When Picard and Dr Crusher arrive, Lore threatens to kill Wesley - again, manipulating them through his understanding ofd emotions. But luckily our heroes are able to teleport him away. We’re not told where he goes: the implication is, I think, that he’s been beamed out into space where he won’t survive. Wouldn’t they check?

Picard doesn’t apologise to Wesley - who was completely right about Lore - but expects to see him back on the bridge. Again, ha ha, how funny that Picard won’t back down and its at Wesley’s expense. It’s a really odd, unsatisfying ending to an episode that’s otherwise about respect for other people’s feelings. If I were Wesley, I’d be going straight to the ship’s counsellor to discuss workplace harassment.

But blimey, on the subject of abuse of staff by Star Fleet, next up is 2.9 The Measure of a Man…

• See also: my review of Picard: Last Best Hope by Una McCormack

The Fated Sky, by Mary Robinette Kowal

After the smart, brilliant, thrilling The Calculating Stars, this second novel in the Lady Astronaut series is just as good - thrilling, compelling and compassionate as our heroine is part of the first crewed mission to Mars in an alternative 1960s.

There are all kinds of hazards along the way, including diarrhoea in space - a hundred times more horrible than it sounds - and Earthbound conspiracists attacking their own technological infrastructure in ways that echo recent attacks on 5G. In fact, this tale of people cooped up together for long stretches really resonates just now, the astronauts missing loved ones and unable to do anything about the medical emergencies affected their loved ones back home...

Yet for all the big events and hard science, this is a novel about the little stuff - the interpersonal relationships, the struggle not to be That Arsehole.

"Space always sounds glamorous when I talk about it on television or the radio, but the truth is that we spend most of our time cleaning and doing maintenance." (p. 425).

I'm keen for the next instalment, The Relentless Moon, due out later this year, but the author's website includes links to some short stories in the meantime:

Here's the list in internal chronological order:
"We Interrupt This Broadcast"The Calculating Stars"Articulated Restraint"The Fated SkyThe Relentless Moon - coming 2020
The Derivative Base - coming 2022
"The Phobos Experience" - in Fantasy & Science Fiction July 2018"Amara's Giraffe""Rockets Red""The Lady Astronaut of Mars" 

Doctor Who: Wicked Sisters

Out in November, Wicked Sisters is a trilogy of Doctor Who stories in which the Fifth Doctor and Leela must destroy two powerful beings who threaten all of space and time. Their names are Abby and Zara...

It's been a thrill to reunite the Doctor with the leads from my sci-fi series Graceless, and I couldn't be happier with the result. The series stars Peter Davison, Louise Jameson, Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington - plus some amazing guest actors who will be announced in due course.

Full press release as follows:

The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) is on course for a reunion with some old friends when he crosses paths with sisters Abby and Zara.

Created by pan-dimensional beings the Grace to assist – and sometimes hinder – the Doctor in Big Finish’s Key 2 Time trilogy, Abby (Ciara Janson) and Zara (Laura Doddington) went on to their own time-spanning adventures in the acclaimed spin-off series, Graceless. After centuries of their own wanderings through time and space, Abby and Zara are about to meet the Time Lord again...

Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Adventures – Wicked Sisters is now available for pre-order, from just £16.99, and is due for release in November 2020.

The Doctor is recruited by Leela for a vital mission on behalf of the Time Lords. Together, they must track down and destroy two god-like beings whose extraordinary powers now threaten all of space and time. Their names are Abby and Zara...

This new full-cast Doctor Who audio drama box set features three linked adventures by Graceless’ creator and writer, Simon Guerrier, who wrote the very first appearance of Abby and Zara in Doctor Who: The Judgment of Iskaar.

1. The Garden of Storms
2. The Moonrakers
3. The People Made of Smoke

Producer Mark Wright said: “It’s been ten years since we first took Abby and Zara off on their own adventures, and it’s fun to get the team that’s worked on every episode of Graceless together every couple of years.

“Simon Guerrier’s scripts always take us into unexpected territory, and Ciara Janson and Laura Doddington bring something new to their performances each time Abby and Zara are back together. As it’s been a decade since the first series of Graceless, we thought it was time to bring things full circle and take the sisters back to where it all began – with the Fifth Doctor.” 

Writer Simon Guerrier added: “It’s been a thrill to write for the Fifth Doctor and Leela, and put them up against Abby and Zara. You don’t need to know anything about Graceless - that was part of the brief from my masters - but they’re sisters with extraordinary powers that threaten all of time and space.”

“They’re very different from the women the Doctor first met all those years ago when we did the Key 2 Time series. Back then, he wasn't required to kill them...

“The three days we had in studio just before Christmas were the highlight of my working year. A dream cast, a lot of laughter, and Lisa Bowerman ably marshalling everyone as we faced the collapse of the universe.”

Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor Adventures – Wicked Sisters is now available for pre-order, exclusively at the Big Finish website from just £16.99.