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 Furious Masters, by Margot Bennett

This is a review of a comic science-fiction novel from 1968, sort of John Wyndham done as sitcom. Yet in poking fun at the mores and anxieties of its time, there are things here worth a content warning for sexual violence. 

Characters - male and female - repeatedly joke about rape and when one woman is stripped naked and murdered, it's played for comic effect. I'm not sure how much that's the author satirising misogyny of the period or being steeped in it herself and, given the overall light comic tone, I'm not sure how much that's on purpose. There's a lot going on under the surface.

At 3 am on 16 May, a sonic boom is heard across Yorkshire, trembling windows in Huddersfield and so terrifying the animals at a farm in Highfield-on-Moor that egg production drops by 40%. Two days later, farmer John Holman writes an angry letter to a government department to complain, believing the boom to have been caused by the RAF running exercises. The ministry denies any such exercise has taken place. 

Meanwhile, four precocious students from Oxford - Cressida, Robbie, Sue and David - go hiking across the moor and discover a strange object:

"The main body was a big, squat, metal cuboid, four feet high and over five across. On each side there were three-inch square slots, which on examination appeared to be filled with thick glass. The body was covered by a low pyramid, from which two long cup-ended tentacles projected at different angles. They looked very like aerials. A thick rod rose several feet above the pyramid to support two flat rectangular sheets of metal; one almost parallel to the ground, the other about ten degrees off the perpendicular." (p. 14)

They're soon joined by photographer Henry Brown, who takes atmospheric snaps of Cressida in front of this "spacecraft" and then hurries down to London to sell them to the papers. Soon people are queuing up to see the "Martian" lander, Holman fencing off his land and charging entry. News reporters come by helicopter, the police turn out in force, the local vicar has a moral perspective on all these proceedings, and even the Prime Minister is making pronouncements on TV about what he thinks is going on, based more on what he'd like to think than the evidence on the ground.

In all this frenzy, it takes a while for the students - and the reader - to spot the effects that this lander seems to have on those who get close it. They become more frenzied, angry, violent... The title of the novel refers to the "furious masters of lust and violence" that govern our behaviour.

We get our first clue to what's going on just after Henry photograph Cressida, thrilled by the possibility that these pictures will make him famous. They're also both hot from the walk and the sunny day, and the heat given off by the "spaceship". Henry suddenly changes tack:

"'I wa thinking to hell with fame and what's the hurry [to get to London] and I should pull you down and...' He put his arms around her and rubbed his face against hers. 'And make love to you on this fine bouncy grass.'" (p. 19)

Cressida initially seems keen but then a sheep bleats nearby and ruins the moment. Cressida admits that she likes Henry but thinks they should call the police to inform them about the lander. Henry persists: 

"I should have raped you [but] I'm over-civilised" (p. 20). 

Cressida laughs this off, but it's the first of many casual references to sexual violence. Later, this is linked to sexual liberation - or the lack of it:

"Cressida and Sue ran across the grass to the helicopter.

'Would you have minded being raped?' Sue asked in her shrill, clear voice, as they climbed on board.

'Yes.'

'With your inhibitions, naturally. I would have liked to be raped. It makes a nice change.'

'Being raped by one man is all very well. But I had two after me. And Sabine women aren't in this year.'" (p. 83)

The casual tone of all this is shocking, but surely a conscious choice by the author. In part, it's satirising sexual liberation. It's also not so different with the comments by members of the public from the time responding to the sexual assault depicted in The Forsyte Saga, which are included as extras on the DVD of that serial. But one big element of the novel is competing ideas about the cause of the increasing violence: whether it's something being done to us by the "spaceship" or something inside us all anyway that's been given an excuse to let rip. As Cressida and Sue have this conversation, is it a new or prevailing attitude?

As I said, much of the violence here is played for comic effect. When Cressida rebuffs Henry's advances, he resorts to attacking his own blown-up photographs of her. Another character makes a clumsy attempt to break into the bathroom when she's in there. In both cases, the threat is undercut by the inadequacies of these men. Later, as things get every more frenzied, another woman is stripped naked and murdered in a church as part of a kind of ritual sacrifice, but the vicar and congregation don sunglasses so as not to see anything rude.

A lot of these incidents feel like comic sketches. The novel is often funny and well observed, its targets including the press, police, church and civil service bureaucracy. There are some great one-liners:

"I must say Mars couldn't have chosen a more awkward time for the Minister." (p. 36)

But many of the gags are specifically visual in nature. Margot Bennett has a knack for conjuring vivid, strange images - such as this glimpse of the fauna of another world:

"Could the population of Mars, formerly supposed to consist of small snails, have devised a machine capable of driving human beings mad?" (p. 139)

Often, we "see" the comic events taking place, such as squabbles over who is in charge of a helicopter, or the top secret files raining down from an open window on to people rioting in the street. With its lively characters and set pieces, I could easily see this being dramatised - and perhaps Bennett, a prolific writer for TV, did so too. In fact, one reason I was so keen to read this novel is that it had been suggested to me that it originated in an idea Bennett may have offered Doctor Who. 

Her name is listed in two internal BBC documents, one from 28 February 1964 and one undated but probably from 2 March, with the idea to commission a four-part story from her to cover the potential loss of what ultimately became Planet of Giants. Nothing else is known about what Bennett's story might have involved.

If it was the seed of what became The Furious Masters, I can see why it didn't go any further as a Doctor Who adventure. On 20 February, story editor David Whitaker declined a story by another would-be writer, David Fisher, on the basis that it was set in the 20th century; the production team wanted Doctor Who to visit other times and places. We don't know much about Fisher's The Face of the Fire, other than it involved the effects of a machine discovered under the Wessex Downs. If this didn't meet with approval, the same was surely true of an idea from Bennett about the effects of a machine found on the moors in Yorkshire.

I'm continuing to look into this, and have in sight Bennett's other science fiction novel, The Long Way Back (1955) and her non-fiction The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964). Note that the latter is from around the time she was mooted for Doctor Who, so perhaps that will provide further clues.

See also:

• Me on The Man Who Didn't Fly, a detective novel by Margot Bennett
• Me on The Victorian Chaise-Longue, a science-fiction novella by Marghanita Laski, another author considered for the first year of Doctor Who
• Buy my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• Memoirs of the Spacewomen, a 2015 radio documentary about the work of Margot Bennett, Naomi Mitchison and Rose Macaulay, presented by Matthew Sweet and produced by Allegra McIlroy

Doctor Who: Ruby Red, by Georgia Cook

Responding to an alien distress call, the Doctor and Ruby arrive in Estonia a few days before the Battle of the Ice on 5 April 1242. 

"'Big one,' the Doctor nodded. 'Well, small in scale, but big in everything else. The final bust-up between the invading Duchy of Estonia and the republic of Novgorod. Marks the end of the Northern Crusades in this region, and cements Prince Alexander Nevsky as a national hero.'

'I've never heard of it,' said Ruby.

'Your planet's had too many wars for anyone to know them all,' said the Doctor sadly. 'Still, here we are.'" (p. 30)

The distress signal has been sent by Ranavere, a 16 year-old girl from an alien culture of warriors, who has been sent to the battle as part of a coming-of-age ritual. Ranavere doesn't to fight - but it soon turns she may not have a choice. There are other aliens on the ice, some of them more of Ranavere's warmongering people and then there's something more monstrous as well...

I really enjoyed this fast-moving, lively adventure by first-time novelist Georgia Cook (who I know a bit). It deftly captures the pace and verve of the recent TV series. In fact, it's packed with set-piece moments that would be great to be able to see. This is a book that would really suit illustration - which should come as no surprise given that the author is also a designer and artist. 

Ruby and the Doctor are captured well, and Ranavere is a character we can relate to; she and her family are well drawn. Like Ruby, I'd never heard of this moment in history but it makes for a rich, arresting backdrop. It's all great fun, not least towards the end when, after all the ice and cold, the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS with a pile of big, fluffy towels for the surviving burly warriors. Their resistance to such comfort quickly melts, in a moment that's perfectly daft, funny and true to character.

The Trouble With Tribbles, by David Gerrold

As with Craig Miller, I chatted to David Gerrold at the GallifreyOne convention last month and bought his book when I got home. The Trouble With Tribbles charts the development of the first script he sold to TV, which is a classic episode of the original Star Trek. We follow how David first approached the production team, the initial story ideas he sent in, the more detailed storyline and notes he got back, and continue on through to a shooting script - reprinted here in full. There are then his notes on what happened during filming and the response his episode got.

First published in 1973 (mine is a reprint by Virgin Books in 1996), it's naturally of its time, the jokes on set between filming include cast members playing their roles effeminately, while David tells us which women in the cast and crew he thinks beautiful. At one point, he blushes during lunch shared with star Nichelle Nichols when,

"she dropped some cottage cheese down into the cleavage of her skimpy costume." (p. 235)

But this leads to something more insightful as he discusses how meeting Nichols changed his sense of how to write characters from other races and cultures, and the significance of featuring Sulu and Chekhov in this prime-time American show - though not in the same episodes, because Chekhov was brought in while actor George Takei was away filming The Green Berets. This is admirable though I suspect David wouldn't phrase some of this in quite the same language today. Of course, that's inevitable in a book written 50 years ago - and about events from five years before that. But I'm struck by this juxtaposition of an imagined, progressive future couched in a language so much of the past.

Another detail from history is the problem of David's IBM Selectric Typewriter typing 12 characters to the inch when most TV scripts were typed in what he calls "pica", or 10 characters to the inch. The effect was that David typed,

"an extra three words per line, of fifty words per page." (p. 134) 

When his first draft script was copied into the correct format, it came out at 80 pages rather than the required 66 and needed extensive cuts. In my first professional jobs as a scriptwriter, duration was still generally judged by number of pages, and a couple of my early scripts which had lots of quick-fire exchanges, each speaker saying just a few words at a time, ended up running short. Now I'm much happier with a word count: 9,500 words pretty much always comes out as an hour of audio drama.

In fact, a lot of David’s other comments on writing chimed with me, too. On page 10, he tells us he was effectively prepping for his work on Star Trek long before the series was even created, as he'd been a devoted reader of sci-fi for years. Such prep, he says, is essential because it means we're ready to respond when opportunity arises. As he says (p. 15), opportunity knocks only softly - his allusion is to a moth at the window - so we need to be alert as well as ready to respond. I wish I'd read this when I was starting out.

Then there's what he says is the key to breaking into television:

"You're competing with the pros now. You have to be better than they are. ... You have to do something outstanding to make the producers notice you. You have to do it on merit alone, because you have no previous credits and nothing else working for you." (p. 49)

On Star Trek specifically, and ongoing series more generally, he says the usual rules of storytelling don't apply. He'd learned before working on Star Trek that, in movies, novels and plays,

"the importance of the story was that the incident it tells is the most important event that will ever happen to this character."

But heroes having weekly adventures can't sustain this kind of drama.

"You can't run your characters in emotional high gear all the time. You'll burn them out, they'll cease to be believable." (p. 47) 

The trick, he says, is to avoid falling into formula stories; by doing something different, you stand out. But I wonder if your story can be about the most important event in someone's life - that's what your guest characters are for. 

Another telling insight into Star Trek is producer Gene Coon's note on David's story premise, dated February 1967, for what became the Tribbles episode. David originally envisaged it involving a new company on an alien planet going into competition with a huge, well-established corporation over the production of grain. The grain element survived into the broadcast story, but Coon wrote in pencil:

"'Big business angle out. One planet against another.' Translated, this meant: 'On American television, big business is never the villain. Make the conflict between two different planets instead." (p. 55n)

In addressing this, David suggested involving aliens from an episode in the first year of Star Trek; the producers decided to include Klingons in three episodes of the second year, including David's episode. The veto on bad business therefore led to a major development in the wider lore of Star Trek.

On the whole, this is a fascinating and insightful deep dive into the making of Star Trek, and gives the impression of a really fun and supportive show to have worked on. David is an enthusiastic, witty guide, honest about his own shortcomings so that we might learn from his mistakes. He's awe-struck by his experience - and the result is that so are we.

Two additional thoughts. First, this particular edition includes a plate section of black-and-white photographs that is really odd. Two of the photos are from The Trouble with Tribbles itself, and there are a few from other episodes of the time and of cast members more generally. But there are also some pictures of cast members out of character - William Shatner seen with his wife, Leonard Nimoy seen with his wife and with his son. There are then photos from the movies Star Trek V, Star Trek VI, the casts of spin-off series The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and a picture of the USS Voyager - none of which get mentioned in the text. I suppose the intention was to make the book appeal to fans of contemporary Star Trek in 1996, but I think they might have felt a little short-changed. It's odd, because David wrote a new introduction to this edition but doesn't mention his work on the first Star Trek movie (in which he briefly appears) or as a writer on The Next Generation. There's no mention of that year's Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations (in which he again cameos), with which this edition was surely meant to coincide. I wonder what happened - and will ask David the next time we meet.

Secondly, via Genome, I looked up when The Trouble With Tribbles first aired in the UK: on Monday, 1 June 1970 (two days after Episode 4 of the Doctor Who story Inferno). It has been repeated on the BBC 10 times since then, on the last occasion in 2007. 

Of little interest to anyone else but I think I first saw it at 6pm on Thursday, 28 November 1985, when I was nine and a half. That's brought back vivid memories of being sat with my brothers at the kitchen table eating jacket potato and having special permission from my mum to have the TV on at the same time. I remember saying to my dad, though probably not about this particular episode, that Star Trek didn't seem old like episodes of Doctor Who that sometimes got repeated. It felt on the same level as new episodes of The A Team and every bit as glamorous.

This wasn't my introduction to Trek. Earlier in the year, for my ninth birthday, we rented the VHS tape of The Search for Spock which had just come out, because (to me) the cover looked like Star Wars. While I was captivated, my two school friends got bored and went out to the garden to play. My mum told me join then, reminding me that this didn't mean I'd miss the film; I could watch it later. Video was still a novelty. 

Anyway - all a bit self-indulgent but this book has given me a bit of a rush, my own ancient past woven into this vision of the future.

Rosewater, by Tade Thompson

Kaaro can find things. He can read people's minds and switch into a sort of psychic internet thing - so long as he's not lathered himself in anti-fungal cream. He's one of a number of "sensitives" working for the Nigerian government, trying to puzzle out - among other things - why America has gone silent, and what the aliens in London might want...

This is a gripping, intelligent thriller, full of big, mad ideas and images. The world Thompson has created is rich enough for multiple stories - this is the first of a trilogy, and in the closing pages we discover someone close to Kaaro does not think of herself as a supporting character but is the heroine of her own tale.

Bayo Gbadamosi's reading of the audiobook is especially good, giving voice to an array of different characters. It's suspenseful, it's weird and visceral, and has that brilliant science-fiction thing of being at once utterly extraordinary and also tangibly real. 

Rosewater won the Clarke Award in 2019. Other books on the shortlist were Semiosis by Sue Burke, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, and The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley.

Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley

This was the perfect accompaniment to my journey to London and back for the Nigel Kneale centenary, and not only because it fitted the drive time almost exactly.

A long time ago, Jem escaped her home in Devon and young son to cross through the Kissing Gate and journey into space. There she met and bonded with an alien called Isley, then brought him home to run a pub, the Skyward Inn, and reconnect with her own people. But the "brew" that Isley supplies has unusual properties, forging connections across time and memory, even giving visions of the future. As a disease takes hold of the Earth, the community starts to break down, people together and yet somehow utterly alone...

As strange and haunting as Whiteley's previous books, Skyward Inn is full of threat just under the surface, a pervasive wrongness that we can't always quite touch. The last section plays out as a nightmare, as unsettling as any Kneale. It's horrible yet beautiful, too - the prose full of feeling and pathos. We're made to understand why people make the awful choice to surrender entirely to the thing that's happening. The ending hangs on our belief in the strength of a connection between two individuals on separate planets and in different periods of time; it's brilliant.

The book owes something to Jamaica Inn, and is about the cross-pollination cultures. At its heart is the colonisation of another, populated world, its native people not resisting human invasion. As with previous Whiteley, that passivity is deeply unsettling. But this is all mirrored with an incursion by humans from across the boundary wall round Devon (now known as the "Western Protectorate"). There's lots on "good" immigrants bringing needed skills and expertise, deemed more worthy of acceptance than other individuals. There's lots on dysfunctional families and how we choose our connections. There's lots about how we interact and are shaped by interaction. We are our connections.

• On The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

Producing Doctor Who

I'm the new producer of the Doctor Who: Lost Stories range - and Tom Baker's boss, which has been a delight. My masters at Big Finish have announced the two productions I'm currently working on - Doctor Who and the Ark and Daleks! - Genesis of Terror, both for release in March 2023. 

As I say in the official announcement:

This is something very special: Doctor Who archaeology brought thrillingly to life. The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks are among the best-loved TV stories ever. We’ve uncovered first draft scripts by John Lucarotti and Terry Nation that are exciting, surprising and very different.” 

“Genesis is a very visual script packed with striking, stark images – Nation even makes the stage directions exciting. In Doctor Who and the Ark, the directions were more functional so Jonathan Morris has carefully adapted the script for audio. Though we’ve kept the original episode titles, such as “Puffball” and “Camelias” – I think Tom Baker enjoyed recording those! Oh, and wait till you hear that cliffhanger… 

More details to follow in due course, but you can pre-order Doctor Who and the Ark and Daleks! Genesis of Terror right this minute.

Santa Benny at the Bottom of the Sea

"Santa Benny at the Bottom of the Sea" is a new, festive science-fiction short story by me, to be featured in Bernice Summerfield: The Christmas Collection in December. The audiobook is narrated by Lisa Bowerman and the blurb goes like this:

An anthology of festive tales featuring Bernice Summerfield.

Christmas… Advent… Midwinter Festival… Spiriting… No matter what you call it on your home planet, this magical holiday at the end of the year, when the nights are dark, and the lights are sparkly, is the perfect time for telling stories...

And who doesn’t have a tale or two to tell about Christmas? Certainly not Benny.

Did she ever tell you about the time she had to escape from a herd of rampaging battle-armoured cyborg reindeer? Or the time she had to convince three tentacled young sea creatures that she was the real Santa? Or the time she nearly let an evil deity back into the world just in time for New Year…

These ten stories are collected from all across Benny’s eventful life, from St Oscar’s to the Braxiatel Collection, to Legion and even in the Unbound Universe...

The stories are:

• Collector’s Item by Eddie Robson
• Santa Benny at the Bottom of the Sea by Simon Guerrier
• Tap by Mark Clapham
• Glory to the Reborn King by Matthew Griffiths
• Signifiers of the Verphidiae by Tim Gambrell
• The Frosted Deer by Sophie Iles
• Vistavision by Victoria Simpson
• Wise Women by Q
• Null Ziet by Scott Harrison
• Bernice Summerfield and the Christmas Adventure by Xanna Eve Chown 

Edy Hurst's War of the Worlds

I'm a guest on a special episode of comedian Edy Hurst's podcast devoted to The War of the Worlds, nattering about the life of HG Wells, his influence on George Orwell and on Doctor Who, and some other stuff.

Interlude 3: Justice for Wells w/ Simon Guerrier

Apple: https://apple.co/3hQYpIS Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3kySidU

You can still listen to the BBC radio documentary I produced on HG Wells and the H-Bomb, while "Alls Wells That Ends Wells" is an extra on the DVD of 1966 Doctor Who story The Ark:

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. 

Doctor Who Magazine 549

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine includes a feature I've co-written with Sophie Iles, a preview of the animated version of 1967 story The Faceless Ones.

We spoke to producer/director AnneMarie Walsh, sound restorer and remasterer Mark Ayres, colour artist Adrian Salmon, 2D animator Kate Sullivan and character designer Martin Geraghty.

Sherlock Holmes - The Vanishing Man, by Philip Purser-Hallard

In 1896, Holmes and Watson are called in to investigate the disappearance of Thomas Kellway from a locked room with a window in the door, through which he was being watched by pairs of observers on a carefully organised rota. Kellway was engaged in a psychic experiment, and his acolytes think he has teleported to Venus. Holmes investigates the strange group of individuals who took part in the experiment - and before long he's caught up in a murder case...

My friend Philip Purser-Hallard has produced a really engaging and fun mystery for Holmes, published last year and part of the line of new Holmes stories from Titan Books. The basic idea - of a psychic who claims to be able to reach across space - feels very Conan Doyle and yet wholly original. It reminded me first of all of the "Victorian seance" performed by Derren Brown.

The strange assortment of characters seem authentically Doylish, too, as does the mix of the oddly comic and the outlandishly macabre. At times I was ahead of Holmes but there are a series of related mysteries and I didn't solve them all. They're all satisfyingly unthreaded by the end.

I especially liked the retcon of Holmes' ignorance of certain subjects that most people take for granted. That issue is described by Watson in chapter two of introductory story, A Study in Scarlet (1888):

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he enquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
'You appear to be astonished,' he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. 'Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.'"

Phil has Watson regret writing these words, with Holmes explaining:

"'When specific knowledge is required of me, I am quite capable of acquiring it from the available sources. I would have been unable yesterday to tell you with any great certainty whether Venus was a planet, a comet or a star, but today I have at my fingertips such facts as are known about its magnitude, its periods of rotation and orbit, its atmosphere and its surface, in case these data should should become relevant to the matter at hand. Among other things, I have learned that Venus is judged by astronomers to be a younger world than our own, on the basis of its greater proximity to the sun, just as Mars is supposed to be older. That being the case,' he said languidly, 'the superior development that Kellway ascribes to its inhabitants appears to be rather anomalous.'" (p. 60)

It's a simple, logical fix. It also nicely incorporates scientific thinking from the period (which we no longer think is right), and even better has Holmes use that as part of his deductions. Clever. 

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

This wasn't what I expected. As a classic of science-fiction, I thought it would be engineer-heroes conquering the frontier and debating the physics of travelators. But The Martian Chronicles (first published in 1950) is altogether stranger, more whimsical and - by the end - unsettling.

Each chapter is dated and the book covers events between January 1999 and October 2026, as humans attempt to settle on Mars. Some chapters are very short - some merely a couple of pages, one a few paragraphs. But others are long, self-sustained stories so that this feels like a classic "fix-up" novel comprising previously published short stories now loosely connected - as it turns out it is. At first, I thought the depictions of Martians in one story contradicted those in another. And it all seemed achingly okay.

Then I got to "Way Up in the Middle of the Air", first published in the magazine Other Worlds in July 1950 and set in June 2003. As colonisation of Mars hits its stride, in an unnamed part of the southern United States, the whole of the African-American populace decides to emigrate - to the horror of the white people they serve.

"His wife's small sob stopped him. She dabbed at her eyes. 'I kept telling her, "Lucinda," I said, "you stay on and I raise your pay and you get two nights off a week, if you want," but she just looked set! I never seen her so set, and I said, "Don't you love me, Lucinda?" and she said yes, but she had to go because that's the way it was, is all. She cleaned the house and dusted it and put luncheon on the table and then she went to the parlour door and - and stood there with two bundles, one by each foot, and shook my hand and said, "Good-bye, Mrs Teece." And she went out the door. And there was her luncheon on the table, and all of us too upset to even eat it. It's still there now, I know: last time I looked it was getting cold.'

Teece almost struck her. 'God damn it, Mrs Teece. You get the hell home. Standin' there makin' a sight of yourself!'" (p. 182)

There's so much to unpack there! The mix of emotions, that craving for love (and gratitude) by the masters for years of drudging service with only one night off. The threat of violence - not only to the servants but to Teece's wife, who calls her husband "Pa". The vision of life, 53 years in the future from the time the story was written, with no apparent progress in civil rights. I'm surprised to learn this chapter is left out of some later editions as it's the one that really hit me. It's an uncomfortable, troubling story, and I'm still puzzling out exactly why.

The second story that really resonated is "The Martian", set in September 2005 and originally published in Super Science Stories in 1949. An elderly couple have moved to Mars after the death of their young son on Earth - but now he comes back to them. When the family go into town on a shopping trip, the son becomes a young girl - the missing daughter of another grieving family. The elderly couple help steal "their" son back, but the son - really a Martian - can't help morphing into the desires of each member of the pursuing crowd. It's horrible, not least because it's clear the humans know that the Martian isn't really what it seems but are overcome with longing. Even at the end, with the Martian gone, the grieving father still waits on the doorstep - the implication being that he waits for the return of a yet another Martian as his son.

In the last third of the book, we start to re-meet characters from previous stories and pick up on threads and whole lives. These people gaze into The Martian night sky at the green (not, as we'd now think, blue) spec of Earth with mixed feelings. On page 224 we're told that many colonists are considering going "home" to Earth, where's there's an impending war.

That's undercut in the very next story, like the former set in November 2005, when one character comments,

"I don't trust those Earth people,' (p. 227).

They are no longer Earth people but Earth remains their home, in a contradiction that feels nuanced and convincing. There's then a terrible cataclysm, which we get from the perspective of an ordinary guy worried about the effect it will have on the tourist business in "The Off Season" - a delicious bit of sardonic irony.

I didn't like "The Silent Towns," about a man of no apparent great attraction longing for a woman - and then meeting one he doesn't like. It's a careful-what-you-wish-for tale and the bleak Martian setting made it reminiscent of The Twilight Zone in tone, but there's little more to it than a misogynist twist.

"There Will Come Soft Rains" is very much better, the story of an automated house going through its daily routine in caring for its long-departed human family. Much of it is simply listing small, domestic details, but each one adds to the sense of what has been lost.

And that's true of the book as a whole: whimsical stories that add up to something a whole, an epic of  failure and loss. I can see why The Martian Chronicles haunts what has followed in SF, why it's referenced in the Lady Astronaut novels and so on. Its influence is surely felt from the "New New York" (p. 265) that echoes in Russell T Davies' Doctor Who, to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy which I now want to revisit after (blimey) at least 20 years.

Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Subtitled "The Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life," this is an absorbing mix of marine biology and philosophy, delving into the worldview of the octopus and our sense of what intelligence even is.

"Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closet we will come to meeting an intelligent alien." (p. 9)

I've waded through some of this stuff before - see my published work on the octopus. Godfrey-Smith also uses studies of other species to shed light on octopus intelligence and our assumptions. He discusses the findings of Baboon Metaphysics, which made me wonder how applicable quotations from Jane Austen would be to the octopus.

This all helps place the octopus in context but the most arresting bits of the book are when Godfrey-Smith is in the water with them, reporting directly, and in his logical analysis of how different their biology and therefore their worldview is to ours.

"Some features show a mixture of similarity and difference, convergence and divergence. We have hearts, and so do octopuses. But an octopus has three hearts, not one. Their hearts pump blood that is blue-green, using copper as the oxygen-carrying molecule instead of the iron which makes our blood red. Then, of course, there is the nervous system - large like ours, but built on a different design, with a different set of relationships between body and brain." (p. 74)

That nervous system extends into the limbs, effectively meaning that octopuses "see" with their arms to a limited extent, as well as with their eyes. Godfrey-Smith discusses (on p. 80) tactile vision substitution systems (TVSS), where a video camera attached to a blind person converts optical images into vibration or electrical stimulation the person can feel. When a dog walks past, the blind person doesn't feel a vibration so much as sense an object in motion, relative to themselves. Key to this is that the TVSS works in real time, so the person's own position and movement is part of the sensation: you move, and sense how that affects the relative position of objects around you.

We then return to the octopus:

"What could it be like to see with your skin? There could be no focusing of an image. Only general changes and washes of light could be detected. We don't yet know whether the skin's sensing is communicated to the brain, or whether then information remains local. Both possibilities stretch the imagination. If the skin's sensing is carried to the brain, then the animal's visual sensitivity would extend in all directions, beyond where the eyes can reach. If the skin's sensing does not reach the brain, then each arm might see for itself, and keep what it sees to itself." (p. 121)

Some of the science is a little hard-going, and (as always) I would prefer footnotes to endnotes, and numbers in the body text to indicate when to check a note. But it's an appealingly short book - 204 pages before the endnotes - stuffed with utterly boggling ideas. It's also an emotional story: the tentative contact with these creatures, the dangers all around them, their shockingly short lives. And then, just when we think we grasp how strange these things are, he undercuts some of what he's said and makes the point that they're not so very distant.

"The mind evolved in the sea. Water made it possible ... When animals did crawl onto dry land, they took the sea with them. All there basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea. I said in chapter I that meeting an octopus is, in many ways, the closest we're likely to get to meeting an intelligent alien. Yet it's not really an alien; the Earth and its oceans made us both." (p. 200)

Target Storybook cover and artwork

My masters at BBC Books tweeted that they have received a first copy of Doctor Who - The Target Storybook:

Artist Anthony Dry then provided his full, amazing artwork, definitive proof at last that Adric was the Doctor all along:

And then the account Doctor Who Comic Art tweeted the thrilling illustration by Mike Collins that accompanies my story in the book:

Doctor Who - The Target Storybook is on sale on 24 October.

15 thrilling new adventures, featuring writers and stars from the hit BBC series - namely Terrance Dicks, Matthew Sweet, Simon Guerrier, Colin Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Jenny T Colgan, Jacqueline Rayner, Una McCormack, Steve Cole, Vinay Patel, George Mann, Susie Day, Mike Tucker, Joy Wilkinson and Beverly Sanford.

We’re all stories in the end…

In this exciting collection you’ll find all-new stories spinning off from some of your favourite Doctor Who moments across the history of the series. Learn what happened next, what went on before, and what occurred off-screen in an inventive selection of sequels, side-trips, foreshadowings and first-hand accounts – and look forward too, with a brand new adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor.

Each story expands in thrilling ways upon aspects of Doctor Who’s enduring legend. With contributions from show luminaries past and present – including Colin Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Vinay Patel, Joy Wilkinson and Terrance Dicks – The Target Storybook is a once-in-a-lifetime tour around the wonders of the Whoniverse.

Imprint: BBC Books

Published: 24/10/2019

ISBN: 9781785944741

Length: 432  Pages

Dimensions: 240mm x 39mm x 162mm

Weight: 667g

RRP: £16.99

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1118653/doctor-who--the-target-storybook/9781785944741.html

Agent of Chaos, by Norman Spinrad

A month ago, while I was busy preparing a talk on utopia and dystopia for the Hastings Writers Group, Francis Wheen tweeted about Agent of Chaos, a science-fiction novel from 1967 with a revolutionary hero called Boris Johnson. I couldn't resist.

The Solar System is in the thrall of the Hegemony, a fascist state where minor errors are met with instant death. In fact, the automated systems often kill people anyway, their fellow citizens assuming some secret crime has been detected. Johnson is in a terrorist organisation, the Democratic League, who are struggling to be taken seriously by blowing up the Hegemony's leaders.

"You know the official line on us - we're a joke, an amusement to be reported with the sports results, if at all." (p. 40)

They have only the most rudimentary grasp of what democracy even is - there is more than one seen when they fail to define what it actually is they're fighting for - but are still determined to shoot and blow up people in its name, even at the cost of their own lives.

They are thwarted - and also sometimes aided - by a third faction, the Brotherhood of Assassins, a peculiar organistion devoted to a doctrine of chaos that seems to be a mash-up of Marx and the laws of thermodynamics. The plot then takes an unexpected turn as a probe reaches a planet in orbit round another star and discovers some kind of intelligent life - far outside the Hegemony's reach.

Wheen is not the first to spot the connection to our current Prime Minister - the Guardian reported on Agent of Chaos in 2017. But, as both suggest, there's fun to be had at comparing the ambitions and shortcomings of the Johnson described here with the one in No. 10. The Hegemony is hardly the EU but the Johnsons possibly share something.

"Your own foolish pride in your supposed cleverness is what defeated you, Johnson ... A most peculiar psychology - a man who believes what he wants to believe." (p. 104)

Frankly, it's just weird seeing his name in the midst of pulp SF. The imagery conjured can be alarming, such as when discussing the relative failure of henchpersons.

"Fortunately, the crazy fanatics seem to be as incompetent as Johnson's boobs." (p. 57)

I'm not sure Spinrad means Johnson so be anything less than a hero. On page 124, Johnson is a babbling fool who can't articulate why he fights for demoracy. Then, oddly, the narrator speaks up for him.

"The Johnsons, he realised, were by and large the best type that the human race could produce under the conditions of the Hegemony - instinctive rebels, viscerally dogmatic in their unthinking opposition to the Order of the Hegemony, but uncommitted and curiously flexible when it came to final ends." (p. 130)

Yet when challenged, he goes rather to pieces - such as when asked about Democracy with a capital D.

"'It's not just a word,' Johnson insisted shrilly. 'It's... it's...'
'Well?' said Khustov. 'What is it then? Do you know? Can you tell me? Can you even tell yourself?'
'It's... it's Democracy... when the people have the government they want. When the majority rules...'
'But the people already have the government they want.' (p. 106) 

Indeed, Khustov argues that Johnson is just after power himself - he's a tyrant in waiting. We're offered little to suggest otherwise. His ingenious (over-complicated) schemes come to nothing, he's dependent on the sacrifice of others bailing him out, and the book ends with one enormous, chaotic mess left in the Solar System which Johnson conveniently leaves behind him while blasting off, unscathed, to new pastures.

Aside from Johnson, another leading character is called Jack Torrence - one letter different from the protagonist in The Shining, to add to the alarming visuals. Spinrad attempts to make his future Solar System multiethnic, but in terms that read uncomfortably now. There are also no women featured at all.

As for the sci-fi, this future all feels pretty standard, with the moving walkways beloved of a generation of sci-fi, the lanes running at different speeds. The mass surveillance that was once a horrifying idea is now a commonplace (if no less horrifying), the incongruous bit in the novel that wards (the human citizens) use paper identity cards and manually check against lists of known insurgents - with rare success.

It's also weird what the priorities are: Johnson can't argue a case for the cause he tries to kill for, which is surely central to him as the protagonist and central to the book. There's no great emotional depth to anyone in the story and there aren't any women, yet we get whole paragraphs devoted to the mechanics of a spaceship making a comet-like slingshot round the Sun or moving apparently faster than light without breaking the known laws of physics.

In short, it's an odd book, forgettable but for the chance of Johnson's name. Oh, and the cover - by an uncredited artist - does not represent anything that happens in the 156 pages. But that twisted, raging man at the centre... Does he look a little like Trump?

Semiosis, by Sue Burke

Semiosis is, like Aliya Whiteley's The Loosening Skin, one of six contenders for the 2019 Clarke Award, to be announced this Wednesday. I'd hate to have to make the call between the two books (let alone the others) because Semiosis is excellent.

It charts the early history of an Earth colony on alien world over five generations and 107 years. Chapters are mostly told from the perspective of one colonist and then we jump a generation and learn, in passing, how that person died.

The first human settlers name the planet "Pax", and each chapter opens with a quote from their constitution, an effort to set out how they will go forward as Pacifists. Characters, too, discuss their efforts to meet the standards set by the original settlers:

"Only intelligent creatures also create civilization. Civilization creates the idea of peace as well as war, and makes both possible. I am a Pacifist. I have chosen the idea that I intend to make real." (p. 248).

For all the ideals, it's rarely very easy. There are accidents, sickness and worse. Some of it is pretty hard going - I'm especially susceptible to stuff about the death of a baby, and there's a battle towards the end that is as horrifying as it is compelling, characters ruthlessly despatched. One section is about the hunt for a serial killer. And yet on the whole this is, I think, a fantasy of integration, of making a success of weaving humanity into the strange fabric of another world that teems with strange and hostile life.

That life includes Stevland, a sentient plant who even narrates some of the story, runs for political office and converses with duplicituous orange trees. Stevland is ambitious and powerful, modifying the fruit it grows and the humans consume so they'll better serve its purpose. Unsurprisingly, some of the humans find this sinister and want to limit Stevland's reach - but the colony is also dependent on that very food.

The humans are also not the only non-native species: there's evidence of creatures the humans name Glassmakers. Again, we're not quite sure what to make of them or their intentions until very late in the story - and individuals don't all agree. The humans, too, are well drawn and distinct, conflicting personalities. A big part of the power of the book is how much we feel the loss of even people we've only met briefly.

I must admit I got to the end of the first, 33-page chapter feeling I'd seen this kind of new-colony stuff before, but Semiosis is something special. The title means signs - the production of meaning others are meant to understand. It's a treatise on how we communicate with others. Unlike so much of colony-in-space fiction, it's not about conquest or the triumph of will and science. The constant thread through the generations is negotiation, of speaking to your enemies to compromise and find peace. It's not always possible - there are terrible mistakes, and there is terrible malice. But the aspiration holds, and leaves the reader with hope.

Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor

I really enjoyed this 90-page science-fiction novella about a girl who runs away from home to go to space university, when her ship is attacked by murderous aliens...

The novella won both Hugo and Nebula awards, and if the word of mouth wasn't already good, the cover boasts a too-die-for endorsement:

"There's more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okoroafor's work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics." - Ursula K. Le Guin

A lot of science-fiction is about encounters between white Earth people and "the other" out in space. Binti, the narrator of this story, is the first of the Himba people of northern Namibia to be offered a place at Oomza University, and other humans (even darker skinned ones) treat her as exotic and strange.

The otjize paste with which she daubs her hair and skin is made from the clay back home, a physical link to her culture and history that plays a key part in the story. The texture and smell of it are part of what makes the telling so sensuous and rich.

A lot of science-fiction is also about war and conquest, the future all jostling colonial powers. Binti feels like it's going to be some typical invasion, but is more about what it takes to bridge the gap between different groups, whether human or otherwise. In doing so, Binti becomes someone, something, else. That willingness to reach out, to leave home and migrate, to embrace the strange, is a defiant, heroic act.

Her story continues in Binti: Home (2017) and Binti: The Night Masquerade (2018), which I hope to get to shortly.

Doctor Who Magazine Yearbook 2018

The Doctor Who Magazine Yearbook 2018 is out in shops now. Among its myriad delights are some things I did the typing on:

WET LOOK
An interview with Stephanie Hyam, who played Heather - the enigmatic student, spooky puddle and love interest of Bill Potts.

NOISES OFF
Sound engineer Cathy Robinson details how the especially unsettling "binaural" sound mix for Knock, Knock was achieved.

THE HERMAPHRODITE CIVIL SERVANT
Ysanne Churchman tells me about returning to Doctor Who after 43 years to reprise the role of Alpha Centauri.

Many of my previous interviews with Doctor Who cast and crew can be read on the Koquillion site.

Doctor Who: Christmas, Mega, Destiny and War

A whole bunch of Doctor Who goodies by me are now available in shops and online. "The Holly and the Ivy" is this year's festive comic strip in the new issue of Doctor Who Adventures. Here's a thrilling excerpt:

Doctor Who: The Holly and the Ivy
By me, art by John Ross with
colour by Alan Craddock

Also out now, The Mega is a six-part audio story featuring the third Doctor, Jo Grant and Mike Yates. I've adapted it from an original outline by Bill Strutton, with the help of magnificent script editor John Dorney.

Doctor Who: The Mega
By me and Bill Strutton, artwork by Damien May

Those splendid fellows at Big Finish have also released the complete box-set of special 50th anniversary series The Destiny of the Doctor, with one adventure for each of (what we thought when we were commissioned was) the 11 incarnations of the Doctor. I wrote the second Doctor's one: The Shadow of Death . Until 31 January, you can buy the box-set for less than half price.

The Destiny of the Doctor

And, just to whet your appetite, Big Finish have revealed the cover to my forthcoming The War To End All Wars. I'm thrilled by Tom Webster's artwork. Cor. The story - which stars Peter Purves as space pilot Steven Taylor (and the first Doctor), and Alice Haig as Sida - is out in April 2014.

Doctor Who: The War To End All Wars
By me, artwork by Tom Webster