Trowelblazers' TrowelTakeover

Today, Samira Ahmed and I took over the twitter feed of the Trowelblazers, which celebrates pioneering women in archaeology, palaentology and geology, past and present.

We shared the story of how we made our Radio 3 documentary, Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt in an 80-tweet thread.

• Listen to Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt

Good in a Room, by Stephanie Palmer

I dared to ask a writer whose work I admire for advice about something I'm working on, and they recommended this book by Stephanie Palmer, subheaded "How to sell yourself (and your ideas) and win over an audience."

It's a simply, straight-forward guide to meeting and maintaining relationships with people who might buy your work, full of practical tips and suggestions. A lot of it is new and immediately useful to me - thinking of meetings as having a "structure" to them, and the ways you identify when to say "no". Some of it also seems painfully obvious - don't get cross at the people you want to employ you - and some of it crystalises stuff that I've sort of been thinking about for some time. 

More than a decade ago now, I was a producer for Big Finish and had writers pitching at me. Some of them were brilliant - three writers I was already a fan of accorded me all respect, like I was the established professionl and they were just starting out. Other writers were less so.

There was the one whose pitch was basically slagging off everything in the range I oversaw. Another pitched an idea we'd just sort of done, and when I said so decided that I should come up with the story they could write. Another, I remember distinctly, behaved as if they'd just read some book on making sales. You could almost see it in their eyes when I said I'd already commissioned everything for my current spaces: "Chapter three techniques haven't worked, so now on to chapter four..."

As a result, I'd been wary of reading this sort of book myself, and of applying these "cheats" on would-be employers. Surely they see through that. But I'm glad to say that's what Stephanie Palmer thinks, too. There's a whole chapter called "Stop Networking Now" for exactly that reason.

Doctor Who Magazine #535

Out today, Doctor Who Magazine issue #535 includes my interview with Feifei Ruan, the illustrator and visual storyteller who created the extraordinary images used to promote Doctor Who in China.

I'm also a page 3 model, with my photo and short biography carefully placed to scare off readers of a nervous disposition. The Dr and the Lord of Chaos were commissioned for the special photo shoot, which included this dramatic moment.

Scratchman, by Tom Baker

I knocked through this delicious new Doctor Who novel very quickly, revelling in its fun and invention. It's based on a movie script Tom Baker - the fourth Doctor himself - worked out with co-star Ian Marter in the 1970s. Now Baker and my mate James Goss have turned it into a novel.

I knew the basic story from an old feature in Doctor Who Magazine (issue #379, cover date 28 February 2007, since you weren't asking.) But the novel is a revelation, full of wit and life that didn't quite come across in a dry synopsis. Partly, that's down to the first person narration - a Doctor Who story told by the Doctor, and in more than once sense, too.

After a prologue in which the Doctor is, yet again, put on trial by his peers - here is Tom Baker reading that prologue - we start with a picnic, the Doctor playing a ukulele to the despair of his friend Sarah, while Harry is keen to play cricket on the beach. But the three friends are watched by sinister scarecrows - including the brilliant mental image of a scarecrow policeman on a bike - and the scarecrows turn out to be linked to Scratchman or, as we better know him, the Devil himself.

In the late 1970s, the proposed film had a director attached: James Hill, who'd later oversee the TV series Worzel Gummidge. I tried to imagine the events of the novel in the same bleak pastoral style, all on film, the scarecrows beautifully realised. That series terrified me as a kid because it seemed so uncannily real. (Not helped by it being shot near where I grew up.)

Scratchman's scarecrows and its depiction of ordinary, village life with its squabbling egos, would suit that kind of production. But as I read the book, I imagined it more in the style of The Android Invasion - a 1975 Doctor Who story about weird goings on in a village, a mix of location recording and studio sets. That story, the last to feature Ian Marter as Harry, is the jolliest of the stories overseen by producer Philip Hinchcliffe, the one most unlike the rest of his tenure. It was directed by his predecessor, Barry Letts, which might account for some of that. But for all the scares and deaths in Scratchman, that's the tone I felt it had. This isn't to criticise the tone - I really like The Android Invasion - but it may explain why Hinchcliffe turned down the proposal to make this for TV.

A few small things also stood out to this tragic fan. On page 92, Sarah sees a picture of herself, "posing while happily hitting her android duplicate with a lump hammer." Surely, the implication is that Scratchman is set after the events of The Android Invasion - with Harry rejoining the TARDIS for more adventures we never saw on TV. Sarah herself was in only four more stories before leaving the TARDIS, so my head has been busy trying to sort out when these new adventures of Harry fit in.

On another occasion, the Doctor lights a cigar from a monster's burning head - a macabre joke, but one that seems out of character for this particular hero. Indeed, on the 1978 story The Stones of Blood, where the Doctor faces execution, Tom Baker changed a line asking for a "last cigarette" to a "last toffee apple." Today, the "rules" about these things are carefully watched over by benign guardians at the BBC, and I imagine they - in their infinite patience and wisdom - made a special exemption here.

Elements of the story also seem familiar from things that have come after it. An awful moment where we learn the life story of one of the scarecrows just before it's destroyed reminded me of things done with the Cybermen in a couple of stories. The Doctor and his friends caught up in a giant game of pinball that then gets mixed up with chess has echoes of the first Harry Potter. Of course, this story was devised first, but we're coming to it new.

The scarecrow with the sad life story is just one of many deaths, many of them involving characters we've come to like, even if we don't always know their names. In fact, a point is made of that when the Doctor claims to remember all those who have died - a scene I thought really powerful. But the emotional impact of the book is more personal and profound. Scratchman wants to know what scares the Doctor, and for all it is played for laughs that is a penetrating question. We get a sense of what it feels like to be the Doctor, to face so much danger and terror, and to carry so much loss. That loss includes himself - the "deaths" of his former selves, and his own impending replacement. There's some fun with this - Baker can't resist a pop at his immediate predecessor not tipping a cab driver, and there's a lovely cameo by one of his future selves where this Doctor tries to be brave about his future. The trial sequence concludes setting up stuff we've since seen on TV involving his successors. 

But the most powerful bit is a PS from the Doctor at the almost very end. Here, surely, is not only the Doctor ruminating on his fears, on what it's like to be him, but Tom Baker, too. He concludes with a beautiful blend of pathos and mischief, and it's hard not to think that Baker is 85. He's quite open in interviews that he's a little fragile now and might not be around too much longer. So this ending ties together the boggling ideas of the book but it also feels like goodbye. It's a perfectly judged sign-off and it completely got me. It made this broken old man cry.

Thank you, Doctor. Thanks for everything. Happy times and places to you, too.

Astounding, by Alec Nevala-Lee

Astounding is extraordinary, a rich, incisive and constantly shocking history of the science-fiction magazine of the same name, and through it a biography of the "golden age" of SF told through the lives of four luminaries of the genre: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and L Ron Hubbard.

I grew up devouring Asimov's stories and a fair bit of Heinlein, and wrote my MA dissertation on the claims made by Campbell and others about the quality - and value - of "real" science in SF. That was all a long time ago, but I thought I knew this story. Not a bit of it, it turns out. And some of my heroes were appalling people.

I'm going to write more about that in a review for someone else, so I'll be brief here. I really admired how Nevala-Lee involves women whose voices have otherwise been lost, reminding us of their presence and underlining their influence. Kay Tarrant, for example, was always at the next desk from Campbell when authors came to visit, so would have had a ring-side view of many of the battles described here. When she had a heart attack, we're told, it took five people to carry out the tasks she'd quietly got on with for decades. We get just an impression of her, but it's a strong one, and important.

The book is also unflinching about the shortcomings of authors - not just the four main subjects - and their sometimes downright awful behaviour. "Asimov, who described himself as a feminist, casually groped female fans for years," we're told (p. 12) - and he's the one who comes off best. But there's effort to understand if not condone them, and we can also glory in their work and their influence.

It's prompted me to read a bunch of Asimov's robot stories again, and I remembered robopsychologist Susan Calvin as a pioneering character - a competent, professional woman getting on with her high-level job. But I think that view must have come from Asimov himself, introducing the stories in his jokey, self-effacing way - as he remarks on his own progressive brilliance,

"You will note, by the way, that although most of the Susan Calvin stories were written at a time when male chauvinism was taken for granted in science fiction, Susan asks no favors and beats the men at their own game. To be sure, she remains sexually unfulfilled - but you can't have everything." - Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot, p. 327.

I'm keen to look again at Heinlein, and have been eyeing The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein by my friend Farah Mendlesohn, perhaps (as a kind tweeter advised) after a read of the Expanded Universe collection.

Pick of the Week in Radio Times

Excitingly, listings magazine Radio Times has chosen our documentary, Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt (this Sunday, 6.45pm, Radio 3), as its pick of the week.

Bolton Council also has a piece on the documentary: "BBC to highlight Bolton's museum benefactor."

ETA: Samira's also written "The women who love mummies" for the BBC News site.

And, on her website, "How we made Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt".

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

This strange, beguiling novel tells many stories. Natalia is a doctor working in the Balkans in the aftermath of years of war. She learns her grandfather - also a doctor - has died in peculiar circumstances, and in trying to investigate what happened we learn about their time together, and his past. That includes his meetings with a man who cannot die, and childhood experience with a deaf-mute woman known as the Tiger's Wife. We unpick the lives of peripheral characters along the way.

It's beautifully written and full of striking imagery. I find myself lingering over particular moments: Natalia and her grandfather following an elephant as it is escorted through town, or Natalia spraying water at her family's holiday home while a wildfire gets ever closer. The sequences with the Deathless Man are brilliantly creepy - at one point, we discover him walled up in the basement of a church, calmly pointing out which of the other people there will not survive the night.

For all the fantasy elements, the real horror is from ordinary people - their cruelty and indifference, the suffering they inflict. Luka, for example, abuses his wife and when he then vanishes people assume he's been murdered - and don't really seem to mind. But we also follow the thread of his life to understand why he is violent. It doesn't condone his actions, or make them any less appalling.

The fate of an apothecary, told right at the end of the book, is the most potent example of what can happen when a country turns on itself and anyone thought of as "foreign". It felt depressingly timely. And then his story concludes by almost casually mentioning the fate of the Tiger's Wife, which is devastating.

One puzzling thing: on the cover, a header proclaims, "Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011". There's then also a sticker proclaiming the same thing.

Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt

Marianne Brocklehurst's diary

Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt, my fourth documentary for Radio 3's Sunday Feature will be broadcast on 3 February. This morning, presenter Samira Ahmed is in the Guardian about it:

• Guardian: "The lure of ancient Egypt is a way to revitalise faded industrial towns"

There are details for the programme on the BBC website:

Samira Ahmed explores the profound connection between ancient Egypt and the Victorian heyday of Britain’s industrial north – in a legacy of museums and northern pride.

Being taken to see the mummies has become a rite of passage, captivating generations of children since the late 19th century. Ancient Egypt is now embedded in early years education. At more than a hundred museums across the UK, that culture helps shape the British imagination. Where did that affinity come from?

To find out, Samira follows in the footsteps of three extraordinary women: Amelia Oldroyd, Annie Barlow and Marianne Brocklehurst. Each came from a northern, mill-owning family, and each felt compelled not only to visit Egypt and to collect antiquities, but to share their treasures with those at home. Each established local museums that survive today, inspiring new generations.

Today, such museums face an uncertain future. By returning to these women’s stories, can lessons be learned from the past?

Contributors:
Katina Bill, Kirklees Museums and Galleries
Matthew Watson and Rizwana Khalique, Bolton Library and Museum Services
Danielle Wootton
Emma Anderson and Kathryn Warburton, Macclesfield Museums
Rebecca Holt, MPhil student at Oxford University
Heba abd al-Gawad, Egyptian Egyptologist
Alice Stevenson, Institute of Archaeology, UCL
Dr Chris Naunton

Producers: Simon and Thomas Guerrier
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4

Christel & Simon Talk Doctor Who

Here's an interview with me and Christel Dee about our book, Doctor Who - The Women Who Lived, conducted at Forbidden Planet in London. It includes glimpses of the book and of some of the brilliant artists. And if you look very carefully, you can spot out loitering boss.

The Story of Rose Tyler

Here's another video entry from our book, Doctor Who - The Women Who Lived, this time telling the story of the Doctor's friend Rose Tyler. The new artwork is by Mogamoka, Cat Zhu, Tammy Taylor, Katy Shuttleworth, Natalie Smilie, Sophie Cowdry, Jo Be and Kate Holden.

Edward Lear - Egyptian Sketches, by Jenny Gaschke

Edward Lear - Egyptian Sketches
by Jenny Gaschke

Having finished the biography of Lear, I had another look at this collection published by the National Maritime Museum in 2009, collating sketches from two trips Lear made down the Nile in 1853-4 and 1866-7.

It's a beautiful book, full of beautiful images, presented in sequence according to Lear's own numbering system so we can follow him on his journeys.

As Gaschke tells us, Lear - like many of his contemporaries - was interested in the picturesque and historical, and ignored signs of modernisation such as the new steam-powered boats. Instead, there are lots of sailed boats sitting quietly on the water, serene and bewitching. (I'm glad to see sketches of the dahabeeh he travelled on - the same kind of vessel hired by Marianne Brocklehurst in the 1870s, about which I'm making a documentary.)

Nor does he  depict his travelling companions, and few of the pictures presented here show the famous monuments. Gaschke is good at underlining what makes his images different from those of others, such as the well known lithographs of David Roberts (1796-1864).

"While closely documenting architectural and natural detail, these (published) drawings were also highly appreciated at the time as aesthetic expressions of the sublime, beautiful and picturesque. Roberts laid emphasis on the exotic, the 'oriental' aspects of everyday life in Egypt, with warm lighting and adoption of dramatic viewpoints, for example from far below, to stylise the monumental remains of ancient temples." (p. 20). 

Lear's images, by contrast, often place ruins at a distance, in outline, even partly obscured by foreground "rox" or trees. Without the low viewpoint, they are smaller, part of wider, sand-swept landscape.

Mr Lear – A Life of Art and Nonsense, by Jenny Uglow

“Lear’s great poems and songs are not about his life – they float free. But their gaiety and sadness feel even keener when set against the tensions he saw, and suffered” (Uglow, p. 380).

This exhaustive account of the life of Edward Lear (1812-88) is a great delight. I’ve been a fan of Lear since seeing his sketches on the walls of the Benaki Museum in Athens in my earliest travels with the Dr. They’re beautiful, briskly drawn things, conjuring a view, a feeling, in just a few lines and annotated with detail for when he came to paint his (to my mind less interesting) full versions in oil. When the Dr and I married in 2004 we chose “The Owl and the Pussycat” as a reading.

The most famous of Lear’s nonsense poems, was – Uglow tells us – written on 18 December 1867, for a troubled young girl called Janet Symonds whose father seemed less interested in Janet’s mother than in publishing his Problems of Greek Ethics, in which he sought to show that,

“what the Greeks called paiderastia or boy-love, was a phenomenon of one of the most brilliant periods of human culture” (quoted in Uglow, p. 377).

Lear was also gay, Uglow tells us, shrewdly sifting the evidence when nothing could quite be admitted to. It was part of his reason for constant restlessness and travel; perhaps it informed the gender of the pussycat and owl. His 30-year relationship with his servant, Giorgio, is rather moving - and ends with quite twist.

Uglow tells Lear's story through impeccable research, from his early days at Knowsley illustrating exotic animals and birds to his last, quiet days in Villa Tennyson, the house he had built in San Remo. He is a funny, kind and rather sad man and its a pleasure to accompany him throughout the world - just as his friends enjoyed his company. Despite my better judgment, I laughed at many of his old jokes, such as this one included in at letter to his friend Chichester Fortescue on 16 August 1863:

“What would Neptune say if they deprived him of the sea? I haven’t a n/otion.” (p. 265).

Lear wrote a lot - letters, diaries, even on his sketches. But where direct sources are missing Uglow quotes from others who were in the same place at around the same time, or whose comments can inform. In fact, the book is full of other people. I was drawn to Lear's friendship with Frances Waldegrave (1821-79), the "dazzling hostess" of Strawberry Hill whose various husbands Uglow dashes through on page 229, adding,

"Trollope allegedly used her as the model for Madame Max Goesler in his Palliser novels."

We learn to love her as Lear did, and her death - in a book where everyone is long dead - comes as a terrible shock.

Another extraordinary character is Charlotte Cushman (1816-76), a stage actress and contralto living in Rome "with her current lover, the sculptor Harriet 'Harry' Hosmer". Lear attended an evening she hosted on 28 January 1859, and Uglow quotes a letter from another attendee, US sculptor William Wetmore Story, to reconjure the "harem" and these "emancipated ladies":

“The Cushman sings savage ballads in a hoarsey, many voice, and requests people recitatively to forget her not. I’m sure I shall not.” (in Uglow, p. 276.)

If Lear's diary doesn't provide insight on that particular night, Uglow quotes his entry of 9 May the same year:

"Lear was astounded when the Prince of Wales commissioned one of her sculptures: ‘& one from Hosmer!!!!!!!!!!!!’” 

For all the exclamation marks, Lear returned to Cushman's for dinner in March 1860, where,

“the other guests were her new partner the sculptor Emma Stebbins, the diplomat Odo Russell … the archaeologist Charles Newton [the subject of the Dr's PhD]… and Robert Browning" (p. 281).

Or there's Gussie - Augusta Bethell Parker - the young, sweet girl who Lear kept thinking he'd marry and then thinking he would not. She might be the passive victim of his indecision and insecurities, had we not been told the first time we met her (on page 343) that Gussie was also author of Maud Latimer (1863), a novel about a naughty, adventurous heroine that suggests a more thrilling inner life.

There is plenty of name-dropping, not all of it because Lear was himself famous. On page 105, Uglow tells us that the young Lear had lodgings at 36 Great Malborough Street in London at the same time as Charles Darwin, who'd just completed his trip on the Beagle, and asks, "did they pass on the stairs?" But nor is it all celebrity encounters. Uglow notes, in brackets, a fun detail about protestant tourists attending mass at the Vatican.

"a few years later English ladies gained a reputation for whispering and eating biscuits, and the Vatican sent round a notice asking for decorum in Holy Week" (p. 114).

She is brilliant at following a thread. In noting, on page 253, Lear's horror at bigotry, she guides us through the religious debates of the day - in response only partly to Darwin. David Friedrich Strauss’s three volume The Life of Jesus, first published in the mid-1830s, set aside the supernatural to see Jesus as a historical figure, while Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) stressed sympathy and love over vengeful justice. Both were translated into English by Mary Ann Evans (later George Elliot) - in 1846 and 1854 respectively.

She returns to this thread sometime later, in chapter 25 - titled "'Overconstrained to Folly': Nonsense, 1861". I wasn’t sure about Uglow’s earlier close reading of the first edition of Lear's book of nonsense, for all it helps explain the enduring appeal.

“The rhymes, ‘Hairy! Beary! Taky cary!’ or ‘mousey, bousey, sousey’, were the kind of nonsense words that parents speak to babies, often the first words they hear, and all the more alluring – and important – for that reason” (p. 264).

But when she returns to this close analysis for the second, revised edition of his book, the differences suggest Lear's changing character and mindset. It is brilliantly done. Then she moves straight into religion, and Darwin and the more pertinent Essays and Reviews, which caused a furore by seeing Jesus historically and doubting the truth of the miracles. It seemed a bit crass to link this to Lear's nonsense - but that's exactly what Lear does himself, addressing the debates in a letter to Lady Waldegrave on 15 March 1863:

"I begin to be vastly weary of hearing people talk nonsense, - unanswered – not because they are unanswerable but because they talk from pulpits” (p. 309). 

Who better than Lear to spot nonsense?

That's what so brilliant about this book: it doesn't bridge the nonsense books with Lear's career as a painter; there is no separation between these parts of him. Insecurties - his sexuality, his epilepsy - fed his travels and his nonsense; his travel informed his nonsense; especially in his later life, his travels were aided by the fame of and delight in his nonsense.

The Story of Susan Foreman

That splendid lot at BBC Studios have produced this lovely video telling the story of Doctor Who's granddaughter, Susan Foreman.

The text is by me and Christel Dee, from our book The Women Who Lived, but there are all new illustrations by Lara Pickle, Dani Jones, Caz Zhu, Mogamoka, Rachael Smith, Kate Holden, Sonia Leong and Gwen Burns. Hooray!

Concrete Elephant

A few weeks ago, I was being old and nostalgic about the days of Doctor Who fanzines, especially the ones handed round in the pub I used to frequent. In May 1999, I produced my own - the first issue of a stupid thing called Concrete Elephant. Last week, it raised once again its pachydermatous head...

Written by me
Cover and design by @nimbos
Contributors: Lord of Chaos, @Mogamoka2 and @SophIlesTweets

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

This is brilliant. In 1950, Juliet Armstrong is a BBC radio producer working in Schools (the department always has a capital S). But ten years before, she worked for the government, transcribing recordings of a group of Nazi sympathisers - as well as doing some more active spy work. We cut back and forth between the two roles as a dark secret from her past threatens to return and engulf her...

As a radio producer who still does a lot of transcribing myself, it all felt brilliantly authentic - for all Atkinson says in her afterword that she made so much of it up. In all the best ways, it has the feel of le Carre - with the language of moles and dead-letter drops. Juliet is just one of many in the book to move from MI5 to the BBC without quite leaving the former.

"There was a subtle - and perhaps not so subtle - emphasis in Schools on citizenship. Juliet wondered if it was to counter the instinct towards Communism." (p. 178)

But the spy plot and moral uncertainties are just part of the appeal. The detail of ordinary life is all perfectly conveyed and compelling. When one of Juliet's broadcast programmes includes an actor clearly saying "fuck", it has just as much drama - and awful consequence - as any of the war stuff. 

It's a wrily funny read, one constant theme Juliet's frustrated sex life. Her perspective full of pithy observations as she moves through the large cast of vividly drawn characters, many burdened with tragedy but doing their best to get on.

"How little it takes to make some people happy, Juliet thought. And how much it takes for others." (p. 231)

Amid all this activity, this life, are some deftly placed clues to what's really going on - such as one character's caual thieving - which I didn't think to put together spot until very late. It's especially clever because often we're ahead of Juliet, spotting one character's sexuality before she has to have it explained. Only in the last section do we realise what the book is actually about. In fact, the one jarring moment is when Atkinson acknowledges that with a wink at the reader:

"Come now, quite enough exposition and explanation. We're not approaching the end of a novel, Miss Armstrong." (p. 315 - 14 pages from the end)

The final revelation only makes me want to read the whole thing again straight away. It's so deceptively simple, such a pleasure to knock through, so rewarding at the end. A joy.

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

A chum tweeted about Foundation this summer, prompting me finally to read it.

It's a short, breezy book covering events over a hundred years. In the first section, 'psychohistorian' Hari Seldon is arrested for predicting the future - and the inevitable ruin of the Empire of which he's a subject. We gloss over the exact process by which he comes by this prediction, or how it's shown to be chillingly accurate. But the authorities are convinced he's right - so place him under house arrest.

Obviously, there are parallels here to the fate of Galileo, but it also made me think of the Drake equation - a clever attempt to quantify the unquanitifiable, marshalling the known unknowns involved to best estimate the number of live, chatty alien civilisations in our galaxy. I wondered if the equation had influenced Asimov, but it turns out the equation was conjured a decade after the book.

In fact, Asimov is ahead of the game quite a lot. On page 8, there's an ingenious device that sounds almost contemporary: a ticket that glows when you're heading in the right direction. Then, as a result of Seldon's predictions, a project is established to gather the Empire's knowledge in the hope it will survive. Sections are book-ended by excerpts from the book this results in, the Encyclopedia Galactica - mocked in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the 1970s, and a precursor of the internet.

It's influence on science-fiction is also evident. Back in my academic days last millennia, I wrote for the journal Foundation. I assume Han Solo being Corellian is a nod to the Korellians here, and Hardin in Doctor Who story The Leisure Hive a nod to the character in the book. Maybe the Doctor Who story Terminus owes a debt to this as well.

Then there are things that seem so much of an ancient past: the smoking of cigars (I initially read "a long cigar of Vegan tobacco" (p. 47) as meaning it was free of animal producrs), the news printed on paper, the merchant who offers tech-fashions to women but tech-weapons to men. A key element in the story is different groups' access and understanding of nuclear energy - "atomic power can be conquered only by more atomic power" (p. 164) - which feels very 1951,  when such energy was a pretty neat idea.

If we're not told how psychohistory actually works, Asimov at least places limits on the super-science to keep things dramatically interesting. Seldon predicts a series of crises, and those that follow him are left to guess how to meet such challenges without making the impending Dark Ages worse.

"I quite understand that psychohistory is a statistical science and cannot predict the future of a single man with any accuracy." (p. 21)

"Because even Seldon's advanced psychology was limited. It could not handle too many independent variables. He couldn't work with individuals over any length of time; any more than you could apply the kinetic theory of gases to single molecule. He worked with mobs, populations of whole planets, and only blind mobs who do not possess foreknowledge of the results of their own actions." (p. 97)

It's also all told in short, punchy chapters and sections - one chapter is barely three paragraphs long. We often jump forward years, and having to catch up on the monumental events we just skipped. There's an awesome scale and a sense of playing an active part in making sense of the bigger picture behind all these fragments.

Asimov occasionally makes sly comment on the politics presented:

"Korrell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal 'honour' and court etiquette." (p. 172)

But in large part the pleasure comes from smart, compassionate men (they're all men) who use that intelligence and compassion to avoid conflict and stick to Seldon's plan. It's an alluring idea, but I can't help feeling that it would be a more rewarding read if it didn't all go as predicted. It's a book that couldn't have been written after the Bay of Pigs or Watergate.

In fact, in 2002 David Langford spelled out a rather fine conjecture about Foundation influencing a real movement that has shaped so much of the 21st century.

I'm now keen to read Alex Nevala-Lee's new book Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, L Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science-Fiction (Dey Street Books, 2018).

Doctor Who Magazine #532

The super new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out tomorrow - but reaching subscribers already. Among the treats inside, I've interviewed costume designer Ray Holman about the current "TARDIS team", with tips for cosplaying the Doctor, Ryan, Yaz and Graham.

As Ray and I were talking on the phone about the practicalties of the Doctor's new costume, Lady Vader (or "Pting" as her brother now calls her) took it all to heart. Soon she was insisting I zip up her favourite princess outfit which she wore with owl backpack and wellington boots. The interview over, I then had to take her out for adventures, splashing in puddles while looking 100%.

Time for an adventure...

The Sky at Night Book of the Moon, by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

BBC Books (who, I should declare, publish stuff by me) sent me this fun new volume from TV's Dr Maggie, which she herself describes as, "a voyage that has explored the physical, mental and emotional impact of the Moon on all of us."

Much of the collected material is familiar from her BBC Two documentary, Do We Really Need the Moon?, detailing the history of our relationship with the Moon and how it benefits us. For example, its relatively large size stabilises Earth's orbit; it has slowed the spin of the Earth to the 24-hour cycle we're used to; the tides it creates may have played an essential role in the development of the very first life.

There's a lot more science, too - including updates on the latest efforts to return humans to the Moon - but also a selection of favourite Moon-related poetry, art and stories, and an exploration of the oldest Moon-related artefacts. I was captivated by the entry on "En-hedu-ana: Astronomer Princess of the Moon Goodess (c. 2354), who is,

"the first female name recorded in history and the first poet known by name too." (p. 65) 

On the next page, we're told that at least one of the numerous depictions labelled as En-hedu-ana shows her with a "substantial beard."

I read the book as research for a potential project, and now I have another one...

• 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
• Me on Moondust by Andrew Smith

Worthing Wormhole and Gallifrey

I will be a guest at Worthing Wormhole this Saturday, signing copies of Doctor Who: The Women Who Lived with co-author Christel Dee.

Christel and I have also been announced as guests at Gallifrey One in Los Angeles in February. (By exciting coincidence, I first met Christel the last time I was at Gallifrey, in 2016.)

And here's a picture of my tired old head this morning at the BBC... 

Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt, by Chris Naunton

I first met Egyptologist Chris Naunton around the time he was working on his BBC Four documentary, The Man Who Discovered Egypt, which included the Dr as a shrewd talking head. Chris then advised me on the Egypt bits in the first chapter of The Science of Doctor Who and a timeline in Whographica - he wrote his own account of working out when exactly the Daleks invaded Egypt.

When the esteemed published Thames & Hudson approached Chris about writing a book on Tutankhamun, he argued instead for a book answering the question he and fellow egyptologists get asked all the time - what is there still to find?

The result is a fascinating, comprehensive and carefully weighed assessment of the chances of tracking down some of the most coveted tombs in history, those of: the great architect Imhotep (the one whose name was co-opted by the horror movies); Amenhotep I; Nefertiti and the other Amarna royals related to Tutankhamun; Herihor whose tomb, it has been claimed, would make "Tutankhamun look like Woolworths"; the pharaohs of the much disputed Third Intermediate Period; Alexander the Great; and Cleopatra.

It's a little like Richard Molesworth's book, Wiped!, which details the loss and recovery of episodes of Doctor Who - at times tantalising, fascinating and utterly frustrating. Along the way, Chris supplies plenty of fascinating history - of ancient Egypt and of modern archaeologists, not all of whom come out of it very well. He is good at putting the claims of some enthusiasts and attempting to weight them against evidence fairly. 

There's plenty that I didn't know - Alexander the Great had a sister called Cleopatra - and I particularly like a quotation from Howard Carter's 1917 report, "A tomb prepared for Queen Hatshepsut and other recent discoveries in Thebes", in which he feels the need to accent and italicise the exotic, foreign word "débris".