Doctor Who: The Invasion, by Ian Marter

Driving up to Blackpool to collect the wife and children this week, I listened to the audiobook of Doctor Who: The Invasion, a book I loved so much as a kid that I borrowed it several times from Winchester Library. David Troughton is a brilliant choice of narrator, with Nick Briggs providing authentic Cyber voices.

I’ve looked it up, and that book was originally published on 10 October 1985, not quite 17 years after the TV version was broadcast. It was a window on to ancient history – Doctor Who from before even my elder brother and sister had watched it, so old it had been in black and white. Of course, this was also the closest I ever thought I’d come to seeing the episodes themselves. I’d not yet seen any old Doctor Who on video and there’d been just a handful of repeats on TV. But I knew the photo of the Cybermen outside St Paul’ Cathedral from the Doctor Who Monster Book, and remember the vivid thrill of realising this was that story.

Other bits of the book stuck fast in my memory: the ongoing joke where the Doctor mixes up radio etiquette, or Isobel writing notes on her wall because its harder to lose than a scrap of paper. I’m struck now how much Isobel and Zoe vanish from the first half of the story, their insistence on being involved in the second half feeling a little too late. I also liked Ian Marter’s invention of the Russian rocket base (named after Nicholas Courtney) and the collaboration between US and USSR that’s needed to stop the invasion.

That said, it’s striking how much the novelisation lacks in context of other Doctor Who. How strange to begin with a hanging reference to one of the most extraordinary moments in the series ever, without ever explaining:

“The disintegration of the TARDIS in their previous adventure had been a horrifying experience,” (p. 8.) 

The novelisation of that previous adventure, The Mind Robber, was not published until 1987 (I never read it, and watched the TV repeat in 1992 with no idea what was about to happen). We’re not told, either, in what context Jamie and Zoe have both met the Cybermen before – for the latter, The Wheel in Space wasn’t published until 1988 – or that Zoe hasn’t already met Lethbridge Stewart.

There’s something strange, too, about referring to this Doctor as “the dapper Time Lord” (p. 11). Dapper isn’t right for this scruffy vagabond of time, and we didn’t learn that he’s a Time Lord until four stories later. (There’s also something odd about referring to him like that anyway, wrote this human.)

Ian Marter is also profligate with adverbs and often he tells us how dialogue is spoken – tersely or sarcastically, gasped or panted – when the words spoken tell us implicitly. But the main thing is how violent this version is.

“The Cyberman’s laser unit emitted a series of blinding flashes and Packer’s body seemed to alternate from positive to negative in the blistering discharge. His uniform erupted into flames and his exposed skin crinkled and fused like melted toffee papers.” (p. 145)

If nothing else, Jamie wouldn’t be able to rob the dead Packer of his jacket, which he then wears in The War Games.

(Actor Frazer Hines tells me about that in the Jamie and Second Doctor set from the Doctor Who Figurine Collection.)

Chernobyl

I've finally caught up with the amazing HBO/Sky mini-series Chernobyl, a gruelling experience because the horror is so perfectly executed. No wonder it's up for all of the awards.

Everything about it - the writing, the realisation - is absolutely right. But I especially like The Chernobyl Podcast that accompanies each episode, in which writer Craig Mazin explains to host Peter Segal how much of what we're watching comes from primary sources or dramatic licence. It's full of insight into the real history, including more about the real people involved. But it's also fascinating to hear how judgments were made in the story-telling: what events and relationships to omit (such as Legasov's family) and how much of the stomach-churning detail to actually show.

I'd dearly love more of this: episode-by-episode interviews with the director Johan Renck, produce Sanne Wohlenberg or costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux on how you make this history, this whole world, so convincing. And I'd love it done for other drama based in real history: Russell T Davies on A Very English Scandal; Sally Wainwright on Gentleman Jack.

Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans

This glorious, funny, wise and sad novel had me utterly enthralled. It's the tale of two former Suffragettes in the late 1920s, the past catching up on them as - among other things - they attend the funeral of Emmeline Pankhurst and finally get to vote. There's so much misery and injustice, and the Fascists are gaining ground, but these women are determined to fight.

It's a rare thing indeed to have a story about older women, neither of them perfect, both of them so real. They are fallible and fail, but we are with them devotedly as they struggle on. In the superb opening scene, 50-something ex-militant Mattie Simpkin has her handbag stolen, grabs a miniature of whisky and hurls it with perfect aim at the thief.

"The slope was in her favour; the missile maintained its height, kept its trajectory, and she was able to feel a split second of wondering pride in an unlost skill before a red-headed girl ran, laughing, from behind the booth, dodged round the thief and received the bottle full in the mouth." (p. 7) 

Real history is deftly threaded through this comic stuff. Mattie gives lectures on the history of the Suffragette movement, which helps (a little cheatingly) to explain the context. But some of the most striking moments are those things Mattie can't allow herself to say, such as why, years ago, she turned down her great friend Arthur Pomeroy when he proposed: 

"For she would never have wanted him to know, for her, a husband would have required not only steadfast kindliness but actual brilliance, or a rare magnetism; her brothers had spoiled her for more ordinary men. And neither did she choose to share the reason that underpinned it all - a kind of horror at the idea of standing still, of choosing a single existence, as if life were a sprint across quicksand and stasis meant a slow extinction. Long ago, as a child in a pinched and stifled century, she had seen her own mother gradually disappear." (p. 85.) 

The last section of the book is especially moving. Without spoiling the details, one woman has behaved badly and is abandoned and forlorn. Her efforts to make some kind of amends, to reach out again and say sorry, are all rebuffed or - worse - simply ignored. And then someone we've barely glimpsed in the story makes an offer of astonishing generosity that quite took my breath away. An act of kindness can change everything.

What follows is no less emotional, as a woman is left to care for two characters in turn, one of them well beyond the end of this book (as the blurb for Crooked Heart makes plain.) So much of it is conveyed so deftly, so concisely. When the boy Noel repeats something he's been told a few pages earlier - that a castle is also a rook - we recognise his intelligence, and more importantly his potential. When we're told no one came to visit him at the Barnet Hosptial for Incurables, it tells us all we need to know about his father's wretched family, and we need no further persuasion about the course of action that's been set.

Quite often, it's almost a pity when a book ends with an ad for the next book in the series. Here, it's a relief. Old Baggage is fantastic.

Doctor Who Magazine 541

"Four Doctors... Forty-three episodes... One groundbreaking director". The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine boasts hidden treasures from the archive of director Chistopher Barry. I interviewed fellow director Michael E Briant and writer Marc Platt about their memories of working with him.

11 Explorations into Life on Earth, by Helen Scales

This beautifully packaged anthology summarises 11 Christmas lectures from the Royal Institution covering aspects of natural history. The lectures are:

• "The Childhood of Animals" by Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell (1911)
• "The Haunts of Life" by John Arthur Thompson (1920)
• "Concerning the Habits of Insects" by Francis Balfour-Browne (1924)
• "Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life" by Sir Julian Huxley (1937)
• "How Animals Move" by Sir James Gray (1951)
• "Animal Behaviour" by Desmond Morris (1964)
• "The Language of Animals" by Sir David Attenborough (1973)
• "Growing Up in the Universe" by Richard Dawkins (1991)
• "The History in Our Bones" by Simon Conway Morris (1996)
• "To the End of the Earth: Surviving Antarctic Extremes" by Lloyd Peck (2004)
• "The 300-million-year War" by Sue Hartley (2009)

Scales recounts the lectures, provides updates on some of the science and speaks to some of those who gave or attended the lectures. There are also a few photos and other archive documents.

The Christmas lectures are aimed at a lay audience including children, and there's lots on how children were involved in helping with the demonstrations or responded with excitement and awe. Last year I read Eric Laithwaite's book version of his 1966-67 lectures, The Engineer in Wonderland, and some of the physics was a bit heavy going. Scales is good at making the science here engaging and digestable, for all it covers a great deal of ground.

(In March, Doctor Who Magazine #536 included my feature on how Laithwaite's lectures were inspired by his meeting with Doctor Who story editor Gerry Davis about potentially becoming the series' first scienctific advisor.)

The lectures are fascinating historically: we see how long scientists have been warning about damage to the environment. They're also peppered with extraordinary detail about the natural world. For example, we're told Balfour-Browne was so devoted to water beetles that there's now an international water beetle conservation trust in his name. But when he shares his interest with the child audience, it's like something out of a horror film. First, he had recovered specimens hibernating in mud:

"When the beetles woke up in March, he watched the females drill holes in water plants to lay their eggs, which in time hatched into voracious larvae. The larvae grab prey in their formidable jaws, inject them with digestive enzymes and suck the juices out through tubes in their / mouths, leaving just their prey's empty, crumpled skin. He [Balfour-Browne] gave a graphic description of the greater silver beetle, a species with specialized jaws that act as a can opener to break into the shells of pond snails. And great diving bettle larvae are cannibals, he says, that 'have no respect for one another and four placed in a large tub were quickly reduced to one'." (pp. 48-9, the quotation from Balfour-Browne's own 1925 book of his lectures)

He also explains that wasps and bees can happily cohabit because they don't compete for food, the bees being herbivores and the wasps... well.

"Instead of pollen and honey, female wasps stock their nests with spiders, caterpillars and flies. The mothers sting and paralyse the prey to keep them alive and fresh, while making sure they can't walk off or fly away." (p. 42)

I had a ghoulish vision of vegetarian families turning a blind eye and affecting not to hear the endless screaming from next door.

The final entry in the book was of particular interest having just read Semiosis with its intelligent, communicative bamboo. Lecturer Sue Hartley details various different ways that plants fend off animal predators, and also communicate with one another to warn of impending danger.

"As well as talking to each other, plants also talk to animals. Wasps smell the plants' warning signals and fly in to investigate."

She demonstrates with a model of a caterpillar that threatens a particular plant - but inside the model there is,

"a handful of sticky goo and giant, model grubs. Inside the caterpillar, the wasp laid hundreds of eggs by piercing through its skin with a sharp egg-laying needle (called an ovipositor). The eggs then hatched and started eating". (p. 184)

Climate change threatens the balance in this long war between plants and animals. Hartley gives the example of aphids, who reproduce asexually - and a pregnant mother has a clone daughter inside her, who is already pregnant with her own clone child, "a system known as telescopic generations" (p. 186). Warmer conditions mean aphids reproduce even more quickly, so the predators that currently keep populations under control will no longer keep up.

"These aphids, she warns, are among the most dangerous pests, causing £100 million of damage to cereal crops every year ... If all [an individual aphid's] offspring survived, Hartley explains, there would be a layer of aphids covering the Earth 150 km deep, reaching half the way to the International Space Station." (p. 186)

 This is all the stuff of nightmares, and perfect for me as I continue to write stories with monsters.

Welt am Draht in the Lancet Psychiatry

The 1 August issue of medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry includes "Cryin', talkin', sleepin', walkin living dolls" - my review of Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), the 1973 sci-fi TV series directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and recently reissued on Blu-ray.

“I've been observing Stiller for some time very closely”, says pipe-smoking psychologist Dr Franz Hahn (Wolfgang Schenck) in the second episode of Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), first broadcast on West German television in 1973. “He's suffering from a case of acute paranoia. He's an extreme example of psychological degeneration. He is in so many words…not responsible for his actions.” Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) sits across from him, and doubts anything in the room is even real. The cigarette his boss is smoking or the chair in which he sits is, says Stiller, an idea of an idea of an idea...

Cinema Limbo on King Kong (1976)

A huge, confused ape wrestles with King Kong. Reader, that ape is me...

The Cinema Limbo podcast re-evaluates old films, and host Jeremy Phillips asked me to discuss the 1976 remake of King Kong. You can listen to our extended rambling here:

http://www.podnose.com/cinema-limbo/068-king-kong

Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi

In the chaos of war-torn Iraq, even claiming the body of dead loved one is difficult. Hadi, a junk dealer, collects scraps of different corpses and stiches them together into a single body in the hope - he claims - that it might have a proper and dignified burial. But the patchwork figure is then inhabited by the soul of another dead person, and animated by the longing of a mother for her long-vanished son. The creature awakes... and immediately seeks revenge on all those it has been murdered by.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is a shocking, often queasy read, Jonathan Wright's translation of Ahmed Saadawi's original Arabic full of visceral detail. It's not just the monstrous creature - the police routinely beat and torture suspects, gangs molest citizens, there is sectarian violence. And yet this is a black comedy, with an eye for the foibles of ordinary people.

One example is the dilemma faced by Mahmoud al-Sawadi, a young journalist, who once wrote a piece about a criminal called Mantis.

"The Mantis's brother had led a small gang that terrorized the locals until he was arrested and detained. The news of his arrest was greeted with great joy by many, including Mahmoud, who then wrote a newspaper article about the need to enforce the law against this criminal. He philosophized a little in the article, saying there were three types of justice - legal justice, divine justice and street justice - and that however long it takes, criminals must face one of them." (pp. 165-6)

This article earns Mahmoud esteem and praise, until the Mantis's brother is set free - another example of corrupt, incompetent policing in the novel. When a rival gang then kill the brother, it seems Mahmoud's philosophy is right - but Mantis has taken exception and Mahmoud must flee the town. Years later, Mahmoud considers returning home but is assured that he's still remembered.

"Don't come. Don't show your face. Stay where you are, for God's sake, unless you want the three forms of justice applied to you. Now the Mantis often talks about them, even on the radio. He's stolen your idea." (p. 169) 

The novel stitches together the strange and the mundane to create a whole of its own. I found it a little slow to get going, with too many characters I couldn't keep track of. But that's then its power: we get to know these people and their interweaving stories.

There's magic - in the old woman whose longing brings a patchwork corpse back to life, and the astrologers whose accurate predictions don't help them save themselves. There's the suggestion that this is all real, carefully researched and documented by the writer from primary sources. And at the end the different characters all reach some kind of closure, our last sight a principal figure curled up with a stray cat and apparently free of the anger that drove so much of the story. If it starts as a story about the ravages of war, the injustice and desire for revenge, it concludes with a sense of peace.

Incidentally, none of the three books I've read this week won the Clarke Award last night, which went to Tade Thompson's Rosewater, which looked great. I was at the ceremony and, as well as seeing lots of old friends, got to meet Aliya Whiteley, whose work I've admired for so long. Afterwards, we were escorted to the Ice Bar, which was cool.

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.

Floating in Space repeat

This Saturday morning, Radio 4 Extra are repeating Floating in Space - a compendium of space-related programming presented by Samira Ahmed and featuring some chatter from me about the early days of spaceflight. The producer was Luke Doran.

On Tuesday, I was in the audience at Broadcasting House for the recording of James Burke: Our Man on the Moon, to be broadcast on Radio 4 on 20 July. It's full of great clips - many of them new to me - and Burke presented with characteristic insight, intelligence and wit. It's superb.

Black Archive: The Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Jonathan Morris

My friend Jonny's book on 1964 Doctor Who story The Dalek Invasion of Earth is excellent - and not only because its reference to my own book in the same Black Archive series says nice things. 

Jonny's focus is the development of the story - from initial idea, through first and final draft of the script, the changes made when it went before the TV cameras and then its adaptations on the big screen and in print. Thrillingly, he's managed to get hold of Terry Nation's first draft scripts - or copies held in private hands, since the originals are no longer held in the BBC's own archives - and a first draft of the script for the movie. The former is especially interesting, as comparison with the camera scripts (used when the story went in front of the cameras) reveals the extent of work contributed by story editor David Whitaker. The most astonishing insight - to me - is that writers were likely to only produce a single draft which Whitaker would then rewrite himself. No rewrites! It's another world!

It would be a shame to spoil any more of the gems here. It's a compelling, engaging original piece of research. Especially pleasingly, I'd hoped it might provide some context for a thing I'm writing about one of the characters in the story; it has loads.

Man on the Moon - the psychology of Apollo 11

My essay "Man on the Moon", about the psychology involved in landing the first people on the lunar surface 50 years ago this month, is published in the new issue of medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry.

You need to subscribe to read the whole thing, but here's the opening paragraph:

"In May 1960, Brooks Air Force Base in Texas (USA) hosted a symposium on psychophysiological aspects of space flight. The meeting aimed to present what was known about human behavioural capabilities in space and to recommend directions for further research. It was still relatively early days in the Space Race. The first human ventured into space the following April, and the first American human a month after that. Only then did the American president announce his ambitious plan to land people on the Moon and get them home safely by the end of the decade. But the delegates at the symposium looked boldly forward to the long-term conquest of space, even considering voyages lasting several thousand years..." ("Man on the Moon", Simon Guerrier, The Lancet Psychiatry, Vol. 6, No. 7, pp. 570–572. Published: July 2019.)

(I've another essay, "So What If It's All Green Cheese? The Moon on Screen", in the exhibition catalogue accompanying "The Moon" at Royal Museums Greenwich.)

The Loosening Skin, by Aliya Whiteley

One benefit of the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel of the year moving from April to July is that when the Dr asked what I might like for my birthday, I could direct her to the shortlist. The result, via my generous in-laws, was three of the six titles: Semiosis by Sue Burke, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi and The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley. (The other three are Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee, The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag and Rosewater by Tade Thompson.)

Of these, I've only read work by Whiteley before. The Beauty (2014) is about a world without women and reads like walking through a nightmare, not least because the narrator is so passive. The Arrival of Missives (2016) is a similarly haunting tale, this time set in a village in the shadow of the First World War. Whiteley is brilliant at taking an outlandish, unsettling idea and playing it utterly credibly.

The Loosening Skin is set in the present day but in a world where humans moult. When, every seven years or so, they shed their skin, they also shed its associated love. At the start of the book, Rose is in a loving, tender relationship with a movie star she's also working for as a bodyguard. Then she sheds her skin and can no longer bear to be in the same room with him. But he's used to having whatever he wants and won't accept that.

As we follow this story, we explore the consequences of moulting. It doesn't just affect lovers - who know from their first kiss that they are doomed. When children moult, they no longer love their parents. This world is full of broken people, struggling with attachment, learning not to love so as to preserve something. Brilliantly, we're told humans have always been like this - which has a huge impact on history and culture. There can be no Miss Haversham in this reality, there can be no Last Tango in Halifax.

There's more than the moulting itself. There's a whole culture around the shed skins - displays of celebrity skins in the British Museum, an underground of illegal sales. Then there's the chance that there might be a cure, a way of preventing the moult - but, of course, at a terrible cost.

I got utterly caught up in this richly drawn, horrible world. It's such a disturbing idea and yet it feels so real. At one point, Rose talks us through her moults in turn, each one devastating. That tale-telling is itself part of a truly horrific episode that haunts the rest of the book. I found the novel haunting, and couldn't get it out of my head, but it's not the horrific moments that got me so much as the simple, everyday consequences that result from this one strange idea. There could easily be more stories set in the same world. I hope there are.

The view from the top of the BT Tower

Portrait by Nimbos

Last night, Nimbos took me on an extra-special birthday treat - to the top of the BT Tower.

As part of the London Festival of Architecture, Tim Ross was doing a comedy set on the 34th floor, and as well as that we got a complimentary glass of fizz and the most extraordinary views as the outer part of the room slowly, slowly revolved.

Here are the pictures and videos I took:

Doctor Who Magazine 540

The superb new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out tomorrow and devoted to Third Doctor actor Jon Pertwee, who was born 100 years ago. There's a lovely interview with his son Sean, and a rediscovered interview with the man himself from the very first Doctor Who convention.

I've compiled a special Time Team in which Beth, Christel, Gerard, Kez and Zainab watch three episodes I chose to show a different side of the Third Doctor. Thrillingly, we were also joined by Katy Manning who played companion Jo Grant.

Gerard, Zainab, Christel, Kez, Katy Manning and me

The issue also includes news of something else I've written:

"The Target Storybook, a new collection of short stories, will be published by BBC Books on 24 October, RRP £16.99. The book promises that each story will 'expand in thrilling ways upon a popular Doctor Who adventure'. Authors include Colin Baker, Steve Cole, Jenny T Colgan, Susie Day, Terrance Dicks, Simon Guerrier, George Mann, Una McCormack, Vinay Patel, Beverly Sanforod, Matthew Sweet, Mike Tucker, Matthew Waterhouse and Joy Wilkinson."

I'm thrilled to be included within such august company. By coincidence, last week I went to see Joy Wilkinson's amazing play, The Sweet Science of Bruising, at Wilton's Music Hall. It took my idiot brain merely until the interval to work out that Aunt George was played by Jane How, who was Rebec in Third Doctor story Planet of the Daleks.

No longer secret agent

Exciting! I have signed with a new agent, Steven Russell of Collective Talent, who will represent me in stuff I write for radio, TV and film. The agency website now has a page all about me, including things I've been working on in darkest secret:

• Simon Guerrier at Collective Talent

Incidentally, this is my 1,500th post on this ancient blog.

Arrival of Moon

The Moon - A Celebration of Our Celestial Neighbour is a new book published by Royal Observatory Greenwich to accompany the Moon exhibition that opens on 19 July. It's a lovely book full of extraordinary archive material and learned scholarship.

Oh, and there's also my essay, "So What If It's Just Green Cheese? The Moon on Screen." I've got in references to Doctor Who, The Clangers and James Bond, among others.

• Buy The Moon - A Celebration of Our Celestial Neighbour from the RMG website

The Secret Life, by Andrew O'Hagan

I was given this 2017 book after chatting with a friend about Andrew O'Hagan's 60,000 word essay on the Grenfell fire, which brilliantly conjures the lives so awfully lost and then not-so-brilliantly identifies heroes and villains. This book is subtitled "Three True Stories" and in two of them O'Hagan trails in the wake of extraordinary individuals, reporting on what seem to be pivotal movements in history. In between these instalments, he charts his own experiment in matters of identity - and it's altogether different.

First, there's "Ghosting", his account of being employed to ghost the autobiography of Julian Assange, the efforts involved to produce a 70,000-word manuscript, and then why that never got published. It's all really peculiar, and few of the people involved are very likeable, but O'Hagan is good at the small but telling details:

"During those days at the Bungay house I would try to sit [Assange] down with a new list of questions, and he'd shy away from them, saying he wasn't in the mood or there were more pressing matters to deal with. I think he was just keen to get away from [his then residence] Ellingham Hall. I had the internet. I made lunch every day and he'd eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate. In all that time he didn't once take his dirty plate to the sink. That doesn't make him like Josef Mengele, but, you know, life is life." (p. 34)

That casual sense of other people being there for Assange's convenience illuminates much of the story. The sense is of Assange talking big and then not delivering, or at least not caring about details, or how that lack of care might affect and damage other people. O'Hagan signs off with his last meeting with Assange, when the book is clearly not going to happen.

"It was a Friday night and Julian has never seemed more alone. We laughed a lot and then he went very deeply into himself. He drank his beer and then lifted mine and drank that. 'We've got some really historic things going on,' he said. Then he opened his laptop and the blue screen lit his face and he hardly noticed me leaving." (p. 99)

His involvement with Assange leads to him being recommended to Craig Wright, the man who, under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, invented bitcoin - or did he? In "The Satoshi Affair", O'Hagan recountsWright's efforts to go public and then decide otherwise - just like Assange. Again, it's a fascinating account of what seems a major moment, one that raises issues about identity, our relationship to technology and the truth, and O'Hagan has a ring-side seat throughout. As with Assange, there's a lot of money at stake and a rather glamorous, showbiz lifestyle being lived - but Wright is another sad, trapped figure racked by indecision and doubt. We'd sympathise with his predicament if we didn't see what it costs everyone else around him.

Between these two accounts is "The Invention of Ronald Pinn." It begins in Camberwell New Cemetery, O'Hagan remarking on the number of young people's graves. He identifies one, Ronald Alexander Pinn, who died in 1984 aged 20, but otherwise roughly O'Hagan's own age, and decides to use the dead man's birth certificate to create a false identity. In doing so, he's inspired by recent revelations about undercover policemen from the Met's Special Demonstration Squard using such identities:

"In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their 'backstory', they would visit the places of their 'childhood', walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their second life." (p. 102)

So that's what O'Hagan does, touring the places Pinn would have known, researching his life, speaking to people who knew him - and then using that to build up an alternative life. He then wants to see what can be done with such a false identity, and goes on to buy white heroin, cannabis and Tramadol, and counterfeit money. He investigates but apparently doesn't buy guns, as if moral scrupples stop him going that far. But who was he paying for the drugs and fake money, and in giving them money what else was he tacitly financing?

These are not victimless crimes. Living in south London, I'm very conscious of the links between the drug trade and knife crime, the lives of children blighted - and ended - by the supply chain. As a bereaved parent, I had a visceral reaction to what O'Hagan did with the name of some mother's son. He's an unapologetic tourist, blithely enjoying a stroll through other people's misery and grief.

At the end of his account, he finds the mother of the real Ronald Pinn and we realise that she must have provided much of the biographical detail given earlier. But it's telling that this is where his account finishes - we don't hear what her son's death did to her, or what she thinks of what O'Hagan has done with her son's name. O'Hagan is, like Assange and Wright, caught up in the thrill of his own story and seems to spare no thought for those hurt along the way.

The October Man, by Ben Aaronovitch

The outrageously named Tobias Winter and Vanessa Sommer are two cops teamed up to investigate a peculiar death - the victim consumed by the noble rot used in making some kinds of wine. Winter, who narrates this case, is the German equivalent of Peter Grant, the narrator of the other Rivers of London books - smart-talking, shrewd and a junior wizard.

Having only read Lies Sleeping last month, I'd hoped this new instalment would pick up where that ended but this is more of a side-step - apparently, Peter isn't even aware of Winter's existence. I can see that the German police would want to recruit someone very like Peter, but if there's a criticism it's that they're not more distinct in attitude and patter. If I were editing this, I might suggest Vanessa - the non-magical sceptic - should narrate it.

But for that small concern, how brilliant to explore another part of the same world. How thrilling to get some more tantalising detail about what might have happened in the Second World War that Peter's boss, Nightingale, will only allude to - and from a German perspective. It's surely prood of the strength and richness of the world Ben has created that such a side-step is conceivable, let alone done so well.

This is a typically fast-moving, slick murder mystery, full of wry observation and stuff that feels totally real, grounding the magic so we take it in our stride. It's 20 years since I took my higher certificate in wines and spirits (yes, really) but the viticulture all seems right. Ben knows London intimately, so it's quite an achievement to suggest the same confident command of Trier. The novella ends with the case resolved, but suggesting there's more to come. I hope so. 

Home Guard cover

Here's Tom Webster's amazing cover for Doctor Who - The Home Guard, an audio adventure I wrote that's out in November. 

"It’s the middle of the Second World War and Ben Jackson has returned to visit his married friends Polly and Jamie in their quiet English village. But they can’t quite shake the feeling that something’s not right..."

The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula Le Guin

The prologue to The Tombs of Atuan (1971) is barely a page long and utterly devastating. In a valley of blossoming apple trees, a mother calls one of five children in from outside, and the little girl's father chides his wife.

"Why do you let your heart hang on the child? They're coming to take her away next month. For good. Might as well bury her and be done with it. What's the good of clinging to one you're bound to lose? She's no good to us. If they'd pay for her when they took her, that would be something, but they won't. They'll take her and that's an end of it." (p. 175) 

The mother can't help herself, and the father, too, is grieving for the loss to come. Their bravery, their acceptance, is awful.

The girl has been identified as the reincarnation of Arha, the priestess ever reborn. In the book proper, we follow her in her new role, carrying our rituals and devising painful death for those who have broken the rules. She has a rival in the temple, and a friend who - shockingly - is not a believer. Arha also explores the labyrinth under the temple: a complex system of tunnels in total darkness, reliant solely on memory if she's not to get lost or fall into traps. We feel the strangeness of it, the danger she's in by exploring ever further. Pushing on into the darkness is as haunting as that prologue.

Then, in chapter 5, Arha is startled by a light in the darkness, cast by a mysterious man. We quickly realise this is Ged, the Wizard of Earthsea from the first book in the series. From Arha's perspective, he's dark-skinned - a detail I missed in the first book but mentioned several times here. Having been given one half of a magical ring or bracelet towards the end of that book, Ged has come to look for the other half, sneaking into the labyrinth and all set to steal it.

Arha, outraged, traps him - but she's also intrigued. She wants to know who he is, what he wants, how he casts his werelight, but the longer she keeps this heretic intruder alive, the more her own position is at risk. Ged also tells her that they're not alone in the darkness; down here, they are prey for evil somethings related to the shadow he battled in the first book.

Arha's predicament is compelling and whatever decision she makes will come at terrible cost. Le Guin is brilliant at making nothing too easy or neat in this simple-seeming story. At one point, Ged is attacked by a character close to Arha and we totally understand why. Ged defends himself and the character is lost to one of the labyrinth's traps. We feel the shock of it, the horror to Arha of losing this loyal figure and her remorse for how she treated them before. In this labyrinth of horrors, with a wizard at her side, it's completely, terribly real.

Without giving away the ending, I felt a pang for the girl's parents. She barely remembers them and doesn't spare them a thought. But surely they'd soon hear of what happens in the story, to the daughter they lost all that time ago. They'll have lost her again, because no one has thought to tell them the truth.

Life Drawing, by Jessica Martin

In the midst of yesterday's deluge, a brave postman swam our street to deliver Life Drawing: A Life Under Lights, the autobiography of Jessica Martin told in comic-strip form.

I've know Jessica for years through comics and Doctor Who things (she played an alien werewolf in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988-9)), and have read her previous comics work. It Girl (2013) and Vivacity (2014) are biographies of real Hollywood stars, and Elsie Harris Picture Palace (2015) is a fictional story about a Hollywood writer. Her own story continues the theme - a love of cinema's golden age weaving through her life.

I thought I knew Jessica's story, from her first appearances in TV sketch shows doing impressions, then on Doctor Who, to being in the huge stage hit Me and My Girl with Gary Wilmott - which my grandpa took me to see. Her account of her time in Doctor Who, and of producer John Nathan-Turner, didn't tell me anything new. But her book is full of illuminating detail, such as when she was in the pantomime Cinderella alongside a future Doctor Who co-star...

Peggy Mount, as seen in
Life Drawing by Jessica Martin

She's honest too about her own vanity and ambition, and how what she calls "erratic eating" affected her work. But this is much more than a series of showbiz anecdotes. It's not just that old Hollywood and muscials excite her, they inspire her to press on.

For all the breezy, straight-forward style, I loved how Jessica conveys the tangle of relationships and her love for people without condoning their actions. Early on, her dad pulls an "ornamental bull whip off the wall" during an argument with Jessica's mum, and we later learn that her parents were never married as he already had wife. He's a difficult figure, and yet we feel for him when Jessica's mum leaves him and in his estranged relationship with Jessica's half-brother, and in his final days.

The book ends with her sharing her drawing and comics with people who encourage her. Comics is a new chapter in her life, but she faces it with typical determination, passion and energy. That's what radiates from this book. It's inspiring.

A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K Le Guin

To the horror of many wise friends, I've started this famous book several times but never finished it until now. It charts the early life of Ged - or Sparrowhawk, or Duny - who, while training as a wizard, unleashes a sinister shadow-thing that then pursues him. As Ged hops from island to island round Earthsea to escape his creation, the monster comes ever on.

The first chapter, in which young dorky Duny first learns some magic and then saves his village from invaders, is brilliant but his subsequent mentoring by stoic old wizard Ogion and squabbles with other pupils at wizard school never quite connected with me before. Having read the whole book, that's all cast in different light. Sneering fellow student Jasper isn't really Ged's worst enemy - it's his own impatience and pride. He must learn subtler arts than spells: using historical research to best a dragon, and not using magic to turn the tables on the shadow.

As with the Le Guin I already know (The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness) there's lots on the way words shape our reality and have their own innate power. Knowing a person or thing's secret, true name gives you power over that person or thing, a simple basis on which to build a complex framework of magic and a richly realised society. Ged's best friendship is defined by them condfiding real names, and when he learns the true name of a young woman it immediately suggests a strong link between them. That distinction between public persona and private, true self seems all the more pertinent today with the lives we live online and IRL.

I didn't realise the "werelights" conjured by Peter Grant in the Rivers of London books came from here, and assume Le Guin also inspired the name of my friend's band:

“As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.” (pp. 117-8)

I've ploughed straight on into the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, which opens with a scene I think more haunting than anything in the first: a man chiding his wife for doting on the young daughter they know will shortly be taken from them, the man already grieving.

TV Years: Classic Children's Television

The new issue of TV Years magazine, from the makers of TV Choice, is devoted to classic children's television. I've written a feature on Play School (1964-88) and interviewed creator and first producer Joy Whitby and presenters Carol Chell and Carol Leader.

La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

Last week, a long car journey through half-term traffic was made infinitely less taxing by Michael Sheen's reading of the first volume of The Book of Dust.

Set within the same fantastic universe as the His Dark Materials trilogy, the heroine of that story - Lyra - is here a new-born baby. She's being looked after by some nice nuns in a priory, and across the bridge from them is a pub run by the parents of 11 year-old Malcolm Polstead. Mal is a hard-working, concientious nerd, with a love for new words and bits of gadget such as screws that only turn one way. Chatting to pub customers, eavesdropping and watching, he starts to spy a conspiracy building round the baby...

Just as with His Dark Materials, Pullman conjures a vivid, rich world so near and yet so far from our own. Malcolm's borrowed books include A Brief History of Time but he's also accompanied by his shape-changing demon, Asta. The etiquette of demons - that it's rude to touch someone else's demon; that demons can change shape until their human reaches adulthood, when they settle in one form - is all subtely conveyed: a world of strange wonders that yet feels real.

This world is populated with memorable characters, and Pullman is good at making us warm to the nice ones and bristle at the villains. For all the villains are hissable, there are plenty of characters we're not quite sure of, or good people we can't quite trust. Kudos to Michael Sheen for expertly voicing such an enormous cast.

The book is in two parts, and the first is easily the strongest as Malcolm uncovers the plot against the baby and encounters various sinister organisations linked to the Church. I found the chapter where one group addresses his school utterly terrifying, children encouraged to turn on their teachers and parents and friends.

"Malcolm's headmaster Mr Willis was still away on Monday, and on Tuesday Mr Hawkins the deputy head announced that Mr Willis wouldn't be coming back, and that he would be in charge himself from then on. There was an intake of breath from the pupils. They all knew the reason: Mr Willis had defied the League of St Alexander, and now he was being punished. It gave the badge-wearers a giddy sense of power. By themselves they had unseated the authority of a headmaster. No teacher was safe now. Malcolm watched the faces of the staff members as Mr Hawkins made the announcement: Mr Savery put his head in his hands, Miss Davis bit her lip, Mr Croker the woodwork teacher looked angry. Some of the others gave little triumphant smiles; most were expressionless." (p. `147) 

If the Church are the baddies, there are plenty of good and kind Christians, such as the nuns in charge of Lyra. Yes, the politics are a little laid on with a trowel - but then that's true of our own world at the moment.

When we stopped for lunch, I asked Lord Chaos how much he understood what was going on in this sequence - and he did, and told me he wouldn't have worn a badge. But it also didn't resonate with him as much as it did with me. But he was on the edge of his seat for the end of part one, and the thrilling things happening in the midst of a huge flood.

Part two is fine and full of strange, arresting events but lacks the thrill of the first half. It details the journey made by Mal's boat - the Belle Sauvage of the title - and stop-offs along the way. After all the conspiracy and intrigue of the first part, I didn't really feel it advanced the plot. There's plenty of excitement, especially in the villainous Bonneville, and the prolonged chase affects the relationship between the protagonists, but I got to the end feeling it hadn't changed much else. That's a shame given the strength of the opening.

The second book, The Secret Commonwealth, is published later this year and set 20 years after the events here - and after those of His Dark Materials. I'm very much looking forward to it, and to the BBC's adaptation of His Dark Materials. You might also like this recent chat between Samira Ahmed and Philip Pullman on how he found his voice.

Doctor Who Magazine 539

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine marks my debut as compiler of the "Time Team" - the regular feature in which a group of 20-something fans watch old episodes of the series with a connecting them. 

This time, the theme is "Is Doctor Who a kids' show?" - something I've been thinking about a lot over the last year as I've watched my son and his school friends get caught up in the adventures of Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. So, I set Beth, Christel and Luke watching The Web Planet (1965), Full Circle part one (1980) and The Caretaker (2014). We were also joined by Ariana - who has never seen an episode of Doctor Who before.

Here's my interview with Andrew Smith, writer of Full Circle.

Seurat and the Science of Painting, by William Innes Homer

Seurat and the
Science of Painting
by William Innes Homer
(1964)

At the turn of the 20th century, work by Max Planck on the odd properties of light led to a revolution in physics called quantum mechanics. But a generation before him, artists showed an understanding of light no less revolutionary.

I've been interested in the overlap of science and art for a long time, as I posted here after a visit to the National Gallery's 2007 exhibition, "Manet to Picasso". Some of that thinking was rekindled by reading The Pinball Effect last month, which cited the influence on Seurat of the chemist Michel Chevreul. An endnote directed me to Seurat and the Science of Painting, published in 1964.

Sifting through Seurat's surviving papers, accounts of his contemporaries and other sources, Homer pieces together the influences on two particularly famous paintings: "Une Baignade, Asnières" (usually translated in the plural as "Bathers at Asnières") from 1884, and "Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte" ("A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette"), painted 1884-86.

"Une Baignade, Asnières" by Seurat (1884)

"Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte"
by Seurat (1884-86)

The key idea is that Seurat followed the colour theories of Chevreul and Rood, among others. Those theories weren't exactly new. Chevreul had experimented with colour while director of the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, publishing his conclusions in 1839 - 20 years before Seurat was born. Nor were he and the Impressionists the first to use these theories in painting. Homer shows that Delacroix was well ahead of them; he died in 1863, when Seurat was not yet four.

The theories are fairly simple to grasp. In trying to make dyes brighter and more arresting, Chevreul found that it was less effective to mix colours physically than to place threads or fabrics dyed in contrasting colours next to one another. From a distance, our eyes do the mixing optically but to more dramatic effect. The contrasts shimmer and fizz.

Homer provides a range of different diagrams explaining colour contrasts and harmonies, as understood by different theorists. Take the three primary colours: yellow, red and blue (or, in some cases, blue-violet). The direct contrast to yellow is the mix of the other two, i.e. purple. Red then contrasts with green, and blue (or blue-violet) with orange. But that's just the start. Homer then details how the theories incorporate gradations of tone and hue. There are a lot of diagrams.

On one spread, radiating spokes are presented three times to show how the same basic idea passed from person to person - the last of them Seurat. There are also circles, grids, stars and triangles to demonstrate connections of colour, the spokes labelled variously in English or French. It's extraordinary that these diagrams explaining colour in such meticulous detail are all in black and white. We must imagine the connections. The colour plates offer just four small images, each a detail of one of the paintings under discussion. The paintings themselves are also shown in black and white.

Diagrams in Seurat and the Science of Painting (1)

Diagram in Seurat and the Science of Painting (2)

The result is that this academic study was all the more hard-going for this reader of limited brain. Homer goes into great detail but (I felt) repeats himself, giving ever more examples of the same basic idea. There's also little on what other science influenced these painters: the invention of photography, the development of new kinds of paint. And I think purists might question how "scientific" some of these theories really are - surely some of the conclusions are more a matter of taste.

But for the most part this is dizzyingly absorbing. The irony is that Seurat's work isn't realistic, yet that stylisation is based on direct observation, recording the strange, real effects of light - such as the colouring of shadows. The brushwork is surely also on to something ahead of its time. Previous generations of painters used delicate strokes to hide their artistry but Seurat favoured spots and strokes, discernable dabs of individual colour. 

It is light conveyed in discrete units, packets - quanta.

Living with a black hole

The June 2019 issue of medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry includes my review of the film Out of Blue.

"Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) has always felt safe working in homicide. However, the shocking death of astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) poses difficult questions. While Hoolihan pursues three murder suspects, she also finds herself increasingly affected by the dead woman's work on black holes and unsettling conversations about quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's put-upon cat. She comes to doubt herself, as do we..."

Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since my holiday in Salonica in January 2011 where I read my friend Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, but I recently listened to the audio version of that first instalment and it all came flooding back. Peter Grant is a cop who can do magic, investigating weird shit in London...

Lies Sleeping is the seventh novel in the series - there's also a novella and a spin-off comic series. Here, there's the usual mix of streetwise wit and procedural detail, grounding the investigation in real life and science and history. Ben's gift is to make it feel authentic.

"... me and Guleed ended up in a corridor at UCH guarding [a suspect]'s hospital room, along with a reassuringly solid member of Protection Command in full ballistic armour and armed with an H&K MP5 machine gun. Her name was Lucy and she had three children under the age of five.
'Compared to them,' she told us, 'I don't find this job stressful at all.'
You use Protection Command people for this kind of job because unlike SCO19 they're trained to do guard duty. You want a certain kind of personality who can stand around in the rain for eight hours and still be awake enough to shoot someone in the central body mass at a moment's notice." (pp. 14-15).

There a big, diverse cast of characters, and many now feel like friends. Then there's eye-popping action stuff, some of it read with your heart in your mouth.

It's obviously difficult to write about this book without spoiling earlier instalments, but it's been a real pleasure to bathe in this world again. I especially like how it's a satisfying, standalone story in its own right, but full of stuff pushing forward so that nothing can be the same.

The Waterstones edition includes a bonus story, "Favourite Uncle", told from the perspective of Peter's 15 year-old trainee, Abigail and is a nice bit of Christmas whimsy, never quite going where you'd expect.

The Science of Storytelling, by Will Storr

I'm reviewing this new book elsewhere so can't go into too much detail here, but this has been a fascinating read. Storr uses lots of recent psychological and neuroscientific studies to explain how our brains respond to stories and what we can do to make those stories more effective. There's everything from devising character and plotting to the construction of sentences.

My own criticism is the sometimes glib, even crass, tone. He illustrates a point about how people justify their own bad behaviour with a real-life example of a Nazi who killed children. But the actual example is so visceral and vivid that it's haunted me for days.