Bidisha on Palestine

Beyond the Wall – Writing a Path Through Palestine is a short, haunting account of a trip Bidisha made there last year. I read it in an afternoon, unable to put it down.

From the rigours of even getting into the occupied territory, to the settlements that literally overlook the old market and rain sewage down on to it, to the starkness of the $3.5 billion wall enclosing the land, “the majority of it paid for by international donors” (p. 65), the glimpses are evocative and linger in the mind. The world and worldviews described are so rich and strange and eerie it feels almost like supremely crafted sci-fi.

Having read her newspaper columns (and worked with her on a documentary about black actors in Doctor Who), I'd expected Bidisha to be a bit more, well, vociferous. Yet the overall sense is of careful negotiation through a complex tangle of competing interests.

“[Ghada Karmi] explains the occupation's corruption of both its victims and its perpetrators, its generation of obsessive behaviours the acts of violence and destruction which can never be taken back and the ceaseless toxic back-and-forth of attrition. What should be feared are not just the actions of one authority and its weapons but the wider poison of these cycles, endlessly regurgitated, of grievance, frustration, claustrophobia, desperate uprising and vicious suppression, abuse and perpetual inter-reaction. I would add, too, that the saddest thing in all this is the life that Palestinian children must live, one of fear, pain, limitation and, as they get older, cynicism, despair, anger and (potentially) vengefulness.” 

Bidisha, Beyond the Wall – Writing a Path Through Palestine, pp. 110-111. 

That link offers another good quotation on the strategy of occupation. True, she's forthright in citing a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and has no time for the settlers, but she takes pains to critique both sides of the divide. You can feel her frustration at the position of women in Palestine. A trip to a school is telling, with large numbers of women taking classes but few willing to speak, and no women in the school management. There's fury, too, at the blatant sexism and misogyny, and horror when it comes from the British men in her own tour group.


But this momentary anger serves to highlight her general restraint, the plain style of reporting all the more effective without comment. Not easy or offering answers, but a compelling read. 

Horsing Around with Alan Cumming

A photostory from the Jackie annual '84, featuring a talking horse and Alan Cumming.

Cleaning Up icon

Mr Jackson (Mark Gatiss)
from Cleaning Up,
art by Red Scharlach

Delighted by this artwork from the amazing Red Scharlach showing Mark Gatiss as Mr Jackson in my short film Cleaning Up. (Red also made me a badge of it and one of Archibald the space pirate badger for my birthday.)

Cleaning Up plays as part of "I wasn't expecting that!" at the East End Film Festival in London this Wednesday at 8.30 pm.

You can also watch my short film Revealing Diary free and online. And the amazing Guerrier brothers have shot a third short film, The Plotters, which I will tell you more about when it is finished.

AAAGH! and the Toyshop!

AAAGH! from Doctor Who Adventures #273

Another AAAGH!, this time from Doctor Who Adventures #273 and featuring a monster from Rose, the first episode of "new" Doctor Who in 2005. (I still think of the Seventh Doctor as new, so am a little weirded out that next year's 50th anniversary jamboree means that Silver Nemesis is halfway.)

As always, this strip is written by me, drawn by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, who gave kind permission to post it here. You can read all my AAAGH!s.

Next time: part one of a two-part AAAGH! Yes! I know! EXCITING.

How How the Doctor Changed My Life Changed My Life

Alex Mallinson's beautiful cover for
Doctor Who: Short Trips -
How The Doctor
Changed My Life.

Five years ago today, on 19 June 2007, the BBC's official Doctor Who site announced the winners of a short story competition that I'd judged. The winning stories, all by first-time fiction writers, were later published by Big Finish as How the Doctor Changed My Life.

I wrote some general feedback on the more than 1,000 entries received, which might help would-be writers of Doctor Who stories.

The book we produced is now sadly out of print - and commanding a small fortune second-hand. But I'm really proud of it, and the hard work the writers put into it.

Anyone could enter who'd never been paid to write fiction before - they might have been paid for non-fiction and/or they might have written fiction for free. My hope was that it might encourage people who'd always meant to write to actually do it, and might even act as a springboard for writing careers. (My own first paid-for work of fiction was in Big Finish's first Short Trips book, Zodiac, in 2002.)

So what have the 25 authors been up to since?

Our overall winner was Michael Coen. Soon after HTDCML, he had a short story, “Ivory”, accepted in the Pantechnicon Book of Lies - but that book sadly never saw publication. “I’m still writing,” says Michael. “I’ve finished one ‘genre’ novel which I’ve sent to a couple of publishers with ‘open submission’ windows and I’m working on my second which is more mainstream. I still get a tremendous thrill from being a published author and haven’t given up on making some sort of breakthrough in the future.”

Simon Moore writes the world's leading 14 line rhyming review portal (as recently featured in the Guardian), and his historical murder mystery was in the long-list of 20 in the CWA's Debut Dagger competition for new writers. Simon tweets at both @asimonmoore and @sonnetreviews.

Mike Amberry's Doctor Who short story “Trial by Fire” was published in Doctor Who: Short Trips – Indefineable Magic (one of seven HTDCML authors to appear in that book). “Oyun” was published in the Mythmakers collection Pseudoscope. Mike has also written a novel “which I will be polishing up this year in the hope that I might interest someone with it. My current project is a short ghost story, even though I've so far failed to get the previous ghost story I wrote published!” He is on Twitter as @mikeamberry.

Stephen Dunn's Doctor Who story, “Once Upon a Time Machine” was published in Indefineable Magic. “Being published again proved - to me at least - that the first story had not a complete fluke. At the moment I am trying to in-doctor-inate my 20 month old daughter Anya Charlotte Eloise in the ways of Who. I have lots of Doctor Who short stories in my head, which I will be sharing with her when she is a little older.”

Bernard O'Toole was a winner of the BBC writers' room “Sharps” competition in 2008, which led to a couple of script commissions and helped get him an agent. He's reached the offers stage for radio drama a couple of times and has a feature script in development. “I constantly write spec scripts and pitches and still apply for competitions,” he says. “In recent years I’ve reached the final stages of competitions like Red Planet, the Alfred Bradley Bursary Award (BBC radio drama) and even Writers' Academy but haven’t landed the top spot. That said, every little victory keeps the moral up and the ideas flowing. It’s still good fun at the end of the day. HTDCML was a major thing for me. Like all of us brought up on the Target paperbacks, which during my childhood meant everything to me, to have a few pages of published Doctor Who prose was a major ambition. I glance up at it now on the book shelf as I type this and it always makes me smile. Good times indeed.”

LM Myles had a short story, “Missing In Action”, published in the e-zine Reflection's Edge, and another one, “The Better Part of Valour”, in the Bernice Summerfield anthology Present Danger. Her essay “Renaissance of the Fandom” was included in the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords and she is co-editing Chicks Unravel Time – Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who, due out in November. She is also on Twitter as @LMMyles.

Michael Montoure has written two anthologies of horror stories, Counting from Ten and Other Stories and Slices, and is co-writing the web series Causality. He's on Twitter as @Montoure.

Tim Lambert's story “Automatic Head Spin” appeared in online sf, fantasy and horror magazine, Allegory in 2011. “This has definitely given me a renewed sense that I must be doing something right,” says Tim, who's continuing to send out stories.

Richard Goff had not, at time of writing, responded to my email.

Caleb Woodbridge's Doctor Who short story, “Blessed are the Peacemakers” was included in Indefineable Magic. He is currently seeking publication for his first novel. He's an editor of the Impossible Podcasts and also writes A Journal of Impossible Things, a blog about fiction, fantasy and faith. He's on Twitter as @CalebWoodbridge.

Chris Wing says his next bestselling novel now has a tentative name - The Secret of the Spires – but “still needs to be written”. He is also writing Doctor Who stories exclusively written for his kids. He says that “Doctor Who and the Missing Girl was a hit amongst the two-strong audience a few bedtimes ago”. He's on Twitter as @chriswing1977.

Mark Smith, uniquely of the HTDCML authors, employed me – commissioning some articles for the Herald.

James C McFetridge's novel Unendlicher Tod is published in Germany this August, and his agent is currently pursuing publishers in the UK. It was also shortlisted in the To Hell With Prizes Award 2011.

Einar Olgeirsson has, at time of writing, not responded to my email.

Matthew James's Doctor Who short story, “Hiccup in Time”, was published in Indefineable Magic. You can read more of his stories on his website. Matthew says: “I have had a little more luck with short film scripts which I've put together for student film projects. I've done three of these and they've been fun. I'm now working on a theatre play which is proving interesting but difficult! Inspired by the student films I'm also putting together a short of my own but time to work on these projects and earn money in the 'real world' mean progress is slow. But thank you Simon, Neil Corry and Big Finish for giving me that one break! Lack of success has never stopped me writing before or since, but it is wonderful to know that some tiny piece of it is out there, published, in the best of all places - the Doctor Who universe.”

Violet Addison has been published in Faction Paradox: A Romance in 12 Parts, as well as the Mythmakers anthology Pseudoscope. This year, she appears in the World's Collider anthology, and has her first original audio piece, Walking with Dragons. She says she is “pitching like mad and entering every competition I can find. I'm still getting about ten rejections for every one thing that gets through though.”

Andrew K Purvis had a short story, “Go Fourth”, published and promises to finish a novel this year.

Nick May had, at time of writing, not responded to my email.

Steven Alexander has written a 100,000-word novel and taken part in more writing competitions. He's also writing for the Planet Skaro Audios.

JR Loflin's “Breath of Echoes” was published in the Mythmakers anthology, Pseudoscope.

Mike Rees' Doctor Who short story, “The Science of Magic”, was published in Indefineable Magic. His novel Broken Heroes is available to buy as a print version and electronic version, and you can preview the chapters at http://brokenheroesnovel.wordpress.com/.

Dann Chinn continues to write. The most solid evidence of this can be found at the recently-revived Misfit City music blog. He's also on Twitter as @dannchinn.

John Callaghan's story, “Have You Tried Turning It Off and Then Back On Again?”, was published in Indefineable Magic. He is currently touring in the two-person comedy musical We Won't Rock You and says his main creative focus is his solo music – such as featured in this video. “I'm finishing the new album I've been working on, on and off, for at least five years now,” says John. “I've assembled all the musical parts and now it just needs mixing. I'm not accustomed to being so busy, so I'm having to fit it in between rehearsals for Brighton and doing the odd remix and live solo show.”

Arnold T Blumberg's Doctor Who short story, “Mardi Gras Massacre”, was published in Indefineable Magic. Arnold has set up his own company, ATB Publishing, whose first book will be Red, White and Who: The Story of Doctor Who in America.

Anna Bratton has collaborated with Brittney Sabo, on a young adult graphic novel, Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny! “We received a Xeric self-publishing grant in 2010 and released Book One the same year. Currently, I am writing Book Two and noodling around with upcoming Doctor Who-related projects.”

The Doctor Who Short Trips books came to an end a year after the publication of How The Doctor Changed My Life, but production company Big Finish continues to produce audio Short Trips, and has run a number of writing competitions since I ran this one.

The sounds of Revealing Diary

The amazing Tapio at Kaamos Sound explains how he produced the soundtrack for my short film, Revealing Diary, here:



You can watch Revealing Diary free and online, or learn more about how and why we made it. Also, the Guerrier brothers shot a third short film this weekend. More details on that soon.

AAAGH! and the Jubilee

AAAGH! meets Queen Victoria

Madder than Madness on the roof of Buckingham Palace, here's Madames Tinkle, Vastra and Jenny arriving in Bessie to receive a gong from Queen Vic. This one owes a bit to Tooth and Claw and a lot to Faceache.

It appeared in Doctor Who Adventures #272. As ever, it's written by me, drawn by Brian Williamson and editing by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who also gave kind permission to post it here. You can read all my AAAGH!s.

Next week: Nervil meets the Auton bride!

The Wedding of James Bond

The tenth James Bond novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) begins with Bond revisiting the scene of the first – the casino from Casino Royale. On a winning streak, he pays off the debt of a pretty girl, who then invites him up to her room. This is Tracy – soon to be Mrs James Bond.

Bond's first night with Tracy is not exactly romantic. She's cross and weird, telling him:

“Do anything you like. And tell me what you like and what you would like from me. Be rough with me. Treat me like the lowest whore in creation.”

Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, p. 36. 

 Bond can see she's troubled and self-destructive, and she makes it explicit that she's shagging him because he paid her. So it's not exactly gallant that he doesn't walk away but instead gets his money's worth. Of course, it's been well established that Bond is an amazing lay. Later, Tracy tells him:

“'That was heaven, James. Will you please come back when you wake up? I must have it once more.' Then she had turned over on her side away from him and, without answering his last endearments, had gone to sleep – but not before he had heard that she was crying. 

What the hell? All cats are grey in the dark.”

Ibid., pp. 36-37.

It's hardly a great start to their relationship, but Bond then keeps his eye on Tracy and stops her when she tries to kill herself after a day on the beach. This rescue is interrupted by some hoodlums who take Tracy and Bond away to a Corsican gangster called Marc-Ange Draco – who turns out to be Tracy's dad.

So far, its a strange and exciting beginning. Draco and Bond quickly become friends – they might work on opposite sides of the law, but they're both rough diamonds with a liking for the finer things in life. The despairing dad explains Tracy's history, and again there's nothing very romantic about it.

“'I was married once only, to an English girl, an English governess. She was a romantic. She had come to Corsica to look for bandits' – he smiled – 'rather like some English women adventure into the desert to look for sheiks. She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well' – this time he didn't smile – 'she found me in the mountains and she was raped – by me. The police were after me at the time, they have been for most of my life, and the girl was a grave encumbrance. But for some reason she refused to leave me ... The result, my dear Commander, was Teresa, my only child.' 

So, thought Bond. That explained the curious mixture the girl was – the kind of wild 'lady' that was so puzzling in her.” 

Ibid., p. 46.

If this mix of glamour and abuse sits uncomfortably, Bond at leasts turns down Draco's offer of money to help straighten Tracy out, and instead recommends a clinic in Switzerland – which will be quite convenient later in the book. Bond returns to London, but he's smitten. Fleming doesn't exactly go overboard in schmaltz, using Bond's new secretary to show how much he's changed:

“Loelia Ponsoby had at last left to marry a dull, but worthy and rich member of the Baltic Exchange, and confined her contacts with her old job to rather yearning Christmas and birthday cards to the members of the Double-O Section. But the new one, Mary Goodnight, an ex-Wren with blue-black hair, blue eyes, and 37-22-35, was a honey and there was a private five-pound sweep in the Section as to who would get her first. Bond had been lying equal favourite with the ex-Royal Marine Commando who was 006 but, since Tracy, had dropped out of the field and now regarded himself as a rank outsider, though he still, rather bitchily, flirted with her.” 

Ibid., p. 57.

James Bond in love. What a dick.

And all this love stuff is just a side show anyway. Bond has also got an important lead from Draco on the whereabouts of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain whose SPECTRE organisation Bond has fought in the last two books. Bond hasn't met Blofeld, but a man who might be him, Monsieur le Comte de Bleuville, is living it up in a posh ski resort in Switzerland. And he seems rather pleased with his title, as he's been writing to the College of Arms to get it officially recognised.

The plot that follows is good fun, Bond posing as Sir Hilary Bray, an expert on heraldry who can help trace Blofeld's line. In doing so, he can also establish the man's history and link him to his crimes. But to do this, Bond has to go stay in Blofeld's luxury complex, high on the top of a Swiss mountain, without even packing a gun.

That's important. As always, the more the odds are stacked against Bond, and the more he must rely only on his wits rather than luck or clever gadgets, the better the adventure. Coincidences mount up against him – first a man who knows the real Sir Hilary is visiting, then one of Bond's own colleagues turns up. We hear the terrible scream of a man “accidentally” falling down the bob-sleigh run, and the threat of such a death hangs heavy over Bond. It all licks along quite nicely. Fleming nicely puts in brackets stuff Bond doesn't know, as Blofeld's henchpersons watch his every move, putting us in a privileged position that helps build suspense.

Also guests of the Count are a group of pretty girls from all round the UK – not from round the world as in the film. They're being treated for allergies to chickens and potatoes, and are all keen to get Bond into bed. He obliges one called Ruby – though we're told he's not forgotten Tracy, this is just him doing his job and getting information. Even so, it's odd to hear Bond call a girl “Baby” and there's something oddly prissy about what he gets up to:

“He gave her another long and, he admitted to himself, extremely splendid kiss, to which she responded with an animalism that slightly salved his conscience. 'Now then, baby.' His right hand ran down her back to the curve of her behind, to which he gave an encouraging and hastening pat.” 

Ibid., p. 122.

There's some fun stuff as he sneaks about, dodging the CCTV and opening locked doors to get into Ruby's room. Again, the details about smell make Bond seem weirdly OCD.

“Her hair smelt of new-mown summer grass, her mouth of Pepsodent, and her body of Mennen's Baby Powder. A small night wind rose up outside and moaned round the building, giving an extra sweetness, an extra warmth, even a certain friendship to what was no more than an act of physical passion. There was real pleasure in what they did to each other, and in the end, when it was over and they lay quietly in each other's arms, Bond knew, and knew that that the girl knew, that they had done nothing wrong, done no harm to each other.”

Ibid., p. 127.

This is all a little convenient. Bond – and Ruby - might feel entirely guiltless, but what would Tracy think? It's telling that he lies to her, says he never touched the girls – but tells the truth to her father, who accepts the fact without reproach. If the marriage had continued, how faithful might Bond have been?

As well as shagging the patients, Bond finally gets to meet Blofeld. Though this is the first time they meet, Bond has clearly gathered a lot of intelligence already:

“He knew what not to expect, the original Blofeld, last year's model – about twenty stone, tall, pale, bland face with black crew-cut, black eyes with the whites showing all round, like Mussolini's, ugly thin mouth, long pointed hands and feet – but he had no idea what alternations had been contrived on the envelope that contained the man.”

Ibid., pp.102-3.

Given the bald, Nehru-suited look of three Bond films (plus Charles Grey in Diamonds Are Forever and Max von Sydow in Never Say Never Again), it's striking how different the book Blofeld is:

“The man was tallish, yes, and, all right, his hands and naked feet were long and thin. But there the resemblance ended. The Count had longish, carefully tended, almost dandified hair that was a fine silvery white.” 

Ibid., p. 103.

Perhaps it's the “dandified”, but I imagined him played by Jon Pertwee. That Bond is able to catch this master criminal by playing to his vanity about a family title is really nicely done – a character flaw that makes a credible lure. Note also the book Blofeld is not accompanied by a white cat.

Speaking of the films, On Her Majesty's Secret Service also shows the influence of the film Doctor No. Fleming originally disliked the casting of Sean Connery but was soon won over – and here accommodates the accent into the canonical Bond:

“My father was a Scot and my mother was Swiss ... My father came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe.”

Ibid., p. 59.

Ursula Andress is also one of the celebs dining at Blofeld's restaurant (on page 114). I'm tempted to suggest that the exciting escape from the Swiss mountain in the midst of an avalanche is also a nod to the action set pieces of the films. Bond's mum being Swiss means he's an okay skier, though Fleming is keen to make his style basic and old-fashioned, which ensures it's not to easy and that the odds remain against him.

Amid Emma Coat's 22 rules of good storytelling compiled while working at Pixar, there is:

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Bond – desperate, exhausted and with baddies almost on him – bumping into Tracy feels like a cheat. Yes, Fleming has set this up and it was Bond himself who recommended that she go to Switzerland, but it still feels too easy. Tracy is good in a crisis and helps Bond escape. He needs to get back to London to report, so she drops him at the airport. And Bond suddenly gets all romantic.

“Bond suddenly thought, Hell! I'll never find another girl like this one. She's got everything I've looked for in a woman. She's beautiful, in bed and out. She's adventurous, brave, resourceful. She's exciting always. She seems to love me. She'd let me go on with my life. She's a lone girl, not cluttered up with friends, relations, belongings. Above all, she needs me. It'll be someone for me to look after. I'm fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience. I wouldn't mind having children. I've got no social background into which she would or wouldn't fit. We're two of a pair, really. Why not make if for always?” 

Ibid., p. 172. 

This might seem a bit brutal and pragmatic, but it's perfectly in character. In context, it's even quite moving. Bond tells Tracy to meet him in Berlin, where they'll tie the knot.

Back in London on Christmas Day, Bond visits M's bizarre, nautically themed home to present all he's learned and work out what Blofeld is up to. There's something comic and late-60s The Avengers about M's house being based on his old ship, even down to his old staff now acting as a butler.

Experts arrive to confirm Bond's suspicions, and we get a full briefing on the new, deadly science of biological warfare. It all sounds credible, quoting a “United States Senate paper, Number 58991, dated August 29th 1960, prepared by 'The Sub-committee on Disarmament of the Committee on Foreign Relations'” (on page 191). Yet, as always, we need to take the things Fleming states as fact with a pinch of salt:

“Now there is plenty of medical evidence for the efficacy of hypnosis. There are well-authenticated cases of the successful treatment by these means of such stubborn disabilities as warts, certain types of asthma, bed-wetting, stammering, and even alcoholism,drug-taking and homosexual tendencies. Although the British Medical Association frowns officially on the practitioners of hypnosis, you would be surprised, sir, to know how many doctors themselves, as a last resort, particularly in cases of alcoholism, have private treatment from qualified hypnotists.”

Ibid., p. 187.

Having established what Blofeld's about, British intelligence is then rather hamstrung by tricky things like international law and the lack of help they can expect from the Swiss in extraditing Blofeld. Luckily, Bond is now owed a favour from Tracy's dad, and enlists the Corsican underground to lead an attack on Blofeld's base. Draco is only too pleased to help, seeing this as a sort of dowry. Tracy is less pleased:

“'All right. I won't ask questions. And I'm sorry I cried.' She added fiercely, 'But you are such an idiot! You don't seem to think it matters to anyone. The way you go on playing Red Indians. It's so – so selfish.'”

Ibid., p. 226.

The thing is that she's right. There's no reason for Bond to go, except his own macho nonsense. The attack is a bit of a disaster – despite an exciting chase down the bob sled run, Blofeld escapes and Bond is badly wounded. He heads to Berlin and to Tracy, where again it's not quite romantic:

“'What worries me is how we're going to make love. In the proper fashion, elbows are rather important for the man.' 

'Then we'll do it in an improper fashion. But not tonight., or tomorrow. Only when we're married. Till then I am going to pretend I'm a virgin.' She looked at him seriously. 'I wish I was, James. I am in a way, you know. People can make love without loving.' 

Ibid., p. 230.

Yes, the real tragedy is that they don't have a proper, loving shag before she snuffs it. A second bracketed section tells us that – in another coincidence - Bond has been spotted by his enemies. It's beautifully done – Bond's wedded bliss while we know something awful is coming, and then the simplicity with which he doesn't quite accept that Tracy is dead.

At the end of the fifth novel, Fleming killed Bond; at the end of the tenth* he kills his wife. I'd loved this book best of all when I originally read the novels in my teens. This time, I was struck by the fun and smart plot (especially after the awful The Spy Who Loved Me), how difficult things are made for Bond, and the striking “visuals” of the setting and action set pieces. The romance between Bond and Tracy is odd, unequal and often uncomfortable, and never quite convinces. She's yet another damaged girl “cured” by Bond having sex with her. Yet the ending is beautifully played and haunting, partly because of a tantalising glimpse of Bond being happy and putting someone else first.

(* For Your Eyes Only isn't a novel but a collection of short stories.)

Now I'm Irresistible

The amazing Guerrier brothers have been signed up by production company Irresistible Films. The press release mentions a whole bunch of stuff we're working on that's not been announced elsewhere. Exciting!

AAAGH! Steampunk Mrs Tinkle

AAAGH! Steampunk Mrs Tinkle

A new AAAGH!, this one featuring Vastra and Jenny from A Good Man Goes To War and the giant rat from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It was published in issue #270 of Doctor Who Adventures, which was in shops until yesterday. The script is by me, the art by Brian Williamson and the editing by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who gave kind permission to post it here. You can read all my AAAGH!s. Steampunk Mrs Tinkle will return in two weeks.

Three Footnotes from Cosmos

Thanks to lovely Abebooks, I'm now the proud owner of a battered paperback of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and a battered hardback (without dust jacket) of James Burke's Connections – and both for less than a fiver, including P&P. Bargain.

I've been working my way through the TV version of Connections on Youtube and will blog about it more when I get to the end (at my current rate, sometime towards the end of the century). But for a flavour of its style and confidence, you can't beat this extraordinary piece to camera:



I've not seen all the TV version of Cosmos but a lot of the material was covered in my astronomy GCSE, so reading the book has been a bit of a refresher course. It's a history of science, similar to The Ascent of Man, but focusing on our knowledge of astronomy.

It's striking how much has been learned and achieved in the 30 years since the book came out. Sagan details Voyager's exciting new discoveries about the Galilean moons but can only guess at the nature of Titan. He enthuses about the possibility of sending roving machines to explore Mars. He speculates on the causes of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (which wiped out the dinosaurs), but doesn't mention the possibility of a large meteorite hitting the Earth. That's especially odd given that elsewhere he talks about the probabilities of large meteorite impacts, such as in Tunguska in 1908.

Sagan packs in fascinating titbits and detail, such as Kepler's efforts to save his mum from being tried as a witch. Excitingly, it's got footnotes instead of endnotes (and an index – so top marks all round), which means plenty of extra nuggets of fact to explode your brain.

For example, Sagan talks at one point about the scale of the Solar System, reminding us that, in terms of our ability to traverse it, the Earth was once a much bigger place. And then he drops in another striking analogy:

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.* 

* Or, to make a different comparison, a fertilized egg takes as long to wander from the Fallopian tubes and implant itself in the uterus as Apollo 11 took to journey to the Moon; and as long to develop into a full-term infant as Viking took on its trip to Mars. The normal human lifetime is longer than Voyager will take to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 159. 

Like James Burke, Sagan is good at making a connection between two apparently disparate things to create a sense of wonder. But I like how the last sentence of the following footnote so lightly declines to impose or invent a reason:

“The sixth century B.C. was a time of remarkable intellectual and spiritual ferment across the planet. Not only was it the time of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Jewish prophets in Israel, Egypt and Babylon, and Gautama Buddha in India. It is hard to think these activities altogether unrelated.”  

Ibid., p. 206.

And, again like Burke, Sagan is good at accounting for chance and circumstance in the slow, steady progress of science through the ages. He uses a Tlingit (Native American) account of meeting the French explorer Count of La Pérouse when he “discovered” Alaska in the 1780s to discuss what first contact with an alien culture might be like. But, explaining that La Pérouse and all but one of his crew died in the South Pacific in 1788, Sagan notes:

“When La Pérouse was mustering the ship's company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned down. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Pérouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found, Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have changed significantly.” 

Ibid. p 334. 

Three short asides, additional to the main narrative, and you could base a science-fiction novel on each of them. Yet the thing that's stayed with me most since I finished the book earlier this week is his reference to the 1975 paper “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence” by James W Prescott:

“The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence ... Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived – during at least one or two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence – of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.” 

Ibid., p. 360.

I'm fascinated by this, but can't help wondering if that conclusion isn't too much what we'd like to believe to be true. There's something chilling, too, in the lightness with which he seems to suggest that organised religion is a symptom of childhood neglect.

AAAGH! A Silent in the Library

AAAGH! A Silent in the Library

Another AAAGH!, this one from issue #269 of Doctor Who Adventures, which was out in shops until yesterday. It may owe a little to the episode Silence in the Library, only with a different sort of Silence. Don't worry, the references get much more obscure in the coming weeks...

As ever, it's written by me, drawn by Brian Williamson and edited by Natalie Barnes and Paul Lang - who gave permission to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

Next time (and in shops at the moment): Steampunk Mrs Tinkle.

The end of analogue

Goodbye to all that

A spectacularly nerdy post, this. But of marginal interest to archaeologists of the future...

When I bought my flat in 2005, my parents decided it was probably time that I stopped using my old bedroom at their house as a store for my old sci-fi rubbish. One afternoon, my dad drove up with lots and lots of books and two bin bags full of videos. Ah, I can still remember the delighted look on the Dr's face...

(It was not a delighted look on the Doctor's face.)

For readers born after the Flood, video was a slower, chunkier versions of DVD, with a more gravelly image and no special features. (Well, some of the later ones and very brief ones, or came with a separate video providing a commentary track.)

My collection of videos sat in my attic, building up an impressive collection of dust and dead spiders, for the five years I lived in that flat. I gave some away when I could find someone who wanted them. But when we moved home last year, I still had a whole binbag of tapes and nothing to watch any of them on.

I'd looked into selling the tapes, or sending them to people who asked for them, but the hassle of actually packing the damn things kept meaning I never quite got round to it. Videos are heavy, so any kind of postage was going to be stupidly expensive.

But on Sunday, a nice man from the local RSPCA shop came round and took the lot. Having also posted back a tape I borrowed from Ian Potter an aeon ago (with no actual way of watching it), as of Monday - and for the first time since 1984 - I live in a home without videotape.

Yes, I know it's not exactly the most exciting watershed moment in all history, but once the tapes had been taken I must have looked suitably forlorn 'cos the Dr gave me a hug.

(If you want them, the videos will be in the new RSPCA shop opening next month at 267 Lower Addiscombe Road, Croydon, CR0 6RD.)

"Trying not to break things..."

Will Barber has interviewed me for the Cult Den about the Doctor Who and other things I have written.

The Man Who Made Love To Her

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) is a really unpleasant book. It's told in the first-person by Vivienne Michel, a young woman running away from her life in England who gets caught up in a nasty scam. The preface says:

“It's all true – absolutely. Otherwise Ian Fleming would not have risked his professional reputation in acting as my co-author and persuading his publishers to bring out our book. He has also kindly obtained clearance for certain minor breaches of the Official Secrets Act that were necessary to my story.”

Ian Fleming, preface to The Spy Who Loved Me. 

 Perhaps this attempt at realism explains the rather mundane plot. After the outlandish fantasies of the last few Bond books, this feels rather pedestrian. Vivienne is taking care of the Dreamy Pines Motor Court in the north of New York State while the owners are away – but the owners are really planning to burn the place down and claim the insurance, blaming the dead Vivienne for the “accident”.

Alone and without protection, Vivienne opens the door to two tough hoodlums sent to do the burning – and they thing they might enjoy this girl before murdering her. But then, by chance, a British secret agent just so happens to show up...

Modern, bratty and naïve, Vivienne is quite a departure from previous Bond girls in the books. The first third of the book recounts a rather tawdry love affair in Windsor, with a posh boy who dumps her as soon as he's had his wicked way. It's surprisingly explicit about her first sexual experience, with none of the usual romance and fantasy. She and her lover – Derek – are caught in the act and thrown out of the local cinema, and then get asked questions by a policeman. The sex itself is awkward and uncomfortable.

Vivienne then runs away from England – but nothing changes: she's still the prey of callous men who only want to use her. As a result, the book is all about her as hapless, helpless victim. There's always been a sadistic streak in Bond books, but with the violence focused on Bond himself. He's a tough, determined secret agent, able to defend himself and win despite what's done to him, so the sadism makes him more of a hero. Here, it only makes Vivienne more of a victim.

This means more than that she's just a weak character. I've said before that the best Bond girls are as tough and resourceful as any man. The tougher it is for Bond to impress them and get them into bed, the more that is an achievement (and, as in Moonraker, he's not always successful). So Vivienne's weakness makes Bond look less cool and the book less exciting.

It also doesn't help that Bond arrives to rescue her from the hoodlums quite by chance – on the way home from a far more exciting-sounding story, working with the Mounties to keep a Russian defector called Boris safe from a SPECTRE assassin. It would have been simple enough to connect the hoodlums to SPECTRE, and make Bond's arrival part of his case. The coincidence kills the “realism” that Fleming has otherwise aimed for.

As it is, there's some odd business as Bond has coffee and makes small-talk while the hoodlums try to look innocent. Why don't they just shoot him and get on with their job? Instead, Bond pretends to go to bed, sneaks round and shoots them before they can carry out their threat on Vivienne. She falls gratefully into Bond's arms, but the tone of what happens next is no less nasty:

“All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful. That and the coinciding of nerves completely relaxed after the removal of tension and danger, the warmth of gratitude, and a woman's natural feeling for her hero. I had no regrets and no shame. There might be many consequences for me – not least that I might now be dissatisfied with other men. But whatever my troubles were, he would never hear of them. I would not pursue him and try to repeat what there had been between us. I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn't care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn't care, because none of them would ever own him – own any larger piece him that I now did. And for all my life I would be grateful to him, for everything. And I would remember him for ever as my image of a man.” 

Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me, p. 154. 

So the title is a lie. Bond doesn't love her but uses her – as all the other men in her life have, or have tried to – and drives off the next morning, leaving her a note rather than saying goodbye. A more accurate title might be “The Man Who Made Love To Me”. True, he squares things with the police so she won't be in trouble and can collect reward money, but that's surely the least he could do.

And Vivienne's point about no girl ever having more of Bond than she did isn't true, either. In the very next book, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, James Bond meets his wife. And it's one of my favourites...

AAAGH! The very hungry Master!

AAAGH! from Doctor Who Adventures #267 - the very hungry Master

Another silly AAAGH! from Doctor Who Adventures #267 and inspired by a certain caterpillar and this. As ever, it's written by me, drawn by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, who gave kind permission to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

Next time: A Silent in the Library!

Tales from the TARDIS

Out in shops now is Ace Adventures DVD box, with two Doctor Who stories featuring the Seventh Doctor and his friend Ace. Among the jam-packed jamboree of extras, there's The Doctor's Strange Love, in which me, Joseph Lidster and Josie Long rabbit on about what we like about the first of Ace's stories, Dragonfire. Thrillingly, we got to shoot it out in time and space...

Me, Josie Long and Joe Lidster in the TARDIS.

The photo Joe took.

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning..."

"What are you young people doing in my TARDIS?"

Whacky Lidster, thumbs aloft.

Our "Radio Times" shot.

Gillane and James, who made our wish come true. Plus my knee.

I look really bald in this one.

What they thought, felt and said

David Lodge’s A Man of Parts is a novel about the life of HG Wells, particularly his sex life. It’s a fascinating, lively read, vividly capturing Wells and the literary and social worlds he moved in. I’ve found it hard to put down, despite a continuing frustration with the book’s two authors – Wells himself and the way Lodge tells the story.

Generally, it’s excellent, such as when detailing Wells’ argument with the Fabians – here a bunch of well-meaning middle-class liberals who want to bring about socialism in Britain, but not so soon as to affect their own cosy standard of living. Wells is much more impatient to bring about social revolution and welfare, what with the practical experience of his youth.

“It wasn’t real poverty. We never starved, but we had a poor diet, which stunted my growth, and made me susceptible to illness. We never went barefoot – but we wore ill-fitting boots and shoes. It was a kind of genteel poverty. I was never allowed to bring my friends home to play because they would see that we couldn't afford a servant, not even the humblest skivvy, and word would get around the neighbourhood. My parents scrimped and saved so they could send me to the cheapest kind of private school, and avoid the shame of a board school, where I might have had better-trained teachers.”

David Lodge, A Man of Parts, p. 45. 

It’s a revealing portrait of a lower middle-class existence, all too aware of and aspiring towards a better social standing. But the real skill is in how this description echoes later. Without making a direct link to this earlier passage, Lodge describes Wells – as an established author – wooing the socialist Fabian Society with his essay, The Misery of Boots (1908). There, he uses a working man's ill-fitting boots – the pain and discomfort caused, the effect on the man's posture – to show how poverty defines a person's outlook and ambition, going on to deplore the preventable misery of social injustice and call for the end of private property.

Later still, the dying Wells concludes that the Labour party of 1945 is a creation of these same Fabians, still – despite their campaign for a welfare state – in no rush to deprive themselves of comfort. Even if that was what Wells thought at the time, it sits oddly given that the Labour government brought in such radical social change and nationalisation in the post-war years. They did the things Wells complains they will not do.

I suspect that Wells' remarks are aimed less at his own time as the (New) Labour party of today. Lodge is keen to underline Wells' continuing relevance to us, and the book ends with a rather clumsy metaphor about this common man prophet. On learning of Wells' death, Rebecca West remarks (through Lodge) that Wells was not a meteor who burned brightly once but a comet in a long orbit, whose time will come again. 

There's plenty of evidence that Wells was ahead of his time. He lived to see the reality of things he predicted decades before – aerial bombardment of cities and the atomic bomb. But the book credits him with more than he can really have claim to, such as in this clunky bit of wordplay:

“I imagined an international Encyclopaedia Organisation that would store and continuously update every item of verifiable human knowledge on microfilm and make it universally available – a world wide web of information.”

Ibid., p. 485. 

That’s not really a web so much as a centrally controlled giant library. And that word “verifiable” doesn’t exactly describe much of the internet as we know it. I’m wary, anyway, of a writer's worth being judged by how much he guessed correctly. Wells also dreamt up a time-travelling bicycle and invaders from Mars, and those novels are no poorer because they did not happen in reality.

For a writer of books ‘of ideas’, Wells’ story is full of human drama which Lodge has mined for psychological detail. We really get under Wells' skin. One highlight is when Wells – himself causing a stir for promoting and living ‘free love’ – discovers that the pious, conservative Hubert Bland (husband of children's author E Nesbit) who opposes him is a serial womaniser whose household includes two children born out of wedlock to his maid. We, too, have come to love the Nesbits and their home, and we, too, feel the vicious betrayal of this hypocrisy.

Yet having followed Wells’ life in detail up to the 1920s, we then rather skip on to the end. The death of his loyal wife Jane is little more than an aside, which is an extraordinary and glaring omission. It's remarked on merely when Wells fears going through his late wife's things and finding evidence that she have had a lover of her own. That's especially strange given how much she's supported him – in his work and his affairs. There's little on what he thought or felt in her final days, or how her illness affected him or made him rethink what he'd done.

Perhaps that would detract from Lodge's sympathetic portrait of Wells, or perhaps Lodge loses interest in Wells once he's peaked as a writer. It seems odd to brush over a decade of the man's life then attempt to sum the whole of him up.

Lodge's Wells is defined by his frustrations – sexual, political and artistic. There's a telling admission in the closing pages:

“I was outwardly successful – ‘the most famous writer in the world’ – but inwardly dissatisfied. The praise I got was not the kind I wanted or from people I wanted to get it from. It made me arrogant and irritable – I was aware of that, but I couldn’t control myself at times.” 

Ibid., p. 499. 

But I think the most telling statement is Lodge's own, before the novel begins:

“Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources – 'based on' in the elastic sense that includes 'inferable from' and 'consistent with'. All the characters are portrayals of real people, and the relationships between them were as described in these pages. Quotations from their books and other publications, speeches, and (with very few exceptions) letters, are their own words. But I have used a novelist's licence in representing what they thought, felt and said to each other, and I have imagined many circumstantial details which history omitted to record.”

David Lodge, preface to A Man of Parts.

There's something deceptive about these words. It's as if what these people thought, felt and said is just a slight embroidery on the solid, historical facts. But invented motives don't just frame what happened, they shape our whole perception of the man and his world. This is not simply a literary biography but a novel with Wells a character of Lodge's own invention, thinking and feeling what Lodge wants him to feel.

The book is a fascinating, compelling story full of great anecdotes and insights. But I couldn't shake the sense that it's more about Lodge than it is Wells.

AAAGH! at the beach!

AAAGH! at the beach

More AAAGH! silliness from Doctor Who Adventures, this time from issue #266 and featuring a Sea Devil, a Marshman and a Haemovore, plus a Pyrovile from James Moran's The Fires of Pompeii. As ever, it's written by me, drawn by Brian Williamson and edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes - who gave kind permission for me to post it here. You can also read all my AAAGH!s.

Next episode: the very hungry Master.

Doctor Who and the Grontlesnurt Horror

Doctor Who and the Grontlesnurt Horror by me

The new issue of Doctor Who Adventures, out today, features this comic strip written by me and illustrated by the amazing John Ross - who's produced every episode of the weekly Doctor Who strip for the mag since it began in 2006.