The Croquet Player, by HG Wells

This short, 82-page novella first published in 1936 was recommended to me after I posted about the 1934 and 1941 editions of A Short History of the World and Wells’s anxieties about where things were headed. I tracked down a first-edition copy, and read it in a single sitting earlier this week. It has haunted my imagination ever since.

The blurb is as follows:

“In a cafe at Les Noupets, as he comfortably sips his vermouth before lunching with his aunt, the narrator is accosted by a voluble stranger who tells him a strange and terrible story of the haunted countryside of Cainsmarsh, and of how he was finally driven to leave it and put himself in the hands of nerve-specialist. The narrator, already disturbed and frightened by the tale, meets the nerve-specialist next day and the mystery, instead of being solved, broadens and deepens until it embraces the whole world.

This is Mr Wells at his very best, and he could have hardly have chosen a more appropriate moment at which to give us this intriguing story.” (Back-cover blurb of first UK edition, Chatto & Windus, 1936)

The story comprises four chapters. In the first, “The Croquet Player”, the unnamed narrator tells us of two strange people he’s encountered, and that he’ll share what they have each told him in an effort to get it straight.

“It was a sort of ghost story they unfolded” (p. 1).

Having promised us something unsettling, he then sets a scene rather out of PG Wodehouse. The narrator and his aunt, Miss Frobisher, are at Les Noupets to play croquet because they don’t care to be seen playing tennis as it is too popular, while golf.

“we find mixes us up with all sorts of people” (p. 7). 

This snob was educated at Harton and Keble, now lives with his aunt at Upper Beamish Street in an unnamed part of Hampshire, and is, he tells us himself,

“just a little inclined to be what the Americans call a sissy [ … with … ] soft hands and an ineffective will” (p. 5).

He is, in short, an unlikely figure to get caught up in a ghost story or strange adventure. He is a comic character, a recognisable type to ground the story in something real before the horror strikes. My first thought was that Wells was doing a kind of fish-out-of-genre story, putting the least likely or least equipped sort of character into an established kind of set-up. That can be very effective, like doing a Chandler-esque thriller but making the protagonist a baffled stoner, as in The Big Lebowski.

In chapter 2, “The Haunting Fear in Cainsmarsh”, the narrator is out on the terrace when he meets nervous young Dr Finchatton, who tells him about his practice in Cainsmarsh where everyone is beset with a strange, low-level sickness that leaves them perturbed, with visions of ghosts from under the ground etc. It is brilliantly unsettling for being so underplayed, reminiscent of MR James, Lovecraft or The Woman in Black.

In chapter 3, “The Skull in the Museum” Finchatton traces the pestilence to the local museum in Cainsmarsh, which holds the newly found skull of some early version of man — I suspect inspired by the contentious real-life “discovery” of Piltdown man. The implication here is that in unearthing the skull they have unleashed an ancient curse, or rather an ancient perspective — a savage, violent, early version of humanity.

Things then step up: heading home, Finchatton finds the body of a dog that has been beaten to death, then learns that the kindly old vicar Rawdon who advised him earlier in the story has attempted to murder his own wife. Finchatton shares with the narrator his theories about the influence of “primordial Adamite” (p. 55) on everyone in the region, including himself.

“And then Finchatton said a queer thing. ‘Little children killed by air-raids in the street.’” (p. 56)

This incongruous reference brings a tale of ancient horror suddenly into the present. Air-raids weren’t a new idea in 1936; London was bombed in the First World War, and Wells had explored the idea in science-fiction novels including The War in the Air (1908), The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the latter made into the influential film Things to Come (1936). 

But the haunting image here of children killed in the street is apparently a response to contemporary events and the civil war in Spain, a year before the bombing of Guernica. The sense is, then, that the curse has already spread far and wide from Cainsmarsh.

I’ve seen this kind of thing done elsewhere, not least in Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59), where the discovery of an ancient skull produces nightmare visions and we learn our deep-seated violence is an ancient inheritance. I’d understood that to be a direct response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, not least given that writer Nigel Kneale was married to Judith Kerr, a Jewish refugee from Berlin, and his mother-in-law was a translator during the Nuremberg trials. So, for me, it’s extraordinary to see the same kind of idea being articulated before the outbreak of war. 

Wells then goes in a different direction. Chapter 4, “The Intolerable Psychiatrist”, flips the whole tale. The narrator meets with Finchatton’s nerve specialist, Norbert, who tells him that Finchatton’s story isn’t true. There is no such place as Cainsmarsh, and the young doctor was practising in Ely.

Yet, says Norbert, the sickness is real: he’s seen loads of people having similar delusions and nightmares, which he thinks is a response to the mounting tensions in the world, implicitly the rise of fascism and the threat of another world war. People are gripped by a nightmare of things to come.

I put this to my friend Niall Boyce, who shared with me an even earlier version of something similar — the vivid, precognitive nightmare experienced by Carl Jung in 1913:

“In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realised that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasised. An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.’ 

That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.” (CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Flamingo, 1961) p. 199.)

Three years after these dreams, with the First World War in progress, Jung first used the term “collective unconsciousness”, in part drawn from Freud’s idea of the “primal horde”, where part of us, deep in the consciousness, will always be archaic, primitive, wild. I think that’s exactly what Wells is drawing on here, initially as a kind of ghost story.

In the story, Norbert argues that the mounting sense of disquiet, the shared nightmares, are a response to looming threat, implicitly of a new war, but originate in the primitive parts of our consciousness. He  appeals to the narrator:

“‘In a little while,’ he said, ‘there will be no ease, no security, no comfort any more.’ (Thank Heaven! he did not say I was ‘living on the brink of a volcano’.) ‘There will be no choice before a human being but to be either a driven animal or a stern devotee to that true civilisation, that disciplined civilisation, that has never yet been achieved. Victim or vigilante. And that, my friend, means you!” (p. 78) 

The narrator has, he admits, been “hypnotised” by all this. Yet when challenged by the psychiatrist, he shakes him off, because he has and appointment to keep with his aunt, playing croquet. He does not succumb to primitive consciousness; he simply ignores the threat.

I said at the outset that the narrator is like something from PG Wodehouse and to a post-war reader the ending reinforces that idea, given Wodehouse’s behaviour in the early part of the war. Of course, Wells could not have known that at the time of writing, but it is another example of his eerie prescience. 

There’s also something more profound in all this: that idea of people unable to face up to challenges and threats, determined to deny them, avoid them or conjure nightmares of something else. That’s coloured my sense of the news this week, with politicians of various hues determined to ignore or underplay climate change. How strange to read a book published 90 years ago and find it is pointedly now. 

The Croquet Player is dedicated “To Moura”, ie Russian translator and double-agent Countess Moura Budberg, with whom Wells had a long-standing on-off relationship. She’s a fascinating character, and given her experience in the Russian revolution, I can well understand why she might sympathise with a story / view of human psychology like this. 

I wonder how much of this strange, haunting story is the ghost of a conversation between Wells and Moura, horrified by a future they could so plainly see coming.  

A Criminal Practice, by Terrance Dicks

A Criminal Practice, a comic play by Terrance Dicks first broadcast on 5 July 1967, has been repeated on Radio 4 Extra today at 3pm and 9pm and will be available for a while on BBC Sounds, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r4tl  

Excitingly, when I checked the archives last year this play was thought lost. It’s been recovered and returned by those heroes at Radio Circle — why not make a small donation to say ta?

By this point, Terrance Dicks had already co-written three TV episodes of The Avengers (1963-64), a seven-episode radio sitcom called Joey starring Alfie Bass (1965-66) and a one-off comic radio drama, Set A Thief, starring Nicholas Parsons (1966).

He tried selling Joey to TV, but Richard Waring — script editor of comedy at BBC Television — thought the the “lower class milieu” of an East End cafe culture lacked sufficient “gloss and sophistication” (source: Waring to TD, 1 Jun 1966).

Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that Terrance’s next pitch to the BBC, received on 8 July, was a drama set in the near future about a well-to-do young solicitor dealing with a gang who steal his car and takeover his house. The BBC declined The Day of the Yob but Terrance seems to have reworked some elements as a comic radio play. A Criminal Practice was commissioned by the BBC Drama Department (Radio) on 16 November. 

Note that for all it’s funny, and Terrance had been working in sitcom, this and the earlier Set a Thief were produced by the radio drama department. He’d not made further headway in comedy, either on TV or radio. 

For inspiration, I suspect Terrance spoke to his lifelong friend Simon Goldstein. They’d met at grammar school in East Ham, then gone to university at Cambridge together. Simon was by 1967 a solicitor and later a circuit judge.

The script for A Criminal Practice was delivered on 11 April 1967 and a week later authority was given to pay Terrance the second half of the fee. Rehearsals began on Thursday 15 June, and two days later it was recorded in Studio 2 at 201 Piccadilly, between 4.30 and 6.30 pm.

The producer was John Gibson, based in room 6082 at BBC Broadcasting House, supported by secretaries Christine Young and Peggy Dowdall-Brown, and stage managers John Farrell, Chris Pallet and Martin Penrose. “John Farrell” is a name used in a 1971 Doctor Who story on which Terrance was script editor, Terror of the Autons. Perhaps that is a coincidence.

A Criminal Practice was first broadcast on 5 July 1967 at 8.15pm on the BBC’s Light Programme as part of “Midweek Theatre”. It got a fair bit of press coverage, though mostly just explaining the wheeze. The audience appreciation index (AI) was 61 out of 100 and a hand-written note on the script now held at the BBC says “good”.

The play was repeated on 01 Jun 68 (Light Programme) and 14 Jul 72 (Radio 4). That all suggests it did well, but Terrance never wrote a full play for radio again. He had better-paying work.

First, he went back to The Avengers, co-writing The Great Great Britain Crime, which began principal photography on 20 November. I have discovered that he was commissioned for a solo-written episode, too. But his return to The Avengers was short-lived. I’ll say more about all of that in my forthcoming biography of Terrance. Stay tuned.

By the end of 1967, he’d taken a job on soap opera Crossroads, where he worked as both writer and storyliner. In February 1968, he was offered a job as assistant script editor on Doctor Who by Derrick Sherwin, who he’d met on Crossroads. He remained attached to Doctor Who for the rest of his life.

By the time A Criminal Practice was repeated on 1 June 1968, Terrance was well into that job; it was down to him that the prolific Robert Holmes was commissioned for his first Doctor Who story the day before, on 31 May.

That day, 31 May 1968, also saw recording of episode 3 of the Doctor Who story The Dominators. The cast included Walter Fitzgerald as Sennex. Fitzgerald had also played The Judge in A Criminal Practice, so surely he and Terrance remarked on the repeat the next day — for which they both received a fee.

Other members of the radio cast Terrance worked with again: Elizabeth Proud, as Penelope, was later Mrs Sowerberry in the BBC One dramatisation of Oliver Twist (1985), Terrance’s first credited work as producer. (To me, she’ll always be Mrs Phoeble in Simon and the Witch).

Bartlett Mullins (who’d been Second Elder in 1964 Doctor Who story The Sensorites) was later in Gulliver in Lilliput (1982), directed by Barry Letts and script edited by Terrance. Alexander John was later in The Franchise Affair (1988), the last TV produced by Terrance. 

Then, more tangentially, Preston Lockwood, as George Larrabie, later played Dojjen in the 1982 Doctor Who story Snakedance, which Terrance novelised. Victor Lucas was Andor in 1977 Doctor Who story The Face of Evil, novelised by Terrance in 1978.

(Nigel Clayton was one of the Fish People in 1967 Doctor Who story The Underwater Menace. But Nigel Robinson novelised that one.)

Anthony Jackson, who plays young protagonist Mathew Laramie in A Criminal Practice, was cast of the voice of Azal in 1971 Doctor Who story The Daemons. The production team then decided that Stephen Thorne would play both voice and body. David Brunt tells me that there is no indication that Jackson's contract was cancelled, so the decision may have been made after he recorded the voice.

(When I interviewed Stephen Thorne, he remembered things a little differently.)

Jackson had a wide-ranging career. He’d already filmed his role as an ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but went on to play Dai Station in the colour version of Ivor the Engine, and did loads of sitcoms and kids shows.

A Criminal Practice was repeated, a second time, on Friday 14 July 1972. Terrance seems to have been on holiday, returning to the Doctor Who office in 24 July to find waiting for him a storyline for The Three Doctors and the script for the first episode of what was then called Destination: Daleks.

I’ve read the script but haven’t heard the play so am very excited about this afternoon’s broadcast. It’s very him, I think: good-natured, warm and funny. Enjoy.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

I read this compelling account of the early days of the American space programme — and the egos involved — an age ago, before my 2009 trip to Cape Canaveral, and have seen the film version a few times. But I looked up a detail the other week and got caught up again. 

Wolfe tells us in his foreword that the book was inspired by a simple question:

“What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? I decided on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few in December of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch then last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. I discovered quickly enough that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage.” (P -4)

He persists in his investigation all the same, and the promise is of stuff about Tough Men Who Don’t Talk Emotions, alongside lots of Detail About Engineering. Yes, there is a lot of that stuff in what follows, but not to begin with. Chapter 1 opens, instead, on a domestic scene, wives ringing one another to find out what people might have heard. It’s ordinary, relatable, with a growing tension as we realise that a plane has crashed and the wives are trying to work out who has lost their husband.

Having explored the social networks and the psychology of all this, we then follow the efforts to recover the crashed plane and what little remains of the pilot, the state of the body described in horrific, visceral detail. It’s emotive and arresting, and I lacked the velocity to escape it. So I’ve read the whole book again.

There are effectively two stories here: first, the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager on 14 October 1947; then the Mercury space programme (1958-63), from the recruitment of the seven pilots, the first American chimps and humans in space, through to the appointment of a second wave of pilots (including Neil Armstrong) for the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programmes that would take astronauts to the Moon.

There’s some amazing stuff, like Yeager being invited to the US premiere of David Lean’s film The Sound Barrier (1952, released in the US the following year). The film claims the British broke the sound barrier first and did so by “reversing the controls”. Yeager found this outrageous, and was then horrified to discover that people thought he was only the first American to break the sound barrier, have copied this manoeuvre from the British.

“The last straw comes when he gets a call from the Secretary of the Air Force.

‘Chuck,’ he says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something? Is is true that you broke the sound barrier by reversing the controls?’

Yeager is stunned by this. The Secretary—the Secretary—of the US Air Force!

‘No, sir,’ he says, ‘that is… not correct. Anyone who reversed the controls going transonic would be dead.’” (p. 62)

Wolfe reports everything in a hard-boiled journalistic style, with an eye for human foibles — ego, hubris, jealousy, anger, lust and foolishness. It’s a little as though Dashiell Hammett had written a history of rockets. He’s good on the culture — the hard drinking, hard driving astronauts, the way they were wooed by sponsors and politicians, the conflict between perceived glamour and the reality. We get to know these different people and what makes them tick. Mission accomplished on that score.

There are also some notable absences. Frustratingly, there are no footnotes or index so we must take Wolfe’s claims on trust. But there are also some big things missing from the story here that I’ve seen picked up elsewhere. For example, there’s this reference to the partying going on at Cape Canaveral in 1960.

“There were NASA people and the contractors and their people, and there were the Germans. Although they scrupulously advised publicity, many of Wernher von Braun’s team of V-2 experts had important jobs at the Cape and were happy to find a fraternal atmosphere in which they could take off their official long faces and let the funny bone out for a tap dance or two. And many were the midsummer nights in Cocoa Beach, nights so hot and salty that the No See’um bugs were sluggish, when sizzling glüwein materialized as if from out of a time warp and drunken Germans could be heard pummelling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’!” (p. 167)

This is a rare mention by Wolfe of von Braun and the Germans working on the space programme, with little to suggest any moral objection to the involvement of former Nazis. I’ve seen that addressed in, for example, the non-fiction Moondust by Andrew Smith, the novel Moonglow by Michael Chabon and the TV series For All Mankind. This is an example, I think, of Wolfe being like the journalists he decries more than once as behaving like “Victorian gents” in the way they reported the space programme, discreetly skipping unpalatable details to present a romantic story.

At the end of the book, he discusses the political pressures involved in recruiting Ed Dwight to the Mercury programme, as the first black astronaut. With other astronauts, Wolfe shares their perspective on events, their frustrations at being pawns in political games; we don’t get that with Dwight. Wolfe also doesn’t say that Dwight’s career was then halted by the end of the Mercury programme — though Dwight finally made it into orbit in 2024. 

The book ends, instead, at the end of 1963 with the Mercury astronauts receiving an award from the Society of Experimental Test Pilots that makes them feel as though they have, finally, been accepted by their peers as proper pilots. There’s the sense of things changing gear as Mercury is superseded by the next stages of the space programme. But I’m struck by Wolfe also closing the curtain on another key moment in history:

“When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 by a man with Russian and Cuban ties, there was no anti-Soviet or anti-Cuban clamor in the Congress or in the press. The Cold War, as anyone could plainly see, was over.” (p. 435).

That seems a remarkable claim to make in 1979, the time of the coup in Afghanistan. For a book all about the importance of precision, it’s not quite correct — not quite the right stuff.

Hamster Book Club podcast interview

The Hamster Book Club podcast, devoted to Doctor Who books, has posted a big long interview with me, covering my books The Time Travellers, The Pirate Loop and the short-story anthologies I edited for Big Finish. 

We also cover my non-fiction work including Bernice Summerfield - The Inside Story, and biographies David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television and the forthcoming Written by Terrance Dicks.

Doctor Who Magazine #626

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out now. I've a couple of pieces in it.

pp. 12-15 "I name you, Sea Devils"

Palaeontologist Dr Dave Hone, who was scientific advisor on The War Between the Land and the Sea, tells me how he came up with Latin names for three distinct classes of Sea-Silurian. 

(I previously interviewed Dave about what he thought of Invasion of the Dinosaurs for The Essential Doctor Who: Invasions of Earth (2016).)

pp. 32-37 "Doctor Where [2025]"

Exactly where and when do the Doctor's adventures take place? I look for clues we can use to set the TARDIS co-ordinates...

Steering the Craft, by Ursula le Guin

Dr Una McCormack recommended me this brilliant book on the craft of writing. The title is a pun, the idea being that a piece of writing — a story, a novel, a work of non-fiction — is like a boat on the water, making for a destination. What can be done to guide it?

Other guides to writing, such as Screenplay by Syd Field, approach this kind of thing like we’re building a house. You work out the frame of your story, put up the scaffolding and then fill in the gaps. 

The danger of that, I think, is that it often becomes a kind of prescribed blueprint, the way screenplays must be constructed. You end up with vast estates of near-identical houses, all achingly by-the-numbers. Sometimes, I watch the first few minutes of a movie, or even the trailer, and know exactly how the thing will play out. 

Le Guin is on to this:

“Plot is so much discussed in literature and writing courses, and action is so highly valued, that I want to put in a counterweight opinion. A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither. To my mind, plot is merely one way of telling a story, by connecting the happenings tightly, usually through causal chains. Plot is a marvellous device.

But it’s not superior to story, and not even necessary to it. As for action, indeed a story must move, something must happen: but the action can be nothing more than a letter sent that doesn’t arrive, a thought unspoken, the passage of a summer day. Unceasing violent action is usually a sign that in fact no story is being told.” (p. 83)

She comes at things from the opposite direction. Rather than start with the structure then fill in the gaps, her focus is on what you put in each sentence. Start with ensuring you have the right tools and know how to use them. To switch analogies, the effect of the book is like sharpening one’s knives before starting to cook.

The chapters cover the sound of your writing spoken aloud, punctuation and grammar, sentence length, the use of repetition, adjectives and adverbs, using verbs to express person and tense, point of view, indirect narration and what she calls “crowding and leaping” — when to provide lots of detail and where to skip through it. 

Each chapter contains examples, either from works of classic (ie out-of-copyright) literature or stuff specially written by le Guin. This stuff is illuminating and fun. 

For example, le Guin quotes the opening paragraphs of the first three chapters of Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1852). The first two are in what she calls the “involved authorial voice” — she objects to the term “omniscient” narrator as judgmental (p. 57) — and then it switches to first person, past tense, from the POV of Esther Summerson. Le Guin comments afterwards:

“Bleak House is a powerful novel, and some of its dramatic power may come from this highly artificial alternation and contrast of voices. But the transition from Dickens to Esther is always a jolt. And the twenty-year-old girl sometimes begins to sound awfully like the middle-aged novelist, which is implausible (though rather a relief, because Esther is given to tiresome fits of self-depreciation, and Dickens isn’t). Dickens was well aware of the dangers of his narrative strategy; the narrating author never overlaps with the observer-narrator, never enters Esther’s mind, never even sees her. The two narratives remain separate. The plot unites them but they never touch. It is an odd device.” (p. 75)

This stuff about different kinds of narrator has been really useful in clarifying my thoughts about what Terrance Dicks was doing as he novelised Doctor Who stories. Le Guin details several different kinds of narrator, with the same scene related in each different mode so we can see the effect. She differentiates between first person, limited third person (ie in the head of one character), involved author, detached author, and observer-narrator (both first and third person).

For example:

“Detached Author (‘Fly on the Wall’, ‘Camera Eye’, Objective Narrator’)

There is no viewpoint character. The narrator is not one of the characters and can say of the characters only what a totally neutral observer (an intelligent fly on the wall) might infer of them from behaviour and speech. The author never enters a character’s mind. People and places may be exactly described, but values and judgements can only be implied indirectly. A popular voice around 1900 and in ‘minimalist’ and ‘brand-name’ fiction, it is the least overtly, most covertly manipulative of the points of view.” (pp. 58-59).

I can see why this mode would suit “brand-name” fiction. If you’re writing a novelisation of a TV show or film, the source takes that point of view anyway — because the viewer is effectively the fly on the wall, and all pertinent information must be relayed by what we see or characters say. Even if you write an original Doctor Who novel — or Star Trek or Star Wars — you’re still often in that mode. Make it read like something we’re watching, and it will feel more authentic.

If you want a novel to feel more novelistic, you do something else. In the very first Doctor Who novelisation, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964), writer David Whitaker used first person, relaying events originally seen on screen through the perspective of one of the lead characters. On screen, a lot of the mood is created by visual design, effects and music. On the page, the tone is set by a narrator sharing his feelings.

In 1990, when editor Peter Darvill Evans established a range of original Doctor Who novels aimed at adult readers, he wanted “stories too broad and deep for the small screen” — a claim printed on the backs of the books. One way he achieved this richness was to insist that books were written from multiple points of view, strictly marshalled.

As per the guidelines sent out to prospective authors, each distinct section of a chapter was to be told in limited third person, the events as seen and understood by one character. If the writer wanted to change perspective, they needed to start a new section. They were also not to relay information from the perspective of the Doctor, so that he’d remain alien and mysterious.

I’ve seen some correspondence from editor Peter Darvill-Evans to Terrance Dicks, insisting on this approach for the novel that became Timewyrm: Exodus (1991). After 64 novelisations of TV Doctor Who stories, Terrance had developed a very different method for writing Doctor Who — but not as detached author.

He’ll tell us, for example, that the Doctor brooding at the start of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (1976) is not his usual, cheery disposition. That’s not the Doctor’s point of view, or that of companion Sarah; it is Terrance as author. He tells us where Sarah picked up her knowledge of ancient Egypt, or what the letters in TARDIS stand for. He’s an involved author, putting out sign-posts to guide the reader.

Within the same section, Terrance might change POV or jump in space and time, but it’s never confusing — we know exactly where we are. Le Guin gives an example of another writer doing the same thing. In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927), we move back and forth between the perspectives of Mrs Ramsay and her husband. Le Guins provides a long example, then says:

“Notice how Woolf makes the transitions effortlessly but perfectly clearly. … The paragraph indent is the signal for the switch back to Mrs Ramsay. What are the next switches and how are they signalled?” (p. 80)

That’s not to suggest that Terrance Dicks was consciously following the example of Virginia Woolf; it’s just that she, via le Guin, opened up for me what he was doing. Note also that le Guin doesn’t simply tell us what’s being done. She prompts us to read the example again and puzzle out its workings for ourselves.

Each chapter includes writing exercises aimed at writing groups of at least six people to prompt discussion and reflection. The point is not to prescribe a method of writing but to suggest things to think about and try.

In that sense, this book reminded me of “Politics and the English language”, the essay by George Orwell about conveying meaning in a plain style to maximise the chances of being understood, which I found so useful when I worked in the press office of a government department, and which I think still influences a lot of what I write. Orwell lays out a series of rules, then tells us to break them if needed.

In the same way, Steering the Craft is a practical and pragmatic guide for writers, and has really helped me this week on something I’m writing as yet unannounced. It meant a switch of perspective, too. Oh, I realised, as the problem I’d been wrestling with suddenly resolved, I’m the one being steered.

See also:

• Me on The Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore by Ursula le Guin

DWM The Yearbook 2026

The latest Doctor Who Magazine special edition is out today, The Yearbook 2026. Among its wonders is something by me:

How You Watch Who (pp. 46-50)

Simulcasts on iPlayer and spoilers on social media have changed the way we watch and engage with Doctor Who - but how? Simon Guerrier investigates...

For this, I spoke to several different fans: 26 year-old Erica Tucker (watching since Rose in 2005); Sam Ripley, Luc Fawcett, Alfie Giffen and Charlie Gaskin from Warwick University's Who Soc; his great eminence Jeremy Bentham; and 9 year-old Olivia who has been watching since The Church on Ruby Road in 2023.

Jeremy boggled my mind by telling me that there are only four episodes of Doctor Who he's not seen - ones he missed on original transmission that are now among the 97 episodes currently missing from the archive. I list what those four are in the article. 

But since then I've spoken to someone who has seen every episode of Doctor Who. Yes, I am arranging for the preservation / scanning of their brain...