Slow Gods, by Claire North

Mawukana na-Vdnaze, the narrator of this novel, has been dead a few times. But being remembered or even thought of brings him back from the dead, or brings back something very like him - he refers to himself as a copy.

The reason he's become immortal, or whatever it is he's become, is that Maw is a pressganged pilot through arcspace, which normally drives people insane or makes them and their ships disappear. For some reason, it has made him something unsettlingly other. He calls himself a monster.

At the same time, Maw's people have been visited by god-like beings who warn of the death of a star in 200 hundred years time which will wipe out a sizeable chunk of the galaxy, including populated worlds. The oppresive regime has time to prepare, but instead decides to suppress news of this announcement. The undying Maw carries out assignments, falls tragically in love, and all the while the clock is ticking to the inevitable foom...

This is space opera on mind-bending scale, and yet it's about something we have seen and continue to see in our own lives here on mundane Earth - the ways people deal with, or refuse to even recognise, crisis. There's loads of strange and haunting stuff going on: the exact nature of what has happened to Maw, and what he now is and can do; the efforts of communities to preserve something of themselves before it is all lost; the way we live with impending and actual loss. 

The result is something big on ideas but also very emotional. It is thrillingly exciting on an epic scale and yet also very personal, which is a natty trick to pull off so well. One key element is an unrequited love story where completely understanding the perspectives of both parties doesn't make it any less heartbreaking.

The stuff about the weird effects on pilots in arcspace reminded me of the classic "Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith (1950). In the deaths and resurrections, there are echoes of North's brilliant The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. But, brilliantly, it remained surprising right up to the last page.

Justin Richards, 1961-2026

My former editor Justin died last weekend. His great friend Peter Anghelides has written movingly about him. 

I knew Justin, first, for his brilliant, brilliant debut novel Theatre of War (1994), which is so smart, funny and surprising. He found clever things to do with companion Bernice Summerfield being an archaeologist, and it’s really good on what history actually is. But for all it’s keenly intelligent, it’s also great fun.

By mid 1999, I was in correspondence with Justin as he patiently read and gently rejected my pitches for Doctor Who novels. He was always encouraging, on one occasion recommending that I read Story by David McKee before trying again, on another telling me that a thriller plot like I had in mind needed to feel— as the reader read the book — like a zigzagging path, lurching in different, surprising directions. But at the end, when the reader looked back the way we’d come together, they should see it had really been one long, straight avenue, the ending inevitable.

He bent the rules to commission my first book before the particular range was brought to an end. There would always be “just a few notes”, often saying what he liked as much as what he wanted changed. 

When I had a bit of a bruising, unhappy experience on a writing project nothing to do with Justin, he insisted on buying me lunch so that he could share — off the record — his own similar, bruising experience of some years before. He was so funny about it, so at ease, and lifted off all the weight I’d not even been conscious of carrying.

I saw his patience, his generosity, his intelligence and mischievous sense of fun on numerous occasions. It’s why he is such a keenly felt loss. 

Talk on David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks

The talk I gave on Doctor Who writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks for the York Festival of Ideas earlier this month is now up in full on YouTube for your delight:

The books mentioned at the end are my biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023), and my archive-investigating analyses of the Doctor Who stories The Evil of the Daleks and The Edge of Destruction for the Black Archive range. 

It is my 50th birthday today, so you should buy at least one of these.

My new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be out later in the year. I am busy writing it right now.

Doctor Who Magazine's Time Museum

Out now from the people what make Doctor Who Magazine, The Time Museum is - it says here - a virtual exhibition of the whole of Doctor Who, told through 100 objects. 

I've written three of the entries, on Cameca's brooch from The Aztecs (1964), the burping bin from Rose (2005) and Queen Victoria's gun from Tooth and Claw (2006).

By chance, I was asked for this at the same time that I was writing the panels for an exhibition in an actual museum, about which more anon.

Doctor Who quiz on YouTube

I'm one of the contenders on the debut episode of Gav Rymill's Doctor Who quiz, battling Ellie Collins, Benjamin Cook and Tim Missing-Episodes. You can enjoy it here and now:

Telegraph article on Coronation Street's dry-run episodes

I am in the Telegraph again, this time with a piece about the photographs that recently came to light of the never-broadcast dry-run episodes of Coronation Street before the series aired.

• The secret Coronation Street pilot episode lost for 66 years (£).

For this, I spoke to actors William Roache and Anne Cunningham, who appeared in the dry-run of Episode 1 before going on to star in the series, as well as John Tomlinson from Corripedia, former Corrie archivist Daran Little who wrote The Road to Coronation Street (2010), Katherine Balmer from Shutterstock which posted the images and fan Lewis Pringle who spotted their significance.

There were two things I didn't have space to get into in the article. First, Shutterstock captioned these images "telesnaps". But "tele-snaps", with a hyphen, were the brand name of the service offered by John Cura, who took photographs of TV programmes as they aired to provide cast and crew with a permanent record of productions otherwise lost to the ether. These images of the dry-run were produced in-house by Granada Television, not by Cura, so they're technically not tele-snaps.

Normally, us historians of TV refer to images of this sort not by Cura are referred to as off-air images. But these dry-runs weren't broadcast so the images aren't "off-air", but taken from internal monitors in the Granada building. So: what should we call them? Daran Little called them "screen grabs", which I've not been able to better as yet.

Secondly, the first image in the sequence is a title card saying "Coronation Street" in what appears to be the TV set. That suggests that the dry run was missing the iconic opening shots of real-life Archie Street in Salford, which John Tomlinson thinks was filmed later. He says the dry run probably lacked the famous theme music, too, quoting an interview with composer Eric Spear: "They’d left the music to the last minute," Eric Spear said in 1965. To inspire him, the director took Spear to Archie Street, in the rain. "Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds and the director said, 'That's the music I want'." [Source]

Presumably, in response to the dry run, the producers felt that a filmed sequence was needed to help convince viewers that this was a real street and not just a TV studio, with the music setting the bitter-sweet tone. That helped make the programme more convincing and compelling as soon as it started.

Interview with Nadine Kaadan for Macfest

Last month, I interviewed children's author and illustrator Nadine Kaadan for an online event that was part of the annual Macfest international festival. She was born in Paris, raised in Syria but left during the conflict there and moved to London, where she still resides. It was fascinating to hear how that life experience informs her work, and a whole lot besides...

You can now see the whole thing on YouTube here:

The books cited are:

• Tomorrow, written and illustrated by Nadine Kaadan (2012)
• The Jasmine Sneeze, written and illustrated by Nadine Kaadan (2016)
• The Kind Activity Book, by Alex Scheffler, Nadine Kaadan and Renia Metallinou (2022)
• The Power of Welcome: Real-Life Refugee and Migrant Journeys, by Marie Bamyani, Ada Jusic, Nadine Kaadan, Ramzee and Sonya Zhurenko, illustrated by Ada Jusic (2023)

I also mentioned what I should have called the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026, and there is also a Children's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2026. I am so old, I still think of them as annual handbooks.

You may also be intereted in a previous post, my family the refugees. And previously for Macfest I've interviewed Shirin Shamsi, Sefi Atta, Fatima Manji and Osman Yousefzada.