Arturo’s Island, by Elsa Morante

Having whizzed through The Lost Voices of Pompeii while on holiday in Naples, I found — horror of horrors — that I had nothing to read, so nosed through the Feltrinelli bookshop in Stazione Centrale looking for something in English. This classic novel, set on an island in the Bay of Naples, seemed the right sort of thing…

Arturo Gerace is 14, and has lived his whole life in a ramshackle old house — a castle — on a little island, where the only other distinguishing feature is a prison. The previous owners of the house banned women from it, and Arturo has grown up with little female contact beyond a dog who died giving birth to a litter that didn’t survive either.

So when Arturo’s wandering father returns home with a new wife, Nunziatella, who is only two years older than Arturo, she makes quite an impression. Arturo is variously angry, jealous, contemptuous and lusty. Meanwhile, his father disappears for months on end — and turns out to have some kind of relationship with one of the inmates of the prison. Arturo’s mother also died in childbirth, and his feelings for this perfect woman he never knew informs a lot of his outlook and unconscious desires.

First published as L’isola di Arturo in 1957 and translated for this edition by Ann Goldstein in 2019, there’s a lot going on here that isn’t quite spelled out — because Arturo, narrating, hasn’t quite figured it all out for himself. At first it seems quite simple but there are depths and undercurrents: Arturo misreads people’s words and actions, assuming for example that Nunziatella does not reciprocate his feelings because she tells him “no”.

In some ways, Arturo and Nunziatella are just as much inmates as the men in the prison, and then there’s wandering Wilhelm, the paterfamilias, who escapes whenever he can. The Freudian psychology running through a lot of the novel is very of its time (see, for example, my piece for the Lancet Psychiatry on the Freudian influence on Frank Herbert, author of Dune.)

It feels relatively timeless until the last part of the novel when Arturo, turning 16, learns there is going to be a world war. When the prisoner is released, turns up at the house and helps himself to food left our for Arturo, there’s an uncomfortable confrontation — when Wilhelm gives his verdict of his son, and Arturo storms out, meaning to sign up to the army. The book ends with him leaving the island for the first time without looking back, off to an uncertain fate.

As I read the novel, I wasn’t sure there was much to it — it seemed to keep promising something about to happen, and then never quite deliver. But in retrospect I’ve been picking over what characters said and did and must have been thinking, making sense of the real story going on under the surface. Then haunting thought is that Arturo, going to war, did not live to do the same.

I would like to read more of and about Elsa Morante; Penguin Classics published a new edition of her debut novel Lies and Sorcery in April and is reissuing History in November.

The Lost Voices of Pompeii, by Jess Venner

For my recent 50th birthday, the Dr and the children took me to Pompeii — a trip I’ve wanted to make since studying the subject at school. They also bought me this new novel, which is an exercise in what the author calls “critical fabulation”, a,

“refusal to treat gaps in the evidence as dead ends,”, 

while seeing,

“absence as production space” (p.18).

This is very much my wheel-house — I’ve written books about absences in the historical record relating to old Doctor Who serials: The Evil of the Daleks (1967), where just one of the seven episodes survives; and The Edge of Destruction (1964), where no production file and very little paperwork survives.

After a scene-setting introduction, each chapter of The Lost Voices of Pompeii follows one of seven people in the 24 hours before the eruption of Vesuvius. There’s some overlap between the lives of Petrinus the slave, Julius Felix the businesswoman, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus the everyman, Umbricia Forunata the matriarch of a working poor family, Euxinus the innkeeper, Amisusius the priest of Isis, and Gaius Cuspius Panda the politician. The structure reminded me a little of 253 by Geoff Ryman, with the same sense of these individual lives connecting into something bigger and more profound.

We see some of the same events from their different perspectives, so understand what a business deal or prayer or shopping trip mean depending on class and status. It’s a good way to explore the intricacies of Roman society. The book is peppered with photographs and footnotes, underlining the fact that this is based on the real, and I found it a bit strange to visit the real-life house of Julia Felix having just read about her.

There’s then a chapter on what happens to these people in the hours after the eruption, and a chapter on the longer-term aftermath. It’s a moving story, but then I also found Pompeii by Robert Harris (2003) and the TV mini-series The Last Days of Pompeii (1984), bits of which we watched at school. 

What’s different is how much more firmly Dr Venner bases her story in fact. That includes some relatively recent new assessments — that the eruption did not take place on 24 August 79, but was later in the year (she suggests 24 October), and that fewer people died than once thought. She gives a figure of between 1,600 and 1,700, or between 9% and 11% of the population (p. 19). (That will be of some solace to Donna Noble, I thought, as we watched The Fires of Pompeii after our trek around the town.)

Dr Venner argues that her “critical fabulation” gives a voice back to the voiceless. I really like the way she explains, in the footnotes, where she’s based things on evidence and where she has embellished things. I can see she’s also tried to make this relevant to now, so there are referencing to upselling, personal brands and so on. I wonder how much those and this fictionalising approach will date over time.

We were in Naples for three nights. On our first evening, we went to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where I was stunned by the frescoes. They’re were once displayed like works of art in a gallery, but now they’re vivid evidence of people’s ordinary / extraordinary lives.

That was a good grounding before a long, hot day at Pompeii itself. I’d seen photos and footage of the site but being there I was knocked out by the scale — a whole town, with main thoroughfares and back streets, whole chunks of it still buried. Waiting in a shady spot at one end of the forum for the Dr to catch us up, it struck me that it was of a similar scale to the Winchester, where I grew up, once a Roman city.

The following day, we explored Herculaneum, which I think the children preferred because there were fewer herds of tourists and more cats. 

The Dr has written her own blog post about the trip, “What remains of humans: Casts in Pompeii.”

A British Childhood, by Frank Cottrell-Boyce

I've written a review for Social Care Today of the new book A British Childhood - How Our Children Live Now by the children's laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

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.

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.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E Butler

This gripping thriller, first published in 1993, comprises diary entries written by American teenager Lauren Oya Olamina between 2024 and 2027. Listening to the audiobook read by the late Lynne Thigpen was a little perturbing; I was on the M6 passing Birmingham as we passed into the future.

The basic wheeze feels depressingly prescient. Climate change is hitting the planet and there is growing unrest and violence in the US. To begin with, Lauren and her family do their best to carry on life as normal. But Lauren becomes increasingly conscious of the need to prepare for disaster.

At the same time, this pastor's daughter is working out her own religious ideas, based on the idea that "God is change" and humanity must get out into space if it is to survive. She comes to call this religion "Earthseed", and quotations from her thoughts on the subject open every chapter.

As well as the prescient stuff about the collapse of civilisation, and Lauren's philosophical musings on change, there's a fair bit about the effects of different made-up drugs. The drugs Lauren's late mother used while pregnant have left Lauren as hyper empathetic, so she feels the pain she sees in other - making it hard to fight back when she is attacked. Another drug makes people set things on fire, including themselves. 

That Lauren is a Sharer is a useful complication: it means Butler must find more ingenious ways of dealing with any given threat than simply whacking or shooting it. But I felt the pyromaniac drug made its users a bit generic - the punks in all manner of cod sci-fi who have no more motivation than a delight in causing chaos. That's a shame because this book is otherwise so good on the nuance and contradiction of character. It's a long way from depictions of Lauren's family: her brother's descent into crime, her father being in her eyes a good man for all he beats his children, the coldness of Lauren's stepmother. 

Lauren navigates various difficult situations where people don't want to face difficult truths and find it hard to trust strangers. There are some big action sequences, and a fair bit of violence, but what's epecially compelling is how the tension builds and builds. I found it utterly engrossing.

See also: me on Kindred by Octavia E Butler

The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard

Fallen angels stalk the ruins of Paris. The newly fallen Isabelle is preyed upon by a street gang who sever two of her fingers, keen to steal her magic. The immortal Phillippe, once a Vietnamese courtier now living in reduced circumstances, is involved. 

Soon, Phillippe and Isabelle are caught up in the machinations of House Silverspires, based around the ruins of Notre Dame. The once-grand House has also fallen on hard times. It used to be overseen by the very first of the fallen angels, Morningstar, who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. His apprentice Selene now rules in his place with the help of a mortal alchemist called Madeleine, who has her own shameful secret. Then the House comes under attack from strange, magical forces, which seem to be linked to Morningstar's disappearance...

This rich, imaginative novel was first published in 2015 and winner of that year's British Science Fiction Association award. It's a gothic fantasy set in a beautifully realised nightmare alternative Paris, the Seine running black with ashes. This Paris is, in turn, set within a world of which we only get tantalising hints but promises more adventure to come. The back cover of my paperback edition describes the book as,

"A superb murder mystery, on an epic scale set against the fall out of a war in Heaven."

Yes, there's big stuff going on here, but it's an intimate story, largely told through people's thoughts as they endeavour to navigate multiple webs. The story is relatively slow moving, I thought, allowing us time to explore the details and get to know the characters. A lot of it hinges on the circumspection of people deprived of their agency. Various characters are or have been tortured prisoners. The fallen arrive on Earth with no memory of why they were banished from Heaven. One character is a kind of drug addict. People are bound by allegiances and contracts.

I've seen fallen angels tackled elsewhere, often in gothy / fantasy stuff inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, but this feels very different. The elements of magical war in a period setting reminded me a little of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, but we're dealing here with the aftermath of a war. There's something, I think, of Peake's Gormenghast in the House steeped in history and magic and eccentric characters. But more than anything, I was struck by how much this doesn't feel like a world I've visited before. 

At the end, some compelling mysteries remain - about secrets as yet unrevealed, about the rules of this fantasy world - and we are left on tenterhooks about at least one relationship. My paperback edition includes a short story, "The House, in Winter", set in the same world, and two more novels in the series have been published. 

The Time Team Unearthed - The Art of Adrian Salmon

I've had some late nights reading / poring over this beautiful new book collating the artwork that Adrian Salmon produced over more than 20 years for the "Time Team" feature that used to run in Doctor Who Magazine. The brief was simple: produce a single, sizzling image based on the TV episodes under discussion that particular issue. But original editor Gary Gillatt wanted Ade to use dramatic licence, to show us the things that aren't seen on screen but should be.

The result was that Ade produced a captivating image for almost ever TV Doctor Who story of the 20th century. For this book, he's gone back and filled in the gaps - and added a few extras.

The result is gorgeous, and gorgeously packaged, providing a thrilling, vivid, fast-moving history of last millennia's Doctor Who all from one artist's perspective. It is fascinating to see Ade's style develop, and the commentary explains how this was in part down to changing the tools he used (he names the specific makes of pens) and in part due to influences of other artists and an effort not to get bored.

There are loads of details I'd not noticed before - the Sandbeast in his image of The Rescue, the way the artwork for Resurrection of the Daleks mirrors what he did for Earthshock, or the tiny Doctors visible in what he did for The Power of Kroll and Time Flight. The new material is great, too, my favourite probably The Myth Makers with another tiny Doctor. But also, cor, The Evil of the Daleks. And also, woo, The Massacre... 

I'm delighted, too, that the book contains so many sketches, drafts and alternate takes. As the commentary says, some of this material has been a job to track down, and Ade has helped restore some artwork by hand painting new colours. The effort is well worth it. Kudos, too, to editor William Brooks for pulling the whole thing together.

Some of the stuff contained here is from the same period when I employed Ade for cover artwork for the Bernice Summerfield range of audio plays and books - I could tell exactly when just by looking at the style of art. In those days, it was a thrill to receive by email his thumbnail pencil sketches and discuss with him which of two or three options worked best for a particular new title. I've always been particularly, er, drawn, to his pencil sketches - and have failed more than once to convince my masters to employ him to illustrate a novel or novelisation just in pencils. One day...

But while we discussed the various options for any given cover, I don't think we ever talked about Ade's approach to his art, or how he put it together. So this book has been a revelation. How illuminating to learn his approach to colour, and what makes an image pop. The art of the art, as it were.

As Ade says, there's more of his artwork out there, as the "Time Team" was born anew to look at 21st century episodes. He also produced a wealth of other Doctor Who related artwork - I remember the unused cover he did for Short Trips: Zodiac in 2002 (not least because that book included my fiction debut). So I hope there's a second volume.

(A collected Cybermen strips next with new instalments, please and thank you.)

The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of 10 novels to feature the “Baker Street Irregulars” — not the street gang who assisted Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four but four modern-day schoolchildren (and their dog) who solve mysteries by applying the methods of the (to them fictional) Holmes.  

Published in hardback in May 1978 and later reprinted in numerous editions, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece was the first original novel by Terrance Dicks since the last of the Mounties trilogy, War Drums of the Blackfoot, two years previously. The Mounties series had been conceived and commissioned by Richard Henwood at Target Books; when he moved to Blackie & Sons as group publishing director, he invited Terrance to Glasgow to meet with his team and come up with a new line of adventures.

The result was originally called “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as per the title page of the surviving manuscript in Terrance’s archive. By the time of publication, that had been changed to make the link to Sherlock Holmes more explicit.

In the book as published, the gang is referred to, once, as “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as well as “The Magnificent 3½” and “The Frightful Four” (p. 21), which may mean those were other working titles, too. One is clearly a reference to The Magnificent Seven (1960), Terrance a big fan of westerns; the other is clearly a reference to Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, which is also a range of adventures involving four children and a dog. That gives us a sense of what Terrance was stirring into the mix: a mash-up of Holmes, westerns and Blyton.

The book begins with a prologue in which two villains we can’t see because of their stocking masks — but who in stature resemble Laurel and Hardy — steal a painting from a posh house, and brutally cosh the man who tries to stop them. They bind and gag the poor man but, notably, the Laurel-like burglar then goes back to remove the gag so the man doesn’t choke. It’s an intriguing bit of kindness.

The story proper then begins in what Terrance calls an ordinary London school, as if that’s something to which all readers will relate. It’s not a very racially mixed London school judging by the names and descriptions — something Terrance would be better on in his later books. But I love the description of the chaos of the school yard, the kids,

“all fizzing like shaken-up Coke bottles” (p. 11).

Amid this, Dan Robinson sits quietly reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. Tall, skinny, bookish and a loner, Dan is rather modelled on Terrance as a schoolboy. When the book is taken from him by a bully and ruined, Dan immediately fights back — and calls the bully a “moron” and “stupid cretinous spastic stinking twit” (p. 14). Later, Dan also pulls at his eyelids to affect being Japanese (p. 79). This is our hero!

When the fight is stopped by a teacher (“Potty Benton”), the bully challenges Dan to a wager: he can have a new copy of the tattered Hound of the Baskervilles if he can solve the real-life case of the stolen painting, in the week that they’re off school. Dan accepts.

He’s joined in his task by three friends. Best mate Jeff Webster is a stocky, sensible boy. Liz Spencer, we later learn, works on the school paper and is the daughter of a journalist. To begin with, we are told that,

“Liz was a keen supporter of Women’s Lib. She was a tough, wiry girl, who had dealt out many a thick ear as a practical demonstration of her principles.” (p. 17)

From this, I suspect Liz was named after Lis Sladen, who’d played plucky journalist and women’s libber Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who, a character Terrance helped to create. Finally, there’s Mickey Denning, younger than the others, dead keen to help and liable to get into trouble. When he goes to spy on the villains later on, he is quickly caught — fulfilling the kind of plot function of Jo Grant in Terror of the Autons.

The four friends start by visiting the house from which the painting was stolen — which is open to the public. As luck would have it, the eccentric Sir Jasper, who owns the place, is also an aficionado of Holmes and gamely recreates the burglary and his being coshed on the head for the benefit of the children. He also shares with them the words of a rude song involving his own name, “Oh Sir Jasper, Do Not Touch Me!”, which isn’t exactly suitable for children. Today, they’d be on to the police about him.

Then Terrance does something brilliant: on the basis of their conversation with Sir Jasper, Dan tells the others what is going on, as a cliffhanger. We have to read the next chapter to discover — always the best bit in a Holmes story — how he’s put this together from a series of logical deductions.

This is swiftly followed by another great moment, when Dan declares that instead of acting like characters in a mystery story, they’ll go straight to the police. Again, the details of routine police work seems a bit odd for a children’s story — we’re told it consists of dealing with flashers, knicker nicking and dog mess (p. 45). But then there’s another great twist: Mickey goes off on assignment to investigate a clue, and spies two men who turn out to be brothers. That doesn’t mean anything to him but it does to us, as readers, because we’ve already heard that the Hardy-like villain from the prologue is working in league with his brother.

Things move swiftly. At one point, Dan and Jeff are trapped on the roof of the villains’ headquarters, the villains climbing up to get them. Then, the villains get hold of Dan’s address and lay siege one evening when he’s home alone. It’s all brilliantly tense — and the solution is ingenious, even if the police arrive very quickly. Still, it seems nuts that the police then leave Dan in the house alone for the rest of the night, assuming the villains won’t return. Also, why don’t the police insist on speaking to Dan’s parents, who would surely come home when they heard what had happened?

Next morning, the nice detective Dan has met, Inspector Day, gives the boy a stern talking to.

“It’s not like in books. It isn’t suspecting, it isn’t even knowing whodunnit that counts. It’s proving it.” (p. 110)

He advises Dan and his friends to give up the case and lie low. Of course, they do no such thing and — by somehow identifying a splash of mud on the side of a van briefly glimpsed as it sped past — they head by train to the Essex marshes for a final showdown.

This is clearly based on the real-life village of Althorne, the battered old houseboat that the villains use as a hideout just like the one where Terrance and his family had regular holidays. Terrance may well have written this section of the book there, his own children fizzing like Coke bottles around him. (I think the nature reserve as described in Doctor Who and the Three Doctors is the same spot.)

There’s other stuff of this sort: Dan’s room at the top of his old, terraced house, complete with office and sloping ceilings, is very much like the top floor of Terrance’s house in London, including the office where he worked. Mickey’s large Cockney family is very much like Terrance’s family, on his mother’s side. 

By peppering the book with such real details and observations, the more outlandish bits of adventure are kept grounded. It’s obviously a much more relatable story than the Mounties novels, and more real than Doctor Who. It is of its time but a cracking adventure, and leaves us wanting more. 

Art by John Bolton

The back cover promises two further titles: The Fagin Foundation and The Blackmail Boys, which were published in November 1978 and sometime in 1979, the suggestion being that, like the Mounties, this was commissioned as a trilogy. 

But the idea for the Mounties came from Richard Henwood. I think this is something different; it’s very much Terrance’s book: what he wanted to write, rather than what people wanted from him, for the first time since he became a novelist.

For more, see my list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts on them. You might also like my 2015 article “My Immortal Holmes” for the Lancet Psychiatry on the appeal of Sherlock.

Fools, by Pat Cadigan

First published in the US in 1992, and in the UK in 1994, Fools by Pat Cadigan won the Clark Award for best science-fiction novel in 1995. My SF Masterworks edition is from 2019 and features an introduction by Tricia Sullivan, another Clark Award winner.

The blurb on this edition is as follows:

“When Marva, a Method actress, wakes up in the hologram pool of a private club, dressed head to toe in expensive new clothes, and carrying more money than she’s seen in years, it’s clear something has gone very wrong.

The murder she now remembers can’t be good new either.

Finding herself pursued by deadly assassins, and starting to question evert facet of her identity, Marva must venture deep into the Downs of the city to unravel the mystery of what is happening to her. One thing, though, is abundantly clear:

This will be her most difficult role yet.”

That makes it sound relatively straightforward, but the book itself plunges us into a dizzying, noisy world where people can swap memories and so alter their personalities and who they are. There’s also a trade in emotional states such as paranoia, and a whole load of weird subcultures and fetishes, like the “onionhead” couples who beat up people they think have intruded on their own relationships. 

As we navigate all this, and the twisty plot, our narrator’s different personae are indicated by different typefaces. The mystery that unfolds is them trying to piece together the jumbled fragments of memory to suss out who they really are. 

The book is divided into three sections, and for much of Part 1, “Fool to Remember” (pp. 1-156) I struggled to keep up with all the mind-switching, and the densely rich cyberpunk setting. I think that’s rather the point — we’re as much lost as the protagonist.

In Part II, “Fool to Believe” (pp. 157-251), our protagonist receives a set of memories to change her persona, enabling her to go undercover in the mean streets of the Downs. Code words and getting hit can trigger a switch to the primary persona, so we flick back and forth between the two  personalities as things get more tense and dangerous. It builds and builds, and pays off really well.

Part III, “Nobody’s Fool” (pp. 253-299) is almost a coda, picking up on events some time later, but reveals things are not quite as we’d thought. It’s difficult to say more without spoiling things.

Along the way, there’s lots of stuff about the logistics of swapping and stealing memories. For example, there are mindwipes available for purchase to free people of difficult memories. But there are also predatory kinds of mindwipe, and the narrator likens this “mindsuck” to a kind of living death:

“A mindsuck is interred not in a grave but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the time, however, it’s only spottily reminiscent of the person that has been, as though the suck has freed an auxiliary person that had always been there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality. There was still a lot of controversy between the behaviorists and the biologists over that and plenty of theories but no clear-cut explanation.” (p. 161)

More than anything, Fools sparked my own vivid memories of the 1990s when I read loads of science-fiction of this kind, eating up the shared consciousness stuff in books by Philip K Dick and the VR puterspace that was prevalent in the Doctor Who New Adventures. Small details here and there are evidence of the time in which it was written: there’s a character told he can’t smoke in a theatre (p. 87) and a reference to “net-mail” (p. 89). It’s a story set in a near-future that is now a 30-year-distant past.

In her introduction, Tricia Sullivan asks why this and Cadigan’s other work haven’t been made into blockbuster films when “so many lesser works [of science-fiction] have” (p. xi). I’m not sure how you’d make this kind of story work on the screen given that it’s all about being in the head of the main character, or characters (but all in the same head). 

But I think it could work on audio, with different actors playing the different personae inside the same head.

Me on some other Clarke Award winners:

• Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer (winner 2025) 
• Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman (winner 2023) 
• The Animals in that Country, by Laura Jean McKay (winner 2021)
• The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell (winner 2020) 
• Rosewater, by Tade Thomson (winner 2019) 
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (winner 2017) 
• The Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (winner 2016) 
• The City & the City, by China Mieville (winner 2009)

(I’ve read much more of them, but don’t seem to have posted my thoughts. What a villain.)

New short story in What The World Needs Now, ed. Martin Edwards

I have a short story in the forthcoming anthology What The World Needs Now: Mystery Stories Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach, edited by Martin Edwards and with an introduction by Rupert Holmes. 

It’s being published by Level Best Books to raise money for autism charities in the US and UK. What The World Needs Now will be published on 30 June in the US and 7 July in the UK, and is available to preorder on Kindle at Amazon:

• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.co.uk
• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.com

I’ll share the title of my story and more details in due course. Blurb for the book as follows: 

What the World Needs Now is a book of brand new mystery short stories written by leading crime writers from around the world, inspired by the music of Burt Bacharach, to raise funds for autism charities in the US and UK.

Burt Bacharach is popular music’s closest equivalent to Agatha Christie, a hugely successful and innovative composer whose work is loved by millions across the world and continues to influence countless songwriters to this day.

Edgar and Diamond Dagger award-winning author Martin Edwards has put together a collection of hugely entertaining new mystery stories, each taking a title (and often much more than that) from a Bacharach song as the starting point. The result is a fascinating anthology that will appeal to mystery lovers everywhere.

Charles Todd, Mark Billingham, Ragnar Jonasson, and Abir Mukherjee are among the bestselling contributors to a book that is not only unique but dedicated to a truly worthwhile cause. 

All proceeds from What The World Needs Now will be donated by the publishers to autism charities in the US and UK.

Martin posted last month that other writers include Sarah Hilary, Rhian Waller and me. 

It’s been a delight to get to know Martin — and go for lunches — as I’m a big fan of his work. I’ve previously posted about his epic The Life of Crime and he is consultant on the British Library Crime Classics, including the following ones I have wittered about:

• Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand (1944)
• The Widow of Bath, by Margot Bennett (1952)  
• The Man Who Didn’t Fly, by Margot Bennett (1955)
• Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett (1958)

A Riot of Writers, by Terrance Dicks

First published on 16 July 1992, this was the second of a series of illustrated, non-fiction comedy titles written by Terrance Dicks for Piccadilly Press. 

Terrance had written numerous children’s books for Piccadilly since it was launched in 1984, and before that worked with the company’s founder, Brenda Gardner, at both Target Books and Pepper Press. This run of comedy titles seem to have been a conscious effort to try something a bit different, aimed at a broader and more grown-up audience than the usual fare. 

The first, Europe United (published 10 October 1991) was well timed given the imminent signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and was well received, too. In the Sunday Times, Harry Enfield called it, “The best Eurobook … bright and amusing … intelligent and great fun.” In the Guardian, Stephanie Nettle said it had, “A snappily amusing style”. They’re cited on the back of this follow-up.

As with Europe United, A Riot of Writers was illustrated by Ray Jelliffe, a former creative director in a large advertising agency who now, in his retirement, kept busy illustrating books and greetings cards. My suspicion, based on previous books by Terrance, is that the writer didn’t brief the illustrator. Instead, Jelliffe would have received the manuscript and then devised his cartoons, as a sort of commentary on the text.

The book is a guide to what Terrance calls “Eng Lit”, as though this is revision for an exam. It provides potted biographies of 30 writers, from Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) to Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), or to JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) if reckoning by the subject latest to die. Of this 30, there are four entries on women: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (sharing a chapter), George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. 

It’s interesting to compare Terrance’s choice of canonical authors with the much shorter list compiled by FR Leavis, Terrance’s tutor at Downing College, Cambridge, in the 1950s. In The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis decided that the canon of Great Authors comprised Austen, Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, though he also allowed a single book by Dickens, Hard Times. Terrance skips James and Conrad entirely, and clearly doesn’t think much of Eliot, though conceding that Middlemarch is a “masterpiece”.

Throughout, the style is chatty and irreverent, reminiscent of the later Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary (the initial pair of which were first published a year after this book, in June 1993). The humour is a bit end-of-the-pier, akin to Terrance’s early days in radio comedy, and sometimes a bit bawdy. For example, in the entry on Byron, we’re told:

“Fashionable hostesses were delighted to have him — and not just for dinner” (p. 46).

There are jokes, too, about bisexuality and homosexuality (the Bloomsbury group, for example, had enjoyed a “gay old time”), which all seems a bit mature for a title from a children’s publisher by a well-known children’s author, even if this isn’t explicitly marketed as a children’s book. It’s a kind of humour, and a book, from another time.

Terrance acknowledge’s Kipling’s chauvinism, and provides examples, but his attitude to Carrie Kipling is a bit judgemental.

“Kipling married Carrie — or perhaps she married him. She certainly ran his life from then on, doing his accounts, fixing his appointments, protecting him from visitors” (p. 120).

The sense is of a domineering figure, rather than this being something Kipling might welcome, or need. There is something similar going on in descriptions of both Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (p. 3) and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth (p. 7) as being “an early feminist” — the gag feels all the more condescending because it’s repeated so soon. 

The only mention of Henry James in the whole book is his reference to George Elliot as “magnificently ugly” (p. 83). Yes, this is Terrance reporting what was said at the time, but other authors are are not judged on their looks. In his entry on George Bernard Shaw, for example, he could have cited the famous story about Isadora Duncan suggesting that a child of theirs would inherit her beauty and his brains; Shaw quipped that it might be the other way round.

Terrance mentions that The Invisible Man by HG Wells was adapted for television, but not that he worked on this production. Several of the authors in his canon here were dramatised under Terrance’s era as script editor then producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serials: Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Doyle, Kipling and Wells. 

I’ve seen paperwork in which Terrance says he didn’t think Austen was suitable for the Sunday teatime serial, so it’s interesting to see here his evident admiration of her work. He also admires Shaw for the strident women at the forefront of many plays. Terrance, of course, borrowed from Pygmalion in Doctor Who, with the character arc of Jo Grant. Like Eliza Doolittle, Jo outgrows her tutor and leaves him heartbroken. But Terrance often downplayed his role in that and the creation of Sarah Jane Smith, who began life stridently championing women’s lib to sisters in the middle ages and in outer space. 

He also quotes a line from Shaw’s Arms and the Man with approval — it’s a very Terrance sentiment:

“You can always tell an old soldier … The young ones carry pistols and cartridges, the old ones grub” (p. 108)

There’s a joke on p. 10 at the expense of Jonathan Miller, who had repeatedly criticised the Classic Serials, Terrance apparently still rankled about it. Some of what’s here helpfully confirms my theories about Terrance’s views on particular authors or modes of writing. I’m delighted to find, for example, that he did have a contemporary drama in mind when commissioning his first Classic Serial, Kipling’s Stalky & Co:

“The Grange Hill of its day, it was severely criticised for the ‘horrible vileness’ of its picture of English public school life” (p. 121).

His thoughts on other writers are interesting, too. While Terrance was at Cambridge, his tutor FR Leavis published DH Lawrence, Novelist (1955), and I’ve evidence that Leavis passed on his enthusiasm for Lawrence to his students. Yet Terrance was not persuaded, or reassessed Lawrence in the years afterward.

He speaks — presumably from first-hand experience — of the “well-thumbed, smuggled-in copies” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that were all that were available until Penguin published its paperback edition in 1960. Then he shares his judgment: 

“Lawrence describes their love-making in graphic detail, using well-known four-letter words in the process. Despite its lurid reputation Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a worthwhile attempt to describe physical love in plain and honest language. To be honest, it doesn’t really work. Tweeness keeps creeping in. The couple refer to their respective naughty bits as ‘John Thomas’ and ‘Lady Jane’ and there’s an incident with a daisy-chain you’ll never see demonstrated on Gardeners’ World.” (p. 145)

Then there’s his assessment of Lawrence as a whole:

“He was a genuine pioneer, and his reputation has suffered ever since. Despite some weird, almost fascist ideas about the deep dark stirrings in the blood, and the need for an intellectual elite, Lawrence at his best is a wonderful writer. The characters he creates, their emotional relationships and the worlds they live in are real and solid, completely convincing.” (p. 144)

There are several places here where I disagree with Terrance and a couple of occasions where he’s misremembered the details of a classic text (he says, of The Time Machine, that the Eloi prey on Morlocks, not the other way round). But this is a fascinating account of what Terrance thought constituted great writing: basically, a good story grounded in real characters and real situations. For example, he suggests that the power of The Hobbit, and why it still sits above its many imitators, is not the epic imaginative fantasy, but the relatable stuff.

“Small, tubby and timid, caught up in the wars of great men and magical beings, the hobbit makes the most reluctant of heroes. All he asks is to survive and to get home to a blazing fire, a pipe, a flagon of ale and four square meals a day.” (p. 149)

It’s exactly what I’ve seen in his Doctor Who novelisations. You can judge the best of English literature by its meals.

***

For more of this kind of thing, see my big list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts about them. My biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published by Ten Acre Books later this year.

Here are some posts about books by authors in Terrance’s canon of Eng Lit:

• Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
• Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
• The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
• A Short History of the World, by HG Wells

A Hard Day’s Night, by Samira Ahmed

I really enjoyed this engaging insightful study of the first Beatles movie, filmed and released in 1964. It’s the first book written by my friend Samira, with whom I’ve made various documentaries for the BBC, and it’s amazing what she packs into the 128 pages. I thought I knew the film pretty well, but now want to watch it again to pick up on the little details and big connections.

In her “Introduction”, Samira explains some of the cultural context from which the film came, and her own relationship with it. In “Watching A Hard Day’s Night”, she recounts what happens on screen. This is much more than a summary of the plot, chock full of insights about what we see, and things for us to go back and spot, like the cameo by Bob Godfrey (p. 56) — he of Roobarb (1974), Henry’s Cat (1983-93) and the Academy award-winning musical animated biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great (1975).

“Making A Hard Day’s Night” is, as you’d expect, a history of the production, again full of great detail, like the fact that John and Paul so enjoyed the TV play No Trams to Lime Street (1959) by Alun Owen, who wrote the screenplay for this Beatles film, that they wrote four pages of a script in the same style, called Pilchard (pp. 72-73). I was particularly struck by what inspired Owen in setting out to write a film about the Beatles: seeing them in Dublin, he had a sense of them trapped by their commitments, their public, the whole machine (p. 73). 

“A Hard Day’s Night and TV” is about what the film shows us of (fictional) live TV broadcasting, and a kind of light entertainment line-up that was once a staple of telly and is now historical artefact. “Women in A Hard Day’s Night” is a compelling chapter on representation, with particular focus on Millie (Anna Quayle) and the unnamed Secretary (Alison Seebohm). I’m really taken with Samira’s idea of a movie telling the Beatles’ story from the perspective of their wives and girlfriends.

“Reception and What They Did Next” explores the critical response to the film and then what followed: another Beatles movie, Help!, also directed by Lester, and then more disparate projects. The sense is that A Hard Day’s Night was made and released quickly to cash-in on the popularity of the Beatles, assuming that the bubble wouldn’t last, but the film helped to establish them as something more than a flash-in-pan pop sensation. Then there’s a concluding chapter on “Legacy”, which ends on a poignant note.

Samira thinks a key moment in the history of all-things Beatles is the “Beatles at Christmas” season on BBC Two over Christmas 1979, not only because it’s when she discovered them but because it presented a body of work by artists. I looked up the details on Genome and Magical Mystery Tour (1967) was shown at 6.10pm on 21 December; Help! (1965) at 6.35 on 22 December; The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1965) at 5.30 on 23 December, Yellow Submarine (1968) at 5.40 on Christmas Eve and A Hard Day’s Night at 3pm Christmas Day. That they weren’t shown in chronological order suggests a value judgment; they’re in order of ascending quality, A Hard Day’s Night the best.

More of me on Beatles books:

• Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald
• Love and Let Die by John Higgs 

Star Trek 2, by James Blish

This second volume of prose adaptations of TV episodes was first published a year after the first, in February 1968. So says the indicia of my 3rd printing of the US edition, which is marked 50 cents on the spine but bears a sticker giving the UK price of 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in this form in the UK in August 1969, a month after Star Trek starting airing on the BBC — and three years before Corgi printed the first UK-specific editions of these Star Trek anthologies.

It looks quite different from the first Star Trek anthology, which boasted artwork by James Bama which had been commissioned to promote the TV show. Rather than commission — and have to pay for — new artwork, this volume features a photograph of what were surely considered the two leads of the series: Mr Spock and Captain Kirk (in that order). The photo is small, contained within a vertical strip of black down the centre of the otherwise white frame. The black strip includes the title “ALL NEW STAR TREK 2 adapted by James Blish”, the photo, and then the boast, 

“THE ULTIMATE TRIP! WORLDS BEYOND TIME! WORLDS BEYOND KEN! BASED ON THE EXCITING NBC-TV SERIES CREATED BY GENE RODDENBERRY”.

The back-cover blurb of the first book focused on three leading characters (Kirk, Spock and Rand), but the back cover here doesn’t name anyone:

“A GALACTIC TICKET TO INFINITE ADVENTURE! Eight journeys into the unexpected with the crew of the starship Enterprise. Travel to the unexplored reaches of outer space, to worlds where Humans are an alien race and the unusual is routine. Astonishing new worlds of strange beings, bizarre customs, unknown dangers and awesome excitement. * A world where war is fought by computers! * A world inhabited by great lizard-like creatures of conquest! * A world ravaged by a relentless plague of madness and death! * A world where life has developed beyond the need for physical bodies! * TRAVEL NOW TO THE BOLD NEW WORLDS OF TOMORROW.”

There’s a second blurb, inside the front page, largely cribbed from the first volume, but now the three leads are Kirk, Spock and Lt Uhura. The latter has usurped Yeoman Janice Rand in her shipmates’ affections but is described in almost all the same words:

“Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly ‘out-of-this-world’ female has drawn the important assignment of scan engineer on her first mission in deep space.”

There’s no mention that she’s black, or Bantu (the word used repeatedly about her in the first book). Did the publishers fear that mentioning this, or showing the third-lead on the cover, might affect their sales?

The book is dedicated,

“To my new-found relative BARBARA BESADNY and all the other Star Trek fans who wrote to me about the first book”

In later books, Blish referred to extensive correspondence he received about Star Trek, not least once the TV series was cancelled. The first book had been dedicated to Harlan Ellison, a writer on the series, but from now on when Blish dedicated a book it was to female fans. Spock Must Die! (1970) is dedicated “to Kay Anderson”, Star Trek 4 (first published in the US in July 1971) is dedicated.

“To DONNA WOODMAN and the the other new English Star Trek fans”,

Star Trek 9 (1973) is dedicated “To Maire Steele” and Star Trek 10 (1974) “to KARIN who also wanted to set Spock to music”. It gives the impression, at least, of an active, engaged and female-led fandom.

Star Trek 2 boasts the same page count as the first volume (128pp including unnumbered pages), but comprises eight stories rather than seven. They are: Arena (12pp); A Taste of Armageddon (13pp); Tomorrow is Yesterday (15pp); Errand of Mercy (15pp); Court Martial (16pp); Operation — Annihilate! (18pp); The City on the Edge of Forever (17pp); and Space Seed (17pp). 

The original plan had been to pack eighth stories into the first volume, too, and I wonder if Blish and the publishers felt it represented better value to feature more stories. The result, of course, is that the adaptations here are even breezier than before.

The running order seems determined by ascending page count rather than broadcast order or the continuity of the TV series, such as in the use of star dates. Even so, Blish includes a few references in later stories to earlier ones (and to events in the first volume), so there’s a sense of a continuing saga. 

We gain some new information, and some corrections to statements in the first volume. We’re in the 23rd century (p. 114) not the 27th and we’re told more than once that the Enterprise can’t land on planets (not the implication in the first book). Blish also moves events of Tomorrow is Yesterday from the 1960s, as on screen, to 1970 — which he gives as the year of the first Moon landing (p. 28). The same story, but the setting bumped along so it is / was still in the near future.

The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (p. 1), where before the figure was a vague 400+. A quarter of the crew are female, and there are 12 ships like Enterprise in the fleet (both facts from p. 30). Warp Four is 64 times the speeds of light, or “64c” (p. 26), while,

“Warp Eight [is] two factors above maximum safe speed” and “over a hundred times the speed of light” (p. 2).

However, Warp Eight is used only in emergencies and not for long, as it would damage the ship (p. 38).

In one story, Scotty refers to the Enterprise’s protective “screens” (p. 22), but in the next story it’s the more familiar “deflector shields” (p. 31). A single star date is given in the whole book: Lt Col Ben Finney “died” in 2947.3 (p. 59).

Not everything is taken from the TV episodes, or from draft scripts containing extra or contrary details. It’s been fun to spot things that are surely all from Blish. Tomorrow is Yesterday features a character called John Christopher; here, Spock refers to the “popular author” or the same name (p. 33), whom Blish surely knew in person.

Later, in Space Seed, Kirk is annoyed at being asphyxiated twice in the same hour (p. 120), Blish rather hanging a lantern on the repetition in the TV story. He also gives Kirk’s perspective a wry humour, such as his response — in the narration but from his point of view, when Spock tries to use telepathy on a guard holding them both prisoner:

“Nothing seemed to happen for at least five centuries, or maybe six” (p. 16).

I’m sure that scholars before me have dissected these anthologies by what’s in the TV episode, what in a draft script and what Blish threw in for his own amusement. He opens City on the Edge of Forever with a seven-line footnote explaining that it draws from both TV version and draft script (p. 89), apparently the only example where he consciously mashed up the sources. 

My suspicion is that the TV episodes are riddled with continuity errors, where a fact given in one episode doesn’t quite match a fact given in another. We might not notice on first viewing, not least with a week between each episodes. But the brevity of the adaptations here, the speed we can hare through several episodes at once, means we’re more likely to pick up on this stuff. 

The most striking bits of continuity, for me, are those that overlap with the later Star Trek movies of the 1980s — the bits of Trek with which I’m most familiar. In Tomorrow is Yesterday, the suggestion that a pilot from 1970 could travel with the the Enterprise into the future is quickly dismissed as he would be,

“archaic, useless, a curiosity” (p. 35).

But that’s in no way the fate of cetologist Dr Gillian Taylor in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), who finds a useful role in the future. That’s all the more striking because that film clearly drew directly from this episode in its method of time travel by flying the Enterprise close to the Sun (p. 36).

Likewise, in Operation — Annihilate!, the Enterprise fires “two fully armed planet-wreckers” that explode with “atomic fire” and destroy a whole plant, leaving behind a nebula (p. 87). This seems to be standard if rarely used artillery on board but in another episode, The Doomsday Machine (adapted in Star Trek 3) and the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the very idea of a planet-destroying weapon is a new, horrific kind of menace.

The final story here is Space Seed, which ends with Kirk sending a gang of villains to settle a new world. He worries that this crop from this seed (his words) might one day come looking for him again, which is exactly what happens in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But in that, the villains are found dwelling on the planet’s surface in their old ship Botany Bay. Here, Kirk sends them down to the planet without their ship, and keeps Botany Bay in tow, thinking it might be of interest to historians. 

Space Seed, of course, involves villainous eugenicist megalomaniac who hails from the 1990s, here called Sibyl Khan Noonien— Blish working from draft scripts — and “dictator of his own breed” (p. 116). Our first sight of him presents an exotic mix of different racial characteristics:

“bathed in a gentle violet glow was a motionless, naked man. He was extremely handsome, and magnificently built. His face reflected the sun-ripened Aryan blood of the Northern Indian Sikhs, with just an additional suggestion on the oriental. Even in repose, his features suggested strength, intelligence, even arrogance.” (p. 108)

Here and elsewhere, what a person looks like is an indicator of their character and inner thoughts, which is all a bit racist for a story about eugenicists being bad. Blish also uses “oriental” as a synonym for “alien”:

“The Klingons were hard-faced, hard-muscled men, originally of Oriental stock” (p. 44). 

That surely implies they originated on Earth. In the next book Spock’s quarters are “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental” (Star Trek 3, p. 106) and here, at the end of Tomorrow is Yesterday, in a sequence not in the TV version, he quotes from “Omar” (Star Trek 2, p. 39); Spock is not only familiar with the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, but on first-name terms with its author.

Dr McCoy refers to “basic humanoid stock” and to the “genetic drift” of a population of colonists who left Earth centuries previously (p. 95). He’s not exactly tactful in his choice of words: elsewhere, he refers to people afflicted by alien parasites as “vegetables” (p. 74). 

The same page features oddly vernacular phrasing from Spock, when he refers to the alien parasites:

"they wanted to brain us” (p. 74).

I also thought Kirk saying “Blooey” and referring to “Miss Uhura” (both p. 27) oddly out of character. It’s from Kirk’s perspective that we first see Edith Keeler in The City at the Edge of Forever. 

“The girl … was simply dressed and not very pretty” (p. 96)

That’s extraordinary for a character played by Joan Collins and with whom Kirk is about to fall in love. Indeed, “No woman was ever loved as much”, we’re told at the end of the story. There’s a tender moment between Spock and Kirk, when the former offers to take his grieving friend to Vulcan, where the nights are long and restful. Kirk responds that they have “all the time in the world” (p. 105).

This isn’t in the broadcast version so must come from Harlan Ellison’s original draft. (I thought, initially, that “all the time in the world” might be Blish linking these tragic events to another grieving hero, but the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was released in 1969, a year after this book. ETA Steven Flanagan points out that it is the last line of the novel, published in 1963, so perhaps Blish did have that in mind...)

Blish also says that these closing moments are the first time Spock calls Kirk “Jim” (p. 105), a key moment. It’s all a much more emotional scene between the two men than the TV version. I wonder: was Blish responding to those active female fans and what they saw — and wanted to see — in the relationship?

The adventure will continue in Star Trek 3...