Arise to Conquer, by Wing Commander Ian Gleed, DFC

A friend recommended this extraordinary first-hand account of the Battle of Britain by one of the Hurricane pilots, written soon after the events of the summer of 1940 and published in 1942. That was just as well, as Wing Commander “Widge” Gleed was killed in action the following year. I got hold of a first edition, yet knowing his fate casts a shadow as I read it. His friends are shot down, he’s in a serious accident, he wonders about his odds, and won’t make long-term plans... 

The book begins on the morning of 3 September 1939, with Gleed woken by his batman, going for breakfast with other pilots, then to check his plane out on the ’drome before listening to the Prime Minister’s announcement on the radio. Yet war doesn’t kick off immediately — the expected Blitz doesn’t come, at least not at first.

“For days there had been no action” except instructions on what to do in an air raid, the business of blacking out building and vehicles, and ominous warnings of fuel rationing that is bad news for one friend, Micky, who owns a rather fuel-thirsty Buick.

The commanding officer knows Gleed as “Leeds” (p. 14), his fellow pilots called him “Widget” or “Widge”; of the latter, he claims “I don’t know why” (p. 15), but Wikipedia suggests it was because he wasn’t very tall. He must have known that but chose not to say, the first of several examples of him not being entirely honest with the reader.

Given a forty-eighter, or 48 hours’ leave, he heads to Herne Bay with his girlfriend Pam, where they sail his boat to Broadstairs — where she lives — without formal permission to be in the water, running the risk of being apprehended or hitting mines. They chance their luck anyhow and, “It was a wizard day,” he says (p. 19) — an adjective he uses a lot. So here he is, cheerful, optimistic, a bit gleefully mischievous. 

Yet this scene and several that follow read very differently when we know Pamela didn’t exist. Gleed later claimed he invented a girlfriend for the book because reader’s like a romance. But in later years, some people who knew Gleed claimed he was gay. So I found myself reading the frequent references to Pam wondering if she was entirely invented, and how much she might stand in for someone else, a man Gleed was close to but did not dare put in print.

For example, Gleed has a last weekend with his parents in Finchley before being posted to France. His mum has amassed a great wealth of supplies for him to take, including two rolls of loo paper; his father — a veteran of the First World War — knows he’ll want to travel light. Meanwhile,

“Daphne, my sister, ‘phoned up Pam for me, and asked her to come and stay the night with us—rather a tall order for her, as she was at home at Broadstairs. She said that she would be arriving at Victoria at ten that evening, and would I meet her?” (p. 24)

He and Pam stay up until the early hours talking, and in the morning Mum can barely keep the tears back, Daphne has to blow her nose a lot, “and Pam and Dad smiled.” If Pam never existed, did something like this still play out, with Daphne — perhaps knowing more than Mum and Dad about the nature of the relationship — inviting someone else?

Then there are some other encounters. In France, Gleed arrives in Merville to find the place crowded with troops and refugees, but he finds a house with a huge double bed going spare, and offers to share it with another pilot, John Banks:

“He was a young boy, who was looking very tired … After asking the lady of the house to wake us at four-thirty, we retired to our room with a couple of candles, stripped and leapt into bed naked. … In two minutes I was asleep.” (p. 40).

In Lille, Gleed and another pilot are the only ones not to befriend the local sex workers and find a double room together (p. 26). It’s at least suggestive.

These infrequent moments aside, the bulk of the book is vivid descriptions of battle in the air. He gives a really good sense of the nerves before a flight and the eagerness to get airborne and have a crack at the enemy. Then, when specks of black appear in the sky, we’re suddenly “Tally-ho” and into the frantic business, the breathless style often passing into internal dialogue and the present tense. Brrrrrrrrm! he tells us, and rat tat tat, rat tat tat.

There’s a lot of slang — Gleed feels the need of footnotes to explain “bull” (red tape),  “flap” (a fuss), “a bind” (a chore), “bumf” (paper), “duffs up” (conditions becoming hazy or cloudy; by extension “duff” means anything going wrong), “force-lob” (forced landing), “piece of cake” (easy), “gong” (medal). I wonder how much war films are to blame for much of this passing into common use. He uses “wizard” a lot, and also “old boy” — the latter still a favourite of my paternal grandfather, who was also in the RAF in the war; it's how he addressed me in my teens and twenties. 

Gleed uses “damned” and “bastard” but there are several instances of a censored “b——s”, not least in referring to the enemy. There are also footnotes for the technical terms used by the RAF: “gen” (genuine information, to be relied on), “black-out” (rendered unconscious by by pulling too quickly out of a dive or turning too quickly), “perspex” and “glasshouse” (the hood of the cockpit), and “super-readiness” (pilots sitting in their planes so they can be airborne in 15 seconds). Pilots shout “Contact” to ground crews when their planes are starting up, and wish one another “Good hunting”. A system for producing a little extra speed is known as a “tit”, which results in an extraordinary sentence in the midst of one scrap:

“I was balls out with the tit pulled” (p. 79).

He’s good on other details: the role of batmen in running round after their pilots, getting them washed and packed and fed; the different types of Hurricane screw; the physical impact of flying (lots of sweating, plus sore arms); and the nature of tests conducted on pilots — a naked examination where Gleed is worried about having dirty feet, then a sight test involving being able to discern tiny letters or figures on a colour background, then blowing a bubble of mercury up a tube and holding it there, as seen in The Right Stuff. 

There’s also good detail on what pilots do in their time off. There’s a lot of drinking — one evening involves, “sherry, champagne and port; then, after that, beer” (p. 15). Once promoted to Wing Commander, Gleed is a bit more careful:

“We all drank orange squash, much to Robbie’s disgust. I was strict about that, as we had a long time to wait, and it’s so damned easy to drink quietly away, not noticing how many beers you have; by the time midnight came we would have been in no condition for a ground-straff. So orange squash it was.” (p. 93)

We learn the pilots share a copy of the book Gone With the Wind (p. 55), read detective novels and magazines, and go to the flicks or the theatre — after getting his gong from the King at Buckingham Palace, Gleed has lunch at the Savoy and then sees Cottage to Let. Pilots lark about, build model aircraft, eat lots of bacon and eggs and worry about getting their tea. It’s a convivial fraternity with Cock, Robbie, Dusty, Watty, Dinky, Beaver, Dickie, Rubber, etc — and so all the more shocking when some of these chaps don’t come home. There’s a poignant chapter in which a few men attend the funeral of one man, Squadron-Leader “Shuvvel” Forbes, killed in the big blitz on 14 August 1940. He’s from New Zealand so has no relatives nearby; his colleagues fly in for the ceremony, place their wreaths and then fly back to HQ ready for the next scrap, trying not to think too much about their own mortality.

All in all, this is an invaluable primary source. For all that bits may be invented, it conjures the sounds and atmosphere. The tone of it, the I-say-you-chaps, is very like the other books I’ve read on the subject and the films of the time, though I think anyone writing about the Battle of Britain or the pilots of the time — my forthcoming Doctor Who — The Missing Hour involves Hurricane pilots on Malta around this same period — may find it too easy to fall into pastiche. That would be a pity given that this book, this record of a man on borrowed time, is so bracingly alive.

I have also been recommended Flying to the Limit (1996) by Roland Beaumont, who flew with Gleed. More on that to come...

Jean Steps Out, by Jean Kitson

Published this month, Jean Steps Out: The Memoirs of a Yorkshire Actress in Rep 1946-1959 is an account by Jean Kitson (1928-2020) of her years with Harry Hanson’s Court Players in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Keighley, Chester, Stockport and Swansea. It’s been published by her son David, who provides notes, a list of his mother’s known stage performances and biographies of the other actors in the company. That includes Jean’s sometime boyfriend, David Whitaker, about whom I wrote a book.

Jean and David were both in the cast of Murder at the Vicarage at the Prince’s Theatre, Bradford, performed during the week of 19-24 February 1951, and rehearsed the week before. They remained in Bradford for the next couple of months and then both transferred to the Theatre Royal, Leeds, their last known credit together Night Call, which ran from 24 to 29 November 1952. In the new year, David joined the Hanson company in Stockton-on-Tees and Jean rejoined the company in Bradford.

This memoir is an engaging account, full of anecdotes about the practicalities of repertory theatre: what exactly an assistant stage manager does, and how they move up to full actor; the fact Harry Hanson wouldn’t allow prompting of lines in actual performances; his kindness and support in turning up for shows across the country; the fact he chose the plays he thought his audience would pay for, imposing them on his companies. 

For a researcher like me, it’s useful to know what Jean got paid — having left school, she was on 25 shilling at week at a mill office in Morley, then £2 a week at the Inland Revenue, then £4 a week as ASM at the Theatre Royal in Leeds, so joining the theatre was a step up from ordinary work. Still, there were privations: the cold, the struggle to find costumes and props, even the accommodation. For a season of plays in south Wales, Jean had to share a bed with leading lady Joyce Cross (p. 21).

Yet this is a cheery account of a fondly remembered period. Jean’s enthusiasm for her days in rep is matched by her delight in the later success of many actors she worked with — Billie Whitelaw, Peggy Mount, Patricia Pilkington (ie Pat Phoenix), Francis Matthews and Bryan Mosley, as well as future Labour MP Gerald Kaufman. I was particularly interested to read more about names that are perhaps less well known but are familiar to me from the cast lists and reviews of David Whitaker’s own stage plays, such as Cissie Ashley, Lawrence Storm and Frank Senior.

And then, at the end, the book includes a QR code with a link to an audio recording of Jean and (it’s thought) John Whyte in a scene from the play Jean Steps Out and with John Roberts in a scene from Quiet Wedding, both recorded in 1948. The former is rather risqué — Basil calls the bluff of his fiancé’s flirtatious sister Jane by turning up in her bedroom one night. The accents are cut-glass, a hint of the north-east still discernible under vowels stretched by elocution. It’s a vivid bit of social history, suddenly alive — and gave me shivers.

Sadly, for my purposes, there’s no mention in what Jean wrote of David Whitaker, as either actor or boyfriend, but Jean’s son David has kindly told me what his mother told him. Indeed, he got in touch because he recognised his mother in one of the photos included in my biography. The memoir provides some context for that picture:

“During the summer months many of the towns we played on organised Sunday afternoon fetes and galas. Celebrities were sought on these occasions, not only to perform the opening ceremony but to crown the Carnival Queen and sometimes judge a fancy dress competition. Not having access either to Royalty or the film industry the organisers looked closer to home, and that’s where the Court Players came in handy.

“We girls always thought it was well worthwhile. I’m not sure the men were quite so enthusiastic but they gallantly came along as escorts ... For us it was a rare opportunity to dress up glamorously, be picked up with some ceremony at the Stage Door and whisked away to a summer afternoon of festivity.” (p. 66)

So here is David Whitaker, on his feet and in mid-flow, in the summer of either 1951 or 1952, presumably in Leeds. Jean is beside him in the white hat. There is a prize cup on the table in front of them, about to be awarded. David and Jean are both 23 or 24 in the picture.

Sadly, Jean probably didn’t know that David immortalised her in the names of the protagonists of his episode of Public Eye (1968) — Valerie and Eric Kitson, played by Sheila Fearn and Edward Fox.

See also:

• Jean Kitson at Theatricalia
• David Whitaker at Theatricalia

The Great Dictator, by Matthew Sweet

The Dr and I had a lovely time this week in That London, at the launch for this new biography of Barbara Cartland by our pal Matthew. It was lovely to catch up with old mates and natter to new people. 

The book is magnificent, in part because its subject is so extraordinary, at once compelling and alarming. I found the accounts of her brothers’ wartime experience especially moving, and the attempts to cash in on the family connection to Princess Diana particularly cringe-inducing. But the book is also peppered with other, extraordinary lives — the various scrapes of Commander Glen Kidston, which begins with him as a 16 year-old naval cadet being torpedoed and rescued twice in one morning in 1914 (p. 146), or the amazing locked-room mystery of a man who somehow fell from a plane (p. 148). 

As ever, Matthew has an eye for the telling detail, the incongruous and absurd — such as the promotion to give away Cartland’s books to customers of a particular butcher. As he says, she’s a major figure of the 20th century, so her life is a kind affords a new history of that period, stranger than we might expect.

It is also a new experience to be papped.

London, UK. 9 September 2026. (C) Simon Guerrier, writer, attends the launch party of The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland by Matthew Sweet (Hodder & Stoughton) taking place at The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square. Guests were encouraged to wear pink to honour Barbara Cartland. Credit: Stephen Chung / Alamy Live News

See also: me on Bookish Volume II by Matthew Sweet.

Star Trek 4, by James Blish

Star Trek is 60 years-old today, sort of. Over the weekend of 1-5 September 1966, its pilot episode The Menagerie was shown to attendees of the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio — says p. 93 of this book. The series proper began with The Man Trap, broadcast on CTV in Canada on 6 September and on NBC in the US two days later. It wasn’t shown in the UK for almost another three years.

Anyway, this fourth anthology of prose versions of TV episodes was published in the US in July 1971 and issued in the UK in October, price 25p (the first Star Trek book in New Pence). It was the last of five Star Trek books available in the UK prior to 8 March 1972, the date on which Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks wrote to writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, asking (among other things) for the return of the Star Trek books he’d loaned them. So, this is my final post on the subject of the influence of these books on Doctor Who of that period.

(For more of this stuff see my posts on Blish’s Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3 and the original novel Spock Must Die!, plus my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49 and my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks...)

The cover of Star Trek 4 looks very different from previous books, with artwork depicting the USS Enterprise in space, between two pale blue worlds. For the first time, there’s no artwork or photograph of the main characters — I wonder if, like with the later Doctor Who novelisations, there were issues over fees owed to actors. As with the previous volume, this is “all new award-winning” Star Trek, though that “new” is a little ingenuous: the adventures here were all broadcast on TV at least three years previously.

The book is dedicated “To Donna Woodman and the other new English Star Trek fans”, the author having now settled in the UK and, through these books, found himself the locus of an active fandom determined to see Star Trek resurrected. In his preface, Blish says he receives a lot of letters from fans and uses them to decide which stories to adapt next — suggesting he had free choice, rather than having it imposed by the publisher or rights-holder. 

He tells us that The Menagerie, adapted in this volume, won the prestigious Hugo award in 1967 and City on the Edge of Forever (adapted in Star Trek 2) won in 1968, but that the subsequent cancellation of the series meant there was nothing to nominate for the award in 1970. This is not entirely honest. For one thing, it misses out the 1969 awards entirely, where no Star Trek episodes were nominated. Technically, Star Trek could have been nominated in 1970 — any of the the 11 new episodes first broadcast in 1969 would have been eligible. But for two years running, it seems, the series was on air but not considered good enough by science-fiction fans.

Production on Star Trek ended in 1969, so Blish was faced with a limited number of episodes to choose from for these books, and an even more limited number of good episodes. But he’d also by this point committed to double the number of these books: 

“As matters stand now, there will be at least four more, all within the next year or so” (p. ix).

That may explain why there are just six episodes in this book, so as not to burn through the fuel. But I think it also explains the peculiar choice of first story.

All Our Yesterdays involves yet another time travel portal, on this occasion dumping our heroes back in a superstitious period. Spock gets emotional and snogs a woman because, we learn, he is 10,000 years back in time and that's what Vulcans were like back then — as if the psychology of his people, even on a far distant world, is contagious. There’s no effort to suggest that the same is true of humans. Anyway, the basic wheeze is that Kirk, with his technological gizmos, is accused of witchcraft. There’s a bit of running about. It’s not very good.

The Devil in the Dark is much better. It’s set on the planet Janus — not Janus VI as on TV — which is rich in the element pergium, atomic number 358. Mining operations for this precious resource are halted by a “big and kind of shaggy monster” (p. 23) that kills an engineer. There are references to new sci-fi material teflon (p. 24 and p. 26), a recent real-life invention of the space age, and Kirk is surprised that people here still use old-fashioned technology like fission (p. 27), because the Enterprise gets its energy from antimatter (p. 25). There’s no mention of teflon, fission or antimatter in the TV episodes, so this sci-fi materials stuff must all come from Blish.

At one heroic moment, Kirk says, “I feel the need for a conference” (p. 29), meaning a planning meeting to decide the next move. I tend to think of sci-fi business meetings round a table, all Walter Citrine in space, as a characteristic of The Next Generation, so this early version caught my attention. But “conference” is also the word Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks and producer Barry Letts used for their meetings with writers to discuss potential storylines, scene breakdowns and scripts. I’ve seen no evidence of the term being used on Doctor Who before this, so the intriguing thought is they took the word from Kirk to make their natters about plot logic sound a bit more dynamic…

If that’s a bit fanciful, elements of this episode were surely a direct influence on them. The plot, involving the last survivor of an intelligent alien species attacking human miners, only for us to realise the alien is quite nice, surely helped to shape The Curse of Peladon (1972). You can almost hear Spock addressing the Third Doctor in one exchange (though he’s really addressing McCoy):

“No creature is monstrous in its own environment, Doctor. And this one appears to be Intelligent, as well.” (p. 29)

I’ve previously argued that the influence of Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror on Doctor Who story Inferno (1970) must have been via the book rather than the TV episode, given relative dates they were available in the UK. Here, the opposite must be true: scripts for The Curse of Peladon were commissioned on 14 May 1971, after a storyline conference between Dicks, Letts and writer Brian Hayles on 1 March — months before this book was issued in the UK. But The Devil in the Dark was broadcast on BBC One at 17.15 on Saturday 6 September 1969 and repeated on 17 March 1971, the latter just as the plot for The Curse of Peladon was being worked out. So, it was the repeat that influenced Doctor Who.

Hayles said himself that he drew on Conan-Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), with attacks by a mythical creature revealed to be a hoax. Yet his Doctor Who story is much closer to what happens with the Horta here. The whole feel of the Doctor Who story, with a sci-fi trip to a civilisation that feels if not ancient than medieval may mean All Our Yesterdays was also an influence.

Both TV episode and book version of The Devil in the Dark reveal the Horta to be a silicon-based life form, which may have influenced Baker and Martin’s later Doctor Who story The Hand of Fear (1976). Blish thought beyond the surface of this creature, and tells us it has teflon-like internal tubing — a stone on the outside but with circulatory system of molten plastic.

Spock sets out his case for not killing the creature even before he’s learned its soft centre:

“If this is the only survivor of a dead race, to kill it would be a crime against science.”

Kirk seems to find this eccentric: 

“Spock in particular was sometimes inclined to hold his fire when his conservation instincts, or his scientific curiosity, were aroused” (p. 34).

He supports his friend, but is bemused by this hippy/ecowarrior/woke sensibility. I would argue thaty this sensibility is very much in line with the Third Doctor — and a new development compared to previous incarnations. I contend that this Star Trek influenced both the character of the Third Doctor and the adventures he had.

Blish describes something quite different to the blobby creature seen on screen:

“It was huge, shaggy, multicolored, and knobbly with objects which might have been heads, sense organs, hands” (p. 37).

The shagginess is much more like Aggedor in The Curse of Peladon, so perhaps the book informed the design of that story — which went into production after this book was available in the UK. 

The TV episode and the book both reveal the simplistic way in which the Horta communicates with humans: “No Kill” it says (p. 39). Blish suggests in the altar and chamber something of the creature’s culture (p. 40). I think this inspired more than stuff in Doctor Who; amaze amaze, there’s quite a bit of the Horta in Rocky in Project Hail Mary.

In treating the wounded stone creature, McCoy uses thermoconcrete — a fun gag — and gets to use the first iteration of his, “I’m a doctor” catchphrase; in this case, he is not a bricklayer (p. 41). At the end of the story, the Horta and its progeny agree to help the humans with their mining. Spock says the agreement is logical, but I can’t think what’s in it for these indigenous creatures as their world is plundered.

That, I think, is where The Curse of Peladon is notably different from Star Trek. Doctor Who of this period is much more ambivalent about the virtues of the Federation and Earth Empire, which Terrance acknowledged quite openly:

“You can’t just do a kind of old imperial story whereby the galactic federation is coming to Peladon and is bringing the simplistic natives the benefits of civilisation, like Sanders of Africa bringing law and order to Africa. This isn’t how people think any more, even with a family adventure serial. We are all well aware now that what happens when an advanced [people] meet a primitive [one] is not always to the benefit of the primitives.” — Terrance interviewed by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado for Doctor Who — The Unfolding Text (1983), p. 53.

The next story in the book, Journey to Babel, begins with Dr McCoy asking Spock for a demonstration of the Vulcan salute, which we’re told is “complex” and that McCoy cannot reproduce, making it sound more like the flourish of Arnold J Rimmer in Red Dwarf than the familiar split-fingers thing. Again, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen to miss something so well known. 

The concern about such protocol is that Kirk, Spock and McCoy are welcoming aboard a Vulcan ambassador called Sarek. Kirk knows this Sarek is 102 years-old, but not that he is Spock’s dad. The awkwardness that follows is surely because Kirk has been badly briefed; I reckon by AI.

There’s some fun stuff about Spock’s people, such as that a Vulcan teddy bear, a sehlat, is alive and has six-inch fangs (p. 51). (No, even I think it’s going too far to suggest that that could have been an influence on the troll doll in Terror of the Autons.)

Sarek is one of a number of delegates squabbling over whether to allow planet Coridan to join the Federation. The issue is that, 

“Coridans have a nearly unlimited wealth of dilithium crystals, but are underpopulated and unprotected. This invites illegal mining operations.” (p. 52)

Of course, the Federation is acting entirely altruistically and it’s just one heck of a coincidence that its fleet of starships run on exactly these crystals. One delegate, a Tellarite, is then murdered and we must work out the culprit. That is all very The Curse of Peladon, though Journey to Babel was first broadcast in the UK on Monday, 22 June 1970, a month after scripts had been commissioned for that Doctor Who story.

There are some notable details here: McCoy can give Kirk orders; Spock trusts McCoy, “to McCoy’s obvious startlement” (p. 58); and Spock insists on observing protocol even if means doing so at the expense of his own father (p. 59). Spock’s relationship with his father doesn’t seem logical in the slightest, but hush, you’re spoiling the story.

At the end, Spock exposes the real villains — smugglers from Orion trying to cause chaos and play off both sides (p. 66). There’s something of that in The Curse of Peladon and another Doctor Who story, Frontier in Space (1973), though I think the latter owes more to the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). In fact, I wonder if that film inspired elements of this Star Trek.

The Menagerie begins with a 15-line footnote explaining that Blish felt it too confusing to adapt the broadcast version, which added lots of new material involving Kirk etc to the untransmitted pilot episode which had Spock under the command of a different captain. Instead of all the dramatic business of Spock-now facing court martial, Blish simply adapted the script of the pilot, in the process restoring the original ending not seen on broadcast. 

Reading it now, with these episodes readily available to watch or rewatch, that means the adaptation offers intriguing details about the original conception and development of this key story. But I can a Star Trek fan of the time feeling a bit short-changed to lose half the TV story — including all the “proper” bits of Star Trek, such as Kirk, McCoy etc. Our relationship to the book is different when it is the only permanent record of ephemeral TV.

Blish says that The Menagerie was the only two-part Star Trek story of the orignal run because the producers didn’t feel it worked. That is odd because it works very well, I think. Indeed, some of my favourite moments of later iterations of Star Trek are its cliffhangers.

The story begins in the aftermath of the Enterprise’s maiden battle, somewhere around Rigel VIII, with Spock still limping from whatever was involved (p. 69). Blish underlines how remarkable it is that Pike doesn't think twice about leaving the Enterprise in the command of Number One — a woman. She is,

“Slim and dark in a Nile Valley sort of way, she was one of those women who always look the same between the ages of twenty and fifty, but she had a mind like the proverbial steel trap, and Pike have never seen her shaken in any situation” (p. 70).

But Blish doesn’t think — or have the authority — to provide her with a name. (In the TV series Strange New Worlds, the character’s name is Una, which is a nice play on “number one” but also in rightful homage to my pal Una McCormack, and surely the coolest thing ever to happen to a TV tie-in writer.)

Blish refers to the “dematerialization of the Transporter” (p. 72). This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The TARDIS is said to “dematerialise” (or it is “dematerialising” or has “dematerialised”) in dialogue used in TV stories The Time Meddler and The Myth Makers (1965), The Daleks Master Plan (1965-66) and The Smugglers (1966). My guess is that that was the influence of story editor Dennis Spooner, picked up by his immediate successor Donald Tosh. But the word then fell by the wayside.

But then the term was picked up again by Terrance Dicks in exactly the period of Doctor Who that I think was influenced a lot by Star Trek. Not only does the TARDIS dematerialise, it boasts a dematerialisation circuit. In that sense, the word is used in dialogue in Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos and Colony In Space (1971), Day of the Daleks and The Time Monster (1972), The Three Doctors (1972-73), The Green Death (1973) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974).

That can’t come from this book, which was published after those 1971 episodes. But perhaps Terrance took the word “dematerialise” from the Star Trek episode Return to Tomorrow, where Scotty uses it to refer to the transporter. That episode was first broadcast in the UK on 17 August 1970, just as scripts for Terror of the Autons were being finalised. Yes, yes, it’s a stretch, but I’m rather delighted by the thought that such a potent word in Doctor Who might have been pinched from the opposition.

Whatever the case, the fantasy realm Captain Pike encounters here is described as, “almost like that of an Oriental potentate” (p. 84); the latest example in these books of Oriental to mean “alien but sexy". There seems a genuine risk that Pike might give up Star Fleet and go with these fantasy slave traders, even before, “Pike saw another girl, nude, her skin green” (p. 85) which tempts him further. This is Vina, her name surely taken from Weena in The Time Machine by HG Wells. Like Pike, she seems quite keen on the fantasy, protesting, “No, let us finish” (p. 86) when it threatens to stop.

At the end of the story, Pike escapes the fantasy world and Vina, but his experience affects how this captain, in charge of a crew of competent people not judged by their sex, now views some members of his crew:

“Pike could not resist stealing a quick look from Number One to [Yeoman] Colt, wondering which of them, in other circumstances, he might have picked.”

Nicely, Blish ends with a twist on this, empowering the two women:

“When he found them both looking at him as if with the same speculation, he turned his eyes determinedly to the viewscreen and banished the thought” (p. 93).

In his afterword, Blish notes that it was decided that this dynamic of captain and two potential love interests would not sustain many episodes of the TV show so it was abandoned. In other changes, he says, Number One was demoted and became Lt Uhura, Colt became Janice Rand, medical officer Boyce becames McCoy, and Tyler became Sulu.

“The net effect was to make the new officers more interracial than before” (p. 94).

He concludes that he sometimes gets letters criticising his adaptations for being different to those as broadcast — presumably from fans with audio recordings of the episodes. He says, “I had to make my own judgment of what would best serve the authors’ intents”, showing fidelity to what was in their heads, if not what they typed.

Next up is The Enterprise Incident, the first adaptation in these books of a third season episode, in which Kirk is working under sealed orders that seem irrational. To keep the secret, he plays up to being “irritable and snappish” as if fatigued (p. 95), to the extent that when Spock questions his behaviour, Kirk responds, “you pointy-eared turncoat” (p. 104).

All of this is because the Federation are sending Kirk on a secret mission to meet a Romulan Commander, an otherwise unnamed woman Kirk thinks, “beautiful, aristocratic, compelling” (p. 99). Like Vina, she soon slips out of her clothes:

“Compared to her appearance in uniform, she seemed now to be wearing hardly anything, although this was in part an illusion of contrast” (p. 109).

We’re also told that, “Vulcans were cyclical in their mating customs, and immune to sexual attraction at all times” (p. 115). That’s clearly not true of the half-human Spock here, who is interested in the Commander.

We learn Spock has been in Starfleet for 18 years (p. 104). He kills Kirk again (p. 107) — a fact spoiled by the Radio Times listing for this episode: Spock “is eventually forced to eliminate his commander with the Vulcan death grip!” (Radio Times #2498, 25 September 1971). I can see why that description would make the casual viewer want to tune in.

The Enterprise achieves Warp Nine while shrouded by the Romulan cloaking device (p. 114), a piece of technology that seems to work very well and is extremely useful; the Enterprise never uses it again. Likewise, the Romulan Commander is a striking woman with a connection to Spock — just the sort of character deserving of a rematch. We don’t see her again, either.

Finally, there’s A Piece of the Action, involving a cargo cult based on Chicago gangsters — and on a particular book, Mobs of the Twenties published in New York in 1993 (p. 121). It’s a fun idea for a story from the 1960s adapted for prose in the early 70s to hinge on a text from the near future but about the past, seized upon by an even more distant future.

In the TV episode, Kirk makes up a card game he says is played on Beta Antares IV. Blish adds that Antares is, in fact, not a double star — so this is Kirk being clever (and certainly not wrong about basic astronomy), saying something his friends will know to be false as a kind of signal to them (p. 124).

Blish also adds a reference to “klee-et”, which he explains is a Vulcan word meaning “prepare to engage”, and refers us in a footnote to the episode Amok Time in Star Trek Three (p. 124, yes spelling out the ordinal) — the first time a footnote appears in these books of adaptations of episodes, having been used a lot in original novel Spock Must Die!

Again, the morality here is a bit suss, Kirk using a show of force from the Enterprise to put down the gangsters. Basically, the Federation is a bigger hoodlum than they are. But I’m struck by a notable absence in these four books: apart from Errand of Mercy in Star Trek 2, they’ve avoided all the TV episodes that work as analogies for the contemporary conflict in Vietnam. At university 30 years ago, I read with great interest H Bruce Franklin’s “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era” in Science-Fiction Studies vol 21, no 1 (March 1994), pp. 24-34, which demonstrates how select episodes of Star Trek reveal changing attitudes to the real-life conflict. Was there an active choice made not to adapt the stories that touched on contemporary geo-politics? Again, I’m curious who decided or imposed the episodes to be adapted.

As a permanent record of the TV episodes, these books must have had a formative influence on early Star Trek fandom in the US and the UK. I wonder how much they influenced a sense of the “best” episodes, or most worthy ones, filtered by the selection process and Blish’s own prejudice as an active member of the community at the World Science Fiction Convention. How much did he impose on fans?

I think this stuff was hugely influential on Doctor Who — both on TV and and on its own nascent fandom. Doctor Who surely took the idea of the Doctor as diplomat from Star Trek. He’s got his own elegant way of fighting — CTRL+F “Vulcan neck-pinch”, CTRL+R “Venusian aikido”. But the Doctor doesn’t kill his best friend the Brigadier, let alone kill him twice. And there’s nothing about the Doctor having alien hormones or a previously unmentioned wife. At least not for the time being.

My abiding thought is how much these breezy adaptations of TV episodes must have influenced Terrance Dicks’s approach to the novelisations of Doctor Who, and even the fact that such books existed at all. Star Trek 5 by James Blish was published in the US in February 1972 and issued in the UK in June that year. Thereafter, Corgi published UK editions of the Star Trek books by Blish. That was surely a vote of confidence in a market for such titles, even with no new Star Trek being made on TV. That must have helped support the case for a new line of Doctor Who novelisations launched by Target in 1973.

I shall return to those Doctor Who novelisations in due course, with a long post picking up where I left off. Coming soon: Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters…

The Mystery of the Missing Diamond, by Terrance Dicks

First published in July 1982, this 56-page novel began a trilogy that Terrance Dicks wrote for Pepper Press, whose children’s editor, Brenda Gardner, he’d previously worked with on the Target Doctor Who books. Gardner went on to set up her own company, Piccadilly Press, for which Terrance wrote more than 100 books, including more adventures for Oliver and his friends. The seventh and last in the series, Gupta’s Christmas, was published in September 1985.

In 1986, Gardner told the Bookseller that she thought the Ask Oliver books were suitable for children up to the age of 10, and were a response to Terrance not being able to find suitable reading for his own youngest son — also called Oliver. Gardner’s responses in that interview are really interesting on why the books Terrance wrote for her appealed to young readers, and how unusual it was for someone to write for this particular age group:

“It’s important for children of this age who have begun to read to have books which they can actually finish … That’s a very great achievement for a child—actually to be able to say, I’ve read a whole book.”

“I think children who are grappling with early reading find it easier if they can go on to other books with a character already formed in their minds.”

“Writers are often not attracted to write for this age range simply because it isn’t as prestigious as fiction for older children. There’s no kudos in it, really; there are no major awards for books for this age range, for example.” — Tony Bradman, “Problems for the five to eights”, Bookseller, 15 March 1986, pp. 1066-67.

Ask Oliver has a similar set-up to Terrance’s already established and ongoing range of Baker Street Irregulars books for slightly older readers, published by Blackie & Son (where the publishing director who got Terrance involved was Richard Henwood, also ex of Target). As with the first of that series, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, this first case involves a theft from a local amenity (there an old house open to the public, here a museum) which four local kids investigate because they want to be like Sherlock Holmes. 

What’s different is that the adventures of the Baker Street Irregulars are narrated by Rob, the leader of the gang and the one who is a fan of the Holmes stories. Here, the gang is led by proactive Pete, it’s cheerful Gupta who knows his Holmes, and Oliver is “the youngest and smallest of Pete’s gang”, as the back-cover blurb puts it. As with the Baker Street Irregulars, there is also a Girl One, in this case Vicky, “a quiet, rather serious girl” (p. 6).

Oliver is small, quiet and often overlooked. 

“He didn't talk much but he thought a lot. Oliver noticed things.” (p. 6)

This made me think of Bill Roach, the bullied schoolboy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy whose watchfulness is spotted by Jim Prideaux. But I think the plot here owes much more to Beau Geste (1924) by PC Wren; as this book was published, Douglas Camfield was busy directing a TV version of Beau Geste, broadcast later in the year. Terrance was script editor.

Like Beau Geste, the plot here involves the theft of a diamond where we're invited to guess who took it, but in fact the real mystery is revealed to be something else. Here, the diamond was “given” (p. 10) to the present museum owner’s great grandfather by an Indian sultan — which may be an homage to the classic Holmes adventures The Sign of the Four (1890). (The TV version of Beau Geste followed the TV version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, also script edited by Terrance, so I think this stuff was all in his head.)

The children get involved because the disappearance of the diamond leads to the police taking in museum attendant Mr Morrison. His previous kindness to the children means that they — and therefore we — think he must be innocent. But Oliver observes what the others have not: that Morrison wasn't arrested (p. 16).

There’s some typically Terrance stuff in the use of food: “doughnuts are very consoling in times of trouble” (p. 14). It’s a shame Vicky’s usefulness to the plot involves her pretending to be younger than she is, and ditzy, and threatening to blub, to get a hotel clerk to share the information the gang needs (p. 28). Cornered by adults, Gupta tries to bluff his way out by pretending to be the son of a sultan (p. 35). It’s a bit… at best, cliched and simplistic.

Facing further peril, Vicky won’t hide with boys in the toilets — “she didn’t think it would be proper, even for a detective” (p. 39). That feels a little too much like a 50-something male writer safely at home at his keyboard, and not what a real girl facing danger would say. Terrance often writes bolshier female characters, sometimes a bit over-zealous and wreckless in their efforts to be just as good as the boys. This feels a bit less rich.

For all that, it’s a fast-moving, twisty and ingenious story. As with The Casing of the Missing Masterpiece, our heroes circumvent genre cliches by going to the police, and are concerned by what their parents will think — so it all feels grounded in the real. The story is broken up by lots of illustrations by Valerie Littlewood, and is divided up into five chapters. 

The penultimate chapter even lists clues we should go back and check for, with hints to help us solve the case. We’re an active participant as reader. The blurb asks, “Can you guess who did it before Oliver”, promising that, “Clues are given in the story to help you solve the mystery” — and encouraging young readers to play along. 

In fact the revelation is that this is a why rather than who dunnit. 

“If no one could work out how it had been stolen, no one would worry about what had been stolen. The theft somehow made the diamond look real.” (p. 53).

Effectively, it turns the game we’re playing isn’t the one we initially thought. I’d have loved that as a kid, and eagerly moved on to the gang’s next adventure…

I’ve written lots more posts on the 235 books by Terrance Dicks. My biography Written by Terrance Dicks will be published soon.

When There Are Wolves Again, by EJ Swift

This novel won the Clarke Award last week, and well deservedly. It's the tale of two women, Lucy and Hester, between 2020 and 2070, from Covid lockdown through the climate emergency to a... well, that would be sad to spoil.

Lucy is six when we meet her, sent to bubble with her grandparents in their house in Herne Hill, where she falls for the teeming life in the garden. She seems to be, though I don't think it's ever quite stated, neurodivergent, and this exasperates various grown-ups around her in ways we only glean. We often have to read between the lines with Lucy to why others behave as they do.

Hester is a few years older than Lucy and, when we meet her, in Ukraine to record a documentary about the wild dogs of Chernobyl, once the pets of the people who had to flee the nuclear disaster. While there, Hester adopts - or smuggles out - a wolf/dog and, back in the UK, falls on difficult times. Then her documentary does well and she can look for other projects to document. That includes efforts to rewild the heat-ravaged country.

As with Octavia E Butler's The Parable of the Sower, it's unsettling to start a story in the past, catch up with the present and then simply keep going, as speed - it's almost like we've taken flight. Swift is very good at keeping us grounded. For all the details of buildings made of mycelium, people flying to Mars and other sci-fi innovations, things feel ordinary and real.

For all there are exciting moments, what really makes this work is the characterisation, of the two protagonists and those they encounter. Sometimes there are big dramatic moments, sometimes personalities just clash, or people are a bit over-tired. Yet Swift makes us want to spend time with these people, whether they're in a fight or just nattering in the firelight. When people and dogs, inevitably, die we really feel their loss.

Lucy and Hester have frequent near-miss encounters, and by the end are aware of one another though they haven't met. We get to know their families, their conflict, their heartbreaks, and there's the antagonist of people in denial about climate change and the urgent action needed to mitigate its effects. It's sometimes funny, sometimes thrilling and horrific, and shot through with warmth and humanity. I really liked it.

I'm not sure I was aware of it while reading, but looking back I think it's a novel exploring the idea of redemption - that we can do something to repair the damage we've done, to our world, to our communities, to each other. Friends fall out and make up again, a brother and sister come to uneasy terms about an inheritance, a violent bad guy is faced, and nature is restored.

Along the way, there's lots about our individual and collective relationship with nature, and ideas about how things might be, if not fixed, then made better. That includes gas dirigibles instead of airplanes, rewilding on an epic scale, and a huge programme in transferring private land to the common people. It's not easy, but the effort and the progress made gave me hope. How strange, how uplifting, to read a book about coming catastrophe and feel we might get through it, if we change how things are done.

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

It took some time to read this long, densely written “new history of humanity”, as it is subtitled, but this is a volume to savour not to rush through. Every few pages, there’s some boggling new idea, challenging notions of early humanity and our journey to “civilisation”, and thus who we are now. I’ve very grateful to Una McCormack, who recommended it in her essay in Writing the Future (2023).

An early example of the perspective-altering stuff comes on p. 35, where the authors — Graeber an anthropologist, Wengrow an archaeologist — refer for the first time to “American intellectuals” of the 16th and 17th centuries, as opposed to their European counterparts. By this, they mean the indigenous inhabitants of North America who were in in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas. 

That term does something extraordinary, putting the debates that follow between the different, clashing cultures on more equal footing. The Europeans assumed they were bringing civilisation to the Americans; Graeber and Wengrow present a compelling argument that in fact American ideas about society and liberty flowed the other way, directly influencing such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who admitted as much) and Montesquieu. The point is that, at the time, the Americans lived lives of much greater liberty than anyone in Europe.

“To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admiral ideal” (p. 43).

Even the spaces in which Europeans came to think about and argue over such ideas may have come from America. Later in the book, the authors cite an account of the Creek community as reported by the Jesuit missionary St Jean de Brébuf (1593-1649) in Jesuit Relations of New France 1645-6 (10: 219):

“Each day the adult men of a town would gather to spend much of the day arguing about politics in a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of tobacco and drinking caffeinated beverages.” (p. 463).

It’s brilliantly boggling to think of the coffee houses of Pepys and Johnson, and the coffee shops today where I sometimes take my laptop, as threading back to the prairie. On another occasion, the authors talk about spiritual lives of some groups, where dreams were important and contained hidden truths that the rest of the community would then help to interpret and act on — centuries before European psychologists got into the business of dreams and unconscious desire.

There are plenty more “modern” notions in the historical record. Among the Nuer people of South Sudan studied in the early 20th century,

“it was not uncommon for the local ‘bull’ [leader] actually to be a woman whose parents had declared her a man for social purposes” (p. 97). 

On the following page, they speak of eccentric behaviour, cross dressing and “unconventional sexual practices” among leading figures, suggesting a society that embraced tolerance and even celebrated difference. Later, we return to the same community:

“However, most Nuer women were not ‘properly’ married. In fact, the complexities of this system were such that a large proportion found themselves officially married to ghosts, or to other women (who could be declared male for genealogical purposes) — in which case, how they went about becoming pregnant and raising their children was nobody’s business but their own.” (p. 132)

This kind of detail peppers the whole thing. I loved the word “scofflaw” (p. 424) for someone who flouts the rules. I can’t get out of my head the extraordinary idea that the mini Ice Age of the late 1500s and early 1600s was linked to the activity of European settlers in America, where 90% of the indigenous people died and 50 million hectares of cultivated land reverting to wilderness (p. 258). A footnote to this says there were 60 million in America before the Europeans arrived (p. 568). The scale and impact are stunning.

The book is largely about how archaeological and anthropological evidence of this sort, much of it unearthed in the past few decades, largely undermines the narrative of early humanity as seen in “The Dawn of Man” sequence at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): early man as timid hunter-gatherer, eking out a modest existence on the savannah for hundreds of thousands of years until suddenly, in a moment, learning to use tools to dominate and kill, creating the world we know now.

As Graeber and Wengrow point out, the bare savannah is just where the last surviving hunter-gatherers are able to live today. In ancient times, before the cities, hunter-gatherers would have lived where food was more abundant — the fertile ground, beside rivers and the sea. Admittedly, for Graeber and Wengrow, the assumed narrative is more one of hunter-gatherers suddenly becoming farmers governed by kings, but the domination goes in hand with the patriarchy. They posit three elements of the modern state as we understand it — sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition — and then provide multiple examples of different ways people have reached this, or rejected it out of hand.

For example, they make a compelling case from the surviving pictorial art and other material culture, in the absence of texts, that the so-called Minoan civilisation on Crete was not a patriarchy under a king, but a much more egalitarian society under a community of woman, perhaps priestesses (p. 435). In doing so, they discuss the way commonly used language shapes and prejudices our view, such as early archaeologists labelling part of a complex a “throne room” which immediately suggests a whole load of hierarchical structures for which there is no evidence.

From these myriad examples, they go on to argue that perhaps the “heroic societies” of warrior kings did not grow out of early farmer-settler communities but in opposition to them — among the “barbarians” at the gate or on the boundaries, who would raid the farms. Those bad guys were us all along.

When Wengrow was a guest on an episode of Free Thinking to discuss this and the late Graeber’s other books, host Matthew Sweet spoke of this book as an anarchist history — not something I’d considered as I read it, but which I can see in retrospect. Much of it is about exploring alternative social arrangements, in history and now. The authors argue that many cultures define their own identity in opposition to alternatives they have encountered, doubling down on ideas that they might not have been conscious of until then. They cite an example given by Marcel Mauss, of Abathascan people in Alaska seeing the advantages of Inuit kayaks but refusing to use them, and the Inuit likewise refusing to adopt Abathascan snowshoes.

‘“Societies,” wrote Maus, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance. [The Abathascans] reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be.’ (pp. 174-5)

This put me in mind of works on sociology I read 30 years ago as a student, and Louis Althusser’s conceptions (IIRC) of “rapport” — where a person or culture changes their behaviour to be more like another so as to make connection — and “differance”, where a person or culture holds to, or even emphasises, the ways in which they are different. If it’s not a wholly original idea, it’s fascinating to see Graeber and Wengrow apply it to concrete examples, and in the midst of a discussion of different ways of enacting trade, such as in gift giving or — as discussed above — realising dreams.

Among the systems of social governance, I was familiar with gift economies (I once put one on Mars) but the French idea “corvée” was new: otherwise free citizens required to do obligatory labour on civic projects on a seasonal basis. We are told that the Sumerians had a similar concept, “dubsig”, the pictogram showing a person with a basket of earth on their head. The idea was that everyone — from king to the lowliest ordinary folk — were required to muck in with whatever needed doing, such as labouring on building sites (p. 299).

The authors provide evidence that indigenous people captured by Europeans or invited to visit their communities were horrified by what they saw, not least in the inequality of wealth, and that Europeans who experienced life in indigenous communities often didn’t want to leave them. The implication is that intoxicating ideas of freedom, consent, of being able to do things differently or to leave a place where we aren’t happy, spread to Europe and transformed who we are. “Civilisation” wasn’t forged when we started farming; it’s a much more modern invention and what we do now could be different — and better. 

• See also: me on Uncivilised, by Subhadras Das

Bat Eater, by Kylie Lee Baker

“Something grabs the back of her shirt and Cora can’t scream, all her words extinguished in her chest. This is when she dies. The weak link, the boring character in a horror movie who nobody liked anyway, the one with no defining traits, a name no one can remember.” (p. 160)

This deliciously horrible thriller won the Shirley Jackson Award over the weekend. It was first published last year as Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, but the Hodder & Stoughton paperback I read is just Bat Eater — on the cover, on the title page and in the indicia, but not in the closing Author’s Note. How ironic to erase the main character’s name from the title of her own story, given what it’s about.

Cora Zeng is an anxious young Chinese American woman living in New York in 2020, during the Covid pandemic. She works as a cleaner of crime scenes with two other Chinese American misfits, Yifei and Harvey, and she’s grieving the death of her half-sister Delilah, who Cora witnessed being pushed in front of a train by a white man who used the term “bat eater”.

That murder is described in shocking, gory detail and the novel doesn’t hold back on what Cora’s job involves. It is a literally visceral novel, all wet and tender. Cora is haunted by the death of her half-sister, and then haunted by a hungry ghost. She and her co-workers then realise there’s a pattern to the crime scenes they’re cleaning, which seems to be linked to the ghost. To make sense of this, Cora must explore aspects of her own identity and cultural history. There is more than one way to deal with jiāngshī, not all of them successful.

This is a brilliant, compelling novel, especially good on character so that — despite the quote above — we really feel the loss of people. It was interesting to read this so soon after The Lost Voices of Pompeii by Jess Venner, which attempts to return voices to the voiceless victims of a tragedy. There’s something similar going on here, too.

At one point, Bat Eater also reminded me of the most haunting bit in the film Halloween (1978), when Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) runs to a neighbour’s house for help, and though we can see the neighbour through the window, he doesn’t answer the door. For all the film is about a violent serial killer, it’s that small moment of ordinary indifference that has always stayed with me. It’s the same here: for all the supernatural stuff going on, what makes this so powerful, so disturbing, is the horror or ordinary people.

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.

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

Stalky & Co, by Rudyard Kipling

A fortnight ago, I was again at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre to undertake more research for my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks. Among the files I looked at were “RCONT22-617-1 Hall James Andew 1980-84” and “RCONT22-90-1 Baron Alexander 1980-84”, which provided some useful material on Terrance’s time as script editor of BBC-1’s Sunday tea-time Classic Serials.

Paperwork I saw at WAC shows that Terrance’s predecessor, Alistair Bell, was still in post as late as 21 May 1980, when he accepted the script for the first episode of Great Expectations, dramatised by James Andrew Hall. This acceptance meant Hall had the go-ahead to write the remaining scripts. Great Expectations was broadcast in 13 episodes between October and December 1981, with Terrance credited as script editor — his first credit on Classic Serials.

Meanwhile, producer Barry Letts commissioned his own dramatisation, Gulliver in Lilliput. As well as writing the scripts, Letts directed all four episodes, broadcast in January 1982.

That left Terrance to find a six-episode story to complete the 22-episode “season”. The earliest document I can find relating to his time as script editor is from his own archive of papers. On 2 June 1980, he wrote a to-do list in a notebook. He had to write The Cop Catchers (the latest novel involving the Baker Street Irregulars), then the novelisation Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon, then an outline for a never-published original novel. On the next page of the notebook, so on or after 2 June, he listed three potential Classic Serials: The War of the Worlds, “Edwin Drood — solved” and The 39 Steps. He clearly wanted to take the series in a more action-adventure direction.

After some back and forth over suitable, available choices, on 18 September Terrance formally commissioned his first Classic Serial: Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling, dramatised by Alexander Baron. He inherited Baron, who’d dramatised Sense & Sensibility for Bell earlier that same year, just the latest in a line of dramatisations and original plays. 

Terrance clearly got on with him: Baron dramatised several more classics for Terrance: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982); Jane Eyre (1983); Goodbye Mr Chips (1984); Oliver Twist (1985); and the 16-part epic Vanity Fair (1987), the penultimate Classic Serial. He also dramatised a six-part serial for Terrance where the scripts were accepted and Baron paid in full, but the production was then cancelled. More on this in my forthcoming book....

The choice of Stalky & Co at the start of their ongoing relationship is really interesting. It’s a book of stories about three naughty schoolboys at a minor public school in the mid to late 19th century, and not exactly in step with 1980, all punk, Grange Hill (1978-2008) and The Empire Strikes Back. My wife has been entranced by Baron’s later dramatisations for Terrance but this one left her utterly cold. There’s little to like about this cruel, privileged trio in their cruel, privileged world. There are almost no women in it at all. What was Terrance thinking?

Well, Terrance was a big fan of Kipling: as I’ve posted before, Kim was among his favourite books. But that is set in India and told on a huge scale. Stalky & Co was better suited to a TV budget, being set in England, with three principal characters and a smallish supporting cast. 

Perhaps this particular book also offered a twist on Grange Hill, which — as detailed in Box of Delights by Richard Marson — caused a storm of outrage by showing badly behaved school kids at an ordinary comprehensive. Stalky & Co presents badly behaved school kids at a posh, Victorian school, perhaps suggesting a legacy of hijinks, that this stuff is not new. I also wonder if, in 1980, Stalky & Co seemed relevant because of the Thatcher government, elected the previous year, being so full of public school old boys. In that sense, it offers a view of how those leaders, or their kind, were forged.

The stories certainly resonated with later generations of pupils at posh schools. My edition, published in 1950 by Macmillan, boasts a sticker saying it was bought for Brown's House Libray in 1951 and was surely read by students there given that it still included a bookmark of someone’s chemistry homework. I suspect the stories reminded Terrance of his own school, East Ham Grammar School for Boys, to which he gained entry as a working-class boy from East London — an outsider.

As detailed in Baron’s own memoir, he was also a a working-class boy from East London, who joined the Communist Party in his youth. I can see both dramatist and script editor being fascinated by the power dynamics, the anthopology, of this strange, elite world as conveyed in these stories. If so, I think they played that down in the TV version.

At least, I think that sense of anthropological study is more pronounced in the book. The nine stories were originally published separately in magazines, beginning with the two-part “Slaves of the Lamp” in consecutive issues of Cosmopolis: A Literary Review in April and May 1897. Part I involves three schoolboys (Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle), engaged in rehearsals for a school pantomime and getting their own back on a teacher who treats them severely. Part II is set decades later, when Beetle — now a man — hears of his former friend Stalky’s heroic exploits in India, turning the tables on his foes. The implication is that school, and the outwitting of rules and teachers, has been a training ground for the adventure of empire.

To this base, the book adds a further seven stories, all from the schoolboy period. Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle (the latter based on Kipling himself) get into various scrapes. In several episodes they enact a kind of justice or revenge. The man who accuses them of thieving is framed to look like a thief; the master who accuses them of trespass is framed to look like a trespasser; the rival House that accuses our heroes of stinking is made to stink. In one story, a teacher even engages the three boys to deal with a bully.

The boys smoke pipes and sneak alcoholic drinks. Their larks include spitting on wild rabbits, shooting and killing a cat, and stealing and pawning each other’s watches to spend the money on tuck. The sense is that this is all meant to be fun, and its based on close observation of real experience, but I didn’t warm to these boys very much.

Even so, it’s interesting how Baron — and Terrance and the team — approached the dramatisation. In surviving paperwork, Terrance implores Baron to stick as closely as possible to the book, and to Kipling’s original dialogue. Yet there are significant differences. For example, the first TV episode is based on “An Unsavoury Interlude”. In the book version, the three friends are out in the countryside one afternoon. Beetle leaves his friends, and M’Turk and Stalky decide to shoot a rabbit.

“Hi! There’s a bunny. No, it ain’t. It’s a cat, by Jove! You plug first.” (p. 75)

They then hide this cat in the rafters of a rival House, and over time it stinks out the place, making their rivals smell bad. Yet in the TV version, Beetle is with his two friends for the rabbit shoot and, being short-sighted, he shoots a cat by mistake. It’s the same nasty incident, but not so cruel.

The choice of stories to dramatise is also interesting. The TV serial adapted six of the nine stories in the book Stalky and Co, but BBC paperwork shows that rights were agreed — with Kipling’s work still in copyright — to three other stories about Stalky and his friends: “Regulus” (1917), “The United Idolators” (1924) and “The Propagation of Knowledge” (1926). None of these ended up on screen. 

Of the three stories skipped from the original book, “Slaves of the Lamp Part II” was obviously cut because it largely describes events in India, decades after the boys leave school, so would have entailed a different, older cast and expensive location filming. “The Impressionists”, set in the boys’ school days, includes a plot element where the boys lend money to their peers, and there are references to “Shylock” and other antisemitic phrases. I can see why Alexander Baron, born Alexander Bernstein, felt he could skip that story.

Then there’s “The Flag of the their Country”, which may have been skipped for being too polemic. Kipling clearly had something to say about patriotism and heroism, though perhaps not what we would expect. In the story, the local council is keen that the boys should drill (march, exercise etc) to prepare them for the army. Stalky ends up running drill as yet another dodge. The headmaster informs the council that the boys are drilling themselves, and word reaches one Raymond Martin MP, who is so impressed he turns up at the school to deliver a patriotic speech, full of platitudes and cliches. The room full of boys listens “in sour disgust”. To conclude, Martin shakes out a rolled-up Union Jack “and waited for the thunder of applause”. This is how the boys respond:

“They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before—down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton sands; above the roof of the Golf Club, and in Keyte’s window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eves? Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk.” (p. 213)

The same story tells us that 80% of the boys in the school were born abroad, and 75% of them are sons of officers in one or other of the armed services, while other stories in the book underline that the boys are largely being readied for military or administrative work in the empire. In “A Little Prep”, which was adapted for TV, we’re told that nine old boys of the school have been killed in India in the past three years, which the current pupils take in their stride. A wounded old boy then visits the school and shares a story about encountering a classmate on the battlefield, where they exchanged their old nicknames:

“I never knew it was one of us till I was right on top of him. There are heaps of Duncans in the service, and of course the name didn’t remind me. He wasn’t changed at all hardly. He’d been shot through the lungs, poor old man, and he was pretty thirsty. I gave him a drink and sat down beside him, and—funny thing, too—he said, ‘Hullo, Toffee!’ and I said, ‘Hullo, Fat-Sow! hope you aren’t hurt,’ or something of the kind. But he died in a minute or two—never lifted his head off my knees.” (p. 178)

In the final story — or the first, in the order that Kipling wrote them — we learn that Beetle ends up getting apprenticed to a newspaper in India, M’Turk leaves school for “Cooper’s Hill”, aka the Royal Indian Engineering College, while Stalky goes to Sandhurst. India is, says Beetle, full of men like Stalky. The boys and their peers are the fuel of the British Empire, so their attitude to the flag is surprising. But it fits with the sentiment in “A Little Prep”, where the hero of the tale is not a soldier but one of the teachers, who puts themselves at risk, without seeking acknowledgement or thanks, to help one of the boys. That is Kipling’s point: Such selfless courage earns admiration; the flag gets nothing at all.

Was that sentiment too controversial, too punk, for a dramatisation in 1982? Perhaps they could have got away with it when the serial was first broadcast, from 31 January to 7 March. But less than a month later it would surely have been unthinkable, given the start of the Falklands War on 2 April.

So, I think Stalky & Co was a more potent, resonant book to dramatise at the time than may first appear. And I think we can see that in the subsequent books dramatised for BBC-1 Classic Serials with Terrance and script editor and producer. More on this to follow...

See also:

• My list of the 236 books published by Terrance Dicks, with links to my longer posts about them
• Me on The Jungle Book by Rudkyard Kipling