How you get there

Who knew Liverpool has a spaceport? It’s conveniently on the edge of the Mersey, looking out across to the Capital of Culture, nestling about halfway between the two tall towers that ventilate tunnels under the river. The art deco building looks like something out of Dan Dare, but there’s no rockets or spaceships or evil Treens on show. Just a Doctor Who exhibition.

We passed the spaceport on Saturday morning as we made our way to the building next door, the Seacombe ferry terminal. As a treat for my brother-in-law’s 30th birthday, we were off on a cruise down the Manchester ship canal – all 36 miles up to Salford.

Yes, it’s up – the five locks we went though lifted us a total of 17 metres. And since the working ships take precedence over a pleasure cruise like ours, there was a lot of hanging around to get into the canal in the first place. We spent more than an hour shunting around in front of the Eastham entrance waiting for the tide, as one such heavily laden ship in the lock needed the Mersey to be deeper.

When the sun peeked through the clouds, it was all very pleasant. But there was a general grey drear and biting gale from the east that meant our red faces owe us much to frostbite as to suntan. We resorted to whisky and crisps and canoodling to keep back the cold.

There was also plenty of waving to be done; the workers on the boats we passed and on the docks and quays, people even coming out of their canalside houses to wave as we went by. Perhaps that suggests the quietness of the route. My late grandmother could remember a trip down to Cornwall sometime in the 1920s, and people coming out their houses to gawp at the car going past. Perhaps it's also to do with the canal being a gentler, more amenable way of getting about than your usual 21st century haste.

The canal was opened in 1894 – the same year as Tower Bridge in London – and all along the route there’s evidence of the extraordinary Victorian engineering. The Dr had fun taking pictures of the various bridges: ones that swung apart to let the masts of ships through, or built up so high over the canal the mast could duck under them.

There was also a constant commentary: not always audible outside on deck, where the gale blew it all about. They turned up the volume, which only made it like shouting below deck. And a little off-putting when you went to the toilet, which had it’s own set of speakers. The lady speaking gave a broad, industrial history – including what industries line the canal today – but tactfully ignored any mention of how vehemently Liverpool opposed the canal in the first place. And maybe there was a bit too much pointing out of things we could already see: ducks and heron on the water, or yet another bridge.

(J. also objected to the idea that traffic on the M60 overhead would all be going to the Trafford Centre.)

The main industry today seemed to be things of power: coal for the coal-fired powerstation, or colour-coded pipes full of gas. And much was made of the canal’s green credentials. It had been neglected after the Second World War, and not just from the impact of bombing. The huge number of planes built in the war meant that airfreight was cheap in peacetime, and quicker than going by boat. But these days, the cost of petrol and environmental concerns mean that the canal is on the up.

In fact, there was plenty of economic joy on show. Liverpool’s Liver building and twin cathedrals are overshadowed by splendid new skyscrapers. It reminded me and the Dr of Sydney; the huge and sturdy Victorian buildings dwarfed by the shiny new tier. But maybe the modern architecture makes all cities look too much the same: this could have been Cardiff or Bristol or Canary Wharf too.

And at journey’s end there was Salford, with its Imperial War Museum and Lowry Centre, and the building site that will soon be the BBC. Again, it felt Canary Wharf and Cardiff, shiny and groovy with plenty of posh drinking and eating, but no different from too many other places. Were it not for the accents of the deferrying passengers, we could have been anywhere.

We trammed into town to join more of J.’s chums (including the Yemayan Ambassador from page 91 of The Pirate Loop) and had our second curry in two days. Made the last train back to Macclesfield, and were home for the last half-hour of Moonraker.

Journey back to London the next day took as long as the canal trip; there are no trains through Macclesfield this whole week – I assume they’ve closed the line at half-term because working commuters take precedence over paying customers merely using the train for fun. So we went via Reading (and beer with H. and J.), and enjoyed screaming children and a girl who wept into her mobile that the boy she’d dumped and told to go find someone else to snog had only gone and done that.

Blimey, we thought. How long ago that teenage stuff now seems. And like the canals and railways, we struggle against the laws of physics to fend off our decrepitude. It is back to the gym tomorrow…

Bite my wire

Just this minute watched episode 1.13 of The Wire. Yes, I am very behind on this one, and yes, I've been meaning to get to it for ages. And oh god yes, it's as good as everyone has made out.

Jimmy McNulty is working in Baltimore Homicide, and is aggrieved that anyone he catches gets off, and that none of his colleagues or anyone in the DEA even knows the name Avon Barksdale - the man running all the drugs. So Jimmy kvecthes to his mate who is a judge, and the judge sets up a special operation tailing Barksdale. But this only pisses everyone in the two departments off, so McNulty's unit is mostly a bunch of lazy, sweary no-hopers, the deadwood everyone else has been looking to get shot of for years.

Or so it seems at first...

It starts slow and for the first three episodes I just thought it was a perfectly competent cop show. Being HBO, there's sporadic nudity, violence and swearing. I know one chap who was turned off the whole thing by a scene in episode one where some cops are stupid and crude.

But firstly, it's clouding up the moralities, so there's nothing so simple as good guys and bad guys. Every one of the huge cast is morally conflicted and there's all kinds of stupidity on show due to short tempers or not giving a stuff.

Secondly, in episode four the real genius kicks in. We get scenes playing off - without spelling out explicitly - stuff we've already seen. And we're often privy to stuff that particular characters don't know: what really happened or how close they came to a lead. And yet at the same time the show holds stuff back from us, so something said earlier on in the series gets shown to be macho bluster in the last episode.

From episode four it is utterly compelling, and when they start bumping off regular characters, you genuinely have no idea where it's going to go. And I have years of this stuff still to get to - hooray!

But Charlie Brooker enthuses much better than I (and has all sorts of stuff about why it feels like a novel and has such an authentic feel):

XO2

I'm not usually hot and sweaty for technological nubbins, but phwoar! check out the news about the X02.

I've been following the One Laptop Per Child project for ever and am a bit surprised I've not blogged about it before. The prototype model of the chunky green thing even came with a yellow crank handle. How can that not be cool?

The BBC news story is especially exciting because the laptops are going to be released to us greedy Westerners:

Prof Negroponte announced the resumption of the Get-One-Give-One programme to allow people in wealthy nations to buy two XO laptops and donate one to a child in a developing country.

The programme will be open to people in North America and Europe and start in August or September.

Stamp duty

Our local Post Office depot closed earlier this year, and collecting parcels or mail that needs signing for – which we do about once a week – now means one stop on the train, and juggling time off work.

Royal Mail is fast running out of solid ground under it, like the polar bears. Branches of Post Office are closing up and down the country – which, one claimant argues, is a breach of human rights.

There was also a story a couple of weeks ago that, since 2006 and the end of Royal Mail’s 350-year monopoly on delivering post in this country, nobody’s actually come forward to try to compete.

It’s apparently just not worth their while; the volume of letters is declining at the same rate as the polar icecaps. And of course, the postal regulator thinks the solution to this is privatisation.

The mail system we understand today is a Victorian invention – Rowland Hill’s revolutionary “Post-office reform: its importance and practicability” was published in 1837, the year Victoria gave up being a princess.

Hill begins his argument for reducing the cost and complexity of the postal system with some numbers. Taxing postage is counter-productive, he says. The tax deters people from using the state-owned mail, and fewer people using the system means less revenue to the state overall – Hill himself quotes a loss of some half a million pounds for 1835 on page 2.

“The loss to the revenue is, however, far from being the most serious of the injuries inflicted on society by the high rates of postage. When it is considered how much the religious, moral, and intellectual progress of the people, would be accelerated by the unobstructed circulation of letters and of the many cheap and excellent non-political publications of the present day, the Post Office assumes the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization; capable of performing a distinguished part in the great work of National education, but rendered feeble and inefficient by erroneous financial arrangements.”

Rowland Hill, “Post-office reform: its importance and practicability” (1937), p. 7.

Admittedly, Hill argued that the system would probably be better administered in private hands:

“There cannot be a doubt that if the law did not interpose its prohibition, the transmission of letters would be gladly overtaken by capitalists, and conducted on the ordinary commercial principles, with all that economy, attention to the wants of their customers, and skilful adaptation of means to the desired end, which is usually practised by those whose interests are involved in their success.”

Ibid.

But, since there is a monopoly, he argued, the state had a duty to make the system work, to make it work well, and to maximise revenues. And, because it had a monopoly, the costs would be easily spread across the whole country. In fact, if you had a national network anyway, the difference in cost of sending a letter 100 miles rather than 10 was almost negligible; either way, it was still even less than a penny.

So Hill rather brilliantly argued that you would raise revenues by at least quartering the price of postage (from the usual 4d) – and paying the fare in advance of posting, to avoid people cheating the system.

“I therefore propose –
That the charge for primary distribution, that is to say, the postage on all letters received in a post-town, and delivered in the same, or any other post-town in this British Isles, shall be at the uniform rate of one penny per ounce ; – all letters and other papers, whether single or multiple, forming one packet, and not weighing more than one ounce, being charged one penny ; and heavier packets, to any convenient limit (say one pound,) being charged an additional half penny for each additional half ounce.”

Ibid., pp. 33-34.

While Hill also called for a “great increase” in the number of receiving houses, he argued that a uniform rate of postage would make their job easier and more efficient: letters would either be paid for or not, so they’d just need distributing. It’s not dissimilar to recent discussions of micropayments: if there’s a system of handling them cheaply and efficiently, then there’ll be enough of them to make it pay.

And Hill’s brilliant system worked.

“In 1839 on average each person in the UK received just 4 letters a year. That figure doubled in 1840 to 8; in 1871 it was 32; by 1900 it had almost doubled again to 60.”

Simon Eliot, “Aspects of the Victorian Book – The Economic and Social Background to Victorian Print Culture: postal system”.

(See the graph at the foot of the page for the extraordinary scale of that…)

The Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp, was issued on 6 May 1840. Soon there were wildly exciting technological developments like envelopes and, in 1843, Hill’s mate (and something of a hero of mine) Henry Cole invented the Christmas card. Hill, still the radical pioneer, was suggesting outlandish things like people having letter shaped holes in their front doors to make delivering post that much easier.

“Reducing the cost of mail would be a boost to literacy and democratise the use of the post,” says the British Postal Museum and Archive – arguing that Hill’s changes to the system were a deliberate social reform. But cheaper postage (and speedier services when post got sent my rail and, in London, it’s own private underground train) benefited everyone: the workings of business, of Empire, of news and thought and science were all given a great push.

As a result, and with Hill’s reforms being quickly adopted abroad, the world became a smaller place; our conversations became more widespread, diverse and quicker.

It’s no wonder that many commentators feel Hill’s postal system has been undone by the Internet – which, since 1990, has had just as huge an impact on worldwide work and natter. But the Internet is not the guilty party; the killer has been choking Hill’s system since long before 1990. Hill argued that the system would work because Royal Mail had its monopoly, and it is whittling away that monopoly that is causing the harm.

Telegrams, phonecalls and later faxes and pagers all competed with old-fashioned post; the speed and convenience of modern technology making many kinds of letter redundant. No longer would a courting couple arrange their dates by post; instead they’d enrage their parents by spending all night saying nothing down the phone.

But until (relatively) recently these technologies were no threat to Hill’s system because they too were part of Royal Mail’s monopoly. With its Victorian communication network set up, Royal Mail was inevitably in the best place to nurture the nascent technologies of telegraph and phone. Telegrams were sent and received from the local Post Office, and via cables that swam from Porthcurno in Cornwall, they reached the whole of the world. Britain’s telephone network was run by the General Post Office until 1980 – when British Telecom was created.

Now I’m not arguing that the telephone lines be renationalised. (But I can see an argument for making letters and parcels part of BT’s licence, that they’re as much “telecommunications” as telephone lines and broadband.) I’m just making the point.

But where the Royal Mail really was screwed was by being split into three. They separated the businesses of delivering letters, delivering parcels and operating post offices in 1986.

Oddly, Rowland Hill might have approved of this split. Having outlined his proposals for the fee of “an additional half penny for each additional half ounce” on parcels, he conceded his own doubts:

“The charge for weights exceeding one ounce should not, perhaps, in strict fairness, increase at so great a rate ; but strict fairness may be advantageously sacrificed to simplicity ; and it is perhaps not desirable that the Post Office should be encumbered with parcels.”

Hill, p. 34.

And yet, I’d argue that the parcels – and post that needs signing for – is the profitable bit. It’s the service you pay a premium on, and it’s the bit phone, fax and email can’t do. Tellingly, Parcelforce doesn’t have a monopoly on this stuff and – as Hill did sort of predicted (see above) – capitalists have skilfully, economically made parcels big business. There are expensive, elaborate advertisements for why one courier’s that millisecond quicker or how you can follow the progression of what you’ve sent to the square quantum particle.

And it’s simple to see why: the transmission of abstract ideas can be done in the electronic ether, as fast and free as available technology; but you’re always going to need someone to shift physical stuff.

And the Internet, I’d argue, has increased the postage of physical stuff. People shop online and then have their wares sent to them from all over the country and even from abroad. They swap stuff, they auction stuff, they send gifts to the people and communities they met online. All the stuff you can’t just do by talking, that needs someone getting off their arse.

It’s difficult to quote any numbers when the infrastructure is in bits, but without competing couriers paying for lavish advertisements, or even paying separately and on top of each other for their networks to have the same reach, surely it’d be cheaper for all of us to send stuff. And, on Hill’s model, that means we’d do it more.

Dividing the postal system up ever further is just slash and burn economics; you strip out the bits of an ecosystem that will yield short term returns, but you do so at the expense of that system having a future.

Tales from the cryptic

On Saturday, I finished a draft of something which hasn't been announced yet so cannot be spoken of now.

On Sunday, I made amendments to something else which hasn't been announced yet and so cannot be spoken of either.

And this morning I was on the 07.02 train to Victoria to spend most of the day visiting something related to another as yet unannounced thingie.

I can reveal, however, that on the way home I was bought some Percy Pigs on expenses. Ooh, my showbiz life. But mmm, Percy pigs.

Merely silly

Mentioned in the pub last night, while at Falldog's birthday, that there's a great summing up of Doctor Who in the 1993 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. So I looked it up this morning:

"At its worst merely silly, at its best is had been spell-binding."

John Brosnan, Peter Nicholls, Kim Newman, "Dr Who", in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (eds. John Clute and Peter Nicholls), Orbit 1993, p. 346.

On the hoof

Does Satan qualify as an ungulate?

50s way to leave your lover

It was like something out of Things To Come (1936) – and one of the glorious utopian bits, not the bits with fighting. A. and I made our way to the Science Museum’s ticket desk to buy our way into Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain (until 25 October 2008). And it turns out to be free.

Hooray! We almost skipped in the great glass elevator up to the second floor.

Also strikingly modern was the new-fangled audio guide. Rather than being given some ersatz walkie-talkie, you used your own mobile phone. (Calls were charged at London landline rate, rather than at some cunning premium. We, um, didn’t bother.)

The post-war period is a fascinating one, and is also currently RESEARCH. Which means any exhibitions and related books and curios are tax deductible. And what follows is cobbled together from various bits of reading and not-quite-thinking.

Britain was punch-drunk after the war, reeling from the barely-understood-yet evaporation of her empire. There’s a thing in Graham Green’s “The End of the Affair”, where the narrator describes the fearlessness of living in the Blitz, where you might die any moment. It seems it’s only when there’s no more bombing, when you might survive, that your muscles unclench and you again remember how it is to be terrified. This is a post-traumatic stress civilisation. How in hell did it get through?

The shared effort of war has led to expectations of a shared effort in peace. There’s a welfare system, a National Health Service and as much dentistry and spectacles as anyone can eat. A huge rebuilding operation was also required.

“The full extent of the war damage to London’s infrastructure and housing stock made reconstruction an urgent priority. The publication of Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan established a framework where issues of reconstruction and social progress combined in the utopian idealism of slum clearance, New Town development and green belt conservation.”

Paul Rennie, Festival of Britain Design 1951 , p. 36.

And with that rebuilding came a magnificent street party, deftly coinciding with the 100th anniversary of a great bash in a greenhouse. In his book on the Festival of Britain’s design and merchandising spree, Paul Rennie speaks of jubilant firework displays and nights of dancing.

“The relative sophistication of these entertainments, for ordinary people, and in the context of post-war austerity, should not be discounted.”

Ibid, p. 21.

The new fashion for promenading wasn’t just dangerous for its European influence. The Thames beside which young people strolled was still busy, noisy and industrial, and the London smog killed 4,000 people in 1952. Yet the Festival marked something important; freedom after the austerity and secrecy of the war.

In some ways, the Festival was a conscious step backward to the pre-Great War – and imagined – period of church fetes and bicycling vicars. Look at the type-faces used in the Festival’s literature: fat-stemmed, fussy, serifed fonts as if Modernism had never happened. Things clearly fashioned by men and not machines. That, says Rennie, is a conscious turfing out of the

“ubiquitous sanserif faces of the 1930s and WWII”.

Ibid, p. 52.

The celebration is especially evident in the Festival’s logo; a compass decked out in coloured bunting. Abram Green’s Festival logo and his posters for the Financial Times, according to Rennie,

“define the graphic style of the decade perfectly.”

Ibid. p. 24.

And yet Rennie’s own book and the Science Museum would seem to disagree. The Festival isn’t of its age for looking fondly backwards, but for its yearning, breathless gaze into the future. It was symbolic, says Rennie, of,

“Britain’s status as an atomic power and the technical lead that it had in such fields as radar, computers, telecommunications, television and jet engines.”

Ibid., p. 50.

The Festival was defined by technical innovation. New electric trains from Waterloo meant the South Bank site was viable because there would be less soot and smoke (p. 15), while the Festival also introduced ordinary people to the space-age concept of proper toilet paper (p. 19). It was this generation that put men on the moon.

Oliver Postgate – later inventor of Bagpuss, the Clangers and Ivor – had a job at the Festival. He helped build the scientific machines, which were constructed around complicated bubble machines,

“in essence, a large diagram depicting a flow of materials, the flow being marked out by thin glass tubes through which coloured liquid, regularly interspersed with air-bubbles, would travel along slowly."

Oliver Postgate, Seeing Things, p. 165.

His description of that work gives a brilliant, idiosyncratic sense of what the Festival – and its time – might have been like.

"The main characteristic of work for the Festival was that nothing that was supposed to happen happened when it was supposed to. Our material was finished and ready on time but the building it was to go into, the Power and Production Pavilion, was, to put it simply, not there. It was eventually made available to us exactly a week before the Festival was due to open, whereupon we discovered that, for reasons we knew nothing of, the showcases had not been made according to the plans we had been working to.

There was no time to argue about this and no point in doing so because nobody was taking responsibility. Bob and I just set to and sustained by Benzedrine and knobs of sugar, worked, non-stop, night and day for the whole week.

Even then I didn't quite finish. As the King and Queen and the two Princesses came through the pavilion, viewing the exhibits on the formal Opening Day, they might have thought that all the ingenious animated displays were electrically driven. Not so; I was lying on my back underneath one of them, winding it by hand.”

Ibid., p. 167.

I love the glee and naivety around this new-fangled science stuff, of civilisation being on the cusp on an enlightenment it doesn’t like to admit it doesn’t understand. Shoe shops of the period excitedly offered to X-ray your feet on the pre-text that they’d fit your shoes much better, but really because it was just cool to use the gadget. Paul Rennie tells of similarly overly-enthusiastic space-age jollity at the Science Museum.

“A proposal for a new 'Newton-Einstein House', which subjected visitors to extreme gravitational forces, was ultimately rejected.”

Rennie, p. 51.

The present day Science Museum is divided into three. The first section contents itself with the new technologies that people chose themselves. There’s the ultra-slim GEC hairdryer (model DM397A) from 1956. “Unlike previous types,” says the label, “it had a compact and quiet induction motor. This did not protrude from the main body and allowed the hairdryer to be sleek and stylish”.

There’s Russell Hobbs’ first offering, an electric coffee pot from 1952. There’s early electric toasters and the onomatopoeic “Sylph” electric iron. Various versions of bulky hi-fi systems all include complex valve and bulb-strewn amplifiers and hardly space-age wooden surrounds. The clunky Post Office-provided telephone receiver was still supplied until 1981.

The list of artefacts is important because each is a sea change in how people lived their lives. More, it gives an insight into how they filled their time and recorded their experience, increasingly with gadgets. I was taken by the mechanics of a Bell & Howell cine-camera, where you only used one side of the 8mm film at once, reloading it when one side was full. At the process lab, the film was split lengthwise and the 2x 25 foot lengths spliced together into 1x 50 foot length.

Beside me in the exhibition, a fellow visitor was trying to capture this explanation on his mobile phone. In the modern world, you just plug in a USB or email the pictures to yourself, or go to one of those photo machines that accept every kind of plug in but the one you’ve got.

And last there were the Frigidaire electric refrigerator, a Hotpoint washing machine (with mangle attachment on its top) and a Dishmaster electric dishwasher – all with the same stylistic rounded edges and gleaming surfaces, like props straight from Dan McRegor Dare.

Dare is the subject of the second section, which sketches who he was and how the Eagle came about, and includes a few pages of original artwork from his comic strip adventures and a selection of the wild merchandise that went with them. Admittedly, the Dan and Digby walkie-talkie is rather less strange a concept than my own walkie-talkie Eccles and Slitheen.

Excitingly, there’s two exclusive Frank Hampson posters, commissioned by the Science Museum in 1977. You can see them here:

• Planetfall
• Earth orbit space station

I was rather sad to see the state of the exhibits. On the latter poster, Hampson’s signature is smudged, while the original artworks would surely be better framed.

I wasn’t surprised to see no mention of Colonel Dan’s adventures in 2000AD, Eagle mark II or recent CGI. A panel did show covers to the Garth Ennis-scripted Dan Dare strip and the Best of Eagle collection, and of course neither of these was available to buy from the shop.

Lastly, there was a section on broader developments in technology – the health service, nuclear power and electric trains. The Daily Mirror of 25 January 1955 (price 1½d, “Forward with the people”) broke the news of a “£1,200,000,000” network of electric trains, ordered by the Transport Commission. And, from Saturday, it would also be offering a brand new “Woman’s Sunday Mirror”.

I loved the British space suit – or rather the “Royal Aircraft Establishment flying suit” – with it’s goldfish-bowl round helmet, chunky zips and pleated arms and legs, with slipper-like boots lacked to the suit’s ankles. It seemed so cheap and simple, and made of natural fibre, that it seemed more like a costume from a low-budget sci-fi show. The adjacent oxygen cylinder had apparently been used on the conquest of Everest. Noticing the chunky black piping, I wondered if the air would taste of rubber. Nicely, these exhibits were often labelled with classic, cutaway illustrations from the old Eagle.

It’s a strange exhibition in all, I think because of the disconnect between the bright-eyed aspiration in the comics and designs – the determination to built a better future after the horror of the war – and the literal fall-out. It’s not just the X ray machines in shoe shops, or the scant protection offered to the Duke of Edinburgh in the photo of him visiting a nuclear power station – in a nice suit, just some paper coverings on his feet. A. spoke of having seen many of the exhibits in his own family’s homes, only yellowed with years of cigarette smoke.

In looking into this period, I guess I keep seeing the same thing; people plunging into the future because it was too awful to go back, rather than because they had any idea what they were doing. There seemed to be no thought at all that people might get burnt by the white heat of technology. The nearest mention we get of the nuclear threat in the Science Museum is an Eagle cutaway of a British intercept missile.

And I didn’t spot any mention of the hovercraft, the resolutely British invention I associate so indelibly with its Eagle cutaway. But then only this weekend I was reading how the hovercraft helped kill off some of the sexy sheen which difficulty lent stuff we take for granted.

“James Bond did not take the car ferry to France. This is the one part of the journey where my plans must diverge from his. He headed instead for Lydd Ferryfield airport, in Kent, where he drove up a ramp and straight into a Bristol plane bound for Le Touquet. This used to be a regular practice for the rich until the hovercraft killed off the business in 1970.”

Jon Ronson, “The name's Ronson, Jon Ronson”, The Guardian Weekend, 10 May 2008, p. 45.

See also Charlie Higson’s piece on Ian Fleming, and the booze and fags and women that killed him, in the same bat-time, same bat-paper:

“Let's face it, writers are pretty boring. Writers never know how to pose for photographs – is it hand on chin, or hand not on chin? Some might get drunk and sleep around, some might shoot themselves in an effort to appear more interesting, but the fact is 99% of our lives are spent locked away in a small room with a keyboard.”

Charlie Higson, “The Man Behind 007”, The Guardian Review, 10 May 2008, p. 21.

Which is my cue to just shut up.

Kingdom come

More news from Big Finish: from July there's going to be another series of the Companion Chronicles. Each one is,

"a new Doctor Who story as told by one of the Doctor’s companions played by the actor who portrayed the role in the Classic Doctor Who TV series. Although essentially a talking book, each production includes dramatised sequences featuring a second actor and boasts sound-effects and an original music score ...

With release number five, we return to the First Doctor with a story told by his short-lived travelling companion, Sara Kingdom who originally joined the TARDIS crew for the epic length TV story, The Daleks’ Master Plan. As in the original TV series, Sara Kingdom will once again be played by Jean Marsh of Upstairs, Downstairs fame. The story, entitled Dream Home, has been written by Simon Guerrier."

Already the Internet is asking how Sara (pronounced "Sarah") can narrate something when she gets killed in the one story she's in. Bwah ha ha, etc.

But I learned a new top fact on Saturday (in the pub, celebrating the birthdays of R. and Jenny Who). Jonny Morris tells me that May Warden, the actress what played the aged-to-death Sara, is the oldest* person ever to have been in Doctor Who - I googled her now and she was born on 9 May, 1891.

If we'd known that on Saturday, we could have celebrated her birthday too.

* Well, all right, technically, she's the earliest-born person ever to have been in Doctor Who.

She's on her own

Big Finish have announced details of Bernice Summerfield: Season 9. It's the first time in 15 audio adventures that I've not been involved in what the old girl's up to - that Eddie Robson is her boss and master these days. I'm on tenterhooks to hear it. Place your orders now.

• Benny season 9 (4 plays, £35)
• Benny 2008 (4 plays plus book of novellas, £40)
  

Antediluvian heritage

Adam Grose's blog announces the not untimely publication of Flood, an anthology of one-page comic strips to raise money for the British Red Cross in the name of flood relief. It includes my first ever commissioned comic strip, "The Coral Invasion of London" - with art by Tony Suleri - which Adam posts as an inducement.

It's just £3.75 a copy and all in a good cause. Buy Flood now.

Number crunch

Credit crunch has been in the news lately, which has got me thinking. And noticing just how many offers I get, all with the thrilling prospect of being able to owe banks some money.

There are many different strategies, but all are desperately urgent and equally simpering to please. Perhaps this is just what you get with being an adult and having a mortgage (and being good for a loan of some £¼ million). But this is what I've had in the last lunar cycle:

• 1 April
  Barclaycard send two blank cheques with a maximum total value of five grand. "Streamline your finances" says the accompanying letter, by paying off "outstanding credit or store card balances to your Barclaycard."
  
  "It couldn't be easier," they continue, "to take advantage of this great offer", where the solution to not keeping up with your myriad debts is to, er, borrow more money. I am reminded of my post last year on business buzzwords.
  
  Consolidate
  Verb. Have sex with.
  
  
• 3 April
  Black Horse personal finance tells me I have "been specially selected by Black Horse for a limited offer Priority Loan. We've set aside an amount of £7,575 especially for you. This offer is only available for a short time - so don't miss out on this opportunity. To activate your Priority Loan call us today - it's that easy to apply."
  
  It says the magic number £7,575 another couple of times on the letter, and in big letters, too, for the hard of cogitating. What's more, "because our loans are available up to £15,000, you could borrow more if you need it."
  
  So why are they only tantalising me with about half what they could offer? I feel rather slighted.
  
  "Enjoy affordable repayments" it also says in bold letters. Yes, because it's such great fun, being technically able to keep off the bailiffs!
  

• 9 April
  MBNA offers a credit card by which I might "spring clean" my finances. How seasonal! It's like the first chapter of Wind in the Willows! They don't do anything so unromantic as name actual cash figures, but the small print says there's a cash limit of £50,000 - though they'll dictate all the terms. In fact, there's so many conditions they have to provide a separate leaflet. Obviously no catches there!
  

• 11 April
  Barclaycard again! And I could have "Cash in just 4 working days" - well, they admit that it could be in your account in that time - from £1,000 to £25,000.
  

• 12 April
  British Airways have sent me a credit card. A real plastic one, stuck to a letter. Only it says in small print on the side, "This is not a Real Credit Card". But being able to see what the actual card looks like sure helps me decide whether it's a good offer.
  

• 15 April
  Black Horse again, with a loan to help "Put your plans into action - now!" And they feel snubbed I've not been in touch. "We recently wrote to you with a loan offer - if that amount wasn't right for you there are different amounts available ... Only you know what you want a loan for - here are some suggestions, what did you have in mind."
  
  They then suggest a garden makeover (£5,050), a dream kitchen (£7,575) and - the jackpot - a chance to spring clean my finances (£10,050). They're oddly precise figures, aren't they? Especially when I don't have a garden.
  

• 20 April
  Lloyds TSB this time, not Black Horse at all. And apparently "£5,000 is ready and waiting for you...". Note the suggestive glance of that slutty ellipsis. "Approval on a loan is less than 30 minutes" they explain - because of course I'm the one rushing to get this signed. In fact, I'm so in a hurry I might not notice the huge great box-out, that "Typical 17.9% APR".
  

• 1 May
  Barclaycard again. Word for word the same letter as 1 April with those two sultry cheques. Just in case I've changed my mind.
  

So in total, in one calendar month I've been offered somewhere between £23,575 (just short of the UK's average annual wage - £23,700 according to the BBC) and £105,000 (more than four times' that).

What is the solution? Well, first there's the Mailing Preference Service. But it can take months and it doesn't always work (Black Horse uses slight variations of my address which, I think, worm round the system). And anyway, the sharks themselves have provided the means of delivery.

There are prepaid envelopes with most of these letters. Prepaid, because the bank has to pay up to the Post Office if the envelopes are used. So you tear up the terms and conditions on the offer, stick them in the envelope, and post them back to the bank.

Petty? Well, yes and no. Because if enough people do it, the cost of sending this rubbish is too much to make it worthwhile. At least that's what I tell myself as I giggle fiendishly at the post box.

You are an insect

Last week I introduced a showing of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars to a bunch of UCL students with an interest in things archaeological. Well, I say “bunch”; what with it being exam season, there was all of one person there.

But I’d been asked to prepare something for people who’d not seen any old Doctor Who before – indeed, who might not have been born by the time of Survival episode three. And the audience seemed quite happy with it - he even asked me for my notes. This is what I said:

Hello. If you’ve not seen old Doctor Who before, you probably need some warning. Pyramids of Mars was first shown in 1975. And some of the special effects look like they are from the mid 1970s. That’s often what most surprises people who haven’t seen much old telly. Yes, the TARDIS is dangling on a string. Yes, some of the cross-fade effects don’t quite exactly match up. But this is from two years before Star Wars and a lifetime before CGI. And as old Doctor Who goes, Pyramids of Mars is one of the best.

It tops polls and top-ten lists. It’s one Doctor Who fans show to those poor people who don’t know – or care – about the old series. Russell T Davies had clips from it in his grown-up series Queer as Folk – which caused a controversy what with its sympathetic portrayal of a Doctor Who fan.

So what makes it so good? Well. Ignoring the 70s special effects, it looks great; it’s set in 1911 and the BBC were always good at period pieces. It thieves its plot from the Hammer film The Mummy – the guy playing Professor Scarman clearly chosen because he looks a bit like Peter Cushing. And mummies make for a great monster.

But more than that. What sets it apart from other stories is that it’s Doctor Who versus a God. Sutekh is a brilliant baddie – though he spends most of his time stuck on a chair. He’s voiced by Gabriel Woolf, who was in the new series with David Tennant a couple of years ago, as the voice of the Devil. Some people think they’re the same character.

But it’s not just that Sutekh’s a God. The Doctor is terrified of him. The way Tom Baker plays it is absolutely chilling. And because the Doctor is scared, so are we.

It’s also a great story for Sarah Jane. She’s in her element here. In fact, she turns out to know a surprising amount about Egyptian mythology and how to use a rifle. She also just so happens to try on the right sort of period clothes. But again, it’s a compelling performance – always running to keep up with the Doctor, terrified but brave.

And special mention to Michael Sheard as Laurence Scarman, fantastically baffled, enthusiastic and rather moving. Sheard would later be throttled by Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back and played Hitler in the last Indiana Jones movie. He’s one of Doctor Who’s best ever guest actors, but is probably most famous as the dreaded Mr Bronsan in late 80s Grange Hill.

Some other things to note:

At the start the Doctor is still nominally working for the Brigadier and UNIT – as featured in the new series on Saturday.

Sarah says she’s from 1980 – five years in the future when this first went out.

Yes, when the Doctor is in disguise, it really is Tom Baker wrapped up in the bandages.

The house where it was filmed was owned at the time by Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

And when Sutekh stands up in episode four… Well, keep your eyes on his chair.

I've had it with blondes

Met the Dr in Kings Cross on Saturday, where we had celebratory chips on the basis of her having a copy of her book. It's all very exciting to see it actually in print.

Thence to Cud playing at the Scala - an indie band I used to read about in the pages of Deadline. And how it did take me back to nights out in the early/mid nineties; there was even a fantastically ill-loved performance poet in the line-up.

Cud were really very splendid, a lead singer Carl Puttnam all very Jim Morrison, squeezed into very tight leather trousers. How exciting to see m'colleague Will Potter being a rock and roll star. I danced about like a foolish buffoon before we ducked out mid-encore to make the last train home.

All the way back there was earnest speculation everywhere you looked as to whether anyone could really vote Boris. People even said they'd x'ed his box "because of the comedy value". What a depressingly stupid place London can sometimes be.

And more so yesterday, when it took an hour and half to get from Waterloo to Richmond (a journey that's usually about 20 minutes). Met up with the brothers and a cousin for beers and cheery chat - and the final delivery of a belated Christmas present. Had meant to get back home in time for last orders at a friend's birthday. But it took nearly three hours to get home...

Rewrites today on a thing as-yet-unannounced. And if that goes okay I might watch last night's Droo.

Change, my dear

The Big Finish website has posted a news story and full details of my forthcoming Doctor Who anthology, How The Doctor Changed My Life.

Alex Mallinson has produced an absolutely stunning cover which gave me chills the first time I saw it.

The schoolboy whose twin brother vanished in the night. A woman whose house teems with alien refugees. The dad who dies every evening...

All through space and time live people, ordinary people, whose lives have been turned upside down.

People who’ve lost jobs and loved ones, or seen their homes destroyed, or found themselves on whole other planets. They’ve nothing in common with one another except that their lives can never be the same.

Because they’re people who’ve met the Doctor. Featuring 25 original stories from 25 brand-new authors – the winners of a competition to seek out bold new writing talent!

Foreword by Paul Cornell

Homework by Michael Coen
Change Management by Simon Moore
Curiosity by Mike Amberry
Potential by Stephen Dunn
Second Chances by Bernard O’Toole
Child’s Play by LM Myles
Relativity by Michael Montoure
Outstanding Balance by Tim Lambert
The Last Thing You Ever See by Richard Goff
The Shopping Trolleys of Doom by Caleb Woodbridge
The Final Star by Chris Wing
The Man on the Phone by Mark Smith
The Monster in the Wardrobe by James C McFetridge
Suns and Mothers by Einar Olgeirsson
Taking the Cure by Matthew James
Those Left Behind by Violet Addison
Evitability by Andrew K Purvis
£436 by Nick May
Time Shear by Steven Alexander
Running on Empty by JR Loflin
Swamp of Horrors (1957) – Viewing Notes by Michael Rees
Insider Dealing by Dann Chinn
The Andrew Invasion by John Callaghan
Stolen Days by Arnold T Blumberg
Lares Domestici by Anna Bratton

Competition rules
Competition feedback

Indistinguishable from magic

To the Clarke Awards last night in London’s glamorous West End; shoehorned into the underground bar in the Apollo cinema on Lower Regent Street.

(Lisa Tuttle explained to the Times last week about the award, its controversies and this year’s nominees.)

Arrived soaked by rain and weirded out by all the folk in really very impressive Star Wars costumes. Was it all in aid of added showbiz gloss, or a ruse to get some interest from the media? The Clarke Awards, after all, only celebrate unsexy stuff like books. Or was this instead some kind of ill-thought-through tribute? The first awards since the death of Sir Arthur, and I wondered what he’d think.

Nope, turns out they’re all there for a film, being shown after the book stuff. But I did have the splendid joy of Darth Vader trying to squeeze past me and J., perhaps trying to reach the free beer. And in a very unSith-like manner, asking politely, “Excuse me.”

Didn’t trip over on the way into the ceremony this time, and sat and ate ice cream and gossiped until they made the announcement. Hooray for Richard Morgan who seemed endearingly amazed. And hooray for more beer and gossip afterwards.

There was my boss Andrew Sewell basking in Blake’s 7 telly. There was Paul Cornell, who – what with the Stormtroopers jostling around us – I described as my own Master Yoda. And then decided he was more my Emperor Palpatine and I was his Darth Maul. By the time I was suggesting that I’d have to throw him off a balcony into the heating system of the Death Star, and that he’d explode for no very good reason and so restore balance and stuff to the Force… Well, he deftly, fearfully walked away.

There was also the SFX gang and the Pan Macmillan gang and Anthony Brown on behalf of all things Visimag. And I realised only after he must have left that one familiar seeming bloke used to be one of my tutors, who I’d not seen since I graduated almost a decade ago. Gah. Patrick Parrinder inspired my paper on Iain Banks and utopia, and marvellously pointed out that, from evidence in the text, the Martians launched their war of the worlds out of what seems to be a giant space cannon.

Excitingly, I did get to say hello to Ken MacLeod. Was, I asked, Trotskyite science-fiction just him spotting a niche? And he started to say no and we almost got talking. Then some bloke came over to say Ken had should have won, and Ken began to explain he was very happy with it being Richard Morgan, and someone needed to get past to reach the free beer and then I was out of his orbit…

And ended up in a silly discussion about how one might improve the Clarke’s? What about additional, less distinguished awards for sci-fi films and telly? Or, because no else does this, adverts thieving sci-fi stuff? That dancing transforming Corsa, for example. (It might not actually be a Corsa ad, but that’s what we geeks called it.) And what happens to the driver when his car morphs into a robot? Is he splattered all over the dashboard?

You see; thinking through the consequences of new technology. One day I’ll be on the Clarke shortlist.

Nine lives and counting

Space, said Douglas Adams, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is…

But there’s a small and dwindling group of men who do. Men pushing 80 who’ve seen the Earth from deep space. The Apollo astronauts could hide our planet, all our lives and worries, behind the end of one thumb.

Journalist Andrew Smith was interviewing former astronaut Charlie Duke when word came through that Pete Conrad had been killed in a motorbike crash. Smith was taken by Duke’s forlorn comment that now there were only “nine of us” left – just nine remaining of just 12 men to ever have walked on the Moon. And so Smith set out to find and interview the remaining astronauts, before it was too late.

Moondust is an extraordinary, brilliant book, full of wit and revelation, Smith struggling to tease out what such an experience can have been like. He interviews not just the Moon men but their team-mates left 60 miles up in lunar orbit, the wives and children who suffered such heroes in ordinary life, the journalists who covered the show first time round and those now trying to prove whether it even really happened.

Throughout, Smith works hard to explain context: the context of these men’s lives now (signing autographs at conventions when they’re lower in the billing than some bloke from Lost In Space); the context of the unreconstructed worldview prevailing in their time; the context of international, domestic, office and personal politics which dictated the decisions being made; the context of Smith’s own life and the impact the Moon landings had on him.

This latter aspect might not appeal to everyone – and I found it a bit wearying at times. It’s in complete contrast to In The Shadow of the Moon, which the astronauts tell themselves accompanied by cleaned-up NASA footage. But Smith’s argument is that the missions to get “out there” is important only in what it showed us about ourselves. Standing on that barren, grey rock redefined our position and meaning here.

This human story should appeal to those who’ve never really got into Moon porn. It’s not all just Top Men talking at length about real, manly physics. In fact, the book is full of detail and observation that punctures the cool, controlled image of spacemen. Snot, for example, is,

“no fun at all in a weightless environment.”

Andrew Smith, Moondust, p. 163.

The unglamorous realities of space travel have long been reported – kids queued up at the space museum in Washington DC was astronauts’ toilet, which I think was from a space shuttle. But that strange looking contraption was modern, extravagant comfort compared to the first pioneers. As early as 1973, Buzz Aldrin’s book Return to Earth revealed,

“That the condoms they’d used for collecting urine were a great source of anguish because ‘our legs weren’t the only things that atrophied in space’… [and] that hydrogen bubbles in the water supply they used to rehydrate food had given them the farts and Columbia’s interior didn’t smell so good (there was ‘a considerable fragrance’) by the time they got home.”

Ibid., p. 101.

It changes our view of these healthy American heroes, filled to the gills with the “right stuff”, to hear of leaks in the condoms that resulted in reeking, “blobbing globules of piss”. (What a brilliantly vivid image; it makes me think of weightless Klingon bleeding in Star Trek VI, or the title sequence of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross.)

“This happened to Gordon Cooper on his Mercury flight and all he could do was herd them together every so often, so that he knew where they were. The rubbers on Apollo had the same problems, but were connected through a hose and valve directly into space. Not only was it easy to catch yourself in the mechanism, but opening the valve brought the hungry tug of absolute vacuum.”

Ibid., p. 247.

And it gets worse. The following grotesque quotation is not suitable for those of a nervous disposition:

“Defecation was the real deal. To do this on Apollo, you had to climb to the lower right side of the craft while your crewmates moved as far away from you as they possibly could – which anyone who’s seen one of the capsules will appreciate wasn’t far. There, you got completely naked, removing rings, watches, everything, because you couldn’t be sure what was going to happen next; then you positioned a special plastic bag as best you could, and went, hoping that everything went in it. Remember that you’re floating; the bag is floating; your shit is floating. Charlie [Duke] says: ‘Anything you can imagine happening… happened.’ Thus there is the tale of the stool that went freelance on one flight … So unspeakable was the hour-long process of dumping and getting cleaned up afterwards that I heard rumours of one astronaut dosing himself with Imodium, which enabled him to hold it for eight whole days.”

Ibid., p. 248.

It’s like some kind of disconnect; the extraordinary aspiration and physics and enterprise, yet inextricable from such humbling, basic human functionality. Smith is also good at connecting the dots, using this beastly detail to explain – though not excuse – the absence of women in the crews.

“Even I find it hard to imagine men and women of his generation sharing these experiences.”

Ibid., p. 247.

The lesson is that space isn’t just big, it’s weird and counter-intuitive. Smith explains space sickness – where those of us who use exterior signals completely lose our bearings – and the complexities of orbital mechanics. Thrust lifts you into a higher orbit, which has weaker gravity and where it’s further to get round to the same place again (because the circumference of the orbit is bigger). Thus increasing your speed to catch something up actually puts you further away.

“Bizarre as it sounds the solution … is to decrease velocity, so sinking to a lower, shorter, faster orbit, then to gradually transfer back up to the original one at precisely the right point to meet the target. This stuff is called ‘orbital mechanics’ and it manifestly is rocket science.”

Ibid., pp. 147-8.

And even more incredibly this stuff was being sussed out and tested, with men putting their lives at risk, by, in Aldrin’s own phrase:

“earnest young engineers, their holstered slide rules slapping against their belts.”

Ibid., p. 211.

The computers by which mission control monitored proceedings were, by modern standards, not even pocket calculator stuff. It makes the whole thing as much foolhardy as brilliant. And so, you’d think, a whole lot more endearing. But there’s also a dark side to the story.

On the side of these engineers was German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, a controversial figure then and now. As in the James Bond novel Moonraker, German rocketry was a valuable commodity in the early Cold War, but came with a difficult moral dimension. Reg Turnhill, the BBC’s aerospace correspondent for two decades, couldn’t shake von Braun’s hand for some years. Reg’s

“eldest son was born prematurely when one of the first V-2 rocket-bombs von Braun designed during World War II fell on Sydenham.”

Ibid., p. 39.

And the man Reg describes working for NASA could come right out of Bond:

“To begin with, his thick accent and mouth full of metal teeth were ‘quite revolting for the viewer’, but one day Reg turned round and, lo, the engineer was speaking perfect English through a gallery of gleaming white teeth.”

Ibid.

Smith teases at the controversy. Did von Braun know about the slave labour conditions under which his work for the Nazis was carried out? Was he complicit in the regime? Did he see the punishment and executions? How much of his past was swept under the carpet so as not to inconvenience the mission? And, madly, mixed up in all that is what sounds like some insanely inspired sitcom.

“Prior to his flight, [Apollo astronaut Edgar] Mitchell spent a week sharing a house with the rocket scientist [von Braun] and Arthur C. Clarke, who was by then regarded as one of the most influential futurist thinkers on the planet, because for that brief period sci-fi was seen as something more than escapism.”

Ibid., p. 69.

There’s a definite sense of the transcendent in that period up to Apollo 11; a sense that anything can be and will be achieved, whatever the sacrifice needed. I’ve talked before that the term “single-minded” is a euphemism for someone being a shit. Here, marriages suffered and collapsed; children suffered dad’s who were impossible role models and who set impossible standards. And von Braun’s involvement is troubling because it exemplifies the any cost approach.

Other German scientists were found out for their part in torture and horrific treatment, and were retired from the programme. Even those who worked with von Braun, who liked him, are sceptical of his innocence; they argue he would have worked under any flag, that the politics didn’t matter half as much as the achievement.

Certainly, von Braun had bold ambitions for where the programme would go next. In 1969, with the Moon landing still a tantalising probability, he presented Congress with a plan for,

“nuclear rockets assembled in Moon bases, to reach the red planet in the early 1980s.”

Ibid., p. 107.

Which is ironic, really. There’s a suggestion that NASA would have been better served with space planes instead of rockets – they would have been safer and more sustainable, so the space age might have lasted longer than December 1972. But von Braun’s lobbying and the fact rockets could be produced faster than new versions of the X-15 seem to have decided things. The single-mindedness turned out to be as counter-intuitive as space.

All the astronauts Smith speaks to yearn to go back to the Moon. I’m not sure whether that’s because they personally need to return – infected with a bug for moondust as some people are bewitched by Africa. Perhaps, like Tennyson’s Ulysees, the old men crave one last great adventure. They’ve all got reasons for insisting on the importance of man going back: science; pioneering spirit; resources and profit; just to beat the Chinese. John Young even claims we have to get off-planet if the species is to survive, that there’s a

“1 in 455 chance of humanity failing to see out the next century … You’re about ten times more likely to get killed in a civilization-ending event than you are of getting killed on a commercial airline flight.”

Ibid., p. 215.

But is this all just skirting around the debilitating sense of anti-climax, the mundane paucity of the human world they have returned to? Is the yearning to return just a way to validate those incredible 10 days off-planet, and the shadow they cast on the rest of their lives?

Smith following them round, begging for interviews, seeing them at expensive dinners and signings, and sadly reports their tetchy in-bickering. There’s a sense that the astronauts – every one of them either an only child or eldest sibling – are still squabbling alpha males.

They are all in their own ways competitive, high-achieving and selfish. They have their own obsessions – religious, artistic or political – and nothing gets in the way. These are, of course, the necessary characteristics to achieve something so improbably and audacious as getting to the Moon. Something so manifestly incredible that huge numbers don’t believe it.

The restless disquiet with life that Smith charts is not down to what they saw out in space. If they have had trouble adjusting to post-lunar life, it seems it’s because there’s nowhere further to go. They can’t describe or explain what it was like to be there, but that can’t stop the endless queue of people asking that very question. The tragedy is not that there are only nine Moonwalkers left, but that, despite our protests, they could never hope to share the experience with the rest of us.

Why the Sontarans are silly

The Mr Potatoheads of Dr Who are back on our screens tomorrow night. The toad-faced Sontarans whose heads snugly fit their helmets of course first appeared in The Time Warrior, back when Sarah Jane Smith seemed a really neat idea. I only realised recently that Kevin Lindsay, the chap playing Sontaran Linx is also Cho-je what first uses the word “regenerate” and whose little-pushes makes Jon Pertwee Tom Baker.

Lindsay returned in the following year’s follow-up, The Sontaran Experiment, playing a matching Sontaran called Styre. Did I mention how much I dearly adore The Sontaran Experiment? Yes, I think I did.

It’s important Kevin Lindsay plays both Sontarans since they’re meant to be clones. But, because he sadly died soon after, their returns in The Invasion of Time, The Two Doctors, A Fix With Sontarans, Shakedown and Mind Game (yes, they all count) were all played by different people. Some of these people even dared to be tall, more ferret than potato.

But just because they’re clones, Sontarans don’t all need to be identical. In fact, in their endless war with the jellyfish shape-changer Rutans, there’s good reason why they might want different body types in stock. They can have short, fat ones for short, fat missions, and tall ones for reaching stuff from shelves. By varying their numbers of fingers or the contours on their heads, they’re also proofing themselves against blights to one strain like parasites and diseases.

We already know that variation is part of how human apes exist, and how we’re not quite the same as bonobos. By trying stuff out our genes keep on surviving. Yet for all the evident success with which we swarm over the planet (destroying our own habitat like any other cancerous parasite), it’s a bit of mucky, inefficient process. There’s extinctions, starvations and various kinds of mutation that are, frankly, not very nice.

Indeed, the first Sontaran we meet berates Sarah for the silliness of this binary reproductive system. Cloning would, he sort-of argues, obviate all the associated weird rituals of pair bonding, like the sacrifice of costly dinner and plants’ gonads to a potential mate. Civilisation has worked out all sorts of strange rules to insist it’s all about what’s best for the children, and not merely some messy, peculiar fun.

No, I don’t want to swap the bedroom for a laboratory – sorry, Dr; you’re not off the hook just yet. But the idea of cloning questions the gestalt of assumptions making up our ever more sexualised society. That’s why it’s such a contentious subject; sex and its related feints and formalities are intrinsic to how we organise our lives.

Anyway. This is all just a lead-up to an old, old joke from one of my old, old fanzines. Because the Sontarans, right, they catch hold of Sarah and notice she’s not a boy. “The hair is finer,” says Linx and Styre, “the thorax of a different construction.” And that’s quite spectacularly silly.

The cultural assumptions of this stupid ape would have blurted, “And blimey, she’s got tits!”

Persian automatic

I’d meant to read Persepolis for ages, but the new film version and not being able to think what else to get the Dr for an anniversary present finally got me buying a copy. I didn’t know that much about it till then; it was about Iran and it was meant to be good. Perhaps it would have something to do with the ancient city.

It’s a memoir by Marjane Satrapi, growing up during interesting times as the Shah falls, fundamentalism grips the country and then the long war with Iraq. It’s a keenly observed, often shocking, often very funny comic strip, narrated and drawn in deceptively simple style.

Yes, a comic strip. Just deal with it.

Iran is, obviously, a timely, provocative subject and the book is an insightful, personal view. But it’s more than that, and I think particularly effective because of its being a comic.

Alan Moore has argued that what sets comics apart from other media is the potential for juxtaposition. Satrapi is very good at gleaning the ironies from her mixed-up life. There’s a complex, compelling blend of personal incident and observation alongside a broader political and cultural history.

For example, her nervous Uncle Taher suffers a third heart attack at the sound of a grenade. Marjane and her auntie rush to the hospital and struggle to get past the bureaucracy. Her auntie needs permission to see her husband, and the director who can grant this turns out to be her former, “creepy window washer” – a ne’er-do-well doing fine under the wartime regime, a fundamentalist now who won’t even look at a woman.

And then… Oh, how do I quote from a comic strip? Here goes:

“After the director we went to see the chief of staff, Dr. Fathi.

Dr Fathi: ‘Ma’am, we’ll do what we can. We are terribly strapped at the moment.

‘Look in this room. They’re all victims of chemical weapons.

‘The Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.’

Marjane’s auntie, shouting: ‘Why are you telling me this?! I couldn’t care less. I want my husband to get well!’”

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, p. 122.

There’s a constant undercurrent of incredible violence. Deaths and beatings are part of daily life even before the war with Iraq. Marjane’s family are descended from the deposed royals (the surname “Satrapi” is a clue to that) and she goes to see her favourite uncle in prison the night before he is executed.

The frustrated anger at the regime and the constant sense of vulnerability and loss give the book an awful depth. Like Maus, the suffering is juxtaposed and made in any way bearable by funny and wry observance, petty human jealousies and foibles including the author’s own.

She feels awkward in the street one time, so reports an innocent man for making lude suggestions and gets him arrested. Or she and her babysitter conspire to chat up the next door neighbour. Her middle class, leftie parents still stick by social orders that define who can date who. After their next-door neighbours are flattened in an Iraqi raid – Marjane glimpses the mangled something that is left of their daughter, her age – they send her to study in Austria.

It’s again with the contrasts, Marjane a duck out of water who barely speaks the language. The richness and ease of the West sits uncomfortably with what we’ve already seen, and there’s something comic about the punk “rebellion” compared to Marjane’s parents smuggling posters of Kim Wilde. Marjanne stands to lose far more buying illegal pop music tapes in Iran than she does hash for her Austrian friends. The book as a whole is constantly probing, exploring and monkeying around with ideas of freedom and independence – what that means, what we do with it, what our obligations are. (Hence the title of this post, do you see?)

Marjane finds herself in the difficult, lonely state of the migrant: a misfitting foreigner who doesn’t ever quite get accepted by the new country; and changed by her sojourn so that she doesn’t fit at home any more. We see the colossal pressures she’s put under by petty racism and mean-mindedness; a far worse affect than the guilty parties can ever have considered. In fact, what with lying nuns and and a landlady who assumes she’s a whore, Marjane is lucky to survive her time away from home.

She names names as she details her clumsy assignations with boys: one who turned out to be gay; one who was a shit; the husband she should never have married. Yet she’s also often guarded about details in a way she’s not when describing torture and brutality. It surprised me when she admits to jealous sniping friends that, at 19, she’s lost her virginity. When and who with, I thought. And do I really want to flick back to see?

But what’s most extraordinary is how she makes the specific general. These are personal, individual experiences in a world so distant from our own, and yet it’s the tale of ordinary people with ordinary wants and feelings.

I think that easy empathy is helped by Marjane’s drawing style. It’s simplistic – deceptively so when you note the keenly observed cars and buildings – and high contrast, without shading or grey. Things are always either black or white (again a juxtaposition with what’s being shown). Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics argues that this simplification to the abstract makes the people depicted more universal – the less detailed, realistic and specific a drawing of a person, the more it becomes not just any but everyone.

This also makes it easy to print this film tie-in edition on ordinary paperback paper, with its rough pulpy feel and potential for yellowy lignin. (I looked into the feasibility of doing something with Adrian Salmon’s similarly high-contrast illustrations, but a Benny comic proved to be a more expensive proposition than a year of audios and books all together.) You might need to squint to read all the captions, but the format disguises this being a comic; it might be an ordinary, proper sort of book.

Only doing things an ordinary, proper book couldn’t do: showing not telling that we are not different, whatever war, religion and politics might try to claim.

Johtaja lähtee eläkkeelle

The shiny new issue of Finnish sci-fi magazine Spin includes a translation of the interview what Leslie McMurtry did with me last year, plus a short story of mine never previously published. And one I'm really rather pleased with.

You have to buy the magazine to read it, and even then only if you can read Finnish. Which I don't; but how exciting to look as if I do.

As a tantalising wossname, the English translation of the story's title is - or should be - "The Case of the Retiring Magnate".

Also, the Blake's 7 people have issued a press release about the return of Michael Keating of Vila. And that includes mention of me writing a play about Blake's friend Jenna Stannis.

Time out with the wife

The Dr's book is due out next month and the media circus has already begun. She's interviewed in this week's Time Out - the second time she's been in that magazine (the last time she was talking about, ahem, Roman marital aids).

The old girl will also be harping on about suggestive bits of cloth at the National Gallery on 14 May.

Yesterday, we celebrated my finishing a first draft of something as yet unannounced by stopping for a pint in the new-look Bridge House Tavern. It's spangly and trendily grey, and all a bit yummy mummy.

I'd just found a table in the much extended pub garden, and was wondering if this was the first time this year that's allowed drinking outside. And the heavens suddenly opened. So we skulked indoors, I suggested the title for her next book and then we went for medicinal curry.

They don't know the words

So. Doctor Who then.

Is Rose Tyler eating all the bees?

But who's counting?

The BBC's Doctor Who website has posted a review of The Pirate Loop by the reading group from Bishop of Llandaff school in Cardiff - that is, Sarah, Lauren, Bethan P, Bethan M, Rosie, Enya and Lydia.

"It wasn't very good and it didn't interest me very much."

Bethan P.

The girls gave me 7 out of 10 - which is what Trev got for Wishing Well, meaning Jim is the winner in the Decemberist gang; Peacemaker got 9.

Though showing all us Decemberists just how it should be done, Terrance's revenge got 9.5.

Like a magic ninja

Hooray! I have as of this morning my copies of Defining Patterns, which have been sat in the Post Office awaiting my collection. It’s a thrilling looking book, with my story, “The Great Escapes” alongside some cracking stuff. There’s competition winner Michael Coen and the Big Finish debut of Ace creator Ian Briggs. What more could you possibly want?

Meanwhile, Sin Deniz has interviewed me for his regular blog on sci-fi writers.

And, perhaps most excitingly of all, you, yes you can buy photographs of me from as little as £3.99.

Scrolling down the list, there’s two of me, one of Peter Davison, one of Chas from Chas & Dave… But David Darlington can be had in no less than four exciting action poses.

Etymological space

My friend Suetekh once told me that she collects definitions of science fiction. Ones where Star Wars isn’t allowed, or that start with Frankestein, Poe or the Iliad. Ones that try to draw a line between sf and fantasy or sf and magic realism. Ones that try to impose some moral purpose on stories, underlining science, speculation or gedankenexperiment. Ones that even have the balls to argue sf is everything, and all other writing merely its sub-genres.

We laughed. We had more cake. We went on to talk about the mad-looking things that live at the bottom of oceans.

I must admit, I was never very bothered by any of that definitions stuff. Sure, it helps to be able to ring-fence an area that you’re writing or talking about, but there’s a fundamental difference between something being about rockets and it being any good or interesting. Too often definitions are merely a territorial marker, the definer staking a claim to the kind of stuff he likes, as a tiger might mark a tree.

In my own recent researches, I’ve noticed all kinds of effort to define the sub-genres of sf, or even to explain – as if to a sick relative – that they’re not sub-genres at all.

The main one is what we call the “what if” sorts of story, set in worlds where Hitler wins the Second World War or where Martin Luther ended up Pope. Just as with sci-fi, there’s those who argue that this isn’t just about coming up with wheezes for good and strange stories. Oh no, they say, if Winston Churchill was writing this kind of thing, it’s got to be serious, academic history.

But what are these kinds of stories called?

Those who call it “alternate history” need to look in a dictionary. Alternate means “every other”. “Alternative history” is better, but still carries a sense that there’s only one possible other option.

“Counterfactual” makes me think “lie”. “Parallel universe” misses the point that most of these kinds of stories include a revelation about where their history diverged from our own. In geometry, parallels don’t ever meet. (Hence the title of “Parallel Lives”; people who are not as close as they seem, so that [Spoiler] falls through the cracks.)

I quite like “allohistory” – meaning “other” in the same way as “allegory”. But people don’t use this very often, and can look puzzled if you do. Ho hum.

Another common term is “utopia”, which literally means “no place” and tends to describe any fictional ideal – do you see what Doctor Who did there? The saint who coined the term in 1516 meant an island of sunshine and sheep, and generally people know what you mean. But what about something like Nineteen Eighty-Four which is evidently the opposite? Or that staple of science fiction, where what seems to be an island of sunshine and sheep turns out to be all monstrous?

These are surely two different things; the state that’s in no way a utopia, and the state that says it is and yet is not. I’ve seen critics carefully define these two terms from each other, labelling them “dystopia” as opposed to “anti-utopia”. The trouble is, different critics apply the labels different ways round.

There are also different kinds of utopia: heterotopia, extropia, techno-utopia. It all gets rather fiddly.

Tom Moylan’s “Demand the Impossible” also argues that utopias can’t be fixed points; that in fact they breakdown if they ever stop striving to be better. What he calls a “critical utopia” is continually self-assessing, asking difficult questions. I argued in Foundation a long time ago that that’s exactly what happens in Iain M Banks’s Culture stories, since we usually see the utopian Culture through the eyes of someone off-message.

Utopia is, then, the journey not the destination. It is the aspiration to make better worlds, the methodology, processess, questions. Literally, it is the state of being, not the place.

Bisy

So, says Scott, what am I up to? And I realise I haven’t posted one of those sorts of posts in ages. So here goes…

I’m almost at the end of a month’s contract working full-time for a Government department, writing and editing things. Next week I start three or four weeks on a part-work magazine.

By Friday, I need to have fully proofed “How The Doctor Changed My Life” – I’m on page 162 as of this moment. I’m monstrously delighted with how it’s all come out, a testament to the hard work and brilliance of the 25 first-time authors. We’re embroiled in discussions of marketing and stuff, and I’ve seen a first draft of the glorious cover. More on all that very soon.

I was meant to have until 6 May to finish something that’s not been announced yet, but the editor’s asked if I can get it in sooner and I likes a challenge. It currently includes the words “Sugar Puffs”, “micturate” and “Noel Edmonds”.

I’ve got two other unannounced things to be in on 12 May. One of them was given to me as a sort of replacement for something I pitched for which didn’t seem like it would happen. And then this week it did – I’ve now got until the end of May to finish it. So all in all I shall have no evenings or weekends until the beginning of June.

By then I shall not be freelancing during the week and can concentrate all my energies on the three sizeable projects that will be taking up most of my summer. Two of them haven’t been announced yet but the third is my very own, original novel, which I am determined to actually spend some time on. I’ve got, since people aren’t asking, about 10,000 words of it not very well written and a small universe of notes.

I’ve got two short films to write for Codename Moose, and a short story for Sin Deniz. And after that, we shall see.

Creature, I name you…

What the internet can tell us about the names of Dr Who’s friends.

• Rose
  Well, duh, it’s after the pretty flower. But it might also come from the Germanic “hros” – or horse. No, really.
• Adam
  The Hebrew word for man; there’s maybe some Biblical punnery on similar Hebrew words meaning “red” (the colour, apparently, of human skin), “making” and “earth”. But the Biblical Adam was also tempted by new knowledge. Was that Nurse called Eve?
• Jack
  Shorter form of Iohannes (also the source of John), derived from the Hebrew for “God is gracious”. Which goes with him being brought back to life by shiny-eyed goddess Rose. (But then it’s not his real name anyway, is it? Considering his brother, I think Jack’s really called Pinkish.)
• Mickey
  Michael is Hebrew for “like God”; in the Book of Revelation he’s the leader of Heaven’s armies and the patron saint of soldiers.
• Martha
  Aramaic for “lady” or “mistress”. But not in the sense of being the other woman.
• Donna
  Means “lady” in Italian. And as a feminine version of the old Celtic “Donald”, it means “ruler of the world”.

I went ape

For reasons of research on something I cannot yet speak of, I have been looking into physics. Specifically, I have been learning about orbital rendezvous and delta-v calculations – the sorts of tricky manouvre one does in rockets in space. You know, real space travel, not all those sci-fi cheats.

The Dr has patiently zoned out of my efforts to explain some of this stuff. She ignored almost all of the DVD of In The Shadow of the Moon, though she was rather moved by the former moon-walkers having trouble coming back to reality. They found God, they drank, they just fidgeted about – though none of them got a job in the music industry in the way that Polly ffaze-Avatron did.

As I’ve said before, the Dr considers all this space stuff to be “moon porn”. Not even my top facts impressed her – like that it took the Apollo missions three days to reach the moon; less time it took the first passenger flights to reach Australia.

I even foolishly attempted to explain to her the late Craig Hinton’s theories that Martian civilisation would have seemed somewhat Egyptian, what with the Ice Warriors and Khufu both being under the yoke of the Osirans. She likes Egyptians. She’s even quite tickled by the idea that the pyramids came from space. Just so long as it wasn’t from mid-70s low-budget Doctor Who space.

She’s also not a great fan of monkeys, and points out that they’re always the baddies. See, for example, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pirates of the Caribbean or the apes that kidnap Mowgli. Against this, I can offer… er… Muggle Wump in The Twits and... um… Cheetah off of Tarzan. And Bernice’s friend the lemur.

Can anyone do any better?

More importantly, what a marvellous conjoinment of the Dr’s two horrors is this news of space monkeys.

The title for this post is, of course, the greatest Knock Knock joke ever.

London under London

I’m a bit of a sucker for the tunnels of London. There’s the space-age aluminium and toughened glass all through the Jubilee line extension that I put into The Time Travellers. Compare that with the hand-made feel of the oldest Tube stations, where the tunnels themselves have kinks in them because horses would freak out if they saw the whole corridor in one go. There’s the echo of the Greenwich foot tunnel and the strangeness of London’s ancient rivers – the various prefixes of bourne, Effra or the Fleet – having once been the highways of the boating city and now all packed up in pipes.

There are few enough opportunities to explore these strange places – a few guided tours, sometimes just tracing the route above ground. And so I’m rather envious to read Neil Gaiman’s description of the brickwork in the Victorian sewers, which he got to explore while researching Neverwhere.

Neverwhere was, originally, a BBC TV series. I must admit it’s not one I remember well – neither fully nor fondly – and I don’t even know how much of it I stuck with. As I recall, it had an awkward, stagey and video feel to it, at a time when telly drama was otherwise all coarse-grained and gritty. It’s not just that it was of its time; it was failing to keep up. The theatricality of fantasy seemed retro in the late 80s when the BBC produced their Chronicles of Narnia. That had featured animated (e.g. cartoon) special effects, like your watching pre-viz placeholders.

Which I suppose just shows the amazing affect digital grading and CGI has had on telly. And in some ways I’m glad there was no Droo in the 90s because it could only have looked cheaper and worse.

The book version of Neverwhere is not constrained by the production values, nor by budgets or regular episode lengths. I don’t know how much Gaiman has expanded or revised the plot but it doesn’t feel like a novelisation – there’s too many characters, too much strange incident, too much you couldn’t pull off in telly. Or, perhaps, it’s very faithful to a script that would have been a huge headache to realise.

The basic wheeze is that a bloke called Richard finds himself in an underground London which mirrors and warps our own. There’s a real Earl at Earl’s Court and Hammersmith is a bloke with a hammer and anvil.

Structurally, it’s very like Gaiman’s later – and, I think, better – Stardust. In both, a rubbish bloke is punching above his weight in the girlfriend department, getting all attached to some posh, demanding girl. She has him jump through all kinds of hoops to please her – but really she just doesn’t like him being him.

I can’t imagine why this bit early on struck a chord:

“Richard found himself, on otherwise sensible weekends, accompanying her to places like the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, where he learned that walking around museums too long hurts your feet, that the great art treasures of the world all blur into each other after a while, and that it is almost beyond the human capacity for belief to accept how much museum cafeterias will brazenly charge for a slice of cake and cup of tea.

‘Here’s your tea, and your éclair,’ he told her. ‘It would have cost less to buy you one of those Tintorettos.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ said Jessica, cheerfully. ‘Anyway, there aren’t any Tintorettos at the Tate.’"

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere – author’s preferred text, p. 11.

Then, being a bit naïve and well-meaning, rubbish bloke ends up on the wrong side of the divide between the real world and the fantastic. It’s all magic and dangerous strangeness, and he’s hardly equipped to survive it. But his well-meaning naivety and all sorts of chance events and encounters mean he gets by okay. And everyone’s after this sulky, gothy girl for her her special powers. But our rubbish bloke comes slowly to realise that he just wants her for her.

(Four years ago today, I married the sulky, gothy girl what drags me round museums…)

The book is a mish-mash of warped London history and elegant flights of fancy. It kept reminding me of other things – Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld is in many ways this book on its head, while the visceral feel of the undercity is very Perdido Street Station.

It’s goth and nasty and people abruptly die or disappear, all shackled to strange and terrible rules that don’t quite meet with logic. It’s also brimming with vivid images and smells – curries and sewer-folk, leaking wounds and vomit. I’d be tempted to mention Bakhtinian ideas of “grotesque” body horror, if I could remember those bits of my degree.

(I must also point out to the ladies of fandom that on page 260 there’s a shopping trolley that goes “squee, squee”.)

There’s candles and mirrors like in lots of Gaiman’s work, and some elements like the angel could have been lifted straight from Sandman. Like Stardust, for all the not-as-random-as-it-seems violence and viciousness, the easy-going nature of the protagonist rubbish bloke and his desire for no more than an easy life gives the whole thing a warm and enthusiastic feeling. Very RTD, I thought.

What’s also like new Doctor Who – and still rare in other fantasy telly – is how good it is on roles for black actors. London Below is just as much a cultural melting pot as the London upstairs. I guess that’s down to the TV version being produced by Lenny Henry’s production company, just as Gaiman admitted Anansi Boys came about because Henry bemoaned the lack of black characters in horror movies.

It’s an atmospheric and enjoyable book, but sometimes the narrating voice is too knowing and though there are great set pieces it never quite surprises. Perhaps it’s merely lacking an edge that’s there in Gaiman’s later novels. Perhaps if it hadn’t first been written for telly the reveals could have been wilder. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this very good book had one better just under the surface…

Genesys

The editor occassionaly known as Cindy Knees has posted details of his forthcoming anthology, In The Footsteps of Gilgamesh. Due out in April 2009, it’s a collection of science-fiction stories with an Assyrian twist.

And one of them will be by me.

I do my moves, I do my moves

Drat and double drat. Having cut shapes in the temple of dance Friday night for the benefit of some very special ladies, I now discover my trademark styles are on the internet for everyone to scouse. Or, alternatively, laugh at.

No thanks at all to Will for spotting these.

“I like to play with things a while before annihilation”

Regular viewers of the Sci-Fi Channel may have seen my ugly mug recently, maconieing on “The Flash Gordon Story” for Free@Last TV. Did the filming back in January and got to meet Peter Duncan - for almost long enough to say hello and things.

One bit they didn’t use in the final cut was my answer to the question “Isn’t Ming, you know, a bit racist?”

And the thing is, yes he is. He’s a terrible stereotype in the style of Fu Manchu and the opium-guzzling East what crops up in Sherlock Holmes and other Very British and American stories (leaving aside for the moment who it was growing and pushing the opium). But Ming is part of the naïve exoticism of Flash, where every instalment needs to be filled with colour and wild new things at which to gawp. For all Flash is not in Kansas any more, he seeks out and embraces the strange – that’s why we follow his adventures, to see what he’ll meet next. The oriental is just one of a hodge-podge of sources that make unlikely cohabitants in Flash’s stories. “Real”, lab-coated scientists get equal weighting to pointy-hatted wizards, while there’s chatty lion-headed people alongside actual lions…

Which makes Ming and his sultry daughter less the imperialist cliché of contemporary pulp shockers and like other gaudy newspaper strips of the time, such as Rupert the Bear. So Princess Aura is sort of sister to Pong Ping.

ETA: Lordy, this is my 600th post.