Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi

In the chaos of war-torn Iraq, even claiming the body of dead loved one is difficult. Hadi, a junk dealer, collects scraps of different corpses and stiches them together into a single body in the hope - he claims - that it might have a proper and dignified burial. But the patchwork figure is then inhabited by the soul of another dead person, and animated by the longing of a mother for her long-vanished son. The creature awakes... and immediately seeks revenge on all those it has been murdered by.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is a shocking, often queasy read, Jonathan Wright's translation of Ahmed Saadawi's original Arabic full of visceral detail. It's not just the monstrous creature - the police routinely beat and torture suspects, gangs molest citizens, there is sectarian violence. And yet this is a black comedy, with an eye for the foibles of ordinary people.

One example is the dilemma faced by Mahmoud al-Sawadi, a young journalist, who once wrote a piece about a criminal called Mantis.

"The Mantis's brother had led a small gang that terrorized the locals until he was arrested and detained. The news of his arrest was greeted with great joy by many, including Mahmoud, who then wrote a newspaper article about the need to enforce the law against this criminal. He philosophized a little in the article, saying there were three types of justice - legal justice, divine justice and street justice - and that however long it takes, criminals must face one of them." (pp. 165-6)

This article earns Mahmoud esteem and praise, until the Mantis's brother is set free - another example of corrupt, incompetent policing in the novel. When a rival gang then kill the brother, it seems Mahmoud's philosophy is right - but Mantis has taken exception and Mahmoud must flee the town. Years later, Mahmoud considers returning home but is assured that he's still remembered.

"Don't come. Don't show your face. Stay where you are, for God's sake, unless you want the three forms of justice applied to you. Now the Mantis often talks about them, even on the radio. He's stolen your idea." (p. 169) 

The novel stitches together the strange and the mundane to create a whole of its own. I found it a little slow to get going, with too many characters I couldn't keep track of. But that's then its power: we get to know these people and their interweaving stories.

There's magic - in the old woman whose longing brings a patchwork corpse back to life, and the astrologers whose accurate predictions don't help them save themselves. There's the suggestion that this is all real, carefully researched and documented by the writer from primary sources. And at the end the different characters all reach some kind of closure, our last sight a principal figure curled up with a stray cat and apparently free of the anger that drove so much of the story. If it starts as a story about the ravages of war, the injustice and desire for revenge, it concludes with a sense of peace.

Incidentally, none of the three books I've read this week won the Clarke Award last night, which went to Tade Thompson's Rosewater, which looked great. I was at the ceremony and, as well as seeing lots of old friends, got to meet Aliya Whiteley, whose work I've admired for so long. Afterwards, we were escorted to the Ice Bar, which was cool.

Semiosis, by Sue Burke

Semiosis is, like Aliya Whiteley's The Loosening Skin, one of six contenders for the 2019 Clarke Award, to be announced this Wednesday. I'd hate to have to make the call between the two books (let alone the others) because Semiosis is excellent.

It charts the early history of an Earth colony on alien world over five generations and 107 years. Chapters are mostly told from the perspective of one colonist and then we jump a generation and learn, in passing, how that person died.

The first human settlers name the planet "Pax", and each chapter opens with a quote from their constitution, an effort to set out how they will go forward as Pacifists. Characters, too, discuss their efforts to meet the standards set by the original settlers:

"Only intelligent creatures also create civilization. Civilization creates the idea of peace as well as war, and makes both possible. I am a Pacifist. I have chosen the idea that I intend to make real." (p. 248).

For all the ideals, it's rarely very easy. There are accidents, sickness and worse. Some of it is pretty hard going - I'm especially susceptible to stuff about the death of a baby, and there's a battle towards the end that is as horrifying as it is compelling, characters ruthlessly despatched. One section is about the hunt for a serial killer. And yet on the whole this is, I think, a fantasy of integration, of making a success of weaving humanity into the strange fabric of another world that teems with strange and hostile life.

That life includes Stevland, a sentient plant who even narrates some of the story, runs for political office and converses with duplicituous orange trees. Stevland is ambitious and powerful, modifying the fruit it grows and the humans consume so they'll better serve its purpose. Unsurprisingly, some of the humans find this sinister and want to limit Stevland's reach - but the colony is also dependent on that very food.

The humans are also not the only non-native species: there's evidence of creatures the humans name Glassmakers. Again, we're not quite sure what to make of them or their intentions until very late in the story - and individuals don't all agree. The humans, too, are well drawn and distinct, conflicting personalities. A big part of the power of the book is how much we feel the loss of even people we've only met briefly.

I must admit I got to the end of the first, 33-page chapter feeling I'd seen this kind of new-colony stuff before, but Semiosis is something special. The title means signs - the production of meaning others are meant to understand. It's a treatise on how we communicate with others. Unlike so much of colony-in-space fiction, it's not about conquest or the triumph of will and science. The constant thread through the generations is negotiation, of speaking to your enemies to compromise and find peace. It's not always possible - there are terrible mistakes, and there is terrible malice. But the aspiration holds, and leaves the reader with hope.

Floating in Space repeat

This Saturday morning, Radio 4 Extra are repeating Floating in Space - a compendium of space-related programming presented by Samira Ahmed and featuring some chatter from me about the early days of spaceflight. The producer was Luke Doran.

On Tuesday, I was in the audience at Broadcasting House for the recording of James Burke: Our Man on the Moon, to be broadcast on Radio 4 on 20 July. It's full of great clips - many of them new to me - and Burke presented with characteristic insight, intelligence and wit. It's superb.

Black Archive: The Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Jonathan Morris

My friend Jonny's book on 1964 Doctor Who story The Dalek Invasion of Earth is excellent - and not only because its reference to my own book in the same Black Archive series says nice things. 

Jonny's focus is the development of the story - from initial idea, through first and final draft of the script, the changes made when it went before the TV cameras and then its adaptations on the big screen and in print. Thrillingly, he's managed to get hold of Terry Nation's first draft scripts - or copies held in private hands, since the originals are no longer held in the BBC's own archives - and a first draft of the script for the movie. The former is especially interesting, as comparison with the camera scripts (used when the story went in front of the cameras) reveals the extent of work contributed by story editor David Whitaker. The most astonishing insight - to me - is that writers were likely to only produce a single draft which Whitaker would then rewrite himself. No rewrites! It's another world!

It would be a shame to spoil any more of the gems here. It's a compelling, engaging original piece of research. Especially pleasingly, I'd hoped it might provide some context for a thing I'm writing about one of the characters in the story; it has loads.

Man on the Moon - the psychology of Apollo 11

My essay "Man on the Moon", about the psychology involved in landing the first people on the lunar surface 50 years ago this month, is published in the new issue of medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry.

You need to subscribe to read the whole thing, but here's the opening paragraph:

"In May 1960, Brooks Air Force Base in Texas (USA) hosted a symposium on psychophysiological aspects of space flight. The meeting aimed to present what was known about human behavioural capabilities in space and to recommend directions for further research. It was still relatively early days in the Space Race. The first human ventured into space the following April, and the first American human a month after that. Only then did the American president announce his ambitious plan to land people on the Moon and get them home safely by the end of the decade. But the delegates at the symposium looked boldly forward to the long-term conquest of space, even considering voyages lasting several thousand years..." ("Man on the Moon", Simon Guerrier, The Lancet Psychiatry, Vol. 6, No. 7, pp. 570–572. Published: July 2019.)

(I've another essay, "So What If It's All Green Cheese? The Moon on Screen", in the exhibition catalogue accompanying "The Moon" at Royal Museums Greenwich.)

The Loosening Skin, by Aliya Whiteley

One benefit of the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel of the year moving from April to July is that when the Dr asked what I might like for my birthday, I could direct her to the shortlist. The result, via my generous in-laws, was three of the six titles: Semiosis by Sue Burke, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi and The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley. (The other three are Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee, The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag and Rosewater by Tade Thompson.)

Of these, I've only read work by Whiteley before. The Beauty (2014) is about a world without women and reads like walking through a nightmare, not least because the narrator is so passive. The Arrival of Missives (2016) is a similarly haunting tale, this time set in a village in the shadow of the First World War. Whiteley is brilliant at taking an outlandish, unsettling idea and playing it utterly credibly.

The Loosening Skin is set in the present day but in a world where humans moult. When, every seven years or so, they shed their skin, they also shed its associated love. At the start of the book, Rose is in a loving, tender relationship with a movie star she's also working for as a bodyguard. Then she sheds her skin and can no longer bear to be in the same room with him. But he's used to having whatever he wants and won't accept that.

As we follow this story, we explore the consequences of moulting. It doesn't just affect lovers - who know from their first kiss that they are doomed. When children moult, they no longer love their parents. This world is full of broken people, struggling with attachment, learning not to love so as to preserve something. Brilliantly, we're told humans have always been like this - which has a huge impact on history and culture. There can be no Miss Haversham in this reality, there can be no Last Tango in Halifax.

There's more than the moulting itself. There's a whole culture around the shed skins - displays of celebrity skins in the British Museum, an underground of illegal sales. Then there's the chance that there might be a cure, a way of preventing the moult - but, of course, at a terrible cost.

I got utterly caught up in this richly drawn, horrible world. It's such a disturbing idea and yet it feels so real. At one point, Rose talks us through her moults in turn, each one devastating. That tale-telling is itself part of a truly horrific episode that haunts the rest of the book. I found the novel haunting, and couldn't get it out of my head, but it's not the horrific moments that got me so much as the simple, everyday consequences that result from this one strange idea. There could easily be more stories set in the same world. I hope there are.

The view from the top of the BT Tower

Portrait by Nimbos

Last night, Nimbos took me on an extra-special birthday treat - to the top of the BT Tower.

As part of the London Festival of Architecture, Tim Ross was doing a comedy set on the 34th floor, and as well as that we got a complimentary glass of fizz and the most extraordinary views as the outer part of the room slowly, slowly revolved.

Here are the pictures and videos I took:

Doctor Who Magazine 540

The superb new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out tomorrow and devoted to Third Doctor actor Jon Pertwee, who was born 100 years ago. There's a lovely interview with his son Sean, and a rediscovered interview with the man himself from the very first Doctor Who convention.

I've compiled a special Time Team in which Beth, Christel, Gerard, Kez and Zainab watch three episodes I chose to show a different side of the Third Doctor. Thrillingly, we were also joined by Katy Manning who played companion Jo Grant.

Gerard, Zainab, Christel, Kez, Katy Manning and me

The issue also includes news of something else I've written:

"The Target Storybook, a new collection of short stories, will be published by BBC Books on 24 October, RRP £16.99. The book promises that each story will 'expand in thrilling ways upon a popular Doctor Who adventure'. Authors include Colin Baker, Steve Cole, Jenny T Colgan, Susie Day, Terrance Dicks, Simon Guerrier, George Mann, Una McCormack, Vinay Patel, Beverly Sanforod, Matthew Sweet, Mike Tucker, Matthew Waterhouse and Joy Wilkinson."

I'm thrilled to be included within such august company. By coincidence, last week I went to see Joy Wilkinson's amazing play, The Sweet Science of Bruising, at Wilton's Music Hall. It took my idiot brain merely until the interval to work out that Aunt George was played by Jane How, who was Rebec in Third Doctor story Planet of the Daleks.

No longer secret agent

Exciting! I have signed with a new agent, Steven Russell of Collective Talent, who will represent me in stuff I write for radio, TV and film. The agency website now has a page all about me, including things I've been working on in darkest secret:

• Simon Guerrier at Collective Talent

Incidentally, this is my 1,500th post on this ancient blog.

Arrival of Moon

The Moon - A Celebration of Our Celestial Neighbour is a new book published by Royal Observatory Greenwich to accompany the Moon exhibition that opens on 19 July. It's a lovely book full of extraordinary archive material and learned scholarship.

Oh, and there's also my essay, "So What If It's Just Green Cheese? The Moon on Screen." I've got in references to Doctor Who, The Clangers and James Bond, among others.

• Buy The Moon - A Celebration of Our Celestial Neighbour from the RMG website

The Secret Life, by Andrew O'Hagan

I was given this 2017 book after chatting with a friend about Andrew O'Hagan's 60,000 word essay on the Grenfell fire, which brilliantly conjures the lives so awfully lost and then not-so-brilliantly identifies heroes and villains. This book is subtitled "Three True Stories" and in two of them O'Hagan trails in the wake of extraordinary individuals, reporting on what seem to be pivotal movements in history. In between these instalments, he charts his own experiment in matters of identity - and it's altogether different.

First, there's "Ghosting", his account of being employed to ghost the autobiography of Julian Assange, the efforts involved to produce a 70,000-word manuscript, and then why that never got published. It's all really peculiar, and few of the people involved are very likeable, but O'Hagan is good at the small but telling details:

"During those days at the Bungay house I would try to sit [Assange] down with a new list of questions, and he'd shy away from them, saying he wasn't in the mood or there were more pressing matters to deal with. I think he was just keen to get away from [his then residence] Ellingham Hall. I had the internet. I made lunch every day and he'd eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate. In all that time he didn't once take his dirty plate to the sink. That doesn't make him like Josef Mengele, but, you know, life is life." (p. 34)

That casual sense of other people being there for Assange's convenience illuminates much of the story. The sense is of Assange talking big and then not delivering, or at least not caring about details, or how that lack of care might affect and damage other people. O'Hagan signs off with his last meeting with Assange, when the book is clearly not going to happen.

"It was a Friday night and Julian has never seemed more alone. We laughed a lot and then he went very deeply into himself. He drank his beer and then lifted mine and drank that. 'We've got some really historic things going on,' he said. Then he opened his laptop and the blue screen lit his face and he hardly noticed me leaving." (p. 99)

His involvement with Assange leads to him being recommended to Craig Wright, the man who, under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, invented bitcoin - or did he? In "The Satoshi Affair", O'Hagan recountsWright's efforts to go public and then decide otherwise - just like Assange. Again, it's a fascinating account of what seems a major moment, one that raises issues about identity, our relationship to technology and the truth, and O'Hagan has a ring-side seat throughout. As with Assange, there's a lot of money at stake and a rather glamorous, showbiz lifestyle being lived - but Wright is another sad, trapped figure racked by indecision and doubt. We'd sympathise with his predicament if we didn't see what it costs everyone else around him.

Between these two accounts is "The Invention of Ronald Pinn." It begins in Camberwell New Cemetery, O'Hagan remarking on the number of young people's graves. He identifies one, Ronald Alexander Pinn, who died in 1984 aged 20, but otherwise roughly O'Hagan's own age, and decides to use the dead man's birth certificate to create a false identity. In doing so, he's inspired by recent revelations about undercover policemen from the Met's Special Demonstration Squard using such identities:

"In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their 'backstory', they would visit the places of their 'childhood', walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their second life." (p. 102)

So that's what O'Hagan does, touring the places Pinn would have known, researching his life, speaking to people who knew him - and then using that to build up an alternative life. He then wants to see what can be done with such a false identity, and goes on to buy white heroin, cannabis and Tramadol, and counterfeit money. He investigates but apparently doesn't buy guns, as if moral scrupples stop him going that far. But who was he paying for the drugs and fake money, and in giving them money what else was he tacitly financing?

These are not victimless crimes. Living in south London, I'm very conscious of the links between the drug trade and knife crime, the lives of children blighted - and ended - by the supply chain. As a bereaved parent, I had a visceral reaction to what O'Hagan did with the name of some mother's son. He's an unapologetic tourist, blithely enjoying a stroll through other people's misery and grief.

At the end of his account, he finds the mother of the real Ronald Pinn and we realise that she must have provided much of the biographical detail given earlier. But it's telling that this is where his account finishes - we don't hear what her son's death did to her, or what she thinks of what O'Hagan has done with her son's name. O'Hagan is, like Assange and Wright, caught up in the thrill of his own story and seems to spare no thought for those hurt along the way.

The October Man, by Ben Aaronovitch

The outrageously named Tobias Winter and Vanessa Sommer are two cops teamed up to investigate a peculiar death - the victim consumed by the noble rot used in making some kinds of wine. Winter, who narrates this case, is the German equivalent of Peter Grant, the narrator of the other Rivers of London books - smart-talking, shrewd and a junior wizard.

Having only read Lies Sleeping last month, I'd hoped this new instalment would pick up where that ended but this is more of a side-step - apparently, Peter isn't even aware of Winter's existence. I can see that the German police would want to recruit someone very like Peter, but if there's a criticism it's that they're not more distinct in attitude and patter. If I were editing this, I might suggest Vanessa - the non-magical sceptic - should narrate it.

But for that small concern, how brilliant to explore another part of the same world. How thrilling to get some more tantalising detail about what might have happened in the Second World War that Peter's boss, Nightingale, will only allude to - and from a German perspective. It's surely prood of the strength and richness of the world Ben has created that such a side-step is conceivable, let alone done so well.

This is a typically fast-moving, slick murder mystery, full of wry observation and stuff that feels totally real, grounding the magic so we take it in our stride. It's 20 years since I took my higher certificate in wines and spirits (yes, really) but the viticulture all seems right. Ben knows London intimately, so it's quite an achievement to suggest the same confident command of Trier. The novella ends with the case resolved, but suggesting there's more to come. I hope so. 

Home Guard cover

Here's Tom Webster's amazing cover for Doctor Who - The Home Guard, an audio adventure I wrote that's out in November. 

"It’s the middle of the Second World War and Ben Jackson has returned to visit his married friends Polly and Jamie in their quiet English village. But they can’t quite shake the feeling that something’s not right..."

The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula Le Guin

The prologue to The Tombs of Atuan (1971) is barely a page long and utterly devastating. In a valley of blossoming apple trees, a mother calls one of five children in from outside, and the little girl's father chides his wife.

"Why do you let your heart hang on the child? They're coming to take her away next month. For good. Might as well bury her and be done with it. What's the good of clinging to one you're bound to lose? She's no good to us. If they'd pay for her when they took her, that would be something, but they won't. They'll take her and that's an end of it." (p. 175) 

The mother can't help herself, and the father, too, is grieving for the loss to come. Their bravery, their acceptance, is awful.

The girl has been identified as the reincarnation of Arha, the priestess ever reborn. In the book proper, we follow her in her new role, carrying our rituals and devising painful death for those who have broken the rules. She has a rival in the temple, and a friend who - shockingly - is not a believer. Arha also explores the labyrinth under the temple: a complex system of tunnels in total darkness, reliant solely on memory if she's not to get lost or fall into traps. We feel the strangeness of it, the danger she's in by exploring ever further. Pushing on into the darkness is as haunting as that prologue.

Then, in chapter 5, Arha is startled by a light in the darkness, cast by a mysterious man. We quickly realise this is Ged, the Wizard of Earthsea from the first book in the series. From Arha's perspective, he's dark-skinned - a detail I missed in the first book but mentioned several times here. Having been given one half of a magical ring or bracelet towards the end of that book, Ged has come to look for the other half, sneaking into the labyrinth and all set to steal it.

Arha, outraged, traps him - but she's also intrigued. She wants to know who he is, what he wants, how he casts his werelight, but the longer she keeps this heretic intruder alive, the more her own position is at risk. Ged also tells her that they're not alone in the darkness; down here, they are prey for evil somethings related to the shadow he battled in the first book.

Arha's predicament is compelling and whatever decision she makes will come at terrible cost. Le Guin is brilliant at making nothing too easy or neat in this simple-seeming story. At one point, Ged is attacked by a character close to Arha and we totally understand why. Ged defends himself and the character is lost to one of the labyrinth's traps. We feel the shock of it, the horror to Arha of losing this loyal figure and her remorse for how she treated them before. In this labyrinth of horrors, with a wizard at her side, it's completely, terribly real.

Without giving away the ending, I felt a pang for the girl's parents. She barely remembers them and doesn't spare them a thought. But surely they'd soon hear of what happens in the story, to the daughter they lost all that time ago. They'll have lost her again, because no one has thought to tell them the truth.

Life Drawing, by Jessica Martin

In the midst of yesterday's deluge, a brave postman swam our street to deliver Life Drawing: A Life Under Lights, the autobiography of Jessica Martin told in comic-strip form.

I've know Jessica for years through comics and Doctor Who things (she played an alien werewolf in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988-9)), and have read her previous comics work. It Girl (2013) and Vivacity (2014) are biographies of real Hollywood stars, and Elsie Harris Picture Palace (2015) is a fictional story about a Hollywood writer. Her own story continues the theme - a love of cinema's golden age weaving through her life.

I thought I knew Jessica's story, from her first appearances in TV sketch shows doing impressions, then on Doctor Who, to being in the huge stage hit Me and My Girl with Gary Wilmott - which my grandpa took me to see. Her account of her time in Doctor Who, and of producer John Nathan-Turner, didn't tell me anything new. But her book is full of illuminating detail, such as when she was in the pantomime Cinderella alongside a future Doctor Who co-star...

Peggy Mount, as seen in
Life Drawing by Jessica Martin

She's honest too about her own vanity and ambition, and how what she calls "erratic eating" affected her work. But this is much more than a series of showbiz anecdotes. It's not just that old Hollywood and muscials excite her, they inspire her to press on.

For all the breezy, straight-forward style, I loved how Jessica conveys the tangle of relationships and her love for people without condoning their actions. Early on, her dad pulls an "ornamental bull whip off the wall" during an argument with Jessica's mum, and we later learn that her parents were never married as he already had wife. He's a difficult figure, and yet we feel for him when Jessica's mum leaves him and in his estranged relationship with Jessica's half-brother, and in his final days.

The book ends with her sharing her drawing and comics with people who encourage her. Comics is a new chapter in her life, but she faces it with typical determination, passion and energy. That's what radiates from this book. It's inspiring.

A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K Le Guin

To the horror of many wise friends, I've started this famous book several times but never finished it until now. It charts the early life of Ged - or Sparrowhawk, or Duny - who, while training as a wizard, unleashes a sinister shadow-thing that then pursues him. As Ged hops from island to island round Earthsea to escape his creation, the monster comes ever on.

The first chapter, in which young dorky Duny first learns some magic and then saves his village from invaders, is brilliant but his subsequent mentoring by stoic old wizard Ogion and squabbles with other pupils at wizard school never quite connected with me before. Having read the whole book, that's all cast in different light. Sneering fellow student Jasper isn't really Ged's worst enemy - it's his own impatience and pride. He must learn subtler arts than spells: using historical research to best a dragon, and not using magic to turn the tables on the shadow.

As with the Le Guin I already know (The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness) there's lots on the way words shape our reality and have their own innate power. Knowing a person or thing's secret, true name gives you power over that person or thing, a simple basis on which to build a complex framework of magic and a richly realised society. Ged's best friendship is defined by them condfiding real names, and when he learns the true name of a young woman it immediately suggests a strong link between them. That distinction between public persona and private, true self seems all the more pertinent today with the lives we live online and IRL.

I didn't realise the "werelights" conjured by Peter Grant in the Rivers of London books came from here, and assume Le Guin also inspired the name of my friend's band:

“As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.” (pp. 117-8)

I've ploughed straight on into the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, which opens with a scene I think more haunting than anything in the first: a man chiding his wife for doting on the young daughter they know will shortly be taken from them, the man already grieving.

TV Years: Classic Children's Television

The new issue of TV Years magazine, from the makers of TV Choice, is devoted to classic children's television. I've written a feature on Play School (1964-88) and interviewed creator and first producer Joy Whitby and presenters Carol Chell and Carol Leader.

La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman

Last week, a long car journey through half-term traffic was made infinitely less taxing by Michael Sheen's reading of the first volume of The Book of Dust.

Set within the same fantastic universe as the His Dark Materials trilogy, the heroine of that story - Lyra - is here a new-born baby. She's being looked after by some nice nuns in a priory, and across the bridge from them is a pub run by the parents of 11 year-old Malcolm Polstead. Mal is a hard-working, concientious nerd, with a love for new words and bits of gadget such as screws that only turn one way. Chatting to pub customers, eavesdropping and watching, he starts to spy a conspiracy building round the baby...

Just as with His Dark Materials, Pullman conjures a vivid, rich world so near and yet so far from our own. Malcolm's borrowed books include A Brief History of Time but he's also accompanied by his shape-changing demon, Asta. The etiquette of demons - that it's rude to touch someone else's demon; that demons can change shape until their human reaches adulthood, when they settle in one form - is all subtely conveyed: a world of strange wonders that yet feels real.

This world is populated with memorable characters, and Pullman is good at making us warm to the nice ones and bristle at the villains. For all the villains are hissable, there are plenty of characters we're not quite sure of, or good people we can't quite trust. Kudos to Michael Sheen for expertly voicing such an enormous cast.

The book is in two parts, and the first is easily the strongest as Malcolm uncovers the plot against the baby and encounters various sinister organisations linked to the Church. I found the chapter where one group addresses his school utterly terrifying, children encouraged to turn on their teachers and parents and friends.

"Malcolm's headmaster Mr Willis was still away on Monday, and on Tuesday Mr Hawkins the deputy head announced that Mr Willis wouldn't be coming back, and that he would be in charge himself from then on. There was an intake of breath from the pupils. They all knew the reason: Mr Willis had defied the League of St Alexander, and now he was being punished. It gave the badge-wearers a giddy sense of power. By themselves they had unseated the authority of a headmaster. No teacher was safe now. Malcolm watched the faces of the staff members as Mr Hawkins made the announcement: Mr Savery put his head in his hands, Miss Davis bit her lip, Mr Croker the woodwork teacher looked angry. Some of the others gave little triumphant smiles; most were expressionless." (p. `147) 

If the Church are the baddies, there are plenty of good and kind Christians, such as the nuns in charge of Lyra. Yes, the politics are a little laid on with a trowel - but then that's true of our own world at the moment.

When we stopped for lunch, I asked Lord Chaos how much he understood what was going on in this sequence - and he did, and told me he wouldn't have worn a badge. But it also didn't resonate with him as much as it did with me. But he was on the edge of his seat for the end of part one, and the thrilling things happening in the midst of a huge flood.

Part two is fine and full of strange, arresting events but lacks the thrill of the first half. It details the journey made by Mal's boat - the Belle Sauvage of the title - and stop-offs along the way. After all the conspiracy and intrigue of the first part, I didn't really feel it advanced the plot. There's plenty of excitement, especially in the villainous Bonneville, and the prolonged chase affects the relationship between the protagonists, but I got to the end feeling it hadn't changed much else. That's a shame given the strength of the opening.

The second book, The Secret Commonwealth, is published later this year and set 20 years after the events here - and after those of His Dark Materials. I'm very much looking forward to it, and to the BBC's adaptation of His Dark Materials. You might also like this recent chat between Samira Ahmed and Philip Pullman on how he found his voice.

Doctor Who Magazine 539

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine marks my debut as compiler of the "Time Team" - the regular feature in which a group of 20-something fans watch old episodes of the series with a connecting them. 

This time, the theme is "Is Doctor Who a kids' show?" - something I've been thinking about a lot over the last year as I've watched my son and his school friends get caught up in the adventures of Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. So, I set Beth, Christel and Luke watching The Web Planet (1965), Full Circle part one (1980) and The Caretaker (2014). We were also joined by Ariana - who has never seen an episode of Doctor Who before.

Here's my interview with Andrew Smith, writer of Full Circle.

Seurat and the Science of Painting, by William Innes Homer

Seurat and the
Science of Painting
by William Innes Homer
(1964)

At the turn of the 20th century, work by Max Planck on the odd properties of light led to a revolution in physics called quantum mechanics. But a generation before him, artists showed an understanding of light no less revolutionary.

I've been interested in the overlap of science and art for a long time, as I posted here after a visit to the National Gallery's 2007 exhibition, "Manet to Picasso". Some of that thinking was rekindled by reading The Pinball Effect last month, which cited the influence on Seurat of the chemist Michel Chevreul. An endnote directed me to Seurat and the Science of Painting, published in 1964.

Sifting through Seurat's surviving papers, accounts of his contemporaries and other sources, Homer pieces together the influences on two particularly famous paintings: "Une Baignade, Asnières" (usually translated in the plural as "Bathers at Asnières") from 1884, and "Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte" ("A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette"), painted 1884-86.

"Une Baignade, Asnières" by Seurat (1884)

"Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte"
by Seurat (1884-86)

The key idea is that Seurat followed the colour theories of Chevreul and Rood, among others. Those theories weren't exactly new. Chevreul had experimented with colour while director of the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, publishing his conclusions in 1839 - 20 years before Seurat was born. Nor were he and the Impressionists the first to use these theories in painting. Homer shows that Delacroix was well ahead of them; he died in 1863, when Seurat was not yet four.

The theories are fairly simple to grasp. In trying to make dyes brighter and more arresting, Chevreul found that it was less effective to mix colours physically than to place threads or fabrics dyed in contrasting colours next to one another. From a distance, our eyes do the mixing optically but to more dramatic effect. The contrasts shimmer and fizz.

Homer provides a range of different diagrams explaining colour contrasts and harmonies, as understood by different theorists. Take the three primary colours: yellow, red and blue (or, in some cases, blue-violet). The direct contrast to yellow is the mix of the other two, i.e. purple. Red then contrasts with green, and blue (or blue-violet) with orange. But that's just the start. Homer then details how the theories incorporate gradations of tone and hue. There are a lot of diagrams.

On one spread, radiating spokes are presented three times to show how the same basic idea passed from person to person - the last of them Seurat. There are also circles, grids, stars and triangles to demonstrate connections of colour, the spokes labelled variously in English or French. It's extraordinary that these diagrams explaining colour in such meticulous detail are all in black and white. We must imagine the connections. The colour plates offer just four small images, each a detail of one of the paintings under discussion. The paintings themselves are also shown in black and white.

Diagrams in Seurat and the Science of Painting (1)

Diagram in Seurat and the Science of Painting (2)

The result is that this academic study was all the more hard-going for this reader of limited brain. Homer goes into great detail but (I felt) repeats himself, giving ever more examples of the same basic idea. There's also little on what other science influenced these painters: the invention of photography, the development of new kinds of paint. And I think purists might question how "scientific" some of these theories really are - surely some of the conclusions are more a matter of taste.

But for the most part this is dizzyingly absorbing. The irony is that Seurat's work isn't realistic, yet that stylisation is based on direct observation, recording the strange, real effects of light - such as the colouring of shadows. The brushwork is surely also on to something ahead of its time. Previous generations of painters used delicate strokes to hide their artistry but Seurat favoured spots and strokes, discernable dabs of individual colour. 

It is light conveyed in discrete units, packets - quanta.

Living with a black hole

The June 2019 issue of medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry includes my review of the film Out of Blue.

"Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) has always felt safe working in homicide. However, the shocking death of astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) poses difficult questions. While Hoolihan pursues three murder suspects, she also finds herself increasingly affected by the dead woman's work on black holes and unsettling conversations about quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's put-upon cat. She comes to doubt herself, as do we..."

Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since my holiday in Salonica in January 2011 where I read my friend Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, but I recently listened to the audio version of that first instalment and it all came flooding back. Peter Grant is a cop who can do magic, investigating weird shit in London...

Lies Sleeping is the seventh novel in the series - there's also a novella and a spin-off comic series. Here, there's the usual mix of streetwise wit and procedural detail, grounding the investigation in real life and science and history. Ben's gift is to make it feel authentic.

"... me and Guleed ended up in a corridor at UCH guarding [a suspect]'s hospital room, along with a reassuringly solid member of Protection Command in full ballistic armour and armed with an H&K MP5 machine gun. Her name was Lucy and she had three children under the age of five.
'Compared to them,' she told us, 'I don't find this job stressful at all.'
You use Protection Command people for this kind of job because unlike SCO19 they're trained to do guard duty. You want a certain kind of personality who can stand around in the rain for eight hours and still be awake enough to shoot someone in the central body mass at a moment's notice." (pp. 14-15).

There a big, diverse cast of characters, and many now feel like friends. Then there's eye-popping action stuff, some of it read with your heart in your mouth.

It's obviously difficult to write about this book without spoiling earlier instalments, but it's been a real pleasure to bathe in this world again. I especially like how it's a satisfying, standalone story in its own right, but full of stuff pushing forward so that nothing can be the same.

The Waterstones edition includes a bonus story, "Favourite Uncle", told from the perspective of Peter's 15 year-old trainee, Abigail and is a nice bit of Christmas whimsy, never quite going where you'd expect.

The Science of Storytelling, by Will Storr

I'm reviewing this new book elsewhere so can't go into too much detail here, but this has been a fascinating read. Storr uses lots of recent psychological and neuroscientific studies to explain how our brains respond to stories and what we can do to make those stories more effective. There's everything from devising character and plotting to the construction of sentences.

My own criticism is the sometimes glib, even crass, tone. He illustrates a point about how people justify their own bad behaviour with a real-life example of a Nazi who killed children. But the actual example is so visceral and vivid that it's haunted me for days.

Doctor Who Magazine 538

Robert Allsopp's first work on Doctor Who was to make the question mark handle for Sylvester McCoy's umbrella in 1987. He's worked on the series on-and-off ever since - his workshop supplied the mechanical version of the Dalek creature hugging poor Charlotte Ritchie in this year's episode, Resolution.

I've interviewed Rob about his career for the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine - out now.

Autism, by Jessie Hewitson

I learned about this book in December when the author was a guest on the (brilliant) 1800 Seconds on Autism podcast, and was particularly struck by the subheading: "How to raise a happy autistic child."

It's full of useful advice, explaining the myriad ways autism can manifest and the torturous process of fighting for support. Hewitson has talked to a lot of experts, lots of similarly struggling parents and - most importantly - lots of autistic people themselves. As well as the practical tips and details of where to turn to for help, the book underlines that this can be very difficult but not impossible. You are not alone.

If there's one message here it's to be proactive and to fight on. Hewitson says she hopes the chapter on support in education will "empower parents to know some of their rights and help people with less money and privilege to navigate this complex system."

"Some local authorities are good, but many of you who have already embarked on the quest to get your council to stump up will know it is those who fight hardest and play the LA at their own game who get most support. The poorer kids, or the kids who don't have the capacity for the fight, are gettinng less support or, increasingly none. Meanwhile, the children of the middle-classes are getting provision because their parents can understand and can play or afford to play the system." (pp. 208-9)

It's not just knowing how to play the system, it's also having the means. Many of the therapies suggested here cost money and also take time. You need time to battle the system and go to all the appointments. You need time to chase the things promised that haven't been done. Then, after all that battling, you're offered a course - or more than one - at short notice, an hour a week for however many weeks that effectively writes off half a day when you're already struggling to stay on top of things. Being freelance has helped me be flexible but all that time eaten up has its effect, from the constant missing of deadlines to never earning enough.

So I read Hewitson's accounts of various private therapy sessions with envy. But we battle ever on.

Costume design in Doctor Who

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition focuses on costume design - an often neglected aspect of a series that has otherwise been studied exhaustively.

Running through the special is a decade-by-decade history of costume in the series written by Piers Britton, co-author of the seminal academic study Reading between Designs: Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in The Avengers, The Prisoner and Doctor Who (2003), and its full of gems like the way Sandra Reid had to find plausible ways to put companions from Earth's past into more contemporary clothes.

"Her solution for Victoria, in the character's second serial, The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), was especially clever. Details of Victoria's original crinoline, with its ruffled bodice, were echoed in a demurely knee-skimming mini-dress, made from a very similar sprigged material but embellished with knife pleats, rather than ruffles, running from shoulder to belt." (p. 8)

The special also includes interviews with costume designers and actors from the series. I spoke to four of the Doctor's travelling companions from contemporary Earth: Anneke Wills (Polly, 1966-7); Katy Manning (Josephine Grant, 1971-3, 2010); Sophie Aldred (Ace, 1987-9); Jackie Tyler (Camille Coduri, 2005-6, 2008, 2010). I also spoke to fan Tim Wearing, who happens to own his favourite costume from all of Doctor Who.

This all dovetails with my ongoing work for the Doctor Who Figurine Collection, where I'm writing 1,200 words for each of the characters I'm assigned from the whole history of the series - as well as longer pieces for the Companion Set issues focused on Doctors and their companions. Here's a list of the issues of Doctor Who Figurine Collection I've written.

The Pinball Effect, by James Burke

Rowland Hill, inventor of the postage stamp, uncovered a parliamentary scandal:

“For several years, at his own expense, Hill investigated the postal system. In the course of these inquiries, he found that government officials and members of Parliament were using their free franking privileges to send private packages through the mail. Some of the less-conventional contents included a pair of hounds, a cow, some sides of bacon, two maidservants and a piano. These and other fraudulent postal practices were costing the British Treasury the princely sum of a million pounds a year.”

This magnificent detail comes from page 14 of The Pinball Effect, or How the Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible – and Other Journeys Through Knowledge, a 1996 book by the science historian James Burke. The premise is familiar from his other work, ranging from the 1978 TV series Connections to this year's Web of Knowledge for Radio 4: following connections through the history of multiple disciplines to show the unexpected ways in which things change.

In his introduction to The Pinball Effect, Burke refers to the Internet - capitalised because in 1996 it was still a neat, new idea - and the way interconnectedness will change how we think about knowledge and educaton.

“In the near future it will be necessary for everybody to be able to use this information superhighway with the same casual familiarity with which we approach books, newspapers and television. Electronic information sources will become as ubiquitous in our future landscape as the telephone is today.” (p. 5) 

That prediction has turned out to be right, of course, but I'll return to something that Burke missed. For the present, it seems that the Internet inspired the format of The Pinball Effect. In the margins of most pages are a series of three numbers, one of 314 "gateways" in the 286 pages that can jump you backward or forward through the text. The idea is you don't - only, anyway - read the book sequentially but hop about following threads.

It's embedding a book with hyperlinks, though Burke's gateways can appear mid-sentence, diverting us mid-thought to some new thread or insight. Even so, the effect is like following links deeper and deeper into Wikipedia - which wasn't created until 2001, five years after this book. Burke's book is from the same year as Geoff Ryman's 253 website (published as a book two years later). It also reminds me of the CD-rom Oliver Postage produced (with assistance from my mate Mark Wyman) to accompany the 2001 paperback edition of his autobiography, Seeing Things. That CD-rom offers the text of printed book riddled with embedded links to additional content in different media (including a chance to hear the author say the word "fuck"). All three titles attempt to apply the innovations of the Web to the traditional printed word.

So, Burke is attempting to embody change as well as to chart it, making a plea on the last page of the book that the form is crucial to understanding the content:

"I hope the reader will try the exercise [of using a gateway] at least once, to get a feel of the crazy way the pinball of change works its magic, bouncing here and there across time and space. There is no single, correct pathway on the web [of knowledge], or in life. Mistrust anybody who tells you so." (p. 286) 

Again, I'll return to that last sentence, but first the content.

Burke's history of change is dizzying, lively and full of fun detail. He delights in the odd and unexpected, especially when a consequence is felt in an entirely different field. For example, there's the massive increase in coal consumption in the 19th century to feed the expanding railroads. A by-product of the coal-coking process was coal gas, and a use was quickly found for this waste product: burning it for light.

“The new gaslight stimulated more leisure time reading in general and triggered the birth of the evening class (and unintentionally, perhaps, was the genesis of the educated, professional woman).” (p. 29) 

I particularly enjoyed learning that celluloid - and thus the consequent film industry - was developed by John and Isiah Hyatt as an alternative to ivory (p. 38), and had never heard before of the Port Royal experiment (p. 71). I've previously written about the history of cybernetics, but hadn't connected that Norbert Wiener - who coined the term - was pioneering systems to help anti-aircraft artillery.

“In 1944 the new system [based on Wiener and Bigelow's algorithms] first appeared in the form of the M-9 predictor: and during the first weeks of its use against incoming V-1 missile targets along the English Channel, it was a resounding success. In the first week of the final month of German missile attacks, 24 percent of the targets were destroyed. On the last day of missile raids, in which 104 rockets were launched, 68 were destroyed by Wiener’s cybernetically controlled guns. Britain was saved.” (p. 90)

Speaking of artillery, Burke explains how Napoleon used smaller, more standardised cannons to make his horse-drawn artillery much more agile and effective. From this, we're told that in 1799 Napoleon led his army through Switzerland on his way to battle the Austrians - but some of the Swiss objected. A battle in the canton of Unterwalden left lots of Swiss dead, and the resulting orphans were taken in by a former farmer and novelist (he failed in both lines) called Pestalozzi.

With no money for books or equipment, Pestalozzi developed a radical new kind of schooling for his charges, which he wrote up in the 1801 textbook, How Gertrude Teaches Children: An Attempt to Give Directions to Mothers How to Instruct Children. Burke's summary makes it sound very progressive: all about independence and hard work, the children teaching each other from direct experience. It's fascinating in itself.

But years before, in 1797, Pestalozzi had met and become friends with a German academic, Johann Fridrich Herbart, who in 1809 (Burke says "by 1808", but checking elsewhere suggests otherwise) succeeded Kant in the chair of philosophy at the University of Königsberg. This made him an influential advocate of Pestalozzi's theories on teaching. In Pestalozzi’s ABC of Observation, Herbart extended his friends ideas by looking at how learning from experience modifies and moulds a person, forming personality. The "apperceptive mass" of experience is how the individual understands the world. Any subsequent experience is either similar to previous experience and at one with the existing mass, or it is different and so crosses what Herbart called the "threshold of consciousness" to be recognised as new.

“Herbart thus established the formative nature of this threshold and effectively turned psychology into a science.” (p. 254)

There's something extraordinary in the science of psychology emerging as a by-product of Napoleon's campaigns - though I now need to return to what Burke didn't spot about the way we (would) use knowledge on the Internet.

Burke's "select biography" runs to six pages, and is full of fascinating-looking books. But The Pinball Effect has no footnotes or endnotes with which we can check the provenance of his ideas and interpretations. We must take Burke at his word as authority. As Wikipedia would say, "Citation needed." In fact, my seven year-old son will repeat by rote the lesson drummed into him at school: because anybody can change Wikipedia, it's a useful starting point for finding things out but you have to check everything claimed.

On the last page of The Pinball Effect, Burke almost acknowledges this issue of authority - as we've already seen.

"There is no single, correct pathway on the web, or in life. Mistrust anybody who tells you so." (p. 286) 

He's so nearly there, but the change isn't quite what he expected.

Noughts & Crosses, by Malorie Blackman

This, the first in a series of acclaimed young adult novels, is set in a segregated world very like our own but where white people are an oppressed underclass. 

I've seen something like this before. It was done in Fable, a 1965 episode of the BBC's anthology series, The Wednesday Play. There's also something of the same idea in MP Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 speech where he quoted one of his consituents - "a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman," according to Powell - who was convinced that, "In this country in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

Fable and that speech were responses to legislation on race relations being put through Parliament at the time, but Blackman's novel is less about specific policy as it is about showing how privilege and prejudice shape the way we see the world.

We alternate between chapters narrated by rich black girl Sephy, whose racist dad is high-up in the government, and chapters narrated by Sephy's friend Callum, who is white. At the start of the novel, Callum has - with Sephy's help - passed an exam to be allowed to go to school, where he'll be one of a handful of white students. On his first day, there are protests outside the school to prevent him getting in. We follow Sephy and Callum through their school days and beyond, as they become ever more politicised by the unjustice and cruelty of their world - and face inevitable doom. 

Blackman makes the unfolding tragedy utterly devastating. We often see the same event first through the eyes of one of our narrators, and then completely differently when viewed by the other. We understand their disagreements and fights from each perspective, and continually learn why other characters behave in what seem mean and spiteful ways. Most haunting, I think, are the handful of characters struggling against insurmountable odds to change, to improve, the system. 

Along the way, the plot covers alcoholism, terrorism, violence and totalitarianism - in appropriate terms for the young adult reader, but not shying away from the moral dilemmas or profound questions involved. Blackman unfolds the story in short, emotive chapters, the prose immediate and straight forward. But the simplicity is deceptive: this is a rich, powerful and affecting novel. It underlines, too, that half a century after that race relations legislation was passed, there is still a long way to go.

Doctor Who Magazine 537

Doctor Who Magazine #537 is in shops from tomorrow, and includes my interview with Samuel Oatley, the actor who played terrifying teeth monster Tzim-Sha - or Tim Shaw - in last year's The Woman Who Fell to Earth and The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos.