Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Subtitled "The Octopus and the evolution of intelligent life," this is an absorbing mix of marine biology and philosophy, delving into the worldview of the octopus and our sense of what intelligence even is.

"Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closet we will come to meeting an intelligent alien." (p. 9)

I've waded through some of this stuff before - see my published work on the octopus. Godfrey-Smith also uses studies of other species to shed light on octopus intelligence and our assumptions. He discusses the findings of Baboon Metaphysics, which made me wonder how applicable quotations from Jane Austen would be to the octopus.

This all helps place the octopus in context but the most arresting bits of the book are when Godfrey-Smith is in the water with them, reporting directly, and in his logical analysis of how different their biology and therefore their worldview is to ours.

"Some features show a mixture of similarity and difference, convergence and divergence. We have hearts, and so do octopuses. But an octopus has three hearts, not one. Their hearts pump blood that is blue-green, using copper as the oxygen-carrying molecule instead of the iron which makes our blood red. Then, of course, there is the nervous system - large like ours, but built on a different design, with a different set of relationships between body and brain." (p. 74)

That nervous system extends into the limbs, effectively meaning that octopuses "see" with their arms to a limited extent, as well as with their eyes. Godfrey-Smith discusses (on p. 80) tactile vision substitution systems (TVSS), where a video camera attached to a blind person converts optical images into vibration or electrical stimulation the person can feel. When a dog walks past, the blind person doesn't feel a vibration so much as sense an object in motion, relative to themselves. Key to this is that the TVSS works in real time, so the person's own position and movement is part of the sensation: you move, and sense how that affects the relative position of objects around you.

We then return to the octopus:

"What could it be like to see with your skin? There could be no focusing of an image. Only general changes and washes of light could be detected. We don't yet know whether the skin's sensing is communicated to the brain, or whether then information remains local. Both possibilities stretch the imagination. If the skin's sensing is carried to the brain, then the animal's visual sensitivity would extend in all directions, beyond where the eyes can reach. If the skin's sensing does not reach the brain, then each arm might see for itself, and keep what it sees to itself." (p. 121)

Some of the science is a little hard-going, and (as always) I would prefer footnotes to endnotes, and numbers in the body text to indicate when to check a note. But it's an appealingly short book - 204 pages before the endnotes - stuffed with utterly boggling ideas. It's also an emotional story: the tentative contact with these creatures, the dangers all around them, their shockingly short lives. And then, just when we think we grasp how strange these things are, he undercuts some of what he's said and makes the point that they're not so very distant.

"The mind evolved in the sea. Water made it possible ... When animals did crawl onto dry land, they took the sea with them. All there basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea. I said in chapter I that meeting an octopus is, in many ways, the closest we're likely to get to meeting an intelligent alien. Yet it's not really an alien; the Earth and its oceans made us both." (p. 200)

Doctor Who Magazine 544

Doctor Who Magazine 544

It's 40 years - and six days - since the first issue of Doctor Who Weekly, which is now Doctor Who Magazine. Issue 544 celebrates this ridiculous milestone with all sorts of goodies, including - hooray! - and index of features and interviews that is really useful for a job I'm doing today.

Also in the issue is a short interview with me about my forthcoming Doctor Who audio story, The Home Guard.

Crooked Heart, by Lissa Evans

Old Baggage, which I loved, is a prequel to this brilliant, comic novel about bad behaviour during the Second World War.

We begin a little after Old Baggage left off, with eccentric ex-Suffragette Mattie Simpkin living just off Hampstead Heath with the small boy, Noel Bostock, she's sort of not-quite adopted. But Mattie's memory and wits are fast escaping her, and when war breaks out Noel is sent to St Albans with other evacuees. There, he's taken on by Vera Sedge, who thinks he might help earn some money in the latest of her ill-fated scams. But nerdy, lonely, grieving Noel has ideas about how to improve their takings...

Evans conjures a dirty, drab and distinctly criminal Blitz, where even the wardens are on the take - I think the most distressing, haunting moment is a woman being led off to an asylum while her house is robbed by the men ostensibly helping her. Life is hard even before the bombs start falling, full of tragedy and meanness and indifference. But as we weave our way through Noel and Vee's adventures, and those of Vee's own mother and son, there's the promise of something to light up the dark - hope of connection, perhaps even a little joy.

That's the gift here: so much of what happens is miserable, so much of what's described is viscerally horrible. And yet the character, the humour, the compassion shine through and make every page a delight.

The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

This smart, thrilling, brilliant new novel is about the women who are part of the astronaut programme in an alternate 1950s. History diverges from ours on 2 November 1948 when Thomas E Dewey beats Harry S Truman in the US presidential election. By 3 March 1952, the US has put its third satellite into orbit. That morning, a meteorite crashes into Earth with devastating effect.  Washington DC is obliterated.

So, despite the devastation the space programme is well ahead. In our universe, the space race began years after this, on 30 August 1955, when lead engineer Sergei Korolev got the Soviet Academy of Sciences to agree a programme to beat the Americans into orbit. The result was Sputnik (4 October 1957), followed by the first person - Gagarin - sent into space, on 12 April 1961. A month later, President Kennedy announced plans to land people on the Moon by the end of the decade.

Part of the joy of The Calculating Stars is how much of "our" history is woven into the alternate timeline: our heroine, Dr Elma York meets Wernher von Braun, while among her fellow trainee astronauts listed on page 426 are "Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong".  Her husband reads science-fiction by Ray Bradbury, his visions of settlements on Mars apparently coloured by the events in this timeline.

Also great is the technical detail. We encouter this world through Elma's perspective as a former WASP, a qualified pilot and extremely competent mathematician. She works as a human computer, outperforming the nascent IBM machines - at one extremely tense moment in the story, her speed and accuracy with complex numbers are vital. Robinette Kowal's acknowledgements include real astronauts and other experts: she admits she doesn't understand the maths herself. As a nerd for the early days of space travel, there was lots I recognised - and lots that came as new.

"There is something about having your legs over your head that makes you need to pee. This makes it into none of the press releases, but every single astronaut talks about it." (p. 493)

But the book is also excellent on the social detail: the drama of this post-meteorite world is overshadowed by inherent sexism and racism, our Jewish heroine not immune to her own prejudice.  Elma also suffers from anxiety and there's lots on the shame and secrecy surrounding mental illness. Characters are well drawn, and Elma must learn to work alongside people she doesn't necessarily like, managing rivalries and her own privilege, for all she is discriminated against. Each chapter opens with a quote from a newspaper filling in more of the background detail of this world, and full of telling turns of phrase. It all makes for a rich and real version of history, a compelling world in which this adventure takes place.

It is an adventure, full of twists and turns. Robinette Kowal nicely manages the personal stakes with the technical and global. I zipped through the almost 500 pages and am keen for the next instalment.

Becoming, by Michelle Obama

When Michelle Obama was supporting her husband's bid to be president of the USA, she used to tell her own story. Growing up in a "cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago", as the blurb on her autobiography puts it, she could never have dreamed of where she'd end up. But her story and that of her husband, she argues, is proof that we can achieve anything with hard work and hope.

In that aspirational message, Becoming reminded me of Chris Hadfield's An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, a life story just as inspiring and daunting. Except that Obama is writing as her husband's successor attempts to expunge all trace of what was achieved in those years in office. Obama does not mince her words about Trump: her horror directed not just at him but at the part of America that embraced him. Other adversaries go unnamed or she reconciles with later. Her hostility to Trump is in notable contrast to the friendships made across the political divide, such as with the Bush family, or across national and social boundaries such as with the Queen.

She doesn't make a link but I did to the one other person to whom she gives no quarter. Taking us through the night that her husband had Osama Bin Laden killed, she details the delight and excitement she shared with others in the White House and beyond, the vindication she felt for the wounded soldiers and their families she'd encountered up to that point.

"I'm not sure anyone's death is a reason to celebrate. But what America got that night was a moment of release, a chance to feel its own resilience." (p. 364) 

For all Obama says she's "not sure" about celebrating his death, she has no doubts about the killing itself. Elsewhere, she is open about her uncertainties - whether Barack should stand in the first place, what being in office has done to their children's lives. I was struck by her frankness about fertility treatment, the grim practicalities of Clomid and IVF. There's the slips in her speeches, seized upon by her critics. There's the time when she can't face the grieving community after yet another shooting. And then there's this extraordinary, awful acknowledgement - guilt - that the rise of the right in America is in some ways directly personal.

"For more than six years now, Barack and I had lived with an awareness that we ourselves were a provocation ... Our presence in the White House had been celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others. The hatred was old and deep and as dangerous as ever." (p. 397)

Yet she remains optimistic, even to the end. Becoming challenges the reader to step up and make a difference, and offers fascinating insight into the practicalities of public office. We learn how she managed her image and needed lessons in smiling, how she decided what she and her children would wear on stage, how she created her own role as First Lady. There's the difficulty of having a date night when your husband is president, or the strange feeling of addressing a huge crowd from behind a shield of bullet-proof glass.

In fact, the security involved is the most telling detail of life in the White House. Obama is daunted by her first sight of the presidential motorcade. Obama explains how difficult all that fanfare is for doing simple things like looking at potential schools for her children, or letting them go for ice cream with friends. She tells us about the challenge of finding a way out of the White House one particular night, the usual door locked even to her. On another occasion, she shares details of a nightmare in which animals roam the grounds of the building and attack her daughters.

One detail stuck with me. The White House is so heavily defended, its walls and windows so secure, that she couldn't hear the Marine One helicopter when it landed right outside.

"I usually figured out that Barack had arrived home from a trip not by the sound of his helicopter but rather by the smell of its fuel, which somehow manage to permeate." (p. 398) 

Science of Storytelling review

The new issue of medical journal The Lancet Psychiatry includes my review of The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. You need to pay to read the review but here's the opening grab:

"What links the 4000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh to the children's book Mr Nosey? According to Will Storr's The Science of Storytelling, they provide “the same tribal function” by showing a character shed a flawed worldview and antisocial habits, then be rewarded with connection and status..." Simon Guerrier, "Flaw Plans", The Lancet Psychiatry volume 6, issue 10, pe. 25, 1 October 2019

I posted a little more about the book here earlier in the year. There's also an index of my pieces for the Lancet. 

I Love the Bones of You, by Christopher Eccleston

My review of Christopher Eccleston's autobiography will be published in Doctor Who Magazine #544 in just under four weeks' time. As last week's headlines made clear, it's a brave and honest account of his own and his father's struggles with mental illness, told with the intensity Eccleston brings to his acting roles.

I've, obviously, concentrated my review on what he says - and doesn't say - about his time in Doctor Who, but that's a small part of the story. As well as all the revelations about the inside of his head, it's fascinating to read his reasons for turning down roles other actors would beg for - Begbie in the film Trainspotting, Sylar in the TV series Heroes - or to learn what drama and actors inspired him. How strange to think of this iconclastic, bolshie star so bristling with terror when meeting his own heroes, whether actor,  footballer or pop star. He tells us that, having been wary of Doctor Who conventions in the past, he's now embracing fandom.

"It has headled something in me." (p. 167)

And why not - because he's just as much the obsessive, anxious fan as the rest of us.

For a flavour of the book, here's Eccleston's recent appearance at Rose City Comic Con, answering audience questions with honesty and love:

Doctor Who Magazine 543

Doctor Who Magazine #543 is out in shops now, and features my interview with TV and radio presenter Stephen Cranford about his friendship with the late producer John Nathan-Turner.

Nathan-Turner died in 2002, and Stephen inherited his photos, tapes and paperwork relating to Doctor Who, which he's kindly shared with the clever lot working on DVDs and Blu-rays. We've been able to publish many of the photos for the first time.

Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson

We begin with three distinct tragedies. First, in 1970, a three-year old disappears from her family home. Then, in 1994, a teenager with a summer job in the office of her solicitor dad is brutally murdered by a man who is never caught. Thirdly, in 1979, an exhausted teenage mum cracks under the strain and attacks her husband with an axe...

The startling thing about these three awful happenings, each one in itself enough to sustain a mystery novel, is how funny they are before things kick off. Atkinson, whose more recent Transcription I adored, has a gift for telling, comic detail which only makes us feel the awfulness more keenly. In the first few pages, she sets up a household of wayward young daughters and their academic dad.

"What he actually did in there [his office in the family home] was a mystery to all of them. Something so important, apparently, that his home life was trifling in comparison. Their mother said he was a great mathematician, at work on a piece of research that would one day make him famous, yet on the rare occasions when the study door was left open and they caught a glimpse of their father at work, all he seemed to be doing was sitting at his desk, scowling into empty space." (p. 20)

Brilliantly, Atkinson also makes sure we're paying attention from the off. On page 18, we're told in passing that these children's grandmother "succumbed to stomach cancer" a few years back. On page 24, we're told that the grandmother had also asked her son-in-law about stomach pains - him being a doctor, but unfortunately of maths.

"Cornered at a tea table covered with a Maltese lace cloth and loaded with macaroons, Devon scones and seed cake, Victor finally confirmed, 'Indigestion, I expect, Mrs Vane,' a misdiagnosis that she accepted with relief." (p. 24)

We're being ensnared in a greater mystery than what happened in each awful case. Since this is also the start of a novel, we assume they're all connected somehow - and more than simply by each taking place in Cambridge.

At last, on page 69 we're introduced to Jackson Brodie, ex-army and ex-police, now private investigator. Largely but not always from his point of view we explore these cases and the effect of such awfulness on other people since. Brodie has his own issues - his estranged wife taking their daughter away to the other side of the world, and something else he keeps buried deep.

As well as him, there are chapters told from the perspective of Amelia, the chronically repressed and now grown-up sister of the vanished three year-old, and Theo the ever-grieving father of the murdered teen. We see them from Brodie's perspective and him from theirs, adding depth and nuance to the untangling of secrets. Admittedly, that structure also causes some problems: we keep jumping back and forward in time as we catch up on someone's perspective. So there's a moment when Theo discovers an unlikely character has one of Brodie's business cards; a few pages later we're in Brodie's perspective and learn why that card was handed over.

If that felt a little awkward, it's the only criticism I can find. This is a wholly absorbing novel, demanding to be rattled through. It's funny and surprising and emotionally powerful, the revelations in the last act utterly devastating. And yet, for all their impact, Atkinson also weaves in a little hope and redemption, and some quite unexpected sex.

This is the first of a series of Jackson Brodie novels - the latest published earlier this year. But Case Histories ends with everything so perfectly resolved I'm intrigued to see how Atkinson plunges the poor man back into untangling other people's misery. I shall be back for One Good Turn.

Target Storybook cover and artwork

My masters at BBC Books tweeted that they have received a first copy of Doctor Who - The Target Storybook:

Artist Anthony Dry then provided his full, amazing artwork, definitive proof at last that Adric was the Doctor all along:

And then the account Doctor Who Comic Art tweeted the thrilling illustration by Mike Collins that accompanies my story in the book:

Doctor Who - The Target Storybook is on sale on 24 October.

15 thrilling new adventures, featuring writers and stars from the hit BBC series - namely Terrance Dicks, Matthew Sweet, Simon Guerrier, Colin Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Jenny T Colgan, Jacqueline Rayner, Una McCormack, Steve Cole, Vinay Patel, George Mann, Susie Day, Mike Tucker, Joy Wilkinson and Beverly Sanford.

We’re all stories in the end…

In this exciting collection you’ll find all-new stories spinning off from some of your favourite Doctor Who moments across the history of the series. Learn what happened next, what went on before, and what occurred off-screen in an inventive selection of sequels, side-trips, foreshadowings and first-hand accounts – and look forward too, with a brand new adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor.

Each story expands in thrilling ways upon aspects of Doctor Who’s enduring legend. With contributions from show luminaries past and present – including Colin Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Vinay Patel, Joy Wilkinson and Terrance Dicks – The Target Storybook is a once-in-a-lifetime tour around the wonders of the Whoniverse.

Imprint: BBC Books

Published: 24/10/2019

ISBN: 9781785944741

Length: 432  Pages

Dimensions: 240mm x 39mm x 162mm

Weight: 667g

RRP: £16.99

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1118653/doctor-who--the-target-storybook/9781785944741.html

Fingers in the Sparkle Jar, by Chris Packham

I've had a busy few weeks - as a guest at the Hastings Literary Festival, working through notes on various things and researching and writing various others - and so made slowish progress through this remarkable memoir by  Chris Packham.

As I knew from his 2017 documentary, Aspergers and Me, Chris is autistic and his heightened senses can often be overwhelming. His memoir is a series of vividly recalled and felt moments from his childhood: passion, terror, injustice, the tactile delight of sniffing, touching, tasting nature such as drinking frogspawn. Some of it is very funny, some is pretty harrowing - not least the jumps forward to 2003-4 where it all got too much and he tried to take his own life.

At one point, he richly describes his first efforts to blow out the contents of a bird's egg he's carefully filched. It doesn't work and the egg collapses.

"The crumpled shell was soft and stuck to his fingers, the exploded mess glued to his hand, which he gradually opened. He felt sick with the shock of it, he had the gummy taste of raw egg in his mouth and he now knew why he had been unable to force the contents out of the pinhole. Looking like a bubblegum bogey bathed in shiny spittle a fully developed sparrow embryo lay on its back - bulbous-bellied, big-headed and black-eyed, with a broad waxy bill and peg-like wings and legs, its toes pricked with minuscule claws. He turned it over. It was dead. If he hadn't stolen the egg it would have hatched by now, or at least by tomorrow." (pp. 201-2)

Given that a trait of autism can be a failure to see things from other people's perspective, Packham recounts several moments in the third-person pespective of people around him - a neighbour, a bully at school, his own sister - which raises questions of authenticity, of truthfulness. How much of these and his own recollections are invented, sensations and colour added not felt at the time? But the effect is to show that everyone else had their passions and fears, that this strange little boy is not so alone in his weirdness.

Packham grew up not far from where I did in Hampshire, if at least a decade before me. His prose is peppered with slang that transported me right back: gob, guffs and jaspers (wasps), kids who chucked up when sick and creased up rather than laughed.

But lots of the book struck a chord as the father of an autistic child who is obsessive about bits of nature - snails and sharks and sea creatures. I'm wowed by his parents' patience and continued encouragement as he boils up skulls or brings home a bird of prey. He mentions but I can well see how hard this could all for his sister, for ever being overlooked by being the easier one. The power of the book is that Packham isn't alone and so seeing the world from his point of view is a revelation.

Post Öykü 28

Issue 28 of Post Öykü, published in May but I only just found out, includes my short story "The Artficial Bees" as "Yapay Arılar", translated into Turkish by Selma Aksoy Türköz.

Randall bir ayağını yeşil liflerin üstüne indirdi. Organik madde, ağırlığının altında kaldı ama onu taşıyor gibi görünüyordu. Öbür ayağını da o garip otsu materyalin üstüne koymaya cesaret etti. Tam o anda Arşiv bir cevapla geri döndü.
“Bir çim,” dedi ona. “Operasyona devam et.” Randall çimin içinde ışığa doğru ilerledi ihtiyatla. Şüpheli bölgeye girerken sensörleri elektromanyetik dalgaların yüksek akımına uğradı. Karanlık endüstriyel arazideki yılların ardından ışık bir anlığına kör etti gözlerini. “Elli beş terahetrz,” dedi Arşiv. Randall gözlerindeki renkli noktaları yakıp söndürerek camın içindeki dünyayı hedef alıyordu...

Read the English version of "The Artifical Bees" on the Uncanny magazine website. 

Agent of Chaos, by Norman Spinrad

A month ago, while I was busy preparing a talk on utopia and dystopia for the Hastings Writers Group, Francis Wheen tweeted about Agent of Chaos, a science-fiction novel from 1967 with a revolutionary hero called Boris Johnson. I couldn't resist.

The Solar System is in the thrall of the Hegemony, a fascist state where minor errors are met with instant death. In fact, the automated systems often kill people anyway, their fellow citizens assuming some secret crime has been detected. Johnson is in a terrorist organisation, the Democratic League, who are struggling to be taken seriously by blowing up the Hegemony's leaders.

"You know the official line on us - we're a joke, an amusement to be reported with the sports results, if at all." (p. 40)

They have only the most rudimentary grasp of what democracy even is - there is more than one seen when they fail to define what it actually is they're fighting for - but are still determined to shoot and blow up people in its name, even at the cost of their own lives.

They are thwarted - and also sometimes aided - by a third faction, the Brotherhood of Assassins, a peculiar organistion devoted to a doctrine of chaos that seems to be a mash-up of Marx and the laws of thermodynamics. The plot then takes an unexpected turn as a probe reaches a planet in orbit round another star and discovers some kind of intelligent life - far outside the Hegemony's reach.

Wheen is not the first to spot the connection to our current Prime Minister - the Guardian reported on Agent of Chaos in 2017. But, as both suggest, there's fun to be had at comparing the ambitions and shortcomings of the Johnson described here with the one in No. 10. The Hegemony is hardly the EU but the Johnsons possibly share something.

"Your own foolish pride in your supposed cleverness is what defeated you, Johnson ... A most peculiar psychology - a man who believes what he wants to believe." (p. 104)

Frankly, it's just weird seeing his name in the midst of pulp SF. The imagery conjured can be alarming, such as when discussing the relative failure of henchpersons.

"Fortunately, the crazy fanatics seem to be as incompetent as Johnson's boobs." (p. 57)

I'm not sure Spinrad means Johnson so be anything less than a hero. On page 124, Johnson is a babbling fool who can't articulate why he fights for demoracy. Then, oddly, the narrator speaks up for him.

"The Johnsons, he realised, were by and large the best type that the human race could produce under the conditions of the Hegemony - instinctive rebels, viscerally dogmatic in their unthinking opposition to the Order of the Hegemony, but uncommitted and curiously flexible when it came to final ends." (p. 130)

Yet when challenged, he goes rather to pieces - such as when asked about Democracy with a capital D.

"'It's not just a word,' Johnson insisted shrilly. 'It's... it's...'
'Well?' said Khustov. 'What is it then? Do you know? Can you tell me? Can you even tell yourself?'
'It's... it's Democracy... when the people have the government they want. When the majority rules...'
'But the people already have the government they want.' (p. 106) 

Indeed, Khustov argues that Johnson is just after power himself - he's a tyrant in waiting. We're offered little to suggest otherwise. His ingenious (over-complicated) schemes come to nothing, he's dependent on the sacrifice of others bailing him out, and the book ends with one enormous, chaotic mess left in the Solar System which Johnson conveniently leaves behind him while blasting off, unscathed, to new pastures.

Aside from Johnson, another leading character is called Jack Torrence - one letter different from the protagonist in The Shining, to add to the alarming visuals. Spinrad attempts to make his future Solar System multiethnic, but in terms that read uncomfortably now. There are also no women featured at all.

As for the sci-fi, this future all feels pretty standard, with the moving walkways beloved of a generation of sci-fi, the lanes running at different speeds. The mass surveillance that was once a horrifying idea is now a commonplace (if no less horrifying), the incongruous bit in the novel that wards (the human citizens) use paper identity cards and manually check against lists of known insurgents - with rare success.

It's also weird what the priorities are: Johnson can't argue a case for the cause he tries to kill for, which is surely central to him as the protagonist and central to the book. There's no great emotional depth to anyone in the story and there aren't any women, yet we get whole paragraphs devoted to the mechanics of a spaceship making a comet-like slingshot round the Sun or moving apparently faster than light without breaking the known laws of physics.

In short, it's an odd book, forgettable but for the chance of Johnson's name. Oh, and the cover - by an uncredited artist - does not represent anything that happens in the 156 pages. But that twisted, raging man at the centre... Does he look a little like Trump?

Doctor Who Magazine 542

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out in shops tomorrow. I've written the preview of the Season 23 Blu-ray box set, comprising the 14 episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord (1986). It's Doctor Who's longest ever story, made at a time of great crisis in the show's history. But the new extras I've seen are full of mischief and fun.

For the preview, I spoke to Russell Minton (head of international production consultancy at BBC Studios, and the person in charge of these box sets), Chris Chapman (director of three new documentaries on the set) and Dr Matthew Sweet (interviewer). Matthew tells me that he begins the research for his in-depth interviews on these box sets by immersing himself in "Pixleyana" - a phrase I shall now adopt - and explains why he thinks Bonnie Langford long ago passed into "the realm of the symbolic".

I'm a Joke and So Are You, by Robin Ince

Subtitled "A comedians' take on what makes us human", this is an intelligent ramble through the psychology of stand-up, and by extension creativity in general. Robin undergoes brain scans, talks to scientists and fellow comedians, and opens up about his own life and experience.

There's plenty of science-of... stuff I found interesting: the notion of Wittgenstein's lion - "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him" - or how being good at Just a Minute appears in your brain. In one chapter, Robin explores an old canard I had heard before, that many successful comedians experienced some kind of trauma as children, such as the death of a parent. He speaks to those of whom that is true, and to other comedians who were adopted or suffered different kinds of trauma. With that in mind, he also explores the impact of traumatic moments in his own life - a car crash he was involved in as a small child that almost killed his mum, or the effect of changing school. Then, just as he seems to be on to something with all of this, he completely undercuts the hypothesis with examples of comedians whose work comes from a childhood of happiness and encouragement. If the conclusion, then, is that there's no simple answer, it prompted this listener to think about how and why I do what I do.

Chapters address the cliche of the "sad clown", the issue of causing offence, the anxieties of both performer and audience. The final chapter addresses death, specifically that of Robin's mother and how it impacted his work. It's agonisingly honest and upsetting, and with a start I realised I'd been a witness to some of what's described, as a panelist on the 2015 Christmas special of The Infinite Monkey Cage. At the time, I didn't know what was going on - Robin was clearly unwell at the recording and had to rush off immediately afterwards. With typical courtesy, and the same freelancer fear of letting other people down he describes here, he emailed me later to apologise. 

Having experienced my own share of trauma, I really get his need to keep busy through this period, to use work both to escape the awful reality and then to make some kind of sense of it. I admire the way he tells us so much so honestly and then won't go any further - only sharing so much. He talks about how his job, his mining real life for comedy, can strain relationships when something like this happens - his own acknowledgement and the fear from people round him that this is all raw material. This is difficult and profound, and Robin concludes - with an example of another comedian's response to his own terminally ill father - that means we end on a note of optimism. But it's not so neat or simple as that, and I remain thinking...

Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman

After the success of The Book of Dust, we tried Audible's version of Northern Lights for some long journeys - and were enraptured.

Author Philip Pullman reads the story but the dialogue if performed by actors. I've experienced this book in a number of formats - reading it myself, watching the two-part play at the National Theatre, listening to the BBC radio version and watching the film. The audiobook retains the rich and vivid description missed from most adaptations and gets into characters' heads.

It's a dense, rich story full of arcane language but the story is thrillingly exciting, full of perilous dangers and set in a fantasy world that feels utterly, scarily real. The Lord of Chaos sat beside me in rapt silence as the hours unfolded.

The production is directed by Garrick Hagon - who I obviously know from his roles in Star Wars and Doctor Who. There's another Who connection: Joanna Wyatt plays 12 year-old Lyra, though once it struck me that she sounded a bit like Camille Coduri I found myself imagining Jackie Tyler organising battles between polar bears.

I'm very much looking forward to the TV version, and to the next two Audible versions in this trilogy, and to the next Book of Dust.

Doctor Who: The Target Storybook

I have a story in Doctor Who: The Target Storybook, a new anthology to be published in October with an amazing cover by Anthony Dry. The blurb goes like this:

"We’re all stories in the end…
In this exciting collection you’ll find all-new stories spinning off from some of your favourite Doctor Who moments across the history of the series. Learn what happened next, what went on before, and what occurred off-screen in an inventive selection of sequels, side-trips, foreshadowings and first-hand accounts – and look forward too, with a brand new adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor.
Each story expands in thrilling ways upon aspects of Doctor Who’s enduring legend. With contributions from show luminaries past and present – including Colin Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Vinay Patel, Joy Wilkinson and Terrance Dicks – The Target Storybook is a once-in-a-lifetime tour around the wonders of the Whoniverse."

The authors are: Colin Baker, Steve Cole, Jenny T Colgan, Susie Day, Terrance Dicks, Simon Guerrier, George Mann, Una McCormack, Vinay Patel, Jacqueline Rayner, Beverley Sanford, Matthew Sweet, Mike Tucker, Matthew Waterhouse and Joy Wilkinson.

Doctor Who Magazine special on Target books

This special edition of Doctor Who Magazine covers the Target novelisations and their proustian delights, and is in shops now. It's full of stuff I didn't know, plus lots about the greatest book related to the series ever - Terrance Dicks's The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975).

I'm also in it, speaking to magnificent Marc Platt about novelising his own TV serial, Ghost Light, and then novelising one by a friend - Battlefield, the scripts of which had been written by Ben Aaronovitch.

Last week, I listened to the audiobook of Doctor Who - The Invasion - one of my favourites of the Target series. This special has made me want to seek out more.

15 years of The Coup

Fifteen years ago today, on the hot, sunny morning of Saturday, 7 August 2004, I followed a print-out from Streetmap round the back of the Academy in Brixton to a tiny cul-de-sac, Moat Place. It was my first visit to Moat Studios, for the recording of my audio play, The Coup - the first of more than 60 I've since written for Big Finish.

The Coup is available for free from the Big Finish website.

In August 2004, I'd been freelance for two years and Big Finish had published six of my short Doctor Who stories. The third of these, "An Overture Too Early", had been a last-minute replacement for someone who'd had to drop out. As a result, I got more work when things fell through or needed doing quick. Assistant producer Ian Farrington also liked the way I'd written the long-established character of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

Ian was producing a Doctor Who spin-off series about UNIT, the army division that investigates weird goings on and then blows them up. He told me this series would be set in the present day with an all-new cast of characters, influenced by the then hip TV shows 24 and The West Wing. But he also wanted the Brigadier to feature in two episodes - the "pilot" episode to be given away free on a CD with Doctor Who Magazine to lure in the punters, and in the final episode of the series. I slowly realised he was suggesting I write the former.

With writers Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett, Ian had devised an arc story about a rival organisation to UNIT, and he was also keen on using a character from a previous Big Finish play - Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, played by a then up and coming actor called David Tennant. Brimmicombe-Wood had been created by writer Jonathan Clements, so Ian brought him on board too, as well as our friend Joseph Lidster. Between us, we emailed ideas back and forth and the UNIT series took shape.

CJ in The West Wing inspired our lead character, Emily Chaudhry - I borrowed the surname from an old friend of mine who I'd recently got back in touch with. Doctor Who on TV had established that UNIT covered up evidence of alien invasions, so the idea was that the cool, unflappable Emily would be the one they put in front of the cameras to give high quality bullshit. I named other characters - French, Ledger and Winnington - after old friends I'd lost contact with but who'd been into Doctor Who. There was a chance, I thought, they'd still be reading DWM - and two of them were and subsequently got in touch.

Ian and Iain gave me elements to work into my story - such as all the details about this new rival organisation to UNIT - and Ian was keen that my pilot episode should include an old monster from the TV show as an added sell. The Silurians were his suggestion. Otherwise, the plot was left up to me.

Previous CDs given away with DWM had offered small-scale comic vignettes, side-steps rather than full-on adventures. I suggested doing something bigger and more like an action movie. What crisis might flap the unflappable Chaudhry, I thought. What about if UNIT were outed and finally had to admit to the existence of aliens? That seemed to match Ian's desire to take his UNIT series somewhere new and unexpected, and the other writers seemed to agree - or, at least, not object.

So I got on with writing my episode, starting with a Silurian/UNIT battle at Potters Fields by Tower Bridge. That's the location of City Hall - as if the Silurians are attacking the Mayor of London. I chose it because Tower Bridge is a well-known landmark the listener would be able to visualise, and because I'd passed through Potters Fields each day for months on my way to work.

Writer Jonathan Morris had provided very useful notes on my first few short stories so I sent my first draft script to him, and to my friends David Darlington and Robert Dick. They all said much the same thing - that I needed to cut down my dialogue to make it pacier and more exciting. The result was that I cut back the long speeches but didn't replace it with more scenes, so the play ended up running shorter than the 25 minutes requested. I don't think I even knew then the rough word count of 4,500 words for that length of time - my version is just 3,761 words. My stage directions aren't specific enough, and there are two long speeches that have people talking over them but contain information the listener shouldn't miss. (I've included the Brigadier's full speech below.) I look back on the script now in horror at my greenness.

The version of the script I've got is dated 6 June 2004, a clean copy without notes or revisions. There were plenty of changes needed to get it to this point, but I can't remember what they were. I remember Ian being very patient and encouraging.

(ETA: Jonny Morris has kept my first draft, from 30 April 2004, which I sent to him, Matthew Griffiths, Robert Dick, Ben Woodhams and Peter Anghelides for comment. It is just over 4,000 words long - and doesn't include Orgath's speech as an appendix at the end as the later version does. Which means I cut about 1,000 words from this version!)

So, on 7 August I arrived at the studio. They'd already recorded some of the UNIT series proper that week, the series regulars established, the pronunciation of names fixed. Ian was directing my story, and I mostly sat in the background being overwhelmed. My friend Scott Andrews, who I'd written a small role for, was brave enough to ask Nicholas Courtney - the actor who played the Brigadier - if he was going to be in the new TV version of Doctor Who, the one with Christopher Eccleston which had started filming just a couple of weeks before. Nick told us he hadn't heard anything and modestly suggested he was no one important. He then asked me why, in my story, the Brigadier had a knighthood. I told him that after all the times he'd saved the Earth he deserved it, and he was rather taken by that. He asked about the origin of my surname, and got interested when Scott mentioned I'd just started freelancing for the House of Lords. We gamely discussed a new story, about the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Lethbridge-Stewart. Perhaps he'd be defending aliens from humans...

In those days, it was rare to have a camera on your mobile phone so there were no selfies. I don't remember anyone taking photographs for publicity - I think they covered the UNIT series on other recording days. Besides, we were on a tight schedule. Looking back, I realise Nick made a point of finding time to talk to me and Scott.

Otherwise, I remember just being awe-struck by the cast, and wishing I'd given the brilliant Sara Carver a bit more to do as Winnington. We finished at lunch-time and while the cast went to the pub - in the days before Big Finish started providing its own infamous lunches - I had to rush off to Bristol for my cousin's wedding. By coincidence, the friend I'd named Currie after was putting me up for the night.

The Coup was issued with DWM #351 in December 2004. Davy Darlington worked wonders with the sound design and reviews - as much as I dared to look - seemed positive. Having delivered my pilot episode I was no longer involved in the production of the UNIT series but Ian sent me the CDs as they were released, so I found out what happened after all I'd set up. In January I was commissioned for a second Big Finish play, The Lost Museum, which was recorded in March.

Around this time, I was passing through Charing Cross station when someone shouted at me. "You!" said Nicholas Courtney. "You have a French name." I went over and said hello, and Nick told me he was on his way to the pub to meet Tom Baker. He asked if I'd like to join them. It was mid-morning and I was on my way to a freelance job, and anyway I thought I'd never survive a day in the pub with those two. Really, I was just in shock. I asked where they'd be and said I'd look in during my lunch hour. I did, and they weren't there.

On 23 April, Nick Courtney appeared on Doctor Who Confidential and suggested that the Brigadier might now be in the House of Lords. I emailed Ian a few days later, referring to this and suggesting a Lord Lethbridge-Stewart story for the second series of UNIT - should it happen. I had the bare bones of a plot, too. "We'll see..." said Ian, cryptically - already knowing that the chances were slim of doing more with his version of UNIT, what with David Tennant having just been cast in another role...

There wasn't a second series of UNIT, and despite my best efforts no one else took up my Lord Lethbridge-Stewart story. But when Nick Courtney was invited to reprise his role on TV, in 2008's Enemy of the Bane, the Brigadier retained his knighthood.

APPENDIX 1: BRIGADIER’S SPEECH IN FULL:

For purposes of rehearsing it and as background in Scenes 18, 20 and 22.

I doubt many of you have any idea who I am. That is just as it should be. Because of the nature of my former work, I’m not allowed to tell you either. 

This country has often been faced with threats, with enemies. The forces assigned to counter those threats have been, necessarily, covert.

Though we cannot divulge details of the work we do, we are accountable. In my time as head of the UK arm of UNIT, I reported directly to the Prime Minister. That probably explains the knighthood.

Even though they do not have access to the details that we supply the Government, the general public may still know of UNIT, and have some understanding of our security remit. 

As a result, significant changes such as those taking place today, need to be explained, if only to allay public concern. That is why I have been called in. 

Change is good. UNIT has always known that. I hope ICIS will also be able to remember that. And to forgive me, now, for stealing their thunder. 

UNIT was formed to investigate extra-terrestrial phenomenon. 

In nearly forty years, it has been directly responsible for preventing more than 200 attacks by alien beings. Axons, Cybermen, Zygons, Quarks…

As a part of the United Nations, UNIT was not representing individual states or nations when it repelled these attacks. It represented humanity as a whole. 

Now we’ve made contact with a species who don’t want to conquer the Earth. They want to forge diplomatic links. They’re not even from outer space.

It is therefore my considerable honour to introduce Ambassador Orgath of the Silurian people. Ambassador?

Book Parts, eds. Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth

This is a comprehensive study of the bits of a book that surround the main text - the "paratext" of (to list them): introductions; dust jackets; frontispieces; title pages; imprints, imprimaturs, and copyright pages; tables of contents; addresses to the reader; acknowledgements and dedications; printers' ornaments and flowers; character lists; page numbers, signatures, and catchwords; chapter heads; epigraphs; stage directions; running titles; woodcuts; engravings; footnotes; errata lists; indexes; endleaves; and blurbs.

Much of this study of paratexts is metatextual. Several chapter headings are arranged to reflect their content, such as the errors corrected in the one for "Errata lists". Other chapters do similar in their texts, such as when "Addresses to the reader" talks to us directly. There's a lot of history - the book, publishing, laws pertaining to copyright - and it is nerdishly fascinating, teasing out the evolution of elements we so often take for granted.

Almost immediately, I delighted in the synonyms given for "Introduction":

"Prologue, dedicatory epistle, preface, textual note, address to the reader, isagoge, proem, preamble, exordium" (p. 6)

Over the page and there's another, as we're told of Alfred the Great's,

"preface - or fore-spræc; fore-speech - to be included before his own translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care" (p. 8).

Or there's the three books that, to dodge punishments for printing dangerous ideas, claim in thier indicia to have been published in Utopia:

"Godwin, Nuncius inanimatus (1629), STC 11944, Folger Shakespeare Library ... John Taylor's Odcombs complaint (1613), STC 23780 and A copie of quaeries, or a comment upon the life and actions of the grand tyrant and his accomplices (1659)." 

(I'm giving a talk on dystopia next week, for which this is perfect!)

There's something thrilling about the detective work described on p. 119 in spotting the same decorative fleuron printing blocks used in different books, which can be used to identify the same printer (who might be named in one volume but not another). It's even possible to spot the aging of blocks from one volume to another, and to use the number of so-called "wormholes" eaten into them by beetles to build up a chronology - the more holes eaten, the later the block was used. In fact, southern European beetles make bigger holes than their northern counterparts, so the location of the printer can also be deduced! (This, a footnote tells us, comes from S Blair Hedges' brilliantly titled, "Wormholes Record Species History in Space and Time", Biology Letters 9 (2013).)

Tiffany Stern's chapter on "Stage directions" also captivated me. She argues that the directions in book versions of plays published in the time of Shakespeare were rarely the work of the playwrights, and can even contradict dialogue. There's stuff about the way stage directions can often be for the benefit of the reader rather than for staging the production - directions that can't be acted but which add colour and character. I'm fascinated by the actors cited who were schooled to always ignore the directions, and Samuel Beckett's efforts to insist that his were adhered to.

I find myself reaching for the next book to read, scouring it for its paratext to better understand its context.

Doctor Who: The Invasion, by Ian Marter

Driving up to Blackpool to collect the wife and children this week, I listened to the audiobook of Doctor Who: The Invasion, a book I loved so much as a kid that I borrowed it several times from Winchester Library. David Troughton is a brilliant choice of narrator, with Nick Briggs providing authentic Cyber voices.

I’ve looked it up, and that book was originally published on 10 October 1985, not quite 17 years after the TV version was broadcast. It was a window on to ancient history – Doctor Who from before even my elder brother and sister had watched it, so old it had been in black and white. Of course, this was also the closest I ever thought I’d come to seeing the episodes themselves. I’d not yet seen any old Doctor Who on video and there’d been just a handful of repeats on TV. But I knew the photo of the Cybermen outside St Paul’ Cathedral from the Doctor Who Monster Book, and remember the vivid thrill of realising this was that story.

Other bits of the book stuck fast in my memory: the ongoing joke where the Doctor mixes up radio etiquette, or Isobel writing notes on her wall because its harder to lose than a scrap of paper. I’m struck now how much Isobel and Zoe vanish from the first half of the story, their insistence on being involved in the second half feeling a little too late. I also liked Ian Marter’s invention of the Russian rocket base (named after Nicholas Courtney) and the collaboration between US and USSR that’s needed to stop the invasion.

That said, it’s striking how much the novelisation lacks in context of other Doctor Who. How strange to begin with a hanging reference to one of the most extraordinary moments in the series ever, without ever explaining:

“The disintegration of the TARDIS in their previous adventure had been a horrifying experience,” (p. 8.) 

The novelisation of that previous adventure, The Mind Robber, was not published until 1987 (I never read it, and watched the TV repeat in 1992 with no idea what was about to happen). We’re not told, either, in what context Jamie and Zoe have both met the Cybermen before – for the latter, The Wheel in Space wasn’t published until 1988 – or that Zoe hasn’t already met Lethbridge Stewart.

There’s something strange, too, about referring to this Doctor as “the dapper Time Lord” (p. 11). Dapper isn’t right for this scruffy vagabond of time, and we didn’t learn that he’s a Time Lord until four stories later. (There’s also something odd about referring to him like that anyway, wrote this human.)

Ian Marter is also profligate with adverbs and often he tells us how dialogue is spoken – tersely or sarcastically, gasped or panted – when the words spoken tell us implicitly. But the main thing is how violent this version is.

“The Cyberman’s laser unit emitted a series of blinding flashes and Packer’s body seemed to alternate from positive to negative in the blistering discharge. His uniform erupted into flames and his exposed skin crinkled and fused like melted toffee papers.” (p. 145)

If nothing else, Jamie wouldn’t be able to rob the dead Packer of his jacket, which he then wears in The War Games.

(Actor Frazer Hines tells me about that in the Jamie and Second Doctor set from the Doctor Who Figurine Collection.)

Chernobyl

I've finally caught up with the amazing HBO/Sky mini-series Chernobyl, a gruelling experience because the horror is so perfectly executed. No wonder it's up for all of the awards.

Everything about it - the writing, the realisation - is absolutely right. But I especially like The Chernobyl Podcast that accompanies each episode, in which writer Craig Mazin explains to host Peter Segal how much of what we're watching comes from primary sources or dramatic licence. It's full of insight into the real history, including more about the real people involved. But it's also fascinating to hear how judgments were made in the story-telling: what events and relationships to omit (such as Legasov's family) and how much of the stomach-churning detail to actually show.

I'd dearly love more of this: episode-by-episode interviews with the director Johan Renck, produce Sanne Wohlenberg or costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux on how you make this history, this whole world, so convincing. And I'd love it done for other drama based in real history: Russell T Davies on A Very English Scandal; Sally Wainwright on Gentleman Jack.

Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans

This glorious, funny, wise and sad novel had me utterly enthralled. It's the tale of two former Suffragettes in the late 1920s, the past catching up on them as - among other things - they attend the funeral of Emmeline Pankhurst and finally get to vote. There's so much misery and injustice, and the Fascists are gaining ground, but these women are determined to fight.

It's a rare thing indeed to have a story about older women, neither of them perfect, both of them so real. They are fallible and fail, but we are with them devotedly as they struggle on. In the superb opening scene, 50-something ex-militant Mattie Simpkin has her handbag stolen, grabs a miniature of whisky and hurls it with perfect aim at the thief.

"The slope was in her favour; the missile maintained its height, kept its trajectory, and she was able to feel a split second of wondering pride in an unlost skill before a red-headed girl ran, laughing, from behind the booth, dodged round the thief and received the bottle full in the mouth." (p. 7) 

Real history is deftly threaded through this comic stuff. Mattie gives lectures on the history of the Suffragette movement, which helps (a little cheatingly) to explain the context. But some of the most striking moments are those things Mattie can't allow herself to say, such as why, years ago, she turned down her great friend Arthur Pomeroy when he proposed: 

"For she would never have wanted him to know, for her, a husband would have required not only steadfast kindliness but actual brilliance, or a rare magnetism; her brothers had spoiled her for more ordinary men. And neither did she choose to share the reason that underpinned it all - a kind of horror at the idea of standing still, of choosing a single existence, as if life were a sprint across quicksand and stasis meant a slow extinction. Long ago, as a child in a pinched and stifled century, she had seen her own mother gradually disappear." (p. 85.) 

The last section of the book is especially moving. Without spoiling the details, one woman has behaved badly and is abandoned and forlorn. Her efforts to make some kind of amends, to reach out again and say sorry, are all rebuffed or - worse - simply ignored. And then someone we've barely glimpsed in the story makes an offer of astonishing generosity that quite took my breath away. An act of kindness can change everything.

What follows is no less emotional, as a woman is left to care for two characters in turn, one of them well beyond the end of this book (as the blurb for Crooked Heart makes plain.) So much of it is conveyed so deftly, so concisely. When the boy Noel repeats something he's been told a few pages earlier - that a castle is also a rook - we recognise his intelligence, and more importantly his potential. When we're told no one came to visit him at the Barnet Hosptial for Incurables, it tells us all we need to know about his father's wretched family, and we need no further persuasion about the course of action that's been set.

Quite often, it's almost a pity when a book ends with an ad for the next book in the series. Here, it's a relief. Old Baggage is fantastic.

Doctor Who Magazine 541

"Four Doctors... Forty-three episodes... One groundbreaking director". The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine boasts hidden treasures from the archive of director Chistopher Barry. I interviewed fellow director Michael E Briant and writer Marc Platt about their memories of working with him.

11 Explorations into Life on Earth, by Helen Scales

This beautifully packaged anthology summarises 11 Christmas lectures from the Royal Institution covering aspects of natural history. The lectures are:

• "The Childhood of Animals" by Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell (1911)
• "The Haunts of Life" by John Arthur Thompson (1920)
• "Concerning the Habits of Insects" by Francis Balfour-Browne (1924)
• "Rare Animals and the Disappearance of Wild Life" by Sir Julian Huxley (1937)
• "How Animals Move" by Sir James Gray (1951)
• "Animal Behaviour" by Desmond Morris (1964)
• "The Language of Animals" by Sir David Attenborough (1973)
• "Growing Up in the Universe" by Richard Dawkins (1991)
• "The History in Our Bones" by Simon Conway Morris (1996)
• "To the End of the Earth: Surviving Antarctic Extremes" by Lloyd Peck (2004)
• "The 300-million-year War" by Sue Hartley (2009)

Scales recounts the lectures, provides updates on some of the science and speaks to some of those who gave or attended the lectures. There are also a few photos and other archive documents.

The Christmas lectures are aimed at a lay audience including children, and there's lots on how children were involved in helping with the demonstrations or responded with excitement and awe. Last year I read Eric Laithwaite's book version of his 1966-67 lectures, The Engineer in Wonderland, and some of the physics was a bit heavy going. Scales is good at making the science here engaging and digestable, for all it covers a great deal of ground.

(In March, Doctor Who Magazine #536 included my feature on how Laithwaite's lectures were inspired by his meeting with Doctor Who story editor Gerry Davis about potentially becoming the series' first scienctific advisor.)

The lectures are fascinating historically: we see how long scientists have been warning about damage to the environment. They're also peppered with extraordinary detail about the natural world. For example, we're told Balfour-Browne was so devoted to water beetles that there's now an international water beetle conservation trust in his name. But when he shares his interest with the child audience, it's like something out of a horror film. First, he had recovered specimens hibernating in mud:

"When the beetles woke up in March, he watched the females drill holes in water plants to lay their eggs, which in time hatched into voracious larvae. The larvae grab prey in their formidable jaws, inject them with digestive enzymes and suck the juices out through tubes in their / mouths, leaving just their prey's empty, crumpled skin. He [Balfour-Browne] gave a graphic description of the greater silver beetle, a species with specialized jaws that act as a can opener to break into the shells of pond snails. And great diving bettle larvae are cannibals, he says, that 'have no respect for one another and four placed in a large tub were quickly reduced to one'." (pp. 48-9, the quotation from Balfour-Browne's own 1925 book of his lectures)

He also explains that wasps and bees can happily cohabit because they don't compete for food, the bees being herbivores and the wasps... well.

"Instead of pollen and honey, female wasps stock their nests with spiders, caterpillars and flies. The mothers sting and paralyse the prey to keep them alive and fresh, while making sure they can't walk off or fly away." (p. 42)

I had a ghoulish vision of vegetarian families turning a blind eye and affecting not to hear the endless screaming from next door.

The final entry in the book was of particular interest having just read Semiosis with its intelligent, communicative bamboo. Lecturer Sue Hartley details various different ways that plants fend off animal predators, and also communicate with one another to warn of impending danger.

"As well as talking to each other, plants also talk to animals. Wasps smell the plants' warning signals and fly in to investigate."

She demonstrates with a model of a caterpillar that threatens a particular plant - but inside the model there is,

"a handful of sticky goo and giant, model grubs. Inside the caterpillar, the wasp laid hundreds of eggs by piercing through its skin with a sharp egg-laying needle (called an ovipositor). The eggs then hatched and started eating". (p. 184)

Climate change threatens the balance in this long war between plants and animals. Hartley gives the example of aphids, who reproduce asexually - and a pregnant mother has a clone daughter inside her, who is already pregnant with her own clone child, "a system known as telescopic generations" (p. 186). Warmer conditions mean aphids reproduce even more quickly, so the predators that currently keep populations under control will no longer keep up.

"These aphids, she warns, are among the most dangerous pests, causing £100 million of damage to cereal crops every year ... If all [an individual aphid's] offspring survived, Hartley explains, there would be a layer of aphids covering the Earth 150 km deep, reaching half the way to the International Space Station." (p. 186)

 This is all the stuff of nightmares, and perfect for me as I continue to write stories with monsters.

Welt am Draht in the Lancet Psychiatry

The 1 August issue of medical journal the Lancet Psychiatry includes "Cryin', talkin', sleepin', walkin living dolls" - my review of Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), the 1973 sci-fi TV series directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and recently reissued on Blu-ray.

“I've been observing Stiller for some time very closely”, says pipe-smoking psychologist Dr Franz Hahn (Wolfgang Schenck) in the second episode of Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), first broadcast on West German television in 1973. “He's suffering from a case of acute paranoia. He's an extreme example of psychological degeneration. He is in so many words…not responsible for his actions.” Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) sits across from him, and doubts anything in the room is even real. The cigarette his boss is smoking or the chair in which he sits is, says Stiller, an idea of an idea of an idea...

Cinema Limbo on King Kong (1976)

A huge, confused ape wrestles with King Kong. Reader, that ape is me...

The Cinema Limbo podcast re-evaluates old films, and host Jeremy Phillips asked me to discuss the 1976 remake of King Kong. You can listen to our extended rambling here:

http://www.podnose.com/cinema-limbo/068-king-kong

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.