Star Trek (1), by James Blish

Who are the leading characters in the original Star Trek? The front cover of this breezy paperback adaptation of seven early TV adventures boasts artwork showing good likenesses of two leads, Captain James Kirk and Science Officer Spock, plus four generic officers from Star Fleet. 

This is repurposed publicity art apparently by James Bama, commissioned by TV network NBC to help sell the series. (Thanks to Adam at Withnail Books for this fact!)

The back cover then adds a third leading character:

CIRCLING THE SOLAR SPHERE IN SEARCH OF NEW WORLDS AND HIGH ADVENTURE

CAPTAIN JAMES KIRK — Assigned to the top position in Space Service — Starship Command — Kirk alone must make decisions in his contact with other worlds that can affect the future course of civilisation throughout the Universe.

SCIENCE OFFICE SPOCK — Inheriting a precise, logical thinking pattern from his father, a native of the planet Vulcanis, Mr Spock maintains a dangerous Earth trait… an intense curiosity about things of alien origin.

YEOMAN RAND — Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly “out-of-this-world” blonde has drawn the important assignment of secretary to the Captain of her first mission in deep space.

WITH A CREW OF 400 SKILLED SPECIALISTS, THE MAMMOTH SPACE SHIP ENTERPRISE BLASTS OFF FOR INTERGALACTIC INTRIGUE IN THE UNEXPECTED REALMS OF OUTER SPACE.

It’s just possible that this blurb was written by someone not wholly familiar with Star Trek. These three leads — Kirk, Spock and Rand — are aboard the Enterprise when it “blasts off” (like a rocket) to circle the “solar sphere” (surely meaning to orbit the Sun). Kirk has a top job in “Space Service” not Star Fleet; Spock is from “Vulcanis” not Vulcan and his curiosity is dangerous (like a cat); Rand is the most popular member of the crew (because she’s pretty?) and has lucked out in getting a job as Kirk's secretary.

Of course, Star Trek and its iconic crew weren’t so well established when these words were written. James Blish was approached to write this book before the first TV episode had even aired. According to David Ketterer’s Imprisoned in a Tesseract — a biography of Blish quoted in his Memory Beta entry — the opportunity to adapt eight scripts was first mooted on 26 July 1966, while the first TV episode, The Man Trap, aired on 8 September.

In fact, this book adapts seven of the first 14 episodes, all of which had aired in the US by the time this was published in January 1967. Perhaps a story was dropped from the book because of the speed at which it had to be written: mooted in July, it was on shelves six months later. Perhaps it lost a story because Blish wrote longer adaptations than expected and they had a set page count.

But then there’s the intriguing dedication: 

“to Harlan Ellison, who was right all the time.”

What is that about, then?

Ellison was, like Blish, an established and well-known science-fiction writer, and he was also engaged on this early run of Star Trek. His story The City on the Edge of Forever was first broadcast on 6 April 1967, after publication. It was and is much acclaimed, winning a prestigious Hugo award in 1968. But as Blish explained in his preface to a later anthology of Star Trek stories:

“This award was given, however, not for the script as it ran on Star Trek [on TV], but for Mr Ellison’s original version, which had to be edited for the show—for one thing, it was too long.” (Blish, “Preface”, Star Trek 3 (Bantam, April 1969), p. viii). 

Blish adapted The City on the Edge of Forever in the second anthology, Star Trek 2 (February 1968). According to Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages — TOS Season One (2013), Ellison sent Blish the draft script hoping it would be used in preference to the rewrite, but Blish, “with all due apologies to Eliison”, based his adaptation on the rewrite while incorporating some elements from the draft (p. 590).

That implies that it was Blish who made the decision to stick largely to what had been seen on screen. But the dedication in this first volume perhaps suggests something different, that Ellison sent the draft script to Blish for inclusion in this volume, and that Blish agreed that it was better than what would make it to the screen. 

So, did Blish want to adapt Ellison’s draft script for this first collection, only to be told “no” by the producers? That would explain why eight stories were cut back to seven. Was he then able to adapt the story for the second volume on the basis that he stuck closer to the TV version? I find these mechanics of adaptation intriguing, and really ought to read Ketterer’s biography of Blish. I shall add it to the list.

One other thing cited in the Memory Beta entry on Blish, also sourced from Ketterer, is that the experienced, accomplished science-fiction writer was unsure whether to take on the Star Trek anthology at all as the deal was a buy-out rather than royalties. In 1966, the flat fee was $2,000. Today, that’s about $20,000. I am available for writing on similar terms, please and thank you.

According to the indicia, Star Trek was first published by Bantam in the United States and Canada in January 1967. My edition is a 6th printing, the cover and spine printed with the US price of 50 cents. A sticker has been added to this for sale in the UK at three shillings and sixpence, or 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in the UK on 21 April 1967 and then again on 18 July 1969, the latter to tie in with the first broadcast of episodes on British television, which began six days previously.

The cover says this is “a chilling journey through worlds beyond imagination … adapted by James Blish.” That got me thinking about what to call this kind of book. It’s not, I think, a “novelisation”, which would imply the different episodes relayed here told a single story. It’s quite common in science-fiction to collect stories originally published separately and, with judicious editing and perhaps some extra scenes, reform them into the chapters of a single narrative.

There are also collections, such as Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling — which I shall blog more about in due course — where what seem to be separate stories involving the same characters are revealed, in the closing instalments, to be thematically connected, the sum of parts having Things To Say. This Star Trek book isn’t doing anything of that sort: it’s an anthology of adaptations of TV episodes.

Fitting seven of them into a slim paperback means they are very breezily told, which makes them quick and engaging — this is a book to hare through. It’s all largely action and dialogue, with little of the inner thoughts of characters or the narrator interposing their view. This is the “Detached Author” as defined by Ursula le Guin in Steering the Craft (p. 58), but it’s also the information you get from a script: what people say, what people do, not what they might be thinking.

The Memory Beta entry speculates on how much, if any, Star Trek Blish might have seen when he wrote this, given that he offers next-to-no description of the regular cast or their ship. Even if he didn’t know the series well, reference photographs could have been provided and the cover art was already available. Rather, I think, this is another sign that Blish worked chiefly from the scripts — which would describe guest characters but not the regulars. In the book, we get a whole paragraph describing Dr Tristan Adams in Dagger of the Mind (p. 28) but Spock’s ears get mentioned once and relatively late, when we’re told a Romulan has ears of the “same shape and cant” (p. 66). 

The only regular to get more description than this is Uhura. Her physical features are often described as “Bantu”, for example:”

“her Bantu face intent as a tribal statue’s” (p. 6).

But, as I noted in my post on Blish’s (later) original Star Trek novel Spock Must Die!, “Bantu” is the name of a group of languages spoken in central and southern African, and used of the people who speak them. Blish uses it as a label for racial characteristics. Later in the same book we’re told that “Uhura has the impassivity of most Bantu women” (p. 56) and also has “large hands” (p. 64).

There’s something a bit more liberated and interesting later on, when a possessed Sulu refers to Uhura as “Fair maiden” and she responds, “Sorry, neither”. But this excellent reply is in the TV version, too. 

There are clearly some differences between events depicted here and as seen on screen, which seems to be because Blish worked from draft scripts not the final episodes. But my nerdy interest is less in how the adaptations differ from the TV versions as the things Blish adds to the lore himself.

The first story in the book, Charlie’s Law — the working title of the TV episode Charlie X— says Kirk has spent “more than twenty years in space” (p. 1). This comes up again in the final story in the book, The Conscience of a King, where we’re told that Kirk was on the planet Tarsus IV 20 years previously (p. 118), when he was a midshipman (p. 128). You currently need to be 17 to join the US Navy; if that still holds whenever these Star Trek adventures are set — see Miri below — Kirk must be about 40, a decade older than actor William Shatner in 1966.

We don’t learn much about Kirk here. In the first story, when he advises precocious, all-powerful teenager Charlie that exercise will keep his mind off girls, Blish adds that this idea was introduced in Victorian England (p. 9), as if Kirk knows all about efforts by 19th century public schools to tackle masturbation by codifying the rules of football.

Second story, Dagger of the Mind, includes Kirk swearing: “Forget the Enterprise [?] Not bloody likely!” (p. 35). His other swears include “Great Galaxy” (p. 89), “Damnation” (p. 103), “Baloney” (p. 105) and “damn well” (p. 123). But there are no bollixes, as in Spock Must Die!

There’s an odd moment where a kind of faucet touches Kirk’s head (p. 35). The word Blish uses instead of faucet is “petcock”, but it’s right at the end of a line and is split on to the next one, with the hyphen after the “t”. That leaves Kirk with a,

“cock on his skull”.

More troubling is how Blish envisions the implanted memory of Kirk’s relationship with Dr Helen Noel. On screen, she says she wishes he cared for her, he says he won’t lie, she says she prefers honesty; then they kiss. In the book, 

“all he had was the memory of having carried her to her cabin that Christmas, of her protests, of his lies that had turned into truth” (p. 33).

Yes, the point is that it’s a false, implanted memory — a violation in itself — but it’s all a lot grubbier and nastier than the fun flirtation on screen.

Third story The Unreal McCoy, the working title of The Man Trap, reveals — I think for the first time — that Spock’s homeworld of Vulcan is in orbit round the (real-life) star 40-Eridani, something I’ve since cited in my own books. Odder is the claim that,

“neither Scotty nor McCoy liked the Vulcanite [ie Spock ... and even Kirk was] not entirely comfortable in his presence” (p. 62).

Also, most of the crew of the Enterprise “had never heard a shot fired in anger” (p. 59).

In the adaptation The Naked Time, which is not nearly so exciting a story as the title suggests, we get our only reference to what the crew of Enterprise wear, as Sulu’s usual,

“velour shirt was off, revealing a black tee-shirt” (p. 80). 

This and a towel round his neck leads Kirk to conclude that Sulu is just back from the gym, suggesting that all the crew do to work out is take off their uniform jumpers. That ship mustn’t half pong.

In Miri, we learn that “the fourth planet of 70 Ophiucus, the computer said, had been the first extrasolar planet ever colonised by man… more than five hundred years ago” p. 92. This was in “the early 2100s” (p. 93), so events of this story take place in the 2600s, some 300 years later than the series on screen.

A conversation also takes place between Kirk and another character that doesn’t happen on screen. I will have more to say about that elsewhere.

Finally, there is The Conscience of the King, where 19 year-old Lenore’s interest in Kirk and his kissing her is a bit less ick on screen with 30 year-old Shatner than the older c. 40 year-old Kirk here. But what also really strikes me is that the book ends without a coda promising more adventures. 

But the story continues in Star Trek 2…

This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Red and Blue are on opposite sides in a war through all of time. They zip back and forth, to see London on fire after a plague, or being built by the Romans, or the Underground used by robots long after all the people are dead - and to places that aren't London or Earth. In between hostilities, Red and Blue correspond, their letters written secretly in obscure media, such as the sting of an insect. They taunt one another, they promise the other's defeat.

And they fall in love.

This rich, compelling novella won a bunch of awards, including a Hugo and BSFA. I'd been meaning to get to it for ages having heard good things. By chance, some last-minute work stuff has meant I'm dashing about this week and could listen to the audiobook on the way. I felt rather in synch with the dashing about of the plot.

Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller are good readers, and provide suitable heft and gravitas for such an epic story. Even so, I suspect I might have preferred the experience in print, as several times I wanted to skip back to a previous letter or incident. There are interesting things going on with the way the protagonists are described, their pronouns, their very modes of being, which I may have absorbed better from the printed page. I followed and enjoyed it, but think I may have missed some of the richness.

That's certainly not a complaint. My first thought on finishing the book was that I wanted to read it again, to pick over the nuance and detail. How very time war to want to run events again and see if they are different.

The Uses of Literacy, by Richard Hoggart

“If we want to capture something of the essence of working-class life … we must say that it is the ‘dense and concrete life’, a life whose main stress is on the intimate, the sensory, the detailed, and the personal” (p. 87).

This ur-text of what’s now called cultural studies is divided into two parts. First, we get 140 pages on the working-class Leeds where Hoggart grew up before the war, and the attitudes and outlooks of his people. This covers everything from the expected roles of mothers and fathers respectively to the focus on what he calls “the personal and the concrete” in the little pleasures taken wherever possible. Hoggart paints a vivid, tactile portrait of a place and time. But there’s a sense of loss, too: it’s a world of which he is no longer part, because of where reading has taken him.

Then there’s more than 160 pages on how things are changing post-war, which he links directly to what working-class people are reading. There’s lots here on magazines, newspapers and what he thinks of as trashy literature — he does not hide his distaste for the lurid covers and cheap newsprint of crime, sci-fi and sex pulp fiction that offers “sensation-without-commitment” (p. 242). He dismisses this as read by adolescents and those on National Service, and is especially disparaging of,

“American or American-type serial books of comics, where for page after page big-thighed and big-bosomed girls from Mars step out of their space machines, and gangsters’ molls scream away in high-powered sedans [which is] bad mass-art geared to a very low mental age” (p. 177).

He’s just as withering about the kind of airbrushed, big-bosomed covers of pulp fiction, often illustrated by or in the style of Alberto Vargas (who Hoggart refers to throughout as “Varga”, for example on p. 227). But he fails, I think, to adequately explain why this kind of stuff might appeal to particular readers, in the way we find in George Orwell’s famous essay. “Good Bad Books” (1945). Hoggart dismisses it all as masturbatorial — and feels the need to explain the service term “wank” on p. 220. 

I think we can understand the attraction of cheap, convenient sensation to teens and servicemen with limited money. If you’re stuck in school or National Service, bored, trapped and frustrated, how thrilling to read of people who take action, break rules and escape. It satisfies in a way that perhaps “good” or canonical literature does not. (I wonder if the illicit thrill of rule-breaking in fiction can also serve a social purpose, shoring up those rules in real life.)

Hoggart is more nuanced when it comes to popular songs, admitting that old tunes and lyrics have an effect on him that makes it hard to be objective (p. 199), and that,

“we remember the best songs from a large number of weak ones” (p. 200).

He can see the stuff is not very rich or good or worthy (in his terms), but it conjures something for him, writ through with keenly felt memory and association. My suspicion is that he found it easier to scorn pulp fiction and comics because he’d not grown up on them. They were not of the world he knew, so they are invaders.

His argument is that improvements in education, literacy and welfare haven’t necessarily seen improvements in reading. Indeed, he thinks reading rates are high, quoting sales figures for magazines and newspapers that seem incredible now. He also cites a Gallup poll from 1950, in which 55% of respondents said they were currently reading a book (p. 301), but slightly spoils this high figure by muttering that it gives no sense of the quality of the books being read. 

This is all part of his thesis that culture is becoming more homogenous and less granular and specific; we are reading more of fewer titles, pitched to a mass-market audience, an identikit culture. He puts particular blame on advertising for this effect, but does not, as he surely would had this book been written just a few years later, cite television as a factor. There is little sense, either, of this being part of a wider social or political development, or even construction of power, though he does mention Alex Comfort on p. 172 — presumably in reference to his book Authority and Delinquency (1950). 

As Hoggart admits, his observations and conclusions are drawn mostly from his own experience as a grammar school boy rather than on broader empirical evidence such as a survey or wider study. But the book chimed with a generation of readers who saw themselves in what he described. I think that rather proves his thesis: his personal, concrete experience had wide-reaching appeal to readers.

Perhaps the most haunting passages are where, towards the end, he describes “the Uprooted and the Anxious” (p. 262) population, largely comprising grammar-school pupils, whose cleverness and reading severed them from their working-class communities. Hoggart describes them — himself — as prone to insecurity and being alone (pp. 264-5). He explains, convincingly, how a bookish boy would grow up studying diligently in the home, so largely in the company of his mother and other women of the family, while the menfolk would go out to work or the pub, and other boys would be out playing (pp. 266-67). This, he argues, shapes a whole outlook for life: what we read shapes who we are.

Given this and his argument that our reading is getting worse, we are left on a pessimistic note. It’s interesting to read, in the interview from 1990 included at the end of the book, that Hoggart thought things improved in the 1960s with a flowering of rich culture, but saw further stagnation in the 1980s.

The Uses of Literacy was first published in January 1957 and widely reviewed and debated in the following months. I wonder if and when it was read by Terrance Dicks, about whom I'm writing a biography. At the time of publication, Terrance — a working-class grammar school boy from East Ham in London — was just coming to the end of his three-year degree in English on a scholarship at Downing College, Cambridge. There, he was taught by FR Leavis, whose close scrutiny of literature for clues about wider social and economic life was surely a big influence on Hoggart’s approach here. Surely his book was discussed at Downing by the final-year students. As I read it, I wondered to what extend Terrance would recognise himself and his world in these pages? 

But Terrance didn’t like that kind of abstract analysis. He preferred things to be more concrete.

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

A matter transporter in Star Trek works like a fax machine that destroys the original. That, effectively, is the case put by Dr Leonard McCoy at the start of this original Star Trek novel:

“Every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder” (p. 6).

The adventure that follows seems to suggest he is right. The crew of Enterprise is alerted to an emergency on the planet Organia (previously seen in the TV episode Errand of Mercy, the first to feature Klingons). Our heroes are keen to investigate but even when travelling at a breathless Warp 6, Organia is six months’ flight time away. 

Scotty and Spock plan to get round this by extending the range of the transporter using tachyons and hand-waving. If things go to plan, the person who steps into the transporter will remain on Enterprise but a perfect duplicate will be created on Organia, able to carry out reconnaissance and report back. They will then remerge with the tachyon universe for reasons of plot convenience — we wouldn’t want two versions of the same person, would we?

However, something goes wrong and there ends up being two identical Spocks on Enterprise. Captain Kirk names them “Spock One” and “Spock Two” and determines that one must be destroyed. That decision is made before we realise that one of the Spocks is evil and working with the Klingons, but we don’t know which. Both Spocks behave in ways that seem out of character, so how can Kirk deduce who to kill?

This is a fun, fast-moving and exciting adventure. For all it is told on an epic scale over a six-month period (from star date 4011.9 to 4205.5), it feels like a TV episode of Star Trek from the original series. The high-concept idea at the heart of it, the high-emotion stakes and the, ahem, questionable science and ethics all feel authentic. It presumes we are familiar with the TV show, too, as there are no descriptions of characters — not even mentioning Spock’s ears.

This may have been in response to the first original Star Trek novel, Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds (1968), which was written expressly for children and is generally considered to be not very good. More than that, the then producers of Star Trek complained about the racially coded ways in which Sulu and Uhura were described. I wonder if in writing Spock Must Die!, the second original novel, James Blish was instructed not to describe them at all.

Referring to Uhura as “the Bantu girl” (p. 9) conveys something of her ethnic background, though it’s not very specific — Bantu languages are spoken over a very wide area. It’s not a connection gleaned from TV episodes, either, but lore surely added by Blish based on “uhura” being a Bantu word (for “freedom”). Yet the same reasoning would make Kirk and McCoy both Scottish. Even so, other writers seem to have picked up on this and referred to Uhura as Bantu in later novels etc. 

That’s also true of another bit of lore here. On p. 2, Kirk recalls McCoy’s reasons for joining Star Fleet (a divorce) and the name of his daughter, Joanna. This isn’t from a TV episode; the character Joanna McCoy was devised for TV and then not used, yet she was added to the series “bible” issued to writers and is mentioned on p. 124 of The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968). Blish must have drawn from one of these sources and decided to make Joanna canonical. She has since appeared or been referenced in various novels and other media. Spock Must Die! might not be the first original novel of Star Trek but it is the first that other writers then built on. 

Then there’s stuff where Blish applies fixes to things seen and heard on screen. For example, he tells us that Montgomery Scott’s Scottish accent, “came out only under stress” (p. 3). On another occasion we’re told that Scotty’s,

“English [accent] was as high, white and cold as his terminology” (p. 71).

I’m not sure Scotty ever sounded English on TV. Besides, Blish pointing out the inconsistency made me spot when he is inconsistent himself, such as when Scotty starts all Brigadoon and then trails off:

“An’ it’s oft before lang an’ lang that I’ve cursed the designer who thought it’d be cute to put no pockets in these uniforms” (p. 99).

The plot of Spock Must Die! is woven from the established lore of the TV series, so that there are frequent footnotes telling us to refer to specific novelisations (also written by Blish). He shares a number of facts about the operations of Star Fleet, such as that there are 17 Federation starbases (p. 8), the Enterprise has a crew of more than 430 (p. 22) and that more than a third of them are female (p. 109).

We learn that Uhura is fluent in Eurish, the language of James Joyce (pp. 48-49), that Kirk practices his quick draw in the mirror (p. 61) and that, according to McCoy,

“The retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed — in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles — badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and, among other bad outcome, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering” (p. 64).

Scotty also uses the term “bollixed”, on p. 99 and p. 103, a term never used on screen (until Miles O'Brien says “bollocks” in an episode of Deep Space Nine). Spock has a a gift for “telempathy” (p. 115), i.e. picking up on someone else’s feelings from a distance, predating Counsellor Troi’s own similar gifts in Star Trek: The Next Generation. At the end of the book, the Klingons and their worlds are banned from spaceflight for a thousand years (p. 112), and Uhura learns that a lieutenant at Star Fleet wants her to teach him Eurish. Her response is:

“I hope he’s cute” (p. 117).

It’s a cheery note on which to close this perilous adventure, and we leave the Enterprise to continue its voyages. The irony is that on screen these had already ended; the last episode of Star Trek was filmed in January 1969 and the series was formally cancelled the following month. The indicia of this battered paperback says it was first published in the USA and Canada in February 1970, and that this is a second printing. Mine is a US edition, with the price of 60¢ printed on the spine. Yet I think it may be a UK-issued edition.

I’ve seen some accounts say that this novel and Blish’s novelisations of multiple TV scripts of Star Trek were not available in the UK until the Corgi editions first published in 1972. So I was a bit surprised by the author’s note at the start of Spock Must Die! First, he suggests that this original novel,

“might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969 [actually, 12 July], and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lead on [sic] life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.” (p. -1)

I don’t think Corgi published new versions of the book at this stage; instead, they seem to have distributed Bantam-published US stock with a sticker added giving a price in shillings and pence. I’ve got a copy of the first novelisation, with 50¢ printed on the cover and a sticker for 3/6 to one side (see image, right). 

So, when were Star Trek books available in the UK, exactly? I looked up the details in trade magazine the Bookseller:

Star Trek (aka Star Trek 1) by James Blish, comprising 7 TV stories

• Published in the US by Bantam tab 50¢, January 1967
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3 shillings and sixpence, 21 April 1967 (source: Bookseller, 15 April 1967, p. 1,938).
• Issued again in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, 18 July 1969 (source: Bookseller, 12 July 1969, p. 134), to coincide with Star Trek first being aired in the UK for the first time, from Saturday 12 July.

Star Trek 2 by James Blish, comprising 8 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, February 1968
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 3.

Star Trek 3 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, April 1969
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 2.

Spock Must Die! by James Blish, an original novel

• Published in the UK by Bantam at 60¢, February 1970
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 4 shillings, April 1970 (source: Bookseller, 25 April 1970, p. 2,174).

Star Trek 4 by James Blish, comprising 6 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, July 1971
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, October 1971 (source: Bookseller, 23 October 1971, p. 2,076).

Star Trek 5 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, February 1972
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, June 1972 (source: Bookseller, 24 June 1972, p. 2,696).

New, Corgi-editions of these books were then published in the UK 1972, with Corgi editions of Star Trek 6-11 to follow.

We know Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks — about whom I'm writing a biography — had a collection of Star Trek books which he loaned to his writers. For example, on 8 March 1972, he wrote to Bob Baker and Dave Martin with notes on a storyline and added, “Where are my Star Trek books?” (source: p. 102 of the “09-04 The Mutants Production Documentation” PDF included on the Doctor Who Season 9 Blu-ray box-set).

Now I know what books those were, I can better trace the influence of Star Trek on Doctor Who in the early 1970s. More on this to follow.

• See also: me on Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish (1964)

Artron Energy podcast #18

The latest Artron Energy podcast is an interview with me about my various Doctor Who related scribblings, conducted by Freddie Hull and Brad Mell in August last year. It is available wherever you get your podcasts, but here are some links:

• Simon Guerrier Artron Energy on Apple podcasts
• Simon Guerrier Artron Energy on Spotify
• Simon Guerrier Artron Energy on Buzzsprout

Doctor Who missing episodes found - in the Telegraph

I've written a piece for the Telegraph about the thrilling discovery, announced today, of two episodes of Doctor Who that have been lost for the past 61 years. They are, as I'm sure you're aware, The Nightmare Begins and Devil's Planet, aka episodes 1 and 3 of The Daleks' Master Plan, which will be up on iPlayer for us all to watch from 4 April.

In December, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph on episode 7 of the same story on its 60th anniversary. An age ago, when the last discoveries of lost Doctor Who were made, I wrote a blog post about why finding missing episodes is such a thing.

See the Film is Fabulous website for more details about the new discovery, and to donate to their valiant work. They have also posted an interview with Peter Purves about the find. It is rather moving to see Peter's delight. 

I also enjoyed the special episode of the Doctor Who Missing Episodes Podcast about these finds. You might also like the special episodes from Dalek 63•88, one on The Nightmare Returns and one on Devil's Planet.

Oh, and these newly discovered episodes include the first appearance of Bret Vyon as played by Nicholas Courtney. Later this year, thanks to Big Finish, Bret Vyon lives.

Writing the Future, eds. Dan Coxon & Richard V Hirst

Subtitled "Essays on Crafting Science Fiction", this is an anthology first published in 2023 comprising, in most cases, authors talking about their own practice, concerns and obsessions. There's a lot on the context in which they've written things, and the sense of genre as community where we're all in conversation. There's stuff about how we make readers engage with climate emergency - and not turn them off - as well as how we conceive of and convey the alien.

In Steering the Craft by Ursula le Guin, which I read recently, these kinds of discussion are a prompt for writing exercises, the reader as active participant and fellow craftsperson. By comparison, Writing the Future is more inward-looking, the authors reflecting on their own working methods but not inviting us to roll up our sleeves. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, just not quite what I'd expected. The call to action, instead, is to look out various the stories and books cited. 

I was particularly drawn to Aliya Whiteley's "A Crash Course in Black Holes", all about researching a story that never quite worked out and how she felt compelled to follow the threads of the idea anyway. Adam Roberts's "Wellsian Futures" has only whetted my appetite for his book, HG Wells: A Literary Life. (See my recent post on Wells's 1936 novella The Croquet Player.)

Nina Allen's "Running Out of Road: The Radical Modernism of JG Ballard" is a similar trawl through the ideas and obsessions of another writer. I also enjoyed Maura McHugh's "The Eternal Apocalypse: How British Comic 2000AD Remain Relevant", not least in its focus on more recent stuff which I've not read (having lost the faith in the mid-1990s). 

And my pal Una McCormack's "'Right now the building is ours': Affinities of Science Fiction and Historical Fiction", has given me lots to think about in the way SF uses or draws from history, and I've added The Dawn of Everything:A New History of Humanity by Davids Graeber and Wengrow (Penguin, 2021) to my reading list - as soon as the Dr is done with it.

“NKATA” in Interzone #304

My unsettling short story “NKATA” is featured in the latest issue of long-running science-fiction magazine Interzone (issue #304, March 2026), which went out to subscribers today and will be available on the Interzone website shortly. 

The beautiful cover artwork by Emma Howitt illustrates another of the stories in this issue: Van Nolan’s novelette “County Colours”. It’s a packed issue, comprising 70,000 words of stories, articles and reviews. Bargain!

You can subscribe to Interzone via Patreon or buy issue #304 of Interzone for €5.00.

I am thrilled to make it into these august pages at long last, having first submitted a story to Interzone in 1998, and to be among such distinguished company. Thanks so much to editor Gareth Jelley. 

The Heartless Sea - out now

My latest Doctor Who audio adventure, The Heartless Sea, is now available to download. It's paired with another story, The Kraken of Hagwell written by Barbara Hambly, as part of a set called The Companion Chronicles: The Legacy of Time.

My story involves Harry Sullivan (Christopher Naylor) and Eleanor Crooks (Naomi Cross) meeting the Second Doctor (Michael Troughton) just in time to take arms against a troublesome sea.

It was lovely to return to the Companion Chronicles range, having written a whole bunch of them back in the day, and to be reunited - though I didn't know until I downloaded the story just now - with sound designer Richard Fox, who has always performed such wonders. As I say in the interview at the end, what a thrill to be support act to the brilliant Barbara Hambly.

The striking cover art, above, is by Oliver Chenery.

Doctor Who Chronicles: 1984

From the makers of Doctor Who Magazine, Doctor Who Chronicles: 1984 is now on sale. My two pieces are:

Frontios Row Seat (pp. 48-49)

Today, Jenny Colgan is a best-selling author - but as a child, she won a competition to see Doctor Who being made.

Windy City Showdown (pp. 98-101)

In November 1984, writer Terrance Dicks and producer John Nathan-Turner has a "blazing row" at a Doctor Who convention in Chicago. Why had their relationship soured?

For the latter, I spoke to Stephen Dicks, Gary Russell, Steven Warren Hill, Emma Abraham, John Lavalie, Kathryn Sullivan, Rob Warnock and Richard Marson. The feature boasts some amazing images from the convention taken by Mary Loye.

The Croquet Player, by HG Wells

This short, 82-page novella first published in 1936 was recommended to me after I posted about the 1934 and 1941 editions of A Short History of the World and Wells’s anxieties about where things were headed. I tracked down a first-edition copy, and read it in a single sitting earlier this week. It has haunted my imagination ever since.

The blurb is as follows:

“In a cafe at Les Noupets, as he comfortably sips his vermouth before lunching with his aunt, the narrator is accosted by a voluble stranger who tells him a strange and terrible story of the haunted countryside of Cainsmarsh, and of how he was finally driven to leave it and put himself in the hands of nerve-specialist. The narrator, already disturbed and frightened by the tale, meets the nerve-specialist next day and the mystery, instead of being solved, broadens and deepens until it embraces the whole world.

This is Mr Wells at his very best, and he could have hardly have chosen a more appropriate moment at which to give us this intriguing story.” (Back-cover blurb of first UK edition, Chatto & Windus, 1936)

The story comprises four chapters. In the first, “The Croquet Player”, the unnamed narrator tells us of two strange people he’s encountered, and that he’ll share what they have each told him in an effort to get it straight.

“It was a sort of ghost story they unfolded” (p. 1).

Having promised us something unsettling, he then sets a scene rather out of PG Wodehouse. The narrator and his aunt, Miss Frobisher, are at Les Noupets to play croquet because they don’t care to be seen playing tennis as it is too popular, while golf.

“we find mixes us up with all sorts of people” (p. 7). 

This snob was educated at Harton and Keble, now lives with his aunt at Upper Beamish Street in an unnamed part of Hampshire, and is, he tells us himself,

“just a little inclined to be what the Americans call a sissy [ … with … ] soft hands and an ineffective will” (p. 5).

He is, in short, an unlikely figure to get caught up in a ghost story or strange adventure. He is a comic character, a recognisable type to ground the story in something real before the horror strikes. My first thought was that Wells was doing a kind of fish-out-of-genre story, putting the least likely or least equipped sort of character into an established kind of set-up. That can be very effective, like doing a Chandler-esque thriller but making the protagonist a baffled stoner, as in The Big Lebowski.

In chapter 2, “The Haunting Fear in Cainsmarsh”, the narrator is out on the terrace when he meets nervous young Dr Finchatton, who tells him about his practice in Cainsmarsh where everyone is beset with a strange, low-level sickness that leaves them perturbed, with visions of ghosts from under the ground etc. It is brilliantly unsettling for being so underplayed, reminiscent of MR James, Lovecraft or The Woman in Black.

In chapter 3, “The Skull in the Museum” Finchatton traces the pestilence to the local museum in Cainsmarsh, which holds the newly found skull of some early version of man — I suspect inspired by the contentious real-life “discovery” of Piltdown man. The implication here is that in unearthing the skull they have unleashed an ancient curse, or rather an ancient perspective — a savage, violent, early version of humanity.

Things then step up: heading home, Finchatton finds the body of a dog that has been beaten to death, then learns that the kindly old vicar Rawdon who advised him earlier in the story has attempted to murder his own wife. Finchatton shares with the narrator his theories about the influence of “primordial Adamite” (p. 55) on everyone in the region, including himself.

“And then Finchatton said a queer thing. ‘Little children killed by air-raids in the street.’” (p. 56)

This incongruous reference brings a tale of ancient horror suddenly into the present. Air-raids weren’t a new idea in 1936; London was bombed in the First World War, and Wells had explored the idea in science-fiction novels including The War in the Air (1908), The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the latter made into the influential film Things to Come (1936). 

But the haunting image here of children killed in the street is apparently a response to contemporary events and the civil war in Spain, a year before the bombing of Guernica. The sense is, then, that the curse has already spread far and wide from Cainsmarsh.

I’ve seen this kind of thing done elsewhere, not least in Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59), where the discovery of an ancient skull produces nightmare visions and we learn our deep-seated violence is an ancient inheritance. I’d understood that to be a direct response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, not least given that writer Nigel Kneale was married to Judith Kerr, a Jewish refugee from Berlin, and his mother-in-law was a translator during the Nuremberg trials. So, for me, it’s extraordinary to see the same kind of idea being articulated before the outbreak of war. 

Wells then goes in a different direction. Chapter 4, “The Intolerable Psychiatrist”, flips the whole tale. The narrator meets with Finchatton’s nerve specialist, Norbert, who tells him that Finchatton’s story isn’t true. There is no such place as Cainsmarsh, and the young doctor was practising in Ely.

Yet, says Norbert, the sickness is real: he’s seen loads of people having similar delusions and nightmares, which he thinks is a response to the mounting tensions in the world, implicitly the rise of fascism and the threat of another world war. People are gripped by a nightmare of things to come.

I put this to my friend Niall Boyce, who shared with me an even earlier version of something similar — the vivid, precognitive nightmare experienced by Carl Jung in 1913:

“In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realised that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasised. An inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.’ 

That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.” (CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Flamingo, 1961) p. 199.)

Three years after these dreams, with the First World War in progress, Jung first used the term “collective unconsciousness”, in part drawn from Freud’s idea of the “primal horde”, where part of us, deep in the consciousness, will always be archaic, primitive, wild. I think that’s exactly what Wells is drawing on here, initially as a kind of ghost story.

In the story, Norbert argues that the mounting sense of disquiet, the shared nightmares, are a response to looming threat, implicitly of a new war, but originate in the primitive parts of our consciousness. He  appeals to the narrator:

“‘In a little while,’ he said, ‘there will be no ease, no security, no comfort any more.’ (Thank Heaven! he did not say I was ‘living on the brink of a volcano’.) ‘There will be no choice before a human being but to be either a driven animal or a stern devotee to that true civilisation, that disciplined civilisation, that has never yet been achieved. Victim or vigilante. And that, my friend, means you!” (p. 78) 

The narrator has, he admits, been “hypnotised” by all this. Yet when challenged by the psychiatrist, he shakes him off, because he has and appointment to keep with his aunt, playing croquet. He does not succumb to primitive consciousness; he simply ignores the threat.

I said at the outset that the narrator is like something from PG Wodehouse and to a post-war reader the ending reinforces that idea, given Wodehouse’s behaviour in the early part of the war. Of course, Wells could not have known that at the time of writing, but it is another example of his eerie prescience. 

There’s also something more profound in all this: that idea of people unable to face up to challenges and threats, determined to deny them, avoid them or conjure nightmares of something else. That’s coloured my sense of the news this week, with politicians of various hues determined to ignore or underplay climate change. How strange to read a book published 90 years ago and find it is pointedly now. 

The Croquet Player is dedicated “To Moura”, ie Russian translator and double-agent Countess Moura Budberg, with whom Wells had a long-standing on-off relationship. She’s a fascinating character, and given her experience in the Russian revolution, I can well understand why she might sympathise with a story / view of human psychology like this. 

I wonder how much of this strange, haunting story is the ghost of a conversation between Wells and Moura, horrified by a future they could so plainly see coming.  

A Criminal Practice, by Terrance Dicks

A Criminal Practice, a comic play by Terrance Dicks first broadcast on 5 July 1967, has been repeated on Radio 4 Extra today at 3pm and 9pm and will be available for a while on BBC Sounds, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r4tl  

Excitingly, when I checked the archives last year this play was thought lost. It’s been recovered and returned by those heroes at Radio Circle — why not make a small donation to say ta?

By this point, Terrance Dicks had already co-written three TV episodes of The Avengers (1963-64), a seven-episode radio sitcom called Joey starring Alfie Bass (1965-66) and a one-off comic radio drama, Set A Thief, starring Nicholas Parsons (1966).

He tried selling Joey to TV, but Richard Waring — script editor of comedy at BBC Television — thought the “lower class milieu” of an East End cafe culture lacked sufficient “gloss and sophistication” (source: Waring to TD, 1 June 1966).

Perhaps it's no coincidence, then, that Terrance’s next pitch to the BBC, received on 8 July, was a drama set in the near future about a well-to-do young solicitor dealing with a gang who steal his car and takeover his house. The BBC declined The Day of the Yob but Terrance seems to have reworked some elements as a comic radio play. A Criminal Practice was commissioned by the BBC Drama Department (Radio) on 16 November. 

Note that for all it’s funny, and Terrance had been working in sitcom, this and the earlier Set a Thief were produced by the radio drama department. He’d not made further headway in comedy, either on TV or radio. 

For inspiration, I suspect Terrance spoke to his lifelong friend Simon Goldstein. They’d met at grammar school in East Ham, then gone to university at Cambridge together. Simon was by 1967 a solicitor and later a circuit judge.

The script for A Criminal Practice was delivered on 11 April 1967 and a week later authority was given to pay Terrance the second half of the fee. Rehearsals began on Thursday 15 June, and two days later it was recorded in Studio 2 at 201 Piccadilly, between 4.30 and 6.30 pm.

The producer was John Gibson, based in room 6082 at BBC Broadcasting House, supported by secretaries Christine Young and Peggy Dowdall-Brown, and stage managers John Farrell, Chris Pallet and Martin Penrose. “John Farrell” is a name used in a 1971 Doctor Who story on which Terrance was script editor, Terror of the Autons. Perhaps that is a coincidence.

A Criminal Practice was first broadcast on 5 July 1967 at 8.15pm on the BBC’s Light Programme as part of “Midweek Theatre”. It got a fair bit of press coverage, though mostly just explaining the wheeze. The audience appreciation index (AI) was 61 out of 100 and a hand-written note on the script now held at the BBC says “good”.

The play was repeated on 1 June 68 (Light Programme) and 14 July 72 (Radio 4). That all suggests it did well, but Terrance never wrote a full play for radio again. He had better-paying work.

First, he went back to The Avengers, co-writing The Great Great Britain Crime, which began principal photography on 20 November. I have discovered that he was commissioned for a solo-written episode, too. But his return to The Avengers was short-lived. I’ll say more about all of that in my forthcoming biography of Terrance. Stay tuned.

By the end of 1967, he’d taken a job on soap opera Crossroads, where he worked as both writer and storyliner. In February 1968, he was offered a job as assistant script editor on Doctor Who by Derrick Sherwin, who he’d met on Crossroads. He remained attached to Doctor Who for the rest of his life.

So, when A Criminal Practice was repeated on 1 June 1968, Terrance was well into that job; it was down to him that the prolific Robert Holmes was commissioned for his first Doctor Who story the day before, on 31 May.

That day, 31 May 1968, also saw recording of episode 3 of the Doctor Who story The Dominators. The cast included Walter Fitzgerald as Sennex. Fitzgerald had also played The Judge in A Criminal Practice, so surely he and Terrance remarked on the repeat the next day — for which they both received a fee.

Other members of the radio cast Terrance worked with again: Elizabeth Proud, as Penelope, was later Mrs Sowerberry in the BBC One dramatisation of Oliver Twist (1985), Terrance’s first credited work as producer. (To me, she’ll always be Mrs Phoeble in Simon and the Witch).

Bartlett Mullins (who’d been Second Elder in 1964 Doctor Who story The Sensorites) was later in Gulliver in Lilliput (1982), directed by Barry Letts and script edited by Terrance. Alexander John was later in The Franchise Affair (1988), the last TV produced by Terrance. 

Then, more tangentially, Preston Lockwood, as George Larrabie, later played Dojjen in the 1982 Doctor Who story Snakedance, which Terrance novelised. Victor Lucas was Andor in 1977 Doctor Who story The Face of Evil, novelised by Terrance in 1978.

(Nigel Clayton was one of the Fish People in 1967 Doctor Who story The Underwater Menace. But Nigel Robinson novelised that one.)

Anthony Jackson, who plays young protagonist Mathew Laramie in A Criminal Practice, was cast of the voice of Azal in 1971 Doctor Who story The Daemons. The production team then decided that Stephen Thorne would play both voice and body. David Brunt tells me that there is no indication that Jackson's contract was cancelled, so the decision may have been made after he recorded the voice.

(When I interviewed Stephen Thorne, he remembered things a little differently.)

Jackson had a wide-ranging career. He’d already filmed his role as an ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but went on to play Dai Station in the colour version of Ivor the Engine, and did loads of sitcoms and kids shows.

A Criminal Practice was repeated, a second time, on Friday 14 July 1972. Terrance seems to have been on holiday at the time, returning to the Doctor Who office in 24 July to find waiting for him a storyline for The Three Doctors and the script for the first episode of what was then called Destination: Daleks.

I’ve read the script but haven’t heard the play so am very excited about this afternoon’s broadcast. It’s very him, I think: good-natured, warm and funny, with a few bits of unexpected grit to make us sit up and take notice. Enjoy.

The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

I read this compelling account of the early days of the American space programme — and the egos involved — an age ago, before my 2009 trip to Cape Canaveral, and have seen the film version a few times. But I looked up a detail the other week and got caught up again. 

Wolfe tells us in his foreword that the book was inspired by a simple question:

“What is it, I wondered, that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan, or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? I decided on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few in December of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch then last mission to the moon, Apollo 17. I discovered quickly enough that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage.” (P -4)

He persists in his investigation all the same, and the promise is of stuff about Tough Men Who Don’t Talk Emotions, alongside lots of Detail About Engineering. Yes, there is a lot of that stuff in what follows, but not to begin with. Chapter 1 opens, instead, on a domestic scene, wives ringing one another to find out what people might have heard. It’s ordinary, relatable, with a growing tension as we realise that a plane has crashed and the wives are trying to work out who has lost their husband.

Having explored the social networks and the psychology of all this, we then follow the efforts to recover the crashed plane and what little remains of the pilot, the state of the body described in horrific, visceral detail. It’s emotive and arresting, and I lacked the velocity to escape it. So I’ve read the whole book again.

There are effectively two stories here: first, the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager on 14 October 1947; then the Mercury space programme (1958-63), from the recruitment of the seven pilots, the first American chimps and humans in space, through to the appointment of a second wave of pilots (including Neil Armstrong) for the subsequent Gemini and Apollo programmes that would take astronauts to the Moon.

There’s some amazing stuff, like Yeager being invited to the US premiere of David Lean’s film The Sound Barrier (1952, released in the US the following year). The film claims the British broke the sound barrier first and did so by “reversing the controls”. Yeager found this outrageous, and was then horrified to discover that people thought he was only the first American to break the sound barrier, have copied this manoeuvre from the British.

“The last straw comes when he gets a call from the Secretary of the Air Force.

‘Chuck,’ he says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something? Is is true that you broke the sound barrier by reversing the controls?’

Yeager is stunned by this. The Secretary—the Secretary—of the US Air Force!

‘No, sir,’ he says, ‘that is… not correct. Anyone who reversed the controls going transonic would be dead.’” (p. 62)

Wolfe reports everything in a hard-boiled journalistic style, with an eye for human foibles — ego, hubris, jealousy, anger, lust and foolishness. It’s a little as though Dashiell Hammett had written a history of rockets. He’s good on the culture — the hard drinking, hard driving astronauts, the way they were wooed by sponsors and politicians, the conflict between perceived glamour and the reality. We get to know these different people and what makes them tick. Mission accomplished on that score.

There are also some notable absences. Frustratingly, there are no footnotes or index so we must take Wolfe’s claims on trust. But there are also some big things missing from the story here that I’ve seen picked up elsewhere. For example, there’s this reference to the partying going on at Cape Canaveral in 1960.

“There were NASA people and the contractors and their people, and there were the Germans. Although they scrupulously advised publicity, many of Wernher von Braun’s team of V-2 experts had important jobs at the Cape and were happy to find a fraternal atmosphere in which they could take off their official long faces and let the funny bone out for a tap dance or two. And many were the midsummer nights in Cocoa Beach, nights so hot and salty that the No See’um bugs were sluggish, when sizzling glüwein materialized as if from out of a time warp and drunken Germans could be heard pummelling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’!” (p. 167)

This is a rare mention by Wolfe of von Braun and the Germans working on the space programme, with little to suggest any moral objection to the involvement of former Nazis. I’ve seen that addressed in, for example, the non-fiction Moondust by Andrew Smith, the novel Moonglow by Michael Chabon and the TV series For All Mankind. This is an example, I think, of Wolfe being like the journalists he decries more than once as behaving like “Victorian gents” in the way they reported the space programme, discreetly skipping unpalatable details to present a romantic story.

At the end of the book, he discusses the political pressures involved in recruiting Ed Dwight to the Mercury programme, as the first black astronaut. With other astronauts, Wolfe shares their perspective on events, their frustrations at being pawns in political games; we don’t get that with Dwight. Wolfe also doesn’t say that Dwight’s career was then halted by the end of the Mercury programme — though Dwight finally made it into orbit in 2024. 

The book ends, instead, at the end of 1963 with the Mercury astronauts receiving an award from the Society of Experimental Test Pilots that makes them feel as though they have, finally, been accepted by their peers as proper pilots. There’s the sense of things changing gear as Mercury is superseded by the next stages of the space programme. But I’m struck by Wolfe also closing the curtain on another key moment in history:

“When Kennedy was assassinated on November 22 by a man with Russian and Cuban ties, there was no anti-Soviet or anti-Cuban clamor in the Congress or in the press. The Cold War, as anyone could plainly see, was over.” (p. 435).

That seems a remarkable claim to make in 1979, the time of the coup in Afghanistan. For a book all about the importance of precision, it’s not quite correct — not quite the right stuff.

Hamster Book Club podcast interview

The Hamster Book Club podcast, devoted to Doctor Who books, has posted a big long interview with me, covering my books The Time Travellers, The Pirate Loop and the short-story anthologies I edited for Big Finish. 

We also cover my non-fiction work including Bernice Summerfield - The Inside Story, and biographies David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television and the forthcoming Written by Terrance Dicks.

Doctor Who Magazine #626

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out now. I've a couple of pieces in it.

pp. 12-15 "I name you, Sea Devils"

Palaeontologist Dr Dave Hone, who was scientific advisor on The War Between the Land and the Sea, tells me how he came up with Latin names for three distinct classes of Sea-Silurian. 

(I previously interviewed Dave about what he thought of Invasion of the Dinosaurs for The Essential Doctor Who: Invasions of Earth (2016).)

pp. 32-37 "Doctor Where [2025]"

Exactly where and when do the Doctor's adventures take place? I look for clues we can use to set the TARDIS co-ordinates...

Steering the Craft, by Ursula le Guin

Dr Una McCormack recommended me this brilliant book on the craft of writing. The title is a pun, the idea being that a piece of writing — a story, a novel, a work of non-fiction — is like a boat on the water, making for a destination. What can be done to guide it?

Other guides to writing, such as Screenplay by Syd Field, approach this kind of thing like we’re building a house. You work out the frame of your story, put up the scaffolding and then fill in the gaps. 

The danger of that, I think, is that it often becomes a kind of prescribed blueprint, the way screenplays must be constructed. You end up with vast estates of near-identical houses, all achingly by-the-numbers. Sometimes, I watch the first few minutes of a movie, or even the trailer, and know exactly how the thing will play out. 

Le Guin is on to this:

“Plot is so much discussed in literature and writing courses, and action is so highly valued, that I want to put in a counterweight opinion. A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither. To my mind, plot is merely one way of telling a story, by connecting the happenings tightly, usually through causal chains. Plot is a marvellous device.

But it’s not superior to story, and not even necessary to it. As for action, indeed a story must move, something must happen: but the action can be nothing more than a letter sent that doesn’t arrive, a thought unspoken, the passage of a summer day. Unceasing violent action is usually a sign that in fact no story is being told.” (p. 83)

She comes at things from the opposite direction. Rather than start with the structure then fill in the gaps, her focus is on what you put in each sentence. Start with ensuring you have the right tools and know how to use them. To switch analogies, the effect of the book is like sharpening one’s knives before starting to cook.

The chapters cover the sound of your writing spoken aloud, punctuation and grammar, sentence length, the use of repetition, adjectives and adverbs, using verbs to express person and tense, point of view, indirect narration and what she calls “crowding and leaping” — when to provide lots of detail and where to skip through it. 

Each chapter contains examples, either from works of classic (ie out-of-copyright) literature or stuff specially written by le Guin. This stuff is illuminating and fun. 

For example, le Guin quotes the opening paragraphs of the first three chapters of Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1852). The first two are in what she calls the “involved authorial voice” — she objects to the term “omniscient” narrator as judgmental (p. 57) — and then it switches to first person, past tense, from the POV of Esther Summerson. Le Guin comments afterwards:

“Bleak House is a powerful novel, and some of its dramatic power may come from this highly artificial alternation and contrast of voices. But the transition from Dickens to Esther is always a jolt. And the twenty-year-old girl sometimes begins to sound awfully like the middle-aged novelist, which is implausible (though rather a relief, because Esther is given to tiresome fits of self-depreciation, and Dickens isn’t). Dickens was well aware of the dangers of his narrative strategy; the narrating author never overlaps with the observer-narrator, never enters Esther’s mind, never even sees her. The two narratives remain separate. The plot unites them but they never touch. It is an odd device.” (p. 75)

This stuff about different kinds of narrator has been really useful in clarifying my thoughts about what Terrance Dicks was doing as he novelised Doctor Who stories. Le Guin details several different kinds of narrator, with the same scene related in each different mode so we can see the effect. She differentiates between first person, limited third person (ie in the head of one character), involved author, detached author, and observer-narrator (both first and third person).

For example:

“Detached Author (‘Fly on the Wall’, ‘Camera Eye’, Objective Narrator’)

There is no viewpoint character. The narrator is not one of the characters and can say of the characters only what a totally neutral observer (an intelligent fly on the wall) might infer of them from behaviour and speech. The author never enters a character’s mind. People and places may be exactly described, but values and judgements can only be implied indirectly. A popular voice around 1900 and in ‘minimalist’ and ‘brand-name’ fiction, it is the least overtly, most covertly manipulative of the points of view.” (pp. 58-59).

I can see why this mode would suit “brand-name” fiction. If you’re writing a novelisation of a TV show or film, the source takes that point of view anyway — because the viewer is effectively the fly on the wall, and all pertinent information must be relayed by what we see or characters say. Even if you write an original Doctor Who novel — or Star Trek or Star Wars — you’re still often in that mode. Make it read like something we’re watching, and it will feel more authentic.

If you want a novel to feel more novelistic, you do something else. In the very first Doctor Who novelisation, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964), writer David Whitaker used first person, relaying events originally seen on screen through the perspective of one of the lead characters. On screen, a lot of the mood is created by visual design, effects and music. On the page, the tone is set by a narrator sharing his feelings.

In 1990, when editor Peter Darvill Evans established a range of original Doctor Who novels aimed at adult readers, he wanted “stories too broad and deep for the small screen” — a claim printed on the backs of the books. One way he achieved this richness was to insist that books were written from multiple points of view, strictly marshalled.

As per the guidelines sent out to prospective authors, each distinct section of a chapter was to be told in limited third person, the events as seen and understood by one character. If the writer wanted to change perspective, they needed to start a new section. They were also not to relay information from the perspective of the Doctor, so that he’d remain alien and mysterious.

I’ve seen some correspondence from editor Peter Darvill-Evans to Terrance Dicks, insisting on this approach for the novel that became Timewyrm: Exodus (1991). After 64 novelisations of TV Doctor Who stories, Terrance had developed a very different method for writing Doctor Who — but not as detached author.

He’ll tell us, for example, that the Doctor brooding at the start of Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars (1976) is not his usual, cheery disposition. That’s not the Doctor’s point of view, or that of companion Sarah; it is Terrance as author. He tells us where Sarah picked up her knowledge of ancient Egypt, or what the letters in TARDIS stand for. He’s an involved author, putting out sign-posts to guide the reader.

Within the same section, Terrance might change POV or jump in space and time, but it’s never confusing — we know exactly where we are. Le Guin gives an example of another writer doing the same thing. In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927), we move back and forth between the perspectives of Mrs Ramsay and her husband. Le Guins provides a long example, then says:

“Notice how Woolf makes the transitions effortlessly but perfectly clearly. … The paragraph indent is the signal for the switch back to Mrs Ramsay. What are the next switches and how are they signalled?” (p. 80)

That’s not to suggest that Terrance Dicks was consciously following the example of Virginia Woolf; it’s just that she, via le Guin, opened up for me what he was doing. Note also that le Guin doesn’t simply tell us what’s being done. She prompts us to read the example again and puzzle out its workings for ourselves.

Each chapter includes writing exercises aimed at writing groups of at least six people to prompt discussion and reflection. The point is not to prescribe a method of writing but to suggest things to think about and try.

In that sense, this book reminded me of “Politics and the English language”, the essay by George Orwell about conveying meaning in a plain style to maximise the chances of being understood, which I found so useful when I worked in the press office of a government department, and which I think still influences a lot of what I write. Orwell lays out a series of rules, then tells us to break them if needed.

In the same way, Steering the Craft is a practical and pragmatic guide for writers, and has really helped me this week on something I’m writing as yet unannounced. It meant a switch of perspective, too. Oh, I realised, as the problem I’d been wrestling with suddenly resolved, I’m the one being steered.

See also:

• Me on The Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore by Ursula le Guin

DWM The Yearbook 2026

The latest Doctor Who Magazine special edition is out today, The Yearbook 2026. Among its wonders is something by me:

How You Watch Who (pp. 46-50)

Simulcasts on iPlayer and spoilers on social media have changed the way we watch and engage with Doctor Who - but how? Simon Guerrier investigates...

For this, I spoke to several different fans: 26 year-old Erica Tucker (watching since Rose in 2005); Sam Ripley, Luc Fawcett, Alfie Giffen and Charlie Gaskin from Warwick University's Who Soc; his great eminence Jeremy Bentham; and 9 year-old Olivia who has been watching since The Church on Ruby Road in 2023.

Jeremy boggled my mind by telling me that there are only four episodes of Doctor Who he's not seen - ones he missed on original transmission that are now among the 97 episodes currently missing from the archive. I list what those four are in the article. 

But since then I've spoken to someone who has seen every episode of Doctor Who. Yes, I am arranging for the preservation / scanning of their brain...

Box of Delights, by Richard Marson

I’ve greatly enjoyed this enormous, 540-page oral history of children’s television on the BBC between 1967 and 1997, published by Ten Acre Books (who also publish me).

A lot of the people and shows referenced here are very familiar; this is the TV output on which I grew up. It’s a thrill to find out what went on behind the scenes of Blue Peter, Newsround and Jackanory and dramas such as Grange Hill and The Box of Delights, not least when what we’re told is a bit salacious. The job tended to involve long hours and lots of chain-smoking for not much money. There was an enviable degree of creative freedom, but some extraordinary clashes of ego and personality, and occasional bust-ups. 

While much of it is about the practicalities of making television for a mass audience, it’s really the story of the people involved. Several of the many contributors are unguarded in what they say about former colleagues, particular shows and even the children who took part. We learn, for example, that one girl looked like a hippo on screen and that a particular group of children who appeared on The Really Wild Show smelled so strongly of cannabis that it confused a sniffer dog.

One constant theme, I think, is the sink-or-swim method of recruitment. The process of finding presenters and child actors often involved people already know to the producers: relatives, colleagues working in the office, people they happened to meet during filming (an example of the latter: Blue Peter presenter Simon Groom). Yes, there was some auditioning, too, but it all feels a bit haphazard, with a tendency to cast particular “types”. Once they’d got the job, some onscreen personalities were clearly not well supported, either. There was not much duty of care.

Some stories here are shocking, such as the claim that no women wanted to work with Rod Hull and Emu as he/they would assault them, or the account of one (former) child actor who almost drowned while filming. I had no idea that Blue Peter presenter Diane Louise Jordan faced so many challenges, in part because of things going on in her life off-screen. And there’s something a bit sacrilegious about some colleagues airing their dislike of Floella Benjamin (pp. 281-2).

A few things prompted me to look up further detail. For example, the book details the impact on the cast and crew of Record Breakers when presenter Ross McWhirter was murdered, but doesn’t tell us why the IRA targeted him. Reading up on McWhirter’s political views and associates only makes it more extraordinary that he and his twin brother Norris were fixtures of children’s TV.

Inevitably, I think, some of the later material here hit less hard as it concerns shows and personalities whose names I didn’t recognise, from a time long after I’d outgrown children’s TV and had not even a passing acquaintance with what was on. It’s all good material, just without the same emotive impact for this particular reader. I suspect different parts of the book will hit differently, depending on the reader’s age.

This isn’t meant as criticism; it’s just that this book has made me think about my own relationship with and response to all the culture spawned from the BBC’s East Tower. The book is just as rich and varied and nuts.

*

For my own purposes, researching the life and career of Terrance Dicks, it was interesting to see what the book says about The Bagthorpe Saga, a six-part dramatisation “completed … for transmission” by Christmas 1980 and broadcast between 25 March to 29 April 1981.

“The first two novels in Helen Creswell’s The Bagthorpe Saga — a humorous series about an eccentric and dysfunctional family living in the country — were adapted by James Andrew Hall. Andrew (as he was known) was a writer then very much in vogue. In the spring of 1979, he had generated a good deal of publicity with his controversial and autobiographical Play for Today, Coming Out [tx 10 April 1979], the angsty story of a homosexual writer and the various men in his life. He was also a regular contributor to the Sunday classic serials. ‘I enjoy writing for kids,’ he said. ‘I think it helps that I haven’t got any of my own. I’ve never really grown up in some respects. When I’m working on an adaptation, [it’s] with a mental note to be true to the other writer’s work, which is always difficult — don’t impose too much of yourself on it, which is not always easy. I just type everything out — tippy tap tip tip tip.” p. 236.

This is welcome detail as I’m currently a bit short on material related to James Andrew Hall; last summer, the BBC’s Written Archives Centre declined me permission to go through the files they hold on him. 

But I know he and Terrance enjoyed a successful collaboration over several years. Terrance inherited him (and Alexander Baron) on the Sunday classic serials. Hall had been working in television since the mid 1960s, while also publishing novels. But he’d only recently worked on the Sunday classic, dramatising The Mill on the Floss (1978-79) and The History of Mr Polly (1980), both produced by Barry Letts. He must have followed Bagthorpe with his 13-part dramatisation of Great Expectations, which began broadcast on 4 October 1981 and was the first of the classics script edited by Terrance. 

Hall went on to dramatise Dombey & Son (1983), The Invisible Man and The Prisoner of Zenda (both 1984) for Barry and Terrance. Then, when Terrance took over as producer, Hall dramatised Brat Farrar and David Copperfield (both 1986), as well as The Franchise Affair (1988). The latter was Terrance’s final production and the last Sunday classic serial produced by the drama department.

In some sense, he was victim of a coup. Two weeks after The Franchise Affair concluded, the same Sunday evening slot boasted the first episode of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. As Marson says in his book, this was the first Sunday serial made by the children’s department since 1962 (p. 410). I wonder how long the coup lasted. There were more Chronicles of Narnia in 1989 and 1990 but did children’s continue to make Sunday classics beyond that? I need to investigate…

While his regular gig on the Sunday classics came to an end, James Andrew Hall continued to work for the children’s department; Marson says his scripts for the dramatisation of Black Hearts in Battersea (1995-96) by Joan Aiken under-ran (p. 504).

Richard has been very helpful in answering my various questions about aspects of all of this; more to follow in my own book.