March Books 21) Time and Relative

21) Time and Relative, by Kim Newman

This was the first of the run of Doctor Who novellas published by Telos, set immediately before the events of the first TV series, in London in early 1963. It's written in diary form, with Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, as the narrator. She and her grandfather are exiles from their home planet, and can't quite remember why; as she tries to fit in at school, she comes top in Maths and Science, but loses out in Geography as she can't remember what the various cities and countries are called this century.

As typical with Telos there is an irritatingly self-congratulatory blurb (this time by Justin Richards) detailing just how wonderful this particular novella is. However, in this case it is close to being justified. For one thing, Newman gives Susan her own voice - in the series, she was rather the archetype of the screaming girl companion, to the dismay of Carole Anne Ford who had taken the role believing that she would have alien kung-fu type skills and whose favourite memory is when she turned violent in The Edge of Destruction. Newman's Susan isn't Buffy - apart from lacking physical fighting skills, she is less lucky in her choice of friends - but she is her own person, plaing not just at being grownup like her friends but also at being human - and it all makes sense.

Newman's other success is that his First Doctor comes closer than any other written version I have seen to capturing the essence of Hartnell's performance. This is helped by the first-person narrative from Susan's point of view: her grandfather is familiar but not central for most of the story. He catches the alienness of the Doctor's motivation and manner very well.

The actual story hardly matters in all of this, but the plot of a monster based on Cold, awakened by drilling experiments and taking over the earth starting with London, is true to many a Who story and also to the horror tradition which Newman is rooted in, so he does it pretty confidently. There are of course pleasing nods to continuity: Ian and Barbara are glimpsed on a date at the cinema, there is a hint that Susan's own people may be sending a man with a beard after her and her grandfather, and more subtly her friends at school are John and Gillian (probably most Telos readers are sufficiently up in obscure Who lore to get that particular in-joke).

Anyway, based on this, one would be encouraged to get the rest of the series of Telos novellas. Unfortunately, I have read two of the others and they don't come up to the same mark (one of them is definitely the worst Who fiction I have read in hard copy). Still, it was a good start.
doctor who
9) Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who, by James Chapman
10) Doctor Who, by Kim Newman

Two books which both claim to go beyond the usual cataloguing of stories and look at the cultural and literary context of Doctor Who. Both take us up to the end of 2005 (Chapman includes "The Christmas Invasion", Newman does not) but start very vigorously from the very beginning in 1963. Both authors declare early on that they are fans and tell us which is the first story they remember watching ("The Dalek Invasion of Earth" for Newman, "The Time Warrior" for Chapman who must obviously therefore be nearer my age).

Newman's book is more gossipy and opinionated (ianmcdonald, for instance, gets an entire footnote to himself, in a comment about a completely different programme) and has lots and lots of illustrations, no doubt contributing to the £12.99 price tag for a paperback with lots of white space on its 118 pages. Newman holds that the series entered terminal decline with the arrival of K9 and so devotes much more time to the first half of the original run. He does succeed rather better than Chapman in linking what was going on in Doctor Who to what else was going on in televised sf at the time, but basically this is a rather thin effort.

Chapman's book is the same price, for 200 dense pages of text and numerous appendices and other apparatus. I thought it was much the better of the two. He goes through each Doctor and each season in chronological order, with reference to the BBC's archives of internal correspondence (where they are available), pointing out the show's connections with other TV drama and with the written sf of the day. He has evoked in me more enthusiasm for the middle Pertwee seasons than I thought possible (though I must finish watching "Inferno" first), and also makes me want to try both "The Celestial Toymaker" and "The Mind Robber".

However I would have liked more. In the front matter, Chapman asks, "The Doctor may have conquered Daleks, Cybermen and Ice Warriors, but would he survive an encounter with Foucault, Derrida or Deleuze?" We don't really find out the answer to that very interesting question. I was also disappointed that there is no decent review of the existing literature on Doctor Who; there's a bibliography, but this is just a listing with no guidance as to what is worth reading (Chapman makes more effort to describe the much more ephemeral websites). Perhaps there is nothing else at all, other than Tulloch and Alvarado's The Unfolding Text? But I find that difficult to believe. Also there were some irritating proofing errors - "reign" instead of "rein" a couple of times, references to "Ursula Le Guinn" and the surprising news that Alan Moore wrote The Dark Night Returns.

Anyway, I'l look out for more along these lines; recommendations very welcome.

Jules Verne's Three Laws of Automata

A homunculus, automaton or other artificial being:
  1. shall not serve a human red wine with fish,
  2. must always alert a human to shortfallings in the quality of his cuisine with a mechanical cry of 'sacré bleu', and
  3. shall not (through inaction) allow a human to be seen in public with mismatching gaiters and cravat.
Full text here (hat-tip pnh)

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