adelaidesean | Entries tagged with doctor who

mondyboy's instigation, I recently re-read Terrance Dick's Target novelisation of The Destiny of the Daleks . I enjoyed it, too, and was reminded of how much I loved them as a kid. Given I'm moving more and more in that direction, creatively, why not read more? So I asked myself--leading to my question for you, dear friends, or at least the sad old Who fans* among you:

Which Target novelisation should I read next?

I asked this question on Facebook and was guided in the direction of The Time Warrior. It's tempting, but I remain open to suggestion...

* Like me.

I'm in a metal mood this week. Any suggestions?

If the Daleks were ever to record a song, I reckon it'd sound a lot like this:

I'm juggling two projects at once this weekend, which always hurts my brain. Here are some recent happenings:

Shawn at Suvudu asked if any of my books originally had different titles. There are a few.
Paul Cornell wondered what I was doing for Christmas.
The ABC's Life Matters program wanted to interview me about my essay on Doctor Who in 50 Voices of Disbelief.
Au Contrair, the New Zealand natcon, very kindly asked me to be their 2010 GOH, and I'm excited to be going.
The Dragon Book is out and looks awesome. If you want to know what happens to Ros after The Changeling, here's part one.

If I hear one more Christmas carol, I swear I might have to kill someone. Unless it's this one, of course:

I’m very excited to be holding a copy of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, a collection of essays edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk featuring such luminaries as Michael Shermer, James Randi, A. C. Grayling, Joe Haldeman, Jack Dann, Susan Blackmore, Gregs Benford & Egan, and many, many more. Including me. Woohoo!

I posted a while back about my piece “Doctor Who and the Legacy of Rationalism” (Rassilon/Rationalism--geddit?) in which I dissect several old stories to demonstrate how watching them led me away from the idea of god, rather than towards it as several recent evangelists suggested it ought to go. Researching it gave me a great excuse to go back and read some of the novelisations mouldering away on my top shelf. They remain as fun as ever.

The essay and the book are out now. Paperback is listed at US$29.95, which is a bargain compared to the hardback (US$89.95) and money well spent at any price. It’s published by the very respectable Wiley-Blackwell. The gorgeous cover is below. Tell your godless heathen friends!

Recently I've been giving Doctor Who* credit for my atheism, when it might in fact have been a comic book character I completely forgot about--until spotting this article on that other Doctor entirely, the Man of Bronze.

I read Doc Savage when I was younger, but my memories of him had very nearly submerged forever. Certain philosophies and lessons must've stuck, though. From Wikipedia:

A keynote of Doc's adventures is that no matter how fantastic the monster or menace, there was always a rational scientific explanation at the end. A giant mountain-walking spider was revealed as a blimp, a scorching death came from super-charged electric batteries, a "sea angel" was a mechanical construct towed behind a submarine, Navy ships sunk by a mysterious compelling force were actually sabotaged, and so on.

Awesome! And I love his oath:

Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.

I'd change "of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates" to "of my fellow humans" to avoid a slight nationalistic tone. Still, words we could all live by.

I'd use this as argument that comic books and TV can be good for you, but some might disagree.

* I used to credit Robert Anton Wilson and Frank Zappa with this, but Who definitely came before them.

Voices of Disbelief is (or soon will be) a book edited by Russell Blackford and Scottish bioethicist Udo Schuklenk containing statements and short essays by prominent atheists, humanists, and skeptics explaining why they do not believe in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God or embrace any kind of religious belief.

I'm very excited to be one of them. My piece "Doctor Who and the Legacy of Rationalism" was accepted this week. Thanks to everyone in the community who helped with the research. A great deal of thought that went into it. My opinion of recent Who storylines has been somewhat mollified, as the essay in its final form will show. When it comes out (from Blackwell, probably next year) I'll post a much earlier draft here for anyone interested in comparing the two.

The editors were inspired to create the book by "the aggressive role currently being played by religious organisations and their leaders in attempting to impose their values, beliefs, and specifically religious moralities on others--whether the issues relate to gay rights, medical research, AIDS policy, the availability of abortion, and a whole range of others." If they can succeed in making the views of their contributors available to a large audience, then that can only be a good thing.

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Listening to: Gui Boratto - Beautiful Life

No spoilers, I promise. Just wanted to say that Steven Moffatt managed to fit more ideas, world-building, character development, plot, and genuine scares into half a story than the rest of this season of Doctor Who combined. He has such a skill for teasing iconic images--zombie kids with gas-mask faces, murderous statues, and now shadows--out of clever SFnal ideas, thereby pleasing both sides of my brain while blowing it at the same time. I'm sure those qualities will bleed into the show as a whole, once he's producer. The sooner he takes over, the better.

Imho, of course.

Tom Huddleston ponders this perennial question in the current issue of Time Out magazine, with a quote or two from this old hack. Take a look.

Don't, however, get excited when it says that The Force Unleashed is available in a good bookshop right now. You still have to wait until August.

In the meantime, go out and buy John Harwood's The Séance. It's a corker!

Current Music: Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie - "Mysterious Skin"

"Mr T vs the Cybermen" is the funniest and strangest thing I've seen for days, and much less disturbing than the Dalek/Cyberman slash I came across a couple of weeks ago.

None of this, though, compares to the news that Felicity Kendall will be guest-starring in an episode of Doctor Who involving Agatha Christie. I am swooning as I type. (Did I ever mention that I grew up on Doctor Who, Agatha Christie and The Good Life novels?) That's the best slash I could ever imagine.

One of the highlights of my honeymoon that I forgot to mention earlier was watching the finale of the latest Dr Who season "live" on TV in a friend's living room in Oxford (while, as an added bonus, eating real English hot chips--yum). Even if I thought the episode a bit sub-par (okay, I hated it), that was a very special moment for me. Sad fanboy that I am.

So no less excited am I to hold in my hand a copy of Doctor Who: Short Trips: Destination Prague, the wonderful hard-cover anthology of Doctor Who stories edited by my dear friend Steve Savile*, in which my effort, "Midnight in the Café of the Black Madonna", is the lead story.**

That amounts to a very long-winded way of saying: hurrah!

* And containing stories by other dear friends Stephen Dedman, Rob Hood, and Lee Battersby.

** If you want to know what the Third Doctor got up to between Jo and Sarah, this is the place to go. It also features aliens invented by my pseudo-son Seb. (He read the final result over the weekend, and liked it. Whew.)

Current Music: Maneki Neko - "Auracle"

Doctor Who: Short Trips: Destination Prague will be out any day now--hopefully in time for me to buy one in London in a couple of weeks. I've raved about this book before, but that doesn't make it any less wonderful. You must all order one immediately! :-)

Keith R. A. DeCandido (from whom I nicked this icon) has kindly posted a list of places in the US that will supply the book (plus a full table of contents). Michael's Comics in particular is offering some amazing deals on not just this book but the entire Short Trips series. They're so cheap it might even be an economical source for Australians...

To whit, I'm sure that Galaxy Books, Slow Glass Books, Pulp Fiction, Fantastic Planet or any other local specialty store will be able to obtain you a copy.

* I'm also hoping to be able to watch the finale of season three in my hotel room, live as it goes to air! *swoon*

Current Music: Sleep Research Facility - "Nostromo"

Like all authors, I'm occasionally asked what I'm reading at the moment. It's nice for once to have a definitive answer to that question.

The book I'm currently enjoying is Lance Parkin's A History of the Universe.

Sounds dry? I assure you it's not.

The universe in question is that of Doctor Who, and I am an unashamed fanboy. It's a happy conjunction.

(Thanks,

dalekboy, for dropping by and giving me this most excellent read!)

Current Music: Joe Hisaishi - "Kiki's Delivery Service" OST

Is it just me, or do we need to re-think our naming systems when the largest extrasolar planet found so far ends up sounding like a droid from the Star Wars prequels, or a bad Hamlet pun?

'"This planet is so unusual that at first we thought it was a false alarm - something that appeared to be a planet but wasn't," said CfA astronomer Gaspar Bakos. "But we eliminated every other possibility, so we knew we had a really weird planet."'

I think we should show superplanets a tad more respect, personally. Haven't these astronomers ever heard of Sontarans?

Current Music: Carbon Based Lifeforms - "Hydroponic Garden"

Short Trips: Destination Prague, the Doctor Who anthology with my story in it, is coming out in May. And I am appropriately excited (that is to say: as giddy as a loon).

I've been a fan of Doctor Who ever since I was, well, a lot smaller than I am now. I have wanted to write for the franchise almost as long as I could hold a pen but never tried it before for several reasons. Fear was the main one: that I'd fail to do it justice. There's only one thing worse than going through life without writing for Doctor Who, and that's writing badly for Doctor Who. That I was able to write for my favourite Doctor (Pertwee) in the period of my choice (between Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith) made this opportunity particularly hard to pass up.

"Midnight in the Café of the Black Madonna" is only the second new short story I've written in six years. Will it do as well as "The Seventh Letter", which won the Aurealis Award for Best Short Story earlier this year? Kate Orman and Jon Blum's excellent Doctor Who novella Fallen Gods won the AA for Best SF Novel a few years back, so anything is possible.

Anyway, the collection is going to rock, edited as it is by Steve Savile and containing a veritable esky of Australians (Lee Battersby, Stephen Dedman and Rob Hood) plus a bunch of Big Names from OS too. The cover is beautiful so that's another reason to buy it, if you need more convincing.

Wait. What am I saying? Here's the Amazon link.

It's great to live in a world where Doctor Who is cool again.

Current Music: Global Communication - "76:14"

I loved Terrance Dicks' novelisation of Dr Who and the Mutants as a kid. Then when I finally got around to seeing the actual episodes (featuring the excellent Geoffrey Palmer), I liked them too. So to celebrate (for no reason at all) courtesy of the wonderful Shelley Jackson:

What kind of mutant are you?

I am the kind that has a craniopagus parasite, apparently, making me a distant relation of the Two-Headed Boy of Bengal, born in 1783. Seems fitting for a Gemini.

(Apologies to anyone out there who might actually have a craniopagus parasite. No offence intended.)

Current Music: Gary Numan - "Jagged"

It's been a long time coming. Prior to a couple of weeks ago, the last "substantial" (ie over 1000 words) short story I wrote that wasn't a spin-off from a novel was "The Girl-Thing", which came into being in September of 2000 and was published by Eidolon.Net in 2002. (It was also recommended by the Datlow & Windling Years' Best of 2003, just by the by, and translated into Polish for Nowa Fantastyka.) I didn't stop writing shorts for any particular reason. It was a simple matter of economics. I was working full-time on a stack of novels al due in a very short amount of time, and short stories simply didn't pay the bills. So I forgot about them for a while. Invitations occasionally came my way, but for one reason or another, rarely reflecting the quality of the publications in question, I wasn't able to do anything about them.

Now, six years later, the drought is broken. In the last two weeks, I've written two stories: one, a shortish piece (for me) called "The Seventh Letter", will appear in the summer reading issue of The Bulletin, due to hit the stands on December 13; the other, "Midnight in the Café of the Black Madonna", is for friend and editor Steve Savile, who invited me to contribute to a Doctor Who anthology he's compiling. Neither story would have been written if I hadn't been invited, thereby nudging me back to my old habits. I was very happily reminded of how quickly shorts can be finished, and how satisfying they can be to write. It's been a real buzz.

I also love the fact that the publications in question exist at opposite ends of the publishing spectrum. The Bulletin is the longest standing literary forum for the short story in Australia, going back all the way to 1880. Doctor Who is, well, Doctor Who. The overlap between the readerships would be minimal. But they sit side-by-side in my mind, and the same amount of care went into each story.

Will I write any more? Apart from the kids's books, which, at around 40k, almost count as short stories (ho ho), I do have a piece to write for MonkeyBrain Books' new line of trade paperback novellas. More on that later...

Purely coincidentally, it rained last night in Adelaide for the first time in what feels like ages, so the title of today's post is doubly appropriate.

Current Music: Susumu Yokota

...it's off to Conjure and Supanova I go. I'll just post one piece of news and one review before shutting up shop for a couple of weeks (probably).

The review first, from The Age last weekend:

"If you're going to write decent sci-fi, the first thing you need is convincing technobabble. Sean Williams and Shane Dix - two Adelaide based overlords of the genre - have got it down to a fine art. Geodesica: Descent is the second instalment of a two-part space-opera and it doesn't dally around with recapitulations or synopses of what has gone before. Set centuries from now, humanity has colonised space and evolved an exotic array of higher forms: the Palmers, intergalactic pilots who can interface with tech; and Exarchs, system rulers capable of spreading their consciousness over many bodies. The annihilation of two star systems by a rogue AI sees three rebels entering an alien artefact, dubbed Geodesica, in pursuit of vengeance. The novel is a racy, well-written and ornately imagined genre epic."

Nice. :-) A tight summary too, hence my copying of the review in its entirety.

And the news: I've been commissioned to write a story for Steve Savile's Dr Who anthology, Destination: Prague. This is immensely exciting for me, since the first tie-in novels I ever read were Who. In fact one of my first stabs at writing was set in that universe (thankfully that effort is lost forever). But most of all, I'm pleased that the aliens featuring in the story were invented by my pseudo-son Sebastian, who draws a mean mutant warrior-elephant. Three other Australians were also commissioned for the project, so it's going to have a dangerously Antipodean flavour. I am stoked!

'Bye for now.

Current Location: Adelaide, temporarily.
Current Music: Massive Attack - "100th Window" (the good tracks)

A great review from Greg L Johnson at the SF Site:

"[T]here's plenty in The Resurrected Man for readers of both mysteries and science fiction. Combining the two is an art form whose standards were established in classic works like Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel and Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. Sean Williams' The Resurrected Man is a worthy addition to this little sub-genre, and should appeal to any readers who like having their cutting-edge social speculation wilded up with a bit of serial murder mystery and gore."

I'm really digging all the references to The Caves of Steel. This was one of my all-time favourite novels when I was younger, and I was so glad that the movie I, Robot didn't go anywhere near it. No one's mentioned Dr Who and the Robots of Death yet, though, and I have to remind myself that that's probably for the best. :-)

S