The Not Yet by Moira Crone, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The Not Yet by Moira Crone (UNO Press, pb, 272pp). Malcolm de Lazarus is the Not-Yet of this book’s title, an orphan who spent his childhood performing in gruelling Sims to entertain the Heirs, a transhuman ruling class with fading memories of what it was like to really live. His earnings went into his Trust, and when he reaches the Boundarytime those savings should pay for his own longevity treatments. He’ll become one of them, shrunken and shrivelled within a spectacular skin-suit and headpiece – and he can’t wait. In 2121 we see him struggle to discover why his Trust is in escrow; whether a beloved mentor has betrayed him. Chapters from 2117 and subsequent years see the Sims business in ruins and the orphans in search of alternative work, bringing Malcolm into contact with Dr Susan Greenmore and her efforts to understand the chronic fogginess that afflicts the oldest of the Heirs. From earlier than that we see episodes from his childhood in the orphanage, where the children are taught to endure and shrug off the worst that can happen: it’s all Prologue.

This is I think Moira Crone’s first science fiction – previous literary fiction such as What Gets Into Us having examined the history of the South since the 1950s – but there’s no sense of dabbling: rather, of a writer who has identified science fiction as an effective method of addressing her concerns. Published by the University of New Orleans Press, it imagines a time when that region is mostly beneath the waves, and though some sections saw publication long before Hurricane Katrina, it feels like a reflection upon that disaster, imagining an America where the poor must paddle not just for a week or two, but for the rest of their lives. Its cover, at first glance an underwhelming photograph of a river and trees, gains resonance as the book proceeds, a reminder that this is not one of Vance’s far-off, extravagant worlds: it’s ours with a few nudges in the wrong direction.

Reflecting contemporary concerns about healthcare provision in the United States, the lives of those ordinary humans (Nats) will be short. All research into the diseases that affect them has been abandoned, partly to encourage them to save up and join the Heirs, but also because there’s no profit in it since the economy collapsed. In Malcolm’s horrid fascination with the Heirs, and disgust at such ordinary human processes as eating solid food, we see the way we idolise the ersatz, photoshopped faces on magazine covers and movie posters: he hates himself for his fascination with fleshy, human, real Tamara. It’s a novel that shows, in its ultimate underground anti-Sim, the Verite, where nothing is simulated at all, the degradation that ordinary men and women will endure to survive, to provide for their children – in this case, to fund an enclave’s transfer to new land before it’s too late – and while grieving for that degradation celebrates the pride of those who do not give up despite the most awful pressures.

Although The Not Yet delivers a stern warning about the present, and though it is published by a university press and written by a professor, it is by no means academic, dry or lecturing. From the first we share Malcolm’s febrile desperation to get his money back, even if we hope he won’t use it to turn himself into a monster. Like Taylor among the apes, he has a series of exciting adventures and uncovers the great secret of his world – the circumstances and consequences of the Reveal, when the Heirs made themselves public – much of which sounds horribly plausible; in many ways the novel resembles a story of alien occupation, the aliens our self-proclaimed heirs. The Not Yet should appeal to any reader with an appreciation for the kind of novels Silverberg wrote in the late sixties and early seventies: short, tense, discomfiting and serious-minded. An intelligent and thought-provoking piece of work.

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Interzone #240, back in 2012.

Ten artists by whom I own more albums than is really justified by how often I listen to them

Ten artists by whom I own more albums than is really justified by how often I listen to them:

1. The Smashing Pumpkins
2. Mansun
3. Ride
4. Ryan Adams
5. Spiritualized
6. Muse
7. Nine Inch Nails
8. Moby
9. The Smiths
10. Toto

How about you?

Wednesday is sometimes list day on this blog of ours. This is list #12.

The Last Revelation of Gla’aki by Ramsey Campbell, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Leonard Fairman is an archivist at Brichester University, whose unwise curiosity regarding a series of occult volumes leads to his involvement in the events described by Ramsey Campbell in The Last Revelation of Gla’aki (PS Publishing, hb, 137pp; pdf ARC supplied by publisher). He is invited by Frank Lunt to Gulshaw, a run-down seaside town, to collect the series, which includes such titles as Of Humanity as Chrysalis, Of the World as Lair, On the Purposes of Night, and Of the Uses of the Dead. But Lunt has just one volume, and directs Fairman to the possessor of the next, and so it goes. Reading each of the books brings on strange thoughts and visions, and Fairman becomes desperate to leave this strange, damp, sticky little town. But everyone seems awfully pleased to have him there, and as they say: “there is so much more to see”. Or is it that there’s so much more to sea?

Fans of Lovecraft will regard it as a treat to have a writer of Campbell’s stature producing a short novel in this vein, and it provides many eerie images and scenes; anyone who has seen a British beach studded with jellyfish can imagine the kind of horrors described here. The idea of a seedy seaside town that drops its human facade in the off-season is creepily believable. (“He could have thought the town was not so much resting from its summer labours as reverting to its ordinary state.”) As Fairman finds himself stuck there for an extra day, and another day, and another, while his wife gets annoyed and his boss gets on his back, it’s hard not to empathise – though he’s given so many good reasons to run for his life that you can’t help wondering why he doesn’t.

And that was the problem for me, that the too-frequent hints about what’s going on were too knowing, too nudge-nudge wink-wink, to be truly frightening: for example hands are “glistening” and “soft and moist”, handshakes are “damp and pliable”, palms are “clammy” and “yielded so much”. The innuendo wears a bit thin, and even begins to feel like fan service. Fairman works so hard to ignore or rationalise everything he sees (“Of course the people were wearing plastic beach shoes, which made their feet look translucent and swollen”) that the reader’s eyes begin to roll. Loving pastiche comes close to tipping into presumably unintentional parody.

More positively, the book is so perfectly suited to cinematic adaptation that one wouldn’t be surprised to learn it began life as a film treatment. The role of Fairman would be ideal for Daniel Radcliffe or Dominic West, and a version of this produced to the same standard as The Woman in Black or The Awakening might give us, at last, a definitive mythos film. If this had been the first Lovecraftian story I’d ever read, I would have adored it – as I did Brian Lumley’s The Burrowers Beneath, back in my schooldays. As it is, I enjoyed it, but I’d hoped to enjoy it much more. Still, I’ve often found that horror stories continue to grow in my estimation long after I’ve read them, as the scariest parts fester, and that might well be the case here. The climactic scene in the Church of the First Word is magnificent, and the book is worth reading for that sequence alone.

A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

A Cold Season (Jo Fletcher Books, pb, 342pp), by Alison Littlewood, is the story of Cass and her son Ben, and what happens when they move to Darnshaw, the town where she grew up. She’s a young widow looking to reboot her life, he’s an angry little boy who misses his dad, lost to the war in Afghanistan. But when they arrive at their new home, theirs is the only apartment in Foxdene Mill that’s been finished and let, even though newspapers are piling up at the flat next door. It’s a bad start to a new life that only gets worse for Cass: bit by bit she loses the means of travel, her connection to the outside world, her ability to put food on the table, her relationship with her employer, and, worst of all, her connection to her son. All of these things have perfectly reasonable, non-supernatural explanations – snow has blocked the roads and downed the lines – but as friendly old Bert tells her, “It allus comes in like this, when he wants it.”

However terrifying things get, Cass has a tendency to rush back to bed (this is to some extent explained later in the story), but then it isn’t really the big, supernatural scares that are tearing her up – she could cope with those – it’s the awkwardnesses and embarrassments of quick conversations at the school gates; with overbearing mums she has no choice but to trust, or with Mr Remick, the nice teacher who seems to like her. It’s wondering whether a message has been passed on to her client; her son not wanting to talk to her, or swearing when he does; and knowing she’s been unfair to Bert and his lovable dog Captain. It’s an accumulation of small emotional wounds that leave her oblivious to the sword dangling over her head.

Over the last few years Alison Littlewood has provided a series of interesting stories to magazines like Black Static, Dark Horizons and my own Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (so do bear in mind my possible bias). Each story I’ve read has been so different from the others that I had little idea what to expect from her first novel in terms of themes or even genre, though I knew to look forward to it. The book didn’t let me down; it’s a strong debut novel with potentially wide appeal, and the publisher has I think been wise in marketing to the mainstream. My mum, for example, would enjoy it at least as much as I did; probably more, since she’s had to deal with her own pair of Bens. Any parent will empathise with Cass’s struggle to understand the moods of her son, and any freelancer will relate to the very modern horror of losing their internet connection, but what I think this book does best is convey the horror that Cass feels at not being in control of her environment, her social encounters and even, ultimately, her actions.

Though the supernatural elements of the plot might not break much new ground, seeing how they affect this particular character in her particular circumstances does much to make them fresh. It’s a fairly quick read, consisting of thirty-eight short chapters, the text generously spaced, with all events seen from Cass’s perspective. The absence of the possessive “s” after Cass’s name throughout seemed a little old-fashioned to me (as did a web developer who uses floppy disks and hasn’t heard of Dropbox), but it’s a novel that is otherwise unfussy and clear. Not simplistic – it sent me to the dictionary a few times – but simply direct. Two images from the book soon turned up in my nightmares. The first would be a spoiler, but you’ll know it when you see it, out at the witch stones. The other is that one finished apartment in that part-renovated mill, its loneliness and isolation a physical symbol of what is happening to Cass.

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Black Static #27, back in 2012.

Ten tips for dealing with pdf proofs

Ten tips for dealing with pdf proofs:

1. PDF proofs are for annotating, NOT editing.
2. Adobe Reader XI (free) has a good set of annotation tools.
3. Sticky notes are best saved for general notes about a page or section.
4. The Text Correction Markup tool is the best way of showing text changes.
5. The highlight text tool is the best way of commenting on specific text and asking questions (e.g. Is this font too small?) or giving instructions. Also good for simple changes.
6. The underline tool can be used to ask for italics.
7. Squiggly underline can be used to ask for bold.
8. Show don’t tell, so far as possible – e.g. if something needs deleting, a swipe with the Strikethrough tool shows it more clearly than a highlight with instructions that say what needs deleting.
9. Repeating yourself is really, really helpful – if the same thing needs doing in ten different places, it’s really worth copying and pasting the same instruction into each comment rather than referring back to earlier comments.
10. Users with iPads should consider getting Goodreader. It’s cheap and fantastic.

Any other tips? In particular, has anyone found anything as good as Goodreader for Android devices?

Wednesday is list day. This is list #11.

Journey into Space: The World in Peril by Charles Chilton, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Journey into Space: The World in Peril (BBC Audio, digital audiobook, 10 hours; Audible purchase), written by Charles Chilton, is the third story in the saga of Jet Morgan and his crew, following on from Operation Luna and The Red Planet, both of which I adored. The CD release of this conclusion passed me by, so it was an utter delight to discover it on Audible.

The twenty-episode story begins with Jet (captain), Mitch (the engineer), Lemmy (the radio operator) and Doc (have a guess) arriving back on Earth after their disastrous Martian mission, with news of a possible Martian invasion. Put into seclusion to keep Martian agents from knowing they survived, and to prevent a panic, the boys kick their heels until a new mission comes their way: to go back to Mars. A fine reward!

Earth wants them to gather more information about the invasion, and, ideally, capture a Martian or one of the conditioned humans who serve them. The mission becomes urgent when strange planetoids appear in Earth’s orbit, and so after a brief sojourn on Luna while the ships are prepared it’s back to Mars for our heroes.

This is that rarest of treasures, the third in a trilogy that lives up to parts one and two. One of the true joys of Journey into Space is that it’s about characters who think very carefully. They chew everything over, consider every aspect and consequence of their decisions, argue intelligently with each other and their enemies, and are put into situations where careful thought is absolutely required and there’s plenty of time to do it. I envy the people who got to listen to this series when it first came out, though waiting a week between episodes must have been quite trying: every episode brings an exciting revelation, a brilliant set-piece or a deadly cliffhanger.

One particular tour de force is the episode in which, after an attack on Mars, Lemmy wakes up in absolute darkness, and must step by step work out where he is, why the ceiling is so low, why his feet can’t find any solid ground, if the rest of the crew are there too – and who the hell is that walking around the room with ice cold skin!

It’s hard to imagine I could have enjoyed this series more, but it does have one failing: the lack of female characters. That, the class relationships and the assumption that listeners will pay attention are the only things that date it. The journey into space is a very long one, but it’s highly rewarding, with an unexpected, perfect conclusion. Good work, Jet boy! (As Lemmy might say.)

Jane Carver of Waar by Nathan Long, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

The heroine of Jane Carver of Waar by Nathan Long (Night Shade Books, pb, 312pp) begins her story not on the far-off Barsoomian world of the title, but here on earth, getting groped by an asshole in a Californian car park. She’s a tall, strong biker chick who trained in the Airborne Rangers, and so he’s soon dead, she’s soon on the run, and like John Carter before her she ends up in a cave whose contents transport her to another world. She was “just too fucking big for this world”, and that goes double on Waar, where she stands out like the redhead burning in the sun that she is. Despite the friends she wins with her bravery, kindness and sensitive bedroom advice, her loneliness drives her desire to get home. To do that she’ll have to help gorgeous, delicate Sai-Far, son of Shen-Far, Dhanan of Sensa.

His proud betrothed, the Aldhanshai Wen-Jhai, has been spirited away by Kedac-Zir, Kir-Dhanan of all Ora. Getting her back is not merely a matter of alerting the authorities, or even snatching her in secret: Sai-Far is honour-bound to challenge her abductor to a duel, and Wen-Jhai will be the first to despise him should he fail to do so. An early encounter with the Kir-Dhanan leaves Jane Carver with her own reasons to see him dead. That leaves one question to pursue Jane and Sai-Far through all their subsequent adventures, through airborne pirates, southern slavery and rooftop escapes: will she let Sai-Far have his shot at Kedac-Zir, and thus at honour and happiness, or will she kill the Kir-Dhanan herself for what he did to her? It’s all complicated by the fact that fighting Kedac-Zir will almost certainly mean the death – even if it’s an honourable death – of Sai-Far, and she’s becoming really fond of him, even if he isn’t her usual type.

Jane Carver is an interesting heroine, but readers who don’t find her appealing might not get far with the book since it’s all in the first person, supposedly transcribed – fruity language and all – by Nathan Long from fifteen tapes she recorded upon her return to our planet. As the book went on, I grew to like her very much. Her sense of honour, as revealed through her actions; her sensitivity to knowing she’s not on the romantic horizon of the man she’s protecting; her anger at the unfair social conditions on Waar; and her willingness to challenge the ideas of her friends: all round out the stereotypical biker we think we meet in the early pages. She’s not the only vivid character in the book. I became as fond as Jane was of pathetic Sai-Far, and even more so of his best friend and fellow princeling Lhan, whose shift from despondency to enthusiasm upon Sai-Far’s resolution to throw away his life was a highlight of the novel, as well as the perfect encapsulation of the alien society in which Jane has found herself.

At a glance this novel looks very much like a straightforward blend of Red Sonja and A Princess of Mars – a tall redhead motivated by a sexual assault fights her way across a far-off world where slightly odd-looking humans live alongside four-armed non-humanoids – and it would be daft to argue against that impression. From the title and the framing device onward this is a full-blooded homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs. But that’s not all there is to it, and readers will I think be surprised by the depth of characterisation, the interplay of societal mores, and how much you hope to hear Jane’s voice again once the novel is over. Plenty of scope for further adventures remains, and so one does hope that she found her way back to Waar, and that another box of tapes will find their way to Nathan Long. It would certainly be nice to read a novel where this big, strong, admirable woman didn’t get groped quite so much.

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Interzone #240, back in 2012.

Fifteen albums I bought without hearing a single song by that artist, and whether I like those albums now

Fifteen albums I bought without hearing a single song by that artist, and whether I like those albums now:

1. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, M83 (yes)
2. Digital Dump, The Jackofficers (no)
3. Volume 2, Echoboy (no)
4. Surfing on Sine Waves, Polygon Window (yes)
5. Compilations 1995-2002, Hood (not really)
6. This Is the Day, This Is the Hour, This Is This! Pop Will Eat Itself (yes)
7. Possessed, The Balanescu Quartet (yes)
8. Alpha Centauri, Tangerine Dream (yes)
9. Unreleased? Fire! with Jim O’Rourke (yes)
10. 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields (yes)
11. Decade, Neil Young (yes)
12. Avant Hard, Add N to (X) (yes)
13. Endtroducing, DJ Shadow (yes)
14. You Make Me Real, Brandt Brauer Brick (yes)
15. The Noise Made By People, Broadcast (yes)

Have you bought any albums like that, just on the basis of good reviews, a nice album cover or an interview in the newspaper?

Wednesday is usually list day. This is list #10.

Hatchet Job by Mark Kermode, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In Hatchet Job (Picador, digital audiobook, 7 hrs 53 mins; Audible purchase) Mark Kermode, perhaps the UK’s most prominent film critic and certainly one of its most respected, covers all the big issues involved in writing reviews: being honest and only saying things you actually believe, trying to get the facts right, writing well, being entertaining, and, sometimes, changing your mind. He talks about the review as an art form in itself, and speaks scathingly of the idea that the only critics of any worth are those hoping to become film-makers. Kevin Smith, who espoused that view and, for example, cancelled the screenings of Red State for UK critics at the last minute, comes in for a great deal of criticism, as does Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, for his habit of publishing any old nonsense that his readers might find interesting, whatever its source, and his practice of publishing anonymous reviews of unfinished films.

A big concern for Kermode is what gives a review weight. Not just the words, but the person, publication and reputations standing behind them. He’s hardly the kind of fuddy-duddy who says all online writing is a worthless, mindless babble – as he explains, everyone writes online now, and he has lots of kind things to say about online sites who have what he believes is a credible ethos, such as Film Threat. But he argues persuasively that a paid, named reviewer puts their reputation and livelihood on the line with every review, as does the publication that chooses to publish it, giving it a credibility that cannot be matched by an anonymous piece on Amazon.

A key phrase in the book is: “Opinions are ephemeral, but professional conduct is sacrosanct.” Kermode tells a story about a falling-out with a distributor, thinking it was because he slated their film, only to realise it was because he’d implied that they hadn’t even tried to market it. It would be depressing to hear Kermode talk about Richard Bacon and Johnny Vaughan’s allegedly unethical approach to film reviewing if he didn’t tell the stories in such a funny way. Bacon didn’t watch the films he reviewed. That’s bad enough. But in fact, he wasn’t writing the reviews either, and hadn’t even read them!

Sock-puppeteers in the book world like Stephen Leather and R.J. Ellory also attract his withering gaze, though not all bad behaviour comes in for such criticism: he seems overly forgiving of hero Ken Russell’s bashing Alexander Walker over the head with a copy of his own review (or at least a rolled-up copy of the newspaper containing it). I think he takes an aggressive response to reviews almost as par for the course, having experienced similar things himself. As he explains: “many of the people who you most admire don’t see much point in what you’re doing”. If Ken Russell had attacked Walker’s integrity – as Kermode once did himself, something he now regrets – that would have been a different matter.

Kermode reads the audiobook himself, which of course enhances it immeasurably, making it a first-rate bonus feature to the Kermode and Mayo film show, though at first it takes some getting used to: he’s speaking so slowly and carefully! There are some points at which, endearingly, and I think probably self-consciously (their careers do after all have certain parallels, except that Kermode hasn’t cocked up his opportunities at the BBC), Kermode strays into Alan Partridge territory (don’t we all?). A mention of the “information superhighway”. “You’ve remembered it wrong. You’ve remembered it wrong. You’ve remembered it wrong. But I hadn’t.” Chapter 6’s morning routine: “Monday morning. Alarm. Up. Wash. Let the dog out. Dog doesn’t want to go out. Insist dog goes out. Dog not going out. Dog goes and lies on the sofa.”

Those were some of my favourite moments, and the audiobook reminded me of Alan in another way, in that like I, Partridge, once I began listening to Hatchet Job I didn’t stop, going through the whole thing in a couple of days. It’s funny, moving and angry, all in the right places at the right time. Kermode knows what goes where, and why. It is recommended to every novice reviewer, and even old hands may find it useful. The book gets a bit soppy towards the end, as Kermode relates first the joy of seeing a childhood favourite again (Jeremy) and then his surrender to A.I. Artificial Intelligence (a film I watched with my fist in my mouth to stop myself bawling), followed by his excruciatingly awkward apology to Steven Spielberg for having got it wrong. So it’s a relief at the end to hear him say, partly in response to news of a new Michael Bay Transformers film, “Where the hell did I leave that hatchet?”

The Empathy Effect by Bob Lock, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In The Empathy Effect (Screaming Dreams, pb, 144pp), Bob Lock introduces Cooper Jones. Named for his father’s profession, he’s a slightly psychic traffic warden. He can sense feelings, which comes in handy on the mean streets of Swansea: it may not stop him getting punched in the stomach, but on a good day it’ll give him time to clench. In this short comic novel he teams up with Albrecht von Wallenstein the Fourteenth (Alby for short), a testicular retriever who seems to share his special gift, to investigate the case of a missing girl.

Cooper’s not so much hardboiled as sunny side up. Throughout his narrative, cheesy dad jokes are the order of the day – for example, “she’s a redhead. No hair… just a red head” – rather than the usual bitter sardonicism of the private eye, try as he might to echo their style. Like his fictional peers, he does have a drinking problem and his relationship with the police is strained at best, here exacerbated by his lowly status as a traffic warden. He even incurs the requisite series of beatings during the investigation, but he takes all of this in surprisingly good heart. Even in victory, he literally holds out a hand to the worst of villains.

Although Cooper says early on that he regards his abilities as “a bloody curse”, the tortured image on the front cover doesn’t quite fit the content, which tends more to the charming and cosy. It becomes clear that Cooper’s biggest regret is not that he has this power, but that he didn’t start using it for good a bit sooner. The back cover, on the other hand, a photograph by the author of what looks like the steepest street in Britain, points up one of the novel’s strengths: its use of Swansea’s geography, in sequences like that in which Cooper and pursuing police officers struggle to stay upright while hurtling down such a street.

The novel begins excitingly in the present tense, throwing us into the ocean with Cooper, watching him drown while clingwrapped to a support leg of Mumbles Pier, before flashing back three days to the past tense. But it then drifts back to the present tense from time to time, and doesn’t return to the present tense once we catch up with the drowning sequence. In The Revenge of the Rose Moorcock uses bursts of present tense brilliantly to engage readers in the action; here it feels more like occasional inadvertence than a stylistic choice.

Similarly, though most of the book is in the first person, occasional shifts to the omniscient third – to keep an eye on the cartoonish villains – jar, as does the sexual aspect of one kidnapper’s motivation, which seems a little inappropriate for such light treatment. The book isn’t at its best when dealing with sex: it very nearly lost this reader with Cooper’s ungallant observation that a lady’s “collar and cuffs matched”. But those are all small problems with what’s generally a pleasant Sunday night drama of a book.

The Empathy Effect is unlikely to set your world alight, unless you’re an ITV executive looking for something to replace Kingdom – in which case, tiger, you just hit the jackpot. There’s clear potential in the character, but he needs a couple of things: a publisher who specialises in mysteries and thrillers and can pitch it at the right audience, and at least a hundred more pages to stretch his legs. The idea of a psychic traffic warden fighting crime with his canine frenemy is unusual and amusing, but the mysteries here weren’t quite substantial enough to do it justice.

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Black Static #20, back in 2011.

Avoiding author meltdowns: twelve tips for reviewers

In my experience, the vast majority of authors are absolutely lovely, but a handful are terrors and everyone has their bad days and tender spots. Bear in mind that these are tips for avoiding author meltdowns, not necessarily rules for reviewing in general:

1. First, put out of your head the idea that you can avoid all author meltdowns. If you write honest reviews of all the books you read, they’re inevitable. All you can do is avoid some of them!

2. You might avoid reviewing a book if you’ll be the only one reviewing it, or if it’s likely to be the only review the author is going to get for a while. The longer they have to stew on it, the more likely they are to kick up a fuss.

3. So far as possible, criticise the book not the author. You’ve no idea what might have happened to the text between author and print. At a convention I once heard an editor say he had rewritten a passage to change the sexuality of a character so that they could seduce a guard and escape from a jail cell. It went to press without the author seeing it. In that case it might well be appropriate to say the book didn’t take its treatment of the character’s sexuality very seriously, but the author might justly feel aggrieved if accused of homophobia. Another book I saw went to press with the final page of one chapter turning up between other chapters much later into the book. A proofreader, noticing this, had added ellipses at the end of the chapter’s penultimate page and at the beginning of the orphan page. Again, fine to criticise the book for what would have seemed very odd to readers, but not the author’s fault (except in so far as they should have checked their proofs more a bit more carefully!). (The corollary of this is that authors must remember that reviewers are considering the entire product, not just the writer’s contribution. There’s nothing unfair about reviews that mention bad cover art, Kindle formatting, proofreading or other elements of the book that are not always within the author’s control.)

4. Try to make your review watertight and avoid woolliness. If there’s something you can’t back up, don’t include it in the review. When reviewing Alison Littlewood’s very good debut A Cold Season, I developed a wonderful theory about horror being about the loss of agency and control over your environment, and that book being the epitome of that, and somehow (I don’t remember how) Peggle was involved! It read well, but on the point of sending it to the reviews editor I suddenly thought of half a dozen counter-examples to my theory and went back to square one. Stick to what you can say with confidence, and if you’re not confident about something say as much.

5. You might want to avoid speculating about the author’s intentions or saying they should have written a different book. It can really bug them: we don’t know what they were thinking or aiming for and if you’ve got it wrong it leaves you wide open to criticism.

6. You might want to watch out for authors who make a habit of nitpicking reviews, and avoid reviewing them. Keep a list. Only review them if you’re feeling robust!

7. Where possible don’t email the review directly to the author or editor of the book. It’s when they try to thank you for it through gritted teeth that the worst things are often said.

8. Another way of avoiding trouble is, when someone thanks you for the review, to just say Thanks, or Hey, thanks, or No worries, rather than getting into a discussion. Everything you said in your review may have been carefully thought out and checked against the book, but if you let slip in an email that you thought Sandy had red hair and Ginger had blonde hair it will fuel their rage!

9. You might refuse to write negative reviews. It’s certainly an option, though not one likely to win you the respect of other reviewers. How much credit can anyone give your praise if you praise absolutely everything? If you’ve made a conscious decision to only say positive things about books, you’re not writing reviews, you’re writing appreciations. It will, however, mostly avoid author meltdowns, though even then there will be people who get angry about being praised for the wrong thing!

10. You might want to avoid writing reviews altogether. It’s inevitable that you’ll have an author lose it with you at some point, and the more reviews you write the more likely it’s going to happen.

11. You might want to keep your reviews on your own territory. Writers are I think more likely to go berserk over reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, partly because of the bigger readership, but perhaps also because there may be the thought at the back of their minds that if enough people complain, they could have the review taken down.

12. You might want to avoid Facebook. It won’t do anything to reduce meltdowns, but it makes it more likely that you’ll be happily oblivious to them!

Wednesday is sometimes list day on our blog. This is list #9.

Doctor Who: The Light at the End, by Nicholas Briggs, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Doctor Who: The Light at the End, by Nicholas Briggs (Big Finish, digital audio, 2 hrs; purchased from publisher) gives us the impossible dream: a team-up of Doctors four (Tom Baker), five (Peter Davison), six (Colin Baker), seven (Sylvester McCoy) and eight (Paul McGann) in their prime, accompanied respectively by companions Leela (Louise Jameson), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Peri (Nicola Bryant), Ace (Sophie Aldred) and Charley (India Fisher). That’s not to mention cameos from Sara Kingdom, the first three Doctors (somehow!), Jamie, Zoe, Tegan, Turlough and I’m sure many others that I missed on a first listen. With all those people involved, does the story matter? You get to hear the fourth Doctor talking to the eighth Doctor! Who cares what they’re talking about?

Well, just in case you do: five of the Doctors (or their companions) notice flashing red lights on their consoles. The problem is not just the flashing, but that the lights have never been there before: they seem to have been created and set off by the Tardis passing through a specific location on November 23rd, 1963. So off the Doctors go to investigate. It’s a bit like a Justice League of America story from the sixties, as four and eight team up, and six and seven, while five has to fend for himself, before they all gather together for the big finale. Since he’s on the cover, it’s no spoiler to say that the Master is involved.

He’s played with a nice subtlety by Geoffrey Beevers, who played the decayed Master in “The Keeper of Traken” (that version having been first portrayed by Peter Pratt in “The Deadly Assassin”). I think it used to be generally assumed that the decayed Master was the Roger Delgado incarnation at the end of his life, but here he seems in slightly better condition – he’s described by an unfortunate human who encounters him as looking like he’s been “injured, burnt” – and on the cover he looks recognisably like Geoffrey Beevers, which would seem to establish him as an entirely separate incarnation from Delgado (if he hadn’t been already).

The story does show the difficulty of a story involving so many of the Doctors and their companions, in that there isn’t much time for anything else. I came away from it with a renewed appreciation of the television story “The Five Doctors”, always one of my favourites. Terrance Dicks did a brilliant job there of giving all four Doctors a moment to shine, and gave each of them memorable, quotable dialogue. In The Light at the End, Nicholas Briggs has five fully active Doctors, plus quite big cameos from three more, and so even two hours doesn’t allow time for many other speaking roles. Like Dicks with his walks to the tower, Briggs keeps things quite simple, focusing on one really sticky problem, allowing his Doctors time to talk around it.

It’s interesting that here, as in many recent television stories, the biggest danger is not that the Doctor might die, but that he might never have existed: as he approaches his regeneration limit, his past becomes more important than his future. As in previous anniversary stories, we once again see the later Doctors defer to the first – odd when the eighth Doctor is about four times older! Perhaps it’s because he’s the only one with direct memories of the Time Lord academy, while all the rest have had their youthful memories jumbled by multiple regenerations.

The absence of the tenth Doctor is a shame, given that David Tennant was working on Big Finish audios long before he took the Tardis keys, but better a contract that lets Big Finish only make stories with the classic Doctors than no contract to make new stories at all. And it’s right that Big Finish’s celebration of the programme’s fiftieth anniversary should celebrate the Doctors and companions with whom they’ve had so many terrific adventures. Caroline Johns, Mary Tamm, Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen are of course missed even more, but well done Big Finish for giving us so many new stories with them while it was still possible.

This is everything I thought I wanted from the television anniversary episode, but don’t realistically expect to get. As many Doctors as possible, on one adventure, interacting with each other: I won’t deny that happy tears were emitted! It gave me that crossover rush without ever becoming a panto. Even if it’s with a mere two or three Doctors, I’m certain Steven Moffat will give us something special in his anniversary special, and this story does a marvellous job of clearing the decks in preparation, leaving the listener ready for whatever November 23rd, 2013 has in store, fannish cravings sated. And who knows, maybe at some point there will be a flashing red light on the Doctors’ consoles in “The Day of the Doctor”. An absolute must-buy for any Doctor Who fan.

Theme Planet by Andy Remic, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Theme Planet by Andy Remic (Solaris, pb, 384pp). Dexter Colls needs a holiday. Investigating some shady business going down in the rough side of town, he was lucky to avoid being blown up, and it’s starting to get to him. Where else would a family man take his adoring wife and more or less adoring kids but Theme Planet: it’s better than drugs, better than sex, and “if you haven’t been sick, you soon will be!” Rollercoasters stand five kilometres high and plunge an equal distance beneath the waves. A reluctant Dex slowly unwinds, encouraged by his family’s enthusiasm, and it’s shaping to be the holiday of a lifetime – until he wakes to find Katrina, Molly and Toffee missing from the hotel. Thus begins an orgy of mindless violence that won’t stop for wine, cheese and Spunky Spunk Chocolate until he gets them back.

Dexter’s not the only one rampaging on Theme Planet: android Amba Miskalov’s mission is to eliminate six key PR people. Given the ease with which she kills a squad of machine gunners in the opening pages, you wouldn’t expect any mission to give her too much trouble, but she has two problems to contend with: her own growing resentment at the way she’s being employed and treated, and a mysterious female voice inside her head. Between them Amba and Dex will rack up an impressive body count, but it’s a conversation between them, not a fight, that will decide the future of every man, woman, child, alien, android and SIM on the planet.

Though dedicated to Philip K. Dick, this novel’s approach to the questions of identity raised in novels such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? essentially amounts to, “Oh, I’m an android. I must be evil. What to do?” This is Dick through the eyes of Paul Verhoeven, not Ridley Scott, the novel a close relation to Total Recall. I love the Schwarzenegger films of that period, and I wish there were more of them, but what thrills over two hours can tire over ten. The pace in this novel never lets up, and some readers may find themselves slowing to a jog, waving for it to go on without them.

On the whole it’s much better than the last Remic I read. The Fanthorpisms and non sequiturs that marred Vampire Warlords (or provided its principle pleasures, perhaps) are generally absent, though one rhapsodic passage would make Lionel proud: a “mammoth ball of blue, [...] a caring Mother, the Earth, Mother Earth, Home of Mankind and Cradle of Humanity”. The novel begins a new series, the Anarchy, and in comparison to the NaNoWriMo-esque Vampire Warlords feels like a decent amount of effort has gone into it. That’s not to say it will win awards for its prose. The word “vast”, for example, is used so frequently – about sixty times – that it starts to seem like an in-joke. Theme Planet itself is not just “vast”, it’s “VAST”!

Thirty-nine uses of “bitch” seem almost parsimonious in comparison, but point to the book’s main problem, a distaste for women and their bodies, especially if they are fat. It’s a book where a woman sighs over her baby-stretched “undercarriage” and her husband jokes about her vibrator in front of their daughter; where having your face pushed between the thighs of a sweaty fat woman is worse than being shot, and where Dex and his partner burst from a doorway “like unwanted foetal ejections from the glowing vulva of an alien whore”.

By most standards this isn’t a good book, but I don’t think it wants to be. It’s aiming to be big dumb fun, a videogame on paper, and in that it mainly succeeds. The violence is as bloody and frequent as people who like bloody and frequent violence might hope, and despite its flaws and daftness I enjoyed most of its attempts to entertain. But by the end I was ready to move on.

After a bit of editing, this review appeared in Interzone #239, back in 2012.

Fifteen tips for completing NaNoWriMo

These are tips specifically to help people complete NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which challenges people to write a brand new 50,000-word novel in the month of November, from start to finish. These are not tips for writing a good novel, nor a ground-breaking novel, nor an important novel.

That’s not to say the results can’t be interesting or worthwhile. The novels I wrote while taking part in NaNoWriMo are infinitely better than any of the novels I’ve written since, because the latter don’t exist. And there’s much to be said for sometimes writing novels for your own amusement, rather than just because they might sell.

So, here are the tips:

1. Aim to write a 50,000-word novel from start to finish in a month. Yes, that’s the whole point of NaNoWriMo, but there are still people who plan to write the first 50,000 words of a fantasy brick, the back end of an unfinished project, or 50,000 words in their journal. If you’re not writing a novel from start to finish, you’ll be a hanger-on, and that’ll sap your enthusiasm for whatever project you’re trying to crowbar into NaNoWriMo. Use another month to write your memoirs.

2. Plan to write the kind of novel that is well-suited to being written in a month. Some novels are easier to write than others. Books with one point of view, with linear timelines, with quests from A to B, etc, or books that draw on clear memories, develop long-held beliefs and ideas, and are set in locations you know well. NaNoWriMo isn’t the best time to write books about the overlapping lives of multiple time-travelling, world-hopping protagonists, nor books that require historical accuracy and extensive research.

3. Write a treatment to narrow your focus. Before you start writing there are a million ways the book could go, which is exciting, but it can be hard to think very far into the novel until you’ve made some firm decisions. Take a sheet of A4 paper and set out your novel’s characters, plot, themes, setting and twists, just as if you were trying to sell an agent, editor or movie producer on the idea. If you’re not happy with it, write another, and another, till you are happy. Each one will only take half an hour or so: much better than getting thirty hours into writing the actual novel and then realising your mistakes.

4. Aim to write 1666 words a day. If you keep doing it each day it’ll build up your writing muscles. If you can’t make 1666, try to write at least something every day, anything to push that word count up. One day without writing can easily turn into two or three and before you know it you’re putting it off to the weekend and facing an uphill struggle.

5. Give yourself a nice, clear job to do each day. I tend to split my NaNoWriMo novels up into thirty chunks, one per day/writing session. It helps to be able to wake up each morning and think, this evening I’ll be writing a chapter where my character goes to see a psychiatrist to deal with his anger issues and discovers the psychiatrist is an alien. And make sure you get that task done. Tomorrow you have another. Don’t get up to 40,000 words and realise you’re still writing the prologue!

6. Draw a map as you go along. I’m not big on world-building: I don’t think it’s necessary for the kind of novels best written in NaNoWriMo. But drawing a map instantly suggests plots and events. How do they get over that mountain? Why is that city surrounded by forests? Who lives in that house on the edge of town? It’s also a good idea to draw a line marking your characters’ progress around the map, noting the dates and times they arrived at and departed from each location.

7. Use your router to block your internet access during the times of day when you’ll be writing, and have someone else set the password. In fact, do everything you can to dedicate a set part of every day to your writing.

8. Stop watching television for the month. Let it build up on the TiVo or Sky+. The only reason you’ve never written a novel before is that you haven’t set enough time aside for it. A novel this length is going to take something like 40 to 60 hours to write. Cut out two hours of television a day and you’ll be well on the way. If you can’t bear to quit the television, give up the Xbox, or reading, or drinking, or however it is that you spent your time last month.

9. Feeling stuck? Never ask yourself what should come next. Ask yourself what could come next. Your character’s thoughts on whether time should be decimalised (clue: it should!) may not be relevant to the plot you have planned, but if you can’t think what else to write, that’s a way to keep moving forward. You can always delete any crap in the second draft. You may find that the digressions turn out to be the best bits.

10. Give your characters a reason to talk to each other, different ways of reacting to things. When you’re struggling to make your word count, having a bunch of idiots jibber-jabber can be very useful. Give them different points of view. Think of something happening in Friends. How does Joey react? (Stupidly.) What about Chandler? (Sarcastically.) Rachel, Ross, Monica or Phoebe? (Selfishly, academically, anxiously, weirdly.) Every new reaction is a way to push up your word count.

11. Ignore the naysayers! Every time NaNoWriMo comes around you get lots of people, often professional writers, sniffily proclaiming their disdain of the event. No wonder, when you think about it: you’re doing for fun what they do for a job, and that can be irritating for them. They’re writing for the man, you’re writing for your inner child. Although some do take part, NaNoWriMo isn’t aimed at professional novelists who spend all day every day staring at a keyboard: writing a fifty thousand word novel in a month isn’t any challenge at all to someone who has all day to write. (Full time, you could be done in under a fortnight.) It’s for people who have other jobs, who wouldn’t clear the space to write a novel otherwise. And remember, however bad your novel ends up being, it has a valuable quality rare in commercially published work: it’s the book you wanted to write, not the book you thought would sell.

12. Give your main character some of the same interests as you. It makes it much easier to win. If you’re mad about the cancellation of Happy Endings, and your character is too, that gives you something to fall back on when you run out of steam. And you know what, while you’re writing what seems to you at first like a digression, your brain is working on a way to integrate it into your plot. An episode of Happy Endings will come to mind that reflects the situation your characters are in, your characters will start talking about that, and maybe it’ll help them to figure a way out.

13. Attend the local write-ins if you can, as long as they are actually focused on writing. The social pressure of being among other people who are quietly typing away makes it easier for you to do the same.

14. If you fall behind a bit, don’t immediately set yourself a increased daily target or try to catch it all up the next day. Focus on getting 1666 words done in a day, and then try to get the hang of writing 1666 words in a single writing session. Once you are confident about doing that, schedule two sessions for a day on which you’ll have time to give it a fair shot.

15. A bit late for this year, but learn to touch-type, ideally using the Dvorak layout. Makes it so much easier if you can type all day without your fingers aching. And look after your fingers this month: don’t play any button-mashing videogames. (Future Stephen, this means you: no Dynasty Warriors!)

Back when John and I were the Birmingham MLs, we created a handout for our local writers, with achievements, graphs to fill in, bits of advice, useful websites, etc. We haven’t updated it for a while, but it’s still available to download and print out on our old website.

Do you have any tips? Pass them on in the comments.

Good luck! See you at the finish line!

Wednesday is usually the list day on our blog. This is list #8.

Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, read by Mark Gatiss, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

I’ve lost track of how often I’ve read the Target edition of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks (AudioGO, digital audiobook, 3 hrs 3 mins; Audible purchase) by Terrance Dicks, but as soon as I saw this new reading by Mark Gatiss (with Dalek voices by Nicholas Briggs) it attracted the attention of my monthly Audible token. That voice! Imagine him reading this: “The cover illustration of this book portrays the third Doctor Who, whose physical appearance was altered by the Time Lords when they banished him to the planet Earth in the twentieth century.” In the first story of his fourth season, the third Doctor (with the help of his earlier selves) had won back the right to travel in time and space, but as usual flew straight into serious trouble. First came the drashigs, and then the incipient space war between the human and Draconian empires, a war engineered by the dastardly Daleks to pave the way for their invasion. This story begins with Jo Grant watching over the injured Doctor, the Tardis being sent by the Time Lords to Spiridon. She’ll soon venture out for help, and end up in the hands of its invisible inhabitants, but as the title suggests, this is no longer their planet. The Doctor will eventually wake and go looking for Jo, only to meet a squad of Thals, here to destroy a Dalek base at any cost.

The six original television episodes were scripted by Terry Nation, writer of the Daleks’ first appearance in 1963 (this story came ten years later), and the story is something of a throwback to those early days, with a lot of aimless running around in jungles. Structurally, it’s pretty much a remake of his first story for the programme, The Daleks. The Tardis is incapacitated, the companion falls ill and will die if not treated, the Thals are attacking a Dalek base. The Tardis interior is so tiny in this story that the Doctor exhausts its air in a matter of hours after the exterior is smothered by Spiridon’s plant life. Makes you wonder how its occupants survive when it is flying through space! The third Doctor is as dismissive of others as the first ever was: reunited with Jo after she’s been crawling around the Dalek base, he doesn’t let her speak, because there’s no way of course she could possibly have any important information for him.

But despite its flaws, there has always been something magical about this story for me: it’s Where Eagles Dare starring Doctor Who! Even now it seems unusual in being a sequel to a story from two Doctors before. And like many of the Pertwee-era stories, it benefits greatly from the Target novelisation: ironically, stories that were rather too long on television become quick-paced, action-packed adventures when compressed down to one hundred and twenty-five pages. This is a typical example, its three hours gripping in precisely the way that the six television episodes were not.

The audiobook includes fun sound effects and music stings, and Mark Gatiss’s narration is perfect, an absolute delight. Unless my memory is playing tricks, I once had a cassette copy of Jon Pertwee’s reading of the same book, and it surprises me to say I prefer this version. It’s unabridged, so that helps, but it always seemed odd to have the Doctor reading a text in which he was a character. As read by Gatiss, even the worst dialogue of the story (“I’m qualified in space medicine, I’ll do what I can for your friend”) becomes something to savour, and he tickles the listener with those words and phrases which adults may find amusing (the noise made by the plants splatting on the Tardis). However many times you’ve read the book or watched the episodes, this new audio version is well worth a listen.

Doctor Who: Shada, reviewed by Jacob Edwards

Doctor Who: Shada by Douglas Adams (BBC DVD, 2013). A thirty-third anniversary celebration or a subdued twenty-first? Tricky stuff, time travel…

Season 17 (1979/1980) of Doctor Who was script-edited by Douglas Adams, and was to have concluded with Adams’s six-part serial Shada. When two studio recording blocks (five days) were lost to industrial action, production on Shada was cancelled. Adams’s last work on Doctor Who went unfinished (gone but not forgotten; Adams subsequently incorporated Professor Chronotis and the Cambridge setting into Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency). Thirty-three years on, the recorded footage for Shada has been released on DVD, along with an extra DVD of special features. Firstly, to these:

“Taken Out of Time” (25 mins) purports to examine why Shada was never completed. It does so, however, in rather a lazy way (drum roll: there were strikes), as if the people at 2|entertain were quite happy just to punt idly along the River Cam, rather than diving in and splashing around in search of real answers. Didn’t the rising popularity of Hitchhiker’s give the BBC more incentive to remount the production? Did Douglas Adams’s apparent dissatisfaction with the script play any part? Given incoming producer John Nathan-Turner’s enthusiasm for the story, coupled with a dearth of scripts and a short turnaround before the next season, would it not have been possible (nay, advisable) to rework Shada in place of either The Leisure Hive or Meglos, both of which had problematic geneses? These questions are not asked, let alone investigated.

“Now and Then” (13 mins) is a recurring special feature on Doctor Who DVDs. Unfortunately, its mandate is to catch up not with the people involved in production, but rather the locations – an exercise that seems particularly banal in this instance where the setting is same-as-it-ever-was Cambridge.

“Strike! Strike! Strike!” (28 mins) sets out to detail the history of BBC strike action with regard to its effect on Doctor Who throughout the years. The topic of industrial action per se seems unlikely to be of any great interest to most viewers, and the Doctor Who angle is only superficially touched upon. The result: an overlong yet facile documentary.

“Being a Girl” (30 mins) takes a feminist-orientated look at the way in which women have contributed (both off- but primarily on camera) throughout Doctor Who’s history from 1963 to present day. Though easily the most engaging of the special features, “Being a Girl” falls down on two fronts: firstly, in interviewing nobody from within the programme itself (although the outside interviewees come off well); secondly, in selecting material with a view to fitting the argument – not to dwell too much on agendas, but if nothing else the cursory treatment of Romanas I and II (particularly as an extra on a DVD in which Romana features) seems indefensible.

“Photo Gallery” (5 mins) is, as the title suggests, a slideshow of pictures from the production of Shada. Lalla Ward fans will be happy, although DVD is not, of course, the most accessible medium in which to display photographs.

“Shada: Animated Version” (feature length) is a flash-viewer presentation of the BBCi webcast of 2003, wherein a new set of actors – with the exception of Lalla Ward as Romana, and John Leeson (who previously and subsequently but not during the original production had provided the voice of K9) – play out in full the six episodes of Shada. Because Tom Baker declined to take part, the script was tweaked so that Paul McGann could participate as the Eighth Doctor. The plot conceit rather cleverly takes the 1980 non-broadcast of Shada into account, suggesting that this adventure was itself cut short and limited to the Doctor’s and Romana’s leisurely afternoon punt… the one piece of Shada to see transmission (as part of The Five Doctors in 1983). Which is all well and good within the context of the original Shada’s being unavailable (as appeared to be the case once the VHS release – see below – was discontinued in 1996). It does, though, rather go against the feature release on which DVD it is now included! And even if we discount continuity the animated Shada continues to vex with its presence. Its so-called “animation” is primitive at best – more like panning a camera across the face of a comic book – and like attempts to bring Asterix or Tintin to life, shows that limited movement can prove far inferior to the artistic poignancy of a genuine still frame. Paul McGann’s performance – when not sounding like a slightly more responsible cross between Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox; unsurprising, given Adams’s propensity for crosspollination – leaves one lamenting that he made only one televised appearance as the Doctor. (Indeed, it will be this paucity, rather than age or lack of sprightliness, that ultimately precludes him, we must assume, from appearing in the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary special.) But McGann, Ward and Leeson aside, i-Shada had only one redeeming feature at time of webcast: that by following Douglas Adams’s scripts in full it afforded the viewer (or listener, at any rate) the means by which at last to take in what is a wonderfully involved and complicated story. As of 2011, however, there has been available (though not included on the current DVD) a version of Shada put together on spec by Doctor Who fan Ian Levine, featuring the original footage linked together by animations and newly recorded voice work from much of the original cast. It seems a very strange choice by 2|entertain commissioning editor Dan Hall not to have included Levine’s version as a DVD bonus… or possibly in place of the main feature. (Cue the letdown…)

Shada (as presented in the 2013 DVD) is nothing more than the version that John Nathan-Turner eventually cobbled together for VHS release in 1992 – the same video, in fact, that Douglas Adams is said to have authorised only by accident while signing a stack of forms handed to him by Ed Victor. Same score. Same effects. Same linking material by Tom Baker. The picture has been cleaned up a bit but there is, in short, nothing new here – not even an audio commentary such as traditionally accompanies Doctor Who on DVD. Consequently, the overall package will be something of a disappointment to those fans whose interest in Doctor Who and Douglas Adams is sufficient that they know the story already and have tracked down Shada on VHS. As for everyone else… well yes, the 2013 (re-) release will bring to the TV screen a true rarity indeed: a Doctor Who story of which they as yet have no fond memories. And furthermore, it’s Douglas Adams, dating from his most prolific, most imaginative period of writing. Which begs just one question… is it any good?

Although only one block of studio recording was completed, all of Shada’s location filming was carried out and provides the production with a beautiful grounding. The first half of Shada is set in and around Cambridge (where Adams himself had studied not so long beforehand). Into these pleasant surrounds step the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana (Lalla Ward), who have been summoned by the Doctor’s old friend, Professor Chronotis (Denis Carey) – a retired Time Lord who has been residing for three centuries as Regius Professor of Chronology at Cambridge University. Chronotis has brought a book with him from Gallifrey; in truth a very dangerous artefact that he’s absent-mindedly allowed postgraduate student Chris Parsons (Daniel Hill) to borrow. Stomping through Cambridge in pursuit of this book is the villainous and Liberace-dressed Skagra (Christopher Neame), who intends to unlock the Time Lords’ mysteriously forgotten prison planet (Shada), steal the powers of the fabled villain Salayavin and use them, in conjunction with Skagra’s own mind sphere, to become (not merely take over) the entire universe…

According to Adams, the script for Shada was written in a tearing great hurry once it became clear that producer Graham Williams wasn’t going to let him run with either of the stories he really wanted to make (The Doctor Retires and Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, the latter of which then became Adams’s third Hitchhiker’s novel Life, the Universe and Everything) – and like much of what Adams came up with once actually chained to an impending deadline, the result was quite extraordinary. Shada is zany, yes, but its sleepless, almost delirious flights of fancy stay true to Doctor Who’s ethos. The wit is sharp (and beautifully delivered by Baker, Ward and Carey), but always in counterpoint to the seriousness of the threat that Skagra poses; in short: black coffee humour, which nobody did better than Adams. Daniel Hill provides an excellent “straight” foil to the craziness around him. The action sequences on location are executed with panache. Even the special effects (Skagra’s mind sphere and a typically Adamsish invisible spaceship) appear to stand up. Truly, it would seem, a classic lost in the making. Although—

Well, there’s a tendency to romanticise such things, isn’t there? Shada was, in essence, a first draft, and while it was no doubt a spectacularly good first draft, there is still much about the script that has quietly benefited from not being put before the camera and subjected to great scrutiny. (By all accounts it took Gareth Roberts a good deal of work to sort it all out for his 2012 novelisation.) Victoria Burgoyne’s character (Claire) is half-baked. Skagra’s menace sinks in the middle episodes and then fails to rise. And whereas the Cambridge scenes work marvellously, enough of the studio filming survives to suggest that the non-Cambridge material, if allowed to manifest, would have suffered from the same shortcomings as Adams’s previous non-Earthbound story, The Pirate Planet; that is, wildly unrealistic expectations of the visual medium in general and Doctor Who’s budget in particular. The ideas that served Adams so well in print and on radio tended to scupper him when translated to screen, and as the material runs dry and Tom Baker tries more and more frantically to talk the viewer through Shada’s second half, one cannot help but wonder whether the production may, in fact, have been pulled away from the water just in time to prevent it from falling in and floundering helplessly.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Director Pennant Roberts shows some nice touches, and might well have learnt a thing or two since the disappointments of The Pirate Planet. Incidental music by Doctor Who stalwart Dudley Simpson would also have helped (rather than Keff McCulloch’s somewhat incongruous score, which graces the VHS/DVD release). Ultimately, of course, it’s just not possible to say. Welcome though it is, and much though it does provide the “tantalising glimpse” promised by the DVD case, the 2013 release of Shada remains unsatisfying. Did the 1979 BBC strikes spare the audience from another botched effort like The Pirate Planet? Or did it rob them of something more in keeping with Adams’s City of Death? Ian Levine’s version may someday provide us with a better idea, but for now, as it was twenty-one years ago when the patched-up Shada first came out on VHS, we still don’t know.

When he unwittingly authorised Shada’s emancipation on video, a chagrined Adams donated his royalties to Comic Relief. Anyone watching Shada in 2013 should consider purchasing not only the DVD but also a Red Nose Day proboscis to wear while doing so.

We See a Different Frontier, edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad | review by Stephen Theaker

We See a Different Frontier (The Future Fire, ebook, 3447ll; Kindle purchase), edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, is an anthology of sixteen stories, and also a special issue of the magazine The Future Fire, which publishes fantasy work with a political edge. After a year’s hiatus, the magazine encouraged applications from potential guest editors. That led first to Outlaw Bodies, edited by Lori Selke, and now to this book. The submission guidelines set an interesting challenge: to approach science fiction from the point of view not of those pushing the frontier out, in their wagon trains to the stars, but from the perspective of those who have experienced the expanding frontier from the other side. When I read the guidelines, my thoughts went towards the alien experience of human expansion, but the introduction makes it clear that the editors were more interested in “us, the aliens from Earth. Foreigners. Strangers to the current dominant culture.” And so only a few of the stories are set in space, most being set here on Earth, using science fiction to address historical, contemporary and controversial issues directly, rather than retreating to the safe Star Trekkian distance of metaphorical alien planets.

But those stories that feature aliens use them well. In “Them Ships” Silvia Moreno-Garcia considers how the flattening of human social structures by an alien invasion might not be entirely unwelcome among those currently at the bottom of the pile. A spacecraft hangs over the city in “A Bridge of Words” by Dinesh Rao, broadcasting an incomprehensible message, while Riya researches the tattoos of the country she left behind. Both are good stories, but Sunny Moraine’s “A Heap of Broken Images” is astonishing. It’s the heartbreaking story of an alien guide showing insensitive human tourists around the scene of a massacre. The story’s point is made by how unsurprised the reader is to learn what happened.

“What Really Happened in Ficandula” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is the only other story to take us off-world. It begins with a strong taste of Battlestar Galactica, as Gemma’s ship arrives at New Cordillera after six hundred and twenty leaps to throw off their pursuers, but it develops very quickly into a fine story with its own flavour that draws on the kind of shameful incidents that go hand in hand with imperial power and colonisation: forced migration, forced adoption, trigger-happy soldiers.

Some stories show us the survivors of global catastrophes, such as Joyce Chng’s “Lotus”, which shows people surviving in a waterlogged land, who find a wonderful source of fresh water and must decide whether to claim ownership of it, given all the consequences that defending it might bring. “Fleet” by Sandra McDonald is the story of a girl called Bridge who used to be a boy named Magahet Joseph Howard USN. She’s married to a man whose other wife hopes she’ll “be gored to death by a goonie pig”. Bridge’s people live on an island which was once part of an empire, and isn’t any more, and they have mixed feelings about re-establishing contact with whatever’s left of civilisation.

Shweta Narayan’s “The Arrangement of Their Parts” is set in 1665, where an Englishman is trying to exploit clockwork life forms, while “Forests of the Night” by Gabriel Murray is told by the unacknowledged son of an English captain, who brings him back to England from Kuala Lumpur. The mother is left behind, the boy employed as a valet. Something is killing sheep, horses and then men, and it needs to be hunted. Though they’re not writers one would expect to meet at this party, Kipling and Doyle came to mind, and the story isn’t embarrassed by the comparison. “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus” by Ernest Hogan sees Tesla creating a helicopter-borne death ray for Mexican revolutionaries, only for it to be hijacked by a guy angry about Hollywood’s cultural appropriation of his girlfriend. It’s the kind of pulpy cartoon story with a serious theme that would fit neatly into an Obverse anthology. “I Stole the D.C.’s Eyeglass” is about a girl who worries for her stubborn sister, Minisare, who disappears off into the forest and doesn’t want to be given a husband. Sofia Samatar shows a community ruined by commercial exploitation, so used to the roar of machinery that the children can all read lips – but it ends on a hopeful note.

Lavie Tidhar is one of my favourite writers at the moment and “Dark Continents” is another excellent story from him. “We began to edit, but we were sloppy at first”, we read. That process created a new role for Livingstone, an African invasion of the confederacy, a Jewish homeland in Uganda. Style, ideas, storytelling: Tidhar’s stories excel in every area. A sentence here sums up the injustice of colonialism: “We had moved en masse to this land, empty but for its people, granted to us by the power of British empire and its King and parliament.”

Another of my favourite stories in the anthology was “Old Domes” by J.Y. Yang. Jing-Li is a cullmaster of buildings: when they are to be knocked down or refurbished she must clear the way by killing their guardian spirits. The story looks not just at the ongoing after-effects of colonialism, but also at the histories lost as colonial powers impose a new year zero. And it also has some good fights! “How to Make a Time Machine Do Things that Are Not in the Manual or The Gambiarra Method” is a Rudy Ruckerish story by Fabio Fernandes about researchers who discover time travel “during experiments on locative media and augmented reality as applied to elevators”. This makes sense, since even ordinary lifts are known to cause time dilations. “Droplet” by Rahul Kanakia inverts the usual story of the Indian emigrant who agonises over having taken their skills abroad – see for example the film Swades – to show what happens when they return to India, in this case because the USA has begun to dry up.

“Vector” is a cyberpunk story told in the second person by Benjanun Sriduangkaew: “You. Are. (A weapon. A virus. A commandment from God.)” You are literally plugged into the internet, and the hope is that you’ll do something to reverse the exploitation of your country and the steamrolling of its culture, a recurring theme in the book: “This is how to rewrite a country’s past, and when a past is gone it is easy to replace the present with convenience.” Similar themes are explored in “Remembering Turinam” by N.A. Ratnayake, despite its more historical (or fantastical?) setting. This wasn’t my favourite of the stories here, its protagonist Salai a bit too self-righteous and unpleasant to carry the reader. The story is essentially a conversation, the subject the active erasing of the Turian language by the Rytari invaders, and the question of whether it should be restored, and if so how. An exploration of the viral nature of language might have been very interesting in this context – you can’t keep a good word down! – but language is a topic big enough to inspire an anthology in itself, and a story shouldn’t be blamed for not exploring every angle.

The book was hardly published in hopes of a pat on the head from a white Englishman, and even the act of reviewing it – issuing my judgment upon the hard work of these plucky foreign types! – seems to go against the spirit of the book. The afterword by Ekaterina Sedia is a more sensitive response to the book’s themes than I could ever write (though if I had thought like her that the stories shared an anti-scientific theme I would have seen it as a weakness rather than a strength). But, for what my opinion is worth, I thought the book was absolutely terrific. The short length of the stories meant none had time to waste, and there is a great deal of variety. It’s full of surprising plots and perspectives, and if the premise of the book might make you expect a lecture, don’t think of the finger-wagging kind, think more of an inspirational guest speaker who opens your eyes to new ideas and new approaches. Many anthologists, when asked about the lack of diversity in their work, declare that they care about quality and not quotas. This book shows that diversity needn’t come at a cost, and is in fact an extremely valuable quality for an anthology.

On the technical side, the Kindle edition is fine, apart from (on my devices, at least) being set in block paragraphs with a line space between. That could be a deliberate choice – it does look rather elegant – but it means more page turns, especially on smaller screens. Other than that, the book is very highly recommended.

Astronauts, reviewed by Jacob Edwards

Astronauts, by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie (Network DVD; original ITV run: 26 October – 7 December 1981 (Series 1); 19 July – 23 August 1983 (Series 2)). Goodies two, Astronauts nil…and the audience is bushnana’d.

Britain’s first ever manned space mission sees an unlikely crew – two men, one woman, one dog – cooped up together for six months trying to break the world endurance record. Cut off from Planet Earth, guided only by an American mission controller (who has to be taught the correct way to read them the football scores), the astronauts must face up to both excruciating boredom and the extreme perils of isolation.

Although the “sit” in “sitcom” need not encompass more than a few rooms – in this case four sections of a space capsule; more than any of the Blackadders – it does at first seem unlikely that Astronauts could successfully derive its “com” element primarily from actual problems documented by the astronauts of NASA’s Skylab programme. Granted, writers Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie had collaborated on The Goodies throughout the seventies, and some of their finest Goodies scripts (“The End”; “Earthanasia”) had come about when late-in-the-season budgets necessitated limiting an episode to the confinement of a single set; but even when tied down The Goodies remained fanciful at heart. Astronauts, on the other hand, was trying to find the funny side of a rather cramped and gritty reality; and not even in a dark, Dr Strangelove kind of way, but rather as a Monday or Tuesday night sitcom. Was that ever going to work?

The answer when Red Dwarf hit our screens on 15 February 1988 was a resounding “yes”. But as for Astronauts, the honest answer is “no”.

Astronauts suffers from an absence of incidental music (a crushing blow for Bill Oddie fans), and a lacklustre studio audience, which laughs only sporadically at fairly slow-moving scripts. Its most obvious shortcoming, however, is that Garden and Oddie, despite writing, did not star in the show. After eight highly successful series for the BBC, The Goodies had just been cut (to free up money for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and had gone over to ITV. Indeed, its one and only ITV series went out from 27 December 1981 to 13 February 1982, just after series one of Astronauts wrapped up. There was no chance that Garden, Oddie or fellow Goodie Tim Brooke-Taylor could appear (Bimbo the dog was the only honorary Goodie to make the cast list); yet, because the Goodies wrote for themselves and put much of their own personalities into their onscreen personas, the character of Ackroyd (Barrie Rutter) comes across as quintessentially Oddie, while Mattocks (Christopher Godwin) and Foster (Carmen du Sautoy) manifest sometimes as Garden, sometimes as Brooke-Taylor… and so it is difficult to watch Astronauts series one without thinking of the Goodies – being played by other people! Series two is a marked improvement: in part because Garden and Oddie were no longer writing Astronauts and The Goodies concurrently; in part because they’d had a chance to observe the dynamic that Rutter, Godwin and du Sautoy brought to their erstwhile Goodies-ish characters; but even at its best, Astronauts still comes across rather in the manner of something that Garden and Oddie would quite like to have moved on to, but hadn’t managed to because they weren’t quite finished being the Goodies.

Curiously enough, it was in 1983, as series two of Astronauts passed largely unheralded from TV screens across England, that Red Dwarf creators Rob Grant and Doug Naylor formed their writing partnership. Graeme Garden once quipped that he and Oddie should have hung on for five years and done Red Dwarf instead of Astronauts; and while it would be spurious to claim that Grant and Naylor in any way salvaged one SF comedy from the drifting wreck of the other, nevertheless it must be remembered that The Goodies was still a high-profile programme at the beginning of the 80s, and that Astronauts – pitched in essence as a Goodies spinoff – consequently was released with quite some fanfare. As budding comedy writers, Grant and Naylor would have been remiss not to check it out and perhaps make a mental note or two.

The first series of Red Dwarf is everything that Astronauts set out to be: a space comedy based on character conflict, confinement and a desert island sense of listlessness; and while only Rob Grant and Doug Naylor could tell us what lessons they learnt, if any, from Astronauts, there are certain aspects of Red Dwarf that do appear to hint at transference. Having the Cat as a humanoid feline, for instance, seems like an idea that might well have been sparked from watching poor old Bimbo’s rather facile inclusion in Astronauts; and similarly, Red Dwarf’s defining brainchild of having its protagonists confined not by a sense of being closed in and constantly watched (as per Astronauts) but rather through being all alone on an enormous empty spaceship effectively without restrictions. Retrospectively, the character of Dave Lister (Craig Charles) is easily discernible in his “scruffy northerner” precursors David Ackroyd and Bill Oddie (qua himself), while Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie) is undoubtedly Malcolm Mattocks taken to an absurdist extreme. The Red Dwarf duo even look quite like their Astronauts counterparts! None of which is to suggest that Red Dwarf is unoriginal, or that it didn’t blast to comedic galaxies that Astronauts could only covet myopically through a large telescope; merely that without one programme, we might not have had the other. (And as a point of interest to Dwarfers, let it be revealed that Ackroyd’s great, shameful secret is that he, like Rimmer, enjoys a spot of Morris-dancing.)

Astronauts is not altogether without highpoints, many of which come courtesy of Bruce Boa – formerly the American guest from Fawlty Towers, subsequently General Rieekan in The Empire Strikes Back, and throughout Astronauts appearing as the overwrought and effusive, charismatic Mission Controller Lloyd Beadle. It takes a while for this, the only true non-Goodies character to develop, but as series one – and particularly series two – hits its stride, Boa/Beadle quickly emerges as the show’s unheralded star. (Perhaps this in some measure explains the Americans’ interest in making their own series of Astronauts, with M*A*S*H’s McLean Stevenson as Beadle. This venture, like the ill-conceived American Red Dwarf, went no further than one poorly-received pilot episode.) The Astronauts DVD release makes sure to credit not only Garden and Oddie but also nominal script editors Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (who teamed up for Porridge) and producer Douglas Argent (Fawlty Towers) – a subterfuge of sorts, having already promoted itself as an “hilarious comedy” (the sort of exaggeration you’d think only Goebbels would have the mettle for, and a rather inane suggestion given such audience reactions as Seema Bakewell going into labour and Alex Mitchell literally laughing himself to death while watching episodes of The Goodies).[1] Add to this the selection of cover photos – which misleadingly depict Carmen du Sautoy as having spent much of the series stripped down to her underwear – and the impression one receives is that Astronauts has been put out as a no-frills, cheap laughs, disposable impulse buy… and while this may, in part, reflect the truth of the original broadcasts, nevertheless it does something of a disservice both to the intentions of the programme and to the role that Astronauts fulfilled within the early development of TV science fiction comedy.

1. Graeme Garden, “The Goodies Still Rule OK Tour Diary”, April 26, 2007 [http://www.the-goodies.co.uk/goodiestourblog.htm]; Robert Ross, The Goodies Rule OK (ABC Books, 2006), p. 115.

Theakerly thoughts #8: X-Files, Nanowrimo, Bullet Journal

Thought 1. I was quite disappointed when the X-Files reunion panel at San Diego Comic Con failed to produce any significant announcements, which made the panel seem a bit pointless. That appearance, and the one at the New York Comic Con this week, make a bit more sense in the light of stories like this. It sounds like Chris Carter and the stars want to make a third film, and the current publicity round is to show Fox that there’s interest in one. I hope it works, although the problems with the second film were nothing to do with the budget, and everything to do with lousy logic. (If someone claiming to be a psychic leads you to a corpse, and then fails to lead you to a second one, you wouldn’t kick them out on their butts for being fake psychics, you’d question them to find out how they knew about the first body!) Both actors have gone on to success with other projects which I’d guess makes them more comfortable with returning to those defining roles. Among other things, Gillian Anderson was brilliant in Hannibal, and David Duchovny is brilliant if despicable in Californication. (X-Filers are recommended to watch season 4, episode 10 of that show, if no other.) My hope, though, is not really for a film. I want new episodes on Netflix, Arrested Development-style.

Thought 2. Nanowrimo! It’s been a long, long time now since I succeeded at Nanowrimo. In fact, I haven’t finished writing a novel at all, Nanowrimo or not, since stepping down as one of the Birmingham MLs. I think it’s because I haven’t really committed to it, starting it out of habit most years without really caring whether I get a novel finished or not, and I have been very happily busy with work for the last few years. Two years ago I went offline for a month to get it done, in theory, but never got properly started. Also, I haven’t been going to the write-ins, and I used to regularly write 5000 words in the course of our Sunday afternoons at Starbucks. This year I feel very differently. I’m desperate to write another novel – I’m getting anxious about it again. I’m planning to take a week’s holiday at some point in the month to concentrate on it, and I’ve set aside each night from nine to midnight for writing. I’ve been forcing myself to write at least 250 words a day to build up my writing muscles. Checking the figures, I’ve actually averaged 449 words a day over the last 56 days, which is a way off the 1666 a day needed to complete Nanowrimo but a lot more than I managed during the last few Nanowrimos. And I’ve been working like mad this month to get ahead of everything. I’m also going to stop reading books and comics five days before the end of this month, so that I’m not tempted to spend time writing reviews during November instead of my novel, and so that the only story I’m ever thinking about is my own. I won’t say anything about the plot here, because I’ll probably end up publishing it in character, under a pseudonym, but I’m quite happy with the basic concept, and my notebook’s pages are filling up with plans and ideas. I’ve had an idea for one brilliant twist and I can’t wait to write that bit! I doubt that the novel overall will be any good, because none of the novels I have ever written have been any good, but writing them does make me happy. The widgets below should, once November has started, show you how I'm getting on.

Thought 3. Very good news about the Patrick Troughton Doctor Who episodes being found. I’m on a spending freeze, as I recover from paying for a holiday and look forward to Christmas and paying my taxes, so they’ve had to go on my Amazon wishlist for now, but Boxing Day is going to be wonderful this year. Amazing to think how careless the BBC was with these treasures. All three series of my beloved Journey into Space were thought lost for decades before being discovered, misfiled, by an engineer. Makes me worry sometimes what treasures of the future might be going into my recycling bin.

Thought 4. Our old friend Steven Gilligan once bought John and me matching moleskine notebooks, telling us how brilliant they were and how many artists love them, etc, etc. We were a bit baffled at the time, but I think he’d be glad to know that one has finally become a big part of my life, because I’ve been using the Bullet Journal method. The big things I like about it are the numbered pages, the contents page that builds up as you use the journal, and the page you create at the beginning of each month listing its days and events. My journal’s now got a bunch of pages relating to this year’s Nanowrimo, others devoted to notes from our monthly TQF meetings, pages listing books read and films watched. The system’s worth a look, especially if like me you have a tendency to scatter your notes and ideas around a bit too much.

Thought 5. My writing appears in the magazines reviewed here and here by Terry Weyna. Unsurprisingly, there’s no particular mention of my brief contributions, but I liked this bit in the Interzone review: “There are nearly 30 pages of book and film reviews following the fiction, written by several reviewers and critics, all eloquent and knowledgeable about science fiction and fantasy, as well as perceptive writers.” Phew – I’m still getting away with it!