Linkblogging For 17/06/11
I’ll be posting the next Seven Soldiers piece (on Frankenstein) tomorrow – and a Beach Boys piece on Sunday. I’ve also managed to rearrange some stuff at work, so I’ll be much less tired from now on, and much more able to write, so expect the pace to pick up a bit. Meanwhile, some links.
I was at the Fantastic Film Weekend last weekend, and was lucky enough to meet Jonathan Miller when he stepped out into the naughty corner with the smokers (I don’t smoke but was with a friend who does). One of the many highlights for me was the showing of Miller’s The Drinking Party, an adaptation of Plato’s Symposium, which I was planning to write about. However Penny (who is a proper classicist) makes most of the same points I was planning to make here. The only thing I’d add is that it shows just what a marvelous event FFW is when the two big events were talks with Doctor Sir Jonathan Miller, talking about the influence of Wittgenstein, and of Dennett’s ideas about the nonexistence of qualia, on his work, and Peter Sasdy talking about directing Hands Of The Ripper and Countess Dracula. I wouldn’t have missed either for the world.
The Monkees’ FBI file, talking about their dangerous left-wing subversion.
Amypoodle on The Invisibles.
Ask A Physicist on the vacuum catastrophe.
When threat models collide – how DRM and 3D are making for a worse experience for people going to the cinema to see 2D films.
Hugo Blogging 2: Grandville, Feed, Blackout, Cryoburn
Continuing my reviews of this year’s Hugo entries. Remember, if you want to get a ton of SF ebooks for $50 and vote in the Hugos yourself, you can get the Hugo packet here.
One point here – the four books I’m reviewing here are a sequel, part one of a two-volume story set in a world where that author has apparently set several previous books, part one of a trilogy, and part of a ‘saga’. The Best Novel candidate I’ve not yet read is also part one of a trilogy. Since when did SF writers become physically incapable of writing individual, stand-alone books?
Grandville Mon Amour by Bryan Talbot
Nominated for Best Graphic Story, while this is far from the best comic released during its year of eligibility, it’s still a Bryan Talbot comic, and therefore deserves to win.
The sequel to Grandville, this has the same strengths and weaknesses as the previous book. The art is still gorgeous (though reading it as a PDF on the computer means you can’t see his masterful layout work in full) and it’s still as fun to play spot-the-reference as with the early League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen issues (I especially like the cameo by the misogynist aardvaark). But like the earlier work, the plot is a bit lightweight – and while the first one was roughly based around the conspiracy theories around the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, this one is *very* roughly based around Jack The Ripper conspiracy theories. This means it invites comparisons with From Hell, which are unfair, as this is a deliberately light, pulpy comic.
It’s no Luther Arkwright or Alice In Sunderland, but even when he’s just having fun Talbot is always worth reading.
Blackout by Connie Willis
This was really, really, really annoying. Five hundred and eleven pages long, this is all set-up with no resolution at all, because the resolution is in another book (I didn’t realise this til I was up to page 507 and the major plot point hadn’t happened yet). It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing at all happened in the book, but certainly the actual *events* in it could be compressed into a short story. Well, half a short story. The Wikipedia page for the book has a nine-line plot summary – and a nine *paragraph* summary of the sequel.
Willis writes well, but fundamentally this is like if someone had taken just the World War II parts of Cryptonomicon (say), removed all the discussion of ideas so you were just left with the painfully accurate research about the war years, and put that out as a book. Except have all the fiddly little details right about the war but totally wrong about the country in which it’s set. Yes, it’s part one of a two-part novel, but it’s still not structured *at all* as a single volume – it just stops, and after 511 pages giving the reader no reward whatsoever seems more than a little unfair.
Over and over again Willis assumes that the UK is really just exactly the same as the USA except for us all drinking tea and loving the Royal Family. It’s a minor point, but the biggest problem I had with the book was that everyone speaks in USian dialect – they say “I’ve got to go get that” rather than “I’ve got to go *and* get that”, and “January thirteenth” instead of “January *the* thirteenth”. If you’re going to go to the trouble, as Willis obviously has, of researching dates of bombings and the names of shops on Oxford Street in the 40s, you could at least bother to listen to an English person speak. Maybe even get one to read the book before you put it out. Judging from these posts, the ePub has actually been revised and the most egregious errors fixed compared to the original paper publication. Christ alone knows how bad this was before that. Utter, utter, unmitigated crap.
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
The ePub file for this crashes my e-reader, so I’m just mentioning it so people know I’m not ignoring it.
Feed by Mira Grant
While I’ve had more than enough of zombies at the moment, seeing on the title page that Grant also writes as Seanan McGuire gave me hope, even despite this being ‘part one of the Newsflesh trilogy’ – McGuire’s piece had been the one piece I’d really enjoyed in Chicks Dig Time Lords, so I expected this to be at least decent.
And while hardly great, it was a pleasant, enjoyable read. The worldbuilding is deftly done – set a few decades after a zombie outbreak, the anti-zombie precautions are very much in the same mould as our current ‘anti-terror’ laws – though I’d question the idea that blogging will still be regarded as ‘new media’ at that time, rather than hopelessly antiquated. All the characters were well sketched, the plot, while predictable, does have one twist that I at least didn’t see coming (though I really should have) and the prose style is very easy to read.
In fact, this reads like what we are now euphemistically supposed to call ‘Young Adult’ books (they’re not for young adults. I’m a young adult – I’m 32 – and they’re not aimed at me. Call them what they are, children’s books – or use the old term Heinlein used, ‘juveniles’). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it makes the book very, very readable. But the end result is something lightweight and lacking substance.
That sounds a harsher judgement than I mean it to. I enjoyed this (and despite it being part one of a trilogy, it had a proper structure and ending. It can be done, Willis) and while I’m not going to eagerly seek out parts two and three of the trilogy, nor am I going to avoid them. Definitely the most enjoyable of the ‘best novel’ candidates I’ve read so far.
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold started with so many strikes against it that I almost didn’t even get through the first chapter. It’s part of a ‘saga’ (I don’t do sagas, and I’m certainly not normally going to start reading something that’s part nineteen or whatever of a story). The characters have odd names in what appear to be multiple different orthographies, causing extra cognitive load to keep track of them. It’s set on a planet where people address each other with -san or -sensei endings but in all other ways behave like Westerners, and its main characters are important in some sort of Galactic Empire (unless you’re Asimov, I want my viewpoint characters to be fighting against hereditary dictators, not helping keep them in positions of power) and have hereditary titles themselves. Were I not trying to read everything so I can vote honestly in the Hugos, I wouldn’t have read this if you’d paid me.
However, *despite* all those things I ended up quite enjoying this. It seems to be riffing off Clifford Simak’s Why Call Them Back From Heaven? and its main effect was to make me want to reread that book, but I found myself almost unwillingly drawn into the story. Admittedly, the plot runs on rails so obvious that I predicted one twist ( “Gung’f abg zl zbzzl!” (ROT13 to avoid spoilers)) two chapters in advance down to the precise wording, but it’s still a *decent* plot, and it’s well-written. I won’t be seeking out any more of Bujold’s work based on this, but am pleasantly surprised by how decent it seemed given that it’s very, *very* much Not My Sort Of Thing.
Twitter failures
If anyone wonders why I’ve been only intermittently on Twitter recently, it’s partly because half the time when I try to post anything I get “Oops, we’ve done something wrong”, so my Twitter account is largely read-only at the moment.
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts
The Faction Paradox series of books has been one of the most consistently good and interesting series I’ve ever read – certainly the best multi-author series, but it’s had a relatively troubled history. Starting out with a series of novels published by Mad Norwegian (a small press in Iowa, devoted mostly to ‘cult TV’, but with a surprisingly high hit-rate of decent books), when Mad Norwegian stopped publishing new entries in the series, a small SF publisher in New Zealand, Random Static, took over.
However, Random Static have only published one novel in the series, the excellent Newtons Sleep. and their FAQ says “When’s the next book coming out? We can’t say yet, but expect an announcement early in 2009.”, so we’ve been waiting a while for anything new.
Luckily, another small press, Obverse Books, which specialises in short stories rather than novels, has stepped up, and the result is this, my favourite book so far this year.
For those who are unfamiliar with Faction Paradox, the series is originally the creation of Lawrence Miles (who, with Stuart Douglas, co-edits this volume) , although it’s had much input from other writers. The books don’t share a setting, characters or background, but all take place in the same shared universe, which provides a certain consistency of tone.
This universe is dominated by the Great Houses, a race of near-gods who can travel through space and time in their Timeships, but who prefer to simply exist on their Homeworld. In a very real sense, they *are* the universe – they embody its physical laws and history, and the universe mostly exists just because they have chosen to observe it in this form.
However recently the Great Houses have gone to war… to War, in fact, against an Enemy as powerful as them. Nothing is known about the Enemy, except what can be found by reading between the lines, except that they are the Enemy, and that for them to win might well mean not only the Great Houses ceasing to exist, but it might completely rewrite the whole universe – not even just its history, but its fundamental logic. The War covers all of space, all of time, and quite possibly those regions beyond either.
The War is in a kind of stalemate, but it has led to the involvement of several minor powers, including the Celestis (a race of malevolent conceptual entities), the various posthuman races, and Faction Paradox, a time-travelling voodoo cult who delight in playing both sides off against each other.
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts is a collection of twelve stories set in this universe. While the twelve stories are very different, they share a few themes. Primarily, they’re about story and its power – fans of Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman might well enjoy this book (despite its co-editor’s well-known antipathy towards Gaiman’s work) – but here story is seen as a far darker, more malevolent force than their comparatively safe work.
Many of the stories also seem Lovecraftian – not by using words like Cthulhu or shoggoth and hoping people get the reference and feel geeky, but by evoking the same feeling he did at his best, of existing in a world fought over by blind, impassive forces that can crush you without even noticing. In fact, some of the stories remind me even more of Lord Dunsany, the great 19th century fantasist who inspired Lovecraft, than of Lovecraft himself. Certainly most of the writers here have a prose style far removed from Lovecraft’s ponderous overwriting.
The stories here are a mixed bag, of course, as in any multi-author collection, and many of the best stories have only a tangential relationship to the Faction Paradox back story – several of them could have been published with only minor changes in a non-FP collection – but they actually feel, to me, more evocative of the Faction Paradox spirit than the ones that concentrate more directly on the Faction and its doings.
Storyteller by Matt Kimpton is one of those. A pseudo-Viking saga about what happens when a storyteller goes looking for stories to be part of, this is one of those “I wish I’d thought of that” stories that feels like an old folk tale. Gramps by Jonathan Dennis can similarly be read with no previous Faction knowledge, though this creepy little short-short about a cat called Gramps with a missing leg is *definitely* a Faction Paradox story.
I won’t deal with every story in the book, but what I will say is that those I enjoyed less are just those I enjoyed less, rather than bad stories – the quality level is remarkably consistent. In fact, the stories I enjoyed least tend to be the ones that were the kind of thing I was expecting when I bought the book – the good ones were just *better* than that.
That said, I don’t have as much to say about every story, so I’ll just look at a handful to give a flavour of the book. Mightier Than The Sword by Jay Eales, about the prison where they put the writers and a very familiar-seeming comic artist, Now Or Thereabouts by Blair Bidmead, which starts as a satire of The Apprentice before turning somewhat stranger, and Print The Legend by Daniel O’Mahony, which manages to have Charles Dickens and John Ga(u)lt team up with a shoggoth without, astonishingly, turning into AWESOME!, are all standouts.
But best by far is the closer, A Hundred Words From A Civil War, the long-awaited sequel to Of The City Of The Saved by Philip Purser-Hallard.
A Hundred Words… is a ‘drabbleplex’ – a hundred separate one-hundred-word stories that work together to tell a much bigger story. In Of The City… Purser-Hallard established an incredible setting, a city between this universe and the next where all the dead humans live forever. Here death has come to that city, and so has civil war – though not The War; this only involves the death of four trillion people, and is nothing like as all-pervasive, though it’s clearly a small part of the overall War.
A couple of examples (I hope PPH doesn’t mind me sharing these bits – if he does I will of course take them down):
Remakes make lousy soldiers.
I tell you, you build a person based round a character from some media fiction, they’re gonna have some pretty odd ideas about reality.
They’re terrible strategists. They make big, symbolic gestures, then act surprised when that doesn’t win the war outright. They abandon vital operations just to rescue one person. Usually a kid.
Yeah, sometimes it’s a dog.
They sacrifice themselves heroically over and over, knowing someone’s gonna Remake them every goddam time.
Did you know the rebels run an entire POW camp just for John Rambos? There’s something like 500 of him there now.
When the most sophisticated of the posthuman civilisations are co-opted into the Civil War, it becomes a rarefied affair. Five Districts are carrying out hostilities entirely through the medium of music, exchanging shifting tonalities and rhythms which delightfully reprogram the senses with revised systems of aesthetics.
Representatives of two more rival cultures are vying in Flautencil’s Plaza, their societies’ respective destinies invested in a single combat which appears to the ordinary human spectator (of whom there are thousands assembled) to consist of sniffing orchids and exchanging significant glances.
The apparent flirtation is in its seventh month, and approaching no resolution.
Purser-Hallard’s story also contains short stories featuring many characters from other stories in the book, giving many of the stories a final extra twist. But even without that, this pushes so many of my buttons it might as well be called “ten thousand words to excite Andrew Hickey” – a piece of eschatological science fiction which references the ideas of Nick Bostrom and has Philip K Dick talking about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, along with the final deaths of all the dying-and-resurrected gods? That’s my kind of thing, as regular readers will no doubt realise.
And the ending of Purser-Hallard’s story, and of the book, is absolutely chilling and puts the whole book in another light. I won’t spoil it for you, but… just read it, OK?
Faction Paradox, A Romance In Twelve Parts, is available in hardback for £11.99 from Obverse Books.
Linkblogging for 07/06/11
I’ll probably be doing a proper post tonight about Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts, and I’ll definitely be going through the comments that have piled up over the last few days, but while I’m finishing reading the FP book, some links.
Corn Mo, one of my favourite outsider musician songwriters (and one whose music I unfortunately lost in a hard drive accident recently. Must rebuy it at some point soon) has released a new song as a free download. Called Emily Fusselmans Rabbit, it’s inspired by Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K Dick, and is far more baroque pop than Corn Mo’s usual stuff, sounding like a depressed, low-budget American Barry Booth (this is a good thing to be).
Debi on why rebooting Batgirl is a bad idea
James Ward thinks Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory is a psychopath
Big Finish’s one day sales continue. Today’s Doctor Who stories that can be bought for a fiver include The Holy Terror (one of the best BF audios), The Shadow Of The Scourge (one of the worst) and Storm Warning (average, but introduces BF’s longest-lasting companion).
I’m currently three and a half stories in to FP:ARITP. Will be reviewing it in a few hours, but so far it’s great.
Linkblogging For 06/06/11
Am actually off work ill with headache/bad chest today so don’t expect anything substantial today (including replies to comments, I’m afraid). Have some links instead.
A libertarian communist site’s obituary for Grant Morrison’s father, focussing on his radical political activities. Essential reading for those who wonder why Morrison has so many father figures in his work, or for those who like reading about truly inspirational figures.
Caron is rather politer about Vince Cable’s utterly wrongheaded speech today than I would be, but gets the point across.
Jennie makes several short points about the intersections between liberalism and class.
Interesting piece on Punjabi-Mexican pioneers in California in the early 20th century.
Stewart Lee and Alan Moore find the historical evidence that Winston Churchill was a pig:
James Graham, who’s thankfully got back to blogging after the end of the Yes campaign, on why David Steel is wrong on the Lords.
Gavin B on this weekend’s Who
Sarah Brown on why she’s not going to the Lib Dem conference
And for those who missed it over the weekend, I’ve put up four of the short stories I’ve posted here in the past (all available through the ‘fiction’ tab above) as a 99 cent Kindle chapbook. UK version, US version.
Happy Birthday @troutcircs !
My friend plok is apparently Officially Old today (I don’t know how old, but those were his words) and has decided that for a birthday present he wants people to post YouTube videos of songs he asks for on their blogs. From me he asked for this – Gimme A Pig’s Foot And A Bottle Of Beer by Bessie Smith.
Interestingly, I’d always liked this track but never looked up who the backing band were. Turns out it’s a pretty stellar line-up – Buck Washington (piano). Frank Newton (cornet), Benny Goodman (clarinet), Jack Teagarden (trombone), Chu Berry (sax) and Billy Taylor (bass). It’s a shame the recording is so muddy, because this is so different from the music Goodman or Teagarden would normally play I wish I could make out their lines better (Goodman is one of the major influences on my own melodic thinking), but the only instruments that can be heard with any clarity are Washington and Newton (playing in a style very obviously influenced by Louis Armstrong).
The Doctor Who Multiple Choice Test
1) If presented with a race that are manipulating humanity for their own, possibly sinister, ends, do you:
a) Expose them to humanity, turning their powers against them so humanity can see them for what they really are and hopefully come to a peaceful settlement – but however they deal with them, humanity must come up with its own solution to being manipulated by aliens.
b) Turn their powers against them by turning the whole of humanity into a race of hypnotically programmed murderers?
2) If your friend is kidnapped and you don’t know where she is, do you
a) Trace the mysterious signals back to their source, or look in the TARDIS information bank, or make an amazing deductive leap, or stumble upon a clue.
b) Get one of your other friends to dress up as a Roman and blow up Cybermen’s spaceships til they tell you where she is, despite the Cybermen having no connection whatsoever to anything, while making macho action-movie quips?
3) If you’ve just spent 90 minutes hammering home the point that the shape-shifters controlled by others’ minds have a sentience of their own, and then discover that one that you thought was your friend is in fact a shape-shifter, and that your friend, unaware, has been kidnapped and is in another, pregnant, body, do you:
a) Find some way to restore your friend to her own body with minimum trauma to both her and the shape-shifter.
b) Zap the shape-shifter with a magic wand ‘sonic screwdriver’ so your friend suddenly finds herself in labour with no warning and the shape-shifter is now dead?
4) If you know your friend and her baby have been kidnapped by your enemies, do you
a) Come up with a clever plan involving sneaking in, maybe stunning a guard with a Venusian aikido blow, but otherwise trying not to hurt anyone very much, and save them, possibly leaving a dummy made out of pillows in their bed or something
b) Come up with a plan that involves sneaking in then dramatically revealing yourself, before bringing in an army of thousands, including lesbian Ninja Silurians, space-Spitfires, pirates and other cool-sounding things, as well as Sontarans, Judoons and anything else they don’t need to make a new costume for, and having them all have a massive fight in which all the NPCs die, but the baddie still escapes with the baby?
How did you score?
Mostly As You are the Doctor, you solve problems using your native intelligence, wit and knowledge, and try not to hurt people unnecessarily.
Mosty Bs Hello Mr Moffat!
I got an email today from my friend Bob Temuka, which I hope he won’t mind my quoting in part:
Bloody hell, there I am, watching the latest Doctor Who and really digging it, and then they have that bit where they point out that ‘Doctor’ now means warrior to many, and that he shouldn’t be getting away with the massive threats he lobs around based on his fearsome reputation, and all I can think is “Damn! Andrew Hickey was right all along!”
Moffat can be great at plotting (though in my opinion he *really* dropped the ball on the first two-parter this series) but where he falls down in my opinion is that he’s got no real moral or human centre to his writing. It’s all intricate clockwork, and wheels within wheels, but there’s no ghost in the machine. That means that it can very, very easily tip over into amorality.
Note I am *NOT* (unlike, say, Lawrence Miles) saying that Mr Moffat himself is amoral. It’s just that he doesn’t appear to think through the moral implications of his writing, or gives them far less consideration than the workings of his epic plotlines.
Last night’s episode was exciting, if clichéd – we knew from the very second that we saw the Headless Monks that one of them would be concealing the Doctor, who would reveal himself at a moment of maximum dramatic tension, but it did all those clichés very well, and there were some genuinely nice moments (the Doctor talking to the baby, the Sontaran nurse), but it still, ultimately, felt hollow. The characters were being jerked around in the service of the plot, rather than seeming to act from any consistent motivations.
Doctor Who at its best – the show I love, which I accept is only a small part of the programme as it was made – is a very small-scale thing, and mostly about the clash of ideas and worldviews rather than about epic space battles. From The Aztecs through to Ghost Light, all the best Doctor Who has been about a clash of characters, and could as easily have been performed as a stage play as on TV. The best of the Welsh series has been like that too, though I think that ‘best’ is a fairly small subset. That kind of thing necessitates developing a character with a strong moral centre – it might be one you disagree with (as when the Doctor destroys Skaro or kills off the Vervoids) but it’s as consistent a moral centre as a programme with multiple writers, script editors and lead actors could possibly have.
But these considerations seem alien to Moffat.
While last year’s series was definitely the best of the new series, this year’s hasn’t even been patchy so much as bad. We had a two-parter that was more plot hole than plot and which ended with the Doctor brainwashing the human race to become killers, a story about pirates that was pretty much the definition of average, a Neil Gaiman story by Neil Gaiman (by *far* the highlight of the year), a decent two-parter that was let down by an ending which contradicted all the moral arguments built up over the previous ninety minutes, and then a fun-but-empty 45 minutes of action-movie bombast. The series has been getting better since that appalingly bad two-parter at the start, but it’s still not reached even the average of last year.
One encouraging sign is that the budget is clearly now almost zero. They’re getting cleverer and cleverer at reusing sets, props and costumes, and this kind of limitation may yet be the making of the show.
I’m not (again unlike Miles) saying you’re wrong if you liked this series – there’s lots to like about it, which definitely wasn’t the case during the RTD era, and taking the last two series and the special as a whole, the trend has been mildly up overall, but this series is like a mix of Earthshock and Time Flight in roughly equal measure, when what I want is The Caves Of Androzani or Castrovalva.
Hugo Blogging 1: Chicks Dig Time Lords
I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to start reading more science fiction (especially as I’ve been *writing* more SF, and it’s a field that demands keeping up with what’s current). Other than Charles Stross, Greg Egan and Neal Stephenson, I’ve read fairly little from the last thirty years or so (oddly, while I prefer SF to fantasy, I’ve read far more fantasy from my own lifetime than SF), though I have an exhaustive knowledge of the field before that.
So I decided to get the Hugo packet, to get an idea of the current state of the best in the field, and vote in the Hugos for the first time.
(I note incidentally, that the Hugos are awarded by AV *and* have a ‘none of the above’ option and so are more democratic than our Commons elections will be. Not that I’m bitter. (I am bitter.))
While I’ve got it, I thought I might as well blog my reactions to the various entries as I read them. First up, an entry in the “Best Related Work” category
Chicks Dig Time Lords is a book I *wanted* to like. It’s published by Mad Norwegian, who among other books have published almost all the Faction Paradox books and the wonderful About Time series of guidebooks, and who are a very small independent company. And it’s about the female experience of fandom, something that’s been neglected.
I certainly wouldn’t have any hesitation in recommending it to some people, but I am so far from the target audience for this that it’s not funny. While the promotion for the book has described it as being about female fandom, it’s actually, for the most part, about a very specific part of female fandom – namely people who will use the word ‘squee’ on a regular basis. We’re actually, here, looking at a snapshot of a sub-subculture – one that grew up around the website Outpost Gallifrey and communities on LiveJournal in the middle of the last decade, one mostly based around enjoying the Welsh series, and one that is extremely uncritical of the show itself.
Now, this is not an invalid perspective, and it is one that deserves to be shared, but this book seems written for people who already have that perspective. Words like ‘squee’ or ‘aca-fan’ are thrown around with an assumption that one has the cultural context to appreciate not just the literal meaning of the words but some kind of subtextual nuance for them. (I had to google aca-fan, having never come across the term before).
Far too much of the book is made up of short autobiographical sketches of very similar-sounding people. There must be at least four or five essays in here which could be summed up as “I remember watching Tom Baker on the PBS affiliate for my Midwestern US state with my annoying kid brother when I was a kid in the 80s. All the other kids at my school thought I was weird for liking this weird English English weird English thing with wobbly sets, so I grew out of it. But then Russel T Davies brought it back and I fell in love with all the characters, especially Jack Harkness, and SQUEE!”
Now, again, I am not criticising this as a perspective – as one of the essays (by Kate Orman, one of the better writers involved) is titled, “If I Can’t Squee, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution”, and enthusiasm is the reason why anyone becomes a fan of anything. And I would have a *LOT* of explaining to do to my wife when she gets back from visiting her Minnesotan parents tomorrow if I tried to say that the perspective of women who grew up in the midwestern US in the 1980s didn’t deserve to be shared.
But I am, fundamentally, an analytical person. Descriptions of how something makes you feel do very little for me, compared to descriptions of *why* something makes you feel that way (or attempts to make the reader feel the same way). I also find it far more revealing sometime to talk about something’s failures than its successes – I’d rather read About Time or The Discontinuity Guide than something that didn’t talk about Doctor Who’s flaws, for the same reasons I’d rather read Liberator than a Lib Dem party press release. And the analytical is pretty much absent from this book. Which is OK. That’s not what it’s for. It’s a celebration. I’m just not a very celebratory person.
Of these autobiographical sketch things, the best by far is “Mathematical Excellence: A Documentary” by Seanan McGuire, which moves away from the generic and had me genuinely laughing quite hard, as well as being moved by the rather poignant ending. Most of the rest of the pieces in this vein are descriptions of emotions, while McGuire’s piece inspires those emotions in the reader. Maybe more of the other pieces would, if I were part of the target audience.
More interesting from my point of view are the descriptions of fan creativity – people talking about creating costumes for their own imagined characters in the Doctor Who fictional universe, or writing fan fiction, or making fan videos. This is something that female fandom has been far more willing to do than male fandom generally (all exceptions duly noted – of course any female/male split is an artificial division, but this book *exists* because of that artificial distinction) – to take elements of others’ work and reimagine them as elements in their own creative projects.
Still, though, by the nature of the book, these essays are too short to properly go into the issues involved or the process of making these things, and I get the impression that a far more interesting book (from my point of view) could have been made just using examples of this fan-art (though I understand that it would be prohibitively difficult to do legally). At least one representative piece of this fan art has been included, a comic strip called Torchwood Babiez. Unfortunately, it didn’t display properly in my ebook reader.
And the book is rounded out by a few interviews with women who have been involved in Doctor Who, mostly actors who have performed for Big Finish, which might be interesting to those who’ve not read interviews with these people before.
It sounds like I’m being terribly critical of this book, and I’m really not. If you’ve taken part in online new-Who fandom, especially on LiveJournal or the old Outpost Gallifrey, this book will probably be precisely your thing, and I know some of my friends have been and are part of that world. The writers are obviously intelligent, talented people for the most part, and I can’t imagine a better book of this type. But it’s emphatically not for me. But that’s OK – not everything has to be. It’s an open-hearted, welcoming, *friendly* book, and that I’m a cold-hearted joyless curmudgeon is, essentially, my problem, not the book’s.
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