About Time 4.1 (And Other Reviews)
So, first of all, thanks to everyone who joined my Patreon after my somewhat desperate Saturday appeal. We’ve still got a long way to go before this upheaval isn’t a major financial stress, so expect me to bang on about it for a while more, but the weekend was still a big relief.
To that end, I want to highlight a specific tier: the $10 a month tier, which gets you not only all my ebooks, Britain a Prophecy, and any new writing that isn’t intended for a specific venue, it gets you Britain a Prophecy serialized scene by scene as Penn and Nechama finish them, an exclusive set of ebooks called Apocrypha Eruditorum, more about which in a few weeks, and a log of all the media I watch, with reviews of a lot of it. I just posted one yesterday, which included a retrospective on Partners in Crime and a review of John Wick.
But one of the things I read last week was provided as a review copy, and it feels unfair to gate that review for Patrons. So here’s a sample of the sort of thing you can expect in the form of a review of the latest volume of About Time, Tat Wood’s exhaustive series of Doctor Who criticism.
About Time Volume 4.1: 1975-77
New volumes of Tat Woods’s astonishing About Time series are always intensely welcome events. In this case what we have is the first half of a revised version of Volume 4, which originally covered the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras in a single volume coauthored by Lawrence Miles that offered by far the scantest coverage of the series. Now we have the first half of a diptych, splitting Hinchcliffe and Williams into separate volumes and diving in with the kind of exhaustive hyper-detail that has characterized the series since Miles’s departure from it.
On one level, this is a small problem to have. Yes, About Time is marketing to a niche of obsessive fans—one that I’m obviously in having written what remains the only real Doctor Who criticism that you’d mention in the same breath as it. This is a staggeringly impressive book, full of rich detail and fascinating arguments. For the sort of obsessive Doctor Who fan it’s aimed at, it remains irreplaceable. I’d have much rather had it by my side than the original edition when writing the relevant era of TARDIS Eruditorum.
But that’s a literally unique use case, and for most use cases it’s hard not to feel like this edition is simply too much book. Certainly when one looks at the price tag—$40, twice the original edition, with Volume 4.2 slated to release in June for $45, ultimately more than quadruple the price. An expansion was certainly warranted—the original volume’s 328 pages are clearly too scant to do justice to six seasons of Doctor Who in the About Time attempts. But the new edition’s 864 pages and $85 price tag are equally clearly simply too much.
There are those of us obsessive enough not to care; I’d have bought this even if I hadn’t been given a review copy, and I’ll absolutely buy the next one if Lars understandably takes me off his review list for this review. And let’s be honest, if you’re reading this review either on the site that hosts TARDIS Eruditorum or on my Patreon, there’s a pretty good chance you are that kind of obsessive, and this book is worth getting. But if you shaved a hundred pages and $10 from each volume, you’d have something that was worth recommending to a more moderate level of Doctor Who obsessive without actually shortchanging the hardcore obsessives of anything important, and it’s hard not to wish they’d gone with that version.
About Time Volume 4.1 is available from Mad Norwegian Press.