Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Legends of Ashildr

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For all that we’ve been picking on the inadequacies of the standard book line, there had been efforts in the background to try new things. For a variety of reasons we didn’t cover efforts like Summer Falls and The Angel’s Kiss in the late Matt Smith era (actually just one reason, which was me saving things for the book), but they certainly represented one effort to change what the book line can and should do. The Legends of Ashildr represents a stab at another possible shape the books could take—anthologies of several short stories. Obviously there are some constraints around this. Just dumping a couple Doctor Who short story collections a year is an invitation for mediocrity with no obvious sales hooks. Whatever one might say about Big Bang Generation, it at least has a hook you can sell it with in a way that wouldn’t be true of a straightforward collection of shorts.

But what does work is grabbing gaps in the series and filling them with anthologies. So, for instance, when you have several hundred years of Ashildr/Me growing and developing as a character between the two halves of her debut you drop a collection of four stories filling in that gap. There aren’t necessarily a ton of things you can obviously do this with. There’s one other big one that we’ll get to towards the end of the era, and a few you could maybe imagining them doing something with that they didn’t (Osgood’s Zygon Adventures, Clara and Me, One Night on Darillium), though many of these start to get into a turf war with Big Finish who one assumes are absolutely dying for Maisie Williams and Jenna Coleman to have a spare weekend they can waste. 

(A quick aside on terminology, since calling people by their preferred names is kind of a thing for me. The credits for episodes list Maisie Williams as playing “Ashildr” in all but The Woman Who Died. This broadly tracks with the Doctor’s inclination—he seems to passive aggressively call her Ashildr as part of his efforts at “redeeming” her. But, well, fuck that sideways with a Tissue Compression Eliminator. I don’t think this is quite a deadname situation, as it’s less rejection of having ever been Ashildr than a statement of having grown and changed, and so I do not have  problems calling her Ashildr prior to her taking on her new name. As these stories keep calling her Ashildr even when doing internal narration [though note my concerns when we reach the final story], I’ll call her Ashildr in this entry, but she’ll be Me going forwards.) 

But when the opportunity presents itself it’s a clear occasion for knocking together a book that’s got a little more freedom to try things and be interesting. With four stories, any of them have the liberty to take risks or display ambition because if they fail there’s three other ones to pick up the slack. There’s opportunities to give new writers a chance.…

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Brave Viking Warriors Slain by the Curse (The Girl Who Died)

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A girl has no spacesuit

It’s October 17th, 2015. Justin Bieber is still at number one, with The Weeknd and Jamie Lawson newly entering the charts. In news, Home Office figures are released showing that hate crimes in England and Wales have risen by 18% in a year, and the first primary debate for the 2016 Democratic Party nomination is held in Las Vegas, over the course of which Donald Trump gained more Twitter followers from live-tweeting events than any of the actual candidates.

On television, meanwhile, it’s the return of Jamie Mathieson and the debut of Maisie Williams’s Ashildr/Me. Let’s start with the latter, as it’s Series Nine’s big piece of celebrity stunt casting, and one the show seeks greater mileage out of than, say, Keeley Hawes or David Suchet’s appearances. Part of this is that Maisie Williams is coming to Doctor Who from a currently-airing hit show. But Game of Thrones is not the cultural juggernaut in the UK that it is in the US; its all-time high ratings were 3.5m for the Season Seven finale, which is more than a million lower than Doctor Who’s worst-ever episode, and more to the point came two years after this aired; the record at the time was the Season Five debut, at 2.6 million. This is still quite good, especially for a premium channel like Sky Atlantic, but the fact remains that at least in the UK, Maisie Williams is moving up a weight class in appearing on Doctor Who; indeed she pulled four million more viewers for this than she ever had on Sky Atlantic, and it remains the highest rated thing she’s ever appeared on in her native country.

And yet all of the marketing treated this as an absolutely huge thing. Williams’s casting got headlines, she’s prominent in the promotional photos for both this and The Woman Who Lived, and her returns at the end of the season are treated as big, audience-pleasing surprises. This is low-key odd, to be sure, though not hard to explain. What matters, obviously, is that Maisie Williams’s celebrity impact is bolstered by the fact that she’s famous for appearing on a hit sci-fi/fantasy show. This isn’t unheard of in Doctor Who—consider the guest casting of Jacqueline Pearce in The Two Doctors. But the era we’re reaching back to there is significant as well. As with the continuity-packed opening of The Magician’s Apprentice, there’s a clear statement about what sort of show Doctor Who is and who its intended audience is. The show is unapologetically catering to genre fans. This obviously isn’t being done with the gross incompetence of the late-Saward/Nathan-Turner era, nor in a way that’s overtly hostile to other types of viewers, but the core audience here is very clearly geeks. It’s an expansive definition of geeks that’s miles from the sort that use phrases like “ethics in video game journalism,” but it’s geeks all the same.

That said, understanding Williams’s casting entirely through the lens of marketing is a mistake.…

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An Evolutionary Error They Obviously Mean to Correct (Under the Lake/Before the Flood)

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For once I don’t have a joke about this, it’s just a screenshot that adds further support to one of my points.

It’s October 3rd, 2015. Sam Smith has debuted at number one with “Writing’s On the Wall,” while the rest of the top ten is basically the same as last week. Justin Bieber takes the number one slot back a week later, when Philip George & Anton Powers and Drake also enter the charts, the latter with “Hotline Bling.” In news, NASA announces that there’s liquid water on Mars, which can’t mean anything bad at all, the US accidentally bombs a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan, and a mass shooter at Umpqua Community College in Oregon kills ten after apparently warning posters on 4chan to stay home from school. 

On television, meanwhile… *sigh*. Ultimately, every story about a hot streak ends the same way. No matter how imperiously brilliant, no matter how ambitious, eventually it all falls apart. The story of how it happened this time is simple enough: Moffat had to go make The Abominable Bride, and so needed two episodes of Doctor Who by someone he wasn’t going to extensively rewrite. With the frontline pick for that job also working on Sherlock with him, in came Toby Whithouse, who did what Toby Whithouse does, which is turn in a banal mix-and-match base under siege that’s not about anything but cliches about difficult men weighed down by the gravity of their serious morality. Actually it’s a step worse than we’re used to from Whithouse, who could previously be trusted to have some semblance of plot logic whereby a majority of events either set up other events or were themselves set up. Here, however, we just have a melange of Doctor Who cliches flowing into one another without anything that can traditionally be recognized as reasons. It’s not merely derivative crap, it’s incoherent and pointless derivative crap.

But we have 2000 words to spend on it all the same, so let’s see what we can do. Let’s start with the basic setup of the base, since it is, charitably, really weird. This is a pretty committedly fanwanky story, with explicit references to Dark Water/Death in Heaven, The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, Kill the Moon, The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, The God Complex, a throwaway about the Autons, and probably a few others I can’t be bothered to go looking for, and so it would be malpractice not to contextualize this in the larger timeline of Doctor Who. The problem, simply put, is that this ends up being completely mad. The contextualization in terms of Kill the Moon makes conspicuous the fact that this is set sixty years after The Waters of Mars, and thus thirty years after Susie Fontana Brooke’s lightspeed trip to Proxima Centauri. We are, in other words, well into the space-based future. Stories that have taken place by this point include Paradise Towers and Nightmare of Eden, which is to say that Earth is setting up colonies and expanding across the galaxy.…

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It Was On The Planet Skaro (The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar)

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The hand mines were understandably agrieved that nobody had ever asked if they wanted chairs.

It’s September 19th, 2015. Justin Bieber is at number one with “What Do You Mean,” while Sigala, the Weeknd, Ellie Goulding, Calvin Harris and Disciples, and Rachel Platten also chart. In news since the whole Dream Crab infestation got cleared up, gunmen killed twelve in the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a Saudi Arabia-led coalition intervened in the civil war in Yemen, FIFA was rocked by a corruption scandal when US officials arrested a host of officials leading to the farcical scene of Sepp Blatter handily winning reelection as FIFA President and then stepping down a week later, the newly elected leftist government of Greece held a referendum on whether to defy the European Union on debt repayment and then immediately ignored the result. In the week before the story aired Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister in Australia, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, and it emerged that Volkswagen had been cheating on emissions tests, while over the week it aired John Boehner announced his resignation as Speaker of the House.

On television, Doctor Who is back. Last time we spoke about an actual episode, we noted that there would inevitably be some sort of price paid for the show’s arrogance, and particularly the decision to avoid changing things up at the end of Series Eight. Here, off the bat, we see it: 1.1 million viewers shed from Death in Heaven to The Magician’s Apprentice, and another .8 million for The Witch’s Familiar. This is the first time in the new series that a season premiere hasn’t broken the top ten, and the first time since The Eleventh Hour that a season premiere failed to top the previous season’s finale, and that was following the rather special case of Journey’s End. The previous nadirs of the new series ratings were, numerically, The Satan Pit with 6.0 million and Silence in the Library in 27th. Series 9 would see those records broken twice apiece, with The Witch’s Familiar and Under the Lake both notching record low numbers (5.7 and 5.6) while Sleep No More and Face the Raven came in at 28th and 30th place respectively, resulting in the first-ever season with no top ten episodes whatsoever. And the damage would continue into Series 10, which bottomed out with The Eaters of Light pulling just 4.7m viewers. (Which is actually the fewest viewers to tune into a Rona Munro episode ever, episode two of Survival having managed 4.8.)

It is easy to overstate how big of a problem this is, and numerous threads on GallifreyBase devoted to exactly that. A show that’s never dropped out of the top 30 and continues to produce massive international sales and significant merchandising is in no meaningful danger of cancellation. Doctor Who is simply too important to the modern BBC’s finances to be cancelled without some genuine efforts at improving it.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: Big Bang Generation

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Books like this always pose something of a problem for the project. On the one hand, a book like this, in which Peter Capaldi’s Doctor goes on an adventure with Bernice Summerfield, is irresistible to a project like this. Once I discovered it existed there was literally never a point where I considered not covering it. The new series intersecting with the Wilderness Years at the point where it’s about to come as close to niche interest as it has been allowed to. The possibilities are vast. Except, of course, for the other hand, which is that it’s by Gary Russell. I ranted a bit in the Blood Cell entry about the inexplicable failure of spinoff media to move beyond the same handful of names who have been around since the Wilderness Years, many of them firmly among the B-list of that era. But Gary Russell takes this to another level, or rather several of them. For one thing, he’s been around far longer than the Wilderness Years, having been a prominent figure in Doctor Who at least since his 1984 Doctor Who Magazine review that described Warriors of the Deep as, and I quote, “a flawless story.” While this can probably be chalked up to the magazine’s official editorial policy of “please Mr. Nathan-Turner can we have some more,” it also proves a distressing augury of his own talents. His novels tend to ostentatiously fill high profile gaps—he’s written Liz Shaw’s departure, Mel’s first appearance, and Colin Baker’s regeneration—but to have little ambition for doing so beyond ticking the relevant boxes, and generally a few more to boot. 

And so it’s helpful to begin with what could be interesting about Big Bang Generation, figuring that we’ll move on to what it actually does afterwards. One possibility, of course, is to contrast her with the character she almost certainly partially inspired, River Song. This option, admittedly, was not available to Russell and its foreclosure is in fact why this book exists—he’d pitched a Twelve/River novel but been shot down by Moffat, who had his own plans in this regard and suggested Benny as an alternative. The book still alludes to the similarities between the characters, but detailed exploration is left to Big Finish, who will surely get there some day.

Another plan would be what I alluded to above, exploring the Wilderness Years’ liminal status and generally celebrating the weird gap in Doctor Who. This has merit, in that the Wilderness Years had room to do things that the popularity and legitimacy of the new series denies it, but the new series is, as mentioned, about to go into a kind of weird niche moment. And it would just be nice to have a nice little monument to the trappings of the Wilderness Years. Russell even comes close to this at one point, with a flashback montage of companions that consists of Benny, Clara, Amy, Rory, River, Wilf, Donna, Martha, Captain Jack, Mickey, Rose, Cinder, Molly O’Sullivan, tamsin drew, Lucie Miller, Cr’izz, Charley, Samson and Gemma Griffin, Mary Shelley, Grace Holloway, Ace, Hex, Mel, and Evelyn Smythe.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

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I’m not going to faff about pretending the justification for this involves Peter Harness’s chances of someday showrunning Doctor Who. I mean, I’d obviously love if that happened, but I don’t expect it (or think that we’re in a place to talk about who should succeed Chibnall yet anyway). No, the reason I’m picking this as our stopover reality between Last Christmas and the start of Series Nine is more idiosyncratic: having declared Harness’s debut the best Doctor Who story ever, I feel obliged to keep a bit of track of his work. 

Anyway, this provides an interesting counterpoint to The Game. Like that series, it is an attempted breakout series that didn’t quite work out. It was announced at about the same time as The Game, and went into production two months later. And like The Game, it lingered around not being released for a curiously long time. Its fate wasn’t quite ignominious—instead of getting pre-empted by BBC America and then demoted to BBC Two, it stayed on BBC One but got burned off over the summer—but it was still visibly allowed to fail. To some extent, the same reason applies for both series, which is that they were commissioned in the latter days of Ben Cohen’s time as BBC One controller and then inherited by his successor who deprioritized them in favor of things she commissioned—a fate suffered by countless films and series at countless companies.

But The Game was also a legitimate turkey, whereas Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a fantastic, high-quality adaptation of the sort that the BBC is renowned for. It’s not flawless—it’s a back-loaded series whose last couple episodes are brilliant but whose first two are dominated by patient scene-setting, a problem that explains how it burnt off two of its four-and-a-half million viewers after the frist episode. But it’s solid at its worst and brilliant at its best, and spends more time being the latter than the former. Where The Game disappeared into oblivion, this has maintained a perfectly respectable afterlife on streaming services and was more to the point well-reviewed even at the time. 

Perhaps more to the point, it is television that actually feels like it belongs to the 2010s. Although clearly rooted in the angst of two white men, it’s deeply interested in women and minorities. The series consistently focuses on the way in which the people who most often pay the cost of the feud between Strange and Norrell are those on the margins of society, most obviously Lady Pole, Arabella, Stephen, all of whom become prisoners of faerie because of the two magicians’ actions. Its resolution reiterates this point, declaring Strange and Norrell to be essentially irrelevant and focusing instead on those characters and a couple members of the poor and working class. 

There are limits to this approach; it’s still anchored by the titular magicians. It fleshes out the people in the margins, but they remain marginal. Yes, there is a measure of historical accuracy to this—white men dominated the 18th century.…

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Red Bicycle When You Were Twelve (Last Christmas)

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I have a cat with chronic upper respiratory issues, and about once a day she just starts sneezing really hard and snots all over her face.

It’s December 25th, 2014. X-Factor winner Ben Haenow is at number one with “Something I Need,” with Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars, Take That, One Direction, Taylor Swift, and Ed Sheeran also charting, the latter with “Thinking Out Loud,” which has been clanking about the charts since before Deep Breath, cracking the top ten in the same week as Flatline, and not leaving it since. In news since the Brigadier returned from the dead as a Cyberman, the US resumed normal relations between the US and Cuba, while riots broke out in Ferguson after Darren Brown was not indicted. In the country we actually care about, meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon becameFirst Minister of Scotland, while her predecessor Alex Salmond announced that he’ll stand for parliament, and the Church of England allowed women to be appointed as bishops and Libby Lane became the first person to do so.

While on television, nothing; an entire episode that writes itself off as a dream. So Moffat is continuing in the vein of cheeky arrogance, doing an episode that flagrantly commits one of the stereotypical “bad writing” twists. That this is the second time in his tenure an episode has resolved this way softens the brashness slightly, but Amy’s Choice tried to deflect from the glibness of its resolution with the simultaneous reveal of the Dream Lord’s true identity and by positioning itself as a serious-minded character piece, at least within the context of Doctor Who. Last Christmas, on the other hand, revels in its final twist, pulling an accelerating series of “it was all a dream!” reveals building up to the final episode-encompassing one so that there’s no way for the focus to go anywhere other than the ostentatious use of a cliche.

It’s dubious, however, whether any other approach could have possibly worked. We are steadily approaching the inevitable peak of Moffat’s ambition. With Last Christmas following so closely on Series Eight and being so distant from Series Nine, it functions much more as a second season finale than as a stand-alone or prelude. And with Moffat deciding to retain the same TARDIS team his only option was to keep the momentum and barrel into Christmas with the same energy that had suffused the back half of the season. Indeed, even Death in Heaven presented Last Christmas as its continuation, cutting into the credits to metatextually critique the episode as a resolution and promise a further installment of the Doctor and Clara’s story. 

And so we get Inception meets Alien, only with Santa Claus. Like a Mummy on the Orient Express or the moon being an egg, this is an exquisitely well-balanced concept. It is oversignified to a precise degree that only Doctor Who can get away with—not quite so over the top as to be unmanageable, but sufficiently so that it feels appealingly audacious.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: The Game

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It’s been a while since Toby Whithouse has entered our tale, and things have changed a lot since then. In the leadup to Twice Upon a Time Moffat joked that he’d had Whithouse write for every season, and the one time he didn’t he made him write two the next season. This is true, but obscures the fact that Whithouse contributed to the first half of the split Series Seven such that there were three full years between A Town Called Mercy and his next contribution. When A Town Called Mercy aired he still seemed like one of the most likely heirs apparent. There remain rumors that in the fuss about Moffat’s slower pace of production than Davies Whithouse had been offered the opportunity of stepping in as some sort of co-showrunner or to helm a single season, which he supposedly declined as the obviously poisoned chalice it was. And my past treatment of his work, going back to covering No Angels as a Pop Between Realities prior to School Reunion, has been rooted in the assumption that he’d probably get the job. Obviously that’s not what happened, though. 

So what’s Whithouse been doing for two years? Well, that’s basically the problem. After a shortened fifth season of Being Human with none of the original cast in early 2013, Whithouse basically disappeared. His next project had been announced in November 2012 as a 1970s spy series to be called The Game, and it started shooting in August of 2013. At the time, this sounded like his big audition piece—the big BBC One drama with which he’d prove that he he could hack it in the big leagues. Instead, however, it got shuffled down the schedule, eventually making its debut on BBC America in Fall 2014, where it got next to no coverage and largely sunk like a stone. When it finally got a UK airing it was Spring 2015, and it had been demoted to BBC Two. Clearly it was a turkey, and Whithouse basically exited the conversation around possible next showrunners, not least because Chris Chibnall had made exactly the sort of splash with Broadchurch that Whithouse didn’t.

Let’s look at the show where Whithouse blew the mandate of heaven, then. The Game follows an elite MI-5 team as they investigate a seemingly massive Russian operation involving sleeper agents in the UK. You’ve got a pretty standard set of stock characters: Brian Cox is charming as MI-5 head “Daddy,” Paul Ritter is the poorly closeted gay high society type, Chloe Pirrie is the secretary who proves terribly competent and eventually becomes an agent in her own right, Victoria Hamilton is what in a more contemporary setting would be the profiler, Jonathan Aris is her autism-spectrum husband/audio specialist, Shaun Dooley is a cop assigned to MI-5, and Tom Hughes is the protagonist, Joe Lambe, who was blatantly cast on the principle of “cast me somebody who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch only a decade younger.” 

The plot of the six episode series concerns the fact that there’s obviously a mole in the division.…

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Oh, Brilliant! (Dark Water/Death in Heaven)

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Missy shows off her new Photographic Vanity Eliminator

It’s November 1st, 2014. Meghan Trainor remains at number one before Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” unseats her. One Direction, Parra, Sam Smith, and Fuse ODG also chart. In news, Blaise Compaoré resigns as president of Burkina Faso, the IPCC repeats the fact that climate change is really bad, and Matthew Williams demonstrates his passionate Torchwood fandom by killing and eating a woman before being killed by a police taser. Also the US midterm elections happen, flipping the Senate back to Republican control and seeing a wealth of Republican governor elected. 

While on television, Series Eight of Doctor Who takes its bow, finding itself ending in a strikingly different place to where it began. What started with a tentative classicism has steadily acquired a swagger and confidence unseen in years. There are a handful of periods in the series like this, where every trick works and every gamble pays off so that even a flawed experiment like In the Forest of the Night or The Chase comes off as sympathetic instead of as a faceplant. What is key about this is not merely quality—there are loads of good runs of stories—but rather a particular sort of bravery. This isn’t a run like the old Season Five, which spat out six rock solid but frustratingly interchangeable bases under siege on either side of its one actual masterpiece. Rather this is like the very tail end of the Hinchcliffe era, where the show dances giddily from the avant garde dreamscape of The Deadly Assassin to the mature SF Face of Evil to an Agatha Christie pastiche with robots before settling down for The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

Even on those terms, however, Dark Water/Death in Heaven stands out. Its first fifteen minutes are unprecedented in Doctor Who, and can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best material of any other show in the history of the medium. It starts at an eleven with Danny’s sudden death and then simply doesn’t let up until it finally offers the release of cutting to him in the afterlife. The volcano confrontation is a majestic payoff to the development that Clara has been given; it’s a scene that would be unimaginable with any other character, or even with Clara just six episodes earlier. The intensity and way in which both Clara and the Doctor escalate the situation is edge-of-the-seat stuff, not because there’s any real sense that Clara might forever seal the Doctor outside of the TARDIS but because the idea of the Doctor and the companion doing things like this to one another is constantly remaining unthinkable right up until the moment the words come out of their mouths. And the subsequent TARDIS scene, with its emotional denouement of “do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference,” is simply perfect. It’s probably the most intense fifteen minutes of television in Moffat’s career, and there’s not actually a single monster or indeed antagonist in the whole thing.…

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An Unearthly Book Relaunch

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Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the rerelease of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: William Hartnell after several months of being off-sale. This book contains edited and expanded versions of all of the Hartnell-era blogposts alongside nineteen book-exclusive essays on topics including Dan Dare comics, David Whitaker’s novelization of The Daleks, An Adventure in Space and Time, and a variety of novels and Big Finish audios.

The book is available at the following links. 

Amazon US: Kindle, Paperback

Amazon UK: Kindle, Paperback

Smashwords (for non-Kindle e-readers)

If you’ve already purchased the book through Amazon or Smashwords you should be able to re-download it and have it immediately update to the new version. If you’ve already bought a paper copy, I regret that I cannot automatically update it for you. The contents of this edition and the previous one are substantially the same; the main difference is that my name is correct. There are two new essays, one on Big Finish’s The Beginning, the other on their First Doctor Adventures box set, but these are deliberately minor treats presented as plums for obsessive people who feel obliged to rebuy the book as opposed to incentives to get anyone to do so.

Thanks to everyone who has bought a copy in the past or who intends to buy one now. And especially thanks to James Taylor both for the cover and for the update to it.…

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