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I’m Sorry, Sir, You Have No Clearance (First Frontier)

40

I’ll Explain Later

We skipped the largely disliked Strange England by Simon Messingham. He gets better in the BBC Books line.

First Frontier, David McIntee’s second novel, mashes up American UFO myths with Doctor Who, and then, about halfway through, pulls off the return of the Master. The book is altogether lighter than White Darkness, although maintains McIntee’s fondness for lengthy action sequences, upon which its reputation largely hinges. Craig Hinton proclaims it to be “another winner from Mr. McIntee,” while Lars Pearson, who had been skeptical about McIntee’s first effort as well, says that the book “needed to shed about 100 pages and not end with a whimper.” On the whole this novel is apparently stunningly average – thirty-third out of sixty-one on Sullivan’s rankings, with a 68.5% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s September of 1994. “Love is All Around,” improbably, is still at number one, having landed there way back in June. They stay there for the first two weeks of the month before Whigfield finally takes them down with “Saturday Night.” Boyz II Men, Blur, Kylie Minogue, R.E.M., and Bon Jovi also chart.

Since last we checked in, a fire wiped out the Norwich Central Library. Woodstock ’94 happened, because nothing commemorates the spirit of the 1960s like a massive corporate remake. And the Provisional Irish Republican Army announces a complete halt to all military options. While during the month this book comes out, Louise Jensen is raped and murdered by British soldiers in Cyprus, the US carries out a bloodless invasion of Haiti, and, in a desperate attempt to let me have three items in this sentence, Andrew Wiles proves Fermat’s Last Theorem again.

And in books, First Frontier. Since the “I’ll Explain Later” section robs me of any chance to bury the lead, we may as well start with the big deal, which is that this book features the return of the Master. Actually, this is still burying the lead slightly, as the real story is in many ways not that the Master is back but that the New Adventures have decided to regenerate him, with the Ainley version of the Master getting shot down by Ace in one of the novel’s innumerable action sequences. This is an unusual move. For a variety of reasons it is unrealistic to have the novels maintain the status quo of the television series – and indeed they haven’t, both introducing Benny and evolving Ace into New Ace.

Nevertheless, there are degrees of this sort of thing. None of the wilderness years lines ever made a sincere attempt at regenerating the Doctor. The only wilderness year regeneration was on television. And the reason for this is relatively obvious: it’s done so that if the series returns to television it can, in theory, pick up where it left off. Even the aging of Ace in Deceit only serves to advance her age by as many years had passed since Survival, effectively keeping Ace and Sophie Aldred’s ages in line.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 42 (The X-Files, Ghostwatch, Twin Peaks)

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We have already discussed in passing the rise of conspiracy theories and a fascination with UFOs in the 1990s. Since the next book we want to deal with is David McIntee’s First Frontier, the New Adventures’ big stab at a 1950s UFO story, it is, I suppose, time to deal with that more thoroughly. The obvious text to look at here is, of course, The X-Files, though we’ll circle back and find a larger pool of things in a bit. 

Unfortunately, if you’re tracking the influence of The X-Files on Doctor Who it is difficult not to have the bulk of it be overwhelmingly negative. The story goes roughly like this: the success of The X-Files, which became Fox’s most successful show among its desired advertising demographic, let to Fox doubling down on “cult” television. This is a phenomenon we’ve talked about in passing a few times, but as we’re finally on the big watershed show in terms of it, we may as well deal with it. The basic idea of cult television is that it has a smaller audience than standard-issue “hit” television, but that its audience is exceedingly loyal. From a studio perspective the advantages of this are twofold. First, loyal audiences buy tie-in merchandise. Second, even though the audiences of cult programs are smaller, they are disproportionately young males with disposable income, a demographic that emits pheromones known to drive advertisers into a lusty stupor. And with The X-Files Fox discovered, or at least thought it had discovered, a reliable formula for this. And so one of the first things they did was agree to fund a TV Movie of an existing cult sci-fi property, specifically a cancelled British television series, which they did straight-up in The X-Files style, right down to filming it in Vancouver. But that’s another post.

Here I am more interested in The X-Files from a cultural perspective, and specifically as an artifact reflecting the role of paranoia in the 1990s and in sci-fi fandom. That The X-Files is a paranoid show ought go without saying. Its entire ordering principle is based around the mythology of government conspiracies to hide the existence of extra-terrestrial life. In this regard it is not alone – in the UK there was, not too long before The X-Files made its debut, the one-off drama Ghostwatch, in which the illusion of a spectral invasion of the BBC was assembled to considerable outcry as popular hosts, including a former Blue Peter presenter, are possessed, murdered, and other such fun. And also in the US is Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s surrealist triumph of a television series.

What is it that links this set together, exactly? The presence of secrets, first and foremost. All three are concerned with the prospect that there is a hidden truth behind things, waiting to bubble up. What is remarkable about Ghostwatch is not so much its existence or style as the way in which it provided a modern day version of the Orson Wells War of the Worlds panic.…

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Vampires in the Stories are Just Pale Imitations of the Real Thing (Blood Harvest)

40

You Were Expecting Someone Else

Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks, is the other portion of the two book cycle that kicks off the Missing Adventures line, the other being the already-talked-about Goth Opera by Paul Cornell. It’s a sequel to State of Decay and practically every story ever on Gallifrey, with Al Capone thrown in to boot. At the time Craig Hinton wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but claimed his “overall impression was of an exciting, compelling book.” Lars Pearson says almost the exact same thing, but says that “Blood Harvest succeeds despite these flaws.” The overall consensus is average – twenty-eighth on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s July of 1994. Wet Wet Wet remain at number one with “Love is All Around,” and remain there all month.  Both Reel 2 Real and All-4-One also chart, as do the BC-52s, and, less numerically, Take That and Erasure. Andres Escobar is shot and killed in Medellin, an incident widely believed to be revenge for his scoring an own goal in the 1994 World Cup, which Brazil wins later in the month. Fourteen firefighters die in a wildefire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Fragments of Shoemaker-Levy begin hitting Jupiter. Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty, and a bomb explodes outside the Israeli Embassy in London. And Tony Blair wins the leadership election for the Labour Party, so he gets to start being a character in these things I suppose.

While on bookshelves, Blood Harvest. I realized, as I thought about this post, that I am fairly sure this is the third-to-last time we’re actually going to cover a Terrance Dicks story. We’ve got The Eight Doctors, we’ll do one of his two New Series “Quickreads” books, but those are actually the last of the Terrance Dicks material we’re going to look at. And so it’s perhaps time to knuckle down and deal with one of those oft-punted topics that I’ve gestured at broadly, namely Terrane Dicks’s politics.

Let’s first set this up in terms of All-Consuming Fire, a book witch which Blood Harvest shares more than a passing resemblance. Both are Doctor Who stories in the classic “mash up some genres” mode, with Blood Harvest combining Doctor Who, vampires, and gangster noir. Both take their relatively mental premises and have a great deal of fun with them. All-Consuming Fire is in several ways better put together – the seams between the Chicago gangster bits with the Doctor and Ace and the E-Space vampire bits with Romana and Benny are weak, and the two settings barely manage to converge at the end. Still, the book is firmly in the range of “great fun,” and is yet another Doctor Who book that clearly has a sense of glee at the fact that it’s Doctor Who, and thus can casually do vampire gangster noir.

Dicks also does a better job than anyone gives him credit for in writing McCoy’s Doctor. This is still McCoy the chessmaster, with an elaborate plan he’s not telling anyone, and Dicks captures that while keeping it comfortably on the same spectrum as other versions of the Doctor.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 33 (The Shadow of the Scourge)

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While Paul Cornell is not the most popular writer to come out of the Virgin era, of the major and acclaimed writers of the Virgin era it is perhaps Cornell who is most indelibly associated with it. Kate Orman penned nearly as many novels for BBC Books as she did for Virgin. Gareth Roberts didn’t write for BBC Books, but was always open about the fact that his real home was the Graham Williams era. And nobody was ever going to mistake Mark “any old fucker with an Equity card” Gatiss for a Sylvester McCoy fan. But Paul Cornell was unambiguously a Sylvester McCoy fan above all other Doctors, and given how many of the iconic New Adventures he wrote it is that era, more than any other, that he’s associated with.

And so it was not in the least bit surprising that when Big Finish decided to do an audio set in the New Adventures era they called on Paul Cornell to write it. But Cornell’s association with the New Adventures was in many ways misleading, in that for all his influence on the line he was, in many ways, diametrically opposed to what the New Adventures were most often taken to be like. The New Adventures are, by reputation, the Doctor Who of the dark, grim, and gritty nineties, with the Doctor as a ruthless chessmaster who manipulates the entire universe. It should already be clear that this reputation is only part of the story, but equally, it’s a real part of it. But if the New Adventures are like that and Paul Cornell is the definitive New Adventure writer than it seems like it should follow that Cornell’s work is like that.

And here we get the rub. Back in the entry on The Highest Science we talked about the rad/trad distinction between books, and why it doesn’t quite work. But there’s a second major distinction between types of Doctor Who, which is the “gun vs frock” debate. We should perhaps start by pointing out that this is a spectacularly loaded framing of a debate. In one corner you have the gun, an implement which the Doctor is typically defined in part by his tendency not to carry. In the other you have the frock coat, which the Doctor habitually wears. So it’s pretty clear which side of the debate whoever framed it falls on, and that is in turn something that influences the tone of the debate. Scads of people identify as frocks, but guns are all “those people.”

The rough contours of the debate are that “gun” writers want Doctor Who to be terribly serious and straightforward, full of violence and properly bad bad guys who are scary and terrifying and must be stopped at great cost. Earthshock, if you want a classic series episode, is probably the gunniest of gun stories. Or Inferno. Terry Nation is a reliably “gun” writer. Frock stories, on the other hand, are camp and fun, and tend to feature the Doctor getting villains to bring themselves down through the consequences of their own schemes.…

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The Gutter Scrapings of Shanghai (All-Consuming Fire)

39

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped the quite-good Tragedy Day and Theatre of War, as well as the quite awful Legacy. They are, in order, a Gareth Roberts romp, a novel that establishes a ton of New Adventures-specific mythology that won’t really ever play in that heavily, and a Peladon story as bad as the last one.

All-Consuming Fire is a Doctor Who/Sherlock Holmes/HP Lovecraft mashup by Andy Lane, though only the first two of these were particularly advertised. It’s written as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, with all but a few sections being narrated by Watson (Benny gets a few sections as well). The format puts the Doctor and company relatively in the background – Benny doesn’t appear at all until the halfway point, and Ace is limited to the final third or so, while the Doctor vanishes for lengthy chunks of time. Still, it’s well-liked. Craig Hinton at the time called it “a brilliant pastiche and a compulsive read,” while Lars Pearson goes with “a little long, but damn fine work.” The Sullivan rankings put it at eleventh place.

——

It’s June of 1994. Wet Wet Wet are at number one with “Love is All Around,” having just knocked out Manchester United with “Come On You Reds.” They remain there all month. Prodigy, Guns ’n Roses, Ace of Base, and Mariah Carey also chart. In albums, you’ve got The Cranberries. Lower in the charts are Nine Inch Nails with “Closer,” but the truth is that that’s mostly interesting for the US, as Nine Inch Nails never did all that well in the UK despite the fact that virtually all of their musical influences were British.

In news, since No Future the US Supreme Court made a key ruling that parody is a valid example of fair use, a case that is also entertaining in that it requires us to imagine Antonin Scalia listening to 2 Live Crew. US troops withdrew from Somalia. Silvio Berlusconi made one of his periodic assents to power in Italy. The Rwandan Genocide began, Kurt Cobain killed himself, and Nelson Mandela became the president of South Africa. Also, John Smith, leader of the Labour Party, died of a massive heart attack, leading to Tony Blair becoming leader of the party in July (after the requisite political wrangling with Gordon Brown). While during this month South Africa rejoins the British Commonwealth, a one month ceasefire lasts only a few days in the Yugoslav War, and the early stages of that great 1990s obsession of the US, the OJ Simpson trial, begin. Also, Microsoft announces that it’s killing off MS-DOS, and Aum Shinrikyo a sarin gas attack in Japan killing seven. And Dennis Potter dies.

And then, in books, All-Consuming Fire. There is a revealing moment, a ways into All-Consuming Fire, in which Benny, explaining the history of India, refers to the 1857 uprising and talks about the ammunition cartridges that were said to be made with animal fat, specifically pork or beef fat. And the Benny comments that, “of course, the Hindus couldn’t touch pork and the Muslims couldn’t touch beef.”…

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I Just Do The Best I Can (No Future)

22

I’ll Explain Later

No Future is the final book of the Alternate History cycle, and the third book in Paul Cornell’s loosely themed quartet. It features the resolution to the tensions among the TARDIS crew, as well as the return of the Vardans, the Meddling Monk, UNIT, and a Chronovore. Paul Cornell himself is on record as not being fond of the book, and nor was Craig Hinton at the time, saying that “we’ve seen it all before” and that “it doesn’t live up to expectations.” Thad said, he rather inexplicably describes Cornell’s writing style as “street-cred cyberpunk,” which really ought disqualify his viewpoints. (That he expresses disbelief that Ace would betray the Doctor over Jan when, in fact, that’s a complete red herring and the point is that Ace wouldn’t betray the Doctor over Jan makes this even more frustrating. I mean, I don’t usually thwap the reviewers here, but this one is a crappy review.) Lars Pearson is more praiseful, calling it “one of the strongest novels.” Fan consensus tends to side with him, putting it at sixteenth of the sixty-one New Adventures. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s February of 1994. D:Ream are still at number one with “Things Can Only Get Better.” Two weeks later it’s Mariah Carey with “Without You,” which closes out the month. This is uninspiring, as is the collection of other things to chart: Toni Braxton, Celine Dion, Reel 2 Real, and Ace of Base, the latter, inevitably, with “The Sign.” More fitting for the book we have on tap, Tori Amos’s Under the Pink debuts at number one, her lone number one album in the UK charts.

In news, Byron De La Beckwith is finally convicted for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, an American civil rights leader. He had previously twice avoided conviction when all-white juries deadlocked on his guilt. In one of these trials a former governor of Mississippi interrupted the trial to shake Beckwith’s hand. In Norway, “The Scream” is stolen in Oslo on the same day that the Winter Olympics open in Lillehammer. Police excavate the garden of Fred West, a serial killer, in Gloucester. And the Bosnian War drags brutally on.

While in literature, we have a Doctor Who book that tries to extend the UNIT era the few years further into the punk era, finally tackling the one great subculture that Doctor Who never fully embraced. In which Doctor Who finally makes direct reference to the Situationists and deals with anarchism as a social movement and philosophy instead of a vaguely defined tendency. One that smashes together huge swaths of continuity, revamping UNIT for the umpteenth time. And one that finally tackles and sorts out the tensions among the TARDIS crew. It is, in other words, a staggeringly ambitious, big novel. Clearly the only person who could be trusted to write it is Paul Cornell, at this point by far the established “marquee” writer for the Virgin line.

The book itself has a reputation for being a bit disjointed.…

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Outside the Government 4 (The Dark Dimension, Dimensions in Time, [More than] Thirty Years in the TARDIS)

, 19

When I turned thirty about a month ago, I comforted myself with the fact that it wasn’t possible to have turning thirty be more depressing for me than it had been for Doctor Who. If the ten anniversary had been a manic burst of glam with a dash of William Blake and the twentieth a banal but more or less inoffensive litany of the show’s past, the thirtieth was a gi?. Even the official thirtieth anniversary logo had a whiff of the funerary, 1993 seeming penciled in by some BBC executive optimistic that it might be time at last to bury this whole embarrassing spectacle for once and for all. For the fortieth anniversary, at least, we got an announcement that the show would be back on the air in two years. For the thirtieth we got an almost tangible absence – an anniversary that was observed but not celebrated. That is not to say, however, that there was absolutely nothing Doctor Who related on television. There were three Doctor Who television projects, in fact, two of which actually happened.

We’ll start with the big absence, The Dark Dimension. The commissioning and production process on this is a complex mess, with a variety of reasons given for why the project failed. Its writer and primary hype engine, Adrian Rigelsford, is a controversial figure to say the least. He’s primarily a writer of non-fiction books about popular culture, but he’s been subject to no shortage of accusations of things like fabricating quotes and interviews, including a fraudulent “Stanley Kubrick’s final interview.” He’s also, you know, been to jail over stealing photos from the Daily Mail picture library and selling them, which, given that it’s the Mail, actually may make him more of a folk hero. Regardless, it means that it’s enormously difficult to get at anything that could fairly be called the “truth” about this production.

Some things are relatively easily established. The script, for instance, has leaked, and we’ll talk about it shortly. It appears that Rigelsford managed to get BBC Enterprises, the arm of the BBC that handled commercial material, to sign off on a direct-to-video Doctor Who story for the thirtieth anniversary. Eventually the BBC proper found out about this and raised a bit of a fuss, since BBC Enterprises wasn’t supposed to be a production unit, but Enterprises persisted and the BBC proper acquiesced with an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude. The problem was that Rigelsford and Enterprises weren’t a production unit, and had no idea what they were doing. The project, by all accounts, could never have worked. Its budget was a joke, and Enterprises mishandled just about everything involved with it, completely botching the negotiations with the actors. The script was, in practice, primarily a Tom Baker story with the other Doctors reduced to cameos. As it turns out, neither the actors nor their agents were fond of that, especially since BBC Enterprises clearly just assumed they’d take the roles and hadn’t even negotiated properly.…

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This Was Altogether Impossible (Conundrum)

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Steve Lyons’s Conundrum is the fourth and penultimate part of the Alternate History arc. It’s another sequel book, this time to The Mind Robber, so clearly I’m going to have some things to say below. As with much of this book arc, it’s also largely about ratcheting up the tensions within the TARDIS, and everyone is at everyone else’s throats for much of the book. It is quite acclaimed – indeed, the most popular of the five books, coming in tenth place on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings. Craig Hinton claimed it as an “absolute masterpiece,” while Lars Pearson calls it “Tremendous.” So obviously I’m going to have something terrible to say. Before that, however, the DWRG summary and Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s January of 1994. Mr. Blobby is still at number one. This comes to a swift end, as Chaka Demus and Pliers get to number one with “Twist and Shout” featuring Jack Radics and Taxi Gang, which seems like far too many people for “Twist and Shout.” Two weeks later it’s unseated by D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better,” which plays out the month, keeping “All For Love” by Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting out of number one. That also seems like too many artists, really, for anything. Culture Beat, Eternal, Haddaway, Depeche Mode, Toni Braxton, and Tori Amos all make the top ten as well, the latter with “Cornflake Girl.”

In the news, NAFTA is properly established. Nancy Kerrigan is whacked in the leg, setting off one of the greatest sports melodramas ever. In one of the greatest purely symbolic acts of foreign relations ever, the US and Russia sign the Kremlin accords, agreeing not to actually point their nuclear weapons at each other but to aim them only if they intend to actually blow up the world. Two blank shots are fired at Prince Charles in Australia. This is, so far as I can tell, utterly unrelated to him retiring from competitive polo a few weeks earlier. Katharine, Dutchess of Kent, converts to Catholicism. And Shannon Faulkner breaks the gender barrier at The Citadel, a US military college, and quickly dropped out in the face of the torrent of sexist abuse she received.

While in dead trees, Conundrum. Steve Lyons is something of a bogey-writer for me. He’s terribly well-acclaimed. According to Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, he’s got top-ten novels in the Past Doctors Adventures and New Adventures, and places at fifteenth in the Eighth Doctor Adventures and sixteenth in the Missing Adventures. And yet I’ve done his work twice – The Witch Hunters in the Hartnell book and The Fires of Vulcan here – and came away unimpressed both times despite the acclaim. And here I am with his most acclaimed book and yet again I have trouble with him.

Admittedly explaining the Land of Fiction was never going to be a way to win my heart. If there’s a premise for a Doctor Who story I’m more likely to outright hate than that, It doesn’t spring to mind easily.…

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They’ve Made Me A Goddess (The Left-Handed Hummingbird)

22

I’ll Explain Later

We skipped the not-bad but not-terribly-interesting The Dimension Riders.

Kate Orman’s The Left-Handed Hummingbird is the first of an impressive five New Adventures by Kate Orman, who also co-wrote So Vile a Sin and helped plot Human Nature. It’s focused heavily on Aztec culture, and features two somewhat controversial sequences in which the Doctor takes hallucinogenic drugs to try to understand the psychic enemy he’s facing. It’s quite popular – Kate Orman’s highest-ranking novel on Sullivan’s list at twelfth place, with a 78.3% rating. Lars Pearson calls it “finely crafted” and “a great opening volley from the elegant Orman.” Craig Hinton goes with “the most adult New Adventures yet, and the most gripping.” DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s December of 1993. Meat Loaf continues to stubbornly refuse to do that. But after one week he is unseated by Mr. Blobby. Here is a fun fact: many pubs in the UK have digital jukeboxes that can play any song that has ever hit number one in the British charts. This means that you can make Mr. Blobby play for 25p. And nobody has to know you did it. As is really completely appropriate for Mr. Blobby, it’s unseated after one week by Take That with “Babe.” But then, because it is an evil, evil song, it comes back to take the Christmas number one. Because there is no god. The Bee Gees, Elton John and Kiki Dee, Bryan Adams, and Prince also chart.

In the news, the European Union properly formed. The Railways Act passed, beginning the privatization of the British rail system. The London Convention banned dumping radioactive waste in the ocean. In the US, NAFTA passed Congress. And the Observer established that a backchannel of communication exists between the IRA and the British government, contrary to the denials of said government. While this month the Space Shuttle Endeavour makes an effort to fix the Hubble Space Telescope, Colin Ferguson makes an effort to kill six people on a Long Island Railroad train, and the UK commits to making an effort to figure out a solution to the whole Ireland problem via the Downing Street Declaration. Also, Doom comes out. I confess, I care about one of these more than the others.

While in literature, The Left-Handed Hummingbird. Which deserves better than being shoved beneath a book launch post. Kate Orman is the first and only female writer of the New Adventures. She’s also the first and only Australian, and that’s probably significant too, but it’s also well outside of my wheelhouse, so you get the focus on “female writer” instead. But perhaps the more important point is that Kate Orman is the first writer to come out of feminist fandom. And that’s perhaps the more significant fact. After all, while it’s not true that scads of women have written for Doctor Who, there are at least a few. It’s not impossible to make a case that Enlightenment has a uniquely female perspective, and it’s downright easy to argue that Survival is overtly feminist.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 41 (rec.arts.drwho)

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So there’s this thing called the Internet, and it’s kind of a big deal, so I suppose we should talk about it. I mean, it’s been lurking about in the background for a while, but it became a genuinely important thing in what Doctor Who was around this time, to say nothing of a somewhat important thing in my life. Because something we haven’t really talked about in the context of the Virgin era is the nature of Doctor Who fandom.

We’ve talked broadly about the way in which computers became standard consumer technology in this time period. The early 1990s were the period where everybody finally got around to agreeing that computers were the future. And so a sleepy bit of high-end technology called the Internet started trickling into mass consciousness. For those who are young enough to have always known an Internet based on the World Wide Web, it may be worth pausing to explain what this meant.

The World Wide Web was publicly launched in August of 1991. But it didn’t really hit breakout “everybody is using this thing” status for a few years. Major bits of the Web like Amazon didn’t even go online until 1995, and it isn’t until the latter half of the decade that “online presence” became a standard feature of practically everything. Up until the mid 90s the Internet was fragmented among a large number of services, not all of them meaningfully interoperable. You had a wide variety of services like (in the US) Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL that offered their own closed-off e-mail systems, chat networks, discussion boards, games, and all sorts of other things. Prodigy, in 1994, was the first of these to offer any sort of interoperability with the Internet at large. Then there were little things like local BBSes – often just computers with modems that you could dial into via a phone number and access online services aimed at the local market.

You also had what we might call the Big Internet, which consisted not only of the World Wide Web but of e-mail and Usenet. For one thing, it’s the chunk that eventually came to eat all of the BBSes and independent services. For another, it had Usenet, a sizable collection of discussion forums and file-sharing services (which were distributed, essentially, by converting files into text). And one of those discussion forums was rec.arts.drwho. Which was about what you’d expect.

The idea that there was an online discussion forum about Doctor Who sounds like the most spectacularly unremarkable thing imaginable in 2012, but you have to realize that in 1993 Usenet was somewhat obscure. Commercial Internet Service Providers existed, but were rare and often charged by the minute. The bulk of Internet users were those who had access provided due to having an account on a system that provided larger services. In practice, this usually meant people affiliated with universities.

Which, in the early-to-mid 90s, actually meant me. With two parents at universities it was relatively easy for me to get such an account on a semesterly basis, and once I started taking actual classes there on the side it became downright easy.…

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