Eruditorum Press

Crash log of the Singularity

time can be rewritten

Time Can Be Rewritten 13 (System Shock, Virgin Books, 1995)

, 11

Reasonable people, by which I’m pretty sure I mean Stephen, one of my wise and decorated commenters, expected me to go for Stephen Marley’s Managra, a metafictional romp through the history of British culture in the far future that even features Aleister Crowley. (I say pretty sure because Connecticut got slammed by the worst snowstorm I have seen in my life last weekend. Nearly a foot of heavy, wet snow falling on trees that still had leaves on them. This turned out to exceed their intelligent design parameters. The result is that 99% of my town is without power. The good news is, this time I am the 1%. The bad news is, I didn’t dodge the Internet outage, so doing things like actually checking past comments is beyond me. But I’m optimistic that I can at least keep a posting schedule.)

There are many good reasons why I would pick that book, and I see why probably-Stephen assumed I would cover it. The thing is, I’ve said an awful lot about metafiction and British culture already in the Hinchcliffe era, and while I’m sure I’ll do Managra when I take another pass in the book version, clearly I skipped it. Equally clearly, at least to those who read titles and look at pictures, is that I’m doing Justin Richards’s System Shock instead, a book which probably-Stephen expressed some surprise as to why I would do.

The answer, probably-Stephen, is that I am a sucker for 90s techno-thrillers about computers, and that I am completely powerless to resist any book that is set, quite literally, “when the information superhighway comes online” in 1998. So crack open a bottle of Zima and put on some Jewel. Because it’s 1995, and people are about to make some very, very embarrassing predictions.

That is of course, terribly unfair of me. But it’s very difficult to read System Shock in 2011 without laughing at its naiveté. The most obvious example is the one we’ve already discussed – the charmingly dated phrase “information superhighway.” This phrase rightly serves as a sort of memetic tombstone for a particular historical moment in digital technology – what we might call the last moment in which you could get away with being stupid about digital technology in public. (It is not, obviously, the end of public stupidity about digital technology in public – merely the end of where you can get away with it. Consider the degree to which, ten years after the date Richards pegs for the information superhighway coming online, the degree to which the ostensibly similar “series of tubes” metaphor proves to be a massive PR disaster for Ted Stevens)

The phrase does not have a clear inventor, although its prominence is due largely to Al Gore. Gore, who had been closely following digital issues as a Senator for decades before becoming Vice President, used the term with reasonable frequency, and so upon becoming Vice President, his newfound profile catapulted the term into the mainstream. But, equally crucially, Al Gore was a politician who liked giving money to the geeks.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 12 (Interference, BBC Books, 1996)

, 14


It’s August, 1999. Doctor Who is as dead as dead can be. These are the heady early days of New Labor, two years after Tony Blair managed to end an 18-year stretch of Conservative rule. In the main stretch of the blog, we are a few years from the dawn of the Long 1980s. Here we are a few years past that, in a murky transition into an era that it’s not quite clear we’ve seen the end of yet – something alarmingly resembling the present. The clock ticks closer towards a millennial change stained deep with eschatology. Musically we are in a wasteland of Ricky Martin, Westlife, and Geri Halliwell doing Latin-inspired numbers. These are not days that anyone claims as the glory days of anything, least of all Doctor Who, which is off the air and seemingly never coming back.

In these transitional moments it is sometimes helpful to mine the past for ideas and directions. The shift between historical eras is a vague phenomenon existing more in the realm of ideas than in the realm of material objects after all – one reason that it is easier to track through psychochronography, which allows us the ability to walk and tour the realm of ideas. These dead spaces between eras mark the periods where old ideologies begin to stagger under their weight and break down, and where new ideologies find themselves pushed in from the fringes. In these moments, one turns to the past, looking at approaches that have run aground and sizing up the repair job needed to get them running again.

Enter Interference. On one level, as we’ll talk about when we come back around to it in 1999, this is a desperate (and failed) throw of the dice – a last attempt to get the unmitigated catastrophe that was the Paul McGann era to act like a functional era of Doctor Who instead of a graveyard. And it’s a clever one. The Past Doctor Adventures line took August off, and instead the Eighth Doctor Adventures line released a two-volume novel featuring interconnected Eighth and Third Doctor stories.

For my part, and I apologize for intruding into the narrative before my time, I know little about it. Interference was the last Doctor Who book I actively remember coming out, but I was by then jaded on the 8th Doctor era and was never big enough on the Third to want to read it, so I never did. Actually, prior to this I’d never read a Lawrence Miles novel, though I’d read plenty about them. I suppose, strictly speaking, I still haven’t, since, given both that this post was so requested (though planned practically from day one – this is one of the books the Time Can Be Rewritten entries were created for) and that it seemed like an entertaining choice to make, I read only the Third Doctor and frame novel sections of the book. Again, I don’t pretend that I’m some uncorrupted Miles virgin. I know the basic ideas of the Faction Paradox plot, I read a summary of the other half to make sure I knew who the major shared characters were, and I know well the extremely complex and contested role Miles has in fandom.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 11 (Verdigris, BBC Books, 2000)

, 13

The year 2000, for a generation of Britain, marked the end of the future. A fluke of naming committed in 1977 inadvertently left the most important comics magazine in the UK with a name demarcating a clear and unavoidable sell-by date. It’s tough to blame anyone – nobody starting a grubby comics rag ostensibly edited by a fictional galactic conquerer and featuring a barely coherent revamp of 50s icon Dan Dare would have taken seriously the question “but what are we going to do in 23 years.” The answer was clear – be working on something else, this magazine having gone under 20 years earlier. But come 2000, there we were, staring awkwardly at one of the most iconic mastheads in science fiction and going “well, that’s underwhelming, isn’t it?”

2000, then, is the perfect date to revisit early 70s science fiction. In 1972, nobody believed there would be a year 2000. And come the year 2000, it turned out they’d been right all along. There really was no future. Enter Verdigris and Paul Magrs. I’ve already, in previous posts, hinted that the rise of the BBC Books line to replace the Virgin books line in Doctor Who was a mixed blessing at best, and that the seven years since the series came back have by and large validated that by favoring writers and innovations from the Virgin line while ignoring most of the new blood brought in at BBC Books. Part of that, though, is that there are actually only two real pieces of new blood brought in at BBC Books. The first is Lawrence Miles, who, while he wrote a Virgin book, is most associated with the BBC line having written four key books for them and spun off his own Faction Paradox series from them. The second is Paul Magrs.

Magrs – who I actually, in one of my handful of brushes with Z-List status in he world of Doctor Who, saw give a talk in early 2001 when I was studying abroad at the University of East Anglia where he taught – is an interesting writer. More than almost any other Doctor Who writer, Magrs visibly has a preferred approach to writing Doctor Who and little desire to deviate from it. Admittedly he has branched out considerably over the years, having now written numerous stories without his signature character Iris Wildthyme, but Verdigris isn’t one of them, so she’s probably as good a place to start as any.

Central to any assessment of Magrs’s work, after all, is the initial decision of whether or not an utterly barmy and frequently inebriated middle aged woman who travels around space and time in a double decker bus that is slightly smaller on the inside than it is on the outside is a brilliant idea or the worst thing ever. Many perfectly intelligent and sensible commentators have committed themselves firmly to the latter answer, which, unsurprisingly, presents a somewhat insurmountable barrier to enjoying Magrs’s work.

The real problem, though, is that Iris is just the tip of the iceberg.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 10: The Face of the Enemy (David McIntee, BBC Books,

, 7

It’s January of 1998 – the month after The Roundheads came out, for helpful reference. But in this case, the slow undulations of the wilderness years aren’t really what I want to talk about, because the book we have on offer today is really quite interesting on its own merits. The Face of the Enemy is an oddity in the Doctor Who novels range. It’s one of two books from the Missing/Past Doctor adventures lines to focus entirely on characters other than the Doctor. The first of these – Virgin’s Downtime – is just the novelization of a Marc Platt-penned direct to video story with the Yeti in it. But this one is a different beast – a story of what UNIT gets up to while the Doctor is on one of his periodic jaunts off-world – to Peladon, in this case.

The result is a story that goes a long way towards disentangling some of the issues and juxtapositions of the Pertwee era. Because we’ve only really seen, at this point, two Pertwee stories that work much like traditional Doctor Who. Other than that, Pertwee has been paired up with the Brigadier and, in most of the stories, Yates and Benton. The Curse of Peladon, in fact, is the first story in the Pertwee era not to feature the Brigadier. So thus far, there’s been no way to meaningfully tell the difference between a Pertwee-era Doctor Who story and a UNIT story. And as I’ve already suggested, this is perhaps at the root cause of some of the tensions we’ve found so far in the Pertwee era.

And let’s be clear – the tensions are there. Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some of my esteemed commenters, I actually do like the Pertwee era. It’s my least favorite era of Doctor Who, true, but that’s like declaring the 2000 vintage my least favorite vintage of a fine wine. I still love the thing. But good lord, the era is utterly schizoid in spots. I keep harping on the ending of The Silurians largely because it captures the fundamental problem – the show can’t decide what it wants to be. And it handles this strangely – it tends to charge off in a given direction, and then, in the next story, charge off in a different direction with minimal heed paid to its compatibility with the last direction. With only the continuity of actors to hold it together, the era becomes… schizoid. I mean, that’s really the only way to describe a show that went from the social realist thriller approach of The Mind of Evil to the glam mania of The Claws of Axos. Yes, Doctor Who has always been about contrast between stories – hence going from Vortis to the Crusades. But it’s one thing to go from the tone of The Web Planet to the tone of The Crusades with a time machine. It’s quite another to do it while remaining on Earth.

But that’s changing.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 9: The Scales of Injustice (Gary Russell, Virgin Books, 1996)

, 13

It’s July 1996, right in the middle of that awkward period where everyone is shifting uncomfortably following the TV movie, by this point not yet sure what it means for the future of Doctor Who, but quite sure that the answer is not, at least in the short to medium term, going to be anything good. The now moribund Virgin Books line releases Gary Russell’s Third Doctor novel The Scales of Injustice.

Gary Russell has something of a reputation for what is generally referred to as “fanwank.” That is to say, he’s known for writing books that are packed to the gills with continuity references for the sake of continuity references. Now, a sane person could and perhaps even should ask what the difference is between fanwank and, for instance, having the Macra pop up forty years after their last appearance for a cameo. And plenty of people have asked that. If nothing else, then, The Scales of Injustice serves to explore that line.

Because this book is not so much continuity heavy as it is capable of producing continuity gravity. Direct references exist not only to the four Pertwee stories preceding it but also to Time Flight, Remembrance of the Daleks, The War Machines, The Invasion, The Web of Fear, The Sea Devils, Warriors of the Deep, and probably a fair swath more that I didn’t even notice. One thing you may notice about that list is that not all of the stories are links. That is because many of them are stories that haven’t actually aired by the point in the series this novel takes place in.

Which means we’re in the wild and wonderful world of future continuity, a topic we’ve picked up in a couple of these Time Can Be Rewritten columns. (Incidentally, a reader found a counter-example to my claim that no stories set pre-The War Games ever mention the Time Lords. Apparently John Lucarotti’s novelization of The Massacre does.) But more even than The Dark Path, this is a book about reconciling Doctor Who stories and squaring away continuity errors. It tackles not only the nature of the Brigadier’s love life (glimpsed in Planet of Spiders and Battlefield), Mike Yates’s assignment to UNIT and promotion to Captain (complete with a gratuitous scene to explain why Benton didn’t get the promotion), Liz Shaw’s departure (more later), but also, for the horde of people who were concerned about it, the question of why the Doctor claimed to have twice negotiated with the Silurians for peace in Warriors of the Deep when in fact he only did so once.

Let’s pause here for a moment and look at that. I don’t want to get too far into Warriors of the Deep some thirteen seasons too early, but accounting for this supposed continuity error is trivial. First, a bit of context for anyone who is actually trying to use this blog to learn about early Doctor Who. Warriors of the Deep is a 1984 story in which the Fifth Doctor faces both the Silurians and the Sea Devils, the latter being cousins of the Silurians introduced in season nine.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 8: The Two Doctors

, 10

At last, the Doctor is confronted with the horror of
a wardrobe choice worse than plaid pants.

It’s February 16, 1985, which is, if we are being honest, yet another odd time for it to be on the road from June of 1969 to January of 1970, but hey, there was still an awful lot of acid going around in 1969, and who are we to question it. Perhaps Doctor Who just nipped off to Woodstock and lost track of things like everyone else. We’ll be here again later, so we may as well skip the music and news and get on to the meat of things, namely the latest adventure of Patrick Troughton, a story called The Two Doctors.

Starting off, it’s shocking how much has changed in this six month gap between seasons six and seven. I mean, look at the new opening credits. The starfield opening is certainly lush, and it’s hard to imagine how it was done with 1970s theme music, but what the heck is with this awful theme music? This isn’t going to stay around for the whole decade, is it? Still, things pick up immediately after. And you get to see the switch to color live! They turn the switch right in the middle of the episode, with the opening scene fading from black and white to color! That’s cool!

Hm. Much as it’s tempting to just continue to review this trying to maintain the conceit that it is a Patrick Troughton story, I think we have to admit, this approach is not even remotely maintainable through the full two and a half hours of The Two Doctors. So let’s back up and take this more honestly. Monday we looked at the slightly bewildering Season 6B idea on its own, as a follow-up to the Troughton era, and found it wanting. Today, in the second and final part of our tour of a fictional season of Doctor Who, we look at the story most responsible for this idea. It’s fair, before we get too deep into this, to ask why we’re even monkeying around here in the first place instead of being into the Pertwee era already.

The answer, roughly, is that this whole idea is too self-evidently ludicrous to take seriously. It is obvious watching The War Games that there is no Season 6B. Or, actually, no. It’s not obvious, because The War Games is so far from supporting a Season 6B that in and of itself, nobody would have come up with such a silly idea. (OK, not quite nobody) Season 6B, in terms of The War Games, isn’t even wrong. It has no relationship whatsoever with The War Games. And yet multiple writers have opted to set stories in this obvious anachronism. It’s a paradox within Doctor Who – something that clearly does exist from one perspective, and clearly doesn’t from another.

I should also, I suppose, briefly disclaim regarding the Colin Baker era, given that it is possibly the most contentious era of Doctor Who there is, save possibly the Sylvester McCoy era.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 7: World Game (Terrance Dicks, BBC Books, 2005)

, 16

Perhaps the image of Patrick
Troughton as Napoleon is actually
all that needs to be said about this
book.

It’s October of 2005. This means, in practice, that we’re between the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant years. We’ve already talked about this time period a bit with The Time Travelers, so I’ll just refer you there for the general time, but suffice it to say that these are the dying embers of the BBC Books line, coming out after the series has conclusively moved on to other things.

What are we doing here? I don’t just mean reading BBC Books from a zombie phase when the line had ceased to have any possible relevance – after all, The Time Travelers firmly established that there was gold in the dying days of BBC Books. I mean doing a Second Doctor story written nearly 20 years after Troughton’s death and set after The War Games.

Well, see, it turns out that for plot related reasons, some 1980s reunion stories that featured Patrick Troughton (and to a lesser extent a 1973 one) opened up some seemingly massive continuity errors, mostly in the form of having Troughton’s Doctor interacting with the Time Lords and knowing about the outcome of his trial. This bothered people for a while, until the fine folks of The Discontinuity Guide proposed something called “Season 6B,” the consequence of which make up this novel.

I’d explain the idea of Season 6B, but it’s one of those absolutely ludicrous moments of Doctor Who that is probably best approached experientially instead of from a distance. And anyway, the point of doing this as a Time Can Be Rewritten entry is that we’re approaching Season 6B in part as if it were actually meant to slot into 1960s Doctor Who. Never mind what it explains and why from 1980s Doctor Who. After all, why should the 1980s get to come and unambiguously muck up our 1960s when the 1960s don’t get the right to sneak into the 1980s and wreck havoc with them?

Of course, this approach acquires an interesting relationship with the rails that is not entirely based on contact more or less at the first page. Dicks’s novel begins with “the genuine and original summary record of the trial of the Doctor,” noting that the version “with which we were, until now, familiar was substantially re-edited for the public record.” We then get a differing version of the trial from the one we saw on television in 1969. One in which the Doctor’s plea about fighting evil is not, as in the original, “accepted,” but is merely said to be “not without merit,” after which the Doctor is sentenced to death.

There’s a couple of things to note here, but let’s start with the fact that this fails spectacularly to fit with what we saw on screen. Dicks is making a very bizarre claim here – one that is not merely a retcon, but something with far wider-reaching implications. It’s not just that what we saw on television is here said to be wrong (which is already a bit of a strange claim for the novels to make, given that in almost every fan’s assessment they are given a less privileged place in Doctor Who than the televised stories), it’s that it’s said to be wrong because the Time Lords have been censoring material that could be viewed as damaging to them.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 6: The Dark Path (David McIntee, Virgin Books, March 1997)

, 9

It’s March of 1997. Depending on the week, either No Doubt is at number one with “Don’t Speak,” or the Spice Girls are with “Mama.” Other options in the top ten include the Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, R Kelly, Ant and Dec, Bush, and the Bee Gees. If you think one of those things is not like the others, I certainly don’t disagree.

You’re hopefully, by this point, getting enough of a sense of the general shape of the 1989-2005 period of Doctor Who that “March of 1997” already gives you some clues. If not, what we’ve got here is the second to last month of Virgin Books before they lost the license to BBC Books. In this period, Virgin, facing their own end and with little to gain or lose, basically proceeded to cut loose with some of the best and most challenging books of their line, but all of this was frankly dampened by the kind of funereal atmosphere. Not everyone had loved the Virgin line, but it had some strong admirers who were crushed to see it go. The prospect of the BBC starting up an in-house line based on the TV Movie was hardly inspiring, especially given the murmurs that the line was to be the anti-Virgin – an explicit reaction against the Virgin era’s excesses and a return to simpler, less challenging prose. In practice the BBC Books line would be weirder and more interesting than that, but it looked bad from the outset.

Meanwhile, Virgin was releasing its last books in a sort of maudlin celebration of the line’s potential. In the second to last month, they released two books. One, Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow, was an ambitious retconning of the history of Gallifrey and the apparent culmination of the last plot strands left lingering from when the series was on television. The other – The Dark Path – was a long awaited attempt to tackle a massive continuity point and deliver what is one of the most wanted untold tales in Doctor Who.

As a result, there’s something almost actively insane about reviewing it within the Troughton era. The supposed conceit of the Missing and Past Doctor Adventures is that the stories they tell could be inserted into their assumed eras. As we’ve seen that’s always been a bit of a myth – even the most faithful recreation we’ve looked at, Gareth Roberts’s The Plotters, takes liberties that could not have been taken in the era whose television the book imitates the tone of. Other times it’s nearly shattered – The Man in the Velvet Mask is flagrantly and deliberately a vision of the Hartnell era distinct from what we see on the screen. But both of those were still fundamentally comments on the Hartnell era. One attempts to work within the format of the Hartnell era to tell a story that wouldn’t have made it to screen with the actors in question or in the year it would have aired. The other attempts to show a counter-narrative to the Hartnell era.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 5: The Roundheads (Mark Gatiss, BBC Books, 1997)

, 5

It’s tough, in 2011, to express quite how depressing it was to be a Doctor Who fan in 1997. I gather it was bleak for most of the 90s, and for a fair share of the 80s, but I lack much to compare it to. But 1997 was a stunningly bad year. By then it was quite clear that the Paul McGann TV Movie was as big a bust commercially as it had been aesthetically. But worse than that, the TV Movie had been used as the excuse for bringing Virgin Books’s license to produce original Doctor Who fiction to an end, and to move the license in house to BBC Books. Financially this was a perfectly sound decision – the BBC understandably was not thrilled with another company making money doing something they could do perfectly well themselves.

Aesthetically, unfortunately, it was a train wreck, as we’ll see when we get to The Eight Doctors. Never mind that the second BBC Book – Vampire Science – was quite good. By then the Paul McGann years had suffered the same problem the Colin Baker years did – two staggeringly bad opening stories that eviscerated the possibility of long-term success. Then, five months in, the coup de grace. The one advantage the BBC Books plan maybe had over the Virgin plan was that BBC Books proudly said they had the rights to the Daleks. And so the fifth book of the BBC Books range – John Peel’s War of the Daleks – was a big deal. And it was an abomination – one of the most legendarily hated Doctor Who books ever, which, if you’re keeping track, means that in five months the BBC Books range had managed to release two epic turkeys. Add to that the fact that the series now had seemingly no feasible way back to television, and that nobody could actually tell you what the Eighth Doctor was like in a meaningful sense, and you have yourself some bleak times. It’s not that these times were any bleaker, objectively, than, say, 1991, when Virgin churned out three flat and fairly predictable novels to kick off their New Adventures series (or, really, two flat novels and one quite nice Terrance Dicks effort). It’s that they’re such an obvious consequence of a false dawn. It’s that it was impossible, in 1997, not to have the sense that Doctor Who had actually been in much better shape before it made a try at coming back – that it had done cancellation better the first time.

Which makes the events of November of 1997 all the more intriguing. In the main line of Eighth Doctor novels, something called Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles happened. For those of you who are going to learn a huge amount about the world of Doctor Who novels when the blog actually gets to 1997 proper, Alien Bodies is a landmark book. There are a couple moments in the novels where everything changes – landmark novels that are as important as the landmark stories like The Tenth Planet in terms of the development of the series.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 4: The Man in the Velvet Mask (Daniel O’Mahoney, Virgin Books, 1996)

, 7

Dodo stares dubiously at the plot
of this novel. Or maybe that’s
just her “come hither” look.

So this one ought to be fun. Daniel O’Mahony’s The Man in the Velvet Mask is pure Marmite. Ostensibly one of the most hated Doctor Who books, it apparently came in dead last in Doctor Who Magazine’s poll about the novels. But that claim carries a metric ton of assumptions with it. I don’t want to do a whole post like The Gunfighters about the various factions of fandom during the interregnum, mostly because I intend to do a whole series of posts when we actually get to that time period. So suffice it to say that this book also has passionate defenders. (I suppose I should, as part of my continued commitment to helping Americans work through their stages of grief at discovering that there are actually entire facets of foreign cultures that have nothing to do with them, mention that Marmite is a savory, salty, yeast-based spread used in the UK on sandwiches, toast, crackers, and other such things. Its use is somewhere between that of peanut butter and mayonnaise, neither of which it tastes remotely like. Among those for whom it is part of their culture there are exactly two opinions available – passionate love or utter hatred. Thus “Marmite” is, in the vernacular, an adjective describing something that produces extremely polarized views with minimal middle ground.)

Most of the dispute centers on whether or not the book simply goes too far to be a Doctor Who story, and, secondarily, whether it goes too far to be a Hartnell story. Which is to say, the objection is over the fact that Dodo spends an awful lot of this book naked, then also has sex and gets infected with an alien virus that slowly corrupts you. (There is some dispute over this, with some people claiming Dodo gets a fatal venereal disease or syphilis. She doesn’t. The description of the virus is that “Once infected, you cannot be sure whether your actions are of your own free will or directed by him.” By the end of the book the him in question is dead, But given that in the next story televised Dodo succumbs to mind control, the implication is that it leaves one susceptible to mental domination in general, and the virus is later described as “eating through her nervous system and her brain.”)

Back in The Celestial Toymaker, I called into question the idea that every story was a Doctor Who story. And as a friend of mine pointed out after that entry, there are more obvious problems with the claim – as she put it, “What about that story where the Doctor is a serial rapist.” Which captures at least one crux of the issue – that the notion of “Doctor Who story” is bounded on one side by the fact that the Doctor needs to act Doctor-like. But is there more than that? The problem with The Ark is not even that the Doctor does the wrong thing – the Monoids are, after all, portrayed as moustache-twirlers.…

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