Time Can Be Rewritten 14 (Asylum, BBC Books, 2001)
One more post of dotting ts, crossing is, and playing with some of the concepts from the Deadly Assassin Megapost, then we’ll do Face of Evil on Wednesday. Here I want to look again at the ways in which having an understanding of history and of the world more complex than the ones I critiqued in the Deadly Assassin entry – or for that matter in the Masque of Mandragora essay – makes for better writing than those of Big-Ass Science or the limited views of the nature of time and history espoused by mainstream fandom. And for that we have Peter Darvill-Evan’s almost but not-quite excellent book Asylum.
The first thing that should be said about Asylum is that Darvill-Evans is a much better writer than he is a historian. It’s actually a relatively minor point within the book, but he goes out of his way to have the Doctor endorse a particular historical view of Roger Bacon in which he is not actually a meaningful figure in the history of science on the grounds that his overall worldview was insufficiently empiricist. I am not a medieval/renaissance scholar, and I am not going to wade too far into this debate, but Darvill-Evans’s view amounts to a variation on the idea that the rise of science was a light switch that got thrown somewhere in human history in which everybody became an empiricist.
And this is very clearly what Darvill-Evans does. He has the Doctor say that Nyssa’s thesis is inaccurate. Her thesis is explicitly that Bacon is a proto-scientist and that an understanding of the “dawning of the technological age” should extend back at least as far as him, as opposed to merely to the twentieth century or the Industrial Revolution. To say that is flatly untrue is, well, flatly untrue. Whether or not Bacon ought be called a “scientist” proper is beyond my expertise, but he clearly has an important place in the history of science.