Eruditorum Press

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Time Can Be Rewritten Final: The Day of the Doctor

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Which makes it all the stranger that he doesn’t.
Even before time was rewritten, of course, this was true. Davies deliberately inserts a gap between The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, even opting to develop the running Queen Elizabeth I joke within it. In this regard, The Day of the Doctor slots in with precision, just as it does with The End of Time, which it goes out of its way to make sure it still fits in with. So much so that Tumblr became an entertaining place in the immediate wake of The Day of the Doctor, as scads of people cried foul about how it contradicted the Davies era only to have scads of people point out all of the tiny little things that Moffat did to actively and meticulously match the Davies era. 
As with many fan debates on Tumblr, the immediate fallout of The Day of the Doctor had no shortage of straw men, with people angrily reacting against points that never actually got made. (See also the “legions” of fans who aren’t going to watch Peter Capaldi because he’s old and unattractive.) Still, there’s an interesting fault line that opens up in the question of just how much of a retcon The Day of the Doctor is – one that is revealing in terms of the sorts of details that each argument prioritizes. 
For one entirely sensible camp, The Day of the Doctor is a retcon only in an additive sense. It simply says “and here’s a bunch of stuff you didn’t know was happening” while playing very actively within the lines of what has gone before. What jumps out here is not the addition of an entirely new incarnation of the Doctor and the wholesale reversal of the end of the Time War, but rather on the numerous conscious nods to the series’ past inserted throughout the episode. So when the Time Lords declare that the High Council’s plans have already failed, this is notable precisely because it checks the box of “how does this fit in with The End of Time,” just as the decision to declare that Arcadia is a Gallifreyan city nicely nods at Doomsday. 
For another entirely sensible, The Day of the Doctor is a massive retcon because of how drastically it shifts the nature of the Time War from an abstract conflict of horrors in the vein of Faction Paradox’s Book of the War to being, basically, a Star Wars movie. Perhaps more significant is the nature of the Doctor’s ultimate weapon. In a Time War, a weapon called the Moment sings of strange and uncanny power. The sense is that the Doctor does not possess a weapon in a conventional sense, but a piece of time itself. Instead we find out that he has a bomb that can wipe out a galaxy and that happens to project an avatar of Billie Piper on the side. The question isn’t, in other words, whether you nod at all the details, but whether you nod at the substance of what the original stories were saying.
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Myriad Universes: Star Trek: The New Voyages

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At first glance, something like Star Trek: The New Voyages might raise a few red flags. It’s a two-volume (though more were planned) fanfiction compilation professionally published under the Bantam Star Trek line edited by Gene Roddenberry and convention regulars Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Immediately, one wants to angrily declare that fanfiction does not require professional validation and is a perfectly legitimate art form in its own right and something like this is only going to lead to a slippery slope where fanfic writers will be competing with each other for places in an artificially constructed hierarchy of credentials.

But in practice, that’s not how Star Trek: The New Voyages reads at all (…at least at first, but we’ll get to that). Instead, this is, rather heartwarmingly, nothing short of an unabashedly warm embrace by the Star Trek production team of the fanfiction community and a firm declaration that this is who Star Trek is really for and with whom the future of the franchise ultimately lies. Gene Roddenberry’s introduction to the first volume is quite simply one of my favourite things he’s ever written: Naturally, he positions himself as the creator from whom all of Star Trek springs from and claims the Original Series was “…not a one-man job, although it was something very personal to me-my own statement of who and what this species of ours really is, where we are now and something of where we may be going”. This is somewhat difficult to swallow knowing about the contributions of Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana and Roddenberry’s own off-the-record statements about how Star Trek is really “just mini Biblical tales”, but hey, it’s Roddenberry and we expect him to say something like this. What we, or at least I, did *not* expect Roddenberry to say is what comes after.

“We were particularly amazed when thousands, then tens of thousands of people began creating their own personal Star Trek adventures. Stories, and paintings, and sculptures, and cookbooks. And songs, and poems, and fashions. And more. The list is still growing. It took some time for us to fully understand and appreciate what these people were saying. Eventually we realized that there is no more profound way in which people could express what Star Trek has meant to them than by creating their own very personal Star Trek things.

Because I am a writer, it was their Star Trek stories that especially gratified me. I have seen these writings in dog-eared notebooks of fans who didn’t look old enough to spell ‘cat.’ I have seen them in meticulously produced fanzines, complete with excellent artwork. Some of it has even been done by professional writers, and much of it has come from those clearly on their way to becoming professional writers. Best of all, all of it was plainly done with love.

Good writing is always a very personal thing and comes from the writer’s deepest self. Star Trek was that kind of writing for me, and it moves me profoundly that it has also become so much a part of the inner self of so many other people.

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An Act of Madness

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So, I decided I wanted to fill in the ballot for Doctor Who Magazine‘s latest “rate all of the stories” poll. And unlike my “take them one at a time” reviews that I’d been posting as “this is not a review blog,” I figured here I should go ahead and create a normal distribution of ratings so that there were 24 stories with a 1, 24 with a 2, and so on.

And at that point, when you have stories in groups of 24, it’s not *that* hard to rank them within that. And once you’ve done that, well, you have something like this list of Doctor Who stories ranked in order of quality from worst to best. (For convenience, a double line break is employed whenever the numerical ranking increases by one.)

Now all I have to figure out is how to assign numerical values to the stories so as to strategically maximize the impact of my votes so as to try to get the final ranking in Doctor Who Magazine to match my own as much as possible. Number geeks – I encourage you to come up with schemes for assigning point values from 1-10. I suspect it’s going to be some frightfully elaborate scheme involving the results from the Mighty 200 poll a few years ago.

I of course make no guarantee that if I did this list again tomorrow it would be particularly similar, although I think my top and bottom ten are pretty solid.

In any case, the list.

The Celestial Toymaker
The Twin Dilemma
Warriors of the Deep
The Invisible Enemy
The Monster of Peladon
The Arc of Infinity
Death to the Daleks
Timelash
The Dominators
The Android Invasion
Attack of the Cybermen
The Keys of Marinus
The Lazarus Experiment
Night Terrors
Fear Her
Time and the Rani
Meglos
Underworld
The Power of Kroll
Destiny of the Daleks
Victory of the Daleks
Time Flight
The Mind of Evil
Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks

Four to Doomsday
The Leisure Hive
Revenge of the Cybermen
The Kings Demons
Planet of the Daleks
Planet of Fire
The Invasion of Time
The Time Monster
The Mark of the Rani
Curse of the Black Spot
The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood
Invasion of the Dinosaurs

The Armageddon Factor

The Chase
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
New Earth
The Ark
The TV Movie
Forty-Two
Mission to the Unknown
Silver Nemesis
The Idiot’s Lantern
Tomb of the Cybermen
Boom Town

Marco Polo
Resurrection of the Daleks
The Next Doctor
The Masque of Mandragora
The Power of Three
The Reign of Terror
The Space Pirates
Planet of the Dead
Black Orchid
The Nightmare of Eden
Dragonfire
The Hand of Fear
The Doctor’s Daughter
Inferno
Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel
Planet of Evil
Horns of Nimon
The Visitation
Terminus
The Seeds of Doom
The Sontaran Experiment
Trial of a Time Lord
The Long Game
Smith and Jones

Dalek Invasion of Earth
Voyage of the Damned
Earthshock
The Wedding of River Song
The Abominable Snowmen
The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe
Fury From the Deep
Let’s Kill Hitler
The War Machines
The Massacre
The Smugglers
Robot
The Unquiet Dead
The Highlanders
The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People
The Mutants
The Moonbase
The Daleks Masterplan
A Town Called Mercy
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
Planet of the Spiders
The Sea Devils
The Runaway Bride
Amy’s Choice

The Daleks
Image of the Fendahl
The Wheel in Space
The Web of Fear
The Bells of Saint Johns
Nightmare in Silver
The Silurians
Journey to the Center of the TARDIS
The Androids of Tara
The Awakening
Castrovalva
Turn Left
Cold War
Tooth and Claw
The Daemons
The Creature From the Pit
The Two Doctors
The Stones of Blood
Battlefield
Day of the Daleks
Colony in Space
The Keeper of Traken
The Fires of Pompeii
Aliens of London/World War III

The Sensorites
Revelation of the Daleks
Planet of Giants
The Five Doctors
The End of the World
The Savages
The Beast Below
The Shakespeare Code
The Romans
The Underwater Menace
The Christmas Invasion
The Green Death
The Invasion
The Waters of Mars
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
Partners in Crime
State of Decay
The Time Warrior
Pyramids of Mars
Hide
Utopia/Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
The Vampires of Venice
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
Closing Time

An Unearthly Child
Galaxy Four
The Claws of Axos
The Gunfighters
The Faceless Ones
The Crimson Horror
Frontier in Space
The Sunmakers
Delta and the Bannermen
The Myth Makers
Horror of Fang Rock
The Rings of Akhaten
The Krotons
Name of the Doctor
The Seeds of Death
Terror of the Autons
The Three Doctors
The Space Museum
The Angels Take Manhattan
Asylum of the Daleks
Full Circle
The Ice Warriors
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
Father’s Day

The End of Time
The Aztecs
Mawdryn Undead
Midnight
Logopolis
The Pirate Planet
The Edge of Destruction
The Web Planet
The Crusade
Vengeance on Varos
Frontios
Warriors Gate
The Curse of Peladon
The Robots of Death
The Deadly Assassin
Paradise Towers
The Tenth Planet
Spearhead From Space
The War Games
Terror of the Zygons
Rose
The God Complex
The Unicorn and the Wasp
A Good Man Goes to War

The Happiness Patrol
A Christmas Carol
Snakedance
The Time Meddler
Ambassadors of Death
Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone
The Macra Terror
Vincent and the Doctor
Enlightenment
The Snowmen
The Face of Evil
Genesis of the Daleks
The Girl Who Waited
Human Nature/Family of Blood
The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End
Evil of the Daleks
The Lodger
Survival
School Reunion
Dalek
Kinda
Planet of the Ood
Day of the Doctor
Gridlock
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead

Love and Monsters
The Eleventh Hour
The Rescue
The Mind Robber
The Ark in Space
The Enemy of the World
Ghost Light
The Brain of Morbius
Blink
Caves of Androzani
Carnival of Monsters
The Girl in the Fireplace
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways
Time of the Doctor
The Ribos Operation
The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
Remembrance of the Daleks
City of Death
The Doctor’s Wife
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
The Curse of Fenric
Power of the Daleks
The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang…

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I Couldn’t Save Any Of Them (The Waters of Mars)

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Drip with me.
It’s November 15th, 2009. The charts have changed, but little else has. The Black Eyed Peas are at number one now with “Meet Me Halfway,” with Cheryl Cole, Ke$ha, and Britney Spears also charting. In the meager two days of news, New Zealand qualified for the 2010 World Cup, Belle de Jour, writer of The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, upon which the Billie Piper vehicle Secret Diary of a Call Girl was based, revealed her real life identity as Dr. Brooke Magnanti, largely in order to scoop journalists from the Daily Mail who were working to out her, and Barack Obama met with the government of Burma/Myanmar, becoming the first US President to do so.
While on television, The Waters of Mars. If there is one thing about The Waters of Mars that remains curiously unfocused on, it is, of course, the ending. I do not, of course, mean the Time Lord Victorious stuff and Adelaide’s suicide, a sequence that has practically blotted out the remainder of the episode, but rather the final title card, dedicating the episode to the recently deceased Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who during the Jon Pertwee era. 
Letts is easy to overlook in the list of great Doctor Who visionaries, which is odd given that he presided over one of the program’s populist high points. It’s true that in many ways the program he made is the least like any other era of Doctor Who, but for a program defined by an aesthetic of strangeness it seems as though being the odd era out should be a badge of honor. And yet Letts and the Pertwee era retain their “problem era” status in spite of their historical and for that matter continual popularity. 
Much of this, as the several months and book dedicated to the Pertwee era will demonstrate, is a consequence of the fact that Letts’s version of the show was consciously good at doing a couple of things, and rarely was inclined to stray outside of its comfort zone. That these things were unique to the era doesn’t get around a sense that there is a certain lack of adventurousness in the era. Which, to be honest, is a criticism that it’s fairly easy to level at the Davies era as well, with its relatively formulaic season structure that meant that even the adventurous stories slotted into pre-ordained positions in the running order clearly marked out as “here things get a bit weird.” That Davies was doing things that nobody had done with Doctor Who before masked this to an extent, but ultimately no more than UNIT masked the repetitiveness of the Letts era. 
Central to Davies’s approach is what we noticed back when we started the Davies era all those months ago, with Rose: a mode of storytelling that is about the act of switching among differing narrative codes. A Davies story is often a shell game – a case of moving rapidly among different types of stories, trying to get the reader to forget a key component just in time for Davies to reintroduce it and interrupt an expected progression.
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“Interregnum”: The Final Voyage

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Star Trek fandom circa the mid 1980s was a curious thing. With four blockbuster movies to its name, the franchise was most certainly not the expressly marginal phenomenon it had at least the appearances of throughout the 1970s. However, given the necessarily sporadic nature of cinema, it’s tough to see how Star Trek would have been seen as a truly ever-present thing (that is, a work that is unarguably current, which is somewhat different then the general ubiquity Star Trek has always had). That kind of presence requires, especially in the days before the never-ending sensory overload of publicity that today’s media artefacts enjoy, something akin to a regular television show, which Star Trek still didn’t have, though this would change now, in 1986, with the announcement of a new syndicated Star Trek series to premier next year.

This makes the appearance of “The Final Voyage” particularly well-timed, for, in addition to giving the Original Series a proper finale of sorts (it was a constant bugbear amongst a certain sort of fan that Captain Kirk talks about a Five Year Mission while Star Trek only lasted three seasons) that segues neatly into the film series, it also serves as a way of passing the torch to whatever the new Star Trek show would be, as it was largely assumed that the new series would follow a new crew and a new ship. That said, what’s the most interesting about all of this is the decision to do this story as a comic book instead of, say, a tie-in novel or errata to one of the movies. Comics had been part of Star Trek’s history forever, but, until recently, they had largely been resigned to doing “bonus stories”: At best, extra stories for when the TV show wasn’t on the air and, especially once the Original Series went off the air, bits of promotional merchandising to cater to the show’s fans and keep the brand in people’s minds.

This doesn’t mean the comics of the 1980s were written by and for what we know now as Nerd Culture: The larger melange of cultural signifiers we associate with this phenomenon today didn’t really exist yet (and certainly not for a franchise like Star Trek, which doesn’t really get co-opted by Nerd Culture until the mid-to-late 1990s), though if you wanted to be particularly reductivist you could maybe spot the trends that would eventually culminate in it a decade or so later. At this point, the comics division of Star Trek is in an interesting place, consisting as it does of a relatively big-name book series from DC that was pegged, however briefly, as a pseudo-official continuation of the story established in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This was of course a task made significantly more annoying by the release of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and, predictably, anyone trying to reconcile all four works together would likely find themselves with a formidable headache.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 1st, 2014)

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Sorry that posts have been late the last two days. I’m having a rash of Blogger problems where things I tell to post instead save to draft and don’t publish. If you missed them, there was a Last War in Albion post on Thursday that contains a fantastically gratuitous visual gag (Figure 249) that I’ve been setting up over the course of a few posts, and for which there’s really no justification. (See also my three-post long parenthetical. Somebody stop me.)

And there was an altogether more normal post on Mona Lisa’s Revenge yesterday. Well, normal on my end. On The Sarah Jane Adventures‘ end, I’m not so sure.

Right. Your weekend update. Kickstarter stuff has one more day of work to do on it before I take it to the post office. My guess is Tuesday for the last day of work, and by Friday for the post office. After that I just have to edit the Soldeed video, get it to the backer so she can do what she will with it, and I’ll be ready to post a Year-In-Review of the writing business, since I think I owe a degree of transparency for how often I shake the cup.

Not long after that, there’ll be a fresh Kickstarter for a stretch of Last War in Albion, probably targeting about $2.5k and featuring mostly digital rewards. That will also include the occasionally mentioned Secret Project, which I will spoil is Doctor Who-related. If it succeeds, I’ll be able to stick to the current status quo of regular blogging for the next year or so.

Let’s see. I’m feeling like a music weekend. I’m terribly looking forward to Alex (co-author of the Flood book) having his new album out in early March. He’s under a new band name called Seeming, has samples including the phenomenal pair of album tracks “The Burial” (my wife’s favorite song at this moment) and “Everything Could Change” up at Soundcloud. Information about the album here. I’ll probably do some proper promotion for it in a week or two, like a nice juicy interview with the gentleman. I’ve heard most of the album at this point, and yeah. I recognize that I’m biased, as he’s one of my best friends, but holy fuck, it’s good.

What music are you caught up in right now? Links to YouTube videos with a few sentences rapturously describing how the song will blow me away are strongly invited. I may even get around to adding some, having discovered the music video for Bat for Lashes’ “Lillies” over a year after I was properly obsessed with the album. And I maintain that the CHVRCHES cover of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is a thing of outrageous beauty.

(Example: The start of the second verse of “Everything Could Change” is an absolutely fantastic moment in which the song declines to crescendo when it’s supposed to, instead deciding to be something altogether weirder and more disturbing than the synth-pop earworm the song keeps suggesting it could be.…

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The Adventure of the Irritated Narrator

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It was in the spring of 18– when I returned to Baker Street after a lengthy sojurn in the wilds of Dorsetshire.  It had been some months since I had last called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes and so I found myself quite anxious to renew that acquaintance which had, over the years, led to my involvement in various grotesque and singular events, many of which I have subsequently recounted for the interest of readers. 

I was let in by Mrs Hudson and climbed the 19 steps up to the rooms which I had once shared with Holmes before my marriage, the old wound from the jezail bullet troubling me but a little. 

I found Holmes slumped in an armchair, smoking a long clay pipe and seemingly locked in a brown study.  He barely responded to my halloas, giving only the faintest twitch of one of his eyebrows to acknowledge my arrival.

Well used to my strange friend’s extremes of mood and temper, and the sullenness which was wont to affect him during fallow periods when he happened to have no case to stimulate his restless desire for intellectual work, I did not take offence.  Instead I sat myself down opposite him before the fireside and regarded Holmes with a watchfulness which I found it hard to disguise.

How well I recalled the years when I, a bachelor in those days, had shared these rooms, these chairs, this fireside with the most brilliant consulting detective in the world. 

It seemed an age before Holmes took full notice of my presence.

“Watson,” he said through the gritted teeth clamped around the stem of the pipe, “you have been in Dorsetshire, I see.  How was the 12.22?  I usually find it rather inclined to be tardy.  I observe that you stopped by at Romano’s on the way here.  Did you enjoy your kippers?”

“Oh fuck off Holmes,” I said.  And walked out.…

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Outside the Government: Mona Lisa’s Revenge

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It’s November 12th, 2009. JLS are at number one with “Everybody in Love,” with Ke$ha, Cheryl Cole, Westlife, and Lady Gaga also charting. In news, Hugo Chavez tells Venezuela to “prepare for war” against Colombia, the US House of Representatives passes the first version of the health care law these days more commonly known as Obamacare, and, in a desperate attempt to get a third news item, Willie Bain wins the Glasgow North East by-election.
While on television, it’s Mona Lisa’s Revenge. It is difficult to get around the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge features the TARDIS as the Mona Lisa. That this involves certain eccentricities of chronology does not even seem like much of a problem: after all, in The Doctor’s Wife one of the major conceits is that the TARDIS does not experience time chronologically, and thus there is no particular reason why the fact that Mona Lisa’s Revenge was made two years earlier should have any bearing on the causality here.
We must also admit that Mona Lisa’s Revenge ties in conspicuously with City of Death, the previous time that Doctor Who has intersected the Mona Lisa. From that we know that the Mona Lisa that comes to life here is, if not a fake, at least not strictly speaking the original – that da Vinci in fact painted six additional versions on canvases onto which the Doctor had scrawled “this is a fake” in felt tip marker. 
This latter fact is worth stressing simply because back when we dealt with City of Death, one of our primary concerns was the fact that it was a story about the nature of authenticity – what Walter Benjamin deemed “aura” in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” That is to say, City of Death is a story about the strange and quasi-mystical allure of the authentic object. The thing that has been touched by the hand of the artist, as it were. Mona Lisa’s Revenge, for all that it is an odd bedfellow to that story, is firmly in the same tradition.
After all, the key event of the story is the presence of the Mona Lisa – the fact that it is on loan from the Louvre, and in the UK. The museum is drenched with Mona Lisa merchandise, and the story thus stresses in a number of ways how many copies and imitations of the image there are. But what’s important is the fact that the Mona Lisa – the one that comes to life and turns out to be rather evil – is the one that Leonardo da Vinci painted. Indeed, the explanation for what’s going on in this story, such as it is, hinges entirely on the medial reality of the painting. The Mona Lisa comes to life because she was painted with paint that happened to have alien rocks in it, or something like that. The explanation is terribly vague, but the underlying point stands: everything that happens in this story stems from the physical object of the Mona Lisa.
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“But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.”: The Enterprise Incident # 5

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Connected to the Preserver interface device, Spock relives an encounter with his father on Vulcan where they both exhibit a manner of tension over Spock’s decision to stay in Starfleet instead of returning to work at the Vulcan Science Academy. In the present, Kirk, McCoy and Scotty monitor the experiment from one of the Enterprise‘s science labs. After Arex detects a massive random energy spike centered around the device and McCoy warns him that Spock’s central nervous system is about to collapse as a result, Kirk has the interface destroyed and beamed out into space, but not before Spock was able to determine that it was the Preservers who constructed the galactic barrier (a ribbon of energy at the boundary of the Milky Way galaxy that was the focus of a number of Original Series episodes). While he wasn’t able to determine the exact purpose, Spock believes the Preservers intended it to protect the younger peoples of the galaxy, and that they hoped one day it would no longer be necessary.

</The Galactic Barrier evokes a number of episodes, but perhaps the most telling are “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Beyond the Farthest Star”, the first episodes of both the Original Series and the Animated Series. In the former episode, crossing the barrier caused Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner to suddenly transform into Godlike beings who, drunk on their newfound power, immediately set about trying to crush the entire universe beneath them. While it wasn’t mentioned in the latter episode, recall that a key aspect of the reading we afforded “Beyond the Farthest Star” was that the Enterprise crew, and thus Star Trek, had grown to a point where it could leave the galaxy behind and begin the next stage of its journey. In other words, leaving the galaxy can be seen as a sign of a particular wisdom and maturity, but also a source of great power that is inconceivably dangerous and destructive if misused, a reading reinforced by the presence of Ayelbourne at the last Preserver outpost./>

Determining the location of the last Preserver outpost, Kirk has the Enterprise race to try and beat Kor to it. However, as soon as they arrive, Kirk, Spock and Arex are whisked away to a chamber bathed in soft white light by Ayelbourne, the elder Organian who played a pivotal role in forcing the Klingons and the Federation to sign the Treaty of Organia in “Errand of Mercy”. Kirk and Spock are furious that Ayelbourne refused to show himself earlier, but Ayelbourne counters that his people have decided their intervention in the affairs of the galactic empires has done more harm then good. The Organians, he reveals, are one of a handful of peoples who are tasked with preserving the knowledge and memory of the Elder Races, infinitely old cultures from the dawn of time, of whom the Preservers are one, who left behind relics that, it was hoped, could be of use to the younger civilizations were they to reach specific points in their development.…

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Curdled to Sea Foam (The Last War in Albion Part 33: The Reversible Man and Chrono-Cops)

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This is the ninth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation.

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s flagging middle period of short stories for IPC came to a fortuitous end with the introduction of the Time Twisters line of stories, which provided his work with a renewed energy.
The flood of animal emotions surging in the street. Present desires precipitated. Curdled to a sea foam. – Alan Moore, The Highbury Working
Figure 247: The narrator of “The Reversible Man” sees his wife for the last
time. (From “The Reversible Man,” written by Alan Moore, art by Mike
White, in 2000 AD #308, 1983)
Moore has commented that “The Reversible Man” was “pathetically easy to write,” and that he was as a result surprised by its reception, speculating that its popularity was because “the events of our lives become dulled by reputation and it takes an unusual view of them for us to see life and its emotional implications anew,” disclaiming that the story’s success “had very little to do with me as a writer.” This is, perhaps, false modesty, however – elsewhere he proclaims it “one of the best stories I’ve ever done,” and boasts of how “during their lunch hour, the day that came out, it had all the secretaries weeping.” But even in that interview, where he breathlessly describes the emotional effect of how “an ordinary little scene of two people meeting, their first meeting… becomes their final departure,” he suggests that the story came mainly out of his inclination to “do something to see what will happen” and to experiment within the confines of the format. 
The story may have been straightforward to write, but the suggestion that there is no writerly skill involved in its success is clearly untrue. Much of the story’s power comes not just from the way in which it frames the events of a man’s life, but in its specific choices of what events to frame and how to frame them. For instance, when the narrator’s father is dug up and brought to the hospital and eventually goes home, the narrator’s mother, understandably, moves out to live with her newly un-dead husband. The narration describes how “they took several of our things with them to furnish their home. Mostly antique furniture. We didn’t mind.” The choice of the furniture as a detail for this reversed event – the death of the narrator’s father – is a carefully chosen one. There are many things that accompany the death of a parent, but the choice of a mundane, material thing like dealing with their old furniture is a well-chosen one, such that the word “antiques” speaks volumes.
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