Eruditorum Press

Single vision and Newtons sleep debt

Some Planet Called America (Warchild)

16

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped Shakedown, Terrance Dicks’s novelization of his direct-to-video project with added framing story featuring the Doctor, and Just War, which is absolutely phenomenal and will get covered in the book version.

Andrew Cartmel’s Warchild completes the trilogy began with Warhead, and features the final fate of Vincent and Justine, who were introduced in that book. It also ostensibly kicks off the Psi-Powers Series, an infamously loose series of books that runs over the final year or so of the New Adventures, but as it has next to nothing to do with any of the other books in that series we can largely leave that alone until Monday. Like all of Cartmel’s books it is neither loved nor hated, slotted at thirty-sixth in the Sullivan rankings with a rating of 65.8%. At the time Dave Owen gave a more or less positive review that largely declines to provide anything like a good pull quote. “The writing style is mature and restrained,” perhaps. Or “Warchild holds the readers interest.” Lars Pearson gushes more usefully: “An incredibly mature, humanistic book.” DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s February of 1996. Babylon Zoo are at number one with “Spaceman.” They remain there for the entire month. Blur, Bjork, Joan Osborne, Mariah Carey, Cher, George Michael, and Radiohead also make the top ten, while popular albums include Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele, Radiohead’s The Bends, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, which is on average an astonishingly lovely month for albums. I’d give you the lower chart data, but the absurd fact that it is possible to control the publishing of factual data means that the website I use to get chart data just got a takedown notice from the Official Charts Company, and the Official Charts Company’s own site doesn’t offer data past the top ten. Not, mind you, it doesn’t offer data past the top ten for free. No, it doesn’t offer it at all. Period. Bastards.

Wikipedia, meanwhile, still happily offers a summary of the news. What we’ve missed: The Dayton Agreement, which brought an end to the Bosnian war, was signed in Paris, which is a very poor definition of Dayton, Ohio. The European Court of Justice made a big, important rule that football players who have reached the end of their contracts may transfer for free to another club. And Calvin and Hobbes ended. Whereas in the month this book came out, Deep Blue defeats Gary Kasparov for the first time. The IRA ceasefire ends as the IRA bombs Canary Wharf. Prince Charles and Princess Diana agree to divorce. The Conservative Party manages to fall to a two-seat majority. And Pokemon Green came out in Japan, beginning that whole thing.

While in books, Andrew Cartmel’s Warchild. This is one of those properly strange moments in writing the blog: the last time we deal with Andrew Cartmel. This is strange in several regards.…

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Children in Need

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The BBC’s failure to protect kids from Jimmy Savile is revolting, but it’s hardly the beginning or the end of their disinterest in violence against children.  Certain children, anyway.  The keepers of Pudsey are strangely uninterested in the child victims of powerful and influential people… be they depraved DJs or depraved states that happen to be Western allies.

For instance, as I write this, the state of Israel – a brutal, aggressive, nuclear armed, apartheid state which is mysteriously supposed to be less of a threat to world peace than Iran – is murdering Gazan children.  (It does no good, by the way, to trot out that old chestnut about them not deliberately aiming at the kids… if you get a machine gun and spray bullets blindly into a school, it’s no good later claiming you were only trying to hit the cigar-smoking TV personality lurking in the corner.)

This is nothing new, nor is the BBC response, which is as routine as it is pusilanimous.  Indeed, cowardice in the face of the powerful Israeli lobby (not to mention the backing Israel gets from the USA and our government) is the most charitable interpretation.  A less charitable – and probably more accurate – interpretation would be that those BBC content providers covering the ‘conflict’ in Gaza are unaware of the way they are loading and slanting their words.

Some examples?  Try these from the BBC website today.  Click on them to make them bigger.

Note that the ‘Key Points’ are all to do with the so-called ‘targeted assassination’ of a Hamas leader.  Note the phrase “militant groups”, presumably including Hamas, a democratically elected party.  Note the prominence given to Israeli officials, who are allowed to frame the Israeli operation as being aimed at “terror targets” in response to “days of on going rocket attacks on Israeli civilians”, the aim being to “protect Israeli civilians” (the only civilians who matter, or even exist, apparently).

No mention of the Gazan civilians, including young children, slaughtered.  Can you imagine how differently the page might read if the Palestinian rockets had caused any comparable damage to Israel, or if Iran had bombed somebody and caused as much suffering?

This one from today too:

Here’s the headline.  Note the relative sizes (and thus importance) given to Israeli and Palestinian deaths… bearing in mind the ratios and the fact that Israel is immensely better armed.  Notice the decontextualised way the attack becomes “cross-border violence” in line with the BBC’s usual way of depicting Israel/Palestine as a two-tribes-squabble issue, rather than the brutal domination of a subjugated captive minority by a powerful state.

Yesterday, the blog Electronic Intifada published a “statement from international academics who recently particpated in a conference on linguistics at the Islamic University of Gaza which decries major media outlets’ failure to report on recent killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza.”  The statement spells out the issue far better than I could, and takes in the BBC’s role as peddling the unbalanced and dishonest message. …

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The 1917 Zone – Part 1: Tim Nice-But-Then and the Curse of Downton Abbey

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The first in a new series of posts looking at the way Doctor Who has tackled World War One.

Looked at from a certain viewpoint, ‘Human Nature’ / ‘The Family of Blood’ makes all the right noises.  All the proper sounds issue from it when it is tapped.  It notices social hypocrisy about war, perhaps even moralising about it.  For instance, while the young boys at the school are taught how to be good little soldiers, a veteran of the Crimean war is to be found begging outside the town hall.

There is also an acknowledgement that war is unpleasant.  The boys tremble and cry when forced to actually point weapons at an approaching enemy, with even the odious Hutchinson is seemingly relieved at the realization that they’ve been shooting at empty scarecrows.  Joan lost her husband at Spion Kop (a battle of the Second Boer War, which would’ve been a British victory but for the farcical incompetence of the British generals).  The Headmaster has his speech in which he describes using his dead mates as sandbags.

There is an attempt at balance, at the dramatic demonstration of values rather than the elaboration of a didactic authorial point-of-view.  Yet, the characters’ values are not allowed to go uninterrogated.  Irony is much used.  So the Headmaster rounds up his boys to fight, responds with angry self-righteousness to the taunting of Baines/Son, and so on… but also evinces sincere horror at the idea of allowing what he thinks of as a little girl to be caught in the crossfire.  Of course, there’s another irony there because he’s prepared for male children to be sent into the line of fire.  Females, especially working class females, are to keep silent (presumably unless cheering you on your way to the carnage).

There’s an awareness of open sexism and racism in the episodes, issues that other forays into the past – ‘Daleks in Manhattan’ for instance – have almost entirely ignored and effaced.  Baines and Hutchinson look down on Martha and Jenny and make their nasty little racist joke.  John Smith assumes that Martha’s talk of aliens is a case of “cultural misunderstanding”; a primitive failing to comprehend the difference between fiction and reality.  Joan scoffs at the idea of a black maid training to be a doctor, apparently finding this concept even more immediately and self-evidently ridiculous than time travel or aliens.

The Class Struggle in Trumpton

There’s quite a common fad nowadays in TV drama, perhaps best exemplified by Mad Men: setting a story in a past era allows lots of implied sneering at crass, blatant, old-style sexism, racism, etc… all underwritten by a kind of tacit, back-slapping awareness of how much better we are than the people back then, now that we’re all enlightened liberals, cured of such silly shibboleths.  In ‘Human Nature’ / ‘The Family of Blood’ there is at least an awareness of class as a factor, though ‘classism’ is depicted as just another category of prejudice alongside racism and sexism.…

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Outside the Government 5 (Downtime/The Airzone Solution)

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Part of the story of Doctor Who’s return is the story of a generation of fans steadily establishing themselves in the television industry and, to varying extents, remaking it in their own image. From a broad perspective, this shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Doctor Who declined artificially into cult television. Cult television’s audience is middle class white men. Middle class white nerds also double as the sorts of people who become professional television writers. And so it’s not a huge surprise that the up-and-coming writers of the 1990s and 2000s included a large number of Doctor Who fans in their ranks.

But the nature of fandom, with its strong DIY ethic, meant that a fair number of these up-and-coming television producers found themselves making delightfully amateurish direct-to-video projects for the Doctor Who fan market. A complex set of legal rules meant that, in effect, almost every part of Doctor Who other than the actual premise of Doctor Who was copyright by the writers who created them or their estates. This meant that as long as you were willing to never mention the Doctor or the TARDIS at all anywhere in your story you could, if you were willing to pay a bit of money to the relevant estates, do all manner of Doctor Who spinoffs. Thus stuff like Shakedown, written by Terrance Dicks and featuring the Sontarans along with Carole Ann Ford and Sophie Aldred playing parts other than Susan and Ace. Or Downtime, featuring Victoria, Sarah Jane Smith, the Brigadier, and the Yeti. Similarly, while you couldn’t do Doctor Who as such, you could readily, say, hire Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant to play “The Stranger” and “Miss Brown” respectively and pretend that you were doing something other than making Doctor Who. And people got real starts here – Mark Gatiss’s first writing for video wa s achain of videos for BBV featuring Liz Shaw and a host of Doctor Who actors in other parts, while Nicholas Briggs is a mainstay of these things. Big Finish are themselves the heir to this style of production, and basically what happened once everybody finally got enough practice that they could reliably make things that weren’t awful.

There was a torrent of these things in the 90s, and we’re spoiled for choice on what to take. So let’s do Downtime, from Reeltime Pictures, and The Airsone Solution from BBV, the big two of the companies doing these things. Neither, to be clear, quite manages “good.” The flaws are obvious, but they’re generally juxtaposed with moments of genuine quality. Downtime, being the one that’s actually tied into Doctor Who, is probably the best place to start.

The problems here are numerous. Marc Platt can, obviously, write well, and we’ve seen him do so twice already in this blog. But we’ve also seen him stumble with a continuity “clarifying” mess in Time’s Crucible, and unfortunately those are the tendencies that largely rule the day here. Downtime is, by necessity, an almost entirely backward looking piece, seeking to cash in on fan pseudo-nostalgia for The Web of Fear and The Abominable Snowmen.…

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The Greatest Specialist in Time-Space Exploration (The Also People)

22

I’ll Explain Later

The Also People is Ben Aaronovitch’s second New Adventure, and features a murder mystery in a utopian technologically advanced society modeled on the works of Iain M. Banks. It also largely resolves the plotline of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, although she’ll make two more appearances in the books. It’s highly acclaimed. Dave Owen admitted at the time that he was “tempted to say that The Also People is flawless,” while Lars Pearson more recently enthuses that it’s “meaty and domestic” and “deserves every drop of the hype.” Good thing, as there’s quite a bit of it – The Also People is ranked third on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, with an 86.7% rating. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide.

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It’s November of 1995. Coolio is still at number one with “Gangsta’s Paradise.” A week later he’s unseated by Robson and Jerome with “I Believe/Up on the Roof,” which sees out the month. The lower charts are far more interesting this time: Everything But the Girl, Oasis, Blur, Madonna, Enya, Bjork, Bon Jovi, Boyzone, Queen, Tina Turner, Meat Loaf, and Def Leppard all chart, almost none of them with anything close to one of their best songs.  (Actually, Oasis chart with “Wonderwall,” which is at least one of their best known songs. Amusingly, it doesn’t hit number one in the UK, but does in the US.

In news, the big one is Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in Tel Aviv. Nine members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People are executed in Nigeria more or less on the behalf of Shell Oil. The US government shut down for a few days. Both Toy Story and GoldenEye come out in theaters. And Princess Diana gives her famed interview to Martin Bashir, scoring all-time record ratings for a current affairs program in the UK. Thrilling.

In books, The Also People. The last three novel entries have all, to varying degrees, dealt with a certain level of inadequacy in the quality of writing in the New Adventures line. This is, as I have said, probably the biggest barrier between them and bringing Doctor Who back in the long term. If you compare Head Games to its nearest new series equivalent, which would probably be The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, the biggest thing that jumps out is that the latter is, like everything to come out of the Davies or Moffat systems, a well-oiled machine in terms of the tightness of its storytelling. Even when the new series coughs up a complete turkey of an episode the basic mechanics of its storytelling are largely impeccable. Its worst episodes still hum with a unity of approach such that every detail is turned carefully towards the questions of storytelling and every beat of the narrative supports a thematic or emotional payoff.

On their good days the New Adventures can match that handily. But their good days are, if not quite few and far between, at least sporadic. The Also People is, however, one of their good days.…

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Cruel and Cowardly

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Trigger Warning.

So, Jimmy Savile and all that.  The hidden well of suppurating pus beneath the now-picked scab of BBC light entertainment.

It would seem that vast amounts of Doctor Who were made by an organisation that, in its widespread branches and ascending echelons, actively colluded in facilitating and covering-up the abuse and rape of children.  Lots of children.

By itself, this observation is irrelevant to the wider scandal, and to dwell on it from the fan standpoint would surely amount to morally myopic solipsism of the first degree.  What matters isn’t how we feel about it, or how it changes our viewing of contemporaneous episodes.  On the list of things that matter, that’s so far down that it’s in an appendix, in small print.  Yet it surely demands some thought from those of us steeped in the show, in the history of it and the watching of it.

Most of us fans have – via the videos and DVDs and toys and… ahem… websites – given unreasonable amounts of our time and loyalty and extra money to the BBC.  The same organisation that cosetted and enabled a man who, beyond being a routine right-wing shitsmear of a type all-too-common in the entertainment world, was also a known child rapist.  The BBC, the makers and marketers of the children’s own show that the adults adore, instititionally sat on the knowledge and did nothing.

We shouldn’t, of course, be shocked out of any illusions about the BBC being a beneveolent, lovable old auntie or any such mindless, sentimental bollocks.  I’m now past the point where I’d be happy to take part in any ‘Proud of the BBC’ campaigns.  I guess even Mitch Benn would probably not write the same lyrics, were he writing today.

No, no.  The BBC News helps naturalise and peddle and thus facilitate wars, invasions, corruption, hard-right government policies, police brutality, neo-liberal assumptions galore, and a thoroughly establishment view of reality.  This is it’s notion of balance and objectivity.  Andrew Marr and Jeremy Vine and other such clueless parrots of capitalist realism, spewing endless reiterations of hegemonic ideology.  BBC drama and comedy and entertainment shows – Doctor Who included – generally promulgate deference, hierarchy, cultural racism, heterodoxy and conformity, heteronormativity, contempt for the working class and bourgeois values.  The BBC, as a force in the culture industries, instinctively advocates respect for authority and royalty and capitalism and established power.

That it is loathed and hated poisonously by the Murdoch press and the rest of Britain’s reactionary print media is testament only to the fact that, being publically owned, it doesn’t earn profit for the capitalist class directly, and even cuts into a wedge of the market.  Being nominally accountable to the public, it is occasionally capable of mild deviations from the ideological ultra-lunacy of the press, red-top or ‘quality’.  From the standpoint of Melanie Phillips and persons of her loathsome ilk, it’s communism to even affect neutrality over, say, Israel/Palestine, even if the real effect of your coverage is to perpetuate all the reactionary lies peddled about the conflict. …

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What More Could A Renegade Wish For? (Head Games)

11

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped the perfectly serviceable Zamper and Toy Soldiers. Head Games is a doozy – the sequel to Conundrum as well as part of a paired release alongside the Missing Adventure Millennial Rites, also in October of 1995, which constitute Virgin Books’ attempt to deal with the Valeyard and the regeneration of the Sixth Doctor. It also has both Mel and Ace. It’s… ambitious, as we’ll see. And yet largely praised. Lars Pearson somewhat idiosyncratically calls for a beverage pairing, saying that it “leaves a lump of your throat as you down cup after cup of cafe mochas.” Dave Owen, at the time, was a beverage agnostic, and was altogether more dour, suggesting that the book was good on the matter of “the psychodrama going on in the TARDIS,” but calling it “dreary” and “dull” when talking about any other parts. It is indeed considerably less popular than Conundrum, hanging out in the mid-list in thirty-fourth place on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings with a 68.3% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

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It’s October of 1995. Simply Red are at number one with “Fairground.” The only bad consequence of skipping Toy Soldiers is that we missed the opportunity to name-check “Boombastic” by Shaggy, not because it’s good, but because it’s “Boombastic” by Shaggy. It’s at number three. In any case, in the last week of the month Coolio unseats Fairground with “Gangsta’s Paradise.” There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden, Pulp, and The Rembrandts also chart, while Oasis debuts at number one on the album charts with “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” i.e. The album of theirs that Americans have heard of.

While we were not reading books DVDs were announced, the White Earthquake struck Chile, Bermudans rejected independence, and Microsoft released Windows 95. While in the month of this book, the Million Man March, consisting of somewhere in the range of 400-800 thousand people, takes place in Washington DC. And Julie Goodyear leaves Coronation Street. Nothing else happens that month. Nothing. (Oh fine. OJ Simpson is acquitted.)

While in books, Head Games. Encyclops, commenting a few entries back, suggested jokingly a glossary of terms that are cliches in fan-analysis of Doctor Who: “romp,” for instance – an admittedly problematic term, and “gurning,” a delightful word that fills a hole in one’s life that one didn’t even know existed. And then there was the third term he proposed, “nightmare brief.” It is, indeed, a fan cliche. But a history of the term is still interesting. The term refers to those occasional stories that happen in which two or more pre-ordained events end up taking place in a single story. The archetypal nightmare brief is probably Planet of Fire, in which Peter Grimwade got to deal with Peri’s arrival, the death of the Master, squaring away Kamelion, writing out Turlough, and going to Lanzarote all in one story.

The nightmare brief is not merely an event story. Remembrance of the Daleks, for instance, is not a nightmare brief, in that seemingly every idea involved in it was always Aaronovitch’s intention.…

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He’s Slipped in the Bilge Water (Sky Pirates!)

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I’ll Explain Later

Sky Pirates!, Dave Stone’s first New Adventure, is a novel in the comedic sci-fi style of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, albeit with a bit of a dark tinge. It’s not hugely popular. Lars Pearson calls it “a drug-induced work, perhaps best suited for trippy, skewed-view people.” Dave Owen is polite, but calls it “a bit of an ordeal.” Shannon Sullivan’s rankings have it languishing down at 47th pace, with a 60.9% rating. It’s worse than Iceberg. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s July of 1995. Robson and Jerome are still at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” A week later The Outhere Brothers take over with “Boom Boom Boom.”  U2, Foo Fighters, Jamiroquai, Bobby Brown, Shaggy, Seal, and Method Man also chart. I have a bad feeling that I accidentally ran the July chart for Original Sin, since this is flagrantly the same chart. I’ll want to fix that for the book version. In news, John Major retains leadership of the Conservative party. Aung San Suu Kyi is freed from House Arrest in either Burma or Myanmar, depending on your taste. And there’s quite a bit of to-do over Iraqi disarmament.

While in dead trees, Sky Pirates! The obvious thing to note about Sky Pirates! is that Dave Stone is no Terry Pratchett. But who in their right minds would expect it to be? One of them is among the most successful writers in the United Kingdom, the other is writing for the New Adventures, and, as we previously discussed, there’s a cap to the expectations one can reasonably have there.

This is, however, a problem for Sky Pirates! in a way that it isn’t for, say, Original Sin. Because as we discussed on Monday, the comedic narrator is first and foremost a matter of style and craft. And doing a Terry Pratchett-style comedy novel when you’re not a Terry Pratchett quality writer then the gulf is going to be more visible than if you’re writing a pulpy action thriller, which is a genre where the difference between a very good writer and a pretty good writer is narrower. Comedy is terribly, terribly unforgiving.

And so, yes, Stone’s novel has problems. Where the books he’s emulating – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Discworld – weave comedy around social and political observations, Stone too often delivers lengthy lectures on sexual politics with a few jokes in them. It’s a subtle difference, but a massive one. Stone is also prone to trying a bit too hard to create a distinctive narrative voice, falling back on gratuitous verbosity and the deeper recesses of the thesaurus in place of actual wit or content.

But that’s the obvious thing to note. We strive for better here. And while I think even a positive reading (and I don’t think the New Adventures require such extreme words as “redemption” for the most part) has to acknowledge the fact that the New Adventures simply aren’t drawing top drawer writers on a regular basis, and it would be utterly unreasonable to expect otherwise.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 44 (Red Dwarf, Discworld)

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Oh, come now, did you all really think I wasn’t going to cover these two? What’s next, being surprised by the Queer as Folk post? It was just a matter of timing. And with Sky Pirates! Coming on Wednesday, this seems to be the time to finally deal with the strain of British comedy devoted to sci-fi/fantasy. It’s worth noting, first of all, just how important this subgenre was in the mid-90s, simply because it’s easy to overlook, especially for American readers for whom the works are not part of their basic cultural context. Red Dwarf was never huge as such, but it was the BBC sci-fi show that was still running in the mid-90s, which, at least for Doctor Who fans, put it in a position of considerable envy. Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, was and is absolutely massive: he was basically Britain’s best-selling author until J.K. Rowling came along. Given this, it was basically all but inevitable that Doctor Who, then a novel series with lingering resentment about being recognized by anyone other than a die-hard fan as a cancelled television series instead, was going to do at least one story in this mode. Between it being by miles the most popular sort of genre novel in Britain and the one BBC sci-fi show left (a position that no amount of people trying to be clever and declare that Doctor Who was now really a novel series and didn’t need to return to television would ever keep anyone from believing made Doctor Who fans apoplectically jealous) it was as inevitable that the New Adventures would do a comedy novel as it was that they’d do a cyberpunk one. So let’s understand this sci-fi/fantasy-comedy subgenre, or, at least, its two biggest examples.

Red Dwarf was just recently written up by Lawrence Miles on his blog, and let me tell you, you don’t realize how much you like a critic until you spend some time working with stuff they haven’t commented on. His observations on the basic arc of Red Dwarf are spot on. To begin with, at least, the series is a straightforward sitcom that happens to be set in outer space, using the potential eradication of humanity as little more than a premise to justify a classic “two people who hate each other stuck in a room together” setup. Rimmer and Lister are as straightforward a chalk and cheese duo as has ever existed in a sitcom. Like any chalk and cheese duo, their similarities are actually far more important than their differences: both are borderline incompetent at their jobs and of painfully low social status, but where Rimmer aspires to better himself (but only ends up being a rules obsessed and hated jerk), Lister is perfectly happy to coast along at the bottom of the social hierarchy and to get by on the standard sort of idiot’s guile that is common in comedies.

It would, in other words, have been wholly unremarkable if not for the fact that it was also a sci-fi show.…

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I’m Not Paid to Have Opinions, Sir (Original Sin)

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I’ll Explain Later

Original Sin, by Andy Lane, introduces Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej, the final two original companions of the Virgin line. It serves as a semi-sequel to Lucifer Rising, in that it fleshes out the time period and the nature of the Adjudicators (basically, at this point, cops), and has a surprise reveal of Tobias Vaughn as the villain behind it all. At the time Dave Owen, newly installed as Doctor Who Magazine reviewer, calls it “a truly auspicious debut for two new companions,” while Lars Pearson declares it “all the more impressive because it doesn’t try to impress you.” It’s quite popular, at sixth in the Sullivan rankings with an 83.1% rating. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s June of 1995. Robson and Jerome remain at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” A week into the month, The Outhere Brothers unseat them with “Boom Boom Boom,” which rides out the month. U2, Foo Fighters, Jamiroquai, Michael and Janet Jackson, Clock, Shaggy, and Seal all also chart, more than one of them with songs from the Batman Forever soundtrack.

In news, what is apparently the busiest hurricane season in sixty-five years begins. So that’s ironic, as I post this from generator power. Jacques Chirac resumes nuclear tests in French Polynesia. US Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady is shot down over Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is rescued. A hijacking situation in Japan is defused after a knife-wielding man attempts to force the release of Shoko Asahara. And John Major pulls a stunt resignation as leader of the Conservative Party to allow a leadership election, which he wins.

In exciting sci-fi television tie-in novels, Original Sin. The needle that the New Adventures perpetually threaded between serious-minded, action-packed sci-fi drama and the sort of ludicrous camp that Doctor Who can do better than any other sci-fi show of note is, perhaps, captured more perfectly in this than in any other novel. On the one hand we have a grim and murder-filled future, a book where the Doctor acquires a pair of cops as his newest companions, and a major secondary character who’s a serial killer. On the other, one of the new companions spends most of the book with a body modification making him look like a giant teddy bear.

This may be a strange thing to focus on, but it still gives some intriguing insight into the way in which the books go about things. There is, after all, no inherent reason not to give the Doctor a giant teddy bear as a companion in the novels. Left to their own devices the comics gave us a shape-shifting penguin, after all. And so the decision to have Cwej be a giant teddy bear for large swaths of this story, but to make sure he gets reverted to human form at the end presents a strange ambivalence: a moment where the books seem to say “this far and no further” in terms of that sort of mad inventiveness.…

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