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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 36 (Snow Crash)

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There are two main ways into cyberpunk, and which one you pick is terribly important to how the genre looks to you. The first option is to go via Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 novel. This is not the first cyberpunk work – the term had been coined a year earlier by Bruce Bethke, and had been around unnamed for a few years previous, including in other works by William Gibson. But it is in many ways the definitive one, where it broke out into the mainstream. A year later we had Max Headroom, which we’ve already talked about.

The other way people approach the genre is Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. This is an altogether more interesting way, since Stephenson’s next novel, 1995’s The Diamond Age, was self-consciously framed as a post-Cyberpunk novel. The first character it introduces, Bud, is a blatant parody of cyberpunk heroes (the first sentence says it all: “The bells of St. Mark’s were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.”) and, more to the point, gets spectacularly and ignobly killed forty-three pages into the book. And while Snow Crash itself is not so prone to aggressively deconstructing cyberpunk, there is a somewhat odd sense of things that comes from having one of the iconic novels of cyberpunk be a book by an author whose later career consists almost entirely of actively moving beyond the genre.
Obviously, given the stated topic of this post, I’m taking the latter, although in my defense I did talk about Max Headroom at the time, which is almost like talking about Neuromancer. Though for the most part this is just a matter of accurately tracking influences. The cyberpunk influences on 1980s Doctor Who are few and far between. Warriors of the Deep, somewhere in its bowels, has a cyberpunk story trying desperately to get out from under the Myrka. Vengeance on Varos has some cyberpunk attitudes, but they’re largely incidental – any attempt to do a sci-fi Play for Today in 1985 would have been about as cyberpunk as Vengeance on Varos. Actually, the most cyberpunk story of the 1980s is probably The Caves of Androzani, which is just kind of too perfect if you want to think about it.
The New Adventures, on the other hand, are mad for cyberpunk. The primary embodiment of this is actually Andrew Cartmel, who has a cyberpunk trilogy spread out over the course of the line, the first book of which we’ll deal with on Monday. But scads of the books are heavily cyberpunk inflected. So we should probably, you know, actually look at what that genre was before we go too much further. 
On a basic, factual level cyberpunk can be described as a sci-fi genre focusing on computers and digital technology (broadly construed), and with a gritty, street-level, punk aesthetic. Typically it’s set in a post-industrial and at least mildly dystopian future, and stars anti-hero hackers as its protagonists.
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Guest Post: Odin and the Doctor

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Fairly early in the process of writing this blog I realized that it was useful to have some prior context for a given story before writing an entry on it. And so I bought the About Time books, which are fabulous and were my anchor for several stories in the classic series about which I’d have had little interesting to say on my own. But I was also, early on, aware that I was eventually going to hit the new series and there would be no About Time to help me.

The solution, I realized, was to get a friend hooked on Doctor Who so they would blog about it and I could just take off on their posts. Unfortunately for me, the friend I chose was Anna Wiggins. The problem with Anna, you see, is that she is vastly more clever and intelligent than I can ever hope to be, and so when my blog hits Series Six, about which she has blogged extensively, I am going to abruptly be found out as the pathetic fool I am and all of my readers are going to, quite correctly, go follow Anna instead. Oops.

In order to ease the transition to all of you abandoning me in favor of my smarter and far cooler friend, I thought I should get a guest post from Anna about the relationship between the Doctor and Odin. And so I did.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, several Germanic tribes migrated to England. And they brought their gods with them. The British isles would be settled, resettled, and invaded by many peoples over the next several hundred years. The bones of Britain contain traces of dozens of cultures, and many of those cultures were Heathen.

To be clear, I’m using ‘Heathen’ in a fairly specific and uncommon sense. Prior to the encroachment of Christianity, a similar worldview and set of religious beliefs was practiced widely across Northern Europe and Scandinavia. The Romans termed these people ‘heathen’. So, I am using the term ‘Heathen’ to refer to this basic religious system, which largely included the same gods, myths, and folk legends. The more commonly known term for this religious system and worldview is ‘Norse’, as in ‘Norse Mythology’. But that is a misnomer – in practice, the same basic set of beliefs and practices held sway throughout northern Europe, and included, at various times, various parts of the British Isles. (I will also mention ‘modern Heathenry’ in the course of this entry – which is a reference to the reconstructionist religion that revives the worship of the Heathen gods)

And so, in the late 1980s, Doctor Who began to draw on these Heathen bones of British culture. The Seventh Doctor was cast as an explicitly Odinic figure, and this vision of the Doctor operating in a Heathen mode would have a lasting influence on the show.

Odin is widely known as the ‘chief god’ of the Heathen pantheon, and as a ‘god of war’ and, if you have a particularly verbose summary on hand, maybe a ‘god of secrets’ or a ‘god of wisdom’.…

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If You Were That Old, And That Kind (Timewyrm: Apocalypse and Timewyrm: Revelation)

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I’ll Explain Later

Timewyrm: Apocalypse is the third New Adventure and third part of the Timewyrm series, and is written by Nigel Robinson. Robinson was the editor of the Target novelizations until 1989, when Peter Darvill-Evans, who created the New Adventures line, took over. He thus continues the pattern across the first three New Adventures of using experienced writers from the Target novelizations. Timewyrm: Apocalypse involves societal revolution on an alien world, and is typically considered unambitous and tedious. I, Who goes with “sadly dull, especially in the middle,” and Sullivan’s rankings have it as the second-worst of the New Adventures with a 45.8% rating. Its reputation at the time of release was perhaps rosier, with Doctor Who Magazine praising it as “just excellent” and “well worth running out to buy.” DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

Timewyrm: Revelation is the debut novel of Paul Cornell, and wraps up the Timewyrm series while starting the (very) loosely connected quartet of Paul Cornell novels that ends in Human Nature. Unlike any previous Doctor Who story, it’s an intensely psychological book in which the bulk of the action takes place inside the Doctor’s own mind where his previous incarnations live eternally. It’s tremendously ground-breaking, and does more to define the New Adventures style than any other book. At the time, Doctor Who Magazine bent over backwards to try to avoid actually calling it the best New Adventure to date, but cautioned against following in its footsteps with future novels. I, Who calls it “One of the blackest, most invasive Doctor Who novels – and one of the best,” while the Sullivan rankings give it a slightly above average ranking of twenty-first out of sixty-one, with a 74.9% rating. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

Its October of 1991. Bryan Adams is still at the top of the charts with “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” and it’s not until the last week of the month that U2 finally dislodge him with “Fly.” Genesis, Moby, Salt-N-Pepa, and Erasure also chart, as, oddly, do Monty Python with “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” released some twelve years after Life of Brian.

It’s also December of 1991, where George Michael and Elton John are trying to keep the sun from going down. They are unseated after two weeks by a rerelease of “Bohemian Rhapsody” following the death of Freddy Mercury, which remains at number one through the end of the month and takes the coveted Christmas number one. These facts obscure a tremendously weird set of songs in the lower positions, as The KLF make it to number two, Right Said Fred have another hit that makes it to number three, and both Michael Jackson and Nirvana fail to hit number one with “Black or White” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” respectively. But most importantly, Hammer, formerly MC Hammer, hits #4 with a rap redo of the Addams Family theme.

In real news, Clarence Thomas is appointed to the US Supreme Court, while Bill Clinton announces he’ll run for President.…

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Then Suddenly, One Year, There Was No Spring (Timewyrm: Genesys and Timewyrm: Exodus)

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I’ll Explain Later

I’ll Explain Later is a feature that will be employed for the out-of-print Virgin and BBC Books covered over the next few months, in which I provide a brief contextualization of what the book is and what its general critical reception is. For these entries, the entry proper begins below the horizontal rule. 

Timewyrm: Genesys is the first of the New Adventures, by John Peel. The first four books are ostensibly a plot arc about the eponymous Timewyrm, who is introduced in this book as an alien using the Osiran playbook on the Sumerians and impersonating Ishtar. She eventually gets magic powers from the TARDIS, like you do. Guest-starring Gilgamesh, and infamous for the amount of boobs and molestation, at the time Gary Russell politely describes himself as “feeling a little disappointed.” More recently, I Who describes it as “brave, if woefully unsuccessful,” and Shannon Sullivan’s novel rankings place it at fifty-fourth out of the sixty-one New Adventures, with a rating of 54.9%. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

Timewyrm: Exodus is Terrance Dicks’s debut in the world of adult Doctor Who novels. Nazis ahoy, this one features an alternate timeline where the Germans win World War II, Hitler as a major supporting character (possessed by the Timewyrm to boot), and the return of the War Chief from The War Games. This easily has the best reputation of any of Dicks’s original novels. At the time, Doctor Who Magazine called it “a mature, intelligent book written by someone who clearly knows his subject backwards.” I, Who calls it “a book with a good reputation that deserves even more praise,” while Sullivan’s rankings put it at seventh out of sixty-one with an 81.4% rating. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.


It’s June of 1991. Cher is at number one with “The Shoop Shoop Song,” replaced by “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd after one week. They hold until the end of the month, when Jason Donovan takes over with “Any Dream Will Do.” Soft Cell, KLF, REM, Kylie Minogue, Salt-N-Pepper, and Amy Grant also chart.

It’s also August of 1991, in which Bryan Adams is at number one with “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” which stays at number one the entire month, fending off Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” for a staggering six weeks straight, with the two occupying #1 and #2 through to the end of September. Guns ’n Roses, Metallica, Heavy D and the Boyz, and The Prodigy also chart.

In news, we have rather a lot to cover in the eighteen month gap. So, starting back in December of 1989, free elections are held in Chile for the first time in sixteen years, and the Romanian revolution begins and ends in a matter of days, with Nicolae Ceau?escu being executed as a Christmas present. Four days later, Václav Havel is elected president of Czechoslovakia.

1990 is all sorts of exciting – a US invasion of Panama, F.W.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 32 (Death Comes to Time)

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One of the enduring mysteries of Doctor Who is how, in 2001, Death Comes to Time made it to the air and, more to the point, did so with as solid a cast as it did. That Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, and, in a late-story cameo, Nicholas Courtney signed on for this is not surprising – all three of them, after all, have a long legacy of doing work for various fan projects and low-end Doctor Who stuff. And I suppose Anthony Stewart Head’s appearance can be explained by the fact that it can’t have taken him more than an hour to record. But good God, what the heck is Stephen Fry doing in this thing?

I’m hard-pressed to come up with much of an argument for being anything other than honest about this one. This is an absolutely terrible story. Virtually everything about it is completely misconceived. For those unaware of it, it’s the first of four attempts at a webcast Doctor Who during the wilderness years. It was successful enough to do more, but not nearly successful enough to justify the same approach – the next two attempts would be farmed out to Big Finish, and after that, attempted their online continuation of Doctor Who in the form of Scream of the Shalka, which we’ll get to in due course. All of which said, what is it about this story that’s so mind-wrenchingly bad?

Back on Friday, in the comments, there was a discussion about the importance or lack thereof of continuity. Which is convenient, because one of the most obvious and often-raised objections to this story is that it is a complete and utter departure from all established continuity. That it kills the Doctor in his Seventh incarnation, thus apparently attempting to relegate the McGann movie into the abyss might fairly be taken as charmingly cheeky by some fans. That it does so in a way that discards the entire New Adventures line would have sacrificed points with many of those fans, but no matter. But that it does so along with completely redoing the Time Lords, turning them into magic sorcerers with no shortage of clear inspiration from Highlander, is pretty tough to swallow.

Why is this? After all, for the most part I’ve been pretty vocal in support of a “there’s no such thing as canon/continuity” approach to Doctor Who. Why not throw major strands away and start over? Continuity, after all, just endlessly and eternally limits what you can do. So if you’ve got a better take on the Time Lords than the series’ – and let’s face it, given that the series’ Time Lords went out with Trial of a Time Lord, itself following the Arc of Infinity/Five Doctors version of Gallifrey, this is not a high bar to clear – why not scrap them and replace it with a new one?

One line of thought is that this is OK, but that it has to be done deliberately and consciously. I largely disagree with this.…

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Sport, sport, masculine sport, prepares a young man for society…

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The Olympics really depresses me. 

Not just the horrendous waste of money and the revolting jingoism and the all-pervading ideological reinforcement… but it represents a boat I missed. 

Sport.  Games.  I hate them.  But I strongly suspect that I hate them because school trained me to, through social punishment. 

In school, sport is a dark ritual soaked in hierarchy and humiliation and hatred and contempt.  Win or you’re rubbish.  Understand and like and care about the right things or you’re ‘gay’ (horror of horrors).  Be thin and athletic or know that you are subhuman. 

All school is like that.  A huge pyramidal structure of power in which the establishment trains its next generation to be drones or managers or lumpen failures salutary for the rest of us.  Meanwhile, the kids compete for popularity and cool and acceptance.  Learn, children, straight away, that life is a race and the losers are scum.  It’s all built on the shaming and degradation of anyone different or overweight or awkward or sad or bookish or unattractive or poor or clueless or weak. 

That was the context in which I was exposed to sport and games for the first time.  I don’t remember ever being taught about it.  I was just thrown in and expected to prove my aggressive masculinity (at age 7 or whatever!), to jeer at anybody who wasn’t as good as me, or accept that it was my place to be jeered at if I didn’t have any aptitude or skill. 

Inevitably, I reacted against it and became not just useless but actively hostile.  I started to define myself in opposition to things like healthiness and outdoorsiness and athleticism.

But I don’t really believe that sport is inherently bad or worthless.  I was just made to take on that rationalisation because sport in school made me feel bad and worthless.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 14 (The Seventh Doctor Comics)

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I will confess that the comics posts have increasingly become some of my least favorite to write. The reasons are fairly straightforward – there are basically no points in the history of Doctor Who where comics were the primary medium for the series, and they were often treated disposably as a result. When they had serious talent attached to them it tended to be incidental, and because the talent in question was in the earliest days of their career, and was thus taking assignments as rubbish as the Doctor Who Magazine strip. More often the Doctor Who comics were done by artists who never broke out more widely. For instance, yes, there’s a Grant Morrison/Bryan Hitch comic from 1988, but it’s Morrison when his only major credit is Zenith in 2000 AD and Hitch in some of his earliest work ever. There are scattered exceptions – John Wagner and Pat Mills most obviously – but for the most part the Doctor Who comics look like the disposable page-count ballast that they have been for almost every publication that has ever run them.

That’s not to say they haven’t been good at various times, but rather that their quality is almost completely independent of what’s on screen. Indeed, their content is almost completely independent of what’s on screen. Steve Parkhouse did the same sort of hazily plotted phantasmagoric stories with Peter Davison that he’d been doing with Colin Baker. The Mills/Wagner stories juxtapose meaningfully with Season Seventeen nowhere except in Lawrence Miles’s childhood. The story of the comics is very rarely related substantively to the story of the series at large.

That makes these entries, even when I’m writing about a good stretch of comics, frustrating, as they become “we interrupt your history of Doctor Who for a complete tangent having nothing to do with any of the blog’s current themes.” I mean, I have an actual coherent (at least in my own head) arc worked out for the blog through to Love and War or so. I’ve got this really nice parallel track going between the fact that the show, at the moment of its cancellation, needed to evolve and the fact that it needed to find a way to exist within the contemporary television landscape instead of as a cult oddity, and I’m all set to go through months of tracking what was compelling in genre fiction and what was compelling in mainstream British television, and how the New Adventures were constantly trying to negotiate that and come up with a new vision of Doctor Who. And now I have to interrupt all of that for another post about this backwater aspect of Doctor Who’s history where I struggle to find two thousand words to say about largely mediocre comics. Which is a minor complaint, as things go, but in practice this paragraph largely exists to set up a rhetorical turn in the next one.

The one exception to the backwater nature of Doctor Who comics came in 1990, the first year since 1963 in which there was simply no Doctor Who on the air whatsoever save for the endearingly awful “Search Out Science” episode featuring Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, and John Leeson as K-9.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 13 (The Video Games)

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Right. We should finally get around to dealing with this backlog of Doctor Who video games I haven’t been dealing with, shouldn’t we? I don’t really have a clever introduction here – this is just one of those “we needed to do it eventually, and here’s a nice big gap between stories that begs to take a post or two like this, so let’s take advantage of the transitional nature of the era” posts. Let’s get on with it.

The curiously named Doctor Who: The First Adventure is an odd duck – a collection of four minigames each flagrantly ripped off of an existing game. In sequence you took the Fifth Doctor (or at least, he was the one on the box) through a Pac-Man-like maze to find the three segments of the Key to Time, a Frogger-style prison break, a Space Invaders-inflected battle with “Terrordactyls,” and, finally, a 3-D Battleship clone searching for the Box of Tantalus, which presumably contains a satsuma at the bottom, just a bit further down than you can actually reach. There are other snarks to make here – the fact that apparently the Doctor has nineteen regenerations total these days, for instance, and that the TARDIS on the packaging looks as though happiness did, in fact, prevail.

The interesting point, however, is that there’s a clear arbitrariness to this. This sounds nothing like a Doctor Who plot. Indeed, it doesn’t sound like much of any other kind of plot. It sounds like an excuse to stitch together Pac-Man, Frogger, Space Invaders, and Battleship(s) into a single computer game. Which, not coincidentally, it probably was. Similarly, the next two Doctor Who computer games were fairly straightforward executions of existing genres. Doctor Who and the Warlord was a standard issue text adventure, and Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror was a sequel to another game that got reskinned as a Doctor Who game midway through development. These are, in other words, not so trying to make a game about Doctor Who as they are games that Doctor Who has been cudgeled into. (Doctor Who and the Warlord, I’ll admit, may be an exception – Graham Williams is apparently among the developers. I can’t get it to run easily on anything I own, and while what I can read makes it sound like a bog standard text adventure, I also suspect there could be more to it. But it sounds unpromising.)

This leads us to an important observation to start with about video games, which is that they are not narrative devices in the same way that other popular media are. That’s not to say, as some extreme positions in game studies have, that narrative is completely extraneous to video games. It’s clearly not. But they’re only indirectly narrative objects. A video game, at its core, is about the interaction of a player and a set of rules through a specific mechanism of control. Most good games are first and foremost about exploring the implications of these controls.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 35 (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

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There are several angles from which to approach Star Trek: The Next Generation in terms of Doctor Who. Most of them entangle themselves in a sort of anxiety of influence, either picking over the ways in which Star Trek and Doctor Who’s histories are intertwined or stomping their feet adamantly over the ways in which they are fundamentally different. I think the more interesting relationship, staring from a post-2009 vantage point, is one based far more on material conditions of broadcast and production. But let’s deal with what everyone else is interested in first.

As I noted when last we talked about Star Trek, at the time they were both being made in the 1960s the extent of influence the two shows had on each other was “none whatsoever.” Short of elaborate theories, it’s just not possible to posit that anyone involved in one show had even heard of the other, little yet seen enough to be influenced.

Come the 1970s, though, when Star Trek was off the air, it began having considerable influence on Doctor Who. The obvious one is the roundel in the Season Fourteen control room, but the larger influences come in the Pertwee era. Under Letts and Dicks the show never became a Star Trek clone, but it nevertheless existed in what was clearly a post-Trek era of science fiction. Colony in Space, The Mutants, Frontier in Space, and the two Peladon stories all clearly existed in a world that presupposed a human-dominated Galactic government with at least some degree of colonial leanings. Being written in a country that had experience in colonialism instead of longing for it, Pertwee-era flirtations with Star Trek’s themes were always short on the military pageantry and longer on a political messiness, particularly when Malcolm Hulke was involved. Star Trek, in all of its incarnations, is terribly fond of being Master and Commander or Horatio Hornblower in space, whereas Doctor Who, when it’s intersected those tropes, has tended to take a less reverential approach (c.f. The Pirate Planet and The Space Pirates, or Beryl Reid in Earthshock), and, more to the point, has never been prone to collapsing space imperialism and the Hornblower aesthetic into being one thing.

On the other hand, there is something to say about the UNIT crew having some Star Trek influences. Certainly there’s something to the fact that Doctor Who introduced a regular set of military characters in the immediate wake of Star Trek airing in its timeslot during the off season. But again, what stands out is the sardonic quality of the influence. Star Trek unfailingly saw Captain Kirk as the pinnacle of American masculinity. The Brigadier, on the other hand, even though he represents a cultural ideal of masculinity just as much as Captain Kirk does, is less straightforwardly viewed as the best the world has to offer, not least because he’s continually shown up by a glam rock space messiah.

So while Star Trek was unquestionably an influence on Doctor Who, the influence was fairly diffuse.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 31 (Atom Bomb Blues)

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It’s December of 2005, and Doctor Who fans are eagerly awaiting the proper debut of David Tennant’s Doctor. Meanwhile, the Past Doctor Adventures line stutters to a stop, some nine months after it was officially relegated to being a historical footnote to a now resurgent series. These final books are an interesting spur road of the series’ history – a last legacy of what is now thought of as the classic series that persisted past the point where it was surpassed.

It’s oddly appropriate, then, that the final book of the series tacks back to the final days of the television show, filling in the space between Survival and Timewyrm: Genesys and tucking the wilderness years into a loop, if not a neat one. Andrew Cartmel, who oversaw the program’s last days, now returns to them nearly a decade after his last writing for that era (though he did a Fifth Doctor story for Big Finish and a Second Doctor one for Telos in the intervening years).

The result is strange. The novel is great fun, but arguing that it’s a successful piece of Doctor Who when you have to slot it in between Parting of the Ways and The Christmas Invasion is a stretch. It’s clearly a step backwards. But, odd as this may sound, I don’t mean that as a criticism. The very act of publishing the novel in this position, as the finale to the Past Doctor Adventures, is a conscious step backwards – a rolling back of the clock. To complain that a book that is self-consciously striving for 1989 doesn’t fit well with 2005 is an odd complaint, although, to be fair, it’s an odd problem as well.

Of all things, reading Atom Bomb Blues felt most evocative of reading a Terrence Dicks novel. This is odd, as Cartmel’s prose is hardly the well-defined quantity that Dicks’s is. He’s only done three other Doctor Who novels, and the only bit of those I remember with any vividness is a description of violence in Warlock that, for some reason or another, stood out to me. (I’ll say more when I cover the novel, as I don’t even remember its context or trust my memories of the description) So it’s not like I’m reacting to the sort of linguistic warm blanket that Dicks prose by default invokes in anyone who grew up with Target novelizations. And yet there’s a sense of deep familiarity to this book.

Certainly many of the concerns of the Cartmel era are well reflected here, with or without a big degree of appropriateness. His anti-nuclear weapons program is firmly in place some sixteen years since the end of the Cold War took some of the bite out of his final season on the program. His enduring infatuation with Ace remains clear and oddly charming, a crush frozen in time. (Cartmel’s love of the character, historically, walks an odd line between a crush on Sophie Aldred, which not nearly as inappropriate as one might think given her character [he’s only four years older than her], and a clear love of the character herself, which is actually somewhat stranger given the level of artifice involved in her.)…

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