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(music: ominous creaking and rays)
Doctor Who personal background and novel history
JM:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts. I'm J.M. and I'm here with Nate and Gretchen, and if you want to hear our little history of science fiction film and TV, along with us talking about our interest in Star Trek, tune into episode one of this series. Now we're going to talk about something rather different, Doctor Who.
So we mentioned Doctor Who a lot on this podcast, don't we?
Nate:
I think so, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
It always seem to come up. So finally we're going to talk about it at some length. I'm sure some of our audience knows a little bit about it.
The show started in 1963, and the first run of the TV series went up till 1989, had seven different actors playing the lead role of the Doctor, who's a traveler in time and space, who basically can show up anywhere and anywhere he wants. Now, obviously, just like Star Trek, Doctor Who, although on paper it sounds like a very free thing that could be pretty much anything at all, does tend to follow a formula most of the time. But the interesting thing is to see how that changes from era to era and the strengths and weaknesses of each era, and fans will talk about this kind of stuff for ages and ages and never come to an agreement. But maybe sometimes come to blows, but hopefully not.
But yeah, it's got a long history. After 1989, obviously, there was some television silence, but various things were happening. I think before we get to that, I guess we'll just talk a little bit about our general experiences like we did with Star Trek, and then I guess we'll get into what sort of happened between 1989 and 2005, because there's quite a story there.
But during that time, Doctor Who wasn't on the air, and I'm pretty sure you guys, well, Gretchen, I know the case is true for you because you weren't born then, but I'm pretty sure it is for Nate to the case that you discovered the show after the initial airing was over, right?
Nate:
Yeah, so I didn't grow up with Doctor Who like I did with Star Trek. I didn't get into Doctor Who until after I graduated college. I had always kind of known it was a thing and JM, I remember you talking about really liking it a lot. But I just never caught it on TV, and it was just never syndicated like Star Trek was across like a billion different channels. So I just really never encountered it until one day walking around town, a lot of people have free giveaways of stuff, and there's like a townwide garage sale and things like that. I saw a copy of the DVD box set, which has the surviving episodes of the lost serials from the Hartnell and Troughton years, and I was like, cool, you know, this is free, you know, it's stuff from the 60s.
JM:
Oh, that's an interesting way to start.
Nate:
Yeah, it is, and I quickly realized that those weren't complete stories. So I was like, all right, I don't know if I want to start with like an incomplete piece, just like randomly in the middle.
JM:
Did you realize that before you got it?
Nate:
No, because like I didn't really know anything about the show. I just saw, you know, in Doctor Who box set, it's from the 60s, it's free, you know, I'm just going to grab it. So I did. But then I, you know, I realized that, you know, they weren't complete stories. So I was like, all right, I'm just going to start at the beginning and I'm going to try to find the first episode and work my from way there, and, you know, I quickly encountered the fact that a lot of them were lost, but kind of survive in that the audio exists, and there's been a lot of fan recreation, which towards the end of Loose Cannon's run, got quite sophisticated as far as how they were able to piece some of the episodes back together with the surviving images, and they do a really good job, I think.
So I ended up watching the entire series in order from the first episode to the end of the show in 1989, and definitely enjoyed a lot. The, I'd say first half, certainly through the Baker years, I like a lot. Some stories more than others. It definitely gets a little shaky in the latter half of the Baker run, and after that, there's some stories here and there I like, but it's a bit rougher going, especially I think during the sixth Doctor era for me, and the seventh Doctor, I think is kind of unfortunate because I think the show starts to get really good again at the very end, and then it just kind of stops.
JM:
And then it finished.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
That's kind of my experience with Doctor Who. It's definitely something I really like at its best, personally, which for me is like the more science fiction horror type stuff that they do in the Troughton era and some of the early Baker era, I think it's just like really, really awesome. But again, I like a lot of the early stuff. Hartnell era and Pertwee era has a lot of really cool stuff to offer too.
JM:
Cool. Gretchen, you go next because I think I'll be on for a while.
Gretchen:
Yeah. So as I mentioned, when we were talking about the Star Trek, how we got into Star Trek, I got into Doctor Who around 2012 when I was like 10, 11, and at the time, I think I just heard about it like online, and I didn't really know the whole story of like the division between like Classic Who and New Who, the time between those two series. I just caught, I think the first time I watched it was just like some reruns of, at the time it was Matt Smith who was on, and I just caught like a few of the newer episodes that just come out on BBC America, and I ended up watching all of New Who, which I found like on Netflix at that time before they took it off of Netflix. I watched through the entire series and then went back and watched the classic series, which I did end up liking more than the new series. I still enjoy certain sections of it, but the way I found it was again, it was just on Netflix, and at the time that was how I got ahold of media.
So I believe it was like one Hartnell story, which was the Aztecs, one Troughton story, a couple of Pertwee. There was like a maybe a dozen of Baker, Tom Baker, and then two Peter Davidson, none of Colin Baker. They went right past him. Not one, none of his, and then one McCoy era.
So that was my first experience with Classic Who was in that very limited range before I started collecting some DVDs that I would find, and, you know, whenever I would go to like stores that had like any sort of films or TV, I would find certain ones, and then eventually I found them on Dailymotion and stuff and watched the rest of them there.
There are still a couple of the missing episodes that I haven't seen yet. I have not seen the recreations of some of the like lesser ones like Space Pirates and stuff like that.
JM:
They're not really stories that are discussed very often. So they're generally not at people's the top of people's lists to watch.
Gretchen:
But yeah, I saw quite a few of the ones that, you know, are like the one like Marco Polo and like a lot of the ones that seem very interesting to me. Yeah, I mean, the Macra Terror is probably one of my favorite classic who stories. I really enjoy the Macra Terror, and second Doctor, third Doctor is definitely the eras that I gravitate the most towards, and it's been a while since I've watched quite a few of those, like a lot of classic and a lot of the new Who episodes back a decade ago is when I first saw them, and there are still, there are a number of ones I've obviously watched and rewatched quite a few times. But I'd like to go back and rewatch quite a few of them and maybe do them in order at some point. I have not done that. So that's very cool that you got to watch them in order, Nate.
Nate:
Yeah, it took like I think a year and a half or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, well, it took me a lot longer. But yeah, Gretchen, was there either new or old doctor? Who was there? Was do you think there was like a single story that you watched that just kind of made you go, Oh, I really like this. I want to watch more of the best show.
Gretchen:
For new Who it's hard to pinpoint. I did watch the entire series, but I don't really, it's hard to think of the time when I was like, I really liked that specific series. But classic Who when I watched the Aztecs and the Mind Robber, those were the two that they had chosen for Hartnell and Troughton for Netflix. As soon as I watched those, I was like, I love classic Doctor Who and wanted to watch the rest of the series. Mind Robber again is another one of my favorites along with Macra Terror.
JM:
So that one's pretty surreal as well. So yeah. Yeah. Nate, have you seen any new who?
Nate:
Not really. Like I've seen a couple episodes here and there, but not substantial chunk at all.
Gretchen:
I've seen there's like a gap during the 12th doctor that when I had my washing of Doctor Who kind of subsided for a little bit, but I have seen most of new Who even after I first discovered it and then went back to classic Who I still kept up to date with new Who. I think it's just like that gap and the last few of the 13th Doctor. I know the 14th Doctor Ncuti Gatwa is now on, but I have not seen the last several episodes.
Nate:
I've certainly seen more stuff starring people who have played the Doctor in new Who and other things. I just watched The Lair of the White Worm, which stars Peter Capaldi.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that's a fun movie.
JM:
Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Apparently not one of Bram Stoker's best books, but really fun Ken Russell film.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. Very typical Ken Russell looks like or what I've seen.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Well, that's really cool. You know, everybody seems to have their own story of how they got into Doctor Who, and I mean, I guess that's true of Star Trek too, but it just seems like sometimes the Doctor Who ones are a bit wild because yeah, like you said Nate, it's even during the time when everybody was watching things on television and like PBS and all that, it wasn't syndicated everywhere all the time, and you had to know when and where to catch it, and sometimes it was a little crazy like one of the first stations I watched it on was PBS station out of Buffalo and they would show the stories in feature length form every Saturday. But the weird thing about that was because they were feature length and each serial was like they weren't all the same length, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So you never knew exactly what time in the afternoon Doctor Who was going to be on unless you looked in the TV guide, which I couldn't read. So I was like, Oh, I'll never know, and Doctor Who's on. Luckily, I would ask my mom and she would tell me usually, and a lot of the time I was busy doing stuff on Saturday afternoon. So generally I would miss the first part of the serial when it was on on PBS, and I would this is how I watched a lot of the Tom Baker ones initially and Pertwee. Although I missed the beginning of the Pertwee years.
But the first story I ever saw was actually episode one of a Peter Davidson story called Earthshock, and at this time, I was very, very young. I was still in nursery school, not even kindergarten yet. I barely watched TV besides like Sesame Street. This is how primal and basic it was when I found Doctor Who. I didn't know what science fiction was. I didn't know what like, I don't know, I guess I had basic concepts like maybe robots and spaceships or whatever, but not even that much, and I was just channel surfing because, you know, we had our TV and with the big dials that you flipped, you know, you just heard the dials and we didn't have cable at that time, I think. So we had like just a few channels. But I mean, I was a kid. So I just liked flicking the dials and even the white noise was kind of cool.
Then I found this show and I didn't understand what was going on, but it was really scary sounding, and I later found out that like, yeah, this is the one episode of Doctor Who where it's like, oh, they were totally riffing on Aliens, except Aliens hadn't even been made yet. It says it's like these guys wandering around in a cave with all these detectors and stuff, and there's an android, the couple of androids wandering around that are protecting this hatch way that the Cybermen have used to put a bomb in there that they're going to destroy the earth with or something, and the androids are supposed to be guarding it, and this archaeological expedition is down there looking for fossils of dinosaurs, and they run afoul of these androids, they're just like stalking them through the dark caves, and every so often, somebody gets killed and their body gets liquified, and that's supposed to be like, Doctor Who always had a thing where it was always having to deal with people saying it was too violent from time to time. So it was just really funny because you could tell that every now and then somebody would try to push things a little.
And like, yeah, I mean, that doesn't sound like like that much by the standards of like, maybe the films that were out in theaters at the time, like, well, not Aliens yet, but Alien, for example. But still, like certain very frightful images that I guess the BBC watching public thought that their children might be exposed to, especially during that Philip Hinchcliffe era of the Tom Baker years that Nate was talking about with the horror sci fi horror stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, and then they kind of like overcorrect it in the other direction and take on this really juvenile kid friendly direction for like a little while.
JM:
Sort of, yeah, and because the that the producer of that stuff, the horror stuff eventually got fired.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
For pushing things too far in some people's estimation.
Nate:
I mean, even early on in the Hartnell era, like in Dalek's Master Plan, when you see the death of one of the major characters, I'm sure I was kind of shocking at what it first aired, especially because the show had a somewhat more juvenile tone at that point, though, they hadn't really played up some of the horror elements as much as they would in the Troughton years.
JM:
Yeah, and that's the thing, Doctor Who really can be anything. So for like three months in 1965, it was this ridiculous, crazy space opera that spanned the entire galaxy, like just out of nowhere, and then the next week, it was like 15th century France, and the Huguenots and the Catholics at each other's throats that is like, all of a sudden, we're watching like a fairly serious historical drama. What's going on here?
If you think about it, especially the Hartnell era, it was really crazy.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It's like all these things back to back and like, it's like they purposefully set out to be like, we don't really know what kind of show we're making, and that's the cool thing about it. Eventually, it definitely settled down. That's both good and bad, I guess, right? Like, the Hartnell years are really interesting. But I guess at times, especially towards the end, you know, that inconsistency of tone and the like, the fact that the lead actor was very clearly on the way out and stuff like that kind of makes it a little difficult sometimes.
But yeah, so I basically started with the Davidson era, and I guess a lot of people my age who grew up with it at that time, remember that stuff fondly, and I definitely see why he's not a favorite of many and his era, maybe, maybe not the strongest, but when it's good, I think that it actually probably is some of the best that Doctor Who has to offer. But it's just not that good all the time.
Nate:
Right. Yeah, no, there's definitely really good ones from his era, for sure, especially his last serial.
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah, I was about to say, like, I mean, Caves of Androzani is definitely one of the best of the series. I love that one.
JM:
I always loved Snakedance. Yeah, that is always one of my favorite ones. That one kind of plays a bit on the horror aspect as well, and again, of course, another thing we've talked about before on the podcast is the music and, you know, how the music was sometimes really effective at conveying an atmosphere. Not just the theme song, but a lot of the incidentals. In the early 80s, the scores were all electronic, and although Doctor Who wasn't the only show doing that at the time, I think it was particularly a thing on the BBC because they found that the composer could just do the stuff in workshop and you didn't have to hire anybody like no musicians to play anything, right? It was all done on a synthesizer, and it makes sense. But it also gave it this cool futuristic vibe, too. So I think that was also how I first became interested in synthesizer music.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly the audio production on the earliest episodes, especially at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is pretty incredible. The tape splicing and all the effects that they did before there were synthesizers and computers and things like that, that they were able to use later on. It's just pretty fascinating how they put all that stuff together, and the BBC in general was very involved in that kind of far out sound production.
Some of the other major radio stations and television stations in Europe, particularly the one out of France and the one out of West Germany, RTF and WDR respectively, had a lot of really out there electronic music from the 1950s and 60s. But to my knowledge, never really did anything as far as combining it with science fiction, TV or cinema in the way that the BBC did with both Doctor Who and Quatermass, and I guess some of the other stuff that pops up in the late 1970s, though.
JM:
Yeah, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had a pretty memorable electronic score as well. But yeah, I mean, in the 60s and 70s, they were using a small, like for the most part, a small orchestra ensemble. But then you get these odd stories in the 70s, like I think season eight was entirely composed on one synthesizer, and it's this really like obnoxious, blaring early 70s synth that's both terrible and awesome at the same time, like really, really prominent in that part of the Pertwee era, and it's just like, most people hear the music and they're like, oh, that's terrible, turn it off, right? I just, I love that.
Nate:
I really like how Doctor Who sounds and looks and it's just, I don't know, like that era specifically of 60s and 70s science fiction, film and TV, it's just how the production just feels and looks and sounds. I don't know, that that's my preferred era of science fiction, visual material, I think.
Gretchen:
I mean, I'm usually someone that doesn't catch like scores as they're being played in certain pieces of media. But definitely some of the stuff that's in like classic Who during the 60s like stands out so well, like thinking of the Macra Terror, that one song that they play in the city throughout like that really cheerful jingle that's like kind of eerie when you get through the episode.
JM and Gretchen:
(humming theme)
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah. The Cybermen theme, especially with the Tomb of the Cybermen when they're all emerging, that motif sticks in my head quite a bit. Yeah, it's really cool.
JM:
So basically, we're talking about something very, very formative to, I guess, my entire experience. So I find it sometimes a little bit hard to look at Doctor Who objectively. I don't mean that in the general fan sense either. I mean, I kind of, I'm not going to say I fell out of Doctor Who, but definitely with the new series, I kind of eventually sort of stopped paying attention, and you know, at first I was really excited about it, and it's cool. But I think I don't know, like it's kind of connected to with how it was with me and Star Trek is that I kind of, I kind of got fatigued with the franchises, and I think that happened probably a longer ago than that it did for a lot of people just because I don't know what it was exactly. I mean, I'm not trying to be like holier than thou or anything like that. But I just, I guess it did start to feel like restrictive and it started to feel like also, you know, things go in certain directions and you take it so personally, like, I mean, we've talked about that before, you know, and like the Star Wars fans and stuff, and it's like, that's not a way to be, and at the same time, like, if you don't like something, you feel like you have to sit there and justify why you don't like it because you've been a fan for so long.
And so I don't want to rain on anybody else's parade, you know, you like the new stuff a lot. That's, that's really cool. I think it has moments that I really thought were cool, and I like the fact that they clearly have a lot more time to do it now because they're not making very much like it's almost like you forget Doctor Who's on for a couple of years and then all of a sudden it's back and you're like, oh yeah, Doctor Who's back cool. That's like totally the opposite of the way it was in the beginning. Like everybody talks about how cheap the show was, but it's not just cheap in terms of budget of money, it's budget in terms of how much time they had and how much turnover there was, whereas like something has to be in the can like a week before it's transmitted pretty much or less, and especially in the Hartnell and Trump times.
Nate:
They were doing like an episode a week for like the entire year more or less. Those early seasons are enormous.
JM:
It's really crazy, and now, now you're lucky if you get like 10 episodes every two years, right? So they put a lot into it now, which is respectable because I mean, obviously, yeah, it deserves to look good. It deserves to have good performances and everything like that that have been rehearsed and things can be fixed a lot in editing. You got as many takes as you want.
Gretchen:
No flies on the camera.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. But I don't know, I just like, I guess a lot of the time with new shows in general, I'm not sure. Like I'm not much of a TV person anymore. I've not really have been ever, I guess, but there are just certain shows that I liked, and now I guess I just have a feel like I don't have the patience to really get into new stuff, and I guess that's kind of sad. But it is what it is. Sometimes sometimes I still try things and like them a lot. So I'm never going to say never, but like the whole getting really into Star Wars again or getting into Marvel movies and comics or getting into like, it's not really something that I want to spend time with in the future.
So I think for a while I did have, it's weird though, like, because every time I feel that way about Doctor Who, something happens like I watch an episode or watch a story, and then I was saying to Gretchen a while ago that I think in December, for some reason, is my Doctor Who month. So we haven't done "a what you've been reading" lately on Chrononauts installment, but in December, around the holiday time, I read three Doctor Who books, which is more Doctor Who books than I read in years, and one of them was, yeah, this one for our podcast. But there was another one that was actually really good and made me question whether I made the best choice for podcast pick.
And that's the thing like, so I guess we might as well talk about it now. When Doctor Who was on air initially, between the 60s and the 80s, there really wasn't original fiction published. In the mid 80s, there were a few kind of standalone books that were published that dealt with the Doctor's companions. But they didn't actually feature the Doctor, and I don't really know that they could be considered Doctor Who books in much stretch of the imagination. Like there was, there weren't very many, but there was one called "Harry Sullivan's War", which was written by Ian Marter, who actually played Harry Sullivan on the television in the early Tom Baker years, and he pretty much wrote Harry into a spy novel. Why not, right?
There's a thing with Harry is like this funny contradictory character because he's all this like he's obviously in the comic relief guy. But if you look at like Ian Marter, who actually wrote a whole bunch of novelizations of who stories, he always ups the violence and the like gore and everything considerably like he's really goes over the top. It's like he's trying to see how much he can get away with it and novelization and it's hilarious. But it's too bad. He didn't actually make it to the wilderness years because I think he could have done some really cool stuff. But the fact is that nobody was publishing original Who fiction at that time.
In 1989, the show went off the air and I agree with Nate, it was just starting to get really good again. I do kind of agree that although I like two or three stories a lot, the Colin Baker years are not the strongest by a shot on the show on the initial run at least.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I really enjoy Colin Baker, like especially in like Big Finish what they've done with him. I do have to admit that his actual run on the show is not that great.
Nate:
Yeah, I think one thing that also works against those episodes is they change the format to make them hour long episodes instead of 22 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever, and I don't know, it just kind of makes it a little more tedious to get through.
Gretchen:
Mm hmm.
JM:
It's weird that didn't work because that's how TV is now.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
The new show is. But yeah, and then it was even weirder over here because I mean, although I did mention the PBS, Davidson and Colin Baker shows, I didn't see that way. I saw those on another station that showed them episodically. But the thing is, they weren't going to change their format for one or two seasons just because the BBC said, Oh, they're 45 minutes episodes now. So they cut them in half.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
They're like, Well, too bad, there's still 25 minutes episodes in Canada. So yeah. So they didn't even end with proper cliffhangers. They would end with like the Doctor and Peri walking out of the TARDIS or something.
Nate:
I guess the cliffhanger stuff is one thing that this novel does really incorporate from the show is that there's so many cliffhangers in the chapters as it like switches from perspective to perspective. Yeah, kind of much like the show handles its plot and pacing points.
JM:
Yeah, except a book is mostly not linear, which I think works well for the most part. But we'll get to it.
So in 1991, Virgin Publishing bought the license to publish Doctor Who books, and this was a new thing. This had never happened before, and I gotta be honest, this was a really exciting time to be a Doctor Who fan, and I couldn't read any of these books for a really long time, and I really wanted to so badly, because that was right at the height of me being into Doctor Who, and I'd actually just started to meet other people who are really into Doctor Who, and that was exciting. So that kind of made it even bigger for me. But it wasn't being made anymore. So all we could do was get together at somebody's house and watch old videos, which we did a lot.
But the books and things like audios, which were already around. I'll talk about that a little more in a bit. But the books mostly featured the seventh Doctor at this point. A couple years later, they did introduce something called the Missing Adventures. I never liked that title because it sort of implied, I don't know, something negative. This is weird, kind of. But they showed up to feature other Doctors and companion pairings.
So we're kind of assuming that a lot of the listeners know the basic nature of the show that travels around in something that looks like a police box, and usually has somebody at least one person traveling with them, and a lot of the time, it's a, I guess, somewhat traditionally attractive woman, but not all the time.
Different people have had different views about the companions. But in general, I think people are supposed to think of them as the audience identification figure. So more so than the Doctor himself, and that was definitely the case in the very beginning, and it's definitely the case in the new series as well. So that was a really interesting time also because the motto of Virgin Publishing at that time was "stories too big for the small screen".
And so what they meant by that was not just spectacle, but they were really going to challenge people's preconceptions about Doctor Who and push the envelope, and well, a lot of the books were traditional, pretty traditional Doctor Who really, just kind of longer than the Target novelizations, which I also read a lot of, which we didn't really get into. But there's really so much to talk about with this subject that, yeah, we could be here all night talking about all the different target novelizations and stuff, and those were like the Star Trek ones, just novelizations of the show itself, and that was how I got onto a lot of the first and second Doctor stories for the first time, because I didn't think I would get to see them. But that's a different story.
But now we're talking about the 1990s, which is, as everybody knows, a time traditionally portrayed as being very angst and full of, I don't know, nu-metal and Anne Rice movie adaptations, and I don't know, there's a lot of things you could say about the 90s, and to an extent, the books did follow suit. But I think that that really interesting thing about the books was that, yeah, they did tend to push the envelope more than what Star Trek novels were doing at that time specifically, and they definitely upped the sex and violence considerably, which did upset a good number of fans. Eventually they did tone it down a bit, at least in terms of what language they were allowed to use in the books, but they still got away with the fair amount.
Some of the, I guess, you could argue that because I guess a lot of the writers were themselves fans, and although there were definitely some professional writers on the writing staff, or not really staff, but who contributed to the books at the time, many of them were publishing for the first time. So there could be inconsistency and quality, certainly. The editors at the time, Peter Darvill-Evans and Rebecca Levine, definitely went out of their way to help their authors along, it sounds like, and they essentially guided the hand of the New Adventures into telling pretty long and involved story arcs, and some of it was pretty epic, and some of it was pretty good.
Again, these novels are, I guess, they're linked to somebody else's intellectual property. So people did still have to work within that framework. The Doctor had to be in all the stories. But they even found ways around that, not actually incorporating him directly in all the books, and just sort of talking about him and having him do things behind the scenes that you didn't actually see, and so the whole point of it was the characters tried to figure out whether this was part of the Doctor's plan or not, because he was never around to tell you. So there were all kinds of those kind of shenanigans going on.
When I finally did start to have the ability to read some of the books, I definitely enjoyed them. But I was a little disappointed that it wasn't for the most part quite as boundary pushing and extreme that as the fans who didn't like it said it was, and maybe it's because I had already been reading stuff that was a bit more risky and a bit, I guess, pushy even in science fiction. I don't think that I'd read too much by him yet, but I already knew who Harlan Ellison was and stuff like that. I'd read some of those classic stories by Silverberg and him and stuff like that. So I don't know, I guess the idea of Doctor Who being more sexy and violent and stuff was like, it didn't really rock my world that much by the time I got to it. But it was still kind of cool.
But then something happened in 1996, and you guys know what that was?
Nate:
You mean the movie?
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah. So there was a television movie made, "Doctor Who", made by Fox in America, and they teamed up with a British writer and some others and got Paul McGann, who was an actor who'd been in a bunch of things to star in the film, and he played the Doctor and the movie was set in San Francisco, and it definitely felt different. At the time, I didn't like it. It was the first time I remember being that critical and being like, whoa, I don't, I don't know if I like this. But I don't know, I think my opinion has softened on it a little bit since then. It's still not great. But it's okay. It's about as maybe not quite as good as it could have been. But like, in terms of 90s sci fi TV pilots, I don't think it's that bad. But it was just that, it was a pilot. They were wanting to make more, and they never made beyond the one story. Some script ideas were definitely put forward. But nothing came of it.
What did come of it was the BBC suddenly got interested in Doctor Who again. So instead of renewing the license for Virgin, they decided, oh, we have our own publishing arm. So we're going to publish these books ourselves, and so that's what they did after 1996, and now we are transitioning into the eighth Doctor, and there are also, of course, books featuring past Doctors, of which our book today is actually one, and these books made by the BBC, a lot of those writers, a lot of the writers were people who had written for the Virgin books. But again, not all of them. There's an interesting variety of faces.
It does seem like in general, one thing to observe is that I'm sure people will notice is that even in the 90s, Doctor Who seems a lot more male dominated than Star Trek does in terms of like the fan writers and the prose writers and stuff like that. I don't really know why that is. Anybody got any theories?
Gretchen:
I mean, I was looking through people talking about the Star Trek tie in novels, and I mean, it is very striking to see just how many of them were written by women, at least in the beginning. It is a majority. I think it's like 60%, maybe 70% of the books were written by women.
JM:
Those two anthologies, "The New Voyages" that Frederick Pohl edited and his publisher put out, were written entirely almost by women, and the weird thing is in the "Voyages of Imagination" book, they don't even talk about that. They just mention all the writers and I'm just like, oh, they're all women. It's weird that they missed, I don't know, maybe they did that deliberately, but they didn't say anything about them trying to make a statement with that. It just seems to be the way it turned out, which is even more interesting.
Nate:
The "Boldly Writing" book was kind of the same way. I thought, I didn't read the entire thing like from beginning to end, I just kind of skimmed through it and looked for the mentions of "The Wounded Sky". But yeah, from what I could tell, pretty much a lot of the people involved with the fanzines and the fanfiction that was coming out at the time were overwhelmingly women, and I don't know if Doctor Who really had the same amount of fanzine activity in the 60s. I mean, Doctor Who fandom was kind of like weird and that you had that like initial Dalekmania craze that produced some odd things like that weird novelty song.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I want to spend my Christmas with a Dalek.
Nate:
But I mean, I don't know if I've ever seen like Doctor Who fanzines from the 1960s or 1970s, but I'm sure they must exist? But I don't know if I'd be in the same numbers as the Star Trek ones, which were like, a lot of publications.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because I've seen like, I think I remembered seeing when looking through like fanzines and stuff. There were a couple of Doctor Who fanzines from like the 70s. I don't think I saw much from the 60s.
JM:
No.
Gretchen:
Just like the things that I can think of that were produced in the 60s that we're writing were like official annuals and stuff, but nothing like from fans.
Nate:
Yeah, it's interesting how that develops.
JM:
Yeah. Well, remember when we were reading back in our fandom episode and there was some special articles from the British contingent and they talked about how they wanted to develop their own fandom, but that it wasn't really, it didn't really seem like it was that feasible and they couldn't even get a sci-fi magazine off the ground, and I just think the climate in Britain was very different, and I don't think that, yeah, I don't, I don't think there were any fanzines for Who in the 60s. I mean, I guess it could be that like a couple of guys did some, like copied a bunch of stuff and passed it around to their friends, which is ultimately what fandom amounts to sometimes, but it just doesn't seem like there was that much until the early, early 80s. Like right at the start of the 80s, it really started to seem to kick off, which is weird because it's also when we associate with, I guess, the time when Doctor Who started going a bit down.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
In terms of its respectability and ratings, but I don't know. It's again, it's the same thing that I noted earlier with the Star Trek stuff. It almost seems like the less people are paying attention to something, the more active the fan community is, and I know that sounds weird.
Nate:
No, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, because it introduces a demand for it, you know.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. When it, when it's almost, I feel like it could also be considering the opinions of the later seasons of Doctor Who. If people were unhappy with the quality of that, they might think, well, I'm going to make my own stories similar to Diane Duane being like, I don't like this book. I can make a better book.
JM:
Right. There was actually a really, I'm not going to say famous because I don't know how many people know it, but I remember came and coming across a review of it in the local Doctor Who fan clubs magazine that I got, and I can't remember the name of the book, but it was essentially a book written by somebody who really didn't like the seventh Doctor's era and didn't like the books and thought that he was too manipulative and terrible and basically created this whole scenario around how this alien had basically taken the Doctor's body or something like that or influenced him to like do all this destructive stuff. Or maybe it wasn't, maybe it wasn't an alien, maybe it was like that, even the sixth Doctor, what was that, the Valeyard that put him on trial and it was actually his...
Nate:
The "Trial of a Timelord" thing. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. But yeah, so it's basically that just denying the whole thing, right? So I don't know, that was definitely a thing sometimes.
And yeah, it just seems like the conventions really took off then too, and what was really interesting in the 80s was that the producer of the show at that time, John Nathan-Turner, took an active interest in conventions, and none of the others had done that before, and it was both a good and a bad thing because apparently he went to the United States a lot, and instead of doing his job on the show, he was hanging out at conventions with his partner and like hanging out with all the Doctor Who fans and talking about all the cool shit that he was going to do, and meanwhile, the show increasingly was falling into chaos, especially during the Colin Baker era. So I don't know, it's a controversial complex stuff around a lot of these characters and outside of the scope of the podcast for sure.
The BBC books basically carried on with the eighth Doctor, and I will say that although I haven't read too many of those, I've read a number of the New Adventures, but certainly not all of them. Those are the Virgin books. But the BBC, I've read fewer, but I started to read more one of those that one that I commented on earlier where I said, yeah, maybe this would be a good choice too. It was actually a really interesting and cool book. Didn't feel at all like traditional Doctor Who and was a BBC book. So again, although a writer tonight, Jim Mortimore, does say that he felt more restricted under the BBC than he did under Virgin. It does seem like until 2005 at least the writers still had a good amount of freedom because yeah, there was no Doctor Who on television. Once it came to the television, I think that changed.
I read a couple of new Who books, and it definitely seems like the tone has changed a lot. While I won't say that again, every like again, I'm not trying to stress that it's all better in the old days. But it seems like when the fiction is not the priority and the show is the priority, there's only so much the writers can do. You feel that consciously when you're reading it, and you also feel like, I don't know, the type of gravity of storytelling and the language and stuff maybe has been toned down a bit, and again, that might not be true in all cases, but it's the impression that I got.
The other side of that is too though, like with the Star Trek being on television, there comes a certain cachet with it. So during the new Who era, you do get some professional science fiction writers writing Doctor Who again, which didn't happen that much during the wilderness years. It did happen a very little bit, but not much. So yeah, you get like Michael Moorcock writing one or two Doctor Who novels, Alistair Reynolds wrote a couple. There's a couple more that I'm forgetting.
Gretchen:
I remember back in around the 50th anniversary, they had this like box set of like these short stories, like only 40 to 60 pages, and I think one of them was at the 11th Doctor One that was like written by like Neil Gaiman or something. Like there were a couple other like notable names that they had there that were written, writing the short stories for that.
JM:
Well, he actually wrote an episode of the TV show as well.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, The Doctor's Wife.
JM:
Yeah, that was the only one that he's done so far, I think. But yeah, I guess in my dreams, Tanith Lee would have written a Doctor Who story. That would have been cool. I bet, I don't know if she liked it, but I bet she probably did at least a little being a British writer and everything.
Gretchen:
Oh, I feel like she would. I mean, I feel like especially as a person who obviously enjoyed Blakes 7 enough to write for it, I'm sure she enjoyed at least, you know, some of Doctor Who, probably some of the more horror oriented ones from the fourth Doctor.
JM:
And the thing is like at times, Doctor Who does have a reputation for being a little bit more for younger adults, right? Like not necessarily, again, like that's a tricky, tricky thing to talk about, because I'm not necessarily going to say that I think Star Trek is more mature than the Doctor Who, because I don't know, I don't often think that's the case. But sometimes maybe, it doesn't matter, really. That's the point is telling a good story.
Nate:
But it really all depends on the serial, I think. I mean, sometimes Doctor Who will just throw you into the middle of some like, political drama in the far future or whatever that, you know, whereas other times you get K9 and other wacky, like...
JM:
Yeah, it's it's part of that crazy total ship that we were talking about, right? Where it's like, you just sometimes don't know what to expect from one week to the next, and that's not only like, what kind of story, but the quality of things like the visual effects, right? It's really funny because the podcast that I like that I mentioned before on the show, Watchers in the Fourth Dimension, they just got to the end of the Philip Hinchcliffe era of to Tom Baker years, and so they did all these Leela episodes, and they're still doing her time period. But now they just did The Invisible Enemy, which is like, the story that introduces K9, and is really trying to be spectacular, but like not has no no budget. So I guess it looks particularly bad, and the director apparently didn't really care about it. So he wasn't like, wouldn't let them do reshoots and stuff like that, and it's just, yeah, it's just funny because that and then next week is Image of the Fendahl, which is one of my favorite stories. One of the best, probably the only Doctor Who does Lovecraft style horror stories.
But so the same we get the same in the books, I guess, with a lot of tonal shift, and that's that can work sometimes. Definitely, Virgin had its ups and downs, and I guess the BBC did as well. The BBC books try to get you involved in really long story arcs, and I think that's one reason I kind of avoided the eighth Doctor novels for the most part, just because I don't want to sift through a whole bunch of bad books to get to the ones that are really awesome.
So yeah, I mean, that's that's again, a problem that you have to deal with with these kind of books, right? There's like, there might be good stuff, but you might have to hunt for it really hard, and if you're a dedicated fan, maybe that's okay. But I don't know, like, there's a lot of stuff I want to read. I'm not that fast of a reader, but I did read three books in December, and this was one of them again. So I've read this book before I chose this book. After much agonizing deliberation, I really wasn't sure. I picked it ultimately because, one, it's a fourth Doctor and Leela book, and that's a great team, and the other thing was, yeah, I mean, doing a seventh or eighth Doctor book, you always run into the risk of, oh, there's too many connections with other stuff, like other books that we haven't read. So I think that it's not really fair to do that kind of thing on the podcast, and I don't know how we're going to tackle series fiction, because even now in, like, when it's not connected to shows, the vast majority of published sci fi in book form is in series, I think now, and I do think I understand the reasons for that, and I understand the appeal, but I also find that unfortunate. Like, not everything has to be a 12 book series, right?
Yeah, but the just publishers know they have a good thing, authors know when they have a good thing. So of course, they're going to go for it, and that's what people like. They want worlds that they can really immerse themselves in. So and I think television shows actually have a lot to do with establishing that mindset. Because that's what a TV show is. It's basically a world that you put yourself in for, I don't know, it used to be like, you couldn't do more than 45 minutes a week. But now, now, thanks to the age of streaming and everything, you can binge your favorite show hour after hour, if you want all day long, if you have the time for it. So it's the nature of the beast, I guess. But I think this was a good book to choose.
(reading from chapter 8 of "The Eye of Heaven")
non-spoiler discussion
JM:
Essentially, we're in the BBC book years, and it's 1998. The BBC have been publishing original 8th Doctor novels for, I think, a couple of years at this point, and they also have their past Doctor stuff with the previous Doctor and Companion teams. They generally did like to work with characters that had already existed, but they were not averse to creating some of their own characters. Not as much, I don't think they did that as much as Virgin did. I think maybe the BBC had more of a, yeah, we're leaving the door open still for potential TV series or something like that kind of attitude where they didn't seem, they didn't seem as keen to do that. Virgin was always introducing new companions and sometimes killing them off soon after they were introduced.
But with this, we actually have a rare thing, and that is a 4th Doctor and Leela book. I don't think we see too many of those. I know Chris Boucher, the creator of Leela, actually wrote a couple himself that are supposed to take place around this time, and I'm sure they're pretty decent. I mean, I haven't read them, but as the person who created the character and also wrote some of my favorite Tom Baker serials, as well as pretty much half of Blakes 7, the guy knows what he's doing.
Nate:
The Leela episodes are definitely some of the show's best run.
Gretchen:
Yeah, there's some really good episodes in that era.
JM:
Yeah, and it's kind of a shame that it goes downhill really fast towards the end, I think, of her time. She doesn't get the best exit, and I kind of think that, like, generally speaking, people remember the exit of Sarah Jane Smith very fondly, and she was the previous companion, and I don't know, sometimes I feel like Leela and the Doctor didn't really get a moment like that, so that kind of took away from the impact, I think, and maybe makes it so that, although she seems to be getting some attention nowadays, it seems like for a lot of the time, you know, since the new series began, the focus was on other companions like Sarah and Melanie Bush, even from the late 80s, which is kind of weird because she doesn't really seem like her time is that fondly remembered. But the actress certainly did her best.
Anyway, Leela was played on television by Louise Jameson, and she was in maybe eight stories, although I was just trying to count them spontaneously, so I might be one or two off, but it sounds about right.
Nate:
It's nine by my count on Wikipedia.
JM:
Nine by your count, okay, perfect. So the thing starts out really good, and then, I don't know, I think her last couple of stories are not favorites among me or a lot of other fans. I know some people like the Invasion of Time because it's a Gallifrey story with the Time Lords and all that stuff. I've never been too much of a fan of it, and Leela's departure is one reason for that.
But I think that exploring her time on the show more in the books is a really sensible way to go about things, and our author today, Jim Mortimore, has done just that. Jim was born in 1962, and he started writing for himself and his friends in the 1970s. He recalls seeing Pertwee years on television, and it was in black and white since he, like many at the time, didn't have a color set. But he said the Doctor who held the most special associations from him and his childhood was, in fact, Peter Cushing.
And he said, "really, though, it's the concept I like. That's what I find so clever, so innovative, so intelligent, the flexibility and mutability of the character, the wit, the danger, the fun. When you get written down to it, I guess you've got to love them all."
Because everybody always wants to know who your favorite Doctor is, and it's a cliche question among fans. I don't know how to answer that myself, really, and I like most of them for one reason or another, even the ones that don't have great stories. Usually the actor does something engaging and memorable. That's what we were talking about Colin Baker earlier, and I think he's pretty good even.
Nate:
Yeah, I think all the Doctors are good as the Doctor is just sometimes the quality of the stories that they happen to appear in varies.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. It's always going to be like that when you have a character that's written by many different writers, and, you know, they all have different viewpoints and ideas about how things should be. Actually, speaking of Chris Boucher, the Watchers in the 4th Dimension team just did an episode on Image of the Fendahl, which is a story that I really like, and in that story, the Doctor hands one of the characters, kind of a villainous character, a gun, so he can shoot himself, and it's like kind of this thing where I guess a lot of fans nowadays especially would question whether that's something the Doctor would actually do, and my feeling on that kind of thing is, well, maybe, maybe not, and you're perfectly free to, I guess, hold that against the story. But I mean, we just talked a lot about the Star Trek tie-ins and stuff and how I think too much oversight over what you're doing as a writer can be really frustrating, and a negative experience.
So I don't know, I mean, if somebody wants to write the character like that and say that his creation is his villain is so terrible that this is something he would actually do, then I don't know, I might be convinced, and so all this to say a bit of a tangent, but essentially we're going to come up against, again, attempts at editorial oversight here.
So apparently the Doctor Who Appreciation Society had an old fanzine called Cosmic Mask and that's where Mortimore made his first fanfiction writing attempts. The editor of that magazine was John Peel. No, not that John Peel, but the writer of Doctor Who and Star Trek books, which is a nice connection between our two properties today. He's written a lot of other stuff too. He wrote at least one of Avengers book, Too Many Targets, which I also have and published, I think, one or two Next Generation books and one Deep Space Nine books, which are actually quite popular. So it's that I haven't read them, but yeah, it's interesting to see there is some crossover in our writing communities. Not a lot, but some.
So Jim got involved with this group of fans calling themselves Audio Visuals in the mid 1980s, and that's where I first heard of him. If you're, well, I know that you guys are, but if the audience, anybody is familiar with Big Finish, Audio Visuals kind of was the precursor or one of the precursors to that, and quite a few of the people who later became involved with the Big Finish Audio Drama Production Company were actually, they kind of got their start with Audio Visuals and the quality was really not bad for 1980s fan productions. They sounded pretty much, maybe not right at the start, but pretty much by the time they got to their second series audio plays, it was pretty much pro 80s radio drama quality. Like they compared the production values to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the BBC put out, for example, and Jim only tends to mention his music because he is a composer as well. So he did a lot of music for that series, but he also did some writing for the Audio Visuals, and as far as I can tell, some of it was uncredited, but generally they goofed around a lot by using weird pseudonyms and stuff so you can't really tell who's responsible for what some of these things.
He's generally quite critical of his own writing efforts, saying especially that he doesn't really know how to build plot foundations, and in the past, he said, well, so he's written several New Adventures for Virgin, I think there were about four of them, and a couple of BBC books. I've read most of the Virgin ones, I think, and I enjoyed them. One was called "Blood Heat", and it's basically this alternate timeline story where the events of the story, the Silurians turned out different and the Silurians were in fact able to awaken and essentially reclaim the Earth. So it's an alternate past where all the Doctor's friends are now pretty much in hiding and UNIT's obviously long gone and there's dinosaurs everywhere, and it's pretty cool.
One thing that I definitely think that Jim likes spectacle, and he's actually really good at writing that kind of stuff. He did say "Eye of Heaven" was great because Leela was such fun to write for. He's written, like I said, several Who novels, and then that all ended with his book "Campaign", which he has a lot to say about because he essentially was given a brief to write a story about the Doctor encountering Alexander the Great, and I guess he pretty much added in too many complications, and the back and forth was very frustrating for I guess both him and the editor and ultimately they decided to cancel the book because he wasn't giving them what they wanted, and that wasn't what he wanted to do, and he wanted to take things in a different direction, and they said no.
So he ended up self publishing the book or he published it for, I think the proceeds went to Down syndrome charity and he published this book, and it's, yeah, I haven't really got around to reading it yet, but I would definitely be curious too. It's kind of supposed to be something that engenders admiration, but also frustration because, you know, it's the most, I guess, him going all away with with being as totally experimental and unrestricted as he wants, and like, there could have been reasons why the editor might have been like, yeah, that's not the kind of book we want. But I don't know, I'm still curious to see what it's like.
Gretchen:
I haven't read it myself, but the first time I ever heard of "Campaign" was someone essentially calling it like the "House of Leaves" of Doctor Who books. The formatting is just very complex and strange.
JM:
I saw that comment too. I don't think it's quite that like, I don't even know what to call "House of Leaves". Like it's meta textual, definitely, but also like the order is weird, you can read it in different, different orders and stuff. But yeah, I've also seen that comparison. So it certainly looks interesting.
He also has a Babylon 5 book out and some of his own stuff, a lot of which he sells on one of his websites, which we'll link here. He has the director's cut of "Blood Heat", so he's actually also taken some of his Doctor Who books and changed things around a bit and expanded them and made them, I guess, his own thing, and in order to do that, he said he didn't have to alter a few things in the text to avoid copyright problems. So I don't know what that means.
Nate:
It's a common issue for some of these for sure.
JM:
They also wrote a number of books for Cracker, which is a series of books based on a British crime drama show that I've never seen anything of. But apparently it stars Robbie Coltrane and Christopher Eccleston, and it's the series that came out in the 1990s. But he lives in Bristol, I believe. Yeah, had a couple of Big Finish audios as well. The Natural History of Fear and one of the Tomorrow People ones. Yeah, it's very unfortunate about the Tomorrow People because so I've never listened to it, but I've listened to another series that this happened to that Big Finish did, Sapphire and Steel, and unfortunately, you can't get those anymore because they lost the license, and again, it's one of the frustrating things about this kind of format is that the stuff can get taken away from you very unexpectedly and quickly, and although, yeah, sure, the audience can, we could find them on eBay or something like that, or not that we would do this, but download them from the Internet, right?
Gretchen:
Never.
JM:
Never. But the thing is, yeah, I mean, they can't sell them anymore. So this stuff that they worked on and produced and it's just like pretty much wiped off the books forever. Not very cool, in my opinion, that people can do that to your work. But again, that's one of the things you have to accept when you work in tie-in land, I guess. So it does have at least one original fantasy novel, "Skaldenland", which was released in 2009.
In general, in his writing, he cites Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury as influences that he read early on, and the first, quote, adult book he remembers reading was Clarke's "A Fall of Moondust", which is certainly something that I considered adding to Chrononauts one day. I would like to do a Clarke book at some point, but I don't really know. I'm thinking "The City of the Stars" might be a good one, but...
Nate:
Yeah, I haven't read that one myself. All the ones I have read, I really enjoyed, so I would certainly like to visit Clarke at some point.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I definitely think that that would be worth going into. I read this book a long time ago, and I remembered liking it, and I think we kind of went into this a little while ago, but I was saying that I really wanted to pick something that was standalone, and also, yeah, dealt with characters that we all were familiar with. So I think that that was my main reason as well as knowing that, yeah, it's a pretty good book.
I read a really good Eighth Doctor book recently, and I was thinking, oh, it would be cool to do an Eighth Doctor book, but so many of them are tied into stuff that's connected to other books. I kind of just feel like it'd be too much to go into.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I've read a couple of Eighth Doctor books, but the first one I ended up reading was "Earth World", which had been reprinted for the 50th anniversary. It's a very strange book to choose because it is very reliant on things that when I was reading it, I really was not sure what it was referencing. So I don't know why. I'm sure there were other options, but that one I definitely needed some context.
JM:
Yeah, it's a very strange choice to release that independently for the 50th anniversary and do a reprint of it, because it does seem like it's really tied in with a whole bunch of stuff, and it doesn't really seem even like one of the more celebrated books from that time period. So I don't know, it's a strange choice, but so be it, I guess.
But what do you guys think of this book?
Nate:
I enjoyed it quite a bit. I really like the weird sea aspect. We did a bunch of these stories and novels a couple years now, I guess, and those were a lot of fun, and I liked the format a lot, so it was kind of cool to revisit that, especially in the horror elements a lot more played up than some of the stories that we covered were. It had it more in the background, or at least sometimes it did. But yeah, this one gets pretty gory at times, which I didn't expect, and has some pretty shocking scenes, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit.
And I guess the other thing I liked is he really does capture the voice of Leela very, very well. Leela's background makes for really good material for these awkward comic scenes that he's pretty good at doing, and there's a lot of these in the novel. So that was fun to read.
Unlike the Star Trek novel that we talked about in the last episode, this one has a ton of plot and things going at all times. So there's all these little twists and turns everywhere, and it's kind of fun to follow where the trails all lead.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I agree.
Nate:
Yeah, there are some reviews I've read of this online that didn't like it, and they were saying that it didn't feel like a Doctor Who story because I guess it was more like on a ship for a lot. But I don't know. I don't really agree with that at all to me. It felt very Doctor Who in that there is something that Doctor Who does a fair amount where it finds this like weird or unexplained thing from antiquity or Neolithic times and give it some alien aspect to it. We talked about the Antikythera mechanism in our "Erewhon" episode, this ancient astronomical calculator that got sunk in the Mediterranean for 2,000 years, that only piece of it survived. I mean, you could easily envision a Doctor Who episode where he goes to ancient Greece and this piece of this computer is actually part of a big thing that the Cybermen were tinkering with or whatever.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And we get a story like that here, and it's always fun to see that.
Gretchen:
I mean, regarding whether or not this is, quote unquote, Doctor Who enough for something, we had already been talking a little bit about how Doctor Who has something that, again, was written by multiple people over several decades at this point. It can kind of be whatever it wants to be. This feels more in line with some of the more historical episodes of the show. This is that similar vibe.
But I also really agree with you Nate, on Leela's voice and the way that he really captures both her voice and the voice of other characters in the novel. I think even the Doctor has a pretty good voice in this novel, and I'm glad that we paired this with "Wounded Sky" since they both feel very bound to characterization and do really good jobs with characterization.
Nate:
Yeah, and it's cool that Leela is the main focus really of the novel and not necessarily the Doctor. She does a lot of the stuff and the Doctor is kind of in the background for a lot of it. I mean, he's pulling some more of the strings and he knows obviously a lot more than pretty much every other character does, as the case always. But we get to see the story through the eyes of a lot of these other characters, and the characters he introduces specifically for the story are pretty fun to deal with too. I mean, they're just straight out of a lot of those Victorian sea novels that we read several episodes back.
JM:
Yeah, very much so, and as you mentioned, Gretchen, you mentioned the historical epic kind of stories and he did say that he was owing a considerable debt to Marco Polo, the story. I definitely get a similar feeling from this. The science fiction content definitely increases in the second half, which I actually think is, I mean, it works pretty well. But I definitely did sort of prefer the first half of this book, which is kind of interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I like the sea section a little bit better, but I wouldn't have minded if it was only that aspect of it without the second half.
Nate:
No, definitely not. I mean, I didn't mind the second half, but I think the my complaint about it is that the science fiction elements when they do come in, it does feel like a little bit rushed. It's just kind of like a lot happens at once and almost like...
JM:
And again, it kind of makes me think if this was Jim's director's cut, it would probably be a lot longer, and, you know, the fans of the book might like that more and people that didn't like the book probably would like it less. You know what I mean? I mean, we definitely have to talk about the structure and the way the book is structured.
Well, first off, I mentioned that the whole book is in first person and that's pretty rare for a Doctor Who book. You do see it every now and then. In fact, the first ever Doctor Who novelization. "Doctor Who and an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks", as it was originally called. I think they changed that name pretty quickly, but that was told in first person from Ian's point of view, and a few of the other Hartnell first Doctor books have a first person narrator, especially Donald Cotton that liked doing the historical stuff. He wrote The Mythmakers and The Gunfighters, and although he didn't write it, he did the novelization of the Romans. He also liked to write in first person, but generally something that both the novelization and original fiction Doctor Who writers tend to stay away from more often than not.
I think that definitely this book being told that way works very much in its favor, but it's also sort of told out of order. Kind of, I mean, the even number of chapters happen before the odd number of chapters, pretty much. It's the way that it works. So in the first part, there's like two, two time periods that kind of you're following two different parts of the story at once.
And for the most part, I think this works really well, but I think that it stops working well about three quarters of the way through the book. Because certain, I guess just the way certain events are told, we already know about certain things that happen before you read about them happening, and there's also one or two things that I think are missing that would have been nice to have included, which I'll point out when we do the summary. But basically, all the characters are really good except one, and I think you guys probably know which character that I mean.
It's the sister of Alexander, Jennifer Richards, and she's just not like, I don't know, I feel like all it was needed was maybe something a little bit earlier on that told us more about her and stuff like I just think the way that she gets revealed and then I think 90% of the time. I think the structure of the book works really well, but I think that towards the end, it might have been actually better to adopt a more linear approach, because it just starts to get a little bit confusing and a little bit like, oh, so did that happen before them? It's like, oh, they're here again. Were they here before or are they going to be there after?
It's still kind of like an even odd chapter split pretty much, but it starts to feel more fragmented somehow, and so I think maybe once they got to the island, he could probably just straighten it out and just told it as a linear story, because I think that might have served a little better at this moment.
But I actually really like the juxtaposition of the sea chapters with the planning the sea voyage chapters. I thought that was really, really nice. I liked reading those two stories simultaneously. That was a lot of fun.
But what do you guys think about the structure of it?
Nate:
Yeah, I think overall it worked. Yeah, I would say the plotting and pacing of the final quarter or so. Yeah, it's maybe doesn't come together as well as it could have. But I think overall it works. It does have that like cliffhanger, the end of every chapter thing that the Doctor Who TV show does too, which I think is a fun element to have.
JM:
That's definitely a fun aspect of original Doctor Who that, I don't know. Some people don't like it. Some people love it. I grew up with them and I always enjoyed the cliffhangers, even though, yeah, maybe some of them get resolved. Like kind of really, you know, I was like, oh, I was waiting all week for that.
Gretchen:
My favorite is I can't remember which serial it was where it seems like someone shoots the Doctor or the companion and then the very second like shot of the next episode is, oh, he just shot another guy. Like they're completely fine. It's all right.
JM:
Yeah, or they reshot the beginning so that it looks like what happened in the first episode, you realize that's not at all what happened.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I think there's one or two instances where they did that. But in general, though, I really like the cliffhangers, especially not so much for how they get resolved, but how they end and the episodes, right? And that is like, leave you really wanting to tune in next week, because yeah, a lot of the time you have to wait a week to watch the next episode, and I think people who watch the original series nowadays, sometimes they don't really take that in consideration. You know, they watch a seven part serial all at one go, and they're like, well, I'm really tired, and there was sure a lot of escape and capture, and yeah, well, I mean, the original serial took almost two months to broadcast. If you were watching that over a two month period, you would probably feel about it differently, and you might actually have to miss an episode and still kind of know what was going on.
So I mean, you could say that some of these things are weaknesses of storytelling, but they worked for what the show was at that time.
Nate:
Yeah, I think it worked great. I mean, I think the format of the show was definitely one of its strengths in that it varies from a lot of the other science fiction shows that I've seen from that time period. Or really, at all, where the format is a story that's contained in roughly an hour and a half to two and a half hours or so of programming versus either like completely episodic or like an arc based like season type version of storytelling.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, just like I do have to sometimes remind myself that stories like that big space opera we were talking about earlier the Daleks Master plan. Yeah, that was on TV for three months originally like for three months doctor who turned into that, and that was what you got.
Nate:
They even do like a Christmas break in the middle of it for whatever reason.
JM:
Yeah, tradition that the new series picked up on that that was the only Christmas special of the original show and now actually I think they stopped doing them in the new series to now they do New Year specials or something.
Nate:
JM:
Yeah. But they were they were doing Christmas specials all through the Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffitt eras.
I definitely like that aspect too. I think this the book handled it well. I think for the most part I'm happy with the fact that we got many different first person points of view and I think you did a pretty good job of differentiating them but I do feel like I would have exchanged out one or two for other ones. I would have gone back to that when we get into more detail about the plot but I definitely think that for the most part he chose well.
I would have liked to see a chapter or two from the point of view of the ships captain. That would have been cool, and maybe an earlier Jennifer chapter or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, I feel like she could have definitely been worked in the story a little bit better.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because I mean I understand where Mortimore was going with her and what he was trying to do with her but I feel like if it had been executed just a little differently it would have worked a lot better.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah, I agree, and I guess without ado then let's talk about the plot so we can get into that with more detail.
Nate:
Sure.
(music: echoey bells)
spoiler plot summary and discussion
JM:
We do start out with a prologue that takes place 30 years before the story and has to do well the rest of the story I should say, and has to do with an Englishman named Stockwood who's on the run, and he is at the naval world in Easter Island which is where a lot of this book is set. Interesting, very remote location to set a book and he does actually talk in the notes at the end about some of the books that he used for research which is cool.
But yeah, Easter Island is now a territory of Chile and it's a remote location in the Pacific among the Polynesian islands and today about 7000 people live there. So there's actually more people living there now than there was during the time when this story takes place, and for a long time afterwards there was speculation about what happened on Easter Island because it seemed like the whole place got deforested and it was like, you know, there's not really a lot of vegetation and, you know, of course they have their huge stone monoliths, which it's again one of those subjects where I guess people see giant artifacts made by a older pre-European culture and wonder where the hell they came from, and it's just kind of funny all the theories that people come up with and I guess to an extent this book plays into it because it was aliens.
I don't know, it's that fun ancient alien stuff Doctor Who loved playing with that too. So getting back to our talk about what is Doctor Who? Well, Doctor Who can be anything including ancient aliens. So, you know, sea stories too? Why not? And yeah, I mean all those, it doesn't feel like Doctor Who kind of comments like, much like Star Trek, Doctor Who has different camps to it and the fandom that is, and there are the people that seem to want everything to be very traditional all the time, and then there's the people that think that the novels especially and things like that are a chance for different things to be done with the concept than what you would normally see.
Because yes, Doctor Who can be almost anything, but most of the time it's a pretty specific thing. Especially around this time, the late 90s and early 2000s. From what I remember seeing there was a lot of talk about this in fandom and about like, well, what can Doctor Who be? Like what is it? How can we tell stories that not only would you not see on the television because like it wouldn't fit the budget, but would you not see because it doesn't fit people's normal ideas of what Doctor Who usually is? But like, I don't know, there's no reason you can't play with the format a lot, and for that one of the reasons why I think, yeah, like Jim is talking about its flexibility and it really is in potential anyway.
But this Mr. Stockwood thinks he can hear the sound of stone grinding behind him and thinks of walking giants as he swims for his life. You see, he's stolen something from the Islanders and it's one of a hundred stone tablets and him and his friends seem to have robbed these people. So his friend though has been captured and is taking part in a ritual on the island and this Stockwood watches as somebody basically loses his mind. Then this is the person who was guiding them on the island. Then I guess there's a feeling that he's been a traitor and he's being pursued, but he does manage to get away and onto the ship that they came on as the Islanders attack and they're very upset about their artifact being stolen.
So leaving his friend behind, Stockwood just kind of leaves and that sets into motion everything that happens going forward.
Stockwood hasn't stopped thinking about this in 30 years. So, he's decided that he wants to mount another expedition, but he doesn't have any money for it, and that's how the Doctor and Leela come into things, and the Doctor sees an article in the newspaper about it, and so he goes to this Stockwood's house in London, and Stockwood and the Doctor seem to hit it off pretty well right away. Stockwood starts telling his story. Leela sees from his body language that if he's not lying, then part of him doesn't believe part of the story that he's telling, and she and the Doctor, in their own ways, believe he's haunted by memories. Stockwood is an archaeologist and he needs a sponsor. He wants to know more about the moai, the walking stones, and he's been laughed out of scientific society and basically broke.
So, the Doctor conjures up a precious diamond and said, Oh, I'll buy your ship, and we'll make this happen. Because he's a Doctor, and he has time on his hands because he's a Time Lord, and he can do this sort of thing.
Stockwood admits there's been some break-ins lately at his house, and they found the translation of the inscriptions that he'd made from the tablets, and some notes on language structure. So he's been discredited and you can't think of who would want to steal from him. But he suspects someone has the idea of getting to Rapa Nui, which is the native name for Easter Island first.
Leela and Stockwood hang out at the house while the Doctor decides to go hunting for a ship, and he has some way of getting funds too by selling precious jewels that he's just keeping around. Leela is puzzled by everything as they go for a walk, especially the horses, and again, we have that infinitely repeated fan question of, when does this book take place? Because, yeah, I mean, I think that it's supposed to take place after the The Talons of Weng-Chiang, because it mentions her having been there before, but then she would have also been in Victoria and London then, so she should have seen some of these things and been somewhat familiar at least.
But, I don't know, it doesn't matter. It's not really worth worrying about too much. I don't think Jim really refers to any other story besides Leela's debut. So, if you really wanted to, you could say that, I don't know, maybe it takes place not long after that one and before any other TV story, and you could say maybe they went to Earth some other time before Talons, and it was just a brief stopover and she didn't have time to absorb anything around her.
So, there's always ways to figure it out and work it out in your own head. I mean, I think nowadays, I don't know, I mean, I know some fans still worry about this, but I think now with Big Finish slotting in literally hundreds of adventures in the midst of the TV show timeline and even introducing new companions to hang out with old ones that we never saw on television, I don't really think that it's something people should spend too much time thinking about.
But they visit the tomb of Stockwood's friend Alexander. Alex was his only boyhood friend during a really harsh time, and there's no body in the tomb because they left him there on Rapa Nui, and Leela recounts how she committed heresy as a young woman of the Sevateem and how her father took the test of the hoarder and her place failed and was killed, and there's really only connection with that one story, and Jim actually really mines it for everything that he can, which is really cool because it's the kind of continuity I think that works, it doesn't feel gratuitous because most of it is told from Leela's first person point of view and obviously she's very influenced by her past experience. This is still quite early in her travels with the Doctor, I guess, so she can't help but think of certain things like she's overwhelmed by the fact that there's so much metal around because to her metal is a holy thing and there's not that much of it, and so these people are squandering all this metal and showing it off everywhere and it feels wrong to her, and so she's having to deal with all these kind of things.
Nate:
And it makes sense from a practical standpoint from writing a tie-in novel that a companion's debut serial is probably one that most people will have seen who might not have necessarily seen all of the serials that companion was in, so putting excessive references to everything they've done might bog down the reader or introduce too many confusing elements that might be hard to follow.
JM:
Yeah, definitely, and both in the notes and in another interview and in the questions that Jim kindly answered for me, he said that he really appreciated the work of Chris Boucher in creating Leela and that you can't help but love her personality and her linguistic corruption like all these different traits that she has.
Nate:
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of fun moments in here and her character is a big part of that.
JM:
Yeah, for sure. So after a while they return to Stockwood's place only to find another break-ins happen and the Doctor's already sitting in the drawing room with champagne. Turns out the butler apparently is responsible for the theft and the doctor caught him trying to steal the rongo-rongo, and Stockwood is very relieved. So the Doctor's got a huge bag of gold with him and now they can get started and they can leave in the morning.
And the Doctor leaves and at this point, I don't know, maybe it's just because I just was watching the Lord of the Rings films, but the doctor really minds me of Gandalf during this part of the book for some reason.
Nate:
Always running around in the background doing things, going place from here to there and all that, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Gretchen:
Like the planner of everything.
JM:
Yeah, and it's like, and he's doing that thing where he's like, okay, meet me at this place in this many days, right? And then the people show up and, uh-oh, something went wrong and he's not there. That's what happens in Lord of the Rings, right?
But yeah, so we also meet James Royston, who is Stockwood's physician and friend, and he wants to come along. He's kind of been worried about Stockwood and his state of mind. Stockwood's happy about this, but not Leela, who doesn't trust him. Royston claims to have already met the Doctor who encouraged him to come, and Leela is definitely suspicious and it's kind of cool because this is never borne out. He does a really good job of showing how canny Leela is, but she's not always correct because she doesn't have the civilization kind of reference points, and sometimes the way Victorian English gentlemen acts might make her distrustful.
So, and this is where we get the unusual Doctor point of view section, and this is a fun thing that no writers of the books is really supposed to do. I don't know, maybe the BBC were more lax about it, but I believe even during the version New Adventures time, their New Adventures Bible, so to speak, had a thing in it, which stated that you're not supposed to get too into the Doctor's head. The reason is that they want to keep the character mysterious, and especially the New Adventures were infamous for having the Doctor, yeah, being pretty much sort of on the sidelines directing things from the background and being very mysterious about his plans and not really often telling the other people around him what he was doing or planning, so they have to guess and it was a source of great angst.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it was a little bit too much. It's kind of one of those things where it's that weird balance that you get in fiction sometimes where you just want to go, look, if you just talk to each other about the problems you're having, everything would be fine, but nobody does that because you want to extend the story out, right?
But here Jim does it for a couple of chapters and it's pretty nice. I mean, not every thought the Doctor has to be connected with revealing some great secret or something like that. I don't know, I'm kind of glad that not all Doctor Who books would do this, but this once, yeah, it's fine. I have no issue with it, it's pretty fun.
So we hear about his arrival at Portsmouth, which is where they're going to buy or charter the ship, and he does some sightseeing and visits the harbormaster and announces he wants to buy a ship, and he has a lot of gold and the harbormaster is pretty overwhelmed, and the Doctor pokes and prods at the Tweed, which is the name of the ship, and the men are very curious, and he teaches them to sing Beatles songs and they're all drunk. I'm not sure somehow I didn't quite picture the fourth doctor being a fan of the Beatles, but it works. I enjoyed that. It was pretty fun.
Gretchen:
I feel like Ian introduced the Doctor to the Beatles after that one episode, the Chase, when he's listening to them, and since then he's been a fan.
JM:
Yeah, that could be, yeah. I think he wanted to hear the Beatles and she was surprised that it was classical music. Somebody online was telling me yesterday that he's never heard a Beatles album in full. So he's planning to rectify that in March, and it's just so funny that like it's become such a part of popular culture and even like the young people today know who the Beatles are, and like, it's one of those things that has well survived the generations. Kind of interesting.
So the Doctor discovers to his chagrin, the TARDIS has been loaded aboard a ship for India. Oops, that gets resolved pretty quickly, but it's kind of fun to think, oh no, you know, he's like the TARDIS is being taken away. How are they ever going to find it?
The Doctor isn't very concerned, though, and he goes to book hotel rooms for the night, and the doctor is really nice to a guy who tries to rob him and some neighborhood kids, and then he's accosted by this evil looking dock worker character, and then back at the Stockwoods, Leela wakes from a disturbing dream, and this is the part that I might read, but the city at night is very frightening and she sees light blinking near and she thinks it's the spirit of death coming for Stockwood.
She goes downstairs where she discovers that somebody has been down there and she thinks it's Royston, but no, it's not. It's just that damn butler again, and now he's been shot because he was creeping around and Stockwood doesn't want to abort the expedition and suggests burying the body in the grounds. So Royston thinks that's very immoral, but seems almost more amused than anything else.
So Stockwood, Royston and Leela arrive at the hotel and they find they have no rooms and the Doctor is missing. So Leela is determined to go find him and she's pretty angry that the men don't show her respect, and many of the men in the town seem to think that she's either a wife or a prostitute or something, and she's pretty put off by this, as you might imagine, and she follows the scent of blood to near the harbor and seems to be retracing the Doctor's footsteps, and she discovers the child the Doctor met earlier. She tells her that the Doctor went with this evil looking guy. It seems like something they could have checked on, but I don't know, their baggage is all hanging out by the hotel. So there's no room, somebody has to keep an eye on it.
Leela seems to be hunted by possibly the same man who accosted the Doctor and they play this cat and mouse game for a while, and she's ready to do an ambush when she stumbles on a busy market and pretty much becomes overwhelmed by everything around her. Because it's very chaotic and loud and smelly and she kind of starts threatening people with her knife, and unfortunately, she lunges at this short red-haired guy who seems to be following her. He shouts, "cutthroat!" And all these people start rushing her and knock her down.
It's pretty cool the way he describes the environment around her. She's like wandering around and all this stuff to prepare for the adventure on sea is pretty cool. I quite liked all these chapters. The others discover that Leela is missing and James kind of wants to abandon Leela and the doctor. But Stockwood is not willing to do this and they somehow do manage to find their ship. I'm not really sure how they managed to do that considering the Doctor is missing, and yet, I guess they were able to track down somehow that this is where the Doctor had been.
James Royston no longer seems like the voice of reason in Stockwood's life, and Stockwood is firm and suggests they start looking for the others at this Three Tons tavern. Stockwood barges into the middle of a massive bar fight. But that just stands there waiting for James to do something. Luckily, James has a gun and they find a woman with a knife crouching defiantly in a corner. But it's not Leela and she was there at some point though, and they're about to leave in disgrace when Stockwood is conked on the head by a short red haired man who seems to be everywhere all at once.
Leela and the three of them are all tied up and dumped in a harbour sewer somewhere, and I think it's in this chapter that the Doctor does his thing where he name drops a lot of people. He's met in his travels including Harry Houdini. But Harry's tricks don't help him escape. Leela though manages to break a post she's tied to, and the Doctor wants to go back to the Three Tons to find out who's responsible for this. But he says they'll still be back at the ship on time but gets Royston and Stockwood to swim for it.
The Doctor and Leela climb up into a tunnel under the tavern, and there's an open door leading to a cellar full of beer kegs, and Nate this is where you get your mention of Old Peculier brew. Yeah you enjoyed the reference.
Nate:
Yeah that stuff is great.
JM:
The red haired enemy is in the cellar and he taunts them. His name's Stump which we find out later, and he feels very confident and he says he'll be well paid to get rid of them, and he's not telling anything he'll just take the gold from the doctor when he's dead, and he's a good hunter and even manages to outwit Leela in the darkness for a while. But she eventually brains him with an ale cask, and Leela thinks they should kill him but of course the Doctor says no.
The book does a really good job of highlighting how the doctor and Leela are friends. But Leela thinks very differently and delivers her kind of position in a very cold implacable but very logical way. I don't know, I appreciated that.
They only have moments to spare before the ship sails. As they run Leela is shot in the arm by the revived redheaded man. The Doctor carries her as he runs, and they manage to reach the ship and the Doctor jumps as he's moving from the jetty. They cling to the side and the redheaded man is stopped by police, and he dives into the water amid a hail of bullets. But they're not outwitted after all because on deck Stockwood and Royston are being held at gunpoint by a cloaked figure, and there are seamen gathered down there in a hostile fashion.
So then we get a bit of a time jump. This is I think where I would have liked, I would have liked a little bit more of that to be filled in and maybe not so much of one or two things in the second part. Like I don't really, I don't know, I wanted to see more of the Jennifer Richards character from this point, and I think because I think she's the one responsible for their predicament essentially. Her point of views, I mean, it makes sense, but it's just not yet. We skip over her taking them prisoner and locking everybody in the hold, and we actually go to the beginning now because I've been sort of avoiding the structure of the book and just telling it in a linear fashion.
So at this point we're kind of back in the opening chapter with Leela traveling on ship, and we got some really cool stuff with her learning how to be a sailor, basically. It's pretty clear that quite a lot has happened. The voyage has already lasted many weeks and the ship is low on stores. Leela is quite at home on deck and she knows all the men by name, and she knows the names of the various parts of the ship as well. So she's obviously been asking a lot of questions and listening as people talk and do their work, and she seems particularly friendly with Jack, who I think is the cook's assistant, and he's also, I can't remember what his other responsibility is, but he seems to hang out in the crow's nest a lot watching stuff. So yeah, Stockwood and Leela have really, I guess, become good friends.
I mean, the Doctor did one of his doctorly things and he's like telling Leela, oh, watch him, he's your best friend. Right, and of course, she sort of interprets that literally, but she doesn't really know quite how to interpret it, and then just the Doctor joking around, and I don't know, I think sometimes it seems like the writers did write the Doctor to be a little bit condescending towards her in a couple of the stories. But for the most part, it does really seem like a friendly bantering relationship, and she gives back as much as she gets. So I don't know. I mean, I think Jim Mortimore is really tapping into that, and I don't really think the Doctor comes across as condescending. I don't think he calls her savage more than once. So yeah.
Gretchen:
And also what's interesting is the part when Leela meets Stockwood and like she thinks of him as a savage, like an animal, basically, because of the way that he responds to her. So it's sort of, I like seeing Mortimore kind of subvert that trope of Leela being savage by thinking others are less on point as she is.
JM:
Yeah, definitely, definitely, and this, the book really plays with that perspective a lot, and it's pretty cool. So yeah, all kinds of cool stuff happens on the journey. There is, of course, storms. There is all kinds of cool stuff, and pretty much if you like the sea adventure genre, there's definitely stuff here to enjoy in all these parts. I wouldn't have minded if there was more of that even. But a good chunk of the first half of the book is taken up by the sea voyage.
Leela gets to narrate many of the chapters herself and talk about how she likes to hang out with the pigs. Sometimes there are better companions than people. She doesn't trust the captain of the ship because apparently he took a bribe to imprison them in the hold and stuff. But all that seems to be mostly over and forgotten now, and Stuart seems like a pretty cool character. He likes to show Leela things and teaches her a little bit about geology and geography and stuff like that.
And yeah, I kind of wanted to see a chapter from him. That would have been cool, especially towards the latter part of the book. So it's a shame that he doesn't get a moment. But I can't really give it to everybody, I suppose.
There is a big storm that they have to weather, though, and it damages the ship pretty badly, and they haven't lost anybody, but they're way off course into dangerous, icy territory. Which is good since they lost all their fresh water. Leela still wants to investigate because she noticed that somebody is being kept in a cabin, and she doesn't know who it is. She thinks there's a sick person in there. So she does eventually find the captain's keys and she opens up the cabin and... Well, it's that Stump guy who's been actually rescued, and he was hanging on to the bottom of the ship and he'd been shot, and he basically, his wounds got infected and he was like... He's pretty much a feverish madman now.
Jennifer Richards seems to want to protect him, and she's actually... I didn't really realize this till later, but she is of course the sister of Stockwood's friend, Alexander, and yes, her whole reason for doing all this is that she wants to... Well, she wants vengeance, basically, and she hates Stockwood because she thinks that... Yeah, rightfully thinks that he basically abandoned his friend and left him to die on Easter Island.
Nate:
And again, a chapter at the beginning where she talks about all that, how she wants to get revenge. Like, even almost immediately after the prologue, I think would have helped her character immensely.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I agree with that. I don't know that it had to be that early, but at least like... Yeah, have a chapter where the Doctor and Leela finally make it on board the ship and then we meet her, and we find out what she was doing and maybe why. I mean, it doesn't seem like Leela really understands everything. Like, there haven't been too many conversations between the different parties, but the Doctor clearly knows everything because he's been talking to Richards too.
So, and there's a very Jules Verne-ish thing here where also an author that Mortimore mentions at one point. But there's a fight between a sperm whale and a giant squid. There was total "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Awesome. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, this scene was really cool.
JM:
Oh, yeah, yeah, and it's, yeah, this is like pretty gory. Animals are biting chunks out of each other and there's sharks circling and it's like... You wouldn't want to be in the water, that's for sure.
But yeah, so Leela goes over the side of a ship, but the water is full of shark, and unfortunately, Royston can't swim. Leela has to stab a shark to death, which is pretty awesome. The Tweed's too far away now and they find some wreckage from the splintered deck rail, and Leela ties Royston to some life boys while she does a number on the squid too. Here's where they do the awesome Leela rides the whale chapter, and apparently Jim had to fight for this chapter. This is one of the things that the editor wanted them to not include, and he essentially had to fight to keep this chapter in.
Gretchen:
I'm glad he won the battle.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, it is a bit over the top, but again, it's like super fun.
JM:
It's totally over the top, but it's... The thing is, I think that's one of his strengths is writing those like giant spectacular stuff. Like in "Blood Heat", there's scenes where there's like Silurians flying around on dinosaurs and humans on colliders, and like there's pitched battles and stuff, and it's like, you can tell that he just likes this kind of stuff, and I think he's pretty good at it. I mean, this is hard for some people to pull off. I mean, I couldn't pull off action scenes like that. So everybody has, I guess, their particular thing, and I'm sure we've all read action scenes that were not very well done, and, you know, some people's strength is dialogue and introspection, and some people's strength is action, and that's fine and good.
But Royston's pretty sick and he's suffering from exposure, and the whale is pretty agitated and keep trying to submerge, but can't stay under due to not getting enough oxygen, and there's a big black column, a tornado, and yeah, pretty much a miracle that they survive. They have to climb into the dead whale's mouth, which probably is really sticky and unpleasant.
Nate:
Yeah, whales are huge.
JM:
Oh, yeah. So we get another time jump and they do make it to Easter Island while that is the Doctor and then do, and Leela eventually does too, and they all seem to find each other. I personally, I'm not sure after, after really realizing just how remote Easter Island is, I kind of feel like if Leela just ran into a bunch of Polynesian fishermen, I don't know that they would really want to take them to Easter Island. But I don't know. That's just kind of, but I'm not sure, right? Like I can't say for certain, but we don't really see this part of the journey. So again, it feels like I'm not sure that I necessarily need everything to be in here. I mean, I don't need the whole book to be a real time descriptions of how they got from point A to B to C. But I am a little unclear on certain things that seem to be brushed over a little bit. So because Easter Island is literally thousands of miles from like anything.
Nate:
Yeah, right. The Pacific Ocean is incredibly vast compared to pretty much everything else in the planet, and it is kind of interesting how many of these places that are just totally remote that are like literally thousands of miles away from the next island there actually are.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Nate:
Because Easter Island isn't the only one.
JM:
No, it's possible that some, I don't really look into the details of this, and this might be in one of the books that Jim read for research because he does talk about a couple of books on the island. But I mean, since the island does seem to be low on natural resources, it could be that they had worked out like trade things with the other island group and stuff, and then that they regularly sent boats there. But it just seems like it's so far away from anything. It's not just like, oh, can you drop us off at Easter Island? That's where our friends are. I don't know.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But be that as it may, the Tweed is arrived and yeah, everybody's, well, Stockwood anyway, and yes, presumably the doctor are quite haunted by the fact that Leela might be dead. Although the Doctors generally seems to think that she probably survives and because she's, he knows how resourceful she is, and he said, I can't remember the exact quote, but it's something like, well, Leela is from a world where God is real and not positively predisposed toward her and her people, and yet she survives. So I'm pretty sure she can deal with whatever she has to face on the ocean, and it's remarkable confidence. But I think in the case of Leela, yeah, it seems to be earned, and if I was stranded somewhere in the middle of the ocean. I would probably feel relatively safe with her as well. As long as I didn't get on her bad side.
Gretchen:
Although Royston was on her bad side and she still was willing to save him.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, they've arrived at the same bay and Stockwood's kind of having deja vu from 30 years ago, and he basically relates the past expedition to the Doctor and explains what happened, and there's a bunch of more Stockwood chapters in this part, and it's pretty good because yeah, I mean, Stockwood seems like a pretty nice guy and he's like, seems to be fair and good nature. But he's definitely a product of his time, and he has a very kind of paternalistic kind of condescending attitude toward the Polynesians as I suppose most Victorian men of his time, even the explorers probably had.
But they're looking at the stone monuments when suddenly the Tweed gets attacked by some Peruvian slavers who anchored on the other side of the island and come around to ambush the new arrivals, and they've been there for a bit already and they've captured a bunch of the Islanders and yeah, the Islanders basically they're no match for the Peruvians and their guns, and this kind of stuff really did happen at this time for sure, and generally the Peruvians are very practical and cruel and we don't really see too much of them, but we do get to hang out with their captain a bit, and I mean, yeah, he's a pretty evil seeming character, but he's also kind of like this fun pirate kind of character, and I enjoyed him a little bit. Wouldn't mind seeing more of that character too. But again, we can't have everything.
The doctor gets shot and taken aboard one of the Peruvian ships, and essentially Stockwood and some of the other survivors are hanging out in this cave with some of the remaining Islanders. There's not many left on the island and everybody's very silent and Stockwood feels very awkward and unhappy and they bring in Jack and Jennifer Richards, and Topeno, one of the Islanders explains how the Peruvians arrived and they made the Islanders a bunch of them sign a contract which of course they couldn't read to become slaves, and many were captured and some tried to escape and were killed, and the fight's been going on for days and hundreds of people have been killed. Not too good.
Yeah, so we get the Doctor hanging out on the Peruvian ship and the Islanders are very angry and naturally hate the interlopers. So the Doctor has quite a bit of work to do to convince them that he's all right, and he means them no harm. But he's hauled on deck to meet the captain, DaBraisse, and he assumes the doctor is a priest and goes about as well as you might expect with DaBraisse saying, he'll convert these valueless men into valuable slave workers, and he takes the Doctor's diamonds, of course, locks them up again.
Stockwood, Jack and Richards, they're taken to a council of war among the people, and that's where they meet Leela, and it turns out she's been there for a while, and Royston's also there, tired and spent, but oddly happy, and he admires Leela quite a bit and thinks she should have a term in politics, and yeah, so then we hear about how Leela and Royston survived and were rescued. But an old woman recognizes Stockwood and accuses him of treachery and theft, of stealing the rongo-rongo, of course, and Tortorro, their old island guide, was her brother, and his son, Stockwood, did indirectly save, is now dead, killed by the Peruvians, and this tall, white-haired man is led through the crowd, and I had a feeling who it would be, and indeed, it is Alex, who rasps, "I am your punishment", and he steps towards Stockwood, arms outstretched, looking terrible, and the old woman, Atani, slits his throat as he repeats his mantra once again, and it's pretty terrible.
But after that, the Islanders wash Stockwood and Alex's blood, and it seemed to think that the punishment is over, and now things will be a little bit more peaceful, even though that's not the case for Jennifer at all, and she's in shock and unable to do anything much, and Leela now trusts the Islanders to welcome and look after Stockwood, and Leela leads an attack on the Peruvian invaders, and they're getting drunk, so the timing's really good, and they take Tweed back and rescue Stuart, and we have another really awesome action sequence, which was another highlight for me. I enjoyed this part.
This really chaotic fight on the ship with things falling over and catching fire and the magazine of the ship blowing up, and the Doctor almost, who's all tied up, almost falling off the plank of the ship and drowning, and Leela has to save him, which she, of course, managed to do quite well, and Leela and DaBraisse get to meet head-on in the inferno of the burning ship, and DaBraisse falls overboard, and he's not dead, though, and we will see him at least one more time.
But Leela, Stockwood, and Richards have a moment after Alex's death as well, and there's some pretty impassioned speechmaking from Jennifer, who essentially laments her place in the world and the fact that she was left behind, and I guess she's kind of speaking for upper-class Victorian English ladies everywhere and how they're not treated with respect by the men in their lives. She makes some fair points, but I just kind of wish that there was a bit more, I guess. Yeah, her character arc is not very satisfying for me, so I think that's probably the least strong part of the book, unfortunately.
So they see the Doctors starting to understand the purpose of the monuments, and the rongo-rongo has a translation for a chant that can be used to activate them, and it turns out that there's the old woman Atani believes that they can send Stockwood, who has been wounded, through the portal, and he can be saved, because as with transporters everywhere, the transporter will magically heal you of any damage that your body might have as it reconstructs you in another place.
We don't get to all that quite in all that order, but we do eventually get to an alien planet, and yeah, this part really reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke. They're kind of wandering around this abandoned technological landscape and traveling between these different portals, and there's one world that's like it's a moon that used to be used for manufacturing, and everything on it is dead, and just dust everywhere, and the sun is strange, and there's a lot of really cool descriptions, and they end up in a city where there's all these anti-gravity things everywhere and floating bridges and stuff like that, and it's pretty cool, and again, very Arthur C. Clarke.
So yeah, it turns out that the ancient aliens that built the monoliths were actually encoding their DNA into part of the human race, and they had suffered a massive calamity due to a war situation, and were almost completely wiped out, and so this was their attempt to basically spread their genes around, and Stockwood and Royston hear about all this, and they're really horrified, because yeah, I mean, it's kind of manipulation on a grand scale, and the Doctor kind of finds it really fascinating, and it's like, we're getting pretty close to the end of the book, and it turns out that, yeah, Jenny does make a last attempt on Stockwood's life, because she just can't get over that, and I don't totally blame her again, but I don't know, it's just, yeah.
The way that they ended was pretty tragic, and I kind of felt some of it, but it just, I don't know. It needed a bit more fleshing out, I think, and her character needed to be more than just, I can see why she's mad, like there needed to be a bit more to it than that, I think.
So Stockwood eventually decides to stay behind on the island. They do encounter the Peruvians one last time, and DaBraisse gets killed, and yeah, the order of the chapters towards the end is kind of unfortunate, because the last chapter before the epilogue is, like I said, a Jennifer point of view chapter, and it's the chapter where they last encounter DaBraisse and the thing is, we already know that Jennifer gets killed soon afterwards, so I don't know, again, all through the first part, I was really happy with the way he structured it, but during this part, yeah, the last quarter, not even the full second part, maybe, but the last quarter, I was starting to feel like the order should not be like this now, because yeah, like chapter 29 is, I don't think anti-climactic is really the right word, but it's kind of like that, like it's just, it's not really like, we've already seen a lot of this happen, we've already been to the alien planet and stuff, we already know what's going to happen to Jennifer, so having this close the book before the epilogue, which is actually a really nice epilogue, it closes the book very nicely, I think, where Stockwood is, now it's 30 years later, in the early 1900s, and Stockwood is old, and Dr. and Leela have left with another expedition a long time ago, and the aliens have come back, and not many of the people remain on the island, and Stockwood will go too in the end.
Yeah, I'm wondering, did the alien codes enter him too? I mean, not sure, and you don't really know exactly what will happen in the future, and I think I do enjoy the ambiguity here of not knowing exactly how much this influence changes the people of the island, and it's not really clear, but I don't know that it really matters, because it's this really cool, mysterious way to do it, and I don't know, I appreciate it, there was some really cool, beautiful, kind of sentimental moments to close the book on, I think, with Stockwood, the old Stockwood.
So, yeah, for the most part, I think this is a really good example of a Doctor Who book, and I definitely do agree that it does feel very Doctor Who, in every way, because as well as what we were talking about, I think one thing Doctor Who often does is grab two seemingly disparate things from maybe two separate genres, and just kind of mash them together and see what comes out.
So, here we got a sea voyage, we got Victorian London escapades, and we got a mysterious sci-fi Arthur C. Clarke-ish plot, all mixed together.
Nate:
Yeah, and I think overall it works, the Arthur C. Clarke stuff at the end, I think does come in a little bit too fast, and probably wraps itself up a little bit too quickly, but aside from that, I thought this was really enjoyable, a lot of fun, he captures both Leela's voice and those scenes with her really well, as well as the weird sea stuff, which I really like those kind of stories, especially since we've been doing them on the podcast.
JM:
Yeah, and earlier on, you heard the excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 8 from Leela's point of view, and that's an example of just how he does this. Music in the background is some of Mortimore's music as well. I did want to mention he made some pretty cool music. It's available on his bandcamp, you can download and listen to all kinds of stuff, and he has it for sale there, but you can listen to everything streaming for free, and really cool ambient music for the most part. He says he's really influenced by Tangerine Dream and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and I can definitely hear that. There's some pretty cool stuff there, for sure, some good ambient keyboard music. Been doing this for a while, I think the first recording on there is from 1986 and that's like during the Audio Visuals days. Yeah, I mean, if you're into that kind of synth exploration stuff, really long tracks of ambient floating soundscapes and stuff, and occasionally melody peeking through, you'll probably dig it.
But I do want to quote what he said about the whale Chapter. He said, "One day I'll publish the inane, desperate, and in no way offensive, epic, seven-page volume justifying keeping the Leela Rides the Whale Chapter in. I think Steve Cole, former BBC Books editor, capitulated not so much because of my perfect logic, but because I begged so embarrassingly. Come to think of it, that's probably the moment when I realized that on the whole, it's much better to have your book cancelled than compromised."
Yeah, I agree. I definitely would feel that way too. Even though a part of you would probably be tempted to be like, but I can get my book published. It's exciting to have a book published, right? And it's, you know, I mean, like we have already established. Yes, there were quite a few writers in the tie-in world who were already established, but some of them were getting their feet in the door this way, and they would be willing to acquiesce to any restrictions, but I don't know, Mortimore from what I see of his personality and from what other people have spoken about him. He doesn't really seem like a person who wants to go his own way and is pretty adamant about it, and so occasionally, yeah, occasionally he's sort of gone against the flow and sort of aggravated some of the editorial staff, and I think, you know, maybe Big Finish because he's never been asked to write another one apparently, and I don't know, it's just, I don't want to speculate too much because yeah, these are matters that that one can only kind of guess at at this point, and the people involved are still around and still involved in their own capacity.
So yeah, but yeah, I mean, I've enjoyed most of what I've read by him. I mean, I wouldn't say like necessarily everything always lands, but when it does, it lands really well, and I would definitely like to see, for example, that original novel that's completely unfettered from the restrictions of tie-in land and see what he can really get away with.
Gretchen:
Overall, I also really enjoyed this novel and I definitely like to check out more of Mortimore, you know, both the Doctor Who, like tie-in stuff and also the original work.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So now that we've kind of talked about all this stuff, I wonder doing this change name of you guys' perspectives on these kind of books. Gretchen, I know you've read quite a few and you don't have a lot of experience with this...
Nate:
No, not really.
JM:
Quote, trashy quote form of fiction. But what do you guys think about all this?
Nate:
I don't know, I thought this was a fun little excursion. I don't know how much I'm going to be revisiting tie-in novels in the future. But yeah, I definitely have no complaints about either novel we covered for this time, and I think they were both fun little looks into TV shows that I really like.
Gretchen:
And as someone who has read some tie-in stuff before, different tie-in novels, I've always had like a fondness for them, and I think this just is part of that. I don't think I have any changed opinion except just having two more tie-in novels under my belt that I really enjoyed and look forward to reading more both of Doctor Who and Star Trek in the future.
JM:
So yeah, I mean, obviously I used to read quite a few of these and I don't think I really talked about this before, but when we were talking about the general tie-in experience at the beginning of the episode there, but I did read quite a few movie novelizations and in a few cases it was before I saw the actual film. But I mean, in general, I guess hearing all the accounts of a writer frustration in both the Star Trek and Doctor Who world kind of confirms a bit of a suspicion or feeling that I've always had that yeah, like it can be tricky territory to navigate both for a writer and a reader because yeah, as a reader, you have to kind of find some happy medium between yeah, I really like Doctor Who and Star Trek. I want to read these books because I like that world so much and but I actually just want to read good books, right? Like I want to read good books and if it's like some really long, they're setting up this like really long serialized arc of storytelling by a whole bunch of different authors and you're like, I wish I could just read the good ones but then at the same time I want to have the whole experience, right?
Like it's just a whole other way of going about things that I don't know, like I kind of and then going back to what Jim just said earlier about feeling like it might be better to have your book canceled than compromised. I do get the feeling that a lot of books get compromised and you know, especially like talking about the dark period of Star Trek fiction that I mentioned earlier where it seems like they couldn't step out of line even a little bit without somebody coming down on their heads being, no, you can't write that character like that. Just so infuriating, and at the same time, you can't really argue because you agreed to work in their sandbox.
Nate:
And all those big franchises are all owned by massive, massive companies.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. So, and then again, it does seem like when the property isn't being made for television or film anymore, that's when the book authors can really go to town and do some fun stuff. Because, yeah, the restrictions have definitely relaxed at the point where maybe somebody like the BBC or Paramount cares just enough to give out a license and to sell the license to people, but they don't really care enough to strongly oversee everything, and I guess in a way, that's the ideal position. But the thing is, fans are always going to be like, oh, I want the show to come back, right? I don't want, I want things to be back in the golden age, and, you know, I remember, I mean, 2005, when Doctor Who was going to come back, I was really excited, and I guess maybe a part of me thought, oh, this might be the end of a golden period for fans too, though, because we might not see books that push the envelope anymore. We might not see audios that push the envelope anymore because they'll have to tread more carefully from here on out, and maybe during the first couple of seasons of Doctor Who, new who, I didn't think about that too much, but those thoughts definitely started to come back when I realized I wasn't really as engaged with the show as I could possibly be, and started spending a lot of time wondering, well, is it me or is the show just so different that I don't really connect with it in the way that I used to? And it's a combination of both things, for sure.
I don't know, you know, sometimes I want to like the new show more than I do, but I don't know. It's not terrible. I'm not going to sit here and complain about it. Kind of what I was saying earlier, I mean, I think there is a point where you just kind of realize that things have moved on without you a little bit and that's okay, because there's a lot of other stuff to get into as well. So I think not all fans of something like Doctor Who or Star Trek can be on board with every little aspect of those things. Because it's pretty much impossible when they have such a long history and so many people are involved.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, you're sort of always going to kind of have to pick and choose the sort of aspects of these franchises that you most want to engage with.
JM:
Right. I mean, something like Doctor Who or Star Trek now has literally thousands of novels and audio productions and comics, and there's no way to really be immersed in it all. So I think that's why like certain websites like the Doctor Who ratings guide are pretty helpful because, you know, you can read other people's thoughts on the stuff. People have kind of taken the time to get into a lot of this stuff and find out maybe where you might want to go. I mean, it's easy to say, well, you should form your own opinion. But I mean, with thousands and thousands of titles to sift through, I think a little help is not to be scoffed at.
Nate:
Especially if you want a one-off like these two have been and you don't want to get involved in a, you know, 15-part serial or whatever.
JM:
Saga, yeah. That's kind of what I was thinking when we were planning this episode, and so I picked this book for that reason because I think anybody who even liked Doctor Who just a bit could possibly get into this, and I think the same is true of the Star Trek book. Like, not only that, but the Star Trek book is the Star Trekiest of the Star Trek. So if you just wanted to show somebody what Star Trek was like and they didn't have access to the show, you could hand them that book, and I think with Eye of Heaven, it is a little bit similar in that like, yeah, Doctor Who can be all these things that are in this book ad more. So they're both pretty good representations in that sense, I think.
So yeah, I don't know if we'll be revisiting this continuum again either. I suspect if we do, it'll be a while. But I mean, there are certainly other franchises we could also dip into. I would say even doing one or two very, very special movie novelizations might not be out of reach in the future. I don't really know which ones we could do, but I'll definitely do some poking around and see which might be a particular note for one reason or another.
There might be some cool cross media experiments too, where you know, it's kind of like, you can't even be sure which came first in a sense. Like the book or the movie 2001 is the perfect example, right? So yeah, I mean, we were talking about Arthur C. Clarke earlier. I actually did reread 2001 recently. I had a pretty good time with it. I had a pretty good time with the book, so I don't know if we'll want to do that, Clarke. But we'll definitely do one, but yeah, I mean, it's a nice, short, well done book, and like what you were saying about the Clarke sci-fi stuff being taken care of pretty fast in this book, "Eye of Heaven", this is true, but I do think it avoids perhaps some of the pitfalls that ClarkE can be sometimes accused of as well, where it's like, you know, he gets too, too wrapped up in the technical side of things and it gets a little bit dry and like, I don't know. It's kind of chapters and chapters of describing how stuff works.
Nate:
I don't mind him.
JM:
I don't mind because, yeah, Clarke is, I think, actually really good at that. I think he has a certain enthusiasm and passion that makes it like, read like, it's exciting to us just like it is to him, kind of.
Gretchen:
It's like the sci-fi equivalent of Melville and Moby Dick being like, look at all of these whale facts and it being like, very detailed, but also the enthusiasm makes it still very interesting.
JM:
Right, exactly, yeah, and I don't know if there's something special about him because I definitely think that not all writers can do that, but I think that he has some kind of sense of grandeur. It's like that sense of wonder that you're supposed to have as a young science fiction fan, right, or as somebody who's really getting interested in science, for example. It's like he still has it and I almost feel like that weird friendship that we talked about once on the podcast before where Clarke and Lord Dunsany became friends, and like, it's hard to imagine two more opposite kind of British writers of fantastic slash genre fiction because Dunsany is all mysticism and like, definitely more fantastical, not science based, and Clarke is the opposite, but Clarke also has this sense of poetry, I think, to him where he really is able to convey those kind of hard science concepts in a way that's beautiful. I think that's probably one of the things that draws people like Jim Mortimore to his work, too.
He's just a little bit like a more hard science Ray Bradbury almost hit that way, I think, but we'll be talking about him more some other time.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
We don't have plans to do him any time in the next several months, but maybe next year we'll get to something by him.
But we do have plans for next month, though. We're all going to have our host choices. Nate and Gretchen both had their turn, and now it's my turn. So I have chosen Fritz Leiber and his Time War stories or Change War, as they like to call it, and this is a series of one novel and a few interconnected somewhat or at least somewhat interconnected short stories, and the novel is very short. You can probably read it in a few hours. It's called "The Big Time", and there's actually a really good LibriVox version, surprisingly. I mean, well, I don't know. Maybe it's not that surprising, but it's kind of a lock and draw depending on who you get to read the stuff. I know Nate and I, when we did Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" and then the follow-up. I listened to the audiobook of the follow-up, and I think Nate listened to some of it, too, and it was rough going.
Nate:
Yeah, there's some dismal stuff on LibriVox, but there's some really good stuff, too. There's this woman, Mil Nicholson, who I might have mentioned before, who does some amazing readings of Dickens that are on par with any of the pros from Blackstone Audio.
JM:
Yeah, that's really cool. The Big Time, as far as I know, it's still up there. I might have to check to see. There's actually an Audible version, too, which I guess is a professional one, and I didn't like that one as much. The LibriVox one is read by Karen Savage, and if you just want to take three or four hours out of your day, you can listen to the novel on LibriVox for free. So I highly suggest that you do that, or in some way, take in "The Big Time", because it's a really cool book.
But there's also some shorts connected with it, and they can be found in the book "The Change War", and there's just a few of them. It starts with "No Great Magic". Then there's "The Oldest Soldier". "Knight to Move". "Damnation Morning". "Try and Change the Past", and finally, "A Deskful of Girls", and those pretty much make up the sequence.
So we're going to be reading and talking about all those, and it seems like a lot of short stories, but some of them are very short. So it will take very much time to read through all this stuff. If you can find it, I definitely highly recommend it. It's pretty cool, and yeah, back in the day, "The Big Time" did win the Hugo Award. I know there's a lot of controversy around the Hugo Awards right now. Maybe not the best time to mention them, but this was 1958. So, I don't know, whatever.
It, I think, deserves it. It's a pretty humble book in a way, and just the way it's told, and the scale of it is simultaneously really small and large, because it tells a tale about a war through time. But it's from the perspective of a very small set of rooms and a very small group of people and how they interact with each other. So the whole book could be a stage play, really, and I think that's what makes it pretty cool. One of the things that makes it pretty cool. So it's kind of a locked room mystery, almost, and I think you guys will probably enjoy it. I know I do.
Gretchen:
Definitely looking forward to it. I've been wanting to get to a Leiber work at some point.
Nate:
Yeah, I've only read a couple of the shorts, so definitely looking forward to getting on to a longer work.
JM:
Nice. Yeah, I think that's going to be really cool, guys. So I'm looking forward to next month, and yeah, by then it'll be springtime. It's warming up here already quite a lot, so.
Gretchen:
Yeah, same here.
JM:
Well, after all that, I believe my flux capacitors in the engine room are just about burned out, and we won't be able to achieve warp capacity for a while yet. So I'm going to find my sonic screwdriver. So now we have been Chrononauts, and we hope you've enjoyed our exploration of the prose versions of some of our favorite televisual adventures, and we bid you good night.
Bye for now.
