The Difficult Forty Ninth Album

It's the 23rd November, 2012 as I type. Doctor Who is 49 today.

The big five-oh next year, with 2013 promising to be a year of Doctor Who reflection, analysis and celebration like no other. 

I thought I'd get in early before everyone is completely sick of it and (hopefully) come at it from a slightly different angle.

I mean; what? Why? Why is this thing still with me? 

Maybe Harry Hill and William Roache can explain...


"I am Ken Barlow and I am the only constant in your life"

If you are not from the UK you may not understand this reference. In short, Bill Roache has played the character, Ken Barlow, in Britain's longest running soap opera, Coronation Street, since 1960 - a world record for the longest serving actor in the same role.
He was playing Ken Barlow ten years before I was born. My family watched Coronation Street when I was a child. I still watch Coronation Street today.

A thrice weekly ritual, observed by one generation and passed on to the next. 

Doctor Who fits this too. 

So, at least part of my preoccupation is to do with a sense of continuity. The World is in constant flux, but Ken Barlow and Doctor Who remain. Although, Doctor Who has the edge on Ken Barlow, because you can change his location and the period where events take place. You can change the bloke who plays him. You can change the tone, the genre and the medium of the stories.

Doctor Who remains, but, like the World, he too is in flux. 

Look at this.

So Vile A Sin

It's the cover of the book I am currently reading. So Vile A Sin was published in 1997 and co-written by Ben Aaronovitch (latterly the author of the Peter Grant novels) and Kate Orman. 
Aaronovitch started it, suffered a catastrophic PC crash, losing most of what he had written and finding himself unable to pick up the peices, Orman took over and finished it. I have been enjoying the book, despite it reading a bit like a book started by someone, been lost in a catastrophic PC crash and finished by someone else.

It's a Doctor Who book. An official one. Doctor Who is in it. There's a TARDIS and everything.

Where's the Doctor Who logo?

Well, this was published by Virgin Books at the tail end of their licence to produce the ongoing  Doctor Who: The New Adventures from 1992 to 1997 - when there was no TV version.
The BBC took the book series in-house when the US TV movie was made, expecting a television revival that wouldn't happen until they had the bottle to do it themselves in 2005.

When Virgin's licence was revoked, the publisher decided to carry on without the Doctor, the TARDIS or any of the BBC owned properties. They had created their own characters (like Bernice Summerfield, Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester) during the New Adventures run and felt that the series was strong enough to survive on its own merit and removed the Doctor Who logo, five books before the character himself left.

Now, Matt Smith in the current TV version of Doctor Who is great. I love it. My family, my wife, my kids all enjoy watching the show together, much in the same way as I watched it with my parents and siblings when I was a kid.

For me the TV show is sort of like the Greatest Hits of your favourite band. All killer material, for sure. The heavy hitters. The million sellers. The one that even your Grandma knows the words to. The three-minute floor-filling, crowd-pleasers. I love that shit.

But, what I love just as much, and in some cases even more so, is the esoteric stuff. The novels (like sprawling album tracks), the comic strips (genre experimentations), the novelizations (remixes and 'live' versions of old classics) and the spin-offs (solo & side projects).

Maybe I'll do you a compilation of my favourite oddities?

49 and counting.

Happy Birthday.

"Let's put on our Classics and we'll have a little dance shall we?"

Venus In Transit

As mention previously, my e-novella, By The Time I Get To Venus, was published last week by Manleigh Books. It's part of their ongoing series; The Periodic Adventures Of Señor 105.

This is me giving a little context to the story. I am not going to include anything that might be considered a spoiler as such, but one might like to consider my previous blog before reading on.

Señor 105

OK? Right...

Who is Señor 105?

He is the creation of Cody Quijano-Schell and has featured in various short stories published by Obverse Books, both as an associate of the trans-temporal adventuress; Iris Wildthyme and as the central protagonist in his own adventures.

As such, he partially inhabits the stranger fringes of the expanded Doctor Who universe, but that is only one thread of an altogether more elaborate, more psychedelic tapestry.


The character was initially inspired from the Mexican Wrestler movies of the 50's, 60's and 70's. Cody has created an amazing video introduction to the genre here -




When Cody approached me to pitch ideas for the Periodic Adventures, I said pretty early on that I wanted to do an Enter The Dragon type scenario. A tournament or maybe even a flashback to Señor 105's early days, training somewhere. Given the exotic nature of the wrestler's adventures, the location of the training would need to be suitably unusual, on another planet or something.

This chimed with Cody's over-arching plans for the series (he has big, big plans!); other planets in the solar system would be featured prominently.

Then it clicked; Enter The Dragon... on Venus!

Why Venus? Check it out...



What we have here is Doctor Who calming an enraged Aggedor with a Venusian lullaby (roughly translated, the rhyme starts; "Close your eyes, my darling. Well, three of them at least")

Now, during this period of the show; Jon Pertwee's Doctor used martial arts, referred to as "Venusian Akido" or "Venusian Karate". There were a several other allusions to Venus and its inhabitants, mainly as comedic asides. These references eventually disappeared with Pertwee's departure from the role.

Venusian Lullaby 

Twenty years later, Paul Leonard wrote the novel Venusian Lullaby.

In his book, Leonard took the sparse, sometimes quite bizarre information given about Venus in the TV series and imagined what this Venusian civilisation might actually be like.

The result was a novel depicting a compelling, complex and truly alien civilisation; depicted in such a detail as to probably be unique in all of Doctor Who.

I could go on at length about how much I love this book, instead I'll just urge you to track down a copy and see for yourself.

Almost another twenty years later, Cody and I wondered if Paul Leonard would let me borrow his world? Just a small corner of it. It made perfect sense that Señor 105 would have trained in Venusian Martial Arts, had the opportunity arisen.

Paul graciously agreed and I was good to go.

The Enter The Dragon on Venus concept bubbled away in the back of my brain, Lalo Schifrin's iconic theme playing in my head twenty four seven. It occurred to me that Señor 105 would need a sparring partner; someone of equal stature, but a differing motivation. Someone with whom he could forge an uneasy alliance (my absolute favourite sort of alliance!)

Theo Possible

I had just the man.

Theo Possible was a character I had originally created for my short story, Party Kill Accelerator! In that story, he was the mysterious curator of an eerie festival. Possible turned up again, hitching a lift across The City of The Saved in the story; Happily Ever After Is A High Risk Strategy.

Like Señor 105, Possible is a senior character; over fifty at least. Unlike Señor 105, his motivations are unclear, perhaps even dubious. Both characters have mysterious personal histories. It isn't much of a leap to suppose that at least part of their respective mysterious histories might, in fact, be one.

It wasn't until I was half way through writing By The Time I Get To Venus that I remembered in Party Kill Accelerator! that there is a reference to Possible having studied something called "Klatch-Ki" - the ancient Venusian art of style over content!

Clearly, this was all meant to happen!

I hope that that's enough background to inspire you to purchase the book. I haven't even touched on what the story is actually about. You shouldn't need to know anything of the above to enjoy the book.

(Also, it's cheap and quite short)

Let me know what you thought of it and tell your friends!

By The Time I Get To Venus

Stop Making Sense

My ebook, By The Time I Get To Venus, was published this week. This post was going to be a primer for it, but then it got me thinking.

Look at this...




I first saw this video about ten years ago. It blew my mind with its acute strangeness.

I don't speak Japanese and at that time I was unaware of the Kikkoman brand of soy sauce. With no frame of reference, I supplied my own, shifting set of ideas as to what the hell it was going on. It made me laugh, it creeped me out and the tune got stuck in my head.

A decade later, I know about Kikkoman soy sauce. Also, a friend who speaks a bit a Japanese explained that there is some play on words happening with the 'Show you!' bit in the song, which I can't quite remember now. Context has crept into this little animation and although I understand it a bit better, I don't quite enjoy it as much as I did.

The tune still gets stuck in my head, mind.

 Now, look at this (be careful, its absolutely terrifying. It's from The Shining)...





The Shining is one of the scariest films I have ever seen and this scene is without doubt the scariest scene in any film, ever.

Why?

Well, again, I think its to do with its inexplicability. Poor Shelley Duvall is having the most horrid day imaginable and just when she thinks it couldn't possibly get any worse she sees... something... in a room at the end of a corridor.

We have a long shot from her point of view... What the hell am I looking at?
Then, crash zoom; Christ! What the Hell Am I Looking At!?

And, she's off. Shelley's got homicidal Jack Nicholson shaped problems right now; how can she be expected to deal with this shit too?

I've never read the Stephen King book that the film is based on. I gather it strays quite far from the direction of the novel. But, one day on the internet, I stumbled across someone explaining the context of the bear in reference to the book.

I stopped reading the piece there and then. I didn't want to hear it. Just to know the fact that there was an explainable context to this scene subtly changed it for me. It lost a few degrees of its chill.

The reason why I find it powerful is the lack of context.

So, I'm rethinking the primer for By The Time I Get To Venus. I'll blog about it soon, but it might be as well for those who are intrigued to just to read the book cold. It will provide its own rewards, I promise.

You can never get back a lack of context.