Tag: science fiction

“Dust” Hugh Howey

Dust is the last book in Hugh Howey’s post-apocalypse trilogy. I read the first two last year (Wool and Shift) and had to wait till this year for the final book because the reservations list at the library was that long. Wool introduced us to a post-apocalyptic society living in an underground bunker after some unspecified disaster had made the Earth uninhabitable – and as the book went on it was clear that there was something rotten at the core of that society. Shift then took us back to the beginning to a near future world, and showed us how we get from there to the world of Wool. By the end of Shift we get to see the events of the end of Wool from a different perspective. So having got both narratives up to the same place we now move forward in Dust.

It’s really difficult to talk about this particular book without giving away the various reveals and I think that would spoil a lot of the pleasure of it. So much so, in fact, that I’m not sure how much re-read potential these have. In Dust Howey continues to reveal exactly what is rotten at the centre of this world, and manages to bring the story to a satisfying ending, with just enough hope for the future combined with doubt about the long term success (and loose ends).

The trilogy as a whole feels very well constructed. As I just said a lot of the pleasure in reading it comes from the unfolding story of what is really going on. There’s a constant stream of revelations, but each feels obvious in retrospect (this is a good thing) – you get there and it’s a sense of “oh of course that’s what those bits meant earlier”. I also liked the characters. The protagonists were interestingly flawed, and the mistakes and missteps they made felt like inevitable consequences of the sort of person they were & the situations they were in. The antagonist is actually mostly the world/society itself but we do get to see something of the man who conceived of it and set it up – and I did get the sense that if he was telling the story then he’d be the hero of it, if you see what I mean. He’d feel he’d made difficult choices and sacrifices for the greater good – it’s just that from our perspective both his intentions and his methods are very much not good.

Overall I’d say it’s a good trilogy, and I’d recommend it. But I don’t think I’ll be re-reading them because most of the draw for me was finding out what was going on.

“The Dervish House” Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald’s book “The Dervish House” is set in Istanbul, in the middle of the 21st Century. It opens with suicide bombing of a tram, that doesn’t kill anyone but the bomber herself. One of the witnesses, Necdet, lives at an old dervish house and starts seeing djinn in the aftermath. Another resident of that house (Can, a young boy with a weak heart who wears earplugs to prevent being startled by loud noises) is also a witness, via his toy robot. The other point of view characters (another 4 of them) are also residents or connected with the dervish house. There is Leyla, a young woman from outside Istanbul but part of a large extended family in the city just starting out in marketing. Georgios is an old man, one of the few Greek Christians left in the city, who was once both an economist and a political activist. AyÅŸe owns a high class antiques & art gallery in the dervish house, and her husband Adnan is a trader (in the stocks & shares sense) with a foolproof scheme/scam to get rich.

The plot follows the six characters over the five days starting with the suicide bombing on a Monday. At first each story seems separate, even AyÅŸe and Adnan are only linked by their relationship not by what’s going on in their story. Necdet sees djinn and tries to find out why. Can sets out to be a Boy Detective and find out about the suicide bombing. Leyla starts work trying to secure funding and promote a startup nanotech business belonging to one of her cousins. Georgios hears his girlfriend from his student days is back in town, and is also invited to a government thinktank to “think outside the box” about threats to the city. AyÅŸe accepts a commission to hunt for a legendary Mellified Man despite some misgivings. And Adnan has a scheme to sell cheap (and illegal) oil from Iran to make a huge profit. In the end, all these disparate stories come together – some links are visible early on, but others stay separate till nearly the end.

For all that the plot is mostly about the aftermath of a bombing, and about potential terrorist activity, I didn’t really find it terribly urgent. I wasn’t particularly worried that anyone would die even when they were in danger. Instead the charm of the book was in its snapshot of the life of a city. The characters cover a range of sorts of people – those with money, those without, men, women, single, married, young, old, Christian, Muslim, secular. They all felt distinct, and like their stories and actions grew out of who they were. For all I’ve just said there was no urgency to the plot, I still wanted to know what these people would do and how their stories linked up. Just it’s not driven by the action.

I’ve never been to Istanbul, and I don’t claim any particular knowledge of Turkey, so I can’t say if McDonald gets it right enough for someone who does. However it feels like a plausible near future Turkey to me. There are differences most notably that there’s new tech, like ubiquituous nanotech to do things like help people concentrate or other mental alterations. But these haven’t changed the world into something unrecognisable, in the same way that ubiquituous mobile phones have changed our world but the world is still full of people being people. I guess it’s an anti-singularity novel – McDonald doesn’t seem to think that technological change will at some point accelerate to the point where there’s a discontinuity and afterward the world will be unrecognisable and “post-human”. Instead technology will change, the details of our lives will change, but the old men will sit in cafes in Istanbul gossiping about their neighbours etc.

I enjoyed this book. It’s not necessarily one I’d rush out to recommend to everyone nor is it a particular favourite, but I’m glad I read it.

Monday Link Salad

This week I start my next Future Learn course – Shakespeare and His World.

I’m starting to quite look forward to Evolve (the new game from the guys who did the original L4D) … hopefully it doesn’t disappoint when it finally gets here 🙂

The Writ of Years is a delightfully creepy fairytale-esque short story.

I’m catching up (slowly, slowly) with reading at tor.com – Jo Walton’s post on if there’s a right age to read particular books caught my eye. I’m in agreement with Walton, I think. Even though I re-read less these days than I did as a kid, it’s odd to think that reading a book “too early” would do anything but mean you missed a bunch of stuff that you’d notice on a future read through (or fail to comprehend it entirely but understand it later).

More book stuff: I’ve set myself up an account on WWEnd which curates a list of authors & books who’ve won SFF awards or been on “must read” type lists. You can set what you’ve read and it gives you stats (like I’ve read 47% of all Hugo award winning books), they also encourage people to rate & review books. I’m about halfway through their list of authors marking what I’ve read that I remember (although only rating stuff I’ve read recently). (I was going to link to my account, but I can’t seem to find a way to directly link to it, oh well.)

Mass groups of whale fossils found in Chile – probably the result of at least four different mass strandings caused by a group of whales eating toxic algae then their dead bodies being washed up on shore.

10 Facts about Ichneumonidae describes these parasitic wasps near the start of the article as “think chestburster from Alien, but for insects.”.

Less creepily here’s 37 photos from history ranging from the moving to the “wtf?” (particularly the baby cage for ensuring your infant offspring get sufficient sunlight and fresh air if you live in an apartment block). Thanks to J for that link 🙂

I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s pretty striking – due to different streetlight lightbulbs you can still see the East/West divide in Berlin.

The only new TV programme I’m setting to record this week is When Albums Ruled the World next Monday – but the BBC’s schedule page was a little broken this morning and I’ve not been able to look at what’s showing on Saturday & Sunday.

Monday Link Salad

Mary Beard recently gave a lecture on the long cultural history of silencing women’s voices, the text is online. Which juxtaposed well (in the sense that it’s similar cultural roots) with the programme we just watched on how Greek attitudes to luxury still affect our own. And juxtaposed in a timely fashion with the bigotry in SFWA thing that’s been rumbling on for the last year – the latest iteration of which blew up just recently and includes someone critiquing a woman’s appearance as a part of a rationale for dismissing her. Having read the lecture just before I read about the SFWA thing it was interesting to see how many times I saw it linked in comments.

Ben Goldacre on the NHS data sharing plan – he says with well thought out arguments and evidence things that match my gut feel on it. Having the data available to medicine would be extremely useful and is a Good Thing, it’s a shame they’re botching the explanation and the regulatory side of it :/

Reshaping Reality has a post up on how science works, the fundamental uncertainties at the roots of physics & thus the whole of science and why scientific literacy matters which includes a list of blogs and books about science.

James Nicoll’s micro reviews of the Science Fiction Book Club books of July 2000 – the one that caught my eye was SUBURBAN GODS (2-in-1 of HOW LIKE A GOD and DOORS OF DEATH AND LIFE) by Brenda W. Clough, that he recommends and I’ve never heard of.

Also from James Nicoll some potential reading list generators – list of women authors who debuted in the 1970s, and 1980s with recommendations from people about books of theirs to read. Mine are in comments on those posts. Lots of them I’ve not read anything by, gonna give the lists a little time to multiply then construct myself a list of books to look for.

Ever wondered what the cryptic spray paint marks are on UK pavements?

In the “OMG I’m old, how’d that happen?” department is this: Descent is 19 years old!! Not a game I ever really got the hang of, I remember J liking it a lot tho. While we were at uni. Which is clearly only yesterday.

Also off RPS (I’m a bit behind on reading it) is confirmation that Steam Tags really are as bad an idea as I thought they would be. They do seem to’ve added functionality so you can report tags but what rock have they been hiding under for the last decade or two to not realise that unmoderated open to all tagging on the internet was going to generate problems?

Chroma looks interesting, but a bit of an odd idea … could be good, could be terrible, have to wait & see. And Doom 4 looks like it’s going to be a thing … can’t work out if that’s exciting or not, I got more into Quake (3 and 4) than any of the Dooms.

Trying to read old Scottish documents? This might help – via my father, who managed to decipher the 17th Century marriage record that I completely failed to read 🙂

Cats taking selfies … because the internet is for cat pictures.

“The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” by Claire North is a book I’d like to read – similar underlying premise as Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” (post) but goes in a different direction. Link via Lady Business.

Apps installed recently include Crowdsourced Weather which uses the sensors on your phone to detect local weather data. Doesn’t seem to have many people using it yet according to the map, but I now have on my phone something that tells me the barometric pressure, the magnetic field of the earth where I am, the temperature (using an algorithm to figure it out from battery temp, a little flaky) and how light it is. This may not be particularly useful but it makes me happy 🙂

Also using Muzei, which gives you a new backdrop every day or so, each one is a famous work of art. A little bit of art appreciation on my phone 🙂 There’s plenty of plugins for things like NASA’s APOD too.

And finally got round to installing Untappd, which lets you track which different beers you’ve tried. It also lets you spam facebook/twitter/foursquare with what you drink, but I’m not doing that 😉

The TV programmes I told the PVR to record this week are rather WW1 heavy:

“Carnival” Elizabeth Bear

Carnival is a standalone science fiction novel by Elizabeth Bear, and the first of her books that I bought – also the only one I’ve ever seen in a bookshop over here. The several books I now have of hers seem to fall into groups which represent her take on a particular sub-genre – to me this one is Bear’s take on the eco/feminist science fiction story. By that I mean the sort of thing that Sherri S. Tepper writes. But as with the others of Bear’s books that I’ve read this takes the familiar tropes of that sub-genre and does something different with them.

Carnival is set in a future where Old Earth is still the political leader of several colony planets. The population of Earth is much reduced – the majority have been Assessed by the Governors. This is explained later in the book, the Governors are AI constructed by a group who felt humans were damaging the Earth too much so the best thing to do is to kill off most of them, then enforce strict controls on population and other ecologically damaging practices. The Governors use the ubiquitous nanotechnology to kill those they Assess as needing to die – starting in the first instance with all the white people (which included the creators of the Governors, something they would definitely have approved of). It’s an End of the World as We Know It catastrophe caused on purpose by a small group of extremists. After the first wave of Assessments several off-world colonies are founded, then the Governors bring the remaining population down to an “appropriate” number. Two of the protagonists are from Old Earth, on a diplomatic mission to one of the colonies.

Said colony is called New Amazonia – it’s the sort of society I have the impression Tepper would approve of. It’s completely run by women, who go armed and have a dueling culture. Men are studs, and second class citizens, unless they’re gay (“gentle”) in which case they might get a bit more education and rights but it’s not like they’re ever going to be on a par with a woman is it? New Amazonia has something Old Earth wants – a clean & limitless power source. Possessing that might make the Governors back off a bit on the population limits. And a third protagonist is the New Amazonian counterpart to the two Old Earth diplomats.

And there’s a third culture involved here too – this one totally alien. Kii’s species once lived on what is now New Amazonia, and there are several interludes from Kii’s point of view. At first Kii feels almost superfluous, but as the book goes on you find out why this is an essential thread of the narrative. And Kii too is a diplomat of sorts – Kii is explorer-caste “And things that are new are things that Kii’s caste is for”, who else would be observing the humans and maybe interacting with them?

One of the things I like about this book is that everyone (including the secondary characters) is the protagonist of their own story. The ones we follow are Michaelangelo & Vincent from Old Earth, Lesa from New Amazonia and Kii, but everyone has their own agenda and no-one is as simple as the mask they present to the world. And everyone is masking something. The conflict in the story comes from the clash between everyone’s goals, rather than a Good v. Bad struggle, even if some of the goals are more sympathetic to me than others. And people that we thought were on different sides aren’t, and people who seem on the same side might not be. Allegiances shift (or are revealed) several times during the story but it always feels like it grows out of who the characters are and what they want.

Something Bear does very deftly is keep each culture feeling both alien to us and yet still sympathetic. I think part of how she does this is to have the things that our current point of view character Others be things that are part of our culture, and the things that they just accept as the obvious axioms of existence be things that we look at in bemusement. So for instance, there’s a bit where one of the Old Earth men is observing in horror that Lesa has a pet, how could she? An example from the flip side of it is Lesa having a contemplative moment about how it’s not like you could expect a hormonal man to really cope with the pressure of government/civilisation, they’re just not biologically set up for it. And very much all the cultures on show have their own flaws. Vincent’s is from yet another culture, and it’s presented as having been almost an idyllic childhood, but I’m not really sure I believe that (and I don’t think Bear meant one to take it at face value).

There’s a lot of other stuff I could talk about too. Communication is definitely a key theme – all three of the human protagonists are very good with the unspoken sides of communication, Kii is in a First Contact situation (kinda). Which links in with the cultures stuff I just talked about – your basic axioms of society affect how you deal with people and the assumptions you make, and how you communicate. Sacrifice is another theme (often is in Bear’s stories, to get what you want you have to pay a high price and you have to decide if that price is worth it). This story also has something going on about choosing prices for other people – the very existence of Governors is a prime example of this. A few people chose that price on behalf of the whole world, and this was not a good and noble thing despite what they might’ve thought when they did it. And this ties in unsettlingly into the interactions with Kii towards the end of the book, ends and means again and I’m not quite comfortable with the choices made on behalf of Kii even if maybe there wasn’t anything else they could do, and maybe Kii was OK with it afterwards.

Pleasingly after the Banks I’ve been reading there’s a hopeful ending. It feels like maybe, just maybe, things will get better. The net change over the course of the story feels like a positive one.

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“A Canticle for Leibowitz” Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Why hadn’t I got round to reading A Canticle for Leibowitz before? Not only is it one of the classics of the genre, it’s also right up my street – a post-apocalyptic novel written in the late 1950s about the recovery of society after a nuclear holocaust. And I’ve no idea why I’ve only just got round to reading it, should’ve done so long ago.

The narrative is centred on a Catholic monastery in the southwest of the USA (although by the time the story opens this is an anachronistic description of its location). It’s told in three sections (originally published separately then put together and modified into this novel). The first one is set about 600 years after the Flame Deluge, the nuclear holocaust which happened in the 20th Century. A backlash against technology and learning in the aftermath of the Deluge had left monasteries once again the storehouses of knowledge in a Dark Age. The story here centres round a novice who discovers relics of the blessed Isaac Leibowitz, beatified for his role in saving the knowledge of the world after the Deluge. His canonisation is being considered by the Church and there’s a tension between joy at the discovery of the relics and fear that this might jeopardise the canonisation if the Pope in New Rome thinks they’re faked. The protagonist for this part (the novice) is a sort of Holy Fool character – he believes, and he copies the knowledge of the ancients, and even understands some tiny part of it, but it’s all in a mystical way and he’d no more fake relics than fly in the air. Other monks are much more cynical, as you’d expect. And no-one really understands the knowledge they’re keeping, they are keeping it because that is their sacred trust.

The second part is around 500 years after that. New states are growing, and in conflict with each other – and the Church is no longer the only place for people who want to learn about the knowledge of the ancients. The story centres round a man who’s trying to rediscover the lost knowledge (in particular physics & electricity), and his visit to the monastery where he reads the books, debates philosophy with the monks. And meets a monk who has a knack for engineering and built a generator to power a lightbulb – the first since the Deluge. If the first part is the Dark Ages, this is the Renaissance or the early Englightenment – reading the old works and doing experiments and new work. Understanding not just preserving.

The last part is another 600 years later – the world has changed again, they have had space travel for over a hundred years and the spectre of nuclear weapons and nuclear war is rising. The world is organised into two superpowers, bristling at each other, and there have been “weapon tests” or maybe they’ve been fired in anger. Both sides have propaganda about how they didn’t do anything wrong, but the other side did and so retaliation etc etc. The story is partly about the Abbot sending out a group (with all the knowledge of the world) on a starship to join one of the colonies – to keep the Church and knowledge alive in the worst case scenario. And quite a lot of it is taken up with the Abbot’s fight against the secular authority’s regulations about permitting euthanasia for those who’ve been exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. Suicide is a sin, you see, so the Abbot is against ending one’s suffering early because he believes that will consign the soul to eternal damnation. The book ends with a hint that the escaping monks made it off planet in time, and a hint that much of life on Earth has been killed in the conflagration. Just enough of a glimmer of hope to stop it being completely bleak, but that’s all.

The book isn’t just a “what might happen next” it’s also about knowledge and history. About how what we know now affects how we interpret the past, and about how chance and politics and circumstance affect what we have of the past to even interpret in the first place. How the events of one era can become the history of the next and the fables of the one after. And about faith (in this case in the particular form of the Catholic Church) and science – neither of which is shown as the One True Way and neither of which is without flaw. It’s also about cycles – and I guess about the question of is some knowledge just too dangerous for humankind. Miller is asking are we doomed to nuke ourselves back to barbarism or worse every couple of thousand years. That specific worry has retreated somewhat, but the more general form of it is still a disturbing one to contemplate. Are we just too curious and too prone to meddling for our own good?

One other thing I wanted to talk about was how much I appreciated the way Miller’s three parts show not only great changes over this large sweep of time (a thousand years between parts 1 & 3), but also continuity. And while the three eras were clearly analagous to periods in our own past & present, it wasn’t a case of recapitulating history exactly the same all over again. Basically the history felt real and solid, and plausible.

There was also a mystical thread running through the story – someone who is strongly implied to be the Wandering Jew of our own legend shows up in all three parts, and is even involved in nudging events at times. Knowingly? Is it really the same man? There are even hints this might be Leibowitz tho he himself denies it. I have a thought I’m struggling to articulate about how including this is intended to remind the reader that we aren’t all knowing gods – some things are still beyond our ken and who are we to say “impossible”.

I sort of think I might like to read a commentary on the book, if such a thing exists – I’m sure I’ve missed allusions to things both inside and outside the book.

“Against a Dark Background” Iain M. Banks

The last of the Iain M. Banks books we own is the non-Culture book Against a Dark Background. This story is set in some indeterminate future (or secondary world) and follows Sharrow as she tries to find the artifact that will buy off the people who’re hunting her – without losing too much in the process.

Sharrow is a member of the aristocracy, one of the party people with access to the wealth and lifestyle that implies. Expelled from several finishing schools she describes herself as a difficult child who became an easy adolescent.

Sharrow is a veteran, she fought, nearly died and lost her unborn child in a recent war. She and her squad mates were synchroneurobonded, able to anticipate each other’s reactions in combat. In some ways as close as family, in other ways, well, in other ways as close as family that knows how to twist the knife.

Sharrow is an Antiquities hunter, she hunts treasure for pay. A swashbuckling maniser*, with a smart ass reply for every situation (no matter how unwise it might be) and a plan for every heist.

*c.f. “womaniser”, she and her female team-mate Zefla play the James Bond role in love ’em & leave ’em relationships.

Sharrow is the product of her life so far – obvious perhaps, but not always true for fictional characters 😉 Through the book there are flashbacks to formative events in her life, the book even starts with the scene of her mother’s assassination in front of her when she was only 5.

Sharrow is the umpteenth (and last) descendent in the female line from a woman who stole (or not) an artifact from a religious cult (or was abducted by them, or was abducted from them, it’s legend and origin story and the details fade into obscurity). Now the Huhsz must kill her before the new millenium so that their promised Messiah can be born. Or she can return the Lazy Gun her ancestor took (or didn’t) from them in the first place. Which is where the story starts – with her cousin Geis bringing the news that the Huhsz have their licences to legally hunt her.

On one level this is a book of adventure – I compared Sharrow above to James Bond, but she’s a James Bond that works with a team, who she brings back together for this one last hunt. They plot daring escapades, there are thrilling escapes and rescues, there are monomaniacally cackling villains to outwit and foil. But underneath that all there is a darker undercurrent. Sharrow’s life so far hasn’t been easy, her family is pretty dysfunctional and finding your chosen family in a military unit has its own stresses and fracture points. She’s done bad shit in the past, often with good intentions or at least not intentionally bad ones. But intent isn’t magic and she has to live with the real consequences. I didn’t think the ending was as bleak as the end of Consider Phlebas, but it’s still pretty bleak. I certainly wasn’t expecting the highlighted similarities between Sharrow & the Lazy Gun, nor was I expecting who the primary antagonist would turn out to be.

I enjoyed this one more than Consider Phlebas, so that’s a good note to finish re-reading Banks on. Next author on the shelf is Elizabeth Bear, which I’m looking forward to. I’ve got 9 of her books (and there are many more to buy), but she’s a relatively recent discovery for me so I’ve not re-read those before and they struck me on first reading as books that would have more to notice on a second read.

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“Consider Phlebas” Iain M. Banks

I’ve been dragging my heels about writing up this book ever since I finished reading it nearly a month ago, because I’ve got no idea what to say about it. Consider Phlebas is the story of a Changer called Horza. Changers can alter their physiology to make themselves into a mimic of a person, and so make good spies or military agents. Horza is a minor figure in a vast war between the Indirans and the Culture. The war is about expansion and politics and beliefs, of course, but Horza’s part in it is down to a simple principle. The Indirans are all biological, but the Culture have machine AIs who are not just citizens of the Culture but heavily involved in running the Culture. And Horza feels that is wrong, on a deep fundamental level. He (and in fact his entire world/people) are on the Indiran side, despite the fact that the immortal Indirans regard mortals as not really people. At least they’re all biological, right?

Horza is rescued from near death after a mission goes wrong, and sent to capture a Mind (a Culture AI) which has gone to ground on a Planet of the Dead. A Planet of the Dead is sort of a museum exhibit – a particular civilisation preserve worlds where the sentient species self-destructed, and embargo them. Except that a few guardians are permitted, and for this particular Planet of the Dead those guardians are Changers, and Horza was once amongst their number. So he’s a good choice, but obviously things don’t go smoothly (there’d be no story otherwise). Horza ends up “rescued” by a mercenary ship after a space battle destroys the Indiran ship he was on, and must first ingratiate himself and then wait for his chance to fulfill his mission. As a supporting cast we have the various other mercenaries, and for a primary face of his antagonist we have the Special Circumstances agent Balveda who is trying to get to the Mind first (to rescue it).

And I got to the end of the book and just ended up feeling deflated. In retrospect I suppose it should’ve been obvious it was going to be a tragedy, but I wasn’t expecting it to end with it all feeling quite so pointless. Horza’s mission is important to him, but it’s not really important to the war, or to the Indirans. He just ends up a pawn ground to dust between vast forces he has no chance of affecting. He has chances to turn aside, to make a life for himself somewhere else away from the war – but he sticks to his principles, he does the right thing as he sees it. And the universe doesn’t care, the Indirans don’t care, mostly no-one even knows he existed. And his principles are misguided at best – the Indirans don’t care at all about him or anyone who isn’t an Indiran, Horza’s elevation of biologicalness as the most important thing is just convenient for the Indirans to make him more useful.

I prefer more optimism in my fiction, I think. Or maybe just less nihilism.

A note of comparison to the other books by Banks that I’ve read – identity is again a strong theme. Horza can change his entire appearance & mannerisms to mimic others, I don’t think we once see him in his natural form in the book. People are always interacting with who he’s presenting as, rather than who he is – and he definitely has issues with his identity, including recurring nightmares about forgetting his own name. I’m not sure if I missed something there – was Horza not his real name and I missed clues about that?

Another note is that I thought the Culture was “in our future” but this book makes it clear that’s not Banks’s intention – there are framing vignettes for the story that give Earth dates for the war, and it’s happening elsewhere in the universe during the past 600 years, or so.

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Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor

Whee! 50th anniversary special Doctor Who, and I think they managed to pull off a suitably epic story. Lots of back references to Old Who, and a mainline plot about one of the big things from New Who. As I generally do with Doctor Who episodes this rest of this post is a not-quite-cohesive collection of things I liked 🙂

(Terminology note: I’m keeping the Doctor numbers the same, and calling Hurt’s Doctor “the War Doctor” instead of 8.5.)

SPOILERS AHEAD! Hover mouse over text to read, or read on entry page:

I liked that the Time War was the focus of the main plot line – it’s been one of the defining characteristics of the Doctor in New Who, he is the man who killed his own people because it was the lesser of two evils. Even 11 isn’t over it, he hasn’t forgotten how many children died on Gallifrey because it “slipped his mind” he’s deliberately chosen not to dwell on it – but that choice still defines him, he’s the Doctor who has decided it’s time to move on from what he did. That’s what the War Doctor and 10 can’t imagine, they’re too close to it. But 11 has had another 400 years on from 10 and he has started to come out of the other side of that grief. Although he’s not all the way there, even if 10 & the War Doctor think he is.

Given it’s such a big difference between the classic episodes & the new ones I think it needed to be in the anniversary story. And it’s also nice to have it tied up, and the Doctor (and the plot lines) can truly move on now. By making this the focus of the special I also think it compartmentalises it in a way – this is not “New Who Is Not Old Who” this is an episode in the whole story of the Doctor’s life. Yes, it’s a third of his life so far, and it’s going to forever colour his life going forward. But it’s just a part of the whole sweep of continuity. (I’m not sure I’ve managed to get that thought out of my head intact, hopefully you can follow what I mean!)

I liked that the Doctor figures out a way to avoid actually having to burn Gallifrey. I didn’t like the actual plan he came up with coz I don’t think it makes sense but I’m willing to not think about it in detail because I like the higher level story. The 4th Doctor couldn’t bring himself to wipe out the Daleks before they began, the War Doctor feels forced into the genocide of both the Daleks and the Gallifreyans, and the 11th Doctor finds a way to be true to his self and avoid it. Just a shame the “and the Daleks will shoot all of each other” bit doesn’t really hold water :/ The time locking the planet thing also fixes that bit at the end of 10’s run where the Gallifreyans break out. Which 11 remembers, incidentally, but 10 hasn’t got there yet.

For all my quibbles I liked the way everything for the climax was set up earlier on. Same software different casing – and we get the immediate pay off with the screwdrivers & the door, but then the real pay off is in the climax. Paintings that are slices of time locked away – and we get the immediate pay off in the Zygon subplot (twice), but again the real pay off is in the climax. I liked the running themes as well, of memory loss (again pays off finally because the War Doctor has to forget he didn’t kill them all), of “which one is the real one” (and in particular the running gag where 10 keeps telling the real Elizabeth she isn’t).

I loved The Moment, both the concept & the execution! The idea of a weapon so complex it became sentient and developed a conscience is really neat. And so of course it was left over at the end of the war – the Time Lords in general were afraid of being judged and found wanting, behind their rhetoric about the war being necessary. But the Doctor will use it because he already judges himself more harshly than even The Moment will. And continues to judge himself for the next 400 years – the last scene of the previous episode where 11 turns away from the War Doctor saying that he didn’t do it “in my name” shows that. So it makes sense to me that there is this spare weapon of mass destruction, and that the Doctor would be the first to use it.

The interface picked from “your past, or is it your future” made sense too – we’ve seen the TARDIS do that to interact with people before, so it’s a Gallifreyan-tech thing. And nice call back to the TARDIS being confused about past/future/causality when she was put in a human body. I thought Billie Piper did a fantastic job of playing the avatar as alien. And in an out-universe sort of way I liked that they had her back to represent the 9 era, given Eccleston didn’t return.

I also liked the way that this weapon with a conscience engineered the situation so that she would not be used. She nudges the War Doctor into seeing his future if he survives this (as punishment – which I also liked, she chose that as the punishment to fit the crime). And she chooses which future selves he meets and when – setting them up to solve the problem, and nudging things along the way to make sure they do figure out a solution.

There was loads of other stuff I liked too, but I think I’ve wittered on for long enough here 🙂 Looking forward to the next one now!

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“Crewel” Gennifer Albin

I reserved Crewel at the library after reading an excerpt from the sequel on tor.com because I was interested in the premise. Don’t read the excerpt if you don’t want to be spoiled for some of the revelations in Crewel btw, and there are some spoilers for plot points later in this post as well.

In Crewel our protagonist is 16 year old Adelice who has just gone through the testing to see if she can become a Spinister – someone who can spin the very stuff of the world. She’s passed – accidentally, her parents had been coaching her how to fail. Tonight they are coming to take her away if she can’t escape. The world is a heavy-handed dystopia, young adult style. Boys and girls are segregated till after they’re 16, then must marry by 18. Women have limited job opportunities with only very 1950s-approved professions available to them (secretary, for instance). Everyone must keep themselves groomed to the appropriate standard – which for women means heavily made up using appropriate cosmetics. The Guild, who control the Spinsters, turn up with overwhelming force and drag Adelice off to her fate … Spinsters are kept in luxury, with their own stylists & so on to keep the girls happy coz we all know that’s all girls care about. But not Adelice, she’s made of sterner stuff and the primary driving force of the plot is for her & us to find out why they haven’t just killed her like they would a normal Spinster candidate who was causing so much hassle.

As you might tell from the tone of that paragraph I didn’t much enjoy the book. I could say “oh it’s YA, that’s why” but I don’t think that actually does excuse the lack of subtlety. There’s quite a lot of anvilicious foreshadowing, and when Adelice does something that shows she’s special we get it referenced several times over a few pages to make sure no-one reading can miss that this is Special. It probably does explain the love triangle which had me rolling my eyes, but that appears to be de rigueur if you have a female protagonist in a YA book. And I’d probably have liked it more when 16 or younger myself, but nowadays I feel it’s rather overdone as a trope.

I found the secondary characters rather shallow. The love interests appear to appeal to Adelice because they’re the first boys of approximately her own age she’s ever met. The antagonists are cartoonish – the leader of the Guild isn’t just interested in Adelice because of what makes her special but SPOILER he’s also interested in her (genuinely? as a means of control? I’m not sure). So there’s a forced-marriage sub-plot that appears out of almost nowhere at the end of the book, with bonus threat of brainwashing if she doesn’t agree. END SPOILER. The other antagonist is a more senior Spinster who takes a hatred to Adelice because Adelice is special and also her pretty boy fancies Adelice, and she’s sufficiently psychotic that she “cleans” (i.e. kills, via the world weaving stuff) a whole handful of people out of petty spite at Adelice not walking into a trap she set (which would’ve ended up with said people dead by Adelice’s hand instead). She doesn’t quite cackle and rub her hands together while talking about her evil plan … but she might as well.

I finished it mostly because it was a quick enough read & I did still like the premise of where this world of Spinsters who could mould reality came from. But I’ve no desire to read further.