Tag: science fiction

“The Alternate Asimovs” Isaac Asimov

I was a bit surprised when I saw this book was still on the shelf – I know I’ve boxed up some Asimov before (my librarything account lists a couple that aren’t on the shelf) and I’m a little surprised that this one made the cut. It’s a collection of three previously unpublished stories, one of which became “Pebble in the Sky”, one of which became “The End of Eternity” and one of which was published with an alternate ending. And the stories have forewords & afterwords explaining their history & how Asimov felt about them now (ie 1987 when this was published).

It’s an interesting idea for an anthology because it shows how the stories evolved, and I think this was probably my first proper introduction to the fact that books aren’t written by someone just sitting down and putting one word after another from beginning to end. That actually stories might be written in one form and then get re-drafted more than once before they get to the reader. But even though it’s interesting it’s still two stories that got rejected then turned into better novels, and one reasonable short story that got a happier ending for publication. Interesting rather than good.

I think I read this anthology before I bought or read “Pebble in the Sky”. So “Grow Old Along with Me” was my introduction to that story (and I still prefer the original title). The novel is next in my re-read so I’ll have to wait until then to discover if I like the story better in that version (pretty sure I do), but structurally speaking this one isn’t great. Asimov makes a big song & dance in a prologue, intermission and epilogue about how he’s telling the story from both ends at once … and it’s not as interesting or entertaining as he clearly thought it was at the time. The afterword says that’s what he thinks by 1987 as well. The thing that struck me most when reading this so soon after reading “Nemesis” was that there are no real women characters in this story – there’s a couple of wives & a daughter but they’re plot devices not people, they only exist to be love interest or to have one conversation that lets someone exposition at the reader then they vanish from the story again.

“The End of Eternity” is one of the Asimov books my mother owns, and as a result I both read it over & over & over when I was in my early teens … and I don’t have a copy of my own. So now the version of the story in this anthology is the only version I have, and that’s probably why the book was still on the shelf. It’s not as good, though. The basic premise is that there is a secret collection of people living outside time in Eternity, and they can move between Reality & Eternity as well as move uptime and downtime in Eternity. They police Reality, making tiny changes which ripple through time to effect big changes later on and change Reality to make it “better” for people (better as defined by the people who live in Eternity, not necessarily anyone else). The plot has to do with the beginning of Eternity, and the novel version (as I remember it) is much more interestingly complex but this story has one of those neat “gotchas” of time travel tales so it’s still pretty good. My favourite of the three here.

“Belief” in its original version is a terribly depressing story of a man who discovers he can levitate but no-one will believe him. I like it in that form, and the happy ending that Campbell wanted instead strikes me as false feeling. But it’s hard to tell how I’d feel if I’d read the two versions the other way round.

Asimov’s bits & pieces in between the stories were informative, but as with his autobiographical stuff in the “Before the Golden Age” books (post) I’m less keen on the tone than I used to be. He comes across as a bit smugly self-satisfied and lacking in self-awareness. There’s a bit right at the end where Asimov says that he doesn’t get rejections or editorial insistence on change any more because he’s just that good & his editors all love him and would of course ask him to change things if it was necessary. This is more than a little undercut by the long section earlier devoted to talking about how he & one particular editor (Horace Gold) rarely saw eye to eye and throughout it Asimov comes across as someone who would be hell to work with. It contains sentences like this one talking about Gold requesting revisions:

“He was quite apologetic about it because by that time he knew very well that requests for revision would be met by me with the sternest possible resistance and that he might have to wait a long time before I was willing to try him again.”

Not quite the rosy picture Asimov paints in the afterword to this book then … There was also a somewhat unpleasant little story where Asimov is self-righteously saying how Gold had asked him to put a female character in a particular story. Asimov just can’t see why there’s any need for that (“since the plot didn’t demand a female”) but he doesn’t want to seem “totally unreasonable” so he writes in a shrewish wife to one of the main characters & Gold was “forced to run the story as revised”. This happened in the 1950s, but clearly in the late 80s he’s still trotting this out as an amusing little tale of how he put one over an editor. Seems a little odd that the man who wrote “Nemesis” (post) with all its female characters (who after all aren’t demanded by the plot to be female) around the same time as he wrote these autobiographical bits was still so smug about how he avoided having a woman protagonist back in the old days.

Overall, interesting but not good sums it up for me. I’ll hang on to it (in a box) because it’s interesting but I don’t think it needs to sit on the shelf.

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“Flash” L. E. Modesitt Jr.

There’s a particular flavour to an L. E. Modesitt Jr. book, although I’m not quite sure I can describe it. Some of it is that his protagonists tend to be of a type (even tho distinct characters in their own right). They tend to be humble and to not quite believe that they are anything out of the ordinary. They have a core of integrity, and often feel forced into action by circumstances because they can’t comprehend choosing not to do anything and letting things go to hell in a handbasket around them. Most of the books I’ve read by Modesitt have been his fantasy books, and there the protagonist often ends up running a country or becoming a leader of some other sort because he or she can’t stand by, although that wasn’t the case here.

“Flash” is set in a 24th Century Earth that was also the setting for his book “Archform: Beauty”, which I don’t think I’ve read*. I don’t think this is a direct sequel, certainly it appeared to me to be complete in itself. In this future there’s been some sort of “Collapse” (ecological, I think) between our time & theirs and the rebuilt world feels different but like it came out of our world. Some politics continues as we’d expect (some early parts of the book have to do with senatorial elections in NorAm, the replacement for the USA), but large corporations called Multis also run the world. Tech has moved on – not just ubiquitous computing that’s way beyond current stuff, but also more out-there things like cydroids (non-sentient clones, remote controlled by computer or by a person). But some things feel familiar, wines have the same sorts of names for instance.

*Between writing that paragraph and this review going live I looked in my librarything catalogue and discovered I own “Archform: Beauty”. Ahem. It’s not on the shelf, must’ve been boxed up during a previous cull of the shelves and I’ve pretty much no recollection of reading it.

One thing I thought Modesitt did particularly well with his extrapolation was names. You can figure out what places were before in most cases, but the words have shifted in believable ways. For instance Denver is now Denv, Texas is Tejas. Other words also give you just enough to figure out what they are in combination with their context. Like safo = safety officer = police. Another example is you have a gatekeeper on your computer system that’s partly a firewall and partly there to announce callers, both at the door and on the equivalent of a phone. So the world felt quite solid and plausible, without Modesitt going into much detail.

The protagonist, Jonat deVrai is a consultant who analyses the effects of this future’s equivalent of adverts on sales of products. He’s the best at his job & has a reputation for honesty, and so he gets hired to investigate if a senatorial candidate is illegally using these adverts in his campaign and to analyse if it’s had an effect on the voting results. It soon becomes clear that there’s more going on beneath the surface than deVrai first thought, and the stakes are much higher than he anticipated. Jonat deVrai is also an ex-Marine with PTSD (who publically resigned on a point of principle, another pointer to his integrity), and his military training & background are important in how he reacts to the things he uncovers.

I’m not sure I always followed the details of what was going on, there are a lot of oblique conversations where what isn’t said is as important as what is said (and how it is said). But I did figure out what was going on with Central Four long before deVrai did (and I’m being vague because it would be a shame to spoil it) – to be fair, that was a case where he was blinded by his societal preconceptions whereas as the reader I didn’t have those, but still pleasing 🙂

This was a book I enjoyed reading. I think Modesitt is one of those authors where if you like his stuff, you like his stuff and this book was no exception for me. But all his books do have a distinctive flavour, so if you’re not so fond of it then you’ll probably find it off-putting here as well.

Star Trek Into Darkness

We went to see Star Trek Into Darkness on Monday, in a surprisingly empty cinema – I know the weather was good for a change but I’d still have expected more people around on a bank holiday afternoon. But at least it being fairly empty meant we got sensible seats instead of under the speaker stack like we had for The Hobbit. Overall I enjoyed the film, it was a fun action film with a lot of neat set piece sequences. I’m not convinced it always made sense, though.

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

The bit we picked over most when we got out of the cinema was why Khan had gone to the Klingon homeworld anyway – in the end we decided he wasn’t expecting Kirk (plus bonus Admiral Marcus) to follow and his actual plan would’ve involved some other next step. I’m … not sure what his plan was though. Was he going to negotiate to get his crew back after killing a bunch of people as “proof of concept” for ability to commit terrorism? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to steal the torpedoes, put them on the super secret special ship that only needs one man to fly, then fly away somewhere? Given he seems to be free to do what he wants to do right up until the point where he blows shit up (and even after that even tho he’s made it harder for himself to go anywhere on Earth he’s still pretty free).

Speaking of not making sense … Kirk in the meeting is saying “why the archive? That’s not a good target, there must be a bigger plan.” And oh look, there’s Khan to shoot them all. Except it wasn’t an archive, it was a secret weapons base that Khan had reason to want to destroy so Kirk’s logic was based on a faulty premise … and why didn’t Khan wait to come and pick them off more sensibly for a super-soldier who’s better at everything. (Each ship has a crew of hundreds, could he not find a Harewood for each ship – off they all fly to find Khan and there are a series of earth-shattering kabooms. Plus an extra one for Admiral Marcus’s office building.)

Well, “because Plot” is the reason, and perhaps I should let them have their collection of implausibilities to string together the set pieces because I did like the set pieces.

I think my biggest overall issue with the reboot Star Trek universe is the age of the crew – there’s a genre of fanfic that’s “alternate universe where they’re all in high school” and that’s what this reboot feels like. It’s been a long time since I watched any of the original Star Trek series, but I remember Kirk & the rest of the main crew as more mature. That Kirk was captain because he’d started as a lower officer and been promoted. Ditto the rest of the crew. They’d earnt their positions on the ship. And here we have a bunch of mostly new graduates dumped on a ship all together with no experience and no senior officers. And their interpersonal relationships are all pretty high school too. Lots of bickering and gossip, and “I thought you were my friend” stuff.

Right, enough complaining, what did I like (other than explosions and spaceship chases etc, because that goes without saying 😉 ).

I’d seen some references to Uhura just being “the girlfriend” in this film, but I’d disagree. She gets to come to the rescue rather than play damsel in distress. Like when she’s trying to talk their way out of trouble on the Klingon homeworld – clearly terrified but once she gets out of the ship she’s got her game face on. She fails, but you’re left with the impression she fails because anyone would not because she messed it up. She’s also the one who plays a pivotal role in subduing Khan at the end.

I guess the overall theme was that violence isn’t the right answer, even when provoked. That’s the flaws that both the antagonists have – Khan reacts to being used by Starfleet by lashing out, Admiral Marcus sees the possibility of war with the Klingons and reacts by trying to start it early. And Kirk is a hero because he has that initial reaction and then calms down (and listens to Spock) and tries the non-violent alternative. Most obviously in his reaction to Pike’s death where he’s consumed with the need for vengeance, but then decides to try to take “Harrison” into custody instead. The Kirk & Spock juxtaposition was well used, too – Spock demonstrates that suppressing all emotional reaction just leaves you inhuman & inhumane. And when Kirk just reacts and lets his emotions run the show he gets into trouble. It’s the combination of both emotion & reason that wins.

Interesting that we are told Khan & his crew would kill anyone they deemed inferior & that’s why they’re dangerous, but we never actually see this. All the violence that Khan does in the film is provoked – not justified, see above, but Khan feels it’s a reaction to what’s been done to him. I guess it makes the mirroring of Kirk more obvious – this is what happens when you let your anger cloud your reason.

I read somewhere elseweb, I forget where, that “it wouldn’t be a J. J. Abrams film if it didn’t have Daddy issues”. I haven’t watched enough stuff by Abrams to know this from experience, but it certainly feels true for this one. Most obviously Kirk – not only is his real father dead but first he disappoints his surrogate father then his surrogate father dies in front of his eyes (pretty much). And then Admiral Marcus tries to step in as the next obvious father figure, only to betray Kirk. There’s also Carol Marcus – disowning her father for cover at first, then disowning him for real once she realises (well, has confirmed) that he’s given in to megalomania. And I guess you can fit Spock into that too – he’s trying to be Vulcan enough for the (paternal) Vulcan side of his heritage.

But most of what I enjoyed about the film was that it was fun and full of explosions & chase sequences Candy-floss for the brain, and there’s nothing wrong with that every now & then 🙂

“Nemesis” Isaac Asimov

Nemesis is a book by Asimov written late in his career, published only a few years before his death. I think I might’ve bought it new (the edition I have says published in 1990, originally published 1989), and I’m not sure if I ever read it more than once. Certainly I had only the haziest recollection of the plot when I started reading it this time round – “something about a star on the way to the solar system”, which is about as much as the blurb on the back says.

It opens with a slightly bizarre author’s note, bizarre because I don’t know why Asimov felt it necessary to explain the two points he makes. Firstly it’s not part of one of his other series, and is an independent story. Secondly it’s not entirely linear, with two narrative strands one in the “present” of the story and one starting the story-past and advancing to meet the first. And really, couldn’t he have trusted the reader to figure that out? Neither are exactly strange things for a book to do.

Our first protagonist, whose story takes place in the story-present is Marlene Fisher a 15 year old girl who is both extremely plain and extremely intelligent. She’s gifted with an ability to read body language that goes far beyond the human norm (and there are hints here of a “supermen among us” type plot, but much more subtly done than the 1948 stories I’ve just recently re-read (post)). And our second protagonist is her father, Crile Fisher who split up with her mother when Marlene was still an infant. He doesn’t share her plain looks or her body-language reading skills, but she’s very like his long dead sister.

The story is set in a future where Earth is ruled by a single government and is fairly over populated, and there are self-sufficient space station colonies called Settlements orbiting the Earth. For all that this is a standalone universe it reminds me of the later books in the Robots series – where Earth is a dirty crowded place with people of all sorts living cheek by jowl and having to make the most of it, but the colonies (planets in the Robots series) are cleaner and have more living space, and are more homogeneous. And are rather smug about their superiority to Earth people. In this book Asimov is pretty pessimistic about humanity’s ability to get beyond racism. On Earth it’s socially unacceptable, and officially frowned upon, but the text makes the point explicitly that even despite this the Settlements have tended to segregate themselves into sorts. Rotor (the Settlement that Marlene lives on) is all white, all Euro in the parlance of the book. Not by fiat or anything, just that if you manage to get permission to move to a Settlement and you’re not the same as the other people there then you are just made to feel unwelcome and eventually you move out to somewhere more “friendly”. I guess Asimov felt (or rather, wrote into this book) that even if you try and move beyond racism in a society once you get back to a situation where there can be small self-contained groups then people will inevitably tend towards xenophobia.

The plot starts with Rotor using new tech to travel at lightspeed to a nearby star. This star, Nemesis, is actually closer to Earth than Alpha Centauri – Marlene’s mother (an astronomer) discovers it, and its proximity wasn’t discovered before because it’s behind a dust cloud when viewing from Earth. Marlene’s story takes place 14 years later when they’ve been in Nemesis’s solar system for about 12 years. Marlene has become fascinated with Erythro, a planet-sized moon around a gas giant in the system. A moon that they are trying to colonise, but there have been some curious effects on people’s minds. Crile’s story starts from his leaving his wife & child & returning to Earth when Rotor leaves and moves forwards till it meets up with Marlene’s storyline at the end. He didn’t meet Marlene’s mother by chance, he’s actually a spy for the Earth government detailed to figure out what Rotor’s new tech is. He’s then assigned to a new project, persuading another Settlement physicist to come to Earth to help them develop better tech than Rotor has.

I enjoyed reading the book, but it felt just on the edge of being dated. It also felt curiously like a YA book, although I don’t think it was marketed as such. Perhaps that was just because Marlene is a teenager, but also her arc seemed to me to be a coming of age story. Her mother is over-protective & treats her like a child, and Marlene is flexing her wings and taking her first steps as an adult. Marlene is the key to the end of the story, and it’s not just because of what she is but also because of her actions, and because she takes responsibility and does things.

The antagonist is interesting in the light of Asimov’s other work. Janus Pitt, who is the leader of the community that lives in Rotor, is fixated on the idea of isolating them from other human societies and engineering some sort of better society. So he’s picked Nemesis for them to go to hoping that no-one else will realise and follow. His obsession isn’t presented sympathetically, and he’s clearly depicted as not really treating other people as people – they’re game pieces for him to manipulate or get rid of (mostly by exile) as he sees fit. Which I found an interesting contrast to the Foundation books where the engineering of the future of a society & of the future of humanity is something shown as a good thing (I’ve not read the Foundation series for years, I may regret saying this when I get there in my re-read!).

Having read so much 1930s & 1940s fiction over the last two or three months it really jumped out at me that the two foregrounded brilliant scientists are both women (which includes Marlene’s mother who is very much characterised as astronomer who happens to also be a mother, rather than the other way round). And the people who are good with people (including Crile) are men. But having said that, the people who are actually in charge are all men, on Earth, on Rotor & on Erythro. I think that’s actually part of what makes it feel a bit dated – I think a more modern story would’ve had a woman as one of the people in charge given the rest of the society. Personally I’d like to swap out the man in charge of the Terrestrial Board of Inquiry (which is effectively in charge of the Earth, in a power behind the throne style) for a woman, I think. One other nice touch was that Marlene is frustrated about people judging her on her looks (not that great) rather than her personality or intelligence – so far so stereotypical, but the person who sympathises the most is the administrator on Erythro because that’s how he felt treated as a teenager too.

While I was reading the book it seemed a bit slight, but thinking about it afterwards to write about it I think there’s more depth there than first meets the eye. I’m still going to put it away in a box rather than leave it on the shelf, tho. I’ve not read it in over 20 years, and I don’t think I’ll want to re-read it in the next 10 years.

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Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor

For all my doubts, this time I think Moffat did pull off a satisfying end to his season arc. Well, the hype about “this will change everything” was somewhat overblown (but see below), but even if we have to wait till November to find out what the very end of the episode is about, I think we still got a proper conclusion…

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

… to the mystery of Clara the Impossible Girl. And possibly a proper wrapping up of the River Song thing too, I could see a cameo or two after that, but not full episode appearances. (Added after talking about the episode with Tony: possibly one more story with River in it still to come – there’s that “spoilers” bit about not disappearing when Clara goes into the time scar, although that could still be related to the Doctor rescuing Clara.)

So “this will change the way you’ll see the Doctor” … and well, kinda? I mean, yeah this means there’s always a Clara off-screen “saving the Doctor”. Mostly from the Great Intelligence’s henchmen I imagine, but obviously not always (cf Asylum of the Daleks). And I guess she helps out the TARDIS in her stealing of her Doctor, too. But really? This doesn’t change much, it just gives them a canon deus ex machina to trot out in the future if they want to. I wonder if they did a bunch of green screen stuff with her for potential future use? After all, she says the Doctor doesn’t often hear her, so it doesn’t need to be interactive.

While I’m nitpicking about meta/hype did anyone else apart from me & J think it was a bit daft to have a whole “he’s me but he’s not the Doctor” thing and then have “John Hurt as The Doctor” come up on screen … The rumours I’ve seen are that Hurt fits between 8 & 9, which would make the stuff he did not in the name of the Doctor something to do with the Time War I guess. Which would make sense as a period of time where he might well do stuff that he wouldn’t want to contemplate or acknowledge later on (and Nine was pretty traumatised by the War and his part in it).

I liked the opening of the Doctor stealing the TARDIS, and Clara with all the other Doctors who couldn’t see her. And the fakeout where it looks like she’s telling One he’s making a mistake in stealing the TARDIS but then at the end we see she’s just making sure he steals the one who wants to steal him.

The conference call was neat – and I particularly like Madam Vastra’s practicality where she gives Clara the chance to light the candle but knows she probably won’t so impregnates the letter with the soporific too. The awkward with River meeting Clara was suitably awkward, and feeds into why I think the River Song story might be completely done with – the Doctor is doing his best to move on, not mentioning River enough to even point out she’s a woman, let alone that this is his dead wife. And on that subject – the Doctor really is rather selfish, isn’t he? He’d rather hurt River than acknowledge her and hurt himself. But in the end he does say goodbye, when circumstances force him to.

I liked that the reason the Doctor can’t go to his grave isn’t coz that’s when he’ll die (which seemed the obvious reason to avoid it to me), but that he will learn things about his future via this scar in time which is what his tomb actually contains. (And I shall just wave my hands about and accept the whole scar in time thing.) Obviously we don’t find out his name or why it’s a secret, and I hope we drop this again (after the 50th anniversary special, maybe?).

And the universe was in danger again – but this time it felt more small scale, if that’s possible. It’s like what the Doctor was saying to the little girl in Rings of Akhaten – she’s unique, there’s no-one else like her, and no-one can be who she is. And the same with the Doctor, he’s unique and despite his fears and his enemies rantings he’s done so much good in the universe that if he had never been then worlds would die.

The relatively personal disaster is also part of what made Clara’s arc feel satisfying, I think. She did what she did to save the Doctor, because he is her friend and she’s the sort of person who takes care of what needs to be done. And I liked the way her memories of the day that had never been (Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS) came back, and then once she knew she’d died to save the Doctor twice that he remembered she knew what she had to do. And did it even if she didn’t think she’d survive (dying to save the Doctor by dying to save the Doctor).

I was assuming that they got back out of the time scar at the end and so Clara will carry on being a companion, but I guess that’s not certain – we don’t see it happen, anyway. Roll on November to see what happens there … on which subject, interesting we got most of the Doctors appearing in this one. I’d’ve expected cameos in the actual special (and there’s no reason why there won’t still be some but I’d think it’s less likely now).

I’m sure I had more I was going to comment on, but this is probably long enough 🙂

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Doctor Who: Nightmare in Silver

So after the Crimson Horror we get a Nightmare in Silver … probably coincidence but the juxtaposition of titles amused me.

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

J was a bit annoyed at the continuity announcer on the BBC spoiling the big bad of the episode, but then it was the cliff-hanger-esque end of the bit before the titles. So not that big a spoiler. I was amused by that, because of course because the Doctor reacted appropriately this wasn’t actually going to be a real live Cyberman by the laws of story logic. And this was a Gaiman written episode so it was definitely going to be well crafted. I don’t think I liked it as much as I liked Gaiman’s last one – the one last season with the TARDIS personified – but it was still a good episode.

Loved Angie. Such a teenage girl, so keen to pretend to be cooler & more sophisticated & more grownup than to actually enjoy any of this. Even though she clearly does enjoy things. And she’s also the only one (alive at the end) to figure out the Emperor before he reveals himself. So she’s actually paying attention under that veneer of cooler-than-thou. And that’s set up well too, although I didn’t notice that clue till she pointed it out at the end. I did call it that Porridge was the Emperor tho, based on the conversation with Captain Alice Ferrin – he had to be Emperor or Crown Prince or something of that ilk.

Liked the parallels with the Doctor & the Emperor, and call backs to what we know of the Doctor’s role in the Time War. Feeling like a monster for doing what needed to be done (because it was horrific), knowing what it was like to push the button & take the responsibility (and doing it again too), lonely on your own at the top. I wonder if the “you can’t run away forever” bit is significant for the finale? After all the Doctor is still busy writing himself out of the universe’s records (as this episode also reminded us).

I didn’t spot any Sixth Doctor references, did anyone else? Even tho I’m pretty sure I watched all of the episodes with Colin Baker as they came out I’m not sure how much I remember. Doctor fighting against a twisted version of himself referencing the Trial of a Timelord, maybe? I actually thought we’d got a Seventh Doctor era visual call back or two in this episode – Clara with the gun v. Cybermen/Ace with guns v. Daleks, Clara with the spiky mace/Ace with the baseball bat. But this might be coloured by the fact that I stood in Waterstones earlier this week & read The Remembrance of the Daleks, which is a Seventh Doctor/Ace story with the baseball bat & a rocket launcher. And Ace is still the best … what can I say, I was exactly the right age at the time and she blew shit up so she has to be the coolest 😉

References to loads of other things tho – Charlie & the Chocolate Factory for the whole set up, something Alice in Wonderland/White Rabbit-like about the dude who leads them off to be entertained, the Mechanical Turk, also the Borg & being assimilated.

Liked Clara being left in charge and rising to the occasion. She really was in charge, and doing as well as she could as were the other guys in the punishment platoon. Even the Captain was trying to do the right thing, even if it would’ve killed everyone including our heroes it was actually the right choice – how could she rely on the Doctor to pull off the impossible? Of course, because he’s the centre of the story we know he’ll save the day, but the Captain doesn’t.

I liked the Doctor & the Cyberplanner fighting against each other inside the Doctor’s head, although I think it went on a bit long at times. I did like the “only way to win is not to play the game” solution that the Doctor built out of the Cyberplanner’s sense of superiority & lack of flexibility. I also liked the way Clara can tell which one it is, that was amusingly done.

Nice touch at the end where we see that Clara is really carrying on her normal life, just going out on datesadventures with the Doctor every Wednesday night. I guess the TARDIS is co-operating with returning her properly to the right place & time each week. And maybe the adventures aren’t necessarily in the same order for the Doctor as for Clara.

And looks like we get are getting a proper finale not waiting till the special later this year. Wonder what will happen there 🙂 (Don’t spoil in comments anywhere please, J is extremely spoilerphobic & hasn’t even watched the trailer.)

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“Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories #10 (1948)” ed Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg

It turns out that this is where I picked up my ideas of what John Campbell looked for in a story when he was an editor. Asimov’s introductions to a few of these stories refer to Campbell’s liking for stories about supermen among us (preferably our descendants) and about plucky Earthmen outwitting the aliens. I think I liked those plots a bit more when I was a teenager, and certainly the dodgy biology irritates me more now. I can’t help but feel there’s a strong element of wish-fulfilment in the supermen ones too – you know, the “I’m so misunderstood, but one day I’ll find my own kind and we’ll rule the world” thing. And I’m afraid that makes me roll my eyes a bit now (tho I suspect that’s exactly what I was enjoying about them as a teenager … 🙂 ).

Interesting contrast between this anthology and the one for the previous year (post) in that the last one had a few stories that were very “we’re doomed and will die horribly” but this is more about superman mutants or unexpected weird effects of nuclear weapons. Perhaps not significant at all, perhaps an artifact of the editors’ choices? But still interesting. And I think this anthology has more paranoid stories than the last.

“Don’t Look Now” Henry Kuttner

Paranoid story about someone who can see the aliens among us. Not sure if I spotted the twist early on because I’ve read this before & remembered it or because it was obvious. It only occurs to me on this reading to wonder if all these paranoid stories about Martians are to do with the ramping up of the Cold War and the whole rooting out of the communists amongst us rhetoric? Or maybe this is too early.

“He Walked Around the Horses” H. Beam Piper

Alternate history, based on an actual disappearance – in 1809 Benjamin Bathurst walked around his horses in an inn courtyard in Prussia and vanished. This is the story of where he walked to – a Europe almost but not quite the same – told through the letters & witness statements of the people who saw him appear & had to deal with him. Possibly the first alternate history I ever read? One of my favourites in the anthology.

“The Strange Case of John Kingman” Murray Leinster (a pseudonym of Will F. Jenkins)

A man in a lunatic asylum has been there longer than seems possible, and has many other odd things about him. It’s both a “supermen/aliens among us” story and a story about not meddling with things you don’t understand. I find it a little too pat – it’s a trope Campbell was fond of as an editor, and I’m not so keen. At least in this case there’s not also a dodgy understanding of evolution/genetics to make it irritating.

“That Only a Mother” Judith Merril

Haunting story about a mother at the end of her time being pregnant & the first few months of her daughter’s life. The sense of ominous doom is built up well with the protagonist worrying about places she or her husband may’ve been exposed to radiation. And then the child is clearly different – extremely clever, faster developing brain – but still the sense of impending doom, only resolved at the very end. Nicely done.

“The Monster” A. E. van Vogt

Aliens arrive on a desolate Earth – and resurrect long dead humans to figure out why the Earth is empty (after all, if you’re going to colonise somewhere you want to make sure it’s fit for habitation). Things don’t go entirely to plan as one of our far future descendants out manoeuvres them.

“Dreams are Sacred” Peter Phillips

Bit of an odd story this one, tho quite fun. Some SFF writer has gone nuts, mind cracked under the strain of an illness, and he’s withdrawn from reality & in his imagination is living out the sorts of plots he puts in his books (very very pulp SF). Our hero is hooked up to a machine that inserts him into the man’s head so he can participate in the dreams and hopefully snap him out of it & back to reality. Afterwards there are indications of some effects on reality too, which seemed to come out of nowhere to me (and spoil the story a bit I think). I preferred the humorous puncturing of the plots in the dream.

“Mars is Heaven!” Ray Bradbury

The first manned landing on Mars, but some how it all looks like Earth circa 30 years earlier. As the crew explore they meet their dear departed loved ones – this must be heaven! Obviously not all is as it seems. I think this is the Bradbury story I remember when I think of him – paranoid Martian stories.

“Thang” Martin Gardner

Funny short-short about things bigger than us in the universe. I like it.

“Brooklyn Project” William Tenn (a pseudonym of Phillip Klass)

The Brooklyn Project is set up to make a device that can travel in time – and this is the demonstration. At each stop the apparatus takes a picture, and inevitably displaces whatever objects previously occupied that space. We start off one way and end quite differently, but our protagonists don’t notice they’re not the same. I think this is my favourite in this collection. And I want to read something set in the initial world (before it changes/without it changing) as it seems an interesting dystopia.

“Ring Around the Redhead” John D. MacDonald

Told as a murder trial – where the defendant turns out not to’ve murdered the victim, but instead the victim has meddled where he should not. The defendant has acquired (by some strange side effect of a nuclear weapon) a device that lets him reach through into other dimensions. He gets a girl (accidentally) from a time/place where tech etc is much superior to ours so that’s the romance subplot, and the victim tries to get gems & gold but his greed is punished. Fun, but you’ve got to approach it like Doctor Who – handwave the plot device & enjoy the ride, don’t pick at the details.

“Period Piece” J. J. “Coupling” (a pseudonym for John R. Pierce)

A 20th Century man brought forward through time attends an endless stream of parties talking to the people of the 31st Century about his own time. Or is that really what’s going on? Obviously it isn’t, and the inevitability of his discovery of the real truth is there from the very beginning of the story. The very end reminds me of a philosophical essay I read sometime ago, but I don’t want to explain as it would spoil the story a bit.

“Dormant” A. E. van Vogt

A remote island in the pacific ocean hosts an old device/creature that has been dormant for a very very long time indeed. This story both shows us the perspective of the people trying to figure out what on earth is going on with the very odd rock, and the device itself as it wakes up and tries to remember its purpose. A story of failure to communicate because of both sides not even seeing the other as communicable with.

“In Hiding” Wilmar H. Shiras

Another “supermen among us” story – a sweet and cheerful one about a teenage boy with extremely high intelligence. He’s hiding this to fit into school/society but opens up & trusts a psychiatrist and tells him about his real life & enthusiasms. I like the story while I’m reading it, and I liked it a lot when I first read this collection. But now I get stuck at the end of the story where there’s this supposedly optimistic note that perhaps there are others like him because he’s the result of a mutation because his parents were exposed to radiation. And it’s just not plausible – even if you accept that as how he came to be, the likelihood of a second identical mutation in another child is pretty much impossible. So it stops the story being quite as upbeat, and makes the end rather sad – he’ll never find an intellectual peer. (And I don’t think the author intended that.)

“Knock” Fredric Brown

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door …”. In this case, aliens have destroyed all creatures on the earth except for a pair of each. Plucky human man outwits the aliens and get them to leave, whereupon he, she and the other animals will repopulate the world (I guess the plants were all left alone …). I didn’t much enjoy this, not sure why – tone or style or something just didn’t sit right.

“A Child is Crying” John D. MacDonald

Another “supermen among us” story, this time disturbing and creepy. The highly intelligent child with mental superpowers is not sympathetic, and he and his cohorts are quite sure they’ll inherit the Earth when they’re good and ready. It’s also strongly influenced by the spectre of all out nuclear war. I liked this, even despite the dodgy biology.

“Late Night Final” Eric Frank Russell

Aliens (very human-type ones) come to conquer a far future Earth. But instead they go native. This is both “humans are better than aliens” and “hippies are better than warmongers” in flavour. It also reminds me of Bradbury’s Martian story, only we’re the Martians & it turns out the paranoia is wrong, going native really is the right answer.

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Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror

I sometimes feel like I should just start these Doctor Who posts with “Here is the spoiler space to make the preview spoiler free on facebook”.

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

“And here is the spoiler space for G+ because it picks a different paragraph for its preview”. It’d certainly be easier than thinking of something interesting to say to fill up the space 🙂

Lizard lady & friends! I like them. Like the way Madame Vastra is supposedly hiding, but really really couldn’t care less about being noticed. After all, who’s going to believe someone who says they saw a lizard lady? And the Sontaran is obviously going to be my sort of character – I was particularly amused by the bit where he’s saying what Jenny should be armed with if she’s going into Sweetville and then when asked why it’s a good idea he just says “well, in general”. Oh and getting all over-excited when he finally gets to shoot people.

From the trailer I’d expected this to be more of a Doctor-lite episode than it turned out to be. So I wasn’t at all expecting the blind girl’s monster to turn out to be the Doctor – J called it just before the reveal tho, so I guess if I’d not had my expectations set by the trailer then there were clues.

I’m not sure from this one if Clara remembers the events of the day that didn’t happen or not – she didn’t show much sign of it, but equally she & the Doctor seemed more at ease with each other than they had done up till now. Of course whether or not she remembers she’s definitely learnt this episode that she’s not unique – both in Madame Vastra & Jenny’s reaction & in the photo the kids have found from Victorian London (where she wasn’t).

The Fifth Doctor reference that I spotted was the one to Tegan (“trying to take an Australian back to Heathrow Airport”). Definitely seems like we’re walking our way through the Doctors in order … I hope the 7th Doctor references include Nitro 9 (Ace was definitely my favourite companion) 🙂 Thinking about it, having the Silurian woman in an episode where we’re looking for Fifth Doctor references is kinda appropriate – didn’t Adric die in the spaceship that’s the meteor that kills the dinosaurs? (And that happens in the Fifth Doctor’s time iirc.)

Best joke of the episode had to be satnav boy – went on just long enough and didn’t out stay its welcome. I also liked the fainting gentleman (and appreciated that this was the only true Victorian fainting we saw – the one woman who did so was faking it). And the morgue attendant, and all the different reactions to his declaiming of the name “The Crimson Horror”.

The plot itself was a bit “evil overlord Victorian variant” by the numbers – right down to explaining all her plans and previous evil schemes so that she could be foiled. But it did work, just about. I was thinking Bioshock references for the actual scheme, but I don’t think J agreed.

Only two episodes left in this half of the season. I wonder if we’re getting a proper finale, or if that’s saved for the special later this year?

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“Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories #9 (1947)” ed Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg

This series of anthologies was published in the 1980s and was a retrospective of the best stories from years gone by as picked out by Isaac Asimov & Martin Greenberg (I possibly unfairly have the impression that Greenberg probably did most of the legwork, then Asimov made final decisions & wrote quirky little intros – no evidence for that tho). I picked up volumes 9 and 10 second hand at some point after I’d bought the “Before the Golden Age” anthologies (my first post about those books) – I don’t know if they were even published in the UK as what I have are US editions. I used to look for others of the series in secondhand bookshops but I’ve never seen any of them (and probably now wouldn’t bother buying them).

This volume covers 1947, and there’s a little introduction that reminds us of what was going on in that year in “the world outside reality” – i.e. what most of us call the real world – and “the real world” – i.e. the world of SFF publishing. I think when I first read these two I found that switch of “real” designation amusing, but I find it rather twee now.

One thing that struck me while reading these stories this time round was that they feel closer in style to more modern fiction than the anthologies I just read. For instance, gone are the “lone gentleman inventor and his machine” type stories (a la H. G. Wells’ “Time Machine”) that were still popular in the 1930s. Even when the subject of the story is an invention it still seems to take place in the world rather than off in some secluded mansion somewhere. Of course one thing that’s happened in the decade since the end of the 30s is the Second World War, and that does have an impact on the subject matter of these stories – one of the intros notes that of the 14 stories in the anthology 4 of them deal with nuclear warfare & its effects. I remembered this as a higher proportion of the book, I think partly because two of the stories that have stayed with me the most are of that type.

“Little Lost Robot” Isaac Asimov

This story is one that I know inside out, as well as being here it’s in a collection of Asimov’s robot short stories that my mother owns that I read over & over as a teenager. Basic plot is that someone tells one of his robots to “get lost” in strong terms, and it does so – it goes & hides in amongst identical looking robots. For plot reasons it’s necessary to find that specific one, and Susan Calvin (robot psychologist) does so via logic. To be honest I’ve never been that fond of the story – it’s about the logic puzzle of the idea rather than the characters or even the plot. But when I was reading it this time, I had a bit of an epiphany. It’s a bit of a “well, duh” moment, but still a genuine paradigm shift for me. Look at these bits of dialogue, one of the engineers talking to one of the robots as part of the set up of the logic puzzle solution:

“Sit down, boy.”
[…]
“Mm-m. Well, boy, gamma rays will kill you instantly.”
[…]
“The only thing I can advise, boy, is that if you detect […]”

The humans call all the robots “boy” and do so frequently, and I’d pretty much not noticed. It stuck out this time, tho, coz I’ve learnt since I last read the story that that would be the way a slave-owner would address their male slaves in the US. Which made it ping into focus that the robots are explicitly replacement slaves, written by someone whose country had fought a civil war over slavery about 80 years earlier. Which, well, duh. But I’d never parsed it like that before – I read the robots as servants, which has different connotations. And now I’m wondering if I’d see different things in the later robot novels (which I always preferred to the short stories). I’m thinking of the ones with R. Daneel Olivaw – who is indistinguishable from a human, but still treated like a robot (coz he is). Is there stuff in those books that went over my head because I wasn’t coming at them from the perspective of robots=slaves? (I don’t own those books, maybe I’ll borrow them from my parents when I next visit.)

“Tomorrow’s Children” Poul Anderson

Story of the aftermath of a nuclear war, and the efforts of what little is left of the US government to find out just how bad it is. Short answer – very bad. It’s a well-written & depressing little story although these days the science feels off (the sorts of “mutants” that are being born since the bombs, for instance, don’t feel right).

“Child’s Play” William Tenn (the pseudonym of Philip Klass)

A parcel containing a child’s christmas present from 2153 is mis-delivered to a struggling lawyer in the 1940s. It’s the futuristic equivalent of a chemistry set – a biology set that lets you build living organisms & do things like twin a person. The protagonist is fascinated & tries things out. The ethical implications aren’t dodged by the story and the ending makes that clear, but you’re firmly in the protagonist’s head and he has no qualms (and squashes any that start to raise their heads). The protagonist is also very sexist, but I’m not sure if the story is or not – I read it as disapproving of the way he sees the woman who’s in the story. I did enjoy this, and I vaguely remembered it once I started, but it’s not really a story I expect to stay with me.

“Time and Time Again” H. Beam Piper

Man dying in explosion in 1975 (in a war) wakes up inside his 13 year old body in 1945. Figures out how to prove to his father this is true & plans to avert the war. This is a kinda neat story, but it feels like it’s all premise & no pay off – like this is chapter one of a longer story. Very boys own club too – I don’t think there’s a single woman with a speaking part.

“Tiny and the Monster” Theodore Sturgeon

The title of this is rather well done – Tiny is a dog, a Great Dane (and thus not tiny), and the monster is only revealed later in the story but it’s not a monster either. Tiny shows an unexpected interest in the work of Alistair Forsythe, a young woman who is a gifted metallurgist (mostly a theoretician, but practical ability too). The story is primarily told from her perspective, and tells us how she (and her mother & Alec who was Tiny’s original owner) figure out what Tiny (and the monster) want and how to give it to them. The romance sub-plot wouldn’t be out of place in a Nora Roberts novel, which means it’s still sexist as hell but at least they’re both people with actual personalities and they have chemistry between them. (Faint praise I guess, but this story does contain the line “a woman is only forty percent a woman until someone loves her, and only eighty percent until she has children”. Yes this is in a character’s mouth, not the narrator’s but it sums up the all pervading sentiment around that subplot.) They’re even presented as complementary & equal in the work that’s done in the story – he’s mostly the brawn & she’s mostly the brains but not only are both important for the solution but also she’s stated to be cleverer than him. I rather enjoyed this one despite eye-rolling at the sexism – it’s quite charming.

“E for Effort” T. L. Sherred

A man invents a time viewer that can look at (but not hear or feel or affect) anything anywhere in the past. Together with the narrator they make a series of films of things like the life of Alexander the Great, but historical drama isn’t the endgame they have in mind. Unfortunately, things don’t work out as well as they hope (I don’t really want to spoil the end of this one) – hence “E for Effort”. It’s a well thought out story – the difficulties of making money out of the device, of getting their films released, are all thought through as are the various ramifications of the device. I enjoyed it.

“Letter to Ellen” Chan Davis

How would you feel if you discovered you were artificial? Two young men working in a big bio-engineering company putting together organisms discover the truth about themselves. The science just feels wrong all over, which detracts from the story a lot for me. They’re basically building an organism from bits like you’d build a house – like there’s a lab doing “the ultramicrosurgery of putting the nuclear wall together around the chromatin and embedding the result in a cell”. And I suppose you could do that to make an organism if you knew everything about every cell in it (I’m thinking with a 3D printer, perhaps?) but the direction real biotech has gone in is growing things & cloning organisms using a cell of an existing organism (which is persuaded to behave like a fertilised egg & put into a womb to develop). So it felt too bizarre for the emotional impact to really come through.

“The Figure” Edward Grendon (the pseudonym of Lawrence L. LeShan)

This is more of a vignette than a story, and on the surface it’s the closest to the “man invents machine” plot in this anthology. But underneath it’s about the world, and it’s one of the nuclear war influenced stories. It’s one of the stories from this anthology that I always remember – it’s chilling, depressing and understated. I think I’d pick it as the best one in the book. I don’t want to say any more, because I think that would spoil the initial impact if you ever have a chance to read it.

“With Folded Hands …” Jack Williamson

This story is in conversation with Asimov’s robot stories, and given my revelation about robots=slaves in “Little Lost Robot” I wasn’t surprised that the robots (“humanoids”) in this story were black in colour. Of course they are, robots=slaves & in the US slavery=black. The point in this story is to explore what it would be like if robots took the first law of robotics (the Prime Directive here) to extremes: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”. For instance these humanoids won’t let a person in the kitchen – knives are sharp you might cut yourself, the oven is hot you might burn yourself. They also do all the work, leaving humanity a purposeless coddled species. Disturbing in implication but not particularly plausible I thought, I don’t think I believed either the setup or the ramifications.

“The Fires Within” Arthur C. Clarke

What if there were a non-human civilisation living 15 miles down in the depths of the earth. A vignette really, told mostly as a letter describing the discovery. With a somewhat predictable twist at the end (not helped by being the second story in the collection to use a similar twist). Felt a bit pedestrian to me.

“Zero Hour” Ray Bradbury

The new game craze for pre-pubescent children is “Invasion” and somehow they’re all playing it across the world at once. 7 year old Mink even says things to her mother like “Mom, I’m sure you won’t be hurt much, really!” or talks about fifth columns, but the adults all ignore it as just yet another incomprehensible kid craze, whatever will they think of next. As the reader you know exactly where it’s going from early on, but Bradbury still manages to make it compelling.

“Hobbyist” Eric Frank Russell

A probeship, manned by a single man & his pet parrot (to talk to, to keep from going nuts with the solitude), crash lands on an unknown planet. In the process of exploring to try & find fuel to get back off again the protagonist finds something that might be our creator. I liked this, particularly the exploration bits & the relationship between the man & his parrot. Tho I did find the creator thing a bit twee.

“Exit the Professor” Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore)

Described in the anthology as a “whacky story” and that’s what it is. A professor comes to a remote rural town to investigate the reports of a family with strange powers. We see the story through the eyes of one of the Hogben family, as they avoid being taken off to be “studied” or put in the circus, or otherwise treated as freaks. A sample:

[…] that time, it all started because Rafe Haley come peeking and prying at the shed winder, trying to get a look at Little Sam. Then Rafe went round saying Little Sam had three haids or something.
Can’t believe a word them Haley boys say. Three haids! It ain’t natcheral, is it? Anyhow, Little Sam’s only got two haids, and never had no more since the day he was born.

It’s a fun story that kinda fits into the “there’s supermen among us” sub-genre.

“Thunder and Roses” Theodore Sturgeon

Post-nuclear war story set in an army base that’s got some of the remaining living people as they basically wait to die. This is the other nuclear war story that stuck in my head – it’s actually the story that I think of first when I think of this book. Depressing, with maybe a note of hope at the end if you squint at it (and very much the counter-example to anyone who thinks SFF is escapism, this is so not ignoring the reality and implications of the time it was written in). I hesitate to say it’s a favourite of mine, because it’s not precisely enjoyable to read – but reading it as a teenager in the 80s it felt as relevant as it must’ve done in 1947.

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Doctor Who: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

Watched Doctor Who a little later than airing time yesterday evening – out for the day in London (which I’ll write up later) then our takeaway took ages to arrive. But got there in the end 🙂

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

Overall I enjoyed the episode, but it certainly started with a few wtf moments. Like – why did the Doctor bring the Van Baalen Bros onto the TARDIS in the first place? Well, I know why – it gave us a B plot for the episode, but it might’ve been nice if there’d been some attempt to lampshade it at least a tiny bit. Oh and it gave us some more monsters, too.

I guess part of what’s particularly irritating about it is that in other ways the episode seems very cleverly constructed with things set up in advance. The photo of the van Baalen family for instance, you see it right at the start and then at the end when you see it again knowing what you know it seems you should’ve known Tricky wasn’t an android. Even before the other hints – the Doctor has clearly figured it out immediately or at least at the point of the respirator scene, but we’re given enough hints that it feels like “of course” when the reveal happens.

There were other clever bits too – the remote being the answer to re-writing time again felt like it should’ve been obvious. After all, Clara catches “something” that the Doctor shortly afterwards takes out of someone else’s pocket (and tells us what it is). I spotted the words coming up on her hand early on even tho I didn’t figure out what they were, and the “big friendly button” reveal was kinda neat 🙂 That’s the other thing the van Baalens do for the story of course – they let us know the whole thing is erased (by their lack of memory and the very fact they’re alive) but that there are echos of the day that never was (the remains of one last shred of decency that the van Baalen brother remembers just as the Doctor told him to). And Clara dodges the Doctor’s question about feeling safe right at the end, I wonder what she remembers from her day. Other than just being as tired as if she’d gone trotting around the TARDIS.

Nice to see some insides of the TARDIS too. The Library was awesome, and of course Clara forgets the danger to go poking around seeing what she can see. I’m intrigued by the Gallifreyan Encyclopaedia in the bottles – and wondering if there’ll be effects from Clara breathing in some of it (that last past the day that never was). And we’re reminded again that the Doctor has a name that is not “The Doctor”, in case anyone had forgotten. The Eye of Harmony as power source of the TARDIS manages to be both a Fourth Doctor reference and an Eighth Doctor reference. (I had to use wikipedia for that tho – I had a vague feeling it was a Fourth Doctor one but that was all.) Anyone spot any other Fourth Doctor things?

The monsters as time leaks of the future was also well set up – J spotted the focus on the hand of the Clara one, I thought mebbe she was hallucinating the monster at the time. But then in the console room with the head tilts it became clear J was on the right track. And then it built up inexorably to the revelation. Again my problem was with the van Baalen brothers – why didn’t the Doctor or Clara help up the one that fell?? (I didn’t pick up which name was which brother of the real ones.) If so, then maybe they would’ve survived … but then they did coz the time reset so it didn’t matter, but the Doctor didn’t know that at the time.

And now the Doctor knows Clara doesn’t know she’s anything but a real girl. Of course, that doesn’t answer if she’s a real girl but it means she’s not complicit in it. Probably. Nah, I’m pretty sure she’s what she seems to be now … but maybe that won’t stay the same. If she isn’t what she seems to be, that is.

So, yeah, overall a good episode …just why the Van Baalen Bros?

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