Back before Big Finish became a Doctor Who content machine, spin-offs were a rare thing indeed. The very first of them came in 2001, a four-part miniseries called Dalek Empire about a Dalek invasion of the galaxy... with no Doctor around to stop it. Written, directed, sound-designed, and composed by Nicholas Briggs (plus with Daleks and one other character played by him), the series strikes a very different tone to other Big Finish releases; it doesn't just feel like Doctor Who without the Doctor in it as many of Big Finish's later spin-offs have.
It was successful enough to spawn three further series: Dalek Empire II: Dalek War (2003), an immediate sequel; Dalek Empire III (2004), set thousands of years later; and Dalek Empire: The Fearless (2007-08), an interquel set during the original Dalek Empire. There was also a Doctor Who story where the Doctor met a couple of the main characters, Return of the Daleks (2006), and a Short Trips volume (2006).
I picked the set up in a Humble Bundle sale in 2014... but with my Big Finish backlog, didn't get around to listening to them until late 2024! I'm sorry I waited so long, and here I kind of want to review them, but mostly want to think a little bit about what the Daleks "represent" in each story.
Dalek Empire Series One
As much as I have gone off a lot of Nick Briggs's writing tics at this point, it's interesting how much I enjoy his approach to something like this. I wouldn't say he's a great master of characterization, but I think he does a good job with some archetypes that a set of skilled performers successfully bring to life. The ground-level view here also plays to his strengths a lot. The stuff with Suz and the Daleks is genuinely clever.
As he often did early in his career, I think Briggs make some
interesting structural choices; I really like the bait-and-switch about
who the narrator is, which totally wrongfooted me. Some comedy aliens
with sound effects, so points off for that, but overall this plays to
his strengths in that the end is totally about the futility of
resistance, which isn't something I want from all or even most of my
Doctor Who stories, but does seem to me the exact kind of story the
Daleks deserve on their first solo outing. And at the end, we even learn
that the Daleks themselves are kind of pointless. A lot of stuff here,
Briggs would do again later but worse (e.g., the Cutbert stories), so
it's good to hear it done well.
The cast is largely great. I particularly like Gareth Thomas as
Kalendorf, though I hope he gets more to do in series two. Sarah Mowat
is excellent, she teeters between likeable and unsympathetic perfectly.
And the guy who plays Alby Brook manages to make a somewhat stock
character come to life.
What I really miss is the early 2000s Big Finish sound design. It's funny that when Briggs became the head honcho, the company largely moved away from this style. I don't know if I have the vocab to support my claims, but it's not doing the "episode of the new show without pictures" style that dominates now, but it has a real tactile feel to it. I miss those clunky Nick Briggs space doors opening and closing! When you listen to a piece of sound design and music by early 2000s
Nick, you live it. I much prefer the "moody noise" style of music to the
"orchestral warblings" that dominate Big Finish now. All those clunking
doors and electronic dings... beautiful!
Even the covers are unique and beautiful; again, a lot of 2020s Big Finish product looks samey, all photoshopped floating heads, but from the moment you pick up the CD (or open up your download, I guess), you know you're in for something different here.
I also miss that early 2000s "Big Finish universe" feel; it's not distracting, but in addition to the ties to the main range Dalek Empire stories, we also get ties to The Sirens of Time (the Knights of Velyshaa) and Sword of Orion (the Garazone sector... complete with the notorious cell phone ring!).
Dalek Empire II: Dalek War
Dalek War is less focused than the original Dalek Empire but I still enjoyed it a lot. Like in a good movie, we actually don't know these characters—Kalendorf, Suz, Alby—very well in the sense that we've only spent a few hours with them, but in actuality you become quite attached to them, which really makes the ending quite effective. Maybe it's because I was an emotional wreck for other reasons at the
time, but I teared up a bit at Kal and Suz's final scene in Dalek Empire II. Would not have expected that of a Nick Briggs script, to be honest.
What Is a Dalek?
Surely the best Doctor Who monsters "mean" something beyond the literal. A Sontaran, for example, is over-the-top patriotism and militarism; hardly subtle, but a good Sontaran story does something thematically with this. (Part of the reason they work so well in the Crimean War in Flux, for example.) A Cyberman can represent ideas about transhumanism or conformity—the monster doesn't have to be the same thing in every story.
Daleks are often stand-ins for fascism and/or xenophobia; in the original series, this is probably most clear in their first and last stories, The Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks. The latter, in particular, makes it very obvious by having the Daleks team up with humans who think England should have allied with the Nazis during World War II!
I spent a lot of the first two series thinking about what the Daleks "mean" for Nick Briggs. Though there are flashes of Daleks-as-fascists here, that's not really his mode. So what is it? The ending drove home that they are humanity's need for conflict, for war (what, if we want to get pretentious, literary theorist Elana Gomel calls "the violent sublime"). The frame story of DE II makes it clear that the Daleks will always be with us, they will always comes back-- just as war always comes back. The flip-flopping of who is on whose side in DE II shows that someone will always be fighting someone else, and Kalendorf's story in particular shows that if he wasn't fighting the Daleks, he would be fighting someone. The Daleks always return, because humanity always returns to violence. It's bleak, but hey, it's Nick Briggs writing a universe (essentially) without the Doctor, of course it's bleak.
People tend to lump Terrance Dicks novelisations into three periods, is my understanding: his early period, where the idea of a Doctor Who novelisation was relatively brand new and he was still going all out; his middle period, where he was cranking them out, but they were solid renditions that expanded on their screen counterparts; and his late period, where they were just the scripts with "said the Doctor" stuck in occasionally.
Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two by Terrance Dicks
I haven't read enough of them to know if this is a fair characterization, to be honest, but it does seem to me that if it is, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang and Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock clearly belong to the middle period. I don't think either of these will set your world alight, but it did seem to me that both stories must have engaged Dicks's imagination enough that, like The Pyramids of Mars (1976), he gives the stories enough embellishment and energy to bring it all to life for a reader whether you've seen these stories or not. (I've seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang a number of times over the years, Horror of Fang Rock just the once almost two decades ago.)
I am of the camp that considers Talons one of Doctor Who's best stories, and Dicks captures it on the page well, especially its characters: Tom Baker's moody Doctor and Leela's directness are both on the page, and Dicks does particularly well, I thought, by Jago, Litefoot, and Li H'sen Chang, each of whom gets some nice moments of internal characterization that complements and expands on his screen performance. I imagine there are times cramming a six-parter into (in my Essential Terrance Dicks edition, anyway) just over one hundred pages could backfire, but it works well here, as we fairly rocket through an engaging story. Dicks clearly enjoyed Robert Holmes's script and brings it to life.
He also does well by his own script in The Horror of Fang Rock, another pseudo-historical of an alien trapped on Earth. There's good period details here, and he (of course, I suppose) captures the complications of the script well. I did find the guest cast somewhat thinner, though. The lighthouse crew are strong enough, actually, but the survivors of the yacht crash don't feel very lively; I'm guessing (it's been a long time since I saw the tv serial) that skilled performers brought them to life more. Still, this is good stuff, especially the early parts where Dicks is setting the scene.
As of this writing, I've read six novelisations reprinted in the Essential Terrance Dicks range, the five in this volume plus The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977) from volume one; I don't know what happened, but Talons and only Talons contains a large number of typos—missing quotation marks, incorrect words, line breaks in the wrong position. (See the last page of ch. 12 on p. 268 for an example of the latter.) Not having access to the original book, I don't know if this faithfully reproduces an original copyedit that was not careful enough, or if it's a product of whatever OCR process converted these twentieth-century books for a twenty-first-century reprinting.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Five Doctors
No. XIII (chs. 39-41) Towards his first wife, Mr Dombey, in his cold and lofty arrogance, had borne himself like the removed Being he almost conceived himself to be. He had been 'Mr Dombey' with her when she first saw him, and he was 'Mr Dombey' when she died. He had asserted his greatness during their whole married life, and she had meekly recognised it. He had kept his distant seat of state on the top of his throne, and she her humble station on its lowest step; and much good it had done him, so to live in solitary bondage to his one idea. He had imagined that the proud character of his second wife would have been added to his own—would have merged into it, and exalted his greatness. He had pictured himself haughtier than ever, with Edith’s haughtiness subservient to his. He had never entertained the possibility of its arraying itself against him. (608-9)
Not much to report about this one, which continues the depiction of the slow deterioration of the Dombey marriage—see above. Also some good but sad stuff about Florence. The new Mrs Dombey's mother dies.
No. XIV (chs. 42-45) 'Does that bold-faced slut... intend to take her warning, or does she not?' (669)
Another one that I found a bit slow and a bit plodding. More Florence, please! I mean, Dombey is thrown from his horse and injured and all, but there's a bit too much Carker. I get that he's up to no good, but I find something about Dickens's underhanded villains who spend a lot of time "on screen" a bit dull; I mean, he's not as bad as Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, but I feel like less would be more with this guy, but instead we just get more. Which is not more.
That said, at times, he's chillingly effective. When Dombey is injured, Carker brings a message from him to Edith (only I am suspicious that the message probably does not represent Dombey's actual intentions), trying to drive a wedge between Edith and Florence:
'His instructions were,' he said, in a low voice, 'that I should inform you that your demeanour towards Miss Dombey is not agreeable to him. That it suggests comparisons to him which are not favourable to himself. That he desires it may be wholly changed; and that if you are in earnest, he is confident it will be; for your continued show of affection will not benefit its object.' 'That is a threat,' she said. 'That is a threat,' he answered, in his voiceless manner of assent: adding aloud, 'but not directed against you.' (683)
I've been reading this book a solid month now, you know, and though my reading has slowed a little of late, I'm almost at the three-quarters mark, so I ought to finish it up in February.
I'm worried about that three-quarters mark, though; so far, Dickens has made the worst things happen at the ends of installment nos. v and x. What will no. xv bring?
This is the fifth in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xv and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:
In Doomwar, T'Challa destroyed all Wakandan vibranium worldwide in order to prevent Doctor Doom from using it for nefarious purposes. Of that move, I wrote, "this happens at the very end of the story, so we get no implications of his choice. This isn't so much an issue for Doomwar itself [...] but one that I am afraid future Black Panther stories will not really engage with. I guess we'll see!" Well, I was wrong, because the very next in-continuity Black Panther story is all about the worldwide vibranium shortage.
Klaws of the Panther continues writer Jonathan Maberry's focus on Shuri as the new Black Panther; in this story, she travels to the Savage Land to obtain some vibranium to replace Wakandan stocks. (Apparently "S.L.V.", an abbreviation you will read way too much in this series, is different from Wakandan vibranium.) What she finds, though, is that someone got there ahead of her—longtime Black Panther nemesis Klaw (he killed her dad) has teamed up with the mad scientists of A.I.M. to do... um, something vaguely nefarious with vibranium and sound.
from Klaws of the Panther #2
While I enjoyed Maberry's Doomwar, this miniseries continued some of the trends I didn't enjoy from Maberry's run on Black Panther volume 5. A bit too much going on about Shuri's inexperience and anger and propensity for using violence. This bothers me for two reasons. The first is that it feels like the kind of thing you do with a female hero specifically; I don't think men are as likely to continually get storylines about how they are bad at superheroing because they are inexperienced and their emotions get in the way. Second, I just don't think the character of Shuri from the comics is (thus far, anyway) as interesting as the one played by Letitia Wright in the movies! Give me the warrior-scientist who can bring her brother up short. I am wondering if at some point the comics character will become more like her film counterpart.
Anyway, as my brief synopsis above perhaps hinted, I didn't care much for the story here. I don't really care for Klaw—no offense, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but what does it mean for a person to be made of living sound... especially if they just seem to be a person still?—and all the stuff about "S.L.V." got too abstract and complicated. On top of this, each issue sees Black Panther teaming up with a different hero: Shanna the She-Devil, Wolverine, Spider-Man, and the Black Widow in turn. The team-up with Shanna is natural enough given the plot, and the meet-up with Wolverine is fun enough (and also makes sense if you buy the series's conceit about Shuri needing to manage her anger better), but the inclusions of Spider-Man and the Black Widow seem kind of pointless and random.
Unfortunately, though the story's events spin out of the choices T'Challa made in Doomwar, I don't think the implications are meaningfully explored here; there's little from Wakanda in this story. The hunt for "S.L.V." could basically be any maguffin. The strength of Black Panther as a concept is in Wakanda itself and its politics, both internal and international, and Klaws of the Panther doesn't have that. I'm curious how the loss of vibranium and Shuri's tenure as Black Panther will both shake out in the long term, because while this series finished in 2011, there wouldn't be another Wakanda-focused Black Panther run for another five years! That's an eternity in comics time, and I feel pretty certain the changes set up in Reginald Hudlin and Jonathan Maberry's runs will be forgotten by then.
This summer, when I was running my Star Trek Adventures campaign, I was also watching season two of Strange New Worlds. (Me to my wife: "'I fly the ship' is clearly Ortegas's Value.") When I got to the episode "Under the Cloak of War," I went, "I want to do that!" Specifically, "Under the Cloak of War" is a flashback about what a couple characters did during the Federation-Klingon War before the series started; it has a much different tone to the rest of SNW.
My STA campaign was set after the Dominion War, but the backstories my players had put together established that some of the had served on the ship during the war, with a slightly different crew. So could I do an episode set during the Dominion War? And make it super grim and very depressing? But the problem I had was that I can only fit four episodes into a summer campaign; if I saved this idea for a hypothetical campaign next summer, would I want to make one of my four episodes a flashback?
An answer arrived when, during the last session of the campaign, one of my players suggested a winter break reunion. That seemed like the perfect opportunity for a one-off story, especially given that not everyone from the summer would be available to play this time out.
So I reached out to my players and determined I had enough interested to run it. Thus I had to find a suitable mission! I wanted something set during a war, something grim, but also something with not very much space combat, since it's the one aspect of STA that has never clicked for me. And, to be honest, I didn't want a whole lot of ground combat either; I wanted it to still be Star Trekky and let my players show off their diverse skills.
I reached out on the STA facebook group and someone pointed me at The Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign, a sourcebook on how to run a whole campaign set during Discovery's first season. I read through the missions until coming to "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" and it clicked for me immediately. [When I played the mission and wrote this up, I didn't know who wrote the scenario, but I've subsequently learned it was Alison Cybe.] A little bit of combat, but lots of other good use of STA mechanics, something for every one to do... and so grim the mission opens with a note to read your players about how sometimes people die and you can't do anything about it! So I had the basis for...
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 51963.1. The Diversitas has been assigned to transport a special tactical team to its new assignment on the Cardassian front. Our ship’s doctor, security chief, and pilot are currently off ship on detached duty, which is unfortunate, as I understand that the tactical team’s ordnance expert and surgeon both served with our own Mooria Loonin before the war. "As the war enters its ninth month, I find the crew’s spirits particularly low. Even with the Romulans joining the Allies, we are fighting a defensive war that seems to be progressing nowhere, the Dominion chipping away at Federation territory one system, one planet, at a time. Though the Diversitas has been spared any frontline actions thus far, everyone on the crew knows someone who has been touched by the conflict. The mood has been brought even lower due to the fact that, for our human crew anyway, on Earth, today would be Christmas Eve. I am told some crew have decided to hold a small celebration in the ship’s bar."
Planning the Mission
Science Station Eldorado Omega under attack (from the Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign; I don't think my players noticed that they're Klingon ships)
The premise of "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" is that the player ship receives a message sending it to a science outpost under attack from the Klingons. The first act is getting there and battling the Klingons, chasing them off.
The second act is the heart of the mission: the players need to evacuate 600 scientists from the station... but they can only beam 20 every thirty minutes... and in eight hours, the Klingons will return. On top of this, 15 scientists will die every thirty minutes from their injuries... and 50 will die every thirty minutes from a radiation leak in the station's reactor! The players have a lot of stuff to do: saving lives, fixing reactors, repairing the station (if you fix the docking arm and/or station transporters, you can increase the rate of evacuation), and so on.
On top of this, there's a number of timed incidents, such as a series of plasma fires, or the discovery that a torpedo has buried itself in the station infrastructure. You can also, as GM, spend Threat to do things like injure players, break things they already fixed, or even reveal that a Klingon commando is hidden on the station.All of this was very adaptable to the Dominion War setting; I just made the initial enemies Jem'Hadar instead of Klingons, and had the reinforcements who come at the end be Cardassians. The only weak part of the mission as written is that the third part is another space battle; going into our first session, I left that part blank, figuring I'd decide on a third act once I saw how the first two went! Other than this, I don't think I made many changes.
Commander L'San (from the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook)
As always, I made some cosmetic reskinnings. "Starbase Epsilon-12" became "Science Station Eldorado Omega"; the moon the station orbited (did it have a name? I don't remember) became Matamoras IV-C. The station commander, L'San, is a Vulcan woman... but we'd done a science station commanded by a Vulcan woman back in "Abyss Station" (and I wanted her to cameo here), so I made L'San into an Aurelian man.
Also, as I planned the mission, I got the idea that we wouldn't just be playing around Christmas, but that it ought to be Christmas, so I set the whole mission on December 24-25, 2374... worst Christmas ever! I named all the acts after Christmas carols, and the scenes after lyrics from them:
If We Make It through December
Got Plans to Be in a Warmer Town
I Shiver When I See the Falling Snow
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Let Nothing You Dismay
To Save Us All from Satan's Power
Tidings of Comfort and Joy
Soul Cakes
The Dogs at Your Front Door
Any Good Thing to Make Us All Merry
Jem'Hadar torpedo embedded in station infrastructure (screen capture from DS9: "Starship Down")
(And, as always, I changed the name of the episode to be more pretentious.)
Playing the Mission
Of my players from the summer, four were able to play in this
one-off. Of those four, two had characters established as being on the
USS Diversitas during the Dominion War:
Debi as T'Cant, first officer
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer
The Diveristas
had a different captain, security chief, science officer, and medical
officer during the war, so my usual captain (Ryan) and usual security
chief (Austin) would have to play different characters; I suggested they switch
it up and play different roles, too, which they embraced. That gave me:
Austin as Stojan Mayer, captain
Ryan as Phalnox Drin, science officer
Admiral Ross: "Merry Christmas, captain." (I'm not sure what episode this screen capture is from)
I
also reached out to two players from my original campaign who I liked
playing with a lot. They hadn't wanted the three-month weekly commitment
of my summer campaign, but were excited to join in on this smaller
commitment... and even agreed to reprise their characters! They had been
fresh-faced ensigns in 2371, so things were perfect for them to be a
little bit further along in 2374. I made them members of special
tactical squad being transported by the Diversitas:
Cari as Jor Lena, ordnance expert
Andrew as Gurg bim Vurg, surgeon
I encouraged the players to lean into the Christmas stuff, and they got into it; our "teaser" was a depressing ship's Christmas party interrupted by orders from Admiral Ross sending the Diversitas to Eldorado Omega.
Playing the first act, though, confirmed to me that either 1) space combat in STA is terrible, or 2) I am totally misunderstanding it. It's basically impossible for my players to win! Even if they score, say, seven Damage, that gets eaten up by the Resistance the enemy vessels have... which then in turn gets eaten up by shields, meaning it takes forever to score any meaningful damage. And it takes a bunch of Breaches to destroy a ship. So I fudged it, but tried to do so consistently: first shields are taken down, then it gets eaten up by Resistance; if the players get a couple Breaches, the enemy ship is destroyed.Thankfully, anyway, my characters got creative; they made a holographic image of their ship and remote-controlled torpedoes to come out of it, distracting one of the Jem'Hadar ships. Once they disabled one of the ships, they tractor beamed it into a second, causing the third to flee. This took up basically the whole first session. At one point, they lost all their shields, but some good rolling by Kenyon brought them completely back up. By the end of the first session, though, I definitely didn't want to do another space battle for act three. I came up with an idea for a space chase and a mechanic to implement it.
I had estimated that act two would take up the entirety of the second session... after three hours of actual play, we had got through four of its eight hours! The mission as written requires a lot of decision-making about who should do what when, so it proved pretty time-consuming, especially as my players got to grips with their options. In session three, they finished act two in just under two hours, and thus we had just over an hour for my space chase! So I did it in a pretty simplified way.Overall, I think act two was very effective. I used glass gems to represent the station personnel, each representing five. As they beamed from station to ship, I moved them from one jar to another; as they died, I dropped them into a pile labeled dead! The game mat I used to track who was doing which task that took how much time (very important).
battling a Jem'Hadar commando (from the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook)
The players did good jobs thinking through who should do what task; Andy as Gurg focused on healing, of course (any interval where no one succeeds at a certain Medicine task, fifteen people die), and refused to leave that task to work on others despite the captain's orders, a good Value-based moment I gave him extra Determination for. Austin taking a Talent making the captain good at time management turned out to be critical, shaving lots of time off some of the longer tasks.I did spend four Threat to introduce a Jem'Hadar commando... who immediately got KO'd by the science officer! But Ryan had deliberately (because of the wartime theme) built a science officer to also be good at fighting, complete with focus in MMA. And unfortunately I had no Threat to make the Jem'Hadar roll better. I had thought about trying to kill off his character because he was the one who could die, but now I'm into Ryan's idea that after the war, Drin gave up his Starfleet career to become an Orion pit fighter as "the Dominion Dominator"!
Just pretend this is a New Orleans-class ship and that there's no wormhole. (from the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook)
Going into the last session, I thought it would set the tone to get the players to read out personal logs, so I incentivized this by offering an extra point of Determination to every player who wrote one up and read it at the session's beginning. Five of the six players did this, and I really enjoyed the logs... but that did mean going into the last session the group had eleven points of Determination available to it! They got pretty low on Momentum; had they not had all that Determination, I probably could have forced them to give me more Threat and made things a bit harder. But I liked the log thing, and I think in future campaigns I might ask one player to do it per session. Lots of people did die... (140 I think), but few who could have actually been saved, I think; the players did save most everyone they could have, and they were creative and thoughtful in their application of Star Trek–style thinking to the problems they were facing. Maybe just having six players made it too easy? Third act aside, I found the scenario a strong one, and a good one for what I wanted; my players reported enjoying it.
Science Station Eldorado Omega (this is a starbase design used on Discovery/Strange New Worlds ...but I flipped it upside down to match the battle image above!)
During the first session, Ryan got AI to write and perform a sea shanty–style Christmas carol about our battle: I found it pretty amazing. You can hear it here; my favorite line is, "And Jor Lena, she was laughing, her console aglow, / 'Let’s deck their halls with torpedoes, ho-ho!'" Star Trek: Ekumene:
Every year, I participate in LibraryThing's Secret Santa program, "SantaThing." Members who pay in are matched with other members on the basis of their libraries, and then select books for each other. While some members may write very prescriptive requests ("here are the books on my wish list, please buy me one of them"), I tend to leave things very open; I give a list of authors I am interested in, but note that what I really want is a book my Santa thinks I might like based on what they can see of my tastes.
This means I usually end up with books I don't know much about—and I try to keep it that way. Most things on my reading list end up there because I've read and thought about them a lot, maybe even researched them; most books I go into I know a lot about. But there's a pleasure in coming to a book largely blind, so when possible, I try to make it happen. With SantaThing books, all I typically do is glance at the tag cloud on LT to see what genre I should tag it, and that's it. Last year, for example, that meant I got to experience the weird pleasures of Antkind and The Kingdoms with no expectations ahead of time. The novels unspooled in my consciousness with no guide other than the novels themselves.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
That worked particularly well with Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. All I knew going in was that I had once read "The Lottery," and that it was probably vaguely spooky. For all I knew, it was about people living in an actual castle! (Spoiler: it is not.) I've recently been developing a theory that all fiction is (or, perhaps, ought to be) about "epistemic crisis": the world does not work how you thought it did. Or put a slightly different way, you do not know how the world works. Obviously, this is why science fiction is thus the best kind of fiction, because (at its best), it's about figuring out how an unknown world operates. As Jo Walton says, and as I quote her saying quite a lot, science fiction stories are mystery stories where the world itself is the mystery.
A lot of people on LibraryThing have tagged We Have Always Lived in the Castle as "mystery," but it's not a mystery novel in the sense that it's about a detective or other figure solving a crime. It's a mystery novel in the sense that it is not very clear what is going on in the book, it's not very clear who these people are or what they are doing or why they are doing it. So though We Have Always Live in the Castle is decidedly not science fiction in the sense that it has no scientific divergence from our world, it felt like science fiction to me in the sense that you as the reader have to work out the rules of this strange world you're reading about. It's a mystery where the world itself is the mystery! How is that not science fiction? So for me, going in blind just enhanced the pleasure I got from it.
All this is to say that I NEVER SHOULD HAVE READ THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE BACK COVER BLURB. I have the 2024 reprint in the "Penguin Modern Classics: Crime & Espionage" series (great cover, by the way), and in big letters at the top of the back cover, it reveals a key ambiguity about the text. Now, thankfully, this didn't catch my eye until I was halfway through the book or so—but I'd still rather have never seen it at all. Yes, it phrases things ambiguously, but in doing so, it makes you think about the question it poses directly, whereas it seemed to me that the power of the novel derived from the slow dawning realization of the reader that this thing the back cover poses must be true. You figure out how the world works—and it's horrifying. But thanks to the back cover, it's more like, "What if the world works x way?" Well, even having it posed as a question means you realize it's possible for the world to work x way, instead of figuring it out for itself.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe everyone who's ever read this book went into it know the thing on the back cover. But it seems to me that the pleasure of the book was disrupted by the confirmation you get at the end of chapter 8 not hitting me like a horrifying ton of bricks. Instead I'd known what was going on for several chapters.
Writing this up, it occurs to me that there's actually two epistemic crises in the book (if not more). You (the reader) do not know how the world works. But additionally, the world does not work how you (the protagonist) thought it did. Even as you the reader work to carefully understand Merricat's weird little world, that world is disrupted by the entrance of an outside force, and her understanding begins to break down while yours is simultaneously built up. I hadn't thought of my concept of "epistemic crisis" that way before, but now I'm wondering if that's intrinsic to the way it works in all (the best) science fiction. Are we always simultaneously working to understand the way a world works even as the way that world works is being undermined? I feel like the answer is yes—this would work as a good description of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, for example. I don't know that I would have thought of putting We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Piranesi together otherwise, but it seems to me that if you like one of them, you would probably like the other.
No. XI (chs. 32-34) It’s entered on the ship’s log, and that’s the truest book as a man can write. (505)
As I had kind of predicted, after a heavy emphasis on Florence and Dombey in the previous installment, we totally stay away from the two of them here. The first chapter is about Captain Cuttle finding out that Walter's ship was destroyed at sea with no survivors. (My prediction, though: in the absence of a body, assume he will turn up alive in a later installment nonetheless.) Dickens does a great job with Cuttle's grief:
Because it ain’t one loss, but a round dozen. Where’s that there young schoolboy with the rosy face and curly hair, that used to be as merry in this here parlour, come round every week, as a piece of music? Gone down with Wal’r. Where’s that there fresh lad, that nothing couldn’t tire nor put out, and that sparkled up and blushed so, when we joked him about Heart’s Delight, that he was beautiful to look at? Gone down with Wal’r. Where’s that there man’s spirit, all afire, that wouldn’t see the old man hove down for a minute, and cared nothing for itself? Gone down with Wal’r. It ain’t one Wal’r. There was a dozen Wal’rs that I know’d and loved, all holding round his neck when he went down, and they’re a-holding round mine now! (505)
People claim that we didn't get the idea of a multiplicity of selves until modernism, but Charles Dickens has got it here!
This chapter, and the other two, continue the growing recognition of the villainy of Mr Carker. Mr Carker reacts coldly to Captain Cuttle's announcement of Walter's death, throwing him out of the firm. The next couple are honestly a bit confusing at first, because over halfway through this book, Dickens is apparrently still introducing new key characters! I thought at first they were from earlier chapters and I'd forgot them, but no. I guess if you think of each quarter of the novel as a "season" of a television show (which seems a pretty good analogy, pacing-wise), it makes sense to introduce some new regular cast members at the beginning of season three.
Anyway, the new character here is Harriet, the sister of the two Carker brothers; in this chapter, she has a conversation with a mysterious man about John, the disgraced one; there are also hints that Mr Carker is up to something as regards Edith, Dombey's new wife. Harriet then dispenses some assistance to a homeless woman.
Then, in the next chapter, we learn more about the homeless woman, another new character, named Alice—but like Harriet, related to a preexisting character, Good Mrs Brown, the street woman who way back in installment no. iii took advantage of Florence. Alice is Mrs Brown's daughter, recently returned from transportation to Australia. Here, we learn that 1) Good Mrs Brown has been keeping tabs on the Dombeys ever since then, and 2) they both have some reason to hate Mr Carker. Upon Alice realizing it was Carker who helped her, she and her mother actually go back to Harriet's house and return the assistance she got. Wow! How all this is going to weave together, but provided I can keep track of it all, I am interested to find out.
No. XII (chs. 35-38) 'Polly, my gal,' said Mr Toodle, with a young Toodle on each knee, and two more making tea for him, and plenty more scattered about – Mr Toodle was never out of children, but always kept a good supply on hand. (580)
Unlike most installments of Dombey and Son, this one has four chapters instead of three—I assume of somewhat shorter length, since I think all the installments are equally long. The first one here is the real standout, chronicling the return of Dombey and the new Mrs Dombey, Edith, from their honeymoon:
'And how my dearest Dombey did you find that delightfullest of cities, Paris?' she [Mrs Skewton, his mother-in-law] asked, subduing her emotion. 'It was cold,' returned Mr Dombey. 'Gay as ever,' said Mrs Skewton, 'of course.' 'Not particularly. I thought it dull.' (543)
There's a really beautiful, but sad, and powerfully written, scene as Dombey almost finds himself showing affection toward Florence. But then he realizes that the only time that Edith demonstrates any affection toward anyone is when she sees Florence; indeed, Edith is a totally different person in the presence of Florence. What exactly Edith is up to, we don't know, but it's clear the one person she has genuine affection toward is not even her own mother, but Florence. Dombey is still, so still that Florence and Edith take him to be asleep in his chair, and so he observes them in secret, discovering a different side to the two of them that he never gets to see under normal circumstances.
The motto of the book, its indictment of Dombey, might be best expressed through this exchange in chapter 35:
[Dombey:] 'I directed that no expense should be spared; and all that money could do, has been done, I believe.' 'And what can it not do, dear Dombey?' observed Cleopatra. 'It is powerful, Madam.' (544)
Obviously the trajectory of this novel is going to be Dombey learning that there are things more powerful than money... but at what cost is this knowledge going to come? For me, the most heartrending passage in this chapter was this exchange between a couple of Dombey's servants: "Cook leads a sigh then, and a murmur of 'Ah, it’s a strange world, – it is indeed!' and when it has
gone round the table, adds persuasively, 'but Miss Florence can’t
well be the worse for any change, Tom.' Mr Towlinson’s rejoinder,
pregnant with frightful meaning, is 'Oh, can’t she though!'" (542). It does seem quite probable to me that things are going to get worse for Florence before they get better; you can feel the tension rising through this chapter most excruciatingly. Poor Florence.
The other chapters here are less captivating but still important, showing the continuing deterioration (is that the right word? you can't deteriorate a thing that was never constructed to begin with) the Dombeys' new marriage, and the continuing negative influence of Carker.
Back in the opening quarter of the book, with Paul's schooling, there was a lot of Dickens's usual invective against bad systems of education; with Paul dead, we can't really get that, but there's still a little of it here, through the character of Rob, who is sent to a badly run charity school for the lower classes:
they never taught honour at the Grinders’ School, where the system that
prevailed was particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy. Insomuch,
that many of the friends and masters of past Grinders said, if this were what
came of education for the common people, let us have none. Some more rational
said, let us have a better one. But the governing powers of the Grinders’
Company were always ready for them, by picking out a few boys who had turned
out well in spite of the system, and roundly asserting that they could have
only turned out well because of it. Which settled the business of those
objectors out of hand, and established the glory of the Grinders’
Institution. (588-89)
This is the fourth in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xiii and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:
This isn't the first novelisation of a fourth Doctor story to be written by someone other than Terrance Dicks (that would be 1977's Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom), but it is the second, and it's the first one I've read in this sequence. And the author is no ordinary author; it's the Target debut of Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan on screen and would go on to write ten Doctor Who books for Target in total, more than anyone other than Dicks. (Though, of course, Marter is a very, very distant second. I don't have any of Marter's other novelisations, but two decades ago I did read Harry Sullivan's War.)
Almost certainly because of this, we get a strong sense of Harry here, much more than we saw in either The Loch Ness Monster (1976) or The Genesis of the Daleks (1976), where Harry often felt like an extra body in the room. Here, he is usually the viewpoint character for the strange discoveries on the Terra Nova (what Marter's book dubs the tv serial's "Space Station Nerva"), and while sometimes flabbergasted, he also occasionally contributes good ideas to the proceedings. I particularly liked a segment (added by Marter) where, while Sarah Jane is crawling through the space station ducts with the power cable, he tugs out an encouraging-but-patronizing message on it in Morse!
Equally, though, Marter has a good command of Tom Baker's Doctor in his flippant but foreboding mood, continuing the improvement we've seen in this area since The Pyramids of Mars (1976). It makes sense—standing alongside Tom Baker for a year's worth of recordings would probably give you a pretty good sense of the way he plays the Doctor!
The weak spot here is thus probably Sarah; Marter uses the Doctor and Harry as his main focalizing characters (sometimes switching which one within a paragraph, which is a bit jarring to a modern reader used to these things being more clearly demarcated), and tends only to use Sarah when there's no other option. Though as someone else pointed out to me, Sarah often has little to do in the actual stories on screen; it's only because of Lis Sladen's performance that she comes across as a strong character, Lis being a gifted actor who could do a lot with a little!
I don't know anything about Marter as a person, but based on this, I wonder if he read science fiction growing up; I feel like this book demonstrates an affinity for sf lingo and concepts you don't quite see in Terrance Dicks, whose interests seem elsewhere (in the adventure and the action and the history). I couldn't tell you why exactly, but in the book's somewhat moody, somewhat elliptical tone, it made me think of Fritz Leiber's sf from the 1950s and '60s, like The Big Time and The Wanderer; Marter is certainly the right age to have read Leiber growing up. Anyway, I sometimes found transitions confusing, but otherwise this is a solid piece of atmospheric sf; like some of the first Doctor books I read for my previous project, I think you could (Doctor and company aside) imagine this standing alone as a novel in a way that's not quite true of a Terrance Dicks effort.
Gina Wickwar's second Oz book following The Hidden Prince of Oz is also the last one published by the International Wizard of Oz Club. It came out over eighteen years ago, the longest gap the Oz Club has ever had between continuation novels (the previous record was seven years between Ozmapolitan and Wicked Witch and between Wicked Witch and Hidden Prince). I'm guessing this means no more continuation novels for the foreseeable future; my understanding is the Oz Club printed way more copies than there was demand for the books, and now the physical supply is something of an albatross. (According to some articles I read about Wickwar, she was working on a third Oz book, a sequel to Queen Zixi of Ix called Queen Zixi in Oz, but there's no sign of it many years later.)
Toto of Oz by Gina Wickwar illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool
Published: 2006 Acquired: June 2024 Read aloud: December 2024–January 2025
For Hidden Prince and Toto, at least, there is a faint whiff of "why bother?" about it all. I don't mean that in a mean way, but previous Oz Club publications had been further installments by Royal Historians (Ruth Plumly Thompson, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw, Rachel Cosgrove Payes), or those associated with them (Dick Martin), giving them something of an official imprimatur. Hidden Prince and Toto, though, are indistinguishable from so many of the other latter-day canon-consistent Oz publications from the likes of Emerald City Press or Hungry Tiger Press or the Royal Publisher of Oz.
In this one, Toto loses his growl again (the previous occasion being a somewhat underexplained subplot in Lost Princess) and sets out on a quest to find it again, alone, being too proud to tell everyone else what's wrong. Meanwhile, in the Scotlandesque country of Kiltoon, King Firth the Fourth's bride-to-be vanishes on their wedding day, causing the royal poet to venture forth on a quest... though not to find princess, but to kidnap Toto and bring back to Kiltoon to cheer up the king, who loves dogs. Meanwhile meanwhile, an orphan boy named Davy is whisked away from Louisville, Kentucky on the day of the Derby along with a horse named Lollipop; when they arrive in Oz, they find out that some enchantment prevents Lollipop from speaking, unlike most animals in Oz, the solution to which can be found in Kiltoon.
Like Hidden Prince, it has a Ruth Plumly Thompson vibe, and like Hidden Prince, I found it a bit weak... though I did enjoy it more than Hidden Prince. Hidden Prince was overstuffed with returning and original characters, and though there are probably still a bit too many here, it's not as overwhelming as in Hidden Prince. Sonny probably doesn't need McTavish the hoot owl with him, though, a character we are often told is grumpy but rarely seems to do anything actually grumpy; Davy and Lollipop don't need to be joined by a pair of living condiments, but thankfully, Wickwar seems to realize that herself, because she packs them off pretty quickly (similar to moves made in other overcrowded Oz books, like Hidden Valley). To that subplot's benefit, Toto has just one other character, Gladstone the guinea pig (he's a pig who makes gold guineas, a joke totally lost on the children of 2025, or indeed I suspect, 2006).
Still, I think all three subplots would have benefited from more characterful moments, the kind of thing the McGraws were so good at in Merry Go Round. Davy and Lollipop would have benefited from stronger interaction; their emotional bond should have been a key part of the book, a thing Thompson was great at with her human/animal pairs, like Pompa and Kabumpo, Ojo and Snuffer, Speedy and Terrybubble, Tompy and Yankee, or even David and Humpty. It's trickier to do if the animal can't speak, but Baum managed to give Hank more of a personality in Tik-Tok of Oz before he could talk than Lollipop gets here. Similarly, I think Gladstone could have been put to better use; surely Toto's character arc ought to have been him overcoming his pride and learning to accept help, but it's strangely muted if that's what Wickwar was going for.
Still, though, I found this fun to read aloud. The Scottish kingdom of Kiltoon (like many of Thompson's vaguely European pocket kingdoms, in the Gilliken country) lends itself to a lot of enjoyable accents, though my Scottish is a bit hit-or-miss! Queen Finna (who turns out to be a sea fairy from Baum's The Sea Fairies) is a great villain, one my kid loved to hate, even if I found the parameters of her exile to Oz somewhat underexplained. There are also, somewhat unusually for an Oz book, a few scenes of physical peril that kept my kid on edge, such as attacks by various guards. And though few post-Thompson authors have been as good as her or Baum for coming up with interesting weird places to visit, Wickwar's rate is above average, with the Dog Pound and the Isle of Sandwich.
Like a lot of Thompson novels, though, the ending is a bit of a letdown, with Ozma and Dorothy using the Magic Belt to just appear in Kiltoon and sort everything out, though Wickwar does manage to give most of the main characters a nice moment of heroism or two. And unlike in Lost Princess, we actually do get an explanation of what happened to Toto's growl! And indeed, my kid was hooked to this idea of re-losing the growl.
So overall fairly enjoyable; I would read a third Oz book from Wickwar if it continues to upward trend, though at this point it feels somewhat unlikely.
Once again, I went into a Black Panther miniseries with low expectations, and once again, I was pleasantly surprised. Captain America / Black Panther is a "flashback" story set during World War II, showing how Captain America and the Howling Commandos came to Wakanda to stop the Nazis from stealing vibranium, meeting the then-current Black Panther. This was something we originally learned about in a brief flashback story during Christopher Priest's run, here expanded to four issues. Though I think in that story, the Black Panther was T'Challa's father T'Chaka, whereas here it's T'Challa's grandfather... whose real name I'm pretty sure we never actually get now that I think about it. The Marvel web site tells me his name is Azzuri, which sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't remember in which previous story we learned that.
from Captain America / Black Panther #2
Anyway, this might be branded as a Captain America / Black Panther story, but I actually felt like neither man was the protagonist. Black Panther, as my comments above indicate, is a largely mysterious presence here. More of a heroic ally than a hero, he doesn't make any big decisions or choices, just assists the the other characters in doing what needs to be done. Captain America's role is pretty straightforward heroism, punching Nazis, etc. I did wonder if there was space to do more with him confronting racism, but there are a couple nice touches there, as Black Panther asks him to imagine what race will look like in the country the Captain goes back to after the war.
No, the real protagonist is one of the Howling Commandos, Gabe Jones. Gabe is a black man in an otherwise white unit almost a decade before the American armed forces were integrated in real life. Gabe narrates the series, and finds his loyalties tested—does he owe his allegiance to the nation that discriminates against him because of his race, or to the country where people who look like him can live in utopia? Hudlin gives us a number of interesting sequences where he weighs up the ways different people react to him, from Steve Rogers to his fellow commandos to Black Panther to the Nazis. His decisions are the most significant ones of the story, and I really enjoyed what writer Reginald Hudlin did with him, giving a real heart and emotional core to what otherwise might have been a generic superhero punch-up.
from Captain America / Black Panther #1
Denys Cowan pencils; he's done a number of Black Panther stories, and I've enjoyed his work on them, especially the 1988 miniseries, as well as elsewhere in DC series like All-Star Comics and Convergence: Detective Comics. He does great here as well, with good character focus and decent action.
I thought this would probably be generic punch-up, and based on Hudlin's other writing (which tends to neither be hit nor miss, if that makes sense), I wasn't expecting much. But this is certainly the best Black Panther comic I've read from him, with solid superheroics and using the framework of black utopianism to tell a story with surprising depth.
Flags of Our Fathers originally appeared in issues #1-4 of Captain America / Blank Panther (June-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Reginald Hudlin; penciled by Denys Cowan; inked by Klaus Janson (#1-2), Tom Palmer (#3-4), and Sandu Florea (#4); colored by Pete Pantazis; lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Axel Alonso.
No. VIII (Chs. 23-25) Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles, very good people, resided in a pretty villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames; which was one of the most desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be going past, but had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and shrubbery. (375)
I feel like Dombey and Son is drifting a bit in this installment, languishing. It's not bad... but I'm also still not quite clear where the novel is going following from the death of Paul Dombey. In these chapters, we follow Florence mostly, with a bit also about Uncle Sol and Captain Cuttle. Probably this is all going somewhere... but where?
If the novel has a main point, though, it's clearly Florence's emotional deprivation. In this installment, Florence overhears the aunt of an orphan talking to her charge about Florence: "your
misfortune is a lighter one than Florence’s; for not an orphan in the
wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living
parent’s love" (381). There are a lot of emotionally deprived orphans (or seeming orphans, e.g., Great Expectations) in Dickens, but (perhaps I'm forgetting something) I can't think of any nonorphans so deprived as Florence. How bad is it to have a parent who doesn't love you, doesn't even hate you, just doesn't think of you at all? All the stuff about Florence is sort of quietly devastating, and for me anyway, she's emerging as one of Dickens's best female characters.
I'm not really sure where this is all going to go, but I continue to mostly enjoy the journey.
No. IX (chs. 26-28) Am I hitting some kind of mid-book slump? Again, an installment I was mostly pretty "meh" on—except for the stuff about Florence, of course, who I continue to have great empathy for. I think the problem is when there's too much stuff about Dombey himself (and his social circle). But all that does lead somewhere in this one, which is... Dombey is getting remarried! What implications will this have for Florence, who doesn't even get to meet her new mother prior to the engagement? I would say it can't make her life worse, but there's over half the novel to go, so it probably will.
What is up with Mr Carker? I don't trust that guy. You might object to a key character only emerging halfway through a novel, but I guess that's serialization for you. Indeed, I like the way he's slowly emerging as a figure of significance. (Douglas Adams does something similar with a minor character in the Doctor Who serial The Pirate Planet.) ((I am willing to bet no one has ever compared these two texts before.))
No. X (chs. 29-31) Say what you will about our man Charles Dickens, but he knows how to pace a serial. Dombey and Son consists of nineteen parts, but the last is double-length (a two-part finale), so the end of installment no. x is the exact midpoint of the novel. At the end of the first quarter, Paul Dombey died; at the end of the second quarter, Mr Dombey gets remarried.
But poor Florence! What is going to happen to her? Dombey's new in-laws are clearly up to something (I am a bit worried I should know what this is but that I glazed over it when I was bored in a previous installment, but I'm sure I'll figure it out), and Dombey's new wife clearly has regrets about it... but is willing to go forward with the plan anyway.
This installment basically totally revolves around the lead-up to the wedding. It has been a while, actually, since we have checked in on some of the side characters. Soon, I am guessing? But in the meantime, I continue to be very into the trajectory of Florence, surely one of Dickens's most put-upon female characters!
This is the third in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xi and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:
This summer, when I was running my Star Trek Adventures campaign, I was also watching season two of Strange New Worlds. (Me to my wife: "'I fly the ship' is clearly Ortegas's Value.") When I got to the episode "Under the Cloak of War," I went, "I want to do that!" Specifically, "Under the Cloak of War" is a flashback about what a couple characters did during the Federation-Klingon War before the series started; it has a much different tone to the rest of SNW.
