Where Female Doctor Who Fans Are At

Trade paperback, 186 pages
Published 2010
Acquired January 2011
Read May 2012

Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It
edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O'Shea

Though I was first excited when I first heard of Chicks Dig Time Lords, by the time it came for me to read it, my initial enthusiasm had waned.  In the interim, even though the book won the Hugo(!), I'd read several lukewarm reviews from folks whose opinions I trusted, and I'd also read She's Such a Geek!: Women Write About Science, Technology & Other Nerdy Stuff, an anthology with a similar premise-- get women to write about their geeky passions-- that I'd found somewhat repetitive and uninsightful.

Perhaps it was because of these diminished expectations, but I ended up enjoying Chicks Dig Time Lords more than I didn't.  Though I think you could level a charge at it that too many essays are about Americans (seriously, do no British women like Doctor Who?) who grew up watching the show on PBS (seriously, where are those flocks of women who came in with the new show?) and love organized fandom (seriously, does no one out there enjoy the actual show for being itself?), the essays themselves are good enough to overcome that. I won't comment on all the essays here, just the somehow-noteworthy ones:

One of the first essays in the book is Carole E. Barrowman's "Time is Relative," which chronicles what it was like growing up as Doctor Who fans with her younger brother-- especially when her younger brother is John Barrowman, who of course went on to play Captain Jack in Doctor Who and Torchwood.  Relatively entertaining.  Coeditor Lynne Thomas also turns in a good essay about "Marrying Into the TARDIS Tribe," which has some touching Elisabeth Sladen moments in it. (Poor Lis.)  Seanan McGuire's confession of love for Adric (who she was convinced was real) was absolutely hilarious.

The best of the personal essays was definitely "Two Generations of Fangirls in Middle America," about Amy Fritsch and her daughter who is growing up on the show.  Adorable, and my kids had better like Doctor Who just as much.

I came to Doctor Who Magazine too late for "The Life and Time of Jackie Jenkins" column, about the personal life of a "single white Who fan," but I enjoyed "Being Jackie Jenkins: Memoirs from a Parallel Universe" nonetheless.  It's a funny look at the strange period of Doctor Who fandom between 1996 and 2005, when increasingly odd things were required to discuss... but it's relevant to everyone's fandom experience, I expect.  I'll probably pick up the book of Jackie Jenkins's collected columns that's recently come out.

I didn't expect to like the essays about fandom activities, but I did: Johanna Mead's "Costuming: More Productive Than Drugs, But Just as Expensive" was actually pretty interesting, even if there are some irrelevant tangents.  Even more fun was Jennifer Adams Kelly's "Rutle-ing The Doctor: My Long Life in Doctor Who Fandom," where she talks about making fanvids over the years.  I was expecting Tara O'Shea's essay about running the "green room" at ChicagoTARDIS to be very "insider"-- oh ho ho, look at me, how cool am I with my hobnobbing-- but it was actually a very interesting examination of a job I hadn't thought much about. (If you're wondering, my prejudice against organized fandom is simply my prejudice against all groups that I do not belong to.) The only one of these that strongly didn't work for me was Christa Dickson's "In Defense of Smut," which doesn't manage to find anything more interesting to say about smut than, "Well, I like it, so there."

There were also essays that weren't memoir, usually analyzing gender components of the show.  Lloyd Rose tackles the "problem of Rose" in "What's a Girl To Do?" and comes the closest of anyone to convincing me that there is a problem of Rose-- though I'm still not convinced.  The best of these was definitely "Girl Genius: Nyssa of Traken" by Francesca Coppa, a stirring tribute to an oft-neglected but excellent companion. (Like so many, though, she's shined much brighter after the series than during it; I love her rapport with the fifth Doctor in the audio dramas.)

On the other hand, "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Have We Really Come That Far?" by Shoshana Magnet and Robert Smith? is an unconvincing and mean-spirited examination of gender in the new series, more interested in scoring points than saying anything interesting. And though K. Tempest Bradford's "Martha Jones: Fangirl Blues" is well-written and makes some good points, it seems to think that Martha was somehow a successful character in spite of her creators, not because of them.

I also enjoyed the interviews: we get Sophie Aldred (Ace in the 1980s), who is great, but best of all, my first companion love, India Fisher, who played Charley Pollard opposite Paul McGann. My only complaint about these interviews is that there weren't more of them; there have been plenty more interesting women affiliated with Doctor Who over the years.  I mean-- Laura Doddington, who played Zara in Key 2 Time!? Who cares? At least get Maggie Stables in!

And, of course, the comic by the creators of "Torchwood Babiez" (Tammy Garrison and Katy Shuttleworth) is every bit as delightful as you'd expect.

There are, as you imagine, some essays that are boring or dull or repetitive, but those simply fade from the mind as you read, leaving you with an interesting and varied set of essays about the experience of being a fan of a marvelous show-- all of which just happen to be written by women. This is perhaps what She's Such a Geek! should have been, and I'm sorry it took me so long to get around to reading it. (But then, I always am.)

Audio Catchup: Doctor Who: The Jupiter Conjunction

written by Eddie Robson

directed by Ken Bentley

released May 2012

starring

Peter Davison as the Doctor
Janet Fielding as Tegan Jovanka
Mark Strickson as Vislor Turlough
Sarah Sutton as Nyssa

Doctor Who #160: The Jupiter Conjunction

Though I enjoyed Big Finish’s first trilogy that reunited the Fifth Doctor with Nyssa, Tegan, and Turlough (Cobwebs, The Whispering Forest, The Cradle of the Snake), it didn’t push its TARDIS team into must-buy status for me, and thus I gave a miss to the second trilogy — and I’d intended to do so to the third.

But there I was, reading reviews for The Jupiter Conjunction, a release which had been overshadowed in my mind by the fact that Big Finish was bringing back Magnus Greel in a prequel to The Talons of Weng-Chiang in the final instalment of this trilogy. As usual, I had grumbled sight unseen about the return of yet another villain from the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era; I’m still waiting for Kandyman II: Sweeties’ Revenge. Anyway, many of the reviews of The Jupiter Conjunction were saying that it was a nice, solid story, the sort that wouldn’t knock the world over but perhaps was the kind of thing Doctor Who should generally aspire to.

( Read more... )

Where Our Minds Are Going

Trade paperback, 280 pages
Published 2011 (content: 2010)
Acquired November 2011
Read May 2012

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr

I skimmed this book a lot when I was trying to find a chapter to pull out and teach to my students (as a companion to M. T. Anderson's novel Feed, which covers the same topic in many ways). I knew that Carr would hate me for that, so I resolved the read the whole book some day.  I'm glad I did; this is a very effective expansion of Carr's notorious article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Carr lines up his ducks quite nicely. He starts by demonstrating that the way we think is shaped by the way we read, and that the way we read is shaped by the technologies we possess, by giving a broad overview of the history of print, heavily drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Elizabeth Eistenstein. There were a lot of things I knew here, but also ones I didn't-- loved the assertion (I think it came from Ong) that we couldn't have had the scientific revolution without the printing press. From there, he discusses research into how we think is presently being reshaped by the Internet and other electronic technologies.  It's hard not to argue with any of his conclusions-- these things are almost certainly happening. Sometimes his arguments boil down to "McLuhan was right all along," but given that we've forgotten that, it's worth repeating.

What are we to do about it?  That's where I wish that Carr had gone further. It's fine for his article to not delve into potential actions, but in a book-length work it seems like something of an oversight and misstep. I'm trying to cut down on my Internet use, for what it's worth, but that's hard to do with a brain like mine in a world like ours.

Where Our Words Come From

Trade paperback, 180 pages
Published 2007
Acquired December 2007
Read May 2012

The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Words

by Anu Garg

This book is essentially a collection of etymological trivia, each chapter presenting a group of word origins on a common theme. For example, one is about words to do with food, another words named after fictional characters, another just about words derived from Dickens characters!  It's a decent little book, with some good information, and some forgettable stuff.  By far my favorite word origin was that of the titular dord, which meant "density"... just from 1934 to 1939.  Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation. (To my disappointment, I couldn't find anything in Google Books from the period where someone actually used dord.) Esquivalience also has a pretty good origin, too.

The book has its annoying tics. The footers all have "word puzzles" in them, with questions like "What words begin and end with the letters und?"  They're okay, mostly forgettable, but some got on my nerves.  Especially one where the question was merely "How are legislators like allegorists?"; the answer is that they're anagrams, a lame puzzle that tells you nothing clever about either word.  Even worse is the fact that "anagram" isn't defined until a puzzle that comes fifteen pages later!

The book feels like it comes from the 1990s sometimes, with a lot of Bill Gates jokes. And Garg is the only person I've ever heard claim that google has become a generic synonym for "to search"-- not Internet search, but as in the usage "I googled my keys." Has anyone ever really said that?  Also, he seems to think that the Romans, led by Julius Caesar, once declared war on Pompeii!

Those quibbles aside, this was a decent, light read.  I'm going to be trotting out that dord anecdote for years to come.

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Alternate Timelines

Hardcover, 202 pages
Published 2006
Acquired February 2012
Read May 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield VII: Something Changed

edited by Simon Guerrier

This Bernice Summerfield anthology has a somewhat odd premise: a man named Doggles brings a "history machine" to the Braxiatel Collection just after the emotionally devastating events of Parallel Lives.  At the end of the first chapter (Simon Guerrier's "Inappropriate Laughter"), the history machine malfunctions, and the devastating consequences are explored in the second chapter (James Swallow's "Siege Mentality"). But at the end of that chapter, everyone dies, and there's another second chapter (Joseph Lidster's "Dead Mice") where we pick up again in a reality where the machine malfunctioned in a different way.  And so the book goes again and again, sometimes picking up immediately after the malfunction, sometimes months or decades later, but always showing a different possibility.

What stops the book from feeling like a collection of pointless alternate-timeline stories is that they all use the premise as a way to create genuine insights into Bernice herself and her supporting cast. I didn't fully understand what was happening in "Dead Mice," but it was a great look into Braxiatel and his levels of manipulation, as is "Family Man" by Ian Mond.  Pete Kemphshall's "Acts of Senseless Devotion," where Bernice is blinded and her son is dying, showed the all-too-plausible depths to which Bernice might sink to save her son.  Jason Kane gets a good showing in Dave Hoskin's "Writing in Green," where he attempts to show Benny the depth of his love with the help of Hass, the Collection's Ice Warrior gardener.  Another dark story was Ian Farrington's "A Murderous Desire," where someone kills Doggles.  Very dark actions from all of our main characters, but seemingly all too plausible.

Of the stories that picked up much later, I most liked Eddie Robson's "Match of the Deity," where Benny and Doggles are reunited eight years later to try to return a religious artifact to an alien planet, with hilarious consequences.  But even though it's set eight years in an alternate future, it still tells us something of both Bernice and Doggles.

Some take odder approaches, but that's okay.  In Ben Aaronovitch's "Walking Backwards for Christmas," the history machine makes Bernice relive her own past, and thus we get a great story of the little-explored period where Bernice was at a military academy and subsequently went AWOL. It's neat to see a very different, but very recognizable Benny. I also liked Dave Stone's "There and Back Again," where Jason uses the constantly shifting timelines to try to help his other selves break free from Braxiatel's conditioning.  Poor guy.

A couple, though, I couldn't see how the worlds they showed were related to the premise at all.  Why is Bernice fighting with a fanatical resistance army in "The God Gene" by Ben Woodhams? No one really ever says. Or why is Bernice fighting for the Fifth Axis in "The Ice Garden" by Jonathan Clements? I have no idea (though it yields the excellent cover image).

Those are just two stories, though, out of an excellent bunch. Once again, Simon Guerrier has knocked it out of the park with a Bernice Summerfield anthology: we have here a collection of deeply character-driven, unique sf stories, which only an open-ended, multi-author series like this could do. A variety of voices and styles, all giving their perspectives on a small group of people, but able to do almost anything like them. Excellent stuff, which once again has me excited for the continuation of the Bernice line.

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Novellas' Curse

Hardcover, 218 pages
Published 2006
Acquired February 2012
Read May 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield VI: Parallel Lives

by Rebecca Levene, Stewart Sheargold & Dave Stone

Ms Jones, the Braxiatel Collection's venerable administrator who made the mistake of falling in love, is gone. Bernice Summerfield is sent out to track her down in an anthology that, like A Life in Pieces, is made up of three closely-linked novellas.

Well, sort of. The collection is bound together by some typically strong writing from Simon Guerrier, who writes a four-part story that precedes and follows each of the novellas. This leads into the first, "The Serpent's Tooth" by Rebecca Levene, where Bernice finds herself on an out-of-the-way planet where Ms Jones has been sighted-- a planet where women are required to cover themselves up completely and hide from sight. So, she disguises herself as a man and soon finds herself involved in a quest to win the hands of the daughters of the king. As you do. Levene writes a story that does what the best Bernice stories do, moving between light humor and dark implications, sketching in a commentary on gender relations that almost seems worthy of Ursula K. Le Guin. Levene was the editor of the New Adventures for much of Bernice's run in the title, and she clearly gets what makes the character work.

As in A Life in Pieces, the middle novella features Adrian and Bev Tarrant on their own adventure. "Hiding Places" is the prose debut of Stewart Sheargold, who wrote two crazy Bernice audios (The Mirror Effect and The Masquerade of Death), and his experimental tendencies turn out to be fantastic in novella format. As Adrian and Bev try to find Ms Jones in a strange hotel, he gives us great prose, terrifying events, and some great characterization for these two oft-underused leads. Between this and Sutton's novella in A Life in Pieces, these characters are being handled very well, and I hope the line keeps this up-- and that we get to see some of this depth given to the actors playing the characters in the audio dramas.

Lastly we come to Dave Stone's "Jason and the Bandits; or, O, Jason, Where Art Thou?" I wanted to like this story, I really did. It features Jason trying to catch up with Benny when he's heard of what's going on, but a series of increasingly unlikely events keep him away. It's a good idea and a really fun story, but it conflicts completely with the tone of the other two novellas and the linking material-- much as happened with Dave Stone's contribution to A Life in Pieces. You can have one oddball story in an anthology of dozens of short stories, but I don't think it works in a collection of novellas, where it means that a whole third of the book is off on a weird tangent. Especially when it it's the last novella in the book, coming just before the incredible climax.

For incredible it is. Guerrier once again shows his depth of understanding of Bernice and her supporting cast, and that last line is oh-so-sad, to boot...

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Return of the Standalone Novel

Hardcover, 179 pages
Published 2005
Acquired January 2012
Read May 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield #7: The Tree of Life

by Mark Michalowski

The last attempt at a standalone Professor Bernice Summerfield novel, The Big Hunt, was pretty unimpressive, part of that deriving from the fact that it felt like it took place to a rootless character with no history before the book.  The Tree of Life avoids that problem nicely, beginning and ending on the Braxiatel Collection, and in a way that actually sets up what's to come in the next few books.  Even beyond that, though, Bernice is better characterized then she has been in some of her other novels; though plot obviously dominates as it does in this type of sf novel, Michalowski keeps her lively by keeping the narration Bernice's voice, and also bringing Joseph along, who gives Bernice someone to spark against.  Obviously this is less essential in prose than in audio (which is usually the only medium where Joseph is really used), but it actually works well here, too.

The plot, which once again feature evil corporate types, isn't terribly innovative, but some cool ideas do come up in the course of its unfolding, most especially in the very well-depicted climax.  All in all, this is a decent adventure, but the Bernice novels really do pale before the audios, anthologies, and novellas, making me glad that after this, Big Finish largely abandoned the format for Bernice's continuing adventures.

Computer Games... in Space!

Trade paperback, 357 pages
Published 2012 (content: 2011-12)
Acquired March 2012
Read June 2012

Constellation Games: A Space Opera Soap Opera
by Leonard Richardson

What kinds of videogames would aliens make? Maybe I'm simply unaware of it, but I'm pretty sure this topic has never been tackled by science fiction before.  In Constellation Games, humanity makes contact with the Constellation, a Star Trek-esque conglomeration of alien species working together in a post-scarcity society.  The first thought of the government is that it's an invasion. The first thought of Ariel Blum, a freelance computer programmer who mostly works on a series of Brazilian games about ponies for girls, is that he wants to review the aliens' games on his blog.

Constellation Games alternates between Ariel's blog and straight first-person narration from Ariel, with chat conversations and letters and such interspersed.  The Constellation takes a multifaceted approach to their contact with Earth, and so Ariel soon finds himself in possession of a replica of a millions-of-years-old Constellation gaming console, along with tons of games.  It's a short hop from the idea of reviewing a game to porting one; he wants to help his fellow human understand aliens by releasing one of their games.

Without a doubt, the best parts of Constellation Games are the game reviews.  There are several alien species in the Constellation and we not only see games for multiple species, but games that one of those species made off another, and yet Richardson never fails to communicate the alien nature of the games while still making them seem like plausible games.  I loved these sections: the game Sayable Spice, where the player collects components of taste molecules, comes up a lot, but Blum (and Richardson) show how a good game doesn't just have an interesting mechanic; it can say something, too.  There's one bit where Ariel plays a game called Gatekeeper where you guard the boundary between life and death, "let[ting] normal traffic through, while flicking away dead people who shouldn't be living (zombies) and living people who shouldn't be dying (suicides?)" (33). Ariel's alien contact, Curic, sends him a message to dispute that they are not zombies, they're people who "want a refund." Ariel says that's the same thing, and she replies:

Curic: Zombies are fully dead people who come back to life for no reason.
What you are seeing is when one half of a person dies, the other half wants a refund.
Otherwise the entire person will die in a few hours.
ABlum: who gives out the refunds?
Curic: There are no refunds.
That's the point of the game. (35)

A whole alien biology and culture, expressed via inscrutable game mechanics!

Even aside from that, it's a surprisingly good novel.  I guess I was expecting something like Taft 2012, the last high-concept sf novel I read, but Richardson gives Blum a strong narrative voice, that while idiosyncratic, never grates, and surrounds him with characters that perhaps initially seem stereotypical, but soon begin to betray extra levels of depth, both human and alien. Tetsuo Milk, the alien paleontologist who eventually becomes a history lecturer at the University of Texas, was probably my favorite, and the transcript of his first lecture is amazing. There are even some bits that approach being genuinely moving.  It's also funny at times-- you can't underestimate the importance of that!  The Constellation are a well fleshed out group of aliens, who avoid feeling too stereotypical in their types of social interactions (I loved the idea of "overlays").

At 357 pages, the plot meanders a bit.  The back cover and some early passages imply there's a conspiracy to uncover, but that turns out to not be true at all; the plot is much more character focused.  As such, the book ends the way that people's experiences actually end: frustratingly open-ended.  What happens to Ariel and his friends next?  I find myself wanting to know, but I'm not dissatisfied with the way the book ended; it came to the exact right spot.

Constellation Games is a love letter to videogames and certain elements of geek culture, that's for sure, but it's not a polemic; it shows both the marvelous possibilities of gaming, but also how it often fails to achieve its full potential-- and why.  It's an engaging, original way to explore an alien society, but also ourselves, like all the best science fiction should.  I rocketed through it (often drawn into a chapter on the basis of just reading that next game review), and I'd happily read more sf by Richardson should he choose to write it.

Victorian Obscenity: Return to Christminster

Trade paperback, 451 pages
Published 1998 (content: 1894-95)
Acquired November 2006
Previously read September 2007 and March 2010
Reread May 2012

Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy

Is three times in five years too much for one book?  Maybe.  I found myself less invested this time out.  "But nobody did come, because nobody does" is still the saddest sentence in literature, though.  On this read, I found myself much more aggravated by Sue than I have been in the past.  Figure out what you want, geeze!

Victorian Industry: Return to Milton-Northern

Trade paperback, 480 pages
Published 1996 (content: 1854-55)
Acquired January 2009
Previously read February 2009
Reread April 2012

North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell

Every time I read an Elizabeth Gaskell novel, I fall in love with its protagonist, and declare that she is the best protagonist in all Gaskell.  So, as I read several Gaskell novels in succession this spring, Mary Barton was quickly dethroned by Molly Gibson, who was in turn supplanted by Margaret Hale.

What I love about Margaret (and thus North and South) is how Gaskell shows that inaction is actually an incredibly difficult action to perform.  Margaret is often put into situations where she must not say or do anything, and yet she wants to so much.  Us enlightened twenty-first century folks are quick to criticized the Victorian concept of the "angel in house" because women can do more things than manage a kitchen, but Gaskell takes a different tack here, showing how awful and unfair it is to put someone into the position of being the emotional support for an entire family.  Yet Margaret bears it with as little complaint as possible, managing to be successful in most cases.  It's hard work, but she manages to do it, and we love her for it.

I find that I enjoy Gaskell's implicit social commentary.  Rarely does any Gaskell character come out and say something like, "I think the strictures against female action are wrong," but instead she has a series of awful complications ensue from those strictures.  When you sit down and think about it, you realize that if women were allowed to express themselves more readily, much of this novel would never have happened.  (Good for the characters, I suppose, even if it is bad for me.)  Margaret may be in an unenviable position, but we're never tempted to dismiss her as whiny or lazy thanks to the way Gaskell sets it up.  We're also kept well aware that there are worse positions in life to be in than Margaret's.

I also have to say that this is without a doubt the sexiest of Gaskell's novels.  Margaret's arms-- oh my!  And let us not forget that delicious silence...