Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume One by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth was the second first Doctor novelisation of the Target era, and the first by the venerable Terrance Dicks. Like The Tenth Planet (1976), it picks out a key moment from the series's history as yet unchronicled in prose, the return of the Daleks and the departure of Susan, an event mentioned but unseen in The Crusaders (1965).
People like to bandy about the word "workmanlike" when describing Terrance Dicks. I think Dalek Invasion shows the positives and negatives of that approach. He's not interested in making this a book book like the writers of those first three novelisations were... but on the other hand he's much better at writing a novelisation than Gerry Davis was with The Tenth Planet. (That said, he's got better source material to work with!) Terry Nation's original script features a lot of convoluted moving backward and forward across a devastated London and England, and Dicks captures that perfectly well, occasionally smoothing out some bits of the tv serial. (On screen, the Doctor says this preceded the events of The Daleks, but Dicks changes it to take place afterwards; there's one bit where Ian admits to himself that his plan doesn't make a lot of sense, which felt like a bit of a lampshade moment.)
My favorite part of the book was the first chapter or so, where the characters are exploring the deserted London. "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" is a fantastic opening line, one I knew before I even read the book. In fact, I once played a game called Liebrary with a number of friends where you get a card with the title, author, and synopsis of a famous book; each player then has to write down an imagined first line for the book (the genuine one is also included in the mix). If more people pick your line than any other, you score points. When Orwell's 1984 came up, in a moment of inspiration I wrote down "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" and won the round handily... even though most of my opponents were also English graduate students! Has Terrance ever written such a great line before or since?
The part that didn't quite work for me were the Daleks themselves. I think probably the Daleks are a bit tricky to capture on the page, but I don't know that Dicks even really tries; the famous cliffhanger where one comes up out of the Thames is curiously undramatic, and I don't think the book really sells you on their alien nature or their monstrousness. It seems to reckon (perhaps accurately) that you'll already know and care what a Dalek is because you've seen one on tv!
I read Dalek Invasion as part of The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume One, which collects five novelisations. A couple I already own, but I will save it to read The Wheel in Space when I get around to doing the second Doctor novelisations. The introduction by Frank Cottrell-Boyce is nice, and I do like the simple but elegant cover of the paperback edition, but the most interesting thing was that the list of famous fans of Terrance includes Sarah Waters, of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet fame. I would never have guessed! Does anyone know more about this? Googling "'sarah waters' 'terrance dicks'" just gets you the blurb for The Essential Terrance Dicks on a number of sites. (I did find a Guardian interview that says she was "a clever, solitary child lost in make-believe, reading widely 'but
nothing memorable', and watching 'an awful lot of telly, sci-fi, horror
and Doctor Who'" in the 1970s.) Maybe it's a cliché, but let's get her in to novelise a "Paternoster gang" story. Ooh, or a Thirteen/Yaz one.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: Galaxy Four
Pick of the month:Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson. I read a lot of good stuff this month—Primo Levi, Miracleman, Alif the Unseen. But I decided this based on what was the book I was most likely to go around enthusiastically recommending to someone, which was this neat sf murder mystery.
Collection published: 2016 Contents originally published: 1989-91 Previously read: March 2012 Acquired: March 2016 Reread: August 2024
Story: Neil Gaiman
Art: Mark Buckingham
Color Art: D'Israeli
Selected Painted Art: Mark Buckingham
Lettering: Todd Klein
Back when I originally got into Miracleman, this is the one volume I was actually able to source via interlibrary loan, so this is the one volume I have read before, in a 1993 trade paperback published by Eclipse. But, of course that time I lacked the context of the preceding three volumes by Alan Moore.
What Alan Moore did in the final issue of Olympus was genre-shifting: take the premise of the superhero genre to its logical conclusion. If superheroes use violence to improve the world, isn't their ultimate goal to force a utopia? In his continuation, Neil Gaiman extrapolates from that, telling us stories of what that utopian world might actually look like. The Golden Age contains a number of short stories from around the world of Miracleman; these issues were originally published 1989 through 1991, though it was two issues after this that right issues would result in the series fizzling out, only to be continued decades later.
Rereading my original review, I have to saw, I largely agree with my past self. Each of the stories here examines some aspect of what it might be like to live in a perfect world—and who are the people who might not fit, what are the ways in which people might be left behind. The only story I didn't really rate in my old review was the spy one, about how Miracleman sets up an artificial city for spies to play out their dramas because there's nothing for them in the new world; I dismissed it as derivative of The Prisoner. And maybe that's true, but the twist isn't the point. The point here is that the spies are all of us. So many of us would rather exist in comfortable but destructive routines than embrace an uncomfortable but perhaps redemptive way of living. (It reminds me of that Jameson canard about the end of capitalism versus the end of the world.)
Perhaps it's a hot take, but Mark Buckingham is probably the best artist on Miracleman so far, a series that has been blessed by a succession of admittedly strong artists! His beautiful work is well suited to the utopian vibes of the post-Miracleman Earth, but I also really like how adaptive he is, with lots of varied artistic styles across the book's eight chapters, always choosing one suited to the particular story being told.
It's almost a shame the series was continued. At the point I write this review, I've already read The Silver Age, and I kind of agree with something I wrote back when I read The Golden Age on its own a decade ago:
It's a shame that we'll apparently never see more of this story to come, but in a way, I like that. The Golden Age
explores the sadness that comes with the passing of a way of life, but
if what comes next is a genuine utopia, it really would be impossible
for there to be a sustained series of stories. The Golden Age
really only succeeds at that by using Miracleman as a god, not a
character. Without Gaiman's planned next two volumes, we'll never see
the degeneration and corruption of Miracleman's utopia, and we'll be
able to forever stop on that image of the people of Earth floating away
on balloons. It makes The Golden Age a much more unconventional
work than it might otherwise have been, one that shows a utopia that
though it has cause for sadness, has much larger cause for joy and
wonder.
"Abyss Station" is an installment of the "Living Campaign," a set of free Star Trek Adventuresgiven away on the Modiphius web site. I had it in mind as one we might do during my first STA campaign, but I never got around to it. A few things appealed:
It had an ancient mysterious structure, something that would tie well into the ongoing story arc of that campaign.
I read some comments about the mission somewhere (maybe on the STA subreddit) that made it sound fun.
One of my players in that campaign was always complaining that his character's Focus in "Philosophy" was useless, and this featured a philosophical debate.
When it came time to plan my new campaign, I realized it would slot well into my new story arc as well, tie into a new player's Focuses, have some good exploration/diplomacy stuff, and allow for the splitting up of the characters.
Thus it became the second episode of...
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53820.4. The Diversitas under my command has successfully completed its first mission, and we have resumed our journey through the Ekumene sector. Word from Ryuku indicates there have been no more Rock Beast attacks. However, the mysterious android corpse found among the members of Return to Harad is befuddling my crew…"
Planning the Mission
The premise of "Abyss Station" is that the player ship is summoned by Abyss Station, a Federation science outpost in the Omega Draconis system. The Omega Draconis system has a black hole for a primary (Omega Draconis A*, pronounced a-star), whose radiation jets provide dim light and heat to its sole planet, Omega Draconis I, inhabited by a prewarp civilization, the Ithik. The black hole is also orbited by an ancient alien facility of unknown origin. Abyss Station sent a landing party down to the facility but it didn't come back, and now the black hole is rotating, its radiation jets about to come into alignment with Omega Draconis I, which will render the planet uninhabitable.
The mission-as-written assumes your players will split up into two groups, one to explore the alien facility, seeking the away team and a cause as to why the black hole started rotating, and the other beaming down to Omega Draconis I to figure out if the Ithik can be evacuated.
There are some STA missions where I make lots of changes, either because I have a better (for me and my players) idea or because I want to tweak it to fit into my narrative. I actually did not make a lot of changes to this one, mostly just in the set-up. At the end of their first episode, my players discovered that one of the members of the terrorist cell they'd been battling was an android; this episode opened with them investigating the android (which was deactivated) to determine its origin. They found it used a mysterious element in its construction, and that the only other place in the sector known to contain that element was the alien facility orbiting Omega Draconis A*. I then laced some further clues into the episode; one of its reveals is that the Ithik have artificial mitochondria, and I had those too contain the mysterious element.
Other than that, I just fleshed out some bits. The mission as written is pretty vague about what the players might find inside the alien structure. I decided they would have three encounters and worked out what they would be:
a room with an ancient computer interface that they could try to get working again (if they did, it would reveal a video detailing the origin of the facility)
a room with a hostile robot and a chasm they'd have to cross, as well as an Extended Task to unlock the door to get out
a room with an injured member of the previous Starfleet team to visit the facility, who was in imminent danger of death but could not be stabilized in the room; I would do an Extended Consequences track that they would have to beat to get out
Additionally, I was going to lose one of my players for six weeks, so I worked that into the narrative. Joel, who plays the science officer, was going to command the away mission to the facility. His backstory included the idea that his body once got flooded with tachyons, sending him through time; I planned that an inopportune moment, a device in the alien facility would recharge him those tachyons and send him six weeks into the future... but where!?
A lot of elements of the mission as written fit well into my players' established characters and personalities. For example, the players have to convince the Ithik mayor there really is a threat requiring evacuation, and they need to go through his ministers; one suggested person is the Minister for Athletics, who challenges a player character to physical competition. Our security chief mostly relies on her brains and thus has a low Fitness score, setting up an interesting challenge! And our executive office has a backstory that she used to be a dancer, but struggled to fit this into her Vulcan need to suppress emotion; I also made a Minister for the Arts who could challenger her to a dance-off.
As always, I changed the title to be more pretentious. In this case, "A Terrible Autonomy." I also came across a quotation by Thomas Henry Huxley including the word "abyss" which I decided would make a good motto for Abyss Station, explaining both its somewhat portentous name and the logic of T'Lah, the villain of the story: “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”
Playing the Mission
I have seven regular players, plus Toren who steps in whenever the numbers are low; we also ended up with a visitor to one session. He just came to watch, but the number of players was such that I actually rolled up a support character for him to play.
Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 1-2)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer (3)
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-3)
Claire as Mooria Loonin, pilot (1-3)
Austin as Frector, security chief (2-3)
Forest as Alita Faraday, medical officer (1, 3)
Joel as Oliver Johnson, science officer (1)
Toren as Tronnen, counselor (1, 3)
[plus special guest star] Scott as Anthor, anthropologist (2)
I paced this one pretty well, with one session per act. In the "teaser" for the first episode, my players had a lot of questions about the android I had not anticipated! But I did get them on track with where I wanted them to go. I got a little bit of RP out of them when Oliver, nervous about how his first mission had gone, went to the ship's counselor. What resulted was a funny scene, where Tronnen, the Klingon counselor, advised the scrawny nerd that what he really needed to do was hit the holodeck and battle ten Klingon warriors for a good warm-up, and then twenty for a real workout.
the alien facility in the Omega Draconis system (all images of it are from a game called Planetary Annihilation)
I said they would need to split up into two different groups, one for investigating the alien facility and one to speak to the Ithik, but left the breakdown to them other than that Oliver Johnson had to be in command of the facility team. They decided Captain Rucot and Tronnen would head to the planet, while Oliver, Nevan, Loonin, and Faraday would shuttle down to the facility. For the facility group, the first session ended with Oliver vanishing into the future.
The mission as written, because it is TOS era I suspect, has the away team to the planet just beaming down and announcing who they are. But I really really hoped my players would surgically disguise themselves as Ithik... and indeed they did. This made for a very funny scene where the seemingly primitive Ithik called them out for who they were... and a delightful last note for the session where the Ithik mayor clapped Captain Rucot on the back and asked how much he liked playing games. As Ryan pointed out, playing games with aliens never goes well in Star Trek!
In the second session, I alternated between the away teams on the planet and the facility, which went very well. The planet team first went through the Minister for Philosophy—whose belief was that no one existed other than the Ithik and thus the away team was a figment of the Ithik's superior imagination! But they managed to convince him if that was true, there could be no danger in evacuating the planet. Frector then had her showdown with the Minister for Athletics, getting good use out of her Value "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better." The mission as written says the players need to convince three ministers to win over the mayor, but my players came up with a scheme to win over the mayor by playing to his obsession with games, and inviting him onto the holodeck. They debated a bit what the game should be (dabo?) but eventually realized they needed something new to him, and settled on an interactive murder mystery. Sherlock Holmes was suggested, but I pointed out that a Cardassian captain was far more likely to suggest an enigma tale, where everyone is guilty but the state needs to figure out of what.
Unfortunately, Debi was sick, so there could be no encounter between T'Cant and the Minister for the Arts as I'd planned.
The Ithik were great fun to play, and my players seemed to get a big kick out of them. Over-the-top, arrogant, complacent, friendly, and exuberant. Their population numbers in the hundreds, but they have dozens of ministers in the government; when the players asked if they knew anything about the facility, they said there were theories from hundreds of competing cults. ("Oh, everyone around here belongs to two or three cults, you know.")
Meanwhile, the away team on the facility had a good time. Forest, playing Faraday, had to back out at the last minutes, but was willing to let the others play her character while she was gone. They did good with the video room. The Extended Consequences challenge—my first attempt at this—turned out to be a little too easy but they did well at it too.
Fighting the security robot turned out to be quite difficult! Unfortunately, neither Faraday nor Nevan are good in combat... but the real point of the combat was to get away, not defeat the robot. They did some good lateral thinking, rigging a phaser to fire remotely and distract the robot, then using debris to make a bridge to cross the chasm. I realized that then having an Extended Task to unlock the door was probably overdoing it, so I dropped that element. (I repurposed it in the next session, making an Extended Task to reactivate the facility's control room, with each breakthrough granting control of one system.)
In the last session, things converge, as the player ship evacuates the planet, heading to Abyss Station to drop the Ithik there, only for Abyss Station's commanding office, T'Lah, to steal a shuttle in an attempt to use the alien facility to fire a black hole at the Dominion homeworld! The players have to stop her from both ends.
They did great! The players on the facility used their controls to lock T'Lah and the two Ithik helping her into a room; Frector and Tronnen meanwhile bluffed her into thinking they were sympathetic to her cause.
Abyss Station (screenshot from DS9's "Blaze of Glory," I think)
In the video the players had been found, there had been no images of the designers of the facility, just th Ithik who did the construction. The players asked the Ithik about the "Engineers" (as Loonin dubbed them) but were told they never saw them, they just had blueprints downloaded into their brains, which they then obeyed. Thus the players came up with the plan of finding a blueprint for shutting the station down and beaming it into the brains of the Ithik. Clever problem-solving at its finest!
Claire complained at the mission's end that though they had solved the immediate crisis, they didn't have any clear answers—only more mysteries! What was the relationship between the Haradin android, the Ithik, and the Engineers? Well, some things would have to remain for future episodes...
This was a fun one overall, and like I said, worked with minimal tweaking. Highly recommended.
This was the first novelisation to feature the first Doctor after Target brought back the books in the 1970s. Doctor Who books are a different thing now; while each of the first three novels essentially stood on its own, now it's a range. These things are being pumped out (approximately) every other month in early 1976, and soon it will be one every month. Now there's a sense of completism to it all, I think. We had the first first Doctor story (sort of anyway), so the gap that needs to be plugged is we don't have the last first Doctor story. How do we get from William Hartnell to Tom Baker? This is a necessary part of that chain. (Though the first second Doctor story wouldn't come along for more than fifteen years!)
To me, the book was qualitatively different from the previous three I've read so far. When it came to The Daleks (1964), The Zarbi (1965), The Crusaders (1966), it seemed to me they'd all been designed to work as a book first and foremost. Especially The Daleks and The Crusaders, you could pick them up and know nothing of the television program and be satisfied, I think; The Zarbi not as much, but as I discussed, Bill Strutton is definitely trying to operate in the same space as The Daleks.
But for the first time, The Tenth Planet is clearly not a novel but a novelisation. It is designed to plug a gap in your viewing of the television programme. That is to say, I don't think there's really that much going on here. We get the scripts on the page, but no sense of character, no sense of atmosphere. The Doctor and his companions almost feel lost in this, observers to the arrival of Mondas at Earth. I know there are constraints here from the story as produced, but it feels like the Doctor is barely even in this book.
This is a doubly momentous event in Doctor Who history—the first Cyberman story, the first (what would eventually be called) regeneration story—but nothing about it as rendered by Gerry Davis feels momentous. Basically a bunch of people hang about in a space center talking about stuff. I could see how this material would come to life on screen with some good acting and direction (it has been a long time since I watched The Tenth Planet, so I don't really remember if it gets that or not), but it never comes alive on the page. I found this a plod in a way that was not true of the three previous books.
It has its fun bits like any novelisation. The afterword points out a nice emphasis on the Doctor's hands that foreshadow what will happen to him. We get a different potted history of the Cybermen than has become accepted (they originated on Telos and moved to Mondas here, which to be honest makes a kind of nonsensical story even less plausible). The date of the story is moved from 1986 to 2000, and the origin of Ben and Polly is moved from 1966 to about 1974. In modern novelisations, I feel like an author's added details are often about smoothing out consistency issues; I kind of like that Gerry Davis just went around causing more problems!
Collection published: 2015 Contents originally published: 1987-2015 Acquired: April 2015 Read: August 2024
Story: The Original Writer with Grant Morrison & Peter Milligan
Art: John Totlebenwith Thomas Yeates, Joe Quesada & Mike Allred
Color Art: Steve Oliff with Richard Isanove & Laura Allred
Lettering: Joe Caramagna with Chris Eliopoulos & Travis Lanham
Alan Moore's final Miracleman volume explains the mystery running through the previous book (who was the mysterious woman?), ties things up with Michael Moran's wife and child, sends him into space to meet the Warpsmiths, and draws him into a final confrontation with Kid Miracleman.
Moore's comics can often be densely narrated, but usually he makes this work, achieving sympathy between word and art. I did not find that to be the case here. Though the stuff with Miraclewoman is fine if kind of predictable (the critique here is that female superheroes are sex fantasies), once the action moves into space, I struggled through the massive amount of ponderous text boxes, and I very much struggled to care. In here and in book one, the Warpsmiths are very much the weak link of the Miracleman saga. They are a necessary part of it, I suppose, but I never found reading about them very interesting.
Once we move back to Earth, the high point is definitely the stuff with Michael Moran's wife, showing us the human cost of utopia and perfection.
The fight with Kid Miracleman is one of those things that would have been more shocking at the time, but after Watchmen, The Walking Dead, The Authority, and so on, it's hard to get excited about comics' ability to depict detailed and gruesome violence.
The other high point is the last issue. This to me was the truly revolutionary idea of Miracleman, and admittedly, the violence of the previous issue was a necessary step to get us there. The idea that superheros are fundamentally about using violence to reshape the world is baked into the origins of the genre; you can see it in the very first Superman stories. But most superhero stories pull back from this, not wanting to show violence, or not wanting to show big changes to the status quo. In Miracleman (as in Watchmen), Moore runs straight into that premise—now that the violence is over, Miracleman and Miraclewoman reshape the world into utopia. It's a staggering concept that few superhero comics would dare to embrace, and I loved the issue; it clearly makes the whole rest of the series worth it, and is probably the single best contribution Moore makes to the idea of the "realistic" superhero.
The volume has two stories by other writers, both published in 2015. One is by Grant Morrison, written in 1984 but not illustrated or published. I found this kind of half-baked, an interesting idea not well executed. The other is an adventure of the Miracleman Family at its peak, like the ones Moore sprinkled through the first two volumes, mostly worth it for the great Mike Allred art.
Don't be fooled by this volume's page count of 328; the actual story pages only go up to 147, and the Alan Moore stuff you are here for just 124. There's a lot of original art here, which to be honest I do not find very interesting. Marvel's three chunky collections of Miracleman are a lie; they are really three thin collections... and ought to have been one 300-page collection. (Marvel did later release a Miracleman Omnibus, but again, they padded it out with all these extras.) It feels like, having finally secured the rights to the character, Marvel wanted a return on its investment by padding the series out into as many purchases as they could, but in the long run, I think it harms the series's purchasability. It wasn't until 2023 that Marvel finally released a reasonably-sized volume of the whole series in one go than can stand alongside Moore's other 1980s works. I probably should have held out for that one.
Yankee in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson illustrated by Dick Martin
In, I believe, the late 1950s, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote an Oz book and offered it to Reilly & Lee (this would have been after Hidden Valley, before Merry Go Round), but they were uninterested. Over a decade later, the International Wizard of Oz Club offered to publish her manuscript (with permission from the official publisher) with illustrations by Dick Martin, making it the first of their so-called "quasi-canonical" Oz books. My kid and I read it after Merry Go Round, when it was finally published.
Before this, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote nineteen Oz books, and I have read enough of them to know exactly what to expect. Thomas P. Terry, better known as "Tompy" is a band kid and football player swept by a hurricane right out of a Labor Day parade into Oz; there he meets Yankee, a test dog for a NASA moon orbit whose capsule crash-landed in Oz as well. As is pretty typical, Thompson devotes little time to justifying the adventure and just kind of gets on with it. Thompson always does well by animals, and the charming relationship between Tompy and Yankee, who quickly become devoted to each other, is the real highlight of the book. This lacks the frantic pacing of some of her books; Tompy and Yankee travel from place to place and meet interesting people. The idea of people you can make by just adding water to a powder is a great Ozzy visual, and I really enjoyed the tone of the section about the Lanternese, who have paper lanterns for heads (and thus cannot speak).
Like a lot of Thompson books, there's also the ingredients for an interesting quest she doesn't quite deliver on. Tompy and Yankee are asked by the people of Wackajammy to rescue their lost princess, but they selfishly refuse. In a book by a different author, you might expect this would be a set-up for a moral lesson to the protagonists... but not so here! They refuse to be helpful, and accidentally bump into her and rescue her and are lauded as heroes for it. Wow. They do both get some good heroic moments, though, taking down the giant Badmannah, who has been kidnapping princesses for his cave. (On the other hand, there are two separate occasions where Tompy bangs his drumsticks on something for no reason and that ends up coincidentally being exactly what was needed to be done.) Badmannah escalates up to kidnapping an oddly powerless and resourceless Ozma (well, par for the course for Thompson, again), and Jinnicky, Tompy, and Yankee manage to save her. Sometimes Thompson protagonists contribute nothing, while convenient
magicians show up, and there is a bit of that with Jinnicky the Red
Jinn, but both characters have their own pivotal moments.
There's also a prophecy that seems like it should be important but goes nowhere, and Tompy and Yankee acquire a book that lets them read minds... which they never use to do anything significant! The careful plotting of Merry Go Round in Oz this is not; like a lot of Thompson's books, it reads like a first draft.
If she gets away with it, it's because of the aforementioned relationship between Yankee and Tompy. Unusually, the book has a whole chapter set back in America at the end. There's a real sense of sadness as it seems like they will have to give up their relationship because Yankee can't speak outside of Oz. This comes all right, of course, but I think my six-year-old was a bit tense, judging by how delighted he was when it all worked out. And there's a very fun bit where Tompy actually goes to a bookstore to buy a copy of Purple Prince to read to Yankee so he can know more about their friend Jinnicky. We've had a few Oz protagonists who have read Oz books, but this is the most specific reference thus far.
Dick Martin's illustrations are largely sparse and boring; whole chapters go by with no pictures, and lots are simple little images of Yankee. There are neat visuals and key characters that go wholly unillustrated. I guess he did it for free, but still.
Not one of Thompson's best, but not one of her worst, either. Pleasant but undemanding, which is sometimes what you want out of a trip to Oz, after all.
I bought print-on-demand copies of this book and Forbidden Fountain from Lulu, where they have been put by the Oz Club. The original 1970s edition was oversized, with lots of text on big pages; this was a hardcover at the same size as all the other Oz books. It had an unfortunate number of typos, though; very distracting. Picking up these two books finished off my collection of "quasi-canonical" novels, which you can see to the right. Lining them up, I was appreciative that Eric Shanower maintained a consistent visual design for the three he illustrated... even though they were released by three different publishers!
Doctor Who and the Crusaders by David Whitaker illustrated by Henry Fox
Doctor Who and the Crusaders was the third Doctor Who novelisation, the last of the novels to appear during the 1960s, and thus also one of the three reprinted to launch the Target range in 1973. When I wrote my review of Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965), I discussed how it seemingly worked to position itself as "the second Doctor Who book" in a world where the only other Doctor Who book was Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964).
What's interesting about Doctor Who and the Crusaders is that it is also working to make itself "the second Doctor Who book" in a world where the only other Doctor Who book was Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964). Here, David Whitaker novelises his own scripts for The Crusade (though having read the book and not seen the serial for obvious reasons, I find myself thinking of the tv version as The Crusaders as well). On screen, The Crusade follows directly on from The Web Planet... but in print, The Crusaders follows directly on from Doctor Who and the Daleks.
Not in the sense that the characters have just left Skaro, but in the sense that the book is clearly designed to be read by someone who has previously read The Daleks. The book's prologue works to provide context for why Susan isn't there anymore, and mentions the Daleks—something which, I would argue, is pretty random if you think of this as one of many Doctor Who novelisations, but pretty essential if it's the second Doctor Who book but with a different main character to the first. (Incidentally, apparently in the Doctor Who book universe, David Cameron let a very different life to both the tv one and our own.) This prologue is, for what it's worth, probably my favorite bit of the book, containing some evocative, thoughtful writing that captures one of the best TARDIS crews (or, I guess I should say, "Tardis crews"), setting the stage for the adventure to follow with an interesting debate about history. For, while The Zarbi worked very hard to emulate The Daleks, The Crusaders is a very different style of Doctor Who story, and thus the book needs to ease you into it a bit. This is the first prose example of Doctor Who as an historical adventure series.
I love the way the Whitaker describes all the Doctor Who stories we haven't got to read. I am a bit surprised no writers of Missing Adventures,
Past Doctor Adventures, or Big Finish stories have ever made us suffer
through their take on "the talking stones of the tiny planet of Tyron,
in the seventeenth galaxy," to be honest... but also quite grateful.
Anyway, how's the book? I ended up enjoying it a lot. I have seen episodes one and three of The Crusade, thanks to the Lost in Time box set, but that was a long time ago, and I find that stories I only see bits of don't really imprint themselves on my memory, so this was basically a new story as far as I am concerned. Like The Daleks, it's a bit grim, but instead of science fiction dangers, it's real dangers: physical assault, dying in a desert, and even sexual assault. But also Whitaker leavens it all with moments of humor, such as the Doctor's clothes-stealing antics, and the thief who Ian tussles with. It's great to see Ian and Barbara on the top of their form after their kind of nondescript run in The Zarbi, but like in The Zarbi, Vicki is again kind of just there.
I did find it a bit tough to get into the book after the prologue; there are a lot of historical figures thrown at you in King Richard's court. And, I also found the shifting emphases kind of off; the Doctor, Vicki, and most of the English characters basically disappear from the last third of the book or so, when it abruptly becomes Ian and Barbara's story. This is disappointing as the Doctor is a very much a highlight of the story! But overall, it was a quick, effective, enjoyable read. Whitaker wouldn't write any more Doctor Who novelisations, which is a bit disappointing.
I read a 1980 reprinting of the 1973 Target edition, which includes illustrations by Henry Fox. He has a good line in likenesses; I don't think the illustrations are essential, but they are nice to have.
I found my copy in a used
bookstore in Storrs, Connecticut back in 2009. (Yes, it has taken me a while to get around to reading it.) It has a stamp in
the front indicating when the bookstore acquired it—two in fact. It was
sold to them in 1987, and apparently purchased, because it was resold
to them in 2006. One of the book's previous owners wrote his name in front: Eric Sonstroem. It seems highly probable to me that this is the same Eric Sonstroem who is currently an English professor at the University of the Pacific. It's not a common name, and Sonstroem got his B.A. at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1988, exactly the right time and place to be selling his Doctor Who books to the Paperback Trader in Storrs in 1987. Sonstroem's research interests include science fiction; he's even presented at Worldcon a couple times.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet
Collection published: 2014 Contents originally published: 1983-86 Acquired: November 2014 Read: July 2024
Story: The Original Writer with Cat Yronwode
Art: Alan Davis, John Ridgway, Chuck Austen & Rick Veitch with Rick Bryant
Color Art: Steve Oliff
Lettering: Joe Caramagna
The second volume of Miracleman is very attention-grabbing—it contains both gruesome violence and an extraordinarily detailed rendering of a birth, as Michael Moran's wife gives birth to their baby. In the post-Watchmen, post-Authority era of superhero comics, the violence isn't so striking, but I still can't think of any other superhero comic I've read in the following four decades where a baby's head emerges from a woman's vagina in close-up detail.
Outside of that, though, this feels like the weak link in the chain of the Miracleman saga. Not that it's bad, but in terms of story, what happens in the two volumes on either side of it are more significant and more interesting; in a classic middle-volume-of-trilogy situation, we need this volume to get from book one to book three, but it doesn't have as much to say on its own. We need the birth, we need to see Miracleman investigate his origin, and there's some important themes and resonances here, but they're not so interesting as what the other two books do.
Thankfully, given it's by Alan Moore and some talented artistic collaborators, how it says what it says is always interesting. Interesting writing as always (though some of what it does with race is very dated now), and Alan Davis and John Ridgway in particular are always great illustrators worth reading. (This might be the first time I've seen John Ridgway art with color and not felt it diminished by the coloring, so kudos to Steve Oliff.) Highlights include: Miracleman's conversation in the woods with a kid scared of nuclear war, the flashback chapters about Gargunza manipulating the dreams of the "Miracleman Family," and the way the malignant government agent ends up helping Miracleman in the end.
There are two extra stories here: one a kind-of-funny story about Young Miracleman trying to hit on a receptionist in 1957, and a frame story by Cat Yronwode to a set of Mick Anglo Marvelman reprints that had to be run in Miracleman #8 when a flood damaged the Eclipse offices, which I guess is nice to have for completeness's sake but pretty meaningless on its own.
Most of the extras in this volume are pages of uncolored original art, which is less interesting to me. Two things I find frustrating about the otherwise detailed archival presentation of these volumes are 1) there are no individual art credits (which chapters did Alan Davis draw? who knows) and 2) there is no original publication data given. Where did these stories originally appear? This is particularly frustrating as the extras will say things like "this is the cover of Warrior #16"... but you have no clear indication of which story originally appeared in Warrior #16!
Well, this year the Hugo Awards certainly went smoother than last year. The Hugo Administrator indicates there were some issues—someone tried to buy a large number of votes for an unnamed finalist, resulting in the disqualification of a number of ballots. Apparently that finalist would have gotten first in its category without that disqualification! But the Hugo team handled it as transparently as possible, and there were no shenanigans like last year. Are the Hugos irrevocably tarnished? I suppose only time will tell that.
The results were announced this past Sunday. Had I been on top of things, I could have watched the ceremony mid-afternoon U.S. time. I am not sure I would have been able to make the time, but it didn't matter... since I totally forgot! I don't always love the ceremonies but I find watching the livestream a lot more interesting than quickly skimming over a web page. Next year's Worldcon is the U.S., so an evening ceremony will actually be in the evening, making it a lot easier for me to tune in.
So what did I think of the results? How did they compared to my own votes?
Two years in a row, now, my first place choice has actually ended up in first place for Best Novel. Excellent! When making my predictions, I wrote, "I think maybeSome Desperate Glory for Best Novel, but maybe that's just my own biases; it seems a bit polarizing." It seems I should have been more assertive, because I was right! Interestingly, Scalzi's Starter Villain got the second-highest number of nomination points but came in last on the final ballot.
Last year, T. Kingfisher did not win, and I thought it was an outrage because she clearly deserved it. This year, T. Kingfisher did win, and I think it is an outrage because someone else clearly deserved it. I can't believe that Rose/House—to me the best thing on the ballot by a wide margin—finished all the way down in fifth. My claim that "[i]f Kingfisher was going to win, I think it would have been for last year's What Moves the Dead; I don't think Thornhedge is strong enough to take it" was clearly off base!
This category had two Chinese finalists; one, "Seeds of Mercury," actually got more first-place votes than any other finalist by a wide margin (881 vs. 593), but ended up not coming in first thanks to instant runoff voting, and finishing in 3rd. Presumably a large number of Chinese members voted for it in first, but many Anglophone members did not (I placed it in 5th myself).
I liked Kritzer's "Year Without Sunshine" a lot, so I am pretty happy with this. "On the Fox Roads" landing in 4th is a bit disappointing but not surprising. Sarah Pinsker's "Science Facts!", which I nominated, needed eight more votes to make the final ballot. Had it done so, I would have ranked it 3rd. Seventh in nominations is a pretty good showing for a piece of short fiction not available in a free venue, to be honest. (It was published in Pinsker's new collection.)
Well clearly I'm pleased! I should note that I predicted Kritzer would win either Best Novelette or Best Short Story, but she ended up winning both, so good on her! I wonder if she had two different acceptance speeches prepared.
Inexplicably, though, "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathub" came in 2nd.
My takes on this category always widely disagree with the electorate, so I am not too surprised here. Indeed, I wrote, "god knows what for Graphic Story—the voters always manage to baffle me on that one even when the nominations are good."
This is another category where a Chinese-language finalist (the Three-Body Problem graphic novel) had the most first-place votes, but ended up not winning thanks to IRV; it came in 4th. I am outraged that Shubeik Lubeik did so poorly, but interestingly, it actually had more first-place votes than any other finalist than Three-Body Problem. It just did very poorly on transfers. There is a small plurality of us who recognize quality!
I did write, "I doubt my personal favorite will win Related Work; I am kind of worried
nostalgia will give it to Banks, but my suspicion is the Weinersmith
will be everyone's second choice and thus it will win on transfers." And I was right!
I am very glad some guy named "Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood" declined nomination for making some tweets; thanks god he had more sense than the people who nominated him. Patrick Stewart's autobiography was one vote away from making the final ballot! I wonder where I would have placed it had it made it? I am a bit surprised that "The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion" was all the way down in 15th, given how much Hugo voters love nominating works about Hugo voting for this category.
I am not surprised Poor Things did not win, but I am surprised that D&D did. I thought it would be Barbie! D&D was a solid film but not one I would give an award to; I wonder if it won out because it was basically everyone's second choice. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse got the most first-place votes. Given some of the voting patterns around Chinese finalists in other categories, I'm surprised The Wandering Earth II got the least number of first-place votes.
Godzilla Minus One needed only one more vote to qualify for the final ballot; it would have replaced Poor Things.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: "Subspace Rhapsody"
5th
I was very weirdly calibrated in this one, my picks for 1st and 2nd coming in 5th and 6th respectively! I thought one of the Star Trek episodes would win, and "Those Old Scientists" at least landed in 2nd. There were two more Doctor Who episodes and two more Strange New Worlds episodes on the longlist.
I am always so off from other voters in this category, so I never expect much... thus I was pretty thrilled to see To Shape a Dragon's Breath take in a well-deserved win! And my second-place choice, Liberty's Daughter, came in 2nd! And and my bottom two choices came in at the bottom two places!! This never happens.
The other voters and I agreed in three categories this year; as I worked out earlier this year, we have overlapped in four categories on three occasions, and overlapped in one category on four occasions. Never before have I agreed in three! This year my average agreement score was 3.5 (that is to say, things I ranked 1st finished at 3.5 on average); my average of previous years' agreement scores was 3.4, so this was a perfectly average year for me. Adding this year's scores maintains Best Novella as the category where my choices do the worst, but moves the Lodestar from second-best to best for that metric.
Some thoughts on categories I don't give full write-ups to:
Best Game or Interactive Work: My wife has been playing Tears of the Kingdom, but it came in 2nd, beat out by Baldur's Gate 3. (I didn't know they were still making Baldur's Gate games.)
Best Editor (Short Form): A third win in a row for Neil Clarke! He's gone from being a finalist who never wins to dominating the category.
Best Semiprozine: Speaking of always being a finalist but never winning, this was Strange Horizons's twelfth appearance on the ballot but first time winning. Well deserved.
As always I had a good time... can we please avoid drama next year, though?
"Abyss Station" is an installment of the "Living Campaign," a set of free Star Trek Adventures 
