Super Doomed Planet

Doctor Who: Comedy or Tragedy? John Seavey’s “The Diamond Pillar: A Fable.” An essay on depression that clarified a lot of what goes on in my head, despite making extensive references to books I’ve never been exposed to. Help for semiliterate internet commenters, in cartoon form.

Kate Orman’s The Year of Intelligent Tigers is the book every Eighth Doctor Adventure wanted to be. Every era of Doctor Who has its own stereotype. The Terrance Dicks/Barry Letts template includes UNIT, the Master, 1970s earth, chases, and Venusian Aikido. Hinchcliffe/Holmes stories are horror pastiches starring charismatic master villains; Saward-era stories are violent, cynical [...]

Michael Moorcock is writing a Doctor Who novel. He says it’s “not a tie-in.” I’m not sure whether that means it’s not part of the regular “cheap, crappy little hardback” line (it certainly would be a special event) or just that it isn’t a novelization of a story from another medium. BBC Books actively approached [...]

Interviewed for a Doctor Who Magazine article years after Virgin Books published his Doctor Who novel Managra, Stephen Marley recalled being “excited about what the series almost was… I thought the point was to consider what it would be like were it done properly.” And, lo, the traditionalists were heard to mutter “how dare he!” [...]

All I’ve been posting lately have been Interactive Fiction Competition reviews, which have a limited audience. So I’m posting this book review I had on hand. Which is about a Doctor Who novel, and therefore also has a limited audience, albeit a completely different limited audience. Sorry. When, in Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum’s Vampire [...]

British Summertime, Paul Cornell’s second entirely original novel, was published in 2002. Since then he’s published short stories but, aside from a novelization of a BBC webcast, no more novels. Lately he’s been writing for television and for Marvel comics. I can’t help feeling he’s come down in the world. I’d like another book from [...]

This is the list of cast and crew interviewed for a behind the scenes “making of” documentary from an upcoming Doctor Who DVD (emphasis mine): • Who Wants to Live Forever? (dur. 24′ 30″) – cast and crew look back at the making of the story. With actors Peter Davison, Nicholas Courtney, Mark Strickson, David [...]

Recently a couple of Torchwood books were recommended to me on the Jade Pagoda mailing list. I’ve now read Slow Decay, and decided to review it. I’m going to begin by talking about Another Life. I read Another Life, and tried to read Border Princes, not long after they came out. This is why I’ve [...]

You know what’s interesting about Shadowmind? It turns out I’d never read it before. I skipped it when it came out due to a limited teenage book-buying budget and mediocre reviews. Much later I decided I wanted an obsessive-compulsively complete New Adventures collection, picked up a copy at a used bookstore… and immediately forgot about [...]

Zombies are hip. They’re in our movies and comics and major investment firms. You can’t walk more than a few blocks without stumbling across some shambling horde of loosely anatomical types desperate for brains. Zombies, it seems, are the new ninjas. So the cover of White Darkness—on which a smiling Doctor, intrigued Ace, and off-model [...]