Falldog

I worry about what Doctor Who has done to me. More precisely, I worry for what it’s done to my tastes. And by that I don’t mean that it has given me a tolerance for shoddy TV science fiction (cf Blake’s 7, most obviously, and any number of other bits of rubbish).

This week saw the release on DVD of a story that occupies a rather monolithic position in my childhood memory (and probably that of every fan of a certain age). It was in this story, ‘Logopolis’, that the nine-year-old me saw Doctor Who change from Tom Baker to Peter Davison. “Hang on! I was just getting to like the goggle-eyed shouty man and now this!” But I was young, I rolled with the punches; and, in fact, it’s not the regeneration that makes this story cast such a long shadow in my memory, it’s the story’s eponymous setting.

The planet Logopolis is a world populated by whispering mathematicians, whose murmured calculations hold the universe together. The Logopolitans take numbers, speak the calculations, and make things flesh. “They use word of mouth… [they] mutter, intone.”

When the Doctor finally gets there (about halfway through the story, most of the time prior to this being taken up with the changing of a tyre), we first see it from above: a grey-pink jumbled maze of buildings, the twisting corridors between them making the curved vista look like a brain – the mind of the universe, in fact. And there, crowning the scene, an unlikely seeming radio telescope: hard, jarring Earth technology jutting from this mystical landscape.

At the time, the series’ script editor was a man who had an obsession with the scientific, and who was very keen to get as much ‘hard science’ into Doctor Who as possible. ‘Logopolis’ is one of the finest examples of this, jam-packed as it is with half-realistic technobabble which feels like it’s cribbed from the index of a particularly esoteric physics textbook. All of which makes it all the more surprising that so much of the story is predicated on the idea of pure will made manifest through the power of incantation – a more magical idea you’d be very hard pressed to find.

But it’s this juxtaposition that makes me so fond of Logopolis, I think, and what has made its imagery endure so thoroughly in my memory. That first, overhead shot of Logopolis is burnt into my mind’s eye as strongly as any other childhood memory; its strangeness, the discomfort of its science/magic clash, immediately captivating the young me – and captivating me still.

And it’s this clash of the magical and the scientific that has gone on to colour my tastes in fiction. It’s not simply a question of ‘liking science fiction’ or ‘liking fantasy’. While I’m partial to fiction of that type, I’m still remarkably fussy about it. For a piece of fiction to really tickle my fancy, there has to be some sort of clash: the magic realism of the novels of Paul Magrs (who later turned out to be a Doctor Who fan, and turned his considerable talents to writing for the range of novels based on the series – and later still, I snared him for a Doctor Who short story collection I edited, which is still one of the highlights of my career) is just one manifestation of the conjunction of real and unreal that I like so much.

It’s there in all my Officially Favourite Things: Buffy, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, even the jolt of the Cylons’ mysticism in Battlestar Galactica, along with the many other odds and sods I hold dear to my heart, including, of course, Doctor Who.

It’s precisely the clash of mystical and science-fictional that turned me on to Liz William’s ‘Darkland’ – which, you may remember back on day one of this blog, was the book that set me on the path I’m on now. Today, I picked up another of her books, about a police detective who solves problems to do with demons and ghosts and… er… I realise this sounds familiar, given recent reading matter, but it has a different spin – and even so, it’s another prime example of the real-meets-unreal bait that gets my mental carp a-bitin’. Er.

So, I suppose this entry is a sort of marker. Stuck here with this last big freelance stint in this office, the dream of spending all my time writing and creating – playing in my own created worlds, just like those made by others which I enjoy so much – seems further away than I would like. But I know I’ll be there soon, and with each passing day, I get more excited about the prospect.

For you, I hope this post was at the very least worth your time. For me, it’s a little heads-up to say, “You know, it’s OK. You’re still on the right path. Stick with it.”

It’s good to see Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor coming out in favour of the new anti-discrimination laws.

“There is legislation and legislation. And some legislation, however well intended, in fact does create a new kind of morality, a new kind of norm – as this does.”

Yes, a reasonable, enlightened kind of morality. A new norm which sees everyone on an even footing.

It’s so nice to see such a prominent Roman Catholic lending his support to the bill, when so many others of his church have attacked and tried to derail it. Thanks, Cormac!

Use a Mac with OS X? (You most assuredly should, but let’s not get into this now.)

You really, really have to use a program called Scrivener.

And that’s all the posting you’re going to get for this week. Because I am, for a change, actually busy getting on with stuff, thanks to the above. See you on Monday, and have lovely weekends!

Tom Cruise, they’re saying, is Scientology’s Christ.

Firstly, there is the glimmer of hope that, even though he hasn’t claimed this, the resulting cries of ‘Blasphemy!’ from the religionista in the US might destroy his career. Secondly… oh my God. They’re all barking mad, aren’t they?

The Scientologists were out in force in Bromley town centre last weekend, sitting at a little collection of tables outside what I understand to be the biggest Primark in Europe. They had their little ‘free stress test’ and ‘Dianetics‘ posters out, presumably encouraging people to sit down and chat on the basis of some flimsy, ‘New Year, New You’, self-help agenda. It got me a little riled, to be honest. I very loudly coughed as we passed, disguising a not-too-subtle shout of “Rip-off cult!” to the poor, duped mums sitting there with their struggling kids. It’s a bit sad, really, that this horrible money-making operation seems to prey on people like this.

There’s a part of me that wished I had sat down and chatted to them, just to see what they had to say for themselves. After all, I find just about every aspect of religion, faith and unwavering following fascinating. (I fondly remember an hour spent with two Jehovah’s Witnesses in my flat on a Sunday morning, me hungover and unshowered, wearing just a dressing gown, mightily fucked off that they’d woken me up, sternly taking them to task over their organisation’s deliberate mistranslation of the Bible.) But every table was occupied by hassled mums, so there was no room for me.

The women’s faces troubled me a little, too: I hope against hope they didn’t think they’d find an answer to their problems in a conversation with some equally duped cultist on Bromley High Street.

Sorry. I thought this might be funnier when I started out.

On Saturday, we had a couple of friends round for dinner and, instead of wine, we bought in a small festival’s worth of bottled beer of one unusual sort of another. A triumph! I would recommend it for an unusual twist to any dinner party.

Delights included: the cloudy, nutty Trappist beer from Orval Abbey; the lightly sweet Organic Honeydew from Fullers; a beer (which I didn’t try, so can’t report on) made with the same yeast used to make champagne; Greene King’s Beer to Dine For* (which everyone should have with a meal at least once in their life – it goes especially well with pork and lamb, I have found); a raspberry beer (a bottle of which I hid from the over-keen guests, as I like raspberry beer and, frankly, was being selfish – sorry, guests!); and, as an after-dinner treat, a glass of Meantime’s coffee beer, which is like Guinness, pudding and espresso all in one.
There are still one or two untried varieties left in the fridge, so there’s more excitement to come. Lucky old me.

In other news: I mentioned the fact I’d recently discovered the Harry Dresden magical-crime novels, you may remember. Funny how things come about. Last week, I saw an advert in a US magazine for the Sci-Fi Channel’s TV series of the books – and now, today, I discover that the same series is due to hit our shores, on Sky One, in just a couple of weeks. Am now unduly excited, having enjoyed the first book tremendously.

Being based in Chicago gives any crime fiction a particular echo anyway, and ‘Storm Front’ plays on this hard-boiled heritage while adding ladles full of oddball magic, fairies, talking skulls and summoned demons. The mystery is tightly plotted and, if the ‘gruff, scruffy, singleton private dick working with the hard-nosed, hard-done-by female cop’ is clichéd, at least the fantastical trappings help it take a large step away from the predictable. I hope, and mostly believe, that the author, Jim Butcher, had his tongue at least tickling the inside of his cheek during the writing, but even so the story is full-blooded, scary and real where it needs to be, and soft and silly where such lightness is welcome. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I would imagine, but a nice, light, different read.

* Ooh! Get the Wikipedia write-up on the beer in question: “the currently popular golden lager style”. A note of snobbishness, with an aftertaste of mint?

I have just stapled two pieces of paper together. Firstly, because they are at least tangentially related and it might be useful to find one when I need the other. Secondly, and more importantly, because I had nothing better – in fact, nothing else – to do and I had to fill my time with something.

Today is clearly ‘one of those days’, but I shall try to struggle through. As it’s Friday, and if you’ve time while you’re passing, what do you think I should do with my time? No constructive suggestions, please.

I have a secret shame. It’s to do with things like this news report, and more specifically its first sentence:

Rescue attempts are set to resume to try to save about six dolphins stranded in a shallow cove off New York’s Long Island coast.

… the implication of that being that the rescuers are thinking, “Yeah, well, about six. If we only save four or five, that’s OK. I mean, fuck the rest, right? They’re only dolphins.”

Why not “a number of dolphins”? The story goes on to make it clear that the rescuers do not know for certain how many dolphins need rescuing, and discusses the approximations of numbers of those originally stranded, those already rescued and those remaining.

Also: “attempts are set to… try”. Well, of course they are, they are attempts. That’s what attempts do.

Also: “Rescue attempts are set to… try to save” the dolphins. Well, good. I can’t count the number of “rescue attempts” that have actually set out to maim or kill their targets.

And my secret shame? I keep emailing the BBC News website to point out their silly, silly mistakes. Well, it pisses me off that I spend so much of my career putting crap like this right – and then some of the money I earn from all that goes into paying the BBC to put shite like that online.

Am becoming one of “those people”.

EDIT: Victory for the picky man! They’ve rewritten the first sentence! Mind you, it still says “about six”.

Yesterday saw the (final!) release of the first World of Warcraft expansion, The Burning Crusade.

Cue an evening full of various comments from the Mrs and myself to each other, mostly involving the highly repetitious use of the word “Wow”. The makers of Warcraft had already created, firstly, an incredibly solid game and, secondly (and possibly more importantly to me), an interesting, varied and consistent world. The expansion – even within the first couple of hours of playing it – brings more of the same… and then even more. An absolute triumph.

A geeky triumph, yes, but a triumph nonetheless.

Popjustice has brought this to my attention:

Dear God. Reach out and touch a clue, would you?

Some people who have commented on that page at YouTube have, fairly, asked if the person who made that video was just having a laugh. Because surely – surely – no one is that stupid or ill-informed? It goes to follow: if you care enough about pop music to make a silly little video alleging plagiarism, you would know who wrote the song in the first place. Surely. Surely? Surely you couldn’t just be that stupid?

Let’s just take a look at some of the other videos posted by that user. There’s your unsettling but conclusive answer.

(Also? Pink? For an emo? Really?)

I used to live just up the road from this, and now I see that it is for sale again. I can’t begin to imagine what sort of obscene amount of money I would need to buy it, but if some philanthropic billionaire out there would like to lend me anything in the region of a likely sum… Well, I ain’t going to say no.

Thanks in advance.