Andrew Hickey

TRIBUTE TO THE BEE GEES - MELODY FAIR (1994)
 
Re-upped by request

Lossy: 320 lame 3.97 (181 mb)

First posted here
2010, November 21

Scarfolk had its fair share of UFO/deity conspiracies in the 1970s. The town's resident UFO expert Bert Cage insisted that extraterrestrials have intervened in mankind's development for generations,  introducing technology and even manipulating our genes.

He claimed the otherwordly visitors have been responsible for: irrigation, rockets, fax machines, polyester bed sheets, dental floss and cocktail umbrellas; not to mention genetic emotional states such as: the disappointment one has seeing the film adaptation of a favourite book and the amusement one feels when seeing a cat fall over.

According to Cage, there are also several significant changes due to mankind very soon. These include: Geo-spankhens (eta: 2014), colonspicers (2019) and the shame one feels for having eaten cabbage for so many years not realising that it's actually an animal (2032).

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… The Doctor’s finished on the telly again, and who most wants him finished? With Doctor Who – The Mind of Evil released this week to complete a rival Time Lord’s adventures on DVD, it’s about time to follow Number 40’s “I’m the Doctor” with a hostile takeover:

“I am the Master.”

And while sometimes I add a second Bonus Quotation here, something’s got into my head (a sort of drumming) and now there are rather more. More spoilers, as well. So, peoples of the Blogosphere: please attend carefully…

“I am many things.”

Springtime for the Master! If he ruled the world, every first day of Spring would be the blizzard (possibly of flying killer heads) that this year’s started out with. After not being at all well and getting out of the habit of writing this Fifty, it’s now the end of Spring, but cast your mind back to the beginning of the season and perhaps it’s just as well that I didn’t post this on the frozen 20th of March – despite it appropriately being a broadcast anniversary of the Axons. Even the alternative date for the start of Spring was still frosty, despite the 1st of April appropriately being a broadcast anniversary of some Sea Devils. And yet the Master’s been very much on my mind, not just nagging me to write but with his own two very special bank holidays – first Beltane, then the Master for one night only from in 1996 (or 1999). The Master, if you didn’t know, is almost the Doctor’s other half – an old friend who also left the Time Lords, but to rule the Universe, not just to see it, longing to make everyone else feel small. He became a jealous enemy across many of his and the Doctor’s lives, and a jack-in-the-box of irresistibly nasty fun across many of years of our television. I may have missed the daffodils, but his blooms last, so here’s something of the first plastic flowering of each Master, most of all the original. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Have a chair…

“This plastic has got unique properties, Mr McDermott. Allow me to demonstrate.”

The Master (Roger Delgado) is a suave, powerful presence with dark, hypnotic eyes and a deep, hypnotic voice. Usually wearing a dark, pointed beard and a dark, elegant suit – most often a round-collared black Nehru suit – he’s also to be found disguised in everything from self-aggrandising pseudonyms to flamboyant robes to the grubby overalls and rubbery face of a phone engineer. The personification of charm when he needs to be; smiling and playful, albeit with his own murderous sense of humour; given to savage flashes of anger. His ambition is to rule the Earth, or occasionally the galaxy, though with an underlying need for the Doctor’s attention – before he kills him in an amusing way. To overcome his status as a one-man band, he forms alliances with a variety of alien races to do is legwork… Always (over-)confident that he can dispose of them when they’re no longer of use, rather than the other way round.

Terror of the Autons is the Master’s first appearance, materialising in the first scene of Doctor Who’s Eighth Season and immediately dominating the show – and the petty ‘big man’ to whom he introduces himself. By the time the Doctor gets a look in, still less when a Time Lord belatedly turns up to warn him of the Master’s arrival, the new villain has already stolen the show (and much more besides). Aiming to create a new spearhead for the Nestene Consciousness and their power over plastic, he’s found Rex Farrel, a young plastics factory manager in a rather nasty fashionable suit eager to make his mark after years following his father’s orders. Unfortunately for him, his new big customer in a much more impressively cut dark suit and gold tie is “Colonel Masters”: meet the new boss; very much not the same as the old boss. But Mr Farrel Senior’s left James McDermott, his own bluff, practical production manager in a sober suit, to report back to him in case his son mucks about too much, and McDermott patronisingly tells Rex the company’s not going to dump all its old customers for a mystery man with no paperwork. McDermott calls up the old man; Rex calls in “Colonel Masters”…

Not liking a new face, McDermott begins with a tirade about changing the plastics mix and ruining a day’s production. The Master is polite, urbane, amused, and shows off a shiny black fat square cushion of material that isn’t to McDermott’s taste at all. But he doesn’t appreciate its unique properties – or the Master’s. At a click of his fingers, the square begins to expand and, to off-key synthesiser music, slithers into the form of a shiny black fat square armchair. Rex seems curiously blasé, but an unsettled McDermott licks dry lips and weakly asks if the new customer is a magician as well as a Colonel. The Master answers quietly, staying still, ominous, powerful, while McDermott fidgets and flails about, trying to assert himself and the company as he knows it. The Master moves to stand behind the inflated chair, arms astride it proprietorially, and strikes a warm, friendly tone:

“Look, why don’t you try it?”
“Well, you’ll never sell that, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Sure, it looks like – like a black pudding.”
“Try sitting in it.”
“It’s got a cold clammy feel to it. Now plastic should be warm and dry to the touch—”
“Sit down, man!”

McDermott’s been eyeing the chair uneasily and prodding it like a first-time swimmer at the water’s edge – but the Master’s sudden whiplash of will is that of a villain who’s suddenly tired of the shaggy dog and wants to skip to the punchline. McDermott can’t help but sit. The moment he does, the chair starts to writhe again, wrapping itself around him and, rearing over his head, suffocating his screams within its thick, blobby synthetic mass and the thick, blobby synthesiser music.

The Master has instant presence, and you can’t tear your eyes from McDermott in the chair. But the third person in the room is in his own way just as fascinating – Rex has come entirely under the Master’s spell, but is shocked for a moment by the horrible death. The Master raises a hand to stop him stepping forward… And, everything over, Farrel is nonchalant again. More even than the Doctor’s companion, Rex is the personification of the viewer here, finding the thrilling new villain utterly compelling, briefly shocked by horror daring you to reject him, then back to watercooler-chat complicity as he steps to the intercom for a killingly funny businessman’s response:

“Sylvia? Will you check Mr McDermott’s entitlement on termination of employment, please?”

Rex Farrel – and the rest of us – are already so far back in the Master’s thrall after all this showing off that when he hilariously affects humility at the waste of so much material for one simple death we’re with Rex in saying, no, no, that was an impressive one, honestly. And like Rex, we want to know what the Master means when he gives a playful smile and promises efficient death with just a few inches of plastic:

“The human body has a basic weakness. One which I shall exploit – to assist in the destruction of humanity.”

I’ve written about the death at the plastics factory before – I didn’t see the Master’s showpiece scene on screen until more than twenty years after it was broadcast, but I saw it in my mind’s eye as a thrilled little boy reading one of the first books I ever bought, Terrance Dicks’ novelisation Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, and not only does it grip you (and Mr McDermott) on TV, it’s just as gripping on the page. Though it makes Rex more sympathetic by taking away his punchline, permitting him more struggling shock and generally removing the impression that his appreciation of the patronising right-hand-man’s death is an eagerness to murder his father by proxy, it gives the Master a terrible gag that I’ve always loved. You can read what in my in-depth review of the novel here, complete with that very scene as my selection of choice (and a terrifying picture of little me). And if you keep watching the DVD, the Master gets another deft little punchline later along the way…

In both forms, this is the Master’s crucial establishing moment – it’s such an outrageously exaggerated swagger of a scene that you just know he’s going to be fun to watch if he’s prepared to put on such a show for an audience of two one (give or take eight million). I don’t know if the phrase ‘hiding behind the sofa’ was in common currency yet back in 1971 or if the Master has always had the power to serendipitously subvert both the show and its viewers even before the clichés have formed to be subverted, but he reaches out to the audience’s safe place and deliciously makes it something to hide from. Similarly, the whole confrontation comes across like a scene from ’60s industrial power-play drama The Plane Makers being warped out of recognition by a devil from another genre stepping into it for a laugh. Perversely, of course, it also made me long for a blow-up plastic chair.

Each time the Master’s been reintroduced to the TV series – The Deadly Assassin, Logopolis, Last of the Time Lords, all below – Terror of the Autons has been the source text that the writers have looked to for inspiration, most of all Russell T Davies as John Simm takes over and, heretically, delivers for me the best interpretation of that original concept’s viciously playful streak. Roger Delgado is fantastic in this scene, but in other points of his first story he doesn’t yet seem as at ease, as in control, to simply be enjoying himself so much as he does growing into the part. So if you’re inspired by this selection to mount your own ‘The Seven Faces of the Master’ retrospective, while Robert Holmes’ Terror of the Autons is the definitive Master script, you might consider for slightly more compelling stories on screen and with Mr Delgado’s definitive Master performances either The Dæmons, in which he puts on a robe so resplendent it makes vaunting a blow-up chair seem almost introverted and then summons the Devil, or The Mind of Evil, out at last this week and making the whole of the Master’s adventures now available on DVD, in which he gets a big cigar, a big car and a big coat to play the part as a fabulously louche Bond villain.

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 1 – The Deadly Assassin

The Master (Peter Pratt) is a daring reinvention of the character, his charm, his humour, his looks, even his skin stripped away, though still boasting a deep, powerful voice. Rather than take the obvious option of simply making him a new regeneration like a new Doctor, Robert Holmes introduces the Master for the second time no longer as the Doctor’s ‘naughty brother’ but his dark side, all his narrow escapes having cost him every life and stretched him to the end of his thirteenth body – after which even a Time Lord must die. A rotting, ravaged ghoul wrapped in a tattered cowl, he’s still walking because he simply refuses to die… And because hate for the Doctor and the other Time Lords keeps him alive. This is The Master Unplugged, stripped to his essence, smouldering with pain and hatred and more impatient than any of his other lives. There’s no time for amusing banter, but only to renew himself at any cost (in fact, preferably at a terrible cost – not merely a killer for fun but a fiend who glories in chaos and destruction). He’s lost his vanity – though the hypnotic power that once seemed like seduction now blazes forth as sheer mental domination. He’s given up his delusions of grandeur – and ironically forms an utterly selfish plan that promises death on his grandest scale yet. He doesn’t hide behind pseudonyms – instead presenting his hideous face almost with pride and bellowing his name as if that is all that he has left. It’s almost as influential an introduction as his first, with the idea of the Master as walking corpse such a powerful one that he’s never quite whole again.

The Master has lured the Doctor back to their home planet of Gallifrey and framed him for the killing of the President – in part as a complex attempt to get his hands on the ancient relics of the Presidency and unlock the secrets of the Time Lords, though mostly to gloat. He will rip their power source away to bring himself new life, destroying their world and perhaps destabilising the Universe itself, making the story – for my money, Doctor Who’s best – a uniquely apocalyptic film noir. In the crypt where the Head of the Presidency and all its regalia lie in state, the Master rises from apparent death to seize them, only to be interrupted by the Doctor and two old Time Lords (the local police chief and the local librarian). As with Terror of the Autons, the confrontation of these equal and opposites is all the more effective for being held back until the finale, and the Master steps from the shadows, pissed off beyond endurance, to answer the Doctor back:

“The Master’s consumed with hatred. It’s his one great weakness.”
“Weakness, Doctor? Hate is strength.”
“Not in your case. You’d delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly.”

Even as the camera lingers on the Master’s gun – and he’s never more brutally trigger-happy than here – even as he’s twisted with physical agony, even he’s as kept alive by his absolute focus on the most important person in his life, the subject of all his rage and envy and vengeance, the one who he’s crafted all this to get his attention before he dies in disgrace, the Doctor still just dismisses him. That hurts.

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 2 – The Keeper of Traken

I did warn you there were spoilers, didn’t I?


The Master (Geoffrey Beevers) remains a twisted, skeletal wreck of himself, but has had to learn patience. He’s found another astronomically powerful Source to steal a new life from, but at the price of sitting it out on a planet that might make him regret calling the Doctor “insufferably good”; on Traken, evil simply gives up and calcifies. But he’s safe inside his TARDIS – disguised as a gorgeously twisted statue, a Melkur of local legend – and uses his time well to plot not just how to gain control but how to twist and corrupt a people kept without real knowledge of good and evil by the Keeper of the world exerting moral sense on everyone’s behalf. The Master here is an outstanding corruptor, blatantly the serpent in this Eden and with a marvellously silky, persuasive voice, pan-fried in evil with extra goose fat. As Richard says, this isn’t just evil. This is rich, gloating M&Ster evil. From the mildness of a wise advisor to the high, gloating glee of triumph at last, the Master’s greatest weapon is his voice. Though blazing energy beams from Melkur’s eyes come in handy, too.

The Master has waited until the old Keeper’s thousand-year reign is faltering, and turns a bride’s love into his instrument for removing the chosen successor. Again, the confrontation between the Doctor and the hidden Master is reserved for the finale – with one stunning scene in particular as the Master taunts him, and demonstrates that surrendering all your decisions to absolute godhood is a dangerous thing – but there are some marvellous exchanges between the Doctor and the Melkur as it slowly evolves from the ivy-covered feature in the background to a creepy walking statue at the centre of events. And it places itself most literally at the centre as the old Keeper dies: with the benign controlling intelligence of centuries suddenly gone, chaos breaks across the world in a storm of unchecked nature, and through the howling gale Melkur gloatingly offers a merciful death, its shrivelled, secret occupant looking down at the Doctor through great eye-like screens. The Doctor defies “Melkor” – appropriately recalling a famous fallen angel, and of what great order was the Doctor a member, and who fell the furthest? – but it’s too late. The Master’s catspaw is on the Keeper’s Throne. In the spellbinding last minutes of Part Three, all seems dark: the Keeper who called to the Doctor for help dead; the Master’s Machiavellian machinations turned almost the entire Court against our hero; the true nature of Melkur about to be revealed when it doesn’t merely walk but, with a wheezing, groaning sound, dematerialises to take the Throne – and, heralding that cliffhanger, long-term viewers feel the hairs rise on the backs of their necks as we see inside Melkur a room roundelled in black with a cowled plotter at the controls… Who turns to us with a great swell of music and with the ravaged face of the Master and, as all the years of insufferable imprisonment come to an end, with a tone of wonder and exultation:

“Now, this Traken web of harmony is broken. I am free…!”

Although Geoffrey Beevers’ time as the Master was a short one on television – though I do love The Keeper of Traken – the Master of voice has appropriately become the definitive audio Master, with many delicious readings of Doctor Who novels (not least Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons) and a splendid new array of adventures for Big Finish. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is Joseph Lidster’s Master, which has more than a passing influence on TV Master stories to come…

If you find yourself in the mood for audio-play Masters, two others are available, with actors you’re highly likely to recognise and enjoy in the part. But both of them are big twists! So I’ll mention Doctor Who Unbound – Sympathy For the Devil, which was released ten years ago and so you’ll probably have heard of it if you were ever going to, but not the one from last year, which is also terrific fun (email me if you want to know). You’ll certainly remember it if you’ve heard it, and I will say that bears a remarkable resemblance to the much earlier Master story The Claws of Axos – done rather better, and very much bigger…

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 3 – Logopolis

The Master (Anthony Ainley) still carries the mark of having used up his lives, a synthesis of his predecessors – and of the poor schmuck whose body he stole as a consolation prize for failing to hold onto the renewing power of the Source. Dark-haired, dark-bearded, sometimes charming, he has something of the look of one prior Master, but the rotten dead heart of the other. Usually dressed in the embossed black velvet of the Traken Court – a reminder of the victim in whose dead body he scampers, father of one of the Doctor’s companions and taunting her with it horribly, while still ever more wounded in his cadaverous existence and needing help with further degradations from or for the Cheetah People, the Tzun or his own carelessness – he’s another Master with a taste for increasingly ambitious disguises, sometimes less for function’s sake than on the edge of sanity. That’s the key to this Master, whose old, confident desire for domination is mostly displaced into being more than ever a one-man band with one man on his mind, obsessed with the Doctor in as bizarre revenges as possible. Laughing all the while. And laughing. And laughing (yet I’ve not picked “Heh heh heh heh!” as his signature quote).

The Master seized a new body as the twist in the tail on Traken, but it’s by insinuating himself throughout Logopolis that he really makes his mark. Glorying in vicious deaths, stalking fear and, as ever, cutting the Doctor down to size, he’s initially little-seen but a palpable presence throughout his first full story. He may laugh a lot, but he’s got a cold, dispassionate air that’s very sinister. A cold, high, echoing music, too. This time, he’s dangerous. But even he doesn’t realise how dangerous, as his greed to find out what secret the planet Logopolis is hiding sparks the greatest catastrophe in all of Doctor Who and the Universe itself begins to unravel. He loses his nerve like a typical bully and bolts, then teams up with the Doctor not to undo the damage – nothing can do that – but to save what’s left by transmitting a new lifeline into another universe to give ours breathing space… And, recovering his composure, he finds again an eye for the main chance. Again borrowing from the iconography of Terror of the Autons, Christopher H Bidmead’s script crafts a far more powerful climax up in the dizzyingly high control room of a radio telescope. But this time they do not get on: the Doctor is revolted by everything the Master’s done, and all the Master’s overtures are ostentatiously mocking of a man he clearly thinks is past it. It’s the final episode of the story, the final episode of this Doctor, and the Master sees himself as the coming man, a lithe, Thatcherite go-getter contemptuous of self-sacrifice and concern for others. But before he finds to his shock that the real coming man is yet to come, he patronises the Doctor’s old, comfy ways and mockingly praises him for a technological deliverance that he clearly thinks he could have delivered himself – but was instead keeping the Doctor busy while he worked out how to turn it to his advantage. The Doctor knocks the Master’s congratulatory hand away as if stung – and, even as he tries to bundle the Doctor out, he can’t resist giving the game away with a good taunt. The gloves are off…

“So it works. Congratulations, Doctor. I always knew you’d do it.”
“You did most of this.”
“Oh, no. I was little more than a humble assistant – but I have learned a great deal. And now I think it’s time for you to go and explain the presence of your friends. There’s quite a hubbub outside.”
“You’re quite right. One mistake now could ruin everything.”
“I know that, Doctor – and it could happen so easily.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Universe is hanging on a thread. A single recursive pulse down that cable and the CVE would close forever. Even a humble assistant could do it.”

Logopolis is probably Mr Ainley’s most dangerous performance – and certainly his Master’s most deadly effect – but, if you want a wider variety of Doctor in your ‘The Seven Faces of the Master’, like Mr Delgado he has other stories worth a look. I’d recommend Planet of Fire for a different and rather glorious interpretation of the Master in which he has a great deal of fun and is pitted for the last time against the ‘new’ Doctor who becomes his arch-enemy as they were in the early ’70s. Then there’s a more different still portrayal in Survival, Mr Ainley’s last TV appearance but, as with his first, not quite managing to finish off the Doctor (here one who shares Mr Ainley’s birthday, and his companion’s, too).

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 4 – The TV Movie: Time Waits For No Man

The Master (Eric Roberts) comes back from being executed first as a wriggling morphant monstrosity and then to possess yet another body, this time an unlucky paramedic. A mere human body begins to rot immediately, though his inner wriggling thing does at least give him the ability to spit sticky and occasionally hypnotic bile at those who get in his way. First underplayed, charismatic and rather sexy, his chiselled, clean-shaven features looking cool in shades, when bits start falling off his rapid deterioration leads to a waspish temper and a desperation to get the Doctor’s body – no, not like that. Oh, I dunno though. He also puts on his grandest frock yet for that big occasion. And yet he’s still not ‘the camp one’.

The Master has charmed a street gangster to his side with hard-luck tales of how – well, he’s no saint, but that awful, awful Doctor! A substantial quantity of gold helps. And the Doctor has made the mistake of choosing his companion rather less well: she’s already killed him once, she doesn’t believe him, and she’s more concerned with her sofa than his TARDIS. Never mind poor Mr McDermott: this is the sofa to really fear. And to top it all, she’s gooily hypnotised by the Master into abetting his S&M torture-possession plans, in a story that does millennialism considerably more stupidly than the one two above. And yet this Master is great fun and more of a mirror to the Doctor than he’s been in years, full of black humour when the Doctor plays it straight and, yes, I’m afraid heavily coded as the Hollywood Homosexual of Evil against a suddenly straight Doctor. I can’t help but enjoy both one-night-only Time Lords taking the piss immensely, and most of all as the Doctor wakes and expresses sheer incredulity as the Master’s companion swallows everything, his own slaps him because she’s evil now rather than merely banal, then the Master interrupts him, flouncing down the stairs with a flourish like Blanche turning up to the end of the world, which only the Doctor seems to notice:

“You! You took my things – where are they?”
“They’re not your things any more. Pretty soon, everything around here’s going to belong to the Master again.”
“Again? What’s he been telling you?
“When he gets his body back from you, I’m going to be rich.”
“And you believe him?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I suppose he neglected to mention that there won’t be any place to spend your money?”
“Which is why we have no time to waste.”
“But time to change!”
“I always dress for the occasion.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 5 – Utopia

I really, really did warn you there were spoilers, didn’t I?


Professor Yana (Derek Jacobi) is a brilliant, eccentric scientist, perhaps the last – the savant at the end of the Universe (no longer delayed). An old man with a young companion, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, selflessly helping everyone (though it would be nice, just once, to get a little credit), with strange twinges of memory about time travel, the Doctor’s companion accidentally alerts him to the significance of the Gallifreyan symbols on his pocket watch. Not long before, the Doctor had used such a watch to hide his true self while living a normal life in a body and person made suddenly human. So with this dear old man so obviously Doctorish, surely there couldn’t be any doubt who’d be inside when he opened the watch…

The Master (Derek Jacobi) is older than some, with grey hair and an old body… But he finds new vigour and purpose – and newly compelling, dark eyes – when his whispering inner self takes over again (and you’ll recognise some of those voices). If you remember him sitting waiting inside a statue, an even better disguise was sitting inside a nice man (sweet? Effete!). If you think he was in drag last time, this was a performance so great that he was lost in it. And if the Doctor’s deepest wish when he had to make himself a new person to hide in was to become an ordinary man, the Master’s deepest wish was to be the Doctor… But just a little bit better. Fleeing service in the Time War, tormented by the drums in his head, in recovering himself the Master’s a real live wire, suddenly turning with contempt on his other life and his friend, sneering at and scorning everything about her – unwisely – and leaping back into murder and sabotage for spite. That came very easily.

This really shouldn’t be here at all. I may not be breaking the laws of my Fifty, but I am— no, hang it, I am breaking them, because here’s a moment, quite a bit of a moment, that’s going to turn up again later. I won’t tell if you won’t. This is only a part of it where, let’s say, the Master has seized control of the Moment. That sounds ominous, and it is. To simply fantastic music, the greatest outing for the 2007 theme we know as ‘Dance of the Macra’, Professor Yana has gazed into the abyss, the abyss has gazed greedily back and, with his most disturbing and brilliantly portrayed possession so far, the Master now takes possession again of – himself. Locked outside, humanity’s twisted, cannibal offshoots the Futurekind bay in hungry frustration as, above, humanity’s more hopeful survivors soar off in search of Utopia; below, the Doctor is confronted with the appalling realisation that You Are Not Alone. And, at the heart of the otherwise abandoned outpost, Professor Yana’s friend Chantho is being confronted with evidence that her friend may no longer be in residence. Black-eyed and delighting in life again, the man in his place is about to rediscover a taste for murder, but first can’t resist some playful, vicious fun as he operates the master controls first to lock the Doctor away from his TARDIS, then to let the Futurekind into the silo to greet (and eat) the Doctor and his friends. Chantho is appalled; the Doctor panics as a massive door slams in his face; and the Master – oh, the Master makes me laugh.

“Chan—but you’ve locked them in—tho…?”

[“Get it open! Get it open!”]

“Not to worry, my dear. As one door closes, another must open.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who The Master Quotation 6 – Last of the Time Lords

The Master (John Simm) is young, and strong, and we see that he’s at last won that new lease of life – he explodes from his previous self’s mortally wounded body with a new voice and new hyperactivity. Or is it simply that, taunted by the Doctor’s survival and rejuvenation, he regenerates by sheer force of will? He bounds away from the end of the Universe and lays a long plan, taking the Earth, a wife and leadership of his most insanely loyal allies yet. He spends months building himself up as Harold Saxon, charismatic Prime Minister and saviour. Urbane, excitable, with just a hint of madness, he’s more spectacularly hypnotic than ever before, and more than any other Master a mirror of and match for the Doctor. And that viciously playful streak is given full reign – over all the Earth, the Universe to follow – with not just taunts, and pranks, and killing again and again, but now dance. Handsome in an untrustworthy way, dark-haired but clean-shaven, he tends to wear sharply tailored black suits and ties, but with just a flash of purple inner lining to mock a Doctor’s cape of old (though after things go a little wrong even with his back-up plan, he turns up again rather the worse for wear and rather more on the side of madness than urbanity, less cheeky than feral). And if the Master really were the Doctor’s equal, what would that mean? He’d win. He does.

The Master takes over the world and the lead – it’s only a shame that Russell T Davies didn’t also remake the title sequence starring John Simm in THE MASTER. The reborn Master can hardly contain himself when at last he gets to speak to the Doctor; he tells him to run, taking command of the whole narrative; he rejoices in teasing him as a public menace; he proclaims the fall of the human race. Well, one of them, anyway. Topping every other writer’s conception of him as fallen angel, he stages the Rapture with terrible pedantry and glories in his legions of the Damned fleeing the ultimate judgement day. And, for a fan who loves The Deadly Assassin more than any other story and grew up intoxicated by novelisations of Roger Delgado’s stories, this tour-de-force follows through on the Master’s original promise and reaches through the screen to take control of me, too: he’s never better than in this story, and it’s an amazing performance, taking everything that Robert Holmes gave the character to set sail and flying away with it. It’s the most fun he’s had since the Chair – this time with the Cabinet. And he’s both very, very funny and utterly horrible. This is perfectly encapsulated a year into his reign, riding high above the Earth, tormenting a Doctor he’s long made a captive audience and aged to infirmity, always ready to make him feel small. He sees the Doctor making a grab for his laser screwdriver and revels in his failure, helping him back to his wheelchair, staring into his face, derisively ‘commiserating’ with him – then laughing in sheer delight.

“There you go, Gramps. Oh, do you know? I remember the days when the Doctor – oh, that famous Doctor – was waging a Time War, battling Sea Devils and Axons. He sealed the rift at the Medusa Cascade, single-handed. Phew. And look at him now. Stealing screwdrivers. How did he ever come to this? Oh yeah – me!”

Here’s to many more Masters – future and past.


Next Time… Who could follow that?


[Number 38 has already been published, but its “Next Time…” would simply have been “Happy Easter!”]

In Britain it was the Guardian that broke the PRISM story. But, while we liberals have been getting outraged and William Hague has been telling us that if we have done nothing wrong we have nothing to hide, strange things have been happening in America.

There the story was broken by the Washington Post and, reports Ed Bott, odd things have been happening to its coverage:

And then a funny thing happened the next morning. If you followed the link to that story, you found a completely different story, nearly twice as long, with a slightly different headline. The new story wasn’t just expanded; it had been stripped of key details, with no acknowledgment of the changes. That updated version, time-stamped at 8:51 AM on June 7, backed off from key details in the original story. 

Crucially, the Post removed the “knowingly participated” language and also scrubbed a reference to the program as being “highly classified.” In addition, a detail in the opening graf that claimed the NSA could “track a person’s movements and contacts over time” was changed to read simply “track foreign targets.”

Bott goes on to suggest that the Post took a leaked PowerPoint presentation from a single anonymous source and rushed to publication because it was afraid that other publications would get the story too:

The Post compounded its error by quietly correcting its story and not publicly acknowledging that there were errors in the original story. In fact, the revised story still claims the NSA and the FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers” of those companies when that allegation no longer appears to be true. 

In short, one of the great journalistic institutions of the 20th Century is now engaged in outright click-baiting, following the same “publish first, fact-check later” rules as its newer online competitors.

I’ve been posting things about my knee problems here because, well, when you commit to blog almost every day, you wind up writing about most things in your life, especially when you think you have some interesting or funny things to say about them. It also saves time. Friends of mine read about it here and then I don’t have to tell them or have them later say to me, "Why didn’t you let me know about this?" I am absolutely not asking for sympathy or pretending it’s important that I can’t climb stairs without wincing a bit.

Something I’ve learned about injury and illness is that it’s important to keep these things in perspective. When you’re sick, you can make your problems worse — even make yourself actually sicker — by living in an overdramatized mindset. Recovery can have a lot to do with not thinking like a sick person…but at the same time, you have to be realistic and not set yourself up for constant disappointments by expecting that broken leg to be fully-healed by Thursday. A friend once said to me of another friend, "He’s making his condition worse because he doesn’t know how to be sick."

Every indicator suggests my knee will be fine in a month or two. I have to accept the pain and inconvenience that I will experience in that time and decide that I’m not going to let it encroach on my life and work any more than it has to. If I resent it…or if I see it as a bigger problem than it is, it can become a bigger problem than it is.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of thing lately because I have so many friends who are not well. I have a lot of that in my life and it’s not just because I’m 61. As you get older, you expect more and more of the people around you to have medical problems and even die. What I’m observing goes beyond that and I think it has something to do with the economy…and with the cost of health care. My torn meniscus will end up costing me around $8000 even with pretty decent health care. I asked a lady at the surgical center what something like this could wind up costing someone with no insurance. She said that in her experience it was roughly a factor of ten — $80,000 — and could go even higher. Needless to say, there are folks out there who simply don’t have the eight grand, let alone the eighty.

That’s bad but like I said, my problem should be over in a month or two. The real tragedy is with people whose conditions are open-ended and which could persist for a long, indeterminate period.

Each morning, I awake to e-mails and calls from sick friends telling me the latest. I log into various forums and read updates…like I just read the latest from Stan Sakai about his wonderful wife Sharon. I’ve known the two of them since before Stan began lettering Groo the Wanderer, which was before he created his own, highly popular comic book character, Usagi Yojimbo. They are great people and it breaks everyone’s heart that Sharon is suffering with a benign but inoperable brain tumor. "Benign" is better than "Malignant" but it has still caused her just about every conceivable health problem one can have: facial paralysis, anemia, rapid heart rate, double-vision, difficulty in breathing, difficulty in swallowing, difficulty in speaking, massive weight loss, etc.

I read all that and I have two kinds of reactions, one of them a bit selfish. The selfish one is that I think, "Jeez…and here I am thinking it’s a tragedy that my right knee is going to be hurting for a few more weeks." The non-selfish one is to feel for Sharon…and for Stan and what he must be going through. They’re smart, strong people and they have insurance — but smart and strong people have their limits and so do insurance policies.

I am one of those people who doesn’t like "Obamacare" because it is not Single-Payer. It’s better than what we had before and infinitely better than the Republicans’ "repeal and replace" goal which seems to largely sidestep the "replace" part. When I hear John McCain acting like he’s offended there’s a war we could be in and aren’t, and you think what those wars cost us just in terms of dollars, it’s a real head-shaker. The most conservative estimates suggest Afghanistan and Iraq will wind up costing U.S. taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion and we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to explain what we got for our money. Some estimates say that single-payer would more than pay for itself and lower the over-all costs of health care in this country. Even if it didn’t, ten years of it couldn’t cost more than we spent to rid the world of those Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam Hussein didn’t have.

Will this happen? Someday. ‘Til then, we put up with it and people will continue to suffer and die because they can’t afford to get things fixed. I have at least two friends who I believe died unnecessarily because they couldn’t afford good insurance. In the meantime, I’m glad for mine…and glad that my problems are so minor compared to some. I hope I don’t give the impression that I think this knee thing is anything more than a minor annoyance.

From Time:

Creative types are often seen as rather flaky — their minds leaping wildly from one bizarre idea to another, ever seeking inspiration. But a new study suggests that people who actually achieve creative success have minds that stubbornly cling to ideas, even to the point where it impairs their ability to shift focus.

. . . .

During the study, participants had to shift their attention from a global level of processing to a local one, by focusing on different aspects of patterns. In some cases, they were asked to identify a large letter made up of smaller ones (for example, an “S” pattern made up of smaller “e’s”). In other instances, the correct answer was the opposite one — identifying the smaller letter.

“It’s a little counter-intuitive,” says Zabelina, “but people with high creativity actually actually perform badly on this test.” In fact, they made more than twice as many errors as the less creative group — and even after controlling for overall intelligence, the creative people still did less well.

. . . .

“The general idea is that [people with ADHD] are not able to focus on anything,” says Zabelina, “But really there are two different parts of the disorder, and one is that if they really get interested in something, they  become almost like autistic people: really focused, so much so that they are not able to practice anything else.”  Indeed, between 30% and 50% of autistic people also have ADHD.

The combination of an ability to range widely from one thought to another and to focus when a good idea occurs may be the sweet spot for creative success. The trick is in the timing: to mind-wander enough when seeking ideas to hit on the best ones and then to zoom in and persist once the right solution has been found.

Link to the rest at Time

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A response to Author Solutions and Penguin Random House – The Real Deal? from the indispensable David Gaughran:

[Author Solutions uses] a multi-pronged strategy:

1. Author Solutions runs a multitude of faux-informational websites purporting to provide independent advice to inexperienced writers. After filling out a questionnaire, these sites then present a selection of publishing “options” – all subsidiaries owned by Author Solutions, all terrible. Author Solutions spends a lot of time and money to ensure that these sites appear at the top of Google’s search results for any generic terms that a publisher-hunting newbie would use (I’m not linking to these sites as that will help their SEO, but you can Google anything like “I need a publisher” to see what I mean. Running variations of those searches will bring up more than 20 different fake sites, all operated by Author Solutions).

2. Author Solutions operates fake social media profiles of “independent publishing consultants” which are manned by Author Solutions staff, target the most inexperienced writers, and only recommend Author Solutions companies.

3. Author Solutions pressures customers into writing positive testimonials before releasing their books for publication. I received one such complaint the last time I posted about Author Solutions, from an AuthorHouse UK customer who said that they wouldn’t publish the book she had already paid for until she wrote the testimonial here (second from top).

4. Author Solutions partners with supposedly legitimate and independent organizations to give a veneer of respectability to their scammy operations (like Hay House, Writers Digest, Simon & Schuster, Lulu, HarperCollins, the Authors Guild, Harlequin, and various writers conferences).

. . . .

While I regularly read both The Bookseller and FutureBook, I’ve had plenty of issues with their editorial line, particularly with regard to their policy of never printing anything critical about Author Solutions – or, at least, not since they were purchased by Penguin.

In the last few months, this policy has extended to censoring comments critical of Author Solutions on their blogs, a policy they now share with Digital Book World - whose parent company has its own Author Solutions-powered vanity press.

Both of these companies depend on income from advertising and running conferences, and it appears they don’t want to be critical of a huge player like Author Solutions’ owner Penguin – especially with their impending merger with Random House, which will create the largest (by far) trade publisher in the world.

Link to the rest at Let’s Get Visible and thanks to Geoff for the tip.

Passive Guy says the vanity press business is just another variation on the contract scams that the “legitimate” operations of some big publishers foist on unwary authors.

Without spending time blowing his own horn or claiming to be the smartest guy around, PG has negotiated a lot of contracts with a lot of large organizations – Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Fidelity, Disney, etc., etc., etc. He’s currently negotiating contracts with companies that are household names for some of his non-literary clients. Suffice to say, PG has a sense of what’s generally considered reasonable in American business contracts.

When he first focused on a plain-vanilla publishing contract from a large New York publisher a few years ago, PG was astounded at how unfair some of the standard contract terms were for authors. As he saw other publishing contracts, he learned that publishers copied onerous terms from one another. The wording might be different, but the meaning was the same.

Additionally, it was not unusual to find what, to PG’s jaded eyes, were drafting techniques designed to disguise some of the more egregious contract provisions from authors who did not have experience dissecting contracts.

After having reviewed many, many agreements and proposed agreements between traditional publishers and authors, PG is prepared to say these contracts, as a group, stand apart from the general run of business agreements as conscience-shocking monstrosities.

No, they do not reflect the special snowflake nature of publishing. They’re simply designed to screw authors and give publishers control over authors and their work that is far beyond what is regarded as reasonable in the rest of American business.

So, when David justifiably rants about how Random Penguin’s Author Solutions and other vanity presses screw authors, PG suggests this is just the other side of the same coin as the non-vanity part of the business. Each side reflects the same attitude toward authors — geese to be plucked.

PG hasn’t written longer posts on specific publishing contract provisions for some time. You can find examples here, here, here, here, here, and here. If you use TPV’s blog search function to look for How to Read a Book Contract and cursor down, you’ll find more.  You can also search on the Contracts category to pull up everything, but this category covers much more than contract problems for authors.

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In the Times Literary Supplement, Ferdinand Mount (a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher) reviews four recent biographies of Thatcher and ends up writing a short biography of his own.

What emerges is that Thatcher’s death has proved a catharsis for her closest allies. They are writing in far more forthright terms than her political opponents, who pulled their punches for fear of seeming disrespectful.

And herein lies a clue to Thatcher’s downfall. She treated her colleagues like shit and most of them ended up loathing her. She was consequently brought down by her own party and not her opponents. Thatcher’s opponents merely disagreed with her, but for her allies it was personal.

It’s been hard to miss the coverage of revelations that the US government has been scooping up data from tech giants such as Apple and Facebook – you’ve probably already seen newspaper reporting on the Prism project slides.

What’s surprising is that people think this is cause for renewed concern. Data in the cloud really should not be considered secure. The Americans have some sort of quasi-legel process for handling this, but I doubt other foreign intelligence is And if you are a big corporate, your data – blueprints, designs, release and pricing information – is probably of more interest to them too, as they can then give it to their own companies to produce cheap knockoffs.

And it’s not like the media in this country are any better behaved either. Personally, I regard all data on Facebook as near-enough public. Privacy settings stop my neighbours snooping but little else.

Rather more concerning is the UK involvement in this. According to the Guardian, “Prism would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.”

This is interesting in light of the recently proposed Communications Data Bill. If the security services already have access to the data, what was the bill for? One option is that it would have allowed open use of Prism data in UK courts, without raising questions as to it’s origin.

Another is rather more concerning: In exchange for Prism data we were expected to be able to generate similar data for the US on data travelling through UK-based servers and networks, building a global network of surveillance by states on each other’s citizens.

The Guardian has revealed that the American National Security Agency is collecting data from internet providers and other companies. Yet Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple have all denied being party to such an arrangement.

Writing on The Daily Beast, Megan McArdle says their are five possible explanations:

1. The companies are lying;
2. Only a few people in the company know about this, and they aren't issuing the statements;
3. The Post and the Guardian are wrong and have been duped;
4. PRISM was operating without the knowledge of the companies;
5. The companies know, and those statements are very carefully worded.

Which does she favour?

All of these are in some way unbelievable. #1 is asking for a class action suit that destroys your company. #3 involves some very suspicious national security reporters at two different outlets simultaneously getting duped. And #2 strikes me as extremely unlikely. I can imagine one rogue employee doing this without telling his employers. I cannot imagine the exact same thing happening at nine of the biggest internet companies. 

The most likely possibilities seem to be #4 or #5: the NSA is filtering this stuff at some point outside the companies, or the companies have issued some very, very carefully worded statements.

Uh, mostly not, because apparently I was the only person in the US who assumed the government was already doing something very much like this? Because it was doing it under Bush, and if Obama had gotten around to stopping doing it, his administration would have made a big deal about it, no? And since the Obama Administration never said a single word about it that I can recall, it was probably still going on? So I guess what I would say is, yeah, seems not surprising in the least, why are you suddenly freaked out about it?

This is separate and independent from the question of whether the government should be vacuuming up every single bit of information out there in our communication channels, to which my reflexive answer is, oh, very probably not. Seems like a bad idea, for all the usual reasons involving rights and civil liberties, and the fact that our government, while nominally seen as liberty-loving, is not forever guaranteed to be so (and of course there are many who do not believe it is that way now). With that understood, again, since this has been happening since the early days of the millennium, it seemed to me unlikely that it had suddenly had stopped. Our government doesn’t have a whole stratum of secret legal and operational apparatuses for nothing, you know. It’s being used. It hasn’t stopped being used, because, again, if it had stopped, the current administration would have made a fine show of not using it.

I’m not personally thrilled with the possibility/probability of everything I do online being strained through the government’s baleen, as it were, but I’ve assumed it’s been doing so for the last decade at least. Inasmuch as I live my online life with the assumption that nothing I do there is private and unknown anyway (i.e., it’s all discoverable at some point, and in some way), this did not require a huge adjustment on my part. The question I usually ask myself before I do anything online is this: Is this something I can tell my wife about, and she would be cool with? If the answer is “yes,” then if someone else finds out, meh.

(This doesn’t mean I’m keen to share all the (generally really not all that exciting, sadly) details of my online life with all y’all, “all y’all” including the NSA, and I think quite honestly most of you are probably happy with that arrangement as well. But if it happened, there’s nothing there that would surprise Krissy, and at the end of the day she’s actually the one that matters.)

On a related note, I’m also aware of how much privacy I’ve already given up on a daily basis to private corporations. For example, I’m nestled fairly deep into the Googlesphere at this point; I use its GMail service, have an Android phone and tablet and otherwise use a fair number of its services. Google knows where I am all the time (so long as I have my phone and/or tablet), reads my email and tracks a lot of what I do online, and in return it does a lot of things that make my life somewhat easier (I don’t get lost anymore when I go on the road, for example).

This constitutes a loss of privacy, to be sure, but it’s also varieties of privacy that I don’t feel terribly awful about compromising because a) I understand what’s being compromised and what I get out of it, b) Google doesn’t actually give a shit about my e-mail or other private information other than for keywords to offer me ads and services (and again I’m aware of that particular trade), c) a decade plus of dealing with Google has given me a good idea what I’m in for. Likewise Apple, Microsoft and Verizon, all of whose devices I use on a regular basis and have for years, and whose user agreements I actually do read.

Do I want Google (or anyone else) to allow the government access to their information on me without appropriate legal procedures? No (note Google’s flat denial of participation in a PRISM program here). On the other hand, again, simply as a matter of course, I have assumed the US government was getting my data one way or another. At the end of the day, the Internet  was born out of ARPANET, and the US government has never been keen of letting the Internet go entirely private. Once more, I’m slightly surprised people seem surprised.

And again, this lack of surprise is separate and independent from my thoughts on whether this assumed suctioning up of my data is correct, just or right. What I’m saying is that I’m not especially outraged at the moment. It’s hard to be outraged for an entire decade. At least it is for me.

Saturday:


Short form: weird, poignant, brilliant, mind-expanding, read it.

Long form: Faction Paradox are, supposedly, all about rejecting the "stuffy" linear constraints imposed on History by their former kin the Great Houses. The enemy is usually described as "an alternate form of history". But what would that look like?

"Doctor Who" is often described as the most flexible story-telling format in history. Of course, it isn't. But the irony is that, to really express how far you can flex this universe, you have to edit the Doctor out of history from the very beginning. That's where Faction Paradox comes in.

AGAINST NATURE, Lawrence Burton, Obverse Books

There is a very well-regarded Doctor Who story called "The Aztecs" which, unfortunately, contains the Western, Christian, Euro-centric, liberal English misconception of the Mexica civilisation in its very title and, rooted there, it informs – or misinforms – the entire narrative. Since "The Aztecs" is a not a story about a genuine historic people, but actually about predestination and time travel, and a view – that you cannot change history, "not one line" – that the series ultimately chooses to reject, this particularly black-and-white misconception is curiously apt and doesn't undermine the story. I love "The Aztecs". But it's really not a story about "The Aztecs".

(And I notice that Microsoft spell checker accepts the word "Aztec" but not the word "Mexica" which tells you this is not a forgotten problem.)

In our comfort and our privilege, we tend to be very, very squeamish about the concept of "sacrifice". In particular, we tend to jump straight in at chopping people's hearts out as an automatic by-word for evil and end any discussion there. "Sacrifice" becomes synonymous with "Murder".

But it's worth referring to the entry on "Sacrifice" in "The Book of the War" (ed. Lawrence Miles), where it says, in simplified terms, sacrifice is something that you do, it isn't something you do or even can do to someone else; it's about "giving up", not "taking away".

(I should say up front, you absolutely don't need a grounding in the lore of Faction Paradox or Doctor Who, or a copy of "The Book of the War" to hand in order to enjoy and fully understand everything that goes on here. Having said that, "Against Nature" does explore and expand a great many concepts and conceits from other Faction Paradox related titles, be they amaranths – "Christmas on a Rational Planet" – arithmancy – "Interference" – or House Xianthellipse, Walking Dead or Waves of the House Military – various entries in "The Book of the War" – which is the mark of a good player in a shared-world sandpit.)

We have become so used to abundance that even the Wartime use of "making sacrifices" is becoming an almost alien concept to us, and even the comparatively slight slowing of growth is called "austerity" and "hardship" as if we can understand that. The idea that people who have very nearly next to nothing to give up might choose to do without things and especially people that they value highly totally dumbfounds us.

(And yet, how many "Doctor Who" stories finish with one character – usually a guest character, but every now and again the lead – dying "for the greater good", often to save someone else, usually lots of someones, but again every now and again just one other someone?)

What Lawrence Burton does here is take that paragraph and really run with it.

It helps that he really knows his stuff. Don't let the peculiarity of the Nahuatl names of people and places put you off; instead let yourself fall into their alternate poetry. Later in the book, as time unwinds, passages of the text start to be written in the form of Mexica history, and this really works as a way of conveying a universe whose rules are being rewritten, and in parallel demonstrating the Faction concept of "alter-time states".

The Mexica religion and philosophy is so different to the standard Western view of the universe – and yet with some curious parallels: for example, there are strong echoes of Plato in the understanding of the difference between what is and what really is – that this is the perfect place to examine what "alternate forms of history" could look like and what happens when their continuity clashes with ours.

But this isn't "enemy" action; rather the ultimate nihilism arising from within the ranks of the House Military, reflecting the damage that war does to the warrior, but also the dangers of forcing the highly conservative agents of the Great Houses, whose entire Universe literally begins and ends with them putting constraints on History, to fight a war on behalf of life in all its diversity.

Starting with five stories – representing the five cardinal directions of Mexica theosophy – that initially appear to echo one another as they revolve around their common axis before beginning to bleed into one another and finally colliding explosively. The conclusion is as satisfying as it is ingenious, an explanation that both makes sense and fully encompasses why the entire scheme to destroy the Universe – spoilers – fails, based as it is in the same misconception of the Mexica with which we began.

The book is full of striking and memorable characters, from Grandma Doña Ultima to a talking Chihuahua to the Gods of Death, by way of central characters Primo, Todd, Emiousha of House Meddhoran and Momacani, and a mysterious, almost-identifiable one time agent of Faction Paradox and/or demoness Yaotl, some of whom may be Time Lords and some of whom may be dead.

(I spent a lot of the novel idly speculating whether Yaotl was Compassion or Lolita, and therefore which "side" she might come down on. In fact, a solitary use of the word Immaculata is suggestive, and the ambivalence about which side she is on becomes an obvious clue. And the idea that there are "good" and "evil" sides is something the whole book is pitching against anyway.)

The landscapes of Mexico City; San Antonio, Texas; the recursive Netherweald where House Meddhoran finds itself lodged thanks to Faction-inspired arithmancy; historic Tenochtitlan and the cities of the Triple Alliance; and ultimately the Tlalocan underworld are all vividly drawn and gather you into their respective worlds, excepting maybe San Antonio – ironically in the light of events later in the book – which I felt was not as distinguishable from present-day Mexico as the other segments, its main character being that Todd's home town it was somehow less vivid than Primo's city. Though that does sort of make sense as well, he says cryptically.

It's also at times a funny book, including an (unobtrusive) nod to that Doctor Who story, and another to name-check Mr Miles "This Town Will Never Let You Go". And a climactic reveal that echoes another classic "Doctor Who" cliff-hanger (I really can't say which) raised to a whole new level. These are the sort of touches that, I have to admit, I do when I'm writing, and in so many ways it's the sort of book I would like to have written myself. If I had ten years to sit down and do the research.

Short of quaffing peyote-based alcohol, this is the best way to expand your mind Mexica style.

PS: "Scarface" in not quite an anagram of "Sacrifice", and it's not deliberate, but it's worth thinking about how coincidence creeps in even when you're not looking.

The guessing game cycle of working out who the next lead in Doctor Who is upon us again. You know, the one where we shout out names of actors we like and then when the character is finally cast look baffled and go, “Who? Who even is he? My show is RUINED FOREVER!”

I use he/him pronouns here, because despite much of the wishlist of dream castings being women, the role will almost certainly go to a man. Which, at the moment, is probably a good thing.

Now, I fervently disagree with the Daily Mails and Louise Mensches of the world, adding their voices to the cavalcade of squawking from the misogynistic fanboys that the Doctor has to be played by a man. These whines about a potential threat to male supremacy, dressed up as false concerns about political correctness and the integrity of canon are nonsense. They’re completely fucking nonsense. A woman Doctor could be really, really fucking cool. Or, indeed, a genderqueer Doctor, a non-binary identified Doctor, or anywhere across the beautiful rainbow of gender. There are so many actors I would love to see in the role: Tilda Swinton as a circumspect Doctor; Sue Perkins as an exuberant Doctor; Judi Dench completely schooling the children in how to get shit done.

However, this all depends on the writer and who’s in charge of deciding the Doctor’s destiny.

And unfortunately that person right now is Stephen fucking Moffat.

As you might gather, I am hardly the Moff’s biggest fan, thinking him something of a colossal sexist. I can see, nightmarishly clearly, just how badly he would fuck up a woman Doctor. She would regenerate, and upon realising she is a woman, announce proudly “I’ve got boobs! Marvellous, exciting boobs!” She would take up with a male companion, because I cannot see Moff allowing women to travel space and time without some male supervision. And she’d fall in love with this male companion, because that’s how women work on Planet Moff. The fact she had regenerated as a woman would become a great, plot-driving mystery, as women are mysterious on Planet Moff.

I cannot see any way that a woman Doctor handled by the Moff would be written and characterised well. All I can see is car crashes.

So not yet, I don’t want a woman Doctor just yet. Not under Moff. He’s got to go before a woman Doctor would stand a chance at being anything other than simultaneously the butt of a joke and the Greatest Mystery In The Universe.

Is there a word for studies which confirm existing prejudices so are trumpeted everywhere as there now being scientific backing for such prejudices? If not, there should be.

The latest that has come to my attention is a study which is being reported as showing that women don’t want to be friends with women who have had a lot of sexual partners, while men don’t mind as much if their male friends are getting a lot of sex. Entitled “Birds of a Feather? Not When it Comes to Sexual Permissiveness“, the study claims to provide some support for a sexual double standard and suggests these findings might have an evolutionary basis. Male and female participants were provided with a profile of a fictional person, and asked questions pertaining to friendship with them. The only difference between the profiles was how many sexual partners the fictional person had had: two, or twenty.

As with most of these prejudice-confirming studies, though, there are a few problems with how the authors reached their conclusions. As with so many studies of this ilk, there is a huge issue with sampling, and the generalisability of this study. Participants were US college students, the overwhelming majority of whom were economically privileged–only 11% rated themselves as working class or lower middle class. But most importantly of all, gay and bisexual participants were excluded from the study to ensure that none of the results reflected any sort of sexual attraction (because, apparently, queer folk are unable to just be friends with heterosexuals). The findings, therefore, can only ever be generalised to heterosexuals and be applied to heterosexual culture. This is something which has not been reported in any media discussions of the study, probably due to a combination of the fact that journalists tend to regurgitate press releases rather than read studies, and a hefty dose of good old-fashioned heterosexism.

There is also a major problem with the stats used in this study. When conducting statistical tests, we use a probability that the finding was down to chance. The conventionally-accepted figure for a statistically significant finding is that there is only a 5% possibility that this finding is due to chance, and it’s important to report the values of this probability as a p-value, where we convert the percentage into a decimal. For example, p=.04 is statistically significant, meaning the result is unlikely to be due to chance. Meanwhile, p=.09 is not significant as it’s more likely that the findings were just chance. In this study, several findings were reported as being “marginally significant”. The threshold for this was p<.08. “Marginal significance” is a phrase which pisses me the fuck off, as it means it actually isn’t significant by any conventions which are used, it’s just kind of close and the authors wanted something else to talk about.

Then we run into another problem. When multiple tests are run, the possibility of a false positive increases. At a significance threshold of p=.05, if a researcher were to run 100 statistical tests, five would come up as significant just by chance. So it’s important, when you’re doing a lot of statistical tests, to adjust for this. The authors of this paper didn’t. The good news is, there’s enough data there for me to undertake a quick and dirty* adjustment called a Bonferroni Correction. As I said above, the generally-accepted significance threshold if p<.05. A Bonferroni Correction takes this significance threshold and divides it by the number tests run. Charitably discounting the 64 descriptive stats tests run, I count 160 tests undertaken (though I may have missed a few). p<.05 divided by 160 gives us the significance threshold of p<.0003, and from the data tables, it looks like there isn’t much that’s significant by this measure. Some findings are reported as p=<.001, although we cannot conclude from the information available whether they manage to reach the revised threshold.

For those of you whose eyes glazed over during that dry statistical excursion, take the findings of this study with a hefty pinch of salt.

If you did read the stats paragraph, you’ll notice I’m feeling charitable today, so now it’s time to talk about something I found really interesting in this paper, and I’m a little sad the authors didn’t examine more. Along with filling in questionnaires which largely formed the basis of the analysis, participants were also invited to write down things they liked and disliked about the fictional person. Almost everyone, men and women, had something negative to say about sexuality, even when it was the fictional person who had only had two sexual partners. These negative things included negative statements about extramarital sex and stigmatising phrases like “whore-like tendencies”.

Conclusions

We cannot draw the conclusions the authors and overexcited journalists have drawn–that women don’t want to be friends with slutty women. What we can see, though, is that among heterosexual US college students, there is still a pretty dodgy attitude towards sexuality, with people holding views which are generally quite negative even when a fictional person has had relatively few sexual partners. This is something we need to work on as a society: sex is a thing a lot of people do, and it’s much nicer to do it without judgment from peers. We need to support others in having safe sex rather than think unpleasant things about them, accepting people. We’ve all internalised a lot of shit, living as we do in a society with a decidedly wack view of sexuality. And that needs to change.

__

*Why do I find Bonferroni Corrections quick and dirty? Because I’m a Monte Carlo Simulation gal. Far more fun, you just get to leave a computer running while you go out for lunch and it feels like you’re working. Also, it’s more robust, or something, but mostly it’s the fact you get to pop out for lunch.

It is one of the biggest yet most under-appreciated ironies of British politics that the policy that unites the Liberal Democrat party membership in its most fervent rapture — the introduction of proportional voting to Westminster elections — is also, probably, the thing most likely, if implemented, to lead to the end of the party is we know it.

That is not to say that PR would necessarily lead to the break up of the party, but it is undeniable that majoritarian electoral systems force together the relatively broad coalitions that are the pre-requisite to winning elections.

The way in which individuals end up as supporters of particular parties under the present system is an interesting consideration in itself. Location, temperament, experience, upbringing: all can be more important factors than ideology. Paddy Ashdown became a Liberal because a canvasser persuaded him that he ought to. Nick Clegg became a Lib Dem because his then boss Leon Brittan thought he would fit in. Whether, but for these encounters, they would have ended up in the party is a matter on which we can only speculate.

Small, individual decisions, and a good deal of chance, explain why self-definining social democrats like Vince Cable and Andrew Adonis, socially and economically liberal politicians like Jeremy Browne and George Osborne, and centre-right Christian Democrat types like, well, David Cameron and Tony Blair end up in different, opposing parties.

What got me thinking about this was this post by Jeremy Cliffe over at the Economist. What, he asks, would British politics look like if we took a similar approach to our northern European neighbours? Here’s Jeremy’s guess, albeit with the sensible caveat that “[s]uch an exercise is doomed to be imprecise”:

Christian Democrats (c.30% support)

• Core agenda: Pro-business, institutional conservatism, support for families
• Voters: Middle- and upper-classes in suburban and rural areas
• Would draw on: Conservatives, Lib Dems
• Foreign corollaries: CDU (Germany), Moderates (Sweden)
• Possible leaders: David Cameron, Ken Clarke, Jesse Norman

Social Democratic Party (c.30% support)

• Core agenda: Progressive taxation, industrial activism, vocational training
• Voters: Working- and middle-classes in urban and suburban areas
• Would draw on: Labour, Lib Dems
• Foreign corollaries: SPD (Germany), Social Democrats (Sweden), NDP (Canada)
• Possible leaders: Ed Miliband, Andrew Adonis, Vince Cable

Free Liberals (c.15% support)

• Core agenda: Cutting taxes, pro-immigration, social liberalism
• Voters: Younger, urban, middle- and upper-class voters
• Would draw on: Lib Dems, Conservatives, Labour
• Foreign corollaries: FDP (Germany), VVD (Netherlands)
• Possible leaders: George Osborne, Nick Clegg, Peter Mandelson

People’s Party (c.15% support)

• Core agenda: Living costs, curbing immigration, social conservatism
• Voters: Older working- and lower-middle-class voters in post-industrial areas
• Would draw on: Labour, Conservatives, UKIP
• Foreign corollaries: Die Linke (Germany), Socialist People’s Party (Denmark)
• Possible leaders: Jon Cruddas, Robert Halfon

National Party (c.10% support)

• Core agenda: Socially conservative, small-state, anti-immigration
• Voters: Older middle-class and upper-class voters
• Would draw on: Conservative Party, UKIP
• Foreign corollaries: True Finns (Finland), Lega Nord (Italy)
• Possible leaders: Nigel Farage, Liam Fox

I think Jeremy is broadly on the money with his guess of the various potential parties we might see, and the spread of current politicians among them. I am less convinced on the estimated vote-shares. In particular I think he overestimates how well the People’s Party and National Party would do.

The other particular unknown is the effect of history on the extent of the changes: would, for example, a new Social Democrat Party emerge, or would the Labour Party simply evolve into it? If the latter, to what extent would those lifelong Labour supporters stick with the party, even if, say a People’s Party, better represented their views? In other words, would voters look dispassionately, rationally at the party that correlates most closely with either their ideology or interest, or would other, less rational, motivators prevail?

Fundamentally, political parties will always adapt to the system in which they operate. An equally plausible alternative to the reversion of the Lib Dems to its predecessor parties would be for the party to remain broadly intact, united as now by some of the fundamental liberal tenets that the vast majority of the party holds dear, but fighting elections in a rather different way: more distinctively liberal, less populist on issues like immigration. The electoral necessity to stick together might not be as strong, but the common threads and shared history would be.

Do share your thoughts below: Would PR be the end of the Lib Dems? Should it be? What of the other parties?

* Nick Thornsby is Thursday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs here.

Submitted by orthonormal • 63 votes • 113 comments 113 comments

 I am writing this blog while I am both hopping mad and absolutely dumbfounded. I have just had an interaction with a creative artist’s representative that has cost me at least a week of my working life, dozens and dozens of e-mails, and hundreds of dollars. This interaction might end up costing me hundreds more, but there is a distinct possibility that, in the end, I will make hundreds of thousands of dollars

All because of one person’s stupidity and ignorance of the law.

First, let me tell you that I’m writing this on the day that the most unbelievable stupidity occurred, the day that I am now turning everything over to my lawyer to handle from this moment forward. I am not publishing this blog for weeks, maybe months, maybe a year or more.

In other words, while I am writing this as if it happened this week (and for me, it did happen this week), you are reading this blog at a completely different time. I’m doing this so that the ignorant idiot I’ve been dealing with doesn’t know I’m talking about it (yes, I’m going to call the idiot “it” and its associates Frick and Frack will also be “it” or maybe “they”), because I think what happened here is a prime example of a teachable moment.

If I can divorce the moment from the details of what happened to me, and get to the core that applies to all working writers.

Here goes.

First, the personal experience—in vague terms.

There are many times in a writer’s career that she works with other creative artists—actual visual artists, screenwriters, comic book writers, translators, musicians, game developers and more—who develop derivative work based on the original property. These derivative works are governed by copyright law.

If someone wants to create a derivative work, that someone needs permission from the rights-holder for that work. The permission must be granted legally. There are different forms for the permission—a paper contract, an e-mail between the two parties, a user agreement on a website (fan fiction sites licensed by the copyright holder, like the ones for the Star Trek properties use this method) and so on.

Most sub rights sales are for derivative works. A translation of a novel into another language is a sub right sale, and it is also a derivative work because the words are different, but the story is the same. The work is a translation of an existing work; it is not the existing work. It was derived from it.

In the definition of derivative work under the copyright law, the statute says in part:

A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.

Once the derivative work exists, then the maker of that work needs the original copyright holder’s permission to do anything with the derivative work. If the Derivative Work Maker does not get the copyright holder’s permission, then the work of the Derivative Work Maker is dead.

Got that?

Long ago and far away, I worked with a creative artist’s representative who was also (briefly) my representative. I gave permission for a derivative work based on one of my works, to be used for six months only. My agreement was with the representative, not with the derivative work’s maker (DWM). I presumed that the representative had a separate agreement with the DWM, which also lasted for six months.

Nothing came of this, except that I made a great deal of money. Like so many things in the sub rights category, someone had a good idea, put some money into it, realized the project would not get off the ground, and went on to other things.

Fast forward several years. I get contacted by DWM’s new representative, who wants to send DWM’s old derivative work into the same marketplace again. I state that I will not permit this, unless we have a written agreement and money has changed hands.

The representative is shocked! Shocked! that I would demand funds and a legal agreement. Then I tell the representative that I have years of experience in all of the businesses this representative (whom we shall now call Frick) deals in, and if Frick wants any cooperation from me on this property, I need a legal agreement and money.

Frick makes an insulting offer. I say no. Frick promises to have a new offer shortly.

I hear nothing. Then I get a weird e-mail from Frick saying that someone else in the industry “is close” to paying me. I realize that Frick has been shopping this property without my permission and without an agreement in place. I demand that Frick come up with a legal agreement and money right now.

I hear from a person who identifies itself as a lawyer. At that moment, I assume said lawyer is attached to Frick and Frack, the representatives of DWM. Instead, I learned—today—that said lawyer represents DWM and doesn’t represent Frick and Frack at all.

Let me simply say that DWM should fire this idiot immediately.

Idiot lawyer is argumentative and nasty, refuses to deal with me by e-mail “because that’s not how it’s done in our industry” and demands to talk with my representative who, idiot lawyer believes, “will understand what I have to say.”

Well, I am now good and pissed, insulted, and on top of that, have three representatives are actively trying to sell a derivative work from my work without my permission. I tell them to stop marketing the work immediately. I tell them the negotiations have broken down and remind them that they do not have any rights in this work whatsoever without me. Since they are unwilling to pay for the privilege, they cannot market the work any longer.

Meanwhile, I’ve been consulting with my attorney all along. My attorney, appalled at these idiots, tells me to be firm with these people and make them go away.

I was, I am, and I get an astonishing letter in return.

The first letter, from the idiot lawyer, says that the representatives and DWM will remove all references to me or the title of my work on the derivative work, and will continue to market the derivative work.

My lawyer, appalled, tells me to remind them that this work is registered with the Copyright Office, and we will sue.

I do tell them this.

Frack contacts me, tells me that name removal is done all the time in their industry, and I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about it.

I again in e-mail tell them they do not have the rights to this.

Why am I doing all this, and not my lawyer? Because my lawyer costs hundreds of dollars per hour, and I am already losing money on this. All I am doing is reiterating that I do not  agree to anything and that these people do not have rights or permission to this work in anyway. I am doing so in e-mail, which is getting forwarded to my lawyer. We have a paper trail. I am doing nothing more complicated than that. I am saying this: No. No. No. No.

Then I get today’s astonishing e-mail, in which the lawyer—the lawyer—for this DWM says that they will continue to market this derivative work without my permission. I can let them do it or “prove that there are damages.”

Ack! Ack! Ack!

The idiot lawyer doesn’t know copyright law. I don’t have to prove damages. The damages are statutory, provided that the original work is registered with the Copyright Office, which my work is. I have actually informed these people of that fact. And to make it worse, copyright law states that if I can show willful infringement—which means that they knew the work did not belong to them and they infringed on it anyway—I’m entitled to even more damages.

Idiot Lawyer put on the fact that they were going to steal this property from me in his reply to my latest cease and desist e-mail. Which proves right there that they plan to willfully infringe on the copyright.

My lawyer is actually salivating. Should the derivative work receive any money at all for any reason, we have grounds to go after Frick, Frack, and Idiot Lawyer.

Unfortunately, we will also have to go after the DWM as well.

I am convinced that all DWM knows about me is that I am an unreasonable bitch. I am sure that DWM’s representatives have informed the poor schmuck that I won’t cooperate, but they have resolved the problem anyway.

For DWM’s sake, this derivative work had better not make any money. Because even if DWM gets a payout in very large figures, DWM’s representatives have guaranteed in writing that I will get a large portion of that payout ( if not all of it). They  have done so with their stupidity.

Okay, I’ve gone on here much too long because I’m mad. But here’s the thing: for the last year or so, I’ve been dealing with other people’s representatives in one way or another. Sometimes it’s on my sub rights and derivative works. Sometimes it’s connected to other projects I’m doing that aren’t writing-related.

In most cases, when I have dealt with a representative of another creative person, that representative has cost the creative person money or has jeopardized a good deal. Or—and this is the most common—has negotiated worse terms for their client than the terms being offered.

Back when Dean and I were doing Pulphouse, kind little writer that I was, I would tell the representative not to ask for that or I would personally contact the creative artist and put a bug in their ear about their representation.

Part of the reason that Pulphouse had no assets to sell when we got in financial trouble was that we bent over backwards to be fair to other creative types. We had nothing to sell. I learned that lesson. Now I bite my lip and write posts like this.

People hire bad representation all the time. Let’s take this out of the realm of the creative for a moment. Every week, it seems, you see an article about some movie star or athlete who is suing their financial advisors for bad advice. Or you read in the paper about legal cases being appealed because of “ineffective assistance of counsel.” Yes, that’s a legal term based the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution. It means what it says—the case is being appealed because the lawyer for the defendant (usually) was stunningly, appallingly, provably bad.

Ignorance of the law, by the way, isn’t part of ineffective counsel or DWM could go after idiot lawyer for that. DWM just hired a lawyer who had the wrong area of expertise or is so arrogant that it never bothered to learn its job. (I vote for never bothering to learn.)

I have been in the same position as DWM almost every single time I’ve hired an agent (one exception only). I discovered only after firing some of them just how bad my representation was, and how much those people interfered with my career. None of them, to my knowledge, invited someone to make me party to a lawsuit like Idiot Lawyer just did, but note that I say “to my knowledge.” I’m pretty sure DWM doesn’t know that my lawyer and I now have a file on DWM that we are prepared to use when/if idiot lawyer actually makes good on its threat.

I was planning to write a blog on this during the month the events were going on, before things escalated, because this incident also marked the first time I’d ever experienced a reaction that Randy Tatano, who works as a freelance broadcast news reporter, mostly for NBC, described in my Freelancer’s Survival Guide . I’m going to reproduce it here (and note, Randy gave me permission to use this in the Guide and on this site):

Well, on the topic of hiring someone to negotiate, a news anchor I know hired an agent to negotiate her next contract. Her agent took such a hard line that management called her bluff and she ended up out of work. She had absolutely no desire to leave but apparently didn’t convey that well enough to her agent.

On the other side I was trying to hire an anchor once and the agent was so incredibly obnoxious I moved on to someone else. I was trying to negotiate and meet the guy in the middle but he wanted to play hardball.

What surprised me about these instances is that both anchors were extremely likable people, yet hired agents who were so difficult to deal with. And, as you pointed out so well Kris, anyone who negotiates for you needs to know exactly how you feel.

I am pretty creative-artist friendly. I like working with others, and I am willing to make a lot more concessions than I probably should. But Frick, Frack, and Idiot Lawyer so angered me that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about DWM. DWM could have called me and tried to talk to me about this problem, and all I would have said was, “Hire new representation, dude.”

That’s it.

I had never before been on the receiving end of a representative who was so slimy, so smarmy, so unlikeable, that I refused to do business with that person, no matter how much I wanted to work with the client. And that was before the Idiot Lawyer told me it would steal from me.

Well, I’ve been there now, and believe me, now I get it.

In the past, I had been the client of the bad representative. One of my agents caused similar problems for me. Several editors kindly told me that no one liked my agent. I figured good: that means my agent is tough. (sigh) Another writer (who I later learned had fired the same agent) pointed out that the agent had a new assistant every year.

As a person who has owned several small businesses, that should have been a red flag for me. The agent couldn’t keep assistants. But it wasn’t. I was lost in the myths that a writer needed an agent. And I believed this agent was a good one. Nope.

Well, not true. That agent still has a reputation for being a good agent. I don’t know where it comes from because those of us who have gotten rid of said agent know it is not true.

I am now making a lot more money on foreign rights than I did with any agent. I am making 100% more money for my Hollywood rights than I did with any agent, because the agents screwed up the deals. I am making 100% more money in audio and in a dozen other sub rights because I’m actually negotiating and making those deals as well.

Just this last week, I spoke to a writer friend, a New York Times  bestseller, whose agent just sold audio rights to a company I’ve worked with. The agent got this writer the exact same deal that I got without an agent (and without a New York Times bestselling series), and will now take 15% of that same deal in perpetuity.

In other words, I’m getting paid more for doing the work myself. How much work was it? Three e-mails. Three. That’s it.

Is doing the negotiations myself worth moments like today? After all, an agent would have dealt with these idiots from day one. The problem is that almost every single agent I had (with one exception) would have given Frick and Frack the rights to this property for free, without consulting me.

That’s why Idiot Lawyer wanted to talk to my representation. Because I was a harder negotiator than any of the agents I had hired. What Idiot Lawyer didn’t understand was that had my lawyer been on the phone, the conversation wouldn’t have gone Idiot Lawyer’s way. At all. Because my lawyer works for me, and unlike all of those agents, my lawyer knows it.

Some people believe that if a writer has a six-figure or more deal on the table, then it’s okay to hire an agent for that one project to shepherd things from here to there, to use contacts to talk with the sales force, to manage.

I disagree. If a writer feels she needs someone to step in and do those things, then she might want to hire someone. But I see no problem with the writer doing that herself. It’s better to do so.

Why do I hold that opinion? Because of today’s experience?

No. Because of an experience I had with three different high powered agents. One had just gotten a Big Name client. I was in the agent’s office as the agent was consulting on Big Name Author’s new book title. The agent looked at me, grinned, and said, “Big Name always writes smut, so we want a smutty title for the book.”

“Smut” was not being used nicely here. The agent told me this to impress me with the fact that she had better literary taste than this, but the “smut” made money. Besides, Big Name did not write smut. Big Name wrote urban fantasy with some sex in it.

I figured that agent was being chummy with me, a client, but the moment rankled. And then got worse as another person came into the office. “What do you think of this title?” the agent asked the other person. “Is it trashy enough to appeal to Big Name’s readers?”

Breathtaking. I left that office wondering what nasty things the agent said about my work behind my back.

Here’s the second incident: I met with the president of a boutique agency. That president only had two clients, neither of whom were me. I was with a different agent in that agency. The president was exceptionally rude to me, essentially telling me that I wasn’t a client worthy of her time, and then told me to leave.

At the time, my 15% paid for two of the in-house employees at that agency, plus benefits.

I left all right. I left the agency entirely.

Finally, a (not-so-dumb) assistant of an agent I hired mailed me the cover letters that had gone out to editors with my latest novel. The agent said point-blank in those letters that my work wasn’t up to snuff, but I had forced said agent to mail the work anyway. Agent was sorry for bothering the editor with it all. Implied in the letters? Please reject so that I can get my client off my back.

This was not some random small-time agent. This was another big name agent at another big name firm.

The damage done to my career by the people who theoretically “managed” or “handled” my career was astonishing. Even more so when you figure they had an economic interest in doing well.

But I’ve only seen more of this kind of thing since I started the blog. So many writers have sent me agency agreements or told me stories of things they discovered that their agents had done wrong.

I recommend attorneys to handle negotiations or at least review legal agreements. But the person I had the most trouble with today was a lawyer—and it was awful.

How do you make sure you have a good one?

First, realize you’re hiring your lawyer for a single job only. Some lawyers are good negotiators. Some are good litigators. Some are good at reading certain kinds of contracts. Some are good at estates.

Hire the lawyer for the job that you need, and make sure that lawyer has an expertise in that area.

Clearly Idiot Lawyer didn’t know copyright law or Idiot Lawyer wouldn’t have written half the things it did in e-mail. Idiot Lawyer also did not copy its client on those e-mails, another no-no in my book.

Second, learn as much about this stuff as you can so that you can make an informed decision when you hire a representative. If you don’t think you’re good at working with people, if you don’t want to liaison with your traditional publishing house on your six-figure deal, then make sure you hire a good person for that job only for a flat fee, and fire that person if they don’t do a good job. Trust, but verify. Make sure they’re doing the job you want by checking with the people they’re supposed to be working with. You’ll hear if things are going badly.

Third, you license copyright. If you don’t know what that means, if you don’t understand why my lawyer is so happy about the paper trail above, then get a copy of the current Copyright Handbook right now. Now! Don’t delay.

Finally, if you end up having success in this business, you will have to hire lawyers, accountants, managers, and all other manner of people to work for you. Hire them when you absolutely need them on an hourly or flat-fee basis. Do not hire them when you start out. If you haven’t made a dime as a writer, why are you hiring an agent for a percentage? Don’t bring your best friend from college in on any deal because he went to law school. He might have studied to become a real estate attorney and he knows nothing about publishing or copyright or anything else. Lawyers, accountants, managers and all other manner of professional service people specialize. Hire the right person for the right specialty.

DWM clearly did not. I’ll wager DWM got Frick and Frack and celebrated because they took him on. I’ll also wager that DWM never researched Idiot Lawyer either. If DWM knew what Idiot Lawyer was writing in DWM’s name, well, I would hope that DWM knows enough to realize that Idiot Lawyer just threatened to steal my work and dared me to stop him.

But I wouldn’t bank on that. I can almost guarantee you that DWM knows nothing about business or copyright or anything else associated with the freelance work DWM  has started to do. There are too many signs that DWM knows nothing—the same signs that twenty-something me was giving off before I realized that I had to monitor my representatives, before naïve me realized that representatives could do bad things or not even try.

Once again, I’ve been confronted by the school of hard knocks. Only today, it’s the potential hard knock that will go to DWM and I will not hesitate to deliver that knock if need be.

It’s sad.

But DWM hired bad representation, doesn’t monitor said representation, and has no idea what said representation is doing in DWM’s name.

I’ve been there. I escaped.

I doubt DWM will.

I hope you all will be more sensible than both of us. And realize that you’re not playing a game here. You’re not just trying to be published or trying to get the best deal or trying to get noticed.

You’re also dealing with contracts and copyrights and courts and things that could have a lifelong impact on you and your family.

Keep that in mind whenever you bring anyone new into your business. Particularly if you ask them to represent you.

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“The Business Rusch: “Good Help” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

 

 

 

 

YouGov have done a survey asking people their opinions about Doctor Who and what characteristics they want to see in the next Doctor. As politics and Doctor Who are two of this blog’s continuing obsessions, I couldn’t resist writing about it – and this post becomes even more ‘my entire blogging history in one post’ if I tell you I’m doing it while I wait for the highlights of the Criterium du Dauphine cycling to come on TV.

(Insert your standard disclaimer here about polling not necessarily being accurate, margins of error, just a bit of fun etc)

It’s perhaps not surprising that Lib Dem voters are more likely to be Who fans than supporters of other parties (see Alex Wilcock’s ‘How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal‘ or my take on it here) but it’s nice to see it statistically confirmed – 41% of Lib Dem supporters are interested in the series, compared to 34% of Labour, 29% of Tories and just 26% of UKIP supporters.

I’m actually surprised to see David Tennant topping the ‘favourite Doctor’ part of the survey by quite a convincing margin – 43% to Tom Baker’s 16% and Matt Smith’s 14%. He won a similar DWM poll while he was the Doctor, but he’s now three years out of the role, which does indicate that he may well have replaced Tom Baker as the public’s image of the Doctor. (He is one of my favourites, but if I’d have been polled, I’d have doubled Patrick Troughton’s support amongst Lib Dems.) However, fun confirmation of stereotypes comes with Jon Pertwee getting his highest ratings from UKIP and Tory voters, but absolutely no support from Lib Dems. It’s possibly because he’s the most ‘establishment’ of all the Doctors – no other Doctor spent so much time hanging around the military – though one could also argue that the Pertwee era was full of images of a proudly independent Britain with its own space programme and big energy projects. As soon as he went, Tom Baker’s first story saw international sovereignty being pooled to protect nuclear codes in ‘Robot’ and the English countryside, if it was real at all, was depicted as being full of androids.

There’s also interest in the questions about what characteristics the new Doctor should have. Even without the breakdown by party, I’m surprised to see that the population of Britain are relatively open to the idea of a different Doctor. The only characteristics that get bare majority support are British (54%) and male (52%) – and male only gets about 40% support from Labour and Lib Dem voters. That gives me hope that when – and I believe it is a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’, even if it’s not this time – we get a female Doctor, the general populace will be much more inclined to accept it and see how it goes than certain Who fans believe they will be.

Other figures almost look as though they were created by the stereotype-o-matic such as 50% of UKIP voters thinking it’s important the Doctor is white, compared to 5% of Lib Dems, though I’m confused by a couple of spikes (which might just be statistical noise because of small sample size) – Tories are more likely to want the Doctor to be attractive, while Labour voters are more likely to want the actor to already be a household name.

My general position is that I want the next Doctor to be played by someone interesting – I’ve not been the biggest fan of the last three years of the series, but I think Matt Smith’s done a good job with some weak material and has been very good when he gets a good script – and most of the actors who I’ve thought could be interesting Doctors have been different from the norm. (That said, I do edge towards the ‘I’d like a woman Doctor, but not one written by Steven Moffat‘ position) If it was up to me, I’d be trying to persuade one of Adrian Lester, Maxine Peake, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Naomie Harris or Ben Whishaw to take the role – but it’s not up to me, so I just get to wait, watch and see what comes next. Hopefully, I’ll still be around for the 100th anniversary, when all this speculation will seem as quaint and irrelevant as ‘can you really get another completely different actor to play the Doctor?’ was in 1966.

That's not right!

OK, let's get this out of the way right off the bat: “Miri” is pretty terrible. Its central concept, while interesting, is basic and stretched far too thin, it's padded to the point whole dialog exchanges and entire scenes are repeated almost verbatim, its pacing is excruciating, it has behind-the-scenes problems that will culminate in Grace Lee Whitney getting fired and it has a someone who looks like a 15-year old falling in love with Captain Kirk (even if she does turn out to be over 300) and as a result this is an episode nobody is especially fond of. In spite of all that, however, it *is* a landmark moment in the history of Star Trek, because this is the first episode overseen by new producer and showrunner-in-all-but-name Gene Coon.

Coon is one of the great unsung heroes of Star Trek and probably the most criminally marginalized person in the entire history of the franchise. Coon's influence on Star Trek, or at least the Star Trek everyone likes to pretend existed, cannot be overstated: Not to put too fine a point on it, but if there's something you remember liking about the Original Series that didn't evolve in some way from “The Cage”, chances are it was Coon's idea. The fact of the matter is the lion's share of the utopianism and progressive idealism Star Trek is so frequently praised for comes not from Gene Roddenberry, but from Gene Coon. I don't want to completely dismiss Roddenberry, mind: He and Coon seemed to generally work well together and one of Roddenberry's virtues was his willingness to listen to every idea and piece of constructive criticism people gave him. Granted, he was more likely than not to go ahead and do whatever the hell he wanted anyway, but he'd at least listen to you. However, the problems come when people, especially Coon, would give Roddenberry particularly good ideas that caused him to see things in a totally new way and then Roddenberry would then turn around and claim it was his idea all along. This will prove to be a troublingly reoccurring motif.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is Coon's first episode and I'd like to take some time to try and tease out a little of how his style contrasts with Roddenberry's. Unfortunately, Coon is given a right turkey of a story to work with here so the show isn't doing him any favours right from the start, but even so there are signs things might just be starting to change. For one, this is the first time the Enterprise seems to be doing something other than running errands or law enforcement: It's not entirely clear what it was up to before receiving the distress signal, but the crew were clearly not on another mission beforehand. And on top of that, the whole teaser and first few scenes are absolute corkers: The Enterprise stumbles upon a planet that is inexplicably an exact clone of Earth and, once the away team beams down, it seems dead except for a group of disturbingly feral children who seem to haunt the town, always hidden just out of sight and chanting in warped versions of playground games.

These opening moments alone are filled with more ideas and imagination than the entirety of the series up to this point: There is a real, palpable sense of mystery as to the setting and, more to the point, for the first time the crew know no more about it than we do-The Enterprise isn't checking out an Earth colony, which, while operating in ways the audience isn't familiar with given it's a futuristic setting is still something the crew knows as it's part of their culture, this is a genuinely strange and unfamiliar world they have to learn the rules of along with us. Of course “Miri” scuttles all this halfway through Act 1 where we find out exactly what killed off all the adults and how to deal with it (and it never does explain why this planet is a clone of the Earth) but even so this is still bolder and more creative than the show has ever been before.

These scenes are the first steps toward moving Star Trek away from being a show about running around policing people and telling them what to believe into one about going out, exploring and making contact with new people and new places. They're tentative steps in that direction, but they're clearly recognisable as steps regardless. If only the rest of the episode was as clever: The mystery is solved immediately and it takes Kirk, Spock and McCoy a tortuously long time to do anything about it. We still have Roddenberry-era gender politics as Miri gets catty and jealous of Rand (I suspect Rand is meant to feel the same, but Whitney does not come anywhere near close to selling it, although to be fair she had somewhat legitimate reasons not to. Still, seeing her acting deteriorate is sad). This is somewhat mitigated by Miri herself being an interesting and likable character, and she manages to work much better as an exploration of puberty than Charlie Evans was ever able to.

It's perhaps possible to read the Life Prolongation Disease as a metaphor for puberty's confusing nature, although I think Adrian Spies probably intended it more as a critique of the glorification of a kind of fairy tale interpretation of childhood and the fanciful desire some have to remain children forever (indeed Rand even gets a line espousing the charms of a permanent childhood, after which Kirk tells her she may want to rethink that). If this is the angle Spies was aiming for it's a laudable one: An unnatural romanticization of children is one of the Victorian era's defining cultural traits and has become a pillar of Westernism (and to an often detrimental extent) ever since. Indeed, the whole idea that children are by definition pure, innocent, honest, asexual beings who are special as they have been unsullied by the world's natural, sinful reality can be seen as an artificial Victorian construction based around a reductive interpretation of the New Testament, and Miri, both the character and the episode, are a sufficient refutation of this idea. Star Trek choosing to criticize this cultural tenet would firmly ally it with the leftist counterculture for the first time.

Although Miri's blossoming sexuality is portrayed as a sign of her maturation, it's something the show unambiguously supports: Kirk at once encourages Miri to grow up, but is gravely concerned for her because he knows that's a death sentence on this planet, causing him to redouble his efforts to find a cure. And William Shatner is gangbusters at this, showing more compassion and love for Miri than he has at any other time for any other character on the show before now. I'm sure he was helped by being a father himself and having two of his own three daughters on set as extras on this episode, and his performance is as heartfelt and beautiful as it is hyper-caricatured and scenery devouring. Of course, this episode runs smack into some more uncomfortable Freudian implications by having Miri be attracted to Kirk, but at least Shatner has the decency to portray Kirk's love as purely platonic surrogate parental concern. I also really appreciate how Kirk's affection for Miri contrasts so perfectly with his awkwardness in dealing with Charlie Evans in “Charlie X”: It seems clear Kirk is much more comfortable taking on this role with women than with men, thus implying he's more of a friend to female culture. This is the most feminist Kirk has been since his first appearance.

But the frustrating thing is this still isn't enough. Spies' script doesn't go anywhere with this idea, or any of these ideas for that matter, bewilderingly thinking the most interesting aspect of the story is watching Kirk, Spock and McCoy kill time in a bombed-out doctor's office waiting for the plot to progress to the point where they're allowed to discover the vaccine. Coming from a modern perspective, it's also really tempting to hope for Kirk, Rand and McCoy to serve as representatives of some sort of idealized, leftist uptopian version of adulthood for Miri to aspire towards, especially in contrast to the deranged monsters adults become on her planet. But the episode is sadly not designed to do this, in no small part due to the fact we're still a ways off from the point where the Enterprise crew can first actually conceivably be called ideals. There are a ton of really intriguing ideas worth pursuing here, but Spies follows through on exactly none of them: All we're left with are half-formed thoughts and glimpses of meaning. As an actual piece of television “Miri” is just a mess of potentialities and implications and doesn't have any desire to pick up any of the threads it leaves strewn about on the floor.

Nevertheless, the fact we can have this kind of discussion about the show's ethics, even if they don't work, is strong evidence something is different now. It doesn't really matter, in this regard, that Adrian Spies never wrote for Star Trek again thanks to Roddenberry finding this episode below-par: Gene Coon's fingerprints on it indicate his version of the show is promising and something it might be worthwhile for us to follow. Coon took a script that really wasn't going to work all that well and injected it with a genuine sense of mystery and imagination, not to mention has begun cleaning up the show's philosophy to be something a bit more nuanced and radical. Right now it looks like bringing him on was one of the best moves Star Trek has made to date. Now all that remains is to see where else Gene Coon will take it.

“What about the United States” is, of course, a terribly weird move to make right now. After all, by the time The Christmas Invasion, which we’ll deal with on Monday, aired in the UK, exactly zero episodes of the new series had aired in the United States. Indeed, the airing of Series One in the US coincided with much of the airing of Series Two in the UK. The show’s US popularity lagged the UK by a quite massive margin. So for the most part the question of Doctor Who in America will be tabled until Matt Smith and BBC America, who do, shall we say, rather a better job with the show.

Still, let’s talk about its initial American context on the Sci-Fi Channel. The Sci-Fi Channel is one of the most unfortunate ideas in television history. It was launched as a cable channel in the early 90s, when cable was expanding and everybody thought cult television was actually a way to make money. (A year before The X-Files, then.) Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. Sci-Fi Channel’s original plan of running old cult series acquired cheap never quite took off, and their forays into original programming were, for the most part, similarly unsuccessful. On the occasions they created good programs - Farscape, for instance, which actually ran after Doctor Who Confidential on BBC Three - they usually ran into the problem that good cult-style science fiction was expensive to create and drew too small an audience to be worth it, which is where most science fiction of this sort falls down. Farscape was good, intelligent, funny, and never attracted ratings high enough for a marginal cable channel like Sci-Fi to produce it.

It’s worth noting that even though science fiction is broadly popular, there’s virtually none of it that’s done in the old cult model anymore. Anyone pitching a high-budget science fiction action-adventure serial aimed squarely at males 18-35 is going to be laughed out of the room. Seriously, is there even a single show that works that way anymore? I’m pretty sure they’ve all adopted some version of the high emotional content/soap opera plotting approach now. (The last arguable survivor I can think of, Warehouse 13, is slated for demolition next year, and is hardly primarily a male audience anyway. Maybe Arrow? I’ve not bothered to watch.) And accordingly, the Sci-Fi Channel, these days rebranded as the non-committal and more trademarkable SyFy, steadily became a shockingly low rent channel known for deliberate pieces of cheese like Sharktopus, more ghost hunting than you can shake a stick at, and a lot of professional wrestling. (A parenthetical on this, as it may well be an entirely US thing - professional wrestling is not actually a sport but a simulated one in which results are pre-determined and stuntmen perform fake wrestling matches according to long-running plotlines. Basically, it’s a gobsmackingly homoerotic soap opera that pretends to be a sports competition. So like the Premier League, only with more match-fixing.) Of the actual genre content they have, fully half of it is imported from other countries, usually Canada.

It’s tempting to suggest that the most damning evidence of the Sci-Fi Channel’s incompetence was their initial decision to turn down Doctor Who in 2005. This may not be entirely fair, however. After all, as we’ve seen the Eccleston season is very specifically aimed at British television, and would port oddly at best to the US. And did, in fact. I’m speaking purely anecdotally, but the number of US fans for whom the Eccleston series really did prove a stumbling block in a way that the Smith material doesn’t is staggering. And it’s really not surprising, because Smith jumps in with fairly universally recognizable things, whereas Eccleston jumps in with British soaps, an extended Tony Blair/Iraq War parody, and culminates in British reality television. It’s not exactly US accessible, not least because save for The Unquiet Dead and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances it’s miles away from heritage theme park Britain.

On the other hand, this is the Sci-Fi Channel we’re talking about, and it’s notable that they reversed course as soon as it was obvious that there was, in fact, demand for Doctor Who and that it was popular in the UK. Let’s not give them too much credit. (The more interesting question is really why it didn’t go to BBC America, the answer seeming to be that the BBC took something of an all-or-nothing approach and was unwilling to see it go to what was then still quite a small channel. The problem is that the resulting gap was so big that there was barely a US Doctor Who fan alive who didn’t know how to use BitTorrent, and nothing Sci-Fi Channel did consisted of actually trying to shrink that gap substantively. Even in Series Four they didn’t start airing it until after it had finished in the UK. BBC America, on the other hand, quickly demonstrated a willingness to treat the program as an a-list property instead of as something to burn off when they were bored, as Sci-Fi Channel always did.)

In any case, while Doctor Who was languishing on the Sci-Fi Channel it was generally paired on the schedule with Battlestar Galactica, either running during weeks when Battlestar Galactica was not on the air, or forming a Friday-night programming block. This alone signifies the sort of show that the Sci-Fi Channel assumed both were, Fridays being a particularly low-rated night of television that was, by tradition dating back to The X-Files, reserved for cult shows. (In a sign of the inevitable, the programming block was called Sci-Fi Fridays, setting up a fairly obvious question about what the other six days on the Sci-Fi Channel might be.)

In many ways it is difficult to imagine two shows that are a poorer fit for one another. Doctor Who is generally fairly light drama, and is generally characterized by a tone of joy. Battlestar Galactica is a doom-laden deconstruction of space opera in which the genocide of all of humanity is continually an imminent threat. But under the hood the similarities are largely clear. Both, in their own ways, are rejections of cult television, Doctor Who in its determined staking out of a position in the mainstream, Battlestar Galactica in its aggressive deconstruction of the standard tropes of the genre in favor of hard-edged social realism and aggressively filmic visuals.

What is perhaps most important about Battlestar Galactica is that it is a remake of a proper cult property - a 1970s television series done in the aftermath of Star Wars that was briefly popular but that aged terribly and was an utter cheese festival. The thing about the reimagined Battlestar Galactica is that it never seems to take the original series all that seriously. Unlike Doctor Who, which honors its camp past, Battlestar Galactica is ultimately a refutation of the original that decides to take its shockingly ambitious premise - robots destroy all of humanity, and the last few survivors go looking for the lost human colony of Earth - and actually take it seriously. The series honored its past in places, but increasingly cut those places down as it went on. Perhaps more notable was its ability to piss off fans of the original in spectacular and embarassing ways, most notably when a washed up Dirk Benedict wrote a jaw-droppingly sexist piece bemoaning the fact that Starbuck, his character in the original, had been changed to a female character in the new series, calling the new character - who was in practice the series’ breakout part - “Stardoe.”

It was, in other words, easy for anyone who enjoyed science fiction but wasn’t nearly as fond of science fiction fans to ally themselves with the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. In practice Battlestar Galactica was made to look like a “serious drama” in the HBO mould. It wasn’t cult television so much as it was about cult television. The biggest problem with it was that it never quite shook the sense that this was accidental. The fourth series - and I’ll go ahead and say I thought it was marvelous - descended down a rabbit hole of the spiritual implications of the series that ultimately failed to appeal to most of the people who actually enjoyed it. (I loved it, for what it’s worth, but have no trouble seeing why others hated it. That said, the fact that you can tell people that the series ends with a Cylon dance sequence and have them not believe you remains some of the most fun that can be had when hooking people on television series.) There’s a nagging sense that Ronald D. Moore, the main writer of the series, was in the end a cult sci-fi writer who got inexplicably lucky with that series.

It’s easy to see why. For one thing, Battlestar Galactica is anchored by Edward James Olmos, a heavyweight of a serious actor who was not generally associated with sci-fi roles. (He was approached to be captain for Star Trek: The Next Generation, but declined out of lack of interest.) Olmos, along with Mary McDonnell, give the show a tremendous weight and seriousness, as does its at times ostentatious sense of visual structure. Not, to be clear, just its special effects, although it sets a new standard for spaceship porn, but its entire visual grammar, from lighting to camera angles to editing. With a lesser cast and crew the material could easily have been revealed as wooden and superficial, but instead it sparkled and formed one of the great canonical TV shows of its era.

The heart of it, of course, was its grounding in the social realist tradition. Battlestar Galactica was a show about people. This was true on multiple levels. On the one hand, it was very much a political show that tackled Bush-era political concerns like the rights of prisoners, torture, terrorism, and all that fun stuff. In that regard its ending in early 2009 was perfect - it’s a show whose basic concerns belonged to the Bush administration. This gave it an aggressive materialism that its original version, which was mostly about the many pleasures of gold lamé, had no real hope of. But it was also about people on the level of character drama. The characters on Battlestar Galactica were, by sci-fi standards, thoroughly well-rounded and complex, with most of them having both great and tragic aspects. This, of course, has largely become standard practice: doing a genre show without well-rounded characters who drive the drama is unthinkable. Everything in genre fiction is, these days, supposed to stem from character traits and the human element. We can discuss whether perhaps this has gone too far in 2013 and it’s time for a course correction back towards the fantastic, but in 2006 it was a titanic breath of fresh air and self-evidently exactly what science fiction needed.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Sci-Fi Channel never quite seemed to know what to do with it. For all its acclaim it could never build the ratings needed to justify its cost. The HBO production model, where shows are funded because people pay a monthly fee to subscribe to HBO, doesn’t quite port to basic cable. Sci-Fi couldn’t cancel it, but was frequently oddly obtuse about renewal, and consciously drew the whole thing to a close after just four seasons. It attempted a spin-off prequel called Caprica, but that died after a season, and a second spin-off was ultimately relegated to being a webseries.

Which is, perhaps, the real story and metaphor here. Presented with what were, by almost any reasonable measure, the two greatest science fiction shows running in the middle of the decade, the Sci-Fi Channel couldn’t figure out what to do with either and frittered both away. Because apparently good science fiction and all of the channels science fiction had previously existed in were, as of this point, simply irreconcilable. The cult model, in 2006, simply didn’t work anymore. To do science fiction without a real and imminent connection to the material had become unthinkable.

“So! Yu-dan! You have the guts to show your face around here!”

“Yes, Li Bai. I have done much thinking.”

“And what have you decided? To face your shame! To be a man! Or to run away, again, like a coward?”

“I feel no shame, Li Bai. I know I made the right choice when I left the school.”

“The you are back! To be a coward. Ha! Ha! Ha! I should have expected as much, from such a weakling.”

“Good grief, Li Bai. Why do you talk like that?”

“I don’t know what you mean, foolish one! Like what, I ask you.”

“In that stilted way. You sound ridiculous. Your sentences are all spoken in fragmented bits. It’s really distracting.”

“Do you challenge me! You fool?”

“Well, I certainly challenge your affected way of speaking. Honestly, it makes it difficult to carry on an intelligent conversation.”

“So, you think me stupid? We will see who is the stupid one! When I accept your challenge…and defeat you!”

“See, now, that’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Taste my…what? Talk to me?”

“Yes. I really think we’re approaching this whole thing the wrong way.”

“What whole thing!”

“Look. You and I both hate the Manchus, right? They make everyone’s life miserable. Yours, mine, Ji Jian Lo’s, Min Feng’s, Wu Yi the Drunkard’s, Crippled Master Liu’s. And yet, what are we doing about it? All we ever do is get into fistfights. And not with the Manchus, but with each other. You’re about to punch me now. Aren’t you?”

“Yes! Your face I will punch, to prove the superiority of my Tae Gu Fist! You think your Choy Li Fut is pretty good, but…”

“You know, actually, I don’t think my Choy Li Fut is all that great.”

“…what?”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine. Maybe I could beat you with it. Maybe I couldn’t. Who knows? I think it’s a better style, to be frank, but you’ve been back here practicing for the last six months, and I’ve been off in the mountains reading economic treatises. You could probably wipe the floor with me.”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“Yeah, it’s really funny. Anyway, my point is, maybe you can kick my ass. Maybe I can kick yours. But what good is any of that going to do against the Manchus?”

“We…I…look! We defeat them! With wushu! Martial skill! Many Manchu pigs have fallen before the blades of Yuyang School!”

“Right. And many more Yuyangs have gotten hauled off and beheaded. We don’t even have any guns, for goodness’ sake.”

“Guns?”

“It’s 1744, Li Bai. Try reading a book sometime that doesn’t just have pictures of people hitting each other.”

“You dishonor our training.”

“I don’t do any such thing. I just recognize its limitations.”

“Then…what will you do?”

“I’m thinking about taking the civil service exam.”

“Civil service! You are not serious, with your words!”

“I am. I think I can change the system from within. All this fighting is just perpetuating an endless cycle of violence. We’re in lockstep with the Manchus. We spend precious intellectual resources — resources that could be used to devise real political and sociological solutions — on figuring out the proper knee positioning for modified cat stance.”

“It’s like this. Your balance knee is up, parallel to…”

“You’re missing my point. I am forsaking a dead-end solution and working towards a new approach.”

“And you think this plan will work?”

“I don’t know. I know it can’t be any worse than standing under waterfalls to improve my resistance to pain, and then getting truncheoned into oblivion anyway.”

“You are a fool, Yu-Dan. History will vindicate my hotheaded face-punching solution! When you and your high-minded schemes for linguistic reform, economic reapportionment and merit-based administrative advancement are long forgotten, people all over China — perhaps even the world — will still revel in tales of how I broke a clay roof tile over the head of a minor trade official, and kicked the stomach of that one cook at Lo Han School who called my sister a trollop!”

“Whatever you need to feel good about yourself, Li Bai.”

A brief note, after all the advertising material of the last couple of months, to point out that More Tales of the City is now available to pre-order in its paper format at £9.99, with a release date of Saturday 15 June, and that the ebook version is available right now at £3.99 for those whose impatience, parsimony or lack of respect for proper paper editions of things make them unwilling to

I was sorry to hear of the death of the comic novelist Tom Sharpe. I read him avidly when I was a student and recall that in those far-off days he was taken very seriously by the critics. As Robert McCrum says in his tribute on the Guardian Books Blog: "For a while, he was spoken of as the heir to Wodehouse and Waugh."

Sharpe wrote his first two novels about South Africa and his violent comic sensibility was conditioned by the cruelty and absurdity of life there. In Britain he found his most rewarding targets in our ancient institutions, which half attracted and half appalled him.

My own favourite is Blott on the Landscape, in part because of its Shropshire setting. It was adapted for television in 1985 and featured terrific performances from the then little-known David Suchet and Geraldine James.

I was going to post a clip from it, but can only find complete episodes, which would be cheating. So buy the DVD.

Cast your mind back to last year when the Lords Reform bill was working its way through parliament.

Like many Lib Dems I was delighted that finally, after so many years we were going to get a largely elected upper chamber. Then the murmurings started. Tory backbenchers were going to kill the bill and they did indeed eventually vote against it in sufficient numbers to prevent it from being implemented. The consequence of this is that we still have a bizarre and anachronistic unelected upper chamber with no prospect of change any time soon.

The primary defence of the Tories who voted against the bill was that all that was in the coalition agreement on this subject were plans to "bring forward proposals" and they had honoured that. In their view they were never duty bound to support them.

I always thought that was terribly disingenuous. As John Rentoul pointed out at the time, what would be the point of proposing to bring forward proposals if they were then just going to be put in the bin?

Fast forward to today when Nick Clegg has killed Liz Truss's childcare proposals. His defence of this move is that the agreement was only to "consult" on these changes, not to implement them. Sound familiar?

I'm not saying this is a great situation for the government to be in but you have to ask yourself which of the parties was the first to breach good faith in this way?

Stevenson ran the first passenger steam train from Manchester to Liverpool, Rutherford split the Atom and discovered and named the proton in Manchester.  It was in Manchester  that Whitworth created his international gauge which enabled the first mass production and the first production of machinery that could be replicated anywhere in the world.  The first overland air-flight in Europe was from London to Manchester in 1910, and the first modern computer was created in Manchester thanks to Alan Turing.

Manchester gave us the Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule; Richard Arkwright built the first steam powered mill in Manchester; Sir William Fairbairn’s riveting machine, John Kay’s flying shuttle and the Rev George Garrett built the first steam submarine in Manchester (okay it sank but it worked before it sank).  The first telephone exchange in the UK was in Manchester, and the first canal of the industrial era was opened in Manchester (the Bridgewater Canal).

Today Manchester is still making scientific history with Graphine, sub-atomic research at Cearn, the International work in space exploration centred at Joddrell Bank and much more.

Manchester is the home of British Science and it is absolutely right that we have a science museum in our city, indeed it could be argued that the National Science Museum should be located in this City when you look at our history.

Saturday:


We are sad because Matt Smith has announced that he will be handing on the mantle of The Doctor.

It feels too soon.

It shouldn’t. By the time he goes, he’ll have appeared in thirty-nine stories over forty-four episodes, which is either slightly more or slightly fewer than David Tennant (who did thirty-four in forty-seven), and his three seasons will have covered four years, much as David’s three-years-plus-specials did.

But perhaps it’s the way the split seasons felt like cheating, maybe it’s that the Ponds stuck around so long, but something about the eleventh Doctor feels like unfulfilled potential.

Is the lifespan of a Doctor measured in numbers of companions rather than screen time? David went adventuring with three companions – Rose, Martha and Donna – and travelled alone after, giving a distinct sense of three or four “eras” of the tenth Doctor. Matt’s eleventh Doctor clung on to Amy for longer even than Rose, and River Song has hung on even longer. A second – and full – season with Clara would have felt more balanced. As it is, the eight episodes this year feel more tacked on than the start of a new era that they deserve to be.

Or do we measure Doctor’s by the number of “classics” that they appear in? Alex said he was still waiting for Matt to be given the string of great stories that his performance as the Doctor deserved, and he’s right.

Billy sets the bar high from the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child”, and has “The Daleks”, “Marco Polo”, “The Aztecs”, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, “The Crusade”, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” (and maybe “The Massacre” if only we could see it); Pat has two Daleks stories, “Tomb of the Cybermen”, “The Web of Fear”, “The Mind Robber”, “The Invasion” and “The War Games”; Jon can point to “...and the Silurians”, “Inferno”, “The Dæmons”, “The Curse of Peladon”, “Carnival of Monsters” and “The Green Death” among others; Tom has “Genesis of the Daleks”, “Pyramids of Mars”, “The Deadly Assassin”, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, “City of Death”, “Logopolis” and (as K-9 K-Tel would say) many, many more. Even Chris has “Dalek”, “The Empty Child” and “Parting of the Ways” on his list from one too short a season, while David can lay claim to “Human Nature” and “Blink”, and arguably “Doomsday” and “Last of the Time Lords”, with “Tooth and Claw”, “Gridlock”, “Turn Left,” “Midnight” and “The Waters of Mars” all bubbling under. These eras all feel “big”.

Conversely, Peter only feels like he’s getting into the swing of it with “The Caves of Androzani”, and although Sylv has “Remembrance of the Daleks” and “The Curse of Fenric”, Colin and Paul have to wait for the invention of Big Finish for any decent stories at all.

Judged on that scale, Matt has had stories that have been crying out to be magnificent that just kind of haven’t been. “The Time of Angels” is almost awesome, but then “Flesh and Stone” starts buggering around with the Angels unique shtick, and begins the confusion over what “erased from time” actually means; “The Pandorica Opens” is let down by the WTF reboot of the universe in “The Big Bang” (and the too-colourful presence of the Tellytubby Daleks); “The Impossible Astronaut”/”The Day of the Moon”... in fact the whole of 2011 yearns to be a grand epic, but it’s deeply undermined by Steven Moffat’s impenetrable, over-extended story arc and a touch of light genocide; by the time we get to “A Good Man Goes to War” and “The Wedding of River Song” the arc is collapsing under its own weight of expectations – largely set up by the Grand Moff’s teasing – and we’re showing off our set pieces, forgetting to tell actual stories in their own right.

So although there are some cracking stories along the way – “Amy’s Choice”, “Vincent and the Doctor”, “The God Complex” and “The Crimson Horror”, even Moffat’s own “Asylum of the Daleks” or “The Snowmen”, not to mention the fan-pleasuring “The Name of the Doctor” – their highs are muffled by the disappointment of story arcs that don’t pay off, seasons without the unity that Russell (or Cartmel, or Bidmead, or Holmes, or Dicks) used to bring, and let’s face it a few real duffer episodes along the way.

And, do you know, thinking about it, I do wonder if it doesn’t all come down to the total disaster that is the last fifteen minutes of “Victory of the Daleks”... just as everything seems to be going brilliantly... THEY appear and suddenly no one is taking this seriously any more.

(And defeating a planet busting bomb with the power of lurve is pretty unspeakable too, and a sign of the direction this series will be heading under Moffat, and unlike the Dalek design decision, that probably is Gatiss fault.)

Would we have been more forgiving of the eleventh Doctor’s first season if we hadn’t already seen the New Paradigm? Did the decision to redesign the series’ iconic villain – and how badly wrong they got it – burn up all of Moffat’s benefit of the doubt? Particularly the way that it was sold: “yeah, we’re changing everything else so we thought we’d redesign the Daleks too”, with hindsight perhaps the braggadocio of a desperate man who’s seen what they’ve made and is having doubts, but coming across as the arrogance of someone who thinks he knows better.

Well, no. It’s not just that.

The errors do compound. A reliance on magic thinking rather than plot logic; a habit of throwing in another “ingenious” idea or another set piece rather than developing the story; a juvenile approach to the sexuality of the lead character (that Amy might react to a trauma like “The Time of Angels” by wanting sex is quite sophisticated; the Doctor responding like a goosed John Inman is not); a conviction that you can bring anyone back from death (especially the endless deaths of Rory Pond)because “it’s science fiction”, when death should be the most serious thing – “nobody dies” was supposed to be “just this once”, not every damn week; a failure to explain in clear terms how major plot threads actually resolved – why the hell did the TARDIS blow up and crack the Universe? Is Madam Kovarian actually dead or did that timeline not really happen? Why were the Silence at “war” with the Doctor? How did he convince River she didn’t want to murder him in “Let’s Kill Hitler”? – and finally a lack of emotional awareness, of understanding that terrible events have consequences, more than anything that baffling decision to make the crucial follow-up to the emotionally charged revelations of “A Good Man Goes to War” an episode of comedy Nazis, indeed a farce, of all things...

Russell wrote a lot of stories that didn’t make a great deal of sense when you looked at them later, or where he pulled a solution out of his hat, but where you felt there was a solid reason why they played out the way they did.

Steven, on the other hand, writes intricate constructions from ideas, not always all his own, with dialogue either wittily clever or poetically moving, which are spectacular but hollow.

e.g. When Russell writes the stars going out, he ties it directly to the nihilistic insanity of Davros, this man who hates everything else so much that he’d rather annihilate it all than suffer it to continue to exist.

When Steven writes the stars going out, it’s the result of a convoluted series of events orchestrated by someone we don’t actually in order to blow up the TARDIS for reasons that we don’t understand and never get explained.

(The most likely candidates remain the Silence, who blow up the TARDIS to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore, and the entire Universe was destroyed only by accident. Which has to be embarrassing, even if the whole purpose of your cult wasn’t, apparently, to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore in order to, er, prevent the entire Universe being destroyed.)

More bluntly, Russell wrote some great stories with rubbish plots; Moffat has the reverse problem.

Except, he is getting better.

People seem to have wearied of Moffat’s bag of conjuring tricks recently, unfortunately just at the point where he seems to have been pulling out of his rut. The 2013 series seems to have come in for unwarranted heavy criticism, from the professional critics as well as the usual fan assassins, and I seem to be in a definite minority in thinking that the stories this year have shown a marked sense of improvement over the lacklustre 2010 and horrible mess of 2011. Whether it’s because Caro Skinner was good for him behind the scenes or because the (maybe I’m reading too much into it) apparent decision to theme an episode for each of the “classic” Doctors gave them some extra impetus to the “movie of the week” style he said he’d adopted for season seven, they’ve all felt much more like stories that had a reason for telling them, moreso even than the five episodes in 2012.

They’re still hamstrung by the shortness of the running time, and if I were producer I’d be pushing for more not fewer (or no!) two-part stories, or at least an extra quarter of an hour each episode (even if it meant only ten episodes in a series. You know, like “Game of Thrones”, which doesn’t do too badly, I understand). And Clara still seems to have no character (which is a shame because I’ve liked Jenna-Louise all along). But even when they’re getting it wrong – “Akhaten”, “Journey...” – at least they’re now getting it wrong for the right reasons: ambition of storytelling exceeding the running time or resources available.

And “The Name of the Doctor” is very nearly right. Sure, it’s still a bit stringing set-pieces together, but there’s a lot more science stuff injected into the fairytale: time travel on the astral plane and a conference call by telepathy, these feel like the sorts of things Doctor Who used to do; and the idea that the Doctor’s travels are a scar on the face of the Universe, that his death is a wound that allows access to all of history, specifically his history (which surely includes the dreaded Time War), these aren’t just conceptually intriguing, but they’re the sort of thing that used to allow us to have the Doctor’s good and bad angels (Clara and the Intelligence) fighting for his soul over the length of his lifetime. And it’s actually about something: “The Name of the Doctor” is about the name of the Doctor being “The Doctor”, that it’s a choice and how and why that is important, to him and to us.

It’s a tragedy that, at least until “The Name of the Doctor”, “The Eleventh Hour” was probably Matt’s best overall story. “The Eleventh Hour” promised so much, and Matt delivered, he’s been terrific every single week, but we are left still waiting for a story that is as great as he is.

Do you hear me, Mr Moffster? The fiftieth anniversary show had better be BLOODY good!

Matt Smith: saluté!

PS:
...and the other sad thing is that this will be the end of the eleventh Doctor’s theme tune. No, not the current tortuous reworking of Ron Grainer: Murray Gold’s lovely eleventh Doctor anthem “Every Star and Every Planet” (“I Am The Doctor”) which is as engrained in this era as “Dance of the Macra” (“All The Strange, Strange Creatures”) was in the tenth Doctor’s, possibly even more so.


Coming Soon...If I ever manage to find some time, I hope to be doing reviews of the two episodes of 2013 I didn’t get around to – “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” which I disliked and “The Crimson Horror” which I adored – and a couple of those classics I mentioned above: Tom Baker in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” and Jon Pertwee in the beautiful new restoration of “The Mind of Evil”. Before that, one of the best bits of Doctor Who you’re likely to come across this year... it’s a book, and obviously the Doctor isn’t in it. Obverse Books’ new Faction Paradox novel: Lawrence Burton’s “Against Nature”. Seriously, go read it!