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Hamster Book Club - The Beast of Fang Rock by Andy Frankham-Allen (featuring Michael Mills) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:02
  Time travel? Anne said she caught Left Bridge
• 0:06
  Stuart's eye as he glanced up at her.
• 0:08
  I'm sorry, Colonel, but it's the only thing that makes any sense
• 0:11
  of this. How else does an ancestor of
• 0:13
  mine know me so precisely? Where else did the UFO go?
• 0:17
  And it's all connected to this machine.
• 0:19
  Archibald said there was a missing piece and that the piece
• 0:22
  would find its way to me. I don't see how.
• 0:25
  We're pretty much off the beaten track here, unless Mr. Heggersey
• 0:29
  has it. What about all this bothers you
• 0:31
  so, Colonel? The idea of ghosts or time
• 0:34
  travel? Both are absurd, really, after
• 0:39
  everything we have seen. I seem to recall how readily you
• 0:42
  accepted the idea in the London Underground when the hobo
• 0:45
  presented you with a way out. Now that Lethbridge Stuart had
• 0:49
  promised to read in Jim later, she figured using the code name
• 0:52
  would be permissible. Born of necessity, Miss Travers.
• 0:56
  The hobo had a craft that could help save my men, and with
• 1:00
  everything else that was going on, I saw no reason to
• 1:03
  disbelieve him. But I have had time to think
• 1:05
  since, and I have seen nothing that convinces me that travel in
• 1:08
  time is real, let alone the idea that such a thing can be
• 1:11
  achieved with a police box. Anne shook her head, but she
• 1:16
  supposed she could not really blame the Colonel.
• 1:19
  She too had spent a long time disbelieving the idea of time
• 1:22
  travel. It wasn't until London, and then
• 1:25
  the discoveries made in Wiltshire last month, but she'd
• 1:28
  finally started to accept it, and she at least had her
• 1:31
  father's stories to prepare her. The Colonel had no such thing.
• 1:37
  Lethbridge. Stuart stood up and held the
• 1:39
  book out. Perhaps you should look through
• 1:41
  this, Miss Travers, see if it helps aliens.
• 1:44
  I can deal with something tangible, but ghosts is absurd.
• 1:50
  But you saw the footage Jim pointed out.
• 1:53
  Yes, and I can't explain it, but I trust Miss Travis can, with a
• 1:58
  rational explanation instead of science fiction.
• 2:01
  Even if I accept the idea of time travel, which I don't, be
• 2:06
  assured that you are here under my protection and as such you
• 2:09
  will not be dying on my watch. Now what's keeping those lads
• 2:13
  with the T? Colonel Lethbridge?
• 2:16
  Stewart left the room and descended the steps outside.
• 2:20
  Stubborn old goat. Anne said behind his back and
• 2:23
  turned back to Jim with a smile. Sorry about that, but I just
• 2:27
  don't understand why he's so against the idea.
• 2:30
  Especially after she stopped herself, reminding herself that
• 2:33
  some secrets had to be kept. Jim took the book off her and
• 2:37
  sat down on the sofa. He began flicking through it.
• 2:42
  OK, I can see how ghosts can bother him.
• 2:44
  After all, I'm not so copper septic about all this either.
• 2:48
  But I don't understand why you're so sure about time travel
• 2:52
  experience, Shim. You see, before I was born, my
• 2:55
  father was an anthropologist. He was particularly fond of the
• 2:58
  myth about the Abominable Snowmen, and in 1935 he funded a
• 3:02
  trip to Tibet to find proof of their existence, which he did
• 3:06
  eventually, but not before encountering robotic Yeti in the
• 3:09
  Himalayas. Robots in Tibet?
• 3:13
  I know it sounds unlikely, but they were created as guards to
• 3:16
  protect a disembodied life form called the Great Intelligence.
• 3:20
  It possessed the Lama Padma Sambavar and took over the
• 3:23
  monastery at Det Sen Why? Anne smiled warmly.
• 3:28
  The less you know, the better. But the point is, in Tibet my
• 3:31
  father met a mysterious traveller, a rather brilliant
• 3:34
  scientist who helped him defeat this Great Intelligence.
• 3:38
  This man claimed to be a time traveller, This hobo person who
• 3:42
  assisted the army in London? Yes.
• 3:45
  Anyway, all my life my father would tell me stories of this
• 3:48
  hobo and his two friends. But as I grew and became a
• 3:51
  scientist, I'm afraid I've become a bit more rational about
• 3:55
  such things. The idea of time travel was
• 3:58
  ludicrous to me and I never came across any evidence to prove its
• 4:02
  existence. So what changed?
• 4:06
  Meeting the hobo and his friends in the London Underground.
• 4:08
  They were exactly how my father described them exactly.
• 4:12
  For them, only a couple of months had passed, but for my
• 4:15
  father nearly 35 years. Hamster Book Club, The Doctor
• 4:25
  Who Novel Review Podcast with Joe Ford and Michael Mills.
• 4:33
  Lethbridge Stewart, Beast of Fang Rock by Andy Frankham
• 4:39
  Allen. Welcome back to the Hamster Book
• 4:47
  Club. My name is Joe Ford and I am
• 4:50
  here again today for the first time since our recording in
• 4:55
  person, I believe, Mr. Michael Mills.
• 4:58
  Hello, Michael. Hello, Joe.
• 5:00
  Yes, safely on the other end of a Zoom call this time.
• 5:03
  You survived the experience. Well done, well done.
• 5:06
  You may have survived that experience, but you may not have
• 5:08
  survived the book that we are talking about today, which I
• 5:12
  believe was your choice, or was it mine.
• 5:17
  I think you, I think it was a committee decision.
• 5:19
  We wanted to do something a bit different, a bit more obscure,
• 5:22
  something off into the far realms of Doctor Who publishing.
• 5:27
  You've done the first, I think you did.
• 5:29
  You did the first version. You definitely did the first
• 5:31
  tell off. You've now you've done the first
• 5:33
  candy jar and you did the first NSA as well.
• 5:38
  I'm not sure where we've got to go from here, you know.
• 5:42
  Those Chris Quedge books that are being published by someone,
• 5:47
  somewhere. Is he still a fat old man
• 5:49
  though? Or is he the young hunk again?
• 5:52
  Based on the cover illustrations, he's a young
• 5:55
  hunk. Oh great, but we'll do it.
• 5:57
  Well, we are here today to talk about The Beast of Fang Rock by
• 6:02
  Andy, Frank and Allen. But before we do that, I've got
• 6:06
  a question for you, which I didn't ask you during your top
• 6:10
  ten and bottom 10 list of Doctor Who books.
• 6:13
  And that is I would like you please to rank the series of
• 6:18
  books in order from your favorite to your least favorite.
• 6:22
  And I think you wouldn't need much time to prepare for this,
• 6:24
  which is why I'm doing it on the call.
• 6:26
  So let's just go run through the ball very quickly.
• 6:29
  Virgin New Adventures, Missing adventures, the 8th Doctor
• 6:32
  adventures, the past Doctor adventures, the targets and the
• 6:36
  new series adventures. And if you want, we, you can
• 6:40
  throw in the Telos novellas as well.
• 6:42
  We won't put in the Candy Job books because they won't rank.
• 6:47
  So from from from from best down?
• 6:50
  Or is it from worst? Yeah, best to to worst or.
• 6:53
  Or in terms of my favorite, which is of course not
• 6:56
  necessarily the same thing, I like Moonraker.
• 7:00
  So that tells you what? That's my favorite Bond 0.
• 7:03
  There we go. No, no, others have got him
• 7:05
  flying around in space with lasers.
• 7:08
  That's a different podcast though.
• 7:10
  So best, well favourites, my favorite I it's it's very much a
• 7:16
  head hearts thing, but I think I have, I have to declare my
• 7:20
  loyalties and say favour is the 8th Doctor adventure adventure
• 7:24
  range. And I think it's a terrible
• 7:26
  thing and it should never be used as any sort of quantitative
• 7:30
  defence. But there is an element of
• 7:32
  nostalgia. You know, they were the ones
• 7:34
  that I was reading as they came out.
• 7:35
  I was too young for the Virgin books, especially the latter
• 7:38
  half, the good half I think we can say of post ancestor cell of
• 7:42
  the BBC books. So I've got a lot of fondness
• 7:45
  there, but also a lot of, you know, I feel like if you were
• 7:50
  into them and you were following them, you feel the need to
• 7:52
  champion them a bit as well because they are under
• 7:54
  appreciated. And I think a lot of people had
• 7:55
  stopped paying attention by the point they got really good.
• 7:59
  But, you know, discussing this podcast, books like Father time
• 8:02
  and they've done books like Alien bodies or, you know, the
• 8:04
  oeuvre of Paul Marsden and and many others.
• 8:07
  I think there's a lot there to champion a lot that I I really
• 8:09
  like. I think they were often that
• 8:12
  that their great success and their great weakness was that
• 8:14
  they didn't have a strong and editorial line and overview as I
• 8:19
  think that they could have benefited from.
• 8:20
  But you know, the good thing about was that you did you
• 8:22
  didn't know month to month what this book was going to be about,
• 8:25
  what the tone would be, what the subject would be.
• 8:28
  And so for that reason, I still, I still they have a fun place in
• 8:32
  my heart and I would go back to something.
• 8:35
  Do you think that it's true to say that if there is a good sort
• 8:41
  of linking narrative between these books, it's conversations
• 8:44
  between the authors rather than an editorial?
• 8:48
  Because we've talked about Lance Parkins, you know, in Father
• 8:51
  Time, say, how he put in references to the next 15 books
• 8:55
  in the future. And that's just because he cared
• 8:57
  to do it in that book rather than someone saying, well, let's
• 9:01
  you know, let's tell all, tell all the kiddie wings what's
• 9:03
  coming up. Yeah, 100%.
• 9:05
  And you know, I think there were some some they often had very
• 9:10
  often with those books, their their reach exceeded their
• 9:13
  grasp, especially when it came to the big ideas of the things
• 9:15
  they wanted to do. So something like Father time,
• 9:18
  we keep coming back to it. But you know, giving the doctor
• 9:19
  daughter examining that quite a big thing.
• 9:21
  And on the level of that one book, it's it works really well.
• 9:24
  But then it never really followed up.
• 9:27
  It felt like it was something that needed following up on at
• 9:29
  some point. And you know, they brought
• 9:30
  Miranda back and did her a dirty frankly.
• 9:33
  And sometime never. But even things like I think
• 9:35
  discussed to the podcast previously, the Sabbath Ark look
• 9:39
  often look down upon. But it's a brilliant idea for an
• 9:41
  arc. What what when the Doctor can no
• 9:44
  longer be the Doctor Who steps in?
• 9:46
  That's brilliant. And in certain books like Camera
• 9:48
  Obscura, History One O 1, you do get a sense of what that could
• 9:52
  have been. Glimpses aren't there.
• 9:54
  Glimpses. It's there.
• 9:55
  You can go. Oh yeah, I think he sort of
• 9:58
  wants Russell T Davis to RIP that idea off.
• 10:01
  You know, take, don't just do the books that work.
• 10:03
  This is the classic thing about remakes, right?
• 10:04
  Don't remake things that worked in the 1st place.
• 10:07
  Remake the things that had a good idea and do it.
• 10:10
  Make them work and. Make them work, you know, Polish
• 10:13
  them off. So so so yeah, it's it isn't
• 10:16
  just putting a Starcho. I think there is a lot to be
• 10:18
  champions and a lot to be spoken about and a lot to be enjoyed in
• 10:21
  those eight doctors books. And I think because at this
• 10:23
  stage as well, the Virginia adventures have been so raked
• 10:26
  over and everyone who was involved wants wants to tell you
• 10:31
  that they invented Martin Doctor Who, which they didn't, but they
• 10:35
  like to say that it did, that the 8th Doctor ventures do feel
• 10:40
  is still a little bit under discovered and a little bit
• 10:42
  under appreciated. So.
• 10:44
  That's why we're doing the work right?
• 10:45
  That's why we are doing the good work.
• 10:47
  That is. That is the work, my friends.
• 10:50
  That is the purpose of this all. I do have another question for
• 10:53
  you then, because I've got a feeling that everyone I've asked
• 10:55
  this question to the one and two spot is being fought over
• 10:59
  between the 8th Doctor books and the New Adventures.
• 11:03
  Yeah. Is that the case for you as?
• 11:04
  Well, yes, that remains the case because it's, it's just the
• 11:09
  right answer, right? It's the the Virgin New
• 11:11
  Adventures. I do, I do appreciate them.
• 11:13
  I do. I for a time, I think I was
• 11:15
  almost a little bit reticent to say how much I enjoyed them
• 11:18
  because I was an Eighth Doctor adventure fanboy.
• 11:20
  And I was so fed up of being told, oh, how much better the
• 11:23
  Virgin New Adventures were. When really it's just that the
• 11:25
  people who got to make Doctor Who in 2005 were younger and
• 11:28
  getting laid more often at the time that those books were
• 11:30
  coming out. But, you know, or like, quibbles
• 11:36
  aside, getting over myself there, it is a really good run
• 11:40
  of books. I mean, don't get me wrong,
• 11:42
  there's some crap in there, and there's definitely some very
• 11:46
  boring books in there as well. But there's no shortage of
• 11:49
  ideas. And I think Pete Starval Evans,
• 11:52
  Rebecca Levine, It's. Yeah, every time we, you, others
• 11:56
  speak to people involved in the version of adventure training.
• 11:58
  Rebecca Levine. Rebecca Levine.
• 11:59
  Rebecca Levine is because you couldn't have her name on a
• 12:01
  book. I think often underappreciated.
• 12:04
  It needs to be something like evidence is the real one of the
• 12:07
  major creative forces behind that.
• 12:08
  And perhaps the difference between the success of the
• 12:10
  Virgin Adventures and the BBC 8th Doctor adventures is that
• 12:14
  editorial line of focus. And that's not a criticism of
• 12:16
  Stephen Cole or Justin Richards. I think it was much more the way
• 12:18
  that it was that it was set up and being operational.
• 12:20
  She had the space, she had the application, she had the
• 12:23
  frankly, the salary and the job description to be putting that
• 12:26
  much effort into into a lot of it.
• 12:29
  Do you think as a result then the new adventures are a bit
• 12:32
  more focused on what they're trying to do, but the 8th Doctor
• 12:36
  books are a bit more idiosyncratic in that they try
• 12:39
  more things? Yeah, I think that's fair.
• 12:42
  And I think part of her being part of the good editorial line
• 12:45
  in that, and Peter Star of Levens before her, is also just
• 12:49
  knowing what you could make work across those books.
• 12:54
  So, you know, if you look a lot, if you take the Sabbath arc,
• 12:57
  maybe one of the reasons the Sabbath arc didn't work was
• 13:00
  because it was so grandiose and so complex and would require
• 13:03
  such tight plotting and interaction.
• 13:05
  If you look at the the plot arcs, certainly within the
• 13:08
  Virgin Adventures, they're really quite light.
• 13:11
  You know, you've got things like the future history cycle.
• 13:13
  Well, that just means we're all writing stories, building off a.
• 13:17
  Which cycle was that, Michael? Is that the blood heat cycle?
• 13:21
  Is it that one to no future? Is that that one?
• 13:24
  No, that's the alternative. Histories are.
• 13:28
  Lots of history cycles. Yes, the Future History 1 is
• 13:31
  between Love and War and Deceit where they basically have lots
• 13:36
  of adventures that map out the future history of the Doctor Who
• 13:39
  universe. Commendable thing to do because
• 13:43
  they're sort of sitting there, their little playground out
• 13:46
  there of, of where to tell their stories.
• 13:48
  Yeah, and very much in the best way of its time, you know, they
• 13:51
  were looking at things like Star Trek, TNG, Star Trek DS9, come
• 13:56
  along by then. I'm not sure.
• 13:58
  Babylon 5, which did map out these worlds and these
• 14:01
  continuities and these science fiction situations.
• 14:04
  I think there was a thing that P Double Evans had said he wanted
• 14:07
  these to be, quote UN quote, proper science fiction novels.
• 14:10
  And, you know, authors like Stephen Banks, the Ian M Banks,
• 14:12
  who have these entire, you know, future history cycles of their
• 14:14
  own. And they, and I think as I
• 14:15
  understand it, there was a, there was a doc, which I think
• 14:18
  is at the back of included in the back of Deceit, which maps
• 14:20
  out like 203 hundred years worth of human history, which is sort
• 14:24
  of joining the dots between what we saw on TV and yeah.
• 14:27
  But again, that's light touch. That's just saying like, here's
• 14:29
  a here's here's 4 pages of a four about future history.
• 14:34
  Just tell stories within that, right.
• 14:36
  Even further along when you've got something like the side
• 14:38
  powers arc at the end, even that's really just kind of, you
• 14:44
  know, in a lot of them like damaged Good Truth, there's only
• 14:46
  a couple of books that are really heavy on that arc and a
• 14:48
  lot of those just sketching it in.
• 14:52
  But that's that's to be commended.
• 14:53
  You know you need to understand what is achievable.
• 14:55
  My only criticism about that approach is then there is a
• 14:57
  tone. There is a tone to the new
• 14:59
  adventures, which they don't break out of very often.
• 15:03
  And that is a what's the word gun, that sort of gun approach
• 15:07
  of soldiers and IMC mining corporations and colony planets
• 15:14
  and you know, all, all of that sort of thing tends to crop up
• 15:17
  quite a bit. Heavy history, like there ain't
• 15:20
  a lot of fun in those books. And that's why when a book like
• 15:23
  Happy Endings and that comes along, it's such a relief.
• 15:26
  To see them. Well, that's still to be
• 15:29
  decided. OK, so the New Adventures is
• 15:32
  your second choice. So what's third?
• 15:36
  The missing adventures. Oh, now usually it's the past.
• 15:40
  I've only had the past so far and then the missing.
• 15:42
  Tell me why. I've put the I've put missing
• 15:44
  adventures further about that because one of the things that
• 15:50
  they did to the Virginia adventures was that it was, as
• 15:53
  you sort of touched on that it was very explicitly pushing
• 15:55
  Doctor Who forwards. And I, I got the sense that for
• 15:57
  a while there was you can definitely read interviews with
• 16:00
  people where they say, Oh, we're not just filling in gaps.
• 16:02
  We don't just want to do what was done on on telly And I I
• 16:05
  like and then when they came to do those stories that are just
• 16:09
  gap filling, which we know some some authors, some creatives
• 16:13
  have been openly disparaging of they, you know, Stephen Moffett
• 16:17
  famously was offered to be involved in Big Finish in the
• 16:19
  early days to write scripts and went not unless you've got
• 16:22
  Mcgahn, because I don't want to write stuff and just lots of
• 16:24
  clean other stories. Fabulously stormed out of the
• 16:27
  meeting, didn't he? Oh, no, wasn't it?
• 16:29
  Yeah, I think I do Stump. I think he.
• 16:32
  Was Cornell? Was that Cornell or was that?
• 16:34
  I think the story is as it is told and I think it was big
• 16:37
  finished. The inside story was that
• 16:39
  actually Stephen Moffett was actually quite tactful, but
• 16:41
  just, you know, and also his he was a, his writing crew was
• 16:43
  taking off. That's not as good of a story I.
• 16:46
  Think the story is that you might be thinking of that
• 16:49
  supposedly when they revealed that Nicholas Briggs would be
• 16:52
  writing the first script. Oh yes, and then Cornell burst.
• 16:56
  He was a poll, wasn't he? Supposedly, yes, allegedly Paul
• 17:00
  Paul Cornell was was somewhat shocked that that would be the
• 17:03
  choice. And I wouldn't say that's an
• 17:05
  unreasonable reaction to all this.
• 17:08
  I think in the years since Paul Cornell has was asked about that
• 17:11
  and I think I think basically upon said he didn't either said
• 17:15
  he didn't remember it or he apologized like you know, that
• 17:17
  it wasn't intended the way it was, but that is the story.
• 17:21
  But you know, that speaks to something, which is that, you
• 17:23
  know, if you're just, if you, if you had been doing the Virgin
• 17:26
  New Adventures and then you did the missing adventures, you
• 17:32
  might think, oh, actually, are we just doing everything we said
• 17:35
  we were never going to do with this license?
• 17:37
  And the reaction of that of a lot of authors just seems to
• 17:40
  have been to therefore write really weird books.
• 17:43
  And I like that. I like that.
• 17:45
  I think there's enough refined, regurgitated, synthesized, you
• 17:51
  know, here's some more Doctor Who, how much, how much or how,
• 17:55
  you know, tie in fiction can be about how much of this same
• 17:57
  would you like Off the slab? And yet you get books like
• 18:02
  System Shock. Oh, I know, let's put the 4th
• 18:04
  Doctor and Sarah Jane and an older Harry Sullivan into a
• 18:07
  techno thriller. You, you get the traditional
• 18:10
  stuff as well, you know. The Plotters is fabulous.
• 18:15
  Managra by Stephen Marley. Menagra even stuff like, you
• 18:20
  know, it's not it's not a great book, but even stuff like
• 18:22
  evolution by John Peel, which is sort of doing towns of wing Chi
• 18:26
  Yangi sort of Victorian Edwardian period stuff.
• 18:29
  But at the same time is is is being a bit odd about it is
• 18:32
  taking like, well, let's let's have a go at water babies, but
• 18:34
  do water babies as body horror. And I really like that.
• 18:38
  I like that that they were at a period when just trying to evoke
• 18:45
  what was done on TV was still viewed with disdain, which I
• 18:48
  think is was an important or was a good mindset for people doing
• 18:52
  this to be. And when we get endless, endless
• 18:56
  stuff these days and over the past 1020 years of just it's
• 19:00
  it's tea time 1977 all over again.
• 19:03
  Fuck off do. You think the past Doctor
• 19:05
  Avengers are more guilty of that then?
• 19:09
  I don't necessarily think they are actually, because having
• 19:11
  said that, you know you a lot of Gareth Roberts stuff is is very
• 19:15
  like what was what was done on on television.
• 19:19
  I don't know if there's anything quite to that extent in the past
• 19:23
  Doctor changes. I think by that point, it's just
• 19:24
  been going on for quite a few years and maybe the ideas have
• 19:27
  got less radical. Maybe the idea is just what is
• 19:29
  exciting. Maybe they maybe the people who
• 19:31
  really want to be writing stuff for writing for the 8th Doctor
• 19:33
  ventures. I don't know.
• 19:34
  I mean, there's still good stuff in there.
• 19:35
  So I put the past doctor adventures forth and I don't
• 19:38
  think there's a huge gap because I do think past doctor ventures
• 19:40
  are overall very good. I did.
• 19:42
  I've spoken to past this podcast about my love of the Robert
• 19:45
  Perry and Mike Tucker 7th Doctor and 8th ones.
• 19:47
  I think that Grace you're. Three times as many past Doctor
• 19:51
  adventures though, isn't it? There's bound to be more dogs.
• 19:53
  Yeah, there's only about 20 odd missing adventures.
• 19:56
  There's not many of them. That's right, they.
• 19:58
  Didn't they? Didn't There's 70 odd past
• 19:59
  Doctor adventures I think? Yeah, no, it's fairpoint,
• 20:02
  because I suppose past Doctor Adventures, Nick, Doctor
• 20:03
  Adventures kicked off at the same time.
• 20:05
  And you forget it was quite a way in before, before the
• 20:08
  missing adventures came along for Virgin, wasn't it?
• 20:12
  So yeah, I don't think that. I don't think it's all, but
• 20:14
  maybe that's part of it. Maybe it's just that there's
• 20:15
  simply more of them. But yeah, there are still a lot
• 20:19
  of. I hold all four of these Rangers
• 20:22
  in in very high regards. And you know, even stuff like
• 20:26
  the time travellers right in the past, which adventures they're
• 20:29
  right at the end still doing new and interesting stuff.
• 20:33
  So don't. So don't be soon down at all.
• 20:36
  And I would therefore put 5th, possibly controversially, the
• 20:42
  target novelizations. Now nobody has put the target
• 20:45
  novelizations above 5th, so all the original books have come in
• 20:51
  the 1st 4 positions. This baffles me.
• 20:53
  I thought the target novels were held in huge esteem.
• 20:56
  So please explain yourself Sir. Well, I'm, I guess I'm just not
• 21:01
  old enough. I've still, I've still, I've
• 21:04
  still got my hair and I, I, I, I do enjoy the target
• 21:11
  novelisations as much as anyone else does, you know, but, and I
• 21:16
  think some of them are very good, but probably non
• 21:18
  coincidentally, the ones that I get the most out of are the ones
• 21:20
  that are doing something different.
• 21:22
  You know, it's the ones from the 80s that that I really enjoy.
• 21:25
  I think I can, I can appreciate the, the comfort and the charm
• 21:29
  of a straight up Terence Dix novelization, but I'm just, you
• 21:35
  know, frankly, not old enough to have read any of those as a
• 21:38
  child to, for them to hold the place in my heart.
• 21:41
  They do for many people being how you accessed.
• 21:43
  Do you think that's a generational thing?
• 21:45
  Then those kids that were growing up with Doctor Who in
• 21:48
  the 70s and the 80s, I'll imagine those people would
• 21:52
  absolutely put the targets as #1 those are the books they first
• 21:56
  read. Whereas for you and me it was
• 21:58
  the original books 1st and then probably the targets later.
• 22:01
  Yeah, absolutely. I think it's generalizations.
• 22:03
  It's probably by the time we were getting to the target
• 22:04
  organisations, you could, OK, it wasn't all there on streaming,
• 22:07
  but you could go and buy a DVD, right?
• 22:11
  And I think it is a certainly a novelization in the style of,
• 22:17
  you know, pick rant, pick random one that does what have Doctor
• 22:21
  Who in the underworld. They are products of a different
• 22:25
  time to the extent that when you when I was reading Wild Blue
• 22:29
  Yonder, which is just a straightforward novelization of
• 22:32
  the script last and that came out last year, it's thinking
• 22:36
  what's the point of this? This is weird.
• 22:39
  Yeah. Who's this for?
• 22:40
  Why are we doing this? It's a weird sort of, to use, to
• 22:43
  use a word, hauntological. This is sort of feels like we're
• 22:47
  being, we're doing this because this is the past forms of how
• 22:49
  things were done and therefore it must have power and we're
• 22:52
  struggling to escape. Even with the covers, right,
• 22:54
  they're doing those old style target covers.
• 22:57
  Tells you everything. They're not.
• 22:58
  You know these are. These products are not aimed at
• 23:02
  141516 year olds, right? There's a reason that they have
• 23:05
  completely different styles and covers to the ones featuring 15
• 23:10
  Ruby. I was going to say those covers
• 23:13
  are colourful and sexy and that literally the doctors reaching
• 23:17
  out the page at you or most of them, those are absolutely for
• 23:20
  the kids of today. Yeah.
• 23:22
  And have you read all the targets?
• 23:24
  Oh God, no, of course I haven't. Well, what about the new series
• 23:31
  Adventures then? Right at the bottom of your
• 23:33
  list. Yeah, we.
• 23:35
  Ping to themselves. Oh, I know, and I feel sorry
• 23:38
  because we, we have championed the new series adventures in the
• 23:40
  past and you know, I love all of these ranges.
• 23:42
  So you know, I'm, I'm, you know, this is the X episode of a
• 23:46
  podcast devoted to Doctor Who books that I've been on, right?
• 23:49
  So I'm not going to hear to to slag any of them off.
• 23:53
  But there is some truth to the fact that a lot of them are just
• 23:57
  content, right? Some of them are very, very
• 24:01
  good. And I'm glad that all of them
• 24:03
  had, you know, in some ways they're the modern versions of
• 24:06
  the target novelizations in so far as there isn't much more to
• 24:09
  them than entertaining the kids who like Doctor Who on TV.
• 24:12
  And one more. And that's absolutely fine.
• 24:15
  There is nothing wrong with that.
• 24:17
  If you were a kid who couldn't concentrate on your lessons
• 24:21
  because you really needed to finish a wooden heart for some
• 24:26
  reason, then you know that's great and I'm not here to to.
• 24:29
  You're so hard on that one. I just, it's, it's just, it's
• 24:33
  just empty calories. Doctor Who?
• 24:35
  My overall listen to the audio of that this week and he said
• 24:39
  Barcal Bills is wrong. Get a Prince on a T-shirt.
• 24:46
  Oh. Well, but is it the fact that
• 24:51
  are they a bit sort of calorie free for those that have read
• 24:56
  the too deep and too broad for the small screen New Adventures
• 25:00
  and Ave. Doctor books?
• 25:02
  Yeah, I think that's it. And I am, you know, the weirdest
• 25:06
  of all things, a Doctor Who fan who was born in the late 1980s,
• 25:10
  exactly the exactly the wrong age to get into Doctor Who.
• 25:15
  So both too young for the target novelisations and probably too
• 25:18
  old for the new series adventures.
• 25:19
  You know, I remember reading one of them in the corner of the
• 25:22
  sixth form common room and getting a couple of looks like
• 25:26
  Michael, come on, there's a copy.
• 25:27
  There's a copy of Nuts on the Table.
• 25:28
  Go and have a look at that. It says so much about you do you
• 25:31
  know? But we have also identified
• 25:35
  where the new series adventures have broken out that mold things
• 25:38
  like the eyeless, things like that, where they are attempting
• 25:41
  to sort of SATA to those people, you know, to provide a full
• 25:47
  course for those. But I think they are few and far
• 25:50
  between. I have gone on a bit of an NSA
• 25:54
  spending spree recently and I've read a couple, some that are
• 25:59
  well regarded and some that are less well regarded.
• 26:01
  And I realized that I like reading those books when I want
• 26:04
  to get in touch with my sort of inner 8 year olds, you know, but
• 26:08
  that's not all the time. So, so it's when I'm in a
• 26:12
  particular mood. It's like putting on a Disney
• 26:14
  film, you know, with when you're in a particular mood.
• 26:16
  Yeah, yeah. And so I have the idea of going
• 26:19
  on an NSA spending spree. I've bought 50 books, I've spent
• 26:22
  £3.00. It was only £2.80 actually.
• 26:30
  Well, talking of books that are slightly calorie free, The Beast
• 26:37
  of Fang Rock by Andy Frankham Allen.
• 26:40
  Now do you have any information about these candy jar books, The
• 26:45
  Left Bridge Stewart series? Do you know anything about them?
• 26:48
  You often give me a potted history like you did with
• 26:50
  Tellos. OK, so let's.
• 26:52
  OK, a bit of background on the left bridge, Stewart reigns.
• 26:55
  So as as many of our listeners may be aware, one of the things
• 26:59
  that is unusual about the way that the contracts for Doctor
• 27:02
  Who writers worked in the 20th century was unlike something
• 27:07
  like, say, Star Trek, where everything's in Star Trek is
• 27:10
  owned by it. Was it Paramount these days or
• 27:14
  whoever? It was the peacocky one that,
• 27:18
  you know, they own all of that. But the way it works in British
• 27:20
  TV was the writers of individual scripts would retain the
• 27:26
  copyright to any original elements that they invented for
• 27:29
  that script. So things that were invented by
• 27:30
  members of the staff, BBC employees, so the Doctor, the
• 27:34
  TARDIS, most of the companions, they would be owned by the BBC
• 27:37
  and could be used, exploited by the BBC however they sort of
• 27:40
  fit. But for any original elements,
• 27:43
  that would remain the property of the individual.
• 27:45
  See if I've got this right. So, say, if Anthony Coburn chose
• 27:49
  to write the Old Mother Adventures, Yeah.
• 27:53
  And he's absolutely got the the rights to do that.
• 27:56
  Yeah. All.
• 27:56
  All the original parts of An Unearthly Child.
• 27:59
  Yes, assuming she was assuming that character didn't appear in
• 28:02
  any briefing or script outline that he was given by by Mary BC
• 28:06
  as I understand it. But yeah, so, so the most famous
• 28:11
  example of that is is the Daleks from from the Daleks whereby
• 28:18
  they were a creation of Terry Nation.
• 28:20
  So he that was like copy because he retains the intellectual
• 28:23
  property to the idea of the Daleks to the use of them.
• 28:25
  The BBC retains the rights to the image of the Daleks because
• 28:29
  that was designed by R.E.M. Cusack, who was ABBC employee.
• 28:33
  Every time a piece of merchandise was created, it had
• 28:36
  the word Dalek on it, which is the idea right rather than the
• 28:40
  image? I would that would make sense,
• 28:44
  but I'm not a percent certain. But yes, so and this is how and
• 28:48
  so that just meant as as time went on, there's even actually
• 28:50
  some quite interesting examples of this Ray in Delta and the
• 28:54
  banner men was, you know, famously considered almost the
• 28:57
  replacement companion for for Mel, but they went with Ace in
• 29:00
  dragon fire instead. And actually there's a memo that
• 29:03
  someone found where the writer of Delta and the banner men just
• 29:05
  for you know, just for league, you know, bookkeeping.
• 29:09
  Make sure we got the record keeping at to sign a piece of
• 29:11
  paper saying that Ray was the creation of the of the beep of
• 29:14
  the Doctor Who production staff just in case they wanted to do I
• 29:18
  think and he couldn't make a claim.
• 29:19
  So Ian Briggs would have had to have done that after writing
• 29:22
  Dragonfly with Ace. As Ace went on, yeah.
• 29:25
  So I assume, yeah, assuming that Ace was, you know, was was was
• 29:29
  created by, I think it was created by Andrew Cartmel.
• 29:32
  I'm sure we'd have heard if if if ACE was.
• 29:34
  If not with all those big finishes Ian Briggs has been
• 29:37
  cashing in for years. Yeah, exactly, exactly that so
• 29:42
  and there's a long history of of those facts being exploited
• 29:45
  within a commercial, exploited with within spin off free.
• 29:48
  I think nation's the only person has become a millionaire off the
• 29:51
  back of it though, right as that absolutely properly cashed in on
• 29:54
  it. Everybody else has just had a,
• 29:56
  you know, small checks through the post every now and again.
• 29:59
  I mean, I can't pretend to have examined the financial records
• 30:02
  or indeed tax returns of Doctor Who authors, but I think I think
• 30:05
  you're right, you know? I know you normally do a lot of
• 30:07
  research for this thing. Obviously the Daleks are the big
• 30:10
  ones, right? What?
• 30:13
  About Hazman and Lincoln then. Yes, this brings on to Hazman
• 30:17
  Lincoln. So there there is a long history
• 30:20
  of these of of all of this sort of thing being commercially
• 30:22
  exploited within Doctor Drew spin off free those familiar
• 30:25
  with the works of BBV in real time.
• 30:27
  For example, a lot of that relies on the fact that people
• 30:29
  didn't need to go to the BBC in order to produce audios about
• 30:34
  the wirram. They just.
• 30:36
  I've been reading Dylan Reese's Downtime this very week.
• 30:38
  Actually. There's been a fair bit of sort
• 30:40
  of writing on napkins saying, yeah, all right, you can do it,
• 30:43
  and keeping older than napkins, you know, just in case there's
• 30:46
  any trouble. Exactly so, but one of the other
• 30:51
  notable characters within Doctor Who that's that falls within
• 30:56
  this this this particular structure is Brigadier Alistair
• 31:00
  Gordon Lethbridge Stewarts because he was an original
• 31:04
  creation of the writers of Haseman and Lincoln for the
• 31:08
  serial The Web of Fear and was never intended to return.
• 31:14
  Just a one off character for that one thing.
• 31:16
  Next time you watch the Web of Fear, do you pay attention?
• 31:18
  Because he's also a red herring. You're meant to think that.
• 31:20
  He's totally you're. Meant to think, which is so easy
• 31:23
  to miss these days all. The arrows are pointing their
• 31:25
  head. He's the one that's behaving
• 31:27
  suspiciously in those middle episodes. 100% But then of
• 31:31
  course he got brought back in the invasion and then
• 31:34
  subsequently was was made regular during the two years and
• 31:38
  became beloved and turns up for many years since.
• 31:41
  But remained the property of the Hazeman Lincoln Estate, as did
• 31:47
  the Yeti and the Quarks and and some of the other creations.
• 31:52
  All of which meant that roll around 2015 and via Cantigar
• 31:57
  Books we got the launch of the Lethbridge Stuart range of
• 32:02
  Doctor Who books, which are, I think that they say, from the
• 32:05
  worlds of Doctor Who, don't they in the time honoured tradition
• 32:09
  on the cover. The Havoc files the back cover
• 32:13
  of my one says. Oh golly gosh, is that a?
• 32:16
  Oh, is that an alternative title for the range?
• 32:18
  No, it's just a reference to the stunt team from the poetry
• 32:22
  years. I think it's an in joke.
• 32:24
  Yes, there's a few of those. There's a few of those in this,
• 32:28
  yeah. So and this yes, produced by Can
• 32:31
  Job books I think are based in South Wales.
• 32:33
  I could be wrong and but yet these books are officially
• 32:40
  licensed by the by the Hazman, the literary states, as I
• 32:43
  understand it, with Andy, Frank and Allen, the author of this
• 32:46
  book, acting as the sort of creative director, range editor,
• 32:49
  sort of all overseeing this. They're not they're not from the
• 32:52
  BBC, but they're using the character of Earth and others
• 32:56
  from from those writers works with the conceit being that they
• 33:01
  are set between at least initially and certainly where
• 33:03
  the beast of Fang rock takes place is that they tell the
• 33:06
  story between the web of fear and the invasion of the
• 33:09
  Brigadier, which is that he get because, you know, end of the
• 33:11
  web of fear. He's an army Colonel.
• 33:13
  He's seen being involved in one instance.
• 33:15
  Well, like a million other BE people in Doctor Who have been,
• 33:18
  but by the time of the invasion, he's in charge of this
• 33:20
  international United Nations task force that is deliberately
• 33:24
  there to counter an invasion. So like what?
• 33:26
  What was the journey there? What happened?
• 33:28
  How did he get all that experience?
• 33:30
  I do think that is an intriguing premise for the for this range
• 33:34
  of books. I do think that is worth
• 33:37
  exploring. I often criticized Doctor Who
• 33:40
  writers going back and plug in these gaps, you know, of how we
• 33:44
  got from there to there. But that's got potential, right?
• 33:48
  That if you're creatively minded, there are stories you
• 33:51
  could tell with that premise. Yeah, I mean certainly compared
• 33:54
  to what, let's face it, what a lot of other Doctor Who spin off
• 33:59
  ranges have at times been based on.
• 34:01
  Tales of New Earth do you mean or the Benton files or?
• 34:06
  Yeah, exactly. It is.
• 34:07
  It's a relatively substantial idea.
• 34:11
  And yeah, so this, this one beast of Fang Rock was the 3rd
• 34:15
  in the series. Before this, we'd had The
• 34:17
  Forgotten Son, which I did read when it came out, which was back
• 34:21
  in 2015, 2016, I think takes place in the immediate
• 34:24
  aftermath. The Weber fear picks up very,
• 34:27
  very quickly afterwards. And then we had The Schizoid
• 34:29
  Earth by David A McKinsey, a name that should be familiar to
• 34:34
  to fans of Doctor Who books past, which is a prequel to the
• 34:38
  Inferno. And then we have.
• 34:40
  My God, a prequel to the Inferno?
• 34:43
  Yeah, he did a sequel to Inferno in Face of the Enemy, didn't he?
• 34:49
  Yes he did If. I can answer the well, but he
• 34:52
  did write the Brigadier very good in Face the Enemy, though.
• 34:54
  I mean, you didn't really need to tell me too much about the
• 34:56
  books that came before this because there was so much about
• 34:59
  the books that came before this. In this book, in the first sort
• 35:03
  of third of it, I basically feel as if I was reading those books
• 35:06
  at some points. Oh yeah, I mean, this so beast
• 35:09
  of fan rock is the third in the series, and it is.
• 35:12
  It is. It is awkward phrasing, but it
• 35:16
  is a serialized series. It is one in which there are
• 35:18
  very strong plot lines plot those running through each one.
• 35:24
  Wouldn't say you can't read them independently, but they're
• 35:26
  definitely intended to be read. All of them.
• 35:30
  I think I'm. Sorry to interrupt you at this
• 35:32
  point at this juncture, but yes, it is a serialized series of
• 35:36
  adventures. But at no point did plot points
• 35:39
  in those previous books ever impact the plot of this book.
• 35:44
  And therefore I do not understand why I was getting the
• 35:47
  potted history of those previous books aside from Andy Frank
• 35:51
  O'mallon asking me to go and read those books because they
• 35:54
  sound so enticing. Yeah, I mean, I did keep a note
• 35:57
  in the first few chapters of Beasts of Fanny Rock.
• 35:59
  We get recaps of the first two books in the series, which may
• 36:03
  be fair enough, but taken a bit far.
• 36:05
  Perhaps we also, but we also get overviews of the horror, Fang
• 36:09
  Rock, the Weber Fear, and bizarrely, the 8th Doctor
• 36:12
  adventure. Revolution, Man.
• 36:13
  Yes. We'll, we'll get there.
• 36:15
  We will get there. Can I put my cards on the table,
• 36:20
  please? Because we have sort of skirted
• 36:22
  around having any kind of opinion about this book at this
• 36:24
  point. Barely.
• 36:26
  I I have read a number of Doctor Who books for this book club.
• 36:31
  Now this is the biggest struggle that I have had with book in the
• 36:37
  book club to date and there are many, many reasons for that.
• 36:41
  I found this a real chore to get through and writing style, the
• 36:47
  pacing of the book, how derivative it was, kind of what
• 36:53
  who it was for, what you know why it existed.
• 36:57
  There was a lot of I was having a lot of inner turmoil whilst I
• 37:00
  was reading this book, but chief amongst them was kind of
• 37:04
  boredom. Yes.
• 37:08
  So when you say it's the biggest struggle, would that be
• 37:12
  different from saying it's the poorest book you've read?
• 37:17
  No, I would say it is the poorest.
• 37:18
  Book. OK, Yeah.
• 37:19
  I mean, I haven't done the pit yet or, you know, some of the
• 37:22
  the worst excesses of the New adventures and the 8th Doctor
• 37:25
  books. But yeah, like in in, well,
• 37:28
  let's can we start with how how the book is written, the prose?
• 37:32
  Yeah, well, should we, should we just give a?
• 37:33
  So it's called just briefly, it's called just a bit of
• 37:35
  context of the book itself. So it's called The Beast of Fang
• 37:37
  Rock. It is both a prequel and a
• 37:39
  sequel to the horror of Fang Rock.
• 37:43
  Great, great story. Great story.
• 37:44
  It's a great story, but it doesn't need a prequel or a
• 37:47
  sequel. No.
• 37:48
  Sometimes you just got to leave it alone.
• 37:51
  And we see the Brigadier in and and and Travers from the web of
• 37:57
  fear investigating mysterious goings on ghostly sightings at
• 38:01
  Fang Rock in the 19 in the 1960s and sent off to investigate as
• 38:05
  part of their ongoing exploration of fantastical and
• 38:09
  what is what is the nature of that which is beyond the normal
• 38:12
  that we see, which is so I would say that's not a bad premise.
• 38:17
  I think that's I think a lot of this is a very good starting
• 38:20
  point. I think if you, I, I, I like
• 38:22
  this idea of doing present day sequels to historical stories
• 38:27
  that feels like it's got a bit more mileage in it than we've
• 38:29
  often been given in Doctor Who. It does.
• 38:32
  And you can sort of lean into the folky horror, you know, a
• 38:36
  bit like that scene in Terror of the Silos, you know, when the
• 38:38
  man's telling the myth of the people going across.
• 38:40
  The more you know you can lean into all of that and there is a
• 38:43
  bit of that in this. Yeah, and it's the 60s, so you
• 38:46
  can do some of the stuff that Jago and Lightfoot did about,
• 38:49
  you know, playing off the kind of Victor, the love of
• 38:52
  Victoriano that emerged in the 1960s again and all that.
• 38:55
  You know, there's a lot of opportunities here to to do
• 38:58
  things that are interesting and new and put a different slant
• 39:01
  and a different perspective on a classic Doctor Who story.
• 39:05
  I would like to put my car to the table and say I don't think
• 39:08
  this does any of them. No, no, indeed.
• 39:10
  Like I said, do we need a sequel to People to Horror Vang Rock?
• 39:14
  No. Should it be this book?
• 39:17
  No. It's also as well a bit of a RIP
• 39:20
  off of Torchwood, I thought as well, because there's a a thing
• 39:25
  called the Vault, isn't there? Underneath London, which deals
• 39:29
  with alien detritus that they've picked up after alien invasions.
• 39:33
  Did you pick that up in the beginning of the book?
• 39:35
  Yes. Well, actually let us mention
• 39:36
  the Vault, because I think the Vault speaks to something, which
• 39:38
  was one of the problems that I have with this book.
• 39:40
  So the Vault actually has a surprisingly long history in
• 39:43
  Doctor Who's spinoffery. So it first appears it is.
• 39:46
  Pretorchwood. Yeah, so the Vault first
• 39:51
  appears. Well, the Vault first appears
• 39:53
  within Doctor Who in the missing adventure The Scales of
• 39:56
  Injustice by Gary Russell. Which is set during the the Unit
• 40:03
  era, is sort of meant to be a kind of capstone to series 7:00,
• 40:06
  and basically seeks to answer the question of what's happening
• 40:10
  to all of that alien technology that's left after all of these
• 40:12
  invasions. So long before torture did that.
• 40:14
  But units don't seem to be collecting this or doing
• 40:16
  anything with it. What if someone else was
• 40:17
  squirreling that away? That's it's supposed to
• 40:20
  appearance within Doctor Great. Idea.
• 40:21
  It's a wonderful. Idea.
• 40:22
  It's such a great idea and it's it's, it's lifted fairly
• 40:27
  wholesale. I think Gary Russell has said
• 40:28
  this from Marvel's Captain Britain comics, where they had
• 40:32
  to default that it's in the same part of the country I'm.
• 40:35
  Sure, it's not the first or last time that Doctor Who authors
• 40:38
  have gone to that way, although, oh.
• 40:40
  No, no, no, no, no, no, and I'm sure others have probably done
• 40:43
  it before Marvel as well. Yes, similar ideas, but so it
• 40:46
  appeared in Scales of Injustice and then it appeared it then it
• 40:51
  just kept cropping up in places. Just one of the ideas that
• 40:53
  people really quite seem to quite like.
• 40:56
  It's there was separately the black the vault in the Companion
• 41:03
  Chronicles, the Big Finish audios there with was it.
• 41:08
  Just called yeah, with Daphne Ashbrook and Gigi to so work in
• 41:12
  there, weren't they? Yeah, exactly.
• 41:15
  Which was apparently, I think when Jonathan Morris created
• 41:17
  that was unaware of the one in the Scales of Injustice.
• 41:22
  But when people pointed out to him how similar they were, they
• 41:24
  then subsequently wrote it into them into subsequent stories.
• 41:28
  That actually was the. 2nd The second one is called Tales from
• 41:30
  the Ball. Yes, and I think it's then the
• 41:33
  screaming skull. Is it from the Tales of the
• 41:37
  world's of Doctor Who? The one that's all of the spin
• 41:39
  off crossover story that makes it explicit If it wasn't before
• 41:42
  that it is. Is it something very different
• 41:44
  from the Black Archive which turns up in TV Doctor Who?
• 41:47
  Well, and then. So when the black archive turns
• 41:49
  up, I I'm pretty certain I think it is then retroactive
• 41:53
  established that the vault is one of the black archive sites
• 41:56
  as well as there's lots of. So it's it's it's this weird
• 41:59
  idea sort of as a as a mean. It's an idea that keep Doctor
• 42:02
  Who keeps inventing and keep needing it.
• 42:04
  Keeps seems to keep needing this idea of whether the.
• 42:06
  Conclusion, Michael, we can draw from this is there is a lot of
• 42:09
  alien gobbins out there. It really is.
• 42:12
  Maybe that's what we have to keep.
• 42:13
  Like every now and again, authors will go hang on a minute
• 42:16
  and all come up with the same answer.
• 42:17
  But you know, there's something fun and friendly about the idea
• 42:19
  that this all starts to accrete around something, and then it
• 42:24
  turns up again in the Lethbridge Stewart books as he I.
• 42:26
  Thought he was doing an original idea.
• 42:29
  I should have known better. But I think my problem with
• 42:36
  that, and one of the problems I have for this book as a whole,
• 42:37
  so it's a it's a prevalent sequel to horror fan rock.
• 42:39
  As we've touched on, it brings in a lot of continuity from a
• 42:42
  lot of other stories, but it does that in a way that is it
• 42:47
  doesn't really seem to serve much of A purpose other than to
• 42:49
  repeat things that have happened before.
• 42:51
  And I'm slightly confused by the way the Vault is introduced.
• 42:54
  It's introduced quite peremptorily as well.
• 42:56
  Oh, here's the thing. And you don't get a huge amount.
• 42:58
  You get some detail and some info dump about it, but I don't
• 43:02
  know that it's introduced with any particular care for the
• 43:06
  readers. If there seems to be an
• 43:08
  assumption. This is a series that's trying
• 43:09
  to establish itself as something separate and to run from time,
• 43:12
  and it has run for long time. There's forty of these books
• 43:14
  now, but at the same time, it's it's just sort of Fair.
• 43:18
  It seems to assume that I already knew all about this.
• 43:20
  But all that's given me a lot of information about, yeah, when
• 43:24
  you go back and you do infra dumpster, you do recaps and you
• 43:26
  do continuity. They're meant to be there to
• 43:28
  help, to guide the reader through what's happening.
• 43:31
  I think here there's just so much information thrown at you
• 43:34
  so often that it kind of obscures the path.
• 43:36
  So I'm like, oh, it's the vault, something that I've not read in
• 43:39
  the previous books and I've got back and checked, and the
• 43:41
  vault's not in any of the Lesson Stewart books up to this point.
• 43:43
  This is, I believe, Ann Travis's first appearance in the series.
• 43:47
  And yeah, it's just there. Oh, oh, gosh.
• 43:48
  OK. Is that important there?
• 43:50
  Is there is a whole page, I'm not joking you, an entire page,
• 43:54
  which is the potted history of the abominable Snowmen and I
• 43:58
  have no idea why it's in this book.
• 44:00
  Again, it has no, it has no impact on the story.
• 44:04
  It's just there. I don't know for Doctor Who fans
• 44:06
  to go. Oh, that's that's the synopsis
• 44:09
  of The Abominable Snowmen. And I can actually point to the
• 44:12
  acknowledgements at the end of the book where Andy Franklin
• 44:16
  Allen does a very long acknowledgments 2 page spread.
• 44:21
  But the very last paragraph says and this, this tells you
• 44:24
  everything you need to know about who this is aimed at.
• 44:26
  And last but no needs leads to all my followers and on Facebook
• 44:30
  and Twitter for the support, humour and inspiration and for
• 44:33
  reminding me how much you are all waiting to read this book.
• 44:38
  This is for a select group of Doctor Who fans that are already
• 44:43
  on board with these books. Yeah, I don't think this is in
• 44:46
  any way trying to grab the interest of anyone outside of
• 44:50
  that circle. No, I think I think you're
• 44:54
  right. I think it's not written to be
• 44:55
  read by anyone who hasn't read the first two books and
• 44:58
  committed them to memory. And knows these characters and
• 45:02
  knows these stories, which is a shame because I do think the
• 45:06
  premise you laid out could be opened out to a wider audience.
• 45:11
  Yeah, yeah, it's definitely much more user friendly than say what
• 45:14
  you say, Tales of New Earth or something like that.
• 45:16
  You know, take another example or what if Jackie tied him at
• 45:19
  the Crotons that. Was pretty good actually.
• 45:25
  But there is this thing that sometimes happens with the with
• 45:29
  these books, and I don't this isn't the only place I've
• 45:32
  experienced that I sort of get this impression from a lot of
• 45:36
  not by all means all. There is a lot of really great
• 45:40
  labour of love stuff that's produced in the world of, you
• 45:43
  know, small press, independent press, Doctor Who spin offs and
• 45:46
  a lot of people really honing their craft.
• 45:48
  Once you tell great stories, not of enthusiasm, but I also
• 45:53
  sometimes feel like I'm reading a story that has been written to
• 45:57
  be turned into a wiki article that that people are going to
• 46:01
  love pouring over this and pulling out all the references
• 46:03
  and all the and adding all the continuity to all of the
• 46:06
  relevant pages about things been established.
• 46:08
  There's just a lot of law here. OK.
• 46:12
  And I'm doing this a lot at the moment.
• 46:14
  There are two types of Doctor Who writer.
• 46:16
  Yeah. And, and I'm now going to do it
• 46:18
  with the continuity reading. There's the Lawrence Mars's of
• 46:21
  this world who writes Christmas on the Rational Planet and says,
• 46:24
  I'm going to put in a reference to every single Doctor Who story
• 46:28
  in this book in one way or another.
• 46:30
  And I absolutely trust them to assemble an original, exciting,
• 46:35
  engaging book with lots of little kisses in there that are
• 46:40
  very cleverly sort of sculpted into the book.
• 46:43
  And then there are others that are literally ripping wiki pages
• 46:48
  off of Wikipedia and shoving them into their book.
• 46:51
  And that's what this is. Well, when we spoke, when we
• 46:54
  spoke to Lance Parkin about it, because his books are full of
• 46:57
  continuity. You know, if you go back and
• 46:58
  listen to our Father Time episode, there's a whole extra
• 47:01
  reading of that book after. You've explained it to me.
• 47:04
  Well, it's reliant on you, but the point is it's reliant on you
• 47:07
  spotting that these are continuity references, right?
• 47:09
  And when we spoke to me asked about this, you know, what is
• 47:11
  the role of continuity in these books?
• 47:14
  Should there be continuity? Is it important?
• 47:17
  And he actually quoted Kate Orman who said it's what can I
• 47:20
  use as fuel? If I can use continuity to fuel
• 47:24
  my story, to tell something new, to move onwards, to produce
• 47:27
  something new and bigger with that, then absolutely, that's
• 47:29
  fantastic. But I think one of the problems
• 47:33
  I had with this book was there is a lot of continuity being
• 47:35
  used, a lot of continuity being brought up, a lot of it.
• 47:39
  And I don't know that it's actually moving anything
• 47:41
  anywhere. It's like it's, it's like it's,
• 47:43
  it's sat there with the on the airstrip with the engines
• 47:47
  running, burning off. All of these references, all
• 47:52
  this information that's been drawn in and not moving
• 47:54
  anywhere. So it's we should mention its
• 47:56
  relationship to horror fan rock. The story ends up being spread
• 48:02
  across three time zones. So the quote UN quote present
• 48:05
  day of 1968, the events of Horrorfang Rock, which I think
• 48:12
  it dates to 19 O 6 and then the further past of the I think it's
• 48:19
  the 1820s, eighteen 30s, which is within Horrorfang Rock.
• 48:23
  If you remember, that's when they talk of the legends of the
• 48:25
  beast that referred to in that. But the problem with this is we
• 48:31
  have three sets of characters across three time zones
• 48:33
  occupying the same space. We're engaged in events that are
• 48:39
  mirroring and echoing each other, but none of that really
• 48:43
  seems to come together into any kind of emergent effect.
• 48:48
  You know that that's a that is an interesting idea and there's
• 48:51
  definitely lots of. So if this is trying to be
• 48:53
  anything, it's trying to be a ghost story, I guess.
• 48:56
  So what we, the reader, quickly realise is that the ghostly
• 49:00
  apparitions that people are seeing in the lighthouse in the
• 49:02
  1960s are the events of The Horror of Fat Rock.
• 49:07
  But the problem is, I don't know that the book is playing off in
• 49:09
  the dramatic irony of that. You know, there's no sense.
• 49:12
  No one reading this book hasn't seen Horror of fan Rock.
• 49:16
  And yet. I think Andy Frank O'mallon
• 49:18
  wants to write horror of fan rock, which is why he just puts
• 49:22
  lengthy passages describing the events of that book and then
• 49:27
  just writes the rest of this around it because I wasn't
• 49:30
  getting anything but horror of fan rock from this book.
• 49:35
  Where's the beast of fan? Rock Yeah, well, we saw.
• 49:40
  So, you know, there's no, there's no this is the thing of,
• 49:46
  you know, I've described it in the past as being that type of
• 49:48
  Doctor Who spin off thing that is death to the Daleks again.
• 49:52
  And this is very much horror fan rock.
• 49:55
  Again, it's not really anything different.
• 49:58
  It is. I would have gone in with less
• 49:59
  expectations had it been called that, you know?
• 50:02
  And I've enjoyed it a bit more. Horror fan rock comma again.
• 50:07
  Yeah, So what you need to do when you're writing this book is
• 50:11
  you need to know who's reading it and you need to think about,
• 50:14
  well, whatever, how do they interact this story?
• 50:15
  I'm, you know, don't get me wrong, I'm sure thought was
• 50:17
  given to this. I just don't think it's for me.
• 50:20
  I don't think it was achieved terribly well.
• 50:22
  I don't think the execution really works, which is that to
• 50:25
  make to stop that just being tiresome and as you say, sort of
• 50:31
  empty on calories, you need to be doing something really quite
• 50:36
  clever and something dramatic with what's going on.
• 50:38
  And there are ways you can do this.
• 50:39
  There are stories where you can reinterpolate, where you can cut
• 50:41
  up and remix pre-existing things and present them in new and
• 50:44
  different ways and tell a story about that.
• 50:46
  But ultimately this doesn't do anything other than run us
• 50:48
  through horror of fan rock again.
• 50:50
  So large part of the work is people watching horror of fan
• 50:53
  rock and us having that describe.
• 50:54
  And I could just go and put the DVD in.
• 50:57
  And. Not have the events of Horror
• 50:59
  Fang Rock told through this turgid prose.
• 51:02
  Yeah. And then we go back, when we go
• 51:03
  back further to the 1820s, to the first set of of events of
• 51:12
  the beast being there for the first time, it just plays out
• 51:16
  like Horror Fang Rock again. And so we end up with these
• 51:18
  three versions of Horror Fang Rock all happening.
• 51:22
  You said it earlier, you said it earlier, right?
• 51:24
  It's set in three different time zones.
• 51:26
  Imagine saying to Steven Moffett, you know, you're a big
• 51:28
  fan of Steven Moffett. Like you've got three different
• 51:30
  time zones here, three sets of characters and the events of
• 51:34
  horror fan rock. He would do a fabulous story, of
• 51:38
  course, and effect, you know, something happening in the
• 51:40
  1800s, which is then affecting what's happening in the 60s,
• 51:43
  which is then, do you know what I mean?
• 51:45
  Like it's, it's, it's ripe for something interesting to happen.
• 51:49
  Yeah, actually one of the books that it I was reminded that I
• 51:53
  kept thinking of in Doctor Who terms because you covered it on
• 51:56
  the podcast earlier this year. Not with me, but you know, I
• 51:59
  won't hold that against you was The Sands of Time by Justin
• 52:02
  Richards, which has a similar idea of let's tell a tiny why me
• 52:07
  backwards and forwards in the middle, before and after story
• 52:11
  of Pyramids of Mars. And you know, I really enjoyed
• 52:14
  that book. I don't think it's perfect, but
• 52:16
  I really enjoyed it, appreciated what it was doing.
• 52:17
  He had the fucking nerve to have Anne Cranley in it at the start
• 52:21
  and then there's this Nisa like character that's been mummified
• 52:24
  throughout and I didn't make the connection.
• 52:27
  Massive drive by spoilers for anyone who's not read The Sands
• 52:29
  of Time you've had. 30 years, right?
• 52:35
  But that's that book. Yeah, I don't think it was
• 52:37
  perfect, but I Justin Richards said in a few places that Peter
• 52:40
  Star of 11's, the range editor, was very concerned that the that
• 52:44
  the time travel intricacies of it all make sense and make sense
• 52:47
  to the reader and the story from having a flow chart, which
• 52:50
  Justin Richards did for him to show it from every character's
• 52:53
  perspective. And Peter Star of 11's had it
• 52:54
  with war for ages. Here there is lots of back and
• 52:57
  forth, but none of it feels particularly elegant.
• 53:01
  There's lots of moving parts, but there's no ballet to it.
• 53:04
  You know there's. And, and each of the individual
• 53:07
  parts, there's not much incident.
• 53:09
  Nothing is really going on. We're constantly told these
• 53:12
  these people are in situations of extreme peril.
• 53:16
  But there was there was nothing dramatic going on.
• 53:19
  There was no real danger. I don't think the beast does
• 53:21
  anything until 2/3 into the book.
• 53:23
  The only place there's any real incident happening is in 19 O 6,
• 53:26
  which is in Horror of Fang Rock. And then when we revisit it, of
• 53:29
  course we can't actually have the bee in Horror of Fang Rocks.
• 53:31
  They're just they're before Horror of Fang Rock, before
• 53:33
  anything starts happening. There's a there's a interesting
• 53:38
  dramatic idea which isn't explored in any kind of death or
• 53:43
  well, of Anne Travers learning that she will die in the past.
• 53:49
  Yes. That's an interesting idea, But
• 53:51
  then she just goes to the past via a drug from an Eighth Doctor
• 53:57
  novel, who knows we'll get there, and then meets her
• 54:03
  ancestor, sort something out of a spaceship, and then just pops
• 54:07
  back to the future again and it it's just so functional.
• 54:10
  It's so functional, there's no, there's no emotion to it.
• 54:14
  None of these. Every character.
• 54:15
  Every character is introduced with a massive info dump.
• 54:19
  Exposition dump. Hello Michael, My name is Joe
• 54:22
  Ford. I work in a shop.
• 54:25
  I do a Doctor Who podcast. I have a boyfriend called Mark
• 54:30
  troubled history with my family. You know, I mean, I've, I just
• 54:33
  went on for the next 10 minutes. That would be like one of the
• 54:36
  opening paragraphs of this book. And then importantly, not do
• 54:39
  anything interesting for the remainder of the book and I.
• 54:42
  Know that information is important.
• 54:44
  That's the, that's The thing is like, why do you keep telling me
• 54:47
  about things that aren't important?
• 54:50
  It's it's, it's a book that is. There have been slighter
• 54:53
  stories, I'm sure, certainly in terms of instant what have you.
• 54:59
  But it is a book that feels remarkably inelegant at a great
• 55:05
  you know, to to to a great degree.
• 55:07
  It feels like in in its plot, it needed to be either simpler or
• 55:14
  it needed to be more complex but functional.
• 55:19
  Yeah, if you think of a really great time travel story, a
• 55:21
  really great Timey 1 Steven Moffat at his best type story,
• 55:26
  you. Hired a doctor.
• 55:27
  Day of the Doctor or or The Big Bang, you know where we redo the
• 55:31
  whole season that we've seen you sort.
• 55:33
  Of I could fight on that, but go on.
• 55:36
  Or blink, you know, you have all of these pieces that have been
• 55:38
  floating around, sort some of them in focus.
• 55:40
  Some of them you can see how they would line up by jigsaw
• 55:43
  pieces twirling around you like like parts of a clock that's
• 55:47
  been exploded. And then in the resolution, they
• 55:50
  all keep turning and keep turning and keep turning until
• 55:52
  they all come into alignment and you go, Oh my God, that is
• 55:55
  beautiful. And suddenly it all makes
• 55:57
  perfect sense. There's none of that here.
• 56:00
  You just have lots of bits that are floating around and you'll
• 56:05
  explain to you what they are separately.
• 56:06
  And then at the end, they're put down.
• 56:08
  And it's the horror of fan rock again.
• 56:12
  And I don't want to hate now. I don't, I don't, I don't like,
• 56:14
  you know, this is, I think we sort of discussing before this,
• 56:17
  we said this is the first book we've done on the podcast that
• 56:20
  we have between you and me anyway, that we've not liked,
• 56:22
  that we've not enjoyed. But it is just a lot of hard
• 56:25
  work. I, I do just wonder if it needed
• 56:30
  another editor to come in to look at, to take a look at it
• 56:33
  and say, look, here's what worked.
• 56:35
  Here's what doesn't. This is a really good idea
• 56:37
  you've got here. This could be a really good
• 56:39
  story, but you know, at storyline stage you need to,
• 56:42
  This is why you have storylines, right?
• 56:44
  You need to be able to say this is too complicated.
• 56:46
  We need the elegance here. Is there any way that we can
• 56:48
  foreshadow these things here in a better way?
• 56:50
  And there and then the actual writing.
• 56:52
  Someone come in with a red pen and say lose that.
• 56:54
  Yes. Oh, God, yes, Yeah.
• 56:56
  I need my. I need Mrs. Headley from Class
• 56:59
  4B to come in with a big green pen and go, no, Joe, this is
• 57:04
  this. This reads terribly because, and
• 57:06
  I want to give you a couple of examples, right, of of the
• 57:09
  inelegance of the prose and just sort of like read these things
• 57:14
  aloud. I'm about to do it now and
• 57:16
  you'll hear how clunky this is. Just just a note, you'll have
• 57:20
  heard a reading from Ken Moss at the start of this.
• 57:24
  God bless you, Ken, God bless you.
• 57:25
  Yeah, but he'll make it work, right?
• 57:27
  He made the stranger work. He can make anything work.
• 57:32
  OK. It was the first time Anne had
• 57:34
  visited Morecambe and Slant solicitors on Mason Ave. slap
• 57:38
  bang in the middle of Square Mile.
• 57:40
  But the elderly Mr. Slant treated her like an old friend.
• 57:44
  Why did we need the directions in the middle of that sentence?
• 57:48
  Wait, wait, wait. As Lethbridge Stewart understood
• 57:51
  it, Owen had been Comma in her past life.
• 57:54
  Comma. The brother that Lethbridge
• 57:56
  Stewart hadn't even known he had until a few months ago.
• 58:00
  What the fuck does that sentence mean?
• 58:04
  I I had one noted down. Anne couldn't explain it, but
• 58:07
  she trusted the root and Scott. Oh well, better than explaining
• 58:11
  it I guess. He knew that technically Owen
• 58:16
  and he were not related, but nonetheless, the sense of pride
• 58:19
  he felt was filial. I had to look up filial if I'm
• 58:22
  honest. I I just think.
• 58:27
  Words words on the page should not be this difficult to to
• 58:32
  read. You know, it shouldn't it
• 58:34
  shouldn't be this, this hard. It's.
• 58:36
  Also a bit where the Brigadier says or thinks to him.
• 58:39
  So it's not the Brigadier, of course.
• 58:40
  He's the Colonel. He's the Brigadier to us, right?
• 58:43
  He thinks. He'd never been a fan of
• 58:44
  Twilight. Oh, I've just had to read that.
• 58:47
  Go on please. Please no you you've probably
• 58:49
  got it written there. He'd never been a fan of
• 58:51
  twilight, that period between dawn and sunrise when it wasn't
• 58:55
  quite night or day, and during his many missions overseas, he's
• 59:00
  seen more than he could count. Thank you very much for
• 59:03
  explaining to me the meaning of the word twilight.
• 59:07
  But it's what that gets to is there's just so much extraneous
• 59:11
  information and none of it serves a purpose for plot or
• 59:14
  character or so he'd never been a fan of Twilight, But we don't
• 59:17
  we don't know why any of that means anything.
• 59:20
  Like, you know, fair enough. I'm sure there are novice who
• 59:22
  could you could bring up that this character doesn't like
• 59:24
  Twilight, but a it's a really odd thing to take against.
• 59:30
  It's like, oh bloody hell, I can't stand Oxbow lakes.
• 59:33
  You know, it's, but if you're going to bring it up such an old
• 59:36
  thing, what's that tell us about the character?
• 59:38
  Why why doesn't he? Why doesn't he like that?
• 59:41
  Why how does that feel? Is the story, you know, this is
• 59:44
  this is a novel. It's meant to have some purpose
• 59:48
  and some vector and some some sense of what it's actually
• 59:54
  about. You know what it reminds me of?
• 59:56
  It reminds me of one shot Star Trek Voyager writers, right?
• 1:00:01
  Go with me here, because they all come in and there's one
• 1:00:03
  scene I always highlight where she's on the bridge, Captain
• 1:00:07
  Janeway, and she's sort of twiddling her badge and
• 1:00:10
  Commander Shikote goes to her. You're clearly in a troubled
• 1:00:14
  situation. And she goes, ah, what makes you
• 1:00:16
  say that, commander? And he goes, well, he goes.
• 1:00:20
  You're twiddling, you're bad. You always do that, and it's
• 1:00:23
  never happened before and it's never happened since.
• 1:00:26
  But they think it's an interesting character detail,
• 1:00:29
  and this book is full of moments like that, you know?
• 1:00:33
  It's full of that sort of thing. I think there's a difference
• 1:00:35
  between, you know, it's a cliche show don't tell, but.
• 1:00:41
  There's so much tell in this though, Michael.
• 1:00:43
  There's so much telling without actually telling us anything
• 1:00:46
  meaningful about the character, like giving us any, you know,
• 1:00:48
  character is is emergent. We are not all of us just facts
• 1:00:52
  that you can write down about ourselves.
• 1:00:54
  We, our characters and our ourselves and our interactions
• 1:00:57
  with others emerge from everything that happens.
• 1:00:59
  And in a good book, that's what happens.
• 1:01:01
  We understand these captures. We move on a journey with them.
• 1:01:03
  We understand them. I think this just seems to feel
• 1:01:05
  but just telling us things about what characters are thinking or
• 1:01:08
  feeling anything will somehow expand them because we've got
• 1:01:11
  another data point about that character.
• 1:01:12
  There's a bit there's a bit very early on in the book where he
• 1:01:15
  where Lethbridge Stewart is is walking from his flat to to
• 1:01:18
  barracks offices and he's just and he just comments in passing
• 1:01:24
  on the recent riots and the recent the recent is it the
• 1:01:29
  Notting Hill riots and how Britain doesn't doesn't treat
• 1:01:35
  immigrants very well at all. And you think what?
• 1:01:37
  I agree totally with the sentiments, but what's it got to
• 1:01:40
  do with this story? It doesn't.
• 1:01:41
  It doesn't relate to anything else about the character at that
• 1:01:44
  point, it just feels it's just another thought put in there.
• 1:01:48
  If he's researched it, it's gone in because during the climax of
• 1:01:52
  this book a character pulls out a gun to use on the Russon and I
• 1:01:56
  kid you not, this is one of the lines gas operated with up to
• 1:02:00
  800 meter range. The L1A1 self loading rifle was
• 1:02:04
  a powerful piece of equipment with 30 rounds in his magazine
• 1:02:08
  clip. Just fire the fucking thing.
• 1:02:11
  There's a monster in front of you.
• 1:02:12
  We do not need to know what this it's a gun.
• 1:02:16
  That's all we need to know. Oh, but you know, but that, I
• 1:02:18
  mean, that's a that's a cliche of of British thriller writers,
• 1:02:22
  right? He looked at and Lance Parkin
• 1:02:24
  has a bit of fun taking a mic at that.
• 1:02:26
  Early on in the dying days. There's a there's a point that's
• 1:02:28
  very like that with the scene near the start where Alex
• 1:02:31
  Christians being transported in the helicopter.
• 1:02:33
  And he makes the point of describing the type of
• 1:02:36
  helicopter flying at a steady rate of X meters above the above
• 1:02:40
  the waves, maintaining a velocity of you know and you
• 1:02:42
  can. But does he do it?
• 1:02:43
  Does he do it in a way that sounds dramatically satisfying?
• 1:02:46
  Because that just sounds like it's come straight out of, you
• 1:02:48
  know, the boys Book of Gums. Yeah, it's just stuck in there
• 1:02:51
  and it's this book. Isn't this among the many things
• 1:02:54
  this book isn't? Is is a thriller, You know, So
• 1:02:56
  one thing, if you were sort of having that tone flap, Oh, no,
• 1:02:59
  no, it's just, it's just thrown in here.
• 1:03:01
  There's two more lines I want to read to you then you've just
• 1:03:03
  given an excuse for that one. So I want to see if you can try
• 1:03:05
  and excuse these because this is Anne is in the in the midst of
• 1:03:09
  the climax and she's heading up the lighthouse.
• 1:03:12
  Her lungs hurt, but she continued to run up, up, up, dot
• 1:03:20
  dot dot. I mean, and then wait.
• 1:03:24
  And his teeth. Oh, what big teeth he had.
• 1:03:28
  Now, that's not from a character's point of view.
• 1:03:31
  That's the authorial voice. It's almost more like script
• 1:03:36
  directions. It's odd.
• 1:03:38
  It's really, really odd and. That's the thing, it's different
• 1:03:41
  times. It has different tonal voices
• 1:03:43
  that just don't seem to seem to merge in in into into anything
• 1:03:47
  at all. I just I, I I found it hard
• 1:03:50
  work. I don't, I don't like, you know,
• 1:03:53
  having our books where I don't feel, you know, it'd be
• 1:03:55
  different if I felt there was something morally objectionable
• 1:03:58
  in any of this and that there isn't.
• 1:04:00
  But it I just didn't feel like it was a terribly well written
• 1:04:06
  book for a large point or maybe not terribly well edited.
• 1:04:08
  It feels very unfinished. It feels like this could, this
• 1:04:11
  could have been a good book if someone had come in with a heavy
• 1:04:14
  pair of hands and said, no, look, look, look.
• 1:04:16
  Here's what you need to do is tie this up.
• 1:04:18
  And in the acknowledgments, it is noted that this was rush
• 1:04:21
  written and it replaced another book that fell through.
• 1:04:27
  But you know, Midnight was rush written, Sit Your Deaf was rush
• 1:04:32
  written. A skilled writer can rush write
• 1:04:35
  a book and it doesn't read like this.
• 1:04:37
  Shadow in the Glass by Justin Richards and Steve Cole was
• 1:04:41
  written in a week I believe, and it's a great book.
• 1:04:46
  I mean, I mean, that makes sense for a lot of it, you know, and
• 1:04:48
  it, it does make sense of, of why there is that a certain
• 1:04:52
  sense of unrefinement about a lot of it, because we've said
• 1:04:56
  like we like a lot of the ideas here.
• 1:04:57
  It's not there's a problem. And I, I read the forgotten
• 1:05:00
  song, but it came out and I don't remember having this
• 1:05:02
  reaction to it. And that was written by Anthony
• 1:05:03
  Franklin as well. So, you know, I don't want to
• 1:05:07
  say say that that this may well not be typical of the range.
• 1:05:12
  I don't know. We've not read enough of them.
• 1:05:13
  And certainly there's some names if you look down the list of
• 1:05:14
  people who've written for. That there's some good names
• 1:05:16
  there. There's some good names in there
• 1:05:18
  and a lot of them coming back. But, you know, I think Jonathan
• 1:05:20
  Blum just wrote the most recent one.
• 1:05:21
  And we, you know, we really enjoy vampire science.
• 1:05:25
  Mcinty's better books, I think, are great.
• 1:05:27
  So that that might have been, and this is very much his
• 1:05:30
  wheelhouse, you know, the Army and hardware and things like
• 1:05:33
  that. And people like Nick Walters as
• 1:05:36
  well, who wrote some some good stuff towards the after end of
• 1:05:38
  the BBC range. So you know, it's and you know,
• 1:05:41
  clearly what do we know? There's been four of these books
• 1:05:44
  now. So they must sell.
• 1:05:44
  People must be buying them, even if it's a devoted following, so
• 1:05:49
  it would make sense if this was not typical of everything of the
• 1:05:53
  range. But I wonder if this is one
• 1:05:56
  situation where, and you can choose to ignore this comment or
• 1:05:59
  not engage with it, Where one of the editors and showrunners of
• 1:06:05
  this range should say, do you know what?
• 1:06:07
  I'm not very good at this. I won't write a book myself that
• 1:06:11
  I will encourage the best out of all the other writers, and I do
• 1:06:15
  think that should have been the case here.
• 1:06:19
  I mean, whenever I used to review books for a magazine in
• 1:06:25
  South Wales, and a lot of that was was small press, a lot of it
• 1:06:29
  was local authors and. Yes, you have regaled us with
• 1:06:33
  the tale of the woman who's now in extended therapy after
• 1:06:36
  reading one of your three line reviews.
• 1:06:40
  No, one of her books has just recently been adapted for the
• 1:06:43
  BBC starring Jenna Coleman, so she's fine.
• 1:06:46
  She doesn't care. What is that for real?
• 1:06:48
  Yeah, yeah. In Your Face, Michael Mills.
• 1:06:54
  Is what she cried at the premiere.
• 1:06:56
  She's called one of the corpses, Michael.
• 1:06:59
  I swear you'll never forget you. But did you still have this that
• 1:07:04
  seems to have this issue, which is, you know, it's one thing if
• 1:07:07
  you get sent like the latest bestseller from Richard Osman or
• 1:07:11
  Stephen King and it's not one you enjoy.
• 1:07:12
  You know, fine, if I think if I think Nadine Doris's latest is a
• 1:07:18
  bunch of crap that's not going to affect her sales or her one
• 1:07:21
  one inch. But you know, you would
• 1:07:23
  sometimes find something to wrestle with this, which is
• 1:07:25
  these are books that are, you know, frankly, they're written
• 1:07:31
  by small publishers, presumably very small advanced, presumably
• 1:07:34
  fairly, you know, labours of love, all all of them.
• 1:07:37
  But what you do if you don't like them, like because you have
• 1:07:39
  to be honest as a reviewer, right, Because you're
• 1:07:41
  essentially giving people a recommendation as well in terms
• 1:07:43
  of should they go and read it. And I think I always came back
• 1:07:45
  to is the moment you're asking people to hand over some money
• 1:07:50
  in order to read this, then there is then the comment is
• 1:07:53
  free. And if the people have passed,
• 1:07:54
  have, have, have paid that money, then or as a reviewer, if
• 1:07:58
  you are giving recommendations or not towards whether people
• 1:08:01
  should spend the money on this, then I, I, I think criticism is
• 1:08:04
  valid as long as it's, as long as it's honest and.
• 1:08:07
  I don't even think money has to be involved because I even think
• 1:08:10
  even down to the level that I do, which is podcasting.
• 1:08:12
  I think the moment you put out something for other people to
• 1:08:16
  ingest, then you have to be willing to hear an opinion.
• 1:08:21
  Yeah, yeah. And that's, and that's right, I
• 1:08:23
  suppose maybe that's if this was a rushed, if this, if this was a
• 1:08:26
  rushed job, frankly, then I, I think you're still, you're still
• 1:08:33
  asking people to pay money, but you're still asking for the, for
• 1:08:37
  the time to be passed over. And is it worth that time?
• 1:08:39
  Is it worth that money? And I'm afraid that I don't
• 1:08:43
  think it is. The trouble is, is I went online
• 1:08:46
  looking for reviews of this and so it's people from that small
• 1:08:51
  circle, that Facebook group, whatever it is, and they all
• 1:08:54
  loved it. And I think they all loved it
• 1:08:56
  just because it it was the horror fan rock again, you know,
• 1:09:00
  So it's ticking all the same boxes as, you know, the big
• 1:09:03
  finishes do that bring together all the continuity elements.
• 1:09:06
  Well. So there's a small audience for
• 1:09:09
  this. Well, you say small audience,
• 1:09:11
  but then I suppose, you know, continuity heavy storytelling is
• 1:09:13
  almost the default setting of a lot of other science fiction
• 1:09:17
  series these days. If you think of things like
• 1:09:20
  that. I like Star Trek Strange New
• 1:09:21
  Worlds. I like Star Trek Lower Decks.
• 1:09:23
  But it is very much feeding, you know, week to week by week.
• 1:09:27
  A lot of its stories are basically building on redoing,
• 1:09:30
  revisiting things from much older versions.
• 1:09:32
  You know, strangely, worlds especially.
• 1:09:34
  Taking the piss out of quite a bit in.
• 1:09:35
  Love taking the piss out of it. Strangely, World especially is
• 1:09:38
  basically just an effort to redo Star Trek The Original Series
• 1:09:43
  20, you know, whatever. Make it a bit more politically
• 1:09:46
  correct. Yes, and you know, Star Wars, a
• 1:09:50
  lot of it stuffs done that as well.
• 1:09:51
  You know, a lot of, you know, the Mandalorian started off
• 1:09:53
  interesting and has just descended into we're going to
• 1:09:56
  put all of the stuff that was in the books on the telly instead.
• 1:09:58
  You know, Ahsoka, this huge, huge.
• 1:10:01
  I enjoy The Soaker, but it was a sequel to a cartoon series.
• 1:10:05
  I am currently and I've never been a big Star Wars fan.
• 1:10:08
  Marver off goes sweet, right? I want us to watch all of Star
• 1:10:11
  Wars in order from Phantom Menace all the way for it,
• 1:10:14
  including the TV series, right? So we've done the pre force and
• 1:10:17
  then we did Solo and then we've started watching Obi Wan Kenobi,
• 1:10:21
  right? And that is what a brilliant.
• 1:10:24
  That is the perfect example for me of using continuity that's
• 1:10:28
  already there to tell a great bloody series.
• 1:10:32
  I think it's brilliant. Yeah, but so, you know, and you
• 1:10:35
  can get good stuff out of that, you can get bad stuff out of
• 1:10:38
  that. But it's something that actually
• 1:10:41
  the Doctor Who format, at least on TV has been much less
• 1:10:44
  cornered back because Doctor Who has its format requires it to go
• 1:10:48
  somewhere new each week or most weeks.
• 1:10:50
  Because I think even actually fans and let's say it's fans who
• 1:10:52
  are making it associate right wrongly.
• 1:10:55
  Everyone's individual things are.
• 1:10:57
  But there is a sense that the period in the 80s where it got
• 1:10:59
  the most continuity heavy in the original 1 was also tied to the
• 1:11:02
  period when it sort of went into popular decline.
• 1:11:03
  So I think there is constantly unconscious.
• 1:11:05
  There is a certain amount of fat and scarring about Doctor Who.
• 1:11:08
  When we get to upper own ass, that's when Doctor Who fails.
• 1:11:10
  Whereas a lot of other franchises that can actually be
• 1:11:12
  really successful. And what this is doing, what Big
• 1:11:15
  Finish does is basically try and do that within Doctor Who, which
• 1:11:18
  is to go back and do that continuity informed storytelling
• 1:11:20
  to revisit those ideas, to expand upon it.
• 1:11:22
  And as you say, that can be successful, certainly.
• 1:11:24
  Expand upon it though. Expand upon it.
• 1:11:27
  Whereas there is a lot that is old here and there is not much
• 1:11:32
  that is new, I think there are two, there are about two
• 1:11:35
  significant new characters, like genuinely new characters, rather
• 1:11:38
  than people who are sort of relatives of of of others, Owen
• 1:11:43
  and Bishop and who. You know, I read this weeks ago
• 1:11:46
  and I've totally I couldn't tell you a thing about them, whereas
• 1:11:50
  I could tell you, you know, things about books I read 20
• 1:11:53
  years ago from the EDA range and I could tell you the back
• 1:11:56
  stories of some characters. Yeah, Owen.
• 1:12:00
  Owen is the Brigadier's nephew, but he isn't because of
• 1:12:04
  something to do with the Great Intelligence, and Bishop is a
• 1:12:06
  soldier who likes science fiction novels.
• 1:12:09
  That's all I got from them. And but then, OK, so if the
• 1:12:15
  guest characters are sort of nobodies, and then give me
• 1:12:19
  something from the characters I know, like tell me something new
• 1:12:23
  about them. But I didn't get anything from
• 1:12:25
  Man Travers apart from how she was portrayed in the Web of
• 1:12:28
  Fear. I didn't get anything from the
• 1:12:30
  Brigadier then how he was portrayed in the Web of Fear.
• 1:12:34
  So why am I reading this? I mean, I wrote down here,
• 1:12:39
  there's no struggle or tension or even effort needed by any of
• 1:12:43
  the characters. Everybody is just waltzing back
• 1:12:45
  and forth to the past with zero drama or consequence.
• 1:12:49
  And it's not until page 170, something 178 when the Rutan
• 1:12:55
  attacks somebody. And that is the first moment of
• 1:12:58
  actual danger in this book. And that's 2/3 of the way
• 1:13:01
  through the book. Yeah, and in the meantime, we
• 1:13:05
  have had a lot of references and a lot to sort of fit on sort of
• 1:13:08
  that. What's been going on is we
• 1:13:10
  mentioned there's a lot of in jokes in this book and a lot of
• 1:13:12
  continuity references, but they're all just there.
• 1:13:15
  They all just sit on the page. So we get references to
• 1:13:18
  Professor X. So the Doctor Who analogue, the
• 1:13:22
  TV series that ran on the BBC between 1963 and 1989 in the
• 1:13:26
  Doctor universe, which was a one off joke in the Virgin New
• 1:13:28
  Adventures 30 years ago and yet is still being dragged out.
• 1:13:32
  We get an extended joke about that.
• 1:13:34
  We get BBC Three from the demons in there for no particular
• 1:13:36
  reason and. It's Alice.
• 1:13:37
  Defergus gets a mention, doesn't he?
• 1:13:39
  Alice Defergus gets a reference and it's not in passing, it's
• 1:13:42
  just adding. It's not.
• 1:13:45
  There's that thing of, you know, when you when you do these sort
• 1:13:49
  of peppery little continuity references, what you can do is,
• 1:13:53
  oh, how I've seen some better writers explain it, and not just
• 1:13:57
  in Doctor Who, but in other Thai and stuff as well.
• 1:13:58
  It's sort of like you're almost like casting, you know.
• 1:14:01
  Oh, so I've got a bit here where I'm need to someone's reading a
• 1:14:03
  paper. Oh well.
• 1:14:05
  And my story requires them to read a paper and it's about
• 1:14:07
  this. And I've reached the point of
• 1:14:08
  reading paper. Oh, well, I suppose it might be
• 1:14:10
  fun if we just said, if I just said in passing when I gave the
• 1:14:13
  title, it's the title of that fictional paper from that early
• 1:14:15
  story. You know, it's just in passing.
• 1:14:17
  It's there. If you just thought if you, if
• 1:14:19
  you want to, if you, if you get it, fine.
• 1:14:21
  If you don't, whatever. That's what Easter eggs are
• 1:14:23
  called Easter eggs, right, Because they're hidden, because
• 1:14:26
  you hugged for Easter eggs. None of these are hidden.
• 1:14:29
  This is all of these are going. It's on the back of the bloody
• 1:14:32
  book. Look the Havoc files if you
• 1:14:35
  don't. Know that these are references.
• 1:14:37
  You're just you. Just be Mr. Fucking.
• 1:14:38
  What is going on? What is happening?
• 1:14:40
  Why are we what? What is this?
• 1:14:43
  Also as well, I mean you say it's not well hidden.
• 1:14:47
  You know the copyright people could be involved because there
• 1:14:51
  is a character that is alluded to several times called the
• 1:14:54
  Hobo. This short, squat, eccentric
• 1:14:59
  character that was involved in these previous unit adventures.
• 1:15:04
  Why do you have your head in your hands right now?
• 1:15:07
  Because the first time they said oh, so so so is the doctor,
• 1:15:10
  obviously, and they need they they feel the need they have to
• 1:15:12
  talk about the doctor without talking about the doctor.
• 1:15:14
  Could the doctor have been involved with these events?
• 1:15:16
  Which, OK, fine, fair enough. Whatever that is.
• 1:15:19
  The Benny New Adventures showed ages ago, there are ways of
• 1:15:24
  skating around the Doctor and doing it in an interesting and
• 1:15:26
  playful and actually meaningful. Often there's actually really
• 1:15:30
  great Benny stories that talk about the Doctor without naming
• 1:15:33
  the Doctor because they make a virtue of the fact that he is,
• 1:15:36
  to use a Grant Morrison phrase, he is the hole in things, right?
• 1:15:38
  He is the absence here that everything is is sort of built
• 1:15:41
  around. And that can be quite affecting.
• 1:15:43
  You know, here's someone who is a huge part of my life, but he's
• 1:15:45
  not here anymore. Here they mention him and then
• 1:15:49
  they say code name Cosmic Hobo. Oh for fuck sake.
• 1:15:53
  But it's just twee and annoying. And then they keep doing it and
• 1:15:55
  they keep saying it like she. Says at one point she holds up a
• 1:15:58
  drink and goes here's to the hobo.
• 1:16:01
  I was like. And but they keep saying it like
• 1:16:03
  it's a serious thing and it's not a serious thing.
• 1:16:06
  Stop behaving. And again, this is not we're.
• 1:16:08
  Supposed to go oh, that's clever.
• 1:16:11
  How clever. Like, you know, Did you ever
• 1:16:14
  watch Shakes Now? Return of the Sontarans.
• 1:16:16
  Did you ever watch that? And obviously that's that's
• 1:16:19
  eludes the doctor in that. And one of the characters got
• 1:16:22
  and it's the only time I can think of it done more clunkier
• 1:16:24
  than this when Brian Crouch's character goes, oh, there was a
• 1:16:28
  fellow that dealt with the Sontarans before.
• 1:16:30
  What was his name? The dentist.
• 1:16:33
  I think that was it, you know, Well, at least.
• 1:16:36
  What I'd say is at least a that is an attempt at being funny and
• 1:16:41
  B it is one line. This is PO faced and repeated at
• 1:16:45
  length. Here's that a hobo.
• 1:16:49
  I mean, and another thing is as well as we've probably alluded
• 1:16:52
  to here in the 1820s section, we are given, we are explained what
• 1:16:55
  the beast of Fang Rock was. So the beast of Fang Rock is, as
• 1:16:58
  listeners all know better than we do in the horror of Fang Rock
• 1:17:00
  is the legends of the haunting of the Lighthouse, which is just
• 1:17:03
  a brilliant bit evocation of the fantastic atmosphere of, you
• 1:17:06
  know, sense of isolation and things hidden out there in the
• 1:17:13
  in the storms and the waters. And these old legends that are
• 1:17:17
  just, you know, the products of men, you know, and it's men
• 1:17:19
  locked up in, you know, so far away, so remotely being battered
• 1:17:23
  by the elements that their minds patriots are their legends, you
• 1:17:26
  know, legends about these rocks. It's great.
• 1:17:28
  No, here we get told what the beast was.
• 1:17:30
  We get a whole explanation of what it was, and it's just it's
• 1:17:33
  it's the worst. Again, this is I'm I'm
• 1:17:36
  criticizing it here, but it goes for everyone who does this story
• 1:17:39
  into spin off, which is nothing can just be a myth for a story,
• 1:17:44
  right. So one of the one of the things
• 1:17:46
  that every long running franchise that pertains to being
• 1:17:48
  set in the real world has to do with Marvel has to do with this
• 1:17:51
  is the ultimate you reach a point where the world that your
• 1:17:54
  characters are inhabiting is not is not the real world.
• 1:17:57
  It's a fantastic world. It's just one the majority of
• 1:18:00
  who's in the high potence of blind to their own reality,
• 1:18:02
  right. So most especially most people
• 1:18:05
  Doctor universe exist in a state of false consciousness about the
• 1:18:07
  nature of their own reality. Like there is no such thing as a
• 1:18:10
  myth in the Doctor universe. It was always an alien, a myth,
• 1:18:13
  a source of myths of themselves, a myth that there's no.
• 1:18:15
  It's usually the doctor of I'm honest if it's something in
• 1:18:17
  history. Well, it's Stephen Moffett.
• 1:18:20
  You know, Stephen Moffett even has River Song make a joke about
• 1:18:22
  that, right? It's always him.
• 1:18:25
  And this might potentially be a ridiculous thing to say about
• 1:18:29
  what is at base a kids show, right?
• 1:18:31
  Like, you know, it's Doctor Who. We don't need to worry about
• 1:18:33
  that too much. But in these books are trying to
• 1:18:37
  create a coherent presence, right?
• 1:18:40
  So they're actually kind of inviting these responses.
• 1:18:45
  And I would almost again, if you, if you're getting so far
• 1:18:51
  along that path, well, carry on down that path.
• 1:18:55
  Where does that take you? This is how storytelling, you
• 1:18:57
  know, this is this should be OK. And then and then and then what
• 1:18:59
  happens then? So OK, maybe maybe you've got a
• 1:19:01
  series here that is about the Brigadier, about some
• 1:19:04
  characters, the Brigadier and Travers and maybe the shadowy
• 1:19:07
  governments, you know, a bit more than they're saying a
• 1:19:09
  little bit. The X-Files in the 60s about
• 1:19:11
  actually, do you know what? It turns out there is shit going
• 1:19:14
  on in this world and maybe we don't fully understand what's
• 1:19:16
  going on. And the journey of this
• 1:19:19
  character, of this story is going to be about someone
• 1:19:22
  sitting down to investigate this, to put the pieces
• 1:19:24
  together. And again, if that's one of
• 1:19:26
  those ideas that just sort of never it's there and it never it
• 1:19:29
  quite comes into focus for you, this idea that he is someone
• 1:19:32
  just beginning to piece together the nature of his own reality.
• 1:19:35
  That maybe our reality is obviously that people in the
• 1:19:37
  Doctor Who universe think they live in our version of the
• 1:19:40
  1960s, but it's not. There's a whole secret history,
• 1:19:44
  you know, extended universe around it.
• 1:19:47
  There that you just evoked, you know, full of ambiguity and
• 1:19:50
  suspense and mysteries. Yeah, this is all too literal
• 1:19:53
  for that, you know. But this is what I mean, this is
• 1:19:58
  what's frustrating about this book because it just doesn't
• 1:20:00
  engage with things on those on those levels.
• 1:20:02
  This is how it works, right? OK, there's a mystery in the
• 1:20:05
  past. Let's take some drugs and go
• 1:20:08
  back to the past. Let's watch it play out and
• 1:20:10
  let's go back to the prison. The end.
• 1:20:13
  I think if you substituted the characters here for the cast of
• 1:20:15
  scooby-doo, it would totally make a bit more sense.
• 1:20:18
  It'd. Be a lot more fun as well, but.
• 1:20:21
  You could see it. Run Raggy.
• 1:20:24
  It's a piece of bad rock. What we need to do is take this
• 1:20:27
  truck and we all travel back in time to the evening 20s.
• 1:20:29
  Well, if you're sure. Even that even though like I
• 1:20:32
  didn't, I didn't at all understand how taking that on
• 1:20:36
  Saw from Revolution Man allowed them to.
• 1:20:40
  She sort of attached it to some technology or something and then
• 1:20:44
  she was in the past. OK, OK.
• 1:20:48
  Yeah, and Travis gets left this note telling her she's going to
• 1:20:51
  tells her she's going to die in the past.
• 1:20:53
  And then she's and she's also left the the device, the strange
• 1:21:00
  crystalline device that will turns out we'll travel into the
• 1:21:03
  past. But before she knows any of
• 1:21:05
  this, she's having conversation with the Brigadier saying, well,
• 1:21:08
  they're being sent off to investigate fan rock.
• 1:21:09
  And she says, oh, I've been left.
• 1:21:11
  I've discovered I've been left this device and says, says this
• 1:21:14
  exchange all the lines of oh, well, it must be connected to
• 1:21:17
  what we're investigating be a coincidence if it wasn't like,
• 1:21:19
  no, that's not how it happens. That's not.
• 1:21:22
  That's not what's. How fortunate I've been left
• 1:21:25
  these instructions of how to travel back in past during this
• 1:21:28
  story where I need to travel back in past and.
• 1:21:33
  Then we get to the do. You know what that leads to?
• 1:21:36
  It leads to, you know, the great revelation that they all go, Oh
• 1:21:39
  yeah, maybe the hobo was telling the truth all along, but he
• 1:21:43
  could travel in time because we've just done it.
• 1:21:46
  Wowzers. Huge character growth and.
• 1:21:50
  Then we discover what's been going on the whole time, and the
• 1:21:55
  beast in the 1820s is not a rutan, it's a werewolf who has
• 1:22:02
  become a werewolf because actually there is a rutan, and
• 1:22:04
  the rutan making become a werewolf.
• 1:22:07
  There's a werewolf on the cover, though, so that's not too much
• 1:22:10
  of a surprise. That sort of gives it away, and
• 1:22:12
  what we ultimately discover spoilers is that the Rutan
• 1:22:18
  scout. Now go with me this joke because
• 1:22:21
  I'm trying to piece it together. So Rutan's scout came to Earth
• 1:22:25
  in the 1960s, attempted to travel and attempted to escape.
• 1:22:34
  Some have tried to travel back in time, but in Travelling back
• 1:22:38
  in time split in two and one version of itself landed in
• 1:22:44
  1900s in Horror Fang Rock and the other version of itself
• 1:22:47
  landed in the 1800s and then the mothership that is coming in the
• 1:22:54
  1960s travels gets caught in the wake and goes back to the 1900s
• 1:22:59
  and. Is that why we're seeing the
• 1:23:01
  mothership at the end of the story in horror?
• 1:23:03
  It's not really improving horror Fang Rock at all, is it?
• 1:23:05
  It's not improving it in any way.
• 1:23:07
  It's just it's not improving it. It's not adding any particularly
• 1:23:11
  interesting additional layers to it.
• 1:23:14
  It's not recontextualizing it, It's just making it more
• 1:23:16
  complicated. But it is making a certain group
• 1:23:19
  of fans go. Isn't the horror fan rock great?
• 1:23:24
  Because the other thing is also it doesn't really succeed.
• 1:23:28
  You know, that thing of, you know, Death of the Daleks again
• 1:23:32
  is sometimes they do just do it again.
• 1:23:34
  But the Ben, I went to see Alien Romulus this weekend and the
• 1:23:39
  criticism of that has been that it just does stuff from alien
• 1:23:42
  and aliens again. And that's true, but at least
• 1:23:44
  does it effectively, you know, at least went, Oh yeah, anyway,
• 1:23:47
  it's a great, I'll have other two hours of that, drink some
• 1:23:50
  beer, eat some, pick a mix and leave and ever think of it
• 1:23:53
  again. This doesn't even do horror of
• 1:23:55
  Fang Rock again particularly well because the great thing
• 1:23:56
  about horror Fang Rock is that sense of isolation is that sense
• 1:24:01
  of mystery and ambiguity. And you know, what is it that
• 1:24:04
  lies outside these walls? You know that threat of being so
• 1:24:07
  very alone in such a hostile environment.
• 1:24:10
  Which Horror of Fang Rock had in spades.
• 1:24:13
  That's in spades the. Atmosphere is thick with that.
• 1:24:17
  One of the best settings ever for a Doctor Who story.
• 1:24:20
  You know, a rock lighthouse in the middle of a storm and I
• 1:24:23
  fantastic. I don't.
• 1:24:24
  Even think this is set at night for most of the book.
• 1:24:27
  It's like I've said at night, which is, you know, OK, you
• 1:24:29
  know, like Lesson 1 in drama, night is scarier than day.
• 1:24:36
  But but there's no, there's no sense of isolation in the 1960s.
• 1:24:39
  People are flying back and forth in helicopters for all we're
• 1:24:42
  told, Oh, we're here. They never really feel like
• 1:24:44
  there because he's got the army like, oh, there's a bit of
• 1:24:46
  someone I know they smashed the transmitter.
• 1:24:48
  Oh, like they did in horror Fang rock.
• 1:24:50
  The then you more is that they're basically just reliving
• 1:24:52
  the events of the horror Fang rock and okay, maybe again,
• 1:24:55
  maybe in a better book you could they could make something scary
• 1:24:58
  and tragedy about Oh no, it's all happening again and now
• 1:25:00
  we're trapped in it. What would we do?
• 1:25:02
  None of that. It's just I.
• 1:25:03
  Was waiting for something clever to happen.
• 1:25:05
  I thought, well, they yeah, they're not going to pick up a a
• 1:25:07
  flare like Leela did in horror fan rock and shoot the router.
• 1:25:10
  No, they just throw oil over it and this and set it on fire and
• 1:25:14
  that's the end of the book. Oh, I think you summed it up.
• 1:25:18
  I was waiting for something clever to happen and it didn't.
• 1:25:22
  It didn't. No, it just.
• 1:25:24
  Sort of ended. Michael, this is not a great
• 1:25:27
  book, is it? It's not.
• 1:25:32
  And you know, I don't like being mean because even even poor
• 1:25:35
  books people put a lot of time and effort into, but it's just
• 1:25:41
  not very good. It's just really rough.
• 1:25:43
  And like I say, I'm totally willing to believe this is this
• 1:25:46
  is an outlier. That's the rest of it is really
• 1:25:48
  good. And that's, you know, makes
• 1:25:50
  sense. What's been running for almost
• 1:25:51
  10 years now, 40 books, great reviews on Goodreads.
• 1:25:56
  You know what? What?
• 1:25:57
  What do we know? All I can tell you was I read
• 1:26:00
  this book and it was a actually I didn't.
• 1:26:02
  I listened to the audio and God bless Terry Malloy.
• 1:26:06
  I did read this book and all I can tell you is from my personal
• 1:26:10
  opinion. I never want to read a sentence
• 1:26:12
  like this again. It was worse than jet lag.
• 1:26:16
  She had already lived through 5:00 AM comma less than five
• 1:26:19
  hours ago comma. And now here she was, living
• 1:26:22
  through it again, comma 104 six years beforehand.
• 1:26:28
  Full stop. Nah, I've got an idea.
• 1:26:36
  Yeah, let's never think about this book again.
• 1:26:44
  Look, just on any terms that I could judge a book in terms of
• 1:26:49
  plotting, in terms of prose, in terms of character creativity,
• 1:26:55
  any way I could gauge this, I found this a real slog, and so I
• 1:27:02
  don't really have much more to say.
• 1:27:03
  How about you? Just one final thing that
• 1:27:08
  annoyed me is that the book ends setting up the next story.
• 1:27:12
  Fair enough, fair enough. Which is that the Brigadier
• 1:27:16
  being sent off to look up Group Captain Chunky Gilmore from
• 1:27:20
  Remembrance of the Daleks because he had three.
• 1:27:24
  You could why not actually again, I think it's again, I
• 1:27:27
  think it's something about one of the odd things about this
• 1:27:30
  book and possibly the range. More importantly, I don't know
• 1:27:32
  it was soon in this book is the way in which it builds massively
• 1:27:35
  on really tiny references from an obscure references in the
• 1:27:41
  past like almost like a rock lighthouse.
• 1:27:43
  You know this huge edifice built on a tiny little submerged lump
• 1:27:47
  of coral. So there's a reference in it's
• 1:27:52
  like the Remembrance of the Daleks novelization or it's the
• 1:27:54
  scales of Injustice where the Brigadier remembers having met
• 1:27:58
  Chunky Gilmore and had a discussion with him its own
• 1:28:01
  club. And it's in the it's a throwaway
• 1:28:03
  reference in a part of him how he pieced this all together.
• 1:28:06
  And you say, oh, you know, fine, fair enough.
• 1:28:08
  And yet this is building entire stories off that one tiny little
• 1:28:11
  reference that presumably most people only spot on the
• 1:28:13
  discontinuity guide. But anyway, the book ends
• 1:28:17
  setting up this meeting. You think, oh, OK, well, I guess
• 1:28:19
  it makes a, it makes sense as the next step of this idea of
• 1:28:22
  you, you know, you're you finding the other people who's
• 1:28:25
  investigating this, you know, like say 1960s X-Files and the
• 1:28:28
  Doctor Who universe. Why not?
• 1:28:29
  There's your pitch. Run with it.
• 1:28:31
  So I thought, oh, OK, well, I don't particularly, you know,
• 1:28:34
  feel particularly motivated to run onto the next one just yet,
• 1:28:37
  but I can see the faddish interest.
• 1:28:39
  That's not the next book, Joe. It's not.
• 1:28:42
  That's the online That's an online only short story.
• 1:28:45
  What for free? Possibly.
• 1:28:48
  I don't know, I didn't go and read it, but it's what a weird
• 1:28:51
  way to structure your series. But just going on to the next
• 1:28:54
  book isn't going to be enough that you've got to go off and
• 1:28:56
  look up a short story online. Well, it does lead to what we
• 1:29:01
  said at the start of this though, isn't it?
• 1:29:02
  Was the first third of this book was alluding to books of Bin and
• 1:29:06
  the end of the book is alluding to books that come.
• 1:29:09
  They want you to read all of these bloody things, don't they?
• 1:29:11
  So I I'll be willing to read more from writers that I trust,
• 1:29:17
  but I'll be interested to see if they're all integrated in this
• 1:29:21
  sort of season 1 Doctor Who sort of way where at the end of the
• 1:29:24
  book they go, Oh my God, we're being dragged down.
• 1:29:26
  Stop being dragged down to where there's the next story.
• 1:29:29
  Is it all like this? Is it also interlinked?
• 1:29:32
  Or can you just pick up one of these books and read them?
• 1:29:35
  Because I can't commit to faulty books, but I haven't read 1.
• 1:29:39
  Yeah, yeah, I, you know, give a bit of time.
• 1:29:42
  I would be interested in reading some other ones from, from, from
• 1:29:45
  some other things like that. There are names there that I
• 1:29:47
  trust and I'd be interested to say, but I, yeah, I've got to be
• 1:29:52
  honest. It's it's.
• 1:29:53
  It's further than my to be read pile now than it was before I
• 1:29:57
  read this. Which is not really a successful
• 1:30:00
  way to conclude this book club episode, but I'll I'll say from
• 1:30:04
  my point of view, I've also heard Andy Franklin Allen's Big
• 1:30:09
  Finish audio set in debt send and I found that an incredible
• 1:30:14
  chore to get through as well. So I just think this author is
• 1:30:18
  not for me, whatever he's doing. And that's another one that's a
• 1:30:21
  sequel to a Doctor Who story. Again, it's it's the Brigadier
• 1:30:26
  again, it's the Abominable Snowmen and Travers and all of
• 1:30:31
  that. He's not a writer that wants to
• 1:30:36
  expand the Doctor Who universe and take you off into new
• 1:30:40
  directions. He very much wants to just grab
• 1:30:44
  hold of stuff that's been and give you a bit more of it, but
• 1:30:49
  in a way that is, frankly, terribly written.
• 1:30:53
  So yeah, I can't imagine I will pick up another Andy
• 1:30:57
  Frankenmallen book in a hurry. Shame.
• 1:31:04
  OK, well look, let's let's park that there.
• 1:31:08
  And anyone who does want to read this book on the back of this
• 1:31:12
  episode, bravo to you. What would you have a recommend
• 1:31:17
  for me for this episode? Did you bring anything along
• 1:31:20
  with you? I completely forgotten so off
• 1:31:24
  the top of off the top of my head, I am going.
• 1:31:27
  To you can't recommend another candy jar because you've you've
• 1:31:30
  only read one other one and you can't remember that one.
• 1:31:34
  I am going to recommend off the back of this discussion another
• 1:31:42
  attempt and you have to give me if I've recommended this one
• 1:31:44
  before or not. I am going to recommend another
• 1:31:48
  effort that there was at doing a Doctor Who spin off in novel
• 1:31:53
  range and I'm going to recommend the Time Hunter series from
• 1:31:58
  Telos novellas. You have alluded to it, but you
• 1:32:01
  have not recommended it. Yeah.
• 1:32:03
  So these are these are even more tangentially related to Doctor
• 1:32:05
  Who. They spun off from the Doctor
• 1:32:07
  Telos novella The Cabinet of Light, which was by Daniel
• 1:32:11
  Omani, which is a really interesting week.
• 1:32:14
  It's somewhere on our very long list to do on the book club at
• 1:32:16
  some point. So we shall spoil that
• 1:32:18
  discussion here. But Time Hunter is a range of
• 1:32:22
  novellas. They're all quite short about
• 1:32:25
  like a couple of characters called forgive me for a
• 1:32:28
  pronunciation wrong Honore le Chasteur and Emily Blandish.
• 1:32:31
  He is a American Private Eye living in London after the war.
• 1:32:36
  She is a mysterious lady who turns up in with no memory in
• 1:32:42
  the night one day and the investigation of all of that is
• 1:32:45
  sort of tied into the cabinet of lights.
• 1:32:47
  The series then that follows on from that follows them and their
• 1:32:51
  adventures in post war London, investigating various strange
• 1:32:54
  goings on, but also the discovery that they between them
• 1:32:58
  possess time travel powers. That one of them can move in
• 1:33:04
  time and one of them can see things in time and together they
• 1:33:08
  can basically travel through time that they can follow.
• 1:33:10
  I think it's do they can follow the life lines of people
• 1:33:13
  backwards and forwards through history.
• 1:33:15
  Hang on, one of them can see things through time.
• 1:33:18
  I'm a bit like this book. And one of them can travel
• 1:33:21
  through time, a bit like this book.
• 1:33:23
  Well, you know, you go, there's similar ideas, I suppose.
• 1:33:25
  Whenever you're doing any Doctor Who spin off, you have to sort
• 1:33:27
  of time travel just seep back in at some point, doesn't?
• 1:33:30
  It assuming it's a more successful attempt though.
• 1:33:32
  Yeah, definitely. I mean, of the ones that I've
• 1:33:34
  I've read, you know, some are better than others, but each one
• 1:33:37
  is a very interesting idea of they they sort of feel like
• 1:33:40
  proper science fiction novels as well.
• 1:33:42
  And each of them is these ones I've read.
• 1:33:44
  They're often taking inspiration from either the science fiction
• 1:33:48
  or the fantastic literature of that periods over the British
• 1:33:51
  post war period. So you get ones that riff on
• 1:33:54
  things like, you know, equator mass is a fairly obvious one,
• 1:33:56
  but there's also George Orwell is is pretty heavy influence on
• 1:34:02
  some of them. I think as time went on, they
• 1:34:03
  also started to look at people like bringing people like Olaf
• 1:34:06
  Staples. And so they're very literary
• 1:34:08
  books. There's one of them that's it's
• 1:34:09
  all about the building on the sorts of works of both Mary
• 1:34:14
  Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecroft, who was a famous
• 1:34:17
  feminist, early feminist. So combining their ideas like
• 1:34:21
  Frankenstein and the role of woman in a patriarchal society
• 1:34:25
  and really interesting and intelligent ways.
• 1:34:26
  Very literally, very informed books.
• 1:34:28
  Very different to anything that really kind of docks you in
• 1:34:31
  other ways. And sort of continuing the work
• 1:34:33
  that tell us wanted to do with the Doctor Who novellas, which
• 1:34:36
  is to tell different types of stories with this license.
• 1:34:41
  Each one is some better than others, but each one rewarding
• 1:34:44
  you for your time and getting your brain to think in in
• 1:34:47
  different ways. And and that thing we've said
• 1:34:49
  before of you, you've said it here.
• 1:34:51
  You know, some books are some books are just drawing on Doctor
• 1:34:56
  Who and some are drawing on other influences.
• 1:34:59
  And this is almost entirely other influences like the it's a
• 1:35:03
  single finger connection with Doctor Who at some point.
• 1:35:06
  It's just about, I mean, there are some that more closely, I
• 1:35:08
  think the Fendall turns up and I think in the in one of them.
• 1:35:13
  And I think later on things maybe begin to to as the series
• 1:35:18
  nears its end, they do start to slide back over towards Doctor a
• 1:35:22
  bit more. But that's great.
• 1:35:23
  That's fine. Just having that starting point,
• 1:35:26
  that starting point of just having the string between Doctor
• 1:35:29
  Who and the series means you're going to get original books
• 1:35:32
  here, unlike these. Yeah, they are the the great
• 1:35:36
  Ridge of them. There's lots of people who have
• 1:35:38
  ended up doing much more in Doctor Who tying stuff since.
• 1:35:42
  So people like Philip Purser, Hallard, George Mann, some of
• 1:35:46
  his first Doctor Who related stuff was I believe in this time
• 1:35:48
  Hunter series. Engines of war, Is that George?
• 1:35:50
  Mann yeah, that's the that's that's the one He's I mean, he's
• 1:35:53
  gone on done tons of stuff now he's he's he's real big success
• 1:35:57
  story and did. Our Lance write 1.
• 1:36:00
  Lance, he did. Our, our Lance.
• 1:36:02
  Can we call him that? Yeah, he did.
• 1:36:04
  He wrote the first one, The Winning Side, which is the one
• 1:36:07
  that is sort of riffing on 1984 because of course that was
• 1:36:11
  written in the period in which these books are set.
• 1:36:14
  We can say our Lance because we're the only podcast that have
• 1:36:17
  done, you know, an entire interview with him and released
• 1:36:20
  2/3. And released 2/3 yes, it's time
• 1:36:24
  to drink up again people to pour one out for the.
• 1:36:28
  How many more episodes can we mention it?
• 1:36:30
  Before I put it out, see this is this is what you do.
• 1:36:34
  This is endlessly deferred gratification, right?
• 1:36:36
  This is how serialized storytelling works.
• 1:36:38
  Just deny them the answer. Deny them the answer, but yeah,
• 1:36:42
  they're still available because I guess not tied up in licenses
• 1:36:45
  in the same way the Doctor Who stuff was.
• 1:36:46
  So I think they're still available on Kindle.
• 1:36:48
  They did audio books of all of them, and I think they're all on
• 1:36:51
  Spotify as well. As you've got a Spotify
• 1:36:52
  subscription, you can listen to them for no additional charge,
• 1:36:55
  or at least you could last time I checked.
• 1:36:56
  And even the Cabinet of Light was, which was a Doctor novella
• 1:37:00
  originally was with just some very small tweaks, republished
• 1:37:04
  as a Time Hunter novel. So you can enjoy that as well.
• 1:37:08
  You know, I think if we're ever looking to sort of branch out
• 1:37:10
  again, that we should reach into the Time Hunter series and
• 1:37:13
  choose, you know, one of the better examples.
• 1:37:15
  Oh, A. 100% I'll be under a You can be Emily.
• 1:37:19
  You might think I'm crazy, but I would like to recommend The
• 1:37:23
  Ancestor Sale by Peter Angelides and Stephen Cole because Andrew
• 1:37:30
  came on and did his top and bottom 10 Doctor Who books and
• 1:37:33
  this was one of his top ten books and he reminded me of how
• 1:37:37
  exciting a read it was when I first read it.
• 1:37:40
  I've read it a few more times since and I am a more prolific
• 1:37:43
  reader now and I can see that there are problems with how it's
• 1:37:46
  put together and some of the prose.
• 1:37:49
  Very, very short chapters. I think there's something like
• 1:37:52
  80 chapters in that 280 page book.
• 1:37:57
  It's got some ambition, it's got some striking imagery and it
• 1:38:02
  offers a time war, which they couldn't do on TV and TV.
• 1:38:09
  They went for the more obvious visual approach of a war of two
• 1:38:14
  sides going Pew Pew Pew at each other because that's that's the
• 1:38:18
  visual media that we understand. But the back end of Ancestor
• 1:38:23
  cell with that huge flower in space and, you know, ghosts of
• 1:38:28
  people from the past and the future, people being murdered at
• 1:38:32
  various points of their lives, the whole of Gallifrey shrinking
• 1:38:36
  down to one room, like it, it was done with a huge amount of
• 1:38:41
  imagination and scope and desperation.
• 1:38:44
  And in the last couple of chapters, you really feel like,
• 1:38:47
  how the fuck are they going to get out of this?
• 1:38:50
  Like there's no answer to this. And when he finally pulls that
• 1:38:53
  lever, and I know people were appalled, I've always hated
• 1:38:56
  Gallifrey. So I'm like, yes.
• 1:38:59
  And we're going to do some original stories as well.
• 1:39:04
  Yeah, I. But please do not make this your
• 1:39:07
  first Doctor because this is taking, I mean, how many books
• 1:39:12
  have there been at that .30 or so?
• 1:39:14
  And, you know, taking plot points from all of them and
• 1:39:17
  pulling them all together. But that climactic final scene
• 1:39:20
  between the Doctor and Grandfather Paradox and all of
• 1:39:24
  that dark stuff with Father Kreiner as well, It's it is very
• 1:39:31
  innovative, isn't it? Is it?
• 1:39:32
  Is it's trying something new and really going for it?
• 1:39:38
  And the I remember the the bone spiders who I've.
• 1:39:41
  Forgotten. That yeah, they the bone spiders
• 1:39:44
  who I think inhabit the it's called the Edifice, isn't it?
• 1:39:47
  Which spoiler alert is the, the yes, it's the record.
• 1:39:52
  The Doctor's TARDIS and the bone spiders are there on board and
• 1:39:56
  they're they're the ghost of the timeline that was unwritten.
• 1:40:00
  They've said that for Metabolis when the 3rd Doctor was
• 1:40:02
  assassinated and killed early, which was, you know, big thing
• 1:40:06
  earlier in the series. Yeah.
• 1:40:08
  And but that timeline is haunting the timeline that are
• 1:40:11
  living in in the form of these bone spiders.
• 1:40:13
  It was like impressively weird at points.
• 1:40:17
  It's like I like weird. The climax to these arcs is very
• 1:40:22
  hit or miss in all of these ranges.
• 1:40:24
  Usually a miss. You know, No Future ended at one
• 1:40:28
  of those arcs and it was just abysmal.
• 1:40:31
  I think the ancestor cell is climactic, though, you know, in
• 1:40:35
  in a sort of season finale sort of a way in a way that sometime
• 1:40:38
  never, which I think is a cleverer book and actually
• 1:40:42
  weaves in a huge amount of continuity from the past doctor
• 1:40:47
  adventures and all sorts into its climax.
• 1:40:49
  But it's a sort of a bit of A and that was done book, whereas
• 1:40:55
  the the scene that Lance Parkin rips out of this and then
• 1:40:58
  rewrites in his own beautiful prose and sticks into the
• 1:41:02
  Gallifrey Chronicles. Oh, man.
• 1:41:05
  With Romana going, you know, you stupid human, Look what's
• 1:41:08
  happened. And then Fitz is running off.
• 1:41:11
  You can hear the footsteps of compassion in the background.
• 1:41:14
  Grandfather Paradox is beating the shit out of the Doctor.
• 1:41:17
  He's reaching for the lever. It's great stuff.
• 1:41:20
  Yeah. So the ancestor cell.
• 1:41:24
  Marvelous. Well, Michael, fortunately we
• 1:41:29
  don't ever have to. I can put this back on my shelf
• 1:41:31
  and never think about it again. My other half did warn me off
• 1:41:34
  reading it, actually. He said it was the worst book
• 1:41:36
  he'd ever read, too. So I'm glad to see we're in good
• 1:41:39
  company. Where are we going next?
• 1:41:42
  Well, we are throwing all the switches on the central console,
• 1:41:45
  hitting the fast return hard as we spin, spin quickly back into
• 1:41:49
  the very deep throbbing heart of officially licensed Doctor Who,
• 1:41:53
  Time Media. We are going to be doing the
• 1:41:56
  Doctor Who Magazine graphic novel Liberation of the Daleks
• 1:42:00
  by Alan Barnes. This is a fabulous episode
• 1:42:03
  because I'll get to explore all of your thoughts and opinions
• 1:42:07
  around the graphic novels, the DWM comic strip and and this is
• 1:42:12
  the the sorry, the 10th Doctor. Forgive me, the 14th, 14th
• 1:42:17
  Doctors First steps after power of the Doctor, aren't they?
• 1:42:22
  You filthy casual. Yes, they are picking up,
• 1:42:27
  picking up immediately after the power of the Doctor and I
• 1:42:31
  believe leading us all the way into Destination Scara.
• 1:42:34
  And spoiler, I fucking loved it. So if anyone's disappointed that
• 1:42:41
  we've been so mean about this, weirdly enough though, those
• 1:42:44
  those episodes do tend to get more listens when we're mean.
• 1:42:49
  Yeah, no, I felt it was a great read.
• 1:42:51
  So will you please go away and get on with that?
• 1:42:54
  Yes, yes, it's on the shelf. And I will speak to you next
• 1:43:00
  time. Goodbye.
• 1:43:02
  Goodbye.