Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Hamster Book Club - The Harvest of Time by Alistair Reynolds (featuring John Lane)

Transcript

Hamster Book Club - The Harvest of Time by Alistair Reynolds (featuring John Lane) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Torch beams scissored the air like searchlights, barely able
• 0:03
  to penetrate the depth of the chamber in which the TARDIS had
• 0:06
  come to rest. It had emerged from the vortex
• 0:09
  at a slight angle on what appeared to be a rubble pile or
• 0:13
  garbage heap. The Doctor placed his footsteps
• 0:16
  carefully, the loose ground shifting under him with
• 0:19
  treacherous intent. It was hard to see his hand in
• 0:22
  front of his face, let alone cracks and crevices in the
• 0:25
  ground. There is a.
• 0:26
  Glow in that direction, the Master said, faint but quite
• 0:30
  unmistakable. It appears to be another chamber
• 0:33
  connected to this one by a throat if the filled up present.
• 0:38
  They're keeping a rather low profile, the Doctor said,
• 0:41
  pausing to tighten the Curry had slipped over his Cape.
• 0:44
  The Master, who had spurned the offer of extra clothing beyond
• 0:48
  his usual minimalist black outfit, said.
• 0:50
  And I will avoid drawing hasty conclusions until we have some
• 0:54
  measure of the place. I advise you to do likewise.
• 0:59
  They crept slowly down the rubble pile, sweeping torches
• 1:02
  this way and that, alert to the presence of any other parties
• 1:06
  once in a while. The Doctor risked A backward
• 1:07
  glance at the Tarvis, all but invisible, safer.
• 1:10
  The lit up letters of the words POLICE public call box and the
• 1:14
  fretted yellow rectangles of its windows.
• 1:17
  So you think it's a ship of thumb kind?
• 1:20
  The doctor asked. Or a station, as I allowed, but
• 1:24
  clearly artificial. Not a silled manufacturer
• 1:27
  either, the Doctor agreed. The sealed built their ships to
• 1:31
  suit their own body's dimensions.
• 1:33
  Riddled with a plumber's nightmare of finger thick fluid
• 1:36
  pipes, they had no use for huge airfield chambers, even less for
• 1:41
  terrestrial gravity. Then what is it doing here, and
• 1:44
  why have we been brought here? In time, Doctor, we may yet have
• 1:48
  some answers. The Master had been right about
• 1:51
  the glow from the adjoining chamber, though even the
• 1:54
  Doctor's eyes had achieved full dark adaptation.
• 1:57
  It was no more than ghostly suggestion, the promise of light
• 2:00
  rather than the thing itself. They had reached a relatively
• 2:04
  level floor, hard and metallic, although even when their
• 2:08
  progress was occasionally Hanford by some rubble pile or
• 2:11
  dark obstruction of indistinct shape, if they were on a ship,
• 2:15
  the Doctor decided, it was obviously long past its prime.
• 2:19
  He gave the TARDIS one final glance, and then their torches
• 2:23
  picked up, the fact that the ceiling was lowering as they
• 2:26
  traversed the connecting throat between the chambers.
• 2:29
  He was beginning to make out more of the chamber ahead.
• 2:32
  It was lit, but only dimly, and there was an impression of
• 2:35
  galleried levels, row upon row of alcoves or nooks climbing to
• 2:39
  a dizzying height. There were things in those
• 2:42
  alcoves, like carved stone figures, but that was as much as
• 2:45
  the Doctor's straining eyes could perceived.
• 2:48
  Quickly, the Master called. He had wandered to one side of
• 2:52
  the throat, where the floor curved around to form a wall.
• 2:55
  The Doctor stabbed his torch in the Master's general direction.
• 2:58
  The beam caught an impression of deeper darkness against the
• 3:01
  wall, an Oval of absolute black against which the Master stood
• 3:05
  with his face to the blackness and his hands clasped against
• 3:08
  the small of his back. What have you found?
• 3:11
  Unless I'm very much mistaken, the outside.
• 3:14
  The Doctor walked over to the window.
• 3:16
  It was as wide and as long as a banqueting table set at a
• 3:20
  convenient height of humanoids. A fine spray of micrometeorite
• 3:24
  impacts peppered the glass. The Doctor guessed that it had
• 3:28
  been in place for centuries, perhaps much longer than that.
• 3:32
  It was conceivable that until recently, a fourth order
• 3:35
  protected the glass. Beyond the glass, nothing but
• 3:39
  swallowing blackness. It's lovely, the Doctor
• 3:42
  commented. I wish I'd bought my box,
• 3:44
  brownie. The Master raised a gloved hand.
• 3:48
  You're impatient, as you know. Credits, Doctor.
• 3:51
  He waited, and was soon rewarded.
• 3:54
  A planet Hove into view, then tracked slowly from the top to
• 3:57
  the bottom of the window. Clearly, the Master had
• 4:00
  witnessed the planet's previous passage.
• 4:02
  Do you recognize it? The Doctor asked.
• 4:04
  There are 100 billion habitable worlds, far too many for anyone
• 4:09
  mind to retain. But it often admits said that
• 4:11
  time knots had an uncanny memory for such things.
• 4:14
  I don't, the Master said, Although it's clearly a world
• 4:18
  near the end of its lifetime. If it had once had oceans, land
• 4:22
  masses, it might ring a bell. Reminds me a little of Scarrow.
• 4:26
  It's definitely not Scarrow. I said.
• 4:29
  Reminds, the Master corrected testily.
• 4:32
  I merely note the extreme desolation, the sense of a world
• 4:36
  exhausted beyond its limits, a place of stagnation and decay,
• 4:40
  of entropy made manifest. Your idea of holiday heaven.
• 4:44
  He waited for the planet to appear again.
• 4:47
  It took 90 seconds to return to the top of the window.
• 4:50
  It was the Master's opinion of the place, notwithstanding A
• 4:53
  dismal looking place. The planet was a dim red, like a
• 4:57
  hot coal that had nearly cooled down to being black again.
• 5:01
  It had no visible atmosphere, no seas or ice caps or indications
• 5:05
  of surface vegetation. But it was not lifeless.
• 5:09
  Or at least it had not always been lifeless.
• 5:11
  Cities. The Master commented.
• 5:14
  Or if not, cities and some kind of technological installation.
• 5:18
  He clenched his first. I curse our unpreparedness.
• 5:21
  We should have had long range sensors, communications devices.
• 5:25
  The Doctor waited for the planet to come round again.
• 5:27
  There must be a thumb, he said. How else will we be able to see
• 5:31
  it? But the Master had become bored
• 5:33
  by the view already. He was on his way to the next
• 5:36
  chamber, with its Milky luminescence and layers of
• 5:38
  rising galleries. The Doctor followed, his mood
• 5:41
  unsettled by the view of the time ravaged world.
• 5:44
  He wondered what relationship this ship or station bore to the
• 5:48
  inhabitants of that planet, if any of them have yet lived.
• 5:51
  We can't have landed in this place by accident, the Doctor
• 5:54
  said, calling ahead to the Master.
• 5:56
  It must have some connection to the field.
• 5:58
  Something drew us here. This place speaks to me, the
• 6:02
  Master said, pausing to face the Doctor.
• 6:05
  I know of it on some level, almost as if I was here once
• 6:09
  before. It's scale and size.
• 6:12
  It's a ship, of that I'm certain.
• 6:15
  A vessel of immense age, older than some solar systems.
• 6:19
  But how can I know that we've both got around a bit, The
• 6:23
  Doctor said, indulging in cosmic understatement.
• 6:26
  Maybe you popped in here once during a previous incarnation.
• 6:29
  I cannot deny it may have happened, the Master allowed,
• 6:33
  but it almost feels as if I've been here 1000 times.
• 6:36
  How is that possible? Some side effect of the time
• 6:39
  fade, perhaps? If this is the epicenter, the
• 6:42
  origin of the fate, quickly. Please, Doctor, tell me I'm not
• 6:45
  deluded. Tell me I'm not seeing what I
• 6:47
  think I'm seeing. The Master had reached the
• 6:50
  entrance to the next chamber. The level of flooring dropped
• 6:53
  shallowly away from him, so that he surveyed proceedings from a
• 6:56
  slight rise. The Doctor caught up with him,
• 6:59
  standing to the right of the other man.
• 7:01
  He could not tell whether the thing he had heard in the
• 7:03
  Master's voice was horror or awe, or some kind of miracle
• 7:07
  combination of the two. The chamber was hemispherical,
• 7:12
  with a gently dished floor. They're coming through a gap in
• 7:15
  the wall at the chamber's base. There was a similar gap in the
• 7:18
  opposite wall. Circles of pale blue, like like
• 7:22
  lines of latitude, ring the chamber from floor to pole.
• 7:25
  These circles were the source of the Milky radiance.
• 7:28
  Between each ring of light was a gap tall enough for an entire
• 7:31
  circle of alcoves, each of which was easily high enough and broad
• 7:35
  enough to contain a man. As the rising chamber curved
• 7:39
  over to form its own ceiling, so the alcoves tipped gradually
• 7:42
  towards the horizontal. There were hundreds in the low
• 7:46
  rings, but far fewers in the high levels.
• 7:49
  How many? The master asked.
• 7:51
  I have an idea, but I'd like to hear yours.
• 7:54
  The Doctor had already performed the same rough calculation.
• 7:57
  More than 700 alcoves, of which perhaps 2/3 are presently
• 8:01
  occupied. 470 occupied spaces by my reckoning.
• 8:07
  Give or take a few. Give or take.
• 8:10
  The Doctor agreed. Do you recognise any of the
• 8:12
  occupants? The Doctor hesitated over his
• 8:14
  answer. One or two.
• 8:18
  Let's take a closer look, shall we?
• 8:21
  It would be foolish to jump to conclusion, however utterly
• 8:23
  inescapable they may appear. They walked to the right.
• 8:27
  The lowest 3 levels of alcoves formed 2 incomplete half
• 8:30
  circles, broken by the two entrances.
• 8:33
  The Doctor studied his companion, hardly daring to
• 8:36
  wonder what was now going through his mind.
• 8:38
  The Master was unpredictable at the best of times, but even the
• 8:42
  sanest of beings would be tested by the knowledge of what lay in
• 8:45
  this chamber. The Doctor's hand slipped into
• 8:47
  his pocket, touching the Sonic screwdriver for reassurance. 1/3
• 8:51
  of the alcoves were empty, but the rest held bodies.
• 8:55
  Each lay behind a frontage of curving glass.
• 8:58
  The bodies were all humanoid figures, although that was as
• 9:01
  much as some of them had in common.
• 9:03
  Here were men and even a few women, representing a spectrum
• 9:07
  of ages and builds and ethnic types.
• 9:10
  Some were very old, while others were still children.
• 9:13
  A fraction were alien or ghoulish in appearance.
• 9:17
  Notice the confining devices. The Master said, as if he was
• 9:21
  conducting A guided tour. Shackled and restrained.
• 9:24
  Escape would have been quite beyond them.
• 9:26
  They would have been barely able to move.
• 9:29
  Note the life support mechanisms, the nutrient minds,
• 9:31
  and the nerve taps. They were playing a kind of
• 9:34
  game. The Master knew that the Doctor
• 9:36
  knew. The Doctor knew that the Master
• 9:38
  knew, but he wasn't sure if he was expected to stay.
• 9:41
  Now. What was blindingly clear?
• 9:44
  These bodies all belong to the master.
• 9:49
  Welcome back to the Hamster. Book Club.
• 9:51
  My name is Joe Ford and it is my delight and pleasure to
• 9:57
  introduce to the world of podcasting Mr. John Lane.
• 10:01
  Hello, John. Hello Joe.
• 10:03
  It's really nice to be here. I'm like really pumped and
• 10:08
  stoked and excited. You might hear my kids in the
• 10:10
  background. It's like tempted their bed, but
• 10:12
  they might. They might get excited, but not
• 10:14
  as excited as I am. I'm on the South Coast, so you
• 10:16
  often get seagulls in the background of me, but I've had
• 10:19
  everything, including mother in law's coming in and asking can
• 10:22
  they use the shower on calls, people's kids, dogs, whatever.
• 10:26
  So knock me out. John, can I ask you a question
• 10:30
  before we even talk about Doctor Who books?
• 10:32
  What's your Doctor Who journey? I don't actually know.
• 10:35
  You and me know each other via the Hamster Patreon and we've
• 10:37
  spoken as a part of the big group, but this is the first
• 10:40
  time we've spoken one-on-one. So could would you just tell me
• 10:43
  a little bit about your doctor journey?
• 10:46
  Well, to be honest, it's been a part of my life for as long as I
• 10:50
  can remember. All right, so I, I remember
• 10:54
  vaguely seeing Tom Baker when I was a kid.
• 10:58
  All right, because I was born in 1973.
• 11:00
  All right, so I remember Tom Baker.
• 11:04
  My first clear memory of Doctor Who is the reveal of scaroff.
• 11:11
  Oh, cry it. Yeah, I really remember that.
• 11:13
  It's really in my head, that moment where like, he takes the
• 11:15
  mask off and there's that green spaghetti head with the one eye
• 11:18
  it's going. To stick in your head at this.
• 11:19
  Moment it does stick in your head it sticks in your head like
• 11:22
  a like a single eye and a plate of green spaghetti so yeah, I,
• 11:26
  it's always been there so I, I must have really enjoyed
• 11:30
  watching it as a small child my uncle was a very, very big fan
• 11:35
  of Doctor Who as well and he and my aunt were very big into
• 11:42
  reading and would encourage me to read and they started giving
• 11:44
  me those target books. So at a very early age, I was
• 11:48
  reading target books, but still not quite understanding the
• 11:52
  whole thing, you know. But once the 5th Doctor started,
• 11:56
  I found myself, OK, I'm in this programme now.
• 12:00
  I'm in it. You never let go the right age
• 12:03
  and I've never let go since, you know.
• 12:04
  And then from that point I started religiously collecting
• 12:07
  the, you know, the target books and reading them and being
• 12:11
  fascinated by these past doctors that I'd never seen before.
• 12:15
  Because of course, this is even before video.
• 12:18
  This is before VHS videos were very.
• 12:20
  Useful. So I would, they were useful.
• 12:23
  You'd have those black and white sketches in the books and they
• 12:25
  were super evocative. And, you know, you would think
• 12:27
  all sorts of things about what was going on in these
• 12:29
  adventures. And then the five faces of
• 12:32
  Doctor Who came on and suddenly you, you see them.
• 12:35
  And it's just been like a burgeoning love the whole time.
• 12:39
  It's tied in with with who I am as a reader.
• 12:44
  It's tied in with with family, the way I had this really good
• 12:48
  relationship with my uncle who taught me a lot about science
• 12:53
  fiction, politics, writing stories, stuff like that.
• 12:57
  This the time I had with my sister, me and my sister
• 13:01
  Frances, she's the next one down from me.
• 13:05
  We would often have Doctor Who nights and we would really, we,
• 13:10
  we really loved watching the new VHS releases when they came out.
• 13:13
  And we, we had rituals. We would have this big bowl of
• 13:17
  crisps with chocolates mixed in with them.
• 13:20
  So you'd have the salty crisp all over the chocolate.
• 13:23
  And we would, we would just watch Doctor Who stuff our
• 13:27
  faces. Just, I don't know, it's all
• 13:31
  part of this one big thing and I've just never let it go.
• 13:34
  Never let it go. I've been like living in
• 13:38
  Barcelona for the last maybe 2627 years.
• 13:43
  It's a lot. And it's, it's so funny that
• 13:47
  the, the first year I was here, I went to a New Year's Eve party
• 13:53
  in the big main square and like at midnight the, the fireworks
• 13:59
  went off and they had a big disco And almost the first tune
• 14:02
  that came on was Doctor Who, Doctor Who, Doctor Who.
• 14:07
  So my, Oh my God, this is, this is amazing.
• 14:10
  It's followed me. And then when the new series
• 14:12
  came back, what was the last word of the very first series?
• 14:17
  Of new Barcelona. Barcelona so like even here it's
• 14:22
  been a thing. I had people around for the 50th
• 14:24
  like special and you can see from my background I mean I.
• 14:29
  Regularly troll over your collection, you know?
• 14:32
  Yeah. All the books are here.
• 14:33
  At some point. I'm going to start collecting
• 14:35
  the targets again at some point, right?
• 14:38
  But the whole collecting thing, watching the DVDs, watching the
• 14:42
  videos now, watching them with my son, which has been like a
• 14:45
  real thing of beauty. It's I don't think it's
• 14:48
  something I will ever let go. It's a journey that is still
• 14:52
  ongoing. How incredible that that linked
• 14:56
  from you to your uncle looking backwards and then you to your
• 14:59
  son looking forwards. I mean, God, if anyone needs to
• 15:02
  learn about the power of Doctor Who, it's all there passing
• 15:06
  people. Across all those generations,
• 15:09
  each one of us still has their own doctor because it's still
• 15:13
  on. Well, what was your uncle's?
• 15:16
  My uncle's was Pertwee What and Troughton, but there was like a
• 15:21
  like, you know, the cusp and. What's yours?
• 15:25
  Mine is Peter Davison. I mean, he's the one that was
• 15:27
  like there as I was just at the age to be really, really
• 15:31
  invested in the show and the story.
• 15:34
  So I've got a lot of the time for Davis and I think he's a
• 15:36
  he's a great doctor. I think the stories are really
• 15:38
  good. I won't hear a word said against
• 15:40
  Kinder. I think it's.
• 15:42
  Amazing love kinda I really I went on a journey with it.
• 15:45
  I I I think. Yeah, it's a journey.
• 15:48
  I thought it was quite dull. As an adult, I think it's
• 15:50
  extraordinary. Watch, Don't.
• 15:53
  Ohh, well, I've never done that, but I'll, I'll give it a go.
• 15:57
  I mean, listen to your story there.
• 15:59
  I really want to come to one of your Doctor Who parties with the
• 16:01
  salty crisps and all the chocolate, you know.
• 16:03
  Please, can you not just have us all over?
• 16:06
  Absolutely. The the important thing is
• 16:09
  you've got to learn the the song Drinky Cokie Chocolatey Crisp.
• 16:13
  I I will learn anything you like if you're providing the snacks
• 16:16
  and Doctor Who. Oh, actually, more importantly,
• 16:20
  one last question there. What's your son's favorite?
• 16:22
  The next generation he's taking the torch on.
• 16:25
  Well, it's funny because for him, he's watched them all in
• 16:28
  one big blast, but he's really enjoying Chuti Gala because
• 16:32
  that's the one that's like where we all sit down together as a
• 16:35
  family to watch. So we've been going through him
• 16:38
  and he he was into Tenant. Then he really liked Matt Smith.
• 16:43
  He likes Peter Capaldi, but I think he prefers Smith to
• 16:47
  Piccardi. But but he loves, he loves and
• 16:49
  Chuti Gala, he thinks that's that guy's super cool.
• 16:52
  And sort of swinging around to you getting those targets.
• 16:54
  Do you remember what your first one was?
• 16:58
  Your first one I had was Doctor Who and the dialects, because I
• 17:01
  remember that, that Akiliast cover with, you know, that
• 17:04
  that's such a mysterious cover with the Doctor with his hands
• 17:07
  clasped and the stars and, and planets in his, in his coat, the
• 17:12
  weird Dalek, the pink TARDIS, just, I would just stare at that
• 17:18
  cover. I would stare and stare and
• 17:20
  stare. And I think maybe I mentioned it
• 17:21
  before in one of the the social chats, but I read that book to
• 17:26
  my son when he was in his mama's womb, before he was born.
• 17:30
  Oh, you got in early then, do you?
• 17:32
  I got in early. You were.
• 17:33
  I got trained in the womb. I'm just.
• 17:36
  That because. That opening, That foggy common
• 17:39
  opening, That opening. Oh boy, no wonder you were who?
• 17:42
  Yeah. And then when you actually get
• 17:44
  to see it, you're like, wait a minute, what's this?
• 17:48
  Who are these people? Did you get the copy of, oh, I
• 17:51
  forget what the magazine is called now.
• 17:53
  Cutaway brought it out and they did an audio of that, of the of
• 17:58
  the opening of that with animation.
• 18:01
  And it's just exactly how I envisaged it, like really
• 18:05
  fabulous animation. Oh, if you.
• 18:06
  Have is it on YouTube? No, I'll find your copy, don't
• 18:09
  worry. Nice.
• 18:10
  Thanks. I would.
• 18:11
  Love to I know the guy who distributes it.
• 18:12
  I'll get you a copy of that. Yeah. 01, honestly.
• 18:15
  Well, OK then. We're here to talk about Doctor
• 18:18
  Who books today then. So you've read through the
• 18:22
  Targets? Well, what about the rest then?
• 18:25
  Did you come to Virgin straight after the TV series?
• 18:29
  Did you read BBC straight after those?
• 18:31
  Was it? Sort of When the Virgin books
• 18:33
  came out, I was there, man. Like I, I was hungry for those
• 18:37
  things. I absolutely like lapped them
• 18:39
  up. I love them at least like I
• 18:41
  loved them at the time and rereading some of them, like now
• 18:47
  they're OK. I mean, yeah, time Worm and Cats
• 18:52
  cradle. They're they're they are what
• 18:54
  they are, right? So you have to pick.
• 18:59
  But at the time, and again, I guess it's because of the age I
• 19:03
  was at. So I would have been probably
• 19:06
  16/17/18 around about that time, you know, they were, they seem
• 19:13
  to to be in tune with who I was, you know, like a teen looking
• 19:17
  for serious sci-fi, wanting my Doctor Who to be more than the
• 19:22
  embarrassed because this of course was at the time of Doctor
• 19:24
  Who was an embarrassing thing to like, you know what I mean?
• 19:27
  Like it was what? You're a Doctor Who fan?
• 19:31
  Look at these. Talks while I go and get some
• 19:32
  friends to. Be like some swearing and
• 19:34
  violence. My God.
• 19:36
  Yeah. You know, something like, oh,
• 19:37
  now it's adult, now it's like, oh, it's serious.
• 19:40
  They're dropping F bombs. You know, it's like, OK, this is
• 19:43
  good. And, and who could complain
• 19:45
  really? I mean, even if the the stories
• 19:47
  in retrospect are a bit embarrassing or a bit sort of
• 19:50
  like, you know, trying too hard, the the fact that they were
• 19:56
  there was just awesome. OK, It was Doctor Who continuing
• 20:00
  in books. So like, I was fully on board
• 20:02
  for that. And then when they started doing
• 20:04
  the missing adventures, that was actually more my jam.
• 20:07
  Right, OK. You know, because I, I loved
• 20:10
  dipping into the past as a, as a, as a kid, you know, once you,
• 20:14
  once the, the, the video started to come out and you had that
• 20:18
  ability to sort of dip into the releases as they came, not in
• 20:23
  any particular order, just as they came.
• 20:26
  Something about going to The Missing Adventures felt like
• 20:29
  that. You know, you would pick up a
• 20:30
  book and you were with the 6th Doctor, or you would pick up
• 20:33
  another one and you were with the second Doctor.
• 20:35
  It was as random, wasn't it? The books.
• 20:37
  It was like you're saying, but. As random, it was the videos
• 20:41
  coming out. Yeah.
• 20:42
  Fabulous, yeah. So did you have the 7th Doctor
• 20:45
  going forward? Did you jump across to BBC then?
• 20:49
  A lot of people, a lot of people that that did the Virgin run
• 20:52
  then sort of fall away early. BBC, Not everybody, but quite a
• 20:56
  few people I've spoken to. No, I mean, I think to be
• 20:59
  honest, it wasn't so much the a jump as as then I went to
• 21:05
  university and so that kind of tailed off anyway, a little bit
• 21:08
  like my I had minimal funds. But when the BBC books came out,
• 21:12
  I started buying them, you know, like and the the EDAS I find
• 21:19
  cool, they're OK. You know, I'm going to do a big
• 21:23
  read of those at some point, but I'm going to wait till I've got
• 21:26
  them all because it's a series. So, you know, when the 7th
• 21:30
  Doctor New adventures came out, I was reading them as they came
• 21:33
  out. So I was into that series.
• 21:37
  But by the time the 8th Doctor came out, I was, I think I may
• 21:41
  have been in Barcelona by that point.
• 21:43
  So I was getting them randomly. So it's hard to sort of keep a
• 21:48
  good grip on what the story was, especially since every now and
• 21:50
  then he would lose his memory again, which is like a thing for
• 21:53
  the 8th Doctor. He can never remember who he is.
• 21:57
  But then when they did the PDAs, those things again, my jam.
• 22:02
  I love the past Doctor adventures that for me, that
• 22:05
  would be my, my favorite range is the past Doctor adventures.
• 22:08
  They're they're so good. That's got some good writers
• 22:10
  going doing some great stuff. I've got a bit of a journey with
• 22:14
  the past Doctor books, like the Virgin Adventures and the 8th
• 22:18
  Doctor books have always been exciting because they were sort
• 22:20
  of the continuing story. And I've always sort of
• 22:23
  dismissed the missing adventures in the past Doctor adventures.
• 22:26
  And after doing this book club, it's really surprised me.
• 22:30
  Some of these books have been so experimental and innovative and
• 22:35
  just really crazily imaginative and doing stuff that they never
• 22:39
  would have done on the TV. And I was like, OK, I should
• 22:42
  have given these a bit more of a chance, but at the end of the
• 22:43
  day, but. That's what's nice about them.
• 22:46
  Like you can just pick one up and read it at random.
• 22:49
  You can dip in, you know, you're not tied to, to a, to a series.
• 22:54
  You know, you don't have to read book one or book 2 or book
• 22:56
  three. You can just go, I'm going to
• 22:58
  choose the third doctor today. I'm in the mood for the Third
• 23:00
  Doctor. Well, funny you should say that
• 23:02
  because you was in the mood for the Third Doctor and here we
• 23:06
  are. So we are covering today The
• 23:08
  Harvest of Time by Alastair Reynolds.
• 23:11
  Now you're going to learn this about me.
• 23:13
  OK, I don't know how many of these things you've listened to,
• 23:15
  but I'm extremely ill educated to anybody outside of a Doctor
• 23:19
  Who book. So please, will you tell me
• 23:22
  anything or everything you know about Alastair Reynolds?
• 23:26
  Well, I mean, for me, he was always a bit sort of hit and
• 23:32
  miss a little bit for me. But I haven't read like lots and
• 23:35
  lots of this stuff to give to say that that's fully the case.
• 23:39
  I really enjoyed a series he did.
• 23:42
  I think it's called the Revenant series, but it's basically about
• 23:44
  Space Pirates, which is like it's a trilogy, which is really,
• 23:47
  really enjoyable. Is it all science fiction he
• 23:51
  does or science fantasy? I as far as I can see, it's
• 23:54
  science fiction. And then I think there was
• 23:57
  another one called The House of the Rising Suns or something,
• 24:00
  which I found a bit tedious, but still, I know he's like a
• 24:05
  respected writer. So I was like very curious when
• 24:08
  I'd seen that he'd written a Doctor Who book, I was thinking,
• 24:11
  oh, because this was during that time where lots of, well, lot,
• 24:13
  not lots, but a number of established authors were writing
• 24:18
  Doctor Who books, which was, you know, wow, amazing.
• 24:21
  So I was awful for giving him a go.
• 24:24
  And to be honest, this is one of the the best Alistair Reynolds
• 24:28
  books I've read. You know, because he really, he
• 24:31
  really gets the 3rd Doctor I I can only assume that he's a fan.
• 24:37
  I mean, in terms of characterization, I will go into
• 24:39
  it, but absolutely. I'll tell you what I was
• 24:41
  expecting from this book. I I thought, OK, they're going
• 24:45
  to capture all of these very popular authors, Steven Baxter,
• 24:48
  Alastair Reynolds, Michael Moorcock, and they're going to
• 24:50
  come in and they love Doctor Who as a kid.
• 24:53
  There's even like a passage at the end of this where he said I
• 24:56
  was absolutely in love with this era, you know, scared the pants
• 24:58
  out of me when I was a kid. So I thought, right, OK, so
• 25:01
  we're going to get a massive love letter to per wee and boy,
• 25:04
  oh boy, does this start that way.
• 25:06
  You know, oil rigs going under, units being called in, the
• 25:11
  masters in prison, an alien invasion, the doctors being a
• 25:15
  bit of a prick, you know, like like it's absolutely Christmas.
• 25:20
  And I was like, yeah, this is everything I was.
• 25:22
  I thought I was going to get fine.
• 25:24
  But really well written, like the probe very vivid.
• 25:28
  And then somewhere about 1/3 to halfway into the book it just
• 25:35
  wrenches in another direction and opens out and suddenly this
• 25:40
  wealth of huge science fiction ideas comes in.
• 25:44
  You realise the whole thing is in no way as traditional as he
• 25:48
  as he made it seem at the start. No.
• 25:52
  There's like it's a multi master story, there's back story for
• 25:56
  the Doctor and the Master. There's so much coming on in
• 25:59
  this. I mean, I don't even know where
• 26:00
  to start really. Yeah, I mean, like there's a lot
• 26:03
  of, there's this stuff here that that you don't normally see the
• 26:07
  3rd Doctor do. Like the the time hopping is not
• 26:10
  something you see. But yeah, there's some, there's
• 26:16
  some big, big concepts, you know, But this is the beauty of
• 26:20
  the books and it always has been the beauty of the books.
• 26:23
  The stuff that you just wouldn't be able to see on TV, you're
• 26:28
  able to imagine here. And yeah, the, the, the world
• 26:33
  that he, that he builds the world Praxedium.
• 26:36
  So there's this planet called Praxedium, which we're
• 26:38
  introduced to at the very beginning of the story.
• 26:40
  That's the, the prologue. We're introduced to the, to the,
• 26:44
  to the Red Queen. And so she's clearly a humanoid.
• 26:50
  Well, she's a human. It's she, she makes a reference.
• 26:52
  So we know that she's a human and she's on this world, which
• 26:55
  is obviously not hers. And already the ideas are really
• 27:01
  big. You know, we've got this thing
• 27:03
  called the infinite cocoon, which is this strange box type
• 27:07
  machine. It's a technology which she
• 27:08
  calls the, I think the worst technology or the worst machine
• 27:12
  in the universe. And it looks like the the
• 27:16
  Proxilians, which are they're like worms, you know, like big
• 27:20
  stripy red worms, red and white worms, like something out of a
• 27:23
  Tim Burton movie. They are nice though.
• 27:27
  They're kind of like cool, cool worms.
• 27:29
  They're not like horrible. They're they're into their queen
• 27:31
  and she's been around for a long time.
• 27:34
  They've got this this crazy box that should make them humanoid
• 27:37
  so that they are able to get into a ship and allow them to
• 27:43
  somehow access the power of time travel, right?
• 27:45
  So great. What a what a huge opener.
• 27:48
  Brilliant opener and they're being turned into soup instead,
• 27:52
  aren't they? They seem.
• 27:53
  To yeah, well, they get turned into they get, they get broken
• 27:55
  down right into into a sort of like the like the cream of
• 27:58
  Scotland Yard and ghosts like they get broken down into some
• 28:01
  primordial soup, but then reconstituted right.
• 28:04
  But they should be, you know, in a in a particular shape.
• 28:07
  But in in this case, the, the the worms are transformed into
• 28:12
  either a big tentacle monster, a bit like the Nestine from
• 28:15
  spearhead, or they're dead or they get killed.
• 28:18
  But like it's, it's, it's pretty horrible.
• 28:20
  You know, it's pretty horrible. And I like how like you, you get
• 28:24
  that sort of there's there's a lot of makes me it reminded me a
• 28:30
  little bit of the clause of Axos.
• 28:31
  You've got this weird alien shit going down.
• 28:34
  And then after you get that prologue of alienness, you, you
• 28:37
  are in this very mundane setting.
• 28:42
  We're on the beach and we get one of those like really lovely
• 28:45
  3rd Doctor tropes where you've got a real, real low class
• 28:51
  character. Like it's not.
• 28:52
  Quite pipping, Josh, but. It's not quite pipping, Josh.
• 28:56
  On that level, yeah. It's McGinty.
• 28:58
  McGinty the Beachcomber, right? So McGinty, the Beachcomber to
• 29:04
  the beach game. It goes like hunting for flotsam
• 29:06
  and jetsam on the beach, finds some mechanical crab, jumps on
• 29:10
  his face and then it like it takes him over and and tells us
• 29:14
  that he's here on earth looking for the master.
• 29:17
  And that's what a great that's you know, I can almost hear the
• 29:20
  the music in my head. You know, that's like, that's
• 29:22
  like a new who prologue music and then we can like kick into
• 29:28
  the invention. Even then though, right,
• 29:29
  because, and I realized sort of flicking ahead, this was what,
• 29:32
  360 pages? So it is longer than your
• 29:34
  average Doctor Who book. They normally come in about 280.
• 29:38
  I was like, OK, fine. So this is going to be a book
• 29:40
  about mechanical crabs that take people over.
• 29:43
  It's going to be a bit English way of death and there's going
• 29:45
  to be lots of zombies going around going surface, hill
• 29:47
  surface. Not a bit of it.
• 29:50
  I mean, it starts off like that. There's a couple of scenes where
• 29:54
  we see the crabs taking people over and there's like a bus, old
• 29:57
  biddies, That's great. Which is very funny.
• 30:02
  Torturing old women. I mean, I approve.
• 30:04
  Hilarious. Although like you said, you get
• 30:07
  that pre pre title sequence, let's call it that, that very
• 30:12
  Spacey consolidator technology Red Queen.
• 30:16
  Then we don't go back there for like the next 2/3 of the book.
• 30:22
  No, but, but we have like, but there's, there's some
• 30:24
  foreshadowing there already. I mean, like when we, we, we, we
• 30:28
  immediately go to this, to this rig, this, this rig in the sea,
• 30:32
  which is again, so there's so much 3rd Doctor stuff going on
• 30:34
  like these big industrial complexes.
• 30:36
  There's nothing, there's nothing.
• 30:38
  So 3rd Doctor as a big industrial complex.
• 30:41
  And this one is in the sea. You know, we meet I think a guy
• 30:45
  called Tom Irwin. He's a Scottish guy.
• 30:47
  He's gruff, but he's likeable, like the miners in in Peloton,
• 30:51
  you know, he's got that salt of the earth type that we like, you
• 30:55
  know, and he takes them to see the the woman in charge.
• 30:59
  Who is fabulous? Edwina Mccrimmon.
• 31:02
  Eddie Mccrimmon. Yeah, possible relation to
• 31:05
  Jamie. And, you know, like there's a
• 31:07
  little bit where we see her thinking about these, this
• 31:12
  notebook that she has, which is the last remaining notebook of
• 31:15
  the stories that she used to write as a kid about this queen.
• 31:18
  And already I'm thinking, OK, that's not a coincidence, right?
• 31:21
  That's that's Chekhov's queen. That queen is going to come
• 31:24
  back. You know 2 Queens so close
• 31:27
  together something there is a connection.
• 31:29
  Right, so but that as well. That that back.
• 31:31
  Story there about and he does this quite a lot throughout the
• 31:34
  book. He gives sort of a potted
• 31:37
  history of those characters and but not in a in a way that feels
• 31:40
  annoying or expository. It told me everything I needed
• 31:43
  to know about her. She's like, yes, my dad found my
• 31:46
  notebooks of all these stories of this fabulous queen out in
• 31:49
  space. He threw them all away.
• 31:52
  You can't waste your time with that sort of thing anymore and
• 31:55
  and then she knuckled down and then she was determined to get
• 31:58
  that business of him by the time you know he was an old man.
• 32:01
  She was going to take it off his hands and then she was going to
• 32:04
  run it her and it was just all there in like 2, yes.
• 32:08
  Yeah, she's, she's a great character, you know, like, so
• 32:11
  like they've gone to to sort of investigate because she's the
• 32:13
  one that's called them, because she's worried about what's going
• 32:15
  on with these rigs. There's been an accident on
• 32:18
  another one. And so she's, she's like, well,
• 32:20
  she's worried about it. But by the time the doctor
• 32:22
  arrives with Jo on a helicopter again, very 3rd doctor arriving
• 32:27
  places in a helicopter. This is all great.
• 32:29
  We love it all right. We love all these.
• 32:32
  This is super, super. So he gets there and she's like,
• 32:36
  I've changed my mind. You know, it's nothing.
• 32:40
  But the doctor is suspicious. You know, you can see like, OK,
• 32:43
  all right, well, we're still going to have a little look
• 32:45
  around, but OK, This is what you're saying.
• 32:48
  This is what you're saying. But we get to meet Pete Lomax,
• 32:51
  who is the survivor, I think of the other rig.
• 32:53
  And that reminds me of the guy in the, in the Silurians, you
• 32:58
  know, there's someone who's a survivor of a, of a, of a
• 33:01
  contact, a primal contact. And he's can I say?
• 33:03
  The line John, can I say the line?
• 33:06
  Please do. He was found in The Cave,
• 33:07
  shaking with ear. He may have seen something.
• 33:11
  I love that. He may have seen, well, this guy
• 33:13
  clearly has seen something, but he's, he's not, he's not
• 33:16
  gibbering. He's just like, I don't want to
• 33:18
  say what I saw because you'll think I'm mad and I would rather
• 33:22
  just forget this, you know. And so it's all very suspicious
• 33:27
  as far as the doctor's concerned, as far as Joe's
• 33:30
  concerned. But he's happy to to go and
• 33:33
  investigate some time ruptures that he'd been studying anyway,
• 33:37
  which again, is more foreshadowing of stuff to come.
• 33:39
  So this, this is great. There's a lot of information.
• 33:41
  This is the the work of a of a writer who who knows his trait.
• 33:45
  But it feels well paced as well. I didn't feel anything.
• 33:47
  Anything felt rashed, you know, There was lots going on.
• 33:50
  There was characters I believed in and like I said, the words on
• 33:53
  the page were very enjoyable to read as well.
• 33:57
  You can turn a phrase. You can turn a phrase, you know,
• 34:00
  like, so I think the dad's name is Callum.
• 34:03
  Big cow. Like she has a word with him.
• 34:05
  Like, you know, he's like, what are you doing letting like UNIT
• 34:09
  people here? You know, we've got this deal
• 34:11
  with the Ministry of Defence. And it turns out that's really
• 34:14
  why she wanted the doctor off, because they've got this secret.
• 34:19
  Great. It's called Merman and it you
• 34:22
  know, it's Tom Tit. It's it's it's like the Tom Tit
• 34:24
  of this book is Merman. And down here it's the I didn't.
• 34:28
  Even make the link. I didn't make the link.
• 34:30
  Thank you. Yeah, it's you got a like a
• 34:34
  what? What is 1/3 doctor adventure
• 34:36
  with that cool acronym, right. So this one is marine equipment
• 34:41
  for the reception, Modulation and Amplification of neutrinos.
• 34:44
  Right. Sounds exciting, doesn't it?
• 34:47
  It turns out it's just contacting submarines along long
• 34:50
  distances. But but the master is involved,
• 34:55
  right? So and he's been using it
• 34:57
  because like there's there's two ministry men who come and visit
• 35:00
  the rig and Edwina doesn't like them.
• 35:02
  And there's one is called Lovelace 1 is called Callow.
• 35:05
  But there's a third man. And as soon as she says third
• 35:08
  man, you're like, OK, here we go.
• 35:10
  And she describes the beard. Soon as the man, yeah.
• 35:13
  With a beard with the grey bits, yeah.
• 35:16
  And it's the Master, so we know that he's there, that the two
• 35:19
  guys, they're angry that she contacted UNIT, but the Master's
• 35:22
  more urbane about it because that's who he is.
• 35:24
  He doesn't really mind, but he's, he's amused that the
• 35:28
  Doctor's been there. And it's a really nice bit like.
• 35:32
  There's a well, there's a really chilling sequence and obviously
• 35:35
  he wants to get rid of the the Lomax.
• 35:37
  He convinces Mr. Lomax to commit suicide, but in a very masterly
• 35:43
  way goes Oh my dear fellow, please finish your tea first.
• 35:46
  Finish your tea. Oh my.
• 35:48
  God, that was chilling. Because he because he felt a
• 35:52
  faint fondness for him as well as even like he stated it like
• 35:55
  there's a he's kind of fond of this guy.
• 35:57
  No, no, no, kill yourself, but have a cup of tea first.
• 36:02
  You know, like you take. Your I'm not a monster, you
• 36:04
  know? Oh no, that's amazing.
• 36:07
  The master steals his biscuit and goes, oh how fortunate I got
• 36:10
  a biscuit as well. You.
• 36:13
  Know like the Master, like Reynolds nails perfect.
• 36:17
  The Master. It's absolutely pitch perfect,
• 36:23
  All right? I love it.
• 36:24
  I mean, I can. I can hear his voice, every
• 36:28
  utterance you can see coming out of Delgado's mouth.
• 36:31
  It's it's super. It's somebody who has watched
• 36:35
  the show when they were younger and just studied that character.
• 36:38
  Yeah, it was just all the dialogue as well.
• 36:41
  I mean, Roger Delgado was just beaming out of the pages.
• 36:44
  It's so good. It's so good.
• 36:46
  And then we find out that that people are weirdly forgetting
• 36:50
  the master. This is a great idea.
• 36:52
  I mean, I, I love this idea of him being wiped out, but slowly.
• 36:55
  He's, he's a sort of the Doctor Who version of the photographing
• 36:58
  Back to the Future. You know, he's slowly fading out
• 37:01
  of people's. It's like memory of his
• 37:03
  existence. And those things are quite
• 37:06
  amusing, aren't they? You've got Joe going, you know,
• 37:08
  the master and Yanks just like, oh, who?
• 37:12
  Oh, I know. It went a bit later on when the
• 37:14
  unit are putting up posters and having the tannoy messages come
• 37:17
  across because it's it's unintentionally hilarious
• 37:20
  because it it is. You can just see them, I can see
• 37:24
  not. Forget this man, He is the
• 37:26
  greatest enemy of mankind. And then a picture.
• 37:29
  Of the Master, it's so funny, it's so funny.
• 37:31
  And then we get to go and visit him like the doctor and Joe go
• 37:34
  and visit the doctor in prison again, superb Dr. trope.
• 37:39
  It's it's everything is being ticked off the list here, but in
• 37:42
  a way that's not upsetting. Big budget, right?
• 37:46
  He's he's in this fabulous underwater tank.
• 37:50
  He's in the Magneto prison from from from the X-Men Movie.
• 37:54
  I was like, this is what you do with with a book right as you do
• 37:57
  what they would have done on what do we have in the Sea
• 37:59
  Devils? It was a prison on the Isle of
• 38:01
  Wight or somewhere, wasn't it? In the middle of nowhere, which
• 38:03
  fair enough that look big budget for the time.
• 38:05
  But man to man with this enormous sort of capsule coming
• 38:09
  out with loads of chains. I was terrific.
• 38:13
  And then you got the you got the master like in a in a chair sort
• 38:16
  of half Davros, half Hannibal Lecter, you know, and that's
• 38:19
  sort of wheelchair bound to it. But it's a really nice sort of
• 38:22
  conversation he has with them. There's a bit, let me see if I
• 38:26
  remember. I think it's I've got it noted
• 38:29
  77 page 77. So they're on their way to visit
• 38:32
  the the master. And, you know, Joe Joe's sort of
• 38:37
  like curious about why the doctor, you know, wants to sort
• 38:42
  of keep this relationship going. And there's this little bit
• 38:45
  where she says that, you know, and he respects Joe.
• 38:51
  He's a companion that she that he values.
• 38:54
  She's got opinions and instances come to surprise or fall for his
• 38:57
  own vanity, someone he enjoyed showing off to.
• 38:59
  Beyond that, though, she was under no particular illusions,
• 39:02
  you know, but only the Doctor and the Master knew what it felt
• 39:05
  like to be the Doctor and the Master.
• 39:07
  No human being in history had ever come close to an
• 39:10
  understanding of how they experienced time and eternity,
• 39:14
  not even Einstein on the best day of his life.
• 39:16
  So the doctor kind of needs to go and see the master.
• 39:20
  He needs this, this thing in his life.
• 39:23
  But it's a strange relationship that they have.
• 39:25
  And it really comes across, you know, when they have this
• 39:28
  conversation, there's this back and forth between them.
• 39:31
  There's this friction that that again, is super redolent of the
• 39:36
  interaction that they have in the Sea Devils.
• 39:41
  It has that feeling, but somehow there's more of a bite to it.
• 39:46
  I'm the master. Later on, when they head
• 39:49
  forwards in time, you actually see how they see the universe
• 39:53
  differently from everybody else. So I like the fact that they
• 39:55
  foreshadow it there, and then you get to see it.
• 39:57
  And then, yeah, you're right. The back and forth, the snip in
• 40:00
  between the two of them. You know, like dear Doctor, I
• 40:03
  think we're on the same page. The doctor goes, well, my dear
• 40:06
  fellow, let's not make a habit of it.
• 40:08
  Say there's great lines. He does keep it funny, but
• 40:12
  you're right. And there's a couple of very
• 40:14
  serious moments where we think the Master might turn good.
• 40:20
  And there's a bit towards the end where the Doctor might leave
• 40:22
  the Master to die and we'll get to all of that.
• 40:24
  But it deals with their relationship with such a
• 40:28
  dempness. Yeah, And of course not only
• 40:30
  like, like, like their present relationship, but their past
• 40:34
  relationship when that's the thing about this book that
• 40:36
  suddenly, like, makes it interesting, you know, Like it
• 40:38
  it turns out that this big old gizmo, the big old Mac Guffin
• 40:43
  that's in the book is something that the Doctor and the Master
• 40:47
  put into the universe a long time ago with the Time Lords.
• 40:52
  Like, really for the Time Lords? By the end of the book, John, I
• 40:57
  think I realised the master was responsible for this story about
• 41:00
  four times over in various parts of his life, you know?
• 41:04
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's it's got the master
• 41:07
  written all over it. But but because they were doing
• 41:09
  stuff for the time laws, I mean, it's the time laws that have
• 41:11
  this idea, right. So I mean, there's no point
• 41:15
  worrying about spoilers with OH. Please.
• 41:18
  Talk about things the way we want to talk about them.
• 41:19
  Right. So, like, bring it on the, the,
• 41:22
  the invaders who have come to Earth, these like mechanical
• 41:25
  crabs, They're not crabs. They're a species called the
• 41:27
  Sild, which I think they're like beautiful little swermy type
• 41:30
  things. Yeah.
• 41:31
  Seahorses. Yeah.
• 41:32
  And they, they take over a species to to use their bodies
• 41:35
  as vehicles. So the Sild are a really
• 41:38
  vicious, pernicious, nasty bunch, and the Time Lords
• 41:45
  decided to imprison them on a ship along with a bunch of other
• 41:50
  nasties, right? The toxic waste of the universe.
• 41:54
  It calls it the. Toxic waste of the universe,
• 41:56
  right and, and get rid of them, but because they're the Time
• 41:59
  Lords, they, they don't want to to, to be accused of genocide,
• 42:03
  right. So, you know, they, they need
• 42:05
  another way and, and they, they ask a couple of promising young
• 42:09
  students to help them out with this.
• 42:11
  I wonder who that could be? Who could it be?
• 42:14
  Let's call them the Mocter and the Duster, right guy.
• 42:18
  And, and maybe that's a clue as to as to who they are.
• 42:22
  Is it a? Promising, A promising
• 42:24
  improviser and I can't very describes them now and somebody
• 42:28
  who's willing to take risks. So it's to take risks.
• 42:31
  Yeah, and it's, it's, it's interesting, you know, the the
• 42:35
  master comes up with a plan. I, I almost don't understand why
• 42:39
  the doctors still against it. It seems like a, a neat, a neat
• 42:46
  solution to getting rid of these things.
• 42:48
  You know, I think firing them into a black hole towards the
• 42:53
  end of the universe and they'll just get destroyed naturally.
• 42:55
  You know, you're sort of like helping them along their way,
• 42:57
  essentially. They seem to suggest that there
• 43:00
  is some academic jealousy on the Doctor's part towards the
• 43:04
  Master, and the fact that he figured out the answer and he
• 43:06
  didn't, that sort of stung ever since.
• 43:10
  But he wants him to take the he doesn't want his name on the
• 43:12
  research, though. So there's like he has a moral
• 43:14
  problem with it, you know, And there's, you can see the
• 43:17
  beginnings of this friction between them.
• 43:19
  But that's for me, that's just one, one tiny instance that I
• 43:25
  can put into this back story of the Doctor and the Master's
• 43:31
  crumbling friendship. You know, I think that's just
• 43:33
  one of the things. I wouldn't call it the thing,
• 43:36
  just one of the many things between them.
• 43:39
  I love the fact as well that the Master's plan obviously goes
• 43:42
  disastrously wrong. It goes to every reason.
• 43:44
  And so the Doctor's a little bit smug about that, you know, like,
• 43:47
  yeah, see, I told you. I told you, but but then but the
• 43:50
  time laws like sweep it under the rug because it's an
• 43:52
  embarrassment too. Yeah, so it all goes wrong and
• 43:56
  these still have gone right and they turn up at the more or less
• 43:59
  like, like way after Gallifrey is dead at this planet, I mean.
• 44:03
  That's huge, right? Way off.
• 44:06
  They say the Praxillion thrived when Gallifrey was just a gleam
• 44:12
  in the universe's eye, long since forgotten.
• 44:15
  So that's way in the future beyond the point the Doctor and
• 44:17
  Master have ever been before. Beyond the ENTT, which I think
• 44:22
  was the era or the epoch of mass time travel, right.
• 44:25
  So this is like way they, they, they know about time travel.
• 44:28
  They, they want in on it and like, you know, they, they, they
• 44:33
  evolve on this world where this mysterious ship is in orbit and
• 44:38
  with the help of the Red Queen, who we don't know how she got
• 44:41
  there by this point, but she's there.
• 44:45
  She they they evolved to a point where they can get they use
• 44:49
  technology to get to this ship and they find this this object,
• 44:52
  this infinite cocoon. How unfortunately, while they're
• 44:55
  doing that, they release the sill and off they pop to start
• 45:00
  their plans to to and that's. Where I'm thinking to get really
• 45:04
  weird. It's really messy because it the
• 45:06
  master has been using this, this, this merman device to send
• 45:11
  a signal to his other selves. Like he's like, OK, I can't
• 45:15
  escape by myself, but I can escape with my help.
• 45:18
  The only person I can trust to save me is me, is me.
• 45:22
  Right. So he does that, but of course
• 45:25
  it's not the master that answers, it's the sealed.
• 45:28
  They recognize what's going on and they're like, OK, we can
• 45:31
  take advantage of this and control all of time and space
• 45:34
  forever, which is why they come to the earth to get the master.
• 45:36
  But you know, that's after they've already they will
• 45:40
  destroy Praxilian, you know, John, but that's.
• 45:42
  Covered. You've just covered two of the
• 45:44
  masters responsibilities in this book already.
• 45:47
  So he's responsible for that Consolidator ship ending up in
• 45:51
  orbit of Praxilian, and he's also responsible after the
• 45:56
  Sealed are out for bringing the seal to Earth.
• 46:00
  Yep, it's all the masters. What a bastard.
• 46:03
  Hey, can we just take a step back from the concepts you've
• 46:06
  just mentioned there though? The toxic waste of the universe.
• 46:10
  All Gavin in one ship. The Time Lords sweeping it away
• 46:13
  into the far future beyond Gallifrey, a fabulous ship that
• 46:17
  exists for thousands of years in the orbit of a planet where
• 46:20
  they're trying to get up there and steal all of its
• 46:22
  technologies. These are massive ideas.
• 46:27
  Well, this is one this is one thing that I do recognise that
• 46:30
  Alistair Reynolds loves and it and it's these massive, massive,
• 46:33
  massive time scales loves them yeah, like the millennia,
• 46:38
  millennia passing. So I can see how like this
• 46:41
  concept would be right up his alley.
• 46:43
  And the fact that you've got time travellers at the heart of
• 46:45
  it means that you can really play with those concepts, you
• 46:49
  know, and and it's not even it's not even like the the there are
• 46:55
  many big ideas in this book. You know, there are many big
• 46:58
  ideas and one of them is this multiple master thing, right.
• 47:02
  You know, when they, they finally get on board this
• 47:05
  consolidated ship, this, this ship, the Time Lords sent into
• 47:08
  the future, The the master feels like a weird sense of Deja vu.
• 47:16
  And as he and the Doctor delve further into the into the inside
• 47:21
  of the ship, they come across this chamber.
• 47:24
  And in this chamber, there are a load of masters from across
• 47:28
  realities, from across time zones.
• 47:31
  Bizarre. Wonderful.
• 47:33
  But when you sit there, like the second he said, I've got Deja
• 47:35
  vu, I'm right. OK.
• 47:36
  He's been here before. Fine.
• 47:37
  Yeah. At some point in his life, he's
• 47:39
  been here before. The last thing I ever expected
• 47:42
  was every iteration of the master from that kid in from the
• 47:47
  flashback in the Sound of Drums, that's right through to the
• 47:50
  crispy Master to John SIM, to Missy.
• 47:53
  I think this is pre. Mr. Pre.
• 47:55
  Missy, isn't it? It's.
• 47:58
  It's also pretty missing I think because.
• 48:00
  There's a woman. There, but there's a woman
• 48:03
  there, right? So as far as I'm concerned that
• 48:06
  I think that's pre empting. What then happens?
• 48:09
  Because the deep breath is 2014, right?
• 48:13
  Yes. I think, and this is 2013, this
• 48:17
  book, so which would it when it was published?
• 48:20
  So it had been written before. I mean I read it as Missy, but
• 48:22
  that's me just reading. It I think I read it as Missy as
• 48:25
  well, but like in in retrospect, I'm thinking maybe he was just
• 48:28
  going no, there'll be a woman. Why?
• 48:30
  Why wouldn't there be Which if that's the case?
• 48:33
  At this point we're we're staring at all of these boobs
• 48:36
  with all these different masters in them.
• 48:38
  I'm like, well now this is one of the coolest books I've ever
• 48:41
  read. It's it's the multiple master
• 48:43
  story. The multiple it's multiple
• 48:45
  masters and they've been put together to create a sort of
• 48:47
  computer or a sort of computing device which can control time
• 48:53
  ruptures. So they use it to open these
• 48:54
  time ruptures the. Assemblage.
• 48:56
  That's it. Yeah, the.
• 48:57
  Assemblage, and that's this isn't used by the seal to open
• 49:01
  these these time ruptures which they've been using to invade
• 49:03
  worlds, bleed them dry of resources, increase their
• 49:09
  number, do whatever it is that they they want to do, just be
• 49:12
  evil. You know, they're just evil.
• 49:14
  And what's what's great about the field?
• 49:16
  The doctor describes it. He says, you know, they can be
• 49:19
  harmed, they can be killed, but they have numbers.
• 49:23
  Soon, he goes, they will arrive in their thousands, 10s of
• 49:26
  thousands. They'll take control of people
• 49:28
  in ones and twos, then 10's and 20s, then hundreds, then
• 49:31
  thousands, then millions. They will keep on coming because
• 49:36
  there are an endless amount of them.
• 49:37
  So you'll be you'll be exhausted eventually, and they'll still be
• 49:41
  coming. Yeah, and I and I love the fact
• 49:43
  that they're so tiny, you know, but yet they somehow managed to,
• 49:47
  to, to become so super powerful, you know?
• 49:52
  Did you ever watch Stargate? I watched some of it.
• 49:56
  I was never a huge surrogate fan.
• 49:58
  There was, there was a race of beat.
• 50:00
  I can't remember what they were now they, but they were
• 50:02
  mechanical crabs and they. Yeah.
• 50:04
  Mechanical. Crabs in waves.
• 50:06
  That's all I was seeing was heat crabs coming out of the sea.
• 50:10
  But it's a slow invasion. But you see that happening for
• 50:13
  real on the Earth and then starting to take people over.
• 50:17
  And then I mean, there's all sorts going.
• 50:19
  Wasn't there's there's pockets of time that are appearing
• 50:25
  around the rigs as well? That's right.
• 50:28
  Yeah, that's right. Like because the the machinery
• 50:31
  is, is like going a bit Dilali because we can't be sure when
• 50:34
  we're on Earth who's controlling the time ruptures.
• 50:37
  By the time we know that the master is doing it, which
• 50:41
  happens a bit later. But yeah, the, the, the rig's in
• 50:44
  trouble. They're I think they're still
• 50:47
  they're trying to to open more and more ruptures to let more
• 50:51
  and more of their their kind in to take over, obviously.
• 50:56
  Yeah. So they the the more power
• 50:57
  they've got, the more holes they're opening, the the the
• 51:01
  more people they're sending through and the the more success
• 51:03
  their invasion is going to it's going to have.
• 51:08
  But this leads to some very nice battle sequences, you know, like
• 51:13
  the the unit battle sequences in ways described in ways that you
• 51:17
  would love to have seen on TV. Squid, they did just see.
• 51:21
  Havoc just over the way there. You can just see havoc.
• 51:24
  Exactly. And you can see havoc driving
• 51:26
  through like, you know, a bunch of unlucky cows.
• 51:29
  Great line from Benton. Now I think like they they have
• 51:31
  to kill all these cows and he's like that's put me right after
• 51:33
  me dinner. That sequence without flock of
• 51:36
  cows that have been taken over by the field.
• 51:39
  That's so bonkers. It's so bonkers, right?
• 51:43
  But it there's, but there's a lot of these these he Alistair
• 51:47
  Reynolds gives space for these things to happen, right.
• 51:51
  So you've got you're with the doctor, you're with the master,
• 51:55
  you're with Edwina on the rig, you know, dealing with what she
• 51:58
  has to deal with and you've got units response to the invasion.
• 52:02
  So you've got the personal stories of the master, the
• 52:05
  Doctor, Joe Edwina, and you've got the big old earth is under
• 52:11
  attack and UNIT, the brave soldiers of UNIT are here doing
• 52:14
  their business to to fight, fight off the the enemy.
• 52:18
  And at one point at the beginning when the Doctor goes
• 52:20
  to when he finds out that the silder after the Master, he goes
• 52:24
  to rescue the master, right, with the Tidus with a nice
• 52:29
  little comedy bit where because he can't quite fly the Tidus
• 52:32
  properly, he ends up very briefly, I think in Viking
• 52:35
  times, Viking comes at him with an axe or something and he's
• 52:38
  like, oh, oops, does a little bit of twiddling with the TARDIS
• 52:42
  and finds himself in the prison. And so he goes to rescue the
• 52:47
  Master and explain, look, you're in trouble.
• 52:49
  There's some stuff coming after you like you've got to come come
• 52:53
  with me and you know, I'll rescue you.
• 52:56
  The Master's like, no, I don't think so.
• 52:59
  They have a little bit of a fight, pushes him over the side
• 53:02
  like into the water, steps on his hands.
• 53:04
  He's a real mean. He's a nasty.
• 53:05
  He's a master though, but very the master.
• 53:08
  You've got Ferry the mouse, don't bug us off.
• 53:10
  But of course, you know, he can't actually make his escape
• 53:12
  properly. He gets attacked by the silt.
• 53:15
  What I like about the sequence as well is that on the outside,
• 53:20
  the Brigadier is in that position where he often is,
• 53:23
  where the Doctor is trapped inside a building with something
• 53:27
  which is of great danger to the world at large.
• 53:30
  And it's going to have to destroy that building, right?
• 53:33
  So it's another one of those Third Doctor tropes where the
• 53:35
  Brigadier is just going to bomb somewhere that the Doctor's in
• 53:38
  and he does, you know, like it's.
• 53:40
  He goes. I'm sure he got our right Miss.
• 53:42
  Grant, I'm sure he got. And then you're sort of there,
• 53:45
  you know, crossing his fingers, going, oh, at least I hope so,
• 53:48
  anyway. But again, it's another one of
• 53:50
  those great moments. It's like, OK, there he is doing
• 53:52
  his business. The Doctor is his friend, but he
• 53:56
  has to do what he has to do. And he, and you know that in his
• 53:58
  heart he trusts that the Doctor will escape.
• 54:00
  And the Doctor does with the Master, who has now been touched
• 54:04
  by the sill, which is not good, but because it's the Time Lord,
• 54:08
  he's managed to sort of fight off the worst of him.
• 54:11
  But still it's going to affect him and will have an effect
• 54:14
  later on. But they're off to find the
• 54:17
  source. They really stress that, don't
• 54:19
  they, that anybody else that that connection.
• 54:23
  With that, contact would have killed.
• 54:24
  Them would have killed them outright and then it's in the
• 54:27
  second-half of the book, Right you are.
• 54:29
  Then it's divided between the Doctor and the Master in the
• 54:32
  future, or two different points in the future, practicing in the
• 54:36
  distant future and practicing in the, let's just say, the far
• 54:39
  future. At the point where the sealed
• 54:41
  first invade them. And the scenes kind of set on
• 54:46
  the rig and with unit and I kept thinking to myself, why do we
• 54:51
  keep going? All this stuff in the future is
• 54:53
  so interesting. Why do we keep going back to Ed
• 54:56
  Weiner on the rig? What is this all about?
• 54:59
  I thought, is he just trying to do the hugely ambitious plus the
• 55:03
  domestic as well? I was like I should have, I
• 55:07
  should have realised. Well, we, yeah, we, we, we get a
• 55:09
  pay off. We get a pay off.
• 55:11
  And I think like in retrospect, like because I mean, this is the
• 55:14
  second time I read the book. And in retrospect, I remember
• 55:18
  feeling a little sort of similar feeling similarly to you in that
• 55:23
  sense. And I was like, why are we
• 55:24
  dealing with all this? Like units that boring?
• 55:27
  I thought some the first time we were in comparison in
• 55:30
  comparison. But, but actually now I, I was
• 55:34
  reading it in a much more loving way, not especially knowing what
• 55:40
  I know, but also it's that it's that 6-7 episode thing, right?
• 55:49
  Where some episodes have to be this bit, right?
• 55:52
  Because you've got to have all your characters in there.
• 55:54
  So the Doctor's off doing his thing with the Master.
• 55:56
  But we want Yeats, we want Benton, we want the Brig, we
• 56:01
  want them there. And you know, the Earth is being
• 56:03
  invaded. So we do need to see what
• 56:06
  they're doing. It's not just about what the
• 56:08
  Doctor's doing with the Master on Praxilla, which they don't
• 56:11
  know about, You know, they, they have no idea what's going on up
• 56:14
  there or even if he's alive. So they are dealing with an
• 56:18
  invasion. If this has been on TVI think
• 56:21
  this would be a 7 parter Allah Inferno and what Barry let's
• 56:24
  always used to say was right. If we're doing a 7 parter then
• 56:28
  about 2/3 or halfway through you need another plot Fred.
• 56:32
  Otherwise this is going to get very stale.
• 56:34
  And that is exactly the point where the Doctor and the Master
• 56:36
  go off into the future. Now, it's cleverer than that
• 56:40
  because it's it's plotted to the hilt.
• 56:42
  This and all of that stuff in the future actually ends up
• 56:46
  causing all the stuff in the first half of the book.
• 56:49
  Well, they, they, they, they kind of cause each other, of
• 56:52
  course, don't they? Like there's a bit of
• 56:54
  bootstrapping here. Very, very muffet, yes.
• 56:58
  Very muffet. Yeah, I mean that that's one of
• 57:00
  the nice things about this this story as well that you have that
• 57:03
  sense of muffets in there, but applied to 1/3 doctor story,
• 57:10
  which is unusual, right. But those those sequences on the
• 57:14
  rig, I I actually quite like them.
• 57:15
  I like I like because I like Eddie Mccrimmon.
• 57:18
  I think she's a really good character.
• 57:21
  And even though the the mermen equipment is like now
• 57:25
  essentially pointless the the horrible guy Lovelace, I think
• 57:30
  he's the one that's left on the on the rig.
• 57:34
  I know he's a like a ministry man.
• 57:36
  For some reason I kept picturing him or hearing an American
• 57:39
  accent. I don't know why.
• 57:42
  He just like, but you know, Lovelace was, is a, is a, is a
• 57:46
  Ministry of Defence man. And he's kind of like, you know.
• 57:49
  John, doesn't he? He gets Oh.
• 57:50
  Yeah, yeah, he's, he's left on the rig, right to to deal with
• 57:54
  like destroying essentially the equipment, you know, Callow is
• 57:57
  like on the mainland. He's like, I can't quite
• 57:59
  remember what we were doing or who we were doing it with, but I
• 58:03
  think just destroy it, right? Destroy it.
• 58:05
  We've got a lot to deal with here.
• 58:06
  There's a bunch of crabs taking over everybody.
• 58:09
  You destroy it. So like, you know, Lovelace is
• 58:12
  kind of left in the lurch on this on this rig, takes Eddie
• 58:18
  prisoner, locks her up, then takes Irvin as a hostage and
• 58:23
  makes his escape on a helicopter, leaving everyone
• 58:25
  behind. You know, like Irvin's like
• 58:27
  dude, take some people with you at least.
• 58:29
  I don't care. Just get off my rig.
• 58:30
  I don't care what you do. Just go.
• 58:32
  Women and children and men from the ministry first, please.
• 58:36
  Yeah, and so like typical ministry men, right?
• 58:39
  Like the off they go and he goes off in helicopter and of course,
• 58:42
  up in the air. What's in there with him?
• 58:44
  The sild crab. And he gets his comeuppance.
• 58:47
  I mean, that helicopter goes down and unfortunately, you
• 58:50
  know, it's tragic as well because you lose what's the
• 58:53
  fellow's name who takes hostage. Irwin.
• 58:56
  Yeah, Irwin gets taken over by the SILD because there's that
• 58:59
  horrible moment where Eddie thinks she's going to be rescued
• 59:02
  by her friend, but the blank look in his, in his face tells
• 59:06
  her, Oh no, he's gone. So she's, she's by herself now
• 59:10
  and she's like, she's super resourceful, you know, like, so
• 59:14
  when, when she's got the. I'm sorry, sorry, I've got the
• 59:17
  line here, I just want to read out because some of this process
• 59:19
  is so great. Smoke had begun to bellow out of
• 59:22
  the rotor assembly in unfeasible black quantities, like ink from
• 59:26
  an octopus. The phrase dropped like a stone
• 59:29
  had never been more appropriate. The helicopter tipped over and
• 59:32
  aimed itself, nose down and narrowing into the water like a
• 59:36
  Gannett. That's so great.
• 59:39
  It's really good. It's really good.
• 59:41
  It's one of the it's like, it's one of the most well written
• 59:44
  Doctor Who novels I've read in a in a good long while.
• 59:47
  You know, like the, the, the, the language is super.
• 59:51
  Poor edgy is trapped below decks, shall we say, on the oil
• 59:55
  rig. And you know, people are passing
• 59:57
  notes between the the window that she's at saying, you know,
• 1:00:01
  the sealed are taking over. What the hell do we do?
• 1:00:03
  And at least a wonderful twist because then at one point later
• 1:00:07
  on, one of the sealed controlled people holds up a paper that
• 1:00:11
  says you will be taken over like the rest of us.
• 1:00:15
  And I just seeing that I can see that directed as a really great
• 1:00:19
  moment. Yeah, yeah, it's it almost.
• 1:00:22
  It's like the like the horror version of the scene in Partners
• 1:00:24
  in Crime. Yes, yeah.
• 1:00:27
  You know, yeah, no, she's, she's a good character.
• 1:00:30
  And of course, she she turns out to be the Red Queen, doesn't
• 1:00:33
  she? Because she like she finally
• 1:00:35
  does manage to escape from the rig in a, in a lifeboat, but it
• 1:00:39
  gets sucked up into a, into a time rupture and she's
• 1:00:44
  transported to Priscilla. And of course, she loses her
• 1:00:47
  memory. She can't remember how she got
• 1:00:48
  there. And she becomes the Red Queen.
• 1:00:50
  She her childhood stories that she wrote are the things that
• 1:00:55
  inform her consciousness of who she is when she arrives at this
• 1:00:59
  place. And you know, she lives her life
• 1:01:01
  there. Did you?
• 1:01:02
  Guess that twist the first time you read this.
• 1:01:05
  I didn't guess it until it landed.
• 1:01:08
  I didn't guess that it was her until, well, I, I, I thought
• 1:01:17
  that that somehow her stories had affected the future because,
• 1:01:23
  you know, we, we hear about the Red Queen, We, we kind of know
• 1:01:26
  that the, that the connections were there.
• 1:01:29
  I wasn't sure that it could actually be her.
• 1:01:33
  But where'd you get swallowed by the time?
• 1:01:34
  Where'd you get swallowed by a time rupture?
• 1:01:36
  I'm like, oh, OK, it's her that moment.
• 1:01:40
  I know, even on the first read. When the doctor, I mean, I'm a
• 1:01:43
  bit dense, John. They are never really spots with
• 1:01:46
  before they're here. When the doctor said it, I was
• 1:01:48
  like how I think I said it out loud.
• 1:01:50
  Holy fuck. Like I wake up, it's.
• 1:01:53
  Yeah, it's still really satisfying.
• 1:01:56
  Yeah. You know, like, it's still
• 1:01:57
  really satisfying. And then at the very end, you
• 1:02:00
  know, when she's like dying and like everything has been sort of
• 1:02:02
  sorted out, they're able to put her into the infinite cocoon and
• 1:02:06
  repair her. And she's young enough to be
• 1:02:08
  herself again so that the Doctor can take her back to Earth and
• 1:02:12
  she can continue her life as if she'd just been rescued from the
• 1:02:14
  boat. It's brilliant.
• 1:02:16
  So like she's. Really like her at that point as
• 1:02:18
  well, so that's a very satisfying ending.
• 1:02:20
  She's, she's like, she's like, she's just someone who does the
• 1:02:23
  best that she can. But, you know, the fact that
• 1:02:26
  she, she wrote these stories as a kid means that she has this
• 1:02:29
  thing inside of her which is beautiful and noble.
• 1:02:33
  And again, like she's she's one of those classic 3rd Doctor
• 1:02:37
  tropes. You know, the the noble queen.
• 1:02:40
  Yeah, you know, like that. The not an evil queen, a noble
• 1:02:44
  queen, someone that that the Doctor would be respectful
• 1:02:48
  towards. I mean, to the point where so
• 1:02:52
  after the sequence with all the masters, essentially a
• 1:02:57
  mechanical spider picks up the TARDIS and we we go to Praxilian
• 1:03:03
  and we're we travel across a dead world via a blasted city,
• 1:03:09
  which is just described in the most beautiful detail.
• 1:03:12
  I mean, there's I've got another little passage here.
• 1:03:14
  Time knows more than anyone else understood the awesome fragility
• 1:03:18
  of worlds. They grasp the moth like
• 1:03:21
  impermanence of stars. There was a time when he would
• 1:03:24
  have swept to see a world reduced to this, but there have
• 1:03:26
  been so many. Even a time knows tears were
• 1:03:29
  exhaustible and just it's it's impressive and it's poignant and
• 1:03:34
  it's arresting. That sequence of them going into
• 1:03:37
  the city and then finding this old husk of a woman.
• 1:03:42
  Very pirate planet being kept alive by these huge time dams.
• 1:03:47
  Yeah. And that turns out to be I.
• 1:03:51
  Can't remember. It's the Red Queen.
• 1:03:54
  Oh, it's the Red Queen. Oh, no, no, sorry.
• 1:03:57
  Dams. Yeah, I know.
• 1:03:58
  It's the Red Queen. I, I as soon as the tech tech
• 1:04:01
  the bubble hits, I'll just stop paying attention.
• 1:04:04
  It's the Red Queen and she's got a big, big plan to take them
• 1:04:07
  back in time and save Brazilian. She's been waiting for them,
• 1:04:11
  yeah. For a longer life, hasn't she?
• 1:04:13
  To the point where they're actually going to arrive.
• 1:04:16
  Here's a bomb. Take it back to my time, like to
• 1:04:19
  to this particular time in my history, like on this planet,
• 1:04:22
  and go blow some shit up. The second that bomb turned up,
• 1:04:26
  I thought, yeah, he's really watched a lot of Pertwee.
• 1:04:29
  This is all going to end with a bloody grey explosion somewhere
• 1:04:32
  along the line. Yeah, what's it called, The Axon
• 1:04:35
  military or the Axon Military Bomb?
• 1:04:36
  It's a weird name. Auxiliary.
• 1:04:38
  Auxiliary A warp. No, because you when you look at
• 1:04:41
  it first, you read auxiliary because that's the way your
• 1:04:43
  brain works, right? But when you look at it closely,
• 1:04:45
  it says something else. Axon Mineral, I'm not even.
• 1:04:47
  Going to look at that. Spacey name?
• 1:04:49
  OK, Space bomb. We'll call it that.
• 1:04:51
  Magic space bomb and so like that, they have to take that to
• 1:04:55
  to to the past and they do. And the doctor tries to convince
• 1:04:58
  the slightly younger Red Queen to take a different course of
• 1:05:02
  action. But you know how people are
• 1:05:04
  being like routed by the Sil. She's got no choice.
• 1:05:07
  You know, she's just like, I'm sorry, you know, you're going to
• 1:05:10
  have to to deliver the master, but you know, take the bomb
• 1:05:17
  you'll have, you'll have to, you know, set it off manually, but
• 1:05:22
  you know you can do it. Take it with you and we'll see
• 1:05:27
  what happens. But I can't not give you to the
• 1:05:31
  sill. I have to give the master the
• 1:05:33
  sill to give my people a chance, you know?
• 1:05:35
  It does lead to a great bluff at the end, but we'll get there.
• 1:05:37
  It does because like in order to go like the Master is like
• 1:05:40
  really weak at this point, you know, like the doctors worried
• 1:05:43
  about him because of this contact with the sill.
• 1:05:46
  But the infinite cocoon is Time Lord tech and the Master's like,
• 1:05:51
  look, put me in there. I can at least repair myself and
• 1:05:55
  face my fate as it's meant to be.
• 1:05:58
  But of course, this is the Master playing the long game.
• 1:06:02
  He's giving himself a little bit of an advantage so that when
• 1:06:06
  they finally confront the seal and there's all this sort of, we
• 1:06:11
  have you now and wah ha ha, and the Doctor's like, you know,
• 1:06:14
  like, don't do this, you mustn't do this.
• 1:06:17
  And the Master's like, well, this is the way it goes.
• 1:06:20
  My fate is my fate. And then he turns to the Doctor
• 1:06:22
  and gives him a little wink. And suddenly the Doctor's like,
• 1:06:25
  oh. The doctor's going to the field.
• 1:06:27
  He's going to trick. He knows something, you know,
• 1:06:30
  all right, don't trust him. And they're like, no, we're,
• 1:06:34
  we're too powerful. The master's making all these,
• 1:06:36
  like, these noises, like, oh, no, no.
• 1:06:39
  And then the Doctor just says he's pulling your leg.
• 1:06:43
  Imagine Delgado hamming it up, you know?
• 1:06:45
  No, please. My fate, I, I can imagine it
• 1:06:49
  like really grinning at the doctor.
• 1:06:51
  And in those moments you can almost imagine how they were
• 1:06:54
  back as kids at the UNI having a laugh together.
• 1:06:57
  You can almost, if the if the stakes weren't so horrible and
• 1:07:01
  like, you know, the mass death that's going to occur, so nasty.
• 1:07:05
  This would be a hilarious joke between the two of them.
• 1:07:08
  But of course he's got a plan and he wants to be put into the
• 1:07:11
  assemblies because the thing that he's done in the Infinite
• 1:07:13
  Cocoon will allow him to control everything.
• 1:07:16
  And that's exactly what happens. They stick him in the machine
• 1:07:19
  and suddenly now the Master is the one that controls the time
• 1:07:23
  ruptures, not the sills, and he just starts opening pockets and
• 1:07:27
  just sending them into space. Or like elsewhere, like he just
• 1:07:30
  he absolutely rants them. I mean, you could write 100
• 1:07:33
  stories of the things he did just there, you know, when he
• 1:07:35
  had the power. And wonderfully obviously, all
• 1:07:39
  of these versions of the Master all start laughing maniacally
• 1:07:42
  and the same that you can see them all John SIM, you know,
• 1:07:45
  Jeffrey Beavers, Michelle Gomez, all of them they're.
• 1:07:50
  Having a great time killing stuff.
• 1:07:51
  Yeah, It's like, absolutely. It's awesome.
• 1:07:53
  It's killing time for the masters, and they're having a
• 1:07:54
  great time. And then he steps out of the
• 1:07:56
  assemblage and the silder, like, kill him and he's like, no, no,
• 1:07:59
  no, I still have absolute control of what's going on here.
• 1:08:03
  He's very suave, very sort of like, yes, in control of things.
• 1:08:07
  But what I like about the master being in control of things.
• 1:08:10
  And So what happens here is that he's never in control of things
• 1:08:14
  for very long. No.
• 1:08:16
  So we've got his face and it's like, I'm not doing that.
• 1:08:20
  I'm not Doctor. I'm this is not me.
• 1:08:22
  I'm not doing this. And the other Masters are like,
• 1:08:24
  no, the Doctor's got a bomb. It's going to destroy us.
• 1:08:28
  Fuck that. No, that's not going to happen.
• 1:08:31
  So basically the Doctor has to to bug her off and he takes the
• 1:08:34
  Master with him and they escape from the TARDIS and I think that
• 1:08:38
  the ship explodes right there. Like it explodes and suddenly
• 1:08:42
  the Master is like wow, they're gone.
• 1:08:46
  This sequence blew me away. The sequence, yeah, He's freed
• 1:08:51
  of the change of the past. And there's the potential in
• 1:08:55
  this one scene, this single scene in all of Doctor Who, that
• 1:09:00
  the Master could be a good person.
• 1:09:03
  He could be the person the Doctor was friends with back in
• 1:09:06
  the day and. The doctor doesn't.
• 1:09:08
  Buy it, does he? Yeah, well, it's it's hard to
• 1:09:11
  like, how is he supposed to buy? He's been tricked before.
• 1:09:13
  I mean, there's something he wants to, but he just can't do
• 1:09:16
  it. And of course, when they finally
• 1:09:20
  landed, because like, the Master wants the Doctor to take him
• 1:09:23
  either somewhere really far in the future or really, really far
• 1:09:26
  in the past, where the assemblage of Masters doesn't
• 1:09:29
  exist and cannot exert their influence over him and turn him
• 1:09:33
  back into what he wants. But of course the Doctor doesn't
• 1:09:36
  do that, because he has things that he needs to do and you know
• 1:09:41
  that the Master steps out the TARDIS and almost immediately
• 1:09:43
  he's evil again. And the.
• 1:09:44
  Doctor, I mean, does he think the Doctor's that the Master's
• 1:09:47
  trying to trick him? I think he's genuine.
• 1:09:49
  He does 1 scene. That he, the Master, is genuine,
• 1:09:53
  but the Doctor thinks he's trying to trick it and then
• 1:09:55
  realises when the Master immediately changes on arrival
• 1:09:59
  that I fuck. Actually, I couldn't.
• 1:10:01
  Doesn't he say at the end of the chapter, I'm terribly sorry when
• 1:10:04
  he realises his mistake and he realises that he.
• 1:10:07
  Could. Have had his friend back again.
• 1:10:09
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's sorry about it, but there's
• 1:10:13
  a little moment. But what are you going to do?
• 1:10:15
  He's, you know, you cry wolf, you cry wolf.
• 1:10:18
  And the master has been crying wolf for for a long time, so
• 1:10:22
  it's a shame. Didn't you love the Lion as
• 1:10:24
  well? I mean of so many great Master
• 1:10:27
  lines in this that just before he steps into the assemblage,
• 1:10:30
  the Master goes. You know.
• 1:10:31
  Don't worry, Doctor, the fault is mine.
• 1:10:34
  If I had not shone so brightly, I wouldn't have come to their
• 1:10:37
  attention. He's amazing, He's amazing, He's
• 1:10:42
  amazing. But you can see him like even
• 1:10:45
  when he's saying it, you know, he's kind of taking the piss.
• 1:10:49
  His arrogance is so bad, right what he says.
• 1:10:52
  If I did not exist, Doctor, the universe would soon fill the
• 1:10:56
  void left by my absence. You could almost say the
• 1:10:59
  universe requires us. We are order and disorder.
• 1:11:02
  We balance each other very effectively, which is.
• 1:11:05
  Because that's what we all think.
• 1:11:08
  He's just saying what we all think, right?
• 1:11:10
  I mean, that's what that's what the Doctor and the Master are.
• 1:11:14
  They are this balance. They are this yin Yang that's
• 1:11:17
  necessary for the universe. Like even at the end right where
• 1:11:21
  he's free of the assemblage, then he wants to bloody bomb the
• 1:11:25
  master, doesn't he? This bomb that could shatter
• 1:11:28
  worlds. So typical.
• 1:11:30
  Yeah, Yeah. And it like, and of course, it
• 1:11:31
  needs to be downfall. What?
• 1:11:33
  His apparent downfall. You know, the Doctor's like, no,
• 1:11:35
  don't go after the bomb, leave it.
• 1:11:38
  Let's just bug her off in the TARDIS because I can't hold her
• 1:11:41
  for much longer. She's going to go.
• 1:11:42
  And of course, like the Master goes after the bomb and Doctor
• 1:11:46
  you wouldn't when he does. And then he takes off and goes
• 1:11:49
  see ya he. Takes off, you know, but then of
• 1:11:53
  course the master returns at the end.
• 1:11:55
  There's this beautiful scene once, like the the doctor
• 1:11:57
  returned Eddie back-to-back to the earth, and Eddie is now
• 1:12:02
  transforming her oil company into a sustainable hydrocarbons
• 1:12:06
  company or something like. That very.
• 1:12:09
  Very. But again, another trope.
• 1:12:11
  There's an ecological message here, an environmental message.
• 1:12:14
  Very good one. At the beginning, the doctor
• 1:12:17
  makes a comment about fossil fuels, so it's great.
• 1:12:20
  There's a little tie up here and they they leave her press
• 1:12:23
  conference and who's waiting for them?
• 1:12:25
  But it's the must. So, you know, like you, you,
• 1:12:28
  you, you escaped. And yes, I found an old Type 40
• 1:12:31
  Titus at the end of time with a broken chameleon second.
• 1:12:34
  But don't worry, I fixed it. You know, like taking the piss
• 1:12:37
  as if it's the doctor's Titus. Maybe it was.
• 1:12:40
  We have. No idea.
• 1:12:41
  And of course he escaped. Of course he did.
• 1:12:44
  Because that's what you want from the Master.
• 1:12:46
  You want the Master to escape. And there he is, gloating, ha ha
• 1:12:50
  ha. Anyway, I'm about to bugger off
• 1:12:52
  into time and space again, Catch you later when click clunk,
• 1:12:55
  clunk, clunk. A bunch of guns appear.
• 1:12:57
  Of course, UNIT have been following the Doctor and very
• 1:13:01
  Sea Devils. He's caught again and it's back
• 1:13:04
  to prison. New guy.
• 1:13:06
  It's beautiful, right? It's such a fun read.
• 1:13:10
  What's so clever is that fusion, I think he he wants to come in
• 1:13:15
  and bring his signature moves of huge science fiction ideas, like
• 1:13:19
  you said, stuff told on a massive timescale and all of
• 1:13:22
  that. And that isn't really the 3rd
• 1:13:24
  Doctor era, is it? Not really.
• 1:13:26
  But he finds a way to fuse that with every single Third Doctor
• 1:13:31
  era. Cliche, but done brilliantly.
• 1:13:34
  It's done brilliantly, yes, because in in the end, I mean,
• 1:13:37
  if you think about the Third Doctor and specifically the
• 1:13:43
  first season of this of the 3rd Doctor, which is very serious
• 1:13:49
  stuff going on. So tonally, in terms of the
• 1:13:54
  events that are happening, there's a very first season, the
• 1:14:00
  doctor feel to the events, the import of the events, but the
• 1:14:07
  the relationships are late. The doctors because it's Joe and
• 1:14:12
  the master. So you've got that mixture of
• 1:14:14
  fun, pickiness, seriousness. The doctor goes through all the
• 1:14:19
  emotional beats in this. There's the anger, there's the
• 1:14:24
  there's the compassion. You know, when Childers, the
• 1:14:26
  prison, the prison ward dies from his contact with the Seals,
• 1:14:31
  you know, the Yorkshire man who like was afraid of that and the
• 1:14:34
  team down and the doctor says to him, you know, in the end, old
• 1:14:37
  chap, you didn't let the team down.
• 1:14:39
  There's all this stuff in there that you recognize because
• 1:14:42
  they're so recognizable, because they're the way that they talk
• 1:14:45
  to each other, the way that they're the doctor acts, the way
• 1:14:48
  that he touches the back of his neck and stuff like that.
• 1:14:51
  It's also recognizable that the setting works.
• 1:14:56
  It doesn't matter that this setting is so huge and massive.
• 1:15:00
  It's it's, it's colony in space with money, you know, in terms
• 1:15:06
  of scope, in terms of scope a lot more.
• 1:15:10
  But you it's because he's so good at making the character
• 1:15:13
  sound authentic that you can put them in almost any setting and
• 1:15:18
  it will work because he's nailed the voices and he's nailed the
• 1:15:21
  relationships. Because in the end, the thing
• 1:15:24
  about Doctor Who is the relationships between,
• 1:15:28
  especially in this period, you know, between the the unit
• 1:15:31
  family and it's there. Like comparing Reynolds to say,
• 1:15:37
  Baxter and Moorcock, I thought Baxter did a brilliant job of
• 1:15:41
  the 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe as well and tying that into a
• 1:15:46
  hugely ambitious science fiction.
• 1:15:48
  Whereas I thought Moorcock absolutely bombed the 11th
• 1:15:52
  Doctor and I just weird I couldn't read the bloody thing
• 1:15:55
  because the the the language he used was just bafflingly over
• 1:16:00
  complicated. Yeah, at some point I'm going to
• 1:16:02
  give like the coming of the Terrafiles another go, but I.
• 1:16:05
  Remember a book club near you? Yes, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe,
• 1:16:11
  maybe. You know what?
• 1:16:12
  Maybe, maybe a later day I might touch the Terrafiles again, just
• 1:16:16
  because it's such a weird book. Baffling.
• 1:16:20
  I mean ambitious. Baffling.
• 1:16:22
  Yeah, but, you know, there you go.
• 1:16:24
  I mean, you, you, you kind of want something out there from,
• 1:16:29
  from a big name writer, right? You, you, this is the this is
• 1:16:34
  the pitch. Give me something crazy.
• 1:16:37
  Give me something more Cockian. Give me something Reynoldsian,
• 1:16:43
  give me some Baxterian, you know, like give me something
• 1:16:46
  like and and and they give you what they give you.
• 1:16:48
  It's. Benting brand new words here.
• 1:16:52
  Thank you. Just call me Shakespeare.
• 1:16:54
  Like they they're there there, there are Doctor Who books on
• 1:16:57
  your shelf now. They were Doctor Who books
• 1:16:59
  written by masters of the sci-fi trash.
• 1:17:02
  And that's, that's worth a lot. Regardless of what we think of
• 1:17:06
  Terrafiles, it's worth a lot. And I'm really pleased they did
• 1:17:10
  it because it's so easy to just have.
• 1:17:13
  I'm not being mean about these writers, but they aren't to the
• 1:17:16
  calibre of like Alistair Reynolds, you know, so easy to
• 1:17:19
  have Christopher Bugis and Justin Richards and all those
• 1:17:22
  people just knock out another 280 pages.
• 1:17:25
  But this is a which have their. Place.
• 1:17:27
  Oh absolutely, I haven't even touched a view this yet.
• 1:17:30
  I'm doing one soon. Mine.
• 1:17:33
  What I thought was particularly brilliant about this book was
• 1:17:36
  there's a lot of mysteries in the first half of the book, and
• 1:17:39
  every single one of them is paid off in spacular fashion.
• 1:17:44
  The the weird time eddies, the crabs coming out of the sea, the
• 1:17:49
  masters signal, just all of it. Yeah, it's all tied up really
• 1:17:55
  neatly. There's density of the very
• 1:17:57
  consistencies. Yeah, there's no loopholes.
• 1:18:00
  It's it's all tied up really, really nicely.
• 1:18:01
  It's it's really well written Doctor Who story.
• 1:18:05
  It doesn't leave you one thing. There was a bit in the middle
• 1:18:08
  right where I really felt as if I needed Basil exposition from
• 1:18:11
  the Austin Powers ones to explain the complexities
• 1:18:14
  because. I was like.
• 1:18:15
  OK, so hang on the master that we've been following throughout
• 1:18:19
  the. Borg.
• 1:18:20
  Who was in prison at the start is then in the future, but he's
• 1:18:26
  seeing himself in his own future as part of the assemblage, which
• 1:18:31
  he'll go and do later on in the book.
• 1:18:35
  Then that will be. And I was just like, oh fuck,
• 1:18:37
  I've gone boss eyed. Never mind, don't think about
• 1:18:39
  it. This is this is the general rule
• 1:18:43
  with time traveller. Don't think about it too much,
• 1:18:48
  just just accept that there's some weird time travel
• 1:18:51
  shenanigans going on and that's it.
• 1:18:53
  If you're trying to think about it too much, you'll always tell
• 1:18:55
  yourself like a nuts. That's why I have such trouble
• 1:18:57
  with the Moffett era, John, You know, like I'm going hang on,
• 1:18:59
  wait, you know, don't worry about.
• 1:19:02
  It just enjoy. It don't.
• 1:19:03
  Is that what? You're saying, yeah, my approach
• 1:19:05
  is always to go, yeah, all right, but like, there's always
• 1:19:07
  going to be some like, baffle gab explanation for it and just
• 1:19:11
  go with it. You know?
• 1:19:12
  Star Trek has techno bubble, you know, it'll be some, some kind
• 1:19:16
  of like spatial anomaly doing some oscillation thing and
• 1:19:20
  you'll go all right then. OK, fine, I'll accept that.
• 1:19:24
  And here you can talk about Blinovich limitation effects and
• 1:19:27
  bloody, bloody blue, blue reversing the polarity of the
• 1:19:29
  neutron flow. It's all, it's all bollocks,
• 1:19:32
  it's all nonsense. Wasn't there a line about
• 1:19:34
  Blinovich in this? There is, yes.
• 1:19:37
  There is a line about Blinovich I remember.
• 1:19:40
  It but he'd be very confused or something he'd be.
• 1:19:43
  Very confused. He'd be very confused, you know,
• 1:19:45
  like, yeah, the the whole thing is, was was really enjoyable.
• 1:19:49
  Also just on a, on a, the your first impressions thing.
• 1:19:57
  Can we just quickly talk about the cover?
• 1:20:02
  Yes. Yeah, so you've got.
• 1:20:04
  Quite talent, isn't it? It's a cock and balls, right?
• 1:20:07
  But it's a fat, it's a fat stubby cock and balls, right.
• 1:20:09
  And I even that made me think, OK, this is very fair, doctor,
• 1:20:14
  because it immediately put me in mind of the time sensor device
• 1:20:18
  from the time monster. It remembers, like I said, we
• 1:20:20
  made the cock and balls device that the doctor uses to sort of
• 1:20:23
  like see if somebody's been messing around with time.
• 1:20:27
  Do you remember? It that.
• 1:20:28
  Yeah. Do I remember it?
• 1:20:30
  Are you kidding me? I mean, I sort of was seeing the
• 1:20:33
  puckering asshole of Axos flying through space.
• 1:20:36
  You know, they do like a phallic image.
• 1:20:39
  They. Love a phallic image, and so
• 1:20:41
  again, even that there's a touch of humor to it, it seems like a
• 1:20:45
  jokey image. Yes, somehow it still manages to
• 1:20:48
  wear because it still kind of takes itself seriously.
• 1:20:51
  But even though you're looking at it, you go, it's a Cocker.
• 1:20:53
  Balls can. You imagine the castellan
• 1:20:55
  sitting there at his desk and going, right, we're going to
• 1:20:57
  send out the toxic waste of the entire universe, you know, in
• 1:21:01
  this enormous cock. That's right.
• 1:21:03
  Yes. And hopefully people will, you
• 1:21:05
  know, men are feared. So hopefully people will keep
• 1:21:08
  away from it. Yeah, they're going to fire it
• 1:21:10
  straight into a black hole as well.
• 1:21:11
  So I mean, come on, they know what they're doing.
• 1:21:14
  I know you've taken notes. Is there anything in your notes
• 1:21:17
  that we haven't covered that you would like?
• 1:21:19
  I always ask this question at the end because people do put a
• 1:21:21
  lot of effort into reading these things.
• 1:21:24
  I think no, like there's a lot of stuff I think I mentioned.
• 1:21:29
  Yeah, all the all the tropes are there.
• 1:21:31
  Industrial complexes, super low class 1st victims, aliens taking
• 1:21:36
  over humans, shadowy government figures, corporate chiefs,
• 1:21:39
  acronyms blowing places up with the Doctor inside.
• 1:21:41
  Stupid Benton. Working class heroes like the
• 1:21:45
  Master of the Doctor team. They got bickering.
• 1:21:47
  The the the bit where you have the Master superior skills.
• 1:21:50
  I love it when the Master is more clever than than the
• 1:21:54
  Doctor. And that bit when they're flying
• 1:21:56
  towards Bracivian and the the Master sort of in control of the
• 1:22:00
  ship and he's, he's and he's really patronising towards the
• 1:22:03
  Doctor. And you can tell it's me being
• 1:22:04
  the Doctor. That stuff is awesome.
• 1:22:06
  And Alistair describes the Titus as wheezing and groaning once,
• 1:22:13
  but it's there, you know? And I'm like.
• 1:22:15
  Uncle Terence. Tick, tick.
• 1:22:18
  Man, because, like, I mean, I don't know about you, but for
• 1:22:20
  me, Terence Dixon was like, like the main name on my bookshelves
• 1:22:24
  as a kid. Yeah, definitely.
• 1:22:25
  You know? So like if I see a reference to
• 1:22:27
  wheezing and groaning, that's off.
• 1:22:29
  He's so funny, wheezing. The TARDIS, the Master, he's
• 1:22:31
  like, Doctor, I forgot what's happened here.
• 1:22:33
  You know none of the TARDIS is working properly.
• 1:22:37
  Yeah, it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing.
• 1:22:39
  Yeah. So I mean, all everything was
• 1:22:41
  really good. I mean, I, I think we've, we've
• 1:22:43
  covered everything that I had had here.
• 1:22:46
  The Doctor, The Voices. Spot on. 2 notes fit and they're
• 1:22:50
  just silly lines. I know one's silly and one is, I
• 1:22:53
  thought, very touching. I just I it's another master
• 1:22:57
  line where he goes. You universes will evaporate
• 1:22:59
  before you and I change our ways, Doctor.
• 1:23:02
  You know I was. So nice like.
• 1:23:05
  There was lots of complicated stuff going on in this and lots
• 1:23:09
  of action, and it could have been very earnest because
• 1:23:13
  another thing the Pearl we era can be is incredibly earnest at
• 1:23:16
  times. But he keeps it witty and funny.
• 1:23:19
  And that's my instructor, so I like the funny lines.
• 1:23:23
  I love the funny lines. What I.
• 1:23:25
  I really loved Was. It isn't just a great Master
• 1:23:28
  story, it is a fantastic Third Doctor story as well.
• 1:23:32
  It really is. There's a sequence where he
• 1:23:34
  decides that the Doctor's ultimate achievement isn't the
• 1:23:39
  things that he does, but the things he inspires in other
• 1:23:44
  people. And there's just.
• 1:23:45
  One very simple. Line where it's the doctor was
• 1:23:47
  one man but he had touched so many countless lives which I
• 1:23:50
  just. Thought was beautiful.
• 1:23:52
  Beautiful. Yeah, no, there's a lot of that
• 1:23:54
  stuff in here. Yeah, I think I've, I've got
• 1:23:57
  stuff about. Yeah, there's a bit where the
• 1:24:01
  Doctor is is looking at the infinite cocoon, and he says the
• 1:24:05
  infinite cocoon was smaller than the Doctor had been expecting.
• 1:24:08
  He had read of it before, scene reconstructions, life-size,
• 1:24:12
  holograms, but his memory had tricked him.
• 1:24:15
  The marbled grey machine was only just large enough to take a
• 1:24:18
  human form lying down inside it. A large creature such as an Ice
• 1:24:22
  Warrior or Jadoon would never have fitted within.
• 1:24:25
  So it was not infinite at all, but in fact rather depressingly
• 1:24:28
  finite in its potential. Just another piece of
• 1:24:31
  overinflated advertising. In other words, the universe was
• 1:24:35
  full of things like that. So he also captures this moment
• 1:24:38
  of the Doctor that that sort of weariness that he has.
• 1:24:41
  This Third Doctor has all of these facets to his character.
• 1:24:45
  This is what I was saying before about these, all these emotional
• 1:24:47
  beats. We get all of those emotional
• 1:24:48
  beats, that sort of, oh, that weariness that he has.
• 1:24:54
  He is the beautiful thing that touches the lives of so many
• 1:24:57
  people. But his reactions to things are
• 1:25:01
  just amazing. And that line you said earlier
• 1:25:03
  that that line you said earlier about, you know, how he has
• 1:25:08
  those relationships with people on the earth, but him and the
• 1:25:10
  master see the world differently.
• 1:25:12
  And the line I said earlier about, you know, he's cried
• 1:25:16
  enough tears for the death of planets.
• 1:25:18
  And he's just so great. There's one brilliant line that
• 1:25:21
  I just would have loved to have seen.
• 1:25:23
  Poetry and Delgado say out lied. And that is where they find
• 1:25:27
  these 400 odd versions of the Master of sleep, All colours,
• 1:25:30
  all creeds, all sexes. And but we or the Doctor goes,
• 1:25:34
  you can't have lived this many lives.
• 1:25:36
  And the Master just goes, why ever not?
• 1:25:41
  This is nice because like he can he.
• 1:25:44
  Can live all these we can now. He can now, but I, I mean, I
• 1:25:48
  have my own theories about how the Master can, can live as many
• 1:25:51
  lives as he wants to, to be honest.
• 1:25:52
  But that's for another time in another conversation.
• 1:25:56
  It was such a good choice, this. I don't think I would have come
• 1:25:59
  to this for a long, long time if you hadn't suggested I read
• 1:26:02
  this. And the fact that he lured me
• 1:26:05
  into that false sense of security with the first half of
• 1:26:07
  the book, with me thinking, OK, it's going to be killer cows and
• 1:26:11
  robot. Because it really follows a
• 1:26:13
  classic 3rd Doctor path up to a certain point, you know, like
• 1:26:19
  it's, it's very sort of balanced between the Unit stuff and the
• 1:26:22
  Doctor stuff and it's very earthbound.
• 1:26:24
  And then suddenly it's it's hugely expansive.
• 1:26:29
  Do you know, I find this with books like your own journey of
• 1:26:31
  reading a book, because when they've popped into the future,
• 1:26:34
  I went, what's going on now? What the hell?
• 1:26:36
  They just what, they're just off out of the action.
• 1:26:38
  And then that turned out to be the better half of the book
• 1:26:41
  anyway. Yeah, no, I was into it.
• 1:26:43
  I was absolutely into it. You know, I mean, I said the
• 1:26:46
  first time I read the book, I couldn't be bothered going back
• 1:26:48
  to, to to unit on Earth. But now, like in second time
• 1:26:54
  around and I have feeling the way I feel about all these
• 1:26:56
  characters, I'm like, no, no, this is good.
• 1:26:58
  I like it. This is nice because it gives
• 1:27:00
  space for that stuff that's happening on Praxillion to
• 1:27:03
  breathe. You know you need some spaces
• 1:27:06
  between those moments, otherwise you have too much of a good
• 1:27:09
  thing. And bizarrely, given we don't
• 1:27:11
  ever see praxillion, that is high.
• 1:27:13
  We only see it in what you know, in being invaded and then
• 1:27:16
  consequence of being invaded. It's actually a very well
• 1:27:20
  depicted world. Yeah, and they and they, they,
• 1:27:22
  they get to start over as well, don't they?
• 1:27:24
  The doctor sort of takes the survivors back to a point before
• 1:27:27
  any of this happens. You know, Prasilians are still a
• 1:27:29
  nice place. He's like, listen, take
• 1:27:33
  technology slowly and you'll probably be all right.
• 1:27:36
  Right. One thing I will always say
• 1:27:38
  about Justin Rich's editorship is that the plotting is
• 1:27:43
  generally watertight. He's a, he's a plotter, Justin
• 1:27:46
  Richards and he, he even puts, he's a plotter in his
• 1:27:50
  acknowledgments. Thank you to Justin for, you
• 1:27:53
  know, helping me basically sign off all of the plot where things
• 1:27:58
  need to be. Because I can imagine you just
• 1:28:00
  have great fun right in the set pieces and the character work
• 1:28:04
  and then sort of not looking at the bigger picture.
• 1:28:06
  But when I sort of pulled back from it, I was like, that's a
• 1:28:09
  really neat story. Yeah, it is.
• 1:28:12
  Great choice. Are you actually, I'm enticed
• 1:28:15
  now to go and do the Baxter one, but I'll, I'll get there.
• 1:28:17
  Well, job, thank you very much for reading it.
• 1:28:21
  Thank you for doing your notes and having the chat.
• 1:28:24
  It's been wonderful. Yeah, it's.
• 1:28:26
  Been really nice. Do you imagine that I could
• 1:28:29
  entice you back to read another book for the book club?
• 1:28:32
  I think. I think you could very easily
• 1:28:35
  entice me back to. And you know, of course we
• 1:28:37
  didn't already decide this before the call, but what book
• 1:28:41
  would you like to read? You tell me.
• 1:28:45
  Well, I I was recently making my way through the Virgin New
• 1:28:50
  Adventures from the start. I'm a few books away from it,
• 1:28:54
  but my impatient makes me want to jump straight to it.
• 1:28:58
  I would love to read Blood Heat. Oh.
• 1:29:01
  What a banger. I mean, I hope I haven't read it
• 1:29:04
  for about 15 years, but. Look, from what I remember, it's
• 1:29:09
  going to be amazing, but even if it isn't, I would quite happily
• 1:29:11
  just sit and stare at the cover of that book for the same amount
• 1:29:15
  of time it would have taken me to read it, because I love that
• 1:29:17
  camera. I'm starting to think, you know,
• 1:29:19
  you've got this obsession with the 3rd Doctor era.
• 1:29:23
  Well but I mean like if I had an obsession I would choose a book
• 1:29:26
  where the 3rd doctor was still alive surely?
• 1:29:29
  At some point in the future, right, Because he's your
• 1:29:31
  favorite. Yeah.
• 1:29:32
  And assuming I don't exhaust your patients with these
• 1:29:36
  conversations, we I'd love to cover 1/5 octopus though in the
• 1:29:40
  future. Given that he's your doctor, I
• 1:29:43
  wouldn't be mean enough to suggest Warmonger or anything
• 1:29:45
  like that. You know, it'll be we'll try and
• 1:29:46
  find a really good one. Yeah, that would be a really
• 1:29:50
  cool one. I mean, it'd be interesting.
• 1:29:53
  I'll try to sort of pick ones that I I haven't read.
• 1:29:56
  It would be nice to because there's, I know there's a few,
• 1:30:00
  there's a fair few that I haven't read of the 5th Doctor
• 1:30:02
  so. Yeah, it is always interesting
• 1:30:05
  to come for something brand new. I've got such borrowed memories
• 1:30:09
  of all of these books that harvest the time.
• 1:30:12
  I think it's the first one I've read the book club that I've
• 1:30:16
  never read before, and it's been so.
• 1:30:20
  Yeah, great. Just.
• 1:30:21
  Well, please, if you're willing to share your details, I don't
• 1:30:25
  mean your address. Now where can people find you
• 1:30:27
  online? Well, I used to be on the on
• 1:30:33
  what is now called X. They used to be called Twitter.
• 1:30:36
  But I left because I cannot, I cannot be there enabling that
• 1:30:42
  fascist fucker more than I, more than I want to.
• 1:30:45
  So now I am on Blue Sky. If you are interested and my
• 1:30:51
  interest there is JFP Lane at Blue Sky.
• 1:30:57
  And we will be back at some point in the future, having
• 1:31:00
  taken a dip into an alternative dimension where terrible things
• 1:31:04
  happen to Lee Shore. Yeah, that that much more.
• 1:31:09
  Yeah. Hello, Liz.
• 1:31:11
  All right, Liz, John, thank you very much for your time.
• 1:31:14
  It has been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:31:17
  It really has. Thank you very much, Joe.
• 1:31:18
  This has been so cool. The.