Doctor Who - 50th Anniversary.

I could not let the 50^th anniversary of Doctor Who go by without writing a blog post about the greatest science fiction show of all time. I grew up watching the original series and I remember watching Partrick Troughton, who was the second doctor. I had nightmares about an episode where that Doctor was investigating a dark room full of giant toadstools. My mother must have forced me to eat mushrooms that day.

I watched the original series right to its end. When I was staying in a residential college (Menzies College) at Latrobe University a group of us used to gather together to watch it.

My favourite episodes usually involved the Daleks. Two of the more memorable stories were Death to the Daleks, where Jon Pertwee had to navigate a deadly maze to destroy an energy sapping beacon, and Genesis of the Daleks, where Tom Baker battled Davros, the evil creator of the Daleks.

My enthusiasm for the show survived the wishy-washy Peter Davison years. I even watched the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years, enjoying the weirdness of episodes like The Happiness Patrol, set on a planet where unhappiness was very much frowned upon. Anyone listening to jazz risked being execution in a tube flooded with marshmallow.

When Doctor Who returned I tuned in out of a sense of duty. And I was blown away. I loved the way the show had grown up, and took itself more seriously. There was less whimsy, more suspenseful drama. The plots were more complex and so was the doctor. The special effects had become really special and the Daleks could go up stairs.

My Doctor Who Favourites.   

Favourite companions – You can’t go past the curious Sarah Jane Smith in the old series. Even though she had a nasty habit of tripping over at the wrong time, she was so cute that any 15 year-old male would dream of saving her. In the new series, Rose beats all those who followed. Intelligent with an emotional strength, Rose supported the doctor, unlike later companions who tried to take over the storyline.

Favourite villians – The Daleks. Those soulless cyborgs never failed to exterminate any of my other thoughts as I became engrossed in their efforts to take over the universe. The Dalek episodes have always been special, right up to last season’s best episode, Asylum of the Daleks.

Creepiest episodes – The Satan Pit, where David Tennant and Rose are trapped in a spacecraft above a planet containing the grave of Satan. And The Empty Child, where a soulless child with a gas mask moulded into his face searches for his mother.

Favourite doctor – Tom Baker, with Jon Pertwee a close second, in the original shows. Baker’s fun was the perfect counter to Pertwee’s seriousness. Christopher Eccleston for the new series: if he said run, I would be sprinting. He played it straight and added a gravity to the doctor that turned the show into something that adults could watch without thinking they should be watching a show for adults.

I am looking forward to watching Doctor Who for many more years, especially now Matt Smith is being retired. I hope a new doctor will prompt a return to the more suspenseful writing of the first four years of the rebooted show.

My Writing Week: Issue 22, Year 5

Typos in books. 

I am spotting more and more typos in books lately. In a post a while back I mentioned I had come across five typos in the novel The Dervish House by Ian McDonald, published by Gollancz.

  

In Jonathon Franzen’s novel Freedom, I spotted a typo where I think the editor might have wanted to change “than” to “then”, but instead included both then and than straight after each other in a sentence that did not make any sense.

I have also noticed a couple of typos in a few other books I have read recently, but as they are not from major publishing houses - and therefore didn’t have access to lots of editorial assistance - one or two typos can be excused.

I am no expert on punctuation and spelling. I only tend to notice a typo when a sentence does not make sense. In past years I rarely spotted typos in novels. Perhaps my choice of more complex novels in recent years has me concentrating more when I read, causing me to notice more typos.

But I have also been reading more recently published works lately. Most of them published in the past couple of years. That tends to suggest that the quality of editing is not as good as it was.

Science Fiction on Television.

For science fiction fans in Australia, Go snuck series four of Fringe back into its schedule last Monday at 10.30 pm. Going on previous series, it will probably be close to the best science fiction on television this year, so don’t miss it.

I hope for another series of Torchwood this year. I also hope the writers of Doctor Who forget about having a continual story line, so each episode can devote its entire 45 minutes to a well-developed and suspenseful story. And please kill off the Doctor’s companions.

My Writing.

My novel manuscript has crept up to 89,700 words. Next week I plan to research and write a new article for Divine. This one is very technical and will require a lot of research. It’s about how government departments define a person with a disability.

My writing week: Issue one, year five.

Hi all,

This is my annual best of the previous years science fiction and new year’s resolutions post.

2011’s Science Fiction Books.

The best science fiction book I read last year was The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, a prequel to her equally as good Oryx and Crake. It’s not about global warming, the flood is a genetically engineered plague. I also enjoyed Stephen King’s Under the Dome – which did sag a bit in the middle - and Dave Kitson’s self-published ebook Turing Evolved, which had a great story, it just needed a good edit.

Overall, I made very good choices for reading in 2011, except for the very much overrated Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. Its story took way too long to develop into anything interesting. It should have been cut to half its 600 pages. 

2011’s Science Fiction Movies.

Apart from the excellent Rise of the Apes, was any other science fiction movie released in 2011? At least that’s the question I asked myself. When I checked what else was released, I did remember other movies I had seen last year.

Source Code was good, but not the sort of film that got my imagination going. Paul was a good laugh. I expected more of a Philip K. Dick story with The Adjustment Bureau. X-men Origins was a good but instantly forgettable movie. The same goes for Super 8 and Cowboys and Aliens. There currently seems little appetite to make science fiction movies that get a viewer thinking. I want more movies with grand themes and ideas like Inception, Moon and District 9.

Two absolute stinkers released last year were Battle Los Angles and I am Number Four.

2011’s Science Fiction Television.

Easily the best science fiction on television last year was series four of Torchwood: Miracle Day. It was a ten part miniseries that slowly built up the tension before reaching a satisfying conclusion. A series that made you think about the prolonging of life for those with little quality of life.  

Doctor Who improved as the year went on. There were some good episodes, but none as good as those with the previous two doctors. Suspense has been thrown out the window with the current doctor. As we all knew the doctor wouldn’t die, although I was hopeful he would regenerate, the continuing story of his death generated zero suspense. I did enjoy the non-alien invasion Christmas episode.

Terra Nova is too predictable and like Falling Skies has been made as a family drama (soap), rather than a science fiction series. The lead characters and families in both series act exactly like other current television families. They even have the same clichéd dialogue. The writers seem to have put no effort into exploring how families might behave in the future or in a world destroyed by aliens. Instead, the writers have said, let’s write characters who today’s teenagers can identify with.

I enjoyed Fringe, and look forward to its return this year. I also enjoyed the low-brow Warehouse 13, Eureka and Chuck. I think the last two will struggle for originality in future episodes.

Two movies I saw on cable stood out, both British. Monsters was an excellent character based movie, set in Mexico, where two people get to know each other as they try to cross a no-go zone full of aliens to get back to the US. I also found Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel very funny, and clever for a story about a group of drunken yobs who step into the lavatory and find themselves in the future. 

Last Year’s Resolutions/Goals

I didn’t make any writing resolutions last year. The previous year I had a goal of writing every day, which I did achieve.

The only new year’s resolution I made last year was to download no ebooks that were less than $5. My next post will tell you how I went with that resolution.

Last year I signed up for the Goodreads reading challenge. My goal was to read 26 novels/anthologies. I only read half that due to tiredness and choosing long books – they averaged 400 pages. This year I will again challenge myself to read 26 novels/anthologies, hopefully the tireds won’t intervene again.

2012 Writing Goals.

My writing goals for this year are many. I want to finish the first draft of Jack Logan, Astronaut. I am about half way through it at 67,000 words. I then want to rewrite it, get it critiqued, rewrite it, and then edit it.

I also hope to edit a 25,000 word novella, get it critiqued, and rewrite and edit it. The same goes for a 6,000 word short story.

I want to do all that writing before NaNoWriMo in November which I plan to do again.

If I have time, I want to return to rewriting another novel, which I was halfway through rewriting last year. 

When I am writing new words my aim is 1000-2000 words a weekday. When I am rewriting and editing, obviously the word count will drop.

I also aim to again get 12 paid articles published in DiVine magazine and to look for other freelance writing jobs.

I want to critique a lot more this year and be more of a contributor to a couple of writing communities I am involved in. In the last two years I have only critiqued a couple of novels and a few stories. I need to do more.
 

I want to do all this before the world ends on December 21, according to the Mayans anyway.

My Writing Week: Issue 37 Year 4

Hi all,

I finished the first draft of a short story that I have been slowly plugging away on for a few weeks. My main character’s voice had evolved by the end of the story, so I immediately started rewriting it. The story is only 5100 words at the moment, which is small for me, hopefully it doesn’t get too much bigger.

I wrote every day of the last week – spending more time writing than the previous week.

Torchwood

Torchwood: Miracle Day, finished on the weekend. I very much enjoyed it, although the episodes varied in quality. The first few episodes were all action as the characters fought for their lives. There was not a lot of character development or back story until midway through the series when we got an episode concentrating on Captain Jack Harkness’ past.

I found the episodes that concentrated on Oswald Danes (Bill Pullman) the least enjoyable because they did not seem to be moving the plot forward. I also had a hard time liking Rex, the CIA agent.

A lot of familiar faces from science fiction popped up during the mini-series, Nana Visitor from Deep Space Nine, John de Lancie (Q) from the Star Trek franchise and Francis Fisher from Eureka.

The final episode satisfactorily brought the mini-series to a conclusion. There was a final twist, which I think most people would have seen coming.

Torchwood vs Doctor Who

Doctor Who really pales in comparison to Torchwood. At the moment, Doctor Who generally lacks suspense as it lurches from problem to solution in quick succession. The most recent episode, Night Terrors, was a tad more suspenseful and had a bit more tension. I was glad it had moved from the “death of the doctor” story line. As we know the Doctor will not die, so I find no suspense in their continual harking back to him being zapped in the first episode of this series.

Those Evil…

Read this quote in an article in the Age Good Weekend about censoring video games:

“the increased prevalence of gross forms of wickedness is due to a general  poisoning, mental and physical, which fills the minds and the veins of its victims with a more deadly venom than we have hitherto known.” This was written in 1869 by US Methodist Reverend J.T Crane and he was referring to novels in general.

Authors Losing Contracts Due to Collapsing Retail Market

According to the Bookmarks column in the Age, mid-list Australian writer Peter Klein had a publishing contract for his next book cancelled by Pan Macmillan because of insufficient orders to justify a print run. Two other authors have suffered the same fate. The publishing director at Pan Macmillan said that 20 per cent of the market had gone with the closure of Borders and Angus and Robertson, shops that consolidate mid-list authors. Supermarkets are not interested in writers who sell less than 5000 copies of a book.   

This is something to consider before buying books online from the UK or US.

My Writing Week: Issues 28/29, Year 4

Hi all,

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’ve been having a break from all things writing, giving the brain a rest from what has been a stressful year.

I watched a lot of science fiction over the past week and a bit, including the last few episodes of the excellent British apocalyptic series Survivors. I also watched the last half dozen episodes of series three of Fringe – very good too, leaving the series in an very interesting position. The last couple of episodes of series four of Doctor Who were only so so. I suppose Doctor Who survived Peter Davidson, I hope it can survive Matt Smith. But then again, I think it has more to do with the absence of writer/producer Russell T Davies.

Speaking of Russell T Davies, the new series of Torchwood, Miracle Day, is fantastic, full of suspense and wit. Two episodes in and we still don’t know why everyone has stopped dying. My bet is on aliens. The third episode of Falling Skies was only average. It looks like Steven Spielberg is involved in another ordinary science fiction series, remember the turkey Seaquest DSV.

I watched a few movies too, including the sequel Wall Street 2 which is set during the GFC. In the movie Gordon Gecko signs copies of his book in Borders, now there is some irony for you.

New Article on Divine – Recycling Televisions

I have a newish article up on Divine on recycling televisions. Regional Victoria, where I live, has just been through the switch off of the analog signal and had the resultant great telly chuck out. Council waste facilities were flooded with old televisions. In the near future manufacturers will take back old television sets and recycle them.

People with Disabilities in Science Fiction

This week, what is left of it anyway, I will concentrate on a new article for Divine. This one is about the portrayal of people with disabilities in Science Fiction – book, television and movies.

My article won’t be just the nice portrayals like Jodie LaForge in Next Gen. There have been some mightily mistreated and evil people with disabilities in science fiction. Gattaca was all about discrimination against those who aren’t perfect. Davros in Doctor Who was the epitome of evil.

I note that there have been a lot of vision impaired and paraplegics in science fiction, not so many manic depressives or hearing impaired. 

Any examples of people with disabilities in science fiction would be appreciated.