So I’m currently reading ‘I Drink for a Reason’, by David Cross. And it’s bad. I mean, it is shit-the-bed bad. It is is-this-actually-meant-to-be-an-ironic-douchebag-persona-he-created-for-this-book-a-la-Colbert, change-the-name-of-the-show-retroactively-to-“Mr. Show With Bob and That Guy He Carried On His Back for Four Seasons”, oh-my-god-did-he-actually-just-put-in-a-chapter-explaining-that-while-he’s-not-bitter-or-angry-about-bad-reviews-they-are-“bordering on libel”-and-he-must-respond bad. I am 82 pages into this 236-page book, and there’s been exactly one bit that I actually thought was funny and I feel kind of dirty for laughing at it because it’s about a guy entering a pole-sitting contest and being pelted with Rupert Murdoch’s feces. (It is, though, kind of funny in context.)

But I’m not quite ready to quit reading yet. Because I started the book. And I don’t like starting a book and not finishing it. I feel like I need closure, even if the closure is just “Yep, that’s 237 pages of unfunny material that I’m going to pretend he was forced to produce at gunpoint, probably by the same sadistic bastards who made him do ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel’. (And yes, I did go look up the correct spelling of “squeakquel”.) But the point is, I know that this is irrational behavior and yet I can’t stop myself. I can only think of two books I’ve ever given up on reading, and I admit to wanting to go back to at least skim one of them to the end.

(‘House of Leaves’, by Mark Danielewski. I couldn’t stand the Johnny Truant or Zampano material, but part of me wants to at least read the Navidson records.)

(‘The Laughing Corpse’, by Laurell K Hamilton. Bought the first two books at once in a fit of optimism because I heard good things about the series and they looked short, gritted my way through the first one, and realized that the second one wasn’t getting any better.)

What I’m getting at is, am I some sort of weird aberration? Does my pathological need to finish what I’ve started and complete even the sloggiest, draggiest book mark me out as some sort of crazy person, or does everyone else gut it through bad books too? And if you do tap out, how long does it take you? Do you give it a chapter, a section, a paragraph, a sentence? Are there specific events that make you decide to nopetopus your way out, like a horrific and gratuitous violent sequence or the use of a particular hacky trope?

And most importantly, should I go with my instincts and continue reading the remaining 154 pages of smug, unfunny ‘comedy’? (Sample joke: “Imagine! A grown man treating the idea of exorcising the ‘Devil’ out of some mentally ill woman as a real thing! Crazy!”) (No, that’s not the setup for a joke. “Crazy!” is apparently his idea of a punchline.) Or should I just sell the damn thing to some other poor unsuspecting fool and get on with my life?

This is the most depressing goddamn book I’ve read in ages. Everyone should go out and read it right now.

Okay, that probably needs a little background. Like, for example, what the hell I’m talking about. ‘Shrill’ is the new memoir by Lindy West (of Jezebel and GQ fame), which jumps around a bit chronologically but is basically the story of how she went from being a shy, vulnerable person who was convinced that she couldn’t be loved to being a badass fat-positive feminist who writes about why she got an abortion and why Daniel Tosh is an asshole whose rape jokes are shitty and unfunny. (Which some folks may remember me agreeing with at the time on this blog…)

I bought it because I was familiar with Lindy West’s writing on Jezebel, because she has always been wickedly funny and brutally insightful and has the kind of take-no-shit attitude that makes me stand up and cheer every time I read one of her pieces. She calls bullshit out for what it is, basically, and that’s always a thing I will enjoy reading. I assumed this would be more of the same, and to some extent it was, but…

This is a book about what it costs to be a badass fat-positive feminist who writes openly about controversial issues on the same Internet as GamerGaters and Vox Day. This is a book about what it’s like to receive six hundred text messages a day explaining how the person on the other end would love to rape you to death if only you weren’t so ugly. This is a book about what it is like to receive a constant, unending torrent of vicious abuse for the crime of being a woman who expresses opinions. This is a book about what it is like to have someone create a Twitter account named after your dad who died of cancer less than a month ago so that they can express, through his lips, what a disappointment you were to him. Basically, if you have any shred of empathy at all, this is like sticking your hand into the fucking pain box from Dune.

But that’s why it’s so important to read. Because as painful as it is to hear about it, it’s even more painful for Lindy West to live it. And Lindy West isn’t at all an unusual or special case; she’s just the person who had the chance to write a memoir about it so that everyone could understand what it’s like just a little tiny fraction of a bit. This is what a lot of women go through on the Internet. All the time. Every day. This is something that if you’re a straight white cishet guy, you need to know about so that you can help, in whatever way you can, in pushing back against it and making the Internet, which is by this point pretty much a default mode of human interaction and not some special Wild West electronic frontier that only the select few need to bother with, a less shitty place for your fellow human beings. And if you think you already know what it’s like, you may want to read the book anyway, because it’s probably worse than that.

Oh yes, and it did also turn out to be wickedly funny and brutally insightful and Lindy West did, in fact, call out a lot of bullshit for what it was. Which was awesome, and did soften the blow of sticking my hand in the pain box just a little bit. But trust me when I say this is not a fun read.

But it’s a necessary one.

There are probably two target audiences for ‘Welcome to Night Vale – A Novel’. Neither of them will be entirely satisfied.

The first is the actual fanbase of “Welcome to Night Vale”, the podcast that began in 2012 and has been spreading through the collective consciousness of geekdom to the point where Stephen Colbert brought the creators (and Cecil Baldwin, the main performer in the series) onto his talk show to discuss it. These people are all intimately aware of the strange and fantastic details that make the series such a wonderful blend of the macabre and the deadpan and know all that can be known about the small desert down where inexplicable things happen all the time. (Which isn’t much, because, well, go look up “inexplicable” and get back to me.)

The second is the people who saw the Colbert appearance (or something like it) and came to the book with only the vaguest notion of what “Welcome to Night Vale” is, and thought that the book might function as an introduction to the strange and mysterious world that Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor have created.

For the first audience, this is a book that takes a while to get going. It focuses on two fairly obscure characters from the Night Vale mythos, pawnshop owner Jackie Fierro and PTA volunteer Diane Crayton, and much of the first half of the book is simply spent establishing them as more than simply background characters whose names are mentioned in passing from time to time. There’s a lot of overlap to their respective story arcs, as well, which means that you’ll frequently feel like you’re reading the same passage twice until the mid-point of the novel when they finally decide to work together to solve their interrelated mysteries.

At that point, the book picks up steam in a big way, and fans of the podcast will be happy to know that the book finally gives out some answers to one of the big questions–who is the Man in the Tan Jacket and why does he keep coming to Night Vale to pursue a vague yet sinister agenda? (The answer is not wholly satisfying, either, to be honest; it requires a lot of squinting and backfilling in every previous story with, “Ah, well, that was all part of my master plan all along!” That said, one of the things about the Man in the Tan Jacket is that he takes “vague” to new heights, so it could very well be that everything was part of a master plan and we just didn’t know it.)

For the second audience, this is undoubtedly going to feel like wandering into a bizarre tangent of a conversation that they weren’t present for–Cecil, the Voice of Night Vale, only appears in a few cutaway sequences and doesn’t interact with the main plot very much at all, and there are a lot of inside jokes that will no doubt just seem like random weirdness to someone not familiar with the podcast. Then again, that’s probably a pretty good introduction to the podcast, because all of the inside jokes got their start as bits of random weirdness until they were promoted. And the revelations about the Man in the Tan Jacket probably won’t mean as much if you haven’t been spending the past three years saying, “Who _is_ this guy?”

Both audiences may be slightly frustrated by the supremely deadpan narrative voice, which takes great pains to smother any surprise or emotional heft beneath a crushing weight of fatalism and existentialism, and which can get almost hypnotically same-y at times. Those people might want the audiobook version, which is read by Cecil Baldwin and has a little bit more verve as a result.

However, all of the audiences will find a lot to like here–there are quite a few read-out-loud funny bits, some genuinely suspenseful sequences (the library looms large in the book), and you will feel surprisingly moved by what happens to the tarantula. Oh, and the plot does hang together quite well even if you feel like the first two hundred pages are mostly about the main characters hoping they can find a way to avoid the narrative altogether and get back to their normal lives.

In short, there are probably two target audiences for ‘Welcome to Night Vale – A Novel’. Neither of them will walk away dissatisfied.

I just finished ‘Raising Steam’, the last of the “adult” Discworld novels (although of course, Terry Pratchett famously considered the difference to be nothing more than branding). It’s the saddest of ironies that even though Pratchett’s memory was failing him by then, this is really the most consciously retrospective of his novels; it is, even more than ‘Unseen Academicals’, a deliberate summation of his stories to date written in the fairly certain knowledge that it would be the last time such a summation would be needed. If the Discworld was a thesis statement, this would be its conclusion.

And just as Pratchett intended, it evokes the memories of all that came before it. There are subtle hints and reminiscences that date all the way back to his very first book–not out of simple nostalgia, but in fact to elicit that spirit of which nostalgia is the exact opposite, the realization that things have changed and that change has been for the better. The Ankh-Morpork of ‘Raising Steam’ stands in conscious, deliberate contrast to the Ankh-Morpork of ‘The Colour of Magic’, and that contrast is perhaps Pratchett’s finest achievement as a writer. He delivered over the course of his career an achievement so audacious that it took forty-one novels (and an array of ancillary materials) to finish it up, offering for the first time an alternative to the path that Tolkien’s devotees had stamped into a rut.

I don’t think any of it was intentional at first; I think that when he started, Pratchett simply realized that the tropes of the Tolkien high fantasy had become cliches, and cliches are ripe for skewering with parody. So the first few Discworld novels were exactly that, parodies of epic quest fantasies (with a tourist standing in for the noble hero, and thinly-veiled versions of various fantasy figures guest appearing) and of apocalyptic “final battles” for the fate of the world. He tossed in all sorts of joking, half-thought out explanations of how a fantasy city and a fantasy world might work, with Assassin’s Guilds that actually regulated murder and gods that depended on the survival of their worshipers, but it was all cobbled together in the way that any good writer will do when coming up with those first mad rushes of inspiration.

And then Corporal Carrot showed up. And things began to change.

Because Carrot was the first fantasy cliche to appear in a Discworld novel and refuse to fulfill his function, even in a subversive way. Carrot was the Rightful King, the Aragorn of the Disc whose role in the story was to return and take his place on the throne (overthrowing the tyrant in the process, of course) and usher in the Good Old Days that once were and shall be again, bringing back the traditions that everyone loved and revered and restoring the Old Order that everyone was so happy with. But he didn’t do any of that. In point of fact, he really stopped being important at all after his first couple of appearances, acting more as a catalyst to transform Captain Vimes into the central figure he wound up becoming. Pratchett’s first real step toward his own vision of fantasy was to say, “No more kings.”

If ‘Guards! Guards!’ took a strong step by critically examining the role of the king in fantasy, then ‘Small Gods’ (possibly his best novel) took a giant leap by examining the role of gods. Because while there are thematic resonances underpinning the Rightful King trope, usually involving nostalgia and its ugly cousin, fundamentalism, most of us really have to think much anymore about a strange man riding in on a white horse to restore the monarchy. (Or, depending on the readership, restoring the authority of the monarchy.) Whereas religion is something that real human beings deal with on an everyday basis. With ‘Small Gods’, Pratchett wasn’t just talking about Fantasyland anymore. He was talking about us. Om was a stand-in for any number of real deities, and Pratchett wasn’t just examining the way that gods are used in the genre, he was examining the way that religion changes and is changed by human beings. The result was a genuinely profound book.

But it was with ‘The Truth’ that things really began to change. Because while Pratchett had started to genuinely resist the conservative (in the philosophical sense, not the political one) bent of fantasy as a genre, which generally views change as synonymous with corruption and in which the restoration of the ancient ways is viewed as victory, he had up until that point generally been articulating that more as a theory than as a practice. He’d introduced a few incremental changes, things like an upgraded City Watch and some thoroughly modern witches, but in general, innovation on the Discworld had been seen as a malign influence introduced from the outside. (As in ‘Moving Pictures’ and ‘Soul Music’. The sequence where the Patrician comes into the offices of the first movable press in order to confirm that nobody involved in its creation had found themselves influenced by strange voices that seemed to come from nowhere has to be the best example of lampshading a trope in the history of literature.)

But ‘The Truth’ ended with a real change. The printing press had come to the Discworld, and it had come to stay, changing civilization on a permanent basis. (This was also where Pratchett put aside “overthrowing the Patrician and restoring some older form of government” as a plot device once and for all.) It seems to have had an effect on Pratchett, forcing him to examine some of his own unthinking assumptions about the world he was writing in. ‘The Truth’ marked the point at which he looked at his relatively staid, unchanging fantasy universe and asked, “Why?” Or, if you like, compared it to the constantly changing real world he lived in and asked, “Why not?”

And so things began to change. The changes required a new character, Moist von Lipwig, who ushered in all of these new innovations and forced Pratchett to see all of his existing characters through the eyes of another. Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.”

And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.

‘Raising Steam’ completes a great work, one that says that fantasy does not have to be nostalgia. It does not have to be a longing for an imagined past, where the rightful king reigned and everyone knew their place and never dreamed of more. It does not have to involve faceless monsters and outside evils, and it does not have to be cruel. It gives us something to hope for, so long as we don’t treat people like they were things. And it’s a story we all can join in with. That’s the true gift of his achievement–all things strive, as he puts it. We’re all in this together.

‘Raising Steam’ is Terry Pratchett’s final word on the matter, but I like to imagine that his influence won’t end for a considerable time to come.

Wow. That title sounds a lot more ominous than I planned. No, I was thinking about “the worst” not in the sense of the impending global war between the zombies and the Lizard People (sorry, folks, but this Tuesday is gonna suck) but in the sense of the way we define quality in entertainment, which is after all a highly subjective thing. I recently picked up a book from dim and distant 1980 called, “The Worst TV Shows Ever”, by Bart Andrews and Brad Dunning, primarily because I’m utterly fascinated by failure, and it was interesting to me that in among shows like “Turn On” (a sketch comedy show notable for being canceled in some markets before the end of the first episode) and “My Mother the Car” were long-running hits like “Hee Haw”, which ran 21 seasons, and “Three’s Company”, which was one of ABC’s perennial draws.

So what does it mean when we say something is “the worst ever”? Can something really be “the worst” if tons of people love it? I’m reluctant to credit that idea, I’ll admit, even though there are certainly many times when I’m convinced that I’m right and the rest of the world is wrong about the quality of a TV show or movie. (**cough** Anything Adam Sandler’s ever done **cough**) We all do that, I think, but I like to believe that most of us don’t take ourselves seriously when we do. It’s one thing to be confident in your tastes and to be able to justify your opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to genuinely believe that the average person has terrible judgment and is incapable of appreciating quality entertainment. I feel like it shuts down discussion rather than opening it; if you decide that “Queen for a Day”, to take another example from the book, is nothing but wallowing in other people’s misery, then you won’t be able to understand what made it popular, and what continues to make successors from “Restaurant Impossible” to “Undercover Boss” work. (In all three cases, it’s about the imposition of a moral order onto the universe–good people who do not deserve to suffer are delivered from their suffering, giving the audience a comforting sense that reality works the way they hope it does.)

Taken to its ultimate extreme, this becomes “hipsterism”, the belief that anything popular must be bad because most people like it and we all know that most people have terrible taste. It can be incredibly exhausting dealing with someone like this; they refuse to believe that there can be any intersection between popular success and artistic success, and will reject their own previously established tastes rather than give up their prejudices about society. Ultimately, though, they’re only hurting themselves by ignoring fun and exciting entertainment.

The other type of “worst” is the commercial failure, which I’ll admit is what fascinates me (and what fascinates Nathan Rabin, who continually does yeoman’s work with his series of “My World of Flops” columns for the Onion AV Club that seeks out failures and dives headlong into what made them crash and burn). There’s certainly a lot of these in the book; variety shows by the likes of Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr that didn’t make it past thirteen weeks, and the aforementioned “Turn On”, which didn’t even make it to Episode Two and which you can’t even find on YouTube. (If I’m wrong on that, please link to it in the comments–I looked like crazy, and all I found was a 45-second clip.) By some standard, these have to be considered to be at least in the running for “the worst”, right?

Except that there’s more to failure than meets the eye, as well. Sometimes the same things that make something a flop can make it a cult classic as well; entertainment that challenges people and makes them uncomfortable can sometimes take a long time to find its audience. (‘Fight Club’, while it didn’t actually flop in theaters, still needed DVD to make its reputation.) Sometimes marketers can fail, sometimes internal politics can doom a project at a studio. Sometimes things just slip between the cracks. (Nathan Rabin calls these “secret successes”, efforts that worked creatively even as they got no box office.)

But I have to admit, my favorite kind of “worst” is always “best worst”, the kind of thing that Rabin labels as “fiascoes”. They’re terrible, and everyone knows it. They’re apocalyptically creatively misguided, generally disastrously bad. But you watch them in a sort of perverse fascination because they’re made with such conviction that you almost feel like if you just tuned your brain to the creators’ frequency, you’d suddenly be seeing a work of staggering genius. “Turn On” is kind of my holy grail for exactly that reason; I want to see it precisely because everyone agreed so instantly and thoroughly that it was a horrible mistake, but at the same time the same people put it on the air in the sure and certain belief they had a hit on their hands. I want to watch it because I want to understand the strange glamour that failure casts, maybe to avoid it or maybe to find a way to recast those ideas free of their flaws. After all, every good idea started as a bad first draft.

Or maybe I just like them. We’re all flawed, we all fail, but good things come out of that. Maybe I just like to remember that some of the most interesting things out there start out as mistakes…but they don’t have to stay that way.

Full disclosure: I was provided a free copy of this book by the author, David Kahn, for the express purpose of reviewing it on this website. I was not previously aware of his work and have no bias regarding him, but if you give me a free book I’ll happily read it and tell you what I think. (In fact, you probably won’t be able to stop me.)

That said, I feel at least a little bit guilty about accepting it now that I’ve read it, because while I think that the geek set will enjoy it, it really functions more as an ambassador to the non-geeky professionals out there who think of comic books and superheroes as a waste of time. ‘Cape, Spandex, Briefcase’ takes as its thesis that in fact, superheroes have a lot to teach about leadership, and it uses comic book (and movie) characters as metaphors to talk about the fundamentals of managing a team.

That’s not to say there’s nothing for the geek set–there are a lot of entertaining comic book references, and certainly I got a few chuckles out of the little Easter eggs thrown into the book (team members include Mary Jane and Virginia Potts, for example). But it’s really about management principles, with the comics used as a means of illustrating those principles. If you’re not looking for advice on how to motivate people, you may find the rest of the book a little thin. That said, if you are looking for advice on how to motivate people, already being a fan will probably help you absorb the lessons easier, since you’ll already be familiar with the subject matter under discussion. That is, unless you decide to nitpick the use of Cyclops as a moral center for the X-Men due to his actions in ‘Secret Wars’ or something.

It’s also important to note that while it is aimed at non-fans, it’s not intended as an education in comic book history. It does do some education along the way–the examples that the author uses, some of which get pretty obscure for non-comics fans (I would not have expected a reference to Sub Diego) are relevant to the topic at hand and explained well enough that a non-geek can follow along–but it’s primarily using those examples as teaching tools. Even so, it illuminates some subtle facets of superheroes along the way. There’s a very nice section, for example, where it looks at Batman through the lens of management–he has sidekicks that function as his employees, he promotes from within by helping people realize their full potential, and he surrounds himself with good people who are willing to challenge him. (Which are obviously some of the traits that Kahn is trying to instill in the reader as well.)

So now that I’ve discussed what it isn’t, let’s talk about what it is. Kahn has five basic principles of leadership, which he describes in a tongue-in-cheek fashion as “super powers”, which he believes will help to make a more effective manager. (The book focuses on the business world, since that’s where the audience is for a book like this, but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use it when running a convention or gaming group.) I feel like it would be a bit unfair to summarize them here, since the whole point of the book is that you need the context to make sense of the principles, but I will say that they seem like reasonable skills for any good leader to develop.

Each one is illustrated with several examples from the comic book world. Some are illustrated in the positive sense (Professor X as an example of business ethics–I’m assuming it’s the one from the movies here, not the one who threw a bowling ball at Iceman’s head to test his reflexes) and the negative sense (Luthor and Otis are given as an example of why management through intimidation creates learned helplessness). Along the way, he shows the main character, Ben, putting them into action with his own team in a sort of framing sequence that surrounds each session of comic book lore.

I did enjoy the framing sequence, although there were a few times I wondered how Ben could have gotten to 2015 without knowing who Wolverine is. (Although as a concession to common sense, Ben has seen ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘Thor’.) Still, I’m willing to forgive the author a certain amount of noobishness on the part of his protagonist, despite the fact that it caters to a stereotype of business types as boring stick-in-the-muds who don’t know anything about pop culture, because Ben needs to learn something for the story to progress. And there probably are people out there who don’t know who Wolverine is–I just don’t move in their social circles.

On the whole, I liked the basic premise of the book, and I thought it was well explicated from the beginning–of course we can learn just as much from superheroic titans as we can from titans of industry. They’re designed as metaphors to teach us about ourselves, after all. I don’t know how much opportunity I’ll have to apply the lessons in the book, but they do seem like good lessons to teach and good lessons to learn.

Maybe I’ll recommend it to my boss…

Full disclosure: I’ve known Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? through a variety of online Doctor Who fan communities since the series was an obscure line of novels carrying on in the wake of the cancelled TV show. I have attended conventions with them, I’m big fans of them as people as well as authors, and I have been commissioned on occasion by Robert for essays in one book or another. (Including the recently released Outside In 2, by ATB Publishing, where I wax opinionated on “The Christmas Invasion”. You know, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.) The point is, I am probably magnificently biased when it comes to the recently released ‘The Doctors Are In: The Essential and Unofficial Guide to Doctor Who’s Greatest Time Lord’.

That said, it’s tremendous fun to read. It’s not an episode guide, because goodness knows we are spoilt for choice when it comes to that. (Including one by Burk and Smith?, as it happens.) It’s also not a history of the program, because again, there are plenty of great ones out there. Instead, this is a book of critical analysis–the authors take a look at the various facets of the Doctor’s magnificently complex personality, embroidered by thirteen actors and dozens of writers, directors and producers over the years, and try to figure out just what makes him tick. Is he a brooding and melancholy survivor of unimaginable devastation? A cold, alien wanderer in the fourth dimension? A puckish sprite who revels in making mischief for the wicked? (Um, yes to all of the above. Sorry, spoilers!)

Naturally, with fifty years of stories to mine for material, there are a wealth of interpretations to draw upon, and a wealth of conclusions to come to. That’s where the book shines, really; Burk and Smith? are among those rare people who can disagree completely and totally and not get upset about it. Over the course of the book, they clash over topics from “Does ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ really live up to its reputation?” to “Was the Third Doctor too cozy with UNIT?” to “Was Matt Smith prone to trying to punch up a bad script by flailing his arms and shouting a lot?” And impressively enough, their answers are always well-reasoned and informative even when they disagree. Even more impressively, they disagree profoundly for much of the book and the tone is still light-hearted and humorous.

Is it essential reading? Well, it does serve as a basic reference guide to the series–Burk and Smith? do give a potted history of the making of the series as they discuss each Doctor, there’s a list of recommended viewing that will certainly serve as a good place to start, and the back of the book contains a list of resources if you want to know more. But I will admit (as do they, in the back of the book) that there are other books out there that serve as a more comprehensive guide to the history of the show both in front of and behind the cameras. This is intended as light reading, not as reference material.

In other words, if you already have one of a dozen or so episode guides, behind the scenes books, or reference manuals on Doctor Who, this probably isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know. But if you’re the sort of person who already has episode guides, behind-the-scenes books and reference manuals on Doctor Who, you’re probably the sort of person who appreciates reading one that’s well-written, entertaining and far from merely a dusty compilation of facts about the series. If that’s the case (whether you own all those other books or not, really) you will get a lot of enjoyment out of ‘The Doctors Are In’.

Sad to say, this isn’t a review of a comic book featuring a collection of D-list superheroes who band together to fight enemies that escape the notice of the heavy hitters. Because that would be awesome. Instead, this is a coffee table book by Jon Morris that describes a number of…let’s just say misguided attempts to create the next Batman or Superman. Going in chronological order from the Golden Age up through the Modern Age (the most recent entry covers Maggott and other late-90s mutants), it shows a variety of characters from the poorly thought out like Doctor Hormone (who’s basically a scientist who solves every problem with “hormones”) to the interesting concepts that never caught on (711, a wrongly-convicted prisoner who breaks out of jail every night to stop crimes he learns about from his fellow inmates) to characters that simply can’t come back (like ROM. DAMMIT.)

The book is a little bit light on information–for the most part, this isn’t due to a lack of research, but simply due to a lack of things to write about. Most of the characters under discussion only had a handful of appearances, many deservedly so, and Morris is able to cover their entire publication history in just one double-page spread. There is, fundamentally, only so much you can say about NFL Superpro or Congorilla. That does mean that no particular hero ever wears out their welcome…well, except perhaps AAU Shuperstar, the superhero who appeared only in ads for shoes and who spoke exclusively in shoe-related puns…but it does mean that the book is really just a light and goofy read rather than a reference book.

Which does mean that if you’re going to buy this, you do have to consider whether it’s worth almost $25 (list price) for what’s basically a silly book about goofy superheroes. As a collection of information, it may not be. However, it’s worth mentioning that the production values on this are first-class; every page contains excellent reproductions of classic comic art (some of them from luminaries like Kirby and Ditko, who were amazingly talented but didn’t always knock it out of the park). It’s certainly the sort of thing that you can leave out as a conversation piece, even if the conversation will probably trend towards things like, “There was really a superhero named Bozo the Iron Man?”

On the whole, I’d say that while you may want to look for a bargain on it, it’s definitely worth a look. If nothing else, it’s a heady mix of discovery (“So that’s where those ‘Nature Boy’ memes came from!”) and nostalgia (“Hey, wait a second! I liked Slapstick!”) If you’re a comics fan, check this one out.

It occurred to me that the novelization of ‘Shada’ might be something that readers here would be interested in, if they knew about it, and that it might also be something that readers here might not know about. So this is both a review, and an explanation of what exactly ‘Shada’ was, and how there came to be a novelization of it by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams’ original script.

In addition to being tremendously famous for his ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series, Douglas Adams also spent a bit of time as a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. This was just before ‘Guide’ hit it big, when he was mainly known for contributing a few bits to the final series of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. (The one without John Cleese.) His big breaks came in a sudden burst, which is why he wasn’t on Doctor Who for very long. But he did do three scripts–the modestly successful “Pirate Planet”, the incredibly well-regarded “City of Death”, and “Shada”…which never actually completed filming due to a strike at the BBC, and which wasn’t remounted for the ensuing season because incoming producer John Nathan-Turner had no interest in doing anything his predecessor Graham Williams thought was a good idea.

“Shada”, in other words, is that rare beast – an unproduced screenplay by a now-deceased legend of science fiction at the absolute height of his skill, which can’t be filmed at this point due to a simply insurmountable number of practical hurdles. But this is where a peculiar tradition of Doctor Who comes in, a legacy of one of the few sci-fi/fantasy series out there to predate video recording in any of its media. Virtually every single episode of the classic series of Doctor Who was adapted as a novel, in order to allow fans to experience episodes that had been broadcast before their time and which (due to the BBC’s policies at the time on repeats and the previously noted lack of home media) they would probably never have the chance to see again. These novels were occasionally done by the original author, but frequently they were adapted by other hands.

While he was alive, Douglas Adams’ stories were among the few that had not been adapted into novels; Adams preferred to adapt his own stories, and the company with the rights to the Doctor Who books simply couldn’t afford his page rate. (According to Adams, every time a new editor took over the line, they had the exact same conversation with him about the chances of adapting his books, and he politely gave them the exact same responses each time.) But tragically, Adams died far younger than anyone that brilliant has a right to, which meant that even the adaptations seemed like a longshot.

Enter Gareth Roberts. Those of you who are fans of the new series might recognize him as the screenwriter of “The Lodger” and “The Shakespeare Code”, among others, but he made his reputation on Doctor Who as an author of several pastiches of the Graham Williams era of the show. His novel ‘The English Way of Death’ (now sadly out of print) is considered to be one of the finest encapsulations of that period’s whimsy, effortless humor, and penchant for borderline fantasy, and he’s always been an outspoken fan of Williams and Adams. As such, when the rights issues were finally sorted out with the Adams estate, Roberts was the first choice to adapt Adams’ unfilmed script into a novel. (For the pedants in the crowd, yes I am aware that the script was also adapted for audio by Big Finish Productions with Paul McGann reprising Tom Baker’s part, and that there is an unofficial animated adaptation done by Ian Levine using Paul Jones as a Tom Baker impersonator. This is the first mass-market adaptation.)

(Yes, I’m also aware that the sequences that were shot were released on video and DVD, with Baker providing linking narration. That’s not a proper adaptation. Sheesh.)

So now that you know what the novelization of ‘Shada’ is, the question that undoubtedly follows is, “Is it actually any good?” And the answer is, “Yes. Not as good as you’d expect a lost Douglas Adams masterpiece to be, but it’s definitely a fun read.” Roberts doesn’t quite have Adams’ deft touch for comic prose, but singling him out for that is almost entirely unfair. He’s not trying to be Douglas Adams. He’s trying to write Gareth Roberts’ very good adaptation of a Douglas Adams story, and he succeeds magnificently at that. His opening line alone is one of the better starts to a novel that I’ve read lately: “At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways – with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, ‘Wait a second. That means there’s a situation vacant.'”

The plot is a fairly classic Doctor Who concept – a megalomaniac (in about as literal a sense as you can get this time) plans to take over the universe using forbidden Time Lord secrets that have been concealed at Cambridge, and the Doctor (accompanied by Time Lady Romana and robot dog K-9) have to stop him. But there are a number of clever twists and elegant misdirections between Cambridge and the lost Time Lord prison of Shada, and I really don’t want to give any of them away for the benefit of those of you who haven’t had the whole thing summarized multiple times in old Doctor Who episode guides. Suffice to say that this is a perfect example of doing something new and clever with an old idea, and the story hangs together very well.

The only issue I had with the book, and this may be my reaction as a long-time Doctor Who fan who had heard about this one for years as a “lost classic”, was that I couldn’t help spending my time wondering which bits were taken directly from Adams’ original script and which were added by Roberts with the benefit of thirty-odd years of hindsight. (The joke about “edible ball bearings”, for example, I’m reasonably sure belonged to Roberts.) I wound up wishing they’d also simply published the shooting script, so that I could see what had been done and when and by whom. It was a bit of a distraction, but one that a less obsessive person might not have to deal with.

On the whole, though, I thought it was a great story well-told, and I think that any fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy it. Pastiches of classic authors have a shaky track record, especially of Douglas Adams (I don’t think, for example, that I’ll ever recommend Eoin Colfer’s ‘And Another Thing…’) but this one stands out as a fun read in its own right.

Let’s start with the full disclosure: I know Lars Pearson, publisher of Mad Norwegian Press, well enough to be on a first-name basis with him at conventions. He has provided me with a few free books, some because I’ve helped him out with proofreading and some because he’s just a really nice guy. That said, I would still be telling you about how much I love the series of essay books he publishes even if none of that were true, because they’re really quite excellent on a number of levels. And apparently the Hugo voters agree with me, since one of them has already won a Hugo and there’s another nominated even as I write this (which is one reason I’m writing this now, because voting is still open for ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ and it’s the best one yet. The other is I just saw him at a Doctor Who convention and I’m in the mood to talk about stuff that happened at the con.)

The essay series, which started with ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ and moved on to Whedon, comics, and has more in the works, is primarily intended as a space for people whose voice has traditionally been underrepresented in fandom to write about their experiences. The writing has been almost universally great, with some essays by excellent professional authors and new voices from within fandom, and it’s also been insightful. When you think you’ve seen it all, especially in a fandom like Doctor Who that’s now going into its fifty-first year and which had a period of about fifteen years with nothing to do but rewatch old episodes and talk about them to each other, there’s no substitute from getting a fresh perspective on the subject from someone whose life experience is different from your own. I’d never thought of relating the process of regeneration to transgender issues, but the metaphor was described so wonderfully in ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ that I can’t see it any other way now. To me, it’s important to give these perspectives a voice, and I’m glad Mad Norwegian feels the same way, because opening oneself up to new perspectives helps you to appreciate other people as people. I always feel like I come away from these books with a tiny sliver of someone else’s viewpoint in my head, and it’s absolutely fascinating.

And they’re fun, too. Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant, for those of you who’ve read her zombie novels) provides a hilarious piece in ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ describing her kid-self’s confusion about whether or not the Doctor was real–he was on PBS, after all, just like ‘Nova’ and ‘Wild America’. And Laura Mead gives an essay in ‘Chicks Unravel Time’ simply entitled “David Tennant’s Bum”. Because perspective is one thing, but nobody wants to be boring.

I’m really hoping that ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ wins a Hugo, because I do think it’s better than ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’; there are several essays that are genuinely moving, and I hope Hugo voters agree with me. But I also just think they’re worth reading, and I think that the people who read this site would like them.

In my email inbox today, in regards to this post from 2011:

SUBJECT: Sad, racist and delusional

Also the funniest part, even if Dorne was the Middle East, or North Africa or even just modern day Turkey(and per the author, it isn’t) that guy from the Indian subcontinent who even by Indian standards is incredibly dark, would have no place representing those regions as he does not look like any of those people, whether Arab/Turk/Persian or even Israeli, that last image confirmed to me your racism and your delusion.

A few points, I think, need to be made here.

1.) I am white as all get out, so suggesting that that argument was made on the basis of insecurity about my own race is kinda fun to say the least.

2.) “Why don’t you create your own” – er, I did.

3.) Naveen Andrews is not “incredibly dark” by Indian standards. If anything he’s relatively light-skinned as Indian folks go. And he’s not from “the Indian subcontinent,” he’s from friggin’ London, born and raised.

I could go on – including the fact that GRRM made his qualifications about the Dornish mostly after that blog post, in part to respond to suggestions like mine – but yeeeeeeeeeeah.

If you watch professional sports of any sort, you know that good players have a productivity curve. They come out young and limber but not really knowing what they’re doing, and then they learn their craft and how to exploit their natural talents to the fullest, and they hit their peak. And then Father Time steps in and they start aging, and they can’t run as fast or push as hard or go as long or heal as quickly, because now they’re in their thirties trying to hang with kids in their early twenties, and their skill may be even greater but their bodies betray them. This is a fact of sports.

However, great players, the ones with hall of fame careers – these are the ones who adapt. They recognize that their old style of play no longer allows them to flourish, and they work like hell to find a new game, refining the parts they can still do to a godlike level while discarding those areas where they are now substandard. Every athlete tries to do this; many fail. The great ones succeed – Michael Jordan revamped his game at least twice, for example (and some claim three times) to accomodate his diminishing physicality.

The reason I am discussing this is because writing, when you get down to it, is a lot like sports. Nobody talks about how, as writers (or most artists, really) get older, they tend to produce less great work. The good stuff in most writers’ careers comes in the middle section, and the stuff at the end is usually the province of the tolerable. The stuff fans enjoy but new readers don’t seek out.

And, to make all of this relevant to the post title, this is why Raising Steam is so wonderful. Over his last few books we’ve seen Terry Pratchett trying to be the Terry Pratchett of old, but since about Wintersmith we’ve seen the slow and deleterious effects of his early-onset Alzheimer’s creeping into the work. Still enjoyable books, for the most part, but not since Thud! has there been a Pratchett book that feels like height-of-his-powers Pterry and we all recognized that, and marked it as Mother Nature being a bitch, and sighed.

But in Raising Steam Pratchett has written a book that simply does not feel like his earlier works. It’s still identifiably a Discworld book and still identifiably Pratchett, but the entire style of the book is completely different. Where most Pratchett previously was driven by the power of his core narrative, this book is more a collection of diverse scenes. Still scenes all connected to a central narrative, of course, but the format feels far more epistolary than we are used to from him (and he has always been a writer who has enjoyed his fun little asides).

But the thing of it is: this is great writing. It is great writing unlike what we are used to from Pratchett, to be sure, but it is great writing nonetheless. Call it Pratchett 2.0 if you like, because it takes the meandering sensibility of his most recent books and puts it to use; a writer challenged by time turning his new problems into positives. It’s a deeply inspiring book on that level, and it’s not right to call it “one of his best” because it really does feel like a whole different writer while still being the same man – Terry Pratchett of Earth-2, or similar.

Dear Mr. Card,

I wanted you to know that I recently read your statement regarding the proposed boycott of ‘Ender’s Game’, and I can understand where you’re coming from in your plea for tolerance. Believe me, I can understand what it’s like to worry that your livelihood will be affected by the intolerance of others. Many of my LGBT friends have had to face open discrimination in the workplace due to the kind of open hatred you personally fostered with your time and money…and in fact, continue to foster today, despite your belief that the whole issue is now “moot”. So I can deeply sympathize with your hope that “the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”

To that end, I pledge that I will in fact show just as much tolerance of you as I expect to see you and others show towards people of different sexual preferences and identities (by the way, I assume that since the issue is now “moot”, you’ll be disbanding NOM? After all, no sense throwing good money after bad, right?) In that spirit, I pledge the following:

I will not seek to deprive you of your legal and constitutional rights.

I will not seek to have you declared mentally ill and institutionalized.

I will not seek to have normal, healthy sexual activities that you perform in private with consenting adults declared illegal, in order to “send a message” to you about their morality.

I will not seek to have you declared an unfit parent based on your sexual preference/inclination, nor will I suggest you act in a sexually predatory fashion towards prepubescent children who match your sexual preference.

I will not refuse to serve you at my place of business.

I will not advocate the overthrow of the United States government in order to install a puppet regime that discriminates against your sexual preference/inclination.

Because I agree with your request for tolerance, I freely and happily pledge to all these things. I think you’d no doubt agree that I am meeting you more than halfway, given your previous verbal and financial advocation on LGBT issues. Nonetheless, as you pointed out, your backwards and hateful rhetoric is rapidly receding into history’s rear view mirror, and you are rapidly becoming seen as nothing more than a bigoted old crank who nobody listens to anymore. In that light, I agree that it’s easy to be tolerant in victory. So let’s stand on this agreement and let bygones be bygones.

…oh, you may note that “paying good money to see your shitty-ass movie” isn’t included in the definition of ‘tolerance’. That wasn’t what you were asking me to do, was it? Drop me a line back and let me know!

Sincerely,

John Seavey

I always feel like I should begin a review like this with a disclaimer, so full disclosure: I’ve been reading Paul Cornell’s books since he was transforming Doctor Who novels into something utterly beyond awesome with ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’. I’ve been on a few mailing lists he was on, and there’s a non-zero chance he might remember who I am. So I may have some bias here, is what I’m saying.

That said, ‘London Falling’ really is excellent.

It’s part of the “urban fantasy” subgenre that has become more and more popular over the last decade or so, specifically the sub-sub-genre that involves police getting involved with the supernatural. I’ve read and enjoyed other books in this field of interest (I also highly recommend Ben Aaronovitch’s Folly series. I also admit to bias there too, because ‘The Also People’ was freaking METAL.) This story involves a seemingly untouchable drug kingpin who gets arrested and dies in custody all in the same night. The attempts to investigate his death lead to several members of the crime squad gaining the Sight, able to see the secret London only visible to practitioners of magic.

Cornell makes an absolutely riveting choice in this book by making it clear very early on that Seeing the secret London has absolutely fuck-all to do with knowing what the hell any of it even means, let alone having any control over it or getting magical abilities from it. The book is absolutely suffocating in its intensity at times; the characters have no Wise Mentor, they have no Book of Thoth, they have been dropped into the deep end and it’s sink or swim. And oh by the way there’s a fucking whirlpool over there.

The characters each deal with the craziness in their own way; Costain, an undercover cop, has what can only be described as the most pragmatic religious conversion in human history, while Ross finally gains explanations for the impossible strangeness that’s tainted her entire life. (I’d go into more detail, but I’m avoiding spoilers as best as possible, because there really is a lot of good twisty stuff in here.) All of them share one important coping mechanism, though; they’re all coppers, and they all fall back on their police training. Cornell meticulously researched the novel, adding a layer of authenticity to the real-world aspects that helps sell the more fantastical elements.

The ending does come off as fishing for a sequel just a bit, but not so terribly much that I minded (although I suspect that if you didn’t like the book as much as I did, you might feel a bit more strongly about it.) On the whole, I have to say that I enjoyed this one and I’m looking forward to his next book.