Happy New Year!

I can’t believe it’s 2012 already! Nor can I believe it’s been almost eighteen months since I last updated this blog or website. While I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions (mainly because I inevitably fail to keep them), I do intend to make a real effort this year to at least post here on a semi-regular basis. My only real excuse is that I’ve been busy writing – with lots of new stuff in the pipeline for this year and next.

2011 was a hectic year, full of exciting stuff, and I think my first task will be to pull together a quick round up of all the novels, audios and stories that were published last year. Then, when I get a little bit more time, I’ll update the individual pages too, and take a look ahead to the stuff that’s up and coming this year.

In the meantime, I want to just thank people for their continued support and for reading my books. Also, a lot of people have sent me messages to ask if there are going to be any more Newbury & Hobbes books after The Immorality Engine, and so I just wanted to respond to those and say yes, there are going to be three more novels, as well as some more short stories and a couple of other exciting projects along the way, too. I’m working furiously on the fourth novel at the moment, entitled ‘The Executioner’s Heart’, and it’s due out towards the end of the year.

The Osiris Ritual

Wow! Look at this amazing new illustration from the pen of M D Penman.

I’ve been working with Mark on a Newbury & Hobbes comic project and yesterday, out of the blue, he sent me this fabulous new piece, which he’s created to illustrate The Osiris Ritual. I’m completely bowled over. Mark is an amazing talent. This is currently my desktop wallpaper.

Moffat’s Doctor Who (or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the (Dalek) bomb)

You know, Steven Moffat had a bloody hard job. He had to reinvent Doctor Who.

Russell T Davies gets a lot of praise (rightly so, I think) for the way in which he took this old, much loved television program and made it relevant again for a modern audience. He took something that was fondly remembered by the many and loved by the few, and turned it into a national institution. That in and of itself is a triumph. I don’t think there’s any arguing with that.

But Moffat had to do the same. Only, I think he had an even harder job. He had to reinvent a recent program, one that was massively successful. He had to make it new and different, but familiar too. He didn’t have the same options as RTD to recreate it from the bottom up, or to decide what he wanted to carry over from the past. For Moffat, there was a recent legacy to uphold, and that must have been a pretty terrifying prospect. He HAD to make his new version of the show move seamlessly from the RTD one, still fresh in people’s minds. He had to be subtle, at least at first. He couldn’t just throw everything out and start again. He had to do it while we were watching, slowly bring us over to his way of thinking, slowly move us away from what we’d grown used to and make us comfortable with what he wanted his version of the show to be. Any of us can sit there and argue about how we would have done it, what our version of Doctor Who would have looked like. But Moffat actually did it. He took RTD’s show and turned it into something new, whilst holding on to the audience.

And you know what? For me, he’s delivered. More than that. He’s delivered what I think is probably one of the best series of Doctor Who we’ve ever had. And this from a hardcore fan, one of those few I mentioned earlier who’s always loved the show.

I think what Moffat has done beyond all else is finally decide what Doctor Who is.

There was lots of talk early on about how Moffat considered Doctor Who to be a fairytale. I liked this idea. In fact, I was hugely enamoured with it. Having recently read Paul Magrs’s The Scarlet Empress, I was ready for a different sort of Doctor Who. And then the first few episodes aired, and I didn’t see it. I didn’t see that magic on screen. Don’t get me wrong – I loved what I saw. But I loved it in the same way I’ve always loved Doctor Who, and in the same way I’d enjoyed the RTD era. I couldn’t see the fairytale on screen. I couldn’t see the magic. But now I realize it was there all along, and Moffat was playing a subtle game. He was luring us in. He was bridging the gap between one era and the next.

Now, having seen the finale and understood (I think!) what Moffat was doing, I’m hugely impressed. This WAS the Doctor Who I was hoping for. It respected the audience without alienating the kids. It gave us logical plots that were well thought out. And importantly – most importantly of all – he told us the rules of engagement. He was clear from the outset.

This is a fairytale, he said. A fairytale in which magic works and mad things happen. A fairytale in which dreams come true and love conquers all. He set out his rules and he stuck to them. Or rather, he threw out the rules and told us that anything goes. Yes, there was lots of technological hand waving, but Moffat knows we’ll forgive him for that because of the story, and the scope, and the vision. He told us outright that this was a version of Doctor Who in which magic works. And I applaud that. This WAS a fairytale. And just like Paul Magrs’s with The Scarlet Empress, Moffat had the balls to see it through.

When the Doctor towed the Earth at the end of the fourth series, or when he was rejuvenated by the ‘faith of the people’ at the end of the third, I baulked. I baulked because it seemed so ludicrous, so outlandish, so out of step with what I expected of Doctor Who. And looking back, I think that’s because I didn’t see Doctor Who as a fairytale. I saw it as a science fiction show. And I think, for the most part, I was right. I think it was a science fiction show. Or at least that’s what we’d been led to believe. And I couldn’t help judging it by those standards. (And don’t get me wrong here, I loved a lot of what we saw in the last five years).

But I think one of Moffat’s greatest achievements this year has been his clarity of purpose, his intent to prove to us that what we’ve been watching was a fairytale. He hammered it home every week. He told us this Doctor, his Doctor, is a magician, a strange, powerful alien who bumbles around the universe in his magic box. Not a human being at all, but a genie from another realm.

I’ve always been a fan of Finn Clark and his superlative reviews of Doctor Who novels. When he originally reviewed The Scarlet Empress (and I keep coming back to this book, because I think it’s a book that’s entirely in tune with what Moffat is doing), he predicted a sea change, a new way of reading the Doctor. That sea change didn’t come at the time, but I think that prediction is finally starting to come true now.

With Moffat we have someone who understands what Doctor Who really is: a fantasy. The sort of lucid dream that you’re desperate to remember in the morning. And as Magrs told us all those years ago, it’s the Arabian nights, a mythological epic filled with genies and magicians, robots and starships, peril and love. The only logic needed is that of a fairytale.

This is what Moffat’s been telling us, I think. This is what his version of Doctor Who is all about. And looking back, it all makes sense. Even that third episode with the dayglo Daleks and the talking bomb, an episode I really struggled with at the time. Because in a fantasy version if the universe, in a fairytale, of course you could persuade a bomb not to explode. Just like you could fly anywhere in time inside a magic box that was bigger on the inside than the outside and contained a lonely genie looking for a friend. I don’t really care whether it’s adolescent or not, or whether it’s not ‘realistic’, or whether people never really die. I don’t. I don’t think that’s what it’s about. I don’t mind the happy endings where everybody lives. I do mind if they haven’t learned anything, or if we, as the audience, haven’t learned anything about those characters.

That’s how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Dalek bomb. Because I realised the rules of engagement. I realised how refreshing it was to stop worrying about whether I was watching good science fiction and concentrating on whether it was a good story. A good fairytale. Moffat’s Doctor Who is closer to Alice in Wonderland than it is to Battlestar Galactica. And realising that has allowed me to enjoy it all the more. To revel in it.

I love the direction Moffat has taken this year. It’s mature and funny and mythic and bold. It’s a big, baroque fantasy story and it’s finally stopped being self conscious and decided what it is.

I can’t wait for Christmas!

Eighth Doctor Adventures!

As I’ve mentioned on this blog once or twice already, I’ve recently rediscovered the delights of Doctor Who fiction. That’s not to say I haven’t read lots of Doctor Who novels in the past, but simply that they’ve always been Target novelizations, Novellas, Short Trips or standalone past Doctor adventures, rather than installments in a regular ongoing series.

I suppose it was a case of ‘continuity fear’ that put me off, the notion that were I to indulge myself in either the ongoing Virgin range or, later, the BBC Eighth Doctor stories, I would either a) lose my entire life to them as I attempted to stay on top of the publication schedule each month or b) dip in and out but not experience them properly because I’d miss out on the ongoing story arcs and character development. I guess I was scared to commit.

Well, that’s all a matter of hindsight now, since both of those ranges are sadly extinct. But recently I decided to dip my toe in the water and read a copy of ‘The Scarlet Empress’ by Paul Magrs, after having reread his Third Doctor novel, ‘Verdigris’, and enjoying it just as much as I remember doing the first time around.

And what a revelation it was. I loved it. Every minute of it. And because of it I’ve gone back to the start and I’m now working my way – at my own pace – through the ongoing Eighth Doctor stories. So I thought I’d do a quick recap on where I’m up to. After Empress I went back to the start and read ‘The Eight Doctors’ by Terrance Dicks. Then back again to ‘The Dying Days’ by Lance Parkin, followed by the Telos Novella, ‘Rip Tide’ by Louise Cooper. Now I’m on with ‘Eye of the Tyger’ by Paul McAuley, before tackling ‘Vampire Science’ by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman.

The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs

For me, this book is a blueprint for a different kind of Doctor Who. A literary Doctor Who that has moved on from the limitations of a television budget and returned to the core ideas of the show. A Doctor Who that celebrates its freedom, recognizes what it is and is not self-conscious about it. This is Doctor Who with the stabilizers removed, an unashamed adventure story and a metatexual examination of the character and his history.

I loved this book. It is at once fantastical, hallucinatory and literary. It plays with form and winks at you knowingly while doing so. It takes a quest fantasy narrative and jumbles it up with the trappings of Doctor Who. It explores the character of the Doctor by juxtaposing him against Iris Wildthyme, the madcap, drunken transtemporal adventuress who is clearly in love with him (and stealing his history, subsuming it into her own).

The setting, too, is filled with wonder. Hyspero is a magical landscape, ever shifting: a place where dreams can become reality and reality can become dreams. We need more stories in this setting. I thought it was rather marvelous.

And what’s more, the book was funny, too. I love the notion of the Doctor coming up against all those wonderful Harryhausen monsters, a giant Walrus and enormous birds. I saw them in my mind’s eye as stop-motion animation, and was filled with nostalgia for a lost age of adventure movie.

Brilliant stuff.

The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks

You know, I’d been led to believe this was worthless. I’d read reviews telling me to avoid it like the plague. I’d heard it was best forgotten, a piece of Doctor Who history that people like to pretend never happened. I came to it with those preconceptions in mind.

Perhaps because of that, perhaps because I expected nothing from this book at all, I have to say: I actually enjoyed it. Now, coming off the back of the Magrs book, I’ll freely admit that this wasn’t revolutionary, and didn’t do anything new, and didn’t really have any depth of characterization or great literary shakes. And it was full of what people like to call ‘fanwank’, references to old continuity from the TV show. But it had a certain charm, and some of the vignettes were very effective. And it felt like Doctor Who.

I read it quickly and never wished it were over. And that kind of left me on a high, because I was expecting it to be a slog. So I went to the next book feeling cheery and ready for more.

The Dying Days by Lance Parkin

This was great, too! It was great in a different way from the Magrs book: it felt traditional. It felt very English. It felt like classic Doctor Who rendered as a novel. I liked that. It was a nice counter to the wild reinvention of the Magrs book (and whilst I think I prefer that kind of wild invention, I also don’t want it every time I sit down to read Doctor Who. Sometimes I do just want Doctor Who, done well).

I imagine Lance Parkin must have felt a great weight on his shoulders while writing this (and from reading his notes on the novel it’s clear he had a ‘shopping list’ of things he had to do). He had to simultaneously wrap up the Virgin era, kick off the Eighth Doctor adventures and launch the Bernice Summerfield spin-off series. And I have to hand it to him, he did it with panache.

I found this thoroughly engaging. I thought the Ice Warriors were great. And it was lovely to see the Brigadier back in action again. I can see why people herald this as one of the best of the New Adventures. And again, some lovely funny moments.

I find myself looking forward to more Lance Parkin novels as I read on…

Rip Tide by Louise Cooper

This was a lovely little book! Only a novella, but with a heart big enough to be a novel. And a lovely treatment of the format: a Doctor Who story with no bad guys! Where the only enemy is the sea and a terrible disease.

I thought the characterization of the Doctor was particularly well done here, and the other characters – particularly Nina, the stand in companion – were well drawn and sympathetic.

This was also a book with a real sense of place. The setting was so fantastically well described that I could almost taste the sea spray and feel the bracing wind coming in off the water.  I wanted the book to go on, for the Doctor to take Nina off to new lands (like Hyspero!). But in the end it was the perfect length for the story, and the farewell between Nina and the Doctor was touching and memorable.

So there we have it. My Eighth Doctor odyssey continues. I’m enjoying ‘Eye of the Tyger’ and looking forward to getting stuck into ‘Vampire Science’ too! I only hope the stories don’t get too bogged down in their own continuity as I read on…

Back from New York

Just a quick update as I get caught up on correspondence from the last week.

I’m back from my trip to New York, where I was attending Book Expo America. I had a lovely time working, catching up with friends and enjoying the familiar sights, places and sounds of the city, as well as discovering new ones, too. I adore New York. I realised this trip how much time I’ve actually spent there – I think this was my thirteenth visit in five years – and I miss it when I’m away from it for too long. There’s some good photographs from this trip, too, so as soon as I can get hold of them (friend and fellow author Nick Kyme was our official photographer this time), I’ll post a few. Lots of great new memories too. And rather a lot of extra luggage (books, clothes, books…)

I’m also long overdue the promised roundup of recent reading. I’m still working my way through the Eighth Doctor stories, amongst other things. More on those when I’ve had time to catch up on sleep!

Babel Clash

I’m currently engaged in a Babel Clash with the most excellent Adrian Tchaikovsky over at the Borders blog. At the moment we’re talking about Superman and the concept of ‘supermen’ as heroes in fantasy fiction. We’re going to be hanging out and conversing for a few days. Make sure you head on over and check it out!

Thea Gilmore

I went back to Thea Gilmore today, specifically her album Avalanche.

This has to be my favourite of her studio albums. I think she’s so underrated; one of the best British female artists working today. I listen to her for inspiration and this album pretty much provided a soundtrack for Ghosts of Manhattan. I put it on in the car this morning and it still sounds fresh, and soulful, and joyous. There are so many great songs here: ‘Mainstream’ (which seems to be a track in dialogue with Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’), ‘Avalanche’, ‘Heads Will Roll’ and my personal favourite, ‘Razor Valentine’. That last, in my mind, is the voice of Celeste Parker from Ghosts, singing a plaintive lament for her lover. I listened to the song again and again while I was writing and it captures the tone of my character perfectly.

I can feel myself gearing up for more. I’m planning to tackle another of her albums tomorrow. Can’t wait.

Presents!

Look what arrived in a parcel today! A gift of tea from a lovely reader called Nathan, who works for the Tea House Emporium in Bath. How fantastic!

Do I really go on about Earl Grey that much? Clearly I do!

I can’t wait to brew a pot of this and sit down with a good book! Thanks, Nathan!

Recent Viewing

I’ve been thinking about Poliakoff this week. I’m a big fan of his TV work and was dismayed to miss Glorious 39 at the pictures when it was released. I realised it was out on DVD the other day so I ordered a copy and watched it over the weekend. It was fab. It reminded me why I loved Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers and all those other marvellous stories so much. He works miracles with a camera. The Poliakoff landscape is a delightful confection, seen through a sugar-coated lens: sumptuous and vibrant and lovely. It’s a fantastic juxtaposition to his often dark subject matter and powerful scripts. I think Poliakoff has a deep understanding of the human condition, of the things that make us tick, or give us joy, or terrify us. Glorious 39 delivered all of that, in spades, along with some great performances. Romola Garai and Bill Nighy were particular standouts for me. I’ll be coming back to this film. But first I’m going back to Shooting the Past, which I was shocked to realise I hadn’t seen for over 10 years!

The other thing I’ve been enjoying recently is Glee. I think it has some of the most sparkling, well-written scripts on TV at the moment. And I love the meta-textual qualities, too, the nods and winks from the writers, the things that expose the real heart of the show beneath all of that musical gloss. This week we saw one of the teachers say to another (and I’m paraphrasing) “We spend so much time around these kids I think we’re starting to act like them.” And isn’t that exactly the point! Don’t we all act like teenagers, most of the time? Do we ever really grow up? Behind the veneer of maturity and respectability, aren’t we all still vulnerable teenagers at heart?

I think the writers and producers and actors behind Glee understand this. Essentially, though, I think the characters understand this too, aware that they’re acting out a series of desperate love stories and aware that we’re watching them do it, too. And every now and then, they also burst into song. Absolutely sublime.

The Beast of Malbury Cross

Hmmm. I wonder what this is?