Obverse Books, current home of Faction Paradox, Iris Wildthyme, and other spinoff series, just published another in its line of nonfiction books: Downtime: The Lost Years of Doctor Who, by Dylan Rees. After Doctor Who went off the air in 1989, there was a long run without new, filmed Doctor Who, aside from the 1996 TV movie. So a number of fans and would-be pros took it on themselves to create extremely low budget videos and audios that would tide the diehard fans over. Sometimes they skated close to the line making Doctor Who-like videos like The Stranger series, starring sixth Doctor Colin Baker. Other times they managed to get the rights to use certain characters or alien races. Wartime featured John Levene as Benton. Downtime featured the characters Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sarah Jane Smith, Victoria Waterfield, and Professor Travers, all played by the people who played them on Doctor Who, in a story involving the Great Intelligence and introducing the character Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. Then there were videos featuring Doctor Who cast members as new characters, like The Airzone Solution. Later, audio series like Faction Paradox (spun off from the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels) and Kaldor City (combining elements from Doctor Who and Blake's 7) appeared. Rees researched old publications but also conducted a number of new interviews. There's a lot of information here. I've seen a handful of the videos described here, which vary wildly in entertainment value, and I've heard some of the audios. Some of this may be seen as just the stuff desperate people put up with for a fix -- but some is quite good, and not only did Doctor Who former companions and guest stars appear, so did several Doctors, as well as people who would go on to be better known -- Mark Gatiss, for example. I'm only a few chapters into the book and I'm a bit bugged by the slightly rough prose, typos, and grammatical errors, but these aren't exactly rare in books from very small presses. The thing is, no major publisher is going to do a book on this stuff, so the range of material Rees covers, the research he's done, and the interviews make up for the book's shortcomings. It's a good look at an important, if now almost forgotten, period of Who history. ETA: just about done reading the book, and it's been a chore. The author doesn't know what punctuation is for, never mind what sentence fragments, run-on sentences, or dangling participles are. The book's had some positive reviews, so maybe people don't care about the quality of written prose these days, or possibly the wrong version of the book was used to create the ebook. Obverse is a small press and some things slip through occasionally, but this is not up to their usual standard. It's a shame because there's a lot of information here. But tonight I'm going to start reading the latest Black Archive book from Obverse, this one on Scream of the Shalka. I'm looking forward to it.
This looks interesting: Nine Lives, a charity anthology of stories about the Shalka Doctor. Don't recognize most of the names involved but I ordered it anyway (https://dwninelives.wordpress.com/).
Oh, that's cool. Although I would love to hear Richard E. Grant reprise the role for Big Finish as an Unbound entry. Edit: I couldn't find any details about the book itself on the page and they're not accepting any new orders right now.
Speaking of the Shalka Doctor, I just ordered Jon Arnold's book on Shalka for the Black Archive series.
Seasons of War: The Final Edition (the charity anthology about the War Doctor) arrived in the mail today. I went back and forth as to whether or not I wanted a hard copy of Seasons of War for a variety of reasons, not all of them related to already having the ebook that was originally released, and when it was offered this time I bit the bullet (ie., the shipping cost from the UK) and ordered the book. Then Sir John Hurt died, and that confirmed the spur of the moment decision. It's a hefty tome, and when I say that I mean it's a heavy book. Differences from the original eBook look like: A brief piece from Declan May on John Hurt. A one sentence epigraph from Steven Moffat. New story: "Life in Wartime" from Gary Russell, after "Gardening." New story: "Reflections" by Christine Grit, after "The Ingenious Gentleman." New story: "The Man in the Bandolier" by Barnaby Eaton-Jones, replacing "Help a Stranded Time Traveller" by Matthew Sylvester. Sort-of new story: "Rise/Risen: A Code" by Delcan May. (I say "sort-of new" because it was posted online) It goes after the Prologue. The Acknowledgements and About the Authors section is gone. I'm not sure why I just documented this. Boredom, I guess.
I read the ebook. Really liked it. Good information and good insights. Hope mine shows up soon, then.
What you and Paul Simpson have said about the book piqued my interest, and then Lulu had a free shipping offer which pushed me over the edge into buying it. I'd buy more Obverse books, but shipping costs from the UK are insane, so the POD option with Lulu was really attractive. I don't regret purchasing it, though the shipping was almost a deal-breaker. As a lover of books, I have a weird issue with its layout -- either indent your paragraphs or double-space your paragraphs, but for the love of typography don't do both. It looks like amateur hour and, frankly, without the double-spacing the page count could have been reduced by at least 100 pages meaning lower printing costs and more money for the charity.
I mentioned the formatting issue somewhere -- Gallifrey Base or facebook -- and whatsisname the editor pronounced that he loved the look of the book and it was a work of art, more or less. But I've encountered a few micropress types whose books' layout looks like a draft Word document in Arial slapped down on paper, and they think they're being creative instead of being bound by the old dumb cliches of conventional publishing. ETA: my copy arrived. It's nice enough for a fanthology, production-wise, but it's not something you'd see in a bookstore. Now, if I find I believe this is actually the final War Doctor production from Declan et al, I may get around to reading it.
I had the opportunity today to read the 2017 Free Comic Book Day special. In past years, the FCBD specials have been three or four unrelated short stories, each story starring the TARDIS teams from the ongoing series. This year's does something different -- it's more like one story, with each Doctor's segment telling a different part of the larger tale. The ninth Doctor's segment... Spoiler: Spoilers! ...is explicitly pre-"Rose." It's not quite a post-regeneration story, but the Doctor is still figuring himself out after the Time War. I think this may be the first official story set in the post-"Day"/pre-"Rose" gap. There's a cute reference to Titan's eleventh Doctor comics in the tenth Doctor's segment of the story. And the twelfth Doctor's segment co-stars Bill, but not Nardole. (Between that and the novels, two of which, judging by the covers and the released blurbs, don't feature Nardole, I'm figuring that Nardole won't be a permanent part of the TARDIS team in the Bill era. That he's a transitional companion of sorts.) I can't say that I have any feeling for Bill as a character after reading this. For something that will be given away for free in six weeks, it's fine if a bit insubstantial. I have some ambivalence there myself. I have this pervading sense of The Last Dangerous Visions -- the self-promoting hucksterism, the shifting goalposts -- to Seasons of War.
This seems strange to me -- the BBC has set up a website for Doctor Who fan fiction. On a different note, Obverse's Scream of the Shalka book arrived in the mail yesterday via Lulu, a print-on-demand service. I'll dive into it this weekend.
The BBC experimented with that a couple months ago with a Class fanfic site. I didn't check it out. This one may be a bit busier. My copy of the third issue of Vworp Vworp arrived the other day. More a perfect-bound paperback than a magazine or old school fanzine. Great production values, neat Dalek audio CD. Haven't dived into the content yet but it looks interesting.
Today I bought Unhistory, Lance Parkin and Lars Pearson's companion to Ahistory (the comprehensive Doctor Who chronology), this one focusing on the non-canonical and apocryphal Doctor Who stories, from the old annuals and comic strips to television commercials and Strax's theatrical intro to "The Day of the Doctor." One interesting (and lengthy) piece in it is an essay titled "Old Tom," a look at the elderly fourth Doctor seen in "Shada," Dimensions in Time, a series of New Zealand television commercials, and, of course, "The Day of the Doctor." Parkin explores some possibilities to explain this Doctor, dismissing the fan theory that he's a future incarnation, and positing instead that he was either created by the Watcher in "Logopolis" or was a reincarnation of the Doctor created by the Time Lords during the Time War, much like the Master, perhaps because the eighth Doctor had avoided the Time War to that point. Definitely a specialist's tome.
Hm, both of those books sound interesting. I'll have to track them down. Are the Big FInish audio plays taken into account in either of them?
Ahistory includes pretty much everything -- television, the novels, Big Finish, the DWM comics, and stuff I'm forgetting. There's a print 3rd Edition (that's freakin' masive) that goes up through 2011's stories, and an ebook supplement that covers just 2012 and 2013's stories. Unhistory is the stuff that doesn't fit, sometimes because it was never intended to, sometimes because the creators didn't care, sometimes because it's really obscure. Yet Parkin's essays show how some problematic element could fit. Admittedly, with something like John and Gillian, the Doctor's grandchildren, that's with great difficulty.
Heh, I went to Amazon to look up AHistory and it turns out that book has been sitting in my "Save for Later" section of my cart for years. Unhistory appears to be only available as an eBook which is too bad.
Titan Comics has announced the 2017 Doctor Who Day -- It's September 2nd -- and given a partial hint to this year's Nine/Ten/Eleven/Twelve crossover (at least one issue drawn by Rachael Stott).
My copy of Nine Lives arrived today. Flipping through it, I noticed that the formatting is inconsistent from story to story. There's the usual amateur mistake of using a sans serif typeface all through the book, but some stories have paragraph breaks properly formatted with indentation, others have breaks between paragraphs, and various combinations thereof. They got their book out pretty quickly compared to some others, though.
For anyone that's interested, Declan May is taking orders for his unofficial War Doctor novel (and follow-up to his unofficial Seasons of War anthology as well as a prequel to "The Day of the Doctor") for the next few weeks.
Tom Spilsbury is stepping down as editor of Doctor Who Magazine with issue #515, on sale at the end of this month.