Gareth Preston's Blog, page 9

Bystander 27 review

What’s it like to live in a world of superheroes? To turn on the news and hear that an invasion from another dimension has just been foiled by a team of brightly costumed men and women with incredible powers. For the second time that year. Or your trip to the shops is disrupted by an army of living clothes or a wall-destroying rumble between two men in hi-tech armour?

  This is a question that’s been on the mind of Rik Hoskin and it’s the kernel that has resulted in “Bystander 27”, an excitin...

Bystander 27

Long time readers of this blog may recall that my friend Rik Hoskin has already had a long career of writing novels under other people’s names, like James Axler. So it was overdue that he got a chance to write one emblazoned with his own. A name that can already be seen on many a comic, graphic novel, DragonCon award and much else. Bystander 27 is a hugely enjoyable SF adventure set in a world of original superheroes, but told from street level. What’s it like to live in a place in a place which...

Worktown Words

My association with Live from Worktown goes back to 2014 and the first Live from Worktown festival in Bolton. Since then the group has diversified into several artistic ventures and one of their recent successes has been the online magazine Worktown Words. It’s a celebration of new writing from the region, both poetry and short prose pieces. Each issue has a guest editor and I was honoured to be asked to curate Issue 9.

After some thought I chose the word celebration as the theme and over the...

Doctor Who – Too Hot for TV Episode 4.5

Recently I had a pleasure of guesting on Dylan Rees’ hugely entertaining podcast about the wider world of Doctor Who – comic strips, Big Finish audios, independent videos and similar. For this issue we were celebrating the Dalek’s own comic strip, printed in TV Century 21 at the height of Sixties Dalekmania. Although credited to Terry Nation, it was in fact largely written by David Whitaker, then script editor for the programme and was fairly sophisticated for children’s title. Certainly compare...

The Star Wars movie saga ranked from Best to Worst

I’ve just finished a Star Wars movie marathon, courtesy of Disney+ It’s been the first time I’ve done that since the Disney movies started appearing and that seems as good as reason as any to rate the movies from 1 to 12. Note I am not including the television series or the Ewok movies. (Assume they’d be between 11 and 12.)

1. The Empire Strikes Back
Remains Star Wars’ finest two hours. Armed with new box of techniques learnt from the first film, the team produce a film that dares to take the ...

Doctor Who – At Childhood’s End Reviewed

It is fair to say that Doctor Who is almost as much a literary world as a television one. Even before Virgin Publishing released the first authorised original novel Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel in 1991, many fans including myself had followed the Time Lord through the Target novelisations of stories which we thought we would never see on television again. Not to mention the hundreds of pages of fan fiction which had emerged since the Seventies, a handful of whoms authors would eventually...

Doctor Who The Aztecs Special Edition DVD

Before we begin this revisit to another of my old ciao.co.uk reviews, a quick note that the latest edition of the Talking Pictures TV podcast is now out. Hosted by Scott Phipps, it features a contribution by myself on the 1979 Quatermass series by Thames. Plus lots of interesting reviews about old British gems like Hobsons Choice and The Snorkel. Listen to it now at Spotify, iTunes etc or its website. Thank you, now back to the marvellous Hartnell era of Doctor Who.

Two very different...

Doctor Who – Colony in Space DVD Review

As gorgeous as the new Doctor Who Collection blurays are, one of the strengths of the DVD releases was that, for one month, nearly story, regardless of reputation, got its moment in the sun. The center of a collection of DVD extras, memories and artwork. Because there are some adventures that otherwise might always be the roughage of a season, a spacer between other more celebrated titles. Colony in Space is such a serial. The most six-parterly of Pertwee six-parters,

The Master has stolen...

Doctor Who – The Ark

If there is one idea science fiction has taught us, its that huge colony ships crewed by generations of humans are generally a bad idea, prone to all kinds of sociological weirdness. Or in the case of this story, employing an another alien race as your servant class is bound to come back to bite you.

Earth is about to fall into the Sun, so the survivors of the human race have set out in a gigantic colony ship to live on the planet Refusis II. Alongside them for the journey are an alien race...

Doctor Who – The Mutants

By the ninth season, the Doctor Who production team of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were finding their reliable Earth based formula for adventures beginning to constrain them. Happily they had cleverly written themselves an escape clause. The Doctors exile could be temporarily relieved by the Time Lords who had imposed it, when they wanted to hypocritically send him on a mission to interfere with other civilisations, the very crime they were punishing him for. The Mutants is one of those...