Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 81

The Only Mystery Worth Solving [WHO-50—1989]

Many fans have pointed out the role of Ace, the last of the “classic Who” companions, in shaping what the modern companion of New Who would look like. In particular, there has been a great deal of commentary and analysis about the changes that were starting to be made during this last gasp of Doctor Who (not just the idea of the companion as protagonist, and raised emotional stakes for the Doctor himself, but also stories that reflected a more gender-aware and diverse Britain) and how this seems to have had a powerful impact on the returning version of the show, especially the 2005 Eccleston and Piper season.

This is hardly surprising, as McCoy’s Doctor and Ace’s character were not just central to the last “proper” run of the show, but also remained the focus of fan and pro creativity for many years in the decade that followed, and many of the fans, pros and fannish pros who were part of that world were themselves involved in the return of the show.

Ace is not Rose, not by a long shot, but there are many elements of her character that demonstrate her influence over the creation of Rose, and why RTD might have thought that the returning show should revolve around the family, angst and narrative of a working class teenage girl.

Ace also has a lot in common with Clara, the current companion that we are only just beginning to parse – because she wasn’t just a key point of view character for the audience, she was also revealed to be a mystery for the Doctor to solve.

This wasn’t quite true from the start – there was nothing especially mysterious about Ace in her very first story, Dragonfire. Sure, her origin story (I blew up the art room with homemade explosives, caught a passing “time storm” and ended up on another planet) makes no sense at all, but the Doctor did not reveal that he was taking an interest in her for anything other than the usual reason – Mel was moving on, Ace was a chirpy girl who looked like she might be handy to have along on adventures. Job done.

But over the next two years, it became clear that there was a mystery. Indeed, there were two layers of mystery to Ace and her origins. One was plot-derived – in The Curse of Fenric it was revealed that Ace was one of many humans descended from a Viking influenced by the evil Fenric, and thus was one of his ‘wolves.’ Unlike the other Wolves of Fenric we meet, however, she is not easily manipulated (except by the Doctor) and proves to be Fenric’s undoing.

All that plotty stuff is rather complex and clever, but it doesn’t directly affect on the other stories that depict Ace’s relationship with the Doctor as Mystery and Detective. The revelation that the Doctor has known this about her all along adds a certain frisson to some of their other confrontations, but much is still left unsaid.

Still, it seems clear that Ace herself (not just the potential pawn of Fenric) is the mystery that the Doctor wants to unravel and solve. Many of her stories, especially those that screened in 1989, show the Doctor manipulating Ace via the TARDIS into facing her fears, the ghosts from her past, and other personal issues.

Only one story of 1989, Battlefield, addresses the Doctor’s own mysterious past (and future), setting him up as Merlin to an intergalactic Arthurian legend – and at the same time setting Ace up as his own Arthur, the hero who draws the sword from the stone and inherits a kingdom thanks to the machinations of guess who? The remaining three stories of this season very much follow the pattern of the Doctor digging away at some key issue in Ace’s psyche, revealing that he knows more than he should about her past, and her potential.

In Ghost Light, the Doctor takes Ace back to Perivale, the London suburb she comes from (and loathes). Quite specifically, he takes her to a beautiful, gothic and scary house that represents the central focus of her teenage anger – in her past and the house’s future, she had burned it to the ground after her friend Manisha’s flat was subject to racist firebombing.

In The Curse of Fenric, Ace not only learns of of her connectios to the sinister and evil villain of the piece, but also comes face to face with the mother she hates, here an innocent baby.

Finally, in Survival, the last of the classic run, the Doctor actually takes Ace back to her home of Perivale in the present day, a few months after she left. Disappointingly, we don’t meet her mother (which feels like a major omission considering how she looms so large in Ace’s unhappiness about herself and her life) but we do see something of the impact Ace’s disappearance has had on her community.

Given that the Fenric aspect had already been resolved, the only reason that the Doctor continued with his quest to make Ace examine many of her sources for personal angst must be because it was the mystery of HER and not Fenric that he was interested in – how humans tick, how they can be broken and mended. It’s an emotional, rather than plot-driven arc, highly unusual for Doctor Who in the 1980′s or indeed prior to 1996.

Here we are in 2013, though, and the Doctor is at it again, scratching away at Clara in the hope of finding out what makes her tick – possibly not because of massive, universe-altering ramifications, but simply because she represents a previously unseen facet of humanity, “the only mystery worth solving.”

Let’s hope they can resolve the matter without burning down any buildings.

“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace — we’ve got work to do!”

ELSEWHERE ON 1989



Battlefield and the Woman Warrior [Doctor Her]

“She Vanquished Me” – Doctor Who: Battlefield [TansyRR.com]

Battlefield [Wife in Space]

Ghost Light [Wife in Space]

Female Power and the Curse of Fenric [TansyRR at Doctor Her]



Lucky Number Seven – Curse of Fenric [NeoWhovian]

All Seven and We Watch Ace Fall – Curse of Fenric [Verity! Podcast]

Survival [Wife in Space]

The Tea is Getting Cold [Tor.com]

The Many Futures of Ace McShane [TansyRR at Doctor Her]

PREVIOUSLY:

Friday Links is Late Today

Sorry!

The big talking point on social media this week is Maureen Johnson’s piece in the Huffington Post about gendered book covers, along with a highly entertaining challenge to genderflip covers from one ‘author’ to another and see what difference it makes.

May the 4th (be with you) brought its usual slew of Star Wars posts, some good, many bad or boring. But I did enjoy this piece about Leigh Brackett, and how her pulp SF fantasy writing (and not her long history of excellent screenwriting) led to her writing a draft of the much celebrated middle film, The Empire Strikes Back.

Bitch Magazine looked at how F. Scott Fitzgerald (and thus The Great Gatsby, and thus all the film versions of The Great Gatsby) completely missed the point of flappers.

My favourite new blog, A Song of Ice and Attire, looks closely at the costume choices of the female characters in Game of Thrones, and all the clever subtext that they convey. It’s brilliant stuff, and makes me look at the designers of the show in a whole new light.

Speaking of A Game of Thrones, what’s going on with the accents in that show? Gawker tries to explain it.

So what exactly are Kindle Singles anyway, and why are they so popular? The New York Times profiles the range, and looks at why it works for Amazon and for the writers involved.

Publishers Weekly looks at how graphic novels went from being ignored by libraries to being their hottest and most checked-out properties.

Deb Biancotti runs through her planning and performance for this year’s Ditmar Awards, with a whole bunch of advice for people running future awards ceremonies in fandom. Great stuff, I wish I had been there!

Going Back to Totter’s Lane [WHO-50—1988]

The junkyard in Totter’s Lane is cemented in Doctor Who history as the location where the TARDIS was parked in the very first episode, An Unearthly Child. It was here that we learned exactly what was Very Strange about Susan, and the lives of ordinary teachers Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton changed forever.

The TARDIS tends to move forwards, onward and upwards to new adventures, but very occasionally it does return to old haunts. In Attack of the Cybermen in 1985, the Sixth Doctor and Peri landed in a certain familiar (and yet looking completely different) junkyard, twenty two years after the Doctor originally left. Not only were there Cybermen walking around the general area, but this story also featured another pointed callback, with the TARDIS chameleon circuit finally fixed, and the TARDIS taking the form of a large harpsichord.

But that callback, it has to be said, was rather gratuitous. The story didn’t have to be in Totter’s Lane, or indeed in a junkyard at all.

Three years later, they did it again.

The original 1963 junkyard in Totter’s Lane

In 1985, the Sixth Doctor and Peri returned to “the junkyard”.

Another completely different junkyard, this one back in 1963 for Remembrance of the Daleks (1988). Note spelling.

A recreation of the 1963 studio junkyard in Totter’s Lane, for the 2013 docudrama “An Adventure in Space and Time.”

This time, in the 25th anniversary year of Doctor Who, the Seventh Doctor took Ace back to his old stamping ground only a few months after he left in 1963 – and we discovered that there had always been a Grand Plan behind him being there in the first place.

There’s no denying that Remembrance of the Daleks is a much better scripted and produced story than Attack of the Cybermen – I mean, it just is – but there are a few continuity details that make it harder to swallow. One is that, basically, the junkyard looks nothing like the one from An Unearthly Child. This is also true for Attack, but at least Attack was set in the 1980’s and there was an excuse for things looking different.

In 1988 An Unearthly Child was a distant memory for most regular viewers of the show. They were still two years away from its first release on home video, and repeats of black and white stories were not exactly thick on the ground.

This is, however, no excuse for the fact that the sign-painter mis-spelled the name on the gate (I.M. Foreman becoming I.M. Forman) which means this is in fact NOT THE SAME JUNKYARD AT ALL. Sure, it’s a minor detail of continuity except for it being the name Susan took when she attended school, and thus was recorded in every book about Doctor Who ever.

Ahem.

On the other hand, if the junkyard of Remembrance had been a devastatingly accurate copy of the tiny, poky little studio-bound space from An Unearthly Child, it would have looked pretty terrible. Group Captain Gilmore would probably not have been able to fit several jeeps into it, and there would have been fewer Daleks exploding. So, you know, swings and roundabouts.

At this point I should probably mention that Remembrance of the Daleks is brilliant. Sure, it invites nitpickers like me to have a go by calling back to old stories, then getting the continuity wrong. It’s also a little disappointing that we spend a lot of time around Coal Hill School without any mention of the teachers who are at this point still missing.

What we do get, though, is a sense of a much larger world than was shown to us in An Unearthly Child. The operation run by Group Captain Gilmore, with Dr Rachel Jensen, Sgt Mike and assistant Allison, is a forerunner to UNIT and indeed Torchwood – investigating mysterious happenings! They’re all pretty adorable.

But the big universe-expanding revelation is that the First Doctor wasn’t just hanging out in 1963 – he left something behind, a powerful Time Lord weapon known as the Hand of Omega which, considering his limitations at the time, he can’t possibly have expected to ever return to.

The Daleks are massing, drawn by their desire for this super weapon, and it seems like this was a trap that the Doctor intended all along, except for the dodgy part where he’d never heard of the Daleks when he was first here, let alone inspired them to take up time travel related conquest of the universe.

Yes, the Doctor is THAT sneaky.

While the plot really does creak if you look too hard at it (so not a unique New Who feature), this story is full of brilliant moments. The spaceship landing in the school. Ace and her souped-up baseball bat attacking Daleks. Explosions and short skirts and Barbara hair! Comparisons between the institutionalised racism to be found in 1960’s Britain, and the xenophobic attitudes of the Daleks themselves…

Oh, and also that one time a Dalek went upstairs, a colossal ‘fuck you’ to the Fourth Doctor’s mockery of them in Destiny of the Daleks, not to mention all those jokes that had been around since the 60’s.

If going back to Totter’s Lane is something that excited you in 1988 (or any time after that when you may have experienced Remembrance of the Daleks) then I have a couple of audio recommendations for you. Counter Measures is a recent Big Finish mini-series featuring the team from this story – Chunky Gilmore, Dr Rachel and Allison, back again to fight mysterious crime to a Swinging Sixties soundtrack. Also, in the current AudioGo Destiny of the Doctor series, the First Doctor and Susan audiobook Hunters of Earth does an effective job of drawing together these two disparate versions of 1963, and making them feel far more like they are parts of the same story.

ELSEWHERE ON 1988



Remembrance of the Daleks [Wife in Space]

Remembrance of the Daleks Episodes 1 [Chronic Hysteresis]

Remembrance of the Daleks Episodes 2 [Chronic Hysteresis]

The Happiness Patrol [The Angriest]

The Happiness Patrol Monochrome Vid [YouTube]

Silver Nemesis [Chronic Hysteresis]

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy [NeoWhovian]

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy [Wife in Space]

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy Ep 3 [Chronic Hysteresis]

PREVIOUSLY:

Galactic Suburbia 80

In which there is gallivanting, schlepping, recycling and rejoicing – cos a Galactic Suburbia baby is on the way!

Download the new episode here.

News

Conflux Update: Alex’s Report, Alisa’s Report, Everyone Else’s Wrap Ups



Ditmar winners (and associated awards) announced.

Through Splintered Walls Art Exhibition

Aurora Award ballot – Canada’s Ditmars?

Shirley Jackson Award shortlist

Culture Consumed

ALEX: Iron Man 3; Oblivion; Cloud Atlas

ALISA: The Adventures of Alyx, Joanna Russ



TANSY: A Song of Ice & Fire update, Flower and Weed by Margo Lanagan

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Postcards from a Saturday Morning

The Shirley Jackson Award shortlist is up! This is especially exciting this year because it features two Australians (a pretty rare event, I think?). Even better, they’re not competing with each other!

Margo Lanagan is up for Short Fiction with “Bajazzle” from her wonderful collection Cracklescape, and Kaaron Warren is up for Novella with the deeply troubling, upsetting and horrific “Sky” from her dark and creepy collection Through Splintered Walls. Both these collections are Twelve Planets!

Congratulations to everyone on the Shirley Jackson list – was pleased to see Robert Shearman there with his new book Remember Why You Fear Me, and Kelly Link with the wonderful story “Two Houses” which I heard her read at Continuum last year.

Speaking of Kaaron Warren’s Through Splintered Walls, if you’re anywhere near Rockingham WA today, go and check out the exhibition of paper art made from the ‘printer error’ batch of those books – Lee Battersby let a few sneak peeks out over Facebook and the work looks spectacular!

In other news, the new Board of Directors of the SFWA has been announced:

President: Steven Gould

Vice-President: Rachel Swirsky

Secretary: Susan Forest

Treasurer: Bud Sparhawk

South/Central Regional Director: Lee Martindale

Overseas Regional Director: Tansy Rayner Roberts

Thanks everyone for your congratulations. So that’s something I’ll be doing from 1 July 2013 onwards… I hope to work towards making the SFWA more relevant to and useful for overseas members, and will be happy to hear any feedback from my constituents (sweetie, darling) about how that could be achieved.

In other OTHER news, the new issue of the fanzine The Drink Tank is out now – it’s their annual Handicapping the Hugos issue which is worth reading for its analysis on the Hugo ballot, but also because I wrote a piece for them! Given free rein on the topic of the Hugo ballot I decided to use my time wisely in researching exactly who all those new people were on the Campbell ballot so I could express vaguely informed opinions about them. So I did that!

Journey to the Centre of Friday Links

There’s a new Verity up – looking at Journey To The Centre of the TARDIS! Some great discussion. The nice thing about being part of this podcast is that I get to listen to it like an ordinary person on the weeks I don’t participate.

Cheryl Morgan writes about the future of gender and trans characters in science fiction at Autostraddle, paying particular note to the way that many of the most innovative and experimental stories about how gender changes/attitudes might happen in the future don’t actually reflect the experience of trans people now. (I’ve been guilty of this myself as a writer in the past so it’s a topic I’m quite keen to pass on to people)

Charles Tan responds to Julia Rios who asked people to create their personal SF/curriculum – very cool post! Try it yourself…

This story of a street photographer who captured all manner of amazing images of the 20th century really caught my attention this week – Vivian Maier worked as a nanny in New York City for most of her life, secretly photographing the characters of her city, but never showing her work. Now the treasure trove has been found…

A discussion on being paid to write – and the expectation (becoming more prevalent in these days of ebooks) that writers will provide their work for free – came up on Tumblr between Cassandra Clare, Holly Black and Sarah Rees Brennan – though unfortunately, Tumblr being what it is, it isn’t always obvious which of them is saying what in the posts. Luckily the three of them basically agree!

Bitch Magazine provides a Brief History of Women Not Being Funny, and follows up with a more personal essay on Here’s What’s Scary About Being a Female Comic.

The Mary Sue covers the current wave of discussions about gender, reviews and reviewers.

This Miranda Richardson interview made me happy – especially where she talks about Hilary Mantel and the culture of sneering at success. Her frank discussion about the many roles she has turned down over the years and why was also very enlightening.

The latest MindMeld looks at crowdsourcing and its ramifications for writing and publishing – interesting, crunchy stuff, from writers who have used Kickstarter or its equivalents.

As I was putting this post together, Tehani (@editormum75) Tweeted this link – What Editors Want. All useful, sensible stuff that writers should never forget!

What To Read This Week: Hey Mickey, You’re So Fine

A few months ago, I was asked to curate a reprint short story over at Strange Horizons, which was a great honour and a lot of fun. I wanted to choose something personally significant, and Australian, and couldn’t do better than “My Lady Tongue” by Lucy Sussex, one of the first feminist science fiction stories that I ever read. Luckily when I re-read it to check, the suck fairy had not visited at all – and I think if read in historical context you can see what an important and awesome piece it is.

Read my introduction to “My Lady Tongue” here.

Read the story itself: My Lady Tongue, by Lucy Sussex (1988)

And oh look, it’s a podcast too!

There have also been a couple of books announced recently that I’m very excited about.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I am appearing in Speculative Fiction 2012, an anthology of online reviews, essays & commentary. This is a super exciting project, just the sort of book that SHOULD exist, and I was delighted that my Supergirl essay was picked up for it. It’s up on Amazon now!

This collection contains over fifty of the year’s best online essays and reviews, from Tansy Rayner Roberts on Supergirl to Lavie Tidhar on China Miéville to Aishwarya Subramanian on My Little Pony to Joe Abercrombie on, er, himself. It is a diverse collection of some of last year’s best and most interesting writing. We fully expect – and hope – it will cause discussion, debate and a bit of a ruckus.

The book also contains a foreword from Mur Lafferty, an introduction from this year’s editors (Justin Landon and myself) and an afterword from the 2012 editors, Ana Grilo and Thea James of The Booksmugglers.

All proceeds from sales of this book are donated to Room to Read, supporting literacy and gender equality in education around the world.

I’m also super bouncy that I just got a review copy of Queers Dig Time Lords, which will be coming out in early June. This, the latest of the pop culture series of essay collections from Mad Norwegian Press, is edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damien Thomas – and features so many great writers and friends of mine!

Check out the Table of Contents:

Queers Dig Time Lords

Table of Contents

Introduction, by John and Carole E. Barrowman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Editors’ Foreword, by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas. . . . . 10

The Monster Queer is Camp, by Paul Magrs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Time, Space, Love, by Emily Asher-Perrin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Seven Ways of Looking at Captain Jack,

by Mary Anne Mohanraj and Jed Hartman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Born Again Whovian, by David Llewellyn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Queer Doctor vs. Straight Trek?, by Paul Cockburn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Sub Texts: The Doctor and the Master’s Firsts and Lasts,

by Amal El-Mohtar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Nice TARDIS, by Jason Tucker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

The Incredibly True Adventures of an Intellectual Fan Dyke,

by Sarah J. Groenewegen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Bi, Bye, by Tanya Huff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

In Praise of Mature Women, or Why Donna Noble and River Song

Totally Need to Call Me, by Jennifer Pelland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

We’re Here, We’re Queer, Rate Us on iTunes, by Erik Stadnik. . . . . . 96

Secrets and Lies, by Scot Clarke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Long Time Companions, by Melissa Scott. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Jack Harkness’s Lessons on Memory and Hope

for Cranky, Old Queers, by Racheline Maltese. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

My Straight Best Friend, by Nigel Fairs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

A Kiss from Romana: Lesbian Subtext in The Stones of Blood,

by Julia Rios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Bothersome Otherness, by Martin Warren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

PVC Made Me a Gay, by Gary Russell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

Torchwood, Camp, and Queer Subjectivity, by Brit Mandelo. . . . . . . 156

The Doctor: A Strange Love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Hating

and Love the Who, by Hal Duncan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

A Man is the Sum of His Memories, by Neil Chester . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

Spoilers: A Letter to Myself, Age 16, by Kaia Landelius. . . . . . . . . . . 186

The Heterosexual Agenda, by John Richards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Hey, Mickey, You’re So Fine, by Naamen Gobert Tihaun. . . . . . . . . 202

Mutants, Monsters, Mutts, and Mentiads,

by Cody Quijano-Schell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Same Old Me, Different Face: Transition, Regeneration,

and Change, by Susan Jane Bigelow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

The Girl Who Waited (for the Guidance Counselor

to Get to His Point), by Rachel Swirsky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

One of my favourite things about these books are the essay titles.

Here’s To The Future, Love Is the Answer [WHO-50—1987]

For me growing up, Doctor Who was a big amorphous pile of everything. Trial of a Time Lord, the Key to Time, the Target novelisation of The Myth Makers, Spearhead from Space, An Unearthly Child and even those Peter Cushing movies were part of this big spinning vortex of Everything Who. There was no forward or backward, no serious attempt at chronological order, and little sense of cohesion. I watched either on VHS tapes, on that perfect ABC time slot between 5:30 and 6:30 pm (a timeslot that also included at various times, The Goodies, Bananaman, Roger Ramjet and Danger Mouse BEST TIME SLOT EVER), and in many cases on VHS tapes recorded from that perfect ABC time slot or exchanged with friends.

But in 1987 (or let’s face it, some time within two years of 1987) everything changed. I was nine or ten, and we were ushered to a living room belonging to a representative of the vaguely-organised Doctor Who fan community in Hobart to watch a New Episode.

Episode 1 of Time and the Rani blew me away. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why, but looking at it now I can see why it was such a big deal. Doctor Who had been colourful for a long time, but this episode SPARKLED. There were elaborate yellow aliens who ran funny, there was the Rani (the first time I’d ever seen her on screen), there was a New Doctor, there were jokes and monsters and everything that wasn’t quarry was fiercely pink or gold.

There were those spheres, the beautiful crackling deadly trap bubbles that picked people up and EXPLODED them into the side of the quarry. In the cliffhanger, our own Mel was caught up in one of the spheres and bounced crazily through the air, screaming her head off. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

Season 25 had begun. It would be a long time for me before Episode 1 was reunited with the rest of the season, because it turned out that it had been sent to our friends on VHS from England, and we now had to WAIT FOREVER for the rest to actually screen on the ABC. I don’t remember how long it was that I had to wait to see if Mel lived or died – weeks, months, years?

This was the days before the internet, and they were hard times indeed.

My love for this season didn’t wane when it finally arrived. I was glued to the screen, entranced by the bright colours, the banter, the musical bits and the horror. I even liked Paradise Towers.

Delta and the Bannermen, however, cemented itself firmly as an all time favourite. Sure, the plot doesn’t entirely make sense, but it didn’t need to for my brain to appreciate the frocks and the comedy, the violence and the scary bits, the dancing and Welsh accents and the romance (shock, romance! In Doctor Who! Not involving Jo Grant!).

I watched Delta and the Bannermen over and over and over, until I could say mysterious things about bees in my sleep.

But then there was the other gem of that season: Dragonfire, and with it my girl Ace, the companion of my heart always and forever.

Yes, Jo and Sarah and Romana and Donna and Polly and Victoria and Amy and Jack are also the companions of my heart SHUT UP I HAVE A BIG HEART THERE’S ROOM FOR EVERYONE.

I’m so glad that I got to experience Dragonfire for the first time when I was ten (or eleven) because I see the various criticisms of that story and I agree with almost all of them. Yes, it’s problematic, yes the direction is awkward, yes there are bits in it that make no sense (hello, it’s Doctor Who calling). I don’t care about that now because I didn’t care about it then.

This Ace, the self-conscious one throwing milkshakes and saying ‘Ace!’ at inappropriate moments and staring into the distance as she confides her sad history to Mel, the one who maybe had a weird history with Glitz (DON’T THINK ABOUT IT) and kept her nitro-nine in deodorant bottles and almost considered taking Kane’s terrible offer… She may be raw and not nearly as well realised as the later Ace, the one clutching a sword in Battlefield or confu-seducing a soldier in Curse of Fenric. She may be less battle-hardened than the Ace of Love and War or Happy Endings, and she’s certainly a whole lot less mature than the fascinating character we get to follow in the Big Finish audio adventures, the one who runs out screaming on the battlefield, weapons blazing, while Hex stays behind to mop up the debris…

But, yes. She’s mine. And however silly the Seventh Doctor is at times in this mixed up patchwork of a first season, he’s mine too.

There are hints of the Doctor we were going to get in each of the stories this season but most of all in Delta and the Bannermen as he awkwardly comforts Rae, and then in Dragonfire when he offers Ace a trip back to Perivale by the scenic route.

I don’t believe in the ‘my Doctor’ thing because they’re all mine, frankly, and I wouldn’t give a single one of them up. When pressed I usually summon my love for Eccleston or Smith or McGann or Pertwee. But then, when I watch even the dodgiest of Sylvester McCoy stories, I remember that, oh yes.

He wasn’t the first Doctor I watched, or first Doctor I loved – but he was the first one who really felt NEW, like I was watching history unfold on the TV in front of me. For a long time, he was the only Doctor I had ever watched without a Programme Guide to tell me how his adventures had turned out…

But, of course, he was the first of many “current” Doctors to win me over. And unlike his predecessors, even the long-lived Fourth Doctor, Seven wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, regardless of whether the show itself was going to stick around…

ELSEWHERE ON 1987:

A Modern Woman’s Guide to Classic Who: the Seventh Doctor Years [TansyRR.com]

Doctor Who for Newbies: The Seventh Doctor [The Nerdist]

Time and the Rani [Hoo on Who]

Paradise Towers [Wife in Space]

Episode 45, Delta and the Bannermen [The Memory Cheats]

Delta and the Bannermen Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3 [Chronic Hysteresis]

Ace: an explosive companion [Marlow Inc]

Fire and Ace [NeoWhovian]

PREVIOUSLY:

Ditmar Pretties 2013

Conflux crept up on me, as conventions you’re not planning to go to tend to. And so it was that I sat down with my computer yesterday after a long day to find a Twitter party going on – and lo, I won some awards!

The best coverage of the ceremony is here, by Sean the Blogonaut – another member of the community who wasn’t actually present! But he has assembled tweets and images via Storify to try to capture something of what looked like a very fun evening.

I was very honoured to receive the Ditmar for Best Fan Writer, and the William Atheling for my “Historically Authenticated Sexism” piece of criticism.

Also the nice thing about a small community like ours is that the chances of me knowing & being friends with all the winners are very high. So I am delighted to congratulate Russell, Margo, Nick, Kirstyn & Mondy, Kathleen (twice), David, Thoraiya, Kaaron (twice) and Margo again. Hooray to all!

Big thanks to Tehani who accepted my trophies on behalf. They look lovely and I am excited about getting my hands on them. Congrats also to Deb – it sounds like she did a fantastic job of hosting the awards, which was a big ask after Kirstyn & Mondy did so well last year. I think the lesson we can take for this is that the Australian SF community is totally better than the Oscars.

Novel: Sea Hearts, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Novella or Novelette: “Sky”, Kaaron Warren (Through Splintered Walls)

Short Story: “The Wisdom of Ants”, Thoraiya Dyer (Clarkesworld 12/12)

Collected Work: Through Splintered Walls, Kaaron Warren (Twelfth Planet)

Artwork: Cover art, Kathleen Jennings, for Midnight and Moonshine (Ticonderoga)

Fan Writer: Tansy Rayner Roberts, for body of work including reviews in Not If You Were The Last Short Story On Earth

Fan Artist: Kathleen Jennings, for body of work including “The Dalek Game” and “The Tamsyn Webb Sketchbook”

Fan Publication: The Writer and the Critic, Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond

New Talent: David McDonald

William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review: Tansy Rayner Roberts, for “Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That.” (Tor.com)

Other awards announced in the ceremony:



Norma K. Hemming Award: Sea Hearts, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)

Peter McNamara Award: Nick Stathopoulos

Chandler Award: Russell Farr (Ticonderoga)

Friday Links is Better at Designing Superheroes Than You.

Thanks to the Mary Sue I found this – Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes than You, a Tumblr which takes examples of super cute superhero cosplay done by real little girls, and turns them into sketch designs for the superheroes themselves. What we get, refreshingly, is superheroes that are designed to be people, rather than sex objects. Hooray!

Who’s Afraid of a Pixie Cut? Bitch Magazine takes on the policing of celebrity hair, and particularly the way that a beautiful woman choosing a short haircut can create panic, suspicion and even suggestions of mental illness.

Strange Horizons looks at the breakdown of reviews, reviewers and gender in the SF community last year. They then updated to include a few more review sources. The commentary from i09 is also worth reading.

Peter M Ball tells you that you do not back up your work enough. He also gives some great advice on Going Into Business as a writer, over on David McDonald’s blog.

Speaking of writing advice, Tobias Buckell has some clever things to say about Rewriting and Reinvention.

The Australian Women Writers site – which has made for brilliant reading this year, I am loving the monthly updates about reviews – reports on the inaugural Stella Prize night.

Via Holly Black, this Tumblr post “for all the women I have loved who were dragged through the mud” talks about the unfortunate misogyny displayed by women in fandoms towards female characters. If you’ve spent any amount of time in the supposed feminist and feminine space of any slash-friendly fandom, you’ve probably seen some hateful commentary or fic which made you feel bad about loving female characters. Why is it that so many creative, intelligent women prioritise the narrative of beloved male characters over the women in their lives, and are so keen to throw female characters of a favourite fandom under the bus in order to focus exclusively on the men in the story? This is a brilliant, detailed and thoughtful examination of why this happens, and why it’s a problem.

What I liked best about that post is that she only deals glancingly at the common theory that it’s about sexual jealousy (OMG that character so doesn’t deserve his love, I would treat him better) as there are many other more probably and weighty reasons for this ingrained hatred and unforgiving nature towards female characters.

Sofia Samatar looks at Joanna Russ in the beautifully titled post: “Joanna Russ Laughs Like Medusa.”

Sophia Stewart, the real creator of the Matrix, wins a billion dollar law suit to prove her material was stolen in the creation of the hit movie – which is especially important because it has been under-reported in mainstream media, and because Sophia is an African American woman. Which is something to remember next time you hear people saying that science fiction is all about the white dudes.

Speaking of gender issues, Wikipedia once again becomes a lens showing the sexism and the invisibility of women in our culture – in this case, it was discovered that the list of American Novelists had been deemed “too long” and thus the women were slowly being edited out of the list, moved over instead to the sub-category of “American Women Novelists.”

The funniest piece of vandalism from our election year in Australia so far: Abbott’s number of illegal boats was changed overnight to reflect the correct usage of the term ‘illegal.’

The blokes behind the Wombles TV show talk about being Wombles for fun and profit.

Terry Pratchett is still with us, and still writing. I enjoyed this interview with him very much.