The Dogshead Saint
Author’s note: What if King Arthur was real? How would that have changed society? There would have been science. There would have been progress. But the world would have been built on the whims of a leader with a strong moral compass.
Part of my inspiration for this is the Doctor Who story Battlefield. Sylvester McCoy, knights, spaceships, a big horned monster, a witch queen and Excalibur. All that was too much for me. It was like someone had looked in my head for all my favourite stuff and put it on telly. I still love that story with unnecessary zeal. If you can spot my Who homage in the story, let me know.
I think I can do more with this world. I like Cei. I like Dwyfan.
The blood on Cei’s gauntlet was proving to have a tenacious grip. Sonic brushes would have taken half the time, but she preferred to use spit and cloth. It felt more honest. She had put the blood there when killing the cicatrix so it was only right she should take it off.
Once the patina was clean enough to see her own face in, she allowed herself a quick smile and then pulled on the gauntlet. She felt the prickle as it checked that she was herself (a necessary safeguard since the possession plague) and then felt the greater strength it gave her hand. She flexed her hand a couple of times, switched on the augur, switched it off and then took off the glove and placed it on the armature.
Doctor Who and the Heart of Time
Author’s Note: Doctor Who is the property of the BBC. This is just for fun. It took ten minutes to write.
The Doctor stood outside the heart of the structure. It was crystalline and fire flickered through it and around it, but it was perfectly cool, because these were time’s fires. And once time has burned something the remains are cold forever more.
‘What’s all this then?’ he asked.
‘This is the truth,’ said Bernadette Starkiss. ‘This is the beginning and the end. This is where you and I and everything else comes from. The nucleus. The germ plasm of existence.’
He raised a hand and pulled on the lobe of his ear. ‘Doesn’t look like much,’ he pointed out.
Starkiss smiled. ‘Wait until you see inside.’ She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the doorway and into the sphere.
He looked around, letting crashing waveforms smash in garish kaleidoscopes against his time senses, hearing the squeal of parallel timelines rubbing against each other. After a moment he wobbled and then he threw up the last meal he had had, which was five weeks old.
‘Welcome to the heart of time, Doctor,’ said Starkiss. She seemed unaffected by the utter wrongness, the absolute chaos of the place. Stood there in her red trouser suit, her arms outstretched, a big scarlet and white smile on her face. ‘Welcome to the very hub of things. Time is simultaneous. From here, all moments are touchable.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’ he asked in a quiet monotone voice, holding his stomach and looking pale.
‘A reward,’ said Starkiss. ‘Pick a moment. Any moment. It will be yours to see and experience and change if you want.’
The Doctor’s first urge was to decline and storm off. The very idea of someone pitying him was so unbearable it made his hearts spasm in his chest. Just because he had helped this woman when her universe-crossing spacecraft had collided with the city of York, causing the spontaneous generation of a thousand thousand ghosts by breaking causality in the local continuum, he had not done it for a gift. He didn’t need to be patronised and condescended to and patted on the head.
But then a moment floated by, like a soap bubble and he caught a glimpse in it of his boyhood. His father was there, tall and muscular and dapper, with a moustache and those sad, sardonic brown eyes. His father lost and probably dead from the time storms that had scourged reality of anything Gallifreyan after Gallifrey and Skaro burned together.
And his mother with her long red hair, and clipped Victorian vowels and tight Victorian gait. How she would have scolded him for this rough Northern accent he used nowadays and his subject-less sentences and casual profanity. Closer to his father’s way of speaking, he realised with a thrill cold and electric.
Ulysses and Penelope doing the things no one else could, and taking their beloved son with them.
He had never had a chance to say goodbye.
He reached out and grabbed it.
More Author’s Note: The Doctor’s parents are the same version Kate Orman and Lance Parkin have used in the past. With Ulysses played by Sean Connery. I might do a Ulysses and Penelope story once of these days. Bernadette Starkiss, though the Doctor doesn’t know it, is, like Gethesemane in Higher Authority, a member of DADA, the Dimension Anomaly Detection Agency. The ghosts in York story is one I’ll write one day.
Just surviving
Author’s note: When I was a boy, inspired by Star Wars and Spaceballs and a Doctor Who comic strip about an alien gourmand who uses the TARDIS to find itself all sorts of good food, I came up with Galaxy Garages, the story of Boss, Dude, Fats, Bug and a number of other characters, as they tried to make money in the far future. They took on a bit of a life of their own, I sold pictures of the characters at a school fair and wrote a stage play with Chris Raettig, that my circle of friends would take time out of tutorials to rehearse.
I was surprised to come across Red Dwarf and realise that Dude was a similar character to the Cat, but felt I should let that go. Robot 59 was inspired by C3PO in the same way Kryten was so that was defensible.
A couple of years ago I sent a Galaxy Garages story to another of the SFX Pulp Idol competitions. Didn’t get anywhere. Again, it wasn’t pulp. It was about a murderous tree, because I’d been talking to people about the Children of Green Knowe.
I’ve had a few goes at putting together a good Silas Crumb (Boss) story. It’s quite difficult, because the original stories about frog people under siege from werewolves, and Silas being hunted by three Mexicans (the 3 Gringos) hired by Globulous Greaseball (basically Jabba the Hut in a linen jacket and panama hat) were all madness and comic strip space opera.
As it is, the story below feels more like the first chapter in something bigger. Maybe it will detail how Silas ends up being chased around the galaxy by bounty hunters and Penny Justice. Maybe it will see a visit to the planet of the frog people and the extra-dimensional demon Whiting (named for the man who taught me Spanish) may show up. Maybe Michael Entelmann and his fifteen personae may be in there too. And FTL Fixup.
God, I hope so…
It began when they shot Silas Crumb through his black heart.
The Dude and Fats had handed him over to the local constabulary for the reward, a tidy sum. His list of crimes had been read out. Most were true, but a few outstanding unsolveds had been tacked on. He had been taken out; they had put a noose around his neck, let him dangle for three minutes and then, while he was still kicking and choking, they had shot him.
Beware the ides of March…
Or is it the eyes of Laura Mars? I always get those mixed up.
I keep thinking that I should share some more of the stories I tried to sell to the BBC.
Here’s one of the early ones: The Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan find themselves on a theocratic planet, where people are being mysteriously killed by “happiness”. The killer turns out to have been slaved to an alien spacecraft that travels between universes. I think there was a thematic point to it all when I came up with it. Something to do with false gods. But someone else had come up with a story about the Fifth Doctor visiting a theocracy and I had the Doctor spend most of the story recovering from a head injury.
Then there was the one where an ecosystem has evolved within the TARDIS, and the creatures that have evolved in there are slipping out of the TARDIS - it would have been set during the Third Doctor’s exile on Earth. The Doctor is faced with the rather difficult decision of whether he can destroy a new form of life or allow them to destroy his TARDIS and potentially kill the Earth.
The main problem with these things tended to be that I was scared that I wasn’t putting enough story in them. In fact, I should have been concentrating on things like internal logic. It is to sigh.
Let them speak for themselves
Crossed Words:
When we speak,
Words are white noise:
Destructive inference
Degrades and encrypts.
GBS
Asked in his will
For a new character set;
Each letter assigned
A sound cleared
From English throats.
Why not bind
Each sound to a thought?
Then I might translate ideas
My tongue cannot form.
Reflections:
The mirror is magic.
It inverts what is real,
Fakes three dimensions
And entraps them in two.
Shallow, slow liquid
Masquerades as solid.
Only within can we see
What others see.
When I looked at you
I saw myself.
Your acts and deeds
Were distorted by
My thoughts and needs.
Technique:
My sable hairs
Have coarsened.
The paint has dried and
My strokes are in vain.
This picture of you:
These impressionistic daubs
Portray less
Subject than object;
Each new fleck of colour
Adds another layer,
Another lie
That I tell myself is art,
Touching the ideal.
Style is everything I do wrong.
Couldhavebeen, part 3
Author’s note: I don’t own Doctor Who, and this fan fiction is therefore presented purely for entertainment value and should not be seen as suggesting I have any rights to the property. Doctor Who is owned by the BBC.
Previously on Doctor Who: couldhavebeen, the Eighth Doctor (think Paul McGann) and his companion Sophie (think Ellen Page) came to Shelley’s World, where technology is kept in stasis so that it does not overwhelm humanity. The Doctor remembers he’s been to the planet before but cannot recall the details, suspecting that the memories have been blocked by an unknown agency and goes to Lemuel Morse, a psychoanalyst, to perform a past life regression.
Meanwhile Sophie encounters Father Tom Browning and a pretty librarian. The librarian tells of the planet’s history of mysterious deaths, for hundreds of years corpses have been found burned and prematurely aged. The Doctor is then arrested by the local police force, the Adjudicators, because his genetic profile is similar to that of genetic material recovered from scenes of murder. Sophie tries to come up with a legal strategy to save the Doctor, with help from Browning. Having pretty much failed, she goes to see the pretty librarian, only to discover she is the latest victim of the killer…
Doctor Who: couldhavebeen
Part Three
The flat thing had been near the mind like its own. It had hoped to extract information from the flat thing, but it had burned. Just like all the rest.
*
The Doctor was sitting in his globe, reading a copy of the Beano from the mid-1980s he had found folded up in his jacket pocket. This was an infuriating cage. He doubted even Harry Houdini would have found its secret.
‘There has been another death. Are you ready to talk now?’
Couldhavebeen, part two
Author’s note: Let’s start with the disclaimer that I don’t own Doctor Who and the BBC does and that this is just for fun.
Previously on Doctor Who, Couldhavebeen, the Doctor, in his Eighth Paul McGann persona, and Sophie Crane, who may or may not be played by Ellen Page with an English accent, arrived on Shelley’s world, a world that has banned technological progress in order that its inhabitants can better examine human nature. But upon arriving, the Doctor realises that this is not the first time he has been to Shelley’s world - he just doesn’t remember what happened the first time. A block has been put on his memories either by himself or by an unknown agency. So he visits Lemuel Morse, a psychiatrist, and asks if Lemuel will help him perform a past life regression. Meanwhile, Sophie sits, sipping coffee and thinking back to when the Doctor first saw the wreck of the Hesperus and went bananas…
Cue the theme tune…
Doctor Who: couldhavebeen
Part two
All moments were as one when it was alone. But now, briefly, time became linear as its mind was touched by another so alike that it might have found itself.
(more…)
Never let go
One thing a writer never does is forget an idea. You’ll have an idea and sit and try and make it work and for what ever reason, it just won’t. There’ll be something missing or you’ll be focussing on the wrong thing. And you’ll say to yourself, well, I’m just going to have to leave it.
I had one of those ideas. I wanted to do a Billy Hartnell Doctor story and so came up with a Nigel Kneale/John Wyndham concept. And then couldn’t figure out where it was going. Then I had another one. I wanted to do a Watchmen thing, but not with super heroes, with telefantasy characters from British television. Y’know, Randall and Hopkirk and the Avengers and the Champions and characters from the Gerry Anderson shows like Captain Scarlett and UFO (which is by the way, such a brilliant show). I even had thoughts for a Doctor Who style character called Mr Kloch. And a girl would call him Grandfather. Which I thought was pretty clever. I thought the sixties milieu, that mixture of hope for the future and yet such ingrained conservatism, would be a perfect setting.
It was going to be a comic strip. And then I thought, God, this is going to be a labour of love. I’m going to need to dig up a ton of Sixties photo reference and have a good idea of what was going on in the world at that time and I need a studio so that I can finally have a drawing table and I need more free time than I’ll ever have.
So I thought, write it. You can expand it out into the comic strip one day. And I started writing, and I realised that Bill Ravenscar wasn’t a black magician detective, a bit like John Constantine, who had a guardian angel, he was a neanderthal detective with a guardian angel. And then I realised that that First Doctor story would fit very nicely here. Not all of it. The seaside boarding house under siege thing had to be thrown out, but the basic gears of the story (I can’t give the details away because it’ll spoil the upcoming story) could be.
And because it’s a short story (I hope, it may balloon out of control) make it closer, more intimate. So there’s a bit of Hammer horror, a bit of Agatha Christie, a bit of sixties Who to it if it comes out right.
It made me think about the fact that there are a distinct number of thematic repetitions in what I’ve put on the site so far. Death is in there, and unrequited love, and the nature/nurture synergy. You can probably see more. I think we should start to spread our wings a bit more soon.
For some writers, reusing old ideas becomes something of a trademark. Robert Heinlein would bring his characters from various books together, and Michael Moorcock has made a living out of using alternate versions of the same characters (although they are all the same characters, in a way) and Kim Newman does much the same. It’s an idea that I’ve adopted in the past. Aubrey Gethsemane has had a couple of mentions here in various incarnations, and Benny and Burke exist in the Superstuniverse but Superstu doesn’t exist in the Benny and Burke universe.
It’s a bit like Douglas Adams pointing out that the inconsistencies in the Hitchhiker books is because each one takes place in a different universe. Or John Munch appearing in every American TV show ever made.
Of course, when we’re all used to multiple versions of fictional characters (how many different versions of Superman, Batman, King Arthur, Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes have you come across?), reinterpretation and fitting character types to the type of story being told, rather than to a cohesive mythology should be something we deal with with ease.
A lot of people don’t though. Consistency in details seems to be what they favour. I used to be a little bit like that, but got through it.