Bowman’s Capsule
Author’s note: Back when Doctor Who wasn’t on telly, I would think of how I would bring Who back. I even went so far as to post a story on the Doctor Who forum that Shaun Kelly used to run, based on how I would do it. It was billed as a Fourteenth Doctor story, and I was thinking of Denzel Washington, who was being rumoured as taking the role in a movie version of the show, in the title role. (Of course the old rule that the Doctor can only have 13 lives is probably off now.) The story was met with acclaim, maybe too much, as people started offering to collaborate on stories and I panicked, unsure that I had a good enough gameplan to fit what the more experienced fictioneers would want to do. And I was a tender innocent 20, when these people were in their late thirties and that kind of scared me. So it never went anywhere. Even though I planned a remixed up-to-date take on Who that would draw on new themes in SF and telefantasy.
I have had to rewrite it because when they reformatted the site back in 2002ish, the story disappeared into the netherworld of deletion. And I didn’t have a backup.
When I think about it, the story is kind of like a remix of An Unearthly Child, Buffy and Sliders. Ho hum. I think it’s okay. And I came up with Rose before Davies did. And if you scramble Stanley Butter, you should figure out who that guy really is.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is the property of the BBC, not of me. I am not gaining reward from this, this is for fun and for the greater endorsement of the Doctor Who brand. And stuff.
‘Excuse me miss, are you headed to Professor Bowman’s class?’
Rose Black turned to the man, a man in his sixties with white hair and a bushy white moustache, dressed like a cowboy and standing like one too. Behind him was the blue marble statue of the spirit of freedom, a semi-naked woman, stood in a small enclosure filled with pebbles and water. He smiled and made her shiver for some reason. Were there too many teeth in his head?
‘Yes, yes,’ she said. She did not stop moving and acted as busy and distracted as she could manage.
Take it back, Sapphire, Time’s your special friend…
http://www.lookinarchive.com/homepages/sapphireandsteel/picturestripindex.html
Sapphire and Steel was something I’d heard of obliquely through reading Doctor Who stuff. The DVDs were cheap at HMV and I watched them. Stupid Rob, poor Tully, cunning Silver, Dr Hibbert as Lead, the man with no face, the transuranic heavy elements, the wobbly credits… It is fantastic. It’s slightly mad, slightly opaque. It’s more fantasy than science.
David McCallum immediately became a hero for the arrogant, cold, headstrong portrayal of Steel. Steel is like House twenty years earlier but in a not quite human, but not alien way. The fact that Joanna Lumley is a celebrity suddenly made sense.
These strips are a pretty good indicator and Arthur Ranson’s art is perfect. Arthur’s another of those artists I wish I could draw like.
Starkiss and Gethsemane
Author’s note: Sometimes you come up with an idea and you have to set it up for yourself. That’s what this one is. It’s like the pre-credits trailer on a Bond film. You’ve already met Aubrey and Bernadette in Higher Authority and the Heart of Time. They’re kind of like the Doctor, they’re kind of like Sapphire and Steel, and Elijah Snow and Jenny Sparks. There’s a bit of Q from Star Trek in there. And a bit of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Warrior and a bit of Grant Morrison’s Invisibles. And a bit of David Bowie.
Probably, in the future I’ll use them to do stuff I can’t do with Doctor Who.
It was later that they fell in love. That was when all the trouble started. But at this point in time Bernadette Starkiss and Aubrey Gethsemane had barely met. And when they had, Bernadette’s brusqueness and Aubrey’s ennui had left vaguely disconcerting impressions on both. So to both be assigned to cleanse some backwater universe of an infection of potentially pandemic proportions, and one that Aubrey saw as having no redeeming features, was hardly going to engender feelings of companionship.
*
The Prime Minister smiled at the children. It wasn’t a nice smile Each word that dripped from his spittle-moistened lips planted eggs in their heads, the larvae of ideas that would hatch and burrow into their individuality and independence and turn them all into mindless drones to work in the infernal machines.
‘You all know not to talk to strangers,’ he said. ‘They could prove to be evil and want to cut you up with a knife or worse.’ (more…)
May contain spoilers
Here’s what I think. In fan fiction form:
Rose watched as the Doctor faded away, as they shifted back to her dad’s reality. But the Doctor was beside her, wasn’t he?
The man beside her smiled like a tiger. ‘Remember what I said at Bad Wolf Bay, Rose?’
She tried but the message had insinuated deep into the structures of her mind, rewriting the codes of her personality.
It was nestled at the core of her being, throttling the message the Doctor had given her, that she was fantastic. Instead her neurons pulsed the message Iamthemasterandyouwillobeymeiamthemasterandyouwillobeymeiamthemasterandyouwillobeymeiamthemasterandyouwillobeyme…
Technofetish
Author’s note: James Bond is, I think, property of the estate of Ian, not Alexander, Fleming. It’s not owned by me, I don’t have their blessing, this is a mashup.
Obviously Bond became all about the gadgets in the films. Very technofetish. And folks like William Gibson were clearly influenced by that stuff. So I decided to fold it back on itself. I was kind of inspired by Paul Pope writing Batman Year 100, which projects a story of Batman in 2039, which I still haven’t read. And I call myself a fanboy. Oh, wait, I don’t…
Also, although I like Bond films, the character of Bond is pretty reprehensible. And if you met him you’d think he was as big a jerk as Wolverine. (Wolverine is a jerk.)
This is almost like a setup story, so I may revisit.
Bond stepped out onto the surface of Mars without a hat, wearing a loose linen shirt and a pair of white slacks. Rayban bubbles covered his eyes, and his skin was interwoven with a form of plastic that not only allowed him great resistance to injury but reflected the dangerous forms of UV light.
Beneath his left ear, a motorola fractal was implanted, and wired to his optic nerve for instantaneous data access.
Saving Grace
Author’s Note: Doctor Who is owned by the BBC, I have no rights to the property but present this entertainment for free and for edification. (That should do it!)
Actually I was writing a Dr McCoy story set after Wrath of Khan, but it’s not quite come together. I might have to reread some Warren Ellis comics and watch Wrath of Khan again to get the voice down. So instead I decided to rewrite an old story last night. Took me a couple of hours but it was worth it.
Way back in 2000, Stories was accepted to appear in the charity fanzine the Cat Who Walked Through Time. The fanzine was such a success, Alryssa Kelly decided to do a second volume, and as such I submitted a second story. It was lacklustre. I wanted to do a counterpoint to the idea of fiction intruding on reality, using my conception of author as vampire (though nowadays I think of it as something more symbiotic). I used the Eighth Doctor because at that point he was the current Doctor and I liked him a lot, and I used Grace, his companion from the TV movie, because in my opinion Grace is one of the best companions ever. I set it in the aftermath of Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum’s novel Unnatural History, as a tribute, and the ending was very different. The Doctor uses the TARDIS and the telepathic circuitry to escape his fate.
The Cat Who Walked Through Time 2 is still pending, so I thought it fair that I dust off the story, give it a re-write to portray a moment I wanted to see, the damaged Ninth Doctor encountering Grace, the first romantic companion, and suddenly the whole thing had a different frisson. Suddenly story points gained a new energy. And instead of the X-Files being a reference point, CSI played a part.
So enjoy, and bonus points if you can figure out who the baddie is. (Clue: word game.)
Grace Holloway had never learned to accept death. It was a wasteful empty concept. Ironic deaths were even worse. Over the past week she had seen the sort of deaths that newspapers loved to report. Olympic class swimmers drowning. Climbers falling to their doom. Race car drivers crashing and burning. Hunters killed by their own guns backfiring. No doubt the great and the good were laughing into their coffees and spluttering out the crumbs of their donuts.
They didn’t have to talk to the families. Didn’t have to watch the relatives break down into tears or blow up in anger or shut off in denial.
She couldn’t even tell them that death was nothing to be afraid of (she had been there herself), because how did that heal the wound? How did that fill the void of the loss? It wasn’t the death that hurt, it was the living on.
(more…)
Bugs
Talking to people about stuff, that’s when my brain works. Like today, I realised that if Roger Penrose is right about consciousness being a quantum phenomenon, then potentially through a mechanism like quantum entanglement something like telepathy is possible. We could all be connected together because at quantum levels space and time stop existing. Which is pretty cool. I can’t prove it because despite having a heavy basis in the sciences, I chose the arts at degree level, but if any scientists are reading, go ahead, knock yourselves out. Also because all quantum theory is just that, theory. Wouldn’t have done it if not talking to someone about Vedic mathematics. As some people know, from talking to me, or rather me talking at them and the conversation corkscrewing off in any and every direction.
Dynamic interaction is always the way forward.
But I was really here to say: William Gibson’s writing partner Tom Maddox, cyberpunk guy, has free writing at http://www.dthomasmaddox.com/.
And more comics from my youth, the Zoids at http://www.zoidstar.com/comics.html. Some of these, particularly the Black Zoid, are written by the great Grant Morrison. I remember being affected by the story where the Namer is fighting a baddie and you don’t see the end of the battle, because I became convinced he had been replaced by the baddie. It might have been the start of my long obsession with being replaced by an evil version of yourself. (That’s kind of where Looking Glass came from.)