reachingforthevoid

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News

📚🎉 The e-book of my novel, The Disinformation War, is out today on Kobo, Amazon Kindle, etc.

#books #ebooks #the disinformation war #goldsf #goldsmiths press

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Happy and prosperous Lunar New Year!

新年快乐

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới

🧧 🐲

#lunar new year #year of the dragon

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News: BSFA Awards long list is out

🎉 The long list for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards is out. Congratulations to everyone on it, and it's an honour to be among this amazing list. 

If you want to explore recent works in the field, then do have a look. And if you're thinking about nominations for the Hugo Awards, many of these will be eligible.

If you are a member of the BSFA and would like to vote for The Disinformation War in the Best Novel category, then you have until 23:59 GMT on 20 February 2024 to cast your votes.

#bsfa awards #the disinformation war

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Reading for Uncanny Magazine 2023 Favorite Fiction Reader Poll?

Try the short story "Waystation City" by A. T. Greenblatt!

Click on the link below!

#scifi #fantasy #fiction #shortstory #uncanny

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Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road

I watched this on 25 December 2023 when it was first shown on BBC1.

We begin with a voice over on a snowy night with a woman dropping a baby girl off at a church. The Doctor is a witness. 19 years ago… which makes it 2004.

Then, in December 2023, Ruby Sunday, the baby in the pre-credits sequence, is being interviewed by Davina McCall about Ruby being a foundling. The wheeze is they’ll take a DNA sample to try to find her family. Setting up a mystery there…

There are creatures on the set, causing mischief. A few days later and Ruby is performing at a Christmas gig when she sees the Doctor in a tight top and kilt. There’s more shenanigans going on. When Davina McCall calls Ruby about the lack of results for the DNA tests, she says she’s suffered a terrible run of bad luck, and then a Christmas tree collapses on her. But Ruby has greater problems… a new foster baby is stolen by a goblin…

This is a terrific romp. Daft and silly and exactly right for Christmas evening. And, continuing a trend set during the Steven Moffat years, the Star Wars vibe is strong with this one. Seriously, the goblins are like evil Yoda’s and the goblin king is like Jabba the Hutt.

We welcome Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday—what a delight.

And, my gosh, Ncuti Gatwa owns the role immediately. This story cements it.

#doctor who #the church on ruby road #ncuti gatwa #ruby sunday #goblins #davina mccall

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Dr Who's 2023 specials

Yay. My blu-rays have arrived of these three tales. Means I can watch them with subtitles, when I clear the decks.

Speaking of which, Santa just parked outside my office!

#doctor who #the star beast #wild blue yonder #the giggle #santa claus

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 Doctor Who: The Giggle

I watched this on 9 December 2023 when it was first shown on BBC1.

We begin 99 years ago in a cod-German shop in Soho, London, England. I’d prefer a cod shop in Germany the way this is going. Ah, okay. John Logie Baird and the invention of television…

Back to now and we rejoin where we left off last week. It’s chaos in London until UNIT sweeps in. 

Blimey - UNIT are looking more and more like Judge Dredd every time we see them. But, hurrah to see Shirley again, and Kate. But where are Tegan and Ace? Oh, but… how glorious to see Mel Bush on the UNIT payroll! Why do I have an image of her running UNIT’s PT? And, that’s nice about Donna getting a job…

Okay, this one felt a bit more like an anniversary story. Lots of namechecks, quotes, and a few visual references. Creepy stuff, too, and a cheeky addition to the lore of regeneration. Am a little sad that the fam didn’t get a mention.

Huge welcome to Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. At last.

#doctor who #the giggle #unit #donna noble #the celestial toymaker #ta ta david tennant (again) #hellooooo ncuti gatwa

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Addendum to Doctor Who: Big Blue Yonder

Liking something is subjective, which is part of the reason why I rarely take a story to task in my mini-reviews. This story left me bored, aside from a few moments of visually exciting material. Yet, just about everyone I know loved it and were buzzing about how good it was hours after first watching it.

They were talking about stuff I didn’t notice. Loads of stuff.

And that made me stop and think. 

And then I realised that for most of it I couldn’t hear the dialogue. Or, to be precise, my brain wasn’t processing the sounds I could hear into meaningful speech. Just about the entire story to me was “blah blah blah” with the occasional clear word. It was incomprehensible gibberish, literally, to me.

One of the many things I learned when I went through the process of discovering that I’m autistic involved sensory processing differences. I’ve a few, but one of the main ones is auditory, and it’s complicated by the fact that I’m going deaf. My hearing was damaged when I was a young teenager and had several grommets put in to drain build up behind my eardrums. The specialist told me what to expect back then, and it’s happening a little later than anticipated. 

Over my 55 years I’ve learned how to compensate for both these facts. I rely a lot on lipreading, and body language. It’s one reason why I don’t like phone calls unless I already know I can process a person’s voice or not. It’s also why video calls exhaust me, because so much of the non-verbal cues are obscured.

Sometimes the sound mix on TV or film makes it really hard for me to follow a story. Subtitles have become a necessity for quite a few things, but not everything. Bad subtitles are exhausting, too, and most subtitles aren’t great.

I realised late last night that I cannot process David Tennant’s voice when he plays the Doctor (I can when he talks “normally”; it’s not an accent thing, incidentally, but a role dependent thing), and I cannot process Catherine Tate’s voice when she plays Donna Noble. I struggle with some of her other characters, too.

How do I know it’s them doing those roles in particular? The pre-credit sequence in Wild Blue Yonder involved other actors playing other parts, and I had no trouble with them. I did with Tennant and Tate in that scene. (Although I gather what I heard of the “joke” made more sense than what was actually said. Not all bad, then.) The same happened at the end with a certain other actor who I could understand clearly.

How have I not noticed it before? Because there have always been other actors and characters I could understand and the context meant that missing what they said didn’t matter so much. An hour’s story in which the vast majority of the talk — and there was so much talk! — was between two actors playing characters that I can’t process what they say… Yeah… it became impossible for me to ignore.

Solution? I’ll have to use subtitles and hope they can do the job.

Oh, it’s not purely a Tennant Doctor and Tate Donna problem. There are other actors/characters, radio announcers, and people I know in-person, who I struggle with. It’s literally a “me thing”.

#doctor who #wild blue yonder #auditory processing differences

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Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder

I watched this on 2 December 2023 when it was first shown on BBC1.

We begin in England, 1666. Not London, I note. It’s a lot cleaner and nicer looking than what we saw in The Visitation back in the day. The TARDIS lands in an apple tree under which a dude named Isaac Newtown was sat. 

Next stop is a dingy space station type place where the TARDIS acts erratically and then disappears. Outside the small room, the set looks like something out of Star Wars. Even the droid does…

This one starts slowly, but when the weird kicks in it’s impressive and creepy. On the whole, though, it’s a very talk-heavy story.

Edited to add: bidding a fond farewell to the lovely Bernard Cribbins. His last scene in Dr Who is in this story. 🫡

#doctor who #wild blue yonder #isaac newton

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Doctor Who: The Star Beast

I watched this on 25 November 2023.

Blimey. Scott Handcock as script editor, eh. Seriously chuffed by that news.

We begin with the Doctor and Donna catching the audience up with what’s been going on. The TARDIS arrives in Camden markets where the Doctor helps a woman struggling with packages. Guess who? Donna’s married and has a daughter named Rose. A UFO turns up and the Doctor grabs a taxi driven by Donna’s husband. 

Rose meets Beep the Meep and … well … that would be spoilers, sweetie.

A frenetic anniversary special that has lots of RTD’s staple set pieces. Barmy ideas. London under threat. Military bumbling. Rapid fire dialogue.

Here’s a warm welcome to Yasmin Finney as Rose Noble. 

#doctor who #the star beast #beep the meep #donna noble #rose noble #unit

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Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor

I rewatched this story on 31 October 2023. It is the Dr Who story made to help celebrate 100 years of the BBC. It also brings to the end my rewatch of Dr Who (that which survives or has been reconstructed in some way). Hilariously, as of tomorrow in the UK I’ll be able to start a rewatch again but this time using iPlayer (with a few exceptions). I won’t. I am glad to have done this, but once is enough.

We begin with a train in space that’s under attack from Cybermen that can regenerate. Our heroes attempt to rescue the people on the train. The train is carrying a child that the Cybermen are after. When Dan says cheerio, a Dalek enters the TARDIS with a mysterious message. Might it be a trap? I’m not going to answer that one.

Meanwhile, Ace and Tegan are in contact with one another, on the trail of weird stuff. Back in 1916 Russia, the Master is disguised as Rasputin. Kate Stewart recalls the Doctor… and it all gets a little daft and highly emotional for fans like me. For all the megalomaniac posturing of the Master, there are some silly jokes. It’s a bit of a greatest hits compilation from Dr Who over its (then) 59 year history, and not only from the television stories.

And so we bid a fond farewell to Jodie Whittaker and her onscreen fam, especially Mandip Gill. We also welcome back David Bradley, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Jo Martin and David Tennant as the Doctor, as well as Ian Chesterton, Jo Jones, Tegan Jovanka, Mel Bush, Ace and Graham O’Brien. Blimey.

#doctor who #the power of the doctor #the master #cybermen #daleks #unit #ra-ra-rasputin #happy 100 years bbc

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Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils

I rewatched this story on 30 October 2023. It originally went out on BBC1 over Easter last year.

We begin in an early nineteenth century Chinese village during a storm. A woman strides in, heading towards a statue protected by a serious looking dude. The statue is familiar to Dr Who fans, and the clue’s in the story title: it’s a ‘sea devil’, last seen during Warriors of the Deep back in 1984. And, it being Dr Who, the statue comes to life despite the warnings.

It turns out that the woman was a real historical person, Zheng Yi Sao (1775–1844) (also known as Shi Yang, Shi Xianggu, Shek Yeung, and Ching Shih). She was an immensely successful pirate. In this story, she’s after a lost treasure, and disturbs a bunch of sea devils with frenetic results. 

This story is so frustrating. It could have been fantastic, going somewhere the series hadn’t been to before… and instead we get this mess with flashes of what could have been amazing. I think the main problem is they tried to ram far too much into a story. It means the nice bits between the Doctor and Yaz don’t work as well as they really ought.

#doctor who #legend of the sea devils #ching shih #zheng yi sao #sea devils #pirates #the doctor and yaz have words

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Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks

I rewatched this story on 29 October 2023. It was the New Year’s Day special for 2022. It’s the first of only three stories shown for the first time last year... yep. I don't have long to go before my rewatch is over.

We begin with Sarah and Nick at a storage facility in Manchester. Nick is a customer and seems to want a relationship with Sarah beyond the professional capacity. Sarah doesn't seem to know what she wants.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, Yaz and Dan leave the TARDIS while the TARDIS resets itself. Of course, they arrive in a Manchester carpark rather than a promised beach paradise. Actually, they’re in the carpark of the storage facility run by Sarah where Nick is storing his set of Monopoly. Weird stuff happens (of course) and a Dalek appears and kills Nick. It wanders to the reception area and kills Sarah. Then the Doctor, Yaz and a perplexed Dan confront the Dalek… and they are exterminated.

Eh, what? And we crash into the opening credits. 

And we’re back to Sarah and Nick alive again, and they realise on some level that they're caught in a time loop or something. When the Doctor, Yaz and Dan arrive they quickly work out the time loop and race to save Nick and Sarah, and themselves. The Daleks are a variation on a theme - the new guns looks machine-gun-like. They are after the Doctor for all the flux stuff.

There’s a lovely scene with Yaz and Dan about Yaz’s feelings for the Doctor. First time it’s acknowledged fully, and then Dan tries to tell the Doctor… and later there’s quite a bit of emotional avoidance by the Doctor. 

It’s a fun story for New Year’s day with loads of tension and daftness, plus a little lesbian love. 

#doctor who #eve of the daleks #yaz admits her feelings about the Doctor #the Doctor avoids confronting her feelings about anyone

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Doctor Who: The Vanquishers

I rewatched this story, the last part of the Flux serial, on 28 October 2023. Happy birthday to Matt Smith, celebrating his 41st birthday today.

We begin with the Doctor and an Ood running from the baddies and ending up simultaneously in several times and places, while Yaz, Dan, Professor Jericho and Joseph Williamson fight off invading Sontarans… and the foursome stumble into a time and place where Kate Stewart is leading human resistance. The TARDIS is there, too. 

Cue opening credits.

There are quite a few plot strands to pull together in this hour-long story and it manages it reasonably well. The Sontaran plan is a tad dodgy…

Then, close to the end, the Doctor gives herself the ominous message about an upcoming regeneration. Ooh, is there a little bit of flirting between Kate Stewart and the Doctor? Then, later, there’s a touching scene between the Doctor and Yaz. 

#doctor who #flux #the vanquishers #sontarans and cybermen and daleks oh my

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Doctor Who: Survivors of the Flux

I rewatched this part of the Flux serial on 27 October 2023.

We begin with another much-needed recap before beginning where we left off, the Doctor surrounded by Weeping Angels. She arrives at Division and meets Tecteun from The Timeless Children. There's lots of stuff about all that in this episode.

Meanwhile, Yaz and Dan are with Professor Jericho are looking for information about when the world is going to end in order to get back to their own time and place. They’re hunted, of course. 

And the snakey chap who the other people featuring in the Flux serial works for pops up on Earth to help set up and run UNIT. There are some lovely little touches in those segments, including the new UNIT refusing to comprehend that the alien detector has detected an alien. Seriously, look up the history of SOE during WW2 if you doubt me about the military mindset in disbelieving their own security precautions.

This episode has a huge cast for Dr Who, and loads and loads of plot strands starting to knit together. It does make this episode a tad choppy on its own but is okay within the whole. And it has another stunningly good ending on a cliffhanger…

#doctor who #flux #survivors of the flux #weeping angels #sontarans #unit

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Doctor Who: Village of the Angels

I rewatched this part of the Flux serial on 26 October 2023.

We’re half-way through this season now and the ‘previously on Dr Who’ recap is essential viewing. 

We begin properly in an English village on 21 November 1967, 54 years before the episode went out on BBC1. Professor Jericho is conducting tests of some kind on a woman who we last saw in 2021 snatched back in time by a Weeping Angel. There’s another Weeping Angel in the TARDIS. The Doctor does something clever to get rid of the Weeping Angel in the TARDIS, but of course that causes more problems. The Doctor finds the woman, Claire, but it’s too late…

The Weeping Angels are flipping terrifying, and this story keeps up that reputation.

Interestingly, this story is the only one of this season not written solely by Chris Chibnall. Not sure if that’s why this one is more coherent than the previous or whether that’s to do with where we are in the serial. The episode doesn’t ignore the larger story of the serial, with odd scenes continuing to add to the overarching plot.

That ending, though. Yikes.

And do keep watching through the end titles.

#doctor who #flux #village of the angels #weeping angels

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Doctor Who: Once, Upon Time

I rewatched this part of the Flux serial on 25 October 2023.

We begin with a recap—much needed, especially when originally watching this on a weekly basis… and then skip to a new character, Bel, who’s trapped on a world where Daleks are multiplying. In a voiceover, she yearns for someone… the slow revelation as to who is nicely done.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is trying to work out how best to save her friends from a time storm and gets a little help from the fugitive Doctor. The story fractures along with the events of the story. 

Confused? If you’re a casual viewer then it is massively confusing. If you pay attention then it’s fine. The alien places look really cool, too. 

#doctor who #flux #once upon time