Doctor Who: Blink

Doctor Who

The Doctor is a time-travelling Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey and Doctor Who (you know, as in "Doctor... who?") is one of the longest-running television franchises in science fiction.

As a huge sci-fi fan I have, of course, heard about it but never seen an episode until maybe 2010 when I have seen a few episodes late night on France 4. The first impression was rather of some silliness but after a few episodes I got into the spirit and found an universe of intriguing ideas and gripping drama with some silly goofiness thrown in. Not every idea is great but what series can not be accused of that crime.

The first episodes I've seen (in French) must have been starring David Tennant but when I started watching in earnest I naturally began with the Ninth Doctor. But you'll always remember your first Doctor and my Doctor is and probably always will be the Tenth Doctor.

Regeneration

When Doctor Who was created in 1963, the character was meant to be an older man travelling with his grand-daughter both being humanoid aliens capable of time travel. By 1966 the need of re-casting the Doctor became apparent and in any normal show that meant either one of two possibilities. One could simply take a new actor and pretend nothing ever happened. Or one could basically do what is today called a reboot - recreate everything and pretend the previous series don't exist. In a rare case you could integrate the fact that the actor has changed by saying the character has undergone plastic surgery but this seems rare indeed.

Being an alien it was suggested that the Doctor could regenerate allowing for a new actor to take on the role with different looks and attitudes while keeping the continuity intact. This way over the years the Doctor has been played by eleven differnt actors (in the official canon) with Matt Smith playing the latest incarnation since January the First, 2010.

Blink

As I have said I'm still loyal to the Tenth Doctor who appeared in three series. While I generally prefer the first and the last of these three years the Third Series still features one of the best Doctor Who episodes, ever: Blink.

A young woman gets messages from the past and needs to sort it out in order to survive the deadliest (and probably most humane) assassins of the universe and help the Doctor.

Two things stand out in this episode. First, there are these monsters whose peculiar nature makes them more frightening than your usual I-rip-your-head-off-and-feed-on-your-blood monster of the week. Second, the Doctor is hardly seen and yet you feel his presence.

I have found a video clip on YouTube but please be aware that watching it before you've seen the episode might spoil it for you!

You can buy it on Amazon…

UK Version…

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Steampunk Literature, Part Two

Some More Fiction

Though I'm still reading another book entirely (Vanquished Gods: Science, Religion and the Nature of Belief) and will read some other book (The Long Earth) before I get into Steampunk I still have found some more to read…

Let's begin with James Blaylock's The Digging Leviathan which is the first novel in his Narbondo series, followed by Homunculus and Lord Kelvin's Machine. Blaylock was mentored - alongside Tim Powers and the aforementioned K. W. Jeter - by Philip K. Dick.

Another novel is Infernal Devices. A Mad Victorian Fantasy by none other than Jeter himself who probably coined the word steampunk in 1987.

Not Strictly Steampunk But Close Enough

Stephen Michael Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers is not entirely what I would call steampunk but close in feeling to be interesting.

Steampunk Literature

Lately I wondered about interesting Steampunk literature.

Steampunk?

Steampunk is a term that - paralleling the word Cyberpunk invented by Bruce Bethke - denotes work featuring a certain punk attitude in combination with a core technology. While in the case of cyberpunk it is the nowadays prevalent electronic technology, steampunk takes a bit more revisionist and romantic approach by making the steam engine the primary driving force behind most technical development.

Édition 2 DVD
chez Amazon France

This makes for visually striking imagery but appears to us today less plausible. This (and the appealing idea that common people can with some training repair everything) helps in popularizing the basic ideas of the steampunk concept. But it also seems to be a reason that steampunk has until late largely refined to visual art forms like movies (my favorite one featuring steampunk concepts so far as I have seen remains La Cité des enfants perdus), animes and comics.

So what about written fiction?

I have decided to create a small list of Steampunk literature that I will try to get and read it and I will eventually post reviews on each book thus processed on this blog.

One book that I actually do own myself is The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. One early example of steampunk writing is Michael Moorcock's A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy published between 1971 and 1981.

More recent additions to the genre is the work of Stephen Hunt's Jackelian fantasy series. Another novel that was placed in the steampunk tradition by none other than Moorcock himself is The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry.

The difficulty seems also to be that due to its nature (and close relation to the Victorian era) steampunk is frequently mixed with gothic horror, supernatural romance and/or written as young adults literature neither of which is necessarily bad but also dilutes the idea of steampunk (that I like).

	The Difference Engine
	The Warlord of the Air
	The Land Leviathan
	A Nomad Of Time Streams
	The Court of the Air
	The Manual of Detection
	Writing Steampunk

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Clive Barker's Imajica

Clive Barker is one the better known writers of fantasy, specifically of a subgenre that I would like to call body fantasy as it shares with body horror its preoccupation with the human body, not necessarily in a destructive or degenerative way though that is one part of it. Hence some of his work is commonly classified under horror.

Imajica

It's been a while now that I wanted to read some of his works so a couple of years ago I bought several of his novels, Galilee, Sacrament, and Imajica. As the story of Imajica seemed to be the most-accessible to me out of the three books I started reading it. But somehow I didn't get past page 30, maybe…

But about a month I have been in search for some book that would allow me to completely leave behind the reality the way Neil Gaiman's American Gods or The Tales of Mithgar have done lately. And my eyes fell on the 1991 novel by Clive Barker. So I picked it up again and started… again.

While it has little consequence in the book itself, its title - Imajica - is quite appropriate as the novel is a very imaginative tale of a man on the quest to find himself. To achieve this goal he goes to hardly imaginable lengths including leaving our world literally behind himself.

Trying to give an indication of what can be found in this book would inevitably spoil the pleasure in reading the novel as discovering the man and the places he travels with him made up a lot of the pleasure. Suffice to say that Barker gives an interesting interpretation of magicians of the Faustian kind. While some critics have called this novel an erotic one I rather feel that they mix up two very distinct ideas. Imajica is deeply rooted in what I have previously called body fantasy and as such features many graphic description of physical destruction, very strange body structures, and very human bodily actions and reactions. At the same time it is about love in all its forms. Most people are driven by different forms of love or, at least, desire. In this aspect the novel becomes a very romantic one.

As before it took a few dozen pages before I got hooked on the story but once hooked I found it difficult stopping to read. The last fifty pages I tried to read as fast as I could to get to the end of it, to understand, but in my haste I guess I missed something because I am left with many open questions, on why some things turned out the way they did, on why some people did the things they did, to what end. So I guess I'll have no choice to re-read at least the final hundred (out of about 840) pages, this time taking the time to let the words sink in properly. After all, the book felt like it provided the answers but that you need to read it carefully to grasp the meaning of it…

To summarize the reading experience, it's very worthwhile but will take some time to finish and understand it. Which makes it a very good book, I guess.

You can buy it at Amazon…

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