BBC Books

[Cherry Pepsi Maxil]

The best one I've read is Illegal Alien, the rejected Season 26 story  involving the Cybermen in London during WWII. Apparently the first half of the book is very faithful to the original script so I'm absolutely certain that if the story had been made it would have been an instant classic. This is a lot darker than most television stories and it has more in common with The Invasion than most other Cyber stories. Unfortunately the version I own has NuWho Cybermen on the cover and spine. Still, it doesn't ruin what is a truly brilliant read. 

[Ludders II]

I found the audiobook CD set in my local library. It's excellent.
They also had Scales of Injustice but i haven't listened to that one yet.

[Cherry Pepsi Maxil]

Mar 5, 2024 1:09:58 GMT Ludders II said:

I found the audiobook CD set in my local library. It's excellent.
They also had Scales of Injustice but i haven't listened to that one yet.

Who is it read by?

[iank]

I was an avid reader of the NAs and to an extent the MAs though I definitely began to drift off when the BBC took over. IA was one of the better ones though probably because it was originally meant for TV.

[Ludders II]

Mar 5, 2024 16:01:06 GMT Cherry Pepsi Maxil said:

Mar 5, 2024 1:09:58 GMT Ludders II said:

I found the audiobook CD set in my local library. It's excellent.
They also had Scales of Injustice but i haven't listened to that one yet.

Who is it read by?

My mistake, it's just read by Sophie Aldred. 
(Check your e-mail) 

[burrunjor]

Mar 6, 2024 6:14:33 GMT Ludders II said:

Mar 5, 2024 16:01:06 GMT Cherry Pepsi Maxil said:

Who is it read by?

My mistake, it's just read by Sophie Aldred. 
(Check your e-mail) 

She does good work from what I'm told LOL. 

I never got into the books from the 90s, 00s to be honest. I never liked the look of them from what I read in DW magazines, which often ironically praised them. Again to me they came over as ridiculous stories that you'd never have seen on tv, too much focus on the Doctor, trying to explain his origins, why he's asexual, trying too hard to make him dark,  obsessing over continuity (ironically) in all the most neurotic ways like trying to fix plot holes from a 1960s story rather than in telling a new story, Doctor/companion romances, it being full of too much sex and not as a natural part of the story, just to show "look DW fans aren't incels." Worse the writers deciding to indulge in forbidden fruit sex, like having 16 year old Ace shagging 40 something Glitz. (Not saying the writers were perverts. This is sadly a thing lots of writers do from George R Martin to Alan Moore, explore deviant sexuality in their works because it's not real life, and it always sucks.) 

To me the books of the 90s and 00s were similar to the comics from that time by guys like Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mark Millar etc. All edge lord crap, written by self loathing fanboys who want to write for things like Batman, Doctor Who, but who don't want to be seen as only writing silly pulpy kiddie fare (even more so in the 90s and 00s where anything different or creative was to be sneered at in the media.) So they fill it full of deviant sex, and inappropriate content or deconstruct the characters to show why they were always actually crap.

Two prime examples of that are Grant Morrison's shockingly bad reimagining of Dan Dare, where he portrays Dan's future as a terrible dystopia, and has Dan kill himself after he's been raped by the Mekon. Also Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That sounded like a fun idea for a story of bringing lots of classic Victorian characters together for a team up, but oh dear god does he not do anything with it. It's all just pretentious, sneering deconstruction and shitting on other people's characters, that is when he's not filling it full of perverted crap that has no place in the story. For instance the Invisible Man is now a pedophile rapist who is explicitly shown raping an underage girl, with a panel showing her skirt being lifted up by an invisible force. The Invisible man however is later raped to death by Mr Hyde too. 



Now in all fairness the DW books as far as I'm aware never went that far, but still to me they came from kind of the same place and sadly the edgelords style has continued to dominate both DW and comics for decades afterwards. I know that DW doesn't try and be gritty, but still a lot of the tropes from the edgelords, like trying to be edgy politically (and just jumping on the zeitgeist with nothing new to say about it.) Having the villain want to shag the hero. (Missy grew out of Morrison's Mekon and his and others equally shitty version of the Joker that wanted to shag Batman.) Being so utterly ashamed of the source material, and trying to deconstruct the character and show how the hero is just as bad as the villain etc. 

All that shit we can blame on 90s self loathing fanboys LOL. 

[Cherry Pepsi Maxil]

Mar 5, 2024 1:09:58 GMT Ludders II said:

I found the audiobook CD set in my local library. It's excellent.
They also had Scales of Injustice but i haven't listened to that one yet.

I like the Monster collection, but why can't they put the era appropriate Cybermen on the cover instead of a Cybus one. It would never happen the other way round.

[Deleted]

Salability, that's all it is. I guarantee that the cybus design is more widely recognised than any other, to young people (for whom they are presumably prioritising their market) first and foremost, but also a large handful of older folks who watched it with their kids and people around the world who first heard of the show when it was on Netflix. It's a business, after all. It's one of the reasons the bronze Dalek and the broader Cybus design have remained in the show for almost 20 years now; they sell really f*cking well and they've essentially been turned into brands.

[Cherry Pepsi Maxil]

Going to start Festival of Death after I've finished my reread of Illegal Alien.

I don't think I've actually read one of the 4th Doctor BBC books before, but it's set during the Williams era with Lalla's Romana so I'm looking forward to reading it. Here's what the description says:

"The Beautiful Death is the ultimate theme-park ride: a sightseeing tour of the afterlife. But something has gone wrong, and when the Fourth Doctor arrives in the aftermath of the disaster, he is congratulated for saving the population from destruction – something he hasn't actually done yet. He has no choice but to travel back in time and discover how he became a hero. And then he finds out. He did it by sacrificing his life."

[iank]

Absolutely one of the best ones IMHO. It took a brave man at the time to try and tackle a story with that trio and risk comparisons to the enormously popular Gareth Roberts ones, but Morris did a superb job. Shame he didn't do more with that team (though his Tomorrow Windows book was one of the better EDAs too). I think he writes a lot for Big Finish now.