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May. 5th, 2008

This review bought to you courtesy of jet lag.

If you've seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow you will know that, in the grand tradition of afternoon serials, each segment makes sense beside its neighbour but that the narrative thread of the whole makes no sense whatsoever. So the reason you are running from place B to place C makes sense but not given the reason you ran from place A to place B in the first place. The Poison Sky was a bit like this. It had a lot of nice, internally coherent pieces but put them together and the whole house of cards collapses.

( spoilers, as usual, under the cut )

I've been scratching my head over how to cover Time and Relative Dissertations in Space in more detail, since I wanted to talk about several of the essays but didn't really want to make 18 more posts about it. I've opted for discussing each of its four parts in turn. These are not so much reviews as comments and thoughts I had while reading the essays - some of these comments probably arise because I'm approaching them from a computer science direction (my general notes about this in my original review of the book).

( How to pilot a TARDIS: audiences, science fiction and the fantastic in Doctor Who )

( The child as addressee, viewer and consumer in mid-1960s Doctor Who )

( 'Now how is that wolf able to impersonate a grandmother?' History, pseudo-history and genre in Doctor Who )

( Bargains of necessity? Doctor Who, Culloden and fictionalising history at the BBC in the 1960s )

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Doctor Who: The Poison Sky
An Earthly Programme: Origins and directions

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