Reading, Listening, Watching

[purplecat]

Reading: Nearly finished Filter House by Nisi Shawl. I've loved nearly all the stories in it so far and they range over everything from futuristic science fiction to ghost stories to urban fantasy.

Listening: to the Doctor Who Bookclub discussing Crooked World. Their confusion about the Penelope Pitstop character and her relationship to her Guardian/The Hooded Claw reminds me forcibly about how the original Who novels spoke to a very specific demographic. They were equally confused (when discussing Love and War) about who the Travellers were supposed to evoke. They hypothesised that they were kind of like the Roma when, to me, they were clearly intended to evoke the New Age Travellers of the 1980s and 1990s.

Watching: Agent Carter - I find it odd how jarring the ongoing narrative structure seems when although Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D started out very episodic it became much more joined up later. I suspect it's the sense that, right from the start, this is a story about a transition -- the founding of S.H.I.E.L.D from the SSR.

Comments

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

It's hard to cast my mind back that far, but I think that I thought the Travellers were supposed to be New Age Travellers too. Although I think a lot of the pop cultural references in the novels passed me by too - I don't think I was ready to understand that you could be a Doctor Who geek and aware of popular culture.

[purplecat]

I think the books were very squarely aimed at middle class men who had been children in the 1960s and 1970s and teenagers in the 1970s and 1980s. Crooked World in particular is all about the cartoons that were on UK Children's television in the 70s.

I could keep up with most of the references to television - it has a very homogenised experience in the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, the 1980s but I don't think I ever really caught all the music references, of which I gather there were many in the books.