#Simon Bucher-Jones

[dalesramblingsblog]

It's a temporal paradox, but probably not the one you were expecting.

As a prelude to our main event next review, Dale's Ramblings takes a brief detour to pick over Ghost Devices, Simon Bucher-Jones' sophomore Doctor Who novel, complete with all the confusion and tangents you've come to expect.

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[thedoctorwhocompanion]

Reviewed: Doctor Who's The Black Archive -- The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit

Reviewed: #DoctorWho's The Black Archive -- The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit

With Halloween just around the corner, it seems apt to revisit one of Doctor Who‘s scarier stories, via Obverse Books’ Black Archive series of monographs. Doctor Who has always treaded the line between science fact and science fantasy, but it wasn’t until 1971’s The Daemons that the show turned its attention to the mythical, the mystical, and the Occult. Introducing and rationalizing Wicca and…

[isayhourwrong]

Round One, Group Nine

[gen-is-gone]

Round One, Bout Eleven

[forgottenlivesobverse]

Forgotten Lives 3

A third and final set of FORGOTTEN LIVES tales…

A person is the sum of their memories. A Time Lord even more so.

But some people live so long that there is no longer room for all the memories; they find themselves diminished, whittled away piece by piece…

For many years, Doctor Who has implied that William Hartnell played the Doctor’s first incarnation — but in The Brain of Morbius, we were given glimpses of eight stern-faced men in assorted historical costumes — Doctors before the one we know as the first.

What were they like, these forgotten Doctors? What worlds did they visit, and what adventures did they have there? Who were their companions, and who were their enemies?

And perhaps just as interesting — what sort of stories would this forgotten prehistory of Doctor Who have told?

‘The Lungs of the Birastrop’ by Paul Driscoll

‘Who Needs Enemies’ by Jay Eales

‘Admission to the Unknown’ by Ian McIntire

‘Hope Springs’ by Chris Wing

‘The Swan and the Flame’ by Kara Dennison

‘Scientific Advisor’ by Daniel Tessier

‘The Country of the Young’ by Philip Purser-Hallard

The Seven Scholars and the Storyteller’ by Simon Bucher-Jones

Edited by Philip Purser-Hallard. Cover art by Jon Huff. Cover design by Cody Schell.

PRE-ORDER ONLY. PUBLICATION EARLY DECEMBER.

ALL PROFITS FROM THIS BOOK WILL BE DONATED TO ALZHEIMER’S CHARITIES.

[theeighthdoctoradventures]

What is Tumblr’s EDA Ranking?

the EDA ranking tournament you’ve not been waiting for! this is not an elimination bracket! this is to determine a ranking of 1st to 73rd place.

ROUND EIGHT: POLL FIVE

Interference (duology) by Lawrence Miles

vs…

The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

- this is just for fun! all pairings were randomly generated by a ranking website

- you can leave propaganda in replies and reblogs

- no books will be eliminated

- this is absolutely not a perfect way of ranking, i can't be bothered to think any harder about this

[crystalromana]

He knew his body’s input signals were near flat-line. Under normal circumstances, a triggered regeneration would have been the best he could hope for, but here in deep space with little or no environmental feedback, a regeneration would be both a colossal waste of energy – energy the body needed at the cellular level to hold back the abnormal and dysfunctional cells that were developing and fix the damage done by the expansion of ice in the bloodstream and tissue.

Any regeneration under those circumstances couldn’t possibly be stable; once triggered it would cause a cascade effect, setting off all his remaining regenerative cycles, burning then out in a futile attempt to adapt to deep space.

Hopefully a futile attempt.

There were old horror stories on Gallifrey about Time Lords forced into chain regenerations in alien environments, each step in the chain changing them further away from the accepted norms of their culture. Sometimes in the early days of the exploration of time and space, they would come back, only to be quietly killed, or walled up in their own TARDISes. He had wondered once if he kept regenerating in human company whether he would grow more and more like them – and look how that had turned out. Ten minutes.

The age when regenerationally challenged individuals would be hidden away as a House’s shame or stasered into unrecognisable protoplasm had been a brutal time, of course, aeons ago. A Dark Time. In his day such an accident would be greeted only with kindness, with pity and the dedicated care of the Hospitalers.

Even so. If he was to die here and now, it would be in his present flesh, not as something his companions would never recognise. He knew now he was going to die; there might be ways out of this but he couldn’t stop regulating his body long enough to think. Twelve minutes gone now.

-The Taking of Planet Five, Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

[a-wartime-paradox]

Auteur is ever nearer...

In the coming days (before or on Halloween 2023), the first installment, written by @aristidetwain , in the upcoming Auteur series will be appear, contained within the Arcbeatle Press Halloween anthology Horrors of Arcbeatle. This installment will also be the kickstart for the "Coloth" series based around the character "Coloth" from Simon Bucher-Jones's War Crimes.

Auteur, for anyone unawares, debuted in @rassilon-imprimatur (Jayce Black)'s A Bloody (and Public) Domain & Going Once, Going Twice, published in Obverse Books's Faction Paradox anthologies "The Book of the Enemy" and "The Book of the Peace", respectively. This publication marks the precedent for future independently-licensed works starring Auteur 👀👀

I will be reblogging this post with a link to purchase the anthology from arcbeatlepress.com as soon as such a thing is possible, so keep your eyes out!

source: tweet from Aristide Twain, second tweet from Aristide Twain

[vikingschism]

Continuing my readthrough of the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures I finished reading The Death of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones the other day. Set in Paris in the late 19th century, the TARDIS crew are trying to avert some catastrophe that is due to happen (which will destroy history, naturally) and The Doctor thinks psychic powers might have something to do with it.

Not going to bury the lede on this one, it was a bit of a confusing mess. By the end it resolved itself into a fairly clear story, but along the way I was constantly unsure what was going on. The experience of reading it was almost dreamlike in a sense; scenes would shift with little to no connection and characters come in and out of prominence with no fanfare. I don't think this was fully intentional however, and it made the book very slow to read.

The concept behind the aliens in this story was cool, however it didn't help with the confusion as there was a lot of jargon introduced very quickly. Again, later on this became more obvious when it was clear what they actually were, but the first few scenes appear so unconnected to the other scenes going on that it's hard to latch on to them. I think that a concept like this could only really be done in a book if executed like it was here - it would definitely be hard to do in a visual medium.

The Doctor and crew were fine here, Chris gets a fun plotline where he has to infiltrate the Parisian police, and ends up needing to pretend to be The Doctor. The Doctor has his fingers in many pies and gets to engage in a bit of scheming. Roz, meanwhile, seems to get the short end of the stick and doesn't get a ton to do. There is some insight on her past though which is interesting. The other supporting characters and villains aren't too interesting overall.

The book does bring back The Shadow Directory from Christmas on a Rational Planet, however they don't seem to do all that much here. The callback does make sense at least seeing as the book is set in Paris.

The next book in the series is Damaged Goods by Russel T Davies, and I'm already halfway through. It's a good one. Expect a review for that one soon.

[aloe-vega]

Think of the universe for a moment as having three additional directions (alterward, paraward, and otherward) all at right angles to the ones you know (length, breadth, width, and time). This is a tremendous oversimplification, but it may help.

Paraward, we find a sheath of histories which are either eternally separate from our own anchored time or which diverge and return to it so far in the past, or so far in the future, as to be - functionally - eternally separate from it in terms of the noospheres of the Great Houses. The physical laws of these universes are identical to ours, but all else is different. We call these paraward space-time entities 'parallel worlds'. Alterward, we find those histories which divert, at critical or innocuous moments alike, from ours. Here are the worlds where a toe goes unstubbed, or a vital battle is lost, where the five hundred and eleventh hair on a sloth in the forest has gone gray in one world, and white in another. Many (perhaps most of these) rejoin the main anchored universe as their micro-changes fall away into quantum uncertainty. When the million sloths are dead and decomposing, what effect will the colour of one hair have had? A few (the mathematics contains several high order infinities, so the number itself may be high) do not appear to rejoin, either eternally leading outside the 'time-space' horizon approachable by a normal time-ship, or curving back in closed loops longer than our normal ships can reach, beyond the futures we can access. We call these alterward space-time entities 'alternate worlds'. Perhaps paraward is just a way of talking about extreme alternates, and alterward is just a way of talking about probability bundle universes. But then there is Otherward. Otherward is Outside. To Otherward the laws themselves are different, the biodata is constituted from other principles. These are universes held on separate 'branes' in hyperspace, outside the sheath that contains the paraward and alterward components of our universe. These are beyond the reach of our time-ships, who go mad in the horrors of the void between.

-- The Brakespeare Voyage (2013), Simon Bucher-Jones and Jonathan Dennis

[doctornolonger]

Book stats. BBC Books averaged 4000 units per book, and the reason for rescheduling was that warehouses got too full to store new publications. Surplus stocks of books were sent to orphanages [in] Eastern Europe, where they improved the efficiency of heating systems.

Simon Bucher-Jones’ notes from a talk Justin Richards gave in Birmingham in 2006. Remember this the next time you balk at used book prices!

[tvmigraine]

FORGOTTEN LIVES: Christopher Barry

Before we begin! Remember to get a copy of the Forgotten Lives Omnibus at this link! I believe pre-orders are open until the 1st of September, you may miss your chance to get this book - don't miss out!

Simon Bucher-Jones, as the first writer for Forgotten Lives, was presented with a unique challenge that is comparable to Patrick Troughton or Christopher Eccleston's TV debut - proving the idea can work. Everyone, of course, had their own challenge in creating a unique and easily defined Doctor in a single story, but Bucher-Jones was the one that would be presented to you first. It was paramount that the Christopher Barry incarnation of the Doctor would grab attention.

So the question is how successful is this first impression?

I won't argue either way of it. Personal opinions and preferences are so broad that if I were to tell you that it was successful, that would only mean I think it's successful and you may disagree when you read it for yourselves. Instead, let's focus on painting the picture of who this Doctor is.

Christopher Barry (1925-2014) was a director for Doctor Who as far back as the first episode of The Daleks. He left his footprint on each Era from Hartnell to Tom Baker, having filmed at least one story for each of the first four. He also then made a sideways step in the franchise when he directed Downtime by Reeltime Pictures.

There may be something on your mind - where do the Morbius Doctors fit? While obviously Pre-Hartnell, their relationship to the Fugitive Doctor is up to interpretation as nothing would conflict her being before these Doctors or after. That being said, the artist for the first book, Paul Hanley, implied a location through the simple use of colour in the Christopher Barry Doctor's outfit.

Paul Hanley did the art for every Doctor and did a TARDIS interior for each of them (these could be found in the first Volume under "The Changing Face of Dr. Who", however these sections are not in the Omnibus). Through the colour of the Barry Doctor's outfit matching the colourful shirt worn by the Fugitive Doctor, along with the golden TARDIS interior versus her blue, this does imply the Morbius Doctors to come after.

So who actually is this Doctor? Well they're a lot less science-fiction than you might first expect. The goal behind these stories weren't to simply write more Doctor Who adventures to fill these gaps, but to write as if they were a part of Doctor Who's prehistory - as such, we see a version of our familiar time traveler in the same way you'd see something out of the corner of your eye. Our first story outright covers a piece of Cornish folklore, about knocking in tin mines, as opposed to anything explicitly alien. I would argue we do not see outright sci-fi elements until we reach our third doctor, Christopher Baker, but that doesn't mean they are completely absent - there is a fantastic moment in the first story where we see time travel taking place in a unique fashion, with characters noticing a change and almost correcting it in their heads as if that's easier for them to stomach.

One more element that feels noteworthy is how these stories all feel. Simon-Bucher Jones gives these stories the feeling of rediscovered manuscripts being adapted, even including footnotes from the person retelling these stories. The footnotes were much appreciated as they painted this picture of somebody rediscovering the stories, which felt apt for the theme of these Doctors' unknown stories. James Bojaciuk elaborates on this idea by removing the footnotes but outright stating the story to be an adaption from a fictional magazine (which also gives us a fictional starting point for the series at 1930), helping to build a history behind where these stories originally came from.

For more insight into the creative process of every author that worked on Forgotten Lives, you can go to @forgottenlivesobverse and find interviews from everyone involved across the books. If you're looking for insight on how the outfits were designed, you can go to Paul Hanley's Patreon and find what went into designing each Doctor.

I do not want to spoil too much more as you should buy the books, but I want to give as much credit to Bucher-Jones and Bojaciuk for the challenge both were given and the quality of their stories. While we haven't discussed the contribution made by Philip Purser-Hallard, don't worry, you'll hear much more about him tomorrow.

In the Forgotten Lives Omnibus, you can look forward to these four stories as we are reintroduced to the Doctor:

THE KNOCKING IN THE MINESHAFT by Simon Bucher-Jones:

THE ISLAND OF AEONS by James Bojaciuk

RETROGENESIS (Part One) by Philip Purser-Hallard

THE HAND OF NIGHT AND SHADOWS by Simon Bucher-Jones

Join us next time when we'll start covering the Robert Banks Stewart Doctor who will take the first step into true science-fiction, while discussing how this era may be more familiar than you'd first expect.

[possforeffect]

All right, now that this blog has some followers...

A couple of years ago, I managed to get a short story professionally published. However, the publisher pays on a percentage of net profits of sales from the volume, and hasn't exactly been forthcoming on the sales numbers; given that payments were meant to be quarterly and I haven't gotten anything since July 1st of last year, I don't think it's selling very well.

With that said, if you want to see what I've done (and have been trying to do) outside of SCP writing-wise, check out Shadows Over Avalon, Volume 1, in the link below. If you want to buy it, great, if not, no big deal.

OTOH, if you want to support me directly, you can find my Ko-Fi here: https://ko-fi.com/ihpkmn

[gen-is-gone]

EDA Writer Tournament: Round Two, Bout Seven

[forgottenlivesobverse]

You asked, and we listened.

For February 2024 only, all three Forgotten Lives volumes are available as ebooks at the Obverse Books site, with the proceeds as usual going to Alzheimer's charities. This is a one-off offer, so don't miss out!

Stories by Aditya Bidikar, James Bojaciuk, Simon Bucher-Jones, Kara Dennison, Paul Driscoll, Jay Eales, Kenton Hall, Andrew Hickey, Matthew Kresal, Gareth Madgwick, Ian McIntire, Lance Parkin, Nicole Petit, Philip Purser-Hallard, Cody Schell, Daniel Tessier and Chris Wing.

[theeighthdoctoradventures]

What is Tumblr’s EDA Ranking?

the EDA ranking tournament you’ve not been waiting for! this is not an elimination bracket! this is to determine a ranking of 1st to 73rd place.

ROUND FOURTEEN: POLL SEVEN

The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

vs…

The Banquo Legacy by Andy Lane & Justin Richards