Alasdair Stuart

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-night-of-the-doctor-and-the-day-of-the-docto...

Alasdair Stuart’s The Day of the Doctor is twice as long. It starts with an introduction, setting out the author’s stall: this is a story involving metafiction and death, and combining Old and New Who. Usually I write my own chapter summaries, but in this case the author has done it for me so I will lazily cut and paste, inserting the chapter titles:

The first chapter [“The Doctor Can See You Now”] looks in more detail at the concept of postmodernism and Who’s own unique flavour of it. Fans of a certain stripe will probably be thinking the word ‘discontinuity’ and they are not wrong.

The second chapter [“The Barn at the End and the Barn at the Start”] talks about the barn, what it represents to the show and also, crucially, the fictional spaces it allows the show to step into. It’s also going to look at the concept of postmodern and metafiction and what that, and 1970s BBC Shakespeare adaptations, have to do with Doctor Who.

The third chapter [“A Man Goes to War”] looks at the War Doctor. He’s arguably the most important incarnation of the Doctor and also one of the least well known. Here we’re also going to explore the idea that each one of these incarnations represents an era of the character.

The fourth chapter [“The Man Who Regrets”] turns the attention to the 10th Doctor. Poster boy for the series’ triumphant return! Big-haired righter of wrongs! Lonely god and occasional near mass murderer. He’s also the representation of the show’s past, which is an odd, interesting thing for him to be.

The fifth chapter [“The Man Who Forgets”] focuses on the 11th Doctor and how this is a story which is a prelude to his final bow in The Time of the Doctor (2013) and how it sets up the future of the show. A future which is far more introspective, for both Doctor and Daleks, than it first seems.

The sixth chapter [“Impossibilities, Moments, Revolutionaries and Evolutions”] examines Clara, the Moment, Kate Stewart and Osgood and why the future of the show is carefully, subtly encoded into those four women.

Finally, [in te seventh chapter, “Midlife Crisis of the Daleks”] we take a look at the Daleks and how The Day of the Doctor is a fictional structure through which the past, present and future of both the Doctor and his nemeses are examined and defined.

There’s also an appendix looking at how the 2020 story The Timeless Children affects our understanding of Day of the Doctor now, including also the “Morbius Doctors”.

This is all good, meaty stuff, well worth adding to the thinking fan’s shelves, and you can get it here.… (meer)

I read the first story thinking it was the story by Lora Gray which is what I'm here for but it was “Baby Fingers” (2019) by Pierce Skinner, narrated by Austin Malone and made zero sense. Doing some googling, I see he writes Lovecraftian. Bingo.

Also read:

-- Polaroid, 1979 (2019) by Lora Gray, narrated by Setsu Uzume
Last story I'll read by Lora Gray. This one the character is a skinless creature that wears boy skins. Eventually wear's it's host/roommate's skin to break out of the prison he has put it in. She definitely works through identity in their stories and I'm not the right audience. She is also not exactly clear which is also outside my reading preference.

-- Metal, Sex, Monsters (2017) by Maria Haskins, narrated by The Word Whore
A girl, during her first kiss, in a dark basement with Judas Priest in the background develops into something else. And she ends up devouring all the boys/men she comes across in the future. Probably some deeper meaning that I'm not getting. The narrator does help by saying each relationship we have changes us or something. A police officer is interviewing her after getting video evidence of her in the act. The cop is seems, is the first boy she kissed. The author writes confusing to me. Not my reading preference but was enjoyable. Narrator was fantastic for this particular story.… (meer)

Psuedopod is a short story horror podcast that I listen to regularly (even if I always do seem to be a few episodes behind). The producers, Escape Artists, also do a science fiction 'cast (Escape Pod) and a fantasy one (PodCastle). They're all pretty great, but in some ways, Psuedopod is my least favorite of the three, just because horror is kind of a hit-and-miss genre for me, and when a horror story fails to work for you, it often fails badly.

But even on those occasions when the story itself doesn't do much for me, I'm always happy I listened, anyway, because they're always followed by host Alasdair Stuart's wonderful "outro"s, in which he somehow always finds really insightful things to say. Even if I don't always get much out of the story, he always seems to, which means that I do, after all. And he then uses that as a jumping-off point to talk about thoughts and experiences of his own on a variety of subjects: the horror genre, writing and creativity, pop culture, martial arts, growing up on the Isle of Man, the everyday struggles of his own life and everyone else's and how to face them with courage. Whatever it is he's talking about, he does it articulately and with a lot of humor and heart, and I always look forward to listening to him.

So I was delighted when I heard these segments were being collected into a book. Sadly, though, I just don't think they're nearly as successful in this format. Stripped of all references to the stories they originally accompanied and recast as standalone pieces, they feel entirely too disjointed and devoid of context. They were clearly written to play in audio format, and they lose a lot in the absence of Stuart's expressive voice. They also haven't been edited well; there are quite a few typos and other kinds of annoying mistakes, some of which actually make the sentences they're infesting a little difficult to parse. So, it's a bit disappointing, and really just not the same as listening to them on the podcast. That probably won't stop me from buying volume 2 when it comes out, though.… (meer)