THE DOCTOR WHO PRODUCTION DIARY: THE HARTNELL YEARS ALSO OUT
RELEASED OUT NOW! 668 pages | Paperback
Author David Brunt
Publisher Telos Publishing
Here’s the hefty first entry in an ambitious, multi-volume series that aims to chart the entire behind-the-scenes history of classic Doctor Who, day by day if not quite Dalek by Dalek. Assembled from an exhaustive trawl of original paperwork held by the BBC Written Archives Centre, it’s a soberly written, detail-focused insight into the pioneering years of the programme.
David Brunt – a former historian of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society – takes everything from internal memos to contract files to taxi receipts and orders it all into diary form, recounting the show’s evolution from the conceptual spark of “a senile old man in a time machine” to the arrival of Patrick Troughton (though frustratingly little documentation survives on the decision to depose original star William Hartnell).
Skewering fan myths along the way, it’s a truly impressive feat of contextualisation. More than that, it offers crucial glimpses of the human story, recording bruised egos and rumblings of dissatisfaction. BBC designer Raymond Cusick requests fair recompense for creating the iconography of the Daleks. His bonus? A thoroughly exterminatable £175. Nick Setchfield There’s plenty more titles that we couldn’t fit in. Bookworms will know Cixin Liu as the author of Hugo-winner The Three-body Problem. One for fans, rather than a jumping-on point, A VIEW FROM THE STARS (out now, Head Of Zeus) is mostly made up of essays about SF, interspersed with interviews and a little short fiction. Edited by Jared Shurin (formerly of geek culture blog Pornokitsch), THE BIG BOOK OF CYBERPUNK VOLUME ONE/VOLUME TWO (out now, Vintage) together run to over 1,000 pages, featuring a total of 108 stories. You can find a full list at bit.ly/bigcyber. Colonisation, betrayal and forgiveness are, apparently, among the themes of Amal Singh’s THE GARDEN OF DELIGHTS (out now, Flame Tree Press). Set in a city where petals are currency and flowers are magic, it centres on a Caretaker who must join forces with a girl who can change reality when a magical rot takes root. We’re promised both “swoon-worthy romance” and “whimsical sorcery” in Sydney J Shields’s debut THE HONEY WITCH
(16 May, Orbit), which follows a young woman being trained as the next Honey Witch. Her magic powers come with a catch: no one can fall in love with her. But then sceptic Lottie turns up… Finally, gothic romance is the order of the day in Laura Purcell’s YA book MOONSTONE (23 May, Harpervoyager), in which a girl is sent to live with a strict godmother and her strange daughter. Cue mysterious deaths, claw marks on the doors and eerie howling in the night. We can likely guess where that’s leading…