Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell (edition 2011)by Philip Sandifer
Work InformationTARDIS Eruditorum - A Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell by Elizabeth Sandifer
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  nwhyte | Apr 30, 2013 |  no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Series
In this newly revised and expanded first volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you'll find a critical history of William Hartnell's three seasons of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand that story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire line of mystical, avant-garde, and radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that really is about everything that has ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the earliest years of the program, looking at how it emerged from the existing traditions of science fiction in the UK and how it quickly found its kinship with the emerging counterculture of the 1960s. Every essay from the Hartnell era has been revised and expanded from its original form, and the eight new essays exclusive to the collected edition have been augmented by a further eleven, providing nineteen book-exclusive essays on topics like what happened before An Unearthly Child, whether the lead character's name is really Doctor Who, and how David Whitaker created the idea of a Doctor Who novel. Plus, you'll learn: How acid-fueled occultism influenced the creation of the Cybermen. Why The Celestial Toymaker is irredeemably racist. The Problem of Susan Foreman No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresRatingAverage: (3.79)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
1
combines an iteration through the televised stories (and some untelevised ones, starting with Kim Newman's Time and Relative) with reflections on the general cultural ambience of the time, though there are fewer of these than there were in the second volume.
This volume has more decription of the scope of the entire project from Sandifer. He firmly locates it as an act of "psychochronography", and devotes some time to unpacking that concept in the opening essay. He also writes in passing about gender and race - particularly race, tackling the question of Hartnell's own racism and the racist interpretations of The Ark and The Celestial Toymaker. It's all rather fascinating.
As before I found areas of agreement and disagreement, and some points of irritation. I found his description of the end of Susan's and Dodo's character arcs, as if they had just run out of things to do and therefore had to be written out, rather too deterministic; the show was always perfectly capable of keeping characters around well after their sell-by date. I'm also not aware of any other evidence that Vicki was originally intended to be killed off in The Daleks' Master Plan. But I cheered for his positive interpretation of The Gunfighters. I think it's also a very strong point that the changeover of producers - twice - in Season Three is one of the biggest changes of production style in the history of the programme, though spread out to happen gradually over several stories.
In any case, these books will be as vital a part of the thinking Who fan's library as Wood and Miles' About Time series, to which Sandifer repeatedly pays due homage. (