Scan barcode
nwhyte's review
4.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3816574.html
I generally enjoyed this, but I am going to start with a serious imperfection in the .epub version which I bought: endnotes and references to them are wrongly joined up, with individual endnote references sometimes taking you to the start of that chapter’s notes section, rather than to the specific note, and sometimes instead to the start of the bibliography for the book as a whole; meanwhile if you do find your endnote, read it, and then want to return to the main text, clicking on the reference instead brings you to the start of the chapter you were in, rather than to the place where you left off. Other books in the Black Archive series have got this right, as most ebooks do, and you would have thought it a fairly straightforward technical tweak, even with 180 notes to a text with rather fewer pages. This may seem like petty whining, but in a book like this where there is a lot of good stuff in the endnotes, the publisher's failure to hyperlink them correctly is a real barrier to reading pleasure.
Which is a shame, because otherwise more than any other book in the series so far, this gave new depths to my enjoyment of something I already really liked. As usual, it is neatly divided into thematic chapters, and as usual, I’ll quickly summarise them in order.
* Looking at the context framed as “audience expectations”, both from the Hinchcliffe era of Who and from wider concerns about TV horror;
a deep dive into the Gothic, especially the 1965 film The Skull;
* the origins of humanity and evolution, as depicted in fiction;
* H.P. Lovecraft, the missing fifth planet and the devastation of Mars;
* ten problems with the script (eg who lets the Doctor out of the cupboard?) and six great things about the story;
* an appendix looking at the novelisation, and at other appearances of the Fendahl;
* another appendix with a carefully argued continuity theory that the destroyed Fifth Planet is actually Minyos from Underworld, the story after next.
This is meaty stuff, all done in tremendous, affectionate and often convincing detail. Recommended.
I generally enjoyed this, but I am going to start with a serious imperfection in the .epub version which I bought: endnotes and references to them are wrongly joined up, with individual endnote references sometimes taking you to the start of that chapter’s notes section, rather than to the specific note, and sometimes instead to the start of the bibliography for the book as a whole; meanwhile if you do find your endnote, read it, and then want to return to the main text, clicking on the reference instead brings you to the start of the chapter you were in, rather than to the place where you left off. Other books in the Black Archive series have got this right, as most ebooks do, and you would have thought it a fairly straightforward technical tweak, even with 180 notes to a text with rather fewer pages. This may seem like petty whining, but in a book like this where there is a lot of good stuff in the endnotes, the publisher's failure to hyperlink them correctly is a real barrier to reading pleasure.
Which is a shame, because otherwise more than any other book in the series so far, this gave new depths to my enjoyment of something I already really liked. As usual, it is neatly divided into thematic chapters, and as usual, I’ll quickly summarise them in order.
* Looking at the context framed as “audience expectations”, both from the Hinchcliffe era of Who and from wider concerns about TV horror;
a deep dive into the Gothic, especially the 1965 film The Skull;
* the origins of humanity and evolution, as depicted in fiction;
* H.P. Lovecraft, the missing fifth planet and the devastation of Mars;
* ten problems with the script (eg who lets the Doctor out of the cupboard?) and six great things about the story;
* an appendix looking at the novelisation, and at other appearances of the Fendahl;
* another appendix with a carefully argued continuity theory that the destroyed Fifth Planet is actually Minyos from Underworld, the story after next.
This is meaty stuff, all done in tremendous, affectionate and often convincing detail. Recommended.
More...