Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!: Guides to Comics, TV, and SF

Introduction

This book is a collection of essays I wrote between September 2009 and January 2011, and represents maybe a tenth of my prose output from that time. The core of the book is two series of blog posts I wrote – The Hyperposts and Eschatology and Escapology. Each of these series was an attempt to answer a single question – the first, posed by an acquaintance, was what I counted in my ‘personal Doctor Who canon’. The second was my own attempt to figure out what was happening in a Batman comic.

Now, these two questions shouldn’t require forty thousand words to answer, even for the most logorrhoeic of writers, but I have an unfortunate tendency to say in order to explain that, first I must explain this. When doing a course on computer software engineering a couple of years ago, and being asked a relatively simple question on user interface design, I ended up having to cite both Plato’s Republic and Detective Comics #38 in order to make a point.

But I digress…

Both those series of essays also ended up exposing – to me as much as my readers – underlying themes in several ostensibly unconnected things. You might not think there’s much similarity between an out-of-continuity Doctor Who audio play and a biographical comic about Oscar Wilde featuring a barbarian aardvaark, but there is. Honestly.

For publication, I have combined those two series and added more connecting material – primarily other essays on those series’ topics – which I hope will bring out the various themes. This may seem at first like quite a rambling book, but in fact it does have a structure, and themes, and a point.

So what you have in your hands – or on your screen – is a book on a whole variety of niche subjects. It’s about Doctor Who novels from when the show wasn’t on TV, and black and white comics from the eighties, about scientific papers on quantum mechanics and fan-fiction on the internet. It’s about Grant Morrison, Jack Kirby and Alan Moore, and Frank Tipler and time travel and Batman and black holes and the second law of thermodynamics.

But most of all it’s about stories – the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell others, and how we use them to make sense of the world. And how maybe we shouldn’t.

PRELUDE: ON THE SUBJECT OF ‘CANON’

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. We love with our desires – although everything has been done to try to apply a canon even to love

Pablo Picasso

This book started as a reply to a simple question, after Dan Howells, in a comment to one of my blog posts, asked me to do a post about things that have never been mentioned in Doctor Who canon, but which you consider canonical anyway – my response to that is actually this:

That image comes from a great post about how there is no Doctor Who ‘canon’¹ , on the blog Teatime Brutality. I’ll be summarising the arguments of that wonderful anonymous blogger later.

However, to answer Dan’s question properly, I ended up having to talk about a lot of other things, including

The Kingdom – a mid-90s DC comics series by Mark Waid and various artists

Seven Soldiers – a DC comics series from 2005-2006 by Grant Morrison and various artists

52, another DC comics series from 2005-2006, by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, Keith Giffen and various artists

The End Of Time – a non-fiction book by physicist Julian Barbour in which he tries to show that time is an illusion.

Melmoth - a semi-fictional comic about the death of Oscar Wilde by Dave Sim and Gerhard

Deadline - a Doctor Who Unbound audio story by Rob Shearman, starring Derek Jacobi.

The comics of Jack Kirby,

Crisis On Infinite Earths - a 12-issue comic series by Marv Wolfman, George Perez et al, published by DC Comics.

This longer, expanded version of these essays also includes articles on the Faction Paradox novels of Lawrence Miles and others, the ‘Omega Point’ hypothesis of physicist Frank Tipler, the multiverse theories of mathematician Max Tegmark, and more.

However, before going into my extended series of essays, I’ll answer Dan’s question on the terms he asked it – here are five things that are ‘true’ in the Doctor Who that’s in my head, but have never been referenced – or have been directly contradicted – on TV:

The explanation of the TARDIS’ workings and ‘artron energy’ in About Time 1, where Miles and Wood suggest that the TARDIS is powered by energy from the collapse of quantum waveforms, and the difference between potential and actuality. Wonderful gibberish that’s just on the cusp of making some kind of sense.

Daleks have no letter J in their alphabet. Terry Nation said so. (Neither do the Welsh, by the way. Coincidence? I think not…)

The Fifth Doctor had a huge series of adventures with Peri, many involving the Pharaoh Erimem as well, and at the same time regenerated within a couple of days of meeting her. He can do that kind of thing.

The Doctor is an agnostic. He’s seen too much to be certain either way about anything, and considers that stating that anything is absolutely true is tantamount to saying you have a perfect, complete working model of the universe in your head, which he doesn’t.

The Eighth Doctor existed but the TV Movie never happened. The Ninth Doctor was very like the one on TV, but no TV story between 2005 and 2009 ever happened, and there is no Tenth Doctor. The Time War happened, but the Welsh series bears as much resemblance to what ‘really’ happened to the Doctor afterwards as Blackadder II does to the real court of Elizabeth I.

But that’s only the story I tell myself. In my personal ‘canon’, the most important stories are the Faction Paradox novels, the mid-period Big Finish audio dramas, and the 1963-1989 TV series. Yours could instead count Scream Of The Shalka, Dimensions In Time, the two Peter Cushing films, the adverts Tom Baker and Lalla Ward made for Prime Computers in 1979, Torchwood, the unofficial Ten Doctors web-comic and the role-playing game, and I bet you could tell yourself some interesting stories with that as the basis, too.

Because continuity and ‘canon’ only have any worth at all – are only not actively pernicious concepts – when they’re a springboard for telling more stories – either the stories told by the author, or the stories we tell ourselves. Those stories can be as simple as us reading between the lines – or a three-year-old pretending a cardboard box is her TARDIS or shouting I AM A DA-LEK! – or as complex as fanfic. But the second they become strictures on storytelling, instead of an inspiration for it, something is very wrong. Stories should never become dogma.

DOCTOR WHO UNBOUND: DEADLINE

THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY (WHICH MAY NEVER HAPPEN, BUT THEN AGAIN MAY) ABOUT A MAN WHO CAME FROM THE SKY IN A BIG BLUE BOX AND DID ONLY GOOD.

IT TELLS OF HIS TWILIGHT, WHEN THE GREAT BATTLES WERE OVER AND THE GREAT MIRACLES LONG SINCE PERFORMED, OF HOW HIS ENEMIES CONSPIRED AGAINST HIM AND OF THAT FINAL WAR IN THE BLIND WASTES BENEATH THE MEDUSA CASCADE; OF THE WOMEN HE LOVED AND OF THE CHOICES HE MADE FOR THEM; OF HOW HE BROKE HIS MOST SACRED OATH, AND HOW FINALLY ALL THE THINGS HE HAD WERE TAKEN FROM HIM SAVE FOR ONE.

IN THE BIG CITY, PEOPLE STILL SOMETIMES GLANCE UP HOPEFULLY FROM THE SIDEWALKS, HEARING A DISTANT WHEEZING, GROANING SOUND.. BUT NO: IT’S ONLY A SAW, ONLY A MACHINE. THE DOCTOR DIED TEN YEARS AGO. THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY…

AREN’T THEY ALL?

I didn’t write that, it’s from a blog post² I found when I was googling to find the precise wording of the opening paragraph of Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, so I could quote the first couple of sentences, but if you google This is an imaginary story which may never happen (without the quotes) that’s the first result involving the quote. One of those synchronicities…

There’s a long tradition in comics of ‘imaginary stories’, started by Superman editor Mort Weisinger in the 1950s, where stories that ‘didn’t really happen’ could happen – Superman could die, or marry Lois Lane, or split into red and blue versions of himself, or something else that could never happen in the ‘real’ comics, with no consequences – it was just an ‘imaginary story’, not a true story like all the other ones.

This later became formalised in both the major comic companies as the series What If? in Marvel and Elseworlds in DC, where we could ask questions like What would happen if Superman had landed in King Arthur’s time?, What would happen if Superman was adopted by Batman’s parents? or What would happen, right, if Batman had been a vampire? Wouldn’t that have been, like, just kick-ass?

While these stories could have been an exciting and interesting thing to do – a way to tell stories about these well-known characters without having to dot the is and cross the ts and ensure they say nothing that contradicts anything in 70 years of already-mutually-contradictory stories, in fact they never were. In the DC Elseworlds stories, no matter what the premise, it almost always went the same way – everything would turn out exactly as it had ‘in continuity’, just with a different backdrop. Sir Kal would joust with the evil black knight Sir Luthor for the hand of Lady Lois, while his squire Jim Olsen looked on along with his aged mentor Sir Perry The White (I’ve not actually read the ‘what if Superman landed in Camelot?’ one, but I already know exactly how it would go).

Meanwhile, in Marvel’s hands, the ‘What If…?’ question was always (for values of always that equal ‘quite often’) answered the world would have ended. What if Wolverine had had baked beans instead of tomatoes for his breakfast? – He would have broken wind and alerted the Skrulls to the X-Men’s presence and they’d have destroyed the world. What if Ben Grimm had bent over to tie his shoelaces? – A villain wouldn’t have tripped over them, and wouldn’t have been caught, and would have used his doomsday device…

In other words, what could be a way of freeing writers and artists from the creative straitjacket of continuity is instead turned into a way of reinforcing the primacy of ‘canon’. Things couldn’t be different, because no matter what change you make, no matter how major or minor, things still turn out exactly the same (DC) or the world would end (Marvel) so the only story that ‘matters’ is the mainline one. All is for the best in the best of all possible continuities. Hopelessly Panglossian indeed.

Big Finish, a company that make CDs of spoken-word plays based on Doctor Who, also created their own range of ‘Imaginary Stories’ – the Doctor Who: Unbound range of audio stories – in the early 2000s, and for much the same reasons. Fans wanted to hear what it would be like if The Doctor was played by David Warner (the answer is exactly as you’d expect, which is a good thing), or What if… the Doctor regenerated into a woman?!