We're All Stories In The End 2 - All-Consuming Fire

 It's time for the first Virgin New Adventure  - a book that manages to combine my love for all things Doctor Who with another literary hero. 

Move over Batman - it's the word's greatest detective...

All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane

Originally published in June 1994

Featuring: Seventh Doctor, Ace, Benny

"I've been all over the universe with you, Doctor, and Earth in the nineteenth century is the most alien place I've ever seen."

England, 1887. The secret library of St John the Beheaded has been robbed. The thief has taken forbidden books which tell of mythical beasts and gateways to other worlds. Only one team can be trusted to solve the crime: Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.

As their investigation leads them to the dark underside of Victorian London, Holmes and Watson soon realise that someone else is following the same trail. Someone who has the power to kill with a glance. And they sense a strange, inhuman shape observing them from the shadows. Then they meet the mysterious traveller known only as the Doctor -- the last person alive to read the stolen books.

While Bernice waits in nineteenth-century India, Ace is trapped on a bizarre alien world. And the Doctor finds himself unwillingly united with England's greatest consulting detective.

Okay, so my first time reading a New Adventures novel and thanks to the fact that our podcast overlord has chosen a different selection system, we are not reading them in publication order. This is going to be interesting !

Mainly because, while a lot of Doctor Who stories contain call backs to things that have not been televised or written,  here there are mentions of adventures that I just haven't read yet. This is especially true with a character like Bernice Summerfield. In this book she's been part of the TARDIS team for a while, but I've yet to find out how she meets the Doctor. My own personal River Song I guess.

Anyway, "All-Consuming Fire" is a great book to start with, as it combines two of my favourite things - Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes

Author Andy Lane clearly knows his Holmes history and peppers the book with references to past cases  - and a bit of Googling revealed that he has written a whole series of Young Sherlock novels, so clearly he's a fan.  I also liked the mentions of characters from the Sax Rohmer Fu-Manchu novels and Professor Challenger from Conan Doyle's Lost World.

And I especially enjoyed the use of long hidden brother Sherringford Holmes. The name really only appeared in Conan Doyle's notes as a possible alternative to Sherlock - and a fictional biography of Holmes in the 1960's -  but it's a name that’s been used by loads of authors since of course. Oddly I first came across it in the character of Sherringford Hovis in the novels of master of far fetched fiction Robert Rankin.

In fact the whole conceit that’s used here about Holmes and Watson being real people and the names being pseudonyms to protect their identities has been around for nearly 100 years - fans often refer to it as "The Great Game". It's a fun idea and many have played with it.

As an aside, as a youngster I personally always liked Author Philip Jose Farmers's "Wold Newton" universe, where everyone from Tarzan and Doc Savage to Holmes, Allan Quatermain, The Shadow and Philip Marlowe are all descended from the same handful of families that were affected by a falling meteorite.

The other bit of the plot I found *really* interesting was the use of spontaneous human combustion or "SHC". 

Now back in the '70s and '80s there was a huge interest in the paranormal - things like Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle,  ESP and of course UFOS. I guess all this  peaked in the UK in 1981 - with the TV show "Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World" and the publication of "The Unexplained" - one of those weekly part-work magazines, this time about all things spooky and weird. I'll admit - I  lapped this up and convinced my parents to let me buy every issue. I still have all thirteen volumes in binders more than 40 years later.

There were a number of pieces about spontaneous human combustion in the magazine and as a gruesomely fascinated 13 year old  I read these avidly, with their pictures of charred remains, stumps of legs and oddly untouched rooms - so much so that when we had to do a 3 minute piece on our favourite subject in front of the English class, where others talked about football teams or pets or TV shows - I chose SHC.

I diligently memorised my three minute speech and held up pictures from the magazine to illustrate my points - to looks of incredulity from my classmates - and my teacher. I'm not sure what they made of it. It definitely wouldn’t be allowed nowadays !

Anyway back in the Sherlockian world of Doctor Who...

Favourite scenes or lines? Well I did like the Doctor clearly getting his Third incarnation kicked out of the Diogenes Club for breaking the no talking rules - and Benny and the Doctor greeting each other by "performing tricks with bits of our anatomy". And who couldn’t like the Baron snarling to Watson "you will pay in coins of agony". 

I also notice Andy Lane gets Holmes to mimic the Groucho Marx line "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member". As a Marx Brothers fan  that made me smile a lot.

However,  I'm not entirely sure about Sherringford Holme's final words mirroring those of Colonel Kurtz from Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now. A bit out of place I felt.

Anyway all great stuff, and I really enjoyed the book -  on to the next one !

...

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"The horror… the horror…"

We're All Stories In The End 1 - Alien Bodies

So this blog has been dormant for a very, very long time. 2019 was the last time I posted anything - and even then I only managed two entries before going on hiatus again. Before that it was 2017. I've not done anything regular for *eight* years. 

Now I could answer that with some long-winded explanation, which I'm sure could include the phrases "not enough time" and "other priorities". I could promise to do better. But I look back on those kind of posts now with acute embarrassment. Who was I trying to kid ? The honest answer is, I couldn't commit. So, forget it. I was gone. Now I'm back. If only in a very limited way.

I'm not going to be releasing loads of new "content" (god I hate that phrase). Maybe I'll eventually finish "Golden Sunsets" in time for my 60th birthday, after some hefty revisions. Maybe I won't. Who cares. In the scheme of the world right now it's meaningless. Instead this is going to be a place to record something that I've actually already completed. 

It all comes back to the one TV series that really defines my life. Let me explain....

As I think I've documented elsewhere, I'd wandered away from Doctor Who after the classic series was cancelled, only really coming back with a vengeance when Chis Eccleston was about to don his black leather jacket. 

During those "Wilderness Years" the flame was kept alive by hundreds of original novels featuring all the Doctors. Originally published by Virgin and then subsequently by BBC Books, these were a lifeline for fans who wanted more adventures featuring their favourite characters. Initially billed as "Stories too broad and deep for the small screen", these were tales that were unrestricted by meagre BBC budgets and which could stretch the format into new and (potentially) interesting shapes. But like I said, I had wandered away for pastures new and although aware of their existence, didn't buy or read a single one.

Fast forward to 2005, when I re-inserted myself back into the fandom with vigour. I convinced myself that I had a lot to catch up on. I fervently bought up huge swathes of the novels (at exorbitant prices), like a good little fan trying to redeem himself. The pleasure endorphins hit hard when I slotted the final paperback onto the shelf. There they all sat - every Virgin "New Adventure" (featuring the Seventh Doctor) and every BBC Eighth Doctor story. And they continued to sit like that for years because - of course - I never found the time or inclination to read the damn things and knowing me, probably never would. Sigh.

Until one day in 2022, along came long-time friend Iain Martin (host of multiple podcasts and life-long DW fan). He asked me if I'd like to be part of a podcast  aiming to read, review and analyse all of the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures *and* the BBC Books Eighth Doctor novels. It would be a kind of "book club" - a main longform conversation between Iain and a guest, followed by capsule reviews from multiple readers, each no more than a few minutes long.

This really appealed to me. Here was an opportunity to *make* me read the books, put my feelings about them into words and be part of an ongoing podcast - something which I'd tried a few times before with varying levels of success. I've never really felt comfortable with the thought of just free-wheeling a review conversation for 60 minutes. I'm too socially self-conscious and need time to gather my thoughts. But here was a way I could plan what I wanted to say and record for just a few minutes. It seemed ideal.

 Of course by 2022 this kind of review project was a furrow that had been ploughed many, many times before. Some of these books were getting on for thirty years old. Surely there was nothing new to say ?

Well Iain thought the conversations were still worth having. Plus there would be a twist. We would not reading the books in published order. Instead we would go alphabetically by title, jumping around like a demented kangaroo between series and timelines. It would be the world's oddest jigsaw puzzle - with the idea being that ignoring the fictional chronologies of the Seventh and Eighth Doctor would generate some new views and allow people to focus on the book at hand, rather than the series as a whole, or how it fitted into the overall arc (as had often been the case in the past).

It was madness. Especially for someone who has never read any of the books before. Would any of it make sense ? I would likely be reading the end of the story before the beginning. What was I thinking ? Well I was intrigued enough to find out, so with paperback and microphone at the ready, I set off on a most extraordinary journey...

And so that's what I have been doing for the last two and a half years. Reading, reviewing, recording. We tackle between ten and twelve books per series and I've just started recording the next batch for release in 2025. As time wore on, it became evident that the other "book club" members were not as interested as me and they dropped away, until now it's just Iain and his guest and then I'm let out of my box for five minutes at the end (or sometimes even in the middle). I'm 40 novels in, with a LOT more to go and it's going to be years before we finish - but it's genuinely been huge fun so far.

I have a tendency to make detailed notes for each episode as I am reading - verging on a script for my recording session. So I decided that while the podcast episodes are out there and transcripts of those exist, I wanted to have a more permanent, personal place for my written thoughts. I also wanted to be able to expand on things if I felt the need, add some musings on the grand experiment as a whole, etc, etc. However, I didn't want to take away from the episodes themselves, so I decided to wait until there had been a sufficient period of time since release - hence the two year delay.

By the way - I'm only going to release these reviews once a month. Even I can stick to that !

So that's all the preamble out of the way. Below is my first review from episode one, originally released in July 2022. It's worth saying that my notes get a more detailed episode by episode, so for this one I've edited things slightly, but it's a good representation of what was on the podcast. It's a bit crude and short and doesn't have a lot to say -  it took me a while to find my rhythm with these. I think I was more conscious of the time constraints rather than necessarily coming up with something meaningful -  so bear with me. I personally think these things get a *lot* better ! 

Alphabetically, the first book is therefore - 

Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles

Originally published in: November 1997

Featuring: Eighth Doctor, Sam

On an island in the East Indies, in a lost city buried deep in the heart of the rainforest, agents of the most formidable powers in the galaxy are gathering. They have been invited there to bid for what could turn out to be the deadliest weapon ever created.

When the Doctor and Sam arrive in the city, the Time Lord soon realises they've walked into the middle of the strangest auction in history — and what's on sale to the highest bidder is something more horrifying than even the Doctor could have imagined, something that could change his life forever.

And just when it seems things can't get any worse, the Doctor finds out who else is on the guest list...

It's my first ever Eighth Doctor Adventures novel and what a start - because it's one of *those* books.

You know, one of the novels everyone has heard about and raves about and apparently is regularly in the top ten of "best" Doctor Who stories. Lawrence Miles is *that* author - this is meant to be something special.

And without getting into a full blown review (because I'm not meant to do that), I can't help but make a few observations.

It's…well it's slow. And perhaps too long. And overwritten. And has a simple idea at it's heart. Yet, it's extremely complex and throws more new ideas at the page than the series had seen in years. 

And at time it's almost like the Doctor has wandered out of his own TV universe into someone else's. One that's darker and stranger, but is oddly familiar and yet makes even less sense.

 It *loves* the minutiae of the shows continuity. And it has Krotons that are menacing. 

And  - and  - and -  heck, back in 1997 this must have blown fans minds !

There's no doubt that it's well written and Miles clearly wants try and do something new. I think he wants to be a cross between Alan Moore and Douglas Adams - there are some lovely turns of phrase in the book and the backwards flashback structure works well - even if  Alan Moore kind of got there first with some of the time war ideas (because yes, I AM old enough to remember the back up strips in Doctor Who Weekly). 

The problem is, while I know this is only the sixth novel in the range  - and the Eighth Doctor only had one TV adventure to try and form his personality - the Doctor in this book just…sits there.

Miles seemed more interested in his world building and new characters than the star of the show. 

And thus we come to my main challenge. Because I can see is that I probably would have had a very different relationship and a very different reaction to this book if I had read it back when it was first published, rather than now 25 years later.

I've watched and read a lot of science fiction in my life - especially since 1997 -  and many of the concepts presented in "Alien Bodies" have been used elsewhere - even in the revived series of Doctor Who - so what was perhaps new and original back then is now...less so.

I just wasn’t as bowled over by this book as I expected to be, given the importance accorded to it by fandom. It's a shame. Maybe its me. It's not a great start to this series of reviews that's for sure.

Anyway, let's end with some positives and my favourite sections or lines.

Well good old Arthur C Clarke and his Mysterious World gets a mention - so that's a thumbs up from me. And Twin Peaks was clearly on Miles's mind, as we get "the chairs are not what they seem" and "but sometimes my arms bend back"

I also liked the mention of the alien Quirkafleeg - a shout out to Fat Freddy's Cat from the Fabulous Furry Freek Brothers or maybe even ZX Spectrum classic Jet Set Willy ?  I'll take either.

But my favourite comes when the Doctor is fighting against the conceptual entity The Shift and the chapter ends with  "Then he closed his eyes and switched himself off"...

Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 32 - 1998

Another really important year for me now, as my second daughter Mollie was born in November, after my wife suffered a difficult pregnancy. She's an amazing young woman - very different to her sister, but just as talented in an artistic rather than literary sense. As I write this she is just starting year two of her degree in CGI/animation and I know she will do brilliantly.

This memory however, is about my first daughter...

1998:

The trivia:

• On 1st April 1998, Burger King took out a full-page advert in the USA Today newspaper touting the introduction  of a  new"Whopper" burger especially designed for left -handed people. The new bun would contain the same ingredients as the original sandwich, but rotated 180° to redistribute the weight and making in easier for lefties to hold without everything falling out. Thousands of customers swarmed BK restaurants requesting this new innovative burger - along with many others demanding their own "right-handed" version.

• As part of a marketing campaign for their new "Beats" watches, Swiss company Swatch tried to introduce a new decimal method of measuring time. Each day was split into 1,000 ".beats", equivalent to 86.4 seconds, with times noted as a three digit number. So the notation "@248" was 248 .beats after midnight or 5.57 am. At the same time Swatch announced that this new metric measurement had become the official time system for "Nation1", an online country apparently created and run by children.Strangely, it never caught on.

•  When the Galaxy 4 satellite malfunctioned, over 45 million pagers in the USA fell silent for more than 24 hours. In the days before widespread mobile phones, they were a not only a fashion accessory gizmo, but also a key way for medical and emergency staff to stay in touch, so this was seen as a major disruption. In addition some TV networks could not transmit programmes to affiliates, weather forecasters lost essential radar data and credit card readers in some petrol stations failed to function. This was over 20 years ago, so imagine what the impact would be in the world now if something similar happened....

The memory:

A Bug's Life

This second ever Pixar feature  has a special place in my heart. Not because of it's fun story, excellent Randy Newman soundtrack or ground-breaking CGI animation - although those are all great reasons for being on anyone's list. But more importantly this was the first film that I properly *shared* with my eldest daughter Hannah. I'm cheating with my timelines a little here, but it's a story that's too important to me not to tell...

"A Bug's Life" was very loosely inspired by Aesop's fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper", with elements of the classic Japanese epic "The Seven Samurai", plus that - back then brand new - special Pixar spin. The movie tells the story of an outcast inventor ant named Flik. When one of his faulty inventions results in the loss of the annual harvest that is always given to a bunch of bullying grasshoppers - and he then causes the tithe to be doubled after standing up to their leader - Flik suggests that he try to recruit some "warrior bugs" to fight the grasshoppers. The ant royal council agree, but really only to keep him out of the way...

Travelling to the insect "city" (in reality a huge pile of rubbish), Flik encounters a group of incompetent circus bugs, whose actions in trying to avoid paying a bill cause him to mistake them for the warriors he needs. He persuades them to return with him to the ant colony - mainly because they think he is a talent agent - but once there and greeted as saviour heroes, both Flik and the troupe realise their mistake. However, after they band together to save Princess Atta's baby sister Dot from a ravenous bird, they come up with an audacious plan...

Hannah was heading towards three years old when "A Bug's Life" came out at the tail end of 1998. I'm not sure my wife and I took her to the cinema to see it, as around about then was when Mollie was born (five weeks early). What I do know is that I bought the VHS tape when it was released a few months later, because by then Hannah had definitely been exposed to the large amounts of merchandise for sale through visits to the Disney Store and presents from relatives. She had a Princess Atta soft toy and her sister had a baby Dot, both of which went everywhere with them.

The thing is, early 1999 was also around the time when my wife and I finally split up after a difficult few years. It was a deeply upsetting time, but by then I wasn't living with the rest of the family full time anyway (due to other circumstances too complicated to go into here), so my weekend trips from London back to the family home 180 miles way just became more...formalised.  Hannah and I had always been close, so in those early months of the separation my two days visits became even more special.

Hannah was not a physically active child, due to the effects of the cerebral palsy she was born with, so she and I tended to gravitate towards more...stationary pursuits. We watched the video of  "A Bug's Life" together over and over and over again. Every scene became ingrained in my memory - it became our go-to film.

She particularly responded to the character of Dot. Perhaps she saw a little of herself in the tiny ant girl who wished she could do more. At the start, when Dot feels that she is never going to make a difference in the colony, Flik shows her a seed, using the analogy that even mighty oak trees come from small beginnings and Dot has to give it time - she is still just a seed. As the film progresses and the battle against the grasshoppers takes a darker turn, Flik is ashamed of all the troubles he has caused and does not want to go back to the colony. Dot then picks up a stone and shows it to Flik, reciting the exact words he told her at the start..."pretend this is a seed", gradually turning his depression into determination. Out of all the love my daughter had for the film, these two scenes seemed to stay with her.

As the year wore on, Hannah, her mum and new baby sister moved from the rented house we had all shared to a new-build house closer to my soon to be ex-mother-in-law. It made sense and it was a nice sized place close to other family members, amenities, etc. My wife and I still spent some time together for the kids sake, plus since I'd had to travel three hours each way to visit them, it was easier to be based at her house then have to be out all the time. But that proximity meant that we still fought over a lot of the same old things....

During one weekend visit, I think I was feeling particularly low - probably due to another protracted disagreement. I was just getting the kids out of the car as it was parked on the driveway of their new house. As was typical of new developments at the time, the driveway that led down the side to the garage was concrete with a centre section covered with small pale stones - probably a form of  limestone gravel known as Cotswold Chippings. As I lifted Hannah out of the car seat onto the driveway, she suddenly bent down and picked up one of the stones. She turned to me with a big smile on her young face - "Pretend it's a seed, Daddy" she said, handing it to me.

Immediately my mood lifted and blinking away some tears, I grinned and hugged her tightly. "I will" I promised, putting it carefully in my jeans. "I will". We carried on into the house and after a couple of hours I drove away for my long journey home. Later that night as I emptied my pockets, I found the stone again. Smiling to myself I put it on a bookshelf and went to bed...

Twenty years later, I still have that "seed".

I'm never going to part with it. It's moved house with me, been knocked off the shelf by cats and even once fell into a glass of Coke, but it's endured all these ups and downs -  just like me and just like my relationship with Hannah, which despite a few rocky patches (pardon the pun), is now better than it's ever been. That simple little stone is a lovely reminder of how wonderful my daughter can be and how we shared something special  - all from a film about tiny insects.


Honourable mentions:

• Age of Bronze by Eric Shanower - This brilliant artist / writer came to prominence through his series of "Oz" graphic novels, published by First Comics in the mid 1980's. His clean, almost glowing, artwork was just beautiful and his stories had a timeless quality, which took me back to a time when I read those original stories by L. Frank Baum as a kid. Shanower did a wide range of work for other publishers over the following years, but in 1998 he began what has become his most ambitious project. "Age of Bronze" intends to tell the entire story of the Trojan War in comic form in as much authentic historical detail as possible (omitting appearances from gods, centaurs, nymphs, etc.). It's a dense read, but Shanowers painstaking eye for period detail brings the characters and settings to life. I love it intensely, but it's not going to be for everyone. If you want an action packed condensed movie-style adaptation you are going to struggle. Frustratingly the story is still unfinished even after 20+ years. However a 2019 switch to full colour and digital single issues (with physical collections to follow) promises an increased release schedule at last. I can't wait to read the rest.

• Gods and Monsters - English film director James Whale is most famously known for his work on several all-time classic horror movies -  1931s "Frankenstein" (with Boris Karloff as the creature), 1933s "The Invisible Man (Claude Rains) and 1935s "Bride of Frankenstein". What is possibly less well known is that he was openly gay - something which was very unusual for the time period. I discovered this early film from Bill Condon by chance on TV, but its sensitive and warm (semi-fictionalised) account of Whale's last few days - and the possible bittersweet relationship he may have had with his gardener (Brendan Fraser) - has stayed with me during the years since. The always watchable Sir Ian McKellan excels as the filmmaker - his best years behind him, living alone, but still haunted by the voices of his past. Fraser equally holds his own as former Marine Clayton Boone - his gentle demeanor and flat-top haircut recalling the unmistakable images of Mary Shelley's most famous creation.There are several flashbacks -  to the making of Whales classic movies, the extravagant pool parties and his experiences during the First World War - all of which enhance a wonderful character piece. The gentle pace may not be for everyone, but I learnt a lot about a man that previously I knew in name only.

• City of Golden Shadow (Otherland Book 1) by Tad Williams -  Okay I'm cheating again slightly here, because 1998 was the year that this first book in the "Otherland" series came out in paperback in the UK, rather than it's original publication date. I was handed the book by a friend who really struggled with it, but he knew I loved Williams's "Memory, Sorrow & Thorn" series so thought I would appreciate it more - and he was dead right. Rather than high fantasy, the four huge novels are set in the near future where total immersion virtual reality has become the norm and anyone can access a vast array of imagined worlds. A diverse set of ordinary people from across the globe find themselves drawn into the "Otherland" network, assisted by a mysterious benefactor  - and not only have to contend with battling bizarre creatures controlled by the all-powerful Grail Brotherhood, but also realise they are unable to log off. They are trapped in the network and  - you guessed it -  if they die virtually, they also die in the real world. Williams manages to have his cake *and* eat it, as the virtual reality setting allows him to create myriad plot threads across every genre - from ancient Egypt to the Wizard of Oz - from the Battle of Troy to a gigantic house with no "outside". Twenty years on, and especially in the wake of successes like "Ready Player One", this may sound old hat, but at the time this was territory that that had not been explored before - and certainly not in such depth. I found myself eagerly awaiting each new instalment, desperate to discover the reason for the world-wide conspiracy and the core mystery of "The Other" at the it's heart. Still well worth a read.

• The Young Persons Guide to Becoming a Rockstar - Another of those odd little Channel 4  programmes which  promptly vanished into obscurity after it's six episode run. I'm sure I'm one of only a few people to even remember it. The series is a humorous take on the UK music industry, focusing on the improbably named Glaswegian band "Jocks Wa Hey". Led by the personable Jez MAcAllister (played by Ciarán McMenamin) along with a motley group of misfits and nutcases, the band stumble through life, somehow managing to get signed, make a ridiculously expensive album and get into the charts. Along the way there are a swathe of celebrity cameos (even a very young Gerard Butler) and gentle piss-takes of certain bands of the decade - such as "Bonk, Bonk, Bonk", who bear a more than passing resemblance to a certain Clydebank soul/pop group, complete with a spiky haired frontman who just won't stop singing. It's hardly savage biting satire, but the cast all appear to be having a great time and the mostly original music was melodic enough to make me buy the soundtrack album. 

• Pleasantville -  If there was any justice, this wonderful film would be lauded alongside "The Truman Show" as one of the best high-concept-with-emotional-depth movies of the decade. Instead it's seems to be under-appreciated. The basic idea of two modern day kids transported into the black and white world of a 1950s TV sitcom is a good one - allowing for all the fish out of water / culture clash motif's you would expect -  but it's the execution where it really shines. David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) find that their very presence is changing the town, stripping away the bland innocence. Not only that, but as both people and places start to burst into colour and characters step outside their defined roles, it allows for an examination of how some embrace change and the lengths others will go to preserve what's considered "normal". The colour effects are uniformly excellent and are used to great effect, such as a tree on fire, "Bud" covering his mother's colour face with B&W makeup and shop owner Bill Johnson paintings (with a lovely performance from Jeff Daniels). Yes some of the outrage about "coloureds" is a bit too on the nose, but it's forgivable when a film is as warm, inventive and enjoyable as this. 

• Wold's Wildest Police Videos - This reality clip show of car chases, smashes and arrests -  presented by the gravelly voiced John Bunnell  - might seem like an odd choice, and it's not here because I particularly *loved* the programme. It earns a place just due to it's sheer ubiquitousness, as it seemed to be on television all the damn time ! If I flicked through the growing number of satellite channels available to me, no matter the hour of day or night - there was ex-Sheriff Burnell with his over-dramatic commentary on yet another law enforcement pursuit. "World's Wildest" became such a guilty pleasure in my family that we played a game each night to try and find it. Was it an episode that we had seen before? Was John going to wax lyrically over the sound of car horns and screeching tyres on the perils of being a criminal and then make some awful pun at their eventual capture? You bet he was!

• Dark City - If it wan't for the emotional connection to "A Bug's Life",  I think this dark SF mystery from Alex Proyas would have made the top spot. Despite its obvious influences, it still offers a unique vision, asks some deep questions - and has a love for science fiction past and present running all the way through. As the film opens, our protagonist, played by Rufus Sewell, wakes up in a hotel bath tub, seemingly with no memory of who he is or his past life. When the phone rings, a mysterious voice urges our man to get out quickly - "The Strangers" are coming. This just as he discovers the body of a murdered woman and a bloody knife. Fleeing the scene through a city of perpetual night, he avoids encountering the sinister Strangers - pale, bald people in black coats and wide-brimmed hats. Tracking down his estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) he discovers that his name is John Murdoch and he is wanted for a series of grisly murders - crimes which he cannot remember committing.... What follows is a desperate chase through a strange cityscape - one which keeps changing at midnight while the inhabitants sleep, as The Strangers use their powers to alter people's identities, twist the shapes of buildings and "tune" their unknowable experiment into new configurations. There is no way I am going to reveal all the twists and turns of this noir-tinged story, as unravelling the layers is one of the best parts of the experience - along with the fantastic production design. Suffice it to say that I found "Dark City" incredibly original and deeply satisfying, even on multiple viewings. There's a really good cast too, including Keifer Sutherland, Ian Richardson, David Wenham and William Hurt. It's especially good fun as "Mr. Hand" (one of The Strangers tasked with capturing John Murdoch) is played by the one-and-only Richard O'Brien of "Rocky Horror" and "Crystal Maze" fame. Never was a creepy bald man cast so well !

Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 31 - 1997

Memory-wise then, we're still in the difficult 1990s, but at least we've reached:

1997:

The trivia:

• Reverend Robert Shields from Dayton in the USA developed a kind of compulsion to document everything about his life. Between 1972 and 1997 he kept a diary of every five minutes, including recording his body temperature, blood pressure,  when he changed the light bulbs and even his bowel movements. By the time he stopped due to ill health, the diary amounted to 37.5 million words and filled 94 boxes.
• As part of his High School science class, 14-year old Nathan Zoner convinced 43 out of 50 classmates to vote to ban the chemical "Dihydrogen Monoxide", citing its many negative effects on the environment. He won first prize at the Greater Idaho Science Fair for his project which proved that the use of true facts can lead the public to a false conclusion, since "Dihydrogen monoxide" is actually...water.
• In April of 1997 the Hale-Bopp comet was at its brightest as it passed close to the Sun, and it continued to be visible in the night sky until December of that year. This lengthy visibility and the extensive coverage in the media and on the internet made it the most observed comet in human history. It also became infamous when 39 members of the religious cult "Heaven's Gate" committed mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft hiding in it's trail

The memory:

The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton

 If the "Lensmen" sequence of novels by E.E. 'Doc' Smith had instilled in me a love of grandiose space opera as a youngster, then this massive series  (in both page count and scope) proved that the SF sub-genre was still alive and kicking and in *very* good hands.

It's worth admitting here that I'm breaking my own internal rules slightly, because the first volume in the trilogy - "The Reality Dysfunction" - came out in 1996, but I didn't discover Mr. Hamilton's work until book two - "The Neutronium Alchemist" was released in 1997. I really wanted the saga to have the top spot somewhere, but since 1996 and 1999 (when final volume "The Naked God" came out) were already allocated, it seemed to fit best here. Anyway, let's dive in...

In the 27th Century, mankind can travel to the stars and has colonised over 900 worlds plus numerous asteroids and space stations. However although humanity is united under the auspices of the 'Confederation' (which also includes two alien species - the Tyrathca and the Kiint) it has split into two distinct factions - the religious "Adamists", who use machine based nanotechnology and see themselves as "true humans", and the progressive, genetically modified "Edenists" who have embraced biotechnology (bitek) and can telepathically communicate with their living wormhole-creating vessels (known as Voidhawks) - not to mention avoid death by transferring their consciousness into their sentient giant habitats. Edenists also dominate the economy because they harvest 'Helium 3' from gas giant planets, which is the primary fuel source for all Adamist starships.

Against this backdrop we are introduced to a vast array of characters  including: the imprisoned terrorist scientist Dr. Alkad Mzu, designer of the outlawed antimatter super weapon "The Alchemist" - space trader Joshua Calvert, who made his fortune from the sudden discovery of artefacts from an extinct alien species - the fiery Edenist Syrinx who forms a telepathic bond with the bitek starship Oeone and now competes against Joshua in the lucrative shipping industry between worlds - and the charismatic but sadistic Satanist, Quinn Dexter, leader of a group of revolting convicts on the tropical settlement planet Lalonde.

It's on Lalonde where the main plot really kicks in. While Quinn Dexter is engaged in torturing a local law enforcer, an ancient alien known as the Ly-cilph which is observing the conflict, notices the dying mans energy signature leave his body and follows it to another dimension (later named "the beyond"), which contains billions of "souls" of human-kind's long dead. Unfortunately this contact ruptures the barrier between the beyond and our dimension, allowing the souls  - many driven insane after centuries of imprisonment, where they can sense the "real" world but not touch it -  to begin to escape and posses the bodies of the living. Dexter is just the first of millions to come.

These reincarnated dead find that they can allow more trapped souls through to posses others and harness energy based powers both as an offensive weapon and often as a way to reshape local reality  - although this prevents them from using use any form of advanced electronics. Although possession has to be with the consent of the host, this can be overcome by various torture methods. Consequently Lalonde is quickly over-run and many of the possessed (including Quinn, who has regained control of his body but kept the powers) leave in spaceships to spread to the wider Confederation.

If  this all sound a bit like the beginnings of a zombie outbreak in space, well that's true in a very limited sense, but the trilogy is so much more than that. As possession spreads throughout the Confederation like a virus, the viewpoint continues to switch so that we see the unfolding chaos across the known galaxy. Individuals battle for survival, governments and even planets fall, there are massive space battles and exploding stars - and across it all Dexter Quinn prepares to unleash his final apocalypse on Earth. It's exhilarating stuff. Even something that might sound hoary - like bringing in Al Capone and Fletcher Christian as two of the possessing souls - works because Hamilton's characters have weight and history and depth. They act like real people, not movie cliche cut-outs and we care about their fates. Key plot reveals also feel earned because characters discover them by detective work and sheer bloody survival.

The horror elements (and the books don't shy away from graphic violence) blend seamlessly with the more serious military science fiction and space opera themes and events have real consequence. Plus Hamilton takes the time to examine the philosophical and metaphysical sides of the conflict. For example, how does the existence of "the beyond" change humanity's views on religion and the afterlife? Yes, there are a vast array of multi-layered subplots, which can be challenging to keep up with - this is certainly not a story that you can skim - but Hamilton is a master juggler and knows exactly how to keep all the planets in the air, when to ratchet up the suspense and when to pull back the curtain.

This huge trilogy is also where a lot of Hamilton's core ideas, which he returns to in slightly different forms in subsequent novels, are first brought into the light. Humans enhanced by integrated technology. Vast man-made habitats. Innovative ways of crossing huge galactic distances. Aliens that are truly nothing like us (no bumpy foreheaded bipedals here). The fact that no matter how far out into the universe we go, we just take our prejudices and limited ways of thinking with us.

If I have one criticism, it's that the ending of the whole saga slightly falls short of the immense build-up. It's innovative, there's a logic to it - and it all fits together in a massively complicated tapestry, but I was perhaps hoping for something just a little...more. But that's nit-picking when a story with this sheer scale, innovation and complexity is so rewarding.

To my mind, after reading this series, there's space opera, there's epic space opera, and then there's Peter F. Hamilton...

Honourable mentions:

• Contact - Starring the always excellent Jodie Foster, this is one of those rare things - an intelligent, thoughtful science fiction film that dares to ask the big questions about science, the universe and faith (in all senses of the word). When radio astronomer Ellie Arroway discovers radio transmissions comic from Vega, it leads to the building of a gigantic machine that may just take mankind to it's first extraterrestrial encounter. What will the occupant find at the other end of their journey? Is it real? Is it the biggest hoax ever perpetrated? The film doesn't give all the answers and it's all the better for it.  It should come as no surprise that I love the film so much when you learn that is was written by one of my personal heroes - the scientist Carl Sagan - and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who was responsible for the almost perfect "Back To The Future Trilogy". A seemingly forgotten classic, 

• Buffy The Vampire Slayer - It's difficult looking back now to really appreciate how much a ground-breaking impact "Buffy" had on genre television. The show's powerful female heroine, witty and intelligent scripts that combined fantastical elements will the real world trials of the average teenager (or twenty-something) and a cast of interesting and relatable characters (even the evil ones), played by a bunch of great actors really brought fantasy television to the attention of the masses. Although it wasn't the first show to use season long plot arcs, it certainly re-popularised the idea, and phrases such as "Big Bad" to refer to the ultimate season villain have become part of modern TV language. I first discovered it in the familiar BBC2 evening slot (where some episodes were cut) before diving in and buying the home video releases - which was where my fascination with the show really took off. It was also one of the first programmes you could buy in "box set" collections (albeit each season was split into two releases of three cassettes each). I bought them all, before upgrading to the DVD complete collection in 2005. It's a few years since I've watched an episode, but any show that can consistently produce excellent episodes week in week out for seven years and also deliver stories as emotionally rich and diverse as "The Body", "Hush" and "Once More With Feeling" will always get my vote. 

• Star Trek: New Frontier -  Now I do like "Star Trek" in all its various TV and film incarnations, but I've never really been one for diving into the novelised adventures of Kirk, Picard , Sisko et al. I can distantly remember seeing the numbered Bantam episode adaptations by James Blish in bookshops in the 1970s, along with the curious 'Fotonovels' which contained stills from the episode along with dialogue balloons in a curious mash-up of live action and comics - but they didn't appeal enough to me to actually buy them. Although Pocket Books started releasing new stories in the early 80s, they didn't make their way to UK shores until around 1987, when I started seeing them in places like Forbidden Planet (I guess to co-incide with the transmission of "The Next Generation") - but again they were nothing more than a curiosity. Then in 1997 along came comics writer Peter David, who began to develop his little corner of the "Trek" universe with its own continuity, using a combination of new characters, ones he had created for other novels and minor background players from the various TV series. "New Frontier" concerned the adventures of the reckless Captain Mackenzie Calhoun and the oddball crew of the Federation Starship Excalibur, as it explored Sector 221-G, home of the recently fallen Thallonian Empire.

• In a neat marketing strategy, Pocket Books released the first story in four slim volumes at a lower price. Intrigued by the concept, plus being aware of the quality of Peter David's comics work from his 12-year run on "The Incredible Hulk", plus "Dreadstar" and "The Atlantis Chronicles", I decided to take a chance and picked up the first couple of books - and that was it, I was hooked. Apart from the interactions of the unique crew and their adventures, my primary reason for enjoying the books so much was that you genuinely never knew what direction things could go in. Unlike Kirk and Picard, who (of course) would always survive, David might decide to kill off a prominent character, or jump forward in time or just throw in a real plot curve ball - it was that unpredictable. Between 1997 and 2006 David wrote sixteen full novels plus the New Frontier crew made appearances in a number of  other book mini-series, anthologies and even their own comics. Things then tailed off and there were only two new books in the next six years before a final trilogy of e-book novellas in 2015. I bought them all, and to my mind they (plus David's other "Trek" work) are some of the very best tie-in books to come out of the mega franchise. Well worth a read even if you are only a casual fan.

• The Fifth Element - It's wild, it's wacky. I'm sure certain parts don't make a whole lot of sense. but I just can't help love Luc Besson's 23rd century science fiction action extravaganza, if for nothing else than it's sheet imagination and ambition - even if it is clearly influenced by the French SF graphic novel series "Valerian & Laureline". Amongst all the special effects and a story of a once every 5,000 years cosmic alignment, Besson weaves an all-star cast - Bruce Willis is world weary and cynical cab driver, Korben Dallas, Ian Holm is a nervous priest who knows the truth behind the elements and Gary Oldman chews the scenery with gusto as Jean -Baptiste Emanuel Zorg - the villain of the piece, with his half shaved head, bizarre Southern accent and dog-faced henchmen. Plus of course Milla Jovovich as the strange, ethereal Leeloo. Less successful is Chris Tucker as the garish DJ Ruby Rhod - his high pitched fast-talking schtick wears thin very quickly, but it's the one small fly in the ointment of of an otherwise riot of a film. 

• Teletubbies - The brightly coloured forms of Tinky Winky, Laa-Laa, Dipsy and Po were *everywhere* in 1997, as what was conceived as a fun, kind-of-educational series for pre-school children caught the imagination of the general population of Great Britain and resulted in four characters who only communicated in gibberish having a number one single! For me as the father of a one-year old daughter who loved the show, I became very familiar with the repetitive surreal world and bizarre things like the Noo-noo and the Voice Trumpets. My wife even turned my daughters room into Teletubbyland, complete with rolling green hills, a grass carpet, paper sunflowers on the walls  and the rays of a Sun Baby shining out from the corner. Goodness knows what the people who lived there after us thought of it !

• Hanson - Mmmbop - Okay so this one is a real bit of a guilty / secret  pleasure. The three young Hanson brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma had been making music since the early 90s, but exploded on the popular music scene with the release of the single "Mmmbop", which reached number one in 27 countries and went on to sell over 700,000 copies in the UK alone, where it was constantly on the radio. Even those who said that they hated it couldn't help secretly singing along to the infectious albeit nonsensical chorus. Sure it's bubblegum pop aimed at a teenage market  - and I was certainly outside that demographic, but what can I say - I like good pop music no matter my age and even when it's not "cool" to do so. Subsequent single releases hit the top 10 too (even though people seem to remember Hanson as a one-hit wonder) and piqued my interest enough to shell out for the whole album, "Middle of Nowhere", when I saw it at a bargain price. Despite a few cheesy ballads, it's a selection of cheerful, supremely catchy melodies mixed with modern slick production values . People seem to remember 1997 as the year of Oasis, Radiohead and The Verve, but at a time when my personal life was going through a series of enormous highs and lows, I remember the music that just made me smile...

• The Game - This is probably the film directed by David Fincher that very few people have heard of, let alone seen, yet strangely for me it's one of the most rewarding. Michael Douglas is wealthy investment baker Nicholas Van Orton who is given an usual present for his birthday from his brother - a ticket for a "game" that he promises will change his life. I can't say too much more for fear of spoiling the enjoyment, as your work your way through the labyrinthine plot and its unexpected twists and turns, but hell is the payoff worth it. I love twisty-turny films like this and the first time I saw "The Game" I sat with my mouth open as Fincher slowly opened up his puzzle box. To be honest it's a trick that really only works on that initial viewing, but boy, is it worth it.

• Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone - Who? Never heard of him...

Handful's of Sand...

Oh dear. That wasn't meant to happen at all...

Almost two years? Two years?!!! It can't be.

But sadly it's true. The last proper post on this blog was 30th October 2017 (a piece about my memories of 1996). Since then - nada. It's...well, disappointing to say the least. It feels like time has been getting away from me  - as if suddenly there is a lot less of it to go round. Did I wake up one day and someone has lopped 5 hours off the day without any notice?

So what went wrong? I'm sitting here on holiday for the first time in 12 months and I thought I'd try and work it out. After all, from looking back at published posts across the last four years, sitting by the pool with my trusty laptop is where I have seem to have done a lot of writing. Maybe the sound of crickets in the bushes and the breeze wafting through the trees will inspire me. So apologies if this turns into a bit of a self-therapy session...

You see, it's not just this blog that has suffered from a lack of progress - I'm also way behind on almost all of my interests. TV shows, films, comics, novels, audio dramas - everything is in a queue that seems to get longer and longer. The only thing I seem to be up to date on is podcasts - and that's only because of the 20 minute walk to and from work each day and listening to them while I mow the lawns or paint the fences. Then there's those ideas I have for a novel (inspired on by my good friend Iain Martin). I have lots of concepts written down and the start of a plot, but that's all sadly.

I could blame work. Or personal circumstances (and goodness knows my life has been full of a few seismic events lately - try having your house flooded for one). Or perhaps I've been more interested in other things (not that I know what those "things" might be). But I know those are old excuses and can't be used forever - and I think the problem goes deeper than that.

If I'm brutally honest, I do have previous form of not finishing things. There is a litter of uncompleted video games for a variety of  different consoles and platforms sitting in drawers or cupboards. Some even date back to the 1990s. I have shelves full of novels or comic collections which I bought with every intention of reading them, but...well, you know. There are DVDs and Blu-rays still in their cellophane that I haven't got round to watching yet. I will, I promise myself. One day, when I have more time....  It sounds crazy but I may have even sold or given away stuff that I never watched or read!

But before you think I am the world's greatest procrastinator, I have finished *some* things. A few novels (though not as many as I'd like). A handful of TV series (albeit probably way behind everyone else). I actually worked my way through the whole of the first three "Uncharted" games on PS3 (told you I was lagging behind the zeitgeist !). I've even read some actual comics in there somewhere. Oh and remember I managed to watch 800 episodes of Doctor Who in a row. Then again, that did end back in 2016. Bugger.

I also know I have a big "collecting" bug - some might even call it a compulsion. Having to complete a set is a big thing for me - even if I then don't ever do anything with it except watch it slowly gather dust on the shelf . This bug also comes in waves. I can break the compulsion if I need to (or am forced to by lack of space or moving house or financial constraints), but it then just manifests in some other form. Right now it's hardcover collections of top rated independent comics (which I have digitally and take up no space, but, boy, those huge books look great...). A couple of years ago it was Doctor Who figurines (I stopped after 110 and too many Daleks). Before that it was something else. Back in the '80s it was buying every new DC comic title published (which was a huge amount). The thing is, I'm making the situation worse, not better, by adding even more things to the bottom of the pile.

Then there are the lists. Cataloguing things is also a particular pleasure for some reason. I love a good list - dating back to my youth when I started to write down the titles of comic book stories in a loose leaf A5 binder. Such were my innocent days before the internet, and it continues now in more electronic form. Some are useful, especially when some items are in storage in boxes, but others, well some might consider them a step too far, perhaps even (dare I say it) obsessive.

Another point is that perhaps that I have too *many* interests. So I like pretty much all forms of SF and Fantasy, including but not limited to: novels, comics (though almost no superheroes), video games, movies and television shows - plus associated websites, podcasts, magazines and a smattering of toys / figurines / collectables. But I also like a lot of more "ordinary" TV output too - things that my wife and I watch together like "Mindhunter" or "The Grand Tour" or "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver". If I am spreading myself too thin across too many options, no wonder there is a far greater chance that I will not be able to keep up with things, let alone write about any of them.

Let's not even start on the time spent playing games or doom-scrolling through social media on my mobile phone. How many hours do I spend doing that now? Probably a lot more than I'd like to admit. I've doubtless squandered several hours a week. Bit by bit I'm using up free time.

It's also worth considering that in at least the TV and movie arenas, the rise of streaming services and the dominance of mega-budget superhero shared worlds has meant that SF&F genre fiction is now more mainstream than ever before. Every week there seems to be another new Netflix or Amazon show that piques my interest. Surely there isn't anyone that can keep up with it all - unless they are fully retired from work, live alone and never need need to go shopping, clean the house or cook for themselves !

Wow. It's a lot when you write it down like that. 

No wonder I feel like I'm never getting anywhere - and clearly I need to pare thanks back a bit - given the limited number of hours in the day. Plus I actually want to enjoy the things I'm "consuming", rather it becoming akin to a swamp I just need to wade through.

I know that I manage things best within a more structured format. Watching all of Doctor Who worked because it was usually no more 45 minutes at the start of every day and not only did I have that time, I could commit to it. But I don't want to become *too* structured, otherwise that will just become a noose around my neck. It could all become an illusory form of control, and potentially setting myself up for further frustration and disappointment. My mindset has to be flexible.

So let's try something like this - 

• watch an episode of something every day
• read a whole novel every week (or every two weeks if it's a very large book)
• listen to a podcast or part of an audio drama on the days I travel to work
• read part of a magazine  / graphic novel before bed
• watch one film a week
• write *something* once a week - even if it's not published. No timetable. No deadlines.
• play video games if there is down-time at weekends

It all sounds great in theory. So let's assume that after my holiday ends I still have the capacity to write something for this little blog that no one is even reading anymore. What would that even look like? Well like pretty much everything else I'm mentioned today, there is a list of uncompleted items - 

• Golden Sunsets - I've done 30 out of 50. I'd love to finish this personal history and maybe even update the early ones slightly
• The Book Tower - at the very least I want to review the last three "Winterhill" books.
• Collector's Dream - There are two comics pieces that are more than 50% complete.

That's a good start. I'll be ecstatic if I can accomplish even half of those things compared to what has *not* happened over the last two years.

Right, enough waffling and self-reflection. Time for a swim, some relaxation and good food with good people...

Here's to the future !

Updates? You say you want updates?...

You have no idea how true that cartoon above really is...

With the blink of an eye we're already three quarters through 2018 and I've written precisely...zilch. I'd love to say that this is all part of that grand plan I talked about at the end of last year for things to develop at their own organic pace - but the truth is no where near so prosaic. Sadly I've just been so unbelievably busy in my day job, that it has become practically all-consuming. I've had just two weekends off this year and even on those few previous days designated as "holiday", I've found myself logging onto the office server to deal with one issue or another.

Anyway this isn't a sob story or an apology, but, well,  a...placeholder. A post to keep the blog alive so I can come back to things when time allows - which hopefully won't be too much longer.

Let's see how that pans out...

The End of the Year Show - an update, an explanation and a plan...

So the few readers I may have left can't have failed to notice that the blog posts trickled to a crawl in the latter half of 2017 - and there has been nothing new at all for two months.That doesn't mean that "Ravings From the Rubber Room" is dead, just that it...lost its way somewhat. This is just meant a bit of personal fun after all, so this post is me trying to make some sense of why things ground to a halt and perhaps figure out what to do about it. Who knows, some of what follows might make sense...

I genuinely went into 2017 with a basic, easy to manage plan. Just one short blog post a week on any kind of topic, plus the "Doctor Who" bullet-point reviews for a dozen weeks when the series came back in the Spring. Simple. But then after finishing the "800 Day Project" where I watched every single episode of "Doctor Who", and having decided that "The X-Files" would be next, a comment from someone on social media convinced me to blog about those too on a weekly basis. I could manage that I thought.

But then I hit upon the idea of looking at each of the last fifty years of my life in turn and picking my favourite books, films, comics, TV shows, music or games from each year, and "Golden Sunsets" was born. A good friend whose opinion I trust recently commented that much of this blog has become a bit like an autobiography - and he's right -  if you look back over the last couple of years, in between all the "Doctor Who" stuff are glimmers of a rose-tinted glow of nostalgia around the memories of my childhood. "Golden Sunsets" became a way of putting that into a more formalised structure and scratching the subconscious itch to document all those things that I liked and had been such an influence on me.

So a small plan had become a somewhat larger one. Three (maybe four) posts a week. That was fine - I was excited and I believed I could cope with the additional workload. Certainly I was incredibly fired up at the start  - the words almost flew off the keyboard and in three months I managed what I thought was a respectable 37 posts (of course I look back now and wonder how on Earth I managed to find the time to write so much...)

But as the Robert Burns phrase goes, "The best laid plans...".

If I am being totally honest here, as the year wore on there *was* a bit of a slip in enthusiasm on my part. Firstly, my "Doctor Who" fandom was going through a bit of a rough patch. I'd known for a while that I wasn't enjoying the show as much as before, and at the start of series 10, after writing about "The Pilot", I decided to step away from all elements of reviewing things related to the series (which included the "Doctor Who Show" podcast). I went back to just being a viewer.

Then the intended weekly "The X-Files" 'view and review' hit a problem fifteen episodes in. Unlike "Doctor Who" (which I always watch multiple times) or many of the other things I've written about from the point of  view of looking back at the past,  I'd not seen the majority of the adventures of Mulder and Scully before, and I realised that I was missing out on enjoying things because I was too busy concentrating on scribbling down notes. I didn't have time to do a second watch in the same week just to write a mini-review. So that element went on hiatus too.

Still I soldiered on with other bits and bobs and most importantly the "Golden Sunsets" strand, which I was enjoying immensely as I worked my way forward from the late 60s to the end of the 80s. The nostalgia thing was obviously where my heart was.

But then in early July, I began to find myself  taking longer and longer to finish a post on 1991. Why was it taking so long to cover this decade when I had written with such passion and frenzy about earlier years? Well, without trying to be too analytical, I think partly that is because the 1990s were an incredibly difficult and emotional period for me personally, where my life changed irrevocably in both positive and negative ways.

To give some context - by the time the decade ended and we entered the new millennium, I had: got married, had a mini nervous breakdown, lost my father-in-law in a tragic motorcycle accident, relocated my home 180 miles further north while still renting out my existing property to what turned out to be the tenant from hell, discovered that my first daughter (who arrived 11 weeks earlier than expected) had been born with cerebral palsy (with all the challenges that followed) *and* struggled to hold on to my job as my wife spent 14 weeks in hospital while pregnant with my second daughter. Then finally six months after her birth, my wife and I ended up separating for good, for reasons far too complex to go into here (although let's be clear, there was no one else involved).

So it's really not surprising that my focus was elsewhere - and hence my memories of the books, movies, television, music and comics of the time are...somewhat hazy.

Struggling to separate the strands of those tumultuous years, I found that the order of things in my head were jumbled. Unpicking the timelines, reflecting on the good and bad memories and doing the necessary research meant that the various sections of each post had begun to take longer and longer to shape into a cohesive whole. Plus, who knows, maybe middle-age was also finally starting to have an effect on my cognitive recall (what *did* I have for lunch last week?).

I believe that this lengthening 'development' process and the difficulties it presented caused the schedule to slip, but I honestly thought I could battle through it and recover the momentum. But then on top of this, in the second half of 2017 along came a plethora of real world issues - family and pet illnesses, broken down boilers and various job related shenanigans that were - of course - a priority over everything else . What once was a regular series of posts became less and less frequent. As I have several times before in my life, I felt like I was trying to keep an infinite number of plates spinning while running in ever decreasing circles - and any minute one of them was going to get smashed to the floor...

The thing is, unlike when this kind of thing has happened before, I'm thankfully now older and (hopefully) wiser -  I'd like to think I know my own limits. I couldn't keep burning the candle at both ends *and* in the middle! A long overdue two week holiday in September gave me some downtime and I managed to relax, yet still write about my favourite things of 1996 by doing a little bit each day by the side of the pool. I squeezed out one more post during October, but by the end of the month it was clear that the only sensible thing to do was...stop. Something had to give, so the blog went on the back-burner while I concentrated on all that boring grown-up stuff.

The problem was, before I could blink, a month had gone past and then six weeks and, well, here we are...

It's the last gasp of 2017. Just over halfway out of the dark and a new year is almost upon us (2018 eh? How did we get here? When I was a youngster the year 2000 seemed like the far, far future). Christmas has come and gone, we have a new female Doctor Who and I've watched season two of "Stranger Things". Work has calmed down a bit and - touch wood - no human or animal is currently ill. In the lull in between seasonal festivities, I've had a chance at last to reopen the blog and look at all the draft posts and the notes I've made.

I've had a lot of encouragement in the last few weeks from another friend who told me that I shouldn't let things get in the way of writing, as what I was doing was too good to leave unfinished (he's biased of course but it was a lovely sentiment). But he was right about one thing - there's a lot of stuff floating around and old, old projects that I desperately wanted to get back to (maybe not the "X-Files" mini reviews - sorry), but I kept looking at the "Golden Sunsets" strand and I knew that was the one I really wanted to finish.

So here's the plan. I'm going to start 2018 with nothing more than a desire to write something about the years 1997 to 2017. No timetable. No deadlines. I have twenty 'episodes' left to go and it might take me twenty weeks or it might take me three years. I don't care. No worries about supplying regular 'content' to an invisible audience. If someone reads all this nonsense and enjoys it - fabulous. If they don't and the blog counter drops to zero views, I'm not going to fret. Ultimately I'm doing all this for just one person - me.

Hopefully with any kind of pressure off, I can get back into the groove and simply write for the sheer enjoyment of it. After I've finished "Golden Sunsets"? Who knows? Probably more nostalgia-driven stuff around comics and old TV shows and a nagging desire to write about the music influences from my school days. We'll see.

So here's to 2018. May you be happy and healthy. I'll see you on the other side.

"Time moves in one direction. Memory in another" - William Gibson

Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 30 - 1996

So 1996 was pretty important for me, as my first daughter was born in March of this year. It's hard to believe that as I sit here writing now, she is 21 years old , has just obtained a first class honours degree in History and Literature and has just started a Masters degree in Shakespeare studies. She obviously doesn't get that intelligence from me! There have been lots of highs and lows in our relationship over the last two decades, especially after her mum and I got divorced and we both married other people, but I think we have come out of it okay. I'm immensely proud of all she has accomplished. So this post is dedicated to Hannah, with love.

1996:

The trivia:

• A 21-year old man walked into radio station Star FM in Wanganui, New Zealand and proceeded to take the station manager hostage with what was believed to be an explosive device. His one and only demand was that the station play "Rainbow Connection" from "The Muppet Movie" on repeat for the next twelve hours. Before the song could be played for the first time, local police retook the station and arrested the poor guy.
• When the movie "The Rock" (of which more later) had it's glitzy star-studded premiere, it was held at the former prison on the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. In true James Bond style, windsurfer Jeff Bunch sailed to the island wearing a wing-collar tuxedo and bow tie under his wetsuit.  He landed on the north east side of the island, climbed over the edge and snuck into the celebrity party. He later claimed to have already had a cocktail with star Sean Connery before being captured by park rangers and escorted off the premises.
• An experienced model enthusiast was flying his self built remote controlled plane at the registered site in Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland. After a few successful short flights, he suddenly lost all control and the plane flew off into the distance in a north east direction, supposedly to crash. However after five miles, the model aircraft ran out of fuel and glided to a safe stop - on the taxi-way of runway 28 at Dublin International Airport.               

The memory:

Quake

So it's no secret that I've always liked video games. I have vague memories of playing a version of the classic text game "Collosal Cave"  on a massive office machine sometimes in the late 1970s (how or why I got to see this is lost to my fading brain cells),  so I guess my love for the form grew from there. Whether it's the simplicity of "Pong", the 48k wonder of "Knight Lore" on the ZX Spectrum, the rip-off platform fun of "Great Giana Sisters" on the Commodore 64 or the fast paced spinball of "Sonic The Hedgehog" on the Sega Megadrive - I've played hundreds of action, puzzle, driving, shooting, platform and adventure games in my life - although I've managed to fully complete only a mere few of those (I said I enjoyed the games, not that I was any good at them!).

But all of those games were on simple "home computers" (which you could program as well), or early games consoles. When I first started work after leaving school, business machines were huge things that look up a whole room or "PC's" were standalone boxes that ran MS-DOS. I actually wrote the menu screen for our first office PC in BASIC. We didn't get Windows until I'd been there several years.

It was 1995 before prices dropped enough that I could afford to get a home PC - running the brand new Windows 95 operating system with it's (for then) flashy interface. I started buying "PC Zone" magazine for the reviews of new games and the cover-mounted CD-ROM full of demos and previews. Some of the first games I bought for the new machine that sat proudly in the spare bedroom were "Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time" and "Star Trek: A Final Unity" - more cerebral, thinking games than fast-paced action. I was aware of the burgeoning genre of first-person shooters pioneered by Wolfenstein 3D" and "Doom" (although I didn't get to play those two until much later). But then came "Duke Nukem 3D" and the demo I installed made me go out and buy the full game almost straight away  - and I completed it too, after much effort (and maybe a little use of the "god" mode to figure out difficult areas first...).

So by the time iD Software's highly anticipated "Quake" arrived, I thought I was pretty up to speed with how these shooting games worked. What I didn't anticipate was just how damn addictive they could be...

The core conceit of "Quake" main storyline seems fairly basic by today's' standards, but back then the combination of  Lovecraftian and satanic imagery plus futuristic technology in a gothic / medieval setting was a heady one  - building on the successes of "Doom" but with a far stronger sense of dread  and lurking horror. The single-player campaign consists of 30 separate levels (several of which are secret) across four 'episodes' - which are accessed through a teleporter known as a "Slipgate". Exploring the labyrinthine passages and hidden rooms requires accessing particular switches or keys and various other portals are also discoverable over the course of the game. The aim is to fight through each of the levels, killing or avoiding the various enemies, and collect four magic runes. These give the player access to the final level and the chance to defeat the demonic presence known as Shib-Niggurath.

The antagonists in "Quake" range from the merely deadly to the truly horrific. Grunts, Zombies, Knights, Enforcers and Ogres are recognisably almost-human, but a Fiend is a mass of teeth and razor-sharp claws, while a Vore is a spider-esque hybrid monstrosity. Then there is the Shambler with it's blood-stained fur, ripping fangs and the ability to fling bolts of electricity. Any one of these creatures appearing suddenly around a dark corner (especially if, like me you played with the lights off or really low) was guaranteed to make a little bit of wee come out...

Sure, it's true that the levels are almost always the same twenty shades of dirty brown colour and at times it could be incredibly frustrating to have to restart yet again when a stray claw took your last nugget of life energy, but the excellent level design and the sheer "oh-go-on-then-I know-it's-2am-but-just-one-more-go" playability of  it meant that I spent *way* too many hours trying to uncover every secret and defeat every enemy. I hadn't been this addicted to a game since the days of the ZX Spectrum.

But I have to make an admission here. Most of my time spent on "Quake" was not in when it first came out. Oh sure, I played the demo and liked what I saw an awful lot - and I picked up a full copy when the price dropped somewhat, but in 1996 I was far too busy with firstly moving house and then coming to terms with the arrival of my first daughter eleven weeks earlier than expected, along with the special care that she needed. After that there were a series of personal circumstances which put a huge strain on the increasingly difficult relationship with my wife. I won't bore you with those problems here, but suffice it to say that despite the joy of my second daughter being born in late 1998, my wife and I ended up sadly separating for good in February of 1999.

So then I found myself living on the outskirts of London with my daughters 180 miles away and mostly only able to see them at weekends (my job was still in London you see and I couldn't afford to move where they now lived). I had almost no free cash and I was on my own much of the time during the week, so I turned to films and television and video games for entertainment. I pulled out that CD of "Quake" and booted up the PC. Sadly I couldn't enjoy any of the innovative multiplayer aspects of the game - my prehistoric dial-up internet connection was not capable of anything like that - so I just satisfied myself with trying to defeat the game on every difficult setting (yes even "Nightmare", which was frankly, impossible). And then I discovered "mods"...

The gameplay of "Quake" could be changed by altering the graphics and audio, using the "QuakeC" programming language. At the start this meant just small fixes and patches and the odd new enemy, but soon fans were creating whole new versions of the game that were very different from the original. The first major mods I read about in the PC magazines was "Team Fortress", but being as it was multiplayer, it was off limits to me. Of far more interest were the multitude of single player levels that sprung up. The small size of these files meant that I could log on, download it (relatively) quickly and then log off. I seem to recall that some mods were also given away on cover mounted CDs. For me this took the game to a whole other level, as I was no longer restricted to the 30 maps that came with the installation disc (yes I know there were a couple of "expansion packs" added later, but for some reason lost to the mists of time I never got round to them).

As internet speeds became cheaper, faster and more reliable, my "Quake" mod interest kept growing. I must have played or tried out dozens upon dozens of new levels. Someone invented "AirQuake" where you were now flying around the skies of QuakeWorld engaged in bombing runs or driving a tank to take down your enemies in the air. Then there was "QuakeRally" which turned things into a medieval version of a car race. "AlienQuake" had me stalking the corridors of the Nostromo facing off against Facehuggers and Xenomorphs. "FantasyQuake" replaced guns and bullets with swords and bows and arrows."Horrorshow" added Jason Voorhees and the ability to inhabit the body of Leatherface. The sky was truly the limit.

Between games of "Quake" and sessions on my beloved Nintendo 64, I whiled away the somewhat lonely evenings after work (including through that first cold winter when the central heating broke down and I couldn't afford to repair it). I persevered with getting my life back in order and clearing my debts. I made new friends and built new relationships, but I kept returning to that first version of  "Quake" to see each new modification. Like the expansion packs I mentioned earlier, I never did progress to "Quake II" or "Quake III Arena", but that was okay. Eventually things improved and in 2001 I met the wonderful woman that would become my second (and hopefully final!) wife and my nights of gaming gradually slowed to a crawl.

As part of writing this piece over the last few weeks, I dug out my dusty copy of the game from storage in the loft and after a bit of fiddling around getting the antique DOS installer to work, pressed "Single Player" on my first game of "Quake " in probably fifteen years. As I moved around that first level, the sound of collecting the backpacks and bullets dropped by the enemies and the grunt of the main character brought all the memories flooding back. Compared to today's standards, it's slow and clunky and incredibly linear but there's still a huge amount of playability and before I knew it an hour had gone past.  It's a great game and while I'd quite like to forget certain other aspects of my life in the mid to late 90s, this is one that I'm quite happy to recall. Even if I am now going to dream about running through dank corridors being snarled at by a rabid Shambler...

Honourable mentions:

• Kingdom Come - I mentioned this landmark comic mini series in my post for 1995, but it's first publication here is worth a more detailed look. Mark Waid and co-writer / artist Alex Ross envisioned the future of the DC universe where the heroes of the present day have abandoned their roles after the rise and popularity of  second and third generation meta-humans who fight more for the fun of it than to protect the innocent and who care nothing for the effects of their destructive behavior. Worst of these is Magog who murders the Joker and manages to turn the American Midwest into a radioactive wasteland, killing millions while in pursuit of the villain The Parasite. Coaxed back into action by Wonder Woman, Superman reforms the Justice League, but finds himself and his allies caught in the midst of a war with Batman and his team of "Outsiders", Lex Luthor and his Mankind Liberation Front and the threat of nuclear destruction. Not to mention a brainwashed Captain Marvel. But trust me it's far more complex and fascinating than that short summary makes it sound.

• The artwork from Alex Ross is simply stunning, painted in such a lush hyper-realistic style that it's almost like looking at excerpts from a film, but still with the comic book sensibilities that make it flow naturally from panel to panel. It's well known that he uses real life models, but this is no tracing of photos, just a way of helping him get the right angle or pose or expression - and hell does it pay off. Every frame is packed with detail and some of the seemingly throwaway character designs have been used in subsequent years as templates for the current DC universe. In fact "Kingdom Come" itself has been referenced or used significantly in other stories in the last twenty-one years - it's that important an event in DC's history.

• The Cable Guy - Made when Jim Carrey was at the height of his first wave of popularity this psychological comedy thriller showed that the actor could also do dark and twisted characters. Matthew Broderick plays straight man as Steven, recently split with his girl friend and on his own in a new apartment. When he slips the cable installer an extra $50 for free premium channels, what he doesn't expect is to be followed around by a guy who at first appears to just be a social misfit but then turns out to be genuinely crazy. I love "Ace Ventura", but if you asked me to choose one Carrey comedy, this would be at the top of the list. Highlights are the karaoke performance of "Somebody to Love" and of course the fight at the 'Medieval Times' theme restaurant that turns into a full on recreation of the classic Kirk / Spock battle from Star Trek's "Amok Time", complete with episode specific weapons and music. This really is an overlooked film.

• Duke Nukem 3D - I mentioned this above. "Quake" might have been the first-person shooter I played the most, but "Duke Nukem 3D" was the one I played first. There's some storyline about Earth being invaded in the 21st Century, but that didn't really matter. What was important was running through a variety of environments collecting objects and weaponry while blasting as many of the hideous alien scum as possible - all while Duke himself gave a string of cheesy one liners in that deep gruff voice that were worthy of Arnie himself. The degree of interactivity with the areas you stalked through along with the clever level design and the satire of pop culture made it enormous fun to play. I'm getting flashbacks to the movie theatre level right now. It's fair to say that this was one of the most important video games of all time and all the FPS games since owe a debt to The Duke. Hail to the King, baby !

• Hamlet - I like a good "Hamlet". I must have seen a dozen or more different versions in my life, either on stage or screen. Some were amateur productions with minimal sets. Some had big name stars such as Benedict Cumberbatch, David Tennant or Mel Gibson. Sometimes the main story is only a sideline, such as in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead". I've even seen the half-hour long animation. But there is only one film version which contains every single word of Shakespeare's original text - and that's the one written, directed and starring the marvelous Kenneth Branagh. I'd been a fan of Ken ever since his 1989 version of "Henry V" and really rated him as someone who wanted to bring Shakespeare back to a mass audience.  Here he updates the setting of the play to the 19th Century, adds flashbacks that visual information and imbues the whole production with an epic style by filming it in 70mm (the last to do so until 2012) and using lots of long single takes for numerous scenes. He is helped by a wealth of famous actors in small and large roles - Derek Jacobi (whose own BBC version is almost as long), Julie Christie, Richard Briers, Kate Winslet, Robin Williams, Gerard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Charlton Heston, John Gielgud, Judi Dench - the list goes on and on. It's sumptuous, layered and incredibly powerful. I adore it.

• Fun Song Factory - No don't click away from the page. There is a good reason for this 90s children's program being here  - and you have probably already guessed that it's to do with daughter number one. I can't remember where it came from but somehow we ended up with a double cassette pack of the first two "Fun Song Factory" shows - the second of which was recorded in 1996, hence how I have managed to squeeze it into this post, even though the VHS releases weren't until 1998. Performed in front of a live audience of kids, mums and dads by Iain Lauchlan, Sarah Davison, Michelle Durler and kids favourite, the unbelievable cheerful Dave Benson Philips, the shows were full of pre-school favourite songs and nursery rhymes such as "The Wheels on the Bus" and "The Grand Old Duke of York" - plus inexplicably, The Beatles "Yellow Submarine". To say that Hannah loved these shows as a toddler was an understatement, and they became a permanent accompaniment to our lives in those first few years. Even now I just have to hear "I am the Music Man" and I can picture her sitting in the living room totally captivated by the screen. Now before you think badly of us, we didn't use the show as a surrogate babysitter (well, maybe only a couple of times when we needed to urgently get things done) - this was a shared experience and it's one of my fondest memories of those years with my daughter, even if around her other things in my life were...extremely challenging.

• The Frighteners - It may have been somewhat forgotten now in the wake of the massive success of the "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" movie trilogies, but this horror comedy from Peter Jackson and starring Michael J Fox in his last leading film role is still a favourite in my house. Fox is Frank Bannister, an architect who is able to see and hear the ghosts around him. Initially he uses this ability to make some supernatural friends and set up a flourishing exorcism scam, but when the spirit of a mass murderer starts attacking both the living and the dead, Frank gets pulled into the investigation. Of course it's a film chock full of visual effects (more so than pretty much any other film of the time) and proved that Jackson could handle the demands of that kind of  shoot, but it's the real performances that stand out. Fox is enjoyable in pretty much everything he's done, but here he manages to imbue his character with a bit of a world-weary attitude. There is a nice turn from R. Lee Ermey who basically reprises his role as the screaming sergeant from "Full Metal Jacket". But is Jeffrey Combs who steals ever scene he is in as the disturbed (and disturbing) FBI agent.

• DC versus Marvel - Fans had been looking for a meeting of the heroes and villains of the rival comic publishers for decades, and after a lot of wrangling we got this four issue mini series by Peter David, Ron Marz, Dan Jurgens and Claudio Castellini. There's some nonsense about cosmic embodiments of the two universes setting up a contest, but it was really an excuse for a series of smack-downs between various characters, with a fan vote deciding the outcome of each bout (I still can't believe Storm defeated Wonder Woman though). It's fun stuff, particularly when the intervention of new character Access resulted in the two universes being merged - and we got the 12 issue "Amalgam" imprint with odd fusions such as Dark Claw (Batman & Wolverine), the Green Skull (Lex Luthor & Red Skull), Moonwing (Nightwing & Moon Knight) and Doctor Strangefate (you get the idea...). There was even the Two-Faced Goblin and an amalgamation of Green Arrow and Hawkeye called...er....Hawkeye. In terms of sheer comics geekery it was pretty hard to beat - until 2003 anyway...

• Mars Attacks! - I wasn't even born when the original "Mars Attacks" trading cards were released, but I was soon aware of them once I started to seriously become interested in all things science fiction (plus, don't forget Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds from 1978...). Who couldn't fail to enjoy the lurid, sometimes blood-soaked paintings by Wally Wood and Norman Saunders depicting the Martians with their skull-like faces and pulsating brains? The cards soon became huge collector's items and think I didn't get to see a full set of images until the rise of the internet. As for Tim Burton's live action satire / comedy / thriller adaptation - it's as mad as a box of frogs. Where else would you get to see Jack Nicholson hamming it up to 11 in two roles. Or Pierce Brosnan as a disembodied head smoking a pipe. Or Tom Jones playing himself as an action hero! Or the Martians heads exploding when they listen to Slim Whitman? It's all over the place and I love it more because of that. Plus the aliens themselves are a triumph of 90s CGI. "Ack Ack Ack Ack !"

• The Rock - Before Michael Bay became the king of over the top mindless action, he made this smart thriller starring the legendary Sean Connery and personal favourite Nicholas Cage. A bunch of rogue US Marines take over Alcatraz Prison, hold all the tourists hostage and threaten to release nerve gas over San Francisco unless they get $100 million for the families of Recon Marines who died on covert operations. Cage plays the FBI's top chemical weapons expert, the wonderfully name Stanley Goodspeed, who is paired up with former British SAS Captain John Mason (Connery) - a man who has been mysteriously locked up without charge for thirty years and is the only person to ever escape Alcatraz. What follows is a wonderful action film, made all the better by the chemistry between the two leads. Connery is clearly enjoying himself as the secretive Mason (was he a disguised James Bond?...) and Cage is on a career roll. It's also worth mentioning Ed Harris as the Brigadier General in charge of the bad guys, who makes his character quite sympathetic at times. It's one of those movies which, when it comes on TV, I stop changing channels and end up watching all the way through - no matter how many times I've seen it before. There's nothing guilty about this pleasure.