Category Archives: Geek

A Conversational Journey through New Who – S03E12/13/14 – Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Timelords

David is coming to New Who for the first time, having loved Classic Who as a kid. Tehani is a recent convert, and ploughed through Seasons 1 to 6 (so far) in just a few weeks after becoming addicted thanks to Matt Smith – she’s rewatching to keep up with David! Tansy is the expert in the team, with a history in Doctor Who fandom that goes WAY back, and a passion for Doctor Who that inspires us all. We’re also joined today by guest viewer Joanne Anderton, who is also discovering New Who for the first time! We’re working our way through New Who, using season openers and closers, and Hugo shortlisted episodes, as our blogging points. Just for fun!

Last time we looked at Blink, and now we move on to:

“Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Timelords”
The Doctor – David Tennant
Martha Jones – Freema Agyeman
Captain Jack Harkness – John Barrowman
Professor Yana – Derek Jacobi
The Master – John Simm

TEHANI:
So, this feels like a bit of a cheat really, but the finale of season three is actually three linked episodes, so that’s how we’ll review them!

First up, JACK IS BACK! Woo! I had forgotten that he and the Doctor actually have a conversation about why the Doctor deserted Jack after he was killed and made immortal. In fact, there’s a lot I’d forgotten about the conversations in “Utopia” – there’s actually some quite revealing things said, which are important to both hindsight and for setting up what’s ahead, which was pretty cool second time around.

TANSY
I am watching this live with Tehani in my living room! Sorry, David. Obviously you need to come visit us too.

DAVID:
Haha maybe next time we need to skype or something.

TANSY:
That would be great fun, though only one step away from podcasting…

My honey is lecturing us on how far away the heat death of the universe will be, and suggesting that the Doctor has got his sums wrong. Surely not!
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Continuum Program

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With only a week to go I am starting to get very excited about Natcon! As usual, the organisers have done an incredible job and the program looks amazing.

For those interested, my schedule looks like this:

Daikaiju Go Heavenly!

From Friday 17:00 until Friday 18:00 (60 Minutes)
Dirk Flinthart, David McDonald, Cat Sparks

What if the gods were daikaiju? Could Buddha beat Jesus, could Loki outwit Allah? Is anyone strong enough to defeat Thor and his mighty Hammer? Jade Emperor, Kali, Ganesh. Which deity will reign supreme, or will king of the daikaiju Godzilla crush them all?

Venues: Argyle Room, Lincoln Room

Continuum 101

From Friday 20:30 until Friday 21:00 (30 Minutes)
Hespa , David McDonald, Sarah Lee Parker

Everything you wanted to know about fan conventions and con-going – an ideal starting point for anyone relatively new to conventions. Learn the secrets from those who have been around long enough to know better.

Venues: Pelham Room

New Faiths For New Worlds

From Saturday 10:00 until Saturday 11:00 (60 Minutes)
Alan Baxter, Jenny Blackford, Russell Blackford, David McDonald

Love it or hate it, religion plays a huge role in our society. When creating a new society from scratch, what part will religion play? How do you create a convincing set of beliefs, and what are the pitfalls you need to avoid?

Venues: Lincoln Room

Fans And Faith

From Saturday 11:00 until Saturday 12:00 (60 Minutes)
Avril Hannah-Jones, David McDonald, Ian Mond, Alexandra Pierce

Religion often frowns upon science fiction and fantasy, and fandom can be quite critical of religion. So how do our panellists reconcile their passion for SF/F/H and their faith?

Venues: Faraday Room

Winter Is Coming

From Saturday 14:00 until Saturday 15:00 (60 Minutes)
Kelly Link, David McDonald, Ben McKenzie, Mick Mihalic, Jules Wilkinson

As the second season of the TV adaptation draws to a close, join us for a discussion of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series in all its forms.

Venues: Argyle Room

Readings – Fablecroft Hour

From Saturday 15:00 until Saturday 16:00 (60 Minutes)
Including: Joanne Anderton, Steve Cameron, Dirk Flinthart, David McDonald

Venues: Faraday Room

We Want Your Brainz

From Sunday 11:00 until Sunday 12:00 (60 Minutes)
Peter M. Ball, Stephen Dedman, Felicity Dowker, Kelly Link, David McDonald

Zombies have taken over in the last 5 years or so and have gone mainstream, but their lore is still being written. How have they changed since the 1970s and what does the explosion of them now say about our present psyche? Could it be a pandemic as recent writers have postulated? And will they ever become sparkly?

Venues: Pelham Room

The Newbie’s Guide To Writing

From Sunday 15:00 until Sunday 16:00 (60 Minutes)
Steve Cameron, David McDonald, Travis McKenzie, Amanda Pillar, Jane Routley

New to writing? Not sure what to expect? Our panellists discuss critiquing, dealing with rejection, and everything else they wish they’d known when they’d started.

Venues: Pelham Room

Not only am I thrilled with the panels I am, but with the people I get to do them with! And, my first ever reading – how nerve wracking!

Hope to see you there. 🙂

The Evils of Comic Books

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Given my love for all things super hero, it may surprise some people to learn that I never really got into the whole comic book thing. There only three or four comic books that stand out from my childhood, and I assume that I was given them by someone. I can vaguely remember a Thor comic, a Ghost Rider comic and an Obsidian comic, but that is about it. My passion has always been for all the peripherals, the tie novels (I really should do a post on some of the good ones I have come across), the movies and especially the animated series.

I devoured Smallville and if I ever met Bruce Timm I would probably fall down at his feet, and I have to confess to spending a lot of time reading Wikipedia entries on story arcs and characters (which is pretty sad, I know). I think Avengers is one the greatest movies ever made and I dream of a great Superman movie. But, the actual comics themselves? They left me cold, to be honest.

I think there were a few factors that contributed to this. One was the often convoluted storylines that made it hard to just dip and pick up what was going on fairly easily. There was also the thinly concealed contempt that the big comic houses seemed (and still seem to) have for their readers, as if they felt that whatever they did, the fans would keep coming back. So, they just kept on with the retcons and reboots and plain butchering of characters.

But, the biggest obstacle for me has been the sheer immensity of the investment of time and money involved in being a serious collector of comic books. It’s usually not enough to read the core comics of a story arc, there are all the crossover titles as well, and it can be pretty daunting for the casual reader. It may seem lazy, but it has always just been easier to get into the condensed versions, the movies or the novelisations or the TV shows, which hopefully take all the good bits and discard the fat.

The comics that I had managed to get into in the past were the self contained ones, that didn’t rely on too many external titles. Perhaps my favourite was the Kingdom Come series, which in my opinion is a work of Art witha capital “A”. I actually purchased the trade paperback of that by mistake in an attempt to buy the very hard to get Eliot S! Maggin novelisation, but it was serendipity. I’d buy anything involving Alex Ross.

But, recently I discovered a real game changer and it has changed the way I have looked at comics, and I fear for my financial future. It’s the Comics app by comiXology on my iPad, and it is brilliant. A very quick rundown, the Comics app is very much like a Kindle store for comics. It allows you to browse titles by the major publishers and a lot of the smaller imprints. You can then purchase the titles within the app, download them and read them on your iPad.

And this is where the app truly shines. It shows off the potential of the iPad as well as any app I have seen, taking advantage of the screen real estate and the graphical interface. As you read it zooms in on the current panel, then out to give you the whole page view. And, just like with ebooks, you can stores thousands of comic titles without the hassle of finding shelf space! In terms of ease of use it really makes the comic book experience hassle free.

But, it’s this ease of use that is the major problem, and has shown me that comic books are evil. It’s so easy to go on a shopping spree, especially when you get to the end of a comic it gives you a button to buy the next one. So, in the past three days I have purchased more comics than I had in my entire life beforehand.

So, sitting in on my iPad I have:

SALVATION RUN (COMPLETE)

KINGDOM COME (COMPLETE)

DEATH OF THE NEW GODS (COMPLETE)

SMALLVILLE Season 11 (ONGOING)

FINAL CRISIS (COMPLETE)

ALL STAR SUPERMAN (still reading)

JUSTICE (still reading)

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS (still reading)

As much as reading on the IPad has ignited a fresh desire to read comics, I did notice that there is still the same issue where you need to read all the crossovers, Final Crisis especially gave me the impression I had missed a lot of backstory, But, perhaps because of the convenience of tracking things down, I find I am more tolerant of this.

So, what comics would people recommend for a relative newbie to the comics world?

A Conversational Journey through New Who – S03E10 – Blink

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We would like to thank everyone who nominated our “New Who in Conversation” series for the William Atheling Jr Award – it’s a great honour to be on the ballot! Voting for the annual Ditmar Awards (which the Atheling is included in) is open to all members of Swancon 36 (2011 Natcon – Perth) and Craftinomicon (2012 Natcon – Melbourne), and can be done online.

Last time we looked at Human Nature and The Family of Blood, and now we move on to:

“Blink” – Season three, Episode Ten
Sally Sparrow – Carey Mulligan
The Doctor – David Tennant
Martha Jones – Freema Agyeman

TEHANI:
We move straight from the excellence that is “Human Nature / The Family of Blood” into the completely different, but equally amazing, “Blink”. And I want to say it straight up – Sally Sparrow ROCKS. Carey Mulligan, who plays Sparrow, absolutely owns this episode – it’s pretty amazing, for a one off appearance.

She shares very little screen time with the Doctor, as this is a “Doctor-lite” episode, and I wonder if this lets us really embrace her – she IS the focus of the episode. While the Doctor is there, making things happen, he’s not THERE, onscreen, with his dazzling charisma – it’s all about Sally – ordinary Sally thrown into the strangest of events – who really gets the job done. I LOVE her!

Favourite line: “I’m clever, and I’m listening. And don’t patronise me, because people have died and I’m not happy.” Go Sally – Doctor smackdown!

And two episodes in a row we have a gorgeous, strong woman finding the Doctor, and passing him up. Poor Matron Redfern in the preceding episodes really had a hard job of it, but Sally did it splendidly – she recognised the Doctor for who and what he is, and it made her choice easy.

TANSY:
I think Sally Sparrow is the character most requested to return as a companion – and as Carey Mulligan’s star rises in Hollywood it becomes less and less likely. She is playing Daisy in the new Great Gatsby movie opposite Leo DiCaprio!!

TEHANI:
Even more than Sophia Myles?? Wow, impressive!

DAVID:
Yes, Sally really is the star of this episode. She has some wonderful lines, and we see the whole range of human emotion in yet another stellar guest appearance. How moving was the scene in the hospital, or how cutting was the “We just run a shop together”? I love the line you mentioned, Tehani, but my personal favourite – “Sad is happy for deep people.” Carey Mulligan has a great screen presence, and I can see why people wanted Sally Sparrow to return. But, as I will no doubt talk about further, I think Sally makes the right decision in the end.

TANSY:
I do love Mulligan in this; her performance is fantastic and it’s one of my favourite Moffat scripts, not for the scary parts so much as the excellent banter, and the economy of words. Nearly every line is packed cleverly with so much character as well as driving the plot forward.

Sally is a wonderful example of someone who can be heroic without necessarily being violent or special. Though she is of course, clever!

I wondered watching this whether they could actually do a whole season (or mini-season) of Doctor Who stories that do exactly this, that show a one off character and their experience with the Doctor from their own point of view rather than that of the Doctor or an Official Companion. Would it work if this was the formula rather than an occasional experience?

TEHANI:
Do we love the Doctor too much to appreciate Doctor-lite episodes for a full season? 🙂

TANSY:
They wouldn’t have to be Doctor-lite! Just putting the point of view in the hands of new characters instead of a continuing companion. It could be argued of course that they did this in 2009, but I don’t want to spoil David so I’ll shut up now…

JO:
Don’t spoil for me either, thank you very much! 🙂
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Wednesday Writers: Sean Wright

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While I am relatively new to the Aussie Spec Fic community, I have been a member of groups that operate in a similar dependent, close knit fashion for most of my life. These experiences have left me convinced that there is a certain type of person vital to the health of such communities, without whom they cannot thrive. These are the people who spend their time promoting and building up the achievements of others, rather than focussing on themselves. Putting others first is not easy to do, but there are some people who do so consistently. I’m delighted to welcome one such person to my blog for today’s Wednesday Writer – Sean Wright.

A 21st Century Fan

I love living in the future.

I grew up in a time before the internet, before mobile phones, in a remote town at least 1500 km away from any major city. My first brush with fandom came with the ABC’s running of Doctor Who (until the late 80’s the only TV channel we had). Myself and four friends formed the Dr Who gang, our arch enemies were the Spades – think the Sharks and the Jets but with flowing multicoloured scarves and Men at Work rather than Leonard Bernstein . This was primary school.

For many years Dr Who was the only game in town (Blake’s 7 I can dimly remember and it didn’t get the reruns) and ours the only fandom we knew – our main activity consisted of raising funds to buy BBC novelisations.

While the rest of Australia was aware of Dr Who Fan clubs, writing and reading fanzines, we were living an isolated idyllic existence. VHS (video tapes) brought with it Star Wars, and Star Trek and later Blade Runner, biannual trips to Victoria (my father got tickets as part of his commonwealth job) filled in some gaps with cinema (I stupidly went to see Beyond the Stars rather than Empire Strikes Back).

But still we lived in somewhat of a vacuum. In the early nineties, introduced to gaming( pen and paper) other aspects began to filter into my view. Magazines (albeit three months out of date) featured all aspects of fan culture and I picked up my first copy of Aurealis (Issue 9). These were sporadic though, arriving and or stocked at the whim of the local newsagent (sure I could have subscribed, but $24 was a lot upfront for me at the time).

University was my first real introduction to fandom in any sort of community sense. The internet had arrived, though it was early days – cc mail and Netscape. The benefits of having a group of like minded individuals, however, was offset by the fact that we were all rather short of dosh. Still the conversations and the joy to be had discussing the latest Babylon 5 episodes are a happy memory.

Work then took over and working two jobs and paying off a house meant little time for delving too deeply into fan culture and I was still living in isolated circumstances. Sure DVD’s came on the scene, the town now had a cinema but a largely transient population meant that social circles were hard to maintain let alone fan communities.

But skip forward to now. I live rurally, perhaps more isolated than before, but closer to capital cities. I connect not only to the local fan scene but to the rest of the world. I can leave messages on forums, read digital copies of fanzines for free, write on author’s blogs, and download books that never would have made it to our shores ten years ago.

I talk regularly with authors, have interviewed them with me sitting in the middle of wheat fields and them atop mountains thousands of kms away or indeed across oceans.

Last night I sat on Twitter, compiling a selection of tweets – pictures and announcements, from the Aurealis Awards so that others unable to make it could get a sense of the proceedings. It was almost as good as being there.

Yes I love living in the future.

Sean Wright (AKA Sean the Blogonaut, Sean the Bookonaut) considers himself an aspiring writer, he tends to do quite a lot of aspiring and not much writing.

You can hear his dulcet tones on various episodes of Galactic Chat

He blogs at Adventures of Bookonaut in attempt to keep himself sane and connected with other humans who share his tastes in fiction and to comment on and support the Australian speculative fiction scene.

He has lived remotely for most of his life and currently lives rural South Australia, in the midst of wheat fields, in a 120 year old farmhouse which has its own history book but no ghosts.

Sean has worked as a teacher librarian, pizza delivery driver, a security guard, a workplace trainer for an international company and as an activities coordinator for a community mental health service.

A Conversational Journey through New Who – S03E08/09 – Human Nature/The Family of Blood

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David is coming to New Who for the first time, having loved Classic Who as a kid. Tehani is a recent convert, and ploughed through Seasons 1 to 6 (so far) in just a few weeks after becoming addicted thanks to Matt Smith – she’s rewatching to keep up with David! Tansy is the expert in the team, with a history in Doctor Who fandom that goes WAY back, and a passion for Doctor Who that inspires us all. We’re going to work our way through New Who, using season openers and closers, and Hugo shortlisted episodes, as our blogging points. Just for fun!

Last time we looked at “The Shakespeare Code“ and “Gridlock”, and now we move on to:

“Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood” – Season Three, Episodes Eight and Nine
The Doctor – David Tennant
Martha Jones – Freema Agyeman

TEHANI:
Before we wriggle on to some of the best eps yet, a quick look at those we’ve skipped…
“Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks” – over the top, quite offensively horrible in some places, and really not at all engaging. Oh, and another “last Daleks eva” storyline, with the Cult of Skaro back again. I pretty much skimmed this on the rewatch and didn’t feel I’d missed anything at all. In fact, I wish I hadn’t bothered at all and never reminded myself of the horrible pig-men. And I REALLY wish this hadn’t been dragged out to two episodes – perhaps in one it would have been a bit better. I think I know what it was aiming to say, but for me, it was definitely a low of New Who.

DAVID:
Wow, you really didn’t like it! I actually quite enjoyed it, and my inner romantic was very happy that Laszlo and Tallulah ended up together at the end. My only real issue, and I am afraid that it really did bug me, was the way that the human hybrid version of Dalek Sec talked, it was atrocious.

TANSY:
I think this is one of my long-term least favourite, and nothing much has changed! The concept of the Daleks in 1930s New York is brilliant, and I liked the idea that they are the only reason the Empire State Building got built, but there isn’t much for me to love here.
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Ditmar Shortlist Announced

Rabid Animals

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I generally avoid blogging on certain topics, not because I don’t think they are important, but because I don’t feel qualified or knowledgeable enough to comment, or because I simply don’t feel I have any right to do so (cowardly of me? Perhaps. You know, I actually found writing this a bit scary*). But sometimes you read things, and they make you feel so sad or mad or depressed (or all of the above) that you simply must say something.

Amidst the furore created by Christopher Priest’s comments on the Arthur C. Clarke Awards were a number of excellent posts, one of which by Catherynne M. Valente really stood out for me, where she discussed how Mr Priest could get away with a lot more by virtue of being male. It is an excellent and thought provoking piece, and I suggest you read it, but it is actually her follow up post that really hit home for me and made me want to write this post.

You really should read the whole thing. But there are bits that leap out at you and grab you by the head and shake you.

The fact is, to be a woman online is to eventually be threatened with rape and death. On a long enough timeline, the chances of this not occurring drop to zero.

This is not exaggeration for the purposes of making a point. It is simply a fact. It’s one of the main reasons why I don’t read below the comment line on many blogs because the amount of hatred and vitriol make my stomach churn, and, while it gets directed at men too, it is undeniable that when it comes to women it goes up a whole other level.

Chris Priest can say what he says not only because he is a giant in his field (Sady Doyle is barely less prominent in hers, and while I do think that harsh criticism goes down better when it’s not the authors in the field at hand who do it, both Sady and Requires are not SF authors of any stripe) but because he is a man. And we respond to it with some anger, but mostly reasoned philosophical or humorous posts, macros, examining what it means, the value of juried awards, defending the authors and jurors but mostly accepting what he said as either a sad gesture by an old man, a hilarious and miserable rant, or valuing that at least someone cares that much–even wishing someone would go equally ballistic about a different award. There is a marked lack of viciousness–and what he said was every bit as bad as some of the stuff that gets Requires Only That You Hate a fever pitch of loathing and seething fury just about every time she posts.

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Thoughts on the Hunger Games – Not a review.

A Conversational Journey through New Who – S03E02/03 – The Shakespeare Code/Gridlock