March 2020 Journal (Patreon)

The Left-Handed Hummingbird (Kate Orman) - A reread. Was feeling pretty disillusioned with Doctor Who after The Timeless Children aired, so I figured it was time to revisit an old favorite. It didn't let me down - Orman has as powerful a Doctor Who debut as anyone. This book is chalk full of things Doctor Who had never done before. Go torrent it or find a cheap used copy. It's worth it.

How to Publish Your Book (Jane Friedman) - I read this one for work, which means I skimmed it for the highlights and put it down when I was done. Can't remember anything about it beyond glossy competence. Next.

Vampire Science (Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman) - Sometimes you need a pruriently queer novel about the Eighth Doctor and Sam going up against vampires. This was a joy to read. That the Eighth Doctor Adventures remain out of print is a tragedy. If the BBC could reprint the line starting with this one, that'd be fantastic.

War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare (Robert Taber) - A useful study on the then-burgeoning forces of guerrilla warfare. It's very early stuff and not terribly in depth, but probably as intelligent and unreactionary a study as the Sixties offered up. More on this in Dreams of Orgonon, maybe.

The Late, Great Planet Earth (Hal Lindsey) - Don't be like me. You might wind up doing things like live-tweeting this book until 3 in the morning. This is a deeply hateful book of pop eschatology that manages to be gobsmackingly awful and fantastically bizarre at once. The use of the fig tree parable to predict a 1988 apocalypse is emblematic of the whole book, but somehow the least of its problems. All the worst instincts of American Evangelism in one volume.

About Time 5: 1980-1984 | Seasons 18-21 (Lawrence Miles & Tat Wood) - The best moments are the critique sections where Miles and Wood tell each other to go fuck themselves using the parlance of media criticism. But everything else is lucid and wonderfully readable too, offering up delicious insights on Doctor Who, British culture, and sci-fi media in the 80s. Oh, and it has the basis for my future essay about Kate Bush and the Mara duology. 

Faction Paradox: Weapons Grade Snake Oil (Blair Bidmead) - SJA lead Kelsey Hooper leaves her life as an Afrofuturist transhumanist communist leader to team up with Santa Claus and a tentacle-fucking Kraken for a time heist in this sequel to The Sun Makers. If that doesn't speak to you, you will be stymied by this book. If, however, that sentence made complete sense to you, you will have a blast. This was my introduction to Faction Paradox, and while I'm not sure I entirely get it, I completely understand its Burroughsian appeal. Thanks, Blair.