![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Time is running out
Nov. 13th, 2008 07:17 pmDW mag arrived yesterday and I spent less than 20 minutes on it. And I've no particular desire to revisit it, though normally it's a highlight of my month. Reason is simple - lack of Tennant. There's barely a single picture of him other than the ones from TND which have already been done to death.
Maybe this will be the shape of things to come - if so, I can't see myself paying £35 a year for a sub. Yeah, I know some of the classic Who stuff is interesting, and they certainly do it well - theoretically, I do want to watch the E-space trilogy - but it's a bit like reading "Paradise Lost" - there always seems to be plenty of time to get around to it without it happening today.
Talking of running out of time, I've been reading Nevil Shute's "On the Beach", rather to my own surprise. It's a post-apocolyptic Cold War tale set in Melbourne just after a devastating nuclear war. There's no-one left alive in the Northern hemisphere and the radiation is drifting south, eventually to wipe out humanity altogether. There's a few months left at least. I can't think of any book I've read before in which every single character dies. I'm rather surprised it isn't more bleak than it is. In fact, in many ways it's a celebration of ordinary life and how very precious it is, and the way people cope with the unimaginable. One couple of characters continue to plan a garden they won't live to see, right down to buying a garden seat as they're dying of radiation poisoning. An American submarine commander who escaped the war by being submerged is an extremely solid, command-and-control guy but still buys a fishing rod for the little boy he can't accept is dead.
How do you begin to convey the emotions people would have in such a situation? It's not an entirely unfamiliar problem for writers of DW fanfic. The answer, back in 1957 was, you didn't. You write about people not talking about it, and Nevil Shute was extremely skilled at doing exactly that. He describes things like going into a completely deserted San Francisco without entering into his characters' inner life at all. He doesn't need to. It's all done through dialogue and what they do (or don't do). And you wind up having a grudging respect for the morality of the period, that stoical, no-use-grumbling adherence to routine as a bulwark against terror and chaos that anyone whose parents or grandparents lived through the Second World War will recognise. This isn't a David Tennant world, it's a Gregory Peck one. This isn't a world where you regard it as a breakthrough when someone falls apart and says how he really feels. Quite the reverse - if you invite someone over whose entire family has perished horribly, you get a few people in to stop him brooding.
And Doctor Who has one foot in this world. It smacked us all in the face in Doomsday because suddenly, after all the Tennant emo, Mr Stiff-Upper-Lip was back, doing the terribly decent thing for the sake of humanity and jolly well not discussing how it made him feel, because what good would it do if he fell apart? In fact, if he could bear to read it given his backstory, I think the Doctor would love On The Beach, because it is a hymn to the beauty and preciousness of carrying on, right to the very end, with ordinary life. That's what it's about - people going to work, figuring out how to get the milk when there's no petrol any more, and discussing whether to grow veggies next summer - and then, suddenly, in the middle of all that, you have a nice young couple discussing how to inject their baby daughter to spare her the agony of a slow death from radiation sickness. Bloody hell.
I found myself thinking, what if the Doctor and Donna had landed in the middle of all that, knowing they could save everyone - take them off to one of those new planets where they could start over, or start injecting people with the Gallifreyan antidote to radiation sickness and cleaning up the atmosphere...and all the moral dilemmas. It would be a fascinating, incredibly moving story, but somehow to do a crossover with such a book shows a lack of respect. And yet the Cold War is just as possible a place for the TARDIS to visit as London in 1599 or the day Vesuvius erupted. But perhaps a little too close to home.
Maybe this will be the shape of things to come - if so, I can't see myself paying £35 a year for a sub. Yeah, I know some of the classic Who stuff is interesting, and they certainly do it well - theoretically, I do want to watch the E-space trilogy - but it's a bit like reading "Paradise Lost" - there always seems to be plenty of time to get around to it without it happening today.
Talking of running out of time, I've been reading Nevil Shute's "On the Beach", rather to my own surprise. It's a post-apocolyptic Cold War tale set in Melbourne just after a devastating nuclear war. There's no-one left alive in the Northern hemisphere and the radiation is drifting south, eventually to wipe out humanity altogether. There's a few months left at least. I can't think of any book I've read before in which every single character dies. I'm rather surprised it isn't more bleak than it is. In fact, in many ways it's a celebration of ordinary life and how very precious it is, and the way people cope with the unimaginable. One couple of characters continue to plan a garden they won't live to see, right down to buying a garden seat as they're dying of radiation poisoning. An American submarine commander who escaped the war by being submerged is an extremely solid, command-and-control guy but still buys a fishing rod for the little boy he can't accept is dead.
How do you begin to convey the emotions people would have in such a situation? It's not an entirely unfamiliar problem for writers of DW fanfic. The answer, back in 1957 was, you didn't. You write about people not talking about it, and Nevil Shute was extremely skilled at doing exactly that. He describes things like going into a completely deserted San Francisco without entering into his characters' inner life at all. He doesn't need to. It's all done through dialogue and what they do (or don't do). And you wind up having a grudging respect for the morality of the period, that stoical, no-use-grumbling adherence to routine as a bulwark against terror and chaos that anyone whose parents or grandparents lived through the Second World War will recognise. This isn't a David Tennant world, it's a Gregory Peck one. This isn't a world where you regard it as a breakthrough when someone falls apart and says how he really feels. Quite the reverse - if you invite someone over whose entire family has perished horribly, you get a few people in to stop him brooding.
And Doctor Who has one foot in this world. It smacked us all in the face in Doomsday because suddenly, after all the Tennant emo, Mr Stiff-Upper-Lip was back, doing the terribly decent thing for the sake of humanity and jolly well not discussing how it made him feel, because what good would it do if he fell apart? In fact, if he could bear to read it given his backstory, I think the Doctor would love On The Beach, because it is a hymn to the beauty and preciousness of carrying on, right to the very end, with ordinary life. That's what it's about - people going to work, figuring out how to get the milk when there's no petrol any more, and discussing whether to grow veggies next summer - and then, suddenly, in the middle of all that, you have a nice young couple discussing how to inject their baby daughter to spare her the agony of a slow death from radiation sickness. Bloody hell.
I found myself thinking, what if the Doctor and Donna had landed in the middle of all that, knowing they could save everyone - take them off to one of those new planets where they could start over, or start injecting people with the Gallifreyan antidote to radiation sickness and cleaning up the atmosphere...and all the moral dilemmas. It would be a fascinating, incredibly moving story, but somehow to do a crossover with such a book shows a lack of respect. And yet the Cold War is just as possible a place for the TARDIS to visit as London in 1599 or the day Vesuvius erupted. But perhaps a little too close to home.
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
