I've been watching Doctor Who for thirty-one years. Almost as long as I've been watching, I've been studying it. I didn't get to watch much TV as a child, and most of it was British (thank you PBS!) but even on first exposure, I knew this show was different from any other -- that there was the weight of a long and complicated story on it that did not invest other shows. I could almost feel the history and mythology.
My first attempts at studying the show were simple, crude, but interesting: I wrote down all the names that appeared in the credits and listed them out. I puzzled over titles like Senior Cameraman and Unit Production Manager and Script Editor.
I noticed patterns.
Soon, those notes, and those patterns were subsumed in the notes and noticed pattern of a far more overarching obsession: literary science fiction, fantasy and horror stories. Weird tales. My mother taught me to read at five from a Doubleday Book Club copy of The Hugo Winners Vols 1 & 2, edited (and wonderfully narrated) by Issac Asimov. As soon as I had stories to read, I had these odd glimpses into the world behind these little bubble universes, and the sure knowledge that it was people who wrote these stories, and those people (and that world) were very interesting indeed.
Then I found the Heinlein juveniles and my reading habits were pretty much set for life.
But those habits were, actually, many and varied. The Hugo Winners Vols. 1 & 2 is an absolute treasure trove ranging far and wide over the possibilities of speculative fiction: from definitive Campbellian grace (E.F. Russell's "Alamagoosa") to elegiac character drama like Walter M. Miller's "The Darfstellar." It ranged from the ferocious human-centrism of Leinster's wonderful "Exploration Team" to the gentle cynicism of "Flowers For Algernon." And that was just Volume 1. Later, I'd experience the Technicolor wide-screen-of-the-mind moral tales of Jack Vance and the slipstream before they made up a slick word for it genius of Avram Davidson (his story "And All The Sea With Oysters," despite being the rather comedic literary equivalent of a staged two-hander, is chilling enough, once the implications sink in, to have kept me up all night).
And from there, with the help of my mother and librarians, I went as crazy for all of it as my environment allowed.
Which was pretty wild, surprisingly. The public library, happened to also be the county library and had quite a bit of speculative fiction, even in the late 70's. They had six large carousels packed with paperbacks: an eclectic mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, westerns and action. I pretty much read 'em all, but I was looking for the real deal, the good stuff, the pure product.
And I found a bunch.
That Doubleday Book Club edition of the Hugo Winners was the grimoire, though. It led me to the writers and the writers to types of science fiction and types of fantasy. It ably guided me, for quite a few years, as I aged and began to be interested in stories that hadn't interested me before, and my range widened and my tastes sharpened. I wish I could say I still had it, but I can't. It's lost like a lot of things.
But I got what it had for me. The stories.
What does this have to do with Doctor Who? Everything. Because even by age seven I was two years into my exploration of speculative fiction, finished with all the Heinlein juveniles, had probably made a pass or three at Vance's "The Dragon Masters", and was starting to think I knew a little something about this sort of thing.
And it proved me both right and wrong.
TBC
