Who is Titantic

I’m afraid my association with Doctor Who is not as extensive or storied as it could be. I watched Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen on PBS with the rest of my generation but I was always more interested in Star Wars and Star Trek, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. Still, Tom Baker is who I think of as the Doctor and the Fourth Doctor is my Doctor. I have friends who are massive Doctor Who fans and I distinctly remember when Paul McGann’s Doctor movie first premiered that we all threw a party for the advent of the Eighth Doctor.

One day, my daughter excitedly grabbed my arm and said, “Dad, you’ve got to see this show!” She turned on BBC America and there was David Tennant and Billie Piper saving the world. She explained patiently, “This is a rerun. He’s the Doctor but he regenerates into new actors. Peter Capaldi will be the Doctor soon!” I smiled, secure in the knowledge that I had done at least one thing right in her upbringing. Fueled by my daughter’s excitement, the current generation of Doctor Who stories became scheduled family time and required viewing.

Forward the Foundation

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is most well known as the winner of the Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966, the only series to date to which the award has been given. Asimov himself assumed the award had been created to honor J.R.R. Tolkien and was surprised to receive it. The original short stories were published between 1942 and 1950 in the pages of Astounding Magazine. These were later collected, and additional material added to form the novels known as the Foundation Trilogy.

The impact of the Foundation stories has been felt in every form of series fiction written since its time, and most significantly in the fiction written for tabletop and electronic gaming. Until Foundation, attempts to build a cohesive mythology around an entirely fictional setting had been mostly accidental and abortive. It’s possible that Asimov’s work was taken more seriously than E.E. Smith’s Lensman series (with which it shares many similarities) due to Asimov’s emphasis on science and problem-solving rather than action, and his choice of humans as the protagonists instead of Smith’s Arisians. It also seems likely that Asimov’s writing was more approachable than Tolkien’s heavily literary style.

Upon the Riverworld

In my previous examination of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld, I spoke much about Farmer and very little about his setting. I'm afraid I find Farmer's work tedious, but the Riverworld setting incredibly fascinating. In particular, I'm fascinated by Farmer's depiction of Riverworld as an archetypal paradise and mankind's inability to accept this paradise as the Heaven it is meant to be. Heaven ought to be a place where all of your needs are met and you can be at perfect peace with yourself. On Farmer's Riverworld, no one is ever at peace.