Robert ShearmanRezensionen

"In many ways the Dalek is the father of us all."

Very clever, witty, self-aware, engaging, and layered. Reads better if you are familiar with the place of Doctor Who in pop culture during the "wilderness years", but Shearman as usual can do no wrong. From what I hear, the post-2005 Big Finish output gradually becomes more generic and less risk-taking, which is a great shame. Those early years sure were something.

Concept seemed neat but the books were too big and unwieldy, didn't think the stories really had any purpose in terms of order read, many were just odd. Actually did not enjoy reading these. Weird, odd in many cases not actually scary.

A collection of fourteen little stories, most of which contain some surreal or fantastical element. Death is a recurring theme, as are bad/loveless relationships and characters with less than zero emotional intelligence.

The best of these were, in their own deeply strange ways, good enough that they left me sort of sitting there going "wow" afterward. But even the ones that didn't seem, to my rational brain, as if they should be particularly effective stories were still somehow weirdly compelling, and the combined result made for a decidedly memorable reading experience. I don't think this one is for everybody, but if "dark and strange and affecting in ways you don't necessarily even always understand" is your jam, this one will probably be your jam.½

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I've always been a bit salty that this book exists. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I am salty that the DWM Special Edition The Ninth Doctor Collected Comics exists. I dutifully bought that, expecting that no such graphic novel would ever come out—there just weren't enough strip adventures to justify such a collection! Eight years later, and the size of these collections had been halved, and so I bought those stories all over again, with just one addition—a prose story that I already had! Well, that and the as usual excellent extras.

So this was a reread again for me, but the added context of the extras was new. I appreciated in particular that were get to hear a lot from Mike Collins, who illustrated every DWM strip of the ninth Doctor; this is one of those eras where we have a consistent artist but not a consistent writer. I've opined before that you need one of those two, otherwise the strip doesn't feel cohesive because you don't have an actor's performance to unify the various voices as the tv programme does. And Mike Collins does good work; he's been with DWM since 1987 as a writer, and since 1991 as an artist, but I knew him first from his work on Star Trek comics for Marvel and Wildstorm and Babylon 5 comics for DC. He's good at likenesses, great at storytelling—exactly the artist you want, I reckon, when you're suddenly producing a tv tie-in strip to an actual tv programme for the first time in over fifteen years!

It's funny, in the extras to both this and the next volume, The Betrothal of Sontar, editor Clay Hickman talks about how they felt they had to a go a bit more kid-friendly now that the tv show was back... but I would hesitate to call any of the DWM strips here notably kid friendly, especially Rob Shearman's! But overall, I remembered this era as a bit of a shambles, and rereading it I didn't find that true at all. It's not perfect, but this is a solid slice of Doctor Who comics. Certainly it's much better than what DWM was putting out last time the tv programme was still on!

The Love Invasion
The ninth Doctor and Rose debut with a very solid piece of Russell T Davies pastiche. There's a lot of running back and forth in 1960s London as the Doctor and Rose must piece together what links some overly helpful young women, the death of several prominent scientists, and a woman who keeps killing aliens. There's solid humor, a decent alien motivation, and a strong sense of the voices of both Eccleston and Piper. The main thing I didn't like was that there's sort of a fake-out double ending, which felt tacked on.

Art Attack
This is a decent story with a good ending, about the Doctor and Rose coming to a futuristic art gallery, and getting caught up in an evil piece of performance art. That said, I felt like there's a better version of this story somewhere in the multiverse: a comics story about art written by an artist seems like it could have done more fun stuff than the story does, and there's surprisingly little made of the fact that both the Doctor and the alien are the last of their kinds—that would have been the emotional center of the story on tv, I think.

The Cruel Sea
I was pretty surprised when Mike Collins noted this as one of the best comic strips he's ever illustrated—because to me it was the weakest story in this volume. It has striking visuals—a cruise ship on the red oceans of Mars, Billie Piper in a skintight spacesuit, a woman whose face looks like a fractured mirror—and some neat uses of the medium—the conversation between the two Doctors—but even though I'm a big fan of Robert Shearman's audio work for Big Finish and his original prose fiction, I found something deeply unpleasant about reading this story. Some of the visuals struck me as inappropriate for the Doctor Who of 2005, and some I just didn't like. Well rendered, but genuinely unpleasant to think about. It's the kind of thing Shearman makes work in prose or audio, I guess (there's some gross stuff in Scherzo), but when you have to actually see it, it's very different. The characters generally are unpleasant, too—this story is very much the epitome of something that's well-crafted but just did not work for me.

When I posted the above on GallifreyBase, Rob himself popped up to opine, "I absolutely agree with you! I'm so grateful to Mike Collins for his amazing art and lovely support, but I don't think I got this story right at all. I've never been a big comics fan, and so misunderstood the particular demands of the medium - and yeah, I think I got the tone wrong completely." Phew!

Mr Nobody / What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow
These two stories, one comics, one prose, are both from Panini's only Doctor Who Annual, and are both more child-focused than the average DWM strip. But they're still both solid. You can of course count on Scott Gray for a well put-together done-in-one, and Steven Moffat's story is a fun time travel loop. We should meet this Sally Sparrow again!

A Groatsworth of Wit
The ninth Doctor's DWM tenure comes to a quick end with this, a decently fun story with some good jokes and a nice last scene. Obviously this ended up a dry run for a David Tennant episode, like some many stories in this volume, but it's different enough to be worthwhile.

Other Notes:

• The Love Invasion, despite being three issues long, spans the entirety of Christopher Eccleston's on-screen tenure.
• The behind-the-scenes stuff about Mike Collins trying to get Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper's likenesses down was great. On the one hand, Eccleston kept shooting down images that were too heroic and good-looking and muscular, too American comics! On the other hand, Piper just said, "Ooh, he's given me hips and tits, I like it!"
• After all the talk of likenesses, it thus becomes very noticeable when Rose has a dream in The Cruel Sea about marrying Mickey, but we never actually see his face, presumably so the story could avoid an extra set of approvals just for a one-page sequence.
• Elements of The Love Invasion, The Cruel Sea, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays, and A Groatsworth of Wit arguably all ended up on screen. The latter two are obvious, but Clay Hickman makes the case that The Cruel Sea influenced "The Waters of Mars." Is this an offshoot of the Flood? A GallifreyBase commenter pointed out to me that the scene in Love Invasion where the Doctor counteracts being poisoned by eating random foods was lifted for "The Unicorn and the Wasp."
• Rose is the first companion to spontaneously appear in the strip since Benny, and only the second to ever do so. Every other previous companion was introduced, even if (as in Peri and Ace) it was a reintroduction. Between this and the Doctor's regeneration, the illusion of the DWM strip as a standalone continuous narrative is shattered. We're in for a lot of that over the next couple years...
• Rob Shearman is, I think, the first tv writer to work on the strip since Marc Platt. (Though one other strip writer here would go on to be a tv writer, as is the case with a couple past writers.)
• It's pretty mind-boggling to learn about the ninth Doctor strips we didn't get from the extras: Russell T Davies and Bryan Hitch writing the ninth Doctor's debut! Russell T Davies and Dave Gibbons writing his final episode!! It's a shame we've still never gotten an RTD Doctor Who comic. I don't know if comics would play to his strength like tv, but I'd certainly be interested to see it.

Doctor Who Magazine and Marvel UK: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

Tansy Rayner Robert's story is a solid 4 stars and I would love more stories in this world.

Robert Shearman's story is a 1.5 stars.

Just not into Weird anymore. More interested in horror. The group I started is called Literary Horror, not Literary Weird. Different strokes for different folks. This particular volume, what I finished, left me uninterested but given my current leanings that doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad. However, I did find every volume except the first somewhat uninspiring.

This audio is a hoot and has more digs at organized religion in the first 15 minutes than anything I've ever read before...

If the first half of this story is funny, the second half is quite serious and dark, involving regicide, infanticide, madness, murder of masses, fictional murder, godhood, death, destruction, reliving one's worst memories/nightmares until one has forgotten the origin point ... and more digs at organized religion, tradition (we do it because it's tradition! [and not because it makes any rational or common sense]) and asking the question about how the father/son relationship should really happen. The ending is not a happy one for all the humor contained in the story, but it leaves one thoughtful.

Mr. Shearman sure knows how to write.

Great fun audio featuring Frobisher the Whifferdill. A great parody of hard boiled detective fiction by Rob Shearman.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3754620.html

Great novelisation of one of the great New Who episodes. You have seen the show, here's the writer's cut, as it were, giving new background to a number of the characters, smoothing out a couple of plot kinks, with combination of tight-third for Rose interspersed with notes from the omniscient narrator explaining what was happening. We lose a couple of the good lines ("He's a bit pretty" / "I hadn't noticed") but we get a lot more in other areas. Well worth adding to the collection.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3754620.html

Great novelisation of one of the great New Who episodes. You have seen the show, here's the writer's cut, as it were, giving new background to a number of the characters, smoothing out a couple of plot kinks, with combination of tight-third for Rose interspersed with notes from the omniscient narrator explaining what was happening. We lose a couple of the good lines ("He's a bit pretty" / "I hadn't noticed") but we get a lot more in other areas. Well worth adding to the collection.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/dalek-by-billy-seguire-and-robert-shearman/

Coming to it again just after rewatching the TV episode, I noticed several significant points that I should have remarked on first time around. Goddard is actually an FBI plant, and takes over operations from Van Statten a bit earlier (which makes sense). We get a lot more about everyone’s background, including the security guards. Adam’s personal weapons cache has been built up by him in case he might need to shoot his way out. It’s very satisfactory.

Originally posted here at Anime Radius.

The one hundredth milestone release for long-running series such as Doctor Who (the audio version, naturally, not the original television program) can be approached in numerous ways: something dramatic and explosive and potentially audience dividing; something that furthers the plot more than the previous 99 releases; something that actually celebrates and showcases what’s kept the series running for so long. For 100, this two-disc set falls squarely into the third category, and with much aplomb. These four trips in the TARDIS with the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe illustrate why listeners have been going back to Big Finish for their Who audio fixes for so many years – and will continue to do so in the far off future.

Each writer involved in 100 has seemingly brought their own views on what makes Who wonderful into their respective stories. The first story, 100 BC, written by my personal favorite of all the Big Finish authors Jacqueline Rayner, is a classic hijinks-in-history story with lots of whoopsies and madcap fun, even when Evelyn tries to change history for the “better” (and in retrospect, it so fits her character to try and turn Julius Caesar into Julia). It’s a story that manages to be terribly amusing even while teaching us a lesson (messin’ with the time line of an established figure in history is bad, mm’kay?). The second story, My Own Private Wolfgang by Robert Shearman, can be seen to celebrate the more odd stories in the series, what with its very wibbley-wobbley chain of events ending up in a veritable bevy of Mozarts (and one very confused Evelyn – and listener). It is probably the weakest story in the bunch, but it has enough wit and cleverness about it that it never drags on – and the ending is just plain brilliant. The third story, Bedtime Story by Joseph Lidster, is a great example of how Who can be both frightening and yet full of hope, something to see while crouching behind the sofa but will eventually bring you back out by tale’s end. The claustrophobic feel of the setting and the plot twist halfway through makes it truly spooky – and the ending is somewhat reminiscent of The Doctor Dances and Ninth’s cry of “This time, everybody lives!”, only with much less ‘dancing’.

The final story in the collection, The 100 Days of the Doctor by Paul Cornell, is the true gem of the set. It’s basic set-up is a mystery that only the Doctor can solve – his own murder – and it takes us back and forth through his time line (only Doctors five through eight though, of course!) to give us a look at what the Doctor has been, currently is, and soon will be. It also gives a good excuse to rehash the basics on regeneration for Evelyn’s sake, and see the other Doctors in the BF range through Six’s colorful point of view. Not to mention the time limit gives the story a sense of urgency, compounded by the horrific pain that the intelligent virus is delivering to the Doctor’s body from the inside out.

The stories themselves are superb, but stories alone do not a Big Finish production make – there is also the voice acting involved. Headlining in all four stories is the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe, played respectively by actors Colin Baker and Maggie Stables. They truly bring their A game to 100, elevating the scripts to a higher lever with their keen grasp of their characters. Six and Evelyn’s casual banter and interactions as a pair with the rest of the stories’ cast are amazing as usual and always entertaining. And then there is Mister Baker, who needs to stop being so darn good at his job; listening to The 100 Days of the Doctor - from being possessed by the virus to being in pain as he’s dying to the final showdown before assassin and target – was thrilling to the point of nerve-racking and is not for the faint of heart who hate to hear their Doctor being hurt so convincingly. But seriously, the voice acting in this is splendid and – combined with the skills of four very talented writers – once again proves that you don’t need a TV screen and props to showcase a great story.

For anyone who loves Doctor Who and is keen on getting into the Big Finish canon, or is a regular fan who has been wondering about listening to this set, you can’t go wrong with picking up a copy of 100 for keeps. There is something about settling down with a great story flowing through your speakers that can’t be duplicated through print – from the atmosphere of the soundtrack to the script tailor made for listening, not to mention the actors’ back and forth as their respective characters, creating the story and moving it forward – and this is all combined to make a unique listening experience that makes this Who audioplay so gosh darn wonderful.

Great performances from both of the cast. This was a very good story that wasn't to my taste; I wish the Doctor would stop falling in love with his companions.

Chilling story and excellent performances. The revelation at the end of part 2 was especially good.

Wow Punchline was different then I thought it would be but I really enjoyed it. Well written.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2910769.html

This is the much-delayed second volume of commentary between Shearman and Hadoke; I read and enjoyed the first back in 2011, and look forward now to the third when it comes out. It's now several years since I completed my own rewatch of Old Who, so this was a nice return to that exercise for me, especially since (like the authors) this is the period of the show that I remember most vividly from my own childhood. And there was one surprise - I had forgotten Tom Baker's appearance in character on Animal Magic, which I think I must have missed when it was shown in 1979.

The two don't deviate much from the received wisdom (or my own views) of the high and low points of the show - in particular, the later parts of both Season Nine and Season Fifteen, where they struggle in their mission to say only nice things about each episode. In fact, they are much harsher on The Claws of Axos than I would be. But it's interesting to consider that one of my recurrent complaints about New Who - that the punch of the season finale has often been pulled - was often just as true of Old Who during the Pertwee and Baker years.

The write-ups of each episode, presented as correspondence between Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke, are very specifically tied to May-August 2009, a period when both writers went on various travels and Hadoke embarked on what turned out to be a short-lived marriage; but the seven-year gap has meant some occasionally poignant endnotes noting the subsequent passing of key figures in the making of the programme (notably Barry Letts).½

These four short stand-alone stories are some of the most delightful Who ever produced. Made to celebrate 100 episodes of Big Finish Audio's Doctor Who continuation, they highlight some of the Doctor's and the show's best qualities. Plus, they all four contain Evelyn, who's up there with Ace and Jamie for my very favorite companion (as Six is up there with Three, Nine and Eleven for favorite Doctor... though if Capaldi ever gets a good script, look out!).

wonderful short stories... about love - being in love, being without love, obsession with love, and the lives of the people looking for it. Quirky with a hint of surreal, but beautifully and understatedly written

Pitch-black humor with a fantasy twist. A little too black for my tastes--I ended up more depressed than smiling. But I loved the surreal elements. Humor is highly subjective, so I'd still recommend this book to anyone who likes to read--and think--a little off the beaten path.

Shearman’s latest collection of absurdist short stories is, if anything, even more horrific, beguiling and strange than his previous collections. The collections from ChiZine emphasise the darker side of his work, most of the stories qualifying as horror in one way or another. But it’s not standard horror, instead it’s absurdist horror; existential terrors summoned to the page to disquiet the reader. Blood and guts do appear from time to time but never to shock purposes. Instead it’s all presented in Shearman’s calm authorial voice, the author always sure and in control where his characters are, in a very British way, politely bewildered by events.

It starts off lightly, with Luxembourg going missing and moves on through unorthodox takes on Peanuts (A Joke In Four Panels), Hansel and Gretel (Peckish), the rewards for martyrs in heaven (72 Virgins) and how we anthropomorphise objects (Static). History and love are recurring fascinations. It’d be apt if, having started with the disappearance of a country, the collection finished with the reappearance of the Twin Towers (History Becomes You, as sharp and wise about history and human nature as any short story I’ve read. And I’ve read a few). And perhaps it’s most satisfying to think of it as the final piece and the last story as a rather sweet coda. For all we’ve seen cannibalism, sex, murder, bestiality and people held captive against their will the collection finishes on the sweetest of notes, a bittersweet paean to the power of music that seems to be moving toward tragedy but lifts itself courageously at the last with a beautiful, earned sentiment. And with that, the writer leaves the stage but leaves the reader craving more.

It had been a quite while since I had enjoyed a speculative fiction collection as much as I’ve enjoyed “They Do the Same Things Different There”, which I found simply amazing. I had previously read a few stories by Robert Shearman, so I knew more or less what to expect, nicely written quirky stories with a touch of irony. And I was pretty sure I was going to enjoy this book, but it has gone beyond all my expectations. From the twenty-four stories collected here, a couple were just good, most of them really good and a handful of them excellent, so no filler stories here.

Although the label weird or surrealist would fit most of them, they were so imaginative and diverse that I didn’t find them monotonous, quite the opposite, each story was a surprise, completely different to the previous ones, and each story, for its part, was full of wonderful twists. For me this book was as delicious and full of surprises as a box of assorted chocolates, so I forced me to space them out and to read one at a time, to make them last longer.

What is more, these are not the kind of story you read and enjoy, and five minutes later you’ve completely forgotten about it: they linger in your mind and make you think, as they leave plenty to the reader’s imagination.

And though in a collection so full of gems is hard to choose, among my favorite ones would be “Static”, “Restoration”, “Luxembourg”, “Our Fallen Sons”, “A Grand Day Out”, “History Becomes You” and “Memories of Craving Long Gone”.½

If I were to categorize my bookshelves by genre, then this collection of stories would simply have to dance from shelf to shelf. Some Bizarro, slipstream, humour, fantasy, horror, science fiction and just plain weird stories abound.



You will have to form your own conclusions with many of the story endings because Sherman does not always hold your hand the whole way; if you cannot watch a film or read a book without being told absolutely everything then perhaps this is not the book for you.

However, if you want to jump out of short story rut-land and you like a little bit of unpredictability read this and you will find not only weirdness galore but well written, compelling and sublimely realised stories.

Received for an honest review.

Urthwild

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley.

They Do the Same Things Different There is an unusually strong short story collection. Most collections are bogged down by a few weak stories, but each story in this collection is delightful in its own way. The author has won numerous awards for his writing, and in this case, it’s well deserved.

The stories in this collection range from disturbing to horrific to odd. The characters are well-described and realistic, though some of them are more likeable than others.

A few of the stories stand above the others. In my favourites, the World Trade Centre Towers return (“History Becomes You”), a family buys a house with a defective sky (“Patches”), and a bed and breakfast has a ghost problem (“The Sixteenth Step”).

Some of the stories in this collection touch on bestiality (“Taboo”) and cannibalism (“Peckish”), which may disturb some readers.

Many of the stories end abruptly, with ambiguous endings. The gnomes thought these endings were powerful, but others may find them frustrating.

This collection is ideal for fans of fantasy, horror, and weird fiction.

Rating: 5 Gnomes Out of 5

This review originally appeared on gnomereviews.ca.

This collection of short stories varies from the macabre to the horrific to the just plain odd.

Vivid descriptions help place characters and settings into rather surreal worlds and/or situations.

Characters vary from likeable to despicable, realistic to bizarre.

Overall, an interesting read.

This collects seven stageplays by Robert Shearman, a dramatist of some repute, or so I've heard, though I primarily know him for the very highbrown reason that he's written a lot for Doctor Who. It's all pretty good, as good as reading a stageplay can be, I suppose. Some of these I like the concept more the execution ("Knights of Plastic Armour," about a group of obsessed historical re-enactors), but it's my supposition that good actors would be doing enough with this material to make it come alive. If I have a favorite, it's "Fool to Yourself," about a married couple who go to the hotel where they first met in an attempt to rekindle their relationship, only their older selves meet and start falling in love with the past version of their spouses... whoops. I also really liked "Inappropriate Behaviour," about a minister and a woman who bump into each other at key life moments, and "Shaw Cornered," about George Bernard Shaw after his death.

Fans of Rob Shearman's Doctor Who work will notice some themes from his Doctor Who work (particularly, Punchline, The Chimes of Midnight, Jubilee): repetition, emotionally disconnected spouses, women purposefully acting a bit dim for their men, Martin Jarvis. Also "Shaw Cornered" reminds one somewhat of the Mozart story Shearman wrote for 100 (as far as its general concerns go, not in its plot).

The title is a bit weird. "Caustic" is less wide-ranging than the book actually is, and "comedies"... well, I guess so, but there's so much more going on than jokes.

Remember Why You Fear Me is a collection of sophisticated and wonderfully bizarre tales. Robert Shearman has the ability to weave and bend reality meshing horrifying fantasies into a mundane backdrop creating something beautiful and simultaneously ugly.

Its a rare day that I come across a book that fits so neatly into exactly the kind of thing I want to read. This is what I want to read today, tomorrow, and always.

a copy was provided by netgalley. Thank you!