Mega City Book Club 118: The Pit

2000AD superfan Stacey Dutton-Whittle is my guest to discuss a cracking Dredd epic from the middle of the much maligned 1990s. Join us if a spoiler free chat about The Pit. And get your copy from the 2000AD shop.

Check out Whittle Waffle on youtube and read Stacey's interview with a number of 2000AD droids about the best volume of Dredd to start reading with on the Games Radar site here. Also check out Mark Dutton-Whittle's Evil Dead blog Within the Woods.

You can find a list of episodes so far and all the upcoming books on the Facebook page, follow the podcast on Twitter, and on instagram, or email me comments and suggestions to MCBCpodcast@gmail.com
 

Download here
Right click and choose save link as to download to your computer.

Mega City Book Club 56: Al's Baby Revisited

The voice of Tharg returns as David Bishop makes his third visit to the book club to give his insights into the conception of Al's Baby in the Meg, and the subject of creator owned strips. You can find details of his creative writing course at Edinburgh Napier university, and find all David's books on his Amazon author page.

Al's Baby is still on the 2000AD online store.

You can find a list of episodes so far and all the upcoming books on the Facebook page, follow the podcast on Twitter, or email me comments and suggestions to MCBCpodcast@gmail.com
 

Download here
Right click and choose save link as to download to your computer.

Mega City Book Club 55: Al's Baby

It's the weirdest pregnancy to ever appear in the pages of the Meg and the Prog as Ben Penfold-Marwick joins me from Oz to discuss a comedy classic from our heroes, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

You can find Ben's musical work on Bandcamp with Celestial Shadows and Flatus

Hurry to the delivery ward on the 2000AD online store to get your bouncing copy of Al's Baby.

You can find a list of episodes so far and all the upcoming books on the Facebook page, follow the podcast on Twitter, or email me comments and suggestions to MCBCpodcast@gmail.com
 

Download here
Right click and choose save link as to download to your computer.

Mega City Book Club - books list

Getting the book cover images to line up is driving me more and making me wish I had chosen wordpress instead of blogger.
The best place to find the current book list is on the facebook group.
Please pop to
https://www.facebook.com/Megacitybookclub/
and like and follow and check the book list post there

In the meantime here's some text instead of pictures.

The list of books and episodes so far

Episodes

1: Dan Dare vol 1 with Simon Belmont

2. The Complete America with Pete Wells

3. The Cursed Earth (Titan editions) with Jim Moon

4. Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood with Tony Richards

Books to come in no particular order:

Button Man: Get Harry Ex with Pete Wells

GoldTiger with Simon Belmont

D.R, & Quinch with Adam Murdough

Zenith Phase 1 with David

Dredd:Origins with Oliver English

Satan's Island

The Apocalypse War with Jim Moon

Alan Moore's Future Shocks with Brett Summers

Scarlet Traces With Scowlin Munkeh

Nemesis Book 1 with Richard McAuliffe

The Ballad of Halo Jones with Sheridan Kelly and Rachel Bullmore

Mandroid with Steve Green

The Pit with Stacey Whittle

Chopper: Song of the Surfer with Seelnelg Vader

Rogue Trooper vol 1 with Chris J Thompson

A Quarter to Fear

A Quarter to Fear is a neat collection of four supernatural short stories from classic writers who are better known for their more mainstream fictional works. It is compiled, edited and annotated by Mr Jim Moon, the host of the excellent Hypnobobs podcast.

Mr Moon has an encyclopaedic knowledge of all matters macabre. Like the Shadow he knows what fear lurks within the hearts of men, and is an expert on the fictional worlds of spooky stories from films, television, and, of course, books. This collection is a follow up to his previous septet of stories published last year, the Seven of Spectres. The difference this time is that he has chosen four interesting tales by unusual authors. They are The Superstitious Man's Story by Thomas Hardy, The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sea Raiders by H.G.Wells, and The Head by E.Nesbit

Each tale is introduced and annotated by Jim and presented with a suitable spooky illustration. They are are creepy and interesting stories but the pick of the bunch for me is Nesbit's tale of a gruesome obsession and revenge. Jim Moon's comments and notes are fascinatingly helpful and all in all this is a splendid collection which is currently available for less than the price of a Sunday newspaper. Highly recommended, Five stars and please, Mr Moon, may we have some more?

In Blogs we trust

A quick mention for some of the other fine blogs that are covering Big Finish releases.

Red Rocket Rising
Doc Oho Reviews
Kiss of the Dalek
Chair with a Panda on it
and
Mike from TimeVault's reviews

More links in the side panel over there on the right.
In particular:
British Invaders (I have no shame)
The Type 40 Podcast
and
TimeVault

We're all in this together!

Big Finish - A quick review

I have gone from being an occasional Big Finish listener to becoming somewhat of an addict.

Looking back at this blog shows that I have now reviewed 36 different titles. The average review score is hovering around 3.5. I have given three different stories the lowest score so far of 2.5, and just one story has got the full 5 star rating.

Looking at the downloads folder on my Big Finish accounts page shows a whopping 23 titles waiting for me to listen to, and that doesn't include future releases that I have subscribed to but have not been released yet. That is a lot of content to get through and lots of reviews to come.

I still plan to try and keep up with my complete James Bond read through, as well as finishing my Alien marathon, watching all of the Superman movies before next year's release of The Man of Steel, reviewing more medicine from the pages of 2000AD, and getting back to talking about some comics. That is quite a wide scope for one blog but I am trying to avoid these pages becoming about just one subject.

If you have listened to any of the Big Finish stories I have reviewed I would be fascinated to read your own reviews. Please send me links or put something in the comments box here. In the meantime thank you for your attention and stay tuned for more.

Big Finish - Home Truths

This is a story from the Big Finish Companion Chronicles series. Home Truths, written by Simon Guerrier, directed by Lisa Bowerman, and starring Jean Marsh and Niall MacGregor.

Sara Kingdom met the First Doctor, but Sara Kingdom is dead. How can she be in a house in the Cambridgeshire Fens, sitting by the fire and telling a sort of ghost story to a visiting police officer?

The Companion Chronicles allow Big Finish to tell stories about all the different people who have travelled with the Doctor over the years. They tend to be shorter, single CD stories which don't feature the Doctor himself. Again this particular story was a recommendation from Brian from Canada who knows that I like a good ghost story, and this one has the added bonus that it is set in Ely where I live.

It is basically a two-hander with Sara Kingdom telling the story of how she, Steven and the First Doctor came to visit the strange house and the mystery they found there. By the end of the tale we will learn what the Home Truths of the title means. It is a cracking little ghost story with fine work by Marsh and MacGregor. It was also nice to hear them talking with director Lisa Bowerman and producer David Richardson in an extra track at the end. I know that some Big Finish listeners like to get the script or separate music tracks as CD extras, but I really enjoy the cast and crew interviews when they appear.

I can't say much more about Home Truths without giving too much away. It is not going to divert me away from the main Big Finish range where, thanks to a recent spending spree, I now have about 20 stories waiting for me to download. However I am going to give it a very impressive 4 out of 5 space security sashes.

Stay tuned for more Big Finish very soon.

Big Finish - Spare Parts

Raiding the back catalogue brings me to Big Finish monthly release 34 - Spare Parts by Marc Platt. Directed by Gary Russell and starring Peter Davison as the doctor and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa.

The Tardis lands on a strange planet and while the Doctor tries to work out where they are, Nyssa gets involved with a family who are struggling to survive in a city of people who are steadily replacing their organs with mechanical parts.

I originally bought this story after hearing it reviewed by the TimeVault team, back in their Cadmium 2 days. It has a reputation as one of the best Big Finish stories and this one certainly stood up to a second listening. Everything about this production is perfection. The cast are fantastic and include well know names such as Derren Nesbitt, Sally Knyvette and Paul Copley. Sarah Sutton is very empathic as Nyssa, and Peter Davison gave us a Doctor who grows irritable as a way of concealing his growing unease about the planet and the future. The sound design and music are great, and Nick Briggs does some astonishing things with the Cyber voices. These are the Cybermen from the Tenth Planet era with their slightly foolish sing-song voices. Yet Briggs manages to make them terrifying. It is an astonishing performance.

Even more astonishing is a moment when a newly "upgraded" Cyberman comes face to face with its former family and tries desperately to overcome its new programming and speak to them. I do not know how much of the tragic vocalisations are down to Nicholas Briggs, and how much to Kathryn Guck, but somehow it manages to be both moving and completely horrifying at the same time. It may be my favourite moment in all of Big Finish so far. And it is the sort of effect that I can imagine happening in classic Doctor Who.

Spare Parts is spoken about as the equivalent of Genesis of the Daleks for the Cybermen and, certainly, what it tells us about people of Mondas, their plight, and the Doctor's role in the events that lead to them becoming the Cyberman remind me of that great story. It is a perfect prequel to The Tenth Planet.

Looking back at the scores I have given Big Finish stories so far I can see that the top spot is shared by The Silver Turk and The Architects of History with 4.5 each. Well, no surprise but Spare Parts is going straight to the top with a full 5 out of 5 Cyber chest units. It's a perfect Big Finish story. Check it out if you have not done so already.

Big Finish - Winter for the Adept

Big Finish release 10 from July 2000 - Winter for the Adept, written by Andrew Cartmel and directed by Gary Russell. Starring Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton, with an early Big Finish appearance from India Fisher.

My flurry of Big Finish reviews continue as I go back to the first stories I bought from them. I think I have had at least two different computers since the one I first downloaded this story on to, but fortunately the new Big Finish site makes it very easy to download all stories purchased in the past. It is a model of digital distribution that other pay for content sites could learn from. Once you have bought your story it remains in your account from then on, so you can download it to new devices as you acquire them.

This was another CD that Brian from British Invaders recommended to me because he knows I like a good ghost story. Somehow Nyssa arrives by herself at a remote school high in the Alps and she is soon caught up in an investigation into a Poltergeist, something that her very logical mind rejects as impossible. Fortunately the Fifth Doctor is not too far behind and on hand to help out when things get rather dangerous.

I must be getting rather spoilt by the high standard of Big Finish dramas lately because this was not quite as good as I remembered it. I was bothered by the accents that two of the supporting actors were using which kept taking me out from the story. Also the Doctor doesn't seem to be acting in a very rational fashion here, particularly when he keeps arranging seances, which seems out of character for him. We're used to him spouting scientific sounding techno-babble but when he starts talking about hauntings, seances and psychic ability it seems a bit strange to me.

Apart from the accents the rest of the cast are fine. India Fisher is good as one of the schoolgirls at the centre of the Poltergeist activity. I presume it was her work here that got her the role as Charley Pollard who becomes a companion to the Eighth Doctor in Big Finish 16 - Storm Warning. And the writer was Andrew Cartmel, he of the masterplan that never got a chance to happen because the television show was cancelled in 1989. Although he did get to supervise the lost stories series for Big Finish.

I think if he had rated this story the first time I listened to it I would have given it 4 stars. However in comparison with some of the stuff I have been listening to recently it is going to get downgraded to 3 out of 5 spillage detectors. But Big Finish and their digital delivery gets 6 out of 5!

I have just ordered another 12 Big Finish releases so plenty more reviews coming soon.

Big Finish - The Spectre of Lanyon Moor

The ninth title in the Big Finish monthly range was The Spectre of Lanyon Moor Released in 2000, written and directed by Nicholas Pegg, and starring Colin Baker, Maggie Stables and Nicholas Courtney.

This was one of the first Big Finish stories I ever bought, I think it was on special offer at the time and Brian from British Invaders recommended it to me as a spooky story with the Sixth Doctor and the Brigadier. I have gone back and listened to it again as part of my look back at some earlier Big Finish releases.

The Doctor and Evelyn Smythe show up at an archaeological dig in Cornwall and, as ever, all is not what it seems. There are strange sightings on the moor, mysterious goings on at the Manor house, and somebody is trying to get hold of a missing and very powerful artefact.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has come out of semi-retirement to represent UNIT at the dig. The Brig never met the Sixth Doctor on television so it is nice to have them encounter each other here. I doesn't take the Brigadier long to recognise the Doctor and soon they are working together just like the old days. Nicholas Courtney was a terrific presence throughout the years of classic Doctor Who. A talented actor and, by all accounts, a lovely person. If there was one person from the television show I wish I could have met it would be Mr Courtney. Sadly he is no longer with us and after the Wedding of River Song we know he is no longer a part of the Who-niverse, which is a sad thought.

Courtney and Baker are on fine form here, as is Maggie Stables as Evelyn Smythe. She gets a job to do which suits her background as a historian, and, inevitably, she gets into trouble but is able to get out of it without the Doctor's help. The rest of the cast are also very good. I have always been a fan of James Bolam and it was great to hear him, and his wife Susan Jameson, in this story.

My only criticism is of the decision to give us an opening scene that tells us what the secret of Lanyon Moor is right at the start. It is unusual position for us to know more about the threat than the Doctor does, but that was just a story telling decision and apart from working out which of the various characters is the villain there are not too many surprises in this adventure. The sound design is as effective as ever, things go bump, strange creatures make strange noises, and large bits of scentific equipment whizz and bang in a suitable fashion.

It's all rather good but perhaps didn't stand up as well as I remembered it. I am going to give it a solid 3.5 out of 5 focus amplifiers rating. My trawl through the back catalogue will continue with Winter for the Adept.

Big Finish - The Sirens of Time

This is the first ever Big Finish monthly release - The Sirens of Time, written and directed by Nicholas Briggs, and starring Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.

I have gone right back to the beginnings of Big Finish after reading a review by Mike from the TimeVault podcast on The Colour for Monsters is Green blog. I was curious to see what Big Finish was like when it first started in 1999. A lot of the people involved had been producing high quality audio dramas based in the Doctor Who universe so they already knew what they were doing when the BBC gave them a licence to produce official stories. And they certainly hit the ground running with this production.

As the cover picture suggests this is a multi doctor story with incarnations five, six and seven all facing an individual challenge before uniting in the final act to overcome the villain. The Doctors are flying solo without companions, Tegan and Turlough are mentioned but are conveniently locked in the Tardis and not heard from. Of the three actors Peter Davison and Colin Baker seem to drop straight back into their roles with ease. Only Sylvester McCoy seemed to me to be searching for his character in the opening episode. Certainly he has found it in all the other Big Finish stories I have listened to, so it did not take him long to pick it up again. The rest of the cast are all very good indeed and Mark Gatiss does a brilliant accent as the German U-boat captain that is so good I didn't realise it was him until I looked at the cast list.

I assumed that this early Big Finish might be lacking some of the production values that we have come to expect from them but it is all terrific. Right from the start they seem to have mastered the sound effects, music and general recording quality. I listened to this as a download from the Big Finish site and was it was great that all the individual chapters had the appropriate track names on them. I presume that data was not on the original CD pressings in 1999 so maybe they have gone back and added them since. Some of the recent CD releases have been a bit variable in track naming but that is just nerdy nit-picking on my part.

The script is great and I enjoyed the episodic nature of the story. Having read the TimeVault review I knew there was a twist coming but still had fun trying to guess what was going on. I know Mike had problems with one of the actor's performance in the first episode but it did not bother me so much. It reminded me of some of the terrible monster performances in the television show in a rather charming fashion. All in all I am tremendously impressed with the high standard set by Big Finish in this first release. It's going to get 3.5 out of 5 Tardis keys.

I'm not planning to work my way through the back catalogue like Mike is. I can't afford to for one reason. However, I am going to be listening to one or two older stories and reviewing them here in between the regular monthly releases.

Big Finish - The Butcher of Brisbane

Back to the main monthly releases and this is number 161 The Butcher of Brisbane by Marc Platt, directed by Ken Bentley. Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton and Mark Strickson all return as the Tardis crew and Angus Wright plays Magnus Greel.

Let me get my confession out of the way first. As the co-host of a podcast all about British science-fiction television it is rather shameful to admit that I have never seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It is reputed to be quite possibly the best Fourth Doctor serial ever and one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time. And yet I still have not got round to watching it. Maybe that puts me in a unique position to review this story which is a sort of prequel to Weng-Chiang with a rather complicated time structure. This is the Fifth Doctor meeting a man who he first encountered in his Fourth incarnation. However it is a younger Greel who has yet to acquire the time machine which he will use to travel back from the 51st century to Victorian London for the encounter depicted in Weng-Chiang. So the writer has to be careful about how much time Greel has with the Doctor himself in order to not interfere with continuity.

Marc Platt solves this problem by making full use of the Doctor's three companions. The role of a companion has varied over the years. Some have been required to do the action stuff for the Doctor such as Ian, Steven, Jamie and Leela in classic Who and Captain Jack, Micky and Rory in new Who. Other companions are needed to ask the Doctor questions so that he can explain to them and us what is going on. Examples include, well just about all of them apart from Liz Shaw, Romana and K-9. The one standard for all companions is that they must get separated from the Doctor and get into some form of trouble. The neat trick that Platt pulls off in this story is to explore the concept of time travel and have the companions separated by time rather than space. It is an idea that has been explored in recent Doctor Who television stories, in particular with Amy Pond and her dilemmas in The Eleventh Hour and The Girl who Waited. The result is a very interesting story which has Nyssa and Turlough embroiled in political intrigues and espionage.

The Doctor himself has a back-seat role in this one. It's almost like one of the Doctor-light episodes that new Who does once a season. As ever the Big Finish production values are top class and the whole thing cracks along at an enjoyable pace. I particularly liked the music by Fool Circle which reminded me of some of the incidental pieces used in the BBC TV version of The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

This maintains the recent high standard of Big Finish stories that I have been listening to. It gets 4 out of 5 Time Cabinets. Now I get a bit of a break before Protect and Survive. Time to catch up on some of the shows I am supposed to be watching for British Invaders.

Versatile Blogging

Blogging? Huh! What is it good for?

Paul from the Timevault podcast and Goldfish & Paracetamol blog was kind enough to mention me in his Versatile Blogger Award post. This is a rather fine idea which is all about sharing the blogs we read and maybe introducing some new readers to them.

After thanks and links as above the VBA calls for me to pass on the compliment and nominate some blogs that I follow so here goes:

D'Blog of D'Israeli
Everything Comes Back to 2000AD
Brit Cit Reviews
2000AD Covers Uncovered
Reading Watchmen
Comic Book Daily
Kiss of the Dalek
Doc Oho Reviews
Polite Dissent
Brian Vs The Internet

And finally, I'm supposed to reveal seven things about myself. Well I'm not telling but:

1. At the time of writing I am 50 years old. Turn that music down would you?
2. Tom Baker called me "Doctor". He really did.
3. I got to the top of Kilimanjaro. Possibly the worst night of my life, but the morning was pretty spectacular.
4. I watch an awful lot of classic British cult television but I still haven't watched a Colin Baker Doctor Who story. Sorry, Sawbones Hex.
5. I've got a 1965 Morris Minor. Well, actually I'm minding it for my son.
6. In my spare time I annotate comic books.
7. I have a serious Big Finish habit thanks to my Canadian friend and co-host, Brian from British Invaders.

And that is it. Now I have to let the next ten bloggers know about their VBA.

Big Finish - Wall of Darkness

This is the Big Finish Sapphire and Steel release 3.4, Wall of Darkness, with Susannah Harker as Sapphire and David Warrner as Steel. Written and directed by Nigel Fairs. And once again here's a signed CD cover.

This was the last of the Big Finish Sapphire and Steel stories which we covered back in British Invaders episodes 109 & 110. I sold my CDs after we reviewed them but I bought this one again for a fiver at Big Finish day so I would have something for David Warner and Nigel Fairs to sign. I had not planned to listen to it again but my current Big Finish obsession encouraged me to stick it in the CD player again.

The mysterious investigators find themselves in an abandoned shopping mall, or are they in a top secret bunker miles deep below the surface of the Earth? As ever there seems to be some problem with time and Sapphire and Steel must identify the cause and fix it before they are wiped out of existence.

Wall of Darkness brings together several plot threads that had been slowly evolving through the three series of Big Finish releases. Discussing them would involve spoilers which I am not going to give away here. Suffice it to say that there is more than one simple mystery for Sapphire and Steel to solve. Things get wrapped up, but also set up for a possible sequel (which, at the time of writing, seems unlikely to happen).

Warner and Harker are splendid and I enjoyed listening to this story again, especially as for the first episode I was convinced I had missed this out when listening to the others. Wall of Darkness gets a solid 3 out of 5 mysterious artefacts.

Big Finish - The Witch from the Well

This is Big Finish release 154 - The Witch from the Well.

The eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley get caught up in a seventeenth century witch hunt which gets more complicated when the fast return switch on the Tardis separates them by 400 years.

This story didn't quite hit the heights of The Silver Turk but it is very good. There's a nice creepy element to the mystery of the titular witch. Personally I could have done with that mystery carrying on for a bit longer before the science fiction solution is revealed, but that is just my preference for spooky ghost stories.

There is only one problem with these eighth Doctor stories and it's the music. I assumed that Big Finish were using the appropriate theme music for each doctor and that this was the music from the TV movie. But as Paul from the TimeVault podcast pointed out on my previous post this is actually a remix.

When Channel 4 did their countdown of the 100 scariest moments they included the original Doctor Who theme music as an entry in its own right. The rock journalist Alexis Petridis described it then as a perfect piece of music, and I agree. That's not to say that I don't like the updated versions for the subsequent Doctors, I actually enjoy all of them apart from the movie version. If you want to listen to an interesting run through of all the theme tunes up to the tenth Doctor then check out Tom Dillahunt's Podcast Who and, in particular, his episodes 40, 41 and 42.

Anyway, this soft rock of version of the theme tune is the worst version out there, it really spoils the cliffhanger endings to the four episodes in this story. But let's look past that and give this Big Finish story 3.5 out of 5 Radiophonic workshops. Next up I'm jumping back in the Big Finish timeline and will be listening to Neverland.

Target Acquired

I'm supposed to have less books now. I have a Kindle and everything, I've had a major de-clutter, so why am I making impulse purchases of second hand paperbacks on eBay?

I do have one shelf of old paperbacks. I have all the Quatermass scripts in their original Penguin releases. I seem to be accumulating a few classic 1970s Panther science fiction books with their great Chris Foss covers, but more about those later.

And now I have these.

Four of the 1970s Target novelisations of some of the Doctor's classic adventures. I'm blaming this entirely on Paul from the TimeVault podcast and Brian from British Invaders.

They do look rather nice on the shelf though.

Big Finish - Recorded Time

This is number 150 in the Big Finish Doctor Who line. A set of four short stories featuring Colin Baker as the sixth Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown.

Now here is yet another embarrassing confession from the co-host of a podcast all about British science fiction television. I have seen precisely none of the sixth Doctor's TV adventures. I know that his run on the show was nearly as chequered as his coat. He was treated badly as the BBC controller Michael Grade put the show on hiatus, a foreshadowing of the decision to cancel the show altogether in 1989. Fortunately Colin Baker has had the opportunity to continue his portrayal of the Doctor in some very successful Big Finish productions. And Baker is, by all accounts, a thoroughly charming and likeable person. A few months ago our local newspaper reported that he had been in town at a charity event and I was genuinely disappointed that I hadn't known in advance to go along and shake his hand.

So I turned to these audio dramas with some interest. Four short stories in which the Doctor and Peri find themselves in the court of King Henry VIII, go up against some futuristic baddies, get trapped in the world of Jane Austen's novels, and finally find themselves on a strange space ship and suffering from complete amnesia. I found them a bit of a mixed bag. Although I enjoyed the meeting of the Doctor with Mary Shelley I generally like the historical Doctor Who stories less than the others. So I was less impressed with the Henry and Austen stories. However the two more traditional science fiction stories were far more enjoyable.

Perhaps because they are just short stories I was less engaged than I thought I might be. They weren't bad just nothing outstanding. 2.5 out of 5 Tardis control console stars. Next up is the seventh Doctor and the Doomsday Quatrain.

Day 10 - Which sci-fi universe/reality would you most like to live in?

I don't want to live in most of the science fiction universes I read about. Most of them are full of wars, Tie-fighters, body horror monsters, explosions in space, and robots that rise up to destroy their makers. The obvious problem is that a utopian universe would be lovely, calm and safe but that doesn't exactly make for exciting fiction.

It would be lovely to live in a universe where there really was a time-travelling alien with a sonic screwdriver who was always there to save the Earth. But again I'm looking beyond the British Invaders worlds. So let's look at a society which has perfected medicine, and has eliminated need and scarcity. Everything is available at the drop of a hat, the humanoids in this society don't age, they have drug glands, an inbuilt neural net that connects them to a vast Internet, and they spend their time having terrific parties or pursuing their academic or cultural interests. Iain M Banks' The Culture is the place to be if you want perfect safety and happiness all the time.

Of course, perfect safety and happiness doesn't really drive plots along so Banks skilfully brings The Culture into contact and conflict with other space-going civilisations to generate the tension needed for his stories. They even have a branch of The Culture known as Contact specially for this purpose.

So put me in the Culture universe and I'll be very happy. And I won't feel the need to push the limits like some of the Culture humans do by rock climbing without an AG belt, lava rafting, or swinging about in a decrepit cable car system. Well, not at first at least. I guess happiness and immortality gets boring eventually.

Day 9 - No. 1 Sci-Fi Hottie

Once again I have to think outside the British Invaders box so I can't pick Servalan again. Instead I'm going to go with the first thought that popped into my head. Well, maybe not the exact first thought, I do want to keep this clean after all. I haven't seen this movie in a long time and suspect it may be a bit creaky and all too camp now, but it made a big impression on me at the time.

My number one science fiction hottie is Barbarella.