Doctor Dwarf: The Books

[International Debris]

I’ve been working my way through all of the Doctor Who novels, novellas, novelisations, and other things beginning with ‘novel’, and have, I think, finally come across a Red Dwarf reference (it’s possible there are others I’ve forgotten).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book is written by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker, he of Making Stuff For Red Dwarf fame. The novel, Storm Harvest, features a character who has written a book called ‘Androgum Cookery for Novices: How to Master the Boomerang Spoon’.
It’s possible that Mike Tucker came up with the name Boomerang Spoon without any relation to his working on Red Dwarf, but I also think it’s exceptionally unlikely.

I’ll make sure to keep you all updated should I find more as the journey continues. Perry and Tucker wrote a series of four books as a sort of unofficial season 26b, between the end of the TV version and the beginning of the Virgin New Adventures novels, so I’m quite a long way in now. The only other thing that may be of note here is that one of the books – can’t remember which right now – pretty much canonised Blackadder the Third in the Whoniverse.

[Flap Jack]

All?! Now that is an impressive endeavour! I’m not sure I even have the time to read the titles of all of the published Doctor Who novels, let alone the content.

Seriously, if anyone at BBC Books, IDW, Big Finish etc. is reading this, could you maybe just… stop? Come on, just give me a few decades to catch up. It’s only fair.

[International Debris]

Including the spin-offs, there are nearly 700 official Who and Who-related novels and short story collections. I’m near the 300 mark at the minute, it took me two years of reading nothing else. I am now alternating, a few Who novels then a few fucking-hell-anything-but-sci-fi-please novels.

Once I’m done I’m doing every Big Finish. That’s around a thousand including all the spinoffs.

[Plastic Percy]

If it helps, the novel ‘First Frontier’ by David A. McIntee has Ace saying Smeg a lot.

[Hamish]

Ace and Doctor?! You sound like a kids’ TV series about a girl and a man who stuffs live ferrets down his trousers!

[Hamish]

Or should I have just gone with plays the spoons?

[Plastic Percy]

Also, Lister is mentioned as using a sonic screwdriver when repairing Kryten in ‘Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers’.

[International Debris]

I never noticed that line in IWCD. I’m so overdue a re-read of the Dwarf books.

Just on Mike Tucker’s Prime Time. He’s introduced a character called Reg Gurney, whose 30 years in the Space Corps have given him the perspective that the key to efficiency is a pair of well-polished boots. He called The Doctor ‘fella-me-lad’. This character is played by Chris Barrie in my head.

[cwickham]

Currently listening to the second Big Finish War Master set, and the third episode is entirely given over to one of the characters slowly going insane whilst stranded on a space station, and there’s a real Series I/Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers vibe to it. I’d be very surprised if Dwarf wasn’t at least vaguely on Guy Adams’ mind whilst he was writing it.

[Seb Patrick]

There’s a “smegging” in The Dying Days.

[International Debris]

If it helps, the novel ‘First Frontier’ by David A. McIntee has Ace saying Smeg a lot.

Just on another McIntee novel, White Darkness, and along with saying “Smegging hell”, Ace also calls someone “molecule mind”.

[Warbodog]

I know the feeling of going through something contemporaneous to Red Dwarf and keeping an eye peeled for overlap that turns out to be less than you hoped (especially if you’re getting a bit bored and need a side quest to keep things interesting).

There was disappointingly little when I went through all of The Comic Strip Presents…, but ‘Space Virgins from Planet Sex’ (1993) had Sara Stockbridge chained up as a sacrificial offering by French and Saunders in an inverse of her scene in Terrorform (1992).

Not worth its own post, barely worth a thread derailing. Peter Capaldi doing Doctor Who memes in ‘Jealousy’ 20 years before he was cast was more noteworthy.

[Taiwan Tony]

Today I read in a Blackadder-based book that the joke about making the earth a full stop was a joke/plot originally thought of by John “QI Etc.” Lloyd in an sci fi sitcom pilot.

[Warbodog]

I read that book earlier this year, it’s very good. Jem Roberts got in there just before the cast started dying. I thought something similar for Red Dwarf would be nice, but we’re getting all those documentaries to supplement all the other documentaries, so probably not necessary.

[Taiwan Tony]

Probably not.
I’m going to buy his Fry & Laurie one.

[(deleted)]

Page 267 is the best page of Soupy Twists.

[Taiwan Tony]

That’s disgusting

[International Debris]

Ace says smeg to herself in Kate Orman’s The Left-Handed Hummingbird. I don’t think it’s ever stated when exactly she was taken from Earth, although some of the novels have her taste in music including The Stone Roses, so she could have been a Red Dwarf fan and just be quoting it.

[Plastic Percy]

Ace has a rather eclectic taste in music, depending on who’s writing. The TV series has her buying a Courtney Pine jazz cassette and turning her nose up at U2, but the novels either have her listening to classical music or a gamut of eighties pop music: The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and The Cure all get mentions at one time or another.

[International Debris]

She had a Brett Anderson poster on her wall in the last book I read, and she’s also hinted at a taste for anarcho punk in an earlier book. There does seem to be a bit of a “Ace is cool so she must like the music I like!” theme.

[Plastic Percy]

Character continuity was never a strong point in the BBC Doctor Who novels. Anji Kapoor, companion to the Eighth Doctor, managed to come from a liberal, middle-class family that was also conservative and devoutly religious. And depending on who was writing, she was either Indian or Pakistani.

[Ben Saunders]

Definitely got that vibe from that one episode that’s all about jazz for some reason (Silver Nemesis?), there’s also a bit of it in Happiness Patrol. The production team really thought jazz was really cool, didn’t they.

[International Debris]

It’s what all the ’80s teenagers were listening to.

[By Jove its holmes]

Ace didn’t swear on TV and didn’t seem willing to use her Nitro-9 on non-robots.

“Come on, Mr. Liberal! We’re the only kids in the country who never say fu-“

[Plastic Percy]

I follow Andrew Cartmel (Script Editor, 1987 – 1989) on Twitter and he’s a Jazz enthusiast, posting about his latest vinyl finds. I figure the Doctor and Ace enjoying Jazz and meeting Courtney Pine is a bit of an ‘author avatar’ moment.

On a book tangent, I do reccomend Cartmel’s Vinyl Detective book series. The series follows an unnamed narrator who hunts down rare vinyl records for money. Some of his clients take his business card a little too seriously and he finds himself investigating murders and other serious crimes.

I’d also reccomend Nev Fountain’s Mervyn Stone trilogy – Geek Tragedy, DVD Extras Include: Murder & Cursed Among Sequels. Mervyn Stone is a washed-up Script Editor mostly famous for his work on cult 1980s sci-fi series ‘Vixens from the Void’. Making a living attending discusion panels at fan conventions, he finds himself turning his Script Editor’s eyes for plot holes and inconsistencies to solving murders.

[Author]

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