The Twin Book Launch
Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 6: The Peter Davison and Colin Baker Years.
You can get it in the following editions at these links:
US Print ($17.99)
US Kindle ($4.99)
UK Print (£13.99)
UK Kindle (£3.99)
Other eReaders/Smashwords ($4.99)
Here’s what this one’s got:
- Revised editions of every TARDIS Eruditorum post from the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras.
- A book-exclusive Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea essay on the musical Time, an oft overlooked influence on Trial of a Time Lord, and the expansion of another one to include Box of Delights and Robin of Sherwood.
- New essays in praise of Tegan, addressing the stuff left out of my Enlightenment essay, exactly and precisely whose fault the cancellation was, and a completely rewritten essay on “A Fix With Sontarans.”
- New Time Can Be Rewritten essays on Burning Heart, Dave Stone’s Doctor Who/quasi-Judge Dredd mashup, Peri and the Piscon Paradox, Nev Fountain’s two-Doctor timey wimey fish farce, and The Holy Terror, Rob Shearman’s first-ever Doctor Who story.
- A pair of Now My Doctor essays looking at the Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras as wholes.
And last but most certainly not least, a massive nearly forty page long interview with Rob Shearman about his work with Colin Baker at Big Finish and his genuine love for the Eric Saward era.
Thanks to our very own Jane Campbell for copyediting and transcribing the Shearman interview, and of course to the inimitable James Taylor, whose vintage covers are frankly better than the books; the back cover on this one features screenshots from a non-existent Doctor Who video game. He talks about his design process here, and it’s fascinating.
But most of all and as always, thank you. Your generosity supporting this site and buying these books is humbling and an honor. And thanks especially to those who spread the word, who recommend the books to friends, who leave reviews on Amazon, and without whom this entire mad scheme wouldn’t work. Thank you for your support, I hope you enjoy this one, and I’m pleased to say it’s not going to be our final release of 2015 either.
September 21, 2015 @ 12:56 pm
Great news, and amazing cover as always. Looking forward to reading it.
September 21, 2015 @ 1:16 pm
Hooray! Now to figure out how to fit this one on my bookshelf once it comes in.
September 21, 2015 @ 1:24 pm
Let me give you some money.
It’s nice to see a mention of Robin of Sherwood. I’m disappointed that you don’t talk about the Season One final, where Good King Richard Lionheart comes back, restores order after the rule of Bad King John, and Maid Marion says to Robin, ‘Hang on a moment, this is just the same old oppressive regime using you as ideological legitimation,’ and Robin and company go back to being outlaws in the forest.
September 21, 2015 @ 2:04 pm
I’m very much looking forward to getting a copy of this!
You’ve commented before that the Saward era was the one you struggled with the most when first writing it. How much has this changed with the revised essays? Were they just as difficult to get a firm handle on / find something new to say about the second time around? How much changed in the arc of the era as you present it in the revised essays?
September 21, 2015 @ 2:20 pm
I found treating the Fifth and Sixth Doctors as one book helped the Fifth Doctor stuff out; it freed me from trying to make Caves of Androzani work as an ending in its own right while simultaneously setting up the fact that things went so badly wrong just one week later.
September 21, 2015 @ 3:04 pm
Finally! I’ve been dying for more of your Doctor Who essays.
I’m glad you’ve combined two Doctors in one book. It’s a better characterization of the show’s development in the 80s, and I’m sure it’ll make the (probably enormous) McCoy era stand out as the upswing it is.
September 21, 2015 @ 3:14 pm
I have to say, for those who’ve already read the blog entries, that the Rob Shearman interview is absolutely wonderful and completely justifies the cost of purchasing the book. It is fascinating not only on account of how much Shearman provides a very different and often contradictory take on Phil’s interpretation of the era, but also for Shearman’s very open and personal story of how much this period of the show shaped his love of narrative.
September 21, 2015 @ 6:35 pm
My favorite bit is when he talks about what Davison’s Doctor means to him. I feel much the same way—even though I’m about two decades too young to have that sort of nostalgia!
September 22, 2015 @ 4:50 am
I’ve read the blog entries and bought the paperback, and still just bought the ebook so I don’t have to wait months to read it!
September 22, 2015 @ 5:39 am
Although it turns out (on mobi via smashwords) that the table of contents is highly borked: the main TOC doesn’t function as links, apart from the introduction; if you Go To TOC from the menu, it takes you to a Trial-specific TOC that was previously hidden BEFORE the title page.
(Also the file name doesn’t mention the volume number…)
September 22, 2015 @ 11:12 am
I have a very nicely formatted mobi file, which I’d love to upload in place of Smashwords’s badly converted one if they’d let me. Alas, they would rather offer their own shitty conversion than a good file.
Shoot me an e-mail and I’ll get you a better file.
September 21, 2015 @ 3:45 pm
A forty page Rob Shearman interview?! Bloody hell. You spoil us.
September 21, 2015 @ 6:46 pm
WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO DO THIS JUST WHEN I’M ABOUT TO GET SOME WORK DONE AND NEED NO DISTRACTIONS?
September 21, 2015 @ 6:56 pm
Excellent – looking forward to reading this.
Just one question:
Do you get more royalties from Amazon or Smashwords?
September 22, 2015 @ 12:26 pm
So close as to not make a difference, and the Amazon version of the .mobi file is better than Smashwords’s ugly conversion, so go with that.
September 23, 2015 @ 4:03 pm
Yoink’ed via Amazon, with only a little guilt. Looking forward to the new stuff, but also to revisiting the (revised) old stuff too! I’ll take my time…
September 21, 2015 @ 7:04 pm
I’m still miffed that you decided not to cover Doctor Who and the Pirates, but I none the less look forward to reading this book.
September 21, 2015 @ 7:26 pm
Ordered.
A welcome surprise. I was flipping through vol.5 a few days ago, and wondering when the next volume would be released.
And – mischievous thought here – a 2015 publication date means its eligible for the final defence against the attack by zombie puppies.
September 22, 2015 @ 12:26 pm
Just wait til you see our other 2015 release. 😉
September 21, 2015 @ 9:31 pm
New book’s out! Take my money!
September 22, 2015 @ 1:55 am
“In praise of Tegan”?!?!? My mind reels!
September 22, 2015 @ 3:43 am
It’s a good essay.
September 22, 2015 @ 7:09 am
When I discovered this blog and the books at the end of 2014, I immediately ordered paperbacks of the lot and devoured them. Since I finished Volume 5 there’s been an Eruditorum-shaped hole in my reading life, so I’m very pleased to see the release of this latest volume! Can’t wait to read it, Phil – thanks for putting so much time and effort into this; it really is worth it. I’ve never read critical theory that I’ve enjoyed as much as yours.
September 22, 2015 @ 9:33 pm
Having read the chapter on Peri & The Piscon Paradox, I’m afraid we are about to fall out 🙂
As I’m decidedly on the Trad side of the Trad/Rad divide and you’re clearly on the Rad side (although both of us seem reasonable sorts who are generally happy the other side is enjoying themselves even if we disagree on stories), this isn’t a surprise.
One thing I think Big Finish does (which you sort of allude to in the piece on one of the three Baker regeneration stories) is the stories are often written to make the actors happy. The older companions tend to get a lot of historicals since most of the actors aren’t terribly interested in science fiction, while P&PP exists largely as an excuse to let Nicola Bryant show off her acting range. Pro-wank, if you will.
Although one point I feel compelled to address is the central plot point about Peri’s infertility. While I understand your objection in the wider social context, I think the problem is more of its over-use than any particular example, and if we narrow the focus to how Big Finish has explored the post-Doctor lives of the Companions, I can’t think of any companion who has explored this particular issue.
In the context of the story, I got the feeling that Peri simply had an idle fantasy of her future life where she married and had kids. When asking her future self about her family, there was a sense that she was wondering if that came about or if she had taken another path. I never got the sense that she felt this was the only possible path to happiness.
Julia Sweeney talks about her own hysterectomy in “God Says Ha” where she admits she didn’t really want kids, but she still had trouble dealing with the fact that it would no longer be an option. And it’s this way I approached Future Peri’s angst. It wasn’t that she choose a life and children didn’t happened; it’s because the choice was brutally taken away from her.
If this sort of story had been the norm for Big Finish, I would likely have a bit of a problem with it. But we have Steven fending off his power-hungry kids, Romana fending off political rivals on Gallifrey, Leela sacrificing her life to defeat an alien threat and being reincarnated, Sara Kingdom being reborn as a sentient house, Sarah Jane getting her own audio series (long before RTD gave her one on TV), Jo Grant as an environmental activist, Teegan coming to terms with terminal cancer, Adric changing the history of Earth, Nyssa becoming a distinguished scientist and mother, and so on. There’s a lovely variety of ways the companion’s continued their stories at Big Finish. Peri’s fate in this story is thankfully not part of a larger trend at Big Finish.
September 22, 2015 @ 9:47 pm
Just bought from Amazon.com.au! And wondering how to post comments with my old login…
September 30, 2015 @ 9:56 pm
The print book arrived today from Amazon. It is massive. 🙂
One thing I noticed — the page headers are wrong. They say Volume 5 instead of Volume 6. It’s not a big deal, but something to fix for later.