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Contexts

Peculiar Lives

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PECULIAR LIVES

CONTEXTS

2005: TIME LORDS AND TIME HUNTERS

Not only is it unnecessary to be familiar with the cultural context of Olaf Stapledon and his peers in order to enjoy Peculiar Lives, but it should also be possible to read it separately from the context of Telos Publishing’s Time Hunter series of novellas, and that of the Doctor Who novellas which preceded them¹. The story is, after all, supposedly written by its narrator, Erik Clevedon, for the consumption of the general public of his time, and he would certainly not imagine any foreknowledge on their part.

In theory, therefore, the reader can learn everything he or she may need to know about Honoré Lechasseur, Emily Blandish, their symbiotic talents and the world they inhabit from Peculiar Lives itself². Anything else is window-dressing, an additional savour of world-building as a reward to the range’s dedicated readers. Here, however – and once again, purely for the benefit of readers who want to delve more deeply – I’ll go into some detail about that window-dressing.

Peculiar Lives is the seventh in the Time Hunter series of novellas relating the adventures of Honoré and Emily, who were first introduced in Telos’ Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light (2003) by Daniel O’Mahony. The Cabinet of Light, which is widely regarded (against some powerful competition) as one of the best Doctor Who books ever published, focuses not on the Doctor himself (who only appears briefly), but on the legends he leaves behind him, and the attempts of Honoré and Emily to trace the legend back to the man. O’Mahony didn’t particularly intend for his novella to spawn a spin-off series, but with such strong characters and setting it was no surprise that Telos chose it, after the BBC withdrew their tie-in licence, as the basis on which to continue publishing ‘Doctor Who style’ fiction in 2004 and beyond.

The first Time Hunter novella, The Winning Side by Lance Parkin, was published late in 2003, and since then the series has established itself as a strong and well-written line, with a diversity of voices and a flexibility of genre to compare with the parent series³. Perhaps taking their cue from The Cabinet of Light’s treatment of Doctor Who as myth, many of the Time Hunter novellas have made a virtue of engagement with sources both legendary and literary. The Winning Side allows the time-travellers to visit the future of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), while Clare Bott’s The Clockwork Woman (2004) relates the proto-feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to the contemporary creation-myth of her daughter Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817). Other books have authors as characters, or play extensively on the genre conventions of the time(s) in which the series is set.

In many ways, The Winning Side formed the primary inspiration for Peculiar Lives, in introducing its protagonists to a fictional future which reflects (as do all portrayals of the future) the concerns of their own, real, post-War present. When I spotted the happy coincidence that both Olaf Stapledon and George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, the idea of simultaneously pastiching and critiquing their ideas using a similar; metatextual approach became irresistible.

Another recurring concern of the series is with politics, at least with that which takes place on a personal scale in the forms of prejudice and control. Several of the novellas delve into the racial and sexual assumptions of Honoré’s and Emily’s time and others. Both The Clockwork Woman and Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett’s Echoes (2005) have feminist themes, relating to the historical and present-day treatment of women. The relationship between the protagonists – a platonic one, in which each of them is acknowledged to have their own strengths and weaknesses and in which Emily is if anything the more adventurous of the two – reflects the complexity of their respective backgrounds.

More broadly, Honoré and Emily have always been outsiders: Honoré as a black American living in an as-yet illiberal London, and Emily as an amnesiac refugee from another time. This status is used in The Cabinet of Light to relate Honoré in particular to that archetypal outsider, the Doctor, and a number of the novellas – including Stefan Petrucha’s The Tunnel at the End of the Light (2004), John Paul Catton’s Kitsune (2004) and Echoes – deal with kindred issues of alienation.

Again, this forms an important part of the background to Peculiar Lives, with Erik Clevedon’s view of the detectives being strongly influenced by the policital perceptions of his (earlier) generation, and having echoes in the general social tenor of the science fiction which he (as Stapledon’s fictional counterpart) has written.

Other aspects of the Time Hunter series seem to tie in particularly well with Stapledon’s fictional universe: for instance, the alternative mode of perception which Honoré, as a ‘time-sensitive’, experiences is one which would have fascinated Stapledon, who often tried in his fiction to envisage the worlds perceived by beings relying on, for instance, taste or smell as their primary senses⁴. The idea of superhuman characteristics which emerge, otherwise undetected, from the pool of human heredity, would also have interested him, as would the attempts seen in The Cabinet of Light and George Mann’s The Severed Man (2004) to build ‘improved’ human beings through technological augmentation of the physical body.

Even the motif of time-travel is reflected in his work, in the interventions of future historians in the past and present in Last and First Men (1930) and Last Men in London (1932) – although Stapledon, unlike his literary mentor HG Wells, never wrote about time-travel occurring on a physical rather than mental plane.

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In writing for any shared-universe series, there is an onus on the author to fit in with the established history of the characters and their world. Although potentially Peculiar Lives has a special get-out clause in this respect, being ‘written’ by a narrator who is not necessarily in possession of all the facts, I did endeavour to remain consistent with what had gone before. The accounts of Honoré’s and Emily’s backgrounds in Chapters I.1 and II.3 are based on studying The Cabinet of Light, although some of the more esoteric interpretation (for instance the idea that the mysterious light from the TARDIS which plays such an enigmatic rôle in that novella, derives from Buddhist or Gnostic conceptions of enlightenment) is my own.

The name ‘Joan Barton’, which Emily gives to the false policeman in Chapter I.1, is that of a character in Echoes – one who is no longer around in 1950 to experience any fall-out from Emily’s deception. Chapter V.1 references The Severed Man, both in Emily’s troubled sleep and in her (unexpectedly Buffyesque) ability to incapacitate soldiers with her bare hands. Emily’s lack of a detectable past and present, as pointed out by Freia in Chapter III.2, was also established in The Severed Man.

One continuity point I was particularly interested in making was in restoring the disturbing term ‘flesh-worm’, used in The Cabinet of Light for the whole timeline of a person as perceived by Honoré, in preference to the less evocative ‘time-snake’ favoured more recently by the Time Hunter authors.

A few, very minor, changes were made to Peculiar Lives to tie in with the overall storyline and future direction of the range. Efforts were made to connect the ‘Hampdenshire Project’, as revealed by Gideon Beech, to the programme of the experimenters who created Abraxas (a character in The Cabinet of Light) and the earlier experimental subject seen in The Severed Man. A couple of passages (which for obvious reasons I can’t point to directly at this stage) relate to future developments in the range, and there may be plans to return to some of the original elements of Peculiar Lives in later Time Hunter novellas.

Time Hunter is also linked by bonds of co-canonicity with the Doctor Who universe, and there are a handful of nods to the series in Peculiar Lives⁵.

Firstly, in Chapter II.1 Olaf Stapledon’s 1948 address to the British Interplanetary Society (a group chaired at one point by Arthur C Clarke, which explored on an amateur basis the potential scientific routes towares interplanetary travel and colonisation) has become, in Erik Clevedon’s life, an address to the British Rocket Group First mentioned in the context of Doctor Who in the story Remembrance of the Daleks (1988), the British Rocket Group was actually the organisation to which Bernard Quatermass – the curmudgeonly scientist-hero of the BBC science fiction dramas The Quatermass Experiment (1953) Quatermass II (1955), and Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59), as well as the late ITV sequel called simply Quatermass (1979) – belonged.

Secondly, Lechasseur’s vision in Chapter II.3 of a future which includes a flying-saucer attack on London (while perfectly consistent with the war-ravaged future Europe of Last and First Men) could well be seen as a premonition of the Doctor Who story The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964).

Thirdly, there’s John Cleavis, who appears in Chapter III.3. Cleavis is a character introduced in Paul Magrs’s Doctor Who book Mad Dogs and Englishmen (2002), and later explored further in his mainstream novel To the Devil – A Diva! (2004). He appears in Peculiar Lives with Paul’s permission. Cleavis is a fictionalised CS Lewis: an Oxbridge don, a writer of children’s fantasies, a close friend of Reginald Tyler, Magrs’ fictionalised version of JRR Tolkien, and a covert member of an anti-Satanist ring (which the historical Lewis, so far as we know, was not).

As I’ve said elsewhere, the great joy of writing for shared universes lies in the collaborative element: developing the ideas of others, and knowing that one’s own ideas will in turn be taken in unexpected directions by others. The Time Hunter series has had some extremely talented authors working on it, and will surely continue to do so. This fuller context can only serve to enhance the value of individual contributions to the range.

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