TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy

TARDIS Eruditorum #7

by Elizabeth Sandifer

In this seventh volume of essays adapted from the acclaimed blog TARDIS Eruditorum you'll find a critical history of the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who. TARDIS Eruditorum tells the ongoing story of Doctor Who from its beginnings in the 1960s to the present day, pushing beyond received wisdom and fan dogma to understand the story not just as the story of a geeky sci-fi show but as the story of an entire tradition of mystical, avant-garde, and politically radical British culture. It treats Doctor Who as a show that is really about everything that ever happened, and everything that ever will. This volume focuses on the end of the classic series and the first part of the so-called Wilderness Years, looking at its connections with cyberpunk, Norse mythology, and American cult TV. The book contains a mixture of revised blog posts and a bevy of brand new essays exclusive to this collected edition, including a look at the strange continuity of the Virgin New Adventures, essays on the earliest Doctor Who work by Steven Moffat, Russell T Davies, and Mark Gatiss, along with an interview with legendary Doctor Who novelist Kate Orman.

Plus you'll learn:
*What happens when you make a panto based on a J.G. Ballard novel
*Whether Ace is queer
*When the Time War happened

Genres: Doctor Who, Nonfiction

600 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2020

About the author

Note: This author previously published under the name Philip Sandifer.

Reviews

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of critical reviews and essays focusing on the Sylvester McCoy era of 'Doctor Who'.

Sandifer's writing has always been insightful and she looks intently at the problems and triumphs of the three years of television and seven years of novels which developed the series.

[Katherine Sas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes me want to read all the Virgin New Adventures (or at least the good-sounding ones).

[Larou]

This is somewhat different from previous books in the series in that only roughly a quarter of the volume deals with Doctor Who on TV; the remaining three quarters concern themselves with the Virgin line of New Adventures books which Sandifer treats as regular continuation of the show. Which means that she does her usual spiel of first embedding the novel she i writing about in its context of pup cultural and material history before proceeding to analyse the book itself and to place it in the context of Doctor Who.

Seeing how the TV show got cancelled in 1989 it makes sense to move from TV episodes to novels, all the more so since those were published at regular intervals and did carry the torch of Doctor Who through what has come to be known as the wilderness years. Sandifer makes a smooth transition from visual to literary medium as the subject of her essays, and throughout the whole book makes a convincing case that the Virgin series of novels laid a lot of the groundwork for the shape the show was to take at its eventual resuscitation on TV in 2005.

This book keeps up the high standard of writing as well as the high densitiy of insights offered that one is accustomed to from Sandifer's writing. Since I have not ever read any Doctor Who novel at all (and am unlikely to, considering the extraorbitant prices they charge for the ebooks), for most essays in this volume of TARDIS Eruditorium I lack knowledge of the source they relate to, which makes for a somewhat disconnected and sort of flat reading experience. I hasten to add, and really want to emphasise, that this is through no fault of the author and that the volume is a quite enjoyable read that does an excellent job of giving a reasoned overview of the pre-TV movie wilderness years. In short, TARDIS Eruditorium continues to be an excellent series (and by the time I am writing this, I am already quite far advanced in volume 8 and poised to start on the new series, both the TV shows and Sandifer's essays).

[Jamieson · Rating 5 out of 5]

TARDIS Eruditorum started out as blog before evolving into a book series. The basic idea is that we get a walking tour through time looking at how Doctor Who affected the world around it and how the world around it affected Doctor Who. This entry covers the late 1980s and most of the 1990s focusing on the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy). Because this is the Seventh Doctor, we get the last three seasons of the TV series and then a decent chunk of the Virgin New Adventures novels.

Most entries start with the music charts before going onto world events and then the Doctor Who serial or book in question. These tend to be a mix of history, politics and philosophy. Mixed in and around the main entries are essays about other pop-culture of the day (such as Knights of God, Casualty, Sandman and the X-Files) or about stories set in the era that were written much later (a few BBC novels and Big Finish). Very readable, these books just fly by. Definitely worth a look if you're into history, politics or philosophy, and happen to be a Doctor Who fan with a decent grasp of at the TV stories.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find that Elizabeth Sandifer has become too radical for me these days & I don't rate her complete dismissal of the 13th Doctor's era, but in terms of TARDIS Eruditorum and the McCoy era we're still on the same page. In this case, lots and lots of pages of excellent, thought-provoking, occasionally snarky analysis. I've bene waiting to binge on this for months, and I wasn't disappointed. Roll on volume eight.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book but it was less interesting to me because most of it was about the New Adventures books.

[Troy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to read someone crawling up their own ass about Doctor Who in an enjoyable and illuminating way, this is the book for you.

[Mark Archer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much like the authors, this is the era that made me a lifelong Doctor Who fan, and with a few exceptions, I can't fault her views on the era!

[Alex Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may not agree with every suggestion, but there are loads of interesting essays here on a particularly compelling era for the show, when it staggered towards cancellation and managed to finish on a high note before a series of novels carried on for fans and acted as a cauldron of ideas. Those ideas helped shape the future of the show, even if only fragments of these ideas ever made it to the screen (the Virgin New Adventures books). It's an era I missed as I got into the novels after the BBC declared an interest again and took the publishing rights back, so it's somewhat less interesting to me than essays on TV stories (or the later BBC-published novels) but as always with Sandifer, it's an extraordinary and fascinating overview. There's an interview with Kate Orman who seems remarkably modest, but is certainly an author I admire based on later novels like The Year of Intelligent Tigers.