Although it would be good to be able to be automatically repost Atomic Razor posts to my LJ, in the meantime the workaround is to friend atomicrazorfeed.

Over the last year, I have been blogging heavily at Atomic Razor with 280 posts since 31 December 2013. There is an RSS feed. It would be good to have some way of automagically posting the Razor entries to my LJ without having to cut and paste. If anyone has ideas, please let me know. As a taster of what is on the Razor, below the cut is today's ( Read more... )

Who is Hurt!Doctor? The generally accepted theory is that he is the regeneration between the 8th and the 9th Doctors who was responsible for the destruction of Gallifrey in the Time War. There are three problems with that theory: (a) Nine and Ten spent a great deal of time mopping around and being all angsty about the terrible things the Doctor did ( Read more... )

I was in Liverpool on Friday and I had just walked past the Adelphi on my way back to Lime Street when I spotted what looked like a comics shop and "sci-fi" collectables shop and I thought "I don't remember that being there from the Liverpool Eastercons. Should I go in? I don't know when the next train back to Preston is. I might miss it. Oh, what ( Read more... )

The most exciting news of the week was the discovery, via the KurzweilAI.net daily newsletter, that Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae is finally available in English translation. This is a book that I have wanted to read for years. It sounds absolutely amazing, although whether it can possibly live up to my expectations is another matter. Still, I ( Read more... )

Terry's back to the portmanteau style of "The Keys of Marinus". I wonder whether people noticed or minded at the time. And here he gets to incorporate plenty of comic relief into the mix. Well. he did begin his writing career as a sketch writer for the likes of Tony Hancock. And I wonder  what people made of that. The Daleks were at the height of ( Read more... )

"The Space Museum" is arguably the first ordinary Doctor Who story: the first sf four-parter. Now you might say that "Planet of Giants" was originally supposed to be a four-parter and, indeed, will be again soon after a fashion. But "Planet of Giants" is technically a sideways story, whereas "The Space Museum" is a futuristic adventure of the kind ( Read more... )

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of Grandfather of Assassins. I recall from my AD&D days that the title of fifteenth level assassin was Grandfather and discovering from the Encyclopaedia Britannica that the Grandfather of Assassins was another title for the Old Man of the Mountain, the ruler of the fortress of Alamut and the head ( Read more... )

There are only two missing episodes from Season Two (it is the shortest season of early Who at 39 episodes, but not really that much shorter than the other Hartnell/Troughton seasons), and if there were to be two missing episodes from this season, we would rather they were from "The Space Museum" or "The Chase". "The Crusade" is a very solid ( Read more... )

"The Sensorites" is not very good. In fact - whisper it quietly - it is probably worse than "The Keys of Marinus". At least, that had a portmanteau format and, if you didn't like one setting there, there would be another along in a minute. Here we get six episodes in which almost nothing seems to happen, certainly nothing of any real interest. The ( Read more... )