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By Matthew Kresal. In light of how Doctor Who spent the second half of the 1980s, it feels safe to say that Peter Davison’s tenure in the TARDIS was the last period of both popularity and stability that its 20th century incarnation enjoyed on television. Even so, the early 1980s left behind a number of unmade serials in its wake as script editor Eric Saward sought writers who could contribute to the series. Among the casualties was a storyline called Nightmare Country from a

By Charles E.P. Murphy Kindle cover via Amazon marketplace. An everyman who can handle himself but has naive romantic ideals goes looking for a missing love on the mean streets, in a dark and dangerous world he's not ready for, and learns the damsel he's looking for ain't much of a damsel. Among the sinister figures circling him, there's a man who seems to know too much and he's not telling us what. A standard noir, except the everyman is a Wehrmacht veteran of the Eastern Fr

By Matthew Kresal. Paperback and kindle cover, courtesy Amazon. Alternate history and space exploration feel made for each other. Missions and crews that might have been, firsts that could have gone another way, and the tantalizing idea that had events in the middle of the 20th century played out another way, humanity might very well have become a multi-planet species by now. Among those who’ve explored such possibilities is Mary Robinette Kowal in her award-winning Lady Astr

By Alexander Wallace. This article was originally published at Nerds of a Feather and the original article can be found there. Please check that blog for more like this. Cover courtesy Amazon Mainstream Western alternate history fiction has a tendency to view Imperial Japan as a sidekick to the Nazis. This is doubtless because most writers in that tradition are Western and as such are more culturally comfortable writing about Germans rather than Japanese (and it’s not like th

By Matthew Kresal. Imagine that the Silver Age DC comics played out alongside real world events of the 1950s. In his 2004-5 six-issue limited series DC: The New Frontier, writer and artists Darwyn Cooke asked readers to do just that. The result was a critical and commercial success, enough so that when Warner Brothers launched the DC Animated Original Movies line of home video releases in 2007, The New Frontier was selected as its second film. Released in early 2008 and with

By Alexander Wallace. This article was originally published at Nerds of a Feather and the original article can be found there. Please check that blog for more like this. The game cover, courtesy Wikipedia. There is a lot to be said about War Front: Turning Point, as I have discovered it after marching through its twenty-two missions. It is a real-time strategy game from 2007, made by the Hungarian studio Digital Reality. Its premise is a knockoff of Command and Conquer: Red A

By Matthew Kresal. When Survival aired in November and December 1989, a number of ideas and serials were in development for Doctor Who’s 27th season. Ones that would, ultimately, go unmade when the series entered what has instead become known to its fans as the Wilderness Era. One of which has earned a place in fandom as a potential regeneration story for Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor set in a former monastery turned spa with giant beetles crawling beneath it. It wasn’t

By Charles E.P. Murphy Art by Keith Burns Thanks to the efforts of the multinational Harrier Squadron, the mid-90s Third World War between the Asian Bloc and Western Federation has ended. Europe is attempting to rebuild. However, there’s another multinational team of air aces out there: Ghost Flight, a gang of pirates in mismatched aircraft who are preying on cargo ships bringing in much-needed aid for both sides! With ASBLOC accusing WESTFED of using the Ghosts as a proxy, H

By Matthew Kresal. Image courtesy Big Finish website. Ask fans of Classic Doctor Who whom their favorite incarnation of the Time Lord is and there’s a very good chance that you’re going to get one name more often than not: Tom Baker. With seven seasons and 41 serials, his remains the longest continuous tenure, taking in three producers with very different ideas about the series and Baker’s role within it. It’s no surprise that it also left behind a number of unproduced storyl

By Charles E.P. Murphy Second print & kindle In the early 1900s, a Zionist expedition came back from a fact-finding mission to British East Africa – and recommended taking up London on its offer to settle a Jewish homeland there instead of the Middle East. Generations later, there's a vast modern Jewish-majority nation between Lake Victoria and Mount Elgon, and there's also an unending conflict with the displaced Nandi people. Minor writer Lior Tirosh left for Berlin years ag

By Matthew Kresal. Region 2 Special Edition DVD, image courtesy Amazon. Parallel worlds. What ifs? Elseworlds. Whatever you (or insert comic book company name here) might like to call them, there’s no doubt that the idea of seeing alternative versions of our favorite superheroes has a place among fans. Something that the long-running DC Universe Animated Original Movies series took advantage of with a number of their adaptations and productions. Among them was Justice League:

By Matthew Kresal. CD cover, via Big Finish's website. The decision in February 1985 to put Doctor Who on hiatus had an immeasurable impact upon the series. The series, which had already begun to bleed viewers, would continue to do so until BBC executives felt they could end it in everything but name nearly five years later. The decision also arguably tarnished the image of Colin Baker as the Doctor, which was further harmed when the same executives pushed him out of the role

By Alexander Wallace. This article was originally published at Nerds of a Feather and the original article can be found there. Please check that blog for more like this. The English translation's cover, courtesy Amazon. One of the things that consistently provides me with a mild degree of amusement as an alternate history fan is how writers from other genres, and especially outside the speculative fiction scene, and especially outside of genre fiction, accidentally reinvent a

By Matthew Kresal. Deathworld cover, image courtesy Big Finish website For Doctor Who’s tenth season, the programme celebrated a decade on-screen with a serial featuring the three actors who had played the Time Lord. But while The Three Doctors as broadcast primarily focused on the Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton incarnations (ill health left William Hartnell in a supporting role) as they faced off against the vengeful Time Lord Omega, the tenth anniversary serial was almos

By Matthew Kresal. Introduced in 1961, the Fantastic Four changed the face of comics. The foursome offered a new take on the genre as a dysfunctional but loving family; their presence put Marvel Comics on the map and set up a still ongoing rivalry with DC Comics both on the page and, later, on cinema screens. They’ve been the stars not only of their own comic for much of the last sixty years but a brief lived radio series, animated television shows, and sometimes ill-fated fe

By Charles E.P. Murphy Cover of first edition, courtesy Amazon. In another world’s 1960s, Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, achieves his dream of draining the lake of Lough Neagh to boost employment and gain land. While it doesn’t quite work out, it does cause an archipelago of small islands to rise out of the water: the “Ark”, so named after it becomes a refuge for people fleeing the Troubles. The world sees it as a beacon of hope in dark times, a place whe

By Gary Oswald. Cover courtesy Amazon Meljean Brooks’ The Iron Duke , the first book in the popular Iron Seas series, follows Detective Inspector Mina Wentworth as she investigates a dead body found in the Isle of Dogs, on the property of the Duke of Anglesey, the titular Iron Duke. This is not however, the book you might think it is from that description. This is not a detective novel or a crime novel. Who killed the dead man (who turns out to be one of the Duke’s friends)

By Matthew Kresal. Copyright Big Finish Productions The making of a television series, like any creative endeavour, is not without its difficulties. Pitches that don’t quite work out and scripts that aren’t up to scratch are part of that experience. Doctor Who was no exception to that. Indeed, some eras being notable for their production woes and the latter part of Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the Time Lord was such a period with at least one serial being abandoned so late

By Matthew Kresal. The 2016 edition. In the 1950s, the Golden Age of Comics gave way to the Silver Age. The real world changed and, with attention brought to the comics as a result, some old characters retired or evolved while a new generation of heroes came to the fore, culminating at DC with the creation of the Justice League. Suppose for a moment that there was an alternate history where the Golden and Silver Age characters existed in and interacted with the real world of

By Matthew Kresal. Image courtesy Big Finish website. The 1980s. A time of tensions related to all thing nuclear. A fear of nuclear weapons and nuclear war dramatized so ably in TV dramas such as Threads and The Day After . Also present was a fear of nuclear power, stemming out of the previous decade and heightened by events such as Chernobyl and the secrecy surrounding the industry as a whole, something brought to life in the classic BBC thriller Edge of Darkness . For a tim