O Canada

Happy Canada Day!

Representation in Class

Patrick Ness reveals an LGBTQ main character to feature in Class.

Our lives may depend on a Dalek!

Bacteria on the Dalek at Broadcasting House could be vital to future medicines.

If that doesn’t give you an adventure hook about capturing a Dalek for science...

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

A Google Doodle for the 180th birthday of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first Englishwoman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain, co-founder of the London School of Medicine, mayor of Aldeburgh.

Rok Of The Reds

And on the subject of Doctor Who comics, the legendary John Wagner and Alan Grant are back, writing an alien invasion threatening a lower-rung British football club in Rok Of The Reds for BHP.

Ninth Doctor issue 1 Writer's Commentary

More teases than reveals in Cavan Scott’s commentary, encouraging reading.

Tutankhamun's Dagger From The Stars

Tutankhamun was buried with a dagger forged from meteor iron, according to a new scientific analysis. Okay, not really alien tech, but...

Lotte Reiniger

A grand Google Doodle today for the... 117th birthday of Lotte Reiniger, pioneer of silhouette animation going back to the silent film era and on for over sixty years.

The silent era was the Gold Rush of filmmaking with all kinds of people trying all kinds of ideas - she did her first animation when Paul Wegener found he could not rats to play their part in The Pied Piper Of Hamelin, and was able to make her first feature film because a friend had bought a lot of film stock during the Weimar hyperinflation panic.

There has to be a story there... perhaps presented as a shadow play...

A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Russell T Davies adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream contained quite a few other familiar names from modern Who, like Murray Gold providing the music and Millennium Effects at work as well.

Don’t be looking for a definitive reading of the text here. The Hollow Crown this is not.

Theseus is presented as juuuuust a bit Fascist in style (although the jacket also suggests Mountie) which earns him one of the biggest rewrites. Others include rather less suicide talk from Hermia and Helena, which is nice. The mix of modern, WWII and medieval in Athens could provide inspiration for something Whovian - the guards are a bit Dredd but also a bit Robomen...

The Fairies led by Maxine Peake and Nonso Anonzie have gone full Changeling: The Dreaming. Bottom is still recognisably Matt Lucas, but you can’t have everything. ;)

Bernard Cribbins!

DWM 500

Issue 500 of Doctor Who Magazine (including the original Weekly title in the numbering, with a cover referring back to it) is on shelves now, running to 116 pages with interviews with Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi and Tom Baker, sealed in a card envelope with a magazine about its history running to another 116 pages, a great big poster, an Iron Legion art card, and a set of stickers featuring DWM logos, the TARDIS, the Vworp! Vworp! sound effect, monsters, and, er, the long discontinued sweets advertising character from the back page of issue 1, and Paul Cornell.

The comic strip is a celebration of the run (and quite right too!) with art from Dave Gibbons onwards and naturally centred on the long-suffering town of Stockbridge and poor old Maxwell Edison, among many many others.

Suzanne Lenglen

Suzanne Lenglen, whose 117th birthday (of course) is marked today by a Google Doodle, changed women’s tennis with her skill and her statements on its rules and attitudes, and the place of women in sport and society as well.

The Independent says that in 1914, at age 15, “she won the World Hard Court Championships, making her the youngest winner of any major tennis championship – a title which she still holds.”

She was an early female sports star, her style pushed the flapper look into the mainstream and she encouraged women to follow her example in active pursuits.

An adventure could feature her expertise - aliens seeking to challenge humanity’s champions, perhaps, or needing to find someone who can strike a target just so to deactivate a killer space automaton threatening Paris - or her effect on society, with someone wanting to change it.

Scientists invent single-beam acoustic levitation device

Or... sonic screwdriver.

The Traveller and Sophie versus the mutants

Stumbled across this quite by accident - paper horror miniatures featuring totally not the War Doctor and Ace battling an outbreak of mutant zombies.

Paul Cornell to write the Third Doctor for Titan Comics

Five rounds rapid! With art by Christopher Jones, whose work I am less familiar with, and starting with Jo and U.N.I.T.

Timeless

Timeless looks like it could be pretty interesting - essentially a modern-day Time Police show so it gets the Stargate small cast thrown into SF adventures every week, in a prototype time machine that works most of the time...

“The future is not on your side!”

The trailer presumably comes from the pilot. The show could be heavily serialised, or more “year of the week” in style. We’ll see.

Fingers crossed for dinosaurs, if not Daleks.