Atlas of Imagined Places

Charting
The Uncharted

Atlas of Imagined Places -
From Liliput to Gotham City
by Matt Brown and Rhys B. Davies
Illustrated by Mike Hall
Batsford ISBN:  9781849946414

Ever wondered exactly where the island from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is, or just where it is in proximity to the passage to the centre of the Earth? How about the location of the wrecked stealth ship from Tomorrow Never Dies and how close that is to Tin Min from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum?

Look no further then because the excellent coffee table book Atlas Of Imagined Places - From Liliput To Gotham City, written by Matt Brown and Rhys B. Davies, with fantastic illustrations by Mike Hall, will tell you all this and more. The book pretty much does what it says on the tin and presents the reader with a selection of 18 sets of maps presented as an atlas, which detail literally thousands of fictitious places which the authors, quite cleverly in some instances, have managed to pin point as an area in the real world.

The book starts off with a section which details just what kinds of places you wont find, by breaking things down into a number different fictional place categories, many of which are included but some of which are not. These range from fictional places (not used in the book because they don’t occur in correlation with our world), fictional places on Earth and fictional surrogates etc. The chapter titles are labelled thusly: 1. The USA - Altered States, 2. 2. Canada and The Arctic - Green Gables and Gold Nuggets, 3. Central America and the Caribbean - The Old New World, 4. South America - Cities of Gold and Banana Republics, 5. Western Europe - The Old Countries, 6. Eastern Europe - Science and Sorcery, Shtetls and Soviets, 7. The Nordic Countries - Here Be Dragons (and Trolls), 8. UK and Ireland - Fake Britain and Sham Rock, 9. The Middle East and Central Asia - Beyond The Silk Road, 10. South Asia - From Peshawar to the Peninsula, 11. Africa - Things Come Together, 12. Southeast Asia - Wilds, Waves, Worlds and Wars, 13. Japan - The Land Of The Rising Gundam, 14. China and North-East Asia - Journey To The East, 15. Australia and New Zealand - The Original Land Of Oz, 16. Antarctica - The Nightmare Continent, 17. The Pacific Ocean - Island Hopping and 18. The Atlantic Ocean - Lost Worlds Of The Western Sea.

Each chapter is broken down with a two to four page introduction, written like a travelogue but with a lot of in-jokes for various fictional locations (some of which I got and, due to the sheer range of literary invention looked at for this tome, some of which I didn’t). This is followed by the map itself over another double page spread and then another section which gives another couple of pages talking about a number of the places you will find on that particular map and, in some cases, how hard to pin down they were and what process led to the authors identifying them where they have. So lots of places like Westworld, Springfield (The Simpsons version), Bedrock, Asterix’s village and Blofeld’s volcano retreat from You Only Live Twice are all flagged but, other things you will need to scour the maps for on your own or check out in the vast index in the second half of the book to find them in situ. For instance, I had to look up places like Midwich (from The Midwich Cuckoos), Antonio Bay (from The Fog) and Tilling (from E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books) myself to cross reference them on the maps.

But the book is a sheer delight. The UK (where I’m from), for example, has a wealth of places including Summerisle (from The Wicker Man), The Village (from the prisoner), Brigadoon and Walmington-On-Sea (from Dad’s Army). The remit is fantastic and takes on not just books and movies but also TV, video games and even real life hoaxes. I now know where the Antarctic base from John Carpenter’s The Thing is in proximity to the Snowcap Tracking Station where the Cybermen were up to no good in the last of William Hartnell’s Doctor Who stories, The Tenth Planet, for example. I also know how far Castle Frankenstein is from Castle Wolfenstein and even how far the mountain that gave birth to The Monkey King is from the Severnaya Satellite control in Goldeneye. Not to mention the Swiss Spaghetti Farm from the famous, 1950s Panorama April Fools Day broadcast.

Now, as the writers admit themselves, there’s always going to be some stuff which seems like it’s missing in action for some people and I do have one big problem with one of the locations in the maps. That being the inclusion of Superman’s Fortress Of Solitude. All well and good but, there’s no mention of Doc Savage’s similar Fortress Of Solitude in the tome and, frankly, this is a big exclusion because it was, along with a fair few things about ‘Clark’ Savage Jr’s adventures, what the version in Superman was obviously based on (stolen from)... Superman debuted in 1938 and Doc made his debut in 1933. It’s a bit of an oversight in my opinion but, hey ho, can’t have everything, I guess.

Ultimately, though, I really enjoyed having a peruse through the various locations of the Atlas of Imagined Places - From Liliput to Gotham City and it was a real treat. I especially liked that the last map in the series shows the location of Pepperland, from the Yellow Submarine movie... not to mention the various seas glimpsed on that particular fictional adventure. It’s all good stuff.

Doctor Who - The Tenth Planet

I Don’t Like Mondas

Doctor Who - The Tenth Planet
UK Airdate 8th - 29th October 1966
BBC Region 2

The Tenth Planet is one of those Doctor Who stories I’d not seen before (I started consciously watching the show, at the age of three, from Jon Pertwee’s first episodes in 1971) but it’s been something I’ve wanted to get around to seeing for a while. Unfortunately, the all important last episode of this story has been missing for quite some time and it’s a shame because it contains the sequence (which the BBC still have, albeit in truncated form) that is one of the reasons why this episode is still so sought after and near the top of everyone’s “missing presumed wiped” wanted list.

I’m talking, of course, about the regeneration sequence at the end of episode four. This story is the very last of Hartnell’s stories as The First Doctor in his original run, although he did briefly reprise the role for the 1973 tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors. When Hartnell was just too ill to be allowed to continue in the role, the people behind the show found a way to keep their extremely popular series running with a change of cast... thus the first regeneration scene, to allow the writers to change actor, and it was a bit of a clever idea for its time. The Doctor could be replaced any number of times and have a brand new personality to go with the new face and outfit each regeneration. So this really is a story which is a piece of television history.

The other reason I wanted to see it is because it’s the very first story in the show to feature The Doctor’s second best known enemy, the Cybermen. I’ve been seeing pictures of the original costume designs for years, which are a lot clunkier and primitive, and always thought they had a charm above and beyond the later designs of them (although the ones used for the Patrick Troughton story Tomb Of The Cybermen are also astonishingly good). Now that I’ve finally seen them in the flesh, so to speak, and heard the almost sing song voices and witnessed the unearthly, uneasy visual of them opening their mouths to speak and then their lips not moving as they talk, I have to say that it’s pretty much my favourite Cyberman design of all time.

The story in this one is pretty simplistic and features the return to our solar system of the Cybermen’s home world Mondas, the Tenth Planet of the title. Here they plan to drain the Earth of all its energy, leaving it a dead husk of a world, and take all of the humans back to Mondas, to delete their emotions and convert them into Cybermen. It’s up to the group of military people at the South Pole, in the far future year of... um... 1986... to stop them, with a little help from The Doctor and his two travelling companions at this point in time, Ben and Polly.

And when I say, a “little” help from The Doctor, I really mean it. Hartnell is hardly in this story. He’s around for the first two episodes but, for the most part, just stands on the sidelines of the action and watches things develop, offering the odd bit of advice or two. By the time the third episode has come around, Hartnell was too ill to work for a while and so a body double collapses to the floor in a weakened state and he’s out of it for the entire episode. Sadly, when Hartnell does have a little more to do, in episode four, it’s the one episode that hasn’t survived and we are left with a quite nicely animated episode, pitched as visuals against the original sound recordings. Which is unfortunate but, it’s the best we can get until a miracle unearthing of the lost episode in future years, perhaps.

I’d have to say that, The Doctor has more to do in the old Target novelisation, in which the various things he had to do which were hastily reassigned to other actors for Episode 3, are still in tact in the book. It’s not the best Doctor Who story I’ve seen, I have to say, but it was completely worth it for the chance to see, and hear, the original Cybermen and to finally watch one of the most iconic serials in the show’s, to date, 51 year old history (it will be 52 years in November 2015). If you want to get a taste of William Hartnell in the role of The First Doctor then, sad to say it, but this probably isn’t the one to watch. However, any fan of Doctor Who would probably want to see this because of its place in the history of the show and due to it being the genesis of the Cybermen. I have to say, it’s whet my appetite for seeing more of the Hartnell stories, so I will hopefully be pursuing a few more of those on this blog, over the next couple of years (along with some more, incomplete Troughton stories). The Tenth Planet is probably not one for the casual viewer but to genuine fans of the show it’s something of a “must see”.  So if you count yourself a such... maybe give it a go sometime.

Doctor Who - Nightmare In Silver

High Cyber Diet

Doctor Who - Nightmare In Silver
Airdate: 11th May 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: Yeah... minor spoilers, I guess.

You know, I really used to like the cybermen as a nipper, growing up with Jon Pertwee as The Doctor. That’s possibly because they were never on TV at that point, of course. Jon Pertwee didn’t met up with them until he officially came back to the role one last time in the anniversary story The Five Doctors. But I knew about them, of course. Because quite apart from Pertwee standing against one of them on the wraparound cover shoot for the Doctor Who tenth anniversary magazine (which I still have) all the kids my age, or any who were of any interest at any rate, would read the Target novelisations of the older stories and, as you may or may not know, the cybermen were pretty much running rampant through Patrick Troughton’s rein on the show, hot on the heels of the really sinister looking versions used in their first outing, the final William Hartnell story The Tenth Planet. So we all knew who they were and we all wanted to see them in action.

So it was pretty cool, actually, when Tom Baker’s incarnation of The Doctor met them in Revenge Of The Cybermen... and then they didn’t come back again for a while. Tom Baker never met them again but when Peter Davison came on board they returned in a big way in the story Earthshock, which truly brought the scariness of the cybermen back in a marching legion of terror... very sinister first episode if I recall and, pre-internet, nobody really had a clue they would be back until the big reveal at the end of the first episode. Not only that, but they killed off The Doctor’s companion Adric, who sacrificed himself to save the planet Earth (and who destroyed all the dinosaurs in the process if I remember correctly). This was a big event and I remember the end credits of that episode being silent (do I remember correctly?) and focussing on the decimated remains of Adric’s gold rimmed badge for mathematical excellence, which he’d used to take out one of the cybermen with... being that they could be killed by the introduction of gold into their system.

But after that, things started to get a bit silly.

The BBC, in much the same way as they have been behaving over the last 6 or 7 years with the show, didn’t really want to waste those new costumes... so the cybermen started coming back again just a little more frequently until, by the time we got up to Sylvester McCoy’s stint on the show, they really were nothing more special than “monster of the week” and were, for all intents and purposes... really boring.

When the show came back under the Russel T. Davies era, the programme had been off the airwaves long enough to once more generate big interest at the return of the cybermen and, although the new design was somewhat juvenile (with a big C across the front) there was enough drama in the story to make their welcome return a success. When they went up against the daleks at the end of David Tennant’s first season, all the fans were into it because, well, ever since the early days of their first appearances on the show in the 60s, people had been wondering who would win a fight between a dalek and a cyberman.

But then the rot set in again. Not only did the cybermen keep coming back repeatedly to the show, but they were still cursed with that blasted C on the front of their armour. Honestly, I’ll never know why the BBC don’t learn about why it’s not a good idea to keep recycling the same costumes in close proximity. The Doctor travels in time as well as space... it’s completely impractical he’d keep meeting the same model of cybermen in different times just because the BBC don’t want to pay out for a new costume design, or rebuild any of the, much cooler, older ones for that matter.

But never mind all that. Neil Gaiman, one of modern fantasy’s great writers (his spin off from his own The Sandman comics, Death: The High Cost Of Living is one of the greats in modern comic book fiction) and who had a very successful episode of the show last series with The Doctor’s Wife (reviewed here) was promising to make the cybermen scary again and, to boot, the BBC were upgrading the design a little. So there was maybe a glimmer of hope there after all.

So was this episode of the show really a Nightmare In Silver or was it more of a bad dream in platinum?

Well I’m sorry to have to report, since I do admire this writer greatly, that for me it really wasn’t a show which was in any way scary or made me feel threatened by the menace that the cybermen should be seen as. It was definitely one of the less interesting stories of the second half of “series seven” although, that being said, it was still a damn sight better than the majority of episodes in the first half.

But, it certainly wasn’t a tragedy either. It was still entertaining and there were definitely some nice things going on in there. When the cybermen started moving very fast, almost like they were teleporting, that was a good sign and I was hoping for more in that vein but, alas, this advantage wasn’t pressed against the army defending the planet and ultimately, uneasy moments were few and far between.

But, like I said, there were some nice things. The Doctor’s ongoing battle of wits with the cyber version of himself in his head was kinda cool and it was a way in to show us that there was a memory block in his head when it comes to new companion Clara. There was also a reference, with Cyber Planner version of himself calling himself Mr. Clever, to the phrase that Clara’s various “apparitions” keep repeating... Run You Clever Boy And Remember... the initials of which make up the word CYBARR... except I don’t believe that "almost had me conclusion" for a minute. Moffat knew we’d all figure that out last year so I’m just assuming the lameness of that particular anagram is dead wrong. I hope.

There were some particularly nice scenes with Clara’s personality really coming to the fore (I think she may be River or The Doctor or possibly Rani or The Master, by the way) and it was really good to see the chemistry between her and Matt Smith working quite well. Also, there was a blink and you’ll miss it alignment of hordes of cybermen who make up the shape of an inverted question mark, just like the inverted question mark that hangs around Clara’s neck... so that was kinda cool. As was the introduction of the new upgrade of the old cybermats... namely the cybermites.

Add to this a very nice turn by Warwick Davis as someone who turns out to be a quite important character and some excellent scoring by Murray Gold, once again using variations of the cyberman theme he composed for their first appearance against David Tennant, plus a few nice appearances of the Eleventh Doctor sub theme, and it made for an okay, entertaining, close but no cigar episode of the show, which is fine. That’s my opinion anyway and it’s hugely disappointing that I didn’t like an episode penned by Neil Gaiman all that much.

And, of course, next week we have the final episode of the current series, which everyone is hoping will be the big reveal. Not of The Doctor’s name, of course. Nobody wants to know that and, frankly, I really hope they don’t reveal it. But hopefully something will come to some kind of conclusion with the current show's dangling story threads. This might, as it happens, even be the last time we see either of Alex Kingston or Jenna Louise Coleman in the programme. I hope not but there’s always that chance. I know lots of people, myself included, are hoping that the return of The Great Intelligence will somehow bring The Doctor’s old foe The Yeti out of hybernation... but something tells me that may not happen, I’m afraid.

Oh well. I’ll be trying to make it through to next weeks episode then... keeping myself alive for the sake of a TV show is as good a way of carrying on as any other I would guess. Hopefully I’ll see some of you here after for a major autopsy... if all things go well.