DW: Love and Monsters

Love and Monsters is a book about Doctor Who, in that is it is a book about Doctor Who fandom, and how it interacts with the main program.

It starts mainly in the 1970s as fandom, in the form of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, was getting together. We see, though the eyes of author Miles Booy, a potted history of both fanzine creation, the proper magazine creation, and the production of Doctor Who, as it intersects with them. While not claiming to be a definitive work, we do get the rise of DWM, of how John Nathan-Turner changed things, how Target novels were the way Doctor Who was remembered, the launching of the in-between years books, and then the explosion (and some might say collapse) of New Doctor Who and the focus not on the fans but on the children.

It did take me a while to get into it. The essay nature of it doesn't lend to immediately jumping into it, although it definitely sounds better than The Unfolding Text (which I haven't read, and now probably never will). Oh, and endnotes... please, authors, make them footnotes, rather than have me flick through pages for them!

This is very much a British perspective, and while I know of the things he's talking about, it doesn't mean that much to me other than as an interesting historical document. (Yeah, I'm biased by certain New Zealand fanzines take on these events.)

Not bad reading, but I wouldn't say it's vital reading.

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