The random witterings of Jonathan Morris, writer.

Thursday 28 June 2018

Future Days

A couple of brief plugs. The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine, has another of my Blogs of Doom. They said it wouldn’t last. Some of them demanded that it shouldn’t. But it’s still going, and some people even quite like it now. Hooray! There’s lots of other marvellous things in the magazine too, I imagine, I haven’t got my copy yet.


I do have a copy of the latest issue of The Essential Doctor Who about Adventures in the Future. For this I wrote the introductory article, giving a broad guide to the TV series’ depiction of the future. It’s a huge subject – over half of all Doctor Who stories are set in the future to an extent –  so I tried to focus on various themes; the depictions of progressive, egalitarian futures of the Troughton era, the depictions of repressive futures in the Pertwee era; depictions of the Earth’s environmental degradation; the future of humanity. Plus a couple of box outs on how the present day is ‘remembered’ in stories set in the future, and how, in the future, some things will remain the same. It was quite tricky to write – I had to hold almost the entirety of Doctor Who in my head at once, like balancing a tower of plates – with the onus very much on trying to say something new, deliver some new insights or perspectives rather than simply listing Every Story Which Does A Thing.

I’m most proud of the sentence:

Doctor Who even successfully predicted the threat of climate change due to deforestation, although, somewhat less successfully, it predicted that it would lead to a new ice age.


Anyway, copies of both magazines can be found in all good newsagents, and various supermarkets. Seek them out!

Next month will be fun, as three Big Finish things I worked on will be coming out! It never rains but it pours etc. So I shall rack my brains trying to think of fascinating things to say about them, as they ‘drop’.