Books: Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde (2024)

 “Welcome to Chromatacia, where the societal hierarchy is strictly regulated by one's limited color perception. Civilization has been rebuilt after an unspoken “Something that Happened” five hundred years ago. Society is now color vision-segregated, professions, marriages, and leisure activities all dictated by an individual’s visual ability, and everything run by the shadowy National Color in far-off Emerald City. Out on the fringes of Red Sector West, twenty-year-old Eddie Russett is being bullied into an arranged marriage with the powerful DeMauve family, purples who hope to redden up their progeny’s color-viewing potential with Eddie’s gene stock. Their obnoxious daughter Violet is confident the marriage won’t hamper her style for too long because Eddie is about to go on trial for a murder he didn’t commit, and he’s pretty sure to be sent on a one-way trip to the Green Room for execution by soporific color exposure. Meanwhile, Eddie is engaged in an illegal relationship with his co-defendant, a Green, the charismatic, unpredictable, and occasionally deadly Jane Grey. Time is running out for Eddie and Jane to figure out how to save themselves. Negotiating the narrow boundaries of the Rules within their society, they search for a loophole—some truth of their world that has been hidden from its hyper-policed citizens.”

For the most part, Red Side Story is worth the 15 year gap between this book and Shades of Grey. And much like Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series (which will have an eighth and final novel, Dark Reading Matter, out in 2025), he brings forth similar ideas, but approaches the concept of a totalitarian future society from the same very different, yet skewed perspective. The good part of Red Side Story is we get some answers from the first book, but we still don’t get a clear understanding what the people of Collective are. They act and respond in a very human sort of way, but they also act like automatons much of the time, especially the Yellows who love rules – or highly functioning androids who believe they’re real. We get a better idea that the four sectors of the Chromatacia are some sort game board, I guess (?), or some sort of highly developed physiological computer/hologram program to test people’s reaction to a authoritarian the social order (The Book of Harmony and the tyrannical following of rules, and preventing free-thinking).

While those will be obviously answered in a third book, I was bothered by a few deus ex machine aspects that let them get away from certain death by the last minute intervention from other people. There were at least three very obvious parts, including the trip to Crimsololia and the timely arrival of Hanson (Angel-Creator?) who saves Eddie and Jane from Yellows who were assigned to murder them, drops a cache of Very Important Plot Points, then because he believes he’s killed them, leaves before Jane’s magic key saves them - so no harm no fowl. The second when the escape their doom from the crime of killing the Courtland from the first book, as well as the Yellows, by another timely arrival, and even their escape from Vermillion was too easy.

The Tin Men, along with the Apocryphal Man (named Baxter’s), are other helpful plot devices that make you realize that neither Eddie nor Jane are really solving any mystery of who and what they are –it’s being fed to them one spoonful at a time.

Still, Fforde’s deadpan and satirical humor shines through. His absurd worlds will remind many of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and Monty Python, which plays on the comedy of manners that British still think, is cool.

The set-up for book three is here, as well, but I found the ending a bit disappointing. I sense the plot is leaning towards a more formulaic ending rather than some Big Revelation. But we’ll have to wait see –just, I hope, not another fifteen years!

Books: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (2009)

 

“Hundreds of years in the future, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of color. Eddie Russett is an above-average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane - a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed. For Eddie, it is love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey.”

First released in the UK in 2009 (published in the US in 2010 and I read it in 2011), Shades of Grey was supposed to be the beginning of a new dystopian trilogy situated in Chromatocia, a world ruled by the Colortocracy where color perception has faded and social hierarchy is determined by what colors you can see. 

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. After writing for nearly decade plus with little time off, author Jasper Fforde schedule a tiny break to recharge his batteries. So after the seventh book in his Thursday Next was released in 2012, and with work already completed on his YA series The Last Dragonslayer: The Eye of Zoltar, which would be released in 2014, he began his leisure activity (mostly photography). But things grew quiet in his world. In his Acknowledgments for his 2018 novel Early Riser, he talks about what delayed this books release. He calls it his “creative hiatus of 2014-2016,” or in plainer language, writer’s block. And thus Early Riser, not a the second Shades of Grey novel, or a Thursday Next, or the fourth novel in The Last Dragonslayer series (which was only supposed to be three books) became his first adult novel to be released in 6 years. As he struggled out the pit, he was finally able to get back work but he’s playing catch up, now.

In my original review in 2011, I found the first half of the book slow going, which is a trademark of many fantasy writers. It does take Fforde a long time to set up his world, slowly revealing how the different colors people see influences their standing in society and the way the government functions as a whole –so at times it becomes a largely a plotless tome of world building, this first half. My opinion has not changed too much, but I did find myself more involved the second time around, which then made me wonder what exactly, is going on in this odd world.

The plot finally does kick in, and provides a satisfying setup for the two sequels. Sadly, no one, let alone Fforde, thought it would take 15 years to get book two. Nevertheless, one hopes that Red Side Story, coming in May of 2024, will go smoother with all the heavy lifting done in this book. We know the third book will not be out next year, as the eighth novel in the Thursday Next series (the last one was 2011) is due in 2025.

For us American’s not familiar with the Western half of the UK, details reveal that East Carmine is located in Wales (the A470 road is mentioned), and the description of the town close to the lower of a series of five dams suggests it is Rhayader, at the foot of the Elan Valley. Nearby Rusty Hill was once Builth Wells. The town of Vermillion used to be Hereford. The town of High Saffron is on the coast beyond the dams, which suggests Aberystwyth.

So, at its base elements, Shades of Grey is just a clever, very elaborate social and political satire –a sub-genre of comedy/humor that British have done so well for decades with. It’s also poking fun at the whole dystopian genre. It is whimsical, without being to over the top and its verbal wordplay will remind many of Douglas Adams and Monty Python.

I do believe Fforde should be more popular here in the States than he currently is, but I also understand that satire –be it political, social, or dystopian - is not everyone’s cup of tea. But he really is a very witty man with an ingenious, sharp and adroit talent for finding a joke in the oddest of places.  

Doctor Who: Season 6B: Fan Theory that Could Work?

 

With the advent of home video and repeat airings in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, fans who were watching Doctor Who started to notice a few things between the end of The War Games –the last serial featuring The Second Doctor- and beginning of Spearhead from Space (1970) - the first serial featuring The Third Doctor. Fans pointed out several inconsistencies with this new Doctor, such as when did acquire a ring, a bracelet, and a TARDIS homing watch when he makes his first appearance, falling out of the TARDIS, if events happened the way it did –that there was no time between Patrick Troughton’s final appearance and first appearance of Jon Pertwee?

 

Back in 1969, in the final episode of the epic 10-part Classic Doctor Who serial, The War Games, we see the Second Doctor (Patrick Toughton) go through a “forced” regeneration after being found guilty by his fellow Time Lords for breaking their cardinal rules of time travel - interference in the natural order of the universe, planets, and its people. Time Lords sentenced him to exile on Earth in the 20th Century, and as viewer saw in the closing seconds of that finale was an image of

the Second Doctor, him twirling around the cosmic maelstrom on his way to Earth to begin his exile.  

 

It’s worth noting a few things were happening at this point in the series' history. First, the show was now going from black and white to full blown color season; the episode output would be cut nearly in half, from around forty episodes a year to just twenty-six. Also, for first time since the series debuted, there would be a close to a six-month gap between seasons. How would this gap affect Polystyle Publications, the a company who was producing the weekly comic strips of adventures featuring the Doctor since it started? It was easy with the one-week gap between the First and Second Doctor, but with nearly 24 weeks with no Doctor Who, not knowing how season seven was going to go, what would the fill this space with?

 

They quickly decided to soldier on and created (non-conically, but this changes a bit later) a series of adventures featuring the Second Doctor. The interesting bit, and seemly long since forgotten, are these adventures would take place not before The War Games, but after. In these comics, the Doctor has indeed been exiled to Earth, but is awaiting his Time Lord-imposed regeneration. For a time, the comic portrays the Second Doctor living the high life as a celebrity based in London’s swanky Carlton Grange Hotel. He travels the Earth, responding to calls received via the Carlton Grange switchboard, with nary a UNIT soldier in sight.

 

In 1995 came The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping. This non-fiction book looked at the Doctor’s adventures and tried to make sense of the continuity errors that kept cropping up, including the Third Doctor’s arrival, and these mid-1960’s weekly comic strips.

 

What came out of it was Season 6B.

 

The Season 6B idea is rather than undergoing the “forced” regeneration shown starting at the end of The War Games, the Second Doctor was recruited to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency, a clandestine Time Lord organization first shown to exist in the Fourth Doctor serial, The Deadly Assassin, some seven years after The War Games. During this time, the Second Doctor regained Jamie and Victoria as companions, acquired a Stattenheim remote control device to summon his TARDIS and undertook an unknown number of missions, including three serials Troughton returned for years later. Eventually, the Doctor's association with the CIA ended for reasons not known, though in a comic entry entitled The Nightwalkers, it shows the Doctor being dragged into the TARDIS by animated scarecrows, allowing his and his full The War Games sentence to be executed at the beginning of Spearhead from Space.

 

But Pandora’s Box was opened, and the authors also asked these:

 

 

How, in The Five Doctors, does the Second Doctor know that the Time Lords had erased the memories of Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot?

Why do the Second Doctor and Jamie appear older in The Two Doctors?

How does Jamie know about the Time Lords in The Two Doctors unless The Two Doctors comes after The War Games for him?

Why is the Second Doctor working, apparently willingly, for the Time Lords in both The Three Doctors and The Two Doctors?

Why does the Second Doctor possess a TARDIS recall device of a type the Sixth Doctor does not have in The Two Doctors?

In The Two Doctors, why is the Second Doctor's TARDIS control room of an obviously different design to that which he used prior to his trial?

Possibly, related to the above: How can the Second Doctor be confident of his ability to retrieve Victoria after The Two Doctors when he could never control the TARDIS during his own era?

Why is the Doctor's recorder in the second console room in The Masque of Mandragora?

 

Still, for a long time, The Discontinuity Guide's notion of the post-War Games Second Doctor working for the CIA would remain a purely theoretical idea –it was just a cute and clever way to explain the discontinuity on such a long-running show.

However, Terrance Dicks, one of the great architects of Doctor Who in the 1970s (that also included Barry Letts, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe), took the idea of Season 6B and put theory into action decades later. Dicks' was prolific author, penning dozens of adaptations of Classic Doctor Who serials, writing many, many of those serials, and then took on a few original novels that were released in the 1990s. Here the whole Season 6B would begin to take shape.

In Players (1999), the Sixth Doctor and companion Peri meet Winston Churchill at three of the “wilderness” periods of his life and discover that he is under threat from a group of aliens who use Earth as their gaming table. It seems that Churchill is one of the most important pieces. The Players were a group of the Immortals who tampered with history to amuse themselves. They were capable of traveling through time, but their abilities were limited. They had knowledge of the Time Lords, and knew them to be devious. If anyone with a working familiarity with The War Games serial will note that these Players and their plan resembled a lot of the plot of that final Second Doctor story (which was co-written by Dicks and who had a habit of recycling ideas). This book, though, features a lengthy cameo for the Second Doctor, which is set after the events of The War Games, which finally canonizes the once theoretical Season 6B.

 

It would be another six years before this theme would be explored again, in Dicks Second Doctor novel, World Games (2005). Under threat of execution after his conviction by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games, the Doctor is granted a reprieve if he agrees to undertake missions for the Celestial Intervention Agency (Dick’s also pilfered psychic paper here, and idea not introduced until the series return in 2005). It’s the ultimate Terrance Dicks novel. It's got it all: sequels or prequels to most of his other novels, continuity overdosing on The War Games, the Players, a the Raston Warrior Robot, you name it.

In the end, though, while the whole Season 6B idea became fact in the books, on TV it never became “canon”. Nevertheless, by using the theory explored in that 1995 book by Cornell, Day, and Topping, it apparently gives us a logical reason, maybe willing reason (which is interestingly, btw) why the Third Doctor was working for the Time Lords who exiled him to Earth in the 20^th Century in The Three Doctors and again, much later, in The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors (1985).

Books: The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom by A.C. Crispin (2011)

Historical note: The events of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom takes place about a dozen years before the first film.

“Twenty-five-year-old Jack Sparrow is a clean-cut merchant seaman pursuing a legitimate career as a first mate for the East India Trading Company. He sometimes thinks back to his boyhood pirating days, but he doesn't miss Teague's scrutiny or the constant threat of the noose. Besides, he doesn't have much choice—he broke the Code when he freed a friend who had been accused of rogue piracy, and he can no longer show his face in Shipwreck Cove. When Jack's ship is attacked by pirates and his captain dies in the altercation, he suddenly finds himself in command.”

A little bit of background here:

It was during the production on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, when the editors at Disney Press, who produce tie-in novels, felt there needed to be a tale that would fill in Jack Sparrow’s back-story. There were already a few kids books series released dealing with his childhood and teen years, but all were geared towards the younger demographic. I’m not sure this was direction Disney Press wanted to go in, but impressed with A. C. Crispin’s (1950-2013) work on Bantam Spectum Han Solo Trilogy -The Paradise Snare (1997), The Hutt Gambit, (1997), and Rebel Dawn, (1998) - they felt she could bring some serious gravitas to a tale about 25 year-old Jack Sparrow, and not just a slap-dash effort to sell additional titles. Plus she was well established in tie-in novel field, having written several titles within the Star Trek universe. Two of those Trek books -Yesterday's Son and Time for Yesterday- were direct sequels to the third-season episode of TOS, All Our Yesterdays, and detail an alternate timeline where Spock and Zarabeth raise their child. Yesterday's Son would become the first non-novelization Star Trek novel to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.  

Somewhat inspired by Tim Powers research done for his homage to the Disney ride that was released in 1987 as On Stranger Tides (which would become the fourth film in the franchise), Crispin did a lot of exploration on the historical period and all the nautical stuff. She goes into great detail explaining how a sailing vessel works, which are better than others, and why some pirates could easily overtake other ships. While she was doing this, Disney provided the script for At World’s End (which filmed in 2005 and 2006) before it was released in 2007, so she could see where the franchise was going. However, she had finished this book before the script for On Stranger Tides (2011) was even written. 

The only instructions for writing The Price of Freedom, all Disney told Crispin was to "stick to historical fact, unless it conflicts with established Pirates of the Caribbean continuity." So Crispin did a deep dive into researching the time period in an effort to do just this with Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly (2006) being one of the four pirate-related books she found herself using the most consistently. 

So with its seemly Patrick O’Brian inspired cover, the novel was released in 2011. And promptly vanished.

Like a few of the movies, though, the book is overlong. I understand Crispin’s desire to include as much as Jack’s back story as possible, but we did not need to be reminded again and again that Jack hated slavers and that the East Indian Trading Company had a dubious history with slavery and men who saw wealth, title, and power as way to move up in the company. Crispin really makes it obvious that –despite the time period- a lot of the EITC members were corrupt, evil, pathetic white men.

The there is the main villain of EITC, one Cutler Beckett, a character who makes his debut in the third film in the franchise, who’s horrible family problems gave him a sort of bizarre reason to be the asshole he was, but then Crispin adds an additional suitcase of vileness that could make some reader have sympathy for him. It was just unnecessary.

For the film fans, we get various cameos from Davy Jones, Hector Barbossa, Captain Teague, and Tia Dalma gets’ named dropped a lot.

While at 672 pages and clearly a more adult tale of young Jack Sparrow (which may explain why this title was never released in paperback and now has become a very expensive book to obtain on the secondary markets), it does slot neatly between two series for kids, Pirates of the Caribbean: Jack Sparrow and Pirates of the Caribbean: Legends of the Brethren Court. But I don’t think this is a kids book, maybe YA, but not kids.

So I’m not sure this was the book Disney was exactly looking for, but remains an interesting and cautious experiment about trying to overly explain Jack Sparrow’s life before the film series. Perhaps too much detail here, or a book split in two may have made it work fully, but this epic tale just suffered.