PARADISE TOWERS: DR WHO

Thank you, Philip Sandifer. Someone understands.

"Tat Wood, in About Time, notes that it is the first story in some time to have no references to previous stories. This is a telling detail that explains at least part of why the story is unloved. The fact of the matter is that Doctor Who has, for several years now, been catering primarily to an audience of fans. Fandom is an exceedingly middle class practice, based as it is on a surplus of leisure time and the disposable income to fritter away on Dapol action figures, Target novelizations, trips to conventions, and other such commercial product. This fact is largely responsible for the maddening sociopathy of mainstream science fiction fandom - it's a self-selected group of reasonably affluent people focused on capitalist production. They are myopic by design. A story about modernism and council estates is, in other words, utterly removed from anything that a fan in the Ian Levine model would ever care about. And to be frank, large numbers of people who talk about Paradise Towers simply don't seem remotely aware the larger literary tradition it fits into. They treat it as a naff runaround with silly concepts. And this inevitably makes it look like a much, much weaker story than it is. Which is fine - Tat Wood's observation of the way in which it breaks from past stories by not catering to fans is telling. This isn't a Doctor Who story for Doctor Who fans. It's a Doctor Who story for the British public - an attempt to think of Doctor Who as an alternative to Coronation Street (which, of course, it was in the McCoy era - directly so).