Tara O'Shea

First, the negatives - in this book ostensibly about the female fan perspective in Doctor Who fandom, there were an overwhelming number of American voices, of white voices, of Anglo voices. Even as a white, Anglo-Australian middle-aged feminine fan who’s obsession with the show spans decades, I found the collection as a whole to be alienating. The large conventions that so many of the authors mention are so outside my ken that I have no way to see these as ‘fans like me’ — what I’ve seen referred to as the uncanny valley of culture, which looks so similar at first glance, and is in fact completely incomprehensible at second look. Several of the essays struck me as very personal, in ways I wasn’t necessarily interested in reading (others were very personal, but fascinatingly so).

On the positive side, there are a number of fabulous essays. In particular, K Tempest Bradford’s essay about Martha Jones; Kate Orman—the nearest to a representative fan to me—talking about uni clubs, and writing for the New/Missing Adventures line; Helen Kang on the safety of television for a school age child learning English; and Shoshana Magnet and Robert Smith?’s wonderful (literary) criticism about the role of companions (although there is rather a whiff of classism, given that Rose is characterised as ‘just’ a shop girl)

Also of interest were the various interviews with television and audio book actors, and what it has meant to them to be part of the family that comes with Doctor Who.… (més)

As fandom history, this book is invaluable, containing oral histories of fandom from the early zine - and - videotape party era to the contemporary Livejournal era (which would all but die out within a year of this book's publication), and encompassing most of what I remember of the discussions around fandom at the time. But that means it's also very dated: one essay makes the same mistake a lot of us did of predicting that the Moffat era of New Who would be much more feminist than its predecessors. Christa Dickinson's "In Defense of Smut" reads as terribly old-fashioned even now, just five years later. It was terribly timely when it came out, but it's suffered for it since.… (més)