Month: August 2007

Only a few hours left to go before the Book Fair starts, and I get personal. It should be no secret to my online friends that I've fallen for Doctor Who. It's my latest addiction, discovered only years after falling out with the original Star Trek series and its one hundred spin-offs. I'm grateful they continued the series with the modern youthful audience in mind. It was a lot easier for me to begin appreciating it that way, I guess. I started off knowing absolutely nothing about Doctor Who, apart from that it's been a large part of UK pop culture. Besides the standard mindblowing, dimension portal-opening rush I get from watching/reading good scifi, it was a lot like having new windows to another culture thrown wide open. I know the UK has such a rich history, which is often delved into even in pop media, but I'm really amazed by how much the DW creative crew has been able to make of it. Ever dared to speculate on Queen Victoria's hemophilia? Or build a complicated thriller starring an intergalactic con man set in the London Blitz? So I've been wondering, is there by any chance a petition or a project out there to adapt Doctor Who for the Filipino setting...? Not a dub-over: I'd really like to preserve the nuances of the language, as well as the important cultural references, so if DW is coming here, the episodes should be pristine. That's really a long shot, though. American English and ways of living have been too deeply ingrained into our system. But really - if Doctor Who can't get us into UK shows, what can? I'm actually thinking DW would be a hit here. The concept alone is highly appealing - a charming, mischievous godlike tourist traveling through space and time, righting wrongs and fighting evil, et cetera et cetera. Add a sympathetic companion and potential love interest, and you're all set! But what I really, really like about DW is that it brings history into the forefront. It's not just about the future: it explores more than one aspect of speculative fiction. Then again we can say that about most other SF series, I think. They have to cover all their bases. It's just that the opportunity to travel BACK in time is especially interesting for me. We have such a (to borrow a catchphrase from the Ninth Doctor) fantastic history - but with conflicting viewpoints and bad historians confusing us about the facts, we just ended up not caring. There are very few among us who honestly want to put things together until they make some sense, and even fewer among those who do are actually storytellers. It'll be dredging up old bones nobody wants troubled. We might say that we don't care what happened before, because we're too busy surviving now - but if that were true, would we be so drawn to fantasy? Is it just that it makes life bearable? Or maybe we're just holding on for the kind of fantasy that would teach as much as it entertains? So when I'm asking for an adaptation, I'm asking for an um. Adaptation. Kind of like Batibot for Sesame Street. Or André Lupin for well, Arséne Lupin. Yes, is this too insane? Of course, if we can come up with a time travel series all on our own, that would be even better. For the audiophiles out there: I will forever associate Muse's Black Holes and Revelations with Doctor Who. One only needs to give the songs a listen to see why.

---

Plugging for a friend: Please be sure to drop by the Read or Die booth if you visit the Manila Book Fair. I hear the booth has an... interesting setup, courtesy of talented graphic artist Leandro Polidario, who is also an old friend of mine from college.For Read or Die's schedule of activities, see Ang Bagong Libro.

I've missed out on a lot of things yet again. But I finally updated my 3-year-old RSS reader today, so even if I'll just point to announcements from other blogs that are relevant to Philippine spec fic, I hope to be more punctual in posting. In the meantime, I'd like to link to two interesting issues in the local literary blogosphere: Thinking Towards Philippine Speculative Fiction [ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ] [ Part 3 ] by Dean Francis Alfar and Crime Does Not Exist via Philippine Genre Stories. Kenneth Yu has also linked to other blog posts discussing the absence of the crime/mystery/suspense genre in Philippine literature. I hope to be able to type up my own reactions to these issues. But while I don't have my own words, I link.