The Name of The Doctor? I know his name

I think The Grand Moff is engaged in a Long Con, and I think it's going to be really successful.

He's promised to reveal The Doctor's greatest secret, and we've got a poster for The Name of The Doctor which makes it look very much like he's actually going to do it.

Not that it matters.

For the exactly nothing that it's worth, I don't care what The Doctor's name is.  The Doctor is, and hopefully always will be, The Doctor.  Giving him a name like Romanavoratrelundar is effectively giving him a Secret Identity.  He should probably have been wearing some sort of mask all these years, and I don't think anyone could be bothered with The Doctor as superhero.

Why do secret identities matter for superheroes?  In Meta terms, it's so we can pretend to be them.  When comic books were still for kids, masked heroes were a way for us to pretend that we could be them.  How many people dressed up as superheroes by putting on a slapped-together mask, or turned a towel into a cape?  Back in pre-Cosplay times, the idea was that anyone could be a superhero just by slipping on a domino mask and going off to fight crime.

We're not supposed to be able to be like The Doctor.  We're barely supposed to understand him.  We can like him, we can admire him and we can even be his companion, but he's meant to remain mysterious, and inspiring.

Besides, The Doctor has had names.  Being John Smith, Scientific Adviser to UNIT, changed absolutely nothing about The Doctor; being John Smith the teacher and human didn't change anything about The Doctor either.  A name is, after all, just a label.  Our names don't tell anyone anything about who we are, beyond hinting at what our ancestry might be about and maybe where we were born (and perhaps when we were born).  Names don't define people.  Which might be why, when the original production team were looking for something to call the central character, they settled on a title instead.

Doctor, as the show seems to have forgotten, isn't just the title given to a healer.  It's an Academic title, as is Master.  The Doctor didn't make things better, he learned about them and, eventually helped other people learn - about their strengths and themselves, their capabilities and their values.  He was never a healer.

So, how does a name have any impact?

Names are only important if you have anything to protect (if you're a superhero) or something you don't want anyone to know about.  The Doctor doesn't have a family to protect, and The Doctor has already indicated that he doesn't care who knows his secrets.  Look at the confrontation between him and Lady Peinforte in Silver Nemesis.  She threatens to tell Ace all about The Doctor's past, and he calls her on this claiming he doesn't care if she does.  The Cyberleader also shows no interest at all in knowing anything about The Doctor.  It drives Peinforte nuts, but it hints at something else.

Names have power to mages.  Peinforte thought she was one, and we've seen how the Carrionites use them, so restricting the availability of one's true name might have been important - if not for the fact that most of the other Time Lords have names which are readily available. 

Names also have power in fairy stories.  Sometimes, a name can be exchanged for something else.  And now we're cooking.

The Master mentioned that The Doctor sealed the rift in the Medusa Cascade and The Doctor said that he was young when that happened.  RTD said that the Medusa Cascade would come back to haunt him, which it did because it cost him Donna and was hiding Davros and his daleks.  What if there's more to it than that.  What if The Doctor gave his name up in return for something important - the power to seal the Rift?  Maybe freedom from the Time Lords?  Maybe something else important.  Maybe that's why Susan Foreman had a name and The Doctor doesn't.  

However, none of this has been referenced anywhere that matters other than very recently when The Doctor's name was teased as something mysterious and portentous  in a way that the character himself and fifty years of writers have never bothered to explore.

The Long Con that The Grand Moff is running is based around building a future for Doctor Who.   Every producer gives the show something to remember him by, every era leaves a legacy, and Mr. Moffat might be trying to set the show up for the next 50 years.  Now, either this is a project worthy of a great writer or it's an act of hubris.  He's building up interest in the show so that the 50th anniversary gets the maximum public interest and helps create a new audience for the years to come.  We might see anything this year - old Doctors, a new Doctor, old friends and foes, new and memorable ones, new ideas or old mythology.  The trick is to keep us guessing and wondering for as long as possible.

So my feeling is that Moffat is teasing us.  He'll keep his word about telling the world what the Doctor's name is, but we will somehow be prevented from knowing.  If the Doctor is present on the field of Trenzelore at the fall of the 11th, when no one can speak falsely and no man may fail to answer, the Doctor will be prevented from speaking.  Or speaking intelligibly.  Or he'll tell us his name is, and always has been...The Doctor, leaving us with the same question we started with.  Or, and this would be a really nice way of doing it, he'll say what his name is but the presence of The Silents will prevent anyone (including us) from remembering what it is.

The fun in this will be seeing how Moffat carries this off.  I have confidence that he will, because he's had recent practice in Sherlock, wherein we're all absolutely certain that the lead character has done something awful and the consequences have been fully explored, but now the impossible situation needs to be unpicked and explained in a satisfying way.  

In the end, we don't need to know what The Doctor's name is because we've known who he is all the time.  We've been told, and we've worked it out for ourselves, and we've been shown, over and over again.  He's the Doctor; he's the mad man in the blue box; he's like fire and ice and the heart of the storm; he's a Time Lord, he walks in eternity; he's a wanderer in the 4th Dimension, an outcast; he's the Oncoming Storm; he's the person the monsters have nightmares about; he's a splendid fellow, all of him.  He's the selfish old man who loved being called Grandfather, who kidnapped two teachers from London more or less by accident and, with them, learned that there were corners of the universe that had bred the most terrible things and took the decision to do something about them.  And if he turned up, leaning casually against his blue box and said "D'you want to come with me?", we'd still say yes.

What else do we need to know?

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First Books, Last Books

One of my enduring pleasures as a reader is discovering a new author.
Better yet, finding the first book by a new author.

First novels are interesting.  Sometimes, if you're lucky, they're glimpses behind the curtain.  You can see the author at work, collecting ideas together and building the story as he or she goes.  From time to time, that first novel arrives like the classic Frankenstein's Monster - stitched together from stories that have already appeared elsewhere, given a new form and new purpose.  Other times, the book is more hesitant and a bit more like a first date - neither of you are sure you're all that into one another, but you're both hoping it will turn out well and end in that amazing tingly feeling of a first kiss to carry with you as you go home.

Or back to the book shop.  Whichever.

This is the glory of reading.  Although you might never speak with the author, by writing something like a novel the author shares something amazing with their readers.  Each book is an open door into that writer's mind - Stephen King talks about it like telepathy, for example - and while anyone can pick up and read the book, only you are going to form the relationship with it that you do.  That's why books, even ones we don't like, even ones that are pretty awful, are art.

If you're lucky, the author you've just developed Readership for is relatively prolific and you'll get to spend a fair amount of time with them.  But there are other authors who rarely seem to publish but who leave you absolutely breathless when they do create something.  And there are the one-book-stands where you're secretly glad that they don't do more than one novel every few decades because you're not really sure you could take that sort of experience more than once in a blue moon.  Or because that one time was so good you know there'll never be anything they can do to quite match it.

I'm lucky.  A lot of my favourite authors would have to be physically restrained from writing, so I've been rather spoiled over the years.  Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett, Harry Harrison, Charles Stross, Iain M. Banks - and Iain Banks, of course - Jim Butcher...every couple of months there's something new to explore.

Lately, I've discovered the Johannes Cabal books.  Jonathan Howard seemed to spend most of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer not quite sure he was going to get away with it, and then becoming more confident and impressive with each successful chapter.  The second book in the series has revealed itself to have a bit of a swagger, which I like in an author.  He knows what he's doing, he knows his audience have turned up to see him and he's realised that he might be able to take a few more risks.  

Ben Aaronovich has hit a similar stride with the PC Grant novels, which not only have excellent stories and characters I want to spend the next however long with, but they have the best covers ever and I want to own very large copies of them and cover the walls with them.  Ben isn't new to authorship - he wrote two of my favourite Doctor Who New Adventures (I'm re-reading The Also People whenever I get five minutes and plan to move on to Transit, which I know is reading them out of chronological order but they're Doctor Who books.  Wibbly-wobbly-timey-so sue me) and Remembrance of the Daleks.  The PC Grant books are a joy to read.

Paul Cornell did something in a similar vein with London Falling, which if you like coppers beset by the supernatural is pretty much a must read.  And if you don't like coppers vs. the Supernatural, it's still worth your time just for the differences between the way two old Doctor Who alumni handle similar material.  It's another great read for many, many reasons so you should buy it.

So there are things to read.  There are always things to read.  Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw's book Jam is currently occupying my solo reading hours and I might have to go find a copy of his first novel Mogworld to see where he started.

Because you never know how long these things will last.

I'm getting older, and one of the unhappy things about ageing is that sooner or later the people I know and like start to die off.

It's happened to some authors - Arthur C. Clarke, Harry Harrison, John M. Ford - and then a couple of years ago Terry Pratchett announced that he had early onset Alzheimers. All of a sudden, you're looking at last books instead of first books.  And in some cases you're really hoping that the most recent book wasn't the last.

Fans of George RR Martin are worried that he'll die before he completes A Song of Fire and Ice and now so is a TV audience who, like me, are a bit hooked on Game of Thrones.  Fans of Robert Jordan know what happens when the original author doesn't get to finish his story.

It seems mercenary to worry about someone's well being because of a book.

The thing is, if the author doesn't get to finish then you'll never get to the end of the conversation that you're in the middle of.  And there's the sadness, too.

If you like books, the loss of an author before they've had the chance to run out of things to say is like a bright light going out.  There's a peculiarity to it, too, because with an author something of the characters they created dies with them.  All those people you knew well might reappear under the pen of another writer, and they might walk and talk like the characters you knew but would they be quite the same?  Mind you, some characters are authorproof - yes, I'm looking at you Conan - but nevertheless there's never going to be a writer who works with him like Robert E Howard.  

If you've had the chance to really get to know an author, the stilling of their words is a bleak reminder that one day we have to face the abrupt end of our own story; we know the world goes on, we might hope there's another story to be a part of after this one or we might accept the final closing of the cover with equanimity but it's still a hard thing, to lose a friend.  Even a friend you've never met or spoken with.

So today's news, that Iain Banks has cancer and isn't likely to live much longer, is awful.  There are lots of people who knew him far better than I ever will - who actually knew him, for example, and will mourn the passing of a man rather than loss of a source of fiction.  He's announced that his most recent novel will be his last.  

All I can think of is the first time I read The Wasp Factory and the feeling of amazement  - the same one I had when I finally wrapped my head around Waiting for Godot - that people were actually allowed to do things like this with literature.  Encouraged to do it, even.   I was young, the book was amazing, and if other books have been like first dates then The Wasp Factory took me out, got me shamefully drunk and then stood by sniggering while I got myself an ill-advised tattoo, ate a kebab, made a slurred and incomprehensible pass at a random woman and woke up in my own flower bed.

I hope there's some form of afterlife.  I hope that all the authors who have opened their imaginations to us get to be told how well they did, how much they were appreciated.  And I hope it happens every time someone picks up their first novel and starts on the journey to their last book.

As usual, Bill says it best.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little live is rounded with a sleep.

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