David is coming to New Who for the first time, having loved Classic Who as a kid. Tehani is a recent convert, and ploughed through Series 1 to 6 (so far) in just a few weeks after becoming addicted thanks to Matt Smith – she’s rewatching to keep up with David! Tansy is the expert in the “Doctor Who in Conversation” team, with a history in Doctor Who fandom that goes WAY back, and a passion for Doctor Who that inspires us all. We are working our way through New Who, using season openers and closers, and Hugo shortlisted episodes, and sometimes a couple of extra episodes we love as our blogging points. Just for fun!

Thanks to everyone who nominated us for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review, we are chuffed and delighted and might even be inspired to run through these a bit faster than we have been doing. No promises, obviously!

TEHANI:
Righto, so we’ve skipped over “The Fires of Pompeii” and “Planet of the Ood”, moving along to “The Sontaran Strategem/Poison Sky” double episode (not Hugo nominated, but Tansy felt they were important to talk about – we agreed!). I would like to mention a couple of things about the preceding two episodes though. In “The Fires of Pompeii”, we saw Donna make the Doctor to rescue just one family from the eruption, effectively forcing him to remember that EVERYONE MATTERS, and clearly setting her up as his conscience and moral compass. This is interesting when followed by “Planet of the Ood”, when his compassion is demonstrated in his fight to save the Ood despite their apparently murderous tendencies. Donna’s impact is swift and cannot be overstated, as it becomes so important later on!

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The Mary Sue looks at the psychology behind the fake geek girl meme. At Tor.com, Liz Bourke looks at the boundary-policing aspect of the attitudes towards women in SF “geekdom”. She also rather generously linked to my Pratchett’s Women AND Xena series of posts, which has somewhat inundated this blog with new readers. Hi, new readers! *waves*

Diana Peterfreund looks at the ‘new adult’ genre/marketing category, and how it has developed since her first series, Secret Society Girl, was published.

Sarah Rees Brennan also has Opinions about New Adult, mostly about the criticisms that tend to get levelled at any media phenomenon (not just publishing) in which young women exert power over the marketplace.

Weird Fiction Review recommends 14 Notable Women Writers of Weird.

The Stranger With My Face Horror Film Festival (with especial focus on female filmmakers, writers and characters) has announced its return next year – 7-10 March 2013. Mark the date!

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Big Finish has a huge back catalogue of plays – more than 12 years worth – and it’s hard for people to know how and where to jump on board. I recently discovered the Little Finish podcast, which is great, but probably of limited value to casual listeners, as they review that month’s plays, spoilers and all. If you’re not keeping up with the latest ones, you’re likely to not get much out of it, which is a shame because it’s a very fun podcast! Anyone wanting to check it out might want to pick the Nicholas Courtney memorial episode, which reviews every Courtney appearance in Big Finish, and has some lovely recommendations and clips.

Anyway, in listening to Little Finish I came to the (not overly shocking) realisation that I actually am one of those listeners now – I subscribe to multiple streams of plays, and have caught up so substantially that I’m in a pretty good position to review, say, the Doctor Who releases for the entire first half of this year.

So here we go!

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