I was born the year Doctor Who started, so I grew up with it, and of course I’m biased.  Nonetheless, “Heaven Sent” – the penultimate episode of the latest season – is quite a tour de force, with a bravura solo performance by Peter Capaldi… and a perfect example of the show’s all-too-infrequent flirtations with truly Big Ideas.

Trapped in the preceding episode and teleported to an unknown location, the Doctor finds himself in what appears to be a castle… and pursued by an anonymous, but clearly lethal, veiled figure.  Somehow, he has to make sense of his surroundings, and figure out some way out of this trap.  He has a few – a very few – clues.  The word “BIRD” scrawled on a pile of sand.  A skull with a worryingly familiar outline.  The fact that the stars, seen from the top of the castle, seem somehow to be in the wrong positions.  And a pointer to “Room 12”, which turns out to contain a barrier, made of a substance harder than diamond, and twenty feet thick.

Since this is episode 11 of 12, I suppose it’s not a spoiler to say that the Doctor manages to escape.  It’s slightly a spoiler to say that, well, it takes a while.

Doctor Who has always been good on claustrophobic settings – the “base under siege” story is a staple of the series.  (It is, of course, entirely possible that this has a lot to do with the restrictions on 1960s BBC budgets.)  “Heaven Sent”, with a cast of one in a restricted location, is about as claustrophobic as you can get.  With 2015 production values, though, it manages to look pretty darn good… and Peter Capaldi’s performance is superb… and, then, there’s that flirtation with big ideas, in this case, one of the biggest there is.  This story’s about taking a metaphor for eternity… and making it literal.

As a show, Doctor Who has had a lot of ups and downs… I’m willing to forgive it a fair number of downs, in return for an episode as good as this.

This one came onto my radar only yesterday, in fact, but it’s certainly good enough to merit a look.  It’s a short and surprisingly sinister film about virtual reality games, with a very dark twist that I’m not going to describe further.  It’s written and directed by Paul Wenninger, and can be found inside the accompanying Slate article right here.

First off, the production values, for such a small project, are truly impressive.  The whole thing looks real – or, where appropriate, unreal.  However, we live in an age where fantastic visual effects live inside everyone’s laptop, so maybe that’s not the most impressive thing.  What I found more impressive was… well, that twist that I’m not going to describe.  But it takes the whole short film out of run-of-the-mill and into the territory of Philip Dick or maybe John Brunner on a good day.  This is actual, proper, serious SF here, people.  It twists your preconceptions around and makes you think, which is what – in my opinion – good SF does.

Ahh, yes.  Kung Fury.  I think that’s all we need to say, really.  Just over thirty minutes of the absolute, distilled quintessence of 1980s action thrillers.  The ultimate expression of a particular genre. Which genre?  The genre defined by one simple and beautiful phrase, “Direct to VHS”.

This may be a short film, but it has everything.  Guns.  Explosions.  Martial arts.  Fast cars.  Exploding fast cars.  Rampaging video games consoles.  More guns.  More explosions.  More martial arts.  Yet more guns.  Yet more explosions. So much martial arts your monitor will get bruises.

What?  You want a plot? Fine.  The ultimate maverick martial-arts cop takes on time-travelling kung fu Hitler, what more plot do you need?  Oh, and there’s laser-beam-shooting dinosaurs, a busty barbarian warrior queen with an authentic Viking minigun, and hacking the flow of time itself with a Nintendo Powerglove.  If all that doesn’t make you drool with desire, you must be dead inside, that’s all I can say.

(Do I have to be serious?  It seems like one of those category mistake things, again….  Kung Fury is an insanely over-the-top and remarkably well-produced parody of 1980s action movies.  And I do mean insanely over-the-top; whenever you think it can’t get any crazier or any cornier, it goes ahead and proves you wrong.  It may lack the polish of a Game of Thrones episode or the intellectual complexity of a good Doctor Who, but I don’t care, I love it.)

Edited by Evelyn and Mark Leeper, this one bills itself as the newsletter of the Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society, and therefore represents, as it were, another strand of fannish endeavour; the fanzine as focus for an SF fan community.  (Online archive here.)

The name of Evelyn Leeper, at least, has been vaguely familiar to me for some time – I have, you see, been dimly aware of fandom for a long, long time, rolling invisibly around it in a distant orbit like H.P. Lovecraft’s dark planet Yuggoth.  The MT Void, though, is hardly a solo effort, containing as it does reviews and articles by various hands, and a thriving letter column which speaks well for the health of the group it’s representing.  The issues I’ve read have covered topics ranging from irrational numbers to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which seems a pretty decent range to me.

The formatting of the online archive doesn’t do the zine any favours – a single compressed column of Courier plaintext, like something someone had ganked off of Usenet in about 1998.  Never mind.  The actual content is what matters, and that’s decidedly worth reading.

OK, this one is… different, anyway.  It may possibly count as a guilty pleasure.  It’s certainly… different.  That’s the word.  Different.

Planetary Stories, edited by Shelby Vick, is a pretty creditable attempt at putting together a Campbell-era – or maybe even Gernsback-era – pulp SF magazine.  With all that implies, when it comes to literary quality… though it might be one of those there category mistakes, that, thinking that literary quality matters in an enterprise of this kind.

What you get, with each issue, is a bunch of short stories in unabashed space-opera mode, and I do mean unabashed.  The very first story in Vol. 1 number 1 (2005) is called “Space Marshal vs King Jorx”, it’s every bit as good as it sounds, and the zine has continued in much the same vein up to the present day.

It’s… well, the individual stories are unlikely to trouble the Hugo nominators, I feel.  We are not talking Nobel Prize for Literature material, here.  But, overall, the zine itself has a certain… nostalgic exuberance… about it.  Yes, the stories themselves are pretty dire, but the overall look and feel of the thing… sort of harks back to a concept of SF that people loved, perhaps in the way that you love an old teddy bear with one eye missing and its fur worn off.  It has a sense of vigor about it, and a sense of enjoyment… maybe that’s enough, and things like literary quality don’t actually matter?  Maybe.  (I’m not, actually, convinced about that.  But it’s worth taking a look at the thing and making your own mind up.)

Canadian fanhistory and reviews zine edited by Dale Speirs, with – at least in the issues I’ve read – a lot of scenic photography, and a concentration on stories and scientific questions of the SF “Golden Age”.  (Again, this one’s got an archive at efanzines.com, here.)  Issue 328, for instance, covers violations of the square-cube law (stories about giant insects, for instance, many of which are capsule reviewed) and takes a look at the recent retro-SF anthology Old Mars, as well as taking a photographic road trip through one of the quieter sections of Alberta.

It’s a well-produced zine – at least, the online stuff is; I’m sure a hard-copy would be just as good – and each issue’s general theme gives it a sense of structure and organization, which you don’t necessarily get a lot of in fanzines.  Speirs is obviously well-read in the genre, and his capsule reviews are incisive and often witty.  I suppose the overall tone of the zine is fairly light and superficial, but there is a distinct sense that Speirs could buckle down and do sercon if he (or his readers) wanted it.  In any case, Opuntia has a fair amount to offer.

Taral Wayne is a Canadian SF fan artist of long-standing and well-deserved reputation, and has several times been nominated for the Best Fan Artist category.  I’m looking now, though, at his perzine Broken Toys, 44 issues of which are currently online (I found them through the efanzines archive – here, specifically.)

Sometimes I wonder if the perzine is a dying art, superseded by blogs – well, this one seems to be chugging along still, though.  It’s almost quintessentially fannish, this; like any perzine, it’s idiosyncratic, eclectic in its material, and relates to SFF only when its author remembers to bother.  (I’m a sucker for the discursive and the digressive and the just-plain-rambling, so this is bound to appeal to me; I’m one of those people who enjoy the whale-taxonomy essays in Moby Dick, for instance.)

Anyway, Wayne rambles nicely – he’s a fluent and lucid writer, and his anecdotes all come to a definite point in the end.  As a simple slice-of-fannish-life zine, Broken Toys has a lot to commend it.  Well worth a look, I think.

This is for one specific piece of work: The Long List Anthology, comprising stories that didn’t make it onto the Hugo nominations shortlist for 2015.

This anthology is very much a product of the (ahem) controversial happenings in the 2015 process… basically, it was a widely held view that the slate tactics had crowded a number of good stories off the Hugo ballot, and so, people suggested, why not assemble a collection of all the stuff that didn’t make the final cut, so the casual readers of SF (like, well, me) could take a look at it and judge for themselves?  And David Steffen stepped up to the plate, ran a Kickstarter project to acquire the rights to as many stories as possible, and produced the anthology.

And he has done a thoroughly decent job of it.  You could argue, I suppose, that the arduous work of selecting the stories was largely done for him; still, acquiring the rights, composing the ebook and audiobook formats, general subbing and layout work – all this takes time and effort and talent, and Steffen’s done a thoroughly professional job of it, all the way.  The fact that these are mostly darn good stories is a bonus.  (Tastes differ, and nobody likes everything in an anthology.  I won’t go into the ones I didn’t like, because the chances are it’s just down to my personal taste.)  On balance, it’s a good anthology of some of the best short SFF of 2014 – and David Steffen’s done a fine job of assembling it, which is why I’m putting him up for consideration.

Ian Whates is proprietor of NewCon Press and editor of a number of significant SFF collections, most notably the Solaris Rising series of SF anthologies, which contain a fascinating selection of modern SF writing.  His qualifying work this year, I guess, would be the collection of Paul Cornell’s short fiction, A Better Way to Die.

Really, though, Whates is one of those people who’ve been around for a while, putting out a range of good stuff, and well overdue for a Hugo nod.  Solaris Rising and Dark Currents (horror and SFF anthology) should have been enough to put him on people’s radar long ago – the man knows how to pick good stories out for an anthology, and what more do you need from an editor?  (Well, all right, you need attention to detail in the production process, too – but Whates manages that just fine, as well; no “goblets of frozen blood” got past the subs in Solaris Rising as far as I could see.)

If you are a cheapskate like me, you will spend a lot of time delving in the low-cost ebooks market, and it’s round about this area that I came across Wildside Press and their very handy – and cheap – “Megapacks” series.  While John Gregory Betancourt isn’t the only person involved in this, he seems to be very much the guiding spirit of the whole enterprise, so what the heck, I reckon he deserves the credit.

The Megapacks series consists largely of reprints of out-of-copyright or just out-of-the-way stuff in substantial, themed volumes.  The important thing, from the Hugos perspective, is that a lot of these themes are SFnal, and in fact many of the Megapacks are devoted to individual writers in the SF and fantasy genres, from the “Golden Age”.  What we’re talking about, here, in fact, is an immense quantity of “Golden Age” material being preserved and re-issued for today’s mass market – keeping these authors accessible for today’s generation.

This is, perhaps, not the place to discuss the actual merits of the likes of Carl Jacobi, Arthur Leo Zagat, John Russell Fearn or Nictzin Dyalhis (to name but four).  Whatever you might think of them, though, they’re part of SF’s heritage, and Betancourt’s doing a lot of work preserving that heritage.  The Megapack editions are well-presented, offer solid selections of each author’s work – and they’re well-edited, too; most of us who get reprinted material in ebook format are all too familiar with scrambled formats and heaps of OCR errors, and there’s none of that sort of rubbish with the Megapack series.

So, my opinion is, Betancourt (and his team) are doing a signal service by keeping all-but-forgotten SF writers in (virtual) print, and he deserves a nod for it!