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Some random fannish Dr. Who musings here. No spoilers or anything, but also of no interest to non-Whovians.

I was just thinking, first of all, that it’d be really nice to eventually see a multi-Doctor story in the current incarnation of the show. There were several done back during the old series; I’d love to see Smith, Tennant, and Eccleston together, no matter how unlikely it may be.

But I think it would be even more interesting if we were to eventually get a multi-Doctor story using a Doctor who hadn’t appeared yet.

It would require a few very specific set of criteria to make happen. It would have to happen late in Smith’s run, and he’d have to have given the producers some pretty advance notice of when he was planning to leave the part. And they’d have to cast the next Doctor earlier than normal. But I think it’d be really cool to have the first introduction of a new Doctor occur during a previous Doctor’s run (and not at the very end of it, either).

But even if that’s asking too much, I don’t think some form of multi-Doctor special would be.

(And I also want us to start seeing more of the TARDIS, damn it! The old series showed us multiple rooms of it; the current series only occasionally mentions them.)

For each of the first seven Doctors, name the one storyline that you’d most recommend.

Catch: You must choose from those currently available on DVD.

I’ve already seen The Chase, Logopolis, City of Death, Genesis of the Daleks, and Pyramids of Mars. Talons of Weng-Chiang is already on my list. If one of these truly is your favorite, go ahead and list it, but I’m mostly looking for new stuff.

(And if you list The Chase as one of your favorites, well… No offense, but I’ll likely dismiss your other suggestions.  😉 Good lord, that was some of the most awful television I’ve ever seen.)

As some of you may recall, I wrote a Suvudu column a while back in which I discussed the definition–such as it is–of Sword & Sorcery fantasy, as opposed to Epic Fantasy (or other fantasy). You can see it here, if you want to review (or if you didn’t catch it the first time around).

Why do I bring it up now? Well, thanks to another Suvudu column–this one by Matt Staggs–the question of an S&S resurgence is being discussed on numerous forums. And in the process of one such discussion on Absolute Write Water Cooler, I made the following assertion. I’d like to share this particular thought beyond the confines of just that one forum, and see what everyone else thinks of it. Said post was sparked by a comment on whether something "blurred the line" between S&S and other fantasy.

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Oh, certainly. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

In fact, I’m not convinced the line ever really existed. Like so much else, I think it’s always really been a continuum, rather than a binary status. Sure, you have fantasy that’s almost entirely on the S&S side of the spectrum–Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, etc.–and then you have fantasy that’s almost entirely on the epic side of the spectrum–Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, etc. But the vast majority of fantasy falls somewhere on a long line between the two.

That’s why I maintain that there are certain tendencies that S&S stories have, and if a single story has enough of them, it probably qualifies–but there’s no hard-and-fast, yes-or-no determining factor. Ultimately, it’s simply a matter of where on said continuum a given person, or the market at any given time, chooses to draw the line and say "Left of this point is S&S, right is fantasy." The precise position of that line’s going to be different for different people and different periods.

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So what do you folks think? Do you agree with that way of looking at it? Or do you see the question as far more binary than I do?

(If you’re not a Dark Sun fan, this won’t mean much to you.)

I was just rewaching the end of season 3 of the (new) Doctor Who on DVD–the episodes where the Master takes over Earth. And that got me thinking about D&D (because, well, almost everything does), and the pseudo-destruction of the world.

So… What about a Dark Sun campaign where the whole campaign setting is a brand new event? The desolation of Athas into a blasted, barren desert wasn’t a slow, gradual process, but something that happened in one fell swoop–a natural disaster, an arcane war, a curse, whatever. And it’s something that happened recently, only in the past few years.

You still have the city-states and the Sorcerer Kings, but they’re new societies, still establishing themselves, still working on enslaving the populace to the power of their rulers. You have people traveling to them and willing to be enslaved, because these are the only civilized parts of the world left. You have bands of refugees, the survivors of entire cities, roaming the deserts in desperate search of a home, still trying to adapt to the loss of the only world they ever knew. And you have multiple resistance groups–both inside and outside of the city-states–fighting against the Sorcerer Kings who are slowly usurping control of what remains of society, and spreading their influence out toward the wandering tribes and the last lingering villages.

You might even still have religion, but it exists only in dying pockets as people abandon the gods, either for "allowing" this to happen, or as the Sorcerer Kings prove more potent than the priests of old.

How else would that change a campaign? What kind of story ideas does it open up? Anyone find the idea intriguing, or is just me? 😉

I just direct messaged someone on Twitter to find out if they’d received the private message I sent them on Facebook regarding an invite to a community on Google Groups. 😐

This constitutes irrefutable evidence that social networking has gotten completely out of hand.

And speaking of short story markets, there’s a new sci-fi market. Lightspeed is an online magazine, focusing specifically on sci-fi (no fantasy) shorts. And they pay professional rates, too (though they’re closed for submissions until mid-July).

Wow. At this rate, spec-fic short story writers may actually have options again before too long. 😉