We’ve got a few comments from readers of the first two issues
The first to respond was Swajax Johnson, who enjoyed Chris Pyman’s article about a female Doctor
Great article Christine, puts the whole Jodie Doctor Who thing into perspective. It will be interesting to see what the next 12 months will bring. I’m sure Jodie will do well and even if it doesn’t work out the show will still go on and on like it always has.
Lilian Edwards has a few concerns about the new season
I’m another woman who in her rational mind didn’t want a female Doctor. But then I didn’t want a very young Doctor till Matt Smith settled into the role and I didn’t want a relatively old one after him till ditto. I guess human nature is to cling to what you know. I didn’t get the intense surge of joy but I have come round to feeling intrigued and expectant. The actress was good on the medical drama she was just on so here’s hoping! I truly didn’t think id ever see this. In rather more worried about Chibnall as showrunner as most his Torchwood and Who eps were rubbish 😣 everyone seems to have forgotten about THAT change in the excitement!
Lilian does like the format
Hi I love the idea of this format! Readable and respondable to on a phone with the ease of Twitter only you can edit yr comments too! It’s more or less wgat I wanted to do myself for years. Only thing id say is on my phone (Samsung, Android) the comment forms seem a bit elusive. I got it ok for the Dr Who piece but couldn’t find it for the Black Panther one. Some thing wrong at my end or at yrs?
Our fault! We decided to move to emails rather than post comments, so we could gather the responses for the next issue. If people really, really want the immediate comments, let us know. We think that eLoCs are a closer fit to the idea of a discrete issue online, though.
Anyway you’d be doing the world a favour if you open sourced this as a shell..
Claire Brialey, co-editor of Banana Wings, commented on the reviews of Gladstone’s Craft Sequence
Having read your reviews of Max Gladstone’s Craft sequence novels in The Wild Goose and just now enjoyed my own re-reading, I would add that I think it is a better experience to read the novels in chronological than in publication order. I know the author contends you can read them in virtually any order (not least since, although some characters feature in several books, the continuity is good all round and there aren’t really spoilers other than people’s survival – and it’s clear in any case that there are ways in which death is not the end); I think he has a slight preference for publication order himself, perhaps because that way the reader gets the benefit of him getting even better as a writer. But I found a chronological reading more enjoyable both for the strands of individual characters’ stories and for the strategic view of the wider world.
As published, the books came out as 3, 2, 5, 1, 4, 6 – the first five carefully signalling that through their titles, of course. Splitting the six novels so far into two parts for your review made it more noticeable since the first (in sequence) is a prequel to the second, the fourth a direct sequel to the third, and the sixth in some ways a sequel to the fifth – so the second half of the sequence so far, as published, seems to dart back and forth even more than the first. Reading them roughly one a year, as they came out, left me with a sense of strands not connecting, which is what prompted my desire to re-read and see the bigger picture; it could have been due to my fading memories of the individual volumes from one year to the next as much as a loss of narrative momentum from reading in that order, but I preferred to encounter recurring characters in the order the stories happened for them (notwithstanding flashbacks). I read too many series and sequences in the ‘wrong’ order as a child, because of what was available and the difficulty of even establishing what the order might be; as noted earlier, it’s given me an incentive not to miss out on the greater story arcs now!
I had noticed the recurring characters and the scrambled sequence on my first reading, in one instance (mistakenly) assuming one event happened after another. But since the novels were busy exploring different facets of the world, the timeline didn’t worry me too much.
We also had some nice verbal comments from various local fans, including surprise that they could read the zine on their phones! We chose a responsive WordPress template, augmented by some page-size aware CSS to make this possible, but it’s still not great on the smaller smart phones. Send LoCs on this issue to letters@wild-goose.net