Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Lights Out (Doctor Who 50th Anniversary E- Shorts #12) by Holly Black Puffin eshort. The Puffin eshorts were a series of short stories released digitally by Puffin Books to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who . One story was released on the 23rd of each month of 2013, each featuring a different incarnation of the Doctor. The series began in January with a First Doctor story and proceeded chronologically through the Doctors until it culminated with an Eleventh Doctor story in November. A short story featuring the , Lights Out , was released on 23 October 2014. Later, on 7 March 2019, Thirteen Doctors, 13 Stories was released, containing a new short story featuring the Thirteenth Doctor, Time Lapse . Doctor Who recap: series 34, episode six – The Caretaker. SPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have been watching the new series of Doctor Who. Don’t read ahead if you haven’t seen episode six – The Caretaker • Read Dan Martin’s episode five blog here “I don’t know anything – because you haven’t told me anything. Which means I wouldn’t approve. Which means you’re endangering this school” The one where the Doctor has to pass himself off as a normal person and makes a dreadful fist of it is fast becoming a sub-genre of its own. These episodes have become writer Gareth Roberts’ “thing” – he penned the James Corden specials for Matt Smith (The Lodger and Closing Time). So The Caretaker might run the risk of repeating itself, except for the fact that both of those episodes amounted to slight curios, sidesteps from the main narrative when they were giving Karen Gillan a week off. This, on the other hand, is so steeped in continuity and “arc-ness” that it’s practically a soap. In a good way. Ofsted would be plunged into crisis if the true nature of Shoreditch’s Coal Hill school ever became apparent. We’ve yet to discover whether Clara’s employment there is for some big plot reason, but it’s no surprise that trouble has found its way there. It’s also telling that the Doctor has yet to inform Clara of his own long history with the place – this was where his granddaughter Susan tried to pass herself off as a normal Earth girl and he inadvertently picked up Ian and Barbara (the last big office romance among the teaching staff) as travelling companions way back in 1963. Times have changed; the place now has a life-sized chessboard and the humanities teachers all dress like hipsters, but the artron emissions emanating from the school’s troubled timeline have made it easy bait. In truth, the alien incursion part of this story is its weakest element, but basing itself in story and character as it does, you barely notice the joins. gets her best ever comedy here, doing incredible work with a simple widening of her eyes, while Capaldi continues to imbue his supposedly “Dark Doctor” with levity and empathy. When he mistakes Adrian for Clara’s boyfriend on account of the bow tie, who wasn’t cheering on the fool? And as annoying children in Doctor Who go, Ellis George’s Courtney Woods is what we call “one to watch”. And yet, fancy this – we’re halfway through the series and there is yet to be a duff episode. And, even more remarkably, most people seem to actually agree on that. Extraordinary scenes. “Never mind that some of us are trying to save the planet, there’s only room in my head for cross-country and the offside rule!” Danny: alpha male. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC. As awkward moments to first use the L-word go, having just been outed to your boyfriend as a secret time-traveller is going to take some beating. But as Clara’s carefully constructed house of cards collapses around her, the deftness of this series begins to play out. As crazy as I went over the timey-wimey River Song arc back in Matt’s era, this more grounded, emotional story is paying off hugely. Here, nobody is completely right and everyone is a little bit wrong. For all his bravery and humility, Danny is still showing signs of being the alpha male whose insecurity leads him to make things all about him. Clara is living in a fool’s paradise, thinking she can get away with living both these lives at once. And this Doctor, once again, is proving himself to be needy and tempestuous behind the bravado. It’s a brave version of Doctor Who, where everybody is written so honestly and as brutally flawed, and we’re only halfway through. The Doctor and Danny’s rivalry is an absolute dead heat as to who is right and who is wrong, and if either of these male egos were to make her choose (something which I doubt she would stand for anyway) I couldn’t call which way she would go. Courtney Woods might wish to check herself if she decides she really does want to follow her English teacher off out into space. Fear factor. The not-so terrifying Skovox Blitzer. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC. For all that the Doctor talks it up, the Skovox Blitzer isn’t exactly the most menacing killing machine the universe has ever known. It made me laugh more than anything, trundling along looking like a robot Silurian on a mobility scooter – which may or may not have been the point. Did it matter that the world never felt under much of a threat? Maybe, but also maybe best to chalk this up to being another of the “funny ones”. That said, the policeman’s severed hand almost made me vomit a little. Mysteries and questions. As is becoming more and more obvious, the big storyline this year looks to be the complicated Doctor-Clara-Danny triangle, and it may not end particularly well. But we also got a welcome dose of the other arc, as that policeman finds himself joining Half Face Man and Gretchen in the Promised Land named for the first time as “the Nethersphere”. And its pen-pusher is Chris Addison as Seb. They clearly have good people skills up in heaven, even when the management are having an off-day. Michelle Gomez’s Missy does not look happy. What can have gone wrong? Time-space debris. The Doctor: levity and empathy. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC. Clara’s jealousy issues now extend not only to all her predecessors but to Jane Austen too. “Oh what, I suppose she was your bezzie mate was she, and you went on holidays together and then you got kidnapped by boggans from space and then you all formed a band and met Buddy Holly!” Nice to see River has not been forgotten completely. We all know there are few things in the world more malevolent than the PE teacher. I’ll share my horror stories if you’ll share yours … Danny’s inability understand the “different” way that Clara might love the Doctor has become my only real problem with him. So much that I almost get the Doctor’s antipathy toward him. What sort of person really believes there’s only one, sexual, kind of love? “It’s funny, you only really know what someone thinks of you when you know what lies they’ve told you.” Next week! Courtney Woods gets her big moment as the first woman on the moon. But there are bigger challenges ahead, and by the end of Kill the Moon, the Doctor and Clara’s relationship might never be the same again … Holly Black: Peter Capaldi is going to bring genuine darkness to the character of The Doctor. Holly Black is the 12th writer to be given her very own Doctor to write about for the Dr Who series 12 Doctors, 12 Stories. And she had to write the first draft before watching Peter Capaldi in action! Site member Patrick gets the low-down on Holly Black’s Lights Out. Check out this gorgeous gallery of Doctor Who jackets and win a special slipcase edition of all the 12 Doctor, 12 stories books! Last modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 12.04 BST. Holly Black has joined a stellar line-up of children’s authors (to name a few: Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman, Patrick Ness, Eoin Colfer and Neil Gaiman) who have each crafted a short tale for every incarnation of the eponymous Time Lord. When the original run of e-books ended in November of last year Matt Smith was the incumbent Doctor but now acting heavyweight Peter Capaldi has taken on the role it seems apt that he should be featured in a story. Black’s story, Lights Out, is unique in many respects. She had the exciting but “super intimidating” task of penning an adventure for the Twelfth Doctor who, when she wrote it over the summer, had yet to appear on our screens. She was given scripts to aid her (“Some of it was blacked out for mysterious reasons!”) and relied on images but she seemed somewhat relieved to have been allowed to edit Lights Out after seeing Capaldi’s debut, back in August. “When I actually saw the episode [Deep Breath] I went back and made a lot of changes,” she tells me. “Because there’s just something so different about seeing Peter Capaldi owning the role onscreen.” Peter Capaldi is joined by Frank Skinner (second right) on a futuristic version of the Orient Express. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC/PA. I recall Patrick Ness’ words where he described writing one of these bite-sized adventures as a fun creative exercise in which you get to put your own stamp on a beloved character but for Black it was different in that she didn’t even know what the beloved character would look like. She laughs and says, “I think it was a nerve-wracking challenge. Mostly because I am so aware of how beloved Doctor Who is and also because I was trying to anticipate what Peter Capaldi would be like. I went off and watched videos of him playing other roles and I was like, “okay, maybe he’ll be a lot like this” but it was a lot of guesswork.” Anyone that might doubt Black’s fan credentials need only read the first chapter. Lights Out takes place on a coffee roasting space station (an idea so barmy it could only used in Doctor Who) that orbits a planet last seen in a Fourth Doctor adventure, featuring a colourful cast of aliens drawn from all eras of the show – look out for Catkind, a Graske and Silurians although,sadly, there was not a Dalek or Cyberman to be seen. One wonders how they would guzzle down their lattes. I ask Black if she had fun including all the references and nods to characters and places from Doctor Who’s past. “Yes, it was,” she enthuses happily. “Again, it was a little intimidating because I knew the BBC were a bit like, “well, you can do this but you can’t do that” but it was really fun picking characters. I would write a bit and then I would say, “where can I put this? What can I steal from the series to try and make it more in that world?” It’s hard because whenever you’re writing science fiction you have to come up with science fictional language and trying to think up actual Doctor Who science fictional language was a little difficult. It’s not something that when you see the show, you watch for.” I ask about Black’s upbringing and her relationship with Doctor Who as a young person. “When I was a kid in the US Doctor Who wasn’t really on but you would occasionally catch an episode. Different stations did marathons,” she says. “I didn’t know about anything that was going on in the world when I was a kid but as a nerd my association with it at first was from seeing other people wearing the big Tom Baker scarfs and knowing that it was this really cool thing. But I don’t think I saw big blocks of it until I was an adult when it came back with Christopher Eccleston and everyone was watching it again. I thought, “right, let’s go and properly do this. Here’s an entry point.” So I sat down and my husband and I just went through all the episodes.” “I think my Doctor is probably David Tennant,” she adds with a fond smile. “Doctor Who rewrites your brain because at first when you watch it you think, “that doesn’t make sense”,” Black says on learning to love the show. “Eventually you stop trying to actually apply science and you give in and you love it. You think, “Everything is great now”.” Black was recently in the UK for a book tour (I’m sad that she didn’t go to Scotland although on the day of the interview neither of us were sure whether Scotland could legitimately included in her UK tour) to promote her joint novel with Cassandra Clare, The Iron Trial, the first of their new Magisterium series. Once I read it I felt that it was ripe for a big screen adaption and I ask Black whether there are any talks of converting Magisterium into a series of movies. “It has been optioned and we’re writing the screenplay for it,” she says. “Well, we wrote it and we’re revising it now but who knows what will happen. Both of us have been through the process of having our books made into movies and we know that nothing’s certain until it’s filming.” Where’s the weirdest place Black has been to? She considers the question for a moment. “I wrote a book called Doll Bones, which was another middle-grade book and when I was writing it I needed a place in the US that made bone china. And there are only two places in the US that make bone china. They made it by grinding down actual cow bones,” she explains. After thirty seconds of groaning and grimacing from myself, Black continues. “It was a plot point,” she explains. “It was a creepy doll book. Three kids find a doll that may have been made out of human bones.” Cue another cry of disgust. “Anyway, to do the research I went to East Liverpool, Ohio, which is a very, very strange little town. But, yeah, I brought my critique partner and we drove through the night and we went through some very scary areas with really high, barbed wire fences. Like much higher than you would think you would need for cows. It was very anti-zombie-like territory; you only need a fence that high for zombies. When we got to East Liverpool we found it really was a strange little town. It was a Saturday, not everything was open. There was a place called Pants Unlimited, which was having a sale, and we went to a museum of bone china. I don’t know if it’s the weirdest place I’ve ever been but it was definitely up there.” Lights Out takes a lot from Charlie Higson’s Ninth Doctor tale, The Beast of Babylon in that they both contain an alien companion. Black claims she “shamelessly ripped off” Higson’s story but this is far from the case. While there’s a slight similarity between the two, Lights Out stands solidly on its own. It’s brisk, enjoyable and nails the characterisation of Peter Capaldi’s Time Lord, finishing off with one killer punch. Every author in this series – formally retitled as 12 Doctors, 12 Stories – I’ve managed to speak to were all asked about the Twelfth Doctor. I put the question to Black: what does she think of Peter Capaldi’s casting? “It’s really interesting because I feel that when you cast someone it really tells you something about the direction the show is going. By bringing in Peter Capaldi it tells us that what we’re going to get in the rest of this season is going to be really different,” she says. “And probably darker because he is someone that can be really sinister. Other Doctors can be sinister, too – David Tennant in the 2007 story, Human Nature and The Family of Blood is deeply sinister – but I really feel that Peter Capaldi is going to bring genuine darkness to the character. I’m excited to see what they’re going to do because when you cast someone like Peter Capaldi, you cast him for a reason. It makes a certain kind of promise.” Die größten Hörerlebnisse nur bei Audible. Erlebe Audible auf dem Smartphone, Tablet, am Computer oder deinem Amazon Echo. Auch offline. Die größten Hörerlebnisse. Entdecke genau das, was du hören willst: Wähle aus 200.000 Titeln und inspirierenden Audible Original Podcasts. Natürlich werbefrei. Genieße dein Hörerlebnis ohne Unterbrechung. Einfach ausprobieren. Teste Audible 30 Tage kostenlos. Du kannst jederzeit kündigen. Hör die Welt mit anderen Augen. Mit Audible Originals und exklusiven Geschichten. Wir können dich kaum erwarten! Entdecke Audible einen Monat lang völlig kostenlos. Genieße jeden Monat ein Hörerlebnis deiner Wahl - und so viele exklusive Audible Original Podcasts, wie du willst. Keine Bindung, keine Frist – du kannst dein Abo jederzeit pausieren oder kündigen. These Minimal "Doctor Who" Book Covers Are Stunning. 1. To celebrate Peter Capaldi’s arrival as The Doctor, Puffin is regenerating its series of Doctor Who novellas with a brand new look. A Big Hand For The Doctor by Eoin Colfer, starring One (William Hartnell). 2. Originally released for the show’s 50th Anniversary last year, the stories have been outfitted with new covers inspired by the unique style of each Doctor. The Nameless City by Michael Scott, starring Two (Patrick Troughton). 3. Written by 12 best-selling authors including Eoin Colfer, Malorie Blackman, and Neil Gaiman, the stories each focus on one incarnation of the Doctor. The Spear of Destiny by Marcus Sedgwick, starring Three (Jon Pertwee). 4. These new editions will be available from October 23rd, in a box set of all 12 paperback stories. The Roots of Evil by Philip Reeve, starring Four (Tom Baker). 5. Excellent work, Puffin. These really are very cool. Tip of the Tongue by Patrick Ness, starring Five (Peter Davidson). Something Borrowed by Richelle Mead, starring Six (Colin Baker). The Ripple Effect by Malorie Blackman, starring Seven (Sylvester McCoy). Spore by Alex Scarrow, starring Eight (Paul McGann). The Beast of Babylon by Charlie Higson, starring Nine (Christopher Eccleston). The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage by Derek Landy, starring Ten (David Tennant). 11. Wait, there's more. Nothing O’Clock by Neil Gaiman, starring Eleven (Matt Smith).