I read a book today Oh Boy

"I've seen The Exorcist  thirteen times, and it gets funnier every time I see it!" So, famously, said Beetlejuice, and I can't argue with him as I don't think I've seen the film of William Peter Blatty's generation-defining horror classic quite that many times. But I've certainly read the book often enough to appreciate the slow descent into Hell of Regan's Mum. But neither film nor book (which came first) was entitled Regan's Mom. The identiity of the titular exorcist seems, at first glance, clear: Lenkester Merrin, a fictionalised version of the archaeologist, phenomenologist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin, who saw his Christ not only as a god-man who once walked among us, but also as a point in the future upon which all Being will converge to partake of divinity. A mystical prefigurement of the Singularity, if you want, combining Hegel's eschaton with a vision of Christianity that is all too seldom allowed to precipitate from dis...

The TARDIS is hurtling towards destruction. The problem is, its fault locator is quiescent because there is no fault in the machinery.  It has to decide how to act; but even a machine as advanced as the TARDIS, although able to make such decisions, is hobbled by its limnited means of proactive communication with the crew. How to alert the Doctor and his companions - his grandaughter Susan, and her teachers Barbara and Ian - to the impending catastrophe? This two-part series was written by David Whittaker and transmitted in 1964, and was possibly rather hastily written because the BBC had opened slots for two more episodes than there were scripts due to Doctor Who 's increasing popularity. Nigel Robinson's novelisation expands somewhat on a very important story which establishes the TARDIS as a character in its own right, which would continue to be expanded upon up to the present day. What shines through to me is that Whittaker had heard of John von Neumann's 1958 lecture o...