Today we have a special guest post from Margaret Stohl, author of the upcoming ya sci-fi novel Icons. Check out this great discussion about Doctor Who and sci-fi in general. Also enter to win an arc of Icons due out May 7.
Why I Love The Doctor
When we talk about immortals, we’re talking about mortality. You know that. When we talk about aliens, we’re talking about humanity. Also pretty clear. When we talk about Doctor Who, we’re talking about his human companions.
Us.
Sometimes it takes a stranger to hold up the mirror.
I love The Doctor because he loves me. Me – and also Rose and Rose’s mom and Donna and Donna’s granddad and Amy Pond and Rory, and their daughter (!) and even Rory’s dad. He loves them and he loves me and he loves humanity.
Plain old affection. It’s hard to come by and hard to write. Harder, even, than a romance. More consistent. Maybe more important.
You’ll never have him all to yourself, and you’ll never be his only companion. But in his heart, the Doctor never leaves you. Not really. Not even when, well, he does.
Margie and her 3-D printer Doctor Who action figures
In seven seasons of Doctors nine, ten and eleven – even when the show majorly reset between the David Tennant / Matt Smith years – they’ve all had at least that in common. Whether it was Nine taking Rose’s hand so often that she seemed like a daughter as much as a potential girlfriend – Ten’s boisterous shout of delight (“Awwww!”) when he saw something particularly human going on – or Eleven’s love of fish fingers and custard – the love affair was with humanity.
The Doctor was all in. He always is. Fascinating. Allons-y. Geronimo.
Every alien universe shows us something new about our own.
For us girls, Star Wars gave us men to fall in love with – including Han Solo, the rapscallion love of my young life, aka I love you, I know.
Star Trek handed us the Manifest Destiny of the Final Frontier, where humanity pushes in perpetuity (or at least, syndication) to know the ever-unknowable alien world.
Dune taught us how deep a Sci-fi universe could be – a true Space Opera on Arrakis – that strange place where Greek tragedy meets the Thornbirds with evil nuns and space-folding worms and wetsuits that recycle your own pee.
Battlestar Galactica showed us how right and wrongless it could be – how morally nuanced, how layered in gray.
But it was the Doctor who told us we were loved. It was the Doctor who took the bullet – the radiation – the pure energy of the time vortex – time and again. It was the Doctor who climbed into hot air balloons, outside airlocks, into the pit of hell itself and back again, in the name of humanity, the earth, and well, his friends.
We are loved, people – if only by a fictional non-human character on the BBC. And that, my friends, is what the Doctor would call a fixed point in time.
And, as everyone knows, you just can’t exterminate that.
Now that you have an understanding of Margie’s love of sci-fi enter to win a ARC of her upcoming sci-fi novel Icons. The giveaway is open to residents of the US and Canada only. The giveaway ends on March 22.
Icons Synopsis:
Your heart beats only with their permission.
Everything changed on The Day. The day the windows shattered. The day the power stopped. The day Dol’s family dropped dead. The day Earth lost a war it didn’t know it was fighting.
Since then, Dol has lived a simple life in the countryside — safe from the shadow of the Icon and its terrifying power. Hiding from the one truth she can’t avoid.
She’s different. She survived. Why?
When Dol and her best friend, Ro, are captured and taken to the Embassy, off the coast of the sprawling metropolis once known as the City of Angels, they find only more questions. While Ro and fellow hostage Tima rage against their captors, Dol finds herself drawn to Lucas, the Ambassador’s privileged son. But the four teens are more alike than they might think, and the timing of their meeting isn’t a coincidence. It’s a conspiracy.
Within the Icon’s reach, Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas discover that their uncontrollable emotions — which they’ve always thought to be their greatest weaknesses — may actually be their greatest strengths.