Cluttered Like My Head

 The Chicago Conversion is an interesting V book. The first two either cover the original series or run parallel to it. The third one features the TV cast running around in an attempt to capture Diana. This is effectively the first one that falls in that gap between the mini-series and the original series, and chooses to fix any problems with continuity by setting itself in a completely different locale, with a completely different cast.  This has strengths and weaknesses. A strength is obviously that there is less chance of it contradicting the story that we see in other media, but a weakness is that the cast from the TV show is already well defined, and the book has to introduce a cast from scratch. I'm guessing that they were also written at pace, and so we tend to see a selection of common tropes appearing in the books. In this one, for instance, we have a hero called Sam Walker, an athletic Vietnam vet, a bit rough around the edges, a reluctant fighter driven by the loss ...

From my recall, book 3 of the series, "The Pursuit of Diana" by Allen Wold came out around the same time as the weekly TV show - I could be wrong (Amazon lists a publication date of June 1985) By the time the weekly show made it to the UK, the wheels had pretty clearly fallen off of the wagon, and instead of it being a high profile weekly show, it was shunted to late night on some ITV regions - not all of them even carried it.  But NEL, in the wake of Pinnacle in the US ploughed ahead, with a book showing how Diana was captured at the close of the two mini-series.  Ostensibly, this closes a gap between those series and the weekly show, which opened a year later with Diana on the stand for 'Crimes against Humanity'.  In reality, its really a lot of set pieces where the resistance capture Diana, then they come up against some humans who have been converted, Diana escapes, they capture her again, they end up on a mother ship, they need to fix the mother ship, they fight ...

 The second V book was East Coast Crisis, a chunky title set (as the title says) in New York rather than the Californa locale loved by television production companies at the time.  This one says that it was published in September 1984 in the US (by Pinnacle) and then April 1985 in the UK (by NEL)  A co-write between Ann Crispin and Howard Weinstein, at 300 pages, this is the chunks of the spin-off books, and runs simultaneously with the events of the original two mini-series and thus the original book.  It's fair to say therefore that there's little opportunity for surprise. We see a lot of plot points from the original series repeated, only with a New York twist. The visitors are our friends / they're converting people / what's happening to scientists etc etc.  I think its also true to suggest that the characters in this book probably suffer in comparison with the ones from the TV show - we can all visualise Mike Donovan and Juliet Parrish in our heads because ...

  I read the recent biography of REM, "The Name of this band is REM" by Peter Ames Carlin. I've read a lot of books about the band in the past, but much as my interest in the band dwindled towards the end of their career, so did the biography industry, and most of the books stop at their peak rather than afterwards. This book carries on to the breakup of the band, and has been well reviewed over the past year or so, and with my interest in the band renewed following the Shannon / Narducy Fables tour in 2025, I put it on my Christmas list and have devoured it since then. First things first - the band aren't interviewed for the book, so any words from them are from contemporary interviews or as told by other people. It's at its strongest in those early years - capturing the contradiction between a band that was willing to put the hours and the legwork into becoming a great band, and one that didn't want to appear in its videos and have decipherable lyrics to sin...

  Back in 1984, a blockbuster US sci-fi show ran over 5 nights and gripped the nation, It was a short-lived phenomenon,  We didn't really know it at the time, but the original V mini-series was a 2 parter which aired in the US in 1983. It was a big success so the network commissioned a follow-uo but differences of opinion with the shows creator saw him depart and a three parter "V: The Final Battle" which saw the show veer away from being a parable about World War 2 towards standard television soap-opera, with lasers.  The 5 episodes were shown across a Monday-Friday in July 1984 on ITV and they were a huge success. Over in the US a weekly series had been commissioned, but it wasn't and although it dribbled into the ITV regions, it was never networked. The time for V had passed.  But - there were spin-offs. DC Comics started releasing a monthly comic to tie in with the weekly show. When that ground to a halt, the comic continued, their characters in stasis waiting fo...