It’s thanks to the Hand of Omega that I’m editing SciFiNow...
The link between the super-powerful, world-toppling Time Lord doohicky from 1988’s Remembrance Of The Daleks, and my career as an opinionated keyboard basher isn’t as tenuous as you might think.
One of my earliest memories is of watching the cliffhanger to Episode One, in which a Dalek ascends the stairs to close in on a cowering Seventh Doctor with my dad, whose own enthusiasm for sci-fi began with the Journey Into Space radio serial of the F
ifties.
That was the start of a lengthy obsession that has yet to abate, but it also sparked off my enthusiasm for publishing. Fairly soon after that moment of almost religious awakening over the anxious face of Sylvester McCoy (don’t picture that), I received my first fanzine.
This was the result of a recent remarriage, an event not unlike the opening of a booster pack and laying out the random pick and mix of new cousins, aunts, uncles and uncategorisables. In this pack was the foil-plated, hand-numbered card of your dreams, the Penny Black of the New Family CCG. My cousin Paul had just returned home to Grimsby after university, where, as far as I was concerned, he’d obviously enjoyed immense popularity as king of the world with his own Doctor Who fanzine, the roughly photocopied Hand of Omega. I vividly remember my mum driving over to his parents with me in tow, and him slowly descending the stares to nonchalantly hand me the only two issues he had remaining.
It was without doubt the most exciting thing I had ever experienced; I think I actually boasted about this at school. I wasn’t popular at school, but I’m not sure in retrospect if there’s a correlation.
I wanted to be that awesome. I didn’t understand the concept of a fanzine, but like a loveable alien attempting to mimic mankind, I did a damn good impression of it. I produced my own zine, one of the features pasted directly from his – an interview with the chap who played Sutekh in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ – a couple of articles photocopied directly from Doctor Who Magazine, and the cover was my own felt tip rendering of the cover for the Target tie-in of Doctor Who and The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
I stapled together about a dozen copies and sold them in the school playground, shifting about three over dinnertime.
Plagiarism aside, it was an auspicious start.
SciFiNow issue #54 is out now, featuring Neil Gaiman talking extensively about ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, his childhood fear of the Fourth Doctor and bringing Sandman to the small screen. Check it out at www.scifinow.co.uk
