What is important to me, ultimately, is that Moffat’s paradigm of time travel – the idea that time can be rewritten as long as it can always look the way it originally seemed from an earlier perspective – radically subverts the ontological imperialism of the Doctor’s colonial gaze. Smith’s Doctor is not the all-knowing liberal-humanist subject of masterfully enlightened reason. He does not know all the answers, and sometimes his companions (and his wife) know much more about things than he does, and he must learn to trust them and regard them as equals (rather than simply guiding them around like pets). He joins families and forms meaningful creative bonds rather than remaining aloof and detached. He stays for Christmas. And, most importantly, he can be wrong, and he can change his mind. In a milieu where the Doctor can change his mind, right and wrong are no longer simply objective truths, and it seems as though the Doctor has thus matured from a fantasy figure of British imperial nostalgia into something else. What exactly he has now become can still be up for debate – and stories that come later may retroactively transform what he has been the entire time; this, to me, is the beauty of what Moffat accomplishes with the series.

Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of 'Blade Runner'. Revised edition. London: Gollancz, 2007. xix+588pp. £16.99 (hbk).Jason P. Vest, Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies. London: Praeger, 2007. xviii+223pp. £29.95 (hbk).Brian J. Robb, Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick on Film. London: Titan, 2006. 317pp. £16.99 (pbk).As John Anderton stands 'in front of a cracked mirror' (Dick Minority 85), he hears the radio blaring from another room. It's an announcement that 'the prophylactic pre-detection of criminals through the ingenious use of mutant precogs' (84) - otherwise known as the 'Precrime system' - has identified the fugitive Anderton as a (probable) murderer. The certainty of the mutants' prediction is that a computer systematically compares and correlates their visions. Since 'unanimity of all three precogs is a hoped-for but seldom-achieved phenomena', the computer collates the opinion of the majority pair and produces 'a minority report of some slight variation, usually with reference to time and place, of the third mutant' (85).In Anderton's case, the minority report is a 'misphased' (89) or meta-vision, a reflection, as through a cracked mirror, of the majority report; this minority report changes the future, since it takes into account the fact that Anderton is notified by the original report of the pending murder: 'a new time-path had been created' rendering the original majority report 'obsolete' (88). But so too does the minority report create another (101), and Anderton eventually manifests his innocence by himself issuing another report - choosing to kill the story's villain, someone who sought to enslave the entire planet Earth. As a punishment (or reward, depending on one's view), Anderton is exiled to the off-world colonies, where his ignominy (or his heroism) will be neither vilified nor praised - just utterly forgotten.Taken from the story 'The Minority Report' (1956), here is an indirect allegory of the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's fiction by industrial cinema. An original text, all the more significant because it captures a minority view, a heterogeneous vision of the future, is rendered obsolete, then refracted as through a cracked mirror, which gives rise to a never-ending spiral of dissenting reviews and interpretations, where that series of discursive disputes sends the prophetic source into exile (or benign neglect, depending on one's view). Dick's original text becomes, ironically, the minority report that disputes the Hollywood adaptation, but it is exiled, by neglect, into heroic ignominy or ignominious heroism. Complications, convolutions and conditional parentheticals abound. Very phildickian, that.1Ever since the appearance of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (US/Singapore 1982), whose genetic ancestor is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Hollywood has shown considerable interest in mining Dick's work for estranging and estranged ideas, which it then immediately subordinates to the system of homogenisation that still marks the Hollywood ideal.2 This tendency is revealed, perfectly I think, in the DVD extra 'Minority Report from Story to Screen'. That story isn't Dick's 'The Minority Report' but instead the story of how Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg came to work together, their mutual enthusiasm based in mutual respect: two Hollywood giants, so to speak, cranking 888, the Penfield Mood Organ's number for 'the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on' (Dick Androids 4).There are now nine films from Dick's work - Blade Runner, Total Recall (Verhoeven US 1990), Confessions d'un Barjo (Boivin France 1992), Screamers (Duguay Canada/US/Japan 1996), Impostor (Fleder US 2002), Minority Report (Spielberg US 2002), Paycheck (Woo US/Canada 2003), A Scanner Darkly (Linklater US 2006) and Next (Tamahori US 2007). Scott's film alone has had almost as many manifestations - a US theatrical release, an international release, a circulating 'working cut', a pan-and-scan version for broadcast TV and video cassette, a Criterion analogue laser disc (wide-screen, but with the bottom ten per cent of the image cropped), a so-called 'Director's cut', an uncirculated forty-seven-minute remix by Charles de Lauzirika and a final cut, let's sincerely hope, called The Final Cut (2007), which ran in limited release before being embalmed with others for the 2007 DVD packages. …

No Maps for These Territories (Mark Neale UK 2000). Reel23. PAL Region Free.[euro]24.99. Available from www.reel23.com.Neil EasterbrookA non-diegetic voice asks a question. William Gibson answers from the seat of a late model sedan, moving at speed. We are inside the cab, two tiny 'lipstick' cameras looking backward from the front toward the rear windows. We see cars passing and passed. Roadway, overpasses, underpasses. Distant skyscrapers, modern cities. Warehouses, grain elevators. Street scenes and curbs, post-boxes and pedestrians. Mostly day, some night. The colours washed, the light unbalanced, the sound imperfect. Inside the cab. The cigarettes. The wandering elliptical answers, the conversational imbrications and repetitions. The voice asks another question. Gibson gives another answer. The earlier equivocation now clarified, the earlier reductive aside now developed with subtlety. Occasionally we see other human beings. In almost every scene, Gibson wears his safety belt, but no one wears mirrorshades.No Maps for these Territories is Mark Neale's documentary with, though not really of, William Gibson. Filmed in 1999-the same moment as the publication of All Tomorrow's Parties, the final volume of Gibson's Bridge triptych-the film was released in 2001, two years before the first of Gibson's 'non-sf sf' novels, Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007). The discussion is pre-post-9/11, but remains remarkably similar to the kind of comments and remarks in interviews given in his last two book tours: we have arrived at a cusp of change; we do not know what precisely it is or what it will bring; it is outside our control to legislate or completely understand; we are already posthuman, the co-opted prosthetic products of interpenetrating technologies; and so forth. Calling it 'My Dinner with Andre in a car', Neale gives Gibson centre stage to answer at his leisure and at length. Almost the entire film is Gibson talking, though in some short portions we hear from Bruce Sterling, interviewed in an Austin cafe. For very brief moments, the novelist Jack Womack rides along and contributes, and there are also passing quips from U2's Bono and The Edge. A few sections of the film are given to passages of the final Bridge book, and The Edge reads 'Chiba City Blues', the opening section of Neuromancer (1984). Much of the discussion is underscored by a music track by tomandandy, with additional music from Bono, The Edge, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and others.What is exciting about No Maps is not precisely what Gibson says, but to be enclosed in the Gibson box for almost ninety minutes. He discusses his current thinking on technology in a 'post-geographical' present; how he came to write Neuromancer and what the novel still means (or does not) to him; recreational drugs, and why he does not use them (anymore); religion; history; his biography, especially his emotional and psychological development; the 'end stage' of capitalism; the very mystery of being human:I think we live in an incomprehensible present, and what I'm actually trying to do is illuminate the moment-and make the moment accessible. I'm not even trying to explain the moment-I'm just trying to make it accessible.Recreational drugs are essentially a wank. And a wank is ok, but you really should know it's just a wank.More real is always better.I think of religions as franchise operations, sort of like chicken franchises. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?Many of the questions are about his writing, but a surprising number are the sort that Oprah might ask-'What is happiness to you?' And also surprisingly,they elicit neither contempt nor denial but thoughtful, heartfelt, witty replies, postmodern irony and naive sentimentality mixed in almost equal measure.This Gibson is not the hyperbolic speed demon of Neuromancer, but the more reflective and wry Gibson of the most recent novels. In his quiet, understated and elliptically elegant way, Gibson remains a remarkable writer. …

Pattern Recognition, Gibson's most recent novel, is purportedly set in "the present," and so purportedly marks a significant break both in his own work and in the way sf is conceived. The book's treatment of the concepts of past, present, and future, however, is inherently ambivalent-that is to say, simultaneously oriented toward several possible alternative positions, some of them mutually exclusive. To clarify this ambivalence, this article engages notions of alternative history, counterfactual conditionals, and historicism to show that Gibson's novel demonstrates a fundamental fact about fictional discourse: that it necessarily forms an "alternative present" of the readerly now.