"This is the first academic study of the science fiction television devised and written by Terry Nation, who wrote Dalek stories and other serials for Doctor Who, and created the BBC's 1970s post-apocalyptic space adventure series Blake's 7".--Back cover.

This book may well be the most unusual document to come out of the Viet Nam war. It is the moving story of nine American soldiers and pilots who were captured and held prisoner for five years. It could only be told in their own words; and so the author interviewed each of the nine men, and edited and wove their accounts together to form a single, compelling narrative of war and survival. For three years these Americans were held in a Viet Cong jungle prison, where they struggled against starvation- and themselves. They describe the details of their daily existence as the war ebbed and flowed around them: the rats, the terror of American bombing raids, the sickness. Through juxtaposition of their individual stories we see the subtle, destructive tensions that operate on a group of men in such desperate circumstances. Then they marched up the Ho Chi Minh trail to Hanoi, where their physical ordeal gave way to an agonizing moral dilemma. Should they join the "Peace Committee", a group of POW's protesting the war? Or should they resist their captors by all possible means as ordered by the secret American commander of the Hanoi prison? After three years in the jungle on the edge of survival, each man had to answer the questions: Who am I? What do I believe? These nine men form a cross section of the army we sent to Viet Nam. Their words illuminate not only their individual background and experience, but also the meaning of the war for us all.

After a devastating tsunami destroys all that they have ever known, Mau, an island boy, and Daphne, an aristocratic English girl, together with a small band of refugees, set about rebuilding their community and all the things that are important in their lives.

Terry Nation was one of the most successful, prolific, and celebrated writers for popular television that Britain ever produced. His late 1970s science fiction seriesSurvivorsandBlake's 7have been durable, cult and critical hits, both being remade 30 years later. His most famous creations, theDaleks, ensured, and at times eclipsed, the success ofDoctor Who. Indeed, almost half a century after their first appearance in 1963, new additions toDalekmythology continue to be made, while the word itself has entered the Oxford English Dictionary, passing into the language as the name of the most famous race of aliens in fiction. While his science fiction work remains at the core of his appeal, Nation also had a role to play in the early days of radio and television comedy—as part of the legendary Associated London Scripts, he wrote for Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, and Frankie Howerd—and in the internationally successful adventure series of the 1960s:The Avengers,The Saint,The Persuaders!, and others. This account of his life and contributions will shed light on a fascinating melting pot of ambitious young writers, producers, and performers without whom British culture today would look very different.

A “splendidly entertaining” biography of the British tv writer acclaimed for his invention of a fictional alien race for Doctor Who (Dominic Sandrook, author of State of Emergency—The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974). The Daleks are one of the most iconic and fearsome creations in television history. Since their first appearance in 1963, they have simultaneously fascinated and terrified generations of children, their instant success ensuring, and sometimes eclipsing, that of Doctor Who. They sprang from the imagination of Terry Nation, a failed stand-up comic who became one of the most prolific writers for television that Britain ever produced. Survivors, his vision of a post-apocalyptic England, so haunted audiences in the Seventies that the BBC revived it over thirty years on, and Blake’s 7, constantly rumored for return, endures as a cult sci-fi classic. But it is for his genocidal pepperpots that Nation is most often remembered, and now, more than 50 years after their creation they continue to top the Saturday-night ratings. Yet while the Daleks brought him notoriety and riches, Nation played a much wider role in British broadcasting’s golden age. He wrote for Spike Milligan, Frankie Howerd and an increasingly troubled Tony Hancock, and as one of the key figures behind the adventure series of the Sixties—including The Avengers, The Saint and The Persuaders!—he turned the pulp classics of his boyhood into a major British export. In The Man Who Invented the Daleks, acclaimed cultural historian Alwyn W. Turner, explores the curious and contested origins of Doctor Who’s greatest villains, and sheds light on a strange world of ambitious young writers, producers and performers without whom British culture today would look very different.

Following the National Theatre's success with plays based on novels by well-loved children's writers like Philip Pulman (His Dark Materials), Jamila Gavin (Coram Boy) and Michael Morpurgo (War Horse), the National now stages Mark Ravenhill's exhilarating adaptation of Terry Pratchett's witty and challenging adventure story in a major Christmas production for 2009. A parallel world, 1860. Two teenagers thrown together by a tsunami that has destroyed Mau's village and left Daphne shipwrecked on his South Pacific island, thousands of miles from home. One wears next to nothing, the other a long white dress; neither speaks the other's language; somehow they must learn to survive. As starving refugees gather, Daphne delivers a baby, milks a pig, brews beer and does battle with a mutineer. Mau fights cannibal Raiders, discovers the world is round and questions the reality of his tribe's fiercely patriarchal gods. Together they come of age, overseen by a foul-mouthed parrot, as they discard old doctrine to forge a new Nation.

America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them. From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.