Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [1]
But with Chadbourn at the helm you know you are in a safe pair of hands. His expertise in storytelling is immediately apparent in the way he skilfully marshals an incredible amount of technical and geographical information without the reader being distracted for a moment. It's an enviable skill, and perhaps one honed through his several years of experience as a journalist before he became a successful novelist. Add that to his deftness in building an ominous sense of dread, delivered in precise increments, and the blend of fear and danger is perfectly pitched for the Doctor Who aficionado.
The characterisation of the Doctor is superb. He moves through the mystery and danger of Haight-Ashbury with the distracted air of a professor puzzled by a mathematical formula. But all the time he is fully aware of the menace, the very real threat to himself and his companions. Sometimes the Doctor appears to hover above events, only touched at a tangent, like Tom Bombadil in The Lord of The Rings. His superiority is evident, but unlike Tolkien's creation, the Doctor's humanity restores his vulnerability and he is every bit as involved in the mystery as its intriguing narrator.
The key to Mark Chadbourn's writing is his understanding of mystery. He knows how the unknown grips us and he knows why. He takes a craftsman's pleasure in carefully assembling the elements, but more than that he understands what lies behind all mysteries, the quest for solution, and perhaps this is why the spirit of Doctor Who sits perfectly in HaightAshbury's social experiment – a quest in its own right.
Mark Chadbourn's Wonderland will take you there also. A world of love and drugs and danger and horror. So settle back, expand your mind, and prepare to be entertained.
Graham Joyce October 2002
Sometimes I dream of San Francisco. The pearly mist rolling up from the bay in a glistening wall, the streets as still and quiet as childhood. Those days will be with me forever, haunting my waking hours, troubling my sleep. Time doesn't dull the memory. Time is meaningless. I lived it then, and I live it now, always. And on every occasion I wake up crying...
The first time I saw the Doctor, sunlight limned him like an angel come down to earth. He strode out of the throng surging through HaightAshbury, all the questors and no-hopers, the dreamers and the trippers and the lost, and he walked into my life and changed everything. At the time he didn't look out of place at all. Only now can I see how unique he was.
It was January 1967. The Summer of Love was just around the corner, and across America battle-lines were already being drawn. Tension was in the air, hard beneath the smoky aroma of grass that brought dreams of hope and peace and love.
For a girl from the conservative suburbs of Dallas, San Francisco at that time was like another dimension, filled with alien beings, where every sight and sound and smell was beyond real. And Haight-Ashbury was the capital city of this weird world, six blocks of pure strangeness straddling the Golden Gate Park Panhandle. White Rabbits and Mad
Hatters, all down there, in Wonderland. I loved it.
Even with hindsight it's hard to comprehend the madness that was Haight-Ashbury. For that brief period it seemed like every oddball in America was either living there or on their way. In 1965 it had just 15,000 residents. By the summer of 1967, that figure had surged to 100,000, all crammed on top of each other, all searching for something. Barely a day went by without some protest rally or a local band playing a free concert in the Panhandle. And those local bands – Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Santana, the Quicksilver Messenger Service... Music never moved me again like it did at that time, in that