The Mind Robber was, for decades, Doctor Who’s most fantastical adventure, but recently it became one of its most science-fictionally prescient, which is a rather fascinating shift on where it sits in the show’s subgenres. Once it was all fairy tale shenanigans, now it’s a furious argument against AI slop, a theme that could not have been in the writer’s mind (almost certainly…I could come up with some outlandish possibilities, but I digress…) and yet is now not only visible, but remarkably nuanced.
This idea of What The Mind Robber Is Now About is something I’ve thought about for a while, and I had the chance to write about it for Uncanny Magazine’s 71st issue earlier this year.
And in a rather depressing turn of irony, I found out when I was getting the link for this post, that my anti-LLM essay has been run through an LLM to be “rewritten” and posted to another site. I both laughed and cried. This was the first time I’ve been plagiarised, and it hurt a lot more than I imagined it would. So, yes, that was fun.
But writing the essay itself was a joy, and much thanks to Uncanny for letting me explore what, at first glance, looks like a rather silly idea, but in reality is an unexpectedly intriguing new angle to take a look at one of the show’s great stories.
It’s free to read (along with many other fine essays, fiction, and poems!) at the Uncanny website.
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