However you fall on this story, whether you see it as abhorrent or just a product of its time, Smith is ready to challenge your opinions.
The Black Archive #58 is slowly picking up some critical steam, with early adopters giving a few positive comments on Twitter and a sprinkling of ratings. There have also been a couple of very positive reviews in some online magazine - I was particularly pleased with Graham Williamson remarking “One of the triumphs of Dale Smith’s Black Archive entry on this story is that it comprehensively demolishes the ‘acceptable in the seventies’ myth”, as this gave me some hope that the book was doing the things I hoped it would before I’d even written a word.
Smith has created a book which any future work on Talons will have to reckon with
It’s not a review as such, but the excellent Doctor Who Literature podcast recently did an episode on The Talons of Weng-Chiang novelisation, and (at around the 45 minute mark) Kate Orman talks about the Black Archive. Pleasingly she describes my favourite point I found during my research as “really interesting”. That makes the podcast great for me, but even if you aren’t me it is well worth a listen, and I wish it had existed when I was writing the book. Nicholas Whyte also praised the book, calling it “one of the best such analyses I’ve read by a white guy, addressing a largely white audience”, which is exactly what I was aiming to do. Fellow Black Archive scribe Tom Marshall also gave a delightfully pithy description of the book during his AMA on Reddit, which I’ve reproduced below.
I had huge fears about this one, given the story/subject matter and that it’s by a white guy, but to my great surprise it goes in hard. Essentially flat out says “fucking idiots, look at the history of oppression, all white people are fucking racist in unconscious bias ways they need to learn to recognise, grow the fuck up about this story”.