I’m still a little way from being able to upload issue 31, but in the meantime here are some articles from earlier issues, originally published between 1990 and 2002.

The first editorial is included mainly for historical reasons. Some more light on how The Tides of Time came to be is shed by this report of the Oxford Doctor Who Society’s 1989 Christmas dinner, also by the zine’s first editor, Louise Dennis.  As she remarked a year later, for an idea born in the toast-drinking stage of a student event, the magazine’s survival at all was pretty good going. Also placed online from the first issue is an article by my nineteen-year-old self, looking back on 1980s Doctor Who: From Skonnos to Perivale.

Tides has published a lot of high quality fiction over the years.  A lot of the more contemplative tales came from the pen (metaphorically or otherwise) of Matthew Peacock, who edited the magazine between 1998 and 2002, with one break. Several of the stories written by Mat (and what might be termed his school) have now been added to the site.  Jacob’s Ladder has an academic citation, as Fiona Moore and Alan Stevens noted its depiction of Lytton in their contribution to the book Time And Relative Dissertations In Space. A third Doctor story, One More Time, anticipates the Doctor’s prolonged farewell to his tenth incarnation by a decade. Penalty Phase looks at the relationship between the Doctor and the Master, as well as playing with the boundaries between the fact and fiction of the 1996 TV movie. The limitations of the Doctor’s ability to see the cosmic picture are illustrated in Coda. If you find libraries sinister and have doubts that text, reader and environment can ever be entirely disentangled, then Out of Print might well confirm your fears.

Out of Print is set in Oxford, and Louise’s report on the dinner is very much rooted in the student culture of twenty years ago. Mat’s farewell to the Tides editorship, This Is Not the End, includes reflections on editing a fanzine within Oxford University, as well as observations which fanzine editors everywhere will share. But for something born out of that student ritual, the punt party, see my attempt at Doctor Who/Beatles filking (though I didn’t know that’s what it was called then) from eighteen years ago, Rassilon’s Eternal Life Club Band. As someone to whom I showed the article years later remarked, none of the songs actually scan, but I think they are fun, so print and be damned…