The story, "The Last Doctor," is the first of what Cornell's calling his 12 Blogs of Christmas, a series of blog posts about "the three worlds I move in: science fiction; comics and Doctor Who." He's calling this story fan fiction, but consider the fan in question was responsible for the amazing S3 double bill of "Human Nature"/"The Family Of Blood", you can take that with a grain of salt.

As part of the series of special posts, Cornell will be answering all questions addressed to his Twitter account between 10am and 10pm BST tomorrow. Get up early and ask him who we have to threaten to get Captain Britain and M13 back at Marvel Comics. (Update: He's moved it to Wednesday.)

The 12 Blogs of Christmas: One. A Doctor Who Story for Christmas [Paul Cornell]

To create When It Changed, editor Geoff Ryman (author of the multiple award-winning novel Air), set up science fiction authors with scientists, and had them develop stories together. The awesome list of contributors includes Paul Cornell, Justin Robson, Liz Williams, Kit Reed, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod and Ryman himself. According to the publisher's Facebook page:

When It Changed is an attempt to put authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-introduce research ideas with literary concerns, and to re-forge the alloy that once made SF great. Composed collaboratively – through a series of visits and conversations between leading authors and practicing scientists – it offers fictionalised glimpses into the far corners of current research fields, be they in nanotechnology, invertebrate physiology, particle physics, or software archaeology. From Planck's Length (the smallest indivisible distance) to Plankton (potential saviours of the Earth's ecosystem), from virtual encounters between Witgenstein and Turing, to future civilisations torn asunder by different readings of the Standard Model, together these stories represent a literary 'experiment' in the true sense of the word, and endeavour to isolate a whole new strain of the SF bug.

Ryman told the news department at Manchester University, where he's based at the University's Center for New Writing:

We wanted to go out and locate what is fresh and new in the sciences, and gives writers a chance to work with researchers to come up with different, contemporary themes. When it Changed actively extends the scientific repertoire of fiction — all fiction, because we have mainstream writers as well. But it gave some of the best SF writers I know of a chance to work closely with a scientist. Some of the ideas they've come up with are mind-blowing ... round the world particle colliders, virtual research, or suits that heal their wearers. And the scientists get to comment or explain.

The book's launch party is tomorrow, Oct. 24, in Manchester, UK. We can't wait to see a copy! Too bad it's not out in the U.S. until April 1 next year.

The new series, announced in yesterday's LA Times, takes the character back in more ways than one. Not only does artist Tom Raney get to bring the character's look back to her classic 1970s look - unsurprisingly, the same one the character sports in Iron Man 2 - but Cornell also will be revisiting the Widow's past to remake her into something much closer than her namesake, as he told Comic Book Resources:

The plot connects back to all these different times in her life, as she tries to save everyone she ever kissed from something deadly. A real Black Widow's curse... She's not defined by the men in her past. They all, to some extent, are defined by her, and now possibly fatally. It's about the past coming after Natalia seeking revenge, and the present not being able to do a thing about it. So she's on her own. And that's fine, because she's never seen herself as being anything else.

Black Widow: Year One launches in November.

FIRST LOOK: 'Black Widow: Year One' [LA Times]

Unsurprisingly, none of the writers involved - Paul Cornell, Iain (M.) Banks, Ken MacLeod and Ian Watson - feel constrained by real-world science, but all acknowledge that it's worth being somewhat aware of what's happening. Cornell sees it as a war between factions within the SF community... for good reason:

The mundane movement is challenging writers to drop ideas that once promised to be scientific ones, but are now considered as fantasy - faster than light travel, telepathy etc - and to concentrate on the problems of the human race being confined to an Earth it is using up. But this is as much an artistic movement as an ethical one. The existence of such a movement, though, suggests that science fiction feels a sense of mission. Unlike its cousin, fantasy, it wants to be talking about the real world in ways other than metaphorical.

Watson has problems with the mundane school of thought:

A recent, undoubtedly short-lived school of thought, mundane science fiction, wishes to stick to the facts and eschew any flights of fancy such as starships or aliens. How very boring of them, say I. What, no zany thought experiments? Zaniness is an important part of science fiction, as well as operating within a certain framework of rationality.

Banks has the best response, however:

My new book is a mainstream novel that borrows science fiction tropes. It plays with the idea that there are an infinite number of different worlds. So it's using speculative hard science. And it's important to the book that there's a degree of respectability about the idea of the multiverse, or the many-worlds theory. But in my science fiction, I merrily break as many laws as I can get my hands on. Especially faster than light travel - I have my starships going at unfeasibly high speeds. Sometimes I pay no attention whatsoever to what's possible and realistic. It really depends on the novel.

How sci-fi moves with the times [BBC News]

Firstly, let's get Marvel and DC out of the way; the former is pushing Secret Invasion pretty hard this week, with four collections from the storyline coming out (Frontline, Incredible Hercules, Thunderbolts and the definite pick of the bunch, Captain Britain and MI-13, written by Doctor Who's Paul Cornell and highly recommended). DC, meanwhile, offers the final Diana Prince retro Wonder Woman collection, as well as the somewhat pricey ($295) Rorschach Prop Gun and Mask Set, in case you want to pretend to be a crazy guy who eats too many beans.

Of course, if Watchmen isn't your 2009 movie of choice, IDW would like to have a word... Especially this week, when they're releasing the first collection of their alternate world Transformers epic All Hail Megatron and the first issue of the self-explanatory GI Joe: Origins series.

If you'd rather get a jump on the movies of tomorrow, however, perhaps you should take a look at The Zombies That Ate The World, the undead satire from French publisher Les Humanoids, or perhaps Andrea Atoms, the debut of a new Flash Gordon-esque female space hero. You can even catch up on indie superhero soap Dynamo 5 with a specially-priced "zero issue" to fill in all the gaps in your knowledge.

Pick of the week, though, is The Great Unknown, a series we've previously covered, and one that simply doesn't disappoint: What if someone really was taking the best ideas out of your head? This new series will answer that question... and teach you new reasons to be paranoid in the process.

Remember, your local comic store can always be found, of course, via the Comic Shop Locator Service, but this week more than many offers the chance to meet the new. Check the complete list of this week's new comic releases if you don't believe me.

About his story, Cornell writes:

Major John Hamilton serves with the 4th Dragoon Regiment of the British army in a present day rather unlike our own. Because of a single difference in the timeline that I haven't yet revealed, the empires of Europe remain in place, and have indeed spread out to compete in the colonisation of the solar system, and the Great Game espionage cold war between them continues on many fronts. Indeed, the concept of a great balance to be kept has seeped into the fabric of these civilisations in all sorts of ways. Hamilton is often called upon to work out of uniform, as what we'd these days call an intelligence officer, intervening in the plans of rival empires.

Hamilton himself is damaged, vulnerable, but also terse, repressed and honourable, though his concept of honour is shaped by his society. He can be horribly dangerous to those who get in the way of his duty, but he feels a need to be tender with innocents. He's not cruel in everyday life, but he can be something of a sadist when his mission and the nature of his enemy gives him leave to be. Indeed, he lets himself enjoy those moments of release. His relationships with women are complicated and rare. I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Ian Fleming's Bond novels (not the movies) but I'm trying to stay away from pastiche, and instead hope to explore the same debates about masculinity and Britishness he did, while perhaps coming to different conclusions. I also hope this is serious SF in all sorts of ways, and that the politics and tactics make them genuine espionage stories too, but that they're also, well, fun!

You can read the story online this afternoon, and then you'll want to scarf down the whole amazing short story collection, which includes new stories from Cory Doctorow, Pat Cadigan, Paolo Bacigalupi, and more.

Catherine Drewe, by Paul Cornell [via Pyr]

In your first Doctor Who New Adventures novel, Timewyrm: Revelation, the Doctor spends a lot of time confronting all the people who have died on his watch. Do you think the similar moment in the latest Who season finale was a tribute to that book?

Apart from Russell never doing homages (because there's nothing worse than a homage, really, oh, wait, a pastiche, that's worse, and yes, I've done loads of them, but then I've lied and stolen too), and the fact that I'm not at all clear that's what happened, and... you know, that never occured to me. I think every now and then I see bits of the New Adventures popping up in the new show (in many ways the new show *is* the New Adventures by other means) but I can't quite get my head round that one. Usually it comes down to Russell having digested every approach and theme of Doctor Who in all its forms, and using it as he sees fit, and having not only the right but the duty to do that, as the show has always done. Another one of those mainstream show tropes which can come as a shock to those of us who grew up in the niche.

In your "Scream Of The Shalka" webcast, you showed a bitter older version of the Doctor, who's full of self-loathing and tired of saving the universe. I asked Steven Moffat about it, and he said we'd never see that version of the Doctor on TV. Do you think he's right?

Yes, I think he's hugely right. That's pretty obvious, isn't it? None of the onscreen Doctors have been sad for more than ten minutes before something fun comes along. And I'm really tired with the idea that 'dark' is adult. If anything, as an adult I've come to cherish really stupid comedy as possibly the highest achivement of mankind.

Because it's the thing we do that most points away from death. I'm increasingly unafraid to say that 'A Matter of Life and Death' has been replaced as my favourite movie of all time by 'One of our Dinosaurs is Missing'. Dum dum dum dum de de dum de dum dum! Just humming the theme tune.

Last year, you adapted your own novel, Human Nature, into a two-part storyline, "Human Nature/Family Of Blood." I was really struck by a couple of differences. First, having Martha instead of Benny forced you to talk about race and class in a way that the book version totally avoided. Was this a bonus, as far as you were concerned?

Very much so. We just touch upon it, and the audience get it, and then we move on. But it makes it an ordeal for Martha in a whole different way than it was for Benny, who was grieving. It's Martha's big chance to be courageous and sensible and fab, and sets up loads of what happened with her later.

And secondly, in the book version, the Doctor doesn't know the Aubertides are after him. He just wants to be human, so he can feel human emotions and lay down his burden for a while. In the TV show, he becomes human to escape the Family without hurting them, which turns out to be a really, really bad decision given how many people die as a result.

Many many people die because the Family kill them. It's their fault. And it's really only a tiny mischance that stops the Doctor's plan from working. And if he hadn't done that, they'd have chased him across the universe, killing people everywhere they landed.

Do you feel like we lost something because the Doctor no longer had this grand motivation for becoming human? Also, why would he go to such lengths in this one instance to avoid hurting his enemies when he's perfectly happy to hurt his enemies in other situations?

Not something that could have been done on mainstream TV. The motivation is never actually spelled out in the book, so that's a best guess, really. I loved being obscure then. Now I can see how much that was the cowardly choice.

So what are you working on now that you're most excited by?

At the moment, I'm most excited by the fact that I've got a story in all three continuing original SF short story anthologies (non-themed, that is). It's a complicated boast, but I like it. Two of the stories are in a series, the "Jonathan Hamilton" stories, which are in the style of Ian Fleming (the books, not the movies) and are vicious espionage tales set in a world where... well, I know what the difference to history is, but I haven't told the audience entirely yet. At any rate, the 'great game' of political balance in Europe continues, and the great European nations have colonised the solar system, while continuing a delicate cold war against each other.

Those two stories, 'Catherine Drewe' and 'One of our Bastards is Missing' are in Fast Forward 2 from Pyr and the Solaris Book of New SF 3, respectively. The other story, 'Michael Laurits is: DROWNING' is in the second Eclipse collection, which is I think is going to be launched at Calgary this year. I love SF short stories, and I'm hoping to get into doing more.

The other great fun thing is the radio play, an adaptation of Iain Banks' "The State of the Art" for BBC Radio 4, which should go out early next year. We've recorded it, with Sir Antony Sher as the Ship (he's exactly what you expect one of Banks' ships to sound like), Patterson Joseph (who's probably best known for Neverwhere) as Linter, and Nina Sosanya as Sma, and the BBC production job is terrific. I can write 'we feel the presence of the Ship floating beside the car' and they can actually do that! Iain's approved the script. I really want to do some more SF for this lot. Good people.

So what's going on with the characters you introduced in your Wisdom miniseries for Marvel Comics, which came out last year? Are we going to see more of what the Skrull Beatles were up to in the 1970s, during that long waking nightmare that was the Beatles' solo careers?

Unfortunately, they're now the ex-Skrull Beatles, so we'll never learn if they managed to become the Skrull Monkees as they elected to at the end of Wisdom. I would have liked to have seen that.

I know you wrote one episode of Primeval in season two. How involved are you in the upcoming third season?

Not at all.

Meanwhile, you're also writing a Captain Britain comic for Marvel. Are you going to add any more classic characters, now that Black Knight and Blade are both on the team?

Union Jack is popping up in issue five, and we'll continue to cameo British Marvel characters as and when. Working with editor Nick Lowe and artist Leonard Kirk has been a bit of a dream, really. We all egg each other on, pushing to make the best possible book, to the point where we get quite demented about the little details. It's the exact opposite of "Aww, who cares?" and it's great to do that every four weeks, to be involved in that sort of team energy.

Was it better or worse to start the comic off with a Secret Invasion crossover?

Oh, better, of course! All those lovely sales! Now we have to keep them! And it gave us a huge war movie opening, a thread which we'll continue. What we are is this widescreen 'espionage/superheroes vs. the supernatural' book, which gives us lots of genres to play with. In issue six, for example, a demon arrives in Birmingham with a very specific agenda, takes over a tower block, and our heroes pile in, with the military onside. It's a bit like a UNIT story in Doctor Who. Only then our heroes discover, of course, that the enemy was rather ready for them. And that the enemy (who's called, ahem, Plokta, in homage to the British SF fanzine) talks like the actor Leslie Phillips. That's what we'll be doing with this book.

People have been comparing your miniseries Fantastic Four: True Story to Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels. Is this an intentional homage?

You can't really avoid that if you're doing metafiction, which is why I give Jasper a namecheck in the first issue, but we also nod to Bill Willingham (in issue two), Neil Gaiman and the Doctor Who story 'The Mind Robber', all of which trod this ground previously.

How do you think it's different having the Fantastic Four enter the world of fiction, versus Roberto Aguirre Sacasa's comics where he introduced himself as a character who was chronicling the FF's adventures? Why do the FF lend themselves to metafiction so readily?

I think because, if you're talking Marvel, they're the founding group, the first family, so you want to work with them. Also, they have a history of exploring other worlds, and that suits metafiction. It's been great to use those voices, which I grew up with (my Mum is very pleased I'm writing for "Mr. Stretchy Man") to comment on the worlds of fiction. And there is, of course, an ancient Marvel villain behind the whole thing.

So there we go — alongside three TV projects of my own that I can't really talk about yet, and a new novel I'm in the middle of, that's everything I'm up to.

It turns out you can make a lot of changes in history without actually derailing it, claimed Flint and Cornell. Go back in time and step on a butterfly, and that probably just means there's one fewer butterflies around in the past. Even if you kill Hitler before he rises to power, Germany probably still becomes a fascist country — although it's debatable whether the Holocaust would have happened.

Flint said his 1632 series of books was his attempt to refute the "great man theory" of history. He's interested in periods of history where huge historical forces are at work, and he chose the early 17th century because of the flowering of democracy and widespread literacy.

At one point, Hemry and Cornell debated whether it would have made much difference if George Washington hadn't been around. The colonies might have broken off from England sooner or later, Cornell said, but Hemry insisted Washington's decision to give up control of the army, and later to step down as president after two terms, helped keep America from becoming too autocratic. That kind of forebearance is rare in history, he said.

So why World War II and the Civil War? It's because most Americans are "ahistorical" and are only dimly aware of most things that happened more than 20 years ago, said Scalzi. There are only a handful of historical periods that stick in people's minds and hold their interest. Neal Stephenson was able to focus on a different period in his Baroque Cycle, only because he had gained so much goodwill with The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon.

Scalzi wanted to do a different approach to changing history, in which someone treats history like a disease state, and tries to "vaccinate against Hitler," making lots and lots of little incremental changes here and there, so Hitler either isn't born or doesn't become a dictator. But when he pitched this to his editors, he got a muted response because a story about people making subtle changes in history didn't sound like good drama. (Which is too bad, because I'm actually prety fascinated with that idea.)

Actually, it's really a relatively quiet book outside of the major publishers, with Chopper Zombie - which we've previously written about here - the only new indie book of interest coming out. The Chopper in question was on show at San Diego, freaking small children out while simultaneously getting gearheads excited:

If your tastes run towards the less gory and more whimsical, then perhaps you should check out Dark Horse's Robots & Donuts, a collection of fantasy artist Eric Joyner's paintings of toy robots from the early 20th century in unexpected settings. Equally whimsical is Marvel's Skrulls Vs. Power Pack, which brings Marvel's second-favorite family of superheroes face to face with everyone's favorite Secret Invaders.

Skipping over to DC for a moment, they have a couple of big books this week: Justice Society of America Annual has Geoff Johns exploring the multiverse by returning Power Girl to Earth-2 finally, while Keith Giffen explores the afterlife in the first issue of Reign In Hell. Maybe more appropriately for the io9 audience, Wildstorm's new dystopic reality begins in the first issue of the re-re-relaunched Wildcats; no Grant Morrison or Jim Lee this time around, but there is a completely-fucked world for our heroes to deal with.

Image sidesteps any notion of continuity with their second Popgun anthology by an amazing selection of creators including James Kochalka, Dan Hipp and Paul Pope, and it's probably the pick of the week. Nonetheless, Marvel has two more books that I must mention: Fantastic Four: True Story sees Doctor Who writer and io9 favorite Paul Cornell take on Marvel's first-family of superheroes (admit it; you thought I'd leave you hanging on that one), while True Believers may be the ideal io9 comic book: A team of superpowered bloggers on a mission to expose the seedy underbelly of the Marvel Universe in a first issue that features a superpowered all-female fight club watched over by old men dressed up as the Hulk, Spider-Man and other familiar faces? With one of our heroes undercover as a hooker who complains that she won't give a john a "crusty bunker"? Who could resist? It's not perfect, of course - Paul Gulacy draws it, for one thing - but it's the kind of zeitgeist-shagging over-written schlock that we don't see enough of these days, and therefore highly recommended.

By now you know the drill: You can find the whole list of this week's releases here, and look for your local comic book store here. Just ask them for the one about the crusty bunkers.