It IS the same Nicholas Pegg!

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It is the same Nicholas Pegg. The dude who wrote the excellent David Bowie encyclopedia I’ve been marveling over is the same dude who operates the Daleks on Doctor Who. I think my brain just melted.

(See: Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf promo, Wikipedia explanation, Complete David Bowie interview.)

If it wasn’t for Doctor Who I wouldn’t even be into Bowie. To further the endless circles of “every British thing I like is connected,” here’s an excerpt from the Bowie encyclopedia that I was meaning to type up anyway. From the entry on the song “Starman”:

During an interview for Rolling Stone in November 1973, Bowie launched into a disquisition on the song’s place in his planned Ziggy Stardust stage production: “The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage … Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman,’ which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village.” Bowie’s affinity with home-grown science-fiction permeates much of his work, and he has always enjoyed this Quatermass-style juxtaposition of the fantastic with the banal, of the mystical with the homely, of black holes with Greenwich Village. Remarkably, this account of “black-hole jumping” and of Ziggy’s ultimate fate (”When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world”) is identical to the storyline of the BBC’s tenth anniversary Doctor Who special The Three Doctors, a high-profile reunion of the show’s lead actors which had been broadcast a few months earlier, while Bowie was in London recording Aladdin Sane.

[cut a bunch more about the song’s success and places it’s shown up in pop culture, then in conclusion:]

Bowie’s original recording cropped up as an appropriate background number following the crash-landing of an extraterrestrial spaceship in Aliens Of London, a 2005 episode of our old favorite Doctor Who.

And, Pegg thanks (among others) Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, and Gareth Roberts at the back of the book.

This icon could not possibly be more appropriate!

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