Talk:The Stranger (novel)

Coverage/Validity
...Okay you lost me. Is the argument that because Ebury manages the rights the republished version of the book now has the rights to use 8, so this is fully licensed, and the author's intent is that it's 8? And since it's referenced elsewhere in the DWU we get coverage? Weird case, to say the least. Almost similar to Cyberon in some ways. Interesting find Nate, if this is your line of thought. But it's a can of worms. Najawin ☎  04:55, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm skeptical. I think it must surely be assumed that Ebury's license to print Who books is conditional on all sorts of things averaging out to BBC-vetting. That's how these things work, at least with large-scale franchises like this. Big Finish don't have the rights to randomly put the Doctor in a Sapphire & Steel audio when they feel like it just because they have both licenses at the same time, either! Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 12:09, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Just because they have the rights to a character in one capacity doesn't mean they can go off and do whatever they like with a character. This page should definitely be swiftly deleted. DrWHOCorrieFan ☎  12:23, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Scrooge wrote, "Big Finish don't have the rights to randomly put the Doctor in a Sapphire & Steel audio when they feel like it just because they have both licenses at the same time, either!" … and yet that's exactly what they did in The Final Amendment and Many Happy Returns, two stories in the Bernice Summerfield range – a range which began before Big Finish's Who license and (until the New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield reboot) was separate from it – which we nonetheless trust to be licensed in their appearances of Sylvester McCoy's Doctor!


 * I don't think it's fair for us to speculate so wildly about behind-the-scenes clearances and processes without any citation. From appearance and outfit to personality and apparent alien abilities, not to mention the author's own description, the "Paul Bowman" character from the book's first page to its last is clearly the Eighth Doctor in an amnesic fugue, just as confirmed in Father Time and The Gallifrey Chronicles (also intellectual properties of Ebury Publishing). I trust Big Finish to only use the Doctor character in stories where he is properly licensed. And by the same stroke, I trust Ebury Publishing. – n8 (☎) 13:03, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The difference, here, though, is that we know the book was written with the intent that it could be published without legally infringing on the copyright of the Eight Doctor, thinly-veiled implication or otherwise. If they were aware of the Doctor connection at all, Virgin originally published it with the understanding that it wasn't a legal use of the Doctor; why should we assume that Ebury, acting as mere reprinters, came to a completely different conclusion, printed it with the understanding that he was the Doctor, and then failed to advertise that fact at all? You have to admit it's rather more of a stretch. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 14:39, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * So, again, let's refer to Talk:Origins (comic story) and nip Corrie's concern in the bud. I think Scrooge has the right tack here. The author clearly had some intentions, but the publisher did not. And without clear statement in the text, we don't make these connections. Again, it seems to me like a Cyberon case. And when we revisit Cyberon, etc, maybe this will come up as well. But I'm not seeing precedent for it being covered until then. Najawin ☎  17:33, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Indeed, and even then, the proposed Cyberon extension would only apply if Claudia's subsequent DWU cameos were licensed from Da Costa, which I'm not sure is true.


 * On the whole, I think it's become all too clear that Nate's initial page-creation (while well-intentioned) was over-hasty. Feel free to continue discussing the ins and outs on this talk page, but for the time being, I'm going to remove this page from the main namespace. (Considering the not-insignificant work which clearly went into it, this will be achieved by moving it to User:NateBumber/The Stranger (novel) rather than straight-up deletion.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 20:33, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Najawin, I hadn't actually read Talk:Origins (comic story), but thank you for linking it, because that's a very helpful quote from Scrooge:


 * As established there, and as in the Big Finish examples I listed, we are not concerned about editorial permissions for specific stories when we know the company has the rights it needs. And no one can contest that Ebury Publishing has the rights it needs.


 * Therefore this is a Rule 4 issue, not a Rule 2 issue, and it is on the grounds of Rule 4 that Scrooge asks about the difference between the Virgin and Ebury editions. Here is the difference: unlike at the time of the release of the Virgin release, the author is now explicitly advertising the book on her website as featuring "the Eighth Doctor Who". Her website has said this since the earliest archive of the page, including while she was involved in promoting the upcoming Ebury Publishing release.


 * So to recap, this is a novel whose author says it features the Doctor; and its publishing company's previous Doctor Who book says it features the Doctor; but you're saying it doesn't actually feature the Doctor?


 * Since Cyberon was mentioned, I'll raise a hypothetical. If after Cyber-Hunt was released, BBC Books published a novel which explicitly referenced the events of that audio, and then later, the same company bought the rights to Cyber-Hunt and re-released it – you're really saying we still wouldn't cover it?


 * Scrooge, your removal decision here is entirely too hasty. By your own line of argument, this is a Rule 4 issue, not a Rule 2 issue. Tardis:Valid sources says,


 * Note the link to Board:Inclusion debates. Regarding Rule 4, stories are innocent until proven guilty, and this proof must be presented in a forum exclusion debate, not merely a talk page. Until we conduct such a forum debate, this story cannot be invalidated on Rule 4 grounds. I request that its removal be reversed with haste. – n8 (☎) 20:57, 15 December 2022 (UTC)


 * You write: “And no one can contest that Ebury Publishing has the rights it needs”, but I do contest it! This is a Rule 2 issue! Rule 4 is not, I think, seriously in doubt. BBC Books, being an arm of the BBC, are a different matter, but Ebury are, as I understand it, merely a licensee. It is not at all clear to me that Ebury's licensing contract with the BBC is as broad as it would need to be for this entire concept to apply. My default assumption would be that their contract gave them a bounded license to print Who books if a certain set of conditions were met, as opposed to giving them full rights to the Doctor and then demanding non-legally-mandated editorial oversight. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 21:04, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * iirc, under rule 4, it's not just the author we care about, it's the entire production apparatus to some extent. This is what we used to disqualify Shalka. I note also that the "previous book" is only previous because this book is a reprint. The concepts originate here. There were no identifiable + licensed DWU concepts in this book at the time of publishing. It's a unique case, since we've never had this sort of "reprint under a different publisher that's now licensed for what it's originally intended to be" issue before. But I don't think that we'd care about the date of the reprint, instead focusing on the date of the original. (With that said, I think I support coverage when the Cyberon extension comes through, though I could go either way on validity.) Najawin ☎  22:24, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * (Just want to register that I don't think that's quite right re: Rule 4 and Shalka, but that's neither here nor there for this discussion.) Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 22:26, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * (Well I would have checked, but I can't. I do think that's what Czech said, but others can feel free to ignore.) Najawin ☎  22:33, 15 December 2022 (UTC)


 * BBC Books and Ebury Publishing are not "different matters", because BBC Books is Ebury Publishing! For instance, see the legal page of any of the BBC New Series Aventures published by Ebury, such as Sting of the Zygons. Ebury inherited not just BBC Books' back catalog but also its special IP relationship with Doctor Who: hence why when a mutual friend inquired after the audio rights to a BBC Books companion, his correspondent didn't check with BBC (who would have retained the copyright from one of its own arms), he checked with Ebury! My Cyber-Hunt hypothetical was a 1:1 analogy: BBC Books and Ebury are the same company.


 * Even if Ebury were merely a licensee as you suggest, that's not a reason to think that its license wouldn't extend to The Stranger. As I've already demonstrated, there are countless examples of licensees using the Doctor outside the context of a Doctor Who range in a way that the wiki nonetheless regards as legal. There is also precedent both for Ebury extending its Doctor Who rights to a Virgin Books novel rerelease – see the 2015 edition of Human Nature – and for licensees extending their license to releases outside of their Who- or BBC-specific imprints – see Eternity Weeps, which like The Stranger lacked any Doctor Who branding, and which (unlike previous Virgin New Adventures) wasn't published under Virgin's "Doctor Who Books" imprint, but which was nonetheless fully licensed. Eternity Weeps demonstrates how use or omission of Doctor Who branding, or the assignment of releases to different imprints, is purely a marketing choice that does not affect the legality of the releases; the same is true in the case of The Stranger.


 * Najawin, I note your concern regarding the date of the reprint vs the date of the original, and you're right that there's some inconsistency in this wiki's coverage of works with multiple releases when the original is invalid. In the footnotes of the article I mentioned The Wings of a Butterfly, which was initially published in Missing Pieces without a license but was republished in 2010 by a company with a proper licensing agreement. An even stronger example is Grass, which in its first printing lacked any connection to Doctor Who (or, for that matter, Faction Paradox) but was later referenced in a Doctor Who novel and is therefore covered in its subsequent rerelease. The Stranger may be unprecedented in its specific combination of aspects that we might call challenging, but regarding each of those aspects it falls well within existing precedent. – n8 (☎) 18:52, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Extended digression

 * I'm going to think some more about the rest of this, but while I'm online, I have a slightly different understanding of the grounds for coverage of Grass. I think, accepting the premise that its original release had no licenses, it is covered by dint of its reprint as a FP story, analogously to the non-Dalek-featuring material in The Dalek Outer Space Book. Having been referenced in a Who novel marginally helps to establish Rule 4, but is mostly irrelevant — if that sort of thing were a criterion in itself under current policy, we'd have been covering Cyberon a long time ago.


 * But also, I do think that Grass grounds itself in some Miles-owned lore even if it doesn't foreground that fact — the concept of "cailloux" being one connection to Christmas on a Rational Planet which is already mentioned on the page. I think we probably would have found our way to covering its original release either way. Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 18:59, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm almost loath to mention this, but even though most of its stories were narratively connected to FP, the Mad Norwegian Press book which included Grass wasn't actually branded or marketed as a FP release. – n8 (☎) 19:28, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Not so! True, the logo's not on the cover, but it's advertised as a "Faction Paradox tie-in" right there in the title of the listing on Mad Norwegian's website. And the foreword of the book itself says of ''Grass':

"Like the rest of the material on offer here, it’s so closely tied to the continuity of the other Faction Paradox books that this seems the ideal venue for it."

- Lawrence Miles


 * Note "other Faction Paradox books": here we have the book itself holding itself to be a FP book!


 * By the way, it occurs to me (not for the first time) that it might help present all this info more legibly if we had Dead Romance (anthology) for the Mad Norwegian book, as distinct from our page about the story itself, and its solo Virgin printing, at Dead Romance (novel). Thoughts? Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 19:51, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I think you're reading way too much into the word "other" there! At the time of its (re)release, Dead Romance was very explicitly "not […] published as part of the Faction Paradox range". Even if MNP changed its mind >10 years later (and I'm not really sure it did), that just raises further questions about how we cover cases where publishers change their branding choices retroactively. But now we're drifting really off-topic. Let's continue at Talk:Dead Romance (novel). – n8 (☎) 20:21, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

So without comment on the broader issues, I'm fairly confident that Grass should have been considered valid in the hypothetical due to the "Cailloux" linkage. (Whether or not it would have been is a different issue. We all know that some of this wiki's earlier inclusion debates are, uh, sketchy, and we need to revisit them when the forums are back.) The ebook of Dead Romance explicitly calls it "Faction Paradox Book 0" - just as a commentary on the issue of Mad Norwegian changing their mind or not. I think they're at the very least waffling. (And, yes, we probably do need to have a discussion on how publishers/companies changing branding effects our coverage. See Eaglemoss Collections for a slightly tangential example that caused me a headache during the TLV stuff.)

But let me ask a hypothetical question. In the universe where Grass wasn't rule valid after its first printing, and we then fixed the "Cyberon" loophole, do you think Grass would now be valid? Do you think The Stranger would be, based on its first printing? My guess is yes for Grass, no for The Stranger. They're not quite the same thing, there's some weird circularity to how this case is working. Najawin ☎  09:43, 20 December 2022 (UTC)


 * The Cailloux "linkage" is extremely tentative at best: one is a character with the last name "Cailloux"; the other is a secret organisation using the code word caillou [sic, no capital or plural "-oux"] in a completely different context. We don't cover Paul Magrs' story Patient Iris just because it has a character randomly called "Iris". But I digress.


 * I've never seen a formal definition of the "Cyberon loophole" besides "some rule that would let us cover Cyber-Hunt". It could be "stories referenced in later Doctor Who stories are valid", in which case it would obviously apply to the first versions of Grass and The Stranger. It could be "Fred debuted in Party Animals (1991) so his appearance in Cyber-Hunt (1998) is valid", in which case it obviously wouldn't apply to Grass or The Stranger. Or as you seem to propose, it could be some middle position which applies to one but not the other, in either direction. It depends on how that rule is specifically phrased.


 * I brought up Grass because my understanding is that its validity depended on its second printing. I believe this is justified by the facts, hence why (until recently) this wiki only covered its second printing. But Grass isn't the only example I gave. If we're at the point that the argument hinges not on licensing but on how we conceptualise narrative linkages between stories, then this is a Rule 4 conversation and The Stranger can only be invalidated in a forum debate. Until then, the page must be restored. – n8 (☎) 14:42, 20 December 2022 (UTC) [edited 14:53, 20 December 2022 (UTC)]


 * Let me clarify. What was termed "Cyberon Principle" until the discovery of the "Fred debuted in Party Animals first" argument has nothing to do with that argument. It is my proposed policy that a work which 1) was intended to be in-continuity with the DWU, 2) had no DWU licenses at time of release but 3) didn't infringe on any DWU licensed at time of release, and 4) elements of which would go on to be referenced in valid DWU stories, could then be opened up to an inclusion debate. (Not validated by default if these circumstances are met, even; but able to be ruled in by community consensus if the community's wishes leaned that way.)


 * As such, it would not actually apply to Cyberon at all if we accept the Fred reasoning; and it would only apply to The Stranger (in its original printing!) if we focused on Claudia Marwood's later DWU acknowledgment, while holding "Paul Bowman" to be legally distinct from the Eighth Doctor despite the obvious implications. Grass might, of course, be a candidate if we deny that it had DWU concepts in it at the time of release. Other examples would be Phoenix Court, Bibliophage, and perhaps something like The Twisters. It would not apply to out-and-out fanfiction, or to any old work with a subsequent DWU crossover (I approve of the notion of having e.g. a real-world overview page for Time Rift, but that's a whole other proposed coverage paradigm). Scrooge MacDuck ⊕ 15:00, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I see. In that case the Cyberon principle would make The Strangers validity even more obvious, even if (as I've explained) it isn't a prerequisite for The Strangers validity. – n8 (☎) 17:43, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

I think that Magrs comparison isn't apt, but, quite honestly, it wouldn't surprise me, given Magrs, if we probably should cover that story. Regardless, I did say in the hypothetical where we rule against Grass on the original validity for the Cyberon precedent. I don't think it actually meets the category as it stands.

Here's another question. Is Claudia Marwood a DWU concept? She's referred to in a DWU work, sure. But a lot of things are referred to in DWU works, Oa, Buffy, etc., and historically we've ignored the rights issues when they've come up. If I write a Green Lantern story, but say point blank that I consider it to be in the DWU, do we cover it on this wiki? What if my publisher owns the comics rights to Doctor Who, even if there's no indication that they've allowed me to use them? (And the wiki has already distinguished between mentioning concepts, and those things appearing, see The Crikeytown Cancellations, and I guess An Ordinary Man and Legacies?) Again, I don't think this is quite as clear cut as you think it is Nate. Not to say that I dislike the page, I like the page. But the deletion was justifiable, and I think a thread is warranted. Najawin ☎  19:40, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
 * The validity of this story doesn't hinge on Claudia being a DWU character, and I've made no claims either way on this matter. It remains perfectly clear – based on my (wholly unanswered) points above regarding, among other things, Eternity Weeps – that this is a Rule 2 issue, not a Rule 4 issue, and that invalidation without a prerequisite forum debate was out of order. – n8 (☎) 15:48, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Return to topic
There are two closely-related arguments being made on this talk page: one that The Stranger should be covered as valid, and one that the unilateral deletion of The Stranger (novel) was in violation of the rules. Before the lengthy digression regarding Dead Romance and the so-called Cyberon principle (which had no impact on either of the arguments at hand), the last word was from Scrooge MacDuck: "I'm going to think some more about the rest of this". Scrooge, have you had any new thoughts, or can we move User:NateBumber/Sandbox/The Stranger (novel) back to the main namespace where it belongs? As a compromise and sign of good will, I'd even settle for its coverage as invalid; surely the very existence of this debate indicates that the story merits at least that. – n8 (☎) 20:07, 28 February 2023 (UTC)