THE EDGE magazine | Book reviews | Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping | X-Treme Possibilities: A Paranoid Rummage Through The X-Files

X-Treme Possibilities
Paul Cornell, Martin Day & Keith Topping
Virgin paperback, 302 pages, £4.99
Published March 1997
ISBN 0753500191
Revised and xpanded edition:
Virgin paperbck, 474 pages
Published December 1998
ISBN 0753502283
Review by David Clark (1997)

A Paranoid Rummage Through The X-Files, managing to be enjoyably trivial and intelligent at the same time. I wish more TV books were like this . . . Actually this is the best book on The X-Files I’ve seen (and I’ve seen too many), being an unauthorised episode guide, covering the pilot through to Terma, ninth episode of the fourth series, which was as far as they could go at the time they were writing.

Coverage of each episode is split into several sections. The trivial: Scully Here is a Medical Doctor (obviously), Don’t be in the (pre-opening titles) Teaser, Scully’s Radical Explanation of the Week, the obligatory writing/directing/etc credits and cast listings, a brief write-up of the plot, Dialogue Triumphs, Phwoar! (are Mulder and Scully shagging, etc), How Did He Do That? (plot absurdities). The serious: The Truth, Continuity, The Conspiracy Starts at Closing Time, Scientific Comment (by a scientist; some X-Files’ science is spot on and some highly inaccurate, the division being about fifty-fifty) and The Bottom Line, a paragraph by each of the three authors. With these three writers, this section is a significant plus point rather than the self-indulgent weakness it might have been in a lesser book.

The book comes complete with Day’s essay I Want to Believe: The X-Files and Faith, and a number of small, extra sections on such subjects as Ask the Lone Gunmen, Do We Need the Conspiracy, The Trailer, and so on. Unfortunately, these are scattered around in boxes and difficult to lay one’s hands on at will. While it can be enjoyable to come across these, a list or an index would have been welcome. This, however, is the one flaw; if you want either a guide to The X-Files or a good critique, this is the best. And most unusually for an X-Files book, it’s damn good value.

The second edition is exactly the same as the first, simply updating all of its features. It now takes us up to the end of the fifth season. •

© THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.