By Martin Morse Wooster: I am watching a show which in the US is called The Heart Guy but in Australia where it originated is called Doctor Doctor.  It’s about a heart surgeon who screwed up and has to spend a year as a general practitioner in the little country town of Whyhope.  I wouldn’t call it “the Australian version of Doc Martin” but the shows are very similar, except The Heart Guy is less about medicine than Doc Martin.  The show I saw tonight is from the show’s second series and was broadcast in Australia in September 2017.

One character is a sf writer who has some success with her first novel because we see her give a reading and members of the audience recite favorite lines from her book.  We see her office on the porch of a large house surrounded by beautiful Australian countryside.  She is stuck on her second novel because trolls constantly tweet her while she’s working and tell her that her first novel is full of mush.

She finds someone camping on her lawn and calls the cops.  The camper is in fact a superfan who comes from some far away town to meet her favorite writer.  She works in a bakery and has made an alien from the author’s novel out of frosting.

The author decides to invite the fan onto her porch for some tea, but the fan sneaks into the author’s office and reads a few pages from her novel in progress.  She instantly solves every plot problem which has been plaguing the author, and the author gratefully writes down the fan’s suggestions on her laptop until she is interrupted by a tweet from another troll.  She turns off her laptop and decides to write her novel on a manual typewriter.

Sf bonus:  There’s an Asian character on the show who is only credited as “Ken” but whose name, I think, is Ken Liu.