I'm editing SF and watching Blake's 7 all at once (and occasionally making public nuisance, obviously). It's very effective. Blake's 7 is the (formalised) speech pattern of my early adulthood and I rather suspect my earliest SF (mostly lost in a computer accident, some published under a pseudonym) sounded somewhat like it. Everyone speaks in careful phrases, and very intelligently. Dialogue contains lots of details, just so that we don't miss anything and the actors work very hard making their lines distinctive. Since we expect different speech patterns now, I get taken out of the reading and can think about what I'm doing. Also, Blake's 7 was never about the special effects - it was always about turning SF into a stage-production, with tensions and ambiguities and one-liners. Right now, I'm listening to it as a radio play, because my back is to the television - it's a lot of fun. Also, it completely works. (And I remember it, which is quite extraordinary, since I haven't seen it since it first came out, which must have been thirty years ago - whole sentences stick, obviously.)
This is a very specific read-through. It pays to have my mind distracted every few pages. Since this novel has a Big Idea underpinning it and it's not the Big Idea that normally goes with SF time travel to the Middle Ages, I really must get the trajectory of the idea right. There's one character in particular who is shaping the paths of peoples' lives without quite knowing it and so her thinking must be crystal clear and her expressions must be, well, the equivalent of telling detail in the matter of daily lives.
I don't know if this novel is going to be my best work or my worst work, but it's teaching me a bunch of skills.
