Doctor Who: The BBC Books #52 – Interference: Book One by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#25

Interference, Book One: Shock Tactic

By Lawrence Miles

First a bit of preamble. Interference is one book in two parts, so it would make sense to review it all at once. Nevertheless, I’m doing it in two chunks. There’s a few reasons for that.

1) I’m a glutton for punishment, apparently. 2) I’m not sure my memory is up to the task of keeping Book One entirely in reserve until it’s time to review Book Two. I barely remember Autumn Mist at this point. (Admittedly that might say more about Autumn Mist.) 3) A major reason for me reviewing these books in any depth is so that I’ll have something to remember them by — see 2) — ergo the more I write, the merrier I’ll be. And 4) as anyone who’s had to track these down via eBay can attest, Interference is still two books, like it or not; reading it does require two trips, so I might as well record what that experience was like. And while we’re at it, what, if anything, makes these books different. (Anecdotally: people seem to sell off Book Two more than they do Book One, which suggests to me that there exists a niche for just reading the first one. So I guess this is for you, weirdly specific collectors.)

Right away it has to be said that Book One is a tough subject to break down, precisely because it is not a whole book. (Whose stupid idea was two reviews, anyway?) This isn’t a story in its own right that ends on the promise of something more, like for example The Empire Strikes Back. (Or Across The Spider-Verse which is possibly better, fight me.) Apart from an almost trivial cliffhanger generously tossed in at the end, Lawrence Miles has pretty much just Finished The Bit He Was On here. Nevertheless, I think the first half of Interference bears examination. It doesn’t round off any plot points but it makes some pretty definitive statements.

For starters, there’s the fact that it exists at all. Interference is many, many rodeos deep into published Doctor Who fiction, but it’s the first bona fide two-part novel in the series. Sequels and “linked books” be damned — this is truly ambitious, particularly (no shade intended) the assumption that readers will come back/shell out for the second half.

It matters that this one has come along after so many prior books. An upside and downside of BBC Books picking up the license after Virgin is that backlog of material, delivering both an understanding of how to handle the format and a long list of ideas that are already crossed off. Since the relaunch we’ve already had a couple of celebratory novels that rapidly grew in ambition from “have lots of Doctors show up” (standard) to “alt-universe prequel” (decidedly not). There have been plot arcs, necessarily more so in the Eighth Doctor Adventures than the more chocolate-box sibling range; we’ve asked big questions about the companions and even disrupted that status quo a few times. Clearly, there’s life in the old dog yet, but even so the books are quick to wriggle back into an old groove, regurgitating character beats and munching the same plots and settings. (Nice alien artefact/ancient weapon/human colony you got there, be a shame if etc etc.) More than once it has felt like something’s gotta give.

It’s not entirely surprising that Lawrence Miles is the one to lob the hand grenade. Alien Bodies — despite being a delightful and fun little bag of ideas, seriously it’s a hoot — was the one to crystallise the idea that Sam Jones was not what she appeared to be, a thread that later exploded in Unnatural History. It also introduced Faction Paradox, the most exciting thing to happen to the Time Lords since Dead Romance. (Okay, that was later, but y’know — time travel.) He’s one of those writers equally entrenched in series continuity and a willingness to set it alight, and for better or worse, they’ve set him loose again.

On a creative level Interference (or at least the first half) is gagging to do things differently. There’s the two-book format of course, but also a framing device: the Doctor is telling the mysterious I.M. Foreman all about what happened. This curiously includes chunks of story he wasn’t a party to, and those chunks vary in format, with things like different time periods, transcribed documentary footage, diary extracts, plus real events and flashbacks interpreted by the characters as scripted action (we’ll get to it) at one point starring Brian Blessed. For good measure there’s a whole other story bolted on towards the end (or begun anyway — Book One strikes again) featuring a different Doctor altogether. And then you get to the ending and oh right, there isn’t one! You truly do get the sense that Miles wanted anything other than to write Just Another Doctor Who Book.

That sense of “do things differently” is baked into the story as well. This is no typical alien invasion or deadly spaceship encounter: the Doctor, Sam and Fitz have been roped into a mysterious arms deal going on in 1996, which involves the mostly human-seeming Remote, a group with an unusual reliance on television signals. Despite the lack of a clear-cut threat (or any clearer than “this shouldn’t be happening in 1996”) all three of the regulars are out of their depth, with the Doctor whisked off to a prison cell to be tortured, Sam stuck on an alien world with one of the Remote, and Fitz lost 600 years in the future to be drafted into Faction Paradox. The only convincing note of hope here is that the Doctor will eventually turn up in the framing device to look back on it all, but even then, the ever-present stink of Faction Paradox suggests that we shouldn’t get too comfortable.

It’s a bracing setup, grounded more than usual in disappointingly human concerns like arms deals and prisons, but all the same there are some familiar notes here. Fitz barely features and is then hardly missed — to be fair, the other two are having a sufficiently crap time that they wouldn’t notice — and to cap it off, indoctrination, again? Miles is no continuity slouch so Fitz’s similar experience in Revolution Man is front and centre here, but with so little time to develop it that simply feels like lamp-shading. Even Fitz seems to think, here we go again.

And then there’s the Doctor, also helpfully recalling a prior experience, this time another inescapable prison — Ha’olam in Seeing I — and while Miles makes it clear that this is an entirely different kind of inescapable prison, and an even more unpleasant one at that, it is still another one for this Doctor. Having your hero go through the same thing and have the same difficulties again threatens to make it a trademark. It would be like erasing his memory a second time. (Oh, too late. Perhaps a third, then. (Oh.)) It’s weird to be going anywhere near old ground in this sort of book.

Ah well: the specifics are where Miles makes his mark. There’s not much you can say about Fitz’s journey at this point — see you next week — but the Doctor’s prison stint allows some of the book’s themes to get up on their feet. He has a fellow prisoner, Badar, and they strike up a conversation about what the Doctor does and where the limits are. Specifically, why he can do what he likes on back-water planets but he can’t stop the everyday horrors on Earth. This is one of those things that exists out of boring necessity — if the Doctor changed Earth beyond recognition we, uh, wouldn’t recognise it any more — but here he’s allowed some justification. “Mankind is always spreading outward, towards the edges of the universe. And the universe is a big place. If I change history on some of the outer planets, the ripples usually only spread outward. Into the void. If I change things on Earth, the ripples touch everything.”

That’s not a bad explanation (although again, the real explanation is extra-textual), but Badar doesn’t buy it, and eventually the Doctor admits to having a degree of preference here. Miles is clearly a bit unimpressed by the Doctor on a fundamental level, and keen to demystify him. Indeed, there is no magic reprieve for his prison sentence here, despite a few astral jaunts to visit others for help. The Doctor, denied his usual tools and even the comfort of bad guys following a routine, has little to do here but lie on the floor and bleed. All of that might change in Book Two, but the important thing seems to be that we’re asking the questions. That, too, is a way to do things differently in a Doctor Who book. Do you always let the character get away with having an escape route, or always letting bad things happen to some people? I don’t know if these are things we can ever meaningfully change, but it feels like a milestone to address them.

Similar questions are asked of Sam, a character you sense right away does not enormously impress Miles. (In the foreword: “‘Political’ usually means that Sam’s going to spend the book lounging around in a Greenpeace T-shirt.” And in Alien Bodies, a novel I already praised for doing interesting things with the character, Sam barely had agency in said things.) Sam has occasion here to consider her political activism and how far along it has come — something novels like Seeing I already did, but hey ho: “The demonstrators were, by Sam’s usual ethical standards, Good People. They were more or less the same people she’d marched with in the ANL rallies, back in the early nineties … So why did the protestors suddenly look so ridiculous? Because the ANL marches hadn’t achieved a thing, maybe?”

There’s at least a sense that she has progressed from where she started — the story features Sam’s bedroom in 1996, pre-Doctor, and all the somewhat naive political posters therein — but then she is directly challenged on her moral stance by Compassion, one of the Remote. These bits echo the Doctor’s talks with Badar, only here I’m less convinced. Partly that’s because Miles already put some of these views into the foreword (so whether I agree with them or not, they feel a bit like authorial soapboxing), but also it’s because they’re just a bit obtuse, and/or examples of false equivalence. See: “You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with [selling weapons]. Why it’s worse than selling matches. Or motor engines. Motor engines kill thousands of people around here. More than shock batons do. So what’s so bad about what we’re doing?” And later: “People die all the time … Traffic accidents. But there’s no organisation in your entire nation-state that believes in banning traffic.” “But people who drive aren’t trying to kill anyone.” “So that makes it all right?”

I know Compassion isn’t necessarily to be seen as in the right here, but nevertheless Sam can’t seem to disagree, which is surely suggestive. I think there’s a pretty clear difference between mechanisms that can cause harm and mechanisms designed to do harm; the former has the possibility of refining its methods and improving safety, whereas the latter is ideologically opposed to that sort of improvement. Fire is a source of life, and it can be managed. People need to get to work, but they can take some precautions. Stun batons exist to attack. This is my own soapbox, I guess, but I think it’s cheating to go “these things are the same so a) nyer and b) Sam is foolish.” The suggestion also that Sam is just a trendy activist because she doesn’t care equally about all causes all the time is setting an impossible standard. I mean, come on, you’d go crazy otherwise. (For good measure Miles lets Sarah Jane, who is also in this, have it as well: “Sarah Jane Smith cried when she saw ET, but two hundred thousand people died in East Timor and it was all she could do to go ‘tsch’.” Yeah, everyone’s a hypocrite, we all suck, cheers Lawrence, please do keep on about it.)

Still, it’s somewhat appropriate to be asking these sorts of questions in Sam’s last adventure (or part one of it anyway). I had forgotten her sudden decision at the end of Autumn Mist to leave the TARDIS on their next Earth trip; the Doctor, in the framing device, confirms that this has now happened, so she’s on borrowed time in these pages. We’re not there yet, and there aren’t many opportunities for her to shine — not when the resolution is paywalled, dammit — but the use of Remote signals to trigger script-themed flashbacks allows her to get a bit more background before we leave her, specifically a dalliance with drugs that darkens her previously perfect record. (Maybe it’s a bleed-through from Other Sam; I forget how that works.) There’s also a maybe real-maybe not vision of her years from now at a friend’s funeral, lamenting how deep down she travelled with the Doctor just because she wanted to see the universe like anyone else, biodata and activism be damned, which feels rather honest.

It might be best to keep some of the specifics back for Book Two — after all, what it all means has yet to be made clear, so there’s no point trying to rate how much of it makes sense. To summarise though: the Remote seem like an interesting enough bunch, people whose decision-making comes from interpretation of random signals, mostly TV. The implicit satire of “letting TV do your thinking for you” is, well, that’s all there is really, but it’s interesting how essentially amoral they are. (Even if I think some of their arguments are full of it.) It’s not clear from Book One why they’re such a big deal overall, even with the shadowy backing of Faction Paradox; they possess a weapon or possible lifeform called the Cold, which ultimately seems to be what’s worrying everyone, but the nature and capabilities of that are mostly for Book Two to worry about. Which is fine, but the stakes don’t feel especially high when you stretch them out like this. On current evidence the Doctor, Sam and Fitz mostly seem to be up a creek just because.

There’s some delightful stuff on the periphery, particularly a post-K9 & Company Sarah Jane investigating, not to mention K9 coming to the rescue, not to mention an Ogron sidekick. (There’s some great stuff about the overlooked depths of Ogrons: “[Ogrons] give you poetry, and you hear it as… as meaningless words about rocks.” At the risk of overreacting though, I think Miles’ intentions get a bit muddy the more he draws attention to the inherent racism surrounding Ogrons. If you’re going to underline it and then keep writing about them anyway there’s a risk of circling back around and just doing it in earnest.)

There’s also the weird, exciting lurch into a Third Doctor story near the end — you’ll have noticed Perters on the cover, of course Miles has found a weird way to do a multi-Doctor story, lobbing a hand grenade into the Past Doctor Adventures as well as the more serialised ones. In sixty pages this creates a lot of atmosphere and suggestion of impending doom. From the Third Doctor learning about Faction Paradox too soon to the TARDIS randomly bleeding to a local authority figure refusing to comply with his charms, and even a smaller suggestive moment where the Doctor (rather than the companion) wanders off, something is clearly wrong here. Again though, it’s all setup and no payoff, so the atmosphere is all there is currently. There’s a ton of weird detail about a travelling circus that’s just weird at this point.

Halfway through, I think it’s fair to say that Interference hasn’t made itself clear, but it has grabbed attention. I’d be hard pressed to describe most of it as fun — prisons, cults, drug flashbacks, oh my! — but the constant variety in storytelling style keeps it at least engaging. The inclusion of Sarah Jane generally seems like a sweetener for all the rough stuff; it also has that same sort of generally amused undertone found in Alien Bodies, with cheeky meta nods taking aim at, among other things, the book itself: “Lord of the Rings? Too long. My attention span only stretches to about three hundred pages.”

Book One is interesting as an opening salvo but also as a shake-up for the range, so that even if you just read this one, there’s at least something to take away. It would be a stretch to call it really satisfying as an instalment — Book Two has the luxury of being what Interference is actually about, as Miles for all his experimentation can’t escape the latter half of a story being the bit where it all knits together — but I think it goes far enough out of its way to be at least memorable.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #51 – The Final Sanction by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#24

The Final Sanctions

By Steve Lyons

War. Huh. You know what, I think I’ll give it a miss.

The last time we saw the Selachians was their introduction in The Murder Game, a light-hearted low stakes romp. They were an incongruous menace, aquatic beings in bio-mechanical suits with sharks painted on the outside, out to destroy all land-dwellers. They posed an obvious threat but were just the teensiest bit silly.

Steve Lyons strikes an entirely different note in The Final Sanction, and he makes that clear right away, landing the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in a warzone. (Hey, there’s an idea.) The first chapter chops up events in a way that Lyons has enjoyed doing since The Witch Hunters: Zoe is having such a miserable time that she’s already remembering their arrival and considering its importance in coming events. This has the effect of starting the story already on the go, which also helps to raise the urgency of what’s happening. The sight of many dead aliens also drives that point home.

The planet Kalaya is one of the last holdouts in the Selachian war with mankind; if they can be driven back from here, all that’s left is their homeworld, Ockora. The trio quickly encounters the two opposing forces. They are, of course, separated, with Zoe becoming a Selachian prisoner and Jamie joining the Earth forces to fight. The Doctor has his own problems: he knows that some time soon the humans will use a catastrophic weapon to destroy Ockora, killing the Selachians and a large number of innocent hostages. Worse, since this is established history he cannot stop it — he must ensure it happens. And now Zoe’s in the firing line.

Tragic inevitability is another holdover from The Witch Hunters, but this doesn’t feel like a repeat as Lyons gets to paint on a much broader canvass this time. The destruction of an entire world is not some subtle chain of events like the Salem witch trials, and this time the problem isn’t remotely the fault of the TARDIS crew. The scale of the problem is so enormous that the tragedy itself is surely much greater, although by the same token it’s so overwhelming that it’s almost impersonal. (Not to mention, entirely fictional.) Frankly, it’s not as if there are many Selachian protagonists around to make us really identify with what’s happening beyond the obvious fact that it is genocide. Unlike The Witch Hunters, and to its detriment, there is never really a plausible path to not carrying out the tragic event.

The point is perhaps further muddied by making this a tragedy about hostages caught in the crossfire — of which Zoe is very keen not to be one, with the Doctor and Jamie in vigorous agreement, thus keeping them all on some level thinking about something other than the impending Selachian tragedy. The most direct reckoning with this horrendous war crime comes in the form of Dr Mulholland, the expert behind the G-bomb who is doing her best to distance herself from its inevitable use. Over the course of the book her defences break down and she faces her part in this. The various military characters we get to know — all troubled men with varying levels of insecurity — never quite reckon with their choices.

For good measure, at least one Selachian does reckon with the scale of what has been lost, thinking of his beautiful home and family and then momentarily losing respect for his superior, saying “you should have surrendered.” More Selachian characters seems an obvious note here: the one I’ve just mentioned gets comparatively the most to do, being instrumental in Jamie’s eventual realisation that they are not merely monsters. His resolute hatred of humanity remains, however, and this is much of a piece with how they all behave, making them (perhaps cleverly but not helpfully) hard to like. The only Selachians not rampaging about are the non-combatants, of whom we only meet a few; they tend to die tragically without sharing their points of view, their deaths being yet more fuel for their already furious brethren. I don’t get the impression that the non-military way of life has disappeared on Ockora (at least not while Ockora exists) but it would have been nice to hear more about it.

The tragedy of the Selachians is ultimately posited as one of abuse — the Kalayans having cruelly mistreated them and stirred their hatred of all land dwellers — and then one of stubbornness. But firstly, the Kalayans hardly feature in this, and the one that we do meet (Kukhadil) doesn’t have occasion to feel bad about his people’s part in these events. In the context of the fighting here, the Selachians feel much the same about everybody who isn’t a Selachian, so it seems a bit redundant that their “true” enemies are involved. Secondly, it’s not as if anyone puts forward an idea of what a Selachian surrender would actually look like in practical terms. The local Earth military leader, Redfern, gives no indication that he’s not just in it for the kill count.

I suppose what I’m saying is, this is not the most nuanced take on the horrors of war. The ingredients are all there, with intractable military leaders on both sides and innocents in the middle, but there’s a certain A-to-B feeling about the execution, with all the Selachians following much the same pattern and, to be honest, most of the humans doing that too. Lyons is Doing A Thing there, I know, but he doesn’t find many opportunities within that to say a great deal that’s new, although there is a bright spot when the death of a soldier takes up an entire chapter; context leads us to believe that he is human, and then the rather sheepish reader is put right.

Perhaps recent books haven’t helped. Autumn Mist was a horrors-of-war story and Storm Harvest concerned multiple other bio-mechanical water-dwellers, some violent; those were the two books directly before this. I will say though that The Final Sanction makes the Selachians more interesting, achieving (in its modest warzone gravitas) a clearly separate identity from the Chelonians, who previously seemed a little too close for comfort. It’s a shame that, chronologically at least, we are unlikely to delve deeper into them as characters.

The book does a good job with its regulars. Steve Lyons is one of those very observant writers who can easily capture the characters’ voices, and despite the dark story there are some charming moments for the Doctor, all quintessentially Troughton-esque: “[The Doctor] dropped the brick and stood up, lacing his fingers together and giving his companions a familiar contrite look: apologising in advance for the fact that he was about to get his own way.” / “The Doctor’s expression suggested that all the misfortunes of the universe were a personal disappointment to him.” There is a darkness to him as well, which of course also fits, as he commits to the unhappy resolution long before it happens, and in the epilogue puts Zoe on the spot to consider whether she would have done things differently. (This is of course intended as helpful.)

Zoe and Jamie are very well defined here, sometimes in deliberate opposition: “Zoe could never be satisfied until she knew exactly how and why things worked.” / “The Doctor, [Jamie] supposed, must have worked some kind of magic. For Jamie, that was explanation enough.” Jamie’s enthusiasm for fighting is perhaps a slight stretch — ostensibly it’s out of the urge to rescue Zoe, but there’s a whiff of just wanting to get into the military thick of things again, with Jamie a little too easily thinking of the Selachians like redcoats and not as people. It serves a pretty clear purpose though of using a somewhat simple man (sorry, Jamie) to demonstrate the easy grip of fanaticism, and to Lyons’ credit the eventual contrite team-up with a Selachian isn’t the end of this journey, his new comrade being ultimately too keen on killing humans for Jamie to tolerate. Along the way he defaults to trying to emulate the Doctor, or at least what would be his choices, which seems a good way to cap it off.

Zoe’s story is, for her anyway, a less satisfying one. She’s escaping only to be recaptured for some of this — one of our oldest chestnuts — but built into that is a gradual attempt to apply her intelligence and lead others, with invariably poor results even despite her (so she reckons) higher intelligence than the Doctor. Being more cerebral than Jamie, she’s considering the wider questions, but also ultimately defaulting to the kind of mentality that drives the Jamies of this situation: just wanting orders from someone who knows what to do. A level playing ground, perhaps, to show that anyone can go along with war. So there are layers to all this; see also, where despite his objections the Doctor is able to steer inevitable events in small ways that lend people a bit more dignity — but rarely, alas, happiness.

I think The Final Sanction is an entirely decent war-is-heck story. I wouldn’t exactly describe it as fun, but as an action adventure it’s well crafted, Lyons sticking with groups of characters for long stretches and building momentum with cliffhangers aplenty. There are simply a lot of unexplored paths that could have made it stronger. A more diverse set of characters to invest in would have been nice. (Redfern, Michaels and Paterson could be more distinct.) More and varied Selachians and definitely more of their culture would have added meaning and pathos. (“Paul Leonard” it up a bit.) And more about the hostage crisis would, ironically, have helped, as this bit ultimately just disappears in all the noise. Nevertheless, these kinds of stories are worth telling. I didn’t love it, but it’s a creditable and confident effort.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #50 – Autumn Mist by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#24

Autumn Mist

By David A. McIntee

New writer!

Well, okay, that’s a stretch. This was his tenth Doctor Who book — he must have been running out of room for his proverbial “Bought The” t-shirts — but nevertheless it’s the first and only Eighth Doctor book by David A. McIntee, so it carries a sort of novelty value for the writer and for the range.

There’s some novelty in the placement of the book as well. Not that readers in 1999 necessarily knew this, but we’re in the last gasp of the Sam Jones era, with her final adventure(s) coming right after this one. Autumn Mist sort of nods towards that imminent sea change, before very directly addressing it at the end. (It would be a stretch, however, to say the book is about that.)

While we’re looking for these things, I’d say there’s also something special about the characters in Autumn Mist. Always a fan of something he can research, McIntee uses as a starting point the Sidhe (pronounced “shee” according to Google) from Irish folklore; fairy folk, in other words. While he goes to some pains to make them a realistic presence in the story, explaining that they are as much from Earth as we are but they exist in multiple dimensions compared to our measly four, there’s something incongruous about fairies or elves in a Doctor Who story. It’s not the first time we’ve flirted with the fantasy genre (Witch Mark was… an attempt) but it helps us mark out Autumn Mist from the rest of the range.

McIntee was perhaps keen to try new things after writing so many books. Sure enough though, some of his recognisable interests or habits are on display here. It’s another historical novel, set during the Battle of the Bulge (so, Belgium) in late 1944. The action concerns people on both sides of the conflict, which means we can get a decent amount of detail on weapons and vehicles. (It’s the sort of thing that’s cool if you’re into it, grit your teeth and get through it if not.) Autumn Mist is a rare lapse for McIntee, however, in that the location is not strongly felt beyond generally being some cold woods near an abandoned town. There aren’t any locals to demonstrate what it is that makes this their home, and all the soldiers regardless of their allegiance want to be somewhere else. You could pick a different moment in the war for this story, in other words — maybe even a different war. (I wonder if some of that vagueness is down to me as a reader. There’s an implication early on of characters being transported somewhere else. After that happened, I think on some level I assumed this wasn’t going to be “true” history after all. Oh well, it is!)

You’ll have guessed this just from the war setting, but it’s a story with a lot of action — another McIntee staple, and a reliable one. Not long after the TARDIS lands the main trio are separated (from the TARDIS as well as from each other) and there’s something breathless about their one-thing-after-another endeavours. The characters are rarely far from a sudden ambush or a catastrophe, with soldiers getting killed left and right, and brutal violence being aimed at everyone including the regulars. The book’s final stretch is an onslaught of action that casually dispenses with several major characters — so casually that it threatens to transcend “war is unfair” commentary and just feel a tad underwritten, in all honesty, but he might well have meant to do that. The book’s deaths at least allow for some of McIntee’s trademark “put you in the moment” writing, like an early observation that someone’s “blood had stopped dripping … and had frozen into red icicles”; a massacre of the wounded seen from a terrifyingly close perspective; and one memorable death we’ll get to later.

The book is naturally a showcase for that often used habit of breaking up the action into short sections — hardly unique to McIntee, although he is very known for it. I think Autumn Mist keeps a tight lid on it, however, often using these little resets for something good. They can shift our perspective to the person on the other side of a conflict, or zoom us in a bit closer to one of the regulars who’s just out of shot in their own storyline. Then there’s the Sidhe, who exist on different planes of reality, meaning that McIntee can break up a page just so they can have a private conversation that the other person in the room can’t hear. That’s an elegant use of simple page formatting.

It’s tempting to talk about the nuts and bolts of Autumn Mist instead of the bigger picture, I suspect because the bigger picture isn’t hugely interesting. Something is interfering with the war effort in Bastogne: strange figures are causing people to see things and bodies to disappear. Something, or multiple somethings are communicating with the leaders on both sides — Lewis and Leitz are both found talking to invisible benefactors in their offices, encouraging them to work against their best interests.

A fair bit of this feels uncomfortably close to The War Games, and combined with the less-than-usually-well-defined historical setting it feels a bit blah as a setup in its own right. The character writing contributes to this, with the Americans getting at least some degree of definition (usually a hard-bitten desire to get the hell outta this mess) but the Germans barely featuring as characters. Too often they seem like unpleasant or psychotic baddies in a war film, or even just crash dummies, rather than people. Lewis and Leitz have similar names, probably for a bit of “all the same in war” theme, but it doesn’t help much with reading comprehension when they have similar aims too.

Beyond the war stuff we have the Sidhe, spooky ethereal weirdos who are experiencing problems because of the war. They’re definitely an interesting presence, one that I’d be interested in hearing more about in other books — I love this spin on the old “humans vs Silurians” dilemma where the “aliens” are so beyond us that we hardly matter to them. But as characters they’re not much, breaking down into a good Queen (Titania), a bad King (Oberon) and a guy who’s just there to share scenes with Sam (Galastel). Apart from a nameless unhappy Sidhe at one point held captive, there’s no visceral sense that they are endangered by what is happening to them; the very ethereal quality that defines them makes them problematic as protagonists. The closest we have to character traits are Titania’s flirtations with the Doctor and Oberon’s (sigh) villainy for the sake of it. His motivations are helpfully guessed at by the Doctor and he suffers a very typical baddie fate in the end. He was the least interesting Sidhe despite having the most plot.

As to the plot, McIntee toys with this quite charmingly when the Doctor explains things to the soldiers: “I can call it ‘magic’, with all the nice feelings of wonderment that that word inspires; or I can waste your time with half an hour of technobabble that you could never possibly understand a word of anyway. Which would you prefer?” I like that a lot — the Doctor writing is generally good in this, particular the description of him as “just a normal guy from a different planet” — but the book leans more technobabble regardless, with the plight of the Sidhe being a little vague and the eventual resolution being a lot of strained, dramatically removed faff involving different dimensions. (Fun fact: the nature of the rift [the thing causing all the ruckus] ties in with The Taint, of all books, but if you’re at all excited by the microscopic organisms from that story then don’t be: he finds no narrative way to make them interesting in Autumn Mist and barely refers to them anyway, so he might as well have made up his own thing out of whole cloth.) The only simple thing about it is the degree to which they need to dredge up the TARDIS in order to fix it, but that retroactively makes dumping it underwater feel like an excuse to make the book longer rather than an interesting challenge. Not to mention, “plug the TARDIS into it” isn’t a very high bar for a genius like the Doctor.

The Doctor is, at least, pretty well written here. He convincingly ingratiates himself with the Americans (not many opportunities to win over the Germans, alas) and he has that typical for McGann isn’t-he-handsome encounter with Titania, but we do miss a few opportunities along the way, such as a bit of potential grief (we’ll get to it) and the fact that he seems altogether blasé about the deaths of enemy soldiers.

Fitz has a much better time here, and he pretty much steals the show. Finding himself behind enemy lines (but thanks to the TARDIS, able to speak German) he somewhat sidesteps the awkwardness he feels about his German heritage and carries out some slightly Doctorish action without any prompting. There’s a marvellous bit where he tries explaining things partly by making them up (“it was kind of fun; no wonder the Doctor behaved like this so often”); there’s a whole sequence where he rescues a Sidhe because it’s what Sam would have done (“Sam would be proud of me, he thought. Go free, strange thing”); and when cornered by Americans, conscious of his historically suspect name, he immediately flips it to “James Bond”.

There’s a good amount of continuity with earlier books, although it’s pretty much all surface level. He’s worried about the implications of sleeping with Other Sam (barely anything is said about it, next) and when confronted with the Taint creatures he reflects that he’d really rather stop them so they can’t kill his mum and stuff, but oh well, can’t do that, next. Hey ho, there’s enough for us to confidently point at him and say, that’s Fitz all right. Autumn Mist is another good showcase for him as an offbeat companion.

Is it a good showcase for Sam? Well, I don’t think McIntee does a bad job of writing her, although she spends entirely too much of the book being somewhere else. (At one point she’s replaced by a duplicate — this again, huh? — and even the fake Sam mostly keeps quiet.) Her wit is present and correct. There are problems with her story, though.

McIntee was, according to Steve Cole, “very keen to kill Sam”. He’s not the first, so automatically that wouldn’t have much weight to do again, but the decision to have her murdered partway through Autumn Mist is a puzzling one. (NB: she gets better.) It’s unlikely to convince anyone that the Eighth Doctor’s best friend is dead for a couple of reasons. You do that sort of thing at the end, surely? The fact that it’s not is surely suggestive. And haven’t we done it before? Not just the killing her off part (The Janus Conjunction, Beltempest) but the aftershocks. This is the third book in a row (!) that tries to put the Doctor through the emotional wringer over losing his friend. He seemed discombobulated in Dominion; he was forced to confront it from another angle in Unnatural History; here, he’s simply a bit sad and accepting, even seeming cold to an American observer, and then he’s happy when it turns out she survived. Is he simply exhausted from feeling this way again and again? Was he hedging his bets, since she normally turns out all right in the end? I dunno, just as I don’t know if this particular repetition across the books was deliberate and intended to achieve something. Beyond McIntee’s reliably visceral description, however, and her well written Sidhe encounter afterwards, it’s a very ineffective beat.

Somewhat impressively, death isn’t her most noteworthy event in the book. Steve Cole contributed much or all of the final two pages, in which Sam abruptly says she wants to go home. Was it the death-followed-by-resurrection? The near miss with rape by German soldiers? The simple fact of death occurring all around her, again, and that finally hitting a tipping point? I’ll be honest, there are plenty of things in Autumn Mist that could set the stage for this decision. But there’s no through line in the text. (Other than her death, and that’s much more the universe tapping its watch than her doing so.) Sam, on the occasions when she is in this, does not seem to be weighing up her life and where to live it. Yes, she has a thoroughly miserable time in the book, but (apart from, y’know, dying) there isn’t anything here that says this should be the one that changes everything. She just says it and — for poignancy, but also inevitably because there’s less than a page to go — the Doctor barely reacts. That’s it.

This could absolutely have worked if it had been a prominent theme in the book. Instead, it’s a very obvious substitution by someone other than the author; a cheap soap opera cliffhanger instead of a heartbreak. Let’s hope Sam is able to really feel this and make something of it in her swansong — and let’s hope the editorial notes move more towards suggestions for changes than “give it here, let me do it.”

Despite complaints, I liked Autumn Mist. I think McIntee’s writing is quite strong in places, showing off some of his better qualities. The story however doesn’t get off the leash. The fantasy elements could be more pronounced, as could the historical ones. (The tie-in with the Philadelphia Experiment got a laugh out of me, at least.) He clearly can write for these characters, which makes it rather a pity he didn’t do so again; it’s just the choice of what to do with those characters that occasionally lets them down. At least they weren’t all his choices.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #49 – Storm Harvest by Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#23

Storm Harvest

By Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

The latest effort from Robert Perry & Mike Tucker opens with a dedication to Mark Morris: “for making us find a title without ‘deep’ or ‘blue’ in it.” This is rather apt as their book has some things in common with Deep Blue. Storm Harvest is another grisly, but otherwise traditional-as-all-heck monster mash. It’s another one that features bloodthirsty creatures from the deep. It’s another one that I read and enjoyed when it was first published and — happily — it’s another one that has more or less held up.

We’re following on directly from Matrix, so it’s understandable that the Doctor and Ace are in dire need of a holiday. They pick the ocean world of Coralee, which unbeknownst to them is not having its best summer ever. Ships are sinking without warning. A strange creature has been sighted around the colony’s control centre. A spaceship lurks nearby and its crew are itching to come and cause trouble and before long, everyone on Coralee will be at risk from the Krill — ravenous monsters that make the Daleks seem open to negotiations. Oh, and they’re due for a hurricane.

There’s bags of grisly incident to be getting on with. One area that distinguishes it however from Mark Morris’s latest is the characterisation. Perry & Tucker wrote their own potted Season 27 within the Past Doctor Adventures, with all their books following on from each other and several even having started life as scripts. That added continuity between novels means that we don’t have so much of the disposability that comes with a storytelling chocolate box like the PDAs. We can — hooray! — pick up on some of the trauma from earlier books.

But only some. There are references to how guilty the Doctor feels about almost murdering Ace before, and to what he almost became in that book. Ace, in turn, has a bit of mental processing to do about all this. We politely sidestep the possibility that he was the one actually committing the Ripper murders, which I suppose means that he definitively wasn’t; meanwhile, I couldn’t see any mention of the murder definitely committed by Ace, which seems to me like money on the table. Why write things like that and then drop them?

Her main drive in the novel is to support the Doctor and “to prove to [him] that he could rely on her.” She even gives him a pep talk, although she later has a brief unconvincing wobble with “Once again the Time Lord had arrived and taken control of people’s lives” before flipping back the other way because, somewhat implausibly, she believes she’s manipulating people too. I wonder if she’s just compartmentalising her feelings the way the Doctor does with necessary evils: when things get dangerous he creates “a space in his subconscious, a place into which he would push all the guilt when the time and opportunity came to destroy [the Krill].” Could Ace be parking her concerns because she feels sorry for his struggles in Matrix, and wants to give him the benefit of the doubt? (Let’s call that one headcanon, shall we? These books might be ersatz New Adventures in terms of when the stories take place, but that’s about as far as the parallel goes. Storm Harvest, while we’re on the subject, lacks the vintage NA weirdness of Matrix, being a lot more in line with their earlier gore-fest Illegal Alien.)

It’s tempting to say this is an interesting one for the Doctor. Still reeling from his identity crisis in Matrix, he’s immediately placed into danger here, but he has that moment of consideration (or at least compartmentalisation) for the Krill, and when he’s in the middle of a humans-vs-(not Krill) aliens uprising he’s forced to not pick sides, watching various humans die as a result. He escapes certain death by the skin of his teeth at least twice. Overall, he somewhat lacks his usual power and self-assurance, and because these books are a series within a series, it’s at least possible that they are Doing A Thing.

There’s some decent characterisation in the supporting cast, mostly in the (I use the term loosely) Malcolm Hulke-ian sense that members of a group or a species can act in individual ways. The aforementioned spaceship is controlled by the Cythosi, a group of hulking marauders who use humans as slaves and want to use the Krill as a biological weapon. Their leader Mottrack is as unpleasant as you could imagine, but second in command Bisoncawl has some layers, rejecting cruelty against the slaves and having an appreciation for art. The slaves are on the brink of a revolution but there are different views held within that, some (like Peck) being absolutely bloodthirsty and others (like Bavril) being more interested in a measured peace. One critical character is an undercover Cythosi, losing his physical shape and his mind flipping between one species and another — his loyalties fluctuate too, throwing multiple plans into chaos. There are also “cetaceans”, aka sentient dolphins that travel over land in a mechanical apparatus: two friendly ones can be found on Coralee helping various parties, while another is aboard the Cythosi ship aiding their attack out of a passionate hatred for land dwellers. (If you think that sounds like the Selachians, you’re right, it does. Given that the original angry underwater guys return in the next PDA, I’m surprised that the editors didn’t call attention to the similarities.)

The characterisation has its downsides — namely, a few too many characters, perhaps to better facilitate the differences between them. (Not to mention, a body count.) There are two experts on all things Coralee, who go on separate undersea expeditions at the same time, each with their own cetacean on board; I got confused flipping between boats. There are two female authority figures, both with a weight of responsibility that is tested by tragedy. (Helpfully, they are friends.) And there is Rajiid, someone Ace meets and — hey, we’re all grown ups — sleeps with. I like that Ace has reached a point where she’s confident enough to hook up with someone on her travels, but Rajiid really seems to be here just so her subplot (trying to retrieve a weapon that will stop the Krill) includes someone to talk to. I never learned anything substantive about Rajiid (or Greg, his partner in the boat tour business who until I checked just now I could swear was called Guy); Ace’s momentary consideration of inviting him about the TARDIS feels generous to say the least.

It’s perhaps fair to assume that people aren’t reading Storm Harvest for the characterisation. If they are then good, because there is some, but much more importantly: this is a novel where all involved were so excited about the monster that it was built and photographed for the cover. (The perks of commissioning a prop guru to write it!) I have no idea how the Krill might have been realised on screen, at least once you get past seeing the things; their sheer bloodthirsty frenzy would test a BBC budget as much as it would the censors. They work great in a novel though, initially as an unseen menace similar to the Sea Devils, then later as a relentless force that effectively puts any obstacle into a blender. They make for an excellent we’re-all-gonna-die level threat and there are some marvellous set pieces built around them, particularly a couple of tense submarine encounters and a horrible penny-drop moment involving an underwater tunnel.

I think Perry & Tucker realised that you can’t have all Krill all the time, however — they can’t be reasoned with so you either stop them, or you escape, or everybody’s dead and your story’s over. So we have some added machinations involving the Cythosi (an interesting but physically less clearly-defined menace) and the Dreekans (four arms and uh, not many other characteristics — look, the Krill are great). The plot is neatly worked out so that it makes sense we’re spinning more plates than just “look out, Krill”, but it must be said that if there is a weapon that will kill only Krill then potential modification of said weapon to kill whoever you like seems far more useful than the Krill themselves.

Ah well. Perry & Tucker moderate the Krill and thus leave room for suspense, as a threat like that means you always know what’s at stake. The setting makes for a very appealing base under siege: the colony is one of the rare pieces of land on this ocean world, making it uniquely vulnerable to aquatic attack. Scenes of them literally battening down the hatches in anticipation of a Krill attack and/or a hurricane practically ooze atmosphere, and made me wish there was an audiobook version of this with sound effects. The various ebbs and flows of violence are generally well apportioned; the authors do a good job of pulling back before the various onslaughts become monotonous, and — in figures like Ace and Holly — they make the chaos feel personal. It only occasionally goes a bit too far, such as a ritual killing that mostly just serves to thin the character roster and depress Ace.

Storm Harvest is unashamedly a giddy monstrous onslaught, and if you have the slightest inclination towards that sort of thing then you’ll want to batten down the hatches and ride it out.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #48 – Unnatural History by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#23

Unnatural History

By Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

The era of Sam Jones is almost over, but lucky us, there was another Blum & Orman book down the back of the sofa.

I doubt it’s in any way controversial to say that these guys write the best Sam stuff. It’s not that they’re the only ones who are good at it — Paul Leonard and Lawrence Miles are no slouches, and most EDA writers at least get the basics right. However, Blum & Orman seem the most actually interested in writing for Sam. They don’t just do it well, they make it the whole assignment. Vampire Science showed us what kind of Doctor/companion team we had now. Seeing I showed us how much they had grown. Unnatural History toys with the idea of not having Sam any more — perhaps more meaningfully so than the brief stretch of books where she actually left — and in doing so, it tells us in more certain terms why she is here, and what that means to her and to her friends.

I’m sure you’re as bored of me banging this drum as I am, so I’ll be quick: BBC Books rushed Sam’s introduction, and then never stopped paying for it. Sam just seemed like a cookie cutter companion, which left multiple authors unsure what to do with her apart from the obvious. Here was a 90s Ace, only without any trauma to fuel her actions. (Ah, I can already hear you saying, but that’s where the books come in. Cue multiple trips to the hospital for Ms. Jones…) She does what she does because that’s just what Doctor Who companions do, which makes absolute sense in a nuts-and-bolts storytelling way, but doesn’t do you any favours in a long-running series.

Was it always the plan for that sort of shiny blandness to be a deliberate act, in-canon? Some of Sam’s behaviour in The Bodysnatchers could be construed as an early hint. By the time of Alien Bodies, anyway, it was officially rubber stamped that she had a second set of biodata — another life, in other words, where she has dark hair and a drug habit. The Sam that we see in the books could suddenly be excused as not entirely whole; maybe there was another one out there to put her in context. But why? And would we ever see how the other half lived? Multiple books have since reminded us about Dark Sam — as she is somewhat portentously known, erroneously suggesting a goatee and a volcano lair — dropping occasional references just to keep the engine running. I tended to assume Lawrence Miles would be the one to pick up the thread proper.

Clearly he will to some extent, as some important questions are left hanging at the end of Unnatural History, as much concerning the Doctor as his oddly duplicated friend. In the meantime though, Blum & Orman take the opportunity to write The proverbial Dark Sam Book and, being Blum & Orman, get as much Samness out of it as possible.

How they go about this might raise a few eyebrows. Sam is gone: something finally snapped in her biodata and our Sam has been supplanted by her dark-haired equivalent, still very much Earthbound and not the person we know at all. The story opens with the Doctor, sounding much like a crazy person, trying to wrangle her help. (I love when stories start already on the move, and this one in particular made me laugh because of course page 1 of the final Blum & Orman book has someone turn up and say they know Sam Jones really well.)

In quick succession we meet Sam’s parents, who we learn have been receiving our Sam’s postcards whilst actually knowing other Sam* instead (*sorry, I can’t type “Dark Sam” with a straight face, I’ll stick with “other”) which suggests that this isn’t a sudden switchover at all, but rather a mess that goes backwards and forwards in time. It also makes a minor virtue of the slightly aggravating EDA habit of not visiting Sam’s parents or even really acknowledging the absence of their daughter: now, we couldn’t have gone back there without inviting a colossal mess. (Or maybe we could have. Don’t worry about it; certainties are not all they’re cracked up to be, at least in this one.)

We then encounter a member of Faction Paradox trying to get hold of Sam. (That messy biodata means a juicy paradox for them.) When the Doctor saves her life, that settles it, she’ll go with him — giving us arguably a more fully-formed companion intro than the one afforded to our Sam the first time around. Next stop, San Francisco, where our Sam went missing and things generally are in a bit of a state.

It’s quite daring to stick Sam, as in the proper one, in a separate dimension for almost the entire book. You might assume this derives from the same impulse as those authors who do their best to sideline her, but no: by replacing Sam with an almost-but-not-quite copy we can see the gap she leaves behind. Other Sam does this directly at times, commenting (usually with some bitterness) on the apparent perfection of her “goodie two-shoes” alter ego. “Was that all? Blonde Sam would probably have picked the kid up and carried him to the nearest police station so he could phone his mummy.” (Ahem, Beltempest.)

She doesn’t know the shorthand between the Doctor and her blonde self (putting her ironically in the same position as Fitz when he first joined), and lacks her immediately heroic instincts. She isn’t remotely as skittish about sex and romance with her two attractive male companions, giving the Doctor a massage that would have sent her primary self into therapy, and finding a human comfort with Fitz that would have been out of the question otherwise. She’s about as sarcastic as the more usual Sam, but here it doesn’t jar against an apparent starry-eyed commitment to her place in the TARDIS. (Other Sam, along with Blum & Orman it must be said, rather undersells Sam’s propensity for moaning all the bloody time.)

There’s a wonderful kind of mess about this Sam that is lived-in and deserving of life: she’s not a mistake, she’s just different, and coming from less overtly plucky beginnings has the effect of making her heroism (when it arrives) feel at least as earned as anything our Sam has done, if not more so because it’s so far out of her comfort zone. Other Sam has the opportunity to see what kind of life she could be living and she can honestly aspire to it because she’s seen the alternative. It helps our Sam make a kind of sense she didn’t before. At least someone’s out here reaching these decisions for actual quantifiable reasons, in effect repeating that opening “why yes I will go with you” set-piece on a bigger canvas.

Urgh. I’m going to say the thing, aren’t I? Yes, I think I prefer other Sam. I’m not convinced the deliberate falseness/double-biodata thing was always the plan, but either way, this version of the character plays out important beats in a more grounded and believable way. When she is placed in a moment of crisis at the end her heroic act has real weight; we can trace her journey from normal person to active protagonist. It’s deliberately heart-breaking that there isn’t room in this world for both Sams, but it’s perhaps more upsetting than was originally intended that it has to be this way around. The assignment could, I suppose, be considered a bit of a backfire as it’s not so much affirming what we’ve already got as showing us how much better this all could have been to start with. But I think this speaks more to the series’ handling of, or at least my enjoyment of the character as a whole. Ultimately Other Sam is Sam, and what Blum & Orman carve out of Sam(s) is really only confirmation that you can write depths within Sam Jones if you want to.

That’s not only true of Sam here. Unnatural History is an important outing for the rest of the TARDIS crew, continuing that process of showing us something by examining the gap it leaves behind. The Doctor and Fitz are clearly moved by the loss of their friend; an awkwardness hangs in the air as they implore her to help, all three knowing the optimal outcome here is that she will ultimately give up her existence for her better half.

Fitz is written at his best in the series so far, perhaps in part because he has that absence to work with, the better to define himself. He feels like a fully integrated member of the team, using his specific skills — mainly theatricality, also an irresistible amiability — to find out information. There’s a feeling that he really wants to be doing this, he knows he is putting these skills to good use. His usual brand of horny nonsense won’t work with this Sam, however, as she is more on his level to begin with, short-circuiting his gags. There’s a tangible sense that he misses his friend, but that he more strongly connects with this one. When they eventually sleep together it feels utterly natural, while also giving an outlet to Fitz’s sensitivity, as he supports Sam while her biodata keeps fritzing. (Something that occurs throughout the book, suddenly remixing Sam’s past and making her into someone new.)

He also has a moment or two of great heroism in this, and again these feel like they come from a real place, not just him signing up for the TARDIS life. Blum & Orman get mileage out of Fitz’s brainwashing in Revolution Man, itself an ideology with no basis in character — something not unlike Sam being a certain kind of way without having truly earned it as a person. When the Sams inevitably swap back at the end, and our Sam attempts to comfort him, Fitz’s familiar bitterness resurfaces for a moment; that cynicism, too, is made to feel more earned.

There’s a lot going on with the Doctor as well. (Indeed, you could write a book about it.) The plot and setting, surprisingly for a book so focussed on Sam, are really all about him. After the damaging events of the TV Movie a scar has been left in San Francisco, pouring out strands of the Doctor’s biodata and causing instability between realms, as well as in the city at large. Seemingly mythical creatures are roaming the neighbourhood while Faction Paradox, strange grey men and an even more sinister gentleman all observe. The TARDIS is as lost as Sam, put to work out of sight in a desperate bid to keep the “scar” from collapsing and causing total chaos. Before long a literal Kraken will awake and destroy the city, not to mention the Doctor’s biodata — and possibly his past and future.

First of all, how immensely cool and totally insane is it to revisit the TV Movie? We’re talking about a full on sequel to something legally off-limits for BBC Books (novelisation notwithstanding), and they went ahead and did it anyway. It gets really good mileage out of it too, building upon that earlier script’s scattershot weirdnesses like windows you can walk through to give us steep hills with varying gravity and unicorns, casual-as-you-like.

The concept of the Doctor’s biodata, torn apart by the Master’s machinations in that earlier story, allows us to dig into a few grand ideas about his heritage — not least of which is that blasted half-human thing, now fully recognised as a twist of the timelines, one possibility of many, and if nothing else the sort of inconsistency Faction Paradox eats for breakfast. Unnatural History is at times as nerdy as it is character-focused, throwing in among other things the fanbait mystery of Daniel Joyce (and his assistant who shares a name with someone in The Infinity Doctors), but there is meaning in how it for example juggles contradictory factoids about the Doctor, and makes the villain an obsessive categoriser who wants only to get his facts straight, someone “not interested in specimens that don’t confirm the theories he already knows. None of this messy ambiguity or complexity.” Griffin the “unnaturalist” is an archetype perhaps familiar to dwellers in fandom, but he also embodies the novel’s refusal to say that a person is one thing or another, just as simple as that. It’s a book about possibilities and uncertainties.

The Doctor is having a fairly terrible time here, having lost the TARDIS and Sam — again, it must be said, due to that unfortunate synchronicity with Dominion. (The authors do their best to recognise this but it still feels way too soon.) For what it’s worth, Unnatural History does it better by not having the Doctor at the whim of some agency for most of it and instead forcing him to confront and/or work around what he’s lost from the get go. Other Sam sees him struggling to cope aboard a plane — a little hint of the cabin fever he gets without a TARDIS, or simply being in one place at a time — and then generally leaving little things unsaid about his intentions towards her. She believes (in a thrillingly bleak moment) that he might simply throw her into the scar to get “his” Sam back. We can be in no doubt that he wants that outcome, but things are already too complicated to get it. His actions just before something like that finally happens leave a question in the air — did he engineer it? — and he refuses to answer, defiant that this uncertainty is part of who he is. There’s a rawness to how much he needs Sam and the TARDIS back, pleading with Joyce to hurry up and fix a gizmo that will aid him, negotiating with (and later ripping vicious strips off of) Faction Paradox, and at one point seemingly lying to the TARDIS itself that he won’t ultimately sacrifice it to save the city. Even he doesn’t seem to know sometimes — although to be fair, this close to the biodata equivalent of a random number generator, who would know for sure?

The Doctor’s ongoing crisis would perhaps be more satisfying if we hadn’t just had a very similar one before this — losing the TARDIS and Sam both times, for Pete’s sake — but again, it’s how you do it, and the situation here goes on to become a broader thesis on who the Doctor is; it makes the point that a loss of history won’t change who he is, he already changes fundamental tenets of himself just by regenerating; he must always cling to who he is now. This Doctor in particular discovered a foundational sort of happiness by forgetting his past. The story also, of course, demonstrates exactly how he’s come to depend on Sam when there are situations that visibly throw him and Fitz into disarray (or in Fitz’s case, heroic action) without her. It all comes back to that.

There’s heaps and heaps to think about, most of which I’ve hardly touched upon here. As I was reading it I was thinking about what I’d get out of it a second time. That said, Unnatural History isn’t perfect. For all the imagination of a San Francisco in this sort of cosmic disarray, there doesn’t seem to be room to meaningfully show it. The city feels incredibly small, with the action frequently ping-ponging back to the same alley with a special effect in it. We are told of things like dragons and unicorns but only briefly see them, and hardly see the reactions of the regular populace at all — there’s barely a supporting cast at that, although that’s perhaps deliberate in a character piece.

As fun as it is to throw out a mystery like Who Is This Daniel Joyce Guy Anyway (sources differ but it seems you can trust TARDIS Wiki here) it can be unpleasantly disorienting to wonder if you’ve forgotten something or someone from another book — and he’s certainly written in that way, just matter-of-factly being sought out by the Doctor. Blum & Orman are keen to play ball with ongoing plot arcs, toying cleverly with the question of who started this Sam biodata business and throwing out conflicting theories before definitively half-answering it (over to you, Lawrence), but some of this stuff does border on homework, which may or may not be your cup of tea. Mileage, and memory capacity may vary. (I’ve read The Infinity Doctors twice and I still missed some of the overlap in this. TARDIS Wiki ahoy.)

How much any of that matters (or is even true) will vary among readers, of course. I think there’s also a belief in some corners that the plot isn’t particularly strong. I have some sympathy with that, as there is a problem to solve here and there is a very nasty character seeking to gain from it, but everything that’s happening is really fallout from something else. Again though — does that matter? Unnatural History is all about the characters and the importance of understanding who they are in the moment. Surrounding them with chaos, not unlike replacing them with an imperfect copy, only serves to underline what matters.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #47 – Millennium Shock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#22

Millennium Shock

By Justin Richards

Justin Richards is famed for his reliability as a writer. There can be few greater examples of this than Millennium Shock, written at short notice to fill a gap and reportedly turned around in a matter of weeks. He makes this sort of thing look bafflingly easy, first doing this and then putting out a critical Bernice novel the following month, a BBC Book only 2 months prior, and later the same year pulling another quick turnaround to fill a gap for Virgin. At some point we must face the possibility that there was simply two of him all along.

Of course, a quick turnaround is all very nice — especially for the publisher! — but all that matters to the reader is whether the book is any good. There are reasons to suspect that Millennium Shock won’t be. There’s the aforementioned turnaround, although the reader shouldn’t be aware of that. And there’s the fact that it’s a sequel — a surprisingly rare commodity in Doctor Who noveldom, unless you count multi-book arcs or linked books such as Blood Harvest/Goth Opera and Shakedown/Lords Of The Storm. It’s even rarer for bridging Virgin and BBC Books — see also Business Unusual, at least, which revisits baddies but with a different Doctor.

Millennium Shock is more your sort of direct sequel. And by direct I mean it literally begins with the last scene of System Shock, albeit slightly expanded. The main action takes place immediately after that, making this arguably just the next 280 pages of System Shock. The entire plot that follows revolves around a pen that happened to be mentioned on that final page.

If all of this sounds like a desperate Hail Mary just to squeeze another book out of something, anything, well to be honest it probably was. But Millennium Shock doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that, picking up the gauntlet of “what happened next” and running with it at full pelt. The pace is crazy, but in a good way: the story stays on track and there isn’t so much of the author’s occasional chopping and changing of scenes and characters. I suspect there wasn’t time to spin that many plates in this one.

Richards, a noted programming enthusiast, would inevitably have been inspired by millennium angst. He uses that to power his latest plot for the Voracians, the semi-cybernetic snake people from System Shock. Still fixated on the ruling power of technology and still keen to release their all-powerful program Voractyll, they are now working within the government to circumvent efforts to fix the millennium bug, which will naturally create a chaotic vacuum they can fill. Said bug is a real gift to the novel — the baddies hardly even need their own weapon since they can just ensure that a problem already happening will run its course. This is a very fun way to incorporate real history into a story. (Or rather, given the publication date, current events. There’s an element of catastrophising in painting such a gloomy what if about the millennium, but that must have been irresistible at the time.)

Millennium Shock has a similar, if not quite as uncanny sense of timing to System Shock: the prior book placed its 70s characters in a fictional 1998, which at the time was 3 years in the future. We’ve still got a 70s character in this one (the Fourth Doctor, travelling solo this time) but he’s in what at time of publication was the present day. There’s still a novelty to that, just as there would be from having him show up in 2025. (The “modern day” for a TARDIS crew is always when they were filming, for obvious reasons.) Of course he manages to fit in easily among the technology of the day, at once being innocently perplexed by energy-saving dimmer switches and running rings around modern programmers.

Richards wrote very well for this Doctor in System Shock and there’s more of that here, such as a scene where he goes “undercover” (“He was in disguise, of course, hat in pocket and scarf tucked away inside his coat”), various moments of winning verbal playfulness (“‘Now,’ [the Doctor] said, ‘tell me, are you one of the people who’s breaking in, or are you as surprised at what’s going on as I am?’”) and in a great pratfall making use of sound in a way Richards would later revisit in The Joy Device. “Behind him the door rocked precariously near the edge of the stair. ‘Well done, Doctor,’ he congratulated himself as he passed the fifth floor. ‘No one will ever guess you were here.’ … ‘What was that?’ Bardell demanded. They had all heard the noise. Clark shook his head and shrugged. ‘It sounded like something heavy falling down a flight of stairs.’”

The Doctor wins people over with his (for want of a less hokey word) bohemian charm, aided by what can only be described as a book that isn’t remotely interested in messing about. There’s very little obstinacy among the government officials who aren’t Voracians, with one noting re the Doctor’s tall tales that “It actually makes no odds. Whether we believe the Doctor’s story or not, we are faced with the same problems, so I suggest we leave the question of alien invasion for now and concentrate on the things we can believe and agree on.” It’s such a relief just to let the plot fly without all that usual time-wasting “do you honestly expect me to believe this” guff. Millennium Shock only occasionally threatens to trip over its own feet in the rush: there’s a sequence where a government official is murdered in a way that will frame Harry Sullivan, but it only seems to matter for a chapter or two and then the open-minded good guys sweep it away so quickly it almost wasn’t worth doing. Ah well.

Speaking of Harry, he’s on companion duty this time, only it’s “modern day” MI5 Harry. I found it quietly touching to visit an older Ian Marter in System Shock and that is still the case here, with more insight into his rather Spartan home life and the regrets that come with his line of work. The action really does tear along to the extent that we’re not exactly having long character conversations, but his easy rapport with the Doctor is a treat — there’s a marked maturity compared to his more chauvinistic youth, and it’s so far not been possible to pair the two of them without Sarah in tow, so that’s its own kind of treat.

Richards manages to build a little pathos into his characters who more often than not come to tragic ends. Harry’s young cleaner becomes somewhat pivotal to his story when she becomes a target, and the Doctor’s interactions with a converted programmer end up being decisive for victory, as well as rather sad because a man’s identity has disappeared. There’s a general pathos to the Voracians, even though they are plainly a piss-take of mindless corporate bureaucracy: it’s reliably funny to hear these megalomaniac cyborgs calmly spout bobbins like “If matters do seem to be exceeding control parameters then you are authorised to issue a termination notice” or “‘We do have a containment strategy for your approval.’ Cutter nodded, evidently pleased with this. ‘Then present it, Mr Bardell. You won’t get unwarranted pushback from me.’ ‘Very well, Mr Cutter. I won’t speak to charts, if that is all right.’ ‘Verbals are fine.’” Yet underneath all that, there is a sadness about these quasi-organic beings who can no longer access what they once were, who now are repulsed by basic things like food and water. It’s sort of an obvious avenue for a semi-artificial villain race, I suppose, and yet it’s distinct from how others like the Cybermen are written, focussing on that specific sense of distaste. Good work, although there’s a chance we’re covering similar (if not exactly the same) ground as System Shock with all this.

The prior book was 4 years old and well out of print when Millennium Shock came along, and it’s been even longer since I last read it, so I can perhaps forgive Richards for playing the hits. And he has other things to draw from, now he has more books under his belt, additionally fitting in another nuclear missile crisis after writing one in Option Lock. (While this one is a bit less heart-stopping, I thought it was far more convincingly woven into the plot.) I do think the timely story makes a case for this being truly its own book, and in any case I thought the pace of it worked better than the first go around, blowing all the dust out at every opportunity and maintaining a real sense of spy-novel fun throughout. How much of the frantic excitement of Millennium Shock is truly down to the time crunch I doubt we’ll ever know, but I like to think that Richards turned a (millennium) bug into a feature.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #46 – Dominion by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#22

Dominion

By Nick Walters

New author! Fetch bunting!

Well, strictly speaking Nick Walters isn’t entirely new to this as he previously co-wrote a Bernice Summerfield novel with Paul Leonard. However, whilst I really liked Dry Pilgrimage I struggled to pin down a writing style that was uniquely Walters. He reportedly wrote most of it, so he should take credit for a good book, but it sounded like Leonard, delving into the moral greys of its characters and the oddity of its aliens. None of that is a bad thing — I guess the two writers were paired with good reason. It just means that I didn’t know what to expect from him the next time.

His first solo novel Dominion still doesn’t leave me sure of that. It does a few things very well and it’s clear that effort has gone into it — I believe this is a writer keen to get the EDAs “right”. But as a novel, a statement of what the writer is like, it’s not much to go on.

There‘s some memorable action at the start. A new character, Kerstin, wakes up to find her rented Swedish lake house half vanished, and her partner Johan MIA. Her landlord Björn barely survives an encounter with a terrifying predator that somehow materialises on his farm. And Sam Jones — moments after her final disagreement with Fitz in Revolution Man — is torn out of the TARDIS by some sort of anomaly, crashing the ship in the process and expelling its two remaining occupants so it can recuperate. The Doctor and Fitz wander around local Sweden looking for help and, so they hope, Sam, but as we’ll find out later Sam is nowhere nearby.

I doubt I’m the first or even the fiftieth person to say that a lot of this feels like The X-Files, with spooky forests, weird alien manifestations and people disappearing into special effects. (Well it was 1999.) We bolt on even more of this when it appears there’s a conspiracy to contain these events, but this swings us helpfully back to Doctor Who as the shadowy force is revealed to be UNIT, or rather, UNIT-and-C19: the even shadier bunch first seen in the Virgin books (Who Killed Kennedy) and then ported to BBC Books (Business Unusual).

You’ll have noticed a fair bit of continuity so far. There’s quite a lot of that in Dominion, but I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm: references don’t seem to be made here in order to bolster the writer’s fan card, but rather to pull the worlds of these stories closer together and serve a purpose here and now. It’s UNIT and C19 because that then creates a specific tension when you add the Doctor into the equation. A nod to UNIT’s troubles in Kebiria is therefore a nod to Paul Leonard’s Dancing The Code, sure — and therefore to Virgin still being canon — but it’s also a usefully violent text to back up the mindset of the character in question.

We get stuff like the TARDIS butterfly room, because that’s a great EDA staple, but also because it can serve a specific purpose when some aliens need a zero-gee hideaway, as well as the “soul-catching” ability introduced in The Devil Goblins Of Neptune (also seen in The Taint) which further pulls together the PDAs and the EDAs, but also helps underline a specifically “Eighth Doctor” skill. He was established as clairvoyant in the TV Movie, a fact given rare scrutiny in Dominion as the sudden loss of that ability is a useful way to show us the effect of the Doctor’s separation from the TARDIS.

Walters seems very adept at characterising the regulars, but only up to a point. The Doctor is best served, being terribly but convincingly out of sorts because the TARDIS has locked him out both physically and mentally — he doubts himself, he can’t do certain useful tricks that have helped him before, and he is generally a bit of a raw nerve. The choice to have Sam and the TARDIS in mortal peril however means that it’s difficult to parse what’s actually bothering him at times, or rather, it’s difficult to believe that Sam is the major crisis for him when the TARDIS is so much clearer in his behaviour. When we do get nods towards the more human weight on his mind, particularly Kerstin wondering (based solely on his expression) if he’s in love with Sam, it doesn’t convince.

Fitz behaves more like a Doctor Who companion than we’re used to, which is great: he actively wonders what the Doctor would do in certain situations, then applies his own bullish equivalent. He seems fully mucked in for the most part, albeit he hasn’t learnt the Doctor and Sam’s weird little number codes. (Another little bit of continuity, usefully deployed to show that he still has progress to make.) Fitz is as haplessly horny as ever, immediately getting the inappropriate hots for the bereaved Kerstin whom he can’t help noticing looks like Sam. Paging Dr Freud. (For good measure, he later mistakes Sam for Kirsten.)

The only real downside with Fitz is that while Walters is very aware of Revolution Man, and keen to pick up the threads of Fitz’s experiences and turmoil in it — particularly his closing disagreement with Sam, traumatically curtailed in their first scene here — he never really runs with it. Fitz never reckons with his years of brainwashing and (Kerstin hots notwithstanding) he doesn’t have much to mull over about Sam and where she fits into all of this. He’s a likeable presence better aligned to the series than before, and Walters knows his stuff, peppering in references to what happened to Fitz’s mum in The Taint. But the story evidently can’t do it all.

Sam, of course, draws the “no two companions may occupy the same story” card — because god forbid we ever build this three character dynamic — and she spends fully 100 pages out of sight. When we pick up with her in the Dominion (the strange world that is inadvertently stealing people and replacing them with aliens) it’s a decent showcase for Walters’ world-building skills, conjuring something not unlike the stuff Jim Mortimore was doing in Parasite. But aside from making friends with a local and trying not to die, there isn’t much for Sam to do. You’d be forgiven for empathising with Fitz who, on page 231, realises he’s forgotten all about her.

I don’t know if Walters was consciously writing towards Sam’s departure but there seem to be hints towards it. There’s Kerstin, the pseudo-Sam who goes the whole hog and considers signing up to the TARDIS life at the end; she even theorises that she has two “selves”, one of which is destined for adventure, which has specifically been a “Sam” thing since Alien Bodies. There’s Sam’s room in the TARDIS literally being lost which, I mean, maybe we don’t need Freud for that one. And when she’s finally reunited with the Doctor in a moment of possible death, despite everything in their past she kisses him — surely an implied “we’re almost done so why not” finality there.

This stuff is as close as Dominion gets to thoughtful character work, though. There’s the supporting cast, such as Björn and a long-suffering police officer keen to give obvious whackos like the Doctor enough rope to hang themselves with: they have reasonably interesting inner lives but they exit the book so abruptly that you might forget they were ever in it. There’s the military contingent at the heart of the plot — Dr. Nagle, the mind behind the teleportation device that has caused all the chaos, and Major Wolstencroft, the UNIT leader trying to contain said chaos — but they’ve both got such tunnel vision that there’s no progress for them to make. Nagle earns our sympathy by gradually understanding the Doctor’s fury over what she’s done, but her insistence on salvaging her work is an obvious death sentence from the outset. And Wolstencroft is the worst kind of one-note military blowhard, stubbornly refusing to believe that the Doctor might be useful and impeding him throughout just to keep the action rolling, leading to the Doctor’s applause-worthy lamp-shading: “Not again! We’ve been through all this before!” He mostly seems to be here to muddy the waters between UNIT and C19, making the former seem as bad as, if not worse than the latter, but in the end all that does is make you wonder why we’re seeing both.

That leaves Kerstin, and it’s fair to say I don’t get what Walters was going for there. If she’s a signpost towards Sam’s departure then okay, up to a point, but having a pointedly Sam-esque character eating up all those pages instead of Sam will inevitably feel as much like a parody of her obsolescence as a sincere attempt to prepare us for it. Even worse, when the time comes to say no to her future aboard the TARDIS it’s handled as abruptly as possible, with the Doctor (mentally back together again by this point) snapping rudely that she has her own life to live and anyway, they’ve got dangerous work to do. (Walters here bookends his follow-up to Revolution Man with a prelude to Unnatural History — only what looked like a means of characterisation the first time feels more like a cheap way out the second time.) The book ends with Kerstin wondering what the hell just happened, and it’s hard to imagine readers being a great deal more satisfied than she is. What a strange, rushed note to end on.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there is no great summing up at the end of Dominion. One of the reasons it took me so long to read and, I suppose, the real problem here is that it’s not about much of anything. Okay, these are Doctor Who tie-in novels, general sci-fi business tends to take priority over deep and thematic explorations of character, but Dominion is truly a “stuff happens” exercise outside of what it’s doing with the Doctor and Kerstin/Sam. It’s a sci-fi problem to be solved — a wormhole accidentally taking away people and things and replacing them likewise — but there’s nothing particularly rich about that as a conundrum, beside how unfortunate this will be for the Dominion. The figureheads of the problem are just some intransigent scientists and soldiers or some (academically interesting) aliens with no agenda and mostly no dialogue. It’s all much of a shooty exploding muchness, happy to trundle on until it’s time to stop. I didn’t egregiously dislike Dominion — did, in fact, appreciate the author’s attention to detail and his interest in the regulars — but I suspect the story’s heart has disappeared through a wormhole.

5/10