Doctor Who: The BBC Books #37 – The Face-Eater by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#18
The Face-Eater
By Simon Messingham

Space: the final frontier. Or that’s usually the idea anyway. At this point in the BBC Books run, especially the Eighth Doctor Adventures, space seems like the only frontier.

In defence of The Face-Eater, this one really is about the frontier of it all. Proxima 2 is Earth’s first colony outside our solar system. That ought to be a pretty arresting setup for a story, not to mention an exciting piece of history for the Doctor to explore. (Sam ought to be interested as well, it being her species and all.)

It’s let down by a few factors, some outside the author’s control. The Janus Conjunction already did a “scrappy human colony on an alien world” story. That one was set further into the future, but it was hitting the same “early days of human space travel” beats as The Face-Eater, so this rather awkwardly feels like somewhere we’ve already been. If it’s specifically colonisation you’re interested in, Kursaal not only did that but also gave us a before and after. (Legacy Of The Daleks also did it by proxy: our world was the one being rebuilt.) And if it’s indigenous creatures fighting back you’re after, guess what: also Kursaal, and chuck in Catastrophea as well. I’m not saying Simon Messingham submitted a bad pitch here; I’m saying, someone at BBC Books should have looked at what was already on the shelf and said “have another go please.”

In all honesty though, The Face-Eater wouldn’t have been a great example of colonial difficulties even if it had come first. The colony — remember it’s our first, not including Mars — is only three years old. The only people there are supposed to be the builders, the folk doing the grunt-work before civilisation starts. Yet Sam’s first thought about the place is that it resembles Benidorm, albeit a sparsely populated one. Fast work there. The main problem facing Proxima 2 is an ongoing murder investigation. It’s a place with traffic systems and secretaries and union disputes. Again: three years old.

I just didn’t buy it. This felt like a place that had been lived in and had begun to crack at the seams. A colony that’s getting on a bit, if anything. Which is fine — it might even be a realistic goal for three years of colony development, although I think that’s rather optimistic. The problem is that there are no intrinsic difficulties to living on this planet instead of on a dingy future Earth. The main difference I can see is that one unhinged person controls the entire city, as opposed to Earth where there might be other governments and stuff. It’s a surprising lapse in world-building from Messingham, after his expansive vision of the Morestran Empire in Zeta Major. Given the Doctor’s relative lack of excitement at humanity’s first steps being taken here — which to be fair might just be me viewing a BBC Book through a New Series lens, as the latter tends to emphasise the USP of a story setting — The Face-Eater could probably be reworked into an anonymous colony story with very few tweaks.

There are choices in the writing that both explain and worsen this. The planet isn’t very interesting. There’s nothing to speak of about the landscape besides some water, dust and mountains, and there’s hardly any indigenous life apart from some harmless-seeming mammals colloquially called “Rats”.  The former is perhaps meant to explain why the planet seemed attractive to mankind; the latter becomes plot relevant. Both things make sense, but nevertheless at no point was I curious about Proxima 2 beyond the confines of the city.

There’s also the population. Messingham writes them as culturally diverse, which makes sense, although it can get a bit clunky having to specify everybody’s accent and ethnicity, even to the point of conscious stereotypes. (One guy has a Southern US accent and wears a Stetson.) I guess you might conceivably cling to these things on another world, but it also has the effect of normalising said world, a bit like the Terrance Dicks approach in Mean Streets where Mega City = Chicago + hover cars. (Proxima 2 doesn’t even have hover cars.) There’s also a preoccupation with people’s past lives, so to speak, with the police chief fixating on his dead wife that drove him to alcohol (very Terrance Dicks) and the local doctor thinking about her previous career in Bombay. It all has the effect of suggesting these people walked through a door to instantly arrive here; nobody is thinking all that much about the years of hard graft spent putting this colony together, which makes it feel even more ready made and unremarkable.

This is where the plot comes in to shake things up, and to be fair, he’s got a decent threat here: the titular monster is a shapeshifting menace somewhere between John Carpenter’s The Thing and something out of HP Lovecraft. Bodysnatcher stories are great for sowing paranoia, and a colony is a great setting for that sort of thing. The setting itself continues to drag it down here, however, as there’s no particular feeling of isolation. (If Proxima 2 weren’t quite so cushty there could be a question of “don’t leave the city” and therefore being stuck with the shapeshifter, but alas, you could just wander off.)

The actual monster isn’t very well executed either, unfortunately. The shapeshifter revelation comes late enough in the story for most of the focus to be on one suspect: Leary. It’s all subjective of course, but I feel like the strongest execution of this idea would be to have more people under suspicion. There are a few character acting suspiciously, and there’s at least one genuinely great switcheroo, but the face-eater of the title ultimately feels like a concept not fully crystallised. Secondary ideas like the face-eater using telepathy to trigger visions of your worst nightmares are absolutely ripe with possibility, but they’re not wheeled out consistently and always feel a bit left-field, especially where the monster a) can just trick you by looking like someone you know and b) already looks like a VFX designer’s terrifying Oscar campaign just in its natural state. Why bother with clown makeup or a dentist’s chair etc?

If you disregard for a moment the setting and the plot, you’re left with the characters, and they’re a mixed bag. Fuller is our protagonist when the main duo aren’t around: he’s likeable enough (more so than the prominent police chief character in Kursaal), although his specific life traumas do feel very pat, and the story doesn’t do anything to build upon or resolve them. His deputy is the aforementioned Stetson-wearer, so is perhaps more likeable than interesting. The doctor is sufficiently flawed to pique my interest, but like a lot of characters in The Face-Eater she’s not destined for a long arc. There are a few more working-class individuals about, mostly somewhat criminal-leaning and need you ask, doomed. Their main interests seem to be a conflict with their rulers, which is something that could equally apply in any colony story.

The most memorable figure here (and I use the term advisedly) is Helen Percival, head of the colony. Her main trait is that she is hopelessly unstable and ill-suited to the job. You get the sense that Messingham is writing someone complex and problematic here, with a number of paranoid tics, but making her the prime authority figure just makes this feel like a standard intransigent person in charge. Her first action in the story is to arrest the Doctor and Sam immediately on their arrival, which is a beat so uninspired that the new series went out of its way to eliminate it with the psychic paper. She’s probably got reasons for being this way — including an incident on Earth, which again feeds that “we just got here” feeling about the colonists — but she’s too close to just being yet another tediously stubborn fool in authority to move the needle. (Perhaps to make her seem more interesting we are introduced to someone even worse: de Winter is such a heavy handed security officer that he starts killing people at random, and is equated quite bluntly with fascism by wanting to “get the trains running on time.” Yep, bad guy, got it.)

Now, inevitably, we arrive at the regulars. Again: mixed bag. Messingham apparently (Pieces Of Eighth) didn’t like Sam, and it shows. Oh it really, really shows. As well as setting her on fire and putting her in a car crash (kind of feel like “Sam gets hospitalised” is overplayed, I mean she’s died a few times by now), Messingham contrives a reason for her to be more annoying than usual: after her loss of autonomy in Beltempest she feels a need to “impose her will, stand up for herself. Stick to her principles. Take them to the nth degree. Isolate her centre, her Sam-ness, which distinguished her from that which was not-Sam.” In practice this means making a tit of herself, expounding at length about the appalling rape of Proxima 2 in the name of humanity, to the Doctor’s visible embarrassment.

As with most of the author’s choices, I can’t argue with the reasoning here — a post-Beltempest crisis makes sense for Sam, and it’s more than we got after her possession and murder spree in Kursaal, plus it’s a neat way for the author to get a handle on this unfamiliar character. But yet again, despite a few references to recent events, the baseline for Sam is effectively the person we met in The Eight Doctors, not the one who has learned and grown since/over the course of Seeing I. (No one bar Blum and Orman seems to have any idea how to write that. Sam as a character just can’t win.) Even when she calms down, Sam in this is a sarcastic, quippy, somewhat horny teenager archetype. Even her views on colonialism don’t inform the story much, as it flirts with the idea of humanity as a bad influence (Percival, de Winter) but also shrugs and points at the Proximans for making questionable choices in the past that are now biting everyone on the bum. And by the way, Catastrophea would like another word. (While we’re back on the subject of inspiration, the face-eater is eventually revealed to be “Another doomsday machine. For all its gloating cunning, for all its mystery and strength, it was just another weapon that had got out of control and turned on its owners.” Which is such a played out concept by now that pointing it out feels like trolling.)

Sam isn’t dreadful in The Face-Eater, but it’s no great showcase either. The Doctor fares better: Messingham has a good handle on the cool stare-danger-in-the-face quality that, if anything, is a creation of the books, combining it with the natural charm of the actor. There’s a great sequence where he tries to reason with someone whilst tied to a chair (coincidentally while rattling off references to a few Virgin books — nice!), and a good bit where he faces off against a nervous man with a gun. He’s also the main advocate for the easily-overlooked Proximans, worrying about them right up to the end of the book as humanity’s occupation reasserts itself as the main concern on this planet. Frankly some of this could (should?) have gone to Sam, who is usually the big “I am” about indigenous rights but in practice is revolted by the Proximans — how much of that is continuing to pick at her natural flaws as an activist and how much is just wanting to say “Sam is a dick”, I can’t say. But anyway, it’s a solid Doctor story.

There’s other good stuff here. The first half is broken up into character-based chapters — something he picked up from Catch 22 apparently — and this does some decent legwork at setting up the colony and keeping us on our toes about what other characters are up to. The bodysnatcher stuff, when we finally get some, works very well, culminating in the scene I mentioned earlier which I don’t want to expand on in case I ruin it, but suffice to say I didn’t see it coming and it’s executed literally as one twist followed by another. Very good stuff. There’s also a tendency to write the face-eater in second person prose, which does a very good job of immediately separating that character voice from everything else. In all honesty I still don’t like it much, because I find second person writing absolutely headache-inducing to read and I can’t wait to get out of it, but I appreciate that the author is trying something here.

“Mixed bag” is unfortunately quite a generous description of The Face-Eater. A mix of stuff we’ve already heard ad nauseam and stuff that just doesn’t quite work in practice, it seems destined to be one of those anonymous books that people tick off and then don’t think about again. After his burst of ideas in Zeta Major, I’m willing to bet that wasn’t the author’s intent, and I’m nevertheless hoping that I enjoy his next one. With change just around the corner for this Doctor-companion setup, I’m also crossing my fingers that the EDAs will pick their feet up concerning the regulars, and maybe set a story somewhere different once in a while. If it must be somewhere suspiciously familiar, as Messingham’s maiden colony unfortunately becomes at this point in the run, then at least offer the editorial guidance to make it seem different.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #36 – The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#17
The Infinity Doctors
By Lance Parkin

Happy 35th anniversary everyone! Be aware though that we are a little late to the party. It was, let’s see, almost as long ago now as the combined run of Classic Doctor Who. Which is fine, obviously. I’m fine with that. (Oh god, oh Jesus.)

The question on these sorts of occasions is how best to celebrate. The most popular answer is “have lots of Doctors in it.” This approach tends to be very good for ratings and it’s always a bit of fun; it did BBC Books no harm in selling their launch title, and that wasn’t even on an anniversary! However, it must be said that (at least according to, ahem, prevailing opinion) The Eight Doctors wasn’t very good — partly because it’s got so many Doctors in it. And while we’re at it this tends to hamper those anniversary shindigs as well. There just isn’t enough for everybody to do.

I think we can infer from this one’s title that Lance Parkin and/or BBC Books knew that we were expecting more of this, and they felt comfortable poking fun at it. Fair enough. What we get instead is a rather more left-field way of celebrating: The Infinity Doctors is an Elseworlds (or should that be Unbound?) sort of tale, set in a version of Doctor Who where he never left Gallifrey (or at least not permanently), with a suitably grandiose plot to make it okay that this is a one and done.

Provided you’re willing to settle for just one Doctor (although curiously enough, there are several copies of him in it), there’s a definite atmosphere of celebration here, not only of the text of the show itself but the general wider idea of Doctor Who. For the committed nerds there are multiversal references to telly stuff like the Hand of Omega, book stuff like Lungbarrow and never-got-made stuff like the Doctor’s father being a man named Ulysses. There’s gloriously forbidden stuff like the Doctor having a family and falling in love (several times), and there’s seemingly frowned-upon stuff like the origin story of the Sontarans, and as a bonus a creative yet credible solution to their war with the Rutans. The Master also appears in it — sorry, The Magistrate — and in this free-for-all context he can be the Doctor’s best friend who unabashedly loves him. What is that but a treat? Finally, crucially, The Infinity Doctors uses the premise of a Doctor that doesn’t travel the universe as a springboard to, well, what else but get him into that sort of thing. (Since a full blown canon prequel about the Doctor leaving Gallifrey would presumably be a treat too far.)

There’s a lot to like here. And I do like it. But at the risk of popping the balloons so festively arranged for you-know-who’s big 3-5, The Infinity Doctors leaves me a bit cold.

For starters, almost the entire thing is set on Gallifrey. You know: the planet so restrictive that the Doctor would traditionally rather be anywhere else in the universe but here. This is, of course, a gentler Gallifrey with a friendly version of the Master and everyone being nice to the Doctor; getting to spend all this time here is likely another one of those anniversary treats, a peek behind the curtain. It even leans towards that more squalid and relatable place we saw in The Deadly Assassin, with passages like “Some of the most awe-inspiring buildings in the known universe became everyday experiences, places you had to walk through to get to or from lectures.” But it’s still not a setting exactly rife with intrigue and character. Fundamentally it is a place to escape from.

We do get somewhat of a look at how the other half lives, aka Low Town — a decidedly unglamorous sector outside the stately Capitol. There is certainly a bit of crime and intrigue here, even a kidnapping and a couple of murders. But the story doesn’t linger here, or on the people here. I get the vaguest whiff of Ankh Morpork about Low Town, especially with the (admittedly very likeable) duo of Watchmen, Raimor and Peltroc, doing the rounds. There’s a fun gag about Raimor being older and wiser but currently inhabiting a younger body, whereas the much more green Peltroc is at the older end of his first regeneration, although the gag is admittedly a bit “you had to be there” in print.

Within the Capitol the action ping-pongs between the Doctor negotiating a peace conference between two ancient warring species and a mysterious murder spree by an equally mysterious figure. There’s a great wheeze with the Doctor appearing in two places at once to appease his guests; even better are the scenes where he takes the lead Sontaran and Rutan to the far future to try to cure their warmongering. It’s more interesting, on balance, than the kidnap/murder stuff, although there is a great Jekyll-and-Hyde concept applied to the murderer.

The people in the Capitol just aren’t all that fascinating, with the possible exception of the Magistrate, and that’s mostly the uncanny novelty of a guy that looks like Roger Delgado being terribly nice to people. I don’t get as much of a vicarious thrill from, for example, the name “Hedin” appearing a lot; look, it’s him out of Arc Of Infinity, and he’s still obsessed with Omega! The most rounded one here has to be Larna, the Doctor’s favourite pupil and companion stand-in. (And just this once, romantic prospect.) She’s got a good amount of pluck and, in a climactic moment, is more willing to stand up to the Doctor than anyone else. I’m still not entirely sure what to take from her decision, or the Doctor later on engineering it so that she didn’t actually take it. (Alas, it’s Unbound, so there’s not likely to be any follow-up.)

On balance, I think the plot is a big point of contention for me here. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just, well… familiar. Omega, ancient Time Lord genius who seemingly died getting Gallifrey its power, finds himself trapped in a universe of antimatter, and now schemes to get back to our universe — a ploy that requires him to swap places with another Time Lord. (Guess Who.)

Many details are different, but this is still quite openly the plot of The Three Doctors, isn’t it? And I mean, it’s arguably better. (I’m a bit of a Three Doctors sceptic.) But it’s still that plot again, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around it being okay just to repeat it, even in the context of an Unbound story. Wasn’t there any other story you could tell about Gallifrey? I’m all for an appropriate amount of nostalgia on an anniversary, but it’s the characters you want to see again, not necessarily the scripts. The whole thing just gives me deja vu.

It bears repeating that the details are different. Omega’s situation is somewhat new — he’s got company over there, and it’s very significant who, albeit only in a one-and-done way. The Doctor’s response to Omega’s offer is different, at least for a time; the reason he then changes his mind is perhaps an example of character growth along the same lines as the “real” Doctor learning empathy from his early companions, aka becoming more like the character we recognise. In which case it’s good stuff for a pseudo prequel, but I still find it difficult to square the levels of similarity at work here.

I just don’t think I get The Infinity Doctors. It’s as thoughtfully written as I’ve come to expect from Parkin — his books are always polished, almost stately affairs. And there can be no doubt that he understands Doctor Who: quite apart from all the nerdiness, look at the unspecific Doctor in this, who without any actorly accoutrements and with a completely different context (even on an emotional level) manages to exude just the same charm and eccentricity we’re used to. His easy acceptance into Gallifreyan society doesn’t come from his making huge concessions, or none more so than his (for some reason) deciding to remain there; he still is the Doctor, is still accepted as such, and Time Lord society is obviously better for having him around. Again, the book celebrates this character, and that’s great. Nevertheless, for me the mix of an Unbound tale we can utterly leave behind and a plot we have already left behind adds up to a glittering, charming, but somewhat disposable book.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #35 – Beltempest: Intermix by Jim Mortimore

NB: This isn’t a BBC Book, but once again we’re exploring a range from the periphery, so in my book it counts. If you’d like to know more, or want to pick up a copy of any of Jim Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts, Intermixes or just plain books, you can reach him at jimbo-original-who@hotmail.com. Alternatively search for Jim Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts 2 on Facebook. Thanks to Jim for the review copy — and apologies for being ever so slightly (4 years) late reading it…

Doctor Who: Beltempest: Intermix

By Jim Mortimore

Beltempest is a book about growing pains, so it makes sense that it would not only continue to evolve but would do so in a strange and staggered fashion.

Unlike Mortimore’s earlier Blood Heat what we’re seeing here is not a full Director’s Cut. This is an Intermix. I’m still a bit unsure what that means, but if it helps I’m picturing it as the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration, with the Watcher momentarily sitting in between Baker and Davison’s blurry faces. A stage rather than a destination.

It’s an altogether quieter edit than Blood Heat 2.0 — but I suppose that should go without saying, since a full Beltempest Director’s Cut is still planned. Will that one resemble the kind of top-to-bottom revision of (I swear I’ll stop mentioning it soon) Blood Heat? It’s impossible to say right now. For starters, where that earlier project renamed both companions (for, I tend to assume, copyright reasons) and swapped out the Seventh Doctor altogether for a kaleidoscopic new one of Mortimore’s invention, Beltempest: Intermix most certainly sticks with the Eighth Doctor and Sam as they were on the first go around.

I have no idea if that’s something that will change in the DC or if this is simply a different sort of assignment, but I think it’s likely that the story is so entrenched in this Doctor and this companion that it would defeat the purpose to start them over. We’ll see. As they’re much the same here, however, I have to be careful not to write the same review again, as my feelings towards them haven’t changed all that much either. Said feelings are still relevant though, so I’ll summarise, or at least try to offer some different clarity.

I don’t think this is a technically invalid take on either character, but it’s not one that really folds into the ongoing series as it was when Beltempest first arrived. The Doctor is a bouncing ball of energy whose quixotic moods can make it seem like he doesn’t care. (Hardly a hot take as secondary characters take him to task for it.) This affects his relationship with Sam whom he passingly believes to be dead at least twice, and carries on with what he’s doing regardless. Yes, the weight of a star system is too much to sideline just because you’re preoccupied with a friend — that dilemma is literally represented in the dialogue at least once — but it doesn’t exactly feel like the Doctor is making that trade-off, more that he’s just having a whizzo time in general. If that disconnect is intended to suggest unfathomable depths then I’m not sure we’re quite there yet. Hopefully it’s something the Director’s Cut will smooth out.

And then we have Sam, technically hitting some Sam-accurate notes like the urge to grow up and be taken seriously and the urge to help people and make a difference. Never mind that she had grown up by this point in the series, the books having gone to great pains to let that happen, and making a difference had not often been a problem either, or not (as it’s generally framed here) a problem exacerbated by the Doctor’s expectations of her. Sam seems desperate to lead by singular example in this, at one point physically rejecting a bag of tools from the Doctor, and that seems a somewhat weird reaction for one half of a symbiotic duo. But then where the story demands that they be apart, symbiosis can’t occur. All in all, Sam’s crisis in Beltempest feels like a pay-off to a specific ongoing tension that wasn’t really there, lending the whole thing a slightly odd sidestep quality. (Of course, Sam is eventually possessed by another life-form, but this is very late in the story so it can’t account for her general mood/quest beforehand. Maybe it would be better if it had had an influence sooner — or maybe I’d like that even less, what with the loss of agency that inevitably must come with it.)

All that said — and said again, in some cases — an upside to reading Beltempest in this form, and/or just reading it a second time, is an increased sympathy with these takes on the characters. If you are able to divorce Beltempest from the preceding few novels, as an Intermix published decades later will do by definition, then it makes a bit more sense to approach the Doctor and Sam in this way. If you looked at those early character briefs there’d be plenty to say for Sam in particular acting like this — the whole failed crusade thing fits right in pre-Longest Day, alongside the likes of Genocide. She did have a lot to prove when she first arrived. (This sort of thing even happened after the jump, The Janus Conjunction being a prime example, only there Sam was doing her best despite being apart from the Doctor, not to make a point of being without him — a meaningful distinction that makes the implied need to return to symbiosis less of a castigating one.) I suppose what I’m trying to say is, if you’re not reading these getting-on-a-bit books in sequence, if you have in fact not read them in years or not read them at all, then Beltempest: Intermix could be argued as a solid one-shot statement of what these characters were about at one time or another.

Okay, that’s more than enough said about what hasn’t changed. What has? Well it’s here that I become sharply aware of the difference between an Intermix and a Director’s Cut. Unlike Blood Heat 2: Even Bloodier Heat I didn’t detect any new set-pieces. This was somewhat of a surprise given the galactic scale of the action, but again, we’re still in a larval stage at this point; maybe that stuff will come later. I occasionally found myself flicking between the new and old versions and invariably found that the more striking or odd moments were already present in the BBC Book, but in some cases they have a little added nuance or context in the Intermix. Some of the individual moons are given names, which really does help to get your bearings. A moment where the Doctor considers the military overreaction to all this planetary chaos is given more weight. There are some little tweaks and massages that I noticed, like the Doctor referencing The Lion King at one point instead of opera, or Sam’s analogous reference to a test tube being updated to a “host mother” to better hint at the story’s theme. The same scene has the Doctor inwardly reflecting that he isn’t sure what Sam is still doing here after her “sabbatical” — a slightly cold thought, but one in support of this novel’s overall read of the Doctor vs his companion. All to the good, then. (This extra matter also works to bed in who Sam actually is, which wasn’t really a worry 17 books into a series but — blah, blah, blah! — it’s helpful in a one shot.)

Going back to the name changes in Blood Heat, Mortimore updates a few here, albeit just the secondary characters. A tribesman goes from “Fastblade” to “Stonebreaker” (or just “Stone”), perhaps to add some familial sibilance with his fellow “Skywatcher”; “Conaway” is now a more manageable “Conway”; “Bellis” becomes “Wells”, possibly to remove an unhelpful repetition of “Bel” where that is also the name of the star and the beginning of all the planet names. The aforementioned moon names are a boon. (If you will.) He sticks with a few names that he was clearly happy with, such as “Smoot.” (And who can blame him?) I think a little more meat on that character’s bones would be helpful, with him showing up late in the proceedings with a turbulent ex-marriage to Conway that we just can’t get into in the time allotted. Perhaps that’s one for the next iteration.

I knew from the introduction that there had been some nips and tucks here which, saints forgive me, I didn’t then notice*. However I think that speaks to these being good choices: nothing that interrupts the flow has been lost, nothing is more confusing in the new edit. (*On reflection I’m pretty sure various references to earlier books have been cut out, which makes sense given when this book came out.) It’s still a bit surprising to me that such a relatively short book could stand to lose a few pounds, but I suppose that could go for any length of writing. I still feel that there’s room for expansion, and I know that’s an altogether redundant observation when we know another revision is coming. Should I make predictions? Would they be doomed to fail? I’ll keep it brief then, and minimise disappointment: I still want to feel what is happening on all those worlds on a more visceral level. Feel it, see it, not just hear about it. I would like to know Con(a)way better, especially since she has an unhelpful ex on the periphery, perhaps mainly because she’s with the Doctor more than Sam has occasion to be. And the last gasp of the story, for my money, deserves to let its breath out more slowly: Sam’s escape from this latest form of possession and her reckoning with what she’s been through here ought to be fully on the page, not merely a thoughtful few paragraphs and then the purview of the next book(s) in the range. (To be fair, Simon Messingham got some mileage out of it.)

Beltempest is an odd duck, and perhaps inevitably so is its Intermix. I don’t think it can be disputed that this is a stronger version, albeit not a wholly transformative one. It’s tighter and at times clearer. I think there’s a case to be made that isolating it from the series makes a stronger statement of its characters, although the overall tensions I found within the story — events on a scale that can’t be translated by smaller beings, or even perhaps readers — still persist. It’s still a book that seems aware of the distance between action and understanding, even putting that into the plot with Sam’s frustrated psychic communications and visions, but can’t quite resolve that into a book that feels its feelings. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s all to come in the Director’s Cut and maybe the Director’s Cut will do something else entirely. Here and now I’d say the Intermix is the best way to visit Beltempest. But still not, by its own stated definition, the best we’ll ever get.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #34 – Beltempest by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#17
Beltempest
By Jim Mortimore

If you thought Eye Of Heaven seemed a bit small scale for Jim Mortimore (at least until the bit with all the interplanetary portals) then maybe Beltempest will be more your speed. It’s in a similar mould to books like Parasite, dealing in massive and weird spatial phenomena with planets aplenty. It arguably has an even greater scale than that earlier book — so it’s surprising that it comes in noticeably below the standard 280 pages of a BBC Book.

As per Pieces Of Eighth, the writing for Beltempest wasn’t the happiest of Mortimore’s career. The book came in “short and late” as a result. This is good to know, because Beltempest has issues, some of which make a bit more sense when you bear that in mind. But in other areas I wonder if there were just fundamental frictions in what the book was going for.

The Doctor and Sam find themselves facing a solar system in crisis: the star Bel is dying at an absurdly fast rate, throwing out fluctuations that affect the dozens of celestial bodies in orbit. Various races and factions are at risk and they are scrambling. The Doctor and Sam are separated (only for most of it; they meet up in the middle), with the Doctor helping the military to stabilise the situation/find a solution and Sam falling in with a surprisingly effective resurrection cult.

It’s worth mentioning that the arrival of another huge star/planet/space problem rankles a little when we only just had that in The Janus Conjunction, and my review of that was already complaining of the format getting familiar. That’s not to say Mortimore doesn’t do anything interesting or new with it here — just that, well, was there something in the water in 1998 that made everybody write about space disasters? He seems aware of this, at least, putting in a couple of polite nods to Baxendale’s book: “What was it with suns these days? [Sam] thought of the near-disasters Janus had brought about, and wondered if the Belannian sun was being manipulated in the same way.” / “[The Doctor] wondered vaguely if the TARDIS had got a bee in her bonnet about wayward suns at the moment.”

And to be fair, this is different: this time billions (trillions?) of lives are in danger across multiple inhabited worlds. The story, admittedly in this respect also like Janus and various others, deals with events set in motion aeons ago by an ancient race, but the details are all Mortimore: the “alien beings” are so unlike anything we’d recognise that they wouldn’t even know we were there, living their lives on a scale we can’t comprehend. This is big picture stuff.

Is it too big, though? Enormous numbers of people die in this and it’s very difficult to feel the weight of that, firstly on a personal level, secondly when it happens over and over again. The crisis does boil down during a hectic moment when Sam is literally overrun by thoughtless fellow refugees; she ends up briefly caring for a young boy she calls Danny, who shortly afterwards goes back to his parents, but leaves her with something to think about. There are also attempts to focus the action on some of the military personnel the Doctor is working with, particularly a stressed doctor called Conaway, but these are quite fleeting. The action is at times so globe(s)trotting that I felt I’d missed a character’s introduction, or couldn’t quite keep track of what planet or spaceship they were currently on. The novel’s running commentary of widespread disaster becomes somewhat numbing after a while.

This, though, feels like a deliberate theme. Beltempest opens and closes with a commentary on the lifespan of stars and celestial bodies, how incalculable they are compared with our own. There are other bits like the Doctor’s discussion with Conaway about how we wouldn’t be able to interpret the signals of an ant trying to talk to us. And just generally there are nods to the incomprehensibility of scale like: “The chaos was indescribable … Individual identities no longer existed.” / “Sam did not know how many of the refugees, the crews, were dead, or how many more were dying. All she knew was that she couldn’t do anything about it.” / “Sam wanted to watch what happened but it all took place on a level beyond the perception of human eyes. The second most significant thing she would ever experience and she could not sense it in any way.” It gets so that when the Doctor casually says “I’ve saved more than a hundred billion people in the last few days,” my first thought was is that good then? compared with the number they started with. (My second thought was did you actually?, since it’s mostly just the deaths we hear about. There isn’t time or, in 250 pages, space to go and meaningfully hang out with the survivors, or get much of a feel for their now dead worlds.)

I don’t really know what wider point to take from the scale of all this besides, after a while: well that’s a lot isn’t it? Or: some forms of life are beyond our understanding. Which is interesting, but on an academic rather than an emotional level, for me. When the problem is finally resolved, it comes in a way that doesn’t exactly stop the death toll so much as put a cap on it, which is… still pretty horrible, but with an SF upside that again we are too small to comprehend or feel very pleased about. Our departure from Beltempest is sharp indeed, with no time to decompress. Then again, how long would have been enough?

Perhaps the best way to boil down this sort of chaos, indeed the thing that makes Beltempest part of a series, is seeing it all through the eyes of its lead characters. Separating the two of them seems like a smart move to cover more ground, though again it’s already a popular EDA “thing” and it prevents/saves authors from having to write the Eighth Doctor and Sam dynamic, which really ought to have been a prerequisite post-Seeing I. Mortimore wasn’t sure what to make of Sam (which strikes me as editorially worrying — surely they had a decent style guide by now, especially after Seeing I?) and the result makes that feeling fairly clear.

On the plus side, there are plenty of references to her recent adventures — Janus, Vanderdeken’s Children, Placebo Effect, Seeing I, so basically he read or was briefed on all the latest books which is good — so there is a textual understanding of where the character is at. But the general beats in Beltempest mostly concern growing up and making her own decisions — something she hasn’t noticeably been prevented from doing by the Doctor, especially after Seeing I. Her quest to save lives here feels authentically Sam-ish, as does the very human degree to which it goes wrong, though that feels like ground we should have sufficiently covered by now. (And what are we saying there? She’s a good person but like, calm it down a bit?) There’s an out for that, but it’s unlikely to be popular: Sam is quietly possessed by another unfathomable form of life (as part of the cult she falls in with) so she gets to make some crazy decisions towards the end. This is definitely a Sam trope by this point, as well as a general Doctor Who crutch for not knowing what to do with the companion, which authors have been using since Transit. The most interesting Sam moments here are arguably when she grapples with fake memories, implanted by some other unfathomable alien guys in order to motivate her. But even there, the fact that those aren’t her memories leaves the exercise curiously light on any lasting effect, just as her overall possession — as in Kursaal — means that in psychological terms, it weren’t me, guv, so there’s no need to worry about it.

This leaves us with the (Eighth) Doctor, who does at least have some reference footage to work with, but again it feels like some sort of style guide would have been beneficial. The Doctor here is a being of “manic intensity,” literally bouncing around and losing his thread in ways that annoy pretty much everyone around him, including Sam. (“He was behaving like a little kid; a rich kid, with too much money and no common sense, abandoned by irresponsible parents to amuse himself at the expense of the local townsfolk. When was he going to learn? You didn’t earn respect by being irresponsible.” / “Aellini felt anger build. ‘Lives are at stake here.’”)

Mortimore is historically great at writing the Doctor, particularly at suggesting his weird depths and oddities, but despite a reference to this one being “different now … younger, more mature,” his default setting seems to be a guy on springs with an IV hooked up to some lemonade. Which, to be fair, he sometimes was in the TV Movie — but only sometimes, and that was specifically a story about him just having regenerated, so he perhaps had an extra few screw loose. Perhaps this likeable sugary quality is a deliberate tonic for all the chaos around him here. There certainly are some delightful moments that brighten the mood, such as a cheery whip-round to borrow clothing to plugs holes in a spaceship before they imminently decompress, or a prison wheeze where he constructs a “deadly weapon” just to encourage the guards to let them out faster. But that cheeriness can seem a bit crazed in context, even in the context of Sam: “Every few moments he would hum distractedly. Then he would stop, as his thoughts turned inevitably to Sam, then, putting aside the pain of loss, he would start again.” Perhaps that sort of disconnectedness, and his levity in general, is part of the book’s (maybe) theme of unfathomable beings — the Doctor too is beyond us, beyond normal considerations for things. If so, that’s not a bad take, but in the context of recent novels (of which Beltempest is specifically aware) in which he has nearly (or actually) lost Sam and moved mountains to get her back, it doesn’t ring true.

As is often the case in these books, Beltempest has some great ideas. I loved the concept underpinning it all, the reason for the planetary weirdness. (I was less keen on the religious cult and the overtly nudge-wink Christ imagery, but it very much seems like there was something in the water for Mortimore to write that the same year as The Sword Of Forever.) Exactly why the ideas come at us the way they do here, in great breathless blasts or in casual comments or in sudden late interludes containing vital information, I don’t know. From context it seems that the book wasn’t finished to Mortimore’s satisfaction, which is probably it, hence a newer and expanded version in the works ala his earlier rewrite of Blood Heat. Giving Beltempest more room to breathe seems like the best course of action: maybe throttle some of that carnage into view for us, and make us truly feel the difference between e.g. “Belannia VII” and “Belannia VIII”. Would it even make sense to break this stuff down, though, or does that go against the point of the book? I’ll have to wait and see. In this incarnation however, Beltempest is very much the thing that it portrays: a massive event in space that we can’t possibly hope to fathom.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #33 – Matrix by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#16
Matrix
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

This one’s quite ambitious for a Past Doctor Adventure. That’s not to denigrate the ones we’ve had so far — if anything, I’ve found them consistently more enjoyable and better at embracing their format than the Eighth Doctor books. It’s just that the kind of characterisation you get in Matrix feels more appropriate for characters that are the “main” ones in your range, rather than rotating guests of the week. Which I suppose is another way of saying that Matrix reminded me of the New Adventures.

Perhaps that’s not surprising as Tucker and Perry (or in this case, Perry and Tucker — is that significant?) are so far the only BBC writers working in that period after the TV series ended. Similarities will suggest themselves. Their earlier Illegal Alien covered similarly familiar ground after so many other writers had spent time in that sandbox.

The familiarity isn’t quite so literal this time, although for a few reasons Matrix does end up recalling Nigel Robinson’s Birthright. (Another Doctor-lite story set against Victorian squalor with a malcontent Time Lord pulling the strings.) It’s the general sense of weirdness I’m talking about.

We open with a mysterious hooded figure in an unknown location being all ominous. (Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!) He sends a clay fish monster after the Doctor and Ace. It finds them already in odd moods, the Doctor feeling so out of sorts that he expects Ace to leave him at any moment. (Ooh, moody! What does that remind me of…) When the fish guy assassin doesn’t work out, mysterious hooded guy communicates through the TARDIS before seemingly blowing it up, except that was only a vision (weird visions, you say?), followed by a nightmare hallucination of dead soldiers who are all actually Ace. (Guilt about what the Doctor has done to Ace? Interesting…) Around this point the Doctor removes the TARDIS telepathic circuit, fearing it was helping the malign presence.

All of this is in the first 30 pages, by the way, and we’re not done with the setup yet. Next there’s a stopover in 1963 (hey, the 35th anniversary was coming up) where it appears that history is out of whack: there’s no longer a TARDIS in Totter’s Lane, but London does have marauding evil spirits, packs of youths with blades strapped to their fingers and an armed curfew. Initially seeking to leave Ace with his earlier self (don’t even get me started) the Doctor miraculously bumps into Ian and Barbara, who helpfully fill in some blanks. It seems there were now more than five murders by Jack the Ripper, to which Britain responded somewhat excessively thanks to a vaguely-defined spectre hanging over them ever since. The Doctor decides to go back and sort this out.

(We’re nearly done with the setup.) On arrival, the Doctor loses his mind and tries to kill Ace. Tossing the telepathic circuit, the two then separate, Ace to find some degree of safety and the Doctor — now amnesiac — to hopefully find himself. But it’s a particularly nasty Victorian London they find themselves in, and it won’t be pleasant for either of them.

And that’s Matrix, or at least the majority of it: a saunter through a dreary and dangerous city with murder in the air. The bonkers list of events that got us to that point feels like a fever dream once you’re actually past it, which in its way also reminds me of the New Adventures. They often swerved into wonky, slightly overreaching oddness in character and setting, especially in the early days where you were more likely to bring up character beats from TV episodes, which of course Perry and Tucker also love doing. It’s all a little bit messy in that “we haven’t quite figured this out” way.

The pace slows considerably once we’re into the story proper, although the authors keep it moving superficially with the use of short chapters and frequent scene changes. (I think I’ve made my feelings clear on this type of pacing: my attention span no-likey.) Ace has a fairly terrible time, ending up in a circus against her will because of an apparent relapse of the cheetah people virus from Survival. (Ooh, TV continuity! See also London 1963 = Remembrance Of The Daleks, creepy Victorian dresses = Ghost Light, circuses = The Greatest Show In The Galaxy. There are also a couple of Time And The Rani and Paradise Towers refs for the true collectors.) Probably the best stuff here is Ace’s growing camaraderie with Peter, a browbeaten young man working for the dreadful ringmaster Malacroix, along with the freaks and circus acts. Nevertheless, Ace’s animalism never comes under particular scrutiny beyond a surface aversion to behaviour like that — the authors more than once revisit the Survival line “if we fight like animals, we die like animals” and that seems to be the extent of it. Ace committing an actual murder is swept aside in the book’s closing pages; if we were back in the New Adventures there’d be a chance to pick up on that later on, but as it is we’ll have to hope Perry and Tucker find it interesting enough to revisit next time around. (Given the Doctor’s loosey-goosey reassurance that neither of them was in their right mind at all this week, I doubt it.)

As for the Doctor, who in many ways this book is about — well, is it, though? The villain is intensely invested in the Doctor and determined to break him, but after his upsetting swerve into potential homicide (with an honourable mention to his very odd mood at the start) the Doctor practically exits the story, the telepathic circuit seemingly taking on the role of the cricket ball in Human Nature and keeping his Doctorness tantalisingly out of reach. (As in that novel, a secondary character here becomes fascinated with the Time Lord totem. You’ve got to assume Perry and Tucker read that one, right?) Instead we’re in the occasional company of “Johnny,” who is taken in by Joseph Liebermann, a kindly Jewish man of indeterminate age who knows a thing or two about regret. (He thinks Johnny is the Ripper, feels sorry for him and takes him in anyway.) Plenty of hints are dropped that Liebermann is more than he seems, and certainly older than any human, including in interludes sprinkled through the book. It’s a nice idea but I never really saw the relevance. He mostly just keeps “Johnny” out of harm’s way until, due to sheer circumstance, the circuit finds its way back to him and the Doctor is finally back in.

Unlike Human Nature, which to be fair isn’t much of a parallel to Matrix beyond a few loose plot points, the Doctor hasn’t learned much or grown in the intervening time. He just didn’t do the ending yet, and then he did. Which brings us to there not being a lot of actual story here. Atmosphere, certainly: try setting a story in Ripper-era London and not having sickly fog seep through the pages. But I was mostly waiting around for Johnny to get his groove back. Ace, for her part, seemingly does the same. She has no real plan here except to kill time; she doesn’t, and perhaps needn’t fully reckon with the idea that the Doctor might be off his rocker for good. (To be fair, she’s right to have faith, but that’s only obvious to us because we know he’s the main character in a series — in a previous-continuity story, at that.) The only person here consciously moving things along is the bad guy, and even he’s taking his time.

The villain in Matrix is clearly meant as a twist, so I’ll be a good sport and not say who it is. What I will say is that I think making it a twist hurts the book. This is a character you could do more with — this whole thing is a rematch so clearly the authors agree on that — and yet holding back who they are, and holding back any character recognition of who they are until that moment, doesn’t leave much room to work. What can you squeeze into forty or so pages? Doctor, it’s me, I still have my pre-existing grievance but this time I’ll definitely win? All that earlier wiffwaff involving spectres and clay monsters only becomes interesting once the novel puts a name to it — in particular, the identity of the villain’s gang opens a huge can of worms, the contents of which we’re simply not going to investigate. Spoilers in books have value, but this one might have been more effective if they had ripped (Rippered?) the plaster off, stuck the baddie on the cover and kept the Doctor in his right mind. Making it a little bit of a fair fight is surely more interesting than no fight.

The implication that the Doctor to some extent committed the Ripper murders is only marginally more tasteless than writing an SF reason for the murders in the first place, but in any case, thanks to the time crunch it’s as effectively meaningless as the murder Ace commits. Matrix has by this point already shown its quality at dispensing information, with a truly diabolical info dump about Ian and Barbara’s alternate history early on and some clunky exposition about Gallifreyan technology near the end — not to mention the crazy pacing of the first act. You can see the skeleton of a dark and disturbing story about who the Doctor is and who he could be, but the book’s choices simply don’t take us to the centre of that, instead ticking off creepy images and famous murders to speed-run a bit of atmosphere. Matrix is hardly terrible (it has that atmosphere after all) but it makes the sort of awkward missteps that a full series might later course correct. The Past Doctor Adventures simply don’t have that luxury.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #32 – The Janus Conjunction by Tevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#16
The Janus Conjunction
By Trevor Baxendale

There’s nothing like a new author to shake things up a bit. Here comes Trevor Baxendale with a story about human factions fighting over an abandoned alien artefact that doubles as a doomsday weapon and… actually, are we sure this is a new guy?

Certain tropes are bound to spring up in a long running series — especially one based on a long running series! — and the BBC Books run seems to have a few of its own by now. We’ve already had severely narky groups fighting over a dangerous alien thing in Longest Day and Vanderdeken’s Children. Alien ruins appeared and were utilised in both of those, as well as Alien Bodies, Kursaal, Option Lock, Seeing I, Legacy Of The Daleks and Last Man Running. (Probably others too.) It’s starting to look like a default setting: want to do SF? Have humans abusing, or wanting to abuse old alien tat for their own evil aims. Just add TARDIS.

This is pretty reductive, of course. It would be silly to put down books like Alien Bodies or Seeing I just for including familiar ideas. As I seem to say quite a lot, it’s what you do with your ideas that counts. And The Janus Conjunction… well… it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel there. But I think it does This Sort Of Thing better than most recent attempts. And I think there’s genuine merit in that.

Right away we’re plunged into a warzone on the eerie world we can see on the cover: permanently eclipsed, with strange blue luminescent sand for lighting, this is Janus Prime. Soldiers in sealed suits are attacking a few visitors from Menda. What their actual beef is, we don’t yet know, but it’s an exciting start that introduces enormous cybernetic “spidroids” and ends with a very well timed wheezing and groaning. The Doctor and Sam instantly fall in with the Mendans, but are then separated by the Link — a mysterious gateway to the sister planet on the other side of their dying star. The Doctor is now on Menda. Sam is now in trouble.

The longer Sam is on Janus Prime, the greater the risk of (spectacularly!) fatal radiation poisoning. But the occupying military figures are not sympathetic types. The Doctor, meanwhile, has to talk the more peaceful (but just as stubborn) Mendans into letting him rescue his friend — as well as stopping whatever it is the maniacal Zemler is up to over on the dark planet, which has something to do with the Link.

It’s worth mentioning here that they’re all human. In a bit of continuity that for once actually puts old stories to work in a way that inspires new ones, we learn that following the Dalek occupation humans made some scrappy efforts to visit the stars. One of those was to set up a colony on the fairly remote Menda. They were escorted by mercenaries led by Zemler, a disgraced military figure who wanted to stay busy. On arrival/crash landing, when it became apparent the mercs couldn’t go home, the mood turned sour. Following the discovery of a strange portal to the neighbouring Janus Prime, Zemler and co found a new lease of life — somewhere to go, a planet to conquer — however this turned out to be an irradiated dump and returning to Menda after too much exposure meant instant death. Worse, the Link couldn’t be used to get them back to Earth. The end result was a pack of mercenaries who hate Menda, and a mysterious Link sitting between them in Chekhov’s Gun fashion.

There’s not a lot of varied motivation here. The Mendans like their planet and Zemler’s troops are mad about stuff. I think, putting on a somewhat charitable hat, there’s a unifying idea here about people trying to make their way and struggling to deal with the consequences of that: the Mendans want a colony, Zemler wants to maintain a kind of career after disastrous crossfire ended his time in the military. With the added continuity (which I like in this case!) it does sort of loosely become a story about What Mankind Did Next, and the different impulses that might drive that — wanting the best for everyone vs wanting the best for yourself. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it the book’s theme — to the extent that it is, it must be a fairly late addition, Zemler’s gang having been aliens in early drafts — but it gives you something extra to latch onto if you want.

Because… yeah. The characters aren’t terribly interesting otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had worse, and I think they all function pretty well within their limits, but there are limits. Julya wants her colony to thrive and she sort of likes Lunder. Lunder is an ex-mercenary who grew a conscience, so he has history with Zemler/a tension with the mostly peaceful colonists, and he sort of likes Julya too. His loyalties don’t wobble as much as you might expect. (A moment where he openly talks a character into self-sacrifice rather than do it himself makes rational sense, but it’s still pretty mean and goes completely unexamined by the Doctor.) Of the rest of the colonists, few register at all, and Menda is pleasant but dull as a rock — basically your average somewhat old-timey Star Trek outpost. An odd thing to get killed over.

The mercenaries are pretty much going along with their mad boss because they’re all dying anyway and it’s something to do. (When one of them switches sides it happens between scenes, so we skip the actual interesting bit.) Zemler is an absolute Emperor Zurg-level bad guy, sitting in an evil lair stroking a pet. He seems openly resistant to any rational reason for what he’s doing, starting off generally annoyed and sinking into megalomania from there. When the story finally starts playing around with the doomsday device, however, with all the technobabble that creates, it’s sort of nice that the stakes are so clear. One guy hates everyone so much that he’ll destroy everything. Okay, that’s a very quantifiable problem if nothing else.

Again with the charitable hat: I don’t think it’s that hard to empathise with these different groups. The Mendans have a nice home, of course it makes sense to protect it. The mercenaries are dying, and dying horribly, so it makes an awful kind of sense that they’d want to lash out, and otherwise have no better ideas than just “whatever the boss says”. Baxendale underscores the point by putting a lot of effort into the horrors of radiation, bodies rotting until they die at which point they instantly liquify. You’re always horribly aware of what’s happening to them, or what’s going to.

I think he just about pulls back from revelling in it, with the cost of it weighing on Sam for a lot of the book. She really puts her principles to the test here, hanging out on Janus Prime (at certain points, voluntarily) and putting herself at risk to help others. She suffers greatly for all of that, getting visibly sicker until she actually dies — a spoileriffic thing to blurt out, I know, but it’s also a thing that is resolved within 5 pages in a way that Sam won’t notice and the Doctor didn’t either, which I think makes it okay to mention here and perhaps makes it a contender for the all time Damp Squib Awards. (I wonder if that brush with/actual encounter with death will somehow come into play at a later date. I suspect that, like her possession and unwitting crimes in Kursaal, it won’t.)

There’s some pretty good interrogation of Sam’s stance on guns (Genocide still casting a shadow it seems), with the awkward bonus that her attempt to create a distraction ends up taking alien lives. She never actively finds out about this, although I very much enjoyed the subtle suggestion that the Doctor tells her via a psychic bond. (“The explosions had stopped the moment the Doctor found out it was Sam using the ripgun.”) Perhaps it’s fair to spread the bad feelings about; the violence here, after all, emboldens the Doctor’s characterisation. He gets to display not only a literal, mental link with the spider creatures/Janusians, but he empathises strongly when they are killed, more so than anyone else around — and he rages when it’s done deliberately by Lunder.

The Doctor here is as dead-on as he gets, a whirlwind of charm that can turn instantly to serious consideration instead. He confronts Zemler fearlessly (albeit perhaps foolishly) and his distress at realising Sam has unwittingly taken lives is as palpable as when he realises just how ill she has become. He displays a pleasing amount of cheekiness as well, at one point using the TARDIS’s temporal orbit to sort out a problem without advancing the overall ticking clock (he should do that every week!) and at the end steering himself and Sam away from a party because “I’ve seen the future and we don’t go.”

The best thing about The Janus Conjunction is the pace. It doesn’t let up, leading to a highly readable story that only looks as if it’s dragging its feet near the very end. The constant and very visible threat of radiation, plus the equally constant, equally visible moon and sands of Janus Prime (and the danger they represent) propels the thing along even though it is, in all honesty, a meat and potatoes Doctor Who story, and a familiar one at that. The writing for the regulars is excellent; the writing for everyone else is good enough. I doubt it’s anyone’s favourite, and I’m very ready to move on from alien wreckages and doomsday machines, but it’s a very solid bit of work.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #31 – Last Man Running by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#15
Last Man Running
By Chris Boucher

I was excited to read this one for a couple of (pretty obvious) reasons.

More Leela is always a good thing. After being criminally ignored in the Missing Adventures she crops up fairly often in BBC Books, shaking things up with her unique perspective and the equally offbeat Doctor/companion relationship that surrounds her. Here she is in her second book already. Marvellous.

And who should be the writer this time but Chris Boucher — originator of Leela. What a coup! He’s written several celebrated Doctor Who scripts and was the power behind much of Blake’s 7. Even when he swings and misses, which happened on both shows, it tends to be at least interesting.

The premise isn’t bad. The Doctor and Leela arrive on a strangely ersatz world that looks deserted, apart from a couple of predators very keen on killing anything that moves, and a team of people on the hunt for a fugitive. There’s shades of The Android Invasion (a place with no wildlife where even the plant life isn’t real), with the exciting addition of everything that is there wanting to kill you. The whole fugitive thing seems promising too — how dangerous is the fugitive? And how trustworthy are the people hunting them? Good ideas here.

I’m highlighting this early sense of promise because in execution these ideas fall completely flat.

The world they’re on has shades of interest about it — particularly good are the random different climates, such as jungle suddenly segueing into forest, but nothing is really done with that besides creating a general sense of oddity when it happens to come up. It’s the sort of thing that might work better in a visual medium where the differences can be more apparent than saying “these trees aren’t like those trees”. (You could probably make the prose dig into what makes it like a forest vs what makes it like a jungle, but we generally don’t.) The same goes for the general lack of wildlife and activity — it worked for The Android Invasion because you could draw our attention to it with production values, but in a novel if you say “forest” or “jungle” I’m already relying on my imagination for birds or cicadas to be busying away, so their implied absence is somewhat abstract. (Given that it eventually turns out the planet is a sort of weapons training facility, where things hunting you is the whole point, you might think a bit of background hubbub would be useful. What’s the point training in conditions that you won’t find anywhere else?)

The setting is unfortunately the least of our problems. For about half the page count Last Man Running is a survival drama, aka an action movie. Sounds exciting, right? Making it a Leela story tips the balance, presumably making it more exciting, like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando: you almost feel bad for anybody getting in his way but it’s fun to watch it play out. Here, not so much. Leela is a match for the various snakes and multi-legged worms and flying things and underwater things and random-bipeds-with-sticks on this planet, and that’s never really in question. So far, so Arnie, but the individual threats are all animals (apart from the bipeds who might as well be), so there’s no outwitting, no sense of foiling something insidious, just the hard graft of chasing and killing things before they kill the Doctor or somebody else. This can take pages at a time to pull off, and then it’s just happening one time after another. Critically, no story is progressing between these attacks — we’re just rummaging around to find another thing she can disembowel. It’s monotonous action in search of a story.

It’s easy to forget that there are other characters since Leela for sure is the biggest moving part. It doesn’t help though that the supporting characters aren’t doing anything of significance. They’re here to find a fugitive, but they aren’t really looking for him; their main preoccupation is finding their ship (which has vanished) and then not getting killed. They mostly just bicker, or in one case flirt, and also their leader has some neuroses about not being good enough and not having a good enough team. In general they’re a deeply unlikeable bunch and — since their leader brought it up — they’re pretty bad at this, actually, so it’s hard to be invested in their success or survival. When one of them stupidly gets himself ensnared by a giant amphibian, you do sort of want it to hurry up and eat him.

The team are all from a species (human, human-ish?) with a number of odd tics. These all hint at world-building, which could be interesting, but none of it really is; it’s just added detail. They call each other “firsters” or “toodies” depending on if they were settled on their first or second planet; they have a thing about weight, with “skinny” being derogatory, so most of them are rather portly; they observe an odd naming convention where the first syllable is its own separate thing, which means they think the Doctor’s first name is “The” for almost the whole book even though they are all well aware of, and correctly use the word “the”; and they have a religious fascination with Shakespeare, but appear not to know who he is, which seems redundant but perhaps hand-waves towards the sheer age of their society. It might be worth remembering the Sevateem and the Tesh in Boucher’s The Face Of Evil, as their names and terminology changed over generations. I’d also point to The Robots Of Death, which contained another bunch of unlikeable drips as the supporting cast. In their case, though, being in an Agatha Christie pastiche, we were invited to wait for the next body to drop. Here we just have a bunch of pompous twerps stumbling into death traps to keep Leela busy. They disappear for a significant chunk near the end, perhaps to see if we’d even notice.

Around the two thirds mark the story shifts underground to the lair of the fugitive/runner of the title (although “last man running” coincidentally refers to something else here). It’s good to finally put a face to the name, so to speak; the Fourth Doctor is at his best when he has someone to run rings around, and this band of hopeless fugitive-hunters don’t cut it. (Incidentally, why he insists on humouring them with the “The” name and lies about his and Leela’s origins, I don’t know. Why should he care how they react to the truth? This Doctor especially. Very odd.) The fugitive is, unfortunately, not a fascinating guy either, and also seems rather a pipsqueak against this Doctor. It’s not really clear what his skills are — he’s a “weapons tech” but since he’s stumbled on the greatest and most intuitive weapons facility ever, he doesn’t really have to work for it. His plan has somewhat far reaching consequences for his people, but our brief forays into their society (hanging out with that useless gang notwithstanding) don’t give us much of a reason to care how that turns out. A major figure in this world is called Dikero Drew, “known to his subordinates as Skinny-dick,” which is just one example of this civilisation’s ehhh-inducing teenage sense of humour. Go to war, guys, seriously. I’m not bothered.

The underground section is suitably trippy, as people see other versions of themselves and wander along corridors to nowhere. It’s here that the book more directly starts to say something about Leela, as it becomes apparent that the fugitive’s plan hinges on her fighting skills. By the book’s end it’s clear that this was meant to be a learning, softening experience for her, but I didn’t really see that. Granted, I was very bored for a lot of it — corridors are corridors, never mind how weird they are — but Last Man Running mostly seems to reinforce Leela’s killer instincts, or just present them. Leela’s hall of mirrors sequence ought to thrum with meaning for her, but in practice it just feels like some more action.

It’s a phenomenon among Chris Boucher’s scripts that sometimes I just don’t see what he’s getting at, and Leela’s character arc in Last Man Running is probably another example. The writing is pretty good for her — you would expect nothing less, let’s face it — with plenty of that simple and direct thought process unique to her character. The Doctor fares less well, his actions (such as abandoning Leela to the TARDIS at the start) not always making sense. He has a real propensity here for philosophical meandering which eclipses his usual wit. (Though again, it’s hard to be witty with morons.) The story mainly being here to reinforce how indispensable Leela is, or so I’m guessing, it often leaves the Doctor up a figurative (and at one point literal) tree awaiting rescue. All a bit unfortunate, really, but I liked the bit about his dress sense being an apparently sincere effort to seem more normal.

It’s a frustrating read. Mainly a tedious one, yes, wading through chunks of Leela-fights-monsters this and idiots-flirt-or-complain-at-each-other that in search of a plot, but you get whiffs of something bigger and better. A mysterious world that can make anything — a memorial to a dead race. (So we find out in an egregious and late info-dump from the Doctor.) A society that has this peculiar relationship with Shakespeare. Leela, not just fighting lots but growing because of it. Could work, probably? Whether the perfect redraft just for some reason never happened, or whether he’s just more comfortable with scripts than novels, the end result is a clanging miss from Boucher. We’ll be seeing more from him and Leela later. I hope the next one’s better.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #30 – The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#15
The Scarlet Empress
By Paul Magrs

Magrs attacks! After popping up in the first Short Trips collection, Paul Magrs — already a seasoned author — makes a splashier landing in The Scarlet Empress. It’s his first Doctor Who book of many.

You know his style when you see it. Imagination, colour, sheer abandon and a good degree of camp are never far away. He also has a fondness for shaggy dog stories, evidenced in the later audio series Hornets’ Nest (where the Fourth Doctor tells Mike Yates one yarn after another), but also back here in The Scarlet Empress, which owes some of its inspiration to Arabian Nights.

The Doctor and Sam are already running for their lives on the eccentric planet Hyspero when they encounter rambunctious lady Time Lord Iris Wildthyme; she’s on a quest which scoops them up as well. They must find and reunite the four members of a mercenary team and bring them to the Empress of the title. And… that’s sort of it for the overall plot, though there’s plenty of other stuff happening along the way.

You can tell Magrs is excited to explore every avenue — he said on Pieces Of Eighth that he put everything in here in case this proved to be his only go at it — from the fluid way The Scarlet Empress moves from one set piece to another. There’s a bus crash that leads to an encounter with a djinn; there’s a buttoned-up town that descends into madness every so often, like in Return Of The Archons or The Purge; there’s a society of shaved bears that all work for a blind bearded lady, above whom a society of birds live and obsess over stories; there’s a giant spider who guards an ancient passage and is crippled by loneliness; and there’s a battle on a pirate ship that ends only when a giant fish swallows some characters whole, leaving them marooned Jonah-style in its stomach.

The storytelling itself is rather fluid, showing us home video footage of characters larking about out of sequence, then slipping between narrators — occasionally working together to assemble the same story. Even on a prose level The Scarlet Empress barely contains its excitement, sometimes having character B react to a line from character A in a paragraph containing more “A” dialogue, so it reads momentarily like character A reacting to themselves. At every juncture the thing is bursting, perhaps even stumbling to express ideas.

All of this, of course, in a story featuring Iris Wildthyme: galactic adventurer and very probably world-class liar. Introduced in his Short Trip Old Flames (but actually before that as a non-Time Lord in one of his early novels), Iris is a cheery, working class Gallifreyan ragamuffin who chronicles her adventures — only most of those appear to be find-and-replace versions of the Doctor’s travels. This infuriates the Doctor no end, and the explanation seems to wobble somewhere between Iris being his unofficial biographer (since he never writes things down and, for the purposes of this book anyway, he tends to forget them) and those events maybe having been Iris all along, somehow. I’m guessing it would spoil things to be definitive about this. For good measure, the Doctor also gets hold of an ancient book called the Aja’ib which contains excerpts from his life, presumably with the names changed, and he never seems to notice. (I wondered if Magrs was Doing A Thing here and the book was leeching away his experiences, but as far as I can tell, no. Weird coincidence or all part of a rich themed tapestry? Probably the latter.)

Iris is surely the highlight of the book, evidenced by her continued existence in Doctor Who. (Some of it unofficial. There is no way that River Song doesn’t owe some of her boisterous, Doctor-infatuated history to the mad lady with the double decker bus.) Iris, and the proximity to her necessary in a quest story mostly taking place in her TARDIS/bus, provides an amusing flip side to the Doctor. Her attitude is different; she seems more down to Earth, which is perhaps why she seems less reliant on companions. She’s a love her or hate her sort of a character. I bought into the novel’s eventual investment in her safety above everything else.

The Doctor becomes more relatable and ordinary in her presence, even by simple virtue of being in a domestic setting, making breakfast and cups of tea for everybody, and occasionally driving the bus. He seems at once more irritable and more comfortable in his own skin than usual in The Scarlet Empress. He even takes over narrator duties several times, in a way that seems pointedly less momentous than when he did it in Eye Of Heaven. (Again with that narrative fluidity: narrators simply come and go here. If you ask why or to whom they’re even narrating, you are probably considered a party pooper.) He is given frequent cause to marvel at his surroundings in this, and just as frequently share moments of heroism with his colleagues on the quest, seeming like a more ordinary (but no less remarkable) character, only — in my opinion — coming unstuck from his character in a moment where he rambles on about how it’s his job is to avoid “tidy plots” and stay in more loosey-goosey genres, which feels more like the author on a meta soapbox.

It feels de rigueur to check in on Sam, so then: she’s good in this too, sharing in the Doctor’s wonderment while also making it clear inwardly where she stands with her travelling companion these days. (Caring about, not fancying; she sees herself as “his only link with the world of common sense.”) The rigours of the plot occasionally leave us scrambling to spin all the plates, with Sam and grouchy alligator man Gila over here, the Doctor and Iris over there, and moments of high drama (such as Sam thinking the Doctor and Iris are dead, eaten by the giant fish mentioned earlier) don’t really land. There are plenty of big moments that do that, such as the fate of the Duchess (last seen “heading for home” — is she dead?) and the confrontation with the, oh right, Scarlet Empress, which seems over in a ludicrous flash after all the build up. (I never quite shook the absurdity that the Empress is expending effort to capture Iris and friends even though they are expressly on their way to meet her.) But anyway, Sam acquits herself well, adding another layer of context to the absurd meta textual games of the Doctor and Iris.

And oh, what games. If you like references to things then you’ll be overjoyed with The Scarlet Empress, which is just as engrossed in colourful yarns as it is in cheekily referencing the plot of The Time Monster, companions from comic strips, Lungbarrow, unseen events in earlier Eighth Doctor Adventures and the fact that the Death Zone on Gallifrey looks suspiciously like North Wales. It’s fannish on deeper levels too, offering its own twisted alternative to Paul Cornell’s “Doctor afterlife” where they all live on in the current Doctor’s head — in this one, they perhaps do the same thing as heads on spikes. See also the rather spirited idea that Sam might be able to communicate with the Doctor across time. Or not. (Did that really happen? Fluidity again/god knows.)

I first read The Scarlet Empress years ago, long before any interest in marathons, and I loved it. I’m clearly a bit more lukewarm on it now. Mind you, I think I’ve changed somewhat as a reader. I like a sprawling bit of adventure fun as much as the next guy — just look at Sky Pirates! — but it seems there’s a certain amount of story-point juggling that starts to lose me, and Empress exceeded it, leaving me drifting in and out of the tale. It’s still a huge, colourful, joyful jaunt, and Magrs is still undoubtedly a welcome addition to the ranks. I suspect I’m just keener nowadays on stories themselves rather than the loosey goosey world of storytelling they inhabit.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #29 – Dreams Of Empire by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#14
Dreams Of Empire
By Justin Richards

Justin Richards finished up a very busy 1998 with Dreams Of Empire, his third published novel of that year. It is, impressively, not much like Option Lock (his Eighth Doctor Adventure about secret societies and nuclear war) or The Medusa Effect (Bernice Summerfield visits a haunted spaceship), although coincidentally each of these, like Dreams Of Empire, is a story fixated on its own past. (Armchair psychiatrists, start your engines.) Managing a breadth of tones as he does across these unrelated books, you can really see why BBC Books were keen to keep him around.

Dreams Of Empire is one of his more compelling efforts, although at first glance it doesn’t look all that interesting. Set almost entirely within a medieval-ish prison on an asteroid (well, I did say medieval-ish), it’s effectively a base under siege story — bread and butter to the Troughton era. And if you liked that, wait until the TARDIS arrives very near the site of a recent murder: would you believe the Doctor and co get into some hot water over that?

Fortunately Richards knows this stuff just as well as his target audience, so although he touches on the trope, he doesn’t wallow in it. We don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to prove the Doctor’s innocence — there’s no reason to bother when the situation with the guards and inmates of Santespri (a name so jaunty I was sure I’d heard it before) makes for a better whodunit.

Some time ago, the Haddron Republic very nearly became an Empire. A civil war erupted between three highly placed friends, and the aggressor — Kesar — became a figurehead. He was eventually defeated and sentenced to exile, but was attacked and badly hurt on his way to prison. He now resides on Santespri in an iron mask with a voice synthesiser to cover for his wrecked vocal chords. More interestingly, his remaining loyalists are there with him, some of them working alongside Republic soldiers as guards. (Sort of like Police Officers and PCSOs.) Attacks on the prison and murder plots within its walls could equally be happening to free Kesar or kill him — Kesar, for his part, seems content to remain imprisoned. When bodies start dropping and an unknown space cruiser approaches, no one knows what to expect. Thrillingly, “the three weirdos next to the police box did it” is not a popular theory.

There’s an oddly genial atmosphere to this civil war and its after-effects, particularly after Richards grounds it in friendship in the first chapter. There’s less animosity than you might expect between the different sets of guards, which is surprising given some tragic shared histories. I wonder if Richards is playing on his proximity to The Enemy Of The World, another story about a world-famous rotter that is placed directly after this one, in encouraging us to expect a lot of back-stabbing in the guy’s orbit. (I’ve seen some reviews point out this arguable overlap and then criticise him for it.) Dreams Of Empire takes a somewhat more optimistic view: most people who are hurt by a few dangerous personalities at the top just want to get on with their lives. I was surprised how well the book kept to this thesis statement, even in the face of some outright villainy and a few tragic deaths before the end.

If you want an example of civilised opposition, it doesn’t get much better than chess, which features heavily in Dreams Of Empire. (And on the cover.) I’ve never learned the rules, so chess scenes in stories to me are like high pressure card games in movies — I can tell which general direction it’s going in but you could make up the words and I wouldn’t notice. Fortunately the chess scenes here have a very clear intent, coming in handy plot-wise in ways anybody could follow, and they help contextualise the tensions in the story. I can see why it seemed important to Richards in a story about taking sides without aggression. It’s also a fun backdrop specifically for Troughton’s Doctor, a character of mercurial intelligence who may or may not be a few moves ahead.

For what it’s worth, I think Richards is betting on “may not be”. That’s not to say the Second Doctor here is not brilliant, or not capable of outsmarting the villains — he’s believably able to win people’s trust, just as he can piece together the bad guys’ schemes and his own counter-schemes. However, Richards puts a lot of effort into keeping up the slapstick side of his portrayal, at one point mixing up a flight from suspicion of murder with a comedy bit about a sandwich stuck to his bottom. The Doctor’s scatterbrained silliness doesn’t feel like a put on, and it also doesn’t contradict his brilliance — it’s all just one big amorphous self. He’s able to ping-pong believably from a stray comment by Jamie to a solution for the whole crisis, and make it a joke. (“He grabbed Jamie’s hand in both his and shook it vigorously. ‘You’re a genius.’ ‘I am?’ ‘Oh yes. Well’ — the Doctor considered — ‘one of us is.’”) I think it’s a great read on the Second Doctor, believably impish and yet intelligent all at once.

Richards is similarly apt when it comes to defining Jamie and Victoria. The former is on high alert around a scene that was once a warzone and might become so again; the latter is affected by the ruined dignity of important figures and shares their sense of loss. There’s a bit of tension when Victoria seems attracted to someone and Jamie doesn’t like it — all-too-easy stuff there, but it still seems well enough established in the era they come from. As the book progresses there’s less and less for the companions to do, perhaps betraying a certain authorial preference for the characters made out of whole cloth here. (Probably the most notable interaction is the Doctor unveiling the sonic screwdriver a few stories early, but in a way where Jamie and Victoria don’t see it, leaving continuity in tact. Phew!) The writing is as considered for them as it is for everyone else, highlighting any quiet words or private little glances. The contained location perhaps focuses the characterisation; just as if it were made for TV: you’ll go stir crazy looking at the walls and invest in all the little stuff instead.

Dreams Of Empire doesn’t build a huge head of steam, or not for a while at least, which I think is a side effect of all that geniality. It makes for oddly pleasant company to read, rather than a furious page-turner. But Richards is an old enough hand at this to reveal a very smart plot as he goes along, some of it not until the very end, and although you’re sort of expecting that (come on, it’s chess) it’s still satisfying when he plays the final moves.

7/10