Doctor Who: The BBC Books #54 – The Blue Angel by Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#27

The Blue Angel

By Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Huh.

It’s sort of quaint, really, remembering the way Interference made me feel the first time I read it a decade ago. Confused, miserable, the dreaded is-this-even-Doctor Who… but fast forward to now, and I see its value! Hooray! It was doing a thing and I mostly see what that thing was! It’s great when you can learn and grow as an audience and find a new appreciation for art and storytelling. Perhaps there’s hope for every unsatisfying book experience.

You can probably tell where this is going. Which, as we’ll learn, is an unusual phrase to hear in relation to The Blue Angel.

Much to my surprise, and I imagine the surprise of many contemporary readers, BBC Books immediately followed their guns-blazing weirdo of a two-part novel with something even more bizarre. Paul Magrs is back, with assistance from partner Jeremy Hoad, to deliver an adventure that uses much the same scattergun-of-imagination approach as The Scarlet Empress. Only more so. Much more. As in, hit the deck.

We’ve got the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion (hold that thought) in an adventure with some angry Star Trek types and some maybe-or-maybe-not malevolent people made of glass. We’ve got Iris Wildthyme, in her younger form from the end of Empress, in an escapade with a gaggle of older ladies and the currently inexplicable ersatz long lost son of one of them, escaping a shopping centre beset by giant owls. And we’ve got some sort of alternate world going on with another Doctor, Fitz, Compassion and Iris but not quite as we know them, with only the loosest connection to what’s happening in those other strands. These, by the way, include a travelling city made of glass, a universe set apart from our own, a realm that sits between the two, corridors of possibility (or maybe they’re just corridors), various alien races of varying animosity and a megalomaniac who looks like a green elephant with talons and magic powers. You’ve got, in short, lots to be getting on with. A pretty stocked shopping basket for lucky old you.

One of the things I struggled with on my most recent read of The Scarlet Empress (so much for learning and growing as you get older, huh) was its profusion of ideas with not exactly a heck of a lot of connective tissue. The Scarlet Empress, though, was a story about storytelling. I don’t love the lingering impression I got (however projected and erroneous it might be) that all of its ideas are automatically good ones and they will go together as long as you make the point that stories are sometimes messy creatures, but it at least felt like that point was being made. And to be honest, you could and perhaps should enjoy The Scarlet Empress as an adventure apart from any (I would argue rather on-the-nose in this case) meta writing commentary, provided you can (wince) switch off a few pernickety faculties and just let a story be for 280 pages, in whichever direction takes its fancy. I know all of that, but for whatever reason I struggled to get past it as an almost-40-year-old reader in a way that I just didn’t at around 20. There’s something to be said for being a young reader, clearly. I’ll probably read it again some day and I sincerely hope it’ll flip back the other way. I’d love to love it again. The Blue Angel, though, will be a tough one to pick up a second time.

I’ve read, or listened to a good chunk of work by Paul Magrs; enough to not take this book lightly. Okay, perhaps “lightly” is the wrong word — if anything his books are going for “lightly” with gusto, like frilly pink missiles — but what I mean is, I don’t assume there’s no thought behind it. He’s obviously a writer of skill. Even just looking at Empress, his prose had a deliberateness rarely found in the humble annals of Doctor Who fiction. It’s clear you’re in practiced hands; if you don’t get it, well that’s unfortunate, but it seems a safe bet that there is an “it” that you might “get”.

Well, I got nothin’ this time. The Blue Angel starts with an eerie sense of the uncanny with its surely-that-can’t-be-right alternate TARDIS team living in domestic normalcy, but it’s weird even to the point that I couldn’t tell who (out of the oddly phoney characters) was narrating at times. This is the first chapter. Then we’re off to visit a gaggle of ladies on a Christmas shopping trip, trying to ignore the (green) elephant in the room that is the miraculously returned son of Maddie, who is clearly not really her son Ian but is just as clearly intent on letting people think he is. This stuff is easier to get a grip on, at least.

Then we’re off to see the “proper” Doctor and co. in the midst of adventuring, but there’s a new elephant in the room in the form of a new companion — Compassion, one of the Remote from Interference, who we must assume at some point asked to join the Doctor and Fitz on their travels, or was asked to do so? That moment isn’t in Interference and it’s not here either. Should I miss it? Is something going on there? I know stuff is going on with Compassion, that much is made clear later on when she displays a weird aptitude for piloting TARDISes, but how much of what’s not here is important and how much is just because it was not of interest to Magrs and Hoad? I’m aware that I might just have New Series Brain when it comes to companion intros — Fitz also did the official “hey come and join us” scene when we weren’t looking — but I feel like even Classic Who bothered to at least state it.

There’s a sense of disorientation from the off, a sense that it’s not clear how things are connected (that’s hardly a crime) or how much we should invest in the characters we’re seeing (maybe a bit of a crime). No doubt it’s personal taste but starting the book with ersatz protagonists cut me adrift straight away: now I’m thinking, how many fakes are floating about? Since we’ve skipped what would obviously be a critical moment for any Doctor Who companion, can any of this be trusted? Are legs being pulled in all directions? That stuff with the owls is a bit silly isn’t it — but is it fun silly or “I’m Doing A Thing” silly? I know on some level this is down to me as a reader, but I was sat there asking these rather dull questions instead of simply enjoying myself. I never rowed back to the centre of the book after that uncanny opening; it resisted all attempts to get into it, not least because it was always hot-footing it over to another story strand.

That’s not to say The Blue Angel isn’t fun. Oh, it’s got whimsy and frippery for days! What else do you expect with the involvement of Iris Wildthyme, with her funny bus and her crazy outfits? That evil elephant is funny even just to look at. (Well, to imagine at least.) A carful of mildly acerbic older women is sure to be a source of mirth; there’s plenty of inherent whimsy in being on the run from massive owls, and then escaping in a double decker time-and-space bus. And did I mention the Star Trek thing? There’s a spaceship full of awful simplistic people (the captain is called “Blandish”) who check how much every action is going to cost them and otherwise shoot first and ask questions later, then barely progress as three-dimensional characters. It’s satire, Jim, but not etc.

I’m sorry. It’s difficult not to sound like a grumpy old sod when you’ve struggled with a book this badly, but struggle I did, and all of that Magrs (and apparently, Hoad) whimsy just didn’t wash with me this time. I fundamentally didn’t connect with the story (really, stories) unfolding all over the place here, which eventually started to pile up next to each other with various parties encountering various alien species who have hang-on-what names like Sahmbekarts and Steigertrude, all using various space-time conveyances to get from one to the other. Following it from page to page was something of a headache, and cheerily lampshading that with an “I don’t understand any of what’s going on” or an “everything has been brought here from somewhere, from some time. But it’s all without rhyme or reason” or a “call me prissy, pedantic if you like, but I do like to know where I am” or a “my concentration has been all over the place” or a yes-we-are-doing-this-again “learn to think of all these things as stories. And stories can’t contradict each other because, in the end, they’re all made up” does not actually help. A story that’s hard to follow and harder to care about on purpose risks being just as troubled as one that did it by accident.

The Blue Angel obviously is rewarding for a lot of people. I know I’m in the minority here — hell, I’d politely concede that I’m flat out wrong if you told me so — because I’ve seen the positive reviews. Even they seem more or less to agree though that the book doesn’t worry itself about an ending or tying anything up or making much sense in the first place, which frankly makes me wonder what the cheat code is for enjoying this thing because good grief all of that sounds iffy to me. I know it’s different strokes; clearly I’m someone who needs to feel a certain degree of understanding or I just feel as though I’ve wasted my time. Clearly I can’t benefit that much doubt. That doesn’t make it invalid to write a weird story, but it does freeze me out somewhat.

Okay, think positive. Praise has been levelled at Compassion in this. I’m so weirded out by the lack of a proper segway into full time adventuring that I don’t know what to make of her, though. (Or of BBC Books taking this particular swing — although to be clear, I am pro taking-swings.) She’s presented as a cold fish who fails to endear herself to new people (“And who did you say you were, dear? Contrition or something, wasn’t it?”) or people she already knows (“You could never have a really good argument with Compassion. You couldn’t wind her up”). Of course it’s early days but she’s not particularly impressive at the companion lark either (“‘[Compassion’s] a good person to have around in an emergency.’ Actually, [Iris] was thinking the exact opposite”), even getting lightly character-assassinated in the third person prose (“She was one of the least companionable of [the Doctor’s] many assistants”). We are presumably meant to get something out of her involvement here, but it’s hard to see what. She’s fully rebuked by the Doctor at one point — a moment I’ve seen held in good regard, but which flopped for me as a character beat, partly because I can’t quite picture the Eighth Doctor saying “You, madam, are stepping out of line” (not his only weirdly anachronistic line, see also “villainous scum”) but mostly because I don’t know this person and I don’t know that the Doctor knows this person and if she’s such an arse, well, why did you bring her along, then?

Fitz keeps his Interference continuity in check — both he and the Doctor highlight the rather odd rebirth he’s had recently — whilst also getting back to some good old fashioned horniness, as he hangs around with an aesthetically pleasing Iris and briefly considers a) leaving the TARDIS for the big red bus and b) whether she’d shag him. There isn’t a great deal else for him to do with his plotline (Iris, owls, horses at one point) being one of many that seem to have gone into a blender, but I liked the brief recognition that he’d never got a chance to say goodbye to Sam. I can, like most reviewers, see why Iris won him over so fast.

It’s… a story for the Doctor. I would hesitate to say it’s a good one because I don’t think he really rings true a lot here, even when he’s the “real” one, flying off the handle so much more than usual, but there’s clearly a lot of significance to him as a character throughout these events. Look at all that alt-universe stuff, with its suggestive oddities and its other Doctors squirrelled away in minor roles; the implicit importance of all this to him and Iris. Again though, we’re back to that sense of significance where I wish I could find the actual significance. At least the writers meant to do that?

The Doctor’s (spoiler) failure to make events turn out any better because that’s how Iris wants to do things is a serious fork in the road between them, and surely a statement about his interaction with the universe around him and how much he can really achieve there. Things are being said, definitely, I can see that — but when the events themselves are such a quasi-fantastical mishmash (I would summarise further but I really can’t be bothered) and the villain is such an overall silly goose, it feels a bit like firing a blank to posit them as relevant to an overall arc, especially when we run away from it all as fast as we do here. The crisis of another universe impinging on, and going to war with ours is huge. It should feel momentous. It doesn’t, with this kind of crazy pace and this much of a frivolous tone. I felt told about the Enclave (and much more so, the Obverse) more than I ever felt that I truly saw or understood it. When it all concludes, did those events suddenly end like that because something-something-the-Doctor or is that just the kind of adventure we were having this week? I bet I know what the answer is, but I don’t quite believe it. Even the gang of older ladies — surely the earthy heart of this novel — get bundled out of the story in a) a fantastical payoff for two of them that doesn’t stop to examine how they feel about it and b) y’know what I can’t remember where the other one went. The whole thing about the son didn’t seem to add up to much either.

Attaching a lot of its significance to Iris feels at least a bit overblown, even if the version of Iris in most of The Blue Angel is a much more competent one than we met the first time. She knows more than we do — must be nice. There’s something of an explanation for her and her weird relation to the Doctor’s history, but it’s moved on from just as quick as the main action. I don’t think I’m as invested in Iris generally as a lot of readers; her brand of randy nonsense ought to have been a tonic for all the confusion I felt reading this, but here it just added irritation to obscurity. I’m sorry, Iris. Maybe next time.

I made a lot of notes on this one, because there’s loads of stuff to pick up on — nudge-nudge plot arc stuff about the TARDIS, picking up the change to Planet Of The Spiders from Interference, fun little references to things like Looms and in one paragraph “new adventures” and a “virgin”; there’s plenty of imagery, some of it quite striking, like the weirdly Dalek-ish glass people and their whole society, plus all that suggestive alt-universe weirdness. And if you haven’t inadvertently made yourself cross and got a headache — ahem — there’s the sense of fun that always comes with Paul Magrs.

I just wish any of it helped. Sorry, Paul. Don’t mind me, people who love this one regardless. Despite everything I found The Blue Angel as impenetrable and insufferable as the bad old days of Virgin first-time novels, and the almost certain knowledge that I’m missing something thought-provoking here didn’t help in the slightest.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #53 – Interference: Book Two by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#26

Interference, Book Two: The Hour of the Geek

By Lawrence Miles

Right then. Two books. Two Doctors. Multiple story threads. Different ranges. 600-odd (very odd) pages. Now that Interference is over, am I clear what it was all about? And was it worth all that?

Mostly yes to both.

I think it all comes down to a question: why does anyone do anything? And off the back of that: what are you going to do? And going back inside that — which feels like a suitably Interference approach — nature vs nurture. All of this is wrapped up in the meta-text with what sort of thing you should be trying to do with Doctor Who books at this point in their lifespan, if Lawrence Miles does say so himself. Everything about the two books seems on some level to interrogate these questions.

Interference asked in Book One why the Doctor does what he does, and more importantly why he doesn’t do certain things that might be helpful. It also challenged the notion of what Sam, and people like her hope to achieve, and the ways in which (or so it argued) this is lacking. Book Two crystallises these arguments somewhat.

Sam, in particular, has her outlook not only placed under the microscope but externalised for an entire city to think about. Miles/Compassion continues to give this a certain degree of side-eye: “[Sam’s] political streak was based on what she’d seen on the Nine o’Clock News, or, at the very least, on what her parents had seen on the Nine o’Clock News.” Once again we’re asking if her ideas are truly her own. Sam, in the context of Interference, also becomes a placeholder for the human concept (or at least the late 90s human concept) of progressivism and empathy — where she has failings, so do we all. “[Compassion’s] world was the same as Sam’s, only without the camouflage.” / “London and Riyadh were the same, Kode decided. But London thought it was different. London thought it wasn’t scared. The people there had used the signals to cover everything up.”

All of this ties in with the book’s wider and, let’s be honest, slightly-getting-away-from-itself argument about politics vs culture. The Remote are a society without principles or agendas, they just exist and get buffeted about by random TV signals. They’re posited as a mostly positive ideal, albeit one that is easily corrupted, because they don’t do politics. “There’s no good and bad. There’s just… politics.” They’ve got something they want to achieve, something that will cause enormous harm because they don’t really understand what it is they’re doing, but there’s an innocence to them not found in stinky old humanity, what with its arms dealing and politics and hypocrisy.

Guest, ostensibly the leader of the Remote (or this particular bunch anyway) wants to get back to their roots and contact the Cold, aka the mysterious force they’ve been trying to sell to humanity. That last bit’s really just a cover to get the Time Lords’ attention by doing something dangerously anachronistic to the timeline, so they will (hopefully) snag a TARDIS to get to the dimly remembered coordinates for the Cold. (The Cold that Guest wants to find and the Cold that he’s selling on Earth are different things, a thing and its byproduct respectively. Ehh, don’t worry about it.) As part of all this, he figures it would be a good idea to plug Sam Jones into his people’s media so they can learn from her — in essence, learn to properly care about what they’re doing so they can’t be stopped. I’m not sure they entirely need this (his peeps already seem pretty far along in the mission without having any measurable fanaticism about it) but it’s the bulk of Sam’s part in all this, so it’s important for her.

Using the same script-format interludes seen in Book One, Sam relates a bunch of moral dilemmas. Save a person or a planet, kill a baby to prevent its evil future, sacrifice animals for a greater good, etc. These aren’t the choices Sam would have made, but that’s sort of the point — using Sam’s understanding of things, a sense of morality that is both informed by and divorced from what she brings to it, it’s like moral dilemma in a raw form. One of the main concerns in Interference is “signals” interfering (ahem) with our decision-making, and we take them away here, We don’t exactly interrogate how Sam feels about these scenarios — as with Alien Bodies, I think Miles is happier characterising Sam the concept rather than Sam the person — but taking her away from her baggage and seeing what’s left seems to be the point. It’s something that we revisit right at the end of her journey in Interference, which is the last time we’ll ever see her and is also, maybe just because it’s Miles, before she joined the series.

Sam doesn’t have a huge amount to do in Interference. There are a lot of moving parts so perhaps that is to be expected, and god knows the EDAs have thrown their collective back out before now trying to figure out what to do with her. This is her last bow, but what there is to say about Sam has mostly been said already, and most of that by Blum & Orman.

Interference, for its part, makes an effort to take her seriously. It’s easy to dismiss Sam Jones as a quip in a Greenpeace T-shirt, in no small part because that’s exactly how she was sold to us; the question of whether there’s even a real person underneath is one that the books themselves have grappled with, with Miles himself introducing the idea that she’s suspiciously phoney even within the text. Interference might occasionally throw more shade at her, but it also gives her the chance to speak for herself. Her decision to leave in Autumn Mist was sudden (and not, in context, very satisfying) but following through on it here shows real conviction. She’s done what she wanted to do with the Doctor and is ready to move on now, simple as that — she’s more, implicitly, than just his plucky companion. She is set apart by the Remote from the kinds of moral judgements she is likely to have made, which can only have made her think more about who and what she is when set apart from the Doctor.

When her leaving scene comes around it’s entirely low key and arguably more human for it, a little like how Ace’s second go at a departure in Set Piece was refreshingly free from histrionics, all that being over with by that point. Then, in a sort of deleted scene we catch up with later on (which The End Of Time sort of copied, but never mind), the Doctor finds a way to visit a younger Sam at a critical moment, without giving away his identity. (I won’t say how, but it’s fun.) He uses the opportunity to ask what she wants to do with her life. Is this truly her crusade, or is it her parents’? Sam says no: she knows what the world is and she earnestly wants to help, and there’s a difference between that and what her parents half-heartedly did in their day. It’s not the Doctor or Faction Paradox dicking around that ultimately matters, she is her own person and she’ll think of something. Together with the flash-forward in Book One I think we get a respectable picture of Sam Jones. By god, it’s been harder work than it should have been because of her sketchy beginnings, but there’s a person in there if you care to try writing about her. Not many did, but oh well, at least some did.

Sam’s nature (vs nurture) is a major part of Interference, just as her departure is another perhaps underrated example of Miles trying to shake up these books once and for all. (He can’t take credit for that decision but it sure fits his mission statement.) He also applies the “why do we do anything” question to humanity, answering with a beleaguered sigh that it’s mostly down to politics and we should really stop that. He also applies that train of thought — or continues to apply it in Book Two — to the Doctor.

There’s a sense in Interference that he is not following his normal path — divorced, perhaps, in a similar way to Sam when she was plugged into the Remote media. His stay in Saudi Arabia is definitely out of the ordinary for him, albeit not unprecedented. (You really can’t get away from Seeing I here, or for that matter Genocide.) His visit to Foreman’s World, bookending One and Two and punctuating the Third Doctor bits, allows him to ponder just what the hell this all means for him, as he still (unusually for him) doesn’t know by the end of the main plot. This is especially relevant when it comes to the Third Doctor portion of the story, which is itself perhaps the biggest gauntlet-throw of Doctor Who bookdom up to this point.

Whilst in his prison cell, the Doctor (Eighth) attempts to find help. In doing so he contacts his earlier self, causing (or did he, stick a pin in that) a diversion in the timeline: the earlier self learns about Faction Paradox too soon, and makes an unscheduled visit to the planet Dust. There he meets I.M. Foreman, namesake of an important junkyard and Gallifreyan with a travelling circus. Dust is besieged by the Remote (a less friendly and much later version) and when we left off in Book One, things were escalating.

In the course of this the Doctor (Third) learns that Foreman was an early Gallifreyan renegade, and inspired the Doctor’s (First) actions both by example and as a physical presence when he and Susan left London in 1963. An echo of Sam, the Doctor now finds himself asking if his ideals are entirely his own — sort of a proto-Timeless Child conversation. We are done with Sam but not with the Doctor, so it makes sense for his outlook to be a little more uncertain now, for his tenets to be shaken rather than stabilised.

This is not, of course, the most interesting thing that happens on Dust. In the course of the adventure the Third Doctor is killed, triggering his regeneration early and potentially upsetting future events. It’s heavily implied that the immediate future will be much the same — Tom Baker through Sylvester McCoy will still happen, although god knows about the events of Planet Of The Spiders — but the possibility exists that the past isn’t what it used to be, which introduces an element of danger to the Past Doctor Adventures. Whether anyone picks it up is another matter, but Miles wasn’t enthused about the closed-off continuity of the PDAs — ya think? — and this seems like a good way to allow those authors an out. I hated this device when I first read Interference, long ago in the before-marathon times, but I can see its value now. Even if, seriously, it might not amount to anything more than sending a “sorry” letter to the Planet Of The Spiders fan club, the sheer fact of using the EDAs as a springboard for the ongoing PDAs makes an actual virtue of there being two book ranges, tying them together for the first time since (and to much greater purpose than) The Eight Doctors.

It serves a dual purpose, however, enriching the EDAs as well. Faction Paradox work a bit of magic while Pertwee is making his early exit, implanting a virus that will come to fruition once the Doctor is McGann-shaped. This handily cocks Chekhov’s Gun for the next stage of the EDAs. (It’s also a possible explanation for the Eighth Doctor’s half-humanness, although that really only makes sense if this is the prime timeline and not “interference” after all. But I mean, whatever, I’ll take it.) It also serves a character point to introduce some danger to the Doctor — is he in control of his actions? Does he control his destiny? (See also, his inability to escape from prison.) All useful stuff for a character that some authors, like Gary Russell, have vocally struggled to find a voice for in these books.

I’ve got questions about how well the Third Doctor stuff integrates into Interference. I know Miles has 600 pages to play with but it’s not hugely beneficial to the pacing. I sort of wish he’d gone off and written a Past Doctor book instead that gradually incorporated Eighth Doctor things like the Remote and then shocked us by tying together and detonating both ranges at the end. I certainly think its presence here dampens Sam’s exit, which for heaven’s sake happens almost a hundred pages before the book properly ends, turning it into more of a memory than a lasting impression once you’re done.

Also, by being the true lasting impression of Interference it keeps the focus more on Where These Books Are Going than What This Book Is About, Here And Now. There’s a definite sense that the wider arc stuff is of more interest than, say, the struggle to prevent the Remote (whose investment is so arguable that they need a pep talk from Sam) from accidentally triggering a galactic whoopsie-pooh. Even within their plot there’s a direct influence from the Time Lords’ war with The Enemy (another Alien Bodies morsel and rainy-day plot point), which is cool and lore-y and everything but doesn’t actually go anywhere in this book.

I also found, on my first read through years back, all the stuff about arms dealing rather dry and mean, to say nothing of the Doctor getting the shit beaten out of him for ages. I felt some of that again this time, although it’s at least obvious that Miles has things to say here, occasionally (like in the chapter that’s just a chunk of the Voodoo Economics documentary) pausing the wider concerns in order to say them. I know “soapboxing” is a simplification but once you’ve identified the Remote’s real reason for being here, all that’s left on the human side of things is finger-wagging.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the “now” plot is what happens to Fitz, which is ironic as he barely seemed to feature in Book One. “Seemed to” is the operative phrase, however, as Fitz’s centuries-long stay with the Remote has in fact looped back around to the present. Following the Remote process of “remembering” where people are reincarnated in new bodies using the shared memories of others (be thankful it’s not the Venusian “remembering” where they keep your memory alive by eating you), Fitz is in fact one of the Remote agents we’ve been seeing all along under a different name.

Miles isn’t just Doing A Cool Thing here with the timeline, encouraging you to read Book One again and go “ohhh” the second time; it’s also an excuse to bed in how much Fitz belongs in the TARDIS, showing us his determination to use any means necessary to stay true enough to himself so that he’ll want to go back to his old life even if on the surface he no longer remembers it. The eventual transformation back to “Fitz” and away from his Remote self is very affecting, with the Doctor ensuring it’s his choice. It’s a subtle bit of character work that follows on nicely from books like Unnatural History and Autumn Mist where he’s more and more becoming one of the guys.

There is an inverse to this, of course, which might come into play later. Fitz had a choice: stay as he is and be corrupted, or die and be reborn now, the remembering process hopefully keeping alive that spark of his true self. In the Eighth Doctor story it’s implied that he did the latter — and for all intents and purposes, he did. But in the Third Doctor story it’s revealed that he didn’t — the copies still happened and so all of that worked out, but the “real” Fitz wanted his own identity and life to remain in tact, which meant he grew old in Faction Paradox, became warped and now hates the Doctor. (He also kills Time Lords for fun. The Master and the Rani are among his trophy heads. Yikes.)

This is, of course, bloody horrible: “our” Fitz is even more of a fake than he appeared. It was bad enough that Fitz had to endure yet another indoctrination, hundreds of years stranded and an apparent suicide all because the Doctor said “hey could you keep an eye on things in Geneva kthxbye” without then going all Dark Side too. I think there’s an argument to be made that this is just the sort of edgy, try-hard character journey you’d expect Miles to roll his eyes at. But it lends itself to future stories. We learn that “Father Kreiner” has now been whisked off to the bottle universe — a Miles device that allows the New Adventures to exist simultaneously, which is nice, and which featured in Dead Romance. The Doctor, in his epilogue on Foreman’s World, doesn’t know who Kreiner is and clearly wants to speak to him again. (Interestingly we are ahead of him on this, as well as on the virus he’s carrying.) It’s worth noting that in his final scene Father Kreiner seems open to seeing the Doctor again not in the context of getting his head on the wall. If this whole thing comes back, hopefully that spirit will enter into it. But I’d understand if a reader simply looked at all this and thought, Christ, that’s a bit harsh innit? Must all companions go through absolute Hell? It’s another ongoing trope, whether Miles-the-great-disruptor likes it or not.

On a lighter note — perhaps the only one — we’re still doing The Sarah & K9 Show, guest starring Lost Boy the adorable Ogron. This continues to be a welcome addition to what is, let’s face it, a lot of heavy-going material, but all the same you get the sense there isn’t a huge amount of room for it: Sarah and co. are politely parked towards the end, and they might only have been there so someone could let the Doctor out of that damned prison cell. It’s still nice that Miles throws the more conventional fans a bone by having these characters turn up, and letting them have fun. (Apart from maybe the bit about Sarah’s belief that the Doctor has made her sterile. Come on, mate.) There’s less stuff about Ogrons in Book Two, the species being — god love ’em — easy to sum up, but a dollop of world-building in the Third Doctor section suggests that we could still do more with them.

I suppose a key concern with Interference is if it makes sense or not. I’d say yes: Miles may have a mind-boggling number of mind-boggling concepts but his writing style is engaging and wry enough about it that it doesn’t feel like work. I raced through both books; enough epilogues queue up politely before the Third Doctor stuff rounds off, and then there’s even more summing up after that for a clear-ish understanding. It’s a lot to take in but it puts the work in to be comprehensible.

Some bits still seem to be hanging though, and I don’t just mean the leftover bees in the Doctor’s bonnet. I’m still unclear on how the confluence of Doctors (surely the main “interference” of the title) came about, since the whole point is that it’s an aberration. We know now that the TARDIS’s recent odd behaviour is because it knew this was coming and the damage it would cause — but what new thing happened to get the Doctor into that cell, and consequently get that message to his earlier self? It matters since this is a paradox, and those don’t just happen naturally: this Eighth Doctor follows on from Planet Of The Spiders and he is now causing that not to happen. It’s entirely possible that I missed a spot, but I couldn’t see the intervention/interference that caused it. You would think Faction Paradox would take the credit — they’re happy to “as you know, Bob” their other achievements at the end. And while we’re at it, was that the only reason the Third Doctor ended up on Dust? Maybe it was, but given all the highfalutin machinations Interference sets in motion, you would think the inciting incident itself would be clear. Again, maybe I’m just thick, or maybe it’s still to be revealed — although I doubt that as Miles is tapping out now. I have a feeling that he simply couldn’t spin every plate perfectly.

Is Interference satisfying? As a piece of world-building and as a general milestone in two book ranges, I’d say a big yes. Of course books like Seeing I have shown that it’s all well and good setting up ground rules but it does depend on others making use of them, so this could still be a damp squib. But Miles engages with the books before now and with his own prior ideas in a way that should, by rights, make everything more interesting from now on. It’s a pleasantly fizzy experience to think about for now.

As a novel though, or the latest weekly adventure of our TARDIS trio, I think it’s rather lacking and certainly a bit dour: the Doctor mostly rots, Fitz mostly waits, Sam mostly watches a script unfold for the benefit of someone else, the Remote struggle with agency generally. I can see why younger me wasn’t engaged, but when you’ve been following all of this at least the character work pays off. Miles is here to ask big questions about the books as a whole and the characters in particular, and I generally found those answers satisfying. It’s just not much fun in between, save for Sarah and cool bits like that whole I.M. Foreman conundrum. Both books are also the most obvious mouth-piece for the author’s views I’ve encountered so far, which is a lack of subtlety that works against them.

Is it the best Lawrence Miles book(s)? Well, that’s all totally subjective, but I’d say Book Two is comfortably stronger than One, although some of that is the sheer contingent of big moments and answers he held back for this one. For what it’s worth I had more fun with Alien Bodies, which works for a casual reader despite all its lore, and although Dead Romance is even more horrible than Interference it’s at least self-contained, its focus more on what story it’s telling now than what stories we could tell later on. Not that that’s a bad thing for Interference per se, but — personal preference — I’ve seen enough sequel setup in movies to feel a little weary of it now, and I’m more excited about what’s in front of me. Again, you maybe have to look at Interference as a character piece for that.

I’m starting to worry that this review’s going to need two books, so: Book Two’s even busier, but it’s good. Sam’s exit works well — farewell, now let’s hope the next companion doesn’t face-plant immediately. (I haven’t mentioned Compassion because the fact of her companion status isn’t addressed in Interference. She just hasn’t left yet. Tune in next week?) Miles has definitely been a benefit to both book ranges before and here in particular, but I suspect that his desire to have and eat both cakes leaves some of what he’s doing in Interference on a lower volume than it ought to be. I know he hoped to write the Best Doctor Who book here. I don’t think he’s done that, but it’s a contender for the Most.

7/10

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