#11
System Shock
By Justin Richards
Throughout this one I couldn’t help thinking of Futurama. Just after Fry wakes up bleary-eyed in the Year 3000, a mischievous guy at the cryogenics lab keeps the lights off and bellows at him, “Welcome… TO THE WORRRRLD OF TOMORROWWWWW!”
Brace yourself, gentle reader from 1995. Can your imagination withstand the horror that is… 1998?
It’s actually quite novel of System Shock to look so near ahead, and
even more so to use the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane in the story. Beloved and quintessentially 1970s characters, there’s fun to be had
in marooning Sarah in a near, yet technologically different time. (The Doctor, of course, fits anywhere.) It’s not the same as her arriving in the past,
or in the Year 3000, or on an unrecognisable alien world. She’s in the same place, but just out of step
enough to be completely lost. It brings
home how quickly these things change.
Indeed, by the time actual 1998 rolled around things weren’t
exactly how Justin Richards envisaged.
The internet (no need for that capital I or N, bless!) had a much
greater hold, and mobile phones were getting ubiquitous; far more so than the
occasional cursory reference to a “cellphone” here. This, of course, is not the author’s fault –
he’s writing a novel, not mapping the future!
(And anyway, he’s too
prescient about 24 hour news and online shopping.) But you risk dating your story when you make such
a fuss about modern technology, hence movies like Hackers drawing giggles from smart audiences, and System Shock’s many references to
“information superhighways” getting chortles from me.
Richards (unlike Hackers) obviously knows what he’s
talking about, dropping plenty of detail into the computer stuff, rolling his
eyes at his own IT background in the blurb, and even opening the book with a
programmer’s joke. (The prologue is
“If…”, and shows us a world going to hell because of technology; the story that
follows is “Then…”) However, revolving System Shock around the perils of
computer chips and the limitless capabilities of a humble CD (!) gives us something
that probably worked very well in 1995, but not so much beyond. Besides which, Self-Aware Technology That
Kills You may be as old an idea as technology itself. It had certainly done the rounds by 1995.
System Shock opens with a series of exciting set-pieces. After the dramatic If… prologue, a man is
kidnapped in a car park; a car seemingly comes to life and crashes, killing the
head of MI5; a terrorist siege comes to an end thanks to the SAS and their
mysterious planning program, BattleNet; and a man on the run for his life slips
a CD into the Doctor’s pocket before being murdered, thus entangling the Doctor
and Sarah in this chain of events. Despite
following the heady action movie heights of The Seeds Of Doom (no, really!),
the Doctor and Sarah look as out of place in all this as they do in the ’90s. Also it’s worth noting that all of these
events are in the first flurry of pages… as well as the first paragraph of the
blurb. A fast-paced action adventure it
may want to be, but it isn’t for very long, as we discover the
part-robot-part-lizard Voracians are posing as terrorists in order to control
Hubway (a country house / information hub), and the majority of the book is a
hostage situation therein. The potential
for world-changing techno-disaster is kept mostly to a few asides; Sarah gets
stuck with the hostages and the Doctor tip-toes through the house outsmarting
the Voracians. For most of it, the
baddies make their plans and the Doctor frowns at a few monitors, but it
never has the corkscrew tension of The Man Who Knew Too Much or (more relevant
for its hilariously out-of-date tech) Enemy Of The State, both of which it
resembles with the fatefully pocketed CD.
The story gets into such an SAS funk in its second half that, while
intermittently exciting, it’s actually rather dull.
I often wondered why a thriller (that
happens to be dressed up like Doctor Who)
should be such a slow read. Partly it
could be the subject matter – computers and programs and CDs, oh my! – which I
simply don’t find fascinating. More
importantly, I suspect it’s the characters.
Excepting the regulars, almost nobody stands out. One of the hostages, the Duchess of
Glastonbury, shines a little like Amelia Rumford in Seeds Of Doom, aka a
charming bit character who gleefully courts danger to help her new friends. There are loads of other hostages / bit
parts, mostly male, few with any colour.
A few of the Voracians – who as well as being lizards and robots are
also masquerading as humans – have
(understandable!) identity issues. There
are too many of them, however, and the point Richards is trying to make with
them speaking in a kind of meaningless business-babble, i.e.
humanity-not-included, doesn’t work as intended. System
Shock isn’t a particularly funny book, so having a large number of
characters talk dryly all the time just looks like a lack of colour. The prose occasionally falls into the same
trap, tediously relishing the brand of car or type of gun a character is using,
or getting way too carried away with
the authentic techno-speak: “The first
chip to trigger into operation was at Hampstead. It had been connected to the central
processor of the output control systems of the electricity substation.” With Theatre Of War and with this, Richards
is good at writing what he knows, and with meting out the relevant details; it
just isn’t always fascinating to read.
Where System Shock works best, outside those well-executed early bits of
action, is with the regulars. An
authentic Fourth Doctor is always a delight to read, and Richards has him pegged,
from the nonchalance in the face of doom to the moments of sudden
gravitas. He’s hilarious pitted against
the generally emotionless Voracians, adept at getting out of trouble with a
yoyo or with a reasoned diatribe, and he runs rings around their computer
system of doom, Voractyll, just by talking to it for long enough. He’s also quick to call Sarah his best
friend. Their rapport is mostly
suggested, as they are predictably split up when she goes undercover, but
Richards has them gently thumping each other or chiding one another in a way
that brings both actors, and their lovely on-screen chemistry to life. It’s a good story for Sarah, relying on that
nose for trouble that got her into the Doctor’s life, and the undercover thing
is a nice throwback to her UNIT days, even if the Voracians are irritatingly
several steps ahead. Her occasional
bewilderment at 1998 also gives us a unique look at a Doctor Who companion, seldom seen by stories that always go further
afield in time.
And there’s something heartening
about reading a story for Harry Sullivan as an older man. It’s not just delightful to show a companion
having moved on with their life, still treasuring their memories and falling
into an easy rhythm when the Doctor returns; it’s also beautiful to give Ian
Marter a role he was no longer around to play.
The final moment, with the older Harry talking to the Sarah of his time,
both still friends, holds a kind of sepia appeal now they’re both gone.
The Missing Adventures occupy an
awkward spot. Should they be too much
like the TV adventures, they’re derivative; should they veer off to the side,
they’re wrong. System Shock is the kind of thriller you just wouldn’t get in the
show circa 1975, never mind the technology involved, but Richards is savvy
enough about Doctor Who to tick the
right boxes, writing the regulars brilliantly and having the Doctor ultimately
outwit the evil computer, bringing it more or less down to Earth. (The penultimate scene, cutting from the
explosion to the Doctor and Sarah immediately departing in the TARDIS,
certainly rings true!) But as it juggles
The Man Who Knew Too Much, Spooks and Doctor
Who, it’s ultimately rather an odd fit, and occasionally dry and dull for
its genre, not to mention Doctor Who.
6/10
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