#15
Millennial Rites
By Craig Hinton
What’s this? Something I have read… before? But such decadence
is impossible! The Before Times were
only a myth. There was, and only ever shall be The Marathon, praise be to
Virgin Books.
Okay, if I squint hard enough through
the mists of time, maybe I did
read Millennial Rites once, before
I had any intention of ploughing through sixty more of the buggers (and then the
rest). Picking a random Missing Adventure
is actually a good litmus test for them as there’s no continuity between books, or so
you’d think, and Millennial Rites
worked pretty well that way. Fast forward to now and the things
I liked most about it have stood up to a second reading. Fair warning, there’s some other stuff that
maybe isn’t so good, which I either didn’t notice or gave a free pass the first
time; if you read it once and liked it well enough, maybe stick to
one-and-done?
Millennial Rites concerns the Millennium (surprise?), and it’s fairly
tech-heavy, with computer hacking quite prominent. Going overboard with modern tech can unhelpfully
date a story, like the slightly-too-enamoured-with-CD-Roms System Shock, but
Craig Hinton keeps the details vague enough and sprinkles on enough fantasy
touches that it doesn’t sound embarrassing 20 years later. It is
another of those dreaded sci-fi-meets-arcane-wizardry books, although it has a
dash of originality that keeps the genre mash-up from being too groan-worthy. And there’s quite a bit of continuity, but most
of it’s done with flair, so it isn’t only rehashing stuff for geek points. I think it’s fair to say that Millennial Rites does a few things
well. Most noticeably the Doctor.
One of the things I loved about
it the first time was the distinctly less brusque Colin Baker-shaped Time
Lord. Hinton mentions “redeeming” Sixie
in a BBC interview and name-checks Big Finish, where he’s a cuddly old uncle in
space. The first time we see him in Millennial Rites, he’s well on his way there. Suavely dressed and dropping by to see an
older Anne Travers on her birthday, he’s keen to see how she is. He’s caring and considerate, a good listener
– if anything too good, as an
invitation for her to kip in the TARDIS is taken to mean considerably more! Hinton isn’t just mashing the Random
Characterisation Button here: Baker always intended to mellow his Doctor. Following his self-exile in Time Of Your Life,
he’s keen to avoid becoming the Valeyard.
This means accentuating the positive.
(Which is an achievement, considering he was not able to avoid Mel Bush
indefinitely.)
It’s pretty good timing that all of
this follows Head Games, which concerns the Doctor’s struggle against his own
dark side, as seen from the other side of his regeneration. There’s a sad irony to this warmer, happier
Sixth Doctor, knowing his life will be cut short and a kind of darkness will
win out after all. But all the same, I’m
not certain Hinton hits the issue squarely on the head. And there’s a curious deficit of Doctor in this. When the muck hits the fan at the halfway
point, it’s the work of Anne Travers, Mel and the villain of the piece; when
things go back to normal at the end, the same applies. The Doctor sort of floats through the story. But… nicely, I guess?
Tobias Vaughn’s protégé (and
therefore obvious rotter) Ashley Chapel is planning some kind of technological
horror at the turn of the Millennium.
Anne Travers is very concerned, not to mention still obsessed with the
Great Intelligence, and she is convinced the two are linked. The Doctor has missed the Intelligence’s third
coming in Downtime. (Which in an odd
piece of timing was not yet novelised. But
you don’t need to have seen or read it, since I haven’t.) Here is some of that not-too-shabby
continuity I mentioned earlier: The Great Intelligence disappeared from Doctor Who (rights issues?) with no
particular plotty reason not to come back, so it feels only natural to revisit
it. Millennial
Rites tends more towards the idea
of those earlier stories than literally sequelising them, which is refreshing. But the continuity has its ups and downs,
with the Doctor info-dumping all about the Intelligence’s real name (Yog-Sothoth)
and where it came from. (When did he
find all that out, then?) It’s also rather disappointing how Hinton writes
Anne Travers, piling on reference after reference to her bitterness, sterility
and generally wasted life. And incidentally,
you’d better get used to monotonous character beats.
Mel, who “looks for the best in
people” while also being rude to everyone she meets, finds herself
investigating Chapel’s “Millennium Codex”, a computer programme of mysterious
import. She is soon hacking into it (at
the behest of Chapel’s second-in-command, who wants to stop him but never
really clarifies his plan beyond Power Grab); before long, she’s debugging it for free. Which is good news for Chapel, who in a
pretty definite lift from The Invasion (the bit where Vaughn gleefully watches
Zoe talk his computer to death) lets her get on with it. I wondered why he was so confident about his
plan if the Codex was in such a terrible state the day it goes live, but that’s mad villains for you. Chapel isn’t the most interesting bad guy,
effectively copying Vaughn’s modus operandi with the mystical Saraquazel
replacing the Cybermen, armed with one lackey (not including monsters) and,
apart from a mental link with Saraquazel, not much motivation to take over the
world. His dialogue is humdrum. If this was made for TV, the actor playing
him would have his work cut out.
Meanwhile a couple of Chapel’s
employees have been laid off, only to find themselves embroiled in the
countdown to disaster. A stolen computer
programme literally transforms Barry’s computer, then summons a
co-worker-turned-winged-monster: enter this book’s monsters, “cybrids”. This literal fusion of technology and fantasy
is an arresting one, and very visual. And
that’s not the half of it, but before we get to the book’s trump card, a few
words on Barry and Louise, the couple (or are they just friends?) on the
periphery of the action. Hinton based
some of Millennial Rites on his own
job experiences, not unlike Justin Richards in System Shock, and it shows. A lot of their gripes rings true of people
who hate their day job, but that doesn’t make them interesting characters. Their dialogue, including endless references
to going to the pub, getting drunk and having a ciggie, sounds like soap opera
filler, and it’s even worse when they get emotional. (Even then, Barry caps a tearful speech with
“As soon as this is over, I’m going to
take you to the White Lion and we’re both going to get totally plastered”!) We’re meant to have our hearts in our throats
when Barry dices with death, but the relationship with Louise is all talk and
no substance, most of it due to her improbable decision to have his baby, never
tell him it’s his and then stay close friends.
Much is said about Louise’s baby and her disability, but it’s mostly a
convenient sore point for her and Barry, and then an unbelievably hackneyed addition
to the plot later on when a sacrifice is needed.
Speaking of which, the Millennium
happens, and this is where the book shines: you go into it expecting a gradual
slow burn of technology and fantasy having at one another, the plot unfolding
as these things do, only to find the whole story transforming at the halfway
point. Chapel’s plan works more or less, and we’re suddenly
in a parallel version of London. Some of
the landmarks look the same, but dangerous magic rules over them, cybrids have
the run of the place, and the people are not what they were. Anne Travers is now the powerful Hierophant,
lurking in the Library of St. John The Beheaded (where she attempted to abort
the disaster, wrongly thinking it was all to do with the Great Intelligence);
Mel is the Technomancer, brilliant and in charge, but utterly lacking Mel’s
positivity; Ashley Chapel is the Archimage, ruling from the Millennium Hall
(ooh, so close!) and consulting with his gods.
The Doctor is the only one who can see that everything is wrong, and a
change is overcoming him as well, albeit slowly.
When I first read Millennial Rites, this was the bit I
took away from it: a story neatly and excitingly bisected, which could work
really well if it was made for modern Doctor
Who. There’s something uncannily
prescient about the whole thing, what with the slightly Big Finish-ish Sixth
Doctor as well, and the pseudo-London is evocatively weird. But on closer inspection, Hinton’s party
trick mostly just works on the surface. There
are about half a dozen humans in the post-Millennial world, a lot of
indistinguishable cybrids and other monsters besides. Comparing these people to their original
counterparts, personalities have mostly just dulled. Fragments of their past lives come back to
them later, but we’ve only got half a book to get on with it, so this happens
in sudden clumsy spurts. The writing
itself seems to get worse in the second half, with hokey fantasy dialogue like
“Walk with me awhile, stranger. Tell me of whence you came”, and that
trope of making a character sound genuine by having them stutter a bit,
mid-sentence. “The information we need is, is...”
/ “Doctor? What’s wrong? Why are you being so, so horrid?” I wonder if a fast-approaching deadline made
things decidedly woollier in the second half.
I’ll take any explanation I can get for the line “Anastasia watched the display of emotions with conflicting reactions.”
In “Part Two”, the Doctor comes
into the story more – but then, does he really?
Flitting between other characters, he more or less inspires them to take
action, all the while suffering his own transformation into you-know-who. But Hinton achieves this by the most
simplistic means possible. His costume
literally gets darker as the book
progresses, until a random mood swing signals that he is no longer himself. It becomes apparent that any use of his magic
powers (which he didn’t know he had) will bring forth the Valeyard, who
promptly throws his lot in with Chapel and offers to sacrifice Louise’s baby
(!) to make the transformation apply to the whole world. But the Doctor is able to overcome this almost
immediately (cue brighter clothes, phew), until he has to use his powers again
(uh oh, black robes). The Valeyard comes
and goes at the drop of a hat, which trivialises him, and worse, Hinton has
created a Catch-22. Writing the Doctor
so he is nicer than usual means there’s
no deeper reason for him to become like his darker self, but that’s the journey
of his character in this novel, as well as his reason for being nicer!
And what of the Valeyard? He wanted to kill the Doctor, his past self,
to sustain his own existence. The
Seventh Doctor did essentially the same by bringing forward his own
regeneration, although he did it for different (supposedly good) reasons. It’s a valid comparison, nicely fleshed out
in Head Games, but I don’t think we know enough about the Valeyard to draw a
much deeper comparison than that. Millennial Rites makes broad references
to game-playing and putting his companions in jeopardy, all of which sounds
like Seven, but less so the sinister bloke in the black garb, don’t you
think? Did he ever really care about the
Doctor’s companions, even as pawns? We
know from Head Games that the Seventh Doctor doesn’t play with people’s lives entirely
guilt-free.
The book makes certain grand gestures,
redeeming its unpopular hero and handling its novel-length genre mash with
unexpected wit, but there’s an absence of depth. It’s debateable whether you should even look
for that here: certainly there’s enough atmosphere and action-adventure to turn
the pages, and plenty of references to please the die-hards. The book is, overall, enjoyable. But Millennial
Rites has ambitions beyond that, trying to ask meaningful questions about
the Doctor and the Valeyard, anchor them in an emotional story closer to home and
offer up another, sideways chapter in the Great Intelligence story. The prose, more fannish and pedestrian as it progresses,
isn’t up to anything fancy.
Clearly it worked for me once,
and the best I can suggest to replicate that is to lower your
expectations. Millennial Rites is enjoyable as a random, unexpected treat; much
less so as an answer to the Valeyard question, or anything especially
deep.
6/10
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