Tuesday 6 March 2018

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #62 – The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#44
The Also People
By Ben Aaronovitch

Blast.  It’s one of those books.

I almost prefer reading stuff that everyone hates.  The worst that can happen is you find positives other people have ignored, and then you can disagree with popular consensus in a nice way for once.  Failing that you get to join in and have a jolly good moan, and who doesn’t love that?

But then you get books like The Also People, which are beloved by most Doctor Who fans that have ever picked up a book on the subject.  It’s like watching a famous movie: you’re objectively wrong if you don’t like it.  But what if it’s rubbish?  What if, therefore, I don’t really appreciate good things when they come along?  What if I don’t even get it?  Okay, we’re discussing a Doctor Who book and not the Sistine Chapel, but come on, some of them are a bit obscure.

Ben Aaronovitch wrote the seminal kick-up-the-posterior Seventh Doctor story in Remembrance Of The Daleks, and its stellar novelisation.  But he also wrote Transit.  A weird, grungy cyberpunk story that takes ages to introduce the Doctor, throws away Bernice Summerfield and gives people names like Ming The Merciless and Credit Card, Transit had very good prose and clearly knew what it was doing, but it never let me in on the plan.  Now we have his follow-up novel, which opens with “Notes on the Pronunciation of Proper Nouns”, a concerning guide to saying names like “aM!xitsa.”  I can’t tell if that’s worse than having to memorise a map, but it’s definitely up there.

I suppose I was gearing up for a fight.  This was going to be me shaking my fist at a famous thing (well y’know, relatively famous) and saying “Oh yeah?!”  But it was for nought.  I got nothin’.  The Also People is exactly, tediously, as absolutely bloody wonderful as everyone says it is.

Ugh.

Trying to explain why made me realise something absurd about it, which is that technically there’s not much to it.  Fresh from the physical and psychological traumas of Head Games (aren’t they always recovering from the last book?), the TARDIS crew go on holiday.  Yes I know, that old chestnut, but for real this time.  Not for a bit early on, like in Shadowmind, or just saying they’re going to have a nice time and it never really coming to pass, like in every other Doctor Who story: the Doctor takes his friends to a peaceful place full of interesting people, some of whom are spaceships, and they really, properly relax.  It’s lovely.  Okay, there’s a murder that needs investigating and the Doctor is up to some deviousness, which is why he picked this place to put their feet up.  But all that feels complementary.  The Also People is the fabled Mostly Character-Driven Book.  It finally happened!  And it worked!

You couldn’t get away with putting your plot on the back-burner if you didn’t have something special to replace it, and in his Dyson Sphere – to pick just one aspect of the book – Aaronovitch has prepared nicely.  The idea’s a fairly old chestnut in the sci-fi community (although I only found out about it recently from the TNG episode where Scotty shows up): an artificial atmosphere built around a sun, it’s theoretically cool, but it’s only as interesting as what you fill it with.  The Also People goes nuts, creating an inside-out planet too vast to see a horizon, with its own planets hovering above.  I honestly don’t know if I pictured it correctly, and I don’t mind if I’m wrong.  I like the imagery the book made me come up with, which extends to the accommodation, a madcap hotel possibly designed by children; inside is a floating 360 degree bath, force-fields that tidy up after you and a bedroom that zooms through the sky while you sleep.  My mind boggled delightedly at the idea of looking up and seeing more land.  Without a doubt, The Also People joins the ranks of Lucifer Rising, Parasite and Sky Pirates! as one of the great world-building Doctor Who stories.  It’s not just a great addition to the series, but a seriously unshabby work of science fiction.

And whoa, back up, what was that about people who are spaceships?  This is where the title comes in.  “People” refers to anything with intelligence and feelings, which totally extends to household items, mobile drones and spaceships of unlimited size.  There’s people, and those things over there… also people.  Such non-biological folks can move their intelligence around if they like, extending their lives and developing a rather philosophical perspective.  There’s a jolly parachute with a lot on its mind, an adorable bit where several spaceships attend a fancy dress party, and a hilarious paragraph where aM!xitsa (ammkzitza?) swims entire oceans of thought, writes and discards entire theses, all while Roz replies to a simple question.  I love anthropomorphic machines.  I’m.  In.  Heaven.

(It’s worth mentioning that along with the Dyson Sphere, the “People” concept had already done the rounds.  Fans are quick to point to Iain M. Banks as a source of “inspiration”, while Aaronovitch says cheekily in his Acknowledgements that New Adventures writers get ideas off the back of a lorry, no questions asked.”  I haven’t read Banks but it definitely sounds like Aaronovitch has, and at the risk of triggering a Double Standard Alert, I’m fine with that.  The Also People isn’t a cash grab – it’s absolutely a Doctor Who story, and any Banks-ian ideas are put to good use enhancing the Who-ian characters.  Sometimes it’s not whether you made up the source material yourself, it’s what you do with it.  Anyway, in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, Aaronovitch says that Banks knows about all this and is flattered.  So there.)

Much like the names and some of the locations, it’s possible I’m not seeing this stuff exactly as Aaronovitch intended – no amount of fun anthropomorphism is going to make me learn a new sub-language just to enjoy a book, I’ll just wing it with the names, thank you very much – but duh, it’s more important what they’re like, and who they are than what precisely each spaceship looks like.  I felt like Aaronovitch left a good amount of the physical detail up to the reader’s imagination, while still filling in loads of other cool stuff like the crazy hotel and the market that sells figurines of Chris and Roz.  The book is character-based after all, and the whole point of it (if I can be pompous enough to assume I get it) is that there’s more to people.

Roz shines for that reason.  It’s still relatively early days for her and Chris, and unlike his first New Adventure finding a sudden unwanted companion on its plate, Aaronovitch takes his time to chip away at Roslyn Forrester: he never shies away from her unpleasantness and prejudices, if anything magnifying them, but (through the cheeky device of a drink called flashback) has her recall her past and try to reconcile it.  She begins a relationship with a man, and ultimately comes to terms with her life as a law enforcer, and how much that means to her.  She also goes for a nice swim occasionally.

Chris gets relatively short shrift, jumping into a relationship with a girl called Dep (although gender and age are somewhat fluid), as entranced by her physical beauty as he is by her interests in building flying machines.  (Okay, maybe it’s 60/40.)  Their relationship is quietly observed and tolerated by everyone, ultimately building to consequences he’s completely unaware of.  Aaronovitch seems just as happy to write Chris as a loveable, handsome goof as his contemporaries, but he encourages the idea that his innocence can’t last forever.  It’s quite dark to let him leave oblivious at the end.  We have a pretty good idea how Dep’s life will go from now on, but she makes her choice regardless.  She’s a more rounded character for having, and keeping secrets.  The penny will drop for Chris some day.

The Doctor and Bernice circle each other, she suspecting he’s up to no good, which is of course accurate, and he knowing she’s onto him, and thus frantically steering everyone holidaywards.  In an unexpected (though obviously planned!) turn the Doctor tells Bernice about his life-or-death mission on the Dyson Sphere and leaves the choice in her hands.  Head Games also dealt with the idea that the Doctor doesn’t relish these responsibilities, brutally so when it came to his parting from Mel, but The Also People is considerably more deft.  It often observes that he’d rather be a daft little juggler than Time’s Champion; it lingers on the dread that his lies might push his friends away forever, counter-weighting it by having him yearn to make them happy, or interrupt Roz just to tell her he appreciates her.  Despite being open about what he’s really like, it’s clear that his mission isn’t as heartless as it appears.  He wants to believe the best in people, he just has rather devious methods for getting it out of them.  Before they go, he encourages one of his friends to see someone they’re about to leave behind, and just be with them for a while, even though they’re guilty of murder.  You only live once, some more literally than others.  (And as he admits to himself, he’s guilty too.)  That moment of perspective seems gloriously par for the course here, as colossal intellects are reduced to petty smallness, and parachutes can be profound.

Bernice comes to understand the Doctor a little better, and Roz too.  The Also People achieves this organically, along with loads of beguiling moments that juggle the Doctor’s Machiavellian nature with, well, juggling, thanks to its unique pace and how it handles its priorities.  Much like the heavy emphasis on character, which also feels like A Thing You Mustn’t Do, there is a true positivity to The Also People.  While bad things still happen and lives are lost, the overall triumph of good feels spectacular after so many gloomy analyses of the Doctor and his friends, as does the generally friendly tone of the prose.  (When the Doctor are Bernice are attacked by something decidedly nasty on page 231, take a moment to wonder how often anyone has been in mortal peril so far, and whether that makes a blind bit of difference to your enjoyment of the book.)  When it’s time to go the characters race into the TARDIS in a great mood, rested and optimistic, and they have absolutely earned it.  I guess it says something about the New Adventures that this feels so original.

The Also People, in essence, nails it.  Which given the scarcity of these books and the unlikelihood of a reprint is sort of annoying, really!  But nope, I can’t turn this into a moan.  It’s a beautiful piece of work and I don’t know how it could have gone any better.

10/10

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