#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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