Sunday 26 January 2020

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #93 – Burning Heart by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#30
Burning Heart
By Dave Stone

A Missing Adventure by Dave Stone? This should be interesting. And it is, but mainly because Burning Heart is not so much a Missing Adventure as a New Adventure cosplaying as one.

The Habitat is a messy, barely civilised outpost in humanity’s distant future. Adjudicators rule with blunt force, but tensions are palpable between the resident humans and aliens. Into this sweeps a random, unearthly element of violence, and lurking beneath the central fabric of the Habitat itself is a sinister intelligence.

This isn’t just set in the aftermath of the well-known NA, Original Sin – it pretty much is the setting for Original Sin. Then there’s the tone. The foulness of life in the Habitat is a lot like Transit, cheerfully highlighting violent crime and body horror in a very un-Classic Who way. If that wasn’t enough, the story ends up leaning into the theme of emergent life, which is even more like Transit. As for the language, the New Adventures’ favourite swearword (cruk) gets a resurgence, plus we bandy around another one (Sheol) that may or may not be new to the books. As well as Adjudicators there’s a supporting character called Kane who, being in a book by Dave Stone, just might be related to someone from the New Adventures.

Now there’s an argument to be made that much of this (the violence, the futurism) makes sense in the Colin Baker era, especially after the satirically violent Vengeance On Varos, so it should work as a Missing Adventure. But you’re reading this years later and potentially alongside the other books published around then, so it unavoidably rings different bells. Even the front cover, which infamously gives us Adjudicators ala Judge Dredd, sends NA signals: my housemate, who doesn’t read these books but has heard me go on about them, took one look and said “That looks like one of the other lot.

Getting back on track to what Burning Heart is rather than what it is like, the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on relatively rough terms. I don’t recall Varos ending on a sour note for these two, and I’d suggest that this kind of characterisation might work better coming right after she meets an unpredictable Sixie in The Twin Dilemma. She doesn’t mince words (or thoughts) here: “One again – yet again – Peri felt that edgy mix of disappointment and annoyance. Once again, on some deep emotional level, she had expected to turn and see the friendly and engaging, utterly decent and trustworthy man she had once known – only to find that it was, well, him. The Doctor. It always slightly disorientated her, kept her on the wrong foot. The fact that she had now known this version of the Time Lord longer than the original seemed to make it all the worse. Now he looked at her with that little supercilious sneer she had come to know and loathe.” / “The real Doctor must still be in there somewhere. That was the only reason why anyone would stay with him and put up with him. At least, any other reasons for staying with him were just too horrible to contemplate.” Ouch.

In the long run, Burning Heart has an excuse for Peri’s instant loathing of him, and Dave Stone comes up with another one up front: seeing Peri’s reaction to the appalling conditions of the Habitat, and acknowledging that they can't be changed, “the anger [the Doctor] had instilled in her had countered and overridden the severe culture shock that might well have threatened to tear her mind apart. Hopefully, it would protect her for a while yet.” I’m not sure culture shock is that likely after the spate of aggressive and weird aliens she’s encountered already – she’s met killer androids, megalomaniac slugs, Cybermen, a smaller and more perverted slug, she’s been turned into a bird – but it’s a nice piece of character work for the apparently thoughtless Sixth Doctor, who elsewhere is “someone who, [Peri] sometimes felt, could not honestly care less if she lived or died.

The overriding problem for me is that Peri and the Doctor spend the next 200 pages apart. They’re in something like three scenes together, so if Burning Heart is intended to be the great “Peri accepts Sixie” book, it lacks the material to qualify. Meanwhile, the Doctor runs afoul of the Adjudicators and spends most of his time meeting other alien undesirables in their holding cells, while he (all too slowly) begins to suspect that something is wrong here. Peri falls in with a violent faction called Human First, which she improbably believes is just this harmless bunch of guys, y’know? (Perhaps 2019’s depressing political atmosphere has made the red flag easier to spot.) The aforementioned excuse for Peri’s bad mood also covers her sudden interest in species-ist uprisings, but then Stone’s bets are hedged with the idea that this dangerous anger was already a part of her. Burning Heart doesn’t really go into or justify that, although her state of undress (taking a moment to examine her bruised, naked body) and her luck with outfits might go some way to explaining a burning rage within: her Human First uniform “mostly came from a supplier for the underground fetish clubs”, and “had also been carefully tailored to enhance certain bits and pieces into what a realtor would probably call a spectacular development of frontage ... She felt like a cross between a peroxide rock chick and the wet dream of a gentleman of a certain age.” I see what you did there, but... can you really be said to be commenting on a thing, if you’re just doing it anyway?

As well as separating them, the book doesn’t seem all that interested in them. The mysterious Kane buzzes around Peri, maybe-or-maybe-not working for Human First, and generally driving the action more than she does. He has an attachment to an Adjudicator named Chong, who works with the somewhat blinkered cop Craator, who seems to impact the plot more (or at least more often) than the Doctor. His boss is the religious zealot Garon (oh good, a religious zealot), while Peri and Kane have to contend with the equally zealous Jelks. Both leaders are getting people killed for their rather vague causes, but neither develops any depth. Same goes for most of the in-between characters, many of whom don’t even get names – it’s just group descriptors like Hand Of God, White Fire and so on. Things in the Habitat get worse until they explode into violence, but unfortunately Burning Heart hasn’t installed enough rounded characters for us to invest in its decline. The Habitat is also such a hot mess to start with that it doesn’t feel at all momentous when it gets worse. It just feels like Tuesday.

Maybe some of this is just the nagging sense that Dave Stone is playing in the New Adventures sandbox, and we’ve heard all this before. I’d also raise an eyebrow at the revelation that (spoiler) people are behaving the way they are because of an outside influence which is (in its own way) benevolent, meaning the violence is incidental. I certainly suspected some mind control with Peri – and got increasingly worried as the book went on and nothing was said about it, in case Stone had simply decided that Peri Loves Terrorism this week – but as well as being yet another accidental (?) yoink from Transit, this also allows Burning Heart to completely shrug off the two-dimensional characterisation of Garon and Jelks. It’s just, well, of course they’re dull fundamentalists. That’s the point! Urgh. Really?

Some arguably interesting things are happening here, such as the pulsing alien Node that hangs monolith-like over the Habitat and causes some of the random craziness below. (Such as deadly hallucinations, psychic murders, angel-like visions that kill and just all sorts of other random yuckness.) There is also OBERON, the computer / intelligence that Garon and the Adjudicators are slave to. Both of these are revealed as emergent lifeforms quite near the end, but it’s more of an info-dump than a drip-fed mystery; the book has by this point shown so little concrete interest in the Node that I was worried he’d forgotten about it. The revelation is like the Sixth Doctor himself, dropping hints and waiting for you to get it, then saying in his most irritating tone, “Well? Give up?” (He tells Peri “Telling is for people without the wit to see”, which is a bit bloody rich.) On the way here, all you can do is wade through Burning Heart, bouncing from one group of characters whom the narrative may or may not be writing with a deliberate lack of detail to another. It felt like 250 pages going on a million.

Much of this sounds crazy, to me anyway, coming from Dave Stone. Sky Pirates! is as jolly, fun and mad as its title suggests. Death And Diplomacy is a jaunty, if somewhat patchier romantic comedy. Such sustained futurism and misery is a funny fit for him, but there is the occasional concession to what, at this point, we can probably call Dave Stone-ness. There are plenty of witty observations, like a tangent on alien religions that includes The Rite Of Exterminating Everything That Isn’t a Dalek. Stone has (inevitable) fun with the Sixth Doctor’s verbosity, leaving other characters bored or irritated in exchanges such as: “Indeed, as the Doctor had said once, if it wasn’t for all these thinking, walking lumps of organised meat, these automemes in organic machines bucking local entropy all the time, the Universe would be in a hell of a state. And Peri had said, ‘What?’” And just when you think Stone has found the ultimate vessel for his obsession with long or obscure words in Sixie, he introduces the Doctor to someone worse: an enormous centipede called Queegvogel with a malfunctioning, psychotically verbose translation box. (I’m not even typing it up, just trust me.) He peppers the book with words like “bathetic” and “geodesic” that we both know aren’t part of everyday conversations over the counter at Tesco, and I may have needed to Google afterwards. He can turn a lovely phrase, like the Doctor’s summing up of what it means to impact other people’s lives even a little, or the coda that follows it.

But here we are. Burning Heart is still a dull, derivative wander through the wrong book range. You’re right, the Habitat sucks. Get me out of here.

4/10

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