#31
A Device Of Death
By Christopher Bulis
Okay, so you’re about to lose the
Doctor Who license. What do you do?
Looking at the books published around this time (such as Cold Fusion,
Lungbarrow, The Dark Path) I can’t help imagining a frantic race to green-light
the wildest, most fan-maddening things they could think of. And why not, since
they were getting evicted? But that theory sort of wobbles when you look at A Device Of Death, published right near
the end and about as likely to frighten the horses as a Doctor Who episode guide. What was the pitch? “Hey Chris, we’re a
book short”? “Which Doctor was your mum’s favourite”? Of course there’s no real
obligation to do something crazy or fannish here, nor any guarantee that doing
that = a good book, but the sheer ordinariness of this is a bit stifling so late on. When you can count your license time in minutes, it seems like folly
just to churn ’em out.
That’s not to say A Device Of Death feels cynical or
knocked together, as Christopher Bulis has a decent idea here and he clearly
likes all his characters. But it could have been published at any point in the run, and whether or not that matters, it feels a bit disposable now.
Fresh from changing history a bit
in Genesis Of The Daleks, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry are heading back to Nerva
Beacon via the Time Ring – or so they think, until the Time Lords decide there’s
something else that requires their attention first. Something goes wrong and
the travellers are split up. The Doctor lands in Deepcity, their real
destination: an underground weapons facility that is part of a massive space
system war. He soon becomes a valued guest helping with the war effort. Harry
arrives in a war-zone where his medical skills quickly endear him to the
military. Sarah, ever the lucky one, winds up working in an enemy camp, and
later befriends one of the humanoid battle droids that litter both sides of the
conflict. All three have amnesia to some degree, but the Doctor will be
affected by it for most of the book, not being sure what he was up to in the
last story, where his home planet is or what blueish box-type thing he happens
to be obsessed with. Mostly the memory loss serves just to delay the plot, as a
Doctor playing with a full deck (and knowledge of TARDISes) makes short work of
the problem later. Harry and Sarah get their marbles back soon enough, and
having this happen one after another begins to feel redundant – Sarah must be
interrogated first, so she can remember the return of her memories!
From the outset, something
clearly isn’t right about this war. This is particularly apparent when 1984-ish
“daily hates” come along to stir wartime spirit (in, improbably enough, Harry).
There’s also the peculiar absence of enemy soldiers – Sarah comes closest to
seeing any, and then it’s mostly synthetic prison guards. Bulis clearly has a
plan in action, but dramatically it’s a bit inert as the main factors are all too
obvious early on. (One side is clearly perpetuating the war, so it just becomes a
question of Why.) Meanwhile the Doctor and Harry have quite a
pleasant time of it (Sarah, admittedly, less so!), and the narrative – though
switching adroitly from one character to another with each chapter – moves very
slowly, with a lot of information dispensed in heavy exposition dumps. (There’s
something uncannily odd about the image of Tom Baker sitting patiently while
another actor talks at length.) There are interesting moments when Harry wins
the trust of aliens on a battlefield, not to mention plies his trade as a field
medic for once, and Sarah’s experiences in a work camp are suitably harrowing,
including witnessing a failed escape. It’s genuinely satisfying when they come
together at the end, and it becomes apparent that (spoiler?) the planet Harry
and Sarah are heading towards is the secret one that houses the Doctor. But the
journey to that point is mostly spent going “Yessss?” with increasing impatience.
There’s something novel (or perhaps desperate) about cramming a story into this gap – which went from the Doctor,
Sarah and Harry spinning through space at the end of Genesis to, er, the same
thing at the start of the next story, presumably! – and there’s something
awkwardly redundant about the wartime bunker stuff that fills the plot. This is
in no literal way a repeat of the previous story, but it still couldn’t have
been made in Season 12 for the sensible reason that you don’t want to see two
things in a row that look or feel alike. There’s more or less a deliberate
reason for this, but it arrives on the second to last page of the book, so it’s
not really enough to offset the creeping suspicion that Bulis simply loved
Genesis and wanted to repurpose some of the sets. (Mind you this was Season 12,
when they were so thrifty they set two stories in the same place. But
like, eight weeks apart, which was something.)
Bubbling along beneath the
“What’s really going on?” action is a subplot with Sarah and the robot, which
she christens Max. This has a wider significance to the story which becomes
apparent in the last stretch, then clicks fully into place on the last page.
(!) This is worth noting because, if you didn’t know it was going somewhere,
these scenes add nothing you haven’t seen before. Even Sarah notes the parallel
with befriending Kettlewell’s robot in Tom’s first story, and the
teaching-a-robot-to-appreciate-human-foibles act is as old as, well, robots.
Max is garden variety “nice robot” in every way, and I say that as someone who
absolutely loves anything with robots in it. A Device Of Death could, in another draft, have been all about
emergent robot life, and may have been more interesting, but there doesn’t seem
to be room to dwell on that theme as we drily move from one plot scene to another until
someone finally owns up about the purpose of the war. There’s a cast of dozens,
only some of whom (like the guilty scientist Tarron or the pompous actor Malf)
feel at all lived in. It definitely feels like Bulis is invested in everybody
here, but the story doesn’t have room to flesh them all out. It has themes,
too, about the dangers of jingoism and ignorance of suffering, but they
seem to happen in spite of the chugging prose rather than because of it.
Is it worth the wait to find out
what’s going on? Not massively. I won’t say exactly what’s going on here
because, beyond spoilers and what would just be the obvious reason for
perpetuating a war beyond its sell-by date, I’m not sure I entirely followed
it. A Device Of Death reaches
count-the-pages territory by the end, not unlike some of Bulis’s other sloggy
novels like Twilight Of The Gods. It’s never actually bad (although you may
sprain something rolling your eyes at the Me Robot, You Friend stuff) but it
lacks a great sense of danger and, being all about war, much in the way of fun.
6/10
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