Doctor Who: The BBC Books #8 – Business Unusual by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#4
Business Unusual
By Gary Russell

Well, I’ve got to do admire the title. Gary Russell promising Business Unusual is a bold claim, since he is definitely one of those writers who Knows What He Likes.

A fairly bold claim is also contained in the book’s introduction, where he announces a “desire to write a sixth Doctor story that I thought Colin Baker would have liked to be in.” Not knowing Gary or Colin personally I’ve no idea what this means — more dinosaurs? — but perhaps more telling is his apparent aim for “what might have been the Sixth Doctor, given time and a decent go at it.” Any Big Finish listener can point to the cuddlier, less explosive character played by Colin on audio as “the version he liked better”. (Gary would of course have had a hand in that.) You can also find an eerily close approximation of this in Millennial Rites. So, story and characterisation-wise, what does Business Unusual do for the guy in the aggressively colourful coat?

Oddly, he’s a lot like he was on screen, particularly in Season 22 when his demeanour hadn’t yet softened. He’s rude (clapping back at an American that his accent seems out of place because he made a similar comment about his coat), he’s loud (frequently doing that “say a word three times with increasing volume” thing to show up whoever said the word first) and he’s more incongruous than is usual even for the Doctor (there are plenty of references to his weight, an odd thing to highlight about a timeless alien but something that makes him stand out more physically). I don’t know what Colin thought of all that; it’s very recognisable, much as it was in The Eight Doctors, but it doesn’t move him on in the same way as, for instance, The Trial Of A Timelord, when he and Peri seemed able to enjoy each other’s company for once. (At least until he went mad and she got murdered.)

Some of this abrasiveness is deliberate, as the Doctor in this is attempting to avoid his own future. Business Unusual gives us, at long last, Mel’s introductory story, as the Doctor’s travels have brought him to Pease Pottage in 1989, where Mel is from. He reckons that if he doesn’t become friends with her then his path will change and he won’t eventually become the Valeyard. QED. We’ve had shades of this before in Time Of Your Life, when he lived off the grid on a distant world to eliminate any possibility of a red-haired fitness fanatic entering his life. This time it’s all a bit more pointed: the Doctor tries to avoid meeting her, then pours cold water on the wonders of space and time travel, being fairly rude to her in general just to split the difference.

This idea ought to be valid, what with there being a prior attempt, but I just don’t like the way it’s done here. Living on a backwater planet is one thing, especially for only a brief portion of the narrative. Actively trying to put Mel off her established future (for most of the novel) is direct interference, and more overtly self-involved than I’m used to for the Doctor. (Perhaps, ironically, this talent for manipulation is a hint towards his future.) Who is he to say that Mel shouldn’t have those experiences? Why is his happiness worth more than hers? It’s also worth saying that the more direct his action to change his future, the more we’re putting it under a microscope and the less it actually makes sense for a Time Lord to think that this is even possible. He has met and interacted with a future, Doctor-adjacent Mel. He even used evidence of their adventures in his trial! Hell, the paradox of even trying this might end up creating the Valeyard. (You can argue that this is all a desperate Hail Mary and even he doesn’t think it will come to much, and fair enough, but there’s little suggestion of that in the text. Even showing us some genuine fear and concern about his future as the Valeyard would help justify it, but the whole thing is presented merely as continuity: he will become this thing so he needs to not do that thing. The Trial Of A Timelord is left to do all the heavy lifting.)

Long story short: “what might have been the Sixth Doctor, given time and a decent go at it” ends up being pretty much the same Sixth Doctor who stomped around shouting at Peri. The stuff I like about him in this is more incidental. We begin Business Unusual with the Doctor closing off a previous adventure (featuring the Master! No, he’s not in the book) which right away is a fun place to start, but in practical terms this means working with the police. By making this the end of an adventure we skip all that tedious “you have to believe me” stuff, and the Brighton constabulary instead have a wonderfully eye-rolling acceptance of the Doctor and his foibles. It’s refreshing to cut to the chase like that, much as it was for Hartnell when The War Machines suddenly repositioned him as a known quantity in the British scientific scene, and for Pertwee during pretty much his entire run. The Sixth Doctor in this also manages to be quite persuasive with new people he meets, such as Mel’s somewhat open minded father Alan and, oh yes, Mel herself, who despite the Doctor’s best efforts to the contrary accepts that he is an alien and quite fancies a trip in the TARDIS. (Perhaps dialling down the “I’ve got a spaceship” bit might have helped his plan along. Ah well.) The Doctor might be a certifiable pain but he brings other people along with him. Perhaps this is what Gary was going for viz “what might have been” etc.

But enough about Joseph and his very colourful whatsit: Mel is here! And Business Unusual does a good job of introducing her, meshing the character’s slightly disparate interests of fitness and computer programming in ways that a novel can do more comfortably than a few frenzied TV episodes. We learn that Mel took a gap year and went to university as a mature student, which right away makes her seem like someone apart from the world around them. The technology she’s working with feels beneath her, the job offers doubly so. It doesn’t take long to believe that this person would be doing a smart thing to get off this rock altogether and see the universe. Her refusal to be cowed by the Doctor (in full “don’t do it” mode) also bodes very well, suggesting a kind of authority that — for better or worse — she rarely had on screen. (See the moment where she screams at something awful, and we make a point of saying it’s the first time she’s ever done that.)

I would rather her first adventure had not been so interested in an abortive attempt to call the whole thing off, and had instead focussed on building their Doctor/companion rapport, but she nevertheless comes out of it well. Or at least she does until the final stretch, when she pleads and pleads with a still-implacable Doctor to let her aboard and he still says no. When she sneaks onboard anyway he gives way genially enough, but by this point she’s ceded some of that authority she’d built up, and the turnaround comes with no apparent resolution of his (highly questionable) future-avoidance plan and certainly no humility about trying to neg her out of her destiny. (Although maybe I’m onto a loser expecting that from the Sixth Doctor.) On balance then, as a companion intro, it’s hit and miss.

Of course there are other reasons to read Business Unusual besides the new companion schtick. What of the proverbial business? Sadly, to quote a Welsh philosopher, it’s not unusual. We’re picking up threads from The Scales Of Injustice (and further down the rabbit hole, Who Killed Kennedy) with the “pale young man,” a shifty inhuman presence with access to a lot of discarded alien tech once again making a nuisance of himself. (He has rebranded as “the managing director”, which makes for a less irritating repetition.) With him as before are the creepy Irish twins and a Stalker — a giant dog infused with Stahlman’s Gas which makes it even deadlier. This is not an inherently bad toy box, and it gives him a completely valid license to regurgitate old continuity. Certain other familiar elements creep their way into the plot, which generally concerns sinister video game consoles; the discerning Whovian will surely develop suspicions about the plastic figures and glassy-eyed duplicates that begin to show up, and let’s just say they’re onto something.

But after a while, when all the pennies have dropped and it turns out the guy who collects old alien stuff is going to (brace yourself) use the old alien stuff, it begins to feel like the writer forgot to actually bring his own idea to the table to make it any different. The villain’s collection ends up as a sort of accidental mirror of his own limited imagination. (Here’s his grand plan: “I want to take over the world simply to give myself something to do.” 200+ pages for that, honestly.) The creepy game consoles are a nice idea, but the “game” part never really manifests; they’re supposed to be a means of control, but the initial test just activates the free toys that come with each one and kills the nearest kid. Which is horrible, obviously, but also pointless. (Do you want to control them or kill them?) And hey, we already did a version of this in Terror Of The Autons, only that was just the toys and not the random game console as well. If you’re going to add elements but not explore them, what you end up with is the old ideas again, with bonus clutter.

The less than intricate plotting is supported by a Gary Russell staple: casual excessive violence. Heads and various other limbs are bitten off by the Stalker, horrific injuries are sustained generally, and we hear about similar awful things in flashbacks — sometimes wistful ones, recalled by psychotic characters. I got whiplash going from the horrible story of a woman taken to bed then (mid-intercourse) violently pulled apart and mind-wiped so she can be a cybernetic secretary on wheels (I don’t even) to the general Enid Blyton cheeriness of the prose in other scenes, but that’s how it goes. When characters die the length of time we’ve spent with them has no bearing on the quickness of their passing, like a man with a tragic UNIT backstory, forgotten by the Brigadier and corrupted by the managing director, only to finally turn and fight back and, oh right, now he’s dead, next. (The secretary doesn’t even get her memory back before being unapologetically bundled out of the book.) There’s a creepy indifference to this stuff that seems to happen in book after book. I wish he’d find a balance between blood and guts and the other stuff he writes, which tends to be blandly inoffensive if prone to a continuity reference.

Speaking of which, we’ve got one more box to tick besides plugging that gap in Mel’s timeline: the Brigadier is here, ready to meet the Sixth Doctor, because Dimensions In Time doesn’t count. (Gary’s own words via Terminus Reviews.) And look, fair enough: everyone likes the Brigadier, so why not. That said though, it’s a curious impulse when the other thing he wants to do is lock up the Brig for almost the entire book, and only have him meet the Doctor briefly at the end. The lone Brigadier stuff is at least worthwhile, having him reflect on the odd situation of living after UNIT (and teaching maths at an all boys school — his life story is in places as disparate as Mel’s), jumping at the chance to get back in action. It’s an excuse to reflect on the cost of what he used to do for a living, particularly when faced with a now corrupted ex-subordinate. This is good character fodder. (Which also ran satisfyingly rampant in The Devil Goblins From Neptune.) Later, when forced to confront Mel with the necessity of killing, he reflects eloquently that living with it means “never forgetting … not letting one face, one name, ever fade away.” I like that very much, although I wish the author would take it on board too.

There’s plenty of introspection elsewhere, but it’s generally just “halt, introspect, onto next bit”, like the sudden mucky remembrances of Mr Jones, or the record-scratchingly abrupt change of heart for the Irish Twins. The prose is as harmless-if-unpolished as ever — unpleasant asides aside — with some purple bits probably thrown in as tribute to Pip and Jane Baker, who get a favourable mention in the introduction. (They’d have loved “Do you possess even the most rudimentary auditory organs under those flowing locks of golden gossamer?” Although I can’t say that I do.) And it does at least try something different, which is to start each scene with its exact time and place. This is perhaps intended to give the story an urgent real time feel, but ultimately it’s stage directions we just don’t need — it’s a novel, there’s already enough context. I’m not likely to bother reading the likes of “Madeira Drive, Brighton, East Sussex, 24 July 1989, 12.36” more than once.

Clearly there’s a lot to say about Business Unusual, and yet there’s really not a lot going on here. Is this a more developed Sixth Doctor? Not that I noticed, and in some ways, he’s worse. Am I glad we finally “met” Mel? Sort of. It mostly works. Am I pleased that the Sixth Doctor met the Brigadier? Well he didn’t particularly, although it was nice to see the latter again. Is this a good finale for Gary Russell’s Scales Of Injustice toy box? Honestly, not really. Similar ideas would later be repurposed as Torchwood, and although I never cared much for that, clearly you can get more mileage out of this stuff than “gosh, this guy’s evil isn’t he? I wonder if the aliens from Terror Of The Autons that he’s manipulating will turn on him like they did in Terror Of The Autons oh.”

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #7 – Genocide by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#4
Genocide
By Paul Leonard

Paul Leonard. Heck yeah! While it’s not surprising to see another rising star from Virgin Publishing make the move to BBC Books, I’m glad he’s here. His books are often very good; even better, they are interesting.

Genocide is a very Paul Leonard book. In particular we’ve got aliens who are really rather alien, now that you mention it. The Tractites are ostensibly horse-like beings, but they possess two sets of eyes (for night and day) and a charmingly smell-based way of reading books. They are utterly benign, even when faced with potential danger, which wins Sam over instantly. Their way of life is front and centre, as is the question of how much it is worth compared to, plucking a not random example out of the air, ours. Because something has happened to Earth — now a lush green world with no pollution and no wars — and all of a sudden the Tractites have always lived here.

The Doctor brings Sam to what should be London hoping to get more back issues of The Strand. (That’s twice now in as many books. Who’s sponsoring this series, Big Strand?) It is immediately apparent that something ain’t right, and soon the dilemma is laid out before them: the calm, positive society they see here has got to go. As Sam quickly realises, this amounts to killing them all. But who’s to say which society has the greater claim to existence?

Well, the Doctor says it, and quite definitively, so there you go. This isn’t just another possible future on some cosmic Lazy Susan: it’s a paradox deliberately set up by a bunch of angry Tractites whose own world will one day be destroyed by humans. Deciding that one bad turn deserved another, they found a way back in time to wipe the Earth clean and start over, which has the slight downside of breaking the time lines altogether, although Leonard rarely crystallises this into as many words. He keeps it a little more broad and “this is all wrong”-ish as opposed to doing the whole Back To The Future Part II bit with the blackboard. (I wish he had though. It’s a minor point but without so articulating it, Genocide never seems entirely clear on why the whole rebooted Earth thing won’t work. Or maybe I’m just being picky and wouldn’t have been happy unless the Doctor outright said “You can’t change the past or the future won’t happen which stops you changing the past.” Heck, it’s not as if saying that would convince the Tractites. But then it’s not really articulated visually either, as the breaking timelines are only apparent if you can move about in time. Which you still can, a bit? Which muddies it even more.)

So, all things considered, the moral dilemma is taking on water. I mean it’s not even a dilemma at all, since we have it on good authority that Earth (and who knows what else) will simply go phut at some point unless they put everything back how it was. Nevertheless, I implied that Genocide is good. (Uh, as in the book.) So how about it?

Well, it’s not always about solving the dilemma, so much as just having the conversation. Critical to Genocide is Sam’s response to it. We’re in her head more comfortably than we’ve been so far outside of Vampire Science. She dials back the snark, focusing more on the simple wonder of seeing an alien world (even when it’s her world), which is something every Doctor Who companion ought to revel in but Sam is sometimes denied. Her background in activism naturally informs her reaction, so that she’s able to appreciate (or perhaps, unable to ignore) the positives of the society that has replaced her own. She’s full of conflict about it anyway — see, Having To Destroy All This — but there are hints of deeper insecurity when she thinks about her parents, their activism, and how that sometimes left her feeling abandoned. Is it always a good thing to save the proverbial whale? Or is that line of thought just a desperate attempt to be okay with what must be done to the Tractites?

Again — it’s not like there’s an option, really. But that’s not the point, is it? She’s still got to actively help to put it all back how it was, still got to take all this away. The story gives Sam the wonder of travelling with the Doctor, but also the horrible cost. I don’t care about the dilemma, or how much of a dilemma it is, so long as we’re using it to define the characters.

And Genocide doesn’t stop there. Sam goes on to befriend and rescue one of the Tractites, Kitig: a particularly nice and noble one with a family back home. (But not any more.) His presence makes the point all the more sore, just as the presence of the Doctor and Sam weighs on Kitig, who in his own way must go along with destroying his world. He later meets the Tractites responsible for all this and he, along with the Doctor, hears them out. There’s a genuinely harrowing account of what triggered all this in the far future, and if you can’t forgive their actions afterwards (which you should’t) then it’s at least clear what drove them to it. (Leonard, to be fair, still takes a slightly easy way out in making them very unstable and damaged, so what they’re doing is cruel even when you ignore the paradox. But this gets Kitig neatly into the right frame of mind, so job’s a good’un. See also, the slightly unfortunate character of Jacob Hynes: a human collaborator who befriends, aka lies to Sam, and provides her with another mirror for what she must do. Unfortunately for this interesting train of thought, and any moral trump cards he might have, and especially for the UNIT officers who somehow approved his work, Jacob is an obvious nutjob.)

By the end of this, Sam has taken a life, which leaves a scar perhaps more painful than the loss of the Tractites’ world. It’s a particularly grim cherry on top of some character development that, despite a few flaws, leaves Sam feeling more real. When she makes mistakes in this, they feel natural for a teenager faced with the whole universe. When she’s wrong, it’s because she’s fallible and learning, and not so much because she’s a bit of a douchebag. Done well, mistakes give a character somewhere to go. After a fairly lukewarm start, I’m excited that she’s going somewhere.

Of course Leonard is no slouch at writing that other TARDIS occupant of note — but it ought to be said that the Doctor in this is possibly more befitting the New Adventures than the TV Movie. (Just as Genocide, as a book, feels a bit more NA.) This Doctor is a bit unapproachable from Sam’s perspective, especially where she’s still learning the ropes — all of which is itch-inducingly out of step with the series so far, particularly Vampire Science where they were thick as thieves, but I think it works for this book. The Doctor here is not a friendly presence, or at least he’s not just that: he plays the fool well enough but suddenly it’s all a bit unconvincing, failing to mask a darkness that hasn’t really been apparent before. (Not including his bloodthirstiness in The Eight Doctors. Yes Terry, I’m still mad.)

Arriving on the Tractites’ Earth the Doctor is correctly (if discretely) identified as The Uncreator, a fabled bringer of doom to their way of life. He schemes to get back to the TARDIS as fast as possible, even faking a medical emergency to move things along. When Sam urges Kitig to get into the TARDIS and out of oblivion, the Doctor’s response is “You can’t possibly save him, you can’t save any of them and anyway what would be the use?” There is no great agony of indecision as you might expect. This is a Doctor who knows how the universe works and will not let it get out of joint for anyone. (Although later on he tries his hand at galactic diplomacy in the Tractites’ future. It’s the best he can do.) Making the Doctor more of a bastard helps put Sam’s struggles into focus, and it’s an exciting look on the most approachable Doctor since Davison. It’s also worth remembering this was all pre-Big Finish, and What The Eighth Doctor Is Like was still virgin territory (ahem) and open to interpretation. Then again, maybe all Leonard’s really saying about him here is that time paradoxes give him migraines. Who knows.

Surprisingly for a book that is quite A to B in terms of story (paradoxes notwithstanding) there’s still other stuff to talk about. A couple of palaeontologists get inveigled in Jacob’s mad scheme to wipe out humanity; they’re interesting (particularly Rowenna, still traumatised by the home intruder who put her in a wheelchair), but the book reaches a point sooner than you’d expect where there’s nothing more to be done with them, and ejects them so forcibly that I mostly felt bad that they’d been in it at all. I have a sneaking suspicion they’re only here so one of them can contact Jo Grant, who oh yes, is in this as well.

Leonard has already done her proud in print (Dancing The Code is very good) and, while I wouldn’t say he ruins any of that here, I’m not sure Jo really needed to show up. We get a snapshot of her later life — she’s okay, but things didn’t work out with Cliff beyond having a son together — and she practically jumps at the chance to get involved again. It seems like Jo, with her life of activism, will provide another mirror for Sam — more for what she’s going through now than that whole School Reunion, “you too, huh?” bit, which is fortunate as that barely registers, which might come as a disappointment. (Perhaps it was felt that readers had sufficiently scratched that itch in Vampire Science, with Carolyn the could-have-been companion.) But the moment never really comes to contrast ideologies, and Jo in the end is just here as well. Although, tell a lie, their viewpoints do cross over a bit: when Sam sullenly announces she will not kill, Jo says she’d like to go home now and takes over the death ray (long story), causing more damage than Sam. If she takes any scars home, we don’t hear about them beyond Sam’s guesses. Given Jo’s mounting horror of violence in Dancing The Code, this seems like a particularly odd choice of Leonard’s.

There are a few odd choices along the way, and some bits that don’t take off quite like they ought to. (What about that Time Tree, eh? It’s critical to all this but it’s just sort of there.) Nevertheless, Genocide has a great central idea (as in, the book!), and uses it to make the Doctor and Sam more interesting, or even in the Doctor’s case, interestingly odd. So I reckon it’s worth a few wobbles. Come back soon, Paul!

7/10

(Oh, and there’s a bit where someone writes a message for someone else to read a million years later in fossilised rock, which New Who straight up pinched. I guess those showrunners don’t just read the Paul Cornell ones…)

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #6 – The Ultimate Treasure by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#3
The Ultimate Treasure
By Christopher Bulis

A flicker of light. Objects begin to move independently, disturbed by fingers of electricity. A great breath seems to draw in all around as Christopher Bulis ascends out of his chair, away from his word processor and into the air. His arms are splayed, eyes closed, smile beautific. He has at last written a book for every classic Doctor. The quickening is at hand.

Good old Bulis, eh? While he tends not to top any Favourite Author charts, he is one of those who’s happy enough to write any combo of characters. I think there’s something to be said for that kind of adaptability, although of course it doesn’t guarantee brilliant books. (I thought State Of Change, Eye Of The Giant and – yes! – Shadowmind were all pretty enjoyable, but the rest were more miss than hit for me.) Love him or hate him, he’s a dependable old workhorse and if you’re diving into a twice-monthly book release schedule, it makes sense to include people like him in your roster.

For his latest mix-and-match assignment Bulis has parachuted the Fifth Doctor and Peri into (as you might have guessed) a treasure hunt. This is quite an unusual pairing, since Peri was only around for one story before violently swapping out Doctors. Is there much to say about that brief window where her travelling companion favoured cricket gear instead of Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat?

I’ll rip off the plaster now: no, not really. We’re reminded that Peri is just enjoying the rest of her holiday in space rather than in Lanzerote (bless her, maybe she should have stayed) and she’s having, by and large, a nice time. What does she think of the Doctor? Not a great deal, although she considers him passingly attractive, but so plainly uninterested in her that there’s no reason to go there. Peri is written with recognisable and likeable informality, but the story doesn’t delve much into her dynamic with the Doctor. There’s little opportunity, as he seems at somewhat of a distance throughout. (You could put that down to The Ultimate Treasure being more from her perspective than his, as after all, she doesn’t really know the guy.)

Glancing at reviews – and may I just say, ouch! – this seems like a popular sticking point. The Ultimate Treasure is not very big on its two leads. Or more specifically the Doctor. Yes, Bulis has crossed off every one of the classics by now – but is it perhaps significant that Davison came last? Recognisably him is a certain insistence on fair play (well, y’know, cricket etc), and there’s a bit where he uses his bowling arm. But he cuts a rather muted and unimpressive figure for most of the novel. Witnessing a murder, the Doctor waits around until the police are summoned so he can help. They immediately point to him and Peri for the killing – and at no point does he say, well why did I call you, then? When said police officer stows aboard the TARDIS, which by then is heading off to find the treasure/catch the crooks, the cop points a gun at him and orders him to turn the ship around. Trying very hard to ignore the fact that guns shouldn’t work in the TARDIS, why does he listen to her? (He is only prevented from dutifully changing course by external forces.) Good grief, man, this is your house! Later, when the treasure hunt is in full flow, the criminals kidnap Peri to force his cooperation in their winning the contest, and he just goes along with it. No underhand tricks or anything, just honest help. I despair. You’re the Doctor!

Of course, if you want to be charitable to Bulis – and just as uncharitable to this incarnation of the Doctor – if any Time Lord was known for letting others get the better of him, it’s this one. His concern for his companions often takes more of a toll on him than his fellows (hey, look what ended up killing him) and he seemed to spend more time in jail awaiting assistance than yer average wibbly wobbly medical practitioner. Could the less than spectacular, downright colourless characterisation here be deliberate, pointed even? I don’t know. But I’m enough of a Fifth Doctor critic to think this doesn’t ring totally false, even if it is all a bit disappointing on the page. (And just to redress it a bit further: the Fifth Doctor at this point in the series was quite hot tempered at times, actually. His fiery mood in the very next, climactic story didn’t entirely come from nowhere. So it might be understandably difficult for some readers to square this zen pushover with that guy.)

Perhaps the reason the Doctor isn’t charging heroically through The Ultimate Treasure is – and it’s a big, hypothetical, nothing-to-back-it-up perhaps – that might not always have been the plan? Not long after this was published Bulis would contribute a book to the Bernice Summerfield range. Does a hunt for lost treasure strike you at all as a sort of, well, Bernice-ey thing? With very few revisions this could be just her sort of caper. There are shades of Dragons’ Wrath about the famous macguffin, and shades of Down about the strange planet. Even the bright, frothy tone is right for her. I’m not disinclined to believe he had a few archaeological ideas floating about and ultimately went with Tempest for Benny, leaving the Doctor on a treasure hunt instead. (Mind you, a grab bag of ideas assigned willy nilly to different Doctors might have been Bulis’s strategy throughout his career.) We still get requisite dollops of Who continuity, never fear: there’s a positively gratuitous recap of Peri’s introductory story at the start, and an even more gratuitous, downright inexplicable cameo towards the end. (I know “spoilers for a 30 year old book” is a touchy subject, but it’s honestly so left field that I’d feel like a bad sport just blurting it out. I’ll stick it at the end in case you want to go “Oof, really?”) Regardless, “Bulis had a spare Benny pitch” is my head canon and I’m sticking to it.

As for the actual treasure hunt and the book at large… well it’s probably significant that I haven’t gone on about the plot much. You can map it out without much help: there is a lost treasure, information is doing the rounds in seedy space bars, multiple colourful parties are interested, they all end up (including the decidedly killy ones) on an equal footing on a mysterious planet all racing to the finish. It ends up sort of like The Ghost Monument, except some things happen in it.

And you know what? I don’t hate it. Of depth, there is not a whole heck of a lot – spreading it across a dozen characters will naturally make that the case, this ain’t Game Of Thrones y’know – but Bulis imbues the various traps with enough variety to keep them interesting, and then varies the response of each group that comes into contact with it. I particularly enjoyed the desert of trap doors, which contain a variety of pitfalls, one of which the Doctor turns into something useful during a heatwave. This kind of narrative is very simple, but the execution has a colourful sense of fun about it, a solid “what’s next” momentum.

As for the characters, there aren’t any that I’d clamour to see again, but they generally acquit themselves within their little arcs. The police officer is fairly enjoyable, although her journey from total stickler to “ah, you guys are all right” is not difficult to predict. There’s a bloke who models himself after Shakespeare’s Falstaff, which you’ll either find annoying or harmlessly quirky. (I leaned towards quirky.) I quite liked the strange tension of these trials all being observed by the omnipotent people of this world and by a nosey reporter using flying drones. (Equally you might say that the former makes any real degree of danger or success rather unlikely. And I mean, fair enough.)

The nature of the ultimate treasure, you ask? From the title alone I was making an each way bet that it would be supreme knowledge (which the Doctor must of course decline) or The Friends We Made Along The Way, and I’m thrilled to report that it’s… not literally that first one. There’s again some variety in how the “treasure” sequence plays out, such that I wasn’t actively disappointed with it. A ringing endorsement, I know.

While I haven’t written The Proverbial Glowing Review Of The Ultimate Treasure, I can honestly say I had a good time with it, in spite of its deficiencies. (And hey, I missed one: there is a higher frequency of grammatical errors is this book than I’ve spotted since beginning this leg of the marathon. “To” instead of “too,” “lose” instead of “loose,” at one point “cleaver” instead of “clever”. I know they were running a conveyer-belt but not every BBC Book is like this, so they can do it.) Perhaps Christopher Bulis just has a talent for catching me in the right mood. If you’re up for 280 pages of undemanding adventure that could just as easily have been Doctor Who as any other sci-fi, you could do worse. If that’s not enough then I don’t really blame you: the ultimate treasure can be the power to skip this one.

6/10

***

That Bonus Spoiler For A 30 Year Old Book So You Can Go “Oof, Really?”, Either At The Spoiler Or The Fact I’m Calling It A Spoiler

So, while separated from the Doctor Peri encounters a mysterious steed (pictured on the cover) which stays by her side and ultimately sacrifices itself against a murderous crime lord. The steed? It’s Kamelion. His essence wasn’t entirely dead after Planet Of Fire, and the mysterious beings on this planet helped him find a new body so he could die all over again, but heroically, instead of being triggered into a heart attack and then shot by the Doctor. And hey, good: every single thing about Kamelion was a weird choice, so I don’t hate the idea of revisiting him after the fact. But a page or two of “by the way it was me, hi and bye I guess, dying again lol” is not going to win awards for not being a quick and random continuity bullet point. Is he really better off this way? Well, as the saying goes, the important thing is, he’s dead.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #5 – The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#3
The Bodysnatchers
By Mark Morris

Ah, The Bodysnatchers. We meet again.

When I was a kid and these books were new I developed a strange habit of buying them but not reading them. I’d take them with me on our weekend visits to the grandparents – literally packing dozens of books into a sports bag. I just liked having them around, I guess. They were smooth and diversely colourful (something they had over the more visually organised Virgin books, which is a bit funny when you consider their more outrageous reputation) and from the blurbs they all sounded like interesting and weird Doctor Who stories. So much potential there. Somehow, having that choice of books to read was as enjoyable to me as actually reading any of them. Sort of like paying for a streaming service now. Or possibly a sign of ADHD.

Anyway – I did read The Bodysnatchers. With a recognisable monster on the front and a recognisable character in the blurb, it tickled my fan brain in much the same way as The Eight Doctors. I could not resist.

Certain moments from it have lingered in my mind ever since. I still remember the opening meeting between grave-robbers Jack and Albert and their shadowy employer, a man with much of his face covered but still something noticeably odd about the eyes. I recall the ending, with a TARDIS full of (thankfully pacified) Skarasen, the Doctor taking them to a new home. And I remember the rich, dank atmosphere of London; this, along with some of those other memories, is largely thanks to the writing.

Mark Morris is our first new writer for BBC Books. (Or first solo writer. Sorry Keith Topping and Jonathan Blum, it’s hard to know who wrote what on a collaboration. Your day will come…) Unusually for a new Doctor Who novelist, Morris was already a seasoned writer, and that shows in the frequently splendid prose. “Within seconds the fog had swallowed not only the tavern itself, but the welcoming glow from its windows.” / “She imagined the huge ripples of the creature’s passage extending ever outward, a series of concentric circles like a widening shiver of fear on the dark skin of the Thames.” The Bodysnatchers is at its best, even as I read it now, when up to its eyeballs in the muck and murk of the Victorian capital.

Something else that would have captured young-me’s attention is – whatever this says about me – the violence. The Bodysnatchers starts with grave-robbing and goes downhill from there, taste-wise; Mary Whitehouse certainly would not approve. But all that’s in keeping with one of the show’s more bloodthirsty eras. As if to underline the parallel, this one takes place in the same location, 5 years on, as one of the most celebrated Gothic stories, even sharing a guest star. Absolutely no prizes for guessing whether Mark Morris is a big fan of The Talons Of Weng-Chiang, what with Professor George Litefoot asking follow-up questions about the Fourth Doctor and Leela, even down to their old joke about said companion having been found as an infant in a hatbox. (There are many other examples of Morris undoubtedly being One Of Us, such as “an almighty KKLAK!”, but I’ll bet there are nevertheless still people complaining that Henry Gordon Jago spent the whole thing in Brighton. Call yourself a fan, Morris?!)

That sense of sheer fannishness would have greased some wheels with me at the time, and I wouldn’t have been alone. I mean, look at it! Zygons! A popular monster that wasn’t done to death in the telly show, back again with no watershed to curtail them! Absolute manna from Heaven for the morbid young geeks who made up at least some of the readership for these books. (With grumpy old geeks filling out the rest.)

I stress this stuff because, stepping away from the author’s talent for atmosphere, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot to The Bodysnatchers otherwise. The Zygons are suitably creepy, although I’m not sure if Morris knew quite how hard the marketing guys would go on their inclusion: they slap one on the cover and name-check them (and their TV story) in the blurb, yet The Bodysnatchers takes half its page-count to name them. It also spends a lot less time on questions of body-swapped identity than you, Zygon fan that you probably are, might reasonably expect; barely anyone gets replaced by the infamous copycats. A rather more urgent concern seems to be the Skarasen, their infamous Loch Ness monster-inspiring pets, who receive much the same “they don’t look crap any more” makeover that the Slyther got in the Dalek Invasion Of Earth novelisation, only with more blood and guts.

And that, frankly, is another thing. There are times in these books (Virgin too, of course) when you’re aware that an older readership is being catered for, and I think that’s fair, just as there’s a fair middle-ground with the “watches horror movies that are too old for them” kid crowd. But there are a few moments in The Bodysnatchers that go too far, and I’m fairly sure I noticed that back in the day as well. I’m not saying Mary Whitehouse was right, but bloody hell, Mark, some of those Skarasen kills are a bit much. Certainly the bit where Jack mutilates a young lad for speaking out of turn should have had a second pass, if not been taken out.

As for what the Zygons are up to, shall we say, not much? There’s nothing exactly wrong with having your aliens want to kill all humans and take Earth as their own and leave it at that, but there’s consequently not much to say about such a plot that hasn’t been said before. The Zygons themselves seem to be going through the motions over it, as perhaps was the author given that this is an actual line: “Invasion. Colonisation. Something boring like that.” Even the novel’s interesting opening gambit – the local Burke and Hare unknowingly supplying the monsters with a ready stock of the dead – turns out to be nothing more interesting than feeding the Skarasen. Keeping it simple probably helped get younger me on board, in all honesty, but it’s an aspect that really falls off if you’re not just now reading your first Who book.

Characterisation is in a similar sort of ball park. The Doctor strikes many of the right notes, with that unstoppable motion that unifies all Doctors, plus the occasional moments of apparent innocence unique to this one. (Morris even includes that rather odd clairvoyance habit from the TV Movie. What was that, anyway?) Once you get past the confidence and the charm, however, the Doctor does a pretty terrible job here. The usual “aim for a peaceful resolution until it all goes belly up” thing happens, of course, but not because of dreadful old humans interfering: it’s because the Doctor makes an almighty cock-up with his Zygon anaesthetic, killing nearly all of them and irredeemably enraging the rest. Events move too fast to stop and examine this, so allow me. Doc: what the hell happened there? I normally hate the clever-clever argument that the Doctor is the cause of most of the universe’s problems, but when the remaining warrior Zygon unleashes hundreds of hungry Skarasen on London, that is unavoidably part of the Doctor’s mistake as well. And there is no examination of that here, which really ought to be the price (if not, the actual interesting bit) of doing something so out of step. Very odd choice there, and/or a messy execution.

More examined, and a bit less dangerous, is Sam. It’s taking me a while to warm to the new companion. Partly this is down to her general demeanour: she’s as aggressively abrasive as Ace, but unarmed; she sticks defiantly (and unwisely) to anachronisms when out of her natural time; she responds to every comment either with sarcasm or with pouty outrage at not being included to the extent she prefers. She’s kind of annoying, then, but that’s at least plausible, if not inevitable for a 17-year-old. More significantly she has a major chip on her shoulder about what kind of companion she’ll be, reacting furiously to not coming along to a mortuary and castigating herself for seeming weak or afraid. At one point she ponders how “she wanted to be indispensable to him, wanted to be an equal half of a dynamic duo that would become feared and revered throughout the galaxy.” And I mean, you what? I dimly recall that this is all intentional and it may well be Going Somewhere, but it doesn’t feel organic so far. Where her origin story basically had her follow the Doctor on a whim, I’m not seeing a basis for this desperate need to live up to something. (Unless her competitiveness with Carolyn-the-would-be-companion in Vampire Science really set something off.) Crucially, with Sam sparking off at everything and the Doctor more or less reacting as he would to any companion, the bond isn’t really there. They don’t seem especially to like each other and she doesn’t seem especially to like being here. In Sam I just see a Totally Radical 90s Companion who doesn’t want to be a Typical Screaming Doctor Who Girl – except I have no idea where she’d have heard about them, and therefore how she can react against said concept.

I’ll always have a soft spot for The Bodysnatchers, for much the same reason I’d fondly recall any book that captivated me enough to finish it as a kid, and had then stuck around at all in my memories since. In the less flattering light of adulthood there isn’t much more here than a solid Past Doctor Adventure – everything you’d want on the telly, only more so – except it’s an Eighth Doctor book, and there’s perhaps an expectation of more depth where they are not boxed between existing episodes. Clearly there are things afoot here, what with the epilogue featuring an Eighth Doctor notably and cagily without Sam. But apart from that future nugget, and his protégé’s awkward fixations, this could easily be a story you’ve heard before – only with something noticeably odd about the eyes.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #4 – The Murder Game by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#2
The Murder Game
By Steve Lyons

Back when the New Adventures were new, fans used to debate the different kinds of book you’d get. One kind was trad: books that felt like photocopied scripts, lovingly familiar but a bit staid. And the other kind was rad: books that felt like someone took all of the drugs and was, at best, dimly aware that Doctor Who used to be a TV show. The Missing Adventures, by virtue of slotting between existing episodes, skewed more trad. Of course they did. And now we’re getting into their successors, the Past Doctor Adventures, I’ve got to wonder how much variety they’re going to have viz trad and rad.

Well, The Murder Game is trad. Very, very trad. It’s as trad as the annual Christmas luncheon held by Sir Henry Tradwell, head of Traditional Studies at Tradition University, a hereditary post that has now been held by ten successive generations of Tradwells. It’s really rather trad, is what I’m hinting at.

Is that a problem? Well, it depends on the reader. Obviously there is a market for stories that feel like gently reheated stories you’ve already heard, or a good chunk of Doctor Who just wouldn’t be there. But when it comes to investing hours and hours in a novel, it’s not really what I’m after.

We begin in the TARDIS – which straight away feels like a throwback to ye olden times, forgoing the novelistic setting of the scene that usually comes before treating us to yer actual Doctor and companions. (At least it spares us a moody and incomprehensible prologue which is often standard in Novel Who.) From here it’s a hop, skip and a jump to a distress signal, a seemingly empty space station, a gaggle of characters who are mistakenly expecting our heroes to turn up, and then a murder mystery game that – don’t tell anyone – might involve a few actual murders before very long. All of which is a bit, oh no, that script fell through, what else have you got that’s ready to go?

Some of this is undeniably fun, with the Doctor in particular relishing the opportunity to put on a costume – his character is “Miss Lucy Buxom” and all that entails – but the Agatha Christie-esque sequence of events that follows still feels like the oldest of plots, and without a veneer of metaness or even Romance Of Crime-ish comment to set it apart. Some people are not who they seem, even when they are not in costume, but they all have that unmistakeable stink of Look, We Need The Numbers So There’s Enough Of Them To Kill Off. I occasionally mixed up my Daphnes and my Dorothys; it seems so inevitable just from the setting that they’ll each have secrets that it’s more surprising when they don’t.

Not much happens in the first half – or rather, so much happens in the second half that my memories have now been taped over. (We’ll get to it.) But anyway, murders are happening for real, and all of this has something to do with the Selachians: aquatic space monsters with a chip on their shoulder. The Doctor and co must find what they’re after before they arrive and ramp up the killing. Red herrings abound, and Ben seems to find himself knocked unconscious quite often. This presages one of the novel’s recurring habits, never-ending jeopardy, with a sudden bout of oblivion lurking behind every corner. It gets a bit silly, but one of its other habits – the announcement of a death, but you’ll have to wait a few pages to find out whose it was – works very well at ratcheting tension.

Eventually it’s time to pay off this Selachian thing, and it’s worth debating whether the long wait was better than giving them a dramatic entrance sooner. Characters mention this murderous species quite a bit, but I kept imagining all this on screen and thinking, well show them, then! When they arrive they don’t disappoint: sharks (or are they dolphins?) so fed up with persecution from land dwellers that they’ve gone to war with everybody, they travel about in water suits with aggressive shark artwork painted on for effect. There’s certainly a hint of Chelonian about them, with the shark replacing the rather more anachronistic tortoise, but their commitment to kill-kill-kill is certainly to be reckoned with.

By the time they arrive on the space station/hotel it has been knocked out of orbit and is inexorably falling towards Earth, and that’s the pace in a nutshell, suddenly ramping up towards imminent heat death. The Selachians want a weapon that was smuggled aboard the station and will kill until they get it. The weapon could doom thousands so the Doctor and co must keep it from them, all while not perishing in Earth’s atmosphere. On top of that the weapon is finally deployed – an algorithm that will use anything mechanical or computerised to kill its target – which leads to Ben evading some very holistic assassination attempts over and over again.

This stuff is quite exciting, and from a quick glance at reviews the last stretch seems to be the agreed upon Favourite Bit. However, there does come a point where constant (and it does become constant) peril gets a bit tiresome, like continually hopping between frying pans and fires. It’s exciting incident with nothing underpinning it; yes, the Selachians are terrible and the weapon (though decidedly wacky) is a big problem, but it’s just a bottomless bag of cliffhangers after a while.

The characterisation is very good, though there’s not a huge amount to dive into with the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly at this time in the series. Ben yearns to be back at sea, and has conflicting feelings of friendship or-possibly-something-more for Polly. Polly feels similarly, but gets slightly shoved down in the mix with all these other characters milling about. The Doctor is fiercely himself, offering up beguiling smiles, outraged outbursts, childish panic and sudden ingenuity. His frustration at being in the company of murderers, and not wanting to encourage any more deaths, believably underscores his Troughton-ish antics. And Lyons makes this the point where he canonically decides that a sonic screwdriver would be a neat idea, if you like that sort of thing.

The Murder Game falls somewhere between a tried and tested 60s episode and a wet Sunday afternoon with Big Finish. It really is very authentic – I kept picturing the lights glaring off the studio floor – but then I kept waiting for it to be funnier, remembering that Steve Lyons was the Conundrum guy. To be fair there are funny flourishes, like the murder mystery game (not enough is made of that), and some oblique Whovian references like “Nobody would end up as cinders floating around in Spain if he could help it,” or – triple nerd points for this one – “He burst into a song, about business being business and always aiming to please.” But I’d hesitate to call it a comedy.

There’s just nothing at all under the surface – and for what it’s worth, barely anything I can say about it. The Murder Game executes its plot very efficiently and gets the voices just right, and I appreciate all of that. Perhaps that ought to be enough, but something is missing here that left me wading all too slowly through its pages.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #3 – Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#2
Vampire Science
By Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman

Okay. You’ve got your new Doctor and his new companion. What’s next?

Televised Doctor Who tells us in no uncertain terms that there are Rules; there are Done Things. The Doctor must show the new companion wonders and dangers, usually in the future and the past, in quick succession. The Eighth Doctor Adventures happened long before all that, and the New Adventures before them never had a fresh start to deal with; whenever those companions started it was always straight over to somebody else’s novel afterwards, and they probably didn’t want the burden of dealing with the new girl, thank you very much, so intros tended to bed in slowly.

Enter Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, picking up after Terrance Dicks very hurriedly did the whole bigger-on-the-inside bit. No pressure, but this is where it really begins.

At first glance, Vampire Science is one of those New Adventures-ey occasions where we’re not going to deal with it after all. We don’t pick up the action right after The Eight Doctors. The Doctor and Sam are on an adventure some indeterminate amount of time later (we’ll come back to that) and our point of view character is a new one, Carolyn.* She witnesses these two weirdos on the hunt for a vampire. Again, at first glance this looks like that same old routine: avoid dealing with the new companion by writing your own. But there’s other stuff at work here. (Side note: it’s always worth giving in media res a go. Vampire Science starts with a wallop, and isn’t that more fun than easing us into it with “Where will the TARDIS take us next, I wonder?”)

*Carolyn was at one time intended to be Grace Holloway, but then rights happened. Knowing this made me go “Ohhh” about the San Francisco setting. Info courtesy of the Pieces Of Eight podcast.

Sam seems pretty confident by this point. Mind you, she seemed pretty confident on arrival, back-talking drug dealers and just as easily assessing the impossibilities of the TARDIS. Some of this, no doubt, is just who Sam is – similarly moral and right-on to Ace, less explosive about it, with a (slightly annoying) 90s self-awareness that helps with all the sci-fi. But through the course of Vampire Science it becomes apparent that she still hasn’t entirely grasped what she’s got herself in for, nearly getting killed several times and winding up seriously hospitalised at least once. The bravado is, in part, an act. It wasn’t a new one just for the Doctor’s benefit – see, drug dealers – but perhaps she’s felt a need to keep it up for him. And it’s potentially reaching exhaustion point here. I kept thinking about the observation that she’s already on “her third pair [of trainers] since Coal Hill”. Running all the way, and with all the time to stop for a breather that that entails. She acts like it isn’t still early days, but there’s still some adjusting to do. The authors have their cake and eat it, then. Phew.

Carolyn adds an interesting wrinkle here. She sees the Doctor and Sam only once, in the 70s, and then not again until 1997 when vampires once again bubble to the surface of San Francisco. (Yes, the Eighth Doctor is back here and no, they don’t make the obvious connection.) As with most people in that situation, she has thought about the Doctor a lot in the intervening years, and presented with him once again the possibility of joining him seems irresistible. Has she been living a life at all, or just waiting to catch that train some day? Just as Sam is potentially rethinking all of this, Carolyn is barrelling towards it. Who wants to be with the Doctor? Who wants to just live a life? It’s an active and unresolved question throughout: Brigadier-General Adrienne Kramer, a weary soldier who knew the umbrella-wielding Doctor of old, is only too happy to school any impressionable young things on the dangers of trusting him. (But also, through gritted teeth, the enormous possibilities of same.) “They all go through this,” she tells Sam pityingly. Is it all worth it?

After a while I found myself standing back from Vampire Science and admiring the authors’ theme, and how far it goes. Vampires – eternal life. Remind you of anyone? I occasionally forget that in Doctor Who (Classic, anyway) the undead are bona fide nemeses of the Time Lords, but then that sneaky, creepy parallel isn’t one that has been greatly explored. (Even Terry, who started it, doesn’t seem all that interested; his vampires tended more towards Hammer Horror.) There’s shedloads of it here, particularly with a reference to vampires living “forever, barring accidents.” Joanna Harris, a doctor who secretly leads the local vampires (but not so much the troublesome youngsters who are causing all the fuss) yearns to live less like a predator and put her centuries of knowledge to good use – not wildly unlike the Doctor, at this time of life. At one point she tries to lure a fellow scientist to her way of life, prompting this Doctorish comparison: “‘So you’re willing to destroy him?’ [the Doctor] said, outraged. ‘Shatter what little faith he’s got, just so you can have him pass you test tubes and tell you how brilliant you are?’” In a last ditch attempt to trust each other, the two even create a psychic bond, putting them so firmly on parallel lines that one can’t die without killing the other. When the time finally comes for the Doctor and Carolyn to broach The Subject, in amongst all this it can’t help sounding like a vampiric bargain that once made, cannot be unmade, especially after Sam’s brush with some distinctly over-sharpened canines. Clearly there are different kinds of long life and different ways to live them, but you might want to think twice before signing up in either case.

Yeah, okay, theme-theme-theme. It doesn’t sound very exciting, I suppose, and there’s something to that. The prelude with the Doctor, Sam and Carolyn hunting down an out of control vamp is all action, perhaps to give you a taste of what you want after picking up a book about vampires, before sneakily settling into a more thoughtful exercise. The slowly mounting deaths in San Francisco are mostly down to one try-hard Nosferatu called Slake, who feels that the old must make way for the young. Sort of like the antagonist from Blade, then, except he rejected tradition and wanted new ways of doing things; Slake is mad that Joanna wants things to change, and prefers the old fashioned hunt instead. Slake is not fascinating, and nor are his dopey followers, but the book isn’t terribly interested in them or in action anyway. The vampires in this are more terrifying and their crimes more tragic when on a small scale. Sam never fully recovers from the shock of her attack. At one point, the Doctor takes Joanna to a victim’s funeral.

Despite what that first chapter suggests, the Doctor isn’t here to go vampire hunting. Yes, the book is interested in long lives and how to live them, on top of how the new companion feels about this crazy lifestyle, but it also has the job of bedding in the new Doctor. The previous book barely touched that – the story wasn’t built for it, and even when it was the choices were questionable. Here, we get to muck in and think about what this Doctor is like, and how he copes in a crisis. In a nutshell then: the Doctor he is, but Machiavelli he ain’t. Almost out of habit, he gets people to listen to him and follow him, but what looks like a grand plan is just as likely a bunch of short-term wheezes that paid off because, well, he’s just very good at this. Crucially he spends most of Vampire Science trying not to engineer the doom of his enemies, preferring to defer, at one point keeping Slake talking long enough just for the military to escort everyone else out of harm’s way. He goes to great lengths even for the possibility of peace – hence the dangerous link with Joanna, and the humouring of her mooted plans for “synthetic feeding”. (Oh, Doctor.) He gladly offers to throw himself off a building if she threatens Sam, and despite her getting a terrible revenge for that threat he then keeps his compassion for Joanna right to the end. He’s all hearts, this one.

But don’t be fooled: the enigma is still in there. Despite his protestations, he goes along with the destruction of the worst vampiric elements in the end. (But with less of the glee, particularly in an incredibly fast course correction from The Eight Doctors: “It was easy for me to kill Lord Zarn’s followers, I didn’t know myself well enough at the time to know that’s not what I do.” Yes! Mic drop.) In the 70s he gives Carolyn a means to contact him and, in a thrillingly clever and ever so slightly threatening moment, he then arrives early and urges her to still send it or he’ll never have come, all while standing behind her unseen. Still early, he can only watch as someone falls into danger just as predicted – but we later find out that he tried to help anyway, because what the hell. He is often likened to a magician. He loves making people breakfast. Cats are inexorably fond of him.

Perhaps most otherworldly though is his time with Sam. She says that he once left her to go on an errand, returning moments later (because TARDIS), but he had actually been away “a pretty long while – like a year” in relative time. He got distracted. (And it’s worse than that, because the numbers don’t add up. He later tells Carolyn this regeneration is three years old. Sam is still 17 – so he has lived more of those years than she has. Where was he?) This seems like something for other authors to pick up and run with, but even if they don’t, it’s an important separation of Doctor and companion. They’re together, they’re close, but there must still be a distance because he’s something else altogether. Your move, other writers in the series.

It’s been one of those reviews where I want to talk about the book rather than about the book, if that makes sense. Trying to wrestle myself back on target, then: I don’t know if it’s what every potential reader would want from a book about vampires, but it’s what I needed from the series right now, done with a degree of nuance that you just don’t expect this early on. And Kate Orman is involved, so where there’s nuance you can expect a sense of fun to follow. She’s worn through a few of her own sets of trainers by this point.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #2 — The Devil Goblins From Neptune by Keith Topping and Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#1
The Devil Goblins From Neptune
By Keith Topping and Martin Day

The Past Doctor Adventures, then. It ought to go without saying that if you’re doing a book range about the current Doctor then you should also do one about the rest, but you know what? That wasn’t a thing until Virgin did it with the New and Missing Adventures, so pour one out for the MAs. The BBC took their lunch money.

That said, the Missing Adventures never quite figured out what to do with themselves. Replicate the style of a TV script? Too derivative. Get experimental or dark? That’s what the New Adventures are for. They tended to oscillate between these extremes, with only occasional gems like The Empire Of Glass grasping that you can just tell a good story in an era.

I mention the MAs because, well, the comparison is inevitable, but also because there seems to be some crossover here. The Devil Goblins From Neptune (I’ll say it, goofy title) was co-written by Martin Day, who got his start with Virgin’s The Menagerie. (Many of the BBC Books writers cut their teeth with Virgin, which is sort of nice. And it’s good sense, because you don’t want to rely on a procession of first time novelists. You could try established higher-profile writers, but they may not flock to your TV tie-in range – no offence.)

On a character level, too, an argument can be made that Goblins is in keeping with the MAs. It’s set between Seasons Seven and Eight on telly: a sea change occurred there, with Liz Shaw disappearing without a peep and Mike Yates materialising as if we’d always known him. Despite sitting in this gap, Goblins does not have Mike arrive on the scene for the first time – so The Eye Of The Giant might still stand. And despite being the first thing that comes to mind when looking at that continuity gap, this is not The Proverbial Liz Shaw Leaving Story either. (Although there’s an epilogue set eight months after she left UNIT.) Is that a case of simply not writing that story right now, or are they politely letting The Scales Of Injustice stay where it is? I guess we’ll see. (Quick reminder here that Virgin sent Liz on her way twice, the first time in the first Decalog. So it wouldn’t exactly be crime of the century if Topping and Day did it again here. But they didn’t.)

I’m probably being unfair to Goblins by starting off with such a lot of fanwank, because it’s not that kind of book. So let’s get back on track. Season Seven strikes me as a good setting for a Doctor Who novel. The stories were longer than usual in the first place, with plenty of characters and subplots and okay, a generous amount of padding. Crucially it was also a time of change for the Doctor, in that suddenly he was part of a team. Yes, he’s always the most interesting one, but crucially he’s not the only one driving the action. Goblins flies with this, allowing the focus to follow the Doctor, Liz, Mike Yates, the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton and visiting Russian UNIT officer Shuskin as needed. There’s enough going on that you’re always fairly engaged – so it doesn’t have to be the Doctor all the time, and the fact that none of the rest of them truly know or understand him anyway gives the authors license to let him hang back and work in an ensemble. (They arguably push this a bit far by having him slip into a coma twice, but again – plenty going on elsewhere.)

Season Seven was also a murkier, nastier kind of storytelling than viewers were used to. Spearhead From Space hints at bodysnatching paranoia. The Silurians features an out of control plague and a morally grey ending that borders on genocide; The Ambassadors Of Death suggests that people are the real problem. And in Inferno we really push the boat out, with the world turning to outright fascism and then ending in lava and screams. (But it’s not our world, so phew I guess.) The season is a good setting for murky allegiances, violence with consequences and unexpected changes of setting: all grist to the mill for a book running about twice the length of a Target novelisation.

So in Goblins, it’s not just a case of aliens invading London and the Doctor leading the charge against them. Shadowy forces are working against UNIT and we follow their agent: Thomas Bruce, suave American and all round, 24-carat a-hole. The aliens have help from humanity – bad apples, of course – so we occasionally dip into the world of Viscount Rose, a part of the English gentry who reckons Armageddon will work in his favour. (Guess how that works out.) There are hippies more or less on board with this, the “Venus people”, led by Rose’s son Arlo, and we occasionally meet them or people on similar drugs. And of course the goblins of the title are out there killing people, so we occasionally cut away to those events, meeting people ever so briefly before, y’know.

A lot of this feels reflective of those long seven parters, particularly the sheer necessity of action scenes. (“Action by HAVOC” appears at the start. Accurate.) Shuskin’s initial mission to recruit the Doctor leads to three failed kidnap attempts, all of which are nominally pointless because she just wants his help but UNIT kept blowing her off, and then actually pointless because the whole “go and investigate happenings in Russia” plot is a massive, insidious red herring. Not that I’m exactly complaining: it’s written with maximum excitement in mind, bullets flying everywhere and the Doctor jauntily eluding danger at all turns. Marvellous. But I know when a certain degree of chain yanking is occurring and – apologies to Thomas Bruce and friends – here be yanks.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of this (in all honesty, quite sprawling) plot is the stuff with the Brigadier. Realising that Shuskin’s experiences indicate rot at a high level, he departs for Geneva to see what’s what. (This smartly ensures that the red herring plot doesn’t go to waste.) The Brigadier often seemed a bit of a buffoon on screen, particularly as the years went on, but he flourishes here, responding to dangerous changes of circumstance with intelligence and taking command of soldiers so that any consequences are off their shoulders. I was never entirely sure what the authors were driving at with where this is all going – the “rot” goes very high up and it must be addressed, but that doesn’t obviously reflect anything in Season Eight and beyond, so are other authors going to pick this up? – but each cut away to his one-man spy movie was enjoyable.

There’s also solid character work happening for the rest of the gang. Mike Yates seems to be having crises of confidence, first when he’s placed in charge and then when it’s taken away – again not entirely sure if that ties into anything, but it fleshes him out. Benton gets partially blown up by a stray bomb, but then adorably rushes back to work and tries to infiltrate the Venus People, which goes surprisingly well until the goblins turn up. And Liz, while not making a point of leaving this time, feels like a person in her own right with skills and interests that just don’t naturally align with UNIT. (She much prefers academia.) Her mentor, Bernard Trainor, turns out to be in cahoots with Viscount Rose, although he soon regrets it. Shortly after she finds out (and after he has changed sides again) he dies of a heart attack, and we see a broken Liz: “Why did you have to go now? Why did you have to go when I hate you?” Leaving now or not, the events of the novel certainly feel like they’re going in Liz’s “cons” column for UNIT, not the “pros”. It may not be her leaving story, which is quite bold in itself, but it contributes meaningfully to that event.

That death is one of several examples that feel a little less throwaway than you’d expect in a monster invasion story. There is certainly more violence than you’d see on television or in a Target novelisation – enough that, combined with the spy shenanigans and the loving detail of all the military hardware involved, I wondered if kids would enjoy reading this at all. (Indeed, I didn’t stick with it as a twelve year old.) But most of it feels consequential and felt. Notably, the Brigadier contends with possibly having to take a life for the first time – a thoughtful character beat, albeit one the Doctor would laugh into silence after some of the orders he’s given recently. (Has he really not done it before?) That said, the Doctor calmly engineers the death of an entire species here, reasoning (albeit not happily) that they “have only themselves to blame.” I think it’s sufficient to say I don’t buy that, and if the Doctor had been any higher in the novel’s mix and thus under more conscious scrutiny from the authors I don’t think he would either.

I’ve gone a long time without talking about those goblins, haven’t I? And with some reason: the Waro (not to be confused with any nefarious yellow-clad plumbers) are murderous aliens who hate everything else in the universe because, basically, they’re the worst and that’s all there is to it. Huh. They have no real voice in the novel (though at one point the Doctor mind melds, aka “soul catches” with one) but they do have a vague environmental disaster back story. And honestly, they’re more of a thing that occasionally happens than a character you’d have any cause to think about. They’re the weakest link in the novel, but I suppose you could argue they’re meant to only be a part of it, like the Doctor; they are stitched into the betrayals and confusions that drive the action, but the real interest comes from the big picture. Spurious reasoning, I know, but I enjoyed the book despite finding the threat boring and the eventual action-packed relocation to a certain UFO site in Nevada also, as it happens, spurious.

In amongst all this is the Doctor, occasionally protesting about wanting to get off Earth, as is his way. I think he protests too much. In a passage that for once does give way to the ol’ fanwank a little, he catches up with Trainor about recent UNIT exploits, and the pair briefly discuss Ian Chesterton, whom the Doctor has met up with offscreen. (!) The sheer domesticity of this leapt off the page at me – the idea that he and Ian occupy the same world now as casual acquaintances. (Ian has a son with Barbara, FYI.) Shortly afterwards the Doctor resumes his membership at the swanky, rather dubious Progressive Men’s Club, in that way that seems quintessential to this Doctor. Later there is a somewhat on-the-nose reference to UNIT being “like a family,” and there are enough hints that the Doctor has settled into it without even noticing, which provides another nicely subtle bridge between the two seasons and a pleasing snapshot of this time and place, in what is otherwise a sprawling, bloodthirsty, giddily globetrotting and sometimes oddly thoughtful ride of a novel.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #1 — The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#1
The Eight Doctors
By Terrance Dicks

He’s back! And it’s about… nothing.

So, you’ve got the Doctor Who license. (Not you, Virgin Publishing. Sorry.) What do you do with it? Well, you could do worse than copy the previous guy’s homework. Timewyrm: Genesys was given to a well respected/well liked/well established/well-in Who author (delete where appropriate) and it opens with one of our characters getting amnesia. This is a handy device for explaining the basic tenets of Doctor Who to any uninitiated readers. (It’s nonetheless a rather odd choice, because the vast majority of readers picking up Timewrym: Genesys were already fans who knew this stuff back to front. But I understand the impulse.)

Fast forward six years and enter The Eight Doctors, which also comes from a familiar-named author and does amnesia for what appears to be the same reason – except this time it’s the entire book. And this time it’s an odd choice for a couple of reasons.

The Eighth Doctor’s only previous adventure on screen made heavy use of amnesia, so it seems silly to do that again right away. (We can perhaps infer that Terrance Dicks wasn’t enamoured with the TV Movie or its ownership of plot beats based on the Doctor’s subtle interpretation of it here: “It had been a weird, fantastic adventure, full of improbable, illogical events.” I mean, he’s not wrong.)

Still, “amnesia” doesn’t dictate how you actually write the character or the memory loss – that’s up to you. Dicks in this instance opts to have the Doctor more or less loaded up with his memories already (right away he has his name, ability to pilot the TARDIS and Venusia aikido), he’s just unfamiliar with, or unable to get at them. This is at least a bit different to the TV Movie, but it puts The Eight Doctors in a weird middle ground where the Doctor Who-ey elements are sort of new to it (and to us, the hypothetical new readers), but they are also presented as if you should already know what they are. This gives us weird stop-start prose like “This, although he didn’t realise it, was the old, traditional TARDIS control room” followed later that page by “What was this place? Clearly it was some kind of control room. But what was it supposed to control?” Is it an unknown or isn’t it? It doesn’t quite work if you tell us what it is and then have the Doctor go, “Huh?” All of which begs the same question as the Timewyrm: Genesys opening: who is The Eight Doctors for?

I’m getting ahead of myself, so to recap: directly after the events of the TV Movie (which doesn’t strictly rule out The Dying Days, every cloud eh) the Doctor finds a backup trap from the Master which triggers memory loss all over again. Along comes the helpful booming voice of Rassilon, whose Five Doctors visage lovingly graces the back cover, to tell him to cheer up and “trust the TARDIS”, which then deposits him in Totters Yard for reasons we’ll get to. It’s here we take a slight detour and introduce what will become the new companion.

This is new stuff, bread and butter for those hypothetical new readers. Hooray. How does it fare? Well, in record time we learn that Sam Jones is of school age, a vegetarian, a runner and a gymnast. (If she had time to breathe she’d probably list her favourite bands as well.) We find her running away from a local drug gang, angry at her for informing to the cops, which also tells us she has strong morals. But we still need her to be a companion, so she needs rescuing, which is where a suddenly-appearing police box (and some quickly recalled aikido) comes in. The police turn up, everyone except the Doctor scarpers and the wrong idea is had about his involvement in local drug deals. Cue a bit of silliness in a police station, while Sam is gently interrogated by her teachers.

It’s not great stuff, honestly, but I do appreciate the expediency of Sam’s introduction and the information it gets across. We’ve had similar and/or worse companion intros on television since 2005. Everything about the criminals (“You remember why they call him Machete Charlie?”) and the cops (“I DON’T GIVE A BRASS MONKEY’S”) is, to put it charitably, more your Terrance Dicks of Mean Streets than of Exodus, but if you bear in mind that some people have this idea about Doctor Who being intended for children then it reads harmlessly enough. (I’m less fond of Sam’s teachers: the male one is good enough at his job to figure Sam needs to talk to someone, but he nevertheless palms her off onto a female colleague with “Maybe you can get her to talk about it, Vicky – you know, girly talk.” Just as night follows day, Vicky calls him a “chauvinistic oaf”, like this is some blazing piece of feminism and not just Who’s On First for pipe-smoking sexists. The whole exchange is reheated from the 70s and it clunks like anything.) But anywho, that’s enough about Sam. The Doctor escapes from police custody and retreats in the TARDIS (sans Sam), which sets a course for the multi-Doctor shenanigans of the title.

And, sorry, this is where the wheels really come off.

The TARDIS/Rassilon/the Doctor’s subconscious or whatever has a plan to beat the amnesia: go and visit his past selves, do a bit of telepathy and absorb their memories. If you think about this for more than a second it falls apart: why not just visit his most recent incarnation and get the memories all in one go? But hey, it’s an excuse to go on a jolly Time Lord’s outing. Again though, it’s how you do it, and as with the amnesia the choices are rather muddled.

We find the First Doctor during his first on-screen adventure. Again, the amnesia prose can’t keep straight what our Doctor remembers: “The old man was angry. The old man was him” is followed by “He could understand [the old man’s passions] as if they were his own. And then he realised – they were his own.” He marches up to the First Doctor, bold as brass, during the near-miss with the wounded caveman and the rock. As well as regaining memories up to this point, he uses the opportunity to wag a finger at his predecessor for contemplating murder.

I hate this, because the scene as televised doesn’t leave room for an intervention. There already is one, with Ian stepping in to stop him. So, why add this talking-to on top? It might be there to give the new Doctor a grounding in his own morals, but those already seemed fully developed when he met Sam, and castigated her enemies for selling drugs to kids. You can argue it’s adding fuel to the First Doctor’s fire, but then that takes away from Ian and the role of the companion in general – however there’s no actual sign that the First Doctor has changed his mind afterwards. The new Doctor yells at him and then the Ian thing plays out just the same anyway! So what’s it for? It’s a towering redundancy, a sort of have-your-cake-and-throw-it-away. Odd, odd choice.

And that’s not even the worst bit. Here’s how the First Doctor reacts to the new arrival: “Good grief! Seven regenerations… I am the First Doctor, and you are the Eighth! … You must find your other selves, all six of them. They’ll restore the gaps in your memory, just as I have — though only up to the time in their lives that you meet them, of course.” Even apart from how agonisingly clumsy it is to offer up the book’s entire plot like this, how incongruous does this Doctor, the one least encumbered by continuity (because most of it didn’t exist yet) sound as he casually refers to himself as The First Doctor, and tosses away his own future regenerations like he’s swapping notes with a fellow trainspotter? It doesn’t speak to the character or do anything to show why we should be interested in seeing him again. And there’s nothing momentous about this meeting, despite how bananas it would have been in that moment and how much of an occasion it ought to be for us – indeed, it’s the premise of the book. The whole encounter is over in two pages. If a random fan had submitted a first pass at this scene, it might have read the same way.

Anyway. Hope you’re comfy. One down, six to go.

The Second Doctor fares much the same: found during The War Games, surrounded by soldiers displaced in time, our Doctor regains some memories, gains a few Doctor Who trivia points and wags his finger/offers encouragement about contacting the Time Lords for help, which will get his younger self exiled. As a section there’s a bit more to it at least – The War Games has more going on generally than An Unearthly Child did, plus Terry co-wrote this one so he’s probably more engaged – but again it’s an intervention that doesn’t really contribute to the outcome; again, if it does contribute then some agency is removed from the original story; and again, it’s all so blandly functional that he could be asking an old colleague for train times.

Around this point it becomes more of a short story collection, but Terrance at least starts putting some action into it. We find the next few Doctors in the moments after a TV story: The Sea Devils, State Of Decay and (aptly/confusingly) The Five Doctors. The Doctor helps the Third Doctor find, lose, find, then lose the Master again, at one point revisiting Devil’s End. It’s all a bit redundant, but quite jolly apart from the Third Doctor trying to steal his successor’s TARDIS at gunpoint. You can generally tell Dicks is more engaged here as it was “his” era, but I’m not sure I give that a pass. Similarly he wrote State Of Decay, and this isn’t even his first prose sequel to it, so the next bit is fairly generous as well: the Fourth Doctor runs afoul of vampires, but luckily the new Doctor a) murders a bunch of them and b) provides a life saving blood transfusion, which is a Bill & Ted paradox but no one seems to mind. Then, following up another story he wrote, the Fifth Doctor’s attempt at relaxation is interrupted by the Raston Warrior Robot and some Sontarans. A clever multi-Doctor ruse helps confuse and defeat the robot, and then the new Doctor engineers the deaths of all the Sontarans as an escape plan. It’s around here that I can’t help looking at this blood-spattered new incarnation and wonder if he has lost his memory since earlier in this book, when he told the First Doctor that the ends didn’t justify the means. (It’s also worth noting that the Eye Of Orion is now once and for all ruined as a relaxation spot, what with the robot being left on guard there. Whoops.)

As we meet number 6, still in the throes of The Trial Of A Time Lord, the action shifts to put the Eighth Doctor more at the centre. This makes sense – he ought to draw the focus at some point, it’s his book series – but you could be forgiven for wishing it was executed differently. Initially working with and passionately defending the Sixth Doctor, he is soon exposing corruption on Gallifrey and organising a revolution, all while repeating the plot points of Trial. It’s worth noting that all of this is our second version of Gallifrey in this novel – the other one came to a head in the Fifth Doctor’s segment, as a seditious Time Lord tried to kill two Doctors using the Time Scoop – and the book does threaten to snap under the weight of Time Lord continuity. (You can’t even say it’s worth it for finally getting to the meaty bit of the book, because although the Eighth Doctor draws the focus for a while, this still isn’t really the main plot of the novel. Because there isn’t one.) For good measure, needling the Sixth Doctor for being a bit of a fatty isn’t very nice, but then again there’s a reference earlier on to the Fourth Doctor secretly wishing Romana was more subservient like his old companions, and there’s the Third Doctor’s whole attempted hijacking bit. For a book supposedly delighting in the company of eight Doctors, few of them come out of it well.

Finally we arrive at the Doctor he might as well have visited in the first place: we find the Seventh one so depressed he’s considering medical intervention. (This is certainly a take, and maybe it’s a comment on the often gloomy New Adventures – although a reference to the Doctor’s parents sort of de-canonises those, eek – but I hope not as he mellowed towards the end of the series.) A death-defying trip to Metebelis III cures his ennui, with a little help from the new Doctor who shrinks a giant spider to death and my dude, would you give the killing a rest? Snuck in here as well is some bonus continuity for the Master – the third-and-a-bit version included in The Eight Doctors, god help you if you don’t know his entire timeline – as we helpfully explain how he pulled off the whole “death snake” thing in the TV Movie. It doesn’t really fit, but I guess Terry figured hey, since I’m here.

And at last we pick up with Sam and send her and the Eighth Doctor on their own adventures. An attempt is made for this to seem like a fresh take on “companion enters the TARDIS,” with Sam assessing more or less all the weird stuff happening around her on the spot and taking it in her stride because she’s from a more savvy age: the 90s. I’m not that charitable, however: in the context of this book, where monumental events are rendered as bullet points, it just reads like we’re getting it done faster. It’s also a bit flat having the companion shrug it off like this. The companion is the reader. There should be some amazement.

So, what does The Eight Doctors try to achieve? As an adventure featuring that titular gaggle of Theta-Sigmas it’s rather lacking, bumping them into each other with no greater ceremony (or critically, banter) than whatever old Doctor it is going “Not you again!” As a celebration of those events, well it really isn’t one, more just acknowledging that those events occurred, often in an exhausting list. At best, it advertises that there are different Doctor Who continuities, which is genuinely very canny when you’re launching two book ranges to explore them. Business concerns aside though, it’s a rough restart for printed Doctor Who fiction, jumping from the depth of the New Adventures into essentially Dimensions In Time without the soap opera.

As a first adventure for a new Doctor, forget it. Although he eventually takes the lead, the closest he has to a distinct personality here is an ease with killing. (This isn’t entirely the author’s fault – there isn’t room to make a definitive statement about a new Doctor – but I did find the violence a bit off.) The best you can do is write it off as a rough sketch written to order and look forward to people actually writing this stuff for real. But in order for that to make sense, you do need to forget that this was the launch title, intended to hook readers.

Who, then, is The Eight Doctors for? Well, here’s a twist ending: me. Aged 12, when this was first published, I loved The Eight Doctors. In the Wilderness Years Doctor Who mostly existed as non-fiction books and videos released in a random sequence, almost as haphazard and intangible as the TARDIS itself. A book that devotes swathes of time to reciting canon was an all-I-could-eat treat for younger me, who couldn’t claim to have watched any of this when it aired and knew it only as second hand legends. (I hadn’t read that many books either, which probably helped rose-tint this particular opus.) I can only assume that other fans in that exact situation also had a good time with it, and for that at least, well done Terry — there is an audience for this. But that still leaves everyone else with a shopping list that can barely claim to have come to life where a novel should be.

4/10