#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
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