Doctor Who: The BBC Books #9 – War Of The Daleks by John Peel

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#5
War Of The Daleks
By John Peel

Daleks! For real this time, sink plunger and everything, DALEKS!

Say what you will about this one, but this is a big deal and quite an exciting shot fired from BBC Books. Sure, they may have copied Virgin Publishing’s homework in general, but those guys never had the license for the most famous Doctor Who baddie of them all. While I would argue that they didn’t suffer for it (they were all about New things after all), sometimes it’s just plain nice to go Doctor Who = Daleks.

Of course, it’s one thing to wheedle a license out of the Nation estate. You’ve then got to actually do something with all those pepperpots. What does that look like in print? Daleks aren’t exactly famed conversationalists; often the worst bit of a Dalek story IS-WHEN-THEY-ARE-GI-VEN-TOO-MUCH-DI-A-LOGUE.

John Peel — known for, among other things, his Dalek Masterplan novelisations — makes some choices in this regard, and some of them are good. War Of The Daleks is not all Daleks, all the time. They are very much kept in the background for the first 150 pages or so, an implacable force of nature that the plot and characters must work around in order to survive. This might seem odd when not showing Daleks was already our default setting, but there’s a lot to be said for atmosphere. Look at the Borg: were they ever better than in The Best Of Both Worlds Part 1, which is mostly just the Enterprise crew bricking it?

Don’t panic, though, Dalek fans: they’re still here, just a bit off to the side. There are several interludes that show Dalek combat in various forms, and never from their POV. We see a Space Security Service agent working a bit of subterfuge against them on an aquatic world; Draconians in a death-or-glory fight in an asteroid belt; Mechonoids, forced to take a break from their daily routine, attempting to keep them away from their never-to-arrive human settlers. (Possibly my favourite bit in the book is a dying Mechonoid’s final report “to Central Computer, to inform it that another Mechon unit would have to be assigned to check on the insect infestation on the geraniums tomorrow.”) There’s good variety here, with some scenarios playing out how the “good guys” hoped, others going in the Daleks’ favour. It paints a picture of an entire way of life spent fighting these things, which can take as many forms as you care to list. As well as giving a good example to any readers who are (god forbid) unfamiliar with what Daleks are all about, it’s using Daleks as more of a narrative way in than as the whole narrative, and as you can see in stories like Power or Evil Of The Daleks (Peel novelised both) that approach can be a great starting point.

We open with probably the most interesting interlude featuring the oldest Dalek enemy, Thals, in the heat of battle. This is likely just what you want when you pick up a doggarn Dalek book at last: loads of action, new and different types of Dalek, even the first word of the book is “Exterminate!” More interesting still is what it says about the Thals: dropping a nuke to wipe out the nearest attack wave also obliterates a primitive settlement nearby, much to the chagrin of Ayaka, the soldier with the biggest conscience. Immediately after that the entire planet is destroyed; unbeknownst to Ayaka their mission was simply a trap to lure some Daleks to their deaths. The entire planetary population are just collateral damage. It’s genuinely a bit of a swing to open your Dalek novel by asking if we can trust the Thals.

Unfortunately, just as getting the Dalek license doesn’t do everything for you in one go, it’s one thing to set up a conflict — it’s another to make a satisfying story out of it. War Of The Daleks asks these questions about the Thals but then follows them to their most literal conclusions. Delani, their leader, has a plan to capture Davros and — rather than put him on trial or kill him — put him to work. Doing what, you ask? Why, genetically modifying the Thals, of course! Because in order to defeat Daleks, y’see, he is willing to turn his people into Daleks and oh god, the obviousness, it’s giving me a rash. This storyline doesn’t have anywhere else to go once we’ve gazed into Nietzsche’s abyss: it’s evil and wrong, we can see that. So things promptly change afterwards and the power is taken away from Delani, leaving the whole genetically-engineered-Thals thing a bit of an “aaaaaanyway.”

And yeah, Davros is here. That should probably be a spoiler since he’s not on the cover, but the blurb happily gives it away, and besides, did you think we could possibly avoid him? Ever since he first appeared, Daleks and Davros have been like a dinner party with Frasier and Niles: you get the one, you get that other one. Davros is an interesting character in his own right, but he tends to diminish the Daleks — and vice versa. Having him here just feels like we looked at the trajectory of Dalek stories in the 1980s, which all do it like this, and genuinely could not imagine a different approach for the next one.

In Peel’s defence, it matters that we’re picking up Davros’s story after we last saw him, and he is central to the plot. But this is a rather shaky defence because the further you stray into the plot, the more obsessed it is by continuity in place of actual storytelling. Now, to an extent, I think it makes sense to go over some key points about Daleks. Why not? There hadn’t been a TV story about them in nine years, and there were no novels featuring them (apart from novelisations). Some readers genuinely might not know much about Daleks, so having the Doctor, for example, recap the plot of their first adventure might help lay down the ground rules. Having Thals in the mix helps with that theme, continuing the original thread right up to the present. I mean it: not all continuity refs are bad. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

There are harmless little sprinkles here and there, such as references to Marc Cory, Varga plants, the Slyther and “that business with Reginald Styles”. You don’t need to have seen The Chase to enjoy the bit with the Mechonoids, for instance. But the main purpose of picking up the story of Davros, which after that little Nietzsche For Dummies bit with the Thals is all that War Of The Daleks is about, is to reshuffle his previous telly stories in a way that will undo Skaro getting blown up in Remembrance Of The Daleks. Which is… fine, if you happen to care deeply about that, and great if you are in the market for a random conspiracy theory re-reading of some unconnected telly episodes, but it’s not really serving an overall story, is it? Never mind those hypothetical “what are Daleks” readers. After a certain point it ceases to be a novel so much as a paddling pool for big fans of lists. It’s Dalek housekeeping. (And the novel seems aware of that: Sam says the info-dumps are “like Jackanory,” and “coming in at the middle of a film.” Which, I mean, nice lampshade and everything, but…? Maybe don’t do it then?)

War Of The Daleks at least lives up to its name. After the Dalek Prime laboriously fills the Doctor in about their crazy plan to avert the destruction of Skaro (trust me, it’s nuts) he engineers a civil war in order to smoke out Davros’s remaining supporters. And there is a lot of action, which certainly provides some bang for your buck re Daleks. I got a bit bored though, since the whole thing feels like a retread of Evil Of The Daleks anyway. More importantly, who cares? They’re Daleks. We keep cutting back to the fighting as if it intrinsically matters how this side or that side is getting on. Blow up or don’t, guys, just call me when you’re done. (Several of the Thal supporting characters get killed off as well, but most of them never got named in the first place.)

There’s not a lot else going on, since it’s all in service of continuity and the eventual civil war, but it’s worth mentioning that Ayaka is fairly compelling; she shoulders most of the “but at what cost?” war moralising, and does it in a more interesting way than her boss’s mad plan to breed Dalek Thals. It’s not her fault the story just stops finding this stuff interesting. Also good is Chayn, an engineer on the garbage ship that finds Davros’s escape pod. She’s fun, capable and instantly intrigued by the TARDIS, but she conveniently falls in love (more or less) so she won’t be joining the Doctor after all. Boo. She mostly seems to be here just to set off Sam’s jealousy, which is all rather unappealing but certainly on brand for her; where her feelings for the Doctor don’t entirely add up, I suppose we can write them off as belonging to a messy seventeen year old, but her possessiveness and over-eagerness are getting a bit old now. It’s a pity Peel couldn’t work in her guilt from Genocide, especially as there is a brief reference to the aliens from it. There are scenes here of Sam literally carrying a gun and wondering if she can pull the trigger, which practically jump up and down to continue that conversation. Ah well.

(Sidebar: I should probably mention the Doctor as well, so here I am, mentioning him. He’s fine. Bit naive at times, suitably grave at others. His characterisation is at least better than in either of Peel’s Virgin novels, it’s just not especially exciting. Both Doctor and companion are just sort of here, apart from some of Sam’s more annoying habits which are regrettably bang on.)

The final stretch is such an exploding onslaught that I started to forget the stuff I liked. And hey, I like stuff in here. It’s highly readable — genuinely, never something to sniff at. There is some creative context to establish why the Daleks are a big deal, and questions around the morality of fighting against them, which hint more towards one of Terry Nation’s other well known shows. I even empathise a bit with the impulse to write the next chapter in the 80s Davros chronology — since they all followed on from each other already, why break the habit of a lifetime? I just don’t think the answers and ideas he comes up with are as exciting as getting Daleks into a book in the first place, and by the end, despite early promise, this one’s just a lot of noise.

5/10

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.