#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…)
No comments:
Post a Comment