#6
Alien Bodies
By Lawrence Miles
So then. Alien Bodies. Bit of a big deal, as these things go. It’s The Lawrence Miles Book That Everyone Likes, which is no small feat. Plus it’s stuffed to the gills with lore and ideas, much of which will go on to inform the Eighth Doctor Adventures later. It’s sort of like the BBC Books equivalent of Timewyrm: Revelation, showing up in a puff of colourful smoke to say — well that’s all good fun as far as it goes, but what are we doing here, what’s it all for?
The range editors must have sat up very straight when Lawrence Miles (I’m presuming it was him) suggested we see the Doctor’s funeral. Well, if you wanted to look to the future, how’s that? It certainly kicks the dust out of the tyres to gallop so far ahead, then drop that clanger right into the present so the Doctor can react to it here and now. The Doctor of Alien Bodies is still coming to terms with his latest regeneration. (“He wanted to be a force of nature again, he wanted to be the incredible escaping equation all the time, but instead he was trapped in a half-human body with a baby-face and floppy curls.”) Knowing for sure that he’s going to snuff it might well help with his sense of identity.
Events conspire against him on that front — but like Miles, I’ve jumped ahead. I should have mentioned that the Doctor becomes inveigled in an auction for an ancient relic, and that it turns out the relic is his corpse. Naturally this creates great interest. (Just imagine all the Whovians trying to get access.) Only the auctioneer, a slippery figure called Mr Qixotl, knows that the bloke in the green velvet with the brown curls is the Doctor; for obvious reasons he is keen that this stays a secret. Uninvited and unwelcome, the Doctor skirts around the edges of events. It feels like he has trespassed in somebody else’s book. Heck, there are more than two Doctors in Alien Bodies — we meet one at the start, then we see a future one later who may or may not also be the one in the casket — which pushes Dr. Number Eight, as Paul often puts it, even further from the spotlight.
If he is not always in front of you, however, he is still often on your mind. Alien Bodies has a stacked guest cast, and you might well notice certain patterns about them. There’s the two officers from UNISYC: a dotty old explorer and his young, female, insecure-but-capable second in command who does all the work. There’s a legit Time Lord and his futuristic, disguised-as-a-humanoid-female TARDIS, who share a professional bond but appear to be in denial about caring for each other at all. (They do.) And there’s a couple of spooky cultists who arrive in what is, when all’s said and done, a TARDIS, albeit one that operates on black magic. The operator is an aloof young woman and her second is a grubby, angry up and comer. Lots of double acts here, all sort of… mirroring something. Hmm! At a time when the Doctor is (apparently) unsure of himself, it’s interesting to surround him with echoes and surrogates.
Of course he’s only half the equation, and all of this is just as revealing about the symbiotic heart of all these stories, showing just how easily that balance can go wrong. The strongest Eighth Doctor books so far — in true Star Trek movie style it’s the even-numbered ones — have been very interested in the relationship between the Doctor and the companion. I’ve struggled a bit with Sam, sometimes feeling that she’s more a companion-shaped placeholder than a person. (I know that’s not entirely fair or accurate, but it’s my general impression of her.) Well, either they decided to turn a bug into a feature or that was the plan all along, because Sam is confirmed to be something along those lines here. Again I’m getting ahead of myself, but why not: it’s revealed in Alien Bodies that Sam is somehow living the wrong life, or rather a version of it that involves the Doctor, with a separate set of biodata that never met him, and never became the sort of person who would tear off in the TARDIS. Where this is going, I don’t exactly know, although Miles plays amusingly fast and loose with the concept even here. Has Sam been manipulated by a third party? On some level, the Doctor doubts it. Is the Doctor somehow influencing time and space to bring about someone like her? It’s proposed, but who knows. (And frankly, it sounds like a fib.) The wider supporting point that the Doctor always needs someone around, or-does-a-tree-falling-make-a-sound etc, feels earnest enough, but I dunno. Watch this space I guess. (And there we are! Seated and interested in where the series is going. Job’s a good’un.)
The downside to this is the trade off between very interesting (and it is!) context and yer actual, pound for pound scenes with these characters. Sam’s psychoanalysis plays out very much externally in a nightmarish sequence with blood-coloured duplicates, and it’s shared with Lieutenant Bregman (the junior UNISYC officer) who undergoes something similar. The whole biodata thing is then discussed over Sam, between the “antibody” version of her and later on, the Doctor. Sam herself impacts the novel like a small stone impacting a window. I’ll be honest, this was a little disappointing. I wish Miles had found a way to make this turning point for Sam more, you know, Sam’s turning point. But it’s a very busy book and I guess it had to give.
I mean, look at all those characters. And we do, taking time out to hear each of their stories. These are all quite interesting, but they mostly serve to set up the wider stakes in the world of these books. Because oh yes, the Time Lords have got competition.
Quick sidebar: I’ve read Alien Bodies before. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to say it was back when I were a nipper and this was all trees as far as the eye could see. I was an adult when I first read this one. More or less.) Alien Bodies is The One That Introduces Faction Paradox, aka the creepy cult version of the Time Lords. And for some reason my brain decided in the intervening years that they were the book’s antagonists. I mean, they are antagonists, but they’re not the enemy the Time Lords are facing. The unspecified Enemy (no name, ooooh) have beaten them back so much that the Doctor’s corpse (and all its weird upgrades) could seriously turn the tide of war. Their agents include anarchitects, beings who can rearrange and delete matter, such as buildings. Miles had by this point already toyed with the idea of unimaginable wars across time and space in Down, and he would go on to perfect it in Dead Romance. (Where amusingly, for rights reasons, the Time Lords are the unnamed party.) All of this strangeness is much more my preference for what a Time War should look and sound like than, to pick a totally random example, Time Lords Vs Daleks, done for the simple virtue that you’ve heard of both of them. (Ever the time traveller, Miles manages to rip the piss out of that idea nearly a decade before the TV series did it: “Earth had been lucky, too. It had been invaded, yes, but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments. The Time Lords, meanwhile, were up against something really dangerous.”)
The Enemy — who don’t exactly appear in Alien Bodies, for much the same reason we’re not resolving the Sam crisis right now — are not the only oddities. Alien Bodies is bursting with possibilities, including a third party in the war, the Celestis: descendants of Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency who took themselves out of time and corporeal reality and mostly use zombies as their agents. Look at characters like Mr Trask (a zombie) and Mr Shift (a concept of language who floats through people’s perceptions in a way that is distinct each time it happens and also distinct from the bits where Miles has chunks of prose acting like dialogue, sometimes in conversation, which in itself is very hard to pull off). Look again at that secondary Time Lord and his female TARDIS, the gently impressive pushing along of that technology. And look at bloody Faction Paradox! A gross, creepy, upside down version of Time Lord orthodoxy where the ultimate punishment is erasure through self-murder. They don’t, contrary to my wrong memories, figure all that hugely in Alien Bodies, but it’s still a hell of an impact, and I can see why they encouraged further study. (And having them not be the novel’s be all, end all is just more of a flex. This is one of its ideas. There are other flexes, like the intriguing early setup for a Brigadoon-style disappearing city, which is explained pages later as a simple trick that Mr Qixotl “doubted anyone would have noticed.”)
I’ve complained before (who, me?) about Lawrence Miles’s tendency to have ideas and just sort of sit in them. Alien Bodies… well, it does do that, quite frankly. Don’t worry, we’re not swerving into “actually Alien Bodies is terrible” here, but it’s worth saying that all of this creativity and setup is not what you’d call a very forward moving plot. The auction is called; the interested parties arrive; the Doctor, rather inconveniently, is there too; several parties stir up trouble; trouble overflows until it explodes and then the Doctor does a thing. I did reach a certain point in Alien Bodies where I thought, oh this is it, isn’t it, plot-wise? And the frequent diversions to hear this person’s story or that tenuously sentient form of language’s story made it a bit of a higgledy-piggledy read at times, although I don’t remember that being the case when I first read it. (Back when I were only twenty-one and this were all trees m’lad, etc etc, music from that Hovis advert.) I suspect my attention span has shifted (Shifted?) a bit over the years, or perhaps it’s just the accumulated weight of 130-odd Doctor bloody Who books rattling around my head now, but anyway, dash through Alien Bodies I did not. Although I highly enjoyed paddling through it.
And that’s the last big thing I’ve not mentioned yet. Alien Bodies is somehow really really fun. It’s pleased as punch most of the time, despite the sepulchral, well, everything, frequently letting these events and characters be funny even when the situation is creepy. Look at the Doctor’s funeral, which comes with a joke about how this omnipotent focal point of the universe can still bugger up a timer. Look at the Doctor’s first scene, when he escapes an assassination attempt by diving out of a window into the TARDIS parked 90 degrees up against a wall. (Was Moffat taking notes?) Mr Qixotl is perhaps the funnest single thing here, and you do get to care about the sneaky little git despite, well, him. But then the rivalry between Time Lords and Faction Paradox — big, lore-y stuff! — is allowed to mostly play out as bitchiness. There are plenty of honest to god goofy little jokes sprinkled about as well, mostly the kind that would specifically tickle a Whovian, like the Doctor’s quasi-mystical relationship with his pockets, or the Raston lap-dancing robots (“the most perfect dancing machines ever devised”), or what appears to be a lightning-fast dig at War Of The Daleks (“My Dalek history’s always been a bit rusty. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t keep changing all the time”), or the big joke that everyone remembers about Alien Bodies that even now, wading in spoilers, I don’t want to spoil just in case, which then pivots into possibly a meta comment on the previous unavailability of certain characters, and then becomes a clever reinvention of a crap baddie.
So, it’s a fun one, especially for long term fans. But it also manages to be quite sweet about the old two-hearted sod, at least occasionally in between all the buffoonish facsimiles, the winking references and horrible blood rituals. My memory had no trouble preserving the Doctor’s funeral for Laika, his rage about her mistreatment, the unspoken bond he feels with the lost dog. That truly has stayed with me ever since. I had though, delightfully, forgotten Mr Qixotl’s cheeky hint that despite all this fuss over his casket, the Doctor of the future might have pulled a fast one after all and not even be in there.
Alien Bodies then. It’s a lot. At the same time it is strangely small, with the zesty pluck of a murder mystery. (And speaking of Bernice, he manages to sneak in a reference to Tyler’s Folly from Down, one of the Bernice Summerfield NAs. I read them all so I guess it’s my job to spot them.) Normally that’s just what I’m after, but — at the risk of angering the gestalt — I do think Alien Bodies could have been stronger. The hall of mirrors approach to characterisation has its ups and downs, and I could have got more of a feel for Sam in this — indeed, that felt like the point of her story here. Also, I know it seems picky to criticise a Doctor Who book for being more in love with the idea of the Doctor as a general concept than with the McGann version specifically, and I don’t even think he’s poorly served here, getting flourishes of anger and cleverness that would glitter on any Doctor’s resume, but — might as well be honest here — it’s a just plain very crowded book and he’s only one part of it.
Hey, every book deserves the occasional poke and prod to make sure it’s all up to snuff. Even the sainted ones. This one’s still pretty bloody good.
8/10
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