Doctor Who: The BBC Books #76 – Imperial Moon by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#34

Imperial Moon

By Christopher Bulis

There’s something almost endearing about the Past Doctor Adventures at this point. Their sister series had gone through a significant reboot to keep readers engaged, but if you’re writing about one of those previous fellas instead? Crack on mate, it’s all good.

Imperial Moon isn’t without its personality or quirks but it’s undeniably another Christopher Bulis book, looking at Doctor Who through the lens of whatever genre has grabbed him this week. It’s along the lines of his SF/fantasy mash-up The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or the stripped back adventure The Ultimate Treasure. This time it’s a Jules Verne/H.G. Wells-style space adventure featuring Victorians on the moon, which is found to contain a forest, monsters and robots.

Right away that’s a very striking premise, and a tremendously visual one. I often wondered if Imperial Moon would have been happier in a visual medium; the steampunk spaceships, the heightened action and violence, not to mention the (ahem) less than introspective character writing would all have suited a comic. The Doctor riding around the moon on a miniature flying saucer practically screams TV Action.

But we’ve got a novel to fill instead, so Bulis introduces a few complications to his old timey SF setup. The whole “Victorian spaceship” idea is as surprising to the Doctor as it is to us, so he’s got to find out how this happened, and more importantly whether this is the “true” timeline or not. (If it isn’t, he needs to get things back on track.) He also, for whatever reason, finds himself with a copy of a diary to be written by one of the astronauts later on. This was then placed in the TARDIS’s “time safe,” a box that apparently sends objects to different points in the ship’s history. The diary gives him and Turlough some useful background on the moon mission — as well as allowing Bulis to write some honest-to-god Victorian adventure prose for a bit.

The Doctor’s sense of agency is debatable in this one, as he’s just following the crumbs left by (presumably) his future self, and working to keep time on track. There’s a prim, almost patrician attitude to the character as he uncomplainingly insists on completing his mission, that doesn’t quite allow for Peter Davison’s natural light and shade. He only gets flatter when dispensing useful exposition, such as a truly indulgent info-dump on page 256.

This incarnation nevertheless is a good fit for this sort of historical action-adventure. He made just as much sense reacting with gentlemanly horror to the supernatural in Goth Opera and The Sands Of Time. The character’s wheels only really come off at the end when Bulis needs to get rid of the monsters, so he has the Doctor, Turlough and Kamelion laser-gun them all to death. No, really. Forget “Have I the right?”, this is more like “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”

Turlough at least makes some sense reaching that violent conclusion, since a) he’s always been a shifty type and b) the story gives him some trust issues that he then needs to work out. You can see Bulis trying to work with the character at this point in the series, aka just before his departure, noting that he has “something missing in my life but I don’t know what it is.” This fondness for continuity has its ups and downs, however, such as the unasked for explanation for Turlough’s limited wardrobe, and the particularly clunky lead-in to Planet Of Fire at the end.

Bulis credits Turlough with an almost meta intelligence, but it’s debatable to what end. He goes around lampshading things like the the obvious Verne/Wells connection and the evident cliché of a Victorian explorer group containing a token female love interest, and a spunky feminist one at that. These ideas aren’t subverted — there is no “Land of Fiction”-style explanation at the end, it just IS quite familiar stuff — which creates the dubious benefit of Turlough apparently knowing he’s in a hokey book. The Doctor at least disputes his view on female explorers, suggesting that Bulis is really just trying to get ahead of his critics here, but there is no rebuttal for the plainly obvious love-story-to-be. (Even Turlough can’t know everything however. At one point he delivers “a line from some B-movie he’d seen, art supplementing a momentary deficiency of imagination.” Is that Turlough or the author telling on himself?)

It’s difficult to believe there’s anything really meta going on here. Even apart from the gleefully pop art setting and storyline there are clunky moments like Turlough, who keeps reading ahead in the diary to get useful tips and appear knowledgeable, somehow noting that this “was another means of holding a mirror up to his soul.” Surely an insight for the novel rather than the character? The Doctor similarly breaks down the themes of class evident among the various moon characters in a way that feels uncannily like Bulis giving book club discussions a leg up.

The useful point here is presumably Turlough sneaking the diary even though the Doctor has asked him not to — that’s a fairly typical bit of Turlough shiftiness that ultimately means he’s desperate to do the correct thing because he’s read about it, which is quite neat, also suggesting a burgeoning sense of doing-the-right-thing that might lead into his TV departure. Less impressive is his insistence on dazzling one of the female Phiadorans he meets on the moon. He’s desperately lovesick for much of the book, which isn’t exactly an established look for the character. (Can you really see Turlough wanting someone to “think [he’s] special whatever the reason”?) This is politely explained away as not his fault during one of the Doctor’s later info dumps, but by then you’ve read the book and reacted to the character.

Perhaps the most accurate character portrayal in the book is Kamelion, a mechanical character that was completely unworkable on screen and yet remains curiously under-represented in print. (Where annoying questions such as “does the robot work” do not apply.) Kamelion in this displays a “permanent expression of mild interest” and is easily prevented from taking part in the action by external factors — so far, dead on, if a bit disappointing re the latter. He eventually gets to muck in, turning into a giant spider to more easily traverse the moon’s diminishing gravity and rescue the Doctor, which is a nice use of his powers. If it feels at all incongruous that he’s joining in with a brutal assault rifle rampage at the end (seriously Chris, wtf) at least you can explain that away as Kamelion being canonically the most suggestible person the Doctor has ever met. “Hey pal, want to zap some monsters?” “Do I!”

I’ve left the overall story til last, perhaps for obvious reasons: it’s tissue thin, a sequence of action adventure stop-starts that captivates the imagination well enough but doesn’t really progress. The forest, it turns out, is a hunting ground for the rich and corrupt; prisoners are their targets. One of the Victorian ships crashes. The captain of another, and the daughter of the ship’s inventor are captured by mechanical guards and taken to a citadel to be prepared for combat. The Doctor and co. must make their way to rescue them — Turlough reading ahead for progress updates, as it was the captured man that wrote the diary — and along the way they encounter the all-female Phiadorans, fellow prisoners and expert warriors. (This feels like another concession to old-timey lit. Close enough, welcome back H. Rider Haggard.) Problems include automated flying saucers, robots, all manner of beasts, body-snatching predators and, closer to home, mutineers.

It’s easy to criticise Imperial Moon for a lack of depth, but it’s got excitement and incident in spades. Plot, not so much, although Bulis does tie everything up by the end. Sometimes too efficiently: he wraps up the troublesome citadel with a hundred pages still to go (whoops) so to keep us going a minor character has to be retooled into a murderous maniac, we repeat the last act of Alien on a budget, a betrayal flips a sympathetic character into a two-dimensional baddie (instead of, to be fair, the equally two-dimensional goodie they were before), and that’s before we pop back to Earth for tea and laser gun battles. I haven’t seen a story vamp this much since Dracula decided that England sounded like a nice place to visit.

As often happens with these genre exercises, you get the impression that the author might be just as happy spinning off into their own non-Doctor Who book. Imperial Moon often itches to write about the side characters instead, particularly Haliwell and Emily, the uneasy couple trapped in the gauntlet. Their courtship is so prim and proper it almost ducks behind a curtain with embarrassment, but it makes for a nice undercurrent to the action, and puts a button on the story at the end. Emily’s deference to social issues and women’s suffrage is laudable, as is the ideological friction with Haliwell, but as themes go it’s as subtle as a brick through a window — another instance of that in the book.

I doubt anyone is rocking up to Christopher Bulis’s Victorians-on-the-moon novel for reasons of subtlety. What you do get with Imperial Moon is a constantly moving, easy-to-visualise adventure that probably works well even if you’re only a bit familiar with Doctor Who. Once we get past the nifty iconography I’d put it closer to Terry Nation than Wells or Verne, but it’s not like he couldn’t keep people reasonably entertained for weeks on end.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #75 – The Burning by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#37

The Burning

By Justin Richards

We’re a little over three years into The Eighth Doctor Adventures at this point. That would be a good enough run for any series of tie-in books, let’s face it, but this is Doctor Who we’re talking about, so stopping isn’t really an option. This presents a problem: how do you keep things fresh?

The obvious answer is to do as the TV show does and regenerate the Doctor. But you can’t easily do that in books — it’s hard enough writing about a guy we’ve only seen for 90 minutes, let alone somebody made out of whole cloth. That means keeping the same Doctor’s adventures interesting over a long period, so arc plots must come and go, along with supporting characters. It risks getting a bit convoluted. New readers might not bother jumping aboard.

Enter Justin Richards and The Burning, which is pretty obviously intended as a jumping on point. Continuity has been muted, if not jettisoned altogether. There are no characters you need to recognise. The monsters weren’t in a previous episode. Everything that happens is self-contained, with the exception of the Doctor’s story, which has places to go from here.

In another life The Burning might have made sense as the first book of the run, easing readers into things in a much less hurried fashion than The Eight Doctors. Richards even plays with the idea that readers might be unfamiliar with all this: he refuses to identify the Doctor at first, whilst also introducing characters that seem to embody his personality. I found these misdirects quite fun and creative — it’s a gag that can only work in prose, with no actors to give the game away — but I can see how they might be irritating. He pushes his luck with exchanges like “‘Did I hear correctly, sir, that you are a doctor?’ ‘I am. Of divinity. So I am equally used to being called Reverend.’” The Doctor eventually arrives more or less between sentences, again playing with prose, which is a bit of fun. I think it’s encouraging that the format itself, as well as the format of the stories, is open to reinvigoration.

Richards doesn’t stop at literally reintroducing the Doctor, however, because this Doctor is no longer himself. He has (I know, here we go again) amnesia, which gives us even less reason to humour any past continuity. He doesn’t have a TARDIS (hold that thought) and what’s more, he has no idea why he’d need one. The Doctor here refers to the future as “a closed book.” There is no hint of time travel in The Burning, just a bloke turning up unannounced and getting involved in some local difficulty. The barest essence of Doctor Who, in other words. (As well as, to be fair, Knight Rider.)

Would new readers come away from The Burning with a clear idea of Doctor Who? Yes and no. You get the basic shape: there are terrifying forces that only someone like the Doctor can stop. The Doctor is someone who endears himself to strangers and throws his weight around as necessary; he stands his ground against villains and encourages heroism and change in those around him. He’ll either defeat the monsters or be the one who made it happen.

But on the flip side, this Doctor doesn’t seem very good at it. At one point he takes a new friend into danger to investigate; when fleeing said danger shortly afterwards, he takes no great pains to keep his friend safe and promptly gets him killed. When another character is found horribly murdered he doesn’t express a lot of sympathy to those that knew him, but he finds the crime scene “interesting”. When the solution to the crisis presents itself, and that solution involves probably killing a lot of innocent people, he casually writes this off as the lesser evil and no further debate is had. And when the villain of the piece finally realises his mistake and reaches out to the Doctor for help, our hero pushes him away and causes him to drown, presumably hoping that this will tie off any possibility of the crisis starting all over again. If he feels any remorse about that, we don’t hear about it.

There’s something to be said for calling this a contrivance. We know what the Doctor is like, and he’s not like this: setting him back to someone more callous and indifferent gives you somewhere to go, obviously, but it requires a pretty drastic overcorrection to get us there. I’m a bit on the fence about it. I can understand the need to strip away everything comfortable since (some of) the authors complained that they didn’t “get” this Doctor and found him hard to write for. Solution, gut him and start over. It’s not very elegant, and it feels weirdly like an admission of failure after 36 books, but maybe it’ll work.

Amnesia is a useful panacea for something like this. (Though Richards doesn’t worry too much about how it works, since the Doctor apparently does remember being a different incarnation who wore a hat.) It’s also worth pointing to the absence of any softening influence, aka a companion. The First Doctor was ready to cave a guy’s head in with a rock until his companions said otherwise. He grew into the person we know. By that logic, showing the reader what the Doctor is like sans friends might create a genuine need for companions. That couldn’t hurt, since we know what it’s like when the books simply tell us that a spunky side-character needs to be there. Since we’re starting over, we can avoid those mistakes. (I’m not convinced they have a better idea yet however. We already know we’re not getting a new companion as a priority, since we know that Fitz will return, but we also know that won’t happen for years in-universe — all of which puts the Doctor in a bit of a holding pattern. I guess it’s not that much of a reboot after all.)

There’s not a huge lot else to think about besides the Doctor. The Burning is a plot-driven monster story and it has plenty of incident, although it takes a while for that to really get going — possibly because the Doctor isn’t playing with a full deck. He still makes friends with the local Reverend, a visiting scientist and his assistant; the group develops a certain Victorian kinship not unlike The Banquo Legacy (and, tired reference point I know, Dracula). There’s a sense that they are banding together to fight something really evil, with the added frisson that the brilliant guy bringing them all together might just as easily get them killed, or otherwise allow bad things to happen in the interim.

As for the evil, Roger Nepath (another strange visitor) seems connected to a mysterious molten rock substance which can do many things, including the duplication of people. Richards is a bit of a kid in a candy store with this stuff, also using it for marauding zombie-like figures, molten Claws Of Axos blobs, bodily possession and even surveillance tech, depending on the needs of the scene. The Doctor’s amnesia seems to be catching, with the suggestion that the creature also “has no past that it is aware of. No memory of who or what it really is.” I suppose this reassures any visiting reader that there is no homework, whilst also doubling as “look, it can do whatever the hell we need it to, okay?” This includes, rather spuriously, a happy ending for one of the dead characters. Shh! Amnesia! (To be fair to Richards, you can also see him working this theme on the town itself: Middletown is “a place defined by where it was rather than what it was, with no identity of its own.” If anything in this book requires the reader to know about it already I want it caught and shot immediately.)

The set pieces are all very solid, if not always surprising. If you somehow missed the signs pointing to the location of the finale, please go to Specsavers. The monster chases are exciting and easy to visualise, and the climactic moments are downright cinematic. Richards also enjoys little motifs like dangerous characters having fire in their eyes; he likes to repeat words and phrases, such as “burning”, in a way that’s almost mantra-like. It builds atmosphere, and reminded me of some of Terrance Dicks’ better books. (E.g. “Like a waxwork” in The Auton Invasion.)

There’s a dearth of really interesting characters in this, however, perhaps to make it more palatable when Richards kills most of them off. The only one that’s really going anywhere is the Doctor, with his dual questions of who/what he is and who/what he isn’t at this stage. This also extends to the TARDIS, as it turns out he does have it after all, except that it’s just a mysterious black cube that tells him where he needs to go. An encounter with the molten rock turns it into more of a big blue oblong with a sort of woody finish. Clearly it’s going to grow and change alongside him. And perhaps it needs to, as the decision to come here was likely driven by its need to encounter that deadly gloop and make use of it — suggesting the TARDIS in its current iteration is just as callous as its master.

There’s plenty to enjoy about The Burning, but it’s not a book that really lingers. The Doctor isn’t yet the kind of character to care deeply about what’s happening, and without a companion to fill that role, nobody really does. But it’s all suitably gruesome, and it’s good at things like setting the scene for the Earth arc, giving new readers some idea about Doctor Who and hopefully giving the other writers something to work with. If that doesn’t work, well, you can always wipe his memory again.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #74 – Prime Time by Mike Tucker

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#33

Prime Time

By Mike Tucker

I’ve read this one before, years ago along with all the other Mike Tucker/Robert Perry books. I liked how they all followed on from each other; it felt like finally getting Season 27. (Someone should tell this guy about the New Adventures…)

I wasn’t very impressed with Prime Time back then. I felt that it was a trad exercise and little more. And look, it certainly is that first thing: the central conceit is that the Doctor and Ace end up on a cruel television show broadcast to a fairly apathetic audience. Vengeance On Varos says hi! Revisiting it now though, I found enough odd little touches to mark this one out as, at the very least, Mike Tucker’s trad exercise.

For starters, the landscape of television has changed since Vengeance On Varos. Although there is a TV show in this dedicated to violence, there’s an altogether more psychological nastiness on display too — a sort of dark half of Jerry Springer that breaks people down with awful revelations. The kind of all-pervasive telly culture in Prime Time is also more insidious than Philip Martin’s all-out Orwellian nightmare: people on Blinni-Gaar aren’t forced by violence to watch TV all the time, they were just tempted into it, and now they’re trapped. There are TVs everywhere. Tucker can’t possibly have known this, but the sense of this planet’s citizens being unable to go two minutes without goggling at the box is eerily recognisable now as mobile phone addiction, especially when we see them at dinner. I wish it was a wild stretch of the imagination.

There’s also a meta quality to Prime Time that heightens its ideas. As well as breaking the book into TV “Parts” (pretty standard stuff there) Tucker throws in a trailer, a pre-titles sequence, a tag scene and even commercials. Even better, the story engages with the Doctor and Ace as famous people in-universe: they are desirable targets for a TV show because their exploits have been noticed. Yes, this is a cheeky excuse for Tucker to make reference to stories such as Storm Warning (and in a thrilling bit of intertextuality, The Genocide Machine — Big Finish is canon!), but why not? It makes sense that events in Doctor Who are commented upon afterwards, and it makes a virtue of Tucker’s (and Perry’s) potted history. It’s continuity, sure, but used in a way that you don’t see often.

This is also a neat excuse for the Seventh Doctor to get out-played for a change. His success has led to fame, and that contributes to his being on the back foot for a lot of this: the villains have plenty of evidence and footage to work with, therefore they can predict his behaviour. Hoist by his own petard, for once. Of course it helps that there are two insidious forces at work here, both particularly on the ball — that spells bad luck for the Doctor, however clever he is. Before you start wondering though if Tucker has mischaracterised the fella in the question mark pullover (as if), he pulls a few brilliant switcheroos near the end, having thoroughly re-affixed his manipulator’s hat. The fake-out involving the TARDIS made me hoot.

There’s continuity to spare elsewhere — of course there is, it’s Tucker. (No offence.) For instance, the Master’s in this. At first that feels a bit like token key-jangling for the fans, as the character seems unusually minimised, being manipulated by the same evil TV show as the Doctor. But Tucker manages to use this as a fake-out to then reintroduce the real, meaner Master later on, allowing the reader to get the initial “oh here we go” eyeroll over with first. (The real one has also been manipulated, but it’s a bit easier to see why.) There are some good scenes with the Doctor and the Master(s), the former earnestly wondering if he can trust the latter again, and considering whether a new body and an end to the cheetah virus might finally balance him out. You can probably guess how likely that is in reality, but to be fair, so can the Doctor. For a minute there they somewhat believably work together.

Ace gets a lot of the book’s hard knocks. While the Doctor is trapped in the Master’s disfigured TARDIS (that setting is an amusing bit of convergent evolution after Campaign and Heart Of TARDIS) and on the run from predators, Ace gets stuck with the Jerry Springer equivalent: paraded in front of gleeful unquestioning viewers, she is shown images of her distressed elderly mother, stirring up a familiar source of mental anguish. Then she’s shown her own gravestone. All of this serves to make her into a frayed nerve by the book’s end, almost executing several of the people responsible. And there I was thinking Tucker could have gone further with the TV satire. (He probably still could, to be fair: with the exception of Gatti, Ace’s friend who doesn’t even watch TV, we don’t spend time with any viewers on or outside of Blinni-Gaar.)

There’s somewhat of a theme here about people’s true natures. The Doctor’s heroism leads to a lot of trouble for him and Ace; Ace’s mistrust of her mother is inevitably questioned, and her violent tendencies are severely tested; the Master is still battling his animalistic tendencies (although does he really mind those?) and he must briefly ally himself with the Doctor, bringing out the old question of whether there’s still a friendship underneath; the Zzinbriizi are a race of jackals that have been granted intelligence by the Fleshsmiths, and they’re constantly struggling to maintain it; diminished TV guy Greg Ashby is converted into a monster, again by the Fleshsmiths (we’ll get to them), and now he’s battling to stay remotely human; prominent TV personality and old flame of Greg’s, Rennie Trasker, now does morally bankrupt work for Channel 400, which she eventually comes to question.

I say “somewhat of a theme” because apart from that the book is essentially all incident. There’s not much to unpack and I didn’t make a lot of notes: Tucker is here to move the plot along and if possible, ick the reader out a bit. Being a monsters guy, his imagination gets right to work there, providing us with the slavering Zzinbriizi and the revolting Fleshsmiths. (The latter charmingly depicted on the cover.) Here we have a sort of organic equivalent of the Cybermen, crossed with Star Trek’s Vidiians: ruined by their planet’s atmosphere, they capture other life-forms and use those materials to stay alive. This gives them an impressive aptitude for manipulating living things, as well as an upsetting larder of captured beings and animals. This fact disgusts the Doctor so much that he has no qualms about killing them all at the end. No need for “do I have the right” this week.

The Fleshsmiths and the satirical Channel 400 both make for compelling antagonists, but it would be fair to say that the combination is a bit random. Still, it’s amusing that both are secretly planning to screw over the other — which also applies to the Master, another villain in the mix. Perhaps the unexpected combination is part of why the Doctor is so discombobulated at first. And perhaps that’s being generous — but hey ho, it works.

Once you’re past all the rock-em-sock-em action Tucker turns out to have an ace up his sleeve. (Sorry.) I dimly remembered from reading this years ago that Ace dies in the book. That’s not quite accurate. (Although thinking so made the climax a lot more exciting!) The Doctor is made aware of impending doom for his young protege, and he is determined to investigate and prevent it — even to the bizarre extent of secretly digging up and lugging around her coffin. This is quite bold in terms of that potted continuity unique to Tucker and Perry. It’s a plot gauntlet-throw that demands to be resolved — and it would be, almost two years later in the duo’s next book, Loving The Alien. It’s a nice little button on the Seventh Doctor’s duty of care for Ace, which he knows he has let lapse during these events. (See, that awful TV show dressing her down.) It’s also a nudge away from the somewhat “safe” continuity of Past Doctors, which ironically is just the sort of thing you could point to as a consequence of Interference, a state of affairs that BBC Books had by now done away with.

It’s hard to rate this as Mike Tucker’s first solo novel because, now that you mention it, I don’t know what was Perry and what was Tucker before. It’s tempting to point to the weirder bits of Matrix as being Perry, since there’s little of that here. Regardless, Prime Time is a solid fleshing out (ahem) of its central idea. The writing is often good, with some neat descriptions like “The planet Scrantek hung in the wastes of the Brago Nebula, black and ugly, like an inkblot on a masterpiece.” Tucker’s familiarity with the era is beyond question, and he’s good at layering that in, such as this jolly moment during the Doctor’s TV interview: “[He] suddenly reached into his pocket. ‘Of course it’s not all just about saving the universe. I am quite musical.’ Ace buried her head in her hands. ‘Oh, no.’” There are occasional limits to his descriptive powers — too many references to fingers “dancing” over controls, a popular crutch for TARDIS scenes — and there’s a lot of that short scene writing I hate. However, in a world completely obsessed with TV, that’s almost appropriate. All told this is solid, suitably icky stuff, with a decent bit of promise for next time.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #73 – The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#36

The Ancestor Cell

By Peter Anghelides & Stephen Cole

Here we are then: the season finale of The Eighth Doctor Adventures. It’s all been building to this. Allegedly.

I’ve no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I’d like to think they at least asked Lawrence Miles to come and put his toys away.* The Ancestor Cell is all about patented Miles stuff like Faction Paradox, the unnamed Time Lord “Enemy”, the bottle universe, human TARDISes, Fitz’s other life as “Father Kreiner”, the Doctor’s premature death on Dust, his infection with a slow-acting Faction disease, and then the ensuing interference (!) in all his intervening lives. There’s also the Compassion-vs-the Time Lords stuff, but then that’s clearly based on Miles’s mythology as well. It just feels weird to outsource a book that’s so obviously entrenched in one guy’s ideas.

Hey ho. For whatever reason, Miles didn’t come back. (Perhaps, not unreasonably, “tie up all your plot threads and then don’t start any new ones” didn’t sound like fun.) The thing to do now is to engage with what The Ancestor Cell is, or at the very least how Anghelides and Cole manage in Miles’s stead.

To answer both questions: not great.

It certainly hits the ground running, picking up the “Time Lords chasing after Compassion” thing straight away. When the Doctor and co. narrowly evade capture they encounter a new threat, the Edifice: an enormous plant-like construction made of bone, orbiting Gallifrey. (It’s the thing on the front cover.) The Time Lords are worried about it; Faction Paradox, who have impressionable young agents on Gallifrey, are curious about it. There’s a good chance this will be the thing to finally ignite the conflict between the two forces.

The book continues from there at quite a lick, with lots of action crammed into short chapters. (46 of them!) It’s highly readable, and I wouldn’t describe it as boring as such, at least not in a page-turning sense. But the actual content of the book is rather dull, since we are so obviously here just to put toys away — as quickly as possible in some cases.

A lot of that comes down to how the EDAs have handled their story arc(s). For a positive example, look — surprisingly enough — at Sam Jones. Yes, that character was riddled with shortcomings, but the actual arc was introduced by Miles, kept afloat by Blum, Orman and Leonard, and then resolved by Miles. There weren’t a lot of plates to spin, so in hindsight it didn’t necessarily matter that the intervening authors weren’t doing much more than mention the arc. (If we were lucky.)

Now go back to that list in the second paragraph. There’s a lot more in the pot this time. We’ve at least had intervening novels that added to the mythology — The Blue Angel, The Taking Of Planet 5 and The Shadows Of Avalon. But the existing ideas haven’t got much further along in the meantime.

Take the Big Two from Interference: the Third Doctor’s immediate future being in flux because of his early death, and the Eighth Doctor slowly becoming a Faction agent. These seemed at the time to be major turning points for BBC Books, and yet somehow The Ancestor Cell has to resolve both of them from a standing start. Why? From interviews it seemed that the whole point of that Third Doctor thing was to introduce some uncertainty into the PDAs. Why even bother, if none of the PDA authors are going to run with it? Also — and look, I know how snotty it is to armchair-criticise a series like this, but how hard would it have been to at least hint that the Eighth Doctor was gradually changing for the worse, or even that the trigger was imminent? Multiple authors could have worked that in!

There’s inevitably a sense of anticlimax when you do all of this stuff at once. In order then: it turns out the Doctor’s TARDIS isn’t dead after all (another lacklustre arc thread incidentally), but it is in a bad way. One of the reasons for this is the Dust fiasco causing it to go mad keeping the Doctor’s right and wrong timelines separate, but it has done that successfully. So in essence, the PDA “interference” could never have happened anyway. Terrific. Toy put away. Then we have the Eighth Doctor’s transformation, which we’ve heard precisely zip about since it was introduced. This week, Faction Paradox turn up and start the countdown. Well hey, at least they didn’t forget about it altogether! The Doctor spends a chunk of the book being told he definitely, positively, almost certainly is going to turn into a Faction guy… any minute now. Just you wait. It’s terribly exciting. Much convince. Many worth the wait. Seriously though: that’s not a story arc. It’s a pause button.

You’ve almost got to admire the amount of stuff The Ancestor Cell tries to cram in, but rarely does it tie something off in a way that works. I’m not convinced that we even needed to resolve Faction Paradox and the Enemy, seemingly for good, right this second. Yes, Justin Richards wanted a clean slate, but you could have just gone easy on these things until someone had a good idea about what to do with them later. Instead we dump the parts like an airplane in trouble.

Who are the Enemy? They must be pretty bad to be worth the appalling behaviour of Romana and her agents in response; they must also be pretty impressive to be worth pointing at Faction Paradox and saying, you think those guys are bad? The Ancestor Cell includes a somewhat convoluted Faction plan to resurrect an obscure Time Lord President, Greyjan, who happens to have theories about the Enemy. These theories are then presented as fact. In essence, the Enemy are some sort of offshoot of the oldest life in the universe, and the Time Lords’ method of travel has upset them. You may or may not find that satisfying as a concept; in either case, the Enemy still aren’t actually in the book, so this (like the Doctor’s feeble Faction conditioning) just feels like tell-don’t-show. The Enemy are lamely described, their influence is shown, and then we’re probably never going to hear about them again. Great. What a pay-off. Incidentally, I’ve no idea how a human TARDIS like Compassion would have helped that particular war effort in the slightest.

Then we have Faction Paradox. Honestly, this might be worse. Getting them right is clearly difficult: Miles wasn’t happy with the way they were handled in Unnatural History, but at least that was colourful and demonstrated how strange they could be. Faction Paradox in The Ancestor Cell are mostly represented by a few bumbling Time Lord kids trying to impress girls, plus a couple of grinning megalomaniacs who want to destroy all the things. They barely demonstrate their awesome powers and freaky practices, and in such small numbers it becomes a bit implausible that they can hold so much sway over the Time Lords in the first place. (Probably the only reason that works is the thoroughly unimpressive and human-seeming Gallifrey we have in the book; grandeur and brilliance are largely missing there too, and all the people are small and malleable. The only one acting like she owns the place is Romana.) Their constant references to the Doctor’s impending transformation aren’t very convincing, since he’s so good at staving it off. Then in the end they’re just swept away, presumably forever. If Miles disliked Blum & Orman’s effort then he’d surely hate this.

Probably the only Faction point of interest here is Father Kreiner, since his existence speaks to actual character development: “our” Fitz is a copy, this embittered Faction guy is the original, and he’s desperate to avenge himself against the Doctor. There’s even a bit of a broader theme here, with the Doctor’s actions having consequences against other people. Fitz (both) has reason to worry about that; there’s a pseudo-companion called Mali who wobbles in and out of his orbit; most of the deaths on board the Edifice can be traced back to the Doctor; and in the end he makes a decision that destroys Gallifrey, presumably killing Romana, Mali and millions more. Probably the best scene in the book is a quiet reckoning between Kreiner and the Doctor, the old man begging the Time Lord to break the timelines to fix his life, and the Doctor refusing. Kreiner’s story is resolved inasmuch as he begins to mellow, but then it’s suddenly over in the most offhand and unsatisfying way, making you wonder (not for the first time) why we’re even bothering with this stuff.

The Faction, in their race to be written out, do at least show us something new: we establish who Grandfather Paradox is. The trouble with that is twofold: no one actually asked, so it’s not a satisfying reveal to suddenly get the answer, and the answer we do get (you can probably guess) just feels like a boring repeat of Kreiner’s story, underlined by Kreiner himself being there. It seems to be an effort to give the Doctor a Big Bad to face off against at the climax, but that feels like a misunderstanding of the kind of threat they represent. The Ancestor Cell just doesn’t seem very engaged with their mythology, and then — or so it seems anyway — they’re over and done with. What a waste.

It’s tempting to focus on the big arc stuff because all the other stuff is a bit pedestrian. The Edifice could be an interesting idea, with a suggestion that it is “affecting causality” — but a suggestion is all we get (tell don’t show, again) leaving us with a big boney spaceship full of killer spiders. That isn’t really anything to write home about — literally, with descriptions such as “The gross, contorted, ivory bodies of the huge spiders” followed on the same page by “Their gross bodies cast huge shadows.” Scintillating.

The supporting characters are largely fodder, to be dispensed with for quick shocks, but even before that they seem unusually ordinary for Time Lords, with altogether dull aspirations like impressing pretty girls. (This must be at least partly deliberate as — unlike Virgin canon — these Time Lords are explicitly made up of parents and children. A line has been drawn there.) Romana continues to be thoroughly awful, which is at least consistent from The Shadows Of Avalon, but the suggestion that her heroism at the end of Warriors’ Gate somehow led to her current fanaticism is a ridiculous reach. Show your working.

It’s a fairly busy story for Fitz — as in “our” one — and he does get some fun interactions with Romana, bringing out her less awful side. He has some rather rudimentary internal back and forth about whether he can trust the Doctor, but at least it’s there. Otherwise he’s very “factory settings” in this one, always dispensing a quip, being inappropriately horny or both. (To be honest the horniness is getting a bit embarrassing. Yes, Fitz is a somewhat embarrassing character on purpose, but one or both authors still took time out to write that he was looking up Romana’s skirt and/or admiring her “shapely backside.” After a certain point the authors themselves [as in all the EDA ones, but also Anghelides/Cole here] become the creepy ones, just as the reader becomes more and more aware that BBC Books is mostly run by men. It risks reading as legit lechy.)

It’s a fairly significant book for Compassion, being — for all intents and purposes — the last time we’ll see her. The question of whether the Time Lords will break and control her is often the focus, but there never seems to be much actual debate about that; Romana and co. are implacable until the Doctor is able to offer alternative solutions, and when those fall through they’re right back to implacable again. Compassion sits out a good chunk of the book while she recovers from an early attack, and then she flits between Time Lord and Faction control. It’s commendable that at no point does she stop demanding her own agency — she’s a Doctor Who companion with no particular fealty to the Doctor, she will seize every opportunity to leave everyone else to deal with the mess. However, stuffing her into the background makes her demand a bit more meta than it ought to be. She escapes in the end, arguably kidnapping a Time Lord of her own to begin some new adventures. The optics of that are debatable (does he particularly want this?) but it’s still nice that our last sight of Compassion is her in control at last, mirroring the Doctor’s path.

It’s a shame, obviously, that her story had to end. Compassion clearly represented an effort to do something different. I suppose it’s at least themed that she wouldn’t want to be tied down longer than necessary. As an arc, it’s been eventful but wonky; yet again BBC Books can’t seem to get all their authors singing from the same hymn-sheet, so you end up with books like The Space Age which barely wrote for her at all, or The Banquo Legacy which contorted to write her as someone else. The excitement of Time Lords in pursuit, much like those leftovers from Interference, could have been a lot more exciting than what we got. I guess all that’s left is to hope that, as and when Justin Richards has a story arc, he has more success encouraging his authors to contribute. (Based on the arc that immediately follows this one, the plan is apparently to force them!)

The last and I suppose biggest piece of The Ancestor Cell is the Doctor, who must be made ready for his next phase of adventures. It’s a shame that more isn’t made about his relationship with Compassion, since that relationship has presumably been the cornerstone of the arc; it would have been nice to afford him a bit of closure there, as even Kreiner managed. He doesn’t see properly eye to eye with Romana either before the end when she, presumably, dies along with everyone else. And about that: it’s a curious choice to pair the Doctor’s imminent soft reboot (amnesia again — sigh — with a convalescence period on Earth while the TARDIS repairs itself) with the destruction of his homeworld. Yes, he’s got a clean slate, but (forgive me) at what cost? Is the deliberate genocide of his own people not going to bother him at all once he remembers it? This might just be the new series talking, but surely this will cause the occasional sleepless night? If the intention wasn’t to create more angst then this is overkill.

It’s a decent showing for the character, particularly in his too few scenes with Kreiner, but the overall structure of The Ancestor Cell inhibits some of his usual flourishes. It’s an enormously stand-around-and-talk sort of a book, only changing up the location from Gallifrey to TARDIS to Edifice and so on. At times it’s about as exciting as Arc Of Infinity, which is presumably where the generous action scenes and (I can’t stress this enough) short chapters come in. The Doctor at least manages to be an unknown element for all sides of the conflict, which is a pretty good summation of the character, even if there is no opportunity to reflect on what it has all meant to him. It also helps that Gallifrey is kept as an uncomfortable, hostile place even for the Doctor, since the intention is to do away with it at the end. I doubt you’ll miss the place. (It’s worth noting that there is some actual show-don’t-tell here — I know! Fetch the bunting! — as the prose carefully hints that the “nine Gallifreys” are slowly whittling down to one, and only the reader and Fitz are aware of this. See, they can do it.)

Despite a few bright spots — the pace, some of the writing for the regulars — it’s likely the chief takeaway here will be the sheer frenzied continuity of the thing. It’s very apparent that The Ancestor Cell is here to do a job, with little room for an actual novel to live and breathe underneath. In doing so, The Ancestor Cell shows up the flaws of the series leading up to it. I doubt even Lawrence Miles could have made it work, since he’d also have to reckon with the general lack of preparedness in the earlier books. It’s frustrating, because the second act of the EDAs has only taken bigger risks, displayed more imagination. The trouble is, your story arc’s only as good as the effort you’re able to commit to it, and The Ancestor Cell is where you end up when that hasn’t been good enough.

5/10

*Update: they didn’t. Sounds like they didn’t fancy the editorial back and forth that would have come with it. HEAVIEST SIGH.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #72 – Heart Of TARDIS by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#32

Heart of TARDIS

By Dave Stone

Look up there — what’s that light in the sky, above Gotham Police Headquarters? Is that…? Yes, it’s the Silly Goose Signal. And if you look down into the street you’ll see him haring towards us now in his polka-dotted cape and squeaky slippers, blowing raspberries as he goes. Dave Stone approacheth.

Heart Of TARDIS is odd, perhaps even by Stone’s standards. It has multiple story strands, heaps of characters, two Doctors with companions in tow, magic, surrealism, jokes, horrible murders and a preoccupation with TV and movies. (Cheese also crops up a lot.) It’s not for the casual reader.

I don’t know if the book specifically or my attention span was the reason that I got 100 pages in, realised I wasn’t quite following it and started again, this time writing out the different plot strands to keep them straight. This mostly helped, but even then there were important moments I struggled to comprehend simply because they were couched in strangeness or silliness; with this one it can be hard to grab onto the genuine activity of a scene, or even a sentence. (Dave Stone newbies would do well to know that some of his sentences are sort of, optional.)

Stone has always been one for silliness, which is a good thing really: Sky Pirates! is hilarious. He loves a comedic diversion and there are plenty of those here, such as a page or two on the history of the obsessive alien Collectors, or a character considering how Romana would fit into her own class upbringing. But there’s somewhat of a sliding scale when it comes to just how firm a grip he has on the story, vs how much fun he’s having. Pirates! and Death And Diplomacy knew just what they were about — a quest narrative and a romcom respectively — whereas, say, Oblivion is really interested in alternative timelines, but it just sort of paddles around in that idea. I’m not sure what it is that drives Heart Of TARDIS as a story. A collision between magic and science, I suppose, since it’s about a literal nexus point of the two, but then no one in it really engages with the difference. There’s no “Science, Miss Hawthorne!” debate this week; magic is just a thing that demonstrably works.

If that feels incongruous to you within the bounds of Doctor Who, well, it’s just that sort of book: unreality is baked into it on a story level and on a meta one. Literally we have characters losing their faculties and doing strange, horrible things to each other: an American town, Lychburg, has stopped following the normal rules of cause and effect and it is no longer possible to leave. (Think Pleasantville. Just add murders.) Beyond that we have weird attack squads who are, in some undefined way, horrifying to behold, and they use black magic. There are diversions (Stone gonna Stone) where characters compare real life to movies and television, which feels like it’s going somewhere but doesn’t really; we even have quasi-cameos from The Simpsons and Cheers characters, as well as two recurring characters who are a very transparent piss-take of The Professionals. Then there’s what happens to the TARDIS at the end — as in, the Fourth Doctor’s one — being transmogrified room by room and filled with random sights, a sequence that would maybe have more cachet if we hadn’t already been on that sort of toboggan ride for 200+ pages.

We also have some fun and games around canon and continuity. (I think we can infer some deliberateness here, given that one of the villains is literally named “Continuity.”) The Second Doctor’s story kicks off because he’s found a way to undo the security controls on his TARDIS, which are the things preventing him from piloting it properly; this is a retcon new to the book. (To be fair, it’s not a bad one.) The Fourth Doctor and Romana are in the middle of a somewhat breathless search for the Key to Time, but they seem completely happy to put that on pause this week; this is fairly unheard of. (Hard to be mad at this as a concept though, as Romana I deserves more stories, and they can’t all involve the Key.) There’s a gag about the (Fourth) Doctor always leaving K9 behind on adventures and needing to go back and rescue him, sometimes centuries later; that’s hilarious, but again, this is the first we’re hearing about it. The Doctor — both — has a strange inability to be photographed, and cannot provide fingerprint samples unless he concentrates; all very magical, and all new here. There’s even a possible blooper to confuse matters, with Benton still being a Sergeant in the late 1980s; he was a Warrant Officer in his last TV appearance. (Perhaps he got demoted…?)

None of this really matters as such, and by all means other authors can pick them up again, but taken together, in the context of the series so far and combined with the quasi-reality of the plot, it does all sort of push the whole thing into the realm of “is any of this real.” And, pure personal taste here, my investment in a story is somewhat tied to how much the characters are invested in it. If it could all have been a dream then, no offence, but why should I care? It’s a tricky balance.

There are subtler weirdnesses as well — let’s call them, takes. Stone characterises the Fourth Doctor and Romana perfectly, capturing their lofty brilliance, Romana’s indomitability, this Doctor’s irreverence that can turn on a sixpence into grave fury.

The Second Doctor and co are more bespoke. This Doctor he characterises as a chaos demon, utterly impulsive and incapable of listening to anybody before he takes action. This is a bit of a stretch, but at least it’s along the right lines. (His predilection for technobabble is definitely a Dave Stone thing, however. I can’t picture Troughton rattling off some of the convoluted stuff he comes out with here.) Jamie seems to dip below Stone’s interest altogether, although he does get a critical plot moment near the end.

Victoria is where he really goes for broke. Pushed into the centre as the rational protagonist of the trio, this Victoria is no frightened girl: she’s well travelled (after dozens of off-screen adventures) and has become downright cosmopolitan. She has got used to futuristic forms of travel, even been “spoilt” by them; she screams only once, and then it feels like a surprise; seemingly no longer a retiring violet, she recognises and even makes innuendos. It’s also through Victoria — now apparently a keen observer — that we get some of the best Second Doctor writing: “[The Doctor had] a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it. It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not.” / “Ordinarily, he took the part — was the part — of a silly little hobo (as she believed the Americans called it) drifting wherever the fancy took him and amiably allowing himself to be taken along with the circumstances in which he found himself. Indeed, he seemed to be most happy in that persona and took pains to preserve it even at all possible. When danger threatened, however — being trapped in a town elided from the universe of space and time and with a killer on the loose, for example — it was as if he put the clown aside and transformed himself into a man of action, fearlessly hunting down the particulars of the case like a bantam-sized Sherlock Holmes… a man whom, in the face of all probability, he claimed to have met.” NB: Typical Dave Stone sentence lengths there.

Stone justifies his sharper, less frightened take on Victoria: “given the tenor of her original times, [she] was not exactly a shrinking violet even in terms of that era. Time and again, on her travels with Jamie and the Doctor, in any number of perilous situations, she had found reserves of courage and fortitude even she had not known she had.” And honestly, she’s an improvement on the person we see in the actual episodes (although the apparently sexual worldliness is a bit odd), but it’s another thing that makes Heart Of TARDIS feel like a self-contained stopover, where this particular author is god and he makes all the rules.

I suppose that only really matters if you need all of these books to feel like they’re part of the same series. I think it’s fine to step outside sometimes. (Look at Campaign.) I’m just surprised that the editorial team were on board with a book that takes so many weird little swings. (Look at Campaign. Okay, that’s unfair: Campaign finally died because it kept missing deadlines, not because it was weird. But there was some resistance from Richards, and I can’t help but wonder what notes he gave for this one. If, indeed, he had time to give any.)

It’s easy to discuss Heart Of TARDIS in terms of ideas — it’s got oodles. (Some, like the K9 rescue, go nowhere beyond “funny bit”. K9 doesn’t return once he’s safe and sound.) It’s harder to crunch it into shape as a story with a point. Or two, really, since this is being sold as a multi-Doctor adventure. (More on that in a moment.) The situation in Lychburg is creepy, often to an extent that seems to be from another book altogether (the woman building a homunculus out of victims’ body parts), but the basic concept of cause and effect going haywire is very interesting. It’s hard to articulate, however, particularly for a word-wanderer like Dave Stone. You soon get the sense that this plot (the Second Doctor one) will be isolated until the Fourth Doctor gets involved. Nothing much really progresses here until it’s nearly over, at which point the grand finale happens virtually off-screen.

Then we have the Fourth Doctor stuff, visiting UNIT HQ to recover a missing Brigadier. This involves the aforementioned black magic practitioners, but again there isn’t much proactively to do for most of it. The weird and wacky characters operate with abandon and eventually, when it’s time to resolve the crisis, the Doctor(s) is only of secondary help. Things are decided by a sort of wizard battle between secondary characters, with the Brigadier (under-written, almost wasn’t worth including him) intervening at a crucial moment.

Heart Of TARDIS gets very close to edging out the Doctor(s) altogether, although it certainly relies on TARDISes for its plot. This is at least themed, although that isn’t articulated until the Epilogue: “We can’t always expect to take what you might call a proactive role. Sometimes, in this life, we’re lucky if we can do as much as work out what’s going on, much less whether what we do has an effect … Great events are the result of the interactions of people who are largely indifferent to each other.” Which is a decent theme for a book… just an odd fit for Doctor Who, and thus, it’s another one-shot Dave Stone “take”. As a reader, as it must have been for the Doctors, most of this becomes an exercise in patiently waiting through each section until the summing up starts, or somebody else does something.

Looking at it as a multi-Doctor story, we must remember that Dave Stone is a silly goose. So, it isn’t one in the traditional sense. I don’t mind that: it’s always difficult to come up with a big enough threat for more than one Doctor to deal with, and it’s equally hard to give each of them something to do. Stone’s approach is more like Cold Fusion, where separate Doctors’ plot lines eventually dovetail. Where this gets really Dave Stone, however, is that they don’t even meet. The Second Doctor is never aware of the other one; the Fourth Doctor twigs fairly late in the story, and then there is a knowingly short scene where the one secretly assists the other.

As you can probably guess, this has all been setup for a funny line, in this case Romana’s: “So that’s it, is it? We get through all this, and our function is to simply open the door to let you in for a grand total of two minutes before you run straight out again?” In other words: you all expected a multi-Doctor story, tee hee hee. And honestly, a 280 page setup-punchline is a fairly impressive thing to pull off. But it is quite likely to annoy a few readers. (I think by that point I’d given up any hope/forgotten the possibility of the two interacting anyway.)

I was never exactly mad at Heart Of TARDIS, and I don’t know if I’d describe it as confusing, although admittedly I did put some work in there. (And it’s still pretty convoluted.) It’s more structured than The Blue Angel and less abstract than Campaign; it’s just weird on every other level and very, very busy. It’s hard to say whether I actually enjoyed it. Stone’s rapid-fire ideas can be very interesting, but that dreamlike strangeness makes it difficult to care on any deeper level. This is where comedy usually helps, and to be fair it’s often very funny, but being tinged with the grotesque sort of undermines that aspect for me.

It’s one of those books where, if nothing else, The Author Definitely Meant To Do That, and I think that deserves some respect. But I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out than an editor had replied with, “Dave, what the hell is this?”

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #71 – The Banquo Legacy by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#35

The Banquo Legacy

By Andy Lane & Justin Richards

At last, we’re getting somewhere. After several books where the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion elude the Time Lords so successfully that you have to wonder if anyone’s even looking for them, The Banquo Legacy introduces the radical idea that the bad guys could put some effort into it.

All of which feels like a spoiler, and indeed I was quite worried that I’d ruined it for myself by listening to a podcast about an earlier book. (It’s been 20+ years, inevitably that sort of thing is a minefield.) But no, The Banquo Legacy makes it clear early on that a Time Lord presence has caused the TARDIS to land in 1898, so it follows that a Time Lord will be lurking nearby. See also the blurb, which straight up tells you that the Doctor is “desperate to uncover the Time Lord agent who has him trapped.” Frankly it would be amazing if you got to the big reveal near the end of the book and didn’t already know.

Too much foreknowledge is unlikely to hurt The Banquo Legacy, since it didn’t begin life as anything Time Lordy or arc-plotty anyway. It turns out that BBC Books had yet another gap to fill, with Rebecca Levene’s novel Freaks sadly disappearing due to work commitments. Enter Justin Richards who — somewhat typically for Justin Richards — had a completed novel just lying around. A non-Who murder mystery co-written years earlier with Andy Lane, it was an epistolary, intended to evoke Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. (Lane wrote one character, Richards the other.) As well as it being terribly nice to get their old manuscript onto shelves, it was simply more expedient to insert Doctor Who elements into this than to write a whole new thing from scratch — especially where Richards had just done so with Grave Matter.

It’s debatable how obvious all of this behind the scenes stuff is when reading the book. It’s not as if epistolaries are unheard of in Doctor Who — Lane’s All-Consuming Fire was a very good one. As that author notes on Pieces Of Eighth, the original book had Who-ey overtones simply because that stuff was baked into its authors; where it is overtly horror, it is arguably by way of things like The Talons Of Weng-Chiang. And Richards, ever the editor, does a convincing enough job of weaving not just the Doctor and co. into this, but the ongoing Time Lord plot as well. It is relevant that this particular murder plot has ensnared these particular characters at this particular point in the run.

While it’s a bit coincidental that we ended up here, it makes for a fun experiment to tell a Doctor Who story from someone else’s perspective, or multiple someone elses. It also allows for an unusual take* on a mystery plot, with one character seeking answers that the other possesses, one character’s scenes filling in gaps from the other’s, and action overlapping. (*I haven’t read any Agatha Christie. Forgive me.) It pays particular dividends about halfway through after a couple of murders in close succession, with the two narrators hurriedly jumping to and fro in a way that satisfyingly speeds up the pace.

There is a downside to this, however, in that the two narrators are not hugely dissimilar. This is awkward to note since it was apparently two separate authors writing them, but Inspector Ian Stratford (Lane) and lawyer John Hopkinson (Richards) are both upstanding chaps of more or less the same type. Neither sounds especially Victorian or egregiously different from one another; if there weren’t two different fonts at work I’d be unlikely to pick either one out of a paragraph.

There is a whiff of cop and criminal about them, Hopkinson having numerous secrets to impart, but — in an admittedly very “Victorian epistolary” way, see Dracula — they end up full of camaraderie anyway, united by chivalry and whatnot. Before long I was wishing that there were more perspectives in the mix. You could even sneak in the Time Lord agent as one of them, and drop hints that way. Agatha Christie did that sort of hide-in-plain-sight thing, or so I hear. (It bears repeating that this book was the work of two quite young writers, and All-Consuming Fire, for example, showed a more pronounced difference between its narrators some years later. Practice makes perfect.)

The murder mystery has enough horror elements to tickle a Whovian’s fancy. The main thrust is a psychic experiment in an old country house which immediately goes wrong, killing the scientist and raising the question of accident or murder. More deaths follow, along with disappearing and reappearing bodies, a gun-toting maniac and — heck, why not — the walking dead. Sprinkle in a fake-out death for the Doctor and the ongoing question of a Time Lord agent and you’re unlikely, all in all, to sit there wondering how this novel ever got stitched together in the edit.

That said, it’s not exactly groaning with plot. Once it is confirmed whodunit and what, for that matter, they dun, The Banquo Legacy becomes a slightly lumbering zombie vehicle, alternating between a really quite amazingly durable killer corpse and a single deranged woman with a gun. I wondered how this presented such an insurmountable problem for the Doctor and friends, but then Richards has done some homework to ensure that regeneration will not work in the vicinity of the house, so dead means dead. (A threat that perhaps loses some meaning in a story that features a zombie.)

The mystery itself is reasonably good, though it’s not without its loose ends. The book opens with a couple of century-old murders that, in the long run, Richards uses to inform the Time Lord plot. I was never clear on why there needed to be two murders in close succession, or why one of them seems distractingly to be the work of a vampire. We never circle back to the details. And the Doctor’s fake-out death leads to a very exciting reveal later on — clearly a nod to The Hound Of The Baskervilles — but his laying low/information gathering doesn’t end up being anything worth hanging around for. These sorts of things tend to suggest the ragged edges of one novel brushing up against another.

For more on that, take a look at Compassion. On the surface this is another neat little solve: there would have only been so much room in the book for new characters (the Doctor replaces one who would otherwise have been killed off), so what do you do with someone as complicated as a human TARDIS? Answer, amalgamate them with someone nearby, and thus create an identity crisis. It gives you an element of danger, not wanting Compassion to be identified to the Time Lord agent, and theoretically it gives Compassion some interesting stuff to work on as she juggles two selves. You can blame it all on chameleon circuits or something.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, Compassion has simply been subsumed by another, markedly less interesting character. Her inner Compassion-ness rarely rises to the surface, and when it does an occasional aloofness or a sarcastic “obviously” will have to do. There’s no especially dramatic conflict at work between the two characters, and no meaningful sense that one of them is diminishing. (It’s not even hugely clear what’s happening.) Yes, the situation has rendered her mortal, but the human being she inhabits was already mortal anyway. Which is certainly handy for the rewrite.

Knowing that she had to be shoe-horned into a pre-existing novel casts a suggestive pall over all this, but even if you don’t know that, where the previous EDA was The Space Age — which had Compassion mentally out-of-it for most of the story — this just looks like another author(s) not wanting to engage with Compassion. Given how many EDA writers would clearly rather dive out of a window than write for Sam Jones, it’s not as if they don’t have form. Honestly, I can see the legwork that has gone into justifying these choices, but the end result still bears an uncanny resemblance to just not knowing what to do with her. Again. It’s disappointing to still be in this position with so little time left.

The Doctor and Fitz are perhaps easier to handle, and sure enough both are creditably written/inserted, with Fitz throwing a very ill-advised (and very Fitz) German accent into a tense situation, then forgetting it; at all times he believably fails to convince. (Stratford notes that he is “about five sentences behind everyone else and struggling to keep up.” That’s him, Officer.) I suspect that the Doctor’s role may have been very loosely Doctorish even in Lane and Richards’ student days, but there’s enough of a whiff of Sherlock Holmes about him to maintain the murder mystery ethos and all at once keep it convincingly Who. He’s very commanding, when he isn’t being (perhaps a little too easily) terrorised.

At least we’re moving the whole Time Lord thing along. The mystery of who the Time Lord agent is, or I suppose if there even is one, might have seemed pretty obvious to me (see second paragraph) but it’s still exciting when the Doctor and [redacted] have a sudden stand-off with a shotgun, all pretence now dropped. It’s interesting to have someone reinforce the Time Lords’ morally suspect argument for capturing Compassion, and for a moment there it did feel like the stakes were higher because her TARDIS capabilities had gone away — even at the potential cost of the agent’s life, since they can’t regenerate either. I especially enjoyed the idea that Time Lord agents had been sprinkled all over the galaxy and are, understandably, running out of patience. (Wouldn’t it be nice if this wasn’t the first we were hearing about it?) The stakes have certainly been raised — or at the very least, reintroduced — for the upcoming grand finale.

Looking at other reviews, I’m clearly less enamoured than most readers, but I didn’t have a bad time with The Banquo Legacy. The epistolary could be better but it’s still fun to read, especially where it’s so ghoulish, and hey, I’m only human — I like zombies too. (NB: I didn’t feel like this was a retread of Grave Matter. Mind you, this one came first.) It’s a good, if patchy example of rewriting something for a new brief, and it inevitably re-energises the EDAs — especially since all the other books have slept on the arc plot. The Time Lords aren’t the only ones tapping their watches.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #70 – Grave Matter by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#31

Grave Matter

By Justin Richards

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Write Novels Quickly Man!

Whilst I can’t exactly prove it, I’m confident that Grave Matter was a last minute replacement for something else. A few things point that way. Justin Richards was clearly very busy around this time, gearing up as range editor, co-writing the next book in the schedule and then fully writing an EDA two books later to soft-reboot the range. I doubt he had time to write another manuscript voluntarily. Then there are the behind the scenes materials in Campaign, which point to the PDA slot after Verdigris being vacant after Jim Mortimore’s book fell through. That was in October 1999, and they needed the next (now non-existent) book at the printers within 2 months. Enter a very frantic Justin Richards, perhaps? (We know he can do it. Look at The Joy Device and Millennium Shock.)

I suppose the other little clue is the book itself. It lacks the sense of a special interest that you get in some of Richards’s books like Theatre Of War or System Shock. For Grave Matter he’s doing a sort of Hinchcliffe-era pastiche which, while very entertaining, could have been assigned to anybody. The pacing also suggests a certain degree of, if not rushing exactly, perhaps not finessing as much as might be preferable. It takes some time to get a real sense of the threat here, and once we’re into the climax there’s a sense of throwing one thing after another just to keep it going for 240 pages.

Not that I mind, of course. The thing to remember about those last-minute Richards novels is that they tend to be very entertaining, almost as if that sense of urgency got baked into the product. If Grave Matter is another one of those then something like that has happened again.

We get some Gothic imagery right away as a strangely corpse-like man flees captivity on an island, then is (literally) hounded off a cliff. Once the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on the island of Dorsill they meet the man, who is frightful to behold, and he prevents Peri from falling to her doom. Once the duo then make it to the town they find a funeral procession by lamp light, which promptly collapses showing Peri the corpse. Even after all that high-level spookery there is Dorsill itself to consider: a strangely old-world place that holds modern day anachronisms.

It’s an arresting start full of memorable visuals, and there’s a lot of that still to come as Dorsill reveals its odd little quirks and — as I mentioned above — its problems, albeit slowly. There have been deaths recently, but nothing in particular links them. Animals have peculiar habits, with the sheep seeming more organised than the sheep dogs. Even the school children have developed odd aptitudes for things in a way that only makes sense if they are somehow psychic. The fact that Dorsill is a modern day (albeit undated) community willingly cut off from technology is the least odd thing about it.

You get the sense though that the Doctor and Peri are investigating a general vague air of mystery rather than anything specific. For instance, the Doctor wants to find out what year it is. (You might think the strange-looking man they meet at the start would be an inciting incident, but they seem to forget about him instantly. Rather odd. He crops up again later.) They are made quite welcome, for once, and this adds an air of comfort to proceedings. Dorsill is very well defined visually and it’s quite pleasurable to follow the characters around it. Not exactly a page-turner in the same sense as Millennium Shock, then, but it’s compelling enough all the same.

Eventually the title starts paying dividends. There’s a marvellous sequence that begins with Peri witnessing an apparent grave robbing-cum-zombie resurrection, which then turns out just to have been grave robbing. (For medical curiosity purposes only.) This is followed by the same corpse actually rising from the grave in the same spot, which is very neat work and would have been horrifying/hilarious if televised. It turns out there are shady experiments originating on Dorsill’s sister island, Sheldon’s Folly, and these connect all the unusual happenings on Dorsill. Suffice to say, the local mad scientists have slightly overstepped, hence the minor problem of the zombies.

Once we find out what’s happening the action re-centres around the Gothic house/laboratory on Sheldon’s Folly, giving us a bit more Hinchcliffian bang for our buck as zombies attack and allies become enemies. This is where the previously mentioned fodder comes into it, particularly in a sequence where Peri runs to fetch help and is variously attacked by possessed seagulls, owls, foxes and (ah why the hell not) a shark. It’s nevertheless fun to watch the Doctor try to figure things out on the fly here, especially when he has to translate the only-brainwashed-a-bit messages of a colleague; everything she says is a deliberate lie to fool the ruling intelligence so he must always infer the opposite. (This feels like a suitably Justin Richards bit of cleverness.)

It’s the kind of story where, once you’ve finished it, there isn’t a lot of substance to mull over. It’s a vibes thing, as da kidz say, coasting along pleasantly enough on spookiness and peril. It does occasionally overstep, in my view. There’s a character who is understandably upset about his brother’s death, who then becomes an antagonist towards Peri for no particular reason beyond presumably being an aspiring rapist. (Which is a very tropey way to treat Peri, on top of everything else.) And there’s a character inveigled in the conspiracy who wants out in the most final way possible, being moved to attempt suicide three times, with a great deal of detail provided in each instance. Got to wonder if anyone other than the range editor could have squeaked that through unedited.

Character voices are otherwise quite strong, with Sir Edward making a memorable accomplice for the Doctor and Peri, and local farmer Hilly feeling like a real-enough person. The two regulars are very well drawn also, particularly a Sixth Doctor still early in his tenure. He’s brash, alliterative and single-minded, but sensitive underneath it all. A moment where he appears to have been taken over by a malign intelligence feels alarmingly plausible when it’s a guy fresh from being in The Twin Dilemma. Peri’s lot in life here is mostly to grouse and try not to be upset when the Doctor is rude, but all of that feels true to where she was at in the series. Although she does experience a brush with the malign influence on Dorsill, at least she’s spared being transformed into something else entirely, which was very much her thing on television.

There’s not a heap more to say about Grave Matter, perhaps for reasons I’ve already speculated about, but the overall concoction is a successful one. Richards kept my interest even when it felt like he was still figuring things out, and he applies memorable little flourishes whenever he can, such as describing a possession as “Her mouth was twisted into a smile, but her mind was in tears.” Spooky, colourful and (perhaps excessively at times) action-packed, it’s a decent enough fusion of the grimdark Season 22 with its similarly nasty ancestors. I’m sure Mary Whitehouse would not have approved.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #69 – The Space Age by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#34

The Space Age

By Steve Lyons

Right then. Time for another exciting instalment of “the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion run away from the Time Lords.” We’re three books in. Maybe they’ve figured out what to do with this plot arc.

Turns out, no. The Space Age is another one where our heroes land somewhere awful (but at least there aren’t any Time Lords!) and then a thoroughly normal book happens. There’s still no attempt by the characters to work towards something, still no sense of progress being made. They’re not even having an especially nice time that they wish would never end. What are we meant to do here except hope that there are Time Lords in the next one?

Still, I suppose plot arcs aren’t everything. These are novels first and foremost, they only need to be captivating in that sense to be worth your time. And… no, The Space Age can’t quite manage that either, unfortunately.

There’s some early promise. A strange encounter on a beach in 1965 between a couple of teenagers and a crashed alien spaceship carries hints of time being rewritten. Then all of a sudden there’s a new world where everyone’s a bit older and the technology is marvellous, but some of the prejudices of their era have been magnified. (Well, one prejudice. No not that one.) 

Into this arrive the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion, only their erstwhile friend/TARDIS is suddenly uncommunicative. Stuck for something to do, the Doctor and Fitz head for a nearby city, encountering a band of outsiders living in a shanty town and then the people living inside the city. These are, unusually for an alien world with futuristic tech such as hover bikes, two warring clans of mods and rockers. And that’s the gist of The Space Age. Mods. Rockers. Rockers. Mods. But in space.

Reviewers love to point out that the blurb is, well, wrong. It emphasises the futurism of the city, the enlightenment of its citizens, the interstellar travel with aliens coming and going for the betterment of all. None of that matches the content of the book, which pays lip service to the marvellousness of the tech but is set at a time when it’s all in such disrepair, and its people are so ignorantly entrenched in war that they barely engage with it anyway. I wonder if the blurb was based on an earlier draft. It might be an attempt to wrong-foot us when we actually see the place — but since we do that very early in the book, that would seem like a wasted effort. The city anyway, as we see it, more closely resembles an even more run down Mos Eisley. There seem to be three or four inhabited buildings and around twenty people dotted about. I mostly pictured sand. You wouldn’t want to live there.

And then we have the mods and rockers. “Ah,” you say to yourself early on, “this will just be one symptom of what’s wrong here. There will be more to discover once you get past them.” Sadly not. You’ve got this one bunch of people who are rockers, yeah? And  then there’s this other bunch of people who are mods. And they don’t like each other, right? Stop me if I’m going too fast.

And look, it’s not as if a conflict between mods and rockers can’t be interesting. Steve Lyons is as good a writer as anybody to make something out of that: he’s done bitter historical prejudice (The Witch Hunters) as well as the horrors of war (The Final Sanction) bizarre new worlds with their own rules (Salvation) and even uninhabitable dumps on alien planets (Time Of Your Life). But there just isn’t anything interesting being said here. The mods are fighty people. The rockers are fighty people. They’re all in the wrong, they all act like kids and hang around in milk bars but they dress differently. Rinse, repeat. It’s like one of those early Star Trek episodes where the budget was looking a bit peaky so they’d visit another Planet Of The 20th Century Dress-Up People. The fact that the Doctor and Fitz are so consistently held captive by these goofballs, with their much more boring space version of West Side Story, reflects somewhat embarrassingly on them both.

Individually they’re not much better. Rockers: there’s single-minded leader Alec and his wife Sandra. They’re the ones who found that alien at the start. They’re not very happy any more and all of Sandra’s older brothers (mods) died in the conflict. Sandra used to be a mod. Is that anything? There’s Gillian, a Technician who ends up paired with the Doctor for some of this, and gets to trade barbs with him. (Well, send them his way. Obviously he’s nice to her.) The others are so nondescript that it’s almost a parody when they’re harmed or killed. No, not Jimmy! Or possibly Johnny!

Mods: their leader is Rick, formerly Ricky, Sandra’s kid brother. He is large and in charge, for some reason; a shouty fanatic who hates rockers because (hang on, lemme check) they are rockers. Fascinating. There’s Davey, his second in command who might as well be the same guy, and Davey’s parents Vince and Deborah. This setup is an obvious parallel to Alec/Sandra/Rick, but I’m not sure to what end, as unfortunately my brain skipped a track whenever I needed to remember that they’re separate people.

None of them can quite articulate what’s so worthwhile about this conflict, which of course might be the point, war being a sort of hell thing, but that doesn’t help the book along when it all just feels like something to do in a boring place. The best we can get for a plot is the rockers trying to convince the Doctor to make weapons, the mods trying to get future tech out of Fitz, and various intermittent escapes/recaptures/fights along the way. The accelerating death of the city would be more interesting if we’d ever seen it in a state of repair, or if we were particularly concerned about its inhabitants. Sadly the same rules as Coldheart apply here: I’ll take option “can we just get in the TARDIS and bugger off,” please. (Before you ask if the time-altering alien has something to do with the plot arc, since that involves the Time Lords and an unspoken Enemy who presumably could do that sort of thing… no. To me these seem like two entirely sensible wires to cross, but what do I know.)

You can normally rely on Steve Lyons to capture the regular characters’ voices, and he mostly does that here. (Working for the first time with a non-televised roster.) The Doctor is a delightful nuisance to the rockers, refusing to make weapons but at one point fashioning a giant sleep-inducing record player. It’s believable that he’d try to mediate between the two sides and his scenes with Gillian the ersatz-companion are quite enjoyable.

In terms of ongoing character work we are mostly doing that “someone else makes an observation” thing that I don’t love. Fitz notes that “the Doctor seemed to be rallying — he hadn’t mentioned the loss of his TARDIS in days — but of late he had been a little too eager to plunge himself into each new experience. He had become almost reckless, as if he were trying to immerse himself in other people’s problems to keep him from dwelling on his own.” It’s not great when you have to pause and tell us that a character’s otherwise normal behaviour is actually informed by subtext, but he briefly addresses this himself, and the arc in general, towards the end. Compassion (once again an external observer) notes that “You don’t want the Faction gaining another foothold” on this planet; while discussing the near-magical solution being offered by the aliens at the end, she says “‘You wouldn’t be tempted to hit the reset switch? Even if it meant, say, getting the TARDIS back or getting Faction Paradox out of your life?’ ‘You don’t learn anything that way.’” Again, it’s nice to know he’s thinking about this stuff.

Fitz is fairly dead on here, letting his imagination get him out of trouble (or at least delay it) when he’s stuck with the mods. There’s at least a whiff of characterisation when it comes to the conflict, as “[Rockers] had always made Fitz nervous: he had thought them one dangerous step away from a different kind of uniform.” He doesn’t have a Gillian analog, sadly, so the book is mostly a case of him having a miserable time with leader Rick until it’s over. Fitz also breaks his streak and doesn’t cop off with anyone here. Some readers might consider that akin to casting Sean Bean in something and then not killing him off.

Compassion is the odd one out. Not quite herself from the beginning, she has very little physically to do in the novel, and when we do encounter her she’s on a sort of loftier plane because she’s been in contact with the fifth-dimensional “Makers” who shaped this world. I don’t know if this is an earnest attempt to do something new with the character or just an admission that she’s difficult to write for, but it doesn’t feel right, and considering that Compassion is the crux of the ongoing plot arc you’d be forgiven for wanting more. She does at least announce that “I’m not lonely, and I’m not unhappy with what I’ve become. I want to stay with you.” Which is nice.

The Space Age is more or less competent, it just doesn’t have enough depth. The city could be any dilapidated space outpost, the mods and rockers could be any two groups. Yes that’s the point, triviality is an irony of war, but extrapolating it so far from any real context and using these particular (mostly very thin) characters just hasn’t lead to a very interesting situation. And anyway, Lyons already made his war points more succinctly in The Final Sanction. It’s one of those books where I don’t hate it, but I do sort of wonder if it was worth putting out there.

4/10