Doctor Who: The BBC Books #37 – The Face-Eater by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#18
The Face-Eater
By Simon Messingham

Space: the final frontier. Or that’s usually the idea anyway. At this point in the BBC Books run, especially the Eighth Doctor Adventures, space seems like the only frontier.

In defence of The Face-Eater, this one really is about the frontier of it all. Proxima 2 is Earth’s first colony outside our solar system. That ought to be a pretty arresting setup for a story, not to mention an exciting piece of history for the Doctor to explore. (Sam ought to be interested as well, it being her species and all.)

It’s let down by a few factors, some outside the author’s control. The Janus Conjunction already did a “scrappy human colony on an alien world” story. That one was set further into the future, but it was hitting the same “early days of human space travel” beats as The Face-Eater, so this rather awkwardly feels like somewhere we’ve already been. If it’s specifically colonisation you’re interested in, Kursaal not only did that but also gave us a before and after. (Legacy Of The Daleks also did it by proxy: our world was the one being rebuilt.) And if it’s indigenous creatures fighting back you’re after, guess what: also Kursaal, and chuck in Catastrophea as well. I’m not saying Simon Messingham submitted a bad pitch here; I’m saying, someone at BBC Books should have looked at what was already on the shelf and said “have another go please.”

In all honesty though, The Face-Eater wouldn’t have been a great example of colonial difficulties even if it had come first. The colony — remember it’s our first, not including Mars — is only three years old. The only people there are supposed to be the builders, the folk doing the grunt-work before civilisation starts. Yet Sam’s first thought about the place is that it resembles Benidorm, albeit a sparsely populated one. Fast work there. The main problem facing Proxima 2 is an ongoing murder investigation. It’s a place with traffic systems and secretaries and union disputes. Again: three years old.

I just didn’t buy it. This felt like a place that had been lived in and had begun to crack at the seams. A colony that’s getting on a bit, if anything. Which is fine — it might even be a realistic goal for three years of colony development, although I think that’s rather optimistic. The problem is that there are no intrinsic difficulties to living on this planet instead of on a dingy future Earth. The main difference I can see is that one unhinged person controls the entire city, as opposed to Earth where there might be other governments and stuff. It’s a surprising lapse in world-building from Messingham, after his expansive vision of the Morestran Empire in Zeta Major. Given the Doctor’s relative lack of excitement at humanity’s first steps being taken here — which to be fair might just be me viewing a BBC Book through a New Series lens, as the latter tends to emphasise the USP of a story setting — The Face-Eater could probably be reworked into an anonymous colony story with very few tweaks.

There are choices in the writing that both explain and worsen this. The planet isn’t very interesting. There’s nothing to speak of about the landscape besides some water, dust and mountains, and there’s hardly any indigenous life apart from some harmless-seeming mammals colloquially called “Rats”.  The former is perhaps meant to explain why the planet seemed attractive to mankind; the latter becomes plot relevant. Both things make sense, but nevertheless at no point was I curious about Proxima 2 beyond the confines of the city.

There’s also the population. Messingham writes them as culturally diverse, which makes sense, although it can get a bit clunky having to specify everybody’s accent and ethnicity, even to the point of conscious stereotypes. (One guy has a Southern US accent and wears a Stetson.) I guess you might conceivably cling to these things on another world, but it also has the effect of normalising said world, a bit like the Terrance Dicks approach in Mean Streets where Mega City = Chicago + hover cars. (Proxima 2 doesn’t even have hover cars.) There’s also a preoccupation with people’s past lives, so to speak, with the police chief fixating on his dead wife that drove him to alcohol (very Terrance Dicks) and the local doctor thinking about her previous career in Bombay. It all has the effect of suggesting these people walked through a door to instantly arrive here; nobody is thinking all that much about the years of hard graft spent putting this colony together, which makes it feel even more ready made and unremarkable.

This is where the plot comes in to shake things up, and to be fair, he’s got a decent threat here: the titular monster is a shapeshifting menace somewhere between John Carpenter’s The Thing and something out of HP Lovecraft. Bodysnatcher stories are great for sowing paranoia, and a colony is a great setting for that sort of thing. The setting itself continues to drag it down here, however, as there’s no particular feeling of isolation. (If Proxima 2 weren’t quite so cushty there could be a question of “don’t leave the city” and therefore being stuck with the shapeshifter, but alas, you could just wander off.)

The actual monster isn’t very well executed either, unfortunately. The shapeshifter revelation comes late enough in the story for most of the focus to be on one suspect: Leary. It’s all subjective of course, but I feel like the strongest execution of this idea would be to have more people under suspicion. There are a few character acting suspiciously, and there’s at least one genuinely great switcheroo, but the face-eater of the title ultimately feels like a concept not fully crystallised. Secondary ideas like the face-eater using telepathy to trigger visions of your worst nightmares are absolutely ripe with possibility, but they’re not wheeled out consistently and always feel a bit left-field, especially where the monster a) can just trick you by looking like someone you know and b) already looks like a VFX designer’s terrifying Oscar campaign just in its natural state. Why bother with clown makeup or a dentist’s chair etc?

If you disregard for a moment the setting and the plot, you’re left with the characters, and they’re a mixed bag. Fuller is our protagonist when the main duo aren’t around: he’s likeable enough (more so than the prominent police chief character in Kursaal), although his specific life traumas do feel very pat, and the story doesn’t do anything to build upon or resolve them. His deputy is the aforementioned Stetson-wearer, so is perhaps more likeable than interesting. The doctor is sufficiently flawed to pique my interest, but like a lot of characters in The Face-Eater she’s not destined for a long arc. There are a few more working-class individuals about, mostly somewhat criminal-leaning and need you ask, doomed. Their main interests seem to be a conflict with their rulers, which is something that could equally apply in any colony story.

The most memorable figure here (and I use the term advisedly) is Helen Percival, head of the colony. Her main trait is that she is hopelessly unstable and ill-suited to the job. You get the sense that Messingham is writing someone complex and problematic here, with a number of paranoid tics, but making her the prime authority figure just makes this feel like a standard intransigent person in charge. Her first action in the story is to arrest the Doctor and Sam immediately on their arrival, which is a beat so uninspired that the new series went out of its way to eliminate it with the psychic paper. She’s probably got reasons for being this way — including an incident on Earth, which again feeds that “we just got here” feeling about the colonists — but she’s too close to just being yet another tediously stubborn fool in authority to move the needle. (Perhaps to make her seem more interesting we are introduced to someone even worse: de Winter is such a heavy handed security officer that he starts killing people at random, and is equated quite bluntly with fascism by wanting to “get the trains running on time.” Yep, bad guy, got it.)

Now, inevitably, we arrive at the regulars. Again: mixed bag. Messingham apparently (Pieces Of Eighth) didn’t like Sam, and it shows. Oh it really, really shows. As well as setting her on fire and putting her in a car crash (kind of feel like “Sam gets hospitalised” is overplayed, I mean she’s died a few times by now), Messingham contrives a reason for her to be more annoying than usual: after her loss of autonomy in Beltempest she feels a need to “impose her will, stand up for herself. Stick to her principles. Take them to the nth degree. Isolate her centre, her Sam-ness, which distinguished her from that which was not-Sam.” In practice this means making a tit of herself, expounding at length about the appalling rape of Proxima 2 in the name of humanity, to the Doctor’s visible embarrassment.

As with most of the author’s choices, I can’t argue with the reasoning here — a post-Beltempest crisis makes sense for Sam, and it’s more than we got after her possession and murder spree in Kursaal, plus it’s a neat way for the author to get a handle on this unfamiliar character. But yet again, despite a few references to recent events, the baseline for Sam is effectively the person we met in The Eight Doctors, not the one who has learned and grown since/over the course of Seeing I. (No one bar Blum and Orman seems to have any idea how to write that. Sam as a character just can’t win.) Even when she calms down, Sam in this is a sarcastic, quippy, somewhat horny teenager archetype. Even her views on colonialism don’t inform the story much, as it flirts with the idea of humanity as a bad influence (Percival, de Winter) but also shrugs and points at the Proximans for making questionable choices in the past that are now biting everyone on the bum. And by the way, Catastrophea would like another word. (While we’re back on the subject of inspiration, the face-eater is eventually revealed to be “Another doomsday machine. For all its gloating cunning, for all its mystery and strength, it was just another weapon that had got out of control and turned on its owners.” Which is such a played out concept by now that pointing it out feels like trolling.)

Sam isn’t dreadful in The Face-Eater, but it’s no great showcase either. The Doctor fares better: Messingham has a good handle on the cool stare-danger-in-the-face quality that, if anything, is a creation of the books, combining it with the natural charm of the actor. There’s a great sequence where he tries to reason with someone whilst tied to a chair (coincidentally while rattling off references to a few Virgin books — nice!), and a good bit where he faces off against a nervous man with a gun. He’s also the main advocate for the easily-overlooked Proximans, worrying about them right up to the end of the book as humanity’s occupation reasserts itself as the main concern on this planet. Frankly some of this could (should?) have gone to Sam, who is usually the big “I am” about indigenous rights but in practice is revolted by the Proximans — how much of that is continuing to pick at her natural flaws as an activist and how much is just wanting to say “Sam is a dick”, I can’t say. But anyway, it’s a solid Doctor story.

There’s other good stuff here. The first half is broken up into character-based chapters — something he picked up from Catch 22 apparently — and this does some decent legwork at setting up the colony and keeping us on our toes about what other characters are up to. The bodysnatcher stuff, when we finally get some, works very well, culminating in the scene I mentioned earlier which I don’t want to expand on in case I ruin it, but suffice to say I didn’t see it coming and it’s executed literally as one twist followed by another. Very good stuff. There’s also a tendency to write the face-eater in second person prose, which does a very good job of immediately separating that character voice from everything else. In all honesty I still don’t like it much, because I find second person writing absolutely headache-inducing to read and I can’t wait to get out of it, but I appreciate that the author is trying something here.

“Mixed bag” is unfortunately quite a generous description of The Face-Eater. A mix of stuff we’ve already heard ad nauseam and stuff that just doesn’t quite work in practice, it seems destined to be one of those anonymous books that people tick off and then don’t think about again. After his burst of ideas in Zeta Major, I’m willing to bet that wasn’t the author’s intent, and I’m nevertheless hoping that I enjoy his next one. With change just around the corner for this Doctor-companion setup, I’m also crossing my fingers that the EDAs will pick their feet up concerning the regulars, and maybe set a story somewhere different once in a while. If it must be somewhere suspiciously familiar, as Messingham’s maiden colony unfortunately becomes at this point in the run, then at least offer the editorial guidance to make it seem different.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #36 – The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#17
The Infinity Doctors
By Lance Parkin

Happy 35th anniversary everyone! Be aware though that we are a little late to the party. It was, let’s see, almost as long ago now as the combined run of Classic Doctor Who. Which is fine, obviously. I’m fine with that. (Oh god, oh Jesus.)

The question on these sorts of occasions is how best to celebrate. The most popular answer is “have lots of Doctors in it.” This approach tends to be very good for ratings and it’s always a bit of fun; it did BBC Books no harm in selling their launch title, and that wasn’t even on an anniversary! However, it must be said that (at least according to, ahem, prevailing opinion) The Eight Doctors wasn’t very good — partly because it’s got so many Doctors in it. And while we’re at it this tends to hamper those anniversary shindigs as well. There just isn’t enough for everybody to do.

I think we can infer from this one’s title that Lance Parkin and/or BBC Books knew that we were expecting more of this, and they felt comfortable poking fun at it. Fair enough. What we get instead is a rather more left-field way of celebrating: The Infinity Doctors is an Elseworlds (or should that be Unbound?) sort of tale, set in a version of Doctor Who where he never left Gallifrey (or at least not permanently), with a suitably grandiose plot to make it okay that this is a one and done.

Provided you’re willing to settle for just one Doctor (although curiously enough, there are several copies of him in it), there’s a definite atmosphere of celebration here, not only of the text of the show itself but the general wider idea of Doctor Who. For the committed nerds there are multiversal references to telly stuff like the Hand of Omega, book stuff like Lungbarrow and never-got-made stuff like the Doctor’s father being a man named Ulysses. There’s gloriously forbidden stuff like the Doctor having a family and falling in love (several times), and there’s seemingly frowned-upon stuff like the origin story of the Sontarans, and as a bonus a creative yet credible solution to their war with the Rutans. The Master also appears in it — sorry, The Magistrate — and in this free-for-all context he can be the Doctor’s best friend who unabashedly loves him. What is that but a treat? Finally, crucially, The Infinity Doctors uses the premise of a Doctor that doesn’t travel the universe as a springboard to, well, what else but get him into that sort of thing. (Since a full blown canon prequel about the Doctor leaving Gallifrey would presumably be a treat too far.)

There’s a lot to like here. And I do like it. But at the risk of popping the balloons so festively arranged for you-know-who’s big 3-5, The Infinity Doctors leaves me a bit cold.

For starters, almost the entire thing is set on Gallifrey. You know: the planet so restrictive that the Doctor would traditionally rather be anywhere else in the universe but here. This is, of course, a gentler Gallifrey with a friendly version of the Master and everyone being nice to the Doctor; getting to spend all this time here is likely another one of those anniversary treats, a peek behind the curtain. It even leans towards that more squalid and relatable place we saw in The Deadly Assassin, with passages like “Some of the most awe-inspiring buildings in the known universe became everyday experiences, places you had to walk through to get to or from lectures.” But it’s still not a setting exactly rife with intrigue and character. Fundamentally it is a place to escape from.

We do get somewhat of a look at how the other half lives, aka Low Town — a decidedly unglamorous sector outside the stately Capitol. There is certainly a bit of crime and intrigue here, even a kidnapping and a couple of murders. But the story doesn’t linger here, or on the people here. I get the vaguest whiff of Ankh Morpork about Low Town, especially with the (admittedly very likeable) duo of Watchmen, Raimor and Peltroc, doing the rounds. There’s a fun gag about Raimor being older and wiser but currently inhabiting a younger body, whereas the much more green Peltroc is at the older end of his first regeneration, although the gag is admittedly a bit “you had to be there” in print.

Within the Capitol the action ping-pongs between the Doctor negotiating a peace conference between two ancient warring species and a mysterious murder spree by an equally mysterious figure. There’s a great wheeze with the Doctor appearing in two places at once to appease his guests; even better are the scenes where he takes the lead Sontaran and Rutan to the far future to try to cure their warmongering. It’s more interesting, on balance, than the kidnap/murder stuff, although there is a great Jekyll-and-Hyde concept applied to the murderer.

The people in the Capitol just aren’t all that fascinating, with the possible exception of the Magistrate, and that’s mostly the uncanny novelty of a guy that looks like Roger Delgado being terribly nice to people. I don’t get as much of a vicarious thrill from, for example, the name “Hedin” appearing a lot; look, it’s him out of Arc Of Infinity, and he’s still obsessed with Omega! The most rounded one here has to be Larna, the Doctor’s favourite pupil and companion stand-in. (And just this once, romantic prospect.) She’s got a good amount of pluck and, in a climactic moment, is more willing to stand up to the Doctor than anyone else. I’m still not entirely sure what to take from her decision, or the Doctor later on engineering it so that she didn’t actually take it. (Alas, it’s Unbound, so there’s not likely to be any follow-up.)

On balance, I think the plot is a big point of contention for me here. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just, well… familiar. Omega, ancient Time Lord genius who seemingly died getting Gallifrey its power, finds himself trapped in a universe of antimatter, and now schemes to get back to our universe — a ploy that requires him to swap places with another Time Lord. (Guess Who.)

Many details are different, but this is still quite openly the plot of The Three Doctors, isn’t it? And I mean, it’s arguably better. (I’m a bit of a Three Doctors sceptic.) But it’s still that plot again, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around it being okay just to repeat it, even in the context of an Unbound story. Wasn’t there any other story you could tell about Gallifrey? I’m all for an appropriate amount of nostalgia on an anniversary, but it’s the characters you want to see again, not necessarily the scripts. The whole thing just gives me deja vu.

It bears repeating that the details are different. Omega’s situation is somewhat new — he’s got company over there, and it’s very significant who, albeit only in a one-and-done way. The Doctor’s response to Omega’s offer is different, at least for a time; the reason he then changes his mind is perhaps an example of character growth along the same lines as the “real” Doctor learning empathy from his early companions, aka becoming more like the character we recognise. In which case it’s good stuff for a pseudo prequel, but I still find it difficult to square the levels of similarity at work here.

I just don’t think I get The Infinity Doctors. It’s as thoughtfully written as I’ve come to expect from Parkin — his books are always polished, almost stately affairs. And there can be no doubt that he understands Doctor Who: quite apart from all the nerdiness, look at the unspecific Doctor in this, who without any actorly accoutrements and with a completely different context (even on an emotional level) manages to exude just the same charm and eccentricity we’re used to. His easy acceptance into Gallifreyan society doesn’t come from his making huge concessions, or none more so than his (for some reason) deciding to remain there; he still is the Doctor, is still accepted as such, and Time Lord society is obviously better for having him around. Again, the book celebrates this character, and that’s great. Nevertheless, for me the mix of an Unbound tale we can utterly leave behind and a plot we have already left behind adds up to a glittering, charming, but somewhat disposable book.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #35 – Beltempest: Intermix by Jim Mortimore

NB: This isn’t a BBC Book, but once again we’re exploring a range from the periphery, so in my book it counts. If you’d like to know more, or want to pick up a copy of any of Jim Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts, Intermixes or just plain books, you can reach him at jimbo-original-who@hotmail.com. Alternatively search for Jim Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts 2 on Facebook. Thanks to Jim for the review copy — and apologies for being ever so slightly (4 years) late reading it…

Doctor Who: Beltempest: Intermix

By Jim Mortimore

Beltempest is a book about growing pains, so it makes sense that it would not only continue to evolve but would do so in a strange and staggered fashion.

Unlike Mortimore’s earlier Blood Heat what we’re seeing here is not a full Director’s Cut. This is an Intermix. I’m still a bit unsure what that means, but if it helps I’m picturing it as the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration, with the Watcher momentarily sitting in between Baker and Davison’s blurry faces. A stage rather than a destination.

It’s an altogether quieter edit than Blood Heat 2.0 — but I suppose that should go without saying, since a full Beltempest Director’s Cut is still planned. Will that one resemble the kind of top-to-bottom revision of (I swear I’ll stop mentioning it soon) Blood Heat? It’s impossible to say right now. For starters, where that earlier project renamed both companions (for, I tend to assume, copyright reasons) and swapped out the Seventh Doctor altogether for a kaleidoscopic new one of Mortimore’s invention, Beltempest: Intermix most certainly sticks with the Eighth Doctor and Sam as they were on the first go around.

I have no idea if that’s something that will change in the DC or if this is simply a different sort of assignment, but I think it’s likely that the story is so entrenched in this Doctor and this companion that it would defeat the purpose to start them over. We’ll see. As they’re much the same here, however, I have to be careful not to write the same review again, as my feelings towards them haven’t changed all that much either. Said feelings are still relevant though, so I’ll summarise, or at least try to offer some different clarity.

I don’t think this is a technically invalid take on either character, but it’s not one that really folds into the ongoing series as it was when Beltempest first arrived. The Doctor is a bouncing ball of energy whose quixotic moods can make it seem like he doesn’t care. (Hardly a hot take as secondary characters take him to task for it.) This affects his relationship with Sam whom he passingly believes to be dead at least twice, and carries on with what he’s doing regardless. Yes, the weight of a star system is too much to sideline just because you’re preoccupied with a friend — that dilemma is literally represented in the dialogue at least once — but it doesn’t exactly feel like the Doctor is making that trade-off, more that he’s just having a whizzo time in general. If that disconnect is intended to suggest unfathomable depths then I’m not sure we’re quite there yet. Hopefully it’s something the Director’s Cut will smooth out.

And then we have Sam, technically hitting some Sam-accurate notes like the urge to grow up and be taken seriously and the urge to help people and make a difference. Never mind that she had grown up by this point in the series, the books having gone to great pains to let that happen, and making a difference had not often been a problem either, or not (as it’s generally framed here) a problem exacerbated by the Doctor’s expectations of her. Sam seems desperate to lead by singular example in this, at one point physically rejecting a bag of tools from the Doctor, and that seems a somewhat weird reaction for one half of a symbiotic duo. But then where the story demands that they be apart, symbiosis can’t occur. All in all, Sam’s crisis in Beltempest feels like a pay-off to a specific ongoing tension that wasn’t really there, lending the whole thing a slightly odd sidestep quality. (Of course, Sam is eventually possessed by another life-form, but this is very late in the story so it can’t account for her general mood/quest beforehand. Maybe it would be better if it had had an influence sooner — or maybe I’d like that even less, what with the loss of agency that inevitably must come with it.)

All that said — and said again, in some cases — an upside to reading Beltempest in this form, and/or just reading it a second time, is an increased sympathy with these takes on the characters. If you are able to divorce Beltempest from the preceding few novels, as an Intermix published decades later will do by definition, then it makes a bit more sense to approach the Doctor and Sam in this way. If you looked at those early character briefs there’d be plenty to say for Sam in particular acting like this — the whole failed crusade thing fits right in pre-Longest Day, alongside the likes of Genocide. She did have a lot to prove when she first arrived. (This sort of thing even happened after the jump, The Janus Conjunction being a prime example, only there Sam was doing her best despite being apart from the Doctor, not to make a point of being without him — a meaningful distinction that makes the implied need to return to symbiosis less of a castigating one.) I suppose what I’m trying to say is, if you’re not reading these getting-on-a-bit books in sequence, if you have in fact not read them in years or not read them at all, then Beltempest: Intermix could be argued as a solid one-shot statement of what these characters were about at one time or another.

Okay, that’s more than enough said about what hasn’t changed. What has? Well it’s here that I become sharply aware of the difference between an Intermix and a Director’s Cut. Unlike Blood Heat 2: Even Bloodier Heat I didn’t detect any new set-pieces. This was somewhat of a surprise given the galactic scale of the action, but again, we’re still in a larval stage at this point; maybe that stuff will come later. I occasionally found myself flicking between the new and old versions and invariably found that the more striking or odd moments were already present in the BBC Book, but in some cases they have a little added nuance or context in the Intermix. Some of the individual moons are given names, which really does help to get your bearings. A moment where the Doctor considers the military overreaction to all this planetary chaos is given more weight. There are some little tweaks and massages that I noticed, like the Doctor referencing The Lion King at one point instead of opera, or Sam’s analogous reference to a test tube being updated to a “host mother” to better hint at the story’s theme. The same scene has the Doctor inwardly reflecting that he isn’t sure what Sam is still doing here after her “sabbatical” — a slightly cold thought, but one in support of this novel’s overall read of the Doctor vs his companion. All to the good, then. (This extra matter also works to bed in who Sam actually is, which wasn’t really a worry 17 books into a series but — blah, blah, blah! — it’s helpful in a one shot.)

Going back to the name changes in Blood Heat, Mortimore updates a few here, albeit just the secondary characters. A tribesman goes from “Fastblade” to “Stonebreaker” (or just “Stone”), perhaps to add some familial sibilance with his fellow “Skywatcher”; “Conaway” is now a more manageable “Conway”; “Bellis” becomes “Wells”, possibly to remove an unhelpful repetition of “Bel” where that is also the name of the star and the beginning of all the planet names. The aforementioned moon names are a boon. (If you will.) He sticks with a few names that he was clearly happy with, such as “Smoot.” (And who can blame him?) I think a little more meat on that character’s bones would be helpful, with him showing up late in the proceedings with a turbulent ex-marriage to Conway that we just can’t get into in the time allotted. Perhaps that’s one for the next iteration.

I knew from the introduction that there had been some nips and tucks here which, saints forgive me, I didn’t then notice*. However I think that speaks to these being good choices: nothing that interrupts the flow has been lost, nothing is more confusing in the new edit. (*On reflection I’m pretty sure various references to earlier books have been cut out, which makes sense given when this book came out.) It’s still a bit surprising to me that such a relatively short book could stand to lose a few pounds, but I suppose that could go for any length of writing. I still feel that there’s room for expansion, and I know that’s an altogether redundant observation when we know another revision is coming. Should I make predictions? Would they be doomed to fail? I’ll keep it brief then, and minimise disappointment: I still want to feel what is happening on all those worlds on a more visceral level. Feel it, see it, not just hear about it. I would like to know Con(a)way better, especially since she has an unhelpful ex on the periphery, perhaps mainly because she’s with the Doctor more than Sam has occasion to be. And the last gasp of the story, for my money, deserves to let its breath out more slowly: Sam’s escape from this latest form of possession and her reckoning with what she’s been through here ought to be fully on the page, not merely a thoughtful few paragraphs and then the purview of the next book(s) in the range. (To be fair, Simon Messingham got some mileage out of it.)

Beltempest is an odd duck, and perhaps inevitably so is its Intermix. I don’t think it can be disputed that this is a stronger version, albeit not a wholly transformative one. It’s tighter and at times clearer. I think there’s a case to be made that isolating it from the series makes a stronger statement of its characters, although the overall tensions I found within the story — events on a scale that can’t be translated by smaller beings, or even perhaps readers — still persist. It’s still a book that seems aware of the distance between action and understanding, even putting that into the plot with Sam’s frustrated psychic communications and visions, but can’t quite resolve that into a book that feels its feelings. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s all to come in the Director’s Cut and maybe the Director’s Cut will do something else entirely. Here and now I’d say the Intermix is the best way to visit Beltempest. But still not, by its own stated definition, the best we’ll ever get.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #34 – Beltempest by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#17
Beltempest
By Jim Mortimore

If you thought Eye Of Heaven seemed a bit small scale for Jim Mortimore (at least until the bit with all the interplanetary portals) then maybe Beltempest will be more your speed. It’s in a similar mould to books like Parasite, dealing in massive and weird spatial phenomena with planets aplenty. It arguably has an even greater scale than that earlier book — so it’s surprising that it comes in noticeably below the standard 280 pages of a BBC Book.

As per Pieces Of Eighth, the writing for Beltempest wasn’t the happiest of Mortimore’s career. The book came in “short and late” as a result. This is good to know, because Beltempest has issues, some of which make a bit more sense when you bear that in mind. But in other areas I wonder if there were just fundamental frictions in what the book was going for.

The Doctor and Sam find themselves facing a solar system in crisis: the star Bel is dying at an absurdly fast rate, throwing out fluctuations that affect the dozens of celestial bodies in orbit. Various races and factions are at risk and they are scrambling. The Doctor and Sam are separated (only for most of it; they meet up in the middle), with the Doctor helping the military to stabilise the situation/find a solution and Sam falling in with a surprisingly effective resurrection cult.

It’s worth mentioning that the arrival of another huge star/planet/space problem rankles a little when we only just had that in The Janus Conjunction, and my review of that was already complaining of the format getting familiar. That’s not to say Mortimore doesn’t do anything interesting or new with it here — just that, well, was there something in the water in 1998 that made everybody write about space disasters? He seems aware of this, at least, putting in a couple of polite nods to Baxendale’s book: “What was it with suns these days? [Sam] thought of the near-disasters Janus had brought about, and wondered if the Belannian sun was being manipulated in the same way.” / “[The Doctor] wondered vaguely if the TARDIS had got a bee in her bonnet about wayward suns at the moment.”

And to be fair, this is different: this time billions (trillions?) of lives are in danger across multiple inhabited worlds. The story, admittedly in this respect also like Janus and various others, deals with events set in motion aeons ago by an ancient race, but the details are all Mortimore: the “alien beings” are so unlike anything we’d recognise that they wouldn’t even know we were there, living their lives on a scale we can’t comprehend. This is big picture stuff.

Is it too big, though? Enormous numbers of people die in this and it’s very difficult to feel the weight of that, firstly on a personal level, secondly when it happens over and over again. The crisis does boil down during a hectic moment when Sam is literally overrun by thoughtless fellow refugees; she ends up briefly caring for a young boy she calls Danny, who shortly afterwards goes back to his parents, but leaves her with something to think about. There are also attempts to focus the action on some of the military personnel the Doctor is working with, particularly a stressed doctor called Conaway, but these are quite fleeting. The action is at times so globe(s)trotting that I felt I’d missed a character’s introduction, or couldn’t quite keep track of what planet or spaceship they were currently on. The novel’s running commentary of widespread disaster becomes somewhat numbing after a while.

This, though, feels like a deliberate theme. Beltempest opens and closes with a commentary on the lifespan of stars and celestial bodies, how incalculable they are compared with our own. There are other bits like the Doctor’s discussion with Conaway about how we wouldn’t be able to interpret the signals of an ant trying to talk to us. And just generally there are nods to the incomprehensibility of scale like: “The chaos was indescribable … Individual identities no longer existed.” / “Sam did not know how many of the refugees, the crews, were dead, or how many more were dying. All she knew was that she couldn’t do anything about it.” / “Sam wanted to watch what happened but it all took place on a level beyond the perception of human eyes. The second most significant thing she would ever experience and she could not sense it in any way.” It gets so that when the Doctor casually says “I’ve saved more than a hundred billion people in the last few days,” my first thought was is that good then? compared with the number they started with. (My second thought was did you actually?, since it’s mostly just the deaths we hear about. There isn’t time or, in 250 pages, space to go and meaningfully hang out with the survivors, or get much of a feel for their now dead worlds.)

I don’t really know what wider point to take from the scale of all this besides, after a while: well that’s a lot isn’t it? Or: some forms of life are beyond our understanding. Which is interesting, but on an academic rather than an emotional level, for me. When the problem is finally resolved, it comes in a way that doesn’t exactly stop the death toll so much as put a cap on it, which is… still pretty horrible, but with an SF upside that again we are too small to comprehend or feel very pleased about. Our departure from Beltempest is sharp indeed, with no time to decompress. Then again, how long would have been enough?

Perhaps the best way to boil down this sort of chaos, indeed the thing that makes Beltempest part of a series, is seeing it all through the eyes of its lead characters. Separating the two of them seems like a smart move to cover more ground, though again it’s already a popular EDA “thing” and it prevents/saves authors from having to write the Eighth Doctor and Sam dynamic, which really ought to have been a prerequisite post-Seeing I. Mortimore wasn’t sure what to make of Sam (which strikes me as editorially worrying — surely they had a decent style guide by now, especially after Seeing I?) and the result makes that feeling fairly clear.

On the plus side, there are plenty of references to her recent adventures — Janus, Vanderdeken’s Children, Placebo Effect, Seeing I, so basically he read or was briefed on all the latest books which is good — so there is a textual understanding of where the character is at. But the general beats in Beltempest mostly concern growing up and making her own decisions — something she hasn’t noticeably been prevented from doing by the Doctor, especially after Seeing I. Her quest to save lives here feels authentically Sam-ish, as does the very human degree to which it goes wrong, though that feels like ground we should have sufficiently covered by now. (And what are we saying there? She’s a good person but like, calm it down a bit?) There’s an out for that, but it’s unlikely to be popular: Sam is quietly possessed by another unfathomable form of life (as part of the cult she falls in with) so she gets to make some crazy decisions towards the end. This is definitely a Sam trope by this point, as well as a general Doctor Who crutch for not knowing what to do with the companion, which authors have been using since Transit. The most interesting Sam moments here are arguably when she grapples with fake memories, implanted by some other unfathomable alien guys in order to motivate her. But even there, the fact that those aren’t her memories leaves the exercise curiously light on any lasting effect, just as her overall possession — as in Kursaal — means that in psychological terms, it weren’t me, guv, so there’s no need to worry about it.

This leaves us with the (Eighth) Doctor, who does at least have some reference footage to work with, but again it feels like some sort of style guide would have been beneficial. The Doctor here is a being of “manic intensity,” literally bouncing around and losing his thread in ways that annoy pretty much everyone around him, including Sam. (“He was behaving like a little kid; a rich kid, with too much money and no common sense, abandoned by irresponsible parents to amuse himself at the expense of the local townsfolk. When was he going to learn? You didn’t earn respect by being irresponsible.” / “Aellini felt anger build. ‘Lives are at stake here.’”)

Mortimore is historically great at writing the Doctor, particularly at suggesting his weird depths and oddities, but despite a reference to this one being “different now … younger, more mature,” his default setting seems to be a guy on springs with an IV hooked up to some lemonade. Which, to be fair, he sometimes was in the TV Movie — but only sometimes, and that was specifically a story about him just having regenerated, so he perhaps had an extra few screw loose. Perhaps this likeable sugary quality is a deliberate tonic for all the chaos around him here. There certainly are some delightful moments that brighten the mood, such as a cheery whip-round to borrow clothing to plugs holes in a spaceship before they imminently decompress, or a prison wheeze where he constructs a “deadly weapon” just to encourage the guards to let them out faster. But that cheeriness can seem a bit crazed in context, even in the context of Sam: “Every few moments he would hum distractedly. Then he would stop, as his thoughts turned inevitably to Sam, then, putting aside the pain of loss, he would start again.” Perhaps that sort of disconnectedness, and his levity in general, is part of the book’s (maybe) theme of unfathomable beings — the Doctor too is beyond us, beyond normal considerations for things. If so, that’s not a bad take, but in the context of recent novels (of which Beltempest is specifically aware) in which he has nearly (or actually) lost Sam and moved mountains to get her back, it doesn’t ring true.

As is often the case in these books, Beltempest has some great ideas. I loved the concept underpinning it all, the reason for the planetary weirdness. (I was less keen on the religious cult and the overtly nudge-wink Christ imagery, but it very much seems like there was something in the water for Mortimore to write that the same year as The Sword Of Forever.) Exactly why the ideas come at us the way they do here, in great breathless blasts or in casual comments or in sudden late interludes containing vital information, I don’t know. From context it seems that the book wasn’t finished to Mortimore’s satisfaction, which is probably it, hence a newer and expanded version in the works ala his earlier rewrite of Blood Heat. Giving Beltempest more room to breathe seems like the best course of action: maybe throttle some of that carnage into view for us, and make us truly feel the difference between e.g. “Belannia VII” and “Belannia VIII”. Would it even make sense to break this stuff down, though, or does that go against the point of the book? I’ll have to wait and see. In this incarnation however, Beltempest is very much the thing that it portrays: a massive event in space that we can’t possibly hope to fathom.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #33 – Matrix by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#16
Matrix
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

This one’s quite ambitious for a Past Doctor Adventure. That’s not to denigrate the ones we’ve had so far — if anything, I’ve found them consistently more enjoyable and better at embracing their format than the Eighth Doctor books. It’s just that the kind of characterisation you get in Matrix feels more appropriate for characters that are the “main” ones in your range, rather than rotating guests of the week. Which I suppose is another way of saying that Matrix reminded me of the New Adventures.

Perhaps that’s not surprising as Tucker and Perry (or in this case, Perry and Tucker — is that significant?) are so far the only BBC writers working in that period after the TV series ended. Similarities will suggest themselves. Their earlier Illegal Alien covered similarly familiar ground after so many other writers had spent time in that sandbox.

The familiarity isn’t quite so literal this time, although for a few reasons Matrix does end up recalling Nigel Robinson’s Birthright. (Another Doctor-lite story set against Victorian squalor with a malcontent Time Lord pulling the strings.) It’s the general sense of weirdness I’m talking about.

We open with a mysterious hooded figure in an unknown location being all ominous. (Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!) He sends a clay fish monster after the Doctor and Ace. It finds them already in odd moods, the Doctor feeling so out of sorts that he expects Ace to leave him at any moment. (Ooh, moody! What does that remind me of…) When the fish guy assassin doesn’t work out, mysterious hooded guy communicates through the TARDIS before seemingly blowing it up, except that was only a vision (weird visions, you say?), followed by a nightmare hallucination of dead soldiers who are all actually Ace. (Guilt about what the Doctor has done to Ace? Interesting…) Around this point the Doctor removes the TARDIS telepathic circuit, fearing it was helping the malign presence.

All of this is in the first 30 pages, by the way, and we’re not done with the setup yet. Next there’s a stopover in 1963 (hey, the 35th anniversary was coming up) where it appears that history is out of whack: there’s no longer a TARDIS in Totter’s Lane, but London does have marauding evil spirits, packs of youths with blades strapped to their fingers and an armed curfew. Initially seeking to leave Ace with his earlier self (don’t even get me started) the Doctor miraculously bumps into Ian and Barbara, who helpfully fill in some blanks. It seems there were now more than five murders by Jack the Ripper, to which Britain responded somewhat excessively thanks to a vaguely-defined spectre hanging over them ever since. The Doctor decides to go back and sort this out.

(We’re nearly done with the setup.) On arrival, the Doctor loses his mind and tries to kill Ace. Tossing the telepathic circuit, the two then separate, Ace to find some degree of safety and the Doctor — now amnesiac — to hopefully find himself. But it’s a particularly nasty Victorian London they find themselves in, and it won’t be pleasant for either of them.

And that’s Matrix, or at least the majority of it: a saunter through a dreary and dangerous city with murder in the air. The bonkers list of events that got us to that point feels like a fever dream once you’re actually past it, which in its way also reminds me of the New Adventures. They often swerved into wonky, slightly overreaching oddness in character and setting, especially in the early days where you were more likely to bring up character beats from TV episodes, which of course Perry and Tucker also love doing. It’s all a little bit messy in that “we haven’t quite figured this out” way.

The pace slows considerably once we’re into the story proper, although the authors keep it moving superficially with the use of short chapters and frequent scene changes. (I think I’ve made my feelings clear on this type of pacing: my attention span no-likey.) Ace has a fairly terrible time, ending up in a circus against her will because of an apparent relapse of the cheetah people virus from Survival. (Ooh, TV continuity! See also London 1963 = Remembrance Of The Daleks, creepy Victorian dresses = Ghost Light, circuses = The Greatest Show In The Galaxy. There are also a couple of Time And The Rani and Paradise Towers refs for the true collectors.) Probably the best stuff here is Ace’s growing camaraderie with Peter, a browbeaten young man working for the dreadful ringmaster Malacroix, along with the freaks and circus acts. Nevertheless, Ace’s animalism never comes under particular scrutiny beyond a surface aversion to behaviour like that — the authors more than once revisit the Survival line “if we fight like animals, we die like animals” and that seems to be the extent of it. Ace committing an actual murder is swept aside in the book’s closing pages; if we were back in the New Adventures there’d be a chance to pick up on that later on, but as it is we’ll have to hope Perry and Tucker find it interesting enough to revisit next time around. (Given the Doctor’s loosey-goosey reassurance that neither of them was in their right mind at all this week, I doubt it.)

As for the Doctor, who in many ways this book is about — well, is it, though? The villain is intensely invested in the Doctor and determined to break him, but after his upsetting swerve into potential homicide (with an honourable mention to his very odd mood at the start) the Doctor practically exits the story, the telepathic circuit seemingly taking on the role of the cricket ball in Human Nature and keeping his Doctorness tantalisingly out of reach. (As in that novel, a secondary character here becomes fascinated with the Time Lord totem. You’ve got to assume Perry and Tucker read that one, right?) Instead we’re in the occasional company of “Johnny,” who is taken in by Joseph Liebermann, a kindly Jewish man of indeterminate age who knows a thing or two about regret. (He thinks Johnny is the Ripper, feels sorry for him and takes him in anyway.) Plenty of hints are dropped that Liebermann is more than he seems, and certainly older than any human, including in interludes sprinkled through the book. It’s a nice idea but I never really saw the relevance. He mostly just keeps “Johnny” out of harm’s way until, due to sheer circumstance, the circuit finds its way back to him and the Doctor is finally back in.

Unlike Human Nature, which to be fair isn’t much of a parallel to Matrix beyond a few loose plot points, the Doctor hasn’t learned much or grown in the intervening time. He just didn’t do the ending yet, and then he did. Which brings us to there not being a lot of actual story here. Atmosphere, certainly: try setting a story in Ripper-era London and not having sickly fog seep through the pages. But I was mostly waiting around for Johnny to get his groove back. Ace, for her part, seemingly does the same. She has no real plan here except to kill time; she doesn’t, and perhaps needn’t fully reckon with the idea that the Doctor might be off his rocker for good. (To be fair, she’s right to have faith, but that’s only obvious to us because we know he’s the main character in a series — in a previous-continuity story, at that.) The only person here consciously moving things along is the bad guy, and even he’s taking his time.

The villain in Matrix is clearly meant as a twist, so I’ll be a good sport and not say who it is. What I will say is that I think making it a twist hurts the book. This is a character you could do more with — this whole thing is a rematch so clearly the authors agree on that — and yet holding back who they are, and holding back any character recognition of who they are until that moment, doesn’t leave much room to work. What can you squeeze into forty or so pages? Doctor, it’s me, I still have my pre-existing grievance but this time I’ll definitely win? All that earlier wiffwaff involving spectres and clay monsters only becomes interesting once the novel puts a name to it — in particular, the identity of the villain’s gang opens a huge can of worms, the contents of which we’re simply not going to investigate. Spoilers in books have value, but this one might have been more effective if they had ripped (Rippered?) the plaster off, stuck the baddie on the cover and kept the Doctor in his right mind. Making it a little bit of a fair fight is surely more interesting than no fight.

The implication that the Doctor to some extent committed the Ripper murders is only marginally more tasteless than writing an SF reason for the murders in the first place, but in any case, thanks to the time crunch it’s as effectively meaningless as the murder Ace commits. Matrix has by this point already shown its quality at dispensing information, with a truly diabolical info dump about Ian and Barbara’s alternate history early on and some clunky exposition about Gallifreyan technology near the end — not to mention the crazy pacing of the first act. You can see the skeleton of a dark and disturbing story about who the Doctor is and who he could be, but the book’s choices simply don’t take us to the centre of that, instead ticking off creepy images and famous murders to speed-run a bit of atmosphere. Matrix is hardly terrible (it has that atmosphere after all) but it makes the sort of awkward missteps that a full series might later course correct. The Past Doctor Adventures simply don’t have that luxury.

5/10