Doctor Who: The BBC Books #50 – Autumn Mist by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#24

Autumn Mist

By David A. McIntee

New writer!

Well, okay, that’s a stretch. This was his tenth Doctor Who book — he must have been running out of room for his proverbial “Bought The” t-shirts — but nevertheless it’s the first and only Eighth Doctor book by David A. McIntee, so it carries a sort of novelty value for the writer and for the range.

There’s some novelty in the placement of the book as well. Not that readers in 1999 necessarily knew this, but we’re in the last gasp of the Sam Jones era, with her final adventure(s) coming right after this one. Autumn Mist sort of nods towards that imminent sea change, before very directly addressing it at the end. (It would be a stretch, however, to say the book is about that.)

While we’re looking for these things, I’d say there’s also something special about the characters in Autumn Mist. Always a fan of something he can research, McIntee uses as a starting point the Sidhe (pronounced “shee” according to Google) from Irish folklore; fairy folk, in other words. While he goes to some pains to make them a realistic presence in the story, explaining that they are as much from Earth as we are but they exist in multiple dimensions compared to our measly four, there’s something incongruous about fairies or elves in a Doctor Who story. It’s not the first time we’ve flirted with the fantasy genre (Witch Mark was… an attempt) but it helps us mark out Autumn Mist from the rest of the range.

McIntee was perhaps keen to try new things after writing so many books. Sure enough though, some of his recognisable interests or habits are on display here. It’s another historical novel, set during the Battle of the Bulge (so, Belgium) in late 1944. The action concerns people on both sides of the conflict, which means we can get a decent amount of detail on weapons and vehicles. (It’s the sort of thing that’s cool if you’re into it, grit your teeth and get through it if not.) Autumn Mist is a rare lapse for McIntee, however, in that the location is not strongly felt beyond generally being some cold woods near an abandoned town. There aren’t any locals to demonstrate what it is that makes this their home, and all the soldiers regardless of their allegiance want to be somewhere else. You could pick a different moment in the war for this story, in other words — maybe even a different war. (I wonder if some of that vagueness is down to me as a reader. There’s an implication early on of characters being transported somewhere else. After that happened, I think on some level I assumed this wasn’t going to be “true” history after all. Oh well, it is!)

You’ll have guessed this just from the war setting, but it’s a story with a lot of action — another McIntee staple, and a reliable one. Not long after the TARDIS lands the main trio are separated (from the TARDIS as well as from each other) and there’s something breathless about their one-thing-after-another endeavours. The characters are rarely far from a sudden ambush or a catastrophe, with soldiers getting killed left and right, and brutal violence being aimed at everyone including the regulars. The book’s final stretch is an onslaught of action that casually dispenses with several major characters — so casually that it threatens to transcend “war is unfair” commentary and just feel a tad underwritten, in all honesty, but he might well have meant to do that. The book’s deaths at least allow for some of McIntee’s trademark “put you in the moment” writing, like an early observation that someone’s “blood had stopped dripping … and had frozen into red icicles”; a massacre of the wounded seen from a terrifyingly close perspective; and one memorable death we’ll get to later.

The book is naturally a showcase for that often used habit of breaking up the action into short sections — hardly unique to McIntee, although he is very known for it. I think Autumn Mist keeps a tight lid on it, however, often using these little resets for something good. They can shift our perspective to the person on the other side of a conflict, or zoom us in a bit closer to one of the regulars who’s just out of shot in their own storyline. Then there’s the Sidhe, who exist on different planes of reality, meaning that McIntee can break up a page just so they can have a private conversation that the other person in the room can’t hear. That’s an elegant use of simple page formatting.

It’s tempting to talk about the nuts and bolts of Autumn Mist instead of the bigger picture, I suspect because the bigger picture isn’t hugely interesting. Something is interfering with the war effort in Bastogne: strange figures are causing people to see things and bodies to disappear. Something, or multiple somethings are communicating with the leaders on both sides — Lewis and Leitz are both found talking to invisible benefactors in their offices, encouraging them to work against their best interests.

A fair bit of this feels uncomfortably close to The War Games, and combined with the less-than-usually-well-defined historical setting it feels a bit blah as a setup in its own right. The character writing contributes to this, with the Americans getting at least some degree of definition (usually a hard-bitten desire to get the hell outta this mess) but the Germans barely featuring as characters. Too often they seem like unpleasant or psychotic baddies in a war film, or even just crash dummies, rather than people. Lewis and Leitz have similar names, probably for a bit of “all the same in war” theme, but it doesn’t help much with reading comprehension when they have similar aims too.

Beyond the war stuff we have the Sidhe, spooky ethereal weirdos who are experiencing problems because of the war. They’re definitely an interesting presence, one that I’d be interested in hearing more about in other books — I love this spin on the old “humans vs Silurians” dilemma where the “aliens” are so beyond us that we hardly matter to them. But as characters they’re not much, breaking down into a good Queen (Titania), a bad King (Oberon) and a guy who’s just there to share scenes with Sam (Galastel). Apart from a nameless unhappy Sidhe at one point held captive, there’s no visceral sense that they are endangered by what is happening to them; the very ethereal quality that defines them makes them problematic as protagonists. The closest we have to character traits are Titania’s flirtations with the Doctor and Oberon’s (sigh) villainy for the sake of it. His motivations are helpfully guessed at by the Doctor and he suffers a very typical baddie fate in the end. He was the least interesting Sidhe despite having the most plot.

As to the plot, McIntee toys with this quite charmingly when the Doctor explains things to the soldiers: “I can call it ‘magic’, with all the nice feelings of wonderment that that word inspires; or I can waste your time with half an hour of technobabble that you could never possibly understand a word of anyway. Which would you prefer?” I like that a lot — the Doctor writing is generally good in this, particular the description of him as “just a normal guy from a different planet” — but the book leans more technobabble regardless, with the plight of the Sidhe being a little vague and the eventual resolution being a lot of strained, dramatically removed faff involving different dimensions. (Fun fact: the nature of the rift [the thing causing all the ruckus] ties in with The Taint, of all books, but if you’re at all excited by the microscopic organisms from that story then don’t be: he finds no narrative way to make them interesting in Autumn Mist and barely refers to them anyway, so he might as well have made up his own thing out of whole cloth.) The only simple thing about it is the degree to which they need to dredge up the TARDIS in order to fix it, but that retroactively makes dumping it underwater feel like an excuse to make the book longer rather than an interesting challenge. Not to mention, “plug the TARDIS into it” isn’t a very high bar for a genius like the Doctor.

The Doctor is, at least, pretty well written here. He convincingly ingratiates himself with the Americans (not many opportunities to win over the Germans, alas) and he has that typical for McGann isn’t-he-handsome encounter with Titania, but we do miss a few opportunities along the way, such as a bit of potential grief (we’ll get to it) and the fact that he seems altogether blasé about the deaths of enemy soldiers.

Fitz has a much better time here, and he pretty much steals the show. Finding himself behind enemy lines (but thanks to the TARDIS, able to speak German) he somewhat sidesteps the awkwardness he feels about his German heritage and carries out some slightly Doctorish action without any prompting. There’s a marvellous bit where he tries explaining things partly by making them up (“it was kind of fun; no wonder the Doctor behaved like this so often”); there’s a whole sequence where he rescues a Sidhe because it’s what Sam would have done (“Sam would be proud of me, he thought. Go free, strange thing”); and when cornered by Americans, conscious of his historically suspect name, he immediately flips it to “James Bond”.

There’s a good amount of continuity with earlier books, although it’s pretty much all surface level. He’s worried about the implications of sleeping with Other Sam (barely anything is said about it, next) and when confronted with the Taint creatures he reflects that he’d really rather stop them so they can’t kill his mum and stuff, but oh well, can’t do that, next. Hey ho, there’s enough for us to confidently point at him and say, that’s Fitz all right. Autumn Mist is another good showcase for him as an offbeat companion.

Is it a good showcase for Sam? Well, I don’t think McIntee does a bad job of writing her, although she spends entirely too much of the book being somewhere else. (At one point she’s replaced by a duplicate — this again, huh? — and even the fake Sam mostly keeps quiet.) Her wit is present and correct. There are problems with her story, though.

McIntee was, according to Steve Cole, “very keen to kill Sam”. He’s not the first, so automatically that wouldn’t have much weight to do again, but the decision to have her murdered partway through Autumn Mist is a puzzling one. (NB: she gets better.) It’s unlikely to convince anyone that the Eighth Doctor’s best friend is dead for a couple of reasons. You do that sort of thing at the end, surely? The fact that it’s not is surely suggestive. And haven’t we done it before? Not just the killing her off part (The Janus Conjunction, Beltempest) but the aftershocks. This is the third book in a row (!) that tries to put the Doctor through the emotional wringer over losing his friend. He seemed discombobulated in Dominion; he was forced to confront it from another angle in Unnatural History; here, he’s simply a bit sad and accepting, even seeming cold to an American observer, and then he’s happy when it turns out she survived. Is he simply exhausted from feeling this way again and again? Was he hedging his bets, since she normally turns out all right in the end? I dunno, just as I don’t know if this particular repetition across the books was deliberate and intended to achieve something. Beyond McIntee’s reliably visceral description, however, and her well written Sidhe encounter afterwards, it’s a very ineffective beat.

Somewhat impressively, death isn’t her most noteworthy event in the book. Steve Cole contributed much or all of the final two pages, in which Sam abruptly says she wants to go home. Was it the death-followed-by-resurrection? The near miss with rape by German soldiers? The simple fact of death occurring all around her, again, and that finally hitting a tipping point? I’ll be honest, there are plenty of things in Autumn Mist that could set the stage for this decision. But there’s no through line in the text. (Other than her death, and that’s much more the universe tapping its watch than her doing so.) Sam, on the occasions when she is in this, does not seem to be weighing up her life and where to live it. Yes, she has a thoroughly miserable time in the book, but (apart from, y’know, dying) there isn’t anything here that says this should be the one that changes everything. She just says it and — for poignancy, but also inevitably because there’s less than a page to go — the Doctor barely reacts. That’s it.

This could absolutely have worked if it had been a prominent theme in the book. Instead, it’s a very obvious substitution by someone other than the author; a cheap soap opera cliffhanger instead of a heartbreak. Let’s hope Sam is able to really feel this and make something of it in her swansong — and let’s hope the editorial notes move more towards suggestions for changes than “give it here, let me do it.”

Despite complaints, I liked Autumn Mist. I think McIntee’s writing is quite strong in places, showing off some of his better qualities. The story however doesn’t get off the leash. The fantasy elements could be more pronounced, as could the historical ones. (The tie-in with the Philadelphia Experiment got a laugh out of me, at least.) He clearly can write for these characters, which makes it rather a pity he didn’t do so again; it’s just the choice of what to do with those characters that occasionally lets them down. At least they weren’t all his choices.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #49 – Storm Harvest by Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#23

Storm Harvest

By Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

The latest effort from Robert Perry & Mike Tucker opens with a dedication to Mark Morris: “for making us find a title without ‘deep’ or ‘blue’ in it.” This is rather apt as their book has some things in common with Deep Blue. Storm Harvest is another grisly, but otherwise traditional-as-all-heck monster mash. It’s another one that features bloodthirsty creatures from the deep. It’s another one that I read and enjoyed when it was first published and — happily — it’s another one that has more or less held up.

We’re following on directly from Matrix, so it’s understandable that the Doctor and Ace are in dire need of a holiday. They pick the ocean world of Coralee, which unbeknownst to them is not having its best summer ever. Ships are sinking without warning. A strange creature has been sighted around the colony’s control centre. A spaceship lurks nearby and its crew are itching to come and cause trouble and before long, everyone on Coralee will be at risk from the Krill — ravenous monsters that make the Daleks seem open to negotiations. Oh, and they’re due for a hurricane.

There’s bags of grisly incident to be getting on with. One area that distinguishes it however from Mark Morris’s latest is the characterisation. Perry & Tucker wrote their own potted Season 27 within the Past Doctor Adventures, with all their books following on from each other and several even having started life as scripts. That added continuity between novels means that we don’t have so much of the disposability that comes with a storytelling chocolate box like the PDAs. We can — hooray! — pick up on some of the trauma from earlier books.

But only some. There are references to how guilty the Doctor feels about almost murdering Ace before, and to what he almost became in that book. Ace, in turn, has a bit of mental processing to do about all this. We politely sidestep the possibility that he was the one actually committing the Ripper murders, which I suppose means that he definitively wasn’t; meanwhile, I couldn’t see any mention of the murder definitely committed by Ace, which seems to me like money on the table. Why write things like that and then drop them?

Her main drive in the novel is to support the Doctor and “to prove to [him] that he could rely on her.” She even gives him a pep talk, although she later has a brief unconvincing wobble with “Once again the Time Lord had arrived and taken control of people’s lives” before flipping back the other way because, somewhat implausibly, she believes she’s manipulating people too. I wonder if she’s just compartmentalising her feelings the way the Doctor does with necessary evils: when things get dangerous he creates “a space in his subconscious, a place into which he would push all the guilt when the time and opportunity came to destroy [the Krill].” Could Ace be parking her concerns because she feels sorry for his struggles in Matrix, and wants to give him the benefit of the doubt? (Let’s call that one headcanon, shall we? These books might be ersatz New Adventures in terms of when the stories take place, but that’s about as far as the parallel goes. Storm Harvest, while we’re on the subject, lacks the vintage NA weirdness of Matrix, being a lot more in line with their earlier gore-fest Illegal Alien.)

It’s tempting to say this is an interesting one for the Doctor. Still reeling from his identity crisis in Matrix, he’s immediately placed into danger here, but he has that moment of consideration (or at least compartmentalisation) for the Krill, and when he’s in the middle of a humans-vs-(not Krill) aliens uprising he’s forced to not pick sides, watching various humans die as a result. He escapes certain death by the skin of his teeth at least twice. Overall, he somewhat lacks his usual power and self-assurance, and because these books are a series within a series, it’s at least possible that they are Doing A Thing.

There’s some decent characterisation in the supporting cast, mostly in the (I use the term loosely) Malcolm Hulke-ian sense that members of a group or a species can act in individual ways. The aforementioned spaceship is controlled by the Cythosi, a group of hulking marauders who use humans as slaves and want to use the Krill as a biological weapon. Their leader Mottrack is as unpleasant as you could imagine, but second in command Bisoncawl has some layers, rejecting cruelty against the slaves and having an appreciation for art. The slaves are on the brink of a revolution but there are different views held within that, some (like Peck) being absolutely bloodthirsty and others (like Bavril) being more interested in a measured peace. One critical character is an undercover Cythosi, losing his physical shape and his mind flipping between one species and another — his loyalties fluctuate too, throwing multiple plans into chaos. There are also “cetaceans”, aka sentient dolphins that travel over land in a mechanical apparatus: two friendly ones can be found on Coralee helping various parties, while another is aboard the Cythosi ship aiding their attack out of a passionate hatred for land dwellers. (If you think that sounds like the Selachians, you’re right, it does. Given that the original angry underwater guys return in the next PDA, I’m surprised that the editors didn’t call attention to the similarities.)

The characterisation has its downsides — namely, a few too many characters, perhaps to better facilitate the differences between them. (Not to mention, a body count.) There are two experts on all things Coralee, who go on separate undersea expeditions at the same time, each with their own cetacean on board; I got confused flipping between boats. There are two female authority figures, both with a weight of responsibility that is tested by tragedy. (Helpfully, they are friends.) And there is Rajiid, someone Ace meets and — hey, we’re all grown ups — sleeps with. I like that Ace has reached a point where she’s confident enough to hook up with someone on her travels, but Rajiid really seems to be here just so her subplot (trying to retrieve a weapon that will stop the Krill) includes someone to talk to. I never learned anything substantive about Rajiid (or Greg, his partner in the boat tour business who until I checked just now I could swear was called Guy); Ace’s momentary consideration of inviting him about the TARDIS feels generous to say the least.

It’s perhaps fair to assume that people aren’t reading Storm Harvest for the characterisation. If they are then good, because there is some, but much more importantly: this is a novel where all involved were so excited about the monster that it was built and photographed for the cover. (The perks of commissioning a prop guru to write it!) I have no idea how the Krill might have been realised on screen, at least once you get past seeing the things; their sheer bloodthirsty frenzy would test a BBC budget as much as it would the censors. They work great in a novel though, initially as an unseen menace similar to the Sea Devils, then later as a relentless force that effectively puts any obstacle into a blender. They make for an excellent we’re-all-gonna-die level threat and there are some marvellous set pieces built around them, particularly a couple of tense submarine encounters and a horrible penny-drop moment involving an underwater tunnel.

I think Perry & Tucker realised that you can’t have all Krill all the time, however — they can’t be reasoned with so you either stop them, or you escape, or everybody’s dead and your story’s over. So we have some added machinations involving the Cythosi (an interesting but physically less clearly-defined menace) and the Dreekans (four arms and uh, not many other characteristics — look, the Krill are great). The plot is neatly worked out so that it makes sense we’re spinning more plates than just “look out, Krill”, but it must be said that if there is a weapon that will kill only Krill then potential modification of said weapon to kill whoever you like seems far more useful than the Krill themselves.

Ah well. Perry & Tucker moderate the Krill and thus leave room for suspense, as a threat like that means you always know what’s at stake. The setting makes for a very appealing base under siege: the colony is one of the rare pieces of land on this ocean world, making it uniquely vulnerable to aquatic attack. Scenes of them literally battening down the hatches in anticipation of a Krill attack and/or a hurricane practically ooze atmosphere, and made me wish there was an audiobook version of this with sound effects. The various ebbs and flows of violence are generally well apportioned; the authors do a good job of pulling back before the various onslaughts become monotonous, and — in figures like Ace and Holly — they make the chaos feel personal. It only occasionally goes a bit too far, such as a ritual killing that mostly just serves to thin the character roster and depress Ace.

Storm Harvest is unashamedly a giddy monstrous onslaught, and if you have the slightest inclination towards that sort of thing then you’ll want to batten down the hatches and ride it out.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #48 – Unnatural History by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#23

Unnatural History

By Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

The era of Sam Jones is almost over, but lucky us, there was another Blum & Orman book down the back of the sofa.

I doubt it’s in any way controversial to say that these guys write the best Sam stuff. It’s not that they’re the only ones who are good at it — Paul Leonard and Lawrence Miles are no slouches, and most EDA writers at least get the basics right. However, Blum & Orman seem the most actually interested in writing for Sam. They don’t just do it well, they make it the whole assignment. Vampire Science showed us what kind of Doctor/companion team we had now. Seeing I showed us how much they had grown. Unnatural History toys with the idea of not having Sam any more — perhaps more meaningfully so than the brief stretch of books where she actually left — and in doing so, it tells us in more certain terms why she is here, and what that means to her and to her friends.

I’m sure you’re as bored of me banging this drum as I am, so I’ll be quick: BBC Books rushed Sam’s introduction, and then never stopped paying for it. Sam just seemed like a cookie cutter companion, which left multiple authors unsure what to do with her apart from the obvious. Here was a 90s Ace, only without any trauma to fuel her actions. (Ah, I can already hear you saying, but that’s where the books come in. Cue multiple trips to the hospital for Ms. Jones…) She does what she does because that’s just what Doctor Who companions do, which makes absolute sense in a nuts-and-bolts storytelling way, but doesn’t do you any favours in a long-running series.

Was it always the plan for that sort of shiny blandness to be a deliberate act, in-canon? Some of Sam’s behaviour in The Bodysnatchers could be construed as an early hint. By the time of Alien Bodies, anyway, it was officially rubber stamped that she had a second set of biodata — another life, in other words, where she has dark hair and a drug habit. The Sam that we see in the books could suddenly be excused as not entirely whole; maybe there was another one out there to put her in context. But why? And would we ever see how the other half lived? Multiple books have since reminded us about Dark Sam — as she is somewhat portentously known, erroneously suggesting a goatee and a volcano lair — dropping occasional references just to keep the engine running. I tended to assume Lawrence Miles would be the one to pick up the thread proper.

Clearly he will to some extent, as some important questions are left hanging at the end of Unnatural History, as much concerning the Doctor as his oddly duplicated friend. In the meantime though, Blum & Orman take the opportunity to write The proverbial Dark Sam Book and, being Blum & Orman, get as much Samness out of it as possible.

How they go about this might raise a few eyebrows. Sam is gone: something finally snapped in her biodata and our Sam has been supplanted by her dark-haired equivalent, still very much Earthbound and not the person we know at all. The story opens with the Doctor, sounding much like a crazy person, trying to wrangle her help. (I love when stories start already on the move, and this one in particular made me laugh because of course page 1 of the final Blum & Orman book has someone turn up and say they know Sam Jones really well.)

In quick succession we meet Sam’s parents, who we learn have been receiving our Sam’s postcards whilst actually knowing other Sam* instead (*sorry, I can’t type “Dark Sam” with a straight face, I’ll stick with “other”) which suggests that this isn’t a sudden switchover at all, but rather a mess that goes backwards and forwards in time. It also makes a minor virtue of the slightly aggravating EDA habit of not visiting Sam’s parents or even really acknowledging the absence of their daughter: now, we couldn’t have gone back there without inviting a colossal mess. (Or maybe we could have. Don’t worry about it; certainties are not all they’re cracked up to be, at least in this one.)

We then encounter a member of Faction Paradox trying to get hold of Sam. (That messy biodata means a juicy paradox for them.) When the Doctor saves her life, that settles it, she’ll go with him — giving us arguably a more fully-formed companion intro than the one afforded to our Sam the first time around. Next stop, San Francisco, where our Sam went missing and things generally are in a bit of a state.

It’s quite daring to stick Sam, as in the proper one, in a separate dimension for almost the entire book. You might assume this derives from the same impulse as those authors who do their best to sideline her, but no: by replacing Sam with an almost-but-not-quite copy we can see the gap she leaves behind. Other Sam does this directly at times, commenting (usually with some bitterness) on the apparent perfection of her “goodie two-shoes” alter ego. “Was that all? Blonde Sam would probably have picked the kid up and carried him to the nearest police station so he could phone his mummy.” (Ahem, Beltempest.)

She doesn’t know the shorthand between the Doctor and her blonde self (putting her ironically in the same position as Fitz when he first joined), and lacks her immediately heroic instincts. She isn’t remotely as skittish about sex and romance with her two attractive male companions, giving the Doctor a massage that would have sent her primary self into therapy, and finding a human comfort with Fitz that would have been out of the question otherwise. She’s about as sarcastic as the more usual Sam, but here it doesn’t jar against an apparent starry-eyed commitment to her place in the TARDIS. (Other Sam, along with Blum & Orman it must be said, rather undersells Sam’s propensity for moaning all the bloody time.)

There’s a wonderful kind of mess about this Sam that is lived-in and deserving of life: she’s not a mistake, she’s just different, and coming from less overtly plucky beginnings has the effect of making her heroism (when it arrives) feel at least as earned as anything our Sam has done, if not more so because it’s so far out of her comfort zone. Other Sam has the opportunity to see what kind of life she could be living and she can honestly aspire to it because she’s seen the alternative. It helps our Sam make a kind of sense she didn’t before. At least someone’s out here reaching these decisions for actual quantifiable reasons, in effect repeating that opening “why yes I will go with you” set-piece on a bigger canvas.

Urgh. I’m going to say the thing, aren’t I? Yes, I think I prefer other Sam. I’m not convinced the deliberate falseness/double-biodata thing was always the plan, but either way, this version of the character plays out important beats in a more grounded and believable way. When she is placed in a moment of crisis at the end her heroic act has real weight; we can trace her journey from normal person to active protagonist. It’s deliberately heart-breaking that there isn’t room in this world for both Sams, but it’s perhaps more upsetting than was originally intended that it has to be this way around. The assignment could, I suppose, be considered a bit of a backfire as it’s not so much affirming what we’ve already got as showing us how much better this all could have been to start with. But I think this speaks more to the series’ handling of, or at least my enjoyment of the character as a whole. Ultimately Other Sam is Sam, and what Blum & Orman carve out of Sam(s) is really only confirmation that you can write depths within Sam Jones if you want to.

That’s not only true of Sam here. Unnatural History is an important outing for the rest of the TARDIS crew, continuing that process of showing us something by examining the gap it leaves behind. The Doctor and Fitz are clearly moved by the loss of their friend; an awkwardness hangs in the air as they implore her to help, all three knowing the optimal outcome here is that she will ultimately give up her existence for her better half.

Fitz is written at his best in the series so far, perhaps in part because he has that absence to work with, the better to define himself. He feels like a fully integrated member of the team, using his specific skills — mainly theatricality, also an irresistible amiability — to find out information. There’s a feeling that he really wants to be doing this, he knows he is putting these skills to good use. His usual brand of horny nonsense won’t work with this Sam, however, as she is more on his level to begin with, short-circuiting his gags. There’s a tangible sense that he misses his friend, but that he more strongly connects with this one. When they eventually sleep together it feels utterly natural, while also giving an outlet to Fitz’s sensitivity, as he supports Sam while her biodata keeps fritzing. (Something that occurs throughout the book, suddenly remixing Sam’s past and making her into someone new.)

He also has a moment or two of great heroism in this, and again these feel like they come from a real place, not just him signing up for the TARDIS life. Blum & Orman get mileage out of Fitz’s brainwashing in Revolution Man, itself an ideology with no basis in character — something not unlike Sam being a certain kind of way without having truly earned it as a person. When the Sams inevitably swap back at the end, and our Sam attempts to comfort him, Fitz’s familiar bitterness resurfaces for a moment; that cynicism, too, is made to feel more earned.

There’s a lot going on with the Doctor as well. (Indeed, you could write a book about it.) The plot and setting, surprisingly for a book so focussed on Sam, are really all about him. After the damaging events of the TV Movie a scar has been left in San Francisco, pouring out strands of the Doctor’s biodata and causing instability between realms, as well as in the city at large. Seemingly mythical creatures are roaming the neighbourhood while Faction Paradox, strange grey men and an even more sinister gentleman all observe. The TARDIS is as lost as Sam, put to work out of sight in a desperate bid to keep the “scar” from collapsing and causing total chaos. Before long a literal Kraken will awake and destroy the city, not to mention the Doctor’s biodata — and possibly his past and future.

First of all, how immensely cool and totally insane is it to revisit the TV Movie? We’re talking about a full on sequel to something legally off-limits for BBC Books (novelisation notwithstanding), and they went ahead and did it anyway. It gets really good mileage out of it too, building upon that earlier script’s scattershot weirdnesses like windows you can walk through to give us steep hills with varying gravity and unicorns, casual-as-you-like.

The concept of the Doctor’s biodata, torn apart by the Master’s machinations in that earlier story, allows us to dig into a few grand ideas about his heritage — not least of which is that blasted half-human thing, now fully recognised as a twist of the timelines, one possibility of many, and if nothing else the sort of inconsistency Faction Paradox eats for breakfast. Unnatural History is at times as nerdy as it is character-focused, throwing in among other things the fanbait mystery of Daniel Joyce (and his assistant who shares a name with someone in The Infinity Doctors), but there is meaning in how it for example juggles contradictory factoids about the Doctor, and makes the villain an obsessive categoriser who wants only to get his facts straight, someone “not interested in specimens that don’t confirm the theories he already knows. None of this messy ambiguity or complexity.” Griffin the “unnaturalist” is an archetype perhaps familiar to dwellers in fandom, but he also embodies the novel’s refusal to say that a person is one thing or another, just as simple as that. It’s a book about possibilities and uncertainties.

The Doctor is having a fairly terrible time here, having lost the TARDIS and Sam — again, it must be said, due to that unfortunate synchronicity with Dominion. (The authors do their best to recognise this but it still feels way too soon.) For what it’s worth, Unnatural History does it better by not having the Doctor at the whim of some agency for most of it and instead forcing him to confront and/or work around what he’s lost from the get go. Other Sam sees him struggling to cope aboard a plane — a little hint of the cabin fever he gets without a TARDIS, or simply being in one place at a time — and then generally leaving little things unsaid about his intentions towards her. She believes (in a thrillingly bleak moment) that he might simply throw her into the scar to get “his” Sam back. We can be in no doubt that he wants that outcome, but things are already too complicated to get it. His actions just before something like that finally happens leave a question in the air — did he engineer it? — and he refuses to answer, defiant that this uncertainty is part of who he is. There’s a rawness to how much he needs Sam and the TARDIS back, pleading with Joyce to hurry up and fix a gizmo that will aid him, negotiating with (and later ripping vicious strips off of) Faction Paradox, and at one point seemingly lying to the TARDIS itself that he won’t ultimately sacrifice it to save the city. Even he doesn’t seem to know sometimes — although to be fair, this close to the biodata equivalent of a random number generator, who would know for sure?

The Doctor’s ongoing crisis would perhaps be more satisfying if we hadn’t just had a very similar one before this — losing the TARDIS and Sam both times, for Pete’s sake — but again, it’s how you do it, and the situation here goes on to become a broader thesis on who the Doctor is; it makes the point that a loss of history won’t change who he is, he already changes fundamental tenets of himself just by regenerating; he must always cling to who he is now. This Doctor in particular discovered a foundational sort of happiness by forgetting his past. The story also, of course, demonstrates exactly how he’s come to depend on Sam when there are situations that visibly throw him and Fitz into disarray (or in Fitz’s case, heroic action) without her. It all comes back to that.

There’s heaps and heaps to think about, most of which I’ve hardly touched upon here. As I was reading it I was thinking about what I’d get out of it a second time. That said, Unnatural History isn’t perfect. For all the imagination of a San Francisco in this sort of cosmic disarray, there doesn’t seem to be room to meaningfully show it. The city feels incredibly small, with the action frequently ping-ponging back to the same alley with a special effect in it. We are told of things like dragons and unicorns but only briefly see them, and hardly see the reactions of the regular populace at all — there’s barely a supporting cast at that, although that’s perhaps deliberate in a character piece.

As fun as it is to throw out a mystery like Who Is This Daniel Joyce Guy Anyway (sources differ but it seems you can trust TARDIS Wiki here) it can be unpleasantly disorienting to wonder if you’ve forgotten something or someone from another book — and he’s certainly written in that way, just matter-of-factly being sought out by the Doctor. Blum & Orman are keen to play ball with ongoing plot arcs, toying cleverly with the question of who started this Sam biodata business and throwing out conflicting theories before definitively half-answering it (over to you, Lawrence), but some of this stuff does border on homework, which may or may not be your cup of tea. Mileage, and memory capacity may vary. (I’ve read The Infinity Doctors twice and I still missed some of the overlap in this. TARDIS Wiki ahoy.)

How much any of that matters (or is even true) will vary among readers, of course. I think there’s also a belief in some corners that the plot isn’t particularly strong. I have some sympathy with that, as there is a problem to solve here and there is a very nasty character seeking to gain from it, but everything that’s happening is really fallout from something else. Again though — does that matter? Unnatural History is all about the characters and the importance of understanding who they are in the moment. Surrounding them with chaos, not unlike replacing them with an imperfect copy, only serves to underline what matters.

8/10