#25
Interference, Book One: Shock Tactic
By Lawrence Miles
First a bit of preamble. Interference is one book in two parts, so it would make sense to review it all at once. Nevertheless, I’m doing it in two chunks. There’s a few reasons for that.
1) I’m a glutton for punishment, apparently. 2) I’m not sure my memory is up to the task of keeping Book One entirely in reserve until it’s time to review Book Two. I barely remember Autumn Mist at this point. (Admittedly that might say more about Autumn Mist.) 3) A major reason for me reviewing these books in any depth is so that I’ll have something to remember them by — see 2) — ergo the more I write, the merrier I’ll be. And 4) as anyone who’s had to track these down via eBay can attest, Interference is still two books, like it or not; reading it does require two trips, so I might as well record what that experience was like. And while we’re at it, what, if anything, makes these books different. (Anecdotally: people seem to sell off Book Two more than they do Book One, which suggests to me that there exists a niche for just reading the first one. So I guess this is for you, weirdly specific collectors.)
Right away it has to be said that Book One is a tough subject to break down, precisely because it is not a whole book. (Whose stupid idea was two reviews, anyway?) This isn’t a story in its own right that ends on the promise of something more, like for example The Empire Strikes Back. (Or Across The Spider-Verse which is possibly better, fight me.) Apart from an almost trivial cliffhanger generously tossed in at the end, Lawrence Miles has pretty much just Finished The Bit He Was On here. Nevertheless, I think the first half of Interference bears examination. It doesn’t round off any plot points but it makes some pretty definitive statements.
For starters, there’s the fact that it exists at all. Interference is many, many rodeos deep into published Doctor Who fiction, but it’s the first bona fide two-part novel in the series. Sequels and “linked books” be damned — this is truly ambitious, particularly (no shade intended) the assumption that readers will come back/shell out for the second half.
It matters that this one has come along after so many prior books. An upside and downside of BBC Books picking up the license after Virgin is that backlog of material, delivering both an understanding of how to handle the format and a long list of ideas that are already crossed off. Since the relaunch we’ve already had a couple of celebratory novels that rapidly grew in ambition from “have lots of Doctors show up” (standard) to “alt-universe prequel” (decidedly not). There have been plot arcs, necessarily more so in the Eighth Doctor Adventures than the more chocolate-box sibling range; we’ve asked big questions about the companions and even disrupted that status quo a few times. Clearly, there’s life in the old dog yet, but even so the books are quick to wriggle back into an old groove, regurgitating character beats and munching the same plots and settings. (Nice alien artefact/ancient weapon/human colony you got there, be a shame if etc etc.) More than once it has felt like something’s gotta give.
It’s not entirely surprising that Lawrence Miles is the one to lob the hand grenade. Alien Bodies — despite being a delightful and fun little bag of ideas, seriously it’s a hoot — was the one to crystallise the idea that Sam Jones was not what she appeared to be, a thread that later exploded in Unnatural History. It also introduced Faction Paradox, the most exciting thing to happen to the Time Lords since Dead Romance. (Okay, that was later, but y’know — time travel.) He’s one of those writers equally entrenched in series continuity and a willingness to set it alight, and for better or worse, they’ve set him loose again.
On a creative level Interference (or at least the first half) is gagging to do things differently. There’s the two-book format of course, but also a framing device: the Doctor is telling the mysterious I.M. Foreman all about what happened. This curiously includes chunks of story he wasn’t a party to, and those chunks vary in format, with things like different time periods, transcribed documentary footage, diary extracts, plus real events and flashbacks interpreted by the characters as scripted action (we’ll get to it) at one point starring Brian Blessed. For good measure there’s a whole other story bolted on towards the end (or begun anyway — Book One strikes again) featuring a different Doctor altogether. And then you get to the ending and oh right, there isn’t one! You truly do get the sense that Miles wanted anything other than to write Just Another Doctor Who Book.
That sense of “do things differently” is baked into the story as well. This is no typical alien invasion or deadly spaceship encounter: the Doctor, Sam and Fitz have been roped into a mysterious arms deal going on in 1996, which involves the mostly human-seeming Remote, a group with an unusual reliance on television signals. Despite the lack of a clear-cut threat (or any clearer than “this shouldn’t be happening in 1996”) all three of the regulars are out of their depth, with the Doctor whisked off to a prison cell to be tortured, Sam stuck on an alien world with one of the Remote, and Fitz lost 600 years in the future to be drafted into Faction Paradox. The only convincing note of hope here is that the Doctor will eventually turn up in the framing device to look back on it all, but even then, the ever-present stink of Faction Paradox suggests that we shouldn’t get too comfortable.
It’s a bracing setup, grounded more than usual in disappointingly human concerns like arms deals and prisons, but all the same there are some familiar notes here. Fitz barely features and is then hardly missed — to be fair, the other two are having a sufficiently crap time that they wouldn’t notice — and to cap it off, indoctrination, again? Miles is no continuity slouch so Fitz’s similar experience in Revolution Man is front and centre here, but with so little time to develop it that simply feels like lamp-shading. Even Fitz seems to think, here we go again.
And then there’s the Doctor, also helpfully recalling a prior experience, this time another inescapable prison — Ha’olam in Seeing I — and while Miles makes it clear that this is an entirely different kind of inescapable prison, and an even more unpleasant one at that, it is still another one for this Doctor. Having your hero go through the same thing and have the same difficulties again threatens to make it a trademark. It would be like erasing his memory a second time. (Oh, too late. Perhaps a third, then. (Oh.)) It’s weird to be going anywhere near old ground in this sort of book.
Ah well: the specifics are where Miles makes his mark. There’s not much you can say about Fitz’s journey at this point — see you next week — but the Doctor’s prison stint allows some of the book’s themes to get up on their feet. He has a fellow prisoner, Badar, and they strike up a conversation about what the Doctor does and where the limits are. Specifically, why he can do what he likes on back-water planets but he can’t stop the everyday horrors on Earth. This is one of those things that exists out of boring necessity — if the Doctor changed Earth beyond recognition we, uh, wouldn’t recognise it any more — but here he’s allowed some justification. “Mankind is always spreading outward, towards the edges of the universe. And the universe is a big place. If I change history on some of the outer planets, the ripples usually only spread outward. Into the void. If I change things on Earth, the ripples touch everything.”
That’s not a bad explanation (although again, the real explanation is extra-textual), but Badar doesn’t buy it, and eventually the Doctor admits to having a degree of preference here. Miles is clearly a bit unimpressed by the Doctor on a fundamental level, and keen to demystify him. Indeed, there is no magic reprieve for his prison sentence here, despite a few astral jaunts to visit others for help. The Doctor, denied his usual tools and even the comfort of bad guys following a routine, has little to do here but lie on the floor and bleed. All of that might change in Book Two, but the important thing seems to be that we’re asking the questions. That, too, is a way to do things differently in a Doctor Who book. Do you always let the character get away with having an escape route, or always letting bad things happen to some people? I don’t know if these are things we can ever meaningfully change, but it feels like a milestone to address them.
Similar questions are asked of Sam, a character you sense right away does not enormously impress Miles. (In the foreword: “‘Political’ usually means that Sam’s going to spend the book lounging around in a Greenpeace T-shirt.” And in Alien Bodies, a novel I already praised for doing interesting things with the character, Sam barely had agency in said things.) Sam has occasion here to consider her political activism and how far along it has come — something novels like Seeing I already did, but hey ho: “The demonstrators were, by Sam’s usual ethical standards, Good People. They were more or less the same people she’d marched with in the ANL rallies, back in the early nineties … So why did the protestors suddenly look so ridiculous? Because the ANL marches hadn’t achieved a thing, maybe?”
There’s at least a sense that she has progressed from where she started — the story features Sam’s bedroom in 1996, pre-Doctor, and all the somewhat naive political posters therein — but then she is directly challenged on her moral stance by Compassion, one of the Remote. These bits echo the Doctor’s talks with Badar, only here I’m less convinced. Partly that’s because Miles already put some of these views into the foreword (so whether I agree with them or not, they feel a bit like authorial soapboxing), but also it’s because they’re just a bit obtuse, and/or examples of false equivalence. See: “You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with [selling weapons]. Why it’s worse than selling matches. Or motor engines. Motor engines kill thousands of people around here. More than shock batons do. So what’s so bad about what we’re doing?” And later: “People die all the time … Traffic accidents. But there’s no organisation in your entire nation-state that believes in banning traffic.” “But people who drive aren’t trying to kill anyone.” “So that makes it all right?”
I know Compassion isn’t necessarily to be seen as in the right here, but nevertheless Sam can’t seem to disagree, which is surely suggestive. I think there’s a pretty clear difference between mechanisms that can cause harm and mechanisms designed to do harm; the former has the possibility of refining its methods and improving safety, whereas the latter is ideologically opposed to that sort of improvement. Fire is a source of life, and it can be managed. People need to get to work, but they can take some precautions. Stun batons exist to attack. This is my own soapbox, I guess, but I think it’s cheating to go “these things are the same so a) nyer and b) Sam is foolish.” The suggestion also that Sam is just a trendy activist because she doesn’t care equally about all causes all the time is setting an impossible standard. I mean, come on, you’d go crazy otherwise. (For good measure Miles lets Sarah Jane, who is also in this, have it as well: “Sarah Jane Smith cried when she saw ET, but two hundred thousand people died in East Timor and it was all she could do to go ‘tsch’.” Yeah, everyone’s a hypocrite, we all suck, cheers Lawrence, please do keep on about it.)
Still, it’s somewhat appropriate to be asking these sorts of questions in Sam’s last adventure (or part one of it anyway). I had forgotten her sudden decision at the end of Autumn Mist to leave the TARDIS on their next Earth trip; the Doctor, in the framing device, confirms that this has now happened, so she’s on borrowed time in these pages. We’re not there yet, and there aren’t many opportunities for her to shine — not when the resolution is paywalled, dammit — but the use of Remote signals to trigger script-themed flashbacks allows her to get a bit more background before we leave her, specifically a dalliance with drugs that darkens her previously perfect record. (Maybe it’s a bleed-through from Other Sam; I forget how that works.) There’s also a maybe real-maybe not vision of her years from now at a friend’s funeral, lamenting how deep down she travelled with the Doctor just because she wanted to see the universe like anyone else, biodata and activism be damned, which feels rather honest.
It might be best to keep some of the specifics back for Book Two — after all, what it all means has yet to be made clear, so there’s no point trying to rate how much of it makes sense. To summarise though: the Remote seem like an interesting enough bunch, people whose decision-making comes from interpretation of random signals, mostly TV. The implicit satire of “letting TV do your thinking for you” is, well, that’s all there is really, but it’s interesting how essentially amoral they are. (Even if I think some of their arguments are full of it.) It’s not clear from Book One why they’re such a big deal overall, even with the shadowy backing of Faction Paradox; they possess a weapon or possible lifeform called the Cold, which ultimately seems to be what’s worrying everyone, but the nature and capabilities of that are mostly for Book Two to worry about. Which is fine, but the stakes don’t feel especially high when you stretch them out like this. On current evidence the Doctor, Sam and Fitz mostly seem to be up a creek just because.
There’s some delightful stuff on the periphery, particularly a post-K9 & Company Sarah Jane investigating, not to mention K9 coming to the rescue, not to mention an Ogron sidekick. (There’s some great stuff about the overlooked depths of Ogrons: “[Ogrons] give you poetry, and you hear it as… as meaningless words about rocks.” At the risk of overreacting though, I think Miles’ intentions get a bit muddy the more he draws attention to the inherent racism surrounding Ogrons. If you’re going to underline it and then keep writing about them anyway there’s a risk of circling back around and just doing it in earnest.)
There’s also the weird, exciting lurch into a Third Doctor story near the end — you’ll have noticed Perters on the cover, of course Miles has found a weird way to do a multi-Doctor story, lobbing a hand grenade into the Past Doctor Adventures as well as the more serialised ones. In sixty pages this creates a lot of atmosphere and suggestion of impending doom. From the Third Doctor learning about Faction Paradox too soon to the TARDIS randomly bleeding to a local authority figure refusing to comply with his charms, and even a smaller suggestive moment where the Doctor (rather than the companion) wanders off, something is clearly wrong here. Again though, it’s all setup and no payoff, so the atmosphere is all there is currently. There’s a ton of weird detail about a travelling circus that’s just weird at this point.
Halfway through, I think it’s fair to say that Interference hasn’t made itself clear, but it has grabbed attention. I’d be hard pressed to describe most of it as fun — prisons, cults, drug flashbacks, oh my! — but the constant variety in storytelling style keeps it at least engaging. The inclusion of Sarah Jane generally seems like a sweetener for all the rough stuff; it also has that same sort of generally amused undertone found in Alien Bodies, with cheeky meta nods taking aim at, among other things, the book itself: “Lord of the Rings? Too long. My attention span only stretches to about three hundred pages.”
Book One is interesting as an opening salvo but also as a shake-up for the range, so that even if you just read this one, there’s at least something to take away. It would be a stretch to call it really satisfying as an instalment — Book Two has the luxury of being what Interference is actually about, as Miles for all his experimentation can’t escape the latter half of a story being the bit where it all knits together — but I think it goes far enough out of its way to be at least memorable.
7/10
