#38
The Quantum Archangel
By Craig Hinton
Well look, if anyone was going to write a sequel to The Time Monster — that barmy Season 9 closer with the silly bird man and also Atlantis for some reason — it was probably going to be the guy that wrote GodEngine.
It was hard to have particularly high expectations for this one. Craig Hinton has certain habits that don’t exactly bring a novel together, shall we say, but he has written well before. That was mostly in Millennial Rites: a Sixth Doctor and Mel book that took a creative approach to the Valeyard problem. This one has the same Doctor/companion combo, so we’re off to a good start. It’s then just a question of “which Craig Hinton are we getting”: the one who has an actual idea for a book, or the one who came here to reference continuity and chew bubblegum and he’s all out of bubblegum?
Sadly it’s the latter. The Quantum Archangel hits every possible self-indulgent traffic cone on its way to being good. It might not be the worst PDA so far (can I interest you in The King Of Terror?) but it joins the ranks of the least effective and the worst written; not for the first time, I’m wondering if the editing process for the PDAs at this point consisted entirely of checking that the page count = 280.
You can’t really critique a Craig Hinton book without mentioning fanwank. (It’s one of life’s little ironies that he is credited with naming it, yet he is one of its most enthusiastic purveyors. I think we need to accept that he probably meant it as a compliment.) Sure enough, The Quantum Archangel is another example of Hinton making so many unnecessary references to things that he must be trying to win a bet. Got the Master in his TARDIS? Well then, why not have him catalogue the various adventures that led to his current physical state, such as Traken and Sarn? Why not have him look at components and remember that he nicked them from Sontarans and/or Rutans? Why not have him recall previous disguises and pseudonyms while he’s devising new ones? (I could say “because it’s not very interesting for a villain to stand around recalling trivia,” but I doubt that the editorial process got as far as asking him about that.)
It’s not just the Master, of course. Everybody, including the disembodied prose, is in it to win it continuity-wise, so we get nods to earlier canon that might be relevant (The Time Monster, Millennial Rites, Business Unusual, Divided Loyalties and — pushing it — The Trial Of A Timelord), nods to things that have nothing directly to do with any of this, but why not eh (e.g. a comparison to the Animus, or locations you might recognise such as the Doctor’s almost-hermitage in The Twin Dilemma) and nods to off-screen adventures, just for fun (featuring Quarks, the Voord, Krotons, Bandrils, Daleks, Yeti etc). It even goes beyond Doctor Who, with chapter names borrowed from mostly inappropriate song titles. (Total Eclipse Of The Heart? Really?) I know there are people that love this sort of thing but for me it has the cumulative effect of making this feel not really like a novel or a story at all, more a series of forum posts with linking material. It’s just bonus stuff sprinkled on already heaped piles of stuff.
Here’s the thing though: I think it goes beyond fanwank. Hinton, no doubt amusing himself greatly all the while, seems genuinely unsure how to distinguish between prose that advances the story and prose that just adds more words. Sentences groan with trivia, whether it’s Doctor Who quiz fodder or just general TMI about the characters. Here’s a typical example, employing punctuation the way you might use chewing gum to hold an old car together: “When he had got back from the physics symposium in Copenhagen — a day early, due to the fact that (a) there was nothing being discussed that was of any interest to him whatsoever, and (b) he had spent most of the week attempting to avoid that old fraud Winterdawn hurling himself around the Copenhagen conference centre in his souped-up wheelchair — he hadn’t gone to the flat; instead, he had come straight to the university — to the TITAN Array, hoping to see Arlene, to surprise her.” Did we need all of that? Did all of it belong in the same thought?
When not overloading us with asides and bonus material The Quantum Archangel indulges an arguably even worse habit: filler. Every character’s inner voice is leaden with dreary rhetorical questions, pondering each line of dialogue and then second guessing every thought: “Hard facts hit him like a bucket of water. How could he return home? How could he face the disapproval and accusation of his peers after the events of Maradnias?” / “He had to choose between emergencies. There were more important considerations that were even greater than a night in one of the best restaurants in the universe. Even greater considerations? Yes, much greater.” / “Friend? Once, long ago, the Master had been his best friend.” (Those are all from the Doctor. Here’s a winner from somebody else: “At that moment his body convulsed in pain and he doubled up in agony. Was he having a heart attack?”) Why can’t they thrash these questions out in dialogue or action? It makes them seem passive, processing the story around them or privately relating it to trivia instead of doing something about it. It matters when characters aren’t dynamic. Between all the fanwank, the overstuffed character detail and the bland introspection it’s an incredibly inert book.
This is at least a bit surprising as The Quantum Archangel has a few ideas that could — if you were the least bit interested in trying — have made for a pretty interesting story.
We find the Doctor and Mel at a crossroads, him having spectacularly misjudged a situation on the planet Maradnias (leading to the deaths of everyone on it), her wanting to leave the TARDIS in disgust, which she then does. What will become of Mel? What, given what we know about (nyurgh) continuity, will happen to bring them together again?
Then we have the book’s really big idea. After about 180 pages spent mucking about with the script for The Time Monster we finally meet the title character: a godlike but flawed entity who wants to make everyone’s lives better by shifting them into timelines that maximise their potential. A benevolent god that nevertheless must be stopped is a terrific twist on the usual fnar-fnar bad guys, and it opens up possibilities for parallel realities. You could write a fairly off-the-wall novel using these realities as a starting point; The Blue Angel, Falls The Shadow, Oblivion and Unnatural History all did something similar, but that’s no reason not to give us the Craig Hinton version as well.
The Quantum Archangel comes to this idea too late to really make a go of it. We get a few alt-histories for the Doctor (now commanding Gallifreyan armies against the Daleks), Mel (now Britain’s Prime Minister facing a Cyberman invasion) and the various physicists they’ve been hanging around with for most of the book. These realities clearly aren’t going to end well so a literal deus ex machina character plucks them all back to our reality instead. Easy peasy, so there’s no need to use these alternatives to reach any new conclusions, for instance with Mel who specifically needs a bit of context for her character arc. Instead it’s just a bit of colour towards the end. What a waste.
That inability to capitalise on ideas runs all the way through the book, which spends great swathes of time trying to dazzle us with enormous space and time phenomena — at one point the Doctor and the Archangel literally throw moons at each other — but Hinton unloads it all in great sweaty heaps of telling rather than showing. He harps on and on and on about incomprehensible things like Calabi-Yar Space, the Six-Fold Realm, the Lux Aeterna, the TITAN Array and (Time Monster fans are eating well tonight) TOMTIT, all while the characters stand around in the TARDIS hearing about it, unless it’s the prose unspooling it for our benefit, in which case it’s just piled over the characters making it doubly hard for anyone to do anything. Before long my eyes were passively rolling over the words. It’s truly tedious stuff, all the scale of a sci-fi epic somehow played out interminably in a small room with a scanner screen.
It’s not much better on a character level. Hinton has specifically served this Doctor and companion well in the past, moving them a little beyond the limited dimensions they often had on screen. Apparently he’s had enough of that now, so the Sixth Doctor is back doing his “repeat a word three times to show incredulity” schtick. Mel spends most of the book out of the way altogether, either trapped in the Master’s TARDIS or thanklessly stuck in a physicist throng in the Doctor’s — which is not great for a character in crisis. But then, presented with a golden opportunity to interrogate her life in the TARDIS, she just ping-pongs arbitrarily between viewing the Doctor as a lost schoolboy and a malevolent menace, before simply picking the nice alternative and choosing to come back. For good measure her hesitation is eventually blamed on an external force, so perhaps there wasn’t really a dilemma at all. Terrific. (I don’t much like the dilemma, while we’re at it. Maradnias is one of the few times in the book that Hinton shares too little information, which makes Mel’s response seem harsh right from the start. We all know the Doctor meant well, and it sounds like getting them to blow themselves up was the last thing he wanted, as well as it being, y’know, their choice.)
The supporting cast aren’t an improvement. The Master has more to do here than in most of his novels, but he flip-flops allegiances and falls on his face so often that he ends up looking utterly hapless. As for the academics the Doctor and the Master are lumbered with — one of whom is a supporting character from The Time Monster, much rejoicing! — it’s hard to get invested, despite tripping over them every other page. It’s like sticking the Doctor with several Liz Shaws, minus the personality.
If you’re a big fan of The Time Monster (hey, it’s a big universe, they must exist) then there’s probably a good deal to enjoy here… except that even as someone who mostly frowns through that story, I kinda doubt it? The Chronovores were the main threat in that one and again for most of The Quantum Archangel, but they barely feature in this book — I suspect because they’re just too massive a concept to really represent for pages at a time. (When Hinton tries to wrap our minds around really big concepts he ends up writing a half-baked reference guide instead of moving the story forward.) But then, if Chronovores don’t work as a menace for your book, why go to all the trouble of sequelizing The Time Monster at all? Surely it wasn’t just to write giggle-fodder lines like “I might be able to search for the Master through the TOMTIT gap!”, or to remind us of that strange piece of sensor equipment that looked like a metal willy?
I don’t think it’s uncharitable to assume that yes, that was the point. Hinton says in the afterword that he meant to write “a fun romp dripping with camp menace.” A contemporary review from the Doctor Who Ratings Guide quotes Hinton a little more specifically: “I set out (with the full backing of Justin) to write the ultimate in fanwank. Indeed, Justin even suggested areas in the first draft which he wanted uber-wanked. I just wanted to see how far I could go.” Which, I mean, you do you, and clearly the editorial staff thought it was okay too, but this is still a published novel that people need to pay to read. In my view, setting your sights no higher than making a small number of geeks laugh because they understood that reference seems like a pretty feeble use of the license and opportunity, not to mention the time of any reader not obsessively well versed in all the lore. And look, I know it’s a Doctor Who tie-in novel, and I’m basically describing most of the readership and myself there, but good god, don’t they ever want anyone new to dip into these? Can you imagine a casual reader sticking with The Quantum Archangel to the end?
Clearly this kind of navel-gazing self amusement isn’t my cup of tea. I do understand that it is for some people, and power to them, but I think this one fails on all sorts of other levels besides its litany of not-especially-comedic “in jokes”. It’s a space opera that’s suffocatingly stuck in the TARDIS console room, forced to describe what’s happening outside with diminishing returns; it’s a sequel that mostly just copies and pastes, until it finds its own genuinely good idea and then doesn’t know what to do with it; and it’s a less coherent idea with worse execution of the two lead characters than Hinton’s own previous effort that used the same ingredients. For all its cosmic silliness and meta winks it’s somehow boring too — a plot the size of the universe and yet no greater ambition than a pub quiz. But hey: I understood the references!
3/10
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