#43
EarthWorld
By Jacqueline Rayner
The EDAs are back on track at last. Earth, shmearth! Now let’s all get in the TARDIS and go to… a place deliberately modelled and named after Earth.
That gag is fairly typical (in a good way) of Jacqueline Rayner, a very funny writer who has at last paused her editorial duties to write a novel of her own. She was already an experienced writer and adapter by March 2001, having worked on the early New Adventures-born Bernice Summerfield audios, written a sublime Evelyn Smythe introduction in The Marian Conspiracy and — showing a little of that Justin Richards/maniac work ethic — delivering a Benny novel, The Squire’s Crystal, one month after this. (Also very good.) BBC Books was lucky to have her working in this capacity, not to mention that it’s about bloody time we saw another female author around the place.
That sense of experience jumps off the page. It’s a confident and witty novel, sufficiently at ease with prose to pull off cloaked character insights like: “‘What was that?’ yelled Fitz, obviously forgetting that he knew everything”, and economical asides like: “Anji shot an alarmed look at Fitz, who tried to shoot one back that said, ‘Don’t worry, he won’t, only we might have to play along with it for now to get out alive.’ He hoped she got all that.” There’s a visible sense of panic to Anji and Fitz’s thoughts as they stumble over additional thoughts in parentheses or in lists; then, when Rayner needs to dial it back and apply subtlety or emotion, that’s handled with aplomb too, as in the final scenes with Anji. (We’ll get to it.) Although it’s not really a first impression for Rayner, it is as far as most of the novel-reading crowd is concerned, and it’s a good one.
EarthWorld has a lot to do, so it’s to Rayner’s credit that it somehow romps along the whole time while getting everything done. This is Anji’s first trip in the TARDIS, and it needs to establish that this will be ongoing. (Since she never actually signed up for it last time.) This is Fitz’s first off-world adventure with the Doctor after their separation — a state of affairs that more or less continued through Escape Velocity — and it needs to re-establish their dynamic, as well as clarifying anything that’s changed. And it’s the Doctor’s return to time-space adventuring after six novels stuck you-know-where, so it needs to throw him in at the deep end and see how he copes with it.
What it’s also doing, of course, is the same sort of thing The Burning did: this is a soft reboot, a Day 1 reset for the new TARDIS crew. You could jump on here — in TV terms, this would be the deceptively bright-and-breezy Episode 1 of a new series after a particularly turbulent Christmas Special. It makes sense that they selected EarthWorld for a reprint in 2012, as it tells you everything you need to know.
Unsurprisingly the character work is the highlight. The Doctor, for example. The Earth arc was a challenge for all the writers: the Doctor couldn’t use any of his usual tools, besides charm and intelligence. There’s a huge sense of relief now that he can whizz around using his sonic screwdriver again. There are moments of tremendous Doctorly power in this, such as a sequence where he appears to move unnaturally fast while an axe falls towards his neck, or even a simple rebuke like: “‘I am the President, Doctor, and you are an escaped criminal! I could stop you leaving with a snap of my fingers!’ ‘No,’ said the Doctor, ‘you couldn’t.’ Hoover looked at the Doctor’s face, and involuntarily took another step backwards.” He is also able to instil confidence in those around him, particularly Anji who by rights ought to be freaking out about all this. Overall, after the stuck-on-Earth run it’s like switching the lights on again.
But it’s not easy. Since we are (nyurgh) keeping the amnesia thing, there is a vulnerability to the Doctor, a sense that this could all come crumbling down. He doesn’t remember how to use the sonic, and can only do it subconsciously by distracting himself — a device Rayner craftily uses to raise the issue about Gallifrey: “‘What world, Doctor? Is this your home planet? Tell me about it.’ There was a loud click, and a buzz from the door. ‘What world?’ The Doctor paused. And then to Anji’s horror he shot her a look which froze her stomach. His eyes suddenly seemed dead. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’”
From Fitz’s perspective “he still seemed to be the week-ago Doctor … in all the ways that mattered,” but “if the Doctor was going to remember, he had to do it naturally. In his own time. So it wasn’t another sudden, Doctor-destroying shock.” Rayner contrives to bring a memory-scanner into the plot which introduces the idea of the Doctor remembering The Ancestor Cell and so on; suddenly Fitz has acquired the role of a caregiver, and actively works to stop this happening until the time is right. All clear signs pointing towards a new character dynamic, which is a good incentive to keep that (mostly hypothetical) influx of new readers reading.
I’m still not crazy about the memory loss, or convinced that it adds very much. As Fitz himself says, for all intents and purposes this is the Doctor and he’s doing all the right Doctor stuff. He wouldn’t need to remember Genesis Of The Daleks or Interference: Book Two in order to solve this particular crisis, and although the “use your subconscious” impediment adds a bit of whimsy to the sonic screwdriver he’s still pointing and clicking away problems with it. So… do we need this? The absence of memory isn’t even sparing the reader any continuity baggage, since Rayner happily provides plenty of that to tell us what he’s missing. So who’s it helping? I recognise that it gives the characters A Problem To Solve, it just doesn’t seem like a very interesting one.
Still, you do get that new look for Fitz. He didn’t get much opportunity to shine in Escape Velocity. EarthWorld is much more his speed, confronting him with his insecurities, his old life as a singer and more generally with the twentieth century, which this alien theme park completely misconstrues. It helps to underscore Fitz’s original time and place (again that sense of a soft reboot) as well as showing how much he’s moved beyond it. Taking care of the Doctor is a striking example of growing up, even if it feels a bit redundant as an arc. (He’s already giving “hey, remember Gallifrey?” a go at the end of this, albeit unsuccessfully.)
Fitz also gets his share of trauma. You might have thought he’d moved past the “duplicate” situation from Interference, but the setting of EarthWorld (aka android duplicates) gives him ample reason to dredge it up again. And really, that’s fair: people can move on from things and yet still go back to them under the right (or I suppose, wrong) circumstances. The Doctor isn’t himself any more, which gives Fitz even more reason to question the relationship between his memories and his real self. At one point Fitz is so distraught that he curls up into a ball and can’t function at all. (Yes, the Fitz in this scene carries a pretty big caveat, but to therefore dismiss it as “true Fitz characterisation” would sort of prove his worries to be correct.)
EarthWorld has its share of psychological horrors but it’s far from a gloomy novel: just as the Doctor is able to begin moving forward, Fitz finds some comfort to counteract his identity crisis. At one point he worries that he can’t die, so he immediately gets hurt, which pithily puts that to bed. He also meets a virtual version of Filippa, his girlfriend from Parallel 59 and the ideal ending for him in the series, who tells him: “Will you stop saying you’re an artificial construct? You are no more so than Compassion was, and you treated her as a person. To put it bluntly, you’re bloody real, Fitz.” So that would seem to be that — or at least until the next crisis sets him off again. (Here’s hoping the writers show some restraint with this.)
For perhaps the best example of setting up trauma as a starting point, then getting comfortable enough for more adventures, there’s Anji. A workable enough character in Escape Velocity, she nevertheless lacked spark. (It was a general character problem with the book.) EarthWorld gives a lot of real estate to Anji, how she’s feeling and how she responds to a more traditionally Doctor Who adventure, and it does all of this very well.
The character has a dry, pragmatic humour: “No network. Surprise surprise. So they were in the past — or on an alien planet — or, just possibly, in Wales.” Her approach is often to wonder about mundane things like how “she couldn’t very well stay in her room with a good book while the others went out exploring the universe, could she. Could she?” Her concerns include the very real dangers of impractical footwear. It all feels suitably apart from the more gung-ho Sam Jones, not to mention the aloof and otherworldly Compassion. (Fitz charmingly hopes that Anji will be “a more amenable travelling companion than the TARDIS bitch queen from hell.” Tell us what you really think, guys!)
Presented with a threat as “cartoonish” as the situation in this theme park, Anji’s thoughts occasionally drift toward tropes, which is a nice way into the meta world of introducing yet another Doctor Who companion. She wonders: “would the universe play by those fictional rules? Should she get a T-shirt printed with I’M A MAIN CHARACTER, DON’T KILL ME?” She’s nonetheless able to relate all this to her own experiences: “It was scary how such important things could dissolve into nothing. An entirely different perspective. Like how she’d been worried for ages about her annual review coming up next month, and now she just had to concentrate on staying alive long enough to even have the chance of getting home again.” And, on making it as part of the TARDIS team: “She’d had to work to fit in, and so she could do it again.” Before you know it, “she [realises] that she’d been thinking in terms of future TARDIS trips, not just going straight home. Which worried her a bit.” It feels like a natural progression.
Trauma plays a part. Anji’s boyfriend Dave died in Escape Velocity, and quite histrionic it was too. The relationship as written was a bit underwhelming, so EarthWorld does a lot of heavy lifting to round it out. Anji often needs distracting from thoughts of Dave, his death, and the Doctor’s failure to save him. (I feel like she’s being a tad unfair to the Doctor here, as he did save him from that fatal infection, as promised. It’s not his fault he got murdered afterwards! But ehh, people can be unfair.)
She frequently writes emails to Dave, or at least mentally composes them, gradually tracking her progress through the story and her acceptance of the TARDIS life, and you can see her feelings about Dave being interrogated as we go. It’s not lost on Rayner that this couple wasn’t perfect: Anji recognises that there was a complacency and a settlement to what they had, and in the end she sees that she can be glad to have something new instead — she can even see the negative ways that she’s using her tragedy to get the right kind of attention. It’s clearly not as simple as “it wasn’t very good anyway” or “you were the love of my life”; it’s messy, like people are. Towards the end there’s a series of beautifully arranged flashbacks that bring Anji back to the present with a bump, dovetailing nicely with her new life. It all feels like a very honest response to what was established in the previous book, and much like Fitz’s issues, it’s up to future writers whether they want to carry on that train of thought, build upon it or just move on.
There are heaps of nice things you can say about EarthWorld and they’re all valid reasons for liking the book. Tellingly though they are all about character. The rest of it, while not exactly bad, doesn’t seem to have captured Rayner’s imagination in the same way. Depending on how much that matters to you as a reader it might sour the experience.
The setting is fun. What if Westworld, but with Earth history as the subject? The trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be any deeper layer to this idea. Other than the ways in which it can help set up that memory-scanner business at the end, all we’ve got are a few “zones” for Ancient Egypt, prehistory, Swinging 60s London or what have you, and they all have more or less the same (admittedly funny) “got it a bit wrong” joke. There’s nothing compellingly scary about the androids (even the mostly-just-clumsy dinosaurs), who for all their Fitz-informing drama don’t rate as characters themselves. And there’s no sense of scale here, with each zone feeling as close to the next one as the claustrophobic sets in The Happiness Patrol. I felt no broad sense that we’re on an alien planet with its own problems — Rayner sets up that this is very much the case with an anti-Earth resistance group (called “ANJI”, which to be honest is a bit of a stretch), but in practical terms they’re just three drippy youths who’ve been arrested for flimsy reasons. They each have a “real”, aka Earth-inspired name like “James” and a “New Jupitan”, aka more sci-fi name like “Xernic”. Good luck remembering all six monikers by the end.
Characterisation is, ironically, a problem once you move away from the regulars. The park is mostly empty apart from guests in danger. (There hardly seem to be any; I don’t think they had names.) Unlike Westworld, the attractions haven’t risen up all by themselves, but because of three disgruntled and psychotic triplets named Asia, Africa and Antarctica. They have a gift for android design as well as some murderous tendencies. They also have a peculiar relationship with their parents — President Hoover, their seemingly distant and unaffectionate father, and their comatose mother Elizabethan whom they may have murdered.
EarthWorld drifts from a fizzy farce into a black comedy whenever they’re around, which in itself isn’t a bad thing (the twisted family dynamic feels like something out of a Robert Shearman script), but it’s jarring, and it makes it difficult to care about them, or any of the action that occurs away from the Doctor, Anji and Fitz. EarthWorld ultimately boils down to a family drama about these weirdo triplets and their parents, which combined with the limited rewards of Funny Theme Park has the effect of making the whole endeavour feel aggressively trivial; the only moments that land are the ones that are tacitly about the regulars instead. Other side characters include Venna Durwell, park director with a random homicidal bent and Presidential confidant Hanstrum; they may occasionally be important to the plot but I still had to look up their names just now. (After one of them died and a character referenced it I had to flick back through the book, as I’d entirely forgotten what happened to them.)
Look, I’m more of a character than a plot guy. EarthWorld’s (main) character journeys may have been built on top of some tinsel but they’re terrific. Sure, I would rather the rest of it held up as well, but I’m confident that this sort of thing won’t always be a problem for Rayner. Indeed, The Squire’s Crystal was next for her, wringing character development out of a bodyswap and a series of inevitable misunderstandings — perhaps that’s a better example of finding a plot the same size as the story. EarthWorld is good enough where it counts that I’d be happy for Rayner to become a Blum-and-Orman-ish fixture. The rest of it is at least pretty funny. How could I stay mad at a book that has a cosplaying Elvis begin a death match with “You gonna be lonesome tonight — in the grave!”
7/10
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