#48
Dark Progeny
By Steve Emmerson
Colony worlds. Gotta love ’em. Apparently.
I’m not going to pretend that all EDAs are like this, but boy this seems like a popular setting. There have even been a few baked-in reasons to keep going there. Colonies gave Sam an easy way into activism, seeing how humans had progressed and done it “wrong.” Compassion was mostly fleeing the Time Lords so was unlikely to visit the Doctor’s favourite planet for a chunk, and humans-in-space is easier to write each month than The Web Planet. And would you look at that — Anji can’t go home. What’s the next best thing?
None of which is to say you can’t do a good colony world story. That’s like saying you can’t do a good base under siege. (The Web Of Fear called.) It’s just that with such a well-worn format it’s tough to avoid diminishing returns, and Dark Progeny doesn’t so much avoid them as get beaten up by them in a dark alley.
The story has promise. Ceres Alpha is being aggressively terraformed by pesky old humans in vast, mobile cities. (That’s slightly different to Kursaal, at least.) The planet has ancient ruins that the uncaring WorldCorp is threatening to demolish. (That’s a bit more like Kursaal.) Related to this, presumably, is the synchronised birth of multiple unusual-looking psi-powered babies. The corporation immediately swept this under the rug, telling all the parents their babies had died but in reality keeping them hidden away to experiment upon. Into all this arrives the TARDIS, seemingly driven mad by a psychic force, and Anji along with it. The Doctor must fetch help while also inevitably coming to the aid of those children.
Right away there’s potential for something weird and emotive, which were the watchwords of Steve Emmerson’s earlier Casualties Of War. Instead of the pain of shell shock and survivor’s guilt we’re looking at children in danger and the loss of a child (even if that turns out to be a lie), which is perhaps even more potent. It’s odd, then, that Dark Progeny seems so uninterested in the kid storyline. A gaggle of alien-headed youngsters are indeed being held in a lab somewhere, tortured and supposedly driving their captors mad with mind-powers… but that’s not really the meat of the novel, which is far more interested in the military bureaucracy of the city, the Doctor getting pressed to reveal who he’s working for, and the general irritated back and forth of an archaeologist (Bains) trying to hold back the bulldozers. In other words, all the stuff we’ve definitely done before.
And so much of it is just stuff. There are loads of characters in this, and with no opportunities for the Doctor, Fitz or Anji (in any combination) to pal up we’re forever cutting between micro-storylines. Yes I know that you know that I hate this approach, but to be fair Emmerson is quite adept at it, for example cutting away from character combo A because one of them answered the doorbell so now we’re following character combo B; it’s thinly spread but at least it’s not too all over the place. But each section of this is barely moving, with e.g. Bains’s attempt to get another look at the dig site needing practically the entire novel to take off. (At one point he gives up and goes to a bar to reminisce about his sad romantic history. We cut away and then return to find him still there.)
Even the Doctor’s outrage at the mistreatment of the kids isn’t a prime mover: it’s just A to B, well of course he’s not going to be pleased with this, followed by well-he’s-not-going-to-be-able-to-do-anything-about-it-until-later-on. By the time he is, bundling the kids and Bains into a helicopter — two birds with one stone there — we for some reason skip and summarise the bit where the Doctor rescues them and Bains is introduced to them, which might have been quite interesting. Similarly, shortly afterwards the Doctor plucks the answer to the psi-kids and the ancient ruins seemingly out of thin air. That’s not the most satisfying conclusion to a mystery, but then if you will spend the entire book on “the Doctor pretends to be someone they were expecting” and “military mind probes” then what else can you do at the climax?
It’s just maddening how the “psi-kids” thing feels like a book that’s happening next door. There are references to how they’ve responded to and attacked their captors — they haven’t done much if you think about it, since they’re still captive — but not enough is done to support the flimsy idea that no one working here thinks it’s remotely iffy to treat them like this, calling them “evil” and “monsters” when they’re just very unusual two-month-olds being, y’know, tortured. A bit of nuance would be nice when the story’s already so black and white that it’s about child torture — it won’t exactly need to work overtime to get the reader on the kids’ side, will it? So why not try to understand the bad guys?
To be fair, Emmerson puts the time in there, marooning us with Foley (military), Perón (military doctor) and Tyran (head of the operation and one letter away from “tyrant”, so I’ll let you guess whether he’s a nice boss). There are flashes of maybe-they’re-okay-actually with some of them, but a violent return to form is always on the cards, so those end up feeling a bit pointless. As for Tyran, he’s actually got a compelling reason to force through the development of Ceres Alpha in that Earth is close to uninhabitable — we could definitely do something with that, but no such luck. We do however tie his story into Bains’s woes, but it’s done with as much care and setup as the Doctor’s “eureka!” moment with the kids, i.e. suddenly and very near the end, so to call it unconvincing would be kind. We don’t do a thing with it afterwards, naturally.
There isn’t much connective tissue between the “military bulldozing the planet” plot and the psi-kids, at least until the Doctor checks his magic 8-ball, but there are a few things on the sidelines. The parents of one of the kids, Veta and Josef, refuse to believe what they’ve been told and go on the rampage to find their baby. Promising and potentially powerful stuff here, and it lets the mother take the lead with all the clever problem-solving stuff, which feels like a turn up. (I don’t care much for Foley, Perón or Ayla, but at least all these prominent characters are women. Dark Progeny does quite well at the Bechdel test.) It might have been better if there was a genuine link between them and their child — this is surely possible, given his powers — but as it is, when they’re reunited it’s as dramatic as the plot demands, yet not exactly a punch the air moment. There’s nothing to really tell the kids apart, there’s no scene of their kid going “has anyone seen my mum and dad?”, and the Doctor doesn’t even know the parents are around. As to any others out there, god knows.
We also have Anji, who (as you’ve probably sussed) is under the psychic weather because the kids reached out to her too hard. (They did this to her and not the Doctor or Fitz because she is a woman, and not because she has ever expressed maternal feelings, which is perhaps half a step backwards on the whole Bechdel thing. Ah well.) Giving the companion a link to the tortured kids feels like a neat way to get the book’s emotions straight into our veins, but alas, that’s not the plan: Anji spends about a hundred pages unconscious, another third of it stuck in hospital, and the in-between bits trying fruitlessly to find the Doctor. Emmerson writes Anji well enough when he does it, bringing up her young brother for the closest comparison to all this, but like the kid stuff generally there seems to be an open goal where there should be substance.
Don’t even get me started on Fitz. I think it’s safe to assume there wasn’t room for another guy in Emmerson’s outline, because Fitz is separated from the others at the start and they spend the rest of the book acting on the assumption that he’s dead, so never mind. When (like Anji) he is resuscitated he’s stuck on the planet’s surface, nowhere near the plot, so there’s nothing useful for him to do. He subsequently (deep breath) gets captured, escapes, gets recaptured, escapes, is briefly recaptured, escapes, is then recaptured again, escapes again, and then meets up with the Doctor, at which point they’re all captured. (I’ll leave you in suspense about what happens next.) Fitz also flirts a bit with his rescuer Ayla and at one point he has a shower. Solid gold. This whole thread feels like an unintended parody of how little plot the book has. At least, I hope it’s unintentional.
There isn’t much to tell Dark Progeny apart from your Kursaals or your Face-Eaters, but Steve Emmerson’s writing stands out a bit, as it did in Casualties Of War. Unfortunately this isn’t always to the good: he tends to over-do it for effect, giving us curiously overwrought statements like “An immense silence stretched between them, like a cold dark ocean filled with fear” and not-meant-to-be-funny ones like “The room was filled with a screaming baby.” Physical descriptions try slightly too hard and become a bit disembodied, such as “She insinuated a wry smile into her face,” and he’s entirely too fond of adverbs, leading to the occasional awkwardness or traffic jam like “Josef shook his head sorrily.” / “Now the electrical activity in the brain was flatlining extremely worryingly.” / “Ultimately, he invariably got his way.” / “Carly Dimitri wondered what he had in mind for this poor man who had somehow inadvertently, most probably quite innocently, crossed Tyran’s path.” That last one sounds like he’s keying up the Lollipop Guild.
It settles down after a little while though, and then the prose bounces along harmlessly enough. There are nice moments like the aforementioned link to Anji’s brother, the Doctor doing a spot of ventriloquism, and this enjoyable Tom Baker-ish non sequitur when he meets the baddie: “‘Mr Tyran. It’s a very dubious pleasure to meet the man responsible for the atrocities I’ve witnessed down in your so-called medicare unit.’ The smile was up full volume, as if [the Doctor] were genuinely complimenting Tyran on an exceptionally well-run operation.” There are also some moments of horror that recall Casualties Of War, such as telekinetic attacks, a zombie (for a split second) and Tyran hallucinating a dead relative who behaves very inappropriately. We could have done with more of this (as in the horror, not the creepy mum) to more consistently inform the novel’s tone, but those bits at least made it not entirely a sci-fi runaround. It’s bad luck, though, that he goes all in on the scariness of rats, as I’ve been an enthusiastic keeper of pet ratties for years now. My main negative emotion about them is that one of the little sods may has stolen my dinner. Otherwise they’re cute little beans that don’t, in fact, hiss.
I can’t help rooting for Steve Emmerson after that joyous initial reading of Casualties Of War, so I feel a bit mean for not enjoying his follow up very much. I’d point the finger at the editors too, however: there should be more pushback on books that sound like we’ve already read them, there should be somebody to spot the lack of forward motion in the plot (as well as sudden wafts of it towards the end), and “is it horror or isn’t it” was a question worth asking that apparently wasn’t. As before, there’s a better book in here somewhere, but it needed to commit to its more compelling parts, and perhaps leave the mind probes and the escape/recaptures in the recycle bin. As it is, Dark Progeny is an “another one” book for completists only.
4/10
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