#54
Anachrophobia
By Jonathan Morris
Likes a bit of time travel, does Jonathan Morris. His last book, Festival Of Death, was notable for its more-than-usual amount of temporal jiggery pokery: it had the Fourth Doctor and Romana reliving the same events at different points and also in the wrong order. Anachrophobia plays in a similar toybox, but there are some key differences between the two books.
First, the treatment of time travel. Anachrophobia is set on a world where time can be made to go too slow or too fast. It’s a weapon used by both sides in a war, and it’s used incrementally as the plot demands rather than shaping the book as a whole; we don’t spend the whole thing cleverly nipping back and forth. There’s also a difference in how the characters deal with time, as instead of the indomitable experts of Season 17 our heroes are a diminished Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji. They are seriously, rather than just whimsically on the back foot about all this which tweaks the dynamic further from Festival.
Second, and this is perhaps an even bigger one, Anachrophobia is not a comedy. Festival was somewhat complicated but also light-hearted, with the characters often seeming as bewildered as the reader. That helped considerably to pull me through its diagram-based time antics. Anachrophobia wants nothing to do with the fizzy wine and good mood of Season 17: it’s a base under siege story that leans into uncanny horror, and it’s a pretty miserable time for the regulars to boot. When the story gets into somewhat complicated time mechanics (as I think we all knew it would) it’s coming from a different place. This time it’s tense and it demands a lot from the Doctor, rather than just going “How is our cheeky chappie going to get out of this one?”
There’s nothing wrong with not going down the comedic route – good for Morris, trying something new on his second book. But some elements still lean comedic, such as the situation on the (unnamed) planet at war. It’s not so much a war really as a legal dispute, with the colonists having “leased” the planet from the Plutocratic Empire and now defaulting on their payments. That’s a pretty obvious basis for a Sun Makers-esque satire, and it’s a valid enough idea to pursue it without the ironic laughs, except without them you’re left with a conflict that’s not about anything meaningful. It’s just people doing awful things for money. Of course most wars are generally that when you peel back the distractions: the bottom line is always money, which is a valid enough observation. (Albeit not one that the book actually makes.) The problem here is that when you take away anything more than a base level of satire you’re left finger-wagging about the evils of capitalism, which makes much the same point at the end of a book as it does at the start. Killing people just because a spreadsheet told you to is, well, wrong, innit? No one here has a hope of mounting a compelling counter-argument to that, so we’re done here pretty much as soon as we start.
Anachrophobia has a similar problem with its monsters of the week. Don’t let the front cover fool you – there’s nothing abstract about the image of a man with a clock for a face. After crash landing the Doctor and co. make it through fast-then-slow time storms only to find a military base running time travel experiments, which naturally go wrong and promptly turn people into clock heads. (They are deliberately left unnamed for mystique purposes.) These are walking, somehow-still-talking people that no longer have souls but do have seemingly random time-pieces instead of the usual eyes, nose and mouth assortment. It’s a great image that would make for an intriguing New Who menace. They have special abilities too, such as reversing time by a couple of minutes to undo damage or secure an advantage. New Who loves monsters with rules.
The trouble is, well, that’s it. For great chunks of the book we’re just spamming the “scary clock people” button, which gets diminishing returns. So many scenes rely on the unbelievable shock value of a character… with… a clock… for a FACE! Which yes, creepy, but we’ve been there and done it now. There’s an entire village of them at one point, hammering us over and over with the idea that this image is simply killer enough all by itself. I was reminded of the zombies in Festival Of Death – one of its downsides, really, a lumbering monster that’s not all that interesting. At least this one has a better aesthetic, although that’s all it has after a while. (They don’t even do much to you. You’ll just also be a clock person.)
There’s an interesting character reason for the clocks (although it doesn’t explain, you know, the clocks) which loosely recalls Nightshade. An unknown force is taunting people with their past misdeeds and offering to put them right, Quantum Leap-style. Only the second they do it they will unwittingly “unwrite” their lives and leave a vacancy for a clock zombie. Not bad, and it gives you a terrific excuse to dredge up people’s back stories out of nowhere. The trouble here (there’s a lot of trouble in this one, isn’t there?) is that the characters aren’t interesting. They’ve got a pretty lousy society as a backdrop – no need to go over all that again, but it’s worth adding that the novel barely includes the colonists. (They at least have a reason to fight.) Individually they’re not much better. There’s a doctor, Lane, who has her moments and a very tragic past, but once you get clocked you cannot get unclocked, so that’s that. I forgot most of the rest of them, but Leader Bragg is the worst: an insecure guy who, at the drop of the hat, decides that the Doctor and his friends are actually spies. Oh, goodie. He couldn’t turn into a clock fast enough for me. (Morris should get points for making an early character, Oake, quite sympathetic before killing him on Page 7. It shows he means business. He then proceeds to not make anyone else sympathetic.)
The gimmick here seems like pretty promising stuff for the three regulars, and we do get whiffs of that. Fitz, poor duck, once again doesn’t amount to very much, although Morris reminds us that his memories are diminishing, which arguably gets him off the hook. (This has been in at least one other book so far – I forget which. Watch this space I guess.) Anji is very well realised, although she isn’t massively tempted by the “past misdeeds” virus: yes, there is a mention of Dave, but she genuinely seems to be over the worst of that, only wobbling because of her questionable choices in Hope. It’s Anji’s commitment to the Doctor, despite occasionally thinking harshly of his choices, that stands out here. She sticks by him and that feels hard-won after several books.
It’s a memorable one for the Doctor, who seems particularly scraggly in his post-Henrietta Street configuration. He falls ill, catches himself by surprise thinking he still has a respiratory bypass system and nearly dies a couple of times. Anji and Fitz more than once remark that he seems more vulnerable now. It lends the time stuff an element of danger that perhaps wouldn’t be there otherwise, and definitely wasn’t there in Festival Of Death. Anachrophobia treats the Doctor sufficiently nastily that suspension of disbelief allowed me to think, sheesh, he’s not getting out of this one without scars.
The memory stuff is perhaps a bit unfortunate since it has come along during a run of books where the Doctor does not remember his past, including the misdeeds. There’s still a surprisingly thrilling sequence where he remembers the last couple of books – although as it turns out those don’t rank among the Doctor’s greatest mistakes. The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street at least presents a clear What If, but considering the alternative would have been for him to die, I’m not sure it’s really all that tempting.
The best bit is probably the Doctor’s grand plan to stop the clock people, which involves time travel but not in the usual way, and not with the usual outcome. I could feel it knitting together so it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but somehow the punchline was still very satisfying. It’s like a little soupcon of Festival Of Death – surprising, really, that there’s so little of this sort of thing on a planet covered in time jiggery pokery, but since most of that is really just another word for “bomb” the ending doesn’t feel like repetition or over-doing it. That’s pretty good going for an author who has, if not spammed the “time travel is complicated” button, certainly tapped it a bit across two books.
There are good things here. I liked that ending; the clock people are pretty cool at first glance; the time storms present a few interesting challenges and some gruesome visuals. But the actual guts of Anachrophobia aren’t that interesting. This is standard base under siege stuff for the most part, with characters running away from lumbering monsters and/or boringly intransigent soldiers. Yeah, the monsters have a pretty decent gimmick, but you need a fundamentally interesting bunch of characters to sell that, and Anachrophobia traded those in for its war “satire”. By the time you reach the end there’s a bonus/nasty surprise, with one character turning out not to be who he appears, which ought to elevate the whole thing and set us up for next time. Perhaps that works for some readers. For me though, nah: I don’t really enjoy rubber mask bad guy reveals, and anyway, I thought we were trying to get away from massive continuity links between books? Why not let this one stand on its own? (It’s fine if not, I’m a Doctor Who fan for god’s sake, but if the editors really are fine with massive continuity links then why did they go to all that effort to erase the Doctor’s memory, and why are we keeping it that way?)
Clever ideas in small doses, not altogether linked, scattered over a pretty dusty framework. It’s a good thing this isn’t a comedy or I’d have made a joke about undoing things.
5/10
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