#59
Blue Box
By Kate Orman
Oh, blast. This is the last Kate Orman Doctor Who novel, not including audiobooks and a Telos novella. It’s the end of an era.
How fitting that she did something different with this one. Not, I’m sure, that she sat down and thought “This will be my last Who book”, but since things worked out that way I’m glad that Blue Box has its own USP.
It’s first person. Yes, another one of those – they’re practically breeding these days what with Eye Of Heaven, Tomb Of Valdemar and The Infinity Race. Blue Box is presented as a non-fiction novel similar to Who Killed Kennedy, written by Australian journalist “Charles ‘Chick’ Peters”. Because of its Earth-bound authorship there is a certain distance around the Sixth Doctor and Peri, whose time-and-space travelling is never exactly confirmed, nor their conveyance seen. (“[Peri] is a little vague about exactly where she has been with the Doctor. But it’s obvious they’ve travelled the globe many times over, usually off the beaten path, more likely to stay in a hut than the Hilton.”)
Blue Box is a cyber-crime thriller set in 1981, which immediately adds another flavour. The internet (it’s not called that here) and email are still new things; characters often note that cyber-crime is too new for the authorities to even get a handle on. This might seem an odd period for a story largely concerned with malware but Orman makes a compelling case for it, with one character observing that “at the moment, any electronics hobbyist worth their salt can hold everything there is to know about a computer in their head.” That proprietorial sense drives the villain, Sarah Swan: she wants to control it all, put her stamp on it, which actually seems possible at this time. There’s an intimacy to the plot, a tug-of-war/road trip across America, that there might not have been in a world of broadband and high-speed downloads. Only the small band of heroes and Sarah seem to exist; computers might as well be their personal playground, a realm only they know.
Make no mistake, this is a nerdy book, full of detail and ephemera that says “80s computers.” Orman even plays some kind of game with the chapter numbering, going “(10) One/Two/Three/Four/(20) One” etc, which I’ve no doubt means something in computer-ese. There are enough sympathetic “Huh?”s from Peri and Chick that it never runs away from the reader however, and the Doctor (this incarnation rarely being one for understatement) makes it clear that the stakes could mean the end of life on Earth. It’s good that we have these little yardstick moments because, as above, the plot is rather low-key: a hunt for alien objects in which we scarcely see the aliens or the objects, and their dangerous effects are largely just hinted at until the end. This is perhaps a feature (bug?) of the non-fiction novel gag, as Chick Peters simply can’t know everything – frankly I wondered at how much he was able to surmise, but then you have to allow a certain amount of wiggle room in Doctor Who. We’re not doing a fictionalised All The President’s Men here.
Orman (and to be fair Jon Blum, usually in the mix whether credited or otherwise) is a wonder at character-writing and there’s plenty of that in Blue Box. The minor characters have enough colour to stand out, particularly Bob Salmon, a programmer who once helped the Doctor in an off-screen adventure. (His later run-in with his dad following a trespassing incident sells their relationship fast.) Chick meanwhile is a compelling narrator/occasional hero with a surprising amount of story arc to put away, the specifics of which would have been rare to see in fiction circa 2003, even more so in 1981. (The way things are going with culture wars we might slide back that way, unfortunately.) His line of work and general gumshoe ethos also leads to some of the more eyebrow-raising language to be found in a Doctor Who story: he comes across the n-word once, the f-slur a few times, and then there’s this saying – admittedly less actually offensive than just WTF – that I’ve seen and now, fair’s fair, you have to as well: “The moment Bob gave us the all-clear, Luis was up the stairs like a raped ape.” Chick isn’t a hateful guy and I’m not trying to cancel Kate Orman here, I just thought it was worth mentioning with such a genial author and a fairly contained and nerdy setting it’s shall we say surprising to see these kinds of choices. Perhaps it was to toughen up a generally sweet writing style. (Mind you, wasn’t Orman the first New Adventures author to include the f-word?) Insert standard They Wouldn’t Publish It These Days disclaimer here.
The villain is also interesting. Sarah (a female villain, unusual already) is a force to be reckoned with, single-minded and mean, but she’s still extremely human and not out to take over the world – she just wants to control her little bit of it. This is all just a happy accident for Sarah and she’s just seeing how far it can take her; as the Doctor notes re the dangerous artefact, “She doesn’t know what to do with it! She’s asking us!” She regards her pursuers with an uneasy neutrality at first, occasionally considering working with them rather than against: “They’re good, Luis, really good for a change. We’ve been playing cat and mouse for days and I’m not sure whether I’m the cat or the mouse.” Our first sight of her is in the aftermath of the adventure, her mind now damaged by what happened, so there’s an underlying sympathy for her right away – a smart in-universe writing choice by Chick – that helps temper some of her smaller and nastier impulses later on. Blue Box really does feel like an unfortunate mistake that got out of hand, which adds an unusual tension for a Doctor Who book, that of containing a disaster to a handful of flawed people rather than summoning UNIT to shoot at them.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between Blue Box and the rest of Orman’s oeuvre is her choice of Doctor. Orman (and Blum, etc) was known at this point for pushing along the Eighth Doctor Adventures, adding crucial depth to Sam Jones in particular. Vampire Science, Seeing I and Unnatural History were load-bearing books. It’s surprising then to find her in the lower-stakes world of the Past Doctor Adventures. What can she do here? Well, broadly the answer to that is “have some nerdy fun with computers.” But there is also a significant stake in the choice of this Doctor and this companion.
She captures the Sixth Doctor brilliantly, but also in her own way. There are so many quintessentially good bits, here’s a random selection: “He spoke in a crisp English accent, with relish, as though just pronouncing words was a pleasure in itself.” / “He takes up a lot of space, not just because he’s a big man: he moves around a lot, he fills the air with words and gestures. He’s the focal point of any room he’s in.” / “The Doctor is the smartest person I know. I have a lot of respect for him. The problem is, he’s also the smartest person he knows.” / “I dipped a hand into the nearest pocket of the coat, hoping for some ID, and instead fished out a dog-eared Roget’s Thesaurus.”
It’s worth noting that Orman writes him more sombrely than usual – not just confined plot-wise to a world of typing commands into a computer, which traditionally doesn’t involve a lot of grand gestures, but even dressing him down into a black suit to attract less attention. He has moments of quiet consideration that lean more towards his successor’s style, such as his dark mission statement to Chick that “there must be a world for Peri to come back home to.” He still has his usual smugness and pomposity, particularly when trying (and failing!) to be diplomatic with Sarah, but his general machinations and game-playing keep him away from opportunities for blustery arguments, as well as seeming generally more like Seventh Doctor-isms. (Perhaps I’m projecting because I’ve read Orman’s Virgin books. Either way, they are Doctor-isms.)
Orman does most of her character work with Peri. She is keen to highlight Peri’s strength of character, having her for instance be the only advocate for an alien cyber-being that poses a threat to the whole world: “Whatever that little alien guy can do, it’s still a living, breathing creature. It’s got rights.” But Orman also pounces on the duo’s combative relationship, which often makes me wonder (during telly rewatches) why the hell Peri sticks around: “[The Doctor and Peri] spent a lot of their time in half-hearted bickering, usually when one of them made some stupid mistake. He burnt dinner, she got lost, he couldn’t steer, she got attacked by some animal. This time it was the Doctor’s turn to screw up. They were supposed to be visiting her family but the Doctor had got them there at the wrong time, messing up her reunion plans.” / “‘You and I have both seen more of life than either Bob or Peri. Their enthusiasm and idealism hasn’t been worn down against the grindstone of time.’ I wasn’t so sure about Peri’s enthusiasm, but I held my tongue.”
Blue Box seems hellbent on answering that question. Chick asks her about it, indirectly at first, then head on: “‘You like him, don’t you?’ The smile pinched its way back onto her face. ‘Yeah I do. He can be a pain in the ass, but he’s a lot of fun to be around.’” / “‘Why do you even want to stay together?’ Peri’s voice grew small. ‘There was a time when he got really, really sick, and I had no idea what to do. I should have made him get help, but I just panicked. I guess in a small way I’m still making that up to him.’” The guilt complex angle is interesting, but that only seems to be part of it; as the book progresses she has more agency in wanting to stay here. “‘I want to be here. No, that’s not right.’ Something was dawning in her face. ‘I don’t want to be here. This is all wrong. I want to be wherever the Doctor is. Wherever he goes.’” / “She looked more relaxed than she had since I first met her, and not only because the crisis was over: she had made up her mind about where she wanted to be.” I’m not entirely convinced that Orman’s impassioned writing for Peri would work slotted between her TV episodes, but read in isolation it’s lovely to see it thought about this much. Given all the trenches Orman and Blum dug to justify Sam Jones it makes sense to see her head-canoning to remove a few stinging nettles from the Saward era.
Blue Box is still not what I’d call a character-driven story as all that (wonderful) Sixth Doctor and Peri stuff is happening alongside the plot rather than driving it. That’s hardly a problem though: it chunters along quite happily as a tech-thriller, with the Doctor and co. and Sarah moving in ever decreasing circles until a (characteristically sly and mostly off-screen) final battle resolves the matter. It’s a strikingly small story which speaks quaintly to the time it’s set in, such as a moment where hacker Bob says of the hypothetical internet “It’ll work as long as everyone in the world doesn’t get a computer.” (Sorry, Bob.) The first person/non-fiction novel style is clever without being obtrusive, and just about believable within its constraints, allowing for little bits of flair like the suggestive dreams in the prologue and epilogue. Crucially it feels like a human story despite its special interest in computers, finding sympathy in Sarah’s downfall and expressing a very human bafflement at the indifference of the aliens, whose limited and disguised appearances keep them unknowable. (Even the “alien” at the centre of all this, “a hormone-secreting, Lego-obsessed Sesame Street monster,” draws an obvious human allusion as it sits there quietly obsessing with puzzles rather than making eye contact.) The focus is not after all on “the great green and black void” of computers but on the people using them, the connections they might otherwise struggle to make and the vulnerabilities that can create.
8/10
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