Doctor Who: The BBC Books #110 – Palace Of The Red Sun by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#51

Palace Of The Red Sun

By Christopher Bulis

Here’s a milestone for the marathon: the last ever Doctor Who novel by Christopher Bulis. He wrote 12 of them if you count the Bernice Summerfield books, which I do. That’s a somewhat load-bearing guy for two different publishers. No mean feat.

I think it’s important to recognise that crazy level of output because, without wishing to be unkind, Bulis is not considered one of the creative trailblazers of Doctor Who lit. Through his fairly long Wilderness Years career he maintained a mostly meat-and-potatoes approach to sci-fi, occasionally pushing the boat out for a State Of Change (famous villain) or a Sorcerer’s Apprentice (SF+fantasy) or a Vanderdeken’s Children (kinda complicated). At his best he wrote novels that seemed familiar but also embraced their genre of choice and rollicked along nicely, such as Imperial Moon. If nothing else he could turn his hand to writing any of the Doctors; in just over five years he wrote for all of them.

I doubt it will surprise anyone to hear that his final book, Palace Of The Red Sun, doesn’t suddenly veer into uncharted territory. It has all the things that cause people who don’t like Christopher Bulis novels to roll their eyes in despair: it borrows greedily from the probable video collections of its readers in order to stitch together an SF-tinged-with-fantasy romp that anyone hoping for a very original work can dismiss out of hand — as indeed they did, based on reviews such as Discontinuity Guide which labelled it “Dire.”

On balance, I don’t think I’m one of those people. Whilst I haven’t exactly been effusive about these things, more often than not I’m swept along by them. Bulis generally sticks to ideas that have been proven to work and he has a good grasp of pacing — you’d hope so after 12 books. I’m a simple man: keep each chapter focused on the same character or group of characters and I’ll be your friend.

Palace Of The Red Sun is an almost constant example of that “DiCaprio pointing at the TV” meme, but I read most of it in a day which ought to count for something. We open an a royal court getting overthrown by some intergalactic bully, only to find that the royals have fled. Shades of Masters Of The Universe or maybe even Krull there. The action moves to a different planet where a primitive society lives in conflict with some uncaring Lords, all of whom are possibly derived from the same society — don’t suppose you’re familiar with The Face Of Evil or State Of Decay? There are aspects of this place such as sprites that lean towards fantasy (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice much) while gardens full of robots somehow give rise to a machine with a mind of its own (too many references to mention, but Bulis’s A Device Of Death is in there), and in the royal court a young princess despairs at having to choose between two strangers as suitors. (How long have you got?!) That’s before we get into the weeds of what’s really going on here, about which I’ll be discrete and just say that several eras of Star Trek got there first.

Some of this is deliberate — and I don’t mean the occasional bits of lampshading. (“Frustrating and possibly anti-climactic, but there it is and we must make the best of it.” / “‘Doctor, isn’t this sort of thing happening twice on one small world a bit much?’ ‘It is not such a great coincidence as it may seem.’” Oh, mate. Yikes.) Dexel Dynes being reused from Bulis’s The Ultimate Treasure is a clear example of here-we-go-again, but he’s harmless enough and it’s a good idea really, since a shady journo probably would continue to follow bad guys in space, and consequently he’d keep getting in the Doctor’s way. The only problem is a) I’d forgotten about him entirely so it wasn’t much of a thrill to see him again, b) he doesn’t interact with the Sixth Doctor or Peri for most of it so they don’t need to remember him much either, and c) Dynes barely distinguishes himself as a character here or even really does anything — which perhaps helps to explain a).

There’s at least one plot point that’s deliberately old hat, about which, mixed feelings. The actual mechanics of this form perhaps the best (only?) surprise in the book, but baking that into a story that’s roughly 80% reused ingredients makes it a bit hollow that the author has successfully identified one hackneyed thing, as if such meta suspicion is usual in his books. (On the other hand, it’s a lot harder to spot that way.)

What about the new stuff, then? We’ve got a villain, Glavis Judd, supposed Protector of multiple planets but obviously in reality a wrong’un. He’s trying to break into Esselven, a very small planetoid with an unusual force shield. Bulis finds Judd pretty interesting, having him reminisce (for no apparent reason) about his back story in ways that recall Silver in Hope. Judd never gets much of a foot in the door though, as first of all it’s quite tricky to get down to that planet, second, hardly anyone down there knows about him anyway. Consequently the main plot of the novel feels, deliberately at least, like a sub-plot. (As for what secrets he’s trying to prise from Esselven, the whole reason for his quest, that ends up being a no-plot.)

It’s what’s on the planet that counts, provided you can stop rolling your eyes at all the familiar story beats. The big stuff admittedly doesn’t quite come off: Esselven is so small and in such an orbit that the days don’t visibly change, meaning the concept of “days” is more of a habit that’s been handed down, but only to the higher classes. That’s interesting! But then you have things like characters referencing winter — how can there be seasons here? And how do the plants survive in constant daylight? It feels like a rare Actually Original Idea (or original enough that it has no immediately obvious analogue) that didn’t quite get the development it needed.

The characters are better. I quite liked Green-8, the sentient robot palling around with the Doctor. (Who adorably fashions a robot disguise so they can sneak about as twinsies.) Green-8 spends most of the book making inroads to having a personality, which honestly isn’t as boring as it sounds. Also quite good, surprisingly: Princess Oralissa. She might have a very old hat predicament on her hands but her gradual suspicions about the world around her, awakening from a more or less fairytale framework to recognise something sci-fi instead, is one of the book’s stronger elements. I even found myself imagining (don’t laugh) a whole book about Oralissa that started as something trite and then spun off elsewhere. She and Green-8 are the ones you’ll care about by the end, if indeed that applies to any characters in your case.

The Scavengers are less enthralling. This is the plot point Peri gets lumbered with, first getting stuck in a work camp (yes I know we’ve done that before) and then escaping to find fellow worker Kel’s dreary hometown. The Scavengers are caveman-style monosyllabic (until, curiously, they’re not any more) and Peri quickly realises she could have just not bothered and stayed hidden in a building instead. On a personal level, there are numerous scenes of Kel either declaring his intentions for Peri or otherwise just copping a feel, which feels like a sorry default setting for an attractive companion from an abrasive era. (It didn’t leave me enamoured with Kel either.) Peri is at least better written here than in The Ultimate Treasure, but that still doesn’t transform her Scavenger scenes into something that needed to happen to progress the story. Bulis is clearly just keeping her busy.

The same is true of the Doctor, as he doesn’t do anything other than look for Peri and vaguely investigate Esselven until Page 180, and he doesn’t find out about Judd until it’s nearly over. It’s perhaps fair to say that the situation on Esselven is important enough on its own, but something’s got to give when you’re doing both, especially when Esselven is a lords vs peasants story but also an ancient mystery but also a potential robot uprising but also a [Star Trek thing] and a [twist ending thing]. Judd seems inconsequential after all that, which of course is what he deserves and then what he gets, which is sort of neat?

Hmm… wasn’t I saying something about Palace Of The Red Sun being good, actually? Here’s the thing: reviewing it is when all its flaws become more apparent and harder to ignore. Many of Bulis’s books work just well enough while you’re reading them, and I found that to be the case here. The characters are a mixed bag, but I found the two most significant ones likeable and interesting enough to care how those plot threads turned out. There are too many plot threads but a few of them paid off. (The collective sense of business also reaches a sort of critical mass that’s always moving, at least.) The Doctor and Peri don’t have a huge impact on events, but they join in with a certain sense of camaraderie by the end that I found quite winning. It all comes together nicely enough, with perhaps an awkward nod to the Doctor’s rather unilateral decisions at the very end.

I’m aware that I’m damning it with faint praise. Bulis might be my most damned-with-faint-praise author, this book possibly being the starkest example. Nevertheless, despite a host of flaws and are-we-sure-about-thats I found Palace Of The Red Sun pacey enough and fun enough to make it through 280 pages quickly and in a good mood. It’s jolly. Whatever else you can take away from it, that is simply not always a given when you pick up a Doctor Who book, and it might be Bulis’s legacy that he managed it more often than not.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #76 – Imperial Moon by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#34

Imperial Moon

By Christopher Bulis

There’s something almost endearing about the Past Doctor Adventures at this point. Their sister series had gone through a significant reboot to keep readers engaged, but if you’re writing about one of those previous fellas instead? Crack on mate, it’s all good.

Imperial Moon isn’t without its personality or quirks but it’s undeniably another Christopher Bulis book, once again looking at Doctor Who through the lens of whatever genre has grabbed him this week. It’s along the lines of his SF/fantasy mash-up The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or the stripped back adventure The Ultimate Treasure. This time it’s a Jules Verne/H.G. Wells-style space adventure featuring Victorians on the moon, which is found to contain a forest, monsters and robots.

Right away that’s a very striking premise, and a tremendously visual one. I often wondered if Imperial Moon would have been happier in a visual medium; the steampunk spaceships, the heightened action and violence, not to mention the (ahem) less than introspective character writing would all have suited a comic. The Doctor riding around the moon on a miniature flying saucer practically screams TV Action.

But we’ve got a novel to fill instead, so Bulis introduces a few complications to his old timey SF setup. The whole “Victorian spaceship” idea is as surprising to the Doctor as it is to us, so he’s got to find out how this happened, and more importantly whether this is the “true” timeline or not. (If it isn’t, he needs to get things back on track.) He also, for whatever reason, finds himself with a copy of a diary to be written by one of the astronauts later on. This was then placed in the TARDIS’s “time safe,” a box that apparently sends objects to different points in the ship’s history. The diary gives him and Turlough some useful background on the moon mission — as well as allowing Bulis to write some honest-to-god Victorian adventure prose for a bit.

The Doctor’s sense of agency is debatable in this one, as he’s just following the crumbs left by (presumably) his future self, and working to keep time on track. There’s a prim, almost patrician attitude to the character as he uncomplainingly insists on completing his mission, that doesn’t quite allow for Peter Davison’s natural light and shade. He only gets flatter when dispensing useful exposition, such as a truly indulgent info-dump on page 256.

This incarnation nevertheless is a good fit for this sort of historical action-adventure. He made just as much sense reacting with gentlemanly horror to the supernatural in Goth Opera and The Sands Of Time. The character’s wheels only really come off at the end when Bulis needs to get rid of the monsters, so he has the Doctor, Turlough and Kamelion laser-gun them all to death. No, really. Forget “Have I the right?”, this is more like “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”

Turlough at least makes some sense reaching that violent conclusion, since a) he’s always been a shifty type and b) the story gives him some trust issues that he then needs to work out. You can see Bulis trying to work with the character at this point in the series, aka just before his departure, noting that he has “something missing in my life but I don’t know what it is.” This fondness for continuity has its ups and downs, however, such as the unasked for explanation for Turlough’s limited wardrobe, and the particularly clunky lead-in to Planet Of Fire at the end.

Bulis credits Turlough with an almost meta intelligence, but it’s debatable to what end. He goes around lampshading things like the the obvious Verne/Wells connection and the evident cliché of a Victorian explorer group containing a token female love interest, and a spunky feminist one at that. These ideas aren’t subverted — there is no “Land of Fiction”-style explanation at the end, it just IS quite familiar stuff — which creates the dubious benefit of Turlough apparently knowing he’s in a hokey book. The Doctor at least disputes his view on female explorers, suggesting that Bulis is really just trying to get ahead of his critics here, but there is no rebuttal for the plainly obvious love-story-to-be. (Even Turlough can’t know everything however. At one point he delivers “a line from some B-movie he’d seen, art supplementing a momentary deficiency of imagination.” Is that Turlough or the author telling on himself?)

Despite those Turlough asides it’s difficult to believe there’s anything really meta going on here. Even apart from the gleefully pop art setting and storyline there are clunky moments like Turlough, who keeps reading ahead in the diary to get useful tips and appear knowledgeable, somehow noting that this “was another means of holding a mirror up to his soul.” Surely an insight for the novel rather than the character? The Doctor similarly at one point breaks down the class themes evident among the various moon characters in a way that feels uncannily like Bulis giving book club discussions a leg up.

The useful point here is presumably Turlough sneaking the diary even though the Doctor has asked him not to — that’s a fairly typical bit of Turlough shiftiness that ultimately means he’s desperate to do the correct thing because he’s read that he’s going to do so, which is quite neat, whilst also suggesting a burgeoning sense of doing-the-right-thing that might lead into his TV departure. Less impressive is his insistence on dazzling one of the female Phiadorans he meets on the moon. He’s desperately lovesick for much of the book, which isn’t exactly an established look for the character. (Can you really see Turlough wanting someone to “think [he’s] special whatever the reason”?) This is politely explained away as not his fault during one of the Doctor’s later info dumps, but by then you’ve read the book and reacted to the character.

Perhaps the most accurate character portrayal in the book is Kamelion, a mechanical character that was completely unworkable on screen and yet remains curiously under-represented in print. (Annoying questions such as “does the robot work” do not apply here.) Kamelion in this displays a “permanent expression of mild interest” and is easily prevented from taking part in the action by external factors — so far, dead on, if a bit disappointing re the latter. He eventually gets to muck in, turning into a giant spider to more easily traverse the moon’s diminishing gravity and rescue the Doctor, which is a nicely expanded use of his powers. If it feels at all incongruous that he joins in with a brutal assault rifle rampage at the end (seriously Chris, wtf) at least you can explain that away as Kamelion being canonically the most suggestible person the Doctor has ever met. “Hey pal, want to zap some monsters?” “Do I!”

I’ve left the overall story til last, perhaps for obvious reasons: it’s tissue thin, a sequence of action adventure stop-starts that captivates the imagination well enough but doesn’t really progress. The forest, it turns out, is a hunting ground for the rich and corrupt; prisoners are their targets. One of the Victorian ships crashes. The captain of another, and the daughter of the ship’s inventor are captured by mechanical guards and taken to a citadel to be prepared for combat. The Doctor and co. must make their way to rescue them — Turlough reading ahead for progress updates, as it was the captured man that wrote the diary — and along the way they encounter the all-female Phiadorans, fellow prisoners and expert warriors. (This feels like another concession to old-timey lit. Close enough, welcome back H. Rider Haggard.) Problems include automated flying saucers, robots, all manner of beasts, body-snatching predators and, closer to home, mutineers.

It’s easy to criticise Imperial Moon for its lack of depth, but it’s got excitement and incident in spades. Plot, not so much, although Bulis does tie everything up by the end. Sometimes too efficiently: he wraps up the troublesome citadel with a hundred pages still to go (whoops) so to keep us going a minor character has to be retooled into a murderous maniac; we repeat the last act of Alien on a budget; a betrayal flips a sympathetic character into a two-dimensional baddie (instead of, to be fair, the equally two-dimensional goodie they were before); and that’s before we pop back to Earth for tea and laser gun battles. I haven’t seen a story vamp this hard since Dracula decided that England seemed like a nice place to visit.

As often happens with these genre exercises, you get the impression that the author might be just as happy spinning off into their own non-Doctor Who book. Imperial Moon often itches to write about the side characters instead, particularly Haliwell and Emily, the uneasy couple trapped in the gauntlet. Their courtship is so prim and proper it almost ducks behind a curtain with embarrassment, but it makes for a nice undercurrent to the action, and puts a button on the story at the end. Emily’s deference to social issues and women’s suffrage is laudable, as is the ideological friction with Haliwell, but as themes go it’s as subtle as a brick through a window — another instance of that in the book.

I doubt anyone is rocking up to Christopher Bulis’s Victorians-on-the-moon novel for reasons of subtlety. What you do get with Imperial Moon is a constantly moving, easy-to-visualise adventure that probably works well even if you’re only a bit familiar with Doctor Who. Story-wise, once we get past the nifty Victorian iconography I’d put it closer to Terry Nation than Wells or Verne, but it’s not like he couldn’t keep people reasonably entertained for weeks on end.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #55 – City At World's End by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#25

City At World's End

By Christopher Bulis

Now for something a bit more normal.

After the continuity-bending antics of Interference, which affected the Past Doctor books as well as the Eighth Doctor ones, you could be forgiven for expecting the PDAs to play a little fast and loose with the rules. Christopher Bulis probably wouldn’t be your go-to guy for that — his book The Ultimate Treasure was used, however fairly or unfairly, by Lawrence Miles as an example of an unadventurous PDA — and sure enough his next one is set before Interference, which keeps the established rules in place.

I don’t think that really matters though. Despite any preconceived notions of mine, Bulis is no more obligated to write an unusual book than Miles was to write Revenge Of The Quarks. A self-contained story set between telly episodes might automatically mute the “main characters might die” alarm but — all due respect to Miles — there are other things to be gained from a story set in a specific moment of continuity. Look at The Witch Hunters, The Roundheads and Eye Of Heaven. Just try to write something compelling and/or in an interesting way. If it’s good, it’ll be worth it. Lots of things can be at stake other than the Doctor and co.’s literal lives.

To its credit, City At World’s End puts a lot of things at stake. Right from the prologue an asteroid collision has knocked the moon of the planet Sarath out of a stable orbit. It’s going to smash into Sarath and end all life there. The TARDIS deposits the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan there with roughly one month until the collision. Their understandable urge to leave right away is thwarted when the building they’re on collapses in a meteor shower; suddenly the TARDIS is lost under rubble, Barbara is missing and Susan is hospitalised. Soon the TARDIS key is missing as well. They must recover it, get back together and leave before the planet is doomed. 

But even apart from all that, what are the people going to do? Should the TARDIS crew simply leave them to their fate? Forcing the characters to stick around automatically underlines this question, and the ultimate fate of Arkhaven (the only city on the planet) is kept up in the air for most of the book.

Our first impression is a memorable one: the building where the TARDIS lands is a fake, mocked up to give the appearance of a functioning city full of moving cars and busy activity. Arkhaven is actually nothing of the sort, the human population having been devastated by war with the native Taklarians. (The initial purpose of the fake buildings was to create false targets in the war.) Most of the survivors don’t know about this. Are they being lied to about anything else?

This whole phoney-city setup would still be interesting, in an admittedly doolally but recognisably 60s-sci-fi way, even without the moon collision aspect. I enjoyed the thought experiment of whether you can really be sure that London has millions of people in it. (I mean you probably can if you give it some thought, but it’s still imaginative to ask.) I’m less convinced though that the survivors could be kept from realising that 98% of their population had died just by turning everything around them into sets and animatronics — at least some of the survivors would have missing friends or family, surely? — but by that point we’re relying on your personal reserve of suspension of disbelief. The further we get into Arkhaven’s problems, and there are many, the more it seems that Bulis is over-reliant on that.

The book’s next big idea is a class system. Arkhaven has Functionaries (regular people who mainly work towards the exodus from Sarath), the Elite (rich people whose grip on society is slackening as the planet is endangered), the Church (who believe “the Maker”, and not a migration from Earth, put them all on Sarath — their grip is also slackening) and the NC2s (“Non-Citizen, Non-Conformists” – an underclass kept in internment camps). There’s heaps to unpack here, and I suspect no amount of the Doctor and co. sticking around would be enough to sort it out.

The thorniest issue is probably the NC2s. When one of them escapes a camp with the Doctor’s TARDIS key, the Doctor is happy to report the man to the authorities. Ian rebukes him for this (“I’m not sure I like the way you’ve implicated that trader, Doctor. After all, he was only helping what amount to refugees and political prisoners to escape”) but not much more is said on the disparity and cruelty towards this underclass. Escapees are, unknown to the prisoners, rounded up and returned by young Elite members as sport, which is another dystopian idea that would be interesting even without the “world’s about to end” setting. We don’t do enough with it here; the main NC2 we follow outside the camp (Gelvert, who nicked the key) ends up exiting the story abruptly and somewhat flushing away the time we spent with him in the process, also taking away our main link to the NC2s. (Minor point, but it’s here that the key disappears and is never found. Luckily there’s another one in circulation, but still — where did it go?)

If someone like Ace had featured, you can bet they’d be leading the charge to rescue the NC2s and indict the ruling class. I get that the First Doctor is unlikely to think like that — such compassion is literally what the companions were for in those days, particularly Ian — but it feels wrong to let this aspect of Arkhaven society slide in a Doctor Who story. It’s explained to the Doctor and Ian that not everyone can escape the calamity and therefore some people must be excluded, which makes a brutal sort of sense I suppose, but it feels like there is a wider and very heated conversation to have off the back of that. Such as, how can you condemn a whole subset of society out of hand? Why treat them so badly when they’re going to die anyway? Doesn’t the hatred coming from the Elite suggest that a new world won’t solve your society’s problems, and maybe you should work on them now? Are you ultimately more deserving of survival than anyone else? City At World’s End clearly isn’t the sort of book to get into the moral weeds on any of this — the NC2 camps drop out of the story for most of it, that’s that I guess — so why set up the debate in the first place?

There’s a lot going on here, and inevitably some of it feels extraneous, there to give the characters (and the book) something to get on with other than the end of days. This meta concept figures into the plot at times, so it must be deliberate, but I’m not willing to give every idea the same pass. The Church’s power grab is definitely running its course just to keep people busy — okay, score one to Bulis. (They’re not very interesting baddies, evangelical characters rarely are, but they’re surprisingly well armed.) Then there are the disappearances happening outside the city — these feel random for ages, but they do eventually feed into the “fate of Arkhaven” story. Fair enough.

Even the machinations that do serve a purpose though serve to distract the reader (and not just, however usefully, the characters) from the looming threat — there are barely any material reminders about the moon collision, and there’s no sense of escalation as it gets nearer. They’re weeks away from the end of all life on the planet! Shouldn’t we see some evidence outside of the opening scenes? And yeah, I know it’s baked into the plot, but the lack of panic about all this begins to work against the tension. Scenes of police officers investigating dangerous church members feel superfluous in the extreme. (As if Bulis has only just remembered, the collision is moved up to about four hours in the final chapters. Oh right, now they panic.)

Then we have the subplot about Taklarians kidnapping and brainwashing people to interfere with the launch. This accounts for most of Barbara’s story in the book (although she is made to forget about it) — however, events conspire so that she didn’t even need brainwashing, and by the end most of the characters didn’t even know about the Taklarian threat. So what were we building up to, exactly? Or was it just to imply a greater purpose for Barbara than “thanklessly trudge through pipes and rubble until you are rescued”?

And hey, since we’re talking about them, what about the Taklarians? They’re native to this planet, apparently. Are we not going to touch on colonialism at all, since the Arkhaven settlers presumably chose someone else’s planet to live on? Yes, it’s sad that millions of humans are dead, but so are nearly all of the Taklarians. No, they’re not very nice, but why should they be? Again it feels like someone ought to be asking why group X deserves to make it out of here alive and group Y doesn’t. The fact that the Taklarians are painted exclusively as Baddies seems to nullify the point. I’m sure I don’t need to highlight the various BBC Books that already mentioned indigenous aliens as well as the rights thereof, however much those books might have bungled it. It’s just weird to skip all of that here.

Everywhere you look in City At World’s End there’s an idea or a character that’s probably quite interesting in isolation but doesn’t have the room to breathe. It can be argued, for example, that the last act villain reveal is a valid one, folding into the overall idea of rulers lying to their people about the state of their city and adding a twist to those mysterious disappearances, as well as finally examining the remarkable machine technology of Arkhaven. But this leads to yet another new group who arguably have rights (they seem to have awareness) and therefore, despite their violence, should have as much claim to getting off this rock as the humans. But they’re largely done away with when the bad guy (or “bad guy”) gets his comeuppance, so once again just never mind I guess. (PS: they have their own brainwashing plot, entirely separate from the Taklarian one. We’re seriously doing “army of sleeper agents” twice in one story, where neither group knows about or impacts the other?)

Probably the most interesting thing about this largely unexamined new group at the end is that one of them is a duplicate of one of the regulars, but that too is (of course) mostly not examined, a can of worms opened just enough to help round off the resolution. Certainly the behaviour of the Doctor towards this character raises questions about identity and the soul, questions he’s very much not engaging with. Now, I’m not against throwing in weird and crazy ideas — please do! But if they don’t mean much to the characters, what are they for? Certainly at this late stage in the story.

City At World’s End is somewhat at odds with itself. Its ambitions are grand, even sprawling at times, but the writing is entirely down to earth. Some of the story mechanics are as old as the hills, particularly the “we lost the TARDIS key” gambit and (stop me if you’ve heard this one) “we wouldn’t be in this situation if it wasn’t for [the Doctor’s] insistence on exploring the city.” Never mind that this is BBC Book: umpty-squillion set on an old Earth colony world. (Although kudos for making it so far along in its history that they’ve forgotten Earth even existed.)

Speaking of ancient mechanics, there’s a tendency towards bland rhetorical questions in the characters’ inner monologues. (“Ben looked at him curiously. He’d spoken quickly and easily, though his face was lined with worry. Was Ian privately losing hope of finding Barbara alive?”) Also the amount of info-dumping here could concuss a rhinoceros: in one scene the Doctor blackmails Gelvert into delivering a blow-by-blow account of how things work on Arkhaven, which is efficient for book purposes but far from subtle. Elsewhere people are always in need of updates which then require further summarising because we know it all already. (“‘While we’re stuck in here anyway, perhaps you could tell us what’s going on in your city?’ Curiosity replaced Plax’s bluster. ‘You really don’t know about the Ship, do you? It’s going to take us to Mirath…’ He gave a concise account of the situation in Arkhaven and a more grudging explanation of his own presence.”)

The writing creaks in a nuts and bolts way at times, with as-you-know-Bob name usage (“‘Please be patient, Prince Keldo.’ ‘We must know what she was doing down there, Thorken’”) and dialogue where one party only seems to show up to provide feed lines. (“‘I’m afraid the explosion might not have been an accident. It is consistent with the existence of the secret tunnel.’ Lant looked dazed. ‘What tunnel?’ ‘The one that runs under the city towards the mountains… at least, so the alignment suggests.’ ‘Alignment from where?’ ‘From the Ship through the point where you lost your mystery quarry.’ ‘What do you mean?’” You remind me of the babe, what babe, the babe with the power, what power…)

It probably should be an interesting one for the regulars, but — despite a very well-organised chapter structure that keeps the focus on one group at a time — they’re never doing all that much. Barbara trudges through a defunct subplot; Ian looks for Barbara; the Doctor tries to move things along with the rocket but keeps vital information to himself, when not refusing to engage with the morality of anything going on around him; and Susan arguably has a very interesting experience that raises questions (not including the action-y hostage crisis with the Church), but none are thought about in depth.

Despite everything though, City At World’s End kept my attention. Bulis has far too many hooks here, but the main one — how are these people going to get out of this? — is actively engaging for as long as possible. There’s a good amount of interest generated just by asking questions all the time, like what the hell that giant snake monster was about. (Not a question you’d expect to hear in a “survive the moon collision” story.) Some of the characters have a tendency to blur together, such as Draad and Lant, but there’s enough of a general air of likability to be invested in them when they’re in it, even if I suspect that Bulis had no idea what to make of any of their actions.

It’s messy, no doubt about it: thoroughly in need of a good prune and in dire need of more focus on the big questions. But as an exercise in plate spinning, what can I say? It’s quite engrossing and you could do worse.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #28 – Vanderdeken's Children by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#14
Vanderdeken's Children
By Christopher Bulis

Right. Think positive. Let’s say something nice about Vanderdeken’s Children.

There’s a good idea in it. This is generally the saving grace in its reviews, and in principle I have to agree: when we find out what’s really going on here, it’s clever. A lot of work has clearly gone into it, evidenced by a bit near the end where the Doctor looks at a visualisation of what’s happening — as per Bulis on Pieces Of Eighth, this is a close to literal representation of actual diagrams the author drew to keep it all in check. Tricky stuff.

The setup isn’t bad either. A mysterious ship is found floating in space and representatives from two opposing societies, on a luxury cruise liner and a warship, want to claim salvage. The Doctor and Sam end up in the middle and, posing as neutral Federation Moderators, they lead the expedition. Naturally the Doctor has a bad feeling about this and he’s hoping to talk everybody out of taking this dangerous spaceship home. There’s plenty of familiarity to all this, some whiffs of Event Horizon, Alien, Rendezvous With Rama, not to mention the Doctor Who cruise ship shenanigans in Terror Of The Vervoids and hey, The Flying Dutchman and all that. But there’s nothing wrong with borrowing a setup. It’s what you do with it.

Next good thing: the role of the Doctor. This is more personal pet peeve than objective Thing What Is Bad, but I think the original series severely overplayed the idea of the Doctor arriving at the scene of some difficulty and automatically being blamed for it. Zeta Major memorably skipped this and so does Vanderdeken’s Children: the Doctor is able to swan about investigating without raising any red flags, and that’s despite his first impression being that everybody thinks the TARDIS is an offensive missile, and as far as they know they’ve already blown it up. Nobody ever twigs that the Doctor was behind that, despite an amusing “Hang on…” moment later on when the various parties see the police box again. I think it’s a sign of some confidence in your narrative when you can let the Doctor just tear through it and focus on the bigger issues, rather than waste time on easy fodder like “Surely you don’t expect me to believe you’re a time traveller.” His personality should generally win people over and it does so here.

But we’re clearly in a cagey, caveat-ey sort of review here, so off comes the plaster. I still did not like Vanderdeken’s Children. Sorry, Chris.

I think a lot of it comes down to how that clever central idea is executed. I won’t go into detail on what it is (yes I know the book’s really old, I just think you’d benefit from the surprise if you read it) but suffice to say, I was already aware of the general gist of it, and I was looking for signs of what was happening. If anything I had a leg up. Somehow, that didn’t help.

I spent most of the book trying to piece together quite abstract visual concepts while leap-frogging from one group of characters to another. There’s the crew of the cruise liner, the crew of the warship, splinter factions from both, the Doctor and/or Sam mixed in with some of the above, other life forms who come into it later, other crews of other ships, all running through settings that include the cruise liner, the warship, a shuttle from each, other ships, the alien ship and another location near the end. It’s an overpopulated book that rarely sits still, which is a problem when there’s not much to hang it all on. (And quite frankly, also a problem when you have my attention span.)

The characters certainly have personalities, but they rarely exceed two dimensions. There’s an ageing military figure turned politician who yearns for relevance and glory. A youthful officer who believes in the cause. A married couple where the bullying wife controls everything. An actor who wishes he was as brave as his characters. A young photographer who… likes photography, I guess. The captains of both vessels have distinct enough flavours, but that only goes so far when there’s ultimately very little separating the Emindians (cruise liner) and Nimosians (warship) other than a certain fanaticism in most of the latter and only some of the former. (Maybe that’s a commentary on how we’re all the same in war, but if so then it still doesn’t help the book along.) The main thing at stake here is this collection of characters; it matters when you either don’t care about them beyond obvious points of reference, or can’t tell them apart.

All of that sort of go-to characterisation is as nothing compared to the monsters in Vanderdeken’s Children which are, as per the Flying Dutchman nod in the title (which only becomes apparent at the very end if you’re not well up on the myth already), ghosts. More specifically we’re talking vague, misty grey figures who shape-shift into all manner of monstrous appendages and random adjectives. Bulis is like a kid in a candy store with these guys, throwing in whatever visualisations come to mind from minute to minute. They did nothing for me as a concept. I couldn’t get a handle on them, as the book doesn’t devote much time to getting in their heads (and most of them are “insane” anyway — fascinating) and I never felt a consistent sense of threat: just, if you go over there, maybe something-something-misty-crab-pincers will wibble-wibble-spooky-tentacle. In a book that clearly has its sights on weird world-building in space, this kind of loosey-goosey expressionism just made me lose interest. And that’s before we start trying to fit these ethereal whatevers into the complicated plot he’s worked out.

The best actual “What’s going on?” stuff is on the alien ship, the simple stuff. There’s an unusual key pad (pictured at the front of the book — a rare BBC Books illustration!) and a room where all the alien buttons inexplicably have labels in English. Good brain-teasing fodder there, and both get a neat payoff. Too often in Vanderdeken’s Children I wasn’t being presented with clear mysteries so much as word jumbles with a vague sense of unease. Maybe it’s just me (and to be fair to the book, I have had a very distracting week), but at times reading this I had my worst Doctor Who brain fog since Time’s Crucible.

When it eventually becomes time to drop the penny the book has to grind to a halt to explain itself. Not what I’d call an elegant solution, plus it’s being delivered by characters who don’t remember key elements of the plot. We’re then into the finale, when there is at least a palpable sense of what we want to achieve (or more importantly, prevent from happening), but the sheer number of characters and spaceships in the mix ended up confusing me further. I pretty much coasted through the last act, grateful for the Doctor’s eventual summing up to Sam. But then even that turns on a dime, either because Bulis thought of another interesting wrinkle or the editor asked him to not go quite so bleak with it. Either way, if leaves the book’s final statement as something of a rush job, tossing out a conclusion that we really don’t have time to feel. I sort of felt that way about the main Clever Idea in the plot; if it had been expanded into the general premise of the book, and not a twist that puts things in a new context, we could have really got into what it can do instead of being all with the oblique hints.

Hey ho: plot isn’t everything. What about the main characters, our guides through whatever funhouse stuff the author of the week comes up with? Well I’ll say this for Sam: she’s fine in this. Not hugely interesting, but Bulis is another author happy to tick off salient continuity points and underline the basic pattern of growth that’s occurred since Seeing I. (I’m beginning to wonder if this boils down to “she does NOT fancy the Doctor any more, okay!” but to be honest if you keep bringing it up then it just feels like she’s protesting too much.) There’s a scene where Sam is literally de-aged to a child, where Bulis has a lot of fun explaining the physics of losing all your memories after that point, that made me wonder if it was a witty comment on her character reset. But they resolve it and move on, never repeating a similar stunt with another character, so I’m not sure why it’s there at all. The best thing about Sam in this is that she’s fine. The worst thing is that she ends up feeling a bit interchangeable with the plight of the young female photographer. (Honourable mention to Sam’s random bursts of technical expertise that could indicate character growth but are never underlined as such. “But why would anybody want to stack a ship full of neutronium?” and “[was this caused by] some sort of hyperdrive motor accident?” are not natural phrases for a girl from late 90s Shoreditch.)

But then we have the Doctor. Now, I’ve already said that I think Bulis handles his role very well here. By 1998 he was certainly expert enough to write the Doctor — becoming I think, in Vanderdeken’s Children, the first Who novelist to write a book for every incumbent. But getting the individual Doctor’s voice right is another matter. This, also, is something Bulis has had success with: I think all his previous Who books get it right, with the arguable exception of The Ultimate Treasure, and I really think that one is arguable. But his Eighth Doctor is a complete miss. The dialogue is fustery, formal and aged. He says bewildering things like “Of course, this is only a four-dimensional approximation of a fifth-dimensional cross section of a multidimensional phenomenon” in that tedious Data-from-Star Trek way that only prompts other character to ask what the hell he’s on about or comedically beg him to stop. If I didn’t know better (and I do, see Pieces Of Eighth again) I might have assumed Bulis had missed the TV Movie altogether, because I cannot imagine Paul McGann turning to his companion and saying things like “It did occur to me that their proposed participation might influence matters somewhat.” This stuff isn’t just unnaturally clunky and boring: it misses the intrinsic charm of the performance that you would sort of assume was key to his success at winning people over in, for example, this novel. Ultimately Vanderdeken’s Children becomes another example, like Placebo Effect, of the BBC Books authors having other things to worry about besides getting Sam right. (Last thought on this: I really think Bulis benefits from available screen time, as a popular complaint about Tempest is that he also didn’t get Bernice Summerfield right. My personal jury’s out on that one.)

I’ve seen it said that Vanderdeken’s Children benefits from a second reading. Plot wise that makes sense, it is definitely that kind of story. But on the one hand I was already looking for these little hints and still didn’t benefit from them, so I’m not sure what else there is to gain. And on the other hand it’s all so intangible and jumbled that I just can’t recommend the experience of reading it once — never mind twice. I wanted to like what Bulis was doing here, and I still think he’s an author who can deliver a decent jaunt through time and space, but I have to be honest and say this whole thing just didn’t come off.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #6 – The Ultimate Treasure by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#3
The Ultimate Treasure
By Christopher Bulis

A flicker of light. Objects begin to move independently, disturbed by fingers of electricity. A great breath seems to draw in all around as Christopher Bulis ascends out of his chair, away from his word processor and into the air. His arms are splayed, eyes closed, smile beautific. He has at last written a book for every classic Doctor. The quickening is at hand.

Good old Bulis, eh? While he tends not to top any Favourite Author charts, he is one of those who’s happy enough to write any combo of characters. I think there’s something to be said for that kind of adaptability, although of course it doesn’t guarantee brilliant books. (I thought State Of Change, Eye Of The Giant and – yes! – Shadowmind were all pretty enjoyable, but the rest were more miss than hit for me.) Love him or hate him, he’s a dependable old workhorse and if you’re diving into a twice-monthly book release schedule, it makes sense to include people like him in your roster.

For his latest mix-and-match assignment Bulis has parachuted the Fifth Doctor and Peri into (as you might have guessed) a treasure hunt. This is quite an unusual pairing, since Peri was only around for one story before violently swapping out Doctors. Is there much to say about that brief window where her travelling companion favoured cricket gear instead of Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat?

I’ll rip off the plaster now: no, not really. We’re reminded that Peri is just enjoying the rest of her holiday in space rather than in Lanzerote (bless her, maybe she should have stayed) and she’s having, by and large, a nice time. What does she think of the Doctor? Not a great deal, although she considers him passingly attractive, but so plainly uninterested in her that there’s no reason to go there. Peri is written with recognisable and likeable informality, but the story doesn’t delve much into her dynamic with the Doctor. There’s little opportunity, as he seems at somewhat of a distance throughout. (You could put that down to The Ultimate Treasure being more from her perspective than his, as after all, she doesn’t really know the guy.)

Glancing at reviews – and may I just say, ouch! – this seems like a popular sticking point. The Ultimate Treasure is not very big on its two leads. Or more specifically the Doctor. Yes, Bulis has crossed off every one of the classics by now – but is it perhaps significant that Davison came last? Recognisably him is a certain insistence on fair play (well, y’know, cricket etc), and there’s a bit where he uses his bowling arm. But he cuts a rather muted and unimpressive figure for most of the novel. Witnessing a murder, the Doctor waits around until the police are summoned so he can help. They immediately point to him and Peri for the killing – and at no point does he say, well why did I call you, then? When said police officer stows aboard the TARDIS, which by then is heading off to find the treasure/catch the crooks, the cop points a gun at him and orders him to turn the ship around. Trying very hard to ignore the fact that guns shouldn’t work in the TARDIS, why does he listen to her? (He is only prevented from dutifully changing course by external forces.) Good grief, man, this is your house! Later, when the treasure hunt is in full flow, the criminals kidnap Peri to force his cooperation in their winning the contest, and he just goes along with it. No underhand tricks or anything, just honest help. I despair. You’re the Doctor!

Of course, if you want to be charitable to Bulis – and just as uncharitable to this incarnation of the Doctor – if any Time Lord was known for letting others get the better of him, it’s this one. His concern for his companions often takes more of a toll on him than his fellows (hey, look what ended up killing him) and he seemed to spend more time in jail awaiting assistance than yer average wibbly wobbly medical practitioner. Could the less than spectacular, downright colourless characterisation here be deliberate, pointed even? I don’t know. But I’m enough of a Fifth Doctor critic to think this doesn’t ring totally false, even if it is all a bit disappointing on the page. (And just to redress it a bit further: the Fifth Doctor at this point in the series was quite hot tempered at times, actually. His fiery mood in the very next, climactic story didn’t entirely come from nowhere. So it might be understandably difficult for some readers to square this zen pushover with that guy.)

Perhaps the reason the Doctor isn’t charging heroically through The Ultimate Treasure is – and it’s a big, hypothetical, nothing-to-back-it-up perhaps – that might not always have been the plan? Not long after this was published Bulis would contribute a book to the Bernice Summerfield range. Does a hunt for lost treasure strike you at all as a sort of, well, Bernice-ey thing? With very few revisions this could be just her sort of caper. There are shades of Dragons’ Wrath about the famous macguffin, and shades of Down about the strange planet. Even the bright, frothy tone is right for her. I’m not disinclined to believe he had a few archaeological ideas floating about and ultimately went with Tempest for Benny, leaving the Doctor on a treasure hunt instead. (Mind you, a grab bag of ideas assigned willy nilly to different Doctors might have been Bulis’s strategy throughout his career.) We still get requisite dollops of Who continuity, never fear: there’s a positively gratuitous recap of Peri’s introductory story at the start, and an even more gratuitous, downright inexplicable cameo towards the end. (I know “spoilers for a 30 year old book” is a touchy subject, but it’s honestly so left field that I’d feel like a bad sport just blurting it out. I’ll stick it at the end in case you want to go “Oof, really?”) Regardless, “Bulis had a spare Benny pitch” is my head canon and I’m sticking to it.

As for the actual treasure hunt and the book at large… well it’s probably significant that I haven’t gone on about the plot much. You can map it out without much help: there is a lost treasure, information is doing the rounds in seedy space bars, multiple colourful parties are interested, they all end up (including the decidedly killy ones) on an equal footing on a mysterious planet all racing to the finish. It ends up sort of like The Ghost Monument, except some things happen in it.

And you know what? I don’t hate it. Of depth, there is not a whole heck of a lot – spreading it across a dozen characters will naturally make that the case, this ain’t Game Of Thrones y’know – but Bulis imbues the various traps with enough variety to keep them interesting, and then varies the response of each group that comes into contact with it. I particularly enjoyed the desert of trap doors, which contain a variety of pitfalls, one of which the Doctor turns into something useful during a heatwave. This kind of narrative is very simple, but the execution has a colourful sense of fun about it, a solid “what’s next” momentum.

As for the characters, there aren’t any that I’d clamour to see again, but they generally acquit themselves within their little arcs. The police officer is fairly enjoyable, although her journey from total stickler to “ah, you guys are all right” is not difficult to predict. There’s a bloke who models himself after Shakespeare’s Falstaff, which you’ll either find annoying or harmlessly quirky. (I leaned towards quirky.) I quite liked the strange tension of these trials all being observed by the omnipotent people of this world and by a nosey reporter using flying drones. (Equally you might say that the former makes any real degree of danger or success rather unlikely. And I mean, fair enough.)

The nature of the ultimate treasure, you ask? From the title alone I was making an each way bet that it would be supreme knowledge (which the Doctor must of course decline) or The Friends We Made Along The Way, and I’m thrilled to report that it’s… not literally that first one. There’s again some variety in how the “treasure” sequence plays out, such that I wasn’t actively disappointed with it. A ringing endorsement, I know.

While I haven’t written The Proverbial Glowing Review Of The Ultimate Treasure, I can honestly say I had a good time with it, in spite of its deficiencies. (And hey, I missed one: there is a higher frequency of grammatical errors is this book than I’ve spotted since beginning this leg of the marathon. “To” instead of “too,” “lose” instead of “loose,” at one point “cleaver” instead of “clever”. I know they were running a conveyer-belt but not every BBC Book is like this, so they can do it.) Perhaps Christopher Bulis just has a talent for catching me in the right mood. If you’re up for 280 pages of undemanding adventure that could just as easily have been Doctor Who as any other sci-fi, you could do worse. If that’s not enough then I don’t really blame you: the ultimate treasure can be the power to skip this one.

6/10

***

That Bonus Spoiler For A 30 Year Old Book So You Can Go “Oof, Really?”, Either At The Spoiler Or The Fact I’m Calling It A Spoiler

So, while separated from the Doctor Peri encounters a mysterious steed (pictured on the cover) which stays by her side and ultimately sacrifices itself against a murderous crime lord. The steed? It’s Kamelion. His essence wasn’t entirely dead after Planet Of Fire, and the mysterious beings on this planet helped him find a new body so he could die all over again, but heroically, instead of being triggered into a heart attack and then shot by the Doctor. And hey, good: every single thing about Kamelion was a weird choice, so I don’t hate the idea of revisiting him after the fact. But a page or two of “by the way it was me, hi and bye I guess, dying again lol” is not going to win awards for not being a quick and random continuity bullet point. Is he really better off this way? Well, as the saying goes, the important thing is, he’s dead.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #111 – Tempest by Christopher Bulis

The New Adventures
#9
Tempest
By Christopher Bulis

Few writers are quite as ubiquitous in Doctor Who fiction as Christopher Bulis, who by this point had written for all but two of the Doctors for Virgin Publishing. (One of the “not”s was Paul McGann and that was probably just because Virgin lost the license. Bulis later rectified this at BBC Books.) It is fitting, then, or at least unsurprising that he should have a crack at the Bernice Summerfield range as well.

Tempest is a murder mystery on a train. So far, blah: it’s fair to say we’ve been there and done that in pop culture. Hell, this range of books has already plundered Agatha Christie for Ship Of Fools. Sometimes though, it’s how you do it, and Tempest… is also not the great brain-teaser of the century as far as murder mysteries go. Bugger. (Let’s just say it employs the old gambit of leaving an obvious suspect completely unremarked upon for some reason. I cheered smugly when I was right.)

There are other marks against it. Bulis has somewhat of a tin ear for names in this, with the action centring around a priceless statue called the Drell Imnulate (just reading it on the page makes my tongue twist), characters such as Lankril, Tralbet the Narg and briefly two completely unrelated people called Lin and Lyn.

Worse though, on a general level, is Bernice. She just doesn’t seem as witty as usual. I can’t help rating these books on how well they’ve captured her voice — it’s one of the only constants of the range — and with inner monologues as, ah, pithy as “The more I learn the more I realise I don’t have to look outside my own species to find behavioural quirks quite as strange as those of any alien society,” I’m unlikely to exceed 3 Paul Cornells out of a possible 5, am I?

And yet: after a while I realised I was haring through this at a good speed. Though I held a pretty firm suspicion throughout over whodunit, I was enjoying the process of uncovering it and how it was dun. Last — and best — of all? It’s bloody Bernice, who is good in this, actually, Mr Judgy Where-Are-My-Quips.

First off, we see Bernice in her element delivering a lecture to laughter and applause. Showing, not telling! Hooray! She’s a guest speaker in need of funds. (“It will be a novel sensation to be solvent for a while.” Wouldn’t you know it, the cushy status quo from Mean Streets hasn’t held up.) As far as she knows she hasn’t been tasked with finding an ancient artefact or even solving a mystery for once, she’s just here to do her job and the plot happens to her while she’s on the way home. I’ve moaned before about the level of contrivance needed to get her into plots sans TARDIS, and it’s nice to make it feel natural once in a while. (Of course it turns out her involvement is not a coincidence, but that reveal didn’t bother me. She manages to avoid being further ensnared, and hence keep her agency, just by getting drunk at the right time. So that’s a character foible becoming critical to the plot. Nice!)

Her (arguable) lack of spark could be attributed to the fact that she’s knackered, and quite simply not interested in cleaning up a mess she didn’t cause. Whatever the reason in-continuity (and outside continuity apparently Bulis wanted to write a very all-ages-accessible Bernice, which in practical terms meant fewer rude jokes, so that’s that mystery solved), the result is a more weathered but I think, not unbelievable Bernice Summerfield. She’s done this sort of thing before, literally: “If you’re volunteering to take charge, be my guest. I’ve played detective before and believe me it’s harder than it looks.” (I think that’s above being called lampshading: if you’re stuck with repetition in a series, say so, as long as you can build on it.) Whether she likes it or not, she fits the role of investigator and hero, and the other characters seem to insist on it.

And why shouldn’t they? I’m probably projecting here – from the book’s general reputation it’s clear I’m quite generous about it too – but I like to think that’s just something characters pick up when they spend enough time with the Doctor. Bernice just seems like the one who’ll sort it out. She fits the mould of responsibility, particularly in a Doctor-ish moment where she consoles the survivors of a fight that, unlike the raiders who just attacked, their own lost lives were given for something that actually mattered. But she’s still not, and can’t be, the Doctor, hence joining in when a gun battle ensues and helping to engineer a fatal crash for some attackers. When we finally get to the accusing parlour scene, it doesn’t feel like a re-run of Ship Of Fools — firstly because this book isn’t so thoroughly arch about it, but mainly because she’s invested in this one, as mucked in as anyone else on this very unfortunate train.

Which is, by the way, another good thing about Tempest. The setting is both claustrophobic, rarely straying beyond the high speed train (which lets us focus on the plot and the characters), and interestingly sci-fi-ish, with the thoroughly inhospitable and weird planet frequently visible (and a frequent hindrance) just beyond the windows. The planet was the original impetus for the book, but I think it’s a smart move to keep it as an incredible thing we only get glimpses of. (You could come back to it and do more with it if you were so inclined, but I’m guessing they didn’t as Bulis didn’t return.) It’s a good way to keep the ho-hum setup from seeming too ho-hum while maintaining the essential “yeah but then what happens” of a murder mystery. That said, don’t panic, there’s plenty of action as well.

The mystery, which I’ve banged on about as being too simple, is at least more complicated in execution, with various red herrings and deliberate nefarious fake-outs. That process is fun, and the character relationships are fleshed out quite interestingly through the investigation. It all serves to get Bernice good and stuck into things, and make it feel as though these things can just happen to her, just as she can sort them out, quite naturally. Tempest isn’t especially bold or showy, but after multiple books where she felt like an afterthought in her own series, I can’t not appreciate that.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #95 – A Device Of Death by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#31

A Device Of Death

By Christopher Bulis

Okay, so you’re about to lose the Doctor Who license. What do you do? Looking at the books published around this time (such as Cold Fusion, Lungbarrow, The Dark Path) I can’t help imagining a frantic race to green-light the wildest, most fan-maddening things they could think of. And why not, since they were getting evicted? But that theory sort of wobbles when you look at A Device Of Death, published right near the end and about as likely to frighten the horses as a Doctor Who episode guide. What was the pitch? “Hey Chris, we’re a book short”? “Which Doctor was your mum’s favourite”? Of course there’s no real obligation to do something crazy or fannish here, nor any guarantee that doing that = a good book, but the sheer ordinariness of this is a bit stifling so late on. When you can count your license time in minutes, it seems like folly just to churn ’em out.

That’s not to say A Device Of Death feels cynical or knocked together, as Christopher Bulis has a decent idea here and he clearly likes all his characters. But it could have been published at any point in the run, and whether or not that matters, it feels a bit disposable now.

Fresh from changing history a bit in Genesis Of The Daleks, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry are heading back to Nerva Beacon via the Time Ring – or so they think, until the Time Lords decide there’s something else that requires their attention first. Something goes wrong and the travellers are split up. The Doctor lands in Deepcity, their real destination: an underground weapons facility that is part of a massive space system war. He soon becomes a valued guest helping with the war effort. Harry arrives in a war-zone where his medical skills quickly endear him to the military. Sarah, ever the lucky one, winds up working in an enemy camp, and later befriends one of the humanoid battle droids that litter both sides of the conflict. All three have amnesia to some degree, but the Doctor will be affected by it for most of the book, not being sure what he was up to in the last story, where his home planet is or what blueish box-type thing he happens to be obsessed with. Mostly the memory loss serves just to delay the plot, as a Doctor playing with a full deck (and knowledge of TARDISes) makes short work of the problem later. Harry and Sarah get their marbles back soon enough, and having this happen one after another begins to feel redundant – Sarah must be interrogated first, so she can remember the return of her memories!

From the outset, something clearly isn’t right about this war. This is particularly apparent when 1984-ish “daily hates” come along to stir wartime spirit (in, improbably enough, Harry). There’s also the peculiar absence of enemy soldiers – Sarah comes closest to seeing any, and then it’s mostly synthetic prison guards. Bulis clearly has a plan in action, but dramatically it’s a bit inert as the main factors are all too obvious early on. (One side is clearly perpetuating the war, so it just becomes a question of Why.) Meanwhile the Doctor and Harry have quite a pleasant time of it (Sarah, admittedly, less so!), and the narrative – though switching adroitly from one character to another with each chapter – moves very slowly, with a lot of information dispensed in heavy exposition dumps. (There’s something uncannily odd about the image of Tom Baker sitting patiently while another actor talks at length.) There are interesting moments when Harry wins the trust of aliens on a battlefield, not to mention plies his trade as a field medic for once, and Sarah’s experiences in a work camp are suitably harrowing, including witnessing a failed escape. It’s genuinely satisfying when they come together at the end, and it becomes apparent that (spoiler?) the planet Harry and Sarah are heading towards is the secret one that houses the Doctor. But the journey to that point is mostly spent going “Yessss?” with increasing impatience.

There’s something novel (or perhaps desperate) about cramming a story into this gap – which went from the Doctor, Sarah and Harry spinning through space at the end of Genesis to, er, the same thing at the start of the next story, presumably! – and there’s something awkwardly redundant about the wartime bunker stuff that fills the plot. This is in no literal way a repeat of the previous story, but it still couldn’t have been made in Season 12 for the sensible reason that you don’t want to see two things in a row that look or feel alike. There’s more or less a deliberate reason for this, but it arrives on the second to last page of the book, so it’s not really enough to offset the creeping suspicion that Bulis simply loved Genesis and wanted to repurpose some of the sets. (Mind you this was Season 12, when they were so thrifty they set two stories in the same place. But like, eight weeks apart, which was something.)

Bubbling along beneath the “What’s really going on?” action is a subplot with Sarah and the robot, which she christens Max. This has a wider significance to the story which becomes apparent in the last stretch, then clicks fully into place on the last page. (!) This is worth noting because, if you didn’t know it was going somewhere, these scenes add nothing you haven’t seen before. Even Sarah notes the parallel with befriending Kettlewell’s robot in Tom’s first story, and the teaching-a-robot-to-appreciate-human-foibles act is as old as, well, robots. Max is garden variety “nice robot” in every way, and I say that as someone who absolutely loves anything with robots in it. A Device Of Death could, in another draft, have been all about emergent robot life, and may have been more interesting, but there doesn’t seem to be room to dwell on that theme as we drily move from one plot scene to another until someone finally owns up about the purpose of the war. There’s a cast of dozens, only some of whom (like the guilty scientist Tarron or the pompous actor Malf) feel at all lived in. It definitely feels like Bulis is invested in everybody here, but the story doesn’t have room to flesh them all out. It has themes, too, about the dangers of jingoism and ignorance of suffering, but they seem to happen in spite of the chugging prose rather than because of it.

Is it worth the wait to find out what’s going on? Not massively. I won’t say exactly what’s going on here because, beyond spoilers and what would just be the obvious reason for perpetuating a war beyond its sell-by date, I’m not sure I entirely followed it. A Device Of Death reaches count-the-pages territory by the end, not unlike some of Bulis’s other sloggy novels like Twilight Of The Gods. It’s never actually bad (although you may sprain something rolling your eyes at the Me Robot, You Friend stuff) but it lacks a great sense of danger and, being all about war, much in the way of fun.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #85 – Twilight Of The Gods by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#26

Twilight of the Gods

By Christopher Bulis

A sequel to The Web Planet?  You had me at awesome.

Okay, so it’s the only telly Who story that literally sends me to sleep.  I still admire them for making it.  Memorable for having no supporting humanoid characters, The Web Planet scores weirdness points over possibly all other Doctor Who.  You’ve got to wonder what would motivate someone to return to that.

Short answer, I still don’t know.  Twilight of the Gods plays strangely coy with its familiar setting, plastering a Zarbi on the front cover and confirming it in the blurb, then not saying it’s Vortis for 64 pages like we’re suddenly going to double take and go, really?  In order for the story to work Vortis has to move significantly through space, Mondas-style, which is really rather odd but no one seems to notice or care much.  Shouldn’t that be one of the main concerns?  The central conflict has much to do with our last adventure on Vortis – you get one guess what sinister force is behind it all, okay it rhymes with Flanimus – but the bulk of the book is about a civil war between the Rhumons, a society split by revolution with both sides claiming the new world.  They’re alien enough to require some solid time in a make-up chair, basically human otherwise.  They have weary leaders, religious zealots, power-hungry lieutenants, thankless grunts, deteriorating marriages and old family manservants – same as us and, just to bludgeon the theme in, same as each other.  Crammed between all this you get the occasional Menoptera clearing its throat to be noticed, even less frequently an Optera, and the Zarbi and larvae guns have what you could generously call cameos.  Bad luck, Web Planet fans.

Call it a hunch, but I suspect there was a working version of Twilight of the Gods set somewhere else before someone leaned in and said “Pssst, change it a bit and get some of that sweet Web Planet dollah”.  It’s not as if I was dying to read 300 pages about the Zarbi and the Optera – I doubt anyone was – but if you’re that uninterested, why bother?  I’m guessing for the sheer convenience of not having to establish 1) a malign intelligence you can wake up later (that’s your last clue) and 2) a society of native non-humanoids to more clearly show colonialism, ramming home the difference between the human-ish Rhumons and the rest.  Shortcut is a word that came to mind a lot while reading it.

You could also use the word authentic, I suppose.  The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are barely out of the TARDIS before they’re accosted by one lot of Rhumons who accuse them of spying for the other lot, then before you know it they’re accosted by the other lot who accuse them of spying for the first lot!  Trope points there.  This routine served a satirical point in The War Games (so hey, it’s era-appropriate), and a similar, more irritating point in Frontier In Space, but it’s just filler this time.  The TARDIS crew then get split up and move between the two Rhumon camps and the Menoptera base; they play a forgettable sort of catch-up for most of the book, before frantically making everything go smashy-smashy at the end until the problem stops.  For better or worse, this certainly feels like a Troughton six-parter with time to kill.  During which, the Doctor uses local something-something-interference in order to pilot the TARDIS properly; Jamie learns how to drive a lorry with improbable ease; and most improbably, Victoria has an interesting time of it, briefly going undercover for the Menoptera, then for one lot of Rhumons, then unknowingly for the other lot.  It’s over too quickly, alas, and she’s back to worrying and fainting, which puts paid to the novel’s aspiration of setting up her departure in Fury From The Deep.  This is foreshadowed in that clumsy Missing Adventures way, along with the Doctor’s need for his sonic screwdriver (which wouldn’t-you-know-it shows up in the next story!), before being picked up again right at the end to give the novel a coda.  Nice try, but nul points: just giving Victoria a life-or-death adventure with a blob of autonomy and saying this has somehow caused her to grow up more than any other adventure before it is just another shortcut.

Sometimes the urge to skip ahead short-changes the book itself, not just its characters.  The Rhumons are all concerned and/or in denial about “ghosts”, and bodies disappearing from nearby graves; there’s a reason for all this, but we mostly have to be told about it in passing rather than see it, and the main thing we take away is the intelligence controlling them.  Are you crazy?  Dead soldiers  skulking about is way more interesting than (literally) generic grey monsters showing up a couple of times, or the political “struggle” between the Imperials and the Republicans.  Even that doesn’t get a fair shake, as the last-act villain reveal (you’ll never guess who) causes them to more or less resolve their differences off-screen, even with the Menoptera.  I kept expecting a reversal of this, because it’s just too easy, and it sort of comes in the last few pages… but by then it’s just bonus noise.  The build-up to the main villain and its frenzied, keyboard-mashing death look sadly redundant when the stakes continue to go up after they’re gone.

Twilight of the Gods isn’t completely naïve about the Rhumons patching up their differences forever, with more ships on their way that don’t know about the ceasefire.  But the ending is still as simplistic as you’ve come to expect, with the Doctor delivering a waffly, page-long speech that rings about as true of the era as Jamie’s HGV licence.  (We know Pat Troughton liked to improvise, so great slabs like this probably would have gone out the window.)  The Second Doctor is reasonably well-written otherwise, embracing (deliberately?) the contradiction of letting violent solutions take place but seemingly being upset about them.  He’s mostly up front about his intelligence and keeps on everybody’s good side as much as possible, which is all a bit off, IMO, so call it a draw.

If you asked me what I thought when I was still reading it, I might have been more favourable.  Twilight of the Gods is a mover, which I can’t sniff at: the characters are straightforward and they say what they mean, the action is easy to visualise.  Younger readers would probably enjoy it, and I had a heck of an easier time here than I did with The Death of Art.  That might seem an unfair comparison, but oddly there are sections that reminded me of the Quoth: some ethereal beings are up to something and they communicate in a bizarre, off-kilter way, which reads like Christopher Bulis experimenting and doesn’t fit at all with the rest of the book.  No thanks.  “Ah,” you might say, “but didn’t you want weirdness?  It’s The Web Planet!”  To which I’d say, I think we’ve established my preferences and limits as a reader – give me consistent weirdness and I’ll think about it, give me random bursts of what-the-hell-am-I-looking-at and I’ll count the seconds until we’re outta there, thanks.  (Incidentally, the ethereal guys enable Bulis to retcon the history of Vortis, which is certainly a thing you could do?  Ditto the wholly unasked for explanation for how a Menoptera can fly.  Dude, if you hate The Web Planet, just say so.)

Somehow, I still don’t hate this.  It can be a lot like Classic Who at times, filler, quarries and all.  But there’s very little to recommend besides a basic level of competency and a quick pace.  Bulis has done better, and hopefully will do again.  Meanwhile if you want to get your alien planet fix, go and read Venusian Lullaby.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #73 – The Eye Of The Giant by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#21

The Eye Of The Giant

By Christopher Bulis

I’ll say this for Christopher Bulis: he’s not afraid to try different things.  From the horse’s mouth, in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, he liked to write for different Doctors in case Virgin’s editors got “bored” with him.  Naturally he became a recurring nuisance for the Missing Adventures, and he’s been largely successful, not just at tackling different eras of the show but at making an interesting go of each book.

I loved the pace and the escalation of Shadowmind, and the moral oddness of its “monsters”.  I really enjoyed the colour and the cattiness of State Of Change.  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was an exception, for me at least, in that it tried to make something new by just putting different clichés next to each other, but it was at least a different kind of First Doctor story.  The Eye Of The Giant is the first Bulis book to really focus on the era details, producing something that feels not only like it could have come from Season Seven, but is a necessary piece of the series that somehow went missing.  (A missing... something or other.)  It is also, for me at least, Bulis back on form.

But maybe not right away.  After a largely forgettable prologue that handles a space battle about as generically as possible, we plunge into a 1930s adventure that feels so like King Kong that Bulis must reference it and make the whole expedition a response to it.  A group of filmmakers (surprisingly enough!) arrive on a mysterious island full of giant monsters.  What are the odds?  The somewhat shaky start continues as he introduces far too many characters in too short a time – including a movie producer, his saintly daughter, his fading actress / second wife, plus sundry crewmen and film personnel.  Things get more interesting as the story ping-pongs back to Pertwee-era UNIT, where the Doctor finds a lump of extremely radioactive rock that, in conjunction with his old Time Space Visualiser, forms a gateway into the past.  If you think the Doctor using a dangerous method to travel in space and time (since his TARDIS isn’t working) sounds a lot like Inferno, then you and Liz would get along fine: “Doctor, you nearly got stranded in that parallel universe the console took you to, remember?”  Well gee, I think he might!  The ultra-subtle writing includes, need you ask, a description of the Doctor’s “shock of white hair”.

Sure enough, the Doctor and Liz end up in the ’30s.  And it’s worth pointing out what a pleasure it is to have these two characters together.  Liz was gone too soon – fortunately Caroline John seemed not to bear a grudge – and her brand of scientific rapport with the Doctor isn’t something we get a lot of.  (Of course, that’s why she went away.)  There are many moments in this where the two of them discuss a problem on almost equal terms.  When it comes to the action and derring-do that make up much of the Doctor’s life, Liz is playful, and almost scornful of it in a way no other companion would be: “Isn’t escaping the sort of Boy’s Own thing you do in circumstances like this?”  Season Seven didn’t keep the Doctor and his new friend together all that much, having him in a coma, negotiating with Silurians underground, going into space or getting lost in a parallel universe.  An argument could be, and probably was made that two such similar intellects cancel each other out.  So it’s a rare treat to have the two of them mucking in, investigating and surviving dangers in their slightly more thoughtful Doctor-and-Liz way.

Their involvement isn’t quite as much barging into the middle of things as usual, and they become more like supporting characters in an Arthur Conan Doyle adventure novel.  (Which is also to say that the ’30s characters, although entertainingly written, are staunchly archetypal.)  I loved The Lost World, so the mysterious trek around Salutua, encountering various giant creatures and odd aliens, added up to a fun read for me.  The Doctor and Liz inevitably fall out of favour with their new friends, but oddly not when they announce they’re from the future.  (A weird move from the Doctor, but then he’s quite big on being honest.)  There are ulterior motives for the film crew’s mission, which have the slight feeling of being improvised in places, and soon the Doctor and Liz are locked up.  But their captors feel terrible and, uh, let them out again?

The Eye Of The Giant has an interesting take on villainy: for the most part, there isn’t any.  The giant animals and insects are just going about their business; when a few of them are inevitably killed for sport or out of panic, I couldn’t help rooting for the creatures.  What appears to be the “villain”, who has his own reasons for wanting a closer look at the island, has basically positive reasons for unlocking an alien power.  (It’s also bitterness for his own past mistakes, so yeah, he’ll probably turn out to be a megalomaniac eventually.)  When somebody else puts it to use, it’s purely for selfish reasons due to their litany of hang-ups and neuroses, but the world they could create with these powers – more or less as a side effect of their ego and what the alien wanted in the first place – would be mostly peaceful, even quite advanced.  Said character is petty and especially bitter towards the film producer’s daughter for being too nice, and not noticeably hating her back.  In one eyebrow-raising moment, she thinks “just once like to see her break down and admit what she felt about being crippled.”  But she’s not a stereotypically evil person, just a broken and bitter one.  Which is much more interesting.

And then we have the aliens.  A long ago feud over a theft has left the titular giant waiting underground; weird, jelly-like aliens are trying to kill him.  His stolen cargo is what caused the gigantic creatures on the island… and none of that is a plan to destroy the Earth, which is a refreshing change.  Brokk, the giant, is an opportunist: he’ll destroy those who get in his way, but he’d sooner just get out of here.  The Semquess have every right to want their stuff back.  Humanity is just in the middle.  It feels weirdly incidental, which is a different sort of scale for Doctor Who.

And yet, Bulis still manages to rope the whole world into trouble, simply by sending the Doctor and Liz back to take part in the story.  Ghostly hallucinations keep appearing in the present, of buildings and people that shouldn’t exist.  It’s pretty obvious that time travel is the cause of this, but this is a very creative use of that plot device, making sport of it in a way that Doctor Who didn’t often dare.  What should be a barmy contrivance – I mean, the Time Space Visualiser?! – ends up being vital.  And it gives Bulis plenty of excuses to keep his story going: just when you think it’s a simple case of trying to survive the island and solve the mystery, it turns out the island is due to explode any minute, and the Brigadier must warn the Doctor somehow!  Then when they sort it all out and get back home, time has changed, and they must avoid being erased from existence!  And then when they must go back and put things back how they should be, even that doesn’t seem to work, and then…

It’s probably worth mentioning the book is nearly 320 pages long.  And you can see how.  But in a funny way, the plot’s sprawling nature – not limited to pretty much forgetting about the giant insects halfway through – only makes it feel more like Season Seven.  The Silurians, The Ambassadors Of Death and especially Inferno had ideas that tallied with what they were about, but still seemed suspiciously added-in-later.  (Looking at you, Primords.  And well, that whole parallel universe thing, really.)  By the time The Eye Of The Giant got to its third climax, I could spot boredom on the horizon, but Bulis keeps things rollicking sufficiently that I didn’t mind.

My favourite thing about it is, bizarrely enough, the continuity: this feels not so much like an awkward repeat of Inferno, featuring another disappearing Doctor and parallel Earth, but an answer to it.  (Ambassadors sort of does that for Silurians, now that you mention it.)  The Brigadier isn’t having any of that again, so it’s (improbably!) him operating the gateway just to make sure they’re all right, with the help of Osgood, best known for another Doctor Who story where his entire mission is to prevent a thing from blowing up.  The Brigadier happily sends Yates through to get the Doctor and Liz back, and when they refuse because they have work to do, he’s ready to wait and send more help.  He has faith in the Doctor, and at the end, even insists he gets the TARDIS working so he has a less dangerous method of getting about!  With the stealthy introduction of Sergeant Yates – not, to my surprise, promoted to Captain at any point, unless I missed it? – the whole thing feels like a transition from the grim military tone of Season Seven to the UNIT Family of Season Eight.  There’s a jolly feeling of “Here we go again”, and everyone knowing how to work with one another, and cope with all this danger and weirdness.

You’re definitely in jolly romp territory with this one.  It’s slight.  But The Eye Of The Giant manages a few interesting character moments anyway, like Nancy’s inherent lack of empathy, and the Doctor’s surprisingly matter-of-fact view that if some people aren’t meant to survive these events, it may be up to him to ensure that’s how it goes.  (Fortunately he doesn’t have to test his theory.)  The for-the-most-part lack of obvious villainy is a delight, and even though it sometimes feels like it’s hitting the Reset button, I enjoyed the story’s nearly bottomless reserve of jeopardy.  Bulis gets the most out of his Pertwee one-shot, and you’re likely to have a good time.

7/10