Doctor Who: The BBC Books #84 – The Quantum Archangel by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#38

The Quantum Archangel

By Craig Hinton

Well look, if anyone was going to write a sequel to The Time Monster — that barmy Season 9 closer with the silly bird man and also Atlantis for some reason — it was probably going to be the guy that wrote GodEngine.

It was hard to have particularly high expectations for this one. Craig Hinton has certain habits that don’t exactly bring a novel together, shall we say, but he has written well before. That was mostly in Millennial Rites: a Sixth Doctor and Mel book that took a creative approach to the Valeyard problem. This one has the same Doctor/companion combo, so we’re off to a good start. It’s then just a question of “which Craig Hinton are we getting”: the one who has an actual idea for a book, or the one who came here to reference continuity and chew bubblegum and he’s all out of bubblegum?

Sadly it’s the latter. The Quantum Archangel hits every possible self-indulgent traffic cone on its way to being good. It might not be the worst PDA so far (can I interest you in The King Of Terror?) but it joins the ranks of the least effective and the worst written; not for the first time, I’m wondering if the editing process for the PDAs at this point consisted entirely of checking that the page count = 280.

You can’t really critique a Craig Hinton book without mentioning fanwank. (It’s one of life’s little ironies that he is credited with naming it, yet he is one of its most enthusiastic purveyors. I think we need to accept that he probably meant it as a compliment.) Sure enough, The Quantum Archangel is another example of Hinton making so many unnecessary references to things that he must be trying to win a bet. Got the Master in his TARDIS? Well then, why not have him catalogue the various adventures that led to his current physical state, such as Traken and Sarn? Why not have him look at components and remember that he nicked them from Sontarans and/or Rutans? Why not have him recall previous disguises and pseudonyms while he’s devising new ones? (I could say “because it’s not very interesting for a villain to stand around recalling trivia,” but I doubt that the editorial process got as far as asking him about that.)

It’s not just the Master, of course. Everybody, including the disembodied prose, is in it to win it continuity-wise, so we get nods to earlier canon that might be relevant (The Time Monster, Millennial Rites, Business Unusual, Divided Loyalties and — pushing it — The Trial Of A Timelord), nods to things that have nothing directly to do with any of this, but why not eh (e.g. a comparison to the Animus, or locations you might recognise such as the Doctor’s almost-hermitage in The Twin Dilemma) and nods to off-screen adventures, just for fun (featuring Quarks, the Voord, Krotons, Bandrils, Daleks, Yeti etc). It even goes beyond Doctor Who, with chapter names borrowed from mostly inappropriate song titles. (Total Eclipse Of The Heart? Really?) I know there are people that love this sort of thing but for me it has the cumulative effect of making this feel not really like a novel or a story at all, more a series of forum posts with linking material. It’s just bonus stuff sprinkled on already heaped piles of stuff.

Here’s the thing though: I think it goes beyond fanwank. Hinton, no doubt amusing himself greatly all the while, seems genuinely unsure how to distinguish between prose that advances the story and prose that just adds more words. Sentences groan with trivia, whether it’s Doctor Who quiz fodder or just general TMI about the characters. Here’s a typical example, employing punctuation the way you might use chewing gum to hold an old car together: “When he had got back from the physics symposium in Copenhagen — a day early, due to the fact that (a) there was nothing being discussed that was of any interest to him whatsoever, and (b) he had spent most of the week attempting to avoid that old fraud Winterdawn hurling himself around the Copenhagen conference centre in his souped-up wheelchair — he hadn’t gone to the flat; instead, he had come straight to the university — to the TITAN Array, hoping to see Arlene, to surprise her.” Did we need all of that? Did all of it belong in the same thought?

When not overloading us with asides and bonus material The Quantum Archangel indulges an arguably even worse habit: filler. Every character’s inner voice is leaden with dreary rhetorical questions, pondering each line of dialogue and then second guessing every thought: “Hard facts hit him like a bucket of water. How could he return home? How could he face the disapproval and accusation of his peers after the events of Maradnias?” / “He had to choose between emergencies. There were more important considerations that were even greater than a night in one of the best restaurants in the universe. Even greater considerations? Yes, much greater.” / “Friend? Once, long ago, the Master had been his best friend.” (Those are all from the Doctor. Here’s a winner from somebody else: “At that moment his body convulsed in pain and he doubled up in agony. Was he having a heart attack?”) Why can’t they thrash these questions out in dialogue or action? It makes them seem passive, processing the story around them or privately relating it to trivia instead of doing something about it. It matters when characters aren’t dynamic. Between all the fanwank, the overstuffed character detail and the bland introspection it’s an incredibly inert book.

This is at least a bit surprising as The Quantum Archangel has a few ideas that could — if you were the least bit interested in trying — have made for a pretty interesting story.

We find the Doctor and Mel at a crossroads, him having spectacularly misjudged a situation on the planet Maradnias (leading to the deaths of everyone on it), her wanting to leave the TARDIS in disgust, which she then does. What will become of Mel? What, given what we know about (nyurgh) continuity, will happen to bring them together again?

Then we have the book’s really big idea. After about 180 pages spent mucking about with the script for The Time Monster we finally meet the title character: a godlike but flawed entity who wants to make everyone’s lives better by shifting them into timelines that maximise their potential. A benevolent god that nevertheless must be stopped is a terrific twist on the usual fnar-fnar bad guys, and it opens up possibilities for parallel realities. You could write a fairly off-the-wall novel using these realities as a starting point; The Blue Angel, Falls The Shadow, Oblivion and Unnatural History all did something similar, but that’s no reason not to give us the Craig Hinton version as well.

The Quantum Archangel comes to this idea too late to really make a go of it. We get a few alt-histories for the Doctor (now commanding Gallifreyan armies against the Daleks), Mel (now Britain’s Prime Minister facing a Cyberman invasion) and the various physicists they’ve been hanging around with for most of the book. These realities clearly aren’t going to end well so a literal deus ex machina character plucks them all back to our reality instead. Easy peasy, so there’s no need to use these alternatives to reach any new conclusions, for instance with Mel who specifically needs a bit of context for her character arc. Instead it’s just a bit of colour towards the end. What a waste.

That inability to capitalise on ideas runs all the way through the book, which spends great swathes of time trying to dazzle us with enormous space and time phenomena — at one point the Doctor and the Archangel literally throw moons at each other — but Hinton unloads it all in great sweaty heaps of telling rather than showing. He harps on and on and on about incomprehensible things like Calabi-Yar Space, the Six-Fold Realm, the Lux Aeterna, the TITAN Array and (Time Monster fans are eating well tonight) TOMTIT, all while the characters stand around in the TARDIS hearing about it, unless it’s the prose unspooling it for our benefit, in which case it’s just piled over the characters making it doubly hard for anyone to do anything. Before long my eyes were passively rolling over the words. It’s truly tedious stuff, all the scale of a sci-fi epic somehow played out interminably in a small room with a scanner screen.

It’s not much better on a character level. Hinton has specifically served this Doctor and companion well in the past, moving them a little beyond the limited dimensions they often had on screen. Apparently he’s had enough of that now, so the Sixth Doctor is back doing his “repeat a word three times to show incredulity” schtick. Mel spends most of the book out of the way altogether, either trapped in the Master’s TARDIS or thanklessly stuck in a physicist throng in the Doctor’s — which is not great for a character in crisis. But then, presented with a golden opportunity to interrogate her life in the TARDIS, she just ping-pongs arbitrarily between viewing the Doctor as a lost schoolboy and a malevolent menace, before simply picking the nice alternative and choosing to come back. For good measure her hesitation is eventually blamed on an external force, so perhaps there wasn’t really a dilemma at all. Terrific. (I don’t much like the dilemma, while we’re at it. Maradnias is one of the few times in the book that Hinton shares too little information, which makes Mel’s response seem harsh right from the start. We all know the Doctor meant well, and it sounds like getting them to blow themselves up was the last thing he wanted, as well as it being, y’know, their choice.)

The supporting cast aren’t an improvement. The Master has more to do here than in most of his novels, but he flip-flops allegiances and falls on his face so often that he ends up looking utterly hapless. As for the academics the Doctor and the Master are lumbered with — one of whom is a supporting character from The Time Monster, much rejoicing! — it’s hard to get invested, despite tripping over them every other page. It’s like sticking the Doctor with several Liz Shaws, minus the personality.

If you’re a big fan of The Time Monster (hey, it’s a big universe, they must exist) then there’s probably a good deal to enjoy here… except that even as someone who mostly frowns through that story, I kinda doubt it? The Chronovores were the main threat in that one and again for most of The Quantum Archangel, but they barely feature in this book — I suspect because they’re just too massive a concept to really represent for pages at a time. (When Hinton tries to wrap our minds around really big concepts he ends up writing a half-baked reference guide instead of moving the story forward.) But then, if Chronovores don’t work as a menace for your book, why go to all the trouble of sequelizing The Time Monster at all? Surely it wasn’t just to write giggle-fodder lines like “I might be able to search for the Master through the TOMTIT gap!”, or to remind us of that strange piece of sensor equipment that looked like a metal willy?

I don’t think it’s uncharitable to assume that yes, that was the point. Hinton says in the afterword that he meant to write “a fun romp dripping with camp menace.” A contemporary review from the Doctor Who Ratings Guide quotes Hinton a little more specifically: “I set out (with the full backing of Justin) to write the ultimate in fanwank. Indeed, Justin even suggested areas in the first draft which he wanted uber-wanked. I just wanted to see how far I could go.” Which, I mean, you do you, and clearly the editorial staff thought it was okay too, but this is still a published novel that people need to pay to read. In my view, setting your sights no higher than making a small number of geeks laugh because they understood that reference seems like a pretty feeble use of the license and opportunity, not to mention the time of any reader not obsessively well versed in all the lore. And look, I know it’s a Doctor Who tie-in novel, and I’m basically describing most of the readership and myself there, but good god, don’t they ever want anyone new to dip into these? Can you imagine a casual reader sticking with The Quantum Archangel to the end?

Clearly this kind of navel-gazing self amusement isn’t my cup of tea. I do understand that it is for some people, and power to them, but I think this one fails on all sorts of other levels besides its litany of not-especially-comedic “in jokes”. It’s a space opera that’s suffocatingly stuck in the TARDIS console room, forced to describe what’s happening outside with diminishing returns; it’s a sequel that mostly just copies and pastes, until it finds its own genuinely good idea and then doesn’t know what to do with it; and it’s a less coherent idea with worse execution of the two lead characters than Hinton’s own previous effort that used the same ingredients. For all its cosmic silliness and meta winks it’s somehow boring too — a plot the size of the universe and yet no greater ambition than a pub quiz. But hey: I understood the references!

3/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #81 – Decalog 3: Consequences edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Doctor Who: Decalog 3: Consequences
Edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Time for more short stories, mostly by new writers, which is exciting.  The theme here is consequences, and we’re leaning back towards the linked story format of Decalog 1: “Ten stories.  Seven Doctors.  One chain of events.” Interesting to see how the authors handle it, and whether anybody takes it literally and coughs up Revenge Of The Sensorites.

Let’s find out...

*

...And Eternity In An Hour

By Stephen Bowkett

We’re off to a dramatic start as the Third Doctor and Jo are sent on a mission by the Time Lords.  They must halt the spread of a colossal time rift which is causing (among other things) horrific deaths on Alrakis.  There are ideas aplenty, such as the TARDIS having “intuition circuits”, which explains why it always arrives at pivotal moments.  (Fair enough, but personally I like the New Who version: “I always took you where you needed to go.”)

Plot-wise this feels like a full story heavily condensed.  The Doctor and Jo are immediately separated when they arrive on Alrakis and promptly given info-dumps by the people they meet.  They then march straight to the story’s climax.  (Jo does this by convincing the TARDIS to fly itself.  Hmmmm.) It has a very busy and bleak ending which would be even harder to swallow if we spent any time with the characters.  Stepping back and letting the Alrakians sort it out / blow themselves up is novel, I guess, but it doesn’t suit these two, or quite tie off the mission they’re on.

The writing is flowery and often very evocative, particularly in describing the effects of the temporal disaster and the Doctor explaining it all to Jo with dominoes.  It’s a pleasure to read in places.  But elsewhere the Doctor witters on a bit too much even for Pertwee, and Jo has a philosophical nous that has simply come from nowhere.  (“Or was it, [Jo] wondered, just making meaning out of chaos? Could it all be simply self-delusion, the presence of prescience in a purposeful void?” And we are all together, coo-coo-cachoo...)

It’s still quite nice to read a mature and contemplative Jo, even if I don’t buy it.  Same goes for the story.

*

Moving On

By Peter Anghelides

Well this is brilliant.  I sort of wish it was a full Missing Adventure, more out of enjoyment than there being anything lacking.

Sarah Jane Smith interviews an unpleasant tech genius interested in Virtual Reality, sees him die in a traffic accident, and then has a fairly odd time afterwards.  (I know what you’re thinking, and to head off any eye-rolls: it’s not that exactly.)

The story mostly concerns Sarah’s life after the Doctor, struggling to make her career as a novelist and deal with the gulf in understanding caused by travelling in the TARDIS for a few years.  K9 seems to be breaking down with no hope of repair and no Doctor around to help him – or her.  Wisps of her past crop up in creative ways, and a sinister figure inadvertently allows her to get closure on the Doctor.

Just because Sarah is not happy with him for letting her go does not mean she can’t have a life, and following her blistering rebuke against a man that isn’t really there we jump to a Ten Years Later epilogue.  We find her stronger, happier and putting the Doctor properly behind her.  It’s bittersweet and brave, particularly the extraordinary bit of writing that closes out the story, paralleling the fate of K9 with Sarah’s old dog, Rab.

Peter Anghelides cares not for spin-offs; everything has its time and everything dies.  That sentiment, and therefore the story is probably not for everyone, but it is definitely for Sarah.

NB: The villain turns out to be a direct continuation from the first story, although the plot is self-contained.  A bit of a tightrope walk in terms of theme; I’ve no idea how everybody else will approach it.

NB(2?): In the “Ten Years Later” bit, Sarah’s new book is published by Virgin.  Aw.

*

Tarnished Image

By Guy Clapperton

This could technically be the least eventful story in Doctor Who history.  It features the First Doctor and Dodo doing some reading in the TARDIS.  The “story” has been resolved already, so they read news correspondence about it and pick apart the inaccuracies.  Buckle up!

Actually it’s not a bad approach, as we still have to find all the stuff out.  Plus it’s refreshing to come at a story from another perspective.  The earlier events concern a planet ruled by the Azmec Company and a series of ritualistic murders.  The Doctor has theories on what caused them and a possible conspiracy involving the Company.  He and Dodo have been mistaken for actors taking part in recent celebrations, but they are secretly investigating.

The Doctor and Dodo are well written, although Guy Clapperton leans a bit hard on Dodo’s accent and the Doctor’s mannerisms.  (Sort of understandable when you’re only here for 30-odd pages.) There is an enjoyable oddness in chopping between the reports of what happened and the Doctor disagreeing with or correcting them.  The main issue for me was the reporting itself, which isn’t supposed to be brilliant – the Doctor bemoans how sensationalist and vague it is – but is nonetheless so busy and full of interjection that I had difficulty following it.  I’m still not sure how the faked holovid dénouement went down or if I’m supposed to recognise the Azmec Company from something else.  I initially missed the link to the previous story, but the Disco Guide helped me out there.  (It has to do with the holovid, so no wonder I was befuddled.)

So yeah, it’s creative and it more or less works, but the writing could have been tighter.

*

Past Reckoning

By Jackie Marshall

In another understated one, the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa visit Trentillys Castle so he can see how some advice he once gave has panned out.  It turns out not well, and the young man he met spent his inheritance and now the castle is open to the public.  Whoops.

This is at the same time a very accurate Fifth Doctor, revelling in the role of blandly pleasant museum guide for Nyssa, and also a rather ill-fitting one.  His determination not to visit Tegan – because she chose to leave and that’s that – goes against his usual amiability, especially when adding in Tom’s portentous line about walking in eternity.  He shows an odd lack of regret for how his advice took effect, and when said advice claims a second victim he cheerily insists that he and Nyssa leave the corpse to be found by someone else.  Pragmatic, yes, given how often he is mistaken for a murderer due to bad timing, but it’s still unusually cold.  He even gets in a bit more busy-bodying, telling the soon-to-be-victim how to live her life.  What a jerk.

It’s all very low-key as strolls around country homes tend to be, but there are some apt bits of writing describing a rather unhappy family’s day out.  The prose is generally delightful; I particularly liked the description of a lake, “as sleek and placid as a pampered cat.” There are some poignant moments, especially a woman’s furious response to the Doctor’s meddling.  (Is a lot of Decalog 3 going to be people shouting at him?) However a quick reminder of Nyssa’s tragic past just underlines how weirdly under-utilised that bit of dramatic fodder has been.  Such indifference suits the Doctor in this story: a callous interior added uncomfortably to our usually milquetoast Boy Scout.

NB: An item directly links this to the previous story.

*

UNITed We Fall

By Keith R. A. DeCandido

Let’s just hurry past the title, shall we? “You Knitted, We Fall”?

Half a decade into his retirement, the Brigadier is still having to justify UNIT’s expenses.  An apparent stroke of luck brings the Doctor (avec scarf) to New York where he can testify that UNIT needed the funding way back when, but he’s early so he slinks off to take in some museums.

The real reason for his summons is a man whose life took a downward turn in the last story, all because of the Doctor.  He has manipulated the UNIT hearing together, recalled the TARDIS and built a bomb with the Doctor’s own equipment, hoping to take the Time Lord out.  He’s not to know that he has an earlier incarnation of the Doctor, and wouldn’t care if he did.

Things promptly escalate to the man panicking and trying to shoot the Doctor dead.  Having survived through the usual mix of being light on his feet and knowing how to stall, the Doctor rushes back to the UN to defuse the bomb, sending the (considerable) explosion ahead in time and knowing it will have consequences there.  That’s two stories in a row that make a slightly laborious point of stressing that there are consequences; a bit clunky.

There’s not a lot to say about this one – a quick, action-driven story that directly follows Past Reckoning and leaves things open for the next story.  It’s as spirited as the Doctor haring through New York amid gunshots, and it works, but aside from the wronged villain and a few amusing insights into the Brigadier as he adjusts to retirement – his sense of humour coming more into focus – there’s no particular substance.

*

Aliens And Predators

By Colin Brake

Am I clutching at straws, or is that a highly unimaginative pseudonym?

Anyway, another not-exactly-deep story places the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe on a ship harbouring the last remains of humanity, in data and DNA form.  The Hope is under attack from the Other.  (Nothing to do with the Doctor’s shady New Adventures past.) They’re bigged up as basically the worst life form in the universe, the Doctor even saying they’ve evolved evil (!) and there’s no turning back for them, and in the scant page-count we can’t really back any of that up.  The supporting cast of tell-don’t-show bad guys and ostensibly good androids aren’t terribly interesting, nor are the space battles.  Also the links to previous / future stories are too obscure.  The humans assume the Doctor is his Seventh incarnation, and the artwork he leaves behind in a gallery is presumably for a future story.  The explanation for the TARDIS signal that brought him here – presumably the one from UNITed We Fall – is somewhat bungled and unclear.

There’s the germ of something emotional here, as the Other represent a different path for humanity and the Hope is pretty much doomed, with humanity’s custodian androids choosing oblivion to resolve the conflict.  But there’s no time to reflect on any of that in a short story, which makes it all a bit of a wasted effort.

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe acquit themselves, but the prose isn’t brilliant (spotted an apostrophe error, deary me) and it’s a bit late in the “chain” to be so wilfully vague.  It didn’t do much for me.

*

Fegovy

By Gareth Roberts

Good old Gareth Roberts.  His style of snippy comedic writing suits the Sixth Doctor very well, and this little jaunt concerning an auction of – wouldn’t you know it – thoroughly unlikeable people makes for a fun 30 pages.

Numerous alien races have come to bid for the painting the Doctor was given at the end of Aliens And Predators.  (I’m not entirely clear if he placed it in this story’s past or future; probably the former.) Fegovy, the computer intelligence hosting the auction, naturally has other plans.  The thoroughly beastly Miss Monodine will probably let her temper scupper the whole thing.

Roberts writes a note-perfect Sixth Doctor, indulgently verbose and brashly confident.  “His eyes glazed over, which [Mel] recognised as a bad sign.  ‘Did I say breakthrough? Too meek a word.  No, our work will be a positive confutation to the sceptics.  A bold charge through the flummery, a vital strike against the purist hordes!’ Mel sniffed.” (He would do it again, with Clayton Hickman, in the sublime The One Doctor.) Mel gets kidnapped, talks her way out of it and otherwise handles the Doctor’s hot air with aplomb.  She’s not as annoying as usual, thank heaven.

The supporting cast are typical Roberts, so a bunch of back-biting low lives including some Chelonians.  He does this sort of thing brilliantly, it's just that (as in the case of Zamper) it can result in diminishing returns when stretched to a novel.  He’s always good for scrumptious prose and frothy dialogue: the Doctor notes that the New Alexandrians have displayed “some leanings to learnings”, and at one point a door breaks down into “buttery gobbets”.  Yum.

The whole thing fits the short story remit very nicely, neatly using an element from a previous story (although still not explaining how it had a TARDIS signal embedded, or some such – I’m probably being thick).  It doesn’t exactly leave the door open for the next story, but it’s excellent all the same.

*

Continuity Errors

By Steven Moffat

Wow, obviously.

As a really cool Doctor Who fan who knows where it’s at, I’ve talked a lot of smack about Steven Moffat.  He’s written an awful lot of Doctor Who, including a measurable amount of awful Doctor Who, but on a good day his interpretation of the character and what he means to those around him is thought-provoking.  It puts the show in a new light, like how you feel about towels after reading Douglas Adams.  Again, that’s on a good day – these ideas have had a lot of airtime over his years as scriptwriter and showrunner for Who, so not every one’s a winner, or can be indefinitely.  Consequently some of the shine might have disappeared from this, his first (?) published Who story, now that I’ve got around to it.*

Yeah, nope.  Continuity Errors explores some of the themes he’d come back to later**, in particular the Doctor’s relative omnipotence when it comes to time and the moral ambiguity of his doing terrible things for good reasons, or wonderful things for selfish reasons.  There is a running thread of lecture notes concerning, in that fourth-wall-bothering way Moffat made seven years of telly out of, the Doctor and his various facets.  Is he our friend? Do any of his friends think it’s odd that everyone in the universe speaks English? Does he just discard them when he gets bored? But even this, the closest Continuity Errors comes to over-egging it and having me reach, with a smug grin, for the “Con” column, is ultimately not as simple as it seems and is put to smart use.

The whole thing revolves around the New Alexandrian Library (mooted in Fegovy) where the Doctor cannot get a librarian to lend him a particular book.  She is written at first very much in Bernice’s vein, all smart-alec observations (oh good GOD do I miss her smart-alec observations, and oh hi Bernice as well, welcome back, stay!), but there is a thunderous misanthropy which will be very important later.  Of course it’s also biting and hilarious.  “You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I haven’t memorised the entire stock, consisting, as it does, of every word ever written by a sentient being.  I had yesterday off.” Her inner gripes do not feel like gimmicks even though they are the meat of the story’s machinations.

The Doctor is written beautifully, forgoing the obvious Oncoming Storm ominousness that, to be honest, would befit his actions in this story, for a more Season 24 portrayal.  At first.  He has “the gap-toothed smile – no, grin – of a seven-year-old delightedly showing his mother some worms he’d found in the garden.” He “seemed likely to suggest they bunk off school together and raid an orchard.” He’s friendly and unassuming, until she figures out who/what he is and says no, flat out.  Then he sneaks off and suddenly little things we’ve already taken on board about the librarian begin to shift, from her thoughts on Bernice’s earrings to the number of people she’s disliked today to her relationships and, in a passage that made my head spin in a good way, a memory that alters in real time as she’s remembering it.  I.  Still.  Have.  Goosebumps.  The librarian is impressively resilient and the Doctor is relentless.  The tug of war is earned, thrilling and deliciously creative.  The whole thing veers between dark and hilarious.

All through this we have Bernice wandering in and out, charmingly up to no good as well, and able to observe the shenanigans from the outside.  (Time traveller’s privilege, I guess.) She’s note-perfect too, from the diary post-its to the quest for a minibar to, best of all, a resigned and even affectionate understanding of what the Doctor is.  She’s done her time being mad at him.  All of which adds up to me wishing Moffat had done a full New Adventure for them both.  Let’s face it, the ideas expounded here would fit right in.  But as with an earlier very enjoyable story in Decalog 3, that’s not because this short story is missing anything.  Continuity Errors fills its space exactly, says its piece and vanishes triumphant.

It’s perfect.  Keep forever.

* A recent Big Finish story, Asking For A Friend, maybe took some of the shine away as it has a suspiciously similar premise.  But I generally like James Goss and the story – which has some important differences, namely the Doctor’s motivation – is also brilliant, so I’m going with unconscious plagiarism.

** Though not all of them.  I still think of The Curse Of Fatal Death as the Moffat era’s Rosetta Stone: the nudge-wink jokes and the show-off time travel one-upsmanship are unmistakeable.  (So I guess Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is the real Rosetta Stone?)

*

Timevault

By Ben Jeapes

This isn’t half bad, but the goalposts have moved a bit in recent pages.

The Doctor and K9 are aboard the cargo ship Collateral Security, the Doctor having bought himself passage by making some repairs and improvements.  He quite enjoys the voyage and admires his efficient hosts, the Lorq – who will store anything, for anyone, so long as it’s paid for.  But then a virulent disease breaks out, followed by something worse: a life-form the Time Lords knew long ago, which can be transmitted in the cure.

The Crialans are perhaps not the most original idea, and they’re the second Big Bad alien in this collection, but they have more going for them than the Other.  A race who only exist as bacteria, members of which are created wholesale when the bacteria is spread and take control of their hosts, they have a pretty good grievance with the Time Lords: they got Continuity Errored, so now there are only two left.  For the Doctor to get rid of any Crialans he essentially has to kill them, which he does to a newborn to save a young Lorq he’s befriended.  It’s a dark observation, but they helpfully don’t leave him a lot of options, making it clear they 1) take people over against their will and 2) will not accept anything less than the universe under their command.  It lets the air out of a moral dilemma somewhat when you stack the deck, but a truly cruel attack wouldn’t suit the Fourth Doctor anyway, especially in a story where he is otherwise his affable, jelly-baby-sharing self.  He’s well written here, and his relationship with the young boy is charming.

I mean, this is absolutely fine.  No complaints.  The story holds together and it doesn’t feel too small for what it is.  There’s just not a lot that’s remarkable about it.  The Time Lord meddling referred to here is executed far more literally and interestingly in the preceding story, and although there is an overall theme of consequences – being the Time Lord war, I guess – there’s nothing much linking it to the rest of Decalog 3.  (There is a reference to an Institute which references Continuity Errors, but I had to look that up.) It would work better in less prestigious company.

*

Zeitgeist

By Craig Hinton

We ride out Decalog 3 with a bit of technobabble.  The Fifth Doctor and Turlough arrive on Heracletus seemingly at the behest of the Time Lords, only to get separated in time; the much talked about Spline, a form of time machine that will allow the Heracletans to benefit from their own future, is surely responsible.

This works quite neatly, dividing its time (ahem) between the two versions of the planet and leaving us to guess what has happened there.  There’s an enjoyable symmetry to the Doctor and Turlough both investigating the same building in different times, but reality gets decidedly complicated towards the end.  As you’ll likely guess, it’s a self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of deal, and the “consequences” here partly rest on the Doctor turning up at all.  There is also an unhappy epilogue to the Doctor’s new friendship in Timevault, which he never actually clocks.

The Doctor is well written, but Turlough gets more opportunities to shine, bringing his patented brand of exasperation to a people that don’t appear to make sense.  He is neatly described as being a mixture of cowardice and bravery.  It all ends unsurprisingly on a bleak note, far from the collection’s first.

It’s another one that does its job well, but isn’t going to set the world alight.  Decent sci-fi fodder.

*

And that’s Decalog 3, apart from a cheeky Afterword from Steven Moffat that adds another Christmas decoration to the Continuity Errors tree.  (It comes a bit closer to over-egging it, but then he’d come a lot closer by pretending he was going to reveal the Doctor’s name decades later, so eh.)

This is ostensibly the last one, or the last in this format: there will be no more Decalogs featuring the Doctors.  I think the format went out on a high, finding a middle ground between a bunch of stories that are tied to a central one (Decalog) and just having a linking theme (Decalog 2).  That said, this is often more about continuity than consequences; some of the links are a bit obscure, and there’s really no overall domino effect at work.  I don’t mind.  The stories are generally of a good standard, and there are several real standouts.  It’s worth seeking out, with a touch of essential reading.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #77 – GodEngine by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#51

GodEngine

By Craig Hinton

Boring.

Well, why dress it up?  Some of these novels are great and deserve to be rediscovered.  Some are abominable.  But there’s a hefty chunk of fillery fan fiction that just sort of... exists.  Books like GodEngine are what most people think of when you say you’re reading a tie-in novel.

As just about any of his reviewers will tell you, Craig Hinton coined the term “fanwank”.  Perhaps the reason it keeps coming up is that, despite nailing the perfectly disdainful term for it, he kept practising it.  GodEngine isn’t as knowingly silly as The Crystal Bucephalus or as creative as Millennial Rites, so a lot of the continuity references just sit uselessly on top of the text.  You expect this from fans, but you’d hope that published writers – fans or otherwise – would rise above it.

Setting your story alongside The Dalek Invasion Of Earth?  You’d better have a random bit-part be related to one of its characters.  Need a tragic back story?  Room for references there!  (“He had lost his job as a psychometric assessor at IMC because he had become hooked on vraxoin.”)  Remember to chuck in nods to Tereleptils, Nimons, Magnus Greel, Professor Kettlewell – anything so that we don’t forget we’re reading Doctor Who.  Although if you can also elbow Star Trek and, sod it, Die Hard then you might get some bonus points.  (Let’s call them garyrussells.)  And hey, going back to Dalek Invasion Of Earth, why not retcon that story’s central (admittedly very silly) plot device into something of your own?  It’s lazier than making up your own thing wholesale, but everyone loves that story so... maybe that’ll rub off somehow?

It’s surprisingly not the first New Adventure to skirt around The Dalek Invasion Of Earth (Lucifer Rising did it better), but at least this one has some added novelty value.  Holy crap, there are Daleks in this?!  Er... sort of.  Numerous books have alluded to or even shown them a bit before, but I suspect GodEngine goes as far as Virgin’s permissions will allow.  The Daleks are after the titular thingumabob; their ships blow up a moon some of our character are sitting on; a Dalek communicates via hologram; and the resident humans still don’t know what Daleks are.  This keeps them in the shadows, and the actual word count of “Dalek” is kept to a minimum.  (Do the Nation Estate count words?  I wouldn’t rule it out.)  The New Adventures more than survived without a licence to exterminate, but it’s still exciting to glimpse the pepperpots.  The new series and Big Finish have a tendency to overdo them, so the restraint here is refreshing.  But it’s probably the only example of restraint in the novel, and I think Hinton oversteps the mark by changing their motivation in that earlier story.  That’s not adding to a previous script, that’s rewriting it.

As for what he’s rewriting it with... whatever you think the GodEngine is, it’s probably more interesting than what he comes up with.  The book endlessly oohs and ahhs over its big scary namesake – and yes, “GodEngine” is a lazy “Ooh isn’t this epic” name for a Big Bad – and eventually bursts the balloon with... a death ray.  A big-ass death ray, make no mistake, but 200 pages is still an awfully long wait for “I dunno, the thing from Star Wars or whatever?”

Still, I’m undecided whether that is the dampest squib here.  How about the destruction of the TARDIS?  Heavy, laboured sigh… no reader is going to buy that for a nanosecond, and any story or characterisation built on such an obvious fake-out – for instance, the Doctor suddenly turning into a moody, xenophobic jerk – is entirely redundant.  But GodEngine soldiers on, handing you the ultimate blowy-uppiness of the TARDIS in deadly earnest and honestly expecting you to take that as read.  It’s a naff, obvious shock, and one of many decisions that make me surprised this is Craig Hinton’s third book, and not his first go at fan-fiction that fell down the back of his hard drive.

Of course there are other indicators, such as the prose, which wobbles between ghastly and laughable.  Hinton was already over-fond of chopping and changing in The Crystal Bucephalus, but he’s absolutely mad about it here.  We initially leap between 1) the Doctor, Roz and some colonists on Mars, 2) Chris and some scientists on Charon, 3) a group of Ice Warriors and 4) another group of Ice Warriors, but they soon mix it up a bit so we can follow Chris on his own, some of the scientists, various internecine Ice Warrior struggles and more.  For me, nothing stops ongoing tension like changing the setting every half a page.  Nothing builds.  But then, wherever we are we’re stuck with wooden characters, and that includes the regulars.

They’re not helped by the prose or the dialogue, which are creaky even on a technical level.  Hinton can’t distinguish between interesting details and technobabble, so you end up with turgid claptrap like “it was an optical illusion caused by the universe’s interaction with the primary subspace meniscus”, or endless dramatic moments hinging on a “subspace infarction”, or just fantasy gloop like “Thanks to the Fississ-cal-oon, Aklaar, Cleece, Esstar and Sstaal had reached Ikk-ett-Saleth.”  Jesus, imagine it as an audiobook!  Most of the book is a trek through the innards of Mars, but it never feels very important that anyone gets anywhere, and none of the locations or perils stand out.

Hinton is obsessed with putting the other character’s name into every line, so it’s “But wait, Doctor,” then “What is it, Roz”, even when there’s only two characters in the room.  Some names get said three or four times per page – it’s like the characters can’t understand who is speaking unless there’s a formal invitation.  Heartfelt moments are often signified by a touch on the arm – or in one not-meant-to-be-hilarious moment, two separate arm-touches on the same guy – and sometimes you get a bit of both.  “Sstaal squeezed McGuire’s hand.  ‘I can only [forgive you] once you have forgiven yourself.  And that, Antony, is going to be the hardest thing of all.’”  As for how Hinton handles the Ice Warriors, that was one speaking, so yeah, they sound just as clumsily melodramatic as everyone else here.  We do find out that their hand-clamps are just wildly impractical gloves, and there’s a bit where one of them gets his genitals out, so that’s like, two garyrussells right there, probably?

Meanwhile, back-story is unspooled like we’re using it to put out fires.  One angry character dislikes Martians, as well as people who like Martians: “Bleeding heart liberal!  McGuire’s wife and children were dead because the Martians had acted first.”  /  “McGuire blamed the Ice Warriors for the death of his wife and children; discovering that one of the party was preparing to give birth to a new generation of Martians probably wasn’t the best news that he could have received.”  The prose is always happy to wade in and point out the obvious, or better yet ask an inane rhetorical question.  “[She] began to wonder about this mysterious Michael.  He had obviously influenced Rachel’s feelings towards Martians, but how, why?”  /  “Had the destruction of the TARDIS been the final straw; was he cracking up on them?”  /  “‘Is that important?’  Obviously it was, but given the Doctor’s current reticence to engage in conversation, such questions were necessary, just to keep him talking.”  /  “‘Any good ideas?’  Because she certainly didn’t have any.”  /  “‘Professor Anders?  The head of the ill-fated Charon research project?’  She nodded.  Who was this odd-looking man?  ‘And you?’”  GodEngine’s characters sound like absolute idiots, mentally narrating a film trailer from the ’50s and prefacing or underlining every thought.  I was willing the death ray to explode.

So we come to the regulars, and… oh dear.  It seems safe to assume that Hinton intended Bernice to be in this one, as 1) it’s a novel primarily about Mars and Ice Warriors, and 2) the novel never shuts up about the fact that Bernice isn’t in it, even ending with a Martian symbolically giving Roz a book of Martian lore… to give to Benny at some point, even though he hasn’t met her.  Roz is somewhat out of sorts here, making occasional efforts towards flippancy and getting teary-eyed at the sight of the TARDIS (oh shoot, spoiler alert?), and generally feeling like a dodgy Bernice substitute.  (But we do get some Rozzy signifiers with typical GodEngine grace: “But xenophobia’s my province, isn’t it?”)  Chris spends most of his time away from the Doctor, believing – as the Doctor and Roz do of him – that his friends are dead.  This is as compelling as when Hinton “killed off” Tegan and Turlough in Bucephalus.

There are two varyingly unfriendly groups of Martians in this, and Chris has run-ins with the worst of them, eventually going on a one-man terrorist spree to distract them, using tools given to him by the Doctor.  He’s really chuffed with this, and so is the Doctor: “That was a very nice bit of terrorism.”  At one point it’s confirmed that 200 Martians died because of it.  Very nice work, indeed.  For good measure, Roz becomes suspicious of one of the humans, who it turns out committed several murders during their journey.  They bond, her motivation turns out to be sort of for the good of mankind, and then Roz and co. just sort of forget about the murdering bit.  Charming.  Still, we shouldn’t be asking the Doctor any moral questions, as he thinks the TARDIS has been destroyed, which apparently gives him cart blanche to make xenophobic assumptions about Martians, long past the point when it’s demonstrated again that their society has facets just like anybody else’s.  Who.  Are.  These.  People?

It’s obvious from the afterword that Craig Hinton wanted to do the Ice Warriors proud, but for whatever reason, a good novel was not the result.  All his worst writerly habits have a field day – there’s no grasp of the characters, new or established, no compelling drive to the story, but significant time is given to fanwank.  Viewing it charitably, it’s bland and by-the-numbers, you’ve read worse.  But viewing it now, having just spent what felt like 58 years on a load of thankless dreck, I’m annoyed they let it escape.

3/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #61 – Millennial Rites by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#15

Millennial Rites

By Craig Hinton

What’s this?  Something I have read… before?  But such decadence is impossible!  The Before Times were only a myth.  There was, and only ever shall be The Marathon, praise be to Virgin Books.

Okay, if I squint hard enough through the mists of time, maybe I did read Millennial Rites once, before I had any intention of ploughing through sixty more of the buggers (and then the rest).  Picking a random Missing Adventure is actually a good litmus test for them as there’s no continuity between books, or so you’d think, and Millennial Rites worked pretty well that way.  Fast forward to now and the things I liked most about it have stood up to a second reading.  Fair warning, there’s some other stuff that maybe isn’t so good, which I either didn’t notice or gave a free pass the first time; if you read it once and liked it well enough, maybe stick to one-and-done?

Millennial Rites concerns the Millennium (surprise?), and it’s fairly tech-heavy, with computer hacking quite prominent.  Going overboard with modern tech can unhelpfully date a story, like the slightly-too-enamoured-with-CD-Roms System Shock, but Craig Hinton keeps the details vague enough and sprinkles on enough fantasy touches that it doesn’t sound embarrassing 20 years later.  It is another of those dreaded sci-fi-meets-arcane-wizardry books, although it has a dash of originality that keeps the genre mash-up from being too groan-worthy.  And there’s quite a bit of continuity, but most of it’s done with flair, so it isn’t only rehashing stuff for geek points.  I think it’s fair to say that Millennial Rites does a few things well.  Most noticeably the Doctor.

One of the things I loved about it the first time was the distinctly less brusque Colin Baker-shaped Time Lord.  Hinton mentions “redeeming” Sixie in a BBC interview and name-checks Big Finish, where he’s a cuddly old uncle in space.  The first time we see him in Millennial Rites, he’s well on his way there.  Suavely dressed and dropping by to see an older Anne Travers on her birthday, he’s keen to see how she is.  He’s caring and considerate, a good listener – if anything too good, as an invitation for her to kip in the TARDIS is taken to mean considerably more!  Hinton isn’t just mashing the Random Characterisation Button here: Baker always intended to mellow his Doctor.  Following his self-exile in Time Of Your Life, he’s keen to avoid becoming the Valeyard.  This means accentuating the positive.  (Which is an achievement, considering he was not able to avoid Mel Bush indefinitely.)

It’s pretty good timing that all of this follows Head Games, which concerns the Doctor’s struggle against his own dark side, as seen from the other side of his regeneration.  There’s a sad irony to this warmer, happier Sixth Doctor, knowing his life will be cut short and a kind of darkness will win out after all.  But all the same, I’m not certain Hinton hits the issue squarely on the head.  And there’s a curious deficit of Doctor in this.  When the muck hits the fan at the halfway point, it’s the work of Anne Travers, Mel and the villain of the piece; when things go back to normal at the end, the same applies.  The Doctor sort of floats through the story.  But… nicely, I guess?

Tobias Vaughn’s protégé (and therefore obvious rotter) Ashley Chapel is planning some kind of technological horror at the turn of the Millennium.  Anne Travers is very concerned, not to mention still obsessed with the Great Intelligence, and she is convinced the two are linked.  The Doctor has missed the Intelligence’s third coming in Downtime.  (Which in an odd piece of timing was not yet novelised.  But you don’t need to have seen or read it, since I haven’t.)  Here is some of that not-too-shabby continuity I mentioned earlier: The Great Intelligence disappeared from Doctor Who (rights issues?) with no particular plotty reason not to come back, so it feels only natural to revisit it.  Millennial Rites tends more towards the idea of those earlier stories than literally sequelising them, which is refreshing.  But the continuity has its ups and downs, with the Doctor info-dumping all about the Intelligence’s real name (Yog-Sothoth) and where it came from.  (When did he find all that out, then?)  It’s also rather disappointing how Hinton writes Anne Travers, piling on reference after reference to her bitterness, sterility and generally wasted life.  And incidentally, you’d better get used to monotonous character beats.

Mel, who “looks for the best in people” while also being rude to everyone she meets, finds herself investigating Chapel’s “Millennium Codex”, a computer programme of mysterious import.  She is soon hacking into it (at the behest of Chapel’s second-in-command, who wants to stop him but never really clarifies his plan beyond Power Grab); before long, she’s debugging it for free.  Which is good news for Chapel, who in a pretty definite lift from The Invasion (the bit where Vaughn gleefully watches Zoe talk his computer to death) lets her get on with it.  I wondered why he was so confident about his plan if the Codex was in such a terrible state the day it goes live, but that’s mad villains for you.  Chapel isn’t the most interesting bad guy, effectively copying Vaughn’s modus operandi with the mystical Saraquazel replacing the Cybermen, armed with one lackey (not including monsters) and, apart from a mental link with Saraquazel, not much motivation to take over the world.  His dialogue is humdrum.  If this was made for TV, the actor playing him would have his work cut out.

Meanwhile a couple of Chapel’s employees have been laid off, only to find themselves embroiled in the countdown to disaster.  A stolen computer programme literally transforms Barry’s computer, then summons a co-worker-turned-winged-monster: enter this book’s monsters, “cybrids”.  This literal fusion of technology and fantasy is an arresting one, and very visual.  And that’s not the half of it, but before we get to the book’s trump card, a few words on Barry and Louise, the couple (or are they just friends?) on the periphery of the action.  Hinton based some of Millennial Rites on his own job experiences, not unlike Justin Richards in System Shock, and it shows.  A lot of their gripes rings true of people who hate their day job, but that doesn’t make them interesting characters.  Their dialogue, including endless references to going to the pub, getting drunk and having a ciggie, sounds like soap opera filler, and it’s even worse when they get emotional.  (Even then, Barry caps a tearful speech with “As soon as this is over, I’m going to take you to the White Lion and we’re both going to get totally plastered”!)  We’re meant to have our hearts in our throats when Barry dices with death, but the relationship with Louise is all talk and no substance, most of it due to her improbable decision to have his baby, never tell him it’s his and then stay close friends.  Much is said about Louise’s baby and her disability, but it’s mostly a convenient sore point for her and Barry, and then an unbelievably hackneyed addition to the plot later on when a sacrifice is needed.

Speaking of which, the Millennium happens, and this is where the book shines: you go into it expecting a gradual slow burn of technology and fantasy having at one another, the plot unfolding as these things do, only to find the whole story transforming at the halfway point.  Chapel’s plan works more or less, and we’re suddenly in a parallel version of London.  Some of the landmarks look the same, but dangerous magic rules over them, cybrids have the run of the place, and the people are not what they were.  Anne Travers is now the powerful Hierophant, lurking in the Library of St. John The Beheaded (where she attempted to abort the disaster, wrongly thinking it was all to do with the Great Intelligence); Mel is the Technomancer, brilliant and in charge, but utterly lacking Mel’s positivity; Ashley Chapel is the Archimage, ruling from the Millennium Hall (ooh, so close!) and consulting with his gods.  The Doctor is the only one who can see that everything is wrong, and a change is overcoming him as well, albeit slowly.

When I first read Millennial Rites, this was the bit I took away from it: a story neatly and excitingly bisected, which could work really well if it was made for modern Doctor Who.  There’s something uncannily prescient about the whole thing, what with the slightly Big Finish-ish Sixth Doctor as well, and the pseudo-London is evocatively weird.  But on closer inspection, Hinton’s party trick mostly just works on the surface.  There are about half a dozen humans in the post-Millennial world, a lot of indistinguishable cybrids and other monsters besides.  Comparing these people to their original counterparts, personalities have mostly just dulled.  Fragments of their past lives come back to them later, but we’ve only got half a book to get on with it, so this happens in sudden clumsy spurts.  The writing itself seems to get worse in the second half, with hokey fantasy dialogue like “Walk with me awhile, stranger.  Tell me of whence you came”, and that trope of making a character sound genuine by having them stutter a bit, mid-sentence.  “The information we need is, is...”  /  “Doctor?  What’s wrong?  Why are you being so, so horrid?”  I wonder if a fast-approaching deadline made things decidedly woollier in the second half.  I’ll take any explanation I can get for the line “Anastasia watched the display of emotions with conflicting reactions.”

In “Part Two”, the Doctor comes into the story more – but then, does he really?  Flitting between other characters, he more or less inspires them to take action, all the while suffering his own transformation into you-know-who.  But Hinton achieves this by the most simplistic means possible.  His costume literally gets darker as the book progresses, until a random mood swing signals that he is no longer himself.  It becomes apparent that any use of his magic powers (which he didn’t know he had) will bring forth the Valeyard, who promptly throws his lot in with Chapel and offers to sacrifice Louise’s baby (!) to make the transformation apply to the whole world.  But the Doctor is able to overcome this almost immediately (cue brighter clothes, phew), until he has to use his powers again (uh oh, black robes).  The Valeyard comes and goes at the drop of a hat, which trivialises him, and worse, Hinton has created a Catch-22.  Writing the Doctor so he is nicer than usual means there’s no deeper reason for him to become like his darker self, but that’s the journey of his character in this novel, as well as his reason for being nicer!

And what of the Valeyard?  He wanted to kill the Doctor, his past self, to sustain his own existence.  The Seventh Doctor did essentially the same by bringing forward his own regeneration, although he did it for different (supposedly good) reasons.  It’s a valid comparison, nicely fleshed out in Head Games, but I don’t think we know enough about the Valeyard to draw a much deeper comparison than that.  Millennial Rites makes broad references to game-playing and putting his companions in jeopardy, all of which sounds like Seven, but less so the sinister bloke in the black garb, don’t you think?  Did he ever really care about the Doctor’s companions, even as pawns?  We know from Head Games that the Seventh Doctor doesn’t play with people’s lives entirely guilt-free.

The book makes certain grand gestures, redeeming its unpopular hero and handling its novel-length genre mash with unexpected wit, but there’s an absence of depth.  It’s debateable whether you should even look for that here: certainly there’s enough atmosphere and action-adventure to turn the pages, and plenty of references to please the die-hards.  The book is, overall, enjoyable.  But Millennial Rites has ambitions beyond that, trying to ask meaningful questions about the Doctor and the Valeyard, anchor them in an emotional story closer to home and offer up another, sideways chapter in the Great Intelligence story.  The prose, more fannish and pedestrian as it progresses, isn’t up to anything fancy.

Clearly it worked for me once, and the best I can suggest to replicate that is to lower your expectations.  Millennial Rites is enjoyable as a random, unexpected treat; much less so as an answer to the Valeyard question, or anything especially deep.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #38 – The Crystal Bucephalus by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#4
The Crystal Bucephalus
By Craig Hinton

Say it with me: The Crystal Bucephalus.  The Cordon Bleu Syphillis.  The Captain Blue Sympathies.  The Crusty Bucket.  The Diamond Dobbin.  The Emerald Equine.  Join in, everybody!  Craig Hinton’s first Doctor Who novel has a great deal of fun at the expense of its own name, and at long-winded verbiage in general.  Set in an exclusive time-travelling restaurant, there’s an air of snobbery and absurdity about it.  For a fair stretch, it’s quite determined to be a comedy.

And not just any comedy.  The premise is the most obvious yoink from Douglas Adams since Gareth Roberts came to town.  The gleefully impossible setting, the pompous personnel, the menagerie of alien oddities, even the belated second coming of a futuristic deity all feel like a nod, a wink, or a deliberate hacking cough towards The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.  But it’s more affectionate than plagiaristic, and to be fair to Adams, his Milliways was more a one-scene gag than a story in itself.  For all its faults, The Crystal Bucephalus does not tire of its namesake.

At first, it feels like Craig Hinton is going to keep it in the same vein as Hitchhiker’s Guide.  The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are accused of murder – well that’s a hoary old trope, but it really lends itself more to farce than drama, since we always know they didn’t do it.  And while we are dealing with the Fifth Doctor (not a comedian by any stretch of the imagination), Tegan and Turlough are both known for their eye-rolling snipes.  All three are in fancy (and therefore, slightly silly) costumes, having been dragged away from historical France; the mental image alone is oddly amusing.  And to play off his innate stuffiness, the Doctor is soon butting heads with the absurd Maitre D’, with whom Hinton has buckets of fun: wherever the man goes, amusing turns of phrase will follow.  “He expanded like a preening baboon.”  /  “His fingers splayed out on the surface like fat spiders.”  /  “His jowls wobbled with pride.”  /  “He sailed away like a galleon in full sail.”

Hinton even pushes the character of the Doctor itself towards comedy in a way that’s either bold or bloody silly, depending on your disposition.  Having a long-standing bank account that occasionally gets “embarrassingly large” due to compound interest, the Doctor occasionally offloads some dosh onto ludicrous business ventures, such as the Bucephalus.  (And apparently, the British film industry.)  As such, he owns the place, which leads to a couple of embarrassed eyebrow-raises later on when he realises the ensuing chaos is his fault.  Hmm.

Other whimsies include a one-note maniacal torturer who (unless I miscounted) appears in one scene; Chelonians, who have yet to put in a “serious” appearance and don’t buck the trend here; some Alpha Centaurians in all their hysterical glory; an effete Cyberman, plus a Cyber-toilet (!); a religion that parallels the now totally forgotten Christianity, right down to Lazarus and “the Final Dinner”; and a much-deserved wah-wah-wahhh! ending for the villain of the piece.  But most of the above is really just silly window-dressing, or more appropriately for Craig Hinton, fanwank.  The Crystal Bucephalus spends most of its time on science fiction, not comedy.  More’s the pity.

And that’s not to say all the comedy works.  Let’s address the elephant (oh, all right, the giant crystal horse) in the room: yes, I think the Doctor’s ongoing battle of attrition with his bank account is bloody silly.  Why would he even have one?  Doesn’t that suggest a certain stability in the Doctor’s life that plainly isn’t there on the screen?  (Or thus far, in the books?)  As for sinking his extra pennies into random “ludicrous ventures” and never checking up on them, what did he think would happen?  If he’s got so much money to spare, why not use it during the many occasions when money would have been pretty handy?  Such as everywhere he’s ever visited?

There might be something to this as a Seventh Doctor story, as was originally intended.  (Hinton swapped the Doctors so this could get published quicker.)  McCoy can be Machiavellian to say the least, and disastrous consequences are his fortè.  But Davison?  As Doctors go, he seems like he’d be uncomfortable paying too much for a pot of jam.  As for making all of this his fault, besides a surface level of irony and the occasional character saying “It’s all your fault, Doctor!”, it doesn’t add significantly to the story.  As non sequiturs go, it’s not quite Zaphod Beeblebrox’s second head, but it’s not far off.  (However, Zaphod was an actual joke.)

It’s funny that fanwank is such a buzzword where Hinton is concerned – he coined the term, of course, but I don’t think he’s that bad for it here.  It makes sense for different alien races to mix and meet in the Bucephalus.  Since the place is famous for history going on in its rooms, it’s a legitimate way to world-build.  (I wonder if I’m more forgiving of it because this is a Missing Adventure.  Legacy attempted the same sort of thing, only it felt like the narrative was grinding to a halt to reference these things, and it seemed fundamentally at odds with the New Adventures remit.  I still think Gary Russell should have gone the whole hog and made it a past Doctor story, since it was a sequel to stories both televised and made up, but hey ho.)  What The Crystal Bucephalus does enjoy in abundance is technobabble.  Heaps and reams and oodles and great steaming quagmires of the stuff.  Oh, lordy, it’s a bit much.

It quickly becomes apparent that the Bucephalus needs a bit of explaining.  How people time travel, how “real” people are when they get there (and hence whether they can change history), how one can interfere with its workings, how one can stop that, what state of affairs the universe is currently in, what would need to go wrong to mess it all up – and like Legacy, Bucephalus occasionally grinds to a halt to explain this stuff.  And it’s tedious.

Even worse: the main thrust of the narrative is not the opening Whodunit, which turns out to be a red herring, but instead somebody interfering with the workings of the restaurant (well, the time-travelling bit – we’re spared any subplots about gone-off food), and the attempts of the place’s architect (Lassiter) to fix everything, and back and forth, ad infinitum.  This stuff is about as exciting as watching a film about hacking – with two people staring at screens and yelling technobabble – but without the aid of dramatic music.  Hinton does try to up the drama here and there, such as cliff-hangers where Turlough and Tegan both seem to fatally disappear.  This not only doesn’t work when you do it twice, it doesn’t carry any weight once: the atmosphere is already too frivolous and complicated, not to mention it’s a daft stretch of disbelief that we’d kill anyone “main” in between two TV stories they’re both in, but the Doctor still trots out a quick monologue about all the dead companions he’s failed, which feels out of place and subsequently rather comical.  When some characters do eventually get (rather unnecessarily) killed, there’s an air of utter disbelief about it.  Dramatic irony, perhaps, finally landing us with some consequences after so much jargon and nonsense, but it still feels bloody cruel.

Besides wading through phrases like “A Legion’s navigation ganglions are right next to its matriculation net”, and chopping and changing characters and settings so often that momentum never really builds (at worst, I counted six changes on a page), there’s a bit of religious satire going on with the whole “Lazarus” thing.  And, don’t panic!  It isn’t anything like St. Anthony’s Fire.  While it does seem like a crude piss-take at first, it eventually builds to a somewhat heartening point about how religion is what you make of it, and if you decide to build something about helping each other, it doesn’t really matter what started it.  Which is good, since (spoiler alert?) what started it is not the wonderful, harmonious guy everyone was expecting.  Not all the ideas of the Lazarus Intent come off – there’s a priest who’s distractingly good at kicking arse, and there’s a racist undercurrent against reptiles that only feels like it’s going somewhere – but for making a point about religion and not making me roll my eyes, points are given.

There’s also a genuinely amusing twist on the gag about the Doctor’s bank balance.  On his way to fetch the TARDIS, he’s re-directed to a random ice planet, and the only way to get back into the Bucephalus network is to have a restaurant worthy of inclusion.  So, he starts one, taking five years in the process and apparently building a few meaningful relationships along the way.  It’s utterly throwaway, or arguably thrown away (we’re talking two or three pages), but considering the Doctor must inveigle his way into the restaurant biz, it makes a lot more sense than the book’s earlier conceit.  (As well as making more sense than Blood Harvest, where the Seventh Doctor ran a speakeasy.)

It's worth wondering if the book makes much sense of its characters, particularly as Hinton swapped them out when Bucephalus was only a few chapters old.  It’s not exactly a character study anyway, so he mostly gets away with it.  The Doctor doesn't always seem right – there's a bit where he hypnotises someone, which seems like entirely the wrong Time Lord – but Turlough and Tegan are analogous enough to Bernice and Ace to make the switch, and more pointedly, all three TARDIS folk spend their time palling about with somebody else.  This is much more a story about Lassiter (Doctor), Tolqvist (Turlough) and Diva (Tegan) than it is about the main three, which often runs the risk of leaving the regulars flapping pointlessly in the background.  Especially Tegan, whose subplot initially leads her to a “leisurely browse” and some “meandering” in London circa 1985, plus later on – brace yourself – swimming.

Despite the work that obviously went into the balancing act of technobabble and guest character melodrama, however, the stuff between Lassiter and his personal life / the villain Arrestis and his acolytes all gets a bit tedious as the thing wears on.  I was too exhausted from the technological disasters going on relentlessly everywhere at once to be bothered about who was in love with whom, and yes, as often happens, I was page-counting by the end.  The Crystal Bucephalus wears out its funny bone and just becomes an exercise in wondering what any of it means, in between losing your thread because it just jumped to a different character again.

And if you're hoping that Craig Hinton has at least written the proverbial Story Where Kamelion Gets Something To Do, because he's on the cover, keep hoping: of the three companions, he's in this the least.  He's here pretty much to justify his continued non-appearance on screen.  Yeah, we are creaking into fanwank territory here.  (Ditto when Hinton devotes most of his finale to explaining why the Doctor was dusting off a new TARDIS console in The Five Doctors.)

Kamelion thinks he can help, which he surely could, but he doesn't make it two steps out of the TARDIS before he's under a psychopath's thrall, and then he quite happily blows somebody's head off.  Shame-faced (or whatever the equivalent would be), he retires to the TARDIS's recesses to think about what he's done, and that's why you don't see him.  Which... fine, does explain it.  (Really though, it's hard to dislodge the obvious explanation: he's a robot, their budget was an average child's pocket money, what on Earth were they thinking?)  But unlike certain other well-intentioned, even quite spirited bits of fanwank – like a reference to that bit of darkness just outside the TARDIS doors when you're inside it, a cameo from a later companion, and some jolly nods to Star Trek including latinum, Earl Grey and Qo'onos – this just reinforces something that already didn't work as being fundamentally redundant.  Why yes, Kamelion was a powerful, largely amoral stooge.  We already thought so, thanks.  If that's the best you can think to do with him, why bother dredging him up?  So much for finally existing in a format where he can get from one room to another.

As I might have guessed from the overcomplicated and whimsical premise, this isn't really about anything.  At best, it's more of a dessert than a meal: it can be rich, clever and fun, but these are highlights, not main ingredients.

5/10