Doctor Who: The BBC Books #65 – Short Trips And Sidesteps edited by Stephen Cole and Jacqueline Rayner

Doctor Who: Short Trips

Short Trips and Sidesteps

Edited by Stephen Cole and Jacqueline Rayner

It’s time for our third and final round of Short Trips. (Books that are, ironically, longer than the novels.) This one promises offbeat interpretations of Doctor Who ideas, and it brings in Jac Rayner, a name I associate with good writing. I’m optimistic, but also sad that for whatever reason this is our last one. (No I’m not doing the Big Finish ones. I took one look at eBay and my eyes nearly melted out of my skull.)

NB: The introduction is an adorable time capsule that name-checks The Curse Of Fatal Death as a sign of freshness and innovation in the series. I’ve still got the video!

*

The Longest Story In The World

By Paul Magrs

Paul Magrs writes about a storyteller — it’s very much in his wheelhouse. What’s unusual is the suggestion that we’re looking at an alternate Susan and First Doctor, with her telling him endless tales of the travels he will one day have, and him disbelieving them. It’s flavourful but soon over with, which is a pleasing irony given the title, but nevertheless it’s the sort of story where you go “oh, are we done?”

*

A Town Called Eternity, Part One

By Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

More Short Trips experimented with multi-part stories and it looks like those are back. I just hope this one sticks the landing. Part One is a very fast-moving bit of fun with the Fifth Doctor and Peri in the old West, facing a conundrum that manages to involve the fountain of youth, a significant piece of continuity from Planet Of Fire and dinosaurs. It’s a laugh, and I enjoyed the recognition of Peri still adjusting to her new life. The characterisation of the Fifth Doctor leans puritanical enough to risk being a parody, but at least he gets to wear a Stetson.

NB: The Doctor says “I quite liked my grandfather — what I remember of him.” I wonder if that’s meant to be an Infinity Doctors nod or some such.

*

Special Occasions: 1. The Not-So-Sinister Sponge

By Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman

The Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive on a planet made entirely of sweets. As you’d expect from the authors this is Season 17 on steroids (or, I suppose, too many sweets) but if you’re in the mood for a daft confection then this will probably do. Gag-wise I thought “Masterbakers” was pushing it, but I enjoyed the cutaway where Romana seemingly experiences the most blockbusting episode of Doctor Who ever and we all miss it.

*

Nothing At The End Of The Lane, Part One: The Valiant Woman

By Daniel O’Mahony

Another story in multiple parts? They should have called this book Short Trips In Small Doses.

This is a very evocative (er, part) story about schoolteacher Barbara Wright suspecting that something isn’t right about her student Susan Foreman, whilst being plagued by visions of impossible dangers and suffering from a mysterious mouth wound. This feels like an Unbound story (one of the promised “Side Steps”) and as it’s incomplete I’ve no idea where it’s going. I’m intrigued though by its uncanny almost-the-sameness.

*

Countdown To TV Action

By Gary Russell

At last we have a one-and-done. This is another very light story, either parodying or sincerely imitating (I wouldn’t know the difference) the run of Doctor Who comics from the 1970s named in the title. Pertwee here is a rather blunt version of himself, happily answering to “Dr Who”. He’s off to solve a faintly Dæmons-esque mystery in a small town that involves killer trees. I’ve no idea how similar this is to the source material but Gary Russell has a good handle on the peculiar humour of the medium. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

NB 1: I liked this meta nudge towards BBC Books and Audio Visuals/Big Finish, which Russell was busy with at the time: “‘[We’ll be] forced to say lines and make moves predetermined by others until one day someone decides we’ve outlived our usefulness and we get cancelled. Or transferred to some other less popular medium, like books. Or worse —’ Dr Who shuddered — ‘audio!’”

NB 2: And here he gets points for sheer clairvoyance: “The powers-that-be have created a new channel. BBC4 will be devoted to nothing but educational programmes.”

*

The Queen Of Eros

By Trevor Baxendale

The Eighth Doctor almost gets married in this Aztecs-ish adventure, where alien Queen Asheya takes a liking to him while the TARDIS and Sam are imprisoned. The novelty of an Eighth-Doctor-and-Sam story caught me off guard, somehow it feels like years since I was reading about just these two. Sam doesn’t get a lot to do (typical) but her humour is dead on, and the Doctor’s awkward attempts to reason with Asheya are quite compelling, as is the real hint of romance. She’s an interesting figure as well.

*

The Android Maker Of Calderon IV

By Miche Docherty

New writer alert! This is pretty much a setup and a punchline, but it’s very funny. A man on a world that has been visited and sorted out by the Doctor isn’t too happy about the result, and he plots his revenge involving murderous android duplicates. Then he is thwarted by bad timing. Lots of fun here — but I must say, it’s a bit of a madcap collection, this one.

*

Revenants

By Peter Anghelides

This was a pleasant surprise. Peter Anghelides has brought back the future Doctor from More Short Trips — who I have since learned is the “Merlin Doctor” alluded to in Battlefield and then described in Ben Aaronovitch’s novelisation. (Not very tall, scraggly red hair, bangles on his wrist, yellow waistcoat, big afghan coat. For some reason I picture him as Barrie Ingham.) In this one the Doctor and Guin — his current companion, a parent, divorcee and museum director — investigate a time experiment on a space station, only to find themselves stuck in a time loop. Time loops are tricky things to write and this one threatens to get (forgive me) repetitive, but the sparkling dynamic between this Doctor and his academic companion kept me engaged.

*

Please Shut The Gate

By Stephen Lock

New writer! The Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe visit Mars only to discover that the Doctor has been to this exact spot before, with some embarrassing consequences that are about to get even worse. This perfectly captures Troughton’s brand of scruffy chaos (you could interpret a line here to say that he hasn’t washed his trousers since the Ben and Polly era — plausible tbh) and it ties in amusingly with, or so I assume from a quick Google search, the ill-fated Mars Climate Orbiter landing in 1999. Very jolly stuff.

*

Turnabout Is Fair Play

By Graeme Burk

Another new writer! We’ve got a very fun premise here with Peri and the Sixth Doctor body-swapped. The story is from Peri’s POV as she improvises her way through an encounter with the sort of megalomaniac the Doctor is good at putting a stop to. She does quite well using a mix of her own botanical knowledge and a Doctorly sort of vamping. Peri’s natural grouchiness comes through in spades. My only negative here would be the too-easy concessions to the Sixth Doctor being overweight. I get that narrators can be subjective and therefore derogatory, and jokes are just jokes, but much like Tegan getting nastily personal about Adric in Divided Loyalties, calling the Doctor “Blubbo the Time Lord” here seems a little much.

*

Special Occasions: 2. Do You Love Anyone Enough?

By Norman Ashby

Short Trips and pseudonyms go together like two sticky go-together type things, so it’s maybe no surprise to see one here. We can perhaps assume that this was written by whoever was range editor at the time, or otherwise Steve Cole, known pseudonym fanatic. It’s surprising however that it’s this pseudonym, a very specific one employed by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln for The Dominators.

Anyway! This is the shortest trip so far, a one-pager with the Fourth Doctor and Romana watching the end of the universe to celebrate Valentine’s Day. I won’t spoil the joke alluded to by the title, except to say that if you get it, you probably have achy joints and bad eyesight at your age. It’s fine; the choice of space/time location feels Douglas Adams-y, which seems appropriate for the pair.

*

Nothing At The End Of The Lane, Part Two: The Watchers On The Walls

By Daniel O’Mahony

We return to Barbara, who apparently did not try to get into that rather odd police box at the end of Part One and is still having difficulty at school. She’s having fainting fits and hallucinations, mostly about nuclear Armageddon, but some of it is about something else altogether. The sinister quality of what looks to be Doctor Who itself breaking into her life made me think of Robert Shearman’s Deadline. Barbara’s nervous inroads to a friendship with Ian are (deliberately) painful to see. This now seems like it will eventually tally up with An Unearthly Child, more or less, but I just don’t know for sure. It’s enormously atmospheric stuff.

*

Dr Who And The House On Oldark Moor

By Justin Richards

He’s only gone and written one about the Cushing Doctor! Set shortly after the Roman epilogue of Dr. Who And The Daleks, this one finds the castaways on a moor in Britain, visiting a not-so-subtly named house. (Oldark.) There they find a Gothic mystery perhaps more in keeping with Hammer than Amicus. The mad scientist is named Tarkin, which could perhaps be another link to Cushing.

The movie characters are evoked very well, with Cushing’s upstanding and bristly Dr Who, Ian the bumbling boob, Susan the bravest and most inquisitive one of the bunch and Barbara still thanklessly reporting for duty. It reads like a colourful ghost story.

*

Gone Too Soon

By Christopher M. Wadley

New writer! (Almost getting bored of pointing that out. What a nice problem to have.) Some time after The Trial Of A Time Lord, the Sixth Doctor somehow finds out about his impending doom. At first upset and then defiant, he decides to make the most of the time he has left. He makes a statement, has some historical fun with the Beatles and intervenes at a few important moments in time. This one packs a lot into a few pages and if anyone was going to rage against the dying of the light, it would be Colin’s Doctor. I particularly enjoyed seeing the Doctor actually do the sort of historical hobnobbing he’s always alluding to.

*

Reunion

By Jason Loborik

New guy again! This is a rather grim bit of sci-fi about an unhappy accountant being lured onto a train along with a lot of what appear to be strangers. The Second Doctor arrives to help thwart an unpleasant creature who has been on Earth for centuries. It’s very visceral at points and it shows a more controlling Troughton Doctor than the earlier Stephen Lock story. Pretty good, but I don’t think it quite digs into the horrifying ramifications of the plot.

NB: Is this Season 6B? I can’t think when else the Second Doctor would be on his own like this.

*

Planet Of The Bunnoids

By Harriet Green

New writer, and this one’s a lady! Our cup runneth over.

This time we get the First Doctor, Vicki and Steven facing off against malevolent robot rabbits and a disembodied force that feeds on emotions. This leads to the Doctor instigating a virtual fairytale for his two companions in which he is cast, perfectly btw, as the Fairy Godmother. Then there’s some cheeky use of the Doctor’s guilt around his companions in order to feed the monsters. A very enjoyable runaround, and it’s interesting that we have two stories in a row with monstrous beings who just want to go home. (Both stories draw opposite conclusions about whether this should be allowed, however.)

*

Monsters

By Tara Samms

Steve Cole alert.

This is quite an urban and exciting tale for the Seventh Doctor and Ace, who are looking for monsters in the wrong places. Things get nasty for young siblings Kirsty and David, who are both having a rough childhood in different ways. Then the ending rolls along and things somehow look even worse for Kirsty now. I suppose Cole makes a compelling enough point about monsters hiding in plain sight (although, do sick people count?) and it works memorably as a horror tale, with excellent characterisation for the two regulars, but eesh, it’s ’orrible.

*

Special Occasions: 3. Better Watch Out: Better Take Care

By Steve Burford

Continuing this jolly series of (hey, new writer! I didn’t forget to point it out!) the Fourth Doctor and Romana in celebratory mood, we now have them breaking into a certain old friend’s abode to mark a certain most wonderful time of the year. This is another nice little confection. These aren’t really world-beaters but they’re delightful.

*

Face Value

By Steve Lyons

We’re getting our money’s worth with the “side steps” idea now, with a sequel to The Ultimate Adventure — the 1989 Doctor Who stage musical that nowadays mostly exists as fan race memory, or perhaps, shared hallucination. (Also: a Big Finish adaptation! All together folks: Buuusiness is business…) You don’t need to know much about it to find this funny, although Lyons does manage to make reference to the three actors who played the Doctor during its run, and he squeezes in a few musical numbers too. Fans of Zog (perhaps the lowest-hanging-fruit alien name in all of Doctor Who) will not be disappointed. Honestly though, it’s a good and funny story in its own right. I loved the idea that some very dodgy villains were inadvertently taken over by some other ones, who had no idea the first lot were even up to no good.

*

Storm In A Tikka

By Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

At first it looks like Tucker and Perry are going to give Steve Lyons a run for his money, geek-wise: this is a sequel to Dimensions In Time, also set in Walford, which then bothers to set up the Seventh Doctor and Ace’s educational appearance in Search Out Science. Nerd alert! The actual story though is bit of not-particularly-EastEnders-y action adventure with a fair amount of bloodshed, concerning the Thuggee goddess Kali. (I’m not entirely sure what to make of this one from a cultural standpoint. Shall we move on?) It’s more noisy than funny, but you’ve got to admire the silly setting.

*

Nothing At The End Of The Lane, Part Three: The Only Living Thing

By Daniel O’Mahony

We answer the conundrum of just what this story is about — it’s not an Unbound version of An Unearthly Child after all, but the “real” Barbara suffering an attack from a psychic monster whilst adventuring with the Doctor and friends. Before she finds this out there is a disturbing altercation with “Grandfather” in Totters Yard; shaken out of her delirium, Barbara shares quite a sweet moment with the real Doctor, where she thinks of Ian in a way that puts unusual focus on his vulnerability as a man out of time. I would happily have finished there, but this is Daniel O’Mahony, so we plunge right back into the nightmare before he lets us leave. Got it all figured out, have you? Nice try. All in all, perhaps the most interesting thing in the book.

*

A Town Called Eternity, Part Two

By Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

The second part of this is suitably action packed, with an eyebrow-raising moment where the Fifth Doctor runs out of patience with a familiar rascal and shoots him point blank. Broadly I think the best bits and biggest surprises of this story are in the first half, but it’s still a satisfyingly cartoonish whole.

*

Special Occasions: 4. Playing With Toys

By David Agnew

One last pseudonym — Steve, is that you? — sees the Fourth Doctor and Romana finish their series of wistful mini-breaks by visiting the room where the Key To Time was once held; they ruminate and (in Romana’s case) nod off. Then we end the book on a spooky note, as a familiar toy-themed menace suddenly takes control of the Doctor. Like a few stories here, I’m not sure what I’m meant to take away from it, but I suppose this one makes a change from whimsy.

*

(And then, hidden after the bumf at the back of the book…)

Vrs

By Lwrnc Mls

A solid gag involving famous monsters and vowels. This review is two words longer than the story. I checked.

*

And that’s the end of Short Trips, at least as far as BBC Books are concerned. I think they rose to the occasion and delivered something colourful and weird on their way out. I didn’t always get it, but it’s okay to be puzzled sometimes. Probably the best of the three volumes, and worth seeking out.

9/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #64 – The Fall Of Yquatine by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#32

The Fall of Yquatine

By Nick Walters

Once again the Eighth Doctor Adventures have changed. From introducing Sam, then losing her for a bit, then bringing in Fitz, trading out Sam and then bringing in Compassion — not to mention the stuff on the back-burner like The Enemy and Faction Paradox — you can’t really fault their ambition to keep things fresh.

There’s a gulf between that and how it’s all executed, though. Take Sam’s lacklustre introduction, her equally on-the-spot decision to leave, Fitz and Compassion both officially joining the team off-screen — not to mention the general abundance of EDA tropes established by this point. So there’s good reason to be concerned about this latest seismic shift, however exciting it is, and to what degree the series will follow it up.

I hope you’ve read The Shadows Of Avalon, because 3, 2, 1: the TARDIS has been destroyed, Compassion is a TARDIS now and the three travellers are on the run from the Time Lords. What, quite simply, the heck do you do next? I half expected them to gloss over it and just do another normal EDA adventure.

I was half right.

The Fall Of Yquatine is very interested in the new dynamic. (Hooray!) Is it a good dynamic? Well, we don’t know that yet, but we’re off to a rocky start. The Doctor doesn’t seem entirely able to communicate with Compassion now that she’s also a mode of transport — he’s familiar to the point that it’s a tad uncomfortable, and that’s before he adds a Randomiser to her console without asking. The thinking here is of course to evade the Time Lords, which is in her best interests, but she has vehemently argued against this by the time we rejoin the gang after Avalon, so this is a serious violation of trust. A Randomiser cancels out her free will and stops her really becoming the thing that she is — and where does that leave her, since she didn’t even ask to become it?

I’ve seen the Doctor’s actions criticised quite heavily in fandom, and I mean, yeah, they should be. But they’re criticised a lot in the book too: it’s questionable behaviour and it is presented as such. The Doctor certainly regrets taking away her autonomy like that, reflecting (somewhat bluntly IMO) that what he’s done is no less a rape than what the Time Lords intend. When his actions cause him to lose his two companions, potentially to their deaths, it’s not really up for debate whether he knows that he’s messed up.

Why aren’t I running screaming from this awful behaviour? Well, it is awful, but I think there’s an opportunity for mistakes in the current story arc — and mistakes are interesting. The TARDIS is gone! (Again, I know, but bear with me.) Who is the Doctor without it? He’s clearly not playing with a full deck since he’s taken Compassion and Fitz to a world that’s presumably famous for its downfall, arriving willy-nilly on the day of its big disaster. That’s something he’d normally plan for, but he’s clearly on the hoof now. That fact speaks to a desperation that I think, if not excuses, maybe explains some of his callous disregard for Compassion’s feelings. There is a huge gulf between a travelling machine that is in a sense alive and one that can call you an arsehole to your face, and the Doctor hasn’t had long to fill it. I think, compounded with the loss of his ship/his oldest friend, a degree of discombobulation is understandable here. (Admittedly the degree to which he’s affected by the loss of the TARDIS is my inference. I would have liked that to be in there more clearly, because why wouldn’t it be?)

This betrayal also puts Compassion in an interesting light. She is a character with, I think it’s fair to say, not many distinguishing features until very recently, although her detached matter-of-fact attitude has marked her out from the more gung-ho Sam. (Her Remote nature is also interesting but the writers have been pick-and-choose about that, and now it’s quite possibly gone forever.)

Now she finds herself powerful beyond imagining, yet also violated by someone she trusts. She completely spirals, going so far as to almost kill Fitz when urging him to remove the Randomiser (which he can’t), then dump him in a different time-zone and leave him there, and later actually kill someone while they’re trying to remove the Randomiser because she’s so out of control with pain. Despite all of that she’s still fundamentally committed to going back to Fitz and the Doctor — because she knows, deep down, that the Doctor was trying cack-handedly to do something useful — and she ends up suffering even more for it, spending “years, decades” in the time vortex first.

Compassion is unquestionably a victim here, but it’s nonetheless eyebrow-raising how out of control she is, particularly when she is ostensibly usurping the safest character/location in Doctor Who. It would be unthinkable for “the TARDIS” to casually threaten murder, or accidentally commit it, or dump people wherever it likes in time and space. It’s also hard to picture the TARDIS casually saving the day, using a mixture of the chameleon circuit and a complete absence of morals, or very nearly rewriting history and creating a paradox without any apparent qualms, both of which Compassion does here. You simply have no idea where you stand with her, beyond the broad sense that she’s a goodie.

Introducing this kind of fallibility completely redefines what travel means for the ongoing series, and the Doctor/companion relationship will bear some re-examination too. I don’t love that this has happened to Compassion several books down the line — and I’m no fool, I know this also isn’t going to last — but it’s definitely a positive that the book directly after The Shadows Of Avalon has committed to, and then built upon the boldness of its ending. The three characters are in a very interesting place, and that’s just what you want in an ongoing series.

Arguably less interesting is the plot of the week — and I do mean “arguable”, because I quite like it anyway. Much of it just feels a bit familiar. With an intergalactic threat targeting a relatively harmonious solar system it’s difficult not to recall Beltempest. but for my money The Fall Of Yquatine paints a more detailed picture of the different planets involved, who occupies them and how it all works. The representatives of each world feature somewhat prominently, which helps us to picture the plethora of species in this solar system.

That sense of variety also helps to overcome the initial sense of “here we go again” about an EDA set on an Earth colony world, not to mention ye olde planet-killing horror. There’s somewhat a sense of a do-over of the author’s previous book, Dominion, which perhaps didn’t go into enough detail about its own wacky eco-system. The Fall Of Yquatine certainly supports the idea that Nick Walters is following on from Paul Leonard in terms of authors fascinated by different species and keen to celebrate their differences. The Saraani from his and Leonard’s earlier Dry Pilgrimage also get a cameo.

The catastrophe happens quite fast, as mysterious ships appear above the planet and rain down an unforgiving black acid. There are few survivors and it initially seems that the vengeful and warrior-like Anthaurk are responsible. However they are soon joining the effort to gather up survivors. Compassion and Fitz have fled by this point, the former in a rage about the Randomiser; the Doctor meanwhile is in a small spacecraft with only a friend, Lou Lombardo, and a wounded woman whom he tells “You’ll thank me for this later” about leaving behind her doomed husband. (I’m sensing a theme here with the Doctor’s confusion around what other people want. I’m enjoying the concept that the Eighth Doctor is just as dreadful as the Seventh, but he’s more up front about it, and is then baffled when it blows up in his face.)

The rest of the book mostly splits between the Doctor trying to figure out what happened and stop it getting any worse, Fitz making the best of a bad situation after being unceremoniously dumped a month in the past, and Compassion flitting around trying to get rid of the you-know-what. It’s one of those books that changes scenes quite often, but Walters is one of those authors who keeps these changes on track and aligned to the same character, so it’s exciting rather than disorienting being swept along. There always seems to be something interesting going on; it has a good pace.

That impression peters out a little as it goes on, mostly because the supporting characters aren’t a lot to write home about. We open with a brilliantly self-contained chapter about Arielle, a visitor to Yquatine who begins a whirlwind romance with the ruling President Vargeld. But then we leave Arielle for a large chunk of the book, skipping whatever was compelling about their romance and arriving after it’s turned sour. Our main impression of Vargeld is that he’s an obsessed, abusive, short-sighted blowhard, leaving us mystified as to his initial appeal. He never gets any better, right up to the last chapter when the Doctor has finally calmed things down. We do pause along the way for an argument/reconciliation between him and the Doctor, both mad at the other’s actions, but it’s too little and far too quick to convince. And Vargeld is awful again soon enough.

The Anthaurk are similarly intractable. While not responsible for the attack, they’re itching for an excuse to change the local power balance in their favour, and are soon behaving about as sympathetically as Selachians. Their way of life has its interesting bits, but the general murderousness ends up putting them in the realm of watered down Ice Warriors or Klingons.

The impression begins to dawn that while Walters has put some effort into populating this solar system with weird and wonderful creatures, he hasn’t made many of them easy to care about. This extends to the threat itself, which we learn is a form of artificial weapon made by someone (footage not found) and capable of doing better if only someone would reprogram it. The Doctor tries, it goes predictably, and then you sort of wonder what it was all in aid of.

Fitz is presumably here to help, and his part of the story is compelling, but I mean — Fitz on his own, separated from the TARDIS and forced to make his own way for a while? We’re really doing that again? There’s the potential to make it fresh because he alone knows what’s going to happen on Yquatine in a month’s time, and he agonises about whether to tell anyone, but that hardly matters in the end — although I did enjoy the bit where Compassion seemed happy to undo the whole mess without a thought for the timelines. (It doesn’t work, so the inevitable tête-à-tête with the Doctor doesn’t happen.)

Then there’s his love story. He meets a down-on-her-luck Arielle just when she’s breaking it off with Vargeld. The two become fast friends and they try to flee the planet. Now, there’s a very fun (and kind of awful) brain-teaser here about whether Fitz’s choices are what ultimately dooms Yquatine — although by that logic it was really the Doctor’s idea about the Randomiser that started it. And there’s a fun sort of chemistry between the two. But Fitz Falls In Love (and its inevitable sequel, Fitz Loses Girlfriend) is threatening to become parody at this point. He even references Filippa from Parallel 59 a few times, just to remind us that that situation was important to him, but also reinforcing that it’s happened before. Then we go ahead and make Arielle another tragic affair he’ll need therapy to get over anyway. It’s like Sam totting up failed attempts at activism.

None of this is bad in isolation, but for a range busting a gut to do something new it’s… well, it’s a choice to mash that “again” button, isn’t it? And it’s not as if the story beat even does Arielle any favours, since by virtue of spending most of her time with Fitz she gets written with a-man-wrote-this-isms such as “The way she carried herself wasn’t how beautiful women usually carried themselves, with a knowing, superior air.” (Arielle’s too-perfect looks are a major character point, but there’s nowhere much to go with that.) There’s some compelling imagery around Arielle thanks to Compassion’s “forest room” — a sort of spookier update to the TARDIS’s butterfly room — but in the end it feels alarmingly close to a copy and paste.

I’ve ended up sounding quite negative about this one. I think part of the reason is that I more or less finished the book (and started my review) a few days ago, and now my memory’s started to fog a bit on the finer details. Or that might be a sign that The Fall Of Yquatine can’t sustain interest throughout, with perhaps too many elements that we’ve seen before.

What’s good about it is the arc stuff. The status quo has changed, and it shows no real signs of becoming as reliable and stable as the good old days. The Doctor’s relationship with Compassion is unlike any he’s had with a companion before, which keeps the interest up for where the series will go next, but Walters also prioritises making it interesting now, which is a basic necessity some of your fancier Lawrence Miles-types might overlook. For that reason, I’m still happy to recommend this one. Although seriously guys, you don’t have to make things more interesting one thing at a time.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #63 – Tomb Of Valdemar by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#29

Tomb of Valdemar

By Simon Messingham

One thing I like about these daft old Doctor Who novels is that the writers sometimes treat them as novels. That’s a rather pretentious statement, I know, since by definition they are all exactly that, but I sometimes get the impression that writers are transcribing imaginary scripts rather than building books from the ground up. See any that constantly change the scene, as if to deter channel-hoppers.

You can see this more novelist attitude in books like The Roundheads, a Boy’s Own adventure that surely belongs in prose; anything by Paul Magrs, who seemingly lives for the particular craziness you only get outside of a visual medium; and the fruitsome Eye Of Heaven, which places great store in who is telling the story and how it is told.

Simon Messingham made similar inroads in Zeta Major, a space opera that occasionally switched away from traditional “he said/she said” prose in favour of news reports and journals. It added a dimension to that story, but I didn’t feel at the time that it was entirely essential. The Face-Eater, a much more conventional Doctor Who book, also dabbled in story perspectives, even using second person for the monster bits. Messingham has now returned to that area wholeheartedly. This time it definitely needs to be there.

Tomb Of Valdemar is a story that relishes being a book. It’s full of choices, which it knows might catch you out. I’m thinking particularly of the use of present tense, which a character nitpicks: “And the way you tell it, all this ‘He says… she says,’ it ain’t right. It should be ‘He said… she said.’ Like proper stories.” (I’m tempted to include the title as An Interesting Choice as it kept wrong-footing me — why isn’t it The Tomb Of Valdemar, which arguably scans better? Was it just more interesting to ditch the definite article? — but then, it is actually called that on the title page. So: was the cover a typo, or the page, or was it all deliberate? *shakes fist* Messinghammm!)

The main reason for that use of present tense is that this story is being told, in the text, to somebody else. This allows for some very human, narrator-led moments such as telling us that a transformed person is chasing them (before telling us the transformation has occurred), or noticing something about a person before they’re described as being in the room, or diving back suddenly to back-fill the reason for telling us something else in the first place. The style is sort of, carefully messy.

A mysterious woman arrives on a fairly harsh world and, for reasons that will come along in good time, tells her story to Ponch: an unassuming fur trapper. My first thought here was that the present tense was creating a sense of danger that you don’t quite get in hindsight — implicitly if you are telling me about it afterwards, then you survived those events — but Tomb Of Valdemar plays a rather cheeky game with the woman’s identity, which throws that off. The tense is mostly a stylistic choice, then; one of a few that the narrator (and presumably author) simply liked best. “Do you think I’m doing this just to be pretentious?” / “Fair enough, Mr Redfearn. Perhaps he is a little incongruous, but I like him. You’ll just have to accept it.”

The story itself concerns, as you’ve probably guessed, a tomb. You might be able to guess much of the rest: this tomb is a gateway to Bad Things and efforts must be made to prevent it from being opened. It’s one of those books where the ideas somewhat edge out the plot, which isn’t to say it’s weak — rather that I just felt I’d been on this sort of archaeological raid before. (Heck, there’s already a famous telly Who story about not mucking about in a tomb, and it also has “tomb” in the title.)

Making things more interesting is the world-building, something Zeta Major also excelled at. There’s a kind of death cult surrounding Valdemar — a shadowy historical figure, supposedly lying dormant — and this cult is mainly there because of a classist revolution that has swept through human society. The disarmingly normal-named Paul Neville leads the cult, and with the help of frustrated novelist Miranda Pelham (who wrote about Valdemar, largely inspiring Neville’s quest) they have located the tomb on what can best be described as a Hell planet. Neville believes Valdemar will grant him all the usual madman accoutrements, but really all he wants is to get one over on Hopkins — the hairless lunatic puritan leading the purge of the old human elite. Both leaders are violent and awful, with poor unsettled Miranda stuck in the middle.

Following Neville are a band of insufferable rich drips, the mysterious and seemingly teenaged Huvan (also insufferable) and the misleadingly-named butler Kampp, who masks with an effete exterior a keen interest in torture devices. Into this mess arrive the Fourth Doctor and Romana, diverted from their quest for the Key To Time by an early attempt to open the tomb. The Doctor must prevent its opening and get back to the business of preventing universal catastrophe — although as it turns out, these goals have a lot in common.

It’s Messingham’s first novel with this Doctor, and it’s a strong showing, with Tom Baker’s unique irreverence blustering through every interaction. (I really enjoyed “He is a charismatic, handsome man, the Doctor supposes,” which nods towards “You’re a beautiful woman, probably.” Also a big fan of: “The Doctor sees a large bank of impressive-looking computer consoles and feels the hum of power beneath his feet. ‘Don’t tell me, the kitchen?’”) There’s a thrilling fusion of his confidence and intelligence with an occasional scruffy underestimation of what’s going on, leading to a lot of very educated winging-it. (Such as his high-born use of telepathy to turn out the lights at a crucial moment, or — inevitably! — the use of his scarf to survive a deadly showdown.)

The placement early in Season Sixteen is no mistake, as his friendship with Romana is still at a formative stage. He more than once bemoans that she is not like his usual companions, and he rather unwisely leaves her at the mercy of a suitor, perhaps assuming that her apparent confidence will prevent any malfeasance and perhaps (on a more bleak note) simply not being that invested in her safety. I think the only Doctor note that didn’t entirely ring true was his seeming insistence on getting back to the Key To Time, a task he mostly found an annoying encumbrance on screen; however I think the question of flawed narrators naturally covers this, as well as layering some external suggestion into his attitude towards his companion.

Romana shines. Perhaps the less popular incarnation when it comes to tie-in fiction, since you’ve inevitably got to work around the Key To Time story as well, her fresh-out-of-the-academy attitude comes into play quite a lot, especially during a few clever references to The Invasion Of Time. (A recent Gallifrey story she wasn’t featured in, it would canonically be fresh on her mind.) Mary Tamm’s somewhat regal bearing makes her a natural, if unhappy fit among Neville’s ghastly acolytes, and it’s difficult to dispute the effect she would have on a confused teenage boy who writes a lot of awful poetry. Despite the very deliberate comedic awkwardness of that pairing, their story manages to affect Romana in more ways than I was expecting. I’m not entirely sure I believe where we leave the two of them, but that’s a great rug-pull nonetheless. (Take note, EDA President Romana.)

There is a degree of archetype about the rest of the cast, with Kampp and Hopkins tending to blur together in their shared sadism, and Neville being a maniacal bore even from the perspective of the other characters. Hopkins’ crew and some of Neville’s guards seem more balanced, but they hardly get a look in. Miranda though is wonderfully well-drawn: a flawed and susceptible creative who essentially just wants to make it out of wherever she’s found herself, deep down she also yearns to make a name for herself. She makes a great pairing with the Doctor (Romana, unfortunately, being stuck with Romeo), with her scatty vulnerability working well against the Doctor’s unpredictable energy. In another life she could have made a great recurring character.

I have criticised the plot, but it’s enjoyable to watch it unfold, with Neville’s adoptive citadel (linked to Valdemar’s tomb) gradually driving its inhabitants mad — and ultimately transforming them. Grotesque transformation seems to interest Messingham, being a The Thing-ish impetus for The Face-Eater. See also the antimatter monsters in Zeta Major, and of course the fantasy/body horror of Strange England, which weirdly might be the closest analogue for this story: Valdemar, without giving too much away, will bring unimaginable chaos to the universe if released. Even before the climax he inspires seemingly random violence and upheaval. (The presence of a couple of sadists also reminded me, somewhat unhappily, of a certain era of Virgin books. At least those guys aren’t driving the plot this time.)

There is a lot of talk of Old Ones, which I suppose might tickle your spider-sense if you like Lovecraft. (As ever I’m taking that as read, since I haven’t read any.) The general speculation on the state of the universe in relation to Valdemar, and how it all links to ideas like telepathy, is all pleasantly mind-expanding without being incomprehensible; no previous Lovecraft-lore is required. The question of “who or what is Valdemar?” kept me guessing and it lands on something that works — not always a given in mysteries — much like the riddle of who’s telling this story and why. Messingham also manages to layer in the idea of storytelling in a way that complements his choice of narrative style, which lends more credence to the mechanics of Tomb Of Valdemar being important rather than just there on a whim.

Tomb Of Valdemar seems confident and comfortable having its narrator (and the Doctor) wing it at times, and it never seemed particularly indulgent to me. Even the rare moments of lamp-shading, like that bit about he said/she said, tell us something about the people complaining. Some of the character writing could be a bit more fleshed out, but at the risk of expanding the benefit of the doubt to breaking point, perhaps the narrator just didn’t get to know everybody?

It’s not perfect, and it can feel a bit off-kilter at times, but the latter mostly just serves to mark it out from the rest. For me, it’s one of the range’s swings that also hits.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #62 – The Shadows Of Avalon by Paul Cornell

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#31

The Shadows of Avalon

By Paul Cornell

Paul Cornell is back! And he’s in a peculiar mood!

The formative New Adventures author is known for delving deep into the character of the Doctor, often using fan lore to make a serious point about him, but he will sometimes toss in references just to have a good time as well. Famously he pulled back on any such excesses to write Human Nature, an emotional character study of what the Doctor becomes without any of his accoutrements. This was after No Future, which rounded off a few plot arcs in a plethora of jolly meta references. He also launched the Bernice Summerfield range by sending her into a literal pantomime. There seems to be, in Cornell’s Doctor Who writing anyway, a push and pull between introspection and fan service, seriousness and panto.

The Shadows Of Avalon lands somewhat uncertainly between these extremes. As the title suggests, it is fantasy-driven, even more so than Autumn Mist. It takes place mostly in Avalon, a multi-dimensional analogue of Britain that has fairies and dragons. Cornell goes some way towards grounding this by making it a world partially inhabited by Silurians/“Earth Reptiles”, who are known for keeping prehistoric creatures. But then again, Avalon is explicitly a world being dreamed into existence by an ancient king under a castle. But then again again, their whole situation, or at least their recent troubles, are largely down to the interventions of Time Lords. The setup is a bit of sci-fi/fantasy Lazy Susan.

The tone follows suit. Much about The Shadows Of Avalon is serious and contemplative — not to mention explosive as far as the Eighth Doctor Adventures are concerned, we’ll get to it — but there’s a certain flippancy to the fantasy elements. Mab, the leader of the displaced Celt tribe who make up the human population of Avalon, is feisty and somewhat a figure of fun, her dialogue tending towards modern colloquialism in a way that feels deliberately light-hearted. (On meeting the Doctor, one of the famous Time Lords: “And the weight of prophecy that you bring! Something bloody huge is going to happen!”) Her fellow Celts however, particularly the troubled advisor Margwyn, are much more “typical fantasy speak.”

Avalon itself is a somewhat glossed-over concoction, with the realms of Celts and “Fair Folk” (mostly Earth Reptiles, but also fairies?) not hugely differentiated; their uses of magic (or in the case of the Earth Reptiles, telekinesis and magic?) are not terribly detailed either. It feels somewhat like a placeholder, a “this is what you’d expect in a Doctor Who fantasy land” and not much more. This is an issue when the whole story revolves around Avalon, the safety of which is at stake because of a war.

There’s a chance here to contrast Avalon with our version of reality, since London (and presumably the world) is suffering psychedelic ill effects because of the war. However, we hardly visit London, and most of what we do see is limited to a single encounter in an office building. It seems to be roughly the sort of weird malaise suffered by the population in No Future, but since the vast majority of the action takes place on Avalon instead, you’ll need to do most of the imaginative legwork there.

It’s tough to say whether this is all by design or whether it’s simply a consequence of the strict 280 page limit, but either way it all feels a bit thin. The war itself itself isn’t much better, the initial thrill of contrasting modern soldiers with dragons notwithstanding. Autumn Mist already did that, more or less. The definitive “Doctor Who meets fantasy” novel, then, still eludes us. (Unless you count Conundrum.)

But there is that other extreme: the insightful character study. And we have gobs of that, chiefly concerning the Brigadier. You may recall that he was de-aged in Happy Endings (also by Cornell), but if not there’s a decent enough précis here. He has, sadly, lost his second wife Doris in a sailing accident. Clearly he is not coping with this, imagining that Doris is still with him and yet frankly discussing with her that she is no longer here. When a nuclear missile somehow disappears from underneath a Tornado jet he is recruited to investigate, and is only too happy to abandon his therapy and dive into work.

Discovering a portal to Avalon, where the missile has gone, he ends up spearheading a military presence there. He allies with the Celts but as a British soldier, not as part of the UN. (He comes up with spurious reasons for this but there aren’t any serious consequences for his quiet betrayal of UNIT.) When Margwyn, for selfless reasons, takes the missing nuke over to the Fair Folk there suddenly exists a nuclear deterrent and an excuse for war. The Brig ignores the Doctor’s protestations and insists on a fight to stabilise Avalon. This goes on for months. (Exact passage of time is another niggly thing that could be clearer.)

Through all of that the Brigadier yearns to die and, if not see Doris again, at least place himself at her imagined mercy for, as he perceives himself to have done, letting her down. It’s a grim situation for the beloved character — especially once he is led to believe that the Doctor has died, and truly loses all hope (a plot point I felt was a little fuzzy) — but it’s handled with sensitivity, as he continues to weigh his desire to pay for his failure against his need to help others. His reliance on the spirit of Doris eventually comes into question, and it’s the very job he’s trying to get himself killed at that eventually brings him around.

The character is allowed to make selfish and self-hating mistakes here, but is written with such fondness that it doesn’t seem like trauma for the sake of drama. He grows out of all of this. His relationship with the Doctor (he’s desperate to tell him about Doris but keeps missing his chance) is also central to what’s happening here, the Doctor essentially being his conscience, and that too is very effectively written. Their eventual hug is a joy to witness, particularly the Brig’s protestations followed by a slight smile. The Brigadier is the source of the best Mab writing here, with the Celt leader impressed by and eventually besotted with him, though on the advice of others she allows him space to work through his grief before any serious wooing. Mab, as well as the ersatz Doris, shows us a more raw and emotional side to this character than we’ve had before.

Similarly explosive stuff is happening to the EDA regulars, although the book is unquestionably The Brigadier Show for the most part. Elsewhere, the Doctor has lost the TARDIS — it’s blown up, kaput, gone! — because of the inter-dimensional nature of Avalon and the Time Lords’ schemes. This sort of thing has been happening a lot recently, and Cornell suggests that many of those earlier encounters were in anticipation of this. I sort of agree: it was established that the TARDIS was behaving and landing erratically because of something in its future, but the fact of meeting similarly destructive fates in Dominion and Unnatural History appears to have been a coincidence.

This is a shame, as the events of Dominion — referenced here, albeit as a joke — do seem to contradict The Shadows Of Avalon. There, the TARDIS was “dead” but recuperating, and the jolt caused the Doctor to lose his TV Movie clairvoyance. Here, the TARDIS is definitively pushing up daisies but he just as definitively still knows people’s futures. That lapse made me wonder if everything was truly as it seemed, and I was surprised to learn that it actually was.

Losing or destroying the TARDIS is, in my view, a bit of a Hail Mary: we know it’s going to be undone some time, and if not, wasn’t it worthy of more comment than it receives here? The Doctor is sad, sure, but he keeps on keeping on. Dominion, again, made a big point of this. Perhaps the simple fact that we’ve done it before means it’s wrong to write it that way again — but then the question surely becomes, so why do it again then?

All will, no doubt, be revealed. There’s plenty of other stuff here that sets up future storytelling. I was completely surprised by the TARDIS death, which is good going when you’re reading 25-year-old books; I was sadly less able to avoid spoilers about Compassion’s fate (if you really don’t want to know then skip to the end of the review), although the stuff surrounding it had also escaped my notice, for better and worse.

Compassion has been going through changes. A changeable character by nature — one of the Remote, a people dependant on external signals with little moral compass of their own — she joined the TARDIS crew (off screen, grr) and has been helping out ever since. Often this is in a typical “complete the mission” capacity, particularly in Frontier Worlds and Parallel 59. But she remains impersonal and standoffish. Granted, Fitz tends to bring that out of people, but the Doctor has displayed an interest in making sure she is happy — cloaking, not very well, an interest in her becoming definitively a person in her own right, aka a real human and not a Remote impression of one.

At the start of The Shadows Of Avalon Compassion is finishing up six weeks in Bristol, having worked through the Doctor’s list of eight things that will in some way enrich her. (Live among humans. Make friends. Get a job. Eat chips. Write poetry. Kiss someone (properly). Get a cat. Fall in love.) She’s done it, but all the same she doesn’t seem like a changed person at the end of it. A looming physical change then haunts her throughout the book, finally showing itself towards the end and revealing that it was the Time Lords’ primary interest all along: she has become a living TARDIS, the kind we first saw in Alien Bodies. The Time Lords want her to support their war against the Enemy. (As well as, thrillingly, their conflict with the People over in Virgin Books. All friends here!) The Doctor knows this will mean suffering for her, so he and Fitz elude the Time Lords and throw established timelines into chaos by escaping in Compassion, setting up an intriguing new status quo of being pursued across different novels by his own people, in a TARDIS shaped like his friend.

The denouement and new status quo are very exciting. The way Compassion is written around this stuff is also very good — she’s understandably resistant to letting go of what little personhood she has, but then she rejoices in the expanded form she takes. I think there’s something to be said about them writing a deliberately difficult character in the first place just so they can loosen her up almost unrecognisably later on, it seems a bit like cheating — and perhaps there’s something to be said for selling out poor pre-transformation Compassion, who also existed in her own right. But really all of that is for future books to figure out.

I will say though that for the most part The Shadows Of Avalon doesn’t feel like a definitive Compassion novel. She and Fitz end up separated from the Doctor very early on, following Margwyn’s somewhat misguided crusade instead. As I said above, the book’s heart is mostly in the Brigadier stuff, with a good amount of Doctorly heroism on the side. (All the more heroic without a TARDIS, I suppose. There’s a very good bit where he gets airlifted onto a helicopter from a London tour bus.) This leaves Compassion and Fitz mostly waiting around in a castle for something to do. At least Compassion has that ending going for her; Fitz is fine, characterisation-wise, with some refreshing reminders of his love for Filippa in Parallel 59, but if he were any more obviously surplus to requirements he might as well have been blown up alongside the TARDIS.

The villains get about as much time as the companions, and they arguably make less of an impression. Our main malefactors are two Time Lord “Interventionists” (think Faction Paradox, but working for the other lot) dispatched by a regenerated and distinctly less personable President Romana, who is willing to do anything to win the war. Cavis and Gandar, a romantic couple, lurk in disguise among the Fair Folk and Celts and they generally nudge the action towards peril. Cornell clearly thinks they’re hilarious, giving them even more colloquial dialogue than Mab and some absurd little moments such as one of them doing a “Stayin’ Alive” pose when they’re happy, or saying “Exit Cavis and Gandar, stage left” to no one in particular. There are also some perhaps-trying-a-teensy-bit-too-hard gags like Gandar threatening the Doctor with the Gallifreyan “Other” expletive “Let’s just kill the Otherf-”. It’s all a bit, “You think you know fantasy and science fiction? THINK AGAIN.”

It’s interesting, I suppose, to present us with such obviously antithetical “Time Lords”, but in practice they’re a couple of self-satisfied, self-amused student types and I mostly just wondered if Romana had run out of better applicants. The grand lore-y idea of the Interventionists doesn’t get far off the ground; in their hands it’s a pale anti-Faction Paradox, if that. Numerous dramatic moments in the book hinge on Cavis and Gandar, in all their slightly embarrassing glory, rendering the tone of The Shadows Of Avalon just a little bit more fractured than it already was. For good measure, the epilogue restores some dignity to one of the pair, but it’s a little too late by then.

The Shadows Of Avalon perhaps bites off more ideas than it can chew. There’s a nuanced and moving character study in here, nestled amongst a huge fantasy story that can’t seem to stop and feel its way around, and occasionally gets a bit silly with it too. The TARDIS crew wait patiently for what is a genuinely exciting change of pace at the end, but how much all of that’s going to mean is for next time. I enjoyed the more sensitive and thoughtful moments. I was entertained by the big shocking bits. I think there probably is a clever and exciting story in the rest of it, but 280 pages doesn’t seem like enough to really get at it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #60 – Parallel 59 by Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#30

Parallel 59

By Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

If you’re wondering what a typical Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion story looks like, Parallel 59 has some thoughts on that. We’re once again dropping hints about the ongoing development of Compassion, and the things troubling her; the Doctor still wants to nurture some camaraderie with his companions; Fitz continues to wonder if he’s the same person, or even a real person after what he went through in Interference; and Fitz also gets a life and settles down with a girlfriend.

That last one has happened a few times in general and now two books in a row, with the domesticity and the (occasional but not constant) first person narration and everything. Parallel 59 seems to have been a relatively late addition to fill a gap (via Pieces Of Eighth) and to his credit Steve Cole* makes all the appropriate allusions to Fitz’s similar experience in Frontier Worlds so that it sounds like it’s just one of those things that it all happened again. (*Natalie Dallaire is Cole’s sister. It sounds like Cole wrote most of the book. From POE again.) But the impact is inevitably lessened when it’s such a close repeat, like poor old Beltempest showing up with an inter-planetary snafu right after The Janus Conjunction had a creditable go at it.

That said, Fitz’s time in the strange world of Mechta is hands down the best thing in the book. A place used for recuperation before sending its convalescent citizens back to “Homeplanet” [sic], Mechta has an unusual, unearthly calm about it. No one needs to work very much, everything costs the same, there’s little excitement but the people are happy enough anyway. When it’s time to go you’re carted off to the wide world in a mysterious red taxi — and if that sets off your “something ain’t right” alarm, congratulations, you’ve encountered science fiction before.

Fitz doesn’t seem to have a job this time but he has plenty of larks. He quickly falls in with a group of friends and gets his end away (as if you had to ask) via a slightly creepy and very cheesy chat-up game on a tram. He has an affair with an older woman (Anya) and then gets true feelings for someone (Filippa); later he has another dalliance (Denna). No flies on Fitz this week. The Filippa portion of the story doesn’t really expand until it starts unravelling, by which time Anya is clinging more and more to his affections. Her husband, Nikol, runs a local conspiracy/freedom fighter group that aims to uncover the truth about Mechta. Fitz mostly just humours him for Anya’s sake, but being one of the TARDIS gang he soon begins putting in the hours to investigate. Towards the end of the story all he’s really interested in is making amends with Filippa, but it’s at this point that Mechta itself begins to twist and fall apart, dissolving into creepy hallucinations and unusual behaviours.

I think Parallel 59 just about overcomes the “we’ve been here before”-ness of a domestic Fitz by a) making it more prominent, b) making it not a work thing this time (he’s not here to achieve anything, he’s just waiting for rescue), c) not fridging his girlfriend again and d) letting him really sit with it all afterwards. Recovering in bed it occurs to Fitz that he needs to change, Scrooge-like; I’m not sure exactly what he means but playing fast and loose with people’s hearts might be it. He won’t be able to make a true go of it with Filippa, but we leave them in a surprisingly meaningful place, with the TARDIS butterfly room making a welcome reappearance. I’m fine with repeats like this in theory, just so long as they serve a purpose. Hopefully this one will.

As to the non-Fitz stuff, it gets off to a terrific start with the Doctor and Compassion hurtling through space in a claustrophobic escape capsule. Talk about starting your story late! I wondered if we were going to flash back to fill all of that in, but no, Cole/Dallaire commits to this and the story follows on from there. Kudos, as it creates a sense of momentum that comes in handy. (We later learn that the TARDIS landed on a space station/“Bastion”; Fitz and the TARDIS got separated and the other two had to get out of there fast.)

The capsule lands on Skale, a planet carved into different Parallels. “59” isn’t very friendly but from context we can assume that’s also true of the others. Skale exists in a general state of xenophobic paranoia, so you can guess how well the Doctor and Compassion are received. The Doctor is soon a prisoner (having charitably but incorrectly assumed that staying put during an escape attempt will denote innocence) and Compassion is soon hanging with the rebels.

It’s worth saying at this point that the whole authority vs rebels thing is not very clear. Parallel 59 is obviously a very strict and unhappy place, with things like enforced marriages and mandated birth rates, but it’s still not exactly fleshed out what it is they’re fighting against. There’s the Project, aka the reason for all those Bastions in orbit, but there’s a lot of secrecy around what all that’s in aid of. No one seems terribly bothered about the authoritarianism either, and when we meet someone working on the inside to aid the rebels, their methods are so casually murderous that it becomes difficult to see where they stand on any of it. The bulk of Parallel 59 just feels like tension and action by rote, people doing stuff loudly and with as much conviction as they can force.

Cole/Dallaire don’t seem all that invested in the world-building — we don’t even see the other Parallels — but they invest in the characters. A bugbear from Longest Day rears its head here, though: there’s too many of them. We’ve got multiple, mostly older upper-management types in the military (such as Dam, Narkompros and Terma), a few icy female officers with shifting loyalties (Yve, Jessen and Slatin), some lowly workers with notable quirks (Jedkah and Makkersvil), some general staff members (sorry, don’t remember); then there’s the whole rebellion side of things (including Rojin and Tod) and Fitz’s gang (the aforementioned ladies, plus Serjey and Low Rez). Cole/Dallaire do a good job of imbuing some or even most of these with nuances, but it’s a losing battle with so many of them, especially when Makkersvil just reads like Fitz 2.0, with the spotty romantic history and everything. Dam has quite an interesting neurosis about his arranged marriage, but for some reason he’s the only person on Skale that thinks about that custom at all. Narkompros is a hypochondriac (or is he?) and Terma is a jerk; both suffer horribly from “pointlessly intransigent authority figure” syndrome.

That’s most of the plot in a nutshell, people barking “alien saboteur!” at the Doctor, the bunch of boring morons. It’s here that Parallel 59 runs into another problem: the Doctor and Compassion don’t know what’s going on for most of it. (Fitz, isolated, stands even less chance of a handy info dump.) Neither the authority figures nor the rebels seem keen to fill in the Doctor or Compassion respectively, which helps keep up the suspense I suppose, but I think that comes at the expense of clear stakes. I’m guessing the reason for this is wanting the truth about Mechta to be a big surprise, but as the entire book hinges on what’s going on with that place and/or those Bastions I just ended up waiting to find out why any of this mattered. It’s a miscalculation that leaves most of the book marking time — admittedly at quite a lick, the pace being firmly set by that action-packed opening.

When we find out the truth it’s a mixed bag. Mechta is, as you may have guessed, an artificial construct: hundreds of people have their minds uploaded to it. This isn’t exactly a new concept but it’s one with legs. The Matrix came out not long before this (the book was written concurrently, okay!) and Doctor Who did something similar in Silence In The Library. It’s compellingly and creepily executed here.

Sadly though, we’re not done yet. While they’re in Mechta their bodies are also used in those “escape capsules” to form a sort of sensor net around the planet. They are also used remotely as bombs. Right. I found myself muttering “Whaaat” at some of that; it’s fairly cockamamie even for an SF novel to multi-purpose a high concept that way, and it’s a lot to take in so late in the book. (P192!) Impressively (or not, YMMV) Parallel 59 pulls yet another surprise out of its pockets by then having the much-scapegoated aliens show up after all and attack. This neatly galvanises all the Parallels, but again it’s so late in the game (P253!!!) that both the attack and the response feel like frenzied action housekeeping. Where were these definitive stakes during the rest of the book?

Your best bet while waiting for all of this to kick off is to follow the Doctor and Compassion, but Fitz is clearly king as far as the interesting stuff is concerned. The Doctor vamps well enough to keep from getting executed; I’m just sick of the old “we don’t believe you” routine. His attitude towards Compassion fluctuates at times. He can be desperately concerned about her, but also quick to shut her down, and happy to use her like a sonic screwdriver. Given his need for Compassion and Fitz to build a rapport in Frontier Worlds, he’s surprisingly poor at doing it himself here.

Compassion has been quietly building her part throughout these books and there’s more of that here — the Doctor openly worrying about what’s going on with her, her having strange dreams and feeling like the TARDIS is having an adverse effect on her — but there simply isn’t that much for her to do once she inadvertently destroys a medical scanner* and runs off with the rebels. (*She has one heart to the locally normal two, rendering her and not the Doctor the odd one out. This is one of the few very attempts to make this alien race at all distinct from humans.) Compassion is more of a grumpy plot device in Parallel 59, but to be fair that’s more feature than bug; like Seven Of Nine, she was written with tech enhancements that can move plots along, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. At least you can make something of the conflict between machine and humanity. We touch on that here.

Not having read anything else by Dallaire it’s perhaps inevitable that I mostly viewed this through the lens of Cole’s books. In that context it’s an improvement. While he continues to overpopulate the sidelines and doesn’t always get the most out of every idea, there are a few strong ones and there’s a firm eye on the ongoing, and even minor character stuff. It feels like we’re heading for an all-round excellent Steve Cole book at some point (maybe keep Natalie on speed dial?), and while Parallel 59 isn’t there yet it has enough going for it to rollick along nicely in the meantime.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #59 – Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#27

Corpse Marker

By Chris Boucher

It’s sequel time! I’m still finding it somewhat novel when BBC Books do these, as they’ve resisted the urge to make them a regular thing. Zeta Major and Divided Loyalties are the closest things so far to picking up where a TV story left off; otherwise it tends to be just returning elements, or revisited books.

If you are dubious about sequels then this one might win you over from the outset. Not only are we returning to The Robots Of Death, a prized Season 14 story, but Chris Boucher is back to write it. My only note of caution was that I didn’t enjoy his previous novel; I found Last Man Running a muddle of action over story. Not to worry though: whether Boucher was inspired by the link to his telly work or he’s just warmed to the theme of his second book, Corpse Marker is much more assured.

The Doctor and Leela are back on Kaldor. (The Doctor notes that “this looks disappointingly familiar”, which may or may not be authorial discomfort about sequels. Boucher also sets out a theme of being surprised by your surroundings, so I don’t think he’s just being cheeky here.) Uvanov, Toos and Poul are still around, and perhaps inevitably so are concerns about robots. There are assassin robots that look like people. There’s a prototype robot, somewhere, that’s so advanced it can share its programming with any other robot nearby. There is an Anti-Robot Front attacking robot factories, confusingly following the teachings of “Taren Capel”. (The maniacally pro-robot figure who died in the TV story.)

Much of this might be happening — just as lessons have not been learned — because the killer robot incident from the TV story was never publicised. That’s part of the general atmosphere on Kaldor, a world with information control and a severe wealth disparity between ruling families and slums. (This disparity, one character reminds us, is the work of the people and not the robots.) I suspect one of the reasons Boucher came back to this was the richness of Kaldor as a setting. We previously only knew it via the characters (and costumes!) on the Sandminer, but we get to expand on that here by spending time with the various groups, particularly the ARF. It’s clearly a subject that would continue to interest Boucher as he contributed to the Kaldor City audio series, which carried over some characters originated in this book.

Whilst it is satisfying to delve into the world of Kaldor, it’s perhaps more gratifying to revisit the old characters. Poul, originally played by David Collings (who narrates the audiobook) is in an even worse state than before. His robophobia is all-consuming, and so it should be given the circumstances. He no longer has a friendly robot for support — come to think of it, there are no almost-sentient “good guy” robots to be found here. (D84, you were too pure for this world.) Poul probably fares the least well of the old “Robots” gang, with his heightened mania giving way rather suddenly near the end to a more blissful amnesia; it’s a sort of inverse of his trajectory in the TV story. He provides a good example though of what Kaldor’s problems can drive people to.

Uvanov, played before with pompous grandeur by Russell Hunter (and then again in the audio series) absolutely lives up to his TV persona as he manipulates events, keeps secrets and grasps for power. Much of the plot ends up spinning around Uvanov, and fortunately he’s dynamic to be around. He makes an unusual scene partner with the Doctor, as Uvanov is familiar with him, doesn’t necessarily like him but still aids him where he can. (Whilst plotting to steal his TARDIS, of course.) It’s through Uvanov that we get our clearest look at how Kaldor’s First Families operate.

Then there’s Toos, who has evolved the most from her TV appearance. Apparently gone is her tendency to panic, perhaps because of what she has been through. She’s virtually unflappable now, whilst leaning even more into a sense of decadence and style that feels recognisably like Pamela Salem. She demonstrates for us the sort of casual dreadfulness of the Kaldor rich, referring to herself at one point as “too beautiful and far too rich to care.” (This is at least partly a front: during a power outage we’re privy to her thoughts, which immediately head for doom. “She could hear them coming and she could feel them reaching and she could feel them closing round and she wanted to die immediately, now before it could happen, now before it would happen.” This repetition-as-a-sign-of-instability is something Boucher plays on throughout the book, especially with poor Poul: “That could never happen now. Once but never again. It could never happen again.”)

It’s a sign of how well drawn and well cast these characters were that they can so easily come alive in print. This certainly helps, as a fair chunk of the novel is spent following one of them instead of the Doctor or Leela. Never one to waste something useful, Boucher also pulls in a Blake’s 7 character: Carnell, the “psycho-strategist” with the piercing blue eyes who fancied Servalan. (He’s another one who returns in the Kaldor City series.) If it feels like Boucher is raiding his idea cupboard, just be glad he’s sticking to the good ones.

Rest assured though, the Doctor and Leela get plenty to do. The Doctor has some hair-raising encounters with dozens of freshly made cyborgs who follow him around, as well as a Terminatore-esque fight with one of them later, a helicopter crash and a one-on-one with the dangerous robot at the centre of it all. Boucher is quick to have the Doctor highlight the easily-led quality of robots, and he echoes this in a thought about warriors, extrapolating nicely the dangers of control and groupthink: “When he emerged again no one had moved an inch as far as he could tell. He made a mental note to be careful what he told these people to do and not to do.” / “That was one of the arguments he had against narrowly specific training; it tended to make behaviour narrowly specific.” / “When he had realised that he must be careful of what he said to those newly formed robots he had met in the hatchling dome, he thought, he should have made a mental note to be careful when speaking to the humans as well.” The Doctor here is reassuringly witty and only a little bit condescending about Leela. (“There was no sign either of the fighting [Leela] claimed to have heard, and the uncharitable thought struck the Doctor that she was probably running around the place trying to start some.”)

Perhaps unsurprisingly (although I mustn’t take it for granted), Leela shines. Following the gauntlet that was Last Man Running, we find the warrior companion more cautious this time, actively trying to avoid fighting when she knows she will win (“They were stupid and disgusting but was that reason enough to kill them?”) and encouraging a fellow fighter not to use lethal force if possible. That doesn’t mean she’s a pacifist — circumstances push her to violence several times, and she’s unashamedly proficient at it, particularly when fighting off cannibals in a slum. But you sense thoughtfulness in her approach, as well as a commitment to the still-present gulf between her understanding of the world and the Doctor’s. (“Was it possible that the TARDIS had miraculously brought them back to a time before the death of Taren Capel? No. Her every instinct told her it was not possible. When they fought him they did not know him for what he was. If this was before then how would they not have known? She must ask the Doctor about this.”) She feels like a character still growing, which makes sense as the novel is specifically placed after Last Man Running.

I’ve seen some comments on the overall writing in Corpse Marker being more like that of a novelisation. I think that’s rather uncharitable. There are plenty of occasions where Boucher uses prose to subtly hint at the mental state of a character, like those strange little repetitions (“That must be what it was. He was losing his mind — that must be what it was”), and there are some neatly omniscient hints at what’s really going on or of things to come, which make the story feel like it’s happening on a bigger canvas. (“No one other than Captain Lish Toos herself must be allowed to know that her assassin was not human.”) There’s some unashamedly poetic description too (on a robot killing spree: “killing like murderous children, murderous like parents killing”) and even a bit of that distinctly Boucher-esque weirdness viz a world-building hint that Kaldor is in a cycle of robot uprisings that they’ve all just forgotten about.

Not to lift one book up just by putting down another, but I’d say there’s a general improvement here over Last Man Running. The earlier book had some ideas that might have worked better on screen, such as a jungle segueing into a forest, and both of those being eerily quiet. There’s a great bit here with Leela examining her surroundings whilst pretending to be asleep, which is something that really works best in prose. Then after she catches her captors unaware and breaks one of their arms, we cut away, and when we return they’re all eating together — which immediately demonstrates the respect she’s earned without having to laboriously point it out. I don’t think Boucher is ever noticeably just transcribing action.

Perhaps the only bum note for me was the ending, which seems in too much of a hurry and doesn’t fully satisfy. The immediate trouble with the robots is over, but there’s such a mess already that it seems optimistic to rule out more of it. The ARF is exposed as something of a sham, but not in such a way that any of them actually learn from it. Uvanov and Carnell respectively win and lose at their manipulations, but you get the sense that the problems of Kaldor haven’t even blinked, so has a great deal of this even mattered? Perhaps that’s why there was room to create further (audio) stories. I definitely felt as though Boucher was quite happy diving into and expanding this world, but then maybe someone said “don’t forget it’s only 280 pages” so he quickly fashioned a stopping point rather than truly rounding it off.

If you liked The Robots Of Death then there’s a lot to like here, although Corpse Marker is not the same kind of Agatha Christie-ish thriller as before. Boucher is like a kid in a candy store with the setting and characters, and the plot is complex, but admittedly without time to process its conclusions it does leave a bit to be desired. It has a little of that Boucher-esque lack of clarity in places, but otherwise it feels like a leap forward for the author. It’s a good example of the range, and I’m glad it’s among the (too few) BBC and Virgin books that got a flashy reprint in recent years.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #58 – Frontier Worlds by Peter Anghelides

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#29

Frontier Worlds

By Peter Anghelides

We’re now a few books into the new normal, or “minus Sam/plus Compassion”, but there hasn’t been much in the way of normality. After the pyrotechnics of Interference came the highly experimental The Blue Angel; after that came a lot of lore-heavy histrionics in The Taking Of Planet 5. I don’t object to books taking big swings, but doing it three books in a row has been a bit exhausting.

Enter Frontier Worlds which — phew — is more down to Earth. The Doctor, Fitz and Compassion are investigating strange experiments on the planet Drebnar, although that’s secondary to the planet having dragged the TARDIS down there. It’s one of those that starts in media res, and it’s one of those where they’ve gone undercover with jobs and everything. I love that feeling of really mucking in and investigating; the New Adventures crushed this when Roz and Chris were around, and Fitz and Compassion make a similar impact here.

Fitz, as “Frank Sinatra”, has an office job and all the internecine annoyances that come with it; he also has a steady girlfriend, Alura. Compassion, or “Nancy Sinatra” (guess who chose the names) is going even more undercover as a somewhat bubbly office girl, keeping a few flirtations on the boil just to find out more. The Doctor wants the two of them working together; it would be beneficial, perhaps especially for Compassion, for these guys to get along.

Right away this is my favourite thing about Frontier Worlds. Now, I think it’s unfair to consider the absence of certain “Doctor Who companion” beats as a failing; the more of these I read, the more I realise that stuff like “spend an episode bedding in the new companion” is mostly a new series invention, and it’s wrong to take it as read that it will be in old books or episodes. Nevertheless, we haven’t had this stuff with Compassion, who joined the TARDIS more or less between books, and I am reading these books with a post-new series brain, so it’s just doomed to irritate me a bit when it’s not there. What can you do. (You’d think I would learn, since we also skipped it with Fitz. And as for Sam…!)

Whatever the reason behind it, Frontier Worlds seems to recognise the room for improvement here, so it spends time on the leads. We get gobs of first person prose with Fitz, which is immediately the sort of no-brainer creative decision that ought to become standard operating procedure. He’s disarming, hilarious and vulnerable, buoying the text nicely where otherwise it might threaten to become procedural. When things with Alura take a shocking turn his cheerful outlook is then doused in cold water, leading to at least one act of, if not revenge, at least a brutal act of not trying terribly hard to help the guilty party. “Fitz suffers” already feels like an EDA trope, but I think this book handles it well, using it to show another side of the character.

We don’t get that close to Compassion — that’s sort of her thing — but after highlighting some of her physical peculiarities in The Taking Of Planet 5, here we focus on her emotional ones, the ways in which she does or (mostly) doesn’t relate to those around her. Some of the best stuff here is a now combat-hardened Compassion reassuring Fitz of his worth in this team. Describing a glance at the stars: “I’d see clouds and stars and vapour trails. The Doctor would see scientific classifications and animal shapes. You’d probably point out that the only reason we could see those things while we were staring up at the sky was because someone else had stolen our tent during the night.” That later turns out to have been a knowing pep talk and not wholly sincere, and that speaks to how absent Compassion is from Fitz’s idea of normal — but it still makes clear that she can, albeit academically, care about her friends. She overall seems to regard this business as a mission to execute. That’s not a new archetype for a companion; her ease with violence puts her in a similar bracket to Leela, for one. But it’s an approach that works, and keeps things moving.

I also liked the way Anghelides made use of their shared physical history. Both Compassion and Fitz have been replicated by the Remote; neither is the person they once were, with Fitz benefiting from a more nuanced set of memories stored in the TARDIS to make him whole again, or at least as close as he can get. Anghelides is right to underline this as a neurosis for Fitz; can he ever be sure who he is? Compassion, having not undergone such a drastic flip-flop, naturally feels more comfortable with her “remembered” self, and rejects the Doctor’s insinuation that she could grow more into the shape of the person she was.

All of this dovetails nicely with the plot, which concerns an alien method of “regeneration” with wildly dangerous side-effects that can ostensibly extend your lifespan. The question of whether the people undergoing these changes are really still themselves afterwards is an effective parallel for the Remote history of Compassion and Fitz (whose shared, too-perfect DNA also figures into the plot), not to mention the Doctor, who knows a thing or two about the Ship of Theseus/Trigger’s broom.

Perhaps that underlying echo explains his rather dishevelled characterisation in Frontier Worlds. Early on Fitz clocks that he “wasn’t like a kid any more”, although admittedly that was following a death-defying fall down a snowy cliff and chase that has left him ragged and bloodied. The Doctor in this seems heightened and vulnerable, just as Fitz does, at one point coming close to a painful vivisection and only escaping thanks to bluffing for time and rushing his aggressor at the last moment. His best laid plans don’t end up happening thanks to Fitz and Compassion’s imperfection, but he manages to steer things right anyway. The whole network of trying to stay one step ahead and then having to wing it speaks, hopefully, to the sort of dynamic we can expect from these three: smart and competent, but woolly enough to remain interesting.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the focus on character dynamics comes at the expense of the plot. That’s not me segueing into “the plot’s bad actually” — more an acknowledgement that there isn’t a huge amount of it here. Sometimes that’s fine. Frontier Worlds is definitely an example of having just enough plot to hang the cool stuff on. And there’s plenty of that, with the aforementioned death-defying jump being just the first example. There’s a lot of memorable action and violence in this, from body horror (characters literally shedding their skins to be reborn) to more general horror (a man walking into an industrial shredder; later, a man falling into a combine harvester) to action movie fare (snow bike chases; a struggle to escape a cable car in a lightning storm). As unpleasant as it can be, it’s brilliantly clear to visualise, particularly where a lot of it takes place in snowy vistas. I would bet David A. McIntee enjoyed reading this one.

For all of that though, there are effective smaller moments. There’s the Doctor’s bookended visits to a man with no short term memory, trapped in a sense of panic whenever his wife leaves the room; Fitz’s inability to break it off with Alura for the sake of the mission, and then his heartbreak when that decision is taken away from him; and there’s all the silly ground-level annoyance of office politics, with “Frank” and “Nancy” navigating local irritants and arranging business deals. You get a convincing sense of how well they’ve integrated here, and at least some sense of how an office job on Drebnar differs from one on Earth.

I’d be lying if I said I raced through Frontier Worlds, but I suspect that’s more on my touch-and-go attention span than the book itself. This is a decent (if trad) story very competently told, heightened when it needs to be and making the most of its lower stakes by making the regular characters the stars. I doubt it dazzles many readers as much as the preceding books, but for whatever reason it’s right up my alley.

7/10