Doctor Who: The BBC Books #123 – The Infinity Race by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#61

The Infinity Race

By Simon Messingham

Expectation strikes again.

Picture the scene. You’ve just finished Time Zero, a book that ends in (and some would argue is written entirely in support of) a big change to the status quo. The timelines are in such a mess that Anji can’t go home — there’s an actual reason for it this time! — and the gang needs Sabbath’s help to fix it. It’s one of the more “oh no, now what!” cliffhangers in the range. In the same literary breath Justin Richards keys up The Infinity Race, Sabbath’s next port of call and ditto the TARDIS. The two things must be connected. Right?

Wrong. The Infinity Race includes a bit of lip service to the Time Zero situation, with Anji half-heartedly wondering if “the shake-up [at the end of this story] had got reality back on the right track,” but otherwise the only forward motion in this arc is the Doctor telling Sabbath about the latest mess he’s got everybody into. The Infinity Race is its own thing — which isn’t technically a problem, but then Time Zero really made it sound like there was some urgency to this crisis, only for us to immediately be told no, apparently it can be put on ice for a while. It’s a frustrating editorial choice.

In fairness that’s probably what it was. Simon Messingham could easily have written an EDA to slot in anywhere, needing only the core trio, Sabbath and yet another batty plan of his to control the timelines. It certainly reads like some arc references were sprinkled in later. We’re better off viewing it as entirely its own thing, or at least as its own Sabbath-era EDA that has no other particular place to be.

The story has some promise, or at least the setting does. Selonart is a planet almost entirely comprised of water. The only sign of life or culture on it (apart from some apparently indigenous people of dubious origin) is a regatta held every five years. Local society seems to exist mostly to support that, with many colourful and in all likelihood dangerous parties coming to Selonart just to compete. Into this mix comes the TARDIS crew finding a mostly abandoned boat, dead bodies, some sort of wraith, a friendly if monosyllabic native called Bloom and some inexplicable ice that makes you very ill to touch it. The Doctor and co. barely survive the boat exploding, but they lose the TARDIS and get blamed for all the destruction and deaths on board.

Now, about that promise — which obviously doesn’t include losing the TARDIS or getting falsely accused of murder, good lord not those again. I think there’s something to a (probably awful) cruise ship culture and a (no doubt dangerous) boat race full of wild characters, but The Infinity Race doesn’t do much with either. The race is a complete wash, happening mostly off-screen with interchangeable crews only to get curtailed for plot reasons anyway. We never get a firm sense of the business-as-usual on Selonart either before that all goes apocalyptically pear-shaped. The only people we meet there are lacking in the personality department: the best we get are a pompous governor, a cruel recruiter who press-gangs Fitz and later somewhat improbably becomes his love interest, and a vaguely mysterious officer with a mission that involves the Doctor and Sabbath, which would be very interesting if anyone bothered to talk about it at length. None of them are missed in the end, and the rest are just screams in a crowd. Who cares? There’s no sense of what is at stake here or if there’s any reason to be bothered about losing Selonart in its current configuration — certainly not compared to Storm Harvest, which already did the “decadent human culture imprints on a mostly-water planet at their peril” thing, even down to the mysterious indigenous people.

The indigenous people should probably be where The Infinity Race sets itself apart, but as for that, oh dear. The idea isn’t bad, especially where it ends up going, and the initial germ even recalls the beleaguered Tharils from Warriors’ Gate: beings with a unique link to their environment that are enslaved by humans to aid their guidance systems. It’s considerably less developed than in that TV story, however, with only a cursory demonstration of their mistreatment on boats followed by wholesale racism once society breaks down. Bloom isn’t the only one we meet but he might as well be for all the flavours of personality on display, although to be fair this sort of becomes plot relevant. The writing for Bloom though is all grunty, monosyllabic English — think Robin the caveman in Ghosts — until his high evolution ending when, quite apart from all the plot stuff happening to him, his English improves. Hmm. Not great, is it?

Simon Messingham can do complex space cultures (see Zeta Major) and he can get in the heads of his characters. I’m not sure what happened this time, as all of that seems to backfire. His use of first person narration, which worked so brilliantly in Tomb Of Valdemar, falls over here. It’s inconsistent, only giving us Anji, Fitz and Bloom’s perspectives, defaulting to third person elsewhere, but also sometimes for Bloom as well. The third person stuff seems to have some personality bleed-through from the other bits, with odd little declarations like “We return to the Governor to find him much more relaxed than of late” and “For those interested in such things, Bloom’s effect on the race was instantaneous.” To whom is anyone, omniscient or Anji etc, telling this story? Sometimes the characters are trying so hard for casual real-person-ness that the actual information starts drying up: “I remember Fitz’s torch and him shouting something.” / “As far as I recall…” / “I was lying on a mattress or something…” / “Someone had pressed a switch or something.” Or what? Why are we asking you if you don’t know?

There is a general insouciance to the narration, whoever’s doing it, that suggests this vagueness is all deliberate and The Infinity Race is a comedy. Trouble is, there aren’t any jokes: the whole thing is just a wee bit irreverent in a slightly irritating way, with lots of lines like “The Captain thought for a minute. A very long minute (and I’ve known some long minutes in my time),” “I was itching to get out. I would have said dying but that was what we were trying to avoid” and “‘Yeah, you’re losing me now.’ I am nothing if not honest.” Fitz comes in handy here, greeting us (who are “we”?) with an occasional “Hi folks” but also sometimes lampshading the inadequacies of the plot: “I can hear you. Hear you sighing as you think: not again, how many times? One boat to another, cells, backwards and forwards all over the place. It’s wearing a bit thin, isn’t it?” Nyurgh. Really?

There are also — and I’m getting proper picky now, sorry — some rather “red pen” bits that compromise the whole thing further. “One of the head-setted technicians, Ingham, suddenly looked up sharply from his display.” / “We found the first body in the first room.” / “I would definitely have gladly gone back there now.” Some of this is in first person, so you could say that the narrator was a bit redundant on purpose. But it’s still part of the book.

The real problem though is the character writing. None of the voices are quite right. The Doctor fares the best, despite an occasionally too awed perspective on Sabbath that goes against the (recent) grain (“a man of many parts. To be honest, I don’t know how many parts. Extraordinary fellow” ???) and a conveniently functional memory for alien cultures. (I thought info dumps were why we got rid of all that in the first place?) He has an impressive moment in the epilogue, facing off against a city of wraiths, and he essentially kills Sabbath at one point (though of course he recovers), which you could argue is a natural progression from the last few books. He also gets inarguably the best scene in The Infinity Race, manipulating time with the help of Bloom to replay the same scene thrice over, including walking it back to become less omnipotent.

Fitz mostly suffers from context. There is no sign of the adventuring he did so recently in Time Zero (this story takes place immediately afterwards) or any effect that might have had on his personality: he’s just the same happy-go-lucky yutz Sam met all those years ago, complete with a now somewhat rare love interest, a woman who has vowed to kill him. It’s all surface level stuff, a step back from the last few books.

Anji is worse. Messingham recognises some aspects of her personality — the annoyance with Fitz, the pragmatism — but he otherwise casts her as an irritating smarm, plaguing the Doctor with questions and interjecting all the time. She shoulders most of the “funny” comments in this. Again we miss important context from prior novels, lightly referencing her eighteen months back at her old job and decision to leave the TARDIS but not really reckoning with how it feels to be back in the thick of it anyway. Or really recognising the fact that she likes the Doctor and Fitz now. The rapport is another big step back: I found her so annoying that I couldn’t grasp the Doctor’s patience and affection for her. It all just feels like Standard Anji, with continuity links used instead of earned character growth.

And then there’s Sabbath. Structurally this is all the usual stuff, effectively doing for Control The Timeline plans what the Master was doing for random power grabs in Season 8, aka always having another one to run off to next week. This makes him and his plans seem more trivial in the moment — especially his pointless reliance on pseudonyms and disguises, seriously who is all that for — but again, that’s just his default editorial setting and not Messingham’s fault. The voice, though. Sabbath is a somewhat taciturn fellow, by no means dull but not someone who can be bothered to waste energy humouring people. He doesn’t make friends easily. Cut to The Infinity Race and it’s like he’s hosting a tea party! All of a sudden he’s avuncular and cheerful, coming out with things like “Doctor, please do get up off the floor. You’ll do yourself a mischief” and “Anji? Put the kettle on, would you my darling?” At one point he introduces himself by paraphrasing a song from The Wizard Of Oz. If you wanted to do a double rug-pull and reveal that Suspicious Large Gentleman is actually Sabbath, then reveal that he’s someone else entirely, this would be the way.

He’s not putting on a great showing with the plot stuff either, mystifyingly expecting the Doctor to go along with his mad plan of the week and then defaulting to the usual stroppy anti-moral grandstanding when he’s denied. When things kick off Messingham takes some delight in knocking him down a peg, which is something I’ve enjoyed about recent EDAs, but it’s done a bit clumsily here with Sabbath begging for his life, offering up other people as sacrifices and generally “[screaming] like a woman.” Embarrassing in several ways. Something tells me he’ll be back to his less sugar-high self the next time we see him in, oh, one book’s time probably.

The Infinity Race has a decent idea to do with Bloom and his people, which conceptually echoes what’s happening back on Earth. This link might be a coincidence for all its actual relevance here but the concept is still neat. (As for the “happy ending” of the remaining Selonart denizens being brought into Bloom’s way of being, agree to disagree. It sounds a bit like hell and it certainly wasn’t consensual.) The book seems uncertain of its tone otherwise, aiming for a light-hearted romp but forgetting to fill the space with anyone we’d actually enjoy hearing from, defaulting to the companions and (however inexplicably) Sabbath in that regard. It feels like a fusion of Messingham’s earlier approaches that doesn’t quite come off, not helped by its place in a newly developed arc that makes it feel even more maddeningly inconsequential.

5/10

PS: Props for remembering that Sabbath’s ship is crewed by apes. The boys are back in town! Until they’re swept overboard. (I’m sure they’re fine.)

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #121 – Time Zero by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#60

Time Zero

By Justin Richards

I’m not quite sure where to start with this one. It’s written by Justin Richards post-The Burning, so it seems likely that some arc plots are going to be resolved or kicked into a higher gear. Time Zero sort of does and doesn’t do that, which nicely fits its quantum theme.

Some of it is an “event book”, i.e. setting things up for future books — the next one in particular. But most of it is self-contained, perhaps even an example of a typical EDA at this point, including a cheeky effort to appear to finish one arc and then — surprise! — not do that. It’s mostly just a self-contained story with lots of action.

I say “just” as if you’re not getting a lot of actual book here, but you are. Richards has a whale of a time with multiple adventures going on in different time zones, all inexorably heading towards each other. And if you like inexorability, check out the chapters: he’s numbered them backwards so that the book becomes a countdown. (At first I thought the whole thing was backwards since the first two sections were. You can relax: he hasn’t done a Memento.)

The initial germ is a satisfying bit of continuity. Fitz is carrying out his wish (see Camera Obscura) to go on an Arctic expedition with George Williamson in 1894. This is “something [he has] to do.” His friends meanwhile aren’t resting on their laurels: Anji has finally decided to go home and, in an abrupt break with tradition, actually does that. Eighteen months pass in her normal job and life, including a reunion with Dave’s distraught family.

Quite an unconventional way to get rid of a companion, doing it at the start like that, and sure enough we’re not done here. Out of the blue she’s recruited onto a military mission to Siberia. Meanwhile the Doctor has discovered what looks like Fitz’s expedition journal up for auction, and quickly gets involved in a web of intrigue that ends in — contain your surprise — a trip to Siberia. Soon the three of them, one over a century in the past, are chasing around the same Siberian castle while murderers and alternate-reality dinosaurs run amok.

It’s very busy. You may, like me, wish to keep a record of all the different groups taking part. Richards helpfully channels his occasional habit of getting distracted into lots of very short chapters, which keeps the plot-lines coherent and gives Time Zero a moreish readability. If, like Anji, you can’t be bothered to learn everybody’s name then that’s all right, since there are murderers and dinosaurs around to reduce the numbers… eventually. The key players and their goals are distinct enough, if not all fully known from the outset.

As the backwards chapters suggest, the plot is fairly complicated. It involves a man with an unusual relationship with gravity, a man who might be a ghost, two people in disguises, impossibly distant galaxies and impossibly frozen fire, dinosaurs, two military groups with their own Siberian missions and let’s face it, very probably a certain character originated by Lawrence Miles somewhere in the mix.

As with the groaning character list however, you don’t need to take on the burden of understanding the plot: explanations will be provided, and at some length, and several times over. A popular criticism of Time Zero would seem to be the Doctor’s commitment to explaining things like quantum theory, and to be honest fair enough. The book slows down when it comes time for the Doctor to tell one group after another how this all works, only for some of them to still not get it. Frankly I’m at a point where quantum theory (which is disputed here as much as it’s reinforced) is functionally indistinguishable from magic. I think I started hearing soothing wildlife sounds after a while as a defence mechanism.

Perhaps the complexities of quantum theory and the differences between light speeds etc caught me off guard because it’s otherwise such an action-oriented story. There are some great images, like a man terrifyingly transforming into a black hole, and many excellent set-pieces, most of which revolve around a team of mercenaries. Anji is caught in several life or death struggles with them; perhaps most memorably she gets herself stranded alone on an airplane as it’s about to hit a mountain. That (incredible) moment ends up highlighting one of the book’s weaknesses, however: sometimes it’s action for action’s sake, as in that case where we’re really just doing the James Bond version of “escape only to be recaptured.” Similarly the bloodthirsty Captain Hartfield and his men, executing scientists left and right, transcended terrifying for me and just became monotonous. “I will shoot you” doesn’t leave much room for characterisation.

The regulars fare better. Fitz and Anji have rarely been this forthright. Fitz’s decision to go on this voyage in the first place is a sign of character growth, but it’s also fun watching him occasionally apply his out-of-this-world experiences to the dangers around him. He builds a meaningful friendship with George, which has its own dramatic ups and downs, and his affection for Anji and the Doctor comes through in spades. I particularly liked this nod to long-time readers re the Doctor’s amnesia, and Fitz’s continuing duty of care: “‘So it’s a paradox?’ Fitz said. ‘In fact, it sounds like the granddaddy of all paradoxes.’ He blinked. ‘Sorry, forget I said that,’ he murmured.”

Despite one of the more hair-raising experiences of Fitz’s life, which is saying something, this is still more Anji’s story than his. The quiet way she goes back to work is disconcerting when she’s someone who’s been in the TARDIS, but that just speaks to who she is. Richards then finds more depth while she’s there, quietly showing her loneliness without Dave: “[She was] ignoring the fact that in her sleep she had pulled the other pillow down so that it was lying beside her in the double bed.” This swings both ways, with her eventually considering that “‘home’ was the TARDIS.” Her specific concern for Fitz, who might be dead for all she knows, is especially poignant: “As she sat cross-legged on the floor, the discarded telephone beside her, Anji was still crying. She cried for herself and for Dave. For Dave’s Mum and Dad. She cried because she had been crying for so long she no longer knew how to stop. And she cried for shame — for knowing that every time she had said Dave she meant Fitz.”

The fact that Anji survives this ordeal and still wants to go home is a great note to leave her on: happy, appreciative, but not in need of the Doctor at all times. However this isn’t her last trip in the TARDIS. Time Zero ends with the timeline in tatters, meaning it’s no longer safe to send her to “modern day London” because that might not be what it is. I’m certainly not mad that we’re keeping her around for a while longer — the camaraderie has got so good I’m a bit confused why we even need to get shot of her. (It’s not as if the actress has itchy feet, and anyway, Fitz is staying.) Richards at least contrives a very good reason to put off her departure, but I suppose anything might be better than “he won’t take her home because um,” which I guess we just fully aren’t resolving now. (At this point I’m guessing it was just an editor’s note to keep her in a holding pattern.)

The Doctor has some of that aloofness that Richards brought with The Burning. He captures the character’s confidence: “Once inside the building, the very fact that he was inside the building seemed to serve as his credentials.” Neither of the disguised characters, with their own agendas, are able to pull the wool over his eyes; the scene where he exposes the Duchess works very well: “‘You are a very clever man,’ she said. ‘Well,’ the Doctor replied with a smile, ‘if I was that clever, I wouldn’t need your help.” And there’s the climax, where he leaves the fate of the world up to another man’s willingness to die for it. Cold, but necessary; a far cry from the TV Movie.

By rights the most memorable Doctor stuff in this ought to be his dressing down of Sabbath, who is in this of course. (I didn’t even need the big reveal: when a mysterious “large man” is mentioned on Page 6 it’s unlikely to be Father Christmas.) Sabbath’s plan ends up a mess that gets him rightly mocked from all comers, including the “Duchess”: “‘There was always a chance I might not succeed here,’ Sabbath said. ‘No?!’ [She] sounded scandalised at the thought.” The Doctor gets some moments of triumph about it, notably: “The universe works the way I say it does, not the way you assume.”

The main issue with this is simply one of context. Camera Obscura already had this debate one book earlier, albeit with less evidence, and went about it in a more interesting way. Sabbath was also a more rounded (behave) character then. I’ve seen him circa Time Zero referred to as a Bond villain, which I get, but I’d place him more as the Master in one of his “foiled again yet still inexplicably confident” moods. He’s even got the disguise! (And the impractical plan. Did he stay with Curtis for years, decades?) His myopic outlook on timelines, effectively the plot of Ghost Light writ large, is beginning to wear thin, and I’m starting to wonder why the Doctor hasn’t found a jail cell for him or some such. He’s just a man, with one heart and a boat full of monkeys. Stop arsing about and get on with it.

Once you get to this point in Time Zero it’s busy getting its ducks in a row for the next book, which is all well and good — and quite sneaky, even name-checking “a race against infinity.” But it made me wonder how much substance is actually left over for Time Zero. I’m wary of movies and TV shows that always have their eye on the next sequel or season, and there’s a little of that here: Anji’s story has arguably stalled, and the entire plot is a mix of fuel for The Infinity Race and (truly inexplicably, but why not I guess) a last minute retroactive explanation for the monsters in The Burning. We also meet the next companion, Trix, whose involvement here is mostly shenanigans. Paul Cornell introducing Bernice Summerfield this ain’t, although her unpredictability has obvious potential.

Time Zero is one of those books that does what it sets out to do with practiced gusto, Richards ably demonstrating his skill with action, thrills and comedy. As often happens he’s clearly got an idea he’s excited about and we’re gonna hear about it (quantum theory), but mostly not to the extent that you’re not having a good time. It’s an energetic example of the mad chaos of the EDAs, that would perhaps pack more of a punch if it hadn’t followed such a strong novel. Ah well: there’s a sense of the workman about Richards, what with his keen collaboration in the arc, which suggests that Time Zero was happy just to show up and set off its fireworks.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #119 – Camera Obscura by Lloyd Rose

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#59

Camera Obscura

By Lloyd Rose

Sabbath. His continual manipulations. The Doctor’s lost heart, and his diminished state. Fitz and Anji’s stress about all of the above. Lloyd Rose isn’t mucking about: Camera Obscura addresses all of it.

Not that we’re done here. Sabbath is still out there at the end, and the Doctor’s return to a more stable place is still ongoing. But Camera Obscura is a very satisfying update in the meantime.

Probably my favourite thing about it is the way the characters seem annoyed or frustrated by the same stuff that’s been bothering me. The Doctor has absolutely had it with Sabbath’s 4D chess moves, and tells him so: “Why don’t we just take it as read, and I’ll go off and do a lot of work and then you can come in at the end and tell me it was all your idea.” Sabbath has seemed one step ahead for a while now and that’s very much paused this week, as the Doctor gets in his face and goads him: “[He] suddenly stretched out across [Sabbath’s papers] like a cat taking over a computer keyboard.” / “I just came to get on your nerves. They are your nerves, aren’t they? Haven’t borrowed them as well?”

There’s nothing wrong per se with having a weakened Doctor and using an apparently superior foe to drive that home, but this is still Doctor Who and if he’s going to be ineffectual all the time then eventually it will become something else. Camera Obscura lets him get his groove back, and the resulting Doctor/Sabbath dynamic is thrilling. I’ve never seen the Eighth Doctor this furious, or Sabbath this on edge. That’s not to say the Doctor cows him into submission completely: Sabbath is still a powerful and self-righteous figure who (inadvertently, then deliberately) saves the Doctor’s life. But the playing field is more level now, as it should be.

The redressed characterisation goes both ways. Rose is clear about Sabbath’s pragmatism and the lack of a figurative moustache to twirl; he believes in what he’s doing. The two clash over their outlooks on time which helpfully lays out their conflict: “‘You think it’s either your kind of order or else it’s chaos. Why shouldn’t time be like music?’ ‘Very pretty. And what if you’re wrong, and every trip you so blithely take pulls out another thread in time’s warp?’ ‘And what if you’re wrong, and in paring down time’s possibilities you strangle reality?’” / “[Sabbath] seems to have the strangest ideas about how time works. I don’t think he’s got it right at all.”

Rose also highlights the physiological bond between the two, aka the stolen heart. This pays huge dividends for the plot, as we find out that the Doctor — while effectively mortal — is kept from dying thanks to his second heart living in Sabbath. I definitely let out an “oh no, not again” when he nearly got himself killed in this, as it’s definitely become a trope in the post-Adventuress era, but it’s a lightning rod for the two ersatz Time Lords in this as it pushes them both along as characters. The Doctor knows this keeps happening to him — you might say he’s had it with that, too — and is testing the boundaries of life and death, but he’s also unstable and doubtless still has some self-loathing going on. Sabbath is intrigued by the link at first, but for one thing it means he’ll have to see more of the Doctor, and for another he’s increasingly disgusted by what this otherworldly nuisance represents. In the end he gives up the heart, killing it at last — which looks to be the very thing that will let the Doctor recover. Progress! Movement! An underlining of who these people are and what they want! It’s like being back in the Blum and Orman glory days.

And speaking of the Sam team, Rose is great with the companions in this. The Doctor-Anji-Fitz dynamic is once again at its peak (it was also great in History 101), in particular Anji’s attitude of an infuriated older sister. She’s quick to call the Doctor an idiot for getting himself in danger, and she makes him painfully aware that he doesn’t know what it’s like to sit around hoping he’ll recover. At one point she tells herself that she will absolutely go home after all this if the Doctor survives — a moment of total vulnerability. But her indignation can be up there with the Doctor’s at times, as she brutally rips strips off his would-be assassin near the end, and Sabbath too, which was so satisfying to read. (Sabbath also gets some good old fashioned shade off her. “And that name! ‘Sabbath.’ Like a comic book villain. He probably thought that sounded cool too. I’ll bet his real name’s Melvin or something.” Yeah, get him!)

Fitz, good old reliable pal that he is, seems to be experiencing his own growing pains. He’s aware of not fitting into Victorian London in a way that suggests his usual bag of tricks might be running low; given the opportunity to attend a lecture about other forms of exploration, completely separate to the plot, he strongly considers it. But his loyalty is still there in spades, as he faces down an apparently homicidal Doctor urging him to leave him alone. I got the sense that Fitz, like the Doctor, was testing his boundaries here.

There’s heaps of character stuff in Camera Obscura and it’s all excellent. The plot is a different beast. Continuing a theme from The City Of The Dead, Rose has written another story that isn’t your typical A-to-B science fiction work, although it’s notably more sci-fi and less magic than her last one. The Doctor has detected a time disturbance in Victorian London. So has Sabbath. Both of them are investigating weird goings on that might be related to it. And that’s it for a while: there’s lots of atmosphere and oddity but not a lot of direction. There’s a curiously successful spirit medium with multiple personalities, and a magician with an impossible trick. What could be the link? And what do either of these things really matter?

Rose gets a lot out of the macabre trappings, such as an incredible technology that’s somehow reliant on mirrors, and a magician whose grand finale recalls Christopher Priest’s The Prestige. (The movie wasn’t out yet.) The weird goings on all trace back to the time disturbance, but you get the overall sense that Rose is exploring each weird idea in its own way; they seem only loosely connected at times. It doesn’t feel like a typical Doctor Who story in that way, but then as with a few recent books (including Rose’s last) that fits with the overall shape of the Eighth Doctor range at this time, more holistic and less rigid. The trade-off is an arguable lack of page-turning plot, but oh well: the Doctor’s various near-misses provide the missing jeopardy, and the damaged people he meets are all reflections of what he’s going through — there’s even a recurring theme of people being split into eighths. It all serves a purpose.

Style is a very memorable part of Camera Obscura, with Rose pushing it to some warped places that recall the New Adventures. There’s some body horror involving monstrous limbs and a toaster once the villain is revealed, and a sequence where Death is personified; this, as well as a subsequent scene needles at the Doctor’s past in ways that he no longer understands but we do, including some mental cameos from former Doctors. All of that recalls Virgin, which feels appropriate in a meta way when he’s casting about for his identity. In amongst all that though, there are moments of sudden violence and horror that stand out all the more for their conciseness, such as the Doctor helping the Angel Maker to complete her grim task, the private life of Octave, and the eventual fate of Dr Chiltern. Rose displays great range here.

Despite being a macabre story full of heavy introspection, pulse-racing indignation and varying shades of gothic horror it’s somehow lots of fun as well. The Doctor’s impish mischief-making against Sabbath is like letting the air back into the room after several standoffish books, and Rose is quick to underline the TARDIS team’s serious traumas with their playful brand of sibling warmth. The Doctor is in a better place at the end of this, seemingly recapturing the unusual magic of the Time Lords right up to the final page and echoing, very neatly, the obsession with his lone heartbeat at the start. Apart from the odd nagging typo (will we never be rid of them?) it’s a book of tremendous poise and intent which extends, I think, to its fairly minimal plot. It’s a pity Lloyd Rose didn’t write any more EDAs after this one, but Camera Obscura is a good note to end on: one of those load-bearing entries like Alien Bodies or Unnatural History that manages to be a good time as well. I hope the other writers take the right lessons from it.

9/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #117 – History 101 by Mags L. Halliday

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#58

History 101

By Mags L. Halliday

Time for another one-and-done BBC Books author. I think it’s fair to say that Mags L. Halliday has a distinct voice, and one that it would have been interesting to see develop across further books.

History 101 seems at first to be familiar territory. Even the characters think so, with Fitz commenting: “Oh bloody hell! It’s another alternative history thingy, isn’t it?” When the Doctor notices that Picasso’s painting of Guernica doesn’t look quite right he’s led to understand that history — or the perception of history — is dangerously off-kilter, so the three of them must travel back to 1936 and investigate. Fitz has the muckiest job, observing the bombing of Guernica first hand. The Doctor and Anji settle in at Barcelona, mixing with anarchists and keeping an eye out for events (or the perception of them) slipping out of true.

This, too, feels a bit familiar for the EDAs: the Doctor sending his friends on missions, said friends spending an ungodly amount of time hanging around and suffering terribly and — as if there was a conspicuous absence of a cherry-on-top — the TARDIS getting knackered and the Doctor catching yet another case of the wifflies. There are even arc hints from the resident rotund boogeyman, here swapping out his military outfit for a snazzy fedora. (It’s not a spoiler, he’s in it right at the start.) You could win BBC Books Bingo with this one.

Halliday, however, has an unusual focus. The threat facing our heroes (and I suppose the course of history, the universe etc) is not one that’s going to jump out and attack you — although latterly it affects people’s behaviour in strange and violent ways. There’s a sense of simply having to immerse yourself in history until the answer pulls into focus. The Doctor and Anji, especially, have a pretty loose remit here.

If this seems like a shortfall for a [Doctor Who story, well maybe it is, but Halliday fills it with character. These are wonderful depictions of the TARDIS crew circa 2002. Anji especially, whom Halliday places firmly in the audience-surrogate slot when it comes to viewing the comparatively crazier other two. Anji sees them as “two younger brothers on permanent sugar rushes,” and has a particular affection for Fitz, an “old scruff” whom she’s delighted to see after his extended absence. She has a distinct older-sisterly concern for the Doctor, particularly when he (heart-rendingly, even if we do go to this well a bit often) seems to lose his marbles out of concern for the TARDIS. The thought of her slowly pulling the doors open, waspishly annoyed with him for not helping even though she’s scared for him, was a favourite moment for me.

The Doctor is great too. His breakdown feels like another little microcosm of what’s going on over this series, as he suddenly seems cut off from his abilities, even just his ability to be of use. Halliday has a great handle on his energy and whimsy when it thankfully returns: the scene of him joyously mending the TARDIS with a ticker-tape machine was another one that made me grin.

And there’s Fitz, long-suffering as always — possibly for sheer mileage the longest suffering companion there’s ever been, even recalling here some of his Interference woes, yet still utterly affable in the face of wartime horror. Many of his scenes are shared with Sasha, a Russian spy, and I can’t be the only one wondering if their at first bristly camaraderie leans somewhat adorably homoerotic. On a less fluttery level, Fitz’s inner monologues about the quality of his cigarettes, and his earnestly having forgotten that a damaged hand might prevent him playing the guitar, really sold Halliday’s understanding of the character.

She has also quite obviously, if perhaps not to a David A. McIntee extent, done her research. Barcelona circa 1936-37 feels hard-won and lived in, richly selling the idea that Anji has been stuck here for six months. She’s surrounded by characters who feel like they have inner lives upon which we are only briefly intruding. We’re privy to some of their suspicions about the Doctor and Anji and, although this is informed by the “perspectives” plot, it seems entirely reasonable for a revolutionary to wonder if a stranger keeping a log of their comings and goings might be a bit suspicious. Siding with a guest character in a moment like that, in a book that so firmly grasps what makes the regular characters interesting and appealing, is a feat in itself.

I couldn’t help wishing, though, that there were slightly fewer characters in this. For every Jueves there is a Luiz, for every Enrique an Alberto. Sometimes, despite loving the way Eleana was written, I got her confused with Pia; just now I had to look up what Enrique was called despite him featuring heavily in the finale. I meant what I said about them all feeling like real people — in the moment, Halliday sells this world full of busy, impassioned people. But we’re not always inside it with them. This also goes for the historical research: I wasn’t remotely surprised to see a bibliography at the end, what with the level of convincing incidental detail on display, but some of the basics aren’t quite there. A working knowledge of the Spanish Civil War would be a boon (I don’t have that), a basic geographic understanding of Barcelona would help (I thought “Eixample” was a typo) and as for the casual deployment of terms like POUM, PSUC and NKVD, help a guy out, honestly. When the story concerns the literal perception of history you could do more to bed in what that history should be. (This is normally where a less-than-brilliantly-informed companion would come in handy, but apparently Anji and Fitz attended all the school days I missed.)

There are also (arguably) problems with the plot and how it’s communicated. A vague sense that history is out of joint is a terrific starting point, and it slots neatly into the more holistic approach the EDAs were taking around this period, but it doesn’t present much of a ticking clock; besides the imperative for Fitz to witness Guernica there is little to no sense of pace in History 101. The long chapters amble along.

Halliday’s central concept is an interesting one, but it’s hard to put into practice. Mostly it’s done with characters losing their perspective and effectively becoming someone else, but in an already crowded roster this can be a recipe for mess, and it doesn’t happen very consistently. There is some slightly random icing on the cake too with hallucinations of moving gargoyles or firing squads, as well as a general sense of weird chaos in Barcelona, but Anji never quite puts a name to these things. I often felt like I was experiencing the same effect facing the TARDIS crew, but not in a creative way. A little bit of unfortunate copy-editing also dogs the book at times, with the odd missing or wrong word — that’s no big deal, but it had the effect of heightening the uncertainty of already (deliberately) uncertain scenes. For instance, Fitz witnessing roughly similar versions of Guernica happening again and again is a strange and disturbing idea, but the first time I noticed a repeated but-not-that-similar scene involving a nun I thought there’d been a mistake.

There’s an argument to be made that History 101 simply caught me napping, and fair enough: no one’s perfect, sometimes you just don’t fully get a book. (I’ve seen that others very much do.) But as this one approached its end I didn’t see a lot of closure happening, with that somewhat intangible problem getting resolved intangibly, a particularly nothing-y bit of setup with Sabbath, and no apparent resolution for Sasha. History has been set right because the balance of uncertainty has been restored, after a wiffly man and a wiffly man-shaped object are introduced to each other. Which is nice and all, but if you’ll forgive a follow up question: wha? See also the bit with Fitz and the TARDIS phone: it’s arguably the most impactful moment in the book, questioning how far these characters will go to preserve history and how much they trust each other. But because it’s couched in Fitz drifting in and out of consciousness, and the way it’s framed suggests that it might be Sabbath rather than the Doctor organising it, and the lack of a significant cool-down about it afterwards, I was more stuck on what actually just happened (and how much of it did) than the ramifications of it for Doctor Who.

Like many of the range’s stronger authors, I’ve no doubt that Halliday had a full grasp of all her concepts, characters and settings: that confidence shines through the book. Actual understanding is muddier, but I’d put that more down to the editing. Never mind the occasional wrong word, if a book’s concept is too hard to grasp then maybe it could be refined. That’s why I’m sad we didn’t get any more BBC Books from her. All that interesting stuff could be sharpened into diamonds.

My vague sense of befuddlement through a lot of History 101 wasn’t enough that I wouldn’t recommend reading it. (And anyway, even if its plot occasionally did an “I’ll explain later,” its themes were sharp enough.) If nothing else it makes a terrific case for this TARDIS team, and it has heaps of flavour. Also, you might follow it better than I did. It’s all a matter of — all together now! — perspective.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #115 – The Crooked World by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#57

The Crooked World

By Steve Lyons

I got this one decades ago, free (if memory serves) with DWM. It’s been a funny little curio on my shelf ever since, this freebie that doesn’t look very much like a Doctor Who novel, and now I’ve actually gone and read the bugger. It’s a strange feeling; I think it was the last Doctor Who book I’d had since my youth but never read.

 

The Crooked World was Steve Lyons’s last Wilderness Years novel. (See also, Christopher Bulis’s Palace Of The Red Sun. We’ll be seeing more of these as the range ticks towards its end.) Thematically it’s a bit like Lyons’s first, as he once again embraces different media. Where Conundrum tackled alternative strands of fiction such as comic strips, The Crooked World focusses on cartoons: the TARDIS seemingly lands inside one, or at least a planet populated with noticeably off-brand recreations of Road Runner, Tom & Jerry, Wacky Races, Top Cat and Scooby Doo.

 

There are a few ways you can tackle this – including, it would only be fair to acknowledge, a comic strip rather than a novel. On that, I think Conundrum demonstrated well enough that Lyons can write a prose story about comic books, so he’s well within his capabilities doing something similar here with cartoons. Besides which, The Crooked World is more interested in the rules and restrictions of cartoons, things that you would want to talk about, than in their visual capabilities, so it works nicely as prose.

 

What starts as a jolly interlude for the Eighth Doctor and friends quickly turns into something nasty, as the Doctor is shot by a farmer and (contrary to local physics) actually gets quite badly injured. This starts a chain reaction of differences in cartoon logic which causes the blunderbuss-wielding pig, Streaky Bacon, to rethink his actions and consider his place in the world. There are other knock-on effects, some deliberate (like Anji telling Angel Falls, an ersatz Penelope Pitstop, to stop relying on men) and some indirect (like Fitz inspiring Jasper, aka Tom, to leave his kitchen and consider the wider world), and that’s the gist of the novel: cartoon characters wondering if that’s all there is to life.

It’s a bit like Pleasantville in other words, but then I’m not averse to seeing Doctor Who’s take on that, and anyway cartoons aren’t the same thing as 1950s TV shows. Lyons isn’t here to interrogate issues of race and sexuality as that film did, although both ideas are obliquely and humourously invoked here; the focus is on free will and what it means to break out of patterns. It’s quite a small-scale novel, despite concerning the fate of an entire world. There’s a feeling about a third of a way in that the plot isn’t going to escalate in the traditional way so much as continue to explore an idea to its natural conclusion.

I’m fine with that, quite honestly. There have been other books with dynamite ideas that didn’t have time to look in every nook and cranny. I tended to come away from those feeling a bit frustrated. Grimm Reality is one to which The Crooked World bears a more than passing resemblance; Lyons (via Anji) gently lampshades this a few times. Even apart from any concerns about repetition – and for all I know, Lyons was directly inspired by that earlier book – it’s worth pointing out the increased lean of the series towards overt magic and fantasy that is implied by seeing more and more novels like this. For my money, The Crooked World is a more balanced effort than Grimm Reality: the cartoon characters don’t just re-enact their little narratives wholesale, they think about them and sometimes change what they’re doing. The Doctor and co. feel less like passive observers this time – indeed, their arrival is the main driving force of the plot. I like idea-based stories that have a “just-right-sized” plot and this is one of those.

It’s a good showcase for the regulars, or at least an accurate one. I can’t be the only reader getting a little tired of the Doctor’s fragility post Adventuress Of Henrietta Street; his injury at the start of this absolutely fits the plot and moves it along, no complaints there, but it risks being yet another reminder of the poor wiffly Doctor with his one heart, a concept that Lawrence Miles sold as something more interesting than a difference in his physiognomy which subsequent writers have largely taken to mean “he runs out of breath now, the poor duck.” Never mind: once he’s back on his feet the Doctor is a joyous force, enthralled by the nonsense logic of the world around him as well as the challenge facing its people. Although he leaves the decision-making to them wherever possible he’s quite partisan here, insisting that to embrace free will and break out of their “cartoons” is the right thing to do. I don’t know if that was an attempt to underscore a more impulsive Doctor or if that was just the way Lyons felt he ought to lean, but it certainly creates sparks with Anji who argues – not unreasonably – that these people seem happy with their lot.

Lyons has a good grasp of Anji, someone who “couldn’t bring herself to believe in anything without tangible proof”; throwing her into a world of nonsense is a good challenge. Her feminist flag-waving with Angel is perhaps a little on the nose, but this is a cartoon, so fair enough. Her scenes with the Skeleton Crew (aka the Scooby Gang) are probably my favourites here, as she forces them to confront the patterns they’re stuck in and adapt how they do things, only to then understand that they’re pretty on the ball and can respond reasonably well to threats and mysteries by themselves, even incorporating what they've learned from her. Lyons prods at her uncertainty around going home, a theme the books have had-their-cake-and-eaten-it with so far, landing on it never seeming like “the right moment” to broach it with the Doctor. He also picks up on her withering relationship with Fitz, having her observe that cartoon characters have discovered the concept of sex and instantly know where that came from. She has a fairly accurate long-suffering opinion of the loveable schlub, such as when the local sheriff tells the Doctor: “‘You call this trouble, boy? Your skinny pal’s been kidnapped, that’s all. It’s not like he’s started to think or nothing serious.’ That was true enough, thought Anji.”

Fitz has long since achieved that Bernice Summerfield status of being hard to get wrong, and sure enough Lyons has a blast with him here, having him adorably care for the wounded Doctor, clumsily reveal the ins and outs of evil lairs to a cadre of supervillains, then make Herculean efforts to explain sex and love to Angel Falls. He wipes away a genuine tear of relief when he hears the words “Tell me about this Earth thing you call ‘sex’” in earnest. (“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for someone to say that. I mean, you really don’t know.”)

For me the most affecting parts of The Crooked World were the reactions of its cartoon characters to their changing landscape. Jasper, a mute cat, tugs the heartstrings in a surprisingly sophisticated fashion as he lopes around after Fitz, who fails to notice him, then gets trapped back in his routine only to escalate it horribly; Streaky, the roundabout sort of Porky Pig/Elmer Fudd creation, seems to be having an existential crisis throughout the book which pays off nicely at the end; Mr Weasley, Angel’s guardian/masked nemesis, starts a schism among the bad guys that leads to an evil witch working on medicines for the injured instead. It could be argued that the cartoons of The Crooked World lack originality or very much in the way of diversity – they’re all knock-offs and their individual storylines would not, with respect to Lyons, impress Chuck Jones very much. But first of all I’d say the plot has a baked-in reason for that when it’s revealed where all this cartoon stuff has come from*, and second we’re not really here to be dazzled by the brilliance of these cartoons. Breaking out of them is the point.**

*This doesn’t particularly explain Anime City, which is mentioned as another part of the world outside of the more Looney Tunes “Zanytown” we find ourselves in for the duration. Maybe Lyons came up with the explanation after he wrote that bit.

**It’s worth pointing out that for some reason Fitz and Anji never say “This is a bit like Tom & Jerry” or “Isn’t that Scooby Doo but with different character names”, and that feels a bit false. They would know these things. But I suspect it was a copyright thing. Perhaps I’m also just used to characters going “Look at that IP!” in the current landscape, which wasn’t as expected or legally possible in 2002.

The Crooked World doesn’t break a sweat explaining itself. That seems to be par for the course with the Eighth Doctor Adventures at this time, magic and fantasy being more normal all of a sudden. Anji pokes the bear a few times and gets a sort of science-y explanation from the Doctor: “In some places, in some entire universes, [reality is] stretched too thinly and the fabric becomes weak.” That’s a bit of a sop in-text and on the meta level as well, like when vampires in New Who turn out to be (gasp!) aliens that act just like vampires. As with his earlier book Salvation and, yeah okay let’s mention it again, Conundrum, the fun of it is in exploring the strange idea he’s come up with, which is: what if Doctor Who landed in a cartoon. It’s a “just go with it” novel that makes a good fist of what it’s trying to achieve, even if the lack of a particularly kinetic plot keeps it from being what I’d call a page-turner. There are plenty of jokes to tide you along, like the observation that an increase in thinking has led to a shortage of lightbulbs. It’s a sweet, creative effort that acts as a fitting send-off for one of the Wilderness Era’s more colourful writers.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #113 – The Book Of The Still by Paul Ebbs

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#56

The Book Of The Still

By Paul Ebbs

This one’s a rarity: a debut novel where the author didn’t come back to write another one. I’ve no idea why. (I’m going to assume he was busy.) It makes The Book Of The Still a bit of a curio since there’ll sadly be no follow up to measure it against.

Still (ahem) it makes a strong first impression. The title is portentous — The Book Of The Still sounds like a big deal. It begins with an epilogue (!) written by someone who hates the Doctor, which suggests — since this is a time travelling series — that this is going to be a complicated affair. And the font is noticeably small, like in The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street: an obvious BBC Books trick to condense a larger novel into 280 pages, suggesting that there’ll be a lot of book for this one to be complicated in.

The first chapter promises an “Obligatory Spectacular Opening” and it doesn’t disappoint, with a master thief sky diving into a building to steal the book of the title, only to be revealed as the Doctor when he’s caught. Other memorable set pieces appear throughout the novel, such as the Doctor resolving a bomb threat by materialising the TARDIS around it first (a little bit Looney Tunes, but in a good way), and the Doctor literally surfing his way through space onto the surface of a sun inside a cube made out of shockingly resilient book pages.

You might infer from all this derring-do that the Doctor is an unstoppable force in The Book Of The Still, but that’s only true some of the time. There’s some acknowledgement of his increased frailty since Adventuress, such as Anji noting that he looks green about the gills re rollercoasters: “She felt closer to him at times like this, when he was open about his vulnerabilities — rather than when he was swinging one-handed across fiery lakes in save-the-distressed-damsel mode.” Although yes, he does do that a bunch here as well, the book still finds time to interrupt his flashy burglary attempt, stick him in a quite unpleasant prison and threaten him with execution, get him beaten up several times, selectively hand over control of his brain to someone else, force him to strangle someone almost to death, and when push finally comes to shove re all the complicated time stuff promised at the start the understanding of it comes from another character, as does the resolution. At one point he feels that there’s no hope of saving a planet so he dances (badly), and then wakes up his companion so he won’t die alone. I wouldn’t exactly say that he’s on the back foot here but Paul Ebbs seems keen to put things in his way, or take things from him, which is quite interesting. (As to the frequent references to his hair getting pulled out or people attempting to pull it out, I’m not sure whether that’s “Paul Ebbs hated the wig” or “The Author’s Barely Disguised Fetish.”)

The other characters have a spottier time due to not always being themselves, although the Doctor has flashes of that as well, sometimes  (however improbably) for unrelated reasons. Fitz and Anji both fall afoul of a shady escort agency, the gist of which is that your memories are replaced with new ones that make you more pliable. In Fitz’s case it makes him a good match, since he thinks he’s a seventeenth century swashbuckler and his date is the woman he rescued. (Though he isn’t very consistent with that identity.) In Anji’s case it’s to facilitate a robbery for fictional reasons. (Still not sure how she did the robbery.)

Anji is otherwise well written, although her instant loathing of Rhian — the Doctor’s fellow prison escapee, keep up! — puts her in a pretty ugly light. She’s quite capable, such as when manipulating a bunch of looters into getting the TARDIS turned right side up. (The TARDIS falling doors-down is a stroke of “surprised that doesn’t happen more often” wit.) I liked her overall fondness for the Doctor and keenness to help out.

I can’t accuse Fitz of being poorly written here even when he’s not himself, as his “other self” is mostly a wild romantic and that isn’t exactly a bolt from the blue. When he’s able to respond properly to events around him he’s about as loveably Fitz as he gets, even outright saying he loves the Doctor at one point. (Is that the bar for me? Companions that want to be around the Doctor?) The degree of out-of-his-mind-ness does threaten to edge him out of the story, however, and we never really deal with the horror of his being forced to love someone. Yes, it’s Fitz, so if anyone wasn’t going to mind that sort of thing then etc etc, but it’s still decidedly iffy and it’s rather dismissed as a concept. (On another note, Fitz losing his memory here really ought to tie into the same thing occurring in the EDAs as a whole, but I’m not sure Ebbs’s story does anything with that. Oh well.)

The book is a little more upfront about the concept of addiction, which Paul Ebbs says (via I, Who) is largely the point of the thing, hence the central character of Carmodi. I’m not sure “time addiction” really does much for his theme, it being rather hard to explain or manifest that idea, but elsewhere you can see Rhian going to quite extraordinary lengths for her missing father and the overall idea of paradoxes — you could say she’s addicted to them. Both characters shoulder the novel’s resolution, which perhaps adds weight to their bits of the story being the truly important, theme-y ones.

If this all sounds a bit fractured, frankly that’s because it is. “Madcap” was the word that kept coming to mind: we vault excitedly from one set piece to another, having a mostly splendid time it must be said, but the majority of the book isn’t really focussed on advancing the plot. It’s more of an adventure story with the Book passed frantically from one party to another. Actions like the Doctor’s blackout-then-burglary aren’t explained until the very end, whereas I’m not sure I ever understood the motivations of the three thugs behind all of Fitz’s woes, who somehow snowball into a nigh unstoppable triumvirate throughout the book despite being essentially The Three Stooges.

Ebbs has heaps of ideas and they’re broadly imaginative and funny, such as the planet Lebenswelt being so wealthy that its prisoners have gold-encrusted handcuffs; it’s “the kind of place where a pauper could eat from a carved emerald plate, but basic sewage systems seemed to be beyond them.” The fake memory scenes are fun vignettes in and of themselves, particularly the adventures of Captain Fitzgerald. (I’m less clear on why the baddies took from this that these were the correct names of people he knew. Aren’t they influencing this stuff?) The bigger villains, the Unnoticed, are a lot less amusing but just as colourful: strange Lovecraftian horrors that go around in trench coats blowing up any worlds that have heard of them. (It’s in the later Unnoticed scenes that we get the most blatant examples of addiction and addicts, with miserable skeletal “time sensitives” walking around a kind of hell they volunteer at, covered in sores. The symptoms connect more than the fix.)

Perhaps the most “money on the table” idea is the Book itself, which is a sort of ever-present lifeline for stranded time travellers. That idea is planted fairly soon and it has obvious potential for complicated hijinks, which Ebbs mostly fulfils during the somewhat higgledy-piggledy climax, but it’s still not what I’d call a time travel book; for much of it the Book could be the Ark of the Covenant instead and you’d get a similar narrative drive. A message from the Book does drive a fair amount of the action, but again it’s not a message for any of the regulars so we’re not terribly focused on it.

As usual I should avoid having preconceptions about what a book will be like. The Book Of The Still is a hell-for-leather tumble of spacefaring nonsense rather than a particularly solemn or important timey wimey puzzle. (Until the climax when it’s that for sure.) It has a consistent sense of humour but also some notes of sensitivity in its prose, like when Rhian sees the two-left-footed Doctor spring into action: “[she] saw how well the Doctor could dance, when the right tune came along.” It’s got some things to say, although they’re perhaps under too many layers of sci-fi to speak clearly, and its high points rank among the more  Technicolour sequences in Doctor Who lit. I liked it. I just wish there were more Paul Ebbs books so I could see what he tweaked next time.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #111 – Trading Futures by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#55

Trading Futures

By Lance Parkin

Lance Parkin is a difficult author to summarise. He likes to invoke (and occasionally invent) lore for the series, so his books gain a certain fan import just by sticking his name on the cover. Cold Fusion and The Infinity Doctors, not to mention his eventual final book in the EDAs, all (presumably!) do cool things and include elements that speak to their respective ranges as a whole, as well as the overall idea of Doctor Who. They’re prestigious. But he can also write more down-to-Earth character pieces like his inaugural book Just War and more recently Father Time, which slowed down life with the Doctor and gave him a daughter.

 

Very big stuff, very small stuff, so far we’ve covered most of the bases… but then he also writes books that set their sights on fun and leave it at that. Beige Planet Mars (co-written with Mark Clapham) is one of the jollier Benny books, which is saying something, and The Dying Days (the first ever Eighth Doctor novel, unless you count the novelisation of the TV Movie) is a repurposed Third Doctor story that’s gung-ho all the way. TL;DR, you never quite know what he’ll do next. (And I’ve not even mentioned his non-fiction effort, The History Of The Universe, which is as ambitious as it sounds.)

 

Trading Futures is unequivocally fun Parkin. (You might have guessed that from the splendid spy movie front cover.) Parkin slips in a bit of arc stuff anyway, enough that it’s very apparent that he’s paying attention to the surrounding novels, but his aim is action adventure right from the jump. And perhaps a commission for a Bond novel while he’s at it.

 

Doctor Who novel openings can be hit and miss, but this one’s an explosive double-header. First a man takes a client into the past to meet Macbeth and display his time travel credentials. Second, the Doctor steals an important suitcase from a well-guarded yacht, blowing it up in the process and escaping via an ejector seat. (You half expect “Nobody Does It Better” to start piping in from the ether.) The pace essentially keeps it up from there, with multiple factions all chasing the time technology. We’ve got – let’s see if I miss one – Secret Service head Cosgrove and his assistant Penny Lik (the name’s a Bond Girl-ish joke about ice cream); time agents Roja and Jaxa; CIA agent Malady Chang and (eventually) the US President; and a spaceship full of angry rhinos called the Onihr – and not, as you might be hoping, the Juddoon. Add to that the Doctor, Anji and Fitz, all three juggling identities at various points in the story, and at least two actual time machines to fight over, not including the TARDIS, and you’ve essentially got a French farce with a very large special effects budget.

 

Parkin keeps at least one foot on the ground, adding some satisfying character moments mostly to the first half. There’s a gentle reminder that Fitz (as well as the Doctor) is having memory problems, but not so much that he doesn’t feel the burden of knowing more about the galaxy’s status quo than the Doctor. The only person he can talk to about all this is the TARDIS, so Parkin writes a lovely scene of that ending with: “You’re a police box, but there aren’t any policemen left.” We get some great expressions of what it’s like to travel in time somewhere that’s mostly recognisable to you, which is something all too easy to take for granted, with Anji musing that she “had no idea if she was meant to feel very, very old or very, very young.” And we get this brilliant assessment of Fitz’s overall slack demeanour: “Long experience of time-travelling had taught him that you answered questions by politely agreeing with the person asking them … so, on his travels, when people asked ‘do you know this is a restricted area?’ or ‘what shall we do with you, rebel scum?’ or the like, he’d learned to shrug and let them carry on with whatever they were going to do anyway.” Yep, tick, that explains a lot.

 

There is also – Bingo blotters are the ready! – yet more stuff about dear departed Dave, as when Anji is provided with the means to travel anywhere in time with precision she chooses Brussels in 2001, hoping to warn Dave away from certain doom. This is one of those things where, yes, it makes sense for Anji to make that choice in that situation, but the novelist choosing to concoct that situation is ignoring the subsequent closures of EarthWorld and Hope – despite referencing both of those stories here. Parkin takes pains to mention that “[Anji] and Dave had been in trouble”, which has been clear since Escape Velocity and makes it even more puzzling that we keep going back to that well. Admittedly the observation that “All the time it was Dave that represented everything she’d left behind and so she’d clung to Dave” goes some way to explaining why she keeps ping-ponging back to this, but good god almighty, are we ever going to be done re-using these tea leaves? (At least this re-do doesn’t last for the whole book; Anji is thoroughly on-the-ball for the rest of it.)

 

Rather more interesting are the little nods to where all this is going, such as Anji’s observation that “there was a pattern to their travels … a bigger picture they were all missing,” and the Doctor once again deliberately failing to mention why he can’t take Anji home as promised, even though he can clearly pilot to order. (I’m pretty sure they’ve already talked it over at this point with her agreeing to the wanderer’s life, but never mind.) There’s also more evidence of Sabbath’s dodgy dealings; in a pleasing boost for the note-takers among us, this involves retroactively recruiting the Time Agents from Eater Of Wasps, before Sabbath even turned up! It’s only a minor inclusion and to be honest you might forget about it by the end of Trading Futures, but it’s good to see that these things are being kept on the boil. Heck, it was a pleasant surprise just to see those Wasps guys again.

 

Lots of good, weighty, sufficiently Lance Parkin-y stuff there – and I’ve not even mentioned the seriously cool idea that a character could use one of the TARDIS crew as an alien interpreter, like seriously why hasn’t that happened before? But as I said earlier, this one is all action. You probably won’t pause to register the other stuff.

 

I’m slightly in two minds about the action. The good: it’s fast and fun, and funny, with Parkin slipping in jokes that would probably have got a smirk out of Douglas Adams. Highlights include: “‘The control box indicates that the Doctor has one heart.’ ‘Er… he’s got two,’ Fitz began. ‘Oh no, hang one, as you were.’” / Fitz chain smokes for a bit specifically because he’s “trying to get off nicotine pills.” / The Onihr have a “pain inducer” that actually makes you remember pain and isn’t very effective, leading to: “The lead Onihr twisted a dial on the pain inducer, and Fitz’s eyes watered as he remembered the time he’d jumped a bit too hard on to the saddle of a scooter.” / There’s this argument with the Time Agents: “‘If this isn’t a time machine, then no crime has been committed.’ ‘But the Doctor himself claims that it is a time machine.’ The Doctor smiled smugly. ‘If you’re going to put me on trial, you’ll need better evidence than that. It’ll be my word against mine!’” / The Doctor’s retort to Malady: “‘We’re in the future?’ The Doctor grinned. ‘Yeah. But here they call it “the present.”’” / And there’s a bit where Anji says she needs to use the loo to get away from a tricky situation, happily bumps into her friends on the way, then needs to discretely ask them to go away because she does need a wee actually. I chuckled while reading it, occasionally synonymising “Lance Parkin” with "comedy" as you do with Dave Stone and he-who-mostly-pens-right-wing-Spectator-columns-nowadays.

 

The bad, or I suppose the less good, is twofold. The action is constant, particularly once we arrive at the finale set in a robot factory. (I’ve not even mentioned the world of roughly 2020-ish is on the brink of war between roughly-the-EU and the United States, and both sides have access to big robots.) Parkin changes settings frequently, which is something I usually hate, but he manages to keep the action flowing and the characters clear enough despite all the deliberate mistaken identities – which, great, but there are points where even the characters are a bit unsure who’s who or doing what, and it all just gets a bit thin. The finale simply goes on a bit.

 

The other issue, or my takeaway at least, is a distinctly casual attitude to death in this. It’s probably normal for an action movie to, for example, drown Athens and kill four thousand people before simply moving onto the next set piece, but it’s peculiar for Doctor Who to do that without really registering the tragedy of what has unfolded. We do get a terrific scene of the Doctor “robbing” a bank in order to protect everyone in it, but the expected hand-wringing isn’t really there to complement it. I suppose he’s too busy? (Malady notices the bodies, at least.) I wondered if this was a “you can’t change history” thing, with the resultant deaths being out of the Doctor’s control apart from say a bank-vault’s worth, but we don’t really have that conversation, or reckon with the fact that what’s going on might not even be that.

Elsewhere people are gunned down like they’re nothing, often characters we’ve been following and got to know a little, all of which can be business as usual in an action story but juxtaposed with that mostly cheerful atmosphere it smacks of callousness. Particularly the bit where a distraught young boy – admittedly up to no good – gets his head blown off at the end of a chapter as the Doctor leaves him behind. Conversely the scene where a villain plunges to either victory or death is handled with brutal black comedy; the Doctor’s lack of response makes more sense there.

 

Perhaps all of that is a commentary on the Eighth Doctor as he exists now, which is to say “not firing on all cylinders” or equivalent cliché. He races through Trading Futures with the confidence and influence of old, but perhaps with less heart(s) than usual, and maybe less deference to changing or not changing history. (Perhaps deep down pondering whether the villain of the piece is really capable of predicting real future events?) I’m not convinced Parkin or Trading Futures is entirely on firm ground with this corner of continuity, however. If, as he does here, the Doctor can expertly shoot bullets out of the air and deftly zip the TARDIS from A to B then you might wonder why he needed that second heart in the first place, and what he’s supposed to be missing. What happened to the weakly human-ish guy from Anachrophobia? But the Doctor is still excellently written here as a character, and so is Fitz (pretending to the be the Doctor, temporarily outfoxing the Onihr), and so is Anji (confidently bullshitting various parties and applying her business knowledge where it will help). All three feel like seasoned adventurers rising to the challenge. Or in Fitz’s case, cheerfully tripping arse over tit through it.

 

Unusually for Parkin this might be a book that you need to think less about. (How, for example, does Anji telephone the President of the United States just by asking for him via Directory Enquiries?) As an action movie it rockets along bloodily, sprinkling in nifty ideas as it goes, such as the smell-based Onihr technology, and it has all the necessary cool bits, such as Fitz bravely resigning himself to self-destruction in order to stop the Onihr only to avert it at the last possible second because whoops there's a solution actually. (Because he’s not the Doctor and he can’t think of everything, okay?) It’s a laugh. It’s just perhaps not advisable to get attached to any of the characters, or expect any deep and meaningful conversations beyond “money, pfft, it sure makes people do crazy things!”

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #109 – Anachrophobia by Jonathan Morris

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#54

Anachrophobia

By Jonathan Morris

Likes a bit of time travel, does Jonathan Morris. His last book, Festival Of Death, was notable for its more-than-usual amount of temporal jiggery pokery: it had the Fourth Doctor and Romana reliving the same events at different points and also in the wrong order. Anachrophobia plays in a similar toybox, but there are some key differences between the two books.

First, the treatment of time travel. Anachrophobia is set on a world where time can be made to go too slow or too fast. It’s a weapon used by both sides in a war, and it’s used incrementally as the plot demands rather than shaping the book as a whole; we don’t spend the whole thing cleverly nipping back and forth. There’s also a difference in how the characters deal with time, as instead of the indomitable experts of Season 17 our heroes are a diminished Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji. They are seriously, rather than just whimsically on the back foot about all this which tweaks the dynamic further from Festival.

Second, and this is perhaps an even bigger one, Anachrophobia is not a comedy. Festival was somewhat complicated but also light-hearted, with the characters often seeming as bewildered as the reader. That helped considerably to pull me through its diagram-based time antics. Anachrophobia wants nothing to do with the fizzy wine and good mood of Season 17: it’s a base under siege story that leans into uncanny horror, and it’s a pretty miserable time for the regulars to boot. When the story gets into somewhat complicated time mechanics (as I think we all knew it would) it’s coming from a different place. This time it’s tense and it demands a lot from the Doctor, rather than just going “How is our cheeky chappie going to get out of this one?”

There’s nothing wrong with not going down the comedic route – good for Morris, trying something new on his second book. But some elements still lean comedic, such as the situation on the (unnamed) planet at war. It’s not so much a war really as a legal dispute, with the colonists having “leased” the planet from the Plutocratic Empire and now defaulting on their payments. That’s a pretty obvious basis for a Sun Makers-esque satire, and it’s a valid enough idea to pursue it without the ironic laughs, except without them you’re left with a conflict that’s not about anything meaningful. It’s just people doing awful things for money. Of course most wars are generally that when you peel back the distractions: the bottom line is always money, which is a valid enough observation. (Albeit not one that the book actually makes.) The problem here is that when you take away anything more than a base level of satire you’re left finger-wagging about the evils of capitalism, which makes much the same point at the end of a book as it does at the start. Killing people just because a spreadsheet told you to is, well, wrong, innit? No one here has a hope of mounting a compelling counter-argument to that, so we’re done here pretty much as soon as we start.

Anachrophobia has a similar problem with its monsters of the week. Don’t let the front cover fool you – there’s nothing abstract about the image of a man with a clock for a face. After crash landing the Doctor and co. make it through fast-then-slow time storms only to find a military base running time travel experiments, which naturally go wrong and promptly turn people into clock heads. (They are deliberately left unnamed for mystique purposes.) These are walking, somehow-still-talking people that no longer have souls but do have seemingly random time-pieces instead of the usual eyes, nose and mouth assortment. It’s a great image that would make for an intriguing New Who menace. They have special abilities too, such as reversing time by a couple of minutes to undo damage or secure an advantage. New Who loves monsters with rules.

The trouble is, well, that’s it. For great chunks of the book we’re just spamming the “scary clock people” button, which gets diminishing returns. So many scenes rely on the unbelievable shock value of a character… with… a clock… for a FACE! Which yes, creepy, but we’ve been there and done it now. There’s an entire village of them at one point, hammering us over and over with the idea that this image is simply killer enough all by itself. I was reminded of the zombies in Festival Of Death – one of its downsides, really, a lumbering monster that’s not all that interesting. At least this one has a better aesthetic, although that’s all it has after a while. (They don’t even do much to you. You’ll just also be a clock person.)

There’s an interesting character reason for the clocks (although it doesn’t explain, you know, the clocks) which loosely recalls Nightshade. An unknown force is taunting people with their past misdeeds and offering to put them right, Quantum Leap-style. Only the second they do it they will unwittingly “unwrite” their lives and leave a vacancy for a clock zombie. Not bad, and it gives you a terrific excuse to dredge up people’s back stories out of nowhere. The trouble here (there’s a lot of trouble in this one, isn’t there?) is that the characters aren’t interesting. They’ve got a pretty lousy society as a backdrop – no need to go over all that again, but it’s worth adding that the novel barely includes the colonists. (They at least have a reason to fight.) Individually they’re not much better. There’s a doctor, Lane, who has her moments and a very tragic past, but once you get clocked you cannot get unclocked, so that’s that. I forgot most of the rest of them, but Leader Bragg is the worst: an insecure guy who, at the drop of the hat, decides that the Doctor and his friends are actually spies. Oh, goodie. He couldn’t turn into a clock fast enough for me. (Morris should get points for making an early character, Oake, quite sympathetic before killing him on Page 7. It shows he means business. He then proceeds to not make anyone else sympathetic.)

The gimmick here seems like pretty promising stuff for the three regulars, and we do get whiffs of that. Fitz, poor duck, once again doesn’t amount to very much, although Morris reminds us that his memories are diminishing, which arguably gets him off the hook. (This has been in at least one other book so far – I forget which. Watch this space I guess.) Anji is very well realised, although she isn’t massively tempted by the “past misdeeds” virus: yes, there is a mention of Dave, but she genuinely seems to be over the worst of that, only wobbling because of her questionable choices in Hope. It’s Anji’s commitment to the Doctor, despite occasionally thinking harshly of his choices, that stands out here. She sticks by him and that feels hard-won after several books.

It’s a memorable one for the Doctor, who seems particularly scraggly in his post-Henrietta Street configuration. He falls ill, catches himself by surprise thinking he still has a respiratory bypass system and nearly dies a couple of times. Anji and Fitz more than once remark that he seems more vulnerable now. It lends the time stuff an element of danger that perhaps wouldn’t be there otherwise, and definitely wasn’t there in Festival Of Death. Anachrophobia treats the Doctor sufficiently nastily that suspension of disbelief allowed me to think, sheesh, he’s not getting out of this one without scars.

The memory stuff is perhaps a bit unfortunate since it has come along during a run of books where the Doctor does not remember his past, including the misdeeds. There’s still a surprisingly thrilling sequence where he remembers the last couple of books – although as it turns out those don’t rank among the Doctor’s greatest mistakes. The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street at least presents a clear What If, but considering the alternative would have been for him to die, I’m not sure it’s really all that tempting.

The best bit is probably the Doctor’s grand plan to stop the clock people, which involves time travel but not in the usual way, and not with the usual outcome. I could feel it knitting together so it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but somehow the punchline was still very satisfying. It’s like a little soupcon of Festival Of Death – surprising, really, that there’s so little of this sort of thing on a planet covered in time jiggery pokery, but since most of that is really just another word for “bomb” the ending doesn’t feel like repetition or over-doing it. That’s pretty good going for an author who has, if not spammed the “time travel is complicated” button, certainly tapped it a bit across two books.

There are good things here. I liked that ending; the clock people are pretty cool at first glance; the time storms present a few interesting challenges and some gruesome visuals. But the actual guts of Anachrophobia aren’t that interesting. This is standard base under siege stuff for the most part, with characters running away from lumbering monsters and/or boringly intransigent soldiers. Yeah, the monsters have a pretty decent gimmick, but you need a fundamentally interesting bunch of characters to sell that, and Anachrophobia traded those in for its war “satire”. By the time you reach the end there’s a bonus/nasty surprise, with one character turning out not to be who he appears, which ought to elevate the whole thing and set us up for next time. Perhaps that works for some readers. For me though, nah: I don’t really enjoy rubber mask bad guy reveals, and anyway, I thought we were trying to get away from massive continuity links between books? Why not let this one stand on its own? (It’s fine if not, I’m a Doctor Who fan for god’s sake, but if the editors really are fine with massive continuity links then why did they go to all that effort to erase the Doctor’s memory, and why are we keeping it that way?)

Clever ideas in small doses, not altogether linked, scattered over a pretty dusty framework. It’s a good thing this isn’t a comedy or I’d have made a joke about undoing things.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #107 – Hope by Mark Clapham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#53

Hope

By Mark Clapham

It’s New Writer time — sort of. Mark Clapham had by this point co-written the frothy Beige Planet Mars, the lore-heavy The Taking Of Planet 5 and the ah-well-there’s-always-next-time Twilight Of The Gods. Hope is his first solo novel, for which no less applause, garlands, kazoo toots etc.

 

For his debut he’s opted for something a bit less eclectic than those earlier co-writes. Hope begins with the Doctor pushing the TARDIS too far to reach the outskirts of humanity’s existence among the stars, the planet Endpoint, which then knackers the ship for a while. After giving it a moment to cool down, the Doctor, Anji and Fitz are separated from it, which means they’ll have to spend the rest of the book getting it back. Oh, and they’ve also arrived at the scene of a murder, in a city that divides into a somewhat prosperous overcity and a less salubrious undercity. Er – not exactly teleporting the envelope into another dimension, is it?

 

But it’s not without promise. I’ve seen reviews that respond quite negatively to the city of Hope itself, but I rather liked it. The patchwork design, and placing it on stilts above a poison sea sets it apart from earlier efforts like Original Sin – it’s an intriguing mental image. The main issue is the lack of a population. I noticed four named people within city limits, two of whom are load-bearing to the plot. As for the other two: Powlin is the head of the local militia, keen to solve the rising murder epidemic. (“Militia” is a bit of a loaded term but we don’t interrogate whether that’s any worse than a police force – could just as easily call them “the police” or “the watch.”) He seems nice enough, but then the Doctor takes over the investigation for plot reasons and it’s pretty much good night from Powlin. Pazon is a local wheeler-dealer, and is perhaps not to be trusted. He seems like he could enliven a dull page, but outside of providing Fitz with a few bits he needs – off-screen, I believe? – he doesn’t hang around much either. As for the denizens in all the buildings? Pass, apart from odd murder victim.

 

This is a shame since Hope is really about the ultimate fate of humanity. It presents some academic arguments for what that’s going to look like, but in terms of actual people living their lives, not so much, which makes it all a bit surface-level. Boo. In the meantime, the meat of the novel can be quite enjoyable, as the Doctor is recruited to solve a series of random decapitations and Fitz investigates a puzzling cyborg brotherhood who for some reason hate the city’s partly-mechanised ruler. This is Silver: an incongruously charming cyborg who brutalises any form of opposition. He is the man who can get the TARDIS back from the poison sea, so the Doctor and co. pal up with him whilst sitting on any reservations they might have. Especially Anji, who soon enters into a deal with (what might possibly be) the devil.

 

Silver’s moral ups and downs clearly fascinate Clapham, who at one point delves into the character’s back story a chunk at a time, creatively pairing this with Anji’s failed attempts to ascertain just that. He was a sickly boy who received some sort of alien transfusion, then excelled in the military, then finally found himself in the future where it made sense to put down roots and take charge. He rules Hope (and more or less Endpoint as a whole) to the extent that he barely bothers lying to people – although that observation is made by someone he’s successfully lied to so um, yeah, he lies. There are skeletons in his closet but the book spends so much time actually with Silver that these seem to shrink in importance. The secret of the anti-Silver brotherhood, and what nasty things can be found lurking in Hope’s sewers are relegated to half-hearted B-plots that barely move Fitz to investigate them. (If you’re wondering why a city suspended above an ocean has a sewer, um… sorry, my phone’s ringing.)

 

Probably the best Silver stuff, apart from the Anji plot (more on that soon) is his scenes with his female lieutenant, Miraso. She’s the other “new character that definitely needs to be here,” and she has a degree of brilliance while also being annoyingly blind to her master’s failings. She holds her own well as a character but her extra-curricular activities aren’t given nearly enough room to breathe. (Speaking of which, a scene where Fitz recognises a mysterious female face is a bit too easy to anticipate as being Miraso, since she is one of the vanishingly small number of other people, let alone women in the book.)

 

There’s something almost comical about Silver being this hulking, terrifying figure – I pictured Cain from Robocop 2 – who is outwardly benevolent but maybe, just maybe, has a dark side? This is a guy who mashes a protester to death in one of his first scenes: he looks like something that would disagree firmly with Sylvester Stallone. Evil, huh? You don’t say. It’s somewhat interesting to suggest that he’s not that bad, which the novel ostensibly does when it introduces a second “pureblood” set of humans who haven’t intermixed with other species. (But have, ickily, intermixed within family lines.) These guys are killing Endpointers for their tough genetic material and view them only as cattle. The Doctor points out that the Endpointers are the real human descendants, or the ones worth a damn, and by extension Silver might not be so bad after all: he’s a random hodgepodge but he’s keeping the city in order, isn’t he? To loop back after that to, yeah he is quite bad actually – witlessly using the same logic against him, “It’s not biology that makes us who we are” – simply tells us to judge a big horrible monster by appearances after all. To which, fine – have Doctor Who, will monster – but why the hell did we invest so much time in him, then?

 

The back end of the book is a bit of a mad scramble as Hope either reaches its crescendo or suddenly opens a box marked “bonus ideas” – place your bets. The “bad” humans are found to possess terraforming pods which they are (I’m not joking) too stupid to realise would have come in handy for making Endpoint liveable. After a pause to lampshade that this is actually a bit like The Year Of Intelligent Tigers we get an incredibly fast transformation for the planet (with only 80 pages to go) and the apparent resolution of the plot apart from the Anji stuff. (I am getting to it.) I wondered what was left for us to do here – as does Fitz, somewhat clunkily and again with the lampshade: “It just all seemed too easy.” The answer to all this is a sudden swerve into Bond villainy, perhaps even ranting Davros territory for Silver. Bye bye, any possibility of a Sabbath-esque “pros and cons” bad guy. (I’m guessing there was at least a whiff of Sabbath influence here. Clapham probably read the book at least, what with the generous references to the Doctor’s current status.)

 

It’s a pretty miserable denouement, with Silver hurriedly creating a genetically engineered race of supermen called Silverati (“Silver calls them Silverati, presumably to indicate they follow after him,” thanks Anji, invaluable stuff there) and deciding to invade time and space. It’s not as if Hope had been teeming with moral ambiguity before that – there were some shades of grey e.g. in the sewers – but after the potentially promising debate between two very different sets of “humans” this finale is about as standard as it gets. When Silver inevitably fails he all but shakes his fist to say “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!”

 

It’s tempting to say “well what did you expect,” but Hope really isn’t that bad for the most part. It’s at least interesting that (spoiler) Silver has been running his own anti-Silver movement in the city just to increase his control over it, although those guys only appear in a couple of scenes, so never mind. There’s potential in the debate about which set of humans is the “right” one, although you’d be hard pressed not to agree with the Doctor’s initial assessment, but we don’t hear much from the “bad” ones after Silver puts them in their place, so ah well. Probably the most promising and interesting thing here is – you can exhale now, Dave fans – the Anji stuff.

 

Dave, Dave, Dave. Remember him? Who among us doesn’t. Set up as a fairly unimpressive no-need-to-stay-on-Earth boyfriend for Anji in Escape Velocity, and killed off in the same book, he warranted a bit of psycho-analysis from Anji in the following book, EarthWorld. It was very good stuff. But they wouldn’t let it lie: book after book has acknowledged Anji’s tortured feelings for poor, dead Dave, her failure to save him, the fact that he did not (despite his sci-fi obsession) get to travel in time and space. Most of this strikes me as quite bad planning from the EDAs. Dave wasn’t very promising in the first place and EarthWorld kind of put paid to Anji’s feelings about him already, but hey, it can be an arc for her anyway! I’m happy to accept that people can “get over” things and then still obsess over them, so whatever really on that score, but those inauspicious beginnings have simply made it a bit silly to keep dredging up a bloke that was essentially just Fitz if you swapped the leather coat for an anorak, who Anji wasn’t that keen on to begin with.

 

Hope does something with it, at least. When Anji meets Silver she realises here is someone who could bring Dave back to life! Or clone him, at least, using one of his hairs she’s been keeping in the TARDIS. (It would have been nice if that had cropped up a bit more in the interim.) She’s so moved by this idea that she even betrays the Doctor, taking scans of the TARDIS interior to feed back to Silver for future take-over-ze-universe use. It’s all worth it to undo the death of a man she even now describes as: “Maybe not the love of her life — she had been far too young, and way too cynical to think it would last forever, and had been on the verge of leaving him at the time of his death.”

 

Like I said, whatever, people don’t always make sense. At least this is grounds for some interesting character development. Or so you’d think, as the resurrection of Dave comes very late in the book – within that last 80 page spurt, amid all the shooty fighty business – leaving us with very little time to ponder on it. Our last chance to make something of it is the confrontation between the Doctor and Anji, but that’s sadly a damp squib: he’s mad at first, but then she explains that Dave is dead and that’s very sad actually and the Doctor does time stuff too, doesn’t he, and that’s somehow… enough? He’s even supportive! “I should have realised you had good reasons … I would probably have done much the same in your position.” To which, sorry, what a crock. This isn’t Dave. This is a simulacrum that does not remember Dave’s existence. Dave is still dead, this is a random person Anji immediately agrees to imperil for the greater good, then promptly leaves to continue his existence on a back-end-of-the-universe planet with who knows what prospects. It’s at least debateable whether Anji has “resurrected” or “saved” anyone here – but they don’t have the debate, let alone interrogate the idea that Anji handing over the interstellar car keys to a final boss in a video game might be a bad omen. (The Twelfth Doctor forgave Clara for that sort of thing, I suppose.)

 

Ah well: once that’s all over and done with Anji believes she is “leaving the emotional baggage of that time behind her,” so at least we’re in with a chance of laying Dave (Daaaaaave!) finally to rest. Unless they decide to just keep going on about him regardless, of course.

 

The character writing isn’t great in Hope. Some of that is down to the frustrating lack of purpose we see in Silver and Anji, but occasionally it’s just not very good. The Doctor oscillates between being genuinely bristly and vulnerable following The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, e.g. insisting they abandon these people and get out of here or casually asking Fitz to risk his life for an investigation, and just being a bit dull, spouting flat jargon like “The atmosphere out there seems to have sufficient oxygen levels for your purposes… and quite a few other things, by the looks of it.” The novel is structured in a way that favours Silver, which means the Doctor comes across as a bit of a plonker for not spotting any red flags. But he’s sometimes not supported by prose that has a certain Nervous Nellie quality of underlining things that didn’t need it: “‘I wonder what happened to all the people,’ mused Fitz. ‘Evolved into these ones, I should think,’ said the Doctor, gently mocking what he clearly saw as an outmoded, human-centric view of history.”

 

It’s not just him, either, and it’s not just unnecessary underlinings. Sometimes it’s sheer redundancy. “‘I have sulph-shakes and caffy for those early morning cravings, and for the health-conscious, simple full or semi.’ ‘Skimmed?’ asked Anji, clearly thinking that Pazon was referring to milk.” / “‘What’s with the ceiling?’ Fitz asked, never too afraid to speak his mind.” / “She could feel the weight of the data-packed scanning unit in her pocket. That weight was both literal and metaphorical, as the strain it exerted on her was mainly due to the nature of what she was about to hand over.” / “She rubbed her head, calling for whoever was outside to come in. She was expecting Silver. Instead, it was the Doctor’s head that appeared around the door” followed on the same page by “Anji had been expecting Silver, and the Doctor had arrived instead.” Snip snip, editors.

 

It’s not very polished and its focus is a bit wonky. Yes, Silver is interesting, but maybe the rest of Hope’s citizens could also get a look in, and maybe don’t do Silver dirty at the end. There’s the skeleton of a pivotal story for Anji here (and don’t forget Dave! Don’t EVER forget Dave) but it’s not quite where it needs to be, since it proceeds from the idea that what she’s doing is fundamentally fine and you’d all do the same thing in lieu of actually moving on – which might have been the stronger story. I ended up imagining a version of Hope that brought in the Dave dilemma earlier, or perhaps even changed it. (Have Dave brought back without Anji’s consent, maybe? How would she deal with a second chance?) You could have the “terraforming” plot at the halfway point, and then properly spend time interrogating Silver as a bad guy vs the (somewhat) nicer guy he seemed to be before. But that would need to be a much longer book, and you’d still have to add the occasional non-Silver character for Hope and Endpoint to really mean something to readers.

 

I found Hope readable and well-paced in spite of my complaints. It ticks along, it’s no car crash; it has a familiar shape and it works well enough within that. It’s quite creative at points, playing with tenses to add mood. I liked the Silver back story bits. But it leaves a bad taste at the end, which inevitably made me wonder if much else about it actually worked.

5/10