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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#32

The Fall of Yquatine

By Nick Walters

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

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

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

I was half right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#31

The Shadows of Avalon

By Paul Cornell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#30

Parallel 59

By Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#29

Frontier Worlds

By Peter Anghelides

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #54 – The Blue Angel by Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#27

The Blue Angel

By Paul Magrs & Jeremy Hoad

Huh.

It’s sort of quaint, really, remembering the way Interference made me feel the first time I read it a decade ago. Confused, miserable, the dreaded is-this-even-Doctor Who… but fast forward to now, and I see its value! Hooray! It was doing a thing and I mostly see what that thing was! It’s great when you can learn and grow as an audience and find a new appreciation for art and storytelling. Perhaps there’s hope for every unsatisfying book experience.

You can probably tell where this is going. Which, as we’ll learn, is an unusual phrase to hear in relation to The Blue Angel.

Much to my surprise, and I imagine the surprise of many contemporary readers, BBC Books immediately followed their guns-blazing weirdo of a two-part novel with something even more bizarre. Paul Magrs is back, with assistance from partner Jeremy Hoad, to deliver an adventure that uses much the same scattergun-of-imagination approach as The Scarlet Empress. Only more so. Much more. As in, hit the deck.

We’ve got the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion (hold that thought) in an adventure with some angry Star Trek types and some maybe-or-maybe-not malevolent people made of glass. We’ve got Iris Wildthyme, in her younger form from the end of Empress, in an escapade with a gaggle of older ladies and the currently inexplicable ersatz long lost son of one of them, escaping a shopping centre beset by giant owls. And we’ve got some sort of alternate world going on with another Doctor, Fitz, Compassion and Iris but not quite as we know them, with only the loosest connection to what’s happening in those other strands. These, by the way, include a travelling city made of glass, a universe set apart from our own, a realm that sits between the two, corridors of possibility (or maybe they’re just corridors), various alien races of varying animosity and a megalomaniac who looks like a green elephant with talons and magic powers. You’ve got, in short, lots to be getting on with. A pretty stocked shopping basket for lucky old you.

One of the things I struggled with on my most recent read of The Scarlet Empress (so much for learning and growing as you get older, huh) was its profusion of ideas with not exactly a heck of a lot of connective tissue. The Scarlet Empress, though, was a story about storytelling. I don’t love the lingering impression I got (however projected and erroneous it might be) that all of its ideas are automatically good ones and they will go together as long as you make the point that stories are sometimes messy creatures, but it at least felt like that point was being made. And to be honest, you could and perhaps should enjoy The Scarlet Empress as an adventure apart from any (I would argue rather on-the-nose in this case) meta writing commentary, provided you can (wince) switch off a few pernickety faculties and just let a story be for 280 pages, in whichever direction takes its fancy. I know all of that, but for whatever reason I struggled to get past it as an almost-40-year-old reader in a way that I just didn’t at around 20. There’s something to be said for being a young reader, clearly. I’ll probably read it again some day and I sincerely hope it’ll flip back the other way. I’d love to love it again. The Blue Angel, though, will be a tough one to pick up a second time.

I’ve read, or listened to a good chunk of work by Paul Magrs; enough to not take this book lightly. Okay, perhaps “lightly” is the wrong word — if anything his books are going for “lightly” with gusto, like frilly pink missiles — but what I mean is, I don’t assume there’s no thought behind it. He’s obviously a writer of skill. Even just looking at Empress, his prose had a deliberateness rarely found in the humble annals of Doctor Who fiction. It’s clear you’re in practiced hands; if you don’t get it, well that’s unfortunate, but it seems a safe bet that there is an “it” that you might “get”.

Well, I got nothin’ this time. The Blue Angel starts with an eerie sense of the uncanny with its surely-that-can’t-be-right alternate TARDIS team living in domestic normalcy, but it’s weird even to the point that I couldn’t tell who (out of the oddly phoney characters) was narrating at times. This is the first chapter. Then we’re off to visit a gaggle of ladies on a Christmas shopping trip, trying to ignore the (green) elephant in the room that is the miraculously returned son of Maddie, who is clearly not really her son Ian but is just as clearly intent on letting people think he is. This stuff is easier to get a grip on, at least.

Then we’re off to see the “proper” Doctor and co. in the midst of adventuring, but there’s a new elephant in the room in the form of a new companion — Compassion, one of the Remote from Interference, who we must assume at some point asked to join the Doctor and Fitz on their travels, or was asked to do so? That moment isn’t in Interference and it’s not here either. Should I miss it? Is something going on there? I know stuff is going on with Compassion, that much is made clear later on when she displays a weird aptitude for piloting TARDISes, but how much of what’s not here is important and how much is just because it was not of interest to Magrs and Hoad? I’m aware that I might just have New Series Brain when it comes to companion intros — Fitz also did the official “hey come and join us” scene when we weren’t looking — but I feel like even Classic Who bothered to at least state it.

There’s a sense of disorientation from the off, a sense that it’s not clear how things are connected (that’s hardly a crime) or how much we should invest in the characters we’re seeing (maybe a bit of a crime). No doubt it’s personal taste but starting the book with ersatz protagonists cut me adrift straight away: now I’m thinking, how many fakes are floating about? Since we’ve skipped what would obviously be a critical moment for any Doctor Who companion, can any of this be trusted? Are legs being pulled in all directions? That stuff with the owls is a bit silly isn’t it — but is it fun silly or “I’m Doing A Thing” silly? I know on some level this is down to me as a reader, but I was sat there asking these rather dull questions instead of simply enjoying myself. I never rowed back to the centre of the book after that uncanny opening; it resisted all attempts to get into it, not least because it was always hot-footing it over to another story strand.

That’s not to say The Blue Angel isn’t fun. Oh, it’s got whimsy and frippery for days! What else do you expect with the involvement of Iris Wildthyme, with her funny bus and her crazy outfits? That evil elephant is funny even just to look at. (Well, to imagine at least.) A carful of mildly acerbic older women is sure to be a source of mirth; there’s plenty of inherent whimsy in being on the run from massive owls, and then escaping in a double decker time-and-space bus. And did I mention the Star Trek thing? There’s a spaceship full of awful simplistic people (the captain is called “Blandish”) who check how much every action is going to cost them and otherwise shoot first and ask questions later, then barely progress as three-dimensional characters. It’s satire, Jim, but not etc.

I’m sorry. It’s difficult not to sound like a grumpy old sod when you’ve struggled with a book this badly, but struggle I did, and all of that Magrs (and apparently, Hoad) whimsy just didn’t wash with me this time. I fundamentally didn’t connect with the story (really, stories) unfolding all over the place here, which eventually started to pile up next to each other with various parties encountering various alien species who have hang-on-what names like Sahmbekarts and Steigertrude, all using various space-time conveyances to get from one to the other. Following it from page to page was something of a headache, and cheerily lampshading that with an “I don’t understand any of what’s going on” or an “everything has been brought here from somewhere, from some time. But it’s all without rhyme or reason” or a “call me prissy, pedantic if you like, but I do like to know where I am” or a “my concentration has been all over the place” or a yes-we-are-doing-this-again “learn to think of all these things as stories. And stories can’t contradict each other because, in the end, they’re all made up” does not actually help. A story that’s hard to follow and harder to care about on purpose risks being just as troubled as one that did it by accident.

The Blue Angel obviously is rewarding for a lot of people. I know I’m in the minority here — hell, I’d politely concede that I’m flat out wrong if you told me so — because I’ve seen the positive reviews. Even they seem more or less to agree though that the book doesn’t worry itself about an ending or tying anything up or making much sense in the first place, which frankly makes me wonder what the cheat code is for enjoying this thing because good grief all of that sounds iffy to me. I know it’s different strokes; clearly I’m someone who needs to feel a certain degree of understanding or I just feel as though I’ve wasted my time. Clearly I can’t benefit that much doubt. That doesn’t make it invalid to write a weird story, but it does freeze me out somewhat.

Okay, think positive. Praise has been levelled at Compassion in this. I’m so weirded out by the lack of a proper segway into full time adventuring that I don’t know what to make of her, though. (Or of BBC Books taking this particular swing — although to be clear, I am pro taking-swings.) She’s presented as a cold fish who fails to endear herself to new people (“And who did you say you were, dear? Contrition or something, wasn’t it?”) or people she already knows (“You could never have a really good argument with Compassion. You couldn’t wind her up”). Of course it’s early days but she’s not particularly impressive at the companion lark either (“‘[Compassion’s] a good person to have around in an emergency.’ Actually, [Iris] was thinking the exact opposite”), even getting lightly character-assassinated in the third person prose (“She was one of the least companionable of [the Doctor’s] many assistants”). We are presumably meant to get something out of her involvement here, but it’s hard to see what. She’s fully rebuked by the Doctor at one point — a moment I’ve seen held in good regard, but which flopped for me as a character beat, partly because I can’t quite picture the Eighth Doctor saying “You, madam, are stepping out of line” (not his only weirdly anachronistic line, see also “villainous scum”) but mostly because I don’t know this person and I don’t know that the Doctor knows this person and if she’s such an arse, well, why did you bring her along, then?

Fitz keeps his Interference continuity in check — both he and the Doctor highlight the rather odd rebirth he’s had recently — whilst also getting back to some good old fashioned horniness, as he hangs around with an aesthetically pleasing Iris and briefly considers a) leaving the TARDIS for the big red bus and b) whether she’d shag him. There isn’t a great deal else for him to do with his plotline (Iris, owls, horses at one point) being one of many that seem to have gone into a blender, but I liked the brief recognition that he’d never got a chance to say goodbye to Sam. I can, like most reviewers, see why Iris won him over so fast.

It’s… a story for the Doctor. I would hesitate to say it’s a good one because I don’t think he really rings true a lot here, even when he’s the “real” one, flying off the handle so much more than usual, but there’s clearly a lot of significance to him as a character throughout these events. Look at all that alt-universe stuff, with its suggestive oddities and its other Doctors squirrelled away in minor roles; the implicit importance of all this to him and Iris. Again though, we’re back to that sense of significance where I wish I could find the actual significance. At least the writers meant to do that?

The Doctor’s (spoiler) failure to make events turn out any better because that’s how Iris wants to do things is a serious fork in the road between them, and surely a statement about his interaction with the universe around him and how much he can really achieve there. Things are being said, definitely, I can see that — but when the events themselves are such a quasi-fantastical mishmash (I would summarise further but I really can’t be bothered) and the villain is such an overall silly goose, it feels a bit like firing a blank to posit them as relevant to an overall arc, especially when we run away from it all as fast as we do here. The crisis of another universe impinging on, and going to war with ours is huge. It should feel momentous. It doesn’t, with this kind of crazy pace and this much of a frivolous tone. I felt told about the Enclave (and much more so, the Obverse) more than I ever felt that I truly saw or understood it. When it all concludes, did those events suddenly end like that because something-something-the-Doctor or is that just the kind of adventure we were having this week? I bet I know what the answer is, but I don’t quite believe it. Even the gang of older ladies — surely the earthy heart of this novel — get bundled out of the story in a) a fantastical payoff for two of them that doesn’t stop to examine how they feel about it and b) y’know what I can’t remember where the other one went. The whole thing about the son didn’t seem to add up to much either.

Attaching a lot of its significance to Iris feels at least a bit overblown, even if the version of Iris in most of The Blue Angel is a much more competent one than we met the first time. She knows more than we do — must be nice. There’s something of an explanation for her and her weird relation to the Doctor’s history, but it’s moved on from just as quick as the main action. I don’t think I’m as invested in Iris generally as a lot of readers; her brand of randy nonsense ought to have been a tonic for all the confusion I felt reading this, but here it just added irritation to obscurity. I’m sorry, Iris. Maybe next time.

I made a lot of notes on this one, because there’s loads of stuff to pick up on — nudge-nudge plot arc stuff about the TARDIS, picking up the change to Planet Of The Spiders from Interference, fun little references to things like Looms and in one paragraph “new adventures” and a “virgin”; there’s plenty of imagery, some of it quite striking, like the weirdly Dalek-ish glass people and their whole society, plus all that suggestive alt-universe weirdness. And if you haven’t inadvertently made yourself cross and got a headache — ahem — there’s the sense of fun that always comes with Paul Magrs.

I just wish any of it helped. Sorry, Paul. Don’t mind me, people who love this one regardless. Despite everything I found The Blue Angel as impenetrable and insufferable as the bad old days of Virgin first-time novels, and the almost certain knowledge that I’m missing something thought-provoking here didn’t help in the slightest.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #53 – Interference: Book Two by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#26

Interference, Book Two: The Hour of the Geek

By Lawrence Miles

Right then. Two books. Two Doctors. Multiple story threads. Different ranges. 600-odd (very odd) pages. Now that Interference is over, am I clear what it was all about? And was it worth all that?

Mostly yes to both.

I think it all comes down to a question: why does anyone do anything? And off the back of that: what are you going to do? And going back inside that — which feels like a suitably Interference approach — nature vs nurture. All of this is wrapped up in the meta-text with what sort of thing you should be trying to do with Doctor Who books at this point in their lifespan, if Lawrence Miles does say so himself. Everything about the two books seems on some level to interrogate these questions.

Interference asked in Book One why the Doctor does what he does, and more importantly why he doesn’t do certain things that might be helpful. It also challenged the notion of what Sam, and people like her hope to achieve, and the ways in which (or so it argued) this is lacking. Book Two crystallises these arguments somewhat.

Sam, in particular, has her outlook not only placed under the microscope but externalised for an entire city to think about. Miles/Compassion continues to give this a certain degree of side-eye: “[Sam’s] political streak was based on what she’d seen on the Nine o’Clock News, or, at the very least, on what her parents had seen on the Nine o’Clock News.” Once again we’re asking if her ideas are truly her own. Sam, in the context of Interference, also becomes a placeholder for the human concept (or at least the late 90s human concept) of progressivism and empathy — where she has failings, so do we all. “[Compassion’s] world was the same as Sam’s, only without the camouflage.” / “London and Riyadh were the same, Kode decided. But London thought it was different. London thought it wasn’t scared. The people there had used the signals to cover everything up.”

All of this ties in with the book’s wider and, let’s be honest, slightly-getting-away-from-itself argument about politics vs culture. The Remote are a society without principles or agendas, they just exist and get buffeted about by random TV signals. They’re posited as a mostly positive ideal, albeit one that is easily corrupted, because they don’t do politics. “There’s no good and bad. There’s just… politics.” They’ve got something they want to achieve, something that will cause enormous harm because they don’t really understand what it is they’re doing, but there’s an innocence to them not found in stinky old humanity, what with its arms dealing and politics and hypocrisy.

Guest, ostensibly the leader of the Remote (or this particular bunch anyway) wants to get back to their roots and contact the Cold, aka the mysterious force they’ve been trying to sell to humanity. That last bit’s really just a cover to get the Time Lords’ attention by doing something dangerously anachronistic to the timeline, so they will (hopefully) snag a TARDIS to get to the dimly remembered coordinates for the Cold. (The Cold that Guest wants to find and the Cold that he’s selling on Earth are different things, a thing and its byproduct respectively. Ehh, don’t worry about it.) As part of all this, he figures it would be a good idea to plug Sam Jones into his people’s media so they can learn from her — in essence, learn to properly care about what they’re doing so they can’t be stopped. I’m not sure they entirely need this (his peeps already seem pretty far along in the mission without having any measurable fanaticism about it) but it’s the bulk of Sam’s part in all this, so it’s important for her.

Using the same script-format interludes seen in Book One, Sam relates a bunch of moral dilemmas. Save a person or a planet, kill a baby to prevent its evil future, sacrifice animals for a greater good, etc. These aren’t the choices Sam would have made, but that’s sort of the point — using Sam’s understanding of things, a sense of morality that is both informed by and divorced from what she brings to it, it’s like moral dilemma in a raw form. One of the main concerns in Interference is “signals” interfering (ahem) with our decision-making, and we take them away here, We don’t exactly interrogate how Sam feels about these scenarios — as with Alien Bodies, I think Miles is happier characterising Sam the concept rather than Sam the person — but taking her away from her baggage and seeing what’s left seems to be the point. It’s something that we revisit right at the end of her journey in Interference, which is the last time we’ll ever see her and is also, maybe just because it’s Miles, before she joined the series.

Sam doesn’t have a huge amount to do in Interference. There are a lot of moving parts so perhaps that is to be expected, and god knows the EDAs have thrown their collective back out before now trying to figure out what to do with her. This is her last bow, but what there is to say about Sam has mostly been said already, and most of that by Blum & Orman.

Interference, for its part, makes an effort to take her seriously. It’s easy to dismiss Sam Jones as a quip in a Greenpeace T-shirt, in no small part because that’s exactly how she was sold to us; the question of whether there’s even a real person underneath is one that the books themselves have grappled with, with Miles himself introducing the idea that she’s suspiciously phoney even within the text. Interference might occasionally throw more shade at her, but it also gives her the chance to speak for herself. Her decision to leave in Autumn Mist was sudden (and not, in context, very satisfying) but following through on it here shows real conviction. She’s done what she wanted to do with the Doctor and is ready to move on now, simple as that — she’s more, implicitly, than just his plucky companion. She is set apart by the Remote from the kinds of moral judgements she is likely to have made, which can only have made her think more about who and what she is when set apart from the Doctor.

When her leaving scene comes around it’s entirely low key and arguably more human for it, a little like how Ace’s second go at a departure in Set Piece was refreshingly free from histrionics, all that being over with by that point. Then, in a sort of deleted scene we catch up with later on (which The End Of Time sort of copied, but never mind), the Doctor finds a way to visit a younger Sam at a critical moment, without giving away his identity. (I won’t say how, but it’s fun.) He uses the opportunity to ask what she wants to do with her life. Is this truly her crusade, or is it her parents’? Sam says no: she knows what the world is and she earnestly wants to help, and there’s a difference between that and what her parents half-heartedly did in their day. It’s not the Doctor or Faction Paradox dicking around that ultimately matters, she is her own person and she’ll think of something. Together with the flash-forward in Book One I think we get a respectable picture of Sam Jones. By god, it’s been harder work than it should have been because of her sketchy beginnings, but there’s a person in there if you care to try writing about her. Not many did, but oh well, at least some did.

Sam’s nature (vs nurture) is a major part of Interference, just as her departure is another perhaps underrated example of Miles trying to shake up these books once and for all. (He can’t take credit for that decision but it sure fits his mission statement.) He also applies the “why do we do anything” question to humanity, answering with a beleaguered sigh that it’s mostly down to politics and we should really stop that. He also applies that train of thought — or continues to apply it in Book Two — to the Doctor.

There’s a sense in Interference that he is not following his normal path — divorced, perhaps, in a similar way to Sam when she was plugged into the Remote media. His stay in Saudi Arabia is definitely out of the ordinary for him, albeit not unprecedented. (You really can’t get away from Seeing I here, or for that matter Genocide.) His visit to Foreman’s World, bookending One and Two and punctuating the Third Doctor bits, allows him to ponder just what the hell this all means for him, as he still (unusually for him) doesn’t know by the end of the main plot. This is especially relevant when it comes to the Third Doctor portion of the story, which is itself perhaps the biggest gauntlet-throw of Doctor Who bookdom up to this point.

Whilst in his prison cell, the Doctor (Eighth) attempts to find help. In doing so he contacts his earlier self, causing (or did he, stick a pin in that) a diversion in the timeline: the earlier self learns about Faction Paradox too soon, and makes an unscheduled visit to the planet Dust. There he meets I.M. Foreman, namesake of an important junkyard and Gallifreyan with a travelling circus. Dust is besieged by the Remote (a less friendly and much later version) and when we left off in Book One, things were escalating.

In the course of this the Doctor (Third) learns that Foreman was an early Gallifreyan renegade, and inspired the Doctor’s (First) actions both by example and as a physical presence when he and Susan left London in 1963. An echo of Sam, the Doctor now finds himself asking if his ideals are entirely his own — sort of a proto-Timeless Child conversation. We are done with Sam but not with the Doctor, so it makes sense for his outlook to be a little more uncertain now, for his tenets to be shaken rather than stabilised.

This is not, of course, the most interesting thing that happens on Dust. In the course of the adventure the Third Doctor is killed, triggering his regeneration early and potentially upsetting future events. It’s heavily implied that the immediate future will be much the same — Tom Baker through Sylvester McCoy will still happen, although god knows about the events of Planet Of The Spiders — but the possibility exists that the past isn’t what it used to be, which introduces an element of danger to the Past Doctor Adventures. Whether anyone picks it up is another matter, but Miles wasn’t enthused about the closed-off continuity of the PDAs — ya think? — and this seems like a good way to allow those authors an out. I hated this device when I first read Interference, long ago in the before-marathon times, but I can see its value now. Even if, seriously, it might not amount to anything more than sending a “sorry” letter to the Planet Of The Spiders fan club, the sheer fact of using the EDAs as a springboard for the ongoing PDAs makes an actual virtue of there being two book ranges, tying them together for the first time since (and to much greater purpose than) The Eight Doctors.

It serves a dual purpose, however, enriching the EDAs as well. Faction Paradox work a bit of magic while Pertwee is making his early exit, implanting a virus that will come to fruition once the Doctor is McGann-shaped. This handily cocks Chekhov’s Gun for the next stage of the EDAs. (It’s also a possible explanation for the Eighth Doctor’s half-humanness, although that really only makes sense if this is the prime timeline and not “interference” after all. But I mean, whatever, I’ll take it.) It also serves a character point to introduce some danger to the Doctor — is he in control of his actions? Does he control his destiny? (See also, his inability to escape from prison.) All useful stuff for a character that some authors, like Gary Russell, have vocally struggled to find a voice for in these books.

I’ve got questions about how well the Third Doctor stuff integrates into Interference. I know Miles has 600 pages to play with but it’s not hugely beneficial to the pacing. I sort of wish he’d gone off and written a Past Doctor book instead that gradually incorporated Eighth Doctor things like the Remote and then shocked us by tying together and detonating both ranges at the end. I certainly think its presence here dampens Sam’s exit, which for heaven’s sake happens almost a hundred pages before the book properly ends, turning it into more of a memory than a lasting impression once you’re done.

Also, by being the true lasting impression of Interference it keeps the focus more on Where These Books Are Going than What This Book Is About, Here And Now. There’s a definite sense that the wider arc stuff is of more interest than, say, the struggle to prevent the Remote (whose investment is so arguable that they need a pep talk from Sam) from accidentally triggering a galactic whoopsie-pooh. Even within their plot there’s a direct influence from the Time Lords’ war with The Enemy (another Alien Bodies morsel and rainy-day plot point), which is cool and lore-y and everything but doesn’t actually go anywhere in this book.

I also found, on my first read through years back, all the stuff about arms dealing rather dry and mean, to say nothing of the Doctor getting the shit beaten out of him for ages. I felt some of that again this time, although it’s at least obvious that Miles has things to say here, occasionally (like in the chapter that’s just a chunk of the Voodoo Economics documentary) pausing the wider concerns in order to say them. I know “soapboxing” is a simplification but once you’ve identified the Remote’s real reason for being here, all that’s left on the human side of things is finger-wagging.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the “now” plot is what happens to Fitz, which is ironic as he barely seemed to feature in Book One. “Seemed to” is the operative phrase, however, as Fitz’s centuries-long stay with the Remote has in fact looped back around to the present. Following the Remote process of “remembering” where people are reincarnated in new bodies using the shared memories of others (be thankful it’s not the Venusian “remembering” where they keep your memory alive by eating you), Fitz is in fact one of the Remote agents we’ve been seeing all along under a different name.

Miles isn’t just Doing A Cool Thing here with the timeline, encouraging you to read Book One again and go “ohhh” the second time; it’s also an excuse to bed in how much Fitz belongs in the TARDIS, showing us his determination to use any means necessary to stay true enough to himself so that he’ll want to go back to his old life even if on the surface he no longer remembers it. The eventual transformation back to “Fitz” and away from his Remote self is very affecting, with the Doctor ensuring it’s his choice. It’s a subtle bit of character work that follows on nicely from books like Unnatural History and Autumn Mist where he’s more and more becoming one of the guys.

There is an inverse to this, of course, which might come into play later. Fitz had a choice: stay as he is and be corrupted, or die and be reborn now, the remembering process hopefully keeping alive that spark of his true self. In the Eighth Doctor story it’s implied that he did the latter — and for all intents and purposes, he did. But in the Third Doctor story it’s revealed that he didn’t — the copies still happened and so all of that worked out, but the “real” Fitz wanted his own identity and life to remain in tact, which meant he grew old in Faction Paradox, became warped and now hates the Doctor. (He also kills Time Lords for fun. The Master and the Rani are among his trophy heads. Yikes.)

This is, of course, bloody horrible: “our” Fitz is even more of a fake than he appeared. It was bad enough that Fitz had to endure yet another indoctrination, hundreds of years stranded and an apparent suicide all because the Doctor said “hey could you keep an eye on things in Geneva kthxbye” without then going all Dark Side too. I think there’s an argument to be made that this is just the sort of edgy, try-hard character journey you’d expect Miles to roll his eyes at. But it lends itself to future stories. We learn that “Father Kreiner” has now been whisked off to the bottle universe — a Miles device that allows the New Adventures to exist simultaneously, which is nice, and which featured in Dead Romance. The Doctor, in his epilogue on Foreman’s World, doesn’t know who Kreiner is and clearly wants to speak to him again. (Interestingly we are ahead of him on this, as well as on the virus he’s carrying.) It’s worth noting that in his final scene Father Kreiner seems open to seeing the Doctor again not in the context of getting his head on the wall. If this whole thing comes back, hopefully that spirit will enter into it. But I’d understand if a reader simply looked at all this and thought, Christ, that’s a bit harsh innit? Must all companions go through absolute Hell? It’s another ongoing trope, whether Miles-the-great-disruptor likes it or not.

On a lighter note — perhaps the only one — we’re still doing The Sarah & K9 Show, guest starring Lost Boy the adorable Ogron. This continues to be a welcome addition to what is, let’s face it, a lot of heavy-going material, but all the same you get the sense there isn’t a huge amount of room for it: Sarah and co. are politely parked towards the end, and they might only have been there so someone could let the Doctor out of that damned prison cell. It’s still nice that Miles throws the more conventional fans a bone by having these characters turn up, and letting them have fun. (Apart from maybe the bit about Sarah’s belief that the Doctor has made her sterile. Come on, mate.) There’s less stuff about Ogrons in Book Two, the species being — god love ’em — easy to sum up, but a dollop of world-building in the Third Doctor section suggests that we could still do more with them.

I suppose a key concern with Interference is if it makes sense or not. I’d say yes: Miles may have a mind-boggling number of mind-boggling concepts but his writing style is engaging and wry enough about it that it doesn’t feel like work. I raced through both books; enough epilogues queue up politely before the Third Doctor stuff rounds off, and then there’s even more summing up after that for a clear-ish understanding. It’s a lot to take in but it puts the work in to be comprehensible.

Some bits still seem to be hanging though, and I don’t just mean the leftover bees in the Doctor’s bonnet. I’m still unclear on how the confluence of Doctors (surely the main “interference” of the title) came about, since the whole point is that it’s an aberration. We know now that the TARDIS’s recent odd behaviour is because it knew this was coming and the damage it would cause — but what new thing happened to get the Doctor into that cell, and consequently get that message to his earlier self? It matters since this is a paradox, and those don’t just happen naturally: this Eighth Doctor follows on from Planet Of The Spiders and he is now causing that not to happen. It’s entirely possible that I missed a spot, but I couldn’t see the intervention/interference that caused it. You would think Faction Paradox would take the credit — they’re happy to “as you know, Bob” their other achievements at the end. And while we’re at it, was that the only reason the Third Doctor ended up on Dust? Maybe it was, but given all the highfalutin machinations Interference sets in motion, you would think the inciting incident itself would be clear. Again, maybe I’m just thick, or maybe it’s still to be revealed — although I doubt that as Miles is tapping out now. I have a feeling that he simply couldn’t spin every plate perfectly.

Is Interference satisfying? As a piece of world-building and as a general milestone in two book ranges, I’d say a big yes. Of course books like Seeing I have shown that it’s all well and good setting up ground rules but it does depend on others making use of them, so this could still be a damp squib. But Miles engages with the books before now and with his own prior ideas in a way that should, by rights, make everything more interesting from now on. It’s a pleasantly fizzy experience to think about for now.

As a novel though, or the latest weekly adventure of our TARDIS trio, I think it’s rather lacking and certainly a bit dour: the Doctor mostly rots, Fitz mostly waits, Sam mostly watches a script unfold for the benefit of someone else, the Remote struggle with agency generally. I can see why younger me wasn’t engaged, but when you’ve been following all of this at least the character work pays off. Miles is here to ask big questions about the books as a whole and the characters in particular, and I generally found those answers satisfying. It’s just not much fun in between, save for Sarah and cool bits like that whole I.M. Foreman conundrum. Both books are also the most obvious mouth-piece for the author’s views I’ve encountered so far, which is a lack of subtlety that works against them.

Is it the best Lawrence Miles book(s)? Well, that’s all totally subjective, but I’d say Book Two is comfortably stronger than One, although some of that is the sheer contingent of big moments and answers he held back for this one. For what it’s worth I had more fun with Alien Bodies, which works for a casual reader despite all its lore, and although Dead Romance is even more horrible than Interference it’s at least self-contained, its focus more on what story it’s telling now than what stories we could tell later on. Not that that’s a bad thing for Interference per se, but — personal preference — I’ve seen enough sequel setup in movies to feel a little weary of it now, and I’m more excited about what’s in front of me. Again, you maybe have to look at Interference as a character piece for that.

I’m starting to worry that this review’s going to need two books, so: Book Two’s even busier, but it’s good. Sam’s exit works well — farewell, now let’s hope the next companion doesn’t face-plant immediately. (I haven’t mentioned Compassion because the fact of her companion status isn’t addressed in Interference. She just hasn’t left yet. Tune in next week?) Miles has definitely been a benefit to both book ranges before and here in particular, but I suspect that his desire to have and eat both cakes leaves some of what he’s doing in Interference on a lower volume than it ought to be. I know he hoped to write the Best Doctor Who book here. I don’t think he’s done that, but it’s a contender for the Most.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #52 – Interference: Book One by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#25

Interference, Book One: Shock Tactic

By Lawrence Miles

First a bit of preamble. Interference is one book in two parts, so it would make sense to review it all at once. Nevertheless, I’m doing it in two chunks. There’s a few reasons for that.

1) I’m a glutton for punishment, apparently. 2) I’m not sure my memory is up to the task of keeping Book One entirely in reserve until it’s time to review Book Two. I barely remember Autumn Mist at this point. (Admittedly that might say more about Autumn Mist.) 3) A major reason for me reviewing these books in any depth is so that I’ll have something to remember them by — see 2) — ergo the more I write, the merrier I’ll be. And 4) as anyone who’s had to track these down via eBay can attest, Interference is still two books, like it or not; reading it does require two trips, so I might as well record what that experience was like. And while we’re at it, what, if anything, makes these books different. (Anecdotally: people seem to sell off Book Two more than they do Book One, which suggests to me that there exists a niche for just reading the first one. So I guess this is for you, weirdly specific collectors.)

Right away it has to be said that Book One is a tough subject to break down, precisely because it is not a whole book. (Whose stupid idea was two reviews, anyway?) This isn’t a story in its own right that ends on the promise of something more, like for example The Empire Strikes Back. (Or Across The Spider-Verse which is possibly better, fight me.) Apart from an almost trivial cliffhanger generously tossed in at the end, Lawrence Miles has pretty much just Finished The Bit He Was On here. Nevertheless, I think the first half of Interference bears examination. It doesn’t round off any plot points but it makes some pretty definitive statements.

For starters, there’s the fact that it exists at all. Interference is many, many rodeos deep into published Doctor Who fiction, but it’s the first bona fide two-part novel in the series. Sequels and “linked books” be damned — this is truly ambitious, particularly (no shade intended) the assumption that readers will come back/shell out for the second half.

It matters that this one has come along after so many prior books. An upside and downside of BBC Books picking up the license after Virgin is that backlog of material, delivering both an understanding of how to handle the format and a long list of ideas that are already crossed off. Since the relaunch we’ve already had a couple of celebratory novels that rapidly grew in ambition from “have lots of Doctors show up” (standard) to “alt-universe prequel” (decidedly not). There have been plot arcs, necessarily more so in the Eighth Doctor Adventures than the more chocolate-box sibling range; we’ve asked big questions about the companions and even disrupted that status quo a few times. Clearly, there’s life in the old dog yet, but even so the books are quick to wriggle back into an old groove, regurgitating character beats and munching the same plots and settings. (Nice alien artefact/ancient weapon/human colony you got there, be a shame if etc etc.) More than once it has felt like something’s gotta give.

It’s not entirely surprising that Lawrence Miles is the one to lob the hand grenade. Alien Bodies — despite being a delightful and fun little bag of ideas, seriously it’s a hoot — was the one to crystallise the idea that Sam Jones was not what she appeared to be, a thread that later exploded in Unnatural History. It also introduced Faction Paradox, the most exciting thing to happen to the Time Lords since Dead Romance. (Okay, that was later, but y’know — time travel.) He’s one of those writers equally entrenched in series continuity and a willingness to set it alight, and for better or worse, they’ve set him loose again.

On a creative level Interference (or at least the first half) is gagging to do things differently. There’s the two-book format of course, but also a framing device: the Doctor is telling the mysterious I.M. Foreman all about what happened. This curiously includes chunks of story he wasn’t a party to, and those chunks vary in format, with things like different time periods, transcribed documentary footage, diary extracts, plus real events and flashbacks interpreted by the characters as scripted action (we’ll get to it) at one point starring Brian Blessed. For good measure there’s a whole other story bolted on towards the end (or begun anyway — Book One strikes again) featuring a different Doctor altogether. And then you get to the ending and oh right, there isn’t one! You truly do get the sense that Miles wanted anything other than to write Just Another Doctor Who Book.

That sense of “do things differently” is baked into the story as well. This is no typical alien invasion or deadly spaceship encounter: the Doctor, Sam and Fitz have been roped into a mysterious arms deal going on in 1996, which involves the mostly human-seeming Remote, a group with an unusual reliance on television signals. Despite the lack of a clear-cut threat (or any clearer than “this shouldn’t be happening in 1996”) all three of the regulars are out of their depth, with the Doctor whisked off to a prison cell to be tortured, Sam stuck on an alien world with one of the Remote, and Fitz lost 600 years in the future to be drafted into Faction Paradox. The only convincing note of hope here is that the Doctor will eventually turn up in the framing device to look back on it all, but even then, the ever-present stink of Faction Paradox suggests that we shouldn’t get too comfortable.

It’s a bracing setup, grounded more than usual in disappointingly human concerns like arms deals and prisons, but all the same there are some familiar notes here. Fitz barely features and is then hardly missed — to be fair, the other two are having a sufficiently crap time that they wouldn’t notice — and to cap it off, indoctrination, again? Miles is no continuity slouch so Fitz’s similar experience in Revolution Man is front and centre here, but with so little time to develop it that simply feels like lamp-shading. Even Fitz seems to think, here we go again.

And then there’s the Doctor, also helpfully recalling a prior experience, this time another inescapable prison — Ha’olam in Seeing I — and while Miles makes it clear that this is an entirely different kind of inescapable prison, and an even more unpleasant one at that, it is still another one for this Doctor. Having your hero go through the same thing and have the same difficulties again threatens to make it a trademark. It would be like erasing his memory a second time. (Oh, too late. Perhaps a third, then. (Oh.)) It’s weird to be going anywhere near old ground in this sort of book.

Ah well: the specifics are where Miles makes his mark. There’s not much you can say about Fitz’s journey at this point — see you next week — but the Doctor’s prison stint allows some of the book’s themes to get up on their feet. He has a fellow prisoner, Badar, and they strike up a conversation about what the Doctor does and where the limits are. Specifically, why he can do what he likes on back-water planets but he can’t stop the everyday horrors on Earth. This is one of those things that exists out of boring necessity — if the Doctor changed Earth beyond recognition we, uh, wouldn’t recognise it any more — but here he’s allowed some justification. “Mankind is always spreading outward, towards the edges of the universe. And the universe is a big place. If I change history on some of the outer planets, the ripples usually only spread outward. Into the void. If I change things on Earth, the ripples touch everything.”

That’s not a bad explanation (although again, the real explanation is extra-textual), but Badar doesn’t buy it, and eventually the Doctor admits to having a degree of preference here. Miles is clearly a bit unimpressed by the Doctor on a fundamental level, and keen to demystify him. Indeed, there is no magic reprieve for his prison sentence here, despite a few astral jaunts to visit others for help. The Doctor, denied his usual tools and even the comfort of bad guys following a routine, has little to do here but lie on the floor and bleed. All of that might change in Book Two, but the important thing seems to be that we’re asking the questions. That, too, is a way to do things differently in a Doctor Who book. Do you always let the character get away with having an escape route, or always letting bad things happen to some people? I don’t know if these are things we can ever meaningfully change, but it feels like a milestone to address them.

Similar questions are asked of Sam, a character you sense right away does not enormously impress Miles. (In the foreword: “‘Political’ usually means that Sam’s going to spend the book lounging around in a Greenpeace T-shirt.” And in Alien Bodies, a novel I already praised for doing interesting things with the character, Sam barely had agency in said things.) Sam has occasion here to consider her political activism and how far along it has come — something novels like Seeing I already did, but hey ho: “The demonstrators were, by Sam’s usual ethical standards, Good People. They were more or less the same people she’d marched with in the ANL rallies, back in the early nineties … So why did the protestors suddenly look so ridiculous? Because the ANL marches hadn’t achieved a thing, maybe?”

There’s at least a sense that she has progressed from where she started — the story features Sam’s bedroom in 1996, pre-Doctor, and all the somewhat naive political posters therein — but then she is directly challenged on her moral stance by Compassion, one of the Remote. These bits echo the Doctor’s talks with Badar, only here I’m less convinced. Partly that’s because Miles already put some of these views into the foreword (so whether I agree with them or not, they feel a bit like authorial soapboxing), but also it’s because they’re just a bit obtuse, and/or examples of false equivalence. See: “You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with [selling weapons]. Why it’s worse than selling matches. Or motor engines. Motor engines kill thousands of people around here. More than shock batons do. So what’s so bad about what we’re doing?” And later: “People die all the time … Traffic accidents. But there’s no organisation in your entire nation-state that believes in banning traffic.” “But people who drive aren’t trying to kill anyone.” “So that makes it all right?”

I know Compassion isn’t necessarily to be seen as in the right here, but nevertheless Sam can’t seem to disagree, which is surely suggestive. I think there’s a pretty clear difference between mechanisms that can cause harm and mechanisms designed to do harm; the former has the possibility of refining its methods and improving safety, whereas the latter is ideologically opposed to that sort of improvement. Fire is a source of life, and it can be managed. People need to get to work, but they can take some precautions. Stun batons exist to attack. This is my own soapbox, I guess, but I think it’s cheating to go “these things are the same so a) nyer and b) Sam is foolish.” The suggestion also that Sam is just a trendy activist because she doesn’t care equally about all causes all the time is setting an impossible standard. I mean, come on, you’d go crazy otherwise. (For good measure Miles lets Sarah Jane, who is also in this, have it as well: “Sarah Jane Smith cried when she saw ET, but two hundred thousand people died in East Timor and it was all she could do to go ‘tsch’.” Yeah, everyone’s a hypocrite, we all suck, cheers Lawrence, please do keep on about it.)

Still, it’s somewhat appropriate to be asking these sorts of questions in Sam’s last adventure (or part one of it anyway). I had forgotten her sudden decision at the end of Autumn Mist to leave the TARDIS on their next Earth trip; the Doctor, in the framing device, confirms that this has now happened, so she’s on borrowed time in these pages. We’re not there yet, and there aren’t many opportunities for her to shine — not when the resolution is paywalled, dammit — but the use of Remote signals to trigger script-themed flashbacks allows her to get a bit more background before we leave her, specifically a dalliance with drugs that darkens her previously perfect record. (Maybe it’s a bleed-through from Other Sam; I forget how that works.) There’s also a maybe real-maybe not vision of her years from now at a friend’s funeral, lamenting how deep down she travelled with the Doctor just because she wanted to see the universe like anyone else, biodata and activism be damned, which feels rather honest.

It might be best to keep some of the specifics back for Book Two — after all, what it all means has yet to be made clear, so there’s no point trying to rate how much of it makes sense. To summarise though: the Remote seem like an interesting enough bunch, people whose decision-making comes from interpretation of random signals, mostly TV. The implicit satire of “letting TV do your thinking for you” is, well, that’s all there is really, but it’s interesting how essentially amoral they are. (Even if I think some of their arguments are full of it.) It’s not clear from Book One why they’re such a big deal overall, even with the shadowy backing of Faction Paradox; they possess a weapon or possible lifeform called the Cold, which ultimately seems to be what’s worrying everyone, but the nature and capabilities of that are mostly for Book Two to worry about. Which is fine, but the stakes don’t feel especially high when you stretch them out like this. On current evidence the Doctor, Sam and Fitz mostly seem to be up a creek just because.

There’s some delightful stuff on the periphery, particularly a post-K9 & Company Sarah Jane investigating, not to mention K9 coming to the rescue, not to mention an Ogron sidekick. (There’s some great stuff about the overlooked depths of Ogrons: “[Ogrons] give you poetry, and you hear it as… as meaningless words about rocks.” At the risk of overreacting though, I think Miles’ intentions get a bit muddy the more he draws attention to the inherent racism surrounding Ogrons. If you’re going to underline it and then keep writing about them anyway there’s a risk of circling back around and just doing it in earnest.)

There’s also the weird, exciting lurch into a Third Doctor story near the end — you’ll have noticed Perters on the cover, of course Miles has found a weird way to do a multi-Doctor story, lobbing a hand grenade into the Past Doctor Adventures as well as the more serialised ones. In sixty pages this creates a lot of atmosphere and suggestion of impending doom. From the Third Doctor learning about Faction Paradox too soon to the TARDIS randomly bleeding to a local authority figure refusing to comply with his charms, and even a smaller suggestive moment where the Doctor (rather than the companion) wanders off, something is clearly wrong here. Again though, it’s all setup and no payoff, so the atmosphere is all there is currently. There’s a ton of weird detail about a travelling circus that’s just weird at this point.

Halfway through, I think it’s fair to say that Interference hasn’t made itself clear, but it has grabbed attention. I’d be hard pressed to describe most of it as fun — prisons, cults, drug flashbacks, oh my! — but the constant variety in storytelling style keeps it at least engaging. The inclusion of Sarah Jane generally seems like a sweetener for all the rough stuff; it also has that same sort of generally amused undertone found in Alien Bodies, with cheeky meta nods taking aim at, among other things, the book itself: “Lord of the Rings? Too long. My attention span only stretches to about three hundred pages.”

Book One is interesting as an opening salvo but also as a shake-up for the range, so that even if you just read this one, there’s at least something to take away. It would be a stretch to call it really satisfying as an instalment — Book Two has the luxury of being what Interference is actually about, as Miles for all his experimentation can’t escape the latter half of a story being the bit where it all knits together — but I think it goes far enough out of its way to be at least memorable.

7/10