Doctor Who: The BBC Books #114 – Warmonger by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#53

Warmonger

By Terrance Dicks

Duck! It’s Warmonger!

Let’s not beat around the bush here: this one isn’t popular. Warmonger tends to be mentioned when people list the BBC Books they liked the least. Contemporary reviews said things like “Arguably the worst Doctor Who novel ever written” (Discontinuity Guide) and “One of the greatest travesties ever perpetuated [sic] on the ‘Who’ book line.” (I, Who.) It must be quite something to have read it with no preconceptions, but I couldn’t avoid those, so the question became not so much Is it any good as How bad is it?

Alarm bells ring early on when our first sight of Peri is a person “sick of running and hiding and killing.” Yes, killing: we begin the story in media res (I knew I shouldn’t have bought that monkey’s paw) and Peri is installed as the leader of a band of guerrillas on the planet Sylvana. She has been hardened by a year of war and her friends have all been murdered or raped. She is now, for example, enough of a crack shot with a sniper rifle to deliberately wound a fleeing enemy soldier (because he’s only a boy) rather than kill him.

That’s Perpugilliam Brown — you know, the fun American botany student who only recently got picked up by the Doctor while on holiday. I’m not against giving an established character a bit of chutzpah, especially one as frequently abused as Peri, but isn’t this the sort of thing you’d struggle to reconcile with the rest of their telly run? Where was Rambo Peri in The Twin Dilemma?

Things get momentarily worse, then better for Peri as the Sylvana regime is overthrown by the Alliance: an army made up of such disparate elements as Draconians and Sontarans. They are fighting a mysterious enemy and are led by a somewhat less mysterious black clad “Supremo”: you know him as the Fifth Doctor. He commands an army of apparently immeasurable size that also includes Ice Warriors and Cybermen, all of whom are happy in his thrall.

Now: there is something to be said for a bonkers idea. There is, equally, value in placing a familiar character in unfamiliar surroundings — it’s the sort of thing a long-running series ought to rely on, quite frankly. There’s even a precedent for the Doctor seeming to have traded in his values (The Invasion Of Time) as well as actually having done so (Big Finish’s Unbound series, particularly Full Fathom Five) — but those examples came with caveats. You can forget that now: Warmonger presents the idea in earnest, as if everyone else was simply too much of a wally to think of it first. The Doctor of Warmonger isn’t even ambiguous about it; he “[likes] being the Supremo — far too much,” and when it’s all over Peri wonders if he can let his adoring soldiers go.

The loudest point of contention with Warmonger seems to be its treatment of the Fifth Doctor. Well known as the most agreeable and pleasant incarnation, he’s more likely to sit in a jail cell and wait than cause a ruckus. It’s insane to treat him as a man who not only considers all-out-war to be the only possible solution to a problem, but one who would enthusiastically lead it as well. All of that’s true. (Apparently it started life as a Sixth Doctor story, which might have made a bit more sense?) But I’d go further. This setup is antithetical to the Doctor in general, whether he’s rocking a stick of celery or a long scarf. It just doesn’t square at all.

(Point of order: A Good Man Goes To War and The War Doctor come to mind. Both of those either came from a place of character [rescue my friend] or served a wider purpose [crisis and closure re the Time War]. Warmonger, bluntly, doesn’t do that stuff so I’m not sure they’re pertinent here.)

There’s a semblance of a point here, at least. Peri makes occasional reference to how much they’ve both changed; the Doctor is at one point “surprised for a fleeting moment by his own indifference to death”, along with other such reflections; the blurb references “the dark sides of their personalities.” Peri lost a year of her life to all this! It seems — charitably — that the story is pushing them to this dark place so it can interrogate that, which again is a perfectly valuable thing to do. But it’s how you do it.

Terrance Dicks isn’t the sort of writer to deal in complex character journeys. The characters in Warmonger are frightfully simple ladies and chaps who chew over their thoughts in handy chunks rather than explore them through meaningful actions. This includes the Doctor/Supremo, who mentally witters such brilliance as “I must write that letter to Hawken when I’ve had some sleep… I must get this coat and these boots back to him… I’d better get Peri out of here very soon.” (Remember to buy milk, pay the gas bill etc.) If someone was going to reckon with a severe change of personality in this one, believe me, it would be visible from two books over. They’re just not that deep.

This also applies to the plot — because hey, there is one, by the way. After Peri meets the Supremo it’s time for us to whiz back and fill in the gaps. (This process takes around 150 pages.) The Doctor takes a stressed Peri somewhere peaceful, and she is promptly gored by a pterodactyl. Apparently seeing no other recourse, the Doctor whisks her back in time to the planet Karn where she can be treated by none other than Solon. The Doctor is thrown in jail for his slightly-too-mysterious arrival, but he’s so charming that they let him out. Peri suspects malfeasance with Solon and, despite the Doctor’s protestations, she finds a lab full of zombies. The Doctor just wants to stay quiet and keep the timeline straight — after all, who would want to disrupt The Brain Of Morbius? All is going well until a mysterious General arrives by the name of Rombusi, bringing with him a band of intergalactic cutthroats. Solon seems to like this Rombusi fellow an awful lot, by the way.

Disaster strikes and Rombusi, a man of great Brain, kidnaps Peri and heads out into space. The Doctor panics at the insurmountable threat Rombusi, also a Time Lord, poses, so he shoots off to Gallifrey to plead for their help while posing as the Karn ambassador. They guess his identity, but he’s so charming that they don’t exile him to Earth or anything. (I have no idea how the timeline works.) The Doctor insists that they can’t just kill this charismatic figure from Gallifreyan history, as that would make him a martyr. (To a bunch of unruly space thugs who are only in it for the perks.) Only a great battle will do! Well, that’s the Doctor for you. After this he quickly falls into the role of Supreme Commander and has an army to wrangle.

It’s not exactly throwing its back out as plots go, and it continues to progress on easy mode from there, with various alien races all turning up and immediately agreeing to work with/for him, some thanks to a bit of Time Lord trickery on the sidelines. (If this is in any way morally equivalent to what the Doctor is doing, this ain’t the book to say so. Other Time Lords shifty! Doctor generally okay!) Warmonger becomes a thoroughly mindless war story where the Doctor’s cronies visit worlds conquered by Rombusi and take them back, gaining willing new armies into the bargain. Can we say, “colonialism”? The thing that was ostensibly bad in that book Catastrophea by, oh what’s his name, the bloke who says “gween” a lot?

If you’re wondering whether liberation that comes via Sontarans and Ice Warriors is really any better than occupation by space pirates, you are officially thinking too much to have written Warmonger. As it happens the people couldn’t be happier. The soldiers cheer in their Supremo’s honour. The Cybermen (!) turn out for a dress parade at the end. The whole Alliance is one long simpering, obsequious banquet in the Doctor’s honour, without a shred of thought towards the shared history between these characters. It would be hilarious if it was a joke, but alas, this is the Uncle Terry that wrote Players, so the best you’ll get viz satire* is a particularly grovelling underling who gets himself killed for a bit of easy pathos, or the Doctor dispensing war homilies from the likes of Napoleon and Wellington. The overall implication is that, while it’s a messy business, someone’s gotta do it: “We’ve saved hundreds, thousands of people from rape and torture and slavery. We wouldn’t have achieved that by telling Morbius’s soldiers that they were being very nasty and would they please go away.” (And for a bonus point: “Some questions don’t have satisfactory answers.” I guess that’s all the ethical bases covered, then.)

It’s Morbius, by the way. Big fan of anagrams apparently. This is an area where Warmonger could actually do something of note: how did Morbius end up as just a brain? Is there more to him than the lumbering Frankenstein’s monster we met in Solon’s lab? Not much, it seems, as the Morbius we meet here is a garden variety megalomaniac with vanity issues. The vast majority of the war doesn’t even feature him, the focus instead being on the Doctor in his exciting new wardrobe with his best mates, the Cybermen. (Oops, I just remembered Earthshock exists.) It’s hard, based on the evidence, to believe he’s really a be-all-end-all threat. Morbius and his men are just getting up to your typical Genghis Khan schtick on an intergalactic scale, with a particular emphasis on rape to weight the scales in favour of the Doctor and his lovely Alliance that everyone is always pleased to see.

The most interesting thing about Morbius is his incredible power of persuasion, e.g. his ragtag bunch of space pirates who’d presumably follow a bright light, or perhaps more convincingly Peri. What else could explain her sudden turn from having an investigative spirit no matter what (defying the Doctor and finding zombies) to quite fancying this Rombusi bloke and ignoring all the Doctor’s warnings not to go on a date with him? She reasons thus: “What if [Rombusi] was a renegade Time Lord? So was the Doctor, by his own admission, and he’d never used his undoubted powers for evil.” You know, I could swear she’s met a dodgy Time Lord before. Pointy beard and stuff. Quite recently, wasn’t it?

Sadly I don’t think we can blame Morbius’s incredible hypno-eyes for Peri’s lapse in judgement. 1) Because Morbius is so vain and stupid that a quick lie about having a skin condition and consequently being a sex risk is enough for him to pack her safely off in an escape pod, with provisions. And 2) “[Peri] thought about the mild, friendly Doctor she had first known — and realised that this ruthless, tormented Supremo aroused very different feelings in her.” Yes, Peri tries to jump the Doctor’s bones in this one — specifically because he’s become a ruthless warlord. I don’t remotely like what this says about Peri and I’m positively icked by what it says about Terry, who (despite his fanciful notion that she could become a guerrilla leader) also directs the infamously comely companion towards a barrage of leers and rape threats throughout the novel — and even, typically enough, some medical experimentation. (In case you were wondering, the Doctor turns her down in a typically eloquent fashion. “There’s a saying on Earth, Peri — try everything once except incest and folk-dancing.”)

The case for Warmonger, like much of Terry’s writing, is short. There are recognisable monsters in it. Fans of The Brain Of Morbius can tick a box. The novel has a decent pace. It’s written in a bright, uncomplicated style that ought to appeal to younger readers, or at least help them through it. And help may be required, because underneath all his cheery bon mots and his “isn’t this cool” repurposing of Doctor Who monsters is a quite nasty story of the Doctor giving up what he stands for just because the plot demands it, until the plot demands that we’ve hit 280 pages now so can he please stop behaving like that and go home.

For all that Terry can turn a page, much of what he actually fills them with is dross. “As nasty-looking a bunch a thugs as I’ve ever encountered” is followed on the next page by “As villainous-looking a group of hard men as you could find in the galaxy.” The book contains a “Hakon” and a “Hawken.” Morbius uses a bloody anagram for some reason. Dicks imagines a darker side for Peri that doesn’t fit into Doctor Who whatsoever, then drops it, and does the same thing for a character he helped define in the first place, then drops that as well like nothing happened. And it’s somehow dull as well, with this great galactic war existing mostly as reported events. The only thing to perk you up is the sheer what-the-[bleep]-ness of seeing the Doctor’s monster army frequently tell him he’s their best mate, he is, and they’d die for him, as he casually sends men to their deaths.

I don’t know if it’s truly the worst Doctor Who book ever written. On a technical level it has a baseline competence that you don’t get in some of Virgin’s slapdash efforts, and nobody gets violently anal-probed in this one, so it’s arguably not worse than The King Of Terror. But the line between Terrance Dicks, great understander of Doctor Who and Uncle Terry, man with very old fashioned view of war and violence is virtually gone now, and this dunderhead of a novel is all that’s left, cheerfully rubbishing the tenets of the series all to explain how a brain ended up in a jar. Behold: the absolutely no brain of Morbius.

2/10

*Since reading it I’ve heard competing theories about Warmonger as a deliberate work of satire. All readings are valid, so fair enough, but I’m happy with mine: Terrance Dicks didn’t do satire without smashing you over the head with it, he actively loves a bunch of the stuff in this (The Brain Of Morbius, any excuse to parrot Winston Churchill) so he’s unlikely to be taking the piss on a wider scale, and if you can’t collectively agree on what it is he’s satirising then — even if he is! — he’s not doing a very good job, is he? Sorry folks: sometimes it just is what it appears to be.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #94 – Superior Beings by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#43

Superior Beings

By Nick Walters

After four books it’s safe to assume that Nick Walters is mostly in it for the aliens — the more diverse, the better. Dry Pilgrimage, Dominion and The Fall Of Yquatine all concern conflicts between different species, each with their own peculiar habits and habitats. Superior Beings is another in that line. This one even includes a xenologist. (Sort of a sci-fi anthropologist, and presumably the author’s dream job.)

The differences between strange beings and the things that make them all interesting is a fine starting point for a sci-fi novel, and in that sense Superior Beings gets off to a good start. We’ve got humans of course, but also the Eknuri, a sort of more advanced Greek God-looking variant; we’ve got the Valethske (bless you), a bloodthirsty bunch of human-hunters who resemble large bipedal foxes; and there’s a planet with a strange plant-centred eco-system, which offers heaps of potential for weird and wonderful creatures. Walters grasps it with glee: there’s a mighty tree at the centre of everything, there are colossal loping “Gardeners” that can quickly evolve into something more dangerous when threatened, and there are car-sized bugs that hold a few plot secrets for later. It’s not exactly Avatar, but it’s something.

As often happens in his books you can tell he’s thought about the minutiae. Where Superior Beings suffers is in the broad strokes. What the book is about, what these characters hope to achieve, what they do achieve. The answer to all of that is invariably, not much.

The Fifth Doctor and Peri (a rare-ish pairing) arrive on an Eknuri planetoid somewhere. They find a xenologist, Aline, getting her feet wet with alien species after a traumatic encounter that previously put her off such unlike creatures. (The Eknuri, who look pretty much human, are a safe enough assignment for now.) All seems to be hedonism and larks, with a pouting Peri letting the impressive Athon show her his massive boat and the Doctor finding common ground with Aline, until a shipful of Valethske turn up: the hunter species periodically gathers human victims to sustain their long journey through space in search of their creators. They replenish their larders, somehow miss the Doctor and Aline, and otherwise leave no one alive.

The Doctor and Aline jump forward a hundred years (!) because they can only get the TARDIS onto the Valethske ship once it’s out of hyperspace. (The humans, including Peri, are all in a deep freeze.) Roughly half a dozen humans and Eknuri are rescued including Peri, Athon and some starship crew members. The rest of the captives are just… not rescued. Violent and gleeful death and dismemberment awaits them all. Soz. This must rank as one of the Doctor’s more pitiful efforts, capped off by parking the TARDIS somewhere that will instantly be out of reach. Nice one, celery.

The Doctor and co flee to a nearby planet — which they will imaginatively call The Garden — where they park and more or less just hope the Valethske won’t join them. No such luck: soon they’re fending off yet more attacks with varying levels of success, generally getting captured and/or eaten and/or murdered, unless some very angry plants get them first. And that’s the rest of the book. You can add in the Valethske wanting the Doctor to share the secrets of time travel (which they improbably suss that he’s capable of doing), the better to get back home or carry out their insane mission, and Aline fulfilling a confused sort of destiny with the plants, but it otherwise levels out as: run away from Valethske, fail at that unless you’re the Doctor or Peri, marvel at the Garden. I was bored senseless.

It’s not for a lack of action. If you want to read about horny fox people eating humans while other despairing humans look on, you’re in luck. (Also, ew.) The eventual battle in what I suppose we should equate with Eden is quite explosive. There’s just little to no point underpinning it all.

What are we meant to get from the characters, for example? Aline has potential, but it largely goes unfulfilled. Her “Encounter” doesn’t really pay off (it’s strictly tell-don’t-show), and if she was intending to offer some incisive commentary on people vs Eknuri vs Valethske vs plants, she doesn’t get around to it — although she does furiously “as you know, Bob” about the Garden’s history near the end. The starship crew (a captain and a female first officer) seem to have their own stuff going on, but that inevitably halts when they die. (I’m not saying a character can’t be interesting unless they survive, but if they escape death only to get killed a little bit later that’s not much of a story arc, is it?) We ought to get to know the Eknuri at least: they seem like a typically Nick Walters-ish idea, offering a chance to contrast “perfect” people against regular humanity, but that’s a dead end for similar reasons. In practice the Eknuri are just big, sexy people who die as easily as we do. We might as well have landed on The Planet Of The Influencers instead.

I suppose that feeds into the title, which is perhaps meant to be ironic and dismissive? The Eknuri aren’t superior (although they generally don’t claim to be), they’re just different. We can read the same sort of thing into the Valethske, who inherently place themselves above mankind because they hunt and kill them; there’s no particular dressing down for them, but they are practically feral in their appetites, so the book puts us on a pedestal for not being that bad. Probably. I’m trying, here.

The Valethske could be interesting, but I kept thinking: the Hirogen did it better. There’s no depth to their practices; it’s repetitive to have scene after scene of these aliens ripping people or each other apart and — yes, I know! — enjoying it a bunch. There’s something to be said for their spiritual mission (something that seems outright insane at first but ends up having a kernel of truth), but as that’s just another form of hunting and killing, I didn’t come away from it with any great food for thought. Their ultimate prey, the Khorlthochloi (I hope you’re practicing all the pronunciations in this, there will be a test) are another example of superior beings who exhibit no great wisdom or brilliance in the end, but all that really does is underline the idea of flawed superiority that we already got from the Eknuri and the Valethske. Yah, we get it.

At least it puts the Doctor and Peri through the wringer. That’s perhaps a crass thing to do to these characters since they will shortly find themselves violently dead/resurrected and traumatised again and again respectively, but drama is drama I suppose. There’s not a lot of that either, though. The Doctor — already on probation for letting a truly bewildering number of deaths happen on his watch — spends most of this offering mealy-mouthed “you didn’t need to do that”s to a society of openly violent marauders who don’t know any better. He’s concerned for Peri’s safety, but The Caves Of Androzani this ain’t: the closest he comes to that kind of lunatic heroism is a mildly amusing sequence where he holds himself to ransom.

Peri has also seen better days. We must assume there were a lot of unseen adventures between her introductory story and Androzani (there’s always The Ultimate Treasure, eh?) because she is snarky as hell right out of the gate, for some reason. Oddly jealous of the Doctor’s ease with Aline, then tortured, surrounded by death and inevitably stripped naked at one point (sigh), it would be difficult for any writer to find a clear through-line for what she endures here. Walters doesn’t quite manage it: despite witnessing (and nearly experiencing) unimaginable horrors she just comes off as petulant, often moaning about wanting a bath and some donuts, occasionally chiding the Valethske not to have her as a “snack” while the Doctor’s not looking. It would make more sense if she spent the whole thing screaming or doing a thousand yard stare. It’s not hard to believe her sentiment near the end, “I’ve had enough of all this crap!”, but her prompt flip-flop to forgiveness of the Doctor, then anger at him again because he befriended one of the Valethske, then empathy over the death of a mutual friend (in one scene!) makes her seem crazily impetuous. I don’t really get her in this.

I’m not convinced there’s any depth to Superior Beings, which is no great crime — I’m not that silly, I know I’m reading pulpy tie-in books here. It doesn’t hold together especially well as an action adventure, however. The race to escape a lot of violent aliens is one the characters mostly don’t win, only (in the end) to more or less send them on their way to keep doing horrible stuff in future. Great. There’s no sense of victory or even relief, just the relentless grind of violent scenes happening until we’re done. For what storytelling purpose, I don’t know: it doesn’t interrogate what they’re doing beyond it being thoroughly unpleasant but normal for the Valethske.

Unusually for Walters there’s not much to dig into with his sci-fi menagerie: the aliens either aren’t very interesting in the first place or don’t complement each other in any useful way. It’s a shame, as I do think the author has some good impulses. They’re just not on display in a book that definitely has some ingredients and lasts for 280 pages, but otherwise may not have been worth the effort.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #82 – The King Of Terror by Keith Topping

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#37

The King of Terror

By Keith Topping

One of the things I look for in these reviews is context. How did each writer begin? How have they evolved? What interests them? When it comes to writer duos, however — say, Mike Tucker and Robert Perry — it’s not really possible to parse that about either of them until they go their separate ways.

We now have such an example from Keith Topping, of “and Martin Day” fame, and therefore we know what would happen if you subtracted Martin Day. The answer, apparently, is: aaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!

Okay, think positive, benefit of the doubt, be nice to him in case it’s his birthday... I think The King Of Terror is just supposed to be a bit of fun, a spirited action adventure that leans silly. It’s quite meta at points, which makes sense as Topping has co-written several irreverent (and very good) TV reference guides. There's nowt wrong with meta if it's applied with the right level of care. That’s Dave Stone and Paul Magrs 101, that is, and they do all right.

Where The King Of Terror goes wrong is in the execution. And, to be honest, the subject matter. Also the meta stuff which is bad actually. The new characters are a problem. So are the pre-existing ones. Somehow just... all of it is bad. This is a "you know what, no thank you" situation. A where-do-we-even-begin-a-palooza. Good. Absolute. Lord.

Okay, okay, I'm getting hysterical now so let's go into review crisis mode: summarise it! The King Of Terror is an alien invasion story set in the modern day. (1999.) The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are brought into an investigation by the Brigadier. A shady billionaire is stockpiling plutonium – what's all that about? Meanwhile a couple of UNIT operatives, Paynter and Barrington, are also on the trail. The aforementioned shady people are congregating in boardrooms and various spy shenanigans are had, all of them a prelude to said alien invasion. (Of which there may be more than one.) More locally, a group of Nostradamus-worshipping terrorists are making trouble. Then Turlough goes missing. It's mostly set in Hollywood by the way.

The story is hard to get a hold of. It should be quite exciting. Aliens have infiltrated corporate America! Shades of They Live there, with much opportunity for satire. But the aliens aren't particularly satirical. They're just your typical Bad Guys with an alien garnish – moody, ordering-executions-on-a-whim-type gangsters who occasionally rip their faces off in private. (And presumably attach new ones afterwards?) It’s oddly reminiscent of Endgame, with aliens that we can barely be bothered to manifest and conspiracies that never amount to much. Also for a guy this interested in pop culture it’s bizarre that the “controlling people via the internet” angle fails to catch on outside of a few references to it.

There are next to no opportunities for the Doctor to face off against them, which let's face it is where baddies get most of their best material, but it's also a useful means to advance the plot. As it is, heavy exposition just has to unfold itself via sheer willpower. There's a bit where Turlough, who has been in prison for most of the book (and so we can assume was not invited to any planning meetings) somehow intuits that the aliens are going to use plutonium to poison Earth's atmosphere. The Doctor knows all about the aliens already of course, in that particularly trite-end-of-Doctor Who way, so he's able to just reel off gobs of their back story at will – but only once he's reached the point in the book where Keith Topping decides that it’s okay to remember who they are now, so as to preserve all that precious buggering-about-not-being-of-any-use time for him earlier. There's a bit, incidentally, where he does his "as you know, Bob" routine in a boardroom, to the aliens, while they all just sit there. When we get to the finale – in theory a spectacular bit that rivals Independence Day for scale – it's for some reason done entirely as reported events, with the main characters sitting around for days while it happens. The phrase "mind-numbingly mundane" is thrown around. By the actual book! (Maybe don't do that?!)

For a spy story/alien invasion actioner it's surprisingly torpid. That lack of involvement from the Doctor sure doesn't help. Step back, though – why even bring him in? Yes, it turns out there's a major alien crisis on the way, but all the Brigadier knows at this point is that a rich guy is stockpiling a sensitive material. He's already got people on the job! What does the Doctor accomplish on top of that? Various meetings, as far as I can tell, including a critical one at the end where he incites a conflict between two groups of aliens that was going to bubble over anyway; ah well, at least it gets the climax underway. It's around here that Topping has the Doctor wonder "Would all of this still have happened if I hadn’t been here?” There's an equal chance that this is a real attempt at self-reflection or just lamp-shading, but either way, yes, it clearly would have, as we have the CIA to thank for much of the solution. Thanks so much for underlining it.

If you're wondering how the book can function without the Doctor front and centre, first of all it's fine not to do it that way. Of course it is! Do whatever crazy version of a Doctor Who story you like, as long as you believe in it. Second of all though, the way Keith Topping does this is by frontloading The King Of Terror with a pseudo-protagonist, Geoff Paynter. He's a UNIT operative, albeit in name only since his behaviour is more along the lines of a roided-out The Sweeney. Paynter receives gobs of coverage and since (as mentioned earlier) the plot is rarely dynamic, that means he's got time to sit around and chat. He mostly does this with his similarly laddish partner Barrington, occasionally pausing the book for cod-Porridge/Red Dwarf bunk-bed scenes. These guys enjoy pop culture, which I mean, Topping writes reference guides so that checks out. But Paynter, as well as sounding absolutely nothing like a person that works for UNIT or a military organisation of any kind, just isn't an interesting guy to listen to. He's the sort of bore who says things like "Rumours of our demise were greatly exaggerated," and who looks at a dangerous situation and says in a long-suffering way, "Another day in paradise." He's coarse and colloquial in a way that's clearly meant to be funny (when riling up Barrington he says "Nah, just pulling your tiddler") but occasionally it just comes off as puzzling. (He says "effing" a lot. Is that the book bleeping him out, or is he just whimsical? Given some of the book's other contents I'm surprised they didn't throw in the F word.)

He's violent to an extent that would even make the Brigadier blush, happily executing an enemy after blowing out his kneecaps, and lucky us: he's a rampaging misogynist as well! Now, I'm not silly enough to think that a fictional character's actions are automatically an endorsement. But Paynter's sheer page-count, combined with a moment where he somehow out-philosophises the Doctor (he fails to grasp the concept of underlying pacifism in wartime until good ol' Paynter explains about Dunkirk and the Charge Of The Light Brigade movie – thanks mate, now I've got it!) suggests that we're supposed to think this guy's pretty great actually. And if you're struggling to make sense of that, take it up with Tegan, with whom Topping somehow conspires to create a romance.

The way it's done would be a terrible, bottom-of-the-barrel cliché regardless of the dialogue. It's two characters forced together by circumstance, who yell at each other and fight (he hits her!) until they give in and kiss. This is a misunderstanding of correlation that many bad rom-coms make. (Never to be outdone for self-awareness, Topping lamp-shades this: "It’s a crass romantic comedy subplot that’s impressing precisely no one." All together now: well, that's all right then!) But the dialogue is howlingly dreadful as well. Paynter, annoyed with Tegan, calls her a lesbian. (Phwoar!) Then he manages to get a kiss following the sentiment – I swear this is in the book – "Smoke my cornet, big arse!” Even Alan Partridge wouldn't attempt that one.

The general suggestion here, divorced from the actual content, is that Paynter is a bon-mot-dispensing machine. ("He was winning the argument through humour.") Tegan is quite up front calling him misogynistic names, and that stuff’s all accurate, but she just... fancies him anyway, no doubt tipped over the edge by a teeth-aching bit of sympathy when he winds up in hospital: "[Tegan] saw another side of Paynter, briefly. A deeply hidden side. ‘It’s like having a part of you ripped away,’ he said softly. The shattering loss was clearly there, inches beneath the surface. He hid his feelings well, she gave him credit for that much, but the veneer was in danger of peeling away and allowing the world to look at the vulnerable, confused, hurt man beneath. She could almost have hugged Paynter at that moment. Almost, but not quite." He said like… one thing there.

Trying to skip over the appalling misreading of Tegan, we've now stumbled across one of the book's major flaws. The King Of Terror is not well written. A recurring nuisance is Topping's fondness for over-description of characters, usually out of nowhere and after a line of dialogue. "‘Sure,’ said Ryman. He was powerfully built with a thick, bullish neck and short cropped hair. He had a livid red scar on his left cheek and a prizefighter’s nose that had taken one punch too many, yet his movements were light and graceful, almost balletic." / "She was a small woman in her late twenties, slightly overweight around the hips and thighs, and power-dressed in a tightly fitting, dark blue jacket and skirt combination that emphasised rather than hid her weight. The cut of her ash-blonde hair was as severe as her clothes and her eyes looked like two chips of ice in the dull lighting of the conference room." / "‘The information that we have from our sources in LA,’ said Frank Greaves, ‘is that there’s a UNIT presence in the city.’ Greaves was a gnomish, tired-looking man with thinning blond hair and a sickly pale complexion that suggested far too many sleepless nights. He cast a nervous glance at his CIA superior who was small, completely inconspicuous and in his early fifties."

There's a nugget of actual characterisation in each of these, but it's still an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach. Good lord, get to the point – and if the character's looks aren't remotely important later on, then you needn't bother. There are heaps of characters in this, a lot of them sound the same, and once they're past the initial description-fest they don't get described again. It doesn't really help to have been told 200 pages ago that one of them moves balletically sometimes. (Strangely Topping doesn't go to town describing the aliens, who just look sort of horrible, really. Their back story, relayed in great dollops by the Doctor, isn’t particularly original either; one lot are compared to the Daleks. Ooh.)

The prose has a tendency to waffle on, often with a comedic bent. I get it – Topping's irreverent, see the original Discontinuity Guide – but it's not well integrated here. Omniscient sentences like "Those who believe that, in a world of infinite variety, an improbable amount of duplication occurs naturally would have just loved the coincidence" will just make you go, hang on, I guess that was a bit of a coincidence wasn't it? Stuff like "Newton turned with a quizzical look on his face. ‘I don’t follow?’" is redundant – you just described the feeling he's having, then signified it with dialogue, you can just pick one. Descriptions like "Milligan had the look of whomsoever it was that had been assigned the tough job of converting Saul on the road to Damascus" are disappearing off into their own little world altogether. Huh?

There's a general uncertainty here about what to do with all the bits that aren't dialogue – but much of the actual dialogue is either first-pass obvious or just embarrassing, like an Irish character who says “He saved my life once, so he did” and “We’re supposed to be the good guys, so we are.” A book with this much action shouldn't have this much time to witter on, and when people say something it should be worth saying.

Tone is another of the book's major problems. It's clearly going for funny a lot of the time, and nerdy, if it can get away with both. (You know Topping, reference guides etc.) Sometimes it's quite unobtrusive: “‘Nice effect. Computer-generated?’ ‘Colour separation overlay,’ replied the Doctor dismissively.” Sometimes it's slightly off: "It’s exactly the same technique the Time Meddler used in the Seventies with that pop concert malarkey." (Yay, a Virgin/No Future reference... but does anyone in-universe call him "the Time Meddler"?) And sometimes it just doesn't work. There's a tissue of references to the Fifth Doctor not being a particularly impressive or well-liked incarnation: "[This incarnation]’s symbolic if somewhat mysterious. A lot of people don’t seem to like it.” / "He strikes me as being a bit wet.” / “‘Which one are you?’ ‘Fifth.’ ‘Oh, the vulnerable one. Well, you’d better sit down before you have an accident.’” What the hell are they talking about? They're not Doctor Who fans! This isn't a Doctor Who forum! You're breaking things for a crap joke. (And look, maybe don't keep telling us how limp and rubbish the character we are reading about right now is. Do you think he sucks? No? Well then, just write him with confidence and ignore the critics. This isn’t The Discontinuity Guide.)

Often that urge to tickle our funny bones arrives at the wrong moment. When we first meet them, the terrorists are variously likened to a With The Beatles-era Ringo Starr and "Noddy Holder circa 1973", and they're clearly meant to be hapless in the extreme. But then they're also very successful terrorists who blow up a building killing 70 people, and later blow up a car incinerating one of the main characters. But like? One of them looks like Noddy Holder, I guess? Ho ho? I barely know why they're in the book – their leader blows himself up after his girlfriend, who he fat shames but don't worry about it, gets her head blown off, and shortly afterwards the remainder are rounded up and that's them done. But they're a great example of the book not knowing when to be funny, or how hard to lean into it.

And yeah, stuff like "terrorists who successfully kill people" kind of punctures any nearby jokes, doesn't it? Those gangster aliens are always having people murdered. Paynter gets into various situations where friends of his die horribly, or he's forced to kill people in a nasty way. Pound for pound, this isn’t a funny story – so why does the prose occasionally lean in to roll its eyes, and why does he conspicuously insert song titles into the dialogue? Didn’t anyone chip in here to say, are you sure these things are complementary?

For the worst example of a tonal mismatch you can check out the nastiest thing in the book, which has no business sitting alongside all those comedy bits and arguably nullifies the lot of them: Turlough's capture and torture. This is done for ultimately baffling reasons, i.e. they want his DNA, which you can get from hair follicles. They nevertheless choose to laser him, rip bits of skin off him, blast him with intense heat, drug him and oh yes – they violently anal probe him as well, after which we're told he soiled himself. Sorry – editor? Justin, where you at? This was one of many moments during The King Of Terror – including action that simply isn't moving the story, puerile characters pontificating for pages at a time, exposition that projectiles at us like the book has food poisoning – that made me wonder if Justin Richards got sidetracked rewriting Endgame and simply didn't give this one his full attention. Because seriously, as well as the book being a literal crap-shoot in many respects, this here is unsuitable material for Doctor Who. Come on. Kids read these. What are we doing. (Turlough's revenge, where he beats his captor and seductress to death with a heavy chain, mashing her head to soup, would probably win the "this really shouldn't be here" award if it weren't for the probe. Good grief.)

The clanging tones are perhaps the worst thing about The King Of Terror, but there's more to go. It wasn’t really worth bringing the Brigadier back given the little he has to do here, and it’s done in a way that means having to reckon with his now thoroughly convoluted novel timeline. The book is way too pop-culture-brained, not just keen to make arch references in the dialogue but occasionally leaning on it for characterisation, which makes it all feel a bit more throwaway. (Tegan talks to a wounded man for support specifically because she saw it in an episode of M*A*S*H, and not because, I dunno, it’s the right thing to do.) Paynter’s misogyny leaks out into the book to some extent; there are very few female characters and they’re either dippy, casually offensive or meanly denigrated in description. And not to get all puritan about it but there are some expletives here that do not belong in a Who book. You’ve got a racist bit, where we’re meant to sympathise with the one saying it, an ableist bit between comedy villains and a random dreadfully homophobic slur when someone is mad at their computer for taking too long. (?!) There’s little enough of this stuff that you could easily cut it with no ramifications, but that just makes it more bizarre that it’s there. (Yes, I know times change and I’d put at least one of these down to just being written in a more ignorant real world — but cumulatively, oof.)

All of this is nitpicking to some extent, so here’s a bigger one: this has to be the worst writing for the Fifth Doctor so far in novels. Perhaps as a response to the (baffling and unnecessary) extra-textual criticisms of his character, he has a sudden equal-opportunities penchant for rude sarcasm, a fondness for making self-mythologising speeches at the drop of a hat, a blundering grasp of philosophy and a need to espouse it, and (when it suits) an apparent dumbness so that Geoff Paynter can "as you know, Bob" at him for a change. I don’t recognise him at all. He's not worried enough about Turlough and he/the novel doesn’t get anywhere near to reckoning with what's happened to him after the fact, attempting to cloak it in a "well, Turlough be mysterious I guess" bullet point that just minimises the whole thing. Similarly Tegan's experiences are apparently meant to make her more cynical, as if she needed the help, but that doesn't explain why she fell head over heels for a guy who smacked her in the face. None of the leads ring true, which raises the question of "why write a novel about them specifically.”

But then... none of it rings true. The King Of Terror doesn't have a clue whether it's a wacky comedy or a brutal action thriller, whether it's Doctor Who or a godawful misogynistic crime show about Geoff Paynter, whether it's introspective and descriptive or irritatingly flippant and obsessed with pop culture, whether it's huge in scope or putting its feet up so it can hear about it all on the news. I really cannot believe that this one passed all the usual editing checks. I don't understand how it's in this state generally, since I enjoyed both of Topping's previous co-written novels — surely Martin Day can't have done all the heavy lifting? As a published novel it’s as rough and misguided as any early days Virgin disaster you'd care to name. It’s the clear nadir of the BBC Books run so far, and with sufficient luck for the rest of it as well.

2/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#34

Imperial Moon

By Christopher Bulis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #57 – Divided Loyalties by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#26

Divided Loyalties

By Gary Russell

Oh boy, here we go. I was looking forward to this one in an admittedly morbid sort of way. Divided Loyalties is regarded as a bit of a stinker in some circles and there is a certain catharsis to reading that sort of book — or reviewing it, at least.

It would be refreshing to say that everyone’s just being mean and it’s brilliant actually, just as it would be rudely amusing to say that it’s as bad as the worst reviews make out. I’m going to be a pain and say that it’s neither of those things exactly — although Divided Loyalties still isn’t very good.

It’s on arguably shaky ground to begin with just by being a sequel to The Celestial Toymaker. This is all subjective, natch, but I find that story’s structure rather unsatisfying: the original Toymaker story is essentially ON, <however many random games you wish to include>, OFF, with little story or character progression in between. It could be four episodes long or forty. The same pattern was employed in another (unproduced) Brian Hayles script, The Queen Of Time, as well as in (to much stronger effect) The Mind Robber, which at least had the sense to mine storytelling itself for its random diversions, paying off quite spectacularly by mashing it all together at the end.

Gary Russell mostly avoids this problem. Divided Loyalties does the perilous if-you-lose-you-die thing, of course, but not until fairly late in the (ahem) game, at least where the TARDIS crew are concerned. We only see brief snatches of it beforehand, with an unassuming family kidnapped for the games and a man forced to play a giant form of Snakes & Ladders.

Rather than just play games all the time, most of the book is concerned with the characters playing them. Gary Russell is a past master at continuity links, which can be a slippery slope to just writing fan fiction, but if he’s going to put that list-friendly knowledge to practical use then I don’t really see an issue. He’s done it before: the strongest moments in The Scales Of Injustice are about where the Brigadier and Liz find themselves, and those ideas are genuinely informed by Russell’s fan card. A similarly concerted effort is made in Divided Loyalties to mine the lives of Tegan, Nyssa and Adric in order to Say Something about their place in the show, resulting in a sort of line being drawn under much of their Season 19 angst before setting off on the relatively low key Black Orchid. Kudos for trying, quite honestly.

Does the book still groan under the weight of continuity? Well, yes, but if you must mention Tegan’s aunt (Logopolis), uncle (The Awakening) and cousins (Arc Of Infinity) in order to make the point that she might miss the rest of her father’s life, and if you use that to put all her “Take me back to Heathrow!” histrionics into perspective, then I think that deserves a pass for character development.

Slightly less convincing is the repeated underlining of Nyssa’s trauma re the Master usurping her father’s body, and the Doctor failing to do anything about it. One of those opportunities for character development that’s missed by the original show and conspicuous by its absence when you put these characters into full length novels, it makes sense to address it, and effort is made so that it will be germane to the plot… but is it enough? I’d say not really. It’s enough trauma to fuel a novel, quite frankly, whereas here it’s only one item on the list; later on when we’re meekly told “Whatever did or didn’t happen between [Nyssa] and the Doctor regarding Tremas and the Master, it was dealt with”, it feels more like a “tell” than a “show” solution to the problem. Save it for a novel that has the Master in it, perhaps. (People who’ve read the book: hold that thought.)

Least convincing is what it does with Adric. As the book goes on and the mind games ramp up, with the three companions all seeing visions that somewhat displace their confidence in the Doctor, Adric is suggested to be trying his best to fit in and his intelligence is treated as unequivocal: the Toymaker himself is genuinely impressed. The early parts, however, include some of the most embarrassing fnar-fnar-nobody-likes-this-character takedowns I’ve ever seen in print. Adric is “someone who thought green and yellow pyjamas were the height of cool fashion”; he is “sarcastic, but unfunny … lazy and workshy and, above all, forgets to bathe regularly”; he is curious out of “an innate need to be nosy rather than because of any genuine intellectual advancement he might achieve”; he says things “pointlessly”, he “waddles”, he has a “snub nose”, he opens doors without thinking which causes the Doctor to roll his eyes (“[Adric] was all smiles, completely forgetting that it was his pathetic need to explore that had got them into this mess”), and he butts in “unhelpfully” with things like “‘I’m an orphan, too,’ said Adric, presumably noticing that he hadn’t yet become the centre of attention.”

Some of this is perhaps meant to indicate Tegan’s particular distaste for him, although to be honest that reflects almost as nastily on her as it does on him. And an effort is arguably made to walk it back by highlighting what Adric is trying to do. Either way, it’s loathsome to read. I remember starting Divided Loyalties years ago as a teen and giving up shortly after the author made an honest to god effort to canonise Adric having noticeable BO. I mean, what are we doing here? This is fan fiction of the worst kind: the sort of “you know it’s true!” convention banter that engages with the perception of characters and not with the substance. Matthew Waterhouse would probably like a word. The editor certainly should have.

None of this, however, is likely to top the proverbial Things People Don’t Like About Divided Loyalties list. For this, we must turn to the middle of the book, where the TARDIS crew still don’t consciously know about the Toymaker — he has appeared to them in visions but, for some reason, blanked their memories of it afterwards. A sleep-inducing drug is used and the Doctor remembers something that helpfully informs the rest of the plot. Specifically his youth on Gallifrey, which we then enjoy for 60 pages. You thought the companions’ back stories were a bit heavy on the continuity? Oh, sweet summer child.

The important bit is that as a young man on Gallifrey the Doctor made an ill-considered trip to the Toymaker’s realm which cost him two of his friends, one of whom in a way that influenced the Toymaker over centuries. This is the problem that now needs to be resolved.

I’m not a fan of hastily-introduced prequel facts because you can’t fake the mileage — it’s all very well him saying “I think about that fateful mistake every single day!” now but he never mentioned it on telly, did he? (You would think it might come up in, say, The Celestial Toymaker.) In its defence, this does set up the book’s plot… but then that’s a bit of a bootstrap defence, since the plot’s reliance on it is entirely the author’s choice.

But oh, the rest of it. The Doctor doesn’t just decide to go there: first he hangs around with his friends, the Deca, a group of 10 mildly insufferable Oxbridge-in-space students that includes the Doctor, Koschei (the Master), Mortimus (the Monk), Ushas (the Rani), Magnus (the War Chief) and Drax (he isn’t cool enough to have two names). So not only did all of the renegade Time Lords boringly already know each other at school — they were all in the same friend group. Most of their heroic-or-villainous attributes are handily already more or less on record, with the Doctor in particular having such rampant wanderlust that he gets thrown out of the Academy for it. Again, this is a pitfall of prequels, and it’s pure fan-brain in action: you take a sequence of events and make it destiny, actually, because everything must fit into a sequence. (See also an embarrassing in-universe reference to “Tremas” being an anagram of “Master,” and that apparently being a sign of inevitability.) You just don’t need this stuff.

The rest of the Gallifrey section runs the gamut from things that probably need to be there for world-building (there’s lashings of Lungbarrow material including Badger) to things crowbarred in because somebody mentioned them once (the hermit who showed the Doctor “the daisiest daisy”) to things that arguably break the show if they show up too soon (the Doctor and friends learn about Daleks and Cybermen). Certainly the feel of a book like Lungbarrow is nowhere to be found here, as we are far more invested in cameoing characters like Azmael than delving into the atmosphere of the place. I’m only amazed that when Russell makes a point of saying the Toymaker’s features “reminded the Doctor of one of the lecturers back at Prydon Academy” he somehow stops short of saying it’s the one played by the same actor. About the only thing we’re not being abjectly fanwankerish about here is the TV story this is a sequel to, which is mostly present in iconography only; I don’t know if that’s Gary Russell showing restraint or just a case of there not being anything useful to draw from — see, perhaps, my objection to its arbitrary ON-OFF games.

The key issue for me is its hyping up the specialness of the Doctor and his desire to leave Gallifrey, rather than letting it be a gradual resistance to his people’s principles. It feels like flatlining a character arc to say, he was always this. But let’s be honest, the whole thing is a massive indulgence. And really, what’s it doing slap bang in the middle of a novel? It doesn’t do the pace any favours: the Toymaker’s mostly been dropping unnecessarily cryptic hints up to this point (if he wants the Doctor so badly then why not just get on with it?), and then we take a whole fifth of the book out just to back-fill continuity. By the time we arrive at the actual plot with all the characters apprised of the facts it’s nearly home time.

I haven’t yet mentioned the plot particulars, but to be honest they’re not very arresting. The reclusive planet Dymok has gone radio silent; the orbiting station Little Boy II (a somewhat crass allusion to Nagasaki) is where the Doctor and co turn up, and they’re only too happy to help investigate. The crew, in defiance of Gary Russell’s usual writing style, don’t spend every waking hour sniping at each other, but there’s not much else to say about them. (There’s plenty of names, but that just gives us some useful losers for the games later on.) When some of them arrive on Dymok they find a people perpetually asleep; their dreams fuel the Toymaker, who we learn (in part during the Gallifrey continuity dump) is the Guardian of Dreams. The Doctor’s intrusion all those years ago is finally wearing off and the Toymaker needs his help to survive. And/or a new host, which naturally will be the Doctor. Cue the games, at long last.

Despite taking all that time out to set it up, there is a lot of explaining still to do around the Toymaker and his schemes. There’s also a lot of explaining to do around the Observer, a tangential figure with his own stake in events, and his schemes. The mind games affecting the companions are due in part to both of these figures, and the goalposts for what they’re actually trying to achieve move as all the explainifying goes on. To be honest, I just started nodding along by the end. The games — surreal exercises where people turn into giant chess pieces etc — ultimately feel like a minor concern, and certainly they don’t come alive as much in print as they would do on screen. The stakes, as far as the Doctor’s old friends are concerned, feel inevitably rushed since we only just met them. (Millennia, in particular, barely features.) The conclusion is rather hazy on this front.

There is some good use of the Toymaker here — I’m thinking of his mind-reading, which basically means picking up on the third-person prose happening all around him — but I did wonder if Russell could have gone further with a metaphysical character like that in a book setting. (Should this one be more like Conundrum?) I don’t know if I’d really call it a strong use of the Toymaker character overall, but then there isn’t much to go on. Making him the “Guardian of Dreams” seems like a reach? I don’t remember dreams featuring heavily in his one TV appearance. Nor in The Nightmare Fair, the cancelled 80s sequel that Gary Russell nevertheless bothers to segue into at the end of this.

It is, surprisingly, quite a good one for the Doctor, or at least for the incarnation we’re seeing here. The Fifth Doctor tends to be about as imposing as the celery he insists on wearing, but he’s pleasingly no-nonsense here, at one point pushing down an antagonist’s gun with a finger. Russell works in some authentically Davison-y “hmmm!”s, as well as incorporating the half-moon glasses from Frontios; perhaps they’re a talisman of Good Davison Doctoring. Russell is a bit less successful writing the “prequel” Doctor; obviously I’ve got my objections to his character arc and goodness knows to all that fanwank as well, but the actual character isn’t really distinct from the Davison one we’re seeing elsewhere. (Both do “hmmm!” and “my dear” at points.) It definitely feels like a stretch to put William Hartnell on the cover, even if canonically that is who it would be.

It might be less frustrating if Divided Loyalties had been a complete write-off, but there’s some real intent here to make something of the continuity (where the companions are concerned) and to do something slightly different (where the Toymaker is concerned). The choice to spend a lot of pages tying up plot points both pertinent and pointless is a millstone, however, weighing down any goodwill to the rest of it and effectively removing any sense of momentum. In the end, Divided Loyalties plays itself.

4/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#25

City At World's End

By Christopher Bulis

Now for something a bit more normal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #43 – More Short Trips edited by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who

More Short Trips

Edited by Stephen Cole

Right, that’s enough novels. Back down the short story mines with you.

There doesn’t seem to be a linking theme this time, although Stephen Cole — clearly amused by the less than imaginative title of More Short Trips, going by the introduction and blurb — suggests that the simple fact of an increased number of stories ought to cover it. Maybe themes are overrated?

He also mentions being the outgoing editor of Doctor Who for BBC Books, which is surprising to me as he still had roughly 30 more books to go at this point. Were they really working that far in advance or did the plans change?

Anyway. Short trips. More of them.

*

Totem

By Tara Samms

Ah yes, Tara Samms, finalist in the 1998 Steve Cole Lookalike Contest. (I’m suddenly wondering how many of this collection’s “new voices” are Cole.)

This one features the Eighth Doctor working for a widow in Portugal, bringing her somewhat out of her shell and inadvertently romancing her. According to Wikipedia he’s making amends for something the Seventh Doctor did, but the story’s so short I didn’t pick up on that. Anyway, it’s an evocative moment.

*

Scientific Adviser

By Ian Atkins

The Second Doctor gets some work on a film set recreating The Invasion. (I very much appreciated the line “Having problems with the invasion, then?”) He’s ostensibly there to ensure a lack of historical accuracy and thus keep UNIT’s secrets safe. However, another plot is percolating.

Ian Atkins does a marvellous job of evoking the odd charm of this Doctor, particularly around children, and it’s an amusingly subversive way into a Doctor Who story — it’s surprising, really, that more stories aren’t told in-universe about known alien invasions, but I suppose that’s the whole reason for UNIT’s actions here. This is an instant hit, although I can feel my brain wrinkling when I try to fit it into continuity.

*

Missing, Part One: Business as Usual

By Gary Russell

Mel’s back home! I’ve got no idea about the logistics of this (wasn’t she last seen leaving Iceworld on Glitz’s spaceship, presumably in the future?) but the character beats seem more important here. Mel has apparently not enjoyed her time with the Doctor, or not enough to consider it worthwhile, which is a somewhat sour take when the author’s Business Unusual (heavily referenced here) was also concerned with keeping Mel from her destiny. It’s not really how she was the last time she was with the Doctor, which frustratingly leaves a gap that we’re not filling. We’ll see what Part Two looks like, but for now this is a quick and rather moody check-in.

*

Moon Graffiti

By Dave Stone

A characteristically funny piece from Dave Stone featuring a moon covered in graffiti and a tiny spaceship full of irritable and sarcastic aliens. This does a pretty good job of world-building for an Earth gone temporarily to hell thanks to some marauding spiders. (The aforementioned graffiti artists.) It has tons of ideas, including an in-universe explanation for Peri’s sometimes questionable wardrobe choices. In his rather pitiable status quo for humanity Stone inadvertently hits on imagery that would be used in The Matrix. (No, not the Doctor Who one.) The Sixth Doctor, needless to say, feasts upon Stone’s verbiage.

*

One Bad Apple

By Simon Forward

Here’s a name we’ll be seeing on novels at some point, and One Bad Apple is an excellent first impression. The Fourth Doctor and Leela are on a jungle world inhabited by large plate-covered animals while a platoon of Cyber-enhanced soldiers skulk about. The story posits an interesting future for those who have been partially converted into Cybermen, and it does clever things with biblical allusions such as knowledge from apples. The characters seem to ring with hidden intelligence. I’m keen to hear more from this writer.

*

64 Carlysle Street

By Gary Russell

Gary Russell gets creative here, telling a story from various viewpoints, all of them working in a country house. The First Doctor, Steven and Dodo have ingratiated themselves in order to investigate and deal with an alien visitor. They’re all well captured and the story ticks along nicely, quietly (for Gary Russell anyway) sequelising an obscure piece of lore.

*

The Eternity Contract

By Steve Lyons

A bit of metaphysical Gothic horror awaits the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa as they fight to escape a house that seemingly serves as a gateway to the afterlife. This is creepy stuff and it plays confidently with the level of the supernatural involved. It also constructs a likeable side-character, Patricia, in whom I invested pretty quickly. I tend to think this sort of thing suits the Fifth Doctor, a character with the sort of good-boy puritanical streak you’d expect to get the vapours when a vampire shows up. (Indeed, see Goth Opera.)

*

The Sow in Rut

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

We’re straight back to the supernatural with this one: Sarah Jane’s stay in a cottage is cut short by what appears to be a spectral force. Perry and Tucker have their cake and eat it with both kinds of explanation catered for in the end. For better or worse, this is something that would fit neatly into an ongoing series of K9 & Company.

*

Special Weapons

By Paul Leonard

This would be a great idea for a TV episode or even a novel: during the Second World War some German troops have got hold of an alien being that can separate a place from its surroundings, cutting off all light and eventually killing everything inside. They have done this to a small English village and they naturally have plans to expand — but the Seventh Doctor, here with Mel, knows this will backfire and kill the planet, to say nothing of the creature.

Apart from the terrifying image of unnatural night, this is a dark (ahem) piece with the requisite Paul Leonard-ish moral toing and froing of supposedly bad characters, here one of the German officers, and a supposedly good one named Oliver. The Doctor and Mel display unusual grit for Season 24 (the adventure happens not long after Paradise Towers) but this kind of gung ho action suits Mel surprisingly well. Excellent stuff.

*

Honest Living

By Jason Loborik

An offbeat sequel to Day Of The Daleks featuring some more time travelling guerrillas with a resulting mess of paradoxes. There’s some pathos in the bookended story of a man who should have died, and there’s an unusually anthropomorphic approach to time taking its revenge against paradoxes. However this one suffers from the problem stories about the mechanics of time travel usually face, in that it’s hard to understand so it needs explaining. I think the general pathos just about carries it.

*

Dead Time

By Andrew Miller

This is a rather excitable and talky bit of fan service with the Eighth Doctor trapped in a mental prison, for a while talking to a future (still McGann) version of himself, then having to battle through all his past lives. It’s one of those stories that needs to constantly explain itself, and although the idea of the Forgotten (beings that “time travel” back through someone’s life) is quite good, we don’t really get any mileage out of it here. Sam features and is not exactly a joy to be around, so at least that’s accurate.

*

Romans Cutaway

By David A. McIntee

I’ve ended up reading this at the perfect time, as I’m currently halfway through a rewatch of The Romans. McIntee — RIP — seizes on the gap in the story between the TARDIS crash landing and the gang all relaxing in the Roman villa; he relates how they found out about its original occupants and he puts Ian and Barbara in a life or death situation. (Their first of several during their stay.) The latter leads to a bit of soul searching from the pair. It’s a nice little pause within a generally restful story, with Ian reacting thoughtfully to his defensive act of violence towards the end.

*

Return of the Spiders

By Gareth Roberts

A romp (what else) from Gareth Roberts featuring (who else) the Fourth Doctor and Romana, here encountering giant spiders in High Wycombe. Roberts is as fond as ever of the banter between these characters and of satirising British society, and although it gets a little too arch for its own good in places it’s still a decently amusing jaunt.

*

Hot Ice

By Christopher Bulis

We’re back with the Fifth Doctor and Peri for the first time since The Ultimate Treasure, so it’s little surprise who wrote this one. It’s a pretty good tale of thieves chasing thieves and then ensnaring the TARDIS crew. I’m not completely convinced by the Fifth Doctor in this — he seems unusually clinical — but various parties do manage to hoodwink him, so it’s pretty close.

*

uPVC

By Paul Farnsworth

This one is in two parts and it has two distinct tones. First we find the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe noticing a strange knock from outside the TARDIS, only to end up facing a double glazing salesman who somehow travels in the vortex. It’s an absurd bit of farce, but when he expounds on his services the Doctor is suddenly interested. We then jump ahead to the Seventh Doctor and Ace for a more melancholy moment concerning the window that was built, and what it means to the Doctor.

It’s a lot to pack into a short story (set entirely within the TARDIS) and it’s inevitably a bit discordant, but it’s an interesting one, drawing a line between these very different Doctors and where they were in their lives.

*

Good Companions

By Peter Anghelides

Ooh. This one features a future Doctor (with ginger hair, I mean can you imagine?!) running into a much older Tegan. Sadly Tegan’s life took a turn after she left the TARDIS and her adventures have now been designated as a mental breakdown; she doesn’t believe in or fully remember them, or the Doctor for that matter. Bumping into “Dr Smith” and his companion Anna leads to an encounter with a strange theatre troupe. Everything that happens is more organised than it first appears, and Anghelides’ future Doctor is a lot more invested than he seems. This is deeply melancholy by the end, but — as much as I wish we’d avoid saying that characters’ lives took nasty turns, and in any case Tegan clearly did find some happiness too — I think this approaches its ideas with sensitivity. I’m guessing it’s the story people talked about most in this collection.

*

Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

At two pages long this is the shortest thing in More Short Trips, pipping Part One to the post. It describes, briefly, a message Mel left floating in space hoping that the Doctor would get it. (Paying off the last thing she said to him on screen.) But he didn’t and now he won’t, and we don’t actually know what the message was. It’s all quite melancholy.

I’m a bit at a loss with these Missing vignettes. Mel was broadly unhappy about her travels apparently (gee, thanks) and wishes she could say something to the Doctor (so perhaps it wasn’t all bad?), but these bits are so brief that they don’t really earn it. As I’ve said before, I don’t object on principle to companions having downbeat lives post-Doctor Who, although I do consider it the most obvious route to go down if we’re seeing them again. I just want it to be something. I was just saying how much effort Peter Anghelides had put into Tegan’s troubled future. The presence of both invites the comparison and it leaves this one wanting. What’s going on with Mel? Why ask if you won’t tell?

*

Femme Fatale

By Paul Magrs

Magrs is in typical madcap mode here with the Eighth Doctor, Sam and Iris orbiting Andy Warhol at the time of his attempted assassination. The Doctor’s feelings about Iris’ plagiarism of his life, multiple time zones with different written perspectives, at least one section that seems to repeat word for word presumably for reasons and a running Avengers parody all occupy the same lift in this jolly, if rather overcooked follow-up to The Scarlet Empress. My poor brain wishes that the most complicated one wasn’t last in the set, but characteristically for Magrs there’s plenty of fun to pick up even if just by osmosis.

*

And that’s More Short Trips. Cole’s theme-but-not-a-theme seems a decent enough excuse for authors simply to have at it, and quite frankly it doesn’t hurt the book at all. There are brilliant ideas in here and only a few swings and misses — with the increased story count, the odds tend to improve. Melancholy seems quite popular among the authors but there’s also a focus on creativity and fun. A breadth of scope is what you want here and the result is worth seeking out.

8/10