Doctor Who: The BBC Books #108 – Drift by Simon A. Forward

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#50

Drift

By Simon A. Forward

A new author, again? At this rate I’ll have to replenish my confetti supplies. Because yes! Simon A. Forward is new here! Party hats! Well sort of new, anyway – he previously wrote a (very good) story in More Short Trips. Drift is his first Who novel.

As with his Short Trips submission, Drift features the Fourth Doctor and Leela. Forward has a great knack for their voices – Leela subtly placing “new” words in italics, for example – and he just generally knows what to do with them. Leela spends most of the story with Kristal, a Native American working with the military and making use of her latent psychic gifts. (If the fantastical element feels at all iffy to you as representation for a Native American, I won’t disagree – it’s one of those where I don’t feel qualified to say either way, it just made me go “hmm”.) Kristal is a rounded character besides that and their shared tribal ancestry makes for an interesting rapport. The Doctor meanwhile constantly bursts through any military bureaucracy or suspicion to get on with handling the crisis, with his charm and obvious capability tipping the balance every time. This feels right, and it saves us a bit of time. He also spends a good portion of the story with a troubled young girl, which is the sort of mix-and-match you didn’t see nearly enough – if at all! – in Classic Doctor Who. (Think about it: Tom Baker and youngsters, getting up to mischief. It’s so obviously going to work. I guess child actors weren’t anyone’s favourite to write for.)

Forward displays a strong authorial style, a mix of sudden horrific detail and an earthy inner voice to complain about stuff, which overall recalls Stephen King. See also the consistent American voice of the novel, which is set in New Hampshire; the dialogue and description feel genuinely of a place, with phrases like “out front of the store” and “Leave her go” tamping it down. (It’s certainly a far cry from the agonised dialects of Instruments Of Darkness.) Drift is very good at getting inside its characters’ heads, with the Doctor and Leela or otherwise. It believably differentiates Amber, a young girl with a troubled family, Carl, her alcoholic and almost estranged dad, and Makenzie, the town sheriff as well as her stepdad. The novel also has a poetic ear for prose, although it threatens to over-do it at times. “Cold perched in the trees. Talons of ice dug into white birches and the air had turned to crisp powder.” Good. “This place was empty like a recently vacated grave.” Great. “Today that cabin was only a shadow on the air, but the look in Makenzie’s eyes as they’d trekked back down his mountain was carved in bark” A little much maybe.

There’s a lot to like about Drift, an action-packed story with oodles of atmosphere. Where it struggles – and it struggles hard – is in how much it wants to pack into 280 pages. The core of Drift is an emotional story about Mak, Amber and her mother Martha, all trying to make sense of their family dynamic and (if necessary) reckon with a Thanksgiving visit from Carl. Good stuff. This is all set against the nightmare scenario of an unknowable ice monster attacking the town. Exciting. This has something to do with a local cult of alien-worshippers making contact with something otherworldly – which in turn draws a military crack team, White Shadow, led by Mak’s estranged brother Morgan. Okay. A couple of suspicious CIA agents turn up to investigate the alien, possibly for their own reasons, and on top of that, guess what! It’s a Doctor Who book! So you need to incorporate a bloke with a long scarf and his current chum as well. Sheesh.

Within that busy framework the novel is simply groaning with characters, and it goes on introducing them throughout its length. There always seems to be another member of White Shadow down the back of the sofa, and Forward is keen to give each of them their due, highlighting what it is that makes them different and underlining the camaraderie between the team-members. (This is a good thing because hey, it’s better than a bunch of thin characters, but cumulatively it’s too much.) There’s also a smattering of cult members, although most of them disappear before the story starts, and some miscellaneous folks – a shopkeeper, some hotel staff, people in cabins who cross paths with the action. There’s even a bit of unhelpful (and to be honest, easy to catch at the editing stage) alliteration that makes things harder to follow: I was tripping over Morgan, Marotta, Makenzie, Mitch, Amber and Martha Mailloux, Melody and Melvin Village. Red pen, guys.

On the plus side, Forward uses clear character dynamics to break them into groups. There’s the aforementioned Leela and Kristal pairing; White Shadow Lieutenant Joanna is kidnapped by cult members and forced to test her Hippocratic oath when one of them gets shot; the Doctor dances around the two CIA agents while figuring out their deal, as well as working alongside Amber and White Shadow; Mak and Martha are often at loggerheads, as are Mak and Morgan; and Carl has his own private drama that goes from a survival horror with coyotes to a tense hold-up when he realises he has no gifts for Amber. It’s a novel that gets progressively easier to read as you practice making sense of each group – but even then, some latter sections devoted to White Shadow soldiers like Derm and Pydych had me straining to tell them apart or remember where we last saw them. I occasionally needed a minute just to figure out if I was reading about cultists, cops or military guys – Forward can’t always be giving us their trains of thought. It’s an occasional plot point that characters disappear (I have yet to mention Mak’s partner Laurie, who blips thusly) and honestly what should be an outlet for horror was more of a relief. Phew! Another one down!

In short, Drift feels like a 500-600 page Stephen King-ish sci-fi horror novel that has been squashed into a BBC Book like too much luggage into a sporty little suitcase. If it makes any sense at all to differentiate the two, the bigger novel at work here is pretty good. Forward is a compelling writer and some of these characters work brilliantly, when given the spotlight for more than two minutes. In particular Amber’s issues, as she comes to empathise with the lonely ice creature, and Mak’s desire to become a dad culminate beautifully towards the end. But there simply isn’t space to make it all sing. I really liked the Leela and Kristal stuff, for instance, and it gets a good enough button on it at the end, but it’s obvious there isn’t much meat on it when the story is able to briskly move on from it. I found the Joanna thread compelling, but there isn’t much of a reason for us to hang around with those violent cultists, considering what’s in store for them. I might have cared about the Mak and Morgan thing, but Morgan barely registers as a separate person – I just pictured Mak running behind the camera and putting on an army hat.

There’s also some probably good stuff that’s conspicuously missing. What Happened To The Cultists feels like an obvious candidate for a creepy prologue, but most of that’s for the imagination only – presumably cut for the word-count. The entire concept of the ice creature (a disembodied force, which at least saves us from another character) isn’t really cemented until we’re over halfway through, leaving it as an entirely vague but apparently “alien” menace until then; characters are just trudging around hoping to figure out what’s going on for the most part. By the time the book hares towards its finale, the Doctor explaining what’s going on and what they’re going to do about it, I didn’t entirely follow it. But what can you do, I suppose, with this much matter in this rinky-dinky book format.

I’m in two minds about it. Drift is one of those books that took absolutely ages for me to read, what with the constant ping-ponging between different groups of characters – and even apart from that, the sheer amount of Stuff Going On threatened to turn to sludge at times. But Forward can write, for these lead characters in particular. He clearly has a novel’s worth of ideas in him, and then some. When a clear sense of drama is able to peek through all the stuff it’s very effective and can even be moving. It can be funny, too – see, the Doctor needing to avoid falling into a psychic trap by getting sozzled. (I was also fond of “It wouldn’t take long to dig the doors clear, at least; especially if Leela put her back into it.”)

Drift would perhaps be a better book if it let the Doctor and Leela land somewhere else and pulled the ripcord on its own small-town terror, giving all its denizens and monsters room to move. As a Doctor Who book it’s at least competent and quite explosive, and of a high standard really at a prose and dialogue level. It gives you an idea of what Simon A. Forward might be capable of.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #100 – Psi-ence Fiction by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventure

#46

Psi-ence Fiction

By Chris Boucher

Chris Boucher is a bit like the proverbial box of chocolates. His scripts tend to be imaginative and they can be tight and brilliant, but sometimes they’re scattered and vague. His novels have followed suit: where there is a bedrock of clear ideas you get Corpse Marker, where there isn’t, Last Man Running. (So I guess you do know what to expect from him in a sense? Checkmate, Forrest Gump’s mum.)

I had hoped that Corpse Marker would be a turning point, but Psi-ence Fiction is a return to a less controlled, less effective Boucher instead. It even shows signs of skipping a thorough edit — hell, someone should have had a word with him about that title. Although come to think of it, an awkward pun does sort of set the tone for what follows.

It’s a Chris Boucher book so it’s going to feature the Fourth Doctor and Leela, which is good news: he wrote for the telly series during one of its peaks and he originated Leela with that Doctor, so he’s great at capturing those two voices. The combative twosome encounter both a profound sense of unease and some sort of time anomaly near a university in England. Said university houses a parapsychology department where Professor Barry Hitchins tests the psi abilities of a group of teens. Spookiness ensues.

If you read the I, Who entry on Psi-ence Fiction you’ll notice that the plot synopsis breaks down into two parts: everything that happens before the last thirty or so pages and then everything that happens in the last thirty or so pages. The first part amounts to one paragraph. Meanwhile in the actual book, the Doctor makes a mental note on page 194 that “There was finally some concrete evidence that something was happening.” It’s not plot-heavy, in other words, relying heavily on atmosphere instead. That’s not so terrible — very good stories have been told that are mostly just atmosphere and vibes. Image Of The Fendahl, for one. The downside, though, is that I can barely remember two thirds of this despite having just finished it, and its attempt to build atmosphere doesn’t come off anyway.

The Doctor and Leela are, predictably, fine. They split up for most of Psi-ence Fiction which seems more like a bug than a feature, but anyway, the Doctor is full of his usual ebullience and (albeit ineffectively) charm. He even indulges in a few of Boucher’s patented political aphorisms, such as: “[The Doctor] was struck once again by how uniform people’s behaviour became when they put on a uniform.” I could have done without his getting collared by security guards and policemen just for being eccentric – I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a “sign of the times” thing where the story is, unusually for these two, set in the 00s, but it felt like wasted time. Similarly, while no reader is in doubt that the Doctor has us all beat in the “genius” department, his ability to suss the particular universal and temporal peril going on here is akin to plucking it out of the ether, which isn’t very satisfying to read. Nor is the resolution, which pretty much resolves itself.

Leela is usually the highpoint of Boucher’s novels and that trend continues here. She keenly identifies a psychic threat, having been menaced in a similar way by the Tesh in The Face Of Evil. To deal with this she recalls her old teachings and considers the ways that her shamans and the Doctor differ in their methods, as well as how much influence they still have on her now, which is all pretty interesting. “There had been so many instructions and orders, so much advice, she wondered if she would ever be allowed to think for herself.” You get the sense that Boucher isn’t done developing her character, which is a great reason to write tie-in novels. It would be nice though if she had more to do with the plot. Despite all that introspection, plus interacting with and at times protecting one of the psi-kids, she doesn’t impact very much on events; she is yanked into the TARDIS by the Doctor at the climax. I was hoping she’d play a more decisive part.

Neither of them seems critical, or even really relevant to what’s happening until the very end. They mark time by chasing literal shadows or investigating half-baked conspiracies involving bottled water. For most of the sludgy “pre-finale” section of the book, aka most of the book, we’re marooned with other characters, starting with the teens at the university. You will quickly notice a theme in their dialogue: they’re funny. Or more accurately, they think they’re funny. It’s one of those dynamics where every individual character wisecracks all the time and every other character finds it irritating, then does it right back. I’ve read reviews that complain of not being able to tell them apart, and that’s sadly accurate.

The problem’s even worse than that, however: it’s every group of characters in the book. There are several university lecturers, each with some sort of stake in Hitchins’ work. (He is mostly referred to as “Barry”, which given that we’re on first name terms with all the students pushes him confusingly into the background at times.) The lecturers all gripe and bitch at each other all the time, so they don’t sound all that dissimilar either. Then there are security guards and policemen – at times I was unclear who belonged to which group – and all of them appeared to be gearing up for an open mic night. None of them are funny, none of them find each other funny, I can’t tell if we’re supposed to find them funny, but on goes the exhausting banter anyway, unearthing solid gold like: “‘No it isn’t,’ Ralph said, ‘and stop calling me Shirley.’” We also get stuff like “Enough with the comedy routine” – see the universal law of Irritating Characters Are Irritating. Telling me how annoying they are does not make them less annoying.

Some of it’s not so much unfunny banter as weak sitcom writing, with a general background radiation of swearwords possibly intended to grit things up, or more likely add a dash of Blackadder-ish snark. See distracting lines like “Put the sodding sandwich down, put the sodding coffee down, put this sodding character in the SODDING LOCKUP!” Urgh. A general lack of punctuation makes it all read as a bit breathless and try-hard.

Throughout Psi-ence Fiction (and boy, is it annoying to keep typing out that title) I wondered if all of this was meant to be creepy. I’m leaning towards yes. We open with a séance where one character is screamed at by a murderous and distractingly profane spirit. The tone of this is immediately difficult to take seriously – constantly calling her a BITCH! in all caps is a bit too bizarre for Doctor Who, like a rude older relative at a party – but said character isn’t strongly affected by it anyway, or not enough to give the insouciance a rest. The creepiness just goes away when the encounter ends. Another character is affected when an encounter with a Ouija board gets a little too threatening, but for some reason we’re not around for the scene where she is so distraught that she takes her own life, making that seem like a random crime that occurred in the background.

In the meantime, on we go with the relentlessly dippy dialogue, with endless references to one of them imitating Hugh Grant and snarky digs about TV shows. At no point was I concerned for their welfare: they all seem fine. I was generally wondering where the Doctor and Leela had got to, and whether I could come too. Nothing terribly frightening is happening in their absence, other than the prospect of more scenes with these people.

Things are a little more consistent around Leela as she hunts for the vague sense of unease or darkness that seems to exist nearby – but “vague” is the word for it, and no amount of Boucher’s at times atmospheric repetition can fill the hole where a defined sense of threat ought to be. Saying that, he really is good at using talismanic phrases to build a bit of mood: “She must not look back no matter how much she wanted to. She must not stop running no matter how much she wanted to. She must get out of the wood. She must get out of the darkness.” / “Everything was moving except for her: everything was motionless except for her.” But it’s all just weird hallucinations and misdirection that might lead to her death, or a murder, but never gets that far. Anyway, it’s not up to Leela to take this crisis by the shoulders and shake it into submission, more’s the pity, so she essentially just has a weird old time until things tidy themselves up at the end.

When the finale rolls around and it’s time to connect the psi-kids plot with the “temporal anomaly” business from the beginning, it just about works, but you’ve got to suspend a hell of a lot of disbelief even for Who. The emotional reason for a character inventing a device that can turn back time is sound enough – it would have been more satisfying if we’d spent time building up to it beforehand, ah well – but the actual concept of a university lecturer building such a thing, and in such a way that it could obliterate the universe, is a teensy bit of a leap, no? His reason for requiring a psychic collaborator is thin as tissue paper as well. All in all, I was left imagining a whiteboard with PSYCHIC VISIONS and TIME STUFF on it, and a lot of question marks in-between. Boucher employs that repetition trick again to make for a more atmospheric and exciting finale, but he can’t rise above a welter of technobabble, a load of “just vibes” prose and what’s essentially a magic wand that fixes it all.

I wonder if this one missed the usual editing window. The plot is ungainly at best, speed-running all of its important stuff at the last hurdle – surely that could have been tidied up. There are dropped speech marks and typos aplenty, with “Chole” for “Chloe,” “Gallifray” instead of “Gallifrey,” a reference to “the sweeny” instead of The Sweeney. And there are peculiar Americanisms like cellular phone, cemetery and galoshes – hardly a crime, but why are they there? I’d like to think the characterisation could have been tightened up a bit as well, but if you looked at that too critically you’d probably lose sheer, aimless banter that amounted to whole chapters.

 

It’s worth stressing that he really does write the Fourth Doctor and Leela well, and that’s a significant part of why you’d pick up a Doctor Who book by Chris Boucher in the first place. It’s quite readable and hares along at a good pace even though pound for pound little is actually happening, which is no small feat. There are aspects that genuinely work quite well, like the way Boucher writes a character with mind-reading abilities, sneakily picking up in dialogue on something we just read in third person prose. I wish there was more of that, and more was made of it.

I’ve had worse experiences reading BBC Books. This just isn’t among the particularly good experiences.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #92 – Asylum by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#42

Asylum

By Peter Darvill-Evans

In his afterword Peter Darvill-Evans says he has “tried to write something that is out of the ordinary run of Doctor Who novels.” I’d say that’s a fair assessment of Asylum.

Probably the most obviously unusual thing here is the casting choice of the Fourth Doctor and Nyssa. The continuity-minded among you might scratch your heads at that, since at no point in the run did these two characters travel by themselves. BBC Books were no doubt pleased that they’d already stopped telling readers when each story was set, since they’d need two answers for this one: the Doctor must be between The Deadly Assassin and The Face Of Evil, being on his own and having not met her yet, while Nyssa must be some time after Terminus, having long since left him.

Quite a torturous setup, you might think, and you wouldn’t be wrong. And for what? Straight away Asylum has almost no scope for interaction between its Doctor and companion. They can’t get to know each other and she can’t tell him anything that will be important later. “So why do it?” is the obvious question. Well, it adds novelty value. It’s a unique dynamic, outside of maybe the Sixth Doctor and Mel. For the vast majority of the (admittedly very short) novel, however, Darvill-Evans takes the path of least resistance and separates them. Which is either the practical thing to do or the final nail in the coffin, depending on your outlook. 

This isn’t the only odd thing about the book. Asylum opens with two prologues. (Not in itself odd, although while we’re here, what is it with Doctor Who novelists and prologues?) The first one introduces a rather good sci-fi idea about non-corporeal aliens stranded in the bodies of medieval Brits. They know the Black Death is coming. To ensure their survival they need to send one of their number back in time to find somebody brilliant to help. They select Roger Bacon, often considered one of the first scientists, who might be able to give them the Elixir of Life and hence allow them to navigate the plague when it arrives.

That’s all in prologue one! Next we find Nyssa in the far future, older, wiser, successful but not happy. A disaster is coming her way too, but she distracts herself by writing a thesis about a fellow scientist, Roger Bacon… until the facts start changing around him. Suddenly the Doctor (well, a Doctor) arrives, hot on the trail of the time anomaly. Once he establishes the likely focal point, as well as his and Nyssa’s awkward relationship, he leaves her to it while he goes off to investigate the historical figure. Except Nyssa has stowed away in the TARDIS.

Asylum is bursting with ideas before we even reach Chapter One. However we still have not reached the odd thing. What Asylum does next is… settle down. History transforming, aliens possessing humans, companions out of time — all quite exciting, only put those things out of your mind, because Asylum is actually a medieval murder mystery. And quite a placid one at that.

I’m guessing this was the novel Darvill-Evans really wanted to write, and the alien stuff was just the springboard. Fair enough. But the disparity between the intriguing setup and the actual matter of the book — which more closely resembles something you’d see on ITV on a Sunday afternoon — takes some getting used to. I kept expecting the alien plot to flare up, or the incongruity of the Doctor and Nyssa to kick off. I was way off: Asylum is a historical novel through and through, with heaps of research behind it (there’s a bibliography) and just as much thought behind the anachronisms of its dialogue and characters (there’s an afterword). Sci-fi-wise, Chekhov’s Gun doesn’t go off, unless you count the neat but rather sad epilogue with the aliens.

I spent a good chunk of Asylum mystified by this, wondering if — like in Independence Day, or my reading of it anyway — Darvill-Evans had failed to join his own dots. Having now finished it, I don’t think so. If nothing else, Asylum seems more deliberate than his earlier novel. True, the aliens never reveal themselves to the Doctor or Nyssa, who finish out the story with no idea what caused all this to happen in the first place. As far as anyone knows, something caused one of the brothers at Roger Bacon’s friary to commit the murders, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the Elixir of Life. It doesn’t really matter what, though, since (hardly a spoiler) things are put right in the end anyway.

So where does that leave Asylum — a sci-fi story that retroactively McGuffins its own premise, a character study about awkward strangers, and a murder mystery with a motive only the reader knows? Well, it’s certainly different. (Score one to Darvill-Evans.) If you’re going to enjoy it, though, you have to do so on its own level: gently paced past crime. It’s quite good at that. There’s plenty of historical flavour, some of it bracingly unpleasant. (See, the anti-semitism.) The period details can be ingenious, like Darvill-Evans’s answer to a locked room mystery. There are moments of genuine excitement, like an attempted break in and an escape from a burning building. And the basic thrust of what might be the birth of science is quite interesting to behold, with an intriguing and quite elegant counter-argument presented to Nyssa at the end. I’d never heard of Roger Bacon before reading this, and Darvill-Evans does a good job of showing why he’s worthy of note — if not entirely deserving of his plaudits.

There are some decent character moments as well, despite the uphill work created by choosing to write about these characters. The Doctor isn’t quite as effervescent as usual, perhaps because he’s in an awkward spot around this Nyssa person, but he still has moments of Baker-ish non sequitur. “I’ll join you there in a moment, if I may. Someone’s been lurking in the corridor behind us all the time we’ve been walking round and round this delightful cloister — so like my own — and he obviously wants to talk to one of us alone.” / “‘What if the time isn't right?’ the Doctor said. ‘Perhaps all this work, these theories and machines, would be best left here to turn to dust. I just don't know. Will I change the course of events if I save Roger Bacon's most scientifically advanced work? Or will that ensure that events follow the correct course? Can I bear to leave these things here to rot? Can you smell smoke?’” He also manages a compelling enough heart to heart with Nyssa at the end despite, or maybe because of their being ships in the night. He’s unusually pensive in Asylum, but I think this just about convinces as a character choice more than just “getting it wrong.”

Nyssa has a less proactive time. Despite evidently wanting to join the expedition in the first place she chills out in a castle for most of Asylum, barely cognisant of the mystery that brought them here. Instead she makes a friend in the widow Matilda and bats away advances from Richard of Hockley, a nice but thoroughly drippy knight of the realm. You can forgive the Doctor for occasionally remembering, with a start, that what’s-her-name is here as well, somewhere. Still, by the end this becomes a somewhat convincing character arc. Nyssa is still traumatised by TARDIS travel and clearly depressed; she often contemplates coming to live here instead, where it’s (potentially) less hectic, but a quiet rest isn’t enough to fix her problems. She even reaches a point where she’s content to be murdered. (!) Her realisation that she’d rather live on, as well as being a relief in itself, goes some way to justifying her inaction through the rest of the book.

Only some, mind. For all its pastoral mindset and relaxing pace Asylum drifts dangerously close to dull at times — an impressive feat where it needs a chunky afterword to even hit 250 pages. The supporting cast for example have clearly been thought through (again, see afterword), but that doesn’t mean you won’t mix up your friars from time to time. The murder mystery itself can be a teensy bit, who cares? And the book never entirely gets past the sense of a missed opportunity with the Doctor and Nyssa. But despite all that, I found myself on its wavelength in the end. I got into the slower pace and the (very) old-fashioned investigation, and the fact that these characters almost know each other but not quite, these aliens almost change the world but not quite, Nyssa almost considers a life in the past but not quite, and Roger Bacon is almost a pioneer of scientific theory but not quite, in a book that’s almost a massive sci-fi story but not quite… it all gives Asylum a sense of thwarted, missed-the-boat tragedy that arguably justifies its smallness. Almost, etc.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #78 – Festival Of Death by Jonathan Morris

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#35

Festival Of Death

By Jonathan Morris

For a show about time travel Doctor Who is surprisingly shy about its mechanics. There aren't a lot of Groundhog Day-style time loops to be found, or Bill & Ted paradoxes, especially in the days before Davies and Moffat. Of course we know that's because time travel isn't really the point of Doctor Who: it's just a handy way into whatever story you'd like to tell. The TARDIS could be a wardrobe to Narnia or the Starship Enterprise and many of the plots could still work. If you were new to Who though, you might expect more (nyurgh) timey-wimey.

Jonathan Morris is perhaps a bit over-excited in claiming (via his Introduction) to have done all of this stuff first. (He at least goes on to credit The Sands Of Time as an early adopter, though he omits The Left-Handed Hummingbird which came even earlier. Tut tut.) Regardless of who dunit first, Festival Of Death probably does time travel shenanigans the most up to this point. It finds the Fourth Doctor and Romana stuck in something like a time loop, where their involvement in a crisis always seems to follow another still-in-their-future intervention. Thus they have to work backwards, parsing as little information as possible along the way to avoid breaking the laws of time, whilst still somehow being effective at solving the problem. It's a pickle and no mistake; Morris, like Richards before him (and perhaps like Orman, but who knows) had to use a flow-chart to keep it all straight.

The problem I have with these kind of stories – including, to be fair, Sands and Hummingbird – is the baked-in reassurance that the characters will get out of scrape A because we know they're going to pop up in scrape B later on. (Or should that be scrape -A?) Yes, the safety of popular characters is generally something you can assume, and it’s a downright certainty in canonical tie-in fiction, but suspension of disbelief still needs to work in individual stories; actively shooting it down with foreknowledge doesn't help. Morris neatly solves this problem by making it clear early on (as well as in the blurb, before anyone shouts about spoilers!) that the Doctor is going to die at the end. Is the reader likely to believe that, in a story that prominently features death and resurrection? Well, perhaps not, but the Doctor and Romana seem convinced. Drama is therefore assured, and the Doctor's knowing journey towards his own doom keeps the tension up, despite his increasingly comical responses to characters x, y and z having met him before, even though he's on his second or third or fourth trip further into the past.

It's not an especially confusing read, although some deliberate scene repetitions (no doubt meant to refresh the context) occasionally gave me unhelpful déjà vu. Morris grounds the story by allowing the Doctor and Romana to be as out of the loop as we are; although they're both brilliantly versed in the technical terms for things (well, Romana is anyway) they're essentially just doing their best to remember which bit of the plot slots into which other bit, which is exactly the experience we're having. There are moments when it threatens to become too much, with all sorts of Doctors and Romanas running about, but Festival Of Death is a light enough read that it doesn't feel as though you'll need to pass a test afterwards. For contrast, I had to make notes while reading Heart Of TARDIS simply to stave off a headache. (I made notes about Eye Of Heaven for fun.)

That's probably the other significant thing to take away: Festival Of Death is a funny book. Perhaps that's not surprising where it's set during the Douglas Adams years, but Morris is keen that it feels authentic to all that. (Indeed, you can point to City Of Death for an example of "Doctor Who already did timey-wimey stuff".) This Doctor/companion combo easily lends itself to comedy, hence the comedic focus of their Missing Adventures, and there are lots of opportunities here for more of that. The Doctor at one point bumbles about disguised as a conveniently mute guard. He clashes multiple times with Metcalf, the small-minded controller of the derelict ship/space station that houses all the trouble, and he makes short work of two unpleasant policemen. The Doctor's "death scene" is a long day's journey into ham, throwing in as many quotes as he can think of until another character gets sick of hearing it and helps him shuffle off. Romana, for her part, is more concerned than acerbic in this, but she enjoys playing along with various fibs that (thanks to all the paradoxes) she already knows about.

At times it's too broad, or perhaps a little too eager to please. Take this Monty Python paraphrase, which is as likely to elicit a groan as a giggle: "My card is marked, my number’s up, my goose is cooked. I’ve cashed my chips and have ceased to be. I am an ex-Doctor." Yes, this should all be a bit Douglas Adams-y, but we don't need a character to reference "life, the universe, and everything!" on top of that, or have a far-out character actually named "Hoopy". The space station's computer, ERIC, is a fairly obvious mish-mash of Eddie the upbeat computer from the Heart of Gold and Marvin the depressed robot, depending on the date when we meet him. We're not talking Slipback levels of "yes we know you're a fan", but it's not far off.

Sometimes it's a less specific broadness. Most of the supporting characters are somewhat lacking in depth, usually for comic effect. Space coppers Dunkal and Rige might be the worst offenders, with one of them mentally noting that "he was getting too old for this sort of thing. He couldn’t run more than twenty metres without getting a stitch. Drinking cheap coffee, slamming his fist on desks and roughing up suspects against fenders; that was more his style." Yes, all very The Sweeney; they drop out of the story after the first "loop" and are not missed. Metcalf is an awful guy for comic effect, which is fine as far as it goes but he never grows. Doomed spaceship commander Rochfort is another ghastly bloke, as well as being one of those bores who refuses to believe things so that we can stall the plot for a sec. Villain Paddox is eventually revealed to have interesting motives for what he's doing, but up to (and including) that point he's still just a creepy man in a lab coat. Harken Batt is perhaps the best example of a shady character: a disgraced documentary-maker with few scruples and fewer positive attributes who nevertheless endears himself to the Doctor and Romana.

Some of what I'm calling broadness might be because the story has to work so hard mechanically that there isn't time to focus on the finer details. Morris admits in his introduction that like a lot of first time authors he was anxious about never getting another shot at this, so he included as many ideas as possible. Consequently Festival Of Death has a couple of competing plots, even apart from the Doctor and Romana playing temporal catch-up, and they don't always chime exactly. For instance, Paddox needs 218 people to go into his "death and resurrection" machine in order to get what he wants. That happens to be the exact number of people used by the villainous Repulsion for its own ends, piggy-backing off of Paddox's work. (At one point it's suggested there's no such thing as coincidence, but I mean, isn't there?) It's hard not to imagine earlier drafts of Festival where he just used one plot or the other.

The structure of the story means that we have to wait a long time to find out what Paddox is up to, and it's a satisfying call-back once it comes, but we're waiting equally long to get to grips with the Repulsion, and that's about as standard a villainous force as you could imagine. We also get a mix of monsters, some of them memorable, some not. The Arachnopods are artificial killers that can reconstruct their bodies, each limb having its own intelligence, which is all fantastic but they're contained to one strand of the plot. Whereas we're also doing zombies again – man, they were really in vogue at BBC Books – and as well as being quite dull beat for beat, they come with the semantic nitpickery of being potentially more dangerous once they're being possessed, rather than merely remote controlled. Which, sure I guess, but it's not as if there are good zombies, is it?

It's worth saying that most of these complaints are themselves nitpickery. The process of following the Doctor and Romana (and don't forget K9) as they tumble through this ridiculous mess is a lot of fun, both in storytelling terms and because of the general light atmosphere. (Granted, it's debateable how light, given that the story revolves around a recreational suicide machine designed for temporary stays in the afterlife.) Morris is able to mine quite a bit of pathos out of the time loop – I'm not sure it is a time loop actually but I'm not sure what else to call it – with the Doctor and Romana both at points lying to people about their imminent doom, knowing that they can't change it. The story ends on a sombre, if slightly overwritten note as reality closes in on Paddox, and there's a lot to think about with the life cycle of Gallura and his people – ethereal creatures who experience their entire lives in loops. There's often a sense of pushing past the plot machinations to really think about what time travel means to people, what they can and can't do within it, and although Festival Of Death refrains from getting very heavy about any of it, I'm glad the story had that on its mind.

Jonathan Morris would go on to write a hell of a lot more Doctor Who, but it makes sense that Festival Of Death is still spoken of highly. It does a very good job of a seemingly chaotic bit of time travel, and it hews closely to the characterisation of its two leads, who pretty much guarantee an entertaining time just by showing up. I think the book makes life harder for itself than necessary, at least when it comes to finessing the things that live between the lines of a flow chart, but it's still very satisfying to make it through the maze.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #72 – Heart Of TARDIS by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#32

Heart of TARDIS

By Dave Stone

Look up there — what’s that light in the sky, above Gotham Police Headquarters? Is that…? Yes, it’s the Silly Goose Signal. And if you look down into the street you’ll see him haring towards us now in his polka-dotted cape and squeaky slippers, blowing raspberries as he goes. Dave Stone approacheth.

Heart Of TARDIS is odd, perhaps even by Stone’s standards. It has multiple story strands, heaps of characters, two Doctors with companions in tow, magic, surrealism, jokes, horrible murders and a preoccupation with TV and movies. (Cheese also crops up a lot.) It’s not for the casual reader.

I don’t know if the book specifically or my attention span was the reason that I got 100 pages in, realised I wasn’t quite following it and started again, this time writing out the different plot strands to keep them straight. This mostly helped, but even then there were important moments I struggled to comprehend simply because they were couched in strangeness or silliness; with this one it can be hard to grab onto the genuine activity of a scene, or even a sentence. (Dave Stone newbies would do well to know that some of his sentences are sort of, optional.)

Stone has always been one for silliness, which is a good thing really: Sky Pirates! is hilarious. He loves a comedic diversion and there are plenty of those here, such as a page or two on the history of the obsessive alien Collectors, or a character considering how Romana would fit into her own class upbringing. But there’s somewhat of a sliding scale when it comes to just how firm a grip he has on the story, vs how much fun he’s having. Pirates! and Death And Diplomacy knew just what they were about — a quest narrative and a romcom respectively — whereas, say, Oblivion is really interested in alternative timelines, but it just sort of paddles around in that idea. I’m not sure what it is that drives Heart Of TARDIS as a story. A collision between magic and science, I suppose, since it’s about a literal nexus point of the two, but then no one in it really engages with the difference. There’s no “Science, Miss Hawthorne!” debate this week; magic is just a thing that demonstrably works.

If that feels incongruous to you within the bounds of Doctor Who, well, it’s just that sort of book: unreality is baked into it on a story level and on a meta one. Literally we have characters losing their faculties and doing strange, horrible things to each other: an American town, Lychburg, has stopped following the normal rules of cause and effect and it is no longer possible to leave. (Think Pleasantville. Just add murders.) Beyond that we have weird attack squads who are, in some undefined way, horrifying to behold, and they use black magic. There are diversions (Stone gonna Stone) where characters compare real life to movies and television, which feels like it’s going somewhere but doesn’t really; we even have quasi-cameos from The Simpsons and Cheers characters, as well as two recurring characters who are a very transparent piss-take of The Professionals. Then there’s what happens to the TARDIS at the end — as in, the Fourth Doctor’s one — being transmogrified room by room and filled with random sights, a sequence that would maybe have more cachet if we hadn’t already been on that sort of toboggan ride for 200+ pages.

We also have some fun and games around canon and continuity. (I think we can infer some deliberateness here, given that one of the villains is literally named “Continuity.”) The Second Doctor’s story kicks off because he’s found a way to undo the security controls on his TARDIS, which are the things preventing him from piloting it properly; this is a retcon new to the book. (To be fair, it’s not a bad one.) The Fourth Doctor and Romana are in the middle of a somewhat breathless search for the Key to Time, but they seem completely happy to put that on pause this week; this is fairly unheard of. (Hard to be mad at this as a concept though, as Romana I deserves more stories, and they can’t all involve the Key.) There’s a gag about the (Fourth) Doctor always leaving K9 behind on adventures and needing to go back and rescue him, sometimes centuries later; that’s hilarious, but again, this is the first we’re hearing about it. The Doctor — both — has a strange inability to be photographed, and cannot provide fingerprint samples unless he concentrates; all very magical, and all new here. There’s even a possible blooper to confuse matters, with Benton still being a Sergeant in the late 1980s; he was a Warrant Officer in his last TV appearance. (Perhaps he got demoted…?)

None of this really matters as such, and by all means other authors can pick them up again, but taken together, in the context of the series so far and combined with the quasi-reality of the plot, it does all sort of push the whole thing into the realm of “is any of this real.” And, pure personal taste here, my investment in a story is somewhat tied to how much the characters are invested in it. If it could all have been a dream then, no offence, but why should I care? It’s a tricky balance.

There are subtler weirdnesses as well — let’s call them, takes. Stone characterises the Fourth Doctor and Romana perfectly, capturing their lofty brilliance, Romana’s indomitability, this Doctor’s irreverence that can turn on a sixpence into grave fury.

The Second Doctor and co are more bespoke. This Doctor he characterises as a chaos demon, utterly impulsive and incapable of listening to anybody before he takes action. This is a bit of a stretch, but at least it’s along the right lines. (His predilection for technobabble is definitely a Dave Stone thing, however. I can’t picture Troughton rattling off some of the convoluted stuff he comes out with here.) Jamie seems to dip below Stone’s interest altogether, although he does get a critical plot moment near the end.

Victoria is where he really goes for broke. Pushed into the centre as the rational protagonist of the trio, this Victoria is no frightened girl: she’s well travelled (after dozens of off-screen adventures) and has become downright cosmopolitan. She has got used to futuristic forms of travel, even been “spoilt” by them; she screams only once, and then it feels like a surprise; seemingly no longer a retiring violet, she recognises and even makes innuendos. It’s also through Victoria — now apparently a keen observer — that we get some of the best Second Doctor writing: “[The Doctor had] a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it. It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not.” / “Ordinarily, he took the part — was the part — of a silly little hobo (as she believed the Americans called it) drifting wherever the fancy took him and amiably allowing himself to be taken along with the circumstances in which he found himself. Indeed, he seemed to be most happy in that persona and took pains to preserve it even at all possible. When danger threatened, however — being trapped in a town elided from the universe of space and time and with a killer on the loose, for example — it was as if he put the clown aside and transformed himself into a man of action, fearlessly hunting down the particulars of the case like a bantam-sized Sherlock Holmes… a man whom, in the face of all probability, he claimed to have met.” NB: Typical Dave Stone sentence lengths there.

Stone justifies his sharper, less frightened take on Victoria: “given the tenor of her original times, [she] was not exactly a shrinking violet even in terms of that era. Time and again, on her travels with Jamie and the Doctor, in any number of perilous situations, she had found reserves of courage and fortitude even she had not known she had.” And honestly, she’s an improvement on the person we see in the actual episodes (although the apparently sexual worldliness is a bit odd), but it’s another thing that makes Heart Of TARDIS feel like a self-contained stopover, where this particular author is god and he makes all the rules.

I suppose that only really matters if you need all of these books to feel like they’re part of the same series. I think it’s fine to step outside sometimes. (Look at Campaign.) I’m just surprised that the editorial team were on board with a book that takes so many weird little swings. (Look at Campaign. Okay, that’s unfair: Campaign finally died because it kept missing deadlines, not because it was weird. But there was some resistance from Richards, and I can’t help but wonder what notes he gave for this one. If, indeed, he had time to give any.)

It’s easy to discuss Heart Of TARDIS in terms of ideas — it’s got oodles. (Some, like the K9 rescue, go nowhere beyond “funny bit”. K9 doesn’t return once he’s safe and sound.) It’s harder to crunch it into shape as a story with a point. Or two, really, since this is being sold as a multi-Doctor adventure. (More on that in a moment.) The situation in Lychburg is creepy, often to an extent that seems to be from another book altogether (the woman building a homunculus out of victims’ body parts), but the basic concept of cause and effect going haywire is very interesting. It’s hard to articulate, however, particularly for a word-wanderer like Dave Stone. You soon get the sense that this plot (the Second Doctor one) will be isolated until the Fourth Doctor gets involved. Nothing much really progresses here until it’s nearly over, at which point the grand finale happens virtually off-screen.

Then we have the Fourth Doctor stuff, visiting UNIT HQ to recover a missing Brigadier. This involves the aforementioned black magic practitioners, but again there isn’t much proactively to do for most of it. The weird and wacky characters operate with abandon and eventually, when it’s time to resolve the crisis, the Doctor(s) is only of secondary help. Things are decided by a sort of wizard battle between secondary characters, with the Brigadier (under-written, almost wasn’t worth including him) intervening at a crucial moment.

Heart Of TARDIS gets very close to edging out the Doctor(s) altogether, although it certainly relies on TARDISes for its plot. This is at least themed, although that isn’t articulated until the Epilogue: “We can’t always expect to take what you might call a proactive role. Sometimes, in this life, we’re lucky if we can do as much as work out what’s going on, much less whether what we do has an effect … Great events are the result of the interactions of people who are largely indifferent to each other.” Which is a decent theme for a book… just an odd fit for Doctor Who, and thus, it’s another one-shot Dave Stone “take”. As a reader, as it must have been for the Doctors, most of this becomes an exercise in patiently waiting through each section until the summing up starts, or somebody else does something.

Looking at it as a multi-Doctor story, we must remember that Dave Stone is a silly goose. So, it isn’t one in the traditional sense. I don’t mind that: it’s always difficult to come up with a big enough threat for more than one Doctor to deal with, and it’s equally hard to give each of them something to do. Stone’s approach is more like Cold Fusion, where separate Doctors’ plot lines eventually dovetail. Where this gets really Dave Stone, however, is that they don’t even meet. The Second Doctor is never aware of the other one; the Fourth Doctor twigs fairly late in the story, and then there is a knowingly short scene where the one secretly assists the other.

As you can probably guess, this has all been setup for a funny line, in this case Romana’s: “So that’s it, is it? We get through all this, and our function is to simply open the door to let you in for a grand total of two minutes before you run straight out again?” In other words: you all expected a multi-Doctor story, tee hee hee. And honestly, a 280 page setup-punchline is a fairly impressive thing to pull off. But it is quite likely to annoy a few readers. (I think by that point I’d given up any hope/forgotten the possibility of the two interacting anyway.)

I was never exactly mad at Heart Of TARDIS, and I don’t know if I’d describe it as confusing, although admittedly I did put some work in there. (And it’s still pretty convoluted.) It’s more structured than The Blue Angel and less abstract than Campaign; it’s just weird on every other level and very, very busy. It’s hard to say whether I actually enjoyed it. Stone’s rapid-fire ideas can be very interesting, but that dreamlike strangeness makes it difficult to care on any deeper level. This is where comedy usually helps, and to be fair it’s often very funny, but being tinged with the grotesque sort of undermines that aspect for me.

It’s one of those books where, if nothing else, The Author Definitely Meant To Do That, and I think that deserves some respect. But I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out than an editor had replied with, “Dave, what the hell is this?”

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#29

Tomb of Valdemar

By Simon Messingham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#27

Corpse Marker

By Chris Boucher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #47 – Millennium Shock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#22

Millennium Shock

By Justin Richards

Justin Richards is famed for his reliability as a writer. There can be few greater examples of this than Millennium Shock, written at short notice to fill a gap and reportedly turned around in a matter of weeks. He makes this sort of thing look bafflingly easy, first doing this and then putting out a critical Bernice novel the following month, a BBC Book only 2 months prior, and later the same year pulling another quick turnaround to fill a gap for Virgin. At some point we must face the possibility that there was simply two of him all along.

Of course, a quick turnaround is all very nice — especially for the publisher! — but all that matters to the reader is whether the book is any good. There are reasons to suspect that Millennium Shock won’t be. There’s the aforementioned turnaround, although the reader shouldn’t be aware of that. And there’s the fact that it’s a sequel — a surprisingly rare commodity in Doctor Who noveldom, unless you count multi-book arcs or linked books such as Blood Harvest/Goth Opera and Shakedown/Lords Of The Storm. It’s even rarer for bridging Virgin and BBC Books — see also Business Unusual, at least, which revisits baddies but with a different Doctor.

Millennium Shock is more your sort of direct sequel. And by direct I mean it literally begins with the last scene of System Shock, albeit slightly expanded. The main action takes place immediately after that, making this arguably just the next 280 pages of System Shock. The entire plot that follows revolves around a pen that happened to be mentioned on that final page.

If all of this sounds like a desperate Hail Mary just to squeeze another book out of something, anything, well to be honest it probably was. But Millennium Shock doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that, picking up the gauntlet of “what happened next” and running with it at full pelt. The pace is crazy, but in a good way: the story stays on track and there isn’t so much of the author’s occasional chopping and changing of scenes and characters. I suspect there wasn’t time to spin that many plates in this one.

Richards, a noted programming enthusiast, would inevitably have been inspired by millennium angst. He uses that to power his latest plot for the Voracians, the semi-cybernetic snake people from System Shock. Still fixated on the ruling power of technology and still keen to release their all-powerful program Voractyll, they are now working within the government to circumvent efforts to fix the millennium bug, which will naturally create a chaotic vacuum they can fill. Said bug is a real gift to the novel — the baddies hardly even need their own weapon since they can just ensure that a problem already happening will run its course. This is a very fun way to incorporate real history into a story. (Or rather, given the publication date, current events. There’s an element of catastrophising in painting such a gloomy what if about the millennium, but that must have been irresistible at the time.)

Millennium Shock has a similar, if not quite as uncanny sense of timing to System Shock: the prior book placed its 70s characters in a fictional 1998, which at the time was 3 years in the future. We’ve still got a 70s character in this one (the Fourth Doctor, travelling solo this time) but he’s in what at time of publication was the present day. There’s still a novelty to that, just as there would be from having him show up in 2025. (The “modern day” for a TARDIS crew is always when they were filming, for obvious reasons.) Of course he manages to fit in easily among the technology of the day, at once being innocently perplexed by energy-saving dimmer switches and running rings around modern programmers.

Richards wrote very well for this Doctor in System Shock and there’s more of that here, such as a scene where he goes “undercover” (“He was in disguise, of course, hat in pocket and scarf tucked away inside his coat”), various moments of winning verbal playfulness (“‘Now,’ [the Doctor] said, ‘tell me, are you one of the people who’s breaking in, or are you as surprised at what’s going on as I am?’”) and in a great pratfall making use of sound in a way Richards would later revisit in The Joy Device. “Behind him the door rocked precariously near the edge of the stair. ‘Well done, Doctor,’ he congratulated himself as he passed the fifth floor. ‘No one will ever guess you were here.’ … ‘What was that?’ Bardell demanded. They had all heard the noise. Clark shook his head and shrugged. ‘It sounded like something heavy falling down a flight of stairs.’”

The Doctor wins people over with his (for want of a less hokey word) bohemian charm, aided by what can only be described as a book that isn’t remotely interested in messing about. There’s very little obstinacy among the government officials who aren’t Voracians, with one noting re the Doctor’s tall tales that “It actually makes no odds. Whether we believe the Doctor’s story or not, we are faced with the same problems, so I suggest we leave the question of alien invasion for now and concentrate on the things we can believe and agree on.” It’s such a relief just to let the plot fly without all that usual time-wasting “do you honestly expect me to believe this” guff. Millennium Shock only occasionally threatens to trip over its own feet in the rush: there’s a sequence where a government official is murdered in a way that will frame Harry Sullivan, but it only seems to matter for a chapter or two and then the open-minded good guys sweep it away so quickly it almost wasn’t worth doing. Ah well.

Speaking of Harry, he’s on companion duty this time, only it’s “modern day” MI5 Harry. I found it quietly touching to visit an older Ian Marter in System Shock and that is still the case here, with more insight into his rather Spartan home life and the regrets that come with his line of work. The action really does tear along to the extent that we’re not exactly having long character conversations, but his easy rapport with the Doctor is a treat — there’s a marked maturity compared to his more chauvinistic youth, and it’s so far not been possible to pair the two of them without Sarah in tow, so that’s its own kind of treat.

Richards manages to build a little pathos into his characters who more often than not come to tragic ends. Harry’s young cleaner becomes somewhat pivotal to his story when she becomes a target, and the Doctor’s interactions with a converted programmer end up being decisive for victory, as well as rather sad because a man’s identity has disappeared. There’s a general pathos to the Voracians, even though they are plainly a piss-take of mindless corporate bureaucracy: it’s reliably funny to hear these megalomaniac cyborgs calmly spout bobbins like “If matters do seem to be exceeding control parameters then you are authorised to issue a termination notice” or “‘We do have a containment strategy for your approval.’ Cutter nodded, evidently pleased with this. ‘Then present it, Mr Bardell. You won’t get unwarranted pushback from me.’ ‘Very well, Mr Cutter. I won’t speak to charts, if that is all right.’ ‘Verbals are fine.’” Yet underneath all that, there is a sadness about these quasi-organic beings who can no longer access what they once were, who now are repulsed by basic things like food and water. It’s sort of an obvious avenue for a semi-artificial villain race, I suppose, and yet it’s distinct from how others like the Cybermen are written, focussing on that specific sense of distaste. Good work, although there’s a chance we’re covering similar (if not exactly the same) ground as System Shock with all this.

The prior book was 4 years old and well out of print when Millennium Shock came along, and it’s been even longer since I last read it, so I can perhaps forgive Richards for playing the hits. And he has other things to draw from, now he has more books under his belt, additionally fitting in another nuclear missile crisis after writing one in Option Lock. (While this one is a bit less heart-stopping, I thought it was far more convincingly woven into the plot.) I do think the timely story makes a case for this being truly its own book, and in any case I thought the pace of it worked better than the first go around, blowing all the dust out at every opportunity and maintaining a real sense of spy-novel fun throughout. How much of the frantic excitement of Millennium Shock is truly down to the time crunch I doubt we’ll ever know, but I like to think that Richards turned a (millennium) bug into a feature.

7/10

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