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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#55

Trading Futures

By Lance Parkin

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #83 – Father Time by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#41

Father Time

By Lance Parkin

Gosh. This is an "oh you're reading that one” kind of a Doctor Who book. But in a good way.

Lance Parkin tends to command a lot of respect from Who fans, and although I haven't personally loved every one of his books it's not hard to see why they feel that way. Right from his debut in Just War it's been clear that he is an assured writer, confident enough to tell a smart and emotional story while still allowing room for a bit of geekery on the side. Father Time brings him into the "Eighth Doctor stuck on Earth" arc, and right away that affords opportunities for an unusual sort of Doctor Who book. Parkin takes almost all of those opportunities, and happily it's one of those Lance Parkin books that I did love.

The Doctor is still waiting to meet Fitz — whoever that is — in St. Louis in 2001. Rather inconveniently it is still the 1980s, so we find him pootling about in the Midlands, renting a cottage and fiddling about with sonic technology. One night he crosses paths with Debbie Castle (née Gordon), an unhappily married schoolteacher who hits a UFO spotter with her car. The Doctor and Debbie become fast friends and he soon comes into contact with a strange girl in her class named Miranda. Like the Doctor she is lightning smart, can regulate her body temperature, can do without sleep and ah yes, that other little detail: she has two hearts.

Father Time never outright says "Miranda is a Time Lord" because it would be useless to bandy that term around while the Doctor doesn't remember it. I think we can infer though that she is from a future where a Time Lord began a brutal Empire to control what was left of the universe. His dynasty was hunted down and killed and only one family member is left. Miranda was spirited away to Earth at such a young age that she doesn't remember any of this, but she is still the target of mercenaries and her father's enemies. The Doctor is in all likelihood all that's stopping them from killing her.

I love a complex and satisfying plot, but I'm just as happy to read a book with a simple through-line, and they don't come much simpler than this: a small group of people with a clear reason to want Miranda dead. The rest of the novel is about the Doctor's attempts to keep her safe. Of course the delightful thing about small plots (when they're done right) is the room they leave for character development, and Father Time has plenty of that.

We're five books into the Earth arc and there are certain ideas the authors have all returned to. The Doctor (sans memories) is still capable of the same heroic feats, but he has a greater ease with darkness and violence. Sometimes this is unspoken and almost primordial, like the murder at the end of The Burning, or the off-screen dispatch of the villain in Casualties Of War; sometimes it's more complex, like his almost willing susceptibility to propaganda in The Turing Test and what that allows to happen; and sometimes it's just The Bourne Identity again, like in Endgame. Parkin hews closest to Paul Leonard's approach, providing an emotional reason for the Doctor to lower his pacifist standards: when it comes to protecting Miranda, he'll do anything.

In the course of Father Time he inadvertently gets a guard shot to death, reverses a mind probe to stop a cruel interrogator's heart, uses a villain's bomb to blow them up instead and rigs a transmogrification machine to turn a dozen armed guards into flowers. (It is made very clear that this means death.) He does at least feel guilty about most of this — at one point he's "disgusted" with himself — and he is horrified when the time finally comes for Miranda to choose whether or not to use lethal force and she shows no apparent remorse for doing the former. He can't quite articulate why he must adhere to these standards, he just knows that there is that baseline. (Both the Doctor and Miranda intuitively notice that the villains are "cruel and cowardly," for instance.)

In many ways the Doctor here is as close to "normal" as he's been in this arc. He's capable of quietly remarkable feats like deliberately "losing" a snooker match by potting every single ball on his first shot, or walking across a very frosty car park without any risk of slipping. He's effortlessly able to pick-pocket an alien as they pick-pocket him, and deliberately planting the bomb they left for him on their own spaceship without anyone noticing. When the time comes to go into hiding with Miranda he's able to "incredibly easily" retrain as a business consultant and make heaps of money advising firms of better ways to do things. (This is so he can provide safety for Miranda. He’s not an aspiring yuppie.) When things get so desperate that he might need to steal aboard a space shuttle, not to put too fine a point on it, but he does so. Some of these things don't feel exactly like normal Doctor behaviour because normally he would have other tools at his disposal — however, they ring true.

Contrary to all that, Parkin underlines the ways in which the Doctor feels out of sorts. During a lovely bit where Debbie notices how unearthly the interior of a spaceship is to her (something we'd normally take for granted since a lot of plastic and metal just looks like BBC set dressing to us — she instinctively knows this wasn't made on her world), we find out that the Doctor feels that way about living on Earth: "I’ve felt it for as long as I can remember. Every morning, when I wake up in a world with buttons, green leaves, paper money and traces of argon in the air I breathe.’” The Doctor, we discover, even thought he was human when he first woke up in that train carriage — "of course I did. I thought I was like everyone else, that everyone else’s life was like mine. I learned that was not the case.” This is also clear in the plot, when the Doctor first encounters some of the hostiles looking for Miranda: "The Doctor frowned. ‘You know me?’ The man hesitated. ‘Of course. You don’t know me?’"

By focusing on the Doctor as off-kilter we get to enjoy a plot without some of the usual safety barriers, i.e. he can't have his normal repartee with the villains and their threats won't mean quite the same thing any more. So maybe they'll just kill him and have done with it. (Of course they don't, and the Doctor has been around for almost a hundred years by now so he's incredibly proficient at lots of things. But the jarring sensation of villains who know him not getting the response they were expecting is a delicious plus, and it's unique to this mini-run of books.)

Some of the best characterisation is unspoken. The Doctor's relationship with Miranda is a way to externalise what he's going through in actions rather than words. Here is another character that shares his unique physical oddities, who even has an analogue for his amnesia since her past is actively the reason people are pursuing her, but she has no access to that past. (Granted, this is because she was a baby at the time and not because of a memory wipe. Go with me here.) The Doctor is determined to let Miranda have a safe and normal life, which is in sharp contrast to his own longing to get away from Earth and the 20th century. (Look at the lengths he went to in The Turing Test.) For Miranda, he’s willing to put all of that on hold and get a job instead. Perhaps, on some level, he just wants one more Time Lord to be alive, knowing the part he played in reducing their numbers. He’s clearly lonely as, with no apparent hesitation, he adopts her.

We never find out how long he would have kept this up. (Would he have said "no thanks" to Fitz and stayed here with Miranda, or taken her aboard? Start your head-canons.) But allowing someone else to live and enjoy what he experiences as disorientation feels like a last attempt to integrate himself into all this, to see what Earth really has to offer — and keep in mind, he’s also keeping Miranda from learning the truth about herself, which might speak to his own ongoing wish to ignore the past. (See Endgame.) Although it feels justified, it’s an unexpected dive towards being human at this point in the run.

The other characters are written with similar interest. Debbie is a quietly fascinating pseudo-companion: it's clear from the outset that she'd rather go and look at other worlds than be married to Barry, who is at best controlling and at worst psychologically abusive. Her attraction to the Doctor is obvious, but quite subtle. We can't help sympathising with her, but there's darkness and weakness there too, such as when she initially lets the villains have Miranda, later identifies where they can find her for fear of being killed, and — after Barry meets an unhappy fate — enjoys seeing him in reduced circumstances... but is nevertheless trapped looking after him, rather than being part of the Doctor-Miranda unit as you might expect. (I couldn't help feeling like this reflected darkly on the Doctor, who surely must know that she needed rescuing in some way too.)

Barry, for his part, is an awful if altogether pedestrian sort of monster, controlling his wife while stepping out on her anyway; nevertheless, he's fully committed to rescuing a young girl the moment he hears that she's in danger. So perhaps he's not all bad? (There's some very neat writing around Debbie's self image which is tied to Barry, who at one point calls her a "stupid fat cow.” When she is able to see herself through the Doctor’s memories, totally separate from Barry's negging, Debbie is “surprised how pretty she looked.")

The villains might have simple goals but they have facets as well. A couple of low rent criminals contribute to the Doctor’s capture at one point, but they’re able to be pragmatic and side with his legal payoff over their boss’s shady riches — they know it will be better for them in the end. There are a couple of creepy mercenaries on the periphery whose primary concern is getting paid, and one of them, an angry (non-copyright-infringing) Transformer who turns into a VW Beetle (!) is an emotional psychotic who blames the Doctor for the death of his wife. (The other two doubt that he was the hero in that scenario: "Anyone who had wiped out Mr Gibson and his entire race couldn’t be all bad.") The Hunters, seeking to eradicate Miranda's family once and for all, have certain standards of combat: "They wouldn’t dishonour the warriors of this time by using weapons a million years more advanced than those of their enemies." (They even offer Barry the chance to get out of here since their fight is not with him.) The Doctor gets a chance to look within Ferran, the young Prefect who is left leading the charge against Miranda, and he determines that: "It’s not your fault you were born when you were, into that family. Since your cradle, since before you can remember, all you’ve been taught is revenge. It’s like an addiction, Ferran. You can help yourself. I know that deep down, below all those layers of hatred that others have filled you with, that you’re a decent man.”

Sadly the jury is still out on Ferran at that point, although he does wobble back and forth once he has the opportunity to kill Miranda. It's here that we get to the weaker end of the book, aka the wrap-up.

Let’s back up. I've not discussed the structure for Father Time. This was deliberate because it's quite interesting, and you should probably just go and read the book and enjoy it for yourself — but I will say that the book has an unusual structure, and there are time jumps. There's a fundamental uncertainty to Father Time where it concerns a character of obvious importance to the Doctor, who (equally obviously) won't be around for future books. (I don't think you need to be revisiting these a quarter of a century later to have sussed that.) So, what's going to happen to Miranda? Parkin keeps this question up in the air. It’s not clear how far anyone in this situation will go, so he can get away with things like suddenly pushing the story forward a few years and recontextualising the characters as they continue trying to evade certain doom.

He tantalises the reader brilliantly when Ferran gets close to Miranda, who at this point is living as a relatively normal teenage girl with the problems that come at her age. (Her awkwardness about "normal" teenage activity is beautifully expressed. She doesn't feel like a parody of a teenager, or like a robot. She's just an unusual person who has grown up with the Doctor as her role model.) Ferran's will-he-won't-he is some of the most tense stuff in the book.

But you'll have noticed at that point that there's still almost a hundred pages to go — and you do have to settle on something eventually. Father Time's final third is a bit more explosive, which is saying something since the first third includes sword-welding assassins on flying discs and an angry Transformer. By the end, Ferran has solved his moral quandary and brought a giant spaceship full of slaves to get Miranda once and for all. Up until now we’ve enjoyed some ambiguity about Miranda’s heritage, and whether Ferran has some justification for his plan after all. By the end though, he surely doesn’t: his “racially pure” society is built on slaves and it is obviously repeating the mistakes of before. He’s just a very bad egg. Disappointing. But then we’re asked to believe that he has reformed — again, for those keeping score. Now, I love a bit of ambiguity, but this is ping-pong. Why should we believe it will stick this time?

The Doctor pushes the “how far will he go to protect Miranda” button quite hard in that final stretch, stealing aboard a US space shuttle in the attempt. This is not outside the realm of possibility for the Doctor, let’s face it, but I couldn’t help feeling that as we literally left orbit to explore a slave uprising on a spaceship, which upturns an entire society in an afternoon, that we had left a beautifully observed novel about lonely people in winter and strange family units quite far behind. The eventual payoff also doesn’t feel equivalent to that early stuff: how Miranda would depart after making such an impression on the Doctor, and how he would react to that are driving forces behind Father Time, and I didn’t feel like either was resounding enough.

Long story short, after something quite trailblazing in terms of an Eighth Doctor Adventure we suddenly get a burst of very normal Doctor Who, where the stakes are all about sci-fi and the characters are all a bit archetypal. (Including the shuttle crew, who simply don’t have the page-count to treat the Doctor and Debbie with the suspicion they’re due.) I probably tricked myself into expecting either a beautiful or a devastating conclusion and the one we get is fine… but it’s neither of those things, instead packing Miranda off to an entirely anodyne SF destiny and having the Doctor wish her toodle-pipski like she hasn’t been his actual daughter for the best part of a decade. He felt more of a wrench leaving Cameca behind in The Aztecs, and he’d only known her for a few days.

I don’t think a damp ending ought to ruin the whole novel though. Father Time is quite obviously above par for these books. Parkin explores the Doctor’s difficulties with life on Earth and he finds a reason to counter-balance them. He supplies interesting and challenging supporting characters, both good and bad. (Although now that you mention it he does drop the ball with Debbie, who deserved better than to feel like a spare toy packed away in a hurry.) He gets in quite a bit of geekery for the list-makers among us, including lines like “Not even the sonic suitcase can get us out of this one,” some references to the New Adventures and a scene with several direct nods to upcoming books, as well as some of Parkin’s previous ones. The prose is typically thoughtful, at times addressing the reader like a storybook in a way that somehow doesn’t feel out of place. And it all feels so fresh, daring to throw the Doctor into a directly familial relationship — something the series seems designed to avoid altogether — in a way that instantly works. I’ve got my reservations about it, but I’m not surprised that people love this one and return to it. What it gets right is worth some imperfections.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #36 – The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#17
The Infinity Doctors
By Lance Parkin

Happy 35th anniversary everyone! Be aware though that we are a little late to the party. It was, let’s see, almost as long ago now as the combined run of Classic Doctor Who. Which is fine, obviously. I’m fine with that. (Oh god, oh Jesus.)

The question on these sorts of occasions is how best to celebrate. The most popular answer is “have lots of Doctors in it.” This approach tends to be very good for ratings and it’s always a bit of fun; it did BBC Books no harm in selling their launch title, and that wasn’t even on an anniversary! However, it must be said that (at least according to, ahem, prevailing opinion) The Eight Doctors wasn’t very good — partly because it’s got so many Doctors in it. And while we’re at it this tends to hamper those anniversary shindigs as well. There just isn’t enough for everybody to do.

I think we can infer from this one’s title that Lance Parkin and/or BBC Books knew that we were expecting more of this, and they felt comfortable poking fun at it. Fair enough. What we get instead is a rather more left-field way of celebrating: The Infinity Doctors is an Elseworlds (or should that be Unbound?) sort of tale, set in a version of Doctor Who where he never left Gallifrey (or at least not permanently), with a suitably grandiose plot to make it okay that this is a one and done.

Provided you’re willing to settle for just one Doctor (although curiously enough, there are several copies of him in it), there’s a definite atmosphere of celebration here, not only of the text of the show itself but the general wider idea of Doctor Who. For the committed nerds there are multiversal references to telly stuff like the Hand of Omega, book stuff like Lungbarrow and never-got-made stuff like the Doctor’s father being a man named Ulysses. There’s gloriously forbidden stuff like the Doctor having a family and falling in love (several times), and there’s seemingly frowned-upon stuff like the origin story of the Sontarans, and as a bonus a creative yet credible solution to their war with the Rutans. The Master also appears in it — sorry, The Magistrate — and in this free-for-all context he can be the Doctor’s best friend who unabashedly loves him. What is that but a treat? Finally, crucially, The Infinity Doctors uses the premise of a Doctor that doesn’t travel the universe as a springboard to, well, what else but get him into that sort of thing. (Since a full blown canon prequel about the Doctor leaving Gallifrey would presumably be a treat too far.)

There’s a lot to like here. And I do like it. But at the risk of popping the balloons so festively arranged for you-know-who’s big 3-5, The Infinity Doctors leaves me a bit cold.

For starters, almost the entire thing is set on Gallifrey. You know: the planet so restrictive that the Doctor would traditionally rather be anywhere else in the universe but here. This is, of course, a gentler Gallifrey with a friendly version of the Master and everyone being nice to the Doctor; getting to spend all this time here is likely another one of those anniversary treats, a peek behind the curtain. It even leans towards that more squalid and relatable place we saw in The Deadly Assassin, with passages like “Some of the most awe-inspiring buildings in the known universe became everyday experiences, places you had to walk through to get to or from lectures.” But it’s still not a setting exactly rife with intrigue and character. Fundamentally it is a place to escape from.

We do get somewhat of a look at how the other half lives, aka Low Town — a decidedly unglamorous sector outside the stately Capitol. There is certainly a bit of crime and intrigue here, even a kidnapping and a couple of murders. But the story doesn’t linger here, or on the people here. I get the vaguest whiff of Ankh Morpork about Low Town, especially with the (admittedly very likeable) duo of Watchmen, Raimor and Peltroc, doing the rounds. There’s a fun gag about Raimor being older and wiser but currently inhabiting a younger body, whereas the much more green Peltroc is at the older end of his first regeneration, although the gag is admittedly a bit “you had to be there” in print.

Within the Capitol the action ping-pongs between the Doctor negotiating a peace conference between two ancient warring species and a mysterious murder spree by an equally mysterious figure. There’s a great wheeze with the Doctor appearing in two places at once to appease his guests; even better are the scenes where he takes the lead Sontaran and Rutan to the far future to try to cure their warmongering. It’s more interesting, on balance, than the kidnap/murder stuff, although there is a great Jekyll-and-Hyde concept applied to the murderer.

The people in the Capitol just aren’t all that fascinating, with the possible exception of the Magistrate, and that’s mostly the uncanny novelty of a guy that looks like Roger Delgado being terribly nice to people. I don’t get as much of a vicarious thrill from, for example, the name “Hedin” appearing a lot; look, it’s him out of Arc Of Infinity, and he’s still obsessed with Omega! The most rounded one here has to be Larna, the Doctor’s favourite pupil and companion stand-in. (And just this once, romantic prospect.) She’s got a good amount of pluck and, in a climactic moment, is more willing to stand up to the Doctor than anyone else. I’m still not entirely sure what to take from her decision, or the Doctor later on engineering it so that she didn’t actually take it. (Alas, it’s Unbound, so there’s not likely to be any follow-up.)

On balance, I think the plot is a big point of contention for me here. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just, well… familiar. Omega, ancient Time Lord genius who seemingly died getting Gallifrey its power, finds himself trapped in a universe of antimatter, and now schemes to get back to our universe — a ploy that requires him to swap places with another Time Lord. (Guess Who.)

Many details are different, but this is still quite openly the plot of The Three Doctors, isn’t it? And I mean, it’s arguably better. (I’m a bit of a Three Doctors sceptic.) But it’s still that plot again, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around it being okay just to repeat it, even in the context of an Unbound story. Wasn’t there any other story you could tell about Gallifrey? I’m all for an appropriate amount of nostalgia on an anniversary, but it’s the characters you want to see again, not necessarily the scripts. The whole thing just gives me deja vu.

It bears repeating that the details are different. Omega’s situation is somewhat new — he’s got company over there, and it’s very significant who, albeit only in a one-and-done way. The Doctor’s response to Omega’s offer is different, at least for a time; the reason he then changes his mind is perhaps an example of character growth along the same lines as the “real” Doctor learning empathy from his early companions, aka becoming more like the character we recognise. In which case it’s good stuff for a pseudo prequel, but I still find it difficult to square the levels of similarity at work here.

I just don’t think I get The Infinity Doctors. It’s as thoughtfully written as I’ve come to expect from Parkin — his books are always polished, almost stately affairs. And there can be no doubt that he understands Doctor Who: quite apart from all the nerdiness, look at the unspecific Doctor in this, who without any actorly accoutrements and with a completely different context (even on an emotional level) manages to exude just the same charm and eccentricity we’re used to. His easy acceptance into Gallifreyan society doesn’t come from his making huge concessions, or none more so than his (for some reason) deciding to remain there; he still is the Doctor, is still accepted as such, and Time Lord society is obviously better for having him around. Again, the book celebrates this character, and that’s great. Nevertheless, for me the mix of an Unbound tale we can utterly leave behind and a plot we have already left behind adds up to a glittering, charming, but somewhat disposable book.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #118 – Beige Planet Mars by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

The New Adventures
#16
Beige Planet Mars
By Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

Honestly, what are these books?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with unconnected adventures (say, have you ever heard of Doctor Who?) but, perhaps because I’ve read all those earlier, Doctor-ier New Adventures, I can’t help expecting this series to have a destination in mind. So far it’s mostly been a lot of monkeying about with murder mysteries. Lance Parkin co-writes this latest entry; if I know anything about him it’s that one of his earlier books, The One With The Nazi Interrogation, still resonates for Bernice Summerfield. Destination, here we come?

Not quite. Beige Planet Mars seems acutely interested in the “where are we going” question, but it’s more into wry asides than actual answers. Surprisingly for Parkin, it’s almost aggressively irreverent.

Bernice goes to Mars. About time, right? It’s her specialist subject! She is there to give a lecture which, naturally, she has barely started writing. She gazes about the buildings with awe, undeterred by the planet’s status as a giant retirement home.

This all feels like a treat, and the pacing would seem to reflect that, dithering wittily on subjects such as Earth’s attitude to Mars: “If [mankind] thought of Mars at all, they did so only in daydreams and stories: idle fancies allowing an escape from the real world, that brightened the time between renewing their car insurance via direct debit, arranging to open a current account with a building society or fretting about the rising price of unleaded petrol.” Much mirth is also had at the expense of the ageing Earth ex-pats. Old people in Bernice’s way are “a conspiracy of duffers”; she at one point waits for some turnstiles to “process their elderly blockage.” Perhaps these thoughts are there because Bernice, like Doctor Who at the time, is turning 35.

But she’s not the only one fixating on wrinkles, as several youthful, low-paid Welcomers to Mars comment internally on the incoming clientele: “[Bernice] was also the first woman through here for a week who could be described without using the word ‘sagging’ somewhere.” There’s a certain male-oriented humour to parts of the book which gets a little irksome. See also a propensity for squarely 1990s references that make very little sense in this context. (Parkin has owned up to these, at least. For good measure there are also more “okay, yes, we get it” references to Daleks than you can shake a plunger at, and a couple of carefully vague allusions to people who might star in a popular BBC sci-fi series.)

The oddly noticeable horniness on display does at least go both ways, with a randy female Pakhar (large rodent) also on the prowl; she is roundly mocked in the prose for her appearance and species, so I wouldn’t exactly call it feminism. Better is Bernice’s guilty gawping at young men on Mars, and her guttural hankering for Jason Kane who is also in this book. Hooray, etc. Is it my imagination or has he mellowed? He seems less of an outright wanker in this one, internally and openly professing his wish to have Bernice back. He’s an author now, albeit of autobiographical erotica. (Side note: the reminder of his gigolo past upsets Bernice, despite her enlightened attitude to future sexuality and sex-work in Walking To Babylon. An annoying incongruity or just people containing multitudes? I wonder.) He’s rather haplessly pathetic at times, which goes some way to making him more tolerable. I still don’t much see the appeal here, or what Benny sees: they fancy each other, they’re bad for each other, rinse, repeat. Can it really change? I doubt it. I doubt Jason even realises he’s sleeping with the Pakhar lady while he’s trying to win Bernice back.

But bumping into Jason, and then doing all sorts of other things with Jason, is just sort of normal for Bernice, isn’t it? And Beige Planet Mars will be damned if it’s the book to break the cycle. So we acknowledge the ongoing thing they have, indulge it, sidestep – almost for the entire book – Jason’s almost genetic inability to keep it in the pants and then just sort of move on. Bernice never seems seriously to entertain the idea of getting back together, just as she mostly doesn’t entertain engaging with the mystery going on around her. Because ah yes, the plot.

This, too, comes with a lampshade attachment, as a Welcomer with the hots for Benny makes her aware that danger follows in her wake and (as the back cover describes) “[her] very presence here has raised this hotel’s insurance premiums by seven point two per cent.” We glance wryly at her recent adventures, noting that “other details, such as that business with the Bane Corporation, had actually been toned down for the sake of plausibility.” He speaks for us all when he asks “What type of jaunt do you reckon this is going to be, then?” Another one seems inevitable since “it’s the classic set-up. Professor Bernice Summerfield arrives intending to have a quiet couple of days in which she can finally do some academic work, and she finds herself in a luxurious and glamorous setting … The question is… who is going to be the first guest to get murdered?”

Sure enough, here be murders – or a murder at least, that of a likeable old war vet Benny meets hours before his death. The official investigation seems determined to end before it begins, which saves us the usual tired suspicions fired at our hero, and also hints at the book’s general shrugging attitude. Bernice is determined to help, but she is marginally more determined to write that bloody speech, instead palming the murder work onto a lethargic Jason and two jolly odd-job slackers, Seez and Soaz. (I hate the names.) Trying to wriggle out of the rigidly familiar Benny structure is the closest the book comes to not just shoving a lampshade on it, but it’s amusing (and yes, meta) to note that the plot doesn’t truly kick off, taking the pace with it, until Bernice makes a critical leap during her eventual off-the-cuff speech and finally abandons academia for plot instead. (Deciding once and for all, you might say, what type of jaunt this is.)

The last chunk of Beige Planet Mars is breathlessly exciting, opting for planet-shaking chaos and a countdown to destruction. But is it all just a big concession to formula, since messrs Parkin and Clapham apparently didn’t know the ending when they started writing? Indeed, I’m not sure they even got it all down, since one character – key to the human history of Mars and with a complicated past – slips through the final pages unnoticed, possibly forgotten. The motive of the villains, hastily retrofitted to seem not so bad after all, is about as convincing as Bernice when she gets to the end of the week and hastily pulls a speech out of her bum. And really, after all the prose about humans and what they’ve done to Mars and was it a good thing or a bad thing – a seemingly central conflict set up early when Bernice befriends a rival scholar – there are no prominent Martian characters to have their say. They don’t even lampshade their absence! Bizarre.

If my train of thought has been a little all over the place, that’s largely down to the book. Beige Planet Mars isn’t The Sword Of Forever weird, but it’s weird, delighting in mockery of local tropes and keen to play with the idea of escaping them, but not having anything concrete to say about where we are, whether that’s any good, where to next, or if it has any better ideas about all of the above. Still, it’s undeniably funny and exciting – with the one giving way rather bluntly to the other by the end, before the book inevitably shrugs and buggers off to the pub.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #102 – Decalog 4: Re: Generations edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Decalog 4: Re: Generations
Edited by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

One of the less celebrated parts of Virgin canon is the Decalog series, and now it continues (along with the New Adventures) without Doctor Who. You’d be forgiven for thinking the linking theme here is “The Doctor doesn’t turn up,” but it’s the Forrester family throughout history. (I love the title.) Honestly, that’s one of their better ideas. I’ve no idea how it’ll go.

*

Second Chances
By Alex Stewart

Sort of a murder mystery on a space station featuring Jack Forrester, an affable guy who mentally pilots a maintenance drone outside the station, and may or may not be dead. The main drive is not hunting the killer but settling on a future for Jack. This has some great sci-fi ideas like bouncing your consciousness into random technology (possibly inspired by the baddie in Original Sin?), and some good writing as a character does not initially realise they’ve died. It’s not exactly spectacular and there’s a bit too much description of people’s speaking tone, but it works very well as a short story.

*

No One Goes to Halfway There
By Kate Orman

Oh snap, Kate Orman’s in this? Here we find another Forrester working a somewhat menial space job, only Theresa Forrester feels a lot more like Roz, being abrasive to co-workers and rejecting her family’s influence and wishes. (If you really wanted to you could draw a parallel between the Forrester dynasty, Roz’s/Theresa’s friction with them, and the Doctor’s rejection of the Cousins in Lungbarrow.) Theresa has few close relationships but she is fond of another space-garbage hauler who goes missing. When she finds out what happened to him it’s bad news for the outpost named Halfway There, and possibly for Earth as well.

Pretty much any Orman is good Orman. This features her characteristic flair for playing with convention: the story flips between diary entries, scripted (and wonderfully interrupted) comms dialogue and normal narrative, with memories weaved in there too. Theresa really is a lot like Roz, and I’m not sure how deliberate that is. The story has a genuine threat and a sombre ending; the problem is an unknown force and there’s no magical Doctor to sort it out, so the characters must make do. Dashes of the writer’s endearingly cheesy humour (such as the garbage scow names, like Cash Scow) lighten a story that is sometimes unexpectedly visceral. It’s a cracking one-and-done.

NB: I’m pretty sure this is the first use of the f-word in any of these books (Decalog, NA or MA), swiftly followed by a second and a third use. I guess they don’t give an f-word any more.

*

Shopping For Eternity
By Gus Smith

This one doesn’t quite come off. Jon Forrester is a huckster. The (naturally sinister) Pabulum Corporation want to use his dubious skills to persuade ne'er-do-well colonists to find religion. (And also, the Corporation.) Despite an apparent spaceship crash and later an escape using just his wits, Pabulum are never far away and Jon ends up on the run for his life. Probably. (Do these Forresters ever make it to old age or, y’know, actually breed?)

The jaunty first person prose lets us into Jon’s head, but the other characters don’t work as well (particularly a silly space captain who throws Jon overboard for silliness reasons) and there’s too much then-this-happened-then-that-happened in the narrative. A few moments could have used a red pen, such as “I had other ideas. Seeing those exhibits on stage had given me an idea.” And “I thought of all the millions of light years I had travelled in space during my lifetime, and here I was, defeated by a few hundred metres of water. Ironic.” (Is it?)

It ends with a satirical swipe about shopping (see title) but with few actual consumers in the story this feels a bit random. Still, it’s all somewhat fun to read.

*

Heritage
By Ben Jeapes

Another one bites the dust. Did the Forresters desecrate an ancient burial site or something?

This is a tense, well written stand off on a “sleeper ship” arriving at a new world after centuries in space. Two generations of Forresters meet, one with less than savoury intentions for the ship and its cargo. There’s a hint of moustache-twirling here which is disappointing, and some moments of villainy seem to jump the gun due to the low page count. Billy Forrester is the star, the weight of responsibility for all the lives on board carving an immediate personality in her, and it ramps up to an impressive, if yet again bleak climax. It’s promising stuff, but jeez would you give a Forrester a break.

*

Burning Bright
By Liz Holliday

This one’s straight out of the New Adventures. Anjak Forrester is in law enforcement on a turbulent future world – so another Forrester that feels quite a bit like Roz, albeit younger. After the apparent death of her partner (okay, you’re taking the mickey now) she works with a disgraced cameraman to uncover a conspiracy that links frequent riots to drug abuse – and possibly the Psi-Powers arc? I’m nostalgic as hell right now.

Besides the latent NA-ness this is a tightly written story that whizzes by, despite being one of the book’s longer entries. Anjak’s family conflicts (now who does that remind me of) help define her and she has a nice rapport with Kenzie the cameraman, although it escalates a bit quickly once again because there’s only so many pages. I’ll let you guess whether Anjak has many Christmases to look forward to after this, but at least Liz Holliday orchestrates a fittingly heroic finale for her.

*

C₉H₁₃NO₃
By Peter Anghelides

Yuck. Kids, this is why you don’t write in second person. Peter Anghelides finds a reason for the device towards the end of this story – the title is as annoying as the prose, anyway it’s the formula for adrenaline – but that in no way makes up for constantly disorienting you and putting you at a distance from the main character. Second person seems designed to stay out of their head; it’s rarely done and, in a remarkable coincidence, is also a bloody stupid way to tell a story.

As for what this actually is, talky and unpleasant, mostly. Samuels and Bocx are on the run from synth humans. They find evidence of dangerous experimentation and for most of what follows, Samuels (you / the lifeless video game protagonist) just listens to expository dialogue about it. Bocx is our best shot at a character and the best thing you can say about him is that he seems to enjoy Virgin’s sudden lack of a swear filter. It ends with a revelation that explains the godawful narrative voice, then gives us more exposition, because in second person there’s sod all you can do but sit there and be told things.

It’s a strange mix of the fairly average and the totally unreadable. Thanks, I hate it.

NB: There is a Forrester in it, but don’t panic, he’s dying.

*

Approximate Time Of Death
By Richard Salter

Phew, another good one. Our Forrester du jour is Mark, who runs a family business that makes food easier to transport across space. A hostile takeover looms and, in possibly the most on-the-nose plot development in Decalog 4, he has received death threats. An Adjudicator (Rachel not-a-Forrester) investigates.

This is a confidently written, craftily plotted was-it-a-murder mystery that warrants a second reading. Rachel comes across as very smart, particularly when wheedling cooperation from a news anchor by threatening to keep him in holding just long enough that his replacement might make a good impression on the public. The Forresters once again have some bad news for the family quilt, but a quick reference at the end reminds us that one of them may actually breed at some point. Anyway, this story’s a winner.

*

Secrets Of The Black Planet
By Lance Parkin

This one’s quite interesting. A sleekly futuristic story featuring taxis that cry over movies and Special Editions of films with higher “emotional definition,” it follows Kent Forrester, brother of the more influential Troy, whose film about Nelson Mandela has (among other things) led to possibly getting the highest office available. He wants to remake his Mandela movie with greater accuracy and he tasks Kent with the research. The consequences are serious, and they come around a bit too quickly. Guess that’s short stories for you.

Parkin gets an immediate feel for the complex racial politics at play here, including the ballsy conceit of Mandela being retrofitted into the man who introduced apartheid in order to strengthen the (at this time) black-led society. Equally eyebrow-raising is the idea that the Forresters are descended from Mandela, but the fact that this seems to be the first I’m hearing about it is surely a clue...

With plentiful ideas and challenging themes, this is rewarding. A pity it’s only 20-odd pages.

*

Rescue Mission
By Paul Leonard

Well that was, er, lovely, wasn’t it?

Abe Forrester lives with his little sister, ailing mother and daydreaming father on a run down colony world. They would all like to escape to a better place, but Abe passes the time merrily enough in flights of fancy and the prose goes along with him, wallowing pleasantly in details as Paul Leonard often does. Then Abe’s sister Callie goes missing. Abe eventually figures out a conspiracy that led to this.

Leonard’s story escalates into a full blown horror movie about (I think?) snuff films, and it’s brutally nasty stuff. This hurts even more after the quite wistful writing about life on the colony, crap as the place is; there’s nothing as sad as betrayed children. I wonder if there was a less extreme avenue this story could have gone down. It’s a bit much, in terms of believability and taste, but it’s certainly not poorly written. Inevitably this is one of the more memorable stories. It’s probably very good, but still, good grief.

*

Dependence Day
By Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Finally we check in with Leabie Forrester, Divine Empress of Earth, in the aftermath of So Vile A Sin. How are things? Unsurprisingly, not great.

A historian, Tranlis, has nearly finished documenting the lives of the Forresters and Leabie is his last port of call. He finds a dead empire, a ruined palace, an old and weakening empress in name only. Oh, and cannibal gangs. Some mysterious aliens have arrived seemingly to hand out food parcels, but something is amiss.

This is funereal stuff, but beautiful in its way. We almost end on a note of hope, though naturally this is qualified with cynicism, and by the time we get to it there’s already been another family tragedy for the Forresters. (It’s as gruesome as the climax of the previous story.)

There’s a hint of mechanism in having the last story feature a guy documenting the Forrester history, but it makes enough sense. His final act is a bit implausible – let’s just say he really wants an ending for his book – but the story’s not really about him. Roz’s spirit makes a literal and figurative appearance and she makes an important difference once more, which is quite fitting.

I’m not sure I wanted this post-script, but it’s a well written piece.

*

Taking Doctor Who out of the equation has been good for the storytelling here, removing the usual constraints of needing to arrive, introduce self, find problem, solve it in under 40 pages. These tales are more grounded in people’s lives and by and large, they’re excellent. That said, they are generally very downbeat to the point where it seems surprising that the Forresters made it this far. Perhaps that’s the point – triumph over adversity – but each generation is so separate, with little to no immediate link between ancestors and their actions in these stories, that it feels more like random people who cannot catch a damn break. Certainly the concept of the Forresters as an elite family with great influence is kept to the sidelines, as much as it was by Roz herself.

Is it a good collection? Yes. The quality is perhaps more consistent than any earlier Decalog, and it’s certainly the best use of a linking theme so far. I would recommend it. But all the same, once in a while it would be nice if the sun came out.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #99 – The Dying Days by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#61
The Dying Days
By Lance Parkin

I’ve said a lot about Virgin losing the Doctor Who license but, forgive me, there’s a little more in the tank. They had achieved so much with it already. Done so much with the Seventh Doctor, with Ace and with new characters created right here on the page. Then they stuck the landing as if it was always meant to end here, leading gracefully towards the TV Movie and books written by somebody else – and not before giving a blockbusting Answer to the Doctor’s Question. All that, only to get as far as the doorway and turn, Columbo-like, to say “One more thing.” And then drop the first new Eighth Doctor novel, beating BBC Books by two months.

You absolute badasses.

It would be wrong to think of The Dying Days as merely an encore, although it certainly is one, affectionately tipping its hat to what had been created since the first (sometimes wobbly) steps of the Timewyrm saga. And it doesn’t stop at the book stuff. The Eighth Doctor makes it a fannish book by default, not to mention adding the fan-favourite Ice Warriors, the Brigadier and oh go on then, Bessie as well. There’s a host of references to old Who episodes, such as a plot that revolves around Martians and spaceflight (meaning we must first rule out The Ambassadors Of Death); the UK space centre as seen in The Android Invasion; Brigadier Bambera, armed with her catchphrase “Shame!” and her off-screen husband Ancelyn; Colonel Crichton, seen in The Five Doctors and Virgin’s Downtime; and assorted alien races mentioned by the Brigadier as having invaded while the Doctor was AWOL. The air of geekdom expands even further at points, with Bernard Quatermass showing up to argue with Patrick Moore, and numerous references to The X-Files (including a cameo from Gillian Anderson, as Bernice meets an amusingly 1997 roll-call of celebs that also includes Chris Evans, Princess Diana and Mystic Meg). The plot not-so-unconsciously recalls The War Of The Worlds, especially with an astronomer named Ogilvy around.

Inevitably – justifiably – there are nods to the New Adventures as well. Page 1 has the opening salvo “Kadiatu and aM!xitsa had dropped [Bernice] off at the Doctor’s house on Allen Road” (!), and much of the action occupies that mysterious New Adventures home base. Bernice is at one point mistaken for Emma Thompson – a visual reference for her character – and she picks up a pair of hoop earrings, just like old times. The Virgin book Who Killed Kennedy was already sort of in-universe canon, but that’s fully rubber stamped here as the head of MI5 laments that book’s incendiary revelations, name-checks both authors (including the real one) and orders the publishers to be raided and closed – providing, if you want, a canon explanation for why the range ended. Later, just showing off now, Bernice’s diary says “I’m copying the next bit from a history book, a fat blue paperback with a scary eye on the cover”. So A History Of The Universe by Lance Parkin, author of, let me see… The Dying Days. If it were any more self-aware you’d turn the page to find the Eye Of Sauron bellowing I SEE YOU.

If you can do this stuff well, then bon voyage. And The Dying Days does it very well, because all of that’s really secondary to a tightly plotted book with a lot to do. There’s a gentle opening where Bernice waits for the Doctor, who is typically late and turns up while she’s in the shower, because god damn it. After a pleasant bit of fangirling when Paul McGann turns up (on Page 8, athankyo), things get briskly on track with a helicopter crash and an escaped multiple murderer. We immediately spiral into a government conspiracy, an ill-fated mission to Mars, and drumroll… a Martian invasion. Those two words are perhaps the most straightforward B-movie plot you could dream of, but Parkin keeps it interesting by staggering the pace, having the Martians arrive about 48 hours sooner than anyone (including the Doctor) realises, and then not having an all-out attack until the last act.

The Martian ship just hangs there. The drama becomes more political with a British conspiracy to aid the Martians, a coup, a plan to betray the other side (naturally planned by both sides), and the sublime ridiculousness of Ice Warriors setting up shop in the Tower Of London – and a Martian being crowned King of England, with severely ill-fitting jewellery. There’s always a little voice in the back of your head while reading this, guiltily saying alien invaders action movie. It seems like a mark of confidence to do something so brazenly obvious with such pizzazz. It’s a shame no one’s ever adapted it to audio or television, because damn it, I need that Ice Warrior coronation scene.

Still, an adaptation would lose much of the colour. It’s often very funny, particularly an observation that the Ice Warriors are helping to reduce VAT. More generally, one of the strengths of Parkin’s writing is his ability to patiently set a scene and make it relatable, which results in great tracts of memorable prose more often than zingy individual lines. There’s a brilliant bit about the sounds of London, and how they’re as ever-present and unnoticed as your heartbeat, which spirals off into the panic you suddenly feel on realising your body is mostly automatic and your ability to stop caring moments afterwards, which pulls back suddenly to the absence of sound in London.

The Martians themselves are rendered with colour and thoughtfulness, which is a godsend as their trajectory has been in a decline since The Curse Of Peladon suggested some of them might actually be nice – and no one has agreed since. It’s clear from The Dying Days that Mars is on the way out, and a coalition with Earth might be in their best interests. They have good reason to, for example, go to another planet and eye up their resources – whether or not that’s the right thing to do when there’s already an intelligent species using them. Although they are aggressors here, a fact further tangled by the British conspiracy to use them for their own ends, they never feel like stereotypical villains. (The morality gets further complicated – or possibly, less – when it turns out the warlord Xznaal has his own plans against Mars.) Bernice’s presence and expertise help this along greatly: her utter horror at having killed an Ice Warrior triggers immediate sobbing, and she’s able to speak to a Martian in his own language about a recent catastrophe on his own world, even after he has tied her up. Parkin also takes his time relating the different atmospheric conditions of Earth vs. Mars, and the physical toll it takes on the Martians in several scenes that sympathetically follow the enormous creatures as they exit their ship.

We often segue into treating all of this as historical fact, either directly via Bernice’s diary or just in the prose, which anchors the action nicely. There’s some lovely satire in the way the Martians are dealing directly only with the UK, a fact that at first causes great relief among the other world powers, then a twinge of jealousy that they weren’t the ones chosen to make first contact. (And then relief again when things go pear-shaped.) Life carries on in the UK, with postcards of the Martian ship appearing almost instantly in shops. The papers react in their typical way, particularly The Telegraph with “ET OUR FRIENDS, BUT THE EU ARE NOT.” (!) The sudden exodus of citizens to other nations, and the creeping suspicion that Britain is going to isolate itself from the world, feels prescient for a number of unfortunate reasons. But even getting your head out of the news, all of this is ripe for a disaster scenario; look at Day Of The Triffids, which is as full of wry observations as empty streets.

Where it really counts, The Dying Days is not an action movie or an encore. It’s a changing of the guard. This applies most obviously to the Doctor, who gets less than 300 pages under the Virgin banner – so it’s no good waiting around for Paul Cornell to define this guy. And we waste no time. The Doctor here is bright, direct and dismissive of his earlier self’s need to plan ahead, which as he notes, did not help in the end. (I think that’s a bit of a stretch, as it was the Seventh Doctor’s abandonment of planning – or checking the bloody scanner screen – that got him shot and hospitalised. But Eight is only making the same life-choice as Seven in that case, so it’s at least consistent.) We get to see his darker, angrier side which wasn’t possible in the TV Movie, as he dismisses killing the Martians, then subsequently warns one not to attack or it’ll die, kills it in self-defence, visibly regrets this and then just carries on. He gets a nicely dramatic “I AM TALKING!” moment when facing off against the Martian King at the end, and he generally displays all his important hallmarks, laced with an urgency and lack of duplicity that marks him out from his predecessor.

The whole sequence where the Martians use a targeted gas to kill him, which malfunctions and starts killing an entire village, is like the Doctor’s mission statement. He races towards it, fully intending to die so it’ll stop what it’s doing. Before he can do that he finds a cat in trouble, makes sure it’s safe, and then gladly offers death a jelly baby. It’s one of the book’s highlights. “Because when it comes down to it, doctors save lives and any life is worth saving.” See also, the gorgeous summary of the Doctor’s need for Bernice (and companions) in the first place: “He couldn’t travel the universe fighting monsters alone, he had told her; the magic dragon couldn’t be brave without the little boy.”

Parkin leans into the light, fun side of McGann’s take on the character, including a few playful nods to the TV Movie such as “‘You’re an alien, are you?’ ‘Well, yes and no,’ he replied evasively.” He does odd little Doctory things, like remind us the way to the his hearts is through his pockets: “The Doctor was rummaging through his pockets and producing his usual assortment of junk: a cricket ball, an elephant feather, a bag of koala nuts, a big ball of string, a piece of the True Cross, even a dog whistle.” His rapport with Bernice is instantly different to what it was, starting with his appearance. “Doctor, your new body is very... well, I say “very” – that doesn’t mean that I personally think... I mean, compared to the way you used to look, of course, but not everything goes on looks. But when it comes to the initial, y’know...’ She blushed, realising she might be implicating herself here.” He’s “a little brother or first boyfriend, not a father,” evidenced by the hilariously blunt moment when they need to wheedle computer access from an uncooperative man running an Internet café, and the Doctor’s plan amounts to: “‘Well you’re not a little girl any more...’ ‘I beg your pardon?’” (This ends up being an agreement to watch sci-fi movies with the guy.) And there are some moments that go some way to defining him as his own Doctor, in particular his rejection of forward planning, and a dizzying sequence where he must survive a great fall by using whatever is to hand; the sudden dash through his memories, and then his pockets, is reminiscent of the Doctor’s mind palace in Heaven Sent, but it also feels craftily like an opposite approach to exhaustive planning. The Doctor that follows Sylvester McCoy could scarcely be defined any better.

For a noticeable stretch of The Dying Days it appears that the Doctor has died, and most of the action is given to Bernice. As we saw in Eternity Weeps, and just generally whenever she’s around, she can carry a book. Unfailingly witty but deep of feeling, she’s able to mask her terror with delightful dialogue: “‘Hello,’ she said weakly, holding up a lit match. ‘Beware the power of my mighty weapon. Sorry, it’s the best I can do.’” Her determination to reason with the Martians matches the Doctor’s, and she just has that indefinable quality that makes her one of the most interesting things in any room she’s in – which is bloody handy, as she’ll soon become the main character. (“To the adventures of Professor Bernice Summerfield,’ the Doctor declared.” Quite.) After finding a job offer as the chair of archaeology on the planet Dellah, she finally moves her stuff out of the TARDIS and sets up shop. The Doctor gives her his old umbrella; the dodgy novelty-equivalent-of-a-torch is passed, and the new era can begin. (And yes, she snogs him because she’d “never forgive herself otherwise”, and it’s hinted that they sleep together. It’s now or never, I guess, but then it’s open-ended enough to draw your own conclusions. My two cents, I don’t think either of them would have gone through with it.)

There have been many endings for the New Adventures. The characters finished their arcs in The Room With No Doors. The Doctor said goodbye to his past in Lungbarrow. The publishers said goodbye to the Doctor with So Vile A Sin. It’s all been said – especially and at length by me, soz – and The Dying Days doesn’t need to say it again directly, because as the afterword mentions, there are still going to be New Adventures of a different kind. But there is still time for an affectionate and subtle goodbye in the form of the Brigadier, who gets possibly his best role in the books to date.

He’s well characterised, sharing a lovely rapport with Doris, particularly when sheltering a famed mass murderer: “‘You trust him?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Then I trust him. I’m going to hide our axe, though.’” His attitude to the Doctor has never been clearer, particularly when waiting behind in Bessie during a heavy bombing, even though the rest of his forces have gone, because he knows they will need the Doctor to win. (“From that moment until his retirement, Lethbridge-Stewart knew only two things for certain: the world depended on him, and he could trust the Doctor.”) His sometimes simple bravery triggers a few eye-rolls from the rest of UNIT, and even he thinks of his and his colleagues’ glory days as being able to “solve the world's problems with a mug of cocoa each and a telephone between them”. The world has moved on, and this is undoubtedly a last hoorah – although Parkin makes it clear that the events of Happy Endings are still to come for him. And he’s okay with this part of his life coming to an end because, well:

“His successors were going to do sterling work, probably even better than his own. But he liked to think that he’d set a high standard for them. Hopefully, in years to come, people would say that he had lived up to his illustrious ancestry, and that by and large he’d done a good job. He knew that he’d had a good innings, and despite the old saying, he’d neither died nor faded away. Retirement wasn’t so bad, not on those terms.”

And there, typically, Lance Parkin says it best.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #83 – Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#29

Cold Fusion

By Lance Parkin

NB: I’m breaking publication order for this one as the blurb puts it squarely after Return Of The Living Dad.  I’m swapping out The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang which won’t cause any ripples coming later in the run.

Talk about a hard sell.  Virgin’s first bona fide multi-Doctor story, directly crossing over the New and Missing Adventures, written by an up-and-comer whose last novel everybody loved?  I mean, sure, if you happen to like that sort of thing.

Cold Fusion is an event book, so you’ll probably want to read it whether or not you’ve read any reviews.  I really had no idea what it was about or what kind of story it was – although it’s a fair bet this is a multi-Doctor story more in the vein of “they both happen to be there” than “all of time and space is on the blink AND ONE DOCTOR ISN’T ENOUGH”.  That’s good, as the latter is difficult to do well.  I’m only surprised it took them this long.  (There was apparently an imperative not to write multi-Doc books, but then at the same time there were more Doctor cameos in Virgin than you ever got on television.*  Work that one out.)

Cold Fusion is primarily a Fifth Doctor book – it is a Missing Adventure after all – with the Seventh Doctor sneaking around the outskirts.  That’s a neat way to approach a multi-Doctor thing, and it suits McCoy who has doubled down on deviousness in the New Adventures.  But it does mean you’re not getting much multi-Doctor bang for your buck.  There’s something pointed and interesting about using these Doctors – Davison having just regenerated, young and idealistic, plus McCoy getting older, more cynical and pragmatic.  But Lance Parkin has his work cut out just finding something for the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, Adric, the Doctor, Chris and Roz to do.  Making sure two out of that lot spend time trading insults does not seem like a priority, and a “Whose side is he on?” dichotomy perhaps needed somewhat equal screen time devoted to each side.  McCoy sits most of the book out, so there isn’t much ideological sword-crossing.

After the TARDIS reacts to something wrong in the vortex, the Doctor (Davison) and co. arrive on an ice planet mostly known for scientific research.  It is ruled by the Scientifica, who are so goal-driven that they have slaves and roll their eyes when people complain about it.  One of them, Whitfield, is very interested in a strange machine that seems to pre-date known human civilisation.  Incidentally (or not), there have been sightings of “ghosts” nearby.

A large number of Adjudicators are on the planet, ostensibly to deal with a terrorist element attacking the Scientifica, but this is clearly and suspiciously overkill.  Nyssa meet a conspicuous and slightly randy blond gentleman investigating all this (Chris, duh) and Adric ends up working with a gruff ex-Adjudicator (Roz).  Tegan and the Doctor soon make the acquaintance of a distressed lady Time Lord, Patience, and then make their way towards a shadowy figure who seems to be pulling the strings.  Probably with the crook of his brolly.

This book has one of those plots where a lot of individual things seem to be happening, yet somehow they don’t knit together into a single, forward-moving plot.  I never felt like the story properly “started” – the characters just move around and meet up in various combinations until it’s time for the denouement, which is surprisingly rushed at that.  The nature of the “ghosts” is revealed too near the end; an apocalyptic event is averted via the Doctors playing “contact” and casually saying it’s been averted; a neat solution is manufactured literally by magic; and then the remaining problem neatly blows itself up quick-smart as well.  By that time I’d lost interest in what all the Adjudicators were up to or what was going on with Adam, the planet’s resident terrorist-or-maybe-freedom-fighter.  Questions such as the nature of Patience, who exits the story rather shockingly but without dwelling on that for some reason, are left for future books.  I’d lost track of where Nyssa, Tegan and Adric even were.

An obvious problem here is hype, and it’s debatable whether that rests on Lance Parkin.  A multi-Doctor story carries certain expectations, and it’s no exaggeration to say the Doctors only share thirty-odd pages near the end.  Mixing the New and Missing Adventures is an intriguing idea – although the waters are pretty muddy with some MA writers playing up the blood and horror elements you didn’t get on TV – and Cold Fusion does this quite well in the last burst of pages.  The two Doctors have their own approaches to the problem, with McCoy wryly commenting on his younger self’s fondness for suicidal selflessness, which contrasts tragically against his own cold manipulations in the final chapter.  But there isn’t enough time to really make something of that, with Davison literally getting knocked unconscious before they can have it out.  (Admittedly it's very funny.)  Other ideas, like the true nature of the ghosts, are certainly interesting but not made enough of.  The running theme of robots with unusual temperaments and jobs – such as an analytical Freudroid, and a robot with a chipper northern accent – is very welcome, but feels a bit too much like a random sprinkling of colour.

It’s a little schizophrenic to compare this to Just War, as it’s not trying to be a remotely similar book.  However, we do know from Just War that Parkin can be brilliant at character development – that was a seminal story for Bernice, and there was some lovely Roz stuff too.  The groaning cast list here precludes any heavy-lifting character work, so we instead opt for random blobs of it.  The text observes a few times that the Fifth Doctor and his companions have been together less than a week, with Adric puzzlingly believing he’s only known the Doctor at all for “a couple of weeks”.  There’s a funny bit where Davison ponders the length of his hair, which fluctuated between his first and second stories due to the shooting order.  (Nerrrrrrd!)  There’s a nice moment where Tegan contemplates her past and what she hopes to do in her future.  Nyssa discovers that a Traken colony has survived, which cheers her up a bit – and is perhaps meant to explain what is, when all’s said and done, a pretty placid Nyssa considering what happened to her.  On a darker note, Roz accidentally kills a man and then convinces herself that it was necessary.  And McCoy is unavoidably confronted with Adric, and must not say anything about what will happen to him.  At first this is shrugged off – par for the course – but we do get this lovely sequence: “The Doctor was more relaxed around Adric than anyone else she’d ever seen.  He watched him, was interested in what he was doing.  Like a grandfather playing with his grandson.  The Doctor’s eyes betrayed a sadness of some kind, some deep regret that he was leaving unvoiced.”

It functions reasonably well as a New Adventure, with Chris and Roz babysitting the Doctor’s earlier companions (in Chris’s case, hilariously almost spoiling what happens to Adric – awkward), although the Doctor’s ultimately callous attitude towards the villains is thrown into maybe too light relief by Parkin playing up his whimsical aspect.  I guess this is to help mark him out from the Fifth Doctor.  (Incidentally, I couldn’t find anything to put this right after Return Of The Living Dad.  The blooming romance between Chris and Roz is nowhere to be seen; otherwise couldn’t this take place anywhere, sans Benny?  EDIT: It’s actually more to do with The Death Of Art, up next, which uses these events to create a fun bit with Chris.)  It’s an at times very thoughtful Missing Adventure, occupying that space right after Castrovalva when all this is new to his companions, and to the Doctor himself.  At the risk of becoming a broken record, however, we don’t really delve into it.  The Doctor could use Patience as a way to come down from his own experience, but they don’t talk enough to make it happen.  The Big Finish audio Psychodrome does a rather natty job with the same time-frame, opening the collective wound a bit more.

The guest cast have very little room to distinguish themselves.  Whitworth, the scientist, espouses the values of the Scientifica and is dating one of the Adjudicators, but beyond that I got nothin’.  She does make some pretty chilling observations about transmats, and how they literally involve creating a whole new self every time you “arrive”.  (A sequence later on describes what happens when it goes wrong, in case you weren’t already creeped out.)  Adam The Friendly Terrorist shows up for a scene or two and then promptly buggers off again; the only thing I registered was his friend, a shark-person named Quint, for obvious reasons.  Patience ought to be the book’s biggest coup, and there is something to be said for the Time Lord world-building that seems to follow her around.  We learn (although it may not be 100% accurate) that the Doctor took Susan away from Gallifrey because she was woman-born, and Time Lords don’t allow that (see Time’s Crucible); Patience suffered something similar, and may or may not be back somehow later on.  Interesting as this stuff is – and there’s a casual-as-you-like reference to the House of Lungbarrow as well – Patience literally doesn’t say anything for most of it, and is then very abruptly taken out of the picture.  So what exactly was all that in aid of?  She could be a telepathic bag of flour.

Livening all this up – if, like me, you find the gradual moving of chess pieces unexciting – are a number of evocative action sequences, including a bloody robot attack at the start, an unusually conscientious train robbery, an avalanche and best of all, a space station hurtling towards a planet.  The writing of that last piece is spectacular, likening the approaching station to a marble, a tennis ball, a melon and so on until it’s impossibly vast.  There are also quite a few light-hearted moments, particularly when Chris first makes himself known using the surname Jovanka and an outrageous Aussie accent, outraging Tegan; there’s some funny confusion over whether the Doctor has regenerated in the course of the story, with McCoy asking if he has become “all frock-coat and youthful appeal?  Well, perhaps I did but I haven’t yet.”  (Yes, it’s a Five Doctors gag.  How apt!)  And there’s a bit where the two Doctors both reverse the polarity, nabbing Steven Moffat’s “confusing the polarity” joke 17 years early.  Nicely done.

I wish I could think of more to say about it.  I wish I liked it more.  It’s not as if I hated Cold Fusion, but it wasn’t the book I was hoping for – even though I couldn’t specifically tell you what book that was.  There are many deftly-written moments here, like the action and the occasional bit of comedy, and even scene transitions which you would ordinarily take for granted but are given clever attention here.  And there are many good ideas, like the Scientifica and the ghosts and the whole concept of the Doctor at two points in his life, dealing with the same crisis and reaching different conclusions.  You could do so much with that.  Cold Fusion maybe tries to do too much, and ends up not doing much with any of it.

6/10

* Did I miss anyone?

* Genesys had Pertwee helping by proxy.

* Apocalypse had a Troughton flashback.

* Revelation had several Doctors in his own head.  No Troughton or Colin, IIRC.

* Love And War has a very grim Pertwee memory.

* Blood Heat had Pertwee’s corpse.

* Tragedy Day had prequel material with Hartnell.

* Legacy had a prequel scene with Perters.

* All-Consuming Fire had Hartnell and Pertwee pop up.

* State Of Change – see Genesys.  (Spotted the favourite cameo yet?)

* Downtime had a few Doctors visiting Victoria, notably Tom and Pertwee.  Pat appeared in a flashback.

* Head Games had a rather unhappy Sixth Doctor cameo.  He’s also insinuated in Love And War and Return Of The Living Dad.

* Cold Fusion has memories of Hartnell, Troughton and Tom.