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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#26

Interference, Book Two: The Hour of the Geek

By Lawrence Miles

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

Mostly yes to both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#25

Interference, Book One: Shock Tactic

By Lawrence Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #11 – Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#6
Alien Bodies
By Lawrence Miles

So then. Alien Bodies. Bit of a big deal, as these things go. It’s The Lawrence Miles Book That Everyone Likes, which is no small feat. Plus it’s stuffed to the gills with lore and ideas, much of which will go on to inform the Eighth Doctor Adventures later. It’s sort of like the BBC Books equivalent of Timewyrm: Revelation, showing up in a puff of colourful smoke to say — well that’s all good fun as far as it goes, but what are we doing here, what’s it all for?

The range editors must have sat up very straight when Lawrence Miles (I’m presuming it was him) suggested we see the Doctor’s funeral. Well, if you wanted to look to the future, how’s that? It certainly kicks the dust out of the tyres to gallop so far ahead, then drop that clanger right into the present so the Doctor can react to it here and now. The Doctor of Alien Bodies is still coming to terms with his latest regeneration. (“He wanted to be a force of nature again, he wanted to be the incredible escaping equation all the time, but instead he was trapped in a half-human body with a baby-face and floppy curls.”) Knowing for sure that he’s going to snuff it might well help with his sense of identity.

Events conspire against him on that front — but like Miles, I’ve jumped ahead. I should have mentioned that the Doctor becomes inveigled in an auction for an ancient relic, and that it turns out the relic is his corpse. Naturally this creates great interest. (Just imagine all the Whovians trying to get access.) Only the auctioneer, a slippery figure called Mr Qixotl, knows that the bloke in the green velvet with the brown curls is the Doctor; for obvious reasons he is keen that this stays a secret. Uninvited and unwelcome, the Doctor skirts around the edges of events. It feels like he has trespassed in somebody else’s book. Heck, there are more than two Doctors in Alien Bodies — we meet one at the start, then we see a future one later who may or may not also be the one in the casket — which pushes Dr. Number Eight, as Paul often puts it, even further from the spotlight.

If he is not always in front of you, however, he is still often on your mind. Alien Bodies has a stacked guest cast, and you might well notice certain patterns about them. There’s the two officers from UNISYC: a dotty old explorer and his young, female, insecure-but-capable second in command who does all the work. There’s a legit Time Lord and his futuristic, disguised-as-a-humanoid-female TARDIS, who share a professional bond but appear to be in denial about caring for each other at all. (They do though.) And there’s a couple of spooky cultists who arrive in what is, when all’s said and done, a TARDIS, albeit one that operates on black magic. The operator is an aloof young woman and her second is a grubby, angry up and comer. Lots of double acts here, all sort of… mirroring something. Hmm! At a time when the Doctor is (apparently) unsure of himself, it’s interesting to surround him with echoes and surrogates.

Of course he’s only half the equation, and all of this is just as revealing about the symbiotic heart of all these stories, showing just how easily that balance can go wrong. The strongest Eighth Doctor books so far — in true Star Trek movie style it’s the even-numbered ones — have been very interested in the relationship between the Doctor and the companion. I’ve struggled a bit with Sam, sometimes feeling that she’s more a companion-shaped placeholder than a person. (I know that’s not entirely fair or accurate, but it’s my general impression of her.) Well, either they decided to turn a bug into a feature or that was the plan all along, because Sam is confirmed to be something along those lines here. Again I’m getting ahead of myself, but why not: it’s revealed in Alien Bodies that Sam is somehow living the wrong life, or rather a version of it that involves the Doctor, with a separate set of biodata that never met him, and never became the sort of person who would tear off in the TARDIS. Where this is going, I don’t exactly know, although Miles plays amusingly fast and loose with the concept even here. Has Sam been manipulated by a third party? On some level, the Doctor doubts it. Is the Doctor somehow influencing time and space to bring about someone like her? It’s proposed, but who knows. (And frankly, that sounds like a fib.) The wider supporting point that the Doctor always needs someone around, or-does-a-tree-falling-make-a-sound etc, feels earnest enough, but I dunno. Watch this space I guess. And there we are! Seated and interested in where the series is going. Job’s a good’un.

The downside to this is the trade off between very interesting (and it is!) context and yer actual, pound for pound scenes with these characters. Sam’s psychoanalysis plays out very much externally in a nightmarish sequence with blood-coloured duplicates, and it’s shared with Lieutenant Bregman (the junior UNISYC officer) who undergoes something similar. The whole biodata thing is then discussed over Sam, between the “antibody” version of her and later on, the Doctor. Sam herself impacts the novel like a small stone impacting a window. I’ll be honest, this was a little disappointing. I wish Miles had found a way to make this turning point for Sam more, you know, Sam’s turning point. But it’s a very busy book and I guess something had to give.

I mean, look at all those characters. And we do, taking time out to hear each of their stories. These are all quite interesting, but they mostly serve to set up the wider stakes in the world of these books. Because oh yes, the Time Lords have got competition.

Quick sidebar: I’ve read Alien Bodies before. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to say it was back when I were a nipper and this was all trees as far as the eye could see. I was an adult when I first read this one. More or less.) Alien Bodies is The One That Introduces Faction Paradox, aka the creepy cult version of the Time Lords. And for some reason my brain decided in the intervening years that they were the book’s antagonists. I mean, they are antagonists, but they’re not the enemy the Time Lords are facing. The unspecified Enemy (no name, ooooh) have beaten them back so much that the Doctor’s corpse (and all its weird upgrades) could seriously turn the tide of war. Their agents include anarchitects, beings who can rearrange and delete matter, such as buildings.

Miles had by this point already toyed with the idea of unimaginable wars across time and space in Down, and he would go on to perfect it in Dead Romance. (Where amusingly, for rights reasons, the Time Lords are the unnamed party.) All of this strangeness is much more my preference for what a Time War should look and sound like than, to pick a totally random example, Time Lords Vs Daleks, done for the simple virtue that you’ve heard of both of them. (Ever the time traveller, Miles manages to rip the piss out of that idea nearly a decade before the TV series did it: “Earth had been lucky, too. It had been invaded, yes, but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments. The Time Lords, meanwhile, were up against something really dangerous.”)

The Enemy — who don’t exactly appear in Alien Bodies, for much the same reason we’re not resolving the Sam crisis right now — are not the only oddities. Alien Bodies is bursting with possibilities, including a third party in the war, the Celestis: descendants of Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency who took themselves out of time and corporeal reality and mostly use zombies as their agents. Look at characters like Mr Trask (a zombie) and Mr Shift (a concept of language who floats through people’s perceptions in a way that is distinct each time it happens and also distinct from the bits where Miles has chunks of prose acting like dialogue, sometimes in conversation, which in itself is very hard to pull off). Look again at that secondary Time Lord and his female TARDIS, the gently impressive pushing along of that technology. And look at bloody Faction Paradox! A gross, creepy, upside down version of Time Lord orthodoxy where the ultimate punishment is erasure through self-murder. They don’t, contrary to my wrong memories, figure all that hugely in Alien Bodies, but it’s still a hell of an impact, and I can see why they encouraged further study. (And having them not be the novel’s be all, end all is just more of a flex. This is one of its ideas. There are other flexes, like the intriguing early setup for a Brigadoon-style disappearing city, which is explained pages later as a simple trick that Mr Qixotl “doubted anyone would have noticed.”)

I’ve complained before (who, me?) about Lawrence Miles’s tendency to have ideas and just sort of sit in them. Alien Bodies… well, it does do that, quite frankly. Don’t worry, we’re not swerving into “actually Alien Bodies is terrible” here, but it’s worth saying that all of this creativity and setup is not what you’d call a very forward moving plot. The auction is called; the interested parties arrive; the Doctor, rather inconveniently, is there too; several parties stir up trouble; trouble overflows until it explodes and then the Doctor does a thing. I did reach a certain point in Alien Bodies where I thought, oh this is it, isn’t it, plot-wise? And the frequent diversions to hear this person’s story or that tenuously sentient form of language’s story made it a bit of a higgledy-piggledy read at times, although I don’t remember that being the case when I first read it. (Back when I were only twenty-one and this were all trees m’lad, etc etc, music from that Hovis advert.) I suspect my attention span has shifted (Shifted?) a bit over the years, or perhaps it’s just the accumulated weight of 130-odd Doctor bloody Who books rattling around my head now, but anyway, dash through Alien Bodies I did not. Although I highly enjoyed paddling through it.

And that’s the last big thing I’ve not mentioned yet. Alien Bodies is somehow really really fun. It’s pleased as punch most of the time, despite the sepulchral, well, everything, frequently letting these events and characters be funny even when the situation is creepy. Look at the Doctor’s funeral, which comes with a joke about how this omnipotent focal point of the universe can still bugger up a timer. Look at the Doctor’s first scene, when he escapes an assassination attempt by diving out of a window into the TARDIS parked 90 degrees up against a wall. (Was Moffat taking notes?) Mr Qixotl is perhaps the funnest single thing here, and you do get to care about the sneaky little git despite, well, him. But then the rivalry between Time Lords and Faction Paradox — big, lore-y stuff! — is allowed to mostly play out as bitchiness. There are plenty of honest to god goofy little jokes sprinkled about as well, mostly the kind that would specifically tickle a Whovian, like the Doctor’s quasi-mystical relationship with his pockets, or the Raston lap-dancing robots (“the most perfect dancing machines ever devised”), or what appears to be a lightning-fast dig at War Of The Daleks (“My Dalek history’s always been a bit rusty. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t keep changing all the time”), or the big joke that everyone remembers about Alien Bodies that even now, wading in spoilers, I don’t want to spoil just in case, which then pivots into possibly a meta comment on the previous unavailability of certain characters, and then becomes a clever reinvention of a crap baddie.

So, it’s a fun one, especially for long term fans. But it also manages to be quite sweet about the old two-hearted sod, at least occasionally in between all the buffoonish facsimiles, the winking references and horrible blood rituals. My memory had no trouble preserving the Doctor’s funeral for Laika, his rage about her mistreatment, the unspoken bond he feels with the lost dog. That truly has stayed with me ever since. I had though, delightfully, forgotten Mr Qixotl’s cheeky hint that despite all this fuss over his casket, the Doctor of the future might have pulled a fast one after all and not even be in there.

Alien Bodies then. It’s a lot. At the same time it is strangely small, with the zesty pluck of a murder mystery. (And speaking of Bernice, he manages to sneak in a reference to Tyler’s Folly from Down, one of the Bernice Summerfield NAs. I read them all so I guess it’s my job to spot these things.) Normally that’s just what I’m after, but — at the risk of angering the gestalt — I do think Alien Bodies could have been stronger. The hall of mirrors approach to characterisation has its ups and downs, and I could have got more of a feel for Sam in this — indeed, that felt like the point of her story here. Also, I know it seems picky to criticise a Doctor Who book for being more in love with the idea of the Doctor as a general concept than with the McGann version specifically, and I don’t even think he’s poorly served here, getting flourishes of anger and cleverness that would glitter on any Doctor’s resume, but — might as well be honest here — it’s a just plain very crowded book and he’s only one part of it.

Hey, every book deserves the occasional poke and prod to make sure it’s all up to snuff. Even the sainted ones. This one’s still pretty bloody good.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #121 – Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles

The New Adventures
#19
Dead Romance
By Lawrence Miles

Things have been looking bleak for the universe since Where Angels Fear unleashed its godlike entities on Dellah. Now along comes Lawrence Miles to ask the important question: what about other universes? Can they be screwed, too?

I’m getting ahead of myself, but that’s in keeping with Dead Romance, a novel told in first person by a distinctly unreliable narrator named Christine. Her notebooks full of memories are not always in the right order.

First person is just better, in my experience. Obviously it needs to be done well – it is done very well here – and third person can be better written, but first person just gets a story into your brain faster, or gets you into the story faster. Christine’s direct and unpretentious reactions to the weirdness and horror that stalks London, and later space at large, grounds Dead Romance in a way that would have helped plenty of other New Adventures to get their ideas across. (That includes ones by Lawrence Miles. Early parts of Dead Romance recall gnarly NAs like Christmas On A Rational Planet or The Death Of Art – all spooky WTF imagery and gross body horror. But this time there’s a clear purpose from start to finish, and nothing feels like it’s happening just to sprinkle on a bit of atmosphere.) The occasional bit of information arriving too early, like a wound in Christine’s leg or an as-yet-unmentioned character named Khiste, really only serves to make you rethink what you’ve already read and want to know more. I was never confused by Dead Romance, but the gulf between what had been revealed and what was very quietly still a mystery often fluctuated.

Here’s the gist: Christine, who tells us from the start that the world ended in October 1970, is having a terrible time thanks to rather too much cocaine and some kind of cannibalistic creature attacking her. She also has a run in with Chris Cwej, who later rescues her and recruits her to the cause. He is here on a mission from his employers (hold that thought) and as Christine knows too much, she’ll go along with him. She travels to other worlds and between universes as Chris tries to do something about the Entities.

As with The Mary-Sue Extrusion, we’re seeing this conflict from an unusual perspective, once again with Bernice Summerfield more as a concept than a character. An interesting editorial decision there. (I sympathise with anyone wondering when the hell we’re going to get on with it, Bernice-vs-the-Gods wise, or even where-is-Brax wise. But I’m not having a bad time waiting for it.) Christine, not a native of the twenty-sixth century, has even less idea what all this means that Dave Stone’s protagonist du jour. But I think both authors approach their outsider perspectives differently. Christine’s lack of preconceptions about the Time Lords are especially helpful when framing the good and the bad in this conflict.

Because ah yes, Chris’s employers – referred to here as “the time travellers” – stand no chance of anonymity behind Miles’s barely-trying air quotes. And they do not come out of this well. Some of their questionable practices are likely just the worst-case-scenario inventions of Christine, such as a murder-regeneration cycle that gradually causes more agony in the recipient. But at least one is on full display in front of her, as Chris foggily remembers his time with an “Evil Renegade” who went around ruining everything, which handily makes him more compliant around said renegade’s big collared betters. When they’re not brainwashing the friendliest character in this series, they’re experimenting on him and others in the front lines, causing mutations into things that will fight better, perhaps survive a little longer. Perhaps this isn’t really “our” Chris – we’ll see what he has to say for himself if he crops up again – but maybe that’s just me hoping, because good grief, the damage to Chris in this, both physical and mental.

And what’s it all for? The time travellers (why not) aren’t actively fighting the Entities in this: they’re retreating, possibly to think of a better idea later on in relative safety. Either way it’s not going to get rid of the problem. This fits, in a rather twisted way, with their policy of non-intervention. They retreated quite openly in Where Angels Fear, so it’s really just an escalation of that. Even the creatures they are most keen to negotiate with – the sphinxes, dimension-expanding monsters that originally worked with the Entities – aren’t directly interested in the conflict. Even the Entities aren’t uniform on the matter. (The Mary-Sue Extrusion highlighted that different “gods” have their own interests, and we are reminded of that here.) After a while it begins to feel like this is more about them being challenged than a genuine assessment of the threat they are facing. Later, when things kick off in this much-maligned 1970, they arguably have even less to do with the arc plot and more to do with the time travellers themselves and their warped monopoly on the worlds they observe.

(I have heard it said that Dead Romance feels like a novel apart from the series, and this bit of plot supports that. But the central question of what will be done in the name of defeating monsters slots perfectly into what the books are doing right now. And besides, no writer could create Dead Romance without being fundamentally interested in Doctor Who and the New Adventures. This one is too broad and too deep for BBC Books by a long shot, but it still finds time to casually throw in a sequel to Shada.)

Underneath all this is Christine, gazing in wonder at the weird worlds where Chris must make treaties with monsters, before – or during – finding herself back in her flat. Again with that out-of-sequence storytelling: she can never entirely hold on to a sense of where she is in the story, or even in her relationship with Chris, which seems to happen mostly when we’re not looking. All of this creates a tantalising sense of the story being both enormous and room-sized, as much itself in a cavernous realm of space as it is in a ruined magic shop. This fits entirely with the story itself, where monsters bigger than human imagination can be reasoned with and huge decisions can be made as simply as tossing a coin. It’s a novel that shrinks and expands throughout, as if sphinxes had settled in between the words.

It’s tempting to dive more into the plot and what it all means for Christine and Chris, but perhaps it’s better to tear those pages out of the notebook. Dead Romance holds together more confidently than I’m used to, and despite its earnest Doctor Who nerdiness – because this is the guy who wrote Alien Bodies, which barely seems bleak at all now – it feels like it ought to appear on sci-fi bookshelves on its own merits, a nightmare you want to share with others. You should go and read it, in other words, despite how gloomy I’ve made it sound. If Christine can stare all this stuff right in the face, so can you.

9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #107 – Down by Lawrence Miles

The New Adventures

#5

Down

By Lawrence Miles

I wasn’t much looking forward to this for some reason. At a guess this was because Lawrence Miles has at least two modes and I don’t know which one I’m getting. Perhaps the clever, plot-driven, fannish-until-he’s-just-the-right-side-of-fanwank Miles? Or the one that has some (probably) very interesting ideas, spends ages filling a big bath tub with them and then asks you to get in and splish splosh about for what feels like an eternity.

I’d call Down a bit of both.

From the outset it’s playing with ideas from The Also People, which I’m all for. With the appropriate understanding that everybody loved The Also People and invoking it may invite comparisons that find you wanting, Ben Aaronovitch’s book threw around some enormous ideas (aka the People, not to mention their creations) that, quite frankly, should have become a bigger thing by this point. (We at least got shades of them in So Vile A Sin, and even some influence on Oh No It Isn't!)

What follows is, consciously, something of a parody of Aaronovitch’s “world sphere”, if not a bit of a parody in general. Bernice, along with a couple of students (Ash and Lucretia, the latter having been kidnapped as bait) heads for the mostly unremarkable world of Tyson’s Folly. They soon find the core of the planet, itself a Dyson Sphere, filled with impossible life forms, such as yeti of varying intelligence and oh yes, Nazis. (These are futuristic pretend Nazis – hobbyists playing at fascism, amusingly named the SSSSSSS – and they are here for a reason, promise.) Also in attendance is Mr Misnomer, a fictional character from old (by Bernice’s time) comics. (Think Abslom Daak in a fedora.) Not to be missed off, we have a terrifying alien related to the People, named !X, and his terrified companion/medical support Fos!ca. Before long Ash ends up with !X, Lucretia ends up with Katastrophen (an SSSSSSS bigwig) and Bernice with Mr Misnomer. The entire bonkers expedition is related to us retrospectively by Bernice, now a prisoner, and it includes all the different POVs. (This is not a mistake, but I wondered why so much of the book went by happily letting it look like one.)

So we’ve got shades of Parasite (look at my big bonkers planet!), All-Consuming Fire (it’s old-timey SF time!), Conundrum (Mr Misnomer is real?) and on a more boring textual level, The Also People. (Just War also has some significant impact for Bernice.) Down is doing a lot, mostly ticking off the crazy sights in its hollow world and then later playing narrative tricks with us, but for the most part it’s a romp – which is all good fun (ahem) but arguably doesn’t always make any great shakes as a story. Because Down, in the end, is one of those books/episodes/movies that has one big idea and then proceeds to unpack it. This it does, extraordinarily slowly, with pages seemingly multiplying before my eyes as I neared the 300 mark. Definitely felt like we ran out of romp at some point.

It’s not as if nothing interesting is happening with the characters, but some of it only becomes clear retrospectively. Bernice sits quite a bit of it out (Christ I'm sick of saying that – guys, stop it!), while Mr Misnomer has plenty to do – what’s that about? Turns out she added him wholesale to the narrative to help cope with some more violent moments, but while that is very interesting as a concept (and there’s more to it that she learns later), there wasn’t time for me to feel or her to significantly reflect on it. I did, though, get to spend time with Mr Misnomer. (“Abslom Daak in a fedora” was not a compliment.)

Lucretia has some intriguing neuroses: she comes from a planet obsessed with breeding (and therefore attractiveness) so she needs to wear a duffle coat to hide her body. She is also petrified of transmats as she believes they kill the original and build a copy – a popular SF bogeyman which is presented here and, unless I missed it, never satisfactorily disputed. Sleep tight. (She also develops an oddly progressive friendship with Katastrophen, but given the Misnomer fake-out which on some level seemed inevitable, I was surprised that he was real.) Ash has some stuff going on, mostly in relation to !X (which makes Fos!ca a touch redundant), and !X is at least hard to look away from: a sort of homicidal tenth generation echo of the Doctor, being an unknowable alien exile who travels around in a quirky geometric shape and has a name you can’t pronounce.

There’s oodles of stuff here all right, but the switching between Bernice/Misnomer, Lucretia/Katastrophen and Ash/!X, all variants of interesting female protag/awful and slightly ridiculous male, leads to some confusion over who the heck is who. (This might be deliberate, and certainly it becomes so nearer the end: a psychic melding has taken place which explains Bernice’s multi-narrator narrative, so perhaps she’s just repeating herself. But again: clever concept, still got to read through it before it become clever thing.)

Call me old fashioned, but this is a Bernice book, so I’d like the focus to be on her. (It’s not as if Down is the first book to give her “companions,” but the range isn’t yet consistent with them.) What Bernice we do get is as champagne-bubbly as ever, at one time described thus: “The prisoner is unarmed, but has a finely honed sense of irony.” (I also loved the bit where she’s strapped to a table facing a mirrored ceiling and tells her reflection: “Don’t just sit there – do something!”) This Bernice, however, feels like all funny stuff and no gristle. Is Miles doing a thing there? We know she might be massaging the narrative to exclude (and/or ridicule) the SSSSSSS because of her wartime experiences, and we know how she feels about “Mr Misnomer”’s actions; we also repeat and underline her famed habit of papering over the bits of her diary that she doesn’t like (controversial opinion: I never liked that. How would that book even work? Post-its aren’t that strong!) but this book isn’t the time for her to reflect on any of that. Shame.

It’s got plenty of time though to discuss the hollow world’s mysterious MEPHISTO (the world sphere is run by a computer named “God,” draw your own conclusions), along with alien processes and lizard dirigibles with built-in yeti. And don’t get me wrong, some of that’s very diverting and much of it is funny. I love that Lucretia’s planet is called Sarah-361 because it turns out when you name a celestial body after yourself it’s legally binding; there’s a bit where the characters watch a sort of information recap (of course they do) and the intro looks like the 80s Doctor Who titles; and there are nerdy little nods like: “According to the Roddenberry-Harrison model of Zeno sociology, ‘God’ was the name given by primitive people to the insane alien supercomputer that secretly ruled their planet from its concealed bunker while keeping them in fear and ignorance.” But there came a point where I wanted everyone to just spit out what it is they want to tell us about MEPHISTO, or shut up.

Plenty of ideas. Multiple laughs. Colours, craziness and fun. But I dunno. This feels like the bath tub full of ideas again, more than it does a solid story.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #106 – Decalog 5: Wonders edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

Decalog 5: Wonders
Edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

Bless the Decalogs. They were Short Trips before there were Short Trips, and despite some youthful awkwardness with the format (how do we string together ten stories? Do we need a linking narrative? Will a theme do?) we got many excellent stories out of them. They have necessarily moved away from Doctor Who now, with the fourth book focusing on the lineage of Roz Forrester and book five (Wonders) completely unmoored from continuity. This is, as far as I can tell, ten stories of honest to god sci-fi. We know going in that this was the last Decalog, so it’s fair to say that one way or another there was no progression from here. Was it a step too far? With these stories, will I be tempted above whether it’s good or bad simply to wonder, is this anything? I’m a fan of the editors so I’m cautiously optimistic.

*

The Place of All Places

By ???

Based on an idea by Nakula Somana

It’s sort of ironic, in a book totally divorced from Doctor Who, that this feels like the sort of moody no-idea-what-that-was-about prologue you’d get in a Who book. It’s very short and mythical: there’s a boy in a strange desert whose uncle builds a washing machine for the local workers and ponders the worth of stories. The boy walks away, pondering. I got nothin’.

*

Poyekhali 3201

By Stephen Baxter

Yuri Gagarin completes his historic flight and orbit around the Earth. Or does he? A shade of the Sam Rockwell movie Moon defines a peculiar monument to Gagarin, as versions of him (machines? Holograms? The same being, but on a loop?) complete the flight over and over, and one of them accidentally catches on. Interesting, but too quick to really grasp hold of anything. Such is the character’s lot, to be fair.

*

King’s Chamber

By Dominic Green

…and suddenly things get really weird. Set in (probably) a future Earth, long after some cataclysm and the splintering of intelligent life into three forms, two of them – man as we know him, and a kind of wibbly amphibian that communicates partly by colour – occupy the planet in an uneasy arrangement. The amphibians live their lives around a shared dream, and the humans (?) begin making inroads about that, which blossom into a psychic attack. This, in turn, leads to a reckoning, and then a better understanding of who the inhabitants are in relation to one another.

Honestly, it’s a lot, but it gets a more generous page-count to flesh out its barking mad imagery. The verbiage is all pleasingly strange – I bet Jim Mortimore loved it – and by the end, I was invested.

*

City Of Hammers

By Neil Williamson

A visit to a mysterious city is shared by a man and his old flame, the latter suffering from a degenerative disorder. You can sense the writer’s excitement at describing this weird closed system of a city, but it’s somewhat over-written here and indeed elsewhere, with character interactions tediously micro-managing their movements and inflections. The real problem though is the characters: Cal is a bitter, dull man who only thinks about himself, while Yanni – essentially dying, wanting to see a remarkable place with an old friend, clearly the character with the most interesting stuff going on here – has almost no input except as an object Cal can mope over or be mad at. I was glad to leave them.

*

Painting In The Age With The Beauty Of Our Days

By Mike O’Driscoll

This wastes no time in announcing that it will be edgy as all heck, muddy funsters! Profanity, sex and drugs are fired at the reader in a manner certain infamous New Adventures could have only dreamed of, as a totally way cool and not at all insufferable protagonist plumbs the depths of depravity to discover whether anything can be art, including terrorism. It has some ideas about artistic expression and how modern day ennui makes it harder to feel anything. The latter is perhaps intended to paper over the lack of any character you could empathise with, but the sheer revolting glee of its excesses (including, but not limited to, necrophilia), the giddy sprinkler system of edge-lord swearwords and the dash of misogyny around its one female character make it difficult to respect what it’s doing so much as want to chuck the book in the bin with embarrassment.

*

The Judgement Of Solomon

By Lawrence Miles

Oh thank god, Bernice is here. Actually wait a tick – Bernice can be in these? Why the blithering heck isn’t it a collection of Bernice stories, then? Sure, variety is the spice of life, I've nothing against a collection of straight sci-fi, but it seems fairly self evident by her appearance here that if you have Bernice, it will improve book. (Gazing at my frequent resource, Bernice Summerfield – The Inside Story, it appears Miles genuinely believe this was intended as Bernice collection. Ah well, certainly no harm done!)

Mind you, some of the credit is due to Lawrence Miles. We can perhaps thank the shorter word-count for a stronger sense of purpose than there was in his last Virgin work (the colourful, swampy Christmas On A Rational Planet), but it’s also just a bloody good application of Bernice Summerfield: archaeologist. Visiting ancient Baghdad (I don’t think they say how but ehh) to settle the question of impossible technology turning up in history, we are soon privy to the story of the old King Solomon and how that relates to the fascinating wonders (natch) of this city. There is beautiful, melancholy writing here, all buoyed by Bernice being fabulous.

*

The Milk Of Human Kindness

By Elizabeth Sourbut

Definitely a unique idea, and very well written, but this one might cause some discomfort. What if everybody started breast feeding? Just a pandemic of that? What would cause it, and then what would happen? There are some disturbing moments, from a man pretty much getting off on it to a war zone. It’s a fascinating story, and a very good example of how SF threats don’t have to be aliens or zombies. Also it seems like a uniquely female idea. But still, your eyebrows will raise reading it.

*

Bibliophage

By Stephen Marley

Ahhh. I’ve missed Stephen Marley. His Managra was one of the most memorable Missing Adventures, and Bibliophage shares its chaotic interest in literature. A likeable duo of adventurers visit a paradoxical library that contains and affects the entire universe, seeking to find out why one of them is disappearing from history. It’s a deliciously clever and funny story, even if the character writing is a little mannered. I’m glad he’s written two in this collection.

*

Negative Space

By Jeanne Cavelos

This is compelling stuff, if a bit more at the traditional end of sci-fi than a lot of this collection: it’s a good old fashioned space expedition gone wrong. Where it gets interesting is the lack of a fully realised alien threat; instead the crew are investigating, and soon endangered by a series of alien “sculptures” and the unusual life-forms that constructed them. Jeanne Cavelos – another female writer, what are the odds! – imbues this with reflections on art and the response to art that raise more questions than they answer, but that’s often the way with gently mind-expanding SF.

*

Dome Of Whispers

By Ian Watson

A short, interesting encounter within an ancient dome that records and repeats every utterance forever. It doesn’t go quite how the tour guide would have liked. Not a lot to say about this one – it’s neat and it works. I wonder if they commissioned an itty-bitty story to work around the longer ones. (The previous story was about 50 pages.)

*

Waters-Of-Starlight

By Stephen Marley

If you’re concerned about the same author showing up twice (and to be fair, it’s sort of unfair) at least these are very different stories. This Stephen Marley is not the frothy, funny one from Bibliophage: Waters-Of-Starlight is not frivolous, as much myth as sci-fi.

In the distant future a woman is parted from her husband, and must honour their pact: the one who doesn’t die must go up the great river. She is pursued by her husband’s vengeful brother. It all gets a bit metaphysical, but I enjoyed its grand ideas even if I only glimpsed them through unearthly waterfalls.

*

The Place Of All Places

By ???

Based on an idea by Nakula Somana

Just a little capper really, touching on what we’ve learned. Like Jim Mortimore in the About The Authors segment, it is.

*

I don’t have much love for short story collections. This is, to be clear, my problem and not theirs: when reading a book I find the story’s momentum is essential to stave off distraction, and I don’t get that when the story has to start again and again. A sci-fi collection with no linking theme or character and (almost) no commonality in its writers is sort of a worst case scenario for me, with each fresh start meaning I might have to construct a world out of mental whole cloth every time. So, I found Decalog 5 hard going more because of what it is than how good it was. (Yeah I know – boo hoo.)

The important question is, how good are the stories? On balance: pretty good! King’s Chamber and Negative Space are strong pieces of sci-fi. The Judgement of Solomon and Bibliophage are great, fun stories. The Milk of Human Kindness probably can’t be called fun but it’s a devious piece of work. Really the only bits that didn’t work for me are City of Hammers (needed character work and the style perhaps wasn’t my thing) and Painting In The Age With The Beauty Of Our Days (thought it was dreadful, other opinions available), so not a bad average.

Do I think they should have done more weird, unmoored Decalogs? Well, they didn’t, but I think they’d have got a stronger handle on this broader (deeper?) remit if they had. What we got though was still mostly worth your time, and the hits can comfortably compete with the more recognisable Decalogs.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #79 – Christmas On A Rational Planet by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#52
Christmas On A Rational Planet
By Lawrence Miles

The name’s Larry.  Mad Larry.  Although maybe not to his face.

Lawrence Miles would go on to be one of those infamous Doctor Who names, known for twisting old canon as well as generating his own.  His books are memorably geeky and odd, running the gamut from spirited fannish mystery (Alien Bodies) to grim fannish treatise on his ideas and how interesting they are (Interference).  People call him Mad Larry and his first book, Christmas On A Rational Planet, makes a pretty good case for that.

All the same, it’s not (and he’s not) that weird in context.  I’ve read New Adventures more obsessed with surrealism, to the point where you can barely read the bloody things; some that take similar or greater gambles with canon; and a few with a cockier authorial voice.  Heck, if we’re dubbing him Mad Larry then why not Mad Marc, Strange Ben, Disturbed Daniel, Weird Simon or Positively Unusual Dave?  The New Adventures often tend towards weirdness – “too broad and too deep” used to be the sales pitch.  I think what we have here, for better or worse, is Another Trippy First Time Novel.  Unsurprisingly it’s marmite.

It makes a considerable first impression.  Roz is running from a gynoid – shapeshifting thing, don’t worry about it – in a desert somehow out of sync with the universe.  So far, so trippy.  But Miles effortlessly chops between this encounter and the one directly before it, where Roz (avec Doctor and Chris) encounter the same creature in the same desert, only not quite?  These bits are in italics and there’s no real confusion about where or when we are.  It’s deft stuff, helped along by a confident, pithy climb inside Roz’s head.  “‘Useful,’ the Doctor had said, five minutes before the world had opened up and dragged her down into its shadow.  Just that, as he’d pressed the sphere into her hands.  ‘Useful.’”

Roz gets far and away the best character writing in the novel.  Miles just seems more invested in her.  Stranded alone in a backward America, circa 1799, she spends her time tolerating racism and working as a fortune teller.  “‘Abracadabra, shalom-shalom … I see into the mists of time and stuff, blah blah blah.’”  /  “‘Is it true you eat people in Africa?’ he heard himself say.  ‘No,’ she said, emotionlessly.  ‘But that isn’t going to stop me biting your face off.’”  Of course she hates it, so she finds a creative but very dubious plan of escape: she meets Abraham Lincoln’s father, if she shoots him she will alter history – and the Doctor will come.  This sort of works and the Doctor is understandably furious, but she blames it semi-convincingly on the cruelty and racism she is living with.  “‘I’ll tell you what it is.  It’s the not knowing.  I don’t know how I’m supposed to act here, and neither do they.  They can’t even decide whether I’m human or not.’”  I think Miles knows this is still a bit of a stretch, but then later on Roz is confronted with a duplicate of herself from before she met the Doctor.  The point is to illustrate how far she’s come – and not with a subtle touch – but if she’s willing to kill a man just to get out of here, is she “better” than her ask-questions-later self?  If not, does the comparison serve us very much?

Hey, I didn’t say it was all good character writing – only that she gets the best of it.  To tackle everyone else we’ll need to examine the plot, an area Christmas On A Rational Planet isn’t entirely comfortable with.

Reality is on the blink.  Roz loses the amaranth, a tool that reshapes the world, when she lands in 1799.  The TARDIS (which is linked to it) consequently isn’t quite itself and refuses to let the Doctor in (stranding him, too, in 1799).  The rest of the town of Woodwicke follows suit, i.e. goes a bit wibbly.  Soon there are monsters – I hope “gynoids” is enough of a descriptor for you – and the local Renewal Society, made up of Rationalists who hate anything superstitious, find themselves on a mindless crusade to round up the local black populace.  They’re led by Matheson Catcher, a disturbed young man hearing voices, whose home has morphed into an “UnTARDIS”.  Meanwhile in the police box, Chris finds an Interface that gives the ship a voice (while it also falls apart), and he shares the experience with Duquesne, a survivor of the French Revolution working for the mysterious Shadow Directory, against Chris and any other world-altering “caillou” like him.  So the Doctor and Roz.

There’s a lot of information here, but I’d hesitate to describe it as a plot.  There is one, certainly: an ancient psychic force (from before the dawn of time etc.) has awakened and the amaranth is a handy tool for getting its way.  But that sentence doesn’t fill nearly 300 pages, so in practical terms, Roz and the Doctor try to survive a mad crusade while Chris wanders around the TARDIS and Duquesne loses her marbles.  And that’s… still not really enough for a book, or for me anyway.  The Doctor has the usual stand-off with a baddie (or two), but otherwise he gets interrogated, lightly tortured and generally just has an awful time.  Chris has some arguably interesting experiences, but his moment of catharsis pointedly isn’t his own, and he otherwise comes off nearer the dumb, horny end of his spectrum.  (It’s not a big spectrum.)  The madness in Woodwicke isn’t very interesting – no one knows what they’re doing, and since reality is borked, what are the stakes?  We all love seeing inside the TARDIS, but that always seems to be code for “gee, I wonder what LSD is like?”  Inevitably there are hallucinations sprinkled on top.  There’s a lot of chopping between these short, weird sections, and it’s difficult to stick with it when there isn’t much of a through line.

There are themes, particularly the Psi Powers arc, although Christmas doesn’t do nearly as much for that as SLEEPY did.  This one essentially underlines that there are psychic forces out there, but it leaves the Doctor and co. still at square one investigating it.  In a broader sense we have Reason vs Cacophany, and how one can ironically lead to another.  And there is a lot of symmetry, as seen in that nifty time-shifting prologue, or scenes of two people separately being frightened by Catcher, or separate journeys through the UnTARDIS and the TARDIS, or the disembodied Carnival Queen of Cacophony and the disembodied TARDIS interface, or Roz’s double.  But I’m not sure how much of that is a deliberate effort to hold up mirrors and how much is just some groovy, trippy repetition.  Call it a mental lapse, but I don’t know what all these echoes are supposed to tell me anyway.  I don’t like halls of mirrors very much.

I’ve read rapturous reviews of Christmas On A Rational Planet which lap all this up, and power to them (and you, if that applies).  But I think there’s fuel here to suggest this isn’t a work of genius.  Like how Miles’s supporting characters have one or two attributes each, but no underlying personality – and how he hammers each attribute until it whimpers.  Erskine Morris lets off an expletive seemingly every other sentence, usually ironically Biblical.  (“Hellfire and buggery!” isn’t hilarious the hundredth time.)  Daniel Tremayne really wants to get away from here and yearns for more out of life.  Duquesne gets an unpleasant feeling in her spine when she’s near something world-changing.  And Matheson Catcher, oh, Matheson ruddy Catcher.  Every character that meets him feels the need to observe that he is, in some way, clockwork.  Again and again this point is made – we get it.  But then later when the voices of the Watchmakers start to get to him, he begins thinking and speaking in caps.  It starts looking like a crude way to make his dialogue stand out – like another character whose name escaped me, who stresses the occasional word to the point where you don’t pay attention to what she’s saying – and when Catcher starts audibly capitalising random letters, it all starts looking a bit desperate.  He certainly never elevates to a character that is intimidating or interesting, despite the enthusiastic caps.

Miles is on a bit of a keyboard walkabout, particularly when the book’s psychic force starts talking for itself, and it uses a tilde and a space instead of speech-marks.  (!)  All this is creative in a blunt sense, but it’s trying a bit too hard for little reward.  So he adds his own, with characters repeatedly congratulating themselves on idioms and expressions.  “He was pleased with the way he put that.”  /  “You can’t chart a river without visiting its source...  thank you, Marielle, a very nice metaphor.”  If you do say so yourself.

Somehow, despite the wealth of words, Christmas On A Rational Planet is often lost for them.  The gynoids are just… things.  (“Each of the creatures looked completely different to the last, different in ways Chris couldn’t quite get his head around.”  Or Miles, it seems.)  The Watchmakers are mentioned frequently, and with a dash of portentous world-building they become possible predecessors to the Time Lords, but god knows how present they are in this story or what they’re doing or what they look like.  Places like the UnTARDIS shift in and out of the gobbledegook dimension.  (“He was at one with the room.  He was in every corner, stretched along every surface.  Its angles were his angles  ...  Then one of the corners blistered again ...  The wall burst open, vomiting madness into the cellar.”  Uh huh.  Oh right.  You betcha.)  Paragraph breaks often begin or end with some perplexingly vague-yet-immense explosion of everything, nothing, etc., which just becomes the done thing after a while.  The whole book hums with excitement at getting all of this down, which is cool, but I was often bored by the lack of definition.  I also began to suspect that every time I put it down some little sod was stuffing it with extra pages, as it was occasionally like reading a treadmill.

Despite all that, and rather fitting the book’s schizophrenic theme, it is occasionally very good.  Miles can turn a phrase beautifully when he fancies it: “Furniture disagreed with him.”  /  “The clock in the church tower struck nine, listlessly, perhaps aware that no one cares about the time this close to Christmas.”  /  “[Tourette was] a man who finds it difficult to come to terms with a piece of machinery as complex as an oar.”  /  “Most of the rain seemed to be missing him somehow, as if the droplets knew that he wouldn’t grow no matter how much they watered him.”  Fill your boots, there’s loads.  One of my favourite bits – where yes, Miles is playing games with prose in his enthusiastic puppy way – sees the TARDIS Interface musing about Chris and Duquesne in the text, and then Chris noticing one of the roundels blinking at him.  That’s as close as a book gets to wading in and telling their characters stuff, and I love that sort of interplay.  Plus there is good character writing, although it is bobbing up and down in the word soup.  Behold, the best argument for not revealing the Doctor’s real name, so shut up already Moffat: “I usually just say my name’s ‘Smith’, if anyone asks, but I’ve been thinking about finding another pseudonym.  It’s getting dangerously close to becoming my real name.”  (Miles also said “It’s smaller on the outside” before he did.)

If you like a few continuity shots fired, you’ll do well.  Obviously telly Who is represented, but if it’s fan-films you’re after (PROBE), or comics (Abslom Daak, referred to here as fictional), or other Virgin books (SLEEPY, The Scales Of Injustice – which came out the same month), you’re equally in luck.  Some of the TARDIS interior stuff is beguiling, particularly the image of the food machine trundling through the corridors in search of customers, and the library that leads to other worlds.  More noteworthy I suppose is an eyebrow-raising reference to the Seventh Doctor’s death in the TV Movie.  Combined with some portentous talk of Eighth Man Bound, a Time Lord “game” where the player tries to see his future regenerations – and no one has ever gone further than seven – it pushes closer to a conclusion for the New Adventures Doctor, which is ballsy for a first-time writer – and is the kind of thing Miles would repeat later in his career.  (There’s also a reference to Lungbarrow, in case you didn’t get the hint.)  I’m still not sure how highly I rate this sort of thing, as referencing Who to a captive audience of Doctor Who fans is fruit so low-hanging you might need to crouch, but it can clearly be done well.

I’d love to say I’m torn about this, but my mind’s pretty well made up.  This one was work, and that doesn’t happen when you like the book.  It’s not as if I don’t like a bit of creative language and world-building; I want to hug Sky Pirates! just thinking about it, The Also People could be my happy place, SLEEPY (which this is a sequel to) practically knocked me on my arse, and I still boggle about the visuals in Parasite and Lucifer Rising.  But the underpinnings are just too wobbly here for me to believe this is a work of genius.  There are great ideas (always a rather loaded compliment) but they’re not tied to a strong narrative.  The best thing about it is knowing he’d do better later on, which is more than you can say for some of Virgin’s other surrealists.

5/10