Doctor Who: The BBC Books #107 – Hope by Mark Clapham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#53

Hope

By Mark Clapham

It’s New Writer time — sort of. Mark Clapham had by this point co-written the frothy Beige Planet Mars, the lore-heavy The Taking Of Planet 5 and the ah-well-there’s-always-next-time Twilight Of The Gods. Hope is his first solo novel, for which no less applause, garlands, kazoo toots etc.

 

For his debut he’s opted for something a bit less eclectic than those earlier co-writes. Hope begins with the Doctor pushing the TARDIS too far to reach the outskirts of humanity’s existence among the stars, the planet Endpoint, which then knackers the ship for a while. After giving it a moment to cool down, the Doctor, Anji and Fitz are separated from it, which means they’ll have to spend the rest of the book getting it back. Oh, and they’ve also arrived at the scene of a murder, in a city that divides into a somewhat prosperous overcity and a less salubrious undercity. Er – not exactly teleporting the envelope into another dimension, is it?

 

But it’s not without promise. I’ve seen reviews that respond quite negatively to the city of Hope itself, but I rather liked it. The patchwork design, and placing it on stilts above a poison sea sets it apart from earlier efforts like Original Sin – it’s an intriguing mental image. The main issue is the lack of a population. I noticed four named people within city limits, two of whom are load-bearing to the plot. As for the other two: Powlin is the head of the local militia, keen to solve the rising murder epidemic. (“Militia” is a bit of a loaded term but we don’t interrogate whether that’s any worse than a police force – could just as easily call them “the police” or “the watch.”) He seems nice enough, but then the Doctor takes over the investigation for plot reasons and it’s pretty much good night from Powlin. Pazon is a local wheeler-dealer, and is perhaps not to be trusted. He seems like he could enliven a dull page, but outside of providing Fitz with a few bits he needs – off-screen, I believe? – he doesn’t hang around much either. As for the denizens in all the buildings? Pass, apart from odd murder victim.

 

This is a shame since Hope is really about the ultimate fate of humanity. It presents some academic arguments for what that’s going to look like, but in terms of actual people living their lives, not so much, which makes it all a bit surface-level. Boo. In the meantime, the meat of the novel can be quite enjoyable, as the Doctor is recruited to solve a series of random decapitations and Fitz investigates a puzzling cyborg brotherhood who for some reason hate the city’s partly-mechanised ruler. This is Silver: an incongruously charming cyborg who brutalises any form of opposition. He is the man who can get the TARDIS back from the poison sea, so the Doctor and co. pal up with him whilst sitting on any reservations they might have. Especially Anji, who soon enters into a deal with (what might possibly be) the devil.

 

Silver’s moral ups and downs clearly fascinate Clapham, who at one point delves into the character’s back story a chunk at a time, creatively pairing this with Anji’s failed attempts to ascertain just that. He was a sickly boy who received some sort of alien transfusion, then excelled in the military, then finally found himself in the future where it made sense to put down roots and take charge. He rules Hope (and more or less Endpoint as a whole) to the extent that he barely bothers lying to people – although that observation is made by someone he’s successfully lied to so um, yeah, he lies. There are skeletons in his closet but the book spends so much time actually with Silver that these seem to shrink in importance. The secret of the anti-Silver brotherhood, and what nasty things can be found lurking in Hope’s sewers are relegated to half-hearted B-plots that barely move Fitz to investigate them. (If you’re wondering why a city suspended above an ocean has a sewer, um… sorry, my phone’s ringing.)

 

Probably the best Silver stuff, apart from the Anji plot (more on that soon) is his scenes with his female lieutenant, Miraso. She’s the other “new character that definitely needs to be here,” and she has a degree of brilliance while also being annoyingly blind to her master’s failings. She holds her own well as a character but her extra-curricular activities aren’t given nearly enough room to breathe. (Speaking of which, a scene where Fitz recognises a mysterious female face is a bit too easy to anticipate as being Miraso, since she is one of the vanishingly small number of other people, let alone women in the book.)

 

There’s something almost comical about Silver being this hulking, terrifying figure – I pictured Cain from Robocop 2 – who is outwardly benevolent but maybe, just maybe, has a dark side? This is a guy who mashes a protester to death in one of his first scenes: he looks like something that would disagree firmly with Sylvester Stallone. Evil, huh? You don’t say. It’s somewhat interesting to suggest that he’s not that bad, which the novel ostensibly does when it introduces a second “pureblood” set of humans who haven’t intermixed with other species. (But have, ickily, intermixed within family lines.) These guys are killing Endpointers for their tough genetic material and view them only as cattle. The Doctor points out that the Endpointers are the real human descendants, or the ones worth a damn, and by extension Silver might not be so bad after all: he’s a random hodgepodge but he’s keeping the city in order, isn’t he? To loop back after that to, yeah he is quite bad actually – witlessly using the same logic against him, “It’s not biology that makes us who we are” – simply tells us to judge a big horrible monster by appearances after all. To which, fine – have Doctor Who, will monster – but why the hell did we invest so much time in him, then?

 

The back end of the book is a bit of a mad scramble as Hope either reaches its crescendo or suddenly opens a box marked “bonus ideas” – place your bets. The “bad” humans are found to possess terraforming pods which they are (I’m not joking) too stupid to realise would have come in handy for making Endpoint liveable. After a pause to lampshade that this is actually a bit like The Year Of Intelligent Tigers we get an incredibly fast transformation for the planet (with only 80 pages to go) and the apparent resolution of the plot apart from the Anji stuff. (I am getting to it.) I wondered what was left for us to do here – as does Fitz, somewhat clunkily and again with the lampshade: “It just all seemed too easy.” The answer to all this is a sudden swerve into Bond villainy, perhaps even ranting Davros territory for Silver. Bye bye, any possibility of a Sabbath-esque “pros and cons” bad guy. (I’m guessing there was at least a whiff of Sabbath influence here. Clapham probably read the book at least, what with the generous references to the Doctor’s current status.)

 

It’s a pretty miserable denouement, with Silver hurriedly creating a genetically engineered race of supermen called Silverati (“Silver calls them Silverati, presumably to indicate they follow after him,” thanks Anji, invaluable stuff there) and deciding to invade time and space. It’s not as if Hope had been teeming with moral ambiguity before that – there were some shades of grey e.g. in the sewers – but after the potentially promising debate between two very different sets of “humans” this finale is about as standard as it gets. When Silver inevitably fails he all but shakes his fist to say “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!”

 

It’s tempting to say “well what did you expect,” but Hope really isn’t that bad for the most part. It’s at least interesting that (spoiler) Silver has been running his own anti-Silver movement in the city just to increase his control over it, although those guys only appear in a couple of scenes, so never mind. There’s potential in the debate about which set of humans is the “right” one, although you’d be hard pressed not to agree with the Doctor’s initial assessment, but we don’t hear much from the “bad” ones after Silver puts them in their place, so ah well. Probably the most promising and interesting thing here is – you can exhale now, Dave fans – the Anji stuff.

 

Dave, Dave, Dave. Remember him? Who among us doesn’t. Set up as a fairly unimpressive no-need-to-stay-on-Earth boyfriend for Anji in Escape Velocity, and killed off in the same book, he warranted a bit of psycho-analysis from Anji in the following book, EarthWorld. It was very good stuff. But they wouldn’t let it lie: book after book has acknowledged Anji’s tortured feelings for poor, dead Dave, her failure to save him, the fact that he did not (despite his sci-fi obsession) get to travel in time and space. Most of this strikes me as quite bad planning from the EDAs. Dave wasn’t very promising in the first place and EarthWorld kind of put paid to Anji’s feelings about him already, but hey, it can be an arc for her anyway! I’m happy to accept that people can “get over” things and then still obsess over them, so whatever really on that score, but those inauspicious beginnings have simply made it a bit silly to keep dredging up a bloke that was essentially just Fitz if you swapped the leather coat for an anorak, who Anji wasn’t that keen on to begin with.

 

Hope does something with it, at least. When Anji meets Silver she realises here is someone who could bring Dave back to life! Or clone him, at least, using one of his hairs she’s been keeping in the TARDIS. (It would have been nice if that had cropped up a bit more in the interim.) She’s so moved by this idea that she even betrays the Doctor, taking scans of the TARDIS interior to feed back to Silver for future take-over-ze-universe use. It’s all worth it to undo the death of a man she even now describes as: “Maybe not the love of her life — she had been far too young, and way too cynical to think it would last forever, and had been on the verge of leaving him at the time of his death.”

 

Like I said, whatever, people don’t always make sense. At least this is grounds for some interesting character development. Or so you’d think, as the resurrection of Dave comes very late in the book – within that last 80 page spurt, amid all the shooty fighty business – leaving us with very little time to ponder on it. Our last chance to make something of it is the confrontation between the Doctor and Anji, but that’s sadly a damp squib: he’s mad at first, but then she explains that Dave is dead and that’s very sad actually and the Doctor does time stuff too, doesn’t he, and that’s somehow… enough? He’s even supportive! “I should have realised you had good reasons … I would probably have done much the same in your position.” To which, sorry, what a crock. This isn’t Dave. This is a simulacrum that does not remember Dave’s existence. Dave is still dead, this is a random person Anji immediately agrees to imperil for the greater good, then promptly leaves to continue his existence on a back-end-of-the-universe planet with who knows what prospects. It’s at least debateable whether Anji has “resurrected” or “saved” anyone here – but they don’t have the debate, let alone interrogate the idea that Anji handing over the interstellar car keys to a final boss in a video game might be a bad omen. (The Twelfth Doctor forgave Clara for that sort of thing, I suppose.)

 

Ah well: once that’s all over and done with Anji believes she is “leaving the emotional baggage of that time behind her,” so at least we’re in with a chance of laying Dave (Daaaaaave!) finally to rest. Unless they decide to just keep going on about him regardless, of course.

 

The character writing isn’t great in Hope. Some of that is down to the frustrating lack of purpose we see in Silver and Anji, but occasionally it’s just not very good. The Doctor oscillates between being genuinely bristly and vulnerable following The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, e.g. insisting they abandon these people and get out of here or casually asking Fitz to risk his life for an investigation, and just being a bit dull, spouting flat jargon like “The atmosphere out there seems to have sufficient oxygen levels for your purposes… and quite a few other things, by the looks of it.” The novel is structured in a way that favours Silver, which means the Doctor comes across as a bit of a plonker for not spotting any red flags. But he’s sometimes not supported by prose that has a certain Nervous Nellie quality of underlining things that didn’t need it: “‘I wonder what happened to all the people,’ mused Fitz. ‘Evolved into these ones, I should think,’ said the Doctor, gently mocking what he clearly saw as an outmoded, human-centric view of history.”

 

It’s not just him, either, and it’s not just unnecessary underlinings. Sometimes it’s sheer redundancy. “‘I have sulph-shakes and caffy for those early morning cravings, and for the health-conscious, simple full or semi.’ ‘Skimmed?’ asked Anji, clearly thinking that Pazon was referring to milk.” / “‘What’s with the ceiling?’ Fitz asked, never too afraid to speak his mind.” / “She could feel the weight of the data-packed scanning unit in her pocket. That weight was both literal and metaphorical, as the strain it exerted on her was mainly due to the nature of what she was about to hand over.” / “She rubbed her head, calling for whoever was outside to come in. She was expecting Silver. Instead, it was the Doctor’s head that appeared around the door” followed on the same page by “Anji had been expecting Silver, and the Doctor had arrived instead.” Snip snip, editors.

 

It’s not very polished and its focus is a bit wonky. Yes, Silver is interesting, but maybe the rest of Hope’s citizens could also get a look in, and maybe don’t do Silver dirty at the end. There’s the skeleton of a pivotal story for Anji here (and don’t forget Dave! Don’t EVER forget Dave) but it’s not quite where it needs to be, since it proceeds from the idea that what she’s doing is fundamentally fine and you’d all do the same thing in lieu of actually moving on – which might have been the stronger story. I ended up imagining a version of Hope that brought in the Dave dilemma earlier, or perhaps even changed it. (Have Dave brought back without Anji’s consent, maybe? How would she deal with a second chance?) You could have the “terraforming” plot at the halfway point, and then properly spend time interrogating Silver as a bad guy vs the (somewhat) nicer guy he seemed to be before. But that would need to be a much longer book, and you’d still have to add the occasional non-Silver character for Hope and Endpoint to really mean something to readers.

 

I found Hope readable and well-paced in spite of my complaints. It ticks along, it’s no car crash; it has a familiar shape and it works well enough within that. It’s quite creative at points, playing with tenses to add mood. I liked the Silver back story bits. But it leaves a bad taste at the end, which inevitably made me wonder if much else about it actually worked.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #56 – The Taking Of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#28

The Taking Of Planet 5

By Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Things are looking up for the Eighth Doctor Adventures. A range of books with much to recommend, they nevertheless often find themselves in ruts, usually consisting of visits to ill-fated colony worlds or, if Sam Jones is around, the nearest hospital. There’s a definite sense post-Interference that this will no longer do, and quite right. The scale of storytelling is much grander all of a sudden. You can’t move for all the ambition flying around.

This has its downsides. I found The Blue Angel all too pleased with itself and apparently keen to keep its genius out of reach of the reader. I felt like my time had been wasted. The Taking Of Planet 5 isn’t quite so obscure, but there is still that sense of authors trying really hard to prove how clever they are. I’m genuinely glad that there seems to be a renewed mission statement at BBC Books — be bigger, grander, don’t be afraid to get complicated — but I wonder if they’ve hit the accelerator a little too hard.

Once again we’re playing with ideas and entities established by Lawrence Miles (they didn’t pay that guy enough), and it’s not just him. The Doctor is intrigued by the apparently real existence of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Elder Things” so he takes Fitz and Compassion back to Earth’s pre-history to investigate. Here he finds Time Lords from his own future (Miles’s War In Heaven from Alien Bodies) masquerading as Elder Things after killing all the real ones. (Or, spoiler alert, the “real” ones.) They have a plan to help win their war, but this is in jeopardy because the Celestis (estranged Time Lord splinter group, also Alien Bodies) have infiltrated their group, hoping to usurp the plan for themselves. To make things worse, the two Celesti agents don’t share the same agenda. Meanwhile, 12 million years in the future, an Antarctic base in 1999 is investigating the fallout from what will happen here. Compassion has somehow straddled the two time periods.

It’s definitely complicated, and it’s not made any easier by all the characters being in disguise. The Time Lords look like blobby eldritch horrors, although that’s not their normal appearance; the Celestis look bizarre in their own way, but (when they’re not casually making themselves two-dimensional) they’re disguised as Time Lords disguised as eldritch horrors — actually, both are disguised as the same one. In the 1999 portion of the story one of the scientists is secretly a Time Lord agent, and pretty soon another one is a Celesti in disguise, killing and copying a little like The Thing.

Navigating all this can be tricky, especially when the Celestis are called “One” and “Two” and are sharing the same disguise. It’s harder still without a lot to get your teeth into character-wise. Both groups investigating this site either side of 12 million years, the Time Lords and the humans, could do with more definition.

The Time Lords are split into veterans and newborns, with the varying levels of experience that implies; their leader Xenaria has a certain no-nonsense attitude that comes across well, subordinate Holsred is quite likeable, but the rest could just as easily be random names generated as the novel went along. They believe the Doctor to be a general from their own ranks pretty much just because he said so, which is great as an example of the doctor’s ability to take (or fake) authority, but does rather diminish them as a serious concern. They’re all a bit silly, albeit knowingly so: busy people encumbered with tentacles.

The humans are worse. The Taking Of Planet 5 has quite an irreverent sense of humour, which is perhaps another carry-over from Lawrence Miles (he treats this sort of universe-bothering weirdness much the same, even in Interference), but it manifests rather awkwardly at times, particularly in 1999. Pretty much the only thing going for the humans character-wise is that McCarthy, an American woman, is fat, something the book finds very amusing. (“Luckily her butt was big enough to absorb most of the impact as she hit the ground.” Oof.) The rest all snap at each other or, where men and women are concerned, boringly lust after one another. The most interesting one isn’t human. There is indeed a joke to be made about whether you’d notice if these guys had been bodysnatched. You might hope to latch onto these scenes for their contribution to the plot, but nothing very interesting is happening in the 1999 part of the story, other than explaining how Compassion got there or why there’s a big hole in the dig site — things that, once revealed, are really more technical explanations given than great mysteries solved.

That’s the book’s main issue for me: a lot of it feels academic. That’s not to say it doesn’t have interesting ideas. The faked existence of characters from H.P. Lovecraft (and by extension, the ability to manifest any literary nonsense as real) is an obvious story goldmine, but the creatures are dead by the time we arrive and the device is hardly used again, very much damp-squibbing the Doctor’s assertion that “we’d better be prepared to meet anything. Anything at all.” The Time Lord plan is quite grand, involving the release of an ancient horror that might doom us all etc, but it rests entirely on close familiarity with a Classic story that is itself barely represented here. Granted, it’s safe to assume that sort of nerd pedigree in the readership — who else are these books aiming at? — but the casual way said story is invoked leaves us without any of its original legwork or sense of danger.

Then you have the Celesti plan — or plans I suppose, oy — which entirely concerns their headquarters, Mictlan. (A weird Hell analogue that is mysteriously falling apart.) Quite apart from why the reader should care about a place this fundamentally unpleasant, the existence or destruction of Mictlan is neither here nor there for most of the characters, besides One and Two. And heck, even those two feel differently about it. Blow it up, don’t blow it up. Ehh. (You can see how this will figure into the War In Heaven arc, so I’m willing to concede it will be interesting. But right now do the Doctor, Fitz or Compassion give much of a stuff either way? Not really. Should we, if they don’t?)

The best we’ve got in terms of stakes is general suggestiveness about the wider story arc(s), but for obvious reasons none of that pays off here. The War In Heaven doesn’t noticeably budge, although you can see how the removal of Mictlan might matter to all that. As to the other plan, it probably would have been a bad idea to try to control Evil From The Dawn Of Time #numbers anyway — it places the entire universe at risk to even try — but hey ho, they’re prevented from doing so because the Doctor is around to course correct, which is another thing that makes the Time Lords look like unthinking idiots for even attempting it. Still, this kind of thing suggests a way that a war in the distant future can affect the here and now. Considering the Doctor would rather not know about any of it, that’s probably the only way we’re going to integrate it into the EDAs.

Probably the most compelling thing about The Taking Of Planet 5 is another little ongoing Easter egg hunt, viz, what’s going on with Compassion? Fitz and the Doctor haven’t forgotten about her ease with piloting TARDISes in The Blue Angel, and we add to that a strange ability to make use of the signals around her and make inexplicable, powerful sounds that control her surroundings. Her personality is still a little on the rudimentary side — unemotional yet bitchy, a sci-fi favourite — but the authors are all in with the peculiarities of this ex-Remote person. She’s utterly unfazed by her wrench across 12 million years, and quickly falls into a sort of Doctor-companion role with the secret Time Lord, albeit both of them are a bit less friendly than the duos we’re used to. I still think it’s weird that the books skipped her addition to the crew, but there’s some back-filling of a sort here: the Doctor considers “whether letting her join him in the TARDIS had been the solution to her problems”, suggesting there had been a thought process there, and when Compassion thinks she’s stuck on Earth she thinks how “[she] could have hoped to travel for longer, but Earth would have to do for the immediate future”, telling us she actually wants (or wanted) to do this. Hey, it’s just nice to have it confirmed. Anyway, apart from that we’re engaging with the interesting things about her, which from past experience is not something to take for granted.

The Doctor and Fitz fare less well. The Doctor is a bit of a rough sketch in this one, with a “goldfish attention span and constant energy”. Between his not-trying-all-that-hard subterfuge with the blobby Time Lords and his getting caught up in a lot of TARDIS action near the end, he has a tendency to fade into the background of the plot, at one point ceding what feels like Doctorly action to that guy in 1999. (He even has an equivalent sonic screwdriver!) I liked the bit where he sympathised with the terrible evil thing and considered going back to rescue it one day.

Fitz has never been friendlier or, in all honesty, less useful to the plot than he is here, but he’s a delight to be around; highlights of his activities include an arguably sexual encounter with an Elder Thing-disguised Celesti, because Fitz gonna Fitz. He’s mostly here to bluntly and repeatedly ask what’s going on, which feels like something I ought to be critical of but to be honest this time I was relieved to hear it. Even the Doctor at one point remarks that “It’s all so confusing I could do with explaining it to myself.”

I wonder if the mixture of ambitious-bordering-on-convoluted scheming and the occasional simple restating of facts is a hint of the cowriting process between Bucher-Jones and Clapham. See also, the helpful (I mean it!) recaps of how Fitz became Kode and then Fitz again, what Compassion’s deal is, and even a whiff of how The Blue Angel came about and where it’s left the Doctor emotionally. Maybe that was all done by one author or the other or both, but I think in mixing it up The Taking Of Planet 5 keeps just on the right side of confusing. It doesn’t help with the general sprawling state of it as a piece of drama, but at least you’ve got plenty to think about.

A last thing to mention would be the general jolly nerdiness of the thing. Obviously there’s the geeking out about Lovecraft, which is mostly lost on me as I haven’t read any. (See also White Darkness.) There’s an obvious debt to a certain 70s story, although as mentioned that’s not handled all that well. The stuff I liked most was the sprinkling of references, something I’m normally immune to but in the context of a big complicated event, and with the general sense of humour employed, it adds a certain levity to an at times stodgy book. There are nods to things as disparate as zygma energy, Karfel, Morlox, Stangmoor Prison, Raston Warrior Robots, Ogri and D-Mat guns. There’s a pre-emptive puncturing of the mysterious Enemy of the Time Lords: “They’ll probably be terribly disappointing. With my luck it’ll turn out to be Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, with a big stick.” The plot manages to explain (although did it need explaining?) the way the people on Delphon communicate with their eyebrows, as well as the way the Tersuruns communicate with a less subtle bodily function. (The Curse Of Fatal Death is canon!) There are oodles of references to looms, helping to settle that debate, as well as a brief mention of Tehke, a deity who’d turn up in the final New Adventure co-written by Mark Clapham two months after this. (Nice to see a bit of Virgin cross-promotion. All friends here.) And on the less meta or piss-taking side there’s also the casual suggestion that the Doctor’s poor piloting in the early years of Who was a deliberate effort to avoid the Time Lords. Head-canon for sure, but I’ll allow it.

I think all of that mild indulgence helped ground The Taking Of Planet 5 for me during its bigger indulgences — a knowingly fuzzy plot with tons of moving parts that all leans on Importance To The Arc(s). I was rarely hooked but I made it through quite painlessly. Saying that, this now makes three Important And Slightly Difficult books in a row. I appreciate the jump in ambition but it’s starting to get a bit stuffy in here. Does every book need to be a massive mind-boggler?

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #125 – Twilight Of The Gods by Mark Clapham and Jon De Burgh Miller

The New Adventures
#23
Twilight Of The Gods
By Mark Clapham and Jon De Burgh Miller

NB: This review contains spoilers for how the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures ended. The book's quite old, but forewarned is forearmed, eh? I’ll signpost the risky bits.

NB (2): This book has nothing to do with the Doctor Who Missing Adventure Twilight Of The Gods, it's just an unfortunate repeated title. 

It’s the end – for real this time. Virgin lost the Doctor Who license in 1997 and, after a 23-book run, they knocked the Bernice Summerfield range on the head as well. It was a good effort, telling stories about someone other than what’s-his-name and making use of new authors where possible. I think it’s apparent by now that I wasn’t bowled over by the spin-off, which retreated to the warm embrace of a murder mystery as frequently as Doctor Who did to quarries, but it’s no less an achievement that they went and did it.

Which brings us to the finale – for real this time. (Sorry, Tears Of The Oracle.) You might expect a bit of a “name” to handle this one, but Gary Russell wasn’t available (no, seriously, that was the plan) so we’re going with lesser-knowns instead. A bold choice. Enter Mark Clapham, who had co-written a couple of novels (starting with Benny’s Beige Planet Mars) and Jon de Burgh Miller, who hadn’t. Like Richards and Stone before them they had been given a ridiculous timeframe to get it done. (“Six weeks from pitch to print” according to Miller.) I wouldn’t envy anyone that, especially if they were relatively untested, but it helps to know what they were up against when reading the finished result. Because the finished result absolutely reads like someone with little experience didn’t have long to put it together.

Yeah, it’s going to be that kind of review. Twilight Of The Gods is bad. With surprisingly little competition (which is nice, really) this is comfortably the worst book of the run. And this is the one they went out on. Good lord.

Let’s start with the good. Continuity. Justin Richards thought he was writing the last Bernice book in Tears Of The Oracle – so someone clearly let him think that, great editorial oversight there guys – and to accommodate that, he put in an ending for the Dellah gods arc: a spaceship containing a force that feeds on belief crashes onto the planet of the obsessive believers. Job done. Return To The Fractured Planet ignored this, or Stone just didn’t know about it (editors?), and now it’s time to go back to Dellah. Surprisingly, Clapham and Miller don’t ignore the now false ending: they incorporate it into the plot. The crash caused “a wave of unbelief” across Dellah which has destabilised the factions of worshippers and made the “gods” compete to the death to keep what they have. At least one has set up a device to keep all this going artificially. At the end of the day it would have been neater to let Richards take it home, but using it is at least better than pretending he didn’t try.

Next, the setup. The Time Lords (unnamed as per) and the People have had enough of the gods and are sending a device to detonate Dellah, and its entire sector of space, once and for all. Bernice and co have a plan B: send Dellah back to the universe where the gods came from. But they’ve got to get it done in time to stop the bomb. Okay, it’s quite similar to Walking To Babylon in some respects, and without diving into the other wonders of this sector it’s a bit difficult to buy the appeal of sending Dellah and everyone on it to the gods’ realm instead of just blowing it up – either way the locals are screwed – but hey, it’s a decent ticking clock.

Okay, so what’s wrong with it? Well, let’s pick up where we left off. Continuity. Yes, it’s nice that we’re picking up plot threads from previous books – not all of them, with Bernice’s memory loss crisis only warranting a brief mention – but the authors get a bit carried away near the end and it doesn’t end well. The magical universe that spawned the gods sounds awfully familiar, and sure enough it’s the one mentioned in Cold Fusion. In order to have someone recognise this they quickly resolve Chris’s corrupted memories from Dead Romance, which again is nice – he had been trained to hate the Doctor! Boo! – but as there’s been no mention of it since Dead Romance, or any recognition of it by other characters, or any exploration of how else it changed him, it makes no material difference to his character to undo it now. (Again, editors, I beg you.) Worse, the Cold Fusion link undoes the whole Tears Of The Oracle thing they just set up! Now the gods aren’t killing each other to compete for worshippers: Tehke, the Worst One apparently (?), is doing it “knowing that they were planning to create a universe where he would be one of many rather than the ruler of many.” Motivations aren’t even kept straight during the book! (For a bonus point Clapham and Miller undo Chris’s new appearance as well, probably in the hope that more books will eventually happen. Fair enough. Making him short, bald and fat has been an example of what Ken Campbell used to call a jokoid: something with the shape of a joke that isn’t in any way actually funny. Ditch it by all means.)

Next, ah what the hell, the setup. Yes, it’s a reasonable ticking clock, but it has some issues. One of the group’s aims is to rescue a diplomat to solve a crisis on the planet Vremnya. A crisis we don’t see. No offence then… but who cares? I kept forgetting his importance in all of this because, against the destruction of an entire sector, which is already a little abstract, and the certain doom of this planet either way, which is philosophically more complicated than anyone writing the book appears to have noticed, an unseen problem feels all too slippery. Then, on the destruction, when they resolve it all – and we’ll get there – no biggie, but the book doesn’t actually say what happened with the bomb? Right. Okay then. Great stuff. (I am guessing it didn’t go off.)

The wider problem with that setup is one of tone. Twilight Of The Gods is all action. That’s not to say it’s constantly exciting; more that the book is, beat for beat, mostly just incident happening. This is a problem for a series of books that has largely got by on the interesting personalities of its characters. They don’t exactly come alive during spaceship entanglements that move one of them to say “They’re closing on us fast” or “Be ready with the weapons … I think we’re going to need them.” Then again, sometimes it’s action in the Terry Nation these-seven-episodes-won’t-fill-themselves sense, with Benny and Jason trekking through dreary desert and drearier caves to meet standard sci-fi filler people with great names like Gruat and Meil. It’s just pages of stuff.

When it comes to the climactic moments the authors then get very excited and try to make everyone sound cool, so everyone’s equipped with quips, such as Jason’s entirely believable response to a friend’s imminent execution of “It’s clobberin’ time!” Or Clarence, that thoughtful and unknowable character who has only recently learned some basic tenets of humanity, telling a group of unconscious people after a successful brawl: “Thanks for the workout … We must do it again sometime.” Or Clarence, again, that unfathomable being who barely understands himself, squaring off against a fighty god with – and I’m embarrassed even typing this out – “Are you a god, or just a big girl?” They don’t sound cool. They don’t, if you want to get into it, sound much like themselves at all. Because the New Adventures are not, on the whole, cheesy SF action movies. There’s an unhealthy amount of swearing sprinkled over all of the above just to make sure it all sounds mega grown up and not, absolutely not at all, like an embarrassing teenager’s early attempt at a SF fantasy epic that should perhaps have remained on their hard drive.

I think we’ve arrived at the key problem here. It’s the writing. And before we get into it, there is something accidentally reassuring about a book like this, because it makes you realise the standard you’ve been used to beforehand. Have all the Bernice NAs been brilliant? No. But the writers tended to have a good handle on the characters, a recognisable authorial voice and quite simply, an aptitude for prose. On the whole we’ve been fortunate. Twilight Of The Gods is over a cliff with all of that. We’re right back at the early New Adventures now, with youthful authors and still-learning editors putting out some hot, steaming whatever. I can’t imagine any of their fellow NA authors reading this book without having to peek through their fingers at it.

Want to know what a character is thinking and feeling? Okay, Clapham and Miller are here to list it out for you. “Benny felt sad…” “Benny found herself frustrated…” “Benny felt terrible…” Curious how one character is reacting to the dramatic actions of another? Okay, but don’t get your hopes up for any variety. “Benny had never seen anyone fight so hard.” “Benny saw a look of determination and pure anger unlike any she had ever seen on him.” “She had never seen him looking so bad.” (See also some of those half-hearted, quite repetitive quips. “‘This is all very fascinating,’ said Clarence … ‘But could you guys please choose a vehicle so we can get out of here?’” And then not long after, “‘Look, this is all very pleasant,’ [Bernice] said, ‘but we really need to hurry up and get out of this cold.’”) Want a hint about how a character feels when they’re delivering, or hearing dialogue? Here, have constant descriptions of their smiles or half-smiles or smiles-inwardly so we all know this is witty or apt, which I guess is easier than actually writing things that are witty or apt. Six weeks from pitch to print. How much of that do you reckon was allocated to somebody with a red pen?

Some of it’s embarrassing even on a technical level. “He used the back of his hand to slap aside a woman with an axe, then kicked a man with a gun in the gut.” (A man with a what? Doesn’t he have enough problems without you hitting him?) “‘I completely understand, Jason,’ Benny told him.” (What is the point of inserting names into dialogue all the time if you’re going to say who is saying what and in which direction afterwards? Never mind how laughable that line is for Bernice.) And loads of it is just dry and lifeless. We get reams of inward character reactions to things that are just acknowledgements. “She couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed at his reaction.” What is that sentence achieving? Everyone, even Benny, has a running commentary instead of an inner life.

So much of it is just unpolished, unambitious chaff. And in amongst it all are the characters we’ve been following through the series. They haven’t a hope. Chris, whom the authors refer to either as that or Cwej seemingly at random, is in a particularly foul mood throughout. Or he’s just a really crass guy now. It’s hard to tell. (It‘s even harder to picture him as a former actually-good policeman when he’s battering people or encouraging Clarence to do so or reflecting on how much he’s disgusted by people.) Clarence, all with the quips here, now has all the intriguing mystery of a joke on a Penguin wrapper. He forms a bond with a young abused woman, Palma, who at one point murders a fellow almost-identically-spunky female character to rid her of a possessive god, which it turns out would have been removed in the next scene anyway had she not shot her. (No comment from Clarence or anyone else.) Jason, at the best of times a little too much like Chris only with rougher edges, is much the same as him here, when he’s not asking Bernice dippy questions or dropping non sequitur pop culture references about The Simpsons or Star Wars or The Fantastic Four in lieu of characterisation. He does at least get to rail against all the quasi-religious forces in one scene, in which the authors soapbox so hard they’re liable to fall off and break something, and they pat him on the back for his incredible logic even though he’s talking to a brainwashed victim and not a rational bad guy.

As for the tenuous do-they-don’t-they Jason/Benny relationship that was continued by proxy in The Joy Device, forget it, as Clapham and Miller are here to bluntly force “I love you”s out of Jason and Bernice, making the former sound uncharacteristically needy and the latter uncharacteristically naïve in the process. At this point in the series we know it’s not as simple as Just Get Back Together, so it rings utterly false to go, “Oh Yes It Is.”

They don’t, of course, but only because of the plot and what it does with Bernice. She is facing up against gods – not even the ones we started with, who are of course reduced to lame colloquial quips along with everyone else here (my favourite was “Sorry, girlfriend!” Seriously WTF) but the “Time Lords” of that Cold Fusion universe who wobble between benevolence and muahaha evil on a random, cheesy whim. Benny must choose between fighting to save Jason and getting back to her universe. She has faced similar choices throughout the book, and in all but one example she went with the greater good. So what does she do here? (SPOILER TIME.) Greater good, again. Which isn’t terribly dramatic as she’s already let bunches of people die several times, but in this case it means leaving Jason alone on a ruined planet in a dying universe before buggering off to a cushy new university job, and all after suddenly professing her undying love for him. That’s how we leave these two. Meanwhile, Chris has been de-aged into a (blonde) child and Clarence is dead, which weighs on Bernice’s mind for two entire paragraphs. (END OF SPOILER.) The last chapter is supposed to be a gentle reset after all that, a fond (and not subtle) farewell to the New Adventures. I did not feel fond reading it.

I can’t quite believe any of this. All this time and we end on an absolute hash of a piece of writing that trundles along like they’ll fill in the character stuff later, which ends by setting up a new status quo built on (MORE SPOILER) the death or doom of two main characters (END OF SPOILER), and it’s supposed to be hopeful. In what way is any of this better than just crashing the damn spaceship in Tears Of The Oracle? Bernice, needless to say, has few opportunities to shine – I know, why break the habit of a lifetime, but any attempt at a final statement on who she is and what these adventures have meant to her is lost in all that dreck.

As for the series, it had its ups and not too many downs. I’d trade a lot of Doctor Who books for Walking To Babylon or Dead Romance, and there have been very few serious misses here. Bernice was certainly worth the gamble, because in almost anyone’s hands, she sings. I wish she’d had more adventures in print. (She had some at Big Finish, albeit more as novelties between audio plays.) She’s a truly great creation, and her literary life deserves a better remembrance than Twilight Of The Gods. Luckily there’s plenty to choose from.

3/10

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