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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#53

Warmonger

By Terrance Dicks

Duck! It’s Warmonger!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2/10

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

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #112 – Amorality Tale by David Bishop

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#52

Amorality Tale

By David Bishop

Doctor Who often visits historical periods for its stories. This helps to provide a shorthand for the viewer/reader — see The Aztecs or The Roundheads, interesting tales hung on a familiar framework. Amorality Tale on the other hand is a period or event that you might not know about, and yet also one that’s potentially still in living memory: in 1952, somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people died in the London smog.

Your mileage may vary but — dreadful as that sounds — to me it doesn’t immediately suggest a story about why these things happen. It’s surely more in the line of how our characters will react to an unavoidable tragedy, like The Fires Of Pompeii. David Bishop’s book isn’t really like that, however: although Sarah Jane does at points want the (Third) Doctor to do something about all those deaths, their hearts are really only in it as far as stopping the catastrophe from spreading further afield — and initially not even that, as she’s just trying to get him out of a funk by investigating the “mystery” of the fog instead. (I did sort of wonder what this investigative journalist was expecting to happen in London at a heavily polluted time in its history.)

Wouldn’t you know it, this is in fact Doctor Who and it turns out the historical event has something to do with aliens. (Lucky Sarah.) Your mileage may vary again on whether it is actually the teensiest bit crass to associate real deaths with a sci-fi doodad. As if aware of this, the book has it both ways: the bad guy aliens state that the fog is just “the dominant native species’ own effluvia,” while later the Doctor says “the smog, it’s not natural. The weather is being controlled by the Xhinn.” (Both statements can be true, but without that second qualifier it might at least be ambiguous.) In any case, there really isn’t much for Sarah or the Doctor to investigate until the nastiness kicks off in earnest a good ways in.

Things at least get off to an interesting start with the Doctor and Sarah already installed in the East End when we arrive. I love stories that begin in media res: it’s intriguing to find Sarah holding her own as a barmaid in a rough pub and the Doctor running a watch-mender’s shop. What a pity then that we immediately undercut this by going right back to the scene where they decided to come here. You don’t need both; you could just as easily tease out the information later on in London.

Ah well: Amorality Tale has other things on its mind, namely gang warfare. Underworld bigshot Tommy Ramsey has just got out of prison and he’s putting his manor in order, little realising that a rebellion is brewing in the ranks. Meanwhile a bunch of youths led by the bloodthirsty Callum is looking to muscle in on Ramsey’s turf.

Amorality Tale is, for much of its initial 100 pages, all gangsters and geezers roughing each other up. There’s a good sense of Bishop doing his research here, such as in the central, easy to picture street filled with housewives all cleaning their doorsteps. Bishop gives suitably distinct voices to his various crooks and lowlifes — which helps where at least two of them are called Billy. The book overall has a simple, no muss no fuss writing style that clings comfortably to the setting and characters, often giving way to little nuggets of wit: “Prison seemed to agree with Tommy Ramsey. But then most things did, if they knew what was good for them.” / “The unbelievable high of winning proved far too addictive for Bob Valentine. One way or another, he’d been going to the dogs ever since.” I can see Terrance Dicks enjoying this writing style: it’s uncomplicated and it pushes things along at a lick. (Fair’s fair, there’s also a clever structure at work: Bishop uses days instead of chapters, which apportions the action into logical yet somewhat unusual intervals while also keeping clear the importance of this brief timespan.)

For a while you’d be forgiven for losing track of any alien threat whatsoever, and we’ll get to that, but it’s worth saying that the “gang stuff” in Amorality Tale makes for compelling enough reading in the meantime. The downside to this is the way Bishop presents his underworld. I’m not naive enough to think that a character’s actions are automatically an endorsement, and sure enough Tommy does some awful things here, like executing an unconscious enemy and being convicted (only on a technicality) for having his girlfriend murdered. But Amorality Tale still overall makes him out as a force for good in the neighbourhood, being the de facto law enforcement once the police fall victim to the alien menace; at one point he spares people’s lives because he reckons they’ve been brainwashed. Tommy, like many famous and/or fictional gangsters, also loves his dear old (slightly awful in her own way) mum.

Crucially he spends a good chunk of the book prodding a would-be romance with Sarah, whose bristly female empowerment excites him. The attraction flutters in both directions, with Sarah at one point considering what they might have been together in another life. (He considers the same.) The writer can turn her around later on and have her call him a small, petty murderer — which she does — but all those moments of domestic closeness have added up by then. See also Brick, aka Alan, Ramsey’s towering enforcer who is also a gentle giant that loves pigeons and hates hitting people. You’d be a bit weird if you came away from the book entirely hating these characters — indeed, Bishop might as well bash you into submission with an actual brick during those pigeon scenes. If Sarah likes somebody, we do too, however bonkers that makes her seem.

And look, it’s okay for characters to have facets or even be quite nice, actually, despite also being appalling. Bunker Soldiers is a fine example of just such a tightrope walk. Amorality Tale, however, is a bit too cute with its cheeky chappies, some of whom seem moments away from departing for Sherwood Forest. Sarah, it must be said, is seeing them on a good day: all their violence is directed at rival gangs, murderous policemen and zombies, with not an innocent bystander in sight. (Well, none that die of criminal violence during the events of the book.) She could still seem a bit less surprised when she weighs it all up and realises that crime does not, in fact, pay.

That’s enough about BBC Books’s answer to Peaky Blinders: show me the aliens! And Amorality Tale does that rather suddenly on page 100, revealing that a gang leader is actually a Xhinn, aka a floating ethereal angel of death. (Bishop forgive me, but I imagined Mr Burns when he’d had too much medication and kept threatening to bring you love.) The book wobbles quite a bit here, having made it significantly far without digging any of the necessary trenches for extra terrestrial bad guys: there’s just a hint of them in the prologue and then later on West Side Story suddenly turns into The War Of The Worlds.

I wish I could say the Xhinn were worth the wait. The Doctor characterises them as “the most petty, vindictive creatures” and he’s not wrong: these awful fellows control and then work people to death, puppeteer them as zombie enforcers, conduct cruel and distinctly Nazi-ish death experiments on them and then to top it off, feed them into horrific (yet nonetheless Penelope Pitstop-esque) conveyer-belts of death. There’s really no coming back from such one note maniacal menaces as these — but Bishop tries, giving the Doctor (and at one point, awkwardly, the prose) some ominous pronouncements about what a famed menace they are throughout the galaxy. The Doctor’s drop-of-a-hat info dumping about the Xhinn is the first time I’ve felt okay about the Eighth Doctor losing his memory; imagine not having to lean on the protagonist to say “Oh, those guys? Hang on, I’ve got it written down somewhere.”

There are a few little wrinkles about them that could be interesting, such as there being three Xhinn that speak almost as one, their method of controlling people without their knowing it, and the way they can create spies in human form. That first one is a damp squib since they don’t say very much of value; the other two really ought to be something, except the spy thing is extremely easy to guess, and the duplicate thing invariably ends in the spy going native, forgetting their roots and then — as if catching an interesting idea on its way out of the window — getting quickly bumped off anyway. The Xhinn’s main contribution, apart from the smog, is an army of brainwashed and/or zombie policemen at the end, but since that’s largely a way into lots and lots of scenes of criminals hacking, slashing and blasting them down, there’s still not a lot to write home about.

This leads to one of Amorality Tale’s little peccadillos: violence. It’s hardly the first BBC Book or Doctor Who novel in general to get nasty, and indeed you should consider yourself forewarned by Bishop’s previous co-written (wink) Who Killed Kennedy, which minced various kindly UNIT chumps and made Dodo extinct. Amorality Tale isn’t entirely gratuitous, but it seems to prioritise actual death rather than triumphs over adversity. There are numerous characters who we follow, get invested in and then place in a cliffhanger-type situation only to — you guessed it — kill ’em anyway. One particularly distraught character decides bluntly “to kill himself when this was over. It was the only way he could ever hope to block out the memories.” You might think that was the beginning of some sort of epiphany but no, eight pages later, off he goes. This kind of all-encompassing horror is perhaps apropos for a book that concerns around 8,000 deaths from the outset, but there comes a point where our noses are simply being rubbed in it. And what’s the takeaway? Violence and death are violent and deadly?

I’m probably missing the wood for the trees here: it’s amoral, after all. But I don’t think it really is on a character level, what with those overall quite personable criminals who have, when all’s said and done, a code of sorts. If the only amoral thing here is the aliens, that doesn’t tell us anything much deeper or more meaningful than, avoid these aliens.

It’s a good thing Amorality Tale is so readable — and it really is. Granted, it’s easy to pick on simpler writing styles like this one, and I’ll own up here and say that there are a few clunkers and redundancies in Amorality Tale. (“The heavy key rattled as it turned, opening the lock on the small door.” / “‘Where’s it coming from?’ Tommy asked. The smog deadened sound, making it difficult to determine from which direction it was emanating.”) I don’t love some of those all-too-neat criminal characterisations, and I wasn’t bowled over by the Doctor and Sarah — the latter runs out of journalistic steam almost immediately, the former tinkers on the sidelines for most of the book until he effortlessly conjures a kill-o-majig for the finale, pausing only to impart useful lore. It’s a violent book without much to say about mass death, but it occasionally finds space to make its impact felt (even, incredibly, letting a few of them survive) and it builds a real sense of escalating disaster as it chunters along. Like some of Uncle Terry’s questionable novel assignments, you can let yourself ease into this one and enjoy the somewhat corny characters and the helpfully A-to-B action that comes in handy chunks. If nothing else, there’s plenty of atmosphere. Smog will do that.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #110 – Palace Of The Red Sun by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#51

Palace Of The Red Sun

By Christopher Bulis

Here’s a milestone for the marathon: the last ever Doctor Who novel by Christopher Bulis. He wrote 12 of them if you count the Bernice Summerfield books, which I do. That’s a somewhat load-bearing guy for two different publishers. No mean feat.

I think it’s important to recognise that crazy level of output because, without wishing to be unkind, Bulis is not considered one of the creative trailblazers of Doctor Who lit. Through his fairly long Wilderness Years career he maintained a mostly meat-and-potatoes approach to sci-fi, occasionally pushing the boat out for a State Of Change (famous villain) or a Sorcerer’s Apprentice (SF+fantasy) or a Vanderdeken’s Children (kinda complicated). At his best he wrote novels that seemed familiar but also embraced their genre of choice and rollicked along nicely, such as Imperial Moon. If nothing else he could turn his hand to writing any of the Doctors; in just over five years he wrote for all of them.

I doubt it will surprise anyone to hear that his final book, Palace Of The Red Sun, doesn’t suddenly veer into uncharted territory. It has all the things that cause people who don’t like Christopher Bulis novels to roll their eyes in despair: it borrows greedily from the probable video collections of its readers in order to stitch together an SF-tinged-with-fantasy romp that anyone hoping for a very original work can dismiss out of hand — as indeed they did, based on reviews such as Discontinuity Guide which labelled it “Dire.”

On balance, I don’t think I’m one of those people. Whilst I haven’t exactly been effusive about these things, more often than not I’m swept along by them. Bulis generally sticks to ideas that have been proven to work and he has a good grasp of pacing — you’d hope so after 12 books. I’m a simple man: keep each chapter focused on the same character or group of characters and I’ll be your friend.

Palace Of The Red Sun is an almost constant example of that “DiCaprio pointing at the TV” meme, but I read most of it in a day which ought to count for something. We open an a royal court getting overthrown by some intergalactic bully, only to find that the royals have fled. Shades of Masters Of The Universe or maybe even Krull there. The action moves to a different planet where a primitive society lives in conflict with some uncaring Lords, all of whom are possibly derived from the same society — don’t suppose you’re familiar with The Face Of Evil or State Of Decay? There are aspects of this place such as sprites that lean towards fantasy (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice much) while gardens full of robots somehow give rise to a machine with a mind of its own (too many references to mention, but Bulis’s A Device Of Death is in there), and in the royal court a young princess despairs at having to choose between two strangers as suitors. (How long have you got?!) That’s before we get into the weeds of what’s really going on here, about which I’ll be discrete and just say that several eras of Star Trek got there first.

Some of this is deliberate — and I don’t mean the occasional bits of lampshading. (“Frustrating and possibly anti-climactic, but there it is and we must make the best of it.” / “‘Doctor, isn’t this sort of thing happening twice on one small world a bit much?’ ‘It is not such a great coincidence as it may seem.’” Oh, mate. Yikes.) Dexel Dynes being reused from Bulis’s The Ultimate Treasure is a clear example of here-we-go-again, but he’s harmless enough and it’s a good idea really, since a shady journo probably would continue to follow bad guys in space, and consequently he’d keep getting in the Doctor’s way. The only problem is a) I’d forgotten about him entirely so it wasn’t much of a thrill to see him again, b) he doesn’t interact with the Sixth Doctor or Peri for most of it so they don’t need to remember him much either, and c) Dynes barely distinguishes himself as a character here or even really does anything — which perhaps helps to explain a).

There’s at least one plot point that’s deliberately old hat, about which, mixed feelings. The actual mechanics of this form perhaps the best (only?) surprise in the book, but baking that into a story that’s roughly 80% reused ingredients makes it a bit hollow that the author has successfully identified one hackneyed thing, as if such meta suspicion is usual in his books. (On the other hand, it’s a lot harder to spot that way.)

What about the new stuff, then? We’ve got a villain, Glavis Judd, supposed Protector of multiple planets but obviously in reality a wrong’un. He’s trying to break into Esselven, a very small planetoid with an unusual force shield. Bulis finds Judd pretty interesting, having him reminisce (for no apparent reason) about his back story in ways that recall Silver in Hope. Judd never gets much of a foot in the door though, as first of all it’s quite tricky to get down to that planet, second, hardly anyone down there knows about him anyway. Consequently the main plot of the novel feels, deliberately at least, like a sub-plot. (As for what secrets he’s trying to prise from Esselven, the whole reason for his quest, that ends up being a no-plot.)

It’s what’s on the planet that counts, provided you can stop rolling your eyes at all the familiar story beats. The big stuff admittedly doesn’t quite come off: Esselven is so small and in such an orbit that the days don’t visibly change, meaning the concept of “days” is more of a habit that’s been handed down, but only to the higher classes. That’s interesting! But then you have things like characters referencing winter — how can there be seasons here? And how do the plants survive in constant daylight? It feels like a rare Actually Original Idea (or original enough that it has no immediately obvious analogue) that didn’t quite get the development it needed.

The characters are better. I quite liked Green-8, the sentient robot palling around with the Doctor. (Who adorably fashions a robot disguise so they can sneak about as twinsies.) Green-8 spends most of the book making inroads to having a personality, which honestly isn’t as boring as it sounds. Also quite good, surprisingly: Princess Oralissa. She might have a very old hat predicament on her hands but her gradual suspicions about the world around her, awakening from a more or less fairytale framework to recognise something sci-fi instead, is one of the book’s stronger elements. I even found myself imagining (don’t laugh) a whole book about Oralissa that started as something trite and then spun off elsewhere. She and Green-8 are the ones you’ll care about by the end, if indeed that applies to any characters in your case.

The Scavengers are less enthralling. This is the plot point Peri gets lumbered with, first getting stuck in a work camp (yes I know we’ve done that before) and then escaping to find fellow worker Kel’s dreary hometown. The Scavengers are caveman-style monosyllabic (until, curiously, they’re not any more) and Peri quickly realises she could have just not bothered and stayed hidden in a building instead. On a personal level, there are numerous scenes of Kel either declaring his intentions for Peri or otherwise just copping a feel, which feels like a sorry default setting for an attractive companion from an abrasive era. (It didn’t leave me enamoured with Kel either.) Peri is at least better written here than in The Ultimate Treasure, but that still doesn’t transform her Scavenger scenes into something that needed to happen to progress the story. Bulis is clearly just keeping her busy.

The same is true of the Doctor, as he doesn’t do anything other than look for Peri and vaguely investigate Esselven until Page 180, and he doesn’t find out about Judd until it’s nearly over. It’s perhaps fair to say that the situation on Esselven is important enough on its own, but something’s got to give when you’re doing both, especially when Esselven is a lords vs peasants story but also an ancient mystery but also a potential robot uprising but also a [Star Trek thing] and a [twist ending thing]. Judd seems inconsequential after all that, which of course is what he deserves and then what he gets, which is sort of neat?

Hmm… wasn’t I saying something about Palace Of The Red Sun being good, actually? Here’s the thing: reviewing it is when all its flaws become more apparent and harder to ignore. Many of Bulis’s books work just well enough while you’re reading them, and I found that to be the case here. The characters are a mixed bag, but I found the two most significant ones likeable and interesting enough to care how those plot threads turned out. There are too many plot threads but a few of them paid off. (The collective sense of business also reaches a sort of critical mass that’s always moving, at least.) The Doctor and Peri don’t have a huge impact on events, but they join in with a certain sense of camaraderie by the end that I found quite winning. It all comes together nicely enough, with perhaps an awkward nod to the Doctor’s rather unilateral decisions at the very end.

I’m aware that I’m damning it with faint praise. Bulis might be my most damned-with-faint-praise author, this book possibly being the starkest example. Nevertheless, despite a host of flaws and are-we-sure-about-thats I found Palace Of The Red Sun pacey enough and fun enough to make it through 280 pages quickly and in a good mood. It’s jolly. Whatever else you can take away from it, that is simply not always a given when you pick up a Doctor Who book, and it might be Bulis’s legacy that he managed it more often than not.

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#50

Drift

By Simon A. Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #106 – Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#49

Relative Dementias

By Mark Michalowski

Bunting! Sparklers! Those unrolling party things that honk! BBC Books has a new author for us. And he’s good.

I know nothing about Mark Michalowski other than the fact that I can’t seem to retain his full name. (I keep having to check.) We can surmise that he likes Doctor Who since he, y’know, wrote one. Relative Dementias has enough flavour to tell us that he knows it rather well, too, or otherwise that he excels at doing his homework. This isn’t a mark of quality by itself of course — most of the people who’ve read this book ought to stand a good chance in a Doctor Who pub quiz. But writing something that feels of a piece with the TV show without feeling like you’re coasting is no mean feat.

It gets off to an exciting start with a very singular teaser, using second person dialogue to set up something iffy going on at Graystairs, a Scottish Alzheimer’s clinic. (It feels a bit too easy to say that a vaguely modern thing feels more like New Who than Classic, but damn it, this one does.) We then dive straight into a bit of world-building, which you don’t often see in Past Doctor books.

The Doctor is asked for help by an old friend from UNIT, Dr Joyce Brunner, whose mother is at Graystairs. She does this via a secret PO Box which is monitored by another old/new friend, Countess Gallowglass: a fabulous grand old lady who lives with her cat in a hidden building. (I could immediately see her being an asset to the series, but alas, this is probably a one-and-done.) What an unusual instinct, using the continuity of the Doctor’s UNIT days but not having it be about Liz Shaw, or Mike Yates. And then throwing in brand new lore to boot! It felt like a proper expansion of the series, all tucked away in the range most people consider a chocolate box. Lush.

The story is on potentially shaky ground with Alzheimer’s, a subject you can imagine being done badly — especially with the potential insensitivity of a sci-fi explanation. Michalowski handles it appropriately, give or take some evil aliens on the periphery. The book doesn’t dwell much on the disease itself or its effect on families, but there are thoughtful moments as the residents rely on each other, and some fearlessly dark ones, such as Joyce’s view of her mother following a heart attack: “A stranger that more and more frequently, had reminded Joyce of what she’d wished for that day.” There is a sci-fi plot of course, as doctors somehow reverse the symptoms of the disease — for a sinister purpose, no doubt — but the book still makes time for Joyce to come back and confront what her mother is going through, the bad and the good. I wish there had been room to explore this more from the residents’ or the families’ point of view — more of a Flowers For Algernon thing, or even a Thursday Murder Club (with spaceships). But what we get feels quite decent.

Also very solid: the regulars. The Seventh Doctor and Ace are among the most written-about TARDIS teams, largely thanks to Virgin, so it might be hard to get them wrong. Even with that in mind, Relative Dementias really sells the duo. Granted, it feels like an earlier time in their relationship than the New Adventures or even most of their BBC Books — despite the Doctor’s Season 26 jacket Ace is a little more gung-ho here than she was in Fenric or Ghost Light. She is given reasons to be mistrustful of him in the novel, rather than carrying them over from other media, but they never really threaten to break their relationship. (Especially since Michalowski also gives Ace reasons to sympathise with the Doctor’s machinations.) Ace’s Leela-esque protectiveness is on full display, as is (charmingly) her sense of fun. I loved the bit at Graystairs when she tries to ruin an unpleasant person’s day: “Ducking back to the lounge, [Ace] opened her mouth to call ‘bingo’ as loudly as she could — only to find it smothered by the Doctor’s hand as he dragged her away. ‘Spoilsport,’ she muttered.”

There’s a surprisingly level playing field in this one between the Doctor and Ace and the villains of the piece. The book takes a while to really get into the action, the Doctor spending about a quarter of it mostly just getting something to eat — it feels, implicitly, like An Easy One. When we finally identify the baddies they’re not exactly the galaxy’s most wanted, feeling more than usually like just some (alien) people caught on the back foot. To an extent the Doctor and Ace have earned this sort of indomitable feeling. Michalowski uses it to set them up for a fall, however, when the Doctor’s relative (ahem) overconfidence puts him in the crosshairs of a certain kind of degenerative mental illness. All of a sudden, the less than accomplished villains are looking rather more threatening. Nice work.

This perhaps ought to be the selling point of the novel, if that doesn’t sound too glib; the Doctor losing his mind. (The blurb seems to think so.) I think Relative Dementias largely sleeps on it, however, pushing the Doctor lower down in the mix for a bit but never quite leaving us in doubt that he’ll recover. (Yes, I know that’s always a given, but still: novels gotta suspend disbelief.) It’s a good excuse to give more action to Ace, and it seemingly sets up a mystery about his past, although I might have misread that bit. If I didn’t then it’s hard to believe that anyone else is going to pick it up.

I haven’t said much about the plot, perhaps because I’d end up spoiling it. Relative Dementias keeps a lot of plates spinning and at times requires a bit of thought to piece it all together. One of its mysteries is perhaps not as mysterious as Michalowski would like to think, but I still enjoyed finding out what was going on there and following it through. There’s a decent number of reveals to keep things going afterwards. There are times though when it threatens to get over-ambitious, particularly with (don’t panic) a writing style that favours short sections and scene changes. Combined with some unusually hot weather, this slowed down my reading somewhat, but I don’t think it’s really a massive hindrance. Michalowski keeps his focus on the same few scenes at a time.

There’s a mild feeling of over-ambition in the characters as well as the structure. There are perhaps too many of them to really give everyone their due, with a number of Graystairs residents threatening to blend into the furniture, a couple of young lads on a boat fighting for pages, and even Joyce ending up as second fiddle to her son — him being a walking example of lore-building, there to set up the interesting but perhaps extraneous idea that life in UNIT has more cons than pros. It’s all good stuff, honestly, and it’s grist to the mill once it’s time for Ace to feel less than terrific about the Doctor’s actions. But in amongst a complex plot it becomes noticeably just another ingredient.

“Slightly too ambitious” is a nice problem to have, ultimately. Relative Dementias is my sort of speed for Doctor Who. The plot isn’t a galaxy-botherer, but there’s enough of it to make it spicy. Granted, the characters are a little over-crowded, but everyone’s got something to them. It engages with the TV series, but more with a “Yes, and” than a “What’s your favourite episode,” which tends to be the way. It’s a good example of the Past Doctor Adventures being fine to pick up and read without any context, only to then go a bit further than your expectations.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #104 – Instruments Of Darkness by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#48

Instruments of Darkness

By Gary Russell

Well, better late than never. Gary Russell’s Instruments Of Darkness* was originally scheduled to appear seven months earlier and was replaced at short notice by The Shadow In The Glass. I don’t know what kept him, though my first guess would be his responsibilities at Big Finish.

And wouldn’t you know it: in a move that will delight enjoyers of shared media, Instruments Of Darkness is the first BBC Book to feature a Big Finish original character! Evelyn Smythe, come on down. (While we’re at it, this one also contains explicit links to the Virgin books, thus linking all three continuities. I’m not made of stone — that’s just plain delightful.)

If this already sounds like yet another trip on  the Gary Russell continuity-go-round, well, yes it is. But at least he’s mainly focused on his own ideas this time. This isn’t a brand new novel so much as the third act in his “C19 trilogy,” concerning a shadier-than-UNIT group who make questionable use of alien tech. (Russell T Davies must have been taking notes.) By this point C19 are no more, but some of the characters from The Scales Of Injustice and a few from Business Unusual reoccur here. All of them have loose ends to tie up.

To be clear: keeping the continuity in the family like this isn’t automatically better than going the fanwank route. In much the same way that books by Craig Hinton might only be comprehensible to those that know The Time Monster back to front, this one relies heavily on your having read (and remembered) Business Unusual. Let’s be honest, that book was a while ago. Russell spends a good amount of time recapping events, so you’re unlikely to be completely lost if you’re new here, but all the same it might have been better if a sequel like this had come out a little closer to the last instalment. (And it’s me saying this — I’m reading these at a rate of knots compared to how they were originally released. Business Unusual was four and a bit years ago in publishing time.) Frankly you shouldn’t need to spend that much time recapping.

Memory warnings aside, it’s kinda cool that he wants to dive back in and explore these characters further — and potentially quite rewarding, if you already happen to have Scales and Business on your bookshelves. What he comes up with is quite interesting, too. The Irish twins (a pair of augmented assassins who can’t die by conventional means) have recanted their evil ways and are looking for the Doctor, and hopefully some understanding as well. Trey, Mel’s friend and also a powerful psychic, is still searching for Joe, his lost love who isn’t really dead. And there’s that lurking question: is C19 really gone? Could there be something else now — something worse?

A recurring theme in Russell’s trilogy (which ought to encompass Who Killed Kennedy as well) is the consequences of Doctor Who stories — the people you wouldn’t necessarily think about and how they were affected. That’s a smart use of continuity (if, indeed, you must use it) and Instruments Of Darkness touches on that again, first by following those earlier characters to their next chapter, then by introducing more collateral damage. We meet retired Vice-Marshal Dickinson who suddenly finds out that his son, supposedly killed in action with UNIT, is alive. Will he find him? There’s an amnesiac villain with ties to the Doctor, as well as a grudge, but he doesn’t know all the facts. Who is he, and what happened to him? There’s Mel, getting back to Earth several years after she left — will she contact her family, and what will she say? And then there’s Evelyn, a walking consequence of the Doctor’s past in more ways than one. In case you missed it after all that, the Doctor helpfully makes it clear that this subject is on his mind: “What of the people I leave behind? As the years have gone by, as experiences have piled upon experiences, I’m left caring more, worrying more.”

Long story short, there’s potential here for a good, meditative book on the trauma of the past, of being left behind, finally putting a button on those ideas after three books. And long story even shorter: Instruments Of Darkness is not that book. Sadly it’s a case of all setup and no payoff.

The most obvious problem here is that there’s too much going on, and it’s not all marching in lockstep. In the main you have the ghost of C19, aka the Magnate, aka the Network. (I think…? these are different things?) Aka a bunch of shifty people in France who pretend to control the world, but actually have much murkier goals. (Which are worse than controlling the world, somehow?) This organisation contains a group of paranormally gifted people who, rather improbably, spend most of the novel just standing in a room. (Andrew Cartmel’s psi-powers arc it ain’t — they barely feature. Nevertheless Russell named the book in reference to these pseudo-X-Men characters.) More pressingly they have John Doe, their boss with amnesia, along with his duo of lady assassins (yes we‘re getting another gruesome twosome ala the Irish twins) and Therése Gavalle, a reluctant new recruit helping to bolster their super-powered ranks whilst puzzling over a gap in her own memory. There are also assorted other staff members whom we’re probably supposed to be able identify due to their memorably unpleasant fates later on, but reader, I couldn’t.

Anyway, this merry band are up to something that context tells us must have something to do with the opening chapter, which quickly jumps through different time periods and cultures. (Memorably featuring some genuinely awful non-British dialects.) A spooky force is intervening in women’s lives through the ages, predominantly to save them from sexual assault or murder (lovely) but also to see if they are Ini-Ma… a concept you’ll be left to puzzle over for most of the book as we bin that off and everyone worries about other stuff instead. The Magnate don’t immediately seem interested, preferring to fuss over super-beings and murders. Nor do the Doctor and Mel (and Evelyn) as they’re busy tracking down the Irish twins. And nor are the friggin’ Irish twins, who are themselves loosely working for the Magnate/the Network but also not because they don’t do that sort of thing any more, but they still are anyway, so…? Yeah I don’t know guys.

For a book that evidently suffered some delays, and so presumably had extra time, it’s not very coherent. Characters’ loyalties are confusing and the book spends so long not getting into the whole Ini-Ma thing that the Doctor (and the reader) has to hear great chunks of exposition about it towards the end instead, as if it was a bonus idea grafted on later. Only at that point is there a sudden barreling rush to make this apparently universe-bothering threat matter, and it doesn’t convince, partly because Russell writes his godlike beings with the same irritating insouciance as everyone else. (“Oh do belt up, Time Lord.” Terrifying.) Climactic action scenes then happen in frenzied blurs, with Mexican stand-offs that involve too many people to keep track of, all moved along by Russell’s signature casual blasts of violence that suddenly make things unappealingly nasty — also, where possible, hurriedly binning off characters so you feel like it was a mistake to wait around for them. It generally gets worse as it goes along, particularly with proofreading errors, which suggest this thing still wasn’t ready when they finally put it out — and perhaps that the ending was written at a sprint. “It occurred to Mel that Evelyn’s faith might have been displaced.” (Do you mean misplaced?) “It’s is already New Year’s Eve.” (It’s is?) “Hmmm… what about those people at the network/“ (Question mark?) “He took A deep breath and then bellowed once more.” (Random capital A?)

All of that’s just the small stuff and plot stuff. The important bits — the ones I think are important anyway, highlighted above — are character stuff. Russell’s not that interested in his world-ending threat so why be upset if that’s a bit messy? Trouble is, the character stuff isn’t very strong either. Take the Irish twins: the concept that they’re effectively do-gooders now, helping out around a village, caring for similar C19 cast-offs and building a support group among the villagers, is full of possibility. They finally meet the Doctor but there isn’t time to win him over very meaningfully — the plot’s going “Mush! Mush!” by that point — so they just explain what’s up, the finale is enacted and then Russell brusquely gets rid of them. Shame.

Better is Trey’s story, which tangles up with the Twins and latterly with Joe, who’s with them. But Russell isn’t here to tell a great love story, leaning into tragedy instead. Okay, could work, tragedy is entirely worthwhile as a story choice — but the truth about Trey and Joe, or more accurately Joe and Trey, is given to us in a throwaway final paragraph, which doesn’t so much recontextualise their scenes and actions together as simply confuse them. I audibly “Huh?”’d.

There’s that retired Vice-Marshal, who has some degree of pathos in his background and retirement home scenes, then reclaims a bit of dignity by throwing off his pursuers and searching for his son — successfully! But he ends up barely speaking to him, usefully holds a door shut for a bit and is then bleakly chucked out of the story, along with his son. Killing characters isn’t automatically a bad thing, I’m not saying that’s an invalid choice, but do it often enough and it begins to feel like these things just aren’t paying off. See also Therése Gavalle, whose allegiance shifts for plot reasons but who then starts acting like a one dimensional murder-crazy bad guy for seemingly no reason. (Don’t worry, she — altogether now! — gets dumped real quick.)

And then of course there’s John Doe. I had — stupidly, entirely my own fault, when will I learn etc — spoiled this for myself shortly before reading it. The truth is revealed five pages before the end (so I dunno, reference guides, maybe it’s not mandatory that you advertise it) and then we only get the character’s first name, and incredibly the character isn’t around for the pay-off. They just don’t finish their arc. There’s no reunion with the Doctor, no reckoning, just a sad little “what a pity” moment whilst also taking a moment to dig the boot into a character no one, including the Doctor, liked. This doesn’t champion Russell’s theme of people left behind and the Doctor’s collateral damage — not when it sounds pretty squarely like it was the guy’s own fault he was in this state, which alarmingly suggests that he was just a conveniently unpopular target for a womp-womp twist. Think, Scrappy Doo in the 2002 Scooby Doo movie. What, I’m getting tired of saying, a waste. (Although to be fair the Scrappy Doo thing made me laugh.)

Lastly we have Evelyn. (I’m skipping Mel. She is politely warned off of phoning home because unbeknownst to her future-Mel is home already, so it’s simpler if she doesn’t engage. Conveniently enough.) Yes, it is unequivocally a delight to have Evelyn here. If you haven’t heard her Big Finish stories you will get some idea of what she offers: a more grown up sensibility, a feisty cantankerousness, and a sort of mellowing effect on the Doctor. (Not so much the latter though given Russell’s propensity for “everyone’s awfully snippy today” dialogue.) I like her in this. I like her scenes with Mel, although their character development predictably comes along in great heavy blobs rather than being organically threaded through the story — we always stop to pontificate on it.

The problem is the bizarre device used to get her here. The story is set at the end of 1993: huge, albeit unclear importance is placed on the New Year celebrations. Evelyn, as we know her, is from 2000. To get around that, we learn that she eventually tired of TARDIS life (this was published during her BF run, so odd choice already) and the Doctor dropped her off, but in 1988, without any means to get by, just so she could keep an eye out for the Irish twins should he happen along and wish to find them. I mean? Isn’t that essentially punishment? Evelyn is out of time and off the grid for an unknown number of years and can’t meet her loved ones. Yet this is somehow cloaked in the Doctor’s concern for people he’s left behind, which is a bit rich. It’s a bizarre bit of stroppy mistreatment for a character at that point still ongoing in Big Finish, and it’s downright bleak to say this lady of advancing years has six of them to look forward to alone, just because the Doctor can’t find a 1988 equivalent of a Google alert. For me it made the whole Doctor-and-Evelyn house of cards wobble unnecessarily. I was not a fan. (To be fair some of the blame is placed on the TARDIS for aggressively taking his side in an argument, but come on, they all knew the deal when the time came to leave her there.)

I’m not convinced that Instruments Of Darkness says anything about Russell’s themes that wasn’t already implicit in the earlier books. There’s no added guilt for the Doctor or any representative of UNIT (none are present) and there’s no notable catharsis for anyone affected by him — even though in Evelyn’s case we’re adding new grudges. The book at least has some new ideas (the Ini-Ma thing) but those don’t feed into said themes, and when it’s time for a dramatic conclusion we have to pull important information hurriedly out of our proverbial nether place because there wasn’t space to set it up, so the Doctor’s umpteenth “there should have been another way” coda re the bad guys doesn’t hit very hard. If you detach from the themes there’s not much else here: a nice enough inclusion of an audio character, some jolly Sixth Doctor writing, a bit of banter and some sudden bursts of action. It’s less a thrilling conclusion than just a load more stuff — an author, very much like his character, faced with things left behind and concluding little more than “Shame, innit?”

5/10

*Super picky of me but I don’t much like the title. It has a reference point in the plot but it feels too portentous for what most of the plot actually is. I wish he’d kept up the pseudo-malapropism theme from Business Unusual, and perhaps called it Finished Business.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #102 – Dying In The Sun by Jon de Burgh Miller

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#47

Dying in the Sun

By Jon de Burgh Miller

I was a little apprehensive about this one, what with Jon de Burgh Miller’s previous Doctor Who book (or at least Who-adjacent) being Twilight Of The Gods, the final Bernice Summerfield novel co-written with Mark Clapham. Circumstances meant that Twilight was written in a hurry and to my mind it showed: reliant on clichés and not convincing in its character writing, it was comfortably the worst Benny book.

Dying In The Sun also had a notable publishing journey, but at least not a rushed one. It was pitched as an Eighth Doctor “stuck on Earth” novel, then retooled for the Seventh Doctor and Ace, then retooled again for the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly. (Credit: I, Who.) This time however the book’s behind-the-scenes tribulations are not especially apparent.

It’s set in Hollywood circa 1947, and sounds like it: lines like “It was the City of Angels, and the angels were screaming” have a certain Humphrey Bogart charm to them, or cheese, depending on your persuasion. I don’t know if Miller or Clapham was responsible for the action movie bent of their last book, but this one’s somewhat hokey setting allows for that sort of thing to come off more naturally, or at least more of a piece with the surroundings. The whole novel doesn’t sound like it’s narrated by a moody gumshoe – more’s the pity – but it has a certain earnestness that might not have worked in a less tacky time and place. I felt comfortable enough with lines like “For a moment, a very short moment, Chate thought he could see sadness in her eyes, like she’d caught a fleeting glimpse of a past that was too painful to bear.” I don’t know if Miller had a tongue in cheek writing that, but it works.

Of the three Doctor/companion combos in the novel’s DNA I’d say Miller landed on the right one, with Ben and Polly being quite close to this time period, a couple of cool kids and very much the children of these movies. It’s unusual to find this TARDIS team enjoying a long layover somewhere, what with this Doctor having no control over his travels and most of those being base-under-siege horror, but it makes sense that they’d want to stick around and enjoy themselves when they’re close-ish to their own era. Polly has a natural glamour that fits well in Hollywood – numerous people tell her that she could be a movie star, and that doesn’t sound like a stretch – while Ben sounds as exasperated as ever. (He seems a hard one to write for but if you get that right, you’re golden.) Finally, the shabbiest Doctor of all provides a delightful contrast against the glamour of Hollywood. His avuncular friendliness, even when accused of murder, fits just right for the character. It’s perhaps a bit odd that he wants to renew a pre-existing friendship with a Hollywood producer – where he can’t pilot the TARDIS it seems unlikely that he’d know somebody – but that might be a casualty of the novel’s earlier versions. You wouldn’t blink if this was McCoy.

The plot is also well integrated into the setting. A new movie is coming out (called Dying In The Sun, naturally) and it’s causing some unusual reactions. The special effects seem impossibly good for the era, and they even seem to change from one screening to another. The stars associated with it have a supernatural glow to them, which has begun to proliferate through the Hollywood ranks. A local organisation has blossomed into a full-blown cult, its members becoming one with a strange microscopic race of aliens that only want to enhance our specialness and share it through movies. The Doctor of course understands that this will mean slavery for the human race.

It’s not hard to decipher the satirical elements of Miller’s Hollywood, with its unnatural allure and powerful cabals in the shadows. The “Selyoids” (the name is a deliberate joke, it’s not that cheesy) allow for a lot of sci-fi fun and games however, with film reels manipulated by them, a glamour added to those who join with them, zombies who are fully controlled by them, enormous projections powered by them and occasional monsters manifested by them right out of the movies. The downside is that, as well as being a little all over the place conceptually, they are a disembodied force – something the characters talk about rather than to, which leads to a bit too much “as you know, Bob” near the end. The Doctor and co debate the morality of the Selyoids living symbiotically with humankind but it feels like they can’t do that in good faith while a) the people debating it are not themselves and b) the Selyoids don’t specifically get a vote. Polly, by this point drinking the proverbial Kool Aid, talks about how wonderful it is to join with them, but that doesn’t really come from an emotional place; we just recognise that it’s cool when people think you’re pretty and want your autograph. (We skip the rather more convincing part where Selyoids can cure all injuries and presumably all illnesses.) Again, it’s satire, and not a very deep one. Hollywood ain’t that deep either, I’m sure.

There isn’t a lot of depth elsewhere in the novel. There’s a murder mystery (the Doctor’s producer friend) where curiously we skip the actual event – it would surely have been worth showing, since the Doctor was present to some extent. There’s a murder suspect, mob enforcer Rob Chate, who we’re supposed to sympathise with but who does actually commit a murder shortly afterwards. (Self defence.) Towards the end of the novel, with practically everyone now under the Selyoid influence, it becomes difficult to differentiate Chate from Detective Fletcher, the hard-boiled investigator who thinks the Doctor dunit. The family history between Chate and police chief Wallis is important but it’s a little too histrionic to make any real impact – it just sounds like a cheesy movie twist, which admittedly might be the point. The book mostly just tumbles along once the Doctor becomes fascinated by the movie at the centre of things, with no real impetus on solving the initial mystery – and, as established, not much of a pronounced alien presence for him to rally against.

Dying In The Sun really does tumble along though. Miller keeps a good pace and the setting is quite colourful, even though a few of its ideas have been done before. (Creatures stepping out of movies, see: Theatre Of War. Symbiotic alien invasions, see: how long have you got?) I’ve got a lot of time for books where it’s clear what’s going on and the author creates some memorable imagery. And, as it seems mandatory to point out based on other reviews for it, there are no deliberate continuity refs here: the TARDIS isn’t mentioned, no previous adventures are alluded to, it’s just three travellers wrapped up in a sci-fi adventure. So it’s a good one to pick up at random, which funnily enough is the thing the EDAs have been striving towards. When order is at last restored, Dying In The Sun: The Movie becomes just another day at the pictures. Miller’s book doesn’t aspire to a whole lot more than that, but it’ll kill time just as well.

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventure

#46

Psi-ence Fiction

By Chris Boucher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

4/10