Doctor Who: The BBC Books #122 – Heritage by Dale Smith

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#57

Heritage

By Dale Smith

It’s difficult to talk about this one without spoiling it. Heritage revolves around something bad happening to a friend of the Doctor’s. A third of it goes by without revealing who it is, so it feels a little unsportsmanlike to name them in a review.

On the other hand Heritage isn’t really like Who Killed Kennedy, Eternity Weeps or Bullet Time. Those all featured a familiar character meeting an unhappy end, but it was just one ingredient of the plot, a tragic outcome that carried extra shock points because we knew the victim. Eternity Weeps, for example, had plenty of tragedy going on already; the added death was just a way of telling you that the Doctor isn’t going to wave a magic wand this time.

Heritage takes a more measured approach. There’s been a death on this dusty planet — two, really — and everyone is going to feel it for 280 pages. It’s Doctor Who in the form of a Western, where the characters fill the roles of archetypes. There’s a powerful, malignant man in control of the town. Psychotic killers for hire. Good men rendered apathetic with guilt. A blameless child. A vacuum filled by the innocent dead. And strolling into town, a stranger whom the villains hardly regard at all — but we know to be an “avenging angel, hiding behind the skin of a man.” A Man With No Name.

Perhaps the book was at a disadvantage with me because I already knew who the victim was. (A friend told me years before I had any interest in it.) And yet, all that foreknowledge really does is place the reader in the same position as the Doctor. It’s the Seventh, who after all doesn’t really do “caught by surprise”, who has come to Heritage to confirm a state of affairs he already seems sure of. He’s listless, he’s been putting it off; Ace is worried about him long before she sees a photo of the victim. There is a dread to Heritage that builds and builds. Who can it be? And then eventually — surely it can’t be true? (Or if you’ve been spoiled: please let me have misunderstood!)

There is a simplicity and a focus to it that I couldn’t help appreciating after so many books with subplots and characters galore. Those aren’t bad things but variety is always nice, and Heritage is a change of pace — quite literally, where the plot takes place over a day. The whole thing being absolutely drenched in its theme also felt like something a bit different. You could argue that it’s a bit too drenched and too simple, with the framework clearly recalling films like Once Upon A Time In The West and characters like the rum-soaked Sheriff having only one way they can go. But that didn’t bother me. It just felt like a Doctor Who novel with a clear sense of purpose.

In short, while I am still not a fan of the “kill off an established character” trope Heritage at least does it in a way that I think works. How and why this event came to pass is critical to the story, its characters and its themes. The absence of the dead character is felt at all times. You can’t accuse it of just going for shock value: the Doctor and Ace grow from the experience.

Heritage likely has the New Adventures to thank for some of that. You can easily spot them in references to Adjudicators or a “goddess” instead of “god”, and the heavy emphasis on the Doctor’s otherworldly and unstoppable nature which derives more from the NAs than his telly adventures. But there’s also a sense of the here-and-now with BBC Books, what with a gun-toting Cetacean (dolphin in a walker), and more significantly Dale Smith weaving all this into the ongoing narrative of Mike Tucker’s Prime Time. The Doctor knows that Ace is going to die and he doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I can’t change what I know to have happened. If I see you die, Ace. If I hold your body in my arms…” Because of that we get to see different sides to his character, so not just the dizzying force of nature who barely needs to lift a finger but also a frightened man who can’t bear to wield any power. “Sometimes, all I want to do is play the spoons in a jazz band, and pull ferrets from my trousers to make children smile.”

In a succession of quite chocolate-box PDAs (which is something I like about them!) a character arc feels significant. The Doctor has a good one here, rediscovering a sense of urgency that beats anything like guilt or fear into second place. “He reminded me what evil is, and he reminded me that it has to be fought, no matter what the consequences. Evil cannot prevail.” When we get to see the Doctor at full blast after all that it’s more satisfying than if it had just been his default setting. “‘I see you’ve even got an Emra Cradle — I haven’t seen one of those in centuries. What else is there?’ Wakeling spun back to face the Doctor, and found himself staring down the business end of a ripped and tattered umbrella. The Doctor’s expression was grim, his eyes hooded like a predator’s. Suddenly, they were alone in the universe, eyes in eyes. ‘Oh yes,’ intoned the Doctor, ‘a murderer.’”

Ace has an arc of her own, as the Doctor’s initial lack of interest in getting involved leaves her to pick up the slack, at times angrily. She often considers her roots, what would have become of her if she’d never met him, how far she’s come under his tutelage. “She wanted to lash out at Lee, just to make the feeling go away. To make him realise she wasn’t a little girl any more. That’s what the old Ace would’ve done. Instead she snatched up her rucksack and flung it over her shoulder with slightly more effort than was necessary. Not as satisfying, perhaps, but a whole lot more sociable.”

She and the Doctor are a force to be reckoned with by the end of this, yet they still want to help others — even the irredeemable bad guys. I haven’t checked, but I strongly suspect Heritage was written just for them; it wouldn’t make as much sense with a different Doctor/companion combo. (This is where I find out it was originally meant for the Fifth Doctor and Turlough.) If true, again there’s that sense of purpose, not a book that’s just using whatever was to hand in the toy box. It’s their best writing in the PDAs so far.

The creeping tension followed by swift justice is of course very satisfying — well, it worked for all those Westerns. Dale Smith does wonders with this right from the start, as the guilty denizens regard the Doctor’s incoming shuttle as a new sun growing in size — a sign of impending doom. The plot’s major revelations are held back at just the right length, although eagle eyes might surmise some facts just from a little girl’s hairstyle. The chapter where the truth comes out is a necessity but it’s also an opportunity to get creative, as several characters unburden themselves at once to different audiences, the reader jumping from thread to thread. There are “quotes” at the start of chapters that offer tantalising glimpses of where things are going.

It’s well-written enough that it’s also satisfying just to inhabit, looking at all these characters under a microscope and feeling as trapped in their humdrum world as they are. That sense of crumminess and claustrophobia is of course part of their shameful motive. You’ve also got the adorable robot “Fussies” whizzing around cleaning things — and they also relate to something central to the story, ensuring that although they add to the overall sense of world-building they’re not just cute incidental details. Where, quite simply, has Dale Smith been all this time?

I’m hard pressed to nitpick Heritage, a book with a solid grasp of what each element is doing here. If I absolutely had to then I might say that villains Ed and Christa perhaps take the archetype thing to an extreme, or that I’m reasonably sure Bernard the Cetacean’s final scene is missing. (Did Smith hit the page limit?) At times I didn’t really like Heritage, because I’m sentimental and I don’t want a familiar character to be dead. But I’ve got to appreciate purpose and intention and it has those. Even when it kills off minor characters it is sat with, it is felt. The book honours its departed character well enough that it doesn’t feel like a repeat of “well, no one’s gonna miss Dodo”, but if it’s a dealbreaker for you then it can easily be consigned to the not-canon bin. I think Heritage is worth the gut-wrench.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #120 – The Suns Of Caresh by Paul Saint

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#56

The Suns Of Caresh

By Paul Saint

BBC Books seemed very keen on new authors at this point, with several trying out just for the space of one novel. (I’m sure the lack of return visits had more to do with scheduling than with them not impressing anybody; none of these “first goes” are as bumpy as Virgin’s.) The Suns Of Caresh is the latest and it shows us what Paul Saint — apparently a pseudonym for Paul Beardsley — has to offer.

For a while I wondered if he’d taken an original manuscript and stapled on just enough Doctor Who to make the grade. The book is initially about a non-Time Lord: Simon Haldane, an unfulfilled geek living in Chichester. He loves to read sci-fi novels when he’s not working at his mind-numbing factory job. Enter Troy Game, a beautiful young woman from another planet who can’t remember exactly what she’s doing here. Simon takes her in and his life quickly adapts. Meanwhile, some sort of threat is turning people to stone.

I’m not even mad if this was a touched up original manuscript as it’s quite an entertaining (if distinctly wish-fulfilly) setup. “Normal man adjusts to alien in his life” could be a sitcom; however, Saint (let’s stick with that) is clearly one of those writers like Paul Leonard or Nick Walters who really wants to know more about aliens and planets, as he invests a lot in Troy Game and her home of Caresh. There are lots of immersive little details about her, such as her appearance (short hair, big irises, no earlobes), her abilities (she can sing in an otherworldly way, read thoughts and replicate other languages), her social oddity (clothes are optional) and her customs (sex is strictly seasonal on Caresh). There are also little bits of secondary cleverness, like how her “language telepathy” doesn’t work over the phone and is actually the result of external interference.

Then there’s Caresh: a planet with two suns and an irregular orbit, unpredictable seasons and climates, different islands with their own levels of technology and antipathies towards each other, and giant locust monsters into the bargain. This is no “it’s a desert so I guess it’s called Aridius” situation, thought has clearly been applied.

He’s also spent time on the plot, or rather plots, as there’s a lot to get your head around. It’s here that Doctor Who gets back into the equation (you can exhale everybody) as the Third Doctor has been cajoled into investigating a time fracture on Earth that extends from 1972 to 1999. He encountered the earlier part during his Earth exile. (Saint going for controversy here with his UNIT dating!) A Time Lady with whom he is familiar, Solenti, catches him on his post-Three Doctors adventures and explains that this has something to do with another Time Lord, Roche. The Doctor has a matter of days to sort this out but for some reason, aiming for the 1972 dig site, he ends up in Chichester at the other end. The Doctor and Jo soon encounter time disturbances, stone bodies, a Time Lord in a mental institution, a dead TARDIS, monstrous “Fates” and Troy Game. And somewhere in all that is Ezekiel Child, the archaeologist from 1972 who is somehow a younger man in 1999.

The book is not short of ideas. Saint sprinkles in little ones as well, particularly when it comes to TARDISes. Jo reminisces about witty off-screen trips: “Sometimes it landed in UNIT HQ, often when she least expected to see home again; once it landed on a planet covered entirely by an ocean that was nowhere more than knee-deep; on another occasion it materialised inside a small cave, blocking off the exit so they had no choice but to depart without ever seeing what the world outside looked like. This had frustrated the Doctor no end.” Saint spends more than the usual amount of effort just on the TARDIS noise: “The twilit Dagusan ruins echoed with the moans of a gigantic living engine.” / “The TARDIS began its familiar landing noise, something between the roar of an animal and the sound of a very large slab being dragged over concrete.” And TARDISes feature interestingly in the plot, with one accidentally draining a lake when its doors are eroded open, and the Doctor’s one suffering a disastrous autopilot malfunction and crashing through various objects and cars — a spectacular sequence that eventually got a big laugh out of me: “‘This cannot be happening.’ Two men were carrying a large sheet of plate glass across a quiet road when they saw the TARDIS heading for them.”

This is not, then, an author unfamiliar with or uninterested in Doctor Who, despite there being a fair stretch of it without the Doctor. See also, Saint’s world-building with Time Lords. He invented Solenti for this and treats her with enough confidence that I half expect the blind mystery woman and her regenerating guide dog to turn up again. He also imbues Roche with peculiar abilities, such as a very targeted and mischievous talent with regeneration. So many parts of The Suns Of Caresh feel like the writer has sat with them for a bit. It’s nice.

It’s still a lot to keep together, which perhaps explains why the overall framework feels paradoxically small: a lot of it is just characters hunting through a richly-described Chichester to either find dots on a scanner or evade death by stone-transforming Fury. This is later swapped out for Bognor Regis (whoa, slow down!) and then — mercifully for any sci-fi fans like the fictional Simon — Caresh, so we can finally tie all this into what’s happening there, viz an impending ecological disaster that has somehow set a couple of enraged Furies against Roche on Earth.

I enjoyed the deceptive and quite fun smallness of it all, buoyed by Saint’s skill with ideas of all sizes, but I don’t think he quite ties everything together. Simon is our point of view character for a while — a role he shares with Troy Game who to be fair has the more interesting perspective, e.g. thinking that buses are moving buildings — but he exits the book quite abruptly after 150 pages, never to be missed. This is perhaps just desserts for his incel-ish behaviour towards Troy Game, but such righteous misfortune still caught me by surprise for a pseudo protagonist. Perhaps I’m just struggling to reconcile this with the idea that — no offence Paul Saint, I know nothing about you — Simon feels a bit like an author insert at first. Other aspects of his life feel slightly too developed to be such non-starters in the end, like the flirty co-worker who somehow knows what Troy Game is called, and the occult journalist/foil who seems to have his own thing going on and then just isn’t in the book any more. All things considered he’s not beating the “already had half a novel on the go” allegations.

The wider plot stumbles a bit too. So much effort goes into the time fracture and explaining the time fracture, and on that score at least there is a great visual focal point in Ezekiel Child — but he’s barely in it, and his curious affliction of ageing and experiencing life backwards is entirely a reported event, despite being interesting enough to support a novel. (You might call it The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.) For all that I enjoyed the general hijinks in Chichester, with raid-the-toybox antics involving TARDISes and regeneration, the moment things moved to Caresh I wondered if we truly needed any of that; none of it meaningfully changes the pickle the planet is in.

That, too, takes a bit of explaining — and attempts are made, the phrase “Let me get this straight” is used more than once — but the beat for beat action on Caresh is still just more chase stuff, with escaping and recapturing and really quite redundant haircuts for the Doctor and Jo to get us to the image on the front cover. They’re sussed as suspicious types immediately anyway. (It’s difficult to mind what with the hilarious way it’s handled. “‘Jo!’ the Doctor barked. ‘I am not doing it and that's final.’ It was not final, of course. They argued some more and the Doctor eventually conceded, with rather poor grace … There was complete silence except for the combined hum of the clippers and the control room. Jo eventually broke the silence. She said, ‘Are you going anywhere special on your holidays this year, sir?’”) There’s some good derring do with boats and giant locusts to build momentum, but then a last minute misunderstanding from Troy Game pointlessly upends everything at the eleventh hour. It’s one of those books that puts a lot of effort into hitting its page count — quite slyly on Earth, and then pretty obviously on Caresh with stunts like that.

There are still interesting things to be found in the book’s secondary setting. Solenti has been hinting about leaving Roche’s work undone, which of course doesn’t sit right with the Doctor. This is where that annoying misconception comes in — but then right next to it is a very good moral conundrum about Roche’s plan and its consequences. Unfortunately the Doctor doesn’t need to weigh his options on it, he just drums up an (admittedly very neat) plan B instead. Which, hooray etc, but that’s then just another interesting thing that isn’t quite in focus. (See also, the Doctor deliberately not telling Solenti he has a companion. What was that in aid of?)

Much about The Suns Of Caresh is wobbly-legged in that “first time author” way, but it’s one of those where rather than be annoyed about it I just wished there had been more books to course-correct any imperfections. Paul Saint has a good imagination in or out of an obvious Doctor Who setting, and for what it’s worth he’s great at the Who stuff too, writing a very enjoyable and recognisable Third Doctor and Jo. (Honourable “not that bit” mention for the Doctor’s spiky temper tantrum towards Jo near the end. In the bin please.) Much of what I liked about it was its ideas and sense of fun; some of what I liked about it may not have even been intentional, such as the references to now quaint modern tech. (“He’d risen early so that he could surf the Internet before the lines were busy.” Bless! A thousand times bless! Mind you this could already have been social commentary by 2002. Depends on Paul’s internet speeds.) What I didn’t like so much was generally due to chewing it over afterwards — in the moment, it worked well enough. I’d say that despite some uneven patches this is a colourful entry and worth seeking out.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #118 – Combat Rock by Mick Lewis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#55

Combat Rock

By Mick Lewis

Get ready for Round Two with Mick Lewis. If you’ve read his earlier book, Rags, then you’re probably not expecting much in the way of puppies and lollipops. Even so this is a bit much.

This time Lewis maroons the whimsical team of the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria in Papul, a politically fraught island on the planet Jenggel split between the downtrodden but welcoming locals and the imperialist Indoni. A group of rebel Papuls have formed the OPG, with the intention of ridding their land of invaders in as bloody a fashion as they think necessary. The Indoni president, Sabit, knows this and is more than happy to disrupt elections and employ mercenaries to stir up trouble, even creating false flags to better capture off-world sympathies. In the middle of all this there are tribal mummies (or Mumis) which are, unaccountably, coming to life and attacking people. This has something to do with peaceful Earth missionary areas suddenly reverting to barbarism. Oh, and there are cannibals.

Combat Rock is, as bizarre as this sounds, one of the more realistic Doctor Who novels. (Let’s just ignore the bit about mummies for a moment, shall we?) By which I mean it resembles real-world conflicts in an almost 1:1 way, what with its imperialism, its grotesque practices on all sides and its lack of any broad resolution to Papul’s struggles at the end. I’m not geopolitically savvy enough to know how well any of this tracks with events Lewis may or may not be mapping his novel onto, but that feels like what he’s doing here. (I’m slightly afraid to say for example “oh this is about Papua New Guinea and Indonesia” based on his comments in About The Author, but if that is the case then wow, he barely even changed the names!)

He at least adds some accoutrements to make it a Doctor Who joint, so you’ve got mummies, extra-terrestrial megafauna and the TARDIS crew making the unhappy acquaintance of the various violent groups. The plot hangs together quite well when it comes to explaining the mummies and so on, with a suitably Doctor-ish unmasking scene at the end; Combat Rock feels more cohesive than Rags, if nothing else, which used much the same “call to violence” idea but with far less defined details. However there are still long stretches of this that read like a random, brutal war story he felt like writing which perhaps sold better with the TARDIS in it.

The over-arching question is probably the same as it was in Rags: how far is it acceptable to go with violence in Doctor Who before it stops being Doctor Who? I don’t know the answer. If it helps, I don’t think anyone should go further than Combat Rock.

Lewis’s writing style is once again expressive and interesting, although as usual it’s mainly devoted to descriptions of death and mutilation. He’s still capable of great subtlety and conciseness, like “the wine-coloured sea, endlessly shushing the beach,” “[She was] dancing, dancing. Jamie was looking, looking,” or “Red sand, and purple sea. On the beach a box.” He can, bizarrely given all his other proclivities, absolutely nail the description of a familiar Doctor Who character, such as Troughton here: “This face was lined and contoured by a life beyond strange, a facial map bursting with character and mystery.”

And on that score, despite popular complaints that it makes no sense to put these characters in this story I think he’s put clear thought into this match-up, with Jamie’s experience against the Redcoats brought explicitly to the fore against a new and senseless warzone, and Victoria’s imperialist upbringing making her an uncomfortable foil for her Indoni capturers who seem, as far as she can see, like reasonable enough chaps at first. Victoria’s views are challenged, just as Jamie’s horrific experiences seem utterly hollow compared to his perhaps rosily remembered “Craig a duir” glory days. The odd man out is the Second Doctor, who surely seems too eccentric and friendly to upset with things like guerrilla warfare and cannibalism – but then, this only brings out his friendly and diplomatic side all the more. Lewis nails his clumsy foibles the rest of the time, adding a good deal of friendly bickering such as “‘Where are we?’ ‘Well, it seems almost to be... er, it could be –’ ‘Och, he doesnae know,’ Jamie finished for him helpfully.”

But those three are the only lights in the dark of an angry, upsetting novel. I can’t stress enough that it is wall-to-wall unpleasantness otherwise. An infant gets shot in the head on the second page. One character is separated from the group and then turns up again as the barely identifiable centre of a cannibal feast. Likeable hostages have no guarantee of surviving the experience. And when a friendly “re-educated” man regresses into barbarism, he attacks a local missionary by force-feeding him the brains of another. (That was a convenient “I think I’ve had enough book for tonight” cut-off point.) Said missionary sequence is well written, of course, with the poor bemused instructor earnestly thinking that “the Kirowai region further along the south coast would be next to succumb to the benefits of civilisation and Christianity.” Fabulous word usage there, “succumb,” which tells us just where Lewis’s stall is set out on the issue. There is an angry balance-of-nature theme to all this which sympathises, unsurprisingly enough given his About The Author spiel, with the cannibals. But my god it’s not easy reading. I really do wonder about commissioning this for a Doctor Who audience. Perhaps Justin Richards thought the front cover would be enough of an age certificate.

So much of Combat Rock is just “how am I going to come up with a new way of describing that,” with occasionally (however begrudgingly) creative results. I suppose I ought to appreciate “The torturer collapsed on top of him, ousted brains fused with flesh, blood and bone into a grisly ice-cream whip sculpture.” I think I actually do rate this one, however much I audibly groaned at the time: “It squeezed the guerrilla’s body like a tube of toothpaste and soon everyone in the canoe was red.” But now and then he decides that there just aren’t enough not-for-kids sentiments flying about, so we also get: “For a moment he was back in Culloden. A claymore sweeping across a Redcoat’s neck, opening just such an orgasm of blood.” And then – he really ought to have got some sort of derisive award for this one – “The man’s eyes were fluttering glazedly open, as though he was awakening from a long and particularly bloody wet dream.” Ugh. Mick.

Not all of it’s revolting just because of his word-choices: sometimes it’s the company he keeps. The mercenaries, for instance, whom he delights in describing one by one, over and over, as if we’re going to be enchanted to behold them every single time. (His descriptions run a peculiar gamut from “guy with an eye in his cheek due to botched surgery” to “bisexual man.” 2002 was a while ago, wasn’t it?) We also get little blobs of back story on them, particularly Pan, a committed rapist and otherwise fan of “whorin’.” Now, I’m not going to get puritanical here, but what exactly is anyone gaining from scene after scene with this guy? Is there really anywhere to go with him after he sleeps with a prostitute, tires of her conversation and then shoots her dead in bed? Yes, he’s bad news. They all are. They still are. What bad news they continue to be. Oh my god I’ve still got 200 pages to go.

It’s a question of taste, I suppose. There really is a lot of thought and, presumably, research to back up Combat Rock: the political machinations of Sabit, the confusing feelings of the Papul inhabitants about freedom vs terrorism, the uncomfortable existence of groups such as cannibals – it all feels rooted in something. I think there’s also an argument in favour of asking awkward questions about characters we know and like, such as Jamie, who seems to be deflecting some latent attraction towards Victoria by going clubbing instead, then has to confront his frequent urges to charge into battle – a thing that conveniently rarely ended in bloodshed on telly. And of course there’s Victoria who, to her credit, somewhat notices her faults as it goes along: “Not for the first time she felt shamed by her Imperialist upbringing.” But she’s still a prude, and still struggles to outpace layers of her own racism. “He spoke astonishingly eloquent English (she had to keep reminding herself that he was an alien, and not just a foreigner). He even offered to hold her hand to steady her progress, but of course she wasn’t going to allow that. His brown face was angular and, with the clipped moustache and dark, intelligent eyes, she had to admit, rather handsome. But then, as her father had constantly reminded her, she always did have a bit of a wild streak, and had always had a penchant for people and things that were rather out of the ordinary.” (Whether this is really fair game since she’s not especially racist on-screen is another argument.)

Part of me is sure that Combat Rock has something to say, about familiar Doctor Who stuff as well as the things Mick Lewis finds interesting and urgent. I can’t call (most of) it bad. Another part of me actually had to read it, though, and he left us a message: this is ’orrible. No thanks.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #116 – Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#54

Ten Little Aliens

By Stephen Cole

This is one of those Who books that everyone seems to like. It must have had a certain cachet in order to have been reprinted in the modern era, with a new cover and everything. It also did well in contemporary reviews. It took me a while to figure out why.

Ten Little Aliens is a peculiar Doctor Who book. Sure, Whovian murder mysteries are ten-a-penny – they were practically the lifeblood of the Virgin Bernice Summerfield series – but then you add in of a bunch of space marines straight out of Aliens. Agatha Christie, James Cameron and late-stage Hartnell era make for a very odd Venn diagram.

Still, it’s not as if Cameron has a patent on space marines. Earthshock sent similar guys underground with the Doctor and friends four years earlier! (Eric Saward should sue.) But I struggled for a while to get into this story as it focussed so heavily on a bunch of tough guys in what is, deliberately, an “all these corridors look the same” situation. The added incongruity of them vs Hartnell, Ben and Polly felt like whiplash at times.

Stephen Cole puts a lot of effort into his guest cast, going over their identities and personalities a few times with a full character roster to boot. This might seem like overkill but we’re going to be stuck with them so we might as well have a fighting chance of telling them apart. (I’d additionally have suggested not using “Shade” and “Shel” as they’re a bit similar. Oh well.) Despite the shared gung-ho attitude there’s a good amount of unique disadvantages and secrets squirreled away here, particularly with Shade, or “Shadow” as he’s disparagingly called. (Perhaps not a brilliant nickname where it’s so close to what he’s actually called, but we are dealing with space marines, not Oscar Wilde.) An early scene where his commander, Haunt, beats him bloodily in front of everyone to prove both the effectiveness and limits of their armour tells us a bunch about both characters.

The TARDIS crew find these men and women on what appears to be a training exercise inside a hollowed-out asteroid. There’s a thrilling (to me anyway) sequence where the Doctor and co. require spacesuits because the atmosphere’s not very friendly – a surprising rarity in these novels. The two groups soon meet and encounter a pile of alien corpses: the Schirr, sworn enemies of the humans, pictured on the front cover. There’s no reason for said bodies to be there, especially that of the Schirr commander. And there’s even less reason for the bodies to start disappearing, one by one.

It’s around here that Stephen Cole’s primary influence becomes clear, and that’s saying something because I haven’t actually read And Then There Were None – or any Agatha Christie novels for that matter. Before anybody stones me, I’ve seen plenty of Poirot films, Miss Marple dramas, things that were plainly inspired by Christie and quite recently The Mousetrap, which is more than enough to experience a twinge of the little grey cells when bodies go missing in this, or soldiers vanish despite the local disintegrator guns not having fired.

I’ve got no idea how close the plot of Ten Little Aliens adheres to the world’s bestselling mystery novel (as per Wikipedia) but I tend to assume not much, what with the amount of sci-fi and horror going on here. The general pattern of disappearances and betrayals, merely suspected or otherwise, likely recalls the earlier work. It all fits neatly into Cole’s murky, violent framework.

Because oh yes, Ten Little Aliens is grim, beginning with performative army cruelty and a pile of corpses and not letting up from there. There’s a spate of strange afflictions mostly affecting the army folk, some of which are grotesque in the extreme, and these eventually become outright body horror. There are monsters – giant mobile angel statues if you (or Steven Moffat) can believe such a thing, only these guys do a lot worse than send you back in time to meet the love of your life. There’s also a truly horrifying engine system that essentially eats people, and if they’ve been torn to bits first then all the better for the digestion.

There’s a lot of potential here to revel in cruelty, but Cole keeps an eye on the character side of things so it’s never that bad. We have, by that point, come to at least empathise with the army guys. There’s Haunt with her strict ways, which hide a lot of pain; Shade and his secrets, as well as his desire to make good; Roba, a powerful but insecure man looking to keep his head above danger; Creben, arguably the most senior officer after Haunt and hoping to make a name for himself; Joiks, a somewhat skeezy guy who makes people uncomfortable to feel better about himself; and "Frog", a troubled young woman with scars and an artificial voice box. (There are more of them but to varying degrees they all stay in the background.)

Ten Little Aliens felt a bit limited and trad to me at first, what with army guys in a cave yelling at each other until the monsters come. Not very interesting, surely? But there’s a deceptive power in this as the book moves forward in such a confined space and more or less in real time, with a strict limit to its characters. Gradually a sense of claustrophobia sets in that you don’t often see in novels, which by their nature are often interested in expansion and world-building. All the world-building in Ten Little Aliens is conversational, describing worlds and conflicts outside this godforsaken asteroid that nevertheless inform what’s happening on it. There are at least two malignant alien races and we don’t meet very many of them: the point of focus is the people stuck in this crucible and whether they’re going to get out of it.

Cole’s attention to tension builds to the book’s USP, and probably its biggest talking point: a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure section. This sounds gimmicky in the extreme, but it fits what he’s doing, as the characters all use interconnected headsets to record thoughts and memories and the Doctor determines that in order to stay alive and solve the crisis they need to keep in contact, and this seems like the best solution. The reader is invited to jump between perspectives in a rough order, but many are optional, which paints a somewhat unique experience for each reader and reading. It also re-enforces the sense of confined characterisation that’s been building throughout the book. Lasting about 40 pages, it’s easily one of the individual creative highlights of BBC Books, up there with Eye Of Heaven and The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, except in microcosm. It’s bloody good going for what looks at first like a trad army story. I can only imagine how long it took to put together.

The story as a whole is less complicated and quite satisfying. I won’t spoil who’s the traitor and what they’re trying to achieve, but it comes together neatly, justifying the disappearances and murders. There’s a late reveal that smacks of a gimmick (and that’s in a book with CYOA), which is at least very Agatha Christie, but I think Cole just about gets away with it via some supporting memories and motivations covertly dotted through the book.

If it seems like the focus is entirely off the TARDIS crew, it isn’t really. Cole makes a very good case for the First Doctor who is initially dismissed by the likes of Haunt, then gradually makes his usefulness apparent. He faces down appalling monsters but still gives them the benefit of the doubt, and maintains a thrillingly aloof distance from Polly and the others (via a clever callback to The Space Museum, of all things) during the mind-swapping section. It’s here that Cole most overtly references the Doctor’s frailty and self-doubt: “We are (we will not waste a second of our life) still young, vital, but trapped inside this awful, ancient (frustration) corpse of a body.” There’s a lot of that throughout, with Ben referring to him as an “old boy”, the Doctor occasionally falling into people’s arms, “crouching arthritically” and even (a bit on the nose) searching for “words that were lost to him like an actor drying up on stage.” In the end when the crisis is averted he considers that he will “feel a new person soon.” (Please ignore the double entendre.) All of which gives the novel a tremendous sense of place in the lead up to The Tenth Planet.

Cole doesn’t sell the Doctor short, despite all his frailties; even his shortcomings feel intrinsically suited to the character, like when Ben observes him working on something “the way [his] dad used to try his luck fixing the family motor, when all else had failed, fiddling with bits of engine he didn’t understand, just in case one of them magically started the car.” The Doctor is nonetheless capable of being unfriendly, like his cutting Polly out of his mind, or making hard decisions, such as a grisly solution to their problems at the end. A cuddly Father Christmas figure he isn’t, or not entirely, which keeps him interesting.

Ben’s POV is achieved quite skilfully as well, with Polly noting that “Ben even thought in a cockney accent.” There are many little shards of his wit and dialect, with Ben observing that someone “had a face like the smell of gas,” that something exploded “like a firework going off in a jam jar,” and making references to “geezers”, “plates” and “jacksies” that we know from the perspective-swapping scenes don’t translate to others. Cole is keenly aware of Ben’s faults, with Polly calling out one of his comments as casually racist, and his strengths, with Ben using his Navy mindset to ingratiate himself with the soldiers and steer them right, such as snapping them out of a trance by telling them Haunt’s coming. He’s a rounded enough character that, even when he’s falling in with the blokes around him, he isn’t sure he should want to. Polly feels like the runner up here, often ending up in a quiet supportive role, but she still has moments to shine, such as a bit of ingenuity in leaving a trail (considering lipstick, then chalk, then making little cairns instead) and an ongoing battle of wills with Shade, whose deal isn’t entirely clear at first.

This is easily Stephen Cole’s strongest book yet, taking a trad setup and milking it for all the tension it’s got, incorporating a classic structure and then going completely off the wall with it. There’s a tight sense of description for the (sometimes abstract) horrors on display, such as “Their smiles were compassionate. Their fingers dripped blood” and “The frozen expressions on the bloodied Schirr faces seemed less representative now of terror and agony, more like those of creatures laughing hysterically, till it hurt, till the tears came rolling down.” It sounds like damning with faint praise, but he really has come a long way since Longest Day.

Probably the only wrinkle in the book, besides a serious case of “cut to someone else” syndrome (which is perhaps necessary for the story but gave me many opportunities to check my phone) is the debatable treatment of its aliens. There’s some typical militaristic small-mindedness about the Shirr and the Morphieans, with the latter being referred to as “spooks” and the former appearing as (among other interpretations) somewhat of a racist stereotype on the cover. The author/book’s proclivities are clear enough what with Polly calling out Ben’s blinkered views, and the Doctor doing the same thing with the marines (“‘They all look so similar.’ ‘How very enlightened,’ said the Doctor”), but bearing in mind the original title of And Then There Were None I did wonder about that choice. Of course I haven’t read And Then There Were None; presumably Cole and Tucker (not to mention Christie) were Doing A Thing here with regards to warped attitudes towards the unlike. There is, after all, textual colonialism and racism in the book. It just isn’t dealt with very much beyond the Doctor wryly commenting upon Earth’s grabby definition of “ownership”, a bit of SF blurring between human and Shirr, and the plot raising questions about whether the Shirr or the Morphiean peoples are really all on the same page as one another. The CYOA section, for example, isn’t used to challenge or deconstruct these views. (Unless I didn’t read those bits.) Perhaps it’s just one of those things that you can leave to percolate in the background of a murder mystery, but in Doctor Who tends to be underlined for emphasis as well.

It’s arguably a bit questionable and often very trad; it’s quietly creative, then very much so. On the whole it’s a winner.

8/10

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