Doctor Who: The BBC Books #79 – The Turing Test by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#39

The Turing Test

By Paul Leonard

Paul Leonard is one of those Doctor Who writers that sticks to his themes. Like Malcolm Hulke before him, he is interested in the differences and similarities between people – human or otherwise.

The Turing Test is a particularly subtle entry in Leonard’s “aliens are weird, but also not” canon. This time there are no outlandish life cycles or outrageous rituals to contend with; the whole point, as suggested by the title, is that they are similar enough to us that they bear further examination. There are little nuggets of alien-ness of course, such as a language that begins as singing, then awkwardly acclimatises itself to human speech. But they’re not so great that the three narrators of this book, themselves very different men with conflicting viewpoints (about the aliens, among other things), ever make up their minds to mistrust or fear these beings outright.

And on that: it’s another in a pleasingly growing line of BBC Books that plays with the format. Yes, we’re already in an odd version of Doctor Who that eschews TARDIS travel and features a Doctor with no idea who he is or what he does for a living. But The Turing Test also bumps the Doctor out of focus, letting three (coincidentally quite famous) men carry the story instead as a relay race. Shades of Eye Of Heaven, Heart Of TARDIS and Festival Of Death there, but Leonard’s book feels like its own take on a multi-narrator jumbled narrative. It occasionally steps back over itself to offer context (like Festival) but that isn’t the whole selling point here. Instead these narrators are trying to figure out who the hell the Doctor is and what he’s doing despite none of them having the complete puzzle.

It’s unusual on a story level too. The basic thrust of most Doctor Who episodes/books/whatever is that aliens, or otherwise bad guys want to carry out an evil plan. That’s not the case here: we just have one group of aliens trying to escape the world circa 1944, and another group of aliens trying to prevent them from doing so. Yes, we can place our bets as to which group of aliens is the “nice” one, but it’s never made explicitly clear – indeed, according to Narrator #3: “I saw that [the Doctor] had no more idea which side had been right than I had.” On one side you have a pompous and sinister general, but also a friendly woman that one of our narrators falls in love with. Both demonstrate constant, subtly inhuman behaviours. On the other side you have a group of strangers we barely interact with at all, but the Doctor seems taken with them, and isn’t that usually enough? It’s murky and anticlimactic to the extent that when some of them do escape in the end the Doctor and co. don’t even see it happen. (It’s even suggested that if you did see it, there’d be no great special effect.)

This is all set against the dying days of the Second World War, where jingoism has ceased to keep people motivated and some (like Joseph Heller) were going out of their minds questioning it all. There are occasional harmless Germans in the story, and few Nazis. Dresden features prominently – a classic example of atrocity not being the exclusive purview of the “bad guys”. Right and wrong are baked into The Turing Test, with Alan Turing and Graham Greene in particular debating the proper emotional reaction to the Holocaust, or to the deaths of regretful Nazi collaborators. Each considers the other to be heartless in his way, and both have a flawed, biased perspective. It’s another form of dehumanisation and wondering if other people have the same right to exist that was already powering The Turing Test via the alien plot.

A frustrated inability to communicate is at the heart of all this, summed up nicely with a line that could apply to all of Paul Leonard books: “‘I didn’t realise how different you could be.’ ‘Well, now you know.’” Alan Turing and the ENIGMA machine make for another smart backdrop to Leonard’s theme – understanding from chaos – which we then extrapolate to the uncertain human-or-not beings on both sides of the conflict, and of course to the Doctor himself, who is about as frustrated as he’s ever been.

We’re three books into the “Earth arc” which was, by all accounts, an attempt to reset the Eighth Doctor’s characterisation and make it easier for authors to grasp. (Personally I thought they were doing a pretty good job already, and their main problem seemed to be just not talking to each other enough, but hey ho.) The Doctor understandably wasn’t himself in The Burning and Casualties Of War, allowing for or inciting acts of violence and generally lacking empathy, or lacking it in his usual quantities. But you’d be hard pressed to point at the character in those books and say that was someone you didn’t recognise.

The Turing Test suggests that he is, if anything, getting worse over time. The TARDIS has evolved to the point where it’s a big blue box you can open with a key, but there’s nothing in it, which causes him to sob and wail. When he finally encounters aliens he has no way to understand them. (Hence Turing.) The very concept of finding alien life, and of sticking his oar in to rescue them or stop them (delete where appropriate) fills him with such wild excitement that he can’t seem to stop getting people endangered or killed for it. His plans aren’t good, and as I’ve mentioned they’re questionably partisan. He’s hardly putting a stop to Davros here: when he arranges for a colleague to bug someone, which inadvertently (??) kills them, there’s little evidence that he’s advanced the cause of good in the universe. And when he arranges/commits another murder at the end (it’s not clear who did it but several people blame themselves) it seems to have been purely in the name of getting off of Earth once and for all, which is the most barefaced selfish he’s been in recent (ahem) memory. We can assume he’s somewhat ashamed of this, as he immediately resets to helping the nearby wounded instead, but you’re still offered a long glimpse of the Doctor at his worst.

It’s debatable whether this stretches to his treatment of Turing, who he may or may not have strung along romantically. Memory or no, we can be sure he’s not dangling any real prospect over Turing, but then he’s also been acclimatised to Earth long enough to have tried signing up with the RAF to help the war effort, and he’s been close enough to people like Mary Minett (who also couldn’t contain herself around him), so this latest infatuation is unlikely to have escaped his notice or earshot entirely. At the end Leonard repeats the fact that no one knows why Turing committed suicide, which in this tie-in genre novel context allows for a certain crass inference. I wonder if it’s really the Doctor or Leonard who’s demonstrating questionable behaviour there.

If I have an issue with The Turing Test it’s Turing. Not so much the writing of him, which is as satisfyingly identifiable as the other two narrators. Turing is curious and analytical; his perspective is unusual, given his ability to sympathise based on logic rather than emotion, but all of that is still recognisably baked in emotion. Greene is emotive and dismissive; he constantly picks up on the tell-tale “bad movie dialogue” of the aliens, and the things happening around him that feel like developments in a dubious novel. (Protesting a little too much if I’m honest there, Paul.) Heller is sardonic and perhaps the most human of the three; it’s him who has to relate the explanations and consequences of all this, so it’s through him that the novel ultimately fails to reach any comfortable conclusions. All three narrators have a distinct and readable style, with Heller’s in particular racing along in an entertaining fashion. (I haven’t read Catch-22 but I’m guessing this bit rings true. Lines like: “Despite his evident willingness to kill me, he seemed a decent, honourable man. ‘Look here,’ said the Doctor. ‘I can see that you’re a decent, honourable man, Major.’” And: “‘You can’t,’ echoed the bewildered major, now very bewildered.” And especially: “Now the mad colonel had me over a barrel. It was a small uncomfortable barrel, rotting in places. It didn’t have any beer in it, and it was adrift, barely afloat, in the middle of the Mediterranean, or perhaps the Atlantic.”)

It comes down to a question of taste – admittedly mine as well as the book’s. Greene and Heller are both dismissive of Turing as a fawning, childlike buffoon. You can comfortably call this the whim of flawed narrators – the characters aren’t Paul Leonard, for heaven’s sake, they can say and think things the author does not endorse. And while Greene says just-plain-mean things like Turing having “the mind of a child — a weak child, timid and unyielding — and like a child he was given to tantrums when he didn’t get his own way”, and downright prejudiced things like “His unnatural sexual orientation, and his imposition of that attitude on the asexual being of the Doctor, were typical of his attitude to life. He may not have been very much more sinful than any of us, but he had no guilt for his sins, and that made him less than a whole man”, to say nothing of outright crass asides such as “His face was illuminated with that selfish flush, that suffusion of blood that you see in children when the lollipop of their choice has been provided. I wondered what lollipops the Doctor was providing for Turing”, the Doctor does at least take him to task for it, albeit slightly: “The fact that he’s homosexual should have nothing to do with it. You have some extraordinary prejudices.”

But then we compound it with Heller too, as he also has shade to throw at him. See: “Alan Turing was a dull, opportunistic man, intelligent and obtuse, observant and self-centred, kind-hearted and wilfully cold. A fleshy man, he nonetheless minced around, filled with uncertainty about his every gesture, yet he was always certain that his overall outlook on life was right.” And: “Turing thinks [life with the Doctor]’s good, because he’s a boring, unadventurous, stuck-up English prig.” (To be fair he also adds that “Greene thinks it’s bad, because he’s prone to swift, emotional judgements, and therefore judges most things to be bad.” So yeah, ’ave it, Graham.) To spend one third of your book lobbing zingers at a real, unhappy, ultimately suicidal man might be considered literary colour. To spend two thirds, well, it comes across as a bit mean-spirited and leaves behind an unpleasant taste. How could it not?

It’s quite possible I’m overreacting. Again, characters aren’t their authors. This is all made up and it’s not as if there’s a rule somewhere that says you specifically can’t be rude about Turing. But in a novel that’s already using the Dresden bombing as a sci-fi sandbox, and has the unspoken-but-kinda-spoken idea that an unrequited love for the Doctor might have doomed Alan Turing, I wonder if frequently jabbing at him as well, without any significant rebuttal or recourse to understand him better as a result of it – which as we’ve established is Paul Leonard’s whole bag – really serves a point other than to illustrate how some people probably reacted to the guy. Which we could already infer was “not with enormous sensitivity” given, you know, his life.

Anyway! Ahem. The Turing Test, then. Apart from certain distractions it’s a thoughtful book, and an unusual piece of ongoing Doctor Who. I don’t know what to make of the Doctor at this stage, and for once that’s not because I don’t recognise what the author is doing – it’s because we’re in somewhat uncharted territory. That’s exciting. The use of an uncertain menace, or perhaps no real menace at all, is something other authors could take note of. It doesn’t always have to be killer blobs or evil conspiracies, y’know. (Not that it always is, but anything we can do to get away from old tropes is a plus.) That’s three novels in a row where the Doctor is capable of not being the lily-white good guy, and although that’s not something I want to see become standard operating procedure, the journey back to a more comfortable place could be ripe for storytelling. There’s even, yes, plenty to be said for novels that are unafraid to make the reader uncomfortable. Without going off on one again about how he handled it and whether it had a point, I don’t hate that Leonard wrote very some human unpleasantness into this. But that aspect does keep me from championing The Turing Test outright.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #44 – Revolution Man by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#21

Revolution Man

By Paul Leonard

Hoo boy. This one is nuts.

There are things about Revolution Man that reminded me of the New Adventures. (Which perhaps contributes to its somewhat divisive reviews.) It has bonkers ideas. It’s primarily about drugs. There’s violence, some of it moving in unexpected directions. And main characters act, or are forced to act in ways outside their nature. I think, deep down, it’s just trying to make statements about the characters and what they are about, and it’s using very eye-catching — perhaps questionable — methods to do that. I really liked it for the most part.

We begin in media res (something I enjoy as it cuts out all the faff) with the Doctor noticing temporal anomalies on Earth. Someone is carving huge “R” symbols on landmarks in 1967. Mucking about with timelines is bad, to say nothing of the suggestive power of someone casually defacing ancient pyramids just for a bit of graffiti. The Doctor, Sam and Fitz go to London hoping to learn more about the supposed “Revolution Man” responsible. They plug into the burgeoning counter-culture scene, meeting the somewhat revolutionary Jean-Pierre Rex (an idol of Sam’s) and an attractive waitress who catches Fitz’s eye. Before long they discover that a drug, Om-Tsor, is responsible for these incidents. It grants the user incredible astral power and it has already claimed hundreds of lives in collateral damage. The Doctor is desperate to investigate and sort it all out. Fitz, finding himself suddenly in a position of care with waitress Maddie, decides he’ll stick around, possibly for good. But even without his TARDIS friends he finds himself investigating Om-Tsor with Maddie.

There’s already a lot here to raise eyebrows. The novel sets out its stall with the amazing, horrifying power of Om-Tsor. Maddie derails a train full of people simply because she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, so what would a genuinely malevolent user look like? The imagery is immediately hard to forget: a pyramid with a logo on it, guns hovering around shooting people, enormous astral projections stomping around the Himalayas or grabbing helicopters. It’s one of the most sock-you-in-the-jaw concepts we’ve had in these books, plus it’s distinct from the kind of mental powers we’ve already seen in Virgin books. (For the avoidance of doubt, “psi powers” warrant a mention here. +1 geek points.) Paul Leonard is never short of imagination but Revolution Man is him in widescreen and technicolour.

Go back a bit, though — what’s this about Fitz leaving? Characters going on sabbatical is practically a tradition at this point, with Ace and Sam having done it and both come back changed, but Fitz only just got here! This is clearly a point of contention with readers, but I think there’s some mileage in it. Fitz is not your typical Doctor Who companion: unlike Sam, he’s not here because he has a burning desire to go out there and, uh, be a Doctor Who companion. He was in a traumatic situation where his only relative died and now he’s wanted by the law. TARDIS travel sounded preferable to that and in any case, probably quite fun too. Whoever said it was a lifetime commitment? Faced with 1960s England again, a few years on from where he left and perhaps any consequences of his departure, is it inconceivable that he’d politely part ways? It’s not as if he’s yet formed a major attachment to the Doctor or Sam; his only adventure that we’ve been privy to made the point that he felt out of his depth and out of his element. I think the promise of new love and some stability makes as much sense as anything else for this guy the Doctor and Sam — not to mention, the readers — barely know.

All that said… he’s back on the Om-Tsor trail pretty much the next time we see him, which he must know is eventually going to lead back to the TARDIS. He’s happy enough with Maddie, and even a little conflicted about the decision to keep investigating, but all the same I wish there had been time for “domestic bliss” Fitz, or whatever normal life looked like for him for that little while. I don’t think anybody reading Revolution Man seriously thought he’d be gone for good, especially a third of the way through. (Who is he, Dodo?) It’s more likely that the device serves to underscore his commitment to joining the TARDIS crew.

Or does it? Later on Fitz’s investigation grows enormously dangerous — just as, thanks to Om-Tsor, he grows about fifty feet taller (!) — and in the wake of it he is spirited away to the Chinese military, brainwashed using the same drug that’s causing all the problems. He’s actively an antagonist towards the end of the book, and although he fights against it and wins, there isn’t time to flesh out his side of the story, what it was like losing his identity, whether — since we’re asking — he does actively want to see the universe. The final lines of the book suggest that he does, but as so often happens with Sam, putting the character out of his head means he’s not having that conversation for a chunk of the book. Taking him away from the TARDIS sets up the opportunity to examine the idea of going back to it but we’re only doing half the job if he doesn’t, y’know, examine it. Instead he is bundled back into the TARDIS after — eek — another traumatic situation.

Fitz is at least well written, capturing his weirdly theatrical persona and his otherwise down to earth wants and needs. He doesn’t feel like a gimmick character, which must so often be a temptation with born-in-print regulars. Leonard is equally adept at writing Sam, though of course he’s had more practice there.

After Blum & Orman I think he’s the writer most interested in developing Sam. Genocide, Dreamstone Moon and Revolution Man all put her activism in context, allowing her to see how other people approach it, each time with a slightly different level of maturity. In the post-Seeing I world we have a Sam who is more weathered, able to work with the Doctor without awkwardness, confident about popping to Rome on reconnaissance. On her travels she observes a younger activist, thinking her “a young, ill-informed anarchist with an almost insane idealism, not much intelligence, and no clear mission.” She dresses down her own idol, Jean-Pierre Rex, disagreeing with his heavy-handed methods, based on her own hard-won experience. (And her own Fitz-style sabbatical.) The sixties is a keystone of revolutionary politics but she’s not that impressed with it, being aware of “just how far the flower children had to go before they reached maturity. Most of them — she recalled again her parents’ generation — would never make it. On the other hand, the steps they had taken would make it possible for future generations to be better than they had been.”

Leonard isn’t painting Sam as a perfect paragon here — she’s grown and she’s good at what she does, but there’s more than a whiff of protesting too much about the failings in others. When she comes to have it out with Fitz concerning the story’s climax, her defence of the Doctor — “‘He’s a hero!’ Sam was shouting too, now. ‘And he never never never does anything wrong — you don’t understand!’” — sounds every bit as far-gone evangelical as the Revolution Man cult, suggesting a pedestal that can only come down. On the whole Revolution Man is a good bit of exercise for who and what Sam is, without suggesting that she’s truly finished growing as a person.

The dynamic with Fitz is also nurtured in a way that hadn’t happened yet. This is a critical aspect of a new companion — how do they fit in? — and although Leonard essentially dodges it again by giving him an out, for a time it is under the microscope. Sam sees his potential departure even before he does, and she understands the rationale behind it. All the same she hopes he will change his mind. She knows what TARDIS travel has done for her and she hopes that will also happen for Fitz. When she realises he is no longer himself, she is desperately keen to get him back. This perhaps lends weight to Leonard offering us a “join the TARDIS properly” story by the back door — not making it Fitz’s choice, making Sam want it. She reflects on Fitz’s embarrassing attempts to flirt with her, almost regretful in case that has spoiled his future in the TARDIS. In short, there’s good stuff in here, even though I feel like no author has yet nailed the three companions setup, or even really tried. We’re getting there.

Darting between the two companions and between crises is the Doctor, and it’s fair to say there’s a lot to unpack here. Some of it literally isn’t unpacked. I try not to be a nitpick guy these days, but is there any explanation for how Om-Tsor wreaks havoc in 1967 when in the “normal” run of things, it didn’t? If it’s simply a thing that happened until the Doctor stopped it happening then that would be part of established events, but it’s presented as an anomaly to be resolved. We know that the pyramid stuff is new. Yet there is no time travelling malefactor in Revolution Man and there are no aliens, just an alien drug that is somehow on Earth and is now part of a timeline where a dangerous idiot stole some of it for his crazy plan. It’s a bit chaotic, not necessarily by design.

On top of that, these events create absolute havoc for two straight years, including unnaturally instigated natural disasters, a world just short of nuclear war and — less important but just as visible — bloody great big letters drawn on the pyramids. Doesn’t any of that have consequences? It won’t if it’s all “established events”, but again, we seem to be in “anomaly” territory to begin with, and the novel’s cumulative mess seems an absurd thing to let stand. I was half expecting a reset button by the end (and the Doctor does mention “purging the vortex”) but no, we just go nuts and get out of there. The pace towards the end is so relentlessly manic that to be fair, the only solution seems to be to just stop.

If you can tear yourself away from the plot (which works quite well generally, just not at a few important junctures) then the Doctor is having quite an interesting time here. He really is frantic about all this, getting awkward about moving the TARDIS and being unsure about telling Fitz what’s going on (this, too, feels like an under-clarified point), but he’s still buzzing with Doctorliness, particularly when he races after a woman pronounced dead and fixes her up not with magic, but simply better medicine than they had in 1967. He gives Fitz a police box calling card for emergencies (which is a great idea we’ll either see again or never mention again), perhaps suggesting he didn’t really think Fitz was gone for good. He and Sam are a well-oiled machine with their own shorthand and backup plans; he sends her on errands, not unlike his more manipulative predecessor. And in the end… well. A thing happens, which if you’ve read the book you’ll have been waiting for.

It’s probably the Revolution Man talking point if there is one, so here we go: the real Revolution Man has been hidden through most of the novel (the scene where an Om-Tsor user appears to kill him during a concert, who did that? Pass) and he has a grand, yet harebrained scheme to unite the world with the drug. Or destroy it. A concert is hastily arranged at Wembley stadium and this well-travelled Om-Tsor user goes for broke. He wants power. He wants the TARDIS, now that he has learned about it from Maddie. A still partially brainwashed Fitz panics and shoots him — only this doesn’t entirely work, and things are only getting worse, so the Doctor picks up the gun and shoots the man dead. It’s the The Doctor Shoots Someone Dead novel.

To be clear: I think the book puts him in an impossible situation. Fitz’s actions (themselves arguably not Fitz’s fault) have caused a dangerous Om-Tsor user to pretty well go nuclear, which is having an immediate effect on the TARDIS that might rip apart the world. The man is dying anyway but he will make everything worse before he goes. And look, it’s not as if the Doctor enjoys it, or jumps straight to that as a solution. It’s just an unusual response to an unusual situation. There is context for it.

That said, it bumps us up against a recurring problem with Revolution Man: it’s too short. Much like Beltempest, this is a novel containing enormous, almost cartoonish chaos that nonetheless comes in 30 pages below the average for BBC Books. Why? There isn’t time for the Doctor to reckon with what has happened, and also therefore — conveniently for the action itself — there isn’t time for him to think of anything else. I don’t have a problem with the Doctor doing this if it makes sense in context. Hell, Sam has killed people, and/or inadvertently caused their deaths, and she’s only learned from it. Characters should be allowed to be imperfect, Sam’s allowed, why not the Doctor. But… if you skimp on the meaning of a thing then it’s like writing a huge life change into a short story. What’s the point if we’re not sticking around to hear more about it? Sam was haunted by the death of a Tractite. Do we need to wait for other authors to do the same for the Doctor?

Revolution Man gives you plenty to think about — some of it in a head-scratchy, hang onnn sort of way. It pushes its characters to interesting extremes using huge, colourful, often beautifully written set-pieces — but it’s in such a hurry that it doesn’t put everything away afterwards. This has the knock-on effect however of making it a deliriously readable and exciting story. It’s weird. It’s a bit messy. But I like it.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #22 – Dreamstone Moon by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#11
Dreamstone Moon
By Paul Leonard

Hey everyone, Sam’s back! I hope she’s refreshed from her *checks notes* one book away.

Not that the timing matters, as her absence wasn’t the point of the exercise.* (Anyway, it’s all relative. If like me you’ve also clocked up two Past Doctor Adventures and a book of short stories in that time, then she’s been gone a little while.) Steve Cole was unhappy with the writing for Sam and he wanted a clearing of the decks. So, no pressure, let’s get it right this time.

Paul Leonard is a good choice for her first book back. Genocide already did a good job of putting Sam and her views into context, and it gave her a not insignificant amount of trauma to deal with at the end, causing the death of a Tractite. Leonard and Sam are on similar wavelengths in Dreamstone Moon, questioning her values and putting her through the wringer throughout.

We pick up immediately after Longest Day, as she requires rescuing from the Kusk ship she had been “helpfully” bundled onto. (I hope we see Anstaar again just so Sam, or the Doctor, or both can go “what the HELL, Anstaar?”) She meets some people on their way to a Dreamstone mine: Daniel, a career miner, and Aloisse, an alien very much against the mining.

Right away we can see another thing Paul Leonard is very good (possibly the best?) at: writing aliens. All the non-humans in this are memorable and have ways of communicating that are unique and often subtle. Aloisse is a Krakenite (a human bastardisation of their name), a sort of large tentacled tube with one big eye and a beak. Despite her left-field appearance she is a thoughtful presence, and as a character she is far more defined by her choices and her views than her lack of digits. You don’t need to look far to see other examples of this. Anton, a central human character, has a girlfriend who’s a Besiddian/large anthropomorphic cat, but her emotions and bankroll are more important than her tail. Anton, seeking answers in a very lowdown part of the city, encounters a dubious fellow who is a Zmm-Zmm/bipedal form of fly. They fight and the Zmm-Zmm is killed, a fact that haunts Anton because well, it’s murder, and when later on he briefly contemplates that the victim “was only a Zmm-Zmm … Not a real person,” he is rightly horrified because “He hadn’t thought he was like that.” Consideration for the rights of the unlike runs throughout Dreamstone Moon, and is easily one of its strongest ideas. (Although it has some pitfalls which we’ll come back to.)

Sam is not immune from this. Based on her appearance, she initially assumes that Aloisse means her harm, when in fact she’s saving Sam’s life. Later, having apologised for this, when she sees dangerous creatures underground she thinks they might be related to Aloisse because they look similar. It’s significant that the initial correction doesn’t stop Sam getting it wrong again — and she makes other mistakes, such as dropping a pretty serious cultural faux pas against a couple of Arachnons/very large spiders, then frantically rushing back to apologise when she realises her mistake. People ain’t perfect.

This is very much Sam’s ethos in Dreamstone Moon. She doesn’t know what to do next — she can’t go home, her best friend is (as far she knows) dead, so what else is there? These are canny questions if you want to redefine the character. Immediately presented with two sides of a situation, she tries to make the right call. Does she support the miners, who are just doing their jobs and are clearly in danger? Or does she go with Aloisse to protest against the Dreamstone company? The latter seems like the obvious choice, but she interrogates it anyway: do the protesters know what they’re doing? Could they be exacerbating things, or even fabricating them? Even if it’s for a good cause, that’s not a positive. At a funeral for some dead protesters she has already come to know as friends, Sam is appalled when the eulogies take the form of ecological grandstanding. But then again, maybe that is genuinely what they would have wanted? (Forgive the drive-by, but all of this is so much more thoughtful than the approach to eco-activism we saw in Kursaal. They need to be better at this sort of thing, since it is obviously critical to Sam as a character.)

Whilst trying to make sense of things, she naturally falls into a Doctor/companion rhythm with those around her. Aloisse, for all Sam’s misunderstandings, is worldly and charming, and even behaves “like the Doctor … She doesn’t know that’s true — she just thinks it might be. And all of us will panic less if we don’t think we’re being bombed, so she presents it as the truth.” Sam seems a little in awe of her. (And perhaps there’s some guilt in there because she left the Doctor.) Later, separated from Aloisse, she finds herself with a journalist (Madge) under her wing, and promptly takes on a heroic role. This has dreadful consequences, but before long she’s in the same role with a clearly out-of-it Anton, and is much more careful this time. It might be tempting to view these dynamics as an obvious go-to in the Doctor’s absence, but I think they make sense for a suddenly isolated companion, especially such a young one. She gets to look at both sides of a lot of things here, and apply a learning curve as she goes.

Sam’s arc is perhaps the strongest thing in Dreamstone Moon, which is good since I think that’s what most readers are here for. (Certainly it’s what Steve Cole had his money on.) Hot on the heels of this is the reunion with the Doctor, but circumstance (aka the plan for the next book) means that it’s not going to happen here. Dreamstone Moon gets tantalisingly close, no doubt because, as per the Pieces Of Eighth pod, that was originally the plan: the Doctor, following Sam, ends up investigating the same thing; they see each other, a dangerous attack separates them again, and then despite heading for the same location at the end Sam is hauled away from him sight unseen. I didn’t know this going in (although as the page count rose it did seem less and less likely that they were going to sail off together this week), and it’s a bit disappointing to tantalise only to then drag it out like that. Especially when the previous EDA, by complete coincidence, also teased and then welshed on a significant reunion. (The Doctor and Susan.) It can’t be helped, but it does leave Dreamstone Moon feeling a bit surplus to requirements.

Still, none of this is what a casual reader is here for. What about the plot, and what are those dreamstones I mentioned? Well, Anton is a professional dreamer. He records and sells his dreams. Much to his chagrin, the Dreamstone company offers alien rocks that will supply endless dreams without all the work. The good news (that’s debatable) is that some are faulty and provide bad, even dangerous dreams. Anton finds himself on a mission to buy up dreamstones, then trace their origin, in the hopes of exposing the company.

This is all quite intriguing but, sadly, the execution is lacking. You would think for all this fuss about dreams we’d see a bunch of them, wouldn’t you? But no, despite a few abstract sit-bolt-upright-screaming reactions from people the actual dreams are treated as a transaction; society at large might as well be addicted to Pogs. I’ve no idea what’s so incredible about Anton’s dreams that’s so popular — it’s not like he meets any satisfied customers armed with feedback. The only people we encounter who even use dreamstones are the ones using a shady drug-den analog to have deliberately bad dreams, screaming all the while, so they’re not representative. The whole plot is predicated on dreams and these ubiquitous bloody dreamstones, but the world-building — very unusually for Leonard — doesn’t strengthen the point, so I was never heavily invested in it.

The nuts-and-bolts action of the story isn’t very interesting either. The moon of the title is having mysterious earthquakes, so the intergalactic Earth military are on site to help. (Or so they say.) Sam is off investigating/pitching in with the protesters, until she falls into danger alongside them. (She falls into danger pretty constantly, which you would think would be exciting, but honestly “Sam is running out of air!” loses some of its shine the third or fourth time around.) The Doctor, hot on her trail and finally getting a search result, assumes she’s safe enough where she is (?!?) and focuses on investigating too. Only he’s totally unable to convince the local figurehead because she, and the entire military, is massively speciesist.

This is another, critical aspect that isn’t underpinned enough by world-building. Yes, I can believe that a traumatised Earth would respond to Dalek invasion with a mistrust of the unlike. And it certainly feeds Leonard’s theme of the importance of respecting other cultures. But the sheer vehemence of, say, Captain Cleomides is necessary to drive the plot, so it ought to be fleshed out and supported. She outright refuses to believe the Doctor when he tries to help, and is even willing to execute him no questions asked just for trying, all because he is non-human. This is a barrier he doesn’t normally face, so it is worth examining to some degree. But there’s seemingly no time for him to reflect on the unusual reception or even offer much of a counter-argument. (Although I’m sure it would do no good.)

Later, possibly as a last minute tweak from Leonard to hold off that reunion, Cleomides – having softened to him a little – suddenly abandons the Doctor to a likely death in order to force an escape with Daniel and Sam. The Doctor makes repeated reference to his belief that she is not an evil person, but as to what she is, there isn’t enough material to get into it. Her actions speak to someone who is broadly terrible but might be reachable... but isn’t when it counts here, so never mind then? (Unless we’re going to see her again and develop this further, but that seems unlikely.) Certainly the rest of her lot, her maniacal boss and her psychotic underlings, come across as simple rotten eggs whom we can dismiss. The whole thing feels a bit left-field and surface level, despite fitting the theme, or perhaps even because of it, since the rest of society that we see in Dreamstone Moon seems pretty damn enlightened about all this. Are the military the only people traumatised by Daleks?

At the centre of all this are the dreamstones, and Leonard’s conclusion here is not one of his best. The Doctor, at least, enjoys some of that Sam-esque pondering about what to do next (which puts them marvellously on the same wavelength): he assumes the dreamstones are alive and lashing out at the miners and dreamstone users deliberately. He is wrong. (The use of illusions to trick soldiers and spaceships into friendly fire is a really neat idea by the way that, once again, doesn’t quite do the homework. It’s something we’re aware of and briefly see happen but it never feels like a primary concern.) What’s actually happening is more instinctual: the planet/moon are “alive” but as to the actual images, those are being generated by a single dreamstone user with, unwittingly, too much influence. This concept is articulated a bit too late for me to really get hold of it, and the preceding lack of definition with dreams and dreamstones makes it difficult to care about what this all means beyond a surface level “killing a living thing is wrong”. I think perhaps the concept of a living planet/living rocks is an alien too far even for Paul Leonard. Certainly the whole thing is packed away too quickly at the end — it’s hard to imagine that being due to the last minute reunion-nixing, and harder still to believe that these somewhat two-dimensional space racists will let it lie.

Dreamstone Moon has a lot on its mind. (And let’s be fair, a lot in the brief.) I think some of it really works. Leonard’s consistent strength is his view on unusual forms of life, and this is (mostly) another strong example of that. Sam is in an interesting place, questioning her role in her travels. Her feelings for the Doctor are unresolved — and definitely still there, by the way — and by the end she’s even uncertain about whether she can travel with him again. Exciting times, despite the enforced annoyance of the To Be Continued.

On the flip-side, the Doctor is not as well served, being mainly on the receiving end of some slightly hysterical prejudice throughout, but also quite frankly not trying that hard to see Sam again, even (in the end) toying with the idea that maybe she doesn’t want him back. All of which I am hoping Blum and Orman put to good use in the next book (I’m sure they will), but it highlights that The Sam Problem was never all about Sam. What’s the Doctor’s investment, beyond what he has with every companion? I don’t think that’s ever been clear, to the books’ detriment — there are times when he might as well be looking after a favourite ornament — and Dreamstone Moon doesn’t move the needle much. I hope subsequent authors give it some thought.

There are great ideas but, as so often happens, they’re not quite in focus. I can imagine a version of this that went off a bit more around dreams, illusions and the conflict of a day to day world filled with life vs a military that doesn’t recognise aliens. But that’s not Dreamstone Moon, which just sort of tells us that stuff instead as it plods through various tunnel collapses. Some of the problem is the lack of catharsis, which isn’t on Paul Leonard, but then some of the author’s strengths are absolutely on display, so it’s not a total loss.

6/10

*All the same, I did imagine the arc that could have been, with a few more Sam-less or even Doctor-less novels gradually drawing them together again. Hey ho.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #7 – Genocide by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#4
Genocide
By Paul Leonard

Paul Leonard. Heck yeah! While it’s not surprising to see another rising star from Virgin Publishing make the move to BBC Books, I’m glad he’s here. His books are often very good; even better, they are interesting.

Genocide is a very Paul Leonard book. In particular we’ve got aliens who are really rather alien, now that you mention it. The Tractites are ostensibly horse-like beings, but they possess two sets of eyes (for night and day) and a charmingly smell-based way of reading books. They are utterly benign, even when faced with potential danger, which wins Sam over instantly. Their way of life is front and centre, as is the question of how much it is worth compared to, plucking a not random example out of the air, ours. Because something has happened to Earth — now a lush green world with no pollution and no wars — and all of a sudden the Tractites have always lived here.

The Doctor brings Sam to what should be London hoping to get more back issues of The Strand. (That’s twice now in as many books. Who’s sponsoring this series, Big Strand?) It is immediately apparent that something ain’t right, and soon the dilemma is laid out before them: the calm, positive society they see here has got to go. As Sam quickly realises, this amounts to killing them all. But who’s to say which society has the greater claim to existence?

Well, the Doctor says it, and quite definitively, so there you go. This isn’t just another possible future on some cosmic Lazy Susan: it’s a paradox deliberately set up by a bunch of angry Tractites whose own world will one day be destroyed by humans. Deciding that one bad turn deserved another, they found a way back in time to wipe the Earth clean and start over, which has the slight downside of breaking the time lines altogether, although Leonard rarely crystallises this into as many words. He keeps it a little more broad and “this is all wrong”-ish as opposed to doing the whole Back To The Future Part II bit with the blackboard. (I wish he had though. It’s a minor point but without so articulating it, Genocide never seems entirely clear on why the whole rebooted Earth thing won’t work. Or maybe I’m just being picky and wouldn’t have been happy unless the Doctor outright said “You can’t change the past or the future won’t happen which stops you changing the past.” Heck, it’s not as if saying that would convince the Tractites. But then it’s not really articulated visually either, as the breaking timelines are only apparent if you can move about in time. Which you still can, a bit? Which muddies it even more.)

So, all things considered, the moral dilemma is taking on water. I mean it’s not even a dilemma at all, since we have it on good authority that Earth (and who knows what else) will simply go phut at some point unless they put everything back how it was. Nevertheless, I implied that Genocide is good. (Uh, as in the book.) So how about it?

Well, it’s not always about solving the dilemma, so much as just having the conversation. Critical to Genocide is Sam’s response to it. We’re in her head more comfortably than we’ve been so far outside of Vampire Science. She dials back the snark, focusing more on the simple wonder of seeing an alien world (even when it’s her world), which is something every Doctor Who companion ought to revel in but Sam is sometimes denied. Her background in activism naturally informs her reaction, so that she’s able to appreciate (or perhaps, unable to ignore) the positives of the society that has replaced her own. She’s full of conflict about it anyway — see, Having To Destroy All This — but there are hints of deeper insecurity when she thinks about her parents, their activism, and how that sometimes left her feeling abandoned. Is it always a good thing to save the proverbial whale? Or is that line of thought just a desperate attempt to be okay with what must be done to the Tractites?

Again — it’s not like there’s an option, really. But that’s not the point, is it? She’s still got to actively help to put it all back how it was, still got to take all this away. The story gives Sam the wonder of travelling with the Doctor, but also the horrible cost. I don’t care about the dilemma, or how much of a dilemma it is, so long as we’re using it to define the characters.

And Genocide doesn’t stop there. Sam goes on to befriend and rescue one of the Tractites, Kitig: a particularly nice and noble one with a family back home. (But not any more.) His presence makes the point all the more sore, just as the presence of the Doctor and Sam weighs on Kitig, who in his own way must go along with destroying his world. He later meets the Tractites responsible for all this and he, along with the Doctor, hears them out. There’s a genuinely harrowing account of what triggered all this in the far future, and if you can’t forgive their actions afterwards (which you should’t) then it’s at least clear what drove them to it. (Leonard, to be fair, still takes a slightly easy way out in making them very unstable and damaged, so what they’re doing is cruel even when you ignore the paradox. But this gets Kitig neatly into the right frame of mind, so job’s a good’un. See also, the slightly unfortunate character of Jacob Hynes: a human collaborator who befriends, aka lies to Sam, and provides her with another mirror for what she must do. Unfortunately for this interesting train of thought, and any moral trump cards he might have, and especially for the UNIT officers who somehow approved his work, Jacob is an obvious nutjob.)

By the end of this, Sam has taken a life, which leaves a scar perhaps more painful than the loss of the Tractites’ world. It’s a particularly grim cherry on top of some character development that, despite a few flaws, leaves Sam feeling more real. When she makes mistakes in this, they feel natural for a teenager faced with the whole universe. When she’s wrong, it’s because she’s fallible and learning, and not so much because she’s a bit of a douchebag. Done well, mistakes give a character somewhere to go. After a fairly lukewarm start, I’m excited that she’s going somewhere.

Of course Leonard is no slouch at writing that other TARDIS occupant of note — but it ought to be said that the Doctor in this is possibly more befitting the New Adventures than the TV Movie. (Just as Genocide, as a book, feels a bit more NA.) This Doctor is a bit unapproachable from Sam’s perspective, especially where she’s still learning the ropes — all of which is itch-inducingly out of step with the series so far, particularly Vampire Science where they were thick as thieves, but I think it works for this book. The Doctor here is not a friendly presence, or at least he’s not just that: he plays the fool well enough but suddenly it’s all a bit unconvincing, failing to mask a darkness that hasn’t really been apparent before. (Not including his bloodthirstiness in The Eight Doctors. Yes Terry, I’m still mad.)

Arriving on the Tractites’ Earth the Doctor is correctly (if discretely) identified as The Uncreator, a fabled bringer of doom to their way of life. He schemes to get back to the TARDIS as fast as possible, even faking a medical emergency to move things along. When Sam urges Kitig to get into the TARDIS and out of oblivion, the Doctor’s response is “You can’t possibly save him, you can’t save any of them and anyway what would be the use?” There is no great agony of indecision as you might expect. This is a Doctor who knows how the universe works and will not let it get out of joint for anyone. (Although later on he tries his hand at galactic diplomacy in the Tractites’ future. It’s the best he can do.) Making the Doctor more of a bastard helps put Sam’s struggles into focus, and it’s an exciting look on the most approachable Doctor since Davison. It’s also worth remembering this was all pre-Big Finish, and What The Eighth Doctor Is Like was still virgin territory (ahem) and open to interpretation. Then again, maybe all Leonard’s really saying about him here is that time paradoxes give him migraines. Who knows.

Surprisingly for a book that is quite A to B in terms of story (paradoxes notwithstanding) there’s still other stuff to talk about. A couple of palaeontologists get inveigled in Jacob’s mad scheme to wipe out humanity; they’re interesting (particularly Rowenna, still traumatised by the home intruder who put her in a wheelchair), but the book reaches a point sooner than you’d expect where there’s nothing more to be done with them, and ejects them so forcibly that I mostly felt bad that they’d been in it at all. I have a sneaking suspicion they’re only here so one of them can contact Jo Grant, who oh yes, is in this as well.

Leonard has already done her proud in print (Dancing The Code is very good) and, while I wouldn’t say he ruins any of that here, I’m not sure Jo really needed to show up. We get a snapshot of her later life — she’s okay, but things didn’t work out with Cliff beyond having a son together — and she practically jumps at the chance to get involved again. It seems like Jo, with her life of activism, will provide another mirror for Sam — more for what she’s going through now than that whole School Reunion, “you too, huh?” bit, which is fortunate as that barely registers, which might come as a disappointment. (Perhaps it was felt that readers had sufficiently scratched that itch in Vampire Science, with Carolyn the could-have-been companion.) But the moment never really comes to contrast ideologies, and Jo in the end is just here as well. Although, tell a lie, their viewpoints do cross over a bit: when Sam sullenly announces she will not kill, Jo says she’d like to go home now and takes over the death ray (long story), causing more damage than Sam. If she takes any scars home, we don’t hear about them beyond Sam’s guesses. Given Jo’s mounting horror of violence in Dancing The Code, this seems like a particularly odd choice of Leonard’s.

There are a few odd choices along the way, and some bits that don’t take off quite like they ought to. (What about that Time Tree, eh? It’s critical to all this but it’s just sort of there.) Nevertheless, Genocide has a great central idea (as in, the book!), and uses it to make the Doctor and Sam more interesting, or even in the Doctor’s case, interestingly odd. So I reckon it’s worth a few wobbles. Come back soon, Paul!

7/10

(Oh, and there’s a bit where someone writes a message for someone else to read a million years later in fossilised rock, which New Who straight up pinched. I guess those showrunners don’t just read the Paul Cornell ones…)

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #115 – Dry Pilgrimage by Paul Leonard and Nick Walter

The New Adventures
#13
Dry Pilgrimage
By Paul Leonard and Nick Walters

New writer alert! And, just sayin’, 13 books into the even newer New Adventures, a fresh face feels a wee bit overdue. (The previous new novelist was Matt Jones with Bad Therapy, back when all this was Doctor Who. He’s had a second book out since then!)

The funny thing about trying to make an initial assessment of Nick Walters, who shares the writer credit here with Paul Leonard (who reportedly just edited the book) is that Dry Pilgrimage feels so much like a Paul Leonard book. There are ideas that hew close enough to Leonard’s Venusian Lullaby in particular to feel like Paul’s really pushing his luck. But if it’s actually Nick then we can perhaps put that down to the latter being a fan of the former, and then putting his own spin on it – or just happening to be a similar sort of writer. Dry Pilgrimage doesn’t feel rippy-offy at all, it just seems to ride similar trains of thought to the ones in Lullaby, Dancing The Code, Toy Soldiers and Speed Of Flight. Or maybe I’m just projecting because I saw “Paul Leonard” on the cover. Either way, it’s a nice problem to have since it makes for interesting books.

Okay, let’s be more specific: it seems like a very Leonard thing to show not just alien characters, but characters whose life cycles are completely alien. Lullaby and Flight go to great pains to show different ways of living and evolving; the short lifespan of Dry Pilgrimage’s Saraani (10 years) is certainly memorable, and the passing down of memories to their young via “holy transference” is a lot like Venusian “remembering,” only minus the cannibalism. They don’t have different sexes (although they are all gendered as “he/him” which seems odd) and they all reproduce without, you know, help. They’re a striking bunch.

But further down the sounds-a-bit-like-Leonard-but-let’s-just-call-it-interesting rabbit hole we go: it’s not just about weird aliens, it’s about people within the same groups having different perspectives. This goes back, Doctor Who-wise, to Malcolm Hulke and the Silurians, with good ones and bad ones all trying their best for their people. (It probably goes back earlier too but that’s a good example.) The Saraani are slavish about their religion, but a schism on their home-world has turned them into refugees, with the “Renaissants” wanting to ditch the old ways. One of their number, Mirrium, is a staunch traditionalist, but the dubious actions of their leader cause him to rethink the whole Saraani way of life. Said leader, the Khulayn, is working with outsiders on a decidedly dodgy project, but he believes he’s doing the right thing. Vilbian, a Saraani befriended by Bernice, has different allegiances altogether and doesn’t know where he fits in. None of these are even Renaissants, although one of those is squirrelled away too. Bottom line, there’s enough here to suggest a race with more ups and downs than the average funny-forehead gang in Star Trek.

And then there are the more recognisable “people”. The Saraani have booked the cruise ship Lady Of Lorelai to take them to some islands on Dellah, hoping to find a new home; on board to study all of this are Bernice and other professors, including Maeve Ruthven, a religious fundamentalist who went against her faith to marry Brion, a geneticist, with whom she has fallen out but who is on board as well. And Brion has his own tortured allegiances. Of the other assorted academics, Professor Smith has a dispassionate anthropological interest in stirring up trouble and observing the results: he feels like a perverse reflection of the author(s), trying to see things from all sides and remain objective. Smith is, of course, no such thing, as shown in a very funny scene where his temper gets the better of him: “He picked up his cup of coffee, spilling it all over his papers. His hands were shaking. Interesting.” Smith, like any good character, thaws as the story goes along.

This it does at a gentle pace, at least to begin with, as Bernice acclimatises to what should be a nice time on a cruise ship. Yeah, right: anyone who’s ever encountered Doctor Who media knows that even for a moment thinking you’re on holiday means you’re about to have a more than usually dangerous time, but the writing of these early chapters is as enjoyable as putting your feet up on deck. Bernice, it turns out, gets terribly seasick, which brings into sharp relief the fact that somehow this is the first Benny New Adventure set on yer actual seafaring boat. (We’ve already had two “cruise ships in space” and a train going across a dangerous planet. Along with Dry Pilgrimage’s best-days-are-behind-her cruise ship, these all essentially occupy the “murders on holiday” genre.) It’s also the first book to stick with Dellah, where Bernice works, as a location. It seems crazy to me that we haven’t explored the planet more, so I’m all for that.

It can’t all be a lovely holiday, of course, and there’s plenty of darkness in Dry Pilgrimage, beginning with the apparent murder of a student at St. Oscar’s. We start off in his perspective as he tries to chat up Bernice, which makes for an interestingly offbeat way to introduce her to the narrative. The dead don’t always stay dead, it seems, and poor Theo finds himself reincarnated – sort of – as a murderous android. Someone else suffers the same fate later, and we get a lot of pathos out of the horrors of being forced to do things in another body. This also leads to Bernice sustaining a significant injury that bothers her for the rest of the novel.

Because, oh yes, Bernice has a horrible time in this. She makes friends and then loses them (sometimes without knowing it, as with Theo), and her grief often takes a while to hit, which rings truer than always bursting into tears on cue. She tries to do the right thing and rescue people, even when it seems hopeless and in the short term might actually endanger her. I think at times this can be a little much – there are quite a few cliff-hangers where she only survives because someone obligingly saves her – but the overall effect is one of humanising her.

Walters and/or Leonard still keeps track of Bernice’s lighter side, or it wouldn’t be much fun to read. Whilst trying to blend in with some bad guys she takes stock of “the eternal still point within her that was forever Bernice: tea. Interesting people. Cats. Fine wine. Vinyl records. Tennis. Justice. Frocks.” Moments later, “however hard she tried, she couldn’t keep time with the military step. This pleased her in a very fundamental way.” She’s hilarious, in that thankfully understated way that the better Bernice writers get, and at one point when needing to say something about a daunting spacecraft, the best she can manage is “Big, isn’t it?” (Whether that’s a deliberate callback to Walking To Babylon I don’t know, but it’s perfectly on brand.) She’s never so amusing that she’s a caricature, or so distraught that this feels like punishment. It reminds me of certain earlier New Adventures that really got the Doctor right. It should be noted when it happens.

I’ve rhapsodised about it so far. Any niggles? Well, as often happens – Lucifer Rising comes to mind – you’ve got all sorts of depth and interesting stuff going on but then the bad guys show up and it gets a bit bland. The villain (“Violaine,” which even looks like “villain”) at least puts some effort into her megalomania – with an outfit that would have had your eye out if they’d put it on the front cover – but her commitment to fnar fnar evilness is still disappointing in amongst all those shades of grey. Then again, her evil plan to create hordes of killing machines requires elderly volunteers who genuinely think this all sounds smashing, and they’re sort of interesting. But then again again, her actual soldiery workforce are as bog standard unpleasant as they come. Still though. If we’re honest, some people are, aren’t they?

By that point I think Nick Walters and Paul Leonard (in that order) have generated enough goodwill for us to remember the hits more than the misses. Dry Pilgrimage just feels substantial in a way that more New Adventures should. Not bad for a first timer doing another dusty old Murder On A Cruise Ship.

8/10

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

Decalog 5: Wonders
Edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

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

*

The Place of All Places

By ???

Based on an idea by Nakula Somana

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

*

Poyekhali 3201

By Stephen Baxter

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

*

King’s Chamber

By Dominic Green

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

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

*

City Of Hammers

By Neil Williamson

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

*

Painting In The Age With The Beauty Of Our Days

By Mike O’Driscoll

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

*

The Judgement Of Solomon

By Lawrence Miles

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

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

*

The Milk Of Human Kindness

By Elizabeth Sourbut

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

*

Bibliophage

By Stephen Marley

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

*

Negative Space

By Jeanne Cavelos

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

*

Dome Of Whispers

By Ian Watson

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

*

Waters-Of-Starlight

By Stephen Marley

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

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

*

The Place Of All Places

By ???

Based on an idea by Nakula Somana

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

*

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

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

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

7/10

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

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

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

*

Second Chances
By Alex Stewart

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

*

No One Goes to Halfway There
By Kate Orman

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

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

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

*

Shopping For Eternity
By Gus Smith

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

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

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

*

Heritage
By Ben Jeapes

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

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

*

Burning Bright
By Liz Holliday

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

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

*

C₉H₁₃NO₃
By Peter Anghelides

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

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

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

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

*

Approximate Time Of Death
By Richard Salter

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

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

*

Secrets Of The Black Planet
By Lance Parkin

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

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

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

*

Rescue Mission
By Paul Leonard

Well that was, er, lovely, wasn’t it?

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

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

*

Dependence Day
By Andy Lane and Justin Richards

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #87 – Speed Of Flight by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#27

Speed Of Flight

By Paul Leonard

Oh good, it’s Paul Leonard. A bit of a sleeper hit when it comes to Virgin’s Who authors, Leonard has now written three quietly impressive books. Venusian Lullaby is the standard bearer for (very) alien life; Dancing The Code is a characterful examination of violence in the Third Doctor era; and Toy Soldiers has an evocative plot steeped in atmosphere and imagery. Now we have Speed Of Flight, another Lullaby-ish deep dive into offworld life. All aboard.

He sets the tone right away with a prologue following Xa, a simple-minded labourer on an expedition he doesn’t understand. The language is all a bit vague, much like Xa, describing suns, skies and lands in a way I can’t quite pin down. And Xa wants to fight – he must fight, if he wants to be “promoted”. The life cycle on this planet demands a mortal battle and to win means evolving wings and changing in other ways.

All of which is sort of interesting, except we’re stuck in Xa’s head and he just goes on and on about fighting while not understanding any of what’s happening around him. As a first impression, it’s frustrating. Not to worry though, since the rest of the book is (mostly) about other characters. But that sense of somewhat imaginative vagueness never goes away regardless of the character we’re following, and I struggled through more or less every page.

It’s hard to pin down the problem here, as there are a lot of complex ideas at work. Nooma – only named in the blurb unless I'm mistaken? – is an unusual setting with its seemingly artificial sky and low gravity. (Just typing “artificial sky” recalls The Also People, and look at the bountiful rewards in that.) The life cycle of its people has obviously been thought through in much the same way as “remembering” in Venusian Lullaby. The villain of the piece, Epreto, isn’t a bad guy per se; he just wants to break free from the strangely rigid evolution of his species, and while he’s at it the world around him, which seems to be falling apart. I’m all for moral ambiguity and a villain with only “good” motivations is a welcome change. There are even ideas to spare, such as the Dead, a series of pseudo-mechanical recreations of deceased people, and there are plenty of neat visuals such as the ubiquitous steamships.

For some reason though, none of this takes off. The world isn’t heavily explored: there is mention of temples on the sky but we hardly see them, nor most of the people who live here; roughly a quarter of the book seems to take place in one character’s house; the lack of gravity never seems important (and is surely at odds with the overall obsession with flight), and there are assorted characters of different sub-species with varying job titles, such as “confessor”, who just refuse to crystallise into relatable, breathing people. I never really understood what the Dead were all about and, as much as Leonard has applied his characteristic flair to the born>fight>evolve process on Nooma, the plot never progresses much beyond it. Also characters yakking on about wanting to fight is really not that interesting to me.

As it takes place after Dancing The Code (with references to prove it), you’re probably expecting more character work to bed in Jo’s imminent departure. That last book ended on a note of defiance for Jo, after all: a fork in the road between her and the Doctor where she was the one offering to help. Unfortunately, Speed Of Flight isn’t all that interested. Hoping to visit Karfel (so we can tick off that all important Timelash Easter Egg) the Doctor picks up Jo and Mike Yates, who have been sent on a prank blind date. Jo promptly meets the Dead and spends most of the novel not feeling like herself. (Towards the end there is a nod towards her desire to move on, but that’s all it is.) Mike’s clumsy arrival gets a sympathetic character killed, and he then spends a portion of the novel dead himself. (An incident at the end hints towards his troubled loyalty in later stories, but it’s a bit of a random link.) The Doctor figures out how this planet’s life cycle began as well as Epreto’s plan, and is curiously unsympathetic.

While his mannerisms are spot on as ever – including a delightful bit where he claims “Eeny, Meany, Miny, Mo” is a Venusian nursery rhyme – the Doctor’s attitude leaves something to be desired. It ought to be significant that he spends most of the novel away from Jo, but that feels incidental, as her out-of-it mind-set means she isn’t really learning and growing from her experiences. Mike Yates was mostly a nothing character on screen, and outside of The Eye Of The Giant (where he displayed some military efficiency for once), he’s the same in print. The Doctor is unfazed by his arrival and not especially knocked by the possibility of his death. It’s an odd three-man unit (ahem) to base your book around.

Speed Of Flight has some of the mechanics that made Leonard’s earlier books great, but it gets hung up on some details and doesn’t delve into others. It’s a book desperately lacking in colour and feeling, soldiering on to service an ultimately simple plot and finding no other rewards. It’s not a book I hate, but it is thankless work. I wish he’d filled this particular gap with Dancing The Code and then moved on.

4/10