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 #102 – Dying In The Sun by Jon de Burgh Miller

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#47

Dying in the Sun

By Jon de Burgh Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #80 – Independence Day by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#36

Independence Day

By Peter Darvill-Evans

The prodigal editor returns!

As you probably know, Peter Darvill-Evans helped launch the New Adventures and then edited them for years. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have EDAs or PDAs without him, so it makes a degree of sense to get him in to write something for BBC Books.

Of course the concern here is that his only prior Doctor Who book was Deceit: a plot-relevant but otherwise long, stodgy, vaguely unpleasant and action-heavy entry that introduced the controversial New Ace. (An older, gun-toting Ace who ran away and joined the space army for a bit.) It existed in service of a plot arc and what little you could glean from it about the author’s creativity was not hugely encouraging.

Independence Day* is at least a more measured effort — albeit not in terms of chapters, of which there are only six plus a prologue across 280 pages. Darvill-Evans is no longer saving up all the important bits for 50 page intervals (a weird Deceit tic), and although this one dips a toe in creepiness there’s nothing to rival the Stockholm Syndrome relationship in that earlier book — although the concept of messed up attraction shows up again. It is, if nothing else, an easy to follow book.

If I seem cagey it’s because I spent most of Independence Day convinced that it was Doing A Thing that would eventually pay off. On the surface it looks like the most, well, surface kind of story imaginable: the Doctor and Ace become embroiled in a slave revolt. They’ll light the blue touch paper and then down will come the terrible tyrant. It’s not exactly new ground but it could be satisfying if done well. The way Darvill-Evans positions his players, though, suggests a much murkier story.

Straight off the bat, the Doctor’s past actions have played a part in all this. While travelling with Jamie he landed on Mendeb Two for no apparent reason — rationalising that he always arrives somewhere “for a reason” — so he asked Jamie to pick up a souvenir to remind him to come back. Jamie picked a vital part of the planet’s communication relay, which ultimately caused a critical imbalance between planets Two and Three. (Maybe tie a knot in your hanky next time.) Fast forward to the Doctor’s return with Ace and Mendeb Two is now easy pickings for its sister world; the populace are being used for slave labour. So you have a story about the Doctor fixing his own mistake.

Sat on the ancient space station between the two worlds is Kedin Ashar, a Duke of Mendeb Three who is apparently loyal to King Vethran, whose kingdom relies upon brainwashed slaves. However, he is secretly working against the King. However (part 2) he is also facilitating the King’s slave trade using his own skill as an inventor/chemist. His plan is to invent a new mind-altering slave drug which wears off sooner, and supplant the original without Vethran noticing. Which is… good, but he’s still actively trading in slaves, and has dosed who knows how many people with the permanent version of the drug already. So he’s not exactly the white knight he appears to be, at least to his followers. The question inevitably occurs of whether he’s really any better than Vethran, and his answer isn’t all that compelling: “I can’t claim that I have a grand new vision for my planet, nor that I’m acting from long-held principles. I’m a soldier and a scientist, not a politician.” So there’s a question of whether this coup d'état will turn out to be anything more than a redistribution.

Then you have the slave revolt, which is happening independently of Kedin/coincidentally with the Doctor’s help. Landing on Mendeb Two he finds the slave operation in full swing and meets Bep-Wor, a depressed fisherman whose wife is a slave on the other world. Soon they’re working together on Mendeb Three, with the Doctor hoping to find Ace and Bep-Wor hoping to find his wife. This mini-revolution soon becomes worryingly messianic, with the brainwashed and free slaves alike chanting “Doctor!” Bep-Wor is hugely swept along by this and he begins steering the group away from the Doctor’s plan of finding the King to negotiate; instead they go from place to place freeing slaves, and doing so violently, against the Doctor’s wishes. (For a while he lies to keep this secret from the Doctor.) So this revolution isn’t spotless — there are questions to be asked about their methods, whether Bep-Wor is really better than the villains he’s killed, and how the Doctor squares that with his own moral code.

Then you have Ace. Free of her New Adventures continuity, she nonetheless wants to grow and be independent (geddit), and insists that the Doctor set her down on the space station to fend for herself. Soon she’s breaking up a fight to rescue Kedin, sleeping with him, winding up a slave herself and then eventually breaking her conditioning, assisting the revolution and intending to stay behind and make a life for herself. So you have a story about Ace’s independence and burgeoning adulthood, and the difficulties within that.

Even some bits you’d normally take for granted are presented with a little extra ambiguity. Vethran, our oogly-boogly bad guy, hardly appears in the book at all; he’s such a background figure that I couldn’t help focussing on Kedin’s grey areas instead. Is Darvill-Evans using this to tip the story the other way? Is Vethran’s reputation exaggerated perhaps, and Kedin’s muted? And we have the slaves. Now, obviously they’re not happy. They’re slaves! They’re drugged into forced contentment! But then we meet a slave/master couple who seem sort of genuinely functional, the one filling in the deficiencies of the other. Bep-Wor’s half-crazed army can’t cope with this idea so they kill the owner and liberate the slave; it’s strongly suggested that we shouldn’t cheer them on, which suggests that maybe, I dunno, there’s a grey area in all this.

Maybe I’ve got my charitable hat on but I think there’s genuine promise here. Sadly Independence Day doesn’t follow through on any of it. Which suggests worrying things about my choice of hat.

For starters there’s the Doctor. Yes, it’s interesting that his actions may have doomed Mendeb Two. But you ideally need to do something with that other than have the Doctor go “oh, whoops” and then proceed to get exactly as involved in the anti-villainy plot as he would have done on any other planet. His complicity doesn’t make much difference to the story since at no point does anyone find out or care about the Doctor’s little mistake, and beyond a little early encouragement he barely contributes to their victory anyway, instead spending a fair chunk of the finale dead. (He gets better.)

Then there’s Kedin, our distractingly handsome hero/slave trader — you know, that old combo. Kedin is anything but lily white politically, but he seems sure that he can fix the slave problem. Based on what, though? There’s zero actual plan to restore the slaves to who they were before, since at the time he planned all this he didn’t know the Doctor would turn up to at least have a credible go at it. Did he think setting a load of servile zombies free on their old stomping ground was a win? All his new drug does is confirm that some new slaves will revert back. Some plan!

His personality isn’t much better. We’re meant to believe he’s pining for his kidnapped love, Tevana. It’s a key motivator for him. That doesn’t seem to get in the way of his taking Ace to bed though, does it? Not to get all prudish about it, but that’s some very messy motivation for a guy already dabbling in straight up villainy, and yet by the time the dust settles at the end you’d think Aragorn had returned to Gondor. So I guess just don’t worry about all of that.

It’s clear that we’re meant to pity Bep-Wor, who gets a downbeat ending after hearing some unencouraging news. I nevertheless kept waiting for his bloody revolution and occasional lies to come back on him, but they didn’t. Shouldn’t it make a difference that he goes against the Doctor’s wishes, uses him as a figurehead and eventually (unconvincingly) feigns helplessness when his mob kills somebody harmless? Instead it’s just one of those things the book throws at us as if to go, well, it’s more colourful that way. And it is, but you really ought to put a button on it as well.

Like Kedin, Bep-Wor is lauded at the end. His unhappy postscript might be seen as penance — I dunno, he mostly seems unhappy about one very specific thing there. The best I can come up with is that Bep-Wor’s decay is because the Doctor felt he deserved it for making his earlier mistake, and that’s why he doesn’t do anything to stop it. I know, I know, it’s probably just (debatably) interesting colour.

You can see that Ace’s story is meant to be meaningful, a sort of New Adventures character arc speed run, but it just doesn’t work. For starters, she gets it all wrong: she completely misreads the initial attack on Kedin (she thinks the fancy rich guy is blameless, not the band of angry peasants? Ace thinks that?) and she puts a fatal amount of trust in him, even after he seemingly ejects her into space. The “mindless slave” section is then a very curious choice for the character, effectively writing her out for half of it. (That may be for the best as it’s strongly hinted that she did more than serve drinks on Mendeb Three. A reference to her being “fit for the arena” due to her fight skills is promising but that goes nowhere — perhaps it was from an old draft.)

Although her recovery and rush into action at the end is some of the most direct and enjoyable stuff in the book, her moral flip-flopping over Kedin is laughable. He drugged you and sent you into slavery! He boffed you while supposedly pining for his missus! But because he’s sad about it, Ace reckons she’s all grown up now and ready to go and serve Kedin instead of travelling in the TARDIS. No way: you, sir, are having a laugh. And so Darvill-Evans appears to be with Kedin’s wince-inducing Casablanca kiss-off at the end. At least we can find some amusement in the Doctor failing to entertain her plan for even a second.

Lastly we have the “take for granted” stuff, and no prizes for guessing how much that leaves in the bank. Vethran is described with, of course, thwarted ambiguity: “Bep-Wor had expected — he didn’t know what he had expected. Someone more remarkable, perhaps: a man whose face betrayed an inner evil. Vethran was tall, imposing, with keen, intelligent eyes and a full beard. And that was all.” But he’s clearly studied at the Ming The Merciless school as there’s no doubt of his total nastiness based on his actions; he even does the “try to kill the goodie when he’s not looking” trick! So yes, he really is worse than Kedin after all, because he just is, so there. (And to now put on my nitpick hat: why did he wait so long before brainwashing his hostage? Come to think of it, why doesn’t he just brainwash the world? Seriously, just poison the water supply and bam, no more wars. Why all the faff?) As for the apparent ambiguity around slaves — which I’m not exactly hopping up and down about as a concept — there’s only one scene of it. Another example of our “whew, that was weird, anyway” approach to moral complexity.

I’ve clearly got a bit sidetracked by all the ambiguity or-lack-thereof, so to get back to the book: yeah, I guess it is just a surface level slave revolt thing after all, despite appearances. And to be fair it can be enjoyed on that level. Darvill-Evans has clearly thought a lot about Mendeb Three and its strangely anachronistic society, with dukes and peasants somehow flying rickety rockets to a space station with much better tech. (5 years to get from radio sets to orbit? Yeah, okay.) Independence Day has an ungainly way of unspooling the planet’s lore at us, occasionally pausing just to “as you know, Bob” directly in the prose for no reason, but some of the added colour isn’t bad. Sue me, I got somewhat invested. (Sadly though it’s not just the prose that gets a bad case of the talkies. Ace, seemingly possessed with the soliloquy powers of Spider-Man, at one point announces to herself: “Now then … what was all that about? That Kedin’s a crafty old sod. Charming and very horny, but definitely crafty with it. I suppose he’s trying to find out how much I know about all this futuristic technology. It’s obvious he hasn’t got the hang of it at all. I just wish I knew what he was up to on this godforsaken space station.” Smooth!)

It’s not, without wishing to be mean, the most memorably written book. This is the sort of SF/fantasy plodder to throw out lines like “‘The signal, Tevana Roslod,’ Madok said”, and where “flirting” manifests as “I think you’d better say a prayer to your own deity, young lady. You’re about to sin.” (Oh, Pete.) We’ve established that virtually no one in this is someone you’ll want to root for, and there’s little in the way of interesting interior lives; nonetheless, the simple march of Darvill-Evans’s revolution keeps the pace up pretty well. The finale is exciting, and there are moments of wit along the way, like how Ace’s brainwashed speech and thoughts aren’t quite as flat as everyone else’s: “It’s a good job I’ve been told that I’m happy doing this, [Ace] said to herself, because otherwise I think I’d be quite pissed off.” If nothing else it’s unchallenging on a plot level and quite easy to get through.

I think I liked it better than Deceit. That’s not a very high bar, and it’s difficult to tell how much of my generally-finding-it-sort-of-okay was because I’d tricked myself into expecting a more complex book. I still think Independence Day has the germ of something with all that moral ambiguity, though equally that might just be a tonal leftover from the New Adventures. With a book this eager to comment on the action and tell us about the surroundings, however, I have to doubt there’s all that much hidden under the surface.

5/10

*Not a great title is it? This is a coup, they depose the guy. They’re not becoming an independent anything, they’re just getting rid of their ruler.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #72 – Heart Of TARDIS by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#32

Heart of TARDIS

By Dave Stone

Look up there — what’s that light in the sky, above Gotham Police Headquarters? Is that…? Yes, it’s the Silly Goose Signal. And if you look down into the street you’ll see him haring towards us now in his polka-dotted cape and squeaky slippers, blowing raspberries as he goes. Dave Stone approacheth.

Heart Of TARDIS is odd, perhaps even by Stone’s standards. It has multiple story strands, heaps of characters, two Doctors with companions in tow, magic, surrealism, jokes, horrible murders and a preoccupation with TV and movies. (Cheese also crops up a lot.) It’s not for the casual reader.

I don’t know if the book specifically or my attention span was the reason that I got 100 pages in, realised I wasn’t quite following it and started again, this time writing out the different plot strands to keep them straight. This mostly helped, but even then there were important moments I struggled to comprehend simply because they were couched in strangeness or silliness; with this one it can be hard to grab onto the genuine activity of a scene, or even a sentence. (Dave Stone newbies would do well to know that some of his sentences are sort of, optional.)

Stone has always been one for silliness, which is a good thing really: Sky Pirates! is hilarious. He loves a comedic diversion and there are plenty of those here, such as a page or two on the history of the obsessive alien Collectors, or a character considering how Romana would fit into her own class upbringing. But there’s somewhat of a sliding scale when it comes to just how firm a grip he has on the story, vs how much fun he’s having. Pirates! and Death And Diplomacy knew just what they were about — a quest narrative and a romcom respectively — whereas, say, Oblivion is really interested in alternative timelines, but it just sort of paddles around in that idea. I’m not sure what it is that drives Heart Of TARDIS as a story. A collision between magic and science, I suppose, since it’s about a literal nexus point of the two, but then no one in it really engages with the difference. There’s no “Science, Miss Hawthorne!” debate this week; magic is just a thing that demonstrably works.

If that feels incongruous to you within the bounds of Doctor Who, well, it’s just that sort of book: unreality is baked into it on a story level and on a meta one. Literally we have characters losing their faculties and doing strange, horrible things to each other: an American town, Lychburg, has stopped following the normal rules of cause and effect and it is no longer possible to leave. (Think Pleasantville. Just add murders.) Beyond that we have weird attack squads who are, in some undefined way, horrifying to behold, and they use black magic. There are diversions (Stone gonna Stone) where characters compare real life to movies and television, which feels like it’s going somewhere but doesn’t really; we even have quasi-cameos from The Simpsons and Cheers characters, as well as two recurring characters who are a very transparent piss-take of The Professionals. Then there’s what happens to the TARDIS at the end — as in, the Fourth Doctor’s one — being transmogrified room by room and filled with random sights, a sequence that would maybe have more cachet if we hadn’t already been on that sort of toboggan ride for 200+ pages.

We also have some fun and games around canon and continuity. (I think we can infer some deliberateness here, given that one of the villains is literally named “Continuity.”) The Second Doctor’s story kicks off because he’s found a way to undo the security controls on his TARDIS, which are the things preventing him from piloting it properly; this is a retcon new to the book. (To be fair, it’s not a bad one.) The Fourth Doctor and Romana are in the middle of a somewhat breathless search for the Key to Time, but they seem completely happy to put that on pause this week; this is fairly unheard of. (Hard to be mad at this as a concept though, as Romana I deserves more stories, and they can’t all involve the Key.) There’s a gag about the (Fourth) Doctor always leaving K9 behind on adventures and needing to go back and rescue him, sometimes centuries later; that’s hilarious, but again, this is the first we’re hearing about it. The Doctor — both — has a strange inability to be photographed, and cannot provide fingerprint samples unless he concentrates; all very magical, and all new here. There’s even a possible blooper to confuse matters, with Benton still being a Sergeant in the late 1980s; he was a Warrant Officer in his last TV appearance. (Perhaps he got demoted…?)

None of this really matters as such, and by all means other authors can pick them up again, but taken together, in the context of the series so far and combined with the quasi-reality of the plot, it does all sort of push the whole thing into the realm of “is any of this real.” And, pure personal taste here, my investment in a story is somewhat tied to how much the characters are invested in it. If it could all have been a dream then, no offence, but why should I care? It’s a tricky balance.

There are subtler weirdnesses as well — let’s call them, takes. Stone characterises the Fourth Doctor and Romana perfectly, capturing their lofty brilliance, Romana’s indomitability, this Doctor’s irreverence that can turn on a sixpence into grave fury.

The Second Doctor and co are more bespoke. This Doctor he characterises as a chaos demon, utterly impulsive and incapable of listening to anybody before he takes action. This is a bit of a stretch, but at least it’s along the right lines. (His predilection for technobabble is definitely a Dave Stone thing, however. I can’t picture Troughton rattling off some of the convoluted stuff he comes out with here.) Jamie seems to dip below Stone’s interest altogether, although he does get a critical plot moment near the end.

Victoria is where he really goes for broke. Pushed into the centre as the rational protagonist of the trio, this Victoria is no frightened girl: she’s well travelled (after dozens of off-screen adventures) and has become downright cosmopolitan. She has got used to futuristic forms of travel, even been “spoilt” by them; she screams only once, and then it feels like a surprise; seemingly no longer a retiring violet, she recognises and even makes innuendos. It’s also through Victoria — now apparently a keen observer — that we get some of the best Second Doctor writing: “[The Doctor had] a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it. It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not.” / “Ordinarily, he took the part — was the part — of a silly little hobo (as she believed the Americans called it) drifting wherever the fancy took him and amiably allowing himself to be taken along with the circumstances in which he found himself. Indeed, he seemed to be most happy in that persona and took pains to preserve it even at all possible. When danger threatened, however — being trapped in a town elided from the universe of space and time and with a killer on the loose, for example — it was as if he put the clown aside and transformed himself into a man of action, fearlessly hunting down the particulars of the case like a bantam-sized Sherlock Holmes… a man whom, in the face of all probability, he claimed to have met.” NB: Typical Dave Stone sentence lengths there.

Stone justifies his sharper, less frightened take on Victoria: “given the tenor of her original times, [she] was not exactly a shrinking violet even in terms of that era. Time and again, on her travels with Jamie and the Doctor, in any number of perilous situations, she had found reserves of courage and fortitude even she had not known she had.” And honestly, she’s an improvement on the person we see in the actual episodes (although the apparently sexual worldliness is a bit odd), but it’s another thing that makes Heart Of TARDIS feel like a self-contained stopover, where this particular author is god and he makes all the rules.

I suppose that only really matters if you need all of these books to feel like they’re part of the same series. I think it’s fine to step outside sometimes. (Look at Campaign.) I’m just surprised that the editorial team were on board with a book that takes so many weird little swings. (Look at Campaign. Okay, that’s unfair: Campaign finally died because it kept missing deadlines, not because it was weird. But there was some resistance from Richards, and I can’t help but wonder what notes he gave for this one. If, indeed, he had time to give any.)

It’s easy to discuss Heart Of TARDIS in terms of ideas — it’s got oodles. (Some, like the K9 rescue, go nowhere beyond “funny bit”. K9 doesn’t return once he’s safe and sound.) It’s harder to crunch it into shape as a story with a point. Or two, really, since this is being sold as a multi-Doctor adventure. (More on that in a moment.) The situation in Lychburg is creepy, often to an extent that seems to be from another book altogether (the woman building a homunculus out of victims’ body parts), but the basic concept of cause and effect going haywire is very interesting. It’s hard to articulate, however, particularly for a word-wanderer like Dave Stone. You soon get the sense that this plot (the Second Doctor one) will be isolated until the Fourth Doctor gets involved. Nothing much really progresses here until it’s nearly over, at which point the grand finale happens virtually off-screen.

Then we have the Fourth Doctor stuff, visiting UNIT HQ to recover a missing Brigadier. This involves the aforementioned black magic practitioners, but again there isn’t much proactively to do for most of it. The weird and wacky characters operate with abandon and eventually, when it’s time to resolve the crisis, the Doctor(s) is only of secondary help. Things are decided by a sort of wizard battle between secondary characters, with the Brigadier (under-written, almost wasn’t worth including him) intervening at a crucial moment.

Heart Of TARDIS gets very close to edging out the Doctor(s) altogether, although it certainly relies on TARDISes for its plot. This is at least themed, although that isn’t articulated until the Epilogue: “We can’t always expect to take what you might call a proactive role. Sometimes, in this life, we’re lucky if we can do as much as work out what’s going on, much less whether what we do has an effect … Great events are the result of the interactions of people who are largely indifferent to each other.” Which is a decent theme for a book… just an odd fit for Doctor Who, and thus, it’s another one-shot Dave Stone “take”. As a reader, as it must have been for the Doctors, most of this becomes an exercise in patiently waiting through each section until the summing up starts, or somebody else does something.

Looking at it as a multi-Doctor story, we must remember that Dave Stone is a silly goose. So, it isn’t one in the traditional sense. I don’t mind that: it’s always difficult to come up with a big enough threat for more than one Doctor to deal with, and it’s equally hard to give each of them something to do. Stone’s approach is more like Cold Fusion, where separate Doctors’ plot lines eventually dovetail. Where this gets really Dave Stone, however, is that they don’t even meet. The Second Doctor is never aware of the other one; the Fourth Doctor twigs fairly late in the story, and then there is a knowingly short scene where the one secretly assists the other.

As you can probably guess, this has all been setup for a funny line, in this case Romana’s: “So that’s it, is it? We get through all this, and our function is to simply open the door to let you in for a grand total of two minutes before you run straight out again?” In other words: you all expected a multi-Doctor story, tee hee hee. And honestly, a 280 page setup-punchline is a fairly impressive thing to pull off. But it is quite likely to annoy a few readers. (I think by that point I’d given up any hope/forgotten the possibility of the two interacting anyway.)

I was never exactly mad at Heart Of TARDIS, and I don’t know if I’d describe it as confusing, although admittedly I did put some work in there. (And it’s still pretty convoluted.) It’s more structured than The Blue Angel and less abstract than Campaign; it’s just weird on every other level and very, very busy. It’s hard to say whether I actually enjoyed it. Stone’s rapid-fire ideas can be very interesting, but that dreamlike strangeness makes it difficult to care on any deeper level. This is where comedy usually helps, and to be fair it’s often very funny, but being tinged with the grotesque sort of undermines that aspect for me.

It’s one of those books where, if nothing else, The Author Definitely Meant To Do That, and I think that deserves some respect. But I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out than an editor had replied with, “Dave, what the hell is this?”

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #51 – The Final Sanction by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#24

The Final Sanctions

By Steve Lyons

War. Huh. You know what, I think I’ll give it a miss.

The last time we saw the Selachians was their introduction in The Murder Game, a light-hearted low stakes romp. They were an incongruous menace, aquatic beings in bio-mechanical suits with sharks painted on the outside, out to destroy all land-dwellers. They posed an obvious threat but were just the teensiest bit silly.

Steve Lyons strikes an entirely different note in The Final Sanction, and he makes that clear right away, landing the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in a warzone. (Hey, there’s an idea.) The first chapter chops up events in a way that Lyons has enjoyed doing since The Witch Hunters: Zoe is having such a miserable time that she’s already remembering their arrival and considering its importance in coming events. This has the effect of starting the story already on the go, which also helps to raise the urgency of what’s happening. The sight of many dead aliens also drives that point home.

The planet Kalaya is one of the last holdouts in the Selachian war with mankind; if they can be driven back from here, all that’s left is their homeworld, Ockora. The trio quickly encounters the two opposing forces. They are, of course, separated, with Zoe becoming a Selachian prisoner and Jamie joining the Earth forces to fight. The Doctor has his own problems: he knows that some time soon the humans will use a catastrophic weapon to destroy Ockora, killing the Selachians and a large number of innocent hostages. Worse, since this is established history he cannot stop it — he must ensure it happens. And now Zoe’s in the firing line.

Tragic inevitability is another holdover from The Witch Hunters, but this doesn’t feel like a repeat as Lyons gets to paint on a much broader canvass this time. The destruction of an entire world is not some subtle chain of events like the Salem witch trials, and this time the problem isn’t remotely the fault of the TARDIS crew. The scale of the problem is so enormous that the tragedy itself is surely much greater, although by the same token it’s so overwhelming that it’s almost impersonal. (Not to mention, entirely fictional.) Frankly, it’s not as if there are many Selachian protagonists around to make us really identify with what’s happening beyond the obvious fact that it is genocide. Unlike The Witch Hunters, and to its detriment, there is never really a plausible path to not carrying out the tragic event.

The point is perhaps further muddied by making this a tragedy about hostages caught in the crossfire — of which Zoe is very keen not to be one, with the Doctor and Jamie in vigorous agreement, thus keeping them all on some level thinking about something other than the impending Selachian tragedy. The most direct reckoning with this horrendous war crime comes in the form of Dr Mulholland, the expert behind the G-bomb who is doing her best to distance herself from its inevitable use. Over the course of the book her defences break down and she faces her part in this. The various military characters we get to know — all troubled men with varying levels of insecurity — never quite reckon with their choices.

For good measure, at least one Selachian does reckon with the scale of what has been lost, thinking of his beautiful home and family and then momentarily losing respect for his superior, saying “you should have surrendered.” More Selachian characters seems an obvious note here: the one I’ve just mentioned gets comparatively the most to do, being instrumental in Jamie’s eventual realisation that they are not merely monsters. His resolute hatred of humanity remains, however, and this is much of a piece with how they all behave, making them (perhaps cleverly but not helpfully) hard to like. The only Selachians not rampaging about are the non-combatants, of whom we only meet a few; they tend to die tragically without sharing their points of view, their deaths being yet more fuel for their already furious brethren. I don’t get the impression that the non-military way of life has disappeared on Ockora (at least not while Ockora exists) but it would have been nice to hear more about it.

The tragedy of the Selachians is ultimately posited as one of abuse — the Kalayans having cruelly mistreated them and stirred their hatred of all land dwellers — and then one of stubbornness. But firstly, the Kalayans hardly feature in this, and the one that we do meet (Kukhadil) doesn’t have occasion to feel bad about his people’s part in these events. In the context of the fighting here, the Selachians feel much the same about everybody who isn’t a Selachian, so it seems a bit redundant that their “true” enemies are involved. Secondly, it’s not as if anyone puts forward an idea of what a Selachian surrender would actually look like in practical terms. The local Earth military leader, Redfern, gives no indication that he’s not just in it for the kill count.

I suppose what I’m saying is, this is not the most nuanced take on the horrors of war. The ingredients are all there, with intractable military leaders on both sides and innocents in the middle, but there’s a certain A-to-B feeling about the execution, with all the Selachians following much the same pattern and, to be honest, most of the humans doing that too. Lyons is Doing A Thing there, I know, but he doesn’t find many opportunities within that to say a great deal that’s new, although there is a bright spot when the death of a soldier takes up an entire chapter; context leads us to believe that he is human, and then the rather sheepish reader is put right.

Perhaps recent books haven’t helped. Autumn Mist was a horrors-of-war story and Storm Harvest concerned multiple other bio-mechanical water-dwellers, some violent; those were the two books directly before this. I will say though that The Final Sanction makes the Selachians more interesting, achieving (in its modest warzone gravitas) a clearly separate identity from the Chelonians, who previously seemed a little too close for comfort. It’s a shame that, chronologically at least, we are unlikely to delve deeper into them as characters.

The book does a good job with its regulars. Steve Lyons is one of those very observant writers who can easily capture the characters’ voices, and despite the dark story there are some charming moments for the Doctor, all quintessentially Troughton-esque: “[The Doctor] dropped the brick and stood up, lacing his fingers together and giving his companions a familiar contrite look: apologising in advance for the fact that he was about to get his own way.” / “The Doctor’s expression suggested that all the misfortunes of the universe were a personal disappointment to him.” There is a darkness to him as well, which of course also fits, as he commits to the unhappy resolution long before it happens, and in the epilogue puts Zoe on the spot to consider whether she would have done things differently. (This is of course intended as helpful.)

Zoe and Jamie are very well defined here, sometimes in deliberate opposition: “Zoe could never be satisfied until she knew exactly how and why things worked.” / “The Doctor, [Jamie] supposed, must have worked some kind of magic. For Jamie, that was explanation enough.” Jamie’s enthusiasm for fighting is perhaps a slight stretch — ostensibly it’s out of the urge to rescue Zoe, but there’s a whiff of just wanting to get into the military thick of things again, with Jamie a little too easily thinking of the Selachians like redcoats and not as people. It serves a pretty clear purpose though of using a somewhat simple man (sorry, Jamie) to demonstrate the easy grip of fanaticism, and to Lyons’ credit the eventual contrite team-up with a Selachian isn’t the end of this journey, his new comrade being ultimately too keen on killing humans for Jamie to tolerate. Along the way he defaults to trying to emulate the Doctor, or at least what would be his choices, which seems a good way to cap it off.

Zoe’s story is, for her anyway, a less satisfying one. She’s escaping only to be recaptured for some of this — one of our oldest chestnuts — but built into that is a gradual attempt to apply her intelligence and lead others, with invariably poor results even despite her (so she reckons) higher intelligence than the Doctor. Being more cerebral than Jamie, she’s considering the wider questions, but also ultimately defaulting to the kind of mentality that drives the Jamies of this situation: just wanting orders from someone who knows what to do. A level playing ground, perhaps, to show that anyone can go along with war. So there are layers to all this; see also, where despite his objections the Doctor is able to steer inevitable events in small ways that lend people a bit more dignity — but rarely, alas, happiness.

I think The Final Sanction is an entirely decent war-is-heck story. I wouldn’t exactly describe it as fun, but as an action adventure it’s well crafted, Lyons sticking with groups of characters for long stretches and building momentum with cliffhangers aplenty. There are simply a lot of unexplored paths that could have made it stronger. A more diverse set of characters to invest in would have been nice. (Redfern, Michaels and Paterson could be more distinct.) More and varied Selachians and definitely more of their culture would have added meaning and pathos. (“Paul Leonard” it up a bit.) And more about the hostage crisis would, ironically, have helped, as this bit ultimately just disappears in all the noise. Nevertheless, these kinds of stories are worth telling. I didn’t love it, but it’s a creditable and confident effort.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #43 – More Short Trips edited by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who

More Short Trips

Edited by Stephen Cole

Right, that’s enough novels. Back down the short story mines with you.

There doesn’t seem to be a linking theme this time, although Stephen Cole — clearly amused by the less than imaginative title of More Short Trips, going by the introduction and blurb — suggests that the simple fact of an increased number of stories ought to cover it. Maybe themes are overrated?

He also mentions being the outgoing editor of Doctor Who for BBC Books, which is surprising to me as he still had roughly 30 more books to go at this point. Were they really working that far in advance or did the plans change?

Anyway. Short trips. More of them.

*

Totem

By Tara Samms

Ah yes, Tara Samms, finalist in the 1998 Steve Cole Lookalike Contest. (I’m suddenly wondering how many of this collection’s “new voices” are Cole.)

This one features the Eighth Doctor working for a widow in Portugal, bringing her somewhat out of her shell and inadvertently romancing her. According to Wikipedia he’s making amends for something the Seventh Doctor did, but the story’s so short I didn’t pick up on that. Anyway, it’s an evocative moment.

*

Scientific Adviser

By Ian Atkins

The Second Doctor gets some work on a film set recreating The Invasion. (I very much appreciated the line “Having problems with the invasion, then?”) He’s ostensibly there to ensure a lack of historical accuracy and thus keep UNIT’s secrets safe. However, another plot is percolating.

Ian Atkins does a marvellous job of evoking the odd charm of this Doctor, particularly around children, and it’s an amusingly subversive way into a Doctor Who story — it’s surprising, really, that more stories aren’t told in-universe about known alien invasions, but I suppose that’s the whole reason for UNIT’s actions here. This is an instant hit, although I can feel my brain wrinkling when I try to fit it into continuity.

*

Missing, Part One: Business as Usual

By Gary Russell

Mel’s back home! I’ve got no idea about the logistics of this (wasn’t she last seen leaving Iceworld on Glitz’s spaceship, presumably in the future?) but the character beats seem more important here. Mel has apparently not enjoyed her time with the Doctor, or not enough to consider it worthwhile, which is a somewhat sour take when the author’s Business Unusual (heavily referenced here) was also concerned with keeping Mel from her destiny. It’s not really how she was the last time she was with the Doctor, which frustratingly leaves a gap that we’re not filling. We’ll see what Part Two looks like, but for now this is a quick and rather moody check-in.

*

Moon Graffiti

By Dave Stone

A characteristically funny piece from Dave Stone featuring a moon covered in graffiti and a tiny spaceship full of irritable and sarcastic aliens. This does a pretty good job of world-building for an Earth gone temporarily to hell thanks to some marauding spiders. (The aforementioned graffiti artists.) It has tons of ideas, including an in-universe explanation for Peri’s sometimes questionable wardrobe choices. In his rather pitiable status quo for humanity Stone inadvertently hits on imagery that would be used in The Matrix. (No, not the Doctor Who one.) The Sixth Doctor, needless to say, feasts upon Stone’s verbiage.

*

One Bad Apple

By Simon Forward

Here’s a name we’ll be seeing on novels at some point, and One Bad Apple is an excellent first impression. The Fourth Doctor and Leela are on a jungle world inhabited by large plate-covered animals while a platoon of Cyber-enhanced soldiers skulk about. The story posits an interesting future for those who have been partially converted into Cybermen, and it does clever things with biblical allusions such as knowledge from apples. The characters seem to ring with hidden intelligence. I’m keen to hear more from this writer.

*

64 Carlysle Street

By Gary Russell

Gary Russell gets creative here, telling a story from various viewpoints, all of them working in a country house. The First Doctor, Steven and Dodo have ingratiated themselves in order to investigate and deal with an alien visitor. They’re all well captured and the story ticks along nicely, quietly (for Gary Russell anyway) sequelising an obscure piece of lore.

*

The Eternity Contract

By Steve Lyons

A bit of metaphysical Gothic horror awaits the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa as they fight to escape a house that seemingly serves as a gateway to the afterlife. This is creepy stuff and it plays confidently with the level of the supernatural involved. It also constructs a likeable side-character, Patricia, in whom I invested pretty quickly. I tend to think this sort of thing suits the Fifth Doctor, a character with the sort of good-boy puritanical streak you’d expect to get the vapours when a vampire shows up. (Indeed, see Goth Opera.)

*

The Sow in Rut

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

We’re straight back to the supernatural with this one: Sarah Jane’s stay in a cottage is cut short by what appears to be a spectral force. Perry and Tucker have their cake and eat it with both kinds of explanation catered for in the end. For better or worse, this is something that would fit neatly into an ongoing series of K9 & Company.

*

Special Weapons

By Paul Leonard

This would be a great idea for a TV episode or even a novel: during the Second World War some German troops have got hold of an alien being that can separate a place from its surroundings, cutting off all light and eventually killing everything inside. They have done this to a small English village and they naturally have plans to expand — but the Seventh Doctor, here with Mel, knows this will backfire and kill the planet, to say nothing of the creature.

Apart from the terrifying image of unnatural night, this is a dark (ahem) piece with the requisite Paul Leonard-ish moral toing and froing of supposedly bad characters, here one of the German officers, and a supposedly good one named Oliver. The Doctor and Mel display unusual grit for Season 24 (the adventure happens not long after Paradise Towers) but this kind of gung ho action suits Mel surprisingly well. Excellent stuff.

*

Honest Living

By Jason Loborik

An offbeat sequel to Day Of The Daleks featuring some more time travelling guerrillas with a resulting mess of paradoxes. There’s some pathos in the bookended story of a man who should have died, and there’s an unusually anthropomorphic approach to time taking its revenge against paradoxes. However this one suffers from the problem stories about the mechanics of time travel usually face, in that it’s hard to understand so it needs explaining. I think the general pathos just about carries it.

*

Dead Time

By Andrew Miller

This is a rather excitable and talky bit of fan service with the Eighth Doctor trapped in a mental prison, for a while talking to a future (still McGann) version of himself, then having to battle through all his past lives. It’s one of those stories that needs to constantly explain itself, and although the idea of the Forgotten (beings that “time travel” back through someone’s life) is quite good, we don’t really get any mileage out of it here. Sam features and is not exactly a joy to be around, so at least that’s accurate.

*

Romans Cutaway

By David A. McIntee

I’ve ended up reading this at the perfect time, as I’m currently halfway through a rewatch of The Romans. McIntee — RIP — seizes on the gap in the story between the TARDIS crash landing and the gang all relaxing in the Roman villa; he relates how they found out about its original occupants and he puts Ian and Barbara in a life or death situation. (Their first of several during their stay.) The latter leads to a bit of soul searching from the pair. It’s a nice little pause within a generally restful story, with Ian reacting thoughtfully to his defensive act of violence towards the end.

*

Return of the Spiders

By Gareth Roberts

A romp (what else) from Gareth Roberts featuring (who else) the Fourth Doctor and Romana, here encountering giant spiders in High Wycombe. Roberts is as fond as ever of the banter between these characters and of satirising British society, and although it gets a little too arch for its own good in places it’s still a decently amusing jaunt.

*

Hot Ice

By Christopher Bulis

We’re back with the Fifth Doctor and Peri for the first time since The Ultimate Treasure, so it’s little surprise who wrote this one. It’s a pretty good tale of thieves chasing thieves and then ensnaring the TARDIS crew. I’m not completely convinced by the Fifth Doctor in this — he seems unusually clinical — but various parties do manage to hoodwink him, so it’s pretty close.

*

uPVC

By Paul Farnsworth

This one is in two parts and it has two distinct tones. First we find the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe noticing a strange knock from outside the TARDIS, only to end up facing a double glazing salesman who somehow travels in the vortex. It’s an absurd bit of farce, but when he expounds on his services the Doctor is suddenly interested. We then jump ahead to the Seventh Doctor and Ace for a more melancholy moment concerning the window that was built, and what it means to the Doctor.

It’s a lot to pack into a short story (set entirely within the TARDIS) and it’s inevitably a bit discordant, but it’s an interesting one, drawing a line between these very different Doctors and where they were in their lives.

*

Good Companions

By Peter Anghelides

Ooh. This one features a future Doctor (with ginger hair, I mean can you imagine?!) running into a much older Tegan. Sadly Tegan’s life took a turn after she left the TARDIS and her adventures have now been designated as a mental breakdown; she doesn’t believe in or fully remember them, or the Doctor for that matter. Bumping into “Dr Smith” and his companion Anna leads to an encounter with a strange theatre troupe. Everything that happens is more organised than it first appears, and Anghelides’ future Doctor is a lot more invested than he seems. This is deeply melancholy by the end, but — as much as I wish we’d avoid saying that characters’ lives took nasty turns, and in any case Tegan clearly did find some happiness too — I think this approaches its ideas with sensitivity. I’m guessing it’s the story people talked about most in this collection.

*

Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

At two pages long this is the shortest thing in More Short Trips, pipping Part One to the post. It describes, briefly, a message Mel left floating in space hoping that the Doctor would get it. (Paying off the last thing she said to him on screen.) But he didn’t and now he won’t, and we don’t actually know what the message was. It’s all quite melancholy.

I’m a bit at a loss with these Missing vignettes. Mel was broadly unhappy about her travels apparently (gee, thanks) and wishes she could say something to the Doctor (so perhaps it wasn’t all bad?), but these bits are so brief that they don’t really earn it. As I’ve said before, I don’t object on principle to companions having downbeat lives post-Doctor Who, although I do consider it the most obvious route to go down if we’re seeing them again. I just want it to be something. I was just saying how much effort Peter Anghelides had put into Tegan’s troubled future. The presence of both invites the comparison and it leaves this one wanting. What’s going on with Mel? Why ask if you won’t tell?

*

Femme Fatale

By Paul Magrs

Magrs is in typical madcap mode here with the Eighth Doctor, Sam and Iris orbiting Andy Warhol at the time of his attempted assassination. The Doctor’s feelings about Iris’ plagiarism of his life, multiple time zones with different written perspectives, at least one section that seems to repeat word for word presumably for reasons and a running Avengers parody all occupy the same lift in this jolly, if rather overcooked follow-up to The Scarlet Empress. My poor brain wishes that the most complicated one wasn’t last in the set, but characteristically for Magrs there’s plenty of fun to pick up even if just by osmosis.

*

And that’s More Short Trips. Cole’s theme-but-not-a-theme seems a decent enough excuse for authors simply to have at it, and quite frankly it doesn’t hurt the book at all. There are brilliant ideas in here and only a few swings and misses — with the increased story count, the odds tend to improve. Melancholy seems quite popular among the authors but there’s also a focus on creativity and fun. A breadth of scope is what you want here and the result is worth seeking out.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #29 – Dreams Of Empire by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#14
Dreams Of Empire
By Justin Richards

Justin Richards finished up a very busy 1998 with Dreams Of Empire, his third published novel of that year. It is, impressively, not much like Option Lock (his Eighth Doctor Adventure about secret societies and nuclear war) or The Medusa Effect (Bernice Summerfield visits a haunted spaceship), although coincidentally each of these, like Dreams Of Empire, is a story fixated on its own past. (Armchair psychiatrists, start your engines.) Managing a breadth of tones as he does across these unrelated books, you can really see why BBC Books were keen to keep him around.

Dreams Of Empire is one of his more compelling efforts, although at first glance it doesn’t look all that interesting. Set almost entirely within a medieval-ish prison on an asteroid (well, I did say medieval-ish), it’s effectively a base under siege story — bread and butter to the Troughton era. And if you liked that, wait until the TARDIS arrives very near the site of a recent murder: would you believe the Doctor and co get into some hot water over that?

Fortunately Richards knows this stuff just as well as his target audience, so although he touches on the trope, he doesn’t wallow in it. We don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to prove the Doctor’s innocence — there’s no reason to bother when the situation with the guards and inmates of Santespri (a name so jaunty I was sure I’d heard it before) makes for a better whodunit.

Some time ago, the Haddron Republic very nearly became an Empire. A civil war erupted between three highly placed friends, and the aggressor — Kesar — became a figurehead. He was eventually defeated and sentenced to exile, but was attacked and badly hurt on his way to prison. He now resides on Santespri in an iron mask with a voice synthesiser to cover for his wrecked vocal chords. More interestingly, his remaining loyalists are there with him, some of them working alongside Republic soldiers as guards. (Sort of like Police Officers and PCSOs.) Attacks on the prison and murder plots within its walls could equally be happening to free Kesar or kill him — Kesar, for his part, seems content to remain imprisoned. When bodies start dropping and an unknown space cruiser approaches, no one knows what to expect. Thrillingly, “the three weirdos next to the police box did it” is not a popular theory.

There’s an oddly genial atmosphere to this civil war and its after-effects, particularly after Richards grounds it in friendship in the first chapter. There’s less animosity than you might expect between the different sets of guards, which is surprising given some tragic shared histories. I wonder if Richards is playing on his proximity to The Enemy Of The World, another story about a world-famous rotter that is placed directly after this one, in encouraging us to expect a lot of back-stabbing in the guy’s orbit. (I’ve seen some reviews point out this arguable overlap and then criticise him for it.) Dreams Of Empire takes a somewhat more optimistic view: most people who are hurt by a few dangerous personalities at the top just want to get on with their lives. I was surprised how well the book kept to this thesis statement, even in the face of some outright villainy and a few tragic deaths before the end.

If you want an example of civilised opposition, it doesn’t get much better than chess, which features heavily in Dreams Of Empire. (And on the cover.) I’ve never learned the rules, so chess scenes in stories to me are like high pressure card games in movies — I can tell which general direction it’s going in but you could make up the words and I wouldn’t notice. Fortunately the chess scenes here have a very clear intent, coming in handy plot-wise in ways anybody could follow, and they help contextualise the tensions in the story. I can see why it seemed important to Richards in a story about taking sides without aggression. It’s also a fun backdrop specifically for Troughton’s Doctor, a character of mercurial intelligence who may or may not be a few moves ahead.

For what it’s worth, I think Richards is betting on “may not be”. That’s not to say the Second Doctor here is not brilliant, or not capable of outsmarting the villains — he’s believably able to win people’s trust, just as he can piece together the bad guys’ schemes and his own counter-schemes. However, Richards puts a lot of effort into keeping up the slapstick side of his portrayal, at one point mixing up a flight from suspicion of murder with a comedy bit about a sandwich stuck to his bottom. The Doctor’s scatterbrained silliness doesn’t feel like a put on, and it also doesn’t contradict his brilliance — it’s all just one big amorphous self. He’s able to ping-pong believably from a stray comment by Jamie to a solution for the whole crisis, and make it a joke. (“He grabbed Jamie’s hand in both his and shook it vigorously. ‘You’re a genius.’ ‘I am?’ ‘Oh yes. Well’ — the Doctor considered — ‘one of us is.’”) I think it’s a great read on the Second Doctor, believably impish and yet intelligent all at once.

Richards is similarly apt when it comes to defining Jamie and Victoria. The former is on high alert around a scene that was once a warzone and might become so again; the latter is affected by the ruined dignity of important figures and shares their sense of loss. There’s a bit of tension when Victoria seems attracted to someone and Jamie doesn’t like it — all-too-easy stuff there, but it still seems well enough established in the era they come from. As the book progresses there’s less and less for the companions to do, perhaps betraying a certain authorial preference for the characters made out of whole cloth here. (Probably the most notable interaction is the Doctor unveiling the sonic screwdriver a few stories early, but in a way where Jamie and Victoria don’t see it, leaving continuity in tact. Phew!) The writing is as considered for them as it is for everyone else, highlighting any quiet words or private little glances. The contained location perhaps focuses the characterisation; just as if it were made for TV: you’ll go stir crazy looking at the walls and invest in all the little stuff instead.

Dreams Of Empire doesn’t build a huge head of steam, or not for a while at least, which I think is a side effect of all that geniality. It makes for oddly pleasant company to read, rather than a furious page-turner. But Richards is an old enough hand at this to reveal a very smart plot as he goes along, some of it not until the very end, and although you’re sort of expecting that (come on, it’s chess) it’s still satisfying when he plays the final moves.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #19 – Short Trips edited by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who
Short Trips
Edited by Stephen Cole

Just when you thought Virgin Publishing had been relieved of all their lunch money, BBC Books goes and finds another couple of quid round the back. Short stories with different Doctors seem a perfectly obvious thing for a Doctor Who publishing company to do, but who knows if they would still have done them without the leg up? For what it’s worth, Virgin — who had not long ago concluded the Decalogs with a volume of pure, license-free sci-fi — warrant this oblique little nod from Stephen Cole: “Linking the stories thematically had traditionally proven successful in this area of Doctor Who publishing.” Naming no names…

Short Trips follows that tradition with its own linking theme, albeit not one featured on the front cover: freedom. I like it — it’s nebulous enough that it seems more likely to inspire storytelling than create a nagging obligation for each story to fill.

Cole also mentions in his introduction that the writers were encouraged to write to the length they needed, hence this is the longest BBC Book yet at 340 pages. Will the stories benefit from all that breathing room? We’ll see.

And away we go…

*

Model Train Set
By Jonathan Blum

Jonathan Blum flies solo in this charming vignette about the Doctor’s train set. He uses this for some colourful insight into previous Doctors, such as the thought that the Sixth would rather be a colourful and noisy train that build a train set, and “No matter what else you said about [the Seventh], he made the trains run on time.” As with Vampire Science, this makes some clear statements about the guy with the brown curls, who once again tries to step away from his predecessor’s controlling nature but struggles to get the balance right. The final image of him just trying to save his little wooden people a bit of effort is some quintessential Doctoring.

For continuity enthusiasts, there is no sign of Sam, so this could easily be the Doctor’s next adventure after Longest Day.

*

Old Flames
By Paul Magrs

A couple of very significant firsts happen in this one: the first published Doctor Who story by Paul Magrs, who has continued contributing to this day, and the first appearance of Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor’s scraggly half-cut mirror image. The Fourth Doctor and Sarah find themselves at an 18th century ball attended by wayward time traveller Iris and her slightly befuddled companion, Captain Turner. They are soon all investigating a mysterious big cat on the grounds.

Magrs makes quite an impression here, with derring do and striking imagery such as the Doctor being rescued from drowning, or perhaps more notably Iris’s same-size-on-the-inside TARDIS in the shape of a double decker bus. Magrs’s uninhibited sense of humour twists the prose quite jauntily and he keeps the plot tight. This one’s a keeper.

*

War Crimes
By Simon Bucher-Jones

An evocative sideways step during the finale of The War Games, as one of the many unseen non-human experiments of the War Lords is sent (still augmented) back to its homeworld, where it tries to avoid its new programming. It then encounters the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe, still making their last desperate escape attempt. This one ends rather abruptly, but not before relating the creature’s agonies to the story it’s sitting next to. This is good stuff — I can imagine these ideas splintering off into their own book. I’m not sure if it really satisfies as a short story though.

*

The Last Days
By Evan Pritchard

A First Doctor story about not changing history featuring Ian, Barbara and Susan might seem an unfortunate thing to publish in the same month as The Witch Hunters, but The Last Days finds another angle. Evan Pritchard makes this Ian’s (rather than Susan’s) dilemma, and offers a chilling new perspective on letting history take its course: at the siege of Masada, when the Jewish rebels are about to be captured by Romans, Barbara explains that their mass suicide is the best course of action for them in the here and now. Incredibly it gets darker from there, with Ian forced to perform a pivotal role in their last defiance, then make a symbolic statement that throws his struggle almost into mockery.

This is The Romans as seen through a very different lens. The Doctor and Ian are figuratively and literally opposed, so much so that it’s hard to imagine how Ian ever had a spring in his step after this. Barbara believably uses her knowledge of Roman slavery to back up her views, but while I was reading it I wrongly assumed she meant her literal experience in The Romans — before remembering that Susan is still here, so that hasn’t happened yet. (The Last Days makes for a very odd prequel to that adventure, considering their misery here and their later high spirits.)

Possible continuity wobble aside, it’s powerful stuff, and proof that you can revisit the same sort of story and get a different result. If only that were true of history.

*

Stop The Pigeon
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

As you can probably guess from the byline, the Seventh Doctor and Ace feature in this one. It’s a madcap story about a bogus anti-ageing process featuring time anomalies and a talking pigeon. There are plenty of fun moments, such as an aggrieved Ace threatening to bend the Doctor’s spoons, and the aforementioned pigeon puffing a joint. (!) The plot just barely hangs together, and the authors throw in fan favourite ideas in a way that doesn’t feel entirely justified. I’m mainly looking at the Master here, chronologically in his first outing since Survival; as well as the writing being something of a poor relation (the Doctor’s pleas not to give in to his animal self simply recall “If we fight like animals, we die like animals”, only windier), it’s not even the first person-into-animal transformation in this collection (thanks to Old Flames) which lessens his impact. It’s good zany fun, if a little misconceived.

*

Freedom
By Steve Lyons

Perhaps the most literal use of the “freedom” theme comes from the writer who suggested it to Stephen Cole. The Third Doctor and Jo fall into one of the (still captive) Master’s traps, and the Brigadier is forced to ask their nemesis for help in retrieving them. The Master’s freedom is at stake, as is the Doctor’s. (For good measure the Master has also set up a company called Freedom. What was that theme again?)

It was an odd choice to sequence two Master stories right next to each other. This one inevitably echoes The Face Of The Enemy, almost word for word in the Brigadier’s attempted interrogation scene; there is also a sequence at the end that somewhat retreads the Third Doctor’s segment from The Eight Doctors, with him once again willing to hang everyone else out to dry if it gets him out of exile. I can understand this take on the character, indeed we’ve seen it on screen, but it sticks in my craw when it’s drummed up within the tight confines of a short story. It just seems a bit flippant that way. Elsewhere, the Doctor’s “future echoes” are a nifty touch, and the scenes of Jo contemplating her eternal captivity stick out in an otherwise rather familiar tale.

*

Glass
By Tara Samms

Ah, Tara Samms. Much like Michael Collier, she has mysteriously never been seen in the same room as Stephen Cole. Authorities remain baffled.

Glass is from the perspective of a regular person who suddenly finds a disembodied face staring at her through glass surfaces. The Fourth Doctor and Romana II arrive to take care of it — a remnant of Shada — and then they’re off again, leaving our poor narrator a traumatised wreck. It’s the sort of perspective you can easily believe, especially with a TARDIS team this confident and (to most humans) this unrelatable. I’m not sure it’s a perspective you’d really want to see very often, as it suggests a rather unhappy world on the periphery of Doctor Who. As a one-off though it’s rather neat, not unlike a Big Finish one-parter.

*

Mondas Passing
By Paul Grice

Um, so apparently this is Stephen Cole as well? I’m beginning to wonder if he’s ever paid for a subscription service in his life. This is definitely a man experienced in free trials.

This is another downbeat one, but it’s interesting, looking in on Ben and Polly as they reunite briefly on New Year’s Eve, 1986. Reminiscing about their adventures (one of which must have just happened over at the North Pole), they all but acknowledge a shared attraction that never got off the ground. They’re both with someone now and, as you might expect, neither of them has an outlet to discuss their bizarre adventures. This is probably true of most companions after they leave, but it seems especially sad here, with the added tacit admission that this will be their last reunion.

It’s a worthwhile little bite; short and sour. Do we think Stephen Cole was feeling okay when he worked on this book?

*

There Are Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden
By Sam Lester

As far as I can tell Sam Lester is a real person and not another variant of Stephen Cole. Just FYI. But it’s hard to be sure, isn’t it? I look in the mirror now and wonder if I’m secretly Stephen Cole.

This is a short, evocative piece with the First Doctor and Dodo visiting a smelly world of flowers — and surprisingly, fairies. Dodo’s preconceptions are somewhat challenged, while the Doctor demonstrates an appreciation for beauty that goes beyond the obvious. It’s more expressionistic than anything else.

*

Mother’s Little Helper
By Matthew Jones

I’m always game for more writing from Matthew Jones, so this was a nice surprise. “Nice” is of course relative, as Jones seems drawn to explorations of emotional and physical violence, and this story continues that trend. A young girl named Nanci crosses paths with a boy who seems able to take away people’s pain, as well as a severe woman controlling him. The Second Doctor is in pursuit. (No companion is mentioned so I dunno when this is set.) Nanci is inexorably drawn to help him.

It’s one of those stories with interesting ideas but not enough time to delve into them. It’s good and it works, but it feels a bit like a summary of a story.

*

The Parliament Of Rats
By Daniel O’Mahony

A strange bit of swashbuckling from the author of the divisive Falls The Shadow, this shares with that novel some wide and interesting ideas that speak to the Doctor and Gallifrey, along with a certain bewildering dreamlike execution. I don’t entirely recognise the angrily dour Fifth Doctor in this, although Nyssa gives him a bit of analysis to show that a lot of thought has gone into it. It could probably benefit from a second read. Right now, I’d definitely call it interesting, but it’s perhaps not my cup of tea.

*

Rights
By Paul Grice

Okay, break’s over, it’s Stephen Cole time again.

We return to the Fourth Doctor and Sarah in a rather heated situation involving a non-bipedal species faced with environmental disaster. (Inevitable shades of Venusian Lullaby there.) The main avenue of research against this seems, for some reason, to require foetus harvesting, which understandably is causing disagreements. It’s a contentious story idea, perhaps with its roots in stem cell research, and the way it’s handled leaves a bit to be desired, at times reaching into black comedy. There is some good reflection here on the Doctor’s limits when interfering in other cultures, and Sarah gets to think like a journalist and weigh up the good and bad of this situation even beyond the foetus science. But no two ways about it, this is an odd duck.

*

Wish You Were Here
By Guy Clapperton

The Sixth Doctor! And it seems not a moment too soon…

This one would slot neatly into Colin’s era. (There’s no companion so if you had to place it, it’s probably some time after Trial?) Visiting a holiday resort run by robots, where naturally things have gone awry, the Doctor encounters a young female operative sent from the company. They have very different ways of investigating.

The reason things are going wrong is a neat one, very pleasingly childlike in its logic. The ending works nicely around the Doctor’s compassion for all forms of life, even artificial ones, and the very ending brings us back to the kind of black comedy that a malfunctioning holiday resort naturally suggests. It’s a fun, clever story that makes good use of this particular Doctor.

The only niggle for me is the continuing insistence on highlighting the Sixth Doctor’s waistline. His voice breaks through very believably, which is what matters, but there’s something unfortunate about having to preface his adventures with “Make way for fatty!”

*

Ace Of Hearts
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Putting the “short” into “short story” (5 pages), Perry and Tucker return for a sweet vignette: the Seventh Doctor goes to a party attended by three generations of Dudmans, ostensibly so he can take a moment to apologise to baby Ace for his later manipulations. I don’t know whether this sort of time transgression is more or less likely given it’s this particular Doctor, but it juxtaposes nicely against his cheery pratfalls at the party. There’s not much to say about it other than it’s a little drive-by poignancy, very rewarding for fans of this era. (So, cool people who know where it’s at.)

*

The People’s Temple
By Paul Leonard

We end on a high note with the Eighth Doctor and Sam — so technically with a Past Doctor Adventure, if you like. Sam wants to see the early days of Stonehenge and the Doctor obliges, landing them in the middle of a very heated power struggle between the slightly mad leader Coyn and the tribe, run by his best friend, enslaved to his purpose. In typical Paul Leonard style the good and the bad refuse to sit still; Sam’s urge to help the repressed tribe ends up backfiring and Coyn might have some humanity in him after all. It’s long enough to warrant a prologue and an epilogue, and it’s a very satisfying piece to go out on.

*

15 stories is good value for money (or was, pre-eBay), and the majority of these are hits. Old Flames is essential reading; The Last Days and Wish You Were Here really jumped out at me; Glass and Mondas Passing provide unusual perspectives; Perry and Tucker display real range; you get a rare sighting of Matthew Jones; Paul Leonard rarely misses. The standard is quite high. Even Stephen Cole’s various aliases manage a distinct variety of storytelling.

As for the theme, it went how I’d hoped: unobtrusively, so you might never know there was a theme at all. It’s a good approach, encouraging writers to really come up with their own ideas. I’m curious what the other volumes will end up going with.

All in all, I remain more of a fan of novels than short stories, but I think we’re better off having Decalogs and Short Trips in the mix as well. I’m glad BBC Books had the same idea.

7/10