Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #12 – The Pit by Neil Penswick

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#12
The Pit
By Neil Penswick

Ah, The Pit.  Neil Penswick's novel is not what you'd call "popular".  (In Doctor Who-ey, New Adventurey terms, that is.  Obviously you're not likely to find it in Waterstones.)  It crops up in a lot of fans' Worst Ever lists, often claiming the top (or rather, bottom) spot.  I doubt it's anybody's favourite book, with the possible exception of Neil Penswick.  I felt nothing other than apprehension about reading it.

And before we crack on, I'll say that there were times, during my Homeric stroll through its 276 pages, when The Pit seemed unfairly maligned.  There are some decent ideas in it.  The prose can be harmlessly readable.  It is a largely inoffensive work.

But, alas.  Much as I'd like to go against the tide and write The Proverbial Good Review For The Pit, I can't.  Under any form of critical scrutiny, The Pit most definitely sucks.

First, let's discuss those ideas.  A planetary system is about to go missing, and no one knows why.  Bernice asks the Doctor if they can go to one of the planets and find out.  Meanwhile, a team of android assassins land on the same (doomed) planet, tasked with retrieving a deadly missile.  This is held by a couple of sinister shape-changers, and their band of (psychic) natives.  A man and his wife are studying the planet, unbeknownst to all.  Meanwhile on the planet Nicaea, capital of the doomed system, chaos is erupting – first a series of gruesome murders, then all-out civil war.  A policeman investigates.  Oh, and the Doctor has disappeared, trapped in another universe (and later Earth in different time-zones), in the company of William Blake.  Yes, that William Blake.  And all of the above has something to do with an ancient enemy of the Time Lords.

When you stack it up, The Pit seems to have enough plot for several books.  That's not a compliment: the story is spread too thin, endlessly hopping between situations that have no apparent link.  It's very difficult to engage when you can't figure out which strand is the "main" one, especially as barely anything happens in any of them.  The androids search for the shape-changers.  Bernice travels with an android, hoping he won't kill her.  The Doctor and Blake quest about from place to place.  The scientist man is killed by some sort of spreading evil; his wife panics.  A depressed policeman investigates the murders.  Civil war is civil-warlike.  It plods on and on and on with no end in sight.  You could cut half of it.

In the midst of such a sprawling plot, your only hope is to cling to the characters.  Good luck with that: Penswick's cast are a dull bunch, repetitious and endlessly introspective.  (And it's worth saying: unimaginative.  There are assassins, so they're called Killers.  There are monsters, so they're Monsters.  Hunters = Hunters, Shape-Changers = Shape-Changers.  And the law-enforcers on Nicaea?  The Justice Police.)

Still, it's pretty obvious that The Pit is going for a theme of spiritual debate and its characters are the instruments, what with William Blake and his Bible references, and the book's other denizens pondering their place in the universe and reminiscing about their past, and then pondering some more and reminiscing again, no matter who they are or who they're with or whether it's relevant.  Even if you can ignore the sheer repetition – and oh boy, is it annoying – none of it is interesting.  Everyone in this is a half-baked philosopher.

And little of it rings true.  If you're going to write androids, why make them as openly spiritual as everybody else?  (You could give them a neat, androids-only spin on religion, like in Red Dwarf, but no, they worship the same "Prime Mover" and fear the same "Form Manipulator" as everyone else on Nicaea.  It also couldn't hurt to show them successfully assassinating anybody.  They are terrible at their job.)  If you're going to write a cop investigating a murder spree, and the best you can come up with is that he's so obsessed with the horrifying aspects of the case that his wife leaves him, is it even worth sharing his thoughts?  We hear reams and reams of what these guys are thinking, and so much of it is either mind-bogglingly banal or just weirdly obvious.

“She looked down at the body and felt sadness.”

“Blake felt sad for the Doctor.”
“The major left the room, punching the wall.  He was angry.”
“Blake was not averse to entering such places, but could think of a number of things he'd prefer to do at this time.”

You could easily fill a whole review just with quotes – it’s the sort of book that will hang itself with enough rope.  To save time, here's the single most pointlessly inane bit I could find.  Steel yourself:

“The travellers had been driving for six hours, and as the meter in the cab had been showing a steady sixty miles an hour, they must have covered over three hundred and fifty miles.”

Urrrrnnnggggggh.

So many characters state the obvious and ask the same questions and just go round in monotonous circles.  But in fairness, much of that concerns the side characters.  The linchpin of a Doctor Who New Adventure is its main characters... who are sadly in much the same state.  Near the beginning, Bernice starts a conversation about how movies only have one ending:

"'You know, Doctor, I used to hate watching twentieth century films and seeing the words "The End". ... What happens to the people after the film's finished? Those films were so...'
'Finite?'
'Yeah. Things can't be changed. I remember that I'd watch The Great Escape to see if other people would escape. I always got upset when Donald Pleasance was shot at the end. Why couldn't they do a version where he survives?'
'Because there's no justice. In real life good people die as well. But never give up hope.'"

Huh?  This is presumably here to foreshadow the ending – spoiler alert, those planets are toast – but it does it oh-so-clumsily.  Why is Bernice confused?  Why does she seem to think it's only films that work like that – you know, with narrative structure?  Hasn't she ever read a book?  The whole thing seems to come out of nowhere.  And it's followed by this gem:

"'Doctor, are you never afraid of the monsters?'
'What monsters?' he replied, pulling out a felt hat from his jacket pocket.
'The monsters you meet on your travels: Cybermen, Daleks, you know.'
'They aren't monsters. They're alien races with their own agendas, plots and dreams.' His voice slowed. 'But there are monsters out there, very real monsters. Monsters which shadow us; that are part of our imagination.'"

Now, I'm aware that Paul Cornell's fellow New Adventures writers were unused to Bernice Summerfield, but come on.  In three books, she has never been the sort of person to offer up childish misunderstandings or infantile My First Doctor Who Companion questions.  Thinking charitably, perhaps childishness is a theme: later, when she's separated from the Doctor and stuck with an android, she reminisces (over and over) about her childhood.  But there's no apparent reason for that in the text.  It just seems like Penswick hasn't got a clue what she sounds like (apart from cursory, overwritten references to sarcasm) and shruggingly opted for "doe-eyed".  Her subplot with Spike-the-malfunctioning-android consists entirely of travel and (you guessed it) lame philosophical pondering.  You could easily cut her from the book, if it wasn't for her original suggestion setting the plot in motion.

And what of the Doctor?  All that "monsters of the imagination" stuff seems to come a little too easily to him, but that's him all over in The Pit: the famously mysterious Seventh Doctor simply cannot shut up about his mysteries and secrets.  He spends much of the book with no clear idea what's going on, and passes the time mystifying William Blake with tales of Gallifrey, different dimensions and sonic screwdrivers.  He's strangely redundant in the end, not least because he cannot act against history – a concept the book never comes close to dealing with – but also because all the major players work independently of him.

I've no idea what we're supposed to get out of William Blake, incidentally; no doubt Penswick finds him interesting, but he fails to translate that to the character who asks a lot of dull questions and is permanently confused and never does anything of use whatsoever.  You could cut him and just have the Doctor and Bernice together, considering she's in a fair portion of the book anyway.  But alas, we're right back to the Kadiatu dilemma: multiple authors submitted a possible companion, and Neil Penswick seemingly chose William Blake, which means A) Bernice gets short shrift again because she was added at a late stage, and B) the Doctor is stuck with William bloody Blake.  I mean, ye gods, how the hell was that ever going to work?

Now, getting back to the man in the question mark pullover, there was at least one moment of Doctorliness that worked.  It's probably my favourite part of the novel.  I feel honour-bound to reproduce it.  Don't blink:

"The stranger pulled out a clothes brush and dusted his clothes. 'Nothing a needle and thread couldn't fix.' He pulled out a needle and piece of cotton from another pocket and started to sew his jacket."

Fun, huh?  For balance, despite showing that momentary grasp of the oddity that is the Doctor (who is otherwise bumbling around, useless and bewildered), Penswick later delivers arguably the most jarring summation I've encountered in this entire range.  Behold, Bernice describes her friend:

"The funny man who had found her on a distant planet and had treated her as a human being.  He hadn't tried to get her drunk or rape her."

Well thank goodness for that, eh?

To the vague extent that Penswick musters an authorial voice – and I am sorely nostalgic for the likes of Roberts, Aaronovitch, Cornell, even Gatiss – it’s dictated by vague and obscure thoughtfulness, unambitiously short sentences (which have a knack of draining your excitement), clumsy she-felt-sad dictation and weird, technical detachment.  He likes to describe people in metres.  Who's narrating this?  The Terminator?

Oy.  There is clearly a lot to dislike, and maybe even hate about The Pit.  But I said it showed signs of being unfairly maligned, so...?  Well, it might be sprawling and pointless, but it's easy to follow from page-to-page.  I was able to dip in and out of its simple images and ideas harmlessly enough, although the eye-rolls mounted up towards the end.  There's a feeling that Penswick has got a theme that really interests him – it’s just any meaningful conclusion that eludes him.  The civil war stuff on Nicaea is sort of interesting, though it's far from the best example of urban futurism the range has produced (see Warhead, Transit); it's viewed through such dull characters and bland, peripheral observations that I didn't feel any of it.  (And come to think of it, you could cut almost all of that as the planet will go up in smoke by page 276 anyway, murders and civil war be damned.)  There are some fleeting moments of creativity: the psi-operatives, particularly the way they have to distract themselves all the time, are interesting.  Overall, if it weren't for numerous examples of unequivocally bad writing, this would be a bland, overstuffed, yet passable effort.

It's not the first time I've had to seriously rummage around for something nice to say.  Ultimately, I can't find anything that counter-balances the sprawling plot, uninsightful insights, random stupidities, considerable bloat and overall obscurity of what The Pit is trying to achieve.  I'm not certain it's the worst New Adventure I've read, and that's about as close as it's getting to a positive appraisal.

Oh, and there's no pit in it.

3/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #11 – The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#11
The Highest Science
By Gareth Roberts

There was no other Doctor Who alternative at the time, but it's still somehow surprising that Gareth Roberts made his authorial début with the New Adventures.  He's a pretty obvious fan of Season 17-era Who, or The Funny Douglas Adamsy Stuff, and would later emulate it in three jolly and well-received Tom Baker books.  His television scripts are (unsurprisingly) among the funniest: neatly and unthreateningly tailored to the voices of their respective showrunners, they're good, and they rarely frighten the horses.  I don't mean to damn him with faint praise – I respect and enjoy much of his writing.  (Even Closing Time.)  But he's not someone you'd expect to help put the "new" in The New Adventures.

Sure enough, that's not what The Highest Science is all about.  This isn't Season 17, but it's still a romp – the rompiest (ahem) New Adventure so far, especially coming right after Transit.  Your mileage may vary.  As for me, well...

For the first time since Time's Crucible (and for very different reasons), I re-read the early chapters before going further.  They don't feature the Doctor or Bernice – a point of contention I'll bet, having to wait 32 pages for anything TARDIS-shaped.  They focus on various groups of people and warlike, tortoise-ish Chelonians as they become inveigled in the plot, taking in a few other perspectives along the way.  These include a memorably misanthropic commuter: "The train had left Chorleywood station over ten minutes ago. So where is it now, screamed the vengeful demon that lurked behind Mr Peploe's respectable exterior."

There's a certain detached humour to the narrative voice, shown off nicely in this sinfully grim anecdote about a human-Chelonian conflict (that ended in the latter suddenly vanishing): "Several generations later, the Priest King, Jobez's great-great grandson, stood at the head of a mighty army assembled to confront another alien force that had arrived in the Wadii deserts. The people were confident of another miracle and waited for the return of the blue lights spoken of in their histories. Nothing happened, and the Chelonian assault force extinguished all parasites on the planet and settled down to some determined grazing."

It's inevitably tempting to draw comparisons with Douglas Adams, Roberts himself having done that many times since.  (Shaaaadaaaa!)  Maybe that's lazy, but then the phrase "These events should have been totally unconnected" puts me in mind of Dirk Gently's theory of random interconnectedness, or even the Infinite Improbability Drive.  There's a whiff of the lost planet Magrathea about Sakkrat, the ancient planet of untold power.  Perhaps this is all coincidental (and how apt), but the Adams-ian randomness and lightly acerbic narration just made it all the more fun to read.  That's why I re-read the intro – I was having a good time and just wanted to appreciate it.  I still read it all in a day.

The grouchy characters and, even better, the obvious difference between the Chelonians and anyone-that-isn't-a-Chelonian provided a fun contrast that kept me engaged.  Roberts celebrates his maniacal tortoises at every turn, mixing Sontaran superiority with sheer Vogon stubbornness.  And there's a little light and shade to them in spite of their warmongering: they're proud of their babies, known for their prowess at flower-arranging.  I found them delightful.  I know they crop up a few more times among the Virgin novels.  I've heard Big Finish's The Well Mannered War, and loved that.  I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for more.

As for the human characters, they're a little less endearing.  We have the 100% nefarious bad guy, Sheldakhur, and his unwilling cohorts, including a brilliant but suicidal (Marvin-esque?) monster, all tasked with finding Sakkrat; a trio of dim-wits who were innocently heading for a rock concert when the "Fortean flicker" (read: time-storm) deposited them here; and a gaggle of commuters in the same situation, who almost entirely avoid the narrative.  The Chelonians try to annihilate all of the above.  For much of the book, not a lot else happens.  You can thank Roberts's bouncy writing style for carrying it off so well, since the plot, which unfolds deliciously in the last 30-odd pages, stays resolutely in "Not Telling" mode until the home stretch.  (Perhaps, like the city of Sakkrat, it is trapped in a slow-time envelope.)

So, having ticked off plot and writing style (that's "so-so" and “yay!"”, respectively), all that's left are the main characters.  We would later find out how good he was at writing the Fourth Doctor, but Roberts also has a great handle on the Seventh.  This story is not one of his grand manipulations, but wrong-footing his enemies still comes naturally; he's essentially winging it, figuring things out not too far in advance of Bernice (or us) and constantly fibbing to stay ahead, which lends him a pleasantly vulnerable aspect.  He's taken by surprise once or twice.  Roberts accentuates the smallness and oddity of him, which can get lost in the Time's Champion-y bluster that was the focus of Season 26, and several New Adventures since.  His spoons re-appear, and there's a lovely moment where he locates a television, gets it to play something melodramatic and naff, laughs at it, then keeps watching anyway.  There's a relaxed quality to him when he's with Bernice; he's lost the burden of laying tracks in front of his companion.  He can potter about and just be quaintly fascinated.  It suits him.

It's a pity that, like Ben Aaronovitch, Roberts feels the need to get Bernice out of the way for much of the novel.  He needn't have bothered.  He writes her very well, easily recapturing that sarcastic but-not-obnoxious wit imbued by Paul Cornell.  The already-delightful prose brightens up further when she's around. "But then, she reflected, that's always the way with boring people.  Having never experienced any other reaction, they assume that being yawned at, insulted and walked away from is the norm for human social interaction."  Her archaeological knowledge, not to mention her unexplosive temperament, seem to refresh the Doctor.  "'War, disease or climactic change could account for such a throwback. Although the additional buildings would suggest population growth rather than loss, which argues against those possibilities.' The Doctor stared at her silently for a few seconds. 'Bernice, you're a pleasure to know,' he said finally."  The Highest Science is little more than a taster of the-Doctor-and-Bernice, but I know their days without Ace are numbered, so I did my best to enjoy it.  I got considerably more out of her here than in Transit.

As for why Bernice is out of action, the random (okay, "Fortean") appearance of an addictive and memory-erasing soft-drink-dispenser seems like a desperate contrivance even if you are referencing Infinite Improbability, which Roberts might not be.  She adds to the Doctor's character just by being with him, which is just what I wanted, but there's virtually nothing she can do for the three rock fans she's stuck with, who are bound to fall out with one another and then do.  Who’d miss them?  (You might expect Roberts to insert his own companion here, as Aaronovitch did, but if he did then I didn't notice.  I'd almost rather he had, as it might explain why she has comparatively little to do.)

There is no great substance to The Highest Science.  While there is a solid and satisfying answer to the plot's questions, the interim is mostly just a lot of witty waiting – not least for Bernice to get her act together.  Roberts nonetheless fills his story with colour, and has a reasonably exciting Indiana Jones-ish climax to cap it off.  It's so downright charmingly fun that there's an argument to be made that it doesn't really belong in the New Adventures.  Roberts himself has admitted that at the time of writing "nobody – least of all me – knew quite what the books were supposed to be", and that his style "stuck out like a sore thumb."  Younger readers might even like it.  But not every New Adventure has to be Love And War or Transit.  It's okay, once in a while, to sit comfortably within the envelope and tell a fun story.  And I'll bet it isn't half as easy as it looks.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #10 – Transit by Ben Aaronovitch

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#10
Transit
By Ben Aaronovitch

Before reading any New Adventures, I tried to get a broad idea of which ones were well-liked and which weren't.  (That was when I was going to cherry-pick them.  Those were the days!)  Of course certain books were red flagged.  More-or-less everybody loves Love And War, Set Piece, The Also People.  Nobody much likes Timewyrm: Genesys or The Pit.  And then there's Transit.  Strong feelings on both sides, this one.

Transit is a bloody weird book.  It has plenty of stuff that's really good and plenty of... other stuff.  Is it good?  Er, what is it might be the more apt question.

Ben Aaronovitch's book concerns a futuristic parody of the London Underground: it's much bigger and nastier.  Perhaps inevitably it feels a little like Andrew Cartmel's worst-case-scenario in Warhead, though its denizens seem less upset about the ever-present grime.  Downbeat futurism has been all the rage since Alien (at least!), and Transit's mucky existence chimes with similar visions like Blade Runner and, in its satirical black humour, Red Dwarf.  There are some deliciously funny ideas stuffed into the background, such as a dedicated "Bad News Show" (with a fake holographic host), politician-fluffing Rent-A-Crowds and sleazy, post-wartime Ice Warrior cosplay.  It's almost a full-blown comedy at times, particularly as we follow the everyday miseries of the transit crew, with weirdo names like Credit Card, Lambada, Dogface, Blondie and their boss, Ming The Merciless.  The gradual build-up to a disaster on the line, as a new intergalactic tunnel to Acturus (sic) turns the President and assorted followers into blue smears, makes for a palpably exciting first act even with the Doctor nowhere in sight.

Then the Doctor turns up and, I'll confess, it's here I started to lose my way.  The novel divides into three(ish) threads: the Doctor and a new friend, Kadiatu, investigating the train disaster; Ming's crew doing much the same, dealing with the mutated horrors that are the result; and Benny, possessed by something-or-other, trying to start some sort of revolution with a couple of prostitutes.  The plots never mesh much, and when they do I tend to forget who's met whom.

Aaronovitch's prose is, if nothing else, deliberate.  There are enough unusual words to warrant a glossary at the back, and the dank, futuristic setting makes little concession for the slow-thinker.  You have a lot to get your head around, including technical processes, violent altercations and floridly dismal living conditions.  There are a lot of characters with weird names (see above) and everybody seems to be determined to do something.  I was never in any doubt that Aaronovitch knew what, and why things were happening.  Unfortunately I did not.

As the Doctor and Kadiatu globetrot, and Benny hurls bombs and leads her unwitting co-conspirators somewhere, and the horribly malformed "cake-monsters" of the transit system struggle against Ming and co., my eyes often rolled over prose only tenuously following it.  There was a constant feeling of "Any time you want to let me in on the joke, Ben."  Even the Doctor seems perplexed, as the intelligence behind whatever-is-going-on seems to regard him barely at all.  That isn't normally how he rolls.

Perhaps the most disconcerting element, from which a lot of the confusion spreads, is the-Doctor-and-Bernice, or the lack thereof.  You've only just met the new companion, you're dying to see her in action, and then she's kept apart from the Doctor as much as possible.  Huh?

It probably wasn't Aaronovitch's idea to follow Bernice's introductory story with one that totally side-lines her – more on this in the next paragraph – and to his credit, he makes considerable use of Love And War, referencing scenes and character habits with seasoned familiarity.  Nonetheless, I can't imagine anybody finishing Love And War and not wanting to see how the Doctor and Bernice get on, and that's the opposite of what you get here.  It makes no sense to spend an entire book post-Ace – the next one in particular – ignoring her replacement.

The reason for all of the above is simple: numerous authors (including Ben Aaronovitch) had the chance to come up with The New Companion, and several novels were submitted with them in.  Which seems like a really fun idea, until some bright spark decides that the winner will be the first one out of the gate.  This couldn't exactly be helped, since Paul Cornell helpfully wrote Ace's departure into the story that introduced Bernice Summerfield, but this inevitably meant several books had to hastily crowbar in Cornell's character whilst still making a redundant fuss about their own Design-A-Companion.  If Virgin were really serious about giving each one a chance, Bernice probably shouldn't have gone first.  If they'd already made up their minds before the books were even published, well, was there really much point in commissioning full novels for each character?

Hey ho: Cornell had Bernice, Ben Aaronovitch has Kadiatu.  Given the choice, I'd still pick Bernice.  Kadiatu isn't uninteresting per se; genetically modified and descended from the Lethbridge-Stewarts, there's definitely something fannishly exciting about her, including an ending that prefigures the otherwise (thankfully) irrelevant The Doctor's Daughter.  Despite her relatively broad trappings, she's a person of reasonable depth.  So much so that the Doctor can't help putting her though the motions to follow in Ace's foot-steps.  (Being super strong, she seems an obvious candidate after Miss Nitro-9.)  He's disappointed when she doesn't, and then he reluctantly returns to Miss Third Wheel.

What with The Rewriting Of Doom, the Doctor meets Kadiatu and seemingly forgets Benny exists.  She could be a blue smear on a wall for all he cares, until about halfway through when he bumps into her trying to kill him (due to mind control, which explains her acting like somebody else, because ugh, last minute rewrite!).  Since this whole mess leaves the Doctor looking like a capricious jerk, maybe there ought to have been a disclaimer at the start?

Still, benefit of the doubt: I could understand some disassociation on the Doctor's part, as he has just lost his closest friend.  You might as well pretend that's what's going on, actually: he even gets drunk at one point.  Elsewhere Ace's shadow looms, or at least peeks over the book.  Two Nitro-9 cans sit in an otherwise empty fridge in the Doctor's house/base of operations from Warhead.  (Incidentally, cool continuity.)  In the mental/technological realm that houses the finale (incidentally, oh dear; not my sort of thing, this), the Doctor is protected by a whole bunch of leather-jacket-wearing explosive experts.  The plural is an explosion of Aces.  She's clearly on his mind, as she should be.  By necessity, Benny isn't: even the epilogue skims over how any of this has affected her (she has killed dozens of people!), preferring to give Kadiatu her sequel-ready grace note.  The only truly Benny-centric plot strand is her attempt to give the Doctor a book, but I confess, I missed where that came to fruition, probably in the last-100-pages dash that only speeds up when I want it over with.

My favourite thing about Transit, besides all the squalid and funny background details, has to be the prologue.  A two-page cutaway that mirrors the story's theme of emergent life, and somewhat literally (towards the end) the life of Kadiatu, it's a perfect vignette, a short story.  That kind of elegance is rarely matched later on, and despite feeling interested in the story's theme – a transit system coming to life – I was too confused by its minutiae to really invest in it.  Ideas like the "cake-monsters", suffering hideous and random deformities but feeling quite chipper about their lot, don't seem to contribute in the end.  A computer system achieving sentience – a fun parallel – is practically thrown away in the aftermath.  And as for the mental realm where the fate of Transit is finally decided, I was so confusticated trying to tally it with the preceding story that any dramatic climax went off like a squib in a pond.  Again I find it difficult not to imagine Aaronovitch in front of his word processor, comprehending every word of this and seeing the connections like a rail map.  I envy him; I was lost.

It's not as incomprehensible as Time's Crucible.  For the most part it's simply a case of characters travelling and plotting and not letting the reader in on it.  Occasionally even they seem to be winging it.  But Aaronovitch's world is still rich enough to enjoy, with much the same lived-in quality that I admired in Warhead.  There's a stark and memorable foulness here, because of course, this is the New Adventure that pushed the boat out.  Sex and swearwords don't make me blush (in print, anyway), but I was still surprised how readily I accepted them here.  It somehow didn't feel like a major progression from what we've already had.  You'll find the odd "bitch" and "bastard" among the Timewyrms, and obviously in Warhead, while heated words (and heated other things) are exchanged in Love And War.  All in all, it suited the world of Transit, where meals are "made out of pet food" and "the one thing that was clear was that you never got out."  There are, quite frankly, more important things to worry about than sex and swearing, though I can understand a sense of controversy about what was (to the world at large) a book for kids.  The New Adventures were obviously moving away from that with a vengeance; any pre-conceived notions would go in time.

Transit is... interesting.  Though muddled, it's far from unreadable.  It's often colourful and hey, memorably unpleasant.  There is probably some rich food for thought concerning emergent life and the difference between us and it, but in my heart, not to mention my distant-but-undeniable headache, I don't feel like Transit really chewed on any of it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #9 – Love And War by Paul Cornell

Working title:

Attack Of The Furry Tentacle Scrotums

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#9
Love And War
By Paul Cornell

For me, this one's a big deal.  (Also for other fans; it's pretty popular.)  I only started reading the New Adventures because I'd heard Big Finish's Love And War adaptation.  It had a certain feel that wasn't quite like the McCoy era I knew.  It was emotional, like some of those Season 26 stories, but it also did things that the TV series must (or in any case did) shy away from.

The Doctor hurts his companion.  Not like in Ghost Light, where he dabbles in her neuroses ostensibly for her own good, or The Curse Of Fenric, where he turns her into a chess piece and once again exposes her to her demons.  She forgave him then.  In Love And War, Ace is collateral damage in the Doctor's plan.  She doesn't take the fall, but someone close to her does.  This time it's too much.  I had to read the book, delve into the stories that led to this.  And of course, see what happens next.

Reading Love And War has been a mixed blessing because of that.  Bluntly, I know how the story goes, Big Finish having reproduced it in apparently lavish detail.  (Seriously, how did they cram all that into a couple of hours?)  But I'm not here to talk about Big Finish.

Paul Cornell's novel is, well.  It's quite something.  I think I've read enough of these to say, with some confidence, he is one of my favourite New Adventurers.  He "gets" the Doctor and Ace in a way that others, aside from maybe Andrew Cartmel, do not.  There's an ease to their relationship.  Not much needs to be said.  And when things are difficult between them – which they often are in Love And War – it is more convincingly articulated than in, say, Nightshade.  He'll struggle to tell Ace she should attend a friend's funeral, for instance: "He'd told her that there was a sad event she ought to attend. Of course, he hadn't told her what it was, but that was because he had real trouble with spiky feelings sometimes".

He struggles to tell her a lot of things here.  Much of the novel sees him all but wincing with dread at the fork in the road he's all but pushing Ace towards.  He tries to spare her, shoving her away from the man she loves by bluntly assuring her he'll hurt her in the end (which is true: he'll die, or worse), or offering an example that really says more about him.

“‘You mean I have to decide between you?’
‘Yes.’  The Doctor wasn't looking at her.  ‘My granddaughter did, a long time ago. She'd fallen in love.  With an Earthman.  Like marrying a mayfly ... You think you've fallen love.  One day you'll wake up and he'll be gone.’”

This is true, of course – he knows! – but he could just as easily be talking about himself, and the pain of loneliness which is his greatest fear.  In a terrifying piece of (no offence meant) ret-con, Cornell adds ten years to the Third Doctor's last trip home.  The TARDIS wandered in the vortex, its frilly-shirt-wearing occupant rotting alone the entire time.  It became the Doctor's worst memory, his nightmare place.  And no wonder he's thinking about it now.  He resents the love of his companions and friends, he views it as a thing that takes them away.  Why should he understand?  “I left [Susan] on Earth, with her boyfriend.  I only saw her once more.  She's living out her incarnation, waiting for him to die.  Then she'll call for me.  Yes... she'll call.  And I'll find her again.”  It's one of the most heartbreaking stories for the Doctor, an eyes-wide look at his weakness, his absolute need for someone out there in the vortex.  (It goes a long way to explaining the end of Nightshade, where he simply decided not to let Ace go with her new boyfriend.  Nonetheless, despite a few timely references to Nightshade and to Robin, the betrayal and what it meant are largely ignored, no doubt because Cornell is devoting a novel to the same concept and it's not his fault they're stacked next to each other.  (Seriously – why end a book the way Nightshade did if you've got no guarantee the next guy's going to bear it out?)

Unfortunately for the Doctor, Ace is feeling something similar, and not for him.  In Nightshade, I found her sudden interest in Robin Yeadon hard to fathom.  He wasn't terribly interesting, and they didn't spend much time together.  In Love And War, Ace's feelings are at the forefront, and of course she becomes attached to people on the fly. "Being flung across time and space made you into a real party animal.  You could either talk to anybody with food or a job or a squat, or you could be shy and dead.  And love got to be like that too."  It's suddenly annoyingly obvious, to me at least – how else is someone like Ace supposed to meet someone?  When's she going to have time for courtship?  Little of this really hit home in Big Finish's adaptation (just a brief mention – shutting up now!), leaving me in much the same position with Jan as I was when I came across Robin in Nightshade.  On the page, Ace's attraction to Jan makes sense.  They are kindred spirits, obviously, his way of life mirroring hers.  (Even down to the worship of a "trickster god"!)  But he also has that same sense of transience.  He counts his ex-lovers among his close friends.  He believes in adventure and impulse.  Ace believes, rightly, that the two of them could settle down.  No doubt the Doctor sees this, as well as Jan's monstery fate, considerably in advance.

There's a poignant inevitability even if you haven't spoiled the plot for yourself.  From the autumnal setting (when things end) to a planet of corpses called Heaven, there's a death-worshipping cult, a death-interested collective, a death-feeding parasite, a hulking ball of death and heck, there are great big hints in the dialogue:

“‘What's more important, winning or feeling good about yourself?’
‘Doesn't one always lead to the other, Professor?’
‘Not always.’”

It's a story about endings, partings and – duh! – death.  But there's also a compelling plot about monsters, because (as with Timewyrm: Revelation) Cornell is more than able to juggle rich emotional themes and sheer, page-turning excitement.  What starts as a deliberately "trivial" way to get Ace's mind off a friend's passing becomes an all-out war against armies of the dead, orchestrated by a nightmare force that is equal parts The Thing and the Borg.  Of course the Hoothi allow Cornell to explore that theme of death, but they also pose a terrifying and well-thought-out threat.  And there's a refreshing sadness to their victims, as they tend to know their fate.  Alternately they explode in a nightmare image of fungus and tentacles and... yeah, that's gonna be playing in my mind-cinema for a while.

When you move away from the emotional heart of the novel, it's difficult not to slide into random, disjointed observations and compliments.  The rest of it's all really good, but it's not as important.  Still, as was the case with Revelation, there are many dazzling ideas that burn bright for not very long.  I love the horrific Planet Of The Spiders ret-con, along with Cornell's imaginative premonition of The Matrix (not the Doctor Who matrix, The Matrix matrix!).  Speaking of premonitions, the bit where the Draconians refer to the Doctor as "the oncoming storm"?  Paging Mr Davies.  Then there's a character weirdly named after Paul Magrs.  And oh yeah, there's the casual suggestion that the Sixth Doctor was sacrificed to make way for the Seventh, and the resultant self-loathing created the Valeyard.  Cornell didn't need that idea – no doubt it informs later New Adventures – but by god, I sat up when I read it!  And then, whoosh, we're past it.  I don't know whether to be disappointed or impressed.  Love And War has a more relaxed pace than Revelation, there isn't such a frantic crush of thoughts and twists, but Cornell still turns it on a sixpence.  It's an assured work.

Amid all this, aka the Doctor and Ace feeling great pain and monsters devouring worlds, Cornell casually changes the New Adventures in a more positive way.  Bernice Summerfield, yo!  And what to make of her?  A guarded, almost panicked sarcasm leaps off the page, not to mention her whims and foibles.  It's early days, but there's a lot to enjoy, confidence and obvious flaws winningly mixed.  She is unlike most other Doctor Who companions in that she feels less imperilled, more on an equal footing.  Also it's interesting how the relationship is born out of the ruins of Ace.  ("‘You call me Benny, and I'll call you Doctor.  Professor isn't true for either of us.’")  They are not equals just because, say, they bring different things to a fight, or because there is some great problem with Benny that the Doctor can fix.  (Unless you count her lost father.)  There's no ghost of Pygmalion here.  I suspect the differences between them (Benny and Ace) will inform the friendship from here on.

Benny signing up is no great burning desire of the Doctor's.  It's more of a moot point, no doubt fed by that permanent ache for companions.  Benny, meanwhile, sees a great opportunity and takes it, but she knows from the outset what damage the Doctor can do.  That's an intriguing and fresh dynamic, and for a novel that is not as optimistic and – will anyone mind? – sweet as Revelation, that Love And War still manages to salvage a note of new life and joy from the wreckage is proof, as far as I'm concerned, that Paul Cornell is a big softie.  As am I.

Is anything wrong with it?  Well, I haven't seen this many typos since Genesys, although there aren't nearly as many and they're not as bad.  It's still distracting amid articulate and interesting prose to hear "The walked up Horsenden Hill", "She hadn't know what to wear" or "Jan shouted, angily."  Worse, names might get muddled, as when Roisa drugs Máire to spare her life: "She took one look back, and watched Roisa smile as she fell into some blissful sleep."  She watched herself?  But typos are merely an inconvenience, and as should be obvious, the last refuge of the critic.  It's probably not Paul Cornell's fault, although I'd be that bit happier if they weren't there.  I'll bet he would, too.

I find strongly positive reviews harder to write than negative ones, because there's usually a reason bad things fail and you can go after that.  When something works, hopefully it does a whole bunch of things well, and I fall into a pattern of just listing them.  Well, shucks: Love And War does a whole bunch of things well.  It is an end and a beginning, an essential part of the New Adventures and, in many ways, an important piece of Doctor Who.  So let me count the ways.

9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #8 – Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#8
Nightshade
By Mark Gatiss

Mark Gatiss is one of those New Who writers you can learn to predict.  He will, in all likelihood, trot out something you've seen before, with a humble reverence that is quite sweet but doesn't add very much.  Robot Of Sherwood repeats a lot of sci-fi tropes (not to mention Maid Marian gags); Cold War does Alien-meets-Dalek on a submarine; Victory Of The Daleks pluckily references Power Of The Daleks, then runs out of steam after twenty minutes.  He's on stronger ground when he embraces the other of his poles, the macabre, usually defined by Victoriana.  His biggest hits are unsurprisingly The Unquiet Dead and The Crimson Horror: scary, creepy and a bit funny, they have more in common with his own imagination than the annals of Doctor Who, etc.  So in other words, he often lets nostalgia get the better of him.  Which is a little ironic given the subject of his New Adventures novel, Nightshade: nostalgia can kill, so don't look back.  Too ruddy true, Mark.

Nonetheless, for a writer obviously intrigued by the halcyon glow of the past, and to a lesser extent whether it lies, killer nostalgia is a canny idea.  Gatiss gets the most out of it, and then some.  You may notice that Nightshade has an enormous supporting cast, and there's a good reason for that: body count.  The novel quickly reveals its trump card, a nostalgic remembrance followed by ghostly apparition followed by death, and repeats it and repeats it and repeats it.  The Doctor, curiously ineffective and clueless, is unable to prevent a long list of deaths.  It's never exactly monotonous – restlessly bouncing between characters and situations every couple of pages, the novel bounds along like you're binge watching all four episodes of a classic serial – but it is very obviously the same gag on repeat.

Fortunately amid the sheer repetition, Gatiss finds some absolutely killer variations on his theme.  We have a monastery full of elderly people all creating their "ghosts" at once; Edmund Trevithick, the Quatermass-ish television star heroically battling one of his old monsters in a lift; and the Doctor meeting what appears to be an old friend, which promises to be a real coup if they reproduce it in the Big Finish play.  (Quick glance at the cast-list: they did.)

Conversely, some trips down memory lane are inevitable and obvious.  The aforementioned "Remember; see a ghost; get killed" rinse cycle becomes predictable, especially when no one's doing anything to stop it.  But more annoyingly, scarcely a book goes by without Ace remembering specific events from Season 25 and 26, not to mention her dratted mother.  Sure enough we get Ghost Light and Remembrance refs in this, plus Mummy Ace and her associated baggage.  It might suit Nightshade to do it all over again, but in her case it just doesn't pack a punch any more.  Even her heroic "I don't believe in you!" moment feels derivative of The Curse Of Fenric.

I wonder if I'm becoming difficult to please, re Ace. I love character continuity, but specific episode continuity gets boring fast.  In her case, the two are annoyingly synonymous.  She's always looking back in order to inform her present.  But at least there are nods to the Timewyrm books, suggesting that yes, her life does continue beyond 1989.  And hey, she's leaving soon (spoilers!), so maybe it's a necessary step to blow out the past before embracing the future.  (She's certainly trying to do the latter, with her would-be boyfriend Robin.)  Again, I thought this was more or less achieved in Timewyrm: Revelation, but then I thought the Doctor got over the Time War in The Parting Of The Ways, so what do I know?

The plot is surprisingly light, or rather very little seems to be achieved over the course of the book.  The ravenous force that is killing Crook Marsham, called The Sentience for want of a real name, ploughs through bodies with abandon.  The Doctor, Ace and a few others zip from location to location without really learning anything.  (A hefty flashback to the Civil War does clue them in a bit, but it doesn't help until the very end.)  Probably more important is the scattered character development, but I'm not sure how much it really achieves.  All the minor (doomed) characters have murky pasts for The Sentience to prey on; Gatiss flexes his character muscles over and over to that end, but since they're all destined to be bumped off anyway, it's oddly futile.  (Also, the definition of "nostalgia" quickly becomes tenuous.  The abbot sees Jesus instead of a departed loved one; Doctor Who-esque TV star Trevithick sees old monsters trying to kill him.)  The only characterisation that can actually stick is in the main two, and that's a mixed bag.

The Doctor is feeling "a profound dissatisfaction and loneliness, a yearning to belong," which is a little on the random side, isn't it?  He seems crabby and irritable about his inability to stop interfering, he this time doesn't do much towards that end, besides a visit to a monastery.  One could argue his general inability to sort anything out is deliberate, but I'm not sure looking on while people get killed is quite what he had in mind.

He suggests packing it all in, going back to Gallifrey and applying his skills at home.  (And speaking of his home turf, there is a brief flashback to an earlier Doctor on the day he left – that's a past Doctor in four books out of eight, score-keepers!)  It's inevitably hard to take that seriously in what are, as we all know, the ongoing adventures of Doctor Who.  Added to which, the Doctor felt considerably more at home in the country village of the previous book (incidentally, what unfortunate juxtaposition – two "sleepy British villages" in a row).  If he was going to feel a yearning to settle down or change his ways, it might as well have been there, right?  Especially with the TARDIS on the fritz.  But no.  With its odd, irritable Doctor ringing the changes seemingly out of nowhere, Nightshade does not entirely convince.

Meanwhile, Ace is also considering settling down, which is incredible timing as the Doctor suspects she'll do just that, and then she apparently falls in love with the first young man she sees!  It's difficult to invest in Ace-and-Robin for a number of reasons – not least the nagging foreknowledge that she'll go through similar motions over somebody else in the very next book (spoilers?) – but frankly, I never saw much in him as a character, or anything that explained Ace's determination to go with him.  She's known him for a day or two.  He's a young man and he's nice enough.  Aside from the excitement of meeting anyone in her constant whirlwind of travel, it's tough to feel cut up when they are forcibly parted at the end.  Even more so when the Doctor's apparent decision to do so comes without explanation or pay-off.  I'm in an odd position of knowing the rough plot of Love And War from its Big Finish counterpart, and I certainly don't recall any adherence to this; I hope Paul Cornell does something with it.  (I only question it because Witch Mark wasn't even finished when it came out, and certain New Adventures character beats – including a similar failed romance between Ace and Raphael in Timewyrm: Apocalypse – seemed to happen without wider consequences.)

It may repeat itself too often, and its character arcs may not convince, but Nightshade still makes good thematic meat out of nostalgia.  The Doctor and Ace react to it and both learn to reject the past.  Where they go from there is annoyingly unclear, though.  I wonder if Nightshade is better enjoyed as a simple horror treat than anything deeply emotional.  Gatiss's ghostly rinse cycle, with its eerie mix of yearning and monstrous hunger, feels like a solid Stephen King idea, and he marries it to Classic Doctor Who while he's at it, with Trevithick's scuttling monsters, a supernatural barrier around an old village, and good old nostalgia for a TV show that gave folks the willies.  It could be argued as typically familiar Mark Gatiss fare, but knowingly so, and probably better for it.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #7 – Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#7
Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark
By Andrew Hunt

As you can tell from Peter Elson's beautiful front cover (and it's obvious from the title), Witch Mark fuses sci-fi and fantasy.  That's not a bad idea in theory, and what with Doctor Who being such a malleable format (or rather one that should be malleable), it was bound to stray into a straight-up fantasy story at some point.  The Mind Robber already dipped a toe in the genre.

I'm not massively keen on fantasy as-in-dragons-and-unicorns, however.  It tends to be treated with a certain dry seriousness, as it always has to feel like a believable historical period but-with-monsters.  (Why does "fantasy" have to mean "bargain bin Tolkein", anyway?)  Sure enough, the portions of Witch Mark spent in Tír na n-Óg, Andrew Hunt's fantasy world du jour, are deathly dull.  The creatures might have different names over there but it's the same old tropes, plus some sci-fi ephemera because hey, it's Doctor Who, and even its "fantasy" stories had better tick that box at some point.  Full of laborious questing hither and thither, bloody battles populated by nothingy characters, and dialogue that wobbles between hokey medieval-isms ("By Dagda's Wheel! ") and feeble banter, the latter stages of Witch Mark are a chore to read.

It's much better early on, where it's set in the Welsh town of Llanfer Ceiriog.  Hunt conjures a satisfying little village here, and there's an enjoyable familiarity for the Doctor as well: it's nice to see places where he feels at home, but we have yet to go.  I could picture the village in all its foggy, early-morning glory.  Even better, it's here that the novel's fantasy ideas mix with reality.  That makes for much more arresting prose: tourists discovering what might be a centaur, and a vet coming across a unicorn's horn are both more interesting than strolling through a world where centaurs and unicorns are commonplace.  (Not to mention how ruddy boring the things turn out to be.)

There's a decent mystery to start us off: a coach loaded with unidentified people crashes, its occupants all carrying suitcases full of cash.  This isn't a mystery novel, however, so Hunt doesn't expend a lot of energy on who they were or where exactly they were going.  We more or less figure it out during the soupy quest narrative, and the explanation isn't altogether uninteresting.  They're fleeing their world and coming to Earth.  Issues of migration are touched on, but naturally push never comes to shove since the Doctor is involved and they can just go somewhere else.  (Having said that, I'm pretty sure there are still some Tír na n-Óg-ians pottering around our world at the end.  There’s also a sub-plot about some feral doubles of the Doctor and Ace which is then entirely forgotten about.  This may have something to do with Andrew Hunt's apparent admission that he didn't have time to finish the book.  Citation needed, I know – but damn, if that doesn't explain a lot.)

Witch Mark never wrings a great deal of drama out of its ideas.  It can be competent and almost enjoyably written – as above, I found the village fairly atmospheric, and some of the early cutaways to Tír na n-Óg are evocative.  But the characters are what really matters, and they're bland and uninteresting.  The two tourists (who discover a centaur and thus become embroiled in the story) have nothing going for them besides being American and seeing a centaur.  (One assumes An American Werewolf In London came to mind.)  The policeman investigating their case, Stevens, is part of a one-man Paranormal Investigative Team, which basically means he's an ineffectual laughing stock.  Any genuine, passionate interest in the supernatural is lost in dry, overwritten exposition:

“'My dear chap,' he said flippantly, 'it's my job to believe in things that other people wouldn't credit. Flying saucers? Of course, they exist. Yeti! Saw them in the London Underground twenty years ago. Ghosts! A headless woman in white with a black dog used to walk through my bedroom at midnight. Mermaids? Grandpa was rescued from the Marie Celeste by one. Vampires? I always wondered where my dad went at night. Telepathy? Right now you're thinking that I'm talking crap. So what can you tell me that I won't believe in?"

Someone should have red-penned about half of that, right?  But they didn't, so towards the end, his half-hearted decision to perform an exorcism makes about as much sense as anything else.  The various fantasy denizens are too trite to dwell on, although it is especially annoying that there is a girl called Bats (short for Bathsheba) and a unicorn called Bat.  As for all the Welsh words acting as fantasy words, they probably mean a great deal to a Welsh-speaker, but they just seemed like random replacement words to me.  They're applied to the same old fantasy tropes.

Hunt's writing of the Doctor and Ace isn't much better.  They're taking time out for the TARDIS to fix itself, owing to the fascinating and not-at-all pointless Cat's Cradle arc.  (We briefly reference Time's Crucible, skip Warhead altogether and then shruggingly conclude this on the final page as essentially, "the TARDIS was feeling a bit funny, it's better now".  If you were expecting an idea they felt important enough to attach to the three book titles to actually go somewhere, well, silly old you!)  The Doctor's familiarity with his surroundings lends a pleasing comfort to some passages – sorry to repeat myself there, it's the only way I can buoy this review – but later on he's got nothing to do but head for the mysterious Goibhnie and hope he can sort out this world's problems.  Cue random assorted perils between A and B, including the decision to ditch Ace as this will be "too dangerous" for her.  You what, Doc?  After what she accomplished in Warhead?  He's blandly Sylvester McCoy-like in the writing, but there's nothing remotely interesting about him.

As for Ace, she's one of Witch Mark's weakest links.  Not for the first time, characterisation lets her down, coming as it does in clumsy blobs of back-story.  We could take her Survival experiences as read and build on them, but no, we'd better recap them first: "It was a look which stirred strange feelings in her because of her experience as one of the hunters on the planet of the Cheetah people."  We could use what she learned in The Curse Of Fenric and incorporate that seamlessly into who she is now, but hey, why not remind us exactly what happened anyway: "As with the faith that has driven back the Haemovores during World War Two..."  It's a bit embarrassing when you can see the joins like that.  There is something new here, at least – a magical connection with a unicorn – but it's treated like another echo of Survival, and it makes no substantial difference to her or the story.  Shrug.

One hopes they'll tone it down as the series progresses, but so far Ace often finds herself drifting between the scant plots of Season 25 and 26, or vaguely railing against her mother and racial intolerance.  Sometimes it feels like there's nothing more to her than the plot points established on TV, which feels like a slap in the face for a format boasting "stories too broad and too deep for the small screen."  Hunt at least tries to delve into Ace's fixation with Nitro-9, only to come up with this hilariously leaden nugget: "It's great when you manage your first truly destructive chemical reaction, but the satisfying moment comes when you create an explosive that does serious damage whilst looking and sounding aesthetically pleasing."  So, the best bit about blowing things up is the blowing things up?  Oh, Ace, tell me more!

(Incidentally, the Doctor isn't free from this Genesys-esque info-dumpery.  There's some dull reminiscence about Block Transfer Computation – don't even ask – and this little doozie that made me laugh out loud: "'Get him to contact UNIT.  They'll help you.'  UNIT was an acronym for the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, an international military organisation which the Doctor had once worked for as scientific advisor."  MORE POWER TO THE INFO-DUMPER.)

Hunt's writing oscillates between vague competence and a weird, forced extravagance.  Take this moment when a person's face appears to change: "Suddenly the feelings changed as loving warmth shifted to the sticky coldness of death."  He was warm and now he's icky!  Or this one, when a character sees his planet's sun return to its former strength and feels "the incredibly sensuous, almost sexual thrill that coursed through his old body”.  Um?  Quite often, things are going well enough – albeit never making your pulse race like Warhead, or igniting your imagination like Revelation – and then pow!, it gets weird.  Overall it's an ungainly, undistinguished piece of work, and one that runs out of steam long before it ends.  Perhaps in an attempt to keep things interesting, the action frequently chops between characters.  I was rarely thrilled to see any of them.

A small village with fantasy accoutrements is an idea after my own heart, but Witch Mark considerably fails to make the most of it.  What we get is a drab sci-fi/fantasy mash-up that you'll forget as soon as it's over.  Pretty cover, though.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #6 – Cat's Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#6
Cat's Cradle: Warhead
By Andrew Cartmel

Difficult to know where to start with this one.  I didn't make a lot of notes or scribble much of it down, as I was pretty much in its thrall the whole time.  I thought I'd have little more to say about the way it's written than "Yep.  This is good."

Okay, I'll try a bit harder.  Warhead is an urban thriller, which is a potentially hackneyed setting for a sci-fi story and a potentially unsuitable one for Doctor Who.  Andrew Cartmel, the show's Script Editor and lead creative voice in its last years, clearly isn't interested in perpetuating what is usual for Doctor Who.  He relishes the chance to establish a grim future for humanity, taking all opportunities to enrich it and make it feel lived in, put up with.  The people feel utterly real and so does the situation, in no small part because we come to it so late.  This is a future where we're almost at the point of no return.  There are very few people trying to save it – they’re simply trying to get on.  It makes the Doctor all the more necessary.  (It is interesting that the Doctor is aiming to save it now, rather than popping back to avert the whole ugly mess.  Interestingly, I probably wouldn't think to question it if this wasn't set on Earth.)

Cartmel's prose is to-the-point and satisfying, especially after the expressionistic whims of Marc Platt.  This is thriller territory: characters think and feel and you're absolutely in there with them, while the story moves with cinematic clarity.  The writing often slips neatly between forensic detail and emotion, lending refreshing weight to so-called "villainous" characters.  For instance, when a vengeful Kurd meets his doom:

"The uncontrolled laser beam needled out slightly, barely visible in the dusty air of the summer night. It went in through the front of Massoud's eye and into his brain, through the frontal lobe and sweeping into the motor and sensory areas. Massoud saw a brilliant light. It filled his vision. It was the sun over the shoulder of his sister."

...and we're treated to a bit of back-story just as we lose him.  (It continues on for a bit but I don't want to quote too much.  That's why I refrained from writing loads down.  I'd be reproducing pages.)  There's a lot of this stuff, and it works beautifully at mixing action, or more usually death, with insight.  It's a very successful writing style; I was hooked.

It's a very grim story, which is arguably part of the New Adventures remit.  These novels have been sneaking in swearwords, sex and violence (or at any rate, more than you'd expect on telly) since Genesys, and all appear rather more graphically in Warhead, but with (I think) the greatest success so far.  (Though there are moments of eyebrow-raising gratuity, like a hallucination featuring a severed head gargling in a urinal.)  This feels like science fiction for a more mature reader.  But it's not too divorced from Doctor Who as we know it: McCoy and co. were shaking their heads at corrupt, broken-down worlds in Paradise Towers and The Happiness Patrol.

The approach to the characters is just as bracing as you'd expect from Andrew Cartmel, who knew the Seventh Doctor and Ace better than most.  The relatively cartoonish character traits of the first three Timewyrm books feel like ancient history for Ace, who methodically follows the Doctor's instructions and puts his plan into action.  I've seen her characterisation here referred to in unflattering terms, and I think that's a pity.  Though she does kill, her remorse is obvious and not at all trivialised.  Earlier, she outright refuses to do it.  She's no mindless killing machine.  Also, her relationship with the Doctor is as lived-in and matter-of-fact as Cartmel's horrid future.  The two barely need words any more.

Ah yes, the Doctor: grand chess player, juggling people's lives without flinching.  He's not a very nice Doctor, but I do think he's a very believable one.  This stuff suits him.  (And it's hardly gone away.  I recently heard Big Finish's LIVE 34, which followed a similar pattern of the Doctor and Ace working to save a nearly-doomed society from its corrupt elders, again from the sidelines.  I wonder if James Parsons and Andrew Stirling-Brown read this.)  He's not in the book much, especially the first half, but his influence is there.  I was always keen to find out what he was up to, but I wasn't bored in the interim.

Even so, the pacing can be a little uneven.  You're introduced to quite a few characters near the start, mostly police-types beginning with M, and they go away for most of the novel as we get back to Ace and then the Doctor.  By the time we meet up with them again, there's a small degree of "Who's who?" (call me childish, but did he really need so many M names?), and with the action ratcheted so high for so long, there's no space reserved for an epilogue.  It's over, and hopefully things will get better. Warhead is an appropriate title: we’re here for the explosion, not for the fallout.

(Speaking of resolutions, just what the hell is Cat's Cradle all about?  The cat's briefly in it again – something to do with the TARDIS's warning systems? – but I can't see much else connecting this to Time's Crucible.  As series-plots go, it's almost comically obscure.)

Warhead was a pleasure to read, though of course, it is not a pleasant story.  Dark and violent, but more resoundingly sad, it manages to evoke various sci-fi sources (the choking cityscape of Blade Runner, the eerie deserted countryside of a zombie movie) whilst adding its own authorial stamp.  It's an intelligent way to handle an environmental message: no one likes the problem, there are no easy fixes, hard choices are necessary to make it better.  And it's a fairly bold way to tell a Doctor Who story.  It's one of those that really deserves the "New" caveat, as it pushes confidently at the show's comfort zones.  It's seriously unhappy stuff – I’d have a nice lie down on standby – but I admire it a lot.

8/10