Doctor Who: The BBC Books #63 – Tomb Of Valdemar by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#29

Tomb of Valdemar

By Simon Messingham

One thing I like about these daft old Doctor Who novels is that the writers sometimes treat them as novels. That’s a rather pretentious statement, I know, since by definition they are all exactly that, but I sometimes get the impression that writers are transcribing imaginary scripts rather than building books from the ground up. See any that constantly change the scene, as if to deter channel-hoppers.

You can see this more novelist attitude in books like The Roundheads, a Boy’s Own adventure that surely belongs in prose; anything by Paul Magrs, who seemingly lives for the particular craziness you only get outside of a visual medium; and the fruitsome Eye Of Heaven, which places great store in who is telling the story and how it is told.

Simon Messingham made similar inroads in Zeta Major, a space opera that occasionally switched away from traditional “he said/she said” prose in favour of news reports and journals. It added a dimension to that story, but I didn’t feel at the time that it was entirely essential. The Face-Eater, a much more conventional Doctor Who book, also dabbled in story perspectives, even using second person for the monster bits. Messingham has now returned to that area wholeheartedly. This time it definitely needs to be there.

Tomb Of Valdemar is a story that relishes being a book. It’s full of choices, which it knows might catch you out. I’m thinking particularly of the use of present tense, which a character nitpicks: “And the way you tell it, all this ‘He says… she says,’ it ain’t right. It should be ‘He said… she said.’ Like proper stories.” (I’m tempted to include the title as An Interesting Choice as it kept wrong-footing me — why isn’t it The Tomb Of Valdemar, which arguably scans better? Was it just more interesting to ditch the definite article? — but then, it is actually called that on the title page. So: was the cover a typo, or the page, or was it all deliberate? *shakes fist* Messinghammm!)

The main reason for that use of present tense is that this story is being told, in the text, to somebody else. This allows for some very human, narrator-led moments such as telling us that a transformed person is chasing them (before telling us the transformation has occurred), or noticing something about a person before they’re described as being in the room, or diving back suddenly to back-fill the reason for telling us something else in the first place. The style is sort of, carefully messy.

A mysterious woman arrives on a fairly harsh world and, for reasons that will come along in good time, tells her story to Ponch: an unassuming fur trapper. My first thought here was that the present tense was creating a sense of danger that you don’t quite get in hindsight — implicitly if you are telling me about it afterwards, then you survived those events — but Tomb Of Valdemar plays a rather cheeky game with the woman’s identity, which throws that off. The tense is mostly a stylistic choice, then; one of a few that the narrator (and presumably author) simply liked best. “Do you think I’m doing this just to be pretentious?” / “Fair enough, Mr Redfearn. Perhaps he is a little incongruous, but I like him. You’ll just have to accept it.”

The story itself concerns, as you’ve probably guessed, a tomb. You might be able to guess much of the rest: this tomb is a gateway to Bad Things and efforts must be made to prevent it from being opened. It’s one of those books where the ideas somewhat edge out the plot, which isn’t to say it’s weak — rather that I just felt I’d been on this sort of archaeological raid before. (Heck, there’s already a famous telly Who story about not mucking about in a tomb, and it also has “tomb” in the title.)

Making things more interesting is the world-building, something Zeta Major also excelled at. There’s a kind of death cult surrounding Valdemar — a shadowy historical figure, supposedly lying dormant — and this cult is mainly there because of a classist revolution that has swept through human society. The disarmingly normal-named Paul Neville leads the cult, and with the help of frustrated novelist Miranda Pelham (who wrote about Valdemar, largely inspiring Neville’s quest) they have located the tomb on what can best be described as a Hell planet. Neville believes Valdemar will grant him all the usual madman accoutrements, but really all he wants is to get one over on Hopkins — the hairless lunatic puritan leading the purge of the old human elite. Both leaders are violent and awful, with poor unsettled Miranda stuck in the middle.

Following Neville are a band of insufferable rich drips, the mysterious and seemingly teenaged Huvan (also insufferable) and the misleadingly-named butler Kampp, who masks with an effete exterior a keen interest in torture devices. Into this mess arrive the Fourth Doctor and Romana, diverted from their quest for the Key To Time by an early attempt to open the tomb. The Doctor must prevent its opening and get back to the business of preventing universal catastrophe — although as it turns out, these goals have a lot in common.

It’s Messingham’s first novel with this Doctor, and it’s a strong showing, with Tom Baker’s unique irreverence blustering through every interaction. (I really enjoyed “He is a charismatic, handsome man, the Doctor supposes,” which nods towards “You’re a beautiful woman, probably.” Also a big fan of: “The Doctor sees a large bank of impressive-looking computer consoles and feels the hum of power beneath his feet. ‘Don’t tell me, the kitchen?’”) There’s a thrilling fusion of his confidence and intelligence with an occasional scruffy underestimation of what’s going on, leading to a lot of very educated winging-it. (Such as his high-born use of telepathy to turn out the lights at a crucial moment, or — inevitably! — the use of his scarf to survive a deadly showdown.)

The placement early in Season Sixteen is no mistake, as his friendship with Romana is still at a formative stage. He more than once bemoans that she is not like his usual companions, and he rather unwisely leaves her at the mercy of a suitor, perhaps assuming that her apparent confidence will prevent any malfeasance and perhaps (on a more bleak note) simply not being that invested in her safety. I think the only Doctor note that didn’t entirely ring true was his seeming insistence on getting back to the Key To Time, a task he mostly found an annoying encumbrance on screen; however I think the question of flawed narrators naturally covers this, as well as layering some external suggestion into his attitude towards his companion.

Romana shines. Perhaps the less popular incarnation when it comes to tie-in fiction, since you’ve inevitably got to work around the Key To Time story as well, her fresh-out-of-the-academy attitude comes into play quite a lot, especially during a few clever references to The Invasion Of Time. (A recent Gallifrey story she wasn’t featured in, it would canonically be fresh on her mind.) Mary Tamm’s somewhat regal bearing makes her a natural, if unhappy fit among Neville’s ghastly acolytes, and it’s difficult to dispute the effect she would have on a confused teenage boy who writes a lot of awful poetry. Despite the very deliberate comedic awkwardness of that pairing, their story manages to affect Romana in more ways than I was expecting. I’m not entirely sure I believe where we leave the two of them, but that’s a great rug-pull nonetheless. (Take note, EDA President Romana.)

There is a degree of archetype about the rest of the cast, with Kampp and Hopkins tending to blur together in their shared sadism, and Neville being a maniacal bore even from the perspective of the other characters. Hopkins’ crew and some of Neville’s guards seem more balanced, but they hardly get a look in. Miranda though is wonderfully well-drawn: a flawed and susceptible creative who essentially just wants to make it out of wherever she’s found herself, deep down she also yearns to make a name for herself. She makes a great pairing with the Doctor (Romana, unfortunately, being stuck with Romeo), with her scatty vulnerability working well against the Doctor’s unpredictable energy. In another life she could have made a great recurring character.

I have criticised the plot, but it’s enjoyable to watch it unfold, with Neville’s adoptive citadel (linked to Valdemar’s tomb) gradually driving its inhabitants mad — and ultimately transforming them. Grotesque transformation seems to interest Messingham, being a The Thing-ish impetus for The Face-Eater. See also the antimatter monsters in Zeta Major, and of course the fantasy/body horror of Strange England, which weirdly might be the closest analogue for this story: Valdemar, without giving too much away, will bring unimaginable chaos to the universe if released. Even before the climax he inspires seemingly random violence and upheaval. (The presence of a couple of sadists also reminded me, somewhat unhappily, of a certain era of Virgin books. At least those guys aren’t driving the plot this time.)

There is a lot of talk of Old Ones, which I suppose might tickle your spider-sense if you like Lovecraft. (As ever I’m taking that as read, since I haven’t read any.) The general speculation on the state of the universe in relation to Valdemar, and how it all links to ideas like telepathy, is all pleasantly mind-expanding without being incomprehensible; no previous Lovecraft-lore is required. The question of “who or what is Valdemar?” kept me guessing and it lands on something that works — not always a given in mysteries — much like the riddle of who’s telling this story and why. Messingham also manages to layer in the idea of storytelling in a way that complements his choice of narrative style, which lends more credence to the mechanics of Tomb Of Valdemar being important rather than just there on a whim.

Tomb Of Valdemar seems confident and comfortable having its narrator (and the Doctor) wing it at times, and it never seemed particularly indulgent to me. Even the rare moments of lamp-shading, like that bit about he said/she said, tell us something about the people complaining. Some of the character writing could be a bit more fleshed out, but at the risk of expanding the benefit of the doubt to breaking point, perhaps the narrator just didn’t get to know everybody?

It’s not perfect, and it can feel a bit off-kilter at times, but the latter mostly just serves to mark it out from the rest. For me, it’s one of the range’s swings that also hits.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #62 – The Shadows Of Avalon by Paul Cornell

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#31

The Shadows of Avalon

By Paul Cornell

Paul Cornell is back! And he’s in a peculiar mood!

The formative New Adventures author is known for delving deep into the character of the Doctor, often using fan lore to make a serious point about him, but he will sometimes toss in references just to have a good time as well. Famously he pulled back on any such excesses to write Human Nature, an emotional character study of what the Doctor becomes without any of his accoutrements. This was after No Future, which rounded off a few plot arcs in a plethora of jolly meta references. He also launched the Bernice Summerfield range by sending her into a literal pantomime. There seems to be, in Cornell’s Doctor Who writing anyway, a push and pull between introspection and fan service, seriousness and panto.

The Shadows Of Avalon lands somewhat uncertainly between these extremes. As the title suggests, it is fantasy-driven, even more so than Autumn Mist. It takes place mostly in Avalon, a multi-dimensional analogue of Britain that has fairies and dragons. Cornell goes some way towards grounding this by making it a world partially inhabited by Silurians/“Earth Reptiles”, who are known for keeping prehistoric creatures. But then again, Avalon is explicitly a world being dreamed into existence by an ancient king under a castle. But then again again, their whole situation, or at least their recent troubles, are largely down to the interventions of Time Lords. The setup is a bit of sci-fi/fantasy Lazy Susan.

The tone follows suit. Much about The Shadows Of Avalon is serious and contemplative — not to mention explosive as far as the Eighth Doctor Adventures are concerned, we’ll get to it — but there’s a certain flippancy to the fantasy elements. Mab, the leader of the displaced Celt tribe who make up the human population of Avalon, is feisty and somewhat a figure of fun, her dialogue tending towards modern colloquialism in a way that feels deliberately light-hearted. (On meeting the Doctor, one of the famous Time Lords: “And the weight of prophecy that you bring! Something bloody huge is going to happen!”) Her fellow Celts however, particularly the troubled advisor Margwyn, are much more “typical fantasy speak.”

Avalon itself is a somewhat glossed-over concoction, with the realms of Celts and “Fair Folk” (mostly Earth Reptiles, but also fairies?) not hugely differentiated; their uses of magic (or in the case of the Earth Reptiles, telekinesis and magic?) are not terribly detailed either. It feels somewhat like a placeholder, a “this is what you’d expect in a Doctor Who fantasy land” and not much more. This is an issue when the whole story revolves around Avalon, the safety of which is at stake because of a war.

There’s a chance here to contrast Avalon with our version of reality, since London (and presumably the world) is suffering psychedelic ill effects because of the war. However, we hardly visit London, and most of what we do see is limited to a single encounter in an office building. It seems to be roughly the sort of weird malaise suffered by the population in No Future, but since the vast majority of the action takes place on Avalon instead, you’ll need to do most of the imaginative legwork there.

It’s tough to say whether this is all by design or whether it’s simply a consequence of the strict 280 page limit, but either way it all feels a bit thin. The war itself itself isn’t much better, the initial thrill of contrasting modern soldiers with dragons notwithstanding. Autumn Mist already did that, more or less. The definitive “Doctor Who meets fantasy” novel, then, still eludes us. (Unless you count Conundrum.)

But there is that other extreme: the insightful character study. And we have gobs of that, chiefly concerning the Brigadier. You may recall that he was de-aged in Happy Endings (also by Cornell), but if not there’s a decent enough précis here. He has, sadly, lost his second wife Doris in a sailing accident. Clearly he is not coping with this, imagining that Doris is still with him and yet frankly discussing with her that she is no longer here. When a nuclear missile somehow disappears from underneath a Tornado jet he is recruited to investigate, and is only too happy to abandon his therapy and dive into work.

Discovering a portal to Avalon, where the missile has gone, he ends up spearheading a military presence there. He allies with the Celts but as a British soldier, not as part of the UN. (He comes up with spurious reasons for this but there aren’t any serious consequences for his quiet betrayal of UNIT.) When Margwyn, for selfless reasons, takes the missing nuke over to the Fair Folk there suddenly exists a nuclear deterrent and an excuse for war. The Brig ignores the Doctor’s protestations and insists on a fight to stabilise Avalon. This goes on for months. (Exact passage of time is another niggly thing that could be clearer.)

Through all of that the Brigadier yearns to die and, if not see Doris again, at least place himself at her imagined mercy for, as he perceives himself to have done, letting her down. It’s a grim situation for the beloved character — especially once he is led to believe that the Doctor has died, and truly loses all hope (a plot point I felt was a little fuzzy) — but it’s handled with sensitivity, as he continues to weigh his desire to pay for his failure against his need to help others. His reliance on the spirit of Doris eventually comes into question, and it’s the very job he’s trying to get himself killed at that eventually brings him around.

The character is allowed to make selfish and self-hating mistakes here, but is written with such fondness that it doesn’t seem like trauma for the sake of drama. He grows out of all of this. His relationship with the Doctor (he’s desperate to tell him about Doris but keeps missing his chance) is also central to what’s happening here, the Doctor essentially being his conscience, and that too is very effectively written. Their eventual hug is a joy to witness, particularly the Brig’s protestations followed by a slight smile. The Brigadier is the source of the best Mab writing here, with the Celt leader impressed by and eventually besotted with him, though on the advice of others she allows him space to work through his grief before any serious wooing. Mab, as well as the ersatz Doris, shows us a more raw and emotional side to this character than we’ve had before.

Similarly explosive stuff is happening to the EDA regulars, although the book is unquestionably The Brigadier Show for the most part. Elsewhere, the Doctor has lost the TARDIS — it’s blown up, kaput, gone! — because of the inter-dimensional nature of Avalon and the Time Lords’ schemes. This sort of thing has been happening a lot recently, and Cornell suggests that many of those earlier encounters were in anticipation of this. I sort of agree: it was established that the TARDIS was behaving and landing erratically because of something in its future, but the fact of meeting similarly destructive fates in Dominion and Unnatural History appears to have been a coincidence.

This is a shame, as the events of Dominion — referenced here, albeit as a joke — do seem to contradict The Shadows Of Avalon. There, the TARDIS was “dead” but recuperating, and the jolt caused the Doctor to lose his TV Movie clairvoyance. Here, the TARDIS is definitively pushing up daisies but he just as definitively still knows people’s futures. That lapse made me wonder if everything was truly as it seemed, and I was surprised to learn that it actually was.

Losing or destroying the TARDIS is, in my view, a bit of a Hail Mary: we know it’s going to be undone some time, and if not, wasn’t it worthy of more comment than it receives here? The Doctor is sad, sure, but he keeps on keeping on. Dominion, again, made a big point of this. Perhaps the simple fact that we’ve done it before means it’s wrong to write it that way again — but then the question surely becomes, so why do it again then?

All will, no doubt, be revealed. There’s plenty of other stuff here that sets up future storytelling. I was completely surprised by the TARDIS death, which is good going when you’re reading 25-year-old books; I was sadly less able to avoid spoilers about Compassion’s fate (if you really don’t want to know then skip to the end of the review), although the stuff surrounding it had also escaped my notice, for better and worse.

Compassion has been going through changes. A changeable character by nature — one of the Remote, a people dependant on external signals with little moral compass of their own — she joined the TARDIS crew (off screen, grr) and has been helping out ever since. Often this is in a typical “complete the mission” capacity, particularly in Frontier Worlds and Parallel 59. But she remains impersonal and standoffish. Granted, Fitz tends to bring that out of people, but the Doctor has displayed an interest in making sure she is happy — cloaking, not very well, an interest in her becoming definitively a person in her own right, aka a real human and not a Remote impression of one.

At the start of The Shadows Of Avalon Compassion is finishing up six weeks in Bristol, having worked through the Doctor’s list of eight things that will in some way enrich her. (Live among humans. Make friends. Get a job. Eat chips. Write poetry. Kiss someone (properly). Get a cat. Fall in love.) She’s done it, but all the same she doesn’t seem like a changed person at the end of it. A looming physical change then haunts her throughout the book, finally showing itself towards the end and revealing that it was the Time Lords’ primary interest all along: she has become a living TARDIS, the kind we first saw in Alien Bodies. The Time Lords want her to support their war against the Enemy. (As well as, thrillingly, their conflict with the People over in Virgin Books. All friends here!) The Doctor knows this will mean suffering for her, so he and Fitz elude the Time Lords and throw established timelines into chaos by escaping in Compassion, setting up an intriguing new status quo of being pursued across different novels by his own people, in a TARDIS shaped like his friend.

The denouement and new status quo are very exciting. The way Compassion is written around this stuff is also very good — she’s understandably resistant to letting go of what little personhood she has, but then she rejoices in the expanded form she takes. I think there’s something to be said about them writing a deliberately difficult character in the first place just so they can loosen her up almost unrecognisably later on, it seems a bit like cheating — and perhaps there’s something to be said for selling out poor pre-transformation Compassion, who also existed in her own right. But really all of that is for future books to figure out.

I will say though that for the most part The Shadows Of Avalon doesn’t feel like a definitive Compassion novel. She and Fitz end up separated from the Doctor very early on, following Margwyn’s somewhat misguided crusade instead. As I said above, the book’s heart is mostly in the Brigadier stuff, with a good amount of Doctorly heroism on the side. (All the more heroic without a TARDIS, I suppose. There’s a very good bit where he gets airlifted onto a helicopter from a London tour bus.) This leaves Compassion and Fitz mostly waiting around in a castle for something to do. At least Compassion has that ending going for her; Fitz is fine, characterisation-wise, with some refreshing reminders of his love for Filippa in Parallel 59, but if he were any more obviously surplus to requirements he might as well have been blown up alongside the TARDIS.

The villains get about as much time as the companions, and they arguably make less of an impression. Our main malefactors are two Time Lord “Interventionists” (think Faction Paradox, but working for the other lot) dispatched by a regenerated and distinctly less personable President Romana, who is willing to do anything to win the war. Cavis and Gandar, a romantic couple, lurk in disguise among the Fair Folk and Celts and they generally nudge the action towards peril. Cornell clearly thinks they’re hilarious, giving them even more colloquial dialogue than Mab and some absurd little moments such as one of them doing a “Stayin’ Alive” pose when they’re happy, or saying “Exit Cavis and Gandar, stage left” to no one in particular. There are also some perhaps-trying-a-teensy-bit-too-hard gags like Gandar threatening the Doctor with the Gallifreyan “Other” expletive “Let’s just kill the Otherf-”. It’s all a bit, “You think you know fantasy and science fiction? THINK AGAIN.”

It’s interesting, I suppose, to present us with such obviously antithetical “Time Lords”, but in practice they’re a couple of self-satisfied, self-amused student types and I mostly just wondered if Romana had run out of better applicants. The grand lore-y idea of the Interventionists doesn’t get far off the ground; in their hands it’s a pale anti-Faction Paradox, if that. Numerous dramatic moments in the book hinge on Cavis and Gandar, in all their slightly embarrassing glory, rendering the tone of The Shadows Of Avalon just a little bit more fractured than it already was. For good measure, the epilogue restores some dignity to one of the pair, but it’s a little too late by then.

The Shadows Of Avalon perhaps bites off more ideas than it can chew. There’s a nuanced and moving character study in here, nestled amongst a huge fantasy story that can’t seem to stop and feel its way around, and occasionally gets a bit silly with it too. The TARDIS crew wait patiently for what is a genuinely exciting change of pace at the end, but how much all of that’s going to mean is for next time. I enjoyed the more sensitive and thoughtful moments. I was entertained by the big shocking bits. I think there probably is a clever and exciting story in the rest of it, but 280 pages doesn’t seem like enough to really get at it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #61 – Last Of The Gaderene by Mark Gatiss

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#28

Last of the Gaderene

By Mark Gatiss

Mark Gatiss returns to Doctor Who with a trip down memory lane, if you can believe such a thing.

Last Of The Gaderene isn’t a literal examination of nostalgia like Nightshade, but it’s just as baked in the stuff, from the use of a favourite era (Gatiss loved the Planet Of The Daleks novelisation so much that he read the BBC audiobook) to the ease with which his characters reflect on their pasts. The sleepy village of Culverton is filled with people such as the commander of the aerodrome, the local police chief or an old war hero who all tend to drift off mentally and think of other times. Jobey Packer, a fabulously-named old sign-painter, thinks of his hometown whenever he travels — another way of yearning for something familiar.

There’s something of a theme here, with unfriendly interlopers encroaching on a peaceful little town and threatening to modernise it into something unrecognisable and dangerous. (The townspeople begin to lose their identities as well.) But I’m reaching a bit, as this really isn’t another Nightshade in story terms — it’s not doing that much with its ideas. I just think “reflecting on the past” is something Gatiss is good at as a writer, and he uses it mostly justifiably to ground his characters and then let rip with often sumptuous, emotionally-tinged prose. Besides, the truest sense of nostalgia here comes from the Doctor Who era setting. (I know that’s not a reach because Gatiss waxes lyrical about it in the book’s introduction.)

The Third Doctor, Jo, the Brigadier and UNIT hold a special place in fandom’s affections, particularly for those who grew up during this unusual part of the show’s history. Last Of The Gaderene offers something of a victory lap for all that, ticking off various elements that ring true of the period. It’s a smart choice for one of those infrequent modern-day reprints, offering an uncanny example of what new fans might expect from old episodes. For better or worse, you could imagine this being transmitted in 1973 — or perhaps more specifically you could imagine it as a novelisation around that time. One of the chapters, in true Terrance Dicks fashion, is titled Escape To Danger.

Culverton’s long-disused airbase has been bought up by a mysterious company. They promptly start making a lot of mess and upsetting the locals, mostly at night. People are also beginning to act strangely and there appears to be a monster in the marshes. Much of this gets back to the Brigadier via his old friend, ex-Spitfire pilot Alec Whistler. After returning from a hair-raising Metebelis 3-esque adventure on a planet enduring a civil war, the Doctor (though initially reluctant) agrees to go and investigate. He eventually discovers that the Gaderene are fleeing their dying home-world and have, regrettably, settled on Earth as their replacement — and its inhabitants as their hosts.

If you like Pertwee reference points, tuck in. We’ve got highly placed duplicates (Spearhead From Space), alien parasites (The Mind Of Evil), monsters who just want a new home (Doctor Who And The Silurians), shifty companies (Colony In Space), a hard cut to the Doctor alone on an alien world (The Green Death), the Doctor showing a sudden interest in helping (The Dæmons), the Doctor getting into fights that probably would have required Terry Walsh (too many to mention but let’s go with The Curse Of Peladon), the Doctor piloting an outrageous vehicle (got to be Planet Of The Spiders) and to cap it off, a villain reveal that would have been somewhat of an exercise in nostalgia even in 1973.

There’s not a lot that feels new here, but to be honest that doesn’t feel like the assignment anyway. There are a few diversions of sorts. The nature of the Gaderene threat means that it’s not as simple as letting off five rounds rapid; you don’t want to hurt the approaching baddies because they’re real people underneath. This doesn’t exactly lead to a change in tactics for the Brigadier however, as the Doctor finds a way to incapacitate the brainwashed denizens before the Brig has to carry out Plan B. There’s another, slightly different Silurian-esque dilemma of an alien race that just wants to survive — although handy for us, they’re so destructive about it and they have so little time left that the Doctor doesn’t need to work out an alternative path for them. (You could do more with this and make it all a bit more Mac Hulke, but I suspect it’s not that sort of UNIT story — we’re not here to boo the military this week, it would defeat the point of being pleased to see them.)

There’s also that early scene of the Doctor finishing off his heroics on the planet Xanthos, which interestingly has occurred without Jo. Is this anything? She was very keen to get home at the end of the preceding story (Planet Of The Daleks, naturally) so perhaps she would have opted out of another TARDIS trip right away, and she does so explicitly in the next story (The Green Death), but given her reaction here of thinking that he might be gone forever, and briefly considering a life after UNIT with some degree of worry, I doubt she would have said no. The whole sequence mostly serves to provide an example of what not to do during a climactic scene later on; otherwise, it might have been an amusing way to make the book a bit longer. (It’s perhaps also meant to nudge us towards Jo’s impending departure, along with the moment where she rankles at being called “a good girl”, but it’s pretty thin stuff all the same. Dancing The Code has nothing to worry about.)

One reference-y area where Last Of The Gaderene perhaps needn’t have bothered is the Master. Turning up without much fanfare on P176, and then not making himself known to the Doctor and co. for another 90-odd pages (to the justifiably unimpressed response of “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in”), he continues his earlier tradition of feeling a bit shoehorned into somebody else’s plot. It’s perhaps significant that this is happening after Frontier In Space, making Last Of The Gaderene canonically the last Roger Delgado Pertwee-era story. It’s not much of a salve if you found Frontier disappointing, however; he turns up late, the two nemeses don’t spar very much, and there are no references to the fact that, the last time the Master saw him, the Doctor was apparently dying. The Master then has the kind of “wait, did he just die?” exit from this story that would quickly become tiresome in the 1980s, which becomes another thing not really commented upon here. He mostly seems to be here just to be here, perhaps to make it all seem a bit more like the more UNIT-heavy Season 8, back when he was in it more or less every week. It’s a shame when The Face Of The Enemy previously made such a satisfying meal of the character.

It’s perhaps easier to discuss the more unsatisfying specifics of Last Of The Gaderene because the positives are more general. It is, once again, very well written by Gatiss. He describes a ladybird as “Bright against his skin like a bead of blood.” He tells us that when the TARDIS is gone, “the empty space yawned like the dusty rectangle left after a painting has been removed from a wall.” He describes “Mr and Mrs Neesham’s little green sweet shop, tucked between two cottages like the filling in a sandwich.” It’s easy to imagine Gatiss packing in the acting and screenwriting lark to write jolly children’s books instead.

There are also moments of clever economy, like following up a meeting between the police chief and the villain by having another character notice “what he was sure was a police whistle, sounding feebly from somewhere inside,” which tells us more or less what happened there. And he keeps up a terrific pace — although, by contrast, not a lot seems to happen for much of it, as we slowly get all our key ingredients into place. A much built-up summer fete is important in the end, but hardly the set piece you might have been expecting. The chapters whiz by anyway.

I wonder if, on some level, Last Of The Gaderene really belonged to the Target range, and what we’ve got here is inevitably a bit longer than the best version of itself. Or perhaps that’s carrying the idea of Gatiss and his reverence for Terrance Dicks a bit too far. What it does well is embody an era of television. I don’t think it engages with its ideas in the most interesting ways possible, but it is nonetheless one of those books where you sense that it was all intentional: it’s here to make a certain impression and then speed off triumphant, probably in a Spitfire. If you yearn for teatime in 1973, your dinner’s ready.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #60 – Parallel 59 by Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#30

Parallel 59

By Natalie Dallaire & Stephen Cole

If you’re wondering what a typical Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion story looks like, Parallel 59 has some thoughts on that. We’re once again dropping hints about the ongoing development of Compassion, and the things troubling her; the Doctor still wants to nurture some camaraderie with his companions; Fitz continues to wonder if he’s the same person, or even a real person after what he went through in Interference; and Fitz also gets a life and settles down with a girlfriend.

That last one has happened a few times in general and now two books in a row, with the domesticity and the (occasional but not constant) first person narration and everything. Parallel 59 seems to have been a relatively late addition to fill a gap (via Pieces Of Eighth) and to his credit Steve Cole* makes all the appropriate allusions to Fitz’s similar experience in Frontier Worlds so that it sounds like it’s just one of those things that it all happened again. (*Natalie Dallaire is Cole’s sister. It sounds like Cole wrote most of the book. From POE again.) But the impact is inevitably lessened when it’s such a close repeat, like poor old Beltempest showing up with an inter-planetary snafu right after The Janus Conjunction had a creditable go at it.

That said, Fitz’s time in the strange world of Mechta is hands down the best thing in the book. A place used for recuperation before sending its convalescent citizens back to “Homeplanet” [sic], Mechta has an unusual, unearthly calm about it. No one needs to work very much, everything costs the same, there’s little excitement but the people are happy enough anyway. When it’s time to go you’re carted off to the wide world in a mysterious red taxi — and if that sets off your “something ain’t right” alarm, congratulations, you’ve encountered science fiction before.

Fitz doesn’t seem to have a job this time but he has plenty of larks. He quickly falls in with a group of friends and gets his end away (as if you had to ask) via a slightly creepy and very cheesy chat-up game on a tram. He has an affair with an older woman (Anya) and then gets true feelings for someone (Filippa); later he has another dalliance (Denna). No flies on Fitz this week. The Filippa portion of the story doesn’t really expand until it starts unravelling, by which time Anya is clinging more and more to his affections. Her husband, Nikol, runs a local conspiracy/freedom fighter group that aims to uncover the truth about Mechta. Fitz mostly just humours him for Anya’s sake, but being one of the TARDIS gang he soon begins putting in the hours to investigate. Towards the end of the story all he’s really interested in is making amends with Filippa, but it’s at this point that Mechta itself begins to twist and fall apart, dissolving into creepy hallucinations and unusual behaviours.

I think Parallel 59 just about overcomes the “we’ve been here before”-ness of a domestic Fitz by a) making it more prominent, b) making it not a work thing this time (he’s not here to achieve anything, he’s just waiting for rescue), c) not fridging his girlfriend again and d) letting him really sit with it all afterwards. Recovering in bed it occurs to Fitz that he needs to change, Scrooge-like; I’m not sure exactly what he means but playing fast and loose with people’s hearts might be it. He won’t be able to make a true go of it with Filippa, but we leave them in a surprisingly meaningful place, with the TARDIS butterfly room making a welcome reappearance. I’m fine with repeats like this in theory, just so long as they serve a purpose. Hopefully this one will.

As to the non-Fitz stuff, it gets off to a terrific start with the Doctor and Compassion hurtling through space in a claustrophobic escape capsule. Talk about starting your story late! I wondered if we were going to flash back to fill all of that in, but no, Cole/Dallaire commits to this and the story follows on from there. Kudos, as it creates a sense of momentum that comes in handy. (We later learn that the TARDIS landed on a space station/“Bastion”; Fitz and the TARDIS got separated and the other two had to get out of there fast.)

The capsule lands on Skale, a planet carved into different Parallels. “59” isn’t very friendly but from context we can assume that’s also true of the others. Skale exists in a general state of xenophobic paranoia, so you can guess how well the Doctor and Compassion are received. The Doctor is soon a prisoner (having charitably but incorrectly assumed that staying put during an escape attempt will denote innocence) and Compassion is soon hanging with the rebels.

It’s worth saying at this point that the whole authority vs rebels thing is not very clear. Parallel 59 is obviously a very strict and unhappy place, with things like enforced marriages and mandated birth rates, but it’s still not exactly fleshed out what it is they’re fighting against. There’s the Project, aka the reason for all those Bastions in orbit, but there’s a lot of secrecy around what all that’s in aid of. No one seems terribly bothered about the authoritarianism either, and when we meet someone working on the inside to aid the rebels, their methods are so casually murderous that it becomes difficult to see where they stand on any of it. The bulk of Parallel 59 just feels like tension and action by rote, people doing stuff loudly and with as much conviction as they can force.

Cole/Dallaire don’t seem all that invested in the world-building — we don’t even see the other Parallels — but they invest in the characters. A bugbear from Longest Day rears its head here, though: there’s too many of them. We’ve got multiple, mostly older upper-management types in the military (such as Dam, Narkompros and Terma), a few icy female officers with shifting loyalties (Yve, Jessen and Slatin), some lowly workers with notable quirks (Jedkah and Makkersvil), some general staff members (sorry, don’t remember); then there’s the whole rebellion side of things (including Rojin and Tod) and Fitz’s gang (the aforementioned ladies, plus Serjey and Low Rez). Cole/Dallaire do a good job of imbuing some or even most of these with nuances, but it’s a losing battle with so many of them, especially when Makkersvil just reads like Fitz 2.0, with the spotty romantic history and everything. Dam has quite an interesting neurosis about his arranged marriage, but for some reason he’s the only person on Skale that thinks about that custom at all. Narkompros is a hypochondriac (or is he?) and Terma is a jerk; both suffer horribly from “pointlessly intransigent authority figure” syndrome.

That’s most of the plot in a nutshell, people barking “alien saboteur!” at the Doctor, the bunch of boring morons. It’s here that Parallel 59 runs into another problem: the Doctor and Compassion don’t know what’s going on for most of it. (Fitz, isolated, stands even less chance of a handy info dump.) Neither the authority figures nor the rebels seem keen to fill in the Doctor or Compassion respectively, which helps keep up the suspense I suppose, but I think that comes at the expense of clear stakes. I’m guessing the reason for this is wanting the truth about Mechta to be a big surprise, but as the entire book hinges on what’s going on with that place and/or those Bastions I just ended up waiting to find out why any of this mattered. It’s a miscalculation that leaves most of the book marking time — admittedly at quite a lick, the pace being firmly set by that action-packed opening.

When we find out the truth it’s a mixed bag. Mechta is, as you may have guessed, an artificial construct: hundreds of people have their minds uploaded to it. This isn’t exactly a new concept but it’s one with legs. The Matrix came out not long before this (the book was written concurrently, okay!) and Doctor Who did something similar in Silence In The Library. It’s compellingly and creepily executed here.

Sadly though, we’re not done yet. While they’re in Mechta their bodies are also used in those “escape capsules” to form a sort of sensor net around the planet. They are also used remotely as bombs. Right. I found myself muttering “Whaaat” at some of that; it’s fairly cockamamie even for an SF novel to multi-purpose a high concept that way, and it’s a lot to take in so late in the book. (P192!) Impressively (or not, YMMV) Parallel 59 pulls yet another surprise out of its pockets by then having the much-scapegoated aliens show up after all and attack. This neatly galvanises all the Parallels, but again it’s so late in the game (P253!!!) that both the attack and the response feel like frenzied action housekeeping. Where were these definitive stakes during the rest of the book?

Your best bet while waiting for all of this to kick off is to follow the Doctor and Compassion, but Fitz is clearly king as far as the interesting stuff is concerned. The Doctor vamps well enough to keep from getting executed; I’m just sick of the old “we don’t believe you” routine. His attitude towards Compassion fluctuates at times. He can be desperately concerned about her, but also quick to shut her down, and happy to use her like a sonic screwdriver. Given his need for Compassion and Fitz to build a rapport in Frontier Worlds, he’s surprisingly poor at doing it himself here.

Compassion has been quietly building her part throughout these books and there’s more of that here — the Doctor openly worrying about what’s going on with her, her having strange dreams and feeling like the TARDIS is having an adverse effect on her — but there simply isn’t that much for her to do once she inadvertently destroys a medical scanner* and runs off with the rebels. (*She has one heart to the locally normal two, rendering her and not the Doctor the odd one out. This is one of the few very attempts to make this alien race at all distinct from humans.) Compassion is more of a grumpy plot device in Parallel 59, but to be fair that’s more feature than bug; like Seven Of Nine, she was written with tech enhancements that can move plots along, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. At least you can make something of the conflict between machine and humanity. We touch on that here.

Not having read anything else by Dallaire it’s perhaps inevitable that I mostly viewed this through the lens of Cole’s books. In that context it’s an improvement. While he continues to overpopulate the sidelines and doesn’t always get the most out of every idea, there are a few strong ones and there’s a firm eye on the ongoing, and even minor character stuff. It feels like we’re heading for an all-round excellent Steve Cole book at some point (maybe keep Natalie on speed dial?), and while Parallel 59 isn’t there yet it has enough going for it to rollick along nicely in the meantime.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #59 – Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#27

Corpse Marker

By Chris Boucher

It’s sequel time! I’m still finding it somewhat novel when BBC Books do these, as they’ve resisted the urge to make them a regular thing. Zeta Major and Divided Loyalties are the closest things so far to picking up where a TV story left off; otherwise it tends to be just returning elements, or revisited books.

If you are dubious about sequels then this one might win you over from the outset. Not only are we returning to The Robots Of Death, a prized Season 14 story, but Chris Boucher is back to write it. My only note of caution was that I didn’t enjoy his previous novel; I found Last Man Running a muddle of action over story. Not to worry though: whether Boucher was inspired by the link to his telly work or he’s just warmed to the theme of his second book, Corpse Marker is much more assured.

The Doctor and Leela are back on Kaldor. (The Doctor notes that “this looks disappointingly familiar”, which may or may not be authorial discomfort about sequels. Boucher also sets out a theme of being surprised by your surroundings, so I don’t think he’s just being cheeky here.) Uvanov, Toos and Poul are still around, and perhaps inevitably so are concerns about robots. There are assassin robots that look like people. There’s a prototype robot, somewhere, that’s so advanced it can share its programming with any other robot nearby. There is an Anti-Robot Front attacking robot factories, confusingly following the teachings of “Taren Capel”. (The maniacally pro-robot figure who died in the TV story.)

Much of this might be happening — just as lessons have not been learned — because the killer robot incident from the TV story was never publicised. That’s part of the general atmosphere on Kaldor, a world with information control and a severe wealth disparity between ruling families and slums. (This disparity, one character reminds us, is the work of the people and not the robots.) I suspect one of the reasons Boucher came back to this was the richness of Kaldor as a setting. We previously only knew it via the characters (and costumes!) on the Sandminer, but we get to expand on that here by spending time with the various groups, particularly the ARF. It’s clearly a subject that would continue to interest Boucher as he contributed to the Kaldor City audio series, which carried over some characters originated in this book.

Whilst it is satisfying to delve into the world of Kaldor, it’s perhaps more gratifying to revisit the old characters. Poul, originally played by David Collings (who narrates the audiobook) is in an even worse state than before. His robophobia is all-consuming, and so it should be given the circumstances. He no longer has a friendly robot for support — come to think of it, there are no almost-sentient “good guy” robots to be found here. (D84, you were too pure for this world.) Poul probably fares the least well of the old “Robots” gang, with his heightened mania giving way rather suddenly near the end to a more blissful amnesia; it’s a sort of inverse of his trajectory in the TV story. He provides a good example though of what Kaldor’s problems can drive people to.

Uvanov, played before with pompous grandeur by Russell Hunter (and then again in the audio series) absolutely lives up to his TV persona as he manipulates events, keeps secrets and grasps for power. Much of the plot ends up spinning around Uvanov, and fortunately he’s dynamic to be around. He makes an unusual scene partner with the Doctor, as Uvanov is familiar with him, doesn’t necessarily like him but still aids him where he can. (Whilst plotting to steal his TARDIS, of course.) It’s through Uvanov that we get our clearest look at how Kaldor’s First Families operate.

Then there’s Toos, who has evolved the most from her TV appearance. Apparently gone is her tendency to panic, perhaps because of what she has been through. She’s virtually unflappable now, whilst leaning even more into a sense of decadence and style that feels recognisably like Pamela Salem. She demonstrates for us the sort of casual dreadfulness of the Kaldor rich, referring to herself at one point as “too beautiful and far too rich to care.” (This is at least partly a front: during a power outage we’re privy to her thoughts, which immediately head for doom. “She could hear them coming and she could feel them reaching and she could feel them closing round and she wanted to die immediately, now before it could happen, now before it would happen.” This repetition-as-a-sign-of-instability is something Boucher plays on throughout the book, especially with poor Poul: “That could never happen now. Once but never again. It could never happen again.”)

It’s a sign of how well drawn and well cast these characters were that they can so easily come alive in print. This certainly helps, as a fair chunk of the novel is spent following one of them instead of the Doctor or Leela. Never one to waste something useful, Boucher also pulls in a Blake’s 7 character: Carnell, the “psycho-strategist” with the piercing blue eyes who fancied Servalan. (He’s another one who returns in the Kaldor City series.) If it feels like Boucher is raiding his idea cupboard, just be glad he’s sticking to the good ones.

Rest assured though, the Doctor and Leela get plenty to do. The Doctor has some hair-raising encounters with dozens of freshly made cyborgs who follow him around, as well as a Terminatore-esque fight with one of them later, a helicopter crash and a one-on-one with the dangerous robot at the centre of it all. Boucher is quick to have the Doctor highlight the easily-led quality of robots, and he echoes this in a thought about warriors, extrapolating nicely the dangers of control and groupthink: “When he emerged again no one had moved an inch as far as he could tell. He made a mental note to be careful what he told these people to do and not to do.” / “That was one of the arguments he had against narrowly specific training; it tended to make behaviour narrowly specific.” / “When he had realised that he must be careful of what he said to those newly formed robots he had met in the hatchling dome, he thought, he should have made a mental note to be careful when speaking to the humans as well.” The Doctor here is reassuringly witty and only a little bit condescending about Leela. (“There was no sign either of the fighting [Leela] claimed to have heard, and the uncharitable thought struck the Doctor that she was probably running around the place trying to start some.”)

Perhaps unsurprisingly (although I mustn’t take it for granted), Leela shines. Following the gauntlet that was Last Man Running, we find the warrior companion more cautious this time, actively trying to avoid fighting when she knows she will win (“They were stupid and disgusting but was that reason enough to kill them?”) and encouraging a fellow fighter not to use lethal force if possible. That doesn’t mean she’s a pacifist — circumstances push her to violence several times, and she’s unashamedly proficient at it, particularly when fighting off cannibals in a slum. But you sense thoughtfulness in her approach, as well as a commitment to the still-present gulf between her understanding of the world and the Doctor’s. (“Was it possible that the TARDIS had miraculously brought them back to a time before the death of Taren Capel? No. Her every instinct told her it was not possible. When they fought him they did not know him for what he was. If this was before then how would they not have known? She must ask the Doctor about this.”) She feels like a character still growing, which makes sense as the novel is specifically placed after Last Man Running.

I’ve seen some comments on the overall writing in Corpse Marker being more like that of a novelisation. I think that’s rather uncharitable. There are plenty of occasions where Boucher uses prose to subtly hint at the mental state of a character, like those strange little repetitions (“That must be what it was. He was losing his mind — that must be what it was”), and there are some neatly omniscient hints at what’s really going on or of things to come, which make the story feel like it’s happening on a bigger canvas. (“No one other than Captain Lish Toos herself must be allowed to know that her assassin was not human.”) There’s some unashamedly poetic description too (on a robot killing spree: “killing like murderous children, murderous like parents killing”) and even a bit of that distinctly Boucher-esque weirdness viz a world-building hint that Kaldor is in a cycle of robot uprisings that they’ve all just forgotten about.

Not to lift one book up just by putting down another, but I’d say there’s a general improvement here over Last Man Running. The earlier book had some ideas that might have worked better on screen, such as a jungle segueing into a forest, and both of those being eerily quiet. There’s a great bit here with Leela examining her surroundings whilst pretending to be asleep, which is something that really works best in prose. Then after she catches her captors unaware and breaks one of their arms, we cut away, and when we return they’re all eating together — which immediately demonstrates the respect she’s earned without having to laboriously point it out. I don’t think Boucher is ever noticeably just transcribing action.

Perhaps the only bum note for me was the ending, which seems in too much of a hurry and doesn’t fully satisfy. The immediate trouble with the robots is over, but there’s such a mess already that it seems optimistic to rule out more of it. The ARF is exposed as something of a sham, but not in such a way that any of them actually learn from it. Uvanov and Carnell respectively win and lose at their manipulations, but you get the sense that the problems of Kaldor haven’t even blinked, so has a great deal of this even mattered? Perhaps that’s why there was room to create further (audio) stories. I definitely felt as though Boucher was quite happy diving into and expanding this world, but then maybe someone said “don’t forget it’s only 280 pages” so he quickly fashioned a stopping point rather than truly rounding it off.

If you liked The Robots Of Death then there’s a lot to like here, although Corpse Marker is not the same kind of Agatha Christie-ish thriller as before. Boucher is like a kid in a candy store with the setting and characters, and the plot is complex, but admittedly without time to process its conclusions it does leave a bit to be desired. It has a little of that Boucher-esque lack of clarity in places, but otherwise it feels like a leap forward for the author. It’s a good example of the range, and I’m glad it’s among the (too few) BBC and Virgin books that got a flashy reprint in recent years.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #58 – Frontier Worlds by Peter Anghelides

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#29

Frontier Worlds

By Peter Anghelides

We’re now a few books into the new normal, or “minus Sam/plus Compassion”, but there hasn’t been much in the way of normality. After the pyrotechnics of Interference came the highly experimental The Blue Angel; after that came a lot of lore-heavy histrionics in The Taking Of Planet 5. I don’t object to books taking big swings, but doing it three books in a row has been a bit exhausting.

Enter Frontier Worlds which — phew — is more down to Earth. The Doctor, Fitz and Compassion are investigating strange experiments on the planet Drebnar, although that’s secondary to the planet having dragged the TARDIS down there. It’s one of those that starts in media res, and it’s one of those where they’ve gone undercover with jobs and everything. I love that feeling of really mucking in and investigating; the New Adventures crushed this when Roz and Chris were around, and Fitz and Compassion make a similar impact here.

Fitz, as “Frank Sinatra”, has an office job and all the internecine annoyances that come with it; he also has a steady girlfriend, Alura. Compassion, or “Nancy Sinatra” (guess who chose the names) is going even more undercover as a somewhat bubbly office girl, keeping a few flirtations on the boil just to find out more. The Doctor wants the two of them working together; it would be beneficial, perhaps especially for Compassion, for these guys to get along.

Right away this is my favourite thing about Frontier Worlds. Now, I think it’s unfair to consider the absence of certain “Doctor Who companion” beats as a failing; the more of these I read, the more I realise that stuff like “spend an episode bedding in the new companion” is mostly a new series invention, and it’s wrong to take it as read that it will be in old books or episodes. Nevertheless, we haven’t had this stuff with Compassion, who joined the TARDIS more or less between books, and I am reading these books with a post-new series brain, so it’s just doomed to irritate me a bit when it’s not there. What can you do. (You’d think I would learn, since we also skipped it with Fitz. And as for Sam…!)

Whatever the reason behind it, Frontier Worlds seems to recognise the room for improvement here, so it spends time on the leads. We get gobs of first person prose with Fitz, which is immediately the sort of no-brainer creative decision that ought to become standard operating procedure. He’s disarming, hilarious and vulnerable, buoying the text nicely where otherwise it might threaten to become procedural. When things with Alura take a shocking turn his cheerful outlook is then doused in cold water, leading to at least one act of, if not revenge, at least a brutal act of not trying terribly hard to help the guilty party. “Fitz suffers” already feels like an EDA trope, but I think this book handles it well, using it to show another side of the character.

We don’t get that close to Compassion — that’s sort of her thing — but after highlighting some of her physical peculiarities in The Taking Of Planet 5, here we focus on her emotional ones, the ways in which she does or (mostly) doesn’t relate to those around her. Some of the best stuff here is a now combat-hardened Compassion reassuring Fitz of his worth in this team. Describing a glance at the stars: “I’d see clouds and stars and vapour trails. The Doctor would see scientific classifications and animal shapes. You’d probably point out that the only reason we could see those things while we were staring up at the sky was because someone else had stolen our tent during the night.” That later turns out to have been a knowing pep talk and not wholly sincere, and that speaks to how absent Compassion is from Fitz’s idea of normal — but it still makes clear that she can, albeit academically, care about her friends. She overall seems to regard this business as a mission to execute. That’s not a new archetype for a companion; her ease with violence puts her in a similar bracket to Leela, for one. But it’s an approach that works, and keeps things moving.

I also liked the way Anghelides made use of their shared physical history. Both Compassion and Fitz have been replicated by the Remote; neither is the person they once were, with Fitz benefiting from a more nuanced set of memories stored in the TARDIS to make him whole again, or at least as close as he can get. Anghelides is right to underline this as a neurosis for Fitz; can he ever be sure who he is? Compassion, having not undergone such a drastic flip-flop, naturally feels more comfortable with her “remembered” self, and rejects the Doctor’s insinuation that she could grow more into the shape of the person she was.

All of this dovetails nicely with the plot, which concerns an alien method of “regeneration” with wildly dangerous side-effects that can ostensibly extend your lifespan. The question of whether the people undergoing these changes are really still themselves afterwards is an effective parallel for the Remote history of Compassion and Fitz (whose shared, too-perfect DNA also figures into the plot), not to mention the Doctor, who knows a thing or two about the Ship of Theseus/Trigger’s broom.

Perhaps that underlying echo explains his rather dishevelled characterisation in Frontier Worlds. Early on Fitz clocks that he “wasn’t like a kid any more”, although admittedly that was following a death-defying fall down a snowy cliff and chase that has left him ragged and bloodied. The Doctor in this seems heightened and vulnerable, just as Fitz does, at one point coming close to a painful vivisection and only escaping thanks to bluffing for time and rushing his aggressor at the last moment. His best laid plans don’t end up happening thanks to Fitz and Compassion’s imperfection, but he manages to steer things right anyway. The whole network of trying to stay one step ahead and then having to wing it speaks, hopefully, to the sort of dynamic we can expect from these three: smart and competent, but woolly enough to remain interesting.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the focus on character dynamics comes at the expense of the plot. That’s not me segueing into “the plot’s bad actually” — more an acknowledgement that there isn’t a huge amount of it here. Sometimes that’s fine. Frontier Worlds is definitely an example of having just enough plot to hang the cool stuff on. And there’s plenty of that, with the aforementioned death-defying jump being just the first example. There’s a lot of memorable action and violence in this, from body horror (characters literally shedding their skins to be reborn) to more general horror (a man walking into an industrial shredder; later, a man falling into a combine harvester) to action movie fare (snow bike chases; a struggle to escape a cable car in a lightning storm). As unpleasant as it can be, it’s brilliantly clear to visualise, particularly where a lot of it takes place in snowy vistas. I would bet David A. McIntee enjoyed reading this one.

For all of that though, there are effective smaller moments. There’s the Doctor’s bookended visits to a man with no short term memory, trapped in a sense of panic whenever his wife leaves the room; Fitz’s inability to break it off with Alura for the sake of the mission, and then his heartbreak when that decision is taken away from him; and there’s all the silly ground-level annoyance of office politics, with “Frank” and “Nancy” navigating local irritants and arranging business deals. You get a convincing sense of how well they’ve integrated here, and at least some sense of how an office job on Drebnar differs from one on Earth.

I’d be lying if I said I raced through Frontier Worlds, but I suspect that’s more on my touch-and-go attention span than the book itself. This is a decent (if trad) story very competently told, heightened when it needs to be and making the most of its lower stakes by making the regular characters the stars. I doubt it dazzles many readers as much as the preceding books, but for whatever reason it’s right up my alley.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #57 – Divided Loyalties by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#26

Divided Loyalties

By Gary Russell

Oh boy, here we go. I was looking forward to this one in an admittedly morbid sort of way. Divided Loyalties is regarded as a bit of a stinker in some circles and there is a certain catharsis to reading that sort of book — or reviewing it, at least.

It would be refreshing to say that everyone’s just being mean and it’s brilliant actually, just as it would be rudely amusing to say that it’s as bad as the worst reviews make out. I’m going to be a pain and say that it’s neither of those things exactly — although Divided Loyalties still isn’t very good.

It’s on arguably shaky ground to begin with just by being a sequel to The Celestial Toymaker. This is all subjective, natch, but I find that story’s structure rather unsatisfying: the original Toymaker story is essentially ON, <however many random games you wish to include>, OFF, with little story or character progression in between. It could be four episodes long or forty. The same pattern was employed in another (unproduced) Brian Hayles script, The Queen Of Time, as well as in (to much stronger effect) The Mind Robber, which at least had the sense to mine storytelling itself for its random diversions, paying off quite spectacularly by mashing it all together at the end.

Gary Russell mostly avoids this problem. Divided Loyalties does the perilous if-you-lose-you-die thing, of course, but not until fairly late in the (ahem) game, at least where the TARDIS crew are concerned. We only see brief snatches of it beforehand, with an unassuming family kidnapped for the games and a man forced to play a giant form of Snakes & Ladders.

Rather than just play games all the time, most of the book is concerned with the characters playing them. Gary Russell is a past master at continuity links, which can be a slippery slope to just writing fan fiction, but if he’s going to put that list-friendly knowledge to practical use then I don’t really see an issue. He’s done it before: the strongest moments in The Scales Of Injustice are about where the Brigadier and Liz find themselves, and those ideas are genuinely informed by Russell’s fan card. A similarly concerted effort is made in Divided Loyalties to mine the lives of Tegan, Nyssa and Adric in order to Say Something about their place in the show, resulting in a sort of line being drawn under much of their Season 19 angst before setting off on the relatively low key Black Orchid. Kudos for trying, quite honestly.

Does the book still groan under the weight of continuity? Well, yes, but if you must mention Tegan’s aunt (Logopolis), uncle (The Awakening) and cousins (Arc Of Infinity) in order to make the point that she might miss the rest of her father’s life, and if you use that to put all her “Take me back to Heathrow!” histrionics into perspective, then I think that deserves a pass for character development.

Slightly less convincing is the repeated underlining of Nyssa’s trauma re the Master usurping her father’s body, and the Doctor failing to do anything about it. One of those opportunities for character development that’s missed by the original show and conspicuous by its absence when you put these characters into full length novels, it makes sense to address it, and effort is made so that it will be germane to the plot… but is it enough? I’d say not really. It’s enough trauma to fuel a novel, quite frankly, whereas here it’s only one item on the list; later on when we’re meekly told “Whatever did or didn’t happen between [Nyssa] and the Doctor regarding Tremas and the Master, it was dealt with”, it feels more like a “tell” than a “show” solution to the problem. Save it for a novel that has the Master in it, perhaps. (People who’ve read the book: hold that thought.)

Least convincing is what it does with Adric. As the book goes on and the mind games ramp up, with the three companions all seeing visions that somewhat displace their confidence in the Doctor, Adric is suggested to be trying his best to fit in and his intelligence is treated as unequivocal: the Toymaker himself is genuinely impressed. The early parts, however, include some of the most embarrassing fnar-fnar-nobody-likes-this-character takedowns I’ve ever seen in print. Adric is “someone who thought green and yellow pyjamas were the height of cool fashion”; he is “sarcastic, but unfunny … lazy and workshy and, above all, forgets to bathe regularly”; he is curious out of “an innate need to be nosy rather than because of any genuine intellectual advancement he might achieve”; he says things “pointlessly”, he “waddles”, he has a “snub nose”, he opens doors without thinking which causes the Doctor to roll his eyes (“[Adric] was all smiles, completely forgetting that it was his pathetic need to explore that had got them into this mess”), and he butts in “unhelpfully” with things like “‘I’m an orphan, too,’ said Adric, presumably noticing that he hadn’t yet become the centre of attention.”

Some of this is perhaps meant to indicate Tegan’s particular distaste for him, although to be honest that reflects almost as nastily on her as it does on him. And an effort is arguably made to walk it back by highlighting what Adric is trying to do. Either way, it’s loathsome to read. I remember starting Divided Loyalties years ago as a teen and giving up shortly after the author made an honest to god effort to canonise Adric having noticeable BO. I mean, what are we doing here? This is fan fiction of the worst kind: the sort of “you know it’s true!” convention banter that engages with the perception of characters and not with the substance. Matthew Waterhouse would probably like a word. The editor certainly should have.

None of this, however, is likely to top the proverbial Things People Don’t Like About Divided Loyalties list. For this, we must turn to the middle of the book, where the TARDIS crew still don’t consciously know about the Toymaker — he has appeared to them in visions but, for some reason, blanked their memories of it afterwards. A sleep-inducing drug is used and the Doctor remembers something that helpfully informs the rest of the plot. Specifically his youth on Gallifrey, which we then enjoy for 60 pages. You thought the companions’ back stories were a bit heavy on the continuity? Oh, sweet summer child.

The important bit is that as a young man on Gallifrey the Doctor made an ill-considered trip to the Toymaker’s realm which cost him two of his friends, one of whom in a way that influenced the Toymaker over centuries. This is the problem that now needs to be resolved.

I’m not a fan of hastily-introduced prequel facts because you can’t fake the mileage — it’s all very well him saying “I think about that fateful mistake every single day!” now but he never mentioned it on telly, did he? (You would think it might come up in, say, The Celestial Toymaker.) In its defence, this does set up the book’s plot… but then that’s a bit of a bootstrap defence, since the plot’s reliance on it is entirely the author’s choice.

But oh, the rest of it. The Doctor doesn’t just decide to go there: first he hangs around with his friends, the Deca, a group of 10 mildly insufferable Oxbridge-in-space students that includes the Doctor, Koschei (the Master), Mortimus (the Monk), Ushas (the Rani), Magnus (the War Chief) and Drax (he isn’t cool enough to have two names). So not only did all of the renegade Time Lords boringly already know each other at school — they were all in the same friend group. Most of their heroic-or-villainous attributes are handily already more or less on record, with the Doctor in particular having such rampant wanderlust that he gets thrown out of the Academy for it. Again, this is a pitfall of prequels, and it’s pure fan-brain in action: you take a sequence of events and make it destiny, actually, because everything must fit into a sequence. (See also an embarrassing in-universe reference to “Tremas” being an anagram of “Master,” and that apparently being a sign of inevitability.) You just don’t need this stuff.

The rest of the Gallifrey section runs the gamut from things that probably need to be there for world-building (there’s lashings of Lungbarrow material including Badger) to things crowbarred in because somebody mentioned them once (the hermit who showed the Doctor “the daisiest daisy”) to things that arguably break the show if they show up too soon (the Doctor and friends learn about Daleks and Cybermen). Certainly the feel of a book like Lungbarrow is nowhere to be found here, as we are far more invested in cameoing characters like Azmael than delving into the atmosphere of the place. I’m only amazed that when Russell makes a point of saying the Toymaker’s features “reminded the Doctor of one of the lecturers back at Prydon Academy” he somehow stops short of saying it’s the one played by the same actor. About the only thing we’re not being abjectly fanwankerish about here is the TV story this is a sequel to, which is mostly present in iconography only; I don’t know if that’s Gary Russell showing restraint or just a case of there not being anything useful to draw from — see, perhaps, my objection to its arbitrary ON-OFF games.

The key issue for me is its hyping up the specialness of the Doctor and his desire to leave Gallifrey, rather than letting it be a gradual resistance to his people’s principles. It feels like flatlining a character arc to say, he was always this. But let’s be honest, the whole thing is a massive indulgence. And really, what’s it doing slap bang in the middle of a novel? It doesn’t do the pace any favours: the Toymaker’s mostly been dropping unnecessarily cryptic hints up to this point (if he wants the Doctor so badly then why not just get on with it?), and then we take a whole fifth of the book out just to back-fill continuity. By the time we arrive at the actual plot with all the characters apprised of the facts it’s nearly home time.

I haven’t yet mentioned the plot particulars, but to be honest they’re not very arresting. The reclusive planet Dymok has gone radio silent; the orbiting station Little Boy II (a somewhat crass allusion to Nagasaki) is where the Doctor and co turn up, and they’re only too happy to help investigate. The crew, in defiance of Gary Russell’s usual writing style, don’t spend every waking hour sniping at each other, but there’s not much else to say about them. (There’s plenty of names, but that just gives us some useful losers for the games later on.) When some of them arrive on Dymok they find a people perpetually asleep; their dreams fuel the Toymaker, who we learn (in part during the Gallifrey continuity dump) is the Guardian of Dreams. The Doctor’s intrusion all those years ago is finally wearing off and the Toymaker needs his help to survive. And/or a new host, which naturally will be the Doctor. Cue the games, at long last.

Despite taking all that time out to set it up, there is a lot of explaining still to do around the Toymaker and his schemes. There’s also a lot of explaining to do around the Observer, a tangential figure with his own stake in events, and his schemes. The mind games affecting the companions are due in part to both of these figures, and the goalposts for what they’re actually trying to achieve move as all the explainifying goes on. To be honest, I just started nodding along by the end. The games — surreal exercises where people turn into giant chess pieces etc — ultimately feel like a minor concern, and certainly they don’t come alive as much in print as they would do on screen. The stakes, as far as the Doctor’s old friends are concerned, feel inevitably rushed since we only just met them. (Millennia, in particular, barely features.) The conclusion is rather hazy on this front.

There is some good use of the Toymaker here — I’m thinking of his mind-reading, which basically means picking up on the third-person prose happening all around him — but I did wonder if Russell could have gone further with a metaphysical character like that in a book setting. (Should this one be more like Conundrum?) I don’t know if I’d really call it a strong use of the Toymaker character overall, but then there isn’t much to go on. Making him the “Guardian of Dreams” seems like a reach? I don’t remember dreams featuring heavily in his one TV appearance. Nor in The Nightmare Fair, the cancelled 80s sequel that Gary Russell nevertheless bothers to segue into at the end of this.

It is, surprisingly, quite a good one for the Doctor, or at least for the incarnation we’re seeing here. The Fifth Doctor tends to be about as imposing as the celery he insists on wearing, but he’s pleasingly no-nonsense here, at one point pushing down an antagonist’s gun with a finger. Russell works in some authentically Davison-y “hmmm!”s, as well as incorporating the half-moon glasses from Frontios; perhaps they’re a talisman of Good Davison Doctoring. Russell is a bit less successful writing the “prequel” Doctor; obviously I’ve got my objections to his character arc and goodness knows to all that fanwank as well, but the actual character isn’t really distinct from the Davison one we’re seeing elsewhere. (Both do “hmmm!” and “my dear” at points.) It definitely feels like a stretch to put William Hartnell on the cover, even if canonically that is who it would be.

It might be less frustrating if Divided Loyalties had been a complete write-off, but there’s some real intent here to make something of the continuity (where the companions are concerned) and to do something slightly different (where the Toymaker is concerned). The choice to spend a lot of pages tying up plot points both pertinent and pointless is a millstone, however, weighing down any goodwill to the rest of it and effectively removing any sense of momentum. In the end, Divided Loyalties plays itself.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #56 – The Taking Of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#28

The Taking Of Planet 5

By Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Things are looking up for the Eighth Doctor Adventures. A range of books with much to recommend, they nevertheless often find themselves in ruts, usually consisting of visits to ill-fated colony worlds or, if Sam Jones is around, the nearest hospital. There’s a definite sense post-Interference that this will no longer do, and quite right. The scale of storytelling is much grander all of a sudden. You can’t move for all the ambition flying around.

This has its downsides. I found The Blue Angel all too pleased with itself and apparently keen to keep its genius out of reach of the reader. I felt like my time had been wasted. The Taking Of Planet 5 isn’t quite so obscure, but there is still that sense of authors trying really hard to prove how clever they are. I’m genuinely glad that there seems to be a renewed mission statement at BBC Books — be bigger, grander, don’t be afraid to get complicated — but I wonder if they’ve hit the accelerator a little too hard.

Once again we’re playing with ideas and entities established by Lawrence Miles (they didn’t pay that guy enough), and it’s not just him. The Doctor is intrigued by the apparently real existence of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Elder Things” so he takes Fitz and Compassion back to Earth’s pre-history to investigate. Here he finds Time Lords from his own future (Miles’s War In Heaven from Alien Bodies) masquerading as Elder Things after killing all the real ones. (Or, spoiler alert, the “real” ones.) They have a plan to help win their war, but this is in jeopardy because the Celestis (estranged Time Lord splinter group, also Alien Bodies) have infiltrated their group, hoping to usurp the plan for themselves. To make things worse, the two Celesti agents don’t share the same agenda. Meanwhile, 12 million years in the future, an Antarctic base in 1999 is investigating the fallout from what will happen here. Compassion has somehow straddled the two time periods.

It’s definitely complicated, and it’s not made any easier by all the characters being in disguise. The Time Lords look like blobby eldritch horrors, although that’s not their normal appearance; the Celestis look bizarre in their own way, but (when they’re not casually making themselves two-dimensional) they’re disguised as Time Lords disguised as eldritch horrors — actually, both are disguised as the same one. In the 1999 portion of the story one of the scientists is secretly a Time Lord agent, and pretty soon another one is a Celesti in disguise, killing and copying a little like The Thing.

Navigating all this can be tricky, especially when the Celestis are called “One” and “Two” and are sharing the same disguise. It’s harder still without a lot to get your teeth into character-wise. Both groups investigating this site either side of 12 million years, the Time Lords and the humans, could do with more definition.

The Time Lords are split into veterans and newborns, with the varying levels of experience that implies; their leader Xenaria has a certain no-nonsense attitude that comes across well, subordinate Holsred is quite likeable, but the rest could just as easily be random names generated as the novel went along. They believe the Doctor to be a general from their own ranks pretty much just because he said so, which is great as an example of the doctor’s ability to take (or fake) authority, but does rather diminish them as a serious concern. They’re all a bit silly, albeit knowingly so: busy people encumbered with tentacles.

The humans are worse. The Taking Of Planet 5 has quite an irreverent sense of humour, which is perhaps another carry-over from Lawrence Miles (he treats this sort of universe-bothering weirdness much the same, even in Interference), but it manifests rather awkwardly at times, particularly in 1999. Pretty much the only thing going for the humans character-wise is that McCarthy, an American woman, is fat, something the book finds very amusing. (“Luckily her butt was big enough to absorb most of the impact as she hit the ground.” Oof.) The rest all snap at each other or, where men and women are concerned, boringly lust after one another. The most interesting one isn’t human. There is indeed a joke to be made about whether you’d notice if these guys had been bodysnatched. You might hope to latch onto these scenes for their contribution to the plot, but nothing very interesting is happening in the 1999 part of the story, other than explaining how Compassion got there or why there’s a big hole in the dig site — things that, once revealed, are really more technical explanations given than great mysteries solved.

That’s the book’s main issue for me: a lot of it feels academic. That’s not to say it doesn’t have interesting ideas. The faked existence of characters from H.P. Lovecraft (and by extension, the ability to manifest any literary nonsense as real) is an obvious story goldmine, but the creatures are dead by the time we arrive and the device is hardly used again, very much damp-squibbing the Doctor’s assertion that “we’d better be prepared to meet anything. Anything at all.” The Time Lord plan is quite grand, involving the release of an ancient horror that might doom us all etc, but it rests entirely on close familiarity with a Classic story that is itself barely represented here. Granted, it’s safe to assume that sort of nerd pedigree in the readership — who else are these books aiming at? — but the casual way said story is invoked leaves us without any of its original legwork or sense of danger.

Then you have the Celesti plan — or plans I suppose, oy — which entirely concerns their headquarters, Mictlan. (A weird Hell analogue that is mysteriously falling apart.) Quite apart from why the reader should care about a place this fundamentally unpleasant, the existence or destruction of Mictlan is neither here nor there for most of the characters, besides One and Two. And heck, even those two feel differently about it. Blow it up, don’t blow it up. Ehh. (You can see how this will figure into the War In Heaven arc, so I’m willing to concede it will be interesting. But right now do the Doctor, Fitz or Compassion give much of a stuff either way? Not really. Should we, if they don’t?)

The best we’ve got in terms of stakes is general suggestiveness about the wider story arc(s), but for obvious reasons none of that pays off here. The War In Heaven doesn’t noticeably budge, although you can see how the removal of Mictlan might matter to all that. As to the other plan, it probably would have been a bad idea to try to control Evil From The Dawn Of Time #numbers anyway — it places the entire universe at risk to even try — but hey ho, they’re prevented from doing so because the Doctor is around to course correct, which is another thing that makes the Time Lords look like unthinking idiots for even attempting it. Still, this kind of thing suggests a way that a war in the distant future can affect the here and now. Considering the Doctor would rather not know about any of it, that’s probably the only way we’re going to integrate it into the EDAs.

Probably the most compelling thing about The Taking Of Planet 5 is another little ongoing Easter egg hunt, viz, what’s going on with Compassion? Fitz and the Doctor haven’t forgotten about her ease with piloting TARDISes in The Blue Angel, and we add to that a strange ability to make use of the signals around her and make inexplicable, powerful sounds that control her surroundings. Her personality is still a little on the rudimentary side — unemotional yet bitchy, a sci-fi favourite — but the authors are all in with the peculiarities of this ex-Remote person. She’s utterly unfazed by her wrench across 12 million years, and quickly falls into a sort of Doctor-companion role with the secret Time Lord, albeit both of them are a bit less friendly than the duos we’re used to. I still think it’s weird that the books skipped her addition to the crew, but there’s some back-filling of a sort here: the Doctor considers “whether letting her join him in the TARDIS had been the solution to her problems”, suggesting there had been a thought process there, and when Compassion thinks she’s stuck on Earth she thinks how “[she] could have hoped to travel for longer, but Earth would have to do for the immediate future”, telling us she actually wants (or wanted) to do this. Hey, it’s just nice to have it confirmed. Anyway, apart from that we’re engaging with the interesting things about her, which from past experience is not something to take for granted.

The Doctor and Fitz fare less well. The Doctor is a bit of a rough sketch in this one, with a “goldfish attention span and constant energy”. Between his not-trying-all-that-hard subterfuge with the blobby Time Lords and his getting caught up in a lot of TARDIS action near the end, he has a tendency to fade into the background of the plot, at one point ceding what feels like Doctorly action to that guy in 1999. (He even has an equivalent sonic screwdriver!) I liked the bit where he sympathised with the terrible evil thing and considered going back to rescue it one day.

Fitz has never been friendlier or, in all honesty, less useful to the plot than he is here, but he’s a delight to be around; highlights of his activities include an arguably sexual encounter with an Elder Thing-disguised Celesti, because Fitz gonna Fitz. He’s mostly here to bluntly and repeatedly ask what’s going on, which feels like something I ought to be critical of but to be honest this time I was relieved to hear it. Even the Doctor at one point remarks that “It’s all so confusing I could do with explaining it to myself.”

I wonder if the mixture of ambitious-bordering-on-convoluted scheming and the occasional simple restating of facts is a hint of the cowriting process between Bucher-Jones and Clapham. See also, the helpful (I mean it!) recaps of how Fitz became Kode and then Fitz again, what Compassion’s deal is, and even a whiff of how The Blue Angel came about and where it’s left the Doctor emotionally. Maybe that was all done by one author or the other or both, but I think in mixing it up The Taking Of Planet 5 keeps just on the right side of confusing. It doesn’t help with the general sprawling state of it as a piece of drama, but at least you’ve got plenty to think about.

A last thing to mention would be the general jolly nerdiness of the thing. Obviously there’s the geeking out about Lovecraft, which is mostly lost on me as I haven’t read any. (See also White Darkness.) There’s an obvious debt to a certain 70s story, although as mentioned that’s not handled all that well. The stuff I liked most was the sprinkling of references, something I’m normally immune to but in the context of a big complicated event, and with the general sense of humour employed, it adds a certain levity to an at times stodgy book. There are nods to things as disparate as zygma energy, Karfel, Morlox, Stangmoor Prison, Raston Warrior Robots, Ogri and D-Mat guns. There’s a pre-emptive puncturing of the mysterious Enemy of the Time Lords: “They’ll probably be terribly disappointing. With my luck it’ll turn out to be Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, with a big stick.” The plot manages to explain (although did it need explaining?) the way the people on Delphon communicate with their eyebrows, as well as the way the Tersuruns communicate with a less subtle bodily function. (The Curse Of Fatal Death is canon!) There are oodles of references to looms, helping to settle that debate, as well as a brief mention of Tehke, a deity who’d turn up in the final New Adventure co-written by Mark Clapham two months after this. (Nice to see a bit of Virgin cross-promotion. All friends here.) And on the less meta or piss-taking side there’s also the casual suggestion that the Doctor’s poor piloting in the early years of Who was a deliberate effort to avoid the Time Lords. Head-canon for sure, but I’ll allow it.

I think all of that mild indulgence helped ground The Taking Of Planet 5 for me during its bigger indulgences — a knowingly fuzzy plot with tons of moving parts that all leans on Importance To The Arc(s). I was rarely hooked but I made it through quite painlessly. Saying that, this now makes three Important And Slightly Difficult books in a row. I appreciate the jump in ambition but it’s starting to get a bit stuffy in here. Does every book need to be a massive mind-boggler?

5/10