Doctor Who: The BBC Books #26 – Placebo Effect by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#13
Placebo Effect
By Gary Russell

This one sounds like a good time if you sum it up fast enough. You’ve got those fearsome parasitic space dwellers, the Wirrrn [sic: we’re doing three r’s to follow the Ark In Space novelisation]; you’ve got the Foamasi, oddly good-humoured space criminals known for squeezing their bulky frames into human disguises (they should totally sue the Slitheen); and you’ve got the Space Olympics as a backdrop. Two random green monsters getting into it at a jolly celebration? Sounds mad, I’m all for it.

Sadly that germ never blossoms. There’s a lot going on in Placebo Effect and fun doesn’t make it to the top of the list.

For starters it’s one of those Doctor Who novels with an oversaturated cast of characters, which can make it difficult to settle down and/or get invested and/or even follow what’s going on. At one point we’re introduced to a man named Carrington whom I fully assumed we’d met before, but it turned out I was confusing him with Cartwright and/or Carruthers. (See also Ethelredd and Eldritch. Maybe keep an eye on the alliteration?) Or perhaps I was mixing him up with the three other businessmen who, by page 39 when Carrington first shows up, had all (like Carrington) been introduced to us while talking to their secretaries.

Besides these kinds of awkward pile-ups there are separate gangs of Foamasi working independently, there’s a religious order with a large membership most of whom don’t do very much, there’s a whole contingent of royal aides with their own simmering office politics, and a race of actual clones working for several of the aforementioned slightly identikit businessmen. This is a story in which identities are often in question, because anyone might turn out to be a Foamasi or a Wirrrn. It seems counter-productive to need reminding who the hell people are in the first place.

You might think all of this uncertainty would elicit some paranoia, The Thing-style, but that’s another (ahem) thing: the plot doesn’t integrate the Wirrrn well enough to build momentum. Let’s forget for a moment that we can see one on the cover and read their name in the blurb: it’s still the book’s job to sell the threat. A short Chapter 1 (really more of a prologue) tells us what a galactic threat the Wirrrn are. Then some mysterious things happen — mostly people being attacked underground — accompanied by no overt hint that this is because of the Wirrrn. The Doctor arrives and has no idea there’s even a problem here, let alone who’s behind it. There is much muchness with businessmen, Foamasi and social events we’ll get to in a bit. Then, on Page 95, the passive-voice narrator just up and tells us that “The Wirrrn had a plan, and so far, it was progressing very satisfactorily.” I mean, come on. You can’t just poke your head out from behind the curtain like that. Work it in! Make it a discovery, a moment of drama! Instead it feels like we’re reading the author’s pasted-in plot synopsis after the editor stepped in and said oi, Gary, where’s me Wirrrn? (The Doctor twigs whodunit on Page 250, with all of 30 pages left to enjoy it.)

This clumsy reminder does at least lead into a bit of character realisation (put them the other way around ferchristssakes) in order to highlight Gary’s thesis statement from the Introduction: the Borg, he reckons, have more in common with the Wirrrn than they do with the Cybermen. It’s technically a take, I suppose? Not an actual germ of a story, but let’s see what he does with it. The Wirrrn do indeed take over the minds of their victims and learn what they know, adding to a group consciousness. The Wirrrn do indeed convert their victims’ bodies into their own material. And… yeah. Done. Is there a great deal else to say about their modus operandi that wasn’t already said in The Ark In Space?

As Placebo Effect went on I rather doubted it, since there are also little dollops of the Cybermen (“You will become like us”), xenomorphs (a straight up Alien Queen rip-off) and ah what the hell, the actual Borg to help pad out the Wirrrn identity. (Refusing to attack when interlopers are not a threat is specifically a Borg thing! It doesn’t enrich the Wirrrn to staple that on.) The general concept of a malevolent hive mind is interesting, but as well as being presented as a thoroughly surface-level idea in Placebo Effect (there being hardly anyone interesting enough to care about them being taken over) the idea was done quite well and quite creatively in the previous book. Those guys were even insectoid to boot. They’re even mentioned here!

While we’re reminiscing about Seeing I, it’s worth mentioning that this is Sam’s first appearance following her big reset. I had some reservations about that being the purview of Gary Russell — big fan of continuity links, tends not to analyse the regulars much — and sure enough, it’s a mixed bag.

A good effort is made to acknowledge those events and the change that has occurred — principally, Sam being older now. Some of this is essentially box-ticking, but as easy as it is to kick continuity of that sort, it can be useful to highlight ongoing character beats. (I think a few of them miss the mark. Russell seems oblivious to Sam’s activism being a family trait, and he doesn’t seem aware that Sam doesn’t remember her possession in Kursaal.) He keeps an eye on the ongoing development too: “Sam had been forced to grow up … This was the first time she’d ever had to deal with a crisis of faith.” / “The Doctor looked at her, as if he was seeing for the first time just how much she had grown up in the last few years. … ‘I’ve rather neglected you, haven’t I?’” A good amount of this is throwing the ball to the next writer, but hey, at least it’s moving.

As an actual character in the story, though, Sam reads much the same as ever. The voice is sarcastic with that little edge of neediness — check. She can’t seem to help kindling a bit of romance with a young guy — check. She wonders about her parents and how she’ll handle that — check. (At this point I’m dead curious where, if anywhere, this is going.) She quickly notes her attraction to the Doctor, but doesn’t go on about it. (New check/character development.) The more seasoned activist and traveller of Seeing I doesn’t really come across here. Perhaps that’s fair since it might be a complex thing to outsource to other writers, but then, wasn’t that the whole point of the Sam-leaving exercise? Write a style guide if it’s tricky. “Her hair is longer and she often makes note of the fact she is now twenty-one” is pretty thin gruel if we’re saying she legit wasn’t working as a character before and should work better now.

Sam still fares better than the Doctor. I will say there’s a dollop of interest here: I was intrigued to find out he’d made friends during that break from Sam mentioned in Vampire Science, and thrilled to be digging into that gap at all. I was perhaps a bit deflated to learn that Stacy and Ssard (a human and Ice Warrior who fell in love) were introduced in the Radio Times Doctor Who comic strip, and not invented here after all — not to mention that said gap was seemingly there to facilitate a few multimedia adventures, and not to suggest ominous things about the Doctor and Sam’s closeness after all. But hey, I still like the “gap companions” thing, and rushing to attend their wedding is a lovely way to get us into the story. (Said wedding goes awry due to a local religious movement, The Church Of The Way Forward, who object to inter-species bonding. Any dramatic fallout from this is denied to Stacy and Ssard who effectively leave the story at that point, their cameo achieved, but it gives Sam something to carp about. She gets into a tedious religion vs evolution tangent with the religious leader in the middle of the book. Gotta make 280 pages somehow, I guess.)

As to the Doctor’s behaviour, well, I’ve got issues with it. He seems awfully at ease with wandering off and leaving Sam to her own devices. Really, after all that? Placebo Effect is set three months after Seeing I, which perhaps gives him the excuse of getting all that development out of the way first. (If that was the intention, yuck. Do the work guys. It’s an ongoing series — you should want to grow the characters.) In any event, we missed those months, so the Doctor sending Sam off on her own, or disappearing for a few weeks (his time) to fetch Stacy’s parents for the wedding feels jarring in context. Their relationship was supposed to have evolved on two fronts.

He just hasn’t got it in general though. The Doctor in Placebo Effect defaults to a certain off-putting weirdness that is possibly emblematic of the Doctor, but doesn’t represent this more (deceptively?) charming incarnation, despite some typically Gary Russell-ish nods to his clairvoyance and his half-human biology. He’s not terribly charming. At one point he mutters under his breath that a person he’s speaking to is a “useless oaf”, which seems unusually aggressive. Apparently (see Pieces Of Eighth) Russell struggled to characterise him, feeling that most of the books up to now were too mercurial to hit on anything consistent about the character. I don’t agree, but in any case, his default characterisation here is based on Columbo, which um, yeah, is not it either, obviously.

It’s difficult to find the Doctor interesting when he drifts through hundreds of pages oblivious to the threat. (Which incidentally is the opposite of how Columbo rolls.) The blurb almost has to tell fibs to suggest more momentum than there is: “The Doctor finds himself drafted in to examine some bizarre new drugs that are said to enhance the natural potential of the competing athletes.” Sure, on Page 207. Traditionally we are past blurb setups at that point! Meanwhile, we hopscotch between factions and hold on for religious debates and no one, it seems, has all that much interest in the Olympics.

I was expecting a bit more effort and world-building there. Is that wrong? Shouldn’t the Olympics be colourful and exciting and central to the drama? Especially spacey, futurey, aliens-competing-ey Olympics? But Russell reserves his serious construction work for (of course) continuity, plumbing in a general Dalek Masterplan-era backdrop (the SSS, the Teknix, the Guardian of the Solar System, the planet Desperus all get a mention), while also generously nodding towards New Adventures continuity, especially his own. (Hey did you guys know he wrote Peladon out of the Galactic Federation? GUYS? GUYS DID YOU KNOW THAT?) He also makes sure we know where Placebo Effect sits vis a vis The Ark In Space, which is perhaps helpful, but also can’t help but pause the flow for us. (It might not feel so jarring if the Doctor got with the program a little earlier.) On the plus side this is by no means his most continuity-sodden book, just as many of his less flattering writing tics are perhaps not at full blast here — thinking of unnecessary usage of names in dialogue, and strangely pronounced enjoyment of his character deaths. All of that is still here, but it’s arguably less noticeable than it was in, for example, Deadfall.

Honestly though, Placebo Effect still ranks low among the Gary Russell books I’ve read. It doesn’t apply continuity in particularly insightful ways (which can be done, and has been done, by Russell), and nor is it even memorably irritating. The central characters struggle to be heard above the din; when they are, there’s little worth saying. There’s potential in the premise for an all out farce and that peeks through at times, such as a man realising he’s had an affair with a Foamasi and not his secretary after all, but the book doesn’t seem very focussed on comedy. It just mixes high camp with body horror, which jars exactly as you might expect.

The absence of a clear and compelling through-line is the real problem though, and there’s really no coming back from that. Just like when it happened in Longest Day, I had to fight to focus, and again the only real momentum was a gradual excitement to not be reading it any more. 

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #25 – Mission: Impractical by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#12
Mission: Impractical
By David A. McIntee

In his customary introduction David A. McIntee calls Mission: Impractical “something to cheer [him] up” following several much heavier books. He also announces that it is “shallow” (“damn right”) and that you can “check your brains at the door.” Boy, I hope he saved space on his shelf for that Salesman Of The Year trophy.

Is he wrong? Well, no, it’s most definitely a romp. There’s not much in it you need to think about and now that I’ve finished it I can already feel chunks of it floating away like candyfloss in a puddle. Is that bad? I think not. I wouldn’t want every book to be all icing and no cake, but once in a while is fine.

The plot is pretty straightforward. (“So straightforward!” screams McIntee through your letterbox. “A buffoon could read it!”) Ten years ago an item was stolen from the Veltrochni. They know it found its way to Vandor Prime and they are threatening war (really more just slaughter) if it is not returned to them. The current owner, a Vandorian who works for the President, discretely arranges for the original thieves to steal it again and take it to its rightful home. The scheme also ensnares our larcenous friends from The Trial Of A Timelord, Glitz and Dibber, as well as the Doctor and his shapeshifting friend Frobisher. (Mostly to be found as a talking penguin.) The Doctor, meanwhile, has a contract out on his life; two bounty hunters/assassins are making unnaturally fast progress in tracking him down, so the TARDIS goes on a random jump right into Mandell’s path. What follows is a “get the gang back together” story, then a heist, and then hopefully not all out war.

I didn’t make a lot of notes on this one, which probably means there’s not a lot to say about it. (“No wonder!” booms McIntee, squinting through the window. “Surprised you finished it!”) But let me see… The gang are likeable enough. There’s Jack Chance, a thrill-seeker who went into (semi) legitimate business running a café. Chat and Liang, twins with incredible acrobatic skills who ended up working for the circus. Monty, an older gent who gripes a lot but probably prefers a life of crime to his mechanic day job. And Oskar, a master of disguise with surprising insecurities, who sits most of it out for various reasons. This kind of thing is familiar territory, and then some, but there are enough little quirks for it not to feel like Terrance Dicks dutifully transcribing a favourite movie. I would say I cared about them the right amount.

Best of the bunch is Glitz, of course, the most developed one by simple virtue of being off the telly, and still sporting that charming Holmesian wit. He bounces off the page and remains one of those characters you wish they’d made more of in the series. (What a shame he never fancied doing any Big Finish.) McIntee is no stranger to continuity, and he has a few things to set in motion in order to get Glitz from his apparent doom at the end of Trial to his carefree arrival in the ship Nosferatu II in Dragonfire. I’m not sure that journey from A to B has ever even occurred to me, but it’s safe to say that if you have any questions about it, McIntee has answered them. (Dibber’s good too, by the way. His was always the more thankless part, but there’s a charming loyalty to him that comes through here, like a Sgt. Benton from the wrong side of the tracks.)

What else, what else. Well, I like the Veltrochni. Introduced in McIntee’s The Dark Path — indeed a heavier book than this one, and not nearly as enjoyable — they feel like a more rounded species here without needing McIntee to do his frequent tic of spending far too long describing everything about them. (Maybe it’s easier because it’s not their first appearance. Also: that’s Virgin continuity, baby!)

It helps that one of the bounty hunters, Karthakh, is a Veltrochni: we’re frequently seeing his point of view and there’s a good amount of pathos to him despite his stoic professionalism. He’s still on some level reeling from a family tragedy, which makes him sufficiently unlike his people that he can partner up with a Tzun — another species from Virgin canon (First Frontier, also by McIntee) and one that the Veltrochni all but wiped out. He and Sha’ol have an unconventional working relationship/friendship; you sense that they are each all that the other has, and time spent in their company isn’t wasted. (Sha’ol, too, has some depths. He’d have to being a Tzun working with a Veltrochni.)

There’s also a ship full of Ogrons led by the ambitious Gorrak. They don’t entirely need to be here, plot-wise, but Ogrons make good comedic fodder, and there is some substance to them if you squint. McIntee takes a page out of the Space War novelisation and highlights their determined, rock-oriented culture. Gorrak’s desire to break his people away from servitude is admirable, even if he is horrible. Before long the Ogrons end up working for Karthakh and Sha’ol anyway, but the arrangement feels equitable enough to put up with.

Ogrons still trigger pretty guttural laughs at the best of times, like a moment where they’re all arming their guns and one Ogron explodes, prompting another to say that his gun works. There’s also the moment Gorrak orders his men to “stun any creature who is alone,” not realising that he has walked into the hall alone “until seven different stun blasts hit him.” (“When he woke up, he knew that at least his men had understood their instructions.”) Is it high art? No. Did I chuckle? Like a drain.

The action has, dare I say it, a whiff of Pratchett with its gung ho bunch of scumbags just trying to get by at the whim of a sinister smart guy. (Mandell, not the Doctor.) The heist itself is reasonably clever, with some neat disguises and enough rational preparation that it genuinely seems to have helped having the Doctor along. For his part, he injects warmth and sense into their machinations wherever possible. You get the sense Colin Baker would have enjoyed his slightly uncouth but-not-outright-horrible storyline here.

Some of the complications don’t really blossom into anything. The whole bit about bounty hunters and who really wants the Doctor dead is paid off, but only in an academic sense where the Doctor knows who did it, beats them at their own game and then that’s enough of that apparently. We don’t, like, go and bring the fight to them. This probably makes more sense when you consider that we’re going more comic book than usual here. Mission: Impractical seems more invested in pay-offs that you can have right this second with whatever’s in front of you, like the machinations of Mandell and how that ultimately impacts on his family. Surprising depth for a somewhat cartoonish baddie.

And I mean, speaking of comics and cartoons, I haven’t even talked about Frobisher! I’ve never read the comics he appeared in but I’m a fan of The Holy Terror, the brilliant and creepy-funny audio from Robert Shearman. This Frobisher seems consistent with that impish character: a loyal friend of the Doctor, clearly with some insecurities but balanced against incredible shapeshifting powers. He isn’t so overpowered that you feel he’s never in danger, and he needs to use some ingenuity to put his powers to the right use. I’m glad we got a novel with him, and I’d read more. (That said, there is a development late in the book that should give Frobisher some serious conflict to work with, but the book seemingly isn’t interested. Oh well, it’s a romp etc. But then why introduce something like that if you’re just going to fire a blank? Okay, it’s a pretty good surprise. Which I suppose answers that.)

McIntee peppers the thing with a decent amount of jokes, and that’s not even including Frobisher’s amusing shape choices. He spends some time laboriously arranging for a character to say “four-sprung duck technique”, sort of like those car adverts innit, boom boom. Perhaps more ambitious is a bit where he both leans into the comic feel and (unintentionally?) rips the piss out of his own writing style: “Wreckage was torn from the hull and scattered far and wide, while the fuel and atmosphere ignited in the sort of explosion that was usually only created by firework specialists on drugs, and would have needed a dictionary full of adjectives to describe properly.” McIntee of old would probably just find the adjectives.

Then there’s his usual intertextuality, with adjustable levels of on-the-nose. The Doctor, watching Star Wars on opening night, observes that Peter Cushing looks familiar and he might once have met his granddaughter. Even better is the moment just before when I thought for sure McIntee had gone the whole hog and sent the Doctor and Frobisher to Tatooine. He definitely got me!

Showing our heroes at the movies seems an appropriate way to start. Mission: Impractical certainly ain’t Star Wars, but it feels more like a trip to the flicks than a novel, flashing before you in a way that doesn’t seem like a wasted ticket but is also, as sometimes happens, mostly just a nice time in a comfy seat with popcorn. Possibly helped by the author’s cautionary lamp-shading, it still sent me away in a good mood. Shallow be damned.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #24 – Seeing I by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#12
Seeing I
By Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

One of the unique but, to be honest, difficult things about Doctor Who is its constant need for redefinition. It’s an easy show to “get” overall, that’s its appeal, but the characters have an in-built turnover that means having to re-learn the same truths, preferably in new and interesting ways every time. When the Doctor changes, who is he now? (Or she.) When a new companion comes along, who are they? But hold up, now there’s follow up questions: why do they want to travel with the Doctor? What about them makes that an attractive proposition, to them and to the Doctor? You can’t just pop another bright young thing out of the fridge and call it a day.

That, I think we can all agree now, is what happened here. Sam Jones comfortably meets the criteria for what a Doctor Who companion might look like in the late 90s. Young. A bit radical. Not immune to the Doctor’s McGann-ish charms. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what is, when you boil it down, Ace minus the explosives and Fenric, plus a teenage crush. (Apart from perhaps a general lack of imagination.) But it’s also how you introduce the character, and The Eight Doctors had far too much on its plate to worry about that as well. By the time Vampire Science rolled around, despite valiant effort from Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, a critical moment had passed, and all the novels afterwards have felt its absence. If I can affix my Coulda Shoulda Woulda hat for a second: there should have been a Sam Begins novel after The Eight Doctors. Introduce him, then her, with a whole book devoted to who she is and how this makes sense, actually. Write Sam’s Love And War. Instead, we were more or less just told this is the right sort of person so let’s all just get on with it, shall we, and it has felt like varying shades of going through the motions since.

Cue a major course correction. Sam left in Longest Day, convinced that the Doctor was dead, and even if he wasn’t, beginning to doubt whether her juvenile feelings were justification enough for this kind of life. It felt a bit left-field coming in at the end of that book (Longest Day sadly isn’t very good) but it set up an intriguing pause. I don’t think that was very well handled either, with the Doctor more or less making “find Sam” a side mission in Legacy Of The Daleks and, to an extent, in Dreamstone Moon as well. But at least the latter gave Sam the time of day. How does she cope without the Doctor? Who is she without him? Taking things away is a useful route to redefinition. I think Paul Leonard did a good job there.

That book wasn’t allowed to reunite them, but to be honest, maybe that was for the best. Blum and Orman are back now and Seeing I gives it the full works. Who is Sam without the Doctor? Who — blessed relief to hear this — is the Doctor without Sam? Should they reunite? This is no side mission. It’s a character-based story with plot galore, albeit further down the pecking order than usual. I’m betting this ratio of plot to character is hit and miss with some readers, but I can’t complain. The questions and answers about Sam undeniably hit harder in this one.

The main and most shocking thing Seeing I does is take its time. Sam is on a new world, having been dragged away from the Doctor all over again in Dreamstone Moon and once again having no direct path to seeing him again. (And a dwindling certainty that she would even want to. She feels a lot of guilt about giving him the kiss of life, and the boundary she pushed.) She has nothing but her core interests, all the time in the world and occasionally a cat for company.

She volunteers at a soup kitchen and begins making friends. When she needs more from life she gets an unrewarding job with INC, a vaguely sinister company in control of everything, thanks to some spiffy eye tech. When that doesn’t get her anywhere — and when she begins having suspicions about INC — she returns to the soup kitchen, and from there joins a group of ex-INC biologists living in a commune. For a while she just lives, having boyfriends and broadening her horizons. But her commitment to helping others is always there, and she slowly begins taking charge of the fight against INC, which explodes when the company (for no apparent reason) comes to knock down the commune. This, as another central character will later impishly observe, means war. But the more important bit is everything else.

She has grown. She is more certain of who she is, because these values have been tested and they have stuck. By the end of Seeing I Sam is at least twenty-one years old, and could comfortably pass for her own older, wiser sister. There’s been no radical reinvention here; merely a chance to examine what we have, test it, and finally be sure of it. They find the best version of Sam here.

It’s so rare that a character can just percolate like this. A break is not unheard of, as Blum and Orman are only too aware, making a direct reference to Ace leaving and then coming back in the New Adventures. Trying not to squee too loudly that this is apparently all the same universe (!), we probably have Deceit to thank for showing how not to do it: don’t just send a character away and bring back their Version 2.0. We need to see them grow. It’s a promising development for Doctor Who print fiction to realise this, even if it’s only occurring because things didn’t exactly go smoothly at launch.

But as I’ve observed/moaned about before, The Sam Problem isn’t all on Sam Jones. She was thrust upon the Doctor because (as Seeing I says, staring right at the elephant in the room) “maybe someone out there had figured it was a good idea to pair him up with a nice non-threatening little kid. Someone who'd keep him busy and distracted by getting into trouble and needing to be rescued. Someone they'd arranged to be the perfect safe companion for him.” Which, okay, fine (also mee-ow, guys!), but all of that detracts from the Doctor as well, because the situation is contrived so that he doesn’t get, or even need a say in it. (“It wasn’t me who guided the TARDIS to her, come to think of it. It was all an astounding coincidence that I should arrive at precisely the moment in time and space where Sam needed rescuing, wasn’t it?” BAD ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. WHO LET YOU IN?) We don’t know that he really needs Sam, or anyone, beyond the surface level need for the Doctor always to have someone around.

Well, Seeing I puts that to the test as well. The Doctor is actively looking for Sam in this, which is a good idea, isn’t it? Sort of helps the urgency along? (Sorry, Legacy and Dreamstone — I don’t think he was trying hard enough there.) He is politely thwarted by a receptionist when trying to make information requests, which goes on for a very amusing few weeks. It’s fun seeing the Doctor struggle with a problem on such a small level. When he inevitably retaliates and hooks into the INC system to steal the info he needs — having by this point also worked up a cautious curiosity about INC and the technology they possess — things backfire spectacularly and he ends up in prison. No big deal, you’re probably thinking, and that’s certainly his view, insisting he will leave as soon as he learns what he needs. But something about this prison makes it very difficult to escape. And before you know it, Sam isn’t the only one spending three years in this novel.

I think there are reservations to be had here. There are good reasons for the Doctor’s difficulty in escaping: he is unwittingly under closer surveillance than he’d ever imagine, and there is a very clever computer at work that can predict his actions. It also serves a vital character point to show him diminished and unable to flourish without a companion — indeed, when he finally escapes it’s because Sam rescues him, because that dynamic has at last been restored, and because she has help. All good stuff and I see what they did there, but I’d be lying if I said this genuinely seemed like an impenetrable fortress that even the Doctor can’t handle. When you stand back from it, it seems like a series of technically solvable problems.

I think the argument here is institutionalisation: they keep keeping him here, which he hates, and an escape attempt costs the life of another inmate/recognisable type of Bright Young Thing, which inevitably strikes a nerve. There is no dramatic evil for him to fight (at one point he asks to be transferred to another, famously more brutal prison just so he can retaliate), and the psychiatrist working with him genuinely seems to want to help him. (This is borne out after the Doctor escapes, and Dr Akalu observes “at least the Doctor seemed so much more alive now. That could only be good for him.” Nothing but love for Dr Akalu, even though he’s wrong about stuff.)

On a deeper character level, the Doctor is alone. What is he doing? What’s it for? He seems rudderless and begins to diminish, becoming childlike and defeatist. Bleak it might be, but it very well makes the point that Sam not being here is a problem for him. And inevitably it puts INC on something of a pedestal, suggesting they are a force to be reckoned with if they can stop the Doctor.

As with the prison I don’t think that bit’s entirely earned, especially as the book nears the end. We find out that INC have indeed got hold of alien technology. Suggested lore-heavy links to other organisations (such as TTC in Longest Day) are eventually shot down, as it turns out INC’s controlling interest isn’t particularly interested in the minutiae. There’s even an external force that orchestrated the alien tech and wants it back — who, in turn, aren’t what you’d call evil and are eventually rendered harmless. Does the planet have systemic problems? Aplenty. Is INC good? Broadly nah. But there’s no profound evil working against the Doctor, which might be a problem for some readers since it’s so pivotal that the immovable object meeting the Doctor’s unstoppable force is, y’know, immoveable.

Hey ho, though. I think Blum and Orman are Doing A Thing by not having an easily defined bad guy (or, bearing in mind the dodgy stuff that INC is doing, not having a bad guy be behind it all), as it takes the focus away from that black and white conflict and redirects it — you guessed it — towards the Doctor and Sam.

When the time comes for them to hang out again (and the rescue itself is awfully quick, isn’t it, almost an anti-climax really but okay, shutting up now!) the Doctor has been through so much that Sam must take the lead. He doesn’t even have his costume — a fun bit of symbolism to show that he’s not quite right — and Sam’s gang don’t trust him, neither seeing him at his best nor knowing anything about him besides Sam’s maybe-apocryphal stories. She is disturbed that people could not be in awe of him, but that is perhaps another little learning curve for her, and a diminishing of those romantic feelings.

She goes back and forth on their reunion. (And so does the Doctor, but it takes a long time, and a connection to Susan, for him to consider that this might be a no.) There is a definite yes-or-no conversation right at the end, but I think her decision was already made by then. She knows herself and her boundaries better than before. She fully believes in her ideals, knows that they’re not just shrapnel from her upbringing, and being in the TARDIS will let her be her best self. She understands that she’s not a monster for being attracted to an unattainable guy. She kisses him — just once, seemingly that’s enough — and away they go. (Sidebar: the Doctor has his costume remade, and then some: “Every last detail of the design was right, but so much more care and workmanship had gone into this outfit than the original.” Implication being that he, too, has grown into something more now. Blum and Ormannn!)

For a characterisation rescue mission, Seeing I is more subtle than I expected. While I agree with the need to do it, I think Steve Cole’s reservations about Sam in those early books was a tad over-cautious — and I think that’s borne out by the fact that what we see of her in this rings true with what we already know. She just needed to pause and work at it. Not to spoil the party, but it’s not as if we’re suddenly immune from authors taking a swing in the wrong direction. (It’ll be interesting to see what happens; can they stay the course?) But as with the first couple of novels, it will be a help to point at Blum and Orman and say, “like that please.”

Seeing I has the patience to sit with things, making those core elements better for it, but there’s a decent plot here too. For all my niggles about immoveable objects, I like that INC has its good apples such as Dr Akalu, and that the beings at the root of INC’s problems are doing what they do because of an absence of clear intentions. Most of Sam’s gang are, to be honest, somewhat interchangeable, but there are little gems strewn through the book that caught my eye, such as the Doctor’s increasingly childlike outrage in prison. (“‘He shouldn’t have taken my bear away,’ the Doctor said grimly. ‘He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.’”) There’s a very satisfying reveal about the cat Sam has been hanging around with, which I’m thrilled to reveal I guessed several pages early, and of course I adored the other little New Adventures nods. (An apparent sequel to Bernice Summerfield’s book is mentioned, as is a sentient computer program from Transit and SLEEPY.)

I’m not sure what a reader who wasn’t following the series would make of Seeing I, whether it would work alone. If you squint, though, Seeing I could be that introductory Sam novel I wanted in the first place, just showing up fashionably late. I would hope any passing newbies would find Sam as successful as the rest of us, and climb aboard with her.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #23 – Catastrophea by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#11
Catastrophea
By Terrance Dicks

Or: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Colonialism.

On their way home after Planet Of The Daleks, the Doctor suddenly gets a psychic jolt from the planet Catastrophea and rushes off to investigate. There he finds a world of subjugated natives, uneasy peacekeepers, an opportunistic company waiting to take over and subjugate the natives even more, activists who want to help the natives, drug smugglers and drug users. The general feeling is of a powder keg.

Pretty soon we get the most interesting thing about the book: the fact that, on the face of it, the Doctor can’t help. “This wasn’t one simple evil like the Daleks; it was a complicated and tragic mixture of extraterrestrial and human interaction that he had seen repeated on many worlds. Perhaps he would just have to let this planet play out its own sad history.”

But wouldn’t you know it, he gets dragged in anyway. When Jo intercedes to stop a Company man beating a native they’re both put on the authorities’ watch list. When the activists get wind of this they wrongly assume that the Doctor is their promised revolutionary hero, El Llama. Then the authorities hear about this, and now they think he’s El Llama too. All the Doctor wants to do is leave (because the planet’s problems are too systemic) but all these wrong assumptions prevent him doing so.

It’s a frustrating setup, because almost everyone involved is stubbornly wrong about something in a way that reinforces everyone else’s wrongness, but at the same time it’s sort of interesting that the Doctor gets involved in a crisis genuinely without even trying, in fact despite conscious effort not to get involved. I clung to that while reading Catastrophea because not a great deal else about it is interesting.

The planet, for example, which is actually named Kastopheria but was nicknamed after a catastrophe — something we are told within the prose rather than in dialogue, which seems clunky, and then we’re told a few more times later for good measure. For all the effort though, I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Is it Ca-TASS-trophe-uh, or Cata-STROFF-ee-uh? Either way it feels like one of Ken Campbell’s “jokoids”: something with the shape of a joke that is not inherently funny.

Most of the planet’s troubles are recognisably human, which helps the reader identify with them, but also takes away any particularly exotic alien quality that you might otherwise have expected what with setting it on an alien planet. We’re familiar enough with the plight of natives under the British Empire, for example, to recognise that being replicated here. But it is just replicated, with awful land owners beating their gardeners and calling them “boy”, and customers thrashing their rickshaw drivers for no reason. Emotive, yes, but there’s not much imagination being applied here. Dicks doesn’t even need to break a sweat writing the actual natives — literally, aliens — apart from making them very big and golden skinned, because it’s plot relevant that they are passive and mute. The Doctor and Jo, of course, despair at the way society ignores them and works around them, but the book steadfastly does it too. They’re even referred to as “The People” — an unfortunate bit of New Adventures overlap there — a name they chose themselves that only makes them more anonymous.

There is something to be said for the simple allegory here, literally being so generic that it can represent any subjugation and thus make the point, if you like, that this happens much the same everywhere. But I suspect this is a charitable view, since it’s (British) humans doing the subjugating — so it’s the actual same thing, then — and just generally, knowing his books, I’m not convinced Dicks was thinking along those lines. More likely it’s: here is a thing you will recognise. (Which, to be fair, is a popular strategy.)

There’s a fair bit of that in Catastrophea, with policemen speaking the apparently “immortal words of policemen everywhere” saying “All right, all right, what’s going on here then?” (“Immortal” circa 1970s telly?) Jo sees a military base and comments that it looks just like Fort Apache, “‘Like it’s a Western.’ The Doctor [nods]. ‘Very similar situation.’” There’s even a café where the various parties can all mix on neutral ground which — groan — is actually called “Rik’s” and — groannn — when we meet the proprietor his first line is, “Of all the cafés in all the planets in the galaxy, you had to throw him into mine!” That’s not wearing your influences on your sleeve, it’s painting them on your face.

Dicks has a habit of writing in allusions to stuff he likes, and more generally just transposing settings and tropes wholesale. Look at Megacity (aka 1920s Chicago) in Shakedown and Mean Streets, which comes with old-timey anachronisms galore even though it’s, y’know, on another planet. Catastrophea follows a similar pattern, with drug dealers being just as awful as they were in Mean Streets and The Eight Doctors, and drugs/drug culture being on much the same basic “this is bad” level as they were there. It’s not a bad style, per se, but I find it all just a bit pedestrian. When everything’s an archetype, none of it pops.

Dicks (and the Doctor) at least finds the activists interesting — which is to say, he generally disapproves of their “do-gooding” as it’s not really helping, and he suspects their motives overall. (This contributes to a perhaps unintentional theme of anti-activism in the BBC Books run so far — see also Kursaal and Dreamstone Moon. I’m not sure where all that’s coming from, especially with pro-activist Sam as our representative.) As for the occupying military, they seem benign enough, apart from being an occupying military, and apart from things like General Walton regularly threatening to have the Doctor and Jo shot — before folding every time because they seem like good eggs after all. What a guy!

It’s hard to know where the book really stands on this stuff. The Doctor is confident that everyone should leave the People alone, of course, but he also seems disconcertingly sure that they’ve brought this on themselves, what with them years ago mentally calming their rages in a way that allowed their occupation, and then not fighting back against it. (The Doctor here smacks a little of his anti-pacifist stance in the first Dalek story, an aspect Terry Nation apparently later regretted.) Combined with a general “it’s bad that they’re here but oh well they’re mostly not that bad” attitude to the military, I think it’s best just to avoid looking under the hood here. At least the plot lands on the side of right, eventually giving the planet back to the People. (What it thinks of the People at that point is a little… hazy.)

There is at least, and at last, a sci-fi idea here, with the People having a history of psychic powers and a need to change who they are to avert catastrophe (ahem), only to find themselves mistreated by humanity afterwards. (If you think that sounds awfully like Colony In Space, well done: so does Dicks, who promptly lampshades that fact.) With their source of mental control fading, the People are on the verge of a mass breakdown — think, Vulcans losing their logic — and a violent uprising seems inevitable. They want the Doctor to help them transition to a less controlled way of life, but not a bloodthirsty one.

Continuing the idea of “he doesn’t think he can help,” the Doctor is critically indecisive about all this, and it ends up being a third party that triggers the change for selfish reasons. The People do, indeed, get a bit bloodthirsty before securing the planet for themselves, with the Doctor frantically asking everyone else not to fight back or they’ll make things worse. (There is something quite neat about forcing pacifism back onto the oppressors, but I’m not sure the book really registered it.)

The question of “was it right to interfere” is raised by Jo. (She dwells comfortably at the “charming nitwit” end of Jo Grant writing throughout, showing absolutely no evidence of the desire to leave that the Doctor somehow clocks at the start of this. Ah well, we’ll always have Dancing The Code.) I don’t think Catastrophea ever really grapples with that, since the Doctor’s involvement is entirely involuntary and, at every crunch point, he’s at best asking people to be nice to each other. You could argue these events would generally have happened without him. The psychic business at least allows a revolution to come, and explains why one hasn’t come already (as well as helpfully breaking us away from the “nothing we can do about it” line), but the real answer here is that the People got their planet back because they put up a fight for it. No one really has to make any hard choices, which is a slightly disappointing end to that promising starting point. All told, I’m not sure the story says anything about occupations that isn’t readily apparent.

It all trundles along with the usual easy reading pace of Terrance Dicks. It’s nice to see the Draconians again, although I think it’s a stretch to put one on the front cover. (Based on that I thought we might get a story that really delves into their culture for once, but alas.) Pertwee’s Doctor is very well captured — we should expect nothing less from his script editor — although I sometimes wondered at his outlook in this. What Catastrophea generally aims for is laudable enough, and it’s as nicely digestible as anything else by Dicks, apart from an awkward contrast between its general children’s adventure tone and some blunt swearing. As a story it takes a few too many shortcuts to really achieve anything, but I suppose it’s no catastrophe. Uh.

5/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #21 – The Hollow Men by Keith Topping and Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#10
The Hollow Men
By Keith Topping & Martin Day

This one caught me off guard.

The ingredients are all fairly typical. You’ve got a creepy village with some even creepier scarecrows, some none-too-wholesome villagers in between. All very “British horror movie”, with an eventual link to a Classic Who story to calm the fans. But The Hollow Men feels more rounded than the jolly genre exercise I expected. It is also, for the people excited by the mere mention of horror, a good deal nastier.

The Doctor has been intrigued by Hexen Bridge for some time. This is a mild retcon, but it wouldn’t be the first time this particular Doctor has revealed a body-hopping interest in a place or a thing. Besides, I like the idea that we’re not privy to all of his adventures, and the suggestion that he’s been intrigued by a town very near Devil’s End ever since Jon Pertwee’s Favourite Story (TM), but has been unable to put his finger on exactly why, puts him at a curious disadvantage.

That wrong-footed feeling stays with the Doctor for most of The Hollow Men, despite his efforts. And we see some of them, such as his visits to the town throughout its history. He was on the school board some years ago, in a couple of different guises it seems, and several of the villagers remember him to some degree. This is a level of familiarity you don’t normally see around the Doctor — especially this Doctor — and there’s a vulnerability in that, because the people who remember him are not as awed by him as newcomers tend to be.

Well, he’s waited long enough, and it’s time for answers. But before he can get any he comes across some particularly nefarious locals (one of whom knew him at school) and they bundle him into a car and off to Liverpool for seeing too much. Again, you sort of expect the Seventh Doctor to wheedle his way out of something like this — it’s a car full of normal people, for goodness sake! — and there might be something to be said here about misreading the character. But I think he’s deliberately written out of sorts. He’s confused by the behaviour of these townspeople he sort of, kinda likes. He’s not one step ahead of what’s happening in Hexen Bridge. Why shouldn’t that mess up his routine?

(Just to be clear, I know this was originally intended as an Eighth Doctor novel, so some of that behaviour probably wasn’t meant to juxtapose against the great chess player of Doctor Who. But it’s his book now, and I think it juxtaposes nicely, so if you don’t mind I’ll behave like all humans according to the Eighth Doctor and see patterns that aren’t there.)

Something is definitely iffy about Hexen Bridge, and some of it is just the sort of thing you’d expect. We open with a horrific flashback to not long after the Civil War, with a mad judge executing all the men in the village — clearly a precursor to some very bad things. Later there are glimpses of nightmarish rituals involving people in hoods (well obviously, you gotta have hoods) and what about all those scarecrows hanging about? But there’s an atmosphere here that goes beyond all that. The people aren’t quite right.

A good example of this is Rebecca, a schoolteacher and daughter of the local vicar, whom Ace quickly befriends. Rebecca stands up for the younger girl against the fairly awful pub landlord, and you can tell they’ve hit it off. But when looking at the creepily identical handwriting of some local kids, Ace notices Rebecca’s is just the same. Later, she turns out to be sleeping with the extremely toxic Matthew Hatch, a young politician of some standing with grand evil plans just out of sight. (Think Roger ap William in 73 Yards.) How much a part of Hexen Bridge is she?

That’s a question asked throughout the book, and of course, there’s no easy answer, as the people seem to go back and forth. Something is poisoning the villagers’ minds and ensuring their cooperation. (It is also ensuring a degree of population control — see, rituals and hoods.) This manifests locally in a level of mistrust and violence, mostly aimed at strangers. The Chens moved here to open a restaurant, and the local publican keeps making racist attacks against them. To be fair (well, not fair, he’s a racist) his wife is sleeping with one of them. But even his relationship with his wife seems on-again-off-again, love-hate in a way that’s not quite right, even with the infidelity. Why does she stay with him? How much does she want Steven Chen? Is that Hexen Bridge, or are some people just a bit inexplicable?

Further afield, this strangeness manifests in the schemes of Matthew Hatch, as well as the crimes of his less charming classmate Shanks. It’s mainly these crimes that ensnare the Doctor, forcing him to enter a club strapped with explosives so he’ll plant drugs on an unsuspecting policeman’s daughter, or else. (I expected a clever bit of sleight of hand would get him out of this, but although he does use his smarts while his captors aren’t looking, it doesn’t work. This results in a grimly funny moment where he tries to defuse the bomb by remembering what Ace has taught him about explosives, which is another unexpected moment of vulnerability, him needing her like that.) This whole Liverpool section seems an unusual fit at first, and maybe it is, but the earthy violence of it and the general atmosphere of crime and urban horror — not to mention the laboratory revulsion of Hatch’s plans — made me strangely nostalgic for the New Adventures, so I didn’t mind.

Back in the village, Ace is exercising her social justice muscles to defend the Chens. This is all very Ace, although it amuses me that it was presumably almost Sam. (I think Ace is her closest on-screen equivalent, and likely a major inspiration, hence a certain ease in swapping them out.) There’s a certain I-don’t-give-a-damn experience to Ace in this, which makes sense after the fairly traumatic TV stories set before this one. She seems indomitable in a way many companions aren’t in the absence of the Doctor, even sort of deputising Steven Chen as a companion for a bit. She seems to win people over in that Doctor-y way. Ace does some investigating in his absence — she knows him well enough not to panic when he seems to have just wandered off — and she gets to more closely observe the scarecrows. Lucky her, eh?

It’s surprising really that there aren’t more creepy scarecrows in Doctor Who. The ones in The Hollow Men are nightmarish indeed, being (spoiler?) converted villagers, slaves to the force underneath Hexen Bridge. Like a lot of great monsters there is a sadness to them, as they seem at least dimly aware of what they used to be. Topping and Day don’t make a very big thing of them, despite what the front cover suggests. (Never bet on the front cover.) This sort of heightens the horror when they do appear, and keeps them from feeling overplayed. Besides, the real horror of The Hollow Men is the effect the town has on its people. It’s predominantly not a “monster” story. (Good. I thought the weakest part of The Devil Goblins From Neptune was the goblins. Maybe the authors felt the same way and deliberately shifted the focus away from the monsters? Or maybe not. You know humans, patterns and all that.)

When the violence really kicks off, which it does increasingly through the second half and then like mad near the end, it’s horribly indiscriminate. Some quite nice people end up dying, and at least one certified bastard doesn’t. This seems to speak to the authors’ interest in the murkiness of people, which is also enhanced by the relative absence of aliens and monsters.

The finale is another thing that (probably by accident) made me nostalgic for the New Adventures, since it is (forgive me) all a bit metaphysical and weird. The Doctor confronts the malevolent force in a strange representation of Hexen Bridge found through a mirror, while in the real world scarecrows battle other supernatural manifestations for the souls of the villagers, who are themselves going mad with random violence. (RTD voice: “Marvellous!” Seriously, if you told me this one was written five years earlier I wouldn’t blink.) But it ends on a genuinely sombre note, even apart from the locals living in the wake of chaos, as we see that the Doctor still doesn’t understand these people. It’s not that he was outplayed by a master chess player — the alien intelligence isn’t that intelligent. It’s just that too many humans can make things harder to predict. (Possibly. That’s my reading anyway. Patterns etc.)

For me it’s a good sign to finish a book and still want to turn it over in my mind. The nature of villainy and the apparent difficulty the Doctor faces made The Hollow Men an interesting experience. If I can climb over the (imagined?) 90s-ness of it that I so enjoyed, however, it is a bit messy. Pulling the action apart across the country feels a smidge random, and the finale (for all its earned, “here’s what you paid to see” excess) does go on a bit. The characters are also a bit thin, but maybe that’s a deliberate thing and they’re supposed to be a bit weird and unknowable? It’s a story with unease hanging in the air, even when it’s just me wondering how many people in Hexen Bridge know the Doctor in a dull way like as an old half-forgotten teacher (because how weird is that), so even when it doesn’t entirely work I still want to look at it and wonder what that’s about. Before running away, obviously, from those bloody scarecrows.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #20 – Legacy Of The Daleks by John Peel

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#10
Legacy Of The Daleks
By John Peel

So. Daleks again.

That’s nice, obviously, and we are lucky to have got two novels featuring the most famous monsters in Doctor Who.

But… gratitude aside (and I promise, I’m grateful!) all that they’ve really achieved is to underline how Doctor Who print fiction was, if not better off, at least doing fine without them. Which is also sort of nice, when you think about it?

This is largely thanks to the Nation Estate, whose “punishing terms” (as per Stephen Cole) meant it wasn’t worth doing a lot with them, and meant that the best author for the job was John Peel. That’s not bad news in itself, as he has handled Daleks very well in print: his novelisations are good and his previous novel, War Of The Daleks, at times cleverly underlined the menace of these monsters by limiting their appearances. But Peel’s original fiction tends to be a bit rudderless, the writing set in a sort of grottier Terry Nation style, added to which is a strange need to tick continuity boxes. War Of The Daleks was a case of diminishing returns as the book went along, and sadly Legacy Of The Daleks is not an improvement.

It’s at least a very different setup for a story, which is something I appreciate. Rather than another space-faring adventure we’re checking in on Earth after the Dalek invasion. The Daleks are ostensibly wiped out, which again allows Peel to limit their appearances. (You do begin to wonder if the Nation Estate charges by the page.) The people are rebuilding, albeit slowly, and it’s in this crucible that the story is told. The Doctor receives a distress call from Susan; already on the lookout for Sam, he decides to kill two birds with one stone by visiting Earth.

A couple of nitpicks already with this setup. One: I’m not sure the dates line up for Sam to even be here post-Longest Day — all we’re told is “In Thannos time it had been 3177, so allowing for that…” — and a ravaged, decimated Earth seems like a very messy information point for a galactic search. Two: Susan’s message wasn’t from Earth. He’s deliberately going to see her before she left Earth and sent the message from somewhere else, partly so he can find out more (which, if she hasn’t sent it yet, he probably won’t…?) and partly to stop whatever it was from happening in the first place, reasoning “it would be tweaking the laws of Time, and he would no doubt get a slap on the wrist the next time he visited Gallifrey. But what did that matter, compared to all of the complaints they undoubtedly had against him already?” Which, I mean, I suppose he might come up with that excuse, but why is he fine with it now but not the many other times he didn’t want to change history, despite it being in his best interest? And of course, changing this would create an immediate and obvious paradox, with him now not needing to go back and change it. The character setup is a bit of a wash to put it mildly — no doubt because Peel wasn’t enamoured with the Where Is Sam? arc — but the rest of the book brushes it off anyway, so never mind, I guess?

Anyway, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth is a fan-favourite for a bunch of reasons, so it’s reasonable to assume this will be an interesting time and place to revisit. What does Earth look like now? The first chapter sets out its stall: a young girl growing up on a farm needs kittens to keep down the rat population, so she follows a friendly, pregnant stray to her hideout. She is soon ambushed by a leftover Slyther — everyone’s favourite rubbish monster on screen, which is luckily more menacing on paper — which is then defeated by a knight on horseback. Immediately we can see that there are some very unusual mixtures going on, almost with different eras combined. And even more offbeat, the knight is a woman named Donna. This is all good stuff, and it’s an effective start, the plucky adventure of Becca (perhaps a nod to one of Terry’s favourite names?) setting a likeable template.

The drop-off happens almost immediately. We don’t see Becca again for most of the book, following Donna instead. She’s a perpetually angry character, for good reason at least, and most of her dialogue is her lamely snapping at people. Besides her we follow the power struggles of Lord Haldoran. Already in control of one of Britain’s domains, he wants the rest of it courtesy of a defeated Lord London. Haldoran is a nasty piece of work, but not in an interesting way where there are layers to peel back; he’s just a vicious, brutal dictator, and he’s having a splendid time with all of that. (Some sadistic sexual habits are also hinted at for extra yuck points.) His lieutenants are variously terrible as well, with their own internecine squabbles and a general wish to depose Haldoran. When we briefly see Lord London and his lot they don’t seem much better. Haldoran, though, has the added bonus of a special adviser: Estro, a small mysterious man with a pointed beard, sunken eyes, a black suit, powers of hypnosis and a special gun that shrinks people to death. And that’s all the clues you’re getting.

Setting aside for a moment the elephant in the Nehru suit, these people just aren’t interesting. I longed for the relative moral complexity of War Of The Daleks, with its variously trustworthy and untrustworthy Thals. It could be argued that the lack of sympathetic characters in Legacy is a nod to its setting, but if so, it’s a far from perfect translation. The Dalek Invasion Of Earth showed a cross section of humanity. You had good people, but also a deluded resistance leader, some downright unhelpful resistance people, self-serving survivors living on the outskirts as well as outright collaborators. It was a believably fractured response to something as dreadful as a Dalek occupation with (impressively) no rose-tinted Blitz spirit to unite them. Now compare that to Legacy Of The Daleks in which every character is horrible or miserable or both. I just wanted to not be in their company. The incongruity of a future world with knights on horseback is certainly interesting, but it doesn’t get a chance to add anything beyond that, and the post-Dalek Invasion setting quickly stops mattering in a literal sense — we don’t see anything like the Slyther again. Was there really nothing else he could do with that landscape? All we’ve got, until things heat up later on (see: Nehru suit), are power struggles between awful people. They’re not even awful because of Daleks, which is normally the inspiration behind this sort of thing; most of them seem not to remember the pepperpots. They’re just awful because there happens to be a power vacuum, which makes it awkwardly possible to tell this story in places that aren’t specific to this time period. I was increasingly keen for some Daleks to turn up and kill everybody.

Donna is the most likeable one here, and she can generally be found biting the Doctor’s head off. We also have Susan and David, but they’re mostly pootling along in the background, in Susan’s case largely separate from everyone else. Susan at least automatically earns our sympathy because we know her, but she’s also having a worse time than you might have hoped. Her alien metabolism has meant she still looks eighteen while her husband ages normally, which is causing tension in both directions. Also, they can’t conceive. (Peel includes the suggestion that Susan dresses up in ways that capitalise on her young appearance in order to appease David sexually and, you know what John, we’re good, we maybe didn’t need that bit thanks.) Peel, in the Pieces Of Eighth podcast, seemed keen to pursue this doomed relationship as dramatic fodder. But it doesn’t really pay off, since his main insight into what would happen if Susan stayed in a relationship which has fundamental problems is, there would be fundamental problems. Where else is there to go? (He also says the characters “hadn’t thought it through” to begin with, but that seems a bit unfair since Time Lord metabolisms didn’t exist in 1964.)

It’s all a bit grim, but on the plus side there’s a reunion to look forward to. Right? That’s surely a major selling point of bringing her back. But, whether he deliberately chose to avoid the obvious or he just missed a trick, Peel holds back on that for most of the novel, with Susan and the Doctor separately investigating the Dalek artefact Lord Haldoran is after. This has the effect of making the reader go “Oh right, yeah” every time we cut back to Susan, which strikes me as a strange way to utilise her. But not as strange as the punchline: besides a violent crossfire that leaves Susan thinking he’s dead, there is no reunion. The Doctor then makes some very tenuous assumptions about Susan being fine after all and just leaves her to it. Susan, at least, is set up to have the book equivalent of a Big Finish spin-off. I have no idea if any authors ran with that, but given that she spends most of Legacy Of The Daleks either depressed, sneaking around behind a Dalek or being taken hostage, I wouldn’t expect much of a queue to form.

The Doctor isn’t having a great time either. Behaving a little strangely from the outset, viz “let’s change history, why not,” he’s then pre-emptively rude to Donna about her personal life, and nastily dismissive of the state of humanity. (He happens to be right about that one, but only because he has the author on his side.) His attitude to violence wobbles throughout, for instance making the usual “no guns” noises, then at one point tossing Donna a gun during a violent confrontation and then being surprised when she shoots their aggressor with it. Later he threatens Estro at gunpoint, and of course, Daleks are his free pass to just blow up the baddies. (You get the general impression Peel would rather he cut the pacifism and just get on with it.) Between a half-hearted search for Sam and a quickly second-tier quest for Susan he doesn’t have much motivation here besides, coo, them Daleks, eh? What a bunch of rotters! (Humans: got my eye on you. Don’t push your luck.)

Thanks to Estro’s misplaced ambitions the Daleks do eventually turn up. Sorry to spoil, but it’s called (something) Of The Daleks, and we all know how that goes. It did occur to me that you could write a story about their legacy and not actually invoke them, but a) that would probably be seen as a waste of the license and b) what we’ve got instead is utterly pedestrian, so bring ‘em on. The human characters are all flat and unpleasant, and their inner voices aren’t much better: everyone, the Doctor included, has this routine of blandly reciting what they’ve learned and then asking rhetorical questions about it. “But how?” “But why?” Etc. The dialogue is mostly just death threats dressed up with weak sarcasm, but there’s a lot of blunt exposition too, with Becca’s dad, Donna, Estro and even the bloody Daleks cheerfully pausing to explain what the world is like/what their evil plan is, muahaha. (This works well when it’s someone telling a story to lay the groundwork for the book, but then the book keeps doing it. Elegant it is not.) In amongst all that, the Daleks are fine, bordering on forgettable, which seems crazy when they’re such a rarity. They just want to do all the normal Dalek stuff, viz make more Daleks and use them to shoot more humans. Where’s the twist? Stephen Cole seemed keen to get to the heart of what makes them scary, and this book is extremely not that, devoting most if its energies to human infighting instead.

Well, not totally human. Is it a spoiler to say that Estro is the Master? Was Peel even going for a surprise reveal here, given that on Page 13 he has Estro say “You will obey me … I am the master [sic]”? The character is recognisably himself, but rather pettier than usual, ostensibly doing all this Evil Vizier stuff with Haldoran just to pass the time. (“I was forced to wait for the implementation of my main scheme, so I dabbled in local politics in the meantime.”) You might expect his reunion with the Doctor to be as worthwhile as the Doctor meeting Susan again, and these two do at least meet with dialogue and everything, but there’s nothing interesting about it besides the Doctor stage whispering that they’ve actually met out of sequence. Oh, how thrilling.

Between Haldoran, his lackeys, Donna, the Doctor and Susan it’s a somewhat cluttered book, and that’s before you bring in the Master. (And that’s before you bring in the Daleks.) You do sort of assume there will be a point to Ol’ Pointy Beard in this. So, about that: you know how the generally agreed upon worst bit of War Of The Daleks was the chapter tying together all the 70s and 80s Dalek stories into one big conspiracy theory? Well Peel’s back, baby, and he’s got a box to tick. Escaping with the Daleks’ secret weapon and a hostage (Susan), the Master goes to Terserus to try it out. But he underestimates his furious captive, who attacks him psychically and then shoots him and his Dalek weapon, scarring him horribly. Yes, we’re really doing “How did the Master end up scarred in The Deadly Assassin” at the end of a story about Daleks and the future of Susan. To call it a gratuitous add-on would be a whimsical understatement. (Yes, this sequence gives Susan something like an empowering end to her story. But what a shame that violence against a person she doesn’t know was the answer, and what a random piece of continuity to get out of mothballs to do it. The whole sequence just doesn’t speak to Susan at all.) 

There are good ideas in here. Well, okay, there are germs. Earth post-Dalek Invasion could be interesting. What Susan Did Next could be interesting. What Would Susan And The Doctor Say To Each Other could be interesting. At every turn, though, Legacy Of The Daleks either advances its ideas one faltering step or it just doesn’t do them at all. This was to be the last Dalek novel of the range, but if they were to continue being delivered by the grace of the Nation Estate’s ever tightening monkey’s paw — and by all accounts, they would have been — then that’s probably for the best.

4/10

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

Doctor Who
Short Trips
Edited by Stephen Cole

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

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

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

And away we go…

*

Model Train Set
By Jonathan Blum

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

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

*

Old Flames
By Paul Magrs

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

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

*

War Crimes
By Simon Bucher-Jones

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

*

The Last Days
By Evan Pritchard

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

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

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

*

Stop The Pigeon
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

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

*

Freedom
By Steve Lyons

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

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

*

Glass
By Tara Samms

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

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

*

Mondas Passing
By Paul Grice

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

Mother’s Little Helper
By Matthew Jones

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

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

*

The Parliament Of Rats
By Daniel O’Mahony

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

*

Rights
By Paul Grice

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

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

*

Wish You Were Here
By Guy Clapperton

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

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

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

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

*

Ace Of Hearts
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

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

*

The People’s Temple
By Paul Leonard

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

*

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

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

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

7/10