Doctor Who: The BBC Books #88 – Rags by Mick Lewis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#40

Rags

By Mick Lewis

Duck and cover, everyone. I’m doing Rags.

Doctor Who novels are a niche within a niche, so there’s not a lot of discourse surrounding them. Nevertheless, for good or ill a few books have stuck their heads above the parapet. Many readers (including me) think The Also People is pretty spiffy; lots of folks (hello again) think The Ghosts Of N-Space isn’t. That sort of thing.

Then you have a book like Rags. People don’t just dislike it: they haaaaaaate it. There is a vociferousness about the negative reactions to Rags that you don’t often see; helpfully, they are unanimous about what they don’t like, which is the violence. It is generally felt that Mick Lewis went too far here.

I wouldn’t dismiss that out of hand as a criticism. Rags is indeed a gleefully, gluttonously grisly book. I think there is a debate to be had, however, about quite how out of step that is with the book range that spawned it.

Doctor Who is a mostly non-violent show (pipe down, Mary Whitehouse) but expanded media is a little different. The New Adventures used those differences as a selling point: many of those books featured shocking (at times, I would argue, indefensible) violence. You might expect BBC Books to tone it down a little, and they’re certainly easier to recognise as Doctor Who products, but the writers have often felt just as comfortable throwing blood at the walls as the Virgin guys. Mark Morris wrote two books, both gore-fests; Mike Tucker and Robert Perry seem to specialise in people or things that murder the hell out of everyone else; Steve Emmerson had a zombie licking blood off a pitchfork as well as a tree decorated with heads; Keith Topping sat down and thought, “I know, I’ll have a scene where Turlough gets violently anal probed.”

So in other words, it’s not completely unheard of for BBC Books to get nasty, and “but it’s a Past Doctor story” doesn’t seem to make any difference to the rules. If you’re reading a lot of them, particularly in sequence, it’s just not that unusual. (Admittedly if you picked Rags out of a pile, or god forbid made this your first Doctor Who read, or even just read it as a child — which is not an unreasonable thing to do! — I’d understand being shocked.)

I know this seems like a pretty thin defence for big violence, so here’s another one: at least the violence is part of the story. We’ve had books before such as Strange England or Falls The Shadow where everything’s a bit weird in an anything-can-happen sort of way, and the “anything” just so happens to be ever-so-edgy violence. To me, that feels token. In Rags, the fact that people are temporarily losing their minds and attacking/killing each other in horrible ways is at least relevant to the plot, and beyond that the themes of repression. Okay, Mick Lewis still chose to write a story that is overall pretty gross, but it was also commissioned and edited. I guess what I’m saying is that if it appals you — and there’s nothing wrong or invalid about being appalled by it — then perhaps some searching questions need to be asked of BBC Books and Justin Richards et al, and not just Mick Lewis or his admittedly questionable taste.

I have to say that in other areas I quite liked his taste. When Rags isn’t staging horrible murders in the West Country — and occasionally when it is — Lewis demonstrates a very nice turn of phrase. Demented events will roll off the page like this: “The thing from the rock felt the rage of the two, and the rage was good. He wanted more. More of this. With sinews that had once been stone, the creature raised its arms. And the two men became one. Became none.” A band playing frightening counter-culture music becomes “a tremble of subversion in the sunshine.” A slim young woman is noted as having “a waist you could easily strangle.” When observing the kind of people coming to see the band, we find that “it was like the band attracted nature’s strange.” Rags is full of these odd, offbeat observations. I often found myself pausing to enjoy them.

Lewis also has a good grasp of the regular characters. Rags might be an objectively strange Third Doctor story, and it doesn’t always use the characters well, but the Doctor for instance is well characterised. Pertwee’s likeable pomposity is on full display here, with a few opportunities to rankle against intractable people, including the Brigadier when he insists on interrupting his experiments. He can also be utterly kind to outwardly unpleasant people. His current situation of being exiled to Earth is made somewhat relevant to the story, and Lewis makes note of this Doctor’s not-quite-black-and-white relationship with authority, observing that he “purported to be on the side of freedom, yet needed the narrow-minded might of the military and all its conservative, stifling authoritarianism to back him up.” That conflict is mirrored in the plot, which pivots around a mistrust of different groups, particularly authority figures. Pretty good work.

The rest of them work well, but it’s diminishing returns based on how well they’re utilised. Jo spends most of the book working undercover following a band on tour, an already dicey idea of the Doctor’s considering there is an obvious mesmeric influence at work here. Pretty much straight away she’s under the evil spell and beginning to doubt the Doctor and UNIT. Now, I wouldn’t put it past Jo to fall under the influence like this — the Master did that to her in her first story — and I think it’s quite neat to throw Jo into a movement like this and give her objections to her day job based on a moral stand, even if it’s fake. It’s a sort of funhouse mirror version of the environmentalists in The Green Death (whose point of view she actually shared), and you could even argue that this is a way to set that up: clearly Jo is not simpatico with UNIT. The trouble is, Jo’s in the book so little, in terms of actually doing anything, that there isn’t a proper conversation to have about it. She barely cools down with the Doctor afterwards. She just shows up, gets hypnotised, says and thinks some pretty nasty things about him and then gets better. I imagine big Jo fans were not impressed by Rags.

UNIT put in a good showing — sort of. The Brigadier’s mannerisms leap off the page, as does the wryly funny shared irritation between the Doctor and the Brig. (“The Brigadier took this as his cue to advance into the room, like a vampire receiving a welcome invitation.”) Mike Yates’s struggle to belong is nicely underlined by giving him a frustrating undercover job; Benton gets to assert his Sergeantly authoritah at times. But the plot requires that UNIT remain at a remove from danger for most of the book, a point that is occasionally articulated so we know it’s deliberate (“It really wasn’t like the Brigadier to procrastinate over something as important as this”) but it’s not articulated clearly enough that I actually know why they’re doing that. (It’s the same for the Doctor: “Maybe this time he would have been wise to let the Brigadier have his way. Maybe this time he had let things go on too long before making a direct move, and maybe he had endangered Jo in the process.” General evil influence I guess?)

I have my suspicions. Rags is on the short side for a BBC Book and, not to pick on Mick Lewis or anything, but there isn’t much plot to go around; it no doubt would have helped to meet the word count to say, “let’s keep UNIT on the other side of the barrier until page 200-and-something,” or “let’s have the Doctor disappear off to investigate in his lab for ages, then get stuck in a metaphysical realm for a bit so he can have, I dunno, some New Adventures-y angst about his selfish desire to leave Earth and his guilt about companions he left behind until he can show up again.” Tellingly, when it’s finally time to resolve things, the Doctor still doesn’t have much of a role: it’s one of those where the bad guy’s own nature somehow causes his downfall (?) helped along by a useful self-sacrifice from the supporting cast. Despite Lewis’s obvious familiarity with the characters, his choice to have the Doctor all but cheering “go on, son!” from the sidelines and Jo mostly off her nut the whole time means that Rags very nearly avoids being a bona fide Doctor Who story at all.

This is where critics of the excessive violence chime in with, “yeah, you could have fooled me.” So let’s add context: Rags is about a rock band who come into contact with a violent, apparently primordial force in the countryside which takes them over. They then travel around playing evil gigs and driving people insane, triggering murders at each site. This is eventually seen to be the work of the Ragman, an ancient alien not unlike Stephen King’s Pennywise, who thrives on violent energy — in particular the kind created by class warfare.

Lewis has some good ideas here, particularly the way an unscrupulous man uses the furore around the killings to more easily gain access to a popular figure, the better to exercise his own class warfare. (This goes horribly wrong.) I’m not sure Lewis really interrogates this stuff, however, since most of the people affected end up dead, or not heard from again. It’s for instance the Ragman, a disposable villain, who makes certain very arguable points about the Doctor’s flaws, and not someone actually useful like Jo, who has her own problems with him throughout the novel but all of those can be written off as hallucinations. UNIT are also forced to confront some very real classist undertones in the ranks, but again most of the perpetrators end up as crime scene decorations. If the Brigadier feels bad about his participation, well that’s just not important right now.

This is presumably where Lewis’s own characters ought to shine — it’s them, after all, that carry the novel home. He invests a lot of effort in the supporting cast and they do feel lived in and damaged, but there is a certain shared nastiness about them that gets in the way of actually caring about them. For example there’s Kane, a drunk with a hatred of bullies and a historical link to the Ragman, who ought to be central to the novel — but he just feels like another really unpleasant guy in the mix. Charmagne, a journalist who also matters greatly (at least in the grand scheme of things) spends too long lost in the curiously metaphysical back of a lorry. She has a recurring nightmare but there isn’t really time to dwell on it. I’m not sure what happened to her in the end.

More frequent characters include Sin, a young woman who is close to Jo for a lot of the book, but who doesn’t actually like Jo, hates her boyfriend and then completely falls in with the Ragman, at least until the very last second when it’s too late. Bit hard to chart an interesting character arc there. (Also: Sin is ethnically Chinese, which in one of Lewis’s rare weak characterisations means she is relentlessly referred to as “the Chinese girl.”) Other recurring figures like Jimmy, Nick and Rod run the risk of requiring a spotter’s guide, especially when (in the name of world-building) Lewis occasionally spends time on new characters who are only going to get splattered in a few pages anyway.

Perhaps inevitably, we’ve circled back around to the violence aspect. I suspect that this was another way, consciously or otherwise, to get Rags to the finish line: all those grotesque, protracted violent scenes that (here we go) do earn a place strictly speaking because the plot calls for them, nevertheless do go into a level of detail that is perhaps a bit much. I think the book’s reputation on this has been exaggerated, as these sequences are not at all constant, but much like the generally manky characters there is a certain skuzziness to the proceedings that is never far away. The story of Kane’s childhood bully feeding him slugs, for instance; the demonic band member who kisses Sin with a mouth full of maggots; the rest of the band who occasionally projectile puke, Exorcist-style, into their willing fans’ mouths. It’s a bit hard to stop and think, “hmm, yes, those themes of classism” when the book is generally just trying to gross you out.

So that naturally becomes the thing Rags is known for: violent scenes and gross bits. There isn’t a lot else to cling to, despite what is obviously supposed to be a general idea of repressed violence in society. The regulars are well characterised, but they feel peripheral; the supporting characters feel like they have lives, but they’re not dissimilar enough from each other; and although there is a plot and there are things to discover along the way (such as Kane’s family history, which to be honest still comes out of the blue), you more or less have the measure of Rags before the Doctor even turns up. Ancient evil glomming onto people and making them do horrible things, then generally sort of feeding on that was my guess after the opening car crash scene, and 250 pages later I wasn’t wrong. Attempts to enrich this include selling the Ragman as a “universal peril” that might worry even the Time Lords, but I just didn’t buy that.

Without a profound sense of threat (beyond just violence) or really any idea what can be done about it (beyond just, stop them I guess?) Rags becomes something of a slog despite its quick page-count: it’s a case of waiting for awfulness and then having the subsequent awfulness happen, rinse and repeat. All in all, the whole “small town generational folk horror” thing on display here held together better in The Hollow Men. I do think Mick Lewis displays a lot of talent on a sentence-by-sentence level, and he clearly loves Doctor Who, despite how he wants to present it. Rags isn’t the abhorrent wash-out I’d been dreading, nor is it unique in its mucky execution; it’s just not compelling or deep enough to justify all of that putrescence to any reader not fully on the author’s wavelength.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #87 – EarthWorld by Jacqueline Rayner

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#43

EarthWorld

By Jacqueline Rayner

The EDAs are back on track at last. Earth, shmearth! Now let’s all get in the TARDIS and go to… a place deliberately modelled and named after Earth.

That gag is fairly typical (in a good way) of Jacqueline Rayner, a very funny writer who has at last paused her editorial duties to write a novel of her own. She was already an experienced writer and adapter by March 2001, having worked on the early New Adventures-born Bernice Summerfield audios, written a sublime Evelyn Smythe introduction in The Marian Conspiracy and — showing a little of that Justin Richards/maniac work ethic — delivering a Benny novel, The Squire’s Crystal, one month after this. (Also very good.) BBC Books was lucky to have her working in this capacity, not to mention that it’s about bloody time we saw another female author around the place.

That sense of experience jumps off the page. It’s a confident and witty novel, sufficiently at ease with prose to pull off cloaked character insights like: “‘What was that?’ yelled Fitz, obviously forgetting that he knew everything”, and economical asides like: “Anji shot an alarmed look at Fitz, who tried to shoot one back that said, ‘Don’t worry, he won’t, only we might have to play along with it for now to get out alive.’ He hoped she got all that.” There’s a visible sense of panic to Anji and Fitz’s thoughts as they stumble over additional thoughts in parentheses or in lists; then, when Rayner needs to dial it back and apply subtlety or emotion, that’s handled with aplomb too, as in the final scenes with Anji. (We’ll get to it.) Although it’s not really a first impression for Rayner, it is as far as most of the novel-reading crowd is concerned, and it’s a good one.

EarthWorld has a lot to do, so it’s to Rayner’s credit that it somehow romps along the whole time while getting everything done. This is Anji’s first trip in the TARDIS, and it needs to establish that this will be ongoing. (Since she never actually signed up for it last time.) This is Fitz’s first off-world adventure with the Doctor after their separation — a state of affairs that more or less continued through Escape Velocity — and it needs to re-establish their dynamic, as well as clarifying anything that’s changed. And it’s the Doctor’s return to time-space adventuring after six novels stuck you-know-where, so it needs to throw him in at the deep end and see how he copes with it.

What it’s also doing, of course, is the same sort of thing The Burning did: this is a soft reboot, a Day 1 reset for the new TARDIS crew. You could jump on here — in TV terms, this would be the deceptively bright-and-breezy Episode 1 of a new series after a particularly turbulent Christmas Special. It makes sense that they selected EarthWorld for a reprint in 2012, as it tells you everything you need to know.

Unsurprisingly the character work is the highlight. The Doctor, for example. The Earth arc was a challenge for all the writers: the Doctor couldn’t use any of his usual tools, besides charm and intelligence. There’s a huge sense of relief now that he can whizz around using his sonic screwdriver again. There are moments of tremendous Doctorly power in this, such as a sequence where he appears to move unnaturally fast while an axe falls towards his neck, or even a simple rebuke like: “‘I am the President, Doctor, and you are an escaped criminal! I could stop you leaving with a snap of my fingers!’ ‘No,’ said the Doctor, ‘you couldn’t.’ Hoover looked at the Doctor’s face, and involuntarily took another step backwards.” He is also able to instil confidence in those around him, particularly Anji who by rights ought to be freaking out about all this. Overall, after the stuck-on-Earth run it’s like switching the lights on again.

But it’s not easy. Since we are (nyurgh) keeping the amnesia thing, there is a vulnerability to the Doctor, a sense that this could all come crumbling down. He doesn’t remember how to use the sonic, and can only do it subconsciously by distracting himself — a device Rayner craftily uses to raise the issue about Gallifrey: “‘What world, Doctor? Is this your home planet? Tell me about it.’ There was a loud click, and a buzz from the door. ‘What world?’ The Doctor paused. And then to Anji’s horror he shot her a look which froze her stomach. His eyes suddenly seemed dead. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’”

From Fitz’s perspective “he still seemed to be the week-ago Doctor … in all the ways that mattered,” but “if the Doctor was going to remember, he had to do it naturally. In his own time. So it wasn’t another sudden, Doctor-destroying shock.” Rayner contrives to bring a memory-scanner into the plot which introduces the idea of the Doctor remembering The Ancestor Cell and so on; suddenly Fitz has acquired the role of a caregiver, and actively works to stop this happening until the time is right. All clear signs pointing towards a new character dynamic, which is a good incentive to keep that (mostly hypothetical) influx of new readers reading.

I’m still not crazy about the memory loss, or convinced that it adds very much. As Fitz himself says, for all intents and purposes this is the Doctor and he’s doing all the right Doctor stuff. He wouldn’t need to remember Genesis Of The Daleks or Interference: Book Two in order to solve this particular crisis, and although the “use your subconscious” impediment adds a bit of whimsy to the sonic screwdriver he’s still pointing and clicking away problems with it. So… do we need this? The absence of memory isn’t even sparing the reader any continuity baggage, since Rayner happily provides plenty of that to tell us what he’s missing. So who’s it helping? I recognise that it gives the characters A Problem To Solve, it just doesn’t seem like a very interesting one.

Still, you do get that new look for Fitz. He didn’t get much opportunity to shine in Escape Velocity. EarthWorld is much more his speed, confronting him with his insecurities, his old life as a singer and more generally with the twentieth century, which this alien theme park completely misconstrues. It helps to underscore Fitz’s original time and place (again that sense of a soft reboot) as well as showing how much he’s moved beyond it. Taking care of the Doctor is a striking example of growing up, even if it feels a bit redundant as an arc. (He’s already giving “hey, remember Gallifrey?” a go at the end of this, albeit unsuccessfully.)

Fitz also gets his share of trauma. You might have thought he’d moved past the “duplicate” situation from Interference, but the setting of EarthWorld (aka android duplicates) gives him ample reason to dredge it up again. And really, that’s fair: people can move on from things and yet still go back to them under the right (or I suppose, wrong) circumstances. The Doctor isn’t himself any more, which gives Fitz even more reason to question the relationship between his memories and his real self. At one point Fitz is so distraught that he curls up into a ball and can’t function at all. (Yes, the Fitz in this scene carries a pretty big caveat, but to therefore dismiss it as “true Fitz characterisation” would sort of prove his worries to be correct.)

EarthWorld has its share of psychological horrors but it’s far from a gloomy novel: just as the Doctor is able to begin moving forward, Fitz finds some comfort to counteract his identity crisis. At one point he worries that he can’t die, so he immediately gets hurt, which pithily puts that to bed. He also meets a virtual version of Filippa, his girlfriend from Parallel 59 and the ideal ending for him in the series, who tells him: “Will you stop saying you’re an artificial construct? You are no more so than Compassion was, and you treated her as a person. To put it bluntly, you’re bloody real, Fitz.” So that would seem to be that — or at least until the next crisis sets him off again. (Here’s hoping the writers show some restraint with this.)

For perhaps the best example of setting up trauma as a starting point, then getting comfortable enough for more adventures, there’s Anji. A workable enough character in Escape Velocity, she nevertheless lacked spark. (It was a general character problem with the book.) EarthWorld gives a lot of real estate to Anji, how she’s feeling and how she responds to a more traditionally Doctor Who adventure, and it does all of this very well.

The character has a dry, pragmatic humour: “No network. Surprise surprise. So they were in the past — or on an alien planet — or, just possibly, in Wales.” Her approach is often to wonder about mundane things like how “she couldn’t very well stay in her room with a good book while the others went out exploring the universe, could she. Could she?” Her concerns include the very real dangers of impractical footwear. It all feels suitably apart from the more gung-ho Sam Jones, not to mention the aloof and otherworldly Compassion. (Fitz charmingly hopes that Anji will be “a more amenable travelling companion than the TARDIS bitch queen from hell.” Tell us what you really think, guys!)

Presented with a threat as “cartoonish” as the situation in this theme park, Anji’s thoughts occasionally drift toward tropes, which is a nice way into the meta world of introducing yet another Doctor Who companion. She wonders: “would the universe play by those fictional rules? Should she get a T-shirt printed with I’M A MAIN CHARACTER, DON’T KILL ME?” She’s nonetheless able to relate all this to her own experiences: “It was scary how such important things could dissolve into nothing. An entirely different perspective. Like how she’d been worried for ages about her annual review coming up next month, and now she just had to concentrate on staying alive long enough to even have the chance of getting home again.” And, on making it as part of the TARDIS team: “She’d had to work to fit in, and so she could do it again.” Before you know it, “she [realises] that she’d been thinking in terms of future TARDIS trips, not just going straight home. Which worried her a bit.” It feels like a natural progression.

Trauma plays a part. Anji’s boyfriend Dave died in Escape Velocity, and quite histrionic it was too. The relationship as written was a bit underwhelming, so EarthWorld does a lot of heavy lifting to round it out. Anji often needs distracting from thoughts of Dave, his death, and the Doctor’s failure to save him. (I feel like she’s being a tad unfair to the Doctor here, as he did save him from that fatal infection, as promised. It’s not his fault he got murdered afterwards! But ehh, people can be unfair.)

She frequently writes emails to Dave, or at least mentally composes them, gradually tracking her progress through the story and her acceptance of the TARDIS life, and you can see her feelings about Dave being interrogated as we go. It’s not lost on Rayner that this couple wasn’t perfect: Anji recognises that there was a complacency and a settlement to what they had, and in the end she sees that she can be glad to have something new instead — she can even see the negative ways that she’s using her tragedy to get the right kind of attention. It’s clearly not as simple as “it wasn’t very good anyway” or “you were the love of my life”; it’s messy, like people are. Towards the end there’s a series of beautifully arranged flashbacks that bring Anji back to the present with a bump, dovetailing nicely with her new life. It all feels like a very honest response to what was established in the previous book, and much like Fitz’s issues, it’s up to future writers whether they want to carry on that train of thought, build upon it or just move on.

There are heaps of nice things you can say about EarthWorld and they’re all valid reasons for liking the book. Tellingly though they are all about character. The rest of it, while not exactly bad, doesn’t seem to have captured Rayner’s imagination in the same way. Depending on how much that matters to you as a reader it might sour the experience.

The setting is fun. What if Westworld, but with Earth history as the subject? The trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be any deeper layer to this idea. Other than the ways in which it can help set up that memory-scanner business at the end, all we’ve got are a few “zones” for Ancient Egypt, prehistory, Swinging 60s London or what have you, and they all have more or less the same (admittedly funny) “got it a bit wrong” joke. There’s nothing compellingly scary about the androids (even the mostly-just-clumsy dinosaurs), who for all their Fitz-informing drama don’t rate as characters themselves. And there’s no sense of scale here, with each zone feeling as close to the next one as the claustrophobic sets in The Happiness Patrol. I felt no broad sense that we’re on an alien planet with its own problems — Rayner sets up that this is very much the case with an anti-Earth resistance group (called “ANJI”, which to be honest is a bit of a stretch), but in practical terms they’re just three drippy youths who’ve been arrested for flimsy reasons. They each have a “real”, aka Earth-inspired name like “James” and a “New Jupitan”, aka more sci-fi name like “Xernic”. Good luck remembering all six monikers by the end.

Characterisation is, ironically, a problem once you move away from the regulars. The park is mostly empty apart from guests in danger. (There hardly seem to be any; I don’t think they had names.) Unlike Westworld, the attractions haven’t risen up all by themselves, but because of three disgruntled and psychotic triplets named Asia, Africa and Antarctica. They have a gift for android design as well as some murderous tendencies. They also have a peculiar relationship with their parents — President Hoover, their seemingly distant and unaffectionate father, and their comatose mother Elizabethan whom they may have murdered.

EarthWorld drifts from a fizzy farce into a black comedy whenever they’re around, which in itself isn’t a bad thing (the twisted family dynamic feels like something out of a Robert Shearman script), but it’s jarring, and it makes it difficult to care about them, or any of the action that occurs away from the Doctor, Anji and Fitz. EarthWorld ultimately boils down to a family drama about these weirdo triplets and their parents, which combined with the limited rewards of Funny Theme Park has the effect of making the whole endeavour feel aggressively trivial; the only moments that land are the ones that are tacitly about the regulars instead. Other side characters include Venna Durwell, park director with a random homicidal bent and Presidential confidant Hanstrum; they may occasionally be important to the plot but I still had to look up their names just now. (After one of them died and a character referenced it I had to flick back through the book, as I’d entirely forgotten what happened to them.)

Look, I’m more of a character than a plot guy. EarthWorld’s (main) character journeys may have been built on top of some tinsel but they’re terrific. Sure, I would rather the rest of it held up as well, but I’m confident that this sort of thing won’t always be a problem for Rayner. Indeed, The Squire’s Crystal was next for her, wringing character development out of a bodyswap and a series of inevitable misunderstandings — perhaps that’s a better example of finding a plot the same size as the story. EarthWorld is good enough where it counts that I’d be happy for Rayner to become a Blum-and-Orman-ish fixture. The rest of it is at least pretty funny. How could I stay mad at a book that has a cosplaying Elvis begin a death match with “You gonna be lonesome tonight — in the grave!”

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #86 – Bunker Soldiers by Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#39

Bunker Soldiers

By Martin Day

Following The King Of Terror we’re now seeing the other side of the Topping/Day solo divide. That’s not entirely fair of course, since Day’s first novel (The Menagerie) was all his own work, but he’s co-written a few things since then and has presumably learned a lot.

It’s a funny old bibliography. I wasn’t very impressed by The Menagerie, an imaginative but rough-around-the-edges first novel, and his co-written Bernice Summerfield book (Another Girl, Another Planet) was some of that range’s least distinct work. But his two PDAs with Topping bear thinking about: The Devil Goblins Of Neptune and The Hollow Men are both violent yet interesting exercises, each with its own voice. All of this brings us to Bunker Soldiers, a book that I wasn’t excited about due to that previous uneven track record but which I can now say is the best thing Day has written.

It’s a pseudo-historical about the Mongol invasion of Kiev [sic] in 1240, adding an alien menace into the mix — but keeping the emphasis on the historical elements. Pseudo-historicals became the default way for Doctor Who to visit the past not long after Hartnell exited the series; I’ve always found them slightly disappointing, as they feel like a concession to impatient viewers that won’t recognise it as Doctor Who unless there’s a bug-eyed monster somewhere. Bunker Soldiers does indeed have an extra-terrestrial lurking about, but it’s there to reflect the nightmares going on in real life. In all honesty the book could probably still work as a pure historical, but I’m not unhappy with what we got instead.

You’ll notice there are no continuity links on the back cover. (This appears to be a change to the PDAs as a whole, no doubt to tone down the fanwank. I’ll bear it in mind the next time we get a Quantum Archangel.) Day is nevertheless specific about what period of the show he’s using: this isn’t set long after The Massacre Of St. Bartholomew’s Eve, what with Steven “remembering our earlier argument after our escape from Paris … the debate had never really ended, and I didn’t want the Doctor to think that the passing of time meant I now agreed with him.” That specific argument has cropped up in the PDAs before, with Salvation set directly in its aftermath, but Bunker Soldiers finds more to say on the subject.

At first things are very clear cut. You know how the Doctor feels about changing history from watching The Aztecs, or more nuanced explorations such as The Witch Hunters. He boils it down succinctly here: “‘We must do something.’ ‘We must do absolutely nothing!’” Awful as it is, the Mongols are going to invade and the Russians [sic] are going to be massacred. Typically, the Doctor and co are separated from the TARDIS, barred from re-entry by a desperate governor who knows a miracle when he sees one and won’t pass up another. The Doctor digs his heels in and refuses to share his secrets, which right away gives the novel a doomy atmosphere: the only alternative to helping is simply waiting to die together.

But there’s another problem. One of Kiev’s advisers, Yehven, has unleashed a secret weapon in the city’s catacombs, a “dark angel” that can assume different guises and kills with ease. He hopes to turn it on the Mongols. (He is apparently blithe about its initial target practice in Kiev.) The Doctor cannot let an already dangerous army get their hands on an alien weapon.

Suddenly the “not one line” guard rails aren’t good enough: to do nothing might be what changes history. The urge to keep time on track is still the important thing, but the addition of a sci-fi problem changes the Doctor’s entire approach. All of a sudden the Doctor has some justification for trying to reason with the Mongols and avert the invasion altogether — after all, what’s the greater crisis? Kiev getting an easier ride or the Mongols getting a super weapon? The Doctor’s usual certainties erode even further as the novel progresses and things get nastier, giving him a more casual attitude towards sharing future information. Why worry about it when most of these people aren’t going to make it?

The story often challenges preconceived notions. Perhaps the biggest one is the Mongol threat. They are perceived as demons and monsters by the Russians. Day doesn’t suggest that this is outright wrong, indeed he frequently demonstrates their scant regard for human life. They execute all but two of the Doctor’s negotiating party, and the last we see of Mykola — a previously treacherous man whom the Doctor has come to respect, so another example of preconceptions challenged — is the sound of Batu Khan having him tortured, presumably to death.

We are given a florid account of what Mongol invasion means to the conquered people, which includes the drastic reduction of their numbers — but then, only if they don’t surrender, and what happens to them after invasion is more or less normal society, perhaps it’s even improved. They have culture and they prize comforts. Their envoys are often captured men, and likeable ones at that; when two of them are rashly executed by the governor of Kiev there’s no doubt in the reader’s mind that this is a gross tragedy. When the Doctor (spoiler?) stands with the reigning warlords overlooking a mostly dead Kiev, he notes that “the wind tugged at the Mongols’ beards and hair and, perhaps, irritated their eyes. Only that could explain their tearful gaze as they, too, looked over the city.” They believe in what they’re doing, up to and including atrocities, but they can also be more than that.

The same is true of the conquered. Yehven is a slippery vizier in the grand tradition of Tlotoxl in The Aztecs: he is generally disliked and has designs of power, and of course he makes enemies of the TARDIS crew. He’s also busy trying to get rid of Isaac, an impassioned Jew looking to translate ancient texts. Yehven eventually finds himself in power, but only at a point when everything’s gone horribly wrong; he opines that “whatever I have done in the past, the pain I have caused — it has been with a greater purpose in mind,” and then in a less genial moment, “what do I govern? A terrified city, riddled with pestilence and soon to be attacked by a great army. This is not what I had in mind!” There’s a fantastic motif around doors, first having him lock Steven in a room with the alien to die, then later locking a number of people out so that he can face danger instead. Sadly, Yehven isn’t quite done twisting and turning at this point, as he was actually attempting to use these people as bait for a Mongol trap. Somewhere underneath all that, however, is a broken family man who means well for his people and his faith.

The rest of them are mostly virtuous, some committing terrible actions for what they thought were the right reasons. Mykola frames Steven for murder to throw suspicion away from the alien; Yehven orders a guard to kill Isaac and destroy his work; Steven meets Olexander, an old man as instantly loveable as Binro the Heretic, but he’s revealed to have been lead astray, much good it does him. Then we have the governor, Dmitri: a good man who seems uncommonly able (for a character of this archetype) to believe the time travellers and support their suggestions — that is, until he loses his mind and instigates a strategy that will doom Kiev. We leave the door open for possible alien influence on Dmitri, plus there’s a cholera outbreak that might be affecting his wits. Nonetheless the possibility remains that a good man under impossible pressure can do monstrous things. In the end he is pitied, but we can’t truly understand his actions. Perhaps he can’t either.

It’s debatable whether you needed an alien threat in amongst all that, but Day makes a good selection all the same. The nameless creature/soldier/machine is a shape changer with a few hallmarks of vampirism, plus the habits of a succubus and/or incubus. It feels suitably superstitious that it could take part in these events without anyone needing to guess what planet it came from, which helps bolster the “historical” part of pseudo-historical. Day’s descriptions are often murky, but that feels deliberate: when it hasn’t settled on a shape people simply don’t know what the hell they’re looking at. The creature’s lack of personality could have made it boring, but Day manages to land on unfathomable and creepy instead, particularly when it plies its trade and the prose gets to work: “As her husband brought his head downwards, his mouth was full of needles.” Ultimately the whole concept of a creature that could be anyone is an inspired one for a story about people that contain dark, unpleasant multitudes.

You would hope that the recurring characters bear examination too, and happily that’s the case. We’ve already gone over the Doctor’s thought processes, and how they challenge his normal attitudes, but Day makes a point of letting the characters sit with what’s happened at the end: despite everything the Doctor feels more resolute about history’s certain course, he’s just had to accept that his involvement might be necessary sometimes. The Doctor is a fierce presence in Bunker Soldiers, quietly pruned of any funny Billy fluffs; he relies on his past experience with Kublai Khan to talk to his ancestor and he does so fearlessly. When the time comes to be with the doomed people of Kiev, any airs and graces have gone and he can be frank with them. When the Mongols try to stop him working against the alien he finds a way to outfox them, and when it’s all over he can somewhat see eye to eye with them. It’s a great reading of the character.

It is though, to a significant event, Steven’s book; he is afforded chapters in first person, and it’s Steven who has to shoulder much of the story. It’s the force of Steven’s personality, not just the Doctor’s, that wins Dmitri around. (Although we must also credit Day for simply not being so dull as to do the usual “imperious type locks up the time travellers so we can squeeze out another episode” structure — well, not beyond a certain point anyway.) Steven has to do most of the legwork when it comes to the alien and his bond with Isaac is a large part of why the travellers are (relatively) so well thought of here. He still never dials down that incredulity that makes the character so dynamic, not shying away from telling Yehven what he thinks of him (and, well, to just get out) despite him trying to offer reassurance in return. Steven, like us, cannot truly see the Doctor’s point of view of history being inevitable and many of its people being uniquely “intimate with death”; if he’s not at last in agreement with the Doctor’s rebuke at the end of Massacre, though, he’s at least accepting of it.

If Bunker Soldiers has a bum note it’s probably Dodo, but not because she’s poorly written. Day lets her off the leash when we see her, she is fiercely and almost ferally Dodo in this. She refuses to “posh up” in a historical setting and says things like this to a love-struck girl: “It all makes sense now. I noticed you staring at him the other day. I thought he had his flies undone or something.” She also joins Steven in tearing strips off Yehven, utterly undaunted in supporting his long-suffering daughter Lesia. The issue is that there isn’t much for her to do — I suspect because Day wanted to write about this Doctor and Steven, specifically after the Massacre, and Dodo comes with that package deal. At least we can count this as a novel in which something personally horrible doesn’t happen to Dodo (murder, STD and sexual assault so far), but then again Day does make it so that maybe she was indirectly responsible for the Black Death? So um, yeah, that is going on the list actually.

It’s worth acknowledging the depth of history here, which is rich enough to involve you even if you didn’t know anything about it. Some of it is both creditably real and genuinely shocking, particularly the bit about the church roof. I think I’m right in saying though that Dmitri’s plan, which Dodo thinks she may have inspired, did not really happen? Which seems at least a little bit tasteless as real people are involved. (On the plus side, if that is the case then that rather argues that Dodo didn’t affect the plague. Every cloud!)

There are other things to like. Bunker Soldiers is at the stronger end of prose for a Doctor Who book, Day perhaps being spurred on by the historical setting and some of those acclaimed Hartnell stories. It starts in media res, which often makes things more exciting. The format is interesting too, juggling Steven’s first person narrative, the rest of it in third and interludes from the alien’s point of view that don’t make sense until you’re near the end. (Potentially irritating, but this had the effect of keeping me intrigued.) Ultimately it just felt like a strong argument for going back to the (mostly) historical well: the past is full of stories and also attitudes, including ones from established characters, which still have room to move. It’s all worth exploring.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #85 – Escape Velocity by Colin Brake

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#42

Escape Velocity

By Colin Brake

Here we go then. After six novels set (and stuck) on Earth the Doctor is finally getting his TARDIS back and is heading out into the universe. So no pressure, first time novelist Colin Brake.

To start positive, he does a few things I like. Brake has that very popular habit among Who novelists of changing scenes frequently, but he is more able than most to keep his focus between them, so we might dart over to the side but it’s clearly the same scene continuing, perhaps from a different perspective. (A cabbie or a passing cat, for instance.) I was still jolted by the all-too-TV-ish scene breaks that tie-in writers are for some reason obsessed with, but they contributed to the momentum overall, at least more than I’m used to.

Also, quite a big deal here, Brake introduces the new companion: Anji Kapoor. I don’t think he does a bad job, or at least no worse than we’re used to. Sam had as much introduction as Terrance Dicks could hurriedly scribble on the back of a crisp packet; Fitz and Compassion both had full stories setting them up, but the actual “join the TARDIS” bit fell between scenes and between novels respectively. Anji is the first one to be actively written like a trip in the TARDIS might make sense for her, and although she doesn’t go down the traditional “sign me up” route there’s at least a proper scene to solidify her ongoing adventures. It doesn’t sound like much but you notice when these things are absent.

Beyond that it’s a bit difficult to get excited about Escape Velocity. It’s a momentous story because of where it sits in the arc, but otherwise when it comes to significant events — whether they’re arc payoffs or just the plot — everything feels anticlimactic.

Some of that is due to scheduling. Staying on Earth means running into the same problem they had in 1970: the threat will be random monsters, mad scientists or alien invasions, over and over. As it turns out, The Turing Test, Endgame and Father Time all had malevolent aliens hiding on Earth. (Unhelpfully so did The King Of Terror over in the PDAs.) As a result I’m starting to get my shifty aliens mixed up. Father Time also stepped on Brake’s toes by sending the Doctor on a space mission at the end — an event that, in hindsight, probably should have been saved for the climax of the “desperate to get off Earth” arc, and certainly feels like less of a big deal now. (Granted, he goes in the TARDIS this time, but only as a last minute substitution.)

It’s not just a feeling of “been there, done that,” however. Major events in the book just seem to plod past. The invading aliens, the Kulan, are outed directly to the reader in an interlude, as opposed to through any sort of dramatic reveal or character interaction. That was easy! After that there are scenes of the Doctor and Anji, then Fitz, then biochemist Christine Holland all finding out about the Kulan, each with as little resistance or secrecy as possible — it’s either a case of someone telling them without prompting or them asking and getting back “yeah, since you asked, aliens mate, big time.” Easier still! Brake was a script editor before this, which makes me wonder if he was deliberately trying to move these beats along faster. If so, well done, but now they feel perfunctory — especially where they keep happening. (See also the bizarre damp squib moment when the Doctor announces that humans have Kulan ancestry. Are we doing anything with that? No? Just gonna drop the mic and go? Okay then.)

The Kulan are not a fascinating menace. The idea itself isn’t bad: an expedition crashed on Earth with the intention of reporting back on whether the rest of them should invade. They broke into two groups, for and against, and due to losing their ship they each need to work with a different space-obsessed billionaire in order to build a rocket that can contact their people. A space race ensues; meanwhile the fleet is approaching.

They’re just not very memorable otherwise. Aliens who want to invade Earth for the resources are ten a penny. We hear a bit of lore about their weird family structure towards the end, but by then we’re pages away from getting rid of them. There are some physical characteristics that mark them apart from humanity, but not so many that they can’t pass for human. Fitz notices that they don’t seem to mind rain and they’re good at mountaineering. (Fascinating.) Some of them are benign and at least one of them is a bit of a psycho — I’ll let you guess how this aligns with their views on Earth invasion. The whole “who gets their message through first” plot seems a bit redundant, since the fleet is almost in orbit. Would you turn around and go home? So the plot supporting all this feels much of a muchness until we can get up there and decide one way or the other.

Said plot is mostly a lot of perfunctory (that word again) action and kidnapping. We meet Anji and her boyfriend Dave as they encounter a “good” Kulan carrying precious cargo. He slips this onto Dave as he’s dying — hello, every other Hitchcock movie — who soon after gets nabbed by the “bad” Kulan. By this point Fitz, getting impatient waiting for the Doctor, gets involved because the dead man had two hearts. (An amazing coincidence that’s the only reason the Doctor and Fitz get involved at all.) Soon the CIA are chasing Fitz, Dave is dying of a strange alien infection, Christine Holland gets involved because of her missing daughter, and the characters are ping-ponging effortlessly between billionaires Tyler (team: good guys) and Dudoin (bad guys) until it’s time to launch, executing various quite easy break-ins and escapes along the way.

Some of this feels superfluous in the extreme, particularly the CIA thread that eventually just gives up and stops. (The afterword suggests that this was done to allow a “small cameo” for Topping and Day’s Control character. I’m sure both of them clapped.) Our time with the billionaires isn’t very well spent either. The concept has certainly/unfortunately aged well, what with Jeff Bezos and the like, but Brake is very optimistic with his nice-guy billionaire Tyler, whose last minute tragic info-dump and heroic exit from the narrative are pure B-movie stuff. Dudoin on the other hand might be insane — he seems happy for Earth to be invaded and he has no qualms about kidnapping his own daughter… so more your Elon Musk type, then? — but he’s not deep enough for it to matter, and he’s quickly dispensed with when the plot needs to wander off somewhere else instead.

Dudoin’s ex-wife and daughter — the latter a very unconvincing smart-beyond-her-years eight year old — don’t have space to process his end, and to be frank they don’t make much of an impact in general. Christine ought to be fairly interesting since her expertise is pivotal to the plot (build an interface that allows humans to pilot Kulan-assisted spacecraft) but there are some stumbling blocks to this. Namely: Christine’s bizarrely instant distraction from her kidnapped daughter just because she’s so excited by Dudoin’s task; her going from “I don’t believe in aliens” to “I’ve built the interface” in about a day; and the slight nitpick that they could probably just get a Kulan to pilot the bloody thing in the first place.

In short, there’s not much of interest happening in the novel-specific nitty gritty — it’s all a bit of a low rent racket. What of the regulars? It’s A Big Deal novel for each of them, after all. Unsurprisingly the answer is: see plot.

You’ve probably been wondering where the Doctor’s “Meet me in St. Louis” note would lead. He has, after all, done a few recces to the city of St. Louis by now and found no clues. (As per Father Time.) I’m not sure whose idea it was to make it a bar in London, or how it makes any sense that the Doctor changes an existing bar to be called St. Louis and that happens to be where the note was talking about, but oh well, if you don’t fancy setting the book in America then so be it. The actual meeting, though, is yet another anticlimax. Yes, it’s a delight to see Fitz again — but the Doctor doesn’t seem to agree, feeling decidedly neutral about the whole thing because (oh yeah) he doesn’t remember Fitz. But wasn’t he excited to find out anyway? I’m pretty sure he was. The plot soon requires that they split up (!!!) and that’s that for most of Escape Velocity. Hope you weren’t expecting a big reunion or owt.

Fitz is much as he’s ever been, thank goodness. (Although he fails to cop off with anyone, plus it’s made clear that Anji is not his type. She’s in a relationship anyway.) The relevant parts are when he wonders about the Doctor’s amnesia. He’s pretty sure it’s “denial on a cosmic scale” about what happened to Gallifrey, and he has a few occasions to wonder if he’s just putting it on, before the Doctor outright fails to remember Sam, which seems to clinch it. (The irrelevant part would be the portion of the book where Fitz seems to develop his own amnesia. Is that going somewhere or is it a dropped stitch? It doesn’t do a thing in context and it’s gone by the end.)

Then we have the Doctor, as well as inevitably the wider question of how this arc has progressed. Plot arcs like this always exist at the mercy of individual writers, and this one has been no exception: the Doctor’s allowance for violence comes and goes, his desperation to leave Earth waxes and wanes, at one point he had an adopted daughter but she’s moved on and there’s no sign that this has had a lasting impact on him. Brake very much has his cake and eats it with the amnesia, but to be fair that’s a constant among the writers: the Doctor can remember stuff when it helps, but in practical terms he’s just “the Doctor, a citizen of the universe. I travel through time and space in my trusty TARDIS and I try to help people. That’s about it, isn’t it?”

Presumably that return to simplicity was the whole point of the arc, but I’m not convinced it’s worth all that much, since a) it’s already getting pretty tedious hearing him say “I don’t remember that,” b) we know all the stuff he doesn’t, so it doesn’t add any mystery and c) the Doctor only needs to harp on about continuity as much as you, the writer, want him to. If you want the books to rely less on deep cuts then maybe just stop returning Craig Hinton’s calls. (The Quantum Archangel doesn’t do much for the “clean break” theory, does it? To the casual reader surely this all seems like the same range.)

The Doctor is a fairly breezy genius/action hero in Escape Velocity, albeit he lacks some of the confidence and any sign of the learned humanity he acquired in Father Time, apart from having the financial resources to casually buy a bar. He makes a decent enough companion (so to speak) for Anji, who sees him display various abilities and attributes. And yes, he gets the TARDIS back, which is a relief, albeit it’s yet another example of anticlimax: the TARDIS isn’t ready until it is, and then the Doctor can pilot it until he can’t, which sets up the Hartnell-ish status quo at the end. This is written in (sorry) as perfunctory a manner as ever, all eye-rolling “Doctorrr!” from Anji and “Here we go again” from Fitz. Much like the amnesia, I’m sure this could lead somewhere interesting in the right hands, but that obviously depends on who’s writing it and what Justin’s asking for. There’s nothing mind-blowing about what we see here.

And that just leaves Anji. As I said, some positives to consider here: she gets that “stuck in the TARDIS” scene so it feels like she is officially here to stay, plus there are several hints that she had wanted to broaden her horizons anyway: “What [Anji] really wanted, she had decided recently, was to go somewhere further afield, somewhere truly different in every way. Somewhere really alien.” Hey, I never said they were subtle.

As a character, so far she is unfortunately very much the sort of character you’d find in Escape Velocity. She’s well intentioned, nice enough but ultimately a bit too dry. She’s science-minded in a way that drives a wedge between her and her family. We hear lots about how practical and pragmatic she is: “As ever, a problem was something that needed a solution, and Anji prided herself on coming up with calm, logical solutions to problems.” There aren’t a lot of opportunities for her to show this; one example is when she incites the annihilation of the Kulan fleet, who otherwise might have been convinced to leave peacefully. Oops. (Mere pages later she shoots a Kulan dead: “Anji felt sick — she’d just killed a living creature. Disgusted with her actions, she threw the gun away.” Yes love, but didn’t you also blow up a cruiser just now? And everyone on it?) Her politics are otherwise less extreme than Sam’s, her friendliness is slightly greater than Compassion’s. She seems good enough, if not particularly intoxicating to read about, but then it’s not really her story.

Well, that’s a partial fib, as her relationship with Dave is a key component of the plot, and presumably it will inform her character going forward. It still isn’t much to write home about though: Anji and Dave are already on the rocks when we meet them, they spend little time together afterwards, Anji is too busy to ruminate on her feelings for most of the book when he’s missing and then when Dave recovers from his illness — easily of course, we wouldn’t want to slow things down! — he gets murdered anyway in a fairly dastardly and, the way it’s written, amusingly explosive fashion. Anji is again too on-the-go to be thoroughly traumatised by this, however. I presume that later books will do more with it, but by then I’ll have to remind myself: this is about Dave? That guy? He feels more like a plot object than a person; at best he’s a less interesting version of Fitz. Even when they’ve rescued him people seem to forget he’s there.

Escape Velocity is one of those “necessary” books that just needed to do a thing, which means you could probably have farmed that thing out to another book altogether — and maybe they should have. The scaffolding we get around said thing is unadventurous, if mostly inoffensive enough. It’s quite pacey at least. I’ve seen fairly scathing reviews for it and I don’t think it’s that bad; it’s just a tepid, unimaginative and not particularly well-written effort that seems weirdly keen to get past all that icky drama stuff as fast as possible, with characters bizarrely stopping for visits to the gym or naps at home during critical events. That’s how I’d prefer to live my life, quite honestly, but it doesn’t help all that much with a race-against-the-clock space thriller.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #84 – The Quantum Archangel by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#38

The Quantum Archangel

By Craig Hinton

Well look, if anyone was going to write a sequel to The Time Monster — that barmy Season 9 closer with the silly bird man and also Atlantis for some reason — it was probably going to be the guy that wrote GodEngine.

It was hard to have particularly high expectations for this one. Craig Hinton has certain habits that don’t exactly bring a novel together, shall we say, but he has written well before. That was mostly in Millennial Rites: a Sixth Doctor and Mel book that took a creative approach to the Valeyard problem. This one has the same Doctor/companion combo, so we’re off to a good start. It’s then just a question of “which Craig Hinton are we getting”: the one who has an actual idea for a book, or the one who came here to reference continuity and chew bubblegum and he’s all out of bubblegum?

Sadly it’s the latter. The Quantum Archangel hits every possible self-indulgent traffic cone on its way to being good. It might not be the worst PDA so far (can I interest you in The King Of Terror?) but it joins the ranks of the least effective and the worst written; not for the first time, I’m wondering if the editing process for the PDAs at this point consisted entirely of checking that the page count = 280.

You can’t really critique a Craig Hinton book without mentioning fanwank. (It’s one of life’s little ironies that he is credited with naming it, yet he is one of its most enthusiastic purveyors. I think we need to accept that he probably meant it as a compliment.) Sure enough, The Quantum Archangel is another example of Hinton making so many unnecessary references to things that he must be trying to win a bet. Got the Master in his TARDIS? Well then, why not have him catalogue the various adventures that led to his current physical state, such as Traken and Sarn? Why not have him look at components and remember that he nicked them from Sontarans and/or Rutans? Why not have him recall previous disguises and pseudonyms while he’s devising new ones? (I could say “because it’s not very interesting for a villain to stand around recalling trivia,” but I doubt that the editorial process got as far as asking him about that.)

It’s not just the Master, of course. Everybody, including the disembodied prose, is in it to win it continuity-wise, so we get nods to earlier canon that might be relevant (The Time Monster, Millennial Rites, Business Unusual, Divided Loyalties and — pushing it — The Trial Of A Timelord), nods to things that have nothing directly to do with any of this, but why not eh (e.g. a comparison to the Animus, or locations you might recognise such as the Doctor’s almost-hermitage in The Twin Dilemma) and nods to off-screen adventures, just for fun (featuring Quarks, the Voord, Krotons, Bandrils, Daleks, Yeti etc). It even goes beyond Doctor Who, with chapter names borrowed from mostly inappropriate song titles. (Total Eclipse Of The Heart? Really?) I know there are people that love this sort of thing but for me it has the cumulative effect of making this feel not really like a novel or a story at all, more a series of forum posts with linking material. It’s just bonus stuff sprinkled on already heaped piles of stuff.

Here’s the thing though: I think it goes beyond fanwank. Hinton, no doubt amusing himself greatly all the while, seems genuinely unsure how to distinguish between prose that advances the story and prose that just adds more words. Sentences groan with trivia, whether it’s Doctor Who quiz fodder or just general TMI about the characters. Here’s a typical example, employing punctuation the way you might use chewing gum to hold an old car together: “When he had got back from the physics symposium in Copenhagen — a day early, due to the fact that (a) there was nothing being discussed that was of any interest to him whatsoever, and (b) he had spent most of the week attempting to avoid that old fraud Winterdawn hurling himself around the Copenhagen conference centre in his souped-up wheelchair — he hadn’t gone to the flat; instead, he had come straight to the university — to the TITAN Array, hoping to see Arlene, to surprise her.” Did we need all of that? Did all of it belong in the same thought?

When not overloading us with asides and bonus material The Quantum Archangel indulges an arguably even worse habit: filler. Every character’s inner voice is leaden with dreary rhetorical questions, pondering each line of dialogue and then second guessing every thought: “Hard facts hit him like a bucket of water. How could he return home? How could he face the disapproval and accusation of his peers after the events of Maradnias?” / “He had to choose between emergencies. There were more important considerations that were even greater than a night in one of the best restaurants in the universe. Even greater considerations? Yes, much greater.” / “Friend? Once, long ago, the Master had been his best friend.” (Those are all from the Doctor. Here’s a winner from somebody else: “At that moment his body convulsed in pain and he doubled up in agony. Was he having a heart attack?”) Why can’t they thrash these questions out in dialogue or action? It makes them seem passive, processing the story around them or privately relating it to trivia instead of doing something about it. It matters when characters aren’t dynamic. Between all the fanwank, the overstuffed character detail and the bland introspection it’s an incredibly inert book.

This is at least a bit surprising as The Quantum Archangel has a few ideas that could — if you were the least bit interested in trying — have made for a pretty interesting story.

We find the Doctor and Mel at a crossroads, him having spectacularly misjudged a situation on the planet Maradnias (leading to the deaths of everyone on it), her wanting to leave the TARDIS in disgust, which she then does. What will become of Mel? What, given what we know about (nyurgh) continuity, will happen to bring them together again?

Then we have the book’s really big idea. After about 180 pages spent mucking about with the script for The Time Monster we finally meet the title character: a godlike but flawed entity who wants to make everyone’s lives better by shifting them into timelines that maximise their potential. A benevolent god that nevertheless must be stopped is a terrific twist on the usual fnar-fnar bad guys, and it opens up possibilities for parallel realities. You could write a fairly off-the-wall novel using these realities as a starting point; The Blue Angel, Falls The Shadow, Oblivion and Unnatural History all did something similar, but that’s no reason not to give us the Craig Hinton version as well.

The Quantum Archangel comes to this idea too late to really make a go of it. We get a few alt-histories for the Doctor (now commanding Gallifreyan armies against the Daleks), Mel (now Britain’s Prime Minister facing a Cyberman invasion) and the various physicists they’ve been hanging around with for most of the book. These realities clearly aren’t going to end well so a literal deus ex machina character plucks them all back to our reality instead. Easy peasy, so there’s no need to use these alternatives to reach any new conclusions, for instance with Mel who specifically needs a bit of context for her character arc. Instead it’s just a bit of colour towards the end. What a waste.

That inability to capitalise on ideas runs all the way through the book, which spends great swathes of time trying to dazzle us with enormous space and time phenomena — at one point the Doctor and the Archangel literally throw moons at each other — but Hinton unloads it all in great sweaty heaps of telling rather than showing. He harps on and on and on about incomprehensible things like Calabi-Yar Space, the Six-Fold Realm, the Lux Aeterna, the TITAN Array and (Time Monster fans are eating well tonight) TOMTIT, all while the characters stand around in the TARDIS hearing about it, unless it’s the prose unspooling it for our benefit, in which case it’s just piled over the characters making it doubly hard for anyone to do anything. Before long my eyes were passively rolling over the words. It’s truly tedious stuff, all the scale of a sci-fi epic somehow played out interminably in a small room with a scanner screen.

It’s not much better on a character level. Hinton has specifically served this Doctor and companion well in the past, moving them a little beyond the limited dimensions they often had on screen. Apparently he’s had enough of that now, so the Sixth Doctor is back doing his “repeat a word three times to show incredulity” schtick. Mel spends most of the book out of the way altogether, either trapped in the Master’s TARDIS or thanklessly stuck in a physicist throng in the Doctor’s — which is not great for a character in crisis. But then, presented with a golden opportunity to interrogate her life in the TARDIS, she just ping-pongs arbitrarily between viewing the Doctor as a lost schoolboy and a malevolent menace, before simply picking the nice alternative and choosing to come back. For good measure her hesitation is eventually blamed on an external force, so perhaps there wasn’t really a dilemma at all. Terrific. (I don’t much like the dilemma, while we’re at it. Maradnias is one of the few times in the book that Hinton shares too little information, which makes Mel’s response seem harsh right from the start. We all know the Doctor meant well, and it sounds like getting them to blow themselves up was the last thing he wanted, as well as it being, y’know, their choice.)

The supporting cast aren’t an improvement. The Master has more to do here than in most of his novels, but he flip-flops allegiances and falls on his face so often that he ends up looking utterly hapless. As for the academics the Doctor and the Master are lumbered with — one of whom is a supporting character from The Time Monster, much rejoicing! — it’s hard to get invested, despite tripping over them every other page. It’s like sticking the Doctor with several Liz Shaws, minus the personality.

If you’re a big fan of The Time Monster (hey, it’s a big universe, they must exist) then there’s probably a good deal to enjoy here… except that even as someone who mostly frowns through that story, I kinda doubt it? The Chronovores were the main threat in that one and again for most of The Quantum Archangel, but they barely feature in this book — I suspect because they’re just too massive a concept to really represent for pages at a time. (When Hinton tries to wrap our minds around really big concepts he ends up writing a half-baked reference guide instead of moving the story forward.) But then, if Chronovores don’t work as a menace for your book, why go to all the trouble of sequelizing The Time Monster at all? Surely it wasn’t just to write giggle-fodder lines like “I might be able to search for the Master through the TOMTIT gap!”, or to remind us of that strange piece of sensor equipment that looked like a metal willy?

I don’t think it’s uncharitable to assume that yes, that was the point. Hinton says in the afterword that he meant to write “a fun romp dripping with camp menace.” A contemporary review from the Doctor Who Ratings Guide quotes Hinton a little more specifically: “I set out (with the full backing of Justin) to write the ultimate in fanwank. Indeed, Justin even suggested areas in the first draft which he wanted uber-wanked. I just wanted to see how far I could go.” Which, I mean, you do you, and clearly the editorial staff thought it was okay too, but this is still a published novel that people need to pay to read. In my view, setting your sights no higher than making a small number of geeks laugh because they understood that reference seems like a pretty feeble use of the license and opportunity, not to mention the time of any reader not obsessively well versed in all the lore. And look, I know it’s a Doctor Who tie-in novel, and I’m basically describing most of the readership and myself there, but good god, don’t they ever want anyone new to dip into these? Can you imagine a casual reader sticking with The Quantum Archangel to the end?

Clearly this kind of navel-gazing self amusement isn’t my cup of tea. I do understand that it is for some people, and power to them, but I think this one fails on all sorts of other levels besides its litany of not-especially-comedic “in jokes”. It’s a space opera that’s suffocatingly stuck in the TARDIS console room, forced to describe what’s happening outside with diminishing returns; it’s a sequel that mostly just copies and pastes, until it finds its own genuinely good idea and then doesn’t know what to do with it; and it’s a less coherent idea with worse execution of the two lead characters than Hinton’s own previous effort that used the same ingredients. For all its cosmic silliness and meta winks it’s somehow boring too — a plot the size of the universe and yet no greater ambition than a pub quiz. But hey: I understood the references!

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #83 – Father Time by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#41

Father Time

By Lance Parkin

Gosh. This is an "oh you're reading that one” kind of a Doctor Who book. But in a good way.

Lance Parkin tends to command a lot of respect from Who fans, and although I haven't personally loved every one of his books it's not hard to see why they feel that way. Right from his debut in Just War it's been clear that he is an assured writer, confident enough to tell a smart and emotional story while still allowing room for a bit of geekery on the side. Father Time brings him into the "Eighth Doctor stuck on Earth" arc, and right away that affords opportunities for an unusual sort of Doctor Who book. Parkin takes almost all of those opportunities, and happily it's one of those Lance Parkin books that I did love.

The Doctor is still waiting to meet Fitz — whoever that is — in St. Louis in 2001. Rather inconveniently it is still the 1980s, so we find him pootling about in the Midlands, renting a cottage and fiddling about with sonic technology. One night he crosses paths with Debbie Castle (née Gordon), an unhappily married schoolteacher who hits a UFO spotter with her car. The Doctor and Debbie become fast friends and he soon comes into contact with a strange girl in her class named Miranda. Like the Doctor she is lightning smart, can regulate her body temperature, can do without sleep and ah yes, that other little detail: she has two hearts.

Father Time never outright says "Miranda is a Time Lord" because it would be useless to bandy that term around while the Doctor doesn't remember it. I think we can infer though that she is from a future where a Time Lord began a brutal Empire to control what was left of the universe. His dynasty was hunted down and killed and only one family member is left. Miranda was spirited away to Earth at such a young age that she doesn't remember any of this, but she is still the target of mercenaries and her father's enemies. The Doctor is in all likelihood all that's stopping them from killing her.

I love a complex and satisfying plot, but I'm just as happy to read a book with a simple through-line, and they don't come much simpler than this: a small group of people with a clear reason to want Miranda dead. The rest of the novel is about the Doctor's attempts to keep her safe. Of course the delightful thing about small plots (when they're done right) is the room they leave for character development, and Father Time has plenty of that.

We're five books into the Earth arc and there are certain ideas the authors have all returned to. The Doctor (sans memories) is still capable of the same heroic feats, but he has a greater ease with darkness and violence. Sometimes this is unspoken and almost primordial, like the murder at the end of The Burning, or the off-screen dispatch of the villain in Casualties Of War; sometimes it's more complex, like his almost willing susceptibility to propaganda in The Turing Test and what that allows to happen; and sometimes it's just The Bourne Identity again, like in Endgame. Parkin hews closest to Paul Leonard's approach, providing an emotional reason for the Doctor to lower his pacifist standards: when it comes to protecting Miranda, he'll do anything.

In the course of Father Time he inadvertently gets a guard shot to death, reverses a mind probe to stop a cruel interrogator's heart, uses a villain's bomb to blow them up instead and rigs a transmogrification machine to turn a dozen armed guards into flowers. (It is made very clear that this means death.) He does at least feel guilty about most of this — at one point he's "disgusted" with himself — and he is horrified when the time finally comes for Miranda to choose whether or not to use lethal force and she shows no apparent remorse for doing the former. He can't quite articulate why he must adhere to these standards, he just knows that there is that baseline. (Both the Doctor and Miranda intuitively notice that the villains are "cruel and cowardly," for instance.)

In many ways the Doctor here is as close to "normal" as he's been in this arc. He's capable of quietly remarkable feats like deliberately "losing" a snooker match by potting every single ball on his first shot, or walking across a very frosty car park without any risk of slipping. He's effortlessly able to pick-pocket an alien as they pick-pocket him, and deliberately planting the bomb they left for him on their own spaceship without anyone noticing. When the time comes to go into hiding with Miranda he's able to "incredibly easily" retrain as a business consultant and make heaps of money advising firms of better ways to do things. (This is so he can provide safety for Miranda. He’s not an aspiring yuppie.) When things get so desperate that he might need to steal aboard a space shuttle, not to put too fine a point on it, but he does so. Some of these things don't feel exactly like normal Doctor behaviour because normally he would have other tools at his disposal — however, they ring true.

Contrary to all that, Parkin underlines the ways in which the Doctor feels out of sorts. During a lovely bit where Debbie notices how unearthly the interior of a spaceship is to her (something we'd normally take for granted since a lot of plastic and metal just looks like BBC set dressing to us — she instinctively knows this wasn't made on her world), we find out that the Doctor feels that way about living on Earth: "I’ve felt it for as long as I can remember. Every morning, when I wake up in a world with buttons, green leaves, paper money and traces of argon in the air I breathe.’” The Doctor, we discover, even thought he was human when he first woke up in that train carriage — "of course I did. I thought I was like everyone else, that everyone else’s life was like mine. I learned that was not the case.” This is also clear in the plot, when the Doctor first encounters some of the hostiles looking for Miranda: "The Doctor frowned. ‘You know me?’ The man hesitated. ‘Of course. You don’t know me?’"

By focusing on the Doctor as off-kilter we get to enjoy a plot without some of the usual safety barriers, i.e. he can't have his normal repartee with the villains and their threats won't mean quite the same thing any more. So maybe they'll just kill him and have done with it. (Of course they don't, and the Doctor has been around for almost a hundred years by now so he's incredibly proficient at lots of things. But the jarring sensation of villains who know him not getting the response they were expecting is a delicious plus, and it's unique to this mini-run of books.)

Some of the best characterisation is unspoken. The Doctor's relationship with Miranda is a way to externalise what he's going through in actions rather than words. Here is another character that shares his unique physical oddities, who even has an analogue for his amnesia since her past is actively the reason people are pursuing her, but she has no access to that past. (Granted, this is because she was a baby at the time and not because of a memory wipe. Go with me here.) The Doctor is determined to let Miranda have a safe and normal life, which is in sharp contrast to his own longing to get away from Earth and the 20th century. (Look at the lengths he went to in The Turing Test.) For Miranda, he’s willing to put all of that on hold and get a job instead. Perhaps, on some level, he just wants one more Time Lord to be alive, knowing the part he played in reducing their numbers. He’s clearly lonely as, with no apparent hesitation, he adopts her.

We never find out how long he would have kept this up. (Would he have said "no thanks" to Fitz and stayed here with Miranda, or taken her aboard? Start your head-canons.) But allowing someone else to live and enjoy what he experiences as disorientation feels like a last attempt to integrate himself into all this, to see what Earth really has to offer — and keep in mind, he’s also keeping Miranda from learning the truth about herself, which might speak to his own ongoing wish to ignore the past. (See Endgame.) Although it feels justified, it’s an unexpected dive towards being human at this point in the run.

The other characters are written with similar interest. Debbie is a quietly fascinating pseudo-companion: it's clear from the outset that she'd rather go and look at other worlds than be married to Barry, who is at best controlling and at worst psychologically abusive. Her attraction to the Doctor is obvious, but quite subtle. We can't help sympathising with her, but there's darkness and weakness there too, such as when she initially lets the villains have Miranda, later identifies where they can find her for fear of being killed, and — after Barry meets an unhappy fate — enjoys seeing him in reduced circumstances... but is nevertheless trapped looking after him, rather than being part of the Doctor-Miranda unit as you might expect. (I couldn't help feeling like this reflected darkly on the Doctor, who surely must know that she needed rescuing in some way too.)

Barry, for his part, is an awful if altogether pedestrian sort of monster, controlling his wife while stepping out on her anyway; nevertheless, he's fully committed to rescuing a young girl the moment he hears that she's in danger. So perhaps he's not all bad? (There's some very neat writing around Debbie's self image which is tied to Barry, who at one point calls her a "stupid fat cow.” When she is able to see herself through the Doctor’s memories, totally separate from Barry's negging, Debbie is “surprised how pretty she looked.")

The villains might have simple goals but they have facets as well. A couple of low rent criminals contribute to the Doctor’s capture at one point, but they’re able to be pragmatic and side with his legal payoff over their boss’s shady riches — they know it will be better for them in the end. There are a couple of creepy mercenaries on the periphery whose primary concern is getting paid, and one of them, an angry (non-copyright-infringing) Transformer who turns into a VW Beetle (!) is an emotional psychotic who blames the Doctor for the death of his wife. (The other two doubt that he was the hero in that scenario: "Anyone who had wiped out Mr Gibson and his entire race couldn’t be all bad.") The Hunters, seeking to eradicate Miranda's family once and for all, have certain standards of combat: "They wouldn’t dishonour the warriors of this time by using weapons a million years more advanced than those of their enemies." (They even offer Barry the chance to get out of here since their fight is not with him.) The Doctor gets a chance to look within Ferran, the young Prefect who is left leading the charge against Miranda, and he determines that: "It’s not your fault you were born when you were, into that family. Since your cradle, since before you can remember, all you’ve been taught is revenge. It’s like an addiction, Ferran. You can help yourself. I know that deep down, below all those layers of hatred that others have filled you with, that you’re a decent man.”

Sadly the jury is still out on Ferran at that point, although he does wobble back and forth once he has the opportunity to kill Miranda. It's here that we get to the weaker end of the book, aka the wrap-up.

Let’s back up. I've not discussed the structure for Father Time. This was deliberate because it's quite interesting, and you should probably just go and read the book and enjoy it for yourself — but I will say that the book has an unusual structure, and there are time jumps. There's a fundamental uncertainty to Father Time where it concerns a character of obvious importance to the Doctor, who (equally obviously) won't be around for future books. (I don't think you need to be revisiting these a quarter of a century later to have sussed that.) So, what's going to happen to Miranda? Parkin keeps this question up in the air. It’s not clear how far anyone in this situation will go, so he can get away with things like suddenly pushing the story forward a few years and recontextualising the characters as they continue trying to evade certain doom.

He tantalises the reader brilliantly when Ferran gets close to Miranda, who at this point is living as a relatively normal teenage girl with the problems that come at her age. (Her awkwardness about "normal" teenage activity is beautifully expressed. She doesn't feel like a parody of a teenager, or like a robot. She's just an unusual person who has grown up with the Doctor as her role model.) Ferran's will-he-won't-he is some of the most tense stuff in the book.

But you'll have noticed at that point that there's still almost a hundred pages to go — and you do have to settle on something eventually. Father Time's final third is a bit more explosive, which is saying something since the first third includes sword-welding assassins on flying discs and an angry Transformer. By the end, Ferran has solved his moral quandary and brought a giant spaceship full of slaves to get Miranda once and for all. Up until now we’ve enjoyed some ambiguity about Miranda’s heritage, and whether Ferran has some justification for his plan after all. By the end though, he surely doesn’t: his “racially pure” society is built on slaves and it is obviously repeating the mistakes of before. He’s just a very bad egg. Disappointing. But then we’re asked to believe that he has reformed — again, for those keeping score. Now, I love a bit of ambiguity, but this is ping-pong. Why should we believe it will stick this time?

The Doctor pushes the “how far will he go to protect Miranda” button quite hard in that final stretch, stealing aboard a US space shuttle in the attempt. This is not outside the realm of possibility for the Doctor, let’s face it, but I couldn’t help feeling that as we literally left orbit to explore a slave uprising on a spaceship, which upturns an entire society in an afternoon, that we had left a beautifully observed novel about lonely people in winter and strange family units quite far behind. The eventual payoff also doesn’t feel equivalent to that early stuff: how Miranda would depart after making such an impression on the Doctor, and how he would react to that are driving forces behind Father Time, and I didn’t feel like either was resounding enough.

Long story short, after something quite trailblazing in terms of an Eighth Doctor Adventure we suddenly get a burst of very normal Doctor Who, where the stakes are all about sci-fi and the characters are all a bit archetypal. (Including the shuttle crew, who simply don’t have the page-count to treat the Doctor and Debbie with the suspicion they’re due.) I probably tricked myself into expecting either a beautiful or a devastating conclusion and the one we get is fine… but it’s neither of those things, instead packing Miranda off to an entirely anodyne SF destiny and having the Doctor wish her toodle-pipski like she hasn’t been his actual daughter for the best part of a decade. He felt more of a wrench leaving Cameca behind in The Aztecs, and he’d only known her for a few days.

I don’t think a damp ending ought to ruin the whole novel though. Father Time is quite obviously above par for these books. Parkin explores the Doctor’s difficulties with life on Earth and he finds a reason to counter-balance them. He supplies interesting and challenging supporting characters, both good and bad. (Although now that you mention it he does drop the ball with Debbie, who deserved better than to feel like a spare toy packed away in a hurry.) He gets in quite a bit of geekery for the list-makers among us, including lines like “Not even the sonic suitcase can get us out of this one,” some references to the New Adventures and a scene with several direct nods to upcoming books, as well as some of Parkin’s previous ones. The prose is typically thoughtful, at times addressing the reader like a storybook in a way that somehow doesn’t feel out of place. And it all feels so fresh, daring to throw the Doctor into a directly familial relationship — something the series seems designed to avoid altogether — in a way that instantly works. I’ve got my reservations about it, but I’m not surprised that people love this one and return to it. What it gets right is worth some imperfections.

8/10