Doctor Who: The BBC Books #121 – Time Zero by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#60

Time Zero

By Justin Richards

I’m not quite sure where to start with this one. It’s written by Justin Richards post-The Burning, so it seems likely that some arc plots are going to be resolved or kicked into a higher gear. Time Zero sort of does and doesn’t do that, which nicely fits its quantum theme.

Some of it is an “event book”, i.e. setting things up for future books — the next one in particular. But most of it is self-contained, perhaps even an example of a typical EDA at this point, including a cheeky effort to appear to finish one arc and then — surprise! — not do that. It’s mostly just a self-contained story with lots of action.

I say “just” as if you’re not getting a lot of actual book here, but you are. Richards has a whale of a time with multiple adventures going on in different time zones, all inexorably heading towards each other. And if you like inexorability, check out the chapters: he’s numbered them backwards so that the book becomes a countdown. (At first I thought the whole thing was backwards since the first two sections were. You can relax: he hasn’t done a Memento.)

The initial germ is a satisfying bit of continuity. Fitz is carrying out his wish (see Camera Obscura) to go on an Arctic expedition with George Williamson in 1894. This is “something [he has] to do.” His friends meanwhile aren’t resting on their laurels: Anji has finally decided to go home and, in an abrupt break with tradition, actually does that. Eighteen months pass in her normal job and life, including a reunion with Dave’s distraught family.

Quite an unconventional way to get rid of a companion, doing it at the start like that, and sure enough we’re not done here. Out of the blue she’s recruited onto a military mission to Siberia. Meanwhile the Doctor has discovered what looks like Fitz’s expedition journal up for auction, and quickly gets involved in a web of intrigue that ends in — contain your surprise — a trip to Siberia. Soon the three of them, one over a century in the past, are chasing around the same Siberian castle while murderers and alternate-reality dinosaurs run amok.

It’s very busy. You may, like me, wish to keep a record of all the different groups taking part. Richards helpfully channels his occasional habit of getting distracted into lots of very short chapters, which keeps the plot-lines coherent and gives Time Zero a moreish readability. If, like Anji, you can’t be bothered to learn everybody’s name then that’s all right, since there are murderers and dinosaurs around to reduce the numbers… eventually. The key players and their goals are distinct enough, if not all fully known from the outset.

As the backwards chapters suggest, the plot is fairly complicated. It involves a man with an unusual relationship with gravity, a man who might be a ghost, two people in disguises, impossibly distant galaxies and impossibly frozen fire, dinosaurs, two military groups with their own Siberian missions and let’s face it, very probably a certain character originated by Lawrence Miles somewhere in the mix.

As with the groaning character list however, you don’t need to take on the burden of understanding the plot: explanations will be provided, and at some length, and several times over. A popular criticism of Time Zero would seem to be the Doctor’s commitment to explaining things like quantum theory, and to be honest fair enough. The book slows down when it comes time for the Doctor to tell one group after another how this all works, only for some of them to still not get it. Frankly I’m at a point where quantum theory (which is disputed here as much as it’s reinforced) is functionally indistinguishable from magic. I think I started hearing soothing wildlife sounds after a while as a defence mechanism.

Perhaps the complexities of quantum theory and the differences between light speeds etc caught me off guard because it’s otherwise such an action-oriented story. There are some great images, like a man terrifyingly transforming into a black hole, and many excellent set-pieces, most of which revolve around a team of mercenaries. Anji is caught in several life or death struggles with them; perhaps most memorably she gets herself stranded alone on an airplane as it’s about to hit a mountain. That (incredible) moment ends up highlighting one of the book’s weaknesses, however: sometimes it’s action for action’s sake, as in that case where we’re really just doing the James Bond version of “escape only to be recaptured.” Similarly the bloodthirsty Captain Hartfield and his men, executing scientists left and right, transcended terrifying for me and just became monotonous. “I will shoot you” doesn’t leave much room for characterisation.

The regulars fare better. Fitz and Anji have rarely been this forthright. Fitz’s decision to go on this voyage in the first place is a sign of character growth, but it’s also fun watching him occasionally apply his out-of-this-world experiences to the dangers around him. He builds a meaningful friendship with George, which has its own dramatic ups and downs, and his affection for Anji and the Doctor comes through in spades. I particularly liked this nod to long-time readers re the Doctor’s amnesia, and Fitz’s continuing duty of care: “‘So it’s a paradox?’ Fitz said. ‘In fact, it sounds like the granddaddy of all paradoxes.’ He blinked. ‘Sorry, forget I said that,’ he murmured.”

Despite one of the more hair-raising experiences of Fitz’s life, which is saying something, this is still more Anji’s story than his. The quiet way she goes back to work is disconcerting when she’s someone who’s been in the TARDIS, but that just speaks to who she is. Richards then finds more depth while she’s there, quietly showing her loneliness without Dave: “[She was] ignoring the fact that in her sleep she had pulled the other pillow down so that it was lying beside her in the double bed.” This swings both ways, with her eventually considering that “‘home’ was the TARDIS.” Her specific concern for Fitz, who might be dead for all she knows, is especially poignant: “As she sat cross-legged on the floor, the discarded telephone beside her, Anji was still crying. She cried for herself and for Dave. For Dave’s Mum and Dad. She cried because she had been crying for so long she no longer knew how to stop. And she cried for shame — for knowing that every time she had said Dave she meant Fitz.”

The fact that Anji survives this ordeal and still wants to go home is a great note to leave her on: happy, appreciative, but not in need of the Doctor at all times. However this isn’t her last trip in the TARDIS. Time Zero ends with the timeline in tatters, meaning it’s no longer safe to send her to “modern day London” because that might not be what it is. I’m certainly not mad that we’re keeping her around for a while longer — the camaraderie has got so good I’m a bit confused why we even need to get shot of her. (It’s not as if the actress has itchy feet, and anyway, Fitz is staying.) Richards at least contrives a very good reason to put off her departure, but I suppose anything might be better than “he won’t take her home because um,” which I guess we just fully aren’t resolving now. (At this point I’m guessing it was just an editor’s note to keep her in a holding pattern.)

The Doctor has some of that aloofness that Richards brought with The Burning. He captures the character’s confidence: “Once inside the building, the very fact that he was inside the building seemed to serve as his credentials.” Neither of the disguised characters, with their own agendas, are able to pull the wool over his eyes; the scene where he exposes the Duchess works very well: “‘You are a very clever man,’ she said. ‘Well,’ the Doctor replied with a smile, ‘if I was that clever, I wouldn’t need your help.” And there’s the climax, where he leaves the fate of the world up to another man’s willingness to die for it. Cold, but necessary; a far cry from the TV Movie.

By rights the most memorable Doctor stuff in this ought to be his dressing down of Sabbath, who is in this of course. (I didn’t even need the big reveal: when a mysterious “large man” is mentioned on Page 6 it’s unlikely to be Father Christmas.) Sabbath’s plan ends up a mess that gets him rightly mocked from all comers, including the “Duchess”: “‘There was always a chance I might not succeed here,’ Sabbath said. ‘No?!’ [She] sounded scandalised at the thought.” The Doctor gets some moments of triumph about it, notably: “The universe works the way I say it does, not the way you assume.”

The main issue with this is simply one of context. Camera Obscura already had this debate one book earlier, albeit with less evidence, and went about it in a more interesting way. Sabbath was also a more rounded (behave) character then. I’ve seen him circa Time Zero referred to as a Bond villain, which I get, but I’d place him more as the Master in one of his “foiled again yet still inexplicably confident” moods. He’s even got the disguise! (And the impractical plan. Did he stay with Curtis for years, decades?) His myopic outlook on timelines, effectively the plot of Ghost Light writ large, is beginning to wear thin, and I’m starting to wonder why the Doctor hasn’t found a jail cell for him or some such. He’s just a man, with one heart and a boat full of monkeys. Stop arsing about and get on with it.

Once you get to this point in Time Zero it’s busy getting its ducks in a row for the next book, which is all well and good — and quite sneaky, even name-checking “a race against infinity.” But it made me wonder how much substance is actually left over for Time Zero. I’m wary of movies and TV shows that always have their eye on the next sequel or season, and there’s a little of that here: Anji’s story has arguably stalled, and the entire plot is a mix of fuel for The Infinity Race and (truly inexplicably, but why not I guess) a last minute retroactive explanation for the monsters in The Burning. We also meet the next companion, Trix, whose involvement here is mostly shenanigans. Paul Cornell introducing Bernice Summerfield this ain’t, although her unpredictability has obvious potential.

Time Zero is one of those books that does what it sets out to do with practiced gusto, Richards ably demonstrating his skill with action, thrills and comedy. As often happens he’s clearly got an idea he’s excited about and we’re gonna hear about it (quantum theory), but mostly not to the extent that you’re not having a good time. It’s an energetic example of the mad chaos of the EDAs, that would perhaps pack more of a punch if it hadn’t followed such a strong novel. Ah well: there’s a sense of the workman about Richards, what with his keen collaboration in the arc, which suggests that Time Zero was happy just to show up and set off its fireworks.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #120 – The Suns Of Caresh by Paul Saint

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#56

The Suns Of Caresh

By Paul Saint

BBC Books seemed very keen on new authors at this point, with several trying out just for the space of one novel. (I’m sure the lack of return visits had more to do with scheduling than with them not impressing anybody; none of these “first goes” are as bumpy as Virgin’s.) The Suns Of Caresh is the latest and it shows us what Paul Saint — apparently a pseudonym for Paul Beardsley — has to offer.

For a while I wondered if he’d taken an original manuscript and stapled on just enough Doctor Who to make the grade. The book is initially about a non-Time Lord: Simon Haldane, an unfulfilled geek living in Chichester. He loves to read sci-fi novels when he’s not working at his mind-numbing factory job. Enter Troy Game, a beautiful young woman from another planet who can’t remember exactly what she’s doing here. Simon takes her in and his life quickly adapts. Meanwhile, some sort of threat is turning people to stone.

I’m not even mad if this was a touched up original manuscript as it’s quite an entertaining (if distinctly wish-fulfilly) setup. “Normal man adjusts to alien in his life” could be a sitcom; however, Saint (let’s stick with that) is clearly one of those writers like Paul Leonard or Nick Walters who really wants to know more about aliens and planets, as he invests a lot in Troy Game and her home of Caresh. There are lots of immersive little details about her, such as her appearance (short hair, big irises, no earlobes), her abilities (she can sing in an otherworldly way, read thoughts and replicate other languages), her social oddity (clothes are optional) and her customs (sex is strictly seasonal on Caresh). There are also little bits of secondary cleverness, like how her “language telepathy” doesn’t work over the phone and is actually the result of external interference.

Then there’s Caresh: a planet with two suns and an irregular orbit, unpredictable seasons and climates, different islands with their own levels of technology and antipathies towards each other, and giant locust monsters into the bargain. This is no “it’s a desert so I guess it’s called Aridius” situation, thought has clearly been applied.

He’s also spent time on the plot, or rather plots, as there’s a lot to get your head around. It’s here that Doctor Who gets back into the equation (you can exhale everybody) as the Third Doctor has been cajoled into investigating a time fracture on Earth that extends from 1972 to 1999. He encountered the earlier part during his Earth exile. (Saint going for controversy here with his UNIT dating!) A Time Lady with whom he is familiar, Solenti, catches him on his post-Three Doctors adventures and explains that this has something to do with another Time Lord, Roche. The Doctor has a matter of days to sort this out but for some reason, aiming for the 1972 dig site, he ends up in Chichester at the other end. The Doctor and Jo soon encounter time disturbances, stone bodies, a Time Lord in a mental institution, a dead TARDIS, monstrous “Fates” and Troy Game. And somewhere in all that is Ezekiel Child, the archaeologist from 1972 who is somehow a younger man in 1999.

The book is not short of ideas. Saint sprinkles in little ones as well, particularly when it comes to TARDISes. Jo reminisces about witty off-screen trips: “Sometimes it landed in UNIT HQ, often when she least expected to see home again; once it landed on a planet covered entirely by an ocean that was nowhere more than knee-deep; on another occasion it materialised inside a small cave, blocking off the exit so they had no choice but to depart without ever seeing what the world outside looked like. This had frustrated the Doctor no end.” Saint spends more than the usual amount of effort just on the TARDIS noise: “The twilit Dagusan ruins echoed with the moans of a gigantic living engine.” / “The TARDIS began its familiar landing noise, something between the roar of an animal and the sound of a very large slab being dragged over concrete.” And TARDISes feature interestingly in the plot, with one accidentally draining a lake when its doors are eroded open, and the Doctor’s one suffering a disastrous autopilot malfunction and crashing through various objects and cars — a spectacular sequence that eventually got a big laugh out of me: “‘This cannot be happening.’ Two men were carrying a large sheet of plate glass across a quiet road when they saw the TARDIS heading for them.”

This is not, then, an author unfamiliar with or uninterested in Doctor Who, despite there being a fair stretch of it without the Doctor. See also, Saint’s world-building with Time Lords. He invented Solenti for this and treats her with enough confidence that I half expect the blind mystery woman and her regenerating guide dog to turn up again. He also imbues Roche with peculiar abilities, such as a very targeted and mischievous talent with regeneration. So many parts of The Suns Of Caresh feel like the writer has sat with them for a bit. It’s nice.

It’s still a lot to keep together, which perhaps explains why the overall framework feels paradoxically small: a lot of it is just characters hunting through a richly-described Chichester to either find dots on a scanner or evade death by stone-transforming Fury. This is later swapped out for Bognor Regis (whoa, slow down!) and then — mercifully for any sci-fi fans like the fictional Simon — Caresh, so we can finally tie all this into what’s happening there, viz an impending ecological disaster that has somehow set a couple of enraged Furies against Roche on Earth.

I enjoyed the deceptive and quite fun smallness of it all, buoyed by Saint’s skill with ideas of all sizes, but I don’t think he quite ties everything together. Simon is our point of view character for a while — a role he shares with Troy Game who to be fair has the more interesting perspective, e.g. thinking that buses are moving buildings — but he exits the book quite abruptly after 150 pages, never to be missed. This is perhaps just desserts for his incel-ish behaviour towards Troy Game, but such righteous misfortune still caught me by surprise for a pseudo protagonist. Perhaps I’m just struggling to reconcile this with the idea that — no offence Paul Saint, I know nothing about you — Simon feels a bit like an author insert at first. Other aspects of his life feel slightly too developed to be such non-starters in the end, like the flirty co-worker who somehow knows what Troy Game is called, and the occult journalist/foil who seems to have his own thing going on and then just isn’t in the book any more. All things considered he’s not beating the “already had half a novel on the go” allegations.

The wider plot stumbles a bit too. So much effort goes into the time fracture and explaining the time fracture, and on that score at least there is a great visual focal point in Ezekiel Child — but he’s barely in it, and his curious affliction of ageing and experiencing life backwards is entirely a reported event, despite being interesting enough to support a novel. (You might call it The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.) For all that I enjoyed the general hijinks in Chichester, with raid-the-toybox antics involving TARDISes and regeneration, the moment things moved to Caresh I wondered if we truly needed any of that; none of it meaningfully changes the pickle the planet is in.

That, too, takes a bit of explaining — and attempts are made, the phrase “Let me get this straight” is used more than once — but the beat for beat action on Caresh is still just more chase stuff, with escaping and recapturing and really quite redundant haircuts for the Doctor and Jo to get us to the image on the front cover. They’re sussed as suspicious types immediately anyway. (It’s difficult to mind what with the hilarious way it’s handled. “‘Jo!’ the Doctor barked. ‘I am not doing it and that's final.’ It was not final, of course. They argued some more and the Doctor eventually conceded, with rather poor grace … There was complete silence except for the combined hum of the clippers and the control room. Jo eventually broke the silence. She said, ‘Are you going anywhere special on your holidays this year, sir?’”) There’s some good derring do with boats and giant locusts to build momentum, but then a last minute misunderstanding from Troy Game pointlessly upends everything at the eleventh hour. It’s one of those books that puts a lot of effort into hitting its page count — quite slyly on Earth, and then pretty obviously on Caresh with stunts like that.

There are still interesting things to be found in the book’s secondary setting. Solenti has been hinting about leaving Roche’s work undone, which of course doesn’t sit right with the Doctor. This is where that annoying misconception comes in — but then right next to it is a very good moral conundrum about Roche’s plan and its consequences. Unfortunately the Doctor doesn’t need to weigh his options on it, he just drums up an (admittedly very neat) plan B instead. Which, hooray etc, but that’s then just another interesting thing that isn’t quite in focus. (See also, the Doctor deliberately not telling Solenti he has a companion. What was that in aid of?)

Much about The Suns Of Caresh is wobbly-legged in that “first time author” way, but it’s one of those where rather than be annoyed about it I just wished there had been more books to course-correct any imperfections. Paul Saint has a good imagination in or out of an obvious Doctor Who setting, and for what it’s worth he’s great at the Who stuff too, writing a very enjoyable and recognisable Third Doctor and Jo. (Honourable “not that bit” mention for the Doctor’s spiky temper tantrum towards Jo near the end. In the bin please.) Much of what I liked about it was its ideas and sense of fun; some of what I liked about it may not have even been intentional, such as the references to now quaint modern tech. (“He’d risen early so that he could surf the Internet before the lines were busy.” Bless! A thousand times bless! Mind you this could already have been social commentary by 2002. Depends on Paul’s internet speeds.) What I didn’t like so much was generally due to chewing it over afterwards — in the moment, it worked well enough. I’d say that despite some uneven patches this is a colourful entry and worth seeking out.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #119 – Camera Obscura by Lloyd Rose

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#59

Camera Obscura

By Lloyd Rose

Sabbath. His continual manipulations. The Doctor’s lost heart, and his diminished state. Fitz and Anji’s stress about all of the above. Lloyd Rose isn’t mucking about: Camera Obscura addresses all of it.

Not that we’re done here. Sabbath is still out there at the end, and the Doctor’s return to a more stable place is still ongoing. But Camera Obscura is a very satisfying update in the meantime.

Probably my favourite thing about it is the way the characters seem annoyed or frustrated by the same stuff that’s been bothering me. The Doctor has absolutely had it with Sabbath’s 4D chess moves, and tells him so: “Why don’t we just take it as read, and I’ll go off and do a lot of work and then you can come in at the end and tell me it was all your idea.” Sabbath has seemed one step ahead for a while now and that’s very much paused this week, as the Doctor gets in his face and goads him: “[He] suddenly stretched out across [Sabbath’s papers] like a cat taking over a computer keyboard.” / “I just came to get on your nerves. They are your nerves, aren’t they? Haven’t borrowed them as well?”

There’s nothing wrong per se with having a weakened Doctor and using an apparently superior foe to drive that home, but this is still Doctor Who and if he’s going to be ineffectual all the time then eventually it will become something else. Camera Obscura lets him get his groove back, and the resulting Doctor/Sabbath dynamic is thrilling. I’ve never seen the Eighth Doctor this furious, or Sabbath this on edge. That’s not to say the Doctor cows him into submission completely: Sabbath is still a powerful and self-righteous figure who (inadvertently, then deliberately) saves the Doctor’s life. But the playing field is more level now, as it should be.

The redressed characterisation goes both ways. Rose is clear about Sabbath’s pragmatism and the lack of a figurative moustache to twirl; he believes in what he’s doing. The two clash over their outlooks on time which helpfully lays out their conflict: “‘You think it’s either your kind of order or else it’s chaos. Why shouldn’t time be like music?’ ‘Very pretty. And what if you’re wrong, and every trip you so blithely take pulls out another thread in time’s warp?’ ‘And what if you’re wrong, and in paring down time’s possibilities you strangle reality?’” / “[Sabbath] seems to have the strangest ideas about how time works. I don’t think he’s got it right at all.”

Rose also highlights the physiological bond between the two, aka the stolen heart. This pays huge dividends for the plot, as we find out that the Doctor — while effectively mortal — is kept from dying thanks to his second heart living in Sabbath. I definitely let out an “oh no, not again” when he nearly got himself killed in this, as it’s definitely become a trope in the post-Adventuress era, but it’s a lightning rod for the two ersatz Time Lords in this as it pushes them both along as characters. The Doctor knows this keeps happening to him — you might say he’s had it with that, too — and is testing the boundaries of life and death, but he’s also unstable and doubtless still has some self-loathing going on. Sabbath is intrigued by the link at first, but for one thing it means he’ll have to see more of the Doctor, and for another he’s increasingly disgusted by what this otherworldly nuisance represents. In the end he gives up the heart, killing it at last — which looks to be the very thing that will let the Doctor recover. Progress! Movement! An underlining of who these people are and what they want! It’s like being back in the Blum and Orman glory days.

And speaking of the Sam team, Rose is great with the companions in this. The Doctor-Anji-Fitz dynamic is once again at its peak (it was also great in History 101), in particular Anji’s attitude of an infuriated older sister. She’s quick to call the Doctor an idiot for getting himself in danger, and she makes him painfully aware that he doesn’t know what it’s like to sit around hoping he’ll recover. At one point she tells herself that she will absolutely go home after all this if the Doctor survives — a moment of total vulnerability. But her indignation can be up there with the Doctor’s at times, as she brutally rips strips off his would-be assassin near the end, and Sabbath too, which was so satisfying to read. (Sabbath also gets some good old fashioned shade off her. “And that name! ‘Sabbath.’ Like a comic book villain. He probably thought that sounded cool too. I’ll bet his real name’s Melvin or something.” Yeah, get him!)

Fitz, good old reliable pal that he is, seems to be experiencing his own growing pains. He’s aware of not fitting into Victorian London in a way that suggests his usual bag of tricks might be running low; given the opportunity to attend a lecture about other forms of exploration, completely separate to the plot, he strongly considers it. But his loyalty is still there in spades, as he faces down an apparently homicidal Doctor urging him to leave him alone. I got the sense that Fitz, like the Doctor, was testing his boundaries here.

There’s heaps of character stuff in Camera Obscura and it’s all excellent. The plot is a different beast. Continuing a theme from The City Of The Dead, Rose has written another story that isn’t your typical A-to-B science fiction work, although it’s notably more sci-fi and less magic than her last one. The Doctor has detected a time disturbance in Victorian London. So has Sabbath. Both of them are investigating weird goings on that might be related to it. And that’s it for a while: there’s lots of atmosphere and oddity but not a lot of direction. There’s a curiously successful spirit medium with multiple personalities, and a magician with an impossible trick. What could be the link? And what do either of these things really matter?

Rose gets a lot out of the macabre trappings, such as an incredible technology that’s somehow reliant on mirrors, and a magician whose grand finale recalls Christopher Priest’s The Prestige. (The movie wasn’t out yet.) The weird goings on all trace back to the time disturbance, but you get the overall sense that Rose is exploring each weird idea in its own way; they seem only loosely connected at times. It doesn’t feel like a typical Doctor Who story in that way, but then as with a few recent books (including Rose’s last) that fits with the overall shape of the Eighth Doctor range at this time, more holistic and less rigid. The trade-off is an arguable lack of page-turning plot, but oh well: the Doctor’s various near-misses provide the missing jeopardy, and the damaged people he meets are all reflections of what he’s going through — there’s even a recurring theme of people being split into eighths. It all serves a purpose.

Style is a very memorable part of Camera Obscura, with Rose pushing it to some warped places that recall the New Adventures. There’s some body horror involving monstrous limbs and a toaster once the villain is revealed, and a sequence where Death is personified; this, as well as a subsequent scene needles at the Doctor’s past in ways that he no longer understands but we do, including some mental cameos from former Doctors. All of that recalls Virgin, which feels appropriate in a meta way when he’s casting about for his identity. In amongst all that though, there are moments of sudden violence and horror that stand out all the more for their conciseness, such as the Doctor helping the Angel Maker to complete her grim task, the private life of Octave, and the eventual fate of Dr Chiltern. Rose displays great range here.

Despite being a macabre story full of heavy introspection, pulse-racing indignation and varying shades of gothic horror it’s somehow lots of fun as well. The Doctor’s impish mischief-making against Sabbath is like letting the air back into the room after several standoffish books, and Rose is quick to underline the TARDIS team’s serious traumas with their playful brand of sibling warmth. The Doctor is in a better place at the end of this, seemingly recapturing the unusual magic of the Time Lords right up to the final page and echoing, very neatly, the obsession with his lone heartbeat at the start. Apart from the odd nagging typo (will we never be rid of them?) it’s a book of tremendous poise and intent which extends, I think, to its fairly minimal plot. It’s a pity Lloyd Rose didn’t write any more EDAs after this one, but Camera Obscura is a good note to end on: one of those load-bearing entries like Alien Bodies or Unnatural History that manages to be a good time as well. I hope the other writers take the right lessons from it.

9/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #118 – Combat Rock by Mick Lewis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#55

Combat Rock

By Mick Lewis

Get ready for Round Two with Mick Lewis. If you’ve read his earlier book, Rags, then you’re probably not expecting much in the way of puppies and lollipops. Even so this is a bit much.

This time Lewis maroons the whimsical team of the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria in Papul, a politically fraught island on the planet Jenggel split between the downtrodden but welcoming locals and the imperialist Indoni. A group of rebel Papuls have formed the OPG, with the intention of ridding their land of invaders in as bloody a fashion as they think necessary. The Indoni president, Sabit, knows this and is more than happy to disrupt elections and employ mercenaries to stir up trouble, even creating false flags to better capture off-world sympathies. In the middle of all this there are tribal mummies (or Mumis) which are, unaccountably, coming to life and attacking people. This has something to do with peaceful Earth missionary areas suddenly reverting to barbarism. Oh, and there are cannibals.

Combat Rock is, as bizarre as this sounds, one of the more realistic Doctor Who novels. (Let’s just ignore the bit about mummies for a moment, shall we?) By which I mean it resembles real-world conflicts in an almost 1:1 way, what with its imperialism, its grotesque practices on all sides and its lack of any broad resolution to Papul’s struggles at the end. I’m not geopolitically savvy enough to know how well any of this tracks with events Lewis may or may not be mapping his novel onto, but that feels like what he’s doing here. (I’m slightly afraid to say for example “oh this is about Papua New Guinea and Indonesia” based on his comments in About The Author, but if that is the case then wow, he barely even changed the names!)

He at least adds some accoutrements to make it a Doctor Who joint, so you’ve got mummies, extra-terrestrial megafauna and the TARDIS crew making the unhappy acquaintance of the various violent groups. The plot hangs together quite well when it comes to explaining the mummies and so on, with a suitably Doctor-ish unmasking scene at the end; Combat Rock feels more cohesive than Rags, if nothing else, which used much the same “call to violence” idea but with far less defined details. However there are still long stretches of this that read like a random, brutal war story he felt like writing which perhaps sold better with the TARDIS in it.

The over-arching question is probably the same as it was in Rags: how far is it acceptable to go with violence in Doctor Who before it stops being Doctor Who? I don’t know the answer. If it helps, I don’t think anyone should go further than Combat Rock.

Lewis’s writing style is once again expressive and interesting, although as usual it’s mainly devoted to descriptions of death and mutilation. He’s still capable of great subtlety and conciseness, like “the wine-coloured sea, endlessly shushing the beach,” “[She was] dancing, dancing. Jamie was looking, looking,” or “Red sand, and purple sea. On the beach a box.” He can, bizarrely given all his other proclivities, absolutely nail the description of a familiar Doctor Who character, such as Troughton here: “This face was lined and contoured by a life beyond strange, a facial map bursting with character and mystery.”

And on that score, despite popular complaints that it makes no sense to put these characters in this story I think he’s put clear thought into this match-up, with Jamie’s experience against the Redcoats brought explicitly to the fore against a new and senseless warzone, and Victoria’s imperialist upbringing making her an uncomfortable foil for her Indoni capturers who seem, as far as she can see, like reasonable enough chaps at first. Victoria’s views are challenged, just as Jamie’s horrific experiences seem utterly hollow compared to his perhaps rosily remembered “Craig a duir” glory days. The odd man out is the Second Doctor, who surely seems too eccentric and friendly to upset with things like guerrilla warfare and cannibalism – but then, this only brings out his friendly and diplomatic side all the more. Lewis nails his clumsy foibles the rest of the time, adding a good deal of friendly bickering such as “‘Where are we?’ ‘Well, it seems almost to be... er, it could be –’ ‘Och, he doesnae know,’ Jamie finished for him helpfully.”

But those three are the only lights in the dark of an angry, upsetting novel. I can’t stress enough that it is wall-to-wall unpleasantness otherwise. An infant gets shot in the head on the second page. One character is separated from the group and then turns up again as the barely identifiable centre of a cannibal feast. Likeable hostages have no guarantee of surviving the experience. And when a friendly “re-educated” man regresses into barbarism, he attacks a local missionary by force-feeding him the brains of another. (That was a convenient “I think I’ve had enough book for tonight” cut-off point.) Said missionary sequence is well written, of course, with the poor bemused instructor earnestly thinking that “the Kirowai region further along the south coast would be next to succumb to the benefits of civilisation and Christianity.” Fabulous word usage there, “succumb,” which tells us just where Lewis’s stall is set out on the issue. There is an angry balance-of-nature theme to all this which sympathises, unsurprisingly enough given his About The Author spiel, with the cannibals. But my god it’s not easy reading. I really do wonder about commissioning this for a Doctor Who audience. Perhaps Justin Richards thought the front cover would be enough of an age certificate.

So much of Combat Rock is just “how am I going to come up with a new way of describing that,” with occasionally (however begrudgingly) creative results. I suppose I ought to appreciate “The torturer collapsed on top of him, ousted brains fused with flesh, blood and bone into a grisly ice-cream whip sculpture.” I think I actually do rate this one, however much I audibly groaned at the time: “It squeezed the guerrilla’s body like a tube of toothpaste and soon everyone in the canoe was red.” But now and then he decides that there just aren’t enough not-for-kids sentiments flying about, so we also get: “For a moment he was back in Culloden. A claymore sweeping across a Redcoat’s neck, opening just such an orgasm of blood.” And then – he really ought to have got some sort of derisive award for this one – “The man’s eyes were fluttering glazedly open, as though he was awakening from a long and particularly bloody wet dream.” Ugh. Mick.

Not all of it’s revolting just because of his word-choices: sometimes it’s the company he keeps. The mercenaries, for instance, whom he delights in describing one by one, over and over, as if we’re going to be enchanted to behold them every single time. (His descriptions run a peculiar gamut from “guy with an eye in his cheek due to botched surgery” to “bisexual man.” 2002 was a while ago, wasn’t it?) We also get little blobs of back story on them, particularly Pan, a committed rapist and otherwise fan of “whorin’.” Now, I’m not going to get puritanical here, but what exactly is anyone gaining from scene after scene with this guy? Is there really anywhere to go with him after he sleeps with a prostitute, tires of her conversation and then shoots her dead in bed? Yes, he’s bad news. They all are. They still are. What bad news they continue to be. Oh my god I’ve still got 200 pages to go.

It’s a question of taste, I suppose. There really is a lot of thought and, presumably, research to back up Combat Rock: the political machinations of Sabit, the confusing feelings of the Papul inhabitants about freedom vs terrorism, the uncomfortable existence of groups such as cannibals – it all feels rooted in something. I think there’s also an argument in favour of asking awkward questions about characters we know and like, such as Jamie, who seems to be deflecting some latent attraction towards Victoria by going clubbing instead, then has to confront his frequent urges to charge into battle – a thing that conveniently rarely ended in bloodshed on telly. And of course there’s Victoria who, to her credit, somewhat notices her faults as it goes along: “Not for the first time she felt shamed by her Imperialist upbringing.” But she’s still a prude, and still struggles to outpace layers of her own racism. “He spoke astonishingly eloquent English (she had to keep reminding herself that he was an alien, and not just a foreigner). He even offered to hold her hand to steady her progress, but of course she wasn’t going to allow that. His brown face was angular and, with the clipped moustache and dark, intelligent eyes, she had to admit, rather handsome. But then, as her father had constantly reminded her, she always did have a bit of a wild streak, and had always had a penchant for people and things that were rather out of the ordinary.” (Whether this is really fair game since she’s not especially racist on-screen is another argument.)

Part of me is sure that Combat Rock has something to say, about familiar Doctor Who stuff as well as the things Mick Lewis finds interesting and urgent. I can’t call (most of) it bad. Another part of me actually had to read it, though, and he left us a message: this is ’orrible. No thanks.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #117 – History 101 by Mags L. Halliday

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#58

History 101

By Mags L. Halliday

Time for another one-and-done BBC Books author. I think it’s fair to say that Mags L. Halliday has a distinct voice, and one that it would have been interesting to see develop across further books.

History 101 seems at first to be familiar territory. Even the characters think so, with Fitz commenting: “Oh bloody hell! It’s another alternative history thingy, isn’t it?” When the Doctor notices that Picasso’s painting of Guernica doesn’t look quite right he’s led to understand that history — or the perception of history — is dangerously off-kilter, so the three of them must travel back to 1936 and investigate. Fitz has the muckiest job, observing the bombing of Guernica first hand. The Doctor and Anji settle in at Barcelona, mixing with anarchists and keeping an eye out for events (or the perception of them) slipping out of true.

This, too, feels a bit familiar for the EDAs: the Doctor sending his friends on missions, said friends spending an ungodly amount of time hanging around and suffering terribly and — as if there was a conspicuous absence of a cherry-on-top — the TARDIS getting knackered and the Doctor catching yet another case of the wifflies. There are even arc hints from the resident rotund boogeyman, here swapping out his military outfit for a snazzy fedora. (It’s not a spoiler, he’s in it right at the start.) You could win BBC Books Bingo with this one.

Halliday, however, has an unusual focus. The threat facing our heroes (and I suppose the course of history, the universe etc) is not one that’s going to jump out and attack you — although latterly it affects people’s behaviour in strange and violent ways. There’s a sense of simply having to immerse yourself in history until the answer pulls into focus. The Doctor and Anji, especially, have a pretty loose remit here.

If this seems like a shortfall for a [Doctor Who story, well maybe it is, but Halliday fills it with character. These are wonderful depictions of the TARDIS crew circa 2002. Anji especially, whom Halliday places firmly in the audience-surrogate slot when it comes to viewing the comparatively crazier other two. Anji sees them as “two younger brothers on permanent sugar rushes,” and has a particular affection for Fitz, an “old scruff” whom she’s delighted to see after his extended absence. She has a distinct older-sisterly concern for the Doctor, particularly when he (heart-rendingly, even if we do go to this well a bit often) seems to lose his marbles out of concern for the TARDIS. The thought of her slowly pulling the doors open, waspishly annoyed with him for not helping even though she’s scared for him, was a favourite moment for me.

The Doctor is great too. His breakdown feels like another little microcosm of what’s going on over this series, as he suddenly seems cut off from his abilities, even just his ability to be of use. Halliday has a great handle on his energy and whimsy when it thankfully returns: the scene of him joyously mending the TARDIS with a ticker-tape machine was another one that made me grin.

And there’s Fitz, long-suffering as always — possibly for sheer mileage the longest suffering companion there’s ever been, even recalling here some of his Interference woes, yet still utterly affable in the face of wartime horror. Many of his scenes are shared with Sasha, a Russian spy, and I can’t be the only one wondering if their at first bristly camaraderie leans somewhat adorably homoerotic. On a less fluttery level, Fitz’s inner monologues about the quality of his cigarettes, and his earnestly having forgotten that a damaged hand might prevent him playing the guitar, really sold Halliday’s understanding of the character.

She has also quite obviously, if perhaps not to a David A. McIntee extent, done her research. Barcelona circa 1936-37 feels hard-won and lived in, richly selling the idea that Anji has been stuck here for six months. She’s surrounded by characters who feel like they have inner lives upon which we are only briefly intruding. We’re privy to some of their suspicions about the Doctor and Anji and, although this is informed by the “perspectives” plot, it seems entirely reasonable for a revolutionary to wonder if a stranger keeping a log of their comings and goings might be a bit suspicious. Siding with a guest character in a moment like that, in a book that so firmly grasps what makes the regular characters interesting and appealing, is a feat in itself.

I couldn’t help wishing, though, that there were slightly fewer characters in this. For every Jueves there is a Luiz, for every Enrique an Alberto. Sometimes, despite loving the way Eleana was written, I got her confused with Pia; just now I had to look up what Enrique was called despite him featuring heavily in the finale. I meant what I said about them all feeling like real people — in the moment, Halliday sells this world full of busy, impassioned people. But we’re not always inside it with them. This also goes for the historical research: I wasn’t remotely surprised to see a bibliography at the end, what with the level of convincing incidental detail on display, but some of the basics aren’t quite there. A working knowledge of the Spanish Civil War would be a boon (I don’t have that), a basic geographic understanding of Barcelona would help (I thought “Eixample” was a typo) and as for the casual deployment of terms like POUM, PSUC and NKVD, help a guy out, honestly. When the story concerns the literal perception of history you could do more to bed in what that history should be. (This is normally where a less-than-brilliantly-informed companion would come in handy, but apparently Anji and Fitz attended all the school days I missed.)

There are also (arguably) problems with the plot and how it’s communicated. A vague sense that history is out of joint is a terrific starting point, and it slots neatly into the more holistic approach the EDAs were taking around this period, but it doesn’t present much of a ticking clock; besides the imperative for Fitz to witness Guernica there is little to no sense of pace in History 101. The long chapters amble along.

Halliday’s central concept is an interesting one, but it’s hard to put into practice. Mostly it’s done with characters losing their perspective and effectively becoming someone else, but in an already crowded roster this can be a recipe for mess, and it doesn’t happen very consistently. There is some slightly random icing on the cake too with hallucinations of moving gargoyles or firing squads, as well as a general sense of weird chaos in Barcelona, but Anji never quite puts a name to these things. I often felt like I was experiencing the same effect facing the TARDIS crew, but not in a creative way. A little bit of unfortunate copy-editing also dogs the book at times, with the odd missing or wrong word — that’s no big deal, but it had the effect of heightening the uncertainty of already (deliberately) uncertain scenes. For instance, Fitz witnessing roughly similar versions of Guernica happening again and again is a strange and disturbing idea, but the first time I noticed a repeated but-not-that-similar scene involving a nun I thought there’d been a mistake.

There’s an argument to be made that History 101 simply caught me napping, and fair enough: no one’s perfect, sometimes you just don’t fully get a book. (I’ve seen that others very much do.) But as this one approached its end I didn’t see a lot of closure happening, with that somewhat intangible problem getting resolved intangibly, a particularly nothing-y bit of setup with Sabbath, and no apparent resolution for Sasha. History has been set right because the balance of uncertainty has been restored, after a wiffly man and a wiffly man-shaped object are introduced to each other. Which is nice and all, but if you’ll forgive a follow up question: wha? See also the bit with Fitz and the TARDIS phone: it’s arguably the most impactful moment in the book, questioning how far these characters will go to preserve history and how much they trust each other. But because it’s couched in Fitz drifting in and out of consciousness, and the way it’s framed suggests that it might be Sabbath rather than the Doctor organising it, and the lack of a significant cool-down about it afterwards, I was more stuck on what actually just happened (and how much of it did) than the ramifications of it for Doctor Who.

Like many of the range’s stronger authors, I’ve no doubt that Halliday had a full grasp of all her concepts, characters and settings: that confidence shines through the book. Actual understanding is muddier, but I’d put that more down to the editing. Never mind the occasional wrong word, if a book’s concept is too hard to grasp then maybe it could be refined. That’s why I’m sad we didn’t get any more BBC Books from her. All that interesting stuff could be sharpened into diamonds.

My vague sense of befuddlement through a lot of History 101 wasn’t enough that I wouldn’t recommend reading it. (And anyway, even if its plot occasionally did an “I’ll explain later,” its themes were sharp enough.) If nothing else it makes a terrific case for this TARDIS team, and it has heaps of flavour. Also, you might follow it better than I did. It’s all a matter of — all together now! — perspective.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #116 – Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#54

Ten Little Aliens

By Stephen Cole

This is one of those Who books that everyone seems to like. It must have had a certain cachet in order to have been reprinted in the modern era, with a new cover and everything. It also did well in contemporary reviews. It took me a while to figure out why.

Ten Little Aliens is a peculiar Doctor Who book. Sure, Whovian murder mysteries are ten-a-penny – they were practically the lifeblood of the Virgin Bernice Summerfield series – but then you add in of a bunch of space marines straight out of Aliens. Agatha Christie, James Cameron and late-stage Hartnell era make for a very odd Venn diagram.

Still, it’s not as if Cameron has a patent on space marines. Earthshock sent similar guys underground with the Doctor and friends four years earlier! (Eric Saward should sue.) But I struggled for a while to get into this story as it focussed so heavily on a bunch of tough guys in what is, deliberately, an “all these corridors look the same” situation. The added incongruity of them vs Hartnell, Ben and Polly felt like whiplash at times.

Stephen Cole puts a lot of effort into his guest cast, going over their identities and personalities a few times with a full character roster to boot. This might seem like overkill but we’re going to be stuck with them so we might as well have a fighting chance of telling them apart. (I’d additionally have suggested not using “Shade” and “Shel” as they’re a bit similar. Oh well.) Despite the shared gung-ho attitude there’s a good amount of unique disadvantages and secrets squirreled away here, particularly with Shade, or “Shadow” as he’s disparagingly called. (Perhaps not a brilliant nickname where it’s so close to what he’s actually called, but we are dealing with space marines, not Oscar Wilde.) An early scene where his commander, Haunt, beats him bloodily in front of everyone to prove both the effectiveness and limits of their armour tells us a bunch about both characters.

The TARDIS crew find these men and women on what appears to be a training exercise inside a hollowed-out asteroid. There’s a thrilling (to me anyway) sequence where the Doctor and co. require spacesuits because the atmosphere’s not very friendly – a surprising rarity in these novels. The two groups soon meet and encounter a pile of alien corpses: the Schirr, sworn enemies of the humans, pictured on the front cover. There’s no reason for said bodies to be there, especially that of the Schirr commander. And there’s even less reason for the bodies to start disappearing, one by one.

It’s around here that Stephen Cole’s primary influence becomes clear, and that’s saying something because I haven’t actually read And Then There Were None – or any Agatha Christie novels for that matter. Before anybody stones me, I’ve seen plenty of Poirot films, Miss Marple dramas, things that were plainly inspired by Christie and quite recently The Mousetrap, which is more than enough to experience a twinge of the little grey cells when bodies go missing in this, or soldiers vanish despite the local disintegrator guns not having fired.

I’ve got no idea how close the plot of Ten Little Aliens adheres to the world’s bestselling mystery novel (as per Wikipedia) but I tend to assume not much, what with the amount of sci-fi and horror going on here. The general pattern of disappearances and betrayals, merely suspected or otherwise, likely recalls the earlier work. It all fits neatly into Cole’s murky, violent framework.

Because oh yes, Ten Little Aliens is grim, beginning with performative army cruelty and a pile of corpses and not letting up from there. There’s a spate of strange afflictions mostly affecting the army folk, some of which are grotesque in the extreme, and these eventually become outright body horror. There are monsters – giant mobile angel statues if you (or Steven Moffat) can believe such a thing, only these guys do a lot worse than send you back in time to meet the love of your life. There’s also a truly horrifying engine system that essentially eats people, and if they’ve been torn to bits first then all the better for the digestion.

There’s a lot of potential here to revel in cruelty, but Cole keeps an eye on the character side of things so it’s never that bad. We have, by that point, come to at least empathise with the army guys. There’s Haunt with her strict ways, which hide a lot of pain; Shade and his secrets, as well as his desire to make good; Roba, a powerful but insecure man looking to keep his head above danger; Creben, arguably the most senior officer after Haunt and hoping to make a name for himself; Joiks, a somewhat skeezy guy who makes people uncomfortable to feel better about himself; and "Frog", a troubled young woman with scars and an artificial voice box. (There are more of them but to varying degrees they all stay in the background.)

Ten Little Aliens felt a bit limited and trad to me at first, what with army guys in a cave yelling at each other until the monsters come. Not very interesting, surely? But there’s a deceptive power in this as the book moves forward in such a confined space and more or less in real time, with a strict limit to its characters. Gradually a sense of claustrophobia sets in that you don’t often see in novels, which by their nature are often interested in expansion and world-building. All the world-building in Ten Little Aliens is conversational, describing worlds and conflicts outside this godforsaken asteroid that nevertheless inform what’s happening on it. There are at least two malignant alien races and we don’t meet very many of them: the point of focus is the people stuck in this crucible and whether they’re going to get out of it.

Cole’s attention to tension builds to the book’s USP, and probably its biggest talking point: a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure section. This sounds gimmicky in the extreme, but it fits what he’s doing, as the characters all use interconnected headsets to record thoughts and memories and the Doctor determines that in order to stay alive and solve the crisis they need to keep in contact, and this seems like the best solution. The reader is invited to jump between perspectives in a rough order, but many are optional, which paints a somewhat unique experience for each reader and reading. It also re-enforces the sense of confined characterisation that’s been building throughout the book. Lasting about 40 pages, it’s easily one of the individual creative highlights of BBC Books, up there with Eye Of Heaven and The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, except in microcosm. It’s bloody good going for what looks at first like a trad army story. I can only imagine how long it took to put together.

The story as a whole is less complicated and quite satisfying. I won’t spoil who’s the traitor and what they’re trying to achieve, but it comes together neatly, justifying the disappearances and murders. There’s a late reveal that smacks of a gimmick (and that’s in a book with CYOA), which is at least very Agatha Christie, but I think Cole just about gets away with it via some supporting memories and motivations covertly dotted through the book.

If it seems like the focus is entirely off the TARDIS crew, it isn’t really. Cole makes a very good case for the First Doctor who is initially dismissed by the likes of Haunt, then gradually makes his usefulness apparent. He faces down appalling monsters but still gives them the benefit of the doubt, and maintains a thrillingly aloof distance from Polly and the others (via a clever callback to The Space Museum, of all things) during the mind-swapping section. It’s here that Cole most overtly references the Doctor’s frailty and self-doubt: “We are (we will not waste a second of our life) still young, vital, but trapped inside this awful, ancient (frustration) corpse of a body.” There’s a lot of that throughout, with Ben referring to him as an “old boy”, the Doctor occasionally falling into people’s arms, “crouching arthritically” and even (a bit on the nose) searching for “words that were lost to him like an actor drying up on stage.” In the end when the crisis is averted he considers that he will “feel a new person soon.” (Please ignore the double entendre.) All of which gives the novel a tremendous sense of place in the lead up to The Tenth Planet.

Cole doesn’t sell the Doctor short, despite all his frailties; even his shortcomings feel intrinsically suited to the character, like when Ben observes him working on something “the way [his] dad used to try his luck fixing the family motor, when all else had failed, fiddling with bits of engine he didn’t understand, just in case one of them magically started the car.” The Doctor is nonetheless capable of being unfriendly, like his cutting Polly out of his mind, or making hard decisions, such as a grisly solution to their problems at the end. A cuddly Father Christmas figure he isn’t, or not entirely, which keeps him interesting.

Ben’s POV is achieved quite skilfully as well, with Polly noting that “Ben even thought in a cockney accent.” There are many little shards of his wit and dialect, with Ben observing that someone “had a face like the smell of gas,” that something exploded “like a firework going off in a jam jar,” and making references to “geezers”, “plates” and “jacksies” that we know from the perspective-swapping scenes don’t translate to others. Cole is keenly aware of Ben’s faults, with Polly calling out one of his comments as casually racist, and his strengths, with Ben using his Navy mindset to ingratiate himself with the soldiers and steer them right, such as snapping them out of a trance by telling them Haunt’s coming. He’s a rounded enough character that, even when he’s falling in with the blokes around him, he isn’t sure he should want to. Polly feels like the runner up here, often ending up in a quiet supportive role, but she still has moments to shine, such as a bit of ingenuity in leaving a trail (considering lipstick, then chalk, then making little cairns instead) and an ongoing battle of wills with Shade, whose deal isn’t entirely clear at first.

This is easily Stephen Cole’s strongest book yet, taking a trad setup and milking it for all the tension it’s got, incorporating a classic structure and then going completely off the wall with it. There’s a tight sense of description for the (sometimes abstract) horrors on display, such as “Their smiles were compassionate. Their fingers dripped blood” and “The frozen expressions on the bloodied Schirr faces seemed less representative now of terror and agony, more like those of creatures laughing hysterically, till it hurt, till the tears came rolling down.” It sounds like damning with faint praise, but he really has come a long way since Longest Day.

Probably the only wrinkle in the book, besides a serious case of “cut to someone else” syndrome (which is perhaps necessary for the story but gave me many opportunities to check my phone) is the debatable treatment of its aliens. There’s some typical militaristic small-mindedness about the Shirr and the Morphieans, with the latter being referred to as “spooks” and the former appearing as (among other interpretations) somewhat of a racist stereotype on the cover. The author/book’s proclivities are clear enough what with Polly calling out Ben’s blinkered views, and the Doctor doing the same thing with the marines (“‘They all look so similar.’ ‘How very enlightened,’ said the Doctor”), but bearing in mind the original title of And Then There Were None I did wonder about that choice. Of course I haven’t read And Then There Were None; presumably Cole and Tucker (not to mention Christie) were Doing A Thing here with regards to warped attitudes towards the unlike. There is, after all, textual colonialism and racism in the book. It just isn’t dealt with very much beyond the Doctor wryly commenting upon Earth’s grabby definition of “ownership”, a bit of SF blurring between human and Shirr, and the plot raising questions about whether the Shirr or the Morphiean peoples are really all on the same page as one another. The CYOA section, for example, isn’t used to challenge or deconstruct these views. (Unless I didn’t read those bits.) Perhaps it’s just one of those things that you can leave to percolate in the background of a murder mystery, but in Doctor Who tends to be underlined for emphasis as well.

It’s arguably a bit questionable and often very trad; it’s quietly creative, then very much so. On the whole it’s a winner.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #115 – The Crooked World by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#57

The Crooked World

By Steve Lyons

I got this one decades ago, free (if memory serves) with DWM. It’s been a funny little curio on my shelf ever since, this freebie that doesn’t look very much like a Doctor Who novel, and now I’ve actually gone and read the bugger. It’s a strange feeling; I think it was the last Doctor Who book I’d had since my youth but never read.

 

The Crooked World was Steve Lyons’s last Wilderness Years novel. (See also, Christopher Bulis’s Palace Of The Red Sun. We’ll be seeing more of these as the range ticks towards its end.) Thematically it’s a bit like Lyons’s first, as he once again embraces different media. Where Conundrum tackled alternative strands of fiction such as comic strips, The Crooked World focusses on cartoons: the TARDIS seemingly lands inside one, or at least a planet populated with noticeably off-brand recreations of Road Runner, Tom & Jerry, Wacky Races, Top Cat and Scooby Doo.

 

There are a few ways you can tackle this – including, it would only be fair to acknowledge, a comic strip rather than a novel. On that, I think Conundrum demonstrated well enough that Lyons can write a prose story about comic books, so he’s well within his capabilities doing something similar here with cartoons. Besides which, The Crooked World is more interested in the rules and restrictions of cartoons, things that you would want to talk about, than in their visual capabilities, so it works nicely as prose.

 

What starts as a jolly interlude for the Eighth Doctor and friends quickly turns into something nasty, as the Doctor is shot by a farmer and (contrary to local physics) actually gets quite badly injured. This starts a chain reaction of differences in cartoon logic which causes the blunderbuss-wielding pig, Streaky Bacon, to rethink his actions and consider his place in the world. There are other knock-on effects, some deliberate (like Anji telling Angel Falls, an ersatz Penelope Pitstop, to stop relying on men) and some indirect (like Fitz inspiring Jasper, aka Tom, to leave his kitchen and consider the wider world), and that’s the gist of the novel: cartoon characters wondering if that’s all there is to life.

It’s a bit like Pleasantville in other words, but then I’m not averse to seeing Doctor Who’s take on that, and anyway cartoons aren’t the same thing as 1950s TV shows. Lyons isn’t here to interrogate issues of race and sexuality as that film did, although both ideas are obliquely and humourously invoked here; the focus is on free will and what it means to break out of patterns. It’s quite a small-scale novel, despite concerning the fate of an entire world. There’s a feeling about a third of a way in that the plot isn’t going to escalate in the traditional way so much as continue to explore an idea to its natural conclusion.

I’m fine with that, quite honestly. There have been other books with dynamite ideas that didn’t have time to look in every nook and cranny. I tended to come away from those feeling a bit frustrated. Grimm Reality is one to which The Crooked World bears a more than passing resemblance; Lyons (via Anji) gently lampshades this a few times. Even apart from any concerns about repetition – and for all I know, Lyons was directly inspired by that earlier book – it’s worth pointing out the increased lean of the series towards overt magic and fantasy that is implied by seeing more and more novels like this. For my money, The Crooked World is a more balanced effort than Grimm Reality: the cartoon characters don’t just re-enact their little narratives wholesale, they think about them and sometimes change what they’re doing. The Doctor and co. feel less like passive observers this time – indeed, their arrival is the main driving force of the plot. I like idea-based stories that have a “just-right-sized” plot and this is one of those.

It’s a good showcase for the regulars, or at least an accurate one. I can’t be the only reader getting a little tired of the Doctor’s fragility post Adventuress Of Henrietta Street; his injury at the start of this absolutely fits the plot and moves it along, no complaints there, but it risks being yet another reminder of the poor wiffly Doctor with his one heart, a concept that Lawrence Miles sold as something more interesting than a difference in his physiognomy which subsequent writers have largely taken to mean “he runs out of breath now, the poor duck.” Never mind: once he’s back on his feet the Doctor is a joyous force, enthralled by the nonsense logic of the world around him as well as the challenge facing its people. Although he leaves the decision-making to them wherever possible he’s quite partisan here, insisting that to embrace free will and break out of their “cartoons” is the right thing to do. I don’t know if that was an attempt to underscore a more impulsive Doctor or if that was just the way Lyons felt he ought to lean, but it certainly creates sparks with Anji who argues – not unreasonably – that these people seem happy with their lot.

Lyons has a good grasp of Anji, someone who “couldn’t bring herself to believe in anything without tangible proof”; throwing her into a world of nonsense is a good challenge. Her feminist flag-waving with Angel is perhaps a little on the nose, but this is a cartoon, so fair enough. Her scenes with the Skeleton Crew (aka the Scooby Gang) are probably my favourites here, as she forces them to confront the patterns they’re stuck in and adapt how they do things, only to then understand that they’re pretty on the ball and can respond reasonably well to threats and mysteries by themselves, even incorporating what they've learned from her. Lyons prods at her uncertainty around going home, a theme the books have had-their-cake-and-eaten-it with so far, landing on it never seeming like “the right moment” to broach it with the Doctor. He also picks up on her withering relationship with Fitz, having her observe that cartoon characters have discovered the concept of sex and instantly know where that came from. She has a fairly accurate long-suffering opinion of the loveable schlub, such as when the local sheriff tells the Doctor: “‘You call this trouble, boy? Your skinny pal’s been kidnapped, that’s all. It’s not like he’s started to think or nothing serious.’ That was true enough, thought Anji.”

Fitz has long since achieved that Bernice Summerfield status of being hard to get wrong, and sure enough Lyons has a blast with him here, having him adorably care for the wounded Doctor, clumsily reveal the ins and outs of evil lairs to a cadre of supervillains, then make Herculean efforts to explain sex and love to Angel Falls. He wipes away a genuine tear of relief when he hears the words “Tell me about this Earth thing you call ‘sex’” in earnest. (“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for someone to say that. I mean, you really don’t know.”)

For me the most affecting parts of The Crooked World were the reactions of its cartoon characters to their changing landscape. Jasper, a mute cat, tugs the heartstrings in a surprisingly sophisticated fashion as he lopes around after Fitz, who fails to notice him, then gets trapped back in his routine only to escalate it horribly; Streaky, the roundabout sort of Porky Pig/Elmer Fudd creation, seems to be having an existential crisis throughout the book which pays off nicely at the end; Mr Weasley, Angel’s guardian/masked nemesis, starts a schism among the bad guys that leads to an evil witch working on medicines for the injured instead. It could be argued that the cartoons of The Crooked World lack originality or very much in the way of diversity – they’re all knock-offs and their individual storylines would not, with respect to Lyons, impress Chuck Jones very much. But first of all I’d say the plot has a baked-in reason for that when it’s revealed where all this cartoon stuff has come from*, and second we’re not really here to be dazzled by the brilliance of these cartoons. Breaking out of them is the point.**

*This doesn’t particularly explain Anime City, which is mentioned as another part of the world outside of the more Looney Tunes “Zanytown” we find ourselves in for the duration. Maybe Lyons came up with the explanation after he wrote that bit.

**It’s worth pointing out that for some reason Fitz and Anji never say “This is a bit like Tom & Jerry” or “Isn’t that Scooby Doo but with different character names”, and that feels a bit false. They would know these things. But I suspect it was a copyright thing. Perhaps I’m also just used to characters going “Look at that IP!” in the current landscape, which wasn’t as expected or legally possible in 2002.

The Crooked World doesn’t break a sweat explaining itself. That seems to be par for the course with the Eighth Doctor Adventures at this time, magic and fantasy being more normal all of a sudden. Anji pokes the bear a few times and gets a sort of science-y explanation from the Doctor: “In some places, in some entire universes, [reality is] stretched too thinly and the fabric becomes weak.” That’s a bit of a sop in-text and on the meta level as well, like when vampires in New Who turn out to be (gasp!) aliens that act just like vampires. As with his earlier book Salvation and, yeah okay let’s mention it again, Conundrum, the fun of it is in exploring the strange idea he’s come up with, which is: what if Doctor Who landed in a cartoon. It’s a “just go with it” novel that makes a good fist of what it’s trying to achieve, even if the lack of a particularly kinetic plot keeps it from being what I’d call a page-turner. There are plenty of jokes to tide you along, like the observation that an increase in thinking has led to a shortage of lightbulbs. It’s a sweet, creative effort that acts as a fitting send-off for one of the Wilderness Era’s more colourful writers.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #114 – Warmonger by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#53

Warmonger

By Terrance Dicks

Duck! It’s Warmonger!

Let’s not beat around the bush here: this one isn’t popular. Warmonger tends to be mentioned when people list the BBC Books they liked the least. Contemporary reviews said things like “Arguably the worst Doctor Who novel ever written” (Discontinuity Guide) and “One of the greatest travesties ever perpetuated [sic] on the ‘Who’ book line.” (I, Who.) It must be quite something to have read it with no preconceptions, but I couldn’t avoid those, so the question became not so much Is it any good as How bad is it?

Alarm bells ring early on when our first sight of Peri is a person “sick of running and hiding and killing.” Yes, killing: we begin the story in media res (I knew I shouldn’t have bought that monkey’s paw) and Peri is installed as the leader of a band of guerrillas on the planet Sylvana. She has been hardened by a year of war and her friends have all been murdered or raped. She is now, for example, enough of a crack shot with a sniper rifle to deliberately wound a fleeing enemy soldier (because he’s only a boy) rather than kill him.

That’s Perpugilliam Brown — you know, the fun American botany student who only recently got picked up by the Doctor while on holiday. I’m not against giving an established character a bit of chutzpah, especially one as frequently abused as Peri, but isn’t this the sort of thing you’d struggle to reconcile with the rest of their telly run? Where was Rambo Peri in The Twin Dilemma?

Things get momentarily worse, then better for Peri as the Sylvana regime is overthrown by the Alliance: an army made up of such disparate elements as Draconians and Sontarans. They are fighting a mysterious enemy and are led by a somewhat less mysterious black clad “Supremo”: you know him as the Fifth Doctor. He commands an army of apparently immeasurable size that also includes Ice Warriors and Cybermen, all of whom are happy in his thrall.

Now: there is something to be said for a bonkers idea. There is, equally, value in placing a familiar character in unfamiliar surroundings — it’s the sort of thing a long-running series ought to rely on, quite frankly. There’s even a precedent for the Doctor seeming to have traded in his values (The Invasion Of Time) as well as actually having done so (Big Finish’s Unbound series, particularly Full Fathom Five) — but those examples came with caveats. You can forget that now: Warmonger presents the idea in earnest, as if everyone else was simply too much of a wally to think of it first. The Doctor of Warmonger isn’t even ambiguous about it; he “[likes] being the Supremo — far too much,” and when it’s all over Peri wonders if he can let his adoring soldiers go.

The loudest point of contention with Warmonger seems to be its treatment of the Fifth Doctor. Well known as the most agreeable and pleasant incarnation, he’s more likely to sit in a jail cell and wait than cause a ruckus. It’s insane to treat him as a man who not only considers all-out-war to be the only possible solution to a problem, but one who would enthusiastically lead it as well. All of that’s true. (Apparently it started life as a Sixth Doctor story, which might have made a bit more sense?) But I’d go further. This setup is antithetical to the Doctor in general, whether he’s rocking a stick of celery or a long scarf. It just doesn’t square at all.

(Point of order: A Good Man Goes To War and The War Doctor come to mind. Both of those either came from a place of character [rescue my friend] or served a wider purpose [crisis and closure re the Time War]. Warmonger, bluntly, doesn’t do that stuff so I’m not sure they’re pertinent here.)

There’s a semblance of a point here, at least. Peri makes occasional reference to how much they’ve both changed; the Doctor is at one point “surprised for a fleeting moment by his own indifference to death”, along with other such reflections; the blurb references “the dark sides of their personalities.” Peri lost a year of her life to all this! It seems — charitably — that the story is pushing them to this dark place so it can interrogate that, which again is a perfectly valuable thing to do. But it’s how you do it.

Terrance Dicks isn’t the sort of writer to deal in complex character journeys. The characters in Warmonger are frightfully simple ladies and chaps who chew over their thoughts in handy chunks rather than explore them through meaningful actions. This includes the Doctor/Supremo, who mentally witters such brilliance as “I must write that letter to Hawken when I’ve had some sleep… I must get this coat and these boots back to him… I’d better get Peri out of here very soon.” (Remember to buy milk, pay the gas bill etc.) If someone was going to reckon with a severe change of personality in this one, believe me, it would be visible from two books over. They’re just not that deep.

This also applies to the plot — because hey, there is one, by the way. After Peri meets the Supremo it’s time for us to whiz back and fill in the gaps. (This process takes around 150 pages.) The Doctor takes a stressed Peri somewhere peaceful, and she is promptly gored by a pterodactyl. Apparently seeing no other recourse, the Doctor whisks her back in time to the planet Karn where she can be treated by none other than Solon. The Doctor is thrown in jail for his slightly-too-mysterious arrival, but he’s so charming that they let him out. Peri suspects malfeasance with Solon and, despite the Doctor’s protestations, she finds a lab full of zombies. The Doctor just wants to stay quiet and keep the timeline straight — after all, who would want to disrupt The Brain Of Morbius? All is going well until a mysterious General arrives by the name of Rombusi, bringing with him a band of intergalactic cutthroats. Solon seems to like this Rombusi fellow an awful lot, by the way.

Disaster strikes and Rombusi, a man of great Brain, kidnaps Peri and heads out into space. The Doctor panics at the insurmountable threat Rombusi, also a Time Lord, poses, so he shoots off to Gallifrey to plead for their help while posing as the Karn ambassador. They guess his identity, but he’s so charming that they don’t exile him to Earth or anything. (I have no idea how the timeline works.) The Doctor insists that they can’t just kill this charismatic figure from Gallifreyan history, as that would make him a martyr. (To a bunch of unruly space thugs who are only in it for the perks.) Only a great battle will do! Well, that’s the Doctor for you. After this he quickly falls into the role of Supreme Commander and has an army to wrangle.

It’s not exactly throwing its back out as plots go, and it continues to progress on easy mode from there, with various alien races all turning up and immediately agreeing to work with/for him, some thanks to a bit of Time Lord trickery on the sidelines. (If this is in any way morally equivalent to what the Doctor is doing, this ain’t the book to say so. Other Time Lords shifty! Doctor generally okay!) Warmonger becomes a thoroughly mindless war story where the Doctor’s cronies visit worlds conquered by Rombusi and take them back, gaining willing new armies into the bargain. Can we say, “colonialism”? The thing that was ostensibly bad in that book Catastrophea by, oh what’s his name, the bloke who says “gween” a lot?

If you’re wondering whether liberation that comes via Sontarans and Ice Warriors is really any better than occupation by space pirates, you are officially thinking too much to have written Warmonger. As it happens the people couldn’t be happier. The soldiers cheer in their Supremo’s honour. The Cybermen (!) turn out for a dress parade at the end. The whole Alliance is one long simpering, obsequious banquet in the Doctor’s honour, without a shred of thought towards the shared history between these characters. It would be hilarious if it was a joke, but alas, this is the Uncle Terry that wrote Players, so the best you’ll get viz satire* is a particularly grovelling underling who gets himself killed for a bit of easy pathos, or the Doctor dispensing war homilies from the likes of Napoleon and Wellington. The overall implication is that, while it’s a messy business, someone’s gotta do it: “We’ve saved hundreds, thousands of people from rape and torture and slavery. We wouldn’t have achieved that by telling Morbius’s soldiers that they were being very nasty and would they please go away.” (And for a bonus point: “Some questions don’t have satisfactory answers.” I guess that’s all the ethical bases covered, then.)

It’s Morbius, by the way. Big fan of anagrams apparently. This is an area where Warmonger could actually do something of note: how did Morbius end up as just a brain? Is there more to him than the lumbering Frankenstein’s monster we met in Solon’s lab? Not much, it seems, as the Morbius we meet here is a garden variety megalomaniac with vanity issues. The vast majority of the war doesn’t even feature him, the focus instead being on the Doctor in his exciting new wardrobe with his best mates, the Cybermen. (Oops, I just remembered Earthshock exists.) It’s hard, based on the evidence, to believe he’s really a be-all-end-all threat. Morbius and his men are just getting up to your typical Genghis Khan schtick on an intergalactic scale, with a particular emphasis on rape to weight the scales in favour of the Doctor and his lovely Alliance that everyone is always pleased to see.

The most interesting thing about Morbius is his incredible power of persuasion, e.g. his ragtag bunch of space pirates who’d presumably follow a bright light, or perhaps more convincingly Peri. What else could explain her sudden turn from having an investigative spirit no matter what (defying the Doctor and finding zombies) to quite fancying this Rombusi bloke and ignoring all the Doctor’s warnings not to go on a date with him? She reasons thus: “What if [Rombusi] was a renegade Time Lord? So was the Doctor, by his own admission, and he’d never used his undoubted powers for evil.” You know, I could swear she’s met a dodgy Time Lord before. Pointy beard and stuff. Quite recently, wasn’t it?

Sadly I don’t think we can blame Morbius’s incredible hypno-eyes for Peri’s lapse in judgement. 1) Because Morbius is so vain and stupid that a quick lie about having a skin condition and consequently being a sex risk is enough for him to pack her safely off in an escape pod, with provisions. And 2) “[Peri] thought about the mild, friendly Doctor she had first known — and realised that this ruthless, tormented Supremo aroused very different feelings in her.” Yes, Peri tries to jump the Doctor’s bones in this one — specifically because he’s become a ruthless warlord. I don’t remotely like what this says about Peri and I’m positively icked by what it says about Terry, who (despite his fanciful notion that she could become a guerrilla leader) also directs the infamously comely companion towards a barrage of leers and rape threats throughout the novel — and even, typically enough, some medical experimentation. (In case you were wondering, the Doctor turns her down in a typically eloquent fashion. “There’s a saying on Earth, Peri — try everything once except incest and folk-dancing.”)

The case for Warmonger, like much of Terry’s writing, is short. There are recognisable monsters in it. Fans of The Brain Of Morbius can tick a box. The novel has a decent pace. It’s written in a bright, uncomplicated style that ought to appeal to younger readers, or at least help them through it. And help may be required, because underneath all his cheery bon mots and his “isn’t this cool” repurposing of Doctor Who monsters is a quite nasty story of the Doctor giving up what he stands for just because the plot demands it, until the plot demands that we’ve hit 280 pages now so can he please stop behaving like that and go home.

For all that Terry can turn a page, much of what he actually fills them with is dross. “As nasty-looking a bunch a thugs as I’ve ever encountered” is followed on the next page by “As villainous-looking a group of hard men as you could find in the galaxy.” The book contains a “Hakon” and a “Hawken.” Morbius uses a bloody anagram for some reason. Dicks imagines a darker side for Peri that doesn’t fit into Doctor Who whatsoever, then drops it, and does the same thing for a character he helped define in the first place, then drops that as well like nothing happened. And it’s somehow dull as well, with this great galactic war existing mostly as reported events. The only thing to perk you up is the sheer what-the-[bleep]-ness of seeing the Doctor’s monster army frequently tell him he’s their best mate, he is, and they’d die for him, as he casually sends men to their deaths.

I don’t know if it’s truly the worst Doctor Who book ever written. On a technical level it has a baseline competence that you don’t get in some of Virgin’s slapdash efforts, and nobody gets violently anal-probed in this one, so it’s arguably not worse than The King Of Terror. But the line between Terrance Dicks, great understander of Doctor Who and Uncle Terry, man with very old fashioned view of war and violence is virtually gone now, and this dunderhead of a novel is all that’s left, cheerfully rubbishing the tenets of the series all to explain how a brain ended up in a jar. Behold: the absolutely no brain of Morbius.

2/10

*Since reading it I’ve heard competing theories about Warmonger as a deliberate work of satire. All readings are valid, so fair enough, but I’m happy with mine: Terrance Dicks didn’t do satire without smashing you over the head with it, he actively loves a bunch of the stuff in this (The Brain Of Morbius, any excuse to parrot Winston Churchill) so he’s unlikely to be taking the piss on a wider scale, and if you can’t collectively agree on what it is he’s satirising then — even if he is! — he’s not doing a very good job, is he? Sorry folks: sometimes it just is what it appears to be.