Doctor Who: The BBC Books #111 – Trading Futures by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#55

Trading Futures

By Lance Parkin

Lance Parkin is a difficult author to summarise. He likes to invoke (and occasionally invent) lore for the series, so his books gain a certain fan import just by sticking his name on the cover. Cold Fusion and The Infinity Doctors, not to mention his eventual final book in the EDAs, all (presumably!) do cool things and include elements that speak to their respective ranges as a whole, as well as the overall idea of Doctor Who. They’re prestigious. But he can also write more down-to-Earth character pieces like his inaugural book Just War and more recently Father Time, which slowed down life with the Doctor and gave him a daughter.

 

Very big stuff, very small stuff, so far we’ve covered most of the bases… but then he also writes books that set their sights on fun and leave it at that. Beige Planet Mars (co-written with Mark Clapham) is one of the jollier Benny books, which is saying something, and The Dying Days (the first ever Eighth Doctor novel, unless you count the novelisation of the TV Movie) is a repurposed Third Doctor story that’s gung-ho all the way. TL;DR, you never quite know what he’ll do next. (And I’ve not even mentioned his non-fiction effort, The History Of The Universe, which is as ambitious as it sounds.)

 

Trading Futures is unequivocally fun Parkin. (You might have guessed that from the splendid spy movie front cover.) Parkin slips in a bit of arc stuff anyway, enough that it’s very apparent that he’s paying attention to the surrounding novels, but his aim is action adventure right from the jump. And perhaps a commission for a Bond novel while he’s at it.

 

Doctor Who novel openings can be hit and miss, but this one’s an explosive double-header. First a man takes a client into the past to meet Macbeth and display his time travel credentials. Second, the Doctor steals an important suitcase from a well-guarded yacht, blowing it up in the process and escaping via an ejector seat. (You half expect “Nobody Does It Better” to start piping in from the ether.) The pace essentially keeps it up from there, with multiple factions all chasing the time technology. We’ve got – let’s see if I miss one – Secret Service head Cosgrove and his assistant Penny Lik (the name’s a Bond Girl-ish joke about ice cream); time agents Roja and Jaxa; CIA agent Malady Chang and (eventually) the US President; and a spaceship full of angry rhinos called the Onihr – and not, as you might be hoping, the Juddoon. Add to that the Doctor, Anji and Fitz, all three juggling identities at various points in the story, and at least two actual time machines to fight over, not including the TARDIS, and you’ve essentially got a French farce with a very large special effects budget.

 

Parkin keeps at least one foot on the ground, adding some satisfying character moments mostly to the first half. There’s a gentle reminder that Fitz (as well as the Doctor) is having memory problems, but not so much that he doesn’t feel the burden of knowing more about the galaxy’s status quo than the Doctor. The only person he can talk to about all this is the TARDIS, so Parkin writes a lovely scene of that ending with: “You’re a police box, but there aren’t any policemen left.” We get some great expressions of what it’s like to travel in time somewhere that’s mostly recognisable to you, which is something all too easy to take for granted, with Anji musing that she “had no idea if she was meant to feel very, very old or very, very young.” And we get this brilliant assessment of Fitz’s overall slack demeanour: “Long experience of time-travelling had taught him that you answered questions by politely agreeing with the person asking them … so, on his travels, when people asked ‘do you know this is a restricted area?’ or ‘what shall we do with you, rebel scum?’ or the like, he’d learned to shrug and let them carry on with whatever they were going to do anyway.” Yep, tick, that explains a lot.

 

There is also – Bingo blotters are the ready! – yet more stuff about dear departed Dave, as when Anji is provided with the means to travel anywhere in time with precision she chooses Brussels in 2001, hoping to warn Dave away from certain doom. This is one of those things where, yes, it makes sense for Anji to make that choice in that situation, but the novelist choosing to concoct that situation is ignoring the subsequent closures of EarthWorld and Hope – despite referencing both of those stories here. Parkin takes pains to mention that “[Anji] and Dave had been in trouble”, which has been clear since Escape Velocity and makes it even more puzzling that we keep going back to that well. Admittedly the observation that “All the time it was Dave that represented everything she’d left behind and so she’d clung to Dave” goes some way to explaining why she keeps ping-ponging back to this, but good god almighty, are we ever going to be done re-using these tea leaves? (At least this re-do doesn’t last for the whole book; Anji is thoroughly on-the-ball for the rest of it.)

 

Rather more interesting are the little nods to where all this is going, such as Anji’s observation that “there was a pattern to their travels … a bigger picture they were all missing,” and the Doctor once again deliberately failing to mention why he can’t take Anji home as promised, even though he can clearly pilot to order. (I’m pretty sure they’ve already talked it over at this point with her agreeing to the wanderer’s life, but never mind.) There’s also more evidence of Sabbath’s dodgy dealings; in a pleasing boost for the note-takers among us, this involves retroactively recruiting the Time Agents from Eater Of Wasps, before Sabbath even turned up! It’s only a minor inclusion and to be honest you might forget about it by the end of Trading Futures, but it’s good to see that these things are being kept on the boil. Heck, it was a pleasant surprise just to see those Wasps guys again.

 

Lots of good, weighty, sufficiently Lance Parkin-y stuff there – and I’ve not even mentioned the seriously cool idea that a character could use one of the TARDIS crew as an alien interpreter, like seriously why hasn’t that happened before? But as I said earlier, this one is all action. You probably won’t pause to register the other stuff.

 

I’m slightly in two minds about the action. The good: it’s fast and fun, and funny, with Parkin slipping in jokes that would probably have got a smirk out of Douglas Adams. Highlights include: “‘The control box indicates that the Doctor has one heart.’ ‘Er… he’s got two,’ Fitz began. ‘Oh no, hang one, as you were.’” / Fitz chain smokes for a bit specifically because he’s “trying to get off nicotine pills.” / The Onihr have a “pain inducer” that actually makes you remember pain and isn’t very effective, leading to: “The lead Onihr twisted a dial on the pain inducer, and Fitz’s eyes watered as he remembered the time he’d jumped a bit too hard on to the saddle of a scooter.” / There’s this argument with the Time Agents: “‘If this isn’t a time machine, then no crime has been committed.’ ‘But the Doctor himself claims that it is a time machine.’ The Doctor smiled smugly. ‘If you’re going to put me on trial, you’ll need better evidence than that. It’ll be my word against mine!’” / The Doctor’s retort to Malady: “‘We’re in the future?’ The Doctor grinned. ‘Yeah. But here they call it “the present.”’” / And there’s a bit where Anji says she needs to use the loo to get away from a tricky situation, happily bumps into her friends on the way, then needs to discretely ask them to go away because she does need a wee actually. I chuckled while reading it, occasionally synonymising “Lance Parkin” with "comedy" as you do with Dave Stone and he-who-mostly-pens-right-wing-Spectator-columns-nowadays.

 

The bad, or I suppose the less good, is twofold. The action is constant, particularly once we arrive at the finale set in a robot factory. (I’ve not even mentioned the world of roughly 2020-ish is on the brink of war between roughly-the-EU and the United States, and both sides have access to big robots.) Parkin changes settings frequently, which is something I usually hate, but he manages to keep the action flowing and the characters clear enough despite all the deliberate mistaken identities – which, great, but there are points where even the characters are a bit unsure who’s who or doing what, and it all just gets a bit thin. The finale simply goes on a bit.

 

The other issue, or my takeaway at least, is a distinctly casual attitude to death in this. It’s probably normal for an action movie to, for example, drown Athens and kill four thousand people before simply moving onto the next set piece, but it’s peculiar for Doctor Who to do that without really registering the tragedy of what has unfolded. We do get a terrific scene of the Doctor “robbing” a bank in order to protect everyone in it, but the expected hand-wringing isn’t really there to complement it. I suppose he’s too busy? (Malady notices the bodies, at least.) I wondered if this was a “you can’t change history” thing, with the resultant deaths being out of the Doctor’s control apart from say a bank-vault’s worth, but we don’t really have that conversation, or reckon with the fact that what’s going on might not even be that.

Elsewhere people are gunned down like they’re nothing, often characters we’ve been following and got to know a little, all of which can be business as usual in an action story but juxtaposed with that mostly cheerful atmosphere it smacks of callousness. Particularly the bit where a distraught young boy – admittedly up to no good – gets his head blown off at the end of a chapter as the Doctor leaves him behind. Conversely the scene where a villain plunges to either victory or death is handled with brutal black comedy; the Doctor’s lack of response makes more sense there.

 

Perhaps all of that is a commentary on the Eighth Doctor as he exists now, which is to say “not firing on all cylinders” or equivalent cliché. He races through Trading Futures with the confidence and influence of old, but perhaps with less heart(s) than usual, and maybe less deference to changing or not changing history. (Perhaps deep down pondering whether the villain of the piece is really capable of predicting real future events?) I’m not convinced Parkin or Trading Futures is entirely on firm ground with this corner of continuity, however. If, as he does here, the Doctor can expertly shoot bullets out of the air and deftly zip the TARDIS from A to B then you might wonder why he needed that second heart in the first place, and what he’s supposed to be missing. What happened to the weakly human-ish guy from Anachrophobia? But the Doctor is still excellently written here as a character, and so is Fitz (pretending to the be the Doctor, temporarily outfoxing the Onihr), and so is Anji (confidently bullshitting various parties and applying her business knowledge where it will help). All three feel like seasoned adventurers rising to the challenge. Or in Fitz’s case, cheerfully tripping arse over tit through it.

 

Unusually for Parkin this might be a book that you need to think less about. (How, for example, does Anji telephone the President of the United States just by asking for him via Directory Enquiries?) As an action movie it rockets along bloodily, sprinkling in nifty ideas as it goes, such as the smell-based Onihr technology, and it has all the necessary cool bits, such as Fitz bravely resigning himself to self-destruction in order to stop the Onihr only to avert it at the last possible second because whoops there's a solution actually. (Because he’s not the Doctor and he can’t think of everything, okay?) It’s a laugh. It’s just perhaps not advisable to get attached to any of the characters, or expect any deep and meaningful conversations beyond “money, pfft, it sure makes people do crazy things!”

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #110 – Palace Of The Red Sun by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#51

Palace Of The Red Sun

By Christopher Bulis

Here’s a milestone for the marathon: the last ever Doctor Who novel by Christopher Bulis. He wrote 12 of them if you count the Bernice Summerfield books, which I do. That’s a somewhat load-bearing guy for two different publishers. No mean feat.

I think it’s important to recognise that crazy level of output because, without wishing to be unkind, Bulis is not considered one of the creative trailblazers of Doctor Who lit. Through his fairly long Wilderness Years career he maintained a mostly meat-and-potatoes approach to sci-fi, occasionally pushing the boat out for a State Of Change (famous villain) or a Sorcerer’s Apprentice (SF+fantasy) or a Vanderdeken’s Children (kinda complicated). At his best he wrote novels that seemed familiar but also embraced their genre of choice and rollicked along nicely, such as Imperial Moon. If nothing else he could turn his hand to writing any of the Doctors; in just over five years he wrote for all of them.

I doubt it will surprise anyone to hear that his final book, Palace Of The Red Sun, doesn’t suddenly veer into uncharted territory. It has all the things that cause people who don’t like Christopher Bulis novels to roll their eyes in despair: it borrows greedily from the probable video collections of its readers in order to stitch together an SF-tinged-with-fantasy romp that anyone hoping for a very original work can dismiss out of hand — as indeed they did, based on reviews such as Discontinuity Guide which labelled it “Dire.”

On balance, I don’t think I’m one of those people. Whilst I haven’t exactly been effusive about these things, more often than not I’m swept along by them. Bulis generally sticks to ideas that have been proven to work and he has a good grasp of pacing — you’d hope so after 12 books. I’m a simple man: keep each chapter focused on the same character or group of characters and I’ll be your friend.

Palace Of The Red Sun is an almost constant example of that “DiCaprio pointing at the TV” meme, but I read most of it in a day which ought to count for something. We open an a royal court getting overthrown by some intergalactic bully, only to find that the royals have fled. Shades of Masters Of The Universe or maybe even Krull there. The action moves to a different planet where a primitive society lives in conflict with some uncaring Lords, all of whom are possibly derived from the same society — don’t suppose you’re familiar with The Face Of Evil or State Of Decay? There are aspects of this place such as sprites that lean towards fantasy (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice much) while gardens full of robots somehow give rise to a machine with a mind of its own (too many references to mention, but Bulis’s A Device Of Death is in there), and in the royal court a young princess despairs at having to choose between two strangers as suitors. (How long have you got?!) That’s before we get into the weeds of what’s really going on here, about which I’ll be discrete and just say that several eras of Star Trek got there first.

Some of this is deliberate — and I don’t mean the occasional bits of lampshading. (“Frustrating and possibly anti-climactic, but there it is and we must make the best of it.” / “‘Doctor, isn’t this sort of thing happening twice on one small world a bit much?’ ‘It is not such a great coincidence as it may seem.’” Oh, mate. Yikes.) Dexel Dynes being reused from Bulis’s The Ultimate Treasure is a clear example of here-we-go-again, but he’s harmless enough and it’s a good idea really, since a shady journo probably would continue to follow bad guys in space, and consequently he’d keep getting in the Doctor’s way. The only problem is a) I’d forgotten about him entirely so it wasn’t much of a thrill to see him again, b) he doesn’t interact with the Sixth Doctor or Peri for most of it so they don’t need to remember him much either, and c) Dynes barely distinguishes himself as a character here or even really does anything — which perhaps helps to explain a).

There’s at least one plot point that’s deliberately old hat, about which, mixed feelings. The actual mechanics of this form perhaps the best (only?) surprise in the book, but baking that into a story that’s roughly 80% reused ingredients makes it a bit hollow that the author has successfully identified one hackneyed thing, as if such meta suspicion is usual in his books. (On the other hand, it’s a lot harder to spot that way.)

What about the new stuff, then? We’ve got a villain, Glavis Judd, supposed Protector of multiple planets but obviously in reality a wrong’un. He’s trying to break into Esselven, a very small planetoid with an unusual force shield. Bulis finds Judd pretty interesting, having him reminisce (for no apparent reason) about his back story in ways that recall Silver in Hope. Judd never gets much of a foot in the door though, as first of all it’s quite tricky to get down to that planet, second, hardly anyone down there knows about him anyway. Consequently the main plot of the novel feels, deliberately at least, like a sub-plot. (As for what secrets he’s trying to prise from Esselven, the whole reason for his quest, that ends up being a no-plot.)

It’s what’s on the planet that counts, provided you can stop rolling your eyes at all the familiar story beats. The big stuff admittedly doesn’t quite come off: Esselven is so small and in such an orbit that the days don’t visibly change, meaning the concept of “days” is more of a habit that’s been handed down, but only to the higher classes. That’s interesting! But then you have things like characters referencing winter — how can there be seasons here? And how do the plants survive in constant daylight? It feels like a rare Actually Original Idea (or original enough that it has no immediately obvious analogue) that didn’t quite get the development it needed.

The characters are better. I quite liked Green-8, the sentient robot palling around with the Doctor. (Who adorably fashions a robot disguise so they can sneak about as twinsies.) Green-8 spends most of the book making inroads to having a personality, which honestly isn’t as boring as it sounds. Also quite good, surprisingly: Princess Oralissa. She might have a very old hat predicament on her hands but her gradual suspicions about the world around her, awakening from a more or less fairytale framework to recognise something sci-fi instead, is one of the book’s stronger elements. I even found myself imagining (don’t laugh) a whole book about Oralissa that started as something trite and then spun off elsewhere. She and Green-8 are the ones you’ll care about by the end, if indeed that applies to any characters in your case.

The Scavengers are less enthralling. This is the plot point Peri gets lumbered with, first getting stuck in a work camp (yes I know we’ve done that before) and then escaping to find fellow worker Kel’s dreary hometown. The Scavengers are caveman-style monosyllabic (until, curiously, they’re not any more) and Peri quickly realises she could have just not bothered and stayed hidden in a building instead. On a personal level, there are numerous scenes of Kel either declaring his intentions for Peri or otherwise just copping a feel, which feels like a sorry default setting for an attractive companion from an abrasive era. (It didn’t leave me enamoured with Kel either.) Peri is at least better written here than in The Ultimate Treasure, but that still doesn’t transform her Scavenger scenes into something that needed to happen to progress the story. Bulis is clearly just keeping her busy.

The same is true of the Doctor, as he doesn’t do anything other than look for Peri and vaguely investigate Esselven until Page 180, and he doesn’t find out about Judd until it’s nearly over. It’s perhaps fair to say that the situation on Esselven is important enough on its own, but something’s got to give when you’re doing both, especially when Esselven is a lords vs peasants story but also an ancient mystery but also a potential robot uprising but also a [Star Trek thing] and a [twist ending thing]. Judd seems inconsequential after all that, which of course is what he deserves and then what he gets, which is sort of neat?

Hmm… wasn’t I saying something about Palace Of The Red Sun being good, actually? Here’s the thing: reviewing it is when all its flaws become more apparent and harder to ignore. Many of Bulis’s books work just well enough while you’re reading them, and I found that to be the case here. The characters are a mixed bag, but I found the two most significant ones likeable and interesting enough to care how those plot threads turned out. There are too many plot threads but a few of them paid off. (The collective sense of business also reaches a sort of critical mass that’s always moving, at least.) The Doctor and Peri don’t have a huge impact on events, but they join in with a certain sense of camaraderie by the end that I found quite winning. It all comes together nicely enough, with perhaps an awkward nod to the Doctor’s rather unilateral decisions at the very end.

I’m aware that I’m damning it with faint praise. Bulis might be my most damned-with-faint-praise author, this book possibly being the starkest example. Nevertheless, despite a host of flaws and are-we-sure-about-thats I found Palace Of The Red Sun pacey enough and fun enough to make it through 280 pages quickly and in a good mood. It’s jolly. Whatever else you can take away from it, that is simply not always a given when you pick up a Doctor Who book, and it might be Bulis’s legacy that he managed it more often than not.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #109 – Anachrophobia by Jonathan Morris

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#54

Anachrophobia

By Jonathan Morris

Likes a bit of time travel, does Jonathan Morris. His last book, Festival Of Death, was notable for its more-than-usual amount of temporal jiggery pokery: it had the Fourth Doctor and Romana reliving the same events at different points and also in the wrong order. Anachrophobia plays in a similar toybox, but there are some key differences between the two books.

First, the treatment of time travel. Anachrophobia is set on a world where time can be made to go too slow or too fast. It’s a weapon used by both sides in a war, and it’s used incrementally as the plot demands rather than shaping the book as a whole; we don’t spend the whole thing cleverly nipping back and forth. There’s also a difference in how the characters deal with time, as instead of the indomitable experts of Season 17 our heroes are a diminished Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji. They are seriously, rather than just whimsically on the back foot about all this which tweaks the dynamic further from Festival.

Second, and this is perhaps an even bigger one, Anachrophobia is not a comedy. Festival was somewhat complicated but also light-hearted, with the characters often seeming as bewildered as the reader. That helped considerably to pull me through its diagram-based time antics. Anachrophobia wants nothing to do with the fizzy wine and good mood of Season 17: it’s a base under siege story that leans into uncanny horror, and it’s a pretty miserable time for the regulars to boot. When the story gets into somewhat complicated time mechanics (as I think we all knew it would) it’s coming from a different place. This time it’s tense and it demands a lot from the Doctor, rather than just going “How is our cheeky chappie going to get out of this one?”

There’s nothing wrong with not going down the comedic route – good for Morris, trying something new on his second book. But some elements still lean comedic, such as the situation on the (unnamed) planet at war. It’s not so much a war really as a legal dispute, with the colonists having “leased” the planet from the Plutocratic Empire and now defaulting on their payments. That’s a pretty obvious basis for a Sun Makers-esque satire, and it’s a valid enough idea to pursue it without the ironic laughs, except without them you’re left with a conflict that’s not about anything meaningful. It’s just people doing awful things for money. Of course most wars are generally that when you peel back the distractions: the bottom line is always money, which is a valid enough observation. (Albeit not one that the book actually makes.) The problem here is that when you take away anything more than a base level of satire you’re left finger-wagging about the evils of capitalism, which makes much the same point at the end of a book as it does at the start. Killing people just because a spreadsheet told you to is, well, wrong, innit? No one here has a hope of mounting a compelling counter-argument to that, so we’re done here pretty much as soon as we start.

Anachrophobia has a similar problem with its monsters of the week. Don’t let the front cover fool you – there’s nothing abstract about the image of a man with a clock for a face. After crash landing the Doctor and co. make it through fast-then-slow time storms only to find a military base running time travel experiments, which naturally go wrong and promptly turn people into clock heads. (They are deliberately left unnamed for mystique purposes.) These are walking, somehow-still-talking people that no longer have souls but do have seemingly random time-pieces instead of the usual eyes, nose and mouth assortment. It’s a great image that would make for an intriguing New Who menace. They have special abilities too, such as reversing time by a couple of minutes to undo damage or secure an advantage. New Who loves monsters with rules.

The trouble is, well, that’s it. For great chunks of the book we’re just spamming the “scary clock people” button, which gets diminishing returns. So many scenes rely on the unbelievable shock value of a character… with… a clock… for a FACE! Which yes, creepy, but we’ve been there and done it now. There’s an entire village of them at one point, hammering us over and over with the idea that this image is simply killer enough all by itself. I was reminded of the zombies in Festival Of Death – one of its downsides, really, a lumbering monster that’s not all that interesting. At least this one has a better aesthetic, although that’s all it has after a while. (They don’t even do much to you. You’ll just also be a clock person.)

There’s an interesting character reason for the clocks (although it doesn’t explain, you know, the clocks) which loosely recalls Nightshade. An unknown force is taunting people with their past misdeeds and offering to put them right, Quantum Leap-style. Only the second they do it they will unwittingly “unwrite” their lives and leave a vacancy for a clock zombie. Not bad, and it gives you a terrific excuse to dredge up people’s back stories out of nowhere. The trouble here (there’s a lot of trouble in this one, isn’t there?) is that the characters aren’t interesting. They’ve got a pretty lousy society as a backdrop – no need to go over all that again, but it’s worth adding that the novel barely includes the colonists. (They at least have a reason to fight.) Individually they’re not much better. There’s a doctor, Lane, who has her moments and a very tragic past, but once you get clocked you cannot get unclocked, so that’s that. I forgot most of the rest of them, but Leader Bragg is the worst: an insecure guy who, at the drop of the hat, decides that the Doctor and his friends are actually spies. Oh, goodie. He couldn’t turn into a clock fast enough for me. (Morris should get points for making an early character, Oake, quite sympathetic before killing him on Page 7. It shows he means business. He then proceeds to not make anyone else sympathetic.)

The gimmick here seems like pretty promising stuff for the three regulars, and we do get whiffs of that. Fitz, poor duck, once again doesn’t amount to very much, although Morris reminds us that his memories are diminishing, which arguably gets him off the hook. (This has been in at least one other book so far – I forget which. Watch this space I guess.) Anji is very well realised, although she isn’t massively tempted by the “past misdeeds” virus: yes, there is a mention of Dave, but she genuinely seems to be over the worst of that, only wobbling because of her questionable choices in Hope. It’s Anji’s commitment to the Doctor, despite occasionally thinking harshly of his choices, that stands out here. She sticks by him and that feels hard-won after several books.

It’s a memorable one for the Doctor, who seems particularly scraggly in his post-Henrietta Street configuration. He falls ill, catches himself by surprise thinking he still has a respiratory bypass system and nearly dies a couple of times. Anji and Fitz more than once remark that he seems more vulnerable now. It lends the time stuff an element of danger that perhaps wouldn’t be there otherwise, and definitely wasn’t there in Festival Of Death. Anachrophobia treats the Doctor sufficiently nastily that suspension of disbelief allowed me to think, sheesh, he’s not getting out of this one without scars.

The memory stuff is perhaps a bit unfortunate since it has come along during a run of books where the Doctor does not remember his past, including the misdeeds. There’s still a surprisingly thrilling sequence where he remembers the last couple of books – although as it turns out those don’t rank among the Doctor’s greatest mistakes. The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street at least presents a clear What If, but considering the alternative would have been for him to die, I’m not sure it’s really all that tempting.

The best bit is probably the Doctor’s grand plan to stop the clock people, which involves time travel but not in the usual way, and not with the usual outcome. I could feel it knitting together so it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but somehow the punchline was still very satisfying. It’s like a little soupcon of Festival Of Death – surprising, really, that there’s so little of this sort of thing on a planet covered in time jiggery pokery, but since most of that is really just another word for “bomb” the ending doesn’t feel like repetition or over-doing it. That’s pretty good going for an author who has, if not spammed the “time travel is complicated” button, certainly tapped it a bit across two books.

There are good things here. I liked that ending; the clock people are pretty cool at first glance; the time storms present a few interesting challenges and some gruesome visuals. But the actual guts of Anachrophobia aren’t that interesting. This is standard base under siege stuff for the most part, with characters running away from lumbering monsters and/or boringly intransigent soldiers. Yeah, the monsters have a pretty decent gimmick, but you need a fundamentally interesting bunch of characters to sell that, and Anachrophobia traded those in for its war “satire”. By the time you reach the end there’s a bonus/nasty surprise, with one character turning out not to be who he appears, which ought to elevate the whole thing and set us up for next time. Perhaps that works for some readers. For me though, nah: I don’t really enjoy rubber mask bad guy reveals, and anyway, I thought we were trying to get away from massive continuity links between books? Why not let this one stand on its own? (It’s fine if not, I’m a Doctor Who fan for god’s sake, but if the editors really are fine with massive continuity links then why did they go to all that effort to erase the Doctor’s memory, and why are we keeping it that way?)

Clever ideas in small doses, not altogether linked, scattered over a pretty dusty framework. It’s a good thing this isn’t a comedy or I’d have made a joke about undoing things.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #108 – Drift by Simon A. Forward

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#50

Drift

By Simon A. Forward

A new author, again? At this rate I’ll have to replenish my confetti supplies. Because yes! Simon A. Forward is new here! Party hats! Well sort of new, anyway – he previously wrote a (very good) story in More Short Trips. Drift is his first Who novel.

As with his Short Trips submission, Drift features the Fourth Doctor and Leela. Forward has a great knack for their voices – Leela subtly placing “new” words in italics, for example – and he just generally knows what to do with them. Leela spends most of the story with Kristal, a Native American working with the military and making use of her latent psychic gifts. (If the fantastical element feels at all iffy to you as representation for a Native American, I won’t disagree – it’s one of those where I don’t feel qualified to say either way, it just made me go “hmm”.) Kristal is a rounded character besides that and their shared tribal ancestry makes for an interesting rapport. The Doctor meanwhile constantly bursts through any military bureaucracy or suspicion to get on with handling the crisis, with his charm and obvious capability tipping the balance every time. This feels right, and it saves us a bit of time. He also spends a good portion of the story with a troubled young girl, which is the sort of mix-and-match you didn’t see nearly enough – if at all! – in Classic Doctor Who. (Think about it: Tom Baker and youngsters, getting up to mischief. It’s so obviously going to work. I guess child actors weren’t anyone’s favourite to write for.)

Forward displays a strong authorial style, a mix of sudden horrific detail and an earthy inner voice to complain about stuff, which overall recalls Stephen King. See also the consistent American voice of the novel, which is set in New Hampshire; the dialogue and description feel genuinely of a place, with phrases like “out front of the store” and “Leave her go” tamping it down. (It’s certainly a far cry from the agonised dialects of Instruments Of Darkness.) Drift is very good at getting inside its characters’ heads, with the Doctor and Leela or otherwise. It believably differentiates Amber, a young girl with a troubled family, Carl, her alcoholic and almost estranged dad, and Makenzie, the town sheriff as well as her stepdad. The novel also has a poetic ear for prose, although it threatens to over-do it at times. “Cold perched in the trees. Talons of ice dug into white birches and the air had turned to crisp powder.” Good. “This place was empty like a recently vacated grave.” Great. “Today that cabin was only a shadow on the air, but the look in Makenzie’s eyes as they’d trekked back down his mountain was carved in bark” A little much maybe.

There’s a lot to like about Drift, an action-packed story with oodles of atmosphere. Where it struggles – and it struggles hard – is in how much it wants to pack into 280 pages. The core of Drift is an emotional story about Mak, Amber and her mother Martha, all trying to make sense of their family dynamic and (if necessary) reckon with a Thanksgiving visit from Carl. Good stuff. This is all set against the nightmare scenario of an unknowable ice monster attacking the town. Exciting. This has something to do with a local cult of alien-worshippers making contact with something otherworldly – which in turn draws a military crack team, White Shadow, led by Mak’s estranged brother Morgan. Okay. A couple of suspicious CIA agents turn up to investigate the alien, possibly for their own reasons, and on top of that, guess what! It’s a Doctor Who book! So you need to incorporate a bloke with a long scarf and his current chum as well. Sheesh.

Within that busy framework the novel is simply groaning with characters, and it goes on introducing them throughout its length. There always seems to be another member of White Shadow down the back of the sofa, and Forward is keen to give each of them their due, highlighting what it is that makes them different and underlining the camaraderie between the team-members. (This is a good thing because hey, it’s better than a bunch of thin characters, but cumulatively it’s too much.) There’s also a smattering of cult members, although most of them disappear before the story starts, and some miscellaneous folks – a shopkeeper, some hotel staff, people in cabins who cross paths with the action. There’s even a bit of unhelpful (and to be honest, easy to catch at the editing stage) alliteration that makes things harder to follow: I was tripping over Morgan, Marotta, Makenzie, Mitch, Amber and Martha Mailloux, Melody and Melvin Village. Red pen, guys.

On the plus side, Forward uses clear character dynamics to break them into groups. There’s the aforementioned Leela and Kristal pairing; White Shadow Lieutenant Joanna is kidnapped by cult members and forced to test her Hippocratic oath when one of them gets shot; the Doctor dances around the two CIA agents while figuring out their deal, as well as working alongside Amber and White Shadow; Mak and Martha are often at loggerheads, as are Mak and Morgan; and Carl has his own private drama that goes from a survival horror with coyotes to a tense hold-up when he realises he has no gifts for Amber. It’s a novel that gets progressively easier to read as you practice making sense of each group – but even then, some latter sections devoted to White Shadow soldiers like Derm and Pydych had me straining to tell them apart or remember where we last saw them. I occasionally needed a minute just to figure out if I was reading about cultists, cops or military guys – Forward can’t always be giving us their trains of thought. It’s an occasional plot point that characters disappear (I have yet to mention Mak’s partner Laurie, who blips thusly) and honestly what should be an outlet for horror was more of a relief. Phew! Another one down!

In short, Drift feels like a 500-600 page Stephen King-ish sci-fi horror novel that has been squashed into a BBC Book like too much luggage into a sporty little suitcase. If it makes any sense at all to differentiate the two, the bigger novel at work here is pretty good. Forward is a compelling writer and some of these characters work brilliantly, when given the spotlight for more than two minutes. In particular Amber’s issues, as she comes to empathise with the lonely ice creature, and Mak’s desire to become a dad culminate beautifully towards the end. But there simply isn’t space to make it all sing. I really liked the Leela and Kristal stuff, for instance, and it gets a good enough button on it at the end, but it’s obvious there isn’t much meat on it when the story is able to briskly move on from it. I found the Joanna thread compelling, but there isn’t much of a reason for us to hang around with those violent cultists, considering what’s in store for them. I might have cared about the Mak and Morgan thing, but Morgan barely registers as a separate person – I just pictured Mak running behind the camera and putting on an army hat.

There’s also some probably good stuff that’s conspicuously missing. What Happened To The Cultists feels like an obvious candidate for a creepy prologue, but most of that’s for the imagination only – presumably cut for the word-count. The entire concept of the ice creature (a disembodied force, which at least saves us from another character) isn’t really cemented until we’re over halfway through, leaving it as an entirely vague but apparently “alien” menace until then; characters are just trudging around hoping to figure out what’s going on for the most part. By the time the book hares towards its finale, the Doctor explaining what’s going on and what they’re going to do about it, I didn’t entirely follow it. But what can you do, I suppose, with this much matter in this rinky-dinky book format.

I’m in two minds about it. Drift is one of those books that took absolutely ages for me to read, what with the constant ping-ponging between different groups of characters – and even apart from that, the sheer amount of Stuff Going On threatened to turn to sludge at times. But Forward can write, for these lead characters in particular. He clearly has a novel’s worth of ideas in him, and then some. When a clear sense of drama is able to peek through all the stuff it’s very effective and can even be moving. It can be funny, too – see, the Doctor needing to avoid falling into a psychic trap by getting sozzled. (I was also fond of “It wouldn’t take long to dig the doors clear, at least; especially if Leela put her back into it.”)

Drift would perhaps be a better book if it let the Doctor and Leela land somewhere else and pulled the ripcord on its own small-town terror, giving all its denizens and monsters room to move. As a Doctor Who book it’s at least competent and quite explosive, and of a high standard really at a prose and dialogue level. It gives you an idea of what Simon A. Forward might be capable of.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #107 – Hope by Mark Clapham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#53

Hope

By Mark Clapham

It’s New Writer time — sort of. Mark Clapham had by this point co-written the frothy Beige Planet Mars, the lore-heavy The Taking Of Planet 5 and the ah-well-there’s-always-next-time Twilight Of The Gods. Hope is his first solo novel, for which no less applause, garlands, kazoo toots etc.

 

For his debut he’s opted for something a bit less eclectic than those earlier co-writes. Hope begins with the Doctor pushing the TARDIS too far to reach the outskirts of humanity’s existence among the stars, the planet Endpoint, which then knackers the ship for a while. After giving it a moment to cool down, the Doctor, Anji and Fitz are separated from it, which means they’ll have to spend the rest of the book getting it back. Oh, and they’ve also arrived at the scene of a murder, in a city that divides into a somewhat prosperous overcity and a less salubrious undercity. Er – not exactly teleporting the envelope into another dimension, is it?

 

But it’s not without promise. I’ve seen reviews that respond quite negatively to the city of Hope itself, but I rather liked it. The patchwork design, and placing it on stilts above a poison sea sets it apart from earlier efforts like Original Sin – it’s an intriguing mental image. The main issue is the lack of a population. I noticed four named people within city limits, two of whom are load-bearing to the plot. As for the other two: Powlin is the head of the local militia, keen to solve the rising murder epidemic. (“Militia” is a bit of a loaded term but we don’t interrogate whether that’s any worse than a police force – could just as easily call them “the police” or “the watch.”) He seems nice enough, but then the Doctor takes over the investigation for plot reasons and it’s pretty much good night from Powlin. Pazon is a local wheeler-dealer, and is perhaps not to be trusted. He seems like he could enliven a dull page, but outside of providing Fitz with a few bits he needs – off-screen, I believe? – he doesn’t hang around much either. As for the denizens in all the buildings? Pass, apart from odd murder victim.

 

This is a shame since Hope is really about the ultimate fate of humanity. It presents some academic arguments for what that’s going to look like, but in terms of actual people living their lives, not so much, which makes it all a bit surface-level. Boo. In the meantime, the meat of the novel can be quite enjoyable, as the Doctor is recruited to solve a series of random decapitations and Fitz investigates a puzzling cyborg brotherhood who for some reason hate the city’s partly-mechanised ruler. This is Silver: an incongruously charming cyborg who brutalises any form of opposition. He is the man who can get the TARDIS back from the poison sea, so the Doctor and co. pal up with him whilst sitting on any reservations they might have. Especially Anji, who soon enters into a deal with (what might possibly be) the devil.

 

Silver’s moral ups and downs clearly fascinate Clapham, who at one point delves into the character’s back story a chunk at a time, creatively pairing this with Anji’s failed attempts to ascertain just that. He was a sickly boy who received some sort of alien transfusion, then excelled in the military, then finally found himself in the future where it made sense to put down roots and take charge. He rules Hope (and more or less Endpoint as a whole) to the extent that he barely bothers lying to people – although that observation is made by someone he’s successfully lied to so um, yeah, he lies. There are skeletons in his closet but the book spends so much time actually with Silver that these seem to shrink in importance. The secret of the anti-Silver brotherhood, and what nasty things can be found lurking in Hope’s sewers are relegated to half-hearted B-plots that barely move Fitz to investigate them. (If you’re wondering why a city suspended above an ocean has a sewer, um… sorry, my phone’s ringing.)

 

Probably the best Silver stuff, apart from the Anji plot (more on that soon) is his scenes with his female lieutenant, Miraso. She’s the other “new character that definitely needs to be here,” and she has a degree of brilliance while also being annoyingly blind to her master’s failings. She holds her own well as a character but her extra-curricular activities aren’t given nearly enough room to breathe. (Speaking of which, a scene where Fitz recognises a mysterious female face is a bit too easy to anticipate as being Miraso, since she is one of the vanishingly small number of other people, let alone women in the book.)

 

There’s something almost comical about Silver being this hulking, terrifying figure – I pictured Cain from Robocop 2 – who is outwardly benevolent but maybe, just maybe, has a dark side? This is a guy who mashes a protester to death in one of his first scenes: he looks like something that would disagree firmly with Sylvester Stallone. Evil, huh? You don’t say. It’s somewhat interesting to suggest that he’s not that bad, which the novel ostensibly does when it introduces a second “pureblood” set of humans who haven’t intermixed with other species. (But have, ickily, intermixed within family lines.) These guys are killing Endpointers for their tough genetic material and view them only as cattle. The Doctor points out that the Endpointers are the real human descendants, or the ones worth a damn, and by extension Silver might not be so bad after all: he’s a random hodgepodge but he’s keeping the city in order, isn’t he? To loop back after that to, yeah he is quite bad actually – witlessly using the same logic against him, “It’s not biology that makes us who we are” – simply tells us to judge a big horrible monster by appearances after all. To which, fine – have Doctor Who, will monster – but why the hell did we invest so much time in him, then?

 

The back end of the book is a bit of a mad scramble as Hope either reaches its crescendo or suddenly opens a box marked “bonus ideas” – place your bets. The “bad” humans are found to possess terraforming pods which they are (I’m not joking) too stupid to realise would have come in handy for making Endpoint liveable. After a pause to lampshade that this is actually a bit like The Year Of Intelligent Tigers we get an incredibly fast transformation for the planet (with only 80 pages to go) and the apparent resolution of the plot apart from the Anji stuff. (I am getting to it.) I wondered what was left for us to do here – as does Fitz, somewhat clunkily and again with the lampshade: “It just all seemed too easy.” The answer to all this is a sudden swerve into Bond villainy, perhaps even ranting Davros territory for Silver. Bye bye, any possibility of a Sabbath-esque “pros and cons” bad guy. (I’m guessing there was at least a whiff of Sabbath influence here. Clapham probably read the book at least, what with the generous references to the Doctor’s current status.)

 

It’s a pretty miserable denouement, with Silver hurriedly creating a genetically engineered race of supermen called Silverati (“Silver calls them Silverati, presumably to indicate they follow after him,” thanks Anji, invaluable stuff there) and deciding to invade time and space. It’s not as if Hope had been teeming with moral ambiguity before that – there were some shades of grey e.g. in the sewers – but after the potentially promising debate between two very different sets of “humans” this finale is about as standard as it gets. When Silver inevitably fails he all but shakes his fist to say “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!”

 

It’s tempting to say “well what did you expect,” but Hope really isn’t that bad for the most part. It’s at least interesting that (spoiler) Silver has been running his own anti-Silver movement in the city just to increase his control over it, although those guys only appear in a couple of scenes, so never mind. There’s potential in the debate about which set of humans is the “right” one, although you’d be hard pressed not to agree with the Doctor’s initial assessment, but we don’t hear much from the “bad” ones after Silver puts them in their place, so ah well. Probably the most promising and interesting thing here is – you can exhale now, Dave fans – the Anji stuff.

 

Dave, Dave, Dave. Remember him? Who among us doesn’t. Set up as a fairly unimpressive no-need-to-stay-on-Earth boyfriend for Anji in Escape Velocity, and killed off in the same book, he warranted a bit of psycho-analysis from Anji in the following book, EarthWorld. It was very good stuff. But they wouldn’t let it lie: book after book has acknowledged Anji’s tortured feelings for poor, dead Dave, her failure to save him, the fact that he did not (despite his sci-fi obsession) get to travel in time and space. Most of this strikes me as quite bad planning from the EDAs. Dave wasn’t very promising in the first place and EarthWorld kind of put paid to Anji’s feelings about him already, but hey, it can be an arc for her anyway! I’m happy to accept that people can “get over” things and then still obsess over them, so whatever really on that score, but those inauspicious beginnings have simply made it a bit silly to keep dredging up a bloke that was essentially just Fitz if you swapped the leather coat for an anorak, who Anji wasn’t that keen on to begin with.

 

Hope does something with it, at least. When Anji meets Silver she realises here is someone who could bring Dave back to life! Or clone him, at least, using one of his hairs she’s been keeping in the TARDIS. (It would have been nice if that had cropped up a bit more in the interim.) She’s so moved by this idea that she even betrays the Doctor, taking scans of the TARDIS interior to feed back to Silver for future take-over-ze-universe use. It’s all worth it to undo the death of a man she even now describes as: “Maybe not the love of her life — she had been far too young, and way too cynical to think it would last forever, and had been on the verge of leaving him at the time of his death.”

 

Like I said, whatever, people don’t always make sense. At least this is grounds for some interesting character development. Or so you’d think, as the resurrection of Dave comes very late in the book – within that last 80 page spurt, amid all the shooty fighty business – leaving us with very little time to ponder on it. Our last chance to make something of it is the confrontation between the Doctor and Anji, but that’s sadly a damp squib: he’s mad at first, but then she explains that Dave is dead and that’s very sad actually and the Doctor does time stuff too, doesn’t he, and that’s somehow… enough? He’s even supportive! “I should have realised you had good reasons … I would probably have done much the same in your position.” To which, sorry, what a crock. This isn’t Dave. This is a simulacrum that does not remember Dave’s existence. Dave is still dead, this is a random person Anji immediately agrees to imperil for the greater good, then promptly leaves to continue his existence on a back-end-of-the-universe planet with who knows what prospects. It’s at least debateable whether Anji has “resurrected” or “saved” anyone here – but they don’t have the debate, let alone interrogate the idea that Anji handing over the interstellar car keys to a final boss in a video game might be a bad omen. (The Twelfth Doctor forgave Clara for that sort of thing, I suppose.)

 

Ah well: once that’s all over and done with Anji believes she is “leaving the emotional baggage of that time behind her,” so at least we’re in with a chance of laying Dave (Daaaaaave!) finally to rest. Unless they decide to just keep going on about him regardless, of course.

 

The character writing isn’t great in Hope. Some of that is down to the frustrating lack of purpose we see in Silver and Anji, but occasionally it’s just not very good. The Doctor oscillates between being genuinely bristly and vulnerable following The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, e.g. insisting they abandon these people and get out of here or casually asking Fitz to risk his life for an investigation, and just being a bit dull, spouting flat jargon like “The atmosphere out there seems to have sufficient oxygen levels for your purposes… and quite a few other things, by the looks of it.” The novel is structured in a way that favours Silver, which means the Doctor comes across as a bit of a plonker for not spotting any red flags. But he’s sometimes not supported by prose that has a certain Nervous Nellie quality of underlining things that didn’t need it: “‘I wonder what happened to all the people,’ mused Fitz. ‘Evolved into these ones, I should think,’ said the Doctor, gently mocking what he clearly saw as an outmoded, human-centric view of history.”

 

It’s not just him, either, and it’s not just unnecessary underlinings. Sometimes it’s sheer redundancy. “‘I have sulph-shakes and caffy for those early morning cravings, and for the health-conscious, simple full or semi.’ ‘Skimmed?’ asked Anji, clearly thinking that Pazon was referring to milk.” / “‘What’s with the ceiling?’ Fitz asked, never too afraid to speak his mind.” / “She could feel the weight of the data-packed scanning unit in her pocket. That weight was both literal and metaphorical, as the strain it exerted on her was mainly due to the nature of what she was about to hand over.” / “She rubbed her head, calling for whoever was outside to come in. She was expecting Silver. Instead, it was the Doctor’s head that appeared around the door” followed on the same page by “Anji had been expecting Silver, and the Doctor had arrived instead.” Snip snip, editors.

 

It’s not very polished and its focus is a bit wonky. Yes, Silver is interesting, but maybe the rest of Hope’s citizens could also get a look in, and maybe don’t do Silver dirty at the end. There’s the skeleton of a pivotal story for Anji here (and don’t forget Dave! Don’t EVER forget Dave) but it’s not quite where it needs to be, since it proceeds from the idea that what she’s doing is fundamentally fine and you’d all do the same thing in lieu of actually moving on – which might have been the stronger story. I ended up imagining a version of Hope that brought in the Dave dilemma earlier, or perhaps even changed it. (Have Dave brought back without Anji’s consent, maybe? How would she deal with a second chance?) You could have the “terraforming” plot at the halfway point, and then properly spend time interrogating Silver as a bad guy vs the (somewhat) nicer guy he seemed to be before. But that would need to be a much longer book, and you’d still have to add the occasional non-Silver character for Hope and Endpoint to really mean something to readers.

 

I found Hope readable and well-paced in spite of my complaints. It ticks along, it’s no car crash; it has a familiar shape and it works well enough within that. It’s quite creative at points, playing with tenses to add mood. I liked the Silver back story bits. But it leaves a bad taste at the end, which inevitably made me wonder if much else about it actually worked.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #106 – Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#49

Relative Dementias

By Mark Michalowski

Bunting! Sparklers! Those unrolling party things that honk! BBC Books has a new author for us. And he’s good.

I know nothing about Mark Michalowski other than the fact that I can’t seem to retain his full name. (I keep having to check.) We can surmise that he likes Doctor Who since he, y’know, wrote one. Relative Dementias has enough flavour to tell us that he knows it rather well, too, or otherwise that he excels at doing his homework. This isn’t a mark of quality by itself of course — most of the people who’ve read this book ought to stand a good chance in a Doctor Who pub quiz. But writing something that feels of a piece with the TV show without feeling like you’re coasting is no mean feat.

It gets off to an exciting start with a very singular teaser, using second person dialogue to set up something iffy going on at Graystairs, a Scottish Alzheimer’s clinic. (It feels a bit too easy to say that a vaguely modern thing feels more like New Who than Classic, but damn it, this one does.) We then dive straight into a bit of world-building, which you don’t often see in Past Doctor books.

The Doctor is asked for help by an old friend from UNIT, Dr Joyce Brunner, whose mother is at Graystairs. She does this via a secret PO Box which is monitored by another old/new friend, Countess Gallowglass: a fabulous grand old lady who lives with her cat in a hidden building. (I could immediately see her being an asset to the series, but alas, this is probably a one-and-done.) What an unusual instinct, using the continuity of the Doctor’s UNIT days but not having it be about Liz Shaw, or Mike Yates. And then throwing in brand new lore to boot! It felt like a proper expansion of the series, all tucked away in the range most people consider a chocolate box. Lush.

The story is on potentially shaky ground with Alzheimer’s, a subject you can imagine being done badly — especially with the potential insensitivity of a sci-fi explanation. Michalowski handles it appropriately, give or take some evil aliens on the periphery. The book doesn’t dwell much on the disease itself or its effect on families, but there are thoughtful moments as the residents rely on each other, and some fearlessly dark ones, such as Joyce’s view of her mother following a heart attack: “A stranger that more and more frequently, had reminded Joyce of what she’d wished for that day.” There is a sci-fi plot of course, as doctors somehow reverse the symptoms of the disease — for a sinister purpose, no doubt — but the book still makes time for Joyce to come back and confront what her mother is going through, the bad and the good. I wish there had been room to explore this more from the residents’ or the families’ point of view — more of a Flowers For Algernon thing, or even a Thursday Murder Club (with spaceships). But what we get feels quite decent.

Also very solid: the regulars. The Seventh Doctor and Ace are among the most written-about TARDIS teams, largely thanks to Virgin, so it might be hard to get them wrong. Even with that in mind, Relative Dementias really sells the duo. Granted, it feels like an earlier time in their relationship than the New Adventures or even most of their BBC Books — despite the Doctor’s Season 26 jacket Ace is a little more gung-ho here than she was in Fenric or Ghost Light. She is given reasons to be mistrustful of him in the novel, rather than carrying them over from other media, but they never really threaten to break their relationship. (Especially since Michalowski also gives Ace reasons to sympathise with the Doctor’s machinations.) Ace’s Leela-esque protectiveness is on full display, as is (charmingly) her sense of fun. I loved the bit at Graystairs when she tries to ruin an unpleasant person’s day: “Ducking back to the lounge, [Ace] opened her mouth to call ‘bingo’ as loudly as she could — only to find it smothered by the Doctor’s hand as he dragged her away. ‘Spoilsport,’ she muttered.”

There’s a surprisingly level playing field in this one between the Doctor and Ace and the villains of the piece. The book takes a while to really get into the action, the Doctor spending about a quarter of it mostly just getting something to eat — it feels, implicitly, like An Easy One. When we finally identify the baddies they’re not exactly the galaxy’s most wanted, feeling more than usually like just some (alien) people caught on the back foot. To an extent the Doctor and Ace have earned this sort of indomitable feeling. Michalowski uses it to set them up for a fall, however, when the Doctor’s relative (ahem) overconfidence puts him in the crosshairs of a certain kind of degenerative mental illness. All of a sudden, the less than accomplished villains are looking rather more threatening. Nice work.

This perhaps ought to be the selling point of the novel, if that doesn’t sound too glib; the Doctor losing his mind. (The blurb seems to think so.) I think Relative Dementias largely sleeps on it, however, pushing the Doctor lower down in the mix for a bit but never quite leaving us in doubt that he’ll recover. (Yes, I know that’s always a given, but still: novels gotta suspend disbelief.) It’s a good excuse to give more action to Ace, and it seemingly sets up a mystery about his past, although I might have misread that bit. If I didn’t then it’s hard to believe that anyone else is going to pick it up.

I haven’t said much about the plot, perhaps because I’d end up spoiling it. Relative Dementias keeps a lot of plates spinning and at times requires a bit of thought to piece it all together. One of its mysteries is perhaps not as mysterious as Michalowski would like to think, but I still enjoyed finding out what was going on there and following it through. There’s a decent number of reveals to keep things going afterwards. There are times though when it threatens to get over-ambitious, particularly with (don’t panic) a writing style that favours short sections and scene changes. Combined with some unusually hot weather, this slowed down my reading somewhat, but I don’t think it’s really a massive hindrance. Michalowski keeps his focus on the same few scenes at a time.

There’s a mild feeling of over-ambition in the characters as well as the structure. There are perhaps too many of them to really give everyone their due, with a number of Graystairs residents threatening to blend into the furniture, a couple of young lads on a boat fighting for pages, and even Joyce ending up as second fiddle to her son — him being a walking example of lore-building, there to set up the interesting but perhaps extraneous idea that life in UNIT has more cons than pros. It’s all good stuff, honestly, and it’s grist to the mill once it’s time for Ace to feel less than terrific about the Doctor’s actions. But in amongst a complex plot it becomes noticeably just another ingredient.

“Slightly too ambitious” is a nice problem to have, ultimately. Relative Dementias is my sort of speed for Doctor Who. The plot isn’t a galaxy-botherer, but there’s enough of it to make it spicy. Granted, the characters are a little over-crowded, but everyone’s got something to them. It engages with the TV series, but more with a “Yes, and” than a “What’s your favourite episode,” which tends to be the way. It’s a good example of the Past Doctor Adventures being fine to pick up and read without any context, only to then go a bit further than your expectations.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #105 – Mad Dogs And Englishmen by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#52

Mad Dogs And Englishmen

By Paul Magrs

If I had a nickel for every time BBC Books followed a Heavy And Important Lawrence Miles book with something frothy by Paul Magrs, I would have two nickels. And so on. But whereas The Blue Angel had the burden of sending a new TARDIS team on their maiden voyage – and more or less ducked it, but never mind – Mad Dogs And Englishmen finds literary Doctor Who in a more stable place. We already know these characters. Yes, very big things happened to them in the last book, but the Doctor, Fitz and Anji all seemed okay with that in the end, thus you can dive into Magrs’s latest without much concern for continuity. This is good news as he is, as always, in the mood for a lark.

 

Mad Dogs And Englishmen continues Magrs’s fascination with fantasy. His is a Doctor Who that incorporates ideas more fluidly: it’s altogether less bothered about the explanations or what’s going to end up on TARDIS Wiki, which fits nicely with the more magical bent of the series in early 2002. Nevertheless, we get a more controlled sort of chaos from Magrs than we did in The Blue Angel, or even Verdigris. Mad Dogs actually wraps up (most of) its loose ends, which is doubly satisfying where the book takes so many big, gleeful swings.

 

As the front cover makes very clear – possibly even when viewed from orbit – this one concerns poodles with hands. These are the denizens of dogworld, a mostly civilised place where humans are the pets, if seen at all. The bloody history of their royal family is having an impact on Earth – specifically on the literary endeavours of one Reg Tyler, whose book The True History Of Planets has suddenly shifted from a Lord Of The Rings-ian tome about fantasy archetypes to a revolutionary history of dogworld. The Doctor clocks this and sets off to investigate the resulting ripples in history, and finds a load more while he’s at it, including literary characters come to life, movie props seemingly self-animated and a strange woman with a time travelling bus. (Is that a spoiler? Could it possibly be a spoiler?)

 

Magrs’s fourth Who novel is at an unusual crossroads between being just exactly what you’d expect from him, and something completely barking. (Ahem.) The prose is deliciously silly at all times, refusing to defer to the kind of reverential seriousness that tends to be a fan’s initial understanding of the show. Describing Tyler, the famous writer: “He was, in short, a brilliant, inventive person, damaged by war and destined to write a biggie.” Describing his work: “Had someone tampered with the final result? Had someone been secretly buggering him about?” Describing some fancy dogs: “They were beribboned and titivated.” Describing said dogs again, but more from their point of view: “Enid was back then, carrying a tea tray. She had brought the dog a bone. She presented it to him as if he ought to be pleased. The chief archivist of the dogstation stared at the grisly remnant, appalled.” Envisaging dogworld: essentially Whitby, with more poodles. And here’s a climactic scene where a character faces certain death from a horde of movie props: “‘Oh,’ said Fuchas, Oscar nominee. ‘Shittitty doo dah.’”

 

Mad Dogs in short has that peculiar rhythm that marks out Magrs from other Who writers – many of whom, to be fair, also have their own strange rhythms – only for once it’s tied to a fairly tight plot as well. It’s even neatly structured, with the Doctor, Anji and Fitz each investigating a different timezone, each getting their own chapter until back around we go. I’ve had my ups and downs with his novels in the past (there is no accounting for taste after all) but I bounced through this one.

 

To describe it in detail would essentially mean listing the jokes. Personal highlights include a dog speaking at an inopportune moment (this one happens a few times and it still works) and Nöel Coward organising a human shield around a favourite lounge singer so they can evade assassination in a Las Vegas hotel. (I’m sure some readers made note of the bit where our heroes are all stripped naked and forced to wear dog leashes. No judgement, folks.) However, Mad Dogs also does a surprising amount of due diligence on the character front. Anji has a surprisingly fun time, while squeezing in her obligatory reminiscence about Dave and pondering her current existence in the TARDIS, coming off mostly favourable re the latter. (She calls it “home.”) Magrs/Anji then anticipate what would have been my complaint about the TARDIS somehow managing to land where it needs to, “when it was something [the Doctor] apparently thought important,” but not in the matter of taking her home. (Magrs defers the actual answer to this since Anji lets it lie. We’ll see how other books do. I thought in the interim that Anji not mentioning it showed growth.)

 

Fitz is a natural fit for Magrs’s camp humour – he’s the sort of character you want to throw into the thick of it, and sure enough he gets lumbered with Flossie, an adorable cook from a space hotel who immediately takes to time and space travel, and Brenda Soobie, a lounge singer with a few secrets. Fitz as usual gets into awful messes and just tries to cadge a few cigarettes while he’s at it; Magrs smartly observes that he seems to get the rough end of the deal every time, which perhaps explains why he’s rarely that bothered about any of it.

 

The Doctor is a bit more of an anomaly. Magrs tends to write the swoon-worthy McGann incarnation more unpredictably than other authors anyway. He has somewhat earthier moods in this one than you might expect, such as his sang-froid about potentially crushing an insect-sized man to death with an improper TARDIS landing, and his ease with his fists. Coward observes: “You’re using these strong-arm tactics rather a lot these days”, to which the Doctor says “Yes, I’m not sure what that’s about.” Given Magrs’s command of continuity when the occasion calls for it, I think this safely ties in with the Doctor’s post-amnesia woes, though not so much with the whole “one heart/man of Earth” thing from The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street. A conversation about belonging goes: “‘This isn’t your world.’ ‘No, you’re right. It isn’t’” – hardly the conclusion from the last book. (Although he then says that 20th century Earth is like his own “back yard”.) Hey, it’s a lot of balls to keep up in the air, okay?

 

Speaking of which: Mad Dogs, as aforementioned, does a good job with its plot threads, but a few seemingly still escape. It is just about clear how figures such as Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger can be walking about in 1942. (A certain someone has used their magic pinking shears to wreak havoc on the timelines/reality itself. Is said havoc reversed afterwards? Um.) It is less clear, to thick old me anyway, how the crisis with Tyler’s book was actually averted – although it’s clear enough why the movie ends up not happening. And it’s left seemingly to the will of the gods why a lot of movie props are suddenly marching about and menacing people. As I’m sure Dave Stone would appreciate, it’s pretty much just setup for a joke anyway.

 

I get the impression that Magrs wanted to leave a few things hanging; it would be a bore, perhaps, to explain absolutely everything. That’s fine as long as you’re having a good time – and Mad Dogs accomplishes this admirably, with jokes that run the gamut from silly to bawdy to deliberately and painfully obvious. It’s quite sweet in amongst all of that, too; another Magrs book that revels in its chosen style and identity, and for once I felt like I was on board. Admittedly now that it’s over I find that chunks of it are drifting away, but perhaps that’s to be expected after a meal that is – in the nicest sense, and like many good comic novels – all pudding and no dinner.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #104 – Instruments Of Darkness by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#48

Instruments of Darkness

By Gary Russell

Well, better late than never. Gary Russell’s Instruments Of Darkness* was originally scheduled to appear seven months earlier and was replaced at short notice by The Shadow In The Glass. I don’t know what kept him, though my first guess would be his responsibilities at Big Finish.

And wouldn’t you know it: in a move that will delight enjoyers of shared media, Instruments Of Darkness is the first BBC Book to feature a Big Finish original character! Evelyn Smythe, come on down. (While we’re at it, this one also contains explicit links to the Virgin books, thus linking all three continuities. I’m not made of stone — that’s just plain delightful.)

If this already sounds like yet another trip on  the Gary Russell continuity-go-round, well, yes it is. But at least he’s mainly focused on his own ideas this time. This isn’t a brand new novel so much as the third act in his “C19 trilogy,” concerning a shadier-than-UNIT group who make questionable use of alien tech. (Russell T Davies must have been taking notes.) By this point C19 are no more, but some of the characters from The Scales Of Injustice and a few from Business Unusual reoccur here. All of them have loose ends to tie up.

To be clear: keeping the continuity in the family like this isn’t automatically better than going the fanwank route. In much the same way that books by Craig Hinton might only be comprehensible to those that know The Time Monster back to front, this one relies heavily on your having read (and remembered) Business Unusual. Let’s be honest, that book was a while ago. Russell spends a good amount of time recapping events, so you’re unlikely to be completely lost if you’re new here, but all the same it might have been better if a sequel like this had come out a little closer to the last instalment. (And it’s me saying this — I’m reading these at a rate of knots compared to how they were originally released. Business Unusual was four and a bit years ago in publishing time.) Frankly you shouldn’t need to spend that much time recapping.

Memory warnings aside, it’s kinda cool that he wants to dive back in and explore these characters further — and potentially quite rewarding, if you already happen to have Scales and Business on your bookshelves. What he comes up with is quite interesting, too. The Irish twins (a pair of augmented assassins who can’t die by conventional means) have recanted their evil ways and are looking for the Doctor, and hopefully some understanding as well. Trey, Mel’s friend and also a powerful psychic, is still searching for Joe, his lost love who isn’t really dead. And there’s that lurking question: is C19 really gone? Could there be something else now — something worse?

A recurring theme in Russell’s trilogy (which ought to encompass Who Killed Kennedy as well) is the consequences of Doctor Who stories — the people you wouldn’t necessarily think about and how they were affected. That’s a smart use of continuity (if, indeed, you must use it) and Instruments Of Darkness touches on that again, first by following those earlier characters to their next chapter, then by introducing more collateral damage. We meet retired Vice-Marshal Dickinson who suddenly finds out that his son, supposedly killed in action with UNIT, is alive. Will he find him? There’s an amnesiac villain with ties to the Doctor, as well as a grudge, but he doesn’t know all the facts. Who is he, and what happened to him? There’s Mel, getting back to Earth several years after she left — will she contact her family, and what will she say? And then there’s Evelyn, a walking consequence of the Doctor’s past in more ways than one. In case you missed it after all that, the Doctor helpfully makes it clear that this subject is on his mind: “What of the people I leave behind? As the years have gone by, as experiences have piled upon experiences, I’m left caring more, worrying more.”

Long story short, there’s potential here for a good, meditative book on the trauma of the past, of being left behind, finally putting a button on those ideas after three books. And long story even shorter: Instruments Of Darkness is not that book. Sadly it’s a case of all setup and no payoff.

The most obvious problem here is that there’s too much going on, and it’s not all marching in lockstep. In the main you have the ghost of C19, aka the Magnate, aka the Network. (I think…? these are different things?) Aka a bunch of shifty people in France who pretend to control the world, but actually have much murkier goals. (Which are worse than controlling the world, somehow?) This organisation contains a group of paranormally gifted people who, rather improbably, spend most of the novel just standing in a room. (Andrew Cartmel’s psi-powers arc it ain’t — they barely feature. Nevertheless Russell named the book in reference to these pseudo-X-Men characters.) More pressingly they have John Doe, their boss with amnesia, along with his duo of lady assassins (yes we‘re getting another gruesome twosome ala the Irish twins) and Therése Gavalle, a reluctant new recruit helping to bolster their super-powered ranks whilst puzzling over a gap in her own memory. There are also assorted other staff members whom we’re probably supposed to be able identify due to their memorably unpleasant fates later on, but reader, I couldn’t.

Anyway, this merry band are up to something that context tells us must have something to do with the opening chapter, which quickly jumps through different time periods and cultures. (Memorably featuring some genuinely awful non-British dialects.) A spooky force is intervening in women’s lives through the ages, predominantly to save them from sexual assault or murder (lovely) but also to see if they are Ini-Ma… a concept you’ll be left to puzzle over for most of the book as we bin that off and everyone worries about other stuff instead. The Magnate don’t immediately seem interested, preferring to fuss over super-beings and murders. Nor do the Doctor and Mel (and Evelyn) as they’re busy tracking down the Irish twins. And nor are the friggin’ Irish twins, who are themselves loosely working for the Magnate/the Network but also not because they don’t do that sort of thing any more, but they still are anyway, so…? Yeah I don’t know guys.

For a book that evidently suffered some delays, and so presumably had extra time, it’s not very coherent. Characters’ loyalties are confusing and the book spends so long not getting into the whole Ini-Ma thing that the Doctor (and the reader) has to hear great chunks of exposition about it towards the end instead, as if it was a bonus idea grafted on later. Only at that point is there a sudden barreling rush to make this apparently universe-bothering threat matter, and it doesn’t convince, partly because Russell writes his godlike beings with the same irritating insouciance as everyone else. (“Oh do belt up, Time Lord.” Terrifying.) Climactic action scenes then happen in frenzied blurs, with Mexican stand-offs that involve too many people to keep track of, all moved along by Russell’s signature casual blasts of violence that suddenly make things unappealingly nasty — also, where possible, hurriedly binning off characters so you feel like it was a mistake to wait around for them. It generally gets worse as it goes along, particularly with proofreading errors, which suggest this thing still wasn’t ready when they finally put it out — and perhaps that the ending was written at a sprint. “It occurred to Mel that Evelyn’s faith might have been displaced.” (Do you mean misplaced?) “It’s is already New Year’s Eve.” (It’s is?) “Hmmm… what about those people at the network/“ (Question mark?) “He took A deep breath and then bellowed once more.” (Random capital A?)

All of that’s just the small stuff and plot stuff. The important bits — the ones I think are important anyway, highlighted above — are character stuff. Russell’s not that interested in his world-ending threat so why be upset if that’s a bit messy? Trouble is, the character stuff isn’t very strong either. Take the Irish twins: the concept that they’re effectively do-gooders now, helping out around a village, caring for similar C19 cast-offs and building a support group among the villagers, is full of possibility. They finally meet the Doctor but there isn’t time to win him over very meaningfully — the plot’s going “Mush! Mush!” by that point — so they just explain what’s up, the finale is enacted and then Russell brusquely gets rid of them. Shame.

Better is Trey’s story, which tangles up with the Twins and latterly with Joe, who’s with them. But Russell isn’t here to tell a great love story, leaning into tragedy instead. Okay, could work, tragedy is entirely worthwhile as a story choice — but the truth about Trey and Joe, or more accurately Joe and Trey, is given to us in a throwaway final paragraph, which doesn’t so much recontextualise their scenes and actions together as simply confuse them. I audibly “Huh?”’d.

There’s that retired Vice-Marshal, who has some degree of pathos in his background and retirement home scenes, then reclaims a bit of dignity by throwing off his pursuers and searching for his son — successfully! But he ends up barely speaking to him, usefully holds a door shut for a bit and is then bleakly chucked out of the story, along with his son. Killing characters isn’t automatically a bad thing, I’m not saying that’s an invalid choice, but do it often enough and it begins to feel like these things just aren’t paying off. See also Therése Gavalle, whose allegiance shifts for plot reasons but who then starts acting like a one dimensional murder-crazy bad guy for seemingly no reason. (Don’t worry, she — altogether now! — gets dumped real quick.)

And then of course there’s John Doe. I had — stupidly, entirely my own fault, when will I learn etc — spoiled this for myself shortly before reading it. The truth is revealed five pages before the end (so I dunno, reference guides, maybe it’s not mandatory that you advertise it) and then we only get the character’s first name, and incredibly the character isn’t around for the pay-off. They just don’t finish their arc. There’s no reunion with the Doctor, no reckoning, just a sad little “what a pity” moment whilst also taking a moment to dig the boot into a character no one, including the Doctor, liked. This doesn’t champion Russell’s theme of people left behind and the Doctor’s collateral damage — not when it sounds pretty squarely like it was the guy’s own fault he was in this state, which alarmingly suggests that he was just a conveniently unpopular target for a womp-womp twist. Think, Scrappy Doo in the 2002 Scooby Doo movie. What, I’m getting tired of saying, a waste. (Although to be fair the Scrappy Doo thing made me laugh.)

Lastly we have Evelyn. (I’m skipping Mel. She is politely warned off of phoning home because unbeknownst to her future-Mel is home already, so it’s simpler if she doesn’t engage. Conveniently enough.) Yes, it is unequivocally a delight to have Evelyn here. If you haven’t heard her Big Finish stories you will get some idea of what she offers: a more grown up sensibility, a feisty cantankerousness, and a sort of mellowing effect on the Doctor. (Not so much the latter though given Russell’s propensity for “everyone’s awfully snippy today” dialogue.) I like her in this. I like her scenes with Mel, although their character development predictably comes along in great heavy blobs rather than being organically threaded through the story — we always stop to pontificate on it.

The problem is the bizarre device used to get her here. The story is set at the end of 1993: huge, albeit unclear importance is placed on the New Year celebrations. Evelyn, as we know her, is from 2000. To get around that, we learn that she eventually tired of TARDIS life (this was published during her BF run, so odd choice already) and the Doctor dropped her off, but in 1988, without any means to get by, just so she could keep an eye out for the Irish twins should he happen along and wish to find them. I mean? Isn’t that essentially punishment? Evelyn is out of time and off the grid for an unknown number of years and can’t meet her loved ones. Yet this is somehow cloaked in the Doctor’s concern for people he’s left behind, which is a bit rich. It’s a bizarre bit of stroppy mistreatment for a character at that point still ongoing in Big Finish, and it’s downright bleak to say this lady of advancing years has six of them to look forward to alone, just because the Doctor can’t find a 1988 equivalent of a Google alert. For me it made the whole Doctor-and-Evelyn house of cards wobble unnecessarily. I was not a fan. (To be fair some of the blame is placed on the TARDIS for aggressively taking his side in an argument, but come on, they all knew the deal when the time came to leave her there.)

I’m not convinced that Instruments Of Darkness says anything about Russell’s themes that wasn’t already implicit in the earlier books. There’s no added guilt for the Doctor or any representative of UNIT (none are present) and there’s no notable catharsis for anyone affected by him — even though in Evelyn’s case we’re adding new grudges. The book at least has some new ideas (the Ini-Ma thing) but those don’t feed into said themes, and when it’s time for a dramatic conclusion we have to pull important information hurriedly out of our proverbial nether place because there wasn’t space to set it up, so the Doctor’s umpteenth “there should have been another way” coda re the bad guys doesn’t hit very hard. If you detach from the themes there’s not much else here: a nice enough inclusion of an audio character, some jolly Sixth Doctor writing, a bit of banter and some sudden bursts of action. It’s less a thrilling conclusion than just a load more stuff — an author, very much like his character, faced with things left behind and concluding little more than “Shame, innit?”

5/10

*Super picky of me but I don’t much like the title. It has a reference point in the plot but it feels too portentous for what most of the plot actually is. I wish he’d kept up the pseudo-malapropism theme from Business Unusual, and perhaps called it Finished Business.