Doctor Who: The BBC Books #103 – The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#51

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street

By Lawrence Miles

I don’t know what’s more impressive — the scale of what is attempted here or the fact that Lawrence Miles came back to write it. Frankly it’s not hard to imagine a little bad blood after BBC Books published The Ancestor Cell, which wrapped up most of his world-building ideas in what you might charitably call “a hurry”.

I wonder if they sweetened him by really letting him off the chain this time. After all, The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street is comfortably the oddest BBC Book since The Blue Angel. It would give Campaign a run for its money if they’d actually published that one — and in fact, the two are quite similar in concept. You take an original novel, you don’t write it, and then you write another much more peculiar book around the bones of the first one. Jim Mortimore wrote a crazy, multiverse-spanning sequel; Lawrence Miles has written a pseudo-non fiction book that treats the original as a real event. As mildly infuriating as it is that they didn’t publish Campaign — which, remember, had a lot to do with missed deadlines — it’s good that the authors kept swinging for the fences like this.

The gimmick here is quintessentially Lawrence Miles. Non-fiction can be a way of reporting events once removed, and he’s been doing that for ages. Alien Bodies was hugely important for Sam, but it externalised her issues (literally, with a second set of biodata) in a way that other characters reflected on more than she did herself. It felt like it was about the idea of things happening to Sam without really getting her take on it. Then you have Interference, which as well as playing around with storytelling formats (there’s a thought!) took bold steps to upset the status quo of the EDAs (and the PDAs!) — but all of the pay-offs were theoretical at that point, and in some cases stayed that way. It was about the idea of possibilities rather than the possibilities themselves. Enter Adventuress, which has all sorts of ideas — look who we’re dealing with — but from the outset it’s not directly connected to them, relying instead on diaries, dream journals and who knows what other ersatz second hand sources to piece it all together, occasionally just guessing at what it all means. It’s his most “removed” book yet, offering glimpses of a more relatable novel that probably never existed.

Let’s not sell that novel short, though: even if he’d written it in a more usual style, all “the TARDIS arrived and the Doctor said ‘Where have you brought me to this time, old girl?’”, Adventuress would still be noticeably out of step with the rest of the run. In it, the Doctor attempts to reconcile a breakdown in the Earth’s relationship to time, which is opening gateways to a realm of murderous apes, by installing himself at an 18th century brothel. He utilises the magic abilities of everyone there to combat the threat holistically, culminating in a symbolic marriage that he goes through with, no take-backsies. Well, not exactly a base under siege, is it? Even apart from the eyebrow-raising brothel stuff, the tone is much more fantasy than sci-fi, although it’s grounded in the latter.

In amongst all of that Miles is also up to his old canon-bothering tricks again, affecting the status quo and setting up stories for others to write. (You have to assume he got some sort of assurance that they would actually bother this time.) However, there’s something more democratic about his approach here. Although he sets up new stuff too, Miles notably builds upon what others have done — in particular, surprisingly, The Ancestor Cell. (He also references Dark Progeny and Grimm Reality, since we’re keeping score.)

Adventuress supposes that the destruction of Gallifrey had long-reaching consequences for the universe, breaking down dimensional barriers and poisoning the Doctor. (It would have been useful if other authors had hyped this up a bit first. Miles seemingly can’t catch a break with support for his world-building in either direction.) It also engages with the idea that the Doctor is not who he once was — something Justin Richards originated — but rather than lamely pointing out that he can’t remember e.g. The Horns Of Nimon any more (while still doing all the usual stuff), as some others have done, Miles asks: okay, so who or what is he now? And he offers an answer. I’m not a big fan of this whole amnesia/“I’m the Doctor but only about 95%” stuff, but this feels like a genuine attempt to make something of it.

This Bit Has A Spoiler In It!

As to whether he makes something good out of it, your mileage may vary, and Miles being Miles this is ultimately still a hand-off to other writers. But anyway: this is the book where the Doctor loses one of his hearts. I was unable to avoid hearing about that in advance, but I was pleased to discover that it wasn’t (as I’d assumed) attempted murder — it’s to save his life. (And to benefit his surgeon to the tune of one bonus heart, but we don’t know that at the time.) The result is a Doctor restored to health and confidence. He is anchored to Earth now instead of Gallifrey; he is “a man: one born of the Earth, or at least bound to it.” This culminates in a bloody battle to the death with the King of the Apes, a menace that overall reflects humanity and not Time Lords, where he viciously mauls and decapitates his enemy and has to be stopped from going even further. He’s a more down and dirty character after all that — in case you missed the wedding and the bit about the brothel — intrinsically more linked to Earth, but in no way precluded from flying off and rescuing other planets as well.

It’s good to make a virtue of him being different post-Ancestor Cell, and I think Miles has perhaps done more on that front than anybody, but all the same I’m puzzled by this apparent need to diminish the Doctor, whether it’s his memories or his organs. It’s presumably to make him more relatable, but first of all the PDAs are still right there with their alien-as-anything protagonist, and second of all, do we need to understand the Doctor all that much? All this can hardly be to save us from continuity since — as I’ve moaned about before — you need to be a tenth-level anorak to have any idea what they’re on about, Gallifrey-wise. At the end of the day it’s an arc, so it’s really only a question of where it’s all going. Hopefully somewhere satisfying. You’ll forgive me though if I’m a bit worried they’ll chuck it in the bin… again.

That’s It For Spoilers. Well, The Big Ones.

As well as expanding the parameters of the series and its characters, Miles spends a lot of time on his setting. Well, it’s “non-fiction,” so that’s sort of a prerequisite. There’s a huge amount of historical flavour and — I’ll bet David A. McIntee loved this bit — heaps of information on display, giving a terrific flavour of England in 1782. (No doubt some of it is fibs but I feel like I’d be spoiling it to check.) He’s particularly careful to frame Scarlette’s house of ill repute as something feminist, specifying that before pimps came along prostitutes were more along the line of rock stars. (!) I don’t have secondary sources to check that, but it’s certainly a nice thought, and it helps to make the Doctor seem like less of a creep for making his base of operations there. There’s certainly no sneering at the women, with Scarlette being the adventuress of the title — strong, proud and instrumental in the eventual victory. I do wish, though, that we’d got to know her (or the rest of them) a bit better.

Which brings us to the overall inevitable problem with Adventuress: we don’t know what anyone is thinking, or generally what they’re even saying to each other. Miles is fairly strict with his gimmick, deferring to journal entries for most of the specifics, and mostly only comes a cropper during some of the more spectacular action scenes when — sorry to be a party pooper — there’s simply too much detail to pretend we’re just hazarding a guess at it all. This then makes it doubly bizarre when his unnamed narrator says things like “It’s impossible to guess what Scarlette might have told her audience” — strictly speaking it’s impossible to know, you can guess your head off otherwise, but is it really outside of possibility for us to know things like that when so much other mad nonsense has somehow made it into this extremely bizarre pretend book? We’ve got various accounts of very private conversations between the Doctor and <very spoilery unnamed cameo>, but not that?

Meanwhile, we’re just not very close to the characters. We can judge the likes of Scarlette by their actions, but that’s about it. What did she think or feel about the Doctor, given that their association went beyond what he’d normally experience with a human? What, if anything, did he feel for her or Juliette, who at one point is also slated to be his bride? (Of convenience, but even so.) What did Fitz or Anji think about all that? There are suggestions that Anji is jealous, but since this is second hand reporting that’s suspect at best. There are so many moments when a grounded view of what’s happening and what’s being felt would, I’m sorry to say, simply be more satisfying than what we got. For heaven’s sake, what do you mean “It’s not known what Fitz’s reaction was, when surrounded by a mob of prostitutes”? Find out!

It’s frustrating that we pick and choose what is and isn’t known. Take the Doctor’s history, for example. It’s all a bit euphemistic because this is half remembered stuff from 1782 and the Doctor may have fudged some of it anyway — frankly, it’s amazing how much is in the book, but surely in order to identify the threat and respond to it he must be somewhat aware of what happened to the Time Lords? Isn’t that a big deal and worth a mention? How did they skirt the subject, if (presumably) Fitz managed to do so? What his thoughts are on the subject are of course not recorded; he and Anji flit through the book like ghosts at times, although Miles’s narrator dutifully records that Fitz bedded at least one of the prostitutes. It must have been a very notable experience to spend literally months in this place, especially for Anji, but (all together now) we don’t get to hear about it. Yes, clever gimmick and everything, but isn’t that a lot of money on the table?

Fair’s fair, Miles is similarly opaque with his new all singing, all dancing addition to the canon. This is the book that introduces Sabbath, shadowy spy guy with a TARDIS-like boat and a fondness for human companions. Readers of Alien Bodies will remember Miles’s mirroring of the Doctor and companions in various combinations, and this is another one of those, albeit one aimed at his diminished post-Ancestor Cell persona. This is a man with skills the Doctor temporarily lacks (at one point even foreign languages) and one with similar goals, but a more mercenary outlook. He appears to be as emotional as the Doctor — as much is suggested when one of his companions, a Leela-esque fighter, meets her end. His precise nature in relation to the Doctor is kept vague, at least until a cheery reference to his homicidal wishes later on, but his name carries a certain weight in fandom. Visiting the book when you only know Sabbath as a moody menace makes his and the Doctor’s various scenes of borderline camaraderie quite pleasingly bizarre. It would be nice to know more about Sabbath in his own mind, or even more about what others think of him, but well, gimmick, etc. In his case at least, a little mystery seems fair enough. He is a walking setup for later, after all. (Let’s see how everybody else writes him. Dramatic chord!)

There is nothing inherently distant or vague about non-fiction, but in trying to imitate that genre The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street adopts a strange lack of feeling. It is a dense book, much bigger on the inside for a 280 page EDA thanks to its minuscule font, full of incident and detail but staying a bit too far away from character and intent. It feels at times like we’re hearing about Miles’s brilliant ideas rather than experiencing them, which is pretty standard for him, but as it goes on there is an increasingly thin line between historical account and plot summary. It can also be an awkward example of “non-fiction” since it occasionally disappears into fanciful action and it comes without a clear understanding from the outset of what the thing is about. It’s apparent that this is a novel because it holds so much back. (I’m sure nobody wanted it to be any longer, but this sort of thing usually comes with an introduction.)

That said, these really are very good ideas, reframing Doctor Who as something altogether more red blooded and peculiar in the aftermath of its recent changes. It’s full of images that have already lodged in my mind more than most EDAs, and as usual for Miles it’s an example of what, in the grand scheme of these books, you could have won. I just wish I didn’t also get that feeling about this book while I was reading it.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #102 – Dying In The Sun by Jon de Burgh Miller

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#47

Dying in the Sun

By Jon de Burgh Miller

I was a little apprehensive about this one, what with Jon de Burgh Miller’s previous Doctor Who book (or at least Who-adjacent) being Twilight Of The Gods, the final Bernice Summerfield novel co-written with Mark Clapham. Circumstances meant that Twilight was written in a hurry and to my mind it showed: reliant on clichés and not convincing in its character writing, it was comfortably the worst Benny book.

Dying In The Sun also had a notable publishing journey, but at least not a rushed one. It was pitched as an Eighth Doctor “stuck on Earth” novel, then retooled for the Seventh Doctor and Ace, then retooled again for the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly. (Credit: I, Who.) This time however the book’s behind-the-scenes tribulations are not especially apparent.

It’s set in Hollywood circa 1947, and sounds like it: lines like “It was the City of Angels, and the angels were screaming” have a certain Humphrey Bogart charm to them, or cheese, depending on your persuasion. I don’t know if Miller or Clapham was responsible for the action movie bent of their last book, but this one’s somewhat hokey setting allows for that sort of thing to come off more naturally, or at least more of a piece with the surroundings. The whole novel doesn’t sound like it’s narrated by a moody gumshoe – more’s the pity – but it has a certain earnestness that might not have worked in a less tacky time and place. I felt comfortable enough with lines like “For a moment, a very short moment, Chate thought he could see sadness in her eyes, like she’d caught a fleeting glimpse of a past that was too painful to bear.” I don’t know if Miller had a tongue in cheek writing that, but it works.

Of the three Doctor/companion combos in the novel’s DNA I’d say Miller landed on the right one, with Ben and Polly being quite close to this time period, a couple of cool kids and very much the children of these movies. It’s unusual to find this TARDIS team enjoying a long layover somewhere, what with this Doctor having no control over his travels and most of those being base-under-siege horror, but it makes sense that they’d want to stick around and enjoy themselves when they’re close-ish to their own era. Polly has a natural glamour that fits well in Hollywood – numerous people tell her that she could be a movie star, and that doesn’t sound like a stretch – while Ben sounds as exasperated as ever. (He seems a hard one to write for but if you get that right, you’re golden.) Finally, the shabbiest Doctor of all provides a delightful contrast against the glamour of Hollywood. His avuncular friendliness, even when accused of murder, fits just right for the character. It’s perhaps a bit odd that he wants to renew a pre-existing friendship with a Hollywood producer – where he can’t pilot the TARDIS it seems unlikely that he’d know somebody – but that might be a casualty of the novel’s earlier versions. You wouldn’t blink if this was McCoy.

The plot is also well integrated into the setting. A new movie is coming out (called Dying In The Sun, naturally) and it’s causing some unusual reactions. The special effects seem impossibly good for the era, and they even seem to change from one screening to another. The stars associated with it have a supernatural glow to them, which has begun to proliferate through the Hollywood ranks. A local organisation has blossomed into a full-blown cult, its members becoming one with a strange microscopic race of aliens that only want to enhance our specialness and share it through movies. The Doctor of course understands that this will mean slavery for the human race.

It’s not hard to decipher the satirical elements of Miller’s Hollywood, with its unnatural allure and powerful cabals in the shadows. The “Selyoids” (the name is a deliberate joke, it’s not that cheesy) allow for a lot of sci-fi fun and games however, with film reels manipulated by them, a glamour added to those who join with them, zombies who are fully controlled by them, enormous projections powered by them and occasional monsters manifested by them right out of the movies. The downside is that, as well as being a little all over the place conceptually, they are a disembodied force – something the characters talk about rather than to, which leads to a bit too much “as you know, Bob” near the end. The Doctor and co debate the morality of the Selyoids living symbiotically with humankind but it feels like they can’t do that in good faith while a) the people debating it are not themselves and b) the Selyoids don’t specifically get a vote. Polly, by this point drinking the proverbial Kool Aid, talks about how wonderful it is to join with them, but that doesn’t really come from an emotional place; we just recognise that it’s cool when people think you’re pretty and want your autograph. (We skip the rather more convincing part where Selyoids can cure all injuries and presumably all illnesses.) Again, it’s satire, and not a very deep one. Hollywood ain’t that deep either, I’m sure.

There isn’t a lot of depth elsewhere in the novel. There’s a murder mystery (the Doctor’s producer friend) where curiously we skip the actual event – it would surely have been worth showing, since the Doctor was present to some extent. There’s a murder suspect, mob enforcer Rob Chate, who we’re supposed to sympathise with but who does actually commit a murder shortly afterwards. (Self defence.) Towards the end of the novel, with practically everyone now under the Selyoid influence, it becomes difficult to differentiate Chate from Detective Fletcher, the hard-boiled investigator who thinks the Doctor dunit. The family history between Chate and police chief Wallis is important but it’s a little too histrionic to make any real impact – it just sounds like a cheesy movie twist, which admittedly might be the point. The book mostly just tumbles along once the Doctor becomes fascinated by the movie at the centre of things, with no real impetus on solving the initial mystery – and, as established, not much of a pronounced alien presence for him to rally against.

Dying In The Sun really does tumble along though. Miller keeps a good pace and the setting is quite colourful, even though a few of its ideas have been done before. (Creatures stepping out of movies, see: Theatre Of War. Symbiotic alien invasions, see: how long have you got?) I’ve got a lot of time for books where it’s clear what’s going on and the author creates some memorable imagery. And, as it seems mandatory to point out based on other reviews for it, there are no deliberate continuity refs here: the TARDIS isn’t mentioned, no previous adventures are alluded to, it’s just three travellers wrapped up in a sci-fi adventure. So it’s a good one to pick up at random, which funnily enough is the thing the EDAs have been striving towards. When order is at last restored, Dying In The Sun: The Movie becomes just another day at the pictures. Miller’s book doesn’t aspire to a whole lot more than that, but it’ll kill time just as well.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #101 – Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#50

Grimm Reality

By Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

Fantasy seems to hold a special fascination for sci-fi writers. It’s an alternative, perhaps even forbidden path to strangeness: we took the one with long words and explanations, they took the one with primordial rules and “monsters, just because.”

Now and again you get sci-fi stories that see how the other half lives. Doctor Who has already taken a few novelistic whacks at it. Conundrum is generally understood to be The Good One, though it mostly worked with different media rather than this genre specifically. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice took it literally, alternating fantasy and SF as the plot demanded — and I would argue, watering both down in the process. Managra dived into literature, but in a way that verged on fantasy. Grimm Reality might be the most direct example yet, hurling the TARDIS onto a planet where anything can happen, but always in the form of fairytales.

I can see the appeal already: narratively you can let your hair down, worry less about the mechanics of things, and it’s enjoyable to put your SF heroes in a different context. But it’s a tightrope walk. You still need rules and, on some level, your fantasy walk-on-the-wild-side still has to function as sci-fi, because look what it says on the front cover. It’s a conundrum (ahem) that’s hard to solve. Do you veer more fantasy or sci-fi?

Grimm Reality has its magical cake and vanishes it. There’s an upfront SF reason for what’s going on here: a white hole. (So what is it?) This has fired blobs of multiversal possibility at a nearby planet, although the planet already comes with fantasy craziness as standard. (We get another SF reason for that later on.) That taken care of, everything in-between can be as fantasy as you like. Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale (I don’t know in what configuration) dutifully fire a rat-a-tat-tat campaign of fantasy problems at the Doctor, Anji and Fitz, such as: a Cinderella job where Anji works for six cruel sisters, and a wishing box won’t help; a quest for Fitz working for two thoughtless princes, also involving a magic wolf skin; a journey to a giant’s castle for the Doctor and some new friends, where the giant’s size is never fixed; a contest to become a King’s bride, with the contest threatening everyone in the kingdom; multiple terrifying figures demanding answers to their riddles; and a sleeping princess whose rescue and reawakening is the talk of the town.

If you like fairytales, and most of us do, there’s a pretty constant supply of fun here. It does however get a bit wearying jumping from one fairytale to another, and within that from the progress of one group of characters to another, and within that from the Doctor/Anji/Fitz to a visiting crew of (reassuringly sci-fi) salvage hunters hoping to strip mine the planet of any white hole goodness. At its peak Grimm Reality has five or six protagonists on the go, each with their own cadre of supporting characters and all going through the motions of some vaguely parodic fantasy story. For a book intrinsically about storytelling, its general inability to sit bloody still and tell us one of them from start to finish is not a plus. Despite its colourful simplicity, I often found it hard to stick with as a novel.

There’s also the individual stories themselves. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a degree of subversion here: our brilliant SF characters bringing what they know to bear on archetypal fantasy stories, and either turning them on their heads or finding that the rules of fantasy will fight back. There is a little of this, with the Doctor plying his trade as “Doctor Know-It-All” and offering mostly quack solutions to fantasy problems, until the King demands more help than he can give; and Anji, tricked into servitude to possess a wishing box she can’t actually use, tries to game it so that the sisters wish to her benefit, only that doesn’t work. Mostly though, these are just straight fairytales that show up and happen. The presence of yer actual Doctor Who alumni in the proceedings doesn’t make a huge difference, which somewhat begs the question of why we’re combining the two things.

The sci-fi stuff is dialled down, perhaps by design. It’s promising enough: the salvage crew is made up of three distinct species, which is a nice bit of world-building, and at the start they take on board William Brok, a rugged but unlucky salvager who found the white hole shortly before his ship failed on him, only for his rescuers to steal the glory. He develops a combative quasi-romance with “human-Captain” Christina, which points to a decent arc, but it’s Christina we follow to the planet, leaving William more or less to the reader’s imagination afterwards. (Christina’s a pretty strong character anyway, or at least she’s consistent, refusing to wilt because of William’s or the Doctor’s charms. She is, frankly, a sod, which is quite interesting.) The abanak (avuncular hippo-people) and vuim (insectoids seeking a cure for a disease) are compelling enough, though they quickly fall into archetypes.

The SF ideas can’t really compete with the fantasy ones. Take the white hole/multiverse stuff: there’s a strong suggestion that this opens up infinite possibilities to anyone that encounters it. Obvious story potential there — only, we’re already on a planet that can manufacture anything, provided it’s a fairytale, so everybody on it is sort of doing all right for magical possibilities, thank you very much. The concept of growing literally anything for fantasy reasons cohabits in Grimm Reality with anything that can happen for sci-fi reasons, and the confluence of the two is just a sort of muddle, really.

In amongst all that you’ve got three regulars and, I would say, some potential for characterisation. That’s another tightrope walk: how much of this is just satire? You don’t really do satire for the meaningful character stuff, and sure enough Anji faces fairly archetypal “modern girl in ye olden times” difficulties living as Cinderella, or being magically compelled to compete for a marriage she doesn’t even want; Fitz has a rough time and harbours grudges against those princes, but for a considerable stretch his “character arc” here is that he’s cold; and the Doctor seems uncharacteristically naive for a lot of this, trusting dangerous people and needing a lot of magical help to get out of scrapes. But there are glimmers of meaning here, with the Doctor being offered (and refusing) the restoration of his memories, and Anji once again going back and forth about her place in the TARDIS, and pining for Dave. (I’m not too crazy about either of those. Do Doctor Who l authors ever compare notes? Aren’t these somewhat settled questions after books like EarthWorld and The City Of The Dead?)

With a few honourable nods to the anything-can-happen likes of Conundrum, Grimm Reality mostly reminded me of the Benny New Adventures. Story-wise it feels like a fusion of Oh No It Isn’t! and Down, and the book’s general wise-guy tone hews closer to that mildly inebriated world than, IMO, Doctor Who. I don’t know if I would have liked it better as an entry in that other range — lord knows most of them were unspectacular — but as a pit stop for the EDAs it doesn’t leave a huge impression. It successfully replicates another genre without doing a heck of a lot with it, and it arguably mistakes a large quantity of fantasy tropes for a coherent plot. It still provides good fun in short bursts, and the let-your-hair-down aspect is a genuine selling point for a Doctor Who book. But as far as subjecting fantasy tropes to critical thought goes, we already have quite a lot of Discworld books for that.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #100 – Psi-ence Fiction by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventure

#46

Psi-ence Fiction

By Chris Boucher

Chris Boucher is a bit like the proverbial box of chocolates. His scripts tend to be imaginative and they can be tight and brilliant, but sometimes they’re scattered and vague. His novels have followed suit: where there is a bedrock of clear ideas you get Corpse Marker, where there isn’t, Last Man Running. (So I guess you do know what to expect from him in a sense? Checkmate, Forrest Gump’s mum.)

I had hoped that Corpse Marker would be a turning point, but Psi-ence Fiction is a return to a less controlled, less effective Boucher instead. It even shows signs of skipping a thorough edit — hell, someone should have had a word with him about that title. Although come to think of it, an awkward pun does sort of set the tone for what follows.

It’s a Chris Boucher book so it’s going to feature the Fourth Doctor and Leela, which is good news: he wrote for the telly series during one of its peaks and he originated Leela with that Doctor, so he’s great at capturing those two voices. The combative twosome encounter both a profound sense of unease and some sort of time anomaly near a university in England. Said university houses a parapsychology department where Professor Barry Hitchins tests the psi abilities of a group of teens. Spookiness ensues.

If you read the I, Who entry on Psi-ence Fiction you’ll notice that the plot synopsis breaks down into two parts: everything that happens before the last thirty or so pages and then everything that happens in the last thirty or so pages. The first part amounts to one paragraph. Meanwhile in the actual book, the Doctor makes a mental note on page 194 that “There was finally some concrete evidence that something was happening.” It’s not plot-heavy, in other words, relying heavily on atmosphere instead. That’s not so terrible — very good stories have been told that are mostly just atmosphere and vibes. Image Of The Fendahl, for one. The downside, though, is that I can barely remember two thirds of this despite having just finished it, and its attempt to build atmosphere doesn’t come off anyway.

The Doctor and Leela are, predictably, fine. They split up for most of Psi-ence Fiction which seems more like a bug than a feature, but anyway, the Doctor is full of his usual ebullience and (albeit ineffectively) charm. He even indulges in a few of Boucher’s patented political aphorisms, such as: “[The Doctor] was struck once again by how uniform people’s behaviour became when they put on a uniform.” I could have done without his getting collared by security guards and policemen just for being eccentric – I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a “sign of the times” thing where the story is, unusually for these two, set in the 00s, but it felt like wasted time. Similarly, while no reader is in doubt that the Doctor has us all beat in the “genius” department, his ability to suss the particular universal and temporal peril going on here is akin to plucking it out of the ether, which isn’t very satisfying to read. Nor is the resolution, which pretty much resolves itself.

Leela is usually the highpoint of Boucher’s novels and that trend continues here. She keenly identifies a psychic threat, having been menaced in a similar way by the Tesh in The Face Of Evil. To deal with this she recalls her old teachings and considers the ways that her shamans and the Doctor differ in their methods, as well as how much influence they still have on her now, which is all pretty interesting. “There had been so many instructions and orders, so much advice, she wondered if she would ever be allowed to think for herself.” You get the sense that Boucher isn’t done developing her character, which is a great reason to write tie-in novels. It would be nice though if she had more to do with the plot. Despite all that introspection, plus interacting with and at times protecting one of the psi-kids, she doesn’t impact very much on events; she is yanked into the TARDIS by the Doctor at the climax. I was hoping she’d play a more decisive part.

Neither of them seems critical, or even really relevant to what’s happening until the very end. They mark time by chasing literal shadows or investigating half-baked conspiracies involving bottled water. For most of the sludgy “pre-finale” section of the book, aka most of the book, we’re marooned with other characters, starting with the teens at the university. You will quickly notice a theme in their dialogue: they’re funny. Or more accurately, they think they’re funny. It’s one of those dynamics where every individual character wisecracks all the time and every other character finds it irritating, then does it right back. I’ve read reviews that complain of not being able to tell them apart, and that’s sadly accurate.

The problem’s even worse than that, however: it’s every group of characters in the book. There are several university lecturers, each with some sort of stake in Hitchins’ work. (He is mostly referred to as “Barry”, which given that we’re on first name terms with all the students pushes him confusingly into the background at times.) The lecturers all gripe and bitch at each other all the time, so they don’t sound all that dissimilar either. Then there are security guards and policemen – at times I was unclear who belonged to which group – and all of them appeared to be gearing up for an open mic night. None of them are funny, none of them find each other funny, I can’t tell if we’re supposed to find them funny, but on goes the exhausting banter anyway, unearthing solid gold like: “‘No it isn’t,’ Ralph said, ‘and stop calling me Shirley.’” We also get stuff like “Enough with the comedy routine” – see the universal law of Irritating Characters Are Irritating. Telling me how annoying they are does not make them less annoying.

Some of it’s not so much unfunny banter as weak sitcom writing, with a general background radiation of swearwords possibly intended to grit things up, or more likely add a dash of Blackadder-ish snark. See distracting lines like “Put the sodding sandwich down, put the sodding coffee down, put this sodding character in the SODDING LOCKUP!” Urgh. A general lack of punctuation makes it all read as a bit breathless and try-hard.

Throughout Psi-ence Fiction (and boy, is it annoying to keep typing out that title) I wondered if all of this was meant to be creepy. I’m leaning towards yes. We open with a séance where one character is screamed at by a murderous and distractingly profane spirit. The tone of this is immediately difficult to take seriously – constantly calling her a BITCH! in all caps is a bit too bizarre for Doctor Who, like a rude older relative at a party – but said character isn’t strongly affected by it anyway, or not enough to give the insouciance a rest. The creepiness just goes away when the encounter ends. Another character is affected when an encounter with a Ouija board gets a little too threatening, but for some reason we’re not around for the scene where she is so distraught that she takes her own life, making that seem like a random crime that occurred in the background.

In the meantime, on we go with the relentlessly dippy dialogue, with endless references to one of them imitating Hugh Grant and snarky digs about TV shows. At no point was I concerned for their welfare: they all seem fine. I was generally wondering where the Doctor and Leela had got to, and whether I could come too. Nothing terribly frightening is happening in their absence, other than the prospect of more scenes with these people.

Things are a little more consistent around Leela as she hunts for the vague sense of unease or darkness that seems to exist nearby – but “vague” is the word for it, and no amount of Boucher’s at times atmospheric repetition can fill the hole where a defined sense of threat ought to be. Saying that, he really is good at using talismanic phrases to build a bit of mood: “She must not look back no matter how much she wanted to. She must not stop running no matter how much she wanted to. She must get out of the wood. She must get out of the darkness.” / “Everything was moving except for her: everything was motionless except for her.” But it’s all just weird hallucinations and misdirection that might lead to her death, or a murder, but never gets that far. Anyway, it’s not up to Leela to take this crisis by the shoulders and shake it into submission, more’s the pity, so she essentially just has a weird old time until things tidy themselves up at the end.

When the finale rolls around and it’s time to connect the psi-kids plot with the “temporal anomaly” business from the beginning, it just about works, but you’ve got to suspend a hell of a lot of disbelief even for Who. The emotional reason for a character inventing a device that can turn back time is sound enough – it would have been more satisfying if we’d spent time building up to it beforehand, ah well – but the actual concept of a university lecturer building such a thing, and in such a way that it could obliterate the universe, is a teensy bit of a leap, no? His reason for requiring a psychic collaborator is thin as tissue paper as well. All in all, I was left imagining a whiteboard with PSYCHIC VISIONS and TIME STUFF on it, and a lot of question marks in-between. Boucher employs that repetition trick again to make for a more atmospheric and exciting finale, but he can’t rise above a welter of technobabble, a load of “just vibes” prose and what’s essentially a magic wand that fixes it all.

I wonder if this one missed the usual editing window. The plot is ungainly at best, speed-running all of its important stuff at the last hurdle – surely that could have been tidied up. There are dropped speech marks and typos aplenty, with “Chole” for “Chloe,” “Gallifray” instead of “Gallifrey,” a reference to “the sweeny” instead of The Sweeney. And there are peculiar Americanisms like cellular phone, cemetery and galoshes – hardly a crime, but why are they there? I’d like to think the characterisation could have been tightened up a bit as well, but if you looked at that too critically you’d probably lose sheer, aimless banter that amounted to whole chapters.

 

It’s worth stressing that he really does write the Fourth Doctor and Leela well, and that’s a significant part of why you’d pick up a Doctor Who book by Chris Boucher in the first place. It’s quite readable and hares along at a good pace even though pound for pound little is actually happening, which is no small feat. There are aspects that genuinely work quite well, like the way Boucher writes a character with mind-reading abilities, sneakily picking up in dialogue on something we just read in third person prose. I wish there was more of that, and more was made of it.

I’ve had worse experiences reading BBC Books. This just isn’t among the particularly good experiences.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #99 – The City Of The Dead by Lloyd Rose

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#49

The City of the Dead

By Lloyd Rose

New author! New female author! New female very good author! It’s like several Christmases come at once.

Prior to this I didn’t know anything about Lloyd Rose, but it’s clear that this is not her first rodeo. There’s no awkward first novel vibes: she brings her setting, a particularly dank and magical New Orleans, vividly to life, while the prose and dialogue sparkle confidently. I didn’t jot a lot of it down because I was having a good time, but I took a minute to marvel at this confident piece of repetition: “He was having trouble seeing, as if there was a cloud between him and the group at the other end of the room. He squinted. There was a cloud between him and the group at the other end of the room.” Also this tidy observation: “He turned and pushed open the window, as if he needed the common sense of fresh air.” And this epic nugget about the city’s struggle against the elements: “Water and wind and heat would win in the end. The river wanted the land back. In the rain, the old city melted towards death.” Fiendish stuff.

It is also a novel of ideas. Oodles of them in fact — but fair warning, they mostly concern magic, which is an itchy subject matter for Doctor Who. But that’s a sensible enough basis for a story set in New Orleans, and though The City Of The Dead veers unapologetically into that realm — with no “what look like magic creatures are actually Footlejibbets from Arcteriax III” caveats, magic is just magic and you’ll have to lump it — Rose does it with enough conviction to sell it.

Anyway, the magic rites in this rely on elemental beings that aren’t so different from Dæmons or Eternals from Classic Who — they’re inexplicable, yes, but only because the Doctor isn’t trying to explain them. (You know what his memory’s like; he probably can’t do it any more.) Elsewhere there is a genuine ring of sci-fi to a brain-bending artefact that interacts with the Doctor’s timeline out of sequence — Rose singles out The Curse Of Fatal Death in her About The Author bit, and now that you mention it that bit does pong pleasantly of Moffat. On the flip side there’s a sequence of straight up deus ex machina magic to rescue the Doctor from certain doom, but a) it’s a beautifully written, quasi-romantic fantasy interlude, I’m not made of stone, and b) it’s not that much weirder than the New Adventures at their trippiest. I didn’t feel cheated.

Setting, good, ideas, convincing, so far huzzah — but where The City Of The Dead really goes for broke is with its characters. Rose’s New Orleans is a weird little place populated by strange people, running the gamut from the grotesque (awkward artist Teddy Acree and his voluptuous, perhaps too supportive wife) to the ridiculous (Dupre, a buffoonish and self-aggrandising tour guide) to the disarmingly likeable (Rust, a cop who instinctively pals along with the Doctor like Lieutenant Kinderman from The Exorcist), and even the flat out magical (spoilers). They feel like a self-contained eco-system and there is always a strong sense of who’s in the scene.

And the regulars are better. Fitz, just to rip the plaster off, comes in last place just because of how the action is dealt out, but Rose still underlines his absurd “big brother, little brother” relationship with the Doctor, which then highlights the Doctor’s fewer-than-usual number of marbles at this point in the run. Fitz and Anji note that he battles evil but is too fundamentally good to really understand it, which leaves him potentially blind to threats. (Which might come into play later in the book, maybe. Ahem.) Fitz, in all his scruffy glory, isn’t quite so enamoured of strangers, plus he knows the Doctor of old, so (as per books like EarthWorld) he wants to protect him from himself. That’s apt, and it’s also consistent, which is an all too rare treat in these scattershot-author novels. For good measure, Fitz’s cheery and slightly inappropriate sense of humour gets the better of him throughout.

Anji feels like she’s finding her place here. Rose is smart enough to let modern day Earth hit the displaced companion hard, and wily enough to let Anji wriggle out of simply catching a flight home from here — Anji reasons that it’s a year or so after she left, so better luck next time I guess, which feels like very quietly protesting too much. Her concern for the Doctor’s wellbeing gets more obvious as the book progresses, just as her attempt to let him worry about himself for a while quickly falls apart; you can feel her starting to belong in the team. Even her banter with Fitz, well, fits; the two give as good as they get, particularly when the Doctor sends them on a fact finding mission that quickly spirals into grave-robbing. (She really cares about Fitz too, as she demonstrates when she suggests he stop smoking out of genuine concern that he’s assuming the TARDIS will fix lung cancer.) Anji also, saints be praised, considers a romantic dalliance in a post-Dave world, although this only amounts to a few lovely dinners and a bit of snogging. We skip the aftermath, which as it turns out would have been worth talking about, but perhaps that’s also a sign that she’s toughening up.

Saving the best for last: the Doctor. The much-repeated reason for giving him amnesia (again) was to make him easier to write for. I don’t know if that was crucial to Rose’s understanding of the character, although it is crucial to his journey in the book, but however she got there The City Of The Dead is one of the most compelling depictions of the character yet.

The Doctor in this is more recognisably a person in his own right, not so much a mythical being who can do anything. When we first see him he is unusually vulnerable: in bed, at least partially naked, having nightmares. That thread continues throughout, with references to him being “off his game” as he misreads situations and — without getting too into spoilers — gets captured and tortured more than usual. He has that innocence that sets Fitz and Anji’s minds worrying, but perhaps less of it than they imagine, as e.g. he finds Dupre loathsome and is repelled by Teddy’s offers to paint him alongside his wife. He’s diplomatic but also capable of putting that up as a front — he’s not necessarily that nice underneath.

And speaking of what’s underneath, he’s not okay. The City Of The Dead focuses on his amnesia, or specifically the sense of what he has lost and what he thinks it might be, more convincingly than any other book post-Ancestor Cell. There are several references to forgotten misdeeds not being in any real sense gone or forgiven, or so he thinks, as well as some typically well-put moments where he is able to repeat information that he no longer understands, like Artron energy being a thing. There’s a terrific dream sequence that suggests his past selves are complicit in his amnesia, and by the time we hit the climax it’s clear that the Doctor’s guilt has been a major factor in his nightmares and his actions. It’s also rather neatly expressed in the villain plot, which handily is about reconciling the past and putting demons to rest, coincidentally in a novel set in New Orleans surrounded by graves. I mean, come on, that’s good.

By rights this should be one of my favourite BBC Books, and I think it’s up there, but I can’t claim it’s perfect. The plot doesn’t have much forward motion, being propelled mainly by a murder investigation that nobody seems to care about. Characters investigate things more or less on the off chance that they’re related to something else, and otherwise they tend to go on dates or, for example, get kidnapped by (possibly unrelated) nutters. There’s a genuinely good surprise near the end that knocked me for six, but I wonder how much of that was the lack of real detective work to lead us to it. The “Thanks” bit at the end suggests that a lot of work went into making this even resemble a plot, and I don’t think it’s too cheeky to suggest that this is still the author’s weak point. I’m fairly bad at maintaining concentration sometimes, so maybe it was just that — we’ve lived through less distracting times — but the loose plotting, combined with Rose’s sometimes intangible ideas, can make The City Of The Dead a slow read. And on intangibility: there is a fair bit of meta-magical “huh?”ery in this, which I don’t exactly mind — I’ve already defended one of the novel’s biggest diversions — but there were moments where I simply wasn’t sure what just happened.

There’s room for improvement, then. (Arguably, as I’m sure some readers loved all the weird stuff without caveats.) Nevertheless, the good bulldozes the bad. I’ve not even mentioned the keenly female perspective on things like dating, and the Doctor in particular; Rose, like Kate Orman before her, highlights his inherent sensuality (shall we say, the Paul McGann Effect) more convincingly than her male peers. If you’re going to hire different authors then you ought to find different perspectives too, and we have that here, whilst also staying on target with the series and its ideas. I’m glad they recognised a good thing and got her back for more books. Now find more good authors.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #98 – Bullet Time by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#45
Bullet Time
By David A. McIntee

I wasn’t keen to read this one because I knew a thing that happened in it.

You know how it is with decades-old books and spoilers: if you’re going to read about them then you run that risk. I try to sort of detect review spoilers by osmosis, then jump over them and skim the rest while squinting, but to be honest this has about the same success rate as finding reviews with or without spoilers in the first place. I didn’t have a hope with this one.

Can a Past Doctor Adventure even have a spoilery thing in it? Turns out yes. Received wisdom tells us that as these books are set between TV episodes they can’t do anything major, but first off, they got rid of the continuity links on the back covers a while ago, which perhaps tells us that they give less of a hoot about that now. Second, with the Seventh Doctor and no Ace this one is implicitly set after the TV series wrapped up, so it’s basically a New Adventure and fair game. Third, it’s by David A. McIntee, who wanted to do A Big Spoilery Thing in a previous book (also a PDA) but was talked out of it. We have new editors at this point who must have been more receptive to his grisly pitches, so spoiler warning, if you care about that sort of thing.

We don’t need to worry about it for the majority of Bullet Time, which has a lot of other stuff going on. (Too much, but what else is new with David A. McIntee.) We open in Hong Kong, 1997, near the time of the handover. This was still quite recent when the book came out, making Bullet Time a neat “historical” adventure. (See also the adorable detail that people’s phones keep running out of credit. Aww!) A UFO is shot down; shortly afterwards Sarah Jane Smith, investigating a porn ring, gets thrown out of a plane and rescued in mid-air, pretty much exactly like in the opening scene in Moonraker. Not shy about action scenes, is our David.

Bullet Time quickly settles down into a more low-key thriller with multiple groups — UNIT, the cops, the Triads, Sarah, her rescuer Tom Ryder and the Doctor — investigating alien devices, unexplained cases of spontaneous human combustion and each other. It has the makings of something really paranoid, with overt shades of The X-Files, but it’s more interested in the people involved than what it all means. McIntee is going for a sort of Paul Leonard “people are complex in all walks of life” thing here, except his one is mostly about humans rather than aliens.

The Triads are the most fleshed out examples. We meet a couple of them on their way to remove a man’s hands as punishment, and en route we get wrapped up in their love lives and family concerns. We get to know how they got into the Triad – mostly just to make a living – and we get the impression that they are more than just the awful things they do. Two of the book’s strongest action scenes (McIntee is known for doing these well) concern the deaths of Triad men which happen more or less by accident, inviting us to pity them for the chain of coincidences that rubbed out these otherwise potentially decent human beings. (Okay, they belong in jail, but still.)

We similarly get to know the cops, who have families at home and skeletons in the closet, and UNIT, who have evolved in directions a lot less friendly than the Brigadier, Benton, mugs-of-hot-sweet-army-tea etc. All of which is interesting, but perhaps it’s too much for one novel (or in any case this novel) to sustain. There are simply too many characters here. Combined with McIntee’s favoured writing style of endless abrupt scenes that feel like they’re ramping up to an action scene even when they’re not, Bullet Time is one of those books that always seems like it has somewhere else to be. Picking it up again a day later it can be quite challenging to remember not just what happened before you put it down, but what half-a-dozen plates were spinning at the time. Before long I was getting the different groups confused, especially where they all have quite similar goals.

This seems like a point of personal taste, but I think Bullet Time has an information delivery problem. Quite why the Triad etc are interested in UFOs and alien devices, and why people keep exploding is kept obscure for almost the entire book. Yes, holding back a big reveal is sort of the point of big reveals, but this felt like holding back the entire reason for following the narrative. This is where it’s very handy to lean on the complex lives of the people involved, but then the book’s overpopulation becomes a problem. I’ve seen Bullet Time described as “fast-paced” and that feels way off to me; it was more like channel hopping between filler episodes.

We do at least have a central mystery to pick at: the Doctor appears to be the head of the local Triad, assassins and drug deals and all. What’s that about? As Sarah notes, this can’t be right – not unless he’s “some sort of evil pod-person.” The conceit of a Doctor and companion meeting again at different times of life is a good one, and Bullet Time challenges the idea that they’d even recognise each other – morally rather than physically, since Sarah knows about regeneration. She is used to an adventurous but morally forthright Doctor, whereas the bloke with the question mark umbrella is a devious schemer. It’s a smart contradiction to throw in the path of an investigative reporter, and it lays bare the difference between the two Doctors, as well as the ways in which Sarah has grown and changed.

I doubt any readers seriously thought he’d begun a life of crime in earnest, but that’s sort of beside the point. While he has a compelling reason for getting involved – which is another example of “people not being what they seem,” in this case the alien invaders he’s trying to keep out of everybody’s way – he’s not keeping track of the collateral damage. It seems fair to assume that people are getting their hands (or whatever else) lopped off while he’s in charge; he’s completely naïve about day-to-day Triad practices, almost getting a close friend sexually assaulted in the process; for good measure, he ruins Sarah’s professional life “to keep her safe”; he has done something to the local drug trade to render it ineffective, which seems very “Doctor”, but as the cops note this might have its own deleterious effects; and while it turns out that (ahem spoiler oh who are we kidding) the aliens aren’t so bad after all, they’ve done questionable things that he didn’t know about and then isn’t happy about, which he’ll just have to put up with for the sake of Earth’s safety. This isn’t a New Adventures-y masterplan in action, but rather a man spinning a plate that won’t stay on the stick. This, too, is a character not being what we expect.

Sarah’s disenfranchisement ought to be the heart of the novel, but there’s too much novel for that. It’s essentially without a protagonist – we’re as likely to follow anyone in the Triad or Tom Ryder as we are Sarah. And not every avenue is automatically interesting, with Tom being an archetypal American hero not unlike a Terrance Dicks character, at least until his loyalties come into question near the end, which recontextualises him entirely – again though this is something we don’t have time to get into because a) we keep diving away to look at somebody else instead and b) we don’t find out critical plot specifics until the thing’s nearly over. When we finally understand what’s going on and what it all means it’s genuinely interesting, heightening McIntee’s themes of murkiness, and there’s a tremendous scene of the Doctor (having mostly failed to pull a rabbit out of hat) dressing Tom down for his human ineptitudes, but I couldn’t help thinking: where was all this for the last 250 pages?

It’s time for The Big Spoilery Thing! Just thought I’d mention it. If you like, you can go and put the kettle on and come back afterwards. Or just squint and power through it at your own risk. Patent pending.

Putting Sarah more in the driving seat might have helped with The Big Spoilery Thing, which I’ve no doubt went down like a cup of cold sick at the time. She dies in this, very near the end. For what it’s worth this is both a heroic act and an indictment of the Doctor’s scheming – it underlines the fact that he can’t muck about on this scale without getting his hands dirty. That’s the sort of exploited character flaw that would perhaps make more sense in the New Adventures, where it could meaningfully affect him long term; in a one-off there’s no reason for anyone to revisit it. (And of course the TV series gives us an out for continuity reasons. Cheers guys!) I knew it was coming, I didn’t particularly like the idea, and the way Bullet Time is written (emphasising the messy web of different lives rather than dwelling too long on individuals) means that the story must push on immediately afterwards, hardly eulogising the fan favourite character and perhaps making a point of not doing so. There is a lovely epilogue that makes you think for a moment that things didn’t go as poorly as all that, but then – tee hee hee, I’m sure – the rug is pulled. It’s one of the stronger pieces of writing in the novel and it’s very poignant, even if I sort of wish someone had poked him in the eye for suggesting it.

Whilst I personally dislike this kind of edgy revisited-character arc (I’m still giving Eternity Weeps the stink eye for what it did to Liz, sorry not sorry) I think McIntee does it with enough gravitas that it doesn’t feel token. It’s a cost not normally balanced against a Seventh Doctor “playing chess with people’s lives” story, and in that context it makes the whole thing a bit more thorny and complex. I wouldn’t disagree with anyone saying she deserved better – the novel agrees with you – and I’m not going to get hung up on book continuity anyway if I don’t like it. What else can I say about it other than it’s as horrible as he intended it to be, well done, and now I’ll file it away as an interesting redundant timeline.

That about wraps it up for spoilers!

It’s one of those books where I like what it was going for, but I don’t think I’m that big a fan of his writing style, which for me stifled what he was going for. I want to learn more about these people, but for that to work I need to properly sit with them sometimes. I want to marvel at the difficult choices the Doctor has made, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what they were until 25 pages before the end. There’s still more complexity here than there might have been with exactly the same plot and characters, which is absolutely something to applaud, but in practice it’s too much like story porridge to really come together. You just have to enjoy it in mouthfuls instead.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #97 – Dark Progeny by Steve Emmerson

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#48

Dark Progeny

By Steve Emmerson

Colony worlds. Gotta love ’em. Apparently.

I’m not going to pretend that all EDAs are like this, but boy this seems like a popular setting. There have even been a few baked-in reasons to keep going there. Colonies gave Sam an easy way into activism, seeing how humans had progressed and, more often than not, done it “wrong.” Compassion was mostly fleeing the Time Lords so was unlikely to visit the Doctor’s favourite planet for a chunk, ergo alien worlds, and humans-in-space is easier to write each month than The Web Planet, hence colonists. And would you look at that — Anji can’t go home. What’s the next best thing, I wonder?

None of which is to say you can’t do a good colony world story. That’s like saying you can’t do a good base under siege. (The Web Of Fear called.) It’s just that with such a well-worn format it’s tough to avoid diminishing returns, and Dark Progeny doesn’t so much avoid them as get beaten up by them in a dark alley.

The story has promise. Ceres Alpha is being aggressively terraformed by pesky old humans in vast, mobile cities. (That’s slightly different to Kursaal, at least.) The planet has ancient ruins that the uncaring WorldCorp is threatening to demolish. (That’s a bit more like Kursaal.) Related to this, presumably, is the synchronised birth of multiple unusual-looking psi-powered babies. The corporation immediately swept this under the rug, telling all the parents their babies had died but in reality keeping them hidden away to experiment upon. Into all this arrives the TARDIS, seemingly driven mad by a psychic force, and Anji along with it. The Doctor must fetch help while also inevitably coming to the aid of those children.

Right away there’s potential for something weird and emotive, which were the watchwords of Steve Emmerson’s earlier Casualties Of War. Instead of the pain of shell shock and survivor’s guilt we’re looking at children in danger and the loss of a child (even if that turns out to be a lie), which is perhaps even more potent. It’s odd, then, that Dark Progeny seems so uninterested in the kid storyline. A gaggle of alien-headed youngsters are indeed being held in a lab somewhere, tortured and supposedly driving their captors mad with mind-powers… but that’s not really the meat of the novel, which is far more interested in the military bureaucracy of the city, the Doctor getting pressed to reveal who he’s working for, and the general irritated back and forth of an archaeologist (Bains) trying to hold back the bulldozers. In other words, all the stuff we’ve definitely done before.

And so much of it is just stuff. There are loads of characters in this, and with no opportunities for the Doctor, Fitz or Anji (in any combination) to pal up we’re forever cutting between micro-storylines. Yes I know that you know that I hate this approach, and to be fair Emmerson is quite adept at it, for example cutting away from character combo A because one of them answered the doorbell so now we’re following character combo B; it’s thinly spread but at least it’s not too all over the place. But each section of this is barely moving, with e.g. Bains’s attempt to get another look at the dig site needing practically the entire novel to take off. (At one point he gives up and goes to a bar to reminisce about his sad romantic history. We cut away and then return to find him still there.)

Even the Doctor’s outrage at the mistreatment of the kids isn’t a prime mover: it’s just A to B, well of course he’s not going to be pleased about that, followed by well-he’s-not-going-to-be-able-to-do-anything-about-it-until-later-on. By the time he is, bundling the kids and Bains into a helicopter — two birds with one stone there — we for some reason skip and summarise the bit where the Doctor rescues them and Bains is introduced to them, which might have been quite interesting. Similarly, shortly afterwards the Doctor plucks the answer to the psi-kids and the ancient ruins seemingly out of thin air. That’s not the most satisfying conclusion to a mystery, but then if you will spend the entire book on “the Doctor pretends to be someone they were expecting” and “military mind probes” then what else can you do at the climax?

It’s just maddening how the “psi-kids” thing feels like a book that’s happening next door. There are references to how they’ve responded to and attacked their captors — they haven’t done much if you think about it, since they’re still captive — but not enough is done to support the flimsy idea that no one working here thinks it’s remotely iffy to treat them like this, calling them “evil” and “monsters” when they’re just very unusual two-month-olds being, y’know, tortured. A bit of nuance would be nice when the story’s already so black and white that it’s about child torture — it won’t exactly need to work overtime to get the reader on the kids’ side, will it? So why not try to understand the bad guys?

To be fair, Emmerson puts the time in there, marooning us with Foley (military), Perón (military doctor) and Tyran (head of the operation and one letter away from “tyrant”, so I’ll let you guess whether he’s a nice boss). There are flashes of maybe-they’re-okay-actually with some of them, but a violent return to form is always on the cards, so those end up feeling a bit pointless. As for Tyran, he’s actually got a compelling reason to force through the development of Ceres Alpha in that Earth is close to uninhabitable — we could definitely do something with that, but no such luck. We do however tie his story into Bains’s woes, but it’s done with as much care and setup as the Doctor’s “eureka!” moment with the kids, i.e. suddenly and very near the end, so to call it unconvincing would be kind. We don’t do a thing with it afterwards, naturally.

There isn’t much connective tissue between the “military bulldozing the planet” plot and the psi-kids, at least until the Doctor checks his magic 8-ball, but there are a few things on the sidelines. The parents of one of the kids, Veta and Josef, refuse to believe what they’ve been told and go on the rampage to find their baby. Promising and potentially powerful stuff here, and it lets the mother take the lead with all the clever problem-solving stuff, which feels like a turn up. (I don’t care much for Foley, Perón or Ayla, but at least all these prominent characters are women. Dark Progeny does quite well at the Bechdel test.) It might have been better if there was a genuine link between them and their child — this is surely possible, given his powers — but as it is, when they’re reunited it’s as dramatic as the plot demands, yet not exactly a punch the air moment. There’s nothing to really tell the kids apart, there’s no scene of Veta and Josef’s kid going “has anyone seen my mum and dad?”, and the Doctor doesn’t even know his parents are around. As to any others out there, god knows.

We also have Anji, who (as you’ve probably sussed) is under the psychic weather because the kids reached out to her too hard. (They did this to her and not the Doctor or Fitz because she is a woman, and not because she has ever expressed maternal feelings, which is perhaps half a step backwards on the whole Bechdel thing. Ah well.) Giving the companion a link to the tortured kids feels like a neat way to get the book’s emotions straight into our veins, but alas, that’s not the plan: Anji spends about a hundred pages unconscious, another third of it stuck in hospital, and the in-between bits trying fruitlessly to find the Doctor. Emmerson writes Anji well enough when he does it, bringing up her young brother for the closest comparison to all this, but like the kid stuff generally there seems to be an open goal where there should be substance.

Don’t even get me started on Fitz. I think it’s safe to assume there wasn’t room for another guy in Emmerson’s outline, because Fitz is separated from the others at the start and they spend the rest of the book acting on the assumption that he’s dead, so never mind. When (like Anji) he is resuscitated he’s stuck on the planet’s surface, nowhere near the plot, so there’s nothing useful for him to do. He subsequently (deep breath) gets captured, escapes, gets recaptured, escapes, is briefly recaptured, escapes, is then recaptured again, escapes again, and then meets up with the Doctor, at which point they’re all captured. (I’ll leave you in suspense about what happens next.) Fitz also flirts a bit with his rescuer Ayla and at one point he has a shower. Solid gold. This whole thread feels like an unintended parody of how little plot the book has. At least, I hope it’s unintentional.

There isn’t much to tell Dark Progeny apart from your Kursaals or your Face-Eaters, but Steve Emmerson’s writing stands out a bit, as it did in Casualties Of War. Unfortunately this isn’t always to the good: he tends to over-do it for effect, giving us curiously overwrought statements like “An immense silence stretched between them, like a cold dark ocean filled with fear” and not-meant-to-be-funny ones like “The room was filled with a screaming baby.” Physical descriptions try slightly too hard and become a bit disembodied, such as “She insinuated a wry smile into her face,” and he’s entirely too fond of adverbs, leading to the occasional awkwardness or traffic jam like “Josef shook his head sorrily.” / “Now the electrical activity in the brain was flatlining extremely worryingly.” / “Ultimately, he invariably got his way.” / “Carly Dimitri wondered what he had in mind for this poor man who had somehow inadvertently, most probably quite innocently, crossed Tyran’s path.” That last one sounds like he’s keying up the Lollipop Guild.

It settles down after a little while though, and then the prose bounces along harmlessly enough. There are nice moments like the aforementioned link to Anji’s brother, the Doctor doing a spot of ventriloquism, and this enjoyable Tom Baker-ish non sequitur when he meets the baddie: “‘Mr Tyran. It’s a very dubious pleasure to meet the man responsible for the atrocities I’ve witnessed down in your so-called medicare unit.’ The smile was up full volume, as if [the Doctor] were genuinely complimenting Tyran on an exceptionally well-run operation.” There are also some moments of horror that recall Casualties Of War, such as telekinetic attacks, a zombie (for a split second) and Tyran hallucinating a dead relative who behaves very inappropriately. We could have done with more of this (as in the horror, not the creepy mum) to more consistently inform the novel’s tone, but those bits at least made it not entirely a sci-fi runaround. It’s bad luck, though, that he goes all in on the scariness of rats, as I’ve been an enthusiastic keeper of pet ratties for years now. My main negative emotion about them is that one of the little sods may have stolen my dinner. Otherwise they’re cute little beans that don’t, in fact, hiss.

I can’t help rooting for Steve Emmerson after that joyous initial reading of Casualties Of War, so I feel a bit mean for not enjoying his follow up very much. I’d point the finger at the editors too, however: there should be more pushback on books that sound like we’ve already read them, there should be somebody to spot the lack of forward motion in the plot (as well as sudden wafts of it towards the end), and “is it horror or isn’t it” was a question worth asking earlier in the writing process. As before, there’s a better book in here somewhere, but it needed to commit to its more compelling parts, and perhaps leave the mind probes and the escape/recaptures in the recycle bin. As it is, Dark Progeny is an “another one” book for completists only.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #96 – Byzantium! by Keith Topping

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#44

Byzantium!

By Keith Topping

My first impression on plucking this one from the bookshelf was similar to the first impression of the bowl of petunias plummeting to its doom in Hitchhiker’s Guide: oh no, not again.

I did not like The King Of Terror very much. Horses for courses – there are enthusiastic reviews for it out there (NZDWFC gave it 5/5), so what do I know? But I still found it a rocky read with its off-the-chain violence, poorly-judged character swings and bizarre air of silliness that seemed to throw the whole thing even more off course. I was surprised to see the author back again so soon.

His next effort is a very different beast. (Whether that has anything to do with The King Of Terror, I don’t know.) Byzantium! is still a fairly violent story but it’s set in a violent time, so that tracks; there is still a little bit of silliness, but it’s in manageable doses; and as for the wild character swings, well there are still a few of those. (Whoops.) Bottom line, it’s a more reasoned and less frantic novel than his last one. Phew.

The setup is a bit unusual. At first it seems like Topping is going to replace The Romans outright, as the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki appear fresh from the cliffhanger of The Rescue with the TARDIS falling off a cliff. (Vicki is clearly new here which also dates it.) They are in Byzantium (duh) rather than Rome, but otherwise it’s the same time period as The Romans. This all turns out to be an extended prologue to the televised story, ending with the TARDIS in Rome and the travellers on their way to find it. That’s an interesting proposition for a novel, sticking another adventure onto an existing one, but it begs the question: is there much you can do that won’t just repeat The Romans?

The basic gist is similar. The four characters are separated in a Roman city and they must work to get back together and find the TARDIS. But since we’ve got the added scope of a novel it can be a much bigger separation than what we got on TV, aka a home invasion. Here, violent Zealots start a riot in a bustling city square, killing many and forcing the four travellers to go their separate ways. Each is completely oblivious to the fate of the others.

This is a good way for us to explore the makeup of Byzantium. Ian gets into the good graces of the Romans, seeing the high society on offer to a select few; Barbara is gradually trusted by the Jews, aka a more everyday society whose antipathy boils over into the Zealots; Vicki is taken in by a family of Greeks, the downtrodden native group who have every reason to hate the Romans; and the Doctor finds himself with a band of Christians, currently the city’s outliers and quick to be persecuted while they work on the tenets of their religion. Byzantium is a powder keg and if the Zealots hadn’t lit the fuse then somebody else would have.

I think Topping’s right in that this is a situation worth exploring, even if it means bolting your book onto an existing telly script. The tricky bit is the number of moving parts, and how to get momentum out of each one. Where The Romans split into fairly archetypal parts of Roman society, allowing for clear and dynamic action in each one (slaves, assassins, the front and back of the Emperor’s court), Byzantium! concerns a complex society with many different ingredients. Frankly there are a lot of characters and they don’t all have particularly pressing goals – irritations, dislikes and suspicions, yes, but not much in the way of a mission. This even extends to the regulars, who from the outset either assume that their friends are dead or otherwise can’t get any immediate help to find out more, so just carry on with what they’re doing. This is critical: the impetus for The Romans (find each other and get back to the villa) isn’t there, so despite the more violent and exciting inciting incident Byzantium! veers away from the more usual quest narrative, resembling a slice of life drama instead.

That’s not a bad thing – it would be redundant to repeat the telly story any more than we’re already doing just by setting this one so close to it. But it does mean spending great swathes of the novel wondering when the Doctor, Ian, Barbara or Vicki are going to get a ruddy move on and start looking for one another. There is drama to be had in the meantime, with the Zealots planning further outrage and a Roman mutiny in the offing, but while these things have clear figureheads and they could result in bloodshed, all the same it’s a bit difficult to track their progress in such a densely populated story. One very-full-of-himself Roman officer or promiscuous-and-power-hungry Roman wife is very much like another after a while, and the Zealots aren’t in it much comparatively.

This is where our four characters come in handy, anchoring the action. Barbara moves past the initial suspicion of the Jewish quarter but never dispels it entirely; she captures the eye of Hieronymous, an officer with great sway, and later rebuffs him painfully, which all feels very “60s Doctor Who episode”. His decision, once spurned, to persecute the Christians to an ever greater degree felt like a turning point in the plot (page 160!) but it doesn’t hugely change things, although it does add some serious light and shade to the Jewish characters. The Doctor, meanwhile, has quite a nice time helping to translate and write the gospel of Mark, which is “the equivalent of collaborating with Shakespeare between draft one and draft two of Hamlet.” He’s initially a rather bleak figure here, weighed down by the loss of his friends, which puts him in a good position to be buoyed by the Christians. (There’s probably something to be said by someone more religiously-minded than me about the emphasis on peaceful Christianity in this book versus the other religions, but I’ll have to sit it out as it’s all Greek to me. So to speak.)

Vicki has perhaps the biggest character arc in Byzantium!, eventually becoming the focal point to get the gang back together. Straight away she goes from the raw nerve of The Rescue to yet another tragedy in (apparently) losing the TARDIS crew. It makes sense that she feels out of place pretty much for the entire book, befriending a young Greek girl but incurring the wrath of her mother. She is clearly still coming to terms with growing up – something that Topping elucidates quite well at times, less well at others.

The problem is her blunt, occasionally just plain weird manner of speaking. “Sorry but that’s, like, pure dead easy for you to say.” / “That sounds peachy-fine to me.” / “Look, don’t trade any of that philosophical babble with me, old man.” It just doesn’t sound like her. I think Topping covers this somewhat by emphasising her insecurities: “She came from an age of computers, electronics, space travel, interactive learning, virtual reality, chemical stimulation, instant maturity. She was fourteen, going on 108, yet to these people … she was what appeared to be to the naked eye: a mere child.” Later a character calls her on it: “You are a child, my angel. Oh, you try to obscure that. You like to think that you are old before your time. That you have had your childhood stolen by tragedy and circumstance. You have seen much that the likes of I shall never see. But, at heart, you are still blessed with the vigour of youth and the freedom that goes with it.” None of this quite squares with the fact that Maureen O’Brien was given generally sweet and innocent dialogue on screen, or at least dialogue that runs counter to the grouchy teen we see here, but at least there’s a rationale.

Then you have Ian. Story-wise it’s not bad stuff: he befriends some officers and a respected librarian (called Fabulous – this isn’t important, I just thought you should know) which gives him a passing familiarity with the local politics and shenanigans and makes it easier for us to follow it. He also finds himself fending off advances from wives and female slaves, lending a little of that farcical flavour from The Romans. Honestly this kind of thing feels more suited to Steven Taylor, or even Fitz – and it’s especially odd where Byzantium! is bookended with “Ian and Barbara married in the 1970s” vignettes but the book offers no material about their relationship. (Ian isn’t even saying “no” because his heart lies elsewhere. He just doesn’t want anyone to have another reason to murder him.)

His dialogue is the bigger issue, though. For whatever reason Topping characterises Ian as a Cockney wide-boy, with all sorts of sayings and dismissive bits of slang that just sound bizarre coming from the generally-RP schoolteacher. “Do you mind awfully if I get up, only it pen and inks a bit down here.” / “Okay, so the former lady of the house goes like the netty door when the plague’s in town.” / “If you want to talk geography, darlin’, then fine.” / “It was a well-known fact (which Barbara Wright had spotted some time ago) that it was the quiet birds that always got Ian Chesterton’s attention. She was peach [sic], this slave girl.” Again, the basic skeleton of this seems right enough for the era: he was similarly well-in with the local court in The Crusade, and he gets an inscribed weapon here to match his Knighthood there. It’s just weird that an author as specific about the nerdy details could swing and miss so hard on what the character sounds like. (Meanwhile he makes time for Billy fluffs, having the Doctor say “Cheddarton” and “Chestington” on the same page.)

There are other peculiar details. The Doctor seems to know Vicki’s future, somehow. (“I shall take care of [Vicki], [he] said quietly. ‘Her destiny was mapped for her thousands of years before she was ever born.” I’m guessing this is a general “make the Doctor seem more mystical” gimmick?) He also mentions Mondas, despite not finding out about that until his final story. (Same again?) There’s a possible cameo from an older Vicki, or “Cressida” anyway, even though the dates for that don’t remotely line up. There’s the strange detail that the TARDIS fell off a cliff at the end of The Rescue, where we find it at the beginning of Byzantium!, but it presumably needs do so again once it gets to Rome in order for the stories to link up. (One of those funny little messes that the story, in trying to be clever, creates for itself.) On the whole though, Byzantium! plays it straight – although there is a bit where someone says “What have the Romans ever done for us?” I guess he just couldn’t help himself. (Honourable wackiness mention: the exclamation mark in the title.)

I mention all of this because The King Of Terror (again) had a tendency towards quirky, ill-judged asides. Byzantium! also does that a little, but it’s subtle, for instance using the flight of a passing bird to connect various scenes, or lines like: “When Georgadis and Evangeline awoke a sleepy Vicki to give her similar news…” or “Ian Chesterton had hardly slept either, though for vastly different reasons.” I have a well-documented (moaned about) dislike of frequent scene changes in books and that’s obviously going to occur in a book with four protagonists, but this feels like a graceful way to handle it. The same applies to the character descriptions. Overly detailed to the point of distraction in TKOT, here it’s mostly left to our imaginations, or otherwise handled with care. “Handsome and dignified, a thin and wiry frame that spoke of many meals missed so that others could eat instead” beats pretty much any attempt in the earlier book. Byzantium! probably benefits from less zany subject matter and tone than its predecessor, but it just feels overall like a more assured piece of writing. (Just for posterity though, there are quite a few typos in it, and at least one historical snafu re Prometheus being transposed to Rome as Vulcan – that was Hephaestus, surely? But it mostly goes off without a hitch.)

It’s hard to disagree with Ian’s uncertain summary at the end: “Is it just me, or didn’t we solve anything?” Byzantium! presents a complicated problem (a place teeming with different peoples and interests; conflicts within conflicts) and just watches it all fall apart. The main characters don’t influence it much, and I’m not sure what they learn from it other than a generally better or more bloody-nosed understanding of history. (The Doctor gets this in early: “Do you really believe everything you read in those history books of yours, child? Do you think it was all that simple?”) I’ve seen Byzantium! criticised for a lack of plot and I can’t really dispute that; it feels like we have four protagonists mostly just sat about existing in a troubled place. It could certainly be tighter and more exciting – somehow, it’s more low-key than the story it’s (by implication) expanding upon. And yet, I liked hanging around here, watching the world go by, wincing at the occasional murder. It’s strangely peaceful. I do quite want to watch The Romans now, though.

7/10