Doctor Who: The BBC Books #129 – The Last Resort by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#64

The Last Resort

By Paul Leonard

Well, if anyone’s going to make this arc work, it’s Paul Leonard. His earlier novel Genocide essentially already covered it: a different timeline supplants Earth’s “normal” one and the Doctor has to make a terrible choice between the two.

It’s quite telling that, as with the Time Zero run, that book had an out whereby if you don’t destroy the aberrant timeline then the whole planet/universe dies anyway. There was no choice at all, really, but Leonard still got a lot of pathos out of his “Which one deserves to live?” debate, a sort of time travel twist on Doctor Who And The Silurians.

Fast forward to The Last Resort and we’ve already had that debate again via The Domino Effect and Reckless Engineering. “No choice at all really” hung over both, despite Anji and Fitz’s protestations that (for example) the miserable survivors of the Cleansing had as much right to exist as anybody else. Such moral grandstanding is fruitless when it’s all destined to go phut in a minute anyway, to say nothing of how particularly wretched both alternate realities were.

It’s perhaps for that reason that Leonard doesn’t rehash the argument a third time. Instead we find a version of Earth absolutely riddled with time travellers thanks to an apparently easy-going tourist industry called Good Times. This is amusing at first, with e.g. the Pharaoh of “the Two Egypts” being someone that must take time out of his day to pose for pictures. But it’s clear right away that, like a quantum experiment, history changes when outsiders come and gawp at it, and it loses something: “The guards stood by, resplendent and holy, and the women flapped the long fronds of palm, but they were gestures, camera-fodder; the guards unarmed, the women unneeded in the air-conditioned throne room.”

Leonard’s aim with The Last Resort is not to get whimsical with the tourist biz, despite Fitz and Anji getting jobs within the company. Nor is it to justify keeping or deleting versions of history – there are too many to begin making a case, such as a reality with “little grey men” on Mars whom Earth has enslaved, one where mysterious aliens conquered Earth in the past and the people there developed time powers, and ancient civilisations partnered with McDonalds. The novel isn’t about to interrogate its unique brand of cultural appropriation, although there are references to locals without time technology being viewed as “timeys,” an under-class. It also doesn’t, since we’re listing things, get into the nitty gritty of the brutal “Time Police” who react with lethal force to unauthorised time travellers, even if they are children. Those guys are simply around, a nasty part of the furniture.

The Last Resort has a lot of furniture. You could write several novels using these ideas, which is apt given that it’s about a profusion of different timelines rather than a single “wrong” one in place of ours. What Leonard really draws attention to is the mess of it all. The Last Resort takes the idea of competing timelines to its limit and shows us reality breaking down, individual experiences ceasing to make any sense and a general overwhelming sense of chaos. The novel works as a sort of hype man for the arc, showing how bad things can get. (Or showing that sort of thing again if you happened to pick up Loving The Alien a month earlier. This one does it better.)

A recurring problem with this arc (and a recurring thing that I’ve moaned about, so I’ll keep this brief) is the lack of consequences for doomed alternates: there is arguably no point investing in e.g. a reality if we know it’s on the chopping block. The Last Resort shifts the focus to make it more personal instead. First there is the knee-jerk horror of a 14-year-old boy getting executed at the side of a road simply for having invented a time machine. You hardly need a lot of time in his presence to care about that. The temporal nature of the story however means that this sort of thing will keep happening, which of course then risks falling into the “so what” trap: if another one will be along in a minute, did the last one matter? To which, yes. Awareness is a key factor here. Characters like Jack gradually realise that versions of them are dying over and over, and that they themselves are likely to die and won’t be the last. There is a dread as well as a perverse sense of routine about all this that gradually hits harder than the Doctor grimly but inevitably hitting the reset button at the end.

Not knowing whether you are the “real” one (aka the lucky one) or just another body is an anxiety fairly unique to this book. There are multiple set-pieces that underline it, such as Fitz discovering a version of Anji that died knowing Fitz couldn’t be rescued until she was gone, or the climax with thousands of each character and Anji, seeing “her” Fitz die, trying to join him rather than go on with a mix-and-match group. This whole temporal charnel house adds weight to Anji’s statement, repeated here from Reckless Engineering: “I knew I was expendable.” She’s right this time, with the Doctor bleakly observing that “More people have to die” to resolve the crisis. (Including him, to be fair.) It’s endless, but no less painful for that.

The Last Resort does a great job of suggesting the human cost of all this nonsensical time-bending, which to be fair includes its share of outright murders as well as people just blipping neatly out of existence. TL;DR, murders still matter even when there are other versions of the victim still alive. What it perhaps conveys less well is plot.

This might be one of the most outright confusing Doctor Who novels there’s ever been, and deliberately so. Leonard embraces the confounding nature of paradoxes and time spillage; he plays games with the reader by repeating the same sequences with a few minor tweaks, playing out a scenario differently to test your observational skills. (And perhaps, patience.) The whole novel isn’t like that, but he makes more out of it than The Infinity Race which did something similar not long ago. Chapter numbers become a complete nonsense because of it.

Leonard plays games on a larger scale as well, running plot threads with duplicate characters (Anji, Fitz, Jack, the Doctor, a time-sensitive woman from the past called Iyeeye) who then meet other duplicate characters, sometimes without realising it. The general impetus is to chase each other from one time to another and try to prevent the other’s death, only to discover that they themselves are “destined” to die according to some flim-flam plan posited by the Doctor – or at least a Doctor. Anji at one point comes up with a fairly convincing explanation for all this and writes it down for Fitz in a “pause to take stock” moment reminiscent of Doc Brown’s blackboard in Back To The Future Part II, only for Fitz to then denounce it as “rubbish” and “totally crap logic,” leaving himself and the reader back at square one – and pointing once again to the colossal mess on display, and the apparent futility of understanding it.

This feels like a deliberate effort rather than a lack of one. There are numerous references along these lines: “Don’t expect complete answers, Jack. It’s not even that I don’t know what they are. There just aren’t any, not any more.” / “I’ve met a couple of other people that might have been me. I don’t know which version, or who, or how, or when any more. I kind of got tired of trying to work it out.” / “At the moment, the only casualty is the one you make up yourself.” It’s telling that we have a guest point of view character, Jack, who despite his prodigious intelligence is an innocent and has no idea what’s going on: he’s there to help us understand, only instead of breaking down the problem into bitesize chunks he ends up as confused or otherwise at risk of sudden death and going back to square one as everyone else. Even the Doctor occasionally finds himself outfoxed by events, or the sheer scale of the problem, or himself, referring to his own efforts here as one of his greatest mistakes.

I think it depends on the reader whether this is all a mess, or a deliberate mess, and then whether there’s any functional difference between the two. The climax doesn’t help, or it didn’t help me anyway: events escalate, we feel the emotion of Anji trying to rationalise her place in this maelstrom of death and duplicates, and then blessedly a solution is reached but I had a hard time pinning down exactly what it was. The Last Resort just seems to scream progressively louder about the dangers of timelines intersecting and people duplicating until, well, boom. And then all of a sudden it’s “now let’s see what the next book does with all this.”

Is it too obvious to say that it gets lost in its own corridors? Again, that feels like the plan from the outset: look at the state of all this, Leonard seems to say, look at what it costs for these characters to stay remotely sane/alive from minute to minute. And those can be compelling questions. There’s a sense of exploring a concept to its baffling conclusion, if baffling it be, that recalls Jim Mortimore’s The Sword Of Forever. I could understand readers being turned off by it.

While I left this book none the wiser, I was never exactly mad about it because there seemed to be that sense of intention. Leonard’s take on the arc is more intense than the fairly rote “what if x instead of y” alt-histories we’ve had so far, and being Paul Leonard he manages to do some interesting character work even in a veritable plot hurricane. Anji’s weariness is more physically earned than ever; the Doctor’s shadiness is more at the forefront than I’m used to (helped by keeping him out of the book for 150 pages, increasing that sense of “what’s he up to?”); even Sabbath is written in a fairly interesting way. It’s no coincidence that the Sabbath books I like the best – this, Adventuress, Camera Obscura – are the ones where he is the least overtly villainous. His observation here that “The Doctor does what he has to. As do I. As do we all” does a better job of levelling the playing field between them than some of the feeble “We’re not so different, you and I” stuff we’ve had in other books. I’m not entirely convinced by his general conviviality here, but it beats being a Bond villain. The only issue with the Doctor’s murkiness is the double-edged sword of keeping him out of the way for so long: there isn’t time to examine it. Or even to be sure which one we’re talking to. There is merely the sense that things really are that bad that the niceties have finally gone.

I think you could dig in here and write a different, but also good book about funny time tourism, or the social conflict caused by it, or the Time Police, or the existential nightmare of reality changing all around you. (Or the side character from an earlier book who it turns out has been loitering out of sight all along, just as I initially suspected.) I still appreciated the mad muddle of all of the above that we got instead. The Last Resort is what happens when the proverbial hits the fan and it feels like it. It is most likely impenetrable for anyone other than a die-hard Doctor Who fan, and perhaps also a bit impenetrable for a die-hard Doctor Who fan. God help us, it really ought not to set an example for how to tell a Doctor Who story, though it’s an admittedly interesting approach for an author now on his tenth (and sadly, last) book. As far as the arc goes this ends up as a desperate cry for it to end, and soon – but as a sort of tone experiment about being at the front lines of a temporal disaster, I got into it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #128 – Loving The Alien by Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#60

Loving The Alien

By Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

Perhaps the biggest difference between the EDAs and the PDAs is their relationship with continuity. The EDAs are an ongoing series full of call-backs, whereas the PDAs are chocolate box adventures set at random times in the show’s history. Both approaches have merit and it’s great that BBC Books supported both — having first ripped off Virgin’s operating model, of course.

I mention this because, buried in the PDAs, Mike Tucker and Robert Perry were quietly having their cake and eating it too. Theirs was a string of novels in direct continuity with each other, effectively marking out their own Season Twenty-Seven. These books followed the Seventh Doctor and Ace through various stressful experiences with Cybermen, Jack the Ripper, sea monsters and (sans Perry) a Vengeance On Varos-style TV nightmare. The latter novel also set up a crisis with Ace’s impending death, with which Dale Smith’s Heritage was also in conversation, thereby joining Tucker and Perry’s potted season. (The likes of The Hollow Men and Independence Day presumably were not invited.) This was all building up to something and at long last Loving The Alien is it.

There’s an appropriate sense of end-of-season excitement about it, at least judging by the madcap scale of the thing. Loving The Alien starts with a disastrous and mystifying space shuttle launch and later encompasses giant ants, cyborg gorillas and warring universes, ending with a regular character getting turned into a kaiju. It’s the sort of confidently goofy story that can get away with lines like “It’s no good, the radiation has made them impervious to bullets!”

Your mileage may vary as to whether it’s ambitious or just self-congratulatory to tie all this back to the authors’ earlier Illegal Alien. It’s hard to ignore the latter possibility when the authors go to the effort of adding footnotes referencing other novels, mostly theirs. Nevertheless, Illegal Alien ended with the promise of more so I think harking back to the past makes sense as a way to wrap things up. It’s suitably impressive to do all this after a 6-year gap as well.

Of course the inciting incident is more recent. The Doctor has been putting off Ace’s apparent demise as long as possible, but now he feels he’d better tackle it head-on. They land in London 1959, him knowing she has only days before she ends up buried with a bullet hole. This is a very Seventh Doctor (and frankly, New Adventures-y) setup for a novel: the Doctor trying to out-manoeuvre time itself.

Odd, then, that he gets so sidetracked. Intrigued and worried by anachronisms such as a British space program, the Doctor encourages Ace to toddle off with a tracking device secreted on her person while he investigates the failed rocket launch, as this may have far-reaching consequences.

In the moment there is perhaps something genuine and human (well, you know what I mean) about the Doctor making a mistake like this despite all his preparation. There’s an irony in the great game player not counting on Ace’s sense of outrage when she finds the device and goes off the grid in a huff, ironically making her death more likely. Similar can be said for Ace’s indignation: you might argue that by now she ought to trust that he has a good reason for this, but then independence has always been a sticking point between the two of them, so she might well have a melt-down over it. (She sees reason after a bit of time to cool off.) All that said, as the payoff to an arc that’s merely 3 years old (!) this is frustrating, especially after Heritage taught the Doctor to pay more attention to his friends. That was literally the reason he came here.

With a story like this, you might have to forgive him for getting distracted. Tucker and Perry lay the action on thick: characters are forever getting into fights or kidnapped. (The Doctor manages it at least twice, under threat of vivisection.) A surprising amount of the book goes by before the Doctor knows who’s behind it all and then, when he figures it out, what the villain wants; he’s too busy just sort of generally being in the thick of it. I got the impression that the authors were having much the same experience, as when we finally get there (the bad guy wants to avoid his predetermined death by… starting a nuclear war?) it’s simply more madcap stuff heaped on top of everything else like ice cream.

The plot escalates in much the same way, aka one nutty thing after another. Britain has a space program! The astronauts have swapped mid-mission somehow! Giant ants are attacking! Russian spies — or are they? — are working out of London Zoo! The zoo has cyborg gorillas! There are also cyborg guerrillas! There’s a parallel universe where mankind is inexorably heading towards the fate of Mondas! A nuclear war might start at any moment! James Dean is back! In amongst all that it’s difficult getting to grips with a singular threat, or even what anyone is trying to achieve from scene to scene besides capturing, or being captured. This is ultimately revealed as “the villain’s tampering has destabilised the multiverse so an implosion is imminent,” which is a solid enough idea, though perhaps it’s an odd choice where the EDAs were concurrently doing exactly the same thing as a multi-book arc. Editor? (Mind you, with only a little massaging this could fit as one of the alternatives post-Time Zero. So maybe the timing was deliberate…?)

I found that the best way to engage with Loving The Alien was via the characters. There isn’t anything very deep occurring here, but there is a general amiable quality to e.g, the misadventures of Cody McBride and Chief Inspector Mullen, both back from Illegal Alien. Their camaraderie, especially after Mullen suffers a terrible accident and McBride sticks by him, is a nice little through line. I enjoyed Rita Hawks, American journalist (there are a lot of Americans in this for some reason) who gets marooned on Earth’s Mondas-like twin. That sequence didn’t add much beyond the sort of “this ain’t right” anachronism that The Domino Effect and Reckless Engineering already traded in, and if anything the whole “Earth-Mondas” thing warrants a much greater exploration than the “minor subplot number 3” treatment it receives here, but Rita is a persuasive presence during it.

And then there are the villains. Spoiler alert: George Limb, deceptively kind elderly genius, is back and once again he’s meddling in things above his temporal pay-grade. The whole *gestures at Loving The Alien* mess is his fault. Tucker and Perry are pleased with their bad guy, and to some extent I get it: he doesn’t seem outright “evil” a lot of the time, which sort of second-handedly suggests complexity. He’s more in the line of Sabbath, all “trust me with the cosmos, I know what I’m doing.” He still doesn’t in any way warrant Ace’s very excitable summation: “Of all the people she’d met on her travels with the Doctor, all the enemies they’d fought, she hated George Limb more than any of them.” Although, perhaps to retroactively earn this title, he does then kill her just so he can create a bit of timey wimey admin that will lure the Doctor here, which is at least psychopath-adjacent. (He apparently believes he can undo it all. To quote the Toymaker: well, that’s all right then!) Our cardigan-wearing time meddler wants to nuke the world, then he doesn’t, and he’s spinning all sorts of plates including murder traps and pretending to be a psychiatrist and it’s all just a bit… start with the finale and work backwards.

He has also recruited — and therefore, rescued — James Dean, which much like the Mondas thing probably ought to be more interesting than just a TARDIS Wiki curio. Hey ho. He gets a few hysterical “acting” moments, is rather improbably used as a honeypot for Ace, possibly impregnates her (that bit might have been a lie) and then he apparently dies in an ironic recreation of his real life accident. This creates another spooky crossover with the EDAs (hello again, The Domino Effect) viz getting awfully fresh with the life and death of someone whose life ended in tragedy. I’m not a particularly huge James Dean fan but even so, I mean, must you?

“Amiable” and “goofy” are the best descriptors I can find for Loving The Alien, at least on the complimentary side. It’s a crazy, pulpy B-Movie that aims for spectacle and pop-colour and romps along (mostly) harmlessly. A fair chunk of it feels unjustified beyond the sheer silly oomf of doing it in the first place, like the giant ants (why just ants?) and the aforementioned movie star, but it’s broadly a good time for the most part.

I wish I could say that after all that it stuck the landing, but it doesn’t. The whole thread of Ace’s impending (and then actual) death gets lost in the noise, with the Doctor hopelessly one step behind until it’s too late, then simply busying around in the hope of avenging it somehow. Where is Time’s Champion, and all that? (Heck, where’s the guy from Heritage?) Tucker and Perry at least contrive an out for Ace, which then provides one of the zaniest moments in the book (and easily the bit I remembered most vividly after reading it years ago) – giant Ace! While you’re reeling from her sudden Monty Python-esque arrival the pages begin winding down fast, and then the book ends a full 10 pages below average – which can be a fine place to cut it, but in this case I think they could have used the space.

Is Ace, our Ace, dead then? Is this a substitute? She’s physically different, lacking any evidence of the adventure, but then the Doctor pontificates that “She is Ace. The only Ace.” But what is “self” if she’s been beamed in from somewhere else? Is this just about timelines? What about lived experiences? Presumably we’re meant to be sopped by the way that everything else has been shrugged back into shape at the last moment – well, most of it, since no thought is given to how divergent this Earth has got, let alone the Mondas one. We just end on a cheery bar scene with Ace saying “Wicked!” like she wasn’t, um, you know. Like James Dean, it’s difficult not to detect a bad taste here, especially in a story where Ace’s autonomy is such a factor (for good and bad) in their relationship. In the end, capping off five novels with one that mostly doesn’t feature her — we don’t even see them reunite! — we examine none of it  We’re off to the pictures instead.

I wonder if Heritage derailed anything here. We’ve had a meditative “your friends are going to die” story now, so perhaps the relevant parts of this one had to go. But somehow I doubt it: Loving The Alien is so all-in whackadoo that this must surely have been the plan all along. I think they’re just… like that. While I’ve got to give it points for commitment to the bit, and for essentially being fine as a bit of pulpy guff, it’s probably the least effective Tucker & Perry novel, jarringly displaying both a front-line fondness for the characters and their era as well as a willingness to, not to put too fine a point on it, blow one of their heads off and move on like nothing happened. It’s not unlike the multiverse it throws into peril: ideas struggling for prominence. The result is chaos.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #127 – Reckless Engineering by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#63

Reckless Engineering

By Nick Walters

It’s time for another roll of the dice as the TARDIS lands on another version of Earth, all aboard hoping that they’ve jiggered the temporal whatsits sufficiently that this is now their Earth. Fat chance.

The Domino Effect presented a planet that wasn’t just different but recognisably wrong. Progress had been stunted, the worst brought out in people – it was not a place you’d want to live. These issues were eventually “resolved” by tossing the whole world in the bin and setting off a chain reaction of similar “wrong” timelines for the Doctor to weed out. Reckless Engineering is sure enough another one of those, so once again we have a world that has skewed onto a tangent, only this time it’s even worse. Following a cataclysm nearly all animal life on Earth is gone. The remaining people live in a pre-Industrial wasteland.

For a series built on the exciting premise of going anywhere and doing anything it’s a curious choice to point at Sliders and say “yeah, but what if we did that instead.” Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with showing different versions of Earth – it worked for Sliders, but that was a show largely predicated on getting the hell out of each new version of Earth. Not so much Doctor Who: in the series proper, our characters effect meaningful change whenever they land somewhere, and if they don’t then that becomes the whole point of the adventure. (See Inferno for an alternate-Earth example.) Contrast that with this mini-run of novels where from the outset we know these Earths are wrong, and the only possible outcome is that they will be tossed in the trash or – trying to suspend disbelief here since I have yet to see a second outcome – maybe the Doctor will just leave and seal them off somehow? Either way, it seems foolish to get attached or invest in any of the minutiae. None of which is Nick Walters’ fault, or David Bishop’s, or Paul Leonard’s since he’s doing the next one, but by gum it makes this arc difficult to care about.

Really all you’ve got to glom onto is whatever the author of the week does for their terrible Earth, and to his credit Nick Walters has a good idea. In 1843 something happened that caused all animal life to get 40 years older. This instantly killed hundreds of millions of people along with most (possibly all?) of Earth’s fauna. The survivors had it even worse: anyone young enough to survive their four-decade mutation would have been so young that they had no idea what was happening. A generation of half-mad children in adult bodies was created. Cut to a century later and their descendants live mostly on bread and booze, unless you look in the less civilised areas where cannibalism reigns. All of this has something to do with a poet, Malahyde, as well as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and a curious house where time moves at a different speed.

Reckless Engineering contains a throwaway reference to John Wyndham which I suspect holds the key to the rest of it. The Cleansing (as Earth’s people politely name their cataclysm) sounds like something Wyndham would throw at us just to see what would happen next. As well as being revolting to think about the Cleansing puts humanity in an interesting spot afterwards, splitting them into the relatively civilised who are able to put themselves together and the “Wildren” who start out crazed and then stay there. Walters has thought about what would happen if we lacked animals for nourishment or (looking at this somewhat quizzically as someone who doesn’t eat meat) presumably any means to mass produce anything else. While I think this is a tad on the pessimistic side – what, so it’s literally bread or cannibalism? – it at least puts Anji into a situation where she contemplates the morality of eating people, considering one man to be: “a cannibal, yes, but not a fiend … A man is infinitely more complicated than a monster.” (You might wonder if BBC Books had a bit of a thing about cannibalism what with this, Combat Rock and Walters’ earlier Superior Beings, which had humans being eaten by aliens. No comment.)

Where Reckless Engineering diverges from The Day Of The Triffids (apart from the general lack of killer plants) is of course in its resolution, which defers to Doctor Who for its technobabble needs, and in its general lack of satire. The people of this world live miserable lives and are not great fun to be around. Aboetta is the closest we have to a fully rounded person, living in relative peace with Malahyde in his posh house before returning to her village to find that somehow ten years have passed there for her four months away. She reconsiders her lot in life, specifically the prospect of her old flame Robin. Aboetta’s dilemma might have been the heart of the novel, but given the general wet blanket qualities of Malahyde and the stout dreariness of Robin it’s difficult to read much into her eventual swing towards the poet beyond a preference for nice furniture over mud huts. Her general deportment, for example ditching the Doctor and co. after they saved her life, left her far from my sympathies when the novel reached its inevitable conclusion.

Walters finds other emotional beats in here but few of them pay dividends. Fitz and Anji both feel a kinship with this wrecked Earth, enough that they are shaken and appalled when (do I have to keep saying “inevitably”?) this version of Earth can’t stay put. Fitz goes all in: “And so what if there hadn’t been an Industrial Revolution? Perhaps that was a good thing — without the internal combustion engine, without the pollutants and effluents of industry, without man’s gradual enslavement to the machine, maybe the human race would retain its dignity.” / “All this represents the triumph of the human spirit.” We later learn that a malign influence is working on Fitz, the timeline “naturalising” him so that he starts to remember this version of reality in place of his own – a process that even affects the TARDIS and might in time claim the Doctor as well. This rather serves to neuter Fitz’s argument, but we circle back to it anyway at the end so he can throw a colossal wobbler about the Doctor’s indifference to the fate of Earth 3.0.

Much like the Sliders gambit there’s nothing verboten about debating the merits of individual timelines, even (or perhaps especially) ones that seem unappealing to the reader. Different experiences have value just as uncomfortable lives deserve to have been lived. This could be compelling. That said, there are things getting in the way of it working here. We already touched on these debates in The Domino Effect so they already feel a bit tired – you run that risk with a “same again please” arc like this one. Fitz is canonically out of his mind when he’s making these points again here. For all the book’s impassioned pleading on behalf of Robin et al we’re ignoring the malign killing of most of humanity and the devastation of Earth’s ecosystem — precisely the sort of hell these guys would normally do anything to prevent on their regular adventures.

The cherry on top is that there simply is no alternative. Left to merrily fester in their own crapulence, the denizens of Walters’ Earth would eventually cease to exist anyway due to the profusion of different timelines. And to make matters even worse (!), if that somehow didn’t happen then the malign alien plot behind the Cleansing would eventually destroy this universe outright. The only way for Fitz to make his argument is to steamroll this point entirely. The whole “what about Robin” debate is simply untenable, which makes it a decidedly wobbly basis for the apparent moral ambiguity of the ending. It just isn’t earned.

I’m not convinced that Reckless Engineering thought about very much besides its mad idea for the end of civilisation. On a character level it’s stop-start at best. Fitz is going through an interesting transition, but that mostly comes too late in the book to convince, and in any case it touches on things that boringly always seem to happen to him. (A different life away from the TARDIS, not sure which of his memories are real? Fancy.) Anji gets in some good yell-at-the-Doctor indignance, some of which is earned since he on two separate occasions uncharacteristically leaves her for dead. That said, her moral compass could do with some recalibrating: the bit where she talks about a morally grey cannibal dismisses the scene pages earlier where he admits to also being a rapist. Better is her outrage at the Doctor’s apparent sacrifice of a man to get them where they need to go, but her extrapolation afterwards that the Doctor would throw away all their lives is a bit far-fetched, as well as being yet another beat that was already covered in The Domino Effect.

It’s fair to say that the Doctor is unloveable in this, lacking many opportunities for charm and occasionally letting his companions down. (Even Fitz’s malaise is partly his fault, the Doctor having taken him at his word and let him stay behind, worsening his condition. For a moment Fitz regrets his choice. If only he’d waited…) The closest we have to positives here are a quite touching scene where he soothes a young woman affected by the Cleansing, and his general demeanour around Brunel once he’s collected from the past and brought into the TARDIS. (You knew they couldn’t resist.) His enthusiasm feels like his old self again. If the purpose of his journey overall is to paint a morally dubious character then it’s unconvincing – he simply seems a bit messy here, working in service of a moral dilemma that’s stacked to fall one way regardless of anybody’s feelings. Which, as established, ought largely to be of the “Good, this place sucks, dump it” variety, since no particular case is made for why anyone should be (or is) happy here.

The plot ticks along necessarily but without flair – it all feels like an excuse for the Cleansing rather than an interesting reason that enhances it. Too much exposition is required, even at times on a character level as some of them tell their life stories back-to-back. As we near the end, inevitably suspecting that reset button, Walters brings in nefarious alien beings and a Device Of Doom; we’re suddenly encouraged to worry about the end of the universe, despite all universes already being on the block when we got here. Mercifully this is blustered away in time for Fitz and Anji to do some finger-wagging, and then it’s back to 2003 for you’ll-never-guess-what. The only scrap of all this that matters is the darkness of the Doctor, but since no one presents him with a compelling counter-argument to their own non-existence, which would be the result of his not doing these uncomfortable things, I’m not going to lose sleep over it.

Reckless Engineering is another EDA that speeds by harmlessly enough. It makes for a more satisfying whole than The Domino Effect and it tries to do something with its reset ending – how successfully, I’m not sure. It doesn’t however break this cycle of self-defeating arc books that make me long for the variety of the PDAs. Once a safe companion piece to more forward-facing Doctor Who stories, they’re now the ones defiantly unsaddled with what Fitz here calls “temporal bollocks”. I wish the EDAs luck on their next landing; may they get us the hell outta here, sooner rather than later.

4/10

 

PS: No Sabbath! Party hats!

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #126 – Blue Box by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#59

Blue Box

By Kate Orman

Oh, blast. This is the last Kate Orman Doctor Who novel, not including audiobooks and a Telos novella. It’s the end of an era.

How fitting that she did something different with this one. Not, I’m sure, that she sat down and thought “This will be my last Who book”, but since things worked out that way I’m glad that Blue Box has its own USP.

It’s first person. Yes, another one of those – they’re practically breeding these days what with Eye Of Heaven, Tomb Of Valdemar and The Infinity Race. Blue Box is presented as a non-fiction novel similar to Who Killed Kennedy, written by Australian journalist “Charles ‘Chick’ Peters”. Because of its Earth-bound authorship there is a certain distance around the Sixth Doctor and Peri, whose time-and-space travelling is never exactly confirmed, nor their conveyance seen. (“[Peri] is a little vague about exactly where she has been with the Doctor. But it’s obvious they’ve travelled the globe many times over, usually off the beaten path, more likely to stay in a hut than the Hilton.”)

Blue Box is a cyber-crime thriller set in 1981, which immediately adds another flavour. The internet (it’s not called that here) and email are still new things; characters often note that cyber-crime is too new for the authorities to even get a handle on. This might seem an odd period for a story largely concerned with malware but Orman makes a compelling case for it, with one character observing that “at the moment, any electronics hobbyist worth their salt can hold everything there is to know about a computer in their head.” That proprietorial sense drives the villain, Sarah Swan: she wants to control it all, put her stamp on it, which actually seems possible at this time. There’s an intimacy to the plot, a tug-of-war/road trip across America, that there might not have been in a world of broadband and high-speed downloads. Only the small band of heroes and Sarah seem to exist; computers might as well be their personal playground, a realm only they know.

Make no mistake, this is a nerdy book, full of detail and ephemera that says “80s computers.” Orman even plays some kind of game with the chapter numbering, going “(10) One/Two/Three/Four/(20) One” etc, which I’ve no doubt means something in computer-ese. There are enough sympathetic “Huh?”s from Peri and Chick that it never runs away from the reader however, and the Doctor (this incarnation rarely being one for understatement) makes it clear that the stakes could mean the end of life on Earth. It’s good that we have these little yardstick moments because, as above, the plot is rather low-key: a hunt for alien objects in which we scarcely see the aliens or the objects, and their dangerous effects are largely just hinted at until the end. This is perhaps a feature (bug?) of the non-fiction novel gag, as Chick Peters simply can’t know everything – frankly I wondered at how much he was able to surmise, but then you have to allow a certain amount of wiggle room in Doctor Who. We’re not doing a fictionalised All The President’s Men here.

Orman (and to be fair Jon Blum, usually in the mix whether credited or otherwise) is a wonder at character-writing and there’s plenty of that in Blue Box. The minor characters have enough colour to stand out, particularly Bob Salmon, a programmer who once helped the Doctor in an off-screen adventure. (His later run-in with his dad following a trespassing incident sells their relationship fast.) Chick meanwhile is a compelling narrator/occasional hero with a surprising amount of story arc to put away, the specifics of which would have been rare to see in fiction circa 2003, even more so in 1981. (The way things are going with culture wars we might slide back that way, unfortunately.) His line of work and general gumshoe ethos also leads to some of the more eyebrow-raising language to be found in a Doctor Who story: he comes across the n-word once, the f-slur a few times, and then there’s this saying – admittedly less actually offensive than just WTF – that I’ve seen and now, fair’s fair, you have to as well: “The moment Bob gave us the all-clear, Luis was up the stairs like a raped ape.” Chick isn’t a hateful guy and I’m not trying to cancel Kate Orman here, I just thought it was worth mentioning with such a genial author and a fairly contained and nerdy setting it’s shall we say surprising to see these kinds of choices. Perhaps it was to toughen up a generally sweet writing style. (Mind you, wasn’t Orman the first New Adventures author to include the f-word?) Insert standard They Wouldn’t Publish It These Days disclaimer here.

The villain is also interesting. Sarah (a female villain, unusual already) is a force to be reckoned with, single-minded and mean, but she’s still extremely human and not out to take over the world – she just wants to control her little bit of it. This is all just a happy accident for Sarah and she’s just seeing how far it can take her; as the Doctor notes re the dangerous artefact, “She doesn’t know what to do with it! She’s asking us!” She regards her pursuers with an uneasy neutrality at first, occasionally considering working with them rather than against: “They’re good, Luis, really good for a change. We’ve been playing cat and mouse for days and I’m not sure whether I’m the cat or the mouse.” Our first sight of her is in the aftermath of the adventure, her mind now damaged by what happened, so there’s an underlying sympathy for her right away – a smart in-universe writing choice by Chick – that helps temper some of her smaller and nastier impulses later on. Blue Box really does feel like an unfortunate mistake that got out of hand, which adds an unusual tension for a Doctor Who book, that of containing a disaster to a handful of flawed people rather than summoning UNIT to shoot at them.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between Blue Box and the rest of Orman’s oeuvre is her choice of Doctor. Orman (and Blum, etc) was known at this point for pushing along the Eighth Doctor Adventures, adding crucial depth to Sam Jones in particular. Vampire Science, Seeing I and Unnatural History were load-bearing books. It’s surprising then to find her in the lower-stakes world of the Past Doctor Adventures. What can she do here? Well, broadly the answer to that is “have some nerdy fun with computers.” But there is also a significant stake in the choice of this Doctor and this companion.

She captures the Sixth Doctor brilliantly, but also in her own way. There are so many quintessentially good bits, here’s a random selection: “He spoke in a crisp English accent, with relish, as though just pronouncing words was a pleasure in itself.” / “He takes up a lot of space, not just because he’s a big man: he moves around a lot, he fills the air with words and gestures. He’s the focal point of any room he’s in.” / “The Doctor is the smartest person I know. I have a lot of respect for him. The problem is, he’s also the smartest person he knows.” / “I dipped a hand into the nearest pocket of the coat, hoping for some ID, and instead fished out a dog-eared Roget’s Thesaurus.”

It’s worth noting that Orman writes him more sombrely than usual – not just confined plot-wise to a world of typing commands into a computer, which traditionally doesn’t involve a lot of grand gestures, but even dressing him down into a black suit to attract less attention. He has moments of quiet consideration that lean more towards his successor’s style, such as his dark mission statement to Chick that “there must be a world for Peri to come back home to.” He still has his usual smugness and pomposity, particularly when trying (and failing!) to be diplomatic with Sarah, but his general machinations and game-playing keep him away from opportunities for blustery arguments, as well as seeming generally more like Seventh Doctor-isms. (Perhaps I’m projecting because I’ve read Orman’s Virgin books. Either way, they are Doctor-isms.)

Orman does most of her character work with Peri. She is keen to highlight Peri’s strength of character, having her for instance be the only advocate for an alien cyber-being that poses a threat to the whole world: “Whatever that little alien guy can do, it’s still a living, breathing creature. It’s got rights.” But Orman also pounces on the duo’s combative relationship, which often makes me wonder (during telly rewatches) why the hell Peri sticks around: “[The Doctor and Peri] spent a lot of their time in half-hearted bickering, usually when one of them made some stupid mistake. He burnt dinner, she got lost, he couldn’t steer, she got attacked by some animal. This time it was the Doctor’s turn to screw up. They were supposed to be visiting her family but the Doctor had got them there at the wrong time, messing up her reunion plans.” / “‘You and I have both seen more of life than either Bob or Peri. Their enthusiasm and idealism hasn’t been worn down against the grindstone of time.’ I wasn’t so sure about Peri’s enthusiasm, but I held my tongue.”

Blue Box seems hellbent on answering that question. Chick asks her about it, indirectly at first, then head on: “‘You like him, don’t you?’ The smile pinched its way back onto her face. ‘Yeah I do. He can be a pain in the ass, but he’s a lot of fun to be around.’” / “‘Why do you even want to stay together?’ Peri’s voice grew small. ‘There was a time when he got really, really sick, and I had no idea what to do. I should have made him get help, but I just panicked. I guess in a small way I’m still making that up to him.’” The guilt complex angle is interesting, but that only seems to be part of it; as the book progresses she has more agency in wanting to stay here. “‘I want to be here. No, that’s not right.’ Something was dawning in her face. ‘I don’t want to be here. This is all wrong. I want to be wherever the Doctor is. Wherever he goes.’” / “She looked more relaxed than she had since I first met her, and not only because the crisis was over: she had made up her mind about where she wanted to be.” I’m not entirely convinced that Orman’s impassioned writing for Peri would work slotted between her TV episodes, but read in isolation it’s lovely to see it thought about this much. Given all the trenches Orman and Blum dug to justify Sam Jones it makes sense to see her head-canoning to remove a few stinging nettles from the Saward era.

Blue Box is still not what I’d call a character-driven story as all that (wonderful) Sixth Doctor and Peri stuff is happening alongside the plot rather than driving it. That’s hardly a problem though: it chunters along quite happily as a tech-thriller, with the Doctor and co. and Sarah moving in ever decreasing circles until a (characteristically sly and mostly off-screen) final battle resolves the matter. It’s a strikingly small story which speaks quaintly to the time it’s set in, such as a moment where hacker Bob says of the hypothetical internet “It’ll work as long as everyone in the world doesn’t get a computer.” (Sorry, Bob.) The first person/non-fiction novel style is clever without being obtrusive, and just about believable within its constraints, allowing for little bits of flair like the suggestive dreams in the prologue and epilogue. Crucially it feels like a human story despite its special interest in computers, finding sympathy in Sarah’s downfall and expressing a very human bafflement at the indifference of the aliens, whose limited and disguised appearances keep them unknowable. (Even the “alien” at the centre of all this, “a hormone-secreting, Lego-obsessed Sesame Street monster,” draws an obvious human allusion as it sits there quietly obsessing with puzzles rather than making eye contact.) The focus is not after all on “the great green and black void” of computers but on the people using them, the connections they might otherwise struggle to make and the vulnerabilities that can create.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #125 – The Domino Effect by David Bishop

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#62

The Domino Effect

By David Bishop

Right then. What happened here?

 

The EDAs are once again doing an arc. Time Zero told us in no uncertain terms that Earth’s timeline had gone wrong. Anji specifically could not go home until this was sorted. The gang followed their only lead to hunt Sabbath — agent provocateur of this crisis — on an alien planet. That bit resolved, they then headed back to Earth.

 

Pop quiz: how is Earth’s timeline doing? Is everything ready for Anji to go home? The Infinity Race had, at best, one line towards the end suggesting that this might be the case. I’m not sure why an entirely separate attempt by Sabbath to Make Time Work Like What I Want It To, on an alien planet no less, would have any effect — but sure, why not hope for the best. Even so it’s an unproven theory.

 

Enter The Domino Effect, in which Anji decides on arrival that Edinburgh 2003 is close enough to be getting on with and once more bids the TARDIS farewell. The Doctor and Fitz are sad but they acquiesce. No one wonders if this is the right version of Earth.

 

Uh, guys? The arc?

 

Oh, Anji spots some anomalies. Her money doesn’t seem to be legal tender any more. Her friend’s business doesn’t exist. There are no computers or signs of advanced technology beyond the 1950s. And the British Empire still seems to be a thing, whereas the concept of a Pakistani-descended Londoner is (quite racistly) not. Anji’s conclusion? These individual people must be crazy! I’m sure if I keep asking I’ll find the normal Edinburgh at some point! I’ll keep trying to pay for things with the same money! Meanwhile the Doctor has holed up in a library to look for clues as to what’s going on here, because something’s definitely not right. In time he realises that a sinister plot has distorted the history of Earth.

 

I feel like I’m going insane. Did they forget to tell David Bishop about the arc? Timelines in flux was literally Earth’s status quo the last time we were there. Incorrect money was a signifier of this! The Domino Effect, with its entirely separate What If Time Went Wonky plot, reads like Bishop was handed “Earth’s history goes wrong so Anji can’t stay there” and thought, okay chief, I’ll write that, instead of following it. Reading these in sequence the main trio’s utter failure to join the dots makes them seem like they’ve had a memory wipe, or worse, like they just aren’t that bright. (And yes, this appears to be an unrelated crisis to the first one so the dots wouldn’t join — but they’d still notice the similarity, surely?) It’s a baffling editorial choice that somehow ends in The Domino Effect rebooting its own version of the arc from scratch. Hopefully someone told the next author that we’re all good now, the arc has started, please just do the next bit, or never mind infinite Earths – we’ll have infinite bloody arcs on our hands.

 

While it adds unnecessary confusion for the constant EDA reader there is still something to be said for The Domino Effect working as a standalone novel/jumping on point. The basic setup of a world gone wrong hadn’t yet been done to death in Doctor Who, with Inferno being the main offender. There’s an excitement in finding yourself in the wrong version of history, perhaps more so in tracing how things got to this point, and arguably the most of all in finding a way to get out of there.

 

Bishop quickly establishes some ground rules for Earth 2.0 with his generally backward British Empire in full swing. This soon expands into a police state in action, where even good people are so hopped up on propaganda that they’d sooner trust the television than their own senses. There’s a vivid sense of injustice to the whole thing, with Anji treated as less than a second-class citizen and Fitz instantly blamed for a terrorist act based on only circumstantial evidence. It’s a mean story that offers little respite, which perhaps gives it a certain edge.

 

Bishop’s structural choices also work in its favour. To start with he fills in narrative gaps while Anji sits under some rubble, letting us know how she got here and what led to the explosion. It helps raise and then keep the reader’s interest. (Fear Of The Dark is another recent example of this device, aka the Dreamworks “you’re probably wondering how I got here” opening.) Bishop then forgoes chapters, sequencing The Domino Effect in days with occasional cutaways to historical moments that helped shape the present, similar to how he wrote Amorality Tale. The text does a lot of “hop over here, hop over there” paragraph-breakage but we’re rarely away from one group long enough to forget them and the groups are mostly not so disparate that we can’t see a common purpose in the narrative. It all hares along nicely, aided by a generously-spaced font size that makes it easy and quick to read. The writing style helps with that too, hewing closer to an easily digestible Target novelisation than anything dense or difficult; the characters tend to say what they mean and their actions are followed very shortly by consequences.

 

The A-to-B simplicity of The Domino Effect is perhaps its greatest strength, but that only takes it so far. There is a lack of complex inner workings to these characters which cumulatively makes them less interesting, with the good being innocent until their unquestioning obedience kicks in and the bad just being consistently awful. Some are secretly double agents, but all that means is that they act completely outraged by the world around them until it’s suddenly time to twirl their figurative moustache and let us know how great it actually is to kill people and be awful all the time. Villains such as Hastings, who imprisons and tortures Fitz, would scarcely seem more dastardly if they tied helpless girls to train tracks. The dialogue suffers as a result, rendering all of these people into jolly one-note caricatures. “‘Get her to the hospital as quickly as possible. We can still save this one.’ ‘But she’s not one of us,’ one man replied. ‘Shouldn’t we save our own kind first?’” / “My men will be along shortly to beat a confession out of you.” What good is spending time with them if they don’t get progressively more interesting?

 

The same applies to the revised version of Earth. Bishop gets all of his weird details out of the way early: there’s no computers, British colonies are still a thing, there are authoritarian cops. Now what? Anji and the Doctor are still able to flit around the side-lines until they can achieve their meagre aims, visiting various safe houses and cafes. There isn’t much about this perverted history that couldn’t slot neatly into any number of real ones with a few alterations. The lack of computers is more of a thematic idea than a practical one, since a character can quite easily get through a novel without checking their emails or paying with a credit card – and as to the concept that not inventing them would ultimately lead to all of this, while I get that we’re all about domino effects here, really? The “Empire” concept might have worked better if the novel wasn’t set in England; with a pointed absence of non-white characters besides Anji there’s no way to input how things are going over in the colonies, what any of it means, if there’s any resistance there as well. There just isn’t a wider story to tell, especially when any remotely savvy reader knows that all of this is eventually destined for the timey wimey bin.

 

There’s scarcely any plot, while we’re at it. Once Fitz is unjustly arrested for the bombing of a tea-shop his lot in life becomes a series of jail cells and torture scenes until he gets rescued. Thrilling as it is to put him through a kangaroo court, narratively it’s a dead end since absolutely no one will listen to him, meaning it’s just “oh yes you did!” ad infinitum. What is there to enjoy about that, unless you’re particularly diverted by scenes where (for example) Fitz is battered so heavily that he vomits and soils himself on the same page?

 

Meanwhile Anji – who eventually generates enough brain-power to realise that She’s Not In Kansas Any More, thank goodness – attempts to lie low after being falsely exposed as a traitor, then eventually reunites with the Doctor. There’s nothing much for them to do besides locate Fitz and the TARDIS, which (in a particularly pathetic display of Doctoring) gets towed away while the Doctor clutches a receipt. The Domino Effect has Big Ideas about timelines, which Justin Richards mostly already came up with but hey ho, but in practice it’s just a series of moody bus or train journeys down to London whilst trying not to get shot. There’s a fairly heavy duty finale but that seems more interested in the books that will come after this one, which conveniently gets The Domino Effect off the hook for any sense of narrative closure. (You can tell as the remaining page-count dwindles that we’re not going to put all the toys away.)

 

It would be nice if there was some character development to cling onto, but it’s not really that sort of novel. Anji ought to be able to rail interestingly against her surroundings what with the racism, but that seems like a one-stop argument, with the people she speaks to either not caring (angrily) or not caring (apathetically). She seems artificially dippy at first thanks to the arc mismanagement, then later has some bizarre temper tantrums at the Doctor for suggesting that they carry out different missions, which just seemed like a random drama-grab. (“You’re planning to leave us both behind, aren’t you?” What the hell is she smoking? Isn’t it obvious that he’s probably got some plan in motion, and on the whole he’d rather Fitz wasn’t executed?) She has every right to be miserable in these surroundings but nothing particularly interesting comes of it.

 

The Doctor catches the same “fails to spot what’s going on here” disease as Anji at first, but he’s hardly a force to be reckoned with afterwards what with the TARDIS removal men. Bishop also brings in that popular trope of Doctorly fainting fits, linked in this one to the mistreatment of the TARDIS, but it’s still a terribly overplayed beat. He at least gets to face off against the villains in the end, offering his usual “you didn’t need to do that”s and telling them their actions are wrong even though they’re plainly not going to listen. But then they wheel out Sabbath – of course they do, it was practically in the BBC Charter at this point – and what do they do with him, even though technically this isn’t the same version of the character? The two characters debate whose approach to history is correct. Again. Only for it to turn out that Sabbath, despite his almighty confidence, has been a dithering prat and has missed the obvious. Again.

 

Bishop’s Sabbath writing is perhaps not the worst of the series thus far (The Infinity Race loses extra points for sheer weirdness) but despite his protestations that he is not “a power-crazed megalomaniac” the big silly villain shoe undeniably fits. We are well past the point of diminishing returns with this character and I will not miss him when and if he eventually sods off.

 

The only other thing to mention about The Domino Effect is the violence. It’s a fairly numbing experience after a while, with Fitz getting mistreated so badly I wondered how his brain was still working by the end. There are also background tragedies and sudden reversals peppered throughout, with Bishop introducing characters only to matter-of-factly kill them off. Several authors have been fond of this approach, perhaps seeking to suggest that anything can happen and thus heighten the drama. I don’t think it works if you keep doing it, with character after character getting a quick gunshot death as opposed to any justice or closure – you stop being surprised and start rolling your eyes. Special mention however ought to go to Alan Turing, whom Bishop puzzlingly resurrects only to imprison for sixty years, then bump off at the climax as part of a wildly confusing “nexus point” explanation for the arc reboot. I thought Paul Leonard’s treatment of the historical figure raised too many questions in The Turing Test, but at least that novel also asked questions about good and evil which placed all of it in a context. Parading him around this menagerie of cliches and technobabble only to kill him all over again just seems like poor taste.

 

The Domino Effect lost me early on, let’s face it. I don’t quite see how an ongoing series can work if it’s going to keep resetting its resets. As a novel in its own right this is blunt and clumsy stuff, easily readable but offering no great rewards for doing so. There is perhaps something to say about a world where history took a different course and what we can learn from that – plenty is going on today that echoes The Domino Effect – but I was left feeling that it had been said before in greater depth, and judging by the current trajectory of the series it will likely be said again before very long. Without Sabbath, if we are astonishingly lucky.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #124 – Fear Of The Dark by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#58

Fear Of The Dark

By Trevor Baxendale

I can see why they reprinted this one. Fear Of The Dark is a gloriously self-contained monster story: only the faintest idea of Doctor Who is needed to follow it, and even then Trevor Baxendale puts in enough little details about the three regulars that you could easily catch up.

Nyssa is having bad dreams. (So is Tegan to be fair, but that’s another story. Baxendale places this one just before her Mara relapse in Snakedance. These things are like buses, clearly.) A darkness is coming to get her, stirring up memories of Traken and her father’s death. It’s a very evocative, even disturbing start: “It inserted itself like a dark finger into the sheet … There was something in her room with her. Something that breathed … As the blemish crept up towards her, so the shadows gathered around her, above her, behind her … She sat, blind and paralysed with fear. Then something in the darkness touched her.”

This same force guides the TARDIS to a moon where they encounter a supposed archaeological dig. Of course the only thing that hard-nosed Stoker, gentle giant “Bunny” Cheung and their associates are looking for is wealth. They find unexpected signs of civilisation instead — doors in the dark — and soon, in true Doctor Who style, the bodies start piling up.

There are some fun little flourishes here, such as the way the Doctor and co. are already ensconced in the action from the start and then we pay out the scenes that led them there, or the fact that Stoker and co. don’t automatically suspect the TARDIS crew of any wrongdoing, mercifully allowing the story to get on with it rather than go the usual route with tedious false accusations. (Which would be era-appropriate if nothing else.) In the main though Fear Of The Dark is straight down the line storytelling, very easy to follow and positively relishing its A-to-B “who’s going to die next?” horror.

As to the horror elements, Baxendale is often one for body horror and there aren’t many opportunities for that here, with much quicker deaths sparing us the irradiated realities of The Janus Conjunction or the “see title” unpleasantness of Eater Of Wasps. There is still a monster on the loose and when we eventually see its vampiric attack (clearly he had “Stoker” on the brain) it’s a more brutally efficient one than any Nosferatu I’ve seen. A less corporeal monster lurks in the shadows and leans more into the spooky horror that would later inform the Vashta Nerada — however it’s still startlingly visceral up close, with one victim “breaking apart in the Doctor’s arms as his bones shattered and his skin tore. Blood gushed out like water over the cave floor.” There’s horrifying collateral damage as well, with one man getting horribly burnt in a spaceship crash but not dying right away, and another having his throat torn out.

The book isn’t like this cover to cover: it’s mostly a case of creeping around in the dark and worrying about what’s coming next. Baxendale does a good job of keeping up the tension, despite the plot essentially traipsing back and forth between the same few rooms and caves. There are neat little touches such as his likening a journey through a forest of stalagmites and stalactites to a shark’s ever-tightening jaws. And there are ways to unsettle the characters without monsters, such as mind games, as the psychic force wraps its tendrils around Nyssa (“I am always with you. Sleeping with you” — ick) and tortures people with visions and insecurities. I wasn’t certain how much of this was “The Dark” and how much was common or garden neuroses — not that such uncertainty is a bad thing. Nyssa and Tegan for example both have cause to suspect that the Doctor might prefer the other; Tegan’s observation seems particularly apt given her brief (at least from her perspective) absence from the TARDIS. This could be the Dark, or it could be occurring by itself. But then you’ve got upsetting dreams of Traken, an apparent future vision of Turlough, and one of the more revolting manifestations of regeneration in print, including a fairly accurate Sixth Doctor bursting out of his predecessor’s corpse.

Quite why the Dark wants to muck about psychically like this was never entirely clear to me, nor the reason that its coming would be a fate worse than death — in practical terms it still seems to be death, albeit a horrible one that perhaps takes a minute or so longer than say, a fatal gunshot wound. Baxendale puts a good deal of effort into the Dark’s oogly-boogly history, making it a compelling “horror from the dawn of time”, but when it comes to specifics (and crucially when it finally gets some dialogue) it’s prosaic territory, all “conquer the universe” and “you will die, Doctor!” Fear Of The Dark is on much more effective ground when it’s getting under its characters’ skins, for instance Tegan remembering a hated old tree that would tap at her bedroom window only to notice something much less benign doing the same thing now.

The characters are a fairly solid bunch, with a strained but believable romance coming through for two estranged lovers-turned-enemies. Some minor figures barely manifest beyond their first names (“Jim” and “Nik” mainly register for their failed attempts to creep on Tegan and Nyssa) while others endear themselves very nicely, only to get aggravatingly killed off anyway because it’s just that sort of “bloodbath” story. (Although let’s face it, anyone saying “All I know is that when this operation’s over, I’m off back to Earth and my family for good” is marked for death.) There’s also a pseudo-antagonist who might have rather more benign intentions than you suspect at first, but insists on behaving like a complete a-hole anyway, presumably to throw the reader off the scent. His righteous indignation later on doesn’t convince.

Baxendale has a good grasp of the Season Twenty crew at the centre of it all, observing that the Fifth Doctor “was hiding something behind all that courtesy.” Fear Of The Dark pushes him towards that “gentleman running out of patience” manner we saw at the end of his run, especially when he demonstrates why live rounds would be a mistake in pitch darkness. There’s a sure to be contentious moment when he feels so hemmed in by the Dark that he considers a murder-suicide bid, but there’s enough ambiguity to suggest that it’s not entirely his choice. (Elsewhere Tegan notes that “It wasn’t like him to be so taciturn” and side character Stoker clocks something that “didn’t sound like the Doctor at all.”) I don’t think the Fifth Doctor’s occasional coldness here is based on nothing at all, but this is clearly an attempt to push it to breaking point.

That aforementioned competitiveness simmers between Tegan and Nyssa, which I thought was a clever and unexplored area; the famously grouchy Tegan ought to show some signs of actually wanting to be here after her return in Arc Of Infinity, and her insecurity here highlights that nicely. Baxendale still has a bit of fun needling her temper and argumentativeness, such as: “‘How about you, Tegan? How have you been feeling?’ ‘Now you mention it, I’ve been feeling pretty irritable and cranky ever since we arrived.’ ‘As I said, it doesn’t seem to be affecting you very much at all.’” But what I mostly took from it was a sense of “what can she do now that she’s back,” which seemed a smart choice at this precise point in her telly run.

Nyssa is perhaps the casualty of the three. For much of the book she falls under the Dark’s influence, albeit in an “if you know, you know” way rather than cackling maniacally, which is a subtle little thread worth highlighting. Other characters forever seem to be asking how she’s feeling, and she’s generally feeling pretty lousy, which takes her out of the action to some extent; when what we have left is knowingly ambiguous viz “alien influence” there isn’t a lot of room to get a feel for Nyssa’s actual character. Even the Traken nightmares don’t take us very far into her psyche, as we’re simply not asking about that stuff very much.

Ah well. It’s still interesting to be asking any questions about Nyssa’s inner turmoil which so often went unexplored on screen, and we do a bit, like when Tegan observes that a young girl’s father has been murdered by an evil force and Nyssa thinks the girl might be better off never knowing about it. Fear Of The Dark is so focussed on its grim rewards that it felt like a treat to get these character moments at all — from the outset it seems like the sort of story that will throw the lot of them in the mincer, Horror Of Fang Rock style. As with a lot of horror it’s somewhat machine-like but undeniably well-oiled.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #123 – The Infinity Race by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#61

The Infinity Race

By Simon Messingham

Expectation strikes again.

Picture the scene. You’ve just finished Time Zero, a book that ends in (and some would argue is written entirely in support of) a big change to the status quo. The timelines are in such a mess that Anji can’t go home — there’s an actual reason for it this time! — and the gang needs Sabbath’s help to fix it. It’s one of the more “oh no, now what!” cliffhangers in the range. In the same literary breath Justin Richards keys up The Infinity Race, Sabbath’s next port of call and ditto the TARDIS. The two things must be connected. Right?

Wrong. The Infinity Race includes a bit of lip service to the Time Zero situation, with Anji half-heartedly wondering if “the shake-up [at the end of this story] had got reality back on the right track,” but otherwise the only forward motion in this arc is the Doctor telling Sabbath about the latest mess he’s got everybody into. The Infinity Race is its own thing — which isn’t technically a problem, but then Time Zero really made it sound like there was some urgency to this crisis, only for us to immediately be told no, apparently it can be put on ice for a while. It’s a frustrating editorial choice.

In fairness that’s probably what it was. Simon Messingham could easily have written an EDA to slot in anywhere, needing only the core trio, Sabbath and yet another batty plan of his to control the timelines. It certainly reads like some arc references were sprinkled in later. We’re better off viewing it as entirely its own thing, or at least as its own Sabbath-era EDA that has no other particular place to be.

The story has some promise, or at least the setting does. Selonart is a planet almost entirely comprised of water. The only sign of life or culture on it (apart from some apparently indigenous people of dubious origin) is a regatta held every five years. Local society seems to exist mostly to support that, with many colourful and in all likelihood dangerous parties coming to Selonart just to compete. Into this mix comes the TARDIS crew finding a mostly abandoned boat, dead bodies, some sort of wraith, a friendly if monosyllabic native called Bloom and some inexplicable ice that makes you very ill to touch it. The Doctor and co. barely survive the boat exploding, but they lose the TARDIS and get blamed for all the destruction and deaths on board.

Now, about that promise — which obviously doesn’t include losing the TARDIS or getting falsely accused of murder, good lord not those again. I think there’s something to a (probably awful) cruise ship culture and a (no doubt dangerous) boat race full of wild characters, but The Infinity Race doesn’t do much with either. The race is a complete wash, happening mostly off-screen with interchangeable crews only to get curtailed for plot reasons anyway. We never get a firm sense of the business-as-usual on Selonart either before that all goes apocalyptically pear-shaped. The only people we meet there are lacking in the personality department: the best we get are a pompous governor, a cruel recruiter who press-gangs Fitz and later somewhat improbably becomes his love interest, and a vaguely mysterious officer with a mission that involves the Doctor and Sabbath, which would be very interesting if anyone bothered to talk about it at length. None of them are missed in the end, and the rest are just screams in a crowd. Who cares? There’s no sense of what is at stake here or if there’s any reason to be bothered about losing Selonart in its current configuration — certainly not compared to Storm Harvest, which already did the “decadent human culture imprints on a mostly-water planet at their peril” thing, even down to the mysterious indigenous people.

The indigenous people should probably be where The Infinity Race sets itself apart, but as for that, oh dear. The idea isn’t bad, especially where it ends up going, and the initial germ even recalls the beleaguered Tharils from Warriors’ Gate: beings with a unique link to their environment that are enslaved by humans to aid their guidance systems. It’s considerably less developed than in that TV story, however, with only a cursory demonstration of their mistreatment on boats followed by wholesale racism once society breaks down. Bloom isn’t the only one we meet but he might as well be for all the flavours of personality on display, although to be fair this sort of becomes plot relevant. The writing for Bloom though is all grunty, monosyllabic English — think Robin the caveman in Ghosts — until his high evolution ending when, quite apart from all the plot stuff happening to him, his English improves. Hmm. Not great, is it?

Simon Messingham can do complex space cultures (see Zeta Major) and he can get in the heads of his characters. I’m not sure what happened this time, as all of that seems to backfire. His use of first person narration, which worked so brilliantly in Tomb Of Valdemar, falls over here. It’s inconsistent, only giving us Anji, Fitz and Bloom’s perspectives, defaulting to third person elsewhere, but also sometimes for Bloom as well. The third person stuff seems to have some personality bleed-through from the other bits, with odd little declarations like “We return to the Governor to find him much more relaxed than of late” and “For those interested in such things, Bloom’s effect on the race was instantaneous.” To whom is anyone, omniscient or Anji etc, telling this story? Sometimes the characters are trying so hard for casual real-person-ness that the actual information starts drying up: “I remember Fitz’s torch and him shouting something.” / “As far as I recall…” / “I was lying on a mattress or something…” / “Someone had pressed a switch or something.” Or what? Why are we asking you if you don’t know?

There is a general insouciance to the narration, whoever’s doing it, that suggests this vagueness is all deliberate and The Infinity Race is a comedy. Trouble is, there aren’t any jokes: the whole thing is just a wee bit irreverent in a slightly irritating way, with lots of lines like “The Captain thought for a minute. A very long minute (and I’ve known some long minutes in my time),” “I was itching to get out. I would have said dying but that was what we were trying to avoid” and “‘Yeah, you’re losing me now.’ I am nothing if not honest.” Fitz comes in handy here, greeting us (who are “we”?) with an occasional “Hi folks” but also sometimes lampshading the inadequacies of the plot: “I can hear you. Hear you sighing as you think: not again, how many times? One boat to another, cells, backwards and forwards all over the place. It’s wearing a bit thin, isn’t it?” Nyurgh. Really?

There are also — and I’m getting proper picky now, sorry — some rather “red pen” bits that compromise the whole thing further. “One of the head-setted technicians, Ingham, suddenly looked up sharply from his display.” / “We found the first body in the first room.” / “I would definitely have gladly gone back there now.” Some of this is in first person, so you could say that the narrator was a bit redundant on purpose. But it’s still part of the book.

The real problem though is the character writing. None of the voices are quite right. The Doctor fares the best, despite an occasionally too awed perspective on Sabbath that goes against the (recent) grain (“a man of many parts. To be honest, I don’t know how many parts. Extraordinary fellow” ???) and a conveniently functional memory for alien cultures. (I thought info dumps were why we got rid of all that in the first place?) He has an impressive moment in the epilogue, facing off against a city of wraiths, and he essentially kills Sabbath at one point (though of course he recovers), which you could argue is a natural progression from the last few books. He also gets inarguably the best scene in The Infinity Race, manipulating time with the help of Bloom to replay the same scene thrice over, including walking it back to become less omnipotent.

Fitz mostly suffers from context. There is no sign of the adventuring he did so recently in Time Zero (this story takes place immediately afterwards) or any effect that might have had on his personality: he’s just the same happy-go-lucky yutz Sam met all those years ago, complete with a now somewhat rare love interest, a woman who has vowed to kill him. It’s all surface level stuff, a step back from the last few books.

Anji is worse. Messingham recognises some aspects of her personality — the annoyance with Fitz, the pragmatism — but he otherwise casts her as an irritating smarm, plaguing the Doctor with questions and interjecting all the time. She shoulders most of the “funny” comments in this. Again we miss important context from prior novels, lightly referencing her eighteen months back at her old job and decision to leave the TARDIS but not really reckoning with how it feels to be back in the thick of it anyway. Or really recognising the fact that she likes the Doctor and Fitz now. The rapport is another big step back: I found her so annoying that I couldn’t grasp the Doctor’s patience and affection for her. It all just feels like Standard Anji, with continuity links used instead of earned character growth.

And then there’s Sabbath. Structurally this is all the usual stuff, effectively doing for Control The Timeline plans what the Master was doing for random power grabs in Season 8, aka always having another one to run off to next week. This makes him and his plans seem more trivial in the moment — especially his pointless reliance on pseudonyms and disguises, seriously who is all that for — but again, that’s just his default editorial setting and not Messingham’s fault. The voice, though. Sabbath is a somewhat taciturn fellow, by no means dull but not someone who can be bothered to waste energy humouring people. He doesn’t make friends easily. Cut to The Infinity Race and it’s like he’s hosting a tea party! All of a sudden he’s avuncular and cheerful, coming out with things like “Doctor, please do get up off the floor. You’ll do yourself a mischief” and “Anji? Put the kettle on, would you my darling?” At one point he introduces himself by paraphrasing a song from The Wizard Of Oz. If you wanted to do a double rug-pull and reveal that Suspicious Large Gentleman is actually Sabbath, then reveal that he’s someone else entirely, this would be the way.

He’s not putting on a great showing with the plot stuff either, mystifyingly expecting the Doctor to go along with his mad plan of the week and then defaulting to the usual stroppy anti-moral grandstanding when he’s denied. When things kick off Messingham takes some delight in knocking him down a peg, which is something I’ve enjoyed about recent EDAs, but it’s done a bit clumsily here with Sabbath begging for his life, offering up other people as sacrifices and generally “[screaming] like a woman.” Embarrassing in several ways. Something tells me he’ll be back to his less sugar-high self the next time we see him in, oh, one book’s time probably.

The Infinity Race has a decent idea to do with Bloom and his people, which conceptually echoes what’s happening back on Earth. This link might be a coincidence for all its actual relevance here but the concept is still neat. (As for the “happy ending” of the remaining Selonart denizens being brought into Bloom’s way of being, agree to disagree. It sounds a bit like hell and it certainly wasn’t consensual.) The book seems uncertain of its tone otherwise, aiming for a light-hearted romp but forgetting to fill the space with anyone we’d actually enjoy hearing from, defaulting to the companions and (however inexplicably) Sabbath in that regard. It feels like a fusion of Messingham’s earlier approaches that doesn’t quite come off, not helped by its place in a newly developed arc that makes it feel even more maddeningly inconsequential.

5/10

PS: Props for remembering that Sabbath’s ship is crewed by apes. The boys are back in town! Until they’re swept overboard. (I’m sure they’re fine.)

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #122 – Heritage by Dale Smith

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#57

Heritage

By Dale Smith

It’s difficult to talk about this one without spoiling it. Heritage revolves around something bad happening to a friend of the Doctor’s. A third of it goes by without revealing who it is, so it feels a little unsportsmanlike to name them in a review.

On the other hand Heritage isn’t really like Who Killed Kennedy, Eternity Weeps or Bullet Time. Those all featured a familiar character meeting an unhappy end, but it was just one ingredient of the plot, a tragic outcome that carried extra shock points because we knew the victim. Eternity Weeps, for example, had plenty of tragedy going on already; the added death was just a way of telling you that the Doctor isn’t going to wave a magic wand this time.

Heritage takes a more measured approach. There’s been a death on this dusty planet — two, really — and everyone is going to feel it for 280 pages. It’s Doctor Who in the form of a Western, where the characters fill the roles of archetypes. There’s a powerful, malignant man in control of the town. Psychotic killers for hire. Good men rendered apathetic with guilt. A blameless child. A vacuum filled by the innocent dead. And strolling into town, a stranger whom the villains hardly regard at all — but we know to be an “avenging angel, hiding behind the skin of a man.” A Man With No Name.

Perhaps the book was at a disadvantage with me because I already knew who the victim was. (A friend told me years before I had any interest in it.) And yet, all that foreknowledge really does is place the reader in the same position as the Doctor. It’s the Seventh, who after all doesn’t really do “caught by surprise”, who has come to Heritage to confirm a state of affairs he already seems sure of. He’s listless, he’s been putting it off; Ace is worried about him long before she sees a photo of the victim. There is a dread to Heritage that builds and builds. Who can it be? And then eventually — surely it can’t be true? (Or if you’ve been spoiled: please let me have misunderstood!)

There is a simplicity and a focus to it that I couldn’t help appreciating after so many books with subplots and characters galore. Those aren’t bad things but variety is always nice, and Heritage is a change of pace — quite literally, where the plot takes place over a day. The whole thing being absolutely drenched in its theme also felt like something a bit different. You could argue that it’s a bit too drenched and too simple, with the framework clearly recalling films like Once Upon A Time In The West and characters like the rum-soaked Sheriff having only one way they can go. But that didn’t bother me. It just felt like a Doctor Who novel with a clear sense of purpose.

In short, while I am still not a fan of the “kill off an established character” trope Heritage at least does it in a way that I think works. How and why this event came to pass is critical to the story, its characters and its themes. The absence of the dead character is felt at all times. You can’t accuse it of just going for shock value: the Doctor and Ace grow from the experience.

Heritage likely has the New Adventures to thank for some of that. You can easily spot them in references to Adjudicators or a “goddess” instead of “god”, and the heavy emphasis on the Doctor’s otherworldly and unstoppable nature which derives more from the NAs than his telly adventures. But there’s also a sense of the here-and-now with BBC Books, what with a gun-toting Cetacean (dolphin in a walker), and more significantly Dale Smith weaving all this into the ongoing narrative of Mike Tucker’s Prime Time. The Doctor knows that Ace is going to die and he doesn’t know what he can do about it. “I can’t change what I know to have happened. If I see you die, Ace. If I hold your body in my arms…” Because of that we get to see different sides to his character, so not just the dizzying force of nature who barely needs to lift a finger but also a frightened man who can’t bear to wield any power. “Sometimes, all I want to do is play the spoons in a jazz band, and pull ferrets from my trousers to make children smile.”

In a succession of quite chocolate-box PDAs (which is something I like about them!) a character arc feels significant. The Doctor has a good one here, rediscovering a sense of urgency that beats anything like guilt or fear into second place. “He reminded me what evil is, and he reminded me that it has to be fought, no matter what the consequences. Evil cannot prevail.” When we get to see the Doctor at full blast after all that it’s more satisfying than if it had just been his default setting. “‘I see you’ve even got an Emra Cradle — I haven’t seen one of those in centuries. What else is there?’ Wakeling spun back to face the Doctor, and found himself staring down the business end of a ripped and tattered umbrella. The Doctor’s expression was grim, his eyes hooded like a predator’s. Suddenly, they were alone in the universe, eyes in eyes. ‘Oh yes,’ intoned the Doctor, ‘a murderer.’”

Ace has an arc of her own, as the Doctor’s initial lack of interest in getting involved leaves her to pick up the slack, at times angrily. She often considers her roots, what would have become of her if she’d never met him, how far she’s come under his tutelage. “She wanted to lash out at Lee, just to make the feeling go away. To make him realise she wasn’t a little girl any more. That’s what the old Ace would’ve done. Instead she snatched up her rucksack and flung it over her shoulder with slightly more effort than was necessary. Not as satisfying, perhaps, but a whole lot more sociable.”

She and the Doctor are a force to be reckoned with by the end of this, yet they still want to help others — even the irredeemable bad guys. I haven’t checked, but I strongly suspect Heritage was written just for them; it wouldn’t make as much sense with a different Doctor/companion combo. (This is where I find out it was originally meant for the Fifth Doctor and Turlough.) If true, again there’s that sense of purpose, not a book that’s just using whatever was to hand in the toy box. It’s their best writing in the PDAs so far.

The creeping tension followed by swift justice is of course very satisfying — well, it worked for all those Westerns. Dale Smith does wonders with this right from the start, as the guilty denizens regard the Doctor’s incoming shuttle as a new sun growing in size — a sign of impending doom. The plot’s major revelations are held back at just the right length, although eagle eyes might surmise some facts just from a little girl’s hairstyle. The chapter where the truth comes out is a necessity but it’s also an opportunity to get creative, as several characters unburden themselves at once to different audiences, the reader jumping from thread to thread. There are “quotes” at the start of chapters that offer tantalising glimpses of where things are going.

It’s well-written enough that it’s also satisfying just to inhabit, looking at all these characters under a microscope and feeling as trapped in their humdrum world as they are. That sense of crumminess and claustrophobia is of course part of their shameful motive. You’ve also got the adorable robot “Fussies” whizzing around cleaning things — and they also relate to something central to the story, ensuring that although they add to the overall sense of world-building they’re not just cute incidental details. Where, quite simply, has Dale Smith been all this time?

I’m hard pressed to nitpick Heritage, a book with a solid grasp of what each element is doing here. If I absolutely had to then I might say that villains Ed and Christa perhaps take the archetype thing to an extreme, or that I’m reasonably sure Bernard the Cetacean’s final scene is missing. (Did Smith hit the page limit?) At times I didn’t really like Heritage, because I’m sentimental and I don’t want a familiar character to be dead. But I’ve got to appreciate purpose and intention and it has those. Even when it kills off minor characters it is sat with, it is felt. The book honours its departed character well enough that it doesn’t feel like a repeat of “well, no one’s gonna miss Dodo”, but if it’s a dealbreaker for you then it can easily be consigned to the not-canon bin. I think Heritage is worth the gut-wrench.

8/10