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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#57

The Crooked World

By Steve Lyons

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#53

Warmonger

By Terrance Dicks

Duck! It’s Warmonger!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2/10

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

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #113 – The Book Of The Still by Paul Ebbs

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#56

The Book Of The Still

By Paul Ebbs

This one’s a rarity: a debut novel where the author didn’t come back to write another one. I’ve no idea why. (I’m going to assume he was busy.) It makes The Book Of The Still a bit of a curio since there’ll sadly be no follow up to measure it against.

Still (ahem) it makes a strong first impression. The title is portentous — The Book Of The Still sounds like a big deal. It begins with an epilogue (!) written by someone who hates the Doctor, which suggests — since this is a time travelling series — that this is going to be a complicated affair. And the font is noticeably small, like in The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street: an obvious BBC Books trick to condense a larger novel into 280 pages, suggesting that there’ll be a lot of book for this one to be complicated in.

The first chapter promises an “Obligatory Spectacular Opening” and it doesn’t disappoint, with a master thief sky diving into a building to steal the book of the title, only to be revealed as the Doctor when he’s caught. Other memorable set pieces appear throughout the novel, such as the Doctor resolving a bomb threat by materialising the TARDIS around it first (a little bit Looney Tunes, but in a good way), and the Doctor literally surfing his way through space onto the surface of a sun inside a cube made out of shockingly resilient book pages.

You might infer from all this derring-do that the Doctor is an unstoppable force in The Book Of The Still, but that’s only true some of the time. There’s some acknowledgement of his increased frailty since Adventuress, such as Anji noting that he looks green about the gills re rollercoasters: “She felt closer to him at times like this, when he was open about his vulnerabilities — rather than when he was swinging one-handed across fiery lakes in save-the-distressed-damsel mode.” Although yes, he does do that a bunch here as well, the book still finds time to interrupt his flashy burglary attempt, stick him in a quite unpleasant prison and threaten him with execution, get him beaten up several times, selectively hand over control of his brain to someone else, force him to strangle someone almost to death, and when push finally comes to shove re all the complicated time stuff promised at the start the understanding of it comes from another character, as does the resolution. At one point he feels that there’s no hope of saving a planet so he dances (badly), and then wakes up his companion so he won’t die alone. I wouldn’t exactly say that he’s on the back foot here but Paul Ebbs seems keen to put things in his way, or take things from him, which is quite interesting. (As to the frequent references to his hair getting pulled out or people attempting to pull it out, I’m not sure whether that’s “Paul Ebbs hated the wig” or “The Author’s Barely Disguised Fetish.”)

The other characters have a spottier time due to not always being themselves, although the Doctor has flashes of that as well, sometimes  (however improbably) for unrelated reasons. Fitz and Anji both fall afoul of a shady escort agency, the gist of which is that your memories are replaced with new ones that make you more pliable. In Fitz’s case it makes him a good match, since he thinks he’s a seventeenth century swashbuckler and his date is the woman he rescued. (Though he isn’t very consistent with that identity.) In Anji’s case it’s to facilitate a robbery for fictional reasons. (Still not sure how she did the robbery.)

Anji is otherwise well written, although her instant loathing of Rhian — the Doctor’s fellow prison escapee, keep up! — puts her in a pretty ugly light. She’s quite capable, such as when manipulating a bunch of looters into getting the TARDIS turned right side up. (The TARDIS falling doors-down is a stroke of “surprised that doesn’t happen more often” wit.) I liked her overall fondness for the Doctor and keenness to help out.

I can’t accuse Fitz of being poorly written here even when he’s not himself, as his “other self” is mostly a wild romantic and that isn’t exactly a bolt from the blue. When he’s able to respond properly to events around him he’s about as loveably Fitz as he gets, even outright saying he loves the Doctor at one point. (Is that the bar for me? Companions that want to be around the Doctor?) The degree of out-of-his-mind-ness does threaten to edge him out of the story, however, and we never really deal with the horror of his being forced to love someone. Yes, it’s Fitz, so if anyone wasn’t going to mind that sort of thing then etc etc, but it’s still decidedly iffy and it’s rather dismissed as a concept. (On another note, Fitz losing his memory here really ought to tie into the same thing occurring in the EDAs as a whole, but I’m not sure Ebbs’s story does anything with that. Oh well.)

The book is a little more upfront about the concept of addiction, which Paul Ebbs says (via I, Who) is largely the point of the thing, hence the central character of Carmodi. I’m not sure “time addiction” really does much for his theme, it being rather hard to explain or manifest that idea, but elsewhere you can see Rhian going to quite extraordinary lengths for her missing father and the overall idea of paradoxes — you could say she’s addicted to them. Both characters shoulder the novel’s resolution, which perhaps adds weight to their bits of the story being the truly important, theme-y ones.

If this all sounds a bit fractured, frankly that’s because it is. “Madcap” was the word that kept coming to mind: we vault excitedly from one set piece to another, having a mostly splendid time it must be said, but the majority of the book isn’t really focussed on advancing the plot. It’s more of an adventure story with the Book passed frantically from one party to another. Actions like the Doctor’s blackout-then-burglary aren’t explained until the very end, whereas I’m not sure I ever understood the motivations of the three thugs behind all of Fitz’s woes, who somehow snowball into a nigh unstoppable triumvirate throughout the book despite being essentially The Three Stooges.

Ebbs has heaps of ideas and they’re broadly imaginative and funny, such as the planet Lebenswelt being so wealthy that its prisoners have gold-encrusted handcuffs; it’s “the kind of place where a pauper could eat from a carved emerald plate, but basic sewage systems seemed to be beyond them.” The fake memory scenes are fun vignettes in and of themselves, particularly the adventures of Captain Fitzgerald. (I’m less clear on why the baddies took from this that these were the correct names of people he knew. Aren’t they influencing this stuff?) The bigger villains, the Unnoticed, are a lot less amusing but just as colourful: strange Lovecraftian horrors that go around in trench coats blowing up any worlds that have heard of them. (It’s in the later Unnoticed scenes that we get the most blatant examples of addiction and addicts, with miserable skeletal “time sensitives” walking around a kind of hell they volunteer at, covered in sores. The symptoms connect more than the fix.)

Perhaps the most “money on the table” idea is the Book itself, which is a sort of ever-present lifeline for stranded time travellers. That idea is planted fairly soon and it has obvious potential for complicated hijinks, which Ebbs mostly fulfils during the somewhat higgledy-piggledy climax, but it’s still not what I’d call a time travel book; for much of it the Book could be the Ark of the Covenant instead and you’d get a similar narrative drive. A message from the Book does drive a fair amount of the action, but again it’s not a message for any of the regulars so we’re not terribly focused on it.

As usual I should avoid having preconceptions about what a book will be like. The Book Of The Still is a hell-for-leather tumble of spacefaring nonsense rather than a particularly solemn or important timey wimey puzzle. (Until the climax when it’s that for sure.) It has a consistent sense of humour but also some notes of sensitivity in its prose, like when Rhian sees the two-left-footed Doctor spring into action: “[she] saw how well the Doctor could dance, when the right tune came along.” It’s got some things to say, although they’re perhaps under too many layers of sci-fi to speak clearly, and its high points rank among the more  Technicolour sequences in Doctor Who lit. I liked it. I just wish there were more Paul Ebbs books so I could see what he tweaked next time.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #112 – Amorality Tale by David Bishop

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#52

Amorality Tale

By David Bishop

Doctor Who often visits historical periods for its stories. This helps to provide a shorthand for the viewer/reader — see The Aztecs or The Roundheads, interesting tales hung on a familiar framework. Amorality Tale on the other hand is a period or event that you might not know about, and yet also one that’s potentially still in living memory: in 1952, somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 people died in the London smog.

Your mileage may vary but — dreadful as that sounds — to me it doesn’t immediately suggest a story about why these things happen. It’s surely more in the line of how our characters will react to an unavoidable tragedy, like The Fires Of Pompeii. David Bishop’s book isn’t really like that, however: although Sarah Jane does at points want the (Third) Doctor to do something about all those deaths, their hearts are really only in it as far as stopping the catastrophe from spreading further afield — and initially not even that, as she’s just trying to get him out of a funk by investigating the “mystery” of the fog instead. (I did sort of wonder what this investigative journalist was expecting to happen in London at a heavily polluted time in its history.)

Wouldn’t you know it, this is in fact Doctor Who and it turns out the historical event has something to do with aliens. (Lucky Sarah.) Your mileage may vary again on whether it is actually the teensiest bit crass to associate real deaths with a sci-fi doodad. As if aware of this, the book has it both ways: the bad guy aliens state that the fog is just “the dominant native species’ own effluvia,” while later the Doctor says “the smog, it’s not natural. The weather is being controlled by the Xhinn.” (Both statements can be true, but without that second qualifier it might at least be ambiguous.) In any case, there really isn’t much for Sarah or the Doctor to investigate until the nastiness kicks off in earnest a good ways in.

Things at least get off to an interesting start with the Doctor and Sarah already installed in the East End when we arrive. I love stories that begin in media res: it’s intriguing to find Sarah holding her own as a barmaid in a rough pub and the Doctor running a watch-mender’s shop. What a pity then that we immediately undercut this by going right back to the scene where they decided to come here. You don’t need both; you could just as easily tease out the information later on in London.

Ah well: Amorality Tale has other things on its mind, namely gang warfare. Underworld bigshot Tommy Ramsey has just got out of prison and he’s putting his manor in order, little realising that a rebellion is brewing in the ranks. Meanwhile a bunch of youths led by the bloodthirsty Callum is looking to muscle in on Ramsey’s turf.

Amorality Tale is, for much of its initial 100 pages, all gangsters and geezers roughing each other up. There’s a good sense of Bishop doing his research here, such as in the central, easy to picture street filled with housewives all cleaning their doorsteps. Bishop gives suitably distinct voices to his various crooks and lowlifes — which helps where at least two of them are called Billy. The book overall has a simple, no muss no fuss writing style that clings comfortably to the setting and characters, often giving way to little nuggets of wit: “Prison seemed to agree with Tommy Ramsey. But then most things did, if they knew what was good for them.” / “The unbelievable high of winning proved far too addictive for Bob Valentine. One way or another, he’d been going to the dogs ever since.” I can see Terrance Dicks enjoying this writing style: it’s uncomplicated and it pushes things along at a lick. (Fair’s fair, there’s also a clever structure at work: Bishop uses days instead of chapters, which apportions the action into logical yet somewhat unusual intervals while also keeping clear the importance of this brief timespan.)

For a while you’d be forgiven for losing track of any alien threat whatsoever, and we’ll get to that, but it’s worth saying that the “gang stuff” in Amorality Tale makes for compelling enough reading in the meantime. The downside to this is the way Bishop presents his underworld. I’m not naive enough to think that a character’s actions are automatically an endorsement, and sure enough Tommy does some awful things here, like executing an unconscious enemy and being convicted (only on a technicality) for having his girlfriend murdered. But Amorality Tale still overall makes him out as a force for good in the neighbourhood, being the de facto law enforcement once the police fall victim to the alien menace; at one point he spares people’s lives because he reckons they’ve been brainwashed. Tommy, like many famous and/or fictional gangsters, also loves his dear old (slightly awful in her own way) mum.

Crucially he spends a good chunk of the book prodding a would-be romance with Sarah, whose bristly female empowerment excites him. The attraction flutters in both directions, with Sarah at one point considering what they might have been together in another life. (He considers the same.) The writer can turn her around later on and have her call him a small, petty murderer — which she does — but all those moments of domestic closeness have added up by then. See also Brick, aka Alan, Ramsey’s towering enforcer who is also a gentle giant that loves pigeons and hates hitting people. You’d be a bit weird if you came away from the book entirely hating these characters — indeed, Bishop might as well bash you into submission with an actual brick during those pigeon scenes. If Sarah likes somebody, we do too, however bonkers that makes her seem.

And look, it’s okay for characters to have facets or even be quite nice, actually, despite also being appalling. Bunker Soldiers is a fine example of just such a tightrope walk. Amorality Tale, however, is a bit too cute with its cheeky chappies, some of whom seem moments away from departing for Sherwood Forest. Sarah, it must be said, is seeing them on a good day: all their violence is directed at rival gangs, murderous policemen and zombies, with not an innocent bystander in sight. (Well, none that die of criminal violence during the events of the book.) She could still seem a bit less surprised when she weighs it all up and realises that crime does not, in fact, pay.

That’s enough about BBC Books’s answer to Peaky Blinders: show me the aliens! And Amorality Tale does that rather suddenly on page 100, revealing that a gang leader is actually a Xhinn, aka a floating ethereal angel of death. (Bishop forgive me, but I imagined Mr Burns when he’d had too much medication and kept threatening to bring you love.) The book wobbles quite a bit here, having made it significantly far without digging any of the necessary trenches for extra terrestrial bad guys: there’s just a hint of them in the prologue and then later on West Side Story suddenly turns into The War Of The Worlds.

I wish I could say the Xhinn were worth the wait. The Doctor characterises them as “the most petty, vindictive creatures” and he’s not wrong: these awful fellows control and then work people to death, puppeteer them as zombie enforcers, conduct cruel and distinctly Nazi-ish death experiments on them and then to top it off, feed them into horrific (yet nonetheless Penelope Pitstop-esque) conveyer-belts of death. There’s really no coming back from such one note maniacal menaces as these — but Bishop tries, giving the Doctor (and at one point, awkwardly, the prose) some ominous pronouncements about what a famed menace they are throughout the galaxy. The Doctor’s drop-of-a-hat info dumping about the Xhinn is the first time I’ve felt okay about the Eighth Doctor losing his memory; imagine not having to lean on the protagonist to say “Oh, those guys? Hang on, I’ve got it written down somewhere.”

There are a few little wrinkles about them that could be interesting, such as there being three Xhinn that speak almost as one, their method of controlling people without their knowing it, and the way they can create spies in human form. That first one is a damp squib since they don’t say very much of value; the other two really ought to be something, except the spy thing is extremely easy to guess, and the duplicate thing invariably ends in the spy going native, forgetting their roots and then — as if catching an interesting idea on its way out of the window — getting quickly bumped off anyway. The Xhinn’s main contribution, apart from the smog, is an army of brainwashed and/or zombie policemen at the end, but since that’s largely a way into lots and lots of scenes of criminals hacking, slashing and blasting them down, there’s still not a lot to write home about.

This leads to one of Amorality Tale’s little peccadillos: violence. It’s hardly the first BBC Book or Doctor Who novel in general to get nasty, and indeed you should consider yourself forewarned by Bishop’s previous co-written (wink) Who Killed Kennedy, which minced various kindly UNIT chumps and made Dodo extinct. Amorality Tale isn’t entirely gratuitous, but it seems to prioritise actual death rather than triumphs over adversity. There are numerous characters who we follow, get invested in and then place in a cliffhanger-type situation only to — you guessed it — kill ’em anyway. One particularly distraught character decides bluntly “to kill himself when this was over. It was the only way he could ever hope to block out the memories.” You might think that was the beginning of some sort of epiphany but no, eight pages later, off he goes. This kind of all-encompassing horror is perhaps apropos for a book that concerns around 8,000 deaths from the outset, but there comes a point where our noses are simply being rubbed in it. And what’s the takeaway? Violence and death are violent and deadly?

I’m probably missing the wood for the trees here: it’s amoral, after all. But I don’t think it really is on a character level, what with those overall quite personable criminals who have, when all’s said and done, a code of sorts. If the only amoral thing here is the aliens, that doesn’t tell us anything much deeper or more meaningful than, avoid these aliens.

It’s a good thing Amorality Tale is so readable — and it really is. Granted, it’s easy to pick on simpler writing styles like this one, and I’ll own up here and say that there are a few clunkers and redundancies in Amorality Tale. (“The heavy key rattled as it turned, opening the lock on the small door.” / “‘Where’s it coming from?’ Tommy asked. The smog deadened sound, making it difficult to determine from which direction it was emanating.”) I don’t love some of those all-too-neat criminal characterisations, and I wasn’t bowled over by the Doctor and Sarah — the latter runs out of journalistic steam almost immediately, the former tinkers on the sidelines for most of the book until he effortlessly conjures a kill-o-majig for the finale, pausing only to impart useful lore. It’s a violent book without much to say about mass death, but it occasionally finds space to make its impact felt (even, incredibly, letting a few of them survive) and it builds a real sense of escalating disaster as it chunters along. Like some of Uncle Terry’s questionable novel assignments, you can let yourself ease into this one and enjoy the somewhat corny characters and the helpfully A-to-B action that comes in handy chunks. If nothing else, there’s plenty of atmosphere. Smog will do that.

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#55

Trading Futures

By Lance Parkin

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#51

Palace Of The Red Sun

By Christopher Bulis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#54

Anachrophobia

By Jonathan Morris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#50

Drift

By Simon A. Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10