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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#49

The City of the Dead

By Lloyd Rose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That about wraps it up for spoilers!

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

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#48

Dark Progeny

By Steve Emmerson

Colony worlds. Gotta love ’em. Apparently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#44

Byzantium!

By Keith Topping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #95 – The Slow Empire by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#47
The Slow Empire
By Dave Stone

Once more unto the breach – the breach, here, being a novel by Dave Stone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but upon finishing one there tends to be a feeling like that scene from Arrested Development where Jason Bateman looks inside a bag labelled DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT: “Well, I don’t know what I expected.”

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy The Slow Empire. Let’s be clear: I think it’s one of his more consistent efforts, and it’s certainly less of a palaver than Heart Of TARDIS. It’s just that it’s another fairly typical example of the mystery that is Dave. Your mileage will probably vary. (I’ve seen five-star reviews for it. Also… less than five stars.)

The closest Stone comparison I can think of is Sky Pirates! – that’s a good thing – in that this is another fairly straight (here meaning “utterly fruit-loopy but at least it’s passingly certain what it’s about”) adventure story. The Doctor, Anji and Fitz are on the run from strange vortex creatures in a temporarily clapped-out TARDIS, only to find themselves entangled in a similarly hostile multi-planetary empire. The planet they arrive on is backward and bizarre, the local militia being armed with (at first inspection) musical instruments, and their only ally is a fellow prisoner, Ambassador Jamon de la Rocas. If this is your first Dave Stone novel then it might surprise you to learn that this man is rather ebullient.

The empire is not what it was, with the only constant being the technology used to send Ambassadors hither and thither: Transference, or a kind of teleportation where you are vaporised at one end and created anew at the other. The Doctor and co. soon determine to get to the heart of the matter, which will mean visiting various planets as the TARDIS slowly recovers, finding information as they go. Along the way they encounter story-obsessed circus folk, a very Dave Stone-ian alien that talks like a sitcom waiter with a dodgy Visa, a sinister virtual reality and finally a gestalt menace with a murderous plan.

If I seem a little light on details, well that’s because they’re starting to fade, and I only finished it an hour ago. The Slow Empire isn’t exactly hard to follow (take another bow, Heart Of TARDIS) but it does have that malaise typical of the author where it all seems faintly silly and amusing in the moment but with only a vague IOU that it will all mean something eventually. The planet of the awful musicians is memorable enough, until we leave it behind for good, as is the planet of the circus people whose entire economy is stories, until we’re done with them as well. We spend a good 30+ pages dealing with alternate lives in virtual reality – another popular Stone theme, see Oblivion – but as well as feeling rather been there, done that after Parallel 59 (what with Fitz being here and doing it again) it doesn’t feel all that consequential to the wider narrative. Once they’re out of it, that’s apparently that. I don’t know if being episodic is a bad thing since it tends to come with quest narratives, but it left the novel in a very wishy-washy place afterwards.

With Dave Stone the good stuff is very often the friends you made along the way, which is to say all of that verbiage surrounding the stuff that’s actually happening, which you may or may not follow and/or be able to commit to memory, is its own reward. The prose is full of Stone’s usual diversions and wafflings, except in The Slow Empire they become their higher selves at last and come with bonus features, aka endnotes. (I find footnotes mildly annoying and endnotes fatally so; I’m not going to flick back and forth like that, soz. But it was perhaps worth it to see Stone defend himself from calls of sounding too much like Douglas Adams by announcing that on one occasion anyway he was actually sounding like Lewis Carroll… who was being quoted by Douglas Adams.)

Stone’s sentences require concentration and to be frank they don’t always reward it. Anji (inadvertently?) lampshades this by way of the Doctor’s excessive verbiage: “‘No offence,’ said Anji acidly, ‘but what you’ve just said didn’t contain any actual new information at all. It’s like saying something’s taller because three feet have been added to its height.’” I find I sometimes have to go back, start again and pick through the words to find the bit where something actually, quantifiably occurred. On the plus side, this is very definitely a style and that is something to be appreciated in a range that – naming no names – can tend towards the stagnant, writing-wise. Stone’s text might wander off to the shops in the middle of a thought but at least it ends up going somewhere, even if it’s just somewhere funny. He’s not for everyone, but he (along with The Slow Empire) is generally good fun. (Anyway, some of his jokes are to-the-point: “‘You have the shard?’ the High Ambassador asked, in that curious way of those in authority, however unearned, who already know the answer to a query — or at least know what the answer damned well better had be.”)

Jamon de la Rocas is perhaps Stone’s best outlet. The florid, garrulous, pick-your-talky-adjective supporting character holds court in his very own first-person passages throughout the novel. As well as being generally amusing he also underscores one of the book’s more interesting ideas, the potentially soulless existence of those people in Transference. I wish there had been more to that, but at least it comes to a head when Anji (being typically forthright and thoughtless) chastises him for his probable lack of substance and gets instinctively slapped for it. (He is very sorry about this.) The Transference idea weighs significantly on the plot by the end, but by then it’s more in the line of technobabble than something I really felt or cared about as a reader. Even in that awkward Anji scene, and following his unhappy experience in VR, Jamon never seems to be soul-searching or wondering about all this particularly. And believe me, we spend enough time with him to find out.

At the other end of the Stone spectrum we have the Collector: denizen of a species that I had completely forgotten was introduced in Heart Of TARDIS. (Only in a passing aside, mind you, but I liked it enough to highlight it in my review at the time.) He/it speaks in the same sort of comedically broken cadence as Sgloomi Po in Sky Pirates!, because heck, if it ain’t broke. Strangely this highlights that in all his wanderings Stone is choosing his words carefully, even if only for maximum amusement: “‘I might not be entirely up on the specifics, but I’m certain the Collectors are known for ravening across entire planets and destroying everything in their path.’ ‘Is not destroy monkey-hominid worlds,’ the creature said virtuously. ‘Is just take things nobody want.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ said the Doctor. ‘What sort of things?’ ‘Nice things. Shiny things. Things what is not nailed down to floor. Is then wait for bit and come back for things nailed down to floor.’” It’s the sort of thing that might be very annoying for some readers but I found welcome and amusing – if nothing else because it’s a break from Jamon’s (and Stone’s) usual Douglas-Adams-if-he-was-born-150-years-earlier cadence.

The regular characters get a fair bit of that too, most noticeably (and out-of-character-ly) Anji’s thought processes in a few early scenes: “In the same way, so Anji gathered, that the commercial spacecraft of The Future supplied ‘viewing ports’ which displayed to their passengers false but aesthetically pleasing images — and which bore about as much relation to the actual conditions outside as Bugs Bunny does to the proliferation vectors of myxomatosis — the Stellarium factored external electromagnetic and gravmetic readings to produce an image with which the mind could more or less cope.” If you say so, Dave. He writes Anji rather well otherwise, walking the tightrope between her wanting to get home and yet also being invested in the safety of the Doctor and Fitz. She nearly goes a whole novel without tearing strips off the Doctor, Tegan-style, but the plot allows her to do so once near the end. This time without creating too many waves. (See Eater Of Wasps and The Year Of Intelligent Tigers for shoutier examples.)

The Doctor is an interesting figure in this, at least academically: Stone has this idea about people’s inner selves regressing to different points, including Anji’s and Fitz’s, which allows him to write the Doctor in different (actorly) ways. The trouble is, since I tend to take it as read that everyone in his novels is going to say twenty words when five might have done, and the Doctor does that from the outset, I didn’t really spot anything out of the ordinary. It just became a rather odd exercise of the Doctor, Anji and Fitz announcing that this was happening rather than me actually noticing it. (The only time I noticed a direct quote from someone else, I’m pretty sure it was Arthur Dent. In hindsight though, some of the Doctor’s technobabble and mood swings could be attributed to Tom Baker or Pertwee, and his eventual strategy is more or less likened to something McCoy might have thought up.) Stone gets some mileage out of the Doctor’s incomplete memories (with the usual obligatory reminder of what happened there, remember everyone that this is the less continuity version of the EDAs), landing on a pleasingly powerful yet still chaotic mix for the character.

Fitz is here too of course, Fitzing his little head off in the virtual reality section where he gets to be a rock star, but to be honest I’m starting to worry about him as a regular. You wouldn’t want to read an EDA with no Fitz in it – like Bernice Summerfield he’s a difficult character to get wrong – but it’s becoming apparent that he’s always the third wheel, good-naturedly bumbling along in the background. That’s largely all he does; even Jamon bumps him out of frame at points here. We’ll see how it goes in later books. It may be the case that, like a Dave Stone paragraph, the general atmosphere of Fitz is its own reward, and fair enough if so, but it would be nice if he actually drove stories too. (Perhaps Anji’s “get me home” angle is all we’re currently allowed.)

I wish I could think of more to say about it. The Slow Empire feels as dense as most of Stone’s books, throwing out sci-fi concepts left and right and couching most of them in jokes, but it nevertheless feels a bit lightweight in the end. I still appreciate having a voice like his in the roster, distinct if not always easy to digest, but Stone novels where the whole thing comes together and wallops you over the head are clearly the exception. With its quest narrative and relatively tight supporting cast though, The Slow Empire at least comes a bit closer than most.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #94 – Superior Beings by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#43

Superior Beings

By Nick Walters

After four books it’s safe to assume that Nick Walters is mostly in it for the aliens — the more diverse, the better. Dry Pilgrimage, Dominion and The Fall Of Yquatine all concern conflicts between different species, each with their own peculiar habits and habitats. Superior Beings is another in that line. This one even includes a xenologist. (Sort of a sci-fi anthropologist, and presumably the author’s dream job.)

The differences between strange beings and the things that make them all interesting is a fine starting point for a sci-fi novel, and in that sense Superior Beings gets off to a good start. We’ve got humans of course, but also the Eknuri, a sort of more advanced Greek God-looking variant; we’ve got the Valethske (bless you), a bloodthirsty bunch of human-hunters who resemble large bipedal foxes; and there’s a planet with a strange plant-centred eco-system, which offers heaps of potential for weird and wonderful creatures. Walters grasps it with glee: there’s a mighty tree at the centre of everything, there are colossal loping “Gardeners” that can quickly evolve into something more dangerous when threatened, and there are car-sized bugs that hold a few plot secrets for later. It’s not exactly Avatar, but it’s something.

As often happens in his books you can tell he’s thought about the minutiae. Where Superior Beings suffers is in the broad strokes. What the book is about, what these characters hope to achieve, what they do achieve. The answer to all of that is invariably, not much.

The Fifth Doctor and Peri (a rare-ish pairing) arrive on an Eknuri planetoid somewhere. They find a xenologist, Aline, getting her feet wet with alien species after a traumatic encounter that previously put her off such unlike creatures. (The Eknuri, who look pretty much human, are a safe enough assignment for now.) All seems to be hedonism and larks, with a pouting Peri letting the impressive Athon show her his massive boat and the Doctor finding common ground with Aline, until a shipful of Valethske turn up: the hunter species periodically gathers human victims to sustain their long journey through space in search of their creators. They replenish their larders, somehow miss the Doctor and Aline, and otherwise leave no one alive.

The Doctor and Aline jump forward a hundred years (!) because they can only get the TARDIS onto the Valethske ship once it’s out of hyperspace. (The humans, including Peri, are all in a deep freeze.) Roughly half a dozen humans and Eknuri are rescued including Peri, Athon and some starship crew members. The rest of the captives are just… not rescued. Violent and gleeful death and dismemberment awaits them all. Soz. This must rank as one of the Doctor’s more pitiful efforts, capped off by parking the TARDIS somewhere that will instantly be out of reach. Nice one, celery.

The Doctor and co flee to a nearby planet — which they will imaginatively call The Garden — where they park and more or less just hope the Valethske won’t join them. No such luck: soon they’re fending off yet more attacks with varying levels of success, generally getting captured and/or eaten and/or murdered, unless some very angry plants get them first. And that’s the rest of the book. You can add in the Valethske wanting the Doctor to share the secrets of time travel (which they improbably suss that he’s capable of doing), the better to get back home or carry out their insane mission, and Aline fulfilling a confused sort of destiny with the plants, but it otherwise levels out as: run away from Valethske, fail at that unless you’re the Doctor or Peri, marvel at the Garden. I was bored senseless.

It’s not for a lack of action. If you want to read about horny fox people eating humans while other despairing humans look on, you’re in luck. (Also, ew.) The eventual battle in what I suppose we should equate with Eden is quite explosive. There’s just little to no point underpinning it all.

What are we meant to get from the characters, for example? Aline has potential, but it largely goes unfulfilled. Her “Encounter” doesn’t really pay off (it’s strictly tell-don’t-show), and if she was intending to offer some incisive commentary on people vs Eknuri vs Valethske vs plants, she doesn’t get around to it — although she does furiously “as you know, Bob” about the Garden’s history near the end. The starship crew (a captain and a female first officer) seem to have their own stuff going on, but that inevitably halts when they die. (I’m not saying a character can’t be interesting unless they survive, but if they escape death only to get killed a little bit later that’s not much of a story arc, is it?) We ought to get to know the Eknuri at least: they seem like a typically Nick Walters-ish idea, offering a chance to contrast “perfect” people against regular humanity, but that’s a dead end for similar reasons. In practice the Eknuri are just big, sexy people who die as easily as we do. We might as well have landed on The Planet Of The Influencers instead.

I suppose that feeds into the title, which is perhaps meant to be ironic and dismissive? The Eknuri aren’t superior (although they generally don’t claim to be), they’re just different. We can read the same sort of thing into the Valethske, who inherently place themselves above mankind because they hunt and kill them; there’s no particular dressing down for them, but they are practically feral in their appetites, so the book puts us on a pedestal for not being that bad. Probably. I’m trying, here.

The Valethske could be interesting, but I kept thinking: the Hirogen did it better. There’s no depth to their practices; it’s repetitive to have scene after scene of these aliens ripping people or each other apart and — yes, I know! — enjoying it a bunch. There’s something to be said for their spiritual mission (something that seems outright insane at first but ends up having a kernel of truth), but as that’s just another form of hunting and killing, I didn’t come away from it with any great food for thought. Their ultimate prey, the Khorlthochloi (I hope you’re practicing all the pronunciations in this, there will be a test) are another example of superior beings who exhibit no great wisdom or brilliance in the end, but all that really does is underline the idea of flawed superiority that we already got from the Eknuri and the Valethske. Yah, we get it.

At least it puts the Doctor and Peri through the wringer. That’s perhaps a crass thing to do to these characters since they will shortly find themselves violently dead/resurrected and traumatised again and again respectively, but drama is drama I suppose. There’s not a lot of that either, though. The Doctor — already on probation for letting a truly bewildering number of deaths happen on his watch — spends most of this offering mealy-mouthed “you didn’t need to do that”s to a society of openly violent marauders who don’t know any better. He’s concerned for Peri’s safety, but The Caves Of Androzani this ain’t: the closest he comes to that kind of lunatic heroism is a mildly amusing sequence where he holds himself to ransom.

Peri has also seen better days. We must assume there were a lot of unseen adventures between her introductory story and Androzani (there’s always The Ultimate Treasure, eh?) because she is snarky as hell right out of the gate, for some reason. Oddly jealous of the Doctor’s ease with Aline, then tortured, surrounded by death and inevitably stripped naked at one point (sigh), it would be difficult for any writer to find a clear through-line for what she endures here. Walters doesn’t quite manage it: despite witnessing (and nearly experiencing) unimaginable horrors she just comes off as petulant, often moaning about wanting a bath and some donuts, occasionally chiding the Valethske not to have her as a “snack” while the Doctor’s not looking. It would make more sense if she spent the whole thing screaming or doing a thousand yard stare. It’s not hard to believe her sentiment near the end, “I’ve had enough of all this crap!”, but her prompt flip-flop to forgiveness of the Doctor, then anger at him again because he befriended one of the Valethske, then empathy over the death of a mutual friend (in one scene!) makes her seem crazily impetuous. I don’t really get her in this.

I’m not convinced there’s any depth to Superior Beings, which is no great crime — I’m not that silly, I know I’m reading pulpy tie-in books here. It doesn’t hold together especially well as an action adventure, however. The race to escape a lot of violent aliens is one the characters mostly don’t win, only (in the end) to more or less send them on their way to keep doing horrible stuff in future. Great. There’s no sense of victory or even relief, just the relentless grind of violent scenes happening until we’re done. For what storytelling purpose, I don’t know: it doesn’t interrogate what they’re doing beyond it being thoroughly unpleasant but normal for the Valethske.

Unusually for Walters there’s not much to dig into with his sci-fi menagerie: the aliens either aren’t very interesting in the first place or don’t complement each other in any useful way. It’s a shame, as I do think the author has some good impulses. They’re just not on display in a book that definitely has some ingredients and lasts for 280 pages, but otherwise may not have been worth the effort.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #93 – The Year Of Intelligent Tigers by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#46

The Year of Intelligent Tigers

By Kate Orman

She’s back! And — all together now — it’s about time.

Kate Orman has a habit of jumping into the EDAs, picking up threads and running with them. Together with Jon Blum, who somewhat co-wrote The Year Of Intelligent Tigers (but has opted to be a silent partner), she’s responsible for the best aspects of Sam Jones. She skipped the Compassion run entirely — draw your own conclusions, or perhaps she was just busy — but now that we’ve got Anji and a newly rejuvenated Eighth Doctor there’s plenty for any passing Kate Ormans to play with.

I’m willing to bet that the Doctor, in his post-exile form, is what intrigued Orman the most. The Year Of Intelligent Tigers starts off as a “holiday” story, with the gang enjoying themselves on the music-mad island paradise of Hitchemus. The Doctor is already realising his dream of joining an orchestra. It’s going well, although he struggles to contain his more virtuosic tendencies, playing solos well beyond other people’s patience. (A few interludes set during his exile — written by Blum — tie this to his now uncertain identity.)

Hitchemus is a world shared by people and, you guessed it, large cats. The people are in charge, until the tigers turn out to be a lot smarter than anyone realised — and just as organised. They take over and make their demands: they want to learn music. So they kidnap the music teachers. (It’s worth stressing that they have opposable digits, so instruments can be played.)

On the one hand this is a wild and creative idea. An attacking force that values, well, creativity above all else is not something I’ve seen before. On the other hand, it also makes things more difficult for the Doctor, at least if you take the view that this is an alien or a monster menace to be repelled: straight away he has something in common with them, a love of music.

The question of his loyalty to the tigers vs his loyalty to the humans is one that runs through the book. It’s perhaps most obviously paralleled in Doctor Who And The Silurians, another story about two forces with claims to a planet where one predates the other. As we’re doing this one in space however there is less of a bias from the audience and perhaps less of a forgone conclusion in the story. The Doctor isn’t exiled to Hitchemus so there is no assumed fealty to the people there; indeed, his sympathies lie mostly with the tigers. He notices after all that their intelligence, which comes and goes over generations, robs them of a clear history: “You don’t have a past, you don’t know your future.” Who could that remind him of?

The Doctor goes with the tigers, ostensibly to negotiate, but he soon goes native enough to learn their language. As in The Silurians his efforts are still not enough to convince all of them that he means well — just as there are humans convinced that he’s sold them out. He is an unknown quantity, furiously interested in peace but just as interested in finding out the secrets of Hitchemus. (And if you like, vicariously solving his own memory problems — although given that he at one point bellows “I hope I never remember! That’ll show them all!”, perhaps not.)

This comes to a head when a supporting character is killed by a tiger. The Doctor is not visibly moved, or at least not enough for Anji: “‘I’m so sorry —’ ‘Don’t give me that!’ she yelled into his face. He was shocked backwards, letting go of her. ‘It’s not good enough. You can’t put on the sad face — oh-I’m-so-sorry after the fact. You had a moment to be human and you stepped right past it.’” (Note that “human” is what she wants him to be — but he can’t do that, can he?) This causes Anji, already somewhat spiralling, to side wholly with the humans, potentially to the Doctor’s peril. “‘What if the Doctor happens to be in the storehouse when you blow it up?’ ‘He’s been warned,’ she said sourly.”

Orman seizes on the open wound of Anji’s situation, her displacement: “I’m a trader. What am I doing out here? I’m not supposed to do any of this!” It’s a good enough reason to make her frightened and even downright unlikeable as things escalate. As well as casually plotting the Doctor’s maybe-death, at one point she finds him broken beside a dead young tiger whom we’ve grown to like, and says miserably: “You’re crying for it?” Not loving the “it,” Anji.

She’s perhaps the face of the dilemma here — one that is presented more to the audience than to the Doctor, who after all just wants peace. Our dilemma: who should we sympathise with? We know humans and we like Anji, at least until she starts giving in to her insecurities. But the tigers, despite some Young Silurian-esque bad apples (“We own this planet. We don’t have to share it with the humans” is almost verbatim Mac Hulke) are a playful and interesting race, capable of the same artistic longings as us. They do have the prior claim, and man has subjugated them during their less intelligent generations… but then again, the humans didn’t know they had this much intelligence, and didn’t mistreat them particularly back when they were “animals”. They just didn’t grant them equal status.

I know that’s a very shaky defence. There are clear parallels with colonialism here, including the racist idea of not even considering the intelligence of the oppressed. But then to make things even more complicated — I hope I’m not reading too much into this — Anji isn’t white, nor is Quick the resistance leader, nor is Grieve the tiger expert who didn’t notice what was happening under her nose. So we’re denied even the easy visual language of the oppressive (white) humans and the long-suffering (other) indigenous population. Both sides know something about oppression, and both have good people and instigators. It refuses to be easy — a fact Orman seems well aware of with lines like “Maybe everyone else had killed one another. That would make things a lot simpler, wouldn’t it?” (Chef’s kiss, by the way, for this line: “The colony has been invaded by indigenous life forms.” That’s the whole thing in a nutshell!)

One of the few marks against this book is that I’m not totally convinced by Anji’s journey. She perhaps levels out too easily after her sudden ironic lack of humanity. Like Fitz, who feels an inevitable pull towards the music of Hitchemus and becomes a loveable hero in amongst the chaos, she considers staying here but ultimately goes with the Doctor instead — there were points earlier on where I struggled to believe that would make sense any more. Anji is perhaps won over by the Doctor’s final decision and his climactic, shock-and-awe display of power: a very Orman, almost New Adventures-y move that proves to the humans and tigers his commitment to non-partisan peace. It’s enough to win all of them over, I suppose, so why not her. (But still, Anji said some pretty nasty things there, so she’d better watch it is all I’m saying.)

Characterisation is otherwise a strong point — as you would expect from the author(s). The supporting characters of either species have their interesting ups, downs and parallels. The incongruity of the chatty, musical, thumb-having tigers quickly stops seeming absurd and becomes believable, especially where Orman throws out expressive sentences like “Bounce could taste hurricane[l” and “Lightning coiled across the sky like a map of hot blue rivers” to suggest their perspective. Longbody, an antagonistic tiger who murders a “friend” human from before the uprising, apparently without batting an eye, says: “She never even recognised me.” So maybe she felt something after all. Then shortly afterwards Karl, a prominent music teacher and prisoner, is “startled to recognise several of his [tiger] students. When had he learned to tell one tiger from another?” So maybe that isn’t so far out of reach.

Karl is worth discussing all by himself: someone swept away by the Doctor’s charms and eccentricities, clearly in love with him and, according to Orman, at it like rabbits. I’m not sure I buy that in the confines of this story, but the attraction is apparent from his end, and the Doctor’s reaction is just the same (i.e. as much or as little as you read into it) as if Karl were a woman. It’s a terrific little gender-swapped grace note that we ought to see more of, complicated marvellously when Karl makes a very unfortunate choice which cancels any tenuous future they had.

It’s the Doctor’s novel, though. Orman finds him yearning for something, a way to express himself, a need to belong somewhere, which puts him uniquely in the middle of this conflict and at odds with his friends as well as with everyone else. In the end he’s not much like any of them, but he seems to revel in that, with Anji noticing: “he wasn’t possessed, he wasn’t transformed. He was, at last, absolutely himself.” It feels like a definitive step, if not away from the amnesia thing then at least owning it. Which gives us yet another example of Orman (and to an extent Blum) confidently restating the positions of the characters and the series, putting subsequent books on a stronger footing. It’s good work, as usual. Wish they’d pestered her more often.

It’s been one of those reviews where I disappear down a theme-and-character hole, so let’s simplify it a bit: The Year Of Intelligent Tigers is a clever take on the old “whose planet is it anyway” problem, and it has a level of confidence that even bleeds into the formatting, chopping up chapters or mashing them together, giving us human perspectives and tiger ones. It’s one of those books where the writer absolutely knows what they’re doing. Despite a general avuncular coolness in the world-building, which feels like another New Adventures holdover — everyone feels loosely like a student — there are moments of darkness and some valid enough reasons not to like the Doctor or Anji, although Orman can’t bring herself to take anything away from Fitz, who is reassuringly wonderful throughout. At times I thought it could have been a longer book with more detail on the power struggles and what Hitchemus was like before the tiger uprising; the focus seems so weighted towards the tigers that I didn’t feel I knew the humans in as much depth. But I guess you can’t have everything in 280 pages. As ever with Orman, it’s a happy enough occasion to have her back, once again refusing to rest on her laurels.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #92 – Asylum by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#42

Asylum

By Peter Darvill-Evans

In his afterword Peter Darvill-Evans says he has “tried to write something that is out of the ordinary run of Doctor Who novels.” I’d say that’s a fair assessment of Asylum.

Probably the most obviously unusual thing here is the casting choice of the Fourth Doctor and Nyssa. The continuity-minded among you might scratch your heads at that, since at no point in the run did these two characters travel by themselves. BBC Books were no doubt pleased that they’d already stopped telling readers when each story was set, since they’d need two answers for this one: the Doctor must be between The Deadly Assassin and The Face Of Evil, being on his own and having not met her yet, while Nyssa must be some time after Terminus, having long since left him.

Quite a torturous setup, you might think, and you wouldn’t be wrong. And for what? Straight away Asylum has almost no scope for interaction between its Doctor and companion. They can’t get to know each other and she can’t tell him anything that will be important later. “So why do it?” is the obvious question. Well, it adds novelty value. It’s a unique dynamic, outside of maybe the Sixth Doctor and Mel. For the vast majority of the (admittedly very short) novel, however, Darvill-Evans takes the path of least resistance and separates them. Which is either the practical thing to do or the final nail in the coffin, depending on your outlook. 

This isn’t the only odd thing about the book. Asylum opens with two prologues. (Not in itself odd, although while we’re here, what is it with Doctor Who novelists and prologues?) The first one introduces a rather good sci-fi idea about non-corporeal aliens stranded in the bodies of medieval Brits. They know the Black Death is coming. To ensure their survival they need to send one of their number back in time to find somebody brilliant to help. They select Roger Bacon, often considered one of the first scientists, who might be able to give them the Elixir of Life and hence allow them to navigate the plague when it arrives.

That’s all in prologue one! Next we find Nyssa in the far future, older, wiser, successful but not happy. A disaster is coming her way too, but she distracts herself by writing a thesis about a fellow scientist, Roger Bacon… until the facts start changing around him. Suddenly the Doctor (well, a Doctor) arrives, hot on the trail of the time anomaly. Once he establishes the likely focal point, as well as his and Nyssa’s awkward relationship, he leaves her to it while he goes off to investigate the historical figure. Except Nyssa has stowed away in the TARDIS.

Asylum is bursting with ideas before we even reach Chapter One. However we still have not reached the odd thing. What Asylum does next is… settle down. History transforming, aliens possessing humans, companions out of time — all quite exciting, only put those things out of your mind, because Asylum is actually a medieval murder mystery. And quite a placid one at that.

I’m guessing this was the novel Darvill-Evans really wanted to write, and the alien stuff was just the springboard. Fair enough. But the disparity between the intriguing setup and the actual matter of the book — which more closely resembles something you’d see on ITV on a Sunday afternoon — takes some getting used to. I kept expecting the alien plot to flare up, or the incongruity of the Doctor and Nyssa to kick off. I was way off: Asylum is a historical novel through and through, with heaps of research behind it (there’s a bibliography) and just as much thought behind the anachronisms of its dialogue and characters (there’s an afterword). Sci-fi-wise, Chekhov’s Gun doesn’t go off, unless you count the neat but rather sad epilogue with the aliens.

I spent a good chunk of Asylum mystified by this, wondering if — like in Independence Day, or my reading of it anyway — Darvill-Evans had failed to join his own dots. Having now finished it, I don’t think so. If nothing else, Asylum seems more deliberate than his earlier novel. True, the aliens never reveal themselves to the Doctor or Nyssa, who finish out the story with no idea what caused all this to happen in the first place. As far as anyone knows, something caused one of the brothers at Roger Bacon’s friary to commit the murders, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the Elixir of Life. It doesn’t really matter what, though, since (hardly a spoiler) things are put right in the end anyway.

So where does that leave Asylum — a sci-fi story that retroactively McGuffins its own premise, a character study about awkward strangers, and a murder mystery with a motive only the reader knows? Well, it’s certainly different. (Score one to Darvill-Evans.) If you’re going to enjoy it, though, you have to do so on its own level: gently paced past crime. It’s quite good at that. There’s plenty of historical flavour, some of it bracingly unpleasant. (See, the anti-semitism.) The period details can be ingenious, like Darvill-Evans’s answer to a locked room mystery. There are moments of genuine excitement, like an attempted break in and an escape from a burning building. And the basic thrust of what might be the birth of science is quite interesting to behold, with an intriguing and quite elegant counter-argument presented to Nyssa at the end. I’d never heard of Roger Bacon before reading this, and Darvill-Evans does a good job of showing why he’s worthy of note — if not entirely deserving of his plaudits.

There are some decent character moments as well, despite the uphill work created by choosing to write about these characters. The Doctor isn’t quite as effervescent as usual, perhaps because he’s in an awkward spot around this Nyssa person, but he still has moments of Baker-ish non sequitur. “I’ll join you there in a moment, if I may. Someone’s been lurking in the corridor behind us all the time we’ve been walking round and round this delightful cloister — so like my own — and he obviously wants to talk to one of us alone.” / “‘What if the time isn't right?’ the Doctor said. ‘Perhaps all this work, these theories and machines, would be best left here to turn to dust. I just don't know. Will I change the course of events if I save Roger Bacon's most scientifically advanced work? Or will that ensure that events follow the correct course? Can I bear to leave these things here to rot? Can you smell smoke?’” He also manages a compelling enough heart to heart with Nyssa at the end despite, or maybe because of their being ships in the night. He’s unusually pensive in Asylum, but I think this just about convinces as a character choice more than just “getting it wrong.”

Nyssa has a less proactive time. Despite evidently wanting to join the expedition in the first place she chills out in a castle for most of Asylum, barely cognisant of the mystery that brought them here. Instead she makes a friend in the widow Matilda and bats away advances from Richard of Hockley, a nice but thoroughly drippy knight of the realm. You can forgive the Doctor for occasionally remembering, with a start, that what’s-her-name is here as well, somewhere. Still, by the end this becomes a somewhat convincing character arc. Nyssa is still traumatised by TARDIS travel and clearly depressed; she often contemplates coming to live here instead, where it’s (potentially) less hectic, but a quiet rest isn’t enough to fix her problems. She even reaches a point where she’s content to be murdered. (!) Her realisation that she’d rather live on, as well as being a relief in itself, goes some way to justifying her inaction through the rest of the book.

Only some, mind. For all its pastoral mindset and relaxing pace Asylum drifts dangerously close to dull at times — an impressive feat where it needs a chunky afterword to even hit 250 pages. The supporting cast for example have clearly been thought through (again, see afterword), but that doesn’t mean you won’t mix up your friars from time to time. The murder mystery itself can be a teensy bit, who cares? And the book never entirely gets past the sense of a missed opportunity with the Doctor and Nyssa. But despite all that, I found myself on its wavelength in the end. I got into the slower pace and the (very) old-fashioned investigation, and the fact that these characters almost know each other but not quite, these aliens almost change the world but not quite, Nyssa almost considers a life in the past but not quite, and Roger Bacon is almost a pioneer of scientific theory but not quite, in a book that’s almost a massive sci-fi story but not quite… it all gives Asylum a sense of thwarted, missed-the-boat tragedy that arguably justifies its smallness. Almost, etc.

6/10