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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#53

Hope

By Mark Clapham

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

5/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#49

Relative Dimensias

By Mark Michalowski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#52

Mad Dogs And Englishmen

By Paul Magrs

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#48

Instruments of Darkness

By Gary Russell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5/10

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

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#51

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street

By Lawrence Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Bit Has A Spoiler In It!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#47

Dying in the Sun

By Jon de Burgh Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#50

Grimm Reality

By Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventure

#46

Psi-ence Fiction

By Chris Boucher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

4/10